Guild Wars 2

My discussion comes very late, as anet has undoubtedly decided which servers to merge today, but I will still dish out a few thoughts on this topic. My opinions are formed through my perspective on tier 2, so (bias disclaimer)(bias disclaimer)(bias disclaimer). Also forgive my ignorance of EU wvw.

Server merging should help a number of issues, but the two which come to mind first are population imbalance and dead servers. Now, for the majority of wvw, server merging will do a great job of getting rid of dead servers while increasing the activity of players on said servers.

However, there is an issue with server merging on the most populated servers such as Tarnished Coat. Last reset all maps were queued and EBG had 130 queued. TC can usually maintain a queue for EBG at all hours of the day, and keep in mind that this was BEFORE the wvw patch. Servers being merged into TC will have an awful time because they will have to wait forever in order to try wvw out and large guilds will try to push them out of maps (Read: “Teq is up!” “We lost that fight because half my guild is in queue get off map T7 noobs” etc.)

Merging servers is a great chance at mending the current population imbalances. It would be a real shame to see anet haphazardly throw all tier 8 servers to tier 1 tell us “We gave each one of you the equal amount of dead servers, is the population fixed yet?”. Instead of this, I hope anet methodically plans which server merges and why. There is plenty of statistical data about each server made by the wvw community, but anet could take it a step further and analyze the population and activities of servers. Then, they could combine an activity level 6 FA with an activity level 4 SBI to create an activity level 10 server to pair up against an activity level 10 TC. (These are just examples.) The imbalance was a player-made issue and could easily be remade if anet fixed it, which is why I also believe diminishing rewards should be given to stacked servers to discourage attempts to imbalance the servers once more.

Again, these are just my own personal opinions. Feel free to share yours and please keep chat clean.

Thank you

I’m pretty sure they’re not doing it haphazardly. I don’t know as much about the EU scene but the fact that they didn’t just merge every server speaks to the careful hand they’re using in this process.

If you look at what they did for EU, they did not merge anyone with T1 or T2 so I would expect that they are trying to make similar populations and similar matchups across the tiers while at the same time still allowing people to play.

Some of the merged EU servers have experienced large queues, but that should be expected with the merger + the patch improvements sparking more interest in WvW at reset. We’ll see how it plays out over the week and during non peak hours.

Interest in WvW has been reinvigorated, and that’s a good thing!

Today queues were longer then usual. Give people some time to try this out before rushing with conclusions.

I got boosted from EU tier 8 into tier 5 and its whole different world. So many enemies. So many players everwhere. Some maps had queues, yes, but nothing major.

My comment was not so much about tier 5 but rather tier 1 and 2 of NA.

They matched this:
FSP + UW vs
GH + FoW vs
Dz alone

Population-wise it seems somewhat imbalanced at the moment.

We’ll have to see at the end of the week though, since Friday evenings are usually a bad indicator of the match over the rest of the week.

I’m still pretty sure the sides aren’t even. Blue seems to be able to field more people than red.