Guild Wars 2

You guys killed HoD, and are now destroying JQ. Why didn’t you block server transfers a month ago ? When the game was out, I was happy that server transfers were free because I could chose which server was good for me (that was during the three-day headstart). I thought it was going to be like that for a week, and it was perfect. Why aren’t the transfers blocked ? Please answer me, you guys are slowly killing WvW with those transfers… Atleast give a one-time free transfer for each account, and the rest has to pay.

Don’t close or delete this topic please, I’m not complaining (okay, just a bit) but I want answers and I think I’m not the only one…

Define killing HoD and JQ? No more 2-5 hour queues? Not quite as untouchable to the peasant servers? The goal of the open transfers is to lessen the disparity between the top servers and the rest and to decrease the queues on said top servers.

Announce a two week grace period for people to get to the server they want to live on.
Then start charging for transfers and limit transfers to once a month.

Problem solved.

With will eliminate several problems that exist in wvw currently, provide additional revenue stream, and requires very little coding to implement.

Jorm

Radiodread.8469:

Define killing HoD and JQ? No more 2-5 hour queues? Not quite as untouchable to the peasant servers? The goal of the open transfers is to lessen the disparity between the top servers and the rest and to decrease the queues on said top servers.

You got everything wrong. HoD had 10 mins queue before, then 30, then 4h, and now back to 0 queues. Same thing will happen to JQ. Queues are getting longer and longer and longer.

HoD had TA on their server, a big and known alliance. When people realized that TA was going to Henge of Denravi, and realized that they were pros, and took HoD to #1, everybody transfered to HoD just to be #1. Same thing happening to JQ right now, except that JQ has always been a calm server, with its own community, but now people from every server are flooding JQ just to be #1.

Ah, yes, I could see the disruption of communities to be a detriment. With that type of behavior perhaps you are correct, but leave the bottom half of the servers free with a CD.

Radiodread.8469:

Ah, yes, I could see the disruption of communities to be a detriment. With that type of behavior perhaps you are correct, but leave the bottom half of the servers free with a CD.

I just feel bad for Jade Quarry right now. I’m here since the three day headstart, I got a lot of friends just from day one, I saw guilds being created, guilds merging, everything. We have our own website, our own teamspeak server, you know it’s like those WoW medium servers where everybody knows eachother, well, even though Jade Quarry has always been a high-full server, it was the same feeling. Now it’s getting destroyed because we all worked hard to get to #1, and people join in because transfers are free and they love to claim that they are #1.

Same thing happened with HoD originally, so I know how you feel. The worst part is trying to get your A team in there in a timely fashion. Weekends are the worst. Oh, and you go from having friendly chat to total randomness and trolling etc. Believe me, I feel for you.

Radiodread.8469:

Define killing HoD and JQ? No more 2-5 hour queues? Not quite as untouchable to the peasant servers? The goal of the open transfers is to lessen the disparity between the top servers and the rest and to decrease the queues on said top servers.

What has happened is that people are now moving over from HoD to JQ.

JQ had low que times, now they have super Q times. HoD went from 2+ hour ques to zero. HoD went from full to high in a few days. This is all due to server transfers as people migrate to the new FoTM server which is now JQ.

Yea, HoD was dominating but JQ was really snapping on our heels. Bet my hat that if TA and others stayed; this weeks battle would have been super close and really fun but now it’s a landslide victory with next to no opposition.

JQ is now the new HoD.

Nothings really changed but the server name people flock to.

Who can deny that free, no punishment transfers does not promote server hopping to winning teams?

Come down to Kaineng, Devona’s Rest, Borlis Pass, Ferguson’s Crossing, Anvil Rock and Darkhaven to see what free transfers can do to a server. Your extra long queue times may have been annoying. But believe me, having your server rendered a ghost town and not able to be competitive in wvw is worse.

fixit: Who can deny that free, no punishment transfers does not promote server hopping to winning teams?

I don’t think anyone is denying that point. And as long as transfers are free and can be done at any time (barring server status) this is going to continue happening and will hamper server loyalty. Well it’ll prevent any sort of real server loyalty from forming.

Jorm

Radiodread.8469:

Define killing HoD and JQ? No more 2-5 hour queues? Not quite as untouchable to the peasant servers? The goal of the open transfers is to lessen the disparity between the top servers and the rest and to decrease the queues on said top servers.

