Guild Wars 2

Guilds on powerful servers (such as T1/T2) have little incentive to move even if it means not growing as fast as they would like. In order to balance population, I agree that Tyler is on the right track – you need more slices in the “cake” so every piece is roughly the same. Unfortunately the only way to do it is to force some changes.

You can see that BG is the most stacked server. Even without ET, I doubt any other server combo could take them (unless you paired TC with DB or TC with YB) and put them up against solo BG. Not saying you should but it will be impossible to balance population unless the larger servers are broken up…one way or another.

Teon.5168:

Ultra Hades.4691:

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Don’t be hesitant to overstack the low tiers. They don’t have the organisation or skill to fight on even terms, give them a chance and give the stronger servers a challenge.

Gotta love that fine grade school logic.

Yea, because we all know that the lower tiers suck at everything. Why else would they be in a lower tier?

Do you actually even have ANY experience playing on a lower tier to base that ridiculous comment on?

Maybe ask our TC mates in wvw about how bad a wvw players we are from Kaineng.

/eyeroll

I don’t need to hear talk, I’d love to face the challenge instead.

@Tyler First, I want to thank you for your patience. You are doing a pretty good job communicating with us.

Second, I think it is a good idea and that it would help a great deal but there are also down sides. Here is what I think off of my head :

Advantage

- More balanced match up
- More opponents with the same strength (which means varied match up)

Disadvantage

- Community splitting (since not all guild would be able or willing to move)
- Lost of infrastructure (teamspeak and forum) (note : building a good and active forum community can take a lot of time…)

Maybe

- Helping with the full server (the new ones will become full at some point too, what do we do then?)

Forcing community to split is a no deal. But, if you just create the servers and let players chose then I don’t really see the problem.

Being one of those guilds who cannot get all our members on server currently, AND being one that has transferred from T1/JQ, I think the point is missing here as to WHY transfer and what they are hoping to achieve.

Guilds do not want to be the only guild on a server, the biggest issue I think is a server being able to provide better coverage and support so your guild is not having to do everything for the server. Guilds want MORE, help not less.

The point of a server is to have everyone contribute so no one guild or group is having to financially support that server alone. Maintaining tiers in WvW gets very costly in both time and money spent to do so, so you want to be in a community where more in that community contribute to accomplishing common goals and the costs of siege and supplies spent to map pin every day in WvW for hours on end and being able to have numerous reliable commanders on from multiple guilds during any hour of the day to call for assistance or to take over if needed so you are not stuck doing everything on a server.

The idea of going to an empty world is not appealing as it places MORE financial burden on your guild and MORE reliability on your guild rather than have more people available at any time of day to have that more evenly distributed.

You are actually proposing the opposite of what is attractive about moving servers. Often large guilds move servers due to the host world that is asking them to join is offering to help with the costs of the raids, offering commanders and guilds willing to help cooperate and respond to calls and ensuring they have community support they may have not been receiving at their previous location. You do not get that from empty worlds, and from worlds unwilling to play as a server. You receive that from large words with a dedicated community that understands what it takes to maintain a tier.

Most important factors for appealing server is a server and community willing to work as a server to accomplish common goals in both willingness to cooperate and the financial burdens of the costs of running in WvW, coverage outside of NA prime time and capability of the players on that server to be able to at least hold their own.

More worlds doesn’t make that better.. that makes that worse. Merging worlds according to timezone coverage would help, but it still does not change the quality of the communities in regards to assisting with financial impacts on guilds for runs or cooperation of the guilds to respond accordingly as needed.

atticus.5284:

Guilds on powerful servers (such as T1/T2) have little incentive to move even if it means not growing as fast as they would like. In order to balance population, I agree that Tyler is on the right track – you need more slices in the “cake” so every piece is roughly the same. Unfortunately the only way to do it is to force some changes.

You can see that BG is the most stacked server. Even without ET, I doubt any other server combo could take them (unless you paired TC with DB or TC with YB) and put them up against solo BG. Not saying you should but it will be impossible to balance population unless the larger servers are broken up…one way or another.

