Guild Wars 2

I get the feeling that mega-server implementation will not go as well as planned.

Time to drop my 2 copper in the pot.

1)Like the idea of a centralized schedule for world boss events. However, limiting them to one at a time per category is too much. Instead, have either all or half of the ones for the lower categories come online each time in rotation. That way, you can always pick where you want to go over the course of the times available.

2)All contestable waypoints contested until on the map is double-dipping in waypoint costs. Especially in light of the champ train nerfs, I suggest removing map travel costs within a zone once you’re in that zone. If necessary, increase cost to travel from zone to zone to compensate, so travelling quickly across the map becomes more expensive, but doing it a slower, cheaper way is also possible via in-zone waypoints(gate to gate, basically).

3)Randomizing ALL node spawns each mapgen is too much. Set rich vein locations need to remain. Removing guesting to other servers to triple-dip on them is a fair enough balance. Furthermore, T6 node spawns need to be set as well to keep costs from skyrocketing. It is not an exploit to access these nodes on multiple characters daily. It is a reward to those who have taken the time to level those characters and can take advantage of that benefit.

TL;DR: If you don’t want to force yet more people to sit around champ farming all day, relax the restrictions on income stream that changes to world boss schedules and availability of valuable gathering nodes will cause. Otherwise you funnel even MORE people into the ‘grind gold to do anything’ gameplay mode. Which is what I thought you were trying to move away from…

Trueflight.9058:

Right. I’ve just read over the enthusiastically written news post about the megaserver update and, to put it -very- mildly, I (and most of the map chat of my home server, Piken Square) am somewhat worried.

For those who don’t know, Piken Square – and our US sister server, Tarnished Coast – are the unofficial GW2 roleplaying servers. We have something of a persistent world co-written between the rather large number of RPers and, for that to continue to work, we need to be able to almost guarantee that we’ll encounter each other. Not just our fellow guildmates or friends, but any of the many, many roleplayers who frequent the server.

Let me explain. At the moment, if I take my character out of Divinity’s Reach (the main RP hub of the server) and go for a wander around the Fields of Ruin, I’m likely to find other Piken Square inhabitants, ones I’ve never met before, RPing their characters. I might encounter characters who’re RPing being part of the Ebon Vanguard, Separatists, Charr troopers, etc – any of whom I could stumble across and start up a spontaneous in-character (“IC”) conversation or scene with. This is only possible because the world we’re all playing on is publicly recognised as the RP server for the EU.

The general worry in my guild, /map chat, frenzied curse-ridden forum posts and so on is that the megaserver update will, with the noble intention of creating tight-knit and fun ingame communities, actually obliterate the one that already exists for us. For our community to continue to thrive – or even exist – it’s essential that we have some controlled way of ensuring that we can join the “RP instance” of whatever zone we’re in (and not just the hubs like Divinity’s Reach – a lot of the most enjoyable RP comes from bumping into IC strangers while out in the combat zones). Note that this cannot be done by just joining our guildmates or friends – it needs to be far larger scale than that.

This thread is not just meant to be me (and others) complaining about the incoming update, as that’ll serve no purpose. Instead, I’ve endeavored to come up with some ideas as to how to make this work.

Firstly, by all means have the megaserver system, but have a manual instance selection. Much like how GW1 had its districts – you should be able to let the megaserver analyse your data and find you an instance, -or- manually join the RP instance of the zone you’re in, assuming it’s not full, of course.

Alternatively, when you roll out the megaserver patch, let us manually dictate what data and filters to send to the megaserver. I.e., I want to filter by language (English), location (Europe), and game type (Roleplaying), with the last as a priority. This won’t be as good as a fixed roleplaying instance, and will still splinter the community somewhat, but will at least help roleplayers find each other in the megaserver system. And perhaps, if your tech works as amazingly as you suggest that it does, it will naturally result in roleplayers gravitating back toward each other over time, eventually restoring the community to its current state.

Closing thoughts – this is meant to be constructive. While a lot of people are angry about this update and feel that Anet is neglecting or disinterested in its roleplaying community, some of us recognise that simply raging about it won’t accomplish anything. I’m also personally of the opinion that this update isn’t actually -designed- to shaft roleplayers, but that Anet hasn’t really considered the ramifications of it on said community. That said, it’s worth stating that a great many of the roleplayers on Piken Square do so exclusively – they don’t really play PvE or PvP – and thus, if roleplaying becomes difficult or impossible in GW2, they -will- leave for other games. Something nobody wants to see happen (particularly as a lot of roleplayers spend a quite frankly preposterous amount of money in the gem store).

