500 gems to transfer to a hopeless server? wut?

Those gem prices are whack. Its like you are trying to make the smallest servers all funnel money into gems to transfer to the larger ones.....thereby slowly killing them off completely, making for easier times pairing them and other benefits since they offer to little as a group to the overall scoring. Which is fine.

I mean its kinda dumb tho since you are killing your own playerbase by doing that....alot of the players will just leave rather than transfer. ANd you funnel all the diehard members from each server into the already diehard large server communities, its easy to see how the large servers who are winners are always the winners.

People are looking to transfer into the highest costing servers, specifically the 1-3 ones that consistently win and don't get pairings (cause having pairings means you could run into unwinnable/hopeless matchups over and over in the future)

You are killing your own community here, and you are making matchups more 1-sided because the winners continue to win more as time goes by....not less under these circumstances. The high population servers are now infested by competent invested diehard players, and its pretty easy to see how 1 of those players is worth 2-4 of the normal players from SMALLL POPULATION WORLDS. That is whack that all the skill AND numbers goes into 1 server and the other is left with .....with wut? nothing. left to die.Then the matchups just get stale, and we continue on a trend that becomes more and more powerful as time goes on,

It would make more sense to make it cheap, if not free, to transfer to the smallest servers. Then any large guilds can join/stack obscure lesser servers, and we can create ways for people from the 24/7winning servers to change servers and make actual competition for their former servers. I'm sure there is plenty of discord in the higher population winning servers on how to do things....and im sure plenty of people would split and form their own factions if they were given a chance to. As it stands, they are forced to stay in their server though...its foolish for them to even think about changing servers cause the system is against them from the start. Allow people to move around....its a pretty simple concept. Just make the moving 1-way. So it still costs a crud ton to transfer to the highest servers, so if they do leave their safety nests there are risks!

ALot of people keep pressing the argument that allowing people to transfer for free, or next to nothing, to the smallest of servers will create more unbalanced matchups. This is a flawed argument. The game has designed things around map ques, so they balance things based on the highest que's possible for a map. Arrow carts and whatever are balanced based on what they do in matchups where the max number ofpeople on each of the 3 sides fight eachother. Reaching this point is the ideal! WE should want map ques for all the servers 24/7 if we really care about balanced matchups. WE should create avenues to make this happen. This would help create that scenario. It will maybe take a few weeks here and there, but we'll get to the point where the populations start to stabilize and we dont' have this HIGH vs LOW thing going on....we'll have medium-large all over, and from there we can balance the system better.

Will it create some problems in the short term? Yes.Will those problems solve themselves? Over time, Yes.Will it create more benefits in the long term? Heck yes it will.

Make it free to transfer to the small servers. Give it a month, we'll have a real gamemode again. Ur one part-time wvsw developer should be able to handle this in a day. No logical reason not to.

If the population algorithm would respond immediately, yes.

@"Strider Pj.2193" said:If the population algorithm would respond immediately, yes.

True.The change is dependent on the ability for it to register when a server status goes from medium ->large-> full status.

Should be easy to code that in though if it isn't already...or are the rumours true and those status' are just arbitrary qualitative labels made by anet after looking over population statistics every 6 months....? lol

I can picture them bringing up a chart every 6 months and looking over it for 5 minutes going "well okay we can change this server to.....largeeeeeee now probably.......change this one to fullll maybe...see what happens"

That would mean there is no system controlling the current transferring at all....only gem costs are blocking people from stacking servers that aren't closed. Could make a large server 5x the size of bg if you had enough people with enough coin.

Heck that seems easier, lets all just start a campaign to get everyone to transfer to a 500 gem server and we'll fill it over the course of a week till its 8x the size of the best full servers, then we can just have an instant winning server every week haha.

I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

I agree that some form of incentive is needed to get players off some of the really full servers.

I know FA, TC for two would tell you they don't feel full at all.

The worry is that some of the 'overfull' servers (i.e. BG) would not change but the ones tired of not being able to recruit new blood (FA, TC, JQ) would lose good guilds to smaller servers.

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

Well I'm not trying to be rude but.....didn't we all already pay? like.....2-3 times over by now?

I can buy anywhere from 5-50 hours of great gameplay with $5 on steam.Yet I should spend $5 and advocate for everyone else to spend $5 to support a broken system? Sounds like a scam.When the garbage man doesn't pick up ur garbage from ur curve, do you round up all ur neighbours and go to the city and pay them $5 per person to make sure they do what you already paid them to do?

I mean it solves the problem, and its just $5 as you said. So I guess that's something you would do? Its not something I would do.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem

I mean you are telling people to spend over 20 US dollars just to play wvsw in matchups where they aren't at risk of getting steamrolled week after week. That's more than the entire expansion price....lol. idiotic.

