Guild Wars 2

Piken WvW Community Getting Shafted

Have to get this part out of the way…

I will say this because at the end of the day someone has too and the community i love playing with is being destroyed

My background, been on Piken since start so seen its rise from low tiers… played 1500+ hours plus, mostly in WvW with over 55,000 kills… Usually run in primetime and night time commander… over 2.8 million Karma on my main WvW char… out of my 8 80’s.

That just shows you that i play alot so I know what im talking about when it comes to Piken Square WvW. Ask me about pve and im a newb

Dear Devs…

I believe I have read somewhere that you would like to encourage servers not to zerg and “blob up” all on the same spot… Well Being on Piken Square Since Day 1 I know we do not fall into that catergory, and did things our own way and strived to be different from our oppostion and zerg as little as possible which i believe we achieve. We have alot of guilds from the start who have known each other in previous games for years, so a few hundred solid base. On top of that have been lucky and met some other good guilds and individuals on our roleplay server.

Our server as been Medium population (was high once when you tweaked the settings) for along time, but despite that look at the WvW rankings… look at our active WvW population, PS never had much Coverage for along time either.

Piken has been a great place to be from the start, such a mature, friendly enviroment.
But your latest changes as pretty much singled out our server and we have been effected the most, our server as been punished by your changes and literally getting destroyed from within now.

Our server is losing its identity. We are no longer a mature,friendly enviroment… Its all getting toxic and more zerg like the rest… because of your changes, creating alot of uncertainty with bandwagoners (locking down free x fers) they moved to the highest ranked “lowest population” server… but that “lowest population is a lie” because our WvW population is high (primetime ques on every bl and then some) Just check the rankings and see how many very high population servers we have beat time and time again if you do not believe me.

So how do you feel about your changes effecting our community like this? I would really like to hear your opinion on how the Roleplay WvW community is being effected. Because its in dangers of exploding and you having another dead server on your hands… (Blacktide, Arborstone, Fort Ranik… to name a few of the latest)

We are now overpopulated because of your enforced changes… and will be even more populated because of the way you have setup your criteria. You Rank us as 500 gems… compared to other servers lower down the tiers which are very high population… You want people to spread out across the tiers but your just encouraging everyone and their mother to move to Piken square, because people are cheap and alot want success, so you put two and two together and Piken Square as got a big Sign on its back saying “MOVE HERE” or that we need more people, and Players who do no research will make assumptions and move to a server with ques, instead of a server lower down the rankings like a underworld which needs more Active WvW players…

I think the entire situation is unfair on Piken Square WvW community and its unfair on any new arrivals to Piken Square Community who are treated not so nicely (compared to the past)

So are you even aware of the issues you have created for our community? and more importantly do you even care? This will have long term implications on the game… as stated previously some of these guilds have played together for years, these are the type of gamers who would usually be in it for the long haul… but if you burn them then I can understand them losing faith in your direction when their community as been singled out.

This whole you need large pve population on a server to do well in WvW is a lie, we and other servers like us, show it is… so I dont understand why its Criteria for choosing a homeworld server… because lets face it now you have made guesting available PVERS can move freely as a guest to any server they want… People will mostly move homeworlds for obviously World Vs World.

I feel our Roleplay Server as been largely discriminated against with the recent changes, for punching above our weight in WvW (according to way you judge a servers population) we get punished… with all the recent arrivals, none of them care about roleplay or how the server as played for months… the first thing they have asked if where is the Zerg?

So Thanks for ruining my gameplay experience and many other hundreds of commited WvWers with your short cited Changes… Which have basically shafted my Server.

I know your not entirely responsible for players moving to our server, but you are the catalyst. Your idea of players spreading out is failing horribly, because you have alot of people who are selfish and in the “I want it easy generation” so they switch around from servers that are losing, to ones that are winning because of their mentality…
Screwing over the native population.

We have a WvW Piken Square meeting tonight, which usually has 100+ all the different leaders of big or small guilds, and all piken individuals welcome… your welcome to attend ANET I can give you the details.

I dont represent everyones views, I dont claim too, but i know my community and im pretty sure ALOT of them will be feeling similar to me.

Thanks for reading
Your Customer

I agree on the part that it’s not a good idea to price transfer fee by overall population , as a medium population server but one of the longest quetimes to WvW they are only gonna get longer in the future.

The Piken Square server i knew was a hard fighting undermanned, around middle tier server but when you gained some new guilds invited or not sometime around the 4 week gandara/arborstone matchup and little after that it was kinda inevitable that other people would follow. And why not , it’s not like only hardcore WvW guilds with invitation were allowed to transfer to Piken.
By bringing those new WvW guilds to Piken you kinda sealed your own fate by racking up so much points so close to the free transfer closure.

Sure, everyone would like their WvW population consisting from only 15-20 people hardcore WvW guild strike teams but it doesnt work that way.

