Guild Wars 2

seems 3 more worlds at least are needed just to get gold silver and bronze tiers on equal numbers , as in the 2014 rankings . where gold only had 6 servers and the rest had 9 .

i would switch to a new server if the main players in the whole of my main guild (w/c)ould go too .

Jayne.9251:

Liston.9708:

will question how others DID get back to their home (which was the same)……

Well that’s because of the ajust BG thread indicating behind the scenes favours (blah) and non-response from Anet.

Very disappointed about that.

I wasn’t even considering that, but yes you are correct….

1. I’m very skeptical about the idea. My gut feeling says it might be fun and interesting in short term, but in long term it might spread out the WvW population too much over too many different servers, making the end result have these servers have almost no added values for any link up with other worlds.

2. Honestly I believe the only real solution to make things more balanced and more interesting in WvW is by merging EU and NA together into the same pool for WvW. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible is it?

Which is too bad, I used to play on NA for 2 years, never had problem with lag. Now on EU I had times I had more trouble with lag even though I live in europe.

I think you need to accept the fact you will always have differences in population and the way WvW is setup is never going to be 100% fair. Trying to balance too much is going to be at the cost of community experience which I think would hurt WvW overall way more.

Instead of opening up new servers, and adding a free transfer to them, why not try out opening up existing servers for free transfer that have a WvW population of (for example) 25% and lower. A guild that moves over has enough time to have all their guildies move over before this % changes (incase it’s a weekly change in number?).

3. Not at this moment. I would only transfer if my guild does.

I think the idea is reasonable and waaaaay better than server merges, but it will not work if you rely on players voluntarily distributing onto new, smaller servers. The “me-wanna-win-no-matter-how” crowd paid to stack on the top servers, they won’t go away on their own – and you know that. If you want to solve the problem, you need to upset some players and push them out of their comfi zone.

I think you need a clean slate. Servers are gone from PvE anyways, so kill the current servers for WvW, create new empty ones with a quite low max player limit (but an unconstrained number of them), don’t call them “server” anymore but “WvW Team” and make those players, who still want to do WvW register for them (it could be an option to register players guild-wide for a team, so they end up on the same team). Heck, big guilds could even fill up their own team. Then, start doing matches, about the samber number as we have now and assign teams to the match colors (sides), starting with a fresh glicko rating and putting as many teams in the same side of a match so that you can reach your desired number of matches (eg: Europe, 5 matches ie. 15 distinct sides; if you had 150 signed up teams you could put 10 teams into each side, so 30 teams would participate in a single match, 10 for each color).

I seriously do not believe that changing single aspects of the current system will do any benefit. Start from scratch. According to the most voicy forum goers, it can’t become worse anyways (I have to admit that I disagree with that, but I would still find fun in a completely new setup, I’m sure; I mean, I even enjoy siege, as it is what this game mode has always been made around).

1. How do you feel about this proposal?
I just do not understand. We have enough servers that have been linked, because the guest servers hardly have people.

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
The problem is the multilingual servers in the EU. This would not change with new servers.
Maybe a different system would be something else

Example:
T1-3 for blobfights and queues.
T4-5 for Medium blobs
T6-7 for roamer and small guild fights

Anyone could choose what they just want. So no server membership, but simply after now just desire and mood, select in a field/selection, without transfer. I have fun today/few hours on blobifights – I join T1-3 or no, I wanna just roam today – I will join T6-7

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
Just no. Have and will not leave my Home Server.

X T D.6458:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We wouldn’t force players to move worlds but stacked worlds would have a high chance of never opening for transfers again since we would be lowering the population player cap on all worlds. So for example in NA worlds like Blackgate and Jade Quarry would stay “Full” and wouldn’t be open for transfers unless player started to transfer off.

And if the players on these servers dont move off, we would be facing smaller worlds? Basically we could all stay put and roflstomp anyone forever with this new system.

Here is another idea that several of us have proposed, how about changing the tier structure into a Gold/Silver/Bronze system. Where Gold tiers have the highest population cap and transfer fees, Bronze would have a smaller population cap and smallest fees, and Silver would be right in the middle. Basically change the tiers to cater to our preferred playstyles.

This so much. While I appreciate ANet’s attempt to breathe more life and balance into WvW, the fact is these alliances have in the long run killed my WvW guild alliance.

We were all in Kaineng because we liked the small scale skirmishes and guerrilla tactics deciding the battles, and not just the giant Zerg vs Zerg. We can’t do that now, and it turned a lot of my former WvW playing guildmates off the mode. While the old setup had it’s problems, you could at least decide the scale of fights you wanted in WvW by server selection.

New Worlds can only work if you treat all servers the same – which you are obviously not doing at the moment. There are 12 NA host servers still running on scores and reputation built before linking, and 12 “guests” that have no identity any more.
If you’re going to keep links then you need to allow every server to see their name and to gain score. Personally, I think links need to go – they’ve done more harm than good.

Look at your own data – do you see more players transferring from host servers into the linked guests than the other way round? I seriously doubt it!

