Guild Wars 2

I am no software architect, but I would love if we could feed the system with a set of priorities, something like a checklist to make the sorting more individual

language
RP/non RP
organised Bossevents
Serverpriority
Guildcontent
less populated maps
leveling

I guess that’s not going to happen but one can dream.

Pirlipat.2479:

I am no software architect, but I would love if we could feed the system with a set of priorities, something like a checklist to make the sorting more individual

language
RP/non RP
organised Bossevents
Serverpriority
Guildcontent
less populated maps
leveling

I guess that’s not going to happen but one can dream.

I guess it is possible since it’s currently prioritizes guildmates (somewhat), party members and other stuff like that. It’s a matter of tweaking and fine-tuning.

timmyf.1490:

The patch is fine. The community is not. Just my personal opinion.

I’m loving the patch so far.

Unjustifiable opinion, I’d suggest, as it requires ignoring the issues EU players are having entirely (easy from the US) and ignoring the issues the trait changes have caused for new players and characters.

Much of the patch is good. Some is dire. That is not the community’s fault, and it’s ridiculous and insulting to suggest that it is.

timmyf.1490:

The patch is fine. The community is not. Just my personal opinion.

I’m sorry, but this is a service. If your game and your community disagree, you don’t change the community. You change the game. Or you go out of business eventually.

qazqazqaz.2098:

Pirlipat.2479:

I am no software architect, but I would love if we could feed the system with a set of priorities, something like a checklist to make the sorting more individual

language
RP/non RP
organised Bossevents
Serverpriority
Guildcontent
less populated maps
leveling

I guess that’s not going to happen but one can dream.

I guess it is possible since it’s currently prioritizes guildmates (somewhat), party members and other stuff like that. It’s a matter of tweaking and fine-tuning.

I’m afraid that no amount of finetuning and prioritizing can help in the situation of sudden zone population shifts (world boss train, for example). When train arrives to a new zone, there is a limited number of instances available initially (often only one, in otherwise dead zones like Sparkfly). Because server cannot predict how many people will arrive, it will only create new instances after the already existing ones are filled. So, regardless of prioritizing, when a huge wave of players arrive, the server’s choice of where to put any single player is very limited (often, to only one option – the instance that was created last and was not filled yet).
When there’s no possibility of choice, prioritization simply cannot work.

Of course you can always make the argument that community is behaving like the sky is falling in their heads, and since it is a pretty large community it’s to be expected that people have their individual ways of communicating. But even still I would claim that most of the feedback has been very astute, accurate and genuinely concerned about the direction the game is going.

Personally I would be very disappointed to lose the sense of server and community identity if we’re all just going to be lumped in one big pile of players, where you might not see any familiar faces besides your guild.

Astralporing.1957:

I’m afraid that no amount of finetuning and prioritizing can help in the situation of sudden zone population shifts (world boss train, for example). When train arrives to a new zone, there is a limited number of instances available initially (often only one, in otherwise dead zones like Sparkfly). Because server cannot predict how many people will arrive, it will only create new instances after the already existing ones are filled. So, regardless of prioritizing, when a huge wave of players arrive, the server’s choice of where to put any single player is very limited (often, to only one option – the instance that was created last and was not filled yet).
When there’s no possibility of choice, prioritization simply cannot work.

But it absolutely could predict this. This is totally something smart programming and study of previous statistics could help with. The bosses are on fixed timers. They are predictable. Anet could start creating extra instances for zones a few minutes ahead of the boss train, with the numbers modelled based on the number of people at the previous world boss and so on (please don’t try to argue specific language – this is doable, that’s the point), and sort people appropriately as they arrive.

Problem solved, really.

EDIT – To be clear, this programming, Astral. It is design. They do not “have to” wait for the instances to fill to create new ones. Indeed they should not. They should be creating new ones predictively as others partially fill (or, as noted, even before they are needed). It’s not rocket surgery.

Astralporing.1957:

I’m afraid that no amount of finetuning and prioritizing can help in the situation of sudden zone population shifts (world boss train, for example). When train arrives to a new zone, there is a limited number of instances available initially (often only one, in otherwise dead zones like Sparkfly). Because server cannot predict how many people will arrive, it will only create new instances after the already existing ones are filled. So, regardless of prioritizing, when a huge wave of players arrive, the server’s choice of where to put any single player is very limited (often, to only one option – the instance that was created last and was not filled yet).
When there’s no possibility of choice, prioritization simply cannot work.

Actually the boss train problem is rather easy to solve for those riding the train. The simple solution is just reserve a spot for them in the next boss event within a small period of time before the event.

The system can also spin up a number of empty instances to allow for proper sorting (perhaps 1-5 less then the number of servers available for that region). Funnel everyone in by server prioritizing Guild and Party. Stop allowing people from the same server in when it reaches medium population limits and only allow party squad and guild groups from that point on.

Guild Missions however is a different story and more complicated.

Just jumping in. I also strongly wish for the ability to set more specific ‘preferences’ that help you get sorted into a server with like-minded people.

I for one rolled on EU Piken Square, because I like the occasional roleplay, and it was unofficially the ‘EU roleplay server’. Unfortunately (especially since I’m not really in a guild myself) I won’t walk into roleplay activity anymore now.

So, I myself would really like to have the option (in game settings) to flag myself ‘roleplayer’.

Thanks!

I never intended or expected to have to ever post on these forums, but in light of the overwhelming impact the megaservers have had on my server I felt compelled to log on and give my 2 cents. I apologize in advance if this seems like a long rant, but have a seat kittenes, it’s story time…

Megaservers have had an absolutely negative effect on my gaming experience in general and imo on my server as a whole. I play on a relatively low population server which just recently became an even lower pop. one due to a few major WvW guilds transferring off to another server. While the majority of my time in game was devoted to doing meta events, it was more or less a way to fund my WvW expenses, gear up each of my toons with ascended equipment and look kitten sexy in whatever skins I purchase to use on them. Despite WvW being the primary reason I play the game, I’ve come to appreciate the small community of PvE/PvX-minded individuals and guilds devoted to spending their time doing whatever content they enjoy while appreciating the game we all love. Now while I may slightly look down on this community and these ppl that choose to spend their time on what I personally may think to be less enjoyable content that’s not as fruitful in representing our server, they do represent an important part of our server which is ultimately our recruitment pool. With megaservers out in full force, this community has been utterly fractured with these PvE/PvX players and guilds feeling lost in the clusterkitten that we now have to deal with having had this megakitten shoved down our throats.

