Guild Wars 2

joneirikb.7506:

Agree with this.

I think that the current T4 match-up was as close as they could get to “Balanced” when they made it according to their previous 2 months of data/activity etc. But the moment the new match-up’s where set up, everything changed.

As Straegen said: Fair-weathers, schedules, time zones, guild moves, etc.

If all of those shift around for every single match-up, how the kitten is ANet ever going to be able to create a “fair” match-up ? The “fair” part is removed after reset, when the majority of players have decided how the week is going to end, and thus doesn’t bother playing any more (self fulfilling prophecy btw).

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A thought: Perhaps if we actually had server movement, so we would meet new servers each week, that it would stay fresh enough, that people would play and try for at least a few more days before giving up? Don’t know if that would work, but if match-up’s changed more often, we wouldn’t know exactly what we played, and with the links, the “servers” also change every now and then, so we would b even less certain what we where facing.

Definitely agree that these match-ups could have been much closer. Anet doesn’t realize the damage that stagnated match-ups does to lower tier servers which in turn makes the balancing much worse.

T4 for instance: I don’t believe many thought the DH/Ebay group would be getting smacked around this badly but right away at the start of the CD match-up Ehmry Bay lost 2 of its largest longest standing guilds which transferred up due to the inability for servers to get out of T4. This then led to the server losing multiple other guilds in the weeks to come.

I know Darkhaven has lost guilds as well.

If match-ups don’t change players will move to find variety; especially those focused on the PvP or GvG aspect of WvW so that they can find different and engaging fights.

Trying to find balance and then immediately implementing something like a 1 up and 1 down system would be the simplest “fix.” But even that wouldn’t last long.

Edge of the Mists is not WvW. It is meant to be an overflow from the real World vs World maps when they are queued or full but is used by players to level and karma train.

Overgrowth is the addition of all servers that are playing green in WvW during that week. Green servers are the servers that are more than likely the top of the current match-up so they are generally going to be the larger servers.

Blue (whatever they are called) are the servers that get second.

Red (whatever they are called starts with a are the servers that are probably getting third and are then most likely the smallest.

Edge of the mist needs not re-balancing because it wasn’t meant to be a game mode in and of itself. All it does is take players from the lower tier servers who could be in WvW playing the actual game mode and makes the population disparity worse because the top servers are still full.

No worries though with the influx in new players recently many don’t know that Edge of the Mists is not a part of the WvW. Just a heads up that you might get poked at. True WvW does need population balancing of some kind as well but that is a different story. If Anet made it free to transfer to #24 and incrementally more expensive as you go up that may help but they tend to do odd transfer prices that make no sense and make it free to transfer to Fort Aspenwood or Maguuma or Blackgate. (I don’t think free transfers to these servers have actually happened but giving free transfers to the bottom server in gold before a season is silly as you are taking more players from lower and making the disparity worse).

To the original poster.

Edge of the Mists (EotM) does not and never will equal World vs World (WvW). It draws from all servers of the same color. So you’ll want green. Ehmry Bay in the last 10 weeks has been Blue: 6, Red: 2, Green:2.

Ehmry Bay has a very strong WvW community with guilds that raid nearly daily in Woes and CoT. We have guilds that do home defense and roamers on at all hours of the day. If you play during EU timezone then I see your plight as I am currently away working on a graduate school project that is required for me to graduate and while I didn’t tag up everyday and we do have others that run tags during EU timezone we are thin.

If you really are referencing WvW and not EotM you’ve jumped into Ehmry at a very poor time (although I don’t think you are). We just won our match-up last week against SoR and Anvil Rock handedly with many on hiatus including myself. Yes we are coming off of a bunch of 2cd and 3rd places because we have been fighting Crystal Desert which has gotten a huge EU and SEA presence since the streamer DocGotGame started there and can run 40 deep during EU timezones so we are behind in PPT like crazy from the start due to coverage (although it looks like he’s doing more Archeage now so we’ll see if CD comes back to earth a bit). His guild can also queue a borderland during NA prime-time by themselves if he chooses to stream at night and they have queued borderlands solo the last 4 resets. And now we are matched up against Darkhaven who has a monstrous glicko lead over us.

