Guild Wars 2

maddoctor.2738:

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.

Softcap and input from players re sorting. Preferred Sorting.
People have stated they don’t care about server community. Let them opt out.
I personally don’t need sorted by friends list. Let me opt out.
I have a personal guild. Why sort that. I could opt out of guild sorting.
If a person wanted to do solely Guild content on a play session, let them uncheck every option but Guild Sorting for that session.
etc.

Let the people with no preference state so, and give the algorithms less to do.

And.. remove the cities from MegaMerge.

timmyf.1490:

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.

Curious what server are you on?

As for your living world comment. I think they are giving themselves time to figure out the MegaServer before they release a Living World event. This is why it is out on all the maps to test it in a environment as close as possible to that as they make adjustments.

anzenketh.3759:

Curious what server are you on?

As for your living world comment. I think they are giving themselves time to figure out the MegaServer before they release a Living World event. This is why it is out on all the maps to test it in a environment as close as possible to that as they make adjustments.

My server is in my signature! ;-) It’s Sanctum of Rall.

We’re a pretty big server, but remember, any server that is big enough to hit overflow levels will have this same problem as overflows are shared between all servers.

I absolutely agree the timing of Megaserver was meant to be in the middle of Living World releases to provide a safer way to test it. I do wish we could be providing better feedback than “this game is hell, I’m quitting.”

Feedback like… “I was doing guild missions, we had X people trying to get into Y map, but it took us Z minutes to get everybody together… almost everybody, that is, because Q people never made it in because the map filled up.”

That’s useful feedback for the devs and the kind that I wish more people would give.

timmyf.1490:

I absolutely agree the timing of Megaserver was meant to be in the middle of Living World releases to provide a safer way to test it. I do wish we could be providing better feedback than “this game is hell, I’m quitting.”

Feedback like… “I was doing guild missions, we had X people trying to get into Y map, but it took us Z minutes to get everybody together… almost everybody, that is, because Q people never made it in because the map filled up.”

That’s useful feedback for the devs and the kind that I wish more people would give.

I was looking for it in your signature before I asked. Must have missed it somehow. I agree that it is a bit upsetting that players are not giving better feedback. It would also give a better perspective for those viewing the threads. I think they will find a trend that the people that are having the worst problems with the megaserver are those that are on extremely high populated servers. Or those that were on the lowest and choose the lowest because they want to have a lower population.

they have solutions, but they require pretty large development and paradigm shifts.

• First off chat filters,
  • I think this is the right idea but the wrong implementation.
    They essentially need a sort of universal language chat, and possibly server chat, that only people who have the settting/server can hear.

• This is different from a on off filter because that simply shuts off peoples voice completely.
  People speak in home tongue when they want to talk to other people in home tongue, but sometimes they expect to speak to any and every body. The filter/chat channel has to be similar. IE, i can communicate with other players, but also i can talk to any one else of (chosen grouping) if i want.

• problem is, it also has to be something that makes instant visual sense to people, since they had no need of it before today, people are used to world chat, and will defualt to that even if they get access to new chat channels.

• Server identity/events/planning.
  • They need to create homelands now, A place where people looking for other people of their server/world/grouping go to congregate and relate. They could make cities into this, but slightly problematic, because cities were desolate for some servers. This type of place would be the hub for world based activities, and a place where you know everyone from there is part of your world.
    Question is, would enough people go there? Most servers only had enough people to maintain one hub, so how many people would be there? i guess thats up to the server community.
  • This would probably be a pretty large undertaking, they would have to design a whole new area.
  • If done as i envision, it would be a major undertaking where the cities condition would be effected by what your server is doing in WvW and in PVE, as well as some voting and descions systems for building/altering the city. But this is best case scenario. I fully realize this system would take too much work and time for anet to be likely to do it.

• Community wise, i think homelands would solve many issues, It would be a place to gather, generate server pride and involvement, and be a hub for communication. This combined with a chat system for groupings, would essentially allow you to communicate just with your server at will and thus reinforce it even in the multiserver world.
• Guild solution,
  • allow guilds to get treated as a group by the system for limited events(essentially queue guild together).
    IE the system holds or creates a space for all of them at once, up to 100 slots at a time. if they dont have enough room for the whole group, in any available server it will place them in a new map. (this map will be open to whomever after that)

• World bosses,
  • This is almost a requirement: you need a system for tracking events, it can be something people unlock, or get access to at a certain level, or via npcs, but there needs to be a way to see whats going on without going to an outside site, list, or whatever.
  • 1 option: create one pop that is guaranteed based on time, and other pops that can happen during that time based on conditions in the map.
  • 2 option: another solution is to have your guaranteed cycle,with other cycles that are a bit more random, and spawn based on how many people throughout the worlds are completing events. IE when a lot of people are playing actively, more varied events spawn.
• Overpopulation on WB
  • option 1: set map softcap lower. Unless your game clients are designed to handle 150 people using all their best skills in small areas, dont create content that forces it.
  • option 2 restructure world events and bosses to scale in location as well as size, think like the marrionette which broke large groups into smaller groupings, except make it so that it has options for only 20 people to be able to win. However i recognize this would be a lot of work, and take some pretty good design (grats to the designer of marrionette, imo thats the best world boss design for large groups)

But yeah, there are solutions, but i dont think that the algorithm will solve these problems, it needs some actual design, and then even in best case scenarios with algorithm, it still needs a lot of work and redesign of small systems.

