Guild Wars 2

What makes for a good WvW server? Is it because of numbers? A good community? Skilled players? Tons of guilds on a server? What makes a server a good WvW competitor?
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The Aftermath: ( I created a video about this topic and named it 5 things that makes a server good at WvW. I took a lot of your suggestions and added a few of my my own.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsUjFkQyiZk&list=UUX00S-7H4nEvwpkEKr1uevQ

Tell me what you think!
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Eredon Terrace!

Coverage.

I’ve seen higher rank server’s zerg being utterly destroyed by a lower tier server’s zerg, yet the higher tier server has more points.
This is because the higher tier servers have more players throughout the day and half the time they are doing PvD because the lower tier server may not have anyone on at 3am in the morning.

You see this a lot especially on german servers; they seem to get up really early and golem rush everything. This allows the server to have a high ppt for quite a few hours in the early morning sometimes even upto the afternoon.

After coverage is numbers.

So even if you have some players on at 3am to fight the enemy server, what good are 10 players versus 30-50?!

So in the end, even if you have very skilled guilds with very skilled players, there is pretty much nothing they can do when they are outnumbered or offline.

WvW is a numbers game. Whenever a server is consistently able to beat the opposition, it is due to coverage. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who thinks their server is somehow the exception is merely deluding themselves.

Experienced commanders who know more than just how to zerg.

Large, organized groups that play WvW regularly and are invested in going for the win and not just personal advancement or fun.

Cooperation between these groups. That is, if someone says in map chat “Our hills are under attack by a group of 40!”, in less than a minute, all the main commanders know about it and a force is dispatched to take care of it.

A good, solid late night/early morning crew. Typically this means players from another country, but not always.

The next two are hard to find because they aren’t that fun for most people.

Scouts. (Some people have two accounts and keep a scout on a separate monitor that they just glance at from time to time or switch to when swords appear on the map.)

People who repair walls, build defensive siege, and keep siege updated so it does not disappear. It’s frustrating to have trebs and omegas vanish because nobody kept them up.

Coverage.

15chars.

P.S.

Team Speak or something similar is a must. Attempting to type commands and fight at the same time is very difficult. When all or almost all of your people in your group are in the same TS channel, it makes life so much easier.

Close quarters large group battle tactics are a weakness I see in many groups. My guild and its allies, organized via Team Speak have often taken out groups twice our size but not as organized as we are. What would seem to be a suicide run turns into victory. I see weakness in this area with many of the higher population servers, I think because with a large queue, many of the better players are being shut out of WvW in favor of random, less effective players.

Losing.

From what I’ve read here, winning is only achieved by zerging, coverage, lack of skill, cheating, buying guilds, double teaming, using open field siege and getting transfers.

Nutjob.9021:

Experienced commanders who know more than just how to zerg.

Large, organized groups that play WvW regularly and are invested in going for the win and not just personal advancement or fun.

Cooperation between these groups. That is, if someone says in map chat “Our hills are under attack by a group of 40!”, in less than a minute, all the main commanders know about it and a force is dispatched to take care of it.

A good, solid late night/early morning crew. Typically this means players from another country, but not always.

The next two are hard to find because they aren’t that fun for most people.

Scouts. (Some people have two accounts and keep a scout on a separate monitor that they just glance at from time to time or switch to when swords appear on the map.)

People who repair walls, build defensive siege, and keep siege updated so it does not disappear. It’s frustrating to have trebs and omegas vanish because nobody kept them up.

yea….no

4 is the ONLY one that matters. anyone who says otherwise is delusional

Coverage/Numbers. That’s all.

Coverage is what makes a server win but that is not what makes a server good at wvw. Morale, voice chat, wvw guilds, and attitude toward militia. These are some of the key things that make a server good/enjoyable in wvw.

What I watched the top servers doing to succeed. A lot of good tactics and a good overall supply and defense plan.

As in the example the permeant WVW introduction thread. Supply is the key. With supply you upgrade and build defenses and can repair damage and push out offensive siege anytime needed. Without supply you lose everything your offensive zerg grabs plus more shortly after the zerg quits.

The top servers most of the time constantly keep you from having supply and aggressively defend their supply.

In example before the tourney against lower servers I regally solo killed caravans and went around rear area’s normally without being caught. Run a guardian so had no stealth for aid. Top servers most of the time I can count on not living long in their rear because of defenders coming out of fortifications, scouts warning of me and quick reaction of players sweeping supply routes of attackers when I do get something. Supply camps are often defended.

