Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Yeah we are happy to drive and thanks for letting us do so. What i mean is just because we all talk about something it doesn’t mean it is a ‘thing’.

Chris

Oh! Understood. I actually wasn’t going off that question. I think that it got brought into the conversation somewhat confused me with the direction Jon was going.

My thought still stands, +1 on alliances visiting/guesting to other guilds hall.

Devata.6589:

For the trolling part, as long as your inside your guild-hall, even if you are in an open world, nobody could be trolling you. An option to block out map-chat inside your guild-plot was already suggested as a technical solution for that.

“The suggestion to randomly toss halls around from plot to plot is more of a “where’s my hall at today” issue. I’m not really focused on the tech hurdles. There are several problems, those were just a couple.”

Also this would not happen. With plots on ground maps it would only happed if a map becomes a ghost time or if a guild go’s inactive (and then you have to place it in the new map, it would not happen automatically).

For sky-maps they just spawn where they where before or at least close to that. (I would think in the case of sky-maps, airships would have hit detection to not fly into each other, so then they might need to spawn a little to the side if another ship is in the way) also then you would not have to look around because you would use something like a guild-hall stone to portal you there.

“I’m not really focused on the tech hurdles. "
I know your not however the things you talk about are not a reason why open world guild halls would be bad but technical difficulties to overcome when using open world guild-halls. Difficulties that would not be in the instance but not things that are unsolvable.

Yes I know what sandbox means. While it would not have to be in the current maps so would not have to influence the current maps.

While you’re solving technical issues open world halls would introduce, beyond “showing off” I see no big benefit to having maps full of guild halls. Maybe in that it keeps a section of the open world populated. Then you have the issue of how many players can be on a map at once, which is a pretty big issue and also ties into megaserver problems. I’m not sure introducing such technical hurdles with solutions makes me feel any better about the concept.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Munki,

We are just brain storming and thus throwing the idea of Alliances up. it was the top voted QOL proposal by the CDI group and something that I think would be really good for many aspects of the game.

It is important to try to not think of me as a dev in the discussion. I am just helping you guys to design and problem solving and you guys are helping me with your design ideas and community persona.

Chris

Fair enough, although i think of you and Jon as the ones that drive these conversations, more in the sense that we at least have a tighter structure so we can all sort specific ideas out. I mentioned some of this in a previous post.

I agree Alliances should be a thing, for sure. I also think you should be able to visit each guild in an alliance hall and guest to that guild for things like GvG and missions. A couple features that should come along with the Alliance idea. But, then again, we still need to work out the issue with a map cap even moreso then.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Morning All,

Due to recent events I must confess that I am only properly knowledgeable up to roughly page 12 but I want to jump in and start discussing things with you. I hope that is ok.

I want to emphasize that my questions, thoughts, and brain storming are theoretical and should not be taken as a given. With that said I want to start at the foundation.

Ok lets assume that in the world of the CDI Guild Halls have a lot of horizontal progression such as the ability to create buildings, upgrade them and customize the whole experience. What is the smallest guild size that this would be suitable for. Even more specifically is it ok to have a ton of progression in this Guild Hall example and have small guilds work through it.

An idea I wanted to throw into the mix would be could small guilds have a shared Guild Hall with an Alliance?

Chris

Hi Chris,

I’m kind of at a loss with this, it seems like we are all sort of going off in different directions? Are alliances a thing?

Anywho, some stuff is sort of floating around the virtual yard so far:

Increasing horizontal progression when is comes to halls
1. Visual upgrades (wall of achievements, representing upgrades)
2. Re-Categorizing current upgrades to reflect more with halls
3. Adding specialized structures (workshops, kitchens, personal spaces, etc. )

Guild hall limitations
1. Member caps
2. Ability to customize the structure (more sandboxy)

Open world halls versus instanced

Costs
1. Up-front fee
2. Maintenance costs (more in line with open world)
3. Equal footing costs for small and large guilds

I’m not looking to drive the conversation, but there is a lot floating around.

JonPeters.5630:

This is a great break down, but I was speaking more about categorizing guild upgrades. Let me give an example to help get things started:

• WvW
• PvP
• Guild Missions
• Dungeons

This would tie the upgrades more to game mode than to the current arbitrary categories.

So. This is about changing the categories to be more inline with game modes and it looks like you’re adding a few as dungeons and PvP only oriented categories don’t exist currently. Since politics and economy work globally across game modes (in general), where would they fall in this new category structure?

I’m at the point of trying to see what this has to do with the halls themselves though. Or are we just speaking about what parts of these new categories would be displayed in a hall? I like the idea of having an extra Asura Contractor show up and start building stuff in a workshop (which could currently sit in the architecture area “Build a physical workshop in your guild hall”). They could be crafting things like banners banquets and the like. While it’s a fun idea, it really doesn’t add much functionality to the upgrade system, but it does integrate the idea of halls more closely to the process.

Devata.6589:

Well being in favor or against it is another question. I just showed one way the problem you talked about there could be solved.

In all honestly you seem to be against because of mainly technical difficulties (just as most people who are against that). However for nearly all (some you can’t without knowing the code.. nor do you know if it’s really a problem) technical difficulties solutions have been offered in this thread.

Like what you talk about here. “There is already enough trolling going around” so your technical difficulty here is to prevent the trolling, not the idea of open world guild-halls itself. (btw what type of trolling do you mean?) Also “the amount of real-estate you would need to add to the game” is a technical difficulty not really something against open world halls. And for that one also multiple suggestions have been giving. Like the sky-maps (that work with over-flows) and dynamical increasing / decreasing ground-maps and a few other solutions.

Trolling in the sense that larger guilds hold “rituals” in open world and are often “bothered” by the open world population (see RP guild requests as well). You prevent that by making GHs instanced.

The suggestion to randomly toss halls around from plot to plot is more of a “where’s my hall at today” issue. I’m not really focused on the tech hurdles. There are several problems, those were just a couple.

Devata.6589:

I think if the game was more designed around the sandbox, it would be a cool feature though.
Well that is one of the things.. To me GW2 always have seemed as if it wanted to be more sandbox but wasn’t. The whole idea with a living breading world and so on.

Dynamic events don’t do much for that and also the ‘living world patches’ don’t help that much for it. A little more sandbox however would do exactly that. People building there own houses or guild-halls. Stuff changes, it’s dynamic, it’s a living world.
So that alone would be a reason and a time to go a little more sandbox with this imho. Especially if Anet want to keep talking about a living world.

