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Gandara server perma-locked


Laurencius.9258

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So, obviously we are not allowed to say anything negative about the game, or our comments will be removed, so let's discuss how GOOD it is that the WONDERFUL folks at Anet have perma-locked the Gandara server so that no new players can join. This means that, even though we are always outnumbered on WVW, which is a GOOD thing, our server is still locked for so we can't get any new people to join to help on WVW. Again, this is a GOOD thing and we are very HAPPY with the FINE folks at Anet for making sure we are always vastly outnumbered in WVW.

Now, a friend of mine had an interesting suggestion for a workaround regarding this GOOD thing Anet is doing for Gandara. He thought it would be a clever idea if everyone on Gandara moved to the Baruch Bay server. Why do that, you ask, especially since Baruch Bay is a Spanish speaking server? Well, here's my friend's clever reasoning: since Baruch Bay is the only Spanish server, Anet can't lock it - if they did, then new Spanish speakers wouldn't have a server at all and Anet would be guilty of discrimination against the 2nd most spoken language on Earth. Thus, everyone on Gandara, plus all their friends could finally be on a single server. We'd no longer be permanently outnumbered in WVW and Baruch Bay would become the new WVW super-power server. We'd never be outnumbered again and we'd never have the issue of friends being unable to join our server.

I like my friend's idea. I like it a lot.

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Well then everyone else would just also move to BB and we all could be on one server that never locks and sit in the que all day. They have transfers for a reason. If you unhappy move and join the dudes that transfer every 2 months to try and stack to win nothing. I doubt everyone going to BB at 1800 gems but yeah that has always been an option to stack BB that never closes it's not like your friend came up with some amazing never before thought of idea

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The Gandara WVW players want to move en masse to a single server, not in ones and twos to random servers - if it's a server that can be locked, some might get locked out before we are all able to transfer, thus sabotaging our effort to stay together. Gandara has been locked for years. Not kidding - years. Which, of course, is a GOOD thing!

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@Laurencius.9258 said:The Gandara WVW players want to move en masse to a single server, not in ones and twos to random servers - if it's a server that can be locked, some might get locked out before we are all able to transfer, thus sabotaging our effort to stay together. Gandara has been locked for years. Not kidding - years. Which, of course, is a GOOD thing!

Not true, it opened during the EU rollback fiasco. Fake news.

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@"Laurencius.9258" said:Gandara has been locked for years. Not kidding - years.

That is an exaggeration and you are wrong. Gandara is full since 2020-05-18. That is not even one year.

And before that Gandara oscillated between "full" and "very high". Whenever the server population dropped to "very high" only a few days later it was "full" again.

So, it looks to me that Gandara is overstacked and overpopulated and that is the reason why it is full.

My guess is: As long as players do not play less on Gandara, or move to other servers, Gandara will continue to stay full.

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@Zok.4956 You say it wasn't locked prior to 5/18/2020 - source please - I don't remember it being open then. It's been locked for so long it's a running gag among Gandarans that if it ever opened we'd never forget the exact date and time. Gandara is not over-stacked and it is not over-populated. Whenever you go into WVW there are maybe 5 Gandara players vs 50 players on both the other servers. How does 5 people constitute a overpopulated? Please explain Zok, since you have all the answers.

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@Seductive.5741 I stand corrected and I stand proven correct. Gandara suposedly is full with 291 players, yet Baruch Bay has a whopping 516 players and is only very high - it never locks. It is also interesting the other servers get to have more players than Gandara - Seafarer's Rest gets to have 502, Underworld gets 427 (and isn't even full), Riverside 330, Miller's Sound 336, Piken Square 341, Gunnar's Hold 373 - no wonder Gandara is always outnumbered. This is solid proof Anet has it's thumbs on the scale against Gandara and isn't even troubling themselves to hide it. Very valuable info this - I cannot thank you enough.

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@"Seductive.5741" said:https://gw2mists.com/worlds/Gandara

There you got a source.While that is a good enough source available to us players, I think it is prudent to point out that it supports Gandara's case a fair bit if you look closer at the dates. We're talking about a server that seems more or less permanently locked for years on end with a couple of week-long exceptions every other month.

