Guild Wars 2

(edit: penalize. I couldn’t edit the topic name after shortening it. Bah.)

I shouldn’t be penalized for solo play if I crash. If we know players who can’t use the 64-bit client will crash from time to time, causing them to enter a new instance is asinine.

The map I was on wasn’t full, but probably full enough that the megaserver algorythm decided I should go to a new one on return, ignoring the progress I had already made in the meta on the existing map, and instead dropping me in a map with no progress at all.

It’s a great way to discourage me enough to give up on that play session. Sure, I can try to find a group, or squad with a commander, but why can’t I just do my part on the map solo, and not be forced into a new map if I crash?

Please take existing effort in a given map into account when re-adding players who disconnect, hard-full map caps aside. Reconnecting players shouldn’t be subjected to the same logic as new map arrivals, and yet that’s exactly what you do.

Thank you.

It’s really an annoying issue indeed. I recently had crashed with a black screen while doing Octovine and it was down at 10% when happened, when I got back I was put in a map with 95%. -_- Maybe a solution would be having a grace period for disconnects before freeing that space for new arrivals, like 30 seconds or 1 min. I don’t think it’s hard for the game to differentiate a log off/crash from a map leave. If the player leave the map and is still online the game would free that slot. If they leave and then goes offline, the game could wait a bit before freeing the slot.

The same could be for giving credit. If a player crashes during an event the game should grant the reward if they come back online within that grace period. It’s annoying to work hard in an event and get no reward at all due a crash right when it was about to end (I missed 2 events while going after daily achievement due black screens) :S

This problem is as old as the mega server and probably older. ANet still hasn’t done anything to allow players to rejoin the map they disconnected from. There can be many reasons for a disconnect: lost internet connection, client crash, pc crash…

Finding solutions to prevent players from disconnecting in the first place is nice and definitely encouraged, but ANet can NEVER fix all problems that lead to players unvoluntarily leaving maps. That’s simply an impossible task.

Possible solution (my favourite so far):

1. Add an automatic and invisible disconnect confirmation to normal means of disconnecting from a map (closing the game via Alt+F4, the x, going to character select screen or changing to another map).
2. If a player disconnects from a map without sending a disconnect confirmation, keep the player character on the map. Have it just stand where the player was when he disconnected. This character can take damage and die to prevent people from potentially abusing this in WvW.
3. If the player doesn’t reconnect within 10 minutes (2 minutes during meta event) or he connects to a different character, his character gets removed from the map and the spot is freed.
4. If the player does reconnect in time, he simply claims back control over his character in it’s current state.

It’s important to leave the character on the map to prevent people from abusing this system to escape dangerous situations or hide from a WvW zerg.

For the critics who claim that it’s better for an event if the spot gets filled immediately: No, it isn’t. A completely full map has about 150 players. During significant lag spikes about 3 or 4 players max loose their connection. These lag spikes usually happen with way more than 10 minutes between. Unless there’s a problem on ANet’s server’s side, a situation where a significant amount of players disconnect and try to reconnect simmultaniously won’t happen. And even if 50 players disconnected at the same time during a crucial meta event, it would take more than 2 minutes to refill the map and bring the new players into position.

In my opinion a spot reserve and reconnect feature for all gamemodes would be a huge improvement and ANet should implement it rather sooner than later.

The way the megaserver works is just bad. I don’t see any advantage over a dynamic number of typical selectable channels, it would only have more upsides with some shared downsides, but no exclusive downsides.