Guild Wars 2

Tyler Bearce.3427:

So again, one of the major advantages of world linking is that worlds will be periodically relinked as populations drift over time. To keep relative world populations roughly in balance. So if hypothetically the triple linked T4 worlds all filled and became supermassive T1 worlds, then that advantage would be normalized at the next relinking.

Have you considered how this will impact off-peak players? People who don’t play during NA or EU hours on their respective servers?

What is your plan to address the issues already being experienced by these players (aside from reducing their impact on score)?

Saern.5619:

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

It technically could work, and if implemented properly map wise their might be a solution there. However the maplayout should be done a bit differently, and not 3x alpine bl & 3x desert bl. After a bit of thinking what could work is if you imagine a pinweel style like Divinities reach: a slightly reworked EB in the middle, surrounded by 3 large maps (or 6 smaller, since large maps can be problematic) for roaming, and then to compleet the pinweel 6 maps sticking out of that circle, of which 3 are turned off (so say 3 alpine bl & 3 desert bl) and from periods they change, if anet wants to use both maps, that is).

The EB could be with half the camps to focus the map on group fights, not neccesarily capping stuff. So perhaps also half the amount of towers. This map should be made to cater fighting-foccused players
The roaming maps in the with more camps and a few towers, and then the bl kind off with the same setup as they are now. And form as a supply route towards sm.
If there are 6 maps, then it could work with 3 towers & 1 keep in the middle, with camps inbetween them. These maps should cater toroamers mostly

Then outside that the standard borderlands as they are now, to create a sieging type of gameplay, as a mix between large scale fights & smaller scaled fighting & roaming.

I do have an idea in my mind on the layout, but my paintskills suck so dont feel like adding that here xD

On the note of community feeling… I agree that it would suck to demolish the server identity. I rather have the linking system to work, but if that does not work, then i guess the 3 alliances would work better. It would create a larger coverage around the clock, and more activety around the clock as well. To prevent dissproportionally big alliances to be made, there should mayeb be a (small) buff to the lowest populated alliance, and a (small) nerf to the biggest populated one. So f/e more & less power/health. Kinda like the outnumbered /bl bloodlust.
Also making the lowest alliance cheaper to transfer to then the fullest alliance would help a bit i guess.
However due to the big scope of the playerbase & amount of maps, it should be less of an issue when an alliance is bigger because of the player spread.

But i dont know… one the one hand 3 alliances with the current 3 orders as patron could work, and fix several issues. And it might be better then kitten, semi broken bandaids to the current server system. On the other hand the nice thing of the current server system is that it, imo, creates for a better community sense. Not to mention that breaking up the current communities would be bad.

Edit:
Got bored and made a (crappy) scetch: http://i.imgur.com/OFJQcRe.jpg
Also added a few gvg maps, primarily ment fighting and just that. Nothing got capture, just a decent terrain for fights

I am really happy you are thinking about this issue Tyler, but this solution would not be something I would want. I play WvW because I like the large scale fights and that I can login at any time on any day to participate in them. This suggested change seems to me like it is directly opposed to these features.

Most (if not all) of the recent suggested changes to WvW focus around eliminating the impact of around-the-clock play that some servers can pull off. I am worried that this proposal is part of that focus. By shuffling the population around you may succeed at balancing the tiers better, but the only way that could happen is by draining players out of the top two tiers.

The top two tiers are already fielding far less players than they did in their prime, and there are already times of the day at which there is a minimal force to fight with. There is only one truly healthy server that fields all day, and even that server has a gap during EU hours. The things I enjoy most about WvW are already fading fast, and this will only accelerate the process.

I think that this is an interesting way to deal with the upcoming issue of WvW guilds being split up, but I am not sure it is the right one. I would rather see the tiers further consolidated, not have the already dwindling population spread out.

DeWolfe.2174:

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.

The problem is guilds need to schedule their own days off and their own events at their leisure, not have that dictated to them. The one day off decided for them may not be the day off the guild wants to have.

The fire alarms were going off last summer ( read back in the forums) where numerous ppl were begging for more help and pretty much mocked and told they don’t have to because “No worries KILL can handle it”. We lasted longer than we thought we would in that environment. Then the posts in the fall, winter.. it just went on and on.. response to calls and willingness to cooperate I think are the most important factors.

If you queue up maps with people who will lose everything on the whole map and are not competent enough to handle their business, there is no room for anyone capable to come there to save it. The people that are there have to be willing and capable otherwise they are wasting everyone’s time.

Hello Tyler,

It seems to me like a very bad idea for a problem that’s anyway broader than a mere figures management.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Hypothetically speaking, if we were to open some additional worlds (and at this point I still don’t know how much work, or how safe a change like that would be), but if we did, would there be player interest in transferring to these new worlds? The new worlds would have lowered population caps, be free to transfer to for a period of time and be immediately linked with existing lower tier worlds..

That part feels like an overall segregation of players who’re not into blobfest or who want to keep things small. Even if it’s a good intention, it’d be far more effective (yet require far more work) to work on mechanics, maps and what WvW has to offer so that everyone can find their own entertainement without refraining other’s ways of liking WvW as much as possible.

Yet… That can’t possibly be because :

2) Achieve a larger number of smaller worlds that we can link together to achieve more balanced numbers for each team.

Which I translate as “ok, you wan’t to keep things small, here you are with a small server. Be careful, we’re gonna use your small server has a management device and link it with bigger servers to eventually have more population”. So, that won’t be small server for small things…

One last thing :

The ultimate goal of this hypothetical plan would be two-fold:
1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.

That actually is a sweet dream. I can’t imagine a big guild wanting to do small things. I’m not into one, yet I can easily emphatize with guildies who want to find fights everywhere, and blobfests, and action in a less-than-15-seconds walk from the spawn. And putting those in a smaller server will only lead them to be the only guild around.

