Guild Wars 2

There have been rich individuals transferring very often every now and then due to guest server being only 500 gems. However, this frequent transfers will upset the population balance and most importantly, the status calculation. I suggest doubling the cost of recent transferees’ (within two months) to deter them from transferring that often.

chuckles

This is like asking a retailer to double their price on an item if their customer bought it within a 2 month period.

Trying to imagine going to the food store & being told I have to pay double for the milk I’m buying because I bought it within 2 months.

I’m sure the retailer might consider your suggestion, but the buying customers won’t like your suggestion.

I understand why you’re asking & can empathize, but it doesn’t logically make sense in the context of a retail situation.

We need a different game mechanic…if not a new game mode…to address the issue that you’re really concerned about…imho

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

SkyShroud.2865:

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

Totally agree 100% with you about trying to maintain balance.

I wish there was a game mechanic in place, or WvW was designed to take advantage of population in-balances as a natural part of creating Match-Ups.

A better solution would be to create a game mechanic, or create a new game mode that takes advantage of population in-balances that naturally occur…instead of punishing players by charging them more to pay for a product they like.

I’d want the retailer to stay in business, and allow customers to purchase goods at an affordable price. It’s just good business sense from a retailer’s viewpoint…imho

SkyShroud.2865:

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

People transfer to either find fun elsewhere or to flock to a easy win. Neither of these will be playing the game if they are penalized for transfering… Your “balance” will be achieved by making these people just quit? I don’t think that people quitting a game when it’s already 4 years old is a good deal to it’s heath.

Jeknar.6184:

SkyShroud.2865:

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

People transfer to either find fun elsewhere or to flock to a easy win. Neither of these will be playing the game if they are penalized for transfering… Your “balance” will be achieved by making these people just quit? I don’t think that people quitting a game when it’s already 4 years old is a good deal to it’s heath.

A game grows when people say ‘this is fun and others should play it.’ A game doesn’t grow when people say ‘i play in hopes that this game will one day be better than it is.’ Getting on the right side of that dichotomy has a much larger impact than a few disgruntled folks leaving.

That said, I’m not a huge fan of this idea. Unless Anet has some ace-in-the-hole to repair the damage that’s been done, locking people in place will be more disruptive than just a few disgruntled people. Perhaps, in a variant, they could just close transfers after linking is done for a week or so. It would, perhaps, let them link more accurately and reduce the urge to transfer.

I don’t think that would solve the problem as organized groups typically band together and have a very large chest for these kind of things; you’d only hurt the small folks looking for new scenery if you made those things too expensive.

OTOH, I wonder how much people are willing to pay for transfers.

I said it about a year ago. The costs should go up the more transfers you do. If you want to transfer and it costs 500 gems first time, your next transfer will be 1000 gems, the next one 2000 etc. The transfer costs would be set to the lower stage when you are not transfering for 6 month.
I don’t see a huge problem with that. Just more money for Anet for people that transfer all the time.

shagwell.1349:

I said it about a year ago. The costs should go up the more transfers you do. If you want to transfer and it costs 500 gems first time, your next transfer will be 1000 gems, the next one 2000 etc. The transfer costs would be set to the lower stage when you are not transfering for 6 month.
I don’t see a huge problem with that. Just more money for Anet for people that transfer all the time.

That’s assuming someone wants to pay $100 real life money to transfer servers one day… I think Anet rather make that same $100 and more with microtransactions from a happy player than lose players from an absurd cost like that.

Keep in mind people transfer for lots of reasons, not just to win/bandwagon. Plenty of WvW focused guilds are paying for guild members to be on guest servers until free spots open up, others might like playing with friends and have a similar situation or maybe it could be as simple as following the fights, one week it’s populated, next it’s not, so why not transfer?

Sviel.7493:

Jeknar.6184:

SkyShroud.2865:

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

People transfer to either find fun elsewhere or to flock to a easy win. Neither of these will be playing the game if they are penalized for transfering… Your “balance” will be achieved by making these people just quit? I don’t think that people quitting a game when it’s already 4 years old is a good deal to it’s heath.

A game grows when people say ‘this is fun and others should play it.’ A game doesn’t grow when people say ‘i play in hopes that this game will one day be better than it is.’ Getting on the right side of that dichotomy has a much larger impact than a few disgruntled folks leaving.

