Guild Wars 2

I dont know if this has been asked yet but it’s a 12 page long thread. Will we be able to force ourselves back onto our main server if we want to? If I am on JQ for a boss and I end up on Tarnished Coast for example. Will I be able to say ‘No I don’t wish to be on tarnished coast, I want to be on my main server’ and move myself back to an overflow or something similar.

I’ve gone many times recently to Divinty’s Reach only to find that I’m on an overflow. This will put me on a server with people I know, instead of being on a random overflow from every single server.

This isn’t a bad things for cities, it’s a good thing.

@up, as far as I understand it’s not merging servers, megaserver it’s algorithm which try to give us maps where You can always find some people, so for example when 90% players are in fractals, dungeons, WvW, PvP or in vigil keep, You can still go to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and find some ppl for mini dungeon.

azizul.8469:

shoot….. there goes my guestable mining nodes !

Actually it seems guesting is still staying around as well. If you are guesting to higher population servers there should be no noticeable difference.

I’ve said it last year, the hierarchy of worlds is slightly flawed and inefficient. It also leads to a lot of negativity between worlds. As long as I’m able to play with those I wish to, especially in WvW, I’m really happy with this. I think EotM showed them it works.

Get off my nice quite zone! Darn kids….

;)

will there be overflows ?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.

Alright, this sounds much more reasonable than telling RPers to “guild up” so we don’t all get split up. :P Thank you for explaining it more clearly! I think it might be a good idea to pay a visit to the Megaserver/RP feedback thread to make this clear, as well, because we were laboring under some misapprehensions there that weren’t really cleared up as well as they were here. (See aforementioned “guild up” quote.)

If you tell Tarnished Coasters that you won’t put us in another Divinity’s Reach until our own DR (or rather, the DR into which TC players are being put) has filled up, and then the system will help everyone who didn’t get into TC “Main” DR to stay in the same DR with each other at least… then that’s much better news!

(Now if the Town Clothes thing could be cleared up, we RPers would have no reason to complain at all and could sit back and enjoy the patch <3)

EDIT: Realization: this could actually be a lot worse for RPers from servers other than the main RP ones (for example, a lot of people can’t afford to switch to TC, and it fills up fast)— because if there’s no official Main and just a “main,” then those people can’t guest. This isn’t a problem for other activities because the game can measure participation in various activities and place people based on those, but the game can’t identify someone as “RPing” or “just sitting around and chatting” because that’s beyond the scope of a computer, or at least most people’s computers. So there’s no way now for roleplayers who weren’t lucky enough to make it to the RP worlds to have a reliable place to find other RPers.

While this situation may therefore be fine for people on the main RP servers, I still can’t be okay with it because it hurts other RPers, and I’m not going to let them be the minority who gets ignored this time. Unless some miraculous algorithm with which the game identifies people as RPers is revealed, or guesting is confirmed to still be available, then it seems like an RP tag or some other system to tell the game “hey I like to RP as well as the things you can actually see me doing because you are a game” sounds like it will be necessary.

Sounds like a good change to me.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.
• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.
• It’s very difficult to understand this situation if you’re not willing to look at the big picture. Similarly, you can’t really explain urban traffic by using a metaphor about seats at a dinner table. Server populations are big and they are not concrete. Players flow in and out all of the time, even when it seems like a map is completely full. The major change in the way the game is handling population is that it’s making better-informed decisions about where to direct you. If only my GPS did that.
• As the blog post mentions, we’ll be monitoring this very closely to make sure that the end result is positive.

Thanks for all your feedback. I look forward to tomorrow’s blog post and answering more of your questions.

Here’s a question that occurred to me. What about the timers for world bosses and temples? What happens when I see a timer say that it’s time to go free a temple in Malchor’s Leap. I decide to go down there and the Megaserver overlord device decides I need to go to another area where it is already done? Is that in the calculations? Will it prevent me from going to an ongoing temple event that my friends have told me about? Has that been thought out in the Megaserver idea?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Community isn’t just guild/friend list. Community is essentially everyone on your server, and that is being messed with.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new system is that it gets you playing with members of your home server more often.

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make sense at all. This is the opposite of what has been presented to us, and what you say is how I would basically describe the way it works now.

