Guild Wars 2

Firstly I agree that free server transfers need to be stopped, however I don’t believe it will fix the problem of lopsided battles. We need to address the core reason why players are switching servers to begin with. If server transfers are stopped, the server hopping players will probably just stop playing WvW and eventually stop playing GW2.

Less players in an MMO = Bad

Players are switching because playing on a losing team is like beating your head against a brick wall. The following changes need to be made to WvW before stopping server transfers.

*Swap Orb buff with outmanned buff
*Remove damage to armor on death
*Fix rendering issue

There is probably more, but these 3 are the main issues that need to be fixed before stopping free server transfers.

it may help however, unfortunatly it’s only the players that can resolve this issue.

perhaps Anet can do something to aid the balancing issue.

buff to low presence world players and forts they occupy give them a chance.

let the undermanned buff work outside the main waypoint area…for some reason it’s there then it vanishes as soon as you step outside your main start area…and that’s not due to population from your world.

change the undermanned buff..right now it’s just worthless.

just a few thoughts, but the massive transfers need to be looked into, why they are doing it what the gains and benifits are and whether those benifits should be changed to be bound elsewhere and tied to something different.

I think they should just hide the score until the entire match is over. That way they can keep their precious scoring but it won’t cause people to not que based on it.

you could just look at the map….should tell you all you need to know about how bad your world is doing.

orlen.7810:

you could just look at the map….should tell you all you need to know about how bad your world is doing.

Probably. I just don’t like the score. Most people understand 100k behind but if they’re stuck in a battle won’t care.

Server transfers are actually HELPING at this point.

My reasoning:

Since release the top 5-6 servers have been the top 5-6 servers because of overwhelmingly higher populations compared to lower ranked servers. Now guilds are finally realizing it isn’t fun waiting 6-hours during your server’s off-time to get into WvW. It is also not fun being the only guild or one of 2-3 reasonably sized guilds on a dead server. They’re transferring to higher population servers (if the server is dead,) and lower population servers (if the queues are overwhelming.) On one side this IS a problem because ideally we want people to transfer to lower population servers instead of off them. On the other, the population on medium-high pop servers are slowly balancing because of mass guild transfers happening to and from various servers.

Take my server for example: Sanctum of Rall. We were fairly close to the bottom despite having a pretty solid showing of 4-5 guilds up until the last 2-3 weeks. While we were winning or at least putting up amazing fights in our match-ups, we couldn’t really progress in ranking because higher population servers had more timezone coverage. In recent weeks we’ve had several guilds (that I know of,) transfer on the server from the extremely high population servers and now that our population is balancing out more we’re beginning to become more organized and we’re able to focus on strategy and skill more instead of hoping we have enough people to do anything. As a result we’re now climbing the rankings steadily.

As another example on the other end of the scale, look at Henge of Denravi. Although I haven’t been there so obviously I don’t have an accurate view of what’s happening – I suspect that guilds are transferring off the server due to queue times and the population is slowly balancing out, where SBI and JQ populations are balancing more slowly (less guilds transferring off, etc.) This means that they’re now falling steadily in the rankings because they don’t have 6-hour off-peak queue times to supplement the four borderlands 24/7 whereas JQ may still have that advantage for the time being.

I’m going to go ahead and guess that if transfers are left open for now, the populations will balance to the point where all servers (except possibly the bottom 2-3, I mentioned this problem at the beginning of my wall of text,) will have somewhat equal populations and the WvW rankings will quickly begin to depend more on individual/guild skill, strategy and communication instead of who can fill WvW for the most time in the day. I can (somewhat,) justify my suspicions with the examples I provided in SoR and HoD. Its at that point that Anet will definitely want to consider closing free server transfers and looking at other ways of balancing WvW if it is still imbalanced. Also at that point they may look at keep free server transfers open for extremely low population servers or offering guild transfers that retain upgrades if they make the move to servers like Devona’s Rest or Kaineng.