Guild Wars 2

Realist.5812:

They made level 80 gear have a chance to drop in low level zones AND dungeons so people actually go there without being penalized.

Why would you play in a low level zone or dungeon if you’re going to get level 50 useless rares for example? For lower level materials? That’s not worth the trade off of not getting level 68+ rares and exotics.

And here’s what it led to. Instead of “not penalising” lvl 80, it’s encouraging lvl 80 players to run AC over and over again because you get the same lvl 80 rares from it as from engame content. And do you know who it is “penalising” now? Low-level players who can’t afford mid-level materials because they’re more scarce thus more expensive than lvl 80 materials. Reason? ANet’s WHACK! balancing style – making significant changes in one go and taking months for “tuning” with another WHACK!

And if ectos are the source of the problem, ANet can a) tune them to be salvageable at lower levels, b) adjust rather map (which are the issue) than dungeon drops, c) leave a chance at lvl 80 drops as Yenrah suggested, or d) even make any rare/exotic gear drop only match players level while leaving the rest of the gear on the map level.

What they need to do is convert almost all low level zones into level 80 zones. Downscaling has been an epic fail.

Lishtenbird.2814:

4. Make dynamic events worth doing.

• Directly increasing rewards looks like an evident solution, but there will always be something needed to offset inflation which comes with it.
• So probably cosmetic rewards is the way to go, and this can be done with PvE regional reward tracks which lets you gather several types of map tokens in these zones which can be than traded to unlock unique non-tradeable map gear and/or dyes, and possibly traded for other materials (laurels? karma? ascended mats?) once you have too much of those.
• More entertaining (harpy love buff!) and useful (fire elemental powder!) consumables introduced every now and then may increase the interest for events just a bit more.

Nice, but doesn’t seem likely. They apparently can’t find the time to fix events that were constantly bugged since i can remember, not to mention something like that.
But there is an easier way to achieve that without much risk for the economy.
Yes, directly increasing rewards, but making them one time per day for every specific event. Just like it is for the worldbosses.
When you’ve done all interesting events in the area, you have to move to another map or change the character.

Lord Kuru.3685:

What they need to do is convert almost all low level zones into level 80 zones. Downscaling has been an epic fail.

And… what will it fix if there’s nothing to do there?

Yenrah.8532:

But there is an easier way to achieve that without much risk for the economy.
Yes, directly increasing rewards, but making them one time per day for every specific event. Just like it is for the worldbosses.
When you’ve done all interesting events in the area, you have to move to another map or change the character.

• Makes some sense story-wise.
• Totally removes the Queensdale train.
• Can’t say for sure how much it helps as we have no data concerning the amount of events being done several times.
• May make population aspect worse by removing from the map those people who would’ve farmed the otherwise; discourages players to help others by doing the same event for the second time for no reward; on the other hand, they may simply rotate around the world.

Of all the things that has been thrown at them, THIS is the challenge that TTS can’t meet? Doing something built for a normal guild?

No disrespect guys, but… that’s actually funny. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll find a way around the problem.

I fear this as well. We have had griefers in the past but what does the future hold with mega servers?

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Now that you have to pay to spawn extra mega-bosses, I’d expect griefing to become more prevalent because the stakes are higher — the griefers not only get the satisfaction of griefing your kill, but also cause you to waste influence (or whatever it costs to spawn a boss).

It’s going to get ugly.

Eh…maybe when the system first rolls out but even then it will be uncommon. How many people do you see trolling guild missions?

I think it would be more satisfying for people to troll the current setup then the new one. The current one requires very sensitive time investments for a lot of people, if there Teq run fails then they have to mix out until the next day. And thats on top of them spending the 30-45 mins just hanging out in Spark Fly doing nothing when they could have been doing something else and probably having to burn a guest pass (depending on the raid time).

New system means a guild can just trigger a map then spawn whenever they want as long as its in between the normal spawn times. Harder to grief unless you know exactly what the guild is going to be doing (and then youre probably a guild member which means you’re going to get kicked).

Also, why can’t you keep Teq and Wurm on an alternating 2 hour spawn rotation? Its not like you cannot have only one word boss active anywhere in the world at once? As far as im concerned mega bosses like Wurm and Teq are on a whole diferent level to zerg fest level bosses like shatterer and claw of jormag.

Karka Queen? Why can’t this be left as is? We can spawn it currently when we like by doing the events. And it is by no way as far as TxS is concerned on the level of Teq and Wurm. Anyone can zerg it to death. Traditionaly its our Tequatl after party but with the proposed changes it will spawn hours away after Teq

Good ideas OP, but I’m operating under a different set of suppositions than you are.

First of all, the changes you’re, in my opinion, won’t solve the future problems Anet has. What if this was the groundwork for coming out with an expansion?

