Guild Wars 2

This is going to be my third post by now. I didn’t want to add it to an older post because it’s a new way of looking at things. It’s also not to call out anyone or talk down on people in any way. It’s simply a difference I noticed.

One of the biggest differences i have seen between zerging in Far shiver peaks and Underworld. Is the core of the zergs we play with and against.

In higher tier servers the core group is a large guild with commanders that are used to run with pugs loosely following them. They call for empowers and “just train through them”
A smaller percentage of the group is on Team Speak and there is a lower amount of control the commander can enforce.

In lower tier servers. and maybe underworld was an exception. the guilds make up a larger part of the core zergs. CLAW ran a pug zerg several times a week and it still mostly felt like a guild run. We added the pugs to the squad, most of them joined Team Speak and they became part of the group really fast.

This is one of the reasons many lower tier people miss being in EB. Commanders who were used to running in EB all night long for their almost GvG like fights are now in queue or in the borders training.

For the players in those zergs it also felt like a bigger deal to do your part.
In the big servers you have maybe six elementalists. So if one dies five others can still hit the water-field.
If you are the only one that can water-field or are one of the three people that can give stability. YOU need to perform cause if YOU go down, everyone goes down.

And while i don’t have anything against the big blobbing fights. Cause kitten they are big, flashy and oh my god the loot-bags. i kinda miss the smaller more tactical almost GvG like fights.

Thanks for the response, it does give a more detailed insight in how it feels for the other servers. And while I stil prefer the rollback I understand why you guys prefer it this way.
For the sake of the argument though, the rest of this comment :P

Why, if you love big fights, did you not transfer to a server that had these?

It is a matter of solo transfer and a group transfer. Also, you have to factor in the amount of time taken to farm those and the amount of gaming time a players have. Likewise, you also have to factor in financial level of the players in real life. And, you have to factor in the thoughts pattern of the players, thoughts such as but not limited to “why should I pay for something that anet is responsible of fixing”. Finally, you have to account for the super casuals.

If you try a bit you can farm about 20gold(counting materials) an hour in silverwastes atm. fractals still earn a nice bit of coin,even wvw and edge of the mists is a half decent way to get some decent gold.
Alone or as a guild transferring is not that expensive or difficult.(we transferred two times before settling in underworld, with “scouts” transferring to over half the servers available)

the “why should I pay for something that anet is responsible of fixing” is a valid response, and in a way I agree. It still baffles me that they didn’t just link the lowest tiers together keeping the bigger ones intact. a retort to this though.

I lost the option to even pay to fix the problem I have now, since there are no low population servers left anymore.

In my eyes a better fix would have been an update to the visitor system where you can’t visit the servers your home world is against right now. but you can enter world versus world. Combined with a “first one’s free” transfer system would allow many players to go to the place they want to be.
Once that is done i’d actually understand if they merged the one or two lowest population servers because of system resources or because those servers are so low in population that they can’t even start a Siegerazer.

Why do you like queues?

It is unfortunate for you but not all servers are packed full after the link. TC might be the only server that is packed really full, afterall a number of guilds of decent size decided it is a great idea to transfer there a week before the patch. Ah, BG might be also another server that might be packed full.

Farshiver peak + Underworld also has a 40+ man EB queue starting at 10am going up to around a hundred or more in prime time.
it might die down a little but for the Underworld people it was rare to see a queue above 5 people.
On reset Underworld had a full squad ready and several roamer groups, while that’s not amazing. We don’t see that as a wasteland.

From what i’ve heard whiteside ridge seems to not have a queue most of the time. but that’s the only one i know of. And i’m going to keep an eye on that.

but ya know "why should I pay for something that anet is responsible of fixing "
(..i’d probably just pay though..)

Why is playing in smaller servers not a valid choice?

Why should the wasteland servers be punished due to declining population? As for your point about computer spec, it doesn’t make sense technically because anet has never release such thing as recommended spec, only minimum spec.

Technical mistake on my part sorry, they have systems exceeding minimum specifications and cannot run it on minimum settings at an even somewhat playable frame rate(in big fights i’d still call 10fps “playable”)
Apart from that the declining server population can be mostly solved by the players. if anet is willing to help and not just smash servers together with no regard for the people in half those servers. It’s not a punishment in my eyes to be in a low population server as long as you can get out if you want to.

why do you think it’s a good idea to change the server linking every three months?

This concern is raised in another thread, way before the link occur, right after the patch, raised by me in fact.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Concerns-about-World-Linking-Reward-Tracks/first

It really depend on how your ts3 admin manage it. Teamspeak can create multiple different permissions and it is relatively easy to remove the permission altogether.

I actually forgot about the permission levels. Stupid of me :P

And the biggest question of all. What it all boils down to for me.

Why do you think it’s a good thing that we lost the ability to choose how we play?