Not sure how the other timezones will turn out, but as a sea player I don’t think it’s possible for the sea population to be spread out more among new servers, because of the already limited pool of players in sea to recruit and fight from. These servers will probably end up in the bottom tiers without any identity because it will be simply linked with other more established servers as a bandwagon paradise as well.

The Population issue is not related to lack of worlds and the ability to transfer off to low tier servers, its an issue of how the most active players stack on the most active (and usually winning) servers. In fact the population imbalance was caused because there were TOO MANY servers with too many tiers which allowed stagnation into defined playstiles for each tier (rather than one compeetitive mode where all servers could complete) and spread the population thin except for the top tier servers.

There is absolutely no guild in any of the t1 servers that couldn’t transfer off to the current bottom tier servers as a whole if they wanted to. They dont do it because THEY DONT WANT TO and thats simply because the lower tiers dont pose any challenge, reward or benefit to those guilds or individual players. Even if they manage to claw their way to the top that could take months of facerolling the other servers to even get into that t1 spot (thus having boring fights, no challenge and just karma training); and those months of work for what purpose?being at the top they already were at t1 before the transfer?

Truth is that its very likely that what needs to be done isnt server linking, its server elimination and population reasignment. Instead of linking the servers and trying to keep a balance the lower tiers should dissapear and a special transfers should be allowed to the server of their choice -as a guild and as compensation. (this would require manually moving those guilds to avoid the server being full all of a sudden). Those random players not part of a WvW guild who get affected just get free choice of what ever open server is available.

Transfer costs should also be removed, instead of a monetary cost server transfers should have a CD period. Simply let people move where they want to move if the server space is available and let the population spread itself as it sees fit.

Generally I see the point, many small worlds are easier linked together in a balanced way than a few larger worlds.

BUT

Why does it need to be worlds created by ANet, why not teams created by guilds?

Here a sketch how such a hybrid approach could look likel:

We have a fixed number of worlds, such that each match consist of 3 worlds.
That would mean 12 worlds in NA, and 15 or 18 in EU. (or just 3/6 worlds each, but a dynamic number of maps?)

Each guild (or group of up to 3 small guilds) can declare itself to be a WvW-team,
Each team can declare a language and its top 3 worlds it want to be linked with.

All player that do not belong to a WvW-team belong to a world, if a guild declare itself as a wvw-team its players do no longer belong to the world.

Linking will respect language and it will try to respect priorities, but for better balance it may ignore them.

As a motivation for guilds to become wvw-teams, wvw-teams get an own scoreboared, where their contribution to the world match determines their rank.

Advantages:

• Guilds that declare themself as WvW-teams are guranteed to play together.
• The do not need to transfer to be linked to different worlds (just change their priorities)
• They can no longer distrub balance by transfering around

Rather than doing that, I believe we need to be looking at the player’s interest. I had discussed and also much heard of this problem with several people in WvW but in the end, they just want fights during their raid/playtime.

True, people often move around/shuffling worlds as a guild and sometimes, the problem either stems from not having enough fights or the fights getting stale.

For example like myself, I have been move from SoS – FA – DB – YB – JQ – TC – BG and everytime I move, it usually because there is no more fights or it gets boring aka stale and everytime I move, it usually with the world that is pushing towards higher tier or have high player activity.

I don’t know what is the solution for the WvW problem as a whole but all I know is that people like a fair number fights and if it can’t be a fair number fights, at least the smaller number had a chance of winning against a blob (well that was the hype in the beginning of WvW anyway of how 10 vs 20 or 30 and claiming it is possible to win) and new world isn’t going to fix that because they all tried it a year ago with fight guilds being in t3, fighting it out. Though, I’m not sure why they ended it but the main point is, it ended. ( I did discuss about the new world as well, a month ago and tbh, it will not fly because it creates more space, space that we don’t need.)

just my thought n opinion on WvW.

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.

You can link as followed:

• World 1 95%
• World 2 82%
• World 3+6 91%
• World 4+5 90%

Now you have a max distance of 13% and no new world. But both solutions wouldn’t solve the single current problem with the current system: after announcing the server-linkings a lot of “winner joiners” transfer to World 6 and make an Ubar-server anyway.

Server transfers have to be time limited. Once per year. Once per 6 months. The current situation is like when you allow football-players to switch teams during season. And not only that: it is like if you allow them also to field more players, after the transfer.

Bytestorm.8021:

You can link as followed:

• World 1 95%
• World 2 82%
• World 3+6 91%
• World 4+5 90%

Not a valid solution 4 worlds neither fit 1 match nor fill 2 matches.

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.

Hypothetically speaking, if we were to open some additional worlds (and at this point I still don’t know how much work, or how safe a change like that would be), but if we did, would there be player interest in transferring to these new worlds? The new worlds would have lowered population caps, be free to transfer to for a period of time and be immediately linked with existing lower tier worlds..

The ultimate goal of this hypothetical plan would be two-fold:
1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.
2) Achieve a larger number of smaller worlds that we can link together to achieve more balanced numbers for each team.

Again, this isn’t something we necessarily can or will do. The purpose of this post is just to quickly feel out community interest, to see if it was worth spending the time it would take to seriously investigate this option.

*Edit: Updated with some clarifications from below.

It is a interesting option, but no, not now.

It would be really nice but theres a big but to that….
Theres no incentivation, for guilds to do that, game is all about swarm empty stuff, or bring a a cluster to easy take anything fast.

As much i got impressed with the result of linking/stacking some worlds together, and looked a very logical way to not introduce megaserver and still stack servers, the state of WvW at the momment lacks alot, what im trying to say is that theres poor content to fight for, Guilds and players need a more indepth concept for WvW, you guys at Anet added allot of awfull gimmicks, like banners and tactvators, wich dumbed down alot the game.

