Guild Wars 2

So I don’t know if this is the best place to do this (and it probably isn’t), but Habib started it..

The most recent update has finally realized most of the hopes and dreams I had regarding world versus world all those years ago when we first started talking about it around the office (somewhere in the 2007 or 2008 area). Wuv has been near and dear to my heart ever since, and I’m extremely proud of what the wvw team has created in that time. Wvw has been my primary focus for a couple of years now, but now it is time to hand the keys to the castle to someone else, Devon is that someone.

Devon and the rest of the wvw team will be fleshing out the new systems we’ve introduced and taking care of a lot of the long standing issues that we can tackle now that the great culling dragon is dead!

I’m extremely excited to see how the game will evolve and improve over time with Devon leading the way. He’s an amazing designer and I’ve seen the list of updates the team is prepping for April, I think most of you will be extremely pleased.

For all the conspiracy theorists out there, this is completely unrelated to any news elsewhere. I’m still at Arena.net, but the next time you see my name it will be for something other than world versus world. Something quite different indeed.

Until then..

I’ll see you on the battlefield!

Can you tell us more about what you were doing before trying to enter the game?

What world are you on?
Were you doing anything like guesting or grouping up with someone from another world before entering (or anytime during your login session)?
Where were you trying enter WvW from?
What map were you trying to enter?

We know this is a thing that can happen, but we’re still trying to figure out why, so any details you can provide could be helpful!

Culling is absolutely a fixable problem, and as Habib mentioned in his MMORPG interview, we are planning to completely remove it from the game in march.

Why is it taking so long? Well, I think the best way I can describe how we’ve had to approach this problem is that it’s almost like changing a flat tire on a car that’s still moving. That’s a really rough analogy, but hopefully it helps illustrate just how difficult this would be in terms that are easier for everyone to understand.

Something like the way players render is extremely core to the engine and any change to that sort of thing could cause all kinds of other issues throughout the game. There are a lot of really complex technical problems that we needed to solve, then make sure that our changes don’t actually cause any of those odd side effects.

That being said, we’re confident that been able to solve those problems on the technical side. We still have a bit more testing to do, but we’re not expecting any major issues to pop up at this point, so we’re really looking forward to flipping that switch and getting rid of culling for good!

We’ll have a blog post coming up sometime in the next month to go into more details about the culling fixes and what you can expect.

We use existing mechanics like player kills and event completions to award world XP, but it is an entirely new system with new pieces of data associated to it so unfortunately there’s no way to award retroactive progress.

EDIT: I should have mentioned that once this system is live, everyone will have access to both this new system and the existing achievement titles.

We will be keeping all the existing WvW achievement tracks and titles associated with them, along with the progress you have already obtained on those achievements. None of that stuff is going away, so you can still keep working on those original achievement tracks and titles (which are intended to be extremely rare and obtained over years of play).

Sorry I didn’t make that clearer in my original post, we will have a blog post coming out before the patch explaining this new system in greater detail!

Mira.4906:

It is perfectly fine, they have mentioned the idea of making them tradeable but it isn’t possible atm due to issues with codeing and they dont have someone working on it currently.

This is 100% correct. Dropping the bundle so someone else can pick it up and deploy the weapon (or pack it up for later use) is totally acceptable.

Fresh fruit is not OP, you simply need to counter it with a silly walk.

We decided to remove them from the spawn points because far too many people were just bouncing into WvW so they could use all the services there for extended periods of time without actually going out and fighting in the map, which just exacerbated the queue issues for many servers.

At the same time, we were also looking to make the personnel upgrade path for keeps a little more enticing for players, so moving the bankers out of the safe areas and into the upgrade path was a way for us to tackle both issues at once.

Yes, people can still use the crafting stations in their server’s borderland map to reach their bank, but we consider that to be a bit of ‘home field advantage’ if you will, and so far those haven’t seemed to create a bunch of traffic that isn’t interested in just camping out in the safe zone.

Yeah, that’s my mistake, sorry. Somehow I missed these guys when bankers were changed from being always available at safe points to being part of the upgrade path at keeps, which is why they are only in a couple of the maps.

