Guild Wars 2

Obligatory resume… Been around for a while.

The advent of server linking initially seemed like an elegant solution to a larger problem however, imho it seems that it has created a much bigger problem for its Band Aid fix.

The simple folding of smaller servers into larger, more established servers pretty much killed any community those servers had, or at best it is a few guilds hanging on by a thread.

The reduction of a large tier system has boiled everything down to 4 tiers of a whole lot of “Don’t give a kitten”

The bandwagon effect from guilds and players has further eroded any semblance of server identity.

Guild migration has undermined server trust to the point that most guilds are barely noticed.

MOST OF ALL. We are all getting to know each other, and rivalry is becoming less important.

In closing, Linking made WvW seem more active than it was but at the cost of every server, great and small.

Just my opinion.

Now exactly what condition do you think servers would be in today without linking? Because a lot of them sure as hell were dying before links and already had major guilds moving up in tiers, I can imagine a few of them would have been absolutely dead even in prime time. Even the top tier servers right now look like mid tier servers from two years ago.

Lets not forget a lot of things from HoT has driven away players in the year and half, including combat changes which is the backbone of a fun wvw experience. A lot of people have also been moving as last ditch efforts to make wvw fun for them again.

We can fully blame links for the deconstruction of communities, but I think that was an inevitable direction for many servers anyways. Links also bought those communities time from complete destruction of a merge, it’s really up to players to keep communities going no matter the changes, but as we can see a lot of players chose to move on in and out of the game.

I appreciate your sentiment and I probably failed to echo it in my original post.

Servers were in terrible shape and something had to be done. Linking IMO had some disastrous effects overall. One cannot just brush off the destruction of communities with a flippant statement. Most communities had websites, councils, war chests, Teamspeaks etc etc etc.

All I can see from the Linkings was a slow ignominious death of proud communities rather than a fast server merge that may have been less damaging in the long run.

Water under the bridge at this point as the whole wvw population has shrunk to a manageable level. Albeit an ever shrinking and unhappy one.

This is all just sad, but true.. :P

I know linking has created it’s own issues, but lets not pretend that the servers were fine before the links either, most of the lower tier servers were dying or heading towards dying and everyone was transferring up tiers, I feel like it was either links or having the majority of servers below T1-T2 be ghost towns.

Trajan.4953:

I appreciate your sentiment and I probably failed to echo it in my original post.

Servers were in terrible shape and something had to be done. Linking IMO had some disastrous effects overall. One cannot just brush off the destruction of communities with a flippant statement. Most communities had websites, councils, war chests, Teamspeaks etc etc etc.

All I can see from the Linkings was a slow ignominious death of proud communities rather than a fast server merge that may have been less damaging in the long run.

Water under the bridge at this point as the whole wvw population has shrunk to a manageable level. Albeit an ever shrinking and unhappy one.

The other alternatives were merging or changing the system to alliance battlegroups which would have destroyed those communities completely by taking away their servers. Links provided an opportunity to keep all the communities, even if half the servers weren’t going to be main servers anymore, but that was up to the players to maintain, communities were always up to the players to build and maintain.

It was either that or let servers die completely on their own, and I believe if left alone half the servers would be dead ghost towns today anyways. Over time we’ve seen players and guilds leave the game and server pride erode, with the stale gameplay catching up to long time players, they started to rely just on their guilds as their community for the game.

I wish we could just go back to vanilla gw2, the first couple years, HoT did major damage to wvw.

Xenesis.6389:

I wish we could just go back to vanilla gw2, the first couple years, HoT did major damage to wvw.

I believe that HoT in itself didn’t hurt WvW. What really hurt WvW was bringing something as big as HoT in while at the same time completely changing WvW with new borderlands that were almost impossible to navigate. The barriers that were there originally combined with much more obstacles that we have to deal with now caused even the most “die hard” wvw players to look at it and go NO WAY. By the time ANet responded by “fixing” the dbl so that it was much more usable (although still too big) a lot of people had just left wvw… and I know a few that still stopped playing gw2 altogether.

