Guild Wars 2

Senzational one.6572:

I just want to know if these FULL status can be bypassed as in the past by, server black outs, auto-clicking programs, low population times? Or are they a TRUE No new Character creation lock out? Could Anet please clarify this?

From what I gather its a complete lockout now.

Aeolus.3615:

morrolan.9608:

lil devils x.6071:

Jayne.9251:

Stage One: Change population to reflect active WvW players.

Stage Two: Wait for people to self-move and spread out.

If Stage Two fails: Reduce map cap on all maps to 60 per server permanently — or until the population regulates itself and spreads out.

Stage 3: watch people abandon wvw to play games where they can play Massively multiplayer together. QQ.

Massively multiplayer means massively multiplayer.. It is already much less than most games I have played allow to play at once.

With this change some sort of guesting mechanism is needed, so you can still play with friends even if you are on different worlds.

u dont need to guest in pve…megaserver remmember? and why woud u want to guest in other server WvW for free? that would leed to troll and stack at spawn to prevent players from entering.

Read Lil Devil’s posts, thats why. You do raise a good point however its something that would have to be worked through. But as it stands now if a new player to the game has a friends on a full server they are completely prevented from joining those friends in WvW.

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Population levels aren’t used to determine matchups – ratings are. Some randomization on the ratings is happening to introduce some variance in the matchups, but if there is a rather large gap in the ratings, that randomization might not be enough to create diverse matchups.

The goal of this change is to make the population spread out better, which will in turn make the ratings get closer, which will result in both more interesting matchups, and more variability as well. This will take some time to happen.

t1 is isolated in ratings. even if there is a gradual drawdown in population for both t1 and t2, we shouldnt expect the rate of that happening to be different for any of the 6 servers, so the current glicko ratings will be similar to the future glicko ratings for t1. and thats bad, because in the future, with the current transfer model in place, the calculated ratings for t1 will be a bad model of their true ratings.

one solution to this is to hold a wvw tourney with enforced “bad” matchups, hopefully it would be far enough in the future that gold league could be expanded from 6 servers to 9 or 12. “everyone” (yeah no, but whatever) likes a wvw tourney. its something different and something to fight for, as long as it doesnt go on for so long that people forget what non-tourney times were like.

another solution is a soft reset of glicko ratings at some point in the future. once again “bad” matches will happen, but you can prevent the worst of them by doing a soft reset and not a hard reset and designing the rating levels accordingly.

either solution is viable. a wvw tourney is prolly more fun for us.

morrolan.9608:

Aeolus.3615:

morrolan.9608:

lil devils x.6071:

Jayne.9251:

Stage One: Change population to reflect active WvW players.

Stage Two: Wait for people to self-move and spread out.

If Stage Two fails: Reduce map cap on all maps to 60 per server permanently — or until the population regulates itself and spreads out.

Stage 3: watch people abandon wvw to play games where they can play Massively multiplayer together. QQ.

Massively multiplayer means massively multiplayer.. It is already much less than most games I have played allow to play at once.

With this change some sort of guesting mechanism is needed, so you can still play with friends even if you are on different worlds.

u dont need to guest in pve…megaserver remmember? and why woud u want to guest in other server WvW for free? that would leed to troll and stack at spawn to prevent players from entering.

Read Lil Devil’s posts, thats why. You do raise a good point however its something that would have to be worked through. But as it stands now if a new player to the game has a friends on a full server they are completely prevented from joining those friends in WvW.

ic now tks for the info, it is the price for having such map/server limitations… :\ larger megaserver (continent style)maps w/o shards would solve that …

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Those changes are now live.

Why was this done without warning ie why didn’t you give us say a days warning? There will undoubtedly be players who were about to move but just hadn’t done it yet who are now seemingly left out in the cold as it were.

morrolan.9608:

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Those changes are now live.

Why was this done without warning ie why didn’t you give us say a days warning? There will undoubtedly be players who were about to move but just hadn’t done it yet who are now seemingly left out in the cold as it were.

original post was 4 days ago, so they did give you more than a day’s warning

Shadow.3475:

rhoiyds.4289 if you played for 2 years you should have some gold in game.

Legendary. Gold sink.

Nate.3927:

morrolan.9608:

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Those changes are now live.

Why was this done without warning ie why didn’t you give us say a days warning? There will undoubtedly be players who were about to move but just hadn’t done it yet who are now seemingly left out in the cold as it were.

original post was 4 days ago, so they did give you more than a day’s warning

It still would of been nice for them to say in the original post,

“this will be live in x number of days” or even next maintenance.

The original post just says "We will be rolling out the new model soon " but soon in gaming worlds mean anywhere from 1 day to 6 months time.

With the changes completely locking down T1 this will be a slow death sentence for OCX WvW and to a lesser extent SEA.

