Guild Wars 2

That’s the only explanation I could come up with. What else could it be?

From what I understand, megaservers use an algorithm to determine on which “channel” (let’s call them that) players best fit, depending on their home world, guild, friends, and other variables, so that they can play with people they know. However, I keep getting thrown on channels at complete random!

It simply doesn’t matter on which channel my friends, my guild or even my own party members are, since nearly four time out of five, I am on the wrong channel. It’s even happened more than once that my party members were spread out on three different channels after a single map transition! What’s up with that?

I sometimes try relogging to join friends and guild members who are all on the same channel (instead of creating a party with one of them and using the “Join in…” option), and I sometimes go through three or four other different channels before landing on theirs, and even then, it takes umpteen tries to get there. The pattern seems to be completely random, too (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 2, 4).

As of right now, megaservers are extremely confusing. The game tells you on which map your friends and guild mates are, but chances are you’ll never find them there because the game does not indicate when they are on a different channel in any way. I even sometimes forget about it and wonder why I can’t see my party members when I seem to be standing on top of them on my minimap!

The solution? Simple! Take example on the original Guild Wars and let us see on which channel we currently are, and let us select on which channel we want to play. No more confusion, no more restriction, and no more complaints!

Oh, and add an extra channel for roleplayers, and everyone couldn’t be happier!

I wouldnt say its broken but I would say it can potentially be optimized a bit more if like you say there are times when your party gets split up (provided you zone at the same time more or less). Thing is for anything apart from party members the mega server can only try to put you together it cannot really manage it reliably every single time. Guild wars like instances will not work either. Keep in mind maps in gw2 have a limit on how many players can host. no one knows for sure some people say only 300 people can be in the same map. Now the mega server can prioritize people from your server to be hosted on map instance 1 for example as much as possible but if the map is full it has no option but to put the rest in say map instance 2 and when thats full on 3… so on.

With party members this should be easily avoided by the megaserver provided you zone at about the same time. The server knows you have say 4 people in your team and can all move you to a map instance where there are 4 free spots so you end up all together. And if thats failing then perhaps they have to tweak the process a bit. Of course if one of you zones and then the others follow some time later it can still happen that in the meantime the server became full and the system had no choice but to move you to the next free instance. There is not much the megaserver can do about that.

You can’t tweak or optimize megaservers as long as maps have caps and players have infinitely many social circles (both their social circles and others’ circles they are in). And the 2nd problem is why megaservers are failing hard and ANet should have never implemented it.

As an answer to OP, in forums, a dev stated that their current architecture does not support distinct idea.

Megaserver is broken and working as intended …

Welcome to Anet’s way of doing things …

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

calyx.9086:

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

Same here, experienced no problems with MegaServer. The only time I run into issues where they are on a different megaserver is when the map is really full and I am unable to join their map. If that’s the case they just join mine and the issue is fixed.

Chase.8415:

calyx.9086:

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

Same here, experienced no problems with MegaServer. The only time I run into issues where they are on a different megaserver is when the map is really full and I am unable to join their map. If that’s the case they just join mine and the issue is fixed.

You have never done organised Tequatl or THW events, have you?

bri.2359:

Chase.8415:

calyx.9086:

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

Same here, experienced no problems with MegaServer. The only time I run into issues where they are on a different megaserver is when the map is really full and I am unable to join their map. If that’s the case they just join mine and the issue is fixed.

You have never done organised Tequatl or THW events, have you?

I have – so there are a few unintended problems – when I have done them we still can beat them both down. Whining and complaining gets one nowhere – try offering some CONSTRUCTIVE ideas but know I don’t think we will be getting rid of mega-servers.

bri.2359:

Chase.8415:

calyx.9086:

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

Same here, experienced no problems with MegaServer. The only time I run into issues where they are on a different megaserver is when the map is really full and I am unable to join their map. If that’s the case they just join mine and the issue is fixed.

You have never done organised Tequatl or THW events, have you?