If anyone else has any suggestions – or simply wants to make their voices heard and make it clear to Anet that this is going to be a serious problem – please post below. And while it’s a long shot, if we could get a response from an Anet developer or community GM, that’d be grand.

This is the culmination of my thoughts as well. I invested more money in Gem Store than any other sub-fee model game and I always prefer GW2 over other because community was created on it’s own as dedicated RP server was never given to us.
I would like to go to sleep without a worry that I haven’t made a mistake spending investment in a game I will no longer be able to enjoy as independent, wondering RP.

All in all, as this move is logical at one point, it is scary at other. There was never a practice that product you buy would change such a core element, add things yes but not revamp existing.

I probably know why Megaserver was introduced.
But what about a little change?

If you keep servers, keep server-only hub city. This should be not much a problem because hub city is always populated.
This way, guilds on one server will have a place where to meet, and yes I am refering to guilds and players interested in wvw. Or guilds with “server pride”.

Just one map in the world will stay server-only and its hub city.

From what I’ve read and understand, this system will be similar to Edge of the Mists map in overflow.
And if that is the case how will you solve the issues that Edge of the Mists had on day 1 and 2?
How will you solve the queuing issue that is glaringly there whenever we try to do a world boss? Will it be similar to world versus world?(I hope it will be)
How will you address the massive lag issue that will be present on the map where the mega-server system is implemented?
Will mapping in a map be luck-based or do we need to cue and wait similarly to wvw?

Alugjen Darlas.5329:

Conncept.7638:

bri.2359:

Conncept.7638:

MRA.4758:

Conncept.7638:

bri.2359:

These events, particularly Wurm, requires a very high level of organisation that the average and / or casual player are simple incapable of or not willing to do.

Bahahaha, ‘organization’, that’s a good one! You have any comedy routines I could see? :P

From this I take you don’t ever have participated in a serious wurm try?

~MRA

You know what they say about those who *ass*ume?

Yes, I did, which is how I came to that conclusion. Dropped in with a bunch of ‘randoms’, we complied perfectly with the event mechanics, had groups clearing mobs quickly and efficiently, had a group constantly DPSing. Hardly anybody going down. Event ended before we even got him below 50%, it’s a mindless DPS check, you could see that yourself were you not blinded by your self-fabricated ‘leetness’.

~Idon’tcareaboutyourcrapshoottag

Wow …
I have read a lot of idiotic troll posts on this forum over past 1.5 years, but this one takes the cake for me.

You didn’t even complete the event, yet here you are being Mr Know-it-all on the Wurm…

FYI,
I have participated in over 40 successful Wurm kills. How many have you done??
Oh right, none ..

I wonder who’s understanding of this event is better and who’s methods actually work?

You are a prime example of why I think this megaserver change will be a disaster for the players/guilds/servers that can successfully complete Tequatl and the Three-Headed Wurm.

Oh yes, your sitting in a spot predetermined for you among a giant group of players all spamming the same skills you’ve been told to spam, carrying the builds, buffs, and items you have been ordered to carry is oh so very impressive, and bestows upon you a wealth of knowledge I couldn’t possibly comprehend.

Get over yourself, Wurm and Tequatl kills are not impressive. Comply with the simple and easily explained mechanics, max enough players DPS and evasion, and you win. If there’s more to it than that, please explain what it is, because none of that requires anything dozens of other bosses do not. The only hitch is in welching every last point out of DPS out of 100+ players, which takes nothing but pathetically obsessive calculation on part of a small group and blind compliance on part of the remainder.

I guess we found an afk-er Shatter spammer here .

I think we found our next guild stalker! ;P

Question for the devs: Is this megaservers, actually a budget driven choice. Aka less players, still crazy amount of servers active, to much money wasted, and you want to sell some servers to make money on them, lower maintenance cost. Cause it sure feels this way. Then again, there is still tons of lag in a lot of game modes, so this would be a step back no matter what in stability.