Actually, this is going in the opposite direction, not the right direction. More slices of cake means less people want to be on those slices due to it costing them more to do so. Guilds want MORE server support, not less. Thus to make match ups more balanced, you focus on server support and coverage of LESS servers, not more.

lil devils x.6071:

Being one of those guilds who cannot get all our members on server currently, AND being one that has transferred from T1/JQ. I think the point is missing here as to WHY transfer and what they are hoping to achieve.

Guilds do not want to be the only guild on a server, the biggest issue I think is a server being able to provide better coverage and support so your guild is not having to do everything for the server. Guilds want MORE, help not less.

Yes as a member of an ocx guild that is now the main ocx guild on JQ this is a huge problem with the way the system is set up. If you have any sort of server pride you feel like you are letting the server down if you are not out there 6-7 days a week. This is a ludicrous situation, simply ludicrous.

morrolan.9608:

lil devils x.6071:

Being one of those guilds who cannot get all our members on server currently, AND being one that has transferred from T1/JQ. I think the point is missing here as to WHY transfer and what they are hoping to achieve.

Guilds do not want to be the only guild on a server, the biggest issue I think is a server being able to provide better coverage and support so your guild is not having to do everything for the server. Guilds want MORE, help not less.

Yes as a member of an ocx guild that is now the main ocx guild on JQ this is a huge problem with the way the system is set up. If you have any sort of server pride you feel like you are letting the server down if you are not out there 6-7 days a week. This is a ludicrous situation, simply ludicrous.

Believe me, I COMPLETELY feel your pain ( as you know). When a server relies so heavily on just a few guilds to do everything while at the same time are not even helping provide the resources or additional forces to do so, it can wear you down pretty fast.

ALL of our commanders get burned out like that, our guild coffers grew bare, and when pleas for help from those on the server fall on deaf ears.. Yes, it is a situation that should be remedied. They DO need less servers since the servers they do have open already need more support to keep running. No one guild or group should have to shoulder the burden of an entire server,this should be more evenly distributed.

Regardless of if you are PST, OCX, SEA, EU, or NA Prime, your guild should be able to come on, hold their own, and get to enjoy time spent in WvW, not feel like it is a chore. If all guilds on a server pull their weight, it is nice, but when you get stuck being the one who carries the server, it gets old real quick. They really need to look at less servers with MORE coverage if they want to balance servers, not more " slices".

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Since it’s seeming increasingly likely that World Linking is going to win the community vote and become a permanent Gw2 feature, the team has been discussing ways to improve the system, especially around further improving population balance, while still allowing players to reliably play with their friends and guildmates.

If the current goal for WvW is achieving population balance, have you considered compressing it into one tier of three worlds? Hear me out for a moment.

The issue of nightcapping and server-stacking becomes much less of an issue when each population is of a certain size. If this critical mass of players is reached, no one is at a disadvantage because each world has so many players that off-hours would not necessarily exist.

This, of course, creates a relatively extreme issue with queue times.
But, if it were possible to have both the Alpine and Desert borderlands running in tandem (meaning players choose from 7 maps: 3 from Alpine, 3 from Desert, and EB) the queue issues would be less intense, though that may still not be enough, in which case duplicating EB and adding Edge Of The Mists (or an additional map similar to EB) might make enough space for everyone.

I don’t know whether having both Alpine and Desert borderlands running at the same time is currently possible, but if it were, it might be something worth consideration.

The complete loss of server identity could be remedied by (based on an idea I saw posted here earlier) having players pick which server (simply named Red, Green, and Blue) they would like to play for during the next week, up until the current weeks match has ended. Players who did not choose a world ingame during the preceding week would be spread between the two worlds with less players, in an effort to keep player totals even. This way, players who want to play with their friends can do so, and players who bear no particular attachment to a world are sent where they are needed most. And, of course, player totals on each world would not be a metric visible to players.

I’m sure this idea has issues I’m overlooking (maybe two ‘tiers’ instead of one?), but it seems to be a potential solution.

I think this idea has merit, but for different reasons. Or, more specifically target populations. If ocx and sea populations were offered their own servers permanently matched against one another a ton of birds might be killed with one stone. They could become a permanent fixture of one tier, paired with whichever NA population best suits it for balanced score

I think it’s an interesting idea, there are pros and cons to this of course.

