Guild Wars 2

Standing in Plains of Ashford on Gates of Madness server, finished half a dozen events, and haven’t seen a single person. The technology is already there to blend servers…it would make sense, to me anyway, to blend low population areas during off-peak hours, like 3am on a Monday morning.

This could be done multiple ways:
1). Just automatically send people to overflow if their natural server has less than a certain number of people. When it determines that a higher number of people from your server are in overflows, it gives them the option to join their natural server.

2). Probably the simplest of the options, allow people to join overflow servers even if their server isn’t full. Isn’t ideal, as most people wouldn’t use the function and then overflows would just be dead.

3). Perhaps a middle ground of the two, where if someone loads into an area, and the number of players is below a certain threshold, have a pop up asking if they would like to go to an overflow that may be more populated. Then people will know of the feature, and will be more likely to use it while still being able to stay on their local server if they wish.

good idea. do a forum search for the word ‘underflow’- its more-or-less what you’re describing.

That man deserves a drink of his choice. Huge thumbs up for that idea;)

I like the idea of Number 3, least intrusive and allows the biggest freedom of choice.

Bump?

Hardly any attention at all to this? Is that enough to just assume it is good and not controversial enough for people to troll?

I’ve gotta agree with this.
the other day it was a nightmare trying to get a fractals group because we couldn’t get to an overflow, and lions arch was so empty. (I mostly play at night)

I would not support this. I’m always very annoyed when Germans just go talking German in /map chat or anything. I’m playing on an international server, I love the fact that everybody there is speaking english. When I get into overflows I’m mostly quite fast annoyed by german speaking germans, which causes me to want to turn back to my own server ASAP.

So, your reasoning for reducing the functionality of the game is xenophobia? way to go.

I think it should be optional. Like a message “This area is currently low populated on your world. Do you wish to move to the overflow?”. But not that if the area is low populated you’re automaticly moved to the overflow.

If you read back that is exactly what has been suggested in the OP. I’d be really interested to know how feasible the Anet dev team think this would be, technically the tech exists in game with the “do you want to go to…” box when you are in overflow already so I assume it’s a case of simply working out what “underpopulated” is as a number of players in a zone.

I don’t think they were being xenophobic, Nesetalis. Way to troll though!

I don’t like it when I go someplace in my city or at work and people around me don’t speak English when I am supposed to be part of the group. It is rude. If they are trying to intentionally exclude people, that is the way to do it. And since this is supposed to be a social game, that defeats the purpose. It is one thing to switch to your native tongue to express something you are not sure you can convey in a foreign language. It is another to be insensitive or uncaring about the people around you.

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Sounds good to me. I heard about the horrid Orr zerg of players, so i stayed away as long as i could, then i actually got interested in playing there and found the zones were practically empty. 20 people in a zone on a good evening. An underflow would be great as much of this content does not seem to be soloable. Too many champions.

Oh please. Don’t confuse xenophobia with a desire to actually understand what people are saying. I’ve played games with Germans online before, and other non English speaking people, and while they are generally nice and fun to play with, the language barrier makes for a frustrating time.

Language barriers are a way of life, though. We don’t have an official world language, as much as English speakers seem to think otherwise, and it’s really assholish to expect other people to speak your language for your own comfort.

And I don’t even know why this would be an issue? If servers are being merged, then there’s going to be more people around from everywhere. Right now, people are not able to group or do certain events because of a lack of players. If you refuse server merging on the grounds that there will be too many people you don’t understand, you’re also throwing out all the extra players who do speak your language, and that could, you know, group with you and help do events.

Not sure if you were responding directly to me or not. I’m not advocating a denial of merged servers at all. And certainly not because of language barriers. I’ll take teamwork where i can get it. A pleasant non-english speaking team mate is preferable to one that does speak english but won’t use it, or uses it disparagingly.

That is a good idea for me, when the Maps Are empty the servers should be dynamic enough for merge servers in that X Map for make it more alive.

But for that, I supose they must change the way it’s working with WvW and make it natural by itself.