Guild Wars 2

Ok, so I am very unhappy with the idea of rotating the links between worlds.
I want to build a relationship and I’m actually very happy with the relationship that’s already building between our worlds.

The responses to “the List of Upcoming Polls”-thread is very unsettling to me as most people are suggesting a timeframe to rotate instead voting against it altogether.

For that reason I want to suggest the following:

Please permanently merge the European servers Ring of Fire and Whiteside Ridge!

Rotations are necessary since they are based on a servers status within a tier. If a tier 1 server dropped to t2 it would eventually be paired with a t7 server for example instead of always being paired with a t8 server. Likewise if a t2 server rose to tier1 and settled eventually it would have to be paired with a t8 server.

I understand your point, I like being able to build a relationship with our friends on ET, and will be sad if/when they are unlinked from us. But rotations were always intended, the question currently being debated is how often which is tricky because you have to take into account servers rising and falling.

I also suggest permanently merging Ring of Fire and Whiteside Ridge. Both our servers seem to have a lot less people than the other links.

Our communities are cooperating really well and we have developed a good bond between us.

Merging the 2 servers permanently would not effect the current match up structure and would potentially allow for more equal links in future.

This seems to be the general opinion on our community forums.

You can’t be expected to fight with a server 1 week and against them a week after.
It just will not work.

Servers shouldn’t be considered as equal or try to make them as equal as possible.
I don’t mind being lower (or even lowest) tier. As long as I can have fun with the people that I invest my time in.

Links changing on some so far unknown schedule is part of world linking. That’s what 80+% of the folks who voted voted for…

@OP

Sorry to sound sarcastic, but we’re going to be Voting on the World Linking Schedule pretty soon…whether you like it or not.

The Majority in WvW Voted to permanently make World Linking a Feature.

All though…I feel that ANet shouldn’t have let this Vote happen….due to my feelings that it was their Fiduciary Duty to protect the Minority of players that feel like you do.

Also, when there’s clearly a better alternative solution that would probably resolve the problems that they’re attempting to fix by using World Linking…imho.

Yours truly,
Diku

Possible Better Long Term Solution – Google Search – Reboot Base Map Mechanic

Diku.2546:

@OP

Sorry to sound sarcastic, but we’re going to be Voting on the World Linking Schedule pretty soon…whether you like it or not.

The Majority in WvW Voted to permanently make World Linking a Feature.

All though…I feel that ANet shouldn’t have let this Vote happen….due to my feelings that it was their Fiduciary Duty to protect the Minority of players that feel like you do.

Also, when there’s clearly a better alternative solution that would probably resolve the problems that they’re attempting to fix by using World Linking…imho.

Yours truly,
Diku

---

Possible Better Long Term Solution – Google Search – Reboot Base Map Mechanic

Yeah, rotations will happen so just accept it peeps for the future health of wvw.

The bolded part- Duki my friend and future comrade in arms… But it was a majority vote and populations increased when linking beta hit… There is not some grand conspiracy.

We must now accept these weak tribes need to work together to oppose us. You and I must unite to rule and control these pathetic mortals and lay claim to all Tyria! Join with me mighty Diku, and we shall scorch the enemy lands together!

Yeah i would like to avoid the relinking, some servers are to small and should be merged.

@Swagger.1459, you may join or unity, temporaly… relink will put players that were used to your gameplay against you, i would like to call at least the relink a betrayal system.

Also feels a slugish fix lets see if this wont be worse.

@Swagger

Umm…I’d like to point out…we’ve never shared the same viewpoints when it comes to solving the following Chronic WvW Problems that I’ll mention here:

1) Reduce the direct impact of Server stacking to Match-Ups
2) Allow friends & family to play together from many different Worlds
3) Allow Off-peak capping, but let players to work out a solution themselves

Glad to see that we’re getting along, but would you stop associating yourself with me?

I do respect your opinion & enjoy seeing you argue your solution.

We’re polar opposites based on our observed past history & discussions…imho

I’d prefer that we keep our efforts separated, but focused to avoid stepping on each other’s toes…so to speak.

Really wish you well in your endeavors to convince ANet & the WvW Community.

Your effort alone shows your passion to have a Long Term healthy & viable WvW Game Mode is commendable…imho

Hushy.9530:

I also suggest permanently merging Ring of Fire and Whiteside Ridge. Both our servers seem to have a lot less people than the other links.

