Guild Wars 2

End game usually go in this direction
gear grind > pvp

Thanks for reading and responding to the question regarding guilds on full servers.
I am still trying to comprehend your idea and how it will work practically. Some questions.

1. Will the world be permanent free or only free for the initial period?
2. Will new players able to choose that world to settle in?
3. Given that the transfer is free, what prevent non-guild members from moving into that server and making that server full once again?

Another thing I am worry about with more new worlds is that the amount of inflow of new players will be spread really thin since they have to choose a server to start with. I wonder if it will be healthy for the guilds in long run. Unless there are plans to make new players choose server ingame instead at the start?

From the comments, it is clear that the dev team has considered several possible solutions. However, it also clear that their main concern is community acceptance to the solutions. In other words, there are solutions that can really solve population unbalance issue but it might not be a popular one. It is quite clear the the dev team has to go a roundabout way of doing things because of the community barriers.

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

Now, you extract the data out and highlight the area that interest only you. However, here’s the thing. Since you are looking at the trend itself, can you tell me exactly which point in the trend has a noticeable price increase, from there tell me what is the correlation between pricing and supplies.

Yeah, don’t you just hate it when people actually back up their argument with references and actual numbers instead of just vague guesses and estimations?

What noticeable price increase are you referring to? They’ve been rising steadily for quite some time now.

SkyShroud.2865:

The next Question is
Did you account for the timeline when AB farming becoming widespread? If AB farming were so well-known right from the patch, this post and similar should be there since then but surely, it isn’t.

I would argue the supply rising from 16k to 164k would have had something to do with the AB farm becoming ‘widespread’, two data points I mentioned in my earlier post. My argument, however is that this barely impacted the price at all, and that if the farm didn’t exist, there still would have been plenty of supply (as shown by early data points where the supply rose greatly over a week before the patch) coming in; that hikes in supply are not uncommon in the ecto market and that ultimately these ups and downs in supply don’t change the price of ectos as much as you think they do… clearly shown by looking at the ecto graph for a couple of minutes.

You also seem to be unable to make any sort of point on your own and relying on me to do any sort of research for you.

SkyShroud.2865:

Another question.
How many gw2 players do you think there are? If I say that because of the large gw2 population, supplies and demands can easily fluctuate in ten of thousands easily, do you agree?

You basically just repeated one of my points to me and then asked if I agree…

SkyShroud.2865:

Yet another question
Once you figure out the timeline of the AB widespread popularity, can you look at the trend again and tell me if you see any similar fluctuation like the past? Then, can you tell if it is really a drop in the ocean.

Correlation =/= causation. The AB meta farm is not the only ‘new’ factor in the ecto market right now. The April 19th patch was huge brought lots of players back to the game and introduced new sinks.

And yeah I can tell you a similar fluctuation because I already did. Do you think this AB meta farm was ‘widespread’ 8 days after the April patch? I don’t. Yet as I pointed out in my post, April 18th -> April 27th, supply increase of 97,000.

Here’s a question for you: How many people do you think are participating in this farm each meta? How many ectos per day extra do you think are being generated by this farm each meta compared to how many would have been generated previously by an AB meta. An extra how many per meta, how many per day? How many more do you think it is compared to if people stuck to previous farms such as fotm40/sw chest farm?

I am pretty sure it is only become widespread recently. AB has been like so since start of HOT and yet only recently people start to complain about it. Isn’t it amusing? For more than 6 months, no people complain about it and only now? It seems that anything that became widespread will get complain soon after. Just like the spider farm during the start of HOT.

Also, I am trying to direct you to a certain direction to understand what I am trying to say here. In any case. From my stand, AB only start to get really popular recently and with that, each meta is estimated to produce about 1,000 ectos and up to 2,000 ectos. Then, how many times it occur per day and you multiple by that, you get that number of ectos. Then, the number of ectos will accumulate over the weeks and eventually people will no longer need ectos and thus ectos will begin to stockpile.

Now, you extract the data out and highlight the area that interest only you. However, here’s the thing. Since you are looking at the trend itself, can you tell me exactly which point in the trend has a noticeable price increase, from there tell me what is the correlation between pricing and supplies.

