The announced changes to Guildwars 2 gamemode World versus World - also know has WvW - have gone in effect last friday. In Guildwars 2 World versus World is a PvP-style gamemode where players from three different servers, or worlds, battle in the Mists. It features open-world combat on five large maps with up to several hundreds of players per map. In World versus World, players can besiege objectives such as keeps and towers with siege weapons, and battle over resources, to win rewards for their world and World Experience for themselves.
Over the past 3 years the game's developer has put minimal efforts into keeping the gamemode alive as it focused on delivering content for the game's other gamemodes, PvE and PvP. As a result players have transfered their accounts up to the top, winning, servers, leaving servers with lower player population struggeling to match it's opponents.
With the new changes players will find themselves playing alongside another server as several servers have been linked together in what the developer of the game calls World Linking. With World Linking the developer hopes to positively influence the player population on different servers to create a more balanced experience for it's players.
In a forum post on the game's official forum the developers shared more details on the update. "We used factors like the world’s current rank and population numbers to define pairings. For NA we will be able to divide the total number of worlds in half, and give every world a partner. However, pairings for EU are a lot trickier. [..] The result is that a number of worlds in EU will not be linked." the statement reads.
Whether World Linking actually has a positive effect on the gamemode remains to be seen. Early reports indicate that there are still population imbalance issues that need to be addressed. In addition to population changes a new reward system for the gamemode launched earlier last week, bringing players several reward tracks to choose from. One of the reward tracks allows players to earn a unique armorset that is exclusive to the gamemode.
