Guild Wars 2

As I mentioned in the https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Identities-of-Linked-Worlds post, I think changing the number of worlds and trying to rally player support around server names is a fruitless pursuit at this point. I understand that increasing the number of worlds would simplify the path forward with the current system. I find no flaw in that. I simply feel that the best option at this point is to finish what you’ve started: abandon the failed server naming system and move on.

Tying WvW activity to guilds and orders rather than server names makes the sizes and numbers of your groups much more manageable. By making WvW essentially a set of megaservers, you’d remove server name relevance, as you have in every other part of the game. This would allow you to move focus to guilds, orders and individuals. The small populations of guilds and parties would allow them to be linked together in such a way as to to reduce the population variance between WvW teams.

This should have been obvious; but, perhaps I’ve missed something.

People will complain if Anet makes this change, or complain that Anet never changes anything in WvW – so either way there’s gonna be a bunch of whiners. So I say just go ahead and do it, will sure shake things up and give people something else to complain about for a while.

Best way to fix the issue is to create new servers free to transfer to, lower the population limits on maps because the lag is already stupid and people will be more likely to move if they have to sit in a larger queue Next create at least one more Tier because of lowering population limits on maps you will need one more tier so people can play and not have big queues. If you lower the population of every server by 10-15 people per map that is 30-45 less people and should help lag issues in large scale blobs in SMC and other places, but still allow for large scale groups fights of still 50 people or so per side.

I’d like to thank you for bringing this up on the forum. For me it is interesting to see how you see the balancing problem, and this sheds a good amount of light in to it.

I see a lot of replies to your question that do not seem to grasp the logic of your argument, and I do hope I’ve managed to grasp it.

In essence, what you are saying is that it is not currently possible to fairly balance worlds due to the way that players are distributed among current servers where some servers have a huge percentage of the player population while others have very little.

Your solution is one where you try to get X percent of all players on all servers to move in to a number of new servers to create a landscape of more servers with on average fewer people further creating a mix of servers that are easier to balance.

In my opinion it is a good solution, but it requires that people understands the logic behind it, as it is a bit counter intuitive.

Furthermore, you write that you would like to double the amount of worlds, which requires a bit of explaining as to exactly how many servers that would result in.

First of all, I believe it will be easier to get people/guilds to move servers than many people here express. Whereas there most certainly is something called server pride, the reverse does occur too, where certain guilds might want to explore new servers after having grown tired of their current server’s community for one or another reason.

Secondly, I feel that doubling the amount of worlds sounds extreme and will be logistically difficult to do, especially keeping a momentum around it, as to not end up with a number of almost-empty servers, with players feeling betrayed when they cannot move back.

So, in conclusion, I understand how your are thinking in order to end up with this model, however I’m worried that your goal of doubling the amount of worlds will be an insurmountable task that will leave the community bitter. It raises the question of what doubling the amount of worlds actually means in practical terms regarding servers? Eight new servers?

Most people want to win and want to have it easy.
Most people think that being where everybody else is will allow then to will easy
That is how stacked servers came into existence.

You can link anyway you want, but people will still try to get that easy win and move server accordingly and/or stay on there currect stacked server.

The only one solution to fix this is to force equal numbers in wvw at all times, so no one server can outnumber another for any length of time

• yes its gonna be hard to program this
• yes people will have to be kicked from the game when opposite server losses players in wvw (idle players first, then on a first in first out bassis )
• yes there will be more and longer queue’s

So if people want to play (and avoid queues) they will have to transfer

• make server population level depend on average number of wvw players over certain time
• make transfers to low.pop servers free (once a week)
• population will have a change to balance itself

This way, the server’s with best players online will win, as every server will have equal numbers in wvw.

Will this be fair: YES
Will we like this: NO
- we will hate getting kicked because opponents have less players
- we will hate being in queue waiting for opponents to get more players

Increasing the number of “worlds” is the only direction that moves WvW towards population balance.

But its not enough.

There needs to be private guild run worlds as well to solve the problem with recruiting and alliance building.