Now you add the linking, and you had noted (in some of the comments I filtered out for space), that it was up to the people to maintain their communities. I know that many people really tried to do this. But what community do you have when you really do NOT have a steady place to “hang your hat”? Being moved from host to host after the third iteration pretty much cleaned out a couple of the linked servers that I know of. They have people that bandwagoned there of course but the original “community” went poof. I moved my main to a host server where I already had some friends and the difference in the “feel” of things was immediate.

This debate could go on forever, and it probably will, lol.

For me I solved my “non fun” by moving to a host that I liked. My alt is still on my old server so I can go run with my friends there when I want but I probably go on that acct once a week now, maybe.

Bottom line to me is that linking seriously damaged WvW more than it helped. Do I have an answer? No I don’t know what the answer would be. So I figured out how to live with what has been done and have some fun again because frankly I still really like this game and the people I know in it

Trajan.4953:

Obligatory resume… Been around for a while.

The advent of server linking initially seemed like an elegant solution to a larger problem however, imho it seems that it has created a much bigger problem for its Band Aid fix.

The simple folding of smaller servers into larger, more established servers pretty much killed any community those servers had, or at best it is a few guilds hanging on by a thread.

The reduction of a large tier system has boiled everything down to 4 tiers of a whole lot of “Don’t give a kitten”

The bandwagon effect from guilds and players has further eroded any semblance of server identity.

Guild migration has undermined server trust to the point that most guilds are barely noticed.

MOST OF ALL. We are all getting to know each other, and rivalry is becoming less important.

In closing, Linking made WvW seem more active than it was but at the cost of every server, great and small.

Just my opinion.

Guilds don’t matter? You are telling me when you run into a random zerg, your mindset is the same as if you ran into BoRP raid? The guild poking your back that’s in random tags means the same to you than if it was Trex? You know that’s not at all true. Guilds are known for playing better just as they always were.

Every other point I can’t agree with, but I guess Mag just is a special flower. We hate some servers a LOT more than others, we deliberately focus servers based on past history, we focus the entire server on securing certain matchups based on server identity.

Getting to know people doesn’t get rid of rivalry. Every time someone transferred it was exciting to go kill or hunt your friend a bit. It’s even better if they weren’t friends.

RE: HoT

HoT’s damage was a LARGE amount of good players left the game for good as a final straw. GvG’s died slowly over time for a lot of reasons (the shifting Stability changes that brought Pirate Ship, then killed it were big) and was barely relevant when HoT launched.

Then the wombo combo of Guild Halls being still crap for GvG’s (way too small), and the balance of the game shifting to a really, really dumb boring style compared to before ended a ton of people’s interest. The biggest different between now and Vanilla Gw2 is how many good, fun people quit.

Balthazzarr.1349:

I believe that HoT in itself didn’t hurt WvW. What really hurt WvW was bringing something as big as HoT in while at the same time completely changing WvW with new borderlands that were almost impossible to navigate.

Bottom line to me is that linking seriously damaged WvW more than it helped. Do I have an answer? No I don’t know what the answer would be. So I figured out how to live with what has been done and have some fun again because frankly I still really like this game and the people I know in it

You can believe that if you want, but the desert bl was only part of the problem, the expansion brought a lot more changes that affected wvw badly in the past year and half. We’ve had alpines back for almost a year and wvw is still in terrible condition.

• Guild upgrades moved from base accounts to HoT accounts, upgrades for the wvw part of the grindhall, players were then forced to pve to reacquire those upgrades, of course the bigger the guild the easier that was to do, but it was also time gated with resources. Let’s not forget the expense of scribing. Guild level 37 was required to regain our most important upgrade in the +5 supply aura, who the kitten cares about magic find aura?

