Switching to foreign districts in UWsc/FoWsc

Why do teams do it? Why would you want to be playing Guild Wars with delay from across the world?

Back in 2005/2006, before loot scaling You always used to get better drops from newly spawned districts or districts where very few players were.

Other factors that used to influence drops:
O How long it was since you had been in that place. We saw that people who had never been to fow/uw got better drops then those who farmed the place.
O When was the last time you had done a coop mission. You could 'unflag' yourself by doing coop missions and so get back to 'newbie' status. This was a key tirick, run GNW a couple of times after every farm and your drops got considerably better.
O Time of day, certain spots had their loot tables refreshed at certain times of day. E .g the old Ettin rune farm run. Before 9:30am GMT nothing, did it at 9:30 on the dot, nearly every drop was a gold.
O always go to Fow/UW etc when events are on. The fewer people in a place, the better the drops.

Once or twice these observations would have been a fluke. It happending every day for 6 months for every DVDF member who followed the above rules surely was'nt. OFC we got nothing from anet saying yup you lot sussed it out. But we did thousands of runs in elite areas over 6 months and always the above held true.

After loot scaling was implemented experiments we did showed things had equalised out some. Loot scaling changed the way drops were allocated and how the loot tables worked so our earlier theroies were no longer as reliable. Nightfall changed how drops work once again so you can't compare what worked pre factions to now.

Make of this as you will, but that's why I think people still go to foreign districts. It's a fallback from our experiments and deductions from years ago,

This used to be right , however i think it's rather complicated for new players , and real reason i assume is because those districts are less laggy...

It's a trick (trap)!!1 euro players made up to make people switch from more populated american dist to euro dist because ping is slightly better there. Polish and Vodka district were quite popular during pre pre (pre?) SF (uw) nerf.

Better put on your tinfoil hat while playing otherwise we can read your every thought.

Seriously though: my guildy plays on a 10 year old PC and has a slow connection, playing on american servers makes him dc about every 2 mins.
Playing in polish or russian districts which are much less populated works like a charm.

There was a time when lag affected anyone regardless of where you were and yes dist swapping used to help with the lag.These days ive seen euro players on usa dist have lag and the rest of team was fine.
One of the main reasons you may find is either - teams like mqsc tend to go german dists as its easier to team up - 99% of players in say aspenwood gate german 1 would be there only for sc.Most of the euro players ages ago migrated to usa servers because theres more ppl there.I recall going to la at 6pm utc and maybe 40 - 50 players and reach 9pm utc and your outnumbered by npcs as the euro dist went dead - switch to usa and usually theres ppl in outposts 24/7 - easier to trade/pug etc.
And ive probably seen more russian/polish on usa dists than i have in their own and thats saying something.

One thing I can assure you, is the length of time you are in a place, has a radical influence on drops.

I have tested this several times in UW (left toon afk overnight) and continued to farm, and almost every drop was merely gold coins, instead of the highly varied assortment normally.

This of course may well only apply in exaggerated situations like being in a zone a great many hours.

I'd also like to point out another obvious here:


- Re-order your party in ToA AE1

vs

- Re-order your Party in ToA Polish 1

A couple of guilds I've been in used to have us all change to Russian (districts, not voice in vent ) when we were doing things like the Deep or Urgoz, supposedly it was less laggy in those districts.

Technically it's less laggy, but the added latency by connecting to another server half-way across the damn world makes any benefit of switching completely useless. (Unless the person switching is switching to a district that is closer to them, example would be players in the UK switching out of American Districts into European English districts).

Like everyone said, its about Lag.
Some districts give more lag, for some players.
Also in Asia districts.....when you zone......type/dance then run 4 semi circles....then talk to 12 npc's in 12 minutes, you also get better drops.

I always thought it was so people could have an easier time re-ordering the party before entering the instance.

Though I always found that silly, click someone, click "Kick" then click "invite". No need to re-zone.

Can't remember if it still happens but team order would always get mixed up as soon as you went into fow/uw

I consider that practice quite amusing, given that new district can be instanced on the very same server you were connected to before switching AND given that subsequent instance you enter could be spawned pretty much anywhere as, iirc, game picks server for instances by location of players and not by cosmetic stuff like chosen language.

Well, when we were doing DoA or other areas and needed more people we'd form the team in the American districts (since the majority of the people play there) and then switch to Italian/Russian/whatever district since the majority of the players lived in Europe and some had connection issues while playing on the American servers. The reason for the odd language is that those districts were usually totally empty.

It doesn't happen now. I know with things like FoWSC, we generally have the terras on the bottom and with UW, EMo on the bottom. Makes things slightly easier for people in terms of glancing at the party window. Same thing goes for MTSC to make it easier on the bonder/monks.

When you enter FoW/UW the regular way the party will get mixed up. With a scroll this doesn't happen.