And now that i think about it, Megaserver release, before guild halls, is a stupid idea. They should be launched simultaneous (or guild hall first). Why? You are gonna nerf server loyalty, and destroy some community bondings. This may sound dramatic, but it’s the truth with such chaotic, and hard to explain – hardware point of view – feature that you are introducting. With that in mind, you basically say ‘make a guild or bye bye community play’. With that in mind, and server unique city instances gone, we need something to be still unique. Here i come guild halls. At least if gw2 team has the same vision, and lately their vision seems clouded by Mordreth’s darkness.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Question for the devs: Is this megaservers, actually a budget driven choice. Aka less players, still crazy amount of servers active, to much money wasted, and you want to sell some servers to make money on them, lower maintenance cost.

GW2 doesn’t have this kind of server structure (1 world = 1 server rack etc). All game maps are distributed dynamically across the whole server hardware. Additional capacity is added or detracted as needed. Modern data centers have this kind of capability.
Things like character data, guild data and the market are shared databases that go across everything.

The Megaserver may free up some resources, but overall, this is a gameplay-driven decision. The “daed gaem” shouts have been around since the game launched. From what we actually know, after the larger drop in players around the end of 2012, the numbers have stabilized and are now actually rising.

Rallying calls in pve (cities or populated zones) has been a major source of support for wvw on my server for a very long time. Having players from every server mixed into these mega-overflows is going to make that nearly impossible to do. I see this having a large negative impact on our ability to get people into wvw when reinforcements are needed.

I’m also going to miss having a familiar community in cities and at world events. I like being able to stick with the same commander/group through multiple events. With events starting at the same time in every instance of a map, what are the chances of actually sticking with the same group between events? And I mean group as being the entire group doing the event, not my party.

The only thing helping a group like that stay together is in the increased chance of landing in an instance with people on the same home server, but instances will be filling rapidly during world events. It seems that large groups will very likely be broken up among several different instances when changing maps.

The one good thing I see with this change is having more populated maps for leveling/general pve. But I don’t see it being a huge difference. Taking 24 nearly empty instances of a map and combining them into one still leaves a very low population map.

It could also help eliminate world events that fail because only a few people show up. The downside to this will be getting stuck with full-map zerg lagfests more often, instead of having more enjoyable events with 20 or so players.

Overall, I think the downsides outweigh the advantages of this system. I’d rather take my chances with too few people showing up for events, than being stuck in a full map that causes server lag and has a large impact on game performance. This makes the event scale and take much longer, which is made worse by the lag and performance issues, as you aren’t able to play as effectively.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Question for the devs: Is this megaservers, actually a budget driven choice.

To my knowledge, no. As it stands now, if you’re the last person to leave a zone, that zone essentially collapses, only preserving the state of a few events (usually the important ones). Once people start filtering back into that zone, the zone expands again and the preserved events are appropriately marked. Overflows currently do not have that ability as they’re made on demand and destroyed on demand. That’s why if you’re at a teq run and DC before he’s spawned, logging back in usually puts you in an overflow that does not have fish heads on the beach (regardless of the main you were on) because that instance has not been “alive,” if you will, long enough for the teq event to have failed, thus spawn fish heads.

What do you think about Mega server?

Do think it going to get boring not having a choice or not knowing when events happen.

I for one hate over populated events.

Do you think the above could happen?

Anyone who’s doing the events has been using the timer websites anyway, so nothing much should change.

No I don’t like the mega server. It’s going to be terrible for event meet ups and for RP.

Events like the Maw often have way too many people. Shatterer and Jormag often have too few. Consolidating maps and then making additional instances as needed may solve both of these problems.

However the plans are not yet finalized. They set out a proposed plan and seeing what people think about it. The final plans will likely be substantially different.

Too bad if you have a job in the EU and want to daily do the mega-boss events.
Here are the new spawn times (all CEST):

18:00 Karka Queen
19:00 Tequatl
20:00 Evolved Jungle Wurm

Then nothing until the next day …

18:00 many still at work or on their way home
19:00 same as above or recently arrived home
20:00 having dinner

Given the time required for organanising events like the Wurm, these events will be out-of-reach for many during the week,

And before anyone says a guild can start these events anytime they want, let me remind you that a guild needs to first accumulate the influence and then build the event, and this takes time. At best a guild might be able to generate 2 of these instances per week.