The only way for what you say to be true, is for it to force people that guest elsewhere, back to their home server, or to give preference to overflows based on server… If it only effects overflows, then there will be no complaining from any of us, but that is not what the article says. I, and the rest of us, hope that tomorrow and Friday give dramatically more information on this, and alleviate our serious concerns, but based on what is in the article, I am very concerned about GW2’s ongoing experience.

edit: When I began typing this, for some reason refreshing did not show me Anthony’s further clarification, and I do thank him for doing so. It is appreciated, although still leaves so many concerns and questions.

Heibi.4251:

Here’s a question that occurred to me. What about the timers for world bosses and temples? What happens when I see a timer say that it’s time to go free a temple in Malchor’s Leap. I decide to go down there and the Megaserver overlord device decides I need to go to another area where it is already done? Is that in the calculations? Will it prevent me from going to an ongoing temple event that my friends have told me about? Has that been thought out in the Megaserver idea?

I believe they’ve said that timers and such will be covered in tomorrow’s blog. I don’t like the fact that they’ve drawn it out for three days, but … nothing we can do now but wait.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.
• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.
• It’s very difficult to understand this situation if you’re not willing to look at the big picture. Similarly, you can’t really explain urban traffic by using a metaphor about seats at a dinner table. Server populations are big and they are not concrete. Players flow in and out all of the time, even when it seems like a map is completely full. The major change in the way the game is handling population is that it’s making better-informed decisions about where to direct you. If only my GPS did that.
• As the blog post mentions, we’ll be monitoring this very closely to make sure that the end result is positive.

Thanks for all your feedback. I look forward to tomorrow’s blog post and answering more of your questions.

That alleviates some of the concerns but definitely not all. I do thank you for giving some clarification on it. But as is being inferred, ‘main’ map is effectively going away, correct?

I will be looking for the next blog posts to further clarify things.

We will need a “server” chat channel, so people on the same home server can hide /map to avoid the trolls from other servers, but still be able to chat to each other in peace.

They said they were going to give more information about this in today’s blogpost. Best to wait for this before panicking.

That being said, this is probably the best thing they have announced in the whole feature pack.

Thank you, Anthony, for clarifying a bit. That does help assuage some concerns, but I have to say that I still can’t really support this change for servers that have a tight knit community unless there is a means for us to reliably congregate.

As others in this thread have brought up, we have already made our decisions on who we want to spend our time with. Adding a load balancer to re-make this decision for us on a day-to-day or hour-to-hour level does not respect our choices, and in fact, alienates us from the communities we’ve built.

At large, your playerbase is already leveraging the tools we have to bring our communities together.

We:
1) Use ferry groups to bring native players into their home instances
2) Wait around on underpopulated overflows in order to reach the end of our home instance queues
3) Use 3rd party utilities like websites, viop and IM to coordinate across overflows
4) Transfer and guest to servers with the communities we want to be a part of

Instead of load balancing us into groups using data you’ve mined, why not support the decision we already made when we selected a home server?

We want to be with “those people”. Not just the people in our party, not just the people in our guild, but the people on the home servers that we look forward to seeing on a daily basis.

You’re right about the population being “unbalanced” by nature. That’s the way we want it!

Taking that away will not bring us closer.

On the technical front:
To really address this issue, you need to have variably sized nodes. Larger server nodes for the high population zones/servers and smaller nodes for the lower population areas.

Load balancing will reduce infrastructure waste, but it won’t eliminate it.

Re-sizing your infrastructure to accommodate the variable load is the only way to really address this issue without damaging the community.

Did you not read that megaserver replaces overflow and overflow maps will not exist anymore?

I like the Idea, I like the plan and I like that its finally getting done, what worries me.
is Anet unkowningly admitting that there losing there playerbase? so to entice players back there going to fix all there Bugs, that people been harping on since start and Merge Server’s because of the Super Low population from people leaving due to PvP Being Dead, Lore that has the intelligent writing of a 10 year old. and not to mention a Huge Separation from it’s GW1 roots of Story and Telling

I may sound a lil Harsh but im not writing this out of anger but rather Concern for the Future of Guild Wars Franchise

Megaserver = perma overflow

But i guess it will turn bad on guild missions and has no benefit for players, just saving computing space for servers.

Olvendred.3027:

huge amount of rudeness

Nothing you quoted has anything to do with what you replied with. Samuel wasn’t talking about removing home servers. The devs have stated multiple times that servers are not going away. And I wouldn’t go pointing to highschoolers for lessons on establishing communities.

party members, friends list, guild, language. That’s it.