Since the bankers are only supposed to be available at keeps after an upgrade, we’ll be removing them from the safe areas in a future build.

As far as I know, the defend events should count towards the achievements. I’ll have QA look into this and see if there’s something funky going on.

Here’s why we think this is a good thing.

As Habib alluded to in his post, we are also revising the math behind the ratings formula. Habib will be explaining the math in a later post, but for now, I can give everyone a glimpse into why we are updating the rating formula and resetting the ratings.

Over the last couple of months we’ve seen that when worlds experience dramatic changes in their ability to field a consistent fighting force for whatever reason, it can take quite a while for them to work their way through the ratings until they end up in a match that suits them better. In a lot of cases, some worlds took multiple matches to work their way through a single tier even after a series of blowouts. We really dont like that, so one of the goals for updating the math behind the ratings is to try and reduce how often we experience the repeated blowouts that can come from that sort of situation and get those teams through the rankings quicker.

We also expect that the large population changes that impacted a number of worlds and helped create a number of those type of blowouts should be much less common now that we are well past the launch period and free transfers are no longer available.

So, not only does world choice have quite a bit more meaning now that paid transfers are online, we also want to adjust how the ratings are calculated. If we redo the calculations involved with the ratings, then it’s much better to just reset the ratings and let the new formula do it’s thing instead of trying to carry the old data over from the old system and have those numbers pollute the new ratings.

In essence this gives every world a chance to start fresh now that everyone is on their ‘real’ team and will help protect against worlds in a state of flux being involved in consecutive blowouts for weeks on end in the future. For us, that means it is actually the perfect time to update the rating system and address some of the issues we’ve noticed with it since launch then reset the ratings.

If it helps, think of the last few months as the preseason games that determined the initial seedings for the season opener (to use a really generic sports metaphor that is in no way indicative of future plans).

Finally, matches are going to remain a week long. We feel that the 24 hour matches are not representative of what we consider ‘standard’ gameplay, and actually create a lot of incorrect data in the system because people play the game much differently when it’s a 24 hour match compared to a 7 day one.

I know many of you are concerned about what all this means and it might seem scary from the outside, but from our perspective this really is a great time to reset the ratings and improve how the math behind all of this works so we can benefit from more competitive matches in the future.

Hopefully this helps some of you feel a little better about why we’re doing this. We really think this is going to be better for the game in the long run, even if it may be a bit bumpy until we have a couple matches completed post-reset.

They will not be usable in WvW after the next patch.

I want to clear something up here, we do not auto-ban people without investigating the account first. Our CS staff reviews reports that come in and if they find questionable activity, they take whatever action they deem appropriate.

You may receive an automated response if you appeal actions taken against your account, but any action we take is reviewed and enacted by human beings.

It is true that we have reinstated folks that were banned erroneously for questionable activity, but we don’t take action against an account unless a very solid reason presents itself upon review.

Please note that I’m not commenting specifically on the actions take against those accounts mentioned in the OP and I have no information on why any action was taken in the cases mentioned. I just want everyone to understand that we don’t ban people just because they get a lot of reports against them, our CS folks have to find and confirm actual infractions before we take any action.

Account bound blueprints

We tried changing blueprints to being account bound and it completely broke the pack up skill when holding the blueprint so we can’t do that either unfortunately.

I’m hoping that someday may find some programmer magic that can solve this so we can at least get rid of them being soulbound, but nobody is looking at it currently.

Badge usefulness, gear variety and earning gold in wvw compared to pve

We are working on a number of different updates that should address these issues over the next couple of months.

We are still working out all the details, but the team has been working on some pretty exciting stuff that should address many of the very valid points you folks brought up. I can’t say much more than that quite yet, but we’re aware of it and we’re working on it.

Any changes or additional things to commander icon?

We’ve talked about a number of improvements we’d like to make to the commander system as a whole, but it’s not on anyone’s schedule right now.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

wow this is the sort of communication people love thank you Mike!