The next Question is
Did you account for the timeline when AB farming becoming widespread? If AB farming were so well-known right from the patch, this post and similar should be there since then but surely, it isn’t.

Another question.
How many gw2 players do you think there are? If I say that because of the large gw2 population, supplies and demands can easily fluctuate in ten of thousands easily, do you agree?

Yet another question
Once you figure out the timeline of the AB widespread popularity, can you look at the trend again and tell me if you see any similar fluctuation like the past? Then, can you tell if it is really a drop in the ocean.

Substance E.4852:

SkyShroud.2865:

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

without this farm, ecto will be 1g by now, well, i dont mind, i have many stacks of ecto in my personal bank waiting to be unleashed to the world at the right moment.

Lol the ectos generated by this farm are a drop in the ocean.

You need to work on your maths.

Feel free to share yours first.

Ectos supply was halved and then continue to drop to as low as 15k, at some point even lower. I remember seeing ecto price skyrocketed by 10s within an hour. If you are that native to think that ectos has a lot of of supplies, maybe try going around doing your world bosses, dungeons or whatever and see how many you get, figure out how many you use yourselves and how many require to craft certain things. If you have any bigger sense of awareness, you will realize that the demand for ecto was going excessive high at one point and if the farm did not exist, I will assume it will be 70s by now.

For me is a plus if the farm never existed to start with, since I flip golds but I am not totally sure if you people want high ecto pricing.

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

I suggest everyone to ignore this thread.

Haha oh the irony of this response. Just ignore this thread everyone because I don’t like it.

Right back at you dude. Just because you dislike the farm personally, you are complaining about it even when the farm is keeping ecto from raising even higher. Like others mentioned, you seems to get a lot of things wrong too. You really just complaining it out of personal reason.

I did the courtesy of actually reading your post, you could at least give me the same by reading mine.

It’s not that I dislike the farm it’s that the precedent has been set for nerfing these kind of farms. The sticking point for me though is being able to loot the chests on maps you did not participate in.

And I’m sorry but what ‘lot of things’ have I got wrong? One error was pointed out but unfortunately that person is 100% incorrect so I’m sorry but you’re wrong too.

As for getting things wrong, I highly doubt this farm is having any great impact on the ecto prices (lol at the person saying they’d be 1g without this farm), people underestimate how many ectos are traded and brought into the game on a daily basis by other means. Is it having an impact? Sure. Is it having a huge impact (let’s define huge as ectos rising 20+s if this farm was removed)? No. No, no, no.

There is a certain irony about people who are clearly cashing in off this farm (and I don’t blame you for doing so) denouncing this thread for having a different opinion then complaining themselves that people disagree with them. Even funnier when they’re factually incorrect about certain things like DS pods…

Precedent. Can you name me some that has multi instance looting and was nerfed?

Also, you seems to be rather oblivion about the ecto trend. Do you know that ecto supply was halved from 100k to 50k within a week and even drop to as low as 15k at some point before the wide publicity of this farm? You’ve totally overestimated how much ectos were pumped into the market before this farm. One can even argue that this amount of rares were intentionally allowed to prevent ecto from skyrocketing.

On The Elaborate Solution ->
Reading this, either our suggestions were read or proposals for server balance are on the same page as some of us.

Anyway, reading the comments. The main problem is community acceptance of the solutions and not the lack of possible solutions. Well, it is expected, the main problem is always the community acceptance.

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

I suggest everyone to ignore this thread.

Haha oh the irony of this response. Just ignore this thread everyone because I don’t like it.

Right back at you dude. Just because you dislike the farm personally, you are complaining about it even when the farm is keeping ecto from raising even higher. Like others mentioned, you seems to get a lot of things wrong too. You really just complaining it out of personal reason.

Sorry OP, your attitude is the problem, nothing to do with your playing time. Dailies are still really easy but apparently, you want to be spoon fed. Do help yourself by actually trying to do the dailies and find out the best way to finish them. In fact, a quick google will give you the guides.

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

without this farm, ecto will be 1g by now, well, i dont mind, i have many stacks of ecto in my personal bank waiting to be unleashed to the world at the right moment.

