Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone.
I’ve been playing on Northern Shiverpeaks since day one of GW2, but it seems to be getting more and more dead in nearly every PvE zone every time I log on. Does anyone have any suggestions for a more active server to transfer to? Maybe it’s just that I have yet to find an active guild, but it seems that no one is even recruiting on this server… Is it worth it for me to server hop a bit, or is this about what I should expect from all the servers? Thanks!

Darkhaven here. Join the club. The game is a ghost town.

I’m guessing everyone is in the higher zones.

I’ve only been playing a few weeks, and can’t find anyone in the lower zones.

I even joined a random guild invite for some grouping-up – only 3 people out of 300 were online.

w-where is everyone?

NO idea what you guys are on about. Unless you are judging population in mid-level zones. Have you been to LA where people search for groups?

Most servers i know of have high populations. Try Isle of Janthir/Crystal Desert/Sea of Sorrows

same thing on piken-square, it’s a ghost town, you don’t see more then a couple of people in the mists at primetime.

Truth be told, nearly all of my friends “went back to WoW”. I haven’t played that in around 2 years and don’t intend to start back at it again. But I do know a lot of people are waiting for more content to come back.

Kind of sucks, but that’s just what I’ve seen.

They would need to halve the number of servers to save the game, but oh well.. I guess they’ll wait until it’s too late. My server is definitely more dead than it used to be, but then again, there are more bots (at least 50 in Cursed Shore 24/7) so I guess numbers don’t show the drop in population number, and that’s confusing the brilliant minds of Anet.
Anyway, first few weeks all areas were so overcrowded and there were tons of people, and these days it takes an hour to get a simple dungeon team together. Oh well, I hope good updates are incoming

You can thank free server transfers. As soon as people noticed we were losing at WvW like half our server left… lawl what a joke, and then people complain about long queue’s because they went to one of the most popular servers there is. And that isn’t the only reason, people transfer just to transfer because it’s free, no one cares.

The game used to be pretty balanced but now some are bloated and some are seemingly “dead”. But it’s a big world.. even in WoW where the supposed 10 million people play, you wouldn’t see anyone in lower zones because they were obviously in the higher area’s. Sidekick system doesn’t mean squat when you don’t get lvl 80 rewards in a level 30 zone. Pointless. This is how all MMO’s work, everyone is at “end game”

When Orr is dead on your server, then you can come here and complain.

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Not true, even places like Cursed Shore are dead on some servers – at launch GW2 sold..2 million copies, right now they is probably less than 250k players across all the servers.

Yea it’s pretty sad how few people are playing… I get excited every time I even only just see another player in a PvE area… why it’s the game so dead?

People complained and complained (about legitimate concerns.) No one was listening. They finally got tired of complaining and left. Now the servers are empty except for a few very devoted fans.

I know that is what happened in my case. Although, I pop into the forums on occasion.

Hm, I see tons of people on my server. Although, I haven’t been in the mid level zones since launch so they could be ghost towns but Orr and the starter zones always have tons of people.

Then again, which game really has lots of people in the starting zones? Before cross realm zones, SWTOR and WoW used to have less than 10 people leveling in each zone on high pop realms.

Maybe GW2 should look into combining realms in certain zones to bring up the population because I understand population is far more important in games like this where events are what people do to level.

“right now they is probably less than 250k players across all the servers.”

There is no way there is 250k players dropped from 2 million. The 2 million obviously do not sign on everyday because even wow doesn’t have 5 million players on every day but there is no way this game lost that many players.

Once they release new content in a week, players will come back and play. The problem is this is a free to play game so people will quit to play AC3 and COD:BO2 etc

I’ve been on NS from launch and don’t find it a ghost town. There is at least one guild i know of that’s pretty active around %40. I’m only a member as i run a site with less people playing GW2 and lead corresponding guild. Shiverpeaks search and rescue [Lost] is the guild.

Many of the servers are listed as ‘full’ at this hour so they aren’t dead. The thing is, a lot of these players will be found in dungeons, sPvP, WvW, or in Lion’s Arch – all of these lead to the players not being seen in any of the maps.

