Guild Wars 2

coglin.1867:

There is no such thing as PvE-ers or WvW-ers or PvP-ers, there are only Play-ers. If your trying to get POI solo, your tieing your own hands. Ask the map for help. Generally they are more then happy to aid you where they can.

Although a player that nobody knows showing up on a map and imploring people in /m to “attack (T3 enemy-held keep while outnumbered buff is showing)” is not going to make people drop what they’re doing and rush to make it happen.

If there is a commander tag showing, you join and contribute, and ask for it. Since it uses other people’s time and expertise, you can’t just expect them to do it for you immediately.

Pikka.6023:

Fix One: Automate upgrades and repairs. Upgrades start automatically and at base level pace. Whenever a yak reaches a tower or keep the upgrades temporarily go a lot faster. At no point is supply spent on upgrades or repairs. In addition to cannons/mortars/oil automatic upgrades include some carts and ballistas. Workers automatically work on repairing walls/gates/permanent siege that has been damaged if it stops taking damage for a minute. Players can spend supply to make additional repairs the the workers’ automatic repairs.

Favours the more populated server in an imbalanced matchup, so not a good addition.

Pikka.6023:

Fix Two: Match WvW rewards to PvE. An hour of WvW should give a similar amount of personal rewards to players as an hour of PvE. Currently the players who contribute the most to the success of the server reap the fewest rewards because it costs so much to run upgrades, and buy blueprints and traps. There’s nothing interesting about the blueprint mechanic; it’s just a gold sink and inventory space waste. Give players a button to the right of their elite skill to select a piece of siege to build; make partially built siege decay a lot faster than the current ten minute build window. Decrease awards for player kills, which is where most of the WvW rewards are right now, even though that’s not how the game is scored. Increase awards for events, especially for defense.

Bad ideas – there are people who make their gold from WvW (because of the aforementioned lack of similar rewards to PvE) by making superior siege from their regular siege (bought with badges) and selling them on. Same with guild catapults. As for decreasing the rewards for player kills… arguably one of the main draws of a versus match against other humans is to directly kill them. I get that you’re trying to make defense more important and to remove incentive to zerg, but taking away existing rewards from WvW isn’t the way.

Pikka.6023:

Fix Three: Close borders when population is low There is nothing interesting, and a whole lot that is tedious, about maintaining defenses on a border that is dead. There’s also nothing interesting about the PvD of capping a dead border. When the participation of any one server falls below a threshold, or the total participation of all three servers falls below a threshold, close all three borderlands, and stop scoring them. If the remaining population is too large for EB, start a second EB map. People could be given a several minutes warning and a chance to queue for the new map so it gets “reset night” type activity when it opens.

You get that about the half the people who WvW and have an opinion prefer the BLs over EBG, right? That investing some time getting your home BL ready for the epic fights that tend to come during prime time is an investment that people make in advance of their actual fun? I personally would be quite pleased if EBG was closed, but I’d prefer none of them close at all. And, at least for my server and many of the servers I’ve encountered while climbing back up from T8, it’s the home BL that matters, not EBG. Taking that away would be as bad for a server as megaservering WvW.

Pikka.6023:

Certainly there is much, much more to do to improve WvW, but just these three changes could have a big impact quickly. Imagine if you knew when you played WvW it was going to be personally rewarding, the maps would be active, and there wouldn’t be any tedium required!

To the highlighted part – no doubt they would. They’d make the game a worse experience, force a zergier playstyle on people who didn’t want it (closing maps to concentrate people all together? No thanks!), and overall favour the most populated server in a match.

I appreciate that you’ve come up with some ideas, because people thinking of how to make things better is definitely a good thing, but I don’t care for any of these particular ones.

Otokomae.9356:

If Anet makes a change like this just so PvE players can get a specific weapon skin easier, then they’re going to need to fix a lot of PvE events as well. For instance, I’d really like to have some of the Tequatl ascended weapon skins, but Tequatl doesn’t get defeated that often, and is usually only defeated during certain times of the day, by organized guilds who completely fill up their map well BEFORE the event becomes available to start. And a single player, of course has NO CHANCE of defeating Tequatl. Even a small, organized group can’t do it, anymore than you and a few friends can take a defended Keep or Stonemist Castle; in fact, far more people have soloed Keeps than Tequatl, as I’ve NEVER seen a video of someone soloing Tequatl, or even any claim of it having been attempted. So my job basically makes it too difficult for me to finish Tequatl at all, let alone enough times to have a decent chance at finally getting one of those rare weapon drops. And those aren’t even Legendary, they’re just Ascended! So maybe Anet could give me the same chance of getting a Tequatl weapon skin every time I kill a Keep Lord as I would if I were defeating Tequatl, since my schedule doesn’t seem to prevent me from killing Keep Lords several times a week. This is just one of many PvE events that I don’t have time for, as a well-compensated professional. But I should still have access to the same weapon skins as everyone else, even if I never complete the events!!! Hurry up Anet and fix this game to better fit my schedule!!!

Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

+1

^^ I wonder if you’ve asked whoever the opponent is that holds that poi you need if they’d mind if you got it?

Especially if you’re on your own / small group and they have defenders there.

I mean, if you don’t want to try to take it by force.

Liston.9708:

SkyShroud.2865:

coglin.1867:

SkyShroud.2865:

unfortuantely, the game is heading towards a direction where the idea of “rebuilding” a server is quite impossible due to lack of population. as the population decline, wvw become inbalance and then it become less fun.

You are mistaken as I see it. The game is moving the the exact direction to build up a servers population. Nothing revitalizes and MMO like an expansion pack.

how sure are you the expansion will have a increase in lasting population? that’s just assumption isn’kitten

And how many Pvx will escape back to pve for a bit as most of the things mentioned in the expansion so far are pve…

More people playing the game overall means more people to play WvW, should they choose to. It’s an opportunity , not ANet promising to “add more players to WvW”.

