Guild Wars 2

Does anyone agree that the free transfers are kind of messing up WvW?

For example, I’m on Crystal Desert. And just because we were losing this week we had tons of people transfer to IOJ because they were kicking our butts.

I feel like if you couldn’t transfer so easily perhaps people would actually put a little more effort into WvW rather than taking the easy road of transferring to the winning server.

We had people in CD advertising to transfer in /M in LA. I was just like… kitten So you’re losing and you just want to take the easy way out? Good riddance. I personally am not going to go anyways just because we lose a week of WvW. Winning all the time isn’t the only fun aspect of this game.

Does anyone know when these free transfers will come to an end?

Well, with our new 4 hour queues, I kind of hope we get stomped and have some transfer out so I can play wvw again.

I agree with Aaron. We went from having a queue of just over an hour to a queue of four hours this week thanks to all of our new transfers. I’d rather be back in Tier 5 with Darkhaven and the rest and our regular WvW crew.

I don’t buy it. A server that wins this week will lose next week. A few pugs make no difference, wvw is about organized guilds. The only advantage to joining the “winning side” is to get a slightly better crafting bonus on Thursday/Friday.

You can’t get more karma transferring to the winning side. You only get a chance to flip if the loser flips something first. And they’re getting the outmaned bonus.

Everyone keeps saying free transfers kill WvW. But I dont buy it. If you have a guild or 10+ people ready to WvW, you’ll reap vastly more rewards on a losing server than a winning one even on the week you’re getting your face rolled. There’s always something to take. You dont have to worry about your zerg taking something. You get out manned bonus. You’ll dominate the lower tier next week.

(I’m one CD as well.)

You contradicted yourself a little there…

You say WvW is about organized guilds, right? So what happens when those Organized guilds transfer off the server? Sure, the void might be filled by another guild, or even puggers, but it wont be the same as a guild who regularly plays one battleground.

Transfers DO affect WvW.

Somehow, despite server transfers, EU had reasonably close match ups for all their tiers last week. Somehow, despite server transfers, 3/8 of NA tiers had good matches, too.

I’m not saying server transfers haven’t affected some worlds. But it’s insufficient to explain all of wvw performance.

Especially when it only takes 100 players or so to really fill up a map (that’s 2 full squads), and you can’t go too much over that. On average there’s 40k accounts per server, if we believe ANet’s claim of selling over 2 million copies. So out of your 40k, really we’re to believe so many transfered off that not 100 remain? And yet, the EU folks don’t.

Anyone that thinks transfers can’t send a server from hero to zero needs to just take a look at what has happened to Henge ever since Titan Alliance dismantled and its core group transferred to another server (Blackgate). For further study, you can take a look at the meteoric rise of Blackgate ever since the transfer.

Chrysalis speaks the truth, nobody can deny free transfers with henge of denravi as a spitting image.

Went from the unbeatable server to the +0 server. Losing the entire map in 15 minutes against blackgate, a tier 2 server.

The worst part of free transfers is that it kills any sort of community building, as it is different people playing with you every week. The game its people simply dont get the time to grow on you since the people you work with one week will be gone the next week.

No matter what opinions are the fact is that transfers completely ruin the ranking system (just look at the current tier 2 matchup for a GREAT example) not to mention the way it ruins queues for the guilds and folks actually trying to pull their weight.

If everyone stopped transferring and we waited (or had shorter matchmaking matches again) we’d actually balance out our brackets and have real competition again. All of the guilds and servers recruiting masses of people from other servers (their competition) as well as those transferring are (in my opinion) competition dodgers. Plain and simple.

I get transferring off of a server once it’s been ruined by free transfers. That makes sense though it still unbalances the brackets.

The ONLY fix is to stop transfers unless we adjust the ranking formula and have shorter matches.

It has broken the game.

^ I agree with Camagee, many guilds on the Gates of Madness server have transferred over to Sanctum of Ral (who completely destroyed us like week due to our lack of forces) or another winning server. It really is ruining the WvW experience for tons of people.

