Dear ANet,
As a player who belongs to a smaller/medium-ish server where roaming and playing in a much leisure way has become our favorite part of the game. I (and most of my fellow server members, including the server we got merged with) am wondering- how is Arena Net going to deal with the loss of server identity, very little roaming opportunities, and how are servers supposed to work well with each other when each have built their own ways of playing WvW (this is heavily linked to server identity)?
I’m from Ferguson’s Crossing. The major reason why I began playing WvW, and continued to do so, is because of our community. Our server is very kind to each other, we police each other because we don’t tolerate toxic gaming attitudes (keeping game play positive), and have learned how to work with each other. We’ve learned how to address different issues with the different guilds and players we’ve had. We like the fact that we’re a medium server with mostly roamers. The past months, we’ve been proud of the fact that we’ve climbed our way out of the bottom tier and to tier 5, beating other blobby giant servers on our way up. THEN only after just getting into T5 out of nowhere- bam- server merge. The work we’ve put as a server to put ourselves to tier 5 pretty much vanished. Our guilds? most of them gone. Most of the people I played with are now M.I.A. not only from WvW but the game itself. Our community is pretty much scattered. We get so happy when we see a team of FC’s in one place. That’s how much we miss our server! It’s not that we can’t work with other servers, it’s more of the fact that this server linking has pretty much rendered our server and everything we worked for together in the span of a few months non-existent. This leads to numerous problems TS, general communication, morale, etc.
From a guildie of mine:
“I had a problem a few days ago, when a commander was doing something I know FC commanders don’t do. I was about to make a suggestion or say something, but then realized- What if that’s how this other server works? What if they’ve found that this other way of doing things works for them? This server linking makes it hard to actually take things personally.”
Believe me, you want us to take this personally. Because when we stop caring deeply about our community and how we play, then this game turns into just another mindless MMO where people just do stuff for the sake of winning. I used to play Guild Wars 2 A LOT because it is not mindless. The way WvW has been with the server linking… it has become zombie-like and very similar to EotM (Follow the commander or the zerg- that’s the only way you can achieve anything since it’s become rare to face a small group of opponents. You think you only see 3-5 rednames? Oh, just wait. There’s more… Waaay more. )
We balanced the teirs out ourselves based on playstyle and the only real issue was the oppression that we had to put on our foes to dig ourselves out of T8. I’m sure we demoralized many servers by having such a consistently high ppt (400-600, with occasional 695) on top of having to fight the same ones for weeks at a time to get anywhere. I hated playing at that point because we were forced to annihilate the other servers if we wanted to move up. We proceeded to crush other servers to such an extent that either their main guilds left or they didn’t want to play either. This leads to a massive loss in morale for the losing sides and great amounts of boredom for the winning side. The PPT system and the walls it produces is what I see as the big problem here. Maybe matchup T8 with the last tier of the European servers from time to time to shake things up.
Your poll about the world linking was poorly implemented. Yes, some players got to put in their vote. The players who are active and who probably don’t mind a lot of zerg fighting or could care less about server identity and community. The players who would say no? They’re not in the game. They’ve left, maybe to check back a few weeks later. They’re not going to see that poll and will not get their votes in. I know this because my friends list, which largely comprises of WvW’ers, has gone down drastically. Most of them offline, the others in PvE. Send out an actual email to players that have logged on within the past 3 months who play WvW, rank 50 or higher and ask for their feedback as well.
In addition, the poll already benefitted the big servers from the beginning. They’re the ones who have the largest number of active players, and they’re the ones who benefits from a more populated world. Of course they’ll vote yes, and of course they’ll have the most votes. This poll system, in my opinion, is broken.
Server merging only helps with one thing- more population. It doesn’t fix population balance from what we’ve seen so far, doesn’t add more activity per player, and it doesn’t make the matches more dynamic (we’ve been merged with the same server fighting the same other servers for the past weeks). Not all of us want high populated worlds. Not all of us like zerging all the time. Some of us put a heavy importance on a healthy and tight knit community. Most importantly before server merging, both playstyles were honored- people went to servers that had high populations and big fights, and the ones who liked the opposite stayed in lower tiered smaller servers. That option is now non-existent. It’s important to note that those people who like large fights still would have another option provided WvW died, which would be EotM (With a map rework. Desert BL perhaps?)
At least give the rest of us a better chance at preserving the part of WvW that we enjoyed the most- roaming, server identity, community. Choice, that’s what matters.
How are you going to address this?
Since I want to end on a positive note, thank you Anet for recently listening to our criticisms of the game mode that we so dearly love and thank you for giving us who play WvW some dungeon track rewards.
Written by myself and a guildie who wishes to remain anonymous.
P.S. If you’re a player and your only response is something like, “if u don’t like how this works then quit the game”, please know that said response is not only unhelpful but ignorant and reflects poorly on our community as a whole . It might as well just stay in your head since it doesn’t help continue the conversation in any shape or form. Thank you.
