What happened to EU WvW server pops? Can someone help me with current system?

[Umut.5471]

Hello,

I have always been a Seafarer's Rest(EU) player. I took a break in 2015, came back with the release of Path of Fire expansion. Bought both expansions and I'm done with PvE stuff for now.

My server was very good at WvW, we always had commanders on and there were epic fights most of the time. Small-party ganking or zerging, you were able to find fights everywhere.

Now I see that SFR is t4 and another 'former' top tier server Desolation is our rival in t4. I wanna see more action and fights.

Did they change matching system or something, or did our servers lose their population?

Should I transfer my account to a t1 server to have some good fights? Is it worth transfering to Gandara for example? They were much worse than SFR or Desolation back then.

But I see that they are on t1 atm. Does this situation change very often with current system? I'm wondering if it's worth spending gems for that or not.

[Deniara Devious.3948]

**At least you got a link on SFR.** You are winning Desolation because of numbers, but it seems populations have dropped on all servers.

 

The reason is simple: changes done to WvWvW were not enough. Desert borderland still sucks and it is nightmare to defend if you have just 1-3 players on the map (e.g. earth keep is designed so that it is easier to attack than defend). Most of the loot and rewards are useless junk. It takes very long time to get ascended and/or legendaries. Rewards still lag behind pve. The meta is full of power creep and the balance between professions is far from being decent. Certain professions, like engineer, have almost never been the meta, yet Arenanet keeps buffing classes like Guardian, which have always been the meta. There is close to zero Arenanet developer attention to this part of forum. **I am sure if there would be significantly better rewards and better skill / profession and population balance, this game mode would also see more players!**

 

Desolation is still classified as "FULL" by Arenanet, even though there is barely ever any queues and near constant outnumbered "buff" on 1-3 maps. This must change. Why to keep the server closed and full for 1+ year when it is obvious that "full" is nowhere near FULL.

 

Ayna / Deniara

 

PS. I am for merging some servers to have higher population match ups. WvWvW is a combination of small scale roaming, solo roaming, but also huge epic fights.

[FogLeg.9354]

I am in FoW which is smaller server linked to the SFR.

 

Before the HoT expansion WvW kept losing people so servers in last tier (FoW was in Tier 9) were pretty empty. The servers in T1 and T2 were still doing fine at that time. Then with HoT game lost about half the players within few months, not all were WvW players but enough dropped out of WvW too, so even top population servers began to feel the impact. Things got so bad, that in Tier9 we had eventually 20 players left on the server who bothered to log into WvW during the week AND enemy servers had less.

 

So they did some redesigns. Maps were changed around. But more importantly couple of basic WvW changes were implemented:

- largest servers were marked as FULL and nobody was allowed to transfer into full server

- smallest servers were LINKED to the average population servers (SFR+FoW or RoF +WSR + RoS). This was to avoid extremely unpopular decision to shut off servers completely. But it also meant small servers linked to the FULL server were open to transfers and so everyone started to jump into linked servers instead. Every 2 months the links are changed, so even if SFR has FoW now, after few weeks (new relink coming end of December) it could get some other server or none

- they also removed server rankings. Every match winner now goes up one tier and loser goes down one tier. Second place server stays in same tier. On the one hand, you are always getting 2 new servers to fight every week. And yet, if there is 3 fairly equal servers fighting one week, it will ALWAYS mean one has to go one tier up to fight much larger servers and one must go down a tier to fight much smaller servers.

- none of these changes really helped. People still quitted the game and every server has now much less people.

- last expansion only made things worse as it again brought some extremely broken classes and skills, clearly designed for PvE, that are making fights in WvW boring and players lose interest very fast

 

There are still servers that can create queues in every map (T1 and T2). But for all others queue is now rare thing, even in primetime. Since the winning server is being punished by forcing them to fight larger server next week, whole tiers have started to avoid winning matches. Many servers never defend keeps or try to capture enemy objectives anymore, cause its boring and pointless. So, they just fight blob vs blob vs blob every evening.

 

So, should you transfer from SFR to Gandara? It is larger server for sure. Are they having more fun, I dunno. They could just go up for one week, lose points to the Baruch Bay nightcrew and drop down again for next week. It is also possible all links will be changed at the end of the month and Gandara could lose players while SFR gains big link. I would say, wait for the relink at least.

 

From my previous matches in upper tiers, nobody there had small scale fights anymore, or did any roaming. If the server had queue for primetime, it meant 50 man megazerg running around. They did it for few hours and then all logged off. For most of the day nothing was happening. Guilds were all trying to outnumber opponent by bringing 30-40 members into raid or simply handhold each other.

[Junkpile.7439]

Well at least we can karma train in WvW. There 4 maps and enemy doesn't defend so you can map hop and cap everything with 20 players. :)

[Dayra.7405]

Linking system has one big advantage: No one really notice when a tier is closed (who does remember that EU started linking with 6 tiers?)

 

So use that advantage on the 29.12. (next link day) and close EU-T5 and maybe EU-T4 as well, and make sure that every server got a link, currently to many bottom servers in EU are full and linkless and therefore doomed to T4-5.

 

Give (reduced amount) of PIPS to EotM-player, WHENEVER all maps of your server have queue give full PIPS, to handle the resulting primetime queue's.

 

Finally shutdown EU-Borderlands for Monday-Friday 1:00-1800 (CE(S)T), all servers in EU easily fit their interested WvW player onto EB during that time, this way they can figth and not only hide-and-seek and PvD.

[Decado.9304]

I wouldn't waste yer gems, good fights aren't that good anywhere these days, monster condi bombs and boon rip bubbles tend to mean quicker and vastly less interesting battles. Small scale stuff can still be pretty decent though