Guild Wars 2

Not only are free server transfers still open to abuse, but there has been a large amount of irreversible damage done to the servers because of this.

My server has had 3 wvw guilds leave the server because of population issues. While I can understand why they left, this has left our server so under-populated we are getting steamrolled by everything. If server transfers were not free, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place and people would actually be trying to put effort in.

The problem is, the damage has already been done. It will take months for our server to get the population it needs, also, we are doing so badly that no-one actually wants to try to WvW anyway.

For servers like mine, this is too far gone to fix.

This has pretty much ruined a large part of the game for me. I COULD transfer, but this is only going to make things worse for those left. Also, a big staying point for me is the fact we have an upgraded guild that we have put a lot of time and influence into. If we were to transfer servers as a guild we would have to start from scratch.

The “problem” is that free transfer is still available to distribute players across servers… As you can see there are few servers FULL, many High and some Medium. They just hope, that people from Full and High servers will move to the Medium ones… So naive.

And I will tell you something – you are doing badly because noone want to do WvW.. not reverse. Wanna change something? Create WvW focused guild and gather people, try to do something instead of waiting.

Its a catch-22

There is a population imbalance

ANet doesnt want to fix it themselves, because anything they do willkitten off a big chunk of the population who did their best to ensure they were on a winning server by default, and dont want to put any effort in their wins.

So ANet gives the tools to “fix” it….to the same people that created the problem…
lo and behold, , all that people do is making the problem worse by stacking some servers EVEN MOAR…sooo unexpected LOL.

In a nutshell: we have a developer/publisher that doesnt dare to take tough/unpopular decitions for the good of their own game, and instead rely on their playerbase to do the “right” thing.
And since we are living in a post-WoW world, the playerbase is constantly doing the “wrong” thing over and over again, and the game is going down the drain because of it.

People like to win.

We had more queues on our server when we owned the whole map last week than this week when we still have a fighting chance.

It’s embarrassing to be honest, our queues have never been long just steady throughout the day and night. but now even in primetime we had borderlands without queues simply because we are not dominating this week.

What has to be done now is lock High/Full servers, lower the cap for those servers to prevent more and more imbalance.

This will force a 1 way traffic out of Full/High servers to medium servers.

I am amazed this hasnt been done yet with 1 week WvW battles…

Phara Miu.2816:

What has to be done now is lock High/Full servers, lower the cap for those servers to prevent more and more imbalance.

This will force a 1 way traffic out of Full/High servers to medium servers.

I am amazed this hasnt been done yet with 1 week WvW battles…

‘Full’ server is locked as far as i know. However, the pop status are related to the ‘current time’ only so ppl who are so fixated on one server can choose to transfer at a very odd hour.

A free transfer at launch were needed because of the way the server is implemented and the anticipating level of GW2 far exceed their expectation. The server pop cap have been increase from time to time. They want players able to play with their friends or to find a server that are in their timezone. But this kinda backfired when combining it with WvW.

Free server transfer should be disabled when guesting works.

I’m guessing you are either in Ruins of Surmia or Fissure of Woe (is there another server like that ? Ring of fire maybe ?)

We had our biggest guilds leave, most of the WvW oriented then left because the others left, we were left with 2-3 small WvW oriented guilds. (RoS)
Having bought a commander, we now have 3 commanders in total trying to be on all the time and not let them steamroll us.

On top of that, Millers Sound and Dzagonur people are abusing the Free transfers. They went together in previous matchup and all went to Millers sound, when Millers sound went up a rank they all went to Dzagonur to steamroll the servers with already very low population.
I find that very frustrating that they are allowed to do so. Let free transfers be allowed but stop them from playing WvW for atleast 4 days, not just 24 or the remainder of the current matchup, because they could just transfer the day before the matchup changes.

Ilesyt.7084:

I’m guessing you are either in Ruins of Surmia or Fissure of Woe (is there another server like that ? Ring of fire maybe ?)

We had our biggest guilds leave, most of the WvW oriented then left because the others left, we were left with 2-3 small WvW oriented guilds. (RoS)
Having bought a commander, we now have 3 commanders in total trying to be on all the time and not let them steamroll us.

On top of that, Millers Sound and Dzagonur people are abusing the Free transfers. They went together in previous matchup and all went to Millers sound, when Millers sound went up a rank they all went to Dzagonur to steamroll the servers with already very low population.
I find that very frustrating that they are allowed to do so. Let free transfers be allowed but stop them from playing WvW for atleast 4 days, not just 24 or the remainder of the current matchup, because they could just transfer the day before the matchup changes.

This, they should implement the WvW restriction when transferring server now, like not getting the buff from WvW and unable to join WvW.