Lol the ectos generated by this farm are a drop in the ocean.

You need to work on your maths.

i saw diamond on the second day while i was wvwing.

i stuck too….no…i havent really started yet
i played my first match a few days later to get my sapphire placement…
my first match seems rather one sided, i won and i was testing build lol.

i didnt play after that. i will find a time to continue with all the new sapphire

You have to look at the trend. Ecto has been going up in price over the years. Even with this farm, the price continues to go up, at one point reaching 55s. The amount of ectos produced from this one event is large and despite that the price continues to climb. You really think ecto won’t reach 1g with this trend that did not change over the 3 years? Disallowing it simply allow the price to climb even faster.

Aside from that, this farm is not pumping raw golds into market but raw mats into the market. It has nothing to do with the gold inflation the market is experiencing.

gem price has been steadily increasing over the years and will continue to increase
currency inflation
it is sad but that’s life…

while it is true for a short period there is a slight drop of gem price during hot, but during that period a lot of people also quit the game. it also important to take note that before the patch for reward improvement was released, the gem price has been going back up

without this farm, ecto will be 1g by now, well, i dont mind, i have many stacks of ecto in my personal bank waiting to be unleashed to the world at the right moment.

zhonnika.1784:

SkyShroud.2865:

yea, they should unlink t1 so people cant move there via guest server
t1 should be locked by themselves and give other servers chance to grow

Organic growth is limited at best without an influx of new players. T8 won’t just suddenly get an influx of people transferring after being unlinked o.o

what to do? the ideal situation is to literally merge all the servers to only 4 tiers and with less servers, the new population will have lesser servers to choose from and growth rate per server will be improved. of course, the highest populated servers should be locked till those lower populated servers situation improves or when the gap reduced.

but it will never happen. people keep going on about the stupid server pride and what anti blob nonsense (even when the maps are not all queued) instead of the overall well being of the game. right now is no different from pre-link. we are just going back to square one at this rate.

yea, they should unlink t1 so people cant move there via guest server
t1 should be locked by themselves and give other servers chance to grow

Jayne.9251 just don’t get the part about non T1 shifting themselves. It doesn’t matter if the rest are shifting around, as long the T1 population remain where they are, it doesn’t change the reality of things.

Iceband.3714:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Just curious, what world do you play for? I’m looking at the current breakdown of votes by world right now, and nearly every world has voted in favor of World Linking. There are a few that are 50/50, and one that is against it.

Tyler I play on fergusons crossing. Most of the people I play(ed) with in wvw arent even bothering anymore. Yea, we were small, yea were were like rank 16, but we enjoyed our small roaming gangs and having to use some skill and thought, not just play follow the blob every night.

as of this posting, were losing….AGAIN, down by about 26k points or so. oh, did I mention, its monday?

Oh, sorry, I meant to say I play on Darkhaven+ you know since FC doesent exist anymore.

Sorry, your words don’t match the reality. T4 does not have a queue most of the time unlike the other tiers and here you are, complaining about blob feast. What? Do you even know what is a real blob feast like?

Yargesh.4965:

Jon Olson.8439:

Our recent response regarding rendering api changes.

What more do you need to know than that it is not going to happen?

Demands drive changes. That’s how business works.

The DX 11 / 12 debates have been going on for ages, I believe a poll will does more justice!

http://www.strawpoll.me/10292457

PS: Please don’t merge this with DX 11 / 12 thread or this poll will be buried.

Edit: To clarify. DX12 has improved pc cores to gpu cores communications but whatever, higher drawcalls is more understandable

It sounds like OP has a VPN pointed to singapore. You should try get someone who has some knowledge of computers to find it out for you.

SkullProX.7083:

@ShyShroud I don’t do SW either, try again

I will try. Looking at your posts history, you have personal issue with large scale farming. So, being a personal issue, even your reasons are personal.

I suggest everyone to ignore this thread.

