Nate.3927

Well, if the large guild want to, they can just create a wvw-only sister guild just for their wvw players to select as wvw guild. Of course technically that eat up another slot.WvW guild isn't that hard to run either and I am sure any large real pvx guild leaders, if they really want to, can easily build up a large 500-man active wvw guild. Fortunately, I believe the leaders find no fun in that since the whole purpose of creating a large guild is to able to play all game modes while having social environment of consistent faces. However, the real concern shouldn't be any kind of 500-man active wvw guild but rather, a combined 500-man active alliance of same timezone, especially non-prime timezones since we don't really have much people in non-prime. Of course, some people downplay that concern, I am interested to see if such alliance really get formed and if it does get formed, how the players gonna react to it and how anet gonna handle it. bear in mind even if it is 500 active, that's not 500 in WvW everyday for hours each day, the majority of those maybe in WvW for an hour a day or less with a smaller minority in WvW for 3-4 hours or more each day. If anything an alliance made up of a single PvX guild would be weaker in real terms to an alliance made up of multiple smaller WvW focused guilds. That's where the WvW playtime considerations will take effect in future. Where the algorithm balances around both raw numbers and playtime. Bear in mind you can fully dominate a server even with 200-300 active players. If your alliance has 5 pugmanders and 200 players that will follow these 5 pugmanders, you already have more power than the 1.000 pugs. Because half the pugs will just follow and listen to those pugmanders, and the other half you can reliably kick because you don't even need them. You can literally control half the gameplay because you're the group that organises things. And most players in GW2 will not organise anything. They'll just scourge around looking for something to join, jump into. Even PPT wise, 200 active players are more than enough to dominate many pug-dominated servers. Sure, you lose coverage 600 vs 200 at first. But if you have 30 capable players online, you can farm virtually any pug blob and after hard-farming a server over the weekend they tend to magically all dissapear. By monday it's 300 vs 200 with one side having way more skill. And i'm talking about the 200 vs 600 scenario. In reality, it'll be 200+400 vs 600. A group with a strong, 200 man alliance is going to faceroll over ANY pug-based alliance without any issues. And most alliances will be nothing but that : pugs looking to jump in and leech. Because that's what WvW is nowadays. I don't disagree with what you're saying in theory, but that's just a L2P issue and pugs are not likely to be spending as much time in WvW as dedicated players so once they put in play hours into the algorithm/equation those will get balanced out. And my point still stands, a 500-player alliance won't have 500 dedicated players. And both sides will have multiple alliances, I seriously doubt there will be an alliance that is 100% random pug players, you might be looking at scenarios of 200 + 400 vs 100 + 500 sure, but your scenario above is unlikely to happen. Maybe you disagree with my terminology. Maybe you consider different skill levels. If I look at EU WvW, I don't see many organised communities and guilds left. If you look at "stacked fight servers" like WSR and vabbi we're talking about a core with maybe 200 players. 500? hahaha. Yet this core is enough to hard-farm virtually any other EU server if they want to. The same is true for some other servers. The majority of their kills and progress comes from the guilds and players that carry the community. Against pug zergs you need 5 good players and you win by default. Because GW2 WvW relies on organisation. And almost all the players in this game are casual pugs refusing to organise. They need other players to do it for them. Hell even then half of them won't. You need other players, communities, ... to tag, tell everyone what to do, teach them, make them play and so forth. If nobody does, then most players don't even bother and you will lose a LOT of pug activity. If players do all this and make players want to play, then you gain pug activity. Let's ask it in terms redditors would understand : Would you rather have 1 ravya on your server, or 100 pugs who play as much as ravya? I'd rather have ravya than 100 times more players. Because truthfully, he's worth more than 100 players. And I assume that, after 2 months, the alliance with ravya will have higher pug activity. Because he'll lead them, teach them and make them have fun. They'll come into WvW MORE because they know it's nice. Meanwhile 100 players without someone leading them can roam and man siege at best. You'd be lucky if you have 10/100 players capable of being useful without them being told what to do. Anyone who isn't interested in solo play won't stay / play because they don't enjoy their alliance. They won't suddenly become commanders that can stand up to experienced players. So as always, an alliance with commanders and the players to follow those commanders will GAIN ACTIVITY because pugs LOVE TO WIN.An alliance WITHOUT commanders (or maybe not so good ones) will continue to get rolled over because they don't have anyone to teach them better; nor to carry them. And slowly but surely, their population / activity goes down. Spreading out the "population" is irrelevant. The population itself is mostly irrelevant. Population is a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The population literally follows around "strong" servers and "high rated / PPT" servers... Yet you'll regularly see T1 "strong" servers lose their core only to bleed out within no time. Even now, the issue is not "population balance". The issue is a huge skill difference between players. Different expectations and playstyles which don't match. Population balance is only the result of the above mentioned issues; and will continue to exist even in alliances. PS. Pretty sure half the pipfarmers on my server spend as much time as dedicated players. There is literally 0 difference (in activity / play hours per week) between someone afk flipping camps and someone who's 7k rank playing throughout the weekend to reach their pips. And both are fairly common. But that veteran who's actively playing is obviously WAY more helpful than the pipfarmer, who's just taking up a spot and a lot of play hours for his alliance. ah you're talking EU, I'm talking NA, the situations are different.