I will say that honestly the megaserver system if implemented well, is probably the best solution. The main problem is that implementing it well is a big task, its the type of thing that would have been best if the system was designed with it in mind. (and even possibly the lore)
Servers shouldnt be something you pick at the start menu now, they are basically joining communities/WvW allegience. They should be something you opt into because it in someway resonates with you.

A lot would need to change to make this system actually work well.

I thought the computer would look at our friends and put us in that map. I found a map with a good node layout so I friended a bunch of people from map chat that were doing the FG champ farm on that map. Switched characters and landed in a different shard. I tried zoning in and out, going to character select and back, switching characters, dropping those people off my friends list and nothing worked. From then on I was put on the shard I didn’t want.

We need to be able to flag our accounts for important choices AND the computer needs to give strong weight to these choices.

Astral Projections.7320:

I thought the computer would look at our friends and put us in that map. I found a map with a good node layout so I friended a bunch of people from map chat that were doing the FG champ farm on that map. Switched characters and landed in a different shard. I tried zoning in and out, going to character select and back, switching characters, dropping those people off my friends list and nothing worked. From then on I was put on the shard I didn’t want.

We need to be able to flag our accounts for important choices AND the computer needs to give strong weight to these choices.

Friend List is not currently used. They said this somewhere but I forget the source. It is something they’d like to do, but right now the only factors are Language, Server, Guild, and Party, iirc.

Thank you A.Net for killing organized events in Northernshiverpeaks for now.

I’ve noticed this game engine might be a fork of gw1 one, and seems it is way to limited for further mechanics developments, the teste/ changes Anet is making at my view point is trying to “obscure” that, they cant do much with this engine or lack the resource for it, this why we are experiencing the waste of time coding stuff that will not work at the end.

Viable but impossible solution would be end of overflow, end servers or reduce them to half, end WvW and create a wars in tyria new continent (aka sandbox siege game).
Make GvG tournaments etc.

This is a pretty accurate description about how I feel. The sense of community is essentially dead now. While it wasn’t perfect, it was way more enjoyable that it is now. When I look around Gendarren Fields, it’s generally people I don’t recognize, and I never see those outside of my guild anymore while running around the game.

I was a big fan of doing the world events the old way, and our PvE community was really good in that perspective, but now it’s gone, world events have become boring and an afk press 1 fest, essentially taking all the fun out.

There are some positives of megaservers, I won’t say there aren’t. It’s good that some players have the option to interact with more players while roaming the world, and certain maps benefit from that highly (Brisban Wildlands, higher lvl maps), but this has such a negative effect on world events and temples that steps to separate those who want the megaserver and those who don’t should be taken as soon as possible. It affects language barriers, it affects content available, and it affects players who prefer the sense of community or a smaller group, rather than huge zergs…

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.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Or.. you create enough MegaMerge instances to keep sort groups homogenous. which essentially puts them back to pre MegaMerge.

That’s a really wild and baseless assumption. There’s no good reason it should be true. Only if they tried to replicate the previous situation perfectly would it even potentially be true. Aiming for better homogeneity does not necessitate a pre-MegaMerge situation – but it does necessitate better sorting and not trying to have full maps 24/7.

There is literally no way out of this situation that doesn’t leave them giving up on 100% full maps, though – if they insist on sticking with that, they WILL lose players, and lots of them. Full-er than previously is fine, but on maps that were already often near-full? Ugh.

timmyf.1490:

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.).

It worked perfectly for me, thanks. Play with my wife? 100% of the time. My party? 100% of the time (literally – I have no idea what stopped you here – can you explain?). Everyone from my guild who wanted to group? 100% of the time (maybe I got lucky there but…).

Every single time i read something about Anet and testing stuff in one sentence i cringe (there it goes again^^).
Seriously, except the beta-test ifself and the EotM we (the players) beta-test everything on an live server. From new minor stuff to world bosses.
Especially the revamped Tequatl and the 3H-Wurm.
The sheer amount on bugs we found there just says one thing: untested.
Skipping phase bug on Tequatl which they broke with the LA update is still broken btw.

In every other mmo i played so far they had test servers on which certain players could log onto, to test the new stuff out and look for bugs.

Eurhetemec.9052:

There is literally no way out of this situation that doesn’t leave them giving up on 100% full maps, though – if they insist on sticking with that, they WILL lose players, and lots of them. Full-er than previously is fine, but on maps that were already often near-full? Ugh.

