New WvW server rankingss as of Oct 5th. For North America, the top 3 servers do not surprise anyone, though they may change as HoD seems to be losing for the first time since the game’s launch.

Graph is of Henge of Denravi

Originally posted by Mike Ferguson (Source)

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This data was collected from 8:00PM Sept 14th to 9:30PM Sept 18th. I believe the time zone listed is UTC, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

There can be up to four lines on each chart, one for each map that world is playing on. A line is only present for a map if it was full and there were people waiting in a queue. The map abbreviations are:

EB – Eternal Battlergrounds
RB – Red Team Borderlands
BB – Blue Team Borderlands
GB – Green Team Borderlands

Be sure to pay close attention to the vertical axis on each chart as the scale changes from world to world. Some worlds have hundreds of people queued for all four maps while other worlds might peak at a hundred in queue on one or two maps.

Unfortunately I just realized I didn’t put the world names on the chart. A chart’s filename matches the world it represents, so you’ll need to look at the end of the url when looking at a chart (or before clicking on it) to see what world it represents.

We thought these charts would be useful information for people to see, as it helps illustrate why some worlds have much longer waits than others. Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Some other information we gathered from this timespan:
- Almost 30% of the total players who logged into the game queued up for WvW
- About 3% of the total players who logged in and queued never got in.

We’re completely ecstatic about the first number and not happy at all about the second. We’re looking at a number of short term and long term solutions that should help make that second number go down even if the first one goes up. As we make progress on those solutions we will keep you updated.

You can find all the graphs in the link supplied above. The graph shown above is the highest populated server (HoD) in the game. Kaineng appears to be the lowest where there is almost never a queue, and when it is, it’s 20 people or so.

Guild Wars 2 Junkies is proud to present our first episode of the GW2 Podcast. Listen to hosts Draegan and Clementine discuss the topics of the week along with a weekly update of W3 discussion. Draegan is the owner and editor of Guild Wars 2 Junkies and Clementine is a guild officer of PRX who is also kicks ass for the Titan Alliance; which dominates Henge of Denravi.

Listen to us each weeks as we give you the latest drama and news from WvW servers around the world. Each week we’ll also round up the news of the week while dropping wisdom. We’ll also try to bring on guests from different Alliances and Guilds from all over the world.

We’re also beginning a contest to name our show. If you’ve got a great idea for a name send it to [email protected] with the subject line: “GW2 Junkies Podcast Naming Contest”. The winner will receive either a free copy of the game or $50 in Diamonds. This contest is open ended and will end once we have a name we like the best.

If you have any ideas for topics or have any tips for us you’d like to hear on the show send an email to [email protected].

STREAM HERE
 
[DIRECT DOWNLOAD]

Coming soon on iTunes!

Originally posted by Mike Ferguson (Source)

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Hey everyone, sorry to not post about this sooner, the last few days have been a little hectic and I wanted to verify a couple things first about the issues we’ve been seeing with the queues before posting anything.

As many of you know, it is possible for someone to queue up for a map after you and get in first. We’re trying to get that fixed as soon as possible but unfortunately we still need a bit more time to solve the problem. We will definitely keep you updated when there is any news on our progress.

I have been checking the queue sizes and wait times for each matchup, and there are a couple interesting things I’ve observed so far that may help reduce queue times for some of you.

Worlds at the top of the rankings can have queues that reach multiple hours (particularly for the Eternal Battlegrounds map), but most of the worlds in the bottom half of the ranking quite frequently have open spots in at least a few maps, and the lower ranked the server is, the more likely it is that there are spots available. I’ll be posting the up to date world rankings shortly.

When there are queues for every map, the wait time for borderland maps tends to be shorter. Enemy team borderlands tend to have the smallest queues for just about every team so you may want to try entering those maps first before attempting to queue for the Eternal Battlegrounds. If you are just entering the queue for the battlegrounds and not checking the borderlands maps first to see if they have space open, you could be missing out on playing in the Borderlands while you wait for a spot to open up for you in the Battlegrounds.

Make sure to continue reading.

Originally posted by Mike Ferguson (Source)

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The match that ends Friday September 14 is scheduled to be our last 24 hour match.
The match that starts on Friday will be 1 week in length. We anticipate having week long matches for a couple weeks before switching to the 2 week format.

We are switching to a 1 week schedule so we can continue to let the ranking formula adjust server rankings faster than every 2 weeks, and it will hopefully help people get acclimated to the cadence of a longer match.

Originally posted by MikeFerguson (Source)

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Starting on September 1 we began using the results of the 24 hour WvW matches to begin rematching worlds using our matchmatching system. We needed to fix a few bugs with the matchmaking server in the first few days which is why our data starts at that point.

Below are the current up to date rankings for all worlds. At some point we would like to deliver this data in a much better format but for now we just want to get the data out there for everyone to take a look at.

