Guild Wars 2

1. Do an assessment of how many players enjoy small scale WvW, the type that low population servers cater to.
2. See how many servers would be left after combining one or two tiers of these low population servers.
3. Give the players on these servers a way to influence how their server is merged so they don’t feel like their server is being deleted.
4. Merge one or two of the bottom tiers.

I wonder if you actually belong to one of these servers…

I don’t, but I know you do Jeknar and you’re an experienced WvWer so I trust your opinion.

This has already been discussed on this thread.

While I’m actually up for server merges, most people down on bronze are not (You can see on the thread). So if they really want to keep these people “happy”, they won’t merge the servers.

When has keeping WvWvWers happy ever mattered? :x

The closest (for the entire week) fight that has been seen in NA for ages happened two weeks ago (but this is Friday, so about to be three weeks) between ET, AR and EB. Neck and neck scores and near-constant fights. When was the last time the blobbier half of the NA servers had that?

Like Jeknar says, the overwhelming majority of players that weighed in on the idea, who are from the servers in the lower six that you highlighted say no thanks to mergers.

But OP, since you said you aren’t from one of those servers, could you give some insight on the obsession (because of the number of similar threads that have popped up in the past three months alone) of low tier server merges that higher tier players have?

In short – why, and what’s in it for you?

Two weeks ago T2. Much closer than ET/AR/EB two weeks ago.

XacTactX.6709:

1. Do an assessment of how many players enjoy small scale WvW, the type that low population servers cater to.
2. See how many servers would be left after combining one or two tiers of these low population servers.
3. Give the players on these servers a way to influence how their server is merged so they don’t feel like their server is being deleted.
4. Merge one or two of the bottom tiers.

I highly doubt Anet has any real idea of the gravity of the WvW situation.

Here’’s the problem and here’s a possible solution:

Problem – Server populations go down after season – PvE/PvP players leave and the population shifts miserably, many being bought by servers trying to claw to the top where Jade Quarry sits as the only real T1 Server – anything else is a like – Blackgate only wins by JQ taking it easy – nothing on JQ is by accident

SOLUTION:

Day/Night SERVER SWITCH

Your server has a population of a decent size, not necessarily in the correct tier yet, but what if Anet used some innovation here and put servers “together” only in that they are cycling out and in as necessary.

Example:

Server A has a strong WvW presence (historical data easily seen in Anet’s databases), at a certain time of day, say midnight for keeping it simple, your population goes down to almost nothing.

Server B has a strong after midnight your time presence – they would “switch” into the slot and be playing a server that far more closely matches their numbers.

Both win.

Both keep their server designations.

The fighting becomes an alliance that actually happens in real life/fantasy.

Not saying it wouldn’t take work, what doesn’t?

Right now WvW is seriously damaged by lack of people on maps even on larger servers.

Tarnished Coast isn’t small but it can not in any way go against Jade Quarry or Blackgate at their peak times or even in the off times most days. It’s in the wrong tier and the numbers at night can be as little as 10-15 on all maps combined.

I am sure there might be even better ideas than mine, but please something has to be done soon.

It’s time Anet fixed the real end game of Guild Wars 2.

Or how about the problem is that server populations go up during season? Then after season everyone gets this sense that things are dying because all the achievement chasers go back to PvE and no one bothers to put in any overtime to win and so they leave too.

Solution: as Hamster (iirc) suggested, have WvW weekly achievements like PvE and PvP dailies instead of seasons.

WvW-Rebalance

1. Unassign everyone from a server
2. Set 12 large scale (max map population as it is now) league WvW-Teams for NA and EU ( 2-3 German, 2 French, 1 Spanish, 6-7 English for EU) each
3. Set 6 small scale (half max map population as now) league WvW-Teams for NA and EU (1 german, 1 french, 4 english for EU) each
4. Make WvW-Team selection optional, i.e. only if you want to play WvW you have to be assigned to a WvW-Team (You only have to assign to EU/NA as PvE/EotM/sPvP player).
5. If you did not enter WvW for 14 consecutive days you become unassigned
6. There is no WvW-Team transfer, if you want to join a different WvW-Team you have to become unassigned by not entering WvW for 14 days.
7. A world that has 10% more player (total played player hours would be even better) assign than it’s league mean it is marked as full.
8. If you are unassigned you can join any not full world.
9. No one can join a full world.
10. Optional: Joining a team cost 500 gems, the first join is free.