They are not trying to aim for a 100% full map. They are trying to aim for a comfortable level.

anzenketh.3759:

They are not trying to aim for a 100% full map. They are trying to aim for a comfortable level.

Not the best aim I’ve seen, then. Cursed Shore is rather unplayable on its soft cap.

Asmodeus.5782:

anzenketh.3759:

They are not trying to aim for a 100% full map. They are trying to aim for a comfortable level.

Not the best aim I’ve seen, then. Cursed Shore is rather unplayable on its soft cap.

Note the word trying. There are a bunch of people using the Join in feature or meeting the criteria to override the soft cap. Players don’t always behave the same way as simulations. They need actual players to give the data to make the systems work right.

Eurhetemec.9052:

timmyf.1490:

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.).

It worked perfectly for me, thanks. Play with my wife? 100% of the time. My party? 100% of the time (literally – I have no idea what stopped you here – can you explain?). Everyone from my guild who wanted to group? 100% of the time (maybe I got lucky there but…).

You must play during non-peak hours or on a low-pop server. Playing around 5-9pm server time (PST), events like Escape From Lion’s Arch would almost instantly create an overflow. Getting into main? Ha! Hilarious!

Okay, so you enter your overflow. Did all five members of your party make it into the same overflow? No, just three? Okay, the two people not with the three of us, join on us. Oh, the world is full? Okay, let’s join on the two of you. Oh, your world is full too?

That was how these events would go for us for WEEKS. Marionette was like this for over a week. Escape from LA was like this for a week or two. The events to retake LA seemed to be a bit better, but it was still hit or miss.

Trying to get 10-15 guildmates into the same overflow? Forget about it. That is simply not happening.

This is frustrating to me because I’m happy with Megaserver, yet I accept that it also has issues that require fixing. I don’t seem to be getting the same courtesy back. Opponents of Megaserver don’t seem to recognize that it solves a huge problem that many of us had. (Or that it should solve the problem. It remains to be seen.) It’d be nice for you to at least acknowledge that the system serves as an improvement for many people who don’t want to go back to the old way.

I miss my Tarnished Coast. I can no longer walk in on RP, I can no longer read a conversation about wvw going on in /map where the entire TC community can add something. I don’t recognize anyone. If I want to join an RP event I have to get someone to ferry me in and it doesn’t always work. I spent a year perfecting my block list on TC and now I am reading all the little troll kittens again so I have to do that all over. I chose my server for a reason from the beginning and now I don’t feel like part of a bigger anything when I play pve… it’s just bleh. I am playing lots of wvw just to be around people I like and trust.

Please give us a way to tag or ‘weight’ ourselves according to our game play or our server affiliation etc. I know possibly a majority of players don’t care about community and for them the megaservers give them the biggest possible chance of success at various world events. However, for folks who are more social, this is just painful.

anzenketh.3759:

They are not trying to aim for a 100% full map. They are trying to aim for a comfortable level.

They are failing miserably, then!

They need to lower what they consider comfortable by 30-50%, I’d suggest.

timmyf.1490:

You must play during non-peak hours or on a low-pop server. Playing around 5-9pm server time (PST), events like Escape From Lion’s Arch would almost instantly create an overflow. Getting into main? Ha! Hilarious!

Nope. Never see main, I agree, but you’re just wrong otherwise. Play on TC, usually on early peak times.

timmyf.1490:

Okay, so you enter your overflow. Did all five members of your party make it into the same overflow? No, just three? Okay, the two people not with the three of us, join on us. Oh, the world is full? Okay, let’s join on the two of you. Oh, your world is full too?

One person enters overflow, invites others, we join, everyone in same overflow. I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS FAIL I don’t know how it could. I’ve never heard it complained about. Ever. I played a lot back in the Scarlet Invasion times so… You get someone in, join their group, go to the zone, everyone is there. You can’t group up AFTER you go in, or just randomly hope, un-grouped, to be in the same overflow, if that’s what you’re complaining about.

timmyf.1490:

That was how these events would go for us for WEEKS. Marionette was like this for over a week. Escape from LA was like this for a week or two. The events to retake LA seemed to be a bit better, but it was still hit or miss.

I find this very hard to believe. It never happened to me or anyone in my guild.

timmyf.1490:

Trying to get 10-15 guildmates into the same overflow? Forget about it. That is simply not happening.

I agree that 15 didn’t always happen. It doesn’t always happen NOW with the current system! So no gain there!

timmyf.1490:

This is frustrating to me because I’m happy with Megaserver, yet I accept that it also has issues that require fixing.

Earlier you said it was “fine”. That’s not “has issues”. It’s particularly not “all the issues of Overflow AND MORE”, which you are now admitting it has.

timmyf.1490:

I don’t seem to be getting the same courtesy back.