I think it was Colin who stated in an earlier interview (during development) that people should never have to leave WvW if they don’t want to. Do you feel that you’ve met this goal so far (or was it a misinterpretation on my part)?

You’re welcome! Things have been really busy around here since we shipped, and that’s a big reason why we haven’t had a chance to communicate nearly as much as we’d like to, so we’re trying to make an effort to change that. We want to talk to you just as much as you want us to tell you stuff

As far as being able to play just in WvW and never have to leave if they don’t want to, that most definitely is our goal, and I think we’ve done a fairly good job at that so far. We do need to make sure ascended gear is obtainable in WvW, but other than that I think we’ve mostly made it so you never have to leave WvW if you just want to play there forever. Feel free to point out why I’m wrong about that

Attic.1562:

Thanks for posting Mike. Would you mind answering another question while you’re at it?

-Is dropping siege blueprints for other characters to pick up an intended function? It seems very bizarre.

It is indeed intended (and bizarre). We would actually prefer to just make the blueprints tradeable, but there are a couple of funky code interactions that happen to make that impossible for us currently. It’s something we’d like to address at some point, but it’s not very high on the priority list currently.

Draygo.9473:

They tend not to play with their anet tags on in wvw as it attracts typically unwanted attention and resentment from players attempting to lead servers.

Actually I LOVE playing with my tag on..I make a great decoy because everyone starts rushing me to try and kill me

Catisa.6507:

There is no system in the world that’s ever going to compensate for server transfers, or guilds taking a break from wvw, or differences in primetime play hours.

Pretty much this. We use gliko to help make sure the matches end up being somewhat competitive, but no systems can really predict and react immediately to constantly changing populations.

While glicko may not be the greatest thing to use for tiered competition, I think it’s actually worked fairly well to help ensure that a large portion of our matches end up being competitive. We haven’t been seeing nearly as many lopsided blowouts happening as we continue to have more matches being played out and then feeding those results into the formulas. The obvious exception to that being the worlds who either lose or gain large amounts of players in a short period of time and get caught in a matchup where they get dominated or are the dominating force.

However, even with all the issues glicko presents, we have seen that while it takes a few weeks for the system to adjust to the population shifts, it DOES adjust, and eventually those worlds end up playing in competitive games again once they reach a tier that suits their current population.

And yes, we need to get paid server transfers in. We all agree with that statement, and we’re trying to make it happen as soon as we can, while still making sure the guesting system is as useful and easy to use as possible. We’re agonizingly close, so hopefully soon we can stop talking about it and just do it!

fab.3298:

Also, what it the hp of wooden/reinforced/fortified walls and gates?

Quite a lot, but I don’t have exact numbers. I can tell you that we also increase the defenses of the reinforced/fortified structures and not just their HP.

Ireniicus.2167:

% of classes that on average play WvW

List top players re kills / to death ratio

I would love to show the percentage of particular classes that play in WvW at some point, but it isn’t part of our current plans.

Kill/Deaths ratio is something we would like to avoid having. We don’t want people changing the way they play because they would rather protect their KDR instead of helping their allies in the game. We want people playing and fighting, not worrying about deaths impacting their stats.

Sure, I’ll spill dome details!

I’ll try to work my way through the thread and answer what I can while I’m throwing food in my mouth during lunch before I have to scurry away to more meetings, sorry if I don’t have a chance to answer everything (because I likely wont be able to).

DonRobeez.3560:

- How does siege despawning work?

Unbuilt siege sites that are placed by players will go away if someone does not bring supply to them within 10 minutes. Anyone that adds supply to a site should reset that timer.

Completed siege weapons will despawn if they haven’t been manned for 30 minutes.

Why do we have to do this? Each weapon takes up some small amount of resources on the server because we register a few pieces of data for each weapon in the field. One thing we absolutely cannot do is remove the timer entirely or else we have a situation where someone can put down a ton of weapons that could potentially be around forever (or until matches reset) and it would start to cause bad things to happen to the server. We also use some placement restrictions to help prevent there being too many siege weapons on the field, I’ll explain those more in the next question.