The only way to get this to work is to start New Worlds for everyone. As many as you like, but no existing names and no historical scores that were gained before linking changed everything. You can keep the servers if you need them for accounts but don’t use them for WvW – we need New worlds with new names, for WvW only.

If the players on the current host servers complain simply make the current 12 guest servers into hosts for six months.

Pick a date.
Do something like this:
1. Tell players you’re starting new worlds in two weeks (or whatever).
2. When a player logs into WvW they are prompted to select a new world to join. Show them the list and check their guilds membership list – show them which world(s) their current guilds are planning to be on. You can use your megaserver algorithm to put these New Worlds at the top of the list to make it easier.
3. The player selects 2 or 3 servers in rank order (1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice).
4. When a world population reaches 10% more than the lowest, temporarily lock it until the difference is 5% or less.
5. Check the world populations, adjust according to player choices (aiming to keep guild members together).
Press GO.

Oh, and definitely +1 for Gold/Silver/Bronze structure. You can indicate this on the new worlds when you make them.

Another big problem with people moving to free worlds is that it will cause leadership issues. Guilds will move there in hoping for a new change but what if other guilds only want to PPT? What if some only want fights? Who steps up to be the leader(s) to make sure the server has coverage around the clock? That’s a lot of work and frustration for no reward other than “balance”. I just sense there would be a lot of hostility.

More servers will not work. Can’t even fill up the 51 we have now for wvw. It’s not logical in any universe.

3 factions, that are built from individual server links and individually moved as needed to balance, is the way to go. If not, expect your hardcore rvr base to jump ship to CU upon arrival and you’ll be stuck with all these empty servers.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

1. How do you feel about this proposal?

Moderately negative, largely because I don’t believe linking is a good long-term solution (although it is a good short-term solution). I’d prefer to play with the same people for longer periods of time, it wouldn’t be so bad if my world wasn’t nearly empty, but it is.
However, if liking is to stay, it’d probably be an improvement to the current situation.

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?

Almost everything as it still relies on linking.
I do like the ideas of new worlds and lower population caps though.

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

I probably would end up transferring as I assume the new worlds would end up with a greater population than my world has now (and I assume no old worlds will be free to transfer to).

I’m not sure if you’re interested but I’d prefer the following:
Destroy all current worlds (with the possible exception of the Spanish one).
Make as many worlds as you consider useful/necessary, if at all possible so that [players in worlds of a certain language]/[worlds for that same language] is as close to equal for all languages as possible.
Set the population caps at no higher than 105% of the average by language (preferably 102 or 103%).
Make transfering free (at least to any world with below average population but preferably to any world).
Without linking if at all possible.

Atoss.1056:

I would aslo add 4. Lower map cap by 10 (at least on EB) to reduce skill lag when all 3 servers meet. Other than that it might be interesting to see the result of this. Just bring it before 2018 :P

This would actually spread out the population a bit too. Say the cap right now on each map is 70 for each server…drop it by 10 for each server. That drops the total amount of numbers seen from 210 to 180. That will lessen the burden on the servers, meaning less skill lag, and encourage people who can’t ever seem to get into WvW due to queues to move to a different server.

I don’t know a ton about the top end, but what I imagine is happening is the gap between the largest and smallest servers is too big.

As others have said, a free transfer is nice, but it isn’t incentive to leave.

How do we close that gap? Put the overpopulated servers in consistent match ups where they should lose considerably. If you want people to leave the crowded servers and have a more consistent spread across them, make them want to leave. Then once the #s looks a bit better across the servers, you can relink.

I preface this by Tyler’s acknowledgement on his post a while back. I am not doing this in spite! It is my short answer, and for some reason it doesn’t put in Tyler’s name correctly:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Update: Thanks everyone. The response was mixed, but there was a general lack of interest in the idea, so we’ll pass on it.

And below is the long answer:

1. Mixed. I understand your intention of having an easier time for balancing, and attempting to give larger spaces for guilds to grow. In practice, it’s not so much about the server space as it is about there is no growth in population. The only way to achieve growth is from hype after a seemingly big change. Then that growth is followed by issues of player retention, like if the game play is actually fun. In my opinion, game play holds back population interest.

2a. This answer assumes we have little growth and are working with our present population: I am not sure it would be applied to NA servers AND EU servers. EU servers have communities born out of language segregation. NA has no type of language barriers installed by the game. This is a change to consider when trying to subdivide language based servers.

Remove the three lowest linked servers, and allow free transfer to those players. Give players that remained on that server an exclusive title achievement in recognition for their persistence. This decision is brutal, but keep in mind this answer assumes no player retention in WvW. The intention is that less linked servers means less maintenance. And perhaps the server boxes themselves could be used to benefit the rest of the cluster.

2b. This answer assumes we gain a massive amount of players after some significant reason. As people have already stated, you can make servers by weight class (or population) and abandon the universal tier progression across all servers. People can play for their desired population (or weight in this analogy), without worrying about their Light Weight server being pushed up to Heavy Weight or vice versa.

Figuring in the additional links, you can then adjust the weight more easily by the additional servers. So a heavy weight would be equivalent to three links, a medium is two, and light weight is one. Or whatever measure you feel comfortable.