A lot of players have stopped playing GW2 or cooled down on it but that doesn’t mean that the servers are dead. There are still a lot of players coming to the game. Unfortunately, for them, the majority of players aren’t in any of the starting zones or even mid-level zones at this point. This leads to a different game experience and, probably, causes some players to leave.

I’m curious to see what, if anything, ArenaNet will do to try to improve the game experience for new players in quiet zones plus increase their retention of existing players.

Our Guild is rl-based. Mostly friends that know eachother for a long time.
80% of the players havnt logged in for months….

PvE is boring
PvP is even more boring and funkilling unbalanced
WvW is the only thing that actually keeps people playing this game.

Anet screwed up so much, funkilling oneshotbuilds, permastealth, security issues, servertranfers, no real teamplay, no real activities for guilds, bots, more bots, botzergs.
The list goes on for 2 sites.

This is a bad time for any MMO, more so for one that is free to play so there is no reason not to quit for a while.

We are in the Holiday release time frame, and MAJOR triple A titles are coming out every week. XCOM, Dishonored, Assassin’s Creed 3, Darksider, MOH, etc…

This is on top of the fact that WOW just had a major expansion and RIFT has one incoming.

ON TOP OF THAT the Halloween event pretty much meant everyone was in the Mad King’s Labyrinth and even Orr was dead.

MMO’s are cyclical. When everyone finishes MoP and the game releases slow down people are more likely to come back to GW2 since its free and they can pick it up at any time. And ANet seems committed to a constant release of fresh content so I don’t think we will get bored with this game any time soon.

And I take it as a good sign that on the server I am on Queensdale is still frequently in overflow mode.

Although I agree ANet needs to make some progress on the balance issues and the bots will eventually kill this game if they don’t address it pretty soon.

There’s no reason to stay on your dead servers if you don’t like it… move up the list to something more lively if that is what you like. Leveling alts all weekend there were plenty of people around, even killed the fire elemental twice (might be because of the new boss/achieve people were after).

servers aren’t dead.

the reason you don’t see a lot of people is because of a combination of how big the zones are, plus the down-leveling system and how many zones there are for each level range.

there’s at least 2-3 zones for each level range. hell, there’s five newbie areas that are 1-15. the other problem is that all stories connect at level 50 and everyone ends up concentrated in the zhaitian-infested areas, thus, that means that other zones are going to be dead.

i see plenty of people in the newbie and higher level zones, but, the mid-level ones aren’t that populated because there’s just too many zones you can level in, then, the three orders all branch off from around 20-50, which, is mid-level where people are reporting that the servers are “dead”. then, there’s sPVP, WvW, etc.

WoW (during vanilla, TBC and WotlK) suffered from the same problem: certain zones were popular whereas others were ghost towns. azshara during the original release? there was no one. it happens in all MMOs.

tl;dr: servers aren’t dead; population is just spread out.

There weren’t any quests in azshara… unless you count the mage class quest in the tower and that one camp. That’s a horrible example. :P

Xericor.9103:

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Wrong orr is dead too.

@ pandemos: yes, i realize that now, but the edit function is dead and i can’t well remember vanilla WoW that well since it was back in ‘05-’06 that i played that and honestly, vanilla WoW was dull. i wouldn’t say “boring”, but…

karma.8763:

Xericor.9103:

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Wrong orr is dead too.

Wrong. Orr is very much alive. Can’t go ten seconds without running into someone.

A majority of people that bought the game at launch have already quit playing. Out of the 7 people I know of personally that bought the game at launch only 3 of us are still playing and 2 of us are playing rarely.

People don’t like that there’s no raiding in this game and they also don’t like that the instances are pretty lame and pointless. Most people that play MMO’s like raiding and or instances. They like the loot grind and this game just doesn’t have much to keep people coming back day after day.

This game sounded good on paper but in practice it doesn’t have that addictive draw that much of the MMO crowd desires.

PvP.

This game’s PvE is more dead than a risen who’s been cremated.

TheUnNamedHero.4167:

karma.8763:

Xericor.9103:

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Wrong orr is dead too.

Wrong. Orr is very much alive. Can’t go ten seconds without running into someone.

…someone with a brown bear.

Can’t go 3 seconds without running into a mob..badummm ting

RLD.7439:

TheUnNamedHero.4167:

karma.8763:

Xericor.9103:

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Wrong orr is dead too.