They literally included your home server as part of that list. How could you miss that?

lol so basically there’s gonna be 200 people in champ trains now? Great

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.
• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.
• It’s very difficult to understand this situation if you’re not willing to look at the big picture. Similarly, you can’t really explain urban traffic by using a metaphor about seats at a dinner table. Server populations are big and they are not concrete. Players flow in and out all of the time, even when it seems like a map is completely full. The major change in the way the game is handling population is that it’s making better-informed decisions about where to direct you. If only my GPS did that.
• As the blog post mentions, we’ll be monitoring this very closely to make sure that the end result is positive.

Thanks for all your feedback. I look forward to tomorrow’s blog post and answering more of your questions.

I’m sorry but it seems like you omit or ignore specifically the problem if density CHOICE/lack of challanges for bigger groups. Makes me think i should start looking for another game.
I don’t want to. I like this one.

It aggregates data about you, like your party, guild, language, home world, and the map copy where people you like to play with can be found…

I’m scared. (see attached image).

The Megaserver idea is great but I wish NA and EU players would be allowed to play with each other, at least dungeons and fractals.

The Good; You will hit the ‘overflow’ with people you normally play with, people in your party and guild, and of coarse on your homeserver. The overflow is getting increased by 225%. So that’s 4x’s the players per map after the change.

The Bad; You will lose the ability to coordinate across servers with out sharing the same guild/party make up. TSS for example, they have 50+ Guilds that they use for the Raid Bosses. This change will make it harder for them to function beyond each guild’s Roster Limit. Same goes for world boss trains that are going on XYZ server at server reset. Guesting won’t help here, as the guild/party make up and the home server will rule when compared to guesting (If guesting is still a function post Megaserver change)

All in all, good ideas. And possibly good implementation. Only time will tell with the things i posted about.

Maybe in the end, our local communities will become stronger because of these changes, and be forced to work together (again) for alot of the harder PvE content (Teq2.0 and wurm2.0). only time can tell. But it will be interesting.

Nokaru.7831:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Community isn’t just guild/friend list. Community is essentially everyone on your server, and that is being messed with.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new system is that it gets you playing with members of your home server more often.

Is Guesting going away then? Because that’s the only way I see this could be true.

The megaserver thing just seems like it’s turning all maps into what we know as Overflows but with priority. However, just because 40% of the people on the map are from Anvil Rock, it can be potentially filled up by players who aren’t.

Is this going to hurt communities like Desolation when they are going for world first kills on megabosses>

I didnt bother reading the 2 pages after this post, but I believe guesting WONT be removed. Using an analogy that’s probably wrong, the whole home server vs guest server is no different than you going on vacation to say… Hawaii for a week, while you actually live in… oh I dont know, Ohio. While you’re on vacation, instead of taking a trip to Walmart in Ohio (weeniedale of your home server), you take a trip to Walmart in Hawaii (weeniedale on the guest server).

Also, no “global” refunds for transfers because some people transferred specifically for WvW and pvp reasons. Send a ticket and you might be able to weasel a refund for yourself. Keep in mind you might also get put back on the server you transferred FROM in the first place.

sirsquishy.8531:

The Good; You will hit the ‘overflow’ with people you normally play with, people in your party and guild, and of coarse on your homeserver. The overflow is getting increased by 225%. So that’s 4x’s the players per map after the change.

PLEASE for the sake of logic, READ the words that accompany the numbers instead of labeling them with your own incorrect definitions. That +225% means if there’s an AVERAGE of 40 players on the map, the megaserver change should conceivable increase that to 90 players (or 130 players depending on the logic used for the math). This has no bearing on the capacity of the server.

DavidH.7380:

Did you not read that megaserver replaces overflow and overflow maps will not exist anymore?

Every map will be overflow now.

It’s basically a condensation of server overflows. In that respect, it’s really simple. I feel kinda bad about those RPers though.

It’s just an overflow system. Nothing special really. It benefits the low population servers though.

Also that contradiction is quite amusing:
- “you will be able to create new communities, we want to remove restrictions, etc.”
- “it will mostly be players from your own servers and you will be seeing familiar faces all the time”

Also, by map population increase they actually meant the average population and not the map cap. So it will be less than what it is on blackgate now but it will be more than what it is on most of the other servers. Very confusing wording there, I wonder if they did it on purpose.