Yes that brings technical difficulties with it and many of those have an easy fix (instance) but the technical difficulties can be solved.

By sandbox, i mean being able to plop down a structure and modify it which influences the open world. The living story is designed and structured by Arena which makes it more like a themepark. Introducing sandbox type elements doesn’t seem all that enticing to me.

Devata.6589:

munkiman.3068:

While i think it would be a good place to run around in, a lot of those sandbox type elements tend to be difficult to maintain. Population changes a lot in MMOs what happens when we run out of space with a ton of inactive houses?

Anyway, i think we could address player housing in another discussion. I’d personally love to see the home instance get a make-over, including being able to allow your friends to check it out whenever they want.

Suggestions to solve this problems have already been made.

Simply lose your plot / place in the world if the guild go’s inactive. But don’t lose the guild-hall itself. When the guild is back spawn it again at a new plot. With air-ships despawn and spawn back again much like players do in the world but now at the moment the last guild-member logs out and the first logs back in again.

I’m not a fan of the idea of open world guild halls, there is already enough trolling going around, not to mention the amount of real-estate you would need to add to the game to support the thousands of guilds. I think if the game was more designed around the sandbox, it would be a cool feature though. I think we could focus on instance based halls and have similar utility without the complication and overhead.

TehPwnerer.7215:

Honestly if they were the exact same as GW1 I would be happy.

My hopes:
-Give us multiple layouts to choose from like GW1
-Allow us to upgrade it to include more vendors, guild/personal storage, etc.
-Allow us to bring guests into it
-Maybe have gathering nodes that reset daily?
-Allow us to explore it and make it an actual guild hall. Something large and wondrous.

And finally, think of the small guilds.. Before you go adding 100k+ influence costs or 1k+ gold costs, remember not every guild has hundreds of people.

Thanks for your time and I’m glad to see guild halls finally being discussed!

I can get behind these ideas. I’d really enjoy seeing GvG guild halls in GW2, with similar functionality. I’d add Saars dynamic content for workshops and asura contractors too!

Prophet.6257:

AlienMenace.7516:

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

If they just made it so a housing instance could be accessed from within the Guild Hall (maybe a door you could use to be transported to the customizable interior of your home) space would not be an issue. Just like using a doorway that took guild members to their specific guild hall instance (if they had their instance at that location) would work.

All of this could use the already-existing technology that sends people to their Home Instance (remember those?) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_instance

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

Your suggestion is likely to be the one incorporated if they do housing b/c it is a bit easier to incorporate into the game as it is now.

However, I would love to see full “Guild Zones” with that many homes in it. It would be beautiful. Full of NPCs and special guild merchants. Making all those instance portals shouldn’t be too much trouble. As far as home variety goes it could be kept to a pretty minimal palette with a more robust texture and asset placement options.

Guild Farms
Personalized Guild Enemies
Guild NPCs
etc, etc, etc

It would end up being a lot of work but the end result would be a place I think people would love to spend time in.

While i think it would be a good place to run around in, a lot of those sandbox type elements tend to be difficult to maintain. Population changes a lot in MMOs what happens when we run out of space with a ton of inactive houses?

Anyway, i think we could address player housing in another discussion. I’d personally love to see the home instance get a make-over, including being able to allow your friends to check it out whenever they want.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

Sorry to hear. Hoping things even out for you.

Davey.7029:

Of course they’re not a problem. People love playing outnumbered, right? That’s why they bought and support this game, so they can have unfair matches. People crying about population imbalances are probably just deluded and sore losers.

It’s a short-sighted solution to a much larger, more complicated problem. Merges and/or alliances will still end up lopsided as long as players can move around. It’s really that simply. We’ll be having this exact same conversation (which we basically have had since release) in a couple months.

Until solid solutions are developed for coverage and promoting defense (making it as effective and rewarding as offense) by changing the scoring system, then it’s still the same round-robin game mode, with lots of kittened off players.

Berk.8561:

munkiman.3068:

I have still yet to read a good reason why population imbalance is a problem.

First, I’ve yet to hear from a player who enjoys being farmed.

The NPCs show up to be slaughtered again and again by more powerful players in PvE and WvW because they don’t care about their quality of play. But I doubt you’ll find a human that wants to sit at a spot on the map waiting for someone else to show up and inevitably kill them so they other person can have fun, at least not without playing them for ti. Years ago, on a tabletop role-playing game forum, a player commented that he didn’t play role-playing games to be the guy who grabs his chest, yells “I’ve been hit!”, and dies. I doubt many players are playing MMOs to be the guy who gets pummeled to death by a zerg while trying to solo-defend a tower against them so they can get more loot bags.

Second, the power dynamic in mismatched match-ups a lot like bullying.

Larger more powerful entities beating up on less powerful entities that can’t effectively defend themselves is normally described as bullying. Further, the games dynamics often encourage the two more populated servers to beat up on the least powerful server. Maybe many MMO players get off on being bullies, but (related to the first point) it’s not a lot of fun being bullied. It’s also not fun for most people to feel helpless. People don’t play to be victims, especially not for the enjoyment of others.

Third, in imbalanced match-ups, the rewards go to the players who have it easiest, not the underdog that fights against bad odds.

The unfairness and lack of enjoyment might be mitigated if the players expending the most effort under the worst situation received greater rewards for their effort than the blob following the tag around to stomp empty towers and outnumbered opponents, but that’s not what happens. What happens is that server that just about everyone can predict will win before a point is scored gets more rewards essentially for showing up. So what incentive do the servers that know they are destined to lose have for showing up?

Please note that I play on Eredon Terrace, a bottom-ranked server where a lot of people do show up every week despite the horrible odds. Of course there are players who will still show up and see how well they can do, even if the game doesn’t reward them and the score tells them they are losers. But I’d be lying if I told you that players don’t start leaving once playing starts to feel futile enough because it does happen. Better compensation for being a punching bag could help make it feel a little more worthwhile and appreciated to play the role of NPCs for another server to farm.

I understand your frustrations (we get rolled on occasion too!) and while entirely valid issues, it still comes down the the mode itself, the way scoring works and the plain fact that population and coverage wins the day. Until those can be addressed (i’d suggest a “test bed” to work out kinks to changes) then no matter how things get shuffled, via an alliance system or flat our merges, unless anet controls the population imbalances we will continue to be stuck with the same problems. I’m more concerned with the aftermath of server merges and some sudo alliance system, and i think the devs are too. I know a few of them have posted how much they enjoy playing on their server, the ones they call home, so they at least have a good perspective in that sense.

