Guild Wars 2

I don’t know why we can’t just have a dialogue pop up that says “There is a Megaserver for this map, do you want to join?”

Similar to how the Overflow message worked to Travel to your home server (or guesting server), Re-enter Queue, or Leave Queue.

I used to play a lot of GW2 on my free time and now I close it almost immediatly when I log in. Megablobver is not working for me at all.
In my previous server I was happy and felt to be a part of something. Now it’s only that I’m face in the middle of faces, no-one, one random dude. It’s more impossible to do any socialising anymore because almost every time I log in there’s different people all the time. At servers I saw people and remembered “oh, that’s the one who helped me with this” and “he was the one who asked this and that, I could ask if he has solved those troubles!”

Also lags hits hard. And roughly and from every direction. Cities are lagging crazily. On enemy maps it’s almost impossible to gt anything from event because 10 people did it already so I could only saw how event was finished.

Megablobver might have work well on a paper and test gaming but when you throw hundreds of players at same box you get only mess. Speaking of boxes map chat is also one terribleness because of all those German-Spanish-English-Danish speakers. Maybe I should start speaking Finnish as well in there!

anzenketh.3759

1.) Force multiple MegaServer shards for language only.
2.) Create a Home Server Map channel

3.) Give players the choice, which “map/instanced” Version the Player wants to join,
as a drop-down list like:
#0, gendarran field, let the automatic decide (default)
#1 gendarran fields, 100 Players, language english
#2 gendarran fields, full
#3 gendarran fields, 10 Players, language german

etc…

I was told the “district” System of GW1 worked like this.

Greetings.

Zok.4956:

anzenketh.3759

1.) Force multiple MegaServer shards for language only.
2.) Create a Home Server Map channel

3.) Give players the choice, which “map/instanced” Version the Player wants to join,
as a drop-down list like:
#0, gendarran field, let the automatic decide (default)
#1 gendarran fields, 100 Players, language english
#2 gendarran fields, full
#3 gendarran fields, 10 Players, language german

etc…

I was told the “district” System of GW1 worked like this.

Greetings.

The ArenaNet Developers have already commented that at the moment this is not possible. My suggestions were items that they could implement now with the least amount of extra work.

I would like really enjoy having districts like in Guild Wars 1.

I think one thing that they should do if they can never give districts is make the Join in feature work in more places then just the party menu for large groups getting on the same map. For example add the Join in on the Guild Menu and display that option only if another Guild Member is on that map.

It does not look like being in a party overrides the soft cap. I think that it should until the hard cap is reached.

Megaservers have been nothing but a tremendous source of irritation so far. For one, they break up player communities: this has already been stated in numerous other posts so I won’t bother to list all the details here. Suffice to say, that communities are the strength of your player base. If you sever those then you shouldn’t be surprised if you start to see a drop-off in players.

Secondly, they are a huge irritation for guilds. During guild missions we are ending up with players on different servers and even bounties spawning on different servers . . . Why can’t we all just be on Tarnished Coast, like we are supposed to be, so we can work together? How are guild supposed to be able to organize any large-scale events together if the server system sends people all over the place?

Explain to me how any of this is a positive improvement for the game.

Karuna.1357:

Secondly, they are a huge irritation for guilds. During guild missions we are ending up with players on different servers and even bounties spawning on different servers . . . Why can’t we all just be on Tarnished Coast, like we are supposed to be, so we can work together? How are guild supposed to be able to organize any large-scale events together if the server system sends people all over the place?

We can’t. Until the implementation of the Megaservers is much closer to how ArenaNet described it earlier I will not organize Guild Missions. I still hope they realize today what a mess it is and do something about it. It is almost 6 PM here (CEST) and for most Europeans the Easter weekend really starts now. A weekend a lot of us would like to use to play GW2 a lot. But that will be more difficult/less pleasant with how the Megaservers work at the moment.

Karuna.1357:

Megaservers have been nothing but a tremendous source of irritation so far. For one, they break up player communities: this has already been stated in numerous other posts so I won’t bother to list all the details here. Suffice to say, that communities are the strength of your player base. If you sever those then you shouldn’t be surprised if you start to see a drop-off in players.

