Guild Wars 2

Let me sum up quickly what has been said by you (ANET) about the new system to determinate server population:

- you said the new system check who join borderlands and ebg (and not who currently is on the map) during whole day

- you said that it does not check Edge of the Mist connections

- you said it has a very long term update time to avoid that ppl could game it.

Ok, this is not working at all.

First of all, no1 gives a kitten about who join a map do his daily and then leave, beacouse then you get noone to play with and server status Full, i really fail to see any logic there. Server status update quite often, i see Full Servers turn to Very High and then to Full again in a few days so many guilds/friends got stuck middle way to transfer, so they either got to pay again to transfer or disband, this looks more like a scum than anything else. In the while borderlands and ebg are more and more empty but EOTM is full everywhere. Less than 4 hours ago, around midnight (EU time) 7 servers turned to Full status all of a sudden.. ..at midnight? for real? so, during prime time with queues on map we had 7 servers as Very High, but then when ppl log off it turns to Full. It is logical indeed.

To sum up, i won’t say that my 8 years old little brother could work out a better system, but indeed that is not to far from the reality :p

This is normal with a new expansion out. In fact, it was expected.

I’d say it’s good news for the health of EU wvw at least.

i may be missing something there, how exactly it could be positive?

It means more servers are filling with bodies, which will make EU very competitive and exciting.

Instead of, you know, just two servers.

funny SOS went from high to full and still got no one playing EB so they just lower the cap again.

Well, i agree with your point ofc

It is nice to spread ppl around all the servers but it is even more important to determinate who really is Full and who not. In my post i refer to the way Anet use to define the server status, and clearly it is not working at all, there servers with Full status that has empty maps 20h / day…

Taxidriver.2043:

funny SOS went from high to full and still got no one playing EB so they just lower the cap again.

that was more or less also my conclusion

I see a lot of people logging into WvW during the day, many of them even new players (running aroung without guild tag, low wvw-ranks etc.). But because everyone is either busy doing PvE or boycotting WvW because they don’t even try to give the new maps a chance there are no commanders around outside prime time so people leave WvW after a couple of minutes and that’s that. But every time we have a commander we manage to get a queue on the map fairly quickly and 2-3 full maps during prime time are normal.

What I’m trying to say is: The players are there, but it is the community’s task to keep them in WvW.

Clearly there’s no way that all these servers are “Full”, wvw outside Prime is mostly empty and the most dominating servers are just left to fight doors.
I don’t see a point in logging on to wvw, outside of prime time like many others, people just end up playing for fights and follow a pug zerg, GvG or Roam (or PVE instead).

Anet clearly doesn’t care that much about competitive balance, it’s not like there’s anything worth the time and effort anyway, till they give WvW more than a new map and gimmicks, which only makes wvw more meaningless to wvwers; who want to play for that PPT.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

It’s OK. The algorithm is flawless.

/s

I guess the server full status limit is probably not fixed numeric value, but a value determined dynamically. It might work so that if finds the most “full” server from EU and then uses it as basis e.g. -20% from that number is also counted as full. Other explanation is that they merely count players who log to WvWvW, no matter how short time they spend there or maybe they just there to access the merchants, harvesting nodes and crafting stations of the home border.

Third possible explanation is that people from low tier servers are not transferring in large numbers to the top, probably in hopes of finding some action there as they their tier is even more empty and will never fill the massive new borderlands.

Surely none of the EU is full in the old sense of the world. It cannot be just the horribly overdesigned new borderland maps, WvWvW nowadays often feels so empty.

A reply to above: It is NOT the community’s task to keep players in WvWvW. I often put the commander tag on, but I don’t have any magical spells to force anybody come to WvWvW. If WvWvW rewards suck, of course majority of players go where rewards are better and the Halloween events have good loot. 3/4 of the players favorite map just changed into something completely different. Imagine if Counter Strike players would have all their old maps replaced with a vast desert, full of jumping puzzles and environmental hazards, taking 30 minutes to find an enemy player. And the remaining the map (Eternal Battlegrounds) also got many drastic changes e.g. the auto upgrades. Too many changes, too quickly. Of course the core players feel alienated. That is the fault of the game developers. They can still fix this by giving the old maps back and increasing the rewards. It is not even hard. Just copy & paste spvp reward tracks to WvWvW and make them so that one can realistically finish one reward track in 2 h of normal WvWvW play.