The thing about servers and the extent that people are pretty passionate about their home servers, not to mention the amount of actual work it takes to maintain them as communities, for anet to flat out disassemble them, would more than likely, cause far more harm than good. Something they really don’t need right now.

Right now, it’s more like the mode is stale, moreso than the match-ups. While on NSP throughout our meetings, we do see varying tactics even the servers we often face change, including our own tactics, based on what we know from past fights. It’s mostly down to WvW not really getting much in the way of love for the mode.

I’d personally include EotM into the battle, introducing it has hurt WvW competitive state as a whole, but i think it could be rectified by some small changes and encorping into the fight. I don’t think it’s as kittened as some people say, but it does take away population from the battle.

I’m also of the mind that GvG needs to be a reality, this will naturally spread out population, since people starving for that mode won’t need to join servers that fight the model of the GvG scene.

I haven’t played much, got about an hour in WvW. 8/17 of the drops were stuff i could equip on my mesmer. No champ bags were counted. Although i’m assuming loot bags don’t toward this system anyway. I’ll do some open world stuff later and see what i end up with.

I have a solution! Include google translate into map chat! This way everyone can be confused

Besides my 2 male asura, all the rest of my toons are female. I loathe most of the male armor, it’s just so typical in MMO’s to have pretty ugly male armors. Although, most of the gem store outfits look fine on male toons.

zenleto.6179:

Being on the NA servers we’ve generally only got English and bad English.

I made a game friend with a bloke who’s first language is Spanish. I think after a while he forgot about things and invited me to a group where everyone spoke Spanish…except me. After a few minutes of me speaking English to him and the others speaking Spanish to each other I said “thanks, cya guys” and left. Nobody was fussed.

I don’t why people get troubled by seeing people communicate in a language other than their own. Unless that’s it – seeing it rather than hearing it. It might get in the way of the brain concentrating on other chat a player is part of. Or something. I’m no expert.

Also, some people are jerks and don’t mind displaying it.

edit:and no, the guy wasn’t Zoso

NA has some quebecois players running around, most of them speak English though. I never minded it in chat, although i’ve seen people complain.

blackysharky.7581:

Behellagh.1468:

Organized crime on Tyria must control all the unions because by now, some 6 months after Scarlet’s defeat, the major bridges should have all been repaired, wooden debris removed, less damaged structures repaired, some of the major pieces of wreckage from Scarlet’s drill removed or have crews around it tearing it apart, etc.

This must be it, there can’t be any other explenation but that, some sort of underground skritt mafia, probably the ones who also stole the whole money raised from the queens pavillon, are also controlling the supply market, that’s why the work is going so slow.

I mean in open world events bridges far bigger then those in LA get destroyed and rebuild on a daily basis, right? ;P

Well the bandits have been working on that bridge in Brisban since launch. Maybe it’s just a bunch of unskilled workers :P

Radical Antics.2740:

zenleto.6179:

munkiman.3068:

Ohoni.6057:

We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.

Ok, I’ll start this by saying that I have a “bank guild” and I want a guild hall for it, so any attempts to prevent me from getting one will not be appreciated. That said, I don’t think this method would work. I also belong to a regular guild, I’m not super active in it, but there are some good people there. If it was a requirement to have five people in my guild “regularly” for several weeks, I could likely convince at least five of the members to join rep my guild for at least an hour a day or so for a few weeks, and then I’d get my hall and they’d be able to leave. I’d just need to make sure to lock down back access beforehand (a circumstance that I imagine would lead to a lot of bank fraud ANet would have to deal with as they might not be so careful).

Now, they could prevent this by making it so that you’d need to keep at least five or more active players even after the hall is created, or the hall would lock out or something, but I imagine this could get in the way of legitimate guild use for the more casual small guilds.

I agree, having these restrictions in place would likely turn a bunch of people off. I think an initial capital investment would be sufficient. They could probably take some metrics on how wealthy most of the small guilds are and base an up front cost on that.

Absolutely. I’ll agree with the agreement. My guild is me who plays every day, my mate who plays 3-4 times a week, another who plays for a short while every few weeks (and absolutely loves the game), and a fourth who reps for us for about half an hour every six months. We aren’t unhappy with his arrangement and I’d really dislike being blocked from having a guild hall because of our set up.

my point was from a purely hardware based point of view. i don’t know what method anet uses for instances but i imagine that it has limitations. now think about if every player who wanted one got themselves a personal guild hall and my idea of having parts of the building different was also implemented. there would probably be issues with the hardware not being able to cope. that being said i am not opposed to the idea of people having personal guild halls i just think that it would have technical issues if thousands of instances were being maintained

also the numbers were an estimate/idea.

Hmmm, i don’t think it’s a problem. There is plenty of instanced content that would vastly outnumber guild halls. Personal story, LS, home instances, pvp arenas, dungeons, etc. are all like that, and players are spawning them in droves sometimes. Not to mention how many maps (or overflows) there were pre-megaserver.

Fay.2357:

What on earth would this do? Say blackgate gets ganged up on and deleted. Let’s follow this to the logical conclusion.

Blackgate is deleted. Everyone on blackgate is forced to move. Everyone on blackgate moves to SoS. SoS becomes the new blackgate.

Did this solve anything or make it even remotely worth anyone’s time? No, it did not.

That’s pretty much the whole argument with merging servers.

I have still yet to read a good reason why population imbalance is a problem.

If by raid, you mean the addition of Underworld or Fissure of Woe, then yes, i’m all for it. If by raid you mean what other games do with raid content, then no. I doubt we will ever see Wow or wildstar type raids.

Challenging dungeon content, with “sweet, sweet loot”…

Well, they do pass out free stuff from the store fairly often and I’ve actually gotten free items for purchases prior. I think for a game that has a store, they give a fairly decent amount away, even if they aren’t the higher priced items.

Sarrs.4831:

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t remember saying locked. I said how would you change some of the current functionality to be more integrated with guild halls? I don’t think functionality has to go away to do this and I’d like to see what value you all might envision a guild hall could bring to things like Guild Missions, the current Guild upgrade system, etc.

Jon

Let’s go all the way.

Your guild instance map is seperated into four sections: Politics, economics, art of war and architecture. As you upgrade these things through the I-VI lines, the sections will get grander; for example, if you have level 0 politics, you have no building on that section, if you have level 1, you have a basic lodge, all the way up to a palace at level 6.