I recall losing the keep in Eternal Battle ground because even though we drove off the first two attacks we could not repair or build new siege as we held no supply. We got one camp and the cut the supply first habit was so great the enemy zerg went way out of it’s way to take that camp before they hit us to win this time. (rather just out of cut the supply first habit or maybe the use captured supply not our stored supply habit)

Top servers also have scouts and defenders and make a priority of upgrading fortifications. In example was told oil was useless and I believed them until I was in a zerg that lost our rams and was thrown back by oil backed up by enough other wall defenses we could not take out the oil.

Many more examples of good tactics I can recall. It smarter play that is wining. Before I complain about numbers I ask what are they doing that we are not doing.

King Stinkeye.3560:

Losing.

From what I’ve read here, winning is only achieved by zerging, coverage, lack of skill, cheating, buying guilds, double teaming, using open field siege and getting transfers.

+1

Coverage is mostly important, but there are other factors that help. After all, in theory, there can be 2 servers with perfect 24/7 coverage (all maps queued). Things that help then are ability to keep bloodlust, snipe dollies/sentries (they give raw points), cap for tick, prioritize what to defend/attack. And well, skill for times you actually have to get into that lords room when enemy defend it.

And btw blobbing isn’t the most optimal way to get points. It’s just most used because it doesn’t require any organization, so in pug-ish environment like WvW it works the best. In perfect world, where every person is a dedicated player, using voice comms and with chain of command, splitting would yeld much more points simply because time of capping objectives doesn’t “scale” with numbers that well after some point – you usually don’t use more than 3 sup rams so it’s enough to have ppl with supplies for them and rest building another 3 rams somewhere else.

Coverage matters the most. Then numbers. Then consistent leadership. Lastly tactics.

1.) Population
2.) Population
3.) Somethinh we are not allowed to discuss here….

You are a chump if you are on a low pop server.
GW will never balance the game…so either know that population wins and that other thing I can’t talk about…or deny that and live a fantasy.

Voice communications. It is not easy to learn to speak up, even harder to listen up depending on the commander. But voice communication is how it works.

Ulion.5476:

Coverage is what makes a server win but that is not what makes a server good at wvw. Morale, voice chat, wvw guilds, and attitude toward militia. These are some of the key things that make a server good/enjoyable in wvw.

I find myself in total agreement with a fellow Elementalist, a fellow WvW player who happens to be on an “enemy” server.

I’d amend the “good at WvW” to be just “good” (e.g. community / teamwork).

I know there’s a lot of good servers out there.

we will stomp you if we can ever get the other 75% of our famously rp server zerg in voice comm, even if you outnumber us 3v1.

you need to hear the commander. Believe it.

Henge of Denravi, and other bandwagon servers that just pile in and consistently have full server attendance. So coverage does help.

I still call bullkitten though. Arena Net should have disabled server transfers at the time the WvW Tournament was announced to prevent this behavior. Now they just created a scenario where a bunch of people paid to win.

Buy a server transfer, stack it up with sheer numbers readily available 24/7, and place high in the tournament by effectively coasting off of those who actually compete for their server.

Whoever thought this was a good idea should politely resign from their position.

No one was expecting HoD to win this league dude, everyone thought that FA had this one in the bag and that IoJ would be second… Most people that stacked there were disgruntled people from other silver league servers and people from bronze servers that wanted to go for a higher ranked server…

bah. I’m on a T1 server. The biggest problem is people not hearing or speaking in comms, by far.

Judging all the posts on the thread, Coverage is winning by far…

Ulion.5476:

Coverage is what makes a server win but that is not what makes a server good at wvw. Morale, voice chat, wvw guilds, and attitude toward militia. These are some of the key things that make a server good/enjoyable in wvw.

This.
Excessive coverage without proper organization and server morale will just lead to implosion after implosion.
SoR happened.
BG will be next.

well good if you lose and we win, but coverage is communication, not just log ons. You can have a lot of people logging on and being completely useless, like EotM.

it really is getting the zerg into comms. really simple and kindof sad, but if people in the zerg could hear the plan and say,

but mostly they won’t and they don’t,

what’s up with that anyway? why?

Why let your team down like that?

let us down so much we kill you on purpose?

Kellth.2146:

What makes for a good WvW server? Is it because of numbers? A good community? Skilled players? Tons of guilds on a server? What makes a server a good WvW competitor?

Eredon Terrace!

Twice as many player in the night as your opponents is all you need to win a match.
Doesn’t even matter if there anyone playing at other times.

