Population: What are the actual numbers?

[hellsqueen.3045]

> @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > > @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> > > > > 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

> > > >

> > > > Not all of the people on that server might do WvW though.

> > >

> > > Then they have no impact on the status of the server. 400,000 accounts that don’t touch WvW do not impact whether your server is full or not.

> >

> > I am pretty sure members who do not do WvW still count for your server population, because they are still considered members of that server even though we have the mega server.

>

> No: this

> > @"Hepatolith.6389" said:

> > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > > > @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> > > > > > 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

> > > > >

> > > > > Not all of the people on that server might do WvW though.

> > > >

> > > > Then they have no impact on the status of the server. 400,000 accounts that don’t touch WvW do not impact whether your server is full or not.

> > >

> > > I am pretty sure members who do not do WvW still count for your server population, because they are still considered members of that server even though we have the mega server.

> >

> > No they don't. They changed that a year? Maybe 2 years ago, so only actual Wvw players + hours spent in WvW per player count towards server population.

>

>

 

How does the game define playing?

People can jump in WvW for one day a week just for dailies they find easy, how does the game calculate this.

I would say those people popping in for easy dailies are not players but they could still end up counting for population.

And how do we reasonably increase round the clock participation in WvW?

 

> @"Caliburn.1845" said:

> Define what is playing WvW? A hour a day? A hour a week?

>

> From a totally anecdotal point of view(IE recent bandwagons such as SOR, KN, AR), you can jump a medium population up to full with roughly 500 accounts moving there and playing 2-3 hours a day, seven days a week. We can also estimate that those transfer people out number the server natives by probably at least three to one at least in visibility. With that said if we exclude people who only go in for dailies, and lets say they play an hour a day for those(totaling seven hours a week). Each server probably has less than 1000 players that play more than seven hours a week. This would put the "active"(at least in my eyes) NA server WvW population somewhere around 12,000 unique players.

 

 

[Strider Pj.2193]

S> @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > > > @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> > > > > > 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

> > > > >

> > > > > Not all of the people on that server might do WvW though.

> > > >

> > > > Then they have no impact on the status of the server. 400,000 accounts that don’t touch WvW do not impact whether your server is full or not.

> > >

> > > I am pretty sure members who do not do WvW still count for your server population, because they are still considered members of that server even though we have the mega server.

> >

> > No: this

> > > @"Hepatolith.6389" said:

> > > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > > > @"hellsqueen.3045" said:

> > > > > > > @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> > > > > > > 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

> > > > > >

> > > > > > Not all of the people on that server might do WvW though.

> > > > >

> > > > > Then they have no impact on the status of the server. 400,000 accounts that don’t touch WvW do not impact whether your server is full or not.

> > > >

> > > > I am pretty sure members who do not do WvW still count for your server population, because they are still considered members of that server even though we have the mega server.

> > >

> > > No they don't. They changed that a year? Maybe 2 years ago, so only actual Wvw players + hours spent in WvW per player count towards server population.

> >

> >

>

> How does the game define playing?

> People can jump in WvW for one day a week just for dailies they find easy, how does the game calculate this.

> I would say those people popping in for easy dailies are not players but they could still end up counting for population.

> And how do we reasonably increase round the clock participation in WvW?

>

> > @"Caliburn.1845" said:

> > Define what is playing WvW? A hour a day? A hour a week?

> >

> > From a totally anecdotal point of view(IE recent bandwagons such as SOR, KN, AR), you can jump a medium population up to full with roughly 500 accounts moving there and playing 2-3 hours a day, seven days a week. We can also estimate that those transfer people out number the server natives by probably at least three to one at least in visibility. With that said if we exclude people who only go in for dailies, and lets say they play an hour a day for those(totaling seven hours a week). Each server probably has less than 1000 players that play more than seven hours a week. This would put the "active"(at least in my eyes) NA server WvW population somewhere around 12,000 unique players.

>

>

 

Play hours. It’s defined by playhours.

 

So yes, popping in for dailies does have an impact. But one person playing for 6 hours a day is the same as 12 players doing an average of 1/2 hour of dailies.

[Straegen.2938]

T4 NA still pulls multiple map Q's across servers. T4 this time of day often cannot find a dozen players across all servers.

 

Is WvW dying, yes but only in the sense that most games lose population to attrition. Still a healthy population most days and most times.

[Substance E.4852]

The cope posting in here is unreal.

 

EotM was explicitly made as an overflow because map queues were so incredibly long that people would sit for an hour or more just to get on a map.

 

The very idea of such a thing being needed today is laughable.

[FogLeg.9354]

There used to be 9 Tiers in EU with all 27 servers having enough players to generate queues in every map every day. Then last tiers died off, the situation was so bad in the last tiers that we had about 10-15 players logging in prime time, and enemy servers had less. This was before linking started.

