Guild Wars 2

There has been a lot done to encourage players spreading out among the servers with the idea of increasing the population on lower populated servers.

Perhaps it’s time to discuss reverting a change that was done to address the issue from the other end. That change is the decision they made a long time ago to increase the population caps on the maps.

The current cap is estimated to be around 80 players per server per map.

Is 240 players max on a map too many? Does this hurt roaming and small groups?

Does 320 players max per server on all maps encourage servers to try to stack themselves even during primetime hours?

Wouldn’t this directly conflict with the reason they are testing the two server concept? People were looking for more people to fight. Or are you picturing that discontinuing and this taking its place. Since players have to pay for transfers this might be rough.

The server pairings count more for the other end of things; increasing the minimum population that are on each WvW map. What population caps are there for is to reduce the maximum population on the maps to reduce disparity between server populations at a given time.

My memory isn’t good with it because I don’t do much sPvP, but weren’t 8v8 matches basically scrapped shortly after launch do to the maps being too small which lead to “zerging” being the dominant playstyle? I am also proposing that the current caps may be doing the same thing in WvW.

Would this change not increase the length of queues on the servers already full of people?

Yes however if you happen to be on a server with massive ques then you wouldn’t really notice. A 120 person queue isn’t much worse than a 110 person queue. Those servers are considered to be stacked servers which is what Anet has been trying to reduce.

Also there are a number of things that should be considered.

1) Even servers that are considered dead can queue maps from time to time.

2) Overall there seems to be more complaints about being vastly outnumbered than there are about having to wait in queue; especially if you ignore reset and the following 24 hours.

3) There is always EoTM which was created specifically to address queue woes.

Lower map caps would help diminish the advantage of extremely-packed giant server pairings and punish server stackers and match manipulators. I think it’s worth considering.

I’m down for at least testing lower map caps and seeing how it goes. Lowering the numbers of players has advantages and disadvantages, it’d be interesting to see what happens.

Advantages are obviously more even ground in combat with population variance, and I think it would quite drastically reduce the skill lag issues as the servers would be running at high load instead of max load (redlining sort of) which I would very much like to see.

Disadvantages are applicable only and exclusively to the overstacker servers, but they have solutions and options in place, they just continuously choose not to use them, for example, they can start using ETOM for its original intended purpose, obviously spread through the maps, etc.

I’d be interested in lowering them a bit just to see what kind of impact that would have on lag.

I don’t personally have a problem with a slight lowering of the map population cap. Like Tongku said, its worth at least testing and trying out. What I do not want is map population caps being raised for a variety of reasons.

The only problem might be related to the desert borderland map (not currently in use) which really requires a higher population to be entertaining but other than that, I’ve always been in favor of lower map caps to help with lag & overpopulation in some time zones.

ok, let’s try it for a week at least.

Lower? Here I was thinking it should go in the other direction. Coming from SoS/GoM, we still get queued maps, and the wait time can be as much as 20 minutes even waiting for the 10 people ahead of you to get in…guess that shows our people are dedicated at least. I can’t imagine waiting for a 100 or more queue if WvW was the only thing I even wanted to log in for.

They tried lower caps about 2 years ago. It didn’t work. Queues were high and didn’t help lag.

Another issue is spreading out – look at the whining people have with the linking. People don’t want to move servers. Locking servers didn’t really help either.