Guild Wars 2

Speaking mostly of T1 servers here lets say each of the 3 main servers has a player pool of 1000 (just tossing out a number).

Of that 1000:

250 are hard core seasoned WvW players who mainly care about their servers
placement.

250 are middle casual players who care about loot and karma as much as placement.

500 players are total noobs and uplevels who only care about xp, karma and satisfying quick caps for rank points.

When one of these servers is OG the majority of the casual, noobs and uplevels will pile into EotM because it’s almost a guaranteed xp/karma train leaving the actual WvW areas to be populated by the hard core players with the higher skills.

In reverse when one of these servers is FR the casuals and noobs will avoid EotM and fill up the rest of WvW and during peak hours will actually prevent seasoned players from participating.

This is just my opinion and i’m sure many will argue with it but if you watch the numbers cooresponding to which server is which color in EotM you’ll see the trend.

This is a rather odd view but it may have some merit.

I see a lot less uplevels in WvW maps these days while EotM is just full of them and I play on a T1 server.

500 >250 soooo….. if I was a developer I’d leave whatever makes the 500 happy.

I can see your point and I do believe it has quite a bit of merit.

But speaking from my experiences during this season:

TC was green during week two. TC probably has the largest share of ‘casuals’ of any of the first tier servers, and yet not only did our server rating increase dramatically that week, but we also had notably increased queue times in the normal WvW maps all week long.

Week one and three had much shorter queue times overall by comparison, suggesting that while being Green, we actually had increased player turnout and coverage in normal WvW, despite the desirable OG status in EotM.

This is likely due to a large number of ‘fair weather’ WvW’ers and casuals, also possibly those possibly uninformed about why we were doing so well, and wanting an easy ride.

I’m not trying to argue against your point, as I do believe there is a trend and a definite correlation between casual or newer WvW players and EoTM color – but just some food for thought.

I actively avoid EotM when my world is OG but then I also tend to avoid WvW if my side is running up the score. It is dull and boring to steamroll everything and I would bet you actually get more rewards as FR & BL in prime time situations for having more stuff to take back more quickly not mention some good fights mixed in between.