Guild Wars 2

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Chris and I just made several informative posts about World Linking on Reddit. I’m reposting them here.
(..) active.

On Relinking More Often

We are also considering adjusting links more than once a quarter. There are some pros and cons to this, but assuming World Linking wins the current poll, we could poll on adjusting the re-link rate.

Pros:

• More variety in allies and opponents.
• Players are less likely to bandwagon.
• World populations become more stable.

(…)

I dont understand a few things:

Q: Having more variaty in allies and oponotents, how can that be a good thing, have your guys noticed what that implies access to the TS server, passwords, give access etc??

Q: How this would make players less to bandwagon?

Q: How world population became more stable, would change server option be removed????

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

insanemaniac.2456, so banwagon guild could provoque a re link if alot bandwagon over and over and re-link loop???

seriously i dont get this solution at all….

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

What Liston.9708 says^

Aeolus.3615:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Chris and I just made several informative posts about World Linking on Reddit. I’m reposting them here.
(..) active.

On Relinking More Often

We are also considering adjusting links more than once a quarter. There are some pros and cons to this, but assuming World Linking wins the current poll, we could poll on adjusting the re-link rate.

Pros:

• More variety in allies and opponents.
• Players are less likely to bandwagon.
• World populations become more stable.

(…)

I dont understand a few things:

Q: Having more variaty in allies and oponotents, how can that be a good thing, have your guys noticed what that implies access to the TS server, passwords, give access etc??

Q: How this would make players less to bandwagon?

Q: How world population became more stable, would change server option be removed????

Your server, whichever it may be, is clearly using a very antiquated system for verification etc. I would suggest that you ask your coms admins to look into solutions that are readily available to them to overcome this.

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

good thing theyre already considering 2 of your 3 ideas.

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

good thing theyre already considering 2 of your 3 ideas.

and will they require a 75% vote as well? too many stackers will vote no on all 3….

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

good thing theyre already considering 2 of your 3 ideas.

and will they require a 75% vote as well? too many stackers will vote no on all 3….

good thing theyre taking feedback about the matter. i doubt you will see a poll for server transfer price increases. obviously people would vote no. i doubt a poll on reducing server link time would have trouble meeting a 75% threshold, in fact it may not have trouble reaching a 90% threshold. 3 months is too long.

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

good thing theyre already considering 2 of your 3 ideas.

and will they require a 75% vote as well? too many stackers will vote no on all 3….

good thing theyre taking feedback about the matter. i doubt you will see a poll for server transfer price increases. obviously people would vote no. i doubt a poll on reducing server link time would have trouble meeting a 75% threshold, in fact it may not have trouble reaching a 90% threshold. 3 months is too long.

all the people who paid to stack or join friends on the host will vote No to more frequent swapping and limited # of transfers over x time….

I guess what bothers me most is Tyler admitted the first link was bad, but here we are with no change allowing bad turn to worse…..

I just don’t see how linking will ever work in the long term, but I am a ‘get off my lawn’ kind of guy so I could be wrong.

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Liston.9708:

insanemaniac.2456:

Aenaos.8160:

What’s the point of keeping underpopulated worlds open and then developing ways to link them together?
Why not just close low pop worlds and offer free transfers from the closing servers to
targeted higher pop worlds?
The last thing WvW needs is even less world/server engagement.
WvW in GW2 is too much of a RvR lite mode as it is.
You already have EotM for the players that don’t really care about open world RvR or their server and simply want to join a random open map and fight.
Which brings me to the elaborate solution and how terrible I believe it will be.
You can’t destroy servers and their communities every few months.

cuz if everyone is on a bunch of low population servers, its easy for anet to break up overstacking when it occurs by relinking and distributing servers more evenly.

the cost to transfer is too cheap and length of linking far too long to not expect the stackers to restack every time links change. You only get around that by increasing the cost to transfer dramatically, limit the times one can transfer, or reduce the time between re-linking occurs. All those options have their own set of issues. this is why linking will never work…

good thing theyre already considering 2 of your 3 ideas.

and will they require a 75% vote as well? too many stackers will vote no on all 3….

good thing theyre taking feedback about the matter. i doubt you will see a poll for server transfer price increases. obviously people would vote no. i doubt a poll on reducing server link time would have trouble meeting a 75% threshold, in fact it may not have trouble reaching a 90% threshold. 3 months is too long.

all the people who paid to stack or join friends on the host will vote No to more frequent swapping and limited # of transfers over x time….

I guess what bothers me most is Tyler admitted the first link was bad, but here we are with no change allowing bad turn to worse…..