Alteros.3019:

Rimmy.9217:

Alteros.3019:

Rimmy.9217:

Alteros.3019:

A lot of GW2 players such as myself are well compensated professionals with day jobs. We’re not going to take a vacation day or sick time to get a POI or Vista. The content of the game should be accessible to any player at any time of the day. I’m not saying that it should be effortless, but the situation on some servers makes it utterly inaccessible.

Somehow being employed means that anybody with a job should have immediate at-will access to their opponent’s back row in a chess game. Good to know.

You should have the realistic and achievable opportunity to enter their back row; the same opportunity that my opponents have any time of day. What most of us have to try to get through on the lower tiers are 3 rows of pawns and a couple of queens…no matter what time of day.

Don’t give me that – my own server imploded and dropped down to the bottom rank of the bottom tier. We’ve climbed back up into silver in the past month (took a year), so I remember perfectly what it’s like to “get to the back row”.

But if you’re going to look at it like PvE, of course you’re going to be disappointed. Anybody can solo a tower or a keep when nobody responds to the swords, but otherwise you’re going to have to work with people to do it. No, you definitely shouldn’t have this game cater to the “I’ve got half an hour and need ____ colour garrison for map completion – that should be plenty of time” mindset. That would be a poor game to play, especially as map completion isn’t a big deal other than to make legendaries and have a star next to your name (and yes, I’ve done both).

The OP claimed to be checking because they really needed map completion, but somehow missed an entire week of when his server was the colour he needed. Shrug.

If you’re proud about it taking a year for you to be able to reasonably do map completion in the borderlands while some guy on another server can run all his/her characters through in a single evening, boy do I have some real estate deals for you. For the record too, I also have borderlands map completion, but I don’t always think about myself. If I wanted to do it again, I have about a 15 min window immediately after reset night before I completely lose the ability to see the interior of all my towers and keeps for the remainder of the week. No joke.

Not proud, just saying I’ve been on the losing WvW server too. It didn’t take a year to get map completion, because (unless you’re in the higher tiers (NA) which don’t move around much, your server goes up and down in the rankings and your colour changes – meaning you’ve got the opportunity to get your WvW map completion without having to tick at +695.

If you’re not a WvWer, and I assume you’re not much of one (time-wise) based on your replies thus far, I can understand why it might be frustrating. But like I said a few posts back, you can’t approach WvW maps the way you’d approach a PvE map. And complaining that (generic) you can’t get things because other people haven’t/can’t/won’t get them for you is… kind of lame.

Like has been said before, on countless threads of PvErs upset about map completion in WvW – get some people together, pick a target, and go get it. One poi a night may seem agonizingly slow, but it gets things done and helps your server and other people coming in WvW seeing something flip to your colour may get inspired and either help you or flip additional things.

If your position remains that you want to waltz in and go wherever you want whenever you want, then you’re going to be disappointed. But that’s not a game concern or design flaw.

Alteros.3019:

Rimmy.9217:

Alteros.3019:

A lot of GW2 players such as myself are well compensated professionals with day jobs. We’re not going to take a vacation day or sick time to get a POI or Vista. The content of the game should be accessible to any player at any time of the day. I’m not saying that it should be effortless, but the situation on some servers makes it utterly inaccessible.

Somehow being employed means that anybody with a job should have immediate at-will access to their opponent’s back row in a chess game. Good to know.

You should have the realistic and achievable opportunity to enter their back row; the same opportunity that my opponents have any time of day. What most of us have to try to get through on the lower tiers are 3 rows of pawns and a couple of queens…no matter what time of day.

Don’t give me that – my own server imploded and dropped down to the bottom rank of the bottom tier. We’ve climbed back up into silver in the past month (took a year), so I remember perfectly what it’s like to “get to the back row”.

But if you’re going to look at it like PvE, of course you’re going to be disappointed. Anybody can solo a tower or a keep when nobody responds to the swords, but otherwise you’re going to have to work with people to do it. No, you definitely shouldn’t have this game cater to the “I’ve got half an hour and need ____ colour garrison for map completion – that should be plenty of time” mindset. That would be a poor game to play, especially as map completion isn’t a big deal other than to make legendaries and have a star next to your name (and yes, I’ve done both).

The OP claimed to be checking because they really needed map completion, but somehow missed an entire week of when his server was the colour he needed. Shrug.

Alteros.3019:

A lot of GW2 players such as myself are well compensated professionals with day jobs. We’re not going to take a vacation day or sick time to get a POI or Vista. The content of the game should be accessible to any player at any time of the day. I’m not saying that it should be effortless, but the situation on some servers makes it utterly inaccessible.

Somehow being employed means that anybody with a job should have immediate at-will access to their opponent’s back row in a chess game. Good to know.

Chaba.5410:

Rimmy.9217:

Don’t know where you got “from afar” from, not sure how not personally interviewing a significant percent of the guilds in the game equates to “never bothered to investigate”, nor how I’m jumping to conclusions. The fallback to ad hominem “points” really undermines the undermining of my argument, frankly. The root causes are obvious and have been stated by both me and many others, across a wide number of threads. Discounting them doesn’t make them a mystery.

The Sun revolves around the Earth. It’s so obvious. </sarcasm>

If you’re not talking to guilds as to why they are moving or why they picked the server they did, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about, just offering a belief as a statement of fact. That isn’t an ad hominem. That’s just basic root cause analysis that you are not doing.

This is what you said:

Chaba.5410:

3- No, no GvG mode anytime soon. It is no more pointless to suggest than destacking is. Players don’t care about balance because they mistake stability for balance. How many guilds did you talk to that are interested in transferring or have transferred somewhere else? Have you asked them why they made the server choice they did? I have. Time and time again “stability” is the answer. Players don’t like to transfer to a server that is at risk of falling out of a tier or leaving them high and dry.

