How will the players for the worlds be distributed in WvW?  Will I be able to play with my friends instead of against them?  Can I choose which world to go into? how will this work?  Has there been an announcement?

3 servers against each other.

Approximately 500 people per server cap.

You can only support your own server in WvW.

Originally posted by colddog04

3 servers against each other.

 

Approximately 500 people per server cap.

 

You can only support your own server in WvW.

That didn't answer my question.

Maybe I wasn't clear with it.  My question is how will Arenanet distribute beta testers among the different Worlds or "servers"?  Will they give a choice of Worlds when we first log in with our beta accounts?  If they do this, there is a chance that certain worlds will be unbalanced and have too many or too little players in them.  The ideal way to do this is to manually distribute beta testers among the different worlds, but with this comes the danger that me and my friends will be on different worlds and have to fight each other.

So how will Arenanet do this?  Have they made an announcement about how they will?  How did they distribute them in the previous tests?

No announcement that I've seen. You'll likely be able to choose and they will likely be unbalanced.

As far as I know WvW is going to be unbalanced by design, ANet is not attempting to balance it at all, so my guess is you will be able to choose any server.

I would expect there will be 3 servers 2 pick for beta. so if you pick same server as the people u wanna play with you will be on their team.

there may be a lot more than 3 servers at the beta as there will be tons of people playing after prepurchasing

Originally posted by Butregenyo

there may be a lot more than 3 servers at the beta as there will be tons of people playing after prepurchasing

There will be 3, 6, 9, 12 and so on it will be a muiltipal of 3

makes sense yes, and they should reduce to battle duration to 24 hours so we can see 3 different match ups

I am going to guess 12 servers at beta launch.

Just make sure to create your characters on the same home server as your friends. Your home server determines who you fight for in WvW. When the game launches, you will have to pay to change home servers. I'm not sure if they will test that feature during beta.(The server upon which you create your first character becomes your home server).

The game allows you to switch servers freely for PvE, so if you did have friends on another server, you can always do PvE content with them, thus server choice matters most for WvW.

It was mentioned a couple of times in videos from the press betas that most PvPers ended up on one server so it was very unbalanced indeed.

That seems to happen a lot though in MMOs, people always seem to want to cram onto one server (usually because after the game begins to die off that server remains popular).

Originally posted by DanitaKusor

It was mentioned a couple of times in videos from the press betas that most PvPers ended up on one server so it was very unbalanced indeed.

That seems to happen a lot though in MMOs, people always seem to want to cram onto one server (usually because after the game begins to die off that server remains popular).

Since there is no pvp in the open world, most pvpers would want to join other servers so that they can be #1

there will always be people that are followers and arn't leaders themselves so they join whats popular, but in GW2 with W v W , I would hope many larger guilds would want to take on the whole world themselves and tries to pick servers that their rivals aren't in so that they can show off their prowness.

For example : Guild War Guru picks server A , MMOrpg wanted to go against Guild War Guru so they pick Server B, hoping that they will eventually get matched against each other and show off how good they are by beating the other guilds.

Otherwise they will be buddies and fighting together, and who the hell want to be buddies : )

Originally posted by DanitaKusor

It was mentioned a couple of times in videos from the press betas that most PvPers ended up on one server so it was very unbalanced indeed.

That seems to happen a lot though in MMOs, people always seem to want to cram onto one server (usually because after the game begins to die off that server remains popular).

Are you sure i thought:

What was "mentioned" was that of the limited numbers allowed to play during the betas , the press server was much more populated because it was the heavy populated one when the new arrivals joined (after the press were already on the only server before that).

In other words, one server was up and had all the press population on it, they opened a few more for the addition beta sign up population (very limited #) and low an behold the server that already had a medium level of population got more.

Lets also be honest for the first months no one gonna be able to WvWvW. Queue times all day long, you'll never get in the the instanced WvWvW pvp unless your ona  lower pop server.

So ther is a good reason to be on lower pop servers. Further more lets say 10 servers are super heavy pvp populationed, no big they will have to fight each other more often, and should not end up in rotations after a month or so with low pop servers. The 3 sided aspect was well thought out... the pop caps are to keep the QQ on lag/server crashes down (but you don't get to pvp in return).

What?  heavy populations are just as likely to get paired up with low populations.  It all depends on how well the server does within the ladder rankings.  A low population with 500 that plays together all the time with no queues could very well be the #1 server.  a heavy server with lots of queues can still only have 500 players in at any one time so there is the balance in numbers.  It comes down to skill at that point rather than server imbalances

I'm not expecting there to be balance issues after launch because of how GW2 is rotating the worlds, and the ladder rankings, low pop servers and low skill servers will be grouped with each other as well as high skill/pop servers will be grouped with each other too.  It's just the beta that I'm worried about, because the Dev's have no idea which servers people will pick, unless they put a "recommended" label next to them.