subversiontwo.7501

> @"Ayrilana.1396" said: > > @"Voltekka.2375" said: > > > @"Ayrilana.1396" said: > > > > @"subversiontwo.7501" said: > > > > Read these forums, they are full of 8 years worth of suggestions. **None of them have been addressed** as ArenaNet does not care about WvW. > > > > > > With how many things that Anet adds/changes based on player feedback in this game, I find it doubtful that not one of them had anything to do with WvW. > > > > Ah, yes. Dollies desyncing, a certain camp in eb never showing as contested, population imbalance, lag issues, the list will be long when one means meaningful changes instead of your average "pLs NeRf *insert random class skill/utility* CaUsE i CaNt OuTpLaY iT". Not that certain skills aren't in the need of fixes, but there are more pressing issues. > > There’s a difference between stating none of the issues have been addressed versus stating none of the issues which matter to you have been addressed. I took issue with your statement doing the former. For someone who comes to argue semantics you sure seem to take things very literal and have trouble reading into context.

> @"mercury ranique.2170" said: > I'll be honest that this is very much discouraging to proceed on my path to my legendary. Look at it from our perspective: The GoB takes about 2 hrs of maintaining your reward track, the rest of the entire item is PvE. How many hours would you assume that is? How do you think we feel when we want to make legendary weapons? Not to be callous but we get threads like yours every other week here and they always sound spoiled to us for that reason. > Anyone got tips to get the gift of battle done on the off hours? It doesn't matter if your server is dead as long as your opponents are not. If your server is heavily out-numbered that can be good for you since you can just go onto any map (pref. an alpine border) and just flip back spawn camps every 10min to keep your reward tracks rolling. > Is the current state of WvW this bad? Yes, ArenaNet does not care about WvW (or PvP at large) and this is the result. > If so, what should Arenanet do to lift it up again? Read these forums, they are full of 8 years worth of suggestions. None of them have been addressed as ArenaNet does not care about WvW. > or should they add a way to get the gift of battle out of WvW. Again, it is hard for us to find sympathy for you. It's a shame that you have to deal with 10% of crap but we have to deal with 90% of crap. I'm sure they could make "PvE only" legendaries if they wanted to give up all pretense of being an MMO. They could also make a separate WvW-only route to legendaries if they cared, but as we already know by now, they don't care about WvW. So, who knows?

> @"nthmetal.9652" said: > @"Zok.4956" we will have to simply agree do disagree here then. Maybe you are right and we on Gandara have figured out a secret: How to play a game, without playing a game. Because that's apparently what is happening: A lot of people are playing the game (according to your facts and the combination thereof) without really playing the game (in terms of seeing any kind of result - result not only being measured in score here, but in any kind of thing where population has an impact on the in-game experience). > The activity of Gandara is not shown in either PPT score, kills or deaths, it also doesn't show up in queues (as has been confirmed by other people in this thread, whereby a commander is apparently able to move a full zerg between maps without much of an issue - which I personally can confirm. There were no issues moving even a full 50-man-zerg between maps freely, even to home and EB). > > To which I would say: > If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. > > Your experiences seem to differ. Already when you had your first meeting on what to do as you got unlinked again I told you to look this up on your discord server:  Again, the only way out of this mess is Alliances. Server pride never existed as Guilds always were the primary content creators and Guilds always cared about Guilds first. The problem with the linking system always was that people could just transfer after Guilds that left full servers to recruit and choke out their recruitment again. That always made Guilds quit and with Guilds quitting: Tags quit. This system has been choking Tags out of WvW since its inception. In fact, the original design has choked Guilds out of WvW and/or the game since its release. My first Guild (fittingly: on Gandara) quit in 2014 citing that WvW is the only place where Guilds matter and as WvW is not given due attention it is not a game where communities can be built or maintained. You are just six-seven years late to the party. One reason Alliances are not here yet is that unproductive players keep muddy the waters. Now, I don't know if this is how it still works, nore do anyone else. You were also given another explanation by an ArenaNet partner on your disc (or at least someone embedded with the partnership-program community, I don't know if he is a partner or not). That could be true. However, this is the only official communication we have on the matter and until ArenaNet says something different this is what we can take at face value. _ed. Capitalization for emphasis_

I wouldn't expect anything for WvW with EoD until/unless they come out and comment on anything gameplay related. A healthy expectation is PoF content (ie., to expect nothing).