We only run into issues with Teq when we are organizing at the official spawn time. I’m not sure how you can make a megaserver isolate all the right guilds when you have 100+ people joining every 2 minutes. Outside of the world boss train, which has the too many people too fast problem, I’ve never had an issue getting our guild together (25 people) for missions, and several of them are other servers. I generally see my guild in the same instance if I randomly zone in (LA, Rata Sum, Cursed Shore, etc.), and the the frequency of this has increased every week. In addition, I have settled into a grouping in terms of other guilds, it seems. I generally see the same dozen or so people with tags at world bosses.

And even Teq isn’t that bad, unless you are organizing at the same time as TTS. Once they set their maps, you can get one that stays joinable for 5-10 minutes. If you really want a guild Teq kill, spawn it yourself.

(Edited spelling)

Megaservers would work well IF we also have:
-A queue system, to join a friend or party member, so that we can do something else while waiting, instead of having to spam right clicks for 30 mins.
AND
-Soft and hard caps on servers. If the soft cap is reached, no more random people are admitted in, unless they’re joining directly a party member/friend/guildmate.

bri.2359:

Chase.8415:

calyx.9086:

Hmm, no problems here, most times I land in the same shard as party and guild members, unless that shards is really packed (Dry Top the first few days), or because those guild/party members are based on a different home server.

Same here, experienced no problems with MegaServer. The only time I run into issues where they are on a different megaserver is when the map is really full and I am unable to join their map. If that’s the case they just join mine and the issue is fixed.

You have never done organised Tequatl or THW events, have you?

I have, and I believe I was clear on the fact that the only time I run into issues is when the map is full. At that point I just tell them to join my instance, problem solved.

As stated by a couple people, the primary problem is in organizing large fights like Tequatl or Guild Missions (due to map population cap). While overflows were annoying, they at least let large guilds force a new overflow to be created and then party taxi everyone to the (nearly) empty overflow before it fills with randoms.

As the OP stated, though, the Megaserver’s algorithm seems a bit out of whack lately. A couple days ago I was put into a different map than my entire party, who were also the only other guild members online at the time, from the same home server, and on my friend list. And yet I was able to still party taxi over to their map because the population cap had not been reached. This means the Megaserver algorithm completely failed in every aspect.

Yeah, I also agree that the “automatic sorting” doesn’t seem to work.

Although it’s still a new function, there’s never a thing that works 100% correctly on release.

Although of some suggestions, it’s mostly my opinions though, I think it’s more reasonable to give players:
GW1 style “district selection” (Choice to players)

GW1 style “Reconnect function” (It’s very annoying to get disconnected and thrown into another map copy, because of lack of something like this)

Queue (No need for long clicking sessions, if we still had this function)

White Dragon.5429:

As stated by a couple people, the primary problem is in organizing large fights like Tequatl or Guild Missions (due to map population cap). While overflows were annoying, they at least let large guilds force a new overflow to be created and then party taxi everyone to the (nearly) empty overflow before it fills with randoms.

As the OP stated, though, the Megaserver’s algorithm seems a bit out of whack lately. A couple days ago I was put into a different map than my entire party, who were also the only other guild members online at the time, from the same home server, and on my friend list. And yet I was able to still party taxi over to their map because the population cap had not been reached. This means the Megaserver algorithm completely failed in every aspect.

Soft-caps exist now. You get thrown to another instance and can join on people to get in. From what we can tell with large scale events is that soft cap is somewhere around 90 on the map.

I’m of the opinion that there should be 2 soft-caps:

1) Around 80-90 people on the map, no new people can join map without already being in party of someone on map.

2) Around 120 (map cap is still 150, right?) means that no one joins without right-clicking and joining a member in map (no auto-join).

Possibly these numbers could be based on the velocity of joins, so that the goal is a minute of time for party members to join a map after it soft-capped, and another minute for force joins.

Hi there,

please make sure to post your feedback about “Feedback/Questions: MegaServer” in the dedicated main thread:
“https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-Questions-MegaServer”

Thank you!