With many smaller worlds around you would be able to mix and match servers a little bit easier to better balance out populations in a cluster of linked servers. I could see the idea of an alliance of friends or players or guilds moving to the same server to play together and grow their numbers. Much like the Empire alliance on TC, and the Rebel alliance that moved from TC to DB to counter them.

But I don’t trust the players to do this properly on their own, even with lower population caps, you open 3 servers and I’m sure one will end up being maxed out with a set of powerhouse guilds, population balance between the 3 would need to be monitored and allowed to grow at an equal pace as well. (Then again I guess it doesn’t matter if anet intends to release more servers after, to continue trying to create more smaller worlds to make it easier to create clusters of balance linked servers.)

One of the cons of this is another server that would lose their identity in the shuffle because only the host is seen for everything that deals with names.

So here’s a question I think needs to be answered first, would we be willing to lose the names of all servers and just name the linked cluster of servers under one new name, to use for display everything in wvw and the server names then become names just for linking purposes? That way server links can change but the main name does not.

For example Tier 4
HoD/EB = Grenth
DH/FC = Kormir
NSP/SF = Jormag

Later the links could change and look like this.
HoD/SF/NS2 = Grenth
DH/SoS/NS1 = Kormir
NSP/EB/NS3 = Jormag

I’ve also been wondering if Anet is able to use the guesting feature for wvw, or if it’s just something that was designed for pve. I’ve been thinking of an idea of doing the alliance idea through that for new servers.

What if they were able to open up 6 new worlds, then allow them to be populated through the guesting feature that would last anywhere from 1 week to 3 months.

So here’s how it would work, 6 servers come up for 1 month, friends from TC SOS EB decide to jump onto NS1, friends from DB HOD BG decide to jump into NS3, etc etc.
The guesting is free but monitored, you can’t get into the server you want until the other 2 are closer in guesting population. Once that’s done the guesting would last 1 month all those players would stay on those servers as guest for just as long. You can drop the guesting and go back to regular wvw, but if you guest again it would be to the server you first chose until the month is up.

Now you would be able to run “tournaments”, or even “seasons” like other games like path of exile or diablo 3 which have seasons that reset and you reroll new characters, compete in leadership boards on completion of challenges which reward unique items for that season, when those seasons are done the characters and the new gear get moved back to the regular leagues.

Obviously you wouldn’t run it the same way, or maybe you would. But once that’s done you drop the guesting and everything returns to normal. Problem of course with this is the regular servers will take an attendance hit, but the guesting options would be picked up or dropped at any time. You’re just linked through guesting to one server the duration of time on a tournament or season.

LetoII.3782:

I think this idea has merit, but for different reasons. Or, more specifically target populations. If ocx and sea populations were offered their own servers permanently matched against one another a ton of birds might be killed with one stone. They could become a permanent fixture of one tier, paired with whichever NA population best suits it for balanced score

All I can think of after reading this post is to just throw a server up in China (or any eastern Asian country really) for the OCX and Sea to play instead of having them connect to NA or EU servers or buy the Chinese edition. Nightcapping fixed! haha

Didn’t read the thread, but at this point I would totally accept a new world that was free to join if it meant that my guild friends and I could finally play together without paying a ridiculous amount of gold to get on the same server..

You guys should focus on WvW gameplay and map variety instead of adding new worlds.

Blackarps.1974:

LetoII.3782:

I think this idea has merit, but for different reasons. Or, more specifically target populations. If ocx and sea populations were offered their own servers permanently matched against one another a ton of birds might be killed with one stone. They could become a permanent fixture of one tier, paired with whichever NA population best suits it for balanced score

All I can think of after reading this post is to just throw a server up in China (or any eastern Asian country really) for the OCX and Sea to play instead of having them connect to NA or EU servers or buy the Chinese edition. Nightcapping fixed! haha

I love having people from all around the world on NA servers, bit of a xenophile.
But their smaller population is greatly Affecting scores, and not being matched against one another is a frustration for them as well. Look at poor JQsea stuck away from BGsea, their primary competition. Or the perpetually scattered Aussies.
These communities suffer by being split by NA power migrations.