Secondly, they are a huge irritation for guilds. During guild missions we are ending up with players on different servers and even bounties spawning on different servers . . . Why can’t we all just be on Tarnished Coast, like we are supposed to be, so we can work together? How are guild supposed to be able to organize any large-scale events together if the server system sends people all over the place?

Explain to me how any of this is a positive improvement for the game.

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

I also think it would be helpful for the developers if people that are experiencing routing issues give what server they have selected (Home Server or if they are guesting what server they are guesting on.) As well as what other criteria you think is met with the blog post.

EDIT: It appears that people are misunderstanding my post about guesting to another server. I am not saying the system is not working as designed. If you notice they have halted pushing the MegaServer to more maps. My suggestion is something people can try as a workaround until the system starts working as designed.

Fired up a guild bounty last night, found the target, had the guild come to the location.

It took almost the entire time of the bounty to get all our guild members in one server, thank goodness we dont need merits & was doing more for commendations.

A server selection would be nice, or at least try to place guildies together.

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

Why should I HAVE to guest to another server to keep with guildies? I chose the server Im on for a reason, not to get separated by this megaserver…

BuD.7851:

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

Why should I HAVE to guest to another server to keep with guildies? I chose the server Im on for a reason, not to get separated by this megaserver…

You should not have too. I was not saying that you should have too. I was offering a possible workaround to a problem. Plus I am curious and can’t test it myself as I am not effected by the problem. Nor do I have the resources to test it myself.

Perhaps with enough information we can come to the conclusion and provide evidence to the developers that perhaps the Highest population servers should get their own dedicated shard for a lot of the maps. Especially the maps in the cities. They don’t even need to hard code that. They could do something as follows:

Take the average population of players for X server(including those guesting) going to Y map during a specific time period if average population is above Z dedicate a shard to that server. Only allow Party and Guild to override that dedication.

Cons:
Takes time to implement. Also makes things more complicated.

Does not solve issues for one-off community events.

Pro:
May further improve the MegaServer System so that it does not split up communities during large events.

Improves the chance of not getting split up during one-off community events.

anzenketh.3759:

BuD.7851:

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

Why should I HAVE to guest to another server to keep with guildies? I chose the server Im on for a reason, not to get separated by this megaserver…

You should not have too. I was not saying that you should have too. I was offering a possible workaround to a problem. Plus I am curious and can’t test it myself as I am not effected by the problem. Nor do I have the resources to test it myself.

My apologies for the misunderstanding.

I like the idea of large worlds having their own shard in the already populated zones, then kick to the megaserver if a map doesnt meet the player count.

anzenketh.3759:

Karuna.1357:

Megaservers have been nothing but a tremendous source of irritation so far. For one, they break up player communities: this has already been stated in numerous other posts so I won’t bother to list all the details here. Suffice to say, that communities are the strength of your player base. If you sever those then you shouldn’t be surprised if you start to see a drop-off in players.

Secondly, they are a huge irritation for guilds. During guild missions we are ending up with players on different servers and even bounties spawning on different servers . . . Why can’t we all just be on Tarnished Coast, like we are supposed to be, so we can work together? How are guild supposed to be able to organize any large-scale events together if the server system sends people all over the place?

Explain to me how any of this is a positive improvement for the game.

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

I also think it would be helpful for the developers if people that are experiencing routing issues give what server they have selected (Home Server or if they are guesting what server they are guesting on.) As well as what other criteria you think is met with the blog post.

We never once had this problem prior to the roll-out of megaservers, and we have been on Tarnished Coast for over 1 1/2 years now. We stationed our entire guild on TC for a reason — so we could perform large-scale events together (more than just WvW). The system isn’t working if we have to wait and ferry people over to the correct map just so we can proceed with our events.

They should have just done mergers, kick the bottom 3 servers and let the pop of those servers go wherever they wanted. The top 6 servers really didn’t have a problem with empty maps anyway. I’m still not really getting why mostly empty zones are a bad thing anyway…

Karuna.1357:

anzenketh.3759:

Karuna.1357:

Megaservers have been nothing but a tremendous source of irritation so far. For one, they break up player communities: this has already been stated in numerous other posts so I won’t bother to list all the details here. Suffice to say, that communities are the strength of your player base. If you sever those then you shouldn’t be surprised if you start to see a drop-off in players.