Anet has said, and shown, that they’re worried about dividing the population to finely. One of the things that worries them most is the introduction of new maps. When that happens, as in most games, everyone will be on the new maps. Anet doesn’t want to necessarily make every new map as good to go to as every other new map, because that would again divide the player base. The world is too big. The world will get even bigger with new zones.

People are treating this mega server technology as a one off suggestion, instead of a step in the development of the future of the game. WIthout knowing the rest of what Anet has planned (and we honestly won’t know that because they’d be foolish to tell us this early out), we can’t really make suggestions like this.

On the surface, suggestions like this might seem good…but they can’t take into account the rest of what the game designers have in the works. This isn’t the end of the story, this is the beginning of the story.

It’s like trying to suggestion a war strategy without knowing what all the forces are doing. You might get a lot of people agreeing with you, but none of us knows for sure exactly why this has been implemented the way it has…we can only guess.

My guess is that when new zones, or an expansion comes out, they’ll need technology to get people together in old zones.

Because at that point, most people are going to move on to the expansion content.

With all the negativity surrounding the megaservers and barely any thread that praises it, I figured I’d make one. Please do NOT make this thread into another concerns/complaints thread. I’d love to hear more positivity from fellow players about this change.

I urge everyone to stay calm and see what the changes bring first. They will be implemented first to low level zones and major cities and from there ArenaNet and we as the community can see if it works or not.

I personally welcome this change and I am super excited for what it will bring. This same change has boosted the community in DCUO as well when they implemented their megaserver. It is also one of the main selling points of ESO and I personally have not heard any complaints about that either. If it is similar to either of those then it will only be a good thing. This change will give the game a much needed boost and I look forward to the feature patch with much excitement.

ArenaNet, please do take the negativity with a grain of salt. Concerns are valid, but as with any change people are freaking out before it is even implemented and assuming the worst. Also do not take this the negative way those of you that are concerned, it shows your commitment and involvement with this game and that is definitely a good thing.

Have some faith. This will end well .

I’m a big fan of this change. To me, this is the best and biggest change of the entire patch. For people in other countries who play on US servers, or people who play at odd hours like I do, this patch is a godsend.

And I don’t think it’ll hurt some groups of people as much as they perceive it will.

Nage.1520:

I’m a big fan of this change. To me, this is the best and biggest change of the entire patch. For people in other countries who play on US servers, or people who play at odd hours like I do, this patch is a godsend.

And I don’t think it’ll hurt some groups of people as much as they perceive it will.

Agreed. With the new perk for guilds to activate events at will I think it will only make it more easier for them to do so. For those who are not in a guild large enough that does this (I myself for instance too) and play at odd hours so that they can’t do the world bosses, it’s a shame. I suggest they do join a guild that focuses on World Events and see which guild fits their schedule. Perhaps the intensity of bosses will be increased after a while, but let’s first see how this works! I’m stoked!

kmortonson.2154:

pdavis.8031:

I can see that, however, in my specific play time window I can do almost every WB. (2015-2330ish). Guesting is still an option, why not guest to an Eastern (or Pacific) server to get the events, and maybe a EU server if needed? It shouldn’t matter which one as they will all be linked via Megaserver, and you’ll not go over your guesting limit. Just an idea. There are still options for being able to do those events.

Yes I was refering mostly to the mega events, but the point I believe is the same. There is no reason you’ll not be able to do ALL of the WB on any given play schedule.

Guesting is not an option – ALL the servers/maps will be launching the same boss at the same time. If it’s Shadow Behemoth’s turn, Shadow Behemoth will be the only world boss launching – time zone and NA/EU have no effect on it.

If, for example, you can only play between 8:15 PM and 10:15PM PST – you will never see Claw, Golem or Ulgoth. No matter where you guest to (if guesting is even still possible), you will never be able to fight these bosses.

If I want to go see a Broadway show, but can only go between the hours of 3 am, and 4 am… chances are I will never see a Broadway show. it is a bit much for me to expect a broadway theater to put on a show to my convenience.

If you cannot fight specific world bosses because you are only able to be on 2 Hours a day, sounds Like a personal problem.

Only someone that feels " entitled" would try to argue…" the new system is not convenient to MY schedule."

Lishtenbird.2814:

• Totally removes the Queensdale train.

No. Why should? frostgorge train exists with no events at all.
It would only assure they dont get even more rewards for doing train, apart from champ boxes. Just one time, like normal players.

PacoXI.7690:

Why not just ask guilds to donate their spawns?

TTS runs teq on the NA zone 4 times a day. At BEST, one of those would be a server’s “public” pop. The others wouldnt. That’s 3 spawn consumables a day. 21 a week, over 90 a month. It’s unlikely even TTS can manage to accumulate that many consumables if they had all 12 guilds churning out the items. What makes you think other guilds can?