Wrong. Orr is very much alive. Can’t go ten seconds without running into someone.

…someone with a brown bear.

No. Someone with a whole bunch of friends yelling, “Everyone, COME!”

TheUnNamedHero.4167:

karma.8763:

Xericor.9103:

Its not a server population problem, its a player problem.
The majority of people simply camp in Orr, farming.

Try posting in the Guild section of this forum, looking for a casual guild, in my experience casuals tend to play events for fun rather than farm.

Wrong orr is dead too.

Wrong. Orr is very much alive. Can’t go ten seconds without running into someone.

Wrong, its dead, Currently in Anvil Rock, i see maybe 20 people between shelter and penitent waypoint……….all other events are completely dead.

Guess I’m on a good server (Yaks Bend). I needed five events for karma juice so I took a break from story with my alt whos lvl 43 and went to queensdale. Found many other people. Did the waspqueen event, Champion spider, and my favorite one in the zone The Big kitten Pig. Escorted some people too. It was pretty lively there.

So for me since day one, I’ve always had someone to play with.

The servers are dead because the pve content is dried up lol, i haven’t played in a month other than the Halloween bit. Like people have said all along there is no end game and when the majority of players are at cap there is nothing to do, just grind for the same kitten everyone has.

For me, it’s the limited weapon skills. I had all my weapon skills by level 5 and nothing really changes to 80. It just got boring fast for me. I have not logged in for almost four weeks now.

I have not played WoW for two years and Guild Wars for a year, but have reactivated both of those games to go back to them and give them a try.

Gone back to playing Rift myself, new expansion with a ton of content incoming and a well designed game at it’s core. Plenty of things to do and always that feeling of progression, people actually taking part in world events and rift events. I love GW2 and really do hope it improves on itself as time progresses, but right now I have hit a wall and see no way over, the lack of people on my server does not help either.

shrug depends on the server, I guess. Orr is very much alive on my server (and since most players are chatting in map chat and I’ve seen very few rangers with bears, I don’t think they’re bots), and in every zone I happen to be playing, I can find players to play and/or chat with.

Gonna chain my characters to Desolation forever.

if you think your server is dead, transfer yourself to a higher pop server instead of asking for ridiculous things such as server merge or cut down the servers in half…

there are plenty of servers with decent population in gw2 right now. Hell, it’s 1:46 am pacific time right now and the game has 11, ELEVEN full servers and the rest of the servers are high (north america servers)

middle pve zones are dead tho because of the lack of event rewards for max level people and that they can’t farm valuable materials in those maps. Low level zones and higher level zones such as Orr still have tons of players doing events.

ArenaNet plz address this issue. Been a huge fan since GW 1 and I would hate to see it die. I think a major reason people aren’t playing as much, or seem to be less active at the very least, is because content scaling. There are essentially 2 lvl 80 zones. That’s where the majority of players will spend half their time, until they have essentially burned themselves out. What this game needs is an expansion with nearly all level 80 content, but first they need to address the bugs in the current game. Don’t let gw2 die!

Mere Image.8376:

ArenaNet plz address this issue. Been a huge fan since GW 1 and I would hate to see it die. I think a major reason people aren’t playing as much, or seem to be less active at the very least, is because content scaling. There are essentially 2 lvl 80 zones. That’s where the majority of players will spend half their time, until they have essentially burned themselves out. What this game needs is an expansion with nearly all level 80 content, but first they need to address the bugs in the current game. Don’t let gw2 die!

there are 11 full servers right now at nearlly 2 am in north america…

and here we are talking about saving GW2 from its death?

Game is packed. Friends list is full. Still see lowbies everywhere who are new to the game when levelling my lowbie ele.

Just because they are not in the same area as you at 4am doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Earn your $ forum trolls.

Honestly it’s not that bad. Unfortunately there is no way to determine how many players are within a zone. A lot players play and stay mute all the time while playing with others in the same zone. We also have unpopular zones sometimes even due to the unpopular choice of faction. I am finding a lot more people in Human zones compared to Charr zones or even Asura ones. I know this because I am doing my dailies in the 10-25 zones and there’s a night and day experience between some of the zones. Last but not least expecting full traffic in all world zones with high player concurrency 24/7 is even something which WoW hasn’t achieved yet.
Since 2008 there’s been the same ghost town debates of some of their realms and that game is far from dead.

xiv.7136:

Game is packed. Friends list is full. Still see lowbies everywhere who are new to the game when levelling my lowbie ele.

