Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone, I was wanting to switch from Blackgate to Tarnished Coast, but the server is full. Is there any way to switch like waiting until 3am or something to transfer? Or is there no way since the megaserver system?

It’s a waiting game, some servers are locked, some like TC are full, and you need to wait for them to open, so I would just wait at the Worlds page and hope it opens up.

Are you aware that your server is only relevant for WvW?

Unless you want to play WvW with people on that server there is absolutely no reason to transfer because everything else is shared.

Because of that the server ‘population’ is based on the number of people considered to be active WvW players. Not the number currently in WvW maps but the number who have participated recently. This means it only updates periodically and the time of day or the number of people online doesn’t make any difference, so there’s no reason to wait until 3am or any other specific time.

I’ve heard that the best time to check is just after WvW resets on a Friday. But there’s no guarantee of any world opening up, especially if they’re currently doing well in their matches.

The “3 am” method no longer applies. It made sense when server status was based on how many people assigned to each world, tempered by how many online right now. So, at off-peak hours, a full world would briefly show as “very high.”

However, that hasn’t been true for ages.

The current system looks only at WvW participation. In the extreme, server A can have 10x as many people as server B, but if no one on A plays, its status would be “low” while B might be full, if half of its pop played WvW often. Further, these participation levels are measured over weeks and months, and averaged out, weighting recent weeks more heavily.

In addition, ANet manually tweaks the status to “decap” some servers — by preventing people from transferring, the numbers will drop due to attrition, allowing participation levels on each server to balance out better. (It’s not a very efficient method, but it probably beats forcing people to move.)

As a result, server status doesn’t change on an hourly basis; it changes very slowly over long periods of time. The reason that Fridays (after reset) are sometimes good is that’s when ANet would remove any manual adjustments.

tl;dr there is no longer any “best time” to try to transfer. If your target world is full today, check again next week. Or just keep refreshing the relevant wiki page to see.

Plus what everyone mentioned above: worlds only matter for WvW; if you only PvE, PvP, or Raid, your choice of world won’t matter at all, for practical purposes.