Guild Wars 2

The WvW populations did increase with the new reward system but the fundamental population issue still doesn’t change. The WvW populations is still unbalance.

We now have numerous servers full but how many of those full servers are truly equal to each other? Many are not.

For those who are new to WvW or the game itself, server status is calculated purely for WvW and not server as a whole. That is to say as long the algorithm determine that the wvw population for that server reach a certain threshold, it will make it full. This threshold is a fixed value, exceeding it a bit or exceeding it by large makes no different for the system.

One major flaw in this whole design is that it exclude potential population. This potential population is base on how big the server actually is as everyone has to choose a server right at the start. This also include accounts that went inactive and then return to the game.

Many servers went full after patch, reaching that threshold but it doesn’t necessary means that every server has the same base population because the algorithm doesn’t determine that. We currently facing the issue that some full servers are noticeably bigger than other full servers. Not only that, servers with high base population can continue to thrive with their untapped populations while servers with low base population will have their life slowly drained away, those who remembered the old DH and DB full status issue, those are fine examples.

WvW devs cannot keep ignoring the fundamental population problem. WvW devs should just blow everything up if unable to find any solution for it.

Ok, that’s a real problem, now let’s see you try and fix it.

Blowing everything up isn’t going to solve anything. Even if you make the servers even now, that potential population will still be lurking. Even if you force people who return in the future to disperse evenly, people playing now will quit/return and the cycle will begin anew.

It’s not a solvable problem. The only hope is to mitigate it.

Sviel.7493:

Ok, that’s a real problem, now let’s see you try and fix it.

Blowing everything up isn’t going to solve anything. Even if you make the servers even now, that potential population will still be lurking. Even if you force people who return in the future to disperse evenly, people playing now will quit/return and the cycle will begin anew.

It’s not a solvable problem. The only hope is to mitigate it.

There is a fix, the battlegroup proposal or some other alliance system.

Sviel.7493:

Ok, that’s a real problem, now let’s see you try and fix it.

Blowing everything up isn’t going to solve anything. Even if you make the servers even now, that potential population will still be lurking. Even if you force people who return in the future to disperse evenly, people playing now will quit/return and the cycle will begin anew.

It’s not a solvable problem. The only hope is to mitigate it.

When we blow something up, of course we not gonna remake the same system again, that’s a stupid thing to do.

Blowing up and devise a system of rules to handle the issues you know will happen is much easier than trying to solve issues that already happened.

Also, since you are talking about mitigating it, can you share with us how are you gonna mitigate it with the current systems?

If you’re gunning for a battlegroup or alliance system, just say so. Then I know better than to try and get details out of you. There’s a reason Anet decided against doing those—they work out great for the big guilds, but are much worse for pugs and most small guilds. Since most of their WvW players fall into the latter group, it makes no sense to switch.

As for mitigation, Skirmishes are an example of an update that aimed to reduce the effects of population imbalance. They didn’t solve the whole thing, but they did make a tangible difference.

Player imbalance is mainly driven by players jumping to the next fotm server. Only way to stop it is to change transfering with some kind of penalties but they make a good chunk of money of it, so i doubt anything will happen.

I agree with you. WvW is so unbalanced. There are some servers with zombies who plays 24/7. They aint even blink. Please ANet fix this. We love WvW but in a fair way.

As stated above, the only way to do this would be to blow up the servers and upon re-forming put severe limits to total player numbers while at the same time completely rework transfer system.

But this will never happen due to the amount of “friends” and “brothers uncles sisters cousins” on BG and alike.

The logic behind linkings, is so bad..

You will never get population balance/solve coverage in any game match that is 24/7.

There are reasons you don’t see pvp type games exceed 30 minutes…in other words concern for burn out or limited time for players is why those games tend to choose 15-30 minutes play sessions.

Sviel.7493:

If you’re gunning for a battlegroup or alliance system, just say so. Then I know better than to try and get details out of you. There’s a reason Anet decided against doing those—they work out great for the big guilds, but are much worse for pugs and most small guilds. Since most of their WvW players fall into the latter group, it makes no sense to switch.

As for mitigation, Skirmishes are an example of an update that aimed to reduce the effects of population imbalance. They didn’t solve the whole thing, but they did make a tangible difference.

No, I am not talking about battlegroup but regardless, those are one of the suggestions.

So that’s what you mean by mitigation but I see that as score balancing and score balancing doesn’t improve gameplay, gameplay is what keeps players playing.

Devs too had thought of blowing it all up initially but fear of backlash stops them from doing it, adapting a different approach but those approaches have proven to be ineffective.

I posted a lot of suggestions but all suggestions require one thing, a complete reset of WvW because it is simply impossible to work with what we have now.

I will repost the same suggestions I have made in the past, other than battlegroup, devs can set up new automate rules to govern WvW which devs already thought of having but didn’t go into details of it since they didn’t chose the blow up approach.

First, cutting down the number of servers by half. Logic behind it is simple, we don’t have population to fill that many servers.

Second, dynamic cap instead of fixed cap. This will inherently solve any population imbalance between servers and easily adapt to explosive population due to events or when game shrinks. The dynamic cap simply take reference from servers and make sure each servers gap in population is not too wide, if it is too wide, you close off the top populated server until that gap is lessen.

Third, servers no longer mandatory, the word itself is misleading due to the existence of megaserver. Choosing server at start too is meaningless due to megaserver. World should rename to a term that people can relate to like fraction or legion. The benefit of not making servers mandatory is to gain better idea of the wvw pop because there are a lot of people that never ever step into wvw. Even if there are people that use wvw for banks or merchant, we can still use it to determine potential pop and use that as a reference to determine server pop. Another benefit to this is guilds get to recruit easily and new players get to join any guilds (they enjoyed) of any fraction before stepping into it.

Fourth, purge inactive accounts. Players do go inactive so we do need to purge those accounts every so often, removing them from the fractions. A month will be too fast, half a year would be too long, 3 months sounds alright. The main idea is to prevent potential populations to explode due to returning players. Also, usually we don’t calculate inactive accounts into wvw pop, then why keep inactive accounts in the server then? Some people may argue it hurts anet wallet but honestly speaking, business talks about retaining customers as well. Players that returns to game will found out that they have to pay gems to switch server to join their new friends, they will be disappointed. But if players found out that they can choose new server as long it isn’t full after returning to the game, I am sure they will be happy and if they play long enough, they may buy and spend gems for other things. Also, I never understand why people like to talk like they work for anet, anet earns or not is not our concern, our concern is to make sure the game is fun.

Fifth. This suggestion actually is costly for game dev to adapt but is still suggestion. We can log player’s play time and therefore their time slice. We can then adapt time slice into transfer system such that if that server require people for a specific time slice, the players that tagged with that time slice will be allow to transfer there, even for free. But, if the time slice is packed then players tagged for that will be prohibited from joining. Initially, everyone will not have time slice thus the normal pop cap will kicks in. This time slice is suppose to be built over a period time, to restrict players transfer, preventing players to overstack a server. Likewise, will need a separate datalog for time slice pop.

Anet… Why don’t you open 1 or 2 more matchup trio. Less linked servers ?
Why we should wait for queue ?
I transfered lower queue server and now i relinked higher one.
This is complete kitten.