-Why would those guilds want to move to lower tiered servers if would be the same ppt swarming stuff, offer easy karma trains??? Would spending time doing that actually improve the game mode? I, dont think so.

Wich means that stacking players will mantain the same issues, the good options added to WvW are still nill.

@Tyler Bearce.3427, seriously theres a few changes that are needed to be done in WvW before that, as much your guys stack players game is loosing interest, game keeps old faster by not having decent stuff to fight for, and i have a request, disable the kitten tactivator and banner gimmicks for a weak.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Fairly regularly, I see posts that say something to the effect of:

“The world that most of our guild is on is Full, so we’ve been having our new/returning guild members transfer to the Guest world, but what will happen if the Guest world gets relinked? Will we have to pay to transfer all those members again?”

This solution would give guilds like that an opportunity to freely reform on a world with plenty of space for their entire guild.

Now of course it’s still entirely possible that guilds won’t actually be willing to transfer off their current worlds, even for the opportunity to get all of their members onto the same world. However, that’s exactly why I made this post, just to confirm either case.

Guilds pick servers based on many factors like how how good the fights are in the tier that the server is most likely to be, recruitment, how the people there act and one huge factor is what it’s like outside of guild raids. People still want to play and have fun with good fights, reasonably skilled commanders/pugs that they like and can get along with. It’s extremely frustrating being with low skilled groups that wipe all the time or being on a server that has no one you like following (or no one at all) on during the time you can play outside of raiding.

The instability of being on a linked server is crazy under the current system because at any moment you could be put with/vs the worst servers in the game and there is no way to control it outside of having to leave (pay a lot of gold) every few months to enjoy the game. Being part of one of the larger host servers has a higher chance for stability and guilds stuck on linked servers are more likely to transfer to your tier meaning better overall fights and you get to stay with your friends from the server that are not part of your guild but you have played with for years anyway.

TLDR: Guilds want their members to have fun outside of raids and they want to fight other guilds of similar skill level (currently if you get thrown in the bottom tier its like legendary players being forced to play with ambers in pvp or something for months at a time). Also the people on the host server matters not just numbers(weird I know).

Edit: I forgot to say but recruiting on linked server is expensive and hard because if you pick up anyone from the host server you run into the same problem with forcing them to leave there home server or leave your guild and then they have to pay gems/gold to leave and there is no way back but transferring to whatever server is linked with that server at the time. My guild is currently running into this problem personally where we have been recruiting from SBI and we almost need the players that we got from them to raid but if CD was thrown with another server we would have to force them to leave there friends or we would be lacking on classes we really need to raid.

I’m from a small server myself… well we werent small until most of our guilds started to leave for other servers in order to search for bigger and better fights in WvW which then left the rest of us behind to try and defend everything and for us it was never easy because the blobs we were figthing with were kicking our kitten as what was left was mainly roaming guilds of no more than 10 people at a time from what i saw.

I am a bit uspet that all the progress our server made as a team and so on has now vanished since being linked with a bigger server and we basically had to start from scratch again merging with a bigger server trying to get to know everyone yet you dont know how they play and so on has been a big change for some of us as we all have our own specific way of playing the game and sometimes because you’re from the smaller server it doesnt feel right to say anything because of that fact.

I do however agree with merging worlds or creating new worlds so we can work together from a specific starting point all at once to achieve the same goal for pvp, pve and wvw so there wont be oh im the bigger server you need to listen to me type of thing and everyone is on equal terms so to speak working towards one thing to get recognised and so on.

im sure that this wont make sense at all but in my head it does at least
basically i am all for this and willing to go ahead with it and especially if there isnt any transfer fees etc involved i know a lot of people who will agree with me that this would be a good idea in the long run and will take away some of the frustration us as players are faced with

I would only be for this if none of the new servers in EU had a specific default language.

Currently I’m on Whiteside Ridge which was linked with Ring of Fire. We went from last place to top of bronze fighting Ring of Fire and having decent match ups that weren’t blow outs.

After linking we got paired with Ring of Fire and we have had a much reduced population in comparison to the other servers. We’re now facing linked national servers where the host server was big enough to crush both Whiteside Ridge and Ring of Fire on their own and now they’re linked they got even more players.

This is a trend right across EU where because we have servers with specific language requirements they were linked in a way that made them way too big. Some of the players on those servers (DL, Dz, Viz) have even complained about having queues on all borders but being a 50 man group vs 4 people, 3 angry bunnies and some ambient raccoons.

The state of WvW for WSR and RoF is at a state where most of my friends have stopped playing it. They do not like fighting a group that is essentially 90% of the map population who sit on siege against groups not even 20% of their size. They don’t like that they can’t do anything constructive anymore because the map group comes and wipes them.

We used to run 5-10 players and would often try to flip poorly defended towers, keeps and sometimes try to hold them vs larger groups. Now against these national servers we have a map blob called in to kill us if we spend more than 2 minutes near a tower. We’ve only fought 1 non national server since linking, Gunnar’s Hold, while they vastly outnumbered us it was much more fun for us as we had smaller groups to fight and they didn’t run 1 massive group killing small groups and running from a semi balanced fight.

One of your biggest mistake when you tried to encourage transfers last time (with the population recalcules) was to STILL have a transfer cost to transfer to the lowest tiers.

Basically you had to pay money to get into the empty wasteland that was T9 EU
AKA
Nobody would do it

Had you opened the very last ones to a free transfer you could have created a dynamic where top massive guilds could decided to move to the lowest tiers to “save” them, or simply for the challenge of making the server go up in tiers. And then the new lowest tiers could have gotten a movement as well.

I’m obviously not saying this was a sure thing. But I am sure that the money part was the main reason the “system” failed definitely.