Its criminal to force us to pay them THAT much just to 'not be forced to lose' every week. Heck its criminal to make us pay anything. I mean you are familiar with the lootbox debate right? like battlefront 2 for example, you can pay money to have ridiculously op perks that make you a god compared to peopel who don't. And the game ISN"T free to play lol....so ur paying twice basically. You find a system like that fair? okay fine, ur entitled to ur opinion. There is a fine line, if you think its okay to force people to pay a few dollars here....then its okay to make them pay alot more dollars down the road for the same thing.

This is why people are concerned over monetizing everything around them. Sure, such a system seems to work on paper. You quantify everything in terms of money. You go to the store....it costs money to get there. You walk down the street.....it costs money to do that. You play a game, it costs money to do that. You work and make money, you get money for doing that. Ur whole life becomes a system of doing work for money and then slowly having ur money counter go down when you stop working.Such a system is fair, people would vote for it. Some people take issue with how far this system goes tho and the rules dictating its usage. So they like to draw lines. And without these lines we enter territory we cannot leave once we get to. And we'll hit the point where peoples lives are sacrificed just to make the system work. Its kinda depressing.

@Cerby.1069 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

I would understand, and sympathize with you, had the devs charged 5,000 gems for transfer, but c’mon... it’s $5 or potentially free... Your argument looks unwarranted from the outside perspective considering this game doesn’t even charge a monthly fee to play. And even if there was a monthly fee, your argument would still look weak.

the solution is simpler than that - make wvw completely random, like regular game map - and make it so people in guilds can jump to the same matches their guild members are in. Balance / stacking problem gone, fixed and wvw would turn into gvg.

If some T1 Server really believes they are the best, they can form a guild and prove it, otherwise - as far as I can see, their only advantage is having round the clock coverage - if lower tiered servers had round the clock coverage, they'd take the top tier ranks in a heartbeat from having faced insane outnumbered / severely imbalanced scenarios for so many years. Those deadly 1 shot / op builds everyone complains about, come from the lower tiers - by necessity.

further, we didn't pay real life money to play unfair games. - so there is a responsibility to fix this.

@Swagger.1459 said:

@Cerby.1069 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

@Swagger.1459 said:I’m not trying to be rude, but we are talking like $5... or you can transfer for FREE by exchanging like 100ish gold to 500 gems.

Seriously... $5 or possibly free.... how is that not “cheap”?

I'll take "$5 or potentially free" to agree with you then.

Still want to stand by your argument? Its gonna cost you....'nothing' as you seem to view it. I'll have $5 at the end though, and since ur opinion is so l ogical then I can just go and do the same to all the other people who are smart and logical on this forum. I can just ask them all for 5$ since its 'potentially free". Then at the end of the day I can have a few hundred dollars. But nothing wrong with that as you say. I mean, only a fool wouldn't do something potentially free right? People are not smart unless they give me that 5$ then. You know, I"m liking your argument more and more!

Even if you are paying 50 cents or 1 cent I would present you the same argument, no changes whatsoever. And you are paying more than $5, lets at least keep the facts straight in your argument. Then you are paying even more if your currency isn't USD. But I'm sure this is all trivial to the point you are making, where paying 28.70 dollars (the price of 1800 gems, the transfer cost to t1 for me) for a fun game you already paid for is, as you say, more than a fair request by anet.

I mean I can have a great deal of respect for arguments like your own, so long as they keep their facts straight. Its when you lie to people and bed the truth here and there...I take issue. Your argument as a whole tho is fine, after cleaning up those alt facts you presented I'm fine with it. I'm more than happy to accept it, as I already stated. I am very much center in my viewpoints of the world, I can accept right and left into my life so long as they are logical arguments.

You ever see that movie where people have to pay to survive? There's like a toll timer on their hearts and they pay money to keep it running. Then all the rich have so much money that they can actually buy time and live forever basically. Interesting parallels. And the rich are rich cause the poor all give them little bits of their money bit by bit....its only little bits though but get enough bits and its pretty impressive what you can get. Kinda basic economics for some people.

Good talk.

I've been kinda interested in the idea of moving the prices from:

Medium - 500 gemsHigh - 1000 gemsVery High - 1800 gemsFull - Locked

to:

Medium - FreeHigh - 500 gemsVery High - 1000 gemsFull - 2000 gems

And let the queues reign free on the full servers, until that free transfer to medium looks mighty tempting! Would be interesting to see how that would make the largest servers look after half a year.

Full should be locked for transfers.

@"Strider Pj.2193" said:If the population algorithm would respond immediately, yes.

Which it clearly don't by design. Which is why we have overstacked servers in the first place. It's all monetized this way. This is the "insert word here" way ANet chooses to make money from WvWers.

@Strider Pj.2193 said:Full should be locked for transfers.

I think his point was to allow transfers to full servers and waste your gems because now there is such a large que you can't play, lol.

@Loosmaster.8263 said:

@Strider Pj.2193 said:Full should be locked for transfers.

Being on a locked server, the queues aren't nearly as long. And for us, mainly reset, or one server, are the only queues.

I don't know. Maybe it WOULD incentivize people to destack...

