Guild Wars 2

I’ve only been playing GW 2 for a year now .so i missed all of that so i was wondering :

What happened to SOR to go from a top T1 server to dropping all the way to dead last in T8 ?

Obviously , the reason for that is that most WVW guilds left to go to greener pastures , bleeding the server out .

But what was the trigger that caused this massive exodus ?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-Death-of-Sanctum-of-Rall/first

so in short :

During the first tournament two 500 man WVW guilds disagreed on the match ( one wanted to throw the match or they would leave ,the other to win the match or they would leave )

They lose the match and one guild leaves .

Then afterwards the other one leaves as well .

Now lacking coverage , SOR kept losing matches causing them to sink down the ladder,and in turn, caused more and more guild to leave , until finally they where bled out at the very bottom .

Have i got this right ?

Server politics, guild egos

Thorgal.1296:

so in short :

During the first tournament two 500 man WVW guilds disagreed on the match ( one wanted to throw the match or they would leave ,the other to win the match or they would leave )

They lose the match and one guild leaves .

Then afterwards the other one leaves as well .

Now lacking coverage , SOR kept losing matches causing them to sink down the ladder,and in turn, caused more and more guild to leave , until finally they where bled out at the very bottom .

Have i got this right ?

In a word, NO.

What happened is that in Week 2 of Season 1, BG “encouraged” a very strong Russian guild (ZDS, if I recall correctly) to transfer over. Due to time zone differences, they engaged the weak, but up until then adequate, night crew and totally obliterated them, nightcapping SoR something fierce, throwing the server into a tailspin. There was no recovering from this, and most of the big WvW guilds on SoR, wanting to play on the “#1 server”, left for greener pastures.

This left the server severely weakened. As the glicko ratings don’t track very quickly, when Season 2 rolled around, SoR was placed in the Silver League when really they should have been in Bronze. Unsurprisingly, they were totally outmatched, losing every round and placing dead last. Also unsurprisingly, this lead to a further exodus of the remaining WvW guilds, and a general lack of enthusiasm for WvW on the server.

It has been a struggle, but lately SoR has seen something of a resurgence, but still lacks coverage and remains very vulnerable to nightcapping.

My own theory:

SoR imploded because there wasn’t a gradual transition to the current T1 attitude towards WvW. At that time the game was not as stale and people still cared about PPT and sever pride for the most part. BG and JQ could sustain PPT and thus the differences in opinion on PPT vs fights were not forced into focus like they were on SoR and were given more time to adapt.

During and after Season 1, for a variety of reasons, SoR could not compete PPT wise in a T1 matchup and win. They could maybe get second if they tried really hard and had help from another server, but had no real chance at first. Because of this, some on the server decided it was not worth all that effort for trying at PPT and not having a shot at second much less first. So these guilds decided to focus on fights instead. However at the time this was very frowned upon, as ppt is the whole “point” of WvW at that time. Player’s attitudes in T1 towards"fights only" was not as accepting as they are now. Which created drama between PPT vs fight guilds, but also between WvW guilds and PVE guilds + pugs.

Eventually, some fights guilds left to look for green pastures in T2, and their coverage fell even further. As SoR dropped out of T1 various guilds who had preferences for playing in T1, transferred back up. T2 at the time was more of a fights scene so the PPT oriented guilds moved back up to T1. The fights guilds had already left and were not interested in coming back to SoR to sustain T2 as it was still filled with many burnt bridges. Ocx/sea numbers have always been small relative to the total population and mainly concentrates in T1 so that there are people to play with and against; so those players moved back into T1 as well. SoR’s reputation as a dying server spread. Guilds started fleeing and SoR could not get more transfers in to arrest the fall. Once the snowball starts there was little chance of stopping it until they hit rock bottom.

A WvW server community is not a monolith, it is various guilds all with independent goals and agendas, playing for what is perceived to be a common purpose. Once that purpose no longer aligns with your guilds own interests, there is little reason to stay. Usually that perception changes slowly and both sides are allowed time to reexamine their own perspectives and slowly compromise to become more accepting of the other. However the pressures of failing expectations so hard in Season 1 really fractured SoRs WvW community where that gradual transition in attitudes was not possible.

As a former frequent commander from SoR, no one has really gotten the answer right from the way I saw it. It wasn’t ZDS, it wasn’t because of some disagreement about throwing the match, and it wasn’t about season 1. Although the first season was the final straw, the problem happened long before it. It’s the game.

SoR was a server that clawed and fought its way up to 1st. There were guilds on there that were there since the start of the game and there were few WvW guilds that left SoR before it fell apart. We all put so much effort into making the server connected and the best that when we got there there wasn’t much left.

For quite a while there we maintained 1st by a sizable margin. In fact, I remember a week where we had BG garrison fully upgraded and held for most of the week. But because of this, it gets boring. So for a lot of commanders GW2 as a whole became less and less appealing without something to work towards. Without that sense of reoccurring competition and because guilds were fairly close with one another, commanders, including myself, started drifting away from the game.

By the time Season 1 started rolling around the people that came back to the game were faced with a tournament that just exacerbated the issues with WvW. After Season 1 was over the people that were extremely dissatisfied with GW2 went away/took a break again and the ones that were in timezones that were uneventful, decided to go to other servers where there was more competition for their guilds.

Indie.4129:

Server politics, guild egos

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Indie.4129:

Server politics, guild egos

Very much this.

Season 1 basically killed SoR for various reasons. BG bought ZDs, which blobbed down everything in SoR’s least populated timezone and won all the fights against dem doors. IRON then left which left SoR without any EU whatsoever. Then the giant egos within TW exploded and SoR’s server leader Indo went MIA for at least a year, but before leaving, Indo and TW decided SoR was going to tank to T2, which started the mass exodus of guilds starting with SoR’s sea coverage. Green Arrow proceeded to drag the server to it’s ultimate death from there.

The death of SoR did teach me one thing though, servers mean absolutely nothing in this game and anyone delusional enough to cling onto server pride basically end up destroying WvW for everyone. IE, Believegate bullkitten over the past year and FA and what they have done to T2 lately.