Our communities are cooperating really well and we have developed a good bond between us.

Merging the 2 servers permanently would not effect the current match up structure and would potentially allow for more equal links in future.

This seems to be the general opinion on our community forums.

I’m on RoF also and yes we have bonded well together and I would love us to be merged together

Thing is… RoF players love RoF and WSR players love WSR so I wonder what you’d do with the name?

the main problem is anet kept the initial links for too long… long enough to meet rly great ppl from the other server to a point where i am really sad that we will have to enemies in the future.
They should have rotated servers more often i feel… before people were able to actually make such good connections..
im gonna be pretty sad when they change links for sure..

The sole purpose of being able to link and unlink servers is to thwart stacking.

Jayne.9251:

The sole purpose of being able to link and unlink servers is to thwart stacking.

What? The purpose was to consolidate the spread thin WvW population into half as many matches.

People need to bugger off with the anti WvW population stuff. It is not fair when one server has more population when the other, but the solution isn’t to ruin WvW by spreading it back out again. The solution is to condense the remaining population into better matches.

Which was the goal of linking.

I also like the players and guilds we got linked with, but I do understand why its necessary to rotate, I just hope we don’t get paired up with the one NA server that is anti-link and things will be sour from the start and feel bad for any server that does get paired with them except YB. I think they’d deserve each other.

Schnook.5419:

I’m on RoF also and yes we have bonded well together and I would love us to be merged together

Thing is… RoF players love RoF and WSR players love WSR so I wonder what you’d do with the name?

I think naming shouldn’t be an issue and for identity’s sake we may need to hold on to what we’ve got.
On both our community’s forums there are discussion going and unlinking is not something anyone is looking forward to as far as I can tell.

However there are worries about server identity.
It has been suggested before to change that tags above our heads.
To make room there was a suggestion about truncated tags:
RoFWsR [WvW ranknr] [Guild tag]

For notifications about captures and such I believe there’s room enough to state on screen:
“Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge have captured Blue Lake”
or otherwise:
“RoF & WsR have captured Blue Lake”

They can start a poll to see if merging is acceptable.

As someone who is on WSR I would not like us to be merged permanently and I know a lot of other people who feel the same. This isn’t because we dislike RoF, we actually like fighting with them but we didn’t go through 3 mass losses of players, what seems to be years in bottom bronze and then build up to be able to compete in T7 to then lose our server.

Linking I can tolerate as we still have our server and the changing of links gives opportunities to play with other people, get bigger fights and hopefully smaller links for smaller fights.

BAITness.1083:

Jayne.9251:

The sole purpose of being able to link and unlink servers is to thwart stacking.

What? The purpose was to consolidate the spread thin WvW population into half as many matches.

People need to bugger off with the anti WvW population stuff. It is not fair when one server has more population when the other, but the solution isn’t to ruin WvW by spreading it back out again. The solution is to condense the remaining population into better matches.

Which was the goal of linking.

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

When they asked about world linking, they never asked which tiers should be linked. IMHO, TI and T2 should not be linked. 3 and below, Yea, help them out some with coverage.

Now the people have spoken, then rotating links is the only thing that makes sense to keep one server from over stacking.

As Vova points out correctly, this link has been on for quite some time.

Friendships have been established.
Recruitment might not have been standing still either and we are now at a point where unlinking us now is going break more then it could have fixed initially.

I understand that you apharma, I don’t want you to lose your server or community, I want to expand it actually.
I would actually opt for a clear merger where our names co-exist:
Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge.

Fazz Um.1537:

As Vova points out correctly, this link has been on for quite some time.

Friendships have been established.
Recruitment might not have been standing still either and we are now at a point where unlinking us now is going break more then it could have fixed initially.

I understand that you apharma, I don’t want you to lose your server or community, I want to expand it actually.
I would actually opt for a clear merger where our names co-exist:
Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge.

I don’t think you do understand, RoF has never been bottom, they have never been in a situation where at prime time there might be 7-8 people in the whole of EB. Where people have had time to take a camp, make 3 trips to build a super cata, take down both hills outer and inner, then had to solo the Lord with no-one coming to defend.

Where you could go a full hour without seeing anyone at all, where you have lost everything because it just happens that at that time the enemy server has 10 people and thus can take almost everything (before disablers) and you had to hope you could build enough super ACs in the keep to stop them PVDing it.