I just don’t see how linking will ever work in the long term, but I am a ‘get off my lawn’ kind of guy so I could be wrong.

i think you are overestimating the number of people doing that. we were able to slip through the cracks for ~3 years and get into even full servers. thats a long time for people to be able to try to get with their guilds. i think that most of the people who wanted to do so did so long ago, and only a few stragglers were left by the time transfers into full servers were sealed.

if it was a common problem, we would have seen threads about it on this forum far more often than we have. because it really is an annoying thing if you are caught in it. and yes it is a large problem.

but the solution to it is something the community is unwilling to commit to, for no reason other than “we want to play with more people”. anet is offering to potentially solve that complaint by placing more people on a single team and by evening out the teams themselves, but there is no incentive for the community to jump for the offer because the majority of people are already happy where they are from the community-driven, jury-rigged solution thats been in place for years: overstacking.

Isn’t it nice that the reasons for the NA linking system were explained while, despite it being obvious that this system won’t ever work properly for EU servers, they still implemented it here as well?

Nobody ever asked: would you consider the linking of EU and GER severs a possibility?

Nobody seems to have thought about that the world linking as it stands puts most of the non-linked servers at a disadvantaged. (Which ofc isn’t a problem in NA, where all servers are linked.)

Nobody seems to care that sever’s like Abbadon and Dzagonur were kittened over, because pairing Desolation with Vabbi was more important.

I personally am only slightly negatively inclined towards the principle of world linking, but I understand why a lot the EU players think they are being overlooked. It just feels like the people in charge couldn’t be bothered to come up with fitting solution for us and instead slapped the NA system on the EU servers because it was the easiest solution.

There’s language barriers for EU, they’re trying to respect that, linking is the least disruptive option.

What other fitting solution is there to do?

Just wondering if you would prefer they stuck with the old system for EU?
Or would you prefer ignoring the languages and just link servers over there like on NA?
Do players generally only move to other servers with their language or do they not care about that?

EU needs to tell Anet what they want if they’re unhappy.

The thing with the EU servers is that there are 4 language groups:

14 EU
7 GER
5 FRA
1 ESP

Those server groups however do not include the Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Polish etc. players. On the EU servers the most spoken language is English, simply because that’s the only language most people can talk in other than their native one. There are guilds from every European country and some from non-European ones.

There are German, French and Spanish people that are on EU servers indstead of their “intended” ones. Also on some smaller servers a bigger majority of the population is from a specific country (one was mainly Swedish for example, but I can’t remember which).

When EU players lfg they are paired with all other EU people. You can select a “group language”, but most people don’t bother. Yes, from my experience both the Spanish and the French are often not happy about speaking English or simply lack the language skills. That’s true for Germans as well, though on a smaller level.

I have talked to people from German servers and while a lot don’t want to “bother” speaking English, many would take the chance to at least try a merging of EU and GER servers. It’s a matter of convenience mostly.

On Elona Reach for example most of the vocabulary the commanders use is already English: “Stack, empower, small blast, big blast, push, rez, engage, disengage…”. Someone who plays WvW regularly uses those terms anyway – seriously, a few weeks ago I had a com (Austrian guy) who used the German word for Empower (“Ermächtigung”). Half the zerg spent 10 mins in utter confusion until someone explained what it meant. I’d never heard that word used in WvW before.

Linking EU servers is not striktly about language. The fat majority of us can speak English. We have community organized Tri-Wurm runs with 100+ players of dozens of countries reaching as far as Australia or Saudi Arabia.

In my opinion matching some GER servers like Abbadon which is currently on last place as they are completely overrun, with EU servers like Vabbi which for whatever reason was paired with Desolation, would have been a far more balanced concept. This was a beta, if it hadn’t worked out another pairing could have been formed. That’s what a beta is for, imo: trial and error.

I’m not saying that the Germans wouldn’t have complained, but honestly we’re very good at complaining. Maybe pairing us with EU servers would have alleviated the extreme rivalry among the German servers somewhat – which would actually have been a good thing.

atheria.2837:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Chris and I just made several informative posts about World Linking on Reddit. I’m reposting them here.

On Population Caps

Some information behind the current server population cap behavior:
Many may already know this bit, but for anyone else who doesn’t: world population is determined by activity level in WvW (Edge of the Mists and Obsidian Sanctum don’t count). If World A has many-times the number of players on it as World B, but World A does’t play WvW at all and World B plays tons of WvW, A will have the lowest population, and B will have a very high one.
/u/piInverse, to your point on increasing world population levels, and especially some becoming full
This is not caused by the additional players bought about by the server link, but from returning players and a lower population cap on the host servers.
This is only partly true. We’ve also had a substantial increase in global WvW participation since reward tracks, world linking, and the return of the Alpine borderlands. On top of that, we use a fairly long historical tail on WvW activity level for world population purposes. Intent being to prevent worlds from artificially lowering their cap with just a couple weeks of intentional inactivity. One flipside of that being that even if global WvW population levels dropped next week, if they were still higher than pre-<aforementioned factors>, population levels would still go up as a new, higher week replaces an older, lower one in the window of time being used.
World linking problem: linking, say, a T8 NA world with a T1 NA world and doing nothing with population caps will make it very easy to pile onto an already-healthy world. So something needs to be done with population caps.
There are two opposing goals we can aim for.