 

In early days EotM was also so big there was at least 10 different maps you could be sent, all being nearly full with multiple comms and many enemy blobs running around. Not anymore. Yes, it is arguable if EotM is even considered WvW, and for some time you were required some WvW reward for legendary items or achievements so many PvE players went to farm in EotM.

 

With linking upper tiers are currently fine. Not like they really have huge queues anymore these days, only on the reset night, and sometimes on prime time, but even with links current last tiers (T4, T5) are nowehere near being "full".

 

So the game has gone from 27 full servers to about 15, which means half the players are gone.

 

It is also worth considering if big WvW fighting guilds who just do large scale GvG every day in the WvW are actually WvW players at all. If they had special arena for 30 vs 30 with WvW rules they would not even log into WvW anymore as they have zero interest about winning the match or defending an objective. And I suspect these make up quite a large portion of current "WvW population".

 

I also want to point out that different people have different meaning for "before". Was it year ago? 2 years? 5 years? What I mean in my post, WvW was mostly dead for tiers 8-9 already before HoT arrived in 2015 so the "good old times" of WvW being packed to the rim were somewhere 2013-2014. If however, you compare 1-2 years back (2016, 2017), not that much has changed with current situation.

[SkyShroud.2865]

Dying is relative.

To us old players who have played since god knows when, WvW indeed is dying.

They will never give us absolute numbers because statistically, even a person that does wvw for 10 minutes per week is consider active.

They will also never give us total hours played, not sure why they won't but they just won't.

 

Personally, I am interested in total hours played for different servers, it will tell us a lot.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

Can’t you figure out the population size based on KD ratio?

 

I’m sure there’s a mixture of equations with variables that can estimate the total number of people based on the numbers in the KD category for a given skirmish

[FogLeg.9354]

> @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:

> Can’t you figure out the population size based on KD ratio?

>

> I’m sure there’s a mixture of equations with variables that can estimate the total number of people based on the numbers in the KD category for a given skirmish

 

I did something like that in May:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/32767/comparing-activity-between-tiers-eu

 

But it is fairly impossible to expand number of kills to the overall population. Because not every player does same things in WvW, some people can spend hours taking objectives and never kill enemy player. While others log in and start to kill hundreds of enemies (or die over and over again). Counting kills also prefers servers with highly organized WvW guilds raiding every day.

 

My point is that you first need to define "population" and "playing WvW". Pretty much every player has their own definition, mostly only counting activities they like to do in WvW. Is someone, who logs in once per month, pops into WvW, dies and leaves the game, a WvW player? Should you count individual player accounts or total hours spent in WvW by all players?

 

What you can do, is to compare same data between servers (if server 1 has twice the number of kills, it is most likely also more populated) and you can compare same data over time (if number of kills has dropped to half over one year, it is likely population has also decreased). But even there are complications, as servers are likely to skip whole week when matched against much stronger opponent. And servers are getting constantly relinked, guilds transfer off to higher tiers etcetc.

 

You can see yourself data from here, for example take activity number in Nov 2017 and nov 2018:

https://wvwstats.com/history/2202/

I would say, there has been drop in activity over the year but it is not huge. Somewhere about 10-15%. So based on that, population has also dropped by similar amount.

 

Or perhaps most players have lost damage, prefer tankier builds and are just more difficult to kill now.

[Aeolus.3615]

> @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

 

nope.

 

if ur server will queue for just a few hours during the week and be completelly empty when not queued will still show full.

 

Each server ends mostly ktrain others in their dead timezones, then when other server increases population the bloby ones goes to sleep... that's how links work.

They dont help servers with low population, they stack servers that play during same period then god afk for others to ktrain.

 

WvW never worked decently before... hardly will..

[TinkTinkPOOF.9201]

I would not say dying, but it is nothing like it was the first few years. For those that were around then, WvW guilds often had two or three guilds because member caps were being hit, and I am talking WvW main guilds. One of the first ones I really got into would queue two maps on our own, with a "skill" team that would be 30+ on another map. We had dedicated roamers and scouts as well.

 

Taking structures were a serious job to, not this fling bodies at walls until we cap something. No, we had people on HOURS before runs that flipped camps and made 40+ golems and would hide them in the rocks or water by garri, because if you didn't get it in a surprise push, you probably were not going to get it. Fights inside would sometimes go on for hours, and this was when ACs were everywhere and was 3-4 nerfs ago, ACs back then HURT, single AC could melt a whole golem raid.

 

WvW was good then, but the good coms from that time almost none are still around, as no changes or updates were made for a LONG time to WvW, so people got tired and left. Then some hope, EOTM was expected, lots of people started showing back up, and then it was released and everyone laughed and left again. As it was nothing the WvW crowed wanted, it was a PvE farm and place WvW players only ever went to when they wanted to level alts. People who liked EOTM said that was not true, aaaaand then the loot nerf came to EOTM and it it's population plummeted.

