Guild Wars 2

First of all a statement: I do not want to see servers merged or destroyed, ever. This post is meant as an idea to be discussed, more along the lines of how things could have been made to avoid the situation we are in now, etc.

…Foreword…

So a lot of people are complaining about this and that in WvW, my server is dead, my server has que’s, I just want to play with my friends (and then loop back one one of the previous two). Fact is we start playing the game, and the very first thing you do when you start the game is pick a totally random server completely uninformed. You have no idea about the amount of players you get to play with, and no idea what sort of play-style you will find etc. I think that is a fairly bad deal.

Thus we have people wanting to tear down the tier 1-2 to populate teh rest, and then others want to scrap the bottom 12+ servers and redistribute them on the rest. All of them have their own view of how they want the game to be played, everyone one of them has found, or are looking for, a server with a play-style they can enjoy. The populations is only the most obvious cause of why the game isn’t playing the way you want.

…moving right along…

So in a perfect world (with dancing unicorns, and little fairies bringing chocolate and candy to everyone!) we would have some way to divide the servers by different criteria, and since it will be to difficult to make a whole “All roamers step into the server on the left, zerglings please walk straight ahead to the blue blinking neon light, and you guild group guys please stand on the right side and wait for your guild leaders!” the easiest way to sort people are probably by population limits (Yes I said limits, bad word, Santa is skipping my chimney this year).

So, how about this idea ? Split the servers according to Gold/Silver/Bronze, and set different restrictions for each of them. Gold could stay where they are which seems pretty much the limit of the server capabilities any ways. Where Silver could get a slight reduction to map limit (for ex 60) which will allow it to have large groups, but avoid the worst lag issues. And little Bronze might even be limited as far down as 40, forcing people to spread out more across the maps, thus populating each one a bit more. Obviously the servers would have to be locked into each type this way, so that when you pick a server you pick one based on what style you want to play, not so that your Silver server gets knocked down to Bronze and gets limited by the crazy low map limit when you’re interested in larger battles (just without the lag and stuff).

…Soon, the end…

This would probably have worked best with 18 servers, 6 servers in each rank. I have no idea how that could be solved right now, without a whole lot of hate in every direction. It is far from perfect, but at least it would give a player some say in what kind of play experience he would get into when picking a server. I also think that you should pick a server later, it isn’t like a server pick matters until you actually go into WvW. One option could be that when you join a guild, it asks you if you want to join the same server as the rest of your guild so that you can play with them. Or just give you a selection the first time you try to go into WvW.

…finally!…

Yeah I’m done, you may all sigh in relief now.

Quite frankly, a new player stepping into WvW in a Bronze tier server outside of the 3 hours of NA prime will probably never come back to WvW again (probably just as a new player stepping into T1 or T2 during prime time, sees the zergs and gets scared away forever). You need activity to breed activity and more activity is almost always better than less activity. Your suggestion has a bit of sense to it though and I’m not 100% opposed BUT. WvW is a coverage driven game mode if you’re aiming to play the PPT game. Simply population limits aren’t the answer exactly. There’s no cure for coverage except MORE population.

Oh definitively, this is not a fix for PPT, Coverage, or really population. This is mostly just about encouraging people to find a play-style then can enjoy.

*If* this was to be a *part* of a complete solution to WvW, it would only be as a minor part of a whole lot of other things that actually fixed the main problems.

This is only meant as food for thought, and that we should try to retain different play-styles, so the largest amount of people can find a place to play the game how they like. Which certainly is not caused by deleting the top or bottom 6 servers. Nor by making WvW into EotM mode, as that would probably make huge parts of the lower tiers stop playing.

This idea was centered around marking different servers for different play styles, in this case by population limits. Basically codifying the existing trend of stacking servers for the play-style they enjoy.

What if i want everything?

After reading this post it occurs to me... ppl just have some rly weird expectations when it comes to wvw. Its almost as if they dont want an open pvp mode when they say they do. Why does everything have to be tightly controlled?

I see continuity with the other bring back OS thread. Ppl dont like being attacked when theyre not rdy. They cant handle... be rdy all the time! The more they start controlling wvw the less community we have.

I am in Borliss Pass.

We are in last place of the worst tier. Yet, we queued maps last night in prime time. Our server is not dead. Our problem is night capping and times of the day when we have no coverage.

This thread pops up every 2 weeks.. Always some poster from t2 or t3 wants to merge off the bronze servers to solve their coverage gaps. However, the bronze servers have the same coverage gaps in the same times as you do!

So merging servers accomplishes nothing.

The problem is the 24/7 game mode and the china/europe/NA split. Games are decided by who has coverage in the off hours. Until this is fixed, WvW populations will flock to the servers who do have coverage in off hours, making he problem worse.

What needs to be done is a total overhaul of scoring.

Let’s say there is a pole and every 15 minutes you can whack it for one point. If 150 people whack it, 150 points. If 20 whack it 20 points. This would be an improvement over current scoring, because the work of 20 people at 5 am doesn’t disproportionately affect the match. But even this doesn’t solve coverage.

Synosius.9876:

What if i want everything?

After reading this post it occurs to me... ppl just have some rly weird expectations when it comes to wvw. Its almost as if they dont want an open pvp mode when they say they do. Why does everything have to be tightly controlled?