Here is how it works: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Nerf-the-domination-of-Coverage/3898667

As far as I can tell, morale on BG is still ok.

If folks new to BG this particular season end up leaving after the season we will wish them good luck as they go on their way. Cough.

All those players already there that decide to stay, along with the rest of us “oldies” that have been around through slogs before, will continue to enjoy a tight-knit community.

Much like many other servers experience.

/salute

Coverage you all say. Coverage has to come from somewhere. The lack of a girlfiend and work will let players to play more. So a good server has unemployed lonely players.

Vaugh.7193:

Coverage you all say. Coverage has to come from somewhere. The lack of a girlfiend and work will let players to play more. So a good server has unemployed lonely players.

Or players from other countries who normally play when you sleep.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Coverage.

This is the only thing that really matters.

Skill, dedication, guilds etc. is all fairly meaningless in comparison. What matters is how many people you can get into WvW at any hour.

So you wiped the enemy zerg 5 times during prime-time, resulting in over 400 kills for your server?

Meaningless compared to having 20 people more online at 5 AM to PvD.

It depends on your definition of “Good”

If your idea of good is winning the matches, then the consensus here of having coverage is probably your answer.

But ask the same question to many of the hardcore WvWers who are sticking it out on their servers, despite having terrible coverage, such as your home server. I bet you hear a different answer, such as having teams that routinely rolls much larger Zergs, skill pride, good communication, good friends. We have it good on ET, but those who watch the match scores would disagree, and would be correct – based on their values and definition of “good”.

Darius.1430:

It depends on your definition of “Good”
…

But it would be nicer if both definitions of “good” for fall together, i.e.
you would win if you play good, and
you would loose if PvD coverage is the only thing you have

Unfortunately it does not matter for winning how you play and to win you need nothing else then some hours of PvD-domination when most of the opponents are sleeping. As we have 3-way matches you need not even go to the match when the other 2 servers are fighting, some hours of undisputed PvD is enough.

No idea how it is in NA, but in EU it is sufficient to win, if you have 150 people from 0:00-8:00 CET and NOT ONE at any other time.

Dayra.7405:

Darius.1430:

It depends on your definition of “Good”
…

No idea how it is in NA, but in EU it is sufficient to win, if you have 150 people from 0:00-8:00 CET and NOT ONE at any other time.

ET would not know what to do if we ever had 150 people on at any time… we would be so confused, at least initially LOL. I think if we ever ran into a queue, the admins would be flooded with trouble tickets from everyone thinking something is broken.

Coverage and numbers. It doesn’t matter if He-man is leading your zerg. Coverage and numbers are the only 2 factors that will always matter.

Kellth.2146:

What makes for a good WvW server? Is it because of numbers? A good community? Skilled players? Tons of guilds on a server? What makes a server a good WvW competitor?

Eredon Terrace!

I really depends. Actually there’s two huge tendencies that seem to stand out:

1. Your server is winning: What makes a server good is skill.
2. Your server is losing: What makes a server good is coverage.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Coverage.

I’ve seen higher rank server’s zerg being utterly destroyed by a lower tier server’s zerg, yet the higher tier server has more points.
This is because the higher tier servers have more players throughout the day and half the time they are doing PvD because the lower tier server may not have anyone on at 3am in the morning.

You see this a lot especially on german servers; they seem to get up really early and golem rush everything. This allows the server to have a high ppt for quite a few hours in the early morning sometimes even upto the afternoon.

After coverage is numbers.

So even if you have some players on at 3am to fight the enemy server, what good are 10 players versus 30-50?!

So in the end, even if you have very skilled guilds with very skilled players, there is pretty much nothing they can do when they are outnumbered or offline.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Covergae/Nightcapping.

If one server goes to sleep for 8 hours of the day, they get zero points for 33% of the time. It will be ridiculously hard for them to win considering that they will wake up to fight fully fortified and sieged towers.

Community

Coverage is only temporary if the community collapses. A good community attracts more coverage.

nekretaal.6485:

Covergae/Nightcapping.

If one server goes to sleep for 8 hours of the day, they get zero points for 33% of the time.

If not all sleep, but the awake ones are badly outnumbered, the result is the same.

titanlectro.5029:

Community

Coverage is only temporary if the community collapses. A good community attracts more coverage.

Clearly a good night-coverage attracts more player playing at night. Simply because you do not feel that alone and outnumbered anymore. I don’t think that quality of the community matters much, it just needs to be good enough to not disturb

Both together leads of course to a concentration of night-coverage on a few server.

