Here’s an honest recruiting message. Darkhaven is a good server with problems, way more problems than a top-tier server, no doubt. One of those problems is a snow-ball effect we are seeing that good, hard-core pvp/wvw-oriented guilds are moving to top tier servers. I understand why they’ve done it, because they are so good at what they do, our problems have become unacceptable to them and they don’t want to wait for us to fix them.
We have a formal alliance between our most active WvW guilds that is trying our best to get better organized and coordinate strategy, supported by a newly re-designed website that will facilitate ongoing discussions of what goes well, what doesn’t; what needs work, what doesn’t.
Right now, our biggest shortcoming is a general lack of interest in WvW. We simply don’t have the raw numbers to push much higher up the tiers than we are now. My prediction for next week (when we do move up a bracket) is that we will do well, but probably not come out on top unless we start seeing some queues.
The perfect server that would do extremely well and keep all their players happy, would be a 5-minute Q for every map. Obviously, this means a full population able to accomplish great things with some coordination. It also means reasonable wait times that just about anybody could live with.
We as a server are pretty effective with the numbers we field on any given map. Make no mistake though, you will still see quite a bit of the mindless, illogical zerging occur with no tactical reasoning behind it. That is one of the other problems we are working on. But something like that does not get fixed overnight.
Our battlefield strength is that we have some very good commanders that can change the scene when they enter the field. Pubs are bought into the overall strategy and we experience reasonable success in rallying them most of the time. Not every time, but most of the time.
Our battlefield weakness is that we do not have enough of those commanders, especially during traditional working hours, North American time-zones.
So here is the deal. We are striving to achieve the perfect balance of short Q times, around the clock for every map. We need more folks interested in WvW to do that. One prong of addressing this is that we are spending this week to rally our existing population to be more active next and following weeks. But I’m afraid that many of our casual WvW crowd lose faith as soon as we start to fall behind. The second prong attempting to resolve this issue is to recruit guilds to fill the places of our friends that left. We need a few more hard-core guilds that know what the heck they are doing and can provide good leadership in the process.
So if you’re with a successful guild, on a top-tier server that is tired of the Q times, why not try discuss dropping down and helping us move up? Not temporarily as a boost to help us climb in the short-term. But consider making Darkhaven your new home and together, we can shape Darkhaven into a top-tier server.
I would recruit from the lower tier servers too, but I don’t want to be accused of poaching from our adversaries and weakening their server with the same snow-ball effect that we’ve seen on DH. So this message is really targeted towards the elite guilds of top-tier servers that are frustrated with not being able to get their entire guild into WvW at the same time. That would be possible on DH and your contributions would be noticed as our night-shift comes on to revel in what you’ve accomplished.