The big caveat: Either of my additions (and this proposal as is) will disrupt large communities.

3. No. The important thing is why. I have no guarantee that there will activity when I want to play. The problem with the server method is you are locked to it, regardless if the linked system is in play. If you played in Sea time zone (8am EST) but you are in the United States then your options are limited, and have to research before hand to find your perfect match. I would be more open to Time Segregated servers over this proposal if you allowed free transfers between different time zones, since it promotes player choice. In the end, if you promote player choice, and finesse the game play you are more likely to increase your player retention. Not saying people will play forever…

[a small rant, sorry to be this blunt]

@McKenna Berdrow, i dont like the idea, so a guild would ocupy an entire map for few minutes then that map would be empty and since this would lead to more servers… what u guys want more empty servers for peoplez think they are good capping empty structures or more full map vs empty map?

Players dont defend, they only want to cap, the issue lies in the game mode itself it lacks alot and covering with more gimmickness is the wrong path, WvW siege gameplay it should be OK to have diferent population size, server with lower population should play on defense but in this game everything is so broken and easy free to take due gimmicky that players prefer to avoid the game during that time because they know how easy is to take strucutres, it makes people logoff when they dont have a ktrain on that map, or dont have superior number of players.

Please revaluate what needs to be changed/improved.

Chinchilla.1785:

Remove the three lowest linked servers, and allow free transfer to those players. Give players that remained on that server an exclusive title achievement in recognition for their persistence. This decision is brutal, but keep in mind this answer assumes no player retention in WvW. The intention is that less linked servers means less maintenance. And perhaps the server boxes themselves could be used to benefit the rest of the cluster.

Why not remove the top three servers that are always full, that everyone else apparently always want to transfer to? Why always pick on the lower tiers? We don’t want to leave our homes, just as much as everyone else doesn’t want to leave theirs. And don’t tell me server identity doesn’t exist, that it’s about the guild…. that’s not true.. I’m in one guild, but run with a lot of others on my server and have for the last 4 years and I do miss that since the linking.

Why not remove all servers?
Why not move to a faction/houses(playign Dune II atm, got inspired by that :\) system? -.-" and start adding maps over time? some smaller some a bit larger?

Aeolus.3615:

Why not remove all servers?
Why not move to a faction system? -.-" and start adding maps over time? some smaller some a bit larger?

Probably because you still need another method of splitting the population the same way servers and tiers do. If you simply have 3 factions how would you split the population. EoTM basically uses a faction system but separates the population by means of a mega server type of instance creation. For WvW we have servers and tiers to accomplish this. For an alliance system to work, it would need an additional method to split the population.

For Example.

Red Faction-World A/B/C
Green Faction-World A/B/C
Blue Faction- World A/B/C

Then you have the added nightmare of matchmaking. Basically you end up with a similar system to what we have now.

X T D.6458:

Aeolus.3615:

(snip)

Probably because you still need another method of splitting the population the same way servers and tiers do. If you simply have 3 factions how would you split the population. EoTM basically uses a faction system but separates the population by means of a mega server type of instance creation. For WvW we have servers and tiers to accomplish this. For an alliance system to work, it would need an additional method to split the population.

For Example.

Red Faction-World A/B/C
Green Faction-World A/B/C
Blue Faction- World A/B/C

Then you have the added nightmare of matchmaking. Basically you end up with a similar system to what we have now.

Yeah and for sure ocx players would stack in one side… :\ only one side would have the 21/7 coverage :\

brakheart.1407:

I call bs.

No matter how many servers you people implement, it will still happen what has always happened since day 1 of this game: people will migrate to top tier servers and the rest will stay empty. Don’t you realize it’s as if you unlinked the current servers? It would be the exact same thing, and you people seem to want to it in order for the few dedicated wvw people to leave the game so the only ones that’re left are casuals.

Based on your observation on how players love to server stack to WIN…

I’d suggest ANet just leave these top tier servers super-stacked in WvW, however, they should replace the Match-Up System & implement a TopDown Targeting of Servers.

1. Remove the Tiers, but keep Server Ranking.
2. Re-purpose the GW2 World Guesting Mechanic & Tailor it for WvW to use.
3. Let Players Visit & fight on any Server with ANet controlled limits on Which Server & How Many. This allows players to pick their own Match-Ups, but ANet to control fair play.
4. Reward more for attacking any Server above you.
5. Reward less for attacking any Server below you.
6. Randomly Show Players the top 3 Enemy Servers scoring points off their Home Server.

Players get a Match-Up System that naturally encourages them to Team up & Target any Higher Ranked Server.

AND

It Positively Uses any “Population In-balanced 800 pound Gorilla” as a PUNCHING bag that can handle the focus of being a Target of everybody else below them.

If you can’t encourage folks to spread out…then design the game mode to take advantage of their super-stacking behavior.

This also leaves communities intact, both social & language based.

