Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, this isn’t an excuse or a real complaint but the truth is anets link between general population size and transfer fees is breaking servers like mine in Wvw

I love underworld, I wouldn’t dream of moving off it, but the truth is its mainly a pve server and because we have been stuck at very high since very early in the game began with haven’t had an increase to our WvW population at all

The problem is we are in sort of a unique situation because we are stuck as very high but we never had much of a wvw community in the first place, we are the only very high server to really be suffering, it costs A LOT of gold to move here which has turned away entire alliances who told us it was to expensive to move there, any guild who has moved here has ended up leaving half of its players behind or only managed to move a few select players who can afford playing 80g+ to move.

Anet keep adding plans like " free transfers to medium servers" which allows entire guilds of players to move from underworld to servers higher ranked even if those servers didn’t need the help in the first place leaving us even more screwed than before.

Anet needs to seperate the ideas of General population and WvW population and consider a better long term method, for example http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#EU

Each servers history of wins is on that site, if your server is the highest rank, you don’t need transfers so make moving cheaper the lower down the general ranks you are, no matter of server size if you have been below 15 rank for months you need more help thank anyone above, if you are in the bottom 6 servers you need more help than the servers above that and so on.

Its simple really, to cheat and lower the cost of transfer cost a server would need to allow its rank to drop 10+ ranks to be worth it, and for most servers you wouldn’t get even close to enough players willing to give up on wvw for months for that to work.

The alternative to anet stepping in is somehow making our players either play even more or manage to be fighting 2vs1 all the time and win against servers with both numbers and as much training as we do which isn’t possible.

I have a day job and can’t spend 5 hours a night in wvw, its not realistic but the current system gives that as the option we have to get out of being the lowest ranked server in the silver league because we have a server which cant get transfers.

Im bumping this because Anets lack of action after a year of this issue been public is unacceptable, the alternative would be remaking the same thread who is no better

Underworld is losing another 5 guilds this week because of the lack of transfers to our population.

Underworld has been the highest population but lowest wvw population of any server on eu for the entire release of the game, we have always been stuck on very high despite the fact that we have had very few transfers we managed to stay in silver league due to guilds working together.

We lost most of our wvw guilds when the league started as we were stuck on last place of the silver league. and now after the league is over we are losing 5 more guilds for more population reasons.
ROS is going to become the most stacked server on bronze league because its a Medium population server with the wvw population of a silver league server, as its the cheapest option for transfers more and more guilds will be moving there stacking bronze league even more.

My guild itself is one of uws largest guilds and has lost 10% of its total population since the league began as wvw players transfered to higher tiers to avoid steamrolling so this is getting silly and damaging our servers pve as well as wvw.

Anet you messed up, admit it and fix the problem because I am losing more and more players to other games because they just feel like you actually care about anyone outside of gold league.

Waiting to the next league in Feb to even consider making this fix is going to be to late and more guilds will quit the game or move to stacked servers.

This is a problem that needs your full attention, and should have been fixed a year ago when we all knew it was going to be a problem.

My personal suggestions are that Anet remove any guild transfer penalty if a guild moves to a lower ranked server, costs should be much much lower to any lower tier server than any higher no matter what the population of that server is.
And maybe actually visit our server with your developers and see the problems we are facing, I havent heard about a developer on our server for 6months now, come on for an hour, contact me and ill get the remaining guild leaders together to show you the problems we face.

While it should have been looked at, it won’t happen. The level of care put into this game is close to zero.

The thing is the fixes are so simple that anet really has no excuse, assuming the game was programmed in any OO manner it should not be hard to add any changes ive mentioned within a few weeks

I imagine if this isnt taken care of servers will die out and players will move to other games.

I loved guildwars 1 and played it for years, guildwars 2 does not have the same long term appeal and care we got in guildwars 1

who cares about a new update every 2 weeks when basic features such as guild management and server population are broken, id rather have a month of no updates and get some basic functionality back that every other game, even guildwars 1 had.

I have to agree. This is a problem that requires attention. Not soon, not in a bit. It needs attention now.
The problem is that the end-game in gw2, is basically Dungeons, World bosses and WvW.
Dungeons and World bosses is pve and can be done cross-servers by guesting, with no repercusions.

However.. WvW is bound to your server. People will keep leaving Underworld, as they reach end-game, and find Underworld completely screwed when it comes to WvW. People are already guesting to Desolation and other servers for Tequatl kills etc. .

Anet, please do something >_> Atleast come online and see for yourself. Let us show you the world! I mean, the problems.. !