PS. I don’t mind keeping all the top EU servers as full. Desolation has a large potential population, but they just aren’t in WvWvW for the above mentioned reasons. The popularity of the new pve maps dropped quickly after the initial rush as well. It seems the longevity isn’t there.

sarcasm Give better loot from players would fix all of this

Masori.3528:

sarcasm Give better loot from players would fix all of this

I wrote: they should bring back the old maps + improve the rewards.

Merely better loot won’t make the majority of the core players happy. The general consensus is that the old Alpine borderland fit WvWvW better. And the new desert borderland would make a great pve/dungeon map. Not a day goes by without somebody stating that in guild/map/team chat.

But somehow I don’t see this happening any time soon. Developers have pride and admitting so huge mistake and installing back the old maps would require swallowing a lot of that pride.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Masori.3528:

sarcasm Give better loot from players would fix all of this

I wrote: they should bring back the old maps + improve the rewards.

Merely better loot won’t make the majority of the core players happy. The general consensus is that the old Alpine borderland fit WvWvW better. And the new desert borderland would make a great pve/dungeon map. Not a day goes by without somebody stating that in guild/map/team chat.

But somehow I don’t see this happening any time soon. Developers have pride and admitting so huge mistake and installing back the old maps would require swallowing a lot of that pride.

If I would give an advise to the dev’s i’d say…

Make 3 different borderlands.

Alpine
Dessert
Jungle

Size of the dessert one is good, though they could add something usefull between the long walks, so that roamers would also still have something to do.

Wouldn’t mind a City map either – tho the FPS would be dreadful.

With how WvW communities are organized these days – you can rotate borders every week. So not everyone has the “fun” maps.

SFR is 5th in EU ranking.

Good place.

Getting Queue on Prime time.

Working as intended.

I don’t understand the problem here. Having 11 serves full means 11 servers have roughly equal population. So the servers rank is based upon skill and organisation rather then just numbers.

just did see Masori´s answer. Making these maps would be great. I suggestet this too. The new desert map is too bloated.

Making new maps will take too long time. It took them over a year to make the Desert borderland and it is far from being playable yet. We need faster solutions to fix the bleeding population issue. That is why I said reinstalling the old maps + copy & pasting reward tracks from spvp to WvWvW would be a fast solution.

I hope some developer would comment these threads and give us more insight how the WvWvW population is counted. Does merely logging to WvWvW and using the merchants + crafting stations count? Or does it measure players outside the spawn per each tick, which would in fact make a lot of sense? The latter is of course more difficult to program.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Making new maps will take too long time. It took them over a year to make the Desert borderland and it is far from being playable yet. We need faster solutions to fix the bleeding population issue. That is why I said reinstalling the old maps + copy & pasting reward tracks from spvp to WvWvW would be a fast solution.

I hope some developer would comment these threads and give us more insight how the WvWvW population is counted. Does merely logging to WvWvW and using the merchants + crafting stations count? Or does it measure players outside the spawn per each tick, which would in fact make a lot of sense? The latter is of course more difficult to program.

I don’t play wvw for the rewards (shock horror)
I play it for team play and because fighting humans is more challenging than pve mobs – and more fun.
I play it because of strategy and because I can troll enemies 24/7.
I’m currently burned out because I tried to get people to proper play wvw for too long – those are the guys all of you are yelling for “bring more pve players” (by increasing the rewards f.e.) – I spent an hour teaching someone new to wvw what wvw is all about, mind you, but if 50%+ people on the map have no idea what to do it becomes exhausting very fast.

>>I don’t understand the problem here. Having 11 serves full means 11 servers have roughly equal population. <<

Let me help you here: Having 11 empty bottles of equal filling does not makes them full!

Or let me explain the result of this awesome peace of engineering.

Our SFR-based Guild (30 people) had problems to get new members on the server since the server was closed for 3 month.

Consequence: Pay 1800 Gem and move to Gandara temporarily.
While transferring Gandara turned FULL and SFR turned OPEN.
Consequence: Those who transferred (over 20) pay again 1800 Gem and move back to SFR.
After the first people transferred back SFR turned FULL and Gandara is FULL.
So now we are stuck on 2 full server with some people who payed 3600 Gems for absolutely no service.

And that is a problem.

It almost feels like Arenanet doesn’t think about guilds and WvW-communities (which also consist of guilds/based on guilds), and ‘merely’ thinks about WvW players as individuals. There are examples of guilds now which got split up, as they were in the process of transferring and got hit by an unexpected server status update (see above).
It has nothing to do with wanting to stack a server to win the ppt-war.

