Hello again everyone! In this post, I’ve got a couple of World versus World tidbits for you as well as the list of servers for our upcoming (and final!) Beta Weekend Event! Let’s get right to it!

WvW Improvements

As many of you know, BWE2 was a rather difficult weekend for many people that wanted to experience WvW because of various issues and bugs in the matchmaking systems. Due to all the issues we encountered, we will not be releasing match results from BWE2. That said, over the last few weeks we’ve been hard at work improving our matchmaking and fixing those issues.

In addition to the bug fixes, we’ve also updated our WvW matchmaking formula to use additional factors like score differential to make even more accurate adjustments in future rankings calculations. Our tests indicate that the system is working much better now and we’re really looking forward to seeing it in action during the event. Also, I’d like to give a special shout out to the extremely detailed analysis from the gamers at Reddit—thank you for all the hard work and great suggestions!

WvW at Launch

We have seen quite a few questions and concerns about world versus world match length at launch. We’re expecting to see large population changes across all worlds in the first few weeks as more players get into the game and guilds start getting settled.

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 2-week long extreme mismatches. Once most worlds are reliably matching up against worlds of similar strength, we will swap over to playing the 2-week duration match cycles.

The BWE3 World List

Now for the most important part of this post: the list of worlds that will be available at the start of BWE3!

Fewer Worlds, More Fun

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.

Many of you may remember our blog post prior to BWE2 that mentioned how we had acquired a ton of new servers in order to support the number of players we expected.

As our esteemed Lead Server Programmer Dr. Stephen Clarke-Willson put it recently, “Quite frankly, we made too many worlds for BWE2 just because we could and not because we should, and thus we had a lot of low population worlds. This time around we’re focusing our new CPU horsepower into fewer, more populated worlds.”

It’s no secret that worlds with low populations just aren’t as much fun to play on (or against), so we’re focused on getting higher populations on each of our worlds to improve the experience for all beta players.

As I mentioned, we’ve been able to greatly increase the maximum player capacity for each server. We’ve been able to do this partially because we’ve opened up a number of new playable areas with the addition of the sylvari and asura as playable characters. We expect that we will increase our capacity again when we launch and the rest of the game areas will be available. There have also been several general technical improvements made by our incredibly talented programming team that have positively impacted the entire game and let us raise our world population limit even higher.

Don’t worry, we’ll be closely monitoring our world populations this weekend and can quickly launch new worlds as needed should problems arise with our new population limits. Our server tech is now able to raise or lower population caps with some very simple changes that don’t require us to take the game down. This lets us adjust world populations based on how the servers react and you won’t even have to leave the game!

While you may not notice it due to our ability to change certain settings with no downtime, we will definitely be working diligently behind the scenes doing whatever we can to ensure you can enjoy the Beta Weekend Event as much as possible…before we go away for another month to get ready for launch.

“Get ready for launch.” How awesome does that sound?

See you on the battlefields!