Diku.2546:

SkyShroud.2865:

Diku.2546:

Knob.6835:

I voted yes cause t7 – 8 were in horrible shape & it should never go back to that. the system still needs fixed up. I’d like to see the server links changed more often to avoid stale match ups. I’d like 1 more tier added, blob wars is gonna get old fast. I’d like to see server specific armors that can be bought to sport the server I’m on. Over all this is much better than the way it was.

Did ANet lock you out from Transferring to any World between kitten before the Linking Beta?

Lol. Absurd. Are you gonna pay for his transfer? You are entitled to your opinion but don’t try to force it upon others.

No I don’t need to pay for his/her transfer…World Linking is currently doing it for Free.

Let’s agree…everyone is entitled to their opinion.

If my question above is forcing an opinion on others…I’ll have to apologize.

…..

Are you reading your own reply? You are implying that he could transfer before the world link and here you are saying it is free. What?

Diku.2546:

Knob.6835:

I voted yes cause t7 – 8 were in horrible shape & it should never go back to that. the system still needs fixed up. I’d like to see the server links changed more often to avoid stale match ups. I’d like 1 more tier added, blob wars is gonna get old fast. I’d like to see server specific armors that can be bought to sport the server I’m on. Over all this is much better than the way it was.

Did ANet lock you out from Transferring to any World between kitten before the Linking Beta?

Lol. Absurd. Are you gonna pay for his transfer? You are entitled to your opinion but don’t try to force it upon others.

Sounds like OP is unhappy that SW is getting replaced by more effective farming method. I totally don’t understand that perspective.

Jayne.9251:

Are the lower tiered servers, paired with the high ones, not getting a population boost? You’re saying people reporting guild movement to lower tiers aren’t being truthful?

I don’t know….which part….of my english….is hard to understand.

Jayne.9251:

It’s completely logical: Anet can unlink the pairings once the other lower servers are more populated.

And yes, I think it’s an intentional fix to a long term issue where players refused to fix it themselves.

Your entire idea of destacking is by betting that T1s players will move out, but no, they are not going any where. Right now, it is simply the non-T1s players shfiting around. It didn’t change the T1s situation a single bit.

Also, you gives too much credit to anet. Since launch, my observation on anet tells me that their long term plan isn’t that long term.

Jayne.9251:

Top servers are being purposefully capped to help spread out the population into the lower linked servers. Once unlinked, I believe the hope is that the lower tiers will see a much better parity for action-based WvW.

Opening up the higher tier servers would defeat this attempt to fix an issue everyone’s been screaming about for three years — stacked T1 NA servers.

Over in EU it’s a bit different (well except for SFR :p), where players have spread themselves out and not stacked any one server — although that appears to be changing, too sadly.

This initiative is to push NA players into different servers because they were unwilling to destack themselves, and still cried on the forums about it.

I don’t think it was done intentionally. I believe the API for host server calculated both the host and the guest server population. This happen because of the server linking and I believe their design approach is to make one of the servers responsible for the overall population and that is the host server.

Furthermore, your last statement is not logical. This does not encourage T1s players destacking in any way. It encourage players to destack and stack on specific server even more than before. Why? There were two barriers to stacking which are server status and the accompanied cost. Now, those barriers are weakened with the 500 gem guest server. Guilds will now then stack on that guest servers which is why you see some guest servers raised to High. If you put together what I said in the previous paragraph and this logic, you will then understand that some servers population have dropped, however, do you know which servers dropped? Certainly isn’t the T1 servers. It never for one bit encourage T1s to destack simply because people are moving their guest server to further stack on it.

Ellieanna.5027:

This is one thing that bothers me about all the “Guild Hall/Scribe issues”

It’s supposed to be a guild thing. Not a personal thing. 5 badges donated by 5 people is really not that bad. To me that is how Guilds should be.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

SkyShroud.2865:

That is so expensive! For a statue that serve to beautify your guild hall. This is not even a raid or world boss statue.

Cosmetic aside

Guild Sieges – EXPENSIVE
Especially the guild cata, we could get it cheaply via influence and now crafting it is like what? 5 badges? 2g+?

WvW Tact – EXPENSIVE!
The expensive part is the fiber. Even if a server manage defend their’s for the entire week, it will reset and you need to fill them up again! Then again, how many servers manage to defend it for the whole week?