RF.. It was brought up on numerous occasions during the WvW CDI thread but ANET have since swept server population issues under the carpet and moved on to other issues they deem more important and more worthy of action.
In reverse strategy kind of way it makes sense what they are doing, hoping servers bring themselves to a halt rather than announcing forced server transfers like SWTOR, to hive players into other less empty servers before killing certain servers they came from, as that rarely goes down well in MMO’s from my experience.
As for our high pop PvE server, as players from facets of the game such as WvW drift to other servers or worse the game then that high pop soon becomes medium/low etc and so their strategy is seen to be working.
Whichever way it plays out ANET will stand to gain financially in the short term which fits nicely into their short window content turnaround strategy.. So the only answer I can see forthcoming is “NO, were not doing anything about server populations and how we market for gem sales”

The thing is at this point i feel that the very high population is not a list of active players but people who have played on uw and quit.

if we have at most 2 500 man guilds on the server and arent able to kill teq at prime time due to lack of numbers i think it says a lot about out servers population problems.

If the only part of the game that requires you to have a home server is wvw then pve only players should be removed from how it is calculated, if you have 10 pvers and 90 wvwers and we have 190 pvers and 10 wvwers we would have a higher population but would be much much weaker in wvw than you but our population would say it was higher.

The number of people playing on a server, regardless of what they’re doing, be it PVE, PVP, WVW, or even just sitting in Lion’s Arch roleplaying, is a factor when it comes to lag issues and load times. Ideally the population load will be spread evenly among all the servers, hence why it’s cheaper to move to lower population servers.

You mention you “love” Underworld, but don’t really explain why. Regardless, if the issue is that gamebreaking for you, why don’t you move to a server that is more in line with your WvW interests and guest onto Underworld for everything else?

Phoenix.3416:

The thing is at this point i feel that the very high population is not a list of active players but people who have played on uw and quit.

if we have at most 2 500 man guilds on the server and arent able to kill teq at prime time due to lack of numbers i think it says a lot about out servers population problems.

If the only part of the game that requires you to have a home server is wvw then pve only players should be removed from how it is calculated, if you have 10 pvers and 90 wvwers and we have 190 pvers and 10 wvwers we would have a higher population but would be much much weaker in wvw than you but our population would say it was higher.

There in lies your main issue.. how do you determine a player is a WvW’er or a PvE.. both options are openly available to anyone logging in.. because someone hasn’t played it yet doesn’t mean they wont .. so you cant easily separate it out like that.. maybe looking at concurrent logging into a server WvW session may help to better reclassify server pops, but whether ANET monitor that information or if they even want to is entirely in the lap of the gods imo.
My feeling they are happy to see players migrate across servers.. people leave undermanned to go to better activity servers so they win via xfer sales.. players get fed up of queuing and poor performance on stacked servers so they migrate again.. ANET win again through a Xfer fee.. somewhere in the ether a balance might be struck eventually, but I wont be holding my breath especially as it can be easily manipulated to gain gem sales boosts whenever they want, else why release Xfer sales right before a season is due to commence.. there is really only one winner whichever way the cookie crumbles

Can someone plz look at the population of Underworld and tell me again its “Very High”? Orr maps are empty, we cant do most of the events in the higher lvl maps, not to mention Tequatli or WvW….

Seems to me they could make a more accurate measure of server participation if they simply added the WvW ranks for all participants together and weighted that. If you are active, you are going to get ranks. If you aren’t you didn’t….

I could show you screen shots from Devona’s Rests Lions Arch map @ all of the prime times. Nothing about that server is very high. I think this is how ANET makes the game look appealing to people coming in for a new game, if they see all of the servers are Very High or High when they are actually Low/Medium they think these players will think the games more active?

Devona’s Rest = Very High population.
Reality = Very Very Very Low population.

This is merely speculation and I’m not sure if it works this way but it would make sense if it did. The way I speculate server population works is this; they add all the accounts registered on a particular server together to calculate the popuation. The problem with Underworld is the server name. New players join Underworld because it’s a cool sounding server with a Very High population, play for 2 months and move on to another game but their account is still registered on the server.

I don’t know if this is true but if it is, it’s not working.

Perhaps implementing some algorithm that calculates player activity when it comes to server population would, I’m sure, create some interesting results when calculating a true server activity. The players you want on Underworld are long-term players transferring from other servers and to be honest, Underworld would be perfect for prime-time WvW guilds who afre sick of queuing up for WvW unable to get their whole guild on a borderland, however, being stuck at “Very High” population means that Underworld is incredibly undesirable for old long-term players and guilds wanting to try a new server or meta.

SWD, SWAG, TKON, GTRS, XxX, SLAY, AA and a few more guilds have left Underworld recently. That’s almost 1000 players surely. Yet the population is still stuck at Very High. ANet really needs to look at this and fix it somehow otherwise they are going to end up with servers being dead and dropping further into the abyss.

[ from an ex-Underworld player]

Newbkakes.4971:

I could show you screen shots from Devona’s Rests Lions Arch map @ all of the prime times. Nothing about that server is very high.

GoM is pretty similar :/ Everyone goes on other server for PvE events and if we aren’t doing good in WvW, the majority doesn’t bother helping us fight.