I never said I didn’t speak to any, or was a part of any. What I said was “I had to ask a significant percentage of all of the guilds that exist in GW2” in order to speak? Don’t think so, and you haven’t either. And no, I can’t give you a count.

lil devils x.6071:

and wvw is extremely limited in the number of players that can participate in the match itself, it is like setting up a knitting club in the middle of a basketball court during a game, it doesn’t belong there and is not fair to those trying to actually play wvw. It allows for one side to get ques due to crafters while the other team face rolls them. This would be different if this were just a free for all pvp area without score, but it is not. As long as there is a score, consideration should be taken for those trying to score.

Non wvw activities should be removed from wvw due to the population caps, including things like fireworks events, otherwise you create even more imbalanced matchups by having servers swamped with crafters when the rest are trying to play the actual game in progress.

Replace “crafters” with “GvGers” and see that what you wrote still holds up.

lil devils x.6071:

How is this condescending? When people are on here every week complaining about their current matchups and their tiers being broken because THEY ARE, ignoring that there is a problem isn’t going to help resolve it.

Toxic people? Yes, there are players on servers that do nothing but rant and insult other players in map chat, intentionally siege cap with useless siege , or stand there and do nothing to help their team win taking up map space that could be used by someone actually wanting to play with others. Yes, that is toxic, and many have requested being able to rid their servers of these people but are currently helpless to do so in the current system.

Because your server isn’t the sterling example of what every other server should be, no matter how much you personally enjoy it.

The matchups are imbalanced partly because of what you’re advocating – mass transfers (often solicited, but not always) from other servers to stack the gold tiers. In a game that is heavily dependent on population, that act alone has put a much worse wobble in the balance of the overall game health of WvW. And you are, in fact, the one ignoring that. Reducing the number of servers makes that worse, and even you recognize that because you’re talking about putting on additional maps… you’re offering a solution for a problem you’d create just to have the solution!

THAT is ignoring the problem of population.

lil devils x.6071:

stand there and do nothing to help their team win taking up map space

You get that anybody not playing for PPT falls into this category, right? People using the crafting stations for a couple of minutes before they log out, people doing dailies, people just running around the map or dueling or any of a host of other things falls into that category.

You know who works harder than anybody to help their team win? The people on the servers that are being swamped by population imbalances. And you want to wipe out their teams by absorbing them into the gold tier blob. No.

lil devils x.6071:

TBH I love the server I am on, and really do not wish to have many of the toxic people from other servers come here, but I also understand after being on multiple servers, that there are many servers that are currently dysfunctional in the current system and that should be resolved to allow everyone the opportunity to play good wvw matches as well.

This is amazingly condescending to so many people.

Chaba.5410:

If you’ve been out of the GvG scene for that long and haven’t followed the meta, you really don’t understand then why the windmill is now considered a terrible place for it, which explains also your EOTM suggestion. In other words, your suggestion may seem like a solution, but it isn’t.

I still see people using the windmill. You know your tier isn’t the only place that people GvG, right? That whatever culture your server or your tier uses isn’t the only one, right? And I wasn’t offering a solution – that people want to get together in the game and do something that is possible in the game but isn’t specifically supported isn’t a problem to be solved.

Chaba.5410:

Either you’re calling for players to “destack” from higher tiers or you’re calling for players to “destack” from a single server in a tier. If you need evidence of “destacking” in a tier, my own server did that for Season 2 so we wouldn’t roflstomp Silver. SoS is doing that now. Will they be able to destack enough? Probably not because they have quite a large population of OCX players that are PVE/PVX who don’t see any need to destack. Are their destacking players going to other T3 server? No because those players have a loyalty to the population/activity in T2. Several of their guilds went to T1 even.

The former, not the latter. If/when ANet lowers the WvW map population caps, destacking from overstacked servers will happen – at least by people who still want to play. And destacking can only happen downward – transferring up is stacking.

Chaba.5410:

So you have only ever observed the symptom from afar, never bothered to investigate, and jump to some conclusion. How are you ever going to be able to take steps to stem or stop this issue if you don’t know what causes it?! If you can’t identify the root causes, any actions or suggestions you take could be like taking a swing at a foul ball. You miss something you never had a chance of hitting anyway.

Don’t know where you got “from afar” from, not sure how not personally interviewing a significant percent of the guilds in the game equates to “never bothered to investigate”, nor how I’m jumping to conclusions. The fallback to ad hominem “points” really undermines the undermining of my argument, frankly. The root causes are obvious and have been stated by both me and many others, across a wide number of threads. Discounting them doesn’t make them a mystery.

Chaba.5410:

1- Have you tried to GvG in EOTM? It is done sometimes but the area that supports it is trolled by auto-spawning cannons.

No. GvG has to be the single most boring thing in the game, and I’m glad it didn’t come about at the hands of ANet. But all it needs is a space – people use the OS and, back when I had to do it, the plateau by the windmill on the BLs. Not every suitable space on EotM has cannons, so why insist on doing it there?

Chaba.5410:

2- IDK why you say there’s no destacking. Where do you think all the players that went to Maguuma came from?

You think that destacking means “everybody who is changing servers all go to one place”?

Chaba.5410:

3- No, no GvG mode anytime soon. It is no more pointless to suggest than destacking is. Players don’t care about balance because they mistake stability for balance. How many guilds did you talk to that are interested in transferring or have transferred somewhere else? Have you asked them why they made the server choice they did? I have. Time and time again “stability” is the answer. Players don’t like to transfer to a server that is at risk of falling out of a tier or leaving them high and dry.

I have to interview a high percentage of the guilds that exist in the game? No, I didn’t do that. But players leaving or transferring to a server en masse have caused far more instability than they’ve ever cured, so stemming or stopping that particular problem and taking steps to reverse it as much as possible seems to be a good idea, don’t you think?

Chaba.5410:

If there were a GvG mode that gave these guilds access to fights against other GvG guilds in other tiers, this stacking wouldn’t be such the problem that it is now.

But there isn’t, and there isn’t going to be anytime soon, so that’s a pointless avenue to go down. And good thing there isn’t a GvG mode.

