Guild Wars 2

It’s been more than a month since the release, please stop the free server transfers as it is ruining WvW. For example: I’m from Whiteside Ridge and this week we got paired with Miller’s Sound and Dzagonur, both DE servers. At day 1-2 the ranking was Miller’s-Dzagonur-Whiteside. After a couple of days we started recovering and now the ranking is Miller’s-Whiteside-Dzagonur. Since that, we don’t see many Dzagonur even in the peak hours and they own no or few objectives; I have the feeling that being both DE servers, lots of Dzagonur transferred to Miller’s as it is the winning server right now, resulting in a costant zerg from Miller’s which now owns pretty everything and discouraging everyone to come in WvW as they greatly outnumber us most of the time. Please note that this is not a QQ because we are losing, i’ll keep fighting in WvW because i like it very much but i think those free transfers are ruining its very mechanics, causing one of the losing server to join the winning one instead of fighting along with the other losing to break the winner’s supremacy. Please find a way to limit these episodes, like paying server transfers with a good amount of gems.

While I agree in a sense. Think about it this way, Arenanet is begging people to balance themselves out and transfer to the lower population servers for less queues. They can not in good manors ask people to do that, then charge them for it.

Unfortunately as i already told, if this is the case, it’s getting the opposite result: most of the people go to the winning server and this is ruining WvW. They clearly stated that they kept free world transfer for “giving people the opportunity to switch a server to play with their friends.” A month have passed, if should already have reached your friends! Time to close the free transfer imho. PLEASE.

It’s a double edged sword, on the one hand Narathkor is correct, on the other is a lot of people arent transfering to balance, but rather take advantage of an exsisting imbalance.

There is going to have to be a point where they shut it down, or at least suspend it during matches. We’ll be moving to 2 week matches soon if things continue as is with the transfers your going to have some matches done the first weekend and people transfering from the loosing side.

Human nature is what it is, you log on to see one server has 95% of the map guilds from your server flipping to it (or another winning server) thats going to kill the W3 play for the match (already happening).

The faucet has to be turned off at some point, if it means long queue’s then thats going to have to be the catalyst for people to move servers. This expirement isnt working.

give people a deadline to move now or have to pay and you’ll see more people moving to balance themselves or foerver have to que.

^totally agree with this guy

Here’s a thought: announce a firm end date for free transfers, then reset WvW server rankings and scores to start fresh on that date.

Both measures are important, but only in combination will they resolve the problems we have been seeing with WvW populations. Stopping free transfers alone won’t accomplish much – it will only lock in the disparities that currently exist among the servers. People have already demonstrated that they aren’t willing to transfer to a losing team in exchange for short queue times, even temporarily. Why expect them to tie themselves to a “losing” team for the long haul? In order to convince people that moving to redistribute the population is worthwhile, they need to feel like they’re not signing up to be slaughtered each and every week for the rest of eternity. With a rankings wipe, the servers get a chance to reconstitute themselves without the baggage of the “loser” title that discourages others from joining and prevents them from attracting the populations they need in order to do better.

The large guilds would also benefit, as this would provide the opportunity that some have been asking for: a way to transfer to a lower population server without immediately being followed by countless hangers-on who would make the queue times on the new server just as bad as the ones they were trying to escape. Right now, such a transfer would be pointless because it would fail to accomplish its purpose (other people would just follow them), and it would also require them to walk away from the success that they had built on their current server. A ranking reset, along with the ability to port guild perks along with the guild itself, would free up the guilds to go where they think they’ll have the best play experience rather than stay where they are because they feel stuck by their investments. The end of free transfers would then discourage many of the “victory chasers” from following.

This will, of course, require a new period of experimental matchups to get the servers sorted into relatively well balanced brackets, which was supposedly what we’ve been doing for the last several weeks. As I have argued elsewhere, however, the current rankings serve little purpose because the “teams” that they rank don’t really exist, and they will not exist until free transfers stop. The membership of a team can currently change so quickly and so easily that the team that ends a a week-long match is not really the same one that started it: vast influxes and/or outflows of players pretty much guarantee it.

Assigning persistent scores to non-persistent entities simply makes no sense, so we need to begin the scoring again from a time when it does make sense: when the teams are more constant because free transfers have ended.

Free transfers need to go. Or Anet need to implement the originally planned two-week moratorium on WvW for transfers.

WvW takes more time and resources than any other portion of the game. Siege equipment is expensive, repair bills can get expensive, structure upgrades are expensive, and battles and map travel take a huge amount time. All this while you are earning fewer and less valuable rewards to offset the cost.

WvW demands more and gives less. Which most people are ok with because they are there for the competition and the co-operation.