To top it off, those other guilds are going to demand room for their members at runs. While it’s not necessarily a problem by itself, but do you want to be the leader that has to pick and choose which 20-40 people (maybe more) cant attend the run because the guild spawning it is “selling” it in exchange for their members to be there?

If a boss spawns on it’s own 3 times a day, that does nothing to make it accessible to more players. A megaserver system doesnt magically transport players 2-7 hours into the future to be at the next spawn. This combination makes the content even more exclusive than it already is. Teq spawning every 2 hours is about as accessible as it can get. Increase it to 4 hours, or 5 hours for a rotating cycle, and you suddenly allow guilds to be able to pop private spawns when they want one, and make public spawns still occur often enough other players can get together when they’re on.

Direksone.3867:

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

The answer lies in this very thread, a few post up from yours. Try reading Daemon’s post.

When people complain about the megaserver, they often announce that Anet is doing this just because they don’t want to merge servers. Well, I’ve played on all of the higest population servers, and I can tell you why server mergers aren’t going to work.

In Blackgate and TC, when doing popular content, I’m often shunted to overflow. On TC, you can end up in overflow just going to DR for example. I’ve gone to the Shatterer and Claw of Jormag and ended up in overflows.

The problem is on the same server, at the slower times of day, I still can’t necessarily get someone to help me kill the giant in Diessa Plateau.

Even busier servers at off hours can have dead zones.

No one is going to merge Black Gate and Tarnished Coast. They’re going to merge lower pop servers, which would then STILL experience the same problems I have.

Imagine new people in the game, who come in and get to mid level zones. Even on big servers, they might run into no people. People are doing WvW now, or they’re doing the current LS content, and they want to explore the zones.

The megaserver technology will combine people in those zones from ALL the maps, not just a few lower pop servers.

Server merges will not help this game. They are not a solution to Anet’s problems.

And if Anet wants to come out with expansions, and seeing mass migrations to newer areas, they’re going to need something like the mega server….NOT server mergers.

Nerelith.7360:

Only someone that feels " entitled" would try to argue…" the new system is not convenient to MY schedule."

Dear kitten, really? People are trying to point out how this system will be limiting nearly everyone (unless a person can play 8 hours a day, though I’d argue it will hurt them to since they won’t be able to consolidate activites and do things in an efficient manner as they can now.) There’s no entitlement about it.

So: let’s say one map gets full, and then the other one just opens. How is that different from an overflow? Everyone will be trying to get into that map that opened first.

All playing together, mid level areas more populated, that’s great.

But world bosses not so good, really not different from overflows.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Realist.5812:

They made level 80 gear have a chance to drop in low level zones AND dungeons so people actually go there without being penalized.

Why would you play in a low level zone or dungeon if you’re going to get level 50 useless rares for example? For lower level materials? That’s not worth the trade off of not getting level 68+ rares and exotics.

And here’s what it led to. Instead of “not penalising” lvl 80, it’s encouraging lvl 80 players to run AC over and over again because you get the same lvl 80 rares from it as from engame content. And do you know who it is “penalising” now? Low-level players who can’t afford mid-level materials because they’re more scarce thus more expensive than lvl 80 materials. Reason? ANet’s WHACK! balancing style – making significant changes in one go and taking months for “tuning” with another WHACK!

And if ectos are the source of the problem, ANet can a) tune them to be salvageable at lower levels, b) adjust rather map (which are the issue) than dungeon drops, c) leave a chance at lvl 80 drops as Yenrah suggested, or d) even make any rare/exotic gear drop only match players level while leaving the rest of the gear on the map level.

What? You mean how the price increased when ascended armour was introduced?

The price didn’t increase when they made loot better, it stayed the same. Ascended gear/crafting is the plague on the game, the player demand drove those prices up.

All mats increase/decrease as per the populations demands.

If on the other hand, they revert it to how it was, or increase the chance of low drops, then, those materials will be in higher supply, lowering the price significantly, meaning the drops you’d get are worth even less than now.

I have no problem with them making silk/wool/cotton/linen easier to obtain via drops/loot bags, since you can’t harvest them, but not at the cost of getting lower level gear.

If your drop is rolled to be low level, it never has a chance to be a level 80 exotic.

Okay TTS might not be able to start the Teq event, but I know my guild would be willing to start it for TTS. I’m sure many guild leaders who are also members of TTS would be in the same boat.

I’m sure many would be happy to contribute influence and merits to keep TTS going.

Szamsziel.5627:

I would also add one thing – bosses will start the same time but killing them will be out of schedule. What it mean I expect plenty of people parking their chars at world boss and in case of quick win logging out and in many times to participate in event not completed yet. Then Anet will “fix” it with the same approach as Karka one chest per account.