Why are you complaining about all of this, RoF and BT have the exact same problem xD RoF has never had a guild group join them before and our main population is very PvE heavy and Blacktide underwent a mass exodus (I think, I could be wrong about that) and with BT war taking all the wvw’ers off that server they are left with next to nothing but the polish guilds like RBL HI and HoD.

So please don’t complain. In fact Underworld might now become the third server to complete the RoF Dzag area we have been search for a third server on the same level as us for way too long since the RiOT, VcY 3rd era of the RoS bandwagoning ruined our last one with GH… RoF vs Dzag vs UW might be the new perfect fight

Yes I Cap.5389:

Why are you complaining about all of this, RoF and BT have the exact same problem xD RoF has never had a guild group join them before and our main population is very PvE heavy and Blacktide underwent a mass exodus (I think, I could be wrong about that) and with BT war taking all the wvw’ers off that server they are left with next to nothing but the polish guilds like RBL HI and HoD.

So please don’t complain. In fact Underworld might now become the third server to complete the RoF Dzag area we have been search for a third server on the same level as us for way too long since the RiOT, VcY 3rd era of the RoS bandwagoning ruined our last one with GH… RoF vs Dzag vs UW might be the new perfect fight

Its not about who is in the worst situation but the fact that we have identified a problem and since we are from underworld we cant claim to know your servers situation.

Underworld is a prime example of the problem since we have always been on very high since the game came out making transfers impossible for any large guilds.

Based off the next set of guilds to leave i imagine underworld will drop much lower, dzag seems much stronger than us in population

have to dissapoint you in that 3 way fight underworld is the new vabbi 4 of their guilds transfering to ruins o surmia this week they are done with being steam rolled i guess and ruins of surmia is on the rise and no not bandwagoning were trying to build a stable silver league server here

Shout out for Underworld! Fighting tooth and nail to hang on to a single keep like we did with the Garrison last night!

I think the problem is two-fold.
Firstly, our lack of numbers in WvW. As epic as last night’s defence of the Garrison was I think it was pretty much the entire population of our Borderlands in the keep lord’s room. There’s no one to spare to try and keep supply lines running so we’re perpetually supply starved, which means that we rarely get the chance to upgrade. I don’t remember the last time that I saw one our borderland keeps with a waypoint in it.
The second closely related issue is the effectiveness of outnumbering your opponents. Not only can you win most encounters, you can spare people to defend, to run supply, to flip camps. The advantage magnifies, making the map progressively more imbalanced.

The thing is, there’s always going to be a population imbalance somewhere, whether on Underworld or another server. You can’t make people transfer to even things out and trying to use incentives to get people to move is like trying to herd cats.
A better solution would be to do something to negate the effects of the imbalance. Ideas might be (and I’m plucking these out of thin air so they’re not going to be that well thought out) allowing players to carry supply that can be put towards the upgrades – if I can take supply from a keep’s stores then why can’t I deposit some? Let’s be honest, no one likes escorting dolyaks and they’re far too easy to kill anyway.
Improve the defensiveness of keeps (I started a thread on this yesterday in this very forum)
Introduce some mechanism to increase the speed or decrease the supply cost of upgrades for low pop servers. Obviously there’d need to be something in place to stop everyone on your server zoning out while an upgrade is applied then zoning back in when it’s done.

I doubt they’ll be able to stop one server having a numerical advantage over the others, but they might be able to at least level the playing field a bit.

Edit: just after I posted that I noticed that we’ve actually got all 3 keeps on our borderlands – it’s a Christmas miracle!
It won’t last and we’re still miles behind but let’s enjoy these few special moments.
Edit 2: it lasted about 30 seconds

I really didn’t wanted to take place in this thread, call it server pride, call it stubbornness that we could fix the server ourselves, or that the problem will get fixed the more we fall on rank. The more time passes I see that UW is dying.

Yes, a whole server dying, not just the WvW population, the whole server.
ANet you really should pay attention to this issue, because it is much deeper than what it seems.

Let’s start from the basics:

Phoenix.3416:

The thing is at this point i feel that the very high population is not a list of active players but people who have played on uw and quit.

I am not sure for the above, but I do believe it. Here on UW we have some signs that will make you believe how the server populations work and that is with the total number of accounts, not the “active” ones.

Few signs:
* Not so important sign about general UW population *
On prime time we have a maximum of 80-100 players total on every borderland & eternal battlegrounds. Off prime time that number becomes 40-50 max.

That is a 100 people playing WvW on one server, out of which 70 to 80% consists of mostly small organized guilds.

“UW is a PvE server!” Such a lie.
UW has contested temples for more than a month.
CoF is locked a month now, it might open once in a month or so.
World bosses are dying on UW. Most people guest to desolation for PvE.
We haven’t had an Overflow on big patches since Scarlet invansions.
LA had no overflow for a couple of months now. LA looks empty on prime time.