It’s probably safe to say that a large portion of my server and its community is very well rooted in PvE…MY server and MY community that anet claims to want to see flourish is now shattered. I won’t go into detail about how much my personal gaming experience has suffered from crippling frame rates, toxic personalities, childish trolls, afk meta-event bots, inefficient players and the general skill lag that has resulted in being forced to play along side far too many people that, to be brutally honest, I really just don’t want to know, play with or even help, if they’re not from my server. NOW… with megaservers, recruiting for guilds or even asking for support in WvW from our community is laughable and almost completely pointless.

A good step in mending this problem would of course be removing megaservers from the major cities(as many people have already suggested), but I personally don’t think that’s enough. To suggest that server communities are formed and revolve around major cities or WvW(which atm is really the only place you can be with players from JUST your server and has since become my only refuge) is ridiculous…there are a kitten-ton of people that WANT to spend their free time doing PvE and WANT to see the same familiar names around doing it with them, despite being from different guilds but still being able to say that these are my ppl and this is my server/community.

So..my feedback is…megaservers suck balls dude.

Whether or not guesting(which is now pretty much redundant) will be completely removed, joining a megaserver should, imo, only be made an option at the character selection screen as guesting is now. By default all characters created are placed on their home server with always the option to log out to character select screen and hop onto a megaserver for whatever reason. I can appreciate the reasons behind megaservers and that some players(probably mostly casuals) would want to hop onto a vibrant and bustling world full of random people with which they have no ties and perhaps never will, but I think creating more incentive in different ways for people to populate near empty zones or take part in various content in a sociable manner is the better alternative to strong-arming people into simply accepting megaservers as the only solution and future of gw2. Just give us the option kitten …plz don’t kill my server.

Shrug. It is no secret that server mergers can be healthy for an MMO as far population, finding groups, etc. This game is at the stage of lifespan where mergers begin to happen. It’s common.

This is server merging. Unlike other server mergers I’ve experienced, where small, but intact server communities move in together… every server got essentially removed from the game with the exception of wvw.

Instead of a world with increased population consisting of two communities learning about and accepting each other, we get a situation of zones constantly in flux, populated by a random sampling of the entire game population, and no option of even getting to know who is in zone, and no need to.. knowing the next zone will be a totally different random mix anyway.

To my somewhat cynical eye, we just got hit with the biggest de-facto server merging in my MMO experience and they managed to relabel it and call it a “feature”. They merged every server without the bad press of “GW2 announces Server Merges”. Great PR stunt at the expense of server communities. Problem is.. this MegaMerge has produced negative effects far beyond conventional server merges. You dodged one bullet and then the piano landed on you.

I live in a rural MN town of 4000. That is a community. I can drive to Mall of America and be in the middle of more people.. doing the same thing I am, but it is NOT a community. It is a ton of people doing the same thing I am. It is a fun place to go, but it is not a community. Population does not instantly create community.

Merged world zones.. I see positives that require tweaking. I see how some love the idea of every zone being “readypug” able to provide warm bodies to finish events that don’t even need grouping and TBH, no need to even know or care who else is 1 1 1 1 as you 1111 at an HP bag.

Server Communities need a home to go to after the Particle Festivals. Give us our home cities back. Dont wreck server and RP communities totally.

Guilds need adequate measures taken to insure that the Guild Content Anet provided for them is doable and enjoyable in spite of MegaMerge. Give guilds the tools or sort weight to load Guilds into zones as a cohesive group. Don’t wreck Guild community.

Anet.. you encouraged the Super Guilds like TTS, GW2 Community, etc. You built the content that made them happen. Give them Schedules and a method to do what they do, please. Don’t wreck their community.

Anet, you made language preferred servers. Respect the communities that made that choice in good faith. They should be exempt from MegaMerge outside of chosen language.

And I’m done with the topic. Again, blowing away the smoke, all I am seeing is everymmo Relabeled and Reloaded. ANET spends far too much time on some weird crusade to somehow re-invent every aspect of the Genre and not enough time to insure that the Brave New MMO is actually working.

Eurhetemec.9052:

timmyf.1490:

The patch is fine. The community is not. Just my personal opinion.

I’m loving the patch so far.

Unjustifiable opinion, I’d suggest, as it requires ignoring the issues EU players are having entirely (easy from the US) and ignoring the issues the trait changes have caused for new players and characters.

Much of the patch is good. Some is dire. That is not the community’s fault, and it’s ridiculous and insulting to suggest that it is.

I don’t see how an opinion is “unjustifiable.” Personally, for me, ignoring the entirety of the world outside myself, I’m loving the patch. That I took steps to clearly label this as a “personal opinion” was supposed to serve as evidence that I recognize others are having problems.

I think those problems are legitimate. But they don’t affect me.

As others have said here, I think there are relatively simple fixes. Allow players to choose a “community” for sorting – Roleplay, World Bosses, Mega Bosses, Dungeons, Fractals, PvP, WvW, Server Chat, etc. If this can be changed on the fly (and take effect next time you map), that will solve some issues.

Language issues are tougher. I’m sure somebody could easily come up with a better solution for that than I could. It obviously needs to be changed.

What’s less obvious is that the best solution is completely dismantling Megaserver.

Eurhetemec.9052:

Astralporing.1957:

I’m afraid that no amount of finetuning and prioritizing can help in the situation of sudden zone population shifts (world boss train, for example). When train arrives to a new zone, there is a limited number of instances available initially (often only one, in otherwise dead zones like Sparkfly). Because server cannot predict how many people will arrive, it will only create new instances after the already existing ones are filled. So, regardless of prioritizing, when a huge wave of players arrive, the server’s choice of where to put any single player is very limited (often, to only one option – the instance that was created last and was not filled yet).
When there’s no possibility of choice, prioritization simply cannot work.

