Guild Wars 2

I have the feeling ANet is somehow under the impression the lower tier servers are across the board more … “casual” in WvW than the higher ranked ones, and thus a suitable match for each other (and only each other) with the introduction of three leagues in the European territory.
But that is not the case. On those lower ranked server, there are many guilds that are dedicatedly involved in WvW (and GvG), often being the driving force behind the successes of those servers.
Personally, on my server standards are high enough that there isn’t a terribly wide gulf of the WvW pop being mostly upscaled complete randoms (they’re mostly regulars) and a few “hardcore WvW” guilds, as I witnessed in some other lower servers against which we played.
However, it is uncertain whether we will end up in league 2 or narrowly in 3. And that is where the crux of my fear lies.
It’s dedicated WvW guilds and players leaving for the upper leagues because the lowest 9 servers, unlike a league of 12 or 15, collectively don’t provide the population density (and professionalism) for competitive play.

In North America, 12 servers per league is a very healthy number. It provides variance, less predictability, lower servers can learn from the playstyle of upper servers, it provides opportunity to rise through the ranks and make comebacks. Ambitioned guilds and players will find fun, challenge and many bags.
9 servers for Europe is way too narrow, especially the lowest tier. In EU, the lowest 3 servers are effectively dead in WvW. Why why why just for those 3 dead servers split the league into 3 tiers and ghettoize each compartment, cement their standing? The gulf between each league will grow wider and wider, particularly as more guilds from T3 transfer to T2/T1. (From T2 to T1 I presume it will be much less pronounced because in the mid-tier atleast you will find people to fight against. But it will be still an issue there, so mentally apply the same arguments I make to those). And this will be a vicious circle. As more guilds leave, standards will sink, causing other guilds to leave. As guilds leave and standard sinks, even regular non-affiliated players will leave for the two upper leagues. Left will be a majority of upscaled, unorganized random players.
It’s just like the old bracket system again, but worse because the league system makes it more attractive to play competitively.

Now Devon said a while ago they can’t just merge those 3 servers because of WvW, underlining that WvW and it’s playerbase play a distant third fiddle in GW2. Well then merge them just for WvW. When a Vabbi players enters WvW, he is on the same side as e.g. Blacktide under one colour/tag.
Or make the lower league one of 15 servers.
As it stands now, the devs are sacrificing the health of all other EU servers, especially the lowest 6, some with vibrant WvW communities, for maintaining those 3 moribund servers.
(If someone from those three is reading, it’s not about you specifically, sorry if it sounds like I try to antagonize you. If there were still only two leagues your existence wouldn’t be questioned at all in this thread).

Maybe it was a grand plan all along to level those 9 servers to the same low standard at the expense of those server’s dedicated players and guilds? Well that would be very cute if it was really mostly due to skill levels, and not the fact that most of those servers have about the pop density of Mongolia.
I just hope in those coming few weeks we don’t get any lolrandom matchups against top 10 servers that set us back to 19/20 temporarily . If we end up in League 3 and don’t get out of it after the first season, this might very well be the end of our server’s WvW community, because you play this match only so many times on indeterminate timescales before getting sick of it.

TL;DR Leagues are a nice idea, but 3 leagues for Europe îs overkill and will lead to the last tier becoming a ghetto.

Jamais vu.5284:

In North America, 12 servers per league is a very healthy number. It provides variance, less predictability, lower servers can learn from the playstyle of upper servers, it provides opportunity to rise through the ranks and make comebacks. Ambitioned guilds and players will find fun, challenge and many bags.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. The population differential between two servers that are ranked even a few ranks apart is enormous. The playstyle of upper servers is to have more population and coverage.

It’s a numbers thing. EU has three leagues because it has 27 servers. NA has two leagues because it has 24. Aside from giving NA four leagues of 6, there is no other way to divide up EU without leaving someone out.

Mergers might help, but Devon has said their metrics indicate no need to do that — ie. pve is still robust.

Do you honestly really care? At this stage Anet have more than proven that they dont give a <insert defecation related expletive> so why on earth should we? Ok sure we have spent a year of our leisure/gaming time in GW2 but to be fair a lot of tha ttime was quite fun. For some people it still is fun but for those of us that no longer even slightly enjoy it lets just quietly go,

Well I still think this topic is current.

i made a study about this…. with 3 leagues for EU, you’ll have 9 team in a league….

with 9 team in a league you will have a total of 12 unique match up where no team will face one another more than once, and we’ll have 3 match ups every week that will last four weeks….