The courtesy where you said the patch was fine and the players were broken, that courtesy, you mean?

timmyf.1490:

Opponents of Megaserver don’t seem to recognize that it solves a huge problem that many of us had. (Or that it should solve the problem. It remains to be seen.) It’d be nice for you to at least acknowledge that the system serves as an improvement for many people who don’t want to go back to the old way.

Opponents of the Megaserver sounds like an awesome metal band or album name.

That said, I don’t “oppose Megaservers”. I say the implementation is so bad it’s seriously impacting my gameplay on my level 80 characters (it improved them for my lowbies, but trait changes also ruined their gameplay so overall loss there!).

So you can see why I wouldn’t say this patch was an improvement. Megaserver is purely worse for my 80s (with trait changes being basically zero sum – free respecs are great, but charging huge sums for the new traits is lame), and Megaserver (slightly better) + trait changes (much worse) is purely worse for my sub-80s.

I also never see RP any more, or my friends from TC. Which blows.

EDIT – The only positive thing I see is, hilariously, that I really often seem to see ArenaNet people (with the little red arena wall next to their name) in town. Which I hardly ever did before.

I am wondering what server most of you are on. I come from a T1 NA highly populated server. Overflows are not new to me at all. World bosses being a giant ball of light are not new. A zerg of players decimating LS event and or normal events is not new.

I realize there are other concerns here, but for those concerns I am a little puzzled.

Lord Kuru.3685:

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.

Paranoid much? Whatever their reason, it’s not this.

timmyf.1490:

Eurhetemec.9052:

timmyf.1490:

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.).

It worked perfectly for me, thanks. Play with my wife? 100% of the time. My party? 100% of the time (literally – I have no idea what stopped you here – can you explain?). Everyone from my guild who wanted to group? 100% of the time (maybe I got lucky there but…).

You must play during non-peak hours or on a low-pop server. Playing around 5-9pm server time (PST), events like Escape From Lion’s Arch would almost instantly create an overflow. Getting into main? Ha! Hilarious!

Okay, so you enter your overflow. Did all five members of your party make it into the same overflow? No, just three? Okay, the two people not with the three of us, join on us. Oh, the world is full? Okay, let’s join on the two of you. Oh, your world is full too?

That was how these events would go for us for WEEKS. Marionette was like this for over a week. Escape from LA was like this for a week or two. The events to retake LA seemed to be a bit better, but it was still hit or miss.

Trying to get 10-15 guildmates into the same overflow? Forget about it. That is simply not happening.

This is frustrating to me because I’m happy with Megaserver, yet I accept that it also has issues that require fixing. I don’t seem to be getting the same courtesy back. Opponents of Megaserver don’t seem to recognize that it solves a huge problem that many of us had. (Or that it should solve the problem. It remains to be seen.) It’d be nice for you to at least acknowledge that the system serves as an improvement for many people who don’t want to go back to the old way.

So your saying they designed the system to fix a problem that only occured when they had massive events which is like 1 per month, and then broke like 3 or 4 MAJOR backkittenelated systems to put into situations when it wasnt usefull at all? That doesnt sound like a good solution to the problem that most people had consisitently.

I can think of some advantages, but acting like for most of the game people couldnt get into content with their guild/party/server is just not very accurate.

Comparing the emergency state system to the always on system doesnt make a lot of logical sense to me.

KOPPER.1458:

I am wondering what server most of you are on. I come from a T1 NA highly populated server. Overflows are not new to me at all. World bosses being a giant ball of light are not new. A zerg of players decimating LS event and or normal events is not new.

I realize there are other concerns here, but for those concerns I am a little puzzled.

A lot of players avoided the t1-2 servers on purpose to avoid these things.

Things were a lot more pleasant on a mid-range silver server for me. If I wanted a crowd, I went to the main hub (LA or Gendarran) and if I wanted to enjoy the atmosphere I went to a racial city. If I wanted to do events, they were being done in good numbers (a lot of people, sometimes even overwhelmingly so but rarely the case). Overall, it was perfect in pretty much every way for me. Even Teq was done or attempted on a regular basis; not like the t1-2 servers but if I really wanted to just kill and get my loot with no hassle I could easily guest to those.

I guested to a bunch of places until I found what I liked in terms of crowd and community to move to for my server. I did find a place where I loved to play.

The places I ranked last were with 0 doubt in mind the t1-2 servers, as I hated the feel of being on them. I would have stopped playing GW2 a long time ago if I had been stuck on a server that like. I’m not saying I like a completely dead server either (Darkhaven did literally no events past 1-2 days), but I had just found a perfect community on NSP that did daily temple zerg with a ton of friendly players and overall it was an awesome server and atmosphere to be on. Rarely saw any issues, the guilds seemed to get along, etc.

Now everything is equivalent to t1-2-overflows.

Why couldn’t they just merge a few lower servers and encourage players to use the guesting feature for content that required more people than their server could offer? They didn’t want the bad press? They didn’t want to destroy the WvW communities? Trust me, there’s enough room on Devona’s Rest and Ehmry Bay to merge them together that they won’t have queues… And we all see the reaction in and out of the game.