So maybe keep in mind that money can ruin the initiative in this case.
make money out of WvW catapult skins, i’m sure ppl would buy those, but plz don’t mess with the core mechanics.

Well done Tyler B, thanks for your work.

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.

Hypothetically speaking, if we were to open some additional worlds (and at this point I still don’t know how much work, or how safe a change like that would be), but if we did, would there be player interest in transferring to these new worlds? The new worlds would have lowered population caps, be free to transfer to for a period of time and be immediately linked with existing lower tier worlds..

The ultimate goal of this hypothetical plan would be two-fold:
1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.
2) Achieve a larger number of smaller worlds that we can link together to achieve more balanced numbers for each team.

Again, this isn’t something we necessarily can or will do. The purpose of this post is just to quickly feel out community interest, to see if it was worth spending the time it would take to seriously investigate this option.

*Edit: Updated with some clarifications from below.

Hypothetically speaking, I would like to highlight some points though I AM struggling to find a right way to word it correctly…:-

1) Creating new worlds and it’s similarities to previous state of WvW

Hypothetically speaking, I would be wondering why put in the extra effort and company resources to create the extra worlds, aimed at those people who want a smaller type of WvW, when we had the resources and those exact servers at the previous state of WvW?

To explain it clearer, here’s the scenario:-

In a server linked WvW state
To my understanding, in this current state, the servers will be paired to each other and their population will be similar to playing WvW on higher tiers. In my mind, this is a similar effect as forcing the population of the lower servers into the higher servers.

Now in this state, anybody who would want to enjoy a smaller style of WvW would have to constantly transfer and join these “extra worlds” that are also linked to the paired servers. The Glicko, will then adjust accordingly to ensure that “population-wise” the servers are evenly matched.
Problem then is that the Glicko could decide that these “extra” server with it’s paired servers now have a population deserving of “higher WvW-tiered gameplay”, those same people will have to transfer again.

Anyway, in effect, wouldn’t the hypothetical system simply have the same effect as
allowing “free transfers” in it’s previous state of WvW, where the community could decide on settling on a higher/lower tier server with the comfort of knowing those low/high servers will stay where they are:-

“I want to play in more populated servers with more zergs. I don’t mind the queues” – free transfer to higher servers.

“I want to play in less populated servers with less zergs, I don’t want queues” -
free transfer to lower servers?

I hope this make sense

So if i understand right, you wanna add new worlds, because some guilds are saying that they need room to move with the entire guild?

And to “balance” population?

Now i wanna ask, do you see the actual situation right? do you know why people transfer mostly? (im talking about full wvw players)

People move to higher tiers because population, because activity. People wanna find people to fight, lower tiers are a wasteland. Why a guild will move to lower tier? just to lose? or just to fight vs gates and empty keeps? or help to rebuild a server with huge sacrifice?
Big guilds mostly are just fairweathers, you need to consider that, bandwagon servers are that, big guilds who just transfer to T1/T2 for easy wins because they dont wanna do the effort or because they just cant kill enemies, many of the pve guilds, they just pick the winner server and login maybe once for daily, but they get the win. (i know just those useless bonus rank chests lol). They want the easy mode, they just join the commander, and follow pressing 1 for the karma train, maybe if you think about that first, you could find a solution on fairweathers.

Im in T2 atm, but been in many servers, even i have another account on T4 so i really know hows the activity, and its dead. You never will find a solution to unbalance while you keep letting people transfer to winner servers, easy wins, mindless blob, thats what the people want, and its sad.

As a roamer, and part of small/medium size guild, i hate blobs in higher tiers, but if i go T4 i cant find anyone.

People will always find the easy way to destroy your balance if you only keep adding farming rewards, or rewards related to wins.

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 your small scale example is valid since using the real number of 24 worlds opens up your scenarios exponentially. With 24 worlds available you could have between 1-8 matches and a huge combination of potential pairings. You also have the safety governor of the queue if you over do it. Based on my experience playing T1 and T2, I’d say 3-5 matches seems about right for avoiding overly long queues while retaining adequate population.

Several people have also mentioned the timezone issue, which will complicate the search for a “balanced” pairing. Also, an overlooked matter is the quantity of quality commanders available. If a good commander is tagged up, people will gravitate and join, which causes a higher population. If you could somehow determine typical commander “coverage” it may help with your metrics (maybe using some data on time tagged up and squad size?)

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.

Hypothetically speaking, if we were to open some additional worlds (and at this point I still don’t know how much work, or how safe a change like that would be), but if we did, would there be player interest in transferring to these new worlds? The new worlds would have lowered population caps, be free to transfer to for a period of time and be immediately linked with existing lower tier worlds..

The ultimate goal of this hypothetical plan would be two-fold:
1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.
2) Achieve a larger number of smaller worlds that we can link together to achieve more balanced numbers for each team.

Again, this isn’t something we necessarily can or will do. The purpose of this post is just to quickly feel out community interest, to see if it was worth spending the time it would take to seriously investigate this option.

*Edit: Updated with some clarifications from below.

Honestly it is a nice thought but the problem isn’t going to go away. Having been around the block once or twice with regards to similar games and format of play this is a never ending problem. Game launches, players start picking servers, servers get queues, more servers released, transfers become available for free, then paid, players bounce around and servers start becoming less and less populated while people move for various reasons (friends, higher map population, PvP, etc). Anyway – nothing you don’t already know. My point is that there can only be one server ranked first, and one ranked last. In the middle are the servers that have forward/upward progression blocked due to reaching the proverbial population issues of lack of 24×7 coverage, numbers, etc. So in my opinion adding more is just doing more of the same.