Not everyone agrees, there is a lot of valid criticism. To me this is Anet’s worse mistake so far, counting Scarlet. When implemented on maps lvl15+, it will hinder established communities. While it may have worked from the start, it is NOT something to add 1.5 years after release!
It also takes the CHOICE away from us players. F-list and Guilds do not make all of our social interaction and a game system shouldn’t make the choice for us when choosing who we play with.
Organising public in-game events will become impossible. Shouting in city map chat for reinforcements in WvW will become impossible. Running with allied guilds will become very difficult (as there is not “Alliance button”). Megaboss timers limit our gaming time.
Considering Anet talked about “removing restrictions” (oh the sweet irony!), this is a very limiting development.

I don’t like this renamed overflow system at all.
I liked guesting on blackgate to get my world bosses.

Nexxius.6017:

No I don’t like the mega server. It’s going to be terrible for event meet ups and for RP.

Looks like you don’t know a way around it.

Join the same guild. You will all meet up at the same zone. Problem solved. After all, it is an event meet up.

A really hope anet come to their senses and cancel the mega-server before there’s a mass migration back to WoW, Aeon, Rift and Final Fantasy 14.

bri.2359:

Too bad if you have a job in the EU and want to daily do the mega-boss events.
Here are the new spawn times (all CEST):

18:00 Karka Queen
19:00 Tequatl
20:00 Evolved Jungle Wurm

Then nothing until the next day …

18:00 many still at work or on their way home
19:00 same as above or recently arrived home
20:00 having dinner

Given the time required for organising events like the Wurm, these events will be out-of-reach for many during the week,

THIS. The ultimate problem with restricting timers on megabosses. It really, really saddens me.
Anet, please understand that not everyone plays all day long. As with the community aspect, you are removing player’s choice and that verges on uninstalling.

Im about 90% sure Ill just quit the game when the megaserver hits, so no, Im not happy with this.

Australia:
7am: Karka Queen
8am: Tequatl
9am: Junglewurm.

Oceanic/American merged servers ftw.

Vaugh.7193:

Im about 90% sure Ill just quit the game when the megaserver hits, so no, Im not happy with this.

Same feeling bro. And it sucks, because I love my server community – it is the reason I kept playing through the atrocity of a Living Story!

I really like Megaservers.

I hope that ANet doesn’t give in. It is a great system. I don’t know what other players think but I don’t see Barren wasteland as a community.

why this inferior system over districts that players can choose?

if i want to play with a friend whos on a seperate server, but i keep getting sorted into the same map as my guildmates/ other friends as there are more of them, and they system says i should play with all these people i know. what happens to people who are on servers with small populations to the extent that each world doesn’t have its own unshared prime instance for a map how are they supposed to recruit for wvw without the competition hearing they are about to make a push on map X

the temples are a mess with this new system, why even have the statues tied to temples when they will all be affected by the closest temple. IF you had implemented districts as you were asked

All you had to do was: district 2 cursed shore – influences – district 2 malachors leap – influences – district 2 straits of devastation

in cases where there is a mismatch the previous instances influence carries over
pretty simple eh?

Astral Projections.7320:

Events like the Maw often have way too many people. Shatterer and Jormag often have too few. Consolidating maps and then making additional instances as needed may solve both of these problems.

On the contrary. It will join maps to create instances with +225% population density and turn every single world boss on a timer into a megablob.

Why create a separate thread? We already have this one and this one, it will get merged at best.

I don’t agree with the megaserver …

As part of an EU multi, cross-server guild currently doing Wurm, Teq, Karka on a daily basis, the megaserver and new boss times will destroy this type of game play and thus the guild.

If you don’t want a barren wasteland as a community there are other ways to do it.

Blizzard added connected realms: Placing two realms of the same kind together in one group. Meaning all the PVPers of one server were put together with the other PVPers of another server and all the RPers were put with their own kind too. Much better.

Ok I have one question and it would be greatly apreaciated if someone could PM me the answer since this is a highly active thread and i’ll probably miss a reply

but as someone who uses GW2stuff to monitor Boss events how are the timers going to work for the Megaserver maps?

how will we know which bosses are up on which map?
or will all bosses be timed to appear at the same time on the megaserver on every version of a duplicate map?

Sorry if this has been asked multiple times now but this thread is over 700 posts long and it’s my first time checking it

Boss events are going to be put on stable timers between instances meaning it’ll all happen at once whether people want it or not.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Why create a separate thread? We already have this one and this one, it will get merged at best.