The private worlds would need to maintain some minimum population (say 500) to persist. If prior to matchmaking, they had a population below the threshold, the population would be randomly dispersed to public worlds. Having this risk is important to keep people from just spamming new worlds know they would not be viable.

Private worlds would have leaders like guild leaders that can approve entry and so on.

Public worlds would be open to anyone provided they are not full.

AND transfers would need to be free but with time restrictions.

Ratings for individual worlds would be possible, but due to high volatility and an unstable composition of worlds, using Elo ratings would make more sense than glicko. Ratings calculations for worlds would be simple with Elo. After each match, each worlds rating is adjusted as if it had independently competed with each of the opposing clusters other worlds. So if a world 1 in cluster A competed and won against 4 worlds clustered in B, then world 1 elo rating would be adjusted as a win against each of the 4 worlds in cluster B.

Anytime a private world comes into existence, it would start with a provisional rating (1000 or whatever, its arbitrary.) and have a provisional K value to allow rapid placement.

Having ratings for all worlds (public and private) would create a sense of pride, ownership and competition.

A hybrid private/public system meets the needs of large organized guild seeking seeking alliances and smaller guilds and individual players that maybe are not interested in larger organizational elements.

At the end of the day, its player behavior thats the hardest to control. Bandwagons happen for reasons that we all know and unless something can be done about that, no system is going to balance out given the mantra of playing with your friends and when you want.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

At the end of the day, its player behavior thats the hardest to control. Bandwagons happen for reasons that we all know and unless something can be done about that, no system is going to balance out given the mantra of playing with your friends and when you want.

Just reduce map cap by 5% a week for overstacked servers, by the time new link happens they could be at -40%. That will motivate them to transfer.

The other, less drastic solution is to not give overstacked servers a link AND make sure that the other linked servers in the matchup always have more players.

Then you moderate (close) all the “I want to play with my friends” threads.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

At the end of the day, its player behavior thats the hardest to control. Bandwagons happen for reasons that we all know and unless something can be done about that, no system is going to balance out given the mantra of playing with your friends and when you want.

Agree…

Don’t even try to balance population…this is what seriously drives this game mode.

Players wanting to play with their friends & family…and winning.

ANet needs to re-design WvW to use over-stacked servers in a healthy competitive way.

Currently…over-stacked servers are being made immortal by the World Linking process.

Servers should be allowed to go through a cycle from being empty to being over-stacked…and then this process should naturally let over-stacked servers die & be recycled over again.

There’s a very simple solution that does this…imho

If we want to get out of the current situation that we’re in…ANet needs to build in a natural process that allows any over-stacked server to “die” & be “reborn”.

Put in mechanics that put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to perform in order to survive Competitively, but Not Socially.

My question is are you going to cap wvw for each world so say you can only have 50 from team x and 50 from team y that are linked together or will you just have a total number from both x and y and go with first come first survived rules?
Its not a bad ideal to use links to even things out it opens up a lot more freedom for anet to control the population like every one is asking for it also would be nice to put it into the lore some how too.

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

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

Diku.2546:

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

How many real friends do you have in GW2 that you wvw with? Is this like faces book where you have millions of “friends?” At best you may have 100 loss friends that you wvw with and say 25 close friends. That not a big enof group that you cant move with them.

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

How many real friends do you have in GW2 that you wvw with? Is this like faces book where you have millions of “friends?” At best you may have 100 loss friends that you wvw with and say 25 close friends. That not a big enof group that you cant move with them.

Agree…just me & 25 close friends is a drop in the bucket.

But I’ll call it…Pennies from Heaven…they add up like rain drops…imho

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

It currently is not possible for us to establish an “equal” number of players on each link/world with the current world sizes.

You can’t make people play in any case. Imposing equal population/coverage is a fool’s errand.

Work on better moment-to-moment gameplay that remains fun even when outnumbered.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

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?

1. It’s wasted effort.
2. Scrap it and work on better gameplay among imbalanced teams.
3. No, and I don’t think my guildies would either.

It seems to me that people mostly transfer to get interesting play or to get easy wins. Transferring to a group that’s intentionally kept small and used to augment a larger force isn’t desirable.