Not to answer a question with a question, but have you ever considered:

1. Increased server, map, world population increase
2. Client side and network optimization
3. Dedicated server / world for only WvW

Underlying idea is to optimize or address client/server issues that require player caps and eliminate them. Truth be told in the year we are in we shouldn’t be facing player population constraints(definitely in compute/network infrastructure). If we get past this then this discussion is moot.

I appreciate the creative thinking……but as others have mentioned we already have several low pop servers open. Adding additional worlds wouldn’t really solve anything in my mind.

Time for Faction vs Faction. Server vs Server dont work b/c some servers are heavy SEA time some are heavy NA time. The score is close but its misleading since most of the time ppl just pvd. Example asian players on JQ are not going to move to another server to fight eachother they would rather pvd.

With Faction vs Faction u can limit how many players can join certain time zone on each faction to make the population more balance.

Magical Things.8465:

I appreciate the creative thinking……but as others have mentioned we already have several low pop servers open. Adding additional worlds wouldn’t really solve anything in my mind.

Yup.

Taxidriver.2043:

Time for Faction vs Faction. Server vs Server dont work b/c some servers are heavy SEA time some are heavy NA time the score is close but its misleading since most of the time ppl just pvd.

Yup.

Well linking is all fine and worked great with the server that got linked to us, how ever i don’t see why there should be a aim to link. Because that will just create artificial solotion to population problem. I mean the reason we have links now is due to the empty servers at the bottom that have no wvw to talk about, so why create more empty servers just to feed the top servers.

Imo linking should be used to support the lower tiers we have. And if there are not enough servers to link, well then link those that are low pop and need a boost.

Imo 2, The issues we have are the sky high gem costs for moving. If they were either lower, or if players got a free move option at least one time each yet or so, then i belive it would be more spread out. Now don’g missunderstand, i realize why they are high, because otherwise people would just bandwagon around which would destroy the wvw mode, but never the less, this can be solved in a good way by either have a free move on each year or maybe add low to no cost to move to servers that are unpopulated.

If it were up to me .. I’d take the bottom 6 servers in NA and merge them in to 3, and set their permanent population cap at somewhere between “medium” and “low” and advertise that these are permanent low population WvW servers designed for their specific style, and then do something similar with the middle servers for medium/high population. That would allow you to move ahead with merging some servers (please give them new names, things that honor the merge and recognize the contributions of both servers to the new team) but also preserve the play styles of the people who are on them by choice. Close them to incoming transfers for the first three weeks while offering all current residents a free transfer off – this would mean merging one set – waiting while their populations choose to stay or go – then merging the next set, allowing for the lower tiers to move up if they wish without being locked out of the mid tiers.

I dunno if I explained that well, I haven’t had any coffee yet and I’m sick. Bleh.

Zok.4956:

Another way to spread the population over the worlds would be to delete all existing worlds and make all new worlds very small mini-worlds with low population caps (10% or 30% of now). Then you can link these new mini-worlds better together to big-worlds and balance the population better.

This is the most practical option, and one I’d like to see, but people would never shut up about it. You destroyed our guild, I was away from the game for six months and lost my home. Maybe if you developed an in-game incentive, a one-time or annual deal where you can volunteer to join new/empty servers and you’ll get 10 2-hour WXP boosters?

What’s really on my mind is that megaservers seek to bring people together based on worlds that are only truly relevant in WvW. If you removed worlds from the megaserver calculation, you’d simplify megaserver match-making and leave worlds where they belong: in World vs. World. At that point, you’d have a lot of control over population, active population, and incentives.

I dont like this idea at all. World linking needs to go, merge server instead.
I will never voluntarily move to low population servers. In my book the higher server population the better. I dont mind seeing queues on all 4 maps.

You have to deal with player’s natural tendency to stack to win. It has always been a problem in every RvR game.

Very few people will transfer to the new worlds without major incentives. Also you need to penalize players on stacked servers.

Right now there are too many advantages to stacking, it’s basically easy mode. Adding new servers will not fix that behavior as long as that’s true.

Malediktus.9250:

I dont like this idea at all. World linking needs to go, merge server instead.
I will never voluntarily move to low population servers. In my book the higher server population the better. I dont mind seeing queues on all 4 maps.

^ this.

Oh how I wish there was 4 queued maps of action in OCX….

It’s kind of silly that we don’t have a 3 faction design…. Every other part of the game is all mixed up with players from all over. Guilds have players from all over. Yet, we are trying to sort those players back out for wvw…

GW2 US and EU both need to go 3 realm across the board for wvw so we can cut out this mess as much as possible. Players can completely play together despite language barriers, it happens all the time.

Invest in making a 3 faction war, and give yourselves and players less headaches for the long run.

GW2 WvW won’t survive when CU comes out. Between nostalgia from the godfathers of RvRvR that brought DAoC, and the fact that top streamers are salivating for the game to come out, GW2 WvW hold up unless things change drastically in the mists AND with professions.

I think this is a good idea. I want to play with a lower population than now and if a free lower pop server were to show up I’d rather go there than stay with the blobs.

Ugh…my head hurts trying to follow this discussion on World Linking.

Also, Let’s Not Talk about Scoring…when both discussions will end up creating Complex Solutions that will probably will harming the Long Term health & viability of the WvW Ecosystem…imho

It’s already Complex with different Time Zones, Languages, and Play Styles while solving the following Chronic Problems:

1) Reduce the direct impact of Server stacking to Match-Ups
2) Allow friends & family to play together from many different Worlds
3) Allow Off-peak capping, but let players to work out a solution themselves

Can you find a simple & elegant solution to these problems?

A solution that is Player Driven…yet…ANet Controlled?

Possible Full Solution – Google Search – Reboot Base Map Mechanic

I can’t imagine sea/ocx/eu players would want to move to the new servers unless they’re moving with a lot of friends. Because the population is lower for those time zones they tend to move onto servers that would get more fighting, that’s why the majority have moved or were already up in to T1/T2 and then trickles left in the bottom tiers.