Long Term…it’s better to use the natural tendencies of how players get pleasure out of your game mode instead of fighting it…imho

For a Better Long Term Solution to WvW – Try a Google Search for – wvg world vs globes

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We could achieve more balanced competition in a world-versus-world setting if we had more pieces to join together with the World Linking System. It currently is not possible for us to establish an “equal” number of players on each link/world with the current world sizes. You may recall this initially was mentioned by Tyler a few months ago.

For example, world populations currently look something like this:
• 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 because we need a team for each color—Red, Blue, and Green—we either need to avoid linking any of the worlds, or link some worlds even if the result is that they have the advantage of a larger population.

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

After linking, the difference in population between the highest and lowest teams is much narrower, but the third rank server still has significantly more population than the server that previously was ranked first. Also, the result of this theoretical world linking is that all worlds are now above our goal population cap, and probably have moderate to heavy queues.

If we instead had twice as many worlds, but if each had about half the population, it would be much easier to create linked teams with similar populations. This would lead to better matchups for everyone, and encounters would be less predictable. In this scenario, we would allow players free transfers to the new empty worlds for a period of time. These worlds would start out linked so that they wouldn’t begin in an empty state in a match-up. We would lower the player population cap on all worlds so that more worlds would become and stay “Full.” The result would be that guilds that want to expand would have an excellent option to do so with a move to these new open worlds.

Having outlined some of the thinking behind this proposal, we’d like your feedback on these three topics.
1. How do you feel about this proposal?
2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

WVW always seemd like the succesor to DAOC to me, but much better. No buff bot for us people who have only one account! Still it does not have the magic of DAOC somehow, even after i take my tinted nostalgia glasses off.

1. Adding more servers seems illogical to me as you basically eliminated a number of servers some time ago. I can understand the idea, but it does not battle what I personally perceive as the main problem:
*WvW is without consequence. There is no hall of fame for it. In this sense, and this sense alone, it is the most casual game mode ever, and there is not attempt from Anet to try to change this inmto something actually worth fighting for. As I did not play wvw in the first year of GW2, I did not even know there is bonus stuff available from the mode. Maybe it is also a little bit of a communication problem what wvw can and should do? I am not sure about the last one.
*If my wvw guild would disband tomorrow, nobody would know it. There is no place to proudly look at and say:
“Hey, I helped building this.”
*If my guild was saving the servers win for weeks, nobody would know it some months ago after we disband. A chronic of the server people, operated by volunteers maybe, would be nice.
*Having a chance to build something. In DAOC keeping a tower even costed points, but people came to defend it anyway for some reason. Without TS, we agreed via map chat with other guilds who would take the tower next when your points ran out.
Guilds need meaning except giving a +5 bonus to do something.

2. Glicko has to go in it´s current form where points are added to servers. It is easy to manipulate, but the problem is indeed very complex.
I would maybe let players do the work for you, choose guilds you know are dedicated to the game and let them form alliances(blue/red/green as now) with other dedicated guilds and recruit freelancer fighters from two pools(guild wo flags itself as wvw guild/players with no guild) of volunteers who want to play wvw for the respective alliance.
The freelancers without guild could change every month or so, and a very dominant alliance can recruit only a handful or no mercenaries at all after a certain point of success.
I still rememember how proud I was when we were invited into the largest alliance of the Salisbury sever in DAOC. There is not much room for feelings like that in GW2 wvw, sadly.

3. I am already on a small server. If the guild moves, I would probably move too.

Edit: This post would probably be better suited for the world linking topic of the op.^^

Trinibaje.7683:

Chinchilla.1785:

Remove the three lowest linked servers, and allow free transfer to those players. Give players that remained on that server an exclusive title achievement in recognition for their persistence. This decision is brutal, but keep in mind this answer assumes no player retention in WvW. The intention is that less linked servers means less maintenance. And perhaps the server boxes themselves could be used to benefit the rest of the cluster.

Why not remove the top three servers that are always full, that everyone else apparently always want to transfer to? Why always pick on the lower tiers? We don’t want to leave our homes, just as much as everyone else doesn’t want to leave theirs. And don’t tell me server identity doesn’t exist, that it’s about the guild…. that’s not true.. I’m in one guild, but run with a lot of others on my server and have for the last 4 years and I do miss that since the linking.

As much as I would like to discuss this with you, but I think it is better everyone addressed the OP instead each individuals thoughts. This way ANET wastes less time on seeing off topic arguments. The idea you question is “2a” based off the assumption the game mode would never get many new players. In that world, you will eventually have to remove the least populated three servers, or remove their playable maps. Unless you do not care for empty matches. Simply put, people stop playing and static servers WILL go empty. It wouldn’t be sustainable to keep a hotel for 600 open for only 100 or even less. It would also mean less servers/links ANET must keep track of.

“2b.” is based off a different assumption of growth. That proposed weight division match-ups at the expense of tiers so smaller could still exist to a degree.

Someone mentioned before about using another layer of servers and I think it’s worth a look at if they’re going to introduce more servers, I even think it could go further and be a structure for a global tournament.

Instead of adding servers to try and spread the current population for links, create a new layer of servers to be the base population for wvw. Basically it would function something like eotm where you usually automatically filter all green servers into one pool of players, but in this case you would have green1 green2 green3 etc and have players sign up for whichever one for a month. So instead of trying to find players to move to new servers you will push all players to choose new servers to play for.

