ArenaNet Reveals World List For Final Guild Wars 2 BWE

Written by: Jason Winter (Twitter @winterinformal - Google+) | July 18, 2012 3:54 pm

40 Comments

World vs. World is getting its final tuneup before launch in the upcoming Beta Weekend Event for Guild Wars 2, and we’ve now got a confirmed list of world names for this weekend, as well as a few tweaks to WvW from ArenaNet‘s PvP guru Mike Ferguson.

In his blog post, Ferguson talks about improvements to matchmaking and that, at launch, matches will be on one-day cycles for a while, until things get settled enough that two-week matches make more sense and offer better balance.

The world list itself is fairly short — less than half the size of the last event’s list, in fact — which Ferguson explains as being the result of ArenaNet’s ability to squeeze more power out of its hardware and to support more players per world. If space becomes an issue, they will launch new worlds over the weekend, as needed.

Of course, that probably means that everyone will be jam-packed into the Asura and Sylvari starting areas, but as an Asura would say, it’s for a good cause: science!

ArenaNet Reveals World List For Final Guild Wars 2 BWE

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11 comments

http://twitter.com/Osuryn Osuryn

Hey, just a small adjustment, GuildCast got moved to wensday no longer tuesday
- St_Draco
  
  Yeah, jeese MikeB, Jason didn’t you get the memo? Keep up with your own, ever changing show schedules =P
  
  Stay tuned to GuildCast, now on what ever day of the week Gary decides this week.
  (Gary must be taking Program Director classes from the guys at SyFy, coming soon Gamebreaker Wrestling Show)
  
  PS, I kid out of love
  - Jadedsheamus
    
    I think it’s likely due to a scheduling issue for the new show, they wanted both to be on the same night and Wednesday is it.
7BitBrian

This is pretty awesome. Most companies choose to go overboard and try to release more and more servers, that inevitably end up being shut down. I’m looking at you SWTOR.

It’s refreshing to see a company trying to be more realistic and not just spam us with servers to make their game look huge.
Sharuko

I mentioned during BWE2 that half the servers were empty, people didn’t believe it. I also mentioned GW2 will be the first MMO in history to merge servers before launch months ago, and guess what? True again. The funny thing is I was half joking about that because I didn’t think it would happen but it is way worse than I thought.

Just in case anyone is curious:

They went from 48 NA servers in Beta 2 to 18 in Beta 3. They went from 48 EU servers in Beta 2 to 24 in Beta 3. Overall they went from 96 servers to 42.

Overall good move, but ouch.
- Lycronis
  
  You are such a moron! Did you even watch the video or read what Ferguson said? Haters gotta hate, trolls gotta troll! Once again you have proven how much of an idiot you are. Go crawl back under you rock you little worm.
- 7BitBrian
  
  Your lack of reasoning is astounding. Server mergers are usually looked down upon because it means less people are playing. Server that used to be full no longer are so the people must not be playing.
  
  That is not hat is happening here. What is happening here is ArenaNet trying to nail down the “right” amount of servers, not to many and not to few, for launch.
  
  Can you really not see the difference there? I mean I want to think you’re mildly intelligent(I like having people of differing opinions in the community), but comments like this call that into question and wonder if you really are spouting nothing but blind hate instead of personal opinion anymore.
  
  /sigh
- http://twitter.com/QuantumQuasars Kara Hylander
  
  Sharuko strikes again!
  
  Being able to hold more people per server = less of a need for a ton of servers.
  
  Imagine you have 4 jars that can hold 15 jelly beans each before hitting max. capacity. Then you go buy bigger jars that can hold 30 jellybeans each, would you still only put 15 in each jar?
  
  No, you would put 30 in each and now only need 2 jars!
  - Jay
    
    ”Sharuko strikes again!” LOL I love it…
- Bradley Phillips
  
  You realize based on the dynamics of how pre purchase works, it’s almost impossible for them to be losing players at this point right? Especially considering they handed out what some estimate was 100k beta keys? This is almost surely a result of cramming more people onto the servers since they have more zones to play with.
  
  It’s almost like you turned your brain off.
  - Old Ben
    
    > It’s almost like you turned your brain off.
    
    Surely that would result in an increase in the overall amount of sense.
- St_Draco
  
  Clever troll is… wait, MikeB beat you to it. NVM, Nothing to see here.
- Damir Miric
  
  I dont know man. They doubled the performance of the game from bwe1 to bwe2 … my 6850 was running the game almost on full ultra settings. So I dont see why they couldnt do the same on servers.
- Spammerbam
  
  “Look at how harshly the game had been judged already and how rabidly it
  has been attacked. The MMO gamer is the only gamer
  with unrealistically high expectations and I would stay far away from
  them. You should take us for granted because we will try the game even
  if we say we won’t.” – Sharuko
  
  Yeah, we know.
  