Welcome to WvW, where everything is just a little bit worse :3

Hello Friends! Have you missed the history lessons? 

> @"Josh.4132" said: > As for pulling the short straw, clearly in anet's eyes Gandara has the best chance of competing as a solo server compared to all the others, take it as a compliment, its the people boycotting that are ruining it for the server. To be quite frank, the main reason that server has not been playing is the same reason as for every other server that tries to dump population: Their guilds are now in the same position as everyone else, having to recruit to sustain themselves and have slowly begun to find themselves split over host and link. When the last relink happened they sat down and every guild listed the players they were losing (A=2, B=3, C=6 etc.) and then they made an attempt at dumping their population (a misguided one, had they read the 2016 relinking information where Anet outright states that they have counter-measures in place for that very thing they tried). This also means that Gandara now has the same three options as everyone else: 1. Abandon friends on links and carry on, watch more friends quit the game over this etc. 2. Continue not playing for the majority of the link period 3. Find a new place to transfer to and get milked by Anet for gems or as a gold-dump while PvE thrives in gold (which btw. means PvE'rs transfers more easily in WvW than main WvW'ers do as they have less gold and things cost more here, being at a competetive disadvantage for transfers B) ). a) choosing different servers splits their community b) choosing a link husk means they can try to rebuild community but it comes with no 100% certainty and they will bleed players regardless None of this because whatever server they are, whose fault it is or whether they had it comming or not - but because the system is absolutely horrible and we have known it to be a short-term solution since its inception in 2016. The same Relinking threads from back then clearly states that relinking was a quick-fix (>6mo) system while they had a more elaborate system in mind (Alliances). That's right, Alliances was outlined by the devs on these forums already in 2016-05, almost two years before the 2018-02 announcement that is now 3 years old. That post also predates whatever "WvW overhaul" was planned already since 2015 that Colin and Mike referred to as abandoned in the 2016 AMA's on Reddit and promised WvW would be a priority going forward. I guess it was a "priority" for a month or two giving us Relinks, a copy of the reward track systems and a late copy of a chance to earn leggy armor. Of course, it didn't help that Anet whisked the most publically active WvW team-lead over to work on LW a mere month or two (2016-08 comment) after the Relink beta (2016-05). It's sort of how they recently whisked the PvP balance guy over to work on new EoD elite specializations a few months ago. WvW/competetive always gives and never gets. It will actually be interesting to see if the new elites will follow the old patterns of being ridiculously imbalanced post-release or if they decided to abandon the PvP balance project to ensure that EoD balance was better out of the box. I'm not betting on it.

> @"Threather.9354" said: > No gankers, no flankers, no ranged tags The problem with this thread is the same as the last time you made these arguments: The above citation is simply not true. I think your problems stem from playing at smaller pickup scale with a more loosely composed squad and less experienced group members (and possibly facing many low- to midtier guild groups that are effective against that with just stack and roll). If you look at the larger pickup groups (50, 50+) on servers with more seasoned populations or guilds that take on more challenging content you will see that almost all of them are first and foremost ranged. The damage nerfs from a year ago have achieved a pretty balanced flex-damage type of tactic at large scale where groups generally do a couple of range bombs and then commit to more risky pushes. That is a good sign of a decent enough balance. Writing this I literally just came off a reset-night squad that had about 65v65 content, with ranged off-squads and towards the end I personally played a flanking approach alone without any support (including no superspeed) and did just fine. Most guild groups I play with also operate a two-support / three-ranged norm. Some of the damage classes are running flex-builds with range-melee weapon swaps but they are predominantly ranged and there are no pure melee builds whatsoever while there still are purely ranged builds. With those groups we also obliterate novice stack-and-roll groups with ease because we know how to coordinate damage and rip boons as well as larger pickup groups even if they have enough superspeed to skate above control conditions. Improving the value of cripple and chill would be alot more boring than what we see right now, including making the boring 40s-cd massive rip-bombs even stronger, and would just make ranged damage even more dominant than it is.