It’s really the only way to shake up players for more even balance, because players are stubborn and don’t want to move if they don’t have to.

• All wvw players would have one week before relinks to sign up for whatever new server they want to play on.
• Any active but unsigned players will be auto placed into worlds that needs more players at the end of that signup week.
• The duration the server alliance would be active is one month.
• All servers would have lower population caps of course.
• All old servers would still exist as the home for players and transfers.
• The only reason for signups and not automatic placement is to allow guilds and their alliances options to pick a world together.
• You could have it so that whatever world a guildleader signs up for, the entire guilds will be reserved for that server. (But what about alliances abusing this and joining 1 guild!) It’s fine with the lower population caps, plus random server pairing and rankings.

But Xen you mention relinks?
Here’s the second part.

• Optional: allow euro servers to follow the same rules, let the players choose unofficially what server they want for their language. If the euro players disagree with that, then just have language servers as it is now, no sweat just an option.
• Now since servers should be closer in populations, you can randomly match them up, and then link their scores.
• Create Alliances for a random pair of NA and EU worlds.
• Randomly place these alliance from rank 1-12.
• Scores generated for both would still be the same as the current process, you would just total them up for the alliance for a global score.
• You can implement 1 up 1 down format.
• This can even be used as a tournament format.

Now here’s an example.

ALLIANCE – NA – EU
1. Dwayna – NA1 – EU2
2. Balthazar – NA2 – EU7
3. Melandru – NA3 – EU10

4. Lyssa – NA12 – EU1
5. Grenth – NA8 – EU11
6. Kormir – NA6 – EU3

7. Primordus – NA7 – EU8
8. Jormag – NA5 – EU6
9. Zhaitan – NA9 – EU12

10. Kralkatorrik – NA10 – EU9
11. Mordremoth – NA11 – EU4
12. Selbbub – NA4 – EU5

So the Dwayna alliance of NA1 and EU2 would be together for 1 month. 4 weeks is enough time for an alliance to move from rank 10-12 up to rank 1 and be the top alliance. Because the NA/EU server pairing and rank placements are random to begin with, there is no guarantee for guilds bandwagoning to a specific server will be on top.

But all that would probably require a lot of work to create the additional layers, which wvw currently doesn’t have time for.

tldr version, just skip to the next post.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We could achieve more balanced competition in a world-versus-world setting if we had more pieces to join together with the World Linking System. It currently is not possible for us to establish an “equal” number of players on each link/world with the current world sizes. You may recall this initially was mentioned by Tyler a few months ago.

For example, world populations currently look something like this:
• 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 because we need a team for each color—Red, Blue, and Green—we either need to avoid linking any of the worlds, or link some worlds even if the result is that they have the advantage of a larger population.

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

After linking, the difference in population between the highest and lowest teams is much narrower, but the third rank server still has significantly more population than the server that previously was ranked first. Also, the result of this theoretical world linking is that all worlds are now above our goal population cap, and probably have moderate to heavy queues.

If we instead had twice as many worlds, but if each had about half the population, it would be much easier to create linked teams with similar populations. This would lead to better matchups for everyone, and encounters would be less predictable. In this scenario, we would allow players free transfers to the new empty worlds for a period of time. These worlds would start out linked so that they wouldn’t begin in an empty state in a match-up. We would lower the player population cap on all worlds so that more worlds would become and stay “Full.” The result would be that guilds that want to expand would have an excellent option to do so with a move to these new open worlds.

Having outlined some of the thinking behind this proposal, we’d like your feedback on these three topics.
1. How do you feel about this proposal?
2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

Fast and simple:

- It looks similar to unlink worlds (previous situation), but linking is not really working because a linked server has more potential population than unlinked ones. Although reducing server population cap could be very interesting.

- Probably we will end with a few full servers and the rest empty or almost empty like now. Maybe could be more interesting to allow players only to migrate once per 4 months, free transfer for anything below high population.

- What will happen to EU? We have several languages all across the servers, this is avoiding the proper world linking, will you ask through communities poll to allow linking with servers with other main languages? And what will happen to Baruch Bay? if server population cap is reduced I guess not all spanish people will be able to play in it, if it’s splitted let’s say in 2 servers will be the only possible linking available.

Xenesis.6389:

Someone mentioned before about using another layer of servers and I think it’s worth a look at if they’re going to introduce more servers, I even think it could go further and be a structure for a global tournament.

Instead of adding servers to try and spread the current population for links, create a new layer of servers to be the base population for wvw. Basically it would function something like eotm where you usually automatically filter all green servers into one pool of players, but in this case you would have green1 green2 green3 etc and have players sign up for whichever one for a month. So instead of trying to find players to move to new servers you will push all players to choose new servers to play for.

It’s really the only way to shake up players for more even balance, because players are stubborn and don’t want to move if they don’t have to.