I guess I tend to think about situations like this a bit differently. So, pretending I’m Anet for a moment this is a discussion more about framing a concept.

Proposal: Advertise for a month in advance that two new worlds are going to be created. Have a naming contest for each world. Perhaps even a cosmetic back piece or armor item that can be worn (in game achievement?) to give an incentive for players to move. Sure, the transfer is free. But we’re trying to get worlds to de-stack.

If I am an enterprising group of guilds that wants to start over on a new world, patch up any issues with timezone imbalance you basically just handed out a winning recipe. To me it sounds like a field day for guilds and players to rally around those new worlds. Course in my mind I would be tempted to create worlds where PVP is turned on all the time and those two worlds only face each other and a rotating world in WvW for combat purposes.

In the eyes of Anet there needs to be a change. The players also feel there needs to be a change. One of the issues in opening up discussion is that we as players rarely can agree. Heck, even in my guild groups we have different opinions.

But I do agree with the other comments that I’m not sure this fixes the main issues. Players will find a way to break open any system. WvW and sPVP populations are incredibly competitive by nature. Give people an incentive to win, give them a reason to transfer, etc.

Anet seems to be attempting to preserve world identity on some level. Naming conventions during linking aside (since this is Beta I would hope that is addressed eventually.)

PVP players are by far some of the most vocal yet also most loyal in a game. The raiding population and PVP population will keep a game going for a very long time.

Saern.5619:

If the current goal for WvW is achieving population balance, have you considered compressing it into one tier of three worlds? Hear me out for a moment.

The issue of nightcapping and server-stacking becomes much less of an issue when each population is of a certain size. If this critical mass of players is reached, no one is at a disadvantage because each world has so many players that off-hours would not necessarily exist.

This, of course, creates a relatively extreme issue with queue times.
But, if it were possible to have both the Alpine and Desert borderlands running in tandem (meaning players choose from 7 maps: 3 from Alpine, 3 from Desert, and EB) the queue issues would be less intense, though that may still not be enough, in which case duplicating EB and adding Edge Of The Mists (or an additional map similar to EB) might make enough space for everyone.

Some sort of server alliance system along these lines has been proposed before. Its extreme but they could have different tiers as being for different style of players. As others have mentioned maybe there is 1 tier where ocx players can congregate, 1 for sea and for eu on NA servers. Maybe have 1 tier for those who want smaller group gameplay and restrict map populations on that tier.

More smaller worlds would allow would be better overall both in terms of community building and more balanced pairing.

Guild alliances could dominate some of the smaller worlds and some of the worlds can just be anarchy roaming havoc worlds.

Frequent relinking will keep the GvG’ers happy also.

This would be much better than the current system. I would even encourage breaking up the larger worlds or slowly lower their population through attrition.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Yes, we do have a handful of small worlds, but the more smaller worlds we have, the more balanced linked populations can be. As a quick smaller scale example of current linking dilemma, lets say we have to link worlds with the following populations:

• World 1: 95%
• World 2: 82%
• World 3: 81%
• World 4: 60%
• World 5: 30%
• World 6: 10%

Since our final world total needs to be divisible by 3, we either need to avoid linking any of the worlds, or link some worlds even if they give a large population advantage.

• Worlds 1+6: 105%
• Worlds 2+5: 112%
• Worlds 3+4: 141%

After linking, the difference in population between the highest and lowers teams is much narrower, but we’ve made the 3rd rank server now have significantly more population than the previously 1st ranked server. Also all worlds are now over our goal population cap, and probably have moderate to heavy queues.

However, imagine that instead we had twice as many, half as populated, worlds. It becomes much easier to link them in a way that gives every linked team a similar population.

So you want to make some new servers and treat each server as a set of numbers that you can conveniently add together just to make the math a bit more simple, yeah gg I love being treated as just a number, kappa
I am already annoyed enough that we have to have servers linked as they are right now, I do not want to be allied to other servers, I want to fight them, they are all my enemys… and we certainly do not need more servers, we need less, you are now snowballing in completely the wrong direction imo.
If you ever come to your senses you will realize that server merges are actually the best solution for wvw, you need to shrink the amount of servers down and stop with this mess of spaghetti servers that you call linking.

