Guild Wars 2

I know this idea has been brought up before on the forums, but I would bring this idea back into the spotlight and gather some data on where people stand regarding implementation of this idea. First I will explain the idea, then below you will see a link to the strawpoll to give your responses.

Tear it Down. Build it Up(NA)
1. All players will receive an in game mail from anet warning the player their account will be unbound from their current wvw server, and that they will recieve a free transfer token that will allow them to select a new home world. When this policy takes effect, all WvW functions will be disabled for week.
If a player logs in well after this time period, this message will instead be presented in the log menu

2. 9 servers will be permanently removed from the game, and the remaining 15 servers will be renamed to something completely different. Server links will be discontinued and all server statistics, glick ect will be completely reset. Upon logging in, players will use their token to select a new home world.

3. As stated in the in game mail, WvW matchmaking will resume one week later.

http://www.strawpoll.me/12598847

Time for everyone, especially temps and casuals to transfer to BG for free!

To what end?

The people voting for this are likely the same people creating the perceived problems.

One thing that’s easy to underestimate is how much server pride and/or established relationships keep people playing long after when they would have otherwise stopped.

I’m on a linked server (Ehmry) that had its population crater shortly after the linking started. In principle, the more populated matchups that lining brought (initially) should have kept people going, but there were a lot of transfers off, a lot of people who stopped playing, and our once (fairly active) server website turned into a ghost town.

I can’t point to a definitive cause, but my bet is that the loss of a common identity played a major role in that. Your proposal essentially rolls the dice and hopes people will stick around to form an identity around their new server, rather than just call it quits.

Not saying it isn’t a good idea, just saying there may be a risk there.

Creating teams anew it’s a necessity, but recreating the same mess under a new name is pointless: first new metrics needed, a measurement of each player’s worth in contribution value, and then teams balanced using these values.

In fights, numbers can be just walking bags, and could never compete against better players. If it’s about capping, active coverage that is willing to cap things, despite being lower numbers. Every player must have a constantly updating contribution rating (reflecting their cap & fight score), so balancing can be based on something real.

I voted yes. Its time to address server stacking before the game mode is destroyed and runs off the remaining players on lower tier servers.

We did this once already.
It was called launch day, witness the result

Blow it up! Blow it up! We should long ago have this as official vote, anet thought of blowing it all up but I wonder why they didn’t put it to vote in the first place but your poll is extremely inaccurate for people can vote multiple times.

So what happens when a 100 man guild is currently 100% on a server and then when they get the mails, the leader pick a server but some are late and only 30% of the guild get on the server before its full?

Your idea is unacceptable.

Make the top 9 servers the ones that get permanently deleted reset glicko for the other 15, then population balance will be on the road to recovery.

People like to propose deleting the lowest servers because they’re dead, by the way, they have effectively been deleted for almost a year and it’s done nothing to correct the issue. Go bigger, delete the populated and full ones and we’ll see how much server pride talk results from it.

Delete my server and it’s game over. I have other MMOs I can play, where I have history and continuity, some of it going back nearly two decades. I’ll just move back to a home that still wants me.

Anet won’t do this for the simple reason that their main worry would be that it would kill off wvw.

For many this would be like treating a victim in A&E with a stab wound by stabbing them again.

Your proposal fails to solve the problem of server stacking. You assume people won’t talk to each other via ts, etc and then all move to stack one new server, creating exactly the same problem you were trying to solve.

The more casual players might just decide to call it a day.

In order for such a change to have any chance at all, it would have to be launched with a complete overhaul of the current wvw system, maps, skills etc with bonuses and penalties to even the playing field and less maps per match up and more teams in each match up. As Anet aren’t interested in spending that sort of dev time on wvw, it’s not going to happen.

@ Baldrick + Choppy: Liked both of your posts, good points.

Just killing the servers, and restart them, will re-create the same problem down the road. And with the player-bases experience in this matter, I doubt it would take more than 2 months to get back to the same spot.

WvW as it plays out right now, for one side to have fun, the two other sides aren’t allowed to have fun (A generalization, exceptions happens. hardcore sadist roamers for ex). So they do what most people do when they don’t have fun, they stop playing. And then suddenly most of the people on the side that had fun, has little to no fun left.

