news Final Beta Weekend - Asura and Sylvari

quote WvW Matchmaking

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 ranking 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.

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.

quote The Why

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!