Guild Wars 2

I had a thought, would it be possible to add the idea of “underflow servers” to the game? What I mean by that is that you have overflow servers where you dump people when the existing area is too crowded, right? Would it be possible to dump players into a shared server if a given area is too empty though?

There are some areas of this game that are plenty crowded right now, sure, but many regions have very few players, since the only real point to going there is to maybe complete 1-2 story steps, or world clear, and once you’ve done that there’s no reason to go back so most players don’t, but there’s always a few who still need those completion points and it’d be nice to have some company.

Here’s how I’d see it working, you keep track of the population of each zone. If it falls below a certain threshold and stays that way for X amount of time (both of which you’d have to figure out as to what worked best), then an “underflow server” would be generated for that zone, just like the overflows. Any new incoming players would be automatically shuffled to that zone and could choose to stay or go to their own server’s version. Any players who are already playing on their own servers (and are presumably hearing crickets and echos) would get a pop-up when out of combat that would inform them that an underflow server was available and give them the option of using it, or staying.

I think that the inclusion of this sort of feature could be very helpful to the feeling of vitality that the game had in earlier months when every zone was packed with people on their way to 80.

It took be a bit to realize you were saying Under instead of Over, but after the initial confusion this is actually a rather intreguing idea. I tend to suspect it isn’t really possible, but it’s still interesting.

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be technically possible if they chose to do it. If they didn’t already have the overflow servers then yeah, it’d be a huge lift to create, but the technology to create these should be almost identical to the overflows, just applied differently.

The idea occurred to me because in a previous MMO they had issues with their open world becoming empty, so they merged all the servers and then had the open world areas fill up entirely based on need, sort of like having only “overflow servers.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go for GW2, but it’d be nice if they could manage some sort of compromise to make the less populated zones more “lively.” The living world and some daily achievements help to some degree, but even if they were pumping them out way faster than they do it wouldn’t really be enough to attain solid populations in every game zone on every server.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be technically possible if they chose to do it. If they didn’t already have the overflow servers then yeah, it’d be a huge lift to create, but the technology to create these should be almost identical to the overflows, just applied differently.

The idea occurred to me because in a previous MMO they had issues with their open world becoming empty, so they merged all the servers and then had the open world areas fill up entirely based on need, sort of like having only “overflow servers.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go for GW2, but it’d be nice if they could manage some sort of compromise to make the less populated zones more “lively.” The living world and some daily achievements help to some degree, but even if they were pumping them out way faster than they do it wouldn’t really be enough to attain solid populations in every game zone on every server.

Ok, think about it this way. How does the Overflow work?
The zone gets filled up to capacity. Someone tries to enter the zone, so it shunts them over to a new zone with room into it. When their home zone gains space they are alerted that they can move back.

How would an Underflow work?
There are less than a minimum number of people in the zone. Someone tries to enter the zone but is shunted to a new zone full of people. No new people enter their home zone because they’re all moved to Underflow which is now over capacity and moving people to an Overflow of the Underflow. It doesn’t break the value for minimum people. Now what?

Kal Spiro.9745:

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be technically possible if they chose to do it. If they didn’t already have the overflow servers then yeah, it’d be a huge lift to create, but the technology to create these should be almost identical to the overflows, just applied differently.

The idea occurred to me because in a previous MMO they had issues with their open world becoming empty, so they merged all the servers and then had the open world areas fill up entirely based on need, sort of like having only “overflow servers.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go for GW2, but it’d be nice if they could manage some sort of compromise to make the less populated zones more “lively.” The living world and some daily achievements help to some degree, but even if they were pumping them out way faster than they do it wouldn’t really be enough to attain solid populations in every game zone on every server.

Ok, think about it this way. How does the Overflow work?
The zone gets filled up to capacity. Someone tries to enter the zone, so it shunts them over to a new zone with room into it. When their home zone gains space they are alerted that they can move back.

How would an Underflow work?
There are less than a minimum number of people in the zone. Someone tries to enter the zone but is shunted to a new zone full of people. No new people enter their home zone because they’re all moved to Underflow which is now over capacity and moving people to an Overflow of the Underflow. It doesn’t break the value for minimum people. Now what?

No if Underflow is full it moves people to another underflow! When X people enter the zone from SAME server they will be moved to original server if they confirm the popup.

You are from server A, you enter server A map but there are less then X people so you are moved to common underflow, there will be several underflows as overflows. when X people from A server are in total on that map, not depended in which underflow, they can all move to original A server.

g e o.2589:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be technically possible if they chose to do it. If they didn’t already have the overflow servers then yeah, it’d be a huge lift to create, but the technology to create these should be almost identical to the overflows, just applied differently.

The idea occurred to me because in a previous MMO they had issues with their open world becoming empty, so they merged all the servers and then had the open world areas fill up entirely based on need, sort of like having only “overflow servers.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go for GW2, but it’d be nice if they could manage some sort of compromise to make the less populated zones more “lively.” The living world and some daily achievements help to some degree, but even if they were pumping them out way faster than they do it wouldn’t really be enough to attain solid populations in every game zone on every server.