Do we actually know when these server-status change? It has now changed twice on a monday if I am correct, so can we conclude that monday is the status-change day (if there is a change in status)?

And yeah, these servers that are “full” don’t feel full at all. It would be nice to get some correct info on how the algorythm works, who/what is counted.

I see your problem here kBoom and I can understand your frustration. It’s clear that something should be done so that guilds do not get unintentionally fragmented during transfer.
However, the goal of this population change was to spread players more equally across the servers and I think that it has succeeded (to some degree) in this regard. Even though as you clearly point out there are associated problems.

Gideon Ravenor.5603:

I see your problem here kBoom and I can understand your frustration. It’s clear that something should be done so that guilds do not get unintentionally fragmented during transfer.
However, the goal of this population change was to spread players more equally across the servers and I think that it has succeeded (to some degree) in this regard. Even though as you clearly point out there are associated problems.

It failed miserably.

Making people transfer from T?1 to T2/3 max is a fail.

Zero incentives and advertisements for transferring to bottom servers.

And what we need is to make part of T1/2/3 servers to gtfu to bottom servers and try to maintain 50/50 ratio.

Also, lock transfers for each account not once a week but maybe once a quarter or half a year.

Implement transfer controls.

And voila, it’ll be better tenfold.

I guess they orient “full” on the mean of all servers.
If the lower server loose more people to pve than the higher server do, then

all high server turn full

I say it since more than a year: the server-concept doesn’t work, replace is by something more meaningful.

MMO terms for dummies. Full = medium, high = low, medium = empty.

No offence thist topic sound like a another SFR Crying topic

For those of you who don’t know, the guy who started this thread is Kresh, the leader of SFR, who paid guilds before season 1 and 2 to join SFR to overstack it. He probably tried to do the same thing again. But this time the guilds he paid got splitt up, because SFR went to full. In my opinion they got what they deserved for trying to overstack a top server with even more people again.

the interest to have a lot of people on some server is to have more people at off peak time… If your server is full but 90% are playing only at prime time then you will have some issue with off peak.
This thing with full server is stupid. Just let people join any server they want. They will leave alone if they have too much queue on map on prime time. But at least you will have a small part of those people to play at off peak time..

Gideon Ravenor.5603:

I see your problem here kBoom …

Well the problem is also the statements of certain former Arena-Net employees about the algorithm.
To be precise:

" It’s not looking at a short period of time"

[Samuel Loretan (3 month ago) in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/World-Population-Changes-Are-Coming/page/4#post5324934 ]

To be fair, Samuel Loretan is now working for Riot-Games, but it would be fair to tell the customer at least roughly how the purchased product works.

kBoom.3748:

Well the problem is also the statements of certain former Arena-Net employees about the algorithm.
To be precise:

" It’s not looking at a short period of time"

I can’t see a problem. Looks like it’s working as intended. The algorithm tracks the active wvw accounts over a longer period of time, probably over a month. Over time the amount of players reduced slightly below the full status. That’s why it switched to very high. As soon as you saw that, you tried to transfer with your whole guild (20+ people). As soon as the first players transfered they were added to the active wvw population and the server switched back to full.

oziris.3279:

No offence thist topic sound like a another SFR Crying topic

Here we go! Seems i won another bet, i was waiting such kind of post since the very beginning, so i got the reply already ready. No worries, noone is being offended. Indeed by a shallow point of view this thread may looks like a Crying topic, but it is not, let me explain why.

I personally see videogames as they are, an hobby, a WAY TO HAVE FUN WITH YOUR FRIENDS AND RELAX AFTER WORK, and here comes the the one and the only thing that can kitten me off in a game. I see ppl in my Community DO NOT HAVE FUN ANYMORE, beacouse they have to play in empty maps 20 hours / day. I talk with servers we fight and they are bored due to lack of opponents, i hear complains everyday about the new borderland maps full of PvE content and about most of the changes Anet has done to WvW. In top of that i also feel the pain of the guilds who has been stuck middle way to transfer ended up being split on different servers being unable to play as guild. Some players has spent already almost 4,000 gems to do not get any kind of positive service. So no, this is not a Crying topic, this is a topic created to step up and defend the fun of the players in my Community as first but i guess (and hope) also from other Communties.

The new way to determinate server population is ruining a lot of ppl fun and, let me repeat again, it looks more like a way to scum gems to ppl than anything else.