In sPvP this would be handled by short matches, and match-making algorithms, so at least that won’t happen over and over, and each match being a few minutes long. WvW you’re kinda stuck with it for a week, and just hope to get away for it the next week (and basically reverse the roles).

This, more than anything else is what needs to change.

Unfortunately, any sort of change to this would either force the game toward a more pure competitive game mode, and thus start changing or removing the server structure and the 24/7 mode, as well as frighten away the casuals and fair-weathers.

Or it would have to go more towards casual and tick off all the competitive minded players, and likely create a huge mess on the forums as they expressed their vitriol on the matter.

Either way, it would be a good bit of work. And I doubt they have the time/resources/manpower/money/will to do it. So guess I’ll just accept WvW for what it is, a defect EotM.

Edit: @Op, you didn’t add an option in the straw-poll for “It doesn’t matter”.

Blow them all up, make 12 servers per region, NA and EU, put an end to the server links, glicko adjustment farce, this is truly the worst period of WvW I have ever experienced.

Using the same failed home server based system is hardly “tearing it down”, more of a temporary band aid that does nothing to address the real issues with WvW population balance.

Choppy.4183:

One thing that’s easy to underestimate is how much server pride and/or established relationships keep people playing long after when they would have otherwise stopped.

I know I would have dropped a certain MMO months and months before I actually did if it weren’t for my guild.

Another temporary fix it would not solve the issue.

HazyDaisy.4107:

Make the top 9 servers the ones that get permanently deleted reset glicko for the other 15, then population balance will be on the road to recovery.

People like to propose deleting the lowest servers because they’re dead, by the way, they have effectively been deleted for almost a year and it’s done nothing to correct the issue. Go bigger, delete the populated and full ones and we’ll see how much server pride talk results from it.

this is what thinking out of the box means like

but anet gonna be like:
https://youtu.be/WdTtvsMBL_Q?t=58

Norbe.7630:

HazyDaisy.4107:

Make the top 9 servers the ones that get permanently deleted reset glicko for the other 15, then population balance will be on the road to recovery.

People like to propose deleting the lowest servers because they’re dead, by the way, they have effectively been deleted for almost a year and it’s done nothing to correct the issue. Go bigger, delete the populated and full ones and we’ll see how much server pride talk results from it.

this is what thinking out of the box means like

but anet gonna be like:
https://youtu.be/WdTtvsMBL_Q?t=58

when the main issue is the big picture problem , and they call it “inovation” >:}

Maybe we are past that point of having faith in ArenaNet, when it comes to WvW, but irony won’t help at all, in that case is better to just back off silently. We have to keep at least an appearance of believing that they care and are working to keep WvW fun: the reasons to have great battles, the possibility to fight back.

Megaservers ended each and every server, a long time ago, the names that are left represent a “world” that is no more. The only part with transfers is the WvW game mode, in order to keep some semblance of balance and limit migration. But failed to do just that, especially when one can simply transfer into the linked server. Now: server names mean nothing, migration isn’t limited… Even the illusion is gone, that these somehow contribute to some kind of balance.

Teams have to be created anew. Then we need quality enemies, worth fighting: who can fight back. Competition has to be built around the people. This is the core need of a large scale PvP environment, not capturing empty buildings guarded by NPC’s, hidden beyond a maze up there on the mountain.

WvW needs to attract new players. WvW needs to stop losing players. It’s all about players, the only fun part.

then get 2-3 server communities together on one small server and rule wvw for ever. great.

Do some of you believe that somehow servers would have been in a better position today without links? Let’s be perfectly honest here, all servers were dying at a faster rate after the expansion release than before. Guilds would have continued to move upwards in the ranks to get more activity. Communities would have died regardless, a merge instead of links would have definitely killed half the servers. The many changes from the expansion including combat has either drove off or reduced the playing time of a lot of players.

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

You can reset the system if you want, but if it exist as it does now, it does nothing to fix the problem as long as transfers exist.

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

morrolan.9608:

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

Because it was a terrible idea that only catered to a specific set of people and didn’t include the majority.

Jayne.9251:

morrolan.9608:

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

Because it was a terrible idea that only catered to a specific set of people and didn’t include the majority.