One of the biggest things that strikes me from reading through all these posts / replies, is how little people actually read the blog and try to understand it. Many of the “concerns” have already been addressed. Go read the blog and read the dev. replies and you may see your concern already explained.

A few examples

You can right click a friend and automatically join them on the map they are on. Guild missions? Have your guild leader or mission organizer on your friends list. He / she goes to the map, right click and join. Not very hard.

A dev already mentioned guesting. I dont have the exact quote but basically he said that when joining a map, your home server OR GUESTED server will weigh into that map you get. So RP’ers that normally guest to TC can still guest to TC and join all the other RP’ers.

This change combined with having to go out into the world to unlock traits and stuff now is going to really liven up the world. We all remember the early weeks of GW2, if we get somewhat close to that its going to be awesome. Really really good job Devs, This could be huge. Thanks.

ceol.9175:

Olvendred.3027:

huge amount of rudeness

Nothing you quoted has anything to do with what you replied with. Samuel wasn’t talking about removing home servers. The devs have stated multiple times that servers are not going away. And I wouldn’t go pointing to highschoolers for lessons on establishing communities.

party members, friends list, guild, language. That’s it.

They literally included your home server as part of that list. How could you miss that?

Any rudeness stems from the way the devs try to feed us advertising in posts like the one I quoted, rather than actually trying to understand and respond to player concerns. Hence why I ridiculed the (ridiculous) idea that the game would somehow take account of my goals and aspirations in a meaningful way, or whatever. Which, tbh, is consistently rude on their part (even though I’m aware they have limits on what they are allowed to say).

The high schooler part was merely that it was obvious, even in high school, how people form communities. The nature and prevailing culture of the communities formed depends primarily on those in them – you may say high schoolers tend to form bad communities, I won’t dispute that. But they form them in the same ways as everyone else.

And yes, I read about home server being included in the list. I even read the hilarious post which told us that “the most exciting part of the update is that you’ll be able to play with people from your home server even more!~”… even though, I do that, like, literally all the time. It’s something I take for granted, just like playing with the people in my party is something I take for granted, just like playing with the people in my guild is something I take for granted.

I don’t have a problem with the Megaserver per se, as long as it meets these two requirements:

1) Does not apply to cities, or to replacement cities (aka, Gendarren Fields at the moment). This is where server communities really come together. (Not to mention other uses, like doing an all-call for WvW, which would be pretty stupid in an overflow full of enemy players…). It’s also where you don’t want massive fights or arguments in map chat, such as, over which server is best. Keeping these server-based helps ensure good and harmonious communities. It also gives players a home, where they’ll be sure they’re at home. And keeping some cities with low populations means I won’t have to sit through the 5 min loading screens that are usual for crowded zones like LA.

2) Give us the choice of Megaserver, without having to relog and hope for a new one, or finding a party in a different megaserver and getting a ferry. This new system is going to sort me on it’s own criteria, not mine. Mine change, depending on what I’m doing, and sometimes I’ll want to be in a different version of a map. We have choice of that now, no reason not to with this Megaserver.

Wuchko.2596:

hedix.1986:

snip

who put you in charge? who are you to say what people should do? which build they want? why even complaining until 15th april? why you think everyone except your guild or other guilds are “noobs”? why do you think this will fail without even trying it?

If you haven’t sniped my post, you would have seen everything explained there. rom a lot of experience, I can state that Megaboss events only work if they have People-Who-Care doing them. That doesn’t mean 5k+ achi, that means willingness to communicate and learn. However, apart from the People-Who_Care, there are AFKers, people who don’t listen the tactics (which, yes, often demand specific builds, look it up) or who just troll for the sake f it. Those people I termed People-Who-Do-Not-Care a.k.a “noobs”. Megaboss communities went to great length to teach the event to people and get them on TS, which is crucial for success (again, this is a fact, esp for Wurm). That also meant keeping the Random-People-Who-Do-Not-Care away from the event, either by going to a specific server or a created overflow.
The Megaserver “feature” as described, when implemented in other zones than just 1-15, will hit us heavily in that regards as it will add even more random element to our already tedious organisation efforts, sicne we cannot choose who to play with.

