Closed Servers

[Arbriel.4397]

I know this isn't an issue for you PvE players out there, but I would like to know why so many servers have been full for so long now? Sure Blackgate could be the exception here.

Tarnished Coast, TC & Stormbluff Isle, SBI have both said in open chat that they don't even manage to get a map queue for WvW on reset nights anymore and so it kinda defies belief that both of these two servers are full. TC itself got linked to a server, Devona's Rest, DR that doesn't even have any WvW guilds on it at all and yet TC remains full despite not having all that many WvW players.

Thoughts anyone?

[CJH.2879]

Somethings definitely been affecting things lately, (PVE included), fellow players have complained about alot of lag, I thought it was just me but nope.... I was having disconnects the other night and alot of lag. Must be something going on.

[Arbriel.4397]

@CJH.2879 said:Somethings definitely been affecting things lately, (PVE included), fellow players have complained about alot of lag, I thought it was just me but nope.... I was having disconnects the other night and alot of lag. Must be something going on.

Yes yesterday I couldn't login and when I could it was impossible to play due to severe lag. I know its not my end as everything else was working fine.

Back to the issue at hand, full servers, perhaps the algorithm that determines full or open servers is a bit wonky at the moment.

[Zaklex.6308]

@"Arbriel.4397" said:I know this isn't an issue for you PvE players out there, but I would like to know why so many servers have been full for so long now? Sure Blackgate could be the exception here.

Tarnished Coast, TC & Stormbluff Isle, SBI have both said in open chat that they don't even manage to get a map queue for WvW on reset nights anymore and so it kinda defies belief that both of these two servers are full. TC itself got linked to a server, Devona's Rest, DR that doesn't even have any WvW guilds on it at all and yet remains full despite not having all that many WvW players.

Thoughts anyone?

Deleting the Client does not delete you from the game...everyone that has ever bought and or played the free version and chosen a "Home World' still exists as far as I understand how the system works, this is because they allow people to return to the game after any length of time off, whether that be 2 weeks or 2 years with all of your account intact.

[Gop.8713]

Just addressing various confusions all at once . . :

DR isn't full, it's medium. Players on a world don't matter, only players who play wvw. Closing a server doesn't have anything to do with the wvw pop on that server, but on the wvw pop on that server relative to others. The goal is to give anet 'even' pops to balance matchups, which is ofc impossible given that everyone has a link and so many players jump servers right after right after relink to avoid even fights :p

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Stop thinking of a "full world" as meaning "there's no more room." Instead, translate it as "too big to balance easily, when compared with all other worlds." ANet should probably have changed the jargon long ago, because the primary use of "full" has always been to close off transfers, regardless of any other reason. (And yes, those reasons do include long queues.)

Until Alliances, the only way to keep matches even close to balanced is to ensure that the puzzle pieces are comparable enough in size. If Worlds A, B, & C are primary, then A can't be as big as B & C combined, because even linkages with X, Y, & Z wouldn't be enough to bring both opponents up to strength.

From our perspective as players, it's going to be very unusual for the links and full statuses to make sense, because we'll never have any of the data ANet uses to decide these things. If you want to play with TC, join TC's linked worlds and check 1-2x/week to see if you can get in to TC proper. Don't worry about why it's full.

---

tl;dr "full" is just a fancy word for "ANet wants to limit transfers"Focus on finding a spot that works for you in the meantime.

[HazyDaisy.4107]

It kind of scares me that my home world is full, because we're currently a guest server in wvw and previously when guests become "full" that's a bad sign. This month, you could think it's because of the SS hype, but previous months when this happened it had nothing to do with PVE.

Anyway, one of two things will happen, either the "full" servers will become or remain wvw host's at the end of June or, the SS craze will start tapering and the populations will dwindle over the next couple of weeks.

[Danikat.8537]

@"HazyDaisy.4107" said:It kind of scares me that my home world is full, because we're currently a guest server in wvw and previously when guests become "full" that's a bad sign. This month, you could think it's because of the SS hype, but previous months when this happened it had nothing to do with PVE.

Anyway, one of two things will happen, either the "full" servers will become or remain wvw host's at the end of June or, the SS craze will start tapering and the populations will dwindle over the next couple of weeks.

Why would the skyscale collection get more people into WvW though? As far as I knew no part of the collection requires you to go into WvW and you can't use the skyscale there. So if anything I'd expect WvW participation to drop while people are working on the skyscale, resulting in lower populations.

[Loosmaster.8263]

@"Arbriel.4397" said:I know this isn't an issue for you PvE players out there, but I would like to know why so many servers have been full for so long now? Sure Blackgate could be the exception here.

Tarnished Coast, TC & Stormbluff Isle, SBI have both said in open chat that they don't even manage to get a map queue for WvW on reset nights anymore and so it kinda defies belief that both of these two servers are full. TC itself got linked to a server, Devona's Rest, DR that doesn't even have any WvW guilds on it at all and yet TC remains full despite not having all that many WvW players.

Thoughts anyone?

I beg to differ on that statement in bold. We still do WvW from time to time but it depends on the host server and if they play the "We're going to tank this week because...** thing.

[Heibi.4251]

Another problem that causes this is the childish actions of some servers transferring alts to another server to fill queues and such in WvW. I always wonder why we have a queue and only see 30 people in the BL at times. They artificially inflate the server population numbers. It's been happening for a long time. Not much ANeT can do about it unfortunately.

[HazyDaisy.4107]

@Danikat.8537 said:

@"HazyDaisy.4107" said:It kind of scares me that my home world is full, because we're currently a guest server in wvw and previously when guests become "full" that's a bad sign. This month, you could think it's because of the SS hype, but previous months when this happened it had nothing to do with PVE.

Anyway, one of two things will happen, either the "full" servers will become or remain wvw host's at the end of June or, the SS craze will start tapering and the populations will dwindle over the next couple of weeks.

Why would the skyscale collection get more people into WvW though? As far as I knew no part of the collection requires you to go into WvW and you can't use the skyscale there. So if anything I'd expect WvW participation to drop while people are working on the skyscale, resulting in lower populations.

No, I was saying that "Full" might have to do with people returning and joining servers for SS in PVE, on the off chance that there's a lot of people coming to and returning to the game and the server numbers aren't split like we think they are and new and returning players DO have an affect on full despite whether they wvw or not.

But, in terms of wvw and how the SS collection could effect server numbers....reward tracks for mats :).

[Astralporing.1957]

@HazyDaisy.4107 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@HazyDaisy.4107 said:It kind of scares me that my home world is full, because we're currently a guest server in wvw and previously when guests become "full" that's a bad sign. This month, you could think it's because of the SS hype, but previous months when this happened it had nothing to do with PVE.

Anyway, one of two things will happen, either the "full" servers will become or remain wvw host's at the end of June or, the SS craze will start tapering and the populations will dwindle over the next couple of weeks.

Why would the skyscale collection get more people into WvW though? As far as I knew no part of the collection requires you to go into WvW and you can't use the skyscale there. So if anything I'd expect WvW participation to drop while people are working on the skyscale, resulting in lower populations.

No, I was saying that "Full" might have to do with people returning and joining servers for SS in PVE, on the off chance that there's a lot of people coming to and returning to the game and the server numbers aren't split like we think they are and new and returning players DO have an affect on full despite whether they wvw or not.

We've had a dev confirmation sometime ago that they do not count strictly PvE players at all when deciding on server populations, and that those are now a purely WvW thing.

[Klipso.8653]

Yup, it only counts players who actually entered WvW. The issue I think is that it counts hours played instead of a player count.

So if 20 people play for 10 minutes, the game thinks that's the same as 1 guy putting in 200 hours. But in reality the 1 guy will get trampled over for those 10 min.

[Khisanth.2948]

@Heibi.4251 said:Another problem that causes this is the childish actions of some servers transferring alts to another server to fill queues and such in WvW. I always wonder why we have a queue and only see 30 people in the BL at times. They artificially inflate the server population numbers. It's been happening for a long time. Not much ANeT can do about it unfortunately.

Actually that can be solved or at least mitigated by gathering more data.

I am assuming that currently every account that plays at least a certain amount of WvW gets counted equally. For example if the minimum threshold was 2 hours then the person who plays 2 hours and the person who plays 10 hours both count as 1 but that doesn't have to be the case.

For the best results coverage would also need to be a factor but I don't think that is going to happen any time soon. IIRC even the alliance system doesn't take that into consideration.

@Klipso.8653 said:Yup, it only counts players who actually entered WvW. The issue I think is that it counts hours played instead of a player count.

So if 20 people play for 10 minutes, the game thinks that's the same as 1 guy putting in 200 hours. But in reality the 1 guy will get trampled over for those 10 min.

See above. :p

If it is like you claim the attempts to inflate population numbers would not work.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the population it considers is based on averages and not moment to moment and it only recalculates periodically rather than continuously.

[Trise.2865]

"Not as many people are playing WvW so the server must be empty"

What?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Klipso.8653 said:Yup, it only counts players who actually entered WvW. The issue I think is that it counts hours played instead of a player count.

So if 20 people play for 10 minutes, the game thinks that's the same as 1 guy putting in 200 hours. But in reality the 1 guy will get trampled over for those 10 min.

They look at some combination of number of players and total hours.

[Zephyra.4709]

Quote from old forums archive:

McKenna Berdrow

Game Designer

2017-08-0121:42:15UTC

1. World sizes are based on WvW play hours and players. People who do not play WvW, or are guests, do not factor into the population size of a server. If a world is locked, it is because it has a larger population than our “Full” threshold.

2. Yes and no. We look at timezone participation but timezone participation is hard to balance because people who play at certain times tend to all gravitate towards the same worlds so they can play with a lot of people. There are not enough off-hour worlds that we could link to create 24-hour coverage for every world. It just is not possible with our current world populations.

3. Yes, high population servers are usually the benchmark for when we link worlds. For example, if Blackgate has 10 players and it’s the highest populated server, then we try to link worlds so their populations are also around 10. We can’t be totally precise so sometimes worlds might end up with 12 or 9 but we try to get as close as possible.

Source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Transfers-Links-and-Population-Data

Hope that helps answer your question.

EDIT: Here is another relevant topic regarding "closed servers"...

McKenna Berdrow

Game Designer

2017-02-2820:21:55UTC

To clarify further this is the first week we are using this new algorithm. So some of the complaints that are being brought up were problems with the old algorithm.

We use play hours to determine the size. Rank gains is tracked for comparison purposes since they usually follow a similar curve, but isn’t actually used to determine the world size.

We have simulated other algorithms to measure world size and ultimately found that player hours gave us more accurate results because we are mostly comparing active WvW play. The past algorithms weighed more heavily on individual players, so we ended up with situations where JQ was ‘Full’ because they had a lot of players, just not necessarily ones that played as much as Blackgate.

Source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Yaks-Bend

[Arbriel.4397]

Thanks for the above details, very helpful indeed and its just that TC has been Full for a very long time, I guess then its because of the amount of players in wvw and the hours they put in that has lead to the algorithm closing TC at this time.