Diku.2546:

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

How many real friends do you have in GW2 that you wvw with? Is this like faces book where you have millions of “friends?” At best you may have 100 loss friends that you wvw with and say 25 close friends. That not a big enof group that you cant move with them.

Agree…just me & 25 close friends is a drop in the bucket.

But I’ll call it…Pennies from Heaven…they add up like rain drops…imho

What else can anet do to try to balance out population with out simply focusing ppl to transfer where they need them to and stop ppl from transferring when they don’t. At least this way its a nicer way of doing it and you can stay with the ppl you like to play with. Beyond keeping things the same (something ppl are saying is killing wvw) this IS the only viable chose.

Silly question (or proposal in another sense):
Why not remove the server concept and establish an alliance system in which there will GUILDS allegiance (In the same principle as gw1).
This would allow guilds to self distribute and remove server concept would allow players not participating in McM not get into the stats of population.

And an exemple of this for players :
There are too many queue on my alliance, okey let’s tag a guild belonging to another alliance (so I leave the current queue of course) and I can do WvW with a community of people I know.

After that there is the problem of spys (but it just makes the easiest thing for them – although there will perhaps something in the API to determine which guild and alliance player represents)

Brown Fang Thump.9482:

As I mentioned in the https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Identities-of-Linked-Worlds post, I think changing the number of worlds and trying to rally player support around server names is a fruitless pursuit at this point. I understand that increasing the number of worlds would simplify the path forward with the current system. I find no flaw in that. I simply feel that the best option at this point is to finish what you’ve started: abandon the failed server naming system and move on.

Tying WvW activity to guilds and orders rather than server names makes the sizes and numbers of your groups much more manageable. By making WvW essentially a set of megaservers, you’d remove server name relevance, as you have in every other part of the game. This would allow you to move focus to guilds, orders and individuals. The small populations of guilds and parties would allow them to be linked together in such a way as to to reduce the population variance between WvW teams.

This should have been obvious; but, perhaps I’ve missed something.

On the surface, I really kind of like this notion. Blow up the ‘worlds’ completely and assign red/blue/green by guild instead. There are a couple possible problems I see after thinking about it a bit, though.
1- My two main wvw guilds are [Owls] and [HELL]. What if Owls are on red team this week, but HELL is on blue? Maybe a non-issue, since I can currently log into my alt account and play for a different server anyway.
2- In a few matchups several guilds would be pitted against one of the big mega-guilds who are maxed out at 500(?) players. Again, maybe a non-issue, since ‘guild-stacking’ would not be the same thing as the current situation of monolithic server-stacking.
3 – Since anyone in the game can decide to play some wvw whenever they want to, pve guilds would also be assigned to r/g/b. Every guild in the game, even someone’s solo bank guild, would have to be part of the system. I can’t help but think this would mess with balance a lot.

Like I said though, on the surface I think the idea has a lot of merit. Maybe the problems above, and any I didn’t think of, would not be too hard to overcome or get around.

pilip.6753:

Silly question (or proposal in another sense):
Why not remove the server concept and establish an alliance system in which there will GUILDS allegiance (In the same principle as gw1).
This would allow guilds to self distribute and remove server concept would allow players not participating in McM not get into the stats of population.

And an exemple of this for players :
There are too many queue on my alliance, okey let’s tag a guild belonging to another alliance (so I leave the current queue of course) and I can do WvW with a community of people I know.

After that there is the problem of spys (but it just makes the easiest thing for them – although there will perhaps something in the API to determine which guild and alliance player represents)

It’s super easy for spies to do their thing if they want to now anyway. That element is probably a non-issue, I think.

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

How many real friends do you have in GW2 that you wvw with? Is this like faces book where you have millions of “friends?” At best you may have 100 loss friends that you wvw with and say 25 close friends. That not a big enof group that you cant move with them.

Agree…just me & 25 close friends is a drop in the bucket.

But I’ll call it…Pennies from Heaven…they add up like rain drops…imho

What else can anet do to try to balance out population with out simply focusing ppl to transfer where they need them to and stop ppl from transferring when they don’t. At least this way its a nicer way of doing it and you can stay with the ppl you like to play with. Beyond keeping things the same (something ppl are saying is killing wvw) this IS the only viable chose.