My point is, even when server transfers are working as expected, this aspect of the game has been pretty much ruined for some servers for the future, not just now. Those guilds would not have server transferred if they had to pay, or were locked out, we would have a better wvw population and would not be losing so bad.

I don’t mind losing to a better opponent. I mind losing to a server who’s population has suddenly increased with a change of brackets, coupled with a decline in my own population of server for the same reason.

If people did not have the option to transfer, they would be fighting for their server.

Ilesyt.7084:

I’m guessing you are either in Ruins of Surmia or Fissure of Woe (is there another server like that ? Ring of fire maybe ?)

We had our biggest guilds leave, most of the WvW oriented then left because the others left, we were left with 2-3 small WvW oriented guilds. (RoS)
Having bought a commander, we now have 3 commanders in total trying to be on all the time and not let them steamroll us.

On top of that, Millers Sound and Dzagonur people are abusing the Free transfers. They went together in previous matchup and all went to Millers sound, when Millers sound went up a rank they all went to Dzagonur to steamroll the servers with already very low population.
I find that very frustrating that they are allowed to do so. Let free transfers be allowed but stop them from playing WvW for atleast 4 days, not just 24 or the remainder of the current matchup, because they could just transfer the day before the matchup changes.

Yes, I am on RoS, you probably see me often enough in chat raging

My other problem with our server is we don’t defend, we are trying to get on the offensive when we don’t have the man-power.

I spend over a gold on upgrading keeps and camps, the moment I shout out one is under attack, no-one bothers to try defend, they are more interested in taking that one keep that has been fully fortified, and die at the walls.

My ign is Reema.

I didn’t know about this behaviour, but I was sure there were something fishy about Dzagonur…
My guild is in RoS and we’re trying to grow for WvWvW mainly, that’s why we’ll soon have a Commander, but even if we stop zerging around and use real strategy we’ll be owned due population issues.
Anyhow, we’ll be a lot more active very soon (in Eternal Battlegrounds), so hopefully we can cooperate with other WvWvW oriented guilds.

I created a thread to try and come up with ideas for how to fix free transfers without ruining WvW, hoping for a dev response. If you guys have good ideas or want to contribute to the discussion here is a link:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/24-Hour-Free-Transfers-Still-Too-Short/

“Free transfers has permanently ruined WvW”

No, free transfers to the highest population servers has ruined it.

They need to make transfers free (no $$ cost, no losing guild perks) to medium and low servers, and restrict xfers to high pop ones. Maybe even give incentives to players to transfer to these less populated servers (lower queue times obviously isn’t enough). Getting guesting implemented needs to be first priority aside from keeping the servers running.

People on the forums keep using the word “Ruined” but I don’t think they know what it means.

There are alot of broken things in wvw, this is just on the list..

I also am on Ruins of Surmia and have been there from the start. My guild has seen everything that happened to our server for better or for worse. The first week we where fine. Guild growing alliances being build. We where doing fine on WvW. Even won one of the 24h battles with big numbers if i recall correctly.

Then a trend started to ocure. We would be very dominant in prime time and would lose everything 1-2 hours after. The bigger guilds got very frustrated by this as we where still losing the match even do we where doing great in prime time. So they decided to leave. All of them in 1 night.

After that we had a bad streak and the sad part was it was just before the 7 days matches began. So we where without any big guilds and where defeated by Whiteside and Drakkar Lake [DE] that week. Totaly demoralising our server. I do have to point out here that we do still have some dedicated commanders that are still trying to lead this server, somethimes with great sucses.

My point being here. We always lost during the night. And im not blaming the “night capping” as its called for this. I don’t want to blame anything for this.
We always lost because our server went to bed 1-1,5 hour earlier then the other server did. In that time they took most of our keeps and towers and upgraded them. When we would wake up everything would be max upgraded. Something i find very odd thats even possible in that time frame.

Our server is on the bottom now and that is fine. We can see exactly what our server is and we are working to make this better. Its an uphill battle as we lack the manpower a little bit but thats also fine. I can play WvW any time i want. Can jump in and out without any que’s. We do what we can and can only go up from here. Ive also seen some transfers to our server wich is also good to hear.

People always see the bad in things. Sure, there are some parts wich can be improved. But the most important part is to create a strong and fun community. There will allways be people trying to mess with that in any way they can. But if you have fun with your mates playing the game isn’t that wat counts?

Free transfers is fine to keep the community flexible and the 24h cap is good enough to stop some of the abuse. Don’t let the actions of a few be reason to change this.

