[2020] WvW Poll 6 June: World Linking Schedule

If we were to put in an extremely low amount of effort, it might be as little as 10 minutes. However, realistically it takes considerably longer than that. There's lots of factors that go into it:

• Analyzing active WvW populations for every world in each of our 3 datacenters (NA, EU and CN), both as an average and broken down by time of day.
• We also try to factor in historical data. Does it seem like any world is trying to game the system? Either through mass transfers, or through temporary inactivity?
• We usually model a couple different sets of linking options for each region. We know that whenever we link worlds together it's going to create some amount of drama. So we try and choose a model that the community will more easily accept.
• Once the links have been decided, there's some technical time spent preparing and updating the new links.
• Last, but not least, there's the time we spend on communication. This includes things like communicating the links, listening to all of the feedback and justifying our reasoning.

Of course even if we end up doing all of this every month, there's still going to be time to continue building or improving other WvW features... just somewhat less. It is a tradeoff, and that's why it's listed.

Yeah, it's possible we could save some time this way. Though I suspect it would still be a larger impact to our workflow to update these monthly than some other larger time period.