TLDR : No I do not want new worlds…

lil devils x.6071:

ALL of our commanders get burned out like that, our guild coffers grew bare, and when pleas for help from those on the server fall on deaf ears.

I’m reading and I believe there is actually smoke coming out of my ears? Wait, was that the smoke alarm???

morrolan.9608:

If you have any sort of server pride you feel like you are letting the server down if you are not out there 6-7 days a week. This is a ludicrous situation, simply ludicrous.

It’s why I just suggested last week that we need a “Day Off” each week. Make matches 6 days and leave the 7th day off. Tyler, I hope you read this because it’s input you Dev’s are not going to find by staring at numbers on a screen.

I think it is a good idea, increasing the granularity of the populations to make balancing more effective is a good idea.

The execution risk is that people don’t transfer to those new servers – perhaps incentivise to ensure a population grows there?

Award some gems or gold for transferring to new1, new2 or new3 and those servers will get populations.

Like when you ask players to join a different megaserver instance and offer them a reward for leaving their current instance.

@ JQ guilds burning out, share those ocx guilds with TC

Lower Population caps is a great idea. Apply this to the existing worlds and maps too. We will get somewhat of a balance in time.

Ultra Hades.4691:

@ JQ guilds burning out, share those ocx guilds with TC

No burn out, just highlighting a severe problem with the current server system even with linking.

Tyler, I really appreciate the community engagement but I can’t help but feel you guys are out of touch with why and how alot of players do WVW in the first place (especially in the more organized and competitively focused guilds). It’s awesome being part of an organized guild on an organized server where commanders actually work together on TS. Why on earth would a player who enjoys an organized environment want to join a new server that then gets linked to far more “casual” lower tier servers? If the incentive is sufficient you might get a bunch of PUG transfers to a new server, but a bunch of PUGs+lower tier server doesn’t = server that can compete in higher tiers (lack of commmanders, infrastructure, organization ect).

Removing the old t6-8 servers THEN adding say 3 new ones and giving players free transfer to those servers with incentives makes sense and I think has a solid chance of the new servers being viable compared to existing servers. I don’t see the point of creating new servers, luring players to them, then linking them to existing low tier dead servers to act as “life support”.

lil devils x.6071:

Most important factors for appealing server is a server and community willing to work as a server to accomplish common goals in both willingness to cooperate and the financial burdens of the costs of running in WvW, coverage outside of NA prime time and capability of the players on that server to be able to at least hold their own.

More worlds doesn’t make that better.. that makes that worse. Merging worlds according to timezone coverage would help, but it still does not change the quality of the communities in regards to assisting with financial impacts on guilds for runs or cooperation of the guilds to respond accordingly as needed.

This guy really gets it, this sort of co-ordinated WVW community is what really draws me to GW2. I don’t see any point to being on a server that’s just a bunch of random players linked to different bunches of other random players every quarter. The only way I’d personally be interested in transferring to a completely new world would be as part of an organized guild alliance (and we could be sure all guilds could make it).

EDIT: I also think the population of serious organized WVW players is under-represented on the forums because mostly we’re busy playing the game.

i would consider this a band aid over an overflow map. people shouldnt have to wait to play a game because its popular.

I think another potential solution would be to provide more maps for players to play on. I just want the ability to log in at any time during the day and be able to fight zergs. I don’t care if I need to sit in a queue to do so.

With that in mind, if this would provide a means for that then I don’t see why not.

this is why I voted no on my 2 accounts – I don’t think there is a good way to link worlds no matter how much effort is put into it…..