I currently belong to a smaller (10-15 people per night) oceanic guild in T1 we have been recruiting for months and the growth is extremely slow although steady, the catch is the majority of our recruits are either new players or returning players coming from lower tier servers because their exists little to no oceanic population T1.
The reason that most (90%) of oceanic guilds gather on T1 is that there simply isn’t enough of a oceanic population left in WvW to be spread out among many servers while also providing an engaging WvW experience.

Without new people coming in or moving up retention will slowly kill off our guild and I have no doubt the same effect is happening to other OCX guilds too as they too have been shrinking over the past few months as the only way to recruit now is hope that older players on your own server return.

As of this new system I could not recommend to any of my friends who stopped playing to come back as I couldn’t even WvW against them let alone along side them, the same situation exists within SEA but the player base in a decent portion larger so the retention will be slower.

Nate.3927:

morrolan.9608:

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Those changes are now live.

Why was this done without warning ie why didn’t you give us say a days warning? There will undoubtedly be players who were about to move but just hadn’t done it yet who are now seemingly left out in the cold as it were.

original post was 4 days ago, so they did give you more than a day’s warning

The original post gave no indication of implementation beyond soon, which could be days or weeks.

So let me get this straight. So a hoard of players,1k + from what I’m being told in map chat, jumped to YB. Right after this then the Dev’s locked the worlds? I had over a 2.5 hour Q to get to EB tonight! You telling me these players are stuck here and can’t go back now????

#devlogic #dedgameinc

Dhemize.8649:

I love the timing of this lockout and who it applied to.
I think Anet works for YB. LOL

As intended.

indeed, I see an Anet tag runnign on YB very often while fighting them. During golem week it was the ONLY time we have witnessed a YB zerg without the exploit buff, when he or she was there.

Maxima.9861:

So let me get this straight. So a hoard of players,1k + from what I’m being told in map chat, jumped to YB. Right after this then the Dev’s locked the worlds? I had over a 2.5 hour Q to get to EB tonight! You telling me these players are stuck here and can’t go back now????

#devlogic #dedgameinc

This is exactly why there needs to be some sort of guesting mechanic.

Calill.3207:

With the changes completely locking down T1 this will be a slow death sentence for OCX WvW and to a lesser extent SEA.

I currently belong to a smaller (10-15 people per night) oceanic guild in T1 we have been recruiting for months and the growth is extremely slow although steady, the catch is the majority of our recruits are either new players or returning players coming from lower tier servers because their exists little to no oceanic population T1.
The reason that most (90%) of oceanic guilds gather on T1 is that there simply isn’t enough of a oceanic population left in WvW to be spread out among many servers while also providing an engaging WvW experience.

Without new people coming in or moving up retention will slowly kill off our guild and I have no doubt the same effect is happening to other OCX guilds too as they too have been shrinking over the past few months as the only way to recruit now is hope that older players on your own server return.

As of this new system I could not recommend to any of my friends who stopped playing to come back as I couldn’t even WvW against them let alone along side them, the same situation exists within SEA but the player base in a decent portion larger so the retention will be slower.

With all your experience in T1, you surely know how to lock in a tier so that no one moves in or out of it.

So organize a mass OCX move out of T1 into one of the non-full tiers and lock it in.

T8 is probably best since servers can only leave T8 in one way: up to T7, making your job easier. In any case, OCX accounts for a lot of PPT so keeping T8 the “OCX tier” won’t be as hard as when people tried to make T8 the “small man tier.”

Jayne.9251:

They are giving players an option to fix this now. If the players refuse to fix it themselves, then the only thing they can do is start squeezing a bit more and making it a more attractive idea to go down to a medium server — and the only way they can do this is via map cap controls.

Jayne, there’s NO WAY every server will be equal, nor should they ever be! People like different things. There is no “Goldilocks Zone” where it’ll be one size fits all. What we had was working and was giving player a chance to choose. Your concept of WvW is what, 30 man map pops??? No TY! Most of us would be onto the next game if that ever happened.

illenos.5134:

x indigo x.6981:

Please don’t get discouraged .. THIS IS AN AMAZING CHANGE TO WVW! and all the true wvw players who has vision know it! .. You have my support here from TC.

“All the true wvw players”…well I guess I’m not trve enough to understand this change. For me it seems to be as half thought out as the golem rush event but I guess time will show us how and if it will change anything.

Not all T2 servers are full, in fact, Half the population of WvW during prime NA is not WVW and misleading. They are just GVGs that sit there quing our BL in empty space and jerking it. SoS is actually a mid pop server during NA prime.

On the brigth side there was some talk on TS about them getting upset and possibly leaving, hopefully they can get more upset and leave rather sooner then later so that our population may be reflected fairly as high or medium, instead of very high.

So you are upset because if you move from T1 you would rather overstack YB like all the other guilds that have made this move rather then go to where players are actually needed ?