But it absolutely could predict this. This is totally something smart programming and study of previous statistics could help with. The bosses are on fixed timers. They are predictable. Anet could start creating extra instances for zones a few minutes ahead of the boss train, with the numbers modelled based on the number of people at the previous world boss and so on (please don’t try to argue specific language – this is doable, that’s the point), and sort people appropriately as they arrive.

Problem solved, really.

EDIT – To be clear, this programming, Astral. It is design. They do not “have to” wait for the instances to fill to create new ones. Indeed they should not. They should be creating new ones predictively as others partially fill (or, as noted, even before they are needed). It’s not rocket surgery.

Peoples choices are not predictable, not even in small percentages based on past behavior. Unless your plugged into the system and it can read in advance what your going to be doing, no algorithm is going to predict behavior or intent. You can’t merge people, but keep them sorted accordingly, dynamically, without literally making instances to suit each possible sorting method, which now we are back to the most reliable method of worlds being separate to begin with. Of course the more sorting methods you tack on, the more it reduces the likelihood you achieve the intended result. Even in left and right scenarios (or coin flips) your best chance at being right is 50% and that’s about as simply as you can get. Compound that to 100’s of flips and you can quickly see that it’s not going to work any better. I’d guess 30% of the time you’ll be playing with the people you intended on playing with and that would be in zones that are typically baron to begin with.

Look at it this way, how do you get better than the extremely high probability of being paired with your party/guild/server that the old system provided? Answer, you don’t.

Porterhouse.6304:

Nage.1520:

Kurr.4179:

Yep. We’re all just waiting to see if they will revert this change or lose thousands of customers. The ball is in their park, and they’re being pretty kittening quiet.

I think they’ll lose less people than you think, because I think more people like the megaserver than is immediately apparent on these forums in particular. Plenty of people love these changes.

And many who don’t will get used to it.

There was a mass exodus from this game during the ascended gear, and though it hurt the game short term, it looks like the game has full recovered. This exodus won’t be nearly so large, and won’t hurt the game nearly as much.

With the current megaserver situation, how would you be able to tell?

Even if half the GW2 population were to up and leave, they just crammed multiple servers into one single zone. It’s going to look more populated than it actually is.

600 people across 6 servers is a higher player base than 300 people packed into 1 server.

Anyone who was around after the final Scarlet event can tell you that the population took a nose dive. After this last fiasco with the town clothes and the megaserver I can only imagine it is even worse.

Annecdotally I can tell by the number of people who claim to like it. Back in the days of ascended gear, maybe one in every 50 or 60 people I talked to liked it. Right now, I talk to more people who like it than don’t like it. That’s a huge huge difference to me. That’s why I don’t think they’re be as big of an Exodus.

The one disclaimer here is that the loudest voices against it seem to be from Europe and I’m on a US server. I obviously can’t comment at all on the European megaserver or how people like it there, but I’m hearing a lot of people like it in the US. Of course we don’t have the language issues to deal with.

Remember how difficult it sometimes was to get on the same map as the rest of your party when the game first came out? Megaservers seem to have reintroduced this.

Last week, I listened to a group of guildies, relatively new players all, struggle most of the evening to get their little group of 6 on the same map. They’re not chasing champ trains. They just want to level their little toons together. It was very frustrating for them and not at all a good new player experience.

I usually only group with a couple other people, so I haven’t had as much trouble, but I have pretty much given up on world bosses and the bigger dynamic events because everything has become a huge hairy zergfest. I enjoy group play, but I don’t enjoy a 30 sec. ant pile.

Also, thanks to the new schedules, the same few world bosses are the only options available to me every single evening, which is very boring. This, at least, could be mitigated by changing the way the schedule rotates.

It’s hard for me to begrudge the benefit this has probably brought to players on low pop servers, but as a player on a mid to high pop server, Megaservers have not introduced a single positive to my play.

what I would like to know is if harvesting nodes are going to be uniform for each copy of the map or random like they are now. Because that is going to make harvesting ancient wood and orichalcum a lot harder if everytime you go to frostgorge, cursed shore, and malchors the nodes move. I recognize this doesn’t affect too many other harvesting resources, but for the t6 ones it’s could be really difficult to harvest them at a reasonable rate.

Megaserver map instances should be numbered, and a way for players to manually go to an existing one without having to go in a party with someone there should be added.

Much like GW1’s districts.

For example, click icon in the minimap, a panel opens with all instances in the map, each one listing number of players, number of friends and number of guildies there. If an instance is full, you are added to a queue to get there like with WvW maps.

Why its called megaserver,are you trying to copy failed game like eso?You copy name but made something else, a megaoverflow with no user control.Everything u did with maps and worldbosses is just stupid.Game is pretty much destroyed for me.

or maybe make a choice on the world map to select server map or megaserver map. In that way larger guilds, groups, individuals etc… would have their own playgrounds. Main cities or at least future “lions arch” should be server sided.

kitten your megaserver kittens

lordkrall.7241:

I am not that good at math, but I am rather sure that 0+0+0+0+0+0+0 is still 0, no matter how many of them you add together.
And wouldn’t all those statements about “almost everyone packing up” after every single update basically mean that there is about 0 people on each server?

Huh????

What is this I don’t even….

Pifil.5193:

Gwenryth.9450:

Ramon isn’t Dev, he’s German Community Manager
His post in few words for non German speakers (sorry for bad english, I’m no native speaker). Maybe later there will be an official english post.

He says A-Net is reading our feedback and they work on the Megaserver.

1. Chatfilter is only a temporary solution.
2. They consider feedback from large guilds and Server organisations, they don’t want to make organisation of big events impossible, but dont have a solution at this time.
3. They are looking what can be done for RP community, some changes in algorithm were done especially in towns, but isn’t finish yet.
4. Megaserver system wasn’t made to save Server costs, it only redistributes serverloads.
5. They’ll rework schedules for world bosses, especially Karka Queen, Tequatl and Worm, for getting a better time frame for EU.
6. They are watching the max. number of people on one map and will make adjustments if necessary.
7. Devs are working active to improve the Megaserver, and watch our feedback, so keep on posting, especially EU feedback because of the different languages problems. Keep on posting, we are listening.

It’s really, really great to read this and I truly hope we see fixes for these problems sooner rather than later, however I have to wonder why any company (MMO or otherwise) would knowingly introduce and roll out “broken” solutions to their servers. These problems were highlighted before the patch when they (and other problems introduced by the patch) should have been fixed before these changes hit the live servers. Even if (especially if) that means either delaying the entire patch or delaying certain features from it.

