So, i've had a look around and i've been pointed at
gw2guilds quite a few times.
Based on the numbers there, it looks like Desolation and Gandara are pretty well stacked. Looking through i think probably Gunnar's Hold might be the best choice, lots of UK\English Guilds, a couple of hardcore in PvP, WvW and PvX, plus i reckon we'll probably get some Gw vets coming in as well.
That is very helpful, how I suppose the question is; What are the downsides of a heavily/over populated server?
the down side to the Desolation server is that it seems to be heavy with WvW guilds\players, meaning it's difficult to just jump in and play some of that, elsewhere, the downsides are that you will be in an "overflow" area if there are too many people.
Early on this isn't too much of an issue, and it doesn't matter so much for the Dungeons, however Orr is based largely around Event chains, so getting moved from overflow to Local to find the chain not started, way behind, or complete, isn't great.
I am going with whatever server the majority of THN picks.
Picking a high population server could be good as i dont like what happend to our WoW server.
The SSL-server in WoW was so empty that it was hard to get any raid/event oganised.
The only organised content in GW 2 are the dungeon type areas, there are several throughout the game, and they're all 5 man instanced areas. They each have a "story mode" which is the lower level, then a higher level explorable area with multiple paths through it.
For larger groups ultimately it'll be finding some of the Events throughout the world. ( as I said above Orr is basically a massive web of events that all affect each other) The benefit of this would be huge for the guild as we discovered that you get silly amounts of rep for guild members doing events together. ( 12 rep solo for 6 events. 100+ for 3 people doing 6... )
There's two aspects to choosing a server, AFAIK. First is the general server population. Second is the WvW group it's in. Rather like WoW IIRC, servers are grouped into battlegroups and it's literally our server vs two other servers in a 3 way punch up. Be nice to be balanced if that was at all possible.
WvW is a ladder of all EU servers, to start with, WvW will be reset daily I think they said, then after a few weeks when an order has been established and populations have settled, the matches will move to 1-2 weeks in length. (again I think that's how long they said they'd be) Iirc after the round ends, the loser drops down ladder and winner moves up, though it might be points based maybe, I haven't seen details on how the ladder will work exactly are so i'm just guessing.
For server population, having lots of people is good, but a good balence of WvW, PvP and PvE\PvX is important. As i said, while Desolation has generally be great throughout the Beta, the last BWE, it was full and WvW was always full, meaning i couldn't go play there even if i wanted. so somewhere slightly less full with a good spread of people would be, in the long run, hopefully a better choice.
Might grab it to play early launch at LAN, but can't find digi download at a reasonable price anywhere. 40 pounds+ is having a laugh.
Trax is getting something from SCAN at LAN ask him i'm not entirely sure which it is.
