Hello all,
(the TLDR part providing some background before I get to the point)
I began my humble GW2 career on Eredon Terrace way back a few months after launch. Not early enough to get a fancy baseball cap, but early enough to have my three birthday boosters for my main character Simba Khan.
ET has been my home on GW2 for my entire time on GW2 minus 5-6 months I spent on NSP. There I had my own little GW2 journey starting off as a clueless pug, to roamer, to pugmander, and even eventually a highly respected community server leader and guild leader of Flames of Courage [FoC].
We always had coverage issues and thus never climbed very far, but we always focused on making sure that when we DID play, we had a blast doing it. We would host Server wide events such as class specific zergs like Necros, Engineers, Rangers, Rifle warriors, etc. We would also host themed nights like Ladies night with pop songs, drinking, wearing pink, sappy poetry reading, and bad karaoke. Our most successful event was a Mystery Night where every single guild on the server got together to solve a pre-made mystery made up by members of our community.
Long story short…I’ve had quite the journey with this server and the game’s history.
(end of the TLDR part)
Now…we fast forward to today and the Population Beta.
The folks here on ET knew that we were going to be a small fish in a big pond, so we all got together and made up a plan. We all wanted to play the game together like we always had, for better or for worse. We gathered up, we made our squads, had our plans, and were all ready to go in and face whatever.
Then WvW opened and before somebody could even say the map to join…every single map was queued. Each.and.every.one. Not a single person in TS got onto a map.
Now, while I understand that nobody wants empty maps, and nobody wants unbalanced BS matchups, either. ET wasn’t a “partner” with Blackgate tonight for reset because nobody actually made it in to participate..other than maybe 1-2 lucky souls. We were shut out immediately.
ANET, your goal was to provide servers with a way to keep their identity, but in this case you erased us from existence tonight. We were given nowhere to play and just threw our hands up and went into EOTM and spent our night there.
Now, this is long-winded, I know. However, I wanted to paint a picture of an EXPERIENCE that was had, not just log in and complain. Our experience was one of uncertain excitement that quickly evolved into complete disappointment and frustration.
I fully expect these queues to die down as the week goes on, but you always wanted reset to be like a big party and everybody was invited. Well tonight…everybody was invited….except us =/
What went wrong and how I believe we could better utilize the linked server feature:
1. Balanced Population/Coverage: A balanced matchup is a rare commodity because while you CAN affect population you can’t necessarily control skill level. However, Glicko’s job is to help by finding servers that generally can compete with one another based on performance. We want to see scores that are close, which is usually caused by all competing servers having a reasonably equal population/skill level across all times zones. This is where mergers can really help when one group gets way out of control. For example, merging a high NA prime population server with a high EU time zone population to increase its coverage and make it more competitive with another server with a similar coverage spread.
2. Battle sizes that fit OUR individual tastes. Not everybody will agree on what density of population activity is ideal. Personally I believe 20-30 man fights are perfect to keep things fun and epic while avoiding many of the dangers of “cheese.” The beauty of the old setup was that you really had options. The lower your tier the smaller the scale of the fighting that you would encounter until you found your particular taste. This allowed players to find that right server/tier for them and settle in.
This particular merger selection took the two most incompatible groups and forced them together. You took people who were used to small scale/rapid access and threw them in with people who like huge scale/wait your turn.
On your next pass in this Beta, I suggest that you attempt to link like-minded groups together.
Here is a hypothetical example…
ET has awesome NA prime but we lack late night and early morning coverage. Pair us with a server who generally struggles during NA but has more activity during times where we are lacking. This way both servers actually help one another and can create better competition for other servers with similar activity. That way we don’t get swallowed by the “host” and both linked servers actually learn to appreciate each other’s contributions.
The issue with this specific merger (I can’t speak for the other mergers at this time) is that ET doesn’t really offer BG anything other than increasing their queue numbers during NA.
Although the BG people that I have met (granted they were in EOTM) were welcoming and friendly, which I give them thanks for.
I’m going to stay optimistic because I do really see great potential here to make things better than they were. I’ll add an edit to this post later based on how things change throughout the week, but I wanted to make sure that you folks at ANET were given some constructive feedback for opening night
(edited by Roadbull.3457)