The other smaller upgrades have smaller effects on the plot. For example, if you build a guild workshop, you have an actual workshop on your architecture plot. If you have Outsource Asuran Contracting, an Asura hangs out in your Politics building and you can talk to him. If those upgrades are actually doing something then they’re doing something in the guild hall; for example if you’re building something at the workshop, the machinery is running and you have a few NPCs running about working, if you have the Asuran Contractor working, he’s fiddling about on one of those computer things they have. Every upgrade should have something along these lines actually happening in the guild hall to correlate with it.

Also a few upgrades could have added functionality, or new upgrades that come out of them. For example, you can upgrade your Guild Workshop to have crafting tables.

That’s a pretty cool idea, accept the different sized buildings thing as you get higher in tier.

Shiren.9532:

I disagree with the idea of forcing only BG to disband (although doing away with servers completely is, imo, the best solution for WvW’s population imbalance problem) but the reality is, servers are killed all the time (and BG is one of the primary contributors to this problem). Communities have been disbanding since GW2’s launch and WvW population imbalances cannibalised other servers as the primary means of winning. The first one I can remember was Henge of Denravi, but then others (SBI, SoS and SoR all had big falls). The exodus from a server snowballs and large groups of players leave the server. The sad reality these days is this kind of server cannibalism is brought on by the T1 servers scavenging lower tier servers to bolster the stacked T1 population (T2 servers do this to a lesser extent). It only takes one or two big guilds to leave a server for things to stop being competitive and then the entire play style of that server is no longer viable resulting in a community kill.

ArenaNet (and people in this thread) might be concerned about harming existing WvW communities, but the reality is the current system does this all the time and it does push players away from WvW and GW2. WvW is already full of guilds on the same servers as former rivals, or on opposing servers of former allies, server loyalty doesn’t matter to the majority of the hard core WvW community. Alliances are far less threatening to the players I like playing with staying with me in WvW than the volatile impacts of WvW’s population imbalance. The only way to insulate yourself from it is to transfer, the higher the better.

Then you have servers like BP and NSP that have had pretty stable communities since launch. Although i’m still of the mind that world imbalances aren’t really a problem at all. I see very little benefit to mashing servers together or allying them in some way.

Togashi Jack.9531:

Clerigo.9475:

Another amazing feature in GW1 that really needs to make its debut in GW2.

I beg to differ. Oh god do I beg to differ. Polymock was horrible in GW1 – Will be even worse in GW2. I wish we could all forget that it ever existed…

I enjoyed polymock, but my wife hated it. As an optional mini-game, i still think it would be a nice addition.

Vayne.8563:

Right and my audience is tiny. No one thinks the way I do. You’re so busy trying to prove I’m a white knight, you didn’t even read what I said. I said I have a group and you have a group and there are a bunch of other groups. I’m not sure why you’d find that so unreasonable. In fact, if you reread what I wrote, there’s nothing in it at all that’s white knightish. I just pointed out that different groups don’t always agree even if they like or don’t like the game. If you think there’s something untrue about that okay. Maybe you’re just hung up on the fact that I’m a white knight so you don’t read what I actually said.

Anet has hard numbers on how many people try the game and how many people continue playing past level 10, level 20. How many go on to buy the game. You saying it’s not broken means about as much as me saying it is. That is, neither comment holds any real weight, because we don’t have the facts.

We do have a quote from Colin saying it’s “absolutely not good enough”, referring to player retention. If you want to argue that, go ahead. But I don’t think you have the evidence, other than I know guys who think like I do. Well yeah, I know guys who think like I do.

I wish you would read what people write sometimes. I actually find your insights balanced ankitten OT in agreement of the white knight comments. It’s like a trigger or something with you when you see those words, i guess.

I’m not sure how many times i’ve said, i’m stating an opinion. I clearly don’t have access to metrics, im not trying to state things as facts. But, metrics is my point and you often defend that you think the game is healthy, which i guess isn’t the case.

Anyways, always nice typing with you.

Ohoni.6057:

We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.

Ok, I’ll start this by saying that I have a “bank guild” and I want a guild hall for it, so any attempts to prevent me from getting one will not be appreciated. That said, I don’t think this method would work. I also belong to a regular guild, I’m not super active in it, but there are some good people there. If it was a requirement to have five people in my guild “regularly” for several weeks, I could likely convince at least five of the members to join rep my guild for at least an hour a day or so for a few weeks, and then I’d get my hall and they’d be able to leave. I’d just need to make sure to lock down back access beforehand (a circumstance that I imagine would lead to a lot of bank fraud ANet would have to deal with as they might not be so careful).

Now, they could prevent this by making it so that you’d need to keep at least five or more active players even after the hall is created, or the hall would lock out or something, but I imagine this could get in the way of legitimate guild use for the more casual small guilds.

I agree, having these restrictions in place would likely turn a bunch of people off. I think an initial capital investment would be sufficient. They could probably take some metrics on how wealthy most of the small guilds are and base an up front cost on that.

Vayne.8563:

It’s broken if people sign up for free weekends and don’t continue on to the game. You don’t ultimately get to decide it’s broken or not broken. Also, your comments about the audience having stuck through the game implies some kind of majority are feeling this way. I accept some people are, but I think you’ll find a disproportionate amount of them post on the forums. There are still plenty of people who started 2 years ago and are still enjoying the game. And some who have left and come back.

YOU are not enjoying the game because of the stuff you’re saying. I’M still enjoying the game, because of stuff I’ve said. “The audience” you’re referring to, doesn’t exist. We’re all individuals with different likes and dislikes. In fact, not everyone dissatisfied with the game is dissatisfied for the same reasons you are, and not everyone who likes the game likes the game for the same reasons I do.

I think a reason people have a hard time conversing with you (i.e. the whole white knight thing), is you don’t really read into what people say, you often just react. Maybe you enjoy being argumentative?

It doesn’t really matter though, i’m not bothered. I’ve had access to a fairly large amount of opinions from players who’ve either played or are still playing the game. I also didn’t say i don’t enjoy the game, i actually said i’m disheartened with it from a direction PoV. Design decisions affect my enjoyment of the game, but it doesn’t make me have knee jerk reactions to simply hate it all the sudden.

It’s actually not broken if it’s had a pretty successful retention rate (this is still a pretty popular game from what i can tell), it’s only broken if there is some hard number it needs to maintain over a certain course of time, which has it’s own set of problems, like feeling rigged, with a stench of rough corporate control.