I think the most important lessons you can learn about WvW is just to understand the name and maps. It is a 3-contender system on very large maps that are essentially built as triangles. The large maps means that there are alot of differently sized groups running around on those maps. They are individual but coexist. It is an eco-system. The global stuff is scoring kills (PvP; PPK) and attacking or defending territory within each server's corner (PPT). You have one home to defend and two homes to wreck. Sometimes the middle is neutral and taking it acts as the tipping scale. The smaller maps also reflects this: One map is your home and two other maps that are someone else's home to invade. They also have sort of a triangle of areas to control but those maps favour the server who calls the map their home a bit, so they are split more like a window where the upper fields belong to the home server and each lower field is held by the attacking servers. Every map has small, medium and large targets (camps, towers, keeps). This also reflects that any map can have small, medium and large groups (roamers, raiders, zergers/blobbers). Some groups care more about kills other groups care more about territory. Some groups are open for you to join (public), others are closed for you to earn the friendship of first (private). That is all you need to know.

> @"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.

> @"PrinceValentine.9320" said: > Let me say this again, gw2 has no deathmatch mode on any of its pvp content like SPVP or WvW. So your kdr doesn't really matter. You can go ahead and fight and kill other players on open fields but main focus of the game is to capture to win. Is this a really hard concept for you to understand? > > And what's wrong about being casual? You did make it sound that it's terrible. Do you even make money out of this game? As far as I know, gw2 left the e-sports scene when spirit rangers were still a thing on Spvp. > > If you're really into kdr, this game is not for you. You may as well just play a shooting game. You can boast about your kdr over there. SPvP has it's 2v2 swiss tournament mode which, per definition, is TDM. WvW has always had GvG both as spontaneous on-map content and as player-run events. That ArenaNet has gone out of their way to try to ruin it doesn't change that. It doesn't have to be a separate mode to exist or to be something that you could participate in if you wanted to. I think most people posting here or who have played WvW since the game came out understands that PPT has a larger impact on score than PPK (or that the mode is most fun when both of those things can go hand in hand, since PPK matters more when PPT is even or vice versa). However, they also know, in EU especially, that the PPT side of things have always been broken (hence the calls for population balance and scoring changes since 2012). That is why so few people care about it now as the PPT has always been less about who is the most successful at actually PPT'ing. It has always been more about who has the most players (even though the game is built for equal sides), who has stacked the most players from the "wrong" region (thus operating outside of the idealistic rules) or what servers are allowed to operate outside of the physical rules (not being full/closed when other servers become so). That is why no one who has a fundamental understanding about PPT or even cares about the holistic idea of PPT and PPK together attributes any value into PPT or the ladder. Those "PPK haters" are right when they say that #1 isn't #1 and never really has been. If you then want to engage in PPT or play casually because you enjoy that on a personal level, knock yourself out. It is fine until you start rubbing it in people's faces, grandstand, make false statements or diminish any real objective issues other players may have. That said, people could obviously always be nicer or more constructive when they talk :3

No to be 'that guy' but you people realize that it is stuff like this that breaks communities and bottlenecks the mode, right? When servers get reputations of being the "best", the "best for pugs" or the "friendliest to pugs", that is when they see transfers deep into full. Then they subsequently get locked and may get unlinked. Then whatever made those servers appealing to begin with is ruined and those behind that transfers off or stops being friendly. Then people like you (you, the would-be reader of this) call those players and groups out when in reality: You are the problem, not them, you and the system. They may eventually become toxic, but that is often preceeded by a majority influx of players who are not willing to help, adapt or let themselves be lead. That is toxic even though it is rarely noticed as such (egoism is easily as toxic as profanities or frustrations turning to requests to demands or call-outs). That comes with players who often see themselves entitled to the content while wanting to play their own way - expecting the PvP of WvW to be inconsequential like the mentoring of PvE farms. Things like that does not factor in full servers, full maps - or that the groups who create pickup content and share that - are dependent upon recruitment and access to their friends who help out on both maps and servers. That is, in its most bare bones summary, what kills WvW under the existing system. The best way to approach a server is to go there with the intention of helping out with the content creation. Don't look to join a server, look to join a guild that participates in public content creation.