• All wvw players would have one week before relinks to sign up for whatever new server they want to play on.
• Any active but unsigned players will be auto placed into worlds that needs more players at the end of that signup week.
• The duration the server alliance would be active is one month.
• All servers would have lower population caps of course.
• All old servers would still exist as the home for players and transfers.
• The only reason for signups and not automatic placement is to allow guilds and their alliances options to pick a world together.
• You could have it so that whatever world a guildleader signs up for, the entire guilds will be reserved for that server. (But what about alliances abusing this and joining 1 guild!) It’s fine with the lower population caps, plus random server pairing and rankings.

But Xen you mention relinks?
Here’s the second part.

• Optional: allow euro servers to follow the same rules, let the players choose unofficially what server they want for their language. If the euro players disagree with that, then just have language servers as it is now, no sweat just an option.
• Now since servers should be closer in populations, you can randomly match them up, and then link their scores.
• Create Alliances for a random pair of NA and EU worlds.
• Randomly place these alliance from rank 1-12.
• Scores generated for both would still be the same as the current process, you would just total them up for the alliance for a global score.
• You can implement 1 up 1 down format.
• This can even be used as a tournament format.

Now here’s an example.

ALLIANCE – NA – EU
1. Dwayna – NA1 – EU2
2. Balthazar – NA2 – EU7
3. Melandru – NA3 – EU10

4. Lyssa – NA12 – EU1
5. Grenth – NA8 – EU11
6. Kormir – NA6 – EU3

7. Primordus – NA7 – EU8
8. Jormag – NA5 – EU6
9. Zhaitan – NA9 – EU12

10. Kralkatorrik – NA10 – EU9
11. Mordremoth – NA11 – EU4
12. Selbbub – NA4 – EU5

So the Dwayna alliance of NA1 and EU2 would be together for 1 month. 4 weeks is enough time for an alliance to move from rank 10-12 up to rank 1 and be the top alliance. Because the NA/EU server pairing and rank placements are random to begin with, there is no guarantee for guilds bandwagoning to a specific server will be on top.

But all that would probably require a lot of work to create the additional layers, which wvw currently doesn’t have time for.

tldr version, just skip to the next post.

Anet is not linking US and EU.

Swagger.1459:

Anet is not linking US and EU.

You wouldn’t physically link the servers, just the scores, everything would still be separate as it is now. All you would need to do is combine the scores to make it a global score.
As a quick example:

1. Dwayna – Blackgate/Jade Sea = 118k, skirmish = 53
2. Balthazar – Ft Aspenwood/Abaddon’s Mouth = 103k, skirmish = 40
3. Melandru – Maguuma/Vizunah Square = 101k, skirmish = 39

Xenesis.6389:

Swagger.1459:

Anet is not linking US and EU.

You wouldn’t physically link the servers, just the scores, everything would still be separate as it is now. All you would need to do is combine the scores to make it a global score.
As a quick example:

1. Dwayna – Blackgate/Jade Sea = 118k, skirmish = 53
2. Balthazar – Ft Aspenwood/Abaddon’s Mouth = 103k, skirmish = 40
3. Melandru – Maguuma/Vizunah Square = 101k, skirmish = 39

Oh, interesting. But it means EU would have to need to have the same ammount of tiers as NA.

Jeknar.6184:

Oh, interesting. But it means EU would have to need to have the same ammount of tiers as NA.

Yeah it’s an extra tier to knock off, I don’t know what the total population is like for EU compared to NA, and if that would cause a lot more queues or not. Only anet would know. Or maybe they could just stretch NA back to 5 tiers.

Jeknar.6184:

Xenesis.6389:

Swagger.1459:

Anet is not linking US and EU.

You wouldn’t physically link the servers, just the scores, everything would still be separate as it is now. All you would need to do is combine the scores to make it a global score.
As a quick example:

1. Dwayna – Blackgate/Jade Sea = 118k, skirmish = 53
2. Balthazar – Ft Aspenwood/Abaddon’s Mouth = 103k, skirmish = 40
3. Melandru – Maguuma/Vizunah Square = 101k, skirmish = 39

Oh, interesting. But it means EU would have to need to have the same ammount of tiers as NA.

Interesting…local team can get International help to balance their score.

ANet already manually creates the Match-Ups using World Linking.

Now you’re suggesting ANet take International Scores & combine them to Local Scores to basically make all scores more balanced across the 3 servers in a Tier?

How do you propose to make this a truly competitive game mode, or is this just to trick WvW players into thinking the scores are soo close…that it has to be competitive forces that made it happen?

If so…this might actually work.

Xenesis.6389:

Swagger.1459:

Anet is not linking US and EU.

You wouldn’t physically link the servers, just the scores, everything would still be separate as it is now. All you would need to do is combine the scores to make it a global score.
As a quick example:

1. Dwayna – Blackgate/Jade Sea = 118k, skirmish = 53
2. Balthazar – Ft Aspenwood/Abaddon’s Mouth = 103k, skirmish = 40
3. Melandru – Maguuma/Vizunah Square = 101k, skirmish = 39

But there is zero purpose of doing that. US is US, EU is EU. The devs are not going to do unnecessary stuff like that.

Diku.2546:

Interesting…local team can get International help to balance their score.

ANet manually creates the Match-Ups using World Linking.