I simply don’t buy any of this “i wanna play with my friend…” BS. Bottom line is some guilds are trying to artificially prop up YB and moved, and they got caught with their pants down while trying to further manipulate and overall further degrade whole gaming experience for everyone else but themselves and now this thread is full of their QQ about “playing with friends ….”

It would actually be great if they get upset enough to leave as well, YB return to its normal size, maybe free up some space on T1. Don’t need much space on kitten, T3 to absorb entire T8 and T7. That would be an awesome change.

Samuel Loretan.8601:

This should be rolled out tomorrow.

To answer a bunch of questions that I’ve seen on this thread:

• The price to move to a server of a given population level isn’t changing. What’s changing is the way population levels are attributed to the servers.

• I won’t detail the way the new algorithm works, because I want to minimize the risk of people trying to game it. That being said, I am confident it is robust against such attempts. It’s not looking at a short period of time, and it’s looking at many aspects of the ways players are interacting with WvW to determine a server population.

• It will continue to be impossible to join or transfer to Full servers. It is possible that some servers are going to be marked as Full for a long time. While I understand this can be annoying for some, this is necessary to create a better experience for everyone.

• I agree that asking new players to chose a World before doing anything in the game is odd, now that Worlds are a WvW concept. This isn’t something we can change easily, however, but I’ll keep it in mind if an occasion arises.

• Please keep in mind that this won’t have an immediate, instantaneous effect on your WvW experience. The effect of the change will take some time to be observable from a player perspective – it should however be visible pretty quickly on my side, and I’ll make sure it’s going in the right direction.

Once this change has been deployed, I’d like to hear what you think about the population level your server now has. Specifically, I’m interested in hearing about feelings of mismatch (like “my server is marked as full, but feels really empty even at peak time”).

Thanks for the feedbacks so far! I’m glad most of you are liking this change.
— Samuel

I certainly appreciate the effort, but why aren’t you guys looking at how other MMO companies are doing it if you’re still struggling with population and balance issues after all this time? Transfer cost feels wrong. I spent over 3 times the money I spent on the full game just to transfer because the server I was in was in an unbalanced matchup.

ESO has a guesting system for WvW, and the amount of server campaigns are created according to the population of the previous campaigns. That way no maps are empty, there are no transfer cost, and you can play with all your friends.

With your current server system I can’t play with or against 80% of the people on my friends list and I have to wait in queues for hours without being able to guest to another WvW server.

Xillllix.3485:

ESO has a guesting system for WvW, and the amount of server campaigns are created according to the population of the previous campaigns. That way no maps are empty, there are no transfer cost, and you can play with all your friends.

ESO campaigns was designed for 2000 players. Guesting in WvW would take a significant percentage of the native population. 10 people guesting EB and that’s like 15% of the population. In ESO it wouldnt even be noticable. It would also dilute server pride, just look at EoTM.

I could imagine something similar to ESO alliances instead of servers, but you have to realize that the ONE GW2 server community today is hard enough to manage. Imagine if we had say… 3 in 1 (ie an entire tier). Using TS would become cumbersome (that’s going to be alot of people on a community run TS). You would need at least 4-5 more borders to spread out the population, which open up a whole heap of coverage issues. I fail to see how it would be any better than what we have now.

If WvW maps supported a larger amount of people so that entire WvW would be just half a dozen maps, it would be possible to have alliances the size of current GW2 servers fighting it out (sort of like EoTM lumping servers together in 3 teams, but giving us the freedom of movement like in WvW which would enable individual server communities to join a specific border). But they dont and they never will.

Samuel Loretan.8601:

A “Full” server is a server with a number of Active WvW Players (as defined by the algorithm) above a certain threshold. It has nothing to do with hardware limitations, or PvE players.

The “Full” threshold is slightly different than the other ones because it doesn’t have an upper limit. So some servers can be just slightly above the threshold and marked “Full”, and some other servers might be well over it, and also marked “Full”, even though their populations aren’t really balanced.

The intent is that since you can’t join or transfer to a “Full” server, their populations are going to diminish over time, until eventually they reach “Very High” again. At this point, all “Full” servers are going to be balanced. This won’t be right away, though, since we’re not kicking anyone out of their servers.

By basing this on peak coverage you are shooting yourselves in the foot with regard to players in other timezones, and quite possibly will lose players in those timezones as a result. I would urge you to quickly consider what can be done to account for off hours coverage being much lower than peak coverage.

This system needs time. The launch of HoT will shake things up too.

Too many people just thinking about themselves and their insignificant problems.
This is a really good change for the future of WvW as a game mode, and for the future of the game.

This is definitely a good change. It would probably benefit hugely from a temporary reduction of transfer costs to high/medium servers too.

I wish I saw this yesterday. My friends and I wanted to swap from Gandara to Sea of Sorrows, but it was full, so we transferred to Northern Shiverpeaks instead. The next day (today) SoS wasn’t full. ._.