I’m expressing an opinion that i actually share with a pretty large audience, that’s really all. I’m also not claiming that audience is the majority or that they all share the same opinion on what’s wrong with the game, just that they do actually share a general consensus.

Vayne.8563:

They released early as many MMOs do. This game as good enough to keep a lot of people over the two year period where they were fixing stuff. It’s a credit to the game.

Because they launched early they are playing catchup. Fixing stuff like this two years later is more normal for MMOs than not normal. Particularly big ones. Because the list of things to do is a long, long list. And hearts weren’t going to be their first priority…at least not until they launched in China and that had a whole lot of new people to do it for.

It’s just that their priorities are different from your priorities.

That end bit really wasn’t at all my point. Also, not my point about fixing bugs 2 years later, obviously if a bug isn’t game breaking it goes to the bottom of the list.

My entire point is the audience that has stuck with the game, paid money to buy your virtual goods, that are now disheartened by persistent bugs and smaller content updates, are the ones that need to be catered to.

And yes, it’s true that some games have gone back several years later and revamped the NPE, in almost every case, it’s shown to be a last ditch effort toward player retention to an audience that wasn’t going to stick with it anyway. This is regardless of the perceived fact that new games draw in the most numbers, giving you the most bang for your buck. Word of mouth from people that already play your game along with a positive public face are what bring people in. Right now, both of those areas need some work. I have no doubt, the NPE did improve “some” players initial experience, but are those players really your target audience? Maybe a small percentage of a much smaller base of people that will even make it to 80.

While they may have already done it for China, i still think it’s a waste of development dollars to try and fix something that was essentially not broken. I’m really of the mind that this is all about metrics and spreadsheets, which is why i feel their priorities are borked, not because they differ from mine, as i have no stake in their success to have any priorities. I just has opinions, and we know what those are like.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

JonPeters.5630:

I think the only good assumption here is that we are talking about to bring up the positives and negatives of a system. What are the benefits to guild halls having a large cost? What are the drawbacks? I’m saying this because I think it has both and am wondering what your take is.

My take is no matter what you do, the forums will be on fire afterwards about how the decision is obviously wrong and ANet is “once again out of touch with what players want”.

There isn’t a way to do any of this which is going to get a 100% approval rating, no matter what you read here in the forums. I’ve inferred such to Chris several times before we started down these CDIs.

And so, I’m trying to think around that particular blocking thought – because it’s become an increasingly stressful problem on trying to come up with anything useful.

What i’ve seen with these CDI’s in general, is the basic fact that we as players don’t really know what our constraints are, so we make all these elaborate proposals and brainstorm around them. Which works amazingly well when you know what is technically feasible. So we get a lot of great ideas floating around, and people say “wow” that’s great, but then we get either a shell of the idea or something radically different.

It’s definitely a bonus to “think outside the box”, yet if you don’t know how big the box is, it’s very difficult to think outside of it. I know it’s their goal to build off the elaborate discussions we have in these, it just seems to typically lead to additions or changes that end up being more frustrating than fun. Add to that the rule of what’s discussed here is just for the sake of it, really doesn’t give anyone a clear design goal.

I got the concept behind all this, but they really need to be more open and focused with us than just have us run with wild ideas. I mean we are going to get those anyway, even when we have a tighter constraints. That’s just how discussion among a large group tend to go.

JonPeters.5630:

Something I haven’t seen much discussion on that I thought would be interesting. Not saying you have to go this way but.

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls? If you would change something, how would you change it to work more with a physical Guild Hall?

Jon

Isn’t the entire concept of Guild Halls completely integral to Guilds? Are you talking about adding (or changing) some feature that would make it more worth it to own a hall?

In as far as having this discussion about open world versus instanced halls, it’s pretty much a no-brainer that open world halls wouldn’t work in this game, unless you really expanded the real estate and you also made them extremely taxing to maintain.

I’m thoroughly of the mind that the original game addressed guild halls and their functionality quite well. So much so that if i could just drop my guild hall into GW2, i would do that and be rather pleased.

One thing to note (since it’s been discussed to some length) one thing you guys did in the original, with factions and control, was interesting, but ultimately more of a bother than fun. Adding in content (Urgoz and The Deep) and “locking” it behind guild ownership, in hindsight was probably not a great idea. I’d say take that lesson and run with it.

Vayne.8563:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Vayne.8563:

Slowing down the rate at which someone sees stuff does have a positive effect on a percentage of people. That is to say, information overload is a problem for many people and slowing down the rate at which information is offered is definitely one viable solution.

Yes, it does. However, changing where in the leveling process something appears, then changing the pace of leveling so that it takes about the same time to gain does nothing for those people.

What might help some people is seeing something in the level-up dialogue about new stuff. The NPE does.this a bit better than the old level up method. Ultimately, however, people don’t learn if they don’t take the time to see what newly introduced things do, no matter when they appear.

I don’t know that it does nothing for those people. The point is to offer it in sections, not all at once. Part of that is removing stuff from the map too. Less input. THa’ts all it takes. It doesn’t take long if you do it right.

Not that we’ll ever see any exact metrics (outside of NCsoft reports), i’d really be curious if this improved purchase of the game post this last free weekend. Or if it actually improves players sticking with the game to 80. Especially since to 15 you go at a good clip, then it declines in speed fairly radically. I only know this based on feedback about the pacing, I have no intention of buying a new slot to experience it myself.

I really have a feeling keeping players engaged (the ones that actually want to play your game) is FAR more important than what they tried to do with the NPE. The gaming market is just too saturated to be worried about a new player experience 2 years out from release. I’d much rather tell the friends that left (which are ever growing) “they just introduced this really awesome thing with GW2, you have to log in and check it out”.

joe.7684:

Asmodeus.5782:

Yenrah.8532:

Was I confused at some points? Of course! Did I die a lot? Hell I did! Did the hungry bunnies beat the crap out of me? You wouldn’t believe! And all of this felt great.

I really feel sorry for those bunnies. After the lobotomy they are a sad, lethargic bunch…

Except that the hungry bunnies do still knock you over if you’re not careful. I know this for a fact because it happened to my newest character the other day when I did that particular renown heart, which is now located at the bottom of the cliff in Taigan Groves. And, in point of fact, I have no quarrel with it. The renown heart as it was previously was quite tedious and the bunnies were really a bit too active, plus which you ran the risk of falling to your death if you were in the wrong spot. This new version goes a lot faster. (I also notice that nobody seems to have commented on the new state of the renown heart involving trade with the jotun. There are a lot of low-level enemies there now which makes the heart go much faster because you can kill them to get it done and get XP in the process, which IMO greatly improves that heart, which previously was the most boring one in Wayfarer.)

