Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m Prae Tor, leader of RED, which is one of the largest and longest-lasting guilds on Devona’s Rest.

Prior to WvW Season 1, we had a mass exodus of players from DR to better-performing servers. Post Season 1, we are having another. “Mass”, of course, is relative, and I am speaking in terms of the active WvW population on Devona’s Rest.

I understand that there will always be people and guilds transferring servers. However, I think that the lack of balance in WvW for situations like ours is a solvable problem and would increase the overall health of servers at the low-end of WvW. I feel that the game should provide mechanisms to enable the lower-populated servers a means to seriously compete against servers with significantly higher WvW populations.

With that topic in mind, I have some questions for my fellow WvWers (and of course, ArenaNet employees):

• Should there be gameplay adjustments to compensate for population difference?
• Should populations be normalized across servers?
• Do you think that there is a server-health problem for worlds performing poorly in WvW?

While I do want to speculate on a possible mechanism for balancing gameplay, the discussion of if there is an issue is presently more important.

Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.
- Prae Tor, red.guild.com

Well buddy thats how ET felt for about 5months? Constant last place steamroll lol. Coverage wins all, so until there is a way for wvw population to become equal around the clock all fights are gonna be relatively uneven as one server will dominate other servers. Honestly imo Anet should just get rid of the ranking system. Cause why does everyone want to stack T1? Well to win of course (and possible gold lures but thats another issue) So if there is no such thing as winning and ranking population might balance out. So until reward systems and such are changed ppl will constantly stack winning servers for free loot bags and such. And there is always the comfort of stomping a 10man zerg with you 50man zerg.

Looking at the population on Devonas Rest, the exodus prior to season one and the current departing migration of WvW focused players I think it is obvious there is a population problem on the lower tier servers. The CDI on world population discussed a wide variety of perspectives on that problem. The most significant point relative to the lower tiered servers is a clear split between WvW population and PVE population. Without that clear separation there isn’t an accurate portrayal of what is happening on the battlefield. I think that Anet is running the population numbers without culling the inactive players off the roster like a large guild that has great numbers but 50% ghosts and a core of 20% active players.
So knowing it is unlikely to be addressed by Anet as the direct movement of players would restrict freedom to play we have to deal with it ourselves. We build our guilds, grow them, recruit from WvW, PVE and off server. Then after all of that work people decide it is time to move on to a different server and our population is decimated again. Low tier servers have become like a farm league for mid tier servers. We don’t have the lag or the queues of top tier servers but we also don’t have the coverage ability. So once a solid team is established they are always in the rotation, always on the front lines. What I have experienced on a lower tier server you have to build the team while staying in the fight and the results of transition and growth are a dedicated team that has value to a higher tier server and is then coaxed into moving on.

Force people to play on lower pop servers when they try to enter a map that’s queued!
INC 500 more players to DR!

Problem solved. UR WELCOME

Yes it is a problem, imo.

However, I think it will always be a problem no matter how you try to fix it. They could try to employ some sort of scaling effect much like in pve when an event scales based upon the number of players involved, but the imbalances of classes played will most likely be greatly amplified by this effect and cause more problems. If they limit server populations, then how will they solve the problem of who goes where and how could they justify forcing a player to move from their server?

So yeah it is a problem. I even transferred from my server after season one ended because the server has a low overall population to begin with but everyone was in wvw all the time. The whole server has ADD and only has enough people to do whatever is new and shiny at the moment. Yeah we got first in Bronze but we couldn’t do anything else and constantly had to guest to other servers to do other things. I like wvw, but I got tired of having to guest elsewhere all the time for other things besides wvw.

I think the problem is that you’re still trying to do WvW on a low pop server. You’re like the old man screaming ’get off my lawn’, times have changed. Move up!

Why should a server be handicapped just because they have more wvw focused players?

they had a discussion on this i think, and one thing to consider, is they cant really regulate WvW population, they cant make people log into WvW, even if server populations are balanced, no guarantee those people will be WvWers, also some times Old WvWer quit, and new people start. I dont think that can solve things.

I suggest weight classes for average WvW population per week, if you start to get beefy, you fight beefier opponents.

WvWvW and PvE populations should be decoupled and there should be incentives to transfer to lower-ranking servers – I hope that’s what ANET’s doing with the data collected in S1.
As for people leaving servers because of performance – I think that’s mainly a community problem.
It might be harder on lower-ranking servers but we survive because we stick together: server forums, a public mumble server where guilds and pug-rallybait live together in harmony making fun of / supporting each other.

The people who weren’t happy about us deciding to tryhard for gold league didn’t transfer off but “took some time off” and are back now.

The game meta in WvW is ment to be play 24/7. There is no way to solve this unless they want to screw over all the offpeak countries. Not only NA that play this game, and they want their right to be important. Sadly, their population (SEA/EU/Oceanic) is not enough to fill the gap for all the server. NA servers have the same problem as EU servers, i do also think that EU got the worse effect of it as the asian/NA population there is totally close to none existence.

