There’s a lot of discussion about how to remove zergs from wvw because they’re the worst thing in this type of gameplay. I submit that they aren’t. Big mercenary guilds are the worst.
I started playing on Blacktide when we were something like 24/27 in EU servers. I had no idea wvw could be any other way. I ran around with my small social guild. I was told we used to be number 1 once upon a time, before “all our big guilds left.” BT has a few other issues, such as constant sniping between English and Polish speakers, but when we all shut up it was pretty fun. And there are some excellent commanders (Azrael Shan, Vidar, I’d follow you guys into hellfire… and often did.)
Then Bt War came along. A serious wvw guild that did training etc, they recruited with the slogan DON’T GIVE UP ON BLACKTIDE WVW! They recruited a lot. I joined them temporarily, until I was told I had to always represent, and I didn’t want to permanently leave my small social guild of friends. Although there were still a good number of skilled pugs, Bt War became huge.
And just before wvw season 1 started, they transferred to a higher server.
It wasn’t that we missed their commanders, because Azrael, Vidar, Mrok etc were still with us. But they’d recruited for people who really cared for wvw, and then ran off with them. Apparently this is pretty much the same thing that happened to send us from number 1 to number 24.
I stuck with BT through season 1 because like I said, our commanders are great and we have a lot of skilled pugs anyway. New blood coming in to get achieves was also a help. Like me previously, they had no idea it could be any different and they fought, and we did okay. We came in 5th when we could have done much worse. We could have done much better, of course. A lot of that new blood drained away when the achieves were over, and when they realized what tier they were in. When the season ended it became obvious there were too few dedicated wvwers left to be the server we were before Bt War took so many. Probably it’ll recover, eventually, until another big guild does the same thing.
I stayed a while longer and eventually even the few people in my social guild I liked to wvw with transferred, so I did too. I went to silver tier, wondering if it would be so different. I’m thrilled that I can now play wvw more often with more people, but I see some of the same things anyway. On this higher tier server it doesn’t destroy us, but it still has an effect. Big guilds still leave on a whim and depress the population. It doesn’t matter what happens behind the windmill, or in OS, or whether that group of 20 can still wipe that blob at 7pm on Thursdays. The commander starts to bleed the pugs they have, meaning less coverage, fewer battles won, and more fairweathers fleeing the field.
tldr: When morale plummets the server suffers, and guild transfers take big chunks out of communities, which destroys morale and makes wvw suck.