Guild Wars 2

Okay ANet I get that the point for the lowered transfer cost is to try and balance the population before WvW leagues start…but right now there’s a serious issue with the method you’re using.

World pop != WvW situation

For example, the #2 ranked server on EU is at medium population..which means they’ll be getting free transfers even though they already have really long queues on prime time.
On NA, there isn’t any medium server..so the whole thing is kinda pointless, and there are bronze league servers as “very high”…so it’d cost the same amount to go to a #20 server and going to #1 server…this is not gonna help with the guilds/players that actually want to try de-stacking WvW from top tiers.

So, can’t you make it so that, at least for this period of time…the transfer cost actually reflect the WvW ranking of servers? (Maybe make it so that the last 2-3 worlds from each league are set to medium) . Just manually set the “population” based on the ranks…then go back to the old system afterwards, otherwise this “lowered free transfers” thing won’t be more than a publicity stunt..

I’ve been saying this for months, and its fallen on deaf ears. Until they base transfer costs on average server participation in WvW, or server rank as you suggested, the entire tiered cost structure is meaningless.

I still don’t understand why this keeps happening. Anet has done research on WvW participation and population. I have seen the graphs that Anet has provided. Why is this data NOT UTILIZED??

Will a dev/administrator please provide us with the reasoning behind this? If there is logic that we are not seeing then it would help the community to understand if you explained it better.

Piken has now become a High pop server, all this in a matter of hours!?
As usual with Anet decisions this is a total mess. How hard wopuld it be to judge a server WvW attendance by going over the last say 2-3 weeks and using the average per an hour as an inidication ant then use that as a basis for Server costs.

The insane population servers should be LOCKED for transfers. It should be FREE all the time to go to Low population servers and then base the rest of the servers on the population per hour?

I think if sfr decide to push hard and farm hard piken square they might die<3

Its easy, they want you tu buy gems for transfers.

They announce the leagues.
Guilds transfer to a server were to fight for the win with the lower queues possibles.
After they announce free/cheaper transfers
Bandwagoners move to kitten servers so they can have a chance of a good reward.
Servers get full
Guilds are forced to transfer again due to high queues.

Result= Anet gets loads of money due to gem purchases.

Anet clearly has the WvW population data. And despite evidence of poor programming practices, it’s unlikely their code only allows transfer fees to depend on overall server population.

Conclusion: They are simply unwilling to base transfer fees on WvW population.

Why? Put your tinfoil hats on and speculate!

Lord Kuru.3685:

Anet clearly has the WvW population data. And despite evidence of poor programming practices, it’s unlikely their code only allows transfer fees to depend on overall server population.

Conclusion: They are simply unwilling to base transfer fees on WvW population.

Why? Put your tinfoil hats on and speculate!

And i am sure there are ways they could get around this. Though they would ONLY change something IF it made them money. They have clearly shown that money, money and more money interest them with how they have acted and the decisions with WvW in mind.

I can’t say for sure if this is monetarily driven since Anet has a rather poor history of that actually … often cutting off their own noses to spite their face. But it definitely raises a lot of questions about their judgment. It also follows their most annoying design pattern: Change for the sake of Change instead of for the sake of a better community & meta….

Guys, calm down. Anet is not all about money. That is definitely what keeps a business going , but I don’t think Anet is trying to force anyone to buy gems. There are plenty of things they could be doing to get more money out of the players, but instead they decide to give us free content every 2 weeks. That is pretty awesome. (And before you say anything, no I do not play GW2 for the PvE).

Now onto the problem of population. It would be nice to see the transfer cost based on WvW population, or maybe even really low transfer prices for everyone at the end of each WvW season (that would really shake up some servers). What would also be interesting is to see the population of each server fleshed out when looking at it in the server list.

I am on Anvil Rock, so I will use it as an example.

Anvil Rock
-sPvP Population – High (in relative terms)
-WvW Population – Low
-PvE Population – High

This doesn’t really help solve the problem, but it would be more information for a prospective player to look at. The population problem in WvW is a very hard problem to solve, because people like to win, and that means being on a higher ranked server. They can’t force people to move to other servers either. You also can’t force PvE players or sPvP players to play WvW, so there will always be an imbalance in WvW population, even if they drastically cap the amount of players on each server to even them out.

The problem of population is difficult, and being a developer, I don’t envy them when trying to solve it. In the long run, I see two potential solutions. Offer free/low cost transfers at the end of each season to players, or make WvW servers separate from PvE servers.

Its never, ever going to happen… But imagine if we could actually fight for a guild.

Remove the idea of fighting for your “server” and introduce real guilds. That’s who you fight for in WvW. Its Guild vs Guild vs Guild instead. Each guild alliance consist of player guilds. You may freely leave your guild alliance and go fight for another without changing your server, though with some limitations of course. The amount of members/player guilds in each guild alliance would of course be open information – that way the players themselves can moderate “population”. Rankings and which guild alliance fight whom would work in the same way as it does now. There may even be WvW rivals on the same server – guilds actually fighting each other in the mists, yet have a ceasefire going on in PvE.

Self moderation, no more transfers, hell Anet could even have guild alliances announcing rewards for joining them instead and interaction within the game (like recruiters for a weaker alliance going around in Lions Arch offering gems).

Ah, it would be like… Guild Wars… You can only dream…

They don’t haver to base it off of participation, make it easy, base it off server ranking and lock the top 4 already.

I think its obvious that the people at the helm are either

a) clueless
b) incompetent
c) don’t care

Dawdler.8521:

Remove the idea of fighting for your “server” and introduce real guilds. That’s who you fight for in WvW. Its Guild vs Guild vs Guild instead..

Anet, it sounds like he is describing Hall of Heroes hmmm…. I would be all for that.

There is a huge correlation between WvW ranking and server population. It might not be perfect but it is right most of the time. The lower the rank the less population your server has.

And the “tags” that say “High” and “Medium” mean nothing. Having played on a server that was literally dead for a long time, it was labeled “Very High”. It is probably based on accounts on the server even if the player quit months ago. And not based on people that are active or logged on.