Guild Wars 2

Make it so the server with the lowest amount of players sets the peak population for the other servers. +10 for buffer so the maps can actually fill up.

Server 1 has 45 people in WvW on all maps combined

Server 2 and 3 can only bring 55 people each.

Problem: If people log out you would in theory have to be kicked on other server aswell to keep the balance. Solution: Change outmanned buff to give a small stat bonus for every player that you are less on all maps combined.

Also requires putting JPs into a separate area, just because pvp is possible in there doesnt make them a part of WvW.

This would give huge incentives for spreading the population evenly across all servers and timezones as you wouldnt have any advantage from stacking on a server.

Make it so, number one.

No

Message Body length must at least be 15.

they could just introduce an overflow map people could play on until their queue came up.

“Everybody leave so the cap drops”.

Yeah horrible idea!
If you want population balance, how about getting ANET to split that stupid association they have with PvE & WvW. For instance SoS is considered a “High population” server, yet they have a low “WvW population”

Also, having PvE players all of a sudden discover a huge interest in WvW are stuck with the server they chose to be on for PvE.

I wish the “worlds/servers/realms” would only be a WvW thing and have PvE handled just like GW1, a bunch of instances of the map and being able to select which one you want to go to.

With the current way GW2 works, they either don’t have WvW metrics or have horrible ones…

EDIT: And for instance, even if WvW population is full on T1 servers, people can still bandwagon by transferring to those servers because those servers are not full in terms of WvW AND PvE population…. resulting in long queues and population imbalances for WvW.

The core issue is too many servers and not enough people to effectively populate them all.

Anything that brings more people into wvw helps eat away at that problem. It brings its own new set of growing pains but nothing would solve it overnight.

Who knows why you’d skip straight to punishing players when Arenanet hasn’t even nicely asked people to move from Gold to Bronze servers yet.

I mean forget incentives, they haven’t even asked or encouraged the behavior….

They should be picking select (or all) bronze league servers and giving free goody bags or gems to anybody willing to go…. also if they could travel back in time 6 months to do this that would be awesome!

Zosk.5609:

Who knows why you’d skip straight to punishing players when Arenanet hasn’t even nicely asked people to move from Gold to Bronze servers yet.

I mean forget incentives, they haven’t even asked or encouraged the behavior….

They should be picking select (or all) bronze league servers and giving free goody bags or gems to anybody willing to go…. also if they could travel back in time 6 months to do this that would be awesome!

Or open up direct transfers instead of free for all transfers.

You know:

BG → FC free for 1 week.
JQ → DH free for 1 week.
etc etc.

See how many take advantage of this and then do it again if needed.

I keep saying it and anet keeps ignoring it. Your servers population needs to be based on your world vs world population/coverage period. Then a server likes ours devona’s rest would be labeled a low population server and have free transfers to it. Right now all servers for na are considered high or very high population. So its expensive to transfer to any server. Nobody is gonna pay 800 gems to transfer to our server. Infact the opposite is gonna happen even more people are gonna transfer to the stacked servers cus they get special prizes when they win. At this point if they refuse to do as I said they might as well just start merging low wvw pop servers together.

Atherakhia.4086:

Zosk.5609:

Who knows why you’d skip straight to punishing players when Arenanet hasn’t even nicely asked people to move from Gold to Bronze servers yet.

I mean forget incentives, they haven’t even asked or encouraged the behavior….

They should be picking select (or all) bronze league servers and giving free goody bags or gems to anybody willing to go…. also if they could travel back in time 6 months to do this that would be awesome!

Or open up direct transfers instead of free for all transfers.

You know:

BG -> FC free for 1 week.
JQ -> DH free for 1 week.
etc etc.

See how many take advantage of this and then do it again if needed.

I would like to give this a shot.

In summary the OP’s suggestions are queues to get the numbers even for more fair matches.

I kindly ask some of you to visit the WoW battleground forums where all their matches are even numbers due to queues but they cry more than this board, lol.

When you see a title “Easy solution for x” on WvW forum, you can be sure there’s some bull inside.

Yeah, this is “Easy fix for server imbalances #153”.

We really need to start numbering these, people, so we can keep track of which is which.

I am currently in bronze league, you know what is wrong and what drives this whole population imbalance ? I’ll give you an example, which is currently happening on my server.