It’s admittedly not an ideal system but it is something we are required to do to keep the game running as smoothly as possible. We’d like to make it more obvious that the weapons have some sort of despawn timer since it is a completely hidden mechanic, but we don’t have a way to expose that timer to players yet.

DonRobeez.3560:

- Do we have a siege limit? If so, what happens if we cross it?

There are two basic hard limits to siege placement.

There is a limit to how many siege weapons can be placed within a certain radius of each other. We tried to set it to be fairly lenient, right now you can set 5 weapons (sites or completed weapons) within any 1000 unit radius. If you try to place a new site somewhere within a radius that already has hit it’s limit, the placement will fail but you should still have the weapon bundle in your hands so you can try to place it somewhere else.

There is also a hard limit to how many weapons can be placed on the map. This map limit is a bit harder to explain as it is based on some internal concepts that don’t translate well to laymans terms, but basically anything that is not a ram counts towards one ‘limit’ for the purpose of this explanation and each team can have up to 100 of these types of weapons out at any time per map. Each team can also have up to 100 rams placed on a map.

DonRobeez.3560:

- How many players can one map contain?

As many as we can fit without causing too much stress on the servers. We can’t be more specific than that, but I can assure everyone that the cap is definitely split equally between all three worlds.

We have heard multiple reports for months about people being queued for a map and entering it only to have the outmanned buff, but unfortunately we’ve never been able to verify ways that could be occurring. I’m not saying it isn’t happening, but we haven’t ever been able to reproduce the problem, and if we can’t reproduce the core problem, it makes it basically impossible for us to find and fix the bug

Jomg.9061:

What about Durios guard not spawning with the proper faction ?

I thought we fixed that one too, might be a similar thing. I’ll try to get it looked at tomorrow!

Any idea what team color it seems to happen on?

I love videos like this. I don’t care if it was against 20 or 30, that’s still impressive control of a fight by using terrain and your combos effectively.

Great teamwork!

It’s definitely a bug.

We found a similar issue in these keeps right after ship and fixed that particular bug, but this post actually helped us find a different bug that could also lead to this behavior, so thank you!

We already have a fix for this that we will be testing internally, once that fix is live we will hopefully never see this issue again.

Hey everyone,

Sorry we had to do a build so soon after the matches reset. We discovered a couple of issues that needed to be fixed as soon as possible.

We don’t like disrupting the game with new builds, especially so close to the matches being reset, but unfortunately sometimes it is unavoidable. Tonight was one of those times, our apologies for the inconvenience.

Here are the new ratings for this week!

Here are the updated world ratings for this week!

NA Worlds

EU Worlds

Here are the new rankings for this week! We’ll post the prettier version once Habib is back in the office.

NA Rankings

EU Rankings

Sorry, Habib was out yesterday. I’ll post the raw numbers in a bit and then we’ll post the newer prettier version next week!

I’d like to figure out a way to do this at some point. It’s not a very high priority right now though.

We adjusted the time last week to match other things that reset at 12:00am UTC. We don’t plan to move it again.

As far as I know, nothing has changed and player kills in WvW should not be affected by any sort of diminishing returns.

We are trying to adjust respawn rates in areas where the non event related respawns are just too fast. We know it can be a problem and we’ve already slowed down some spawns, but we also know there are more areas out there we need to look at.

If we know the map area and creature(s) involved we can usually find the spawns pretty quickly, so if you know of problem spots please give us as much information as you can and we’ll look into the spawns in those areas whenever we get a chance. Thanks!

Using any kind of speed or map hacks will never be acceptable and will always be a bannable offense. We have been banning people for using them and will continue to do so.

AoE splash damage going through doors is something we’ve been looking at, but there’s not much we can do to change how it works.

We do have team members focused on WvW and they are currently working on some updates that will help support most of the changes we want to make to the game. Almost all of the updates they are doing right now are structural changes to the underlying code and will not be visible to players so we haven’t been saying much about them, but we need those changes to be completed before we can work on the updates that will be apparent to players.

