Guild Wars 2

frans.8092:

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.

You missed the point.. its not how to- it’s how can someone be considered one or the other when the modes are entwined with a large majority of the WvW playerbase actually doing both, even dedicated hard-core guilds do in order to keep their build/skills competitive… and because there is likely nothing else to do for hours in WvW except faceroll empty towers or be facerolled by a 50v1 zerg equally as bored.
Besides that such formulating of players times is likely far too much effort for them.. yes there are ways to do it, but simply put – they don’t want to do it..

I think the recent posting re removal of the WvW matchup forums is another indicator that they want to try and brush all WvW negativity under the carpet while protecting and improving anything remotely supportive of their revenue stream… silly thing is I agree with Phoenix in that players/ guilds are simply leaving GW2 rather than re-plant themselves elsewhere and wait for it all to repeat itself over and over… me and mine have to the point we just log in do a daily or an hour of LS etc then go elsewhere for our fun fix..
I certainly wont be pushing anymore coins in the gem meter to support such an out of touch development team, which is a shame cos GW2 had potential across all areas of its game… now all we have is a shell of a game with very low replay value, bug ridden re-skinning every 2 weeks with many things never being put right at all and a draconic approach to managing anything that might be construed as negative towards the game.
Add to that the low ebb of activity across many servers already and not just in WvW…. like others have said take a look at many of the maps, most of the content/events are ghostly quiet unless you step across to Queensdale to farm the same 4-5 champs over and over before falling asleep.. occasionally you might get a train running across frostgorge for the same thing and some servers might generate a 50 man zerg on map for an hour or two across the 7 day matchup.. ..

Simply put, it doesn’t matter what formula is struck to differentiate players and their gaming habits.. it doesn’t overcome the real issues that this thread is trying to highlight.

but to coin a phrase – All is vain!

Free transfers to low/medium population servers. Increase wxp for everything by x%, but divide by the number of participants capping an objective/killing a player. Boom solved.

Bloodstealer.5978:

You missed the point.. its not how to- it’s how can someone be considered one or the other when the modes are entwined with a large majority of the WvW playerbase

You don’t have to put the player into on or the other (PVE/WVW) , you only need to know how much time they contribute, or server load they take up.

Renny.6571:

Free transfers to low/medium population servers. Increase wxp for everything by x%, but divide by the number of participants capping an objective/killing a player. Boom solved.

Low/medium servers? There are very high population servers in T6 and T7 and T8 in EU.
Why? Because Anet seems like count dead accounts too.
Those servers that needs free transfers wont get them. I think Piken had free transfers before league and it is T1 server.

Hule.8794:

Why? Because Anet seems like count dead accounts too.

There are no dead accounts. All accounts can become active at any time, and a part of the inactive accounts do become active again, daily. They have to keep the ‘headroom’ to accommodate players returning to the game after months of inactivity. They have to keep even more headroom for a surge of players returning during holidays and vacations.

frans.8092:

Hule.8794:

Why? Because Anet seems like count dead accounts too.

There are no dead accounts. All accounts can become active at any time, and a part of the inactive accounts do become active again, daily. They have to keep the ‘headroom’ to accommodate players returning to the game after months of inactivity. They have to keep even more headroom for a surge of players returning during holidays and vacations.

They do count dead accounts… a dead account is a player who isnt coming back to the game

or takes a large break, i know there are alot of them since ive kicked 100 players a month from my guild for inactivity for a long time now . theres noway uw can be counted at very high, recruitment is much slower and there are maybe 2 guilds close to 500 on the entire server at best the other i havent seen for a while so they might not even be here anymore

its a fact that anets done something to include inactive accounts or have fixed the server pop record so it looks higher than it is by a lot. ROS just got what 10 new guilds? still at medium…

I think it really would be best if they – like someone suggested – remove the account from the server if not logged in for a while.

Then let choose a new server if players return after some time. Let them choose lowest population servers for free and higher servers only for a small fee(but still should be a lot lower than a active player paying a “transfer fee”). This would prevent then logging tons of players in again and chosing the same server that might have gotten already a lot of more players because of lower transfer costs.