Couldn’t agree more. Instead of encouraging stable, consistent, fun, friendly and open communities on servers, we are forced into tanking matches, discouraging friendlies and being rude to people who join the server. Since server is now only a wvw issue, does it not make sense for transfers to be dependent on wvw population and not total population? And since this is Guild Wars, would it not make sense to encourage people to play as a guild, and not a massive blob?

To the dev’s, please attend our piken square meeting, we probably represent at least 75% of the wvw community on piken, and should have representatives from most of the wvw guilds there. It would allow you first-hand experience with what is concerning the wvw player base, not only for our server, but the majority of servers, which at some point has been the victim of this at some point.

the core of piken didnt seal its own fate, it more a case of bad timing as far as where we were and when free closure ended and all the sign posts which ANET put up are pointing transfer to piken square, they need more players because they are only medium population (which wasnt true)… where roleplayers who pve would be on piken already… and our WvW community was very active (look at the tiers and medium population) majority of people transfering now are WvW’rs not Pver’s who have atleast the option of guesting…

We have a great roleplay community in PVE & WvW… now this is starting to become overshadowed in WvW with new arrivals. The mature and friendly roleplay WvW community is becoming toxic.

So to say Piken brought this on itself isnt really fair or true. When i think of Piken I dont just think of the guild groups, i think about the crazy individuals always fighting hard and outmanned at off peak times like you mention.

So I would really like to Know ANET’s Stance on this issue.

I feel your pain. The exact same thing happened to Tarnished Coast.

We started out as a server of small and medium-sized guilds in WvW. The zerg guilds were looked down upon and laughed at. But who is laughing now?

It’s innate in WvW design: once a server reaches a certain population and number of organized guilds: it goes zerg.

There have been many threads elsewhere discussing how to allow space for other playstyles than zerging, but I’m not sure how optimistic I am they will be implemented.

Oh great, another thread.

Gamblit.5041:

Wamgor.9347:

The mature and friendly roleplay WvW community is becoming toxic.

Its like a miracle on christmas eve appeared today out of nowhere.

I sure like to meet this guys. Does your imaginary RP WvW community also have members?

You obviously haven´t seen our toggle walk charges, pirate boats or storytimes around a campfire.
Have you perhaps seen the cat kind sir?

I agree, it makes no sense for a highly ranked (thus already busy) wvw server to have the cheapest transfers.

It could have been done that the cost was an equation that factored in wvw rank so the most expensive transfers were very high pop high rank servers and the cheapest med pop low ranked servers.

as is now there’s always going to more attractive choices than low ranked high pop servers.

playandchill.3908:

Roleplay + PvP = Meh

You mean the majority of the guilds that are respected and known trought other servers like Tup,sIN,Boon,VII,GG,Hob,Dt.Ka,Tntd,(i dont think RG does rp but Lyric seems like a rp guy ^^ )and many many others not so know guilds to the public but vastly recognized in the WvW community with Piken Square as their home server?

I dare you sir to meet any Piken guild that does RP on the field to show them how “meh” they are :P

Gamblit.5041:

Its like a miracle on christmas eve appeared today out of nowhere.

I sure like to meet this guys. Does your imaginary RP WvW community also have members?

This user just seems gelous to me because he can’t enjoy 5 trebuches on a boat packed with 30 players,1 dolyak,1 moa(parrot) and a couple of pirates shooting at the enemy zerg trying to take out bay holding the boat for hours.But it’s not his fault,maybe doing Rp in cities or pve zones is superior to what we usually do on Piken No stamp of aproval for our RP? /sadface

graverr.6473:

(i dont think RG does rp but Lyric seems like a rp guy ^^ )

Liryc = Huge roleplayer, get him around a camp fire and the roleplay just doesn’t stop.

Wait, RG are a WvW guild? I thought they were a hardcore RP guild, all those ghost tonics with a Charr commander, I figured it was some strange foefire scene.

ive been on piken a long time , long enough to remember dranul as the only commander running around , (the first i think on PS? very early anyways). however I am invisible in wvwvw, I dont join guilds , cos i’m a 40 year old grumpy scottish bam. so i dont usually find guild chat too much to my liking. Voice coms also wake the kid and/or annoy the wife.

I understand Wam,s point howerver i think Piken needs to do what it does best and mobilise the numbers of pugs in the battle not slam them for joining the server. most pugs will follow commanders and learn , cos they want to win. If your guild cant get all its guys in one BL in prime time thats annoying for sure , but then they could be taking the lead whereever they get in and making the diffrence rather than whining about bandwagoneers in map chat and blaming them for wanting to play on “their” server.

I understand the complaint you make it respectfully , but at the end of the day I think you have to just see it as another part of the meta-game and make strategy fit the new circumstances you find yourself in.

I know when i find myself in maps with commanders i follow them silently to see what they do, and most work well. for example some of the new commanders you have aquired are pretty effective imo, the commander from Xaoc ( bal-something i think) is like a machine when you follow him around hes constantlly reacting and moving , must be very hard to catch if your the enemy. excellent small unit tactics.

while some of the others like yourself and dranul excel at the larger planned siege breaking moves. you guys are strong , strong enough to adapt i’m sure.