Anet best luck ever is that there is not other games who offer an experience similar to the WvW one, otherwise they would already have lost the almost totality of the WvW players.

SkiaPhil.4015:

kBoom.3748:

Well the problem is also the statements of certain former Arena-Net employees about the algorithm.
To be precise:

" It’s not looking at a short period of time"

I can’t see a problem. Looks like it’s working as intended. The algorithm tracks the active wvw accounts over a longer period of time, probably over a month. Over time the amount of players reduced slightly below the full status. That’s why it switched to very high. As soon as you saw that, you tried to transfer with your whole guild (20+ people). As soon as the first players transfered they were added to the active wvw population and the server switched back to full.

Let me repeat please:

> no1 gives a kitten about who join a map do his daily and then leave, beacouse then you get noone to play with and server status Full, so you can t get new players who could stay on map and fight.

Do you see the problem now or still nothing?

11 servers suddenly full while nothing is happening is just not possible. Where’s the fun if you are fighting against 2 other full servers and during prime time you don’t even get fights?

ilmau.9781:

oziris.3279:

No offence thist topic sound like a another SFR Crying topic

I talk with servers we fight and they are bored due to lack of opponents, i hear complains everyday about the new borderland maps full of PvE content and about most of the changes Anet has done to WvW.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that the current WvW system has its flaws.
But saying you’re talking with the opposing servers and still lacking fights is a crack in your credibility…

The thing atm is – the rewards in PVE are better and faster than in WvW.
There isn’t alot of content in WvW that upgrades your Guild Hall for example..

Also Fractals give me a better / faster chance to upgrade my gear to ascended than a night of WvW. And well the droprate of other stuff in WvW is so kitten, that i can’t earn my gold with it.

As for server population… Like many said before me (in other threads) Anet should actually merge some of the servers to balance the population.

ilmau.9781:

Let me repeat please:

---

> no1 gives a kitten about who join a map do his daily and then leave, beacouse then you get noone to play with and server status Full, so you can t get new players who could stay on map and fight.

Do you see the problem now or still nothing?

If you want new players try to recruit them from people doing their dailies and PvE players on your server instead of trying to recruit from other wvw communities, which only moves the problem away to another server and doesn’t solve anything.
You could recruit all those EotM players aswell, rumours have it that SFR has a lot of them.

Masori.3528:

But saying you’re talking with the opposing servers and still lacking fights is a crack in your credibility…

I fail to see any logic in ur sentence tbh O_o i can t be online 24/7 to check it myself but indeed i got friends and contacts with almost any server, if they tells me that SFR is empty and they do not got anyone to fight with, i trust them.

Let me post a clear example, we even were outnumbered in two maps at reset. Ok? i never said outnumbered at 5am in the middle of the week, i said, OUTNUMBERED AT RESET!!!! But well, ANET keep say that SFR is very populated, (a mail from less than 1 hour ago) so yes, we are so populated to be considered Full. Everything is working properly, everyone has fun. Noone has been skitten.

SkiaPhil.4015:

ilmau.9781:

Let me repeat please:

---

> no1 gives a kitten about who join a map do his daily and then leave, beacouse then you get noone to play with and server status Full, so you can t get new players who could stay on map and fight.

Do you see the problem now or still nothing?

If you want new players try to recruit them from people doing their dailies and PvE players on your server instead of trying to recruit from other wvw communities, which only moves the problem away to another server and doesn’t solve anything.
You could recruit all those EotM players aswell, rumours have it that SFR has a lot of them.

we want WvW players, EOTM is not WvW sorry

ilmau.9781:

we want WvW players, EOTM is not WvW sorry

In other words you want High Quality WvWers and you’re not interested in players who would like to start WvWing properly.

Looks like there was no problem to begin with.

Can we delete this topic please?

I think the problem is somewhere in the algorithm it gets values from other servers to define what makes a server full or not and with the massive amount of WvWers slacking atm it only takes a spike of much smaller WvW player numbers to bump up population and balance populations causing all these servers to go full.

So basically we need 1 server to start massive PvD train with 60 people all day and all night to unlock all the other servers haha. Even Deso has sod all in maps until prime time most the time. I’ve been taggin up in PvE hahaha!