 10 Charrs /salute

> @"Dawdler.8521" said: > What are you playing today (assuming not a condi rev)? Because it will probably be described as literally the most braindead build in all of WvW by people who fight it. No need to be like that, it's easy to see where people's frustrations come from. It may not be a build that scales up, rocks the tiers of sPvP or dominates the peaks of the roaming scene in WvW, but it is a bullying beginner stomper or zergling ganker, it is very powerful at the skill floor and it has some abilities that likely were missed in the rebalance effort (with outstanding application to uptime rates). There are plenty of builds in the past that got nerfed simply because they were too punishing against beginner players or mismatched builds. The old Holorifle, for example, dominated no heights of PvP but it got slapped because it was very apt at taking out learning players in short order.

> @"Tekoneiric.6817" said: > What are your gem store purchase regrets and why? All of them I never wanted any of the items I bought, I bought them to support the development of a product. Then I found out that the developers no longer care about that product. I was perfectly happy with any purchases up until that point. The things I like to play simply never gets any fair development resources, despite whatever I do to support it. I can't even play my main account anymore. The developers are holding it hostage. In my primary game mode, I have to move it to re-gain access to my friends and content again. The developers charge more money for that. Even if I would fork out the ransom, that is no insurance because most places to move to that still has some content and active communities are full and locked so you can't even reliably play with your friends if you tried or if you paid. ArenaNet sees no urgency in solving that fundamental and catastrophic problem. So here we are. This was once a game with a gemstore, now it is a gemstore with a game. Amusingly enough, a gemstore only makes sense as long as people care about their accounts or the product it exists within.

> @"scerevisiae.1972" said: > I'm pretty sure this is just about maximising server transfer income now. > > When was the last substantive improvement to WVW? September 2014 (debatable if it was a substantive improvement, but the ambition surely was for it to be that and they did deliver, on EotM; considering re-linking was announced as a temporary fix already at inception, I don't count it; Stronghold wasn't in WvW and Warclaw wasn't really for us; the GHA could count as a substantive improvement for WvW but wasn't intended as such, so that is also a grey area but would make the date october 2015 or smth, right?) >When was the last substantive balance patch? February 2020 (with some people claiming an intended cadence of 4-6 weeks, that would have amounted to 8-10 passes of which we got 3-4 afaik)

> @"Strider.7849" said: > > @"Voltekka.2375" said: > > Necro has booncorrupt, i think its fair scrapper has condi conversion. Just remove condi conversion skills (apart from contemplation of purity) from firebrand and make it condi removal instead. Booncorrupt is still a thing and several nec skills turn one boon into multiple condies. > > Boon corrupt is what got scourge severely nerfed. It affects 2 targets now (not including utilities and wells) and is no where near the level of rapid conversion that scrapper is at. Scrapper alone keeps condi builds entirely out of zerging. This doesn't take into consideration the other support it provides - damage reduction, stealth, projectile destruction, the best group super speed in the game, AND some of the strongest healing in the game provided that your group is booned up. It is more so people's stupidity that keeps conditions out of large scale gameplay. The way conditions are designed you have to overwhelm an opponents counters to bring the conditions to bear. It will never work to just bring a condi build or two into an otherwise power-damage environment because the opposing side will build cleanses to deal with the control conditions and whatever damage a handful of condi-damage dealers put out will just blend into that. By the same virtue, if you do manage to overwhelm opponents' condition counters with conditions all those control conditions will weave into the damage output and the damage output will just climb making the opposing side collapse with little to no other retort. That also makes conditions potentially incredibly powerful and play-breaking. People occassionally experience that in small doses when they get caught behind and get to feel the state of hopelessness that comes from self-cleansing away only covers and just standing there in a sea of cripple, chill and imob no matter how many buttons they push. Many stab skills come with breaks. Few cleanse skills come with resist. If you want to see what conditions can do at different scales you need to build a comp around it. It's also probably a good idea that building such comps is not overly appealing, common or simple because most people remember things like the epi meta with unfun dread. That showed what conditions can do and you only need to tally up some numbers to see what it still potentially could do.