At the same time, I think Laurencius should spend less time trying to interpret and connect data that isn't in that context and spend more time looking at the old forums where ArenaNet themselves have posted alot of information that contradicts all the tinfoilery that goes on. Anet has released information about what factors contribute to population flagging, how it is done and how it decays. It's still there, you can go read it today.

That also reflects the two sides of the whole Gandara discussion with regards to the Population Cap and Relinking Systems. On the one hand Gandara is in a particularily bad place because of how the server is composed on the other hand they have brought a fair portion of their problems upon themselves. That is also a shame because the Relinking system is designed in contradiction to the game as a whole. The players and behaviours regarded as virtues elsewhere are actually negative factors in the Relinking system. It isn't good to be nice, helpful, casual or socially active in the Relinking system.

At the same time, Gandara and its community has also largely dug its own grave in this regard as the the server was happy to pose as the "nice and pug-friendly" server here on these forums and elsewhere. The server is full of anti-Alliances apologists who have wallowed in "server identity", keeps hammering on about removing EU T5 as some dreamt up of solution to the problems and talked down to communities who have been forced to change servers in the past without realizing that they essentially share the same problems even if they are brought about by different attractions. It is only starting to dawn on Gandara now that their own guilds have the same problems as guilds on other servers etc. While this has been a commonly argued point since the system came out in 2016 and the first few link-servers got stacked. There is a post by Etheri on Reddit in 2016 that essentially summarizes everything I tend to say in more or less the same way. This has been the truth since 2016 and anyone who has only recently understood it has been engaging in quite an unhealthy amount of ostrich behaviour.

The solution, as always, from Anet Tyler B's post outlining Relinking in the spring of 2016 that already back then had a short comment about another, more elaborate, system up to that system being named World restructuring in 2018 (amusingly enough, the same term used for Megaservers in 2014) is Alliances. Anyone who does not subscribe to that just keeps putting their heads in the sand.

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@Laurencius.9258 said:@Seductive.5741 I stand corrected and I stand proven correct. Gandara suposedly is full with 291 players, yet Baruch Bay has a whopping 516 players and is only very high - it never locks. It is also interesting the other servers get to have more players than Gandara - Seafarer's Rest gets to have 502, Underworld gets 427 (and isn't even full), Riverside 330, Miller's Sound 336, Piken Square 341, Gunnar's Hold 373 - no wonder Gandara is always outnumbered. This is solid proof Anet has it's thumbs on the scale against Gandara and isn't even troubling themselves to hide it. Very valuable info this - I cannot thank you enough.

Aww you don't even understand how to interpret what you see, "stand proven correct", oof.

@Laurencius.9258 said:@Seductive.5741 If that's true, why don't the numbers change?

The numbers don't change because people registered mostly during the anet-promoted christmas giveaway on that site. Then people can opt in and out of sharing their account details. Who cares why it doesn't change, what matters is that it is not the actual number of players.

@Laurencius.9258 said:Whenever you go into WVW there are maybe 5 Gandara players vs 50 players on both the other servers. How does 5 people constitute a overpopulated? Please explain Zok, since you have all the answers.

Also the answer to this is pretty simple: what you just wrote is false. Keep overexaggerating, I'm sure that will help you make a valid point.

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@"subversiontwo.7501" said:At the same time, Gandara and its community has also largely dug its own grave in this regard as the the server was happy to pose as the "nice and pug-friendly" server here on these forums and elsewhere. The server is full of anti-Alliances apologists who have wallowed in "server identity", keeps hammering on about removing EU T5 as some dreamt up of solution to the problems and talked down to communities who have been forced to change servers in the past without realizing that they essentially share the same problems even if they are brought about by different attractions. It is only starting to dawn on Gandara now that their own guilds have the same problems as guilds on other servers etc.

We got rid of that part of the community in October 2020. The more toxic-and-trolling part of the community chose to leave the server after several meetings were held to discuss their behavior. Luckily for the rest of the server, they felt less welcome and decided to move to a different server.