I love the new grading structure, reminds me of Starbucks, where they have tall, grande and venti to avoid using the word ‘small’.

Having the lowest population showing as ‘medium’ is just marketing speak for ’ nearly dead’ on the wvw servers list, and a pure cash grab.

‘Medium’ should be classed as ‘available’ (to avoid the use of the word ‘empty’) and should be FREE to transfer to, then you can have medium, high, very high, full. The new classification will just lead to disappointment for a new player when they join a ‘medium’ server and discover this means 4 people running around in prime time pvd’ing. Will they pay more money to then transfer off? Nope, they will go find something else to play.

All feels like just another way to squeeze money out of the wvw population to me (cynic that I am).

It’s high time the lowest population servers were closed- this is what other games do when population drops. It’s sad that the half dozen players left there will lose their ‘server loyalty’ but it needs to be done now.

Notsoperky.4291:

The new classification will just lead to disappointment for a new player when they join a ‘medium’ server and discover this means 4 people running around in prime time pvd’ing. Will they pay more money to then transfer off? Nope, they will go find something else to play.

Yeah it was so much better when the server they picked was called ‘very high’ lol.

I deliberately signed for a server that had been classed as medium when I started this game.
Half a year later I started to play wvw.
A lot can change in half a year.

Samuel Loretan.8601:

The intent is that since you can’t join or transfer to a “Full” server, their populations are going to diminish over time, until eventually they reach “Very High” again. At this point, all “Full” servers are going to be balanced. This won’t be right away, though, since we’re not kicking anyone out of their servers.

Good reply. This is how I also interpreted the changes. These won’t however do much to help the lowest tier servers.

Most WvWvW players want a “full” experience. Meaning that their server has reasonable amount of people on at any hour. Currently only the top EU servers can offer this and it is impossible to transfer to them. The current change benefits “Very High” status servers the most. I predict that several guilds and WvWvW players will move from the “full” servers to them, but now people need to think their server transfers more carefully, maybe it is not possible to return.

The only real way to solve the problem of diminishing WvWvW population is to increase the rewards and make the WvWvW feel more fair, balanced and fun. Merging low population servers might be needed in EU, but merging servers isn’t a long term solution if the player base is bleeding.

My suggestions to make WvWvW a better experience:
1. Increase rewards to same level as other game modes (I do not count EotM as WvWvW) e.g. each WvWvW chest should have 1 guaranteed rare, it still takes more time to earn one WvWvW chest than attend a world event in pve
2. Introduce (copy & paste) the reward tracks from spvp to WvWvW
3. Allow more varied gear, including ascended materials, back piece bought with laurels + gold + badges of honor e.g. ascended backpiece 30 laurels + 5000 badges + 50 g.
4. Make WvWvW gear salvegeable
5. Keep WvWvW unique, do NOT make it a watered down copy of pve or spvp. In other diminish both spvp and pve alike elements from WvWvW, less random pve mobs like the forest animals and less contesting the circle like conquest based spvp.
6. Have a separate WvWvW balance team. WvWvW skill balance and meta is different from pve or spvp e.g. stealth is more powerful in WvWvW than spvp and WvWvW has large group fights, still dominated by the GWEN and pirate ship metas.
7. Change the scoring system so that it leads to more even match ups. Encourage the #2 and #3 attack the currently leading server. e.g. if you take an objective from the server, which is leading the match up (determined real-time), you will get double rewards + bonus server points from capturing objectives from that server.
8. WvWvW achievements need to be put down to realistic level, not 1 million dolyak kills, but more like 5000. Introduce multiple level achievements and titles, like spvp has.
9. Quality of life changes, like addition of WvWvW blueprints to wallet

I am sure that after these changes, the numbers of happy WvWvW players will increase dramatically. Then Arenanet can think about moneytizing it.

One thing I’m wondering about. (tell me if this has been asked before)
if there is not even a single server lower than medium (+the players above the threshold) and since the population is now only based on active wvw players what do you think will happen with hot?
New map, new players. I don’t know how solid the algorithm is but I may see some new servers coming, since this seems like a massive amount of new players coming?

Deniara Devious.3948:

Snipped Wall of Dreams

I like how sunny and positive you are in posting all of this. Unfortunately, I don’t think the dev’s are up to the task of creating such a dream list. It’s a good list though!

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how effective this system is going to be. Is it going to filter out players that come into WvW just to use the banks or crafting stations? Is it going to filter out those who come in just to claim a node or camp for a daily? Is it even going to filter out those just passing thru the Citadel or spawns to get to LA? Most of them are not what I’d call a “WvW player”.

Entenkommando.5208:

if there is not even a single server lower than medium (+the players above the threshold) and since the population is now only based on active wvw players what do you think will happen with hot?