We have had various “exodus” on UW. Small ones, big ones. This week ,as stated above, 5 more guilds left UW and guildless people leave every day.

I am not sure how many or which are the server with the same problem as UW, but it doesn’t change the fact that this IS a problem.

I don’t know the solution, maybe make server transfers based on WvW rank, maybe merge servers or clean inactive accounts from the population count. One thing I know is that UW is slowly and painfully dying.
It is not just the server that dies, it is the fun that comes with playing the game.
Ghost WvW and ghost PvE will only make more people(the ones that can’t afford a transfer , like big guilds) unhappy.

ANet, we are calling.

Nothing really gets done on UW other than Queensdale champ train. Orr is contested constantly, Tequatl I can’t even dream of trying out. I’m running out of reasons to stay on this server.

The rest of the zones are empty too of course since why would people go there?

We have to face it. It’s too late for UW. I transferred to RoS this week with several friends. I stayed, fought and got steamrolled for two months during season 1 because I believed things would get better, and there were rumours of a population reset/new way to calculate transfer costs to servers. Nothing happened, and even more guilds left the server as a result of it. We didn’t even have a queue during last reset, and there rarely is any commander around, meaning that the PvE’rs won’t even bother staying, as zerging is the only thing they know. WvW was just not fun anymore.
First hours of WvW on RoS was like a breeze of fresh air after being locked in a basement for a year.

Abandon ship while there are still life boats.

Its to late for underworld and any server below it to have anet give them end game content that many of us love?

Thats not a valid excuse for anet not sorting it out, and saying it is to late is like saying the game is dead, unless anet wants to abandon thousands of players publically which is not going to be good for there image.

This problem is easy to solve or at least start the balll rolling for the next 3 ideas.

Make it free for a guild to move down to a lower league, make it cost to move UP a league.

Remove any guild reset penalties for guilds who move down(they keep upgrades and influence)

have anet devs play on the lower tier servers so they can understand more than just what tier 1 wvw is like, tier 1 league achievements took a few days while down here while youre getting steamrolled its a few weeks so its important they know gold league isnt the only league for wvw.

The following are more general wvw changes but you get the idea

Consider giving players who move down and fight in a lower league to help a server out a reward if that server improves in rank during the league?

outmanned should be more than just a small buff to magic find, if im outmanned 5 to 1 magic find isnt going to make my life easier. a small stat bonus isnt going to make us able to win 50 vs 10 but its going to make us survive a tad longer, naturally if you arent getting so many stats youre worth an extra player we would rather have the extra player but its going to help to start with.

Different levels of outmanned, if im outmanned at all we should get a small bonus, and the more outmanned we are the bigger it should be so we can gauge how doomed we are and give us a small advantage in 1 on 1.

Underdog bonus: the 2nd and 3rd servers could be given an additional bonus to encourage them to keep fighting, 100% magicfind bonus, some stats etc to encourage those players to keep going instead of quiting when it gets harder. Infact making repairs free for the third server of the week would be a major bonus and maybe 50% off for the 2nd server. If wvw isnt costing you money if you die thats going to make it less painful to wipe to a huge server

When it comes to WvW the problem is not reflected very well(if not at all) on the NA servers.
Just go on MOS and see how much more balanced the matches are on NA compared to EU.

On NA there are 2/9 match ups which are getting steamrolled by 1 server(and even on these 2 the diffrence is reversable).

Now check the EU. Only 2/9 match ups look balanced which means 7/9 matches on EU are getting steam rolled by 1 server.

You don’t have to be a genius to understand that something is wrong.
77% of the match ups are balanced on NA, while only 22% on EU.

ANet just bring yourselves over to some lower ranked EU servers so you can understand what unpleasant WvW means.

Also look at how healthier the rankings are on NA and how bad they look on EU.

Phoenix.3416:

……..unless anet wants to abandon thousands of players publically which is not going to be good for there image.………..

Wait. Hold on guys.
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They have an image?

Every time I see one of these threads pop up I am hoping for someone to actually post a solution, but I have yet to see a single solution to the problem.

What would be considered a WvW-player?
Someone standing around in spawn for hours?
Someone not doing anything useful for the server (such as trading keeps/farming WXP)?
Someone who logs in for 5 minutes and then leaves?

How often should they update it and so on?

Why do we have to define the WvW player?

The populations are the obvious problem here. Highly populated servers(on papers) which have close to zero activity on game aspects(such as WvW or PvE).

WHY are we considered a Very High server while we have the active population of a medium server?

lordkrall.7241:

Every time I see one of these threads pop up I am hoping for someone to actually post a solution, but I have yet to see a single solution to the problem.

What would be considered a WvW-player?
Someone standing around in spawn for hours?
Someone not doing anything useful for the server (such as trading keeps/farming WXP)?
Someone who logs in for 5 minutes and then leaves?