I completely agree some hearts needed work, however if “getting your house in order” is a basic premise they are addressing 2 years after release, they have some pretty big problems.

I’m completely of the mind that there is really no better MMORPG out there, least for me. But, now i tend to float in and out of this and other games and i’m usually a person that sticks with one for a pretty long time.

It makes me sad that the game and the team seem so mismanaged and that i just don’t feel that “deeper” connection. I’d really like to support the game, but in it’s current state and direction, i’m having a really hard time justifying it.

Johje Holan.4607:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Twinny.9304:

Sin.4130:

To devs:
The solution is really simple, how to do that?
Just change “tick score” system to “gain points” system – that’s all!
For claiming every object server gets points once.
Camp- 5
Tower -1 0
Keep – 25
SM – 35
As usual, but only once, so server which does pvd (player vs door) will get only max 695 points for all night for example, not like now that one or two nights with pvd and match is over.
Feel free to modify this system in anyway.
Benefits?:
- no more blob style, which will be extremely not effective with gain point system,
- no more zombies blob all day long,
- overpopulated servers will split naturally, because insane coverage factor will be crushed and not one way to win.

BTW:
For WvW community health I suggest to separate pvp servers, u can change names of that servers, because in one mega server time, PvE players just killing WvW in lower tiers, they rise transfer costs, and don’t participle in WvW. Make transfer to lower tiers cheaper and you will gain balance pretty soon.

Got a funny feeling that people wouldnt cap their stuff back until last day to avoid it being flipped again for more points.

I would probably say in regards to scoring:

Only get points per stomp – but your stomps are worth more the depending on what structures (keeps/towers) you hold.

at least this way night capping wouldn’t score any points unless they had enemies to stomp. Yes they could still turn things to paper and make stomps worth more, but without the actual stomps it wouldn’t affect the score.

That’s a really good idea and you should bring it up when they do the scoring discussion next week. Only change I would make is give points for kills in general and more points for stomps.

I don’t think points for stomp or kills is a good idea.

1. It would actually serve as an incentive to avoid fights unless you have the clear advantage.
2. It would bring about an Alt-F4 meta.

But as you said, we shall get to discuss that in next weeks Scoring Discussion.

There is already points for stomps. Players enter a PvP mode for PvP. Alt-F4 still awards Wxp, xp and a bag if one drops if someone logs out during a fight. Not to mention how many run from fights already. Sure there might be more pressure to perform better, but ism’t that a good thing?

The fix, it seems to population imbalance seems to be unilaterally a player choice in favor. But we can’t do that unless we rebuild the mechanics that helps promote players to not stack on winning servers.

I also think it’s a good idea to put inactives in a holding pattern till they log in again. While i’m not entirely sure exactly what weight is used to gauge population on a particular server, i’m guessing part of it is players that reside on that server.

Twinny.9304:

Sin.4130:

To devs:
The solution is really simple, how to do that?
Just change “tick score” system to “gain points” system – that’s all!
For claiming every object server gets points once.
Camp- 5
Tower -1 0
Keep – 25
SM – 35
As usual, but only once, so server which does pvd (player vs door) will get only max 695 points for all night for example, not like now that one or two nights with pvd and match is over.
Feel free to modify this system in anyway.
Benefits?:
- no more blob style, which will be extremely not effective with gain point system,
- no more zombies blob all day long,
- overpopulated servers will split naturally, because insane coverage factor will be crushed and not one way to win.

BTW:
For WvW community health I suggest to separate pvp servers, u can change names of that servers, because in one mega server time, PvE players just killing WvW in lower tiers, they rise transfer costs, and don’t participle in WvW. Make transfer to lower tiers cheaper and you will gain balance pretty soon.

Got a funny feeling that people wouldnt cap their stuff back until last day to avoid it being flipped again for more points.

I would probably say in regards to scoring:

Only get points per stomp – but your stomps are worth more the depending on what structures (keeps/towers) you hold.

at least this way night capping wouldn’t score any points unless they had enemies to stomp. Yes they could still turn things to paper and make stomps worth more, but without the actual stomps it wouldn’t affect the score.

These would be countered with objectives taking on a neutral state after a period of time. This way it limits the night crews ability to earn points, but not make it a total snooze fest. Also keeps people from “not playing” to save point loss.

They should just go all the way and making points per kill, with bloodlust giving extra.

I’ll just leave this here…

http://northernshiverpeaks.org/index.php?/page/Articles%20and%20News/articles.html/_/articles/meet-a-commander/

Could be to fill a position of a designer that left. People do leave their jobs, yanno.

PabbyGaul.9682:

munkiman.3068:

PabbyGaul.9682:

I don’t think high-population servers are the root of the problem. I think the imbalance is simply human nature, playing the game against the rules they are given. Its all artificial. If you want it function in verisimilitude yer gonna have to simulate it.

Again, my point to balance things out has to be centered around the design of the game mode. Tier 1 players have noted they typically don’t queue more than 2 maps during seasons, so lowering the cap (unless it’s brutally lowered) does very little to influence movement. What about the people that like playing on BG JQ TC and aren’t there simply to win? It’s basically a punishment to those folks.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Well “punishment” is necessary in any balanced system. Pick any naturally balanced system and you will find that something pull in the opposite direction, generally something that directly counters that which is pulling in the other direction and is related to the consequences for doing so. Just how it is. rarely do things people want come without a price, there are natural consequence for practically everything worth having, doing ect. In essence we are really just taking the “bonus” from the higher tier servers and giving it to the lower tiers. So, it snot just a punishment, someone gets a Bonus! And the point would not be to force anyone, simply put the stuff in place and let it work itself out.

As many have mention, Overpopulation, Coverage, Rewards, Tournaments, all related. We submitted about 20-30 different changes. Its like 7 pages of stuff…If people are interested I could post I suppose.

Lowering map caps doesn’t do much more than institute frustration, but as John mentioned it’s a suggestion that is the least amount of work, but it’s also one of the least effective methods. Which falls right in line with your natural balance example.

I understand why PPT is what we have, it’s very likely a more death-match type scoring system has overhead and tracking issues. It also would cause scores to vary wildly, higher pop servers could have quite a bit higher points than lower pop, but if you score on averages via a max point count, say to win you need more than 33% of the total score, then you solve that problem. I mentioned before that PPT has been a bad idea since almost a month or 2 after release, which is why we keep having these conversations. The mode needed a restructure before it even made it to the design table.