Secondly, they are a huge irritation for guilds. During guild missions we are ending up with players on different servers and even bounties spawning on different servers . . . Why can’t we all just be on Tarnished Coast, like we are supposed to be, so we can work together? How are guild supposed to be able to organize any large-scale events together if the server system sends people all over the place?

Explain to me how any of this is a positive improvement for the game.

Try guesting to another server while doing guild missions. I honestly think Tarnished Coast PvE population is just too large for the soft caps causing the equivalent of overflows.

I also think it would be helpful for the developers if people that are experiencing routing issues give what server they have selected (Home Server or if they are guesting what server they are guesting on.) As well as what other criteria you think is met with the blog post.

We never once had this problem prior to the roll-out of megaservers, and we have been on Tarnished Coast for over 1 1/2 years now. We stationed our entire guild on TC for a reason — so we could perform large-scale events together (more than just WvW). The system isn’t working if we have to wait and ferry people over to the correct map just so we can proceed with our events.

Never said it was working. My idea about guesting is a experiment and a possible workaround. Please re-read my post.

With the coming megaserver, i’m interested in reading/hearing what other guys and gals that invested time/money/effort into organizing and building a sense of server community think about this change. I really feel strongly that a very large part of my effort and the effort of the rest of the community is all for not on a pve level with this change.

If you know your servers community leaders/organizers please encourage them to discuss any ideas and/or strategies they plan to focus on to help keep our sense of community from crumbling under the weight of the megaserver.

Please remove Megaserver.
We’ve chosen a Server at the beginning because we wanted to play there. We transfer to another Server, if we don’t like the one we’ve chosen. Most of us love their Server and the “family” we found there, but the Megaserverthingy destroys everything.
I want to play with my Drakkar-family, and don’t want to be forced to a map, where 5 different languages are spoken and German speaking peoples are called kittens (kittens=bad guys from 2nd worldwar).
Maybe the system works for NA Servers, where most fellows speak English, but in EU it’s really bad.
My English isn’t good enough to bring up all my disappointment, but I think everything what bothers me was posted earlier in this thread.
Please give us back our Homeworlds!

Gwenryth.9450:

Please remove Megaserver.
We’ve chosen a Server at the beginning because we wanted to play there. We transfer to another Server, if we don’t like the one we’ve chosen. Most of us love their Server and the “family” we found there, but the Megaserverthingy destroys everything.
I want to play with my Drakkar-family, and don’t want to be forced to a map, where 5 different languages are spoken and German speaking peoples are called kittens (kittens=bad guys from 2nd worldwar).
Maybe the system works for NA Servers, where most fellows speak English, but in EU it’s really bad.
My English isn’t good enough to bring up all my disappointment, but I think everything what bothers me was posted earlier in this thread.
Please give us back our Homeworlds!

Friend, I’m American and I agree 100%.

I picked a low pop server because my machine is not the newest (AMD Dual Core Athlon x64), and huge amounts of people on the map force me to turn my graphics down so low that Guild Wars 1 looks better.

I agree with the Megaserver concept, just not it being FORCED. Keep the megaservers, but also keep the world servers, and let the player choose if they want to stay in their normal world maps or the megaserver maps. If overflow is an issue on a map, then that can be automatic megaserver rather than overflow.

Here’s my feedback report: Experiment have failed.

By experiment I mean the combination of Megaservers and World Boss encounter changes.
It’s totally not viable in this condition.

World Boss run literally died for me. The pre-events SHOULD NOT be allowed to activate while the boss spawn time IS OFF. For the past few days people continued to rush to complete the pre-event BEFORE the spawn time IS ON. Which lead to the event being finished BEFORE BOSS HAS ANY CHANCE TO SPAWN. Which mean boss is killed before he is born, and it counts as boss being killed, so try again 2hrs later (sigh…)

This mess on top of a megaserver, we cannot coordinate efficiently any more. Players from different servers have DIFFERENT ADJUSTMENTS TO ADAPT.