Why allow free character transfers in the first place, Anet? I would really like to hear the reasoning behind this from a member of the staff. It amazes me how a company who worked so hard to create such a beautiful game could make such a stupid mistake.

Camagee.5391:

It has broken the game.

I don’t think it’s broken the entire game, but it’s definitely screwed up WvW pretty badly I think.

Don’t think they can do more damage now, compared to how they already have butchered some servers.
The damage is done.

@gibson “Why allow free character transfers in the first place”

The early promotional materials for GW2 touted that you’d be able to play with friends no matter what server they’re on (not for wvw, but for pve).
As it turns out, launch came and went without them getting fully functional party capability, much less cross-world guesting. So it’s the lack of guesting ability that requires they keep server transfers freely available.

I think they’ll always have server transfers available, because of the one-server-per-account design. Perhaps they’ll cost gems in the future.

Something notable — EU has free transfers, yet all their wvw are at least somewhat competitive. So there’s more going on than just free transfers.

Dragonbrand has suffered from this as well. A few weeks ago we were doing fantastically in WvW. Now we can’t secure a single win. It is so bad our last game we lost be 3 or 4 times the enemy team’s score.

Apparently a whole guild from Dragonbrand left and after that our team has sucked.

I want to know what the Devs are going to do about it because WvW in Dragonbrand is not enjoyable AT ALL. We cannot even secure supply camps for very long, and when we do take a tower, it’s only a minor victory as we get zerged and lose it within an hour or so.

Free world transfers has completely messed up WvW for some servers. Other servers might not have suffered as Dragonbrand has, but just listen and try to sympathize. Can the Mods please do something about world transfers. At least make it so those who transfer can’t participate in WvW for that week.

Can the Devs get back to us and please let us know which worlds have suffered from mass world transfers, and can they then find a way to prevent it in the future or correct the damage that has been done?

The game during the 29th of September shows when Dragonbrand lost players. A number of guilds jumped ship into other worlds during this game – mentioned as happening from October 1st onwards – and after that our world couldn’t catch up in any games.

Free transfers at launch were a great idea so that friends could always stick together and if people weren’t completely happy with server choice, they wouldn’t come down with a heavy dosage of buyer’s remorse.

However, I would have thought the free transfers would have been closed by now, like a max a month period. If they wanted to extend this luxury to the new accounts, surely there’s a way to tag newly created accounts and give them a few weeks of a grace period to transfer among servers while locking out this option for older accounts?

Also, since there’s the free transfers in effect still, the touted guesting feature still has yet to see the light of day at this point. All it has done is create this mentality of bandwagoning onto winning servers! I was Blackgate since the 25th with my small close knit friends guild, half of them jumped ship because “blackgate was sucking” onto the behemoth then that is HoD. Now that HoD is empty, they’re complaining they can’t get back onto blackgate. Bandwagon mentality never wins but the server transfers are at the root of the issue.

My only response to them is that they should have never left and stop picking winning servers especially if don’t even want to put in the effort to win in the first place. Now this is first world problem as hell but with everyone on Blackgate, WvW simply is not fun. There’s no room for big pushes or overcoming dramatic odds when your server has 23813139% of the map. I don’t even mind getting nightcapped as that just means more objectives to take during the prime time, I rather have that then what the juggernaut Blackgate has become.

I have to agree with TJV on this, I was having fun on Dragonbrand back during the supposed great match up of Dragonbrand vs Blackgate vs Fort Aspenwood. Then about half way through the week I hear about an entire guild leaving to Blackgate due to an argument with a SINGLE person. First off I understand this makes the guild almost not worth having, but when that guild is apparently your entire WvW force that has a bad impact on the server that lost people. I have heard that the entirety of two or three guilds left us and were large players in our server, now it seems that no matter what we try, no matter how organized Dragonbrand gets we cannot secure even half of our own Borderlands let alone any of Eternal battlegrounds or the other two borderlands.

Point proven in the most recent match up (as of this post) we are just under a day into the new match up, it is Tarnished Coast vs Fort Aspenwood vs Dragonbrand and the last time we went against either of the servers we crushed them, now we are in third place and losing by over 3k points and the other two teams are rising quickly