The main problem with that is however that it is not really a good idea (from Anets point of view) to force returning players to play on another server and the one they used to play on (in case of servers having become full during their absence or their inability to pay a fee).

too many bots, thats why you hardly see people.

Bump to the top

Phoenix.3416:

frans.8092:

Hule.8794:

Why? Because Anet seems like count dead accounts too.

There are no dead accounts. All accounts can become active at any time, and a part of the inactive accounts do become active again, daily. They have to keep the ‘headroom’ to accommodate players returning to the game after months of inactivity. They have to keep even more headroom for a surge of players returning during holidays and vacations.

They do count dead accounts… a dead account is a player who isnt coming back to the game

or takes a large break, i know there are alot of them since ive kicked 100 players a month from my guild for inactivity for a long time now …

… which can come alive at any time and thus can not be ignored when estimating potential server load. If you do not take them into account you will run into problems with servers not able to handle the load.

@Frans ok, but for example. my original guild had 120 members at start.
In March only 15 guildies logged in. Its 105 players that did not logged in after 02/13
And they are already on other game.

If you take this to extreme:
10 000 players per server makes server Very high. But 9 000 players did not logged in more than 6 months.
Should they be counted to server population? You said yes they should, but then only 1000 players are really playing on that server. And that would normally make that server very low population.

Is it intended by Anet so players will not see real status of this game, or to get more gems from players thus more real money?
There is no other explanations. If they would care, they will not count accounts dead for more than 3 months.

The fact that the population of a server can change back and forth during a single day would however suggest that they do mainly count active population (or simply the fact that less people have left than people here want to suggest).

lordkrall.7241:

The fact that the population of a server can change back and forth during a single day would however suggest that they do mainly count active population (or simply the fact that less people have left than people here want to suggest).

No it doesn’t at all.. it simply means they have likely already factored in the inactive accounts within a servers base activity.. like others have said they have to include for these when looking at server loads/caps.. what your seeing is active accounts logging in and out concurrently at any given time of the day.. still doesn’t negate that all the inactive accounts are already accounted for.

Of course they are accounted for, but the majority still seems to be based on actual active accounts, seeing as it can go from Very high, to medium and back over the course of a day. And it is quite unlikely that such high amount of people transferring back and forth during a single day.

It’s only who is logged in at the time.

Since no one really knows the mechanism that Anet uses to count server populations except Anet they should not tie gem cost for transfer to whatever their definition of server population might be. The best and easiest way to calculate gem cost for transfer is to tie it into the W3 tier that a server maintains. If need be they can average a server’s tier rank over the life of the game to come up with a calculation.
Average W3 rank:
T1- 1800 gems
T2- 1500 gems
T3- 1200 gems
T4- 1000 gems
T5- 600 gems
T6- 300 gems
T7 and below- Free

This makes the transfer cost more inline with need.

Another option would be to merge lower tier servers. Most companies do not like to merge servers, as it gives off a negative vibe to current and future customers.

Kaiser.9873:

Since no one really knows the mechanism that Anet uses to count server populations except Anet they should not tie gem cost for transfer to whatever their definition of server population might be. The best and easiest way to calculate gem cost for transfer is to tie it into the W3 tier that a server maintains. If need be they can average a server’s tier rank over the life of the game to come up with a calculation.
Average W3 rank:
T1- 1800 gems
T2- 1500 gems
T3- 1200 gems
T4- 1000 gems
T5- 600 gems
T6- 300 gems
T7 and below- Free

This makes the transfer cost more inline with need.

Another option would be to merge lower tier servers. Most companies do not like to merge servers, as it gives off a negative vibe to current and future customers.

This would be a much better system. As it stands now if they counted “live” accounts instead of all accounts, including dead ones, I would be surprised if any server outside of T1 and T2 actually had Very High population.

The entire population metric needs to change. Someone that hasn’t logged in for 6 – 12 months probably isn’t coming back, and should not be counted towards a servers population. It just stinks of manipulation of numbers to me. Some kind of Bill Clinton style number game, where you switch the metrics of “success” around around till it looks better.