We have a new commander in our wvw, he made a guild and he does OK, not spectacular, but not horrible either. His sole purpose is to make a huge guild and then transfer off and take more of our population away to T1 / T2. This guy is from T2 and wants his server to be T1.

I cant call him out in the forums but I would love to. He and his are exactly and precisely the problem.

You want to have less ques ? How about getting involved in your community and stopping this sort of crap ? take some initiative and do something about it, talk to the guild leaders on your server, organize an anti-transfer ant-scabbing campaign.

The que problem is not just on a-net to fix, but on you and your community too and even more so. Stop your scabbing of the low tier servers.

Why not simply merge the bottom 3 servers into another mid range or mid/low wvw server and link that to the PVE worlds to form 3 new wvw servers. Bam! instant fix on numbers and servers are better balanced. Heck i would even be ok with DR,AR, and GOM all being merged to make 1 wvw new sever that might be able to complete. with the higher ranked servers.

Talewin.3820:

Why not simply merge the bottom 3 servers into another mid range or mid/low wvw server and link that to the PVE worlds to form 3 new wvw servers. Bam! instant fix on numbers and servers are better balanced. Heck i would even be ok with DR,AR, and GOM all being merged to make 1 wvw new sever that might be able to complete. with the higher ranked servers.

Then they will just get scabbed again for people to transfer to T2 T1, even some T3 for the silver league wins and you are back to square 1 over and over again until there is nothing left but only 3 servers.

The only solution is to drastically adjust transfer prices, maybe 3x as much as they are now to T1, free to the bottom 3, scale the rest as appropriate. And the upper tier people really need to get involved in their communities and put an end to the practice of stealing population from servers who already are having problems.

Ways to quickly balance servers:

1) Rewards are by GUILD on a Tier system (best guild gets best rewards for a campaign) so that HIGHLY discourages a bunching up of the top guilds.

2) For Pure population you send invitations with heavy one-time incentives to move to certain servers to your casual crowd. E.g. For every 80 you have, we will level up one of your alts to 80. We will give you 1 crafter to 400 etc. Make the herd want to go where you want it to be.
a) when you get the population you want, stop. This allows great flexibility.
b) You can’t control what that new population does but. . . you do have analytics
c) Do not allow these players to transfer for X period of time OR require double gems as they got a benefit to move.

merge servers, save the world.

Tongku.5326:

Talewin.3820:

Why not simply merge the bottom 3 servers into another mid range or mid/low wvw server and link that to the PVE worlds to form 3 new wvw servers. Bam! instant fix on numbers and servers are better balanced. Heck i would even be ok with DR,AR, and GOM all being merged to make 1 wvw new sever that might be able to complete. with the higher ranked servers.

Then they will just get scabbed again for people to transfer to T2 T1, even some T3 for the silver league wins and you are back to square 1 over and over again until there is nothing left but only 3 servers.

The only solution is to drastically adjust transfer prices, maybe 3x as much as they are now to T1, free to the bottom 3, scale the rest as appropriate. And the upper tier people really need to get involved in their communities and put an end to the practice of stealing population from servers who already are having problems.

I don’t think leaving anything up to the server population will fix anything. There will always be those people who fancy them self as hard core and think its there right to do what ever they want in a open sand box balance be dammed. They will say you don’t like to bad. and why not to them nothing is broken. and to a degree that’s valid. they Spent long hard hours recruiting and building there guilds/servers to the beasts they are. all that said. the real question is what does anet want? from a everyone is happy and continuing to play i would think they would want balanced severs that offer good match ups as to keep everyone challenged so they play harder and stay hooked on the game. but to be honest they may simply be ok with letting the players play in the there sand box come what may. so really the only true answer is the lower pop wvw severs just need to rally behind 1 leader and “steal players from other severs” In the end there will be no real change only tweaks to make it look like they are trying to do something.

So the solution to wvw problems is to punish one server because a different server logs out?

So one server can log out to punish the other and makes it impossible for them to capture their T3 keep?

This is not going to work at all. Probably the worst idea of all posted on the forums.

Pro tip: Remove WvW! No problems with population then. PvE allows guesting. (Maybe also allow guesting for WvW? )

@Samhayn & WilliamDaBloody: Your objections are already answered in the OP. Nobody gets logged out.

And yes the system is about punishing the server with more population to make active WvWers spread across all servers again, and equally so. Afterall its about fixing the population imbalance, you dont get that with designing a new teddybear for the gem shop.