These are the bad times I talk of, these are the times that people on WSR, UW, FoW, RoS, Fort Ranik and a few others know of and have clawed themselves out of nothingness to make a difference. Where you have been bottom of bottom, there is no point in doing WvW as you actually get nothing from it and certainly when there was the whole hacker fiasco it was pointless doing anything.

That’s without mentioning that some people do not like how blobby these linkings have made WvW. A lot of people would welcome a good old RoF, WSR, Arbor type match up where there’s a lot less blobs and small roaming guilds like AoC, OTAN, CURE and TasH can actually do stuff without having 30 people respond by WPing in and training over them.

I have been at the bottom tier. Me and my guild were in RoS just months ago.
We took the well-advised decision to transfer up as the situation was unbearable.

Being on RoF before the links gave us the opportunity to get to know the people and I want nothing but build the community.

I fully agree with you about the fight-types, as [Much] was exactly the type of guild for ~15 man fights.
Although I miss those, I know that I have been in some really good fights in the past few weeks too!
Which is thanks to WSR and RoF working together.

I’m on SF, paired with NSP. I wasn’t thrilled about the pairs at first for a number of reasons. But, now, even after only a month, it feels natural.

The rumor was relink every 3 months, now I’m thinking, it took roughly 2 weeks for people from both sides to get comfortable and start building or trying to build a community together. Their enemies are our enemies, but their enemies may be our parent in 2 months. It’s not right man.

Jayne.9251:

BAITness.1083:

Jayne.9251:

The sole purpose of being able to link and unlink servers is to thwart stacking.

What? The purpose was to consolidate the spread thin WvW population into half as many matches.

People need to bugger off with the anti WvW population stuff. It is not fair when one server has more population when the other, but the solution isn’t to ruin WvW by spreading it back out again. The solution is to condense the remaining population into better matches.

Which was the goal of linking.

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

I think this unfairly demonize the players. I seen guilds try to balance out populations and fix timezones so they are not lopsided.

It is honestly like throwing a pebble to try to stop a tsunami. Usually what happens is that those guilds break.

But I guess no one ever gets credit for trying do they? They just get lumped into bandwagon players instead. Success is the only thing that matters.

apharma.3741:

Fazz Um.1537:

As Vova points out correctly, this link has been on for quite some time.

Friendships have been established.
Recruitment might not have been standing still either and we are now at a point where unlinking us now is going break more then it could have fixed initially.

I understand that you apharma, I don’t want you to lose your server or community, I want to expand it actually.
I would actually opt for a clear merger where our names co-exist:
Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge.

I don’t think you do understand, RoF has never been bottom, they have never been in a situation where at prime time there might be 7-8 people in the whole of EB. Where people have had time to take a camp, make 3 trips to build a super cata, take down both hills outer and inner, then had to solo the Lord with no-one coming to defend.

Where you could go a full hour without seeing anyone at all, where you have lost everything because it just happens that at that time the enemy server has 10 people and thus can take almost everything (before disablers) and you had to hope you could build enough super ACs in the keep to stop them PVDing it.

These are the bad times I talk of, these are the times that people on WSR, UW, FoW, RoS, Fort Ranik and a few others know of and have clawed themselves out of nothingness to make a difference. Where you have been bottom of bottom, there is no point in doing WvW as you actually get nothing from it and certainly when there was the whole hacker fiasco it was pointless doing anything.

That’s without mentioning that some people do not like how blobby these linkings have made WvW. A lot of people would welcome a good old RoF, WSR, Arbor type match up where there’s a lot less blobs and small roaming guilds like AoC, OTAN, CURE and TasH can actually do stuff without having 30 people respond by WPing in and training over them.

Actually RoF has been bottom and has spent most of its time around rank 19-21. I remember the days when we fought blacktide etc and were rank 22.

RoFs history has been pretty volatile through bronze/silver over the years with many guilds building up on our server then transferring up to higher ranks (im sure this can be said about most servers). We have never had a huge population, just a dedicated community who have work hard to try and push us forward and keep us as high as possible.

We have always had stints were our community pushes really hard and gets into silver league and starts to look competitive then we burn out and fall down the ranks again.

We have experienced the pain of losing 5-6 main guilds all at once a basically droping tiers while being unable to do anything about it.

I do feel strongly however that regardless of what happens Anet needs to unlink some of the more popular servers like Deso, Gandara, Drakkar.

Due to the way that server linking has worked servers like the ones i mentioned above that already had high population have received links where as servers like RoF and WSR which have pretty low populations have been left at the bottom of the pile merged together.