More on World Boss encounter changes:
there’s a 15 minute window between each world boss activation time, but please understand that there are bosses that can DIE WITHIN A MINUTE. I don’t want to afk for 15 minute after EVERY SINGLE WORLD BOSS.

To score them individually:
World Boss encounter changes: -1,000,000% (1000% unnecessary changes)
Megaserver: 50% (I like the idea, but there needs to be more adjustments)

I propose:
Remove World Boss encounter changes, this way megaserver could really stay for good, and people won’t blindly complete pre-events and ultimately stop boss from being spawn.

Tken.1986:

I propose:
Remove World Boss encounter changes, this way megaserver could really stay for good, and people won’t blindly complete pre-events and ultimately stop boss from being spawn.

I say they need to make it so that the pre-events should not start until it is time for the boss to spawn. This is likely a bug. I would report it as a bug.

Just want to point out, that is article was about short term and long term transitions.
In the short term, I not happy, I feel cheated and the current state of some parts of the game is made poorer for it.
Do I think in the long term that things will be fixed and made better? Yes I do.

However in the short term, the companies of Anet and Ncsoft have proven that 10 million dollars in profit every quarter is not good enough for them and wish to make less money for certain portion of the player base who cared about the gem store, community and a challenge.

The Mega Server in it’s current state is a joke. Trying to get guild members on the same map takes way to much effort. Waypoints that are contested don’t show up as contested, so it becomes a guessing game to move around the map. All the boss battles are just giant zerg fests, where things die in 5 seconds. Any sense of challenge or playing the game in a personal manner is gone.
Trying to find anyone from the same server is even a challenge.

Having the world bosses on a set schedule, only showing up 3 times a day instead of 12. So you have to be logged in the game 12 hours a day to fight a certain boss you enjoy fighting?
So much for dynamic events. Even doing the pre-events for the world bosses they do not show up. As it’s not on Anets time.
What happen caring about the player’s time?

In the short term this update was not ready for production. Anet needs to stop beta testing on the production servers. Other companies use open test servers for a reason.

Anyone can defend Anet to high heaven, but I seriously doubt those people have logged into the game and played it for a large amount of time, while trying to play with friends, guilds or community members you know. Without being in a party.
Yes trying to get a group of 20 or more people together that you know, is a nightmare in the game, right now.

If you have not seen this issue or understand what I am talking about than you don’t have or not playing with more than 5 people at a time.

My (changed) opinion after another few hours of playing today. Megaservers is great as long as I don’t play with my guilds/friends. I see a lot more players in areas that were almost empty before. I play on Piken Square and I don’t use map chat often so I did not check to see if there were players who used another language. For my “solo”-play I don’t need anything special, just other players who use English.

BUT: The Megaserver should improve my gameplay also when I play with the guild/friends. And it doesn’t. After I finished getting some more map completion on my Mesmer I decided to do some trait hunting with some guild mates. I asked them to go to the map first and wait their 30 seconds for me. When I WPed to Straits of Devistation I ended up in a different map instance as they did. I had to join their party to get the option to join them in the map. As I play a lot with these players I should have been placed in the same map instance. They are part of my community.

Conclusion: Megaserver is great for “solo play”, but fails for group play so far for me. And that last part is more important for me. I would rather see ArenaNet remove the Megaservers until they got their algorithms solved. And if they need us to play with it and endure the misery before they can do that l would like to hear that from them. So far it seems they think it works great.

My frustration with the current implementation is partly because I don’t understand why they can’t get their algorithms working. I collect and analyse data for a living. With 20 months of data they should have more than enough to put people in the correct map instances. The fact that they can’t make me believe they do not have the full 20 months of data. Or they made the gap between the soft and hard cap much too small. Or they simply don’t know what they are doing

Rose Solane.1027:

My frustration with the current implementation is partly because I don’t understand why they can’t get their algorithms working. I collect and analyse data for a living. With 20 months of data they should have more than enough to put people in the correct map instances. The fact that they can’t make me believe they do not have the full 20 months of data. Or they made the gap between the soft and hard cap much too small. Or they simply don’t know what they are doing

Thing is most of your time in PvE is solo play. Players just do not level in parties or guilds a lot.

They do have some data. That is how the system works as well as it does now. It was horrible at launch in overflows.