We are working on a few content updates that do not require any updated code, but those will be smaller impact changes compared to the things we would like to do once the code updates are ready.

I’m intentionally being vague regarding the various changes we are planning to make because plans can change rapidly during development. We do not want to get people’s hopes up by saying we are going to do something and then have that not happen for whatever reason. We’ll be providing some details about what we are changing once we start getting our more visible fixes are closer to going live, but that’s probably going to be a few weeks away.

If an orb is placed at a keep, that Lord will be determined (invulnerable) until the altar is destroyed. Destroying the altar should remove the determined state from the lord.

However we did discover a bug yesterday that could cause the lord to not drop his invulnerability in certain cases. Given how long it has been occurring for you, my guess is that keep was affected by the bug.

We have already fixed the cause of that particular issue on our development server and are testing it now. I’m hoping we’ll be able to get the fix pushed up to live next week, but we’ll need to make sure we are not causing additional issues first.

We will update the rankings thread with the updated values once the current matches end.

I expect to see a good bit of churn in the rankings because of the blowouts we have in the current matchups.

I think the 24 hour matchups did a decent job of separating servers so they matched up decently for that style of play, but it took a couple of matches to get there. I am fairly sure it will take a couple 7 day matches before the rankings are more representative of long term performance as well.

Some worlds are great at 24 hour matches, but a 7 day match plays out much differently than a 24 hour match. I expect that the servers that are dominating during non peak hours will start to float to the top of the rankings after winning matches against worlds that don’t have great 24 hour coverage, and eventually those worlds will be in put in matches that reflect their abilities during all hours of the day.

I do not expect things to somehow magically be much better in the next match, but I do expect that matchups should start getting better as worlds will now start being sorted based on their 7 day performances.

Attached are a collection of charts showing the queue size of each map for a given world. These charts are for the North American worlds.

This data was collected from 8:00PM Sept 14th to 9:30PM Sept 18th. I believe the time zone listed is UTC, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

There can be up to four lines on each chart, one for each map that world is playing on. A line is only present for a map if it was full and there were people waiting in a queue. The map abbreviations are:
EB – Eternal Battlergrounds
RB – Red Team Borderlands
BB – Blue Team Borderlands
GB – Green Team Borderlands

Be sure to pay close attention to the vertical axis on each chart as the scale changes from world to world. Some worlds have hundreds of people queued for all four maps while other worlds might peak at a hundred in queue on one or two maps.

Unfortunately I just realized I didn’t put the world names on the chart. A chart’s filename matches the world it represents, so you’ll need to look at the end of the url when looking at a chart (or before clicking on it) to see what world it represents.

We thought these charts would be useful information for people to see, as it helps illustrate why some worlds have much longer waits than others. Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Some other information we gathered from this timespan:
- Almost 30% of the total players who logged into the game queued up for WvW
- About 3% of the total players who logged in and queued never got in.

We’re completely ecstatic about the first number and not happy at all about the second. We’re looking at a number of short term and long term solutions that should help make that second number go down even if the first one goes up. As we make progress on those solutions we will keep you updated.

Attached are a collection of charts showing the queue size of each map for a given world. These charts are for the European worlds.

This data was collected from 8:00PM Sept 14th to 9:30PM Sept 18th. I believe the time zone listed is UTC, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

There can be up to four lines on each chart, one for each map that world is playing on. A line is only present for a map if it was full and there were people waiting in a queue. The map abbreviations are:
EB – Eternal Battlergrounds
RB – Red Team Borderlands
BB – Blue Team Borderlands
GB – Green Team Borderlands

Be sure to pay close attention to the vertical axis on each chart as the scale changes from world to world. Some worlds have hundreds of people queued for all four maps while other worlds might peak at a hundred in queue on one or two maps.

Unfortunately I just realized I didn’t put the world names on the chart. A chart’s filename matches the world it represents, so you’ll need to look at the end of the url when looking at a chart (or before clicking on it) to see what world it represents.