If they did this they would effectively kill any need I have of my alts in open world PVE. I literally would have no reason to log into 6 of my 7 toons 99% of the time. Only time I would log into another toon would be for a specific dungeon run (that they nerfed the benefits of runnings alts in already).

Palador.2170:

Of all the things that has been thrown at them, THIS is the challenge that TTS can’t meet? Doing something built for a normal guild?

No disrespect guys, but… that’s actually funny. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll find a way around the problem.

Not one of the TTS guilds has research done. They operate on the policy of if the whole guild is not going to benefit, it is better to not have it. That means each of the 12 guilds is going to have to pick a server that the majority of it’s members are on, or shift players around to a guild that’s a majority of their players on a single server, and do the research. Here’s the stickler, it’s going to take 760g for each guild to buy influence for the prereq research. Midway, they’re going to be forced into missions to build up influence which will cost a few more golds worth of influence. Then the research is going to take an estimated 2 months. And that’s not even covering what the cost for the world boss research is going to be.

Direksone.3867:

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

No TTS is not “just a big guild” in fact TTS does not function as a guild at all. We use the guild system because that is what we are given.

TTS doesn’t accrue influence, does not have any real rep requirements, does not make upgrades and does not run guild missions.

TTS kills Teq, Wurm and Karka and sometimes hangs together for other things.

We have many people with many different guilds and we do not want to be forced to have people choose between their main guild and TTS.

We in the past have been accused of “stealing” members from guilds or from servers. This is basically forcing that to be true.

If we have to run guild missions then that takes away from any other guilds that run them. If we have to accrue influence by making people rep us that takes away from other guilds .

We were never designed as a main guild, we were designed as a way for people who are guildless or who are in smaller guilds or guilds that can not run these massive things to run them and have an actual shot at winning.

Nage.1520:

Direksone.3867:

Lothirieth.3408:

Direksone.3867:

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

The answer lies in this very thread, a few post up from yours. Try reading Daemon’s post.

So basically because this is TTS’ problem and therefore everyone else’s too. Aaaalllllrighty then.

TTS is comprised of not hundreds, but thousands of people across every NA server. There are 11 full guilds with 500 people in each. I’d say that means we’re talking about 5500 players, not just one small guild.

12 guilds. And this problem has more implications than people are willing to see. That’s six thousand people who are members of OTHER guilds. Those other guilds have anywhere from 10-500 people. That means TTS is running content that is open to 60,000 to (accounting for some guild duplication) 500,000 people.

Nage.1520:

Direksone.3867:

Lothirieth.3408:

Direksone.3867:

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

The answer lies in this very thread, a few post up from yours. Try reading Daemon’s post.

So basically because this is TTS’ problem and therefore everyone else’s too. Aaaalllllrighty then.

TTS is comprised of not hundreds, but thousands of people across every NA server. There are 11 full guilds with 500 people in each. I’d say that means we’re talking about 5500 players, not just one small guild.

There are 12 guilds now, a max of 6000 people (though I think at the moment it is closer to 5000 as we purged inactives recently.

As the co-owner of TTS some of this stuff makes me sad.
I have been working towards helping the GW2 community and helping to bring these amazing large fights to more people and get them more interested in doing the awesome higher level content and giving them the tools to do it without failing over and over and giving up in frustration.
I think that putting the “mega bosses” on an 8 hour timer is only going to hurt the community as a whole.
There are so many people out there who want to do this content and want to experience everything that the Devs make and you guys are denying them that opportunity.
For anyone who is on the east coast of the USA they will be forced to make choices. Either join a guild that is big enough to spawn Teq when it wants or stay up late and get 4-5 hours of sleep before work or don’t do Teq at all.
I don’t think that forcing someone to choose between their job and their fun time is a good idea.
Also you are killing some of the greatest community building moments I have ever witnessed in a game, the exact reason I play this game over WoW or ESO or whatever other MMORPG is out there.

I have been reading all the blog posts and have been quite happy with most of the stuff coming out but not really that excited untill I read about the megaservers. This is a huge change that I really feel will greatly improve GW2. Super amped for the update and I am really looking forward to seeing how it will work! Thank you Anet!