Because this is a HUGE GAME BREAKINGCHANGING ISSUE and needs to be discussed as much as possible and it’s problems need to be brought up to the surface in the most visible manner possible! It is difficult to do that with the other 2 threads that have 500+ posts each.

Nexxius.6017:

Blizzard added connected realms: Placing two realms of the same kind together in one group. Meaning all the PVPers of one server were put together with the other PVPers of another server and all the RPers were put with their own kind too. Much better.

“Underflow” idea that was suggested a lot is also preferable to this mega-overflow system. Cause fixing the issue of underpopulated maps like Timberline at the expense of destroying the community feeling in cities and elsewhere it too high a price to pay!
And the reason Snowden and Timberline are underpopulated in the first place is that there is nothing to do there once you explored them.

mrstealth.6701:

Rallying calls in pve (cities or populated zones) has been a major source of support for wvw on my server for a very long time. Having players from every server mixed into these mega-overflows is going to make that nearly impossible to do. I see this having a large negative impact on our ability to get people into wvw when reinforcements are needed.

Since the megaserver will put people with the same Home on the same instance, it won’t affect rallying calls that much. Yes it will have players from other servers mixed in, if your server doesn’t have a high enough population to support one map but that’s also a problem with the current system.

I’m also going to miss having a familiar community in cities and at world events. I like being able to stick with the same commander/group through multiple events. With events starting at the same time in every instance of a map, what are the chances of actually sticking with the same group between events? And I mean group as being the entire group doing the event, not my party.

Once again, if you are of the same Home server, when you port to kill another World Boss you will be put in the same map instance as everyone else you were playing with before. Provided there is enough room on the map instance (same with the Overflow system). I don’t think the Megaserver will affect this part of the game much either.

The only thing helping a group like that stay together is in the increased chance of landing in an instance with people on the same home server, but instances will be filling rapidly during world events. It seems that large groups will very likely be broken up among several different instances when changing maps.

There is a way to prevent this from happening in the game already. There is a soft cap on all maps and there is no reason to remove it, after the map reaches the “soft cap”, only players of the same Home will fill the last spots until you reach the “hard cap”. Although there IS a possibility for the Megaserver to disrupt big groups, it won’t happen as easily, and as often as people say.

The one good thing I see with this change is having more populated maps for leveling/general pve. But I don’t see it being a huge difference. Taking 24 nearly empty instances of a map and combining them into one still leaves a very low population map.

If 6 out of those 24 instances have 1 person each, it will allow those 6 people to play together and even do Group events that would’ve been hard to solo.

There is a reason they are putting the Megaserver tech on low level zones first, to see how the system works and adjust it as needed.

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

I just want to know how it works with multi-map flags like the Corrupted Statues in Orr.

Do the three Orr maps just work in permanently affixed clusters or do I face the possibility of flipping a temple in one map, strolling across the border to the next map and finding the corresponding statues there still active?

And now I know.

And frankly I’m DISGUSTED.

For a bunch of storytellers who chased after EPICNESS to the verge of complete nonsense, throwing away the ability to have any interaction carry across zone borers is a GIGANTIC STEP BACKWARDS.

Removing empty wastelands is a step backwards. okay.

It’s going to happen whether you agree with it or not.

runeblade.7514:

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

I just want to know how it works with multi-map flags like the Corrupted Statues in Orr.

Do the three Orr maps just work in permanently affixed clusters or do I face the possibility of flipping a temple in one map, strolling across the border to the next map and finding the corresponding statues there still active?

And now I know.

And frankly I’m DISGUSTED.

For a bunch of storytellers who chased after EPICNESS to the verge of complete nonsense, throwing away the ability to have any interaction carry across zone borers is a GIGANTIC STEP BACKWARDS.

Removing empty wastelands is a step backwards. okay.

That’s only a minor aspect of the megaserver system that could have been solved in other ways (see the proposed “underflow”). But it comes at too high a cost of destroying the server communities and boss gameplay as we knew them.

So what will happen with the gathering nodes, like orichalcum and ancient wood?
Since there wont be main server anymore, the nodes will change each time we login with a different character?

Vitus Dance.4509:

It’s going to happen whether you agree with it or not.

And when / if (cause they did say it’s just a plan) that happens on lvl15+ maps, I’m leaving the game.
I will miss the game I initially got though, and I will miss my server community.