So I wouldn’t worry about those zones. This would be a move to try and spread the NA pop over more servers.

Kungsmurfen.2861:

I think this is a good idea. I want to play with a lower population than now and if a free lower pop server were to show up I’d rather go there than stay with the blobs.

If you don’t like to encounter or play around “blobs” then wvw is not for you.

The whole point of this hypothetical topic is to even out all population and link all these even servers so the blobs are more even.

Didn’t have time to read entire thread, so just to reply to OP:

In theory I think it would be a great idea to make lots of smaller servers, so they can be set up in equal matches by adjusting the number of servers. From a design perspective that would be a dream come through.

By linking together 3-4-5 servers, you could still make match-up’s that would give someone to fight even with very low pop servers. So that wouldn’t be a problem either.

In practise, you have to deal with human players, and it is quite obvious that the majority of players want to stack together for advantage, rather than split out for balance.

I think the net effect would be if you made +6 servers, that we would just get even more empty servers, and even more stacking on the top servers. And it would create some more shifting so you wouldn’t necessarily know who you’re playing with.

This idea would have worked much better with much lower server caps to begin with, if you halved the existing server pop limits, so that a single server would have a hard time to stack large enough to fill a match-up alone, this could have worked. But if you do that now, the rage-quit would be real.

In that regard you might be better off destroying the existing servers, and create new servers with a reduced population limit, and more numbers.

obastable.5231:

If it were up to me .. I’d take the bottom 6 servers in NA and merge them in to 3, and set their permanent population cap at somewhere between “medium” and “low” and advertise that these are permanent low population WvW servers designed for their specific style, and then do something similar with the middle servers for medium/high population. That would allow you to move ahead with merging some servers (please give them new names, things that honor the merge and recognize the contributions of both servers to the new team) but also preserve the play styles of the people who are on them by choice. Close them to incoming transfers for the first three weeks while offering all current residents a free transfer off – this would mean merging one set – waiting while their populations choose to stay or go – then merging the next set, allowing for the lower tiers to move up if they wish without being locked out of the mid tiers.

For the long term this seems like the most fair option for all different play styles in NA. Get rid of linking. Give everyone one free world transfer and heavily advertise what “low, mid & high population” tiers means so no one gets stuck somewhere they do not want to be, drastically increase the top 6 tiers population caps with the expectation of 24/7 action and long kitten queues because that seems to be what some people want, keep the bottom low for roaming and tight knit communities and let the mid range be the best of both play styles. This will lock worlds into those categories with only 5 others to ever compete with (18 tiers total, 3 population cap size breakdowns) but if those populations were equal enough matches could still feel dynamic.

I’d also advocate for an in-game way to earn a world transfer, maybe even like a legendary weapon quest type of journey but at the least the option or remove gems from the process entirely (knowing a lot gems will be bought/spent to complete the material rich recipes) so people are more personally invested in their decision to move.

I don’t like the idea. I’m pleased with the way things are now. This seems like an idea that will cost a lot of time and resources and will likely not produce any results for quite some time and in the end will probably upset a lot of the player base. Meanwhile, we could be moving on to other issues that could improve QoL in WvW that could show more immediate results/ happy players.

I love all the " hypotheticals" without actually thinking about how this works in the end.. Who pays for all of the addition voice comms and website upkeeps when there are less players on server to do so and this is already an expense that is difficult for the existing servers to manage? Who admins all of these things when you have less players available to do so? Who pays for all the siege and supplies it takes to run map raids 24/7 with less people? The problem is the current servers are already struggling to manage these things so more players are forced to bond together in order to reduce the costs on everyone. You need more people to be able to play at once on LESS servers in order to make this easier on everyone on each server. The opposite of what you suggest.

Players are not just " bandwagoning" as some may think, they are moving to servers they can afford to play on since it costs each person less to play on the more populated servers than it does on the others. You want MORE help, not less, so that all players on the server spend more time having fun and less time worrying about everything it takes to run WvW and having players to work as a server to make that happen.

The more servers you have the more expensive in both time and money is needed to maintain that server. We need far less servers, not more.

Like a lot of discussions, a lot of posts (including those from ANet) seem to view WvW players a group of diverse people with near-identical preferences.

• Some people have never transferred (and likely never will).
• Some people only care about good fights; they like some queues (because it strongly implies good fights) but not so long that they have have to wait 30+ minutes more than 1-2x/month.
• Some people identify so strongly with their server that they are willing to put up with all sorts of inconvenience to ‘beat’ the other worlds.
• Some identify so strongly with their guild that they’ll move anywhere the leader suggests.
• And plenty of folks are primarily focused on the rewards.

Linking and discount transfers has a different appeal depending on which group you’re in. There’s never going to be a solution that works really well for everyone.

Instead of trying to please everyone, I think the goal should be to avoid some of the worst issues and promoting some of the best elements of the game mode.

• Address night-capping: you can only rally so many times after returning from an even/victorious night to find all the maps in enemy colors.
• Address match up diversity: fighting the same world week-in/week-out gets dull. Glicko is great for finding match ups among 1,000s of players, but I’m convinced it’s a weak tool for promoting ‘fun’ matchups across a dozen or three dynamically evolving worlds.
• Address imbalance at the start of a match: it’s fun once or twice to try to fight a world that outplays you from day one; it’s not fun to have an entire week of it.
• Address queuing: no queues are bad (you end up with only the most hardcore players) and 100+ person queues lasting 1 hr+ are bad (you end up with only the most hard core players).

Some of the recent proposals address some of these (while I fear a few might make things worse).

tl;dr I think ANet should keep its focus on promoting the more enjoyable aspects of WvW and reduce the worst elements. I like the current direction of the WvW team (and its engagement with the community). I hope that ANet keeps reminding us that we are a diverse group and that some of the best proposals for one group of us will be horrid for another group.