My only suggestion for them is to merge the server. Unless you guys can think of a better solution.

Yes I do believe there should be adjustments to the game, and we should all no longer look to balancing the population because that will never happen. No matter how many times you try to promote low fee or free transfers, population and coverage is something no one has control over. The game mechanics need to be changed to compensate for this, that’s if Arenanet really wants this to be competitive, and I’m assuming they do if they keep doing wvw seasons.

I already made a suggestion thread about it but doesn’t look like people were interested, just another suggestion lost in the forum jungle.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/WvW-pop-and-points-from-a-different-angle/first#post3303258

:/ population and servers should really be delinked from each other and wvw needs to be redone…I say that because Im tired of these unbalanced matches a net need to implement more help to servers that are just ran over like a speed bump No one should be able to get 600+ PP points via the out maned buffed is buffed when they are winning that badly. Im tired of standing at the spawn area looking at a sea of red heck even when we are winning that bad and we have been for a few weeks in a row when you own all four maps there still nothing to do so you “let” them take stuff just so you can take it back what kind of fighting is that…50:1 man power ratio’s were they insta build 15+ omega’s and run over you like a speed bump. But yes something needs to be done, Disconnect wvw from servers and let the player pick or something, and moving servers to the winning one is not the answer anyway I have my own Guild only 2 people in it we have 2 tier 3 and 2 tier 4 upgrades you know how long that took to get with 2 people? Guild upgrades do not transfer so I’m stuck..but I don’t do bandwagon jumping as what’s the hot server now might be the next T8 server tomorrow. It’s a Game and at some point game mechanic’s itself must balance this. doing 4 servers instead of 3 or something 1 vs 1 variation ‘s, something? anything? or Maybe make wvw more like NASCAR most of the car’s are the same that representing man power it’s the skill that wins you the victory.

Yawgmoth.1230:

• Should there be gameplay adjustments to compensate for population difference?

Of course this.
How the Fur can they able 100 vs 10 matches? That doesnt make any Frilling sense.
Thats cause anet doesnt Fluxpavilionin cares.

It is normalized, it is normalized between all wvw servers. Now, if you don’t have the population to fill a wvw que, that’s a different story. Perhaps Anet could adjust the WvW population cap lower in the lower populated tier servers to “balance” things out?

I think it’s the 24/7 coverage requirement that causes most performance imbalance.
Time-sliced matches https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Night-protection-1/3281118 that allow less populated servers to focus on one of the smaller (8h per day instead of 24) time-sliced matches would help to restore competition a lot.

As long as we have to play Coverage-Wars, where quality during prime-time doesn’t matter compared to hours of PvD in off-time, size of WW-population is the decisive factor and concentration onto a few servers will continue.

I keep saying the issue is incentive. For the league the incentive was to stack a winning server for better rewards that turned out to be lousy anyways. There should be some incentive to transfer to a lower pop server such as free or extremely cheap transfer cost. As et and ar have seemed to grow a little and dr has died more we are now the lowest wvw population server on na. Yet its still 1k gems to transfer here. We are considered high population yet there is no high population anywhere. Not in pvp not in pve not in wvw.

Peetee.9406:

I think the problem is that you’re still trying to do WvW on a low pop server. You’re like the old man screaming ‘get off my lawn’, times have changed. Move up!

Don’t be part of the problem. Smarten up.

Unless you’re the top server, there’s always servers that have smaller population. If you don’t want the game dying a server at a time, WvW needs to be fun on every server.

It is not useful to say things like, “ArenaNet doesn’t care.” ArenaNet builds software, which takes time. They have finite resources and constantly must decide what is important to them. What is important to you as a singular player may be in conflict with their decisions.

Having said that, the purpose of this thread is to bring this concern into ArenaNet’s eyes. By voicing your opinion on the questions I posed, there is a greater chance that ArenaNet will decide that addressing this issue is important.

I avoided speculating on possible solutions in the original post as I didn’t want this thread to discuss the merits of such speculation, but it’s too fun a topic to avoid. In my opinion, this problem could be best solved by decoupling WvW from a player’s home world.

Players could register to participate in whatever world they please. Registrations would be locked for the WvW seasons (excluding new accounts). During the off-season, a registration would last until the next reset. I think this is awesome because it would provide a period of time where guilds and players could rub elbows with strangers during WvW. It would also allow ArenaNet to enforce registration policies that encourage better distribution of WvW policies.

WvW been plagued by this problem for a while hence why buying guilds became a thing during the season; the propositions been made many times as well, including rework of outmanned buff, rewards, defense buff etc.

i don’t think anything will be done any time soon though

When EOTM goes live, WvW may become empty on most worlds.
A few competitive worlds play WvW. The rest goes to these worlds or for EOTM for fights.

Maybe it’s better to do something before WvW dies out on several worlds, than having to reannimate worlds afterwards.

