Mike Ferguson on the Current State of the World (vs. World)

[Balandar]

Hey everyone, time for another world versus world update! Today I’ll be recapping some of the more important WvW related issues we’ve dealt with since we launched the game.

First, let’s talk about queues for WvW. Here’s how they work:

• You can only be queued for one WvW map at a time.
  
• If you try to enter a WvW map while queued for another map and the new map is not full, you will join that new map, but still be queued for the first one you tried to enter.
  
• If you are queued for a WvW map and try to queue for a second WvW map that is full, you will be asked if you would like to queue for the second map. If you select ‘No,’ you will still be in queue for the first map. If you select ‘Yes,’ then you will enter the queue for the second map and no longer be queued for the first map.
  
• You can be queued for a WvW map while in an overflow map, but you will not be able to see scores or team names at all while you are in an overflow map.
  

As many people already know, quite a few worlds frequently have multi-hour queues to get in to WvW (particularly the Eternal Battlegrounds), but there are also worlds that have minimal or even no queues at all during prime time.

If you are playing on one of the worlds that has extremely long queue times and can move to one of the lesser populated worlds, we would recommend doing this, since spreading out the player population will not only reduce queue times, but also help provide better competition for all worlds.

One reason some people experience long wait times is that we are still seeing extremely high concurrency rates, which makes queues longer on worlds that have a large number of players focused on WvW. We also discovered a bug that was allowing people to queue up and enter maps ahead of players who had been queued for much longer. Please check on our forums for an announcement when the fix has been implemented. This should fix the problem of some people staying queued for hours while other people can queue up for the same map and enter within a matter of minutes.

Another thing that is fairly constant across all worlds is that Eternal Battlegrounds (the central map in WvW) is by far the most popular map for people to queue for. You may help lower your wait time by queuing up for a borderlands map first, then entering the Eternal Battlegrounds queue once you are in the borderlands.

Now let’s talk about matchmaking and match timing.

During Headstart Access, we encountered a few issues that required us to take world matchmaking offline for a few days at launch. During this period, we let the matches run a bit longer, which is why some of you noticed that we had matches that lasted 2-3 days or scores would not be cleared out properly when matches were supposed to be reset.

The good news is that we were able to fix those issues quickly and have been running 24 hour matches since September 1. These games have given our ranking system enough data that, starting Friday, September 14, matches will run for 7 days.

We’ve changed to 7-day WvW matches instead of 14-day matches to let the ranking system get a few more points of data faster and to help people get used to playing in a longer match format. WvW match results and the initial world rankings can be found on our forums.

[Martok]

They're saying just transfer.