What they wanted: new players cannot select “full” servers and WvW population will balance itself out because T4-T6 will get massive amounts of new players. (…not)

We have heard much complaining about how the new map will affect lower tiers and T1 servers are full of players and have massive queues already. What ANet hopes is that this will balance amount of WvW players between servers, but more likely this will result new players to join “dead” WvW servers where nothing is happening.

Active guilds are not encouraged to transfer to any reasonable servers as (in at least EU) first server with 500 gem transfer is in T7 and every active WvW guild knows what kind of fights there is. Sure, if one server would get multiple active guilds it would rise to T3-T4 easily. Still getting enough players to transfer to lower tiers might be option if you don’t want to sit in a queue and I suppose ANet would want that since it’s 6.25€ (-taxes) per player.

T1 servers have more than enough player base to stay Full for few years after HoT will bring back bunch of old players and some T2 servers have much less population than worst T1 servers. At the same time Full server guilds are expect to experience slow death since existing communities are not getting new players and they are not encouraged to transfer to greener pastries. They are left to bicker between themselves with 10 or less active WvW players since new ones are not comming in a while…

Still, making free transfers might be even worse, try to remember what happened when season 1 started (?) and they offered free transfers to medium servers. Hard to say exact numbers, but I expect that SFR’s WvW population quadrupled since it was guild focused T1 server with medium population.

Entenkommando.5208:

New map, new players. I don’t know how solid the algorithm is but I may see some new servers coming, since this seems like a massive amount of new players coming?

plz not !! we already have to much Servers.

For me a perfect Server Population means that in Primetime there is a short qeue on eb (5-15min /on weekends 30-45min are still ok) and all bl are full/nearly full.
outside primetime eb should always be a 20-40 zerg in the normal time 8am-1am and some spontaneously bl raids.

At the time of the first wvw Tornament middle silver had this population in eu (i play on AM at this time)

nowadays t1/2 in eu (play the last 6 month on deso/ now on fsp since 3 weeks) the population isn´t higher than middle silver during first wvw season. Only problem is that the players concentrate on eb cause often there is only 1 commander even in primetime online. outside primetime no qeues but always at least 1 zerg with 20-40 ppl you can play wvw in bigger numbers than 10vs 10.

if i want smallscale action i play pvp and not wvw.

for my understanding of what real wvw means maybe top 1-3 server in eu are full /the servers maybe place 7/8 are fine than the next 5/6 server are low and the rest is dead and should get closed to spread out on the 14-18 Server that are on a good populatien then.

you cannot ignore how many ppl left active wvw and try to spread all player on a way to much servers.

the state of an actual “very high” server is dead !!! still have an alt account on AM and beside primetime there is 10-14 hours of the day no real public lead above 20 players . Maybe a short eb qeue in prime and 2 bl half full .
That is no mass pvp mode playable on these Server at least over the half of the day.

And if hot bring so many new ppl than raise the mapcaps a bit and let the qeues be higher for 1-2 month and then the hype is gone.

Well looks like my transferring options have suddenly become a lot better. Thanks guys! Maybe now I will be able to experience a vivid wvw experience!

Notsoperky.4291:

I love the new grading structure, reminds me of Starbucks, where they have tall, grande and venti to avoid using the word ‘small’.

Having the lowest population showing as ‘medium’ is just marketing speak for ’ nearly dead’ on the wvw servers list, and a pure cash grab.

Good point it is patently ridiculous to class DR and ET as medium when they are the 2 lowest pop servers probably in the entire life of the game, and it basically ruins the credibility of what they are doing.

Maxima.9861:

Jayne.9251:

They are giving players an option to fix this now. If the players refuse to fix it themselves, then the only thing they can do is start squeezing a bit more and making it a more attractive idea to go down to a medium server — and the only way they can do this is via map cap controls.

Jayne, there’s NO WAY every server will be equal, nor should they ever be! People like different things. There is no “Goldilocks Zone” where it’ll be one size fits all. What we had was working and was giving player a chance to choose. Your concept of WvW is what, 30 man map pops??? No TY! Most of us would be onto the next game if that ever happened.

Where on earth did I say anything about being equal and fair? I think you’re misreading what I’ve written, lol.

The fact is, the No.1 complaint on these forums for the past THREE years has been population imbalance. A demand for WvW population accountability and a measure to control it. If you don’t know that, then you haven’t read the forums much in the past three years.

Anet has finally given that to the players, since they were unwilling to move or transfer and try to balance out the servers more instead of stacking like lemmings on one server — and then complaining about lack of variety, lol.

Honest to god, folks need to let go of the idea that they MUST have the blue ribbon or they’re nothing. EU has managed this — well there are some like that on SFR — I’d hope for the same for NA, since it’s been the biggest complaint for three years.

As for map cap, I suggested 60 (like they experimented with a couple months back) to increase queues and maybe nudge some in the right direction to self-fixing this piteous NA problem. But hey, 30 cap would likely make that go faster! So I’m all for it!