I don’t get you. The only choice you had was a highly populated server or a low populated server. The only thing that affect you is your playstyle, it doesn’t change your ranking and skill range. Also, when you made transfer from one server community to another server community, did you ever care about the server community you were in? =)

The entire problem is that it affects my play style, I chose to transfer to a lower population server because I prefer how the gameplay is there. And i feel that there is a bigger sense of community. it’s hard to explain but in big servers i feel like a spec in the masses, and while i don’t need to feel like a hero of the server. smaller servers give you the feeling that you make more of an impact in the game.
one person messing up in a big wvw server does not lose a match up, but one person in pvp can break it significantly, low population servers to me are the golden middle ground of impact versus responsibility.

And to answer the community question. In my home server(ring of fire) I didn’t care one bit. I only knew guild mates and a couple of random people. But other than that it was just “the masses” to me.
In Underworld it felt more like one big community, and while i definitely didn’t know everyone. There was a higher percentage of people I knew and played with.

Like I have said before in other threads I see no pros to this. none.

Can the people who like this change explain these things to me. I am genuinely interested in these answers.

Why, if you love big fights, did you not transfer to a server that had these?
they have existed in the higher tiers. and transferring is not actually that expensive at all. You can get enoug gold/gems with a couple of days of silverwaste farming if you are even remotely willing to put a little time into it and not want to spend a couple of bucks.

Why do you like queues?
While I get that they represent a map being full and having a fair fight.
it also represents people not able to play where they want to play(the red number to me is people wanting to go somewhere they are not allowed). First and foremost this is a game people play to have fun in some way. Red numbers to me look like people not having fun, or not having as much fun as they want to.

related to this: Prime time is not there because people only like the big fights. It’s there because that’s when the most people have time to play. If that’s when there are massive queues. That means that prime time players lose a significant chunk of their gaming time waiting to play.

Why is playing in smaller servers not a valid choice?
Many like the more focused smaller fights. Some of us transferred away from the big servers to the smaller ones for their own reasons.

and more practically. It can be a way to avoid problems.
We have lost guild mates to the simple fact that their computers or internet cannot handle the big fights now dominating even the borderlands. And they have computers above the recommended system specifications.

why do you think it’s a good idea to change the server linking every three months?
Communication among team speak and community guilds is already at risk of being spied at. We have people joining guilds and TeamSpeak servers of people we might fight against in a couple of months.
Right now i am in the community guild of another server. If they don’t scrub their guild the next time we’re against them. We can just casually follow their every move.

And the biggest question of all. What it all boils down to for me.

Why do you think it’s a good thing that we lost the ability to chose how we play?

Ranking, skill level, community thrown aside. All feelings of how you want to play thrown away.
How can you call it a good thing, that a way of playing the game, available for years now is shoved aside and removed.

We had the choice how to play. And now we don’t. I can not think of a single reason why this is good. Not as a player, not as a consumer and not for a company.

We had a lot of talk about this in underworld

And we boiled it down to one big thing.

Arenanet as a company Took away a choice from the consumer. nothing more, nothing less.

People had the ability to transfer for years. anyone even remotely interested in WvW could
find the gold or the sponsors to transfer even to lower tiers in about a week.
We had the choice to go where we felt the population,community and gameplay was right for us.

All they did was take this choice away. Because you can’t wait for this to settle and transfer back to a lower population server again. As they said the links will change every three months.

They took away the choice from the consumer.

As a player who transfered from Ring of fire to Blacktide back to Ring of fire before i found my home in underworld.
All i feel is sadness and betrayal. Because the company did nothing but take my choice away from me.

If i wanted to play in far shiver peaks I would have already been playing there.
Let me play how I want to play.

I started with a big ball of feedback but i deleted it. I think this says it all. and shows why people rage in both directions.

Back in the day you gave us the ability to transfer between servers. People transferred to the places they wanted to be. Even the people in the low tiers.

weather you liked big servers or small ones. we could choose.

All this update did was remove our ability to choose. Just give that back to us, and we’ll be fine.

I want to go back to my old server,
I want to go home.

jamesdolla.3954:

I don’t know why people complain about Map Q’s. it’s always a good thing in my eyes. The maps being empty should be a concern.

The problem with this is that we went from servers with room to spare to 100+ man queues
and like I said, not everyone has the bandwidth for or likes the large group fights. The tiers gave variety to let people choose that for themselves

Right if you are interested a bit of early feedback.

Initial hostility between servers is high. Fights are uncoordinated and commanders are confused and unwilling to cooperate.
I hope this changes fast and might still happen.

Another more prominent problem. Especially for the lower tier people is that we have a lot of players that have some form of issue with high population servers.
The most prominent ones are lack of network bandwidth and processing power. Causing lag and disconnects. These people are now unable to play. and this is something that time will not fix.
Some of us also just plain don’t like the massive fights and prefer the lower population servers for more focussed and impactful world versus world gameplay. This is gone now.