I believe we shouldnt take a look at this from just a wvw standpoint and population alone. In general we must look at guild populations. If guilds grow overly large they will need to create unofficial alliances which in then would be hard to manage. Similar to the Edge of The Mists area we could and should somehow, link worlds together based on rotations of colors based on tiers anyway but with the forementioned (red post) setup. Instead of having all set worlds like JQ, FA, BG etc with all of these home servers, we should combine tiers with tiers almost like it is now in EoTM. Badlands, Frostreach, Overgrowth. Red,Green and blue. Combinging everyone in a set color will boost wvw but force overflows again, however link everyone by …

megaservering, but with wvw…. language is taken into place, region etc. just as pve megaserver. then add an alliance system. Guild wars 1 went the right direction and it seemed as if gw2 scrapped it. It had ALOT of potential, everyone had help upgrading halls with each other, communities grew like nuts, pvp like JQ, FA, and Alliance battles were booming…It may be a discussion all in itself but it is what i believe must be done first, to take a look at communities first and add this alliance feature.

TL;DR Force a wvwvw type of megaserver for wvw only specifics.
pugs with pugs, guildies with guildies(or alliance members)

Add alliance system from gw1

Have EOTM alliance feature added to all of wvw. Rotations are entirely random and are NEVER the same, allowing friendships between different worlds then enemies the next. Come next rotation meet new people, new allies.

Megaserver idea from pve added to wvw plus this eotm alliance feature being inhibited into all of wvw game types make each game fresh, ensures you get in with friends or guild instances.

For population balance the top worlds would have to lose players and the bottom worlds would have to gain players. The population cap should stay low. Free transfers to all low pop servers. The re linking should happen once a month. Ranks & tiers shouldn’t matter. It should be all about winning your week for a reward of course. No server stacking cause it’s just going to switch in a month. No stale match ups. People can build communities back up since there is no real reason to Keep switching teams. Once population balances, raise the cap incrementally & charge for transfers again. Then link teams randomly so everyone gets a chance to win & lose. When all pops are reasonable split servers for a tournament to see who the best is and lock transfers. After tourney go back to linking. I think it is more important to balence the worlds we have than make 3 new worlds.

Most Ecosystems need time to properly nurture the living & breathing organisms they contain before they can thrive…imho

Established guilds are probably more conservative when it comes to moving everything over to these new worlds, so I don’t think new worlds will help ‘em out very much. That’s because not everyone will move. Even if they do, some will definitely return to their old world. On the other hand, these new worlds will help sprout new WvW guilds, and it will probably be teeming with a great many small WvW guilds for awhile until 1-2 alliances formed (e.g. many Commander tags on the map doing their own things). If this plan succeeds, I’m predicting one or two of these servers will be very stacked with World-vs-World (WvW) players.

How about splitting the worlds into PvE-only (sPvP) and PvE & WvW (sPvP) and eliminating tier 4 and above. There should only be three tiers, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. All worlds should be linked into those three tiers, and the WvW population cap. should be increased. This is under the premise that smaller worlds should not have access to WvW (PvE-only + sPvP), and ‘outnumbered’ should not be a thing.

WvW will not survive if we can’t compete against this…

“Three Realms in one persistent, massive, open-world sandbox environment, with towns and cities built almost entirely by the players. Do battle over scarce resources, take and hold Places of Power, burn down your enemies’ homes, and seek to conquer The Depths™, a TriRealm dungeon like none other in gaming. This might be a sandbox game, but you aren’t building sandcastles: You are building and defending your homes!”

“Bored with typical MMORPG combat? In our game, you can build your own powerful ability combinations and unleash them on other players and structures. Even better, these abilities can interact with other abilities! Thus, a fireball hits a waterball to create a steam cloud, which you can then push over an enemy for some par-boiled TriRealm™ fun!”

“features a custom built game engine created in-house with the specific needs of solid performance in massive open world battles in mind.”

I’m not saying we need home and structure building, but Anet really needs to upgrade wvw and professions and engine capabilities if they want RvRvR minded players to stick around.

We need less worlds not more worlds.

While I understand the idea of more links (3+) to maintain better matchups and shift people around I do not think it’s a good idea unless the entire visibility of your server change.

Right now the links are a bandaid to a simple fact – we needed less tiers for more balance. I’m OK with that. But the entire system alienate the parasite server. If we are to get a third parasite server we absolutely need to see it active in WvW. The only way that happen is if keep/tower claims are actually server based, not side based. We cant just have them swallowed up under a single name.