Let me tell you a story.
TTS choose Borlis Pass as our server one day for our Teq kill. We invited the locals to come join us by announcing in LA that we were doing a Teq kill there. We filled the main and an overflow that night with a mix of TTS members and BP locals. We ended up getting 2 Teq kills and getting a few people their achievements for Teq that had never had the chance to kill him.
I went to LA to manage my bags and I got a whisper from a BP native. She thanked me for helping to bring kills to BP. They had apparently tried to kill Teq a few times before without much luck, she said that because of our presence more people were talking to her and interested in doing Teq there. She asked if we could help her to learn to lead a Teq run like we do. I said of course and spent the rest of the night explaining things to her. I promised we would send a couple of our people over to help with their kill.
They picked a night and time when the most people were able to come. The night came and a fellow TTS Leader and I went over to help them and actively teach them. They had gathered a group of people from many different medium guilds and some guildless people there and had TS3 set up and people who were willing to learn.
We talked with their commanders and gave them info about how to set up and a few pointers then guided them as they did the set up. We participated in their attempt. It went OK but we did not get the kill due to some really bad luck.
They thanked us as they had never been so close and they now have a strategy to do it.
The next day I logged into the game and had an in game mail from the person who organized the BP kills. She had sent me 5g and some food. She said she wanted to thank me for helping with the run.
I sent the mail back saying I can not accept gold for helping people as that is simply what TTS does.
She then sent me back an in game mail that really touched me. It is something I think about every single time I log into game for a TTS event. Here is the mail: http://i.imgur.com/2vGsoD7.png
She called us heroes.
It was at that point that I realized just how much this game means to people. It sprung into focus how doing something as simple as teaching someone about Teq could change someone, how finally beating this thing can make someone’s crappy circumstances melt away because of the achievement in game. It really made me happy and feel like I was making a difference in someone’s life.
Now let us look at that in the light of these changes. First off because we have not spent months upgrading our guilds to do guild missions we wouldn’t have been able to do that exact run at an off time. So we would be at the kill on the scheduled time. Because of the megaserver system we would be in there with all TTS members. We wouldnt be guested to BP. But because we are still here for the larger GW2 community we send someone to Vigil Keep anyways. Well now we try to get them on the same map and no dice it is full. The run happens, TTS kills the dragon, nobody else is invited to our map and we can not use another map due to the fragmented system from 12 guilds. 150 people get a dragon kill. End of story.
But lets assume we somehow got people on to our map. This person is really happy and wants to do their own kills. We offer to help. Well the people she brought together are from various guilds or no guild and have a hard time getting together.
Let us assume they get everyone there at the dedicated time. None of the guilds involved are big enough to have guild challenges unlocked. No kill for them at their specific time. So we move to a scheduled spawn time.
Sorry a good percentage of their people can not get there because they have to sleep for work. OK lets go ahead with the people on the map. Well there are 30 people who are standing at south hills and not on teamspeak or interested in working together and look a guy who is specifically trolling and 10 people off doing map completion and another few who are simply AFK the whole time. South hills and boats gets scaled up, we lose the turrets on south and the zerg is hit with poison. Then because people are not listening on teamspeak when we finally get to a battery phase nobody hangs out at north on grub holes and we lose a battery because when we call for backup at north nobody can hear us, as we frantically type into map chat we die and have to WP back watching north battery fall as we walk back only to be hit by a wave. Most of the people then leave saying screw this thing, these idiots will never kill it. It’s a losing battle in most people’s mind at that point.
The fight is lost and the person who had wanted to do this content is discouraged and they no longer even feel like doing Teq let alone leading others.
This is going to be the reality for a while and that is not even getting into Wurm which is magnitudes harder and only one person can mess it up for the whole of the map

Direksone.3867:

Is TSS not a huge guild? Why is it out of your reach to get those boss spawn thingies? Please do explain that to me. If anything that specific change should make it even easier for a huge guild to do World Events as they can do them at will.

Well TTS is not one unified guild to begin with, it’s formed out of multiple smaller guilds that span over all the servers.

Secondly ,the guilds are only used for organization, they are not an actual active guild that does other events outside world bosses so they don’t gain much influence to buy the thing.

Thirdly, the new megaserver will make running and organizing tequatl/wurm a living hell, thanks to the megaserver shuffling incoming ppl on different versions on the map in order to accomodate the populations. Taxiing over 50 ppl is quite the chore. Which brings to the fact, the already present population (which is formed out of ill equiped low lvl characters exploring the area) on that version is higher thanks to the new system will make it easier to cap out thus leaving other teq/wurm runners out of the version of the map where it is run.

Also with the old system, by capping the normal map, you could create a completely clean overflow where you could get in all the teq/wurm runners, making coordination on TS and ingame much easier let alone now you a full population cap in the new overflow to accomodating all the runners. And considering the difficulty of doing Wurm even with a full, well organized, overflow of ppl i can safely say, without breaking the new system like the old one, it will be close to impossible.

I’m not sure what you are trying to say. server mergers and mega servers are the exact same thing just with some additional window dressing.

Mega servers are just server mergers + underflow.