I am still trying to format the results of the 24 hour matches so I can start posting them here as well, but right now I have an excel table with lots of columns that I need to convert over and it’s not playing nice. Hopefully I can post them sometime in the next few days. I’ll try to update this thread with current rankings whenever possible.

Continue reading to see the results.

Were you part of this three way fight this weekend? If you’re into competitive W3 play, then these three servers are probably worth checking out if you haven’t found a home yet.

World vs. World is a fantastic part of GW2 that is just starting to shape up. The better servers are bubbling to the top; but everything is not hunky-dorey. Queues are killing a lot of people’s will to play. Some players are reporting up to 5 hour queues. Let’s hope Arenanet is working on this issue now.

In other news, GW2 is sold out digitally and at retailers all over the world.

Good scouting will be critical to success in WvW, or you will always end up being one move behind the enemy. But what do the battle markers mean? How far can you see? Do maps show the same range as sight? Who should scout and where? Take an initial look at these and other questions in this episode of RESULTS.

Tales of Tyria, Episode 43, has been released and this week they discuss W3.

News of the week: We now have a launch time! Midnight?!? How will that affect you? There was also a stress test this weekend and some new websites have cropped up! Next we move onto a some mailbag questions from our audience and then roundtable discussion on World vs. World mecahnics. Will there be problems encouraging people to keep fighting once it’s lost?

Hit us after the break to watch the full episode.

Today we get a fifth video discussing all the aspects of Guild Wars 2, and as promised, we get the the last concerning World vs. World vs. World.

Guild Wars 2 Game Designers Matt Witter and Mike Ferguson talk about World vs World (WvW), where three teams battle for control over objectives across four massive maps. Each team represents an entire server, so literally hundreds of players take part in wars that last for weeks. It’s PvP combat on an epic scale!

Hit us after the break for the video.

We get some pretty good information with the latest dev blog for this weekend’s BWE. Here are a few tidbits that should help out your guild’s strategy launch.

To help account for the rapidly fluctuating populations at launch, we’ll initially use the 24-hour match format until world populations settle down a bit and we are able to get some data that will help avoid having two-week-long extreme mismatches. Once most worlds are reliably matching up against worlds of similar strength, we will switch over to playing the two-week-duration match cycles.

What this change does it hyper-inflate the initial competitiveness of launch. Established guilds were most likely aiming to control maps from day 1 and over the course of the first two weeks, stake a claim for world dominance. Initially this gave them some breathing room. Now with this change, it appears worlds will be reset and you will have to repeatedly claim W3 territory every day.

This should provide for some amazingly competitive battles and PVP rushes as guilds attempt to claim influence every day until things settle down.

The second piece of news is:

As you’ll see, there will be fewer worlds available initially than we had during BWE2. Why do we have fewer worlds for a much larger beta event? There are a few different reasons for this, ranging from being able to have a larger player limit on all worlds, to a shift in focus for how we utilize our server power.

Larger server populations! This should definitely help head start angst about getting locked out of the server of your choice. We found that many guilds were focused on a few different servers. Hopefully now players won’t be stuck on another server not being able to play with friends and waiting on server transfers to open up.

You can read the rest of the dev blog on Arenanet’s official website.

We got a chance to ask Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer, Eric Flannum, a few questions about the game ranging from World vs World, class balance, PVP vs. PVE progression and more. We’re very excited to share this with, especially on the same day that Arenanet has announced that the game’s launch is August 28, just two months from now!

GW2 Junkies: Guild Wars 2 has some amazing character models, ranging from gigantic norn to tiny asura. With any competitive MMO, players worry about hit boxes and how character models affect gameplay. Since a player can get hit by stray damage, how have you designed the hit boxes for all the varied sizes and shapes that GW2 has to offer—asura are short, norn are tall, charr are wide (and low to the ground when they are running), etc.?

Eric Flannum: Every player character in Guild Wars 2 has the exact same sized collision cylinder. For asura this means that the cylinder is larger than they are and for norn it means that it is smaller. Very early in the process of making the game we knew this was going to be the case, so the min and max sizes of our races are heavily influenced by this.

We’ve discovered a video by Navi B. Zhang that shows us the new dungeon added to the W3 maps. In order to get in your server needs to control one of the keeps.

A first impression of the new wvwvw dungeon in the eternal battle ground is a nice jumping puzzle with loots in the end and many broken legs and faces in between.

Few things in the video are pretty awesome and worth mentioning. First, there is a second of the dungeon that requires torches, and if you don’t have them, your screen is completely dark (10:42 in the video). There are traps that you have to avoid and you need to throw your torch to light your way (14:27). The rest of the video shows us the really cool jumping puzzle inside.

Watch the full video after the break.