Should the Transfer System be fixed?

I think, ANet has essentially two design-flaws in the transfer system, that lead to the current mass-transfers just after every relink, that destroys the idea of balancing by relinking:1) The price depends only on the individual servers and not on the total population of the link. One should also consider the link status, e.g. above average populated link then there's a surcharge (e.g. + 2000 gems) on the transfer price, average then it stays as it is, below average then there's a discount (e.g. costs only half as much) and maybe even rewards as proposed by enkidu.5937 below2) Transfers do not directly change the population status of servers & links (Today it takes several days till the population-status adapts to mass-transfers, more than enough time for massive coordinated overstacking). It would be better if every transfer directly influences the game hours, e.g. if a player transfers from A to B, and X is the average number of game hours per player on A, then directly at the transfer A-population := A-population -X and B-population := B-population + X (And similar for the whole link-status)

Is that supposed to be fixed before the alliance system? I suppose it is too costly. But I also have no idea when the alliance system will be finished. Should it need more years, it would probably be worth it. (But for a real fix both problems need to be solved, fixing only one of them doesn't work, because the players coordinate themselves during the transfer to a small time window of a few hours.)

As a short-term remedy, the time window for transfers could be limited: Transfers are only possible in week 6 with 8 weekly linkings (7 with 9 weekly linkings).Then

• The population is at least 5 (6) weeks long as balanced as possible by linking
• After the transfers, the population status can still adapt to the changes for 2 weeks, so that the new linkings are correct again.

Presumably this would solve the mass transfer problem completely (because it is no longer worth to transfer) at the expense of the somewhat limited "friendship reunion". But that might even be the problem that prevents such a solution: ANet wouldn't earn much less on transfers.

Fight fire with fire. Anet makes money out of transfers, so they will stay. We need more (sic) ^^ transfers, but in the opposite direction, to compensate the current bandwaggoning flux and immediately give back population to abandoned links.

Give an incentive to make ppl transfer to a low populated server in an overall low-populated link:

• give a reward buff for 4 weeks after transfering to a low populated link and server (e. g. +100% pips, reward track progress, bags, Gold, EXP, Karma)
• pips can still be earned directly after transfer to a low populated server

The suggestions in the TO would be easy to start with, as well.

I think restricted it to the one week before re-links is the easiest short term solution. I get that it would be inconvenient for those who want to transfer for other reasons, but a 7-week waiting period isn't the end of the world, especially considering PvE and sPvP are unaffected by what server you're on.

@enkidu.5937 said:Fight fire with fire. Anet makes money out of transfers, so they will stay. We need more (sic) ^^ transfers, but in the opposite direction, to compensate the current bandwaggoning flux and immediately give back population to abandoned links.

Give an incentive to make ppl transfer to a low populated server in an overall low-populated link:

• give a reward buff for 4 weeks after transfering to a low populated link and server (e. g. +100% pips, reward track progress, bags, Gold, EXP, Karma)
• pips can still be earned directly after transfer to a low populated server

The suggestions in the TO would be easy to start with, as well.

I appreciate your intent but I think this would be abused. I could see bandwagoners all just going to the lowest population server to flood it causing it to raise up to the top just to crash again once people repeated the steps next time to gain the boons and fight back up thru the ranks.

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

@enkidu.5937 said:Fight fire with fire. Anet makes money out of transfers, so they will stay. We need more (sic) ^^ transfers, but in the opposite direction, to compensate the current bandwaggoning flux and immediately give back population to abandoned links.

Give an incentive to make ppl transfer to a low populated server in an overall low-populated link:

• give a reward buff for 4 weeks after transfering to a low populated link and server (e. g. +100% pips, reward track progress, bags, Gold, EXP, Karma)
• pips can still be earned directly after transfer to a low populated server

The suggestions in the TO would be easy to start with, as well.

To avoid that abuse it is vital that point 2 is fixed as well: Status changes need to be immediate on every single transfer. This prevents flooding, it can just be filled up-to average, everyone later (even a ms later) will not get the rabat or bonus and people much later (when the link goes to above average), will be required to even pay the surcharge.

@Dayra.7405 said:

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

@enkidu.5937 said:Fight fire with fire. Anet makes money out of transfers, so they will stay. We need more (sic) ^^ transfers, but in the opposite direction, to compensate the current bandwaggoning flux and immediately give back population to abandoned links.

Give an incentive to make ppl transfer to a low populated server in an overall low-populated link:

• give a reward buff for 4 weeks after transfering to a low populated link and server (e. g. +100% pips, reward track progress, bags, Gold, EXP, Karma)
• pips can still be earned directly after transfer to a low populated server

The suggestions in the TO would be easy to start with, as well.

