Ok I know traditionally Test server players aren't much interested in PvP. But all the really nice appearance armour, weapons and housing items finally tempted some of us to give it a go and earn ourselves some tokens. After all, helping to test the new map for GU60 wasn't so bad, it was actually fun at times! So today a few of us from Test went over to try the battlegrounds. We zoned over to Champion's Respite and queued up... but we couldn't get in. We started with 4 people, and then pulled a couple more in until we had 6 of us queued up. We tried queueing for all of them, and we tried queuing for just Gears (which at 6x6 maximum seemed the most likely to let us in). We tried queuing individually (solo) and we tried as 2 groups of 3. Nothing worked, we couldn't get into any of the battlegrounds. Needless to say we zoned back to Test rather disappointed, so what's going on here please? Are the battlegrounds simply turned off for Test/TestCopy at the moment for some reason? Or is the minimum number of players set too high for us to realistically achieve from our server? Admittedly we didn't have a ton of people. But this is Test server, we're never going to have loads of people who want to do this. Regardless of people's feelings towards PvP, our community of testers who are playing permanent characters on Test simply isn't that big to draw from in the first place. And obviously no one plays for real on TestCopy, or indeed plays there at all unless there's new content or changes to mechanics around. So no one is going to join us from the TestCopy side unless it's friends from live dragged in to help us make up numbers. It's really only ever going to be a small number of us Test folk. I know during the testing of GU60 the minimum was dropped to just requiring 2 people to get in from Test/TestCopy. Was this then raised to a value suitable for the live servers when GU60 went live? If so, please could you turn it back down to an achievable number for our server? Any help from our friendly devs would be most appreciated here. Because right now, this content is looking out of reach for us.
Wow they even convinced me to go give it a shot and go try to get tokens for house items. It would be nice for less uber types to be able to learn how things work them playing with us testers in BG instead of being targets and scrubs in the live ones. Plus give test people a shot at some of the over priced house items. Turn it on please
I agree, I was disappointed when we couldn't even get it to launch with 6 of us there. I had hopped onto Test Copy trying to help pad it out since my normal Test toon is too low for the BGs, but it just wasn't enough. I don't know if there's a way to permanently keep a low queue for the Test server without it affecting Live, but it would be awesome if that could be done. I saw the weapon that Soresha wants to get tokens for and it's awesome, but testers need a way in first!
welcome to underpopulated servers. You can't enter if you have less than a certain amount of players, and I'm pretty sure it's 8 to open Gears. I always queue on live (Storms) to let those who want to BG have the possibility to enter because with tons of advertising, there are only, sometimes, some Gears firing off. You can refuse to enter the BG once it starts, so it's always possible to queue (and open a BG) without entering it. Reason why I did a totally boring Frozen Tundra at 4 vs 4 the other day (at the end of the match, we started at 3 vs 2) and 2 vs 2 gears are not uncommon. BG works fine for US/UK servers point. All other servers have to struggle to be able to enter them.
With respect Whil, whilst the population on Storms may not be high, I doubt it's the same definition of "low" as we're using when talking about Test. For example when I get home from work and play (Euro evening, US daytime) there's often only 20-30 people logged in, with maybe 2 or 3 other level 90 adventuring characters showing. Ok it picks up a bit around midnight when the Americans get home, and some days are livier than others, but you get the idea. I don't know exactly how the sharing of BGs across live servers is set up right now. But if you're having trouble getting enough folks for BGs from just Storms, maybe the answer is for your server to join the UK or German BGs. Maybe it could even be coded to put everyone from Storms on the same team to avoid any language issues. Hmm... French vs. British or German PvP teams, that could add a whole new flavour! Unfortunately no such solution would be possible for Test - as a testing environment using a different build of the game, we have to be kept isolated.
Oh, yeah, I know Storms is way more populated. But if with 300-400 players at pick time we cannot enter a single battleground after hours of advertising, I wouldn't have thought for a single second that a battleground could fire on Test. Problem is : we cannot enter an english server if we logged into the game from French patcher. Same problem since BG launches for Valor and Storms (and UK before they were merdged with US). So we don't have a solution, neither on Storms nor on Test. Appart from authorizing the BG to fire with less people in queue (which would probably be a huge problem for US/UK BG). Sorry for derailing the thread, I was just trying to explain why Test BG were'nt starting.
Nah that's cool, Whil. I didn't realise the different language regions are separated so much either. Considering your problems too then, it looks like there's a strong case for being able to set different minimum numbers for BGs in different regions. *hints at the devs*