Considering that anet wants to utilize open world for zerg content, a mega server makes sense. Also, having a mega server saves them some headaches (face too) of having to close, merge or maintain multiple individual servers. There will definitely be benefits to mega servers, but I foresee profession growth and development suffering greatly because there will not be a need to evolve the most important aspect of the game when the majority of playtime will be running in a zerg using your auto attack with a few gimmicks tossed in to beat mega bosses. All in all, mega servers will give a whole new meaning to the phrase “zerg wars 2” so I think we should start using “mega zerg wars 2” instead.

My concern: zerg fest everywhere. Please tell me this won’t be the case… or I need a new game.

hedix.1986:

bri.2359:

Too bad if you have a job in the EU and want to daily do the mega-boss events.
Here are the new spawn times (all CEST):

18:00 Karka Queen
19:00 Tequatl
20:00 Evolved Jungle Wurm

Then nothing until the next day …

18:00 many still at work or on their way home
19:00 same as above or recently arrived home
20:00 having dinner

Given the time required for organising events like the Wurm, these events will be out-of-reach for many during the week,

THIS. The ultimate problem with restricting timers on megabosses. It really, really saddens me.
Anet, please understand that not everyone plays all day long. As with the community aspect, you are removing player’s choice and that verges on uninstalling.

Please lower the timers to a recycle of 1 hour before the events restart… That way everyone gets a chance.

jaka.9635:

So what will happen with the gathering nodes, like orichalcum and ancient wood?
Since there wont be main server anymore, the nodes will change each time we login with a different character?

Sadly, gathering will become much much much more tedious. No more node charts either. I expect prices of Ori / ancient wood to go up ridiculously high once / if this is implemented in lvl15+ maps.

Sirendor.1394:

My concern: zerg fest everywhere. Please tell me this won’t be the case… or I need a new game.

Yup, that will indeed sadly be the case. Hence the +225% increased population. Which is fine for bigger stuff, but Behemoth will go down before you can press 1.

hedix.1986:

Cause fixing the issue of underpopulated maps like Timberline at the expense of destroying the community feeling in cities and elsewhere it too high a price to pay!
And the reason Snowden and Timberline are underpopulated in the first place is that there is nothing to do there once you explored them.

Take all my +1s.

Megaserver is just a glorified overflow system.

One point I dislike too that hasn’t been said is how the waypoint system is changing. Now I have to enter a map…and then move to a different part of the map? It’s not like the cost scales down that well based on distance. I’d be spending nearly twice as much just to travel to any destination I want to. Unless they remove the costs of waypoints, that feels like a cheap method of developing a goldsink. Pfft.

Really all this megaserver thing is artificially making the game look larger when ANet is being plagued by depopulation. It’s not a real solution, it’s a temporary cover-up.

already three feedback threads about this topic…..in the future, OP. read the subforum first.

I disagree with this because it breaks large communities at a time which communities are the main thing holding many players in the game.

I disagree because it completely negates the choice of server, making it even less of a reason to play on a underdog server in wvw. I choose a low population server so I can just goof off with friends without having all the popular events done seconds after it pops up (beta weekend style), not so I would get shifted into someone else’s shard constantly. I know that on many maps this still won’t be a problem, but it still irritates me.

I have no idea why they are doing this to cities because these, of all places, should remain server bound. There is nothing to the 5 cities, I can see former lion’s arch, the social center, being joined maybe… But where are wvw guilds going to recruit now? If guilds become free of server bounds as the new update suggests might happen in the future, then why would they choose servers to represent, beyond wvw bonuses?

You might have noticed I’m a big wvw person… If I don’t want to take up a slot in wvw, and want to chat with fellow server members in particular, say we are planning a community event, which was a very common occurrence in old LA, where and how? Do we have to “guild up” which is the current solution to these problems? What if my guild slots are full, what if some guilds don’t want people who only join in on occasion joining them?

Many questions, and I’m not sure that its fully thought out.. But we’ll see I guess

I have a lot of concerns with this:

• Population: I don’t want 100 people amassing for everything. It makes personal skill redundant and the game laggy.
• Fixed timers: bad idea… instead of every boss spawning at every time, now they are on rotations that take hours (and a lot of people only have 1-2 hours a day to play).
• Social aspect: this really feels like bringing EotM to PvE… and we all know how EotM turned out: a giant blob of people that never talk and just zerg along for gold, gold and more gold.

maddoctor.2738:

Since the megaserver will put people with the same Home on the same instance, it won’t affect rallying calls that much. Yes it will have players from other servers mixed in, if your server doesn’t have a high enough population to support one map but that’s also a problem with the current system.