That in mind, free transfers totally undermine the enjoyment people are getting for their investment.

Players transfer to recently lost keeps and use all of the supply to build useless rams inside the walls, so their server can come take it back. What was a long, expensive siege is rendered totally irrelevant in about half an hour.

Trolls are jumping over and either harassing people in /t, or they are jumping in to squads and relaying information to their servers larger WvW guilds and squads via voip.

Entire matches and every bit of effort made by a server is trashed because guilds, en masse, jump from a losing server to the winning server or one that is in close second. That is akin to half the players of a losing football team quitting and signing with the opposing team in the 4th quarter of a game.

I can understand wanting the players to spread out. And they will. But server populations will always be mercurial, and WvW will be pointless to participate in while players can willy nilly jump to and fro.

No one is going to pick a home if they don’t have to. Bloated servers are becoming more bloated due to people brute forcing themselves on during off-peak hours or after resets.

Enable the two week moratorium and announce a date for the end of free transfers.

Disallow transfering to servers you are currently matched again. This would solve a lot of issues while people will still be free to transfer where they really want, in worst case after a week.

Whats the solution to balancing populations?

Offer free transfers to lower pop servers AND incentives for staying there.

Unfortunately right now guilds who transfer not only get nothing for transferring but it also resets the progress that they had made in the game.

Na keep em going and open I prefer any time anywhere gives us more options.

I wonder, every hour of the day, as to WHY they have kept it open so far. Anyone with half a brain can see that it’s ruining PVP. Two weeks ago Fissure of Woe was a little competitive, we were able to match the other two servers, capture points, push them back, etc. We had a lot of people fighting and there was even a short que.

Now, it’s empty. We can’t go out of our spawn point, heck, I can’t even find 5 people that would go with me for some guerrilla tactics.

Free transfers must go.

or WvW will never be balanced. many big guilds are transferring between servers making the WvW too unbalanced.

change the WvW duration to 24h again and stop the server transfer to balance this game plz ! (just for 1 week, to balance the servers again)

End the free transfers? Yes please.
24h battles? I’m honestly indifferent, but we should focus on one issue per thread.

Has been said hundreds of times. Won’t happen….seems anet loves it this way. Eh..other games will come out…in the end this game was just another play2throw.

the free server transfer are temporary. for the beggining of the game, it will end soon

Free transfers were the worst idea ever to make into a live game. It has completly destroyed WvW. Servers mean nothing when you can hop to a better one any time your ego is hurt. I thought it was a good idea before on paper but seeing it on live…….Seriously Anet, letting it go on for this long when the WHOLE community is against it could be the straw that broke the cammels back.

And you think stopping them will accomplish what?

they will eithe
A: stop playing WvW altogether o
B:spend the gems to move.

i mean, just a week or something like that to balance the servers again. not permanent

etsmith.9025:

And you think stopping them will accomplish what?

they will eithe
A: stop playing WvW altogether o
B:spend the gems to move.

Most large guilds that are server hopping, aren’t going to be able to continue to do so once transfers are no longer free. Yes, some of their roster will cough up the gems to do so. But in a guild of 300+ with 80-100 actives they’ll be lucky if a quarter to one-third of their actives would be willing to hop at the rates that some guilds have been doing it.

Implementing the cost that has been discussed prior to release will slow down the rate of transfers, the fast vacuums that large guilds create on the servers they leave and will lead to more guilds working to better their servers instead of just jumping ship.

WvWvW, as discussed frequently prior to release, was meant as a way to instill pride in your home world. At this point, it’s not happening on the large scale that would be preferable. Right now, the going gets tough for a server, guilds ship out to a winning one. Week after week.

You will still have a vacuum. If they perceive The game to be “lost” , they will stop playing WvW in favor of dungeons and events.

Most equate “fun” with winning. If they aren’t winning, they aren’t having fun and will find another avenue to enjoy the game. For instance farming the. gold necessary to buy the gems to transfer.

The problem with the free transfer is that there is no consequence for doing so. If people actually have to take a negative consequence alongside transferring (be it spending gems, being locked out of WvW for the current rotation, or only able to transfer during a short downtime between matches while they reset – maybe have a 3-6 hour break on Friday where no WvW takes place). Without a negative consequence nothing stops anyone from picking up and moving to “greener pastures,” even though the same problems will happen on those fields as well.

And if they don’t (because all of the time zones are covered already) you run into queue issues, and if you honestly only care about being on a winning/top tier server, you’ve already missed the point of WvW – server pride and glory.

There was another MMO that had free server transfers, albeit they were once every 7 days, the fact still remains that the free transfers played a major part in the downfall of the game. Why stick with your guild/stay on a slowly progressing server with you can give a better one a shot every 7 days with absolutely no downside.

