With the change to Favour, are Account Movement restrictions still needed?

Prior to last weekend, Favour of the Gods was Territory specific - and it made sense to prevent players from hopping across Territories willy-nilly to chase where Favour was at the time.

Now that Favour applied to all Territories at once (including the International Districts), is there any further need for account move restrictions?

The actual move of an account between Territories is handled automatically and immediately when the user requests it, so it would appear that it doesn't need staff resources to make the move.

Guilds can have members in multiple Territories already, though the Guild is locked to the Territory that the leader was in when it was created (which is fine - it keeps PvP play suitably Territorial ).

However, since there are not 'local' servers in all areas of the world (would be far too expensive to have this!), there are some areas where it would be useful to have the freedom to change servers more than the "4 times ever" to achieve a better connection (for the last week my connection has been plagued by dreadful packet loss, and the advice from ArenaNet's support is to move to a different Territory - I'm going to run out of moves if that doesn't work).

Since there is no longer any tie between Territory and PvE play, and Guilds can still be Territorial for PvP play - is there still a need to restrict the movement of an account between servers to just 4 for the lifetime of the account?

I remember the month or so where it was possible to select which server to use within the Territory - I loved that, since it kept my account in Europe but I could choose which server machine to connect to (seemed to have Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as the default Europe servers) - the Hong Kong server would give a far better response and download rate than the default server did for Europe. Was sad when it went away again

I fully agree on this, on the other hand it would give a chance to meet new players and make new friends in game.

/signed

I would love this. Because the guild I just joined is euro and I'm american.

I dont see why not.

/signed

I went to euro server once and it was alright

It wasn't needed to begin with...

It's just that people are greedy and would do cross-continental trader business...

I'd say favor was the main reason behind the switch count, however, it wasn't the only one.

I've seen numerous posts about how bad people's connections are from lag, cables being down, etc etc. Quite frequently I see it happening on the Euro servers. What happens when all those people decide to jump to another server? While the Euro server wasn't great, there are now tons of people on an already used server. And I'm doubting that's really going to help the second server at all. In fact, it'll probably give them just as many problems and now you've got two screwed servers instead of one.

I've never agreed with the 4 (originally 5) switch count, but I don't think completely doing away with it is the best way to go. Perhaps changing it to yearly or something?

I'm sure there's probably another reason they put in the restriction, but that's the first to come to mind.

Unless someone can give a good reason why it would be a problem, I also agree that the territory movement restriction should be eliminated.

/signed

There doesn't seem to be a good reason to restrict it anymore. Unless Galie or somebody else gives me a technical reason not to do this, I don't see a problem with it.

/Signed

1234567890

"The Pyrenees exist no longer..." (War of Spanish Succession)

Er...

/signed

/signed

Another possibility that someone has brought up is completely removing the separate regions and making everyone use language categorized international districts. There are some issues with this though:

- ANET will need to have some code to decide which server to stick an explorable instance on based on the ping times of the players entering that instance. Then again with parties launched in the international districts currently and PvP matches between people of different regions this code would already need to exist. But I don't actually know if it will work well enough, or if it will require too many resources for it to run every single time someone wants an instance created.

- If we assume that there is no way for ANET to change which server any particular instance resides on, then there could easily be times where a town district full of American players is residing on the European servers and giving everyone lag because it had a lot of European players when it was created several hours ago.

- There may be other problems I've missed.

/signed
Or at least, make the counter reset every 3 - 4 months

With the change to favor, why in the world would you need/want to swich territories so frequently? There are International Districts, you know. The Territory switch limit is also in place so players don't exploit it for a quick buck by taking advantage of timezones in special events. Also, traders were originally tied to territories, although that is no longer the case.

ANet has reset everyone's territory limit counter back; I don't think they will relax the restriction any further. It's too much of a server burden for them to allow players to take it for granted. For example, if one of their servers has a problem, players would all switch en masse, and just overload the others.

/signed

I totally agree on this

how do you figure that? as far as i can remember, events were always run on PST

He/she may be referring to the amount of players on at peak times at an event.

totally agree.

/signed, signed and signed

well said
/signed

/signed
its a great idea

Actually, Korea got a headstart on Halloween and Wintersday, if I recall correctly, in 2005.
Naturally, this also apllies. Sorry if I was unclear in my post. I recall reading threads of people switching territories in the first year events to make a killing on event items at peak hours in both timezones. The territory limit counter restricted this to a one-off move for them.

Also, he/she? I thought my forum name made my gender pretty clear...Oh, well.

Doesn't this thread belong in Sardelac?