Chris.7653:

People on the forums keep using the word “Ruined” but I don’t think they know what it means.

ruin
n.
1. Total destruction or disintegration, either physical, moral, social, or economic.
2. A cause of total destruction.
3.
a. The act of destroying totally.
b. A destroyed person, object, or building.
4. The remains of something destroyed, disintegrated, or decayed. Often used in the plural: studied the ruins of ancient Greece.
v. ru·ined, ru·in·ing, ru·ins
v.tr.
1. To destroy completely; demolish.
2. To harm irreparably.
3. To reduce to poverty or bankruptcy.
4. To deprive of chastity.

Limli.9501:

People always see the bad in things. Sure, there are some parts wich can be improved. But the most important part is to create a strong and fun community. There will always be people trying to mess with that in any way they can. But if you have fun with your mates playing the game isn’t that wat counts?

Free transfers is fine to keep the community flexible and the 24h cap is good enough to stop some of the abuse. Don’t let the actions of a few be reason to change this.

I completely hear where you are coming from with regards to the community, and agree.

What I don’t agree with is the free transfers, they were not intended to work this way, or be abused in the manner that they have. A 24 hour cap would have been better… in the 24 hour match ups.

With 1 week match ups, it is not have any effect on this particular issue. There are supposed to be WvW repercussions on changing servers, making you unable to play for 2 weeks after transfer (or at least the rest of the match up) to prevent this.

This is not working as intended, and already ruined (see my previous post) our server.

They need to open up free transfers, but only to specific low population servers.

That way people can’t abuse the system to “join the winning team”.

I don’t know why they just don’t bar people from transferring to servers that they are currently facing in WvW?

Scribbles.7493:

They need to open up free transfers, but only to specific low population servers.

That way people can’t abuse the system to “join the winning team”.

Azure Prower.8701:

I don’t know why they just don’t bar people from transferring to servers that they are currently facing in WvW?

Both great idea’s.

I think it definitely needs to be set at its intended values for standard play (gem cost and cooldown). Server ratings will then match the no-transfer environment and it’ll eventually gravitate to where it’s most accurate.

On a tangentially related note, it might be worth not charging to transfer to certain underpopulated servers (how you doing Kaineng).

Azure Prower.8701:

I don’t know why they just don’t bar people from transferring to servers that they are currently facing in WvW?

This seems like a sensible option, provided servers aren’t perpetually locked into fighting one another (sup Maguuma/TC).

Just bumping as this is still a major issue. The last match-up has us against the same guilds that steam-rolled us last week have transferred to the server that we are now playing this week…

The only way they can “partially” fix this will be to merge servers together. They won’t do that to try fixing it because they see it “as intended”, so yea it’s permanently broken.

ArenaNet’s belief that the servers would eventually balance themselves out was somewhat overly idealistic, I think. A lot of people are willing to endure worse things than long queues if it means they get to “win”, even in something like WvW where the bonuses for doing so are largely irrelevant.

People have transfered from our (losing underpopulated) server (with no queues) to join (Higher population) servers with longer queues. I doubt this was the “balance” ANet had in mind.

Not seen many (any) people from high population servers coming to our low popped losing server… yet.

Hey guys, why are you expecting perfect balance in servers a month after release?

With the current system, cut your loses and move to a better server. It will not get better. Hop around till you find one that has your type of people. You will enjoy the game a lot more. Sticking it out on a dead server because you have some sort of loyalty won’t get you anywhere. GW2 will not see any major population increase to fill those servers. The opposite will happen, GW2’s population will decline like every other MMO has 30 days after release.. The lower tier servers will get worse and should be either closed or reserved for people that have no desire what-so-ever to WvW. Pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins…..

Chewy.9263:

Hey guys, why are you expecting perfect balance in servers a month after release?

Because it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better; because the current disincentive of playing on an overpopulated server, long queues, isn’t disincentivizing people from playing on overpopulated servers for several reasons:

1. Better to wait and win.
2. The queues are easy to bypass anyway because they were improperly coded.

Try transferring to Ruins of Surmia or Fissure of Woe for a day and then say that.

A lot of our members have left, first it was the big guilds, then it was the smaller ones and then the randoms and the PvE’rs, it’s now a ghost town outside of WvW they say.

We expect our situation to get better, but it keeps getting worse by the day.

permanently?

… Ok, yeah, no it hasn’t, lol. temporarily maybe.

Again, you’re going on about data from only a month of gameplay. Short term results cannot predict long term. An example ingame was HoD vs. SBI vs. ET. HoD was losing in the first 3 days, but eventually pulled out a victory.

You can’t expect things to instantly happen.

Chewy.9263:

Again, you’re going on about data from only a month of gameplay. Short term results cannot predict long term. An example ingame was HoD vs. SBI vs. ET. HoD was losing in the first 3 days, but eventually pulled out a victory.