Even if people do move, it will never be “fair” and “Goldilocks” … but it will rely more on player skill and not numbers, and I think most people playing WvW would prefer that to the mindless blob.

And if I was a guild, my perfect gaming environment would be one where I’m constantly challenged each week by new teams, so we could improve collectively, instead of the same stale matches, week after week. Stale = bored = players quit.

Well it just got that much harder to move guild members in other servers into Yak’s Bend that want to experience WvW with their friends. Give people another reason not to want to WvW.

Anet seems to have tunnel vision when it comes to metrics. Yeah this might make since on paper but people forget that people have a choice not to play WvW and are more likely not to play if they can’t play with their friends. Moving servers and the cost of moving servers is a huge barrier to this mode.

I see some players constantly posting how to make WvW more popular. Making it harder to get your friends together to play this mode is going to make it less popular. They will play another mode or a game they can play together.

Its just another reason highlighting how fundamentally WvW and the server system is broken and Anet has no idea how to fix it. Anet is leaving it to the player base to achieve balance. When has that ever worked?

They really need to somehow invent a guild WvW rating/reward/leader-board system and assign guilds to tiered worlds seasonally.

Atoss.1056:

LoL at all the ppl crying “I can’t bring my friends to my xxxx T1 servur, qq” – if you care so much to play with your friends why don’t you go to lower ranked one and play with them there?

I think the answer to that is obvious: you have dozens of friends you’ve made playing WvW for three years now, but on the rare occasion an RL friends picks up the game (likely made more common when HoT comes out), you want to play side-by-side with them, too.

The thing is, for that newbie? Being able to play with their friends is quite likely the difference between whether they get into WvW or just ignore it.

Y’all need to remember that the “full” servers aren’t just “bandwagons.” They’re communities that have managed to sustain themselves and grow in the face of massive player attrition throughout the game. Much as I like to snark about rival servers just buying guilds or whatever, the reality is that, through a combination of factors including both good leadership and blind luck, every higher-tier server has managed to cultivate a community that straight-up works better, for more people, than the servers languishing down in the lower tiers (which, honestly, seem to drive a lot of the discussion around here). Wanting to see them undone is pretty much rooting for the death of the working part of the WvW community.

Balancing coverage matters but so far this change looks like it’s just locking some servers in a bubble and hoping that attrition screws them a bit. (You don’t actually need to make this change to funnel the — hypothetical, at this point — influx of new players to the right place. Note that even before the patch it was already impossible for newbies to join JQ/BG/TC without waiting weeks and having someone explicitly instruct them on how to find “gaps” where they could join.) That’s not even addressing 5% of what’s wrong with population and coverage in WvW.

Mireles Lore.5942:

Well it just got that much harder to move guild members in other servers into Yak’s Bend that want to experience WvW with their friends. Give people another reason not to want to WvW.

Anet seems to have tunnel vision when it comes to metrics. Yeah this might make since on paper but people forget that people have a choice not to play WvW and are more likely not to play if they can’t play with their friends.

I see some players constantly posting how to make WvW more popular. Making it harder to get your friends together to play this mode is going to make it less popular. They will play another mode or a game they can play together.

Its just another reason highlighting how fundamentally WvW and the server system is broken and Anet has no idea how to fix it. Anet is leaving it to the player base to achieve balance. When has that ever worked?

Being able to join the guild that you want is a core part of WvW, but on the other hand… full is full. You have to draw a line somewhere. You may look from it from a “but its only my buddy!” perspective, but if all the guilds and players on a server started argue that they want to bring in just one more it would be chaos. We already knew that GW2 servers had limited slots before. All you can hope for is that players move away from the server.

If population is based on WvW activity, it should be much more dynamic. I mean before a guild could disband and stop playing and the server population probably wouldnt budge. If they do that now, it should be a significant drop in activity even if several of them join other guilds. But I dont know if Anet mentioned somewhere on the update frequency here. If the stats dont update until next year then meh. If it update every other reset you might see movement on some servers.

This change will not work as intended. It will only make more WvWers quit the game. I was there…I’ve played on your “medium” servers. The numbers they have is not the problem. The problem is how they play.

Use ts at least while running with a public tag? nope. Playing builds which actually work in zergs and are not just bullkitten? nope. Organizing the server to move up in ranks? nope.

I’ve seen about 40 players joining one of these servers and within two months they’ve left again with about 60-80 players because everyone is sick of the “servers” mindset. Yeah they want to have more players but at the same time they want to do change anything. Leave them alone.
The server stacking in EU happened because of bandwagoners – yeah I have to admit it – and the hardcore WvWers who wanted to play some serious MUs and not this handholding perma losing kitten down there.

Just remove this system again and merge the last 12 servers into three. Problem solved.

Dawdler.8521:

Xillllix.3485:

ESO has a guesting system for WvW, and the amount of server campaigns are created according to the population of the previous campaigns. That way no maps are empty, there are no transfer cost, and you can play with all your friends.