@Ricky.4706 said:if lower tiered servers had round the clock coverage, they'd take the top tier ranks in a heartbeat from having faced insane outnumbered / severely imbalanced scenarios for so many years.

I don't entirely believe it. That experiment seems to have already been run with Anet having created teams that are larger in population than BG and the only server combo that actually accomplished the feat was Maguuma+link. All other server combos decided they didn't want to play against BG.

@Chaba.5410 said:

@Ricky.4706 said:if lower tiered servers had round the clock coverage, they'd take the top tier ranks in a heartbeat from having faced insane outnumbered / severely imbalanced scenarios for so many years.

And they did it only because of FotM train, everytime, all the time. Hard pass, methinks.

Op is seriously going way overboard over like $5.

You want free, because you don’t agree with $5? Then gather up some gold in-game and exchange your FREE game gold and buy your now FREE 500 gems for a FREE transfer.

@Chaba.5410 said:

@Ricky.4706 said:if lower tiered servers had round the clock coverage, they'd take the top tier ranks in a heartbeat from having faced insane outnumbered / severely imbalanced scenarios for so many years.

naw, it's true, I was there for the birth of both servers, and was briefly in HOD when they originally had the crown.

Blackgate was a concerted effort between several major alliances of guilds to get guilds from various time zones to have round the clock coverage. This is a fact that I along with many others vets from 1st gw2 beta observed.

Maguuma - became popular with the Goon Squad from Eve that came en masse to gw2 - they played hard and caught the attention other pvp intensive guilds - this was years after blackgate had already been established, - maguuma plays very well but has no where near the round the clock coverage blackgate has.

It's also a fact - as I've been involved in such strategies, that you can easily turn a match around in a matter of 1 hours to have an extreme lead with organized groups - blackgate has this ability around the clock, maguuma does not. Blackgates lead is no mystery nor skill nor magic, it is simply around the clock coverage, nothing more, nothing less - maguuma or any other server for that matter can't keep up.

No debating this, at least with me, I saw them all being created since Orbs of power were a thing, and even ran around with a few of the groups that were involved, In fact, I'm still in one of the first guilds that were hardcore wvw - which is now a ghost town, out of 393 members, I along with maybe 1 or 2 others are the only ones that log on to it these days. - it's creepy actually - a ghost town wvw guild.

And they have all stayed on their respective servers.....

The algorithm is more in line with the server pop than player speculation. What a mathematical algorithm can't calculate are the feelings of players and the high emo population of fairweathers on each and every link. The population in actuality is addressed by the algorithm. Fairweathers and snowflakes are a player based issue.

i can't even begin to imagine how many people quit because no one took the wvw ranking serious - the guild I'm in (or was, now that they are a ghost town ) was a part of the big alliance talks and got disillusioned with the way things panned out...they simply left. They were serious e-sport types.

This stacked format without a doubt prevented wvw from becoming anything worth taking serious. The hardcore players / pvprs saw this and wanted no part of it, because wvw and pvp is "Their" endgame and it was a corrupted meta that was here to stay. I have evidence of with my guild roster - they were part of a gaming review site audience that gave up on gw2 because the way the stacking went down. I stay in it hoping one day they come back, but it won't happen as long as this imbalance is allowed to continue. But if they do, you can trust I'm in one of the best wvw guilds in game lol.

not good enough to beat beastgate then!

In all honesty, kinda miss the days when people cared about stacking. bought good drama, much wow.

well if everyone else wants to play chess, and along comes wackgate throwing dodgeballs to their opponents face saying they won, no argument from me.
I admit tho, the good old days was fun, it was kinda like a running joke at the time, unfortunately ....this running joke became a standard.

back then wvw was still fresh and new, and I have to respect how well blackgate coordinated their server (many of whom originally brought HOD to fame - the guys originally from Hod were super talented - when they left HOD, it dropped in rank like a rock - they didn't have round the clock coverage - cue transfers to blackgate ) - anet shouldn't have let it continue like that though, this running lulz stunt had ruined wvw for people who were never a part of those talks and lost a great part of the game, to a running joke.

the parameters anet has recently set with skirmishes, links, and pop algorithms are better than they were 5 years ago. maybe a little too late, but they are steps in the right direction. WvWers don't play chess, we play epeen wars. All the trouble to go through to recruit guilds aren't worth it anymore. The more you get into server politics the more you realize no it isn't worth it. Guilds claiming to move to servers for better competition are in reality are looking for 1) gold to pump epeen status 2) which guilds on X server will carry to pump their top tier fight guild epeen status 3) which server has other guilds to stroke their epeen the bestest.

you really can't blame the guilds, they were all the guys that use to dominate hall of heros in gw1 united - that was a loyal guildwars base that loved gw pvp / competititon. - the problem became when those guilds united and stopped competing against each other. Now every new or non guilded player suffers because of it.

I mean, imagine if all of eve stopped fighting each other, and joined one server in Eve 2 - no contest to any new players joining. competition would come to a halt because all vet competitors stopped fighting each other and only went for new or non guilded players 24/7