  And as for the servers, your predictions were a bit off. Server merges are due to a low and declining population. In GW2′s case, there is actually more people joining and the server capacities have been improved extensively, meaning, it can hold a much bigger population. So, there’s no reason to have extra servers at launch.
  
  Just in case you’re curious:
  
  “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.” – Mike Ferguson
  
  Try to have a bit more reasoning before you post something..
- http://twitter.com/Mjoukai Michael Harrison
  
  I’d rather have 42 full servers than 96 low pop. servers. It’s funny that you take this move for a game that is in beta, you know… beta? Where they test stuff? as a gauge for the game doing bad, and in the video you post your poor reasoning in they joke about the very thing you’re trying to pan as serious. What a joke you are.
- http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
  
  gamebreaker should think about paying sharuko to post on gw2 threads, he probably singlehandedly brings in at least 20% of the posts on most gw2 threads he posts on.
  
  The trolling is strong in this one.
- Jay
  
  It’s like you’re not even trying anymore… At least before you were spouting opinions, but now it’s just foolery based mildly on the subject.
  
  You’re strangely starting to resemble a Reply Girl… /tinfoil hat
  - Sharuko
    
    lol reply girl, finally a funny comment from you.
    - Jay
      
      You’re welcome ^^ I almost always think your comments are funny.
      
      In a trollish kinda way…
- Fluffenstuffen
  
  I don’t know why I’m going to bother reiterating what everyone has said. Obviously you don’t want GW2 to succeed and whatever that reason is, I’ll try to respect that. That being said, I think you’re offbase and absolutely wrong. I believe there were much more than 18 NA servers either full or close to it at all times during the previous BWE. Even if we assume there going to be less people playing the beta this weekend, why would they use a little over a third of the servers?
- TacoBaal
  
  Way to not read the article, pleb. Let me assist you.
  
  “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.” – Mike Ferguson
  - DoctorOverlord
    
    I don’t, do you have a link?
- http://www.facebook.com/people/João-Colaço/100001710416093 João Colaço
  
  Well folks you heard it here: GW2 is dead.
  
  Lol, who cares how many servers there are or used to be, if they reduced it’s because there were too many, that simple.
- http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.hornsby.7 Jonathan Hornsby
  
  You’re conveniently neglecting to mention the fact that in
  addition to lowering the number of servers they have more than doubled the player capacity
  of all existing servers. They didn’t cut down the number because they didn’t
  have enough player to fill them; they cut down the number because they can now
  fit the increased number of players already signed up for BWE3 into fewer
  servers. The number of people playing GW2 has actually grown by quite a few,
  Arena Net just has better tech than every other MMO out there; as proved by the
  fact that over its entire sever year lifespan GW1 had less server downtime than
  WoW has in an average week.
  - Sharuko
    
    Did they somehow get the tech to make high capacity servers in the last 2 months? That is just marketing talk, the “merge” word is dreaded in the MMO community. DCUO said “super servers” so did SWTOR when they merged servers. GW2 is saying the same exact thing, but only in beta.
    
    Difference is, these guys magically got the technology in less than 2 months, right. I have a bridge I want to sell you.
    
    So did WvW capacity also increase? Or does that stay the same. The forgot to cover their tracks.
    - Sathure
      
      If you’d read the blog post instead of just attempting to troll then you’d know. They state directly in the blogpost why.
      
      After BWE2 they changed in focus in how to utilize their server clusters processing potential. Instead of each server managing it’s own world. You now have multiple servers working in conjunction in handling a single world.
      
      The technology has been present since BWE2. They’ve just changed their approach.
      - Old Ben
        
        > Instead of each server managing it’s own world. You now
        > have multiple servers working in conjunction in handling
        > a single world.
        
        I’m pretty sure that was the plan all along (i.e., the base “technology” was these since development started). That’s why they have separate “zones” with gates and loading screens between them, instead of a single continuous world (*), but there were probably some bugs when transferring player data between servers. In BWE1 parties were getting split up when going into overflow servers and in BWE2 people were sometimes losing levels when entering a different zone (experience gained in the previous zone was getting rolled back).
        
        I think that’s why they added new servers in BWE2, to try to minimize the impact of those bugs by reducing the number of times people got bounced to a different server.
        
        They’ve probably (finally) fixed those issues, so they can have more people per shard, and just move them to overflow if there are too many in a single zone.
        