How often should they update it and so on?

my solution does not need any of that information as its based off league standing. the cost changes depending on your league not your servers population

since wvw is the only part of the game where guesting isnt an option to help another server then basing the transfer costs off how well a server is doing in wvw makes sense

natsos.3692:

Why do we have to define the WvW player?

The populations are the obvious problem here. Highly populated servers(on papers) which have close to zero activity on game aspects(such as WvW or PvE).

WHY are we considered a Very High server while we have the active population of a medium server?

Because people (such as the OP) keeps talking about somehow base the transfer fee on the number of active WvW-players, and in order to do that we need to be able to define what actually is an active WvW-player.

Phoenix.3416:

my solution does not need any of that information as its based off league standing. the cost changes depending on your league not your servers population

since wvw is the only part of the game where guesting isnt an option to help another server then basing the transfer costs off how well a server is doing in wvw makes sense

But what if a server that is leading in the league suddenly loses several of their major WvW-guilds?
Then they will be dropping like a stone, but it would still take quite some time before other guilds could transfer there due to the fact that they are still highly ranked in the league.

1. If a server is “high population,” it’s not dead or dying — that number is largely based on current and recent logons (and you can see this by noticing that the status changes over the course of the week).
2. The cost of transferring has nothing to do with helping WvW or PvE. It’s better for players and ANet if each server has approximately the same population, so ANet offers a discount to move to less populated servers.
3. If anything about this was easy, ANet would have done it already, if for no other reason to reduce the number of threads with folks complaining about this issue.

All that said, I support the idea of offering a discount for servers with low WvW scores:

• The discount should apply to anyone transferring, not just WvWers.
• The most expensive moves should still be to Very High pop servers; the cheapest should still be to the lowest populated servers.

So the current could be changed from

• 1,800 (very high) | 1,000 (high) | 500 (med)
• 1,800 (very high) | 1,000 (high) , 750 (high + low wvw scores) | 500 (med)

Keep in mind that even at 1,800, the cost to move is still $22,50, less than the discount cost of buying a new copy of the game.

Krall, OP is not talking about WvW-players(as individuals) ,he is talking about actual ranks.

E.G. :
If you are on server with rank 18 it takes X ammount of gems to transfer to the server with rank 17. If you want to transfer to 16, then it takes even more than the rank 17. But if you want to go to rank 19 then it’s free.

Sounds pretty simple.

Also when we talk about WvW population then we talk about the number of All individuals that patricipate on WvW during 24hrs. SFR & Piken have diffrent numbers on WvW during a full day than FS & FR.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

1. If a server is “high population,” it’s not dead or dying — that number is largely based on current and recent logons (and you can see this by noticing that the status changes over the course of the week).

That is absolutely false.
Underworld has been a Very High population server since the first days, it has never ever changed, altho it is almost a ghost server(even on prime time).

Today we had a Wintersday event , organized by some people on the server. LA was almost full but guess what. many old friends from other servers came and even with this no overflow was created.
I will double type it: Today we gathered for a big give away event, people from other servers came also and we didn’t have an overflow

Basing transfer cost on active wvw population is stupid mainly because it is impossible to define what an active wvw player is. It would also take up a whole lot of resources for Anet to keep up with the ever changing performance of servers.

Also, do you guys seriously think that free/reduced transfer costs would attract guilds to transfer down? There’s a reason why servers in the Bronze League are there…. and population isn’t the only factor.

Deli.1302:

Basing transfer cost on active wvw population is stupid mainly because it is impossible to define what an active wvw player is. It would also take up a whole lot of resources for Anet to keep up with the ever changing performance of servers.

Also, do you guys seriously think that free/reduced transfer costs would attract guilds to transfer down? There’s a reason why servers in the Bronze League are there…. and population isn’t the only factor.

Transfer cost would be based off league ranking not wvw population, its the only fair way to figure out how a server is in wvw.

and ive already spoken to some guilds who would transfer to underworld if it was much cheaper or free. including guilds who originally moved off underworld in the first place due to the transfer problem

population isnt the only factor but transfer costs are a huge factor on where a guild moves too, why would you move to a lower ranked server which is on very high when you can go to ROS which is medium and is already full of wvwers? if its going to cost you double to move to a very high knowing that not everyone will be willing to pay so much then you will go for the cheaper option

over the last year ive spoken to guilds representing 1000s of players who wanted to move to a server like underworld but decided against it last minute because of the higher cost. a year later this has broken our server and although my server pride doesnt want to admit it, its time anet sorts it out

ROS has many more players than we do but is on medium while we are on very high, i think that speaks wonders for how broken the measurement is, i have yet to see underworld go less than very high, even when we had 11 guilds of 200+ move in one week a year ago i didnt see it change, and now looking at a near empty lions arch and half filled border in wvw its obvious that the calculation is wrong or broken

Phoenix.3416:

Deli.1302:

Basing transfer cost on active wvw population is stupid mainly because it is impossible to define what an active wvw player is. It would also take up a whole lot of resources for Anet to keep up with the ever changing performance of servers.