Please consider adjusting those costs.

The 100 badges of tribute cost 35 gold on the TP (buying instantly; you can save by putting in a custom buy offer). Given that it’s a skin that you can use forever, that doesn’t seem like much (at least, as far as the badges go).

The main point is the value and consistency. Of course everything can be cheap in that perspective but is it just?

Did Guild Cata cost more than 2g before? Nope, even looking a TP, the price has been pretty stable throughout. Did guild cata worth 2g of influence back then? Nope. Then why does it take more than 2g to craft now? You can argue that it can be obtain almost immediately. But hey, we had a choice to rush guild cata in the past for extra cost but now, we are forced to rush guild cata paying that extra cost. Honestly, I don’t mind having the machine queued with guild cata if it cost less to craft. If wanna rush it, then pay using the resonator. Otherwise, what’s the point of having resonator and that machine, who would want to rush something that only takes 30s to build.

Next is that 100 badges. Yes, 35g for one but it also means 350g for 10 and 700g for 20. Comparing to the immense lion that is large which cost 13g to craft. The gap is pretty big. Also, the ornate armor stand cost 22g, 22g for its size compare to 13g of Lion’s size. Big gap as well.

That is so expensive! For a statue that serve to beautify your guild hall. This is not even a raid or world boss statue.

Cosmetic aside

Guild Sieges – EXPENSIVE
Especially the guild cata, we could get it cheaply via influence and now crafting it is like what? 5 badges? 2g+?

WvW Tact – EXPENSIVE!
The expensive part is the fiber. Even if a server manage defend their’s for the entire week, it will reset and you need to fill them up again! Then again, how many servers manage to defend it for the whole week?

Please consider adjusting those costs.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

There are very few (if any) features in the game that couldn’t be improved with additional resources invested in them. However, that then becomes a question of priorities. Do we improve Feature A, Feature B or Feature C first? Or perhaps we should prioritize building an entirely new feature instead?

So the first thing we need to ask is: “Is World Linking a positive improvement to the game and worth keeping around?”

If it is, then the next time we ask players to determine which feature work we prioritize, additional World Linking improvements can be one of the options. But it’s important to ask that question in a poll where it’s clear what the tradeoffs to that choice are. For instance: Players may want improvements to World Linking, but perhaps not at the expense of delaying improvements to Scoring.

In the event world link fall below that 75% mark and you decided to remove the world link, what is gonna happen to those who transfer to the guest server join up their guilds or friends? Will they able to get a refund?

This poll lack depths, any plans on depth polling?

Because the main server is full, assuming because it calculated both the main and guest servers population (sucks for the main server), players can be found transferring to the guest server for several reasons:

1. Further stacking
2. To join up with friends / guilds

It was sad but the world linking to boost the population was welcoming but not the aftermath.

Now there is a dilemma. If relink is to occur, it will break the people who transfer for 2nd reason. For people who transfer for the first reason, I don’t care and should let them burn but not for the people of 2nd reason.

The server status is super unhealthy.

It was mentioned that future polling will notify players via ingame mail

I guess we did play different games since you mentioned DAOC. But since you mentioned DAOC, SG also launch in the same year. I guess DAOC and SG simply have a different approach for balancing. SG is literally the most successful MMORTS ever made even until now but the lack of updates kills it eventually. The spiritual successor or should I say the china remake (China is not afraid of copyright infringement) which released a few years back is highly populated.

As for aggressive, half of your comments are. You are thinking way too much into the word proposal like it is already implemented.

I really doubt the there are huge cost accompanying it. Guild wars 2 is already using periodic calculations for active counts, that itself already settle half of the requirements. The other half of the implementation is simply making it a dynamic cap instead of a fixed cap. They simply have to decide the acceptable range or tolerance or margin of error for the disparity differences. The idea is actually very simple, get rid of the fixed cap to allow servers to grow evenly. In fact, the idea of “fixed cap” is exactly the same as your typical match balancing mechanism of 20vs20 or 10vs10 or 5vs5 and so on. But, if you put that in a large context like thousands of players, eventually the thousands of players will fall below that cap due to decline population and create problems.