The server merger part will fix the problem for the empty servers, the underflow part I doubt will fix anything. You still won’t be able to kill the giant in diessa because 0+0+0+0+1+0 is still just 1. There is no reason to be in that map, you can combine 1000 servers and there still wouldn’t be a reason to be there.

Well. It has been your choice to run things the way that you do. It is up to you to come up with solutions. ArenaNet does their best to improve upon the Guild system, which is there to bring people together. Now you expect them to cater to something that you have made yourself that falls outside of this system. I’m not sure I find that reasonable. Good luck.

Honestly IMO you are right, the megaserver will probably (if done right ) be a good thing overall. The only worry is the boss times and the fact that they are only half rolling it out (not merging guilds together as well as the servers at the same time).

No, they’re not the same thing.

A server merge only affects low population servers. A server merge does nothing for higher population servers.

With this plan, a person playing off hours on ANY server, will have people to play with. With a server merge, that’s not true.

I’m telling you that if the busiest servers NOW have dead zones at certain times, then a server merge won’t help smaller servers. It’ll make them like bigger servers.

Bigger population events WILL be populated….most of the maps will be dead.

Server merges do NOT solve that problem. The meta server does. The megaserver is not another name for server merge.

Direksone.3867:

Well. It has been your choice to run things the way that you do. It is up to you to come up with solutions. ArenaNet does their best to improve upon the Guild system, which is there to bring people together. Now you expect them to cater to something that you have made yourself that falls outside of this system. I’m not sure I find that reasonable. Good luck.

So you are saying that TTS should use its numbers to bully people into leaving smaller guilds? Because if we conform to the guild format that is given to us that is what would happen.

I for one never want to tell people that they have to make a choice between being in their guilds and say running Wurm. I am not that much of a jerk and nor are any of my Leaders.

Bully people? No. You create a Guild or Guilds that focus on World Events, PvE etc. etc. and make it a nice community for everyone and whoever wants to join, joins, who doesn’t, doesn’t.

KainRacure.1023:

Honestly IMO you are right, the megaserver will probably (if done right ) be a good thing overall. The only worry is the boss times and the fact that they are only half rolling it out (not merging guilds together as well as the servers at the same time).

I just read your posts about how negative the megaserver system would be and how it would ruin some of the moments you love in the game. I’d like to hear some of your thoughts on the other side of the coin, because right now you just seem to have a very arbitrary opinion depending upon whichever conversation you can be a part of at the time.

I’m so incredibly excited about this update. This will eliminate a lot of grinding/farming and champ train opportunities, which, yes, may harm the community on some level (there are a lot of people who do those things) I think that it’s a good thing because people whine about the game having too much grind when it wasn’t supposed to. (I am a staunch believer that the game only has so much grind as you allow. I have never grinded!) So the more ArenaNet neuter grinding potential, the better!

This update will also really make it more fun to just play the game without a focus. As in, if you’re just exploring the world, you’ll have more people to play with, and a lot of dynamic events that are rarely accomplished will be successful! There’s nothing more frustrating than just playing the game to get my dailies done but not being able to complete the successful events category because I’m romping around in a quieter zone.

The only concern I have is the boss timers, and how some people will honestly not be able to do the bosses, realistically. However… this is such a freaking easy fix (add more boss spawns, change the timers, etc) that I’m not even worried. ArenaNet is so good at listening to feedback and making changes (despite what people say, I’ve never been involved in a developer-player community that is this close and responsive) that I know they’ll make things better for everyone in the end.

Nage.1520:

Good ideas OP, but I’m operating under a different set of suppositions than you are.

First of all, the changes you’re, in my opinion, won’t solve the future problems Anet has. What if this was the groundwork for coming out with an expansion?

Anet has said, and shown, that they’re worried about dividing the population to finely. One of the things that worries them most is the introduction of new maps. When that happens, as in most games, everyone will be on the new maps. Anet doesn’t want to necessarily make every new map as good to go to as every other new map, because that would again divide the player base. The world is too big. The world will get even bigger with new zones.

People are treating this mega server technology as a one off suggestion, instead of a step in the development of the future of the game. WIthout knowing the rest of what Anet has planned (and we honestly won’t know that because they’d be foolish to tell us this early out), we can’t really make suggestions like this.

On the surface, suggestions like this might seem good…but they can’t take into account the rest of what the game designers have in the works. This isn’t the end of the story, this is the beginning of the story.

It’s like trying to suggestion a war strategy without knowing what all the forces are doing. You might get a lot of people agreeing with you, but none of us knows for sure exactly why this has been implemented the way it has…we can only guess.

My guess is that when new zones, or an expansion comes out, they’ll need technology to get people together in old zones.

Because at that point, most people are going to move on to the expansion content.

+1 Agree to this.

