Guild Wars 2

With the upcoming leagues there has been a mad flock to the t1 servers, mainly from t2 servers and below. both Tarnished Coast and Fort Aspenwood have been losing guilds to the big 3 widening the gap between 3 and 4 creating further imbalances and further strains on your server. Everything Arenanet has introduced to this point has supported this from paid transfers to leagues to bloodlust.

Now i’m asking Anet what are you going to do to help push some of these guilds to lower tiers, being in charge of alot of the recruitment in my server we have had discussions with many guilds about transferring here. Some from t1 some from t2 etc, now the main reason why they would choose a t1 server over us is because of transfer fees and t1 servers essentially paying for their transfer (We had instances where they said that they will transfer to SoS in an instant if we could pay for even 30% of the transfer, we couldn’t but a t1 server paid 100% of their transfer so they did it.) Now i don’t blame these guilds i too would rather go for the no risk option if i were transferring.

So there needs to be a couple of intiatives put in place by Arena net to ensure that people destack and produce a more balanced playing field especially in gold league which this is affecting the most.

no.1= Reduce map caps by 10-25%, this would create longer queues for the t1 servers which helped in the intial destack where HoD and ET imploded and all their guilds spread out, creating 6 relatively competitive t1 servers at the time. (FYI Sea of Sorrows was the most stacked at the time and we wouldn’t queue all4 bl’s on reset so population isn’t much less then it was before).

Reducing the map caps will also reduce the effects of nightcapping, skill lag and zerging.

no.2= Lower transfer costs to lower tier servers, one of the main problems is transfer costs to a t1 server is the same to a t6 server yet the t1 server will be able to pay for the guilds transfer. If the t1 server transfer cost is much more expensive whilst a t4 server is cheaper then it is now it will help in a guilds decision to help destack.

no.3= Give personalized league based rewards.

I hope this was a good read, the current state of the gold league NA is worsening every day as more guilds from TC and FA flock to the t1 bandwagon.

what are they going to do?

what they’ve always done: make it worse somehow

I still think this is just a way to weed out the sparsely-populated servers into the rest that have meat on their bones. -and get mad money for it at the same time.

Please prove me wrong Anet, I don’t want to think that such a low tactic would be used.

This money grab is going to backfire, because once those 3 servers are full, or more beyond full than they are now, and the lower tiers are fully destroyed, your lower tier players are just going to quit.

It may even start happening in leagues if its as bad as it looks like its going to be balance wise.

Maybe they will try consolidating servers somehow for WvW only, but that would be dubious. The time to fix this is before the disaster happens. And its already in progress beginning.

I think nothing will be done because Anet is looking at the wrong metrics.

The “How many players are playing” is the wrong metric.

Now that you are starting leagues, you need to compare baseline levels of participation from TC, FA and SoS/Mag, before the season was announced, and during to see how much losing week after week after week after week after week after week after week does to the participation of these servers. The same for #10-#15 and #19-#24.

While you are looking at metrics, see how many transferred from/to each server since you announced that the gold league would be the top 6.

BG/JQ/SoR have been in T1 over 75% of the time

That metric alone should be enough to tell you that WvW is broken.

Also I’m afraid ANet is currently banking on the idea that when Leagues and Seasons start the new “WvW Achievements” are going to pull tons of PvE/Casual Players into WvW completely eliminating the population imbalances.

Sadly I don’t think it is going to work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what they are thinking…

im on fa and the guilds that are left here atm have no intention to go to t1 ever. the ones that left i’d say their loss as our community and im sure tc’s aswell are strong and fun to be around. if we were to transfer, all of us would go to a lower tier server as we all like good fights. we dont hunt for ppt only. we hunt for great fights and fun.
i understand that people in t2 feel like running when thinking about the terrible leagues comming up as t1 will be smashing out in blowout matchups, but honestly, where is the fun in having 70 people on each and every map all the time and facing a server that has a normal to high population.
they zerg a keep from all sides and think that they’ve accomplished something when they get the keep?
well we feel accomplished when we hold the keep despite facing a monsterblob that outnumbers us 3to1.
fa and tc had a lot of bad blood in the past, but honestly i kinda miss the good old matchups and epic fights we had with them. they do have a great community too and are open to fun and actual skilled fighting. yesterday during the matchup screw up we all had a blast.
the t1 massstacking is ridiculous atm and fa will stay strong. we dont need 70 man zergs 24/7 to feel good about ourselves. we got a great community and if u ever joined our ts then u know how much fun we have together and im sure tc is very similar to that.
if guilds bandwagon to t1, their loss…enjoy the queues!

