Before the randomization of server Match-Ups, GoM’s server match-ups were straightforward. Around the time HoD moved up to tier six, we moved down to tier eight, fighting Ferguson’s Crossing and Eredon Terrace before moving back to tier seven to fight Devona’s Rest and Northern Shiverpeaks, our longtime rival. When the random server match-ups were announced, we were excited to finally fight someone new for a change. By that point we were always beating the other two servers, and eventually NSP just quit outright and it seemed like DR just avoided us.
We had gained some new guilds and we were doing well against our opponents at the time. The first week was very encouraging, as we fought Darkhaven and Northern Shiverpeaks. Despite DH’s superior coverage, we managed to scrape by with a positive rating change, while NSP had a large positive change and DH had a large negative change.
However, since that first week our selections have become worse and worse. The very next week we fought ET and FC again. Needless to say, fighting the two worst servers on the board proved unchallenging and we sent both servers into negative rank gains while we ran off with a large positive gain (and plenty of gold from all the PvE we had done that week. Seriously, we practically took the week off).
Next week was Sorrow’s Furnace and our old friends DR. Both servers provided a better fight than the last two servers. I assume we didn’t beat them hard enough, however, because we lost close to half of our gains from the past two weeks.
The next week was DR and FC… Again? Really? This week we focused mostly on DR, seeing them as a bigger threat, but unfortunately I guess we didn’t beat FC enough because our rating went down by the same margin as before.
The next week (last week) we fought FC and SF. It wasn’t great. It was like our fight with ET and SF, but with a little less PvE. Our rating went up, but not by much. Communication has always been good between the guilds, so we know that many players were starting to get bored of WvW.
This week we’re fighting FC (third time in a row) and AR. AR is the first server we’re fighting with a higher ranking than us since the first week with DH, but based on their drastic drop in ranking we didn’t expect much this reset night. We don’t usually do well on reset night but based on today I’d say we’ve already won. FC has learned to keep their distance from us and now they’re attacking AR solely, while we go in and take all the towers without much resistance, if any.
It’s not challenging, it’s not fun, and hell, it’s not really PvP if you ask me.
For the past few weeks we’ve been keeping an eye on NSP’s match-ups as we consider them a rival, and every week we are jealous. Although for the first four weeks they fought DH, and for the last two of those weeks they fought IoJ, they managed to consistently gain in the rankings, and on their final week with DH they managed to beat both servers. Then the next week they fought two completely new servers.
And the sad part is that there hasn’t been a single week until this week that they’ve fought a server with a lower rank than them. GoM went four weeks without fighting anyone better than us, and when we finally did find someone with a higher ranking, it turned out that they might as well be at the bottom rank anyway.
The worst part is NSP’s match-up this week. We’ve got a guild on the server who’s looking for blood from HoD, their former server. My guild has wanted to fight IoJ so we could see how we’d stack up against a server that got beaten by our greatest rival (the server that we transferred from, actually). Everyone in the main guilds wanted to fight these two servers, and we were crossing our fingers for IoJ and HoD, and of course, our main rivals have gotten our dream match-up.
TL;DR At this point we’re worried that if we went up against NSP again we’d be destroyed. Basically, most of us would like to fight the servers that NSP are fighting. We want tougher, more challenging match-ups that will be more engaging.
Because right now most of the server thinks we’ve already won this match-up. I can already hear all the people pulling out their dungeon sets for the rest of the week.