See my signature below.

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

Diku.2546:

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

Jski.6180:

Diku.2546:

If we continue to use the original WvW game mode design…

Then the only viable way to “fix” WvW is to put extreme pressure on over-stacked servers to survive Socially.

Keeping Servers Full & Blocking players from joining it.

You’ll slowly torture the life out of WvW with this Long Term strategy…imho

How many real friends do you have in GW2 that you wvw with? Is this like faces book where you have millions of “friends?” At best you may have 100 loss friends that you wvw with and say 25 close friends. That not a big enof group that you cant move with them.

Agree…just me & 25 close friends is a drop in the bucket.

But I’ll call it…Pennies from Heaven…they add up like rain drops…imho

What else can anet do to try to balance out population with out simply focusing ppl to transfer where they need them to and stop ppl from transferring when they don’t. At least this way its a nicer way of doing it and you can stay with the ppl you like to play with. Beyond keeping things the same (something ppl are saying is killing wvw) this IS the only viable chose.

See my signature below.

While I am not here to oppress legitimate discussion of the OP. After a while of going back in forth on each other’s ideas for the original proposal you end up generating topic clutter. This clutter buries whatever initial point you wanted to send to Arenanet.

If you said your piece on the OP, then kindly refrain from over-posting on every page to allow others to contribute, and their voice to be heard by Arenanet as well. It is my opinion that we are not here to waste developer’s time scrolling through long posts (often created by a string of quotes like this one).

Good luck!

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?

1. I like it very much.
2. Lock old servers and change them to pve variant and new ones will solely be wvw.
3. Yes I will and will transferr where my guild will get the most fights

Server pride when servers started buying guilds and I am one of those filthy players that will take servers gold to transfer for fights.

WvW map cap should be per server on the map not per map

example:
BG vs MaGET vs KainBP DB
(40) vs (40+40) vs (40+40+40)

and eventually will lead to
BG vs Mag vs DB
(40) vs (40) vs (40)

becuz those upper tiers will now have a real competition instead of the
“were on high tier because we stay competitive” saying they brainwashes themselves at

if they are competitive enough to remain in that tier against an opponent twice their size on a map at any given time i’ll believe them, if not…, then the so called tiers are the definition of imbalanced

There is no incentive to de-stack so why would anyone even want to leave whatever server they may be on for a new one. As far as new servers; why bother creating new ones when the low population ones that already exist can’t even be filled. No incentive to leave and opened up BG ect. so more can move there….why not just shoot WvW in the head now and start over because new servers won’t fix a thing at this point.

Still no idea why anet is so insistent on new worlds instead of working on the existing worlds, they actually talk about this twice (include this thread). Is the dev so stubborn to the point that they believe new worlds will work better in a long term when the current numerous worlds already failing?

The dev should be more realistic and practical when come to choosing solutions, the dev should consider a middle ground where you make current specific servers free to transfer, for example the guest servers of T4. Dev could even setup additional transfer rules like higher transfer cost from “High” to “Medium” if they are targeting to shift population from “Very High” to “Medium”. dev can also reduce global cap to channel new players towards the bottom servers.

I doubt creating new servers is any easier than working on the current. Proven to be doable since S2 had free transfers for specific servers.

migellito.7301:

Brown Fang Thump.9482:

As I mentioned in the https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Identities-of-Linked-Worlds [sic] Tying WvW activity to guilds and orders rather than server names makes the sizes and numbers of your groups much more manageable.

There are a couple possible problems I see after thinking about it a bit, though.

Thanks for the thoughtful assessment there Migellito.

The problems of players being assigned to multiple colors (teams) because they belong to multiple guilds should easily be solved by the fact that guild team assignment would be assigned by earned guild rank, with player team assignment being tied to currently represented guild. Guilds in WvW would act effectively like players in PvP.

The kind of system I would prefer most would include thorough ranking systems and leader boards to help make WvW more of a tournament-style competition than a nominally server pride based free-for-all.