Curious what Server are you on? How many players are you trying to get on one map?

I am seeing LESS people now on maps than I was prior to the megaservers’ implementation. I’m on TC, so obviously there was never a problem for us. I could usually count on fifteen or twenty other people on any given map. Now, apparently being guilded and being ‘based’ on TC isn’t enough to push me into the ‘main’ shard and I’m finding myself zoning into areas with maybe two other people on them? I walked into the reactor in Metrica Province and every event was backed up and running at once, save FE.

The game feels deserted. I thought the idea was to make maps more full. Instead, so many people are being pulled into so few instances of the same map that if you aren’t lucky enough to get into a ‘main’ you end up playing by yourself. I’ve never been in a standard overflow as empty as this.

Still no response from Anet. The overwhelming majority of people here HATE this new mega server system. I literally find it so toxic and community breaking. My community is shattered, I can’t end up in the same instances as my guild or party, now we have all been relegated to only doing WvW since that is the only thing that we can actually do as a group now. How are we supposed to earn our merits? Do you really not want people in PvE anymore?

My feedback on the matter of Mega Servers:

It seems as if either the criteria by which the servers are filled don’t really work out, or the servers are filling too fast, like Overflows on maps with recent patch events.
For the second possibility, my idea would be some kind of “soft border”.
Fill the Mega Server randomly, with people from servers of the same language until they reach about half the capacity of the server. From this point on, create a new Mega Server and start filling it randomly, while the first one allows entry only for people that are invited, have a Guild Member online, are in the same party as a person on that server or belong to the server which is represented the most.

Also, I would at least double the Boss spawns. At the current rate, it’s rare to actually fight a boss once per day. You have to keep a schedule for that, which is nothing a game should require their players to have.

I NEVER used to lag. I mean seriously on my desktop I could stream dev quality streams. My laptop wasn’t as good, but still a good quality stream not laggy. I could be in the zerg on either computer at Tequatl’s foot and not lag.

Now? I am averaging 3-4 frames per second on the mega server maps. I’m lagging somewhat in dungeons and lagging on most other maps. And you know what the best thing of all is? I’ll be at Teq in the zerg and am hit by a wave before I even see it. Why? Simply because of this update. So yes Thank you very much anet. This is the best update ever. NOT!

Mega servers and wb events—- horrible just awful. Please remove.
Maps are filled with players. making questing fairly often imposible to do. all the monsters being dead before hand.. We fight to get to hit the mobs….
map chat all over the place sounds like kitten QD chat with hate talk and the same meme’s being said again and again.

can’t even see my bank with this many players..

WB?? seriously…. no fun anymore.. I choose Vabbi- Because! it was low population. It was a great game to do Fire elemental 3-10 players. Now there is 100 at every kitten champ. sure it was also thus impossible to do Teq or karka or LS major events and we had to guest to get enough for those. BUT
You have made every single Encounter into a boring zerg!.
I would rather for ever miss out on the major bosses, then always have so many players there.
There is also no good way to figure out when we can do a boss. (yes saw some kind of table on the forum- but we would need a proper tracker)

I have gone from emjoying killing some 10 WB’s a day- to about 1-2 and I now find no enjoyment of it.

Worst Idea ever-

They aren’t going to solve the majority of the problems with algorithms. By stating you’d actually see more of your friends/guild and server using this megaserver is just PR. It’s impossible to merge players together and expect to see more than you would keeping them separate. That cannot be fixed, you’ll never see even 60% of your server (unless you’re on a super high pop server) on a regular basis. How is that more than 100% of the time? Ha… You might see more of your guild and friends, if they aren’t on your server, but how does that matter when you have guesting?

After WvW tourney is over, just dump the bottom 6 servers, let those players go wherever they want… That’ll bring up populations on the remaining servers. Or better yet, go back to what it was.

Feedback about Megaserver system, problems then suggested fixes:

Problems

1) The Megaserver system effectively maxes player population, which causes massive problems for people who meet the “minimum” system requirements instead of the “recommended”. This effectively locks some people completely out of content which they could access before, and makes the content harder to enjoy for additional people who have to turn their settings down just to stay in zone. This affects not just these people, but also their friends and guildmates who depend on them being able to play effectively.

