I see a lot of posts from low tier servers saying they don’t want to deal with large battles in higher tiers. From my experience visiting several servers over EU and NA, it’s only when you get to tier 4 that you get even medium sized battles frequently. That means that merging the bottom few servers will only bolster WvW participation as more people in WvW only makes more people want to participate. Those who want to roam alone are in the minority by a large percent.
The real problem with low tier servers though, is the “fair weather” problem. Many servers (ET included prior to transfers – my experience on ET for a week a few months back showed me a large population of 50+ on EBG every night but no one working together) have a LOT of players that simply don’t show up if the matchup isn’t in their favour. This makes unbalanced matchups even more lopsided and simply snowballs from there.
What’s a “medium sized battle”?
So the people who want to roam alone are a minority, yet ET has a large population that doesn’t concentrate into a large force because… they want to roam alone or in small groups. What people seem to keep missing from is that the people who want small server play, even if they are a minority, aren’t going to magically learn to like high-tier play, especially the ones who transferred down to get away from it. They’ll likely just stop playing WvW entirely.
As for fairweathers, I think that problem exists top to bottom and mergers aren’t going to make it go away because it’s fairly obvious that many people are going to prefer winning and being rewarded to losing and not being rewarded. “Would you rather have a cupcake or a slap in the face? I don’t know why nobody ever stands in the ‘slap in the face’ line.”
The one thing that makes players show up for a slap in the face is community and that’s the thing that any forced mergers is going to destroy, just like the megaservers destroyed community in PvE.
Kerzic [CoI] – Ranger – Eredon Terrace
Vastly more people WvW on the top 3 tiers, why disrupt more people when you can roll the dead server players into the more active tiers. Minimal disruption and we get fewer threads about how dead it is down in T8.
There are plenty of threads full of whining from the top two tiers, too. I don’t know what the bottom looks like in the EU or during every part of the day, but I wouldn’t consider my server dead nor the servers we are playing. The point is, why disrupt anyone by destroying the level of play they enjoy? Is the point to drive people out of WvW and have fewer Guild Wars 2 players? Because that is what it will do.
If you like low population, stay…it’s really simple.
That’s all a lot of people want, but we can’t do that if ArenaNet deletes our server or forcibly merges us with other servers, can we?
Kerzic [CoI] – Ranger – Eredon Terrace