Also, do you guys seriously think that free/reduced transfer costs would attract guilds to transfer down? There’s a reason why servers in the Bronze League are there…. and population isn’t the only factor.

Transfer cost would be based off league ranking not wvw population, its the only fair way to figure out how a server is in wvw.

and ive already spoken to some guilds who would transfer to underworld if it was much cheaper or free. including guilds who originally moved off underworld in the first place due to the transfer problem

population isnt the only factor but transfer costs are a huge factor on where a guild moves too, why would you move to a lower ranked server which is on very high when you can go to ROS which is medium and is already full of wvwers? if its going to cost you double to move to a very high knowing that not everyone will be willing to pay so much then you will go for the cheaper option

over the last year ive spoken to guilds representing 1000s of players who wanted to move to a server like underworld but decided against it last minute because of the higher cost. a year later this has broken our server and although my server pride doesnt want to admit it, its time anet sorts it out

ROS has many more players than we do but is on medium while we are on very high, i think that speaks wonders for how broken the measurement is, i have yet to see underworld go less than very high, even when we had 11 guilds of 200+ move in one week a year ago i didnt see it change, and now looking at a near empty lions arch and half filled border in wvw its obvious that the calculation is wrong or broken

Your missing the point RF.. As much as its hard to fathom, a servers WvW ranking is directly affected by its actual server population.. yes its true UW is noted as a “very high” pop server and yes I personally think that is so far out of date with such a low ebb of activity across all facets of the game, but you, me and everyone else cannot define accurately what a WvW player is – that’s because every player I would hazard a guess has done and is likely to do things that cross all areas of the game, otherwise ANET are not focusing their game content very well and stand a very high risk of loosing players in drones due to their low replay value of openworld content…. why do you think they are pushing out 2 week time gated content with nothing more than “swing a sword, swing it again” lists of AP attached – to keep players in game that little while longer.
WvW on any server isn’t a big enough pull to keep the game alive and kicking but it is absolutely tied in with a servers actual population… who knows next reset 90% of UW might jump into WvW for a few hours (ok not realistic, but perhaps it might help players understand how a population in one area of the game can spike based on its overall pop). The problems are not so easily remedied as you think and ANET know that – transfers may help promote a worse shift of population than you think because a server as inactive as UW is nowadays isn’t a great incentive to anyone above us to come to, no matter if the costs to come are discounted or even free.

The only way that the ball can be started rolling is for ANET to admit that it’s server pops are a complete mess and begin reducing the number of servers by way of placing forced transfers to rebalance a number of low/medium pop serversy…. but they wont do that any time soon because they know in doing that it will create not just negative press but a likely black hole effect with unhappy players leaving the game for good… so its a loose /loose scenario for them either way – but their flipside is transfer costs and as its a business at the end of the day, they know at least in the short term gem sales will help paint over the cracks and keep the bean counters happy a whiles longer

Bump.

We want ANet to address the problem even if it is just:
“We’re watching” .

lordkrall.7241:

Every time I see one of these threads pop up I am hoping for someone to actually post a solution, but I have yet to see a single solution to the problem.

What would be considered a WvW-player?
Someone standing around in spawn for hours?
Someone not doing anything useful for the server (such as trading keeps/farming WXP)?
Someone who logs in for 5 minutes and then leaves?

How often should they update it and so on?

Krall ANET (Devon specifically) feels as though they have an accurate enough metric in place to claim numbers on WvW population(s).

As evidenced in a few postings he made some months back during the “WvW is dying” threads, he basically said and ANET even released some data that WvW was actually growing in popularity.

My point is that if they could measure this metric then, they could do it again….We all know you love ANET and defend to a fault, but my friend this time even ANET couldn’t side with you.

The fact is that many servers are full or people that do not WvW (regularly) and these populations are affecting the transfer system, and in that vein encouraging the “stacking” issue (by essentially discouraging de-stacking)that much more.

To fix this, Anet need to separate the WvW and PvE servers.

Separate PvE and WvW servers would allow:

1. WvW transfers to be are based on WvW population not PvE population
2. People to join the WvW server they want without undermining their connections with their PvE friends

natsos.3692:

That is absolutely false.
Underworld has been a Very High population server since the first days, it has never ever changed, altho it is almost a ghost server(even on prime time).

Not absolutely false, no.

