Guild Wars 2

This is probably the millionth rant about this topic, but i’m gonna make it anyway. I understand that the whole linking servers is hard and you need to thread the needle on balancing it. But the linking we got this week makes no sense whatsoever. A little common sense would make anyone understand that this is a horrible week for my server.

I’m on Gunnar’s Hold. We’re 18th on the WvW rankings. We’re up against Aurora Glade and Drakkar Lake. Aurora is 13th, so they’re already a lot better than us. What linking doe we get? We get put together with Vabbi who are 25th, Aurora get linked with Ring of Fire who are 17th. Yeah, that’s right. The server who is already way better than us, gets linked with another server that’s better than us. While we get paired with one of the worst servers in the game. Drakkar, 12th, get paired with Miller’s Sound who are 1 spot behind us. So another server way better than ours gets paired with a server around our level. No point in even saying that we’re getting absolutely destroyed in WvW this week.

I understand this is a hard process, and some computer module came up with this. But if a real person with common sense looked at this for 1 second. They would realise that this is a really bad linking.

I does when you consider why it was done.

The game is dying, WvW is on it’s last legs.
Players have stopped playing, servers got inactive.
So let’s bring in the Megaserver!
Well Megaserver’s little brother, server linking!
And let’s pretend WvW is still active, when all you’ve done is destroy server identity and thrown the little of what’s left of the player base into half the number of servers.

So there you have it, population inbalance got so bad, that Anet had to “delete” HALF the servers!

There used to be 27 servers in EU and 24 in US, now there’s 15 EU and 12 US.

This option is usually one of the last options a developer does before letting go of a game!

I think megaservers is one of the best things they changed in the game tbh. And i like the idea of serverlinking, the linking itself can be done better tough imo.

I think linking was one of the few paths they saw forward amidst declining populations that wouldn’t take a full rewrite of their architecture. It is a compromise they are still trying to balance.

I am utterly convinced they wouldn’t implement the server system if they could do it all over again. Servers are an “old school” design that fail in virtually every MMO that used them for large scale PvP. I think Anet realized they screwed up departing from the original non-server GW design and went back to their roots in PvE. They did their best to rectify it in WvW but only so much they can do after the design cemented.

Straegen.2938:

I am utterly convinced they wouldn’t implement the server system if they could do it all over again.

If they do it again, they would have done EoTM only. I have little doubt about that. Sure you would never have seen true WvW, but you’d have a system that scale from 0 to any number of players with absolutely no effort on Anets behalf. Ideal for an “instance” game.

The thing is, EoTM could probably have been made to work closer to WvW. Linking doesnt make no sense due the links themselves – it makes no sense because it shouldnt even exist as a “solution”. The solution to a smaller population is merging servers (duh), the solution to the gameplay mode is that WvW and EoTM need to become a unfied system to handle the populations dynamically. That’s pretty much what we knew since it they made EoTM and I would imagine Anet knew that too.

But I digress, we are where we are.

Straegen.2938:

Servers are an “old school” design that fail in virtually every MMO that used them for large scale PvP.

It’s the game design that is failing & not the Server concept.

Server concept can provide the unique identities that would fuel exciting battles between Staunch or Bitter Rivals in a healthy competitive annual tournament.

The SuperBowl franchise is based off of this “Old School” concept & it’s highly lucrative.

Get rid of the Tiers that locks servers into stale match-ups due to huge differences in population.

WvW needs to be re-designed to make Higher “Ranked” Servers be the “targets” in weekly match-ups.

Then use a scoring system that discourage attacks against Low “Ranked” Servers, but encourages attacks against any Higher “Ranked” Server in relation to a player’s Server.

GW2 already has the mechanism in place that would allow this to happen, but it just need to be re-purposed for WvW…imho