Rackhir Tanelorn.9123:

Also I’m afraid ANet is currently banking on the idea that when Leagues and Seasons start the new “WvW Achievements” are going to pull tons of PvE/Casual Players into WvW completely eliminating the population imbalances.

Sadly I don’t think it is going to work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what they are thinking…

I think both the last few posts hit on something important. The numbers Anet are seeing is a lot of spillover from PVE, its not new customers, and its not WvW players. Many of these casual PVE’ers are just out to farm, karma train, or get Ascended mats. When you get in a unfavorable matchup they disappear and suddenly your server has 1/4 the amount of WvW players.

But this is dangerous to count these players participating as a success for WvW, becasue the style that brings them out, is the same style that WvW endgame players dislike and feel is killing the game mode. And if the hardcore WvW base bolts, you will be left with just the casuals, who Anet already has hooked into via the other PVE modes in the game. It’s just the same players doing cross over, but the true WvWers leaving would be an actual net loss of player base if it happens.

Whereas if they just manage to fix WvW properly, create consistent balance in matchups, the casual PVE farmers will simply go back to PVE to do their thing, but Anet might actually also grow their WvW base.

Right now for much of each day, WvW just feels like PvE maps that happen to have all players flagged for PVP. Occasionally someone feels like fighting, but most of the time, because of the imbalance, its just zergs doing ring around the rosy, following each other in an endless train.

Wvw will never get fixed for hardcore players as long as anet refuses to c it as a competitive gameplay mode

I want to see a redesign of all the towers/keeps/camps. Defense in this game is a joke. Taking an objective is much easier and much more worthwhile than defending said objective. The gates melt before anyone can even get in to get on siege for defense. Some people only care about fights, some only about ppt, some just want to scout and defend. Why is it so hard to accommodate and reward all of these play styles ? You might object “well one person should not be able to stop a zerg from taking a tower”. It’s not just one person, it’s the tower/castle as well. That is what they are DESIGNED for. I’m not saying that one person should always be able to stop a zerg from getting in but he should at least be able to stop them from using flame rams on the kittening gate !

Asurastafarian.9708:

I want to see a redesign of all the towers/keeps/camps. Defense in this game is a joke. Taking an objective is much easier and much more worthwhile than defending said objective. The gates melt before anyone can even get in to get on siege for defense. Some people only care about fights, some only about ppt, some just want to scout and defend. Why is it so hard to accommodate and reward all of these play styles ? You might object “well one person should not be able to stop a zerg from taking a tower”. It’s not just one person, it’s the tower/castle as well. That is what they are DESIGNED for. I’m not saying that one person should always be able to stop a zerg from getting in but he should at least be able to stop them from using flame rams on the kittening gate !

very much agree with u. the towers and keeps need a whole makeover. also gates should not take dmg through pvd. we dont need siege to be made godlike, we need the keeps and towers to have traps, narrow chokepoints and safer walls. stronger gates, traps and stuff that slows a zergs down or even splits the zerg up as certain passages can be blocked or so.
taking a keep should be alonger process and not just 70 people facerolling everyone. preventing people to get on walls and pvd after rams are down.

Ahh Anet you’re cheeky 1’s aren’t ya change the title of my thread so i can’t recognize it when i’m at uni. Need to think of a new cheeky title name i guess.

Rackhir Tanelorn.9123:

Also I’m afraid ANet is currently banking on the idea that when Leagues and Seasons start the new “WvW Achievements” are going to pull tons of PvE/Casual Players into WvW completely eliminating the population imbalances.

Sadly I don’t think it is going to work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what they are thinking…

It will work maybe for a week before those exact PvE players get frustrated and quit forever because they get steamrolled by the stacked servers WvW regulars.