2) There are communities in place on each server of people who do world events, bosses, champ trains, and/or dungeons together. These groups of people are from the same server, and occasionally party up together, but rarely are in the same guild or have each other friended. With the current Megaserver system, these communities are not being placed together in the same instances, to the point which it is a very rare occurrence to meet another member of a given community. Either the commonly-plays-with detection algorithms need to be improved, or the Megaserver needs a whole new criteria to match against. In response to the potential question, these people could join the same guilds and/or friend each other to increase the chance of Megaserver matching, but for the following:
a) The members of these communities already have guilds and friends they’ve chosen via personal standards, and they shouldn’t have additions to those groups dictated by a server selection mechanic, -especially- considering that some of these communities are huge.
b) Ignoring this issue for this reason would be effectively saying that the only forms of community in GW which are valid are guildmates and friended people… and if you value the social playerbase at all, you definitely do not want to say that.

Suggestions

1) Drop the max player cap. This value should be based such that a computer which barely meets the game’s minimum requirements, when on lowest settings, can run the instance at max player population without -any- lag or disconnect issues. This is the absolute maximum population any zone should be allowed to have, no exceptions – thats the -definition- of minimum requirements. This would then be the “hard” cap for a zone, with the “soft” cap being even lower, to allow room for the Megaserver system to work on matching players with their playgroups.
-P.S.: Additional bonus, this would also help with many of the other problems players are having with the Megaserver, such as too many questers, difficulty getting credit, etc.

2) Add a new matching criteria to the Megaserver weighting, call it whatever you want, for now I’ll call it the “buddy” list. Each account would have a buddy list in addition to the friend list, ignore list, etc. Players can add additional people to their buddy list without being in the same guild or friending them, and the Megaserver system will account for this new list when trying to match instances, in addition to trying to match server/friends/guild. This gives each player an additional degree of control on who they want to see consistently as they travel the world.
-P.S.: I imagine that the easiest way to code this would be to have only one list count as a matching criteria per person – e.g. a person on both the friend list and the buddy list would only be counted as being on whichever list has the higher weight in the system. However, if it was possible, it would be nice to have this not the case, so that players could use the buddy list to prioritize certain friends or guildmates over others. In a small guild or to someone who only has close friends on their friend list of course this wouldn’t matter.

Whenever the devs come back, I hope this gets seen, and I thank you for reading.

That won’t completely solve the problems, but it could be a start. I totally agree to the max player cap drop, it’s very frustrating as it is.

And add Preferred Language option maybe? I’m sick of the multilingual nightmare the game has become.

Just popping by quickly to say that the Megaserver really broke up our Guild Bounties and any larger (4×5)+ guild parties. Some members would always end up in another instance and either miss out on a bounty or the guild event we where doing.

Lucyfer.9517:

lordkrall.7241:

I love this community:

Before megaservers:
“Buhuhua all maps are empty, the game is dead!!!!”

Now:
“Buhuhu the megeserver system sucks, it is the worst thing ever added to the game, why can’t I play on my server?!?”

And pathetically enough it is often the SAME people that said both of these things.
I suppose complaining for the sake of complaining is something we just have to get used to here.

As a deso player i never complained about population it was not an issue, i could go to any boss at any time and have many people to complete it with. And yes the megaserver sucks, it would be good if it was enabled for small servers only. For big servers it brings nothing but harm.

Well as a Vabbi player (Notoriously lowest pop server) I would like to also not have mega servers please.
Yes we have issues with never having population to do LS large scale events, Teq-karka-3hwurm. Often even not enough to do Claw.. Hence we had to guest to try those events. And yes. wvw would always give us Outnumbered boon.

But… I would still much rather miss out on all that and not have everything else in the game become a boring zerg fest – including all the way down to normal heart quests I used to solo.
It must be possible to scale things so that you can do solo-able quests and 2-10 man-able WB’s, and still sometimes be able to do a Teq. —
And if not-- fine— ill miss out on the LS major events and such-
Rather that then this Mega-Cat-Kitten- Feline- Felidae—Felis server CAT

I originally posted this in the last Megaserver thread. Since then I have seen megaserver in all its wonder and feel it’s much worse than I thought. Please see this additional post describing the issues we face. This patch essentially Killed any chance of ever hosting a public community event in Guild Wars 2.