Server status is almost certainly actively controlled by log-ons but the extent to which that number fluctuates based on some “lower” value is odd (which is likely the number of registered accounts that have logged within some X duration of time, because you need a baseline bottom to avoid returning players causing over-Full servers). This is why you can actively watch servers fluctuate in their rankings and, back before they raised server caps, server transfers required “blackouts” for Full servers.

natsos.3692:

Today we had a Wintersday event , organized by some people on the server. LA was almost full but guess what. many old friends from other servers came and even with this no overflow was created.
I will double type it: Today we gathered for a big give away event, people from other servers came also and we didn’t have an overflow

Why would this be an indicator of anything? The majority of the population of any server isn’t aware of “gatherings” or events. Not to mention that LA’s map cap is unusually large and thus a bad metric.

Phoenix.3416:

The problem is we are in sort of a unique situation because we are stuck as very high but we never had much of a wvw community in the first place, we are the only very high server to really be suffering

No you are not. RoF is in same situation from day1.
And we are suffering much more,because we have even less wvw population than you. At least we had before leagues. Now, we just need to meet in battle to know it.

I must agree with Vena on indicator on population of a server. I’m on Gunnar’s Hold, and we’ve been medium server for over 6 months, and only lately, about 1 month ago, we became high populated server.
Also like Vena said, basing population on some contest that is only known to one part of server is not really good. Hell I’m on Gunnars and only latetly did I find out we do Balthazar Temple everyday at 9 pm and Teq on mondays… and I’ve been playing this game regulary since first BWE

Faerun.3091:

I must agree with Vena on indicator on population of a server. I’m on Gunnar’s Hold, and we’ve been medium server for over 6 months, and only lately, about 1 month ago, we became high populated server.
Also like Vena said, basing population on some contest that is only known to one part of server is not really good. Hell I’m on Gunnars and only latetly did I find out we do Balthazar Temple everyday at 9 pm and Teq on mondays… and I’ve been playing this game regulary since first BWE

Guesting completely ruins all metrics as well, because I can be at “home” on server X but spend all of my time playing on server Y. The game is still going to count you as X irregardless of where you spend most of your time.

Vena.8436:

natsos.3692:

Today we had a Wintersday event , organized by some people on the server. LA was almost full but guess what. many old friends from other servers came and even with this no overflow was created.
I will double type it: Today we gathered for a big give away event, people from other servers came also and we didn’t have an overflow

Why would this be an indicator of anything? The majority of the population of any server isn’t aware of “gatherings” or events. Not to mention that LA’s map cap is unusually large and thus a bad metric.

That was just an example. LA is the biggest and most common city in the game, if you want to get a population sample this is the place to go.

I highlighted the day of a big “happening” that was advertised for weeks, many players from other server(that had moved recently) announced their arrival that specific day.

For the first time in months we had seen LA so overpopulated, but it was still not full. A few months back with every living story we had quite a few overflows, the day the leauge started things became bad, and it was getting worser day by day.

Today if you guest to our server, you will only find a small train on Kessex hills, an empty frostgorge, empty Orr, locked temples for weeks, locked instances, outnumber buff on 3/4 wvw maps and hardly enough population on the 4th.

These are all on prime time. Now if this doesn’t tell you anything about our “Very High” population, then what is ?

The system that is used to define the server populations is vastly broken. On a VERY HIGH population server, at least on prime time, there should be some kind of server progress, doesn’t matter if it is on PvE WvW or SPvP, but there is none.

Just show Anet your discontent and massively move from your server.

Zanshin.5379:

Just show Anet your discontent and massively move from your server.

Showing Anet discontent by giving them $20? Yeah sounds like a great incentive for them to change things.

Wanted to express support for this. Darkhaven is in the same boat but in NA- we have always been Very High in population and yet never higher than T5 in the last year, fluctuating between T5 and T7, and guilds leaving have cited the fact that we will never get transfers as one of the reasons they give up on us. I don’t even understand what Anet’s “very high” threshold is even measuring, as we clearly don’t have a PvE population which compares to servers higher than us. I can’t even load into servers like TC LA without sitting for 5 minutes loading character models and participating in their world events gives me 2 fps, whereas finding people to do world events on my server is a challenge. I’m pretty sure they’re counting inactive players into that mix as well, or they drastically lowered the threshold for “very high” (it was confirmed they lowered it before Season 1, but how much is unknown).

Transfer costs need to be based on WvW rank at the very least. Population imbalances should be at the front and center of Anet’s attention in order to retain the large, consistent, paying, hardcore player base which makes up the heart of MMO longevity.

Should be number 1 priorty at their list for future updates and stuff. Yet they do only other stuff. That won’t earn them money. Other crappy stuff nobody needs… is not making WvW players buy gems.

Maybe they would buy more gems if they could transfer servers. But certainly not with wrong population. If you want go to a low population server where you are outmanned(and maybe less fun) then you should not have to pay a high price(because that server is “very high”). Nobody would transfer. Nobody would buy gems = bad for ArenaNet. Not earning money.

