One more for the road.8950

At this point it's probably not so much about what they prefer, it's about what they can do to stop the game mode from dying a slow death at the same rate it's currently doing. Which means making it easier to enter for newer or more casual players as well as having a dynamic way to adjust numbers automatically to not end up at the same place again further down the road.

Because one of these things also discriminates others. And it's not the server hopping ones. Today's server system gives people extremely different and uneven playground for getting into WvW already from the start based on whatever server you picked without knowing anything about it or what it was even used for back when you created an account.

And.... you will find this legacy mode being nothing else than a glorified chat box, a mIRC with a new GUI, as I said in another thread - as people just stop playing it and the mode loses players one by one or guild by guild. Or maybe it will be chatting while running in circles PPTing on maps with the only two other servers with any population, being careful you go at the same speed. Your suggestion turns WvW of tomorrow into today's EotM.

Also, for this, there are also just servers that doesn't fit the different players, even if there is a community going already. If you have a community being "policed" like some other people have been talking about in this forum just the last months - or even just servers with a couple or few strong personalities running the show - you'll have players on those servers that will draw a relieved breath getting away from it. And that can go several ways, just as much getting away from people that's been in the game mode for years berating anyone not understanding right away that they aren't doing things the "right way", or it might also be for keeping for the server down by not giving space to people that enjoy more focused fight or competitive content. Any server with a community that looks at any part of WvW while scoffing, be it GvG, PPT, BvB, chatmanding, voices squad only, roaming, dueling, havoc squads, you name it - you have a community with someone not fitting in.

Well, obviously the MU's won't be balanced, it's a week long beta without any tier settling whatsoever, so basically WvW in current state after relink and mass transfer where T1 material is in T4 and vice versa. Not to mention it's just world restructuring, the Alliance system hasn't even been implemented yet, other than a few community guilds or guilds banding together in a new one to bypass the lack of system for now. And what low pop servers will see, is that they find themselves in a world with other alliances and or guilds that fills up the space that today is empty - or taken by a link server that perhaps even drains them for even more players. Now it won't be a matter of people leaving a server with friends due to lack of options, if nothing else, it will be an alliance or guild that is paired with other alliances, guilds and players that together will make a world for that season. And if moving around it will be due to finding communities and people catering to your own interests and comfort, not whatever you happened to end up with and next to for years. People moving between guilds and player bases will be a more fluid and dynamic way to adjust to the game mode and least you won't be left behind due to no options or not wanting to shell out money on a move that might not give you anything you want anyway. And anyone afraid of fight guilds stacking an alliance running over everyone else will find that a) they are only active at certain times and their enemies will then be free to do whatever they want when they are not around, b) it won't take long before running over an enemy without any effort gets boringly stale and c) that boredom will lead to infighting and drama in a community with competitive people already well known for infighting and drama already and therefore d) won't last long whenever they try. Fight guilds and GvG is great content when it works, but it mostly works when there is an enemy to hone your skills against - when not it resorts to tchat and discord content instead.

I take it you weren't there when the Alpine Borderland spawns suddenly were decked out for Wintersday completely out of season? 😉

The thing tho, is that it might be boring for the people that has been there for years and years. It's not for new players. But as the years go by in the current system, it gets harder and harder for people new to the game mode to get into it. As the mode sheds players naturally as in any game, it gets even harder for others to get in, and therefore even more boring as the population gets smaller and players find it getting more and more stale as time passes.

If anything, the servers system we have TODAY gives guilds and commanders more power at the expense of the player base, as the only other option is to shell out money/gems to transfer to a place that might not even be better. Or, you know, not play.