I was more referring to enkidu's point about granting boosts to groups that move to lower populations. If you go with that kind of system you would still be encouraging more movement where as I think they were referring to encouraging people to balance thinking that smaller groups would move about. But if big groups just did that we are back to wild swings in the population which is what also throws off matches and is counter-intuitive to the linking calculations. We have already seen groups doing mass bandwagoning to a lower servers to group up and move that server up now that its is stacked. I wouldn't want to give those peeps free buffs. I think your intent is to balance over stacking which is a good thought but not at the price of less stability in population than we have now. Think we would need to target both, less overstacking and more stability in population. I get it server pride is dead for most but there are still a lot of people that don't server hop today so maybe some incentive for staying in a place longer. This may change with alliances, but odds are good people are already figuring out how to game the alliance system as well.

Edit: on reference

Restricting transfers would certainly improve the game, and it's probably worth the dev time unless alliances are coming along a lot sooner than we all believe . . .

But you also have to consider that the one thing we know for certain is that the vast majority of players don't want the more balanced matchups that restricted transfers and the alliance system will bring, as evidenced by their behavior under the current system . . .

@Gop.8713 said:But you also have to consider that the one thing we know for certain is that the vast majority of players don't want the more balanced matchups that restricted transfers and the alliance system will bring, as evidenced by their behavior under the current system . . .

Yeah I know, in a balanced 50:50 match only 50% of the players have won, while in an unbalanced 80:20 match, 80% of the people have won the match.That's why we have these mass-transfers after re-balance happen, but I think at least in EU (I don't know NA) they aren't the (vast) majority.

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

@"enkidu.5937" said:Fight fire with fire. Anet makes money out of transfers, so they will stay. We need more (sic) ^^ transfers, but in the opposite direction, to compensate the current bandwaggoning flux and immediately give back population to abandoned links.

Give an incentive to make ppl transfer to a low populated server in an overall low-populated link:

• give a reward buff for 4 weeks after transfering to a low populated link and server (e. g. +100% pips, reward track progress, bags, Gold, EXP, Karma)
• pips can still be earned directly after transfer to a low populated server

The suggestions in the TO would be easy to start with, as well.

Make each move be more expensive than your last +50% each time. No points etc for one month after you move.That would stop the guilds moving 'for the fights' and instead they might actually try and improve the server they are on instead of insulting everyone, calling everyone noob,etc and then ruining the server voice comms and then bandwagonning off to the next server to destroy...and of course if they really are moving 'for the fights' they won't mind anyway:-)

Anet doesn't care. Similar requests have been put up numerous times, they just don't care.Not only that, there will always be the vocal minority going against those requests just because they don't want their p2w transfer to become more expensive.The game is dying, the community killed it, anet killed it, just play it while it last.

In no particular order or system:

• No point changing Transfer system when they're working on Alliances, which will make it moot.
• The best change, from the very start, from a WvW design perspective, would have been to have disabled it straight away. But that would never have worked.
• The largest problem really comes from having anything tied to a competitive aspect linked to a server, before MegaServer people where trying to transfer to the "best pve servers" etc. Flat out, servers is a horrible system for this.
• If you're going to fix Transfer, you're also going to need to poke at the requirement of transferring, atm anyone can transfer almost whenever they want for no reason, just spend some gems and click a button. And that's going to be a nasty hornets nest.
• Just setting the Link transfer cost to the same as the Host cost (or full) would likely solve some of the unorganized band-wagoning, but do nothing to stop the organized ones.
• Limit transfer to once per 6 months, watch forum froth. Means people are stuck on the same server for 3 re-links. Means ANet could actually calculate the servers somewhat before they change.... again...
• Limit transfer time to last 2 weeks before re-link, close it the day before re-link. Watch the forums froth.
• Encouragement to go to low..... sorry thats medium servers, would be nice but likely won't accomplish much.

Now if you want to have some fun:

• All rewards (loot, wxp, pips, participation, etc) scale to the number of players on your team nearby. The more players, the less all over rewards for everyone. Now watch as every medium server hits "full" within the week. And the forums froth.

@"joneirikb.7506" said:

Now if you want to have some fun:

• All rewards (loot, wxp, pips, participation, etc) scale to the number of players on your team nearby. The more players, the less all over rewards for everyone. Now watch as every medium server hits "full" within the week. And the forums froth.

This would be kind of amusing. But, playing on a server that everyone trolls non-stop, instead of just pulling our tactics before zerging us, they would stand next to us doing nothing, to make sure we both lose our structures AND get little to no loot/rewards.

@Dayra.7405 said:... that lead to the current mass-transfers just after every relink, that destroys the idea of balancing by relinking:... because the players coordinate themselves during the transfer to a small time window of a few hours.)

If players really coordinate themselves for transfer in a small time window it is difficult to imagine this is a widespread practice and concerns more than a few dozen players per server.