        (*) It’s still possible to have a continuous world while having different zones handled by different machines, but it makes coding harder and can lead to some inconsistencies near the transition zones (similar to WoW’s phasing, where some players can’t see each other).
      - Sathure
        
        It could of been. There’s a number of things that could of prevented them from doing so previously. Client performance, zone design, etc.
        
        They’ve said since beta1 that the game isn’t optimized yet. You obviously don’t want to cram 100 players on screen in a single room if the majority of clients machines can’t handle it. By now the Client is probably performing at a level they’re much more comfortable with.
        
        I think part of the issue was that they limited the number of starting zones available as well. Now they’ve nearly doubled the zones available.
        
        Regardless of the amount of clients a shard can handle, game play also comes into the equation as far as how many players can exist on one shard. You don’t want a zone to feel empty but you also don’t want to overfill it. You don’t want 300 players zerging an event built for up to 40.
    - Lycronis
      
      You STILL didn’t read the blog post did you?
    - Bo Fernatt
      
      I find it humerous that you and a couple of other are still posting you negative comments. Its quite funny to read posts by people that seem to genuinely dislike a game but keep posting on forums shouting their disapproval. If I didnt like a game, whether by what I had played in beta or seen in video. I dont give it much thought. Its dead to me and drops off my “im curious or interested RADAR” Its almost as if you feel that if you provide a semi logical compelling retort that you will save many fellow game players from this horrible atrocity of a game they call GW2. You remind me of maxed out players sitting in Stormwind complaining about anything and everything because your so bored. Your entertainment is to stir people up because thats how you get your jollies I suppose. So it will be interesting once the dust settles and GW2 launches what new game will you go after and write about as being doomed or terrible for this reason or that. Shall we take a poll to see? I guess this is a long winded post that could have been summed up with, if you dont like it play something else. Your not a baby jesus saving the gaming world from some fail game.
      - Sharuko
        
        So you just want people to comment on games they like? You want only positive comments on GW2 videos?
        
        I post on a lot of these videos just not GW2 ones. I don’t talk negatively about most games but I have for FFXIV, STO and GW2 that is about it.
      - Bo Fernatt
        
        Replying negatively to something as your opinion is one thing. You can state what you dislike about a game, heck it might even spark a debate the a developer making said game even reads and says. Hey they’ve got a point we need to change that.
        
        But most posts I see from you and a select others. Basically stating I told you so, I am right your are wrong. Point in case Arenanet has given their reasons for lowering the number of servers. Being in the computer field myself I can grasp what they are trying to do and unless you work for them you cannot say with any absoluteness that your statements are correct. So for you to say:
        
        Hate to say I told you so but I mentioned during BWE2 that half the servers were empty, people didn’t believe it. I also mentioned GW2 will be the first MMO in history to merge servers before launch months ago, and guess what? True again.
        
        Its pretty much hog wash, as I stated before you like stirring up the people’s emotions. You go on to reply to someone else saying:
        
        Did they somehow get the tech to make high capacity servers in the last month? If they have all these technology did they slip up? On June 8th they boasted about how they doubled the servers.
        
        Again do you work for them… do you know the minds of the developers at Arenanet. Wow could it be to keep game interest high that they popped out more servers for BWE2 to handle growing population growth because they werent ready to push their servers cpu’s to their limits. I think Arenanet has been very careful of their moves, knowing the gaming industry is watching them with vulture eyes. They are trying to make things seamless and engaging / fun as possible with what they are ready to show the general public.
        
        So I would venture to say, you pretty much give your opinion, on the slight troll side of things with factual information weaved into the mix to basically cause general havoc and discordia. (Yes thats a Gunslinger reference)
        
        But alas have your say no matter. It does not hurt me I have played all the betas thus far. Its what I am currently looking for in a MMO. So have fun with your forum complaining and emotion stirring. I’ll have my fun elsewhere.
- pandora005
  
  Why are you still whining about the game? Just add up the time you spent on this and realize that you wasted all of your temper tantrums on a game you wont be playing anyways.
Oskiee

OMG are the servers going to be crowded. Which is a good thing, but personal space is going to be an issue…. i dont want to many asurans touching me…
- http://twitter.com/Master10K Master10K
  
  The hope to yourself that you’ll even up on the Over Overflow Server. ^_^
- http://twitter.com/borded nathan law
  
  role a guardian, it comes complete with personal space protection bubble.
Jay

Mike B AKA Fony, your shirt is making me hungry…
http://twitter.com/borded nathan law

yay my server no longer exits =/
DoctorOverlord

Sounds like they’re applying more of that ArenaNet behind-the-scenes expertise. GW1 is famous for the amazingly limited amount of downtime players experienced, I wonder how GW2 will do.
pandora005

Geordi LaForge? Booo!

Scotti tech beats that all day!

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