The megaserver will try to put you in a version of the map populated by other players from your server. Keyword is “try”. If the megaserver system decides enough ppl from your server have reached a “comfortable number” on that version you’ll be basically ported to a version of that map that needs more players in it to reach the cap. You know, they have to take players from somewhere to actually reinforce the numbers in les populated versions. Also since the system is automated you have no control where you’ll end up in.

As an example you have 2 versions:
A- 40-GH players, 10-TC, 10-RoS, 25-Gandara, etc
B- 25-TC, 5-RoS, 5-GH, etc

As a gunnars-hold player if i want to get into the version A of the map for guild missions for example, thanks to the way the number of players scale up in the population algorithm (Also them coming and going from the map) i’ll most likely end up in the lower pop version while other guildies will end up in other lower pop versions all around. If we party up you may end with the same problem but now with parties.
Sure we can start to taxi ppl around into one version but this is a hassle that currently we don’t face with the current system unless we hit an overflow.

Also this system makes it hard to coordinate big events like Teq, especially as a server run, since you loose all your control over who gets in the map and from where, let alone the now increased number of low lvl ppl who were just exploring the map and capping out spots for ppl wanting and being prepared to kill Tequatl.

Sirendor.1394:

My concern: zerg fest everywhere. Please tell me this won’t be the case… or I need a new game.

That is the case. The new system will draw in players from other servers and arange them in different versions in order to cap out those versions at a nebulous “comfortable number” of players.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand I’m a little keen to see how it all pans out but on the other I have this nagging feeling its going to be ANet’s NGE.

Bleh, someone’s already used NGE.

hedix.1986:

jaka.9635:

So what will happen with the gathering nodes, like orichalcum and ancient wood?
Since there wont be main server anymore, the nodes will change each time we login with a different character?

Sadly, gathering will become much much much more tedious. No more node charts either. I expect prices of Ori / ancient wood to go up ridiculously high once / if this is implemented in lvl15+ maps.

Sirendor.1394:

My concern: zerg fest everywhere. Please tell me this won’t be the case… or I need a new game.

Yup, that will indeed sadly be the case. Hence the +225% increased population. Which is fine for bigger stuff, but Behemoth will go down before you can press 1.

I’d be careful with that +225%. That’s an overall number and as such it is greatly influenced by maps that see little to no traffic right now.
For Maps that already see a lot of traffic the increase will be much lower.

Other than that however I have to agree with you. Especially since a lot of the smaller mega-events now happen less often. this wil lead to a drastical increase in visitors. until now for something like the Mark II Golem the players were spread out among a lot of opportunities to do that event. Now there are rather few times left in comparison, when you can go there. (Granted the Mark II is a rather extreme example, but it drives home the point I think.)

Another problem I have is the acquisition of Obsidian shards. Under the current system, If you wish to acquire obsidian shards via karma from the temple of balthazar, you can just check on which world it is currently open and guest there to shop.
With the new system that option is gone entirely. You can only hop onto the map. check if its open, and if not try again later/another day. With this it might take a very long time to find an open temple.
I would suggest to everyone to load up on shards before the new system goes live. Thankfully, only the low level maps will be affected for now, so there’s enough time to do so.

hedix.1986:

Yup, that will indeed sadly be the case. Hence the +225% increased population. Which is fine for bigger stuff, but Behemoth will go down before you can press 1.

This is another case of badly done math. The increased population is relative, nor does it relate to the capacity of a server. +225% for a map that usually saw 40 people is 90 or 130 depending on how anet’s using percentile (I’m not going to assume).

Also, I’ve been to Behemoth at times where we’ve had enough people show up that we forced an overflow before the first portal event was even active. And with that many people there, we decided to go for a kittens’n’grins fight and used every consumable that summoned something that did damage (ele powder, pet whistle, mortar kits, seed turrets, etc). He was dead within 30 seconds. Of course, that isnt a problem with him being zerged. The real problem with Behemoth is that there is absolutely no scaling for him. 100-120 people kill him in under a minute, yet it takes 3-7 people almost the entire 15 minutes. That scaling is one of the things I’m hoping they’re going to fix with the update.
I dont mind the hilarity of the 30-45 second “insta-kills,” but I like having more fun than going 12345f waypoint.