Guild Wars 2

All my friends have this game and told me to buy it which i did but when i wanted to join their server (Desolation) it was full. I was wondering if there are certain times when servers arent full which then allows me to join because if i cant i think i just wasted my money.

Thanks for any replies.

It depends what game mode you want to play – WvW is the only mode that is affected by server. If you’re more interested in PvP or PvE you can join any EU server and still play with your friends in those modes.

The ‘full’ state is calculated based on how many people play WvW, and unfortunately, Desolation is one of the higher tier servers in WvW and therefore reasonably well populated. There’s no fixed period in which space is freed up, you’re reliant on people leaving to free up space.

You can change servers at later date, but this costs gems, which you can buy with either real money or in-game with gold. Not an ideal solution as it costs more in the long run, but you could pick another server so you can at least get in game while you wait for space to free up on Desolation.

Thanks for the reply i think guild wars needs to add some sort of queuing system into the game allowing people to join these full servers.

+ I was wondering what is the fastest way to reload the servers to see if it goes to very high at the moment i log out and log in but us there a faster way?

As mentioned, the servers are pointless outside WvW. And if it’s just WvW with your friends you want, is it too much to ask them to join you on a lower population server? (then again, if it’s just WvW you want, you’re missing out on a huuuuuge part of the game anyway.)

Logging out and back in or refreshing the list won’t help because the server populations only change gradually over time. (I’m not sure of the specifics because they changed it recently.)

But as other people said you only need to be on the same server to play WvW together, and that’s a small part of the game. Absolutely everything else you can do together with anyone on any EU server. So unless you bought the game just for WvW you can pick any other server on the list and your friends can come and meet you as soon as you get out of the tutorial and play with you from that point on.

Danikat.8537:

Logging out and back in or refreshing the list won’t help because the server populations only change gradually over time. (I’m not sure of the specifics because they changed it recently.)

ANet has stated that the population status is based on

• WvW participation only (not PvE or PvP)
• It is no longer based on a count of accounts or logons, i.e. it only measures participation.
• It follows long term metrics, specifically designed so that the status is stable. In other words, it cannot change overnight (let alone more quickly) and it’s very unlikely to go up one week and down the next.

Over the long run, this is a more sensible system, since it focuses on the only important impact on the community (queues during peak periods) and removes the uncertainty of seemingly random ebbs/flows.

In the short run, it is lousy for new players that want to WvW with friends on full servers. This is especially true, since currently there are modest incentives for moving to higher population servers (notably: better chance of decent match up, better chance of finding like minded allies and opponents) and no incentives for moving away from high pop servers (it costs gems and there’s no guarantee of a better WvW experience).

Thus while I think the new system is the one we should have had from the start of megaservers (i.e. it’s ultimately better for the game), I wish they had also implemented a change in the costs of moving servers. For example, anyone willing to volunteer to move from Full to Middle/Low pop servers might get to waive their transfer costs or perhaps get 500 gems worth of benefits (perhaps a discounted future move, choice of boosters or choice of dye/mini kit, BL keys, etc).

tl;dr expect the current list of full servers to remain the same for months, or until ANet announces new tournaments and/or new transfer costs/incentives.

The ideal system, at least since megaservers were introduced, would be for players to not even need to choose a server until they enter WvW.

(Even better if, when they do come to choose they’re presented with the relevant information, or at least a link to the leaderboards, so they can make an informed choice. Right now it’s a matter of either taking advice from friends or guessing based on the names and stated populations of the server.)

Edit: Unless you’re in Europe and prefer to speak Spanish, in which case you have a grand total of 1 choice.

Danikat.8537:

The ideal system … would be … to not even …choose a server until … [entering] WvW.

Wow, that’s a great idea. (The follow-up is good, too — I wanted to highlight the brilliance of this simple change.)