Oh,, blast it,, I will just copy paste my post from THIS THREAD in the beta sub-forum It's kind of interesting to see so many in here talking about their community on their servers not understanding that not everyone has it. No matter how many times it gets said. Some might have had it in the past, but no longer, or they might never even have experienced being on a server with a somewhat united server community even if playing - by now - for years. There is quite a number of people that doesn't want to do/try out the mode in the game simply due to this. Or had bad experiences when trying it out. There is also servers having a community fitting themselves and their individuals, but that is very hard for someone new to claw their way into or to even understand - and my personal guess, or hope if you will, after talking to some of these people that has experienced these things might have a lower threshold for giving it another go.. If nothing else, if this new system gets implemented, you can give it several goes in fact, like every two months (or every new season) to see what changed. And if you find yourself in one you like, maybe you can even find a guild within those two months that you like and want to join for further game play. Not to mention the possibility that if a few PvE friends want to check out the game mode together, they absolutely can! Without transferring at a high costs. Back in the day the people you met and bonded with in PvE would also be in the same team in WvW, while people nowadays going from PvE to WvW might find themselves in a server without anyone they recognize, or barely anyone at all for that matter. And nobody to turn to asking for help other than map chat or team chat having no idea who is who and who might be the resident troll(s) and proud toxic player(s). I am sure NCSoft and Anet,, as most other game companies and mostly anyone else providing services for customers for that matter, doesn't necessarily base their decisions on what to try out and not on whoever yells loudest or posts the most posts about a topic of a very selected few in a sub-forum compared to players in the game mode (even if in decline) themselves. They see people are falling off the mode one by one, sometimes guild by guild, and they probably also see that people on servers wanting to keep their community will lose it too as their reason for even being there disappears - as I am sure you don't want your server to be a glorified chat box. It'd be like mIRC with a new GUI.

It's kind of interesting to see so many in here talking about their community on their servers not understanding that not everyone has it. No matter how many times it gets said. Some might have had it in the past, but no longer, or they might never even have experienced being on a server with a somewhat united server community even if playing - by now - for years. There is quite a number of people that doesn't want to do/try out the mode in the game simply due to this. Or had bad experiences when trying it out. There is also servers having a community fitting themselves and their individuals, but that is very hard for someone new to claw their way into or to even understand - and my personal guess, or hope if you will, after talking to some of these people that has experienced these things might have a lower threshold for giving it another go.. If nothing else, if this new system gets implemented, you can give it several goes in fact, like every two months (or every new season) to see what changed. And if you find yourself in one you like, maybe you can even find a guild within those two months that you like and want to join for further game play. Not to mention the possibility that if a few PvE friends want to check out the game mode together, they absolutely can! Without transferring at a high costs. Back in the day the people you met and bonded with in PvE would also be in the same team in WvW, while people nowadays going from PvE to WvW might find themselves in a server without anyone they recognize, or barely anyone at all for that matter. And nobody to turn to asking for help other than map chat or team chat having no idea who is who and who might be the resident troll(s) and proud toxic player(s). I am sure NCSoft and Anet,, as most other game companies and mostly anyone else providing services for customers for that matter, doesn't necessarily base their decisions on what to try out and not on whoever yells loudest or posts the most posts about a topic of a very selected few in a sub-forum compared to players in the game mode (even if in decline) themselves. They see people are falling off the mode one by one, sometimes guild by guild, and they probably also see that people on servers wanting to keep their community will lose it too as their reason for even being there disappears - as I am sure you don't want your server to be a glorified chat box. It'd be like mIRC with a new GUI.

I don't know why it is so hard understand that transferring not might actually mean bandwagoning. Bandwagoning is when several go together to make one server strong, either by several guilds and individuals moving to one server at the same time or by guilds going to already strong servers with existing good guilds or well working population. Transferring is something you do because there is no content for you currently on the server you are on, for example lack of guilds or people catering to your interests as a single player, or smaller/medium guilds moving perhaps due to server environment. If you are on a server with a somewhat ok environment -maybe even with server pride since I see this being brought up - and mix of guilds and content to offer, good to be you and there is no reason to move anywhere. For those that do not, transferring is a way to get away from current state, be it conflicts, disagreements, needing fresh recruiting grounds or just to get away from dead server. But it's costly to wander from server to server to find a community or guild that fits you, so having a system like the alliance system will help those unfortunate to not have that. NOT implementing this or not do any changes at all, just means that the servers those that finds themselves in a well populated one fitting them like a glove will get less and less activity from enemy servers and will in turn see a loss of activity on theirs. A server turning "dead" doesn't mean everyone just transferred from it either, it can mean people just stopped playing. Left the game. Are having a break. Is playing something else. May or may not come back. Gave up on WvW and is just doing PvE. And GvG doesn't have jack all to do with this as long as it's done in EotM - as you don't even have to be on the same server to be on the same team in GvG.

Unless you want to find yourself on a completely different server when the beta is over, yes indeed, people will have different servers names showing up. During world restructuring beta the new worlds/teams are borrowing the for now regular servers stats and API assigning population to the different ones. In EU, for example, if you are on Seven Pines you are currently assigned to Blacktide and if you are on Phoenix Dawn you're currently assigned to Ring of Fire. Your account, however, have not actually transferred, it's still on your "home" server, which might be, for example, Far Shiverpeaks - which happens to currently lending itself to Griffonfall. If you see people you know are on the same maps right now at current time showing up as being on differently named maps on guild or friends list chances are that those people are not usually on the same server and will not be after the beta is over. Last beta the map names people were showing on friend and guild lists when going from BBL to GBL to RBL was what whatever world/team was borrowing the stats/API from what would have been BBL/GBL/RBL for the match that week if there was no beta. So technically if someone with an account on Blacktide and another with an account on Far Shiperpeaks were currently together on Phoenix Dawn and jumping from BBL to GBL to RBL they would show up with differently named maps on the list and even in the match up UNLESS they were supposed to fight each other in a match up that week or are assigned to a world/team currently borrowing from server that would have been in the same match up that week - in this case Ring of Fire. I haven't checked for this beta, but unless they have a new mass transfer back and forth implemented into this beta or are testing a new feature, I am guessing this will be true for this one as well.

[JA]urora Glade needs just two more months of national DE/FR links to make it a full year with DE/FR national links.

I'd like to see the academic research into that, please? Oh. Wait. It's an "In my experience" thing. I'll counter that with I only know one female actually preferring to play support tempest, they are all boys and men crying about how tempest is the better support than scrapper. In theory. On paper. Doing number games. But not actually managing to prove it by performance. Or wasn't that what we were doing? (P.S.: Before anyone goes there: What a good scrapper or a good tempest can do is not what every scrapper or tempest out there actually does.)

.... you seem to confuse WvW zergs or blobs with GvG. Two different things, two different types of play, two different types of meta comp. And capped at 15.

The scrapper nerf was a long time coming, and I don't mind it being nerfed. It is, however, one of my favorite classes to play due to the feel and flow of it, especially when being a heal and cleanse support in WvW. Nerfing it by taking away what makes scrapper play unique instead of nerfing the output or cd's is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Does any of you play scrapper regularily? Do you know what makes the game play feel different from the others? Do you understand why making it all ground targeted wells is hitting harder than any other nerf you could come up with? Asked with the best intentions and true curiosity, no shade. It just feels like we will end up with just a bunch of specializations that basically feels the same if you keep going in this direction - while GW2 is known for not having that. Right now, anyone can play a WvW support scrapper and do well on... well, everything. Enough to sustain what they need to sustain. So yeah, nerf away. But a good scrapper enjoying the type of play you do on it can do so much more. They're as special a breed as elementalist lovers, and it hangs just as much on the way it feels while you play as well as the what it does. Not even gonna touch the lore part of it. 😉

If anything, Steam players are so used to games never coming out of beta or early access but still earning money that it'll be business as usual.

Uh, whatever you are seeing in GW2mists right now is as inaccurate as it can possibly be, since the servers are lending their identifications to the beta test, so what you see there is not Gunnar's Hold, it's one of the beta test worlds. Jade Sea is also winning their match up. Alone. Not linked. Not actually happening. 😉

I know there has been some saying they did indeed choose before the deadline for the beta test, but from what I can see both in the game and on this forum, the amount of times this has happened have been reduced considerably compared to the earlier betas - which I would count as a success. It did say "reduced", not "eliminated". If the support tickets have had the same drop, they did something right for sure. Which still doesn't mean it's any less "fun" for those few it did indeed happen to, of course.