ESO campaigns was designed for 2000 players. Guesting in WvW would take a significant percentage of the native population. 10 people guesting EB and that’s like 15% of the population. In ESO it wouldnt even be noticable. It would also dilute server pride, just look at EoTM.

I could imagine something similar to ESO alliances instead of servers, but you have to realize that the ONE GW2 server community today is hard enough to manage. Imagine if we had say… 3 in 1 (ie an entire tier). Using TS would become cumbersome (that’s going to be alot of people on a community run TS). You would need at least 4-5 more borders to spread out the population, which open up a whole heap of coverage issues. I fail to see how it would be any better than what we have now.

If WvW maps supported a larger amount of people so that entire WvW would be just half a dozen maps, it would be possible to have alliances the size of current GW2 servers fighting it out (sort of like EoTM lumping servers together in 3 teams, but giving us the freedom of movement like in WvW which would enable individual server communities to join a specific border). But they dont and they never will.

Yeah but ESO will add smaller maps for their WvW next month and the system will stay the same. EotM has no “pride” because it is only based on colors instead of alliances; it is a terrible system in comparison.

They need to find a way to:
1- Get rid of transfer fees
2- Make it so that you can plat with all your friends
3- Keep the population full on all servers
4- Eliminate queues (EotM is a complete failure at that, it’s not even WvW)
5- Make it possible for a server to catch up (giving them more points per kill if they are losing)
6- Make an engaging reward system

ASP.8093:

Y’all need to remember that the “full” servers aren’t just “bandwagons.” They’re communities that have managed to sustain themselves and grow in the face of massive player attrition throughout the game. Much as I like to snark about rival servers just buying guilds or whatever, the reality is that, through a combination of factors including both good leadership and blind luck, every higher-tier server has managed to cultivate a community that straight-up works better, for more people, than the servers languishing down in the lower tiers (which, honestly, seem to drive a lot of the discussion around here). Wanting to see them undone is pretty much rooting for the death of the working part of the WvW community.

No, what they did, however successful for them, is a large part of the ruining of WvW for a huge percentage of other players. That is not sustainable. Cherry-picking your so called “community” by over stacking the top servers is a big problem and this is a very mild way to try to address some aspects of it. If you are on a full server and you want to play with new friends, or old friends new to the game, you have to choose between not playing with them or transferring.
Remember, the population balance is a problem, at this point everyone is affected one way or the other by it. Remedying it will have a temporary negative impact on some or even many players, but in the long term we can hope it gets better. My guess is that if you are on a full server it’s going to be quite a while before it goes very high, even if there are large transfers of guilds… So settle in and enjoy the ride…

Tspatula.9086:

Remedying it will have a temporary negative impact on some or even many players, but in the long term we can hope it gets better.

In the long term most of the actual hardcore WvWers will take a look at Camelot Unchained and Eternal Crusade. I guess at this point all the issues regarding WvW are solved.
We don’t look for a certain IP and we give a kitten about how much content you can play besides WvW/RvR. Such things won’t hold anyone of us.

illenos.5134:

Tspatula.9086:

Remedying it will have a temporary negative impact on some or even many players, but in the long term we can hope it gets better.

In the long term most of the actual hardcore WvWers will take a look at Camelot Unchained and Eternal Crusade. I guess at this point all the issues regarding WvW are solved.
We don’t look for a certain IP and we give a kitten about how much content you can play besides WvW/RvR. Such things won’t hold anyone of us.

Well, being a “hardcore” WvWer myself, I’m not bothered by this, as you can tell I think it’s a step in the right direction. Having some people leave is, again a short term negative impact overall, but a small price to pay if things end up balancing out better. And, the game mode of WvW is going to change with the new borderlands map so this attempt at server re-balancing may not be the only thing that drives “hardcores” away to other games… WvW has gotten very stale, it desparately needs a “shake up” and I think everyone who plays it understands that. Deal or jettison.. Life is all about choices.

Tspatula.9086:

No, what they did, however successful for them, is a large part of the ruining of WvW for a huge percentage of other players. That is not sustainable.

That’s a conversation that needed to happen two years ago. Now all that other stuff is dead and gone.

Look at T1/T2/T3 NA. It’s been stable and playable for months, until the big YB move. (Stable in this case is a good thing because — for example — TC and Mag can’t really fight each other productively; it’d be a tedious matchup for both sides involved. Also each “tier” managed to carve out an identity. They play differently and want to play differently.)

Tspatula.9086:

If you are on a full server and you want to play with new friends, or old friends new to the game, you have to choose between not playing with them or transferring.

In practice, this mostly means “Don’t bother getting your friends into the game.” Which is kind of a reality anyway, given the hoops you need to jump through to actually enjoy it.