It included the majority just fine, it simply wouldn’t cater to your minority who bang on about on about the joke that is server community, in a game where servers were made irrelevant to most of the playerbase with megaservers, where most WvW players be it GvG/fight guilds, roamers, bandwagoners, PPT heroes, etc have transferred multiple times even before links which made “server community” even more of a joke, look at the state of your server as I write this.

It was never likely to happen because it involved the killer combination of actual meaningful changes that required work/resources and WvW.

I do agree with this. I personally hate server linking. Sense of community is dead, building a server is dead, having the passion to do push weeks is dead. They need to just blow up all the servers and start 9 or 12 new ones. Let people know a week or two in advance that the current servers are shutting and new ones are opening up so guilds and players can be mentally ready. Alongside that also introduce 1 up and 1 down system. Glicko system is terrible it sucks.

Also it shouldnt be a temporary fix if arena net introduce better things to WvW… Ascended gear vendor, legendary backpiece, more and better WvW specific skins, WvW specific class balance, nerf epi, nerf conditions. WvW would be at much better state but it will just get ignored because WvW is PvE and sPvP lives matter more than WvW even tho there are still more players consistently playing WvW than PvP and WvW is pretty dead compared to what it used to be LOL.

What is the point?
People will spend the week discussing which servers they will stack onto. In the end, you will get the exact unbalanced situation as we have now.

Jayne.9251:

morrolan.9608:

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

Because it was a terrible idea that only catered to a specific set of people and didn’t include the majority.

You would say the same thing about any alliance based change proposal, you only think its terrible because you personally don’t want the mode to go in that direction.

morrolan.9608:

Jayne.9251:

morrolan.9608:

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

Because it was a terrible idea that only catered to a specific set of people and didn’t include the majority.

You would say the same thing about any alliance based change proposal, you only think its terrible because you personally don’t want the mode to go in that direction.

I’m not alone. In fact, I’d say I’m in the majority.

Anet should really tell us what percentage of the population is organized guilds, because that’s only who that kind of mode would benefit.

And if implemented, then we would really start to see some gaming of the system.

Honestly, if I had to go without wvw for a full week.. I prob would quit the game entirely. It’s the only game mode that brings me back to play.

Jayne.9251:

morrolan.9608:

Xenesis.6389:

The problem here is, anet said that links were a quick easy solution to help with population bleed, but where’s the long term solution? It’s been almost a year, are they even working on a long term solution or are they just waiting for this to completely die? Anet has done next to nothing the past year to help promote wvw and try to get players into it, wvw has been dying a slow death from day one.

Their long term solution was the battlegroup proposal but anet got cold feet.

Because it was a terrible idea that only catered to a specific set of people and didn’t include the majority.

It isn’t about majority, but the survival of the game mode. If there is no leader on (commander or similar), the majority sooner or later will log out & leave. There are a few roamers, but even them really thrive in an action rich environment, and that is provided by leaders that the players enjoy following.

WvW Guilds bring stability, and their presence is the life and breath of the game. The old server communities were built always around guilds, with “lonely” “PUG” commanders filling the empty spaces, though every commander needs loyal and trustworthy regulars, on whose one can rely, which is very similar with what guilds are. New teams have to be built around these entities: guilds & leaders. These are the forces who can take and hold everything on the map, and without them even a “full” server is considered “dead”. Balancing has to be done around these, not just raw numbers, like it was done until now.

This will fix absolutely nothing, it will return the same state as it was before. It will be a complete mess for possibly quite a lot of guilds/players, guild members picking the wrong server, guild members getting locked out of the server their guild is on due to it being full, friends/family locked out a specific server their friends/family are on due to it being full. Also, I don’t often play so I will probably miss the “servers resetting” and most likely will get locked out of my own server that I’ve been on since launch. All of this is unacceptable.

The only way I would consider approving of this is if people were able to opt out, even then I don’t know.

The flaw with this design is that you’re just going to have the same groups of players hyper-stack one server/group/side/color whatever if they get the choice, because most players communicate out-of-game and would quickly work together to stack.

So then you end up with a static, non-changing environment of servers where one totally and undeniably dominates the others. Basically, just how T1 NA is now, except made game-wide.

