I have read many posts on here from folks who ask guilds and players to transfer to their server because they need oceanic guilds, or NA guilds, or anything in between. Those posts usually start with “we have such a great and tight knit community” or some variation of that statement.
Ehmry Bay was down at T7, and worked its way up to T4 even though we didn’t have the numbers for it. The ascension of our server was as much about the dedication of the WvW guilds we have/had as it was about the ineptitude of some of our opponents.
Ehmry Bay never had an actual oceanic WvW presence, HIRE was on the server for a month and that did help once we were in T4, but they arrived after we had already made it to T4 with very little else but a strong US (West Coast) group and the help of a small oceanic contingent from TDE that would do WvW on a schedule.
T4 ended up being a brick wall that simply could not be broken down without better time zone coverage and greater numbers around the clock. The result was that people burned out, drama flared up, and with the news that free transfers are about to come to an end some guilds left because we were simply not pro enough.
It’s true. While we have many excellent WvWers, most people on Ehmry Bay do not treat the game as a job but rather as entertainment. The true hardcore players that would put in 16 hour days have left. What we have remaining though is the community so many other servers tell you about, the difference being that we can actually back that claim up.
Ehmry Bay doesn’t have mega-guilds with 500 active players. We do have some guilds which routinely bring 20-ish players to the map, we have many more guilds who bring a group or two, and we have the same crowd of pugs that every other server has.
We also have infrastructure with a public voice comms server for WvW/PvP/PvE, where guilds can request their own private channel with admin rights for that channel, so you don’t need to run (and pay for) your own voice comms setup.
We have the most active server forum community among all GW2 server forums. On those forums we don’t turn every word into “kitten” and we don’t censor/delete inconvenient post just because it may make our server look bad to potential transfers. On the Ehmry Bay server forum what you see is what you get.
Here’s a post one of our members recently made:
“People seem to forget what community / family really means. People who you fight with constantly, but happily team up with and defend from people outside the family.
Sometimes a little drama goes a long way to making something stronger. You have people from guilds who have “drama” with each other teaming up right now on this thread.
Ehmry is great. We’re dysfunctionally right on point.”
We have many small guilds who have carved out a WvW niche for themselves without that they need to roll with a zerg (which we rarely have enough people for anyway). Here’s what a commander from RE (on Kaineng, which is currently steamrolling us) had to say about one such small guild:
“I for one am impressed with some of the guild tags I have seen, PUNK being one of them, even though we succeed in fighting a nice cohesive turtle, it is still nice to see that type of organization in this match up. I personally didnt know how to react to it at first …”
So to sum this up;
If you are someone who doesn’t mind waking up to a map that often has been taken over by nightcapping.
If you are someone who just wants to log in after work, maybe do some breakouts, set up some siege, get a few badges and die a few times.
If you are someone who is in a small or medium sized guild and you are tired of some mega-guild constantly telling you how you should play your game.
If you don’t care about tiers, and if you don’t care that the guy next to you may not be a pro GW2 player.
If you instead care for a mellow place to play GW2, where WvW players are truly making an effort to improve communication and coordination between them without to step on anyone’s toes and where we have a strong and active forum community that goes along with it, then I invite you to check Ehmry Bay out.