Guild Wars 2

What are ANETs thoughts on server population’s effect on the outcome of each week’s matches?

For example SoS does great on the weekends, when maps are full and each server has queue times. Then during the week we see the higher pop servers slowly come out ahead. Its frustrating to watch our server hold it’s own when we have equal numbers and then slip during the work/school week when there’s less people on. Servers with higher pops have a larger pool of players and thus can still field large forces after weekday/RL obligations kick in.

If server pops were roughly equal would it not put an end to this? Would WvW still be largely considered a numbers game?

I think you’d see more variation in the match ups as well. If a server rallied and made a strong push they could move up a rank or two in a week. Right now rank changes at a snails pace (at least at the higher tiers, don’t know about the low ones).

What could be done about server pops? What if ANET offered free transfers from high pop servers to low pop servers? Has anyone been talking about this?

Im certain someone else will post this at some point, so I’ll save them the hassle.
Server Population =/= WvW Playing Population. There’s definitely some correlation, though.

And I’m all in favor of free transfer to low pop servers, but keep in mind this, SoS is a very high population server, much like all tier 1 servers so it would not help your predicament. In fact, SoS, which i assume you play on, is probably as populated as the other tier 1 servers. The only thing it lacks is complete WvW coverage, so SoS is a terrible example.

SoS is a low pop server ? Every time I look its full or very high.

Kam.8109:

Has anyone been talking about this?

Ya, for the last 6 months.

This is at least the second thread this week by an SoS players suddenly noticing the pop issues. Funny how quickly people will notice an issue when it starts hindering them rather then benefiting them.

It does make me wonder if there’s been an partial exodus away from SoS recently.

WvW would be 1000 times better with balanced populations. Unfortunatley, I don’t think there’s a way to achieve that without eliminating the seperation of servers themselves.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Kam.8109:

Has anyone been talking about this?

Ya, for the last 6 months.

This is at least the second thread this week by an SoS players suddenly noticing the pop issues. Funny how quickly people will notice an issue when it starts hindering them rather then benefiting them.

It does make me wonder if there’s been an partial exodus away from SoS recently.

Hahahaha.

The issue is that during free transfers all the instant win kids went to SoS due to their success. Before paid transfers started JQ did a huge recruitment drive that has benefited them greatly.

The result, a bunch of QQ threads from people that were winning but now currently are not. These people now have to use gems to transfer in order to get their instant win or simply quit the game.

So yes while a portion of the population on SoS has imploded. There a still a number of significant guilds on SoS that are staying. Also, SoS was always the unofficial oceanic server, those guys were happy even before they were expecting to win every week.

Expect the QQ threads to continue for a little while but once SoS settles down and the instant win kids have either stopped playing or transferred. Expect SoS to be focused and ready for action.

Kam.8109:

What could be done about server pops? What if ANET offered free transfers from high pop servers to low pop servers? Has anyone been talking about this?

Server rated population doesn’t reflect the actual participating PvP population. All T1 servers in your example are rated as Very High since the changes, and were all Full before the transfer changes.

Your question is flawed.

Anet should mix up the bag and place Euro and NA severs against each other.

You have no right to complain about population imbalance without caring about T8 at the same time, because if you were green in our tier, you wouldn’t be making this thread right now.

You don’t know the meaning of the words ‘Low Pop’.

Server population =/= WvW population. Which make your question invalid. There is one good example for a server which have lower population but can compete very well (and it is in T2):

Piken Square: medium population can compete very well with Seafarer (High) and Jade Sea (Very High)

ANET’s mistake when charging for transfers was in basing it on server population. You can always guest on another server for PVE. That means the primary reason for transferring servers is WvW. Transfers should be based on tiers, something like this. The gem numbers would be the cost to transfer TO that tier.

Tier 1: 2500 gems
Tier 2: 2000 gems
Tier 3: 1500 gems
Tier 4: 1000 gems
Tier 5: 750 gems
Tier 6: 500 gems
Tier 7: 250 gems
Tier 8: Free

style.6173:

ANET’s mistake when charging for transfers was in basing it on server population. You can always guest on another server for PVE. That means the primary reason for transferring servers is WvW. Transfers should be based on tiers, something like this. The gem numbers would be the cost to transfer TO that tier.

Tier 1: 2500 gems
Tier 2: 2000 gems
Tier 3: 1500 gems
Tier 4: 1000 gems
Tier 5: 750 gems
Tier 6: 500 gems
Tier 7: 250 gems
Tier 8: Free

Exactly

You can guest to other servers for free. The only reason to pay for a transfer is WvW. So the pricing should be based on WvW…

The problem with WvW population imbalances, like just about every other major problem in this game, is that WvW is fundamentally flawed in it’s design. WvW should have never been about server vs server or " server pride ".

There are a million ways Anet could have implemented WvW but they made the choice to implement it in the worst possible way, and it’s no surprise. GW2 is literally the game that should be looked at when developers want to know exactly how to ((( not ))) do things.