Although, isn’t that what EotM is actually good for? It gives a given guild the chance to meet up with guilds from 2/3 of the other servers and fight them.

And despite that… there’s no indication of destacking.

lil devils x.6071:

give the defenders a chest of loot equal to if not greater than capping rewards!

That would help slow down the K train to get people who actually want to defend in there.

Better still would be upping the loot for player kills, and make WvW about as lucrative as EotM is now, while reducing the loot in EotM. It’s such a pity that a competitive game mode got reduced to a farm run.

lil devils x.6071:

2) I would like to see active maps added and deducted according to population shifts, “event bonus maps”

Absolutely not. All adding additional maps would do is encourage further server stacking which is a terrible idea. We have to reverse that trend, not increase it. Definite no to this. And “work on server balance issues later”? Server balance is far more important than rewarding stackers.

lil devils x.6071:

This is how wvw was meant to be played,

This is your opinion, not a fact. Anecdotal experience doesn’t illuminate anything.

lil devils x.6071:

I think everyone should have a chance to experience the best wvw has to offer as well, even if they just walked in the door, and still need to learn the ropes.

And artificially overstacked servers aren’t that. Out of control growth is cancer – that isn’t what people should think is normal. Sorry.

lil devils x.6071:

AS for population cap reductions, Strongly opposed, currently, we have 500 person guilds, yet you do not even have a battlefield in game for an entire guild to play together at once. Reducing this further only ensures more people who wish to play together will not be able to do so.

500 person guilds has nothing to do with having that many people on in the same place at the same time in WvW. Population caps will spread out the population of people who want to play, and that is a healthy reversal of what’s happened far too often.

lil devils x.6071:

It should be noted that more people are in favor of server merges than population reductions, even in the statistics listed above. Wvw was meant to be large scale pvp, we already have small scale pvp, and this would be removing the only platform large scale pvp has available. Instead of reducing population, you add more active maps to increase it, just keep it balanced on all sides instead of reduce the actual population cap.

You think the number of posts on the forum equal the number of people who actually want those ideas? You think that majority should rule? Would you want China to set policy for the world because it has the single highest country population?

Of course not. We have no idea what most people want, because only a percentage of the playerbase is represented on the forums. Remember that while you personally may like the idea of the destruction of servers outside of the gold tiers, there are significant arguments for the idea that the gold tier servers should be disbanded and their populations scattered around the other eighteen servers.

And if you find that unpalatable, then maybe stop with the “merge everybody who doesn’t play like I do” talk.

lil devils x.6071:

If they were to even consider lowering the population cap, even for a trial, they really should put a poll when you log in, as this alone could cause some of the largest guilds in the game to rage on not being able to play at all, as I do feel strongly this is a minority opinion. To even implement this for a trial period would mean many players not being able to play the game at all during the trial period, and possibly leave all together over it. I do not think that option was thought through very well at all.

A poll doesn’t indicate what people actually do. And the largest guilds can still play – that they “can’t play at all” because map population caps change is a ridiculous notion. You may as well say that they rage if fifteen or twenty randoms show up on the map that they want to play on, thus preventing the largest guild from fielding as many people as it wants to. It’s literally the same thing.

lil devils x.6071:

IF guilds cannot even play together during the times they play, why would they play this instead of another game that will allow them to play together? Many guilds play many games together, not just one. This isn;t meant to be a single player RPG, people play this to play together, lowering population caps will make that even more difficult for them to do.

Not really. By this logic you’re saying that max guild population should be eighty, or whatever a WvW map population caps out at, and that they’d be raging then if they couldn’t all play simultaneously. Seems like a non-problem, really.

Ryu.3972:

Im in gates of madness as of this moment, and it really sucks because we are just getting karma trained all day/week. We are losing all morale and have lost all our guilds recently. Just really tired of guilds moving and making servers overpowered and over populated.

You should stop picking on Ehmry Bay and start trying to doubleteam the server in first place.

/unbiasedopinion

coglin.1867:

Rimmy.9217:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Oh so I’m childish for calling you selfish for wanting to maintain a broken system that favors the minority?

You consider full servers with queues, in comparison to empty servers that folks are complaining about being empty? What logic path are you using to develop that conclusion?

You understand that full servers with queues means that there are people who want to play WvW but can’t, right? That’s definitely the opposite of healthy.

What are you talking about? I was referring to artificial queues by lowering the player cap, from what it normally is, in order to only allow the more populated server to have similar population in the world based on the opposing servers in the match. my point was that I feel it is a bad idea to to artificially create unnaturally high queues in such a punishing manner.

I wasn’t replying to you in that one, but I agree. I don’t care for the idea of dynamic caps, as stated in my post just above this one.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Rimmy.9217:

Jim Hunter.6821:

If Anet decides to test out a soft cap for a month or 2, they should re-open free transfers and then later set cost on the server based on it’s WvW population. Last time free transfers were terrible because people could stack on 1 server to steamroll everyone, but with a cap people will be encouraged to more evenly spread out.

Reducing the map cap would be a better idea than a dynamic cap for destacking and evening out server WvW populations. Otherwise, two servers with different prime times will result in both servers being frustrated. Make it sixty or forty, or whatever seems good based on the data that I assume ANet has, and people that still want to play and don’t want the queues will transfer.

And to the person/people who so rabidly wants to condense people to six maps (not surprising this comes from a T1 NA server, btw) and then add maps… that’s what EotM is. How have you enjoyed that particular solution to queues so far?

I used to think that would be the better option but there are people that enjoy running in groups larger than that. A soft cap wouldn’t stop them.

As far as your other point, I believe over time the servers with vastly different prime time numbers would even out on there own. That’s why I suggested they open up free transfers at least in the beginning.

I’m sure there are people that enjoy siege trolling and spawn camping, but it doesn’t mean they should be catered to.