Do we have any knowledge about actual numbers? Any statistics? How much transfer-players are we talking about? What is the current upper limit for a server population? Is it 10.000 players per server or more or maybe even less? Does the system count players who haven't logged in for months or even years? What is the average percentage of server populations active in WvW for more than just the dailies?

Questions over questions, do we have any answers? We know the system is build from another angle than WvW. We know ANet is working on a great 'restructuring'. Asking to fix this issue now after 7 years while they are working on a whole new approach and have to stomach the loss of 100 colleagues may be a bit too much. Besides, the gems needed for all those transfers help to pay the bills for ANet.

If we are talking about just a few hundred transfers every 2months in a system of tens of thousands of players a possible fix worthy to be considered doable should be very easy to implement for ANet. Maybe the current Glicko system can make the new server pairing in a much shorter time span than 2months. If server pairing happens every 2 weeks than maybe players will get tired of server hopping very soon.

Just open up every server for some juicy drama while we wait on alliances. Its not like anyone is doing anything anyways. Its just karma trains outside of prime time and even then the action lasts for an hour at most.

The problem isn't transfers but stacking. Allowing 50 or more players to transfer cheaply to a top or bottom server is a fundamental flaw because it frequently takes weeks for a server group to settle. In the meantime every other server abandoned or flooded gets a feast or famine problem. That said nobody wants to be stuck on a server group they find toxic so some transferring is a good idea.

ANet needs to promote population diversification and curtail population concentration. There are simple quick fixes. I would suggest making it relatively cheap for players to move from top servers and limiting the number of players that can transfer to a server at a given time.

@"Percy.2954" said:Questions over questions, do we have any answers?

For some we do. For some we can estimate from our experience.

Do we have any knowledge about actual numbers?

How much transfer-players are we talking about?Let me give you an example I know:On Thu 4. July people transfered from Kodash to Dzagonur, people in german forum discussed it was 3-4 guilds plus followers. But this was only the Germans on Kodash, also a lot of international players transferred, all in all a few hundered. Naturally (due to the pip-system) they transfer within 24hours (Thursday evening till before reset), while the current transfer system needs 5 days (till Tuesday evening) to "notice" this change. More than enough time for a coordinated jump, plus even a weekend for late followers.When it finally did, Server-Pop on Kodash went from "Full" to "Medium" and Dzagonur from "Very High" to "Full". So a not small amount of Kodash's total WvW-population transferred.

What is the current upper limit for a server population? Is it 10.000 players per server or more or maybe even less?

The upper-limit for a server population is not the number of players , but the number of hours player spend in WvWhttps://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Yaks-Bend/first#post6513382

ANet never publishes that, but we can observe servers that are full and not linked: They aren't able to fill all maps in primetime, quite often not even on reset.A map is filled, if there are around 100 players per side on it (a bit less, ANet played with that number, which is the mayor cause of skill-laag.).So the maximum is below 400 player per link that can be online in WvW at the same time, a full unlinked server has problems hitting that limit.Player at of-time are usually only a fraction of those in primetime. (Talking about EU, I've no clue about NA)So I would estimate current server limit as: 300 (player on in prime, maps 75% filled) 2 (hours of prime) 7 (days of a match) * 1.5 (off-time hours sum up to 50% of that)= 6300 hours per week as the current limit of "Full".

That makes around 500 player, where each plays 2 hours a day every week, or around 3000 player doing just dailies.Of course, both types are mixed, and all server have a different mixture of them, and every player is a mixture of both types as well.Probably a Full server has around 500-1000 player entering WvW per week.

Does the system count players who haven't logged in for months or even years?

If they have not logged in, they spend 0 hours in WvW, so they count 0.

What is the average percentage of server populations active in WvW for more than just the dailies?

A player that does dailies generate score by that (except by killing veterans) , but he doesn't need long for that.Say 15min a day? So a just daily player adds 7 0.25, i.e. less than 2hours to server pop, a WvW-guildplayers, that plays 2 hours prime every day adds 7 2 = 14 hours to server pop. Both amounts are summed up.

We know the system is build from another angle than WvW. We know ANet is working on a great 'restructuring'.They do since nearly 2 years, and there is no estimate when they finished.Next month? This year? Next year? In a few years, probably not even ANet knows.The relevant question is: will it come before the player are gone. And for that it may pay-of to fix serious problems of the current system.

If server pairing happens every 2 weeks than maybe players will get tired of server hopping very soon.

Yeah shortening the link period to 2 weeks would be a solution as well.

When you really dig down, transfers are not the core problem, they are how a portion of the WvW player-base responds to the problem. The core problem is that there are not enough players across most timezones to balance out the matchups in every tier. I think the best solution on the NA servers is probably to reduce the tiers from 4 to 3 (there are rarely queues outside of reset nowdays). But I don't know if Anet sees that as a positive move.

