Showing Posts For electronvolt.7541:
Good on you, CD. But the demographic that contributes a large dose of “pride” to your server is neither unique to the GW2 ecosystem (not contingent on server selection) nor dependent on game design.
An acknowledgement and a tip of the hat to the healthy (and well meaning) pride communities on Crystal Desert, but c’mon, very little of it has to do with the server, WvW, or anything remotely connected with the architecture or meta.
I agree completely that it isn’t unique or a special snowflake of a community. I think most other servers probably have something similar, especially the smaller ones.
However: communities exist in the ecosystem that they form in. You can’t make the claim, online /or/ offline, that a community exists separate of the architecture it forms around. They exist /because of/ the server system. As a counterpoint: my first MMO used a fluid server system (you chose every time you logged in), and there was nothing even remotely similar. Communities formed around external guide-sharing/discussion/etc. sites, guilds, and groups of friends.
With a server system, you basically are ensuring that people are interacting with the same group of people regularly. The megaserver system apparently will be pushing that, so I think ANet understands that fact: but I think the point people are making is that the current setup could cause a disconnect between the PvE community of a server and its WvW community. It doesn’t hurt PvE much because outside of very limited amounts of content, PvE doesn’t require a lot of consistent coordination of groups of more than 5. (Teq. and wurm are the exceptions) However, it hurts WvW because the communities are no longer 1-1: so a person can’t necessarily WvW with the people they PvE with, and WvW can’t draw on a larger community of people who don’t WvW much, but like doing it sometimes.
I think people are assuming that megaservers will lead to faction vs. faction matchups, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. You can still have team based play, the only difference is you won’t need to have one team per server. The higher pop servers would stay that way, but they could consolidate the low pop ones to help add more parity to the matchups. If the bottom three servers started fighting on the same team, would it really harm their server pride?
I can’t speak for all low pop. servers, but I know that basically everyone who does WvW on Crystal Desert regularly has a good amount of server pride (considering that we don’t do super well, you’d have to…); there’s a server teamspeak (which I think is normal across most servers), we know who the good commanders are, etc. I know that at least I am not in a specifically WvW guild, but I enjoy playing with the same group of people regularly (and they’re from a variety of guilds).
I’d imagine it’s the same across other servers, even the low pop. ones. Smashing three communities together in hopes that they’ll all (a) work well together, and (b) form a better team/collaborate well seems unlikely to me. I’d imagine that you’d get initial drama between competing egos/groups (even down to little things like which teamspeak to use), followed by one server community ‘winning’ and the other two getting somewhat subsumed as players who are fed up/don’t like the new vibe/etc. leave. If this happened repeatedly/the ‘factions’ were changed on a regular basis, it would be less likely to kill two communities, but you definitely wouldn’t get an organized team.
I, for one, want to see how the megaserver system plays out and what they do as far as WvW goes. As someone who does PvE, too, I think it’s definitely a win for most PvE content (but there /is/ a PvE community on my home server, too, and commanders who’re respected there and who are good at organizing the server during large events or bosses or etc., and I’d hate to see that go away either), but I hope that ANet has thought about the potential consequences for server communities (although I’m hesitant, given that their answer has been “They’ll stay because you’ll usually get put with people from your server”*) and WvW in particular.
*What if your server/group of guilds/etc. is trying to do something, and most of the people end up in one instance, but then that instance is full and the other people can’t fit? It’s the same problem as with overflows, it just seems more likely to happen for things like Teq. and world bosses, since they’re all on a unified timer now. Unless there’s a heavy bias for creating a new instance if a few people arrive from one server at the same time, it seems likely to introduce the same problem as overflows for servers that didn’t have that problem beforehand.
I’d suggest a middle path, of giving the winning worlds some rewards (tickets+finisher), while also giving the people who’re playing tickets with some sort of repeatable achievement system.
It’s true that some things (scouting, being eyes for a tower, or keep, etc.) are great contributions and not really easy to quantify or reward. That will always be the case, though, and I can’t think of a way to address that and have rewards for the gameplay. This is an issue with any metric, though (you see it in workplaces, schools, college admissions, scientific or statistical studies, etc.): if you addressed it in one place, there would always be another place where you could argue that a contribution is very helpful and unrewarded, so I don’t think that’s a good reason to tie all of the rewards to world success.
The current system has some pretty major faults, though, and one is that certain rewards (bought with tickets) are exclusively reserved for players on winning worlds. It over-incentivizes jumping to worlds that are likely to win, which is bad for both the server that people are leaving and the one that people are going to: one server loses population, which makes WvW and PvE (some people do both, after all) harder for everyone.
The other server loses too: if any community (online or offline) has a huge influx of new people, it’s likely to cause the community+culture that was there to be lost in the din. New blood doesn’t enter the community, and older members are likely to become dissatisfied because the community they were part of seems gone, and might leave the server or potentially the game. If the new players then move worlds again (because they aren’t doing as well as they expected, or because the tournament was over, or because there isn’t a strong community on the server that they’re part of), it’s a net loss for the server that had the influx, even if they won in the short term.
Since ANet does seem to care about the health of servers* (but even if they don’t, they should: it’s what keeps people from jumping ship to another MMO when they get bored or hit a cap or a point where the difficulty spikes), it’s strange to me that they didn’t try to address that issue.
- I think the tiered transfer system was intended to balance WvW out, which in moderation has the effect of strengthening the communities that might be doing less well by incentivizing people going to them.
(edited by electronvolt.7541)
Jumping on the praising CD bandwagon: I’m fairly new to GW2 and WvW, but maps get queued super rarely, and the community+commanders in both WvW and PvE have seemed really nice+accepting of players who’re new+learning, almost down to a player. (I think one person has been rude in like a month and a lot of hours logged? I haven’t seen that /anywhere/, but I don’t have lots of GW2 experience.)
And some commanders in particular are great at getting non-guild, normal zerg groups to wipe groups twice as large through superior tactics+timing+movement. Not every commander manages that, but there are ones who do, and running with them is awesome.
By all of that, I mean: please join HoD so that we can get your bags.
That’s inspiring , hes new but he already got CD’s mindset
" By all of that, I mean: please join HoD so that we can get your bags. "
My only level 80 is an ele, and after much experimentation, a staff is definitely my weapon of choice.
I have a vested interest in lots of them running in large groups, so that I can more easily nuke them from orbit.
Jumping on the praising CD bandwagon: I’m fairly new to GW2 and WvW, but maps get queued super rarely, and the community+commanders in both WvW and PvE have seemed really nice+accepting of players who’re new+learning, almost down to a player. (I think one person has been rude in like a month and a lot of hours logged? I haven’t seen that /anywhere/, but I don’t have lots of GW2 experience.)
And some commanders in particular are great at getting non-guild, normal zerg groups to wipe groups twice as large through superior tactics+timing+movement. Not every commander manages that, but there are ones who do, and running with them is awesome.
By all of that, I mean: please join HoD so that we can get your bags.