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

What did SG do to remove the incentive of one team from logging out to artificially force the other team into extremely limited numbers?

That was a really old game, like early 2000s. People at those time don’t have this cowardly idea of trying game the system. They play the game as it should be.

Then I can’t see that working here. Not when history has shown wide cooperation to the extent that communities were able to get more players onto their server by logging out en masse.

Active count can be current online count and can also be base on a periodic records. Currently gw2 active count is base on a periodic calculation.

Chaba.5410:

What did SG do to remove the incentive of one team from logging out to artificially force the other team into extremely limited numbers?

That was a really old game, like early 2000s. People at those time don’t have this cowardly idea of trying game the system. They play the game as it should be.

Xenesis.6389:

Smaller team based games have been doing that for years. I’m sure most games use it for their smaller battleground spvp scenarios as well, to ensure they don’t start them with a ridiculous 10v1 type of teaming. But for a mmo to use it to populate their servers? Haven’t heard of one yet so I was just curious.

Much easier for CU to go with this system from the very start when they are first populating their servers, that itself is going be problematic and I’m sure we’ll hear of players not able to join their friends and guilds right away and having to wait on the other servers to fill up.

Only way that would work in GW2 at this point is to kick everyone off their servers and repopulate them again, which I don’t think would go over very well.

Yes, it is exactly like your typical match balancing mechanism. The difficulty of implementing this on a much greater scale is the existence of uncertainties like players behavior (wvw when feel like it) or returning players or guild activities or so on. Therefore, adjustment is needed to create allowance for this.

Indeed, putting this approach at this stage of game is indeed extremely difficult as all population balancing methods should be applied right from the start since population balance cannot occur overnight and population imbalance will only get worse as days go by.

Teon.5168:

SkyShroud.2865:

One example of a old game is shattered galaxy, population unbalance will result in serious bad gameplay since the entire game is built on the idea of players fighting over plots of lands.

Most recent example will be Camelot Unchained. They had a similar proposal for population balancing.

Shattered galaxy looks like it was a very limited (20 player teams) pvp sort of strategy game, rather than large scale wvw/rvr such as DaoC or GW2. So I find that sort of comparison odd, to say the least. Shattered galaxy had a much smaller scale, and therefore, more controllable sort of pvp.

Giving your recent example as Camelot Unchained, which hasn’t even gotten out of kickstarter funding yet, is absolutely ludicrous. You have no idea what their large scale rvr will be like besides what they’re imaging for the game at this point. I would just like to point out that CU is being done by Mark Jacobs, who also did DaoC, and I have had lots of experience with DaoC’s large scale wvw/rvr…..and if CU is anything slightly close to Jacobs’ last successful mmoprg, it will have stacking problems just like DaoC did.

It seems like you didn’t play SG before. SG while look like 20v20, but that is just one plot of land. In the whole game, several battles are happening over a world map. If population unbalancing is to be occured, one fraction could push all the way to another fraction’s capital and IIRC, the capital only has 2 maps accessible to it and if got capital lock, you can sit and cry till some group break it. If comparing it to WvW. If your server only has one zerg of 20-men while another server has 3 20-men zerg. The other 2 20-men could be going around cap your stuffs while one 20-men zerg play with your’s.

For CU, like I said, is a proposal. I don’t think the word proposal suggest anything more. You seems rather aggressive.

Xenesis.6389:

SkyShroud.2865:

Nope. This kind of thing can be controlled and has been demonstrated in some old true PvP focused MMO. It cannot be 100% balance, that is for sure but the disparity can be greatly minimized to the point that match up variety will naturally occur due to it.

The current system works like this
There is a algorithm to determine the number of active WvW players.
There is a cap on the server, this cap is assumed to be fixed as it is historical observed to behave so and I read it somewhere that some T1 servers had higher than average cap before the revamped server status. Base on this, stacking and destacking easily occur whenever the cap is not reached.