You really don’t seem to be aware of what’s happening. Free transfers aren’t eliminating imbalances. It’s creating them. The best you can say about it is that the imbalances are possibly always shifting but there will always be imbalances. HoD had no queues for the at first, then 8 hour ones, now very small ones. JQ had small ones now very large ones. Who is going to (re)start their WvW adventures on Kainang? It’s a very rare organized guild who will want that task. They may not want to deal with queues in tier one but how about tier two or three? And in the meantime server stability and community are disrupted. It’s not worth it. Let people choose when they create their characters and give low pop servers some kind of exp boost if you like but just letting people transfer at random is creating chaos.

Kiviar.7063:

Come down to Kaineng, Devona’s Rest, Borlis Pass, Ferguson’s Crossing, Anvil Rock and Darkhaven to see what free transfers can do to a server. Your extra long queue times may have been annoying. But believe me, having your server rendered a ghost town and not able to be competitive in wvw is worse.

Exactly, those free transfers are not only killing top tiers servers, but also low tiers… sad… come on please stop that

The joke is on us, the customers, because this IS ArenaNet’s form of “balancing” WvW and it is NOT going away… ever! What better way to bring “balance” than let people play merry-go-round with the front-running servers, only to kitten off the server’s original inhabitants forcing them to a) transfer, or b) lose a huge chunk of their population when the queues get so long everyone else bails for the “up-and-comer”?

The only way to balance is to enable transfers to low population servers, but disable them to high and full servers. I still don’t understand why free transfers are still there.

Prototype.9852:

The only way to balance is to enable transfers to low population servers, but disable them to high and full servers. I still don’t understand why free transfers are still there.

I guess they’re here because Anet doesnt’ want to make them paid until they have the guesting system implemented to not screw up PVE players trying to meet with friends on other servers on a regular basis. And I think that’s exactly the right thing to do.
However, while the guesting isn’t live and server transfers free they should introduce blocking access for X days to WvW after a player has changed the server. This way, the WvW imbalances should go away while not unnecessarily limiting pure PVE players.

The minute Anet announces the imminent end of free server transfers, all the lower pop/losing servers will be completely drained of their remaining players.

Ending free transfers isn’t the solution to server balance, implementing guild transfers is.

/thread

ecwoodrow.7034:

The minute Anet announces the imminent end of free server transfers, all the lower pop/losing servers will be completely drained of their remaining players.

Ending free transfers isn’t the solution to server balance, implementing guild transfers is.

/thread

They should’ve blocked free transfers one week after the release of the game…

JQ is always full so people can’t really transfer there. I’m not seeing the issue?

Prototype.9852:

ecwoodrow.7034:

The minute Anet announces the imminent end of free server transfers, all the lower pop/losing servers will be completely drained of their remaining players.

Ending free transfers isn’t the solution to server balance, implementing guild transfers is.

/thread

They should’ve blocked free transfers one week after the release of the game…

That would have been the worst thing they could’ve done.

Gankfest.4965:

JQ is always full so people can’t really transfer there. I’m not seeing the issue?

You’re the only one from JQ I guess, and no it’s not always full, maybe it is now, but everytime I’m online it’s High. The “Low-Med-High-Full” thing depends on who’s online on that server, not how many people are on that server.

ecwoodrow.7034:

Prototype.9852:

ecwoodrow.7034:

The minute Anet announces the imminent end of free server transfers, all the lower pop/losing servers will be completely drained of their remaining players.

Ending free transfers isn’t the solution to server balance, implementing guild transfers is.

/thread

They should’ve blocked free transfers one week after the release of the game…

That would have been the worst thing they could’ve done.

Not at all… believe me, all the people from the headstart thought the transfers would end after a week, and we were all happy to see that there was free transfers at the begining. Now it’s just too much. Especially in a game where there’s competition between servers.

I am pretty sure we will hear about the transfer lockdown in the same blog post that will announce the guild transfer system.

However, I’d still hope people would relax about the current WvW rankings. See it this way: Season 1 of WvW has not even started! We are currently still playing in one-week pre-season friendlies, and who really cares about the results of pre-season friendlies?

~MRA

What is the theory behind these posts? There have been hundreds of them previously, they get locked for being superfluous. But this will be the thread that finally convinces Anet!!!

Prototype.9852:

ecwoodrow.7034:

Prototype.9852:

ecwoodrow.7034:

The minute Anet announces the imminent end of free server transfers, all the lower pop/losing servers will be completely drained of their remaining players.

Ending free transfers isn’t the solution to server balance, implementing guild transfers is.

/thread

They should’ve blocked free transfers one week after the release of the game…

That would have been the worst thing they could’ve done.

Not at all… believe me, all the people from the headstart thought the transfers would end after a week, and we were all happy to see that there was free transfers at the begining. Now it’s just too much. Especially in a game where there’s competition between servers.