@Djamonja.6453 said:When you really dig down, transfers are not the core problem, they are how a portion of the WvW player-base responds to the problem. The core problem is that there are not enough players across most timezones to balance out the matchups in every tier. I think the best solution on the NA servers is probably to reduce the tiers from 4 to 3 (there are rarely queues outside of reset nowdays). But I don't know if Anet sees that as a positive move.

The best solution to this is: Reanimate EotM (which can adapt the number of parallel played maps), add EB (and maybe the border maps as well) to it and shut-down WvW (as WvW has always 4 maps per tier at every time, 2h a day full, 22h a day empty).Reducing the number of tiers to say 1-2, may help a bit as well, but at the cost of queues-from-hell in primetime, as peole tend to spread of into of-time, when primetime has mega-queue. (But lets do the math :) : Capacity of a single tier is: 100 (per map and side) 4 (maps) 3 (sides) 24 (hours of a day) 7 (days) = 201'600 player hours, if a full server has 6500 player-hours as above we would need 31 full server (~10 linked together per side) to fill a single match 24/7 ;) that's an amount in the order of current EU and NA together)A third possibility is: weight the skirmish-points by player-hours spend in that skirmish. Then coverage becomes mostly irrelevant for match outcome.

@Dayra.7405 said:

The only solution to this is: Reanimate EotM (which can adapt the number of parallel played maps), add EB to it and shut-down WvW (as WvW has always 4 maps per tier at every time, 2h a day full, 22h a day empty).Reducing the number of tiers to say 1-2, may help a bit as well, but at the cost of queues-from-hell in primetime, as peole tend to spread of into of-time, when primetime has mega-queue.

I think at least half the WvW player-base would quit if Anet replaced the WvW maps with EoTM. You can't just add maps as one side gets more players because what if the other side doesn't have more players? Are you just going to create an instance with one side having 30 players and the other side having zero?

@Djamonja.6453 said:I think at least half the WvW player-base would quit if Anet replaced the WvW maps with EoTM.

I did not said replace WvW-Maps with EotM map, I said replace the concept of 7 days 24hours matches in fixed tiers by map-instance allocation on demand.(add the WVW maps under the EotM match system, i.e. under mega-server system like PvE) => no queues (all want to play EB, just open another EB map), no empty maps (no one want to play: close the maps when they are empty)

You can't just add maps as one side gets more players because what if the other side doesn't have more players? Are you just going to create an instance with one side having 30 players and the other side having zero?

Current EotM did, and it had better filled maps and more fights than WvW before the PIP system killed it. But who says that sides (colors) have to be fixed?Stay alone, form a party, or even form a squad and join (with the whole party/squad) EotM, the system adds you (your party/squad) to the weakest team, will definitely be more balanced than everything we currently have.

@"Dayra.7405" said:Reanimate EotMOne could propably also turn the EotM mechanic around: Ppl that only log into WvW from time to time, for rewards, with no real affiliation to their server / community, one could let them chose to become a "server-free agent" (instead of chosing one specific server). Kind of mercenaries, that every time they log in, they get assigned to aserver that is currently heavily outnumbered and would play there until they log out.

Maybe give them a "+15% rewards", cause they are mercenaries :p

Maybe give them restrictions like "not allowed to pull tactics" or even "not allowed to place or use siege", to prevent ppl from trolling around.

@enkidu.5937 said:

@"Dayra.7405" said:Reanimate EotMOne could propably also turn the EotM mechanic around: Ppl that only log into WvW from time to time, for rewards, with no real affiliation to their server / community, one could let them chose to become a "server-free agent" (instead of chosing one specific server). Kind of mercenaries, that every time they log in, they get assigned to aserver that is currently heavily outnumbered and would play there until they log out.

Do you think this would be used by "noble" players wanting to help the weak?

No.

It will be used by players on weak servers in the hopes of landing on something better at that moment, so they can win. Players on strong servers wont use this feature. They will stay. Because they win.

Linking and transfers does exactly what it's made for, thus no problem to be fixed

@"Dawdler.8521" said:People seem to forget that Anet - as much as they'd like to - cant create players out of thin air and add to the total amount for balance.Then add "forced recruitment" like Napoleon did.

forced recruitment:Players from an outnumbered server can port to Lion's Arc, and mark other players. The marked player is instantly transfered to WvW and can only port back to Lion's Arc after completing a reward track.:p

+1 player on a server means -1 on another.closing a tier has been suggested a lot

Do you think this would be used by "noble" players wanting to help the weak?thats why I wrote: give them +% rewards

It will be used by players on weak servers in the hopes of landing on something better at that moment, so they can win. Players on strong servers wont use this feature. They will stay. Because they win.add gem costs to prevent constant switching