I’m taking a break atm. Bought a few games at Steam the last sale few weeks ago and soon next sale(winter/ christmas sale). And after that season 1 I need a break… after playing a lot of one and the same game it gets boring. And I need to play the tons of other games I bought/buy at sales(probably not even finishing one of them completely lol).

Next 1-2 months break(only daily for laurel + living story for unique rewards from meta achievement) and I hope when I return they have fixed some major issues(including this iwth the “very high” population on low populated servers).

Luthan.5236:

Should be number 1 priorty at their list for future updates and stuff. Yet they do only other stuff. That won’t earn them money. Other crappy stuff nobody needs… is not making WvW players buy gems.

Maybe they would buy more gems if they could transfer servers. But certainly not with wrong population. If you want go to a low population server where you are outmanned(and maybe less fun) then you should not have to pay a high price(because that server is “very high”). Nobody would transfer. Nobody would buy gems = bad for ArenaNet. Not earning money.

I’m taking a break atm. Bought a few games at Steam the last sale few weeks ago and soon next sale(winter/ christmas sale). And after that season 1 I need a break… after playing a lot of one and the same game it gets boring. And I need to play the tons of other games I bought/buy at sales(probably not even finishing one of them completely lol).

Next 1-2 months break(only daily for laurel + living story for unique rewards from meta achievement) and I hope when I return they have fixed some major issues(including this iwth the “very high” population on low populated servers).

Of course by doing nothing ANET are in fact making money.. cos as the discontent grows on low ebb servers like UW then the more players transfer across to others.. then as soon as those servers begin to suffer long queues and performance drops so players leave.. its a merry go round that is heavily weighted in ANETS favour and they know it. Why else would they simply ignore the single most biggest issue in the game.. because by fixing it they might impact on the money stream that undoubtedly comes form the transfer market.

I absolutely agree with what you, Rob and others are saying, I just don’t feel that ANET has any intention of doing anything about it.. the CDI World pop thread and their lack of presence/ pushing it under the carpet kinda told us that… but hey they will absolutely jump on commander tag issues now, why cos there is a very real chance that players will want to obtain it in a rush and buy gems to do it.

Thing is they are losing players from the game over this, ive removed so many inactive members since this all started, they told me they were sick of anets lack of meaningfull updates and that kind of thing and to be honest i agree. I always ask them why they are leaving the game and its always complaints about the 2 week content or how getting steamrolled isnt fun.

if they keep this up the lower tiers will just quit

I would rather have 2 months of updates i want that should have been ingame from release than 6months of living story nonsense.

The players who play WvW casually in Underworld have left the game and the players who play it seriously switched to Ruins of Surmia.
That’s the bitter truth. I know this isn’t helping your case but, I’d switch over to RoS while the transfer fee is minimal. You can’t expect anyone to fix this issue. Everytime a server looses it gets demoralised and people transfer to a better there is no “fix” to it.

Hweng.9475:

The players who play WvW casually in Underworld have left the game and the players who play it seriously switched to Ruins of Surmia.
That’s the bitter truth. I know this isn’t helping your case but, I’d switch over to RoS while the transfer fee is minimal. You can’t expect anyone to fix this issue. Everytime a server looses it gets demoralised and people transfer to a better there is no “fix” to it.

Actually out of the guilds moving to ROS only one of them is hardcore wvw, the others are casual and none of them have many players. ther hardcore guilds moved to higher tiers excluding a few and the more casual are moving to ROS, you got it mixed up man :P

And anyone with half a brain will be able to figure out that stacking ROS is a stupid idea, lets put everyone in bronze league on one servers so ROS steamroll in bronze but still don’t have enough to get far in silver.

Bandwagoning to one server is never a good idea and will actually make wvw worse for you guys ironically. Thats the position underworld was in just before the league, we would have dominated bronze easily but didnt have enough for silver.

Newbkakes.4971:

Devona’s Rest = Very High population.
Reality = Very Very Very Low population.

Hello all.
I’m also on Underworld and I can say just the same.
ANet counts dead accounts into the server population.

WvW is deserted, empty, if we have 30-50 at evenings its best we can get, in daytime there are maybe 5-10 people (we are constantly outnumbered).
I rarely see anyone on world map.
World bosses have not more than 30 people on them (no mater the time of the day).
LA… Even after last update I never got kicked to overflow in LA. Thats sick.
Many people left us before WvW Season 1 and now it’s truly dead/deserted server.

Yet we are still VERY HIGH population server.
What’s with that?!

People who don’t log in after 3-4 months should be disconnected from the server so they can choose server again when they come back and that would give us free spots on every server there is.

I know statistics will look way worse, but people already say in the open that those server loads are very untrue.

Bloodstealer.5978:

There in lies your main issue.. how do you determine a player is a WvW’er or a PvE..

Look at the time they’ve spend in each, and in total, and compare that to general statistics for players with a similar use pattern.