Closing them after a week would’ve left servers far more imbalanced than they even are right now. There’s no getting past the fact that free server transfers have overwhelmingly helped bolster lower queue/losing servers.

Kryptorchid.7620:

The joke is on us, the customers, because this IS ArenaNet’s form of “balancing” WvW and it is NOT going away… ever! What better way to bring “balance” than let people play merry-go-round with the front-running servers, only to kitten off the server’s original inhabitants forcing them to a) transfer, or b) lose a huge chunk of their population when the queues get so long everyone else bails for the “up-and-comer”?

Not really the joke is the people. Anet’s mistake is having faith that people would even out the population and it has shown the polar opposite
People ruin games plain and simple. That was actually the one thing I like about swtor is they assigned guilds to servers. Probably the best way to do it, granted it didnt help that everyone wanted to play a sith but regardless.
As soon as you give people the ultimate control they completely ruin the system and this is a perfect case in point, but ofc if you dont allow the people to choose they cry

I would love to see a game come out when when you bought your copy you were assigned a number, that number was your server, then you had to create everything from scratch, but at least the servers would have the same amount of populations

im from Sorrows Furnace. My server used to have a large pop. Thanks to Anet’s free transfers all my server is now is a farming server for everyone else to farm. We lost 80% of our wvw pop. More n more keep going to the wining side. Im tierd of this, Soon my server will stop wvwing all together. Last night between all Borderlands, their was a woping 11 people on. Gate of Madness have all bl’s pure green. Not even emhry bay was around. Begining of the match we had people all hours of the night, enough to keep us on the map and in the fight. Now we have nothing. Myservers pve side is filled with bots, but players its vanishing. So again thanks Anet, your gonna force us to transfer to a active server because your free transfers has turned our high pop server into a below low pop server. This is happening to ALL servers, Dont add the guest crap, End transfers period, of if ya wantem so badly, 1 free one when ya make an account, then its 30 days wait, then 60,then 90 etc. End this crap, as im 80 got all my gear and WvW is all i do and when i cant do that i dont see a reason to play this game and makes me want to uninstall it.

Many players had no true idea how Anet’s wvwvw system would work, nor did we have foreknowledge of where oceanic, US, and EU players would land.

What we got is a cluster%$#@. Servers like Henge have a large Oceanic presence allowing them to run wvw ops 24×7. Servers like Sanctum (SoR) have mostly US guilds and very little international presence, time boxing most serious wvw into US prime time.

How do these 2 compete? Answer – they can’t and never will in the current system.

The total design is flawed and short of tearing it down and rebuilding something that works OR forceably moving guilds and people around to balance the servers – you will never have a workable wvwvw system. There will always be the haves vs the have nots.

Anet sold people on a game with good pvp – people of homogenious servers are not getting that. And since no fix is in the works – the only option is to allow players to move around. So of course servers like Henge get new players coming in – serious pvp players want to be on a server that is competitive.

Anet built the model. It does not work. There is no elegant fix. And thats how we got here and why free transfers are still the order of the day.

Over time we will end up with two types of server and population – those interested in pvp and those who are mostly pve cause they can’t compete and lost all their good pvp players to other servers.

The worst part is, if TA was still around (or at least transfers were locked so the bandwagon couldn’t jump ship), the JQ / HoD battles would have been epic and close week after week, with the winner up in the air depending on how SBI / ET played.

Now? HoD was the only thing JQ was gunning for, and it didn’t get the match it wanted, but now it has the coverage and coordination to take down the beast (if it still existed). Who’s going to fill the gap? SBI and ET, with (maybe) HoD or (dwayna forbid) IoJ popping up into tier 1 every other week.

The beast is dead, and there’s nothing that can even touch the new one. My forecast calls for week after week of JQ landslide victories in tier 1, and it’ll last until the majority of JQ quits without being replaced, one of HoD / SBI / ET / IoJ / whoever manages to get a similar level of coverage to challenge JQ, with the third server teaming up against JQ to fell that beast, or Anet steps up with drastic changes to WvW.

I’m not usually a betting person, but I highly doubt this week was just a “fluke”

Yashimata.2986:

The worst part is, if TA was still around (or at least transfers were locked so the bandwagon couldn’t jump ship), the JQ / HoD battles would have been epic and close week after week, with the winner up in the air depending on how SBI / ET played.