To reiterate, the goal here is to balance WvW matches by aggregating small groups (guilds and individuals) into large teams with roughly similar populations and potentials for winning any given match. This is more granular than simply doubling the number of servers and thus it has a higher chance at actually delivering more balanced play.

As WvW stands now, guildies can find that they can’t play WvW together unless they belong to the same or linked servers. What I propose is to replace that server qualification with a guild qualification that says, "while player X is representing guild Y, player X has an aggregate rank of Z and can play with all guild Y players, regardless of server, in WvW matches that use glicko and other ranking systems to maintain balanced competition. Ideally, I’d base player and guild ranks on actual play data and include qualifier matches with competitive matches, as I verbosely described elsewhere on these forums (see link in previous post above).

As a PvX guild leader, I found that despite having 3 accounts, each on different servers, it was difficult to muster a 5 person party for WvW due to server constraints because I didn’t limit guild membership to a specific server. This artificially imposed limitation that ArenaNet subjects us to meant that my guildies could play PvP and PvE in parties or squads with no issues then suddenly find themselves split up if they attempted WvW. Under a system that ignores server choice, this would cease to be an issue, as all guild members would be able to play together, just as they do in PvE and PvP (which proves the capability is viable, by the way).

As for the idea that bank guilds would muddle the system, players don’t generally play representing bank guilds; but, if they did, the system I am proposing would treat their progress the same as any other data point that is already collected, calculating the appropriately earned rank for the guild and the player separately. As in PvP ranking systems, WvW ranks for inactive guilds and players would be recorded and relevant to active guilds and players accordingly. This would promote representation consistency amongst players who want the prestige of having a high rank. It also makes ranks more than obligatory benchmarks by tying them to earned progress.

“The first step is admitting you have a problem” then “you determine your own level of involvement…. Like a space monkey.”

Creating new worlds is a solution in search of a problem.

Please stop asking us to give our opinions on solutions. Get feedback on problems instead and then consider ways to solve those problems.

Different people will perceive different problems or needs, of course, and ANet probably can’t address all of them at once, definitely not with a single solution.

But if you show you understand problems players actualy experience, we can communicate more effectively.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of including guild rank as part of the calculation. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Of course, my main guild is lvl 69, so that’s pretty easy for me to say… heh.

Seeing that BG and JQ have opened up again, balance is not something that Anet actually cares about. This entire topic is nothing more than a ruse.

Everyone bandwagon on over and let the population dwindle further.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Seeing that BG and JQ have opened up again, balance is not something that Anet actually cares about. This entire topic is nothing more than a ruse.

Everyone bandwagon on over and let the population dwindle further.

The word is BG has already picked up a bunch of guilds. Not sure how JQ is doing.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Seeing that BG and JQ have opened up again, balance is not something that Anet actually cares about. This entire topic is nothing more than a ruse.

Everyone bandwagon on over and let the population dwindle further.

How can you say that? It’s not like ANet is encouraging people to bandwagon by adding rewards for winning skirmishes!

no point in this now that bloated BG, that was going to be perpetually closed with these extra servers, is now open….. Sorry BG you don’t have your 2013 population anymore, but no one does…..

1. How do you feel about this proposal?
> Good, it is a reasonable concept. An unlikely worse case scenario is very few folks move to these new servers, but no harm no foul. And it should balance over time with incentives.

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
> A likely outcome is that one of the new servers gets a large influx of organized guilds. I recommend restricting the new servers to a much lower population at first (i.e. 100 max transfers) and over time to be opened up as you see fit. Similarly, lowering the population cap on existing servers should be tightened gradually to allow folks to adjust. Ask the community on reasonable incentives to transfer off FULL servers beyond just “Free”.
You might consider a better approach for complete guilds to transfer, so that some members don’t get locked out.

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
> If my guild was then yes. But many have been on TC since launch so who knows.