[samo.1054]

I'm leading a spreadsheet of sum of all kills on EU servers at the end of the week. All I can tell you is that compared to March 2018, the sum of all kills is about 5-10% less nowadays, so I'd say nothing outside of ordinary/natural decline.

 

 

[Caliburn.1845]

If those spreadsheets are public I'd love to take a look at them.

[clone wars.9568]

> @"TyPin.9860" said:

> Since the release of GW2 I have been reading about how *"WvW is dying"*... But what are the actual numbers on that? What is the percentage of players playing WvW? What are the absolute numbers?

>

> Just interested. Not trying to make a statement.

 

Anet will NEVER reveal the numbers for each server because they're not equal. They have admitted that one "full" server can have a lower amount of players on the server vs other "full" servers. This is because of the way anet calculate the wvw populations of each servers NOT based on player number or server numbers but in fact, are based on the amount each player plays wvw. So a heavy wvw user will equal to 2-3 people on the server (a crazy system I know). So one person that plays a lot will take up 3 slots. On another server people who are play wvw a few hours, a week will only be classed as one person. The problem with this is if the heavy users stop playing or reduce the amount they play the server will still not be opened up for new players to join the server. This failed system will carry over to the new system of "worlds" when we get allies in wvw in the coming big wvw patch (and probably last wvw major update).

 

This is one reason anet say they won't open up BG or pair them with other servers not because they have more people, in fact, anet revealed BG had at the time far fewer people on the server, they simply had people who played longer. Until anet look again at real ways to balance the game mode then we'll only be waiting for this hype train that is the "new world system" for years simply to be disappointed.

[reddie.5861]

i left t1 couple years ago on EU cus it was unplayable everyday all day.. thats how it used to be.

i mean server would lag so horrible bad that it didnt even matter how good you played or what you dodge or what you dropped it just came down to who gets the most 11111 off untill enough people died so u could actually use skills again.

 

is gw2 better now, yes and no the lags are more or less gone for most of the time but now u have to deal with hot/pof builds which to me are equally shit to crap lags back in the day.

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"hunkamania.7561" said:

> 8 full server NA tho! That means the game is loaded with players right!?

 

No... "Full servers" simply means that there's enough players active in WvW that they don't want more players in those servers.

[DeadlySynz.3471]

 

 

> @"clone wars.9568" said:

> > @"TyPin.9860" said:

> > Since the release of GW2 I have been reading about how *"WvW is dying"*... But what are the actual numbers on that? What is the percentage of players playing WvW? What are the absolute numbers?

> >

> > Just interested. Not trying to make a statement.

>

> Anet will NEVER reveal the numbers for each server because they're not equal. They have admitted that one "full" server can have a lower amount of players on the server vs other "full" servers. This is because of the way anet calculate the wvw populations of each servers NOT based on player number or server numbers but in fact, are based on the amount each player plays wvw. So a heavy wvw user will equal to 2-3 people on the server (a crazy system I know). So one person that plays a lot will take up 3 slots. On another server people who are play wvw a few hours, a week will only be classed as one person. The problem with this is if the heavy users stop playing or reduce the amount they play the server will still not be opened up for new players to join the server. This failed system will carry over to the new system of "worlds" when we get allies in wvw in the coming big wvw patch (and probably last wvw major update).

>

> This is one reason anet say they won't open up BG or pair them with other servers not because they have more people, in fact, anet revealed BG had at the time far fewer people on the server, they simply had people who played longer. Until anet look again at real ways to balance the game mode then we'll only be waiting for this hype train that is the "new world system" for years simply to be disappointed.

 

Yea this is true, and we all know which server has the most numbers at the moment. The way they calculate "play hours" is a bit screwy and how they calculate 1 server as full and the next not full. The funny thing is, the way they've done it, they're basically baiting players into failure. Case and point, we have a server in T1 that's stacked themselves, and on all accounts, are basically failing because they're terrible and repeatedly get beat even when they have 15-20 more. Much like another server did semi-recently, they have to increase their play hours in an attempt to blob more and win. They will inevitably lose their link, and thus a portion of their alliance, then crash and burn just as the other server did. Rinse and repeat, find a new server to bandwagon to, suck there, blob more, and lose the link. I keep telling people, this behavior is going to transfer over into the new alliance system, but I wonder how that is going to pan out.

 

I'm unsure why Anet refuses to make the numbers actively public (even an in-game menu that shows all the active numbers in WvW at one time). If players see this then they may actively try to even themselves out. Even if they don't want to reveal the actual numbers, how about a simple play time graph showing the active play time split up into 2hr increments that aligns with the current scoring increments.