We thought these charts would be useful information for people to see, as it helps illustrate why some worlds have much longer waits than others. Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Some other information we gathered from this timespan:
- Almost 30% of the total players who logged into the game queued up for WvW
- About 3% of the total players who logged in and queued never got in.

We’re completely ecstatic about the first number and not happy at all about the second. We’re looking at a number of short term and long term solutions that should help make that second number go down even if the first one goes up. As we make progress on those solutions we will keep you updated.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the offers of assistance for getting the match results formatted! I know many of you out there are waiting to dig into this data, so instead of trying to make it look good, I’m just attaching the text file with all results from matches that started on 9-1 to 9-10.

I’ll post the results from matches that started after 9-10 early next week.

If I understand the situation correctly, this should not be happening. Every world has the same population cap and outmanned only activates when your team has significantly less people on the map as another team, so you shouldn’t be getting the buff if your map is full.

What world and map are you on when this happens?

Hey everyone,

While this is a good place for discussion about the game, if you feel there are specific lackluster traits and have suggestions or just want to let us know why you think those traits in particular need help, please do us a favor and post any feedback in the profession forums as well.

Jon checks the profession forums pretty religiously for feedback on things like this and he’s making sure we address trait issues. You can make it much easier for him to find your feedback by posting it on those forums.

Thanks!

We definitely want to have something like this at some point. No ETA though.

And yeah, we have quite a few camelot fans here, so we know all about the herald

No, you can currently only be queued for one map at a time. Here’s a basic breakdown on how the queues are setup:

- You can only be queued for one WvW map at a time.

- If you try to enter a WvW map while queued for another one and the new map is not full, you will join that new map and still be queued for the first one you tried to enter.

- If you are queued for a WvW map and try to queue for a second WvW map that is full, you will be asked if you would like to queue for the second map. If you select ‘No’, you will still be in queue for the first map. If you select ‘Yes’, then you will enter the queue for the second map and no longer be queued for the first map.

- You can be queued for a WvW map while in an overflow map, but you will not be able to see scores or team names while you are in an overflow map.

Due to the amount of people we see queued for maps while spaces are open in other maps, we have started talking about possible ways we can change the current setup to help get people into the other maps if they have space available, but that stuff is all still in the discussion phase so it’s not likely we’ll be able to change things anytime soon.

We’d really like to do things like that to make guild claims more visible, but it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon as all our resources are working on more pressing priorities at the moment.

Unsure how long we’ll run them right now. Thats why I only said a couple weeks

The 24 hour matches were good for getting servers into initial ranking brackets, but it does significantly change how people approach the game and we’re hoping the 1 week matches will make people feel a little better about investing significant resources into their holdings.

We intend to make it so retaliation does not effect siege weapons. No ETA, but we’re looking into it.

The match that ends Friday September 14 is scheduled to be our last 24 hour match.

The match that starts on Friday will be 1 week in length. We anticipate having week long matches for a couple weeks before switching to the 2 week format.

We are switching to a 1 week schedule so we can continue to let the ranking formula adjust server rankings faster than every 2 weeks, and it will hopefully help people get acclimated to the cadence of a longer match.

EDIT: Should have mentioned that we have been resetting the matches at 4:00PM PDT (11:00PM UTC), but we are considering changing that to 5:00PM PDT (12:00 AM UTC) to align with our achievement reset times.

Starting on September 1 we began using the results of the 24 hour WvW matches to begin rematching worlds using our matchmatching system. We needed to fix a few bugs with the matchmaking server in the first few days which is why our data starts at that point.

Below are the current up to date rankings for all worlds. At some point we would like to deliver this data in a much better format but for now we just want to get the data out there for everyone to take a look at.

I am still trying to format the results of the 24 hour matches so I can start posting them here as well, but right now I have an excel table with lots of columns that I need to convert over and it’s not playing nice. Hopefully I can post them sometime in the next few days. I’ll try to update this thread with current rankings whenever possible.