ANET says they will make 12-team leagues for NA, so i’m not sure how ANET is going to implement it, if the requirement is “no team will meet another team more than once”

A B C
D E F
G H I

unique matchup : ABC DEF GHI , ADG BEH CFI, BDI CEG AFH, AEI BFG CDH….

each team will play 4 times… no team meet another team more than once….

so 9-team league is good.

azizul.8469:

i made a study about this…. with 3 leagues for EU, you’ll have 9 team in a league….

with 9 team in a league you will have a total of 12 unique match up where no team will face one another more than once, and we’ll have 3 match ups every week that will last four weeks….

ANET says they will make 12-team leagues for NA, so i’m not sure how ANET is going to implement it, if the requirement is “no team will meet another team more than once”

I was under the impression that it would be 7 weeks worth of 1 week matches. And the requirement was that “each server will meet each other server at least once.”

if that’s the case, then it would be different….

Kuru is correct, it’s “at least once”, not “no more than once”.

I still hope they sometimes merge EU and NA (and get rid of language servers) and just make 3 leagues out of that.
EU wasn’t balanced at the start of the game, because timezones in EU are close to each other, so any server with people from countries +3 or -3 hours from central EU prime time would dominate. (or servers with the most players who can stay up late)
There will be no good competition in the EU bracket without massive transfers from all over the world to EU servers – and that won’t happen.

gebrechen.5643:

I still hope they sometimes merge EU and NA (and get rid of language servers) and just make 3 leagues out of that.
EU wasn’t balanced at the start of the game, because timezones in EU are close to each other, so any server with people from countries +3 or -3 hours from central EU prime time would dominate. (or servers with the most players who can stay up late)
There will be no good competition in the EU bracket without massive transfers from all over the world to EU servers – and that won’t happen.

There was never a good reason to have separate NA and EU servers available to the same account. Should have just been one lot of servers or NA and EU being completely separate and unable to transfer between.

I dunno, given how close the ratings points are in EU (aside from the 1 & 2 servers) it makes for some interesting matchups where third spot rotates fairly frequently and even the 1 & 2 spots switch up. Feels like EU has the advantage in balance in comparison.

TBH, having the bottom tier a ‘ghetto’ wouldn’t be terrible, not everyone likes large numbers after all, it gives a place for smaller groups. The players who don’t want to be in that situation will transfer up, and either find themselves in queue’s on already full servers, or filling the ones with slots making those upper leagues a bit more overall competitive.

The real problem is that players don’t want competitive, they want victory. Guild’s won’t look at a server and think “Hmm, if I move there then they’ll put up a bigger fight to server above them, and the league will be more fun!” they think “Hmm, if I go to the one above it I can win!”

in EU I’m aftraid it will be more interesting League 2 than 1.
The winner of League 1 will be probably VS or maybe SFR, no chance for a Piken, Desolation, Riverside or Elona.
We face long queues on prime time and every time we have a match against SFR or VS the best we can hope for is an honorable 2nd place.

The “solution” would be SFR and VS in their own league and the other servers from 3rd to 9th in another :-)
So, in the end League 2 might be much more balanced and interesting with 4-5 possible winners
Bronze League may be again a mix of few potential winners, 1-2 underdogs and, unfortunately two servers with little to zero chances, still predicting a winner there won’t be easy.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution, and most of the solutions proposed in the various thread are from “my server” point of view.
Take it as it comes, a League with some prizes, no one will get a millionaire contract to play in a certain server, only thing that a.net should have avoided is the bandwagon to get some prizes.

On my Rank 18 server, it’s already starting.
The original reasons for the exodus of a major WvW guild were possibly only partially related to league concerns. But the guild transfers that followed are due to the weakened, now improbable to be able to compete in T2, nature of the server.

This is a fiasco for WvW that surpasses even the insanely long free-transfer period in 2012.

I blame Devon and his team entirely. You killed one server’s, and quite likely 9 server’s, WvW communities.

But you don’t care. You only care about numbers. Disgusting. Inhumane.

Jamais vu.5284:

On my Rank 18 server, it’s already starting.
The original reasons for the exodus of a major WvW guild were possibly only partially related to league concerns. But the guild transfers that followed are due to the weakened, now improbable to be able to compete in T2, nature of the server.

This is a fiasco for WvW that surpasses even the insanely long free-transfer period in 2012.

I blame Devon and his team entirely. You killed one server’s, and quite likely 9 server’s, WvW communities.

But you don’t care. You only care about numbers. Disgusting. Inhumane.

Agreed. Same thing is happening on low tier NA servers. We had an exodus of guilds before the League. But now with League promising match ups with more than 3 tiers difference a lot of guilds are having meetings as to where to transfer. And with the way anet has been treating the issue so far, people who want to stay have no argument to use. I can’t say that its going to be better later, as I have no hope in the dev team.
The community team at least seems to try to communicate, but the dev numero uno can’t get off his high horse and visit low tier servers to see what is going on.

