Guild Wars 2

That WvW is dead on many of their servers. And it’s not only because of player migration to other servers with larger wvw communitys.

The damage is done Anet you helped foster the killing of your own game mode because you think that you will make more money with paid transfers.

You think let the servers die we will get more money when they make mass exoduses off those servers. Lets pretend that the lower tier servers actually have healthy populations and label them as high so the share holders will think the game is doing good.

Fact your lower pop servers do not have nearly the populations that the server browser states they do and wvw is dead on those servers. And you don’t care becasue people will spend gems to transfer off.

Soon as these other games come out that have GvG and RvR you know which ones I am talking about its going to even further exacerbate so that it will be impossible to hide from the truth any longer.

Anet you need to reopen free transfers and then start consolidating these lower servers soon. Or they are going to be just wasting space and electricity and bandwidth in your data centers.

free transfers is what kills low pop servers, not the other way around.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

free transfers is what kills low pop servers, not the other way around.

Fixed: Free transfers is what killed low pop servers long before paid transfers were put in place.

The paid transfers system now prevents low pop servers from recovering. Why would most people pay to transfer to a dead server? And ANET just keeps the game this way to rake in more money from people paying to escape from dead servers. By encouraging stacking and ignoring the issues that cause people to want to stack. Then using those issues as a way to make revenue.

what servers would you consider as being “dead”?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

what servers would you consider as being “dead”?

The servers that most people wouldn’t pay to transfer to, and people pay to transfer off. That have no chance of winning matchups even in lower tiers.

Example if a server is T8 and still loses every week that server is dead.

which servers are those, specifically?

and have you played on them, to have such insight as to how dead they are?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

which servers are those, specifically?

and have you played on them, to have such insight as to how dead they are?

I was on Kaineng about two months ago. When I went into WvW, I was outnumbered roughly 90% of the time I was in (peak hours) weekends were worse. Being outnumbered is just plain lame. The outnumbered perk is useless when you have like 5 people in WvW trying to capture things, just doesn’t happen.

I switched (paid) to another server with many more players, never looked back. Was tired of playing on Kaineng for so long with no hope.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

which servers are those, specifically?

and have you played on them, to have such insight as to how dead they are?

Don’t question it.

The majority don’t want server merges and there is no reason for it. If you are kitten about the wvw on your server, just transfer. If you don’t want to pay to transfer, that’s just too bad.

Deli.1302:

The majority don’t want server merges and there is no reason for it. If you are kitten about the wvw on your server, just transfer. If you don’t want to pay to transfer, that’s just too bad.

Why the majority enjoy playing in a desert wvw? Because is that. I play in t3 server and is pretty empty. I only can fight SOMETIMES if i follow the zerg.

Roaming is dead. You need to walk a LOT for a fight. Basically you only do PvE and PvD in tiers below T1 or maybe T2.

Warlord.9074:

Don’t question it.

So you have absolutely nothing to back up your assertion that many servers are dead?

colour me shocked.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

which servers are those, specifically?

The bottom 3-4 NA servers are all pretty sparsely populated but Kaineng seems particularly dead. I play on ET so have been playing against them and the only reason why our scores are close this week is because GoMs been smacking both of us around pretty well. And that’s after ET lost a few of it’s largest and most active WvW guilds to higher tiered servers.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

and have you played on them, to have such insight as to how dead they are?

I would argue that the bottom tier play is actually fairly interesting so long as all the servers involved have low WvW populations and that’s why I haven’t abandoned ET. I actually like the scrappy fights that pull in various small groups where everyone makes a difference. The problem is that any significant population imbalance makes it fairly easy for the higher population server to take most, if not all, of the map. It’s fun being an underdog. Not so much fun being a piñata.

EotM doesn’t help the lower tiered servers because it sucks people out of the main WvW maps because we don’t have a queue problem that needed solving. It solves a problem we didn’t have by creating a problem we didn’t have. And, if anything, EotM softened one of the two liabilities with higher-tiered servers that might have caused people to transfer to a lower-tiered server — queues. The limited time Living Story events also suck people out of WvW, which hurts low-population servers more than high-population servers. And Bloodlust only makes the problem worse because it makes it that much harder for an outnumbered server to fight opponents with boosted attributes.

I find it difficult to understand why ANet has such a difficult time grasping the concept of handicapping competitive events, especially since that’s exactly what they do when they upscale and downscale characters in PvE and scale the difficulty of encounters based on the number of participants in an event in PvE.

What they’ve done in WvW is not unlike balancing all the PvE events so that only the highest population servers fielding a zerg can complete them and, worse, make the events even harder if you have fewer people. If you want to reward the winners, do it with gold, skins, and other things that don’t make it even harder for a lower-population server to win.

There is a reason why competitive sporting and gaming handicap the better player and give advantages to the weaker players instead of the other way around. There is a reason why the bottom-ranked sports teams get the first draft picks for the next season and the best team gets the last pick. This is not that difficult of a concept to grasp yet every change I’ve seen to WvW suggests that ANet actually doesn’t get it.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

So you have absolutely nothing to back up your assertion that many servers are dead?

It depends on how you want to defined “dead”, but population has definitely been a reason for people to transfer off of lower-tiered servers. You’ll notice that various servers keep rising up to the 15-18 rank level in NA and then fall back down toward the bottom again. The reason for that is that they get some good guilds from a higher tier that transfer in and greatly improve the server’s performance, up to a point. But then they hit a wall and it becomes harder to move up in the rankings, sometimes because of numbers and sometimes because of coverage, so the guilds transfer off for greener pastures, sometimes taking additional people with them. I’ve seen it happen on ET a few times and it’s happened on other servers, too.

You’ll also find people talking about fair-weathers playing and not playing. A server can go from being fairly lively to pretty dead for a week if the match-up is highly imbalanced because people stop playing when the odds get too bad. Again, not fun being someone else’s piñata. Nobody wants to be a mob for someone else to farm.

Note that I like the fact that WvW has different levels of play, from often-queued zergzilla servers to sparsely populated servers where two people and a catapult can cap a tower. The problem is handicapping play so that one or two of the servers in the matchup don’t wind up getting farmed by a much more highly populated server.

Deli.1302:

The majority don’t want server merges and there is no reason for it. If you are kitten about the wvw on your server, just transfer. If you don’t want to pay to transfer, that’s just too bad.

So it’s your way or the highway? And I wouldn’t try to speak for the majority since you don’t know what they do or don’t want.

I though that gem store was money going to NCSoft?

urieldhynne.2743:

Deli.1302:

The majority don’t want server merges and there is no reason for it. If you are kitten about the wvw on your server, just transfer. If you don’t want to pay to transfer, that’s just too bad.

Why the majority enjoy playing in a desert wvw? Because is that. I play in t3 server and is pretty empty. I only can fight SOMETIMES if i follow the zerg.

Roaming is dead. You need to walk a LOT for a fight. Basically you only do PvE and PvD in tiers below T1 or maybe T2.

hoo buddy.
you gotta get out of the zerg and learn how to make yourself a threat. you cant wander around a map at random and expect people to cross your path outside of t1 or t2. especially if youre playing outside of your continents prime time.