WvW Match-up system for EU-servers is broken.
I’ve been matched up against the same opponents for probably a year or more (except for brief tournaments). The problem is if the matchups change, the boredom will not.
You have 3 boredom options:
1. Stale boring matchups as they are now.
2. Impossible boring matchups against overwhelming numbers from higher tier servers.
3. Extremely easy boring matchups against empty lower tier servers.
This is not an issue about population imbalance, this is an issue about the match-up system not fulfilling its work anymore, hence a technical issue.
I can’t force guilds or players to switch to other servers ( and I don’t even want to), but when a game-mode fails to entertain since everybody gets tired of “Oh, they do A again, so lets react with B, but keep in mind the inevitable happening of C”, solely based on the reason that you face identical enemies all the time, outside of overstacked T1 Servers or deserted t9 servers, then this is a bug in the System.
We (or you) can discuss all the different issues with population imbalance in the WvW forum, but this one is indeed a bug, one that has nothing to do with population-imbalance (even tho it amplifies its symptoms).
Keep in mind that this is actually worsening the original issue with population imbalance, since it makes lower tier Servers even less attractive, resulting in even worse overstacked t1 Servers. Formerly one could have chosen to transfer down to experience more enjoyable WvW gameplay. This option is invalid now.
And frankly, in my 1.5 years of playing WvW in T8-7 I never got bored by the various match-ups. That also includes stomping on deserted Servers and getting stomped on by higher population servers. I always managed to take my joy from WvW, be it with blobbing, solo-roaming or zerging with my guild.
The current system is working as designed. I agree that it might be better if there was a new system in place, but it’s not as simple as retooling the calculations. Further, we know that HoT (or around then), ANet will completely overhaul the WvW maps, so whatever match-ups we see now will be affected over time.
Post a suggestion in the WvW forum about how you’d like to address:
- Stale or repetitious match-ups week-to-week, month-to-month.
- Encouraging some players to move from ‘full’ T1/T2 servers to less-populated bottom-tier ones.
- Making Tx-1 server competitive with Tx, e.g. T1 servers generally roll over T2, so for now, it’s probably better that some match-ups remain stale. (Easy to see in NA T2, which has four servers; which ever gets matched with T3 dominates the week.)