A pve player asked me as to what guild I would recommend he joins on our server to do wvw. I had to tell him to wait 2 week and see which ones stay.

I am also hearing the same things from other servers in “Silver League”. Everyone wants to transfer to ioj as they are the current bandwagon server with 24h coverage, or to whichever server from Gold can win the Tanking race to drop to 13.

Dream In A Dream.7213:

I am also hearing the same things from other servers in “Silver League”. Everyone wants to transfer to ioj as they are the current bandwagon server with 24h coverage, or to whichever server from Gold can win the Tanking race to drop to 13.

Thanks from the interesting insight from NA. I feared you’d have to deal with the same issues as we across the pond.

In the end it really does turn out that leagues are a nice idea with a horrible implementation (like most things in GW2).

Jamais vu.5284:

I have the feeling ANet is somehow under the impression the lower tier servers are across the board more … “casual” in WvW than the higher ranked ones, and thus a suitable match for each other (and only each other) with the introduction of three leagues in the European territory.
But that is not the case. On those lower ranked server, there are many guilds that are dedicatedly involved in WvW (and GvG), often being the driving force behind the successes of those servers.
Personally, on my server standards are high enough that there isn’t a terribly wide gulf of the WvW pop being mostly upscaled complete randoms (they’re mostly regulars) and a few “hardcore WvW” guilds, as I witnessed in some other lower servers against which we played.
However, it is uncertain whether we will end up in league 2 or narrowly in 3. And that is where the crux of my fear lies.
It’s dedicated WvW guilds and players leaving for the upper leagues because the lowest 9 servers, unlike a league of 12 or 15, collectively don’t provide the population density (and professionalism) for competitive play.

In North America, 12 servers per league is a very healthy number. It provides variance, less predictability, lower servers can learn from the playstyle of upper servers, it provides opportunity to rise through the ranks and make comebacks. Ambitioned guilds and players will find fun, challenge and many bags.
9 servers for Europe is way too narrow, especially the lowest tier. In EU, the lowest 3 servers are effectively dead in WvW. Why why why just for those 3 dead servers split the league into 3 tiers and ghettoize each compartment, cement their standing? The gulf between each league will grow wider and wider, particularly as more guilds from T3 transfer to T2/T1. (From T2 to T1 I presume it will be much less pronounced because in the mid-tier atleast you will find people to fight against. But it will be still an issue there, so mentally apply the same arguments I make to those). And this will be a vicious circle. As more guilds leave, standards will sink, causing other guilds to leave. As guilds leave and standard sinks, even regular non-affiliated players will leave for the two upper leagues. Left will be a majority of upscaled, unorganized random players.
It’s just like the old bracket system again, but worse because the league system makes it more attractive to play competitively.

Now Devon said a while ago they can’t just merge those 3 servers because of WvW, underlining that WvW and it’s playerbase play a distant third fiddle in GW2. Well then merge them just for WvW. When a Vabbi players enters WvW, he is on the same side as e.g. Blacktide under one colour/tag.
Or make the lower league one of 15 servers.
As it stands now, the devs are sacrificing the health of all other EU servers, especially the lowest 6, some with vibrant WvW communities, for maintaining those 3 moribund servers.
(If someone from those three is reading, it’s not about you specifically, sorry if it sounds like I try to antagonize you. If there were still only two leagues your existence wouldn’t be questioned at all in this thread).

Maybe it was a grand plan all along to level those 9 servers to the same low standard at the expense of those server’s dedicated players and guilds? Well that would be very cute if it was really mostly due to skill levels, and not the fact that most of those servers have about the pop density of Mongolia.
I just hope in those coming few weeks we don’t get any lolrandom matchups against top 10 servers that set us back to 19/20 temporarily . If we end up in League 3 and don’t get out of it after the first season, this might very well be the end of our server’s WvW community, because you play this match only so many times on indeterminate timescales before getting sick of it.

TL;DR Leagues are a nice idea, but 3 leagues for Europe îs overkill and will lead to the last tier becoming a ghetto.

Which server did you want to stick into this “ghetto” war vabbi and???

I dont think it’s overkill at all.
Last week AG was matched up with FSP, which was 6 ranks bellow us.
The difference in coverage and the numbers of players is so big that’s it’s not fun at all for AG to fight against FSP.
I even remember one time when I was on Ruins of Surmia, we got matched up with Vabbi and Fissure of Voe, this was before the guilds left RoS, but we steamrolled both servers so hard that people didn’t even bother to log into game, even ended up with my guild moving from RoS as we couldn’t stand having to fight nothing for an entire week.

So three leagues in EU seems pretty fine tbh