If you have a dynamic cap, then it means that large guilds and even server communities as a whole can’t plan how they’re going to play, since it will depend on the turnout of the least-populated server at any given time. Putting a firm map cap on (like sixty) will let them say “Okay, this is where the game is at now” and decide if they need to leave their server or not.

Seera.5916:

Why would you tell them anything different than you tell them now? There are plenty of PC’s that are unable to play GW2 as it is, they do not make game designs around outdated computers.
/quote]

The obvious solution here would always be for ANet to be mindful of the minimum system specs for GW2. As long as anything they implement doesn’t exclude players running what is allowable for the game, they’ll be in good shape.

That definitely argues for keeping all the servers open, doesn’kitten

lil devils x.6071:

Seera.5916:

So tons of players are forced to sit in a queue? That’s so much fun.

There would be less GW players in que with event maps being available than are currently in que when you add up all servers. This actually solves more of the que issue than it would create. In this system, you get more actual wvw maps when all servers que, currently you only get to go EoTM.

That will only happen if the three servers in a given matchup have fairly equal populations on at the same time. That’s a pretty narrow niche to try to shoehorn your idea into.

Seera.5916:

lil devils x.6071:

Seera.5916:

lil devils x.6071:

roxybudgy.8205:

lil devils x.6071:

No, it solves it permanently since there are not as many servers to transfer to, allowing for all servers to be equally populated. If one server is stacked they will be the only server with massive ques in this system, thus if they want to play the game they will move to another server to balance out the ques. You cannot stack one server in this plan due to event maps only appearing when all servers in the matchup being qued. ALL servers will be populated, and with bonus maps appearing on an" as needed" basis, you will never have too many on one server and not enough on another, otherwise the server with the stacked population will not be able to get their guilds on the map to play.

Do you not see the problem with this? I’ve been on the same server since day one so I don’t know how things are on other servers (although my brother plays on Blackgate, usually no queue when he wants to WvW, but then again we play during oceanic hours), but there was a time when these forums were filled with people whining about queues. Some might say EotM was the answer, it was supposed to be a de-facto overflow map, but based on the various threads whining about EotM, this is not an acceptable “solution”.

Even with all the complaining about queues, people still “stacked” on certain servers. Who’s to say that this will not happen, even if you drop the number of servers to 3?

So what happens when all servers are full? Make a new server? Or another EotM? Then what happens when players quit, reducing the population on some servers? Force transfer again? This is why server merge is not a permanent solution. Population goes up and down for various reasons, making any forced transfer a temporary band-aid solution at best.

When all servers are full, you open more active maps, that is why you would have timed “event maps” that allow for bonus ppt while they are open to accommodate population influx and decline. I already addressed that issue in my OP on this thread. This solution is a permanent solution, not a temporary one because it allows for population increase and decline, prevents one side from allowing more people on map than others, and prevents too many maps open at once than all sides can cover.

The way it works is:
1) you have stable maps that are always open
2) you have event maps that are open for a set time when ques from all servers reach a specific number allowing for bonus ppt.
3) those event maps do not show up unless all servers have ques, allowing for extra maps to play on for wvw ( not EoTM ideally a map like EBG since that is currently the most popular map for all servers) during high pop times and allowing for less maps during low pop times. Reducing the number of servers to 3- 6 solves the problem of population decline already, as there will never be ghost town servers.

When all servers are full you open more maps for them to play on. When one server is full you open none, thus countering server stacking. It physically will not allow more players on one side than another.

It matters not that one side is full of ques, since those in que are not actually in the wvw match, because it will not allow more to enter for one team if the other teams do not have the same amount in que.
If one servers population logs out while an event map is open, a new event map will not open when that map’s time is up, to keep it balanced.

So if Server A has twice as many WvW players than either Server B or Server C does.

Server A knows there’s a bonus map that pops up if they just have everyone try to play on the same map. Presto, big huge zerg in the event map is open giving Server A tons of bonus PPT. PPT that the other two servers have no access to because they can’t realistically keep higher numbers than the other server.

And there could be a population decrease:

Players who decide to stop playing WvW because their sense of server pride, what little of it remains, just got shattered. Or they much preferred the smaller zergs as their computers crash if there’s a big zerg.

If server A has more population than server B or C, they do not get a bonus map until server B and C hits the same number in que. The que is based on the numbers on all maps, not just one. Total population of all maps , people stacking to go in one map has no effect on bonus maps.

So tons of players are forced to sit in a queue? That’s so much fun.

Apparently he feels that this is preferable to spreading out that queued population to servers where they can play.

roxybudgy.8205:

lil devils x.6071:

No, it solves it permanently since there are not as many servers to transfer to, allowing for all servers to be equally populated. If one server is stacked they will be the only server with massive ques in this system, thus if they want to play the game they will move to another server to balance out the ques. You cannot stack one server in this plan due to event maps only appearing when all servers in the matchup being qued. ALL servers will be populated, and with bonus maps appearing on an" as needed" basis, you will never have too many on one server and not enough on another, otherwise the server with the stacked population will not be able to get their guilds on the map to play.

Do you not see the problem with this? I’ve been on the same server since day one so I don’t know how things are on other servers (although my brother plays on Blackgate, usually no queue when he wants to WvW, but then again we play during oceanic hours), but there was a time when these forums were filled with people whining about queues. Some might say EotM was the answer, it was supposed to be a de-facto overflow map, but based on the various threads whining about EotM, this is not an acceptable “solution”.

Even with all the complaining about queues, people still “stacked” on certain servers. Who’s to say that this will not happen, even if you drop the number of servers to 3?

So what happens when all servers are full? Make a new server? Or another EotM? Then what happens when players quit, reducing the population on some servers? Force transfer again? This is why server merge is not a permanent solution. Population goes up and down for various reasons, making any forced transfer a temporary band-aid solution at best.

No no, obviously if it comes to that point lil devils wants the number of servers to be reduced even further, with the ultimate logical conclusion that everybody will eventually stack on to a single server, always get to play in large groups, and win every single week.