I’d say it’s ~85% negative reaction (yes I pulled that number out of my kitten but it’s about the rate I see).

KOPPER.1458:

I am wondering what server most of you are on. I come from a T1 NA highly populated server. Overflows are not new to me at all. World bosses being a giant ball of light are not new. A zerg of players decimating LS event and or normal events is not new.

I realize there are other concerns here, but for those concerns I am a little puzzled.

The difference is between “not new” and “all the time”, though, is it not? (lol trying to contract that to be more grammatically normal sets off the kitten system, really Anet, that is terrible and whoever maintains that system should be embarrassed).

I’m from TC. Sometimes, SOMETIMES, a boss would be giant ball of light (esp. the two non-Teq dragons). But not all the time. Not even 50% of the time. Probably not even 30% of the time.

Overflow are familiar, of course, but again, they weren’t constant after day 1, and they often featured a lot of people from TC, and I was always able to get my group into them. Plus, they only really happened for zones where a big event was going on – whereas now they effectively happen for all zones, all the time.

So we’ve gone from “occasional issue” to “the new normal”, and you seem to be suggesting there’s no real change?

Love megaserver for quest, exploring and simple events. However: have been doing Teq since the dawn of time and since the megaserver update never ever ever got into the same server as the one with my regular EU FSP server commanders and teams. Not even when the map is far from capped.

I am from the EU FSP server, they are from EU FSP server, the map is not capped, how come I do end up with total strangers on a server where no organisation for the event is happening whatsoever?

Luckily I have been able to taxi over to “my” FSP instance of the Teq event, but it bothers me to bits I do not end up there in the first place when there is ample room on the map.

This is probably nothing that has not been said before, but it irritates me too much to ignore.

I love that I can now go to any map and always find players. I can’t recall the number of times I was in Orr all by myself.

My only complaint is I guess more of a personal one, and I’m not even sure anything can be done about it, but I just want to put it out there.

With the fact that people on our maps will be from many different servers, there is going to be the problem of tolerance. Some servers are very social, using emotes to enhance their experience with friends and guildmates, while other servers are very anti RP of any nature. My home server was never one of the big RP servers, but people generally didn’t care if you were doing any emoting(as long as it wasn’t spamming). Now, any time I or other people do any of the emotes(which I assume were added to the game to be used, not to be shunned), there is a flood of “take your noob emotes to DR”, and similar posts.

The difference in like-minded servers is interesting to watch, but also kind of puts a damper on things. Yes, the block function is there for a reason, but so is the ability to filter out what you don’t want to see in your chat. Again, this is mostly just a personal issue, I guess.

TL;DR – emote users and the people who hate them are now in forced close proximity

Overall, great job! I can’t wait to see what else is to come!

Solution Suggestion: Open up more waypoints in each map that used to be closed all the time.

My guild is having issues getting all of us in the same map to do guild missions even though all of us are repping the same guild. It seems to me like the guild you rep should be the highest priority in getting in the same instance.

There are waypoints in maps that could totally be left unlocked now that would make it easier for us to get around. If the tech changes, then the way waypoints work should change as well. Double mapping is a small annoyance, but it is annoying nonetheless.

Eurhetemec, I’m not going to sit here and have a personal argument with you on this thread. If you’d like to do that, you’re welcome to message me here or in-game and we can do that.

I have never said that Megaserver is perfect. What I have said, repeatedly, in multiple threads (some of which you may not be reading) is that Megaserver is an improvement for me, needs some tweaking (better ability for guilds to get together, inclusion of Friends list as a mechanism for sorting, ability to choose a style of megaserver such as RP, Dungeon runner, casual, etc) and has a large problem dealing with language which definitely exists, though is not a problem for me. If you disagree, you can easily look up my post history to verify this information.

I think the design of Megaserver is imperfect but a step in the right direction. I think it can be tweaked and made to work well.

What I’m less certain of are these forums. There are lots of smart people saying lots of smart things, even things I disagree with, about the update. But those smart things are often lost in a sea of complaints, I’m-quitting posts, hyperbolic “this has ruined everything” posts, and demands for immediate responses from the devs.

This is all counterproductive. We would all be much better off attempting to provide actionable feedback that explains precisely the issues we have while giving enough information to allow the devs to fix the algorithms for Megaserver.

If this is happening somewhere on the forums, I have not seen it.

timmyf.1490:

Eurhetemec, I’m not going to sit here and have a personal argument with you on this thread. If you’d like to do that, you’re welcome to message me here or in-game and we can do that.

I have never said that Megaserver is perfect. What I have said, repeatedly, in multiple threads (some of which you may not be reading) is that Megaserver is an improvement for me, needs some tweaking (better ability for guilds to get together, inclusion of Friends list as a mechanism for sorting, ability to choose a style of megaserver such as RP, Dungeon runner, casual, etc) and has a large problem dealing with language which definitely exists, though is not a problem for me. If you disagree, you can easily look up my post history to verify this information.