What the really pvp focused MMO did is go a step further
They too have a algorithm to determine the number of active players.
Now, instead of a fixed cap, they calculate the disparity percentage of the fractions and close it if the disparity grew too big. This resulted a scenario where all fractions grow at the same rate. Since the population are rather comparable, a higher degree of population is achieved. At the same time, this system literally prevent large scale movement that involve multiple guilds intending to switch sides. If guild wars 2 use this approach, match up variety will likely increase due to closer population, people that complain server full status will know it will open when the disparity reduce.

However, like you said, there is a problem implementing this after 3 long years of stacking which means disparity can be really large and some servers will be locked for a long time. What I can suggest is in accompany with this approach, make last 3 lowest populated servers completely free to encourage movement of players, quickly reducing the disparity gap.

However, before they can use this approach, they need to resolve the number of servers.

What games did that?

One example of a old game is shattered galaxy, population unbalance will result in serious bad gameplay since the entire game is built on the idea of players fighting over plots of lands.

Most recent example will be Camelot Unchained. They had a similar proposal for population balancing.

Teon.5168:

Xenesis.6389:

Teon.5168:

Fwiw, I don’t think anything can be done about stacking. That is something that Anet can not control, imo.

I don’t think so either, they can’t lock all the servers because then people will complain about not being able to transfer to friends and family on other servers. I’m sure they could look into heavy restrictions for transfers too, but that’s really a waste of time and money. Like I said there were servers that were stacked from the very beginning of the game, it was going to happen one way or another for a multiple server based system.

Completely agree. Have seen exactly the same sorts of things in other mmorpgs with wvw/rvr.

Nope. This kind of thing can be controlled and has been demonstrated in some old true PvP focused MMO. It cannot be 100% balance, that is for sure but the disparity can be greatly minimized to the point that match up variety will naturally occur due to it.

The current system works like this
There is a algorithm to determine the number of active WvW players.
There is a cap on the server, this cap is assumed to be fixed as it is historical observed to behave so and I read it somewhere that some T1 servers had higher than average cap before the revamped server status. Base on this, stacking and destacking easily occur whenever the cap is not reached.

What the really pvp focused MMO did is go a step further
They too have a algorithm to determine the number of active players.
Now, instead of a fixed cap, they calculate the disparity percentage of the fractions and close it if the disparity grew too big. This resulted a scenario where all fractions grow at the same rate. Since the population are rather comparable, a higher degree of population balance is achieved. At the same time, this system literally prevent large scale movement that involve multiple guilds intending to switch sides. If guild wars 2 use this approach, match up variety will likely increase due to closer population, people that complain server full status will know it will open when the disparity reduce.

However, like Xenesis said, there is a problem implementing this and that is 3 long years of stacking which means disparity can be really large and some servers will be locked for a long time. What I can suggest is in accompany with this approach, make 3 lowest populated servers completely free to encourage movement of players, quickly reducing the disparity gap.

However, before they can use this approach, they need to resolve the number of servers.

Population disparity has always been the root of the problem. Scoring is nothing more than the result of that. The scoring changes is nothing more than a illusion in telling oneself that population disparity is not the issue. When people plays the game, it is the reality of the map that matters more than the silly scoring.

Also, people stack on the server for the more frequent wvw activities. This stacking cause a chain of problems. When people stack on selected servers, it also means that certain servers are getting less populated which then means that people in those servers can either choose to suck it up, to stack servers like others or stop wvw because it is less interesting. Evidently, lower tier server start to get lesser people over time mainly because of the second and last reason. With the destacking and stacking, you also lose a lot of WvW players over time.

Players are naturally selfish, they do not care about the consequences of stacking and destacking. Anet has to and must step in to put a stop in these actions by implementing a system that does that. Currently, anet system does not discourage stacking and destacking, from a pvp perspective , it is a terrible design.

The world link is kitten, the ambiguous status is a timebomb. It didn’t fix anything but super short term boost to the population. The server status gonna continue encourage people to stack on selected servers, WvW will revert to how it will be before the world link.

I do not know why people are so obsess over superficial things like scoring than the actual root of the problems.

The matchmaking supposedly designed not to discriminate people base on play hours and instead on actual skills. Good Luck.