I think Megaserver idéa sounds like the best option to populate maps so I am not at all against it. The MegaServer is young (even unborn), there are more stuff to be implemented to it before it is perfect and there is more parts that needs to be fixed. We could call MegaServers and Alpha or Beta but I am glad that Anet has decided that we will be the ones to make it perfect.

Sure there are atm some pro’s and Con’s to this but imo the pro’s are just overflowing in my head. I am totaly looking forward to see this in action.

As to OP’s Idéas, they are not bad but I think they won’t do much.
They will make players visit maps, do their stuff and leave or farm them. It wouldn’t be life it would only populate the interesting parts of the maps. By adding more rewards you add more farming, and I think economy will rise thus making one or two of the “best” farm spots to be over populated again and we are back to square one. If they are BoA it will iether do the same or be done once you got what you need and then left alone. My impression if how Anet wants GW2 to be is ‘No or as little farming/grinding as possible’ so by adding more tokens like dungeon tokens, there will be more need to farm. And with OP’s suggestion more or less every part how to populate the maps is to lure players out to grind/farm more. I do like the Map Bounties – Unlocking new trait(Ofc) – Gonna catch ´em all.

Direksone.3867:

Bully people? No. You create a Guild or Guilds that focus on World Events, PvE etc. etc. and make it a nice community for everyone and whoever wants to join, joins, who doesn’t, doesn’t.

You basically just defined what TTS IS. The only difference is TTS doesnt require others to rep the guild outside of raids unless you want to.

Again. That is the choice of TTS and its members. Your problems should not influence Guild Wars as a whole. I´m being quite blunt here, but I gotta keep it real.

Nage.1520:

No, they’re not the same thing.

A server merge only affects low population servers. A server merge does nothing for higher population servers.

With this plan, a person playing off hours on ANY server, will have people to play with. With a server merge, that’s not true.

I’m telling you that if the busiest servers NOW have dead zones at certain times, then a server merge won’t help smaller servers. It’ll make them like bigger servers.

Bigger population events WILL be populated….most of the maps will be dead.

Server merges do NOT solve that problem. The meta server does. The megaserver is not another name for server merge.

You are overestimating the number of players you are going to find on dead maps. Plus this megaserver system only treats the symptom (while creating a neverending list of problems) not the cause which is the lack of worthwhile activities on said maps and the dwindling population on some servers.

Direksone.3867:

Bully people? No. You create a Guild or Guilds that focus on World Events, PvE etc. etc. and make it a nice community for everyone and whoever wants to join, joins, who doesn’t, doesn’t.

So what about guys like me who love my smaller guild and still want to do big world events. Now you’re asking me to choose between repping my main guild and repping TTS to get the influence.

The truth is TTS solve problems for thousands of people. It allows us to rep them to do the big events and still have our small close knit group of friends.

A TTS problem isn’t a one guild problem. It’s a major probably that needs a solution even if that problem doesn’t affect you personally.

Not to mention the thousands of remoras out there, who piggyback off guilds like TTS for major events and benefit from it.

Anet created events that you can’t just show up for and do. They require coordination. Anet didn’t make TTS but they made the game that requires guilds like TTS.

If bad people get on the guns on the Tequatl fight, that fight is over. No one can win. The entire design of the battle depends 100% on the people on the guns and the people protecting them. The wum requires major coordination. Everyone on the same channel doing the same things.

Players didn’t create these events, Anet did.

TTS was formed because a percentage of the playerbase wanted to do them. Do you realize there are still posts fairly frequently about people who ask who does Tequatl because most servers never do it?

But TTS does it multiple times a day. It’s a guild anyone can join and still be part of their main guild. I’d hate for that to change.

Direksone.3867:

Again. That is the choice of TTS and its members. Your problems should not influence Guild Wars as a whole. I´m being quite blunt here, but I gotta keep it real.

It does influence negatively about 5000 players who are in the guild and their friends and it also kittens all the servers who do server runs on these bosses outside TTS…that brings it quite close to a big chunk of the GW2 playerbase.

A five hour window in between boss rotation rounds is super inconvenient.

Doing mega boss fights involves a LOT of standing around and waiting already, but at least right now, after fighting Tequatl or the Wurm, you can head right on to the Karka Queen without having to wait another 40 minutes. :\

Yenrah.8532:

Lishtenbird.2814:

4. Make dynamic events worth doing.

• Directly increasing rewards looks like an evident solution, but there will always be something needed to offset inflation which comes with it.
• So probably cosmetic rewards is the way to go, and this can be done with PvE regional reward tracks which lets you gather several types of map tokens in these zones which can be than traded to unlock unique non-tradeable map gear and/or dyes, and possibly traded for other materials (laurels? karma? ascended mats?) once you have too much of those.
• More entertaining (harpy love buff!) and useful (fire elemental powder!) consumables introduced every now and then may increase the interest for events just a bit more.