Megaserver = Megamess for Guild Missions
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/missions/Megaserver-Megamess-for-Guild-Missions/first#post3924070

ORIGINAL POST—-

Greetings,
Many of you may know me as the leader of Gaiscioch [GSCH] a 13 year old gaming community who has spanned 4 games and now entering our 5th. I am also a man whose life was affected by Roger Oldroar Rall and organized a group of his friends and family to help influence ArenaNet to get a server named in his memory.

I understand the goals behind the MegaServer:

1. Avoid Server Closures / Mergers
The Megaserver concept pushes servers together so that they are 1 group of people sharing the same game world. This is a fantastic concept and from a PR perspective brilliant. Instead of the gaming press reporting about server closures and mergers (as you know they would) putting a negative tone on your product and usually causing a snowball effect, you can avoid all this by megaservering up.
2. Putting people in empty zones.
As the population has progressed and spread out, population in non-champ farm zones or Orr has dwindled. This system would allow everyone who IS playing in a zone that’s not as popular as it once was to have people to play with. This is a great concept.
3. Putting more opportunity to make new guild mates.

By pushing the community together guilds can have a much larger recruiting pool. However the problem then becomes how to get them to be able to play with you in WvW.

All of these concepts are great on paper however in application there are some things that you need to think about.

1. The Death of Server Communities.
By Megaservering if your server is not a 100% WvW dedicated place, such as Sanctum of Rall, your zones will be filled with foreigners, people who you have fought against for over a year and a half, who’s blood boils at the mere sight of you. We’ve all seen it, you’re in an overflow and someone starts up with the server bashing. This is going to be day in day out every day in Guild Wars 2 from this day forward. The bad blood is going to be spilled out all over our capital cities, our formerly friendly zones, and fill our chats.

2. Public Community Events
In addition think about events like the Great Tyrian Adventure where 150 people from all of the guilds on Sanctum of Rall pull together for a few events per week to play together and make some epic memories. In the new system all of the servers flood into instances of the zone. Getting those 150 people into the same 2 overflows will become increasingly more difficult. See the Lion’s Arch event for example. Getting into the same instance with 30 of your friends was impossible. Imagine trying to do that with 150+. The megaserver will prevent things like Great Tyrian Adventure from happening altogether. Imagine trying to talk 150 people into getting into the same map to complete as task. Can we say migraine?
Goodbye to Server Climate
The server climate we all have come to love over the years will now be gone. You’ll be mixed into all servers and the feeling of server pride will solely be one for WvW players. For the better part of the past 2 years I have been giving bags out to new players on Sanctum of Rall to thank them for calling us home. On April 15th that will no longer be feasible as every player in the game would also share that zone. There is no way for me to communicate just to the Sanctum of Rall players.

Server Communication
Before every WvW event I travel around and let people know where we’re going and encourage them, no matter the level, to come out and have some fun with us in WvW. I hit queensdale, divinity’s reach, vigil keep, and a few zones in Orr. Come April 15th I will no longer be able to do that as people will not be from Sanctum of Rall and will be unable to join us in WvW. With no way to communicate with your allies this will become an even more difficult feat for non-wvw focused servers to mobilize forces.

I see you objective and it is a valued one however I strongly feel that this is a bad move and will negatively affect the game in the coming months. You’re changing Server Community to Game Community and putting barriers in communication which will hurt those servers who have been struggling.

On top of that I’m pretty sure this is just the tip of the iceberg and soon WvW will be to follow. At which point there will be nothing left of the houses we built.
Please reconsider this option until you have some time to think about all the repercussions and the long term effect on communities.

Concerned,

Mods pls keep this separate if at all possible as this thread is only dealing with guild missions.

I figured this was worth bringing up here so that we could generate some discussion on guild missions and how they are currently being effected by the megaservers and if there are any positive things we could suggest to make running them easier now that many servers and guilds are running them at the same time.

Originally from here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/missions/Megaserver-Megamess-for-Guild-Missions/first#post3924070

Foghladha.2506

Last night I tried to run Sanctum of Rall’s community guild missions event which runs every Thu @ 6PM and Sat @ 11PM PDT (Server Time). I was hopeful about the mega server after it stated that people are prioritized on Mega Servers.