TBH (imo) gem costs are kind of irrelevant now that the servers have been allowed to become so imbalanced. Not many players are going to sink gems/money to transfer to those lower tier servers that are PvE ghost towns and/or being squashed day in day out within the WvW MU’s … you might get more movement within a given tier but that isn’t fixing the problem it only makes it worse within that tier.
The mess that its in now requires tough decisions to be made and for me that would mean taking servers that are low in all aspects of the game and force merge them with other low pops.. sure players like myself stand to loose our home server but within a few weeks or a month maybe of better activity levels and better balanced matchups players will soon be at peace with things… for a whiles at least.

Following the hard love the softer tools can then be more effective.. server transfers that are better traffic controlled with gems costs better reflective of actual server pops or revised WvW tier rankings.
But of course that’s just my opinion and not one that will likely be shared by ANET when there are easy gem sales to be made out of the disparity we now see.

I find that many of the medium to smaller W3 guilds that are exclusively W3 go to higher tiers to find fights. Many then do not like the PPT meta that gets more strict the higher you go, and return to lower tiers to focus more on fights. The issue is that they never transfer too far down the ladder.

This leads to guilds going up, then coming down, but never far enough down to really help any servers T6 or below. The exodus makes any server below T6 virtual W3 ghostlands, and the only way this would change is for a large alliance to decide to move en masse(and put up with MANY weeks of PvD), similar to when WM went to Kaineng.

The issue is even more of a problem in EU time. To find EU fights now on a NA server you need to be T1, and those are fewer and farther between with COIN and IRON leaving to go back to EU servers.

**Something that I think might be an interesting fix, but would probably be impossible is to give NA servers and EU servers a “sister” status. Take the T1 NA and match them up with T8 EU as sister servers. T2 NA with T7 EU, T3 NA with T6 EU and so on and so forth. ONLY for W3 would this match be made. I realize EU has an extra tier over NA, and I have no idea how that would be handled.

> This would be like matching Blackgate with Fissure of Woe, Jade Quarry with Whiteside Ridge, and Sanctum of Rall with Ring of Fire. < >Likewise Devona’s Rest would be matched with Vizunah Square, Gate of Madness with Seafarer’s Rest, and Kaineng with Piken Square<

Doing this would give NA servers with strong NA and decent EU an accompanying weaker EU addition and vice versa. Would it be fair? I don’t have a clue if it would be fair for everyone. Would it be fun? I think 24/7 fights throughout the week through all tiers would be amazing, and guarantee it would shake the ladder up significantly.(Unless there were mass transfers again) Perhaps disabling transfers for a month would solve that issue as well.

Gate of Madness lost ~5 guilds at the beginning of the summer due to the lack of dedicated WvW players. This is a terrible reason for people to leave, and only dooms the server further. I believe that WvW population balance should be a great priority. It has taken us 6 months to begin to recover from the loss but, without greater support and incentive from ArenaNet, it has been a difficult struggle uphill that has even chased other players out of our loyal WvW guilds and to other servers.

Bump

Wonder how long anet can ignore basic issues like this, i give it a few months before people jump ship to other games :/

I agree with the OP that servercost at least ALSO depending on wvw ranking would be a good (and very easy) thing to do. I myself changed from Devona to SBI a while ago, because wvw is a big part of the fun in the game and in wvw “size matters”.
Now both servers have “very high population” (all other servers have too), although at least the things I have seen, seem to contradict this statement that the servers are in any way similar in population.

I am not sure if arenanet will take this problem seriously. Some of the pve changes (teq, world bosses) specifically need a lot of players at the same place. And even SBI as 3d-tier server only does Teq once a day. I don’t know if this is, because those events are very badly balanced for fewer people or if it is intentional to get people to move from lower population servers to higher ones to – making money in the process – make it easier to later merge servers. If that is the plan, then they probably don’t want your change.

I think if you really have problems with the wvw or pve population of your server I would suggest you to change it. It is expensive, but you will enjoy the game a lot more afterwards and it beats waiting for a change that probably will never come.

Bump, we lost the thread for abit due to a huge influx of new threads ha

Moving servers for me is not an option, I have the only 500 man guild on my server, If I leave it would cost an insane amount and take a huge amount of time

saying move servers isnt acceptable since this is a server balance issue not a player issue, anet broke the transfer costs not the players which is what caused this mess in the first place

Adding my support to this. Anet can say that a server is very high, despite it’s WvW pop, but come on. You can’t base server population on players who get on for an hour, do their daily and then jump off.

