Guild Wars 2

I play on Gandara. About a year or so ago WvW was pretty good with Gandara. We had a medium to high population. Most nights every borderland had an active commander and day / nights you could still find active groups on the home border and eb. Now sadly our population has dropped and finding a decent fight has become extremely hard. The past 3 weeks we’ve been set against SFR who just end up dogpiling us because they outnumber us so heavily. This isn’t fun for the people being dogpiled, and I can’t imagine its much fun for SFR either. I remember dogpiling some low pop servers back in Gandara’s more active days. It felt so empty. We spent more time dps’ing doors than fighting.

Population disparity is a huge problem in WvW, but I have the solution!!!

Step 1: For 2 weeks ArenaNet make server transfers FREE.
Step 2: Players can only enter a WvW map if their server has <10 players more than the opposing servers have on the map.
Step 3: Have free transfer windows at the start of each WvW season.

This would obviously make it extremely difficult for players on high population servers to join WvW when fighting medium or low population servers. However, with free transfers these players can easily move to lower population servers for guaranteed access to WvW.

I am sure within 2 weeks the player base will have transferred to even out the active WvW players across the servers. Then we’d have competitive battles every match up & little to no dogpiling.

Everyone would just complain and not transfer.

Stop guilds like RKO night / early morning capping and you will end up matched with more evenly populated servers. Gandara and Abbaddons Mouth both have the issue of strong night crews carrying them into high tier matches due to a point gain that doesn’t truely reflect their active wvw popultion.

@OP:

You believe that population parity is the problem. It is not. It is one of the issues but not the main one. The problem is that people don’t want to play WvW. That is because of two things:

1. WvW was stagnant for a long time. A lot of people left due to boredom
2. ANET started making changes, but they were the wrong changes. They tried to add in a lot more PvE into WvW and make gimmicky terrain that took away the ability for larger fights.

@style A lot more will leave if all WvW is, is dogpiling. Before at least smaller teams had a small chance to fight much larger teams with good use of stability. Now with Stability nerfed and generally much higher dps on all classes surviving against larger numbers is near enough impossible.

Obviously population will play a primary role in balance. Naturally there’s differences between players and guilds but that would be the difference between close win and close loss. You can see right now that server with more active WvW pops do better than those without.

@haz Yes night pops do affect server ranking but if you read my OP you will understand this would also become balanced. You wouldn’t be able to join if your server has far more on than the other servers on the map at that time.

Step 2: Players can only enter a WvW map if their server has <10 players more than the opposing servers have on the map.

i agree on something similar.

scaling people in the map.
10 people of server A? so 20 of B and 20 of C not more

200 people of server A? so 210 of B and 210 of C.

will never get a 50 vs 10 (this speaking of tier 8 )

Torasan.6029:

I play on Gandara. About a year or so ago WvW was pretty good with Gandara. We had a medium to high population. Most nights every borderland had an active commander and day / nights you could still find active groups on the home border and eb. Now sadly our population has dropped and finding a decent fight has become extremely hard. The past 3 weeks we’ve been set against SFR who just end up dogpiling us because they outnumber us so heavily. This isn’t fun for the people being dogpiled, and I can’t imagine its much fun for SFR either. I remember dogpiling some low pop servers back in Gandara’s more active days. It felt so empty. We spent more time dps’ing doors than fighting.

Population disparity is a huge problem in WvW, but I have the solution!!!

Step 1: For 2 weeks ArenaNet make server transfers FREE.
Step 2: Players can only enter a WvW map if their server has <10 players more than the opposing servers have on the map.
Step 3: Have free transfer windows at the start of each WvW season.

This would obviously make it extremely difficult for players on high population servers to join WvW when fighting medium or low population servers. However, with free transfers these players can easily move to lower population servers for guaranteed access to WvW.

I am sure within 2 weeks the player base will have transferred to even out the active WvW players across the servers. Then we’d have competitive battles every match up & little to no dogpiling.

Gandara wants another free transfer wave like before season 2?

@ your solutions: Don’t fight the symptoms (low pop), make Wvw again a fun and viable game mode.

haz.6358:

Stop guilds like RKO night / early morning capping and you will end up matched with more evenly populated servers. Gandara and Abbaddons Mouth both have the issue of strong night crews carrying them into high tier matches due to a point gain that doesn’t truely reflect their active wvw popultion.