So in short, if we get a Server1+Server2+Server3+… system we need to see the following:
“Server1 has captured enemy garrison!”
“Server2 got blue border, np.”
“Server3 got open raid on red border, taking hills.”
“GuildX from Server1 is handholding with GuildY from Server2, unfair!”
“GuildZ from Server3 claimed bay.”

Etc and so on. We need distinction, visible in WvW, what faction is doing what. We need to remain unique… Whether that be a large server, smaller server or “Anet megaguild” that contain player guilds is irrelevant. Without this WvW become random chaotic EoTM and most of us dont like that. We like belonging to a team.

Soon the 2 world link will not be viable. There will be no links that would keep the balance. More smaller servers allows for alignment.

Unless of course you all want to maintain your current pairing for years. Tiers are already stale, match ups aren’t changing as there’s no one else to match with. I don’t want to fight the same 2 servers in t4 for the rest of gw2 life.

If you allow us one free transfer, I will transfer to a smaller server in a heartbeat. I miss the days of being one of the smallest servers.

What would help WvW would be resetting all tiers and randomizing what players are where and giving everyone a choice of what server to choose and perhaps finding a way to remove server bias choices but honestly pairing small/medium servers(who usually dont have serious groups) with large-ish ones just makes for example a slightly larger group for a paired duo of active medium servers to slaughter

Before any major changes goes into world population, the first thing that must happen is that A-Net needs to dangle a carrot so people will actually want to WvW. The rewards are completely skewed now when WvWing. Not only that but if I want to WvW, I sometimes will have to sit in a long queue that may never pop. Once you implement a new legendary something for WvW people will flock to it and player count will grow.

I would love to see a EOTM system where worlds are linked semi-randomly or intentionally based on the population or time zone activity. you can even mix things up like:
3 super stacked servers VS 5 fairly populated servers VS the rest

The only way this would work is if you

1. De-link all worlds from accounts once, and have all players on all accounts have to pick a “new” server (for free) when they first log in post-patch, as if they’re a new acct.

2. RESET all server rankings completely.

3. Lower population caps for all worlds thus forcing players to spread out.

4. Forget and ignore all the “lul my guild on this server and I can’t transfer them to zerg harder”. Its a temporary pain to solve a major issue, and the game will be far healthier overall for it.

Thanks for reading and responding to the question regarding guilds on full servers.
I am still trying to comprehend your idea and how it will work practically. Some questions.

1. Will the world be permanent free or only free for the initial period?
2. Will new players able to choose that world to settle in?
3. Given that the transfer is free, what prevent non-guild members from moving into that server and making that server full once again?

Another thing I am worry about with more new worlds is that the amount of inflow of new players will be spread really thin since they have to choose a server to start with. I wonder if it will be healthy for the guilds in long run. Unless there are plans to make new players choose server ingame instead at the start?

Reikou.7068:

The only way this would work is if you

1. De-link all worlds from accounts once, and have all players on all accounts have to pick a “new” server (for free) when they first log in post-patch, as if they’re a new acct.

2. RESET all server rankings completely.

3. Lower population caps for all worlds thus forcing players to spread out.

4. Forget and ignore all the “lul my guild on this server and I can’t transfer them to zerg harder”. Its a temporary pain to solve a major issue, and the game will be far healthier overall for it.

Hmm a jubilee huh. This would work very well.

Hypothetically speaking, will these new servers be running in the same VM cluster? if so, please don’t – in T1 (EU) we’ve got massive server side lags – what – i would imagine – not be resolved by adding more VM’s to the same Hardware.

but otherwise, new wvw worlds would be nice – but than of course, you could just increase the server cap limit and the wvw map limit for players and don’t bother with the new worlds at all.

I’ll be willing to move to new servers. Can we name these new servers Kurzicks, Luxons and Canthas?

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Yes, we do have a handful of small worlds, but the more smaller worlds we have, the more balanced linked populations can be. As a quick smaller scale example of current linking dilemma, lets say we have to link worlds with the following populations:

• World 1: 95%
• World 2: 82%
• World 3: 81%
• World 4: 60%
• World 5: 30%
• World 6: 10%

Since our final world total needs to be divisible by 3, we either need to avoid linking any of the worlds, or link some worlds even if they give a large population advantage.