• New guild upgrades that broke certain parts of wvw, watchtower, smc airships, smc stealth water, banners, shield generators.

• Guild catapults nerfed in supply cost, this was a staple to havoc groups, but it also allowed zergs to get through walls much faster.

• Elite specs which forced players to upgrade for because they were in every case better than vanilla specs.

• Introduced new broken specs, stat combinations, and runes into the game.

• Trait changes of june 23rd 2015 which were the first step into the revamping of classes and combat for the expansion.

• Stability change which broke melee front lines and turned the game into pirate ship meta for 6 months.

• Combat change to focus more on conditions and boons, which at first produced boon sharing meta for more than 6 months, now still condition heavy with epidemic bombs.

• Desert borderland which was left in for far too long before fixes were made, and alpines returned. Rotation of the maps should have been their first thought when bringing another map into the game, not shoving it down everyone’s throat until players left.

While linking has it’s own set of problems, the alternatives were bleaker.

• Servers left to rot on their own, which they would have, and be in the same state as they are today. I was on Ehmry bay a mid tier server when HoT landed, the expectation for most on that server were there would be a lot of returning players, it didn’t happen. Instead for the next few months activity in the forums and TS went down before links even happened. Once links happened it was pretty much the last call for a few guilds who decided to move up in tiers, the glicko wall was also a problem at the time.

• Merge, which would have instantly deleted half the servers. And frankly with all the movement guilds have made in the past year would have put servers back to square one of being unbalanced in population. Maybe even in worse shape than today, at least we can rotate servers every 2 months to try and fix the damage players are currently doing.

• Battlegroups which would have probably taken 6+ months to implement and possibly destroy every single server and it’s community, depending on how it was implemented.

Identity is one of those QoL things they should have worked on early on, to help those link servers keep some pride and purpose. But at the time I believed links were suppose to be a temporarily solution that they could implement quickly and not months down the road, now it seems like it will be the permanent solution.

At the end of the day, it’s up to players to keep in touch and keep community going. At this point a lot of players have left the game or turned to their guilds as their community for the game.

@Xenesis.. +1 !

Good post, especially the points made by Xenesis being I was a mid/low tier player myself.

HoT drove havoc and roaming groups into the ground, one of the most fun parts of wvw. Then came along the tower tracking system, further killing the art of roaming/havoc/ninja because an entire zerg needs to respond to a 3 man group apparently these days.

Meta doesn’t even make sense from a class standpoint, we have squishes running around in melee groups, melee playing back line, melee and squishes all hanging in one big ball of heat spamming crap all over the place: obsessive stuns, interrupts, pulls, glitter all over the place that the servers can’t even keep up with the combat numbers. I wish we could get back to the vanilla style like mentioned. It’s just too much over the top damage and things needed toned down. Make players use their brain again instead of mashing their keyboard.

Overall, we all need to stop living in the past unfortunately because it is not coming back and I don’t think Anet can really revert this game mode to former glory. I do think its noble of a lot of guilds and players still keeping a positive attitude because we honestly can’t afford to drive off more wvw players.

Not to interrupt the revisionist history nostalgia trip but do you think it would be possible to stay on topic and discuss linkings?

expandas.7051:

Not to interrupt the revisionist history nostalgia trip but do you think it would be possible to stay on topic and discuss linkings?

Are you referring to my post? Because I do discuss links in them. If you want to discuss links then what’s your input?

Right before the link, Anvil Rock was basically the horse that needed to be taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery. The only thing missing were the tumble weeds and occasional dust cloud drifting down the street. It’s kind of hard to want to play when constantly outnumbered on all maps and there is no night crew so you log in and your color is nowhere to be seen.

After the linking thing; I at least got a free pass so to speak to check out other server communities before finally biting the bullet and leaving the server I’d been on since beta.