The only way to fix WvW stacking and population is to have the matchups be data-driven based on previous matchups and play habits through game log parsing and a comprehensive learning AI that also utilizes a little bit of genetic algorithms for diversity, and not by glicko or a simple 1U1D, and then have it quickly change matchups on a weekly basis to try and make the best-balanced matchups, give or take some mutations to prevent stagnation. That’s the only way to fix the problem; you need to have no community decision whatsoever, and kitten the people that try to stack by either forcing them into spending huge sums of gold (unsustainable) to keep transferring weekly, or to stop playing (kills off toxic players which is better for the long-term health of the game). Fact is, however, this solution is complex, time-consuming, and very expensive. So it won’t happen, since ANet doesn’t care about WvW.

I’ve been following this thread, and I’m glad that it is getting ample responses. In this post I’ll clarify some points and respond to some good points that I have read.

I’ve read many posts that say that this idea will not be enough to fix wvw completely and that there will need to be various game play changes as well. I certainly agree that this idea by itself will not completely fix wvw, in fact, with the state wvw is in now it will take many changes to perfect it. However, I do maintain my position that population balance was and still is the greatest challenge. Secondly, I realize that there are more elaborate changes that could be made such as essentially rewriting the code for server ranking, and going through player logs to analyze player populations ect. but anet is very unlikely to consider expensive and time consuming solutions. While I’m no experience in running servers, I believe that this idea is likely to be easier than the ambitious proposals I’ve seen on the forums lately.

DeceiverX.8361:

The flaw with this design is that you’re just going to have the same groups of players hyper-stack one server/group/side/color whatever if they get the choice, because most players communicate out-of-game and would quickly work together to stack.

So then you end up with a static, non-changing environment of servers where one totally and undeniably dominates the others. Basically, just how T1 NA is now, except made game-wide.

The only way to fix WvW stacking and population is to have the matchups be data-driven based on previous matchups and play habits through game log parsing and a comprehensive learning AI that also utilizes a little bit of genetic algorithms for diversity, and not by glicko or a simple 1U1D, and then have it quickly change matchups on a weekly basis to try and make the best-balanced matchups, give or take some mutations to prevent stagnation. That’s the only way to fix the problem; you need to have no community decision whatsoever, and kitten the people that try to stack by either forcing them into spending huge sums of gold (unsustainable) to keep transferring weekly, or to stop playing (kills off toxic players which is better for the long-term health of the game). Fact is, however, this solution is complex, time-consuming, and very expensive. So it won’t happen, since ANet doesn’t care about WvW.

I think we share common ground in that wvw would benefit from an improved algorithm that better estimates sever population and coverage and reacts to changes in these parameters, but I disagree with you (and others) that say a faulty algorithm is the cause of population balance, and here is why.

To make my point more clear, I will cite previous wvw match ups and servers because they are just as relevant in explaining the fundamental problem in population balance.

The power differential between servers is so huge that it I believe it is impossible to create truly competitive and balanced match ups between servers, even with links. For example, in the current state no individual server can field enough players to be competitive with Blackgate. The next largest server, Jade Quarry, while not as big as Blackgate is substantially more active than arguably the next largest server Fort Aspenwood. The rest of the servers follow a similar pattern.

Even if we had the best possible matchmaking algorithm money can buy, it will be impossible to create a competitive and balanced match up when the servers themselves have huge disparities between them when it comes to population and coverage. Take the following made up distribution

#1.Blackgate: Population strength10 l Coverage-8
#2.Jade Quarry: Population strength 6 l Coverage-8
#3.Fort Aspenwood: Population strength 5 l Coverage- 4

#4.Sea of Sorrows : Population strength 4 l coverage-3
#5.Maguuma: Population strength 4 l coverage 3
ect. ect.

Analyzing this distribution which more or less describes recent match ups, there is simply no way to create a balanced match up because there is too much disparity between successive ranks of servers. Even if we could someone match the “closest” servers together you could very easily end up with a complete wash. This problem continues even at lower “tiers”- the top ranked server of one tier has historically almost always been annihilated if the move up a tier.

Admittedly, this is probably the chief reason why we have server links in the first place because it allows anet to automatically boost a server’s manpower between matches to allow them to be more competitive, but again this comes with it’s own set of drawbacks which I’ll outline briefly.