I can almost guarantee that if we based a server’s overall population upon the WvW ranks it be next to 100% accurate. Why is it that I can go to LA on IoJ and see maybe 20 people across the whole map, but guest to BG and see nearly a hundred, sometimes more?

I mean, lets be realistic, the servers are not all “very high” population. I’d be more inclined to say that they have a very high frequency of tourist, where a tourist is the people who don’t actually play more than an hour or two when they jump in.

I’d like to see the actual stats for this, but unfortunately Arenanet continues to hide a lot of the specifics. I want more black and white with this stuff.

Phoenix.3416:

frans.8092:

Hule.8794:

Why? Because Anet seems like count dead accounts too.

There are no dead accounts. All accounts can become active at any time, and a part of the inactive accounts do become active again, daily. They have to keep the ‘headroom’ to accommodate players returning to the game after months of inactivity. They have to keep even more headroom for a surge of players returning during holidays and vacations.

They do count dead accounts… a dead account is a player who isnt coming back to the game

or takes a large break, i know there are alot of them since ive kicked 100 players a month from my guild for inactivity for a long time now . theres noway uw can be counted at very high, recruitment is much slower and there are maybe 2 guilds close to 500 on the entire server at best the other i havent seen for a while so they might not even be here anymore

its a fact that anets done something to include inactive accounts or have fixed the server pop record so it looks higher than it is by a lot. ROS just got what 10 new guilds? still at medium…

As a matter of fact: we started the game with 50 people in our guild, in september some 100. 3 months later (december), 15-ish of the original members were left. 4 months later (january) 10-ish.

We then started recruiting again, got our members to 250 in the course of 3 months.
Each month around 3/4 of the recruited ones went inactive again. Around May I think we had 200 inactive again and less than 50 active. I tired of recruiting people who stopped playing the game anyways (other officers did still try) and the guild died within 2 months. I left not long after. Out of the first 50-100 players have ever returned afaik, since I had some 30 of them friended (and around 3 who stayed in the game with me but we’ve all went our own ways).

It does show many of the initial players have long since stopped playing.

Phoenix.3416:

saying move servers isnt acceptable since this is a server balance issue not a player issue, anet broke the transfer costs not the players which is what caused this mess in the first place

You are not right here. This “issue” has source in players – not in servers.

Lowering transfer cost will only cause more transfers, but not more balance on wvw. Just imagine that – players from 7-8 tier servers will transfer to last server in ranking for blobing everything. And when server will go up in ranking they will transfer again and again and again… Just don’t forget there’s many players who want to always win/do karma trains.

Second thing, come on guys and (maybe) girls. You all are writing here about players on normal maps/LA/WvW, but what with players who are doing mostly dungeons/FotM? I moved from UW some time ago to GH. I still have many friends on UW and they mostly do dungeons. Together. You will not see them often in other places. You will make new server “ghetto” for them so you will not count them to population on “non-ghetto” server?

Third, Anet first of all want to make more players will like to play wvw mode. Not to put “existing on wvw” players on all servers in same quantity. More players = more balance, less players = more stacking in servers with good player base in same mode.

So maybe you will do some advertising and help anet to get more players to wvw?

I hope i see you all on wvw instead of defending LA.

The fact that you end with that statement shows you know very little of how i spend my game time let alone to pull it out in a argument over a completely unrelated topic shows you really have very biased thoughts at this point if you need to resort to personal attacks.
Anyone who runs a 500 man guild will know how much effort it takes to keep it in order, i afk in lions arch while writing mails and managing disputes. I would love to be in wvw all the time but its better that I as 1 player handle those problems so 10 others can go to wvw in my place. Thats logically more efficient and puts more of my guild in wvw, since half of my time is organising other guilds to merge events and work together I think that my time is best spent how I currently spend it.

Anyway to the actual argument at hand

Lowering transfer costs based off wvw rank will cause more transfers yes but thats the point, it makes the higher tiers more expensive than the lower promoting players to move to lower tiers which spreads out the wvw population over more servers than stacking in the highest tiers.