• Short-term prevention of bandwagoning. To do this, we’d need to make it more difficult to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.
• Long-term health of worlds with less WvW activity. To do this, we’d need to make it easier to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.

As for what modifications we’ve put in place for population levels to not allow world linking to break the meaning and purpose of population entirely, we’re currently trying a compromise between going completely toward either the long-term or short-term health goals for world populations.

• Unlinked worlds have the highest population cap.
• Linked worlds have significantly lower population caps.

Some things we’re considering to help discourage bandwagoning:

• Increasing the cost to transfer to lower-population worlds (since they’re now often going to be linked to high-pop worlds). For example, possibly 800 gems instead of 500.
• Having merge hosts always considered Full, and their guest(s) all sharing the population their host would otherwise have.
• Locking out transfers for a period of time after world links become active.

On Relinking More Often

We are also considering adjusting links more than once a quarter. There are some pros and cons to this, but assuming World Linking wins the current poll, we could poll on adjusting the re-link rate.

Pros:

• More variety in allies and opponents.
• Players are less likely to bandwagon.
• World populations become more stable.

Cons:

• Matchmaking becomes less accurate. There’d be more unfair matches.
• The WvW World Rank leaderboard becomes less meaningful.
• Additional administrative work for worlds coordinating voice-chat/forum access with their changing allies.
• Players may start to avoid socializing and forming bonds with their cross-world allies, since they are likely to change often.
• My team(WvW) spends more of our time analyzing population and match data, to determine new links, leaving less time for other types of WvW work.
• It becomes harder to remember which worlds are currently linked, and know when the next relink is supposed to happen.

Want an idea to change WvW?

Lock GUILDS to their servers (and the people IN them so they don’t guild or server hop!) for at least six months.

You haven’t looked at the populations or you wouldn’t have locked the servers together – they would be movable to whichever server is larger with a smaller server to augment.

It makes me crazy that we suggested the latter and you took it as a quick out to just lock bottom and top servers (at the time) without any recognition or care of the populations and the server stacking that is STILL going on.

And shall we talk about hacking? It’s getting ridiculous.

Lock guilds to the guild wvw server could be awesome.

My guild mates are transfering to our linked server because our wvw server is full and we don´t know when they can transfer to the host server.

Ashamir.9574:

The thing with the EU servers is that there are 4 language groups:

Chuckles…

I’ll Totally agree & support your opinion that Language is Important…actually Critical for you to enjoy the WvW Game Mode.

However, you’ll have to convince the Larger NA Voting Population that it’s important.

Yours truly,
Diku

Possible Full Solution – Google Search – Reboot Base Map Mechanic

stack.. stack.. stack that server… and then stack some more

Stacking = Skillz

TheGrimm.5624:

+1 on posting here. It can be rather disheartening to see more official posts on Reddit versus the games own forums. Thanks!

This multiplied by infinity. I know these forums are extremely toxic but it’s such a breath of fresh air to read these posts, Tyler has given me a real reason to fully read these forums again.

Ultra Hades.4691:

4) If you want to really make meaningful progress towards population balance, you need to introduce a server and player timezone month-long activity metre and locks based on time. Players who are active in some time period looking to transfer to a server that is active in that same time period should have to pay more or simply not be able to transfer (because full server in that time period). Players active in a time period looking to transfer to a server with a low activity in that period should be rewarded.

So are you saying that, if a player cannot play on a server because there is no one in their time zone, it should just be “too bad, so sad” for them and go do PVE because you aren’t allowed to transfer to a server with an active time zone that you play in? That sounds like a good way to really get people to quit the game fast!

Tyler Bearce.3427:

• Short-term prevention of bandwagoning. To do this, we’d need to make it more difficult to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.
• Long-term health of worlds with less WvW activity. To do this, we’d need to make it easier to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.

Some things we’re considering to help discourage bandwagoning:

• Increasing the cost to transfer to lower-population worlds (since they’re now often going to be linked to high-pop worlds). For example, possibly 800 gems instead of 500.
• Having merge hosts always considered Full, and their guest(s) all sharing the population their host would otherwise have.
• Locking out transfers for a period of time after world links become active.

Before you do any of this, could you please at least find out the real list of reasons why people want to move? I think you may find there are more reasons out there than just “bandwagoning.” Thank you.