• Worlds 1+6: 105%
• Worlds 2+5: 112%
• Worlds 3+4: 141%

After linking, the difference in population between the highest and lowers teams is much narrower, but we’ve made the 3rd rank server now have significantly more population than the previously 1st ranked server. Also all worlds are now over our goal population cap, and probably have moderate to heavy queues.

However, imagine that instead we had twice as many, half as populated, worlds. It becomes much easier to link them in a way that gives every linked team a similar population.

I don’t think this is a good idea or a solution. Mathematically it makes good sense, but from practical stand point its just not feasible long term.

Also, if you take this route, why not instead of eliminating tier 8 and tier 7 NA just eliminate tier 8 ? Would that not save you some work and resources in general ?

As pointed out above, most players tend to gravitate to where they find action, not away from it. There are a minority of players who have gone to or remain on low tiers specifically to escape the action WVW was designed for (massive battles), so I could kind of see a “special” tier with severe limits on group sizes, chat functionality, map caps reduced by 50% etc. just for those players.

On the flip side of this, you could heavily promote and allow free transfers to it etc., in which case it will just become another overstacker server.

Both empty servers and overstacked servers are bad, and we have been there and done that and its exactly and precisely what landed us in this mess in the 1st place.

The only way I could see this successful is if you force and then extremely tightly control transfers, but then the particular playerbase that got transferred might get so ticked off they might just leave entirely.

So while mathematically it makes sense to do so, from practical application stand point we already know this willl come full circle and recreate a large part of the mess that caused the playerbase shrinkage.

Therefore, I think this is a bad idea.

littlemunster.1059:

I’ll be willing to move to new servers. Can we name these new servers Kurzicks, Luxons and Canthas?

you mean Kurzick, Suxon, and Canthan right?

niconori.7235:

Reikou.7068:

The only way this would work is if you

1. De-link all worlds from accounts once, and have all players on all accounts have to pick a “new” server (for free) when they first log in post-patch, as if they’re a new acct.

2. RESET all server rankings completely.

3. Lower population caps for all worlds thus forcing players to spread out.

4. Forget and ignore all the “lul my guild on this server and I can’t transfer them to zerg harder”. Its a temporary pain to solve a major issue, and the game will be far healthier overall for it.

Hmm a jubilee huh. This would work very well.

I also like this…. Maybe have a que for transferring worlds just in case all your friends don’t make it, so they will in time.

Knob.6835:

niconori.7235:

Reikou.7068:

The only way this would work is if you

1. De-link all worlds from accounts once, and have all players on all accounts have to pick a “new” server (for free) when they first log in post-patch, as if they’re a new acct.

2. RESET all server rankings completely.

3. Lower population caps for all worlds thus forcing players to spread out.

4. Forget and ignore all the “lul my guild on this server and I can’t transfer them to zerg harder”. Its a temporary pain to solve a major issue, and the game will be far healthier overall for it.

Hmm a jubilee huh. This would work very well.

I also like this…. Maybe have a que for transferring worlds just in case all your friends don’t make it, so they will in time.

This sounds so wrong on the surface, but I am not so sure the nuclear option isn’t the right way to go…… I had never thought about a waiting to list for transfer either. not sure that is so wrong….

Get rid of host and guest and just fight for red blue & green or what ever name they’d come up with, keep worlds I’m not taking about factions …. Nuclear option plus the new scoring system… I don’t no how much more equal you can get. Screw everyone equally :-)…. Doubt that would get a 75% vote.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

…

Why didn’t you guys go with a sandbox gametype for WvW? Just replicate the Tyria PvE map, form it into some giant PvP map, and let it be ran by guilds + alliances in a single shard? Add some form of contesting, so that parts of the map could be owned by guilds/alliances, allowing them to build their own keeps/castles/what have you.

Yea ok, would cost heaps of time/hardware/etc. but you know … WvW would connect literally everyone across the globe, you as developers wouldn’t have to pour time into population balances as it’s completely player driven , the gamemode would just feel that more immersive as it’ll always be war over either territory or resources or even property, and so on . Will there be blobs? There will always be blobs. It does not matter how you seek the balance population in any kind of model that is known today.