> @"Balthazzarr.1349" said: > I’ll never understand the need to play this way. And ANet can’t, or won’t do anything to deal with it. I'm very late returning to the party here, but I logged in for the first time in 10 days and my inbox blew up with all you guys keeping my post qouted underneath while you went back and forth with each other. However, this comment caught my eye as it strikes me as kind of odd. What way to play is it that you do not understand? I mean, there are things I may disagree with in choices other players make but when it comes to the behaviour of the playerbase in broad sweeps I often understand it pretty well. Granted I know far less about NA than EU and they certainly have some significant unique phenomena (like the attention on BG for NA or the existance of BB in EU). However, things like migrations and their triggers have always been rather easy to understand. Even if they have shifted and could be described as three different things over vanilla, HoT and PoF, they are each still rather easy to understand the motive behind and the results of.

> @"Super Hayes.6890" said: > Yes, it is 2021 and an expansion is on the way. It truly would be appreciated if someone said something. The assumption that makes the most sense to me is that alliance work died when the lay offs happened. If so then just say it. All of us here can of course only speculate, but I would bet that something like this is more plausible: When ArenaNet sold to NCsoft there was probably a verbal agreement to a good degree of autonomy. When GW2 vanilla became the smash hit that it became that probably drove the publisher to overstep and push for further short revenues and that turned the developer from the leader of trends to a follower of trends. That backfired but the cat was out of the box regarding whatever silent agreement and attempts at salvage simply meant more overstepping culminating with Mike O's departure. If you read early interviews alot of this is really easy to see where Mike speaks of innovation but alot of moves made later and after are very formulaeic. Something as isolated as how GW2 approaches MTX is an interesting study from early days, to midterm to late present day. From positive management, to defendable issues to all out non-tradeable box rolls. I think NCsoft overstepped many other things (eg., in design) where Anet was made to innovate from poor routines just to replace that with the same old poor routines and that ultimately made Mike quit. The industry is also rather cutthroat and success has its ramifications with talent getting poached. That no doubt hurt ArenaNet after release but ArenaNet has also likely suffered additional setbacks from an HR department corrupted with alot of nepotism. Hirings has been suggestedly done on vouches and recommendation alot (eg., comments made during the Deroir-incident), by- and for people with similar outlooks and skillsets leading to something akin to a team full of goaltenders. It is hard to win games with that. It may also have caused quite alot of factioning on the inside with new and old groups. The sPvP and WvW initatives most likely came from a Mo-loyalist faction with Mike Z looking to pick up pieces that couldn't fit into the PoF crunch. It became pet projects of the Mike Z era and while there are certainly things to say about the productivity, iterativity and cancellation of related projects in the past, the two PvP initiatives in this era did look rather thought-through and shippable. However, by june that year Ray got a new job. Mike likely still tried to keep some resources to those projects and made reassurances but resources kept being shuffled or held off (at the time of the infamous saga announcement) and with Mike and whatever resistance his tenure posed gone a couple of months later those projects were likely frozen with another faction getting more speed under their wings again. The resources put onto Alliances when the downsizing came was not taken away, because they were probably limited to the people we know have worked on it since already by then. Nothing was really given that could be taken away. Also, even if a company may shed senior employees at times like that, they usually do not shed employees in important positions, like engineers, unless they have to. Especially not if they are understaffed on them to begin with. Whatever Mike's promises probably included existing engineers or hopes of getting some margin to rehire and balance out for programming. Like I've alluded to elsewhere, I think Ray is being honest when he says some work is still being done on Alliances. However, I also think that "work" is very close to something the group at competetive get to do on their own time. Like how SAB was or how side projects have come about in other games (for example the GvG arena that came to EVE) with developers working overtime, "between lunch and recess" or off the clock (because they have a sense of responsibility that heartless business leaders do not). I think that is where we are. Of course, this is as much speculation as Hayes' comments and at times it certainly drifts out into the more outrageous, however, past lessons has told that it isn't as far-fetched as it may seem to some. The examples may stem from whatever leaked out at the rando cowboy-hat's departure, but what was said certainly painted a picture of a likeminded faction who held itself in high regard, was convinced of its own excellence, operated in an echo chamber and viewed the 'others' as a separate dinosaur faction. On its own, I wouldn't really vest much worth in it, but it fits into the backdrop of the studio's behaviour with past- and present admitted reshuffles, turns in direction and productivity issues. So with the liberty of some tinfoil, this is how I would put it. Given the rehashed nature of alot of this I thought this would be a rather short summary, but you know, whatever vOv