I think the design of Megaserver is imperfect but a step in the right direction. I think it can be tweaked and made to work well.

What I’m less certain of are these forums. There are lots of smart people saying lots of smart things, even things I disagree with, about the update. But those smart things are often lost in a sea of complaints, I’m-quitting posts, hyperbolic “this has ruined everything” posts, and demands for immediate responses from the devs.

This is all counterproductive. We would all be much better off attempting to provide actionable feedback that explains precisely the issues we have while giving enough information to allow the devs to fix the algorithms for Megaserver.

If this is happening somewhere on the forums, I have not seen it.

the emotional hyperbolic responses are feedback too, they give you a clue to the intensity of the problem.
looking at these threads, i see you have some really intense problems for people of certain playstyles, intense enough to make them leave the game, and rage even when before they were fairly content.

Essentially the megaservers are EXTREMELY bad for decent sized guilds, and people who selected their communities, they also pretty bad for people who selected their desired population density.

And i dont think tweaks will solve these issues, its going to require some big things, that probably should have been in place before firing it up. If it takes them a month to solve the guild/community issue, they will lose a lot of players and a lot of trust.

They really need some help with this process, i dunno if they should pull people to the side, or do cdi, but it doesnt seem like the team grasps these issues until after it blows up. They also need to communicate, because its likely people will have no solution any time soon. IF they communicate their intent and customers like/accept it, they are is less likely to be angry, and less likely to give up on the game/harbor hate for the devs or the game.

maybe its an acceptable loss, and they hope to replace the community driven people and the large guilds, but lack of communication, and these changes sitting for a long period of time is a recipe for losing these people.

btw i think its a step in a direction that could have benefits, but i think they will need to build some pretty hefty/different systems to really support the system without making the game a bit more sucky.

phys.7689:

And i dont think tweaks will solve these issues, its going to require some big things, that probably should have been in place before firing it up. If it takes them a month to solve the guild/community issue, they will lose a lot of players and a lot of trust.

But how many more would they have lost due to the wasteland effect and people feeling that no-one is playing the game. There is a reason why I don’t play Guild Wars 1 anylonger.

phys, I think you’re absolutely right. There are definite winners and losers here, but all systems can be changed. Since we know they’re investigating and tweaking Megaserver RIGHT. NOW. it would be in all our best interest to keep it calm, rational, and provide QA-quality feedback to help them improve.

Sadly, the people best in a position to provide that feedback seem to be providing the lowest quality feedback so far.

anzenketh.3759:

phys.7689:

And i dont think tweaks will solve these issues, its going to require some big things, that probably should have been in place before firing it up. If it takes them a month to solve the guild/community issue, they will lose a lot of players and a lot of trust.

But how many more would they have lost due to the wasteland effect and people feeling that no-one is playing the game. There is a reason why I don’t play Guild Wars 1 anylonger.

Well i guess we have passed the point we re we know what the other path brings, while people may have felt a wasteland effect, i think its better than active anger and feelings of betrayal. Doesnt matter right now though.

I guess the real key is what they can do now to alleviate some of these issues asap.

I personally think they could have put this on the backburner, and focused on adding some major new content, that would have got the world a lot less empty feeling. IMO the number 1 problem with GW2 at this stage was lack of new content. you can only watch the same movie so many times.

Sadly new content is probably even further out now, they have to fix core systems they changed.

timmyf.1490:

phys, I think you’re absolutely right. There are definite winners and losers here, but all systems can be changed. Since we know they’re investigating and tweaking Megaserver RIGHT. NOW. it would be in all our best interest to keep it calm, rational, and provide QA-quality feedback to help them improve.

Sadly, the people best in a position to provide that feedback seem to be providing the lowest quality feedback so far.

People arent always going to react in the most logical way, then again reacting in the most logical way doesnt often get results.

regardless, if they actually want feedback, they have to do a bit more to encourage it. People have given pages of feedback, and they havent said anything or even asked questions.
I perfectly understand not wanting to step in a mine field, but when you are in a mine field, you basically are going to have to step on it eventually. I mean if you make a program, and it breaks a bunch of other programs, you are going to have to tell the customer something.

As of right now, anets official response to people who said you broke my game is nothing at all. There was a german community rep response, but its not over here. The only thing i can gather from that is the language filter is temporary.

Why couldnt anet just put in an option for megaserver/no megaserver?
Let the player choose.

Seems to me that would make both sides happy.

To re quote the short blog post:

“We’re pleased to announce that now all PvE maps and the Heart of the Mists have been moved over to megaserver technology!

Although we’re excited that you have more players than ever to explore the open world of Guild Wars 2 with, our work is not yet complete. Our megaserver team will continue to monitor the performance of the technology on live and evaluate your feedback. We will continue to tweak and update the way the system works until it is providing even better megaservice!

