You can’t fix server issues with name changes. The changes over the past few years have removed many positive aspects of servers in WvW. If you want to restore server pride and identity, you need to restore the positive value of servers. Lets look at some of the main functions of servers in WvW that have taken beatings:
1a) A recruitment funnel in PVE – People could advertise in PVE and actually bring people to a map, server, or guild that needed people. That lead to people discovering WvW, joining guilds, prompting guilds to do training events and other community building activities. Megaserver eliminated that. No recruitment funnel from PVE, no training events, no community building. Dead time zones are permanently dead, with no way of fixing them short of paying guilds to server transfer. You could fix this by providing that mechanism again, perhaps by a /server chat channel. People can filter it if they feel like its spam. Personally if I’m in PVE and something critical is going down in WVW, I want to know about it.
1b) A recruitment funnel in WVW – For players who are new WvW, their first real introduction to servers is at re-pairing time when they land in one alliance while the rest of their guild is on another. They are then offered the unattractive option to pay anet to correct this injustice by way of a server transfer fee. You could fix this by eliminating server transfer fees, or by eliminating server pairing. You have ways of locking full worlds, so transfer fees aren’t necessary for that. If you need to avoid mid-match transferring, you could limit it or schedule it to occur at match reset. Yes that would complicated re balancing, but not impossibly so.
2) A common long term goal – Servers used to have a sense of working towards the next tier, and improving their teamwork, etc. Now with dynamic server pairing, this is pointless. Any progress made towards improving your server will be wiped out by the server pairing to foster competitiveness The fall of DB was an example of this. The server worked its butt off to compete in T1, and it was rewarded by having its pair removed. Many saw that this ruined its competitiveness, and moved to servers where they could play fun matches again. Community destroyed, sense of purpose gone. The current problems with Glicko are just another manifestation, Glicko is meaningless because any progress made is wiped out at the re pairing. You could fix this by moving from dynamic pairing to merges. What about balancing the servers? There are other options beyond pairing. You could for example remove transfer fees and allow guilds to organize themselves up to some specified server size caps. Those caps could even be different for different tiers, allowing guilds to pick the level of crowdedness they like.
3) A common short term goal – Working to win a match used to be something most players cared about. Now we have a scoring system where there is often no difference between you playing at the top of your game, and you logging out. Frequently, you cannot affect the weekly score at all, no matter what. If you aren’t on the cusp of flipping skirmish rank, your contribution counts for nothing. This encourages the “screw the score, just pvp for fun, bags, and dailies” mentality. Maybe that’s all some people want, but that tends not to be what drives the people who keep the maps alive. You could fix this by adjusting the scoring to make all contributions count in the final score. Note: This is made worse by DBL, since the different teams aren’t even playing the same game anymore. Who cares if the scores are close when one team is playing football and the other soccer. I will not challenge democracy’s wisdom to keep DBL, but it should be made more similar in competitiveness to ABL. Analyze the time it takes to go from spawn to an uncontested cap of each tower to get a baseline. Look at the percentage of a squad that ports when a tag moves from EBG to ABL, compared to what percentage ports from EBG to DBL. It would give you more insight into what it takes for the maps to be equally competitive.
4) A way for people to organize voice chat – Unfortunately voice chat suffers from trolls, so some authentication is needed. The overhead used to be reasonable with a static server, but now entire populations need to be managed every month or so. This is tedious for admins and confusing for users. The result is dramatically less use of voice chat. This hurts community building as well as just coordination of game play. You could fix this by integrating voice chat into GW2, or going back to static servers. Some admins have moved to an API key solution, but this just switches the trust and effort problem to the users.
I’m glad to see anet looking at this problem, I hope something here resonates. To me the key take away is that server identity isn’t about the name, its about what the server does and the community it fosters.