WvW Purgatory: The server stuck in the middle

On October 18, 2013, Guild Wars 2 will begin its first season 1 Sever competition. There will be three leagues: European Servers, North American Gold Servers, and North American Silver & Bronze Servers. What does that mean for you? Check out this chart that I just put together, this is based on the current stats. 

 I decided that it made more sense to split North America into three leagues, much like Europe. In the case of North America, the top six worlds will be the gold league and will battle each other in a clash of titans over a seven week period. The silver and bronze leagues will be made up of nine worlds each and will function exactly the same as the European leagues.

For reference, the red servers below are the Gold leagues. These top six servers are far beyond in score and population so it is natural for Anet to create a separate league. Blue colored servers are the Silver leagues and green colored servers are the Bronze leagues.

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Now compare that chart to the European server charts, see how huge the North American gap is? Good luck reaching the 2 million mark.

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So who are these top six North American servers? They are Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry, Blackgate, Tarnished Coast, Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry and Blackgate are STACKED servers. They have the highest player population and the queue times can take hours. All three servers have good coverage across NA (North America) prime time, EU (European) prime time and SEA (South East Asia) prime time. They were once called Tier 1 servers. 

Tier 2 is a whole other mess consisting of Tarnished Coast, Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. I am a player of the Tarnished Coast. TC has a reputation for having a good community and it is the unofficial Role Playing server. I do not RP, I spend my time kicking butt on the World versus World battlefield. Look at my pitiful collection of badges, each badge represent how many players I have killed in battle.

Yes, enjoy my pitiful collection of sweet tears from my enemies. If you have a server in which players are organized and skilled enough, you can have a map like this one below. It looks so beautiful when your server has control of all camps, towers and keeps. Now, with a top server like TC, we suffer from the case of the zergs. It is how the top three servers deal with fighting against a horde of 100 players on the map.

Below is an example of a zerg overtaking a tower. If you are smart, you better run away if you don't have the numbers to fight them. If you are brave, godspeed, your body becomes a sacrificial offering for the zerg to collect their loot from your corpse.

See how scary this is? It is a sea of red players ready to kick your ass. I once joked that if you start lagging out of nowhere, chances are that there is going to be a zerg rush coming to run you down. I stopped joking after that because it is a real threat. Although, while us toasters suffer from being stuck in the middle, we still try to have fun.

We are forever stuck as a 1.5 server. We don't want to be tier 1 because Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry and Blackgate often steamrolls us with their higher numbers. We are a NA prime server, we lack coverage in EU, especially SEA prime time. Once it hits 10 pm PDT, our numbers fall leaving most of our defenses unmanned. Some people have said that Tarnished Coast is not tier 2 because we have the higher numbers than Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. I have no comments about Fort Aspenwood, but Sea of Sorrows can be terrifying when SEA prime time comes around (see sea of red).

At the end of the day, we all have fun and yes there were times where we take ourselves seriously. We are not here to win. Tarnished Coast is the server that can teach you how we dealt with the top three servers. So many servers have risen and fell but Tarnished Coast has risen from the 7th spot up to the 4th spot. We are staying strong, we like where we are because we can focus on our strength through skill and not numbers. The last time I ran a zerg was for the infamous Karka event. Don't get me started, this image below sums it up.

Yeah, no more angry Karka...crab island...it was horrible, but I did survive it.