Thanks, and we’ll see you all (literally) in game!"

Why on earth did you write this? You haven’t acknowledged our feedback in your official thread even once in two weeks. There are over 1000 posts saying that we hate the new system. There are posts telling you ways to make it better, there are posts telling you to remove it until you fix it, there are posts telling you why it is broken. AND YOU NEVER RESPONDED TO ANY OF IT! Why would you write you are listening to our feedback? You clearly aren’t as you rolled it out to all maps (which we already noticed earlier this week). You said it would be a slow rollout. How do you consider that slow?

Sure some people like the change. I won’t deny that there have been a few posts regarding that. But the overwhelming amount of posts, and in game feedback is negative. And yet you plunge ahead and ignore us. You tear communities apart and then ignore us. I refuse to spend another penny in support of this company until you start leveling with us. Your blatant ignoring of the problem/ upset customers is atrocious. I encourage anyone who dislikes this change to withhold any spending of money on gems until this company actually talks with us and tries to be reasonable. You shouldn’t stop playing the game, since you playing for free can arguably hinder them as much as you not playing at all.

Your PR actions here are completely unacceptable. I’m not asking for the system to be perfect, I’m asking for you to actually be transparent, and communicate with us. I am severely disappointed with the way this company is handling this change, and all the respect I garnered for you over the years as a loyal customer has been destroyed.

That is a simple No, they posted the blog post, did not reply ANY of the reports, problems, discussions and the many people asking for the maps as the Wurm / Tequatl to be not put on the new system yet.

This was a complete forced upon players change, i was able to do Tequatl / Wurm today, but from 20 members of my guild trying to play with me, only 2 got able to enter the organized run.
If this is the so great MegaServer, it’s nothing different than Overflows when it comes to break parties and guildies apart.

Thanks for pointing out this blog post.

Absolutely brutal. Just nothing else to say. Just brutal.

I got very upset when I’ve read that too. We dont have ANY awnser from the devs on ANY of the threads.

And in response for all that we are saying it is not working on some maps, they just go and roll it on to all maps.

clap crap

i rather buy and hunt for weapon skills than traits, this game is way to much copy pasta.
Game getting worse every time…

This is the answer for the thread, where people asked why Anet is silent.
Players either want a comment on every post or won’t be statisfied and I don’t want any arguments going ‘’if they just had one comment explaining’’, players will react negativly whatever Anet does.

They may as well be silent and let the players complain cause they complain anyhow.

nGumball.1283:

This is the answer for the thread, where people asked why Anet is silent.
Players either want a comment on every post or won’t be statisfied and I don’t want any arguments going ‘’if they just had one comment explaining’’, players will react negativly whatever Anet does.

They may as well be silent and let the players complain cause they complain anyhow.

Are you saying that none of the issues or concerns are valid at all?

I wanted to stay away for the forums for this but I decided to show up just in case someone read the comment and appreciated the feedback.

As with a lot of people I had some reservations about the megaserver when it was initially getting made, some of those reservations were prooven false as the megaserver does indeed help PvE, but theres a small catch: it only helps solo roaming or very small groups.

After fully experiencing the differences I can say that people SHOULD be allowed to pick which megaserver to go and even be able to create instanced versions of the map.

All week me and my guild experienced problems trying to complete stuff because no one would get sorted into the same map. this was an issue for guild missions which we had on monday and took 45 minutes longer to complete (than we usually do) because half of that time we had to brute force our way into the same megaserver and the other half we would move and had no idea if we were in the correct map and/or if the other was dead.

Aside from Guild Missions we tried to do a coordinated map clears, another guild event we do, and we failed at that one because people got frustrated with not being able to get sorted into the same map (one of the map even hardcaped twice :/). This is very much a hindrance over the previous system were we pretty much guaranteed an empty map by guesting to the less populated servers.

Now we come to the coordinated boss triggers…. The idea was to coordinate with another guild a run of Wurm-Tequatl-Karka Queen as part of our PvE night so that all the guild got in on the fun and got some rewards (particularly on wurm). The results? total failure, even though the times we used werent the designated server times for the events the maps still had enough people roaming/doing other stuff that it prevented a significant number of the guild people to get into the correct map (it hardcapped consistently). This meant that we didnt have enough people for the wurm, the PUGs there were of no use because they has 0 preparation, Tequatl almost failed (50 seconds left), we had to spend more merrits/influence on Karkaa Queen because we had to lure her out on two megaservers (so guild people didnt get left out because lol bad sorting). All in all people were extremely frustrated, some of them even left the event/closed the game out of this frustration because they were genuenly excited about this (like killing wurm because it was the first time they were going to) and took time to prepare only to be slapped in the face by the terrible sorting system that doesnt work.

The saddest part is that while megaservers arent fixed we have decided just not to attempt any organized PvE content, the system literally killed various guild events we had planned because it was a week full of frustrations, and many people have outright stated they will not even participate in guild missions if its going to be this way (because they have no need for the commendations and really dont want to be dealing with this).