Swagger.1459:

Invest in making a 3 faction war, and give yourselves and players less headaches for the long run.

GW2 WvW won’t survive when CU comes out. Between nostalgia from the godfathers of RvRvR that brought DAoC, and the fact that top streamers are salivating for the game to come out, GW2 WvW hold up unless things change drastically in the mists AND with professions.

We had similar issues with DaOC. I recall 2 – 3 AM relic raids It doesn’t matter if we define it by server or faction at the end of the day people will move if it is an option and we can’t stop the 2×7 wall clock. We also don’t know what CU is planning with regards to servers or population and it isn’t due out in ’16. We will be lucky if it is even out in 17.

We need to stop looking at it at the server or faction level and invest in the technology or optimization to increase the player cap on a map. Not on the same level but think about Eve Online and how they handle the player base. We really need to open a world, server, or map and have no limits or constraints on the player base.

Then we can look at guilds, alliances, and player ports that provide other incentives to do everything we do in WvW.

lil devils x.6071:

I love all the " hypotheticals" without actually thinking about how this works in the end.. Who pays for all of the addition voice comms and website upkeeps when there are less players on server to do so and this is already an expense that is difficult for the existing servers to manage? Who admins all of these things when you have less players available to do so? Who pays for all the siege and supplies it takes to run map raids 24/7 with less people? The problem is the current servers are already struggling to manage these things so more players are forced to bond together in order to reduce the costs on everyone. You need more people to be able to play at once on LESS servers in order to make this easier on everyone on each server. The opposite of what you suggest.

Players are not just " bandwagoning" as some may think, they are moving to servers they can afford to play on since it costs each person less to play on the more populated servers than it does on the others. You want MORE help, not less, so that all players on the server spend more time having fun and less time worrying about everything it takes to run WvW and having players to work as a server to make that happen.

The more servers you have the more expensive in both time and money is needed to maintain that server. We need far less servers, not more.

I think GW2 has enough nerds to keep the operating costs of those teamspeak and web servers pretty low.

There are cloud server packages that start at $5/month and can be dynamically scaled to your needs (by the hour if need be.) You can install anything you want on those servers.

There will always be people that willing to invest their time and money to help build and maintain communities. This is a part of the game for many.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Like a lot of discussions, a lot of posts (including those from ANet) seem to view WvW players a group of diverse people with near-identical preferences.

• Some people have never transferred (and likely never will).
• Some people only care about good fights; they like some queues (because it strongly implies good fights) but not so long that they have have to wait 30+ minutes more than 1-2x/month.
• Some people identify so strongly with their server that they are willing to put up with all sorts of inconvenience to ‘beat’ the other worlds.
• Some identify so strongly with their guild that they’ll move anywhere the leader suggests.
• And plenty of folks are primarily focused on the rewards.

Linking and discount transfers has a different appeal depending on which group you’re in. There’s never going to be a solution that works really well for everyone.

---

Instead of trying to please everyone, I think the goal should be to avoid some of the worst issues and promoting some of the best elements of the game mode.

• Address night-capping: you can only rally so many times after returning from an even/victorious night to find all the maps in enemy colors.
• Address match up diversity: fighting the same world week-in/week-out gets dull. Glicko is great for finding match ups among 1,000s of players, but I’m convinced it’s a weak tool for promoting ‘fun’ matchups across a dozen or three dynamically evolving worlds.
• Address imbalance at the start of a match: it’s fun once or twice to try to fight a world that outplays you from day one; it’s not fun to have an entire week of it.
• Address queuing: no queues are bad (you end up with only the most hardcore players) and 100+ person queues lasting 1 hr+ are bad (you end up with only the most hard core players).

Some of the recent proposals address some of these (while I fear a few might make things worse).

tl;dr I think ANet should keep its focus on promoting the more enjoyable aspects of WvW and reduce the worst elements. I like the current direction of the WvW team (and its engagement with the community). I hope that ANet keeps reminding us that we are a diverse group and that some of the best proposals for one group of us will be horrid for another group.

Agreed on basically all points.

Predetermined matchups (and the anti-fun that accompanies them) are a significant problem.

I can predict with high confidence the winner of this week’s NA T1 matchup and the same for EU. I can also predict those outcomes for next week, the week after, and the week after that (barring some massive game or player behavior change). (These will be won by the server pairings that took 1st in that matchup for the prior 5 weeks and have run away in the current week.)

Within 30 seconds after reset on Friday, I’ll be able to tell you the winner of the NA T2 matchup (it’ll be whichever of TC, YB, and DB gets put into the T2 match).

Some of you have a very big misunderstanding on something. As far as I have read, the dev team did consider possible solutions but the main problem here is community acceptance to the solutions. In other words, solutions that theoretically will solve the balance issue is not necessary acceptable by the community because such solutions will involve dissolving all servers. Thus, they have to explore ways to do it, ways that will not kitten off the community but let me tell you, those “ways” found will be much less effective. For example, the current world linking. It is great in some way but I am sure everyone agree it doesn’t solve the population balance. However, this is the result of a less effective method, a method that will not kitten off the community.

Some of you are asking to keep things and yet at the same time asking for population balance, do you realize that is contradictory in nature? You can’t achieve population balance without radical changes, not after 3 years.

SkyShroud.2865:

Some of you have a very big misunderstanding on something. As far as I have read, the dev team did consider possible solutions but the main problem here is community acceptance to the solutions. In other words, solutions that theoretically will solve the balance issue is not necessary acceptable by the community because such solutions will involve dissolving all servers. Thus, they have to explore ways to do it, ways that will not kitten off the community but let me tell you, those “ways” found will be much less effective. For example, the current world linking. It is great in some way but I am sure everyone agree it doesn’t solve the population balance. However, this is the result of a less effective method, a method that will not kitten off the community.