Now you’re suggesting ANet take International Scores & combine them to Local Scores to basically make all scores more balanced across the 3 servers in a Tier?

How do you propose to make this truly competitive game mode, or is this just to trick WvW players into thinking the scores are soo close…that it is competitive?

That’s the deal buddy. WvW isn’t meant to be a truly competitive game mode because it cannot be balanced since it operate 24/7. It’s more like a open world with PvP where you fight for a team but gain/lose nothing in the end regardless of the result. I’d say WvW is more closer to a Hotjoin PvP mode if anything.

Swagger.1459:

But there is zero purpose of doing that.

Why?

Jeknar.6184:

Diku.2546:

Interesting…local team can get International help to balance their score.

ANet manually creates the Match-Ups using World Linking.

Now you’re suggesting ANet take International Scores & combine them to Local Scores to basically make all scores more balanced across the 3 servers in a Tier?

How do you propose to make this truly competitive game mode, or is this just to trick WvW players into thinking the scores are soo close…that it is competitive?

That’s the deal buddy. WvW isn’t meant to be a truly competitive game mode because it cannot be balanced since it operate 24/7. It’s more like a open world with PvP where you fight for a team but gain/lose nothing in the end regardless of the result. I’d say WvW is more closer to a Hotjoin PvP mode if anything.

Swagger.1459:

But there is zero purpose of doing that.

Why?

Because our servers are separated by the ocean, do not play together, do not communicate… and to force some type of scoring system dependent on teams that have nothing to do with each other is one of the worst suggestions I’ve read. Complete waste of time to even think about.

Y’all really have to start thinking these ideas through…

I would still prefer a system where each player committed to playing with a guild for wvw and anet spread guilds out across all the “servers” or guild alliances. If this were rerolled every 1-2 months, they would have the most cohesive small chunks they need. And would prevent stacking other than in a guild, which has predefined limits already which are very small.

This would of course eliminated their transfer revenue as transferring would basically be removed.

Solo players can just join whenever and the first time they do, get placed in an alliance.

Guild Wars could actually have guild wars…what an idea!

Jeknar.6184:

That’s the deal buddy. WvW isn’t meant to be a truly competitive game mode because it cannot be balanced since it operate 24/7.

WvW can seriously be a competitive game mode that’s similar in scope to the Super Bowl or World Series Franchises. ANet needs to redesign the fundamental base map mechanic that drives WvW to allow it to happen…imho

You’re right…WvW can’t be balanced...that’s why ANet should use a solution that takes advantage of these huge in-balances between populations to Target the 800 pound Gorilla & to Fuel the Attacks by encouraging “weaker” Servers to team up.

You’re right about Different Time Zones (24/7) also make it difficult to Balance Servers.

We mustn’t forget…Different Languages & National communities further adds to this complexity on trying to Balance Servers.

There’s a better Long Term Solution that’s based on a different vision than what’s being proposed here.

Swagger.1459:

But there is zero purpose of doing that. US is US, EU is EU. The devs are not going to do unnecessary stuff like that.

Because it’s a 24/7 game, but the majority of it is heavily played in a couple time zones for each area. Most of the NA player participation comes from NA and OCX/Sea time, while most of EU player participation comes from EU time zones, if you combined them you could get a much more complete total score.

The reason why we don’t have any tournaments is because of how lopsided scores, population, coverage is. They have skirmish to help with runaway scores, you can get more balanced populations with the introduction of a new base of servers instead of just adding servers and waiting for blackgate to ever destack, then you fix a piece of the coverage puzzle by adding EU scores to NA scores to help offset the off hours scoring for each, you would be in a better place to run tournaments.

Seriously though it really wouldn’t take much effort to add NA1 and EU1 total scores together, everything is already in place and working right now. That’s like the least time consuming part of the proposal.

scores messing wich other would be like european soccer scores apearing in USA national tournaments … well just the score stacked in some other team..

it does not even make sense… move along guys…dont ruin gw2 lol…

Xenesis.6389:

Swagger.1459:

But there is zero purpose of doing that. US is US, EU is EU. The devs are not going to do unnecessary stuff like that.

Because it’s a 24/7 game, but the majority of it is heavily played in a couple time zones for each area. Most of the NA player participation comes from NA and OCX/Sea time, while most of EU player participation comes from EU time zones, if you combined them you could get a much more complete total score.

The reason why we don’t have any tournaments is because of how lopsided scores, population, coverage is. They have skirmish to help with runaway scores, you can get more balanced populations with the introduction of a new base of servers instead of just adding servers and waiting for blackgate to ever destack, then you fix a piece of the coverage puzzle by adding EU scores to NA scores to help offset the off hours scoring for each, you would be in a better place to run tournaments.

Seriously though it really wouldn’t take much effort to add NA1 and EU1 total scores together, everything is already in place and working right now. That’s like the least time consuming part of the proposal.

That’s never going to happen.

You want to run tournaments based off of teams that have nothing to do with each other besides a forced scoring system? Do you know how silly that sounds?