1. Friends
2. Guilds Paired Together
3. Servers
4. Mixed from other servers.

This concept on paper looked like if we group up first in a common ground (WvW) we could get everyone into SORC (Sanctum of Rall Community Events) Then head back to the PvE area to complete the guild missions. Usually these runs are an hour for all 4 mission types that yield rewards.

Last night however was a disaster. The above diagram doesn’t work at all. We had people who were repping SORC in 6 different versions of Snowden drifts. The timberline falls challenge we spent 30 minutes just taxing people to the right instance only to find another guild kicked it off while we were trying to get organized. For the Bounty there was 4 other guilds there trying to dog-pile him and the creature died before most of us could even get there.

At the end of the day we spent an hour and 45 minutes on the run and couldn’t even complete the puzzle due to the bug where the torches didn’t light. This megaserver has turned running missions to near impossible. Guilds are fighting over who goes first and it’s next to impossible to get everyone on the same version of the map. The prioritizing doesn’t work at all and the whole thing is quickly becoming more trouble than it’s worth.

This was my fear in the beginning when I posted about this patch. Things like the Great Tyrian Adventure (http://sanctumofrall.com/gta) will now be utter chaos and pretty close to impossible to run smoothly.

Please fix the system to get guilded folks together. Or at least give us the ability to select what version of the world we can join like Guild Wars 1. Coordinating larger numbers in PvE is now almost impossible.

I figured there were enough people out there running missions and I am wondering if others are running into the same issues that we had last night. I know I have 12 guilds working toward starting mission running and if we were having headaches with just 50 people I can’t imagine things going any better with more people involved.

Loving the silence from anet here – they do have a pr department right?

I believe they think that it’s just a hype that will go away in a few days. Trust me, it won’t.

I have been doing map completion in Fields of Ruin. Noone from Tarrnished Coast (as I am). I get criticised by 3 people and told “TC is that way →” when I simply mention the fact that as a human, I feel awkward killing humans (separatists) to aid the charr.

At this stage, I am wishing there was a game out there that interests me more than GW2.

GuzziHero.2467:

I have been doing map completion in Fields of Ruin. Noone from Tarrnished Coast (as I am). I get criticised by 3 people and told “TC is that way ->” when I simply mention the fact that as a human, I feel awkward killing humans (separatists) to aid the charr.

At this stage, I am wishing there was a game out there that interests me more than GW2.

Have you tried Space Station 13? An awesome thing for any rpgamer

TC has been rather shredded by a massive influx of complete trolls and kittenheads.

TC is getting a whole lot of kitten because we’re ‘the roleplay server.’ Throwing us in with people who aren’t interested in RP and think it’s stupid/all cybersex/etc. was never going to end any other way. There’s a reason those people chose not to join TC in the first place. My ignore list is filling up rapidly.

The PvE community has taken a hit, too. If WBs weren’t dying faster I wouldn’t even be showing up for them, because the numbers have cost any semblance of community. It’s like a contest to see who can be the biggest kitten, and it’s in every chat channel. If I want to avoid it (I don’t feel like listening to a bunch of 16 year old boys scream about their genitals) I have to turn off everything but GC + party and effectively cut myself off from the entire social aspect of the game.

Totally unimpressed with the megaserver idea. Am guessing A-net is not doing well at the moment if they have to lump all former servers together. And, am quite curious what will happen Saturday when the Guild Missions reset. Thinking that my guild will end up in different maps, and it will be nigh on impossible to get us all together. I would so much rather go back to what we had, even with the overflows during certain events, such as the Marionette had. I’d also rather go back to the previous schedule of world events along with the API. Now it’s like what’s next on the rotation, try to get there long before it starts so maybe, just maybe one will be with guildies.

All, I originally posted this back in the pre-patch thread talking about the megaserver changes that were headed our way; I like the idea less now.

Original post:

[snip]
Anyways, the dev team should be able to come up with a solution to be able to see which dungeons, and waypoints are contested/ open at any given time for any given player. This may not be the most computationally simple algorithm, