WvW Population Imbalance

[GreatApe.1820]

I have waited some 8 years or so to see ANET come up with a solution to solving population imbalance in WvW. Does anyone know why they don't care about the WvW game mode? 

[Bristingr.5034]

Anet has ZERO incentive to fix it because WvWers are stupid enough to keep paying Gems to transfer their characters across servers.

[Spartacus.3192]

server transfers is pretty much a steady cash stream for ANET.

 

Also the reason why ALLIANCES will never happen. Whoever suggested Alliances prob got jettisoned out of ANET. Why would anet spend money developing something that will actually make them LOSE revenue?

[KrHome.1920]

We all should buy more gems for transfers to support ANet's alliances development.

[Sleepwalker.1398]

Yes they care.

That's when BG gets open...sometimes.

[Junkpile.7439]

Bigger problem than population is that game mode doesn't motivate you to try. Balanced population doesn't really help when 80% of players don't contribute anything. You can have 20 player queue and lose t3 keep while 5 players bother to come defend.

[Svarty.8019]

This is clearly not a gauge of the facts, but it's certainly a good indication of player perception.

 

That perception seems, understandably in my view, quite non-positive.

[Bristingr.5034]

15 hours ago, Junkpile.7439 said:

Bigger problem than population is that game mode doesn't motivate you to try. Balanced population doesn't really help when 80% of players don't contribute anything. You can have 20 player queue and lose t3 keep while 5 players bother to come defend.

I mean, that's also true. There's zero incentive for winning skirmishes. Nothing like '10 Mystic Coins for the Server who gets 1st place -- each character who plays for at least Gold chest (Pips).'

[Pharaohz.3470]

They don't care they are already thinking about where they will go for summer vacations.

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

How can they fix a player created problem? If they player base as a whole, really wanted balance they could spread out and make it happen. That isn't what they want. My opinion on why the alliance system was scrapped is basically because of this. There was already 2 very powerful alliances aligning up to do battle, everyone else was gonna get rolled. Anet saw this and realized it was time to jump ship. They can't fix population without taking away player choice. 

TL;DR Players choose to stack to imbalance.

Yes, they care, but...

Edited May 20, 2021 by Crazy.6029

[Zikory.6871]

I say embrace the chaos. Make all NA server "Very high" to maximize Transfer costs. 

[Apokriphos.7042]

A consequence of 12 servers in NA being full is better play-hour balance between matchups.

 

Technically, two paired full servers (both of whom don't have legacy player numbers over the full cap) should have a relatively even match. Also, as pointed out, this situation also reduces the amount of transfer gems Anet can extract from Bandwagoners looking for an easy matchup, since they cant transfer to 'Full'.

 

Does Anet care about balance? I think they do, but it is not a priority. More like an afterthought - and their financial incentive is not aligned correctly to influence this decision for the better.

 

Anet needs better metrics to determine if players who play WvW mostly tend to spend more gems if they have a balanced matchup. This would provide effective motivation to increase balance in the WvW gamemode. Until then, expect to see continued reinforcement of "mindless blob" style gameplay, which apparently Anet thinks is good for Twitch stream advertising. Also expect to see PvE balance leak into WvW gameplay, because small scale doesn't matter.

 

Its unfortunate. We can only hope things change with the Expac, and more importantly, the pressure of good competition from other games.

[Leaa.2943]

It is very clear to EU that Arena Net do not have any intentions to fix the imballance. Instead looking at what is happening is the other way around where Arena Net decide who is gonna have a active WvW link period and who is gonna be the 3 servers with no link and locked during that whole time and spend their time in the bottom. At first people did not react because it was other servers getting this treatment, but now all have realised what a kitten situation this is and there is nothing we can do about it. 

 

The links was support to add activity to their WvW on hosts so that low populated servers did not get stuck in a inactive sisutation. But instead the links are crashing the hosts and again arena lock them down and the only thing you can do is either moving as WSR have done or wait it out and hopeing your server wont break to much and not too many players will move off due to it. 

 

If there was a reason to win in WvW and to be in tier 1 as in you gained something from it then the matchmanipulation that is going on each period would blow up every were, but since there is no gain we just suffer and hope something will happen .

[Talindra.4958]

No.. really they dont care..end of story 😭

Well they need more hands

[Riba.3271]

Population imbalance is caused by bad balance. Unfortunately the WvW infrastucture is a toiletshow as it is and needs to be fixed.

If there are fast upgrading objectives that give massive combat boost everywhere combined with watchtowers that reduce serverwide communication, it just feels like an unnecessary hassle playing on a weaker server where you can never take anything from stronger/overpopulated ones, even on that one-day-a-week you feel slightly stronger than them. And relinkings make only viable long term goal for a server: "lets stack it!" as any other problem will just renew with new people every relinking.

Pugs and server communities get worse every passing month if you carebear them so hard instead of maintaining healthy balance where equally strong attackers stand a chance and server building exists as a longterm goal.

And no, all of the flaws that I mentioned didn't exist in the past but were introduced in half-assed no-adjustment manner.

They can change combat balance as much as they want but as long as they keep only option for good fights neutral open field, people won't enjoy it and keep stacking.

Edited May 24, 2021 by Threather.9354

[Choppy.4183]

They care as much as they should (using server links and sliding gem cost for transfers), and they shouldn't care more. Besides, coverage is waaaaay more important than population.