Enzo.3906:

Unfortunately the positives outweight the negatives with this patch. A lot more people want to play and see others than those who wish to play alone.

That doesn’t not mean its positives. Of course people don’t want to play alone, it’s an MMO. But since we have established communities for over a year now, people want to see other people from their community, not randoms. This will ruin the server spirit, have impact on in-game events and WvW. The oly positive thing is that places like Snowden or Timberline might have more people when the system is implemented there, but it comes at a great cost of destroying server communities. So in fact, negatives outweight the positives with this patch.

I do not understand the concerns over how communities might get diluted over the new system. The original blog post made it clear that you will be more likely to be play with people on your own server. All the hypothetical ruinous situations where you got “outsiders” in your previously non-overlow (home) instance is a bit absurd.

What his system will do is to patch the ways where large raid groups would manipulate instance generation and gathering. This isn’t necessarily a detrimental change. It seems some people forgot that willingly manipulate overflow generation is not an intended feature.

In conclusion, how good or bad this new mechanics is largely depend on implementation. I’m pretty sure ANet has not finalize their algorithms on how exactly players will be placed into which instance. And even when they do figure it out, we’ll still have to see how it works in game. ANet isn’t well known to get stuff right in the first try (MMO developers rarely do in large), thus the limited roll out in beginner areas and cities.

Now, instead of worrying about “communities” being destroyed by megaservers (ANet said explicitly that it will not), people should make more suggestions in detailed areas, such as disallowing wvw opposing servers from share city instances.

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Will this system breaks existing communities?
The whole goal of this new system is to enhance the in-game social environment. We completely get that the community of your home world is important to you, and this is why MegaServers takes that into account. But I also think that with this tool, we can go further. While home world communities are important, they are also very abstract. Choosing which home world to pick is a difficult task, even more difficult when you’re playing the game for the first time, because more often than not, you don’t know what the differences are between each of those worlds. Also, home worlds communities can be quite unbalanced, population wise.

So wait, you are tailoring this to new players while ignoring the communities established by your old loyal playerbase. Wow. slow clap Of course communities are important! With the poorly presented, barely-playable Living Story, my great server community on RoS has been the only reason for me to play this game! Enhancing social environment? Well let us keep our social servers then! Choosing a server is not a problem if you’re a newcommer, you join an existing community. A quick web search will reveal most of the server “atmospheres”. Destroying long build communities for the small benefit of the incoming newbies is not worth it.
Again, we don’t want “different people”, if you’re in a Megaboss or a WvW guild, you want to be able to go to a city and ask for reinforcements in the map chat! You do not want to look for say Surmians in a sea of random server people, some of which will be your opposing WvW servers! It just breaks the social game aspect as we’ve had it for 1.5 years!

Also, while this feature may have worked ok from the start, adding it in the game 1,5 years after release is NOT an a wise decision!

kgptzac.8419:

I do not understand the concerns over how communities might get diluted over the new system. The original blog post made it clear that you will be more likely to be play with people on your own server. All the hypothetical ruinous situations where you got “outsiders” in your previously non-overlow (home) instance is a bit absurd.

“More likely”. Not “able to”, only more likely to. The fabled Anet’s RNG element! Whereas right now, we are not just “more likely” to play with people we want, we ACTUALLY CAN.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Community isn’t just guild/friend list. Community is essentially everyone on your server, and that is being messed with.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new system is that it gets you playing with members of your home server more often.

Huh? We we can do that NOW. By simply going to a server we want. By simply being in a community on our own servers, surrounded by our friendly server guilds, by our server WvW brothers/sisters-in-arms. What exactly do you mean “more often” as opposed to now, when we can choose with whom to play with at all times?

ExAstris.8527:

The anxiety is this thread boils down to one thing: choice. The mega server system will be making choices for the players that we used to be able to make on our own.

Indeed. Taking the choice away is never a smart move. Especially not over a year down the line.

EDIT. @ Anthony.
A few crucial things need to be clarified here, after your post talking about maps being filled out.

• Will the megaserver system be applied just to the overflow, i.e. when a real map is full?
• Will we still have our real servers that we can choose from?
• Will we still be able to guest, an make events like “meet at X pm on server Y”?

