But please don’t aim it at GW2: EU players can play on NA servers if they want, and vice versa, they just need to select the world and transfer. From the wording on their website, I suspect the biggest reason they have EU servers is a lot about “supporting their local retail partners,” the rest of the stuff about language, customer support and optimal datacenters is making it sound nicer for the consumer.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-world-of-choice-the-regions-of-guild-wars-2/

I think people miss the downside of being stuck in off hours which is that you tend to miss a lot of the cool exciting big events (if the game has any), which is kind of miserable. When I played MUSHes, we had to get up at 3am for most of the big RP events, so I hear what you’re saying. It sucks.

Locking by region means artificially creating borders taken from the real world into your game world, where the whole pretense should be that everybody can play with everybody, regardless where they live. Isn’t this one of the main fascinations about online games, after all?

Sorry I’m ranting so much about that point, but as someone who has moved intercontinentally before and knows enough people who also have, we have been fucked over before by arbitrary regional locks. It really sucks when the “get up at 3am” routine in your example suddenly becomes inevitable if that happens to be your old region’s prime time.

In real life, because travel time and logistics matter, the attacker is constrained in what she can attack, and the defender can guess at what the target is from the attacker’s current position and trajectory, if the defender discovers that intel. However, most games aren’t willing to make movement that important (because just moving is pretty boring) and so all the power swings to the attacker.

I think Eve gets around the problem by having potential targets go vulnerable for specific windows, so both the attacker and defender know when the battle will be.

In fact, part of sizing up your opposition is determining how strong you are versus them in the three key timezones, EU, US, and AU. Right now the CFC is slowed down in the war in Tribute because NC has a much stronger presence in AU TZ and has been using that advantage well. The last couple weeks of the war has been kind of dull for me, because timers and ops all seem to be happening in EU TZ when I am at work or AU TZ when I am asleep.

The rest of the world is quite happily lumped in with the NA servers. I’d be happier if it were like GW1 and allowed for freely swapping between all ‘districts’ (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/District) but I guess the model doesn’t work for GW2, given the whole server vs server design and how buggy their cross-server parties/guilds already seem to be.

Honestly, I think the issue is less that of lack of defense due to people asleep, but a lot more about morale. It’s exceptionally hard to encourage people to hold and defend, without an organized guild distributing roles and responsibility. Even in games like TF2, most people don’t bother defending. In WvW, there’s no real in-game reward for it. It’s actually a toll due to siege weapon costs, repair bills and it’s mostly either boring (no one comes) or demoralizing (too many people start knocking on your gate/walls.)

There’s very little chance of an underdog victory – you can hold off an unorganized zerg who didn’t bring siege with siege indefinitely, but pretty much the only way to temporarily clear an organized attacking zerg with siege is to ram them from the back/sides with another zerg, or have enough inside to jump out and wipe them. And they’ll be back to try again, unless you can distract them with something else happening on another front.

People steadily start to bail and desert like rats from a sinking ship because they see no hope of victory, and the inevitable happens. The main counter is an inspirational leader who rallies up enough morale to keep pressing on. And hopefully, ArenaNet might tweak things down the road to encourage more defenders.

Funny anecdote. Same timezone play from one day to the next. One day there was practically no resistance at the keeps/towers – just disorganized defenders who got mowed down, the other day there were way too freaking many. The difference? A guild leader-commander from the opposing team apparently took a day off to have a break. Leadership is a big deal in WvW.