Now? HoD was the only thing JQ was gunning for, and it didn’t get the match it wanted, but now it has the coverage and coordination to take down the beast (if it still existed). Who’s going to fill the gap? SBI and ET, with (maybe) HoD or (dwayna forbid) IoJ popping up into tier 1 every other week.

The beast is dead, and there’s nothing that can even touch the new one. My forecast calls for week after week of JQ landslide victories in tier 1, and it’ll last until the majority of JQ quits without being replaced, one of HoD / SBI / ET / IoJ / whoever manages to get a similar level of coverage to challenge JQ, with the third server teaming up against JQ to fell that beast, or Anet steps up with drastic changes to WvW.

I’m not usually a betting person, but I highly doubt this week was just a “fluke”

SBI is no joke. I think they were a little demoralized when HoD came back against them a couple of weeks ago but a full throttle SBI is not to be trifled with. JQ is not ready to be as dominant as HoD was. Not yet.

I agree that the free server transfers are absolutely detrimental to WvW on most servers and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Dragonbrand is a perfect example and the discussion is even raging on our private guild forums right now.

Dragonbrand started as an unorganized server with a decent population and a couple of large guilds formed and started to lead the masses. But then it became apparent that it was easier just to transfer to another server with a night population to win WvW. Overnight we lost several of our top guilds that were helping keep WvW successful and it shows in our performances over the last couple weeks. Unfortunately at this point the damage is done, the transfers have occurred and the queues are the only thing left to force people to move away from the top servers. There is nothing at this point that won’t be to little to late.

Mordyth.9018:

SBI is no joke. I think they were a little demoralized when HoD came back against them a couple of weeks ago but a full throttle SBI is not to be trifled with. JQ is not ready to be as dominant as HoD was. Not yet.

I’m not saying SBI is a joke, you guys put up a hell of a fight. I just don’t think (and please correct me if I’m wrong) you guys have the off-peak coverage required to keep all the maps full at all hours of the day. Without that coverage, it really doesn’t matter how awesome you are for 8 hours of the day if the other 16 you fall so far behind you can’t make it up again.

If any server is going to rise up to challenge the new JQ behemoth, it’s either going to be a renewed HoD (after getting kicked around for a few weeks/months) or SBI, but my money is on SBI (and that’s who I’ll be rooting for if it ever happens).

there should not be any free transfers to the tier 1 servers. in fact no free transfers to the the top 3 tiers would be better.

Prototype.9852:

Gankfest.4965:

JQ is always full so people can’t really transfer there. I’m not seeing the issue?

You’re the only one from JQ I guess, and no it’s not always full, maybe it is now, but everytime I’m online it’s High. The “Low-Med-High-Full” thing depends on who’s online on that server, not how many people are on that server.

Except he isn’t from JQ either, he transferred here also. So obviously people are still transferring here to get carried.

server transfers should be allowed until most servers have 24/hr coverage. Its that simple. Until then, some servers will suffer and won’t ever be a top tier.

i feel for u.. i wont troll u but i truely feel how u r feeling now

Transfers are completely negating the entire scoring and “balancing” system.

There are no rivalries or server pride.

It’s made WvW subpar.

Jayce.5632:

there should not be any free transfers to the tier 1 servers. in fact no free transfers to the the top 3 tiers would be better.

I don’t think you understand the huge difference in coverage between tier 1 and 2, and tier 2 and 3. A tier 3 server has the same coverage as those in tiers 4 and 5.

I think there should be a cost put in with transferring, if people want to transfer just for being able to jump in with higher ranked servers then I believe Anet could stand to make a hefty profit, also I think it would serve as a deterrence somewhat. The server’s are never going to be balanced and settled into at the rate we are going because everyone is going to server hop to get into the best ranks.

At the very least I think they should put an 16 day cool down on being able to transfer if they don’t instate a charge for it. 16 days would stop people from being able to jump back to wherever they were originally. A month might really be more reasonable. It would make people stop making rash decisions about where to move to.

Adding to this…. the people that are transferring to the “best” servers are only doing themselves and the server a disfavor. They aren’t going to get to play as much because of que’s, the people that have been fighting the whole time and know what’s actually going on aren’t going to be in the battle’s. Because now there’s a line 3 miles long to in, so all the new people that don’t know the strategies that have been in place for weeks are just going to help the server lose IMO.

You guys at JQ got it so bad man, I feel for you. Most be horrible.
How do you think it feels for the servers who aren’t doing so well? People were still getting organised on my server to perform better at WvW, but now all the opportunists are going to the servers that are doing a lot better at WvW. This basically means that we are heavily outnumbered in most matches. Like 20 people against an entire army.

But yeah, you guys got it bad.