(
wow outnumbered:
• http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Tenacity_
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6WdLozT50U

gw2 outnumbered:
• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Outnumbered

->Facepalm

)

Of course there’s a general lack of interest.
1- People want different things, you will never get everyone to agree.
2- You just opened up BG/JQ showing that Anet has a lack of interest.
3- There is plenty of feedback here, if you want people to take it more seriously maybe the timing on opening BG/JQ was a bit silly, you’ve only managed to discourage a large portion of the community and basically make this thread a bad joke in doing so.

Bearer of Burden.4621:

Most people want to win and want to have it easy.
Most people think that being where everybody else is will allow then to will easy
That is how stacked servers came into existence.

You can link anyway you want, but people will still try to get that easy win and move server accordingly and/or stay on there currect stacked server.

The only one solution to fix this is to force equal numbers in wvw at all times, so no one server can outnumber another for any length of time

• yes its gonna be hard to program this
• yes people will have to be kicked from the game when opposite server losses players in wvw (idle players first, then on a first in first out bassis )
• yes there will be more and longer queue’s

So if people want to play (and avoid queues) they will have to transfer

• make server population level depend on average number of wvw players over certain time
• make transfers to low.pop servers free (once a week)
• population will have a change to balance itself

This way, the server’s with best players online will win, as every server will have equal numbers in wvw.

Will this be fair: YES
Will we like this: NO
- we will hate getting kicked because opponents have less players
- we will hate being in queue waiting for opponents to get more players

+1

Agree with this. This or blow up servers, only way I can see people de-stacking, ever. And I think it gauges the player reactions and feelings perfectly.

I’m sure more worlds could improve the match-up quality, and I support it. Though I also see an issue. There’s already a lot of complaining by smaller servers about their identity and the main cause of the problem is their small impact on the match-up overall. Some just aren’t real linking partners but minor assets. And more tiny worlds won’t solve that, but balancing populations between servers could.

In my opinion before introducing new worlds you should try to optimize transfer rules first. If you were to introduce free transfers from servers with full or very high population to those with medium or low ones, I believe it would help improving link quality as well. There could also be some kind of reward for transferring down.

Btw why don’t you make a poll on it?

Edit:
I’m very interested in your idea! And I am completely for giving it a try, I’m persuaded that it will improve the current situation.
But imo you still need to put some more thought in transferring rules. Try to encourage the destacking of the biggest servers in some way and also promote the small servers that already exist.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Thanks for the feedback everyone! It still seems like there is a general lack of interest in the idea, so we’ll pass on it again.

Maybe you should consider the ideas given in the feedback than asking the same idea twice. Asking the same idea twice in such a short duration is already giving the impression that devs are reluctant to accept other ideas other than their own preferred ones.

Nuzt.7894:

Of course there’s a general lack of interest.
1- People want different things, you will never get everyone to agree.
2- You just opened up BG/JQ showing that Anet has a lack of interest.
3- There is plenty of feedback here, if you want people to take it more seriously maybe the timing on opening BG/JQ was a bit silly, you’ve only managed to discourage a large portion of the community and basically make this thread a bad joke in doing so.

+1000
Just kittening ridiculous.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

…

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.

TLRD; This idea would be great in theory, but I see no practical way of accomplishing it, without nuking every single server, and forcing people to join new servers from scratch.

This would work very well with the Linking system, having something like this, where the “n” are the new servers:

• Match-up 1
  * Green: 1 + 12 + n13 + n14
  * Blue: 2 + 11 + n15 + n16
  * Red: 3 + 10 + n17 + n18
• Server
  * Green: 4 + 9 + n19 + n20
  * Blue: 5 + 8 + n21 + n22
  * Red: 6 + 7 + n23 + n24

With each server having a max of say 50% of the existing servers, in both population for full, as well as reduced map limit. Would certainly make it easier to balance the population, and make servers much closer in size to each others.

Now for the reasons I don’t think it will ever work.

• There is no way you will get players to de-stack willingly.
• There is no variety in play-styles, everyone is thrown into full zerg-fest
• Each server community would have even less impact in WvW, thus apathy
• Recruitment for servers will be from a smaller pool, less growth or variety

(1)

The simplest one to point out is the lack of reason to de-stack. There needs to be a reason for people to want to de-stack, hostory shows there is next to none. The average WvW’er on a big server went there for a reason (or didn’t move away from it for a reason), they like/want big battles, with lots of commanders and guilds etc. They no more want to be forced out of that into some tiny server with “nothing”, than I want to be stuck into T1 blob-fest ever again!