They already tried free transfers. It was the worst thing to happen to WvW (until HoT came out, of course). If Anet has any job openings for WvW, you should apply. You’d be a good fit there.

style.6173:

@OP:

You believe that population parity is the problem. It is not. It is one of the issues but not the main one. The problem is that people don’t want to play WvW. That is because of two things:

1. WvW was stagnant for a long time. A lot of people left due to boredom
2. ANET started making changes, but they were the wrong changes. They tried to add in a lot more PvE into WvW and make gimmicky terrain that took away the ability for larger fights.

That is extremely false.

VAST MAJORITY of people I know stopped playing WVW for multiple reasons. Main one, especially on any of the mid and lower tiers was and is nightcapping. Simply put, once they realized that their skill as a team is irrelevant, it made it pointless to log in.

Most just left, about 40%ish (myself included) transferred out to higher tiers where there is sufficient coverage to at least have some sort of a chance at balanced matches so that those of us who enjoy fights, be it over objectives or otherwise, can actually push to make a difference at least once in a while.

Yes there are other issues at play as well, stagnation, bad game balance, bad desert BL design, lack of rewards in wvw on per time basis vs pve, etc. etc. and those issues do add to the situation, a lot. But the main reason for transfers upwards and abandoned lower tier servers is population imbalance. Both in terms of nightcapping and prime time where many servers now just can no longer come even remotely close to taking on map que (or close to it) blobs.

This has been made worse by the fact that such servers can no longer draw in “new blood” sorta speak, due to the constant losses due to population. Winning, at least once in a while is what brings in new players and / or gets them to stay. If you just constantly don’t stand a chance, people just leave, then the emptiness trickles upwards, which is exactly and precisely what has happened and is happening.

It’s just not as fun anymore to go into WvW. Especially when you meet servers that avoid you the best they can daytime, and get rekt in every fight. And then tick 500 during the night.

Magnuzone.8395:

It’s just not as fun anymore to go into WvW. Especially when you meet servers that avoid you the best they can daytime, and get rekt in every fight. And then tick 500 during the night.

Sounds like Sorrow’s Furnace.

We’ve been against them for 2 weeks now and somewhere around the end of last week I swear they made some kind of collective agreement with Crystal Desert to focus us down. Both servers since around last Thursday and continuing in to this week (same match up) have been doing nothing but pressuring us often at times in such a way that they’ll both be in our keep at the same time.

SF either avoids fights and builds open field siege or blobs us when they outnumber us 3 to 1. Then as soon as our server starts to sleep they magically all wake up and 50+ of them PvD their way to victory running down any solo’s they see.

Never had much of an issue with SF prior to last week. They’ve never been my favorite server to fight either but some kind of grudge has blossomed and I’m starting to feel the same for them as they apparently do about us.

PS. if any [MvM] see this, yes I’m going to be /sit spamming your corpses for chasing me around the map multiple times when I was alone and yes I’m going to siege things to the teeth when my server goes to sleep just to make your karma train difficult.

One server will always have more population as another, as the fairweather players move wherever they think the loot is more plentiful.

Quite simply, the matchups should not be based only on Glicko. There should be someone at Anet who actually monitors these things and handpicks each matchup based on Glicko AND on recent match history. Sure, he or she might get flamed each week because you can never please everyone, but it would be better than having to fight the same servers weeks on end.

All at 0 is parity, isn’t_it? Will be reached soon, so special action to reach it needed.

Torasan.6029:

I play on Gandara. … blablabla

So ask your morning/lunch crew to stop pvd , like that maybe you can meet other server…

Free transfers won’t balance the tiers because Anet doesn’t know how to control who transfers.
Servers in the past have used blackouts to get past the full server status to overstack.

Free transfers won’t balance the tiers because the players really don’t want balance, at least in NA. In all the years of WvW there’s only been a very few servers in T1.

That being said, free transfers does do two things.

1. Players in continually outmanned matches will have the opportunity to transfer away from a situation that deters participation. Transferring away from this situation is the same as PAY TO PLAY, and should have been fixed years ago.

2. There was less stagnation of the servers when players were able to transfer for free.

Step 2: Players can only enter a WvW map if their server has <10 players more than the

This makes no sense. This would ruin many people game time. Ragequitting could be a strong weapon to deny other players their right to play.
And what would happen if some blob leaves a map and the other one remains?

Many people wouldn´t even be able to join WvW to purchase items in npc so first of all All respawn stuff should be moved to another place.

I agree that population disbalance must be fixed, but not this way for sure.