Currently from a RoF/WSR pov we have several days during the week where we have barely anyone that plays. While DL/MS & Viz/arbor still have 1-2 60+man blobs running round with several guilds as well.

They do not have to unlink it. They can choose to merge everything and lock all the really high populated servers while giving the low servers really attractive transfer cost, then unlock those really high populated servers when all those low servers catch up in population.

While I like being paired with Fort Aspenwood (I’m on Borlis Pass), I would not mind getting paired with another server. I think FA/BP have the best balance in NA right now, but I also don’t mind trolling, I mean meeting new people either.

The linking is a good way for ANet to determine population balance in WvW between 2 servers and link according to what is most balanced population wise. If people start stacking up BP, I don’t think we should continue to be linked with FA, I think we should get linked with a less populated server so that there is still balance in the world.

That means less chance of queues, better chance of meeting new friends and foes, keeps the game interesting because of the diversity.

Im semi against this idea too.
Throwing 2 servers together is disruptive – when we got linked and put in MU’s against unlinked servers our ability to give them a decent fight just took a nosedive for a couple of weeks (our score went up, but thats another story).
We’re very slowly beginning to get back to our previous level.
It just took a while to adjust to each other which is fine as a once off. It happening routinely would just get pretty tiresome fast. Honestly it was pretty frustrating initially, despite liking the folks we got linked with.
After the 5th or so move how bothered would you be trying to integrate the 2 communities?
EDIT:
Change it if necessary but it should be done with a degree of reluctance imo

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

… because of paired servers in WvW?

Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

… because of paired servers in WvW?

Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

No. Because guesting.

Still don’t understand why a wvw guild would be 50/50.

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

… because of paired servers in WvW?

Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

No. Because guesting.

Still don’t understand why a wvw guild would be 50/50.

You cant guest in wvw.

SkyShroud.2865:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

… because of paired servers in WvW?

Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

No. Because guesting.

Still don’t understand why a wvw guild would be 50/50.

You cant guest in wvw.

Exactly.

Jayne.9251:

SkyShroud.2865:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

Dawdler.8521:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population. It’s preventative because it was the No.1 complaint on the forums and nobody was willing to do anything to fix it ourselves.

But how do you define “top heavy” when it’s time to split apart guilds and commanders? Because WvW isnt as simple as numbers.

In particular, how would you deal with a scenario where a guild is spread 50/50 across both servers?

One does not simply “unlink” from friends.

Why on earth would a guild be 50/50 on two servers?

… because of paired servers in WvW?

Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

No. Because guesting.

Still don’t understand why a wvw guild would be 50/50.

You cant guest in wvw.

Exactly.

And to reiterate exactly what I said:
Imagine if Anet split up PvE today. No more megaservers. Everyone back to the server they are on with no option to guest. That wouldnt mess up any PvE guilds at all?

I posed a hypothetical scenario eqvivalent of a WvW split, modified for WvW rules, ie you cant guest.

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population.

Which fails miserably if you are only going to relink every 3 months.

I have to agree, they should have done the linking at weekly intervals, and not so basic, with T8 – T1, they should have a means to mix it up a bit, like a T7 and a T1, and a T2 and T8, server joining.

Just to keep things lively. But it should have at least, been randomized every week. When things settle, it feels like a straight up merger, and that’s no fun.

I have friends that came to our paired server because the server im on is full and if they rotate the pairing then I lose some friends that I WvW with so please don’t rotate pairing

zinkz.7045:

Jayne.9251:

If one pairing gets too top-heavy, they can simply unlink and relink to a lower population.

Which fails miserably if you are only going to relink every 3 months.

Eh they said they would look at the rotation time in an upcoming poll. I guess we’ll have to see.

Linking is a powerful tool and can be used for a lot of good. For example, balancing worlds within a tier with worlds with different coverages has great potential.

Relinking is necessary, because things often change and one server can simply grow / shrink too much and becomes unable to compete. It adds another balancing to tier system, which isn’t enough by far.

Also relinking is good, since it discourages t1 stacking (and it will happen around t1 only, since the links there have the greatest differences in population). If you’d wanted to keep stacking on BG for example, you’d have to pay 800 gems every 3 months to hop on the new linked world, leaving the old in the dust yet again (which is bad as well, actually, this time for ET).

