Guild Wars 2

With the static rankings settling in again, rather than raising caps, having non T1 servers at FULL, etc.
Why not remove everyone’s home server selection and let everyone pick anew when HoT releases?
This might help servers that are FULL and might encourage some guilds and players to spread out among different servers; renewing matchups which in many cases are lopsided and/or stale.
Is there a reason not to do this?

I get the feeling the winning servers will pick their own servers and the losing ones will try to bandwagon to the winners..

Although letting people re roll from lower to higher populations would be nice, i feel like eventually we would end up with the same issues we have now, oh sure we would have maybe a 2-3 month nice period of even fights and player numbers but once again it would flop and the unbalance would start up.

We need a way to KEEP balance (maybe a 1 to 1 ratio of who can move to a server, so when 1 person wants to move to server x, a person from server x must also want to move to server g, g would also want to move to x.. that way we have a constant flow of equality) The downside to my idea is that people will not be able to mass migrate guilds/ friends to where they want. but it would fix the population balance issue :P

Its not an easy fix, we need something that isnt going to break as soon as it is implemented.

Would only work if all servers were renamed something completely different, and even then NA would kitten itself all over again by stacking.

Although it could prove a financial win for Anet with the transfer fees, lol.

There would be shuffling around and it would not be a perfect solution. However, it would act as a reset as PvE purists don’t really care what server they are on, while PvX players will move wherever their guild does.

Yes, we will be looking down the barrel of this problem again in a few months post-release; but it’s at least a start.

This doesn’t fix the problem, eventually a few servers will rise to the top and people interested in WvW will eventually migrate there, leaving empty tiers at the bottom.

To actually solve it, I think a few things need to be done (at least):

1) Separation of PvE and WvW population. I’m on SoS, and it is usually ‘full’. YB always has more people than us but they are only ‘very high’ population. By doing this it gives a clearer metric of a server’s population.

2) Make WvW fun for all tiers. Even on SoS (T2) I sometimes have trouble finding people to fight. And the two enemy servers almost always have larger zergs. Presumably, lower tiers are even less sparsely populated. EotM was an interesting idea but it didn’t have the feeling of getting points for ‘your server’.

One possible idea is to have only 3 enormous servers with a much higher population cap, and each of the existing worlds will be bundled into one of these 3. Of course there are problems with this idea, such as map queues and servers losing their community but this is just supposed to give an idea of what they could do. It might not even be possible to implement with the current way GW2 is programmed anyway.

3) Put a new map with interesting mechanics. They are doing that in the expansion so we’ll just have to wait and see.

ANET needs to do a bunch of work to encourage server communities & loyalty before trying to start over otherwise we will end up back in the same situation in rather short order. Things to help worlds advertise and develop their personalities that lets new players make a more informed home world choice.

My idea of a server reset is actually to reset everyone’s account back to the server they initially started on and then provide one free guild server transfer (something that does not exist yet but some way for all members of a guild to get a notification of the guilds determined home world and an option for a free transfer there) and one free personal transfer after they find a different way to track server full status and lower the WvW map caps so players can figure out where to play without queues.

The only problem is they can’t do this (or much else) right after the release of HoT since WvW populations will be artificially inflated for awhile with everyone checking out the new map and goodies. In a perfect world something like this would have happened already but I am guessing they’ve been too busy with HoT so maybe early next year might be a better time frame to shoot for. If HoT doesn’t do something to drastically change population dynamics or if something isn’t talked about being the works shortly after HoT’s release I will have pretty much given up the idea of WvW ever reaching its full potential.

Please leave my server alone. Thank you. If I wanted to stack on a server I would have transferred a long time ago but I don’t. All this would do is people would stack on servers.

Server A stomps server B/C.

This goes on for a few months.

And then players from B/C get frustrated so they pay 20 bucks to move to server A.

Servers B/C drop like a rock to the bottom of the list and who ever is still on them are SoL if they want to enjoy WvW.

Rinse repeat.

Team stacking for the WIN! Literally.

Well not that Anet cares, they profit big time over this so I expect they will go to even more lengths to encourage this.

Chris.3290:

With the static rankings settling in again, rather than raising caps, having non T1 servers at FULL, etc.
Why not remove everyone’s home server selection and let everyone pick anew when HoT releases?
This might help servers that are FULL and might encourage some guilds and players to spread out among different servers; renewing matchups which in many cases are lopsided and/or stale.
Is there a reason not to do this?

Not sure what server you’re on, but mine uses ts to organise things like raids, pugs, etc.

So if you reset and let everyone choose where they want to go, nothing will change. All the current wvw guilds on my server would choose a server and all jump on that one- then you have the problem of terrible mismatches with stacked server playing one or two almost vacant servers while they move back to the top of the pile (and get the usual bandwaggoners).

Sunflowers.1729:

One possible idea is to have only 3 enormous servers with a much higher population cap, and each of the existing worlds will be bundled into one of these 3. Of course there are problems with this idea, such as map queues and servers losing their community but this is just supposed to give an idea of what they could do. It might not even be possible to implement with the current way GW2 is programmed anyway.

This is kind of how I best see them resolving the problem. Measure weekly metrics like server performance based on a per-server basis (whenever a kill is scored with bloodlust, say, the points increase for that server, and all server scores of the same alliance are just pooled together for display. This isn’t anything too crazy, and pooling the populations together isn’t too crazy, either, since they already do this on EoTM.

Maybe this doesn’t even need to be merge into one huge server, but two or three smaller ones.

Keeping track of other metrics like points scored from objectives vs kills, guild sizes, average player population per server in WvW at a given time (coverage problems resolved), point value, etc., can all be done and thrown into a database each week, where an algorithm tries to create the best match scenarios for the week. And this gets run every week. What this means is opponents are constantly rotating and you’re constantly being paired with new people. It also reinforces server and guild pride: you get friendly competition between servers to be the most outstanding while working towards a common objective, but your only true permanent allies are your server and guild-mates. This also gets rid of the need to adjust tiers by wvw population, so PvE players can enjoy the fun every so often if they want to without being in a ghost town. It also helps keep servers honest by allowing other potential future enemies know if people are hacking, etc. The player counts can also be bumped up per map, and maybe even come HoT, they could give WvW seven maps – the alpine BL’s + Desert BL’s + EBG to help resolve the population issues.

Or perhaps have the base 100 members but with a dynamically-adjusting size limit based upon the number of people queued across each combined server; if red has 22 people queued, blue 19, and green 30, the first 19 for each color can get admitted. It might make things a little too hectic, but this is war, and just imagine the craziness of multiple large blobs covering ground all at the same time, or three or four titanic blobs smashing into each other with streams of reinforcements. A lag-fest, maybe, but totally awesome :P

Just some thoughts. I think it’d definitely be better than the issues we’re facing now, though.

I’d absolutely hate having an EOTM-type WvW scene.

One of the best things in WvW is establishing teamwork and relationship. If you do the three mega servers, your chances of playing with the same “team” every week are slim.

I’d rather the players took responsibility and spread out on the servers instead of stacking. It really makes no difference if you’re the No1 server of the No24 (except by a population measure) — it’s just a number. Players should want to spread out to ensure good fights and not focus on the actual tier.

Except they don’t. That’s the issue at hand.

That only works well for lonely players with no friends or guilds they have any relationship with.

For the rest of us, it would be a disastrous mess of trying to get in touch with all of our friends and guildies to coordinate how we will coagulate on one server.