Personally, I don’t care what that slice of computer hardware is called I happen to play on. So long as I can do it with my friends and meet interesting people along the way. The megaserver allows me to do this more than before and it partially restores what we had before in GW1

hedix.1986:

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Will this system breaks existing communities?
The whole goal of this new system is to enhance the in-game social environment. We completely get that the community of your home world is important to you, and this is why MegaServers takes that into account. But I also think that with this tool, we can go further. While home world communities are important, they are also very abstract. Choosing which home world to pick is a difficult task, even more difficult when you’re playing the game for the first time, because more often than not, you don’t know what the differences are between each of those worlds. Also, home worlds communities can be quite unbalanced, population wise.

So wait, you are tailoring this to new players while ignoring the communities established by your old loyal playerbase. Wow. slow clap Of course communities are important! With the poorly presented, barely-playable Living Story, my great server community on RoS has been the only reason for me to play this game! Enhancing social environment? Well let us keep our social servers then! Choosing a server is not a problem if you’re a newcommer, you join an existing community. A quick web search will reveal most of the server “atmospheres”. Destroying long build communities for the small benefit of the incoming newbies is not worth it.
Again, we don’t want “different people”, if you’re in a Megaboss or a WvW guild, you want to be able to go to a city and ask for reinforcements in the map chat! You do not want to look for say Surmians in a sea of random server people, some of which will be your opposing WvW servers! It just breaks the social game aspect as we’ve had it for 1.5 years!

Also, while this feature may have worked ok from the start, adding it in the game 1,5 years after release is NOT an a wise decision!

This is quite a doomsday scenario you cooked up here. Your definition of “community” is rather twisted. You never had control of who you’ll be seeing in most of the open world pve maps, as you cannot stop people from guesting or making new characters at your server. So no, losing control of something you never had (nor have any rights to) doesn’t ruin anything that matters.

Now fancy me again with the following situation: Your server is underpopulated. A mid-level map has 10 players scattered doing whatever (hears, dynamic events etc). An average player, X, joined this map and plan to do activities. X isn’t likely to personally know all the other 10 players on this map, who he will most likely not meet during his time playing because each map is so huge.

With megaservers, 40 more players are on the map. More players means an easier time for X adhoc group up with others to complete dynamic events, hearts, and possibly tackle champions. X will likely enjoy playing others more than him soloing, as the game is designed to leave virtually no room that other players can ruin casual pve experience for X.

Please tell me how average player X would feel his community being destroyed.

Overall I am really happy to see this change coming to GW2. Not being able to do group events because some zones are empty is a real bummer sometimes. The only aspect of it that concerns me however is regarding RP servers like TC, which I am on. But I think the thread for that sums up my thoughts pretty well.

hedix.1986:

kgptzac.8419:

I do not understand the concerns over how communities might get diluted over the new system. The original blog post made it clear that you will be more likely to be play with people on your own server. All the hypothetical ruinous situations where you got “outsiders” in your previously non-overlow (home) instance is a bit absurd.

“More likely”. Not “able to”, only more likely to. The fabled Anet’s RNG element! Whereas right now, we are not just “more likely” to play with people we want, we ACTUALLY CAN.

Please read the devblog, my reply, and your reply again.

By “more likely” it is meant for that in the event of full map instance, which currently offloading plays to overflow maps. In this situation, the new megaserver algorithm will more likely to place you and those who you associated to (home server and guild) together on the same instance.

And if that doesn’t work, it is said that you can travel to another instance, which I imagine will be very similar to ferrying people as of now.

kgptzac.8419:

-snip-

As I posted before in this thread, the only good thing about this new system is that places like Snowden or Timberline will maybe have a decent number of people, when/if this is applied to 15+lvl maps. It will still not be a huge number of players because not a lot of people are interested in those maps. Hence them being abandoned.
However, more populated places will suffer in terms of community spirit of you have separate overflow-clouds and if you cannot chose from them (something they haven’t explained yet). Cause essentially, the megablob system makes the choice for us.
I don’t care for playing with randoms, I want to see friendly faces I AFK next to or run world bosses next to and have funny map chat with. I wanna see my server’s guild tags around. And I definitelly dont want any server bashing, which always came up in overflows during big events like Knightfall. By removing real servers, all we have left is a cloud of overflows essentially.