What guild in their right mind starts transferring and doesn’t finish before a Tuesday where new population calculations have been making changes for quite a while? Seems SFR in another sticky situation :p

If you don’t invest in your community internally and expect to be propped up by an ever-revolving door of transfers, you can see how the law of diminishing returns would apply. A constant change of new bodies/guilds means everyone’s “new” and nobody works well together, because they’re not used to working together. So you wind up being less effective over time — and given the new server caps, that means you have to make due with less than you had in the past — you are not going to ever get back up to the steamrolling population of the past. It’s now about skillset, not endless population.

The smart thing to do is to train within. Offer clinics to new people, get everyone on the same page strategy-wise. Make the community feel cohesive — that’s what makes people invest and stay.

If you can’t be bothered to help others learn, then they likely won’t be bothered to stick around.

Eventually people settle in where they feel part of a community. Then the trickle of bodies dries up entirely.

The Full population system most likely works based on the #1 ranked server, not just an arbitrary number.

With HoT and Haloween, a lot of people are in PvE, including a lot of WvW players who want their masteries and specializations quickly.
As such WvW activity across all servers have fallen.

This activity based population system has taken note of it, and hence the level at which a server is classed has Full has fallen.
And it is most likely due to this that so many servers are now Full.

I wonder how on earth can Aurora Glade be full.. with empty maps..

Tao.1234:

ilmau.9781:

we want WvW players, EOTM is not WvW sorry

In other words you want High Quality WvWers and you’re not interested in players who would like to start WvWing properly.

Looks like there was no problem to begin with.

Can we delete this topic please?

In other words EOTM standard player do not join TS, do not use a build with any kind of sense, do not know to dodge nor to use combo fields nor to do anything usefull in a team. And the worst thing ever is that they do not even care about anything listed above, since being EOTM a grind/farm map the standard EOTM player just care for personal achievements and rewards and nothing more.

If rather you are talking about players who get in touch to WvW willing to learn and cooperate with the community well, they are more than welcome. You can find this wrote clearly in each and every recruitment thread SFR has around and also on our website homepage. We even used to have a entry level community guild to train costantly new players.

Said it before and saying it again: The server population algorithm is a sad joke.

The new algorithm might be working when there are no “special events” going on in WvW but as everybody can see in extreme situations it’s just flat out awful.

It doesn’t or not enough factor in if a server which is going to get closed does have a healthy WvW population or not.

It’s just a numbers game where servers become “full” because on the lower ranked ones literally nobody is playing or because the higher server have a pretty even population and get included into the range of too “full” (e.g. highest pop = 100%, every server within the 90% range gets closed) or a combination of both.

It may lead to an even WvW population across all EU server but that doesn’t mean that the top server have a high enough and healthy one or they are just wastelands.

Hopefully Anet will alter their server status algorithm or else when a new WvW season/tournament is starting things will get as worse as it’s now.

I confirm, fullstatus is not good at the moment, for any of those 11 servers

I’m playing with communities since February 2013, they are not something that you can “move” easily… we saw Seafarer Rest splitting up.. that was bad and because of amount of randoms who joined just to win the legues (that was something that has to be prevented with this fullstatusjoke, even if not a fair solution) and then the unability to move all the community away.

That said, i’m agree that there is no other game which can be similar to GW2 in the WvW part, it’s the best…

So please, ANet gave us already a nice support with Gilded Hollow Arena, finally i can scrim with my Guild without server restriction or queues or whatever.
Now we just need to have a proper enstablishment for Server that is prevented by this “fullstatus” for apparenly no reason.

Why running with a guild in WvW when there is noone to fight or just blobs? In the end, strong communities goal is to stop blobbing that lower the performance of server and reduce the fun overall. 20-35 is the correct number, and stop those three-way-fights. Atm we’re forced to do it because people get all in one map, for what?

Noone plays WvW for Reward! We play for Fun and Challenge! Keep reward to randoms in PvE as you are doing already and all will be fine. But at least, let guild move through servers. (don’t even dare telling someone should transfer lowest tier = you spend money to fight noone.. that deal.)

Many guilds returned for HoT, don’t make them change game again.

Soo, another week has passed and nothing has changed.

Talking about my server, SFR, we are still Outnumbered even in Prime Time while we got the same status (Full) of the servers which actually Outnumber us.

We even asked at Colin about, we got screenshot of the chat which we could post there if needed , he said “we will discuss plans for stuffs like that in WvW in the future” that sounds more like “we do not care at all”

I would like to remind you we are paying customers and we are not satisfied of the service we got. To sum up very quickly, we pay, we want attention, we want to have fun, we want working stuffs. So please do something about.

Thank you.