This resulted in the game’s population slowly migrating to a handful of servers and because the end-game raiding content was ridiculously difficult and nigh impossible for you to carry even a single bad player, you either moved to one of those servers with the population or you recruited/sniped raiders from dying/dead guilds who were still stubborn enough to keep raiding.

The problem is the damage has already been done to many servers and stopping transfers will destroy any hope of them ever recovering.

Anet has said several times that they want people to move to lower pop servers, but give them incentive to do so other than queue times. In fact with guild upgrades not being shared between servers, transferring is actually punished.

The biggest problem with this whole situation is that people just don’t like losing. Given the choice of sitting an hour or two in a queue and winning a fight, and having no queue and a high chance of losing it is obvious what people will do.

They will sit in that kitten queue and moan that queues are too long.

Kiviar.7063:

The problem is the damage has already been done to many servers and stopping transfers will destroy any hope of them ever recovering.

Some larger WvW guilds have already talked about wanting to switch servers because people jumping on to theirs has made queues so bad they have a hard time playing together. Their hesitation is coming from knowing as soon as they move, if their new server is winning in WvW, then people will transfer and it will just happen all over again.

If Anet just enabled the kittenkittening two week lock-out as intended and announced a date for ending free transfers, then those servers would have a better chance to recover than they do now. Because at the 11th hour all of the large guilds and small ones alike that want to get away from queue times and band-wagoners will transfer so they can’t be freely followed.

As it is now the lower pop servers will just continue to bleed players and higher pop servers will just get worse. Unless they are intentionally trying to empty some servers so they can merge and close them, the free transfers are creating an absolute disaster.

Free server transfers need to stop. It hurts the communities, the balance and diminishes any sense of server pride.

People already had plenty of time to meet friends in the same server, i think they should at least close free transfers to servers with high queue time IMO.

Give a two week warning to allow folks to get to where they want to be then start charging for transfers and limit transfers to once a month.

Problem solved.

Jorm

I like Jorm’s idea. Give a warning so people can get to where they want then lock it. Make it cost money. But as it is, it’s just not working, and anyone who argues against it is delusional.

Melkiah.2496:

It’s been more than a month since the release, please stop the free server transfers as it is ruining WvW. For example: I’m from Whiteside Ridge and this week we got paired with Miller’s Sound and Dzagonur, both DE servers. At day 1-2 the ranking was Miller’s-Dzagonur-Whiteside. After a couple of days we started recovering and now the ranking is Miller’s-Whiteside-Dzagonur. Since that, we don’t see many Dzagonur even in the peak hours and they own no or few objectives; I have the feeling that being both DE servers, lots of Dzagonur transferred to Miller’s as it is the winning server right now, resulting in a costant zerg from Miller’s which now owns pretty everything and discouraging everyone to come in WvW as they greatly outnumber us most of the time. Please note that this is not a QQ because we are losing, i’ll keep fighting in WvW because i like it very much but i think those free transfers are ruining its very mechanics, causing one of the losing server to join the winning one instead of fighting along with the other losing to break the winner’s supremacy. Please find a way to limit these episodes, like paying server transfers with a good amount of gems.

Cool.
So this week-end we’re going to receive a fresh arrival of germans to farm. The ones we’re fighting this week are getting a bit, tired and softy.

Polish up your armors bros and sistas of Ruins, new German arrival incoming soon.

Free transfers has basically screwed Dragonbrand out of a win this week. Almost when the match was complete with Dragonbrand in the lead, an alliance from the European servers transferred to Blackgate as did an alliance from the third place server Fort Aspenwood. The 23k lead Dragonbrand struggled for over the course of four days vanished in less than 12 hours. Now Titan Alliance guilds have moved there.

@Narathkor: How can ppl willingly balance out when ppl only care about the winning side (that being the general mentality even if it’s bad)? It’s the worst decision/mentality ANet could chose. People are 90% lazy….they don’t want to work for their win…they want to receive their win.

Dragonbrand was stolen a win, out of a VERY balanced match (literally 4-5k difference between servers – mid week) and with work over 20k lead. Because of what happened (transfers of EU guilds and some from the third server we were matched up with) ppl are leaving the server for bigger ones. The mentality ANet chose didn’t balance servers..it made “the rich richer and the poor poorer by eliminating the middle class”. The only thing it encourages is greed4win.

Only thing they could do to possible fix a small part of this, is to fuse servers together.

I agree that from WvWvW point of view free transfers are bad – that’s basically why ANet has limited them to one every 24h.
But they can’t be removed until ANet manages to implement guesting system.