That said, I’m not a huge fan of this idea. Unless Anet has some ace-in-the-hole to repair the damage that’s been done, locking people in place will be more disruptive than just a few disgruntled people. Perhaps, in a variant, they could just close transfers after linking is done for a week or so. It would, perhaps, let them link more accurately and reduce the urge to transfer.

Both of you mentioned it, game doesn’t grow if it isn’t fun. Population imbalance isn’t fun at all, do not forget about that. Siding with the group that transfers frequently and disrupt the balancing, is the same as forsaking the people who didn’t transfer and suffer the consequences of the disrupted balance. There are more people that don’t transfer frequently compare to those who transfer like having vacation, base on that and along with that logic, more people quits currently.

hmm.. may be it is [TIME] to transfer again….. ?

Jeknar.6184:

SkyShroud.2865:

However, this isn’t a food stall or retail shop, it is called as what it is, a penalty. Also, it isn’t a matter of people (who transfers a lot) liking the idea, it is a matter of controlling the transfers to maintain the balance, balance that got broken by the players themselves every time we relink.

People transfer to either find fun elsewhere or to flock to a easy win. Neither of these will be playing the game if they are penalized for transfering… Your “balance” will be achieved by making these people just quit? I don’t think that people quitting a game when it’s already 4 years old is a good deal to it’s heath.

But you need to consider that the game also loses population due to highly imbalanced matchups.

Surely you don’t want to completely strip off players’ freedom. But there still should be some slightly harder restrictions to prevent easy large population shift.

sephiroth.4217:

shagwell.1349:

I said it about a year ago. The costs should go up the more transfers you do. If you want to transfer and it costs 500 gems first time, your next transfer will be 1000 gems, the next one 2000 etc. The transfer costs would be set to the lower stage when you are not transfering for 6 month.
I don’t see a huge problem with that. Just more money for Anet for people that transfer all the time.

That’s assuming someone wants to pay $100 real life money to transfer servers one day… I think Anet rather make that same $100 and more with microtransactions from a happy player than lose players from an absurd cost like that.

Keep in mind people transfer for lots of reasons, not just to win/bandwagon. Plenty of WvW focused guilds are paying for guild members to be on guest servers until free spots open up, others might like playing with friends and have a similar situation or maybe it could be as simple as following the fights, one week it’s populated, next it’s not, so why not transfer?

You can’t make players happy. End of the story. People mainly transfer for joining a winning team. That’s what the majority does. That’s how NA wvw always worked and that’s the reason wvw is getting less attractive.

If you want to join a guild, join their server. There is not a single reason to transfer off again or transfer elsewhere except the guild is typical “follow the bandwagon – guild”. In that case you need to decide if you want to do that and pay lots of gems or if you find another guild that doesn’t make to transfer away every month.

This transfers are the reason that the fights are bad. Always was the case. It’s guilds that don’t want to invest time in community building and instead do their own thing on a server. Why was EU tier 1 more entertaining all the years? Because they don’t bandwagon from server a to b to c and back to e before going to a again. They had good fights. In NA tier 1 you have a server with a huge NA population and everyone and their mom and whole family transfers there. And in the end they complain about no one is fighting, same goes for the other timezones.
Arenanet shouldn’t let the whiny bunch decide how to transfer they should make transfers an one time option not a thing you do weekly because you feel like.

The players won’t change if you don’t give them a reason to change and the main reason to change your behaviour are stricter rules.

the OP doesnt seem to realize that anet cares more about its revenue streams and ‘play where and how u want’gameplay than it does actually balancing and creating fairness in the mode.

until the priorities change…ur arguments are wasted. and trust me, arguments and solutions are already well known and easy to implement…..but they dont want to.

Have you heard of this, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?

If people stop bringing things up, it will always be ignored. That is to say, if the community itself find balancing not necessary, why should anet cares if community don’t give a single kitten either? At the end of the day, it all depends how badly the community wants it and if community says balancing is not important, I do expect people to stop complaining about bad match up.

SkyShroud.2865:

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?

Still Believing that WvW can be saved if ANet changes the Game Mode’s Core Base Map Mechanic to take advantage of Population In-Balances instead of fighting it.

I’d rather see ANet remove the Tiers, assign a single map to each World, then let all Worlds attack each other with only the WvW Rank Leaderboard to provide players a weekly score & target system.

Why punish the customer by raising prices…let the retailer sell their goods to players that want to transfer to the #1 (NA/EU) or Any Top Ranked Worlds.