1. How do you feel about this proposal?

Sounds pretty nice BUT…

I wonder if server population is comparable to wvw participation. I feel that some servers are pretty wvw heavy while others are not no matter of the server population in general. So maybe world population is not the right basis for world linking at all.

Would be nice to get some figures about wvw participation in respect to server population.

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?

Why not breaking the whole “named” server system and introducing only three fractions like “red”, “blue” and “green”. And then create enough instances of maps like we already have with the EotM.

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

yes

Xari.1086, as much i would love something arround that (no more servers…), population manipulation would be easy to achieve players would stack all timezones in one faction to allow them ktrain as much as they can.

The issue is how WvW works, any changes w/o changing its foundantions will hardly work, because the issue is on wvw /game core concept/design, the maps itself promotes blob and ktrain with population discrepancy.

-Maps needs players -> maps cant hold players and every lags

-Anet creates more servers to spread players -> every server becomes more empty and one side can always ktrain the adversary due time zones mismatch.

-Anet creates faction, every one stacks their times zones in one faction side.

Stay with what they have and try to make it good, it is a hard task that Anet have at their hands.

best solution imo would be no factions and no servers, still migh hard to emplement how game actually is designed to work.

Aeolus.3615:

scores messing wich other would be like european soccer scores apearing in USA national tournaments … well just the score stacked in some other team..
it does not even make sense… move along guys…dont ruin gw2 lol…

Except soccer is a team sports game played with even players, on an equal playing field, and equal time. That isn’t the case for wvw.

When I was thinking of the format I was thinking something like the Ryder cup. Golf is a single person sport but you can play it as a team, individual scores from 1v1 matches are added for a total.

But whatever.

Are we forgetting that some other games have managed to balance their servers for their WvW-game-type.

Why not just do what has been proven to work?

Merge the servers in 3 alliances, have players choose their alliance, create the appropriate number of overflow campaigns on a weekly basis according to the previous week activity and population.

1. How do you feel about this proposal?
I dont like it at all

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
Like not be implemented

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
No thanks, not even for free i like where i am

Xenesis.6389:

But whatever.

For having the guts to post an idea for us to discuss…

Thank you,
Diku

1. How do you feel about this proposal?

I have mixed feelings.

I like that you are trying to balance matches. I feel uneasy that this may evolve into a “blow up the servers” solution. I am concerned for the potential loss to my servers community if guild groups went for this option.

Ultimately I don’t think enough people would go for this option to make it feasible, which brings me back to my earlier concern that this will turn into a “blow up the servers” solution, which I feel would lead to a lot of people leaving the game.

I also feel that unfortunately most (didn’t say all) of the players who have stacked onto these full servers have done so because they want to be on a server with superior numbers that dominates not an even match. Relying on these people to volunteer to move to a smaller server isn’t likely to be successful. I’ll also note that there are people on smaller servers who prefer being in smaller matches and don’t want a population that matches everyone elses.

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?

Rather then adding new servers, I would offer free transfers OFF Full and High pop servers TO Medium and Low population Servers. That should demonstrate just how many people are actually willing to switch.

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

No.

Swagger.1459:

You want to run tournaments based off of teams that have nothing to do with each other besides a forced scoring system? Do you know how silly that sounds?

Think about this.
The average core NA prime players doesn’t play, doesn’t talk, or even care that there’s core OCX/Sea/EU prime players on their server, they practically have nothing to do with each other than you share the same maps and score. The only difference with the idea is that the EU players are on different maps on the other side of the world.

Having outlined some of the thinking behind this proposal, we’d like your feedback on these three topics.
1. How do you feel about this proposal?
Ans: Bad idea
2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
Ans: open the Full Server
3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
Ans: NO. still 22 Na Server no full isn’t ? or Anet want make 50+ Server ???

just lower the population cap on WvW maps, no need adding new servers, merging or color coding, no polls needed

then adjust then population cap if the population grew from time

the answer to if is if you could make people interested in WvW and thats another topic…

Jerry CCH.9816:

Having outlined some of the thinking behind this proposal, we’d like your feedback on these three topics.
1. How do you feel about this proposal?
Ans: Bad idea
2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
Ans: open the Full Server
3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
Ans: NO. still 22 Na Server no full isn’t ? or Anet want make 50+ Server ???

Lol funny

Yeah, we can’t even fill up the servers we have… let’s work on improving wvw so people actually want to participate.

Xillllix.3485:

Are we forgetting that some other games have managed to balance their servers for their WvW-game-type.

Name 2 games that did it.

You want to make more servers for wvw when we currently have horribly under/over populated servers, i don’t know how you come up with this kitten anet, but i want what you guys are taking.

Here’s my concerns with the plan:

1. Which servers are above the lowered population cap? Should they even get links?

2. What’s the incentive for players on overstacked servers to move, if they can beat linked servers?

3. Does this mean the you are de-linking the WvW and PvE servers?

4. How will the new servers recruit PvE players? How does a new player to WvW get assigned a server? Are you reassigning PvE servers also?

5. How quick will you lock or open servers that have WvW guilds transfer?

6. Certain servers have been known as having higher “non-prime” populations, which has caused imbalanced matches. How will you get those players to spread out to other servers?