> @"Balthazzarr.1349" said: > > @"Hesione.9412" said: > > Oh, we're not trying to tank. We're just completely overwhelmed by the other servers. It's like being in silver PvP and having platinums fight against you. > > No we’re not, but other servers are. Well, this is nothing new since 2012. It is scoring- and population mechanics that are anathematic to the ladder we play on. It could be as simple as Balthazzar points out with other servers tanking around you to inflate your position on the ladder and you didn't see it in time to adapt. It could also be something more benign but easily as problematic. Something as small as a 10-man night crew that has no opposition in your "actual" tier inflating you up to a tier where they finally get some opposition, only then, your prime-time is out-populated 2:1 and has to suffer the consequences. Things like that can also pull and push you up and down like a yo-yo between content that matches you poorly. So you may simply be two tiers too high than what your are supposed to be at but what's broken in scoring and population mechanics simply lands you there. It could also be transfers of course and that is reaching some rather ridiculous levels by now where the movement of communities that are as small as a single guild in size can move servers across the entire spectrum from 500-gem husk to locked/unlinked simply because the content creator-consumer balance has grown so incredibly out of whack due to ArenaNet's actions. Guilds are often blamed for the migrations but in reality it is almost always "everyone else" that is the problem.

**1. The Alliance system 2. The sPvP 10+ system** Deliver, deliver and deliver. Nothing else matters unless they want to keep heading towards every server having T5-level activity and singular guilds producing the majority of content on every server while triggering transfer avalanches anytime they move to get out of full/unlinked. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/introducing-the-megaserver-system/ Read to the end for a tickling reminder B)

> @"Galmac.4680" said: > More mount speed would be nice, perhaps only in own regions. > Perhaps something like a third dodge. > And with the first attack perhaps hitting more than one target (what currently looks really really weird when attacking these white ambient creatures) > Wouldn't it be nice if the dismount could kill downed players as well? Lel.

Running around with a group of 5 or so friends on my first 80, sometime late '12 or early '13, cleric vanilla book-guard, yo B) . Then having to level up another class because we had too many (almost only) Guards, almost immidiately. Then having to level up another class that we basically had none of. Then deciding to level up another class to be nice and help out because a friend felt jailed on his main, only to be jailed in that role myself. That sums up vanilla, heh.

> @"Svarty.8019" said: > 1. Sammy - Babe Come Down > 2. Fu Manchu - Over the Edge Come now Svarty, he only asked for good music for his video, not good music period ;) .