Just let the Bottom Ranked Worlds & everybody in between to attack the Top.

Then, keep the Map Caps the same so everybody spreads out when they find out that the queue to enter the #1 Ranked World’s Map take forever to enter…

ANet can later adjust the Map Caps to provide better game performance, Match-Up balance & to respond to increased player demands.

This option helps to build Long Term Communities in the Lower Ranked Worlds.

Still standing up to say something…

…GW2 Server don’t make sense at all lol since there is a mega server idk why we have all these servers to begin with…the only way to fix this is give everyone a free server transfer and close all the servers and only open up 3/4 servers and let them fill up and open up new servers as older one get maxed…I mean then again idc my server does well in WvW :x

WvW Rank should be reset to Zero when players transfer to a different World.

Also, I believe there should be a minimum WvW Rank to Setup & Use Siege.

This will go a long way in helping build Community & Keep Trolls in check.

Most people don’t really care about their WvW rank. I would be annoyed, but I would be more annoyed if I were forced to stay in a server where my WvW experience isn’t being enjoyable.

Veka.8710:

…GW2 Server don’t make sense at all lol since there is a mega server idk why we have all these servers to begin with…the only way to fix this is give everyone a free server transfer and close all the servers and only open up 3/4 servers and let them fill up and open up new servers as older one get maxed…I mean then again idc my server does well in WvW :x

Because your idea touch on sensitive issue like server pride or efforts (and money) already put in to the existing server community. It is not like people didn’t suggest deleting all the servers and rebalance it, however, within the community itself there are people opposing to such idea.

With all the different factors in consideration, imposing transfers penalty has less impact to the community as a whole compare to all other suggestions that require drastic changes.

Jeknar.6184:

Most people don’t really care about their WvW rank. I would be annoyed, but I would be more annoyed if I were forced to stay in a server where my WvW experience isn’t being enjoyable.

You are not banned from transferring, you are simply penalized for transferring too often. There is a line of difference there.

SkyShroud.2865:

Have you heard of this, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?

If people stop bringing things up, it will always be ignored. That is to say, if the community itself find balancing not necessary, why should anet cares if community don’t give a single kitten either? At the end of the day, it all depends how badly the community wants it and if community says balancing is not important, I do expect people to stop complaining about bad match up.

Well obviously you need to change HOW you ‘stop doing nothing’, cause its been 4 years now with multiple periods of complaining and the priorities have not changed.

You are absolutely right tho, if you whine enough something will happen. You are not whining enough though since the issue is too divisive atm due to the server pairings and their constant changings. I mean you should take a note from the desert bl complainers. THey posted everywhere…..and complained every single opportunity they had. ANd what did we learn from that whole experience? That the actual numbers of people who wanted desert bl gone were nowhere near a majority ruling (look no farther than the votes anet did). You are free to disagreee but I present actual evidence (as weak as it may be) and everyone who disagrees presents an opinion. Opinions alone do not represent just cause.

Just cause….does the justice and law system cares about majority ruling from general public? There are things that shouldn’t be decided through a simple national questionnaire. Democracy cannot be used as a mean to make every single decision because majority ruling of general public is not always right. This isn’t about a map that people gonna play on, this isn’t about a class that gonna be added or deleted, this isn’t about any contents.

This is about the repeating unbalance in every relink and how individuals and even guilds are found transferring every relink, turning every supposedly closely balanced matchup to unbalance. Then what? Resulting in unbalance matchup, more complains. Of course, this suggestion will not be a magical solution to the balancing, it is simply one of the things that need to be done to deter people from transferring that often and let the pairing works itself out.

I agree that ANet has a conflict of interests with regard to penalizing transfers and WvW, and I can’t see them agreeing to do that. However, why not reverse the philosophy and give people who actively play WvW rewards for server loyalty?

You could organize it any which way—maybe make it so people have to be on the same server that they completed the previous server-linking in, and active in WvW in both server-linking periods, before being eligible for any rewards, and reset the counter any time a transfer occurs, so it would block out rewards not just for the current linking, but the following one as well (require people to continue to play on the same server through more than one linking before receiving any reward).

