Guild Wars 2

The game won’t let me create a character on Tarnished Coast or Blackgate. I can start on Jade Quarry, though, and I hear it’s a good server for PvP. Are Dragonbrand or Yak’s Bend any good? I don’t know what to do :[

Join the server with the best name !

What are you looking to do in the game? are you planning on playing a lot of wvw (open world large scale pvp) spvp? (small scale organised pvp) pve? (dungeons and such)

also, how good is your computer? that surprisingly plays a role in deciding your server :P

Your home server only affects which guilds you can join and your WvW standing.
If you do want to start playing WvW I wouldn’t recommend the top 1-3 servers (Jade Quarry/Blackgate/Tarnished Coast) since they will have the longest queues and biggest zergs. Somewhere down the middle (Tier 2-5) I’d say would be the most balanced and enjoyable for more casual players. The lowest tiers will have the smallest populations so if you join those you may find yourself outmatched or underpopulated some of the time. PvE has Megaservers so outside of grouping up with guildmates you’ll be able to play with others outside of your home server in open world. PvP is regional so your home server makes no difference as far as I know.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw

Highchu.3806:

Your home server only affects which guilds you can join and your WvW standing.
If you do want to start playing WvW I wouldn’t recommend the top 1-3 servers (Jade Quarry/Blackgate/Tarnished Coast) since they will have the longest queues and biggest zergs. Somewhere down the middle (Tier 2-5) I’d say would be the most balanced and enjoyable for more casual players. The lowest tiers will have the smallest populations so if you join those you may find yourself outmatched or underpopulated some of the time. PvE has Megaservers so outside of grouping up with guildmates you’ll be able to play with others outside of your home server in open world. PvP is regional so your home server makes no difference as far as I know.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw

This “zomgz longest queue t1 runneh awaaaaay!!!!11” is total bullkitten. On JQ we have a queue only on reset nights and only 20-30 people long max on EB, very rarely at other times, and even a queue of 30 is a small wait, 10-15 mins? The days of hours-long waits in the queue are long gone, some people really need to get with the times. Or not talk about stuff they don’t know much about.

On-topic, the best choice would always be a tier 1 server for a new player: these are servers with very large communities where you can pretty much test any play mode you want and learn the ropes. But, in the end, server only matters for WvW, so if you decide that you preffer smaller scale WvW, you can always transfer out to a lower tier server. But on t1 you will always find people to play with in WvW, no matter the hour.

You can enjoy PvE from any server since GW2 has the megaserver tech, which populates the maps with players from all servers and when one instance of the map is full, it creates another one and starts populating that one as well. There are no more empty maps now.

Server does not matter for PvP as far as I know, you play with/against people from all servers.

You can also join TC or BG even if it says it’s full, but you will need to wait a while before the option to chose that server becomes open, usually a few days of spamming…

I’m on dragonbrand right now, and I wouldn’t recommend it, as its kind of a dying WvW server, as all the guilds freaked out and went to FA or SoS when we dropped to T3 last weak and SBI and Yak’s Bend were a boring joke with infrequent overly easy roflstomp fights. My guild will probably go to SoS or FA (since Maguuma is a clusterkitten server that we have animosity towards) but we may go JQ depending on how our guild votes when we pick a new place to go, but we’re worried about T1 being too blobby.

Hopefully this helps!