EotM:

• You are assign by mega-server mechanics to a team on a map (not only to the map, while the team is predetermined).

Language for mega-server gets an explicit option and is no longer inferred from server.

Any suggestion which uses “megaserver” in the description or involves dissolution of servers is an instant no-go for me. Stripping server identity and culture from WvW would ruin it just as effectively as it has PvE. Thanks to the megaserver idiocy, my map chatter is filled with German, and I always need a taxi to join my guildies on the same map for a guild mission because, obviously, the megaserver system can’t comprehend why guild mates who play on the same server should be directed to the same map instance during an active guild mission.

If you want to fight for a faceless team, there’s always PVP.

msalakka.4653:

Any suggestion which uses “megaserver” in the description or involves dissolution of servers is an instant no-go for me. Stripping server identity and culture from WvW would ruin it just as effectively as it has PvE. Thanks to the megaserver idiocy, my map chatter is filled with German, and I always need a taxi to join my guildies on the same map for a guild mission because, obviously, the megaserver system can’t comprehend why guild mates who play on the same server should be directed to the same map instance during an active guild mission.

Quoted for truth, and +1ed.

@Dayra – we don’t need fewer servers. We really don’t.

Are numbers down? Yes, overall. So what?

This idea that ONLY big fights are what WvW is for is a pretty blinkered idea, and it keeps on popping up on the forums. New threads on this pop up practically daily.

Servers wanting the lower tier servers to be merged, if they really believe that is something that needs to happen, can pay for their own transfers down to those servers. The bulk of us, based on posts on those multitudinous threads, are by and large happy with our low-tier dynamics.

If the way that higher tiers played WvW was so great, I’d have to think that they wouldn’t be losing so many people that they’re desperate to have ANet force others to be on stacked servers.

Our style of play affords us fights and tactics and roaming and yes, even zerging. And we’ve been dealing with a much lower overall population that higher tier servers for some time now, and we aren’t crying about it. Enough already. I’m going to trot out my same tired line: the lower tier servers are not a resource to me strip-mined to prop up the tired playstyle of the upper tier servers.

thing is is that it is an easy fix.

First is what everyone said when the game was launched, dont separate out players based on which continent they are on. If WvW is supposed to be 24/7, why create servers which will attract players from specific timezones.

As we are already in this mess what anet need to do is monitor activity levels on all servers. From this they can easily find out that server X is inactive at 1am, but server Y has long queues. Therefore allow limited free transfers from Y to X.

This will allow all WvW server to be active 24/7 as it was supposed to be, with WvW populations more accurately balanced; it still wont be perfect, but should be better the the current setup.

Of course all of this greatly relies on one major thing: that the devs put some work into WvW development.

Rimmy.9217:

The bulk of us, based on posts on those multitudinous threads, are by and large happy with our low-tier dynamics.

That’s why I did not proposed to merge servers, but to build two leagues. One league with low-tier dynamics and one with high tier dynamics. Obviously it’s neither a good idea to enforce the same population to both kinds of teams nor to let them play against each other, so they are permantly separated, and separately balanced.

More or less I proposed to keep the lowest two tiers in low-tier dynamics and
reduce the number of servers above, i.e. t1-6 (7 in EU) are very imbalanced and a reduction from 18 (21) to 12 servers would make sense there, as some servers may have queue on 4 maps in primetimes, and others, only on 1-2 maps, and if they play against each other, the rerult is bad, and if they are frozen in their tier due to the existing imbalance, the matches become stale.