1. Server relinks are too slow and by the time anet gets around to relinking them, people quit the game, guilds transfer and communities dissolve.
2. Server relinks absolutely destroy server identity for the linked servers. If you’re not proud of your server’s identity, there is very little to stop the average person from bandwagonning. Not that I blame them for playing with friends, just saying in the long run it can cause problems
3. Introduces too much randomness. Linked servers are cheaper to transfer to and can fluctuate almost immediately after server links which because of problem #1 make match ups even worse.

To conclude this long post, my belief is that if we can reset the servers, get rid of half of the servers, and enforce server population caps (which seem a little sketchy, how can JQ and BG both be full when JQ is barely competitive with two servers to help them.) so that it closes immediately upon reaching a threshold, the we will end up with a lot less servers, but these servers will have the games population distributed among them more evenly. With properly distributed servers, we can enjoy more competitive and varied matches.

Players will just break the system again anyways, and faster now that they know what it takes to “win”. Then we’ll also get those loner players who prefer lower population servers in here complaining again.

jul.7602:

I think we share common ground in that wvw would benefit from an improved algorithm that better estimates sever population and coverage and reacts to changes in these parameters, but I disagree with you (and others) that say a faulty algorithm is the cause of population balance, and here is why.

To make my point more clear, I will cite previous wvw match ups and servers because they are just as relevant in explaining the fundamental problem in population balance.

The power differential between servers is so huge that it I believe it is impossible to create truly competitive and balanced match ups between servers, even with links. For example, in the current state no individual server can field enough players to be competitive with Blackgate. The next largest server, Jade Quarry, while not as big as Blackgate is substantially more active than arguably the next largest server Fort Aspenwood. The rest of the servers follow a similar pattern.

Even if we had the best possible matchmaking algorithm money can buy, it will be impossible to create a competitive and balanced match up when the servers themselves have huge disparities between them when it comes to population and coverage. Take the following made up distribution

#1.Blackgate: Population strength10 l Coverage-8
#2.Jade Quarry: Population strength 6 l Coverage-8
#3.Fort Aspenwood: Population strength 5 l Coverage- 4

#4.Sea of Sorrows : Population strength 4 l coverage-3
#5.Maguuma: Population strength 4 l coverage 3
ect. ect.

Analyzing this distribution which more or less describes recent match ups, there is simply no way to create a balanced match up because there is too much disparity between successive ranks of servers. Even if we could someone match the “closest” servers together you could very easily end up with a complete wash. This problem continues even at lower “tiers”- the top ranked server of one tier has historically almost always been annihilated if the move up a tier.

Admittedly, this is probably the chief reason why we have server links in the first place because it allows anet to automatically boost a server’s manpower between matches to allow them to be more competitive, but again this comes with it’s own set of drawbacks which I’ll outline briefly.

1. Server relinks are too slow and by the time anet gets around to relinking them, people quit the game, guilds transfer and communities dissolve.
2. Server relinks absolutely destroy server identity for the linked servers. If you’re not proud of your server’s identity, there is very little to stop the average person from bandwagonning. Not that I blame them for playing with friends, just saying in the long run it can cause problems
3. Introduces too much randomness. Linked servers are cheaper to transfer to and can fluctuate almost immediately after server links which because of problem #1 make match ups even worse.

To conclude this long post, my belief is that if we can reset the servers, get rid of half of the servers, and enforce server population caps (which seem a little sketchy, how can JQ and BG both be full when JQ is barely competitive with two servers to help them.) so that it closes immediately upon reaching a threshold, the we will end up with a lot less servers, but these servers will have the games population distributed among them more evenly. With properly distributed servers, we can enjoy more competitive and varied matches.

That’s the thing; it’ll always be flawed given 1:1 pairings. I think a major stride ANet made was linking different numbers of servers together to face another one.

So it could be something like BG vs all of T1/T2 vs the entire rest of the game one week, maybe splitting hairs on low-impact servers into other tiers another week. In all reality, the very notion of tiered lists doesn’t need to exist, and should be susceptible to change dynamically week-to-week.

Hell yes!

I am all for tearing down what little server loyalty we have left for your new (LOL) idea!

You are right, we should destroy all the friendships and alliances made with websites and teamspeak and discord because you want to!

You got this Bro, just tear it all apart because you have no friends! LETS DO THIS!!!!!!!!!!

Or…