Nice, but doesn’t seem likely. They apparently can’t find the time to fix events that were constantly bugged since i can remember, not to mention something like that.
But there is an easier way to achieve that without much risk for the economy.
Yes, directly increasing rewards, but making them one time per day for every specific event. Just like it is for the worldbosses.
When you’ve done all interesting events in the area, you have to move to another map or change the character.

This pretty much. I don’t understand why they haven’t introduced a daily reward for each event already. It doesn’t need to be huge, and if the daily event rewards would turn out become the new champ loot, it would probably make players spread out in the world and find new events to do rather than farm the same area/boss over and over again like the champ trains.

AlexEBT.7240:

Nage.1520:

No, they’re not the same thing.

A server merge only affects low population servers. A server merge does nothing for higher population servers.

With this plan, a person playing off hours on ANY server, will have people to play with. With a server merge, that’s not true.

I’m telling you that if the busiest servers NOW have dead zones at certain times, then a server merge won’t help smaller servers. It’ll make them like bigger servers.

Bigger population events WILL be populated….most of the maps will be dead.

Server merges do NOT solve that problem. The meta server does. The megaserver is not another name for server merge.

You are overestimating the number of players you are going to find on dead maps. Plus this megaserver system only treats the symptom (while creating a neverending list of problems) not the cause which is the lack of worthwhile activities on said maps and the dwindling population on some servers.

How do you know I’m overestimate the number of people? That’s my question. We’re knocking this when we haven’t even tried it.

The list of problems isn’t never ending, sorry. It’s a small list of problems and there are problems solved by it. There’s no pleasing everyone but a lot of people are pleased and looking forward to this. Anet has tested this. We haven’t.

I’d say that there’s more chance of me having people to play with if ALL the servers were merged into one, including Blackgate and TC in emptier zones, than there would be if a few lower pop servers merged.

People are complaining the world is dead. Until we see the results,. we can’t know that this isn’t a solution. But I strongly suspect it will be.

Megaserver has its heart in the right place, and I’m quite excited for it. People are pointing out a lot of problems that it could, potentially, have, but I doubt anyone has said something that ArenaNet hadn’t already considered. But heck, even they know that the system probably won’t be perfect so they’re implementing it slowly. The goal is to unify people, not drive apart friends.

Two things I’d love to see them decide to do:
1) Allow you to pick your own weights on which map you land on. Right now it sounds like there’s a high preference for you to be mapped with other people from your server – but I’d rather be with people from my guilds or people on my friends list with my server being a super low addition to the equation.
2) Allow people on my blocked list to influence which map I’m on. If I blocked someone, it was for a good reason. And if I had a reason to block that person, it isn’t that strange to think that I wouldn’t really like the same people that they like, so I wouldn’t want to be mapped with them either. And heck, I doubt they’d want to hang out with me either. (Right now, my blocked list contains only one person and I don’t even remember who they are, but I would love to use it to tailor and enrich my PvE experience.)

I belong to TTS and I worry for them, but it’s not cool that many of us -need- TTS to do certain content. While the reduction on the megaboss timers is restrictive, I can see that it’s meant to be a strong filtering tool. If Teq only spawns twice in a day, that map is going to be PACKED at those two spawns and, with the megaserver, you don’t have to worry about your server not caring about the content.

I do hope TTS gets a solution to the problem that they’re going to have to keep them relevant, but I’m not that concerned. I’m not concerned about any mentioned problem, though two changes would be particularly wonderful: Never-contested dungeons and either free WP cost to contestable WPs or a proper relocated to uncontested WP fix.

Direksone.3867:

Bully people? No. You create a Guild or Guilds that focus on World Events, PvE etc. etc. and make it a nice community for everyone and whoever wants to join, joins, who doesn’t, doesn’t.

And we did. We created a nice community of people who want to kill “Mega bosses” and people join all the time.

But now we are being forced to do something we do not wish to do AND wait about 2 months to do what we DO want to do.

It would be like you make a WvW guild and to get into WvW you have to have all of your members complete 5 jumping puzzles each week for 2 months and then you can get in to WvW BUT you are capped on the amount of time you can spend in WvW even if you do all the jumping puzzles all the time. However there is a free 15 min of WvW every 8 hours so go nuts. (Oh and sorry if a good percentage of your people can not make the time slot, maybe they can stop sleeping or not go to work on days they want to WvW for those 15 minutes.) Oh and your members have to drop their other guilds or at the least put them on the back burner for those 2 months as well.
Also for your work you get 2 blues and a green from running the WvW karma train.

This is just another example of players being FORCED to play the game the way the game maker wants you to play and NOT the way the players want to play.