So just how are you going to make it tempting enough for the average WvW’er to even consider moving ? It would have to be something pretty substantial to tempt them, while at the same time be something that encourages them to stay on that server, and not just grab it, grind some gold, and transfer out again. So obviously no gems, or legendary weapons or ascended etc. Well unless you make them SERVER BOUND, so you can’t sell them and can only use them while on that server -_-

(2)

This proposal also further cements the effect of Linking that we’re all supposed to have one single play-style, “Welcome to Zergling Wars 2! Now with 20% less Firebats!” If you got this to work (somehow), it means that ANY link would have enough population to fight somewhat evenly with every other link.

That is great in and by itself, but what about those of us that doesn’t like Zerging ? That doesn’t want skill-lag when soloing a camp because 150 people is dancing “the robot” in SMC mashing 1. The idea of all tiers is equal is great in itself, but what about those that liked the lower tiers for various reasons? (hardware limitations, low-pop roaming, easy dailies, enjoying the small scale open world pvp style, etc).

(3)

For some people, the community/server is the reason they play, so obviously if there are 4+ different different communities present, then those people are going to feel less invested in the game play. Nature of the beast.

(4)

This will hurt some guilds more than others, probably WvW specialized guilds would have more problems with this than others. Also, PvX guilds is going to find this a nightmare.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

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?

(1) Good in theory, not possible in practise. Only way to get this working is nuking all servers and start new ones. AND remember to make it dynamic this time, so you don’t end up with empty servers down the road again.

(2) If you want to test this, just implement the lower pop caps, and lower map caps, and make transfer free to all medium worlds. And see how it works. And ignore every single request to open full servers, ever! Have moderators flat out close them on sight.

(3) Nope. Granted I’m from Kaineng, and I’m fairly certain we would be a medium pop server under your new system anyway.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Thanks for the feedback everyone! It still seems like there is a general lack of interest in the idea, so we’ll pass on it again.

6 pages of reply and you define that as a “lack of interest”…
We’ve been asking for a WvW population fix it for 2 years…

We are interested beyond belief, but your proposition is not even a half measure, it’s a cheap fix that would lead to terrible results. It’s only good on paper and not in practice, which is what about 66% of the people in this thread have been saying. Why do you need us to tell you that? It has nothing to do with our interest.

More worlds = harder to play with friends = harder to transfer guilds = not good idea.

Is Anet so dependent on the cash you make from world transfers that it would rather let WvW in the current state instead of letting us all play together in a merged system? Is it the marketing people leading the development of WvW or dedicated developers with outstanding ideas?

Personally I have paid way too much on transfers just to follow the action in WvW with my friends and I’m never doing that again now that all my friends are scattered on different servers. It’s actually what made me and them uninstall the game, the complete impossibility of playing with my friends in WvW.

Many solutions have been proposed and you’re still in the conceptual stage of making surveys over a year after HoT’s release. How long will we have to wait? We thought you had this “WvW overhaul” figured out over a year ago when it was announced. It seems you didn’t even start.

We pretty much all agree that it’s not the time for half measures. Look at the title of your own game and then ponder for a moment about the acknowledgement of Guilds in WvW. You don’t even have a guild ranking system for WvW.

Look the campaign system from ESO. Their game is flawed but their campaign system would be perfect for GW2 servers with a few adjustments.

Good luck!

Xillllix.3485:

We are interested beyond belief, but your proposition is not even a half measure, it’s a cheap fix that would lead to terrible results. It’s only good on paper and not in practice, which is what about 66% of the people in this thread have been saying. Why do you need us to tell you that? It has nothing to do with our interest.

What’s most bizarre is that they asked us the same thing back in May and people didn’t like the idea then either.

I have to suspect somebody inside ANet really thinks this proposal is just the ultimate solution to every WvW problem and brings it up regularly.

