Guild Wars 2

It has been a few weeks since the world linking and there isn’t much news about it after that. Is that all there is to world linking? Is that all there is to population balance? Do all the full servers have to be stuck as full servers because of the world linking? While majority of the people are getting distracted by the revived wvw and neglecting all of this, the ambiguous status of the servers is gonna have a negative impact towards the population balance eventually.

World linking was never about balance as it does nothing to help the balance. All it does is add a few more people to a server. It is nothing but a disguised server merge. Nothing more nothing less. Population balance is a pipedream until anet does something truly radical. and the only thing that will balance the servers is to merge both datacenters.

IKR! The world linking is meant to quickly bring up the population but it never balance the population. People seems to be avoiding this topic and move on to “score balance” and forget all about population balance.

Our server group SoS/GoM was simultaneously outnumbered on 3 out of 4 maps during some of the NA prime time hours over the weekend. The prior two weekends, we had queues on at least 2 maps during prime time hours. A sign of waning interest, or was it just Mother’s Day festivities? Hard to say at this point, but those two reasons would probably have affected the opposing servers as well.

People tend to log in much more when server is winning. When we in GH+FoW had to fight much bigger servers, players simply stopped logging in and we had about 20 people over all 4 maps. It got so bad we did not even have any keeps at prime time. This week we rolling over AM and RoF and suddenly we have queue to EB every night again plus multiple guild groups in BL maps.

In the EU server, huge majority of the population is concentrated in the prime time, literally.

In the NA server, it is really more international, it is really a 24 hours coverage. USA itself span across multiple timezone from the East NA all the way to the pacific ocean, overlapping a small part of oceanic region. Canada itself also span across a multiple timezone. Likewise, there is also south america like brazil which again in a different timezone than north america. Also, EU players plays in NA. Finally, aus, new zealand, SEA, east asia come into picture. The off hours imbalance is really big problem in NA since great majority number of SEA/OCX love to stack on servers, how is anet gonna balance the off hours?

@skyshroud, don’t think they will balance the pop. look at the scoring poll for their answer ‘score balancing’….

Indeed, if they can’t balance it due to fear of backlash if use brutal methods, I at least hope that they will attempt to balance it over a period of time by controlling the intakes of players to the different servers. Right now, their intakes is hard cap, as shown during the days where T1 server is opened. I hope they change it to dynamic cap which will literally help balance the lower servers.

The servers itself too is a issue, the ambigous server status. Is anet gonna merge it or are they not gonna merge it, leaving it at that the status is harmful to the guilds in long run.

WvW always tends to go into a state of attrition war in the long run.

Initially, the larger and stronger server will only have slight advantage here and there. But gradually this advantage builds up and frustrates the smaller server. So you will see more ppl quit on the smaller server.

The initial ,say, 5:4 population ratio can then easily snowball into a much more lopsided difference.

Much like what you see in a hotjoin PvP game. Ppl will quickly see which side is going to win and gravitate to the winning side.