Guild Wars 2

Here’s a novel idea that fits right in with Anet’s hope that players will filter down from the top servers to lower ranked servers. The queues simply aren’t good enough to fix this problem since people are willing to wait around for hours to get into WvW.

Base a zone’s population cap on its current population.

These numbers are just an example (the actual variables could be tweaked a bit, but you’ll get the gist of what I’m proposing):

The starting cap is 10 players per server per zone. 2 of the 3 participating servers both need to reach that 10 player cap in the borderland/EB before the zone cap increases to 20 players. With that new cap, 2 of the 3 servers need to have 20 players online in the zone before the cap increases to 30 players per server.

If players signed off to go to work, sleep, etc. nobody currently in the WvW zone would get kicked out, but the cap could drop, and other players would be stuck in queue longer.

Overnight, Arenanet could solve the problem of night capping, and this change might help persuade off-hour players (i.e. Aussies on NA servers) to transfer to other servers. Remember, MOST players aren’t hardcore. They’re casual and just here to have fun, and I think this is a good compromise.

If you can articulate why having off-hour players congregate on a single server and essentially ruin WvW is a good idea, not only for the game’s current “fun factor” but also the long-term health of the WvW community, I’ll never offer up any other WvW suggestions again.

One thing’s pretty clear though. Arenanet needs to do something and fast before players grow too demoralized.

This is a global game. When you think you are ‘winning’ before you go to bed. They are being ‘nightcapped’ by you.

Exactly. This would ensure that no one server would be able to field significantly more players than the other two at any given time and would keep us NA players from “night capping” the Aussies. You just made a very good point! Balanced populations are very important – I agree.

You are agreeing with yourself, as I did not say that.

You just pointed out why it’s important to have stable 24/7 server populations to prevent this very pressing issue of nightcapping, unless you LIKE the idea of nightcapping – i.e. taking all the keeps with no opposition. But hey, you’re on HoD, so it probably is the latter.

I see some flaws to the idea, but its still a good start either way. Just reduce the current cap to 100 per world or so, only have extra people be able to enter if each server has people in queue.

In all honesty though you realize just fixing the outmanned buff to be useful and be scaled toward the amount of people you’re outmanned by would fix the nightcapping problem easier, and probably be more effective.

Setch,

Strawman argument is strawman; offtime players don’t congregate on servers with only offtime players, they congregate on servers with a huge primetime playerbase. There’s no ‘nightcapping’ the Australians, HoD has full primetime too.

Fact of the matter, that except for the one lucky server that has a significant offtime playerbase, WvWvW is being ruined for the majority in order to cater to the minority.

Forcing region-bound servers is the only acceptable solution, other than population limits which would ruin everyone’s fun, offtimers never getting in, primetimers having even longer queues if one team decides to boycott the game due to losing, planetary allignment or synchronized menstrual cycles.

It’s pretty easy to sum up. SBI is very competitive with HoD during primetime hours. Everything falls apart during the off hours because it seems all of the oceanic players are on HoD. We primetime players can’t do ANYTHING to convince the oceanic players to transfer to our servers, so we’re stuck losing, even though we put up a very strong fight the rest of the time. Anyone who thinks that makes for fun WvW is incredibly dumb. Tell me I’m wrong.

You are not wrong. The solution presented by OP would cause more issues then it would fix imo.

As Ramanthes said locking servers by Region is the only acceptable solution to fix the issue of some servers having Oceanic players and not others.

The only issue I could see with Region locking is some North American guilds now have Oceanic players in them to help with the night capping. So this would cause an issue now with that aspect.

“You are not wrong. The solution presented by OP would cause more issues then it would fix imo.”

Why? And who isn’t wrong about what?

Putting in rotating caps would encourage oceanic and EU players/guilds to transfer over to lower pop servers, which is one of Arenanet’s stated goals for WvW.

Not going to happen.

Imagine if this was put in place. SoS has a large Oceanic player base, and a very small NA turnout. So servers playing SoS would not be able to put anyone into WvW during NA primetime.

But maybe that might encourage NA guilds to move to SoS – you’re all more than welcome

No. If you cannot field the players to defend against the enemy, tough luck. Why should I be prevented from joining WvW because my enemy refuses to?

Not the first thread about this bullkitten and it’s not gonna happen.

Well, I hope you guys are ready for WvW participation to drop off the deep end if nothing gets changed.

Saerith.2015:

Well, I hope you guys are ready for WvW participation to drop off the deep end if nothing gets changed.

And participation would drop even more if we are further limited in joining because the losing server don’t want to fight in a given zone. Hell, this could even be abused by the winning side by getting everyone out of the zone while they hold everything, thus preventing the enemy from taking anything (keep 5 people in the zone and they can get to any tower or keep and defend it long before the 10 enemies can take it down). It would also prevent the 2nd team from recapping once the losing side gives up.

All in all this is a horrible idea and the devs would be morons to even consider it.

Wow, you clearly didn’t read the idea AT ALL. Nobody would be kicked out when the cap dropped, and it’s based on 2 out of the 3 servers, not 3 of the 3 servers. If you’re going to comment on the merits of an idea, maybe you should read it first before posting some gut reaction to it.

one possible solution is by limiting the number of players from each NA, EU, Africa and Asia/Oceanic a server can have…..

A-Net can code this i’m sure….. they have the stats to play around…

Right now they are not discouraging people from flocking to larger servers, thus making the problem even worse. That needs to be the first step. Next, some sort of steps need to be taking to even out the servers. Whether it is a population cap, out-manned bonus, objective locks during off hours, or even some sort of scoring bonus for lower population servers is up to Anet.

WvWvW is the biggest draw of GW2. Right now it is flawed and a lot of people are being discouraged. People are being punished just because they did exaclty what Anet asked and picked less populated servers. Now, their server can’t compete in WvWvW just because the more populated servers can out-man them. That just isn’t right or fair. If it is, why not just have 3 servers and ensure there is a 24 hour queue times.

I really hope Anet addresses this problem quickly. I hate to see such a great MMO die because they took to long to address a game breaking design flaw.

Ljiona.9142:

WvWvW is the biggest draw of GW2.

Just to nitpick (sorry!), this actually isn’t true. ANet’s own stats state that there is ~30% participation in WvWvW. So while I’m sure its the biggest draw for some, its not for the majority.