Anet-TylerB

Hey, I'm still around at ArenaNet, but I'm no longer on the WvW team. I'd been working with McKenna for a while to take over my position there. When I was transitioning off the team, the decision was made to have me gradually fade out of the WvW spotlight, rather than make a big announcement post about it.

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.

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 com...

Honestly, we had a difficult time deciding if this poll should be decided by a simple majority, rather than a super majority. When we first decided to start polling, the team decided that whenever we are making a major change to the existing game, that change should require 75% of the community to agree to it. We wanted to avoid anything close to a 51/49 split. Mixed Borderlands definitely falls under the category of a major change to the existing game. However, what made the decision harder, was that polling only started relatively recently. Had this poll existed 6 months ago, before we ever started rotating borderlands, it likely would have been decided by a simple majority instead.

This poll, along with almost every poll we have put up to date, has required a 75% majority. Interestingly, there wasn't really any outrage to this requirement until now, the first time the 75% lost.

The results turned out more mixed than we think will be good for the future health of the game. For that reason we are going to run a “Remove Desert Borderlands?” poll first and then run a variation of this poll again. The updated poll will be reworded for clarification due to large amounts of feedback that many of the ‘No’ votes were cast with a misunderstanding of what they meant.