If you are talking about Edge of the Mists then I would suggest doing what everyone suggests and pick a server that is always going to be green. If you mean WvW and play during NA prime-time I don’t think you’ll see much difference between Ehmry a T5 server and T4 servers so you’ll have to go up to at least T3. If you mean true WvW and you play during EU or SEA you’ll have to choose CD (EU) or DB or HoD (SEA) or just re-roll to T1 and become another part of the problem.

Don’t want stagnant match-ups. Spread the population. Don’t want queues spread the population.

In short. What do you mean WvW or EotM? They are not the same. What timezones do you play on?

Inter guild politics? Not really. The entirety of Dragonbrand’s WvW population is transferring and they are planning on going to the same place. When PvE population is taken into account for server population even with megaservers making PvE servers irrelevant it puts the hurt on servers with a higher PvE to WvW player ratio.

It seems Dragonbrand wants to combine it’s WvW population with the WvW population on a server that has fewer slots taken up by PvE players.

I’ve only heard of 1 guild planning on separating from the major group and they went to Yak’s Bend.

Rumor mill says it’s along the lines of 18 guilds. 18 guilds going to HoD.

Anet. WvW is broken. Pl0x fix.

I agree with the guy that said low tiers are a lot of fun. If you play during prime-time that is and don’t really care about where your server fits in the rankings. Off hours can be torture though in the low tiers so keep that in mind.

T4/5 have very skilled players and a good mix of solo roaming havoc, zerging, and guild groups. I personally play on Ehmry Bay and we have 4-5 havoc guilds that run 3-6 people during NA prime-time. The downside to Ehmry Bay for sure though is our EU coverage. A 3 man havoc or roaming squad during EU hours (or any addition for that matter) would do way more for us than it would for some others.

Henge of Denravi are some classy folks so I would also recommend them as a destination. Those I have talked to there are great individuals and I have had some great fights from them during EU hours.

Crystal Desert has a singular massive blob that runs during the EU timezone which is fun to fight but only if you can get 10 of them away from the 40+ group. The EU presence in T5 NA at least is lacking.

During NA primetime all 3 of these servers are very similar.

The current T4 servers of IoJ, SBI, and NSP I can’t talk about much as we haven’t fought them in awhile.

Personally I would recommend one of the following 3 servers, Anvil Rock, Henge of Denravi, or Ehmry Bay.

My role on my current server is that of a scout and home defense roamer. I frequently respond to white swords which allows my server (Ehmry Bay) to move around other maps without having to worry about sitting a player in every single tower and/or keep. During the day there are times that lower populated servers have anywhere from 0-10 players on a map. Just today there was a time that our active WvW population between all 4 maps could probably have been counted on my fingers and toes. The only way we can be competitive with servers like Gates of Madness and Darkhaven is if our tenacious defenders can respond to attacks within a reasonable amount of time.

I support the points per kill change being made but not the removal of white swords. We are in Tier 6 and we don’t have the population to protect our objectives and many servers are smaller than us. The original poster is from one of the Tier 1 servers and he sees this as a terrible idea. I understand that this is temporary but if you change it how will you determine whether the change was beneficial? Most match-ups are blowouts due to coverage problems already and those that are close now are being skewed by the Holiday content (how will December be effected by Wintersday?) and the end of the tournament resulting in players taking time off.

As a roamer and defender it will be a lost cause for me to stay on our home Borderland and try to defend when I have no idea what is going on. It is already possible to flip unupgraded camps in under 2 minutes even with characters made for support. The delay on the white swords makes it nearly impossible to respond to these players as it is if you don’t have upgraded keeps. Clever travel through the terrain and mixing up objectives makes it even harder to respond to attackers as it is.

I think this change will seriously turn WvW into EoTM. Smaller servers won’t be able to respond to objectives being hit and they will stop upgrading objectives making them easier to flip. The larger server with a superior population will be able to post scouts and will put an end to the smaller servers offensives. If the group inside decides to use siege they can easily stomp the smaller force and take advantage of the PPK change. This in turn will decrease the amount of players that log in for the smaller server. Every one of these things makes the problem worse not better.