The idea that reducing the number of servers is much like the idea that many people have that they (and their government) should reduce spending during a recession, when what you’re supposed to do is increase spending – it’s literally the textbook answer to getting out of one. While ‘common sense’ would tell you “If money is tight, then reduce your expenditures”, that only makes the overall problem worse.

Reducing the number of servers is a bad idea. Players on stacked servers will often think it’s a good idea as it means they will get an influx of players, but their perspective is that of people riding high on the benefits of living in post-WW2 United States. You can’t pay for your prosperity on credit forever, but nobody wants to be the one to put the brakes on it.

If people want to keep on playing WvW in a close approximation of what they currently enjoy about it, then they have to stop living in an endless now and consider the future, and that doesn’t mean lil devils future of ‘prop up my stacked server by stacking it higher so I can keep having what I want and kitten the consequences’.

Lower the map caps, let the populations spread out, see what happens.

But this may all be moot depending on when the expansion comes out, and if ANet decides to use that as a time to reboot and reinvigorate WvW. Certainly if the expansion is coming out within the year there should be no major changes made to WvW before that except as a test, as no white swords and PPK was.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Oh so I’m childish for calling you selfish for wanting to maintain a broken system that favors the minority?

You consider full servers with queues, in comparison to empty servers that folks are complaining about being empty? What logic path are you using to develop that conclusion?

You understand that full servers with queues means that there are people who want to play WvW but can’t, right? That’s definitely the opposite of healthy.

lil devils x.6071:

( I used to write articles for a gaming magazine, and multiple gaming sites)

Who didn’t?

This isn’t a bunch of gaming neophytes you’re talking to in this forum, you know. And quite a lot of us can do the math and test the models. Your idea and reasoning doesn’t hold up at all.

Jim Hunter.6821:

If Anet decides to test out a soft cap for a month or 2, they should re-open free transfers and then later set cost on the server based on it’s WvW population. Last time free transfers were terrible because people could stack on 1 server to steamroll everyone, but with a cap people will be encouraged to more evenly spread out.

Reducing the map cap would be a better idea than a dynamic cap for destacking and evening out server WvW populations. Otherwise, two servers with different prime times will result in both servers being frustrated. Make it sixty or forty, or whatever seems good based on the data that I assume ANet has, and people that still want to play and don’t want the queues will transfer.

And to the person/people who so rabidly wants to condense people to six maps (not surprising this comes from a T1 NA server, btw) and then add maps… that’s what EotM is. How have you enjoyed that particular solution to queues so far?

ChainedOne.7369:

I am part of my server’s community. There are zergs on every single map. I am using the definition of zerg as 25+ members running in a group. Perhaps it’s just my kitten tier showing, perhaps the higher tiers have a more refined definition, I don’t know. Some guilds just hop maps to reinforce, but typically one group has at least 40 or so members while the other maps might be a little bit less. This doesn’t include their coverage or roaming groups. Of course, I am not trying to say they just sit on a map when no enemies are there, but it doesn’t matter how many maps you spread across or where you attack, they will have a group there to fight you and it will be much larger.

I’m not trying to argue numbers, we’ve wiped their ze-.. groups of people before, and I am not even going to go into the night crew stuff and how we wake up every morning to 650+ ppt. I am just concerned that they haven’t moved up yet.

I wasn’t being condescending – I’m from the tier just above you and we only got this high a month ago, so it’s not like I don’t know where you’re at or what it’s like, plus we fought Mag the other week BUT that was before they got their transfers.

From my spies/friends on Mag, it seems that the many groups they run are coordinating better with each other lately, and you’re getting the brunt of that. You’ll likely have GoM instead of Mag after Friday, so you’ll get fewer people but stronger players. Good luck.

Arius.7031:

Rimmy.9217:

People won’t care about your spelling when they’re trying to climb out from under the rubble of your falling Walls of Text.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVl_sjUrNQE

mist.9807:

Let me tell you a story.
A couple weeks ago, a guild-mate of ours needed the inner vista of garrison on red’s map. However, that particular garrison had a ton of siege and scouts around the clock, as well as a zerg to defend it. We haven’t been red for months, and we weren’t red in the following weeks either. So what did we do? We as a guild (not even 10 players), went around and built some omega golems. We asked another tag (they had just took NW tower), to treb garrison so the focus would be on that wall. During the duration, we had a group of about 10-20 players escort our handful of golems to Watergate garrison.

We didn’t take garrison, we didn’t need to. Our party was made up of thieves so that we could stealth our guild-mate up to the third floor to get the vista. This took a couple hours to accomplish, and you need to learn to be patient and willing. Learn some tactics, and the random generator shouldn’t even matter.

Out of curiousity, why wouldn’t you take garrison since you were there anyway?

ChainedOne.7369:

I am having a hard time understanding some of the opinions in this thread, as they are clearly not from a server experiencing these gross balance issues in WvW. I am from Anvil Rock, and for the last 4 weeks we have been paired against Maguuma and a random other. The first week went alright, with us getting second behind by about 21k points. No complaints. Week was fun.

However, after that WvW has been terrible. For the next 3 weeks (as it has just begun AGAIN last night) Maguuma has been fielding at least twice our numbers minimum at all times. This is not an exaggeration. We had around half their total points two weeks ago, a third last week, and this week looks to be just as bad. Our server fields the same guilds, same numbers each week but it is simply not enough. The other server can field zergs on every map that grossly outnumber anything we can manage.

I understand that this happens. I don’t mind it happening every now and then, but this is the fourth week in a row. The 3rd server has been switched out, why are we stuck playing against a server that is clearly in the wrong tier? It not only ruins the experience for us but destroys our chances of gathering new players because they enter WvW and see us behind by over half.

TL:DR: I don’t mind unbalanced matches. I mind when they happen literally 3 weeks in a row. It is destroying our server’s morale to get stomped every week. Stop making us play the same server.

They are ranked at 16, AR is ranked at 17. It’s how it goes.