Some of you are asking to keep things and yet at the same time asking for population balance, do you realize that is contradictory in nature? You can’t achieve population balance without radical changes, not after 3 years.

World linking and for for that matter merging worlds aren’t solutions to the balance problem no. As all they do is reshuffle the board without solving the problem. Anet is just unwilling to spend time and effort to do what has to be done and thus try to fool people with this.

SkyShroud.2865:

Some of you have a very big misunderstanding on something. As far as I have read, the dev team did consider possible solutions but the main problem here is community acceptance to the solutions. In other words, solutions that theoretically will solve the balance issue is not necessary acceptable by the community because such solutions will involve dissolving all servers. Thus, they have to explore ways to do it, ways that will not kitten off the community but let me tell you, those “ways” found will be much less effective. For example, the current world linking. It is great in some way but I am sure everyone agree it doesn’t solve the population balance. However, this is the result of a less effective method, a method that will not kitten off the community.

Some of you are asking to keep things and yet at the same time asking for population balance, do you realize that is contradictory in nature? You can’t achieve population balance without radical changes, not after 3 years.

Community isn’t always right. Could also be a small percentage replying in the various forum threads. People are talking obviously to the hypothetically asked question and we may not have all the right answers. In this case the developers and/or designers need to make a decision and make the change. Whatever it is. If they get it wrong the good news is that no one dies. Go back to drawing board and try again.

Edge of Mists was supposed to be the sand box to try new things. Maybe it is time to revisit that map rather than leave it has a karma or experience level train… But more to your point(s) is that from what I’m seeing in this thread the common theme or area of agreement is that no matter how you rack and stack the servers we will always run into the population vs wall clock wall. Those two distinct values directly impact the outcome of the match. The poster who said they can predict who comes in first, second, and third pretty much has it right.

No, this time around with all due respect the ball in in the developers court. They actually have to really think about the format of play, longer term goals, take into considering current and future technology, and expansion packs and give us a solution. They need to think outside of the box.

Sounds about high time we have a development / test server so we can make some quick ad-hoc changes without impacting production.

SkyShroud.2865:

Some of you have a very big misunderstanding on something. As far as I have read, the dev team did consider possible solutions but the main problem here is community acceptance to the solutions. In other words, solutions that theoretically will solve the balance issue is not necessary acceptable by the community because such solutions will involve dissolving all servers. Thus, they have to explore ways to do it, ways that will not kitten off the community but let me tell you, those “ways” found will be much less effective. For example, the current world linking. It is great in some way but I am sure everyone agree it doesn’t solve the population balance. However, this is the result of a less effective method, a method that will not kitten off the community.

Some of you are asking to keep things and yet at the same time asking for population balance, do you realize that is contradictory in nature? You can’t achieve population balance without radical changes, not after 3 years.

Yup, that’s the hurdle they will always face with any changes they may want to implement. The communities acceptance of changes. Going forward there is always going to be a group not happy about something, but if players want change and they want improvements and make wvw more balanced and less stale, they will have to be more accepting and work with anet to tweak the changes.

Does anyone really think they haven’t thought about hard server merges? they have, but they’re trying to find the least disruptive solution to the problems. I’ve seen suggestions to just blow it up and reform everything, blow communities that have been around for 3 years? you probably would lose the most players with that option over hard merges or links. I can see wvw maybe going to those last resort options eventually, but it’s not really needed right now when there’s another option to explore in links.

If the cost of polling is low, I would poll this to get a feel for how many people would consider moving. I think it would be less than expected though. Since it seems you can do additional analysis, aka are recording who voted for what, you could then compare those answers to the number of people on the worlds that they are already on and that might tell you if this would help and whether or not this was whole guilds or not.

I understand the intent is to assist in the balancing, but also agree the EU model makes more sense than the NA where overly populated servers should remain in their own group. I think servers that are already stacked will remain stacked servers though since for whatever reason people stacked on them before remains. Until that environment variable that created the stacking changes people will probably not move unless forced to.

It might make more sense to try additional server roll ups first though before adding more worlds. The point about recruitment is valid, and by combining servers you are opening doors for recruitment that might not have been available before world linking. The issue of transfers needs to be addressed but that should be for a different thread.

Using NA as example here, picture world linking as something along the lines of:

Current Weekly
Tier Match Tier
T1 – Tier 1
T2 – T2
T3 – T3
T4 – T4
T5 – T4
T6 – T5
T7 – T5
T8 – T5

This assumes a relationship of server population to weekly scoring. So as servers stack or don’t they move between tiers that combine them or leave them on their own for weekly matches. Since we still have people in T1 and T8 this is assuming that something in the system is still calculating score at the individual server level as well as the combined score when servers are linked.

Not sure if its feasible but is there any way to share numbers of servers with queues today? From the different tiers this issue might vary in priority which could account for some of the responses. Based on feedback in game and on the forums I think addressing how the servers are represented when linked seems like a bigger issue and would only be magnified if more servers are rolled together. People like to rep their guild and server and when you tag them as different it can create ill will.

If the issue here is to address people that can’t get their guild on a server, the odds are they trying to get onto an already stacked server, meaning they probably won’t move to a new server since it won’t have the draw of the old one. Unless you can draw enough loose people from those stacked servers it would not resolve the core issue.

If the issue is more pure population balances then I think trying different serber linking combinations first might be more cost effective before trying the new world method.

2 cents.

Edit: post really didn’t like placing two T1 descriptions with a space between them, oh those silly kittens lol.

I see the usefulness of point #2, but couldn’t come up with anything worth saying on the matter, even after sleeping on it. I leave only one word that sums up the WvW experience for many: relationships.