It was mostly directed at Rambit’s comment but looking at it now I suppose much of the shared anguish we find ourselves wading through is due in part to a plethora of dependent and interconnected factors. It’s inevitable that the other topics will eventually seep into the discussion at hand.

In order to tackle the subject of server links, I’d like to take a step back and pose a question to help frame the discussion. Why do players play WvW and what keeps them coming back? Once we tackle this big picture “WHY” we can move on and worry about the finer details like game and game mode mechanics, concepts of fairness, etc.

Some people play for the sense of thrill, the excitement of an intimate fight, large or small. Others are playing because of the community, whether that’s coming from the guild that they’re in or the server that they’re on. There are also those that play to win, either through the point totals at the end of the week or the outcomes of each individual organized scrimmage or duel. Lastly, you have people that play WvW because of the rewards, namely the Daily rewards and Gift of Battle.

These groups are: for-the-fights, community-driven, play-to-win, and rewards-driven. They are themselves multifaceted in both polarity and intensity, and most definitely not mutually exclusive. The implementation of linked servers benefited and hindered these groups differently, but how so?

I often hear that the for-the-fights crowd benefited from having more players squeezed into the same matchup. Servers that were formerly described as ghost towns would now get a taste of the action that they had longed for. However, things aren’t so cut and dry. Being for-the-fights isn’t reserved for liking large-scale 30+v30+ engagements. We as a community don’t hear very much about the solo roamer who walked with two heavy loot bags after getting ambushed at a camp. You rarely hear the tales of the organized roaming teams winning five versus seven, eight, ten, and so on. More common are the laments of the self-described “fight” guilds fielding 20-odd players in open field and their frustration of always getting “a—jammed” or “blobbed” down by the map zerg of the hour. I think it is to fair to say that for these players, the influx of players and elimination of many matchup tiers made the possibility of having clean engagements and winning outnumbered fights more difficult- before you factor in arguments about post-HoT skill balance and the like.

Community-driven players are a diverse bunch as well. You’ve probably heard of the term “server loyalty” before—previously as mark of praise and now a self-contained sardonic joke. Whether it was intended or not the implementation of linked servers knocked down the support pillars of each community that was slowly erased. It removed any incentive for the scouts, roamers, and defenders, sometimes playfully referred to as the “homeland moms” to keep participating. Your server now existed in name only, and each cycle of relinks only diluted the familiar names you remember. On the flip side, if your community was the guild that you played with then links probably had little or no effect in this regard. In fact some guilds took advantage of this system to get in favorable matchups and drive their poaching and recruitment of players. To be quite honest I don’t really hear about this disparity in winners and losers talked about very much. I suppose it wouldn’t be as discouraging if the doomed servers weren’t home to predominately smaller and medium sized communities that rely on each other even more.

Partially because of time constraints and because they weren’t significantly impacted by server links; the last two groups, the play-to-win and rewards-driven players can be covered together. When I say play-to-win I’m talking about folks in the upper-end GvG guilds, the server leaders and organizers that take after buying guilds and managing communities, or the aficionados of siege play who use every tool at their disposal to achieve victory. Aside inflated numbers of players and the syncopated nature of relinks, nothing else here is drastically different post-links that hasn’t already been covered. The same applies to folks hopping into WvW for rewards. The zergs that they run with might be larger, but it goes both ways. And once those dailies are out of the way—out they leave, as fast as they came!

Understanding the underlying motivations driving WvW players has helped me defog my picture of the situation. The server links produced distinct winners and losers. These winners tended to be players on more populated servers that weren’t at risk of closure and large guilds that gained from the escalation in combat sizes. Their guild centric mindsets benefited from easier recruiting via links. The losers were the sentenced players on servers about to be erased and those players that enjoyed roaming and medium/small size engagements. The unaffected were the PvXers and the resident “elites” of each mid/upper tier server.

Is there any surprise that the feedback that ArenaNet surely received and factored in to their decisions benefited the aforementioned parties? Is there any surprise the discord between the parties rarely intersect meaningfully on the subject?