But what your entire post is basically saying: "You don't get rewarded for server loyalty. You get punished, rather." If the business model is set to be "people transferring servers by buying gems", financially is makes sense to force players to move around constantly. But does it make sense morally? I'm sure NCSoft cares less about how, and more about the black numbers in the spreadsheets telling them that they've made a profit. But what's the point of calling it "home world" if it's not your home? A nomad system where you need to pay hard-earned money to play the game properly is not the morally right system. It will drive players away. Nobody should wonder whether or not to transfer servers on a weekly basis.

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@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@"Seductive.5741" said:

There you got a source.While that is a good enough source available to us players, I think it is prudent to point out that it supports Gandara's case a fair bit if you look closer at the dates. We're talking about a server that seems more or less permanently locked for years on end with a couple of week-long exceptions every other month.

At the same time, I think Laurencius should spend less time trying to interpret and connect data that isn't in that context and spend more time looking at the old forums where ArenaNet themselves have posted alot of information that contradicts all the tinfoilery that goes on. Anet has released information about what factors contribute to population flagging, how it is done and how it decays. It's still there, you can go read it today.

That also reflects the two sides of the whole Gandara discussion with regards to the Population Cap and Relinking Systems. On the one hand Gandara is in a particularily bad place because of how the server is composed on the other hand they have brought a fair portion of their problems upon themselves. That is also a shame because the Relinking system is designed in contradiction to the game as a whole. The players and behaviours regarded as virtues elsewhere are actually negative factors in the Relinking system. It isn't good to be nice, helpful, casual or socially active in the Relinking system.

At the same time, Gandara and its community has also largely dug its own grave in this regard as the the server was happy to pose as the "nice and pug-friendly" server here on these forums and elsewhere. The server is full of anti-Alliances apologists who have wallowed in "server identity", keeps hammering on about removing EU T5 as some dreamt up of solution to the problems and talked down to communities who have been forced to change servers in the past without realizing that they essentially share the same problems even if they are brought about by different attractions. It is only starting to dawn on Gandara now that their own guilds have the same problems as guilds on other servers etc. While this has been a commonly argued point since the system came out in 2016 and the first few link-servers got stacked. There is a post by Etheri on Reddit in 2016 that essentially summarizes everything I tend to say in more or less the same way. This has been the truth since 2016 and anyone who has only recently understood it has been engaging in quite an unhealthy amount of ostrich behaviour.

The solution, as always, from Anet Tyler B's post outlining Relinking in the spring of 2016 that already back then had a short comment about another, more elaborate, system up to that system being named World restructuring in 2018 (amusingly enough, the same term used for Megaservers in 2014) is Alliances. Anyone who does not subscribe to that just keeps putting their heads in the sand.

Couldn't agree more. Especially on the "pug friendly" part. Gandara makes people leave gandara, as a comm of old used to say

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@"primatos.5413" said:Anet not telling the truth about how servers are defined "full" or whatever .. it is monkeys (maybe cats?) rolling dices ..not algorithm lol kkthxbb and better luck next time o7

Like currently EU t2. Underworld + FoW (Very High / High) has no doubt a lot more people than us and we are full/high.

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I'm on Gandara.

At prime-time and in fights we can hold our own.

But we are not competitive without a link. Just not enough people. I dug up total kills/deaths over a week (an imperfect metric I know) on an earlier thread which was removed, can't be bothered to do it again, but we're a good 25% behind 2 linked servers.

We were recently linked with Ruins of Surmia and met some great people. But now we're unlinked, we're not competitive and can't play with our new friends.

Fundamentally, the linking system is unsatisfactory, and especially unsatisfactory when there aren't enough links to go around.

Everyone reading this knows it, there's nothing new, but it doesn't stop it being frustrating.

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@adammantium.8031 said:I'm on Gandara.

At prime-time and in fights we can hold our own.

But we are not competitive without a link. Just not enough people.

It doesn’t help that as soon as gandara is without a link, people just up right stop playing as some attempt of defiance against anet, but then forget about the 60 people following Cormac for 10 hours on a Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday until very early hours. It was not long ago that gandara had one of the biggest blobs I have ever seen in the 6 years I’ve played this game, golem rushing eb at 4am....