Darius.1430:

Dayra.7405:

Darius.1430:

It depends on your definition of “Good”
…

No idea how it is in NA, but in EU it is sufficient to win, if you have 150 people from 0:00-8:00 CET and NOT ONE at any other time.

ET would not know what to do if we ever had 150 people on at any time… we would be so confused, at least initially LOL. I think if we ever ran into a queue, the admins would be flooded with trouble tickets from everyone thinking something is broken.

We had a 10 man queue for EB this reset for at least 2 or 3 hours…

1. Coverage. This is the number 1 thing reflected in scores from servers. I’ve done math to back this up too: the PPT system doesn’t serve as measure of server skill in a competitive envrionment. It serves as a mechanism to match equally covered servers with each other.

2. Culture of communication. This is number 2. Your server’s culture must foster and promote communication between guilds and militia. If your server is full of guilds who run tagless and celebrity militia commanders who just karma train you won’t be able to fight against odds. I see situations where I’m raiding with my guild but I have no idea who is on our map. I come into a keep expecting to fight off an enemy to steal the cap and… if GW2 had friendly fire I woulda wiped an allied guild.

3. Militia culture. Guilds are great when they work together for your server but at the end of the day it’s the militia who keep the PPT strong. Guild leaders (I see myself do this sometimes but i’m not fully in lead of a guild) need to take off-raid times to lead the militia.

That’s what makes a server good. The biggest one is coverage. When coverage matches the server with better communication and militia will come out on top.

Jeknar.6184:

Darius.1430:

Dayra.7405:

Darius.1430:

It depends on your definition of “Good”
…

No idea how it is in NA, but in EU it is sufficient to win, if you have 150 people from 0:00-8:00 CET and NOT ONE at any other time.

ET would not know what to do if we ever had 150 people on at any time… we would be so confused, at least initially LOL. I think if we ever ran into a queue, the admins would be flooded with trouble tickets from everyone thinking something is broken.

We had a 10 man queue for EB this reset for at least 2 or 3 hours…

Are WvW map limits based on per server, or a designated number slots regardless of your server?

HoD is an interesting example of people’s answers. They are going to easily win silver league because of coverage, however there was a pretty brutal learning period where they got the every loving hell farmed out of them by several different servers. Many of their new numbers were trying to democracy zerg in full berserker instead of the typical follow the commander with tanky builds. I wish I could have seen it from their perspective the first few weeks of the tourney, it must have been pure chaos.

I think on SBI what makes us good is the resiliency of our community. We’re certainly not perfect nor immune to the ebb and flow that goes with never-ending competition, but we have a lot of good, hard working players who don’t panic and don’t give up when the going gets tough, as evidenced by our weathering of the last so-called mass exodus. We shrugged it off and kept on fighting, bypassing the expected plummet in our ranking and holding firm.

Small organised groups/guilds hitting other locations on the map can prove to be very helpful.

Coverage is the linchpin, but not the only factor by far.

Good commanders and strong guilds to either build around or to work in tandem with mixed groups is important.

The level of participation of the average combatant is highly important. A solitary roamer doing their own thing is not very helpful. A roamer on VoIP, slapping yaks and scouting enemy movements is invaluable.

Lastly the ratio of hardcore WvW vs casuals. If everyone on most given servers were to jump into WvW in the middle of the day you’d have a beastly EU presence that would put a lot of numbers on the board.
The greatest thing preventing this is that most servers don’t have many hardcore WvW folks who run midday or have tags to follow at that time of day.

How much time people are willing to invest in WvW is also key. Most NA servers see 90% of the heated fights happen between 5pm-9pm server time. However NA folks are getting home from work as early as 1pm server time, but you don’t see broad pushes at that time.

You want to play the ppt game, then you got to recruit hard for your guild and get like-minded folks. You on the East Coast and get home quick, find everyone in WvW on at that time and recruit them to your guild. Buy a tag and just PvD everything before the enemy gets home. You on the West Coast, stay up a little late and end NA strong.

The natural OCX/SEA populations on the Gold League servers have typically been on those servers for a long time. They aren’t going to suddenly decide they want to PvD in Bronze League some day; nor will they appreciate being forced to by some of the lame suggestions that clutter this forum (they’d probably quit playing).

You simply have to look at how to better use what you have and make the best of it.

Darius.1430:

Are WvW map limits based on per server, or a designated number slots regardless of your server?

They are based per server… So if the limit is 100, each server can field up to 100 people on that map. If one server has a queue, it doesn’t mean the others will have a queue aswell…

coverage trumps all