Maguuma just got/bought a few guilds, so in the short term they’re imbalanced to be in your tier. BUT, to move up, someone also has to move down. This is likely to happen after this week’s matchup – GoM will drop down to T6, and Maguuma will rise up to T5.

Also, they’re not fielding “zergs” on every map – you may want to talk to your server’s WvW community/commanders for a better picture of the overall situation. You’re not grossly outnumbers, but you are outnumbered. Mag will be running guild groups with their not insignificant number of pugs tagging along.

Build arrow carts for the rest of the week. Good luck.

Vael Victus.2654:

It’s unfortunate that your legendary requires some legendary acts to construct. Or just getting it handed to you with a 1/3 chance every Friday.

I thought PvErs just bought their legendaries outright, using a small portion of the gold that gets showered on them whatever they do.

Arius.7031:

Rimmy.9217:

I love having Arius doing all of the talking – my metaphors are better, but he doesn’t foam at the mouth. Better spokesperson.

I just actually looked through my posts for grammar/spelling errors and general typos. The horror. I really need to start proofreading again :/.

People won’t care about your spelling when they’re trying to climb out from under the rubble of your falling Walls of Text.

I love having Arius doing all of the talking – my metaphors are better, but he doesn’t foam at the mouth. Better spokesperson.

This is covered in many other threads and you are being unreasonable.

You don’t need map completion, you want map completion. The third place server is usually the red one, so you’re out of luck there. Find like-minded people on your server, and have an event where you take Overlook.

If you’re going to take WvW completion away from map completion, then you should take all of the PvE hearts, POIs and vistas out as well, so WvWers don’t have to do them.

Otherwise, put some effort into it, instead of “waiting” for others to hand you what you want.

There’s an awful lot of people quick to use the “it’s messed up anyway, so why shouldn’t people (continue to make things worse overall)?” argument. The “Very High” levels are a ridiculous argument, since that “Very High” isn’t referring to WvW population, is it?

Look, if you personally are guilty of every single thing that’s been listed in this thread as having had a detrimental effect on WvW, you don’t have to defend yourself. This isn’t a war crimes tribunal, and you’re not going to be executed. Regardless of what you thought or think, or where you want to place “blame” – the overall health of WvW isn’t as good as it could be, and a disproportionate amount of the reason for that is player’s actions.

Bringing up the causes of how we got to where we are today helps to illustrate some of the underlying problems. Whether you personally find it distasteful to destack from your currently overstacked server, or if you’re employing the Nirvana fallacy of “it won’t automatically and completely fix everything that’s wrong, so I’m rejecting any change completely”… then relax.

Nothing written in here is going to require you to do anything. Some people just want to maintain the WvW experience for as many people as possible for as long as possible, in as enjoyable a way (for everybody) as possible. We don’t have that now and, to use a partial parallel – people will tell you that hoarding money during an economic downturn is the worst thing that people can do. Individuals may personally benefit in the short term, but suffer more and for longer in the long run. Overstacking has much the same effect on WvW as a whole.

sephiroth.4217:

I think population log in was the best I saw…

“match ups are decided by the total amount of players that logged into WvW the previous week”…

Should be month for smoother data, although something as simple as the current “light up the fireworks found in your spawn” dailies will totally skew those numbers.

etrigan.4213:

No one said that stacking didn’t have negative consequences for a lot of other servers, but blaming the players for a faulted gaming mode is ridiculous and short sighted.

You have an unbalanced game due to coverage wars, and you expect people not to try their way of balancing it…after 2 1/2 years waiting for ANET to fix it?

Now two of you want those servers to destack and spread out logically on their own??

How exactly would that happen? Who’s going to figure out who goes where to make it all balanced?

I mean screw server pride right?
———————————————————————————————————————
It was never balanced to begin with.

The smarter fix would be to introduce some sort of autobalancing mechanism to the game. There’s been tons of player solutions posted in this forum. I have no idea which would be the best, or if any would work at all…

Nobody has blamed players for the game mode, only their consequences of their actions within it. And no, I wouldn’t expect people not to try to “balance” things, but after 2.5 years they’ve done the exact opposite – some tiers are locked, and others face the kind of imbalanced matchups that players in 2012 couldn’t even dream of, thanks to player-driven “solutions”.

“Screw server pride” was the mantra when significant chunks of a given server’s WvW population left en masse and went to stack a server. How exactly would said servers destack and spread out logically on their own? Very much the way they got stacked in the first place, but in reverse.

Dropping map population caps to sixty or even forty would probably nudge that along, even if the map caps were only temporary. If player population is a fluid (which it’s not), then rather than the hydraulic despotism of hoarding it all in one place it should be left to to spread out.

A large group of people have more fun in a wide seven-meter deep pool than in a single-lane pool that’s thirty meters deep.

And more matchups without population imbalances means more fun for more people – fun in a game, if you can believe it. It will also mean that players new to WvW will find an active scene regardless of which server they’re on. It will also lead to more matchup variability, which is definitely a good thing. And finally, it’ll mean that being in the top three means more than “we outblobbed the other servers”. There will have to be a hint of skill in there too.

So yeah, the player-driven “solution” has been a failure. Time to try something else and try to bandage up the damage that was done.

Atherakhia.4086:

Deathdom.8250:

Atherakhia.4086:

Tier 4 – 7 hasn’t seen a queue in a year even 30mins after reset.

Every server in T4 and T5 has seen a queue outside of reset.

My appologies then. I was on FC just this last reset and lol. I think I saw 20 people.

This just in: a single T7 server represents twelve servers across four tiers.

Atherakhia.4086:

So eventually one of the tier2 servers that cycles out will be a desserted wasteland like tier 3 and below.

Tier 4 – 7 hasn’t seen a queue in a year even 30mins after reset.

The servers need to be combined or they need to introduce the PvE world server architecture to their WvW game mode in some fashion.