One thing I have noticed about gandara atm, which is very different to what gandara used to be known for, is that it’s roamers don’t actually do anything anymore, they’d rather just gank players at the side of blob fights rather than flip/defend objectives. Another thing that is apparent is if there is no tag, people won’t even leave spawn, which again is odd for what gandara used to be like.

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A lot of players did stop playing in the hope that we could lower our population status and get some fresh blood into the community.I didn't agree with them, but I do think it's a damning indictment on Anet that they've created a game mode where players even think they can be rewarded for not playing the game.

I'll give you that we are lucky to have a single commander who tags up like clockwork on a Friday and Saturday night (often the only one), and can be largely uncontested for a few hours after 2am. We do come into Saturday and Sunday morning's quite strong. I don't feel that having a pugmander who runs particularly late twice a week negates the overall population difficulties, though.

I haven't found your observations about roamers to be accurate, at least when there's a presence on map to take advantage of their efforts.

All we can do in lieu of any solution being implemented is to voice our frustration as our community suffers.

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@Josh.4132 said:

@adammantium.8031 said:I'm on Gandara.

At prime-time and in fights we can hold our own.

But we are not competitive without a link. Just not enough people.

It doesn’t help that as soon as gandara is without a link, people just up right stop playing as some attempt of defiance against anet, but then forget about the 60 people following Cormac for 10 hours on a Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday until very early hours. It was not long ago that gandara had one of the biggest blobs I have ever seen in the 6 years I’ve played this game, golem rushing eb at 4am....

One thing I have noticed about gandara atm, which is very different to what gandara used to be known for, is that it’s roamers don’t actually do anything anymore, they’d rather just gank players at the side of blob fights rather than flip/defend objectives. Another thing that is apparent is if there is no tag, people won’t even leave spawn, which again is odd for what gandara used to be like.

Most of our more prominent roamers dont play often anymore. Especially after last relink, i haven't seen them at all.

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My comment was removed due to it quoting a comment that was also removed. I'll state it again in its own comment.

For all the people stating "just move servers, ez", you're forgetting that Gandara has a lot of players that are stubborn and server-loyal. They would rather not play for a month than transfer servers, just to prove a point.

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@"Arky.3072" said:My comment was removed due to it quoting a comment that was also removed. I'll state it again in its own comment.

For all the people stating "just move servers, ez", you're forgetting that Gandara has a lot of players that are stubborn and server-loyal. They would rather not play for a month than transfer servers, just to prove a point.

But then you have your answer to why gandara is always full. People don’t leave. And then when it does open up, for like a week, that many people move there that it most likely becomes too full again, which is an issue if people never leave.

It also kinda comes down to what people want from a server. If it’s just for the community, which you can’t really fault on gandara, then being outnumbered doesn’t really affect that, other than people complaining about being outnumbered, but you can still have fun with friends nonetheless. If it’s just easy fights then you get situations like bandwagon servers which generally lack any form of community.

You don’t need to be winning to be having fun with friends. What kills a server is people that stop playing because they have to actually put effort into fights rather than stomping on smaller groups. It ruins your own server, and the MU for the other two servers

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@adammantium.8031 said:

I'll give you that we are lucky to have a single commander who tags up like clockwork on a Friday and Saturday night (often the only one), and can be largely uncontested for a few hours after 2am. We do come into Saturday and Sunday morning's quite strong. I don't feel that having a pugmander who runs particularly late twice a week negates the overall population difficulties, though.

But then you’ve hit it on the head with being uncontested, which means you have more coverage than the other 2 server basically across the weekend, which is quite a strong position to have for a server which people believe is empty, but like I said, it’s close to 60 from reset to about 3/4am, thats a big contribution.

I’ve said it for about a year now, as nice as it is to have a commander which does that, it does absolutely zero favours for gandara. It’s keeping you in tiers that you can’t necessarily compete in, boosting your average playtime and adding to the problem of always being full. Gandara being full is basically your reward for golem rushing empty maps with 15 golems and 40 people vs 2 servers with 10 defenders between them.

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