Guild Wars 2

Was just thinking

if Anet was trying to balance T4- Servers by making them free to transfer

(after leagues)
Is there any reason to roll back to the horrible PVE population based gems
(1600 to T8 server)

Any reason ? One reason

I can think of one.

Money.

I can think of another reason.

Balance.

As much as I’d like to believe this promotes balance, it’s had the opposite effect in the past (Kaineng, HoD now). Free transfers almost always result in bandwagons which eventually fall apart. If anything, it’s more likely that guilds abandon their servers for peer servers with more momentum instead of transferring down to balance coverage.

Actually it would be a good way to balance servers by giving servers in the lower tiers free transfers as improved servers would go up and servers that need free transfers would fall down to get the benefit.

However it seems ANET would prefer WvW groups to congregate in the upper tiers for competitive purposes perhaps?

Jeff.5139:

Actually it would be a good way to balance servers by giving servers in the lower tiers free transfers as improved servers would go up and servers that need free transfers would fall down to get the benefit.

This would probably only work at the very bottom, (T7-T8). Otherwise, we’ll just get what we’re seeing now: lots of guilds abandoning T5-T8 servers to join HoD in T4. It makes the bottom tier even more empty and promotes bandwagoning in higher tiers. I think free transfers should only be warranted if the WvW population is actually low enough, and that’s simply not the case for T4/T5 (and perhaps even some T6) servers.

Basically, the goal is to balance low pop servers, but if higher servers are free, guilds generally abandon the low pop server for the higher tier servers, which is just the opposite of what you want. If T4-T6 servers were always free, I bet you’d see no WvW guild left on T7/T8 servers within a month.

I would like to see free transfers for the ENTIRE LOWER HALF of all the tiers.

You cannot help but admit that the way things are atm there really just aren’t enough people to make all of the tiers competitive. Tier 1 will never de-stack, Tier 1.5 to 2.5 will always want to fight in T2, and all servers are driven by server pride to challenge the tiers above their own.

By granting free transfers to the lower half you give them the opportunity to attract guild groups that want to start fresh or take center stage in helping push a community up the ranks without having to worry about losing members who do not want to spend for transfers or taking risks with low pop servers without a viable exit plan in case their memberships find the community to be disagreeable with them or if they are not given a good enough reason to stay and call that server their home.

Did you play back before they introduced paid transfers?