But one thing is important here: underpopulated maps will still be underpopulated as there is no reason to go to them anymore, after you’ve explored them. Megaserver insn’t the solution, adding more interesting content is a solution.

hedix.1986:

EDIT. @ Anthony.
A few crucial things need to be clarified here, after your post talking about maps being filled out.

• Will the megaserver system be applied just to the overflow, i.e. when a real map is full?
• Will we still have our real servers that we can choose from?
• Will we still be able to guest, an make events like “meet at X pm on server Y”?

I don’t see the point of asking when the answer is basically right there in the devblog. Read it again. #1 and #2 are answered, and #3 can be easily inferred from basic reading comprehension and reasoning.

Overflow + Underflow = MegaServer.

Sounds good on paper, but automated systems rarely give a comfortable result. Still, we’ll have to see how it works (I’ll be glad if I don’t get dumped into German/French overflows anyway), and at least wait for the new blog posts about world boss timers (somehow I enjoy meeting the same people at events even without friending them).

hedix.1986:

However, more populated places will suffer in terms of community spirit of you have separate overflow-clouds and if you cannot chose from them (something they haven’t explained yet). Cause essentially, the megablob system makes the choice for us.
I don’t care for playing with randoms, I want to see friendly faces I AFK next to or run world bosses next to and have funny map chat with. I wanna see my server’s guild tags around. And I definitelly dont want any server bashing, which always came up in overflows during big events like Knightfall. By removing real servers, all we have left is a cloud of overflows essentially.

If you actually read the devblog and devpost you would see your concern is already addressed. If you read the dev posts, you would understand that ANet is already aware that it’s important to maintain a comfortable size of players in the popular maps. If you apply reading comprehension and correlates to the original devblog, you would come to an understanding that the map instance under megaserver architecture will realize exactly what you want—as seeing familiar faces more than unfamiliar faces. I think you have a personal fantasy where most GW2 players dislike others from another server and would actively and mutually ruin the gameplay experience for each other. It’s time to wake up and face the fact that 1) trolls who really want to do that can already do that by guesting and 2) players from another server aren’t looking to ruin you.

kgptzac.8419:

hedix.1986:

However, more populated places will suffer in terms of community spirit of you have separate overflow-clouds and if you cannot chose from them (something they haven’t explained yet). Cause essentially, the megablob system makes the choice for us.
I don’t care for playing with randoms, I want to see friendly faces I AFK next to or run world bosses next to and have funny map chat with. I wanna see my server’s guild tags around. And I definitelly dont want any server bashing, which always came up in overflows during big events like Knightfall. By removing real servers, all we have left is a cloud of overflows essentially.

If you actually read the devblog and devpost you would see your concern is already addressed. If you read the dev posts, you would understand that ANet is already aware that it’s important to maintain a comfortable size of players in the popular maps. If you apply reading comprehension and correlates to the original devblog, you would come to an understanding that the map instance under megaserver architecture will realize exactly what you want—as seeing familiar faces more than unfamiliar faces. I think you have a personal fantasy where most GW2 players dislike others from another server and would actively and mutually ruin the gameplay experience for each other. It’s time to wake up and face the fact that 1) trolls who really want to do that can already do that by guesting and 2) players from another server aren’t looking to ruin you.

I think you’re the one who’s not reading what Hedix is saying. He wants to make choices himself, not have a megaserver force them on him. I agree with him.

My major worry is the Boss Event Timers, is one of the few things who i enjoy to play when im alone between updates, i had 3XXX hours played, a few legendaries and ascended armors and farm like GW1 is one of few because i still play, and if they nerf it the ecto will skyrocket by the way.

I know that today will explain the new Events i will wait , to my arena.net should put a timer ingame for each server and this will “fix” it.

I

I don’t understand. People already have the tools to meet up with their friends (party,guilds) and yet they are asking for maps and servers dedicated to them.

Please!
Take into consideration your fellow players experience before making such blatant demands. This change will make maps feel alive again. New players will get the chance to feel the joy of exploring with people as we did when the game lunched.

You know guys there are two more blog posts that colin said a lot of our questions would be answered with. These ideas could already be a part of this and we don’t even know.

While I’m happy that we will finally get rid of Overflows, I’m concerned about group of players that doesn’t use English or neither any of supported languages (German, French, Spanish). Will they be kicked – despite the all statements about merging, into some low populated copies of map?

They probably tested whole Megaserver system for players cap but I’m not sure how this will work with languages.