You can’t expect things to instantly happen.

This really doesn’t address my points. Unless you think Arenanet will find a way around them.

Chewy.9263:

Again, you’re going on about data from only a month of gameplay. Short term results cannot predict long term. An example ingame was HoD vs. SBI vs. ET. HoD was losing in the first 3 days, but eventually pulled out a victory.

You can’t expect things to instantly happen.

Except you are ignoring the simple fact that the game will most likely LOSE players over the long term.

Using the most populated servers to make a point also ignores the issues of the lower population servers.

ANet is dropping the ball on this hard. Most players just want to have fun and the current system almost seems to be working against that.

spif.7580:

ANet is dropping the ball on this hard. Most players just want to have fun and the current system almost seems to be working against that.

Thanks spif, this is my stance on the current situation too.

Whomever said there is no loyalty to a server… I know a few community members that I like and talk to, while I can still do this when moving, I can’t WvW with them.

I also have a guild that while small has plenty of good upgrades (rank 2 in everything bar one which is rank 3, guild armour/weapons etc). Moving servers I will lose all the guild perks I have gained and have to start over, made harder by the fact that a lot of our influence came from tombs, then from influence boosters.

Moving servers is, simply put, not an option for some guilds. The guild I’m in I know wouldn’t dare dream of it, having rank 3 upgrades in everything and currently having a rank 4 going. I’m not willing to leave it to travel away on another server on my own either. To top it off, yeah, I DO have server pride. I just love CD. Loved it since day 1. I want nothing but the best for it. Not everyone is a bandwagoning mercenary that cares only about winning, but nobody likes to get constantly pummeled.

Anyway, back to the point. I truly think they should lock transfers to the bandwagon servers and offer some kind of incentive to transfers off to all the other servers. Server merging would potentially be something to consider, but I would say only after trying to get the numbers more spread out.

This is unproven at best and quite possibly false. This may have initially and temporarily imbalanced WvW for the servers who have filled up fastest, but ANet is looking at the big picture. They only recently moved WvW into 1 week matches, when the original plan was 2 weeks. This means while Guild Wars 2 as a whole may have gone “Gold”, WvW is still in its relative infancy and could be considered “Beta”. It is important for guilds who have gamed together and have desire to: A) form alliances with each other by ensuring they’ve all gotten onto the same server to play as a large force, and B) join servers specifically to be continuously matched against / ranked with old rivals. This is a win/win because it will keep players interested for years, and WvW as a whole an active part of the experience on those servers.

Down the road, 3 months, 6 months, 2 years… every server will eventually reach capacity once competition (like MoP, cough) fail to live up to expectations and gamers from all around decide to come home to roost. At at that point WvW as a whole will be more polished, we’ll enter the 2 week format as intended, server transfers will be gem driven and slow down significantly, and guilds will have established their long-term home servers (guesting on another server will lock them out of WvW as intended). At that point servers at the bottom of today’s list have every bit of a chance to participate, improve, and organize themselves into a “Final Four” server and climb the ladder as the ones that currently sit up there today (the early birds that happened to catch the worm).

There is a saying “You can’t rush genius”, and with patience and foresight I believe people will come to realize the WvW system will reveal itself as just that.

Also, HoD will one day pay for sheltering all the traitors from JQ that make up a decent chunk of their WvW muscle now, particularly those very same players that defected (you know who you are). We lost some of our arguably best players, but we are slowly replacing them with some very solid, dedicated WvW’ers that will enjoy helping the rest of us seek out vengeance. All in due time, the crew that adhered to the philosophy “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” will be crushed by the crew that prefers “If you can’t beat ’em, step up your game and beat ’em.”

solution:

Close off transfers to full/high pop servers and only allow people to go to medium or low

There will never be balance with free no-obligation no-drawback server transfers.

All those scores that are meant to establish rankings are largely irrelevant, the “meta” that ArenaNet wants to have established is as finicky as quicksand because … yip you guessed it … free no-obligation no-drawback server transfers.

How are things meant to settle when players and entire guilds are moving from server to server like migrant workers? I’m sorry but “guesting” is not a good enough reason to allow this to continue indefinitely.

I was reading the chat last night and had people leaving the match because of this issue. Now they were being dramatic but still on CD we need all the bodies we can get. Regardless of accuracy of the claim (I dont know if its ruining W3) the perception is it is. Obviously we are still only a month in after launch but the issues are pretty clear (real or imagined). ArenaNet would be wise to address this quickly and begin to implement caps (once a week, then every 2 weeks).

We need the servers to stablize for the matches so we know what populations we have. As it is, if one jumps out to an early lead people transfer off the loosing server. This issue has to be addressed sooner rather then later.