Ok, think about it this way. How does the Overflow work?
The zone gets filled up to capacity. Someone tries to enter the zone, so it shunts them over to a new zone with room into it. When their home zone gains space they are alerted that they can move back.

How would an Underflow work?
There are less than a minimum number of people in the zone. Someone tries to enter the zone but is shunted to a new zone full of people. No new people enter their home zone because they’re all moved to Underflow which is now over capacity and moving people to an Overflow of the Underflow. It doesn’t break the value for minimum people. Now what?

No if Underflow is full it moves people to another underflow! When X people enter the zone from SAME server they will be moved to original server if they confirm the popup.

You are from server A, you enter server A map but there are less then X people so you are moved to common underflow, there will be several underflows as overflows. when X people from A server are in total on that map, not depended in which underflow, they can all move to original A server.

And that is all very complicated and technical and not at all simple to design or implement, thus proving my initial point.

While the idea has been posted a few times already, I would love underflow servers.
However, I see the same problem as Kal sees.

Maybe instead of adding underflow servers, merge the PvE maps for EU and American servers. They’re hosted in the same room anyways, I think. Last time I ran ip command in Frostgorge Sound, Desolation, I got 206.127.146.58:0, which traces to NC Interactive, Austin, Texas, US.
So for every EU server, there would be an American server counterpart for the PvE maps (Not cities, and excluding language servers I guess). This would even the players-online-graph a bit, making the maps slightly more populated.

How would an Underflow work?
There are less than a minimum number of people in the zone. Someone tries to enter the zone but is shunted to a new zone full of people. No new people enter their home zone because they’re all moved to Underflow which is now over capacity and moving people to an Overflow of the Underflow. It doesn’t break the value for minimum people. Now what?

There are different ways to do it, but I described by plan for it a bit above. Basically, a sever resets, obviously is starts with zero people in it so it wouldn’t automatically start shunting people right away, but they could take population density averages over time, and if a zone still has few people in it a half-hour after a reboot, and it has a track record from the past few days of having few people in it, then this could trigger an underflow server. A this point, while incoming players would default to the underflow, they would get a pop-up just like on an overflow, and if they really preferred not to be there, they could opt out and be transported to their own server’s version.

Based on their comments in the past they seem to already have the metrics tools to get the numbers needed to make these decisions, and it would be fairly simple to write a program that could decide whether an underflow was warranted based on recent zone performance.

One thing that would definitely help would be if they could also display to the player what the population numbers would be like, for example it could say “You have been transported to Brisban Wildlands Underflow, which contains 100 players, would you prefer to move to Brisban Wildlands Yaksbend, which contains 3 players?”

As for “Overflow of the underflow”, there would be hard numbers for that too, which I can’t really guess at without a complete understanding of their systems but they know these things fairly well. Basically, yes, you would have “overflows of the underflows,” which is that after the underflows reach a certain level (which I would actually put at a bit bellow what would trigger a traditional overflow), then a second Underflow would be triggered, just as a massive event can cause multiple overflows of a given zone. If there are enough underflows filled that they contain enough players to well-populate the home zones, then perhaps another alert could pop up offering players the option of returning home, saying that a critical mass had been reached.

Really that option shouldn’t be fairly common though, if a zone is so poorly populated over so long a time that it would trigger an underflow zone in the first place, then it isn’t likely to ever reach the level where returning to the home server would be a good option. The zones that are likely to trigger an underflow will probably be in permanent Underflow mode until such time as they add some new events to the zone that attract some temporary attention, which really isn’t a problem since if you think about it that’s basically how dungeons work right now with more players using gw3lfg to partner up cross-server than just shouting in general chat to group with people on their own servers.

My guess would be that zones like the starters, cities, Kessex, Gendarian, Harathi, Sparkfly, Blazeridge Steppes, and Cursed Shore would probably be immune to this. Many of the other zones would likely be much better populated if they used Underflow servers.

And that is all very complicated and technical and not at all simple to design or implement, thus proving my initial point.

It’s not simple-simple, but in the grand scheme of MMO design it’s not insanely complex either. If I had access to their metrics data and could figure out what they considered the ideal zone populations (it’s hard to tell how many people are in your zone when they are so spread out), and what they currently use for overflows, I could probably work out a formula that would result in a pretty good method for implementing this, which would then require some testing but they could always tweak those cut-offs.

Maybe instead of adding underflow servers, merge the PvE maps for EU and American servers. They’re hosted in the same room anyways, I

They could, but then the popular zones would ALWAYS be overflow servers all the time, and as Guesting shows, that’s always a huge hassle, especially with the big chain events. I think Underflow gives a good compromise, allowing players to stay on their home servers whenever in zones that are well populated, but also allowing you access to more populous zones when you don’t want to be running an entire zone solo.