Im not sure you are responding to my post….miss click maybe?

Map Caps, I don’t mention except to say they wont help….and averaging PPT is not something I discuss either.

I was re-affirming your post, sorry.

I think until we get our concerns addressed officially, suggestions after 22 pages are just chasing shadows. We really don’t have any idea on a scope of whats possibly/feasible.

I think it’s definitely been seen that they are taking into account player feedback and overall all the changes that players have requested that have been implemented are equally good IMO. It’s the ones no one asked for…

The worse change however, that players sort of asked for, the trait system. I say sort of, since it seemed the discussion was more about skill capture (possibly just new PvE only elites), not trait chasing/unlocking. Ah, well they all can’t be gems.

John Corpening.9847:

Hey Guys,

Just a quick note to let you know I’m not dead I took a day off to celebrate a birthday for a special little dude in my life. Now I’m back and waaaaaay behind!

I’ve had some thoughts based on some feedback you guys have given on the proposal I posted. I’m going to try to get caught up on this thread then see how we can adjust things to cover some concerns.

John

Special little dude sounds like a son, well at least that’s what i’ve called all my boys, so congrats? maybe? Sorry out have to welcome you back to read such doom and gloom…

I love how fair weather post show up. We can t expect ppl to read 3, let alone 20 page,but geesh.

Rimmy.9217:

munkiman.3068:

I personally would like to stop thinking terms of imposing limits on an already tightly monitored, fairly unrewarding (besides winning good fights) system. Caps that cause longer queues on highly pop servers, things that focus on high pop servers rewards, in order to “force” balance are simply crappy solutions, they are “one click fixes”. I think most of us are growing tired of those.

Except that this is a thread about population imbalance, and high population servers are one end of that imbalance. And almost nobody complains when they end up against a lower population server. Since the population is a finite resource, methods that spread it out rather than hoarding it in just a few spots are viable to explore, and very much in the spirit of this thread.

Yes, i know. But, i actually don’t think it’s a problem that needs to be solved, as i’ve stated numerous times already. If the game mode supported imbalanced match ups, we wouldn’t keep having the same conversations over and over.

Shadow.3475:

If you missed info then it is your fault, the info been written like 100 times and discussed so if you ignore info its not much Arena net can do.

I sat this season out, since i’d knew i couldn’t collect rewards for 2 weeks. Funny how they didn’t really learn from the temporary content of LS1 and applied to the rewards for seasons. Let’s keep alienating players from a slowly dying game mode, that’ll help.

Dayra.7405:

Berk.8561:

yanniell.1236:

TC + ET = Eredon Cost

If they do this, I will stop playing Guild Wars 2. I despise what the megaservers have done to PvE, found out that’s one of the main reasons the person who got me into GW2 hasn’t played in 2 months despite formerly having played every day and having more than 10,000 achievement points, and it’s why other friends play less. If they do the same thing to WvW, I’m outta here.

Isn’t that a bit to emotional reaction? Mega-server still mean you may or may not meet your people, while in a community preserving merge, you are guaranteed to meet all ET people, just some others as well.

It like a merge of two schools where classes remain the same (WvW merge) vs a merge of two schools where classes are mixed on order of entrance (mega-server and EotM).

Thing is, it’s so arbitrary and doesn’t solve anything as long as people are free to move. Nothing wrong with expressing an emotional reaction.

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

eithinan.9841:

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

dedication and organisation wins the day

Numbers and Off PRIME coverage wins the week

On SFR it is the same people. We have commanders who command for 14+ hours every day. Dedication.

We are outnumbered during the night but still manage to turn the map green. Organisation.

Sounds like burn-out, which doesn’t help with the longevity of the game mode. Also, depends on what you mean by outnumbered.

PabbyGaul.9682:

I don’t think high-population servers are the root of the problem. I think the imbalance is simply human nature, playing the game against the rules they are given. Its all artificial. If you want it function in verisimilitude yer gonna have to simulate it.

Again, my point to balance things out has to be centered around the design of the game mode. Tier 1 players have noted they typically don’t queue more than 2 maps during seasons, so lowering the cap (unless it’s brutally lowered) does very little to influence movement. What about the people that like playing on BG JQ TC and aren’t there simply to win? It’s basically a punishment to those folks.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Well “punishment” is necessary in any balanced system. Pick any naturally balanced system and you will find that something pull in the opposite direction, generally something that directly counters that which is pulling in the other direction and is related to the consequences for doing so. Just how it is. rarely do things people want come without a price, there are natural consequence for practically everything worth having, doing ect. In essence we are really just taking the “bonus” from the higher tier servers and giving it to the lower tiers. So, it snot just a punishment, someone gets a Bonus! And the point would not be to force anyone, simply put the stuff in place and let it work itself out.

As many have mention, Overpopulation, Coverage, Rewards, Tournaments, all related. We submitted about 20-30 different changes. Its like 7 pages of stuff…If people are interested I could post I suppose.

Lowering map caps doesn’t do much more than institute frustration, but as John mentioned it’s a suggestion that is the least amount of work, but it’s also one of the least effective methods. Which falls right in line with your natural balance example.

I understand why PPT is what we have, it’s very likely a more death-match type scoring system has overhead and tracking issues. It also would cause scores to vary wildly, higher pop servers could have quite a bit higher points than lower pop, but if you score on averages via a max point count, say to win you need more than 33% of the total score, then you solve that problem. I mentioned before that PPT has been a bad idea since almost a month or 2 after release, which is why we keep having these conversations. The mode needed a restructure before it even made it to the design table.

Vayne.8563:

I think server pride is a thing of the past and I think people should start getting used to it. There was a thread in the WvW forums floating the idea of doing away with servers in WvW too.

It would have the advantage of making the game a completely serverless game.

Your identity, instead, would come from your guild…or your alliance (which was another suggestion floated in the same thread).

There isn’t going to be a home server place, because Anet is moving away from home servers, and I think, personally, this is a good thing.

Instead of having people who can’t join my guild because they’re not on my server and sometimes we WvW, we can have guilds that aren’t locked down and they can just recruit anyone.

Instead of having friends who join the game and can’t get on Blackgate or TC, they can just join our guild.

Servers are a thing of the past. Some day they will be completely relegated to the past.