I thought I saw a list of where all the developers went during the adopt-a-dev thing. I believe only 2 of the plethora of developers were in Bronze Tier and one of them was on Darkhaven (arguably the strongest of the bronze tier servers) the other was on Eredon Terrace. I urge you strongly to talk to that developer. He/She alone would have an idea of how this will effect the state of WvW entirely.

mexay.3902:

That’s just one example. There’s so, so many ways to fix the current system. Hell even just combining servers would work. The population is currently spread a little too thin beyond T4 and match-ups are completely unbalanced, with some servers in the same tier able to queue all maps, and others that can’t even queue one.

WvW is basically broken at the moment and no amount of tournaments, trailers, siege masteries or photoshopped doritos will help it. It needs a proper rework. The game mode has incredible potential. It’s just being wasted.

I’m from a T7 server on NA and we were able to queue 3 of the 4 maps on reset night for a significant amount of time so I don’t think it’s a matter of the lower servers not having enough population but instead the problem of getting them into WvW. Please do not merge servers. Ever.

The main reason I posted in this thread was to share a very old suggestion for creating more equal matchups that would be easy to implement. See the video here.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-system-guilds-and-the-future/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/introducing-the-megaserver-system/

“What about World Bosses, Guilds, and WvW?

Later this week, we’ll be discussing how our transition to the megaserver system will affect the timing of world bosses and some changes we’re making to support this. We’ll also be discussing the long-term plan for guilds and WvW in relation to our megaserver system, so check back each day this week for more information!"

“The Megaserver System and the Future of WvW

Though we are moving to our new megaserver model in PvE, it’s extremely important to us that we maintain the level of identity and competition in WvW that we’ve established since the release of Guild Wars 2. The entire game mode is based on battles between different players aligned to the named worlds, and as such we have no plans to remove this concept from WvW.

We’ll go into the very specific details about these changes as we approach the launch of this system game-wide, but we wanted to get a head start on messaging this since these are natural questions the addition of our megaserver system raises."

Don’t worry guys. They plan on telling us what they plan before they roll out mega-servers.

So this is what I’m currently running in WvW.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApVo1CxeI8DNRCBlVNw+DPPFXfhAcAA-TVUAABBYioiHAAAmDsQJIDmE6+CAkkStCOCAKpsQGNBEpSzAmQ2RVAs2fAJVEGUHQPqBQGAzlA-w

I haven’t had too many issues with it but now that I have some disposable gold I would like to start customizing my gear rather than relying on drops. I see a lot of advice around for guardians that are running as commanders or in large groups which is not the case when I WvW. When in large groups my guardian gets me through the fights and seems to be a decent contributor but when I’m running in smaller groups of less than 10 or by myself I seem to get into long drawn out fights where I slowly die. I was wondering if there are any guardians out there that utilize shouts and are capable roamers that could share some advice with this lowly noob at the guardian profession.

The tournament standings may not be a great indicator of current strengths among servers in the bronze league due to the great migrations that occurred just prior and during the season. Ebay and ET lost members and guilds prior to the tournament due to cheap transfers and there was another power shift when Kain, DH, SF lost members with the launch of the China servers. I am not super knowledgeable of what happened but it’s what I heard. I love Ebay and hope we never lose our identity but I am afraid that this may be the only answer…

Atherakhia.4086:

I hope ANet will finally take note of how terrible these servers have become and will merge some of them.

Only thing I can think of is taking the 3 smallest servers Ebay, ET, Kain and merging them with the three above them creating: ET+SF, Kain+DH, and Ebay+Anvil. As much as I don’t like that idea I would prefer it to them just disbanding any servers completely. Oh well Anet said there would be changes to WvW later this year so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Edit: Purely speculation but I see an EotM like format for all of WvW with 3 server “teams” that are rotated and then fixed during tournaments based on how the regular season went.

Ehmry Bay:
1.EBAY
2. oG
3.HOME
4.CoT
5. VII
6.Para
7. Maki

Those are probably the most active WvW guilds in Ehmry there are more but these are by far the largest and most WvW oriented that I’ve noticed. They are in no order other than what came into my mind sitting here. And don’t get mad if I forgot somebody I’m in a guild that isn’t even on this list but I don’t think our WvW presence is large enough to warrant messaging at this time.

1. Ranger – not going to suggest I know how to fix it but this class needs some work.
2. Elementalist
3. Guardian – (PvE I think it’s fine but they cannot roam for anything and are at a disadvantage in any 1v1) Ranged weapons could use some work.