Other people have called for a public test realm and I really think this shows the benefits one could bring; all these problems that were apparently missed by ArenaNet would have been caught and highlighted before the changes went live. Also the simple knowledge that features I really wanted were on the test server in other games was enough for me. Sure it’d be a while before they arrive but now at least know they’re coming!

Because the people writing the checks told them they had to.

Anet, please consider removing megaserver for Orr at least. At the moment the temple situation is out of control. Of course Tequatl and Wurm should have a better private instance solution instead of a Guild World Event solution which is a disappointment as well.

Pluthero.4156:

I never intended or expected to have to ever post on these forums, but in light of the overwhelming impact the megaservers have had on my server I felt compelled to log on and give my 2 cents. I apologize in advance if this seems like a long rant, but have a seat kittenes, it’s story time…

Megaservers have had an absolutely negative effect on my gaming experience in general and imo on my server as a whole. I play on a relatively low population server which just recently became an even lower pop. one due to a few major WvW guilds transferring off to another server. While the majority of my time in game was devoted to doing meta events, it was more or less a way to fund my WvW expenses, gear up each of my toons with ascended equipment and look kitten sexy in whatever skins I purchase to use on them. Despite WvW being the primary reason I play the game, I’ve come to appreciate the small community of PvE/PvX-minded individuals and guilds devoted to spending their time doing whatever content they enjoy while appreciating the game we all love. Now while I may slightly look down on this community and these ppl that choose to spend their time on what I personally may think to be less enjoyable content that’s not as fruitful in representing our server, they do represent an important part of our server which is ultimately our recruitment pool. With megaservers out in full force, this community has been utterly fractured with these PvE/PvX players and guilds feeling lost in the clusterkitten that we now have to deal with having had this megakitten shoved down our throats.

It’s probably safe to say that a large portion of my server and its community is very well rooted in PvE…MY server and MY community that anet claims to want to see flourish is now shattered. I won’t go into detail about how much my personal gaming experience has suffered from crippling frame rates, toxic personalities, childish trolls, afk meta-event bots, inefficient players and the general skill lag that has resulted in being forced to play along side far too many people that, to be brutally honest, I really just don’t want to know, play with or even help, if they’re not from my server. NOW… with megaservers, recruiting for guilds or even asking for support in WvW from our community is laughable and almost completely pointless.

A good step in mending this problem would of course be removing megaservers from the major cities(as many people have already suggested), but I personally don’t think that’s enough. To suggest that server communities are formed and revolve around major cities or WvW(which atm is really the only place you can be with players from JUST your server and has since become my only refuge) is ridiculous…there are a kitten-ton of people that WANT to spend their free time doing PvE and WANT to see the same familiar names around doing it with them, despite being from different guilds but still being able to say that these are my ppl and this is my server/community.

So..my feedback is…megaservers suck balls dude.

Whether or not guesting(which is now pretty much redundant) will be completely removed, joining a megaserver should, imo, only be made an option at the character selection screen as guesting is now. By default all characters created are placed on their home server with always the option to log out to character select screen and hop onto a megaserver for whatever reason. I can appreciate the reasons behind megaservers and that some players(probably mostly casuals) would want to hop onto a vibrant and bustling world full of random people with which they have no ties and perhaps never will, but I think creating more incentive in different ways for people to populate near empty zones or take part in various content in a sociable manner is the better alternative to strong-arming people into simply accepting megaservers as the only solution and future of gw2. Just give us the option kitten …plz don’t kill my server.

Just wanted to save this before it is removed along with other good posts.
From me, in short: PvE is now an utter hell. I tried, I really did. I love this game. But this. Is. Hell.

munkiman.3068:

Peoples choices are not predictable, not even in small percentages based on past behavior. Unless your plugged into the system and it can read in advance what your going to be doing, no algorithm is going to predict behavior or intent. You can’t merge people, but keep them sorted accordingly, dynamically, without literally making instances to suit each possible sorting method, which now we are back to the most reliable method of worlds being separate to begin with. Of course the more sorting methods you tack on, the more it reduces the likelihood you achieve the intended result. Even in left and right scenarios (or coin flips) your best chance at being right is 50% and that’s about as simply as you can get. Compound that to 100’s of flips and you can quickly see that it’s not going to work any better. I’d guess 30% of the time you’ll be playing with the people you intended on playing with and that would be in zones that are typically baron to begin with.

Look at it this way, how do you get better than the extremely high probability of being paired with your party/guild/server that the old system provided? Answer, you don’t.

Actually people’s choices and patterns of activity, when measured as a group, can be predicted. We as a society have been doing so for quite some time. Businesses of all sorts do so every day.

Perhaps the most basic and simple example is to consider how many cashiers a grocery store has at midnight compared to six in the evening. The grocery store schedules more or less staff based on predictions of customer traffic. In some cases these predictions will break predicted customer traffic down to the hour (or even smaller time increment).

Now consider that, with the aid of computer software, a merchant knows not only how much customer traffic he is likely going to experience at any given hour of the day, but which areas of the store are going to see the largest portion of that traffic, which merchandise categories will sell best at what time, and so on.

Does the merchant know what a specific person is going to do ? No. But he has all sorts of data telling him what people are going to do.

Well, its been fun but i uninstalled a while back and frankly kept checking the forums just in case things improved for a reinstall but after 20+ days – now fully walking away and deleting my backup .dat file.
Sorry anet, gave you time but that times up, not even zephyr can drag me back now.

I hate the megaserver. Where is my server? It’s gone. This game kittening sucks. Why didn’t they just have factions from the start? So that way when they mushed everything together after 2 years there would be some faction pride left. This is really kittenty.

I guess the people who like the kittenty pve in this game are happy. Idk how you can stand it. It’s terrible. Put some shoes on that hillbilly girl in the white dress kitten .

I am surprised to see that there are actually people who like these changes. I just can’t see any advantages. I used to play a couple of hours each evening. Now I finish my dailies and log off. Some of my friends quit playing and one of them even deleted all her characters because she was so disappointed.
We’re more into immersion and exploring than speed runs and zerging to get loot. Maybe that’s the difference? If you want to level quickly and run around with a huge posse, tagging mobs for XP and loot, maybe these changes were for the better?