So, which part of - We hope to test a new internal deployment system that automates many aspects of executing a World Restructuring beta, including the steps involved in team creation and matchmaking. It should simplify the internal process of hosting beta events and make it less prone to human error. This is a big step toward having the feature enabled full time on the live game servers without manual upkeep by our Platform Engineering team. - We’ve reduced the likelihood that players will be placed on the incorrect team or realm (assuming they properly selected a WvW guild prior to the deadline). - We’ve implemented bug fixes and mitigations for the “queue bug.” went wrong? These are the goals stated for this beta. And of course it would be sides overrunning the others, this is like if you took the servers on either NA or EU and shook them in a box, and then randomly pulled who was gonna face who. A bit like what happens after relink - it always takes a couple, or more, weeks to stabilize, and so it would now if it was a continuing experience for a while. Also, the Alliance part isn't even in it yet, and therefore some have implemented their own way of getting the Alliance part by making community guilds, perhaps making it even more skewed... this time around.

Soooo... What you are saying is that you don't like the link system, and therefore nobody else should get any players. Instead of... perhaps... letting them catch up to you population wise so maybe someone else can be linkless instead of you. Maybe even take turns being linkless until they change the current system. But only you. Not any other full (or linkless) server. That also can't get any new people. Color me pink and call me a Lipton, but that sure sounds unfair to me. But yes. Sure. Let's confuse the link system and full server capacity system and keep NA out of the conversation, because .. new people. I spent a lot of time last betas trying to explain to people normally on Gandara being confused and mad about the beta what the beta actually did and what they were testing and what Alliances might look like one day in the future if they got further. So far nothing I explained then has been wrong, but when it comes to.... ... I think perhaps there might be a lot of assumptions on Gandara about how things work that, in lack of a better explanation, lack proper sources. It sure was then.

What do you mean? Gunnar's Hold has a link, in fact Gunnar's Hold are now just a High server linked with a bigger Very High server, Whiteside Ridge. Due to ODIN moving to Kodash to be with Far Shiverpeaks, as per usual. Edit: and it was in T2, not T1, last week.

Yeah, you are in different match ups during the beta then, you can't join each other. It's like one of you are on Desolation and the other on Gandara. It will be back to normal on Friday afaik.

Bad habit, but I will quote myself for a second time, from THIS thread - it is probably connected to the same thing as showing up as being on differently named maps while standing next to each other. You will probably find that people on the same server as you usually will show up in blue as they normally would, while everyone not on your usual server will show up as green. The only visual difference between the green (out of squad) and green (in same squad) right now is that if you open the actual big map, you will find you can see green dots all over the place, in all corners, if any of your squad happens to be there. So it works, you can see where your squad members are, it just currently is hard to separate from the usual green dots around you as they are visually exactly the same on the minimap. Let's say you are on a server in T3, server x, and server y and z are your opponents. The guy next to you, standing on the same map, is in T2, on server 1, and server 2 and 3 are their opponents. Let's say it's blue Alpine Border. On the list you will show with the name that currently borrows server y, z or x's identification of what *would* have been BBL in your match up - T3. At the same time, the person next to you shows up as being on the server borrowing what would have been the BBL's identification in their match up -1, 2 or 3's identification in T2. If you hover over the icons of the people in a squad on your team/world in a MU, you will find that they all have their actual server names listed, they are not all listed as "moogaloo" or "Griffonfall" or "Reaper's Corridor" like your enemies. But you are all standing together in a map as being in the same world/team/server. Sorry about the Quoteception there.

This is what they do indeed, yes, afaik, it makies sense from a testing perspective. To quote myself a bit: Let's say you are on a server in T3, server x, and server y and z are your opponents. The guy next to you, standing on the same map, is in T2, on server 1, and server 2 and 3 are their opponents. Let's say it's blue Alpine Border. On the list you will show with the name that currently borrows server y, z or x's identification of what *would* have been BBL in your match up - T3. At the same time, the person next to you shows up as being on the server borrowing what would have been the BBL's identification in their match up -1, 2 or 3's identification in T2. If you hover over the icons of the people in a squad on your team/world in a MU, you will find that they all have their actual server names listed, they are not all listed as "moogaloo" or "Griffonfall" or "Reaper's Corridor" like your enemies. But you are all standing together in a map as being in the same world/team/server.