If they go through with it, it will be the end for a very sizable chuck of players.

Otokomae.9356:

Well, I’m basically about to make bullet points from my previous “Wall of Text” post, since I doubt most people will read it, hopefully this will help:

1.) A lot of the stacking problems in this game are a DIRECT RESULT of GW2 having no official GvG game mode. This means that, not only is WvW people’s only option for “Unofficial GvG”, but people can only GvG with other guilds IN THE SAME TIER. This means that if you want to have a good GvG scene to fight in, you currently MUST stack just 1 Tier with as many GvG guilds as possible. This, in turn leads to massive numbers in WvW as well, since there is an enormous crossover between these game modes for most guilds.

2.) There is already a TON of resistance in this thread to any ideas of creating “EotM-style Battle Groups”, sometimes called “Alliances” in this thread, where several (or all) servers are lumped together in groups, hoping that across so many servers, the numbers will sort of “even out”, even in off-peak timezones. I believe the resistance to this kind of change would be FAR LESS if GvG were an official game mode, since that would give people an outlet for full-on competition, as lumping all the servers together would make WvW far less competitive for many people.

3.) As mentioned above, much of the massive stacking was caused by Guilds all congregating to a single tier in an effort to create a better GvG environment. If GvG were an official game mode which was INDEPENDENT of the Tier you are in or the server you play on, then it would be FAR EASIER to convince guilds to “de-stack”, and move around to less populated servers, and any changes made to WvW to promote spreading the population out would be received with far less crying from the current WvW community, since we would have another outlet for competing and even just hanging out with our friends from other guilds.

This is only part of my point, but I hope that gives you a few ideas of the benefits of adding GvG as a separate game mode, and how it could ease the transition from WvW’s current state to one in which the population is more evenly spread throughout the game.

Does anyone from EU want to weigh in on this? What do people over there think of GvG as a separate Game Mode, and how it might affect WvW?

Can we move this to a GvG thread? But i’d be very curious on how GvG should look. Does it resemble GvG of GW? Sadly, i think we are putting to much on the plate of devs, which i personaly think are already over worked. meaning there are a lot of demands, in pvp, wvw and pve. the some point we have to decide i GvG is within the focus and hkps the wvw balance? i would venture a guess how ppl are confused. least in this thread..

Johje Holan.4607:

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

Guild Wars 1 was so successful because of the varying types of PvP. GvG, Heroes Ascent, Team PvP, Random Arenas, Alliance Battles. The variety created balance and not over population.

This plus it was just a much better game. The PvE was better too. I still can go in and play some PvE in GW1 and enjoy it. I can’t stand the PvE in GW2.

Back to your point and another posters – I don’t see how an official GvG is going to help with WvW population imbalance?

The idea of a long deserved GvG system, actually would pull highly organized WvW guilds out of the system, for times when GvG is in play. It’s completely a wanted system, beyond the band-aid we have now. As a matter of fact, if ANet implemented a flat map (similar to what we have now) it’d be a far better GvG system than we have now.

It’s very hard to actually gauge the impact, but some thoughts about it is, a more focused Guild Experience, which in general would move the groups that focus on this type of battle system out of the WvW system, helping spread out the pop. NSP has one really sizable group that would absolutely love a GvG system. It’s a nitch group, but one that could actually be catered to by providing an arena (flat map) so they can extend the battle beyond WvW opponents.

Otokomae.9356:

PabbyGaul.9682:

Apparently, there aren’t any ecologists that play/program in this game.

The slow polarization of WvW servers is inevitable because the system doesn’t mimic reality and is being played by real people. There is NO incentive to move to lower populated areas because right now More Population = More Kills = More Rewards. Its not rocket science…….its ecology.

Scale Magic Find, Drop Rates and Experience based on simulating a limited resource (Bags) rather than an infinite one (because its computer game) and the problem solves itself.

The result would be that high population servers have a severely impaired Magic Find, Drop rate, and Experience bonus in WvW. WHY?….Because in reality bags don’t drop out of thin air, they are a limited resource. So if there’s only a thousand bags to be had, I would much rather be after them with only 50 ppl rather than 2000. Making these stat bonuses inversely proportional to population mimics the reality that when you have lots and lots of people good stuff is harder to find. Exp would scale also because fighting on lower populations is simply more challenging. If it wasn’t people wouldn’t be leaving. If yer always the underdog why shouldn’t their efforts be considered more difficult? Isnt experience related to the difficulty of the task…ect.

So….the solution is really simple. Limit rewards in a way that mimics the consequences of actual population size.

The details of this idea were already submitted via Adopt-A-Dev. Would welcome some criticism.

Well, this was a nice try, but most of your argument is inaccurate. First of all, bags don’t drop out of thin air in WvW, and the number of bags in WvW is limited… by the number of players ON THE OTHER SERVER. So if, say, BG went down to T8 for a week and fought Eredon Terrace and Anvil Rock, most of Blackgate’s players would already be getting FAR fewer bags than they’re used to, even without your Magic Find scaling, while the players from ET and AR would likely get more bags that week (at least, the bags would there, running around on the maps ready to be killed.)

Second, this isn’t really a solution to anything. I’m on Blackgate, which according to these forums is the stackiest of stacked servers in any game anywhere ever, and I’ve never known or even heard of anyone transferring here for the easy XP! lol
The players who “stacked” the top servers level outside of WvW because it’s faster, and no one really appreciates having the rally-bait tag along during competition. And it’s pretty well-known that WvW is probably the WORST place in the game to farm for bags or gold, especially when you consider that much of WvW is already a gold sink. If you look at this thread, you’ll see many people are even advocating that we RAISE Magic Find on EVERYONE in WvW, just to get more people out there! I don’t agree with that, but you could make all of WvW a “No-Drops Zone”, with absolutely no loot at all, and it wouldn’t have much affect on the Population Imbalance that this thread is here to discuss, because server populations are not based on the “Awesome Loot” found in WvW, the population difference in WvW at the moment are based on people moving around looking for a competitive environment that they enjoy (large-scale, small-scale, easy-wins, underdogs, etc) and/or people not moving for the sake of server-loyalty or simply wanting to stay put and play with their friends. People go to EotM for Loot, if they’re really trying to avoid PvE (they run dungeons if they need Loot in a hurry).

So feel free to scale Magic Find, Experience, Karma, whatever, or even remove rewards in WvW altogether, it won’t have any real effect on Population Imbalance.

+1,000,000 to you sir. You said it, from a really well received perspective IMO.