I agree with redzerofighter. (S)he articulated the situation that I am also seeing. Honestly, looking this proposal doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds like Anet wants to fracture the “machine” so it has more pieces (smaller pieces) to combine with smaller pieces. I get the idea, but I don’t see it as a solution to the problem with linking servers.

Server population is an issue that is difficult to manipulate because of player choice. Offering more and more choices for us is wonderful, but not if it doesn’t solve the problem.

I don’t even know what goes into Anet’s consideration when they even look at server population. What it seems Anet has to do is manually place the server population proportionately so it can service the world v world community with fair and representative matchups. But how can you do that without angering the players who are playing on the worlds they chose or who have the choice of moving at the whims of the players?

When Anet began all this linking, my server disappeared. I’ve been a on a “guest” server ever since. Does anybody remember Ehmry Bay? R.I.P.

Funny 6 pages of comments and ideas, and you say there is a lack of interest lol!! Now we all know where the real problem is lol

Electra.7530:

I agree with redzerofighter. (S)he articulated the situation that I am also seeing. Honestly, looking this proposal doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds like Anet wants to fracture the “machine” so it has more pieces (smaller pieces) to combine with smaller pieces. I get the idea, but I don’t see it as a solution to the problem with linking servers.

Server population is an issue that is difficult to manipulate because of player choice. Offering more and more choices for us is wonderful, but not if it doesn’t solve the problem.

I don’t even know what goes into Anet’s consideration when they even look at server population. What it seems Anet has to do is manually place the server population proportionately so it can service the world v world community with fair and representative matchups. But how can you do that without angering the players who are playing on the worlds they chose or who have the choice of moving at the whims of the players?

When Anet began all this linking, my server disappeared. I’ve been a on a “guest” server ever since. Does anybody remember Ehmry Bay? R.I.P.

For me the core issue is really that I have about 100 friends doing WvW, and there about 8 of them on each servers. Now they come and propose to add more servers? How is that going to help with server communications and keeping the community together? It’s going to do the exact opposite.

I parked my account on JQ, so that when I feel like reinstalling the game WvW isn’t empty and I have more friends there. If I ever get kicked out of that server I’m never even going to bother loading up the game again.

1. How do you feel about this proposal?

Looks good, worth trying.

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

Give free transfers to new worlds, just that.

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

Yes, but will follow my guild.

Heimlich.3065:

Xillllix.3485:

We are interested beyond belief, but your proposition is not even a half measure, it’s a cheap fix that would lead to terrible results. It’s only good on paper and not in practice, which is what about 66% of the people in this thread have been saying. Why do you need us to tell you that? It has nothing to do with our interest.

What’s most bizarre is that they asked us the same thing back in May and people didn’t like the idea then either.

I have to suspect somebody inside ANet really thinks this proposal is just the ultimate solution to every WvW problem and brings it up regularly.

And when people didn’t wildly support it anet opened up BG as a big kitten you to the player base.

forumbugpleasefixfinallyanet

ubi.7289:

(
wow outnumbered:
• http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Tenacity_
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6WdLozT50U

gw2 outnumbered:
• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Outnumbered

->Facepalm

)

The only facepalm here is you. The two companies have different approaches to the outnumbered effect. Blizzard wants to help make a fair fight (and from the video you linked they have completely failed to do that with their buff, so you are hurting your own point imo), whereas ANet wants to just encourage you to come out and play, not necessarily to make fights more even. The outnumbered buff is clear in that regard. No penalty for dying (no armor breaking), theoretically more loot from stuff due to the magic find, and quicker rankups. Its there purely to encourage people to play when they know they have no chance.

Its an entirely different philosophy towards what should be given to outnumbered players, but that doesn’t mean one is inherently better than the other. The Blizzard one is clearly just as broken as Anets implementation, just in the opposite direction.

Jim Hunter.6821:

And when people didn’t wildly support it anet opened up BG as a big kitten you to the player base.

So true.

Anet gave you a solution, you all said No, now live with the consequences [insert evil laugh] flips the switch to open BG. [ hysterical laughter ensues]