Well, if the large guild want to, they can just create a wvw-only sister guild just for their wvw players to select as wvw guild. Of course technically that eat up another slot.WvW guild isn't that hard to run either and I am sure any large real pvx guild leaders, if they really want to, can easily build up a large 500-man active wvw guild. Fortunately, I believe the leaders find no fun in that since the whole purpose of creating a large guild is to able to play all game modes while having social environment of consistent faces. However, the real concern shouldn't be any kind of 500-man active wvw guild but rather, a combined 500-man active alliance of same timezone, especially non-prime timezones since we don't really have much people in non-prime. Of course, some people downplay that concern, I am interested to see if such alliance really get formed and if it does get formed, how the players gonna react to it and how anet gonna handle it. bear in mind even if it is 500 active, that's not 500 in WvW everyday for hours each day, the majority of those maybe in WvW for an hour a day or less with a smaller minority in WvW for 3-4 hours or more each day. If anything an alliance made up of a single PvX guild would be weaker in real terms to an alliance made up of multiple smaller WvW focused guilds. That's where the WvW playtime considerations will take effect in future. Where the algorithm balances around both raw numbers and playtime. Bear in mind you can fully dominate a server even with 200-300 active players. If your alliance has 5 pugmanders and 200 players that will follow these 5 pugmanders, you already have more power than the 1.000 pugs. Because half the pugs will just follow and listen to those pugmanders, and the other half you can reliably kick because you don't even need them. You can literally control half the gameplay because you're the group that organises things. And most players in GW2 will not organise anything. They'll just scourge around looking for something to join, jump into. Even PPT wise, 200 active players are more than enough to dominate many pug-dominated servers. Sure, you lose coverage 600 vs 200 at first. But if you have 30 capable players online, you can farm virtually any pug blob and after hard-farming a server over the weekend they tend to magically all dissapear. By monday it's 300 vs 200 with one side having way more skill. And i'm talking about the 200 vs 600 scenario. In reality, it'll be 200+400 vs 600. A group with a strong, 200 man alliance is going to faceroll over ANY pug-based alliance without any issues. And most alliances will be nothing but that : pugs looking to jump in and leech. Because that's what WvW is nowadays. I don't disagree with what you're saying in theory, but that's just a L2P issue and pugs are not likely to be spending as much time in WvW as dedicated players so once they put in play hours into the algorithm/equation those will get balanced out. And my point still stands, a 500-player alliance won't have 500 dedicated players. And both sides will have multiple alliances, I seriously doubt there will be an alliance that is 100% random pug players, you might be looking at scenarios of 200 + 400 vs 100 + 500 sure, but your scenario above is unlikely to happen.

unfortunately, there are also legal reasons why Arenanet would need to split up EU customers from the rest of the world. In more recent news, GDPR comes to mind, but even before GDPR there are other existing laws as well. Not sure how that would be an issue since you agree to the terms when creating an account and Anet presumably secures our data adequatly. Plus you can already play wherever for free? Just create a f2p NA or EU account?A customer having an NA account and an EU account is fine. However, Arenanet as a company putting their NA customer details in the same database and data center as their EU customers may be an issue. I work for a global company and we are facing that issue right now. We wanted to create a global system to handle our marketing, which means we want to store all our customer details in a single system, that way marketers in Australia for example can access customer from Europe and potentially market to them. The legal advice we've obtained so far says that we should not do that because we could face serious fines and legal trouble. I'm not part of the legal department and I'm not personally working on any of the GDPR stuff, but from what I know the rules and regulations are not specific to our industry and is a more general rule that affects all industries. Running a global company is complicated because laws differ by region, country etc. At the moment the high level discussion is actually that we may have to maintain multiple copies of our system, hosted on multiple physical data center locations, at least one in the EU, I think we need one in Canada due to Canadian laws and then one in Hong Kong which is our current one.

I would like to see a scarf that isn't a shoulder piece and is instead maybe a back piece or a head piece. Reason being I want snow to fall on my character, while wearing a scarf. But I can't do that since the scarf is a shoulder piece and the winter's presence is also a shoulder piece. Alternatively, make winter's presense, and the bat effect and whatever other effects may be applicable into backpieces instead of shoulder pieces.

unfortunately, there are also legal reasons why Arenanet would need to split up EU customers from the rest of the world. In more recent news, GDPR comes to mind, but even before GDPR there are other existing laws as well.

Well, if the large guild want to, they can just create a wvw-only sister guild just for their wvw players to select as wvw guild. Of course technically that eat up another slot.WvW guild isn't that hard to run either and I am sure any large real pvx guild leaders, if they really want to, can easily build up a large 500-man active wvw guild. Fortunately, I believe the leaders find no fun in that since the whole purpose of creating a large guild is to able to play all game modes while having social environment of consistent faces. However, the real concern shouldn't be any kind of 500-man active wvw guild but rather, a combined 500-man active alliance of same timezone, especially non-prime timezones since we don't really have much people in non-prime. Of course, some people downplay that concern, I am interested to see if such alliance really get formed and if it does get formed, how the players gonna react to it and how anet gonna handle it. bear in mind even if it is 500 active, that's not 500 in WvW everyday for hours each day, the majority of those maybe in WvW for an hour a day or less with a smaller minority in WvW for 3-4 hours or more each day. If anything an alliance made up of a single PvX guild would be weaker in real terms to an alliance made up of multiple smaller WvW focused guilds. That's where the WvW playtime considerations will take effect in future. Where the algorithm balances around both raw numbers and playtime. You clearly don't understand how small non-prime timezone is.I play OCX and SEA. I live in Australia, I've tagged and roamed both against TIME and on the same side as TIME. I know exactly how small non-prime timezones are. We don't have 500 dedicated WvW players who all like each other enough to get into an alliance together long term in our timezone. And on the positive side we have enough people with brains across the different OCX/SEA guilds who can say "hey, let's not stack because it will be boring and then everyone will quit". At no point did I say "500 people who play WvW everyday won't make a difference". What I am saying is "500 people on paper is not 500 actual dedicated WvW players that play WvW everyday". The biggest OCX focused WvW guild I have ever been in had ~370 people on the roster at it's peak, of those ~300 were people who consider themselves as WvW players. The most we were ever able to pull into WvW concurrently is ~35 and of those only ~15 were people who spend 3-4+ hours in WvW each day, and not all at the same time. The rest drop in and drop out based on irl responsibilities or PvE interests.

Well, if the large guild want to, they can just create a wvw-only sister guild just for their wvw players to select as wvw guild. Of course technically that eat up another slot.WvW guild isn't that hard to run either and I am sure any large real pvx guild leaders, if they really want to, can easily build up a large 500-man active wvw guild. Fortunately, I believe the leaders find no fun in that since the whole purpose of creating a large guild is to able to play all game modes while having social environment of consistent faces. However, the real concern shouldn't be any kind of 500-man active wvw guild but rather, a combined 500-man active alliance of same timezone, especially non-prime timezones since we don't really have much people in non-prime. Of course, some people downplay that concern, I am interested to see if such alliance really get formed and if it does get formed, how the players gonna react to it and how anet gonna handle it. bear in mind even if it is 500 active, that's not 500 in WvW everyday for hours each day, the majority of those maybe in WvW for an hour a day or less with a smaller minority in WvW for 3-4 hours or more each day. If anything an alliance made up of a single PvX guild would be weaker in real terms to an alliance made up of multiple smaller WvW focused guilds. That's where the WvW playtime considerations will take effect in future. Where the algorithm balances around both raw numbers and playtime.

Dont really need Anet for that. Just look at your own server. How many 500 man WvW guilds do you see? Do any of them actually field more than 20-25 people? The answer might be yes... Maybe 1 guild. Probably the community guild. Might even be 2 if you got a link. And thats most likely representative of all servers. what I meant is, we can all say that, and we're probably right, BUT it's more official and believable if actual statistics gets released.

I think somewhere between 500-750 is good for an alliance, as others have said you want to make the chunk big enough to maintain community, but small enough to make balancing easier. I have many friends on other servers, on the occasion that we are linked together, then we play together. When we are not, we hunt each other down. You can still be friends even if you're not on the same world. I think what might help people is if Anet releases some statistics on how many guilds exactly have their Guild Missions set to WvW AND have player numbers in the 300-500 range where the majority goes into WvW on a regular basis. For example if there exists a guild whose Guild Mission is set to WvW and have 450 players, but only 100 actually go into WvW on a weekly or daily basis, then really that's not a 500 member guild.

Every single time I need a specific bounty, I put up an LFG with a description of what bounty it is and why I want to kill it, then I announce in map chat. Usually within a minute or two I get at least 4-5 other people joining me. I play mainly OCX and SEA times. Perhaps your timezone just happened to be particularly dead because most of the people during that timezone prefer other game modes? Quite often the people coming don't even need the bounties themselves. I mean if I look at my own behaviour, I've killed corrupted Facet 6 or so times. Obviously I only need it once for the collection. Once I was just in the area and the bounty was up so I joined in, the other 4 times I was helping strangers who needed it who clearly did not have enough numbers.

I'd like more colour variation. The problem is the actual colour being picked since I'm colourblind. For example, at the moment I literally cannot tell the difference between a friendly aoe circle and an enemy aoe circle. I can barely see the red on objective caps and that's only if I actually stand right next to it and zoom in. Thin lines on the ground are impossible to see. Yellow and green also often look the same for me, especially when it's on a small moving object.