Tspatula.9086:

Remember, the population balance is a problem, at this point everyone is affected one way or the other by it.

In actuality, though, it’s mainly a problem within tiers, and at the super-low-end where there just aren’t enough players to sustain any action.

~

These three servers are all “Medium” under the new system.

http://i.imgur.com/AfhCh8F.png

http://i.imgur.com/8woSPRx.png

So, basically the only difference so far is that it’s harder for “top-tier” WvW servers to pick up more, which is mostly something they do to try to balance out off-hours coverage.

I’m willing to wait and see, but the new system has no actual mechanism for dealing with coverage gaps or population imbalance within the “lower” tiers.

Because there’s no way to deal with coverage gaps without closing the server if off hours.

Look at it that way. Say, you got server A that only plays from 00:00 to 12:00. They have 0 presence the rest of the time. As a result, they are more or less guaranteed 100% PPT for that period and nothing the other. That other period sees PPT split between the server B and C.

What do you want the system to do? The servers have the same population on average over the day/week. Should it allow more people to join B and C cause they are “losing”? But B and C are already at max capacity during the day. Adding more players at that time period will not help at all. And even if there was room, it wouldn’t help either.

The only way to solve that is with hard lockdowns based on current time. Say, you want to join B for the 00:00-12:00 period, fine you can. But you aren’t allowed in WvW outside of it. or you plain close the servers down to a small time period. Is that what you want?

stof.9341:

Because there’s no way to deal with coverage gaps without closing the server if off hours.

Look at it that way. Say, you got server A that only plays from 00:00 to 12:00. They have 0 presence the rest of the time. As a result, they are more or less guaranteed 100% PPT for that period and nothing the other. That other period sees PPT split between the server B and C.

What do you want the system to do? The servers have the same population on average over the day/week. Should it allow more people to join B and C cause they are “losing”? But B and C are already at max capacity during the day. Adding more players at that time period will not help at all. And even if there was room, it wouldn’t help either.

The only way to solve that is with hard lockdowns based on current time. Say, you want to join B for the 00:00-12:00 period, fine you can. But you aren’t allowed in WvW outside of it. or you plain close the servers down to a small time period. Is that what you want?

What I want is a system that doesn’t just further cut off servers’ attempts to balance their coverage themselves. The hoops we had to jump through under the old system were terrible, but now it’s just a brick wall.

And folks are crowing about how this brick wall will somehow fix WvW even though it has next to no effect on the current population distribution except in the very, very long term, and mainly through existing player attrition.

The point is that there’s nearly no way to systematize things without causing an ugly mess, which is why the annoying loopholes in the old system were actually functional — as a kind of “safety valve” for the system itself being trash. Now we have a very similar system but without the old workarounds.

You cannot have such a system with hard lockons like I mentioned. Anyone could exploit the “low coverage spots” to play in prime time instead.

stof.9341:

You cannot have such a system with hard lockons like I mentioned. Anyone could exploit the “low coverage spots” to play in prime time instead.

Map caps.

Moving to T1 if you want to play NA primetime is largely a waste of both your time and theirs. That’s why they don’t bother to court those guilds.

well this ‘fix’ will destroy WvW, there is also an big difference of quality between high and lower tiers. Not just that if an guild wants to play in an higher server for another kind of experience this now will kill it.
Not just that, guilds that want to go for an higher server rather would quit the game and play something else, cause they cannot get anymore new experiences cause its all full.
This may be the start of the destruction of WvW.

Nitron.6405:

I wish I saw this yesterday. My friends and I wanted to swap from Gandara to Sea of Sorrows, but it was full, so we transferred to Northern Shiverpeaks instead. The next day (today) SoS wasn’t full. ._.

You still can, its not that big of a hassle. It costs around 2k gems, last Sunday gem prices dropped to 316 gold for 2k when I bought mine (though for reasons other then transfers), it took me literally about 4-5 hours of SW farming, then selling all the mats I got to come up with it. So its really no big deal.

I could have just paid some cash but I decided not to use my money anymore until I see the population / balance issues somewhat solved, and while this is a definitive step in the right direction, the game needs far more “stacking” improvements on this front then just this.

I also feel great about those stackers that are now trapped on YB. They so get what they deserve LOL just LOL and now they come here and try to spew bull kitten arguments about “playing with friends….” etc.

Tongku.5326:

I also feel great about those stackers that are now trapped on YB. They so get what they deserve LOL just LOL and now they come here and try to spew bull kitten arguments about “playing with friends….” etc.

Err, not really. Several reasons:

• Like half the people who jumped to YB have alt accounts elsewhere. They’re not really trapped anywhere.
• Based on YB’s week-to-week performance, they actually stand a reasonable chance of breaking into T1 soon, so the transfers are “trapped” exactly where they want to be.
• AFAIK, their intent was never to jump up YB and then abandon it. It was to elevate YB at the expense of (mostly) BG.