For me, this game was all about server communities – you even have WvWvW – and now we can’t even tell which server we’re on. You’re standing in a town talking to someone, switch to another character to show them something, and you end up in a parallel universe where people don’t speak your language.
World events have been chaotic, to say the least. The Tequatl and Triple Threat events I’ve been to have been disorganised and failed at every stage of the fight.

Traits: Low-level characters have to do dungeons and complete high-level maps to get what used to be a lvl 15 trait. It’s like Anet’s doing things backwards. Other games had this when they started, forcing players to do certain raids and dungeons before they could advance, but they eventually realised not all players are like that.
I want to level up the way I want and go to the maps I choose, not be forced to do things in a particular order. GW2 used to be quite good in that respect.

Maps: This morning map chat in Wayfarer was French; Queensdale was French and Spanish; Rata Sum was German; and DR German and English with a gold seller standing in front of the bank.

Outfits: Gone, destroyed, stolen by the company who sold them.

For me and my friends, the April 15 patch has been the NGE of GW2.

Morrigan.2809:

So let me tell you about my experience yesterday:

I was leveling a new character when someone said Behemoth pre’s are up.

I switched to an 80 only to find that he was halfway down because I was in another part of megaserver

After he was dead I switched back to the character I was on before- and when someone asked about Behe replied in map that he had just died.
Only to be called a troll and a liar because he was up— so in the space of 10 min I was on 3 different Megaserver shards or whatever..

Now think about this- basically all those people you see around you?
You are never likely to see them again because they are completely random.
This is not good- it makes other players nothoing more than pretty npc’s, you have no reason to engage with them because they are as fleeting as bubbles.
Megaserver completely destroys community.

oh- I forgot, for the first time since the patch I saw that one of my friends were on and at Maw- naturally I wanted to join him.
So I went to Maw- only there was no friend, 2 other people and no Maw.

That was when I just logged out.

MMO’s live and die by the cohesion of their communities- we have none atm.
It is currently more lonely playing GW2 than it is playing a single player game

This is really sad.

Yenrah.8532:

Pluthero.4156:

I never intended or expected to have to ever post on these forums, but in light of the overwhelming impact the megaservers have had on my server I felt compelled to log on and give my 2 cents. I apologize in advance if this seems like a long rant, but have a seat kittenes, it’s story time…

Megaservers have had an absolutely negative effect on my gaming experience in general and imo on my server as a whole. I play on a relatively low population server which just recently became an even lower pop. one due to a few major WvW guilds transferring off to another server. While the majority of my time in game was devoted to doing meta events, it was more or less a way to fund my WvW expenses, gear up each of my toons with ascended equipment and look kitten sexy in whatever skins I purchase to use on them. Despite WvW being the primary reason I play the game, I’ve come to appreciate the small community of PvE/PvX-minded individuals and guilds devoted to spending their time doing whatever content they enjoy while appreciating the game we all love. Now while I may slightly look down on this community and these ppl that choose to spend their time on what I personally may think to be less enjoyable content that’s not as fruitful in representing our server, they do represent an important part of our server which is ultimately our recruitment pool. With megaservers out in full force, this community has been utterly fractured with these PvE/PvX players and guilds feeling lost in the clusterkitten that we now have to deal with having had this megakitten shoved down our throats.

It’s probably safe to say that a large portion of my server and its community is very well rooted in PvE…MY server and MY community that anet claims to want to see flourish is now shattered. I won’t go into detail about how much my personal gaming experience has suffered from crippling frame rates, toxic personalities, childish trolls, afk meta-event bots, inefficient players and the general skill lag that has resulted in being forced to play along side far too many people that, to be brutally honest, I really just don’t want to know, play with or even help, if they’re not from my server. NOW… with megaservers, recruiting for guilds or even asking for support in WvW from our community is laughable and almost completely pointless.

A good step in mending this problem would of course be removing megaservers from the major cities(as many people have already suggested), but I personally don’t think that’s enough. To suggest that server communities are formed and revolve around major cities or WvW(which atm is really the only place you can be with players from JUST your server and has since become my only refuge) is ridiculous…there are a kitten-ton of people that WANT to spend their free time doing PvE and WANT to see the same familiar names around doing it with them, despite being from different guilds but still being able to say that these are my ppl and this is my server/community.

So..my feedback is…megaservers suck balls dude.

Whether or not guesting(which is now pretty much redundant) will be completely removed, joining a megaserver should, imo, only be made an option at the character selection screen as guesting is now. By default all characters created are placed on their home server with always the option to log out to character select screen and hop onto a megaserver for whatever reason. I can appreciate the reasons behind megaservers and that some players(probably mostly casuals) would want to hop onto a vibrant and bustling world full of random people with which they have no ties and perhaps never will, but I think creating more incentive in different ways for people to populate near empty zones or take part in various content in a sociable manner is the better alternative to strong-arming people into simply accepting megaservers as the only solution and future of gw2. Just give us the option kitten …plz don’t kill my server.

Just wanted to save this before it is removed along with other good posts.
From me, in short: PvE is now an utter hell. I tried, I really did. I love this game. But this. Is. Hell.

Karuna.1357:

Morrigan.2809:

So let me tell you about my experience yesterday:

I was leveling a new character when someone said Behemoth pre’s are up.

I switched to an 80 only to find that he was halfway down because I was in another part of megaserver

After he was dead I switched back to the character I was on before- and when someone asked about Behe replied in map that he had just died.
Only to be called a troll and a liar because he was up— so in the space of 10 min I was on 3 different Megaserver shards or whatever..

Now think about this- basically all those people you see around you?
You are never likely to see them again because they are completely random.
This is not good- it makes other players nothoing more than pretty npc’s, you have no reason to engage with them because they are as fleeting as bubbles.
Megaserver completely destroys community.

oh- I forgot, for the first time since the patch I saw that one of my friends were on and at Maw- naturally I wanted to join him.
So I went to Maw- only there was no friend, 2 other people and no Maw.

That was when I just logged out.