Hi, tier 5 here. Had home BL and EBG queued for hours both at reset and the following evening. And it isn’t the first time, AND a month ago we were T6. But I can generalize too:

“Tier 1 is only skillless zergs k-training around in a four map version of EotM.”

Yay, that was fun.

gnoams.3129:

I don’t know how you can fix the balance issues, but not being able to talk to the opponents or even see their names always confused me. What led to that decision? In my experience not being able to talk to your opponents in pvp type games leads to hatred and griefing because players feel no accountability and no consequence for their actions. Sometimes it’s totally innocent, one player thinks its all in fun and the other is kittened cause they were trying to get some skill point etc and the other guy keeps getting in their way. I just can’t see any good reason to not be able to talk to each other.

Click on the player, then click on their portrait at the top of the screen. Block them.

Then go to your block list and you’ll find their name. Whisper them, then unblock them so they can reply.

Or, click on them and press P and invite them or join their party.

Talk away.

etrigan.4213:

Rimmy.9217:

Arius.7031:

Unfortunately our playerbase was so incredibly stupid, we’ve pretty much permanently damaged our own WvW scene by stacking tier 1/2 and saying “screw you” to every other tier.

+1

And a whole host of subsequent problems, both social and mechanical, have followed.

While the ideas posited may not fix the current situation, having them in place for when the problems are fixed isn’t a terrible idea.

No his post is crap, he’s basically blaming players for wanting to play with other like minded people.

Like how is it on the shoulders of the end user to fix servers they may have never been on?

There was imbalance at the launch of the game and there is imbalance now. Was it the players fault that there was imbalance and coverage problems in August 2012?

Not one mention of ANET having an unbalanced pvp game mode.

It’s the players’ fault that they stacked. It’s also the players’ fault that overstacking servers is unstable, as can be seen on various servers over the lifetime of the game.

It’s the player’s fault that, to maintain that particular “solution” that it practically requires a constant influx of additional people, or the merging of other servers (depending on where you are on the ladder).

It’s the players’ fault that they don’t destack, too.

People, whether singly or in huge numbers, can transfer at will – that’s built into the game. It would be dumb to pretend that the consequences of the way players have done it haven’t had an overall negative effect on the game as a whole.

Arius.7031:

Unfortunately our playerbase was so incredibly stupid, we’ve pretty much permanently damaged our own WvW scene by stacking tier 1/2 and saying “screw you” to every other tier.

+1

And a whole host of subsequent problems, both social and mechanical, have followed.

While the ideas posited may not fix the current situation, having them in place for when the problems are fixed isn’t a terrible idea.

TheSongBringer.2834:

You can try writing an email to Exploits@Arena.Net. I agree with you 100%, that the report options that they give us in-game, and our ability to accurately record the incident (writing a short description) is very lackluster in GW2.

That’s not what the exploits@ is for, and anything submitted there will be discounted.

Arius.7031:

Yes this happens frequently. Why is it wrong, exactly? If a guild would be happier elsewhere, and is offered aid or even bribes to move, why is it wrong? The wrong choice is in transferring to the wrong server, but not in the actual action of being bought itself. Buying isn’t an issue, buying and stacking 2 tiers, however, is mind-blowingly stupid and unhealthy in the long run. NA WvW, if it is dying, is killing itself by how T2 especially has tried to create such a stacked fights tier instead of letting the fights guilds be spread out a bit more. That is what is wrong, not the fact that guilds can be aided or purchased in and of itself.

Sure, but since (clearly) people don’t self-police for the greater good, then artificial limits should be put in place.

Like, transfers can only be bought with cash and not converted gold, for starters.

Kungsmurfen.2861:

King Amadaeus.8619:

Servers have been buying guilds for a while, the end game is 9 servers full of players and 15 barren wastelands full of people screaming “SERVER PRIDE”.

And it’s people thinking like you that will make server mergers or population redistribution impossible. People will still bandwagon off a server at the first chance they get and create new “barren wastelands” only to demand servers are merged again and again without solving any of the causes to the problem.

while being

Fixed that for you.

Tom Gore.4035:

Spooksie.4930:

Is this mode all about coverage and that’s it?

Yes.

They tried PPK and it did actually even out coverage differences. Then they removed it and now we’re back at Coverage Wars.

It was a test to see what we did with it, just like it was a test to see what we did with no white swords.

Don’t worry, something that went over as well as PPK will be back. Hopefully that was the last time we’ll see no white swords, though. Unless they remove them only for the server currently in first place in the matchup.

Go to your server’s forum at www.sanctumofrall.com and sign up. You’ll be able to post your question there and be answered, and you’ll (probably) be able to read past threads from the people that left.

darkwarder.3645:

We’ve been the dead last NA WvW server for…well, I don’t know how many months.

Eight weeks, if you include the current week.

cdsmith.1072:

Deathdom.8250:

Rimmy.9217:

cdsmith.1072:

The idiotic match ups killed Crystal Desert. We’ve had weeks of getting our kittens handed to us and everyone stopped playing WvW. I don’t even recognize any of the commanders anymore. They all left.

You certainly blobbed all over the place enough last week to make me doubt the “… and everyone stopped playing WvW” part.

Yeah we had a blob occasionally last week but we see outnumbered buff more often than we blob.

Yep, we could occasionally get some groups together and there are some people playing. I’d say we have far less than half our previous population in WvW anymore.

Blob tactics aside, we were a bit surprised at your lack of overall coverage – this week against HoD is more what we thought fighting you would be like, i.e. constantly outnumbered, ridiculous point differences, etc.

Anima.8521:

I transfered to TC, and the difference is huge, even at 4am there were people roaming everywhere and talking all the time. In SF at the same hour there were literally 3 people trying to defend a keep from a middle sized group, that’s all the action I could find at that hour.

I’m glad you’re happier where you are, but it’s people transferring off in search of “greener pastures” that has helped to make some servers “dead”.

That said, in that screenshot you were a level two thief trying to defend Stonemist. I have no idea what you’d consider fun about that.