Romo.3709:

nGumball.1283:

This is the answer for the thread, where people asked why Anet is silent.
Players either want a comment on every post or won’t be statisfied and I don’t want any arguments going ‘’if they just had one comment explaining’’, players will react negativly whatever Anet does.

They may as well be silent and let the players complain cause they complain anyhow.

Are you saying that none of the issues or concerns are valid at all?

I am saying that since the players always react negativly, it maybe a reason why Anet is starting to be more silent. I am not saying it is good, or bad…neither I am a supporter of the situation or vice versa, just simply my own thougts. Players usually complain about the information from Anet wether it is little, or it is hype and if none of those they complain about why Anet does take long time before releasing what they promise.d which usually makes sense since they sometimes release info about things they are planning to work on and may take months just to start the process.

The playerbase of this game and other MMOs is the same and it is basically based on complaints since the player-base so huge and there will always be groups not happy with the game, therefore complaining on the forum. Since Anet know the forums ALWAYS gonna be complained at, wether the game is trash or amazing, they may simply have given up on the communication that usually lead to misunderstandings rather than soultions.

EoTM is a map the removes all the community aspects of WvW. It’s now simply a karma train and place for PvEers to get their WvW dailies.

Megaservers removes all community aspects of PvE. It won’t end well.

nGumball.1283:

Romo.3709:

nGumball.1283:

This is the answer for the thread, where people asked why Anet is silent.
Players either want a comment on every post or won’t be statisfied and I don’t want any arguments going ‘’if they just had one comment explaining’’, players will react negativly whatever Anet does.

They may as well be silent and let the players complain cause they complain anyhow.

Are you saying that none of the issues or concerns are valid at all?

I am saying that since the players always react negativly, it maybe a reason why Anet is starting to be more silent. I am not saying it is good, or bad…neither I am a supporter of the situation or vice versa, just simply my own thougts. Players usually complain about the information from Anet wether it is little, or it is hype and if none of those they complain about why Anet does take long time before releasing what they promise.d which usually makes sense since they sometimes release info about things they are planning to work on and may take months just to start the process.

The playerbase of this game and other MMOs is the same and it is basically based on complaints since the player-base so huge and there will always be groups not happy with the game, therefore complaining on the forum. Since Anet know the forums ALWAYS gonna be complained at, wether the game is trash or amazing, they may simply have given up on the communication that usually lead to misunderstandings rather than soultions.

I have to disagree here. I’ve been reading forums for quite some time for many different games (WoW, GW1, GW2, Neverwinter Online… to name a few) and never have I seen such discontent with a new feature – both in game and in forums. Of course there are people that like it, and they should be able to use the feature if they choose to. Likewise, those of us who do not like it should be able to opt out, as megaservers truly destroys some of our favorite aspects of the game, and because the feature is forced on us we have no choice in the matter.

In any case, I’ll be waiting until the next update to play again. If they’ve fixed many of my quarrels with megaservers (or the best case scenario: remove them…but unfortunately I doubt they will) then I will keep living in the world of Tyria.
If things keep going the way they are, well then it was the best 2000+ hours over 607 days I’ve ever spent in an mmo, and rather than watch the game die I’ll unfortunately be finding a new place to call home.

Just popping in to say, while I understand most of your concerns, I prefer the megaserver system.

Honestly, I think that a guild flag to keep guilds together would solve all the problems I’m hearing here (RP, Guildmissions, etc.). Also, guild mission collaboration may work better as well (multiple guilds getting credit for guild missions they are all taking part in).

Besides that though, it’s much better for newer players, imo. I love it, and I’m a veteran of GW1 and GW2.

See yall later.

I do not want to sift through the thousand+ posts so please forgive me if this has been asked.

Is it not possible to leave at least ONE hub server specific ? Its annoying having not just our guild but our server scattered in several different instances. Please for the love of god give us somewhere server specific outside of WvW.

Nuzt.7894:

I do not want to sift through the thousand+ posts so please forgive me if this has been asked.

Is it not possible to leave at least ONE hub server specific ? Its annoying having not just our guild but our server scattered in several different instances. Please for the love of god give us somewhere server specific outside of WvW.

Sounds like a great case for guild halls

I am loving the megaserver, but there are some down-sides to it, which can mostly be addressed:
1) It’s no longer possible for wvw to shout (meaningfully) into LA (or Vigil Keep) for assistance. (Solution: add a Server chat option)
2) I can’t find my guildies on the world map even if we are in a party, unless we are already in the same map. (Solution: should be very simple to ensure party members arrive in the same instance as each other, and almost as easy to fix the world map so it shows our little blue dots like it used to. Adding different color dots for guildies and friends would be a bonus, but not strictly needed)
3) Areas that used to be popular are no longer really worth going to. Too many people are flooding the area, and getting in on an event or champ kill before it’s over becomes downright difficult in some cases. (solution: ???)