Okay I am getting a little bit sad with my gaming experience lately.
It seems that with every update we get something that aids the PvE community, but utterly kills the WvW community, or else it unbalances what little stability the game boasted at all.
I’ve made this rant before in a similar manner, located here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Population-unbalance-and-Defenders/first#post3078935
I know I’m a nobody, not one dev has stopped by to comment on a thread I worked hard to word and make concise. I know my posts have as much chances of being noted by developing staff as a dolyak has at launching itself into outer space, but pardon me if I thought my value as a player was worth something.
I will start with a question; With the brand new megaservers to hide the lack of people playing, where do we call for help when no one logs into WvW anymore? There’s no server wide announcement system, so if we call out for help, our enemy has a chance to tell their server where to press us. Now we have no way to encourage people to play WvW on their home server, to tell them we’re going on a golem rush that’s going to be a lot of fun, or to tell them a favored commander is running a zerg. Talent doesn’t mean much if you’re one person against 15 people.
To start airing grievances, I wish server transfers had only been allowed once. Just once per account. In every game that has ever hosted world conflict, when has it ever worked out to allow people to transfer as much as they want? Sure it lines your pockets with world transfer money, but at the end of the day it means that someone is going to get unfairly advantaged. Look at the ncsoft game Aion, they have the elyos (light elves) and the asmodians (dark elves) at war. Everyone was allowed to transfer to whatever side and whatever server they wanted. Now everyone playes Elyos, so they locked server transfers and put in the ‘asmodian initiative’ giving the underpopulated players rare items in hopes of attracting more players to that side. It didn’t work, of course the players won’t play the underpopulated side because everyone is on the other side, and stepping into the pvp area means suicide.
In my opinion, people go to server transfers to win without having to work for it. So naturally, they beat their chests and roar when they squish the five (or one) people their 25 man zerg runs across as though they have talent. Way to go, you won a fight that was one sided to begin with.
Anet: Let me give you some insight into what it’s currently like to play WvW on an underpopulated WvW server.
I play for an average of 5-8 hours a day. I am so dedicated to helping my server have a chance, I run back and forth with the workers for hours straight just giving them speed boosts as they upgrade. I stand on walls and wait to see if someone attacks, sacrificing loot. I try to solo camps that have flipped different colours. I know people who do much more than that, but it doesn’t mean a thing at the end of the day. Why? Here’s why.
When you have 10 people in EB on average, and 5 on your borderland on average, how are you supposed to hold back a 40 man zerg with no backup? There isn’t enough siege in the world, enough rushes and they’ll take whatever they want.
So essentially, I’m wasting my time trying to help my server. I’m wasting time, money, and sanity when you continue to ignore the grievances of servers who got screwed because of server transfers and unfair balancing systems.
Here’s why I think nothing will be done about server population unbalance:
With the recent implementation of the megaserver, PvE has never been easier. So why go into WvW where your server is getting your butt kicked when you can just frolic around with random people farming. I think Anet, that you are secretly hoping we give up trying to fight and just transfer so you can start shutting down under populated servers to hide the fact that a lot of the ‘joiners’ have moved on from the game.
It’s depressing, and frustrating. There are 3 things keeping me playing to date:
1) My friends.
2) The NPC dialogue.
3) The combat/interface system.
Sorry if this sounded like an all negative rant. There are some things I really like about the new megaservers, but on the whole it killed my chances at helping in WvW and all the hard work I’ve done or will do in WvW to this point. So thanks.
Yeah it was a left field comment, but often such things are born out of frustration.