Linking was the way to go. I was T1 which obviously has a healthy population.. but T4 is actually really fun and has queues during prime time. I can’t imagine how bad it was below T4 before the links.

Point is, every MMO I’ve ever played ultimately has had server merging. Face it, people leave to do other things in life or other video games, whatever. This was an inevitable outcome. It’s only a matter of time before those 12 servers in NA get merged into the 12 servers that are tiered. Some people just can’t be happy.

expandas.7051:

More common are the laments of the self-described “fight” guilds fielding 20-odd players in open field and their frustration of always getting “a—jammed” or “blobbed” down by the map zerg of the hour.

I think it is to fair to say that for these players, the influx of players and elimination of many matchup tiers made the possibility of having clean engagements and winning outnumbered fights more difficult- before you factor in arguments about post-HoT skill balance and the like.

Why would you blame links for bringing server population back up what they were just before HoT landed? Getting jammed or blobbed existed years before links. The problems you hear about for smaller groups stem from the changes to combat from HoT, less players are willing to run solo because class balance has become a joke. How many complaints have we heard by now about thieves, mesmers, druids, dragonhunters with broken dps or unkillable specs. It’s harder to get outnumbered kills because of combat changes that made conditions even more cheesier than before, numbers just make it worse, but the situation forces players to run those numbers to win.

I do understand the complaints of those that stayed in the lower tiers in order to get those smaller fights, and how much of a shock it would have been to be thrown into t1 for the first links, because naturally anet would start links off by just folding servers from the lowest populations to the biggest populations. Eredon Terrace players were not happy to be with Blackgate and t1 apparently.

I have made a couple suggestions already to either build separate tiers for each type of player, the blobs t1, the small to mid zergs t2/3, the roamers havocs t4, back when the glicko wall was still around. More recently I have suggested to just take the 3 lowest population servers and stick them in t4 with no links, and then add links to the rest of the servers.

expandas.7051:

Whether it was intended or not the implementation of linked servers knocked down the support pillars of each community that was slowly erased. It removed any incentive for the scouts, roamers, and defenders, sometimes playfully referred to as the “homeland moms” to keep participating.

Your server now existed in name only, and each cycle of relinks only diluted the familiar names you remember. On the flip side, if your community was the guild that you played with then links probably had little or no effect in this regard.

I don’t fully agree with this. There were other changes that killed havoc groups as I outlined in the other post. Scouts and defenders basically got removed with HoT introducing automatic upgrades, sentries, and watchtower. Desert borderlands was a pain that no one wanted to play on, so why would anyone bother building siege and tapping it every hour when the map was empty for the most part? Besides of which the main servers still had their “homeland moms”, why would they quit from links?

Keeping track of siege was a pain since the keeps were basically giant mazes and easy to lose track of siege placements, no one wanted to spend 15 mins running around a keep trying to keep everything tapped. Let’s not forget the stupid decision not to have waypoints in the side keeps other than emergency waypoint. Everyone dog piled into ebg for 6 months which meant zergs were operating in there most times, and people eventually went with that flow.

Roamers were left but they have started to die off because frankly with the changes with HoT and elite specs, it has made it boring and in some situations stupid to bother roaming when 75% of the time you meet a thief or a mesmer out in the field. Do I mention ghost thief here? Havoc sized groups still exist if you really want to call them havoc, more like gankers taking advantage of roamers 4v1.

Guild buying and stacking was already a big thing before links.

Now again I say look at the alternatives to links and tell me it wasn’t the best option at the time. Every other option would have been more damaging to servers and their communities. Does anyone honestly think if links was not done and servers left alone, that we wouldn’t have more of than half the servers dead of players? Even roamers would have been moving up. Links left communities the option to keep running, players just chose not to care anymore that their server name was not in front of another. Communities were already dying before links because of HoT.