North American World Rankings
2143.02 Henge of Denravi
2047.43 Stormbluff Isle
2044.01 Jade Quarry
1987.6 Eredon Terrace
1778.2 Isle of Janthir
1736.46 Crystal Desert
1727.17 Dragonbrand
1693.44 Blackgate
1598.21 Fort Aspenwood
1595.57 Sea of Sorrows
1570.33 Tarnished Coast
1533.33 Gate of Madness
1529.41 Yak’s Bend
1447.74 Maguuma
1432.65 Ehmry Bay
1388.46 Sorrow’s Furnace
1371.21 Sanctum of Rall
1367.18 Darkhaven
1334.71 Northern Shiverpeaks
1169.81 Anvil Rock
1125.78 Borlis Pass
1022.02 Ferguson’s Crossing
723.686 Devona’s Rest
615.89 Kaineng

European World Rankings
2058.176 Vizunah Square
1886.71 Far Shiverpeaks
1866.576 Riverside
1804.8 Desolation
1723.34 Augury Rock
1702.86 Arborstone
1695.781 Elona Reach
1674.053 Kodash
1662.167 Gunnar’s Hold
1630.724 Seafarer’s Rest
1625.987 Blacktide
1607.816 Baruch Bay
1562.81 Aurora Glade
1551.208 Fort Ranik
1549.531 Jade Sea
1545.292 Gandara
1446.024 Underworld
1414.024 Abaddon’s Mouth
1357.828 Vabbi
1352.937 Ring of Fire
1302.943 Piken Square
1255.43 Whiteside Ridge
1206.487 Miller’s Sound
1147.409 Dzagonur
1133.909 Drakkar Lake
915.472 Ruins of Surmia
820.931 Fissure of Woe

Hey everyone, sorry to not post about this sooner, the last few days have been a little hectic and I wanted to verify a couple things first about the issues we’ve been seeing with the queues before posting anything.

As many of you know, it is possible for someone to queue up for a map after you and get in first. We’re trying to get that fixed as soon as possible but unfortunately we still need a bit more time to solve the problem. We will definitely keep you updated when there is any news on our progress.

I have been checking the queue sizes and wait times for each matchup, and there are a couple interesting things I’ve observed so far that may help reduce queue times for some of you.

Worlds at the top of the rankings can have queues that reach multiple hours (particularly for the Eternal Battlegrounds map), but most of the worlds in the bottom half of the ranking quite frequently have open spots in at least a few maps, and the lower ranked the server is, the more likely it is that there are spots available. I’ll be posting the up to date world rankings shortly.

When there are queues for every map, the wait time for borderland maps tends to be shorter. Enemy team borderlands tend to have the smallest queues for just about every team so you may want to try entering those maps first before attempting to queue for the Eternal Battlegrounds. If you are just entering the queue for the battlegrounds and not checking the borderlands maps first to see if they have space open, you could be missing out on playing in the Borderlands while you wait for a spot to open up for you in the Battlegrounds.

That being said, while we still have worlds that consistently have open spots for more players, it would be fantastic if some players out there could help us spread the WvW population out a bit so we don’t have a few heavily stacked populations facing large queues on some worlds while many other worlds still have room to support people.

While I know this isn’t what most of you wanted to hear, I also want all of you to know that we are still investigating numerous other options we can take to help resolve some of these ongoing queue issues and we’ve been discussing them internally every day to see what would provide everyone with the best long term solution, but we wont have anything ready on that front for quite a while.

Ideally, we would see some people move from worlds with extreme queue times to worlds that need additional people and start building up active wvw communities there as well. Having more worlds with heavily active populations in WvW will be a very good thing for the long term health of the game, and spreading out the population will help reduce the queue times on the worlds with the longest queues.

While queues do indeed suck, the fact that they are this bad is because so many of you are trying to play and that is actually one of the best possible problems we can have at this point. It may sound silly, but it means that there are quite a few of you out there are enjoying the game and we’re thrilled that so many of you are out there trying to fight for your world. We will do our best to make sure you can.

Finally, I would like to ask everyone to post any additional queue comments to this thread only from now on and refrain from creating additional threads about it.

Thank you all for your understanding and patience.