Although I agree that its open to abuse, it still costs a lot of money for players to mass transfer down the tiers over and over and i imagine a cooldown would be added to prevent abuse of the system, no one would move so low that their karma trains were unstoppable, it would mean no one would retake the land and they would barely profit from it making it pointless to move so low that wvwers cant attack back, even if you moved down a few tiers, by moving down to farm you would force that server up the ranks but unless your guild is 500 man it wont move THAT much to make moving often cost effective.

I lead the largest mixed guild on UW, a minority are wvw players so yes I did take the others into account, I have monitored the population of UW since the start including dungeons, wvw, pvp and world bosses and compared to now we barely have 5% of what we had at those spots a year ago even though we are still on the same population level according to anet, Recruitment is much slower than before and I haven’t seen an overflow for a long long time now. You may have friends on underworld but I have 500 players to monitor, I know how many become inactive every month and how fast I can replace them not to mention how other guilds on the server are struggling or dying out,

From a logical point of view the only content of the gameplay that is effected by server population and cant be fixed by guesting is WvW meaning that WvW should be the factor of what chooses the price of the server to move too.
If it costs 100 gold to move to a server of 50-50 pve and wvwers but 50gold to move to a server thats 10 to 90 in favour of wvwers then thats a major balance issue as the server which needs the transfers wont get them.

The only issue against this is server hardware but the solution is that if a player is inactive for more than X amount of time say 6 months his account isn’t counted as part of the servers total count anymore until he returns, it is unlikely that so many would return to break the hardware quickly giving anet time to slow transfers

Keep in mind that I have personally negotiated with entire alliances who wanted to move to underworld, representing over 1000 players who wanted to move to a lower tier, they could not afford to move to underworld so moved to the servers around us instead who before the move had equal wvw pop as we did because those servers had half the cost we did, so I know what the problem is more than anyone.

Not everyone will love WvW, demanding everyone on a server play wvw is stupid and really never going to happen. The situation we have is that servers got stacked because even though they had a huge wvw population they had a lower transfer cost early into the game so like minded players got together leaving the more expensive servers with low or no transfers.

It is better for the game that if there are 10 servers and 1000 wvwers that every server gets 100 wvwers, making every server balanced against each other in total wvw player count than stacking the first 4 servers and leaving the other 6 with 10 wvwers.

We balance this by making wvw rank the factor which determines the cost to transfer and we remove punishments for guilds that move to lower tiers.
Doing this will help to allow the wvw population to spread out over the tiers, eliminating queues in higher tiers and helping to balance match ups more equally.

Demanding everyone on uw start playing wvw due to a SERVER caused balance issue is not acceptable, logical or even realistic. Anet broke the servers and its not the players who should have to solve the problem as its out of our control.

Apologise for how long that post is, I felt it was required to explain this in full

I agree that it would be a good idea with making the costs also (not solely) depending on wvw-activity by weighting that a little more than pve. I would still take pve and pvp into account to make sure that servers that are now imbalanced (like 90:10 wvw:pve in your example) dont have whole areas dieing out because nobody will change there because of the high costs.
I also agree that if you never make any move free of charge, then there will not be a lot of serverhopping, because even if it costs “only” 400 diamonds, this would still be 35 gold and that is still quite a lot of money.

The problem here is that it is in your control on what server you play. So if you are hindered in your enjoyment of the game because your server lacks wvw people, u could in theory just move to another server that has those people. So it is not like you say that it is out of your control at all. You just don’t want to make the investment of changing servers with your guild, and I fully understand that. I just don’t think arenanet will act on it.

I imagine if 500 players on a lower pop server suddenly leave it would screw over everyone else on the server too and to be honest I don’t want to be THAT guild leader who broke a server like that. Not to mention how we help smaller guilds with events which as a knock on of them considering leaving or disbanding too :/

As much as I admit we COULD move, its not realistic to say we can do it and remain as a guild. Anet made the problem by breaking the population of servers, fixing us on very high when we are not is stat manipulation on anets side and it looks good for new players who want to play the game yes but it leads to servers flaming each other and dying out as populations drop

I control the server I play on, but anet determines which servers get the most help from new transfers and players and they are giving it to the wrong people. Its like giving tax money to the rich and ignoring the poor in another way of looking at it. The people who dont need help get help while the people who do are abandoned like Vabbi.