They have promised that system since they announced different servers and it would be unacceptable to bring fees up without making it able for friends from different servers to play together.
As a matter of fact, i already disagree with the 24h cooldown on transfer – I would much prefer the cooldown to apply to WvWvW enterance (so, you can transfer more often, but you can only access WvWvW 24h after you ytransferred).
I have friends on multiple servers that I want to play with. They are mostly my guildies fom different games I’ve played recently.
We were not fussed much about server choices because of the promised guest feature.
The 24h cooldown already complicates our lives, we can only really do dungeons freely together. It’s the WvWvW access that’s the biggest problem, not transfers.

I know a lot of people on Dragonbrand were completely demoralized when when logged on during primetime and Blackgate suddenly owned everything after massive work all weekend. Today PvP was nearly dead on our server. There were a total of 20 or so people on Eternal Battlegrounds that I could tell and we were losing everything almost everywhere on the map. Fort Aspenwood seemed to be having the same issue. People don’t seem to be transferring to the low population (ie losing) servers, not that Dragonbrand is a low population server, but potentially after this match up it very well could be. We’ve already had people in our guild leave to join Blackgate to hop on the bandwagon and many of us our consider this the number 1 reason we may not continue playing Guild Wars 2 as our primary MMO. Note I’m only speaking for my guild here and what I’ve observed from Dragonbrand the last 3 days, but I think it’s safe to make the assumption that the free server transfers aren’t working as Arenanet intended them to.

Several solutions could be offered. Put WvW lockouts on people who transfer till the next match begins. To keep things fair you may want to consider resetting server rankings once server transfers become paid to, as of right now Dragonbrand probably doesn’t belong in it’s current ranking and it will likely be a few months before we settle into our real ranking as we likely lost a large number of our WvW force. Simply making the transfers paid should alleviate the issue too while keeping lower population servers free to transfer to (this way guilds actually transfer to them!) and maintaining guild buffs and maybe even other incentives for these kinds of transfers.

The match up with Fort Aspenwood and Blackgate was really enjoyable for us (speaking for my guild again) as well as the earlier match up with Crystal Desert up till Blackgate got numerous transfers. We were seeing a number of guilds we never saw in WvW in full presence on Blackgate that night in WvW and tonight we could barely field a tiny force to go harass supply camps and other minor objectives on the Eternal Battlegrounds map.

I know I am not sure I can get myself to play WvW this upcoming week after the debacle of what happened with the Dragonbrand vs Blackgate vs Fort Aspenwood match. I mean, what if I spend 12 hour nights working to get my server a win only to have free server transfers to ruin it again. I know if I do play, I will just be going through the motions, I won’t actually enjoy it. I am still not sure if I even want to play Guild Wars 2 anymore as the only part of the game I really enjoyed was WvW and it feels totally ruined for me now.

^ This. WvW is completely pointless. You level faster, its cheaper, and you bank more by just playing PvE. If you want PvP, 8v8 or free 5v5 tournaments can scratch that itch and come with no risk or reward (other than skins).

The reasons to WvW are large scale battles, assault/defend gameplay, server pride, and badges of honor for legendaries or PvP exotic gear.

Well, it’s hard to have server pride when the longer the match goes on the smaller the 2nd and 3rd place servers get because fence-hoppers transfer. Its hard to enjoy the assault/defend mechanics when your server is so demoralized or full of trolls from transfers that you don’t have enough people to make an honest push or legitimately hold real-estate.

A lot of people on Dragonbrand are just disregarding WvW until the transfers are done. We are tired of them being the determining factor in matches over effort, commitment and investment, and we are tired of the channel trolls and supply leeches.

The community has been pretty unanimous on this. More so than a lot of other issues that have been directly addressed anyways. It would be nice to see the issue acknowledged. I don’t really consider the 24hr transfer cooldown and acknowledgment. I have no idea what anyone realistically thought that would solve. One can hope its a robustness test for a larger implementation. Still does nothing to resolve people transferring to servers they are currently matched against.

2 week WvW lockout after transfers that are free or otherwise.

“The last data I saw had an overwhelming majority of transfers from servers with long queu times (generally from winning servers), to servers with short queu times (generally to losing servers). There are some people going to the winning servers, but the simple truth is the vast majority are not.”
— Colin Johansen, game director.

Don’t you get it? Server transfers are always going to be free! What incentive do they have to end them? Just look what it did to HoD. HoD was unbeatable, everyone transfers to that server diluting the “skilled” and organized WvW population on that server. This continues until people on the server get completely fed up with the situation and leave, making another server "the best’ by default. Now people flock there… Vicious cycle repeats.

It is their built-in mechanic to balance out powerhouse servers. kitten ain’t goin’ nowhere.