I never wanted to post on these forums. After 7 years of playing Guild Wars 1, I know all too well the arrogance and vitriol and lies that get splattered around textboards. But after hearing about this thread in WvW tonight, coincidentally enough, I had to come here and share my opinion, for once. Arena Net, this is the single most destructive decision you could do to the WvW community, and it doesn't even fix the issue that you're trying to resolve. You're going to delete 5 years of WvW history to cater to casuals and haters of a gamemode they don't understand or appreciate, for the sake of temporarily changing the line-up that will quickly result in the same complaints that you're having now. The players that only put in an hour of WvW gameplay a week will always complain about not being included, always ignoring their own lack of self-inclusion and refusing to acknowledge their own contribution while demanding the same rewards. In your initial post you blatantly display whom your ire and dscrimination is aimed at, and that is my home server, since prerelease, of Blackgate. It's a running gag here in my server about how much Anet hates Blackgate, and we wear it as a badge of honor because we are STILL successful by our hardwork and dedication despite fighting, at some times, up to 6 servers at once. Your idea to dissolve servers for the sake of shifting WvW power about guilds instead of server populations will end in the exact same situation we're in now, and that is an alliance with mostly Blackgate members dominating the WvW field, and you'll have effectively achieved nothing but taking our name away from us. You also introduce the worst element of all into the WvW environment, something that is protected right now by an account's home server location, and that is the human element. If only alliances with guilds can participate in high tiered WvW matches, then the decision on who gets to play in high tier WvW will come down to those few leaders of said guilds. Imperfect, biased, self-interested, prejudicial, human players. They will, without a doubt, hold their alliance's status over their individual players' heads as a cudgel (an ever-increasingly popular term these days) to force submission from their numbers in order to continue playing in a tier that they may have already spent YEARS working to achieve. Favoritism will determine who is tier 1, not skill or dedication or hours or sacrifice. It'll come down to kissing the right butt, and continue kissing that butt until this new system too fails to change the demographic you're so eager to create waves in. I am not opposed to trying this idea, but I am fanatically opposed to having it forced onto me and my server with no recourse. Go ahead and replace the failed Edge of the Mists experiment; the lacklust rewards of that gamemode will not be missed. Do not delete 5 years of WvW rivalry and identity for shallow and foresight-lacking purposes, you as the developer do not write the history of your game, the players do. You make changes and introduce new ideas into the game world, but WE the players are the ones that experience the game, WE write the game's history, and WE decide what works, what's fun, what's exploitable, and what has got to go. WvW has been server-based since the beta weekends in 2012 (that we the masses were allowed to initially experience), and the moment you expunge that from the game is the moment that WvW ceases to have a reason to exist in a lot of our hearts and minds. Give your players choice, we've earned that. Do not take away something that gives us the pride, and some of us the reason, to log onto your servers each night and spend hours of our time holding a banner that is much more than a simple server name. It is a history that we the players have created on our own, for we have earned the right to keep our identity after over half a decade of dedication. I am Blackgate. We are Blackgate.~Xtc Soul Dragon
