Guild Wars 2

First, let me be clear, I am from Fort Aspenwood and I have no intention of trolling here. Myself, and I expect my server at large have no delusions about where we stand and where we will end up in Gold League. I understand the original intention of transferring to what was formerly called Tier 1. I used to play in Hawaii Time so I was like 50% West Coast, 50% Oceanic time player. Though I am West Coast now, I know the reasoning to be among servers that that have similarly matched coverage has nothing to do with NA. NA fights in a T2/3 against T1 servers are what they are. Almost any server ranked 9 and up can put up strong NA numbers and bring serious competition in that timezone. The off hours consistency varies quite a bit compared to when matches were based purely on ranking.

That time has gone and even though, the rating of the Top 3 has mostly protected them from imbalance matches though a purely numerical buffer against the variance, the leagues are not going to be so nice. At best, with a lot of luck, a 1-2-3 match will happen twice in the leagues. At worst, you will meet only 1 time and every other match is going to be 12X 3XX, 13X 2XX or 23X 1XX where X is basically going to be 4, 5 or 6. If you look at your own match history, you can see pretty plainly that you have never experienced this many matches of this sort in a row.

In fact, with SOS in our match against JQ and TC facing SOR and BG, these kinds of matches are what will likely make up 6 out of the 7 matches we play in Gold League. I doubt the outcomes will change much. So now having explained all this, I am wondering how the major guilds who run in OCX, SEA and EU time feel about NA Gold League?

The numbers will win the numbers game..
But who really cares anyway? A-net doesn’t..so why should we?

Everyone on one of the NA T2,T5 and T8 servers is going to be used by Anet as the “metric” to decide whether the league system works. After all, if your server’s WvW numbers go up from the weeks before the season then that tells Anet you really do like getting blown out week after week for 7 weeks.

If you want to send Anet a message that you don’t like unbalanced matches then

DON’T PLAY SEASON ONE

You guys are missing the point. This isn’t about winning and losing, it is about consistency of fights. T1 has enjoyed that for a long time. They get occasional vacations at our expense but for the majority of the time that the random leagues have been random, they have had high enough rating to mostly fight each other.

17 matches have been played since the randomization has been introduced and 10 of those have been rank 1v2v3. In the leagues, only 1 will be 1v2v3. Basically its going from 58% of matches are balanced to 14%. That is a pretty big drop in consistent action from a week to week basis. Until the season starts, the longest streak of non-1v2v3 matches was 3 weeks in a row.

The off hour will be fine because we do not necessarily need a 1v2v3 match…..

Any match with atleast one of those will be entertaining, TC can also throw a significant amount of off hour bodies to beat on, so it wouldnt be completely dead. If SOS manages to get number 6 they have significant off hour coverage as well.

TBH, the only match I can see that will truly be a snooze fest is Xv5v6 ( with X being a tier 1 server).

As an oceanic player, it’s a little annoying. T1 NA seems to be literally the only place that has reasonable amounts of oceanics to fight with/against, and going against t2 servers will be boring for us (I’m on JQ – have been ticking above 500 all through my timezone each night against SoS/FA)

But it’s much better than 2 leagues. That would have been enough to make me quit the game.

@Aurust
Luckily, that match will likely only occur once (Xv5v6). But if you look at TCs match history, against a T1vXvX where X was TC + 5th of 6th, they haven’t faired any better. If you look at Blackgates most recent matches, Week 38 BGvJQvTC, they finished with only 145k. Down 2 weeks earlier to week 36 BGvJQvFA, we finished with 139k. While I will admit, TC does significantly outcover FA, there performance in these types of matches is equivalent. These are very recent matches also.

There will be many more Xv4v5/6 matches and considering the recent migration of Dragonbrand, I don’t think you will find the results to be that much different. This new T1 League monster that has been created is quite formidable.

@OliT
Historically there have always only been about 4 decently covered servers. This goes all the way back to the HOD domination days when T1 would always kick 1 server down into T2 and T2 was basically a practice week to whatever T1 server got downgraded. The only thing that ever changed was the mass migration of Off-Hour guilds. Since there are so few of you compared to NA, you rarely see a shift. It takes a long time for NA to push into T1, SOR would be a classic example of that. They had to power through T2 for weeks before being able to make the critical mass for competitive T1.