You’re not wrong. Changes from HoT to skill balance, game design, and game mode mechanics definitely contributed to the WvW we have today, but this thread is about server links. Telling me that certain roaming specs were overpowered or that guild buying was a thing already misses the point.

Was implementing server links the best option at the time under the circumstances? Possibly, probably not. It’s very easy for me to say that the superior alternative would be to address the community outcry against the Desert Borderlands, game mechanic changes, and skill balancing at the time- in short, to fix their game. They could have increased the rewards for playing the game mode a la PvP season 5. They could have discouraged server stacking and omniblobbing by tweaking map population caps and the outnumbered buff to give substantive advantages. For whatever reason they chose the arguably simpler and faster route of just pairing servers together which introduced its own set of challenges. That said, what I would consider better doesn’t translate to easier for Anet to develop, implement, and contribute to their bottom line.

DO not blame the Anet Linking Servers ,it is the people (pugs) and big bandwagon guilds jumping servers ,this can change the balance of each servers , (FOTM) which server are we going to push on top ,

OP, I disagree.

Linking has saved wvw. ANet could’ve just merged all the servers to create an alliance system, in which there would be nothing but faceless zerg trains 24/7 and wvw would be officially dead. At least with linking, servers are kept.

expandas.7051:

It’s very easy for me to say that the superior alternative would be to address the community outcry against the Desert Borderlands, game mechanic changes, and skill balancing at the time- in short, to fix their game.

They could have increased the rewards for playing the game mode a la PvP season 5.

They could have discouraged server stacking and omniblobbing by tweaking map population caps and the outnumbered buff to give substantive advantages.

For whatever reason they chose the arguably simpler and faster route of just pairing servers together which introduced its own set of challenges.

They weren’t able to “fix” their game for four years, I don’t think it would be reasonable to assume they could have fixed it post HoT mess up. They fixed the desert borderlands problem, well to most players anyways the hardcores just want it deleted. Game mechanics and skill balancing still haven’t been touched much in the last 18 months, that’s stuff anet doesn’t want to spend time on.

They did increase rewards with the reward tracks, but yeah could have done better since then, they’ve never treated wvw fairly against the other game modes.

When links came around they had all the main servers locked, that’s not discouraging stacking? Players cried about it and eventually they started opening up. Players did stack on the lower population servers for certain links, which would be ok in my book because that meant shifting populations to the smaller servers, some might leave after the relinks, but some might have stayed as well. In the long run that was one step in helping spread some population back to those lower servers, until main servers remained opened which shot that to hell.

Lower map caps wouldn’t have done kitten, let’s be real here, most times it’s 1 tag up on a map and most people will flock to that tag or the orange swords. We would still have blobbing, just on multiple maps now. Nothing but hardcore limitations will be needed to force most players into smaller groups.

As for the reason why they went with links Tyler had explained it..

Tyler Bearce

We had/have another, much more elaborate, solution to world population imbalance. However, we decided to table it (perhaps indefinitely) in favor of World Linking for three primary reasons:

1. Time – We felt we needed to improve the world population situation as soon as possible. Any solution that was likely to take 6+ months was off the table.

2. Acceptance – Our two ‘quick’ solutions were World Linking and World Merging. We went with World Linking because we felt players would be more likely to approve it, due to it better preserving the identity of all original worlds, and being more flexible than a more traditional World Merging solution.

3. Complexity – World Linking and World Merging are both fairly easy to understand solutions. This ties back to points 1 and two, but a complex solution would have taken longer to implement, and have been harder to get players to understand and accept.

Links eventually got them thinking about having more smaller sized servers, which could have helped balance out populations by having more pieces to put them together. The players disagreed of course.

Perhaps if they had acted sooner and not wait six months after the expansion to actually fix wvw, and actually went through with the rumored battlegroups, things would have turned out better than links. Just pretty obvious Anet doesn’t not care to spend that much resources and time on wvw for years now.