• increase the rewards for longer periods of loyalty to a given server
• add an RNG element for greater rewards to increase gambling addictiveness (the more you play WvW on the same server, the better chances for great reward)
• add unique skins for various items (minipets, gliders, etc)
• give a large measure of it as account bound items so as not to disrupt the economy
• but DO give some items that are worth gold (including precursors, at least at the same rate with which they’re dropped for world events)
• if eligible because of no server transfers, allow people to buy tickets for Badges of Honor, and lower the prices the longer the loyalty period

It wouldn’t solve everything, but it would be a way of rewarding players that isn’t dependent on population or winning, would encourage casuals into the game mode, would make transferring require slightly more thought, and would not specifically penalize people for transferring if they wanted.

NGL, I’ve been on the same server since the beginning and have no intention of moving, so this would definitely benefit me. It would just be a nice consolation prize, if the rewards are decent enough, for continuing to play in a way that doesn’t stress the way the game mode works. Just a thought.

shagwell.1349:

sephiroth.4217:

shagwell.1349:

I said it about a year ago. The costs should go up the more transfers you do. If you want to transfer and it costs 500 gems first time, your next transfer will be 1000 gems, the next one 2000 etc. The transfer costs would be set to the lower stage when you are not transfering for 6 month.
I don’t see a huge problem with that. Just more money for Anet for people that transfer all the time.

That’s assuming someone wants to pay $100 real life money to transfer servers one day… I think Anet rather make that same $100 and more with microtransactions from a happy player than lose players from an absurd cost like that.

Keep in mind people transfer for lots of reasons, not just to win/bandwagon. Plenty of WvW focused guilds are paying for guild members to be on guest servers until free spots open up, others might like playing with friends and have a similar situation or maybe it could be as simple as following the fights, one week it’s populated, next it’s not, so why not transfer?

You can’t make players happy. End of the story. People mainly transfer for joining a winning team. That’s what the majority does. That’s how NA wvw always worked and that’s the reason wvw is getting less attractive.

I stopped reading here.

I’m a happy player for the most part so don’t tell me I’m not, I know there are quite a few people in my guild and others who are being paid to transfer to guest servers until free spots open up and I know of a few people who regularly transfer to stay in a certain population level due to FPS/Fights reasons.

I think the issue is here, is that YOU pay to transfer to win. Don’t assume everyone else shares your mentality.

The game mode has been bleeding players for quite a while, hence the server merger. Penalizing the very players who keep that game mode populated will only further destroy WvW from our side and from Anet side it means a drastic loss in sales from the WvW focused population.

Knowing Anet is a company, and the primary focus of a company is to make money, I’m quite happy knowing these suggestions in this thread will never be implemented unless they want to toss out everything they learned at business management courses and sales productivity courses, which I doubt will happen seeing as this game is constantly trying to make a revenue.

People transfer for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is for a new environment, the playerbase is not as large and stable as it once was causing a constant imbalance in matchups only made worse by the volatility in glicko and world linkings. Linkings change every 2 months, the reason transfer fees are lower to linked worlds is because they get new hosts every 2 months, not always but most do. So you can find yourself linked to a t2 server then next time find yourself linked to a t4 server.

I dont know if I buy the idea of people simply stacking on servers to win, you get nothing from winning. I would say any bandwagon resembling effect is simply players seeking the new active server because their old server is not as active as they want. We see this with each linking.

Uncertainty and unbalanced matchups for so long will cause population loss. At first I was for the 2 month links because I thought it was a good balance, but since anet decided to just let things run their course during linkings regardless of how it effects matchups, I think one month linkings would be a better idea.

tbh something should be done with transfers. A lot of the population issues in WvW come from guilds metagaming the WvW system via transfers.

Diku.2546:

SkyShroud.2865:

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?

Still Believing that WvW can be saved if ANet changes the Game Mode’s Core Base Map Mechanic to take advantage of Population In-Balances instead of fighting it.

I’d rather see ANet remove the Tiers, assign a single map to each World, then let all Worlds attack each other with only the WvW Rank Leaderboard to provide players a weekly score & target system.

Why punish the customer by raising prices…let the retailer sell their goods to players that want to transfer to the #1 (NA/EU) or Any Top Ranked Worlds.

Just let the Bottom Ranked Worlds & everybody in between to attack the Top.

Then, keep the Map Caps the same so everybody spreads out when they find out that the queue to enter the #1 Ranked World’s Map take forever to enter…

ANet can later adjust the Map Caps to provide better game performance, Match-Up balance & to respond to increased player demands.

This option helps to build Long Term Communities in the Lower Ranked Worlds.

Still standing up to say something…

Random capitalization Mid-Sentence.