@ginzo

It is hard to adapt when your guild raid of 20 ppl and other guild raids can’t join a map because too many ppl came to the server.These people that build the that community and brought Piken were it is while outmanned will get tired of not beeing able to play and find another home,the server and all that everyone worked for will be destroyed and all will be left will be the newly arrived wich will change server once more after they see how the server is not any good without it’s guilds.Imo this is what Wam was talking about.Ps: some guilds already left because of this issue,guilds want to play as a guild not waiting jumping arround or /sit in HotM,and if the situation will persist there will be no more a Piken Square like you know and love.

well part of the problem is all these guilds want to play in the same 4 hour time slot so unless you get a server to yourself its gonna be hard to find maps empty enough to mean several full guilds can all insta-join a map as a unit. then if you leave to a very low pop server to enable just that. you destroy the other low pop servers and climb up the ladder and find yourself back in the same situation in a month or so.

hence why i say you have to either adapt and accept the new reality or find yourself in a cycle doomed to repeat the same thing over again. you kinda are victims of your own success. things will settle down i think, people will drift from GW2 in time , all mmo’s become stale or get superceded by the next MMO. Elder scrolls online will be out in summer and neverwinter some time around then , after that you can be sure queues and getting your guild into a battleground wont be an issue.

My issue, besides the Stealth nerf since update on monday to population cap per a map to try reduce culling (which btw is still broken and in my opinion worse, alot more siege culling now than before too) Is that Piken Square WvW community, is getting punished for its own success as you pointed out…

Anet are the Sat Nav and basically telling everyone to go Piken Square because we are a medium population… despite we are full in WvW (look at the tiers and servers we beat it doesnt lie… we have a very high active wvw population) but no this doenst get taken into account what so ever in terms of cost of moving to a server….

So more and more people will fill up on Piken Square for WvW (which already has que issues) guilds and core piken players who built the server will not be able to get in… the roleplayers wont be able to roleplay and will be replaced by Zerglings from other servers who care more about score than the community and just want to ride the karma train… something Piken’s never been about so we as a server will lose our Identity.

Then guilds will look else where and Piken Will die if it loses these guilds if they move(because of issues getting out of hand) like blacktide died when they lost their guilds…

The Fact that Piken Square is 500 gems and all its rivals are 1000+ Piken being a international server (people overlook the fact its roleplay because of how much kitten we kick)

This is very unfair measuring stick used for gem price on transfer… it encourages people to move to our full WvW server… if they want to pve here like i said roleplayers would already be here or they could atleast guest for pve… so why are we the cheapest option when in rankings we clearly dont need more, if you look at que statistics we have alot of ques on Piken Square WvW maps…

Then look at the rankings at servers like blacktide… look at their scores in current matchups, those servers are “DEAD” but expensive there is no incentive to transfer there… there is alot of road blocks due to their pve population and no WvW…

Where is the balance? and where are the soultions?

Gems prices should be placed on Tier Ranking if you want to atleast help out balance WvW population… Make the high tiers very expensive that people are not willingly going to switch there… i.e t1-t3 = very high t4-t6 = high t7-t9= low

This will encourage downward migration… to the servers that need more players, there will be little risk moving to a server and trying it out in the low tiers and liking it… and high price for high tiers will more likely put some people off and so spread to the servers that actually need it…

But no, everything is about PVE POPULATION in PVP Enviroment… I do not get this logic it hurts my brain i struggle to understand this. What does pve have to do with WvW? Why is Pve having such a big effect on WvW? when they should be seperate…

Im very concerned that these changes will effect long term health of Piken Square WvW community where the roleplay aspect will eventually get lost by bandwagoners, the community will fall apart and that will be sad… There are multiple videos of our community roleplaying in WvW which ANET have even Tweeted links to some.

So im not sure if ANET are aware or even cares about the damage the system they have setup is going to do… if they read these forums, because the last thing WvW needs is another dead server.

playandchill.3908:

Roleplay + PvP = Meh

Don’t be silly. It is a merely a myth that RP’ers are terrible PvP players.

As for the thread at hand, I’ve been in Piken since release.
I’m not much of a serious RP’er, I only do it casually.
I spend more time sPvP’ing or WvW’ing then anything else.

I’ve seen the community take a turn for the worse a couple of weeks ago, during the matchups with Gandara.
Not only the new people are to blame here, I’ve seen piken veterans throwing tantrums about and against the newly landed.
I get why they aren’t really welcome, but acting this way only makes the whole community even more toxic.

You can safely say that we have become a victim of our success.
I personally feel that our lower tier match-ups we’re way more fun, especially for people who avoid big fights and aim to complete the smaller objectives.

During those match-ups we had to split up our outnumbered forces and small teams or even solo players could leave a big impact on the field.

Every week I see more and more zergs and less and less roamers like myself.
This includes allies and foes alike.

It’s a shame, to say the least. Hopefully things will balance out.
I’m sure the newly hopped on players don’t enjoy the queue either.