MMO’s live and die by the cohesion of their communities- we have none atm.
It is currently more lonely playing GW2 than it is playing a single player game

This is an excellent example of how the whole megaserver thing actually works contrary to the stated goal. Thanks for the post.

Yup, this one of my pet peeves with megaservers. :/

munkiman.3068:

Gwenryth.9450:

Ramon isn’t Dev, he’s German Community Manager
His post in few words for non German speakers (sorry for bad english, I’m no native speaker). Maybe later there will be an official english post.

He says A-Net is reading our feedback and they work on the Megaserver.

1. Chatfilter is only a temporary solution.
2. They consider feedback from large guilds and Server organisations, they don’t want to make organisation of big events impossible, but dont have a solution at this time.
3. They are looking what can be done for RP community, some changes in algorithm were done especially in towns, but isn’t finish yet.
4. Megaserver system wasn’t made to save Server costs, it only redistributes serverloads.
5. They’ll rework schedules for world bosses, especially Karka Queen, Tequatl and Worm, for getting a better time frame for EU.
6. They are watching the max. number of people on one map and will make adjustments if necessary.
7. Devs are working active to improve the Megaserver, and watch our feedback, so keep on posting, especially EU feedback because of the different languages problems. Keep on posting, we are listening.

Thanks for this. My response isn’t to you, but those points you translated.

#The language problem has no solution under this merge. You’ll still have people that use a french client, that speak english, wanting to play with english speaking players and so on. Go back to the original system.
#You’ve literally broken all sense of a server community. You don’t have a solution since there isn’t one, apart from going back to the old system.
#I don’t remotely pretend to know how you’ve coded the game, but i can guarantee there is no magic algorithm that is going to solve the major issues with this system.
#Yet the lag is even worse than before. What’s the real reason for this change?
#Making it so world bosses don’t overlap might have been ok, but combined with this megaserver nonsense, you’ve created a mass of players pummeling these bosses.
#No need, go back to the old system.
#By making this move, you’ve just created a pile of work for yourself and arguable made the game worse for it. From a players perspective, the only thing this “solves” is a solo players experience of being able to complete events they can’t solo. That and the more people on the map. Most of your player base, i would say, were fine with the original system.

My personal take is, why not just have this megaserver fill only barren maps dynamically instead of this flat out toss everyone into a map fiasco?

Very good points.

Faeyas.2816:

I discovered three significant opinions about this mega server business….one: a fair number of players liked it out were willing to go with it before all of the maps changed….two: most of those advocates hated or started to oppose it after we lost all of the maps… three: the stronger the community and the more important that community is to a player or community, the more unhappy they are with the megaservers in general.

Therefore I think that ultimately anet would benefit from studying nations and what makes a nation a nation, and how that relates to our server communities. I believe understanding this will help you see how many of these complaints about the mega servers are really all the same.

Basically what you did was create an artificial diaspora fot all of your players to muddle and suffer through. This isn’t because mega servers are flawed…no….it is because you did it wrong.

We have lost the ability to find, communicate with, and interact with general people from our servers outside of wvw. It is like you took a pool and dumped all of our coloured buckets into it. Yet somehow you expect us to maintain our colour because we were dumped in the same area.

Not that your intentions were bad, but you have left our servers with no identity, and in some cases a cultural crisis. You need to fix this or even wvw will suffer in the long term.

We build community and identity a and relationships in pve because we have time to. Wvw is solely for battle. We train in pve, we organize in pve, we recruit in pve for wvw. We create culture, events, and community in pve. We can’t do that now because we don’t know if our server is in our map, or if our enemy servers are in our map. We can’t communicate with only our server, we have no means of organizing server wide events because all it takes is a wp change and anyone can suddenly be serverless.

This does not mean abandon the idea entirely…just give us a point of reference….a Home base…maybe the cities don’t have to be mega…no events or battles happen in them outside of instances anyway…further cities have historically been where events and organization occurs for all the servers.

If cities were left server exclusive, servers could then maintain their ability to organize, communicate, and be communities with unique identities as each server defines itself, While still creating fuller maps out in the world.

Also…other note…. you should probably fix the bosses…wping should not change boss status because you randomly changed meta maps….that’s just broken.

Yes Please do leave the cities out of the megaserver system. It killed RP in many cases, and now I’m seeing a furiously increasing amount of anti-RP trolls that before patch I rarely ever had to put of with because my server was ultra-RP friendly (Tarnished Coast). >.<

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Shrug. It is no secret that server mergers can be healthy for an MMO as far population, finding groups, etc. This game is at the stage of lifespan where mergers begin to happen. It’s common.

This is server merging. Unlike other server mergers I’ve experienced, where small, but intact server communities move in together… every server got essentially removed from the game with the exception of wvw.

Instead of a world with increased population consisting of two communities learning about and accepting each other, we get a situation of zones constantly in flux, populated by a random sampling of the entire game population, and no option of even getting to know who is in zone, and no need to.. knowing the next zone will be a totally different random mix anyway.

To my somewhat cynical eye, we just got hit with the biggest de-facto server merging in my MMO experience and they managed to relabel it and call it a “feature”. They merged every server without the bad press of “GW2 announces Server Merges”. Great PR stunt at the expense of server communities. Problem is.. this MegaMerge has produced negative effects far beyond conventional server merges. You dodged one bullet and then the piano landed on you.

I live in a rural MN town of 4000. That is a community. I can drive to Mall of America and be in the middle of more people.. doing the same thing I am, but it is NOT a community. It is a ton of people doing the same thing I am. It is a fun place to go, but it is not a community. Population does not instantly create community.

Merged world zones.. I see positives that require tweaking. I see how some love the idea of every zone being “readypug” able to provide warm bodies to finish events that don’t even need grouping and TBH, no need to even know or care who else is 1 1 1 1 as you 1111 at an HP bag.

Server Communities need a home to go to after the Particle Festivals. Give us our home cities back. Dont wreck server and RP communities totally.

Guilds need adequate measures taken to insure that the Guild Content Anet provided for them is doable and enjoyable in spite of MegaMerge. Give guilds the tools or sort weight to load Guilds into zones as a cohesive group. Don’t wreck Guild community.

Anet.. you encouraged the Super Guilds like TTS, GW2 Community, etc. You built the content that made them happen. Give them Schedules and a method to do what they do, please. Don’t wreck their community.