The only way this would work is if they target WvW population, not server population. The number of people on your server does not represent the number of people in WvW. If they made it cheaper (or free) to transfer to lower populated servers (which is incredibly important for open world PvE) it wouldn’t solve the WvW problems. Plenty of servers have very high populations but have very few people playing in WvW. Kaineng had a High population for a lot of its time in tier two and still does at times of the day, it’s the 5th strongest server in the NA tiers.

There are certainly servers that need more people and free transfers to them (base it on both population and WvW ranking, control it heavily so you can cut it off before it creates another Kaineng) but those servers aren’t in tier 1 or 2. The situation the OP is talking about is simply that no server in the game comes close to the JQ population. That’s a unique problem to JQ. They created it and only they can solve it. Until attrition/boredom/burnout kicks in, JQ will continue to win tier 1 on numbers alone, the other two servers will fight it out for second place. Hopefully the other servers will still care about the competition after fighting a pointless fight in tier 1 until that happens. Fortunately, tier 2 looks very competitive and any of the servers getting knocked out of tier 1 should be able to enjoy a few weeks of actual competition away from the one sided matches you see in tier 1.

Until then there are other things that can be done to help WvW numbers. One is to simply bring more PvE people into WvW. There are multiple ways to do this, who knows what ArenaNet is considering along this path, making WvW more rewarding would certainly be a nice start. Another is to bring back more WvW players and slow down or stop the boredom and attrition many of them are facing. It would be an understatement to say that the January-no-February-it’s-actually-March-now WvW update is going to be pivotal to this for many WvW players and guilds.

As much as WvW is a one to two year thing for many people, for ArenaNet it’s a long term thing. The people who will quit if they don’t what they want in the next three months are important to ArenaNet, but keeping WvW healthy and active (even if that takes on a different form in the future) for the long term is most important to them. Getting more of the core GW2 players into WvW is going to more important to most people than getting people onto other servers and that will go a long way to making it so that servers with high populations might also have comparable WvW populations. The people are there, ArenaNet just needs to get them playing.

Another thing ArenaNet needs to solve is why players don’t want to be on a lower tier server. Most players don’t care about winning first place in tier one, and the ones that do already transferred to JQ. The rest of the people just don’t enjoy being outmanned on every map, crushed by giant zergs around every corner and generally having WvW be unplayable for them. Hopefully some of these issues will be alleviated in March when the WvW update hits, until then, I don’t think it’s as simple as getting people to transfer (especially when two of the three tier one servers can’t fill more than two maps for most of the week and don’t even fill all maps on the weekend).

Straegen.2938:

style.6173:

The gem numbers would be the cost to transfer TO that tier.

Tier 7: 250 gems
Tier 8: Free

If this system hit, another Kaineng-esk rise in 3… 2…

nekos.2584:

There are a million ways Anet could have implemented WvW but they made the choice to implement it in the worst possible way, and it’s no surprise. GW2 is literally the game that should be looked at when developers want to know exactly how to ((( not ))) do things.

Anet is not the first nor the last to implement the server based system. However, I too think server match-ups is fundamentally flawed and they should have used their guild system to create weekly matches.

I agree completely.

Again, WvW should have never been server vs server. Like you said, server vs server has been done before. The problems GW2 is facing with WvW / server populations are the same as those other games faced.

" those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. "

Straegen.2938:

style.6173:

The gem numbers would be the cost to transfer TO that tier.

Tier 7: 250 gems
Tier 8: Free

If this system hit, another Kaineng-esk rise in 3… 2…

I have no problems with a Kaineng-esk rise. It keeps things interesting. What I don’t want is to get stuck in a rut of playing the same server 10 weeks in a row.

In my previous server of SBI, there were plenty of ex-wvwers. However the lack of reward and failures in battle has driven most of them away and back to pve.

There should be multi-guild alliances which can be created across all servers with a “roster cap”, and then those alliances compete against each other in a BL. it is the responsibility of the alliance to fill in their coverage gaps for the 1 BL for 3day-1 week matchup.

That way alliances create their own roster and then go at it, and alliances move up or down.

A NA guild(s) from JQ, with a Oceanic guild(s) from SoS and an asian guild(s) from Dragonbrand and a Euro guild(s) from Blackgate can form an alliance within their roster cap and fight other guild alliances.

Game would be 100x more fun and interesting. Be a lot of dynamics and change, with the ability for anyone to put together an “alliance” and be competitive, right now the server v server is stagnant.

And quite frankly, this type of system would actually fit the game name infinitely better than what the system is now.

insanemaniac.2456:

track man hours put into wvw for each server

make transfer fees to servers with over average man hours totally obnoxious
make transfer fees to servers with under average man hours low / nonexistent (or “pay” people to transfer in)

put in a feedback cycle for low fee servers – have it act similar to gems<->gold where transfer fees spike (but more drastically) when lots of people transfer in in short periods of time (prevents supermassive transfers, set the bar high enough for reasonably large guilds so they dont have issues).

if rewarding players for transferring to undermanned servers:
track hours they spend in wvw and hours spent playing. if you have a certain % spent in wvw after 2-3 weeks, give the reward. dont tell people what your quota is so they dont try to abuse cheap/free transfers to unbalance servers.

once average man hours in wvw per server levels out, make transfer fees less obnoxious, but keep the price spike system in place to prevent regression to the current problematic state.