> @"kamikharzeeh.8016" said: > this is therefore not working here. our numbers extremly rely on our linked server, therefore i agree, it makes absolutely no sense that we're a permaful host server. we have some odd night population, but even those are by now usually outnumbered 1:3 normally. I think you need to read what I wrote again, consider the context and keep a perspective of a longer stretch of time. Or we just misunderstand each other and then this entire post will be superfluous, but meh, at least someone else can always learn something from it then. Desolation was originally one of the most guild-stacked servers in Europe. For tournament one they (you) rather famously tanked from gold to silver simply to fight all the other servers with a european profile. The gold tier was just coverage-stacked with canadians and south americans so no one who actually wanted to compete against europeans wanted to be there. By the second tournament I think Desolation was pushed up to gold tier anyway. That also reflects that it was both typically guild-stacked with a european profile but also the largest of those servers at that time. That also persisted for a long time. Throughout most of late vanilla and early HoT Deso was one of two servers almost constantly in Tier 1. The other server was whatever non-european stack was keeping itself up there so Deso essentially was THE european stack and regarded as the #1 in Europe thanks to that. That attracted alot of players for a very long time. It just didn't ruin the guilds as much back then because there were still plenty of guilds around so they had not depleted and vultured themselves to the point of non-recruitment yet and if one guild died finding a new one on Deso wasn't a problem. In fact, by the time the GvG community decided to stack three servers for matchup reasons as we were creeping up on 2017, Deso was choosen as one of the three servers simply because so many of the guilds were already there and wasn't overly interested in moving. The other two servers at that time was of course Vabbi and Whiteside Ridge which most people had hardly heard of before that because they were regarded as "dead" already when the linking system was first introduced. So what you describe has only happened in the last year or two and as your server is obviously struggling, that new community that has less of a guild profile is clearly struggling with content, per your description. That supports my argument, it doesn't detract from it. If Desolation has adopted a "server identity" today, that is only recent and has clearly lead to the sewers of the ladder and general content production issues. Often when these discussions come up you on Deso get lumped together with Gandara. Gandara as a server has a fairly similar history to Deso as it was also very guild-stacked in vanilla, came second in silver after Deso for the first tournament if I am not mistaken and won silver in the second tournament when Deso didn't tank out of gold. Essentially every commander worth his/her salt on Gandara originally was a guild-commander. They may not have been in guilds for stretches of time after their guilds died but they earnt their stripes as members of guilds and learnt commanding publically with the support of their guilds. I don't know the inner workings of Deso as well but I remember enough of who Deso was stacked with throughout most of vanilla and HoT. Deso is certainly not helped by all those years of being "#1" today with lowered server caps, dead guilds and apathic players lingering around. Similarily Gandara is certainly not helped today by all the time that community spent accepting every player here on these forums that asked for a "nice community" when all their guilds were dying out. Like I've pointed out countless times by now: I am not defending the server system. I think it is terrible and destroys the game mode at this point. However, I understand the server system, I can try to explain it and it isn't surprising to me how it affects servers like Desolation and Gandara. That isn't any more surprising than how it is starting to affect the more recent stacks or remaining communities that actually has some guilds cooperating. How long did WSR's attempt to flush their server work for them? A relink and a half? Then they were stuck in locked hell again simply for having two-three good guilds that can create- or match up to alot of content and for having inherited that unpleasant label of being #1. That is very representative of the sorry state of our game mode, when all it takes is a guild or two to attract enough completely anonymous players to lock the server. We clearly need restructuring and guild-encouraging content to slip out of that chokehold. It is either that or being milked to death. A death where every server looks like your typical T5 server. Perhaps that is ArenaNet's vision, I can't tell. I mean, that will still have some players play and people can come tourist from PvE. Perhaps it isn't misrepresentative for GW2, the GW2 we have come to know today. However, it is still "death" from a WvW-identity perspective, from an MMO-identity perspective and any sliver of hope for seeing the mode claw its way back towards its potential. At that point it may be Cydoriil for most of us even if nothing more promising has come along. GW2 WvW will no longer be the best player on a weak RvR starting roster. At that point, if ArenaNet can survive on the single-player PvE majority, more or less alone, will be put to the test. I don't think so, but that isn't really my problem so I don't really have to concern myself with it.