Anet, you made language preferred servers. Respect the communities that made that choice in good faith. They should be exempt from MegaMerge outside of chosen language.

And I’m done with the topic. Again, blowing away the smoke, all I am seeing is everymmo Relabeled and Reloaded. ANET spends far too much time on some weird crusade to somehow re-invent every aspect of the Genre and not enough time to insure that the Brave New MMO is actually working.

I really am hoping that by at least three months, ANet has already tweaked and improved the coding so that we can have our server’s PvE and RP communities back. I’m already starting to miss the usual faces at the Vigil Keep…

The entire megaserver idea is good in theory, but terrible for this game in practice. Nothing would be better in the long run for the game than if they scrapped the idea entirely, or at the very least, limited it to only certain PvE zones.

Basically, you are forcing a system on the player base that the player base doesn’t want. How many posts does it take to get the message across?

Oops, sorry for the spam. Gonna give it a rest now.

Megaserver system is great but should work like districts in GW1, allowing manual selection of servers. No need to reinvent the wheel when you already had a great system going in the first game.

Shinzan.2908:

Megaserver system is great but should work like districts in GW1, allowing manual selection of servers. No need to reinvent the wheel when you already had a great system going in the first game.

Districts reveal how many players are in the game (or at least an estimate). I don’t think that’s information Anet wishes to divulge.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

To my somewhat cynical eye, we just got hit with the biggest de-facto server merging in my MMO experience and they managed to relabel it and call it a “feature”. They merged every server without the bad press of “GW2 announces Server Merges”. Great PR stunt at the expense of server communities. Problem is.. this MegaMerge has produced negative effects far beyond conventional server merges. You dodged one bullet and then the piano landed on you.

I live in a rural MN town of 4000. That is a community. I can drive to Mall of America and be in the middle of more people.. doing the same thing I am, but it is NOT a community. It is a ton of people doing the same thing I am. It is a fun place to go, but it is not a community. Population does not instantly create community.
…

Guilds need adequate measures taken to insure that the Guild Content Anet provided for them is doable and enjoyable in spite of MegaMerge. Give guilds the tools or sort weight to load Guilds into zones as a cohesive group. Don’t wreck Guild community.

Anet.. you encouraged the Super Guilds like TTS, GW2 Community, etc. You built the content that made them happen. Give them Schedules and a method to do what they do, please. Don’t wreck their community.

Anet, you made language preferred servers. Respect the communities that made that choice in good faith. They should be exempt from MegaMerge outside of chosen language.

And I’m done with the topic. Again, blowing away the smoke, all I am seeing is everymmo Relabeled and Reloaded. ANET spends far too much time on some weird crusade to somehow re-invent every aspect of the Genre and not enough time to insure that the Brave New MMO is actually working.

Love the comparison of a community and random people doing the same thing.
I really liked Anet’s GW2 as it was, it was an excellent game that created nice communities etc, had fun dynamic (i.e. non scheduled) events. Scarlet was the low point, but at least we’ve had other things except the Living Story – there were server communities, server world boss runs and other in-game activities, server guilds helping each other with g-missions, etc etc. Now, even that social aspect is taken away, so that playing with other people that noone guarantees you will ever see again if you relog (!) is the onlything that remains. And that is not enough for an MMO. Personally I play MMO for the people. Right now, I can just go and play a single player RPG and have much more fun.

Morrigan.2809:

MMO’s live and die by the cohesion of their communities- we have none atm.
It is currently more lonely playing GW2 than it is playing a single player game

Sad, but totally true.

I have had different experiences with the megaserver, for one I loved playing in the low level explorable zones again. Much more people to play with, however when going for Tequatl, or some kind of guild event, the megaserver limits my experience. Second I do think it is weird to only maintain home servers for wvw and use the current itteration of the megaserver for the open world.

The megaserver splits existing communities and limits their experience, essentially based on a black box the megaserver sorts players. Second of all their is no such thing as a server community anymore, which is a shame and I suspect will influence wvw ultimately as well.

In the end, guilds dont want a smart algorithm which decides what community you belong to, people want to choose the communities they interact with themselves. The current implementation is lackluster.

Atleast keep some citadels/PVE zones server specific, for the sake of the server spirit (WVW) and RP communities. Second large guild events/missions/World boss events, should allow players to choose with whom they had like to play. The current megaserver system is to restrictive for already existing communities.

timmyf.1490:

I don’t see how an opinion is “unjustifiable.”

Any opinion which has no rational or reasonable basis is impossible to justify, and hence, unjustifiable. It doesn’t matter if it’s personal. Look up the definition of justify if you’re still having difficulty with the concept. I mean, I could have the opinion that everyone who plays Elementalist is seriously bad, and say “It’s just, like, my opinion, maaaaan”, but that doesn’t mean it’s a reasonable or justifiable opinion – obviously, it is not. It’s completely impossible to justify the stance that the patch is fine and the community is broken, and it’s particularly nasty to even voice that as a US player, because you’re essentially saying that all the EU players suffering because of the changes are “broken”, which is just the internet at it’s worst.

munkiman.3068:

Peoples choices are not predictable, not even in small percentages based on past behavior. Unless your plugged into the system and it can read in advance what your going to be doing, no algorithm is going to predict behavior or intent. You can’t merge people, but keep them sorted accordingly, dynamically, without literally making instances to suit each possible sorting method, which now we are back to the most reliable method of worlds being separate to begin with. Of course the more sorting methods you tack on, the more it reduces the likelihood you achieve the intended result. Even in left and right scenarios (or coin flips) your best chance at being right is 50% and that’s about as simply as you can get. Compound that to 100’s of flips and you can quickly see that it’s not going to work any better. I’d guess 30% of the time you’ll be playing with the people you intended on playing with and that would be in zones that are typically baron to begin with.

Look at it this way, how do you get better than the extremely high probability of being paired with your party/guild/server that the old system provided? Answer, you don’t.

Oh boy.

If you are right, our entire society cannot exist, and we are living a lie. Perhaps we’re in the Matrix? Agent Smith will be along to deal with us shortly.

Everything in our society is based entirely on the fact that people are extremely predictable. Food shipments, electricity generation (how much and at what times), what shops choose to stock, where hospitals are built, who we allow to be teachers, where cops patrol most, and so on.

