[2020] Server linking is great, but the server population cap is poorly implemented.

Some information behind the current server population cap behavior:

Many may already know this bit, but for anyone else who doesn't: world population is determined by activity level in WvW (Edge of the Mists and Obsidian Sanctum don't count). If World A has many-times the number of players on it as World B, but World A does't play WvW at all and World B plays tons of WvW, A will have the lowest population, and B will have a very high one.

/u/piInverse, to your point on increasing world population levels, and especially some becoming full

This is not caused by the additional players bought about by the server link, but from returning players and a lower population cap on the host servers.

This is only partly true. We've also had a substantial increase in global WvW participation since reward tracks, world linking, and the return of the Alpine borderlands. On top of that, we use a fairly long historical tail on WvW activity level for world population purposes. Intent being to prevent worlds from artificially lowering their cap with just a couple weeks of intentional inactivity. One flipside of that being that even if global WvW population levels dropped next week, if they were still higher than pre-, population levels would still go up as a new, higher week replaces an older, lower one in the window of time being used.

World linking problem: linking, say, a T8 NA world with a T1 NA world and doing nothing with population caps will make it very easy to pile onto an already-healthy world. So something needs to be done with population caps.

There are two opposing goals we can aim for.

• Short-term prevention of bandwagoning. To do this, we'd need to make it more difficult to join a world that's already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.
• Long-term health of worlds with less WvW activity. To do this, we'd need to make it easier to join a world that's already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.

As for what modifications we've put in place for population levels to not allow world linking to break the meaning and purpose of population entirely, we're currently trying a compromise between going completely toward either the long-term or short-term health goals for world populations.

• Unlinked worlds have the highest population cap.
• Linked worlds have significantly lower population caps.

Some things we're considering to help discourage bandwagoning:

• Increasing the cost to transfer to lower-population worlds (since they're now often going to be linked to high-pop worlds). For example, possibly 800 gems instead of 500.
• Having merge hosts always considered Full, and their guest(s) all sharing the population their host would otherwise have.
• Locking out transfers for a period of time after world links become active.

Edits: formatting, more formatting, and a couple words.

By what we use to consider a player active in WvW for a given world for some period of time, none but your last item would qualify. For the last one, only that player can truly determine whether they're there to participate or farm.

It does behave something like this already; though that wasn't clear from my wording. A player's past playtime is attributed to their currently-assigned home world for the purposes of world population levels.

This also brings up an interesting point: we actually don't want to stop a guild all moving together mid-move, if we can avoid stopping it. Stopping a guild mid-move would split their community, and then no-one would be happy. :(

Instead, we should ideally be ensuring bandwagoning is neither a simple and cost-effective solution to optimize rewards, nor an expensive necessity to get the kind of gameplay people want. So it's more about both reducing reason to mass-transfer, and reducing the total number of groups that mass-transfer. Rather than stopping one group's transfer.

This is also something we might do. Especially in EU due to the difficulty of balancing linked worlds with language restrictions. World linking is pretty flexible, such that there could be any number of worlds linked together, all mixed with unlinked worlds as opponents.