It can also balance bad tiers (t1 NA), since you can link a more populated world with the t1 competition lagging behind (BG has around double YB’s score). On t1 there’s no way of balancing with tiers alone any further. Unless you want to make a BG tier and let them compete among themselves :P

I’d defend longer periods of linking, since you can take more statistical data (and I sincerely hope ANet does) about the individual worlds.

There’s the amount of core wvw players in a world who will always turn up no matter what (not always the same people but the approximate number) then there’s the people who bloat the world during interesting / easy matchups.

The times / time zones when these players appear and what they focus on doing (blobbing, hiding behind sieged walls, havoking).

With such data, ANet can find better links. And should really focus on balancing tiers before trying to make all links / tiers equal.

I think it would be more fun if havok guilds actually meet each other in their preferred timezones, same would go with medium-sized guilds, or even blobs.

Lol. You have to rotate the links. Populations are way out of balance as it is. And with transfers it gets only worse.

Until you stop the lemmings from stacking servers (never gonna happen), you have to rotate links to get any sort of balance.

If they penalized lemmings and had an actual outnumbered buff that worked, none of this would be necessary.

Grim West.3194:

Lol. You have to rotate the links. Populations are way out of balance as it is. And with transfers it gets only worse.

Until you stop the lemmings from stacking servers (never gonna happen), you have to rotate links to get any sort of balance.

If they penalized lemmings and had an actual outnumbered buff that worked, none of this would be necessary.

People who paid to stack once will pay to stack again and again and again. If the relinking period is 3 months or longer, then relinking will not have a prayer of working to balance out populations.

Enough people are willing to switch for easy mode blob wins that opening up overstacked servers to joiners (via server linking) can only create more problems than it solves.

$7 for 3 months of easy wins is too cheap.

Hushy.9530:

apharma.3741:

Fazz Um.1537:

As Vova points out correctly, this link has been on for quite some time.

Friendships have been established.
Recruitment might not have been standing still either and we are now at a point where unlinking us now is going break more then it could have fixed initially.

I understand that you apharma, I don’t want you to lose your server or community, I want to expand it actually.
I would actually opt for a clear merger where our names co-exist:
Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge.

I don’t think you do understand, RoF has never been bottom, they have never been in a situation where at prime time there might be 7-8 people in the whole of EB. Where people have had time to take a camp, make 3 trips to build a super cata, take down both hills outer and inner, then had to solo the Lord with no-one coming to defend.

Where you could go a full hour without seeing anyone at all, where you have lost everything because it just happens that at that time the enemy server has 10 people and thus can take almost everything (before disablers) and you had to hope you could build enough super ACs in the keep to stop them PVDing it.

These are the bad times I talk of, these are the times that people on WSR, UW, FoW, RoS, Fort Ranik and a few others know of and have clawed themselves out of nothingness to make a difference. Where you have been bottom of bottom, there is no point in doing WvW as you actually get nothing from it and certainly when there was the whole hacker fiasco it was pointless doing anything.

That’s without mentioning that some people do not like how blobby these linkings have made WvW. A lot of people would welcome a good old RoF, WSR, Arbor type match up where there’s a lot less blobs and small roaming guilds like AoC, OTAN, CURE and TasH can actually do stuff without having 30 people respond by WPing in and training over them.

Actually RoF has been bottom and has spent most of its time around rank 19-21. I remember the days when we fought blacktide etc and were rank 22.

RoFs history has been pretty volatile through bronze/silver over the years with many guilds building up on our server then transferring up to higher ranks (im sure this can be said about most servers). We have never had a huge population, just a dedicated community who have work hard to try and push us forward and keep us as high as possible.

We have always had stints were our community pushes really hard and gets into silver league and starts to look competitive then we burn out and fall down the ranks again.

We have experienced the pain of losing 5-6 main guilds all at once a basically droping tiers while being unable to do anything about it.

I do feel strongly however that regardless of what happens Anet needs to unlink some of the more popular servers like Deso, Gandara, Drakkar.

Due to the way that server linking has worked servers like the ones i mentioned above that already had high population have received links where as servers like RoF and WSR which have pretty low populations have been left at the bottom of the pile merged together.

Currently from a RoF/WSR pov we have several days during the week where we have barely anyone that plays. While DL/MS & Viz/arbor still have 1-2 60+man blobs running round with several guilds as well.