I see continuity with the other bring back OS thread. Ppl dont like being attacked when theyre not rdy. They cant handle... be rdy all the time! The more they start controlling wvw the less community we have.

Well for one thing, you can have a bit of everything in most servers, just not at every given time. Even down in the bottom tiers you can find zergs at least a couple of hours in prime time (except a few really weird servers). And lots of people report that you can indeed roam and evne solo roam on the Tier 1 servers, so everything is possible already. But how often can you do that ? If you like to zerg most of the time, and only rarely want to roam, then obviously you will like the higher tiers better than the bottom. And if you like me like to roam and get allergic rashes if staying in a zerg for more than 10 minutes, well, you’ll like it in the bottom tiers.

And yes I agree, we have a huge amount of people, that all look for something different. Humans are wired like that, we never ever agree (Gotta love ’em, they makes life interesting!). And ideally we would have a setup that gave everyone the freedom so play as they liked at any given time, but when that includes other players it gets incredibly hard to accomplish.

Long winded way of saying I agree to pretty much everything you said.

nekretaal.6485:

I am in Borliss Pass.

We are in last place of the worst tier. Yet, we queued maps last night in prime time. Our server is not dead. Our problem is night capping and times of the day when we have no coverage.

This thread pops up every 2 weeks.. Always some poster from t2 or t3 wants to merge off the bronze servers to solve their coverage gaps. However, the bronze servers have the same coverage gaps in the same times as you do!

So merging servers accomplishes nothing.

The problem is the 24/7 game mode and the china/europe/NA split. Games are decided by who has coverage in the off hours. Until this is fixed, WvW populations will flock to the servers who do have coverage in off hours, making he problem worse.

What needs to be done is a total overhaul of scoring.

Let’s say there is a pole and every 15 minutes you can whack it for one point. If 150 people whack it, 150 points. If 20 whack it 20 points. This would be an improvement over current scoring, because the work of 20 people at 5 am doesn’t disproportionately affect the match. But even this doesn’t solve coverage.

First of all, I take offence to you calling T8 "the worst tier", I have fond memories of Tier8, and almost always enjoy the games I have there (top or bottom, doesn’t matter, we’ve been all over it).

Also, very curious how you think I encourage to destroy or merge servers ? I’ve specifically said in both my earlier posts that I do NOT want to Merge/Destroy servers! And heck, I’ve also listed my server in my signature, Kaineng definitively is not in T1-3 :p we fought you last week!

And yup, I know you guys can still que maps, we felt it! (We can’t!)

But aside from those minor points I completely agree with everything else you said. This is not supposed to be a fix for Coverage/Population/PPT (Which I also stated in a previous post), it is merely a "What if" scenario to think a bit out of the box, and hopefully get some good discussion.

Personally I agree that PPT needs an overhaul, but I don’t like the suggestion you had there, that is merely making PPT more worth it in NA Prime than any other time, which will kitten off the people playing at other hours. I’m very fond of a suggested Point alternative posted my munkiman.3068 in the CDI threads if you’re interested in looking it up.

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thank you all for the posts!

Reverence.6915:

Quite frankly, a new player stepping into WvW in a Bronze tier server outside of the 3 hours of NA prime will probably never come back to WvW again.

You need activity to breed activity

More T1 comments about “bronze iz ded”.

We’ve been getting new people trickling into WvW on their own for months now, at all times. And they stick – guess they must like the solitude eh?

Rimmy.9217:

Reverence.6915:

Quite frankly, a new player stepping into WvW in a Bronze tier server outside of the 3 hours of NA prime will probably never come back to WvW again.

You need activity to breed activity

More T1 comments about “bronze iz ded”.

We’ve been getting new people trickling into WvW on their own for months now, at all times. And they stick – guess they must like the solitude eh?

Way to edit my post to suit your agenda. I’ve been down in T8. Outside of NA prime, you could literally be the only person on your home borderland, or maybe form a single party on EBG. There’s some exceptions (KN…) but that’s how T8 tends to be, when Americans are sleeping. T8 isn’t dead for NA prime, but it certainly is at all other times of the day

Reverence.6915:

Rimmy.9217:

Reverence.6915:

Quite frankly, a new player stepping into WvW in a Bronze tier server outside of the 3 hours of NA prime will probably never come back to WvW again.

You need activity to breed activity

More T1 comments about “bronze iz ded”.

We’ve been getting new people trickling into WvW on their own for months now, at all times. And they stick – guess they must like the solitude eh?

Way to edit my post to suit your agenda. I’ve been down in T8. Outside of NA prime, you could literally be the only person on your home borderland, or maybe form a single party on EBG. There’s some exceptions (KN…) but that’s how T8 tends to be, when Americans are sleeping. T8 isn’t dead for NA prime, but it certainly is at all other times of the day

Didn’t edit to suit any agenda, I edited out the dross to leave the parts I wanted to reply to. I could have added extra line breaks I suppose, but who can’t remember a post they just read when reading a reply?

Yes, I know about your your little trips to other servers. I spent months in T8, after riding down there and now climbing back up. Your dalliances have given you no insight, based on your posting history, since they tend to stand in opposition to what people on the T8 servers say.

I’ll drop the alt into T1 for a couple of weeks and then be the authority of what it’s like, regardless of what long-term denizens of it say. Makes as much sense.