Being one who used to be on DR and has transferred over to FC. I feel you there. I left the DR server due to after the mass exodus of many of our WvW guilds DR became a massive PvE server. It is hard to manage this on a server and get people interested in the PvP and WvW side of things. But i have notice a bunch of changes on the lower servers. Look at AR they where at the bottom of servers for a while and now are doing well again at the end of season 1, ET had the same problem. I have faith that DR will once again go back to being a decent force in WvW.

I don’t think there is anything that Anet can do about making the servers fair cause people will go play where they will. I think as server communities its our job to promote our servers and try to get people to notice us and see that we have a chance. I still dont understand how so many can play on the super populated servers since when i quest over there to do some of my PvE stuff i constantly hear they Crying about WvW ques on their server, if those people want to do more WvW then look at the lower servers and come down here and bring your friends.

Since I myself have moved to FC i found a few great guilds to run with or be part of that are PvX and get good fights in the WvW that aren’t massive zergs. Only thing i wished is that Anet could bring something in to help the small servers against the mass zergs, its a little hard to fight and keep WvW moral up when every time you go into WvW there is a 80+ zerg running around on every map against maybe 20 man zerg due to populations.

just wanting to know has there been a fix made for this yet what did they decide and when will they be doing it if there is one.

i feel you…. CD has undergone 5 meltdown…. not many WvW focused guild left… people gave up too easily….

Deli.1302:

Why should a server be handicapped just because they have more wvw focused players?

Why should a server be rewarded for doing nothing more than smashing their faces against a gate?

That’s the reality of GW2 WvW. Also why I’m glad the Season 1 rewards were complete and utter garbage. Matchup outcome is 100% determined by coverage. If you can’t put up similar coverage to the opposing servers, you’re fighting a losing battle. With all of the awful siege in this game, it also means that your ability to re-capture is already severely handicapped. WvW is supposed to be strategic, and yet throwing bodies at doors during off-hours and in unmanned borderlands is rewarded above all else.

It’s going to take a lot of difficult and risky work to succesfully change WVW away from the current meta of population dominating over skill.

In the meantime, things (i.e. competitiveness of match-ups and the resulting improvements in participation) would be improved enormously by balancing WvW server populations.

“How?” you ask.

1. Separate the WvW and PvE servers (required for 3, 4, 5 and 6 below)
2. Set/adjust upper and lower population thresholds for WvW servers
3. Merge underpopulated WvW servers
4. Block transfers to overpopulated WvW servers
5. Make it cheap/free to transfer to underpopulated WvW servers
6. (Optionally) Provide other incentives that encourage participation on under populated WvW servers
7. Review impact of population (and incentive) changes on the competitiveness and enjoyment of WvW matchups
8. Rinse and repeat from 2

Each of these changes is straight forward and delivers results with a high degree of confidence and minimal risk of destabilising gameplay.

The hardest part of all this will probably be accepting that rather than encouraging the degree of WvW participation required for WvW to be effective across the board, tying the WvW and PvE servers together has instead been a major contributor to the population imbalances that plague WvW.

Reasons why the WvW-PvE link has not provided sufficient encouragement to participate in WvW include:

• To most players, the impact of WvW results in PvE is indistinguishable from the normal RNG, and therefore does not provide a real incentive for PvE’ers to participate in WvW
• PvE’ers try WvW primarily because they want to try the game-mode, not because of the WvW-PvE link

Reasons why the rigid PvE-WvW link has contributed to the population imbalances in WvW include:

• The total number of WvW servers cannot be optimised for the overall level of WvW participation (c.f. PvE where the total number of servers is constrained to ensure each server has an adequate level of participation)
• Transfers between WvW servers cannot be distinguished from PvE transfers making it impossible to manage population shifts that could (and do) unbalance WvW
• WvW populations can only be capped at the map level not the server level as can be done with ‘full’ PvE servers
• The pool of players on a WvW server is restricted to a single PvE server population, meaning WvW participation (and therefore competitiveness) is constrained by the level of WvW interest in each PvE population. (This wouldn’t have been a problem if levels of interest in WvW were the same across all servers, but very clearly they are not.)
• The strong link between WvW participation and success in WvW polarises WvW populations by encouraging stacking on the PvE servers with the highest levels of WvW participation and discouraging WvW participation on those PvE populations with less interest in WvW
• WvW Players with ties to existing PvE communities are discouraged from moving to servers that need additional WvW players

Address the WvW population disparities, with the corresponding improvements in the competitiveness of matchups, and you’ll have a stronger foundation on which to make other riskier changes to WvW.

I would really appreciate some feedback from ArenaNet on this. It would be nice if this was acknowledged as an issue. One of the reasons that Devona’s Rest is hemorrhaging players and guilds is that we are no longer convinced that this issue will ever be addressed.

There are many threads on this issue or issues related to it. Many are rude and inflammatory towards ArenaNet and I can understand why ArenaNet’s WvW-focused employees do not wish to participate in that conversation. However, many of us are silently, patiently, and anxiously awaiting some communication from ArenaNet.

Please consider this, ArenaNet.

Thank you,
- Prae Tor, red-guild.com