Is it perfect? Obviously not.

Is it pretty good? Obviously yes.

You totally can predict people’s behaviour in a relatively controlled environment with obvious motivators and so on. We’re not talking mind-reading, as you seem to think, we’re talking very simple statistics. Coin flips are a totally clueless comparison, I’m afraid, and show you don’t know what you’re talking about. Humans aren’t coins. The more people involved, too, the lower the randomness (not the higher, directly contrary to your apparent assertion – lower).

Seriously, if you were even slightly right in your comparison, civilization would not be able to exist. You might want to think on that.

As for your facile answer at the end, sure, you don’t, but that isn’t coming back, so you can either go forwards to a better system, or mope and talk about the good old days.

There should be a 100% chance to be on a map with players from the realm the players chose (often paying to transfer to).
100% chance to be with players in the guild they currently represent.
100% chance to be with players in their squad.
100% chance to be with the players in their party.

If the larger champions/events/world bosses were to spawn a lot more often, this would also spread out server load as players would distribute themselves more evenly through maps.

Finally, to re-iterate what has been said several times already, it’s very hard when you know little to no Spanish (or German/French/English) to communicate and coordinate a large world event such as Wurm or Teq.

I dont like megaservers.

didn’t read all the posts here but my feedback : now it’s very difficult to get credit for a kill … so .. no loot .. and everything die so fast ….. Wurm and Teq are impossible to complete..

I haven’t logged on in a couple of days now and I’m starting to be pretty happy about my decision. I was hopelessly addicted to this game. I have a 10 page excel sheet for playing this game, keeping track of everything from builds to what I should do next, etc. Basically I am/was addicted as can be.

But honestly it hasn’t been difficult to not log in. I know if I do I won’t be enjoying it. I thought I would have a hard time letting AP, laurels and guild comms slip by incase I wanted to come back in the future but it hasn’t been tough.

In fact, I played a bit of Guild Wars 1 instead. It was fun but at the same time I think I want to stay away from ANet/NCSoft games for a while.

Thank you ANet for curing my addiction for the past 1.5 years (well, almost 10 years if you include Guild Wars 1). Sincerely, a player with 2600 hours played, that spent money on the gemstore, and that had no plans to stop either.

Kestrelle.8165:

There should be a 100% chance to be on a map with players from the realm the players chose (often paying to transfer to).
100% chance to be with players in the guild they currently represent.
100% chance to be with players in their squad.
100% chance to be with the players in their party.

What if the map is full?
Should they disconnect someone already on the map?

lordkrall.7241:

Kestrelle.8165:

There should be a 100% chance to be on a map with players from the realm the players chose (often paying to transfer to).
100% chance to be with players in the guild they currently represent.
100% chance to be with players in their squad.
100% chance to be with the players in their party.

What if the map is full?
Should they disconnect someone already on the map?

Well, and here you are approaching the core of the problems with the megaserver implementation. It should work as mentioned above. It doesn’t, and can’t work that way.

lordkrall.7241:

Kestrelle.8165:

There should be a 100% chance to be on a map with players from the realm the players chose (often paying to transfer to).
100% chance to be with players in the guild they currently represent.
100% chance to be with players in their squad.
100% chance to be with the players in their party.

What if the map is full?
Should they disconnect someone already on the map?

It was an accident, but thank you for pointing out the gaping flaw of the MegaMerge. They cannot provide both full maps AND the level of sorting they keep alluding to.

Either you kick people from maps, or you split sort groups up. Or.. you create enough MegaMerge instances to keep sort groups homogenous. which essentially puts them back to pre MegaMerge.

Astralporing.1957:

Well, and here you are approaching the core of the problems with the megaserver implementation. It should work as mentioned above. It doesn’t, and can’t work that way.

Yes it should.
But with today’s technology (and most likely any technology in the foreseeable future) it will never be possible to have an unlimited amount of data in the same space.

The thing is though that this isn’t a new issue, this existed in more or less exactly the same form long before MegaServers were added.

There are currently two choices:

1: Have empty maps which makes stuff impossible to do in many cases.
2: Have megaservers with many people, which might cause issues.

They had the first for about two years, and people have been demanding something else more or less as long. Now they are trying the second choice. Simple as that.

Give it time, and I am certain many of the issues people have will be dealt with.

lordkrall.7241:

Kestrelle.8165:

There should be a 100% chance to be on a map with players from the realm the players chose (often paying to transfer to).
100% chance to be with players in the guild they currently represent.
100% chance to be with players in their squad.
100% chance to be with the players in their party.

What if the map is full?
Should they disconnect someone already on the map?

There is a way to ensure the above happens on most occasions.

There is already a system in the game that prevents new players from joining a particular instance called “Soft cap”, when the soft cap is reached no solo player may be put in the instance, only people that are in parties (using the “join in…” option)

Let’s assume that the population hard cap is 150 and the “soft cap” is at 100 now. I’m sure the values depend on the zone too but for the sake of argument let’s use these values.

A way to solve some of the megaserver issues is to make the soft cap very very small, say 20 people, more than enough to do ANY regular event, or Group Event, without making everything trivial or forcing huge zergs.

Then, after that, those 20 players can start calling in their friends/guildies to fill the rest of the empty spots in order to do content that requires even more people, like Tequatl, Wurm, Temple Events or Guild Missions. You DON’T NEED 150 players to do a Champion train, you DON’T NEED 150 people to kill the Shadow Behemoth or Shatterer. 20 players are enough for ALL content and will make zones feels alive and good.

Provided of course they won’t do the sane thing and offer us Private Instances already.

I love how everybody acts like the overflow system worked perfectly. Do you know how often I was able to play with my full guild for new Living World events on patch day?

Never.

How about my full party?

Occasionally.

How about just my girlfriend?

Usually, but not always.

Very often, by the time we all loaded into a map and tried to join on somebody else, that somebody else’s server would already be full. As would ours. Not soft-capped full. Hard-capped full. (We weren’t guesting.)

To really see if Megaserver works, I want to test it in one of those Living World events because that is where I’ve had absolutely no luck so far. If it works in those situations, I’ll be a happy camper. If not, I’ll be back here talking about fixing or removing it with the rest of you.