Just because they are not in the same area as you at 4am doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Earn your $ forum trolls.

Nice try, but even at peak times it’s a chore in itself to find people to do group events with. People are too spread out and the incentive to travel back to lower level areas isn’t there once it is fully explored. I have seen many group events active for prolonged times on my server and any attempt to inform people on map chat is met with silence.

And to the people saying “transfer to a more populated server”, can you not see that it was server transfers in the first place that caused quite a lot of this mess? People not wanting to be on a crappy WvW server and moving off it is just one example…Also I am on Underworld and even at off peak times the population is high according to the server screen.

Rezz.8019:

They would need to halve the number of servers to save the game, but oh well.. I guess they’ll wait until it’s too late.

uh no, they need to adjust rewards so people have a reason to visit the rest of the world. most servers are still full or high pop. the pop has actually grown since release.

everyone is in 1) Orr, 2) WvW, and to a lesser extent 3) dungeons and spvp

- Free server transfers
- Players going back to their previous MMO and/or school
- Fall release schedule (people only buy video games during oct-dec according to the industry)

When you include the typical post-launch player rate drop off its not hard to see why there’s less people around. It’s not just your server and is yet another problem Anet needs to address. Sadly, they’ll probably let go until January when they’re done with their event release schedule.

SHM.7628:

People complained and complained (about legitimate concerns.) No one was listening. They finally got tired of complaining and left. Now the servers are empty except for a few very devoted fans.

I know that is what happened in my case. Although, I pop into the forums on occasion.

This, a million times, this. The game was rushed, it was obvious, the loyal fans & dev’s would accept no negative feedback, few changes were/have been made, and now they get to have the game to themselves. It sucks, because the potential was huge.

Dragonbrand is pretty healthy. Some zones are barren, but I don’t think that is from lack of players as much as those areas just aren’t important to story, dungeons or leveling.

Because of server transfers your server population is directly proportional to how well you have done in WvW. So once you start doing bad, it’s a lot harder to get back up.

You worry about lack of players, while people on the higher bracket servers are complaining about two hour queue times, overflows, and lag/popping players because of too many people in a zone.

Anet really shot themselves in the foot and hurt a lot of servers in the long run with free transfers after the first week or two of launch. I doubt it will start to even itself out until after the holidays or a new expansion. Something to get an influx of new players in that start on lower pop servers. Maybe some of the people that come back for this content patch will transfer to avoid the huge crowds, but I doubt it will be enough to make an immediate noticeable difference.

Far shiverpeaks is pretty packed actually,some areas are a little less populated then others,but nothing major as you guys aredescribing.I still see loads of people everywhere i go.

Since the game has no actual subs and Anet have reduced the population cap on the servers, theres no real rush or reason for people to play 24/7.

An example would be wow, where since there is still a subscription fee, people feel that they must play the game every day to make the most of that fee.

No fee = no rush or no feeling to play as much.

If PvP meant something i.e. you got some reward from winning that was worth keeping I would play a lot. But no tangible rewards means no reason to play.

My server (Tarnished Coast) is pretty active, I am constantly running into people in all zones pretty frequently. Only times I have issues finding people is when I am on at an odd time like 5am and then things are far less active. Of my guild of 30, I consistently see each of them log in almost everyday or at the very least 4-5 days a week. I can’t think of the last time I entered LA and wasn’t shoved into overflow. I am one of those people who enjoys raiding, and does miss it and I do miss the class dependencies like tank and healer but I am enjoying the game here and it seems my server is very active.

greg.3792:

If PvP meant something i.e. you got some reward from winning that was worth keeping I would play a lot. But no tangible rewards means no reason to play.

You dont need rewards to participate in something. Theres this little thing called fun.

I play on a medium pop server and I get kicked to overflow during halloween, still have ques in WvW.

Most 80’s are in Orr at the Camps, Plinx, or in a Dungeon for the Most part.

Most people hang out in lions Arch. There are 3 dragons so people could be there. Plus every dungeon entrance people hang out in front of there LFGng.