I am confused, is the Danicus.4952 dude the OP? Or the OP delete the first post? I mean, who is that OP he is referring to?

fishball.7204:

Please. TIME isn’t a WvW guild lmao. Good joke mate, you guys are more irrelevant than KOME and don’t pretend your entire guild steps in WvW when 90% of your guild are Pve players.

We isn’t, I didn’t say we are. I am a responsible leader and would like to to have my entire guild transferred instead of part of my guild. Could you be so kind to do that? For all of us, the thousands of SEA/OCX? We are just too poor to afford transferring to join up our guilds who are on the other side of the server wall, I mean, we didn’t choose any servers particularly for whatever reason, we just randomly chose it to play the game, it isn’t our fault we are left astray on random servers. We will all be really grateful to you if you can do that for all of us, for eternity. Please do not advocate for a punishment, we didn’t do any wrong to reward that.

On a side note, despite being a PvX, my guild fare much better than many wannabe WvW guilds. Btw, did you know? I had people from BG asking us to move there when JQ was at the peak. We are indeed more irrelevant than anyone, your home server is awesome to have you there.

PS: I have to delete my original post because I think I am on a borderline infraction there.
PS2: I didn’t know people still talks about KOME as they’re dead for 2 long years, I guess KOME was a really influential guild for people to still remember them and occasionally bring them up.

Edit: I think my time line on death date is wrong. should be 2 years or 2.5. kitten , i am bad server mate, i don’t even remember their death date, we started out in the same server afterall.
Edit2: I think is 3 years? Can’t be. I am not sure, anyone knows?
Edit3: Had whisper telling me to fix some grammars, fine, i will fix it.

fishball.7204:

Chaba.5410:

fishball.7204:

they should just have JQ/DB/BG in 1 tier with all the OCX/SEA/NA

Only, there are pockets of OCX and SEA players who are not on those servers and already made the choice not to stack into T1 in the first place.

I’ve heard the rumors of these fabled OCX/SEA guilds in low tiers but honestly haven’t seen at all outside of LAG on IoJ. Unfortunately the low tiers were always dead in OCX and I highly doubt there’s some magical population that decided not to move up tiers.

Gonna be blunt too, what these ‘pockets’ of OCX/SEA are doing is not WvW. They are literally ‘nightcapping’ since they run into nothing on the maps most of the time. If anything they should be merged upwards so that they don’t get free caps with no resistance.

I apologize for my guild night capping (even though we had known records of fighting against DB blobs). I would love to accept your offer to move upwards if you can cover the transfer cost of my entire guild, just my guild alone would be around 230k golds. I am sure it cost more than millions of golds once you include other guilds and random pugs. I will thank you on the behalf of the lower tiers servers for resolving the night capping (even though it was caused by the T1 bandwagoners) and behalf of all night capping guilds for finding a place where they can finally strive to become skill guilds.

Liston.9708:

SkyShroud.2865:

Liston.9708:

SkyShroud.2865:

Sorry, I totally do not understand the purpose of this polling. Isn’t the changes supposedly comprehensive and not selective parts?

the poll is the order they implement. the changes will be introduced piecemeal and not after all changes are done…..

And isn’t that bad? All the mentioned changes affect the overall scoring. They might be working good as a whole together but it might perform really bad in parts. Thus, using incremental approach is questionable.

personally speaking, any score changes before getting linking out of beta are bad. the linkings were ill timed, poorly linked, and now guests are being stacked on the cheap to get around full on the host…..

I agree, I too asked about the progress on that but many people don’t seem to care about that. The ambiguous server status is basically a timebomb.

You cannot compare BDO and BnS with Gw2.
BDO and BnS belong to the same category, pvp focused mmorpg.
Gw2 is not a pvp focused mmorpg, it is designed for casual mainstream market and in this design, they separate the components instead of having it as one like BDO and BnS.
You also cannot make such a comparison to WoW. WoW started in 2005 iirc and if you really want to make comparison, you have to compare WoW’s first 3 years with Gw2’s first 3 years.

IMO, I would have played BDO if not for the region block. I am not suitable for a game like gw2, gw2 has a liberal guild concept that makes guild unimportant and therefore stable and “steady” community rarely forms, especially in my timezone.