That’s not bottom. Try being stuck in T9 and you’ll understand T7 isn’t all that bad… a MU or 2 in T8sucks but it isn’t the bottom

It is a little bit late to work this in right now, but if each server was much smaller, you could have matched together multiple ones easier to try to create even match-up’s.

Still has some problems, but if we had something like 30 servers, all with t4-t5 size populations (pop cap), they could throw together 2-3-4 different servers into a single pairing. Would have made it much easier to match different sizes of servers together, and negating the stacking.

Smaller pop-cap per server, each side being 2-4 servers together depending on size, so a single server couldn’t stack high enough to really affect the game alone. And if 2 servers gets stacked high, they could be playing against 4 enemy servers on each of the other sides. (2 vs 4 vs 4).

But as said, too late now, unless they wanted to blow up all servers and create new ones.

We haven’t had a single rotation yet, which is a bit of a problem because we can’t tell how the long-term effects of world linking will play out until we do.

In theory players might not be so inclined to bandwagon to linked servers when they’ll have to shift every three months, but when the transfer fee is that low they might just do it anyway.

Moving NA T8 server links to the T4+5 group (or establishing a separate T5) might be the way to go.

Ben K.6238:

We haven’t had a single rotation yet, which is a bit of a problem because we can’t tell how the long-term effects of world linking will play out until we do.

In theory players might not be so inclined to bandwagon to linked servers when they’ll have to shift every three months, but when the transfer fee is that low they might just do it anyway.

Moving NA T8 server links to the T4+5 group (or establishing a separate T5) might be the way to go.

T1 servers should not have gotten link partners. They were adequately populated.

Links should not have proceeded unchanged after players transferred using the information in leaked (accurate) pre-patch info.

ANet surely has internal data that would allow them to accurately gauge and create links based on population and participation rather than on current-Glicko-rating. That was a major mistake in several ways.

• It was well known that unpopular changes had suppressed WvW participation.
• It was reasonable to expect that players would return to WvW in light of improvements to rewards and gameplay.
• There was a set of high-profile and well known (among WvW players) guild moves immediately before server links were established.

It would have been possible to determine likely participation/population numbers using data on ANet’s systems. My first cut would have been:

• Select the sum of WvW rank-up events across all players who have actively played WvW in the last 6 months, for rank-ups in the last 12 months, grouped by that account’s current server.

You could refine that by futzing with the date thresholds and weighting more-recent activity more heavily, but I think that would determine an approximate coverage/activity metric for each server, it would account for players taking a moderate-length break (who may return) and would account for accounts that have moved servers.

I have doubts that world-linking is a viable solution to WvW problems, but I also believe it can be done much better, if ANet chooses to learn from the shortcomings of this attempt.

The whole point of links is to smooth out population imbalance and put an end to bandwagoning creating a majority of ghost town servers.

Rotating those links is the only way either of those goals can actually be accomplished. If you permanently link servers, you’re going to end up with the same exact problem we had before world links. A handful of servers that are active, and a vast majority that never get a chance to get new members because everyone just transfers to the active ones.

Rotating links are the best option simply because they make server transfers a waste of time and money, and encourage new players to support the server they are on more than encourage them to just transfer to the winning team. This means more populated matches across the board, less pvdoor, and less bandwagoning.

I’m from Whiteside Ridge. I agree with Fazz Um, Hushy and Schnook.

• We dont want all time blob fights. We are a PPT / roaming server.

The times with small groups is past That will be no longer with the linking. RoF is shut the weakest server of the strong and we’re on bottom. When a new linking are, then we will link with are stronger server ( I hope not) and thatwill happen:

More Queues and Blobs I dont wanna linking with higth T server as deso / gandara / SFR / pikes etc. Then even more blobs … I dont like full maps or blob fighting. Comfortable to make PPT, this is my world.

• We are in the last Tier, we do not care. As long as I can have fun with the people I did invest my time in.
• We write together in both our forums, we know us well.
• We cant have 3 months a relationship and then are again as enemies. They know us and we them. How does it work?

Please permanently linking (not merge yet) the EU servers

• Ring of Fire & Whiteside Ridge

Allthough I personally find server pride and having a constant core of people you play with important, I think that a lot of problems of server linking will not manifest ingame but rather outgame. Most servers have their own ts, some even have community forums and server meetings. It’s already been a pain in the behind to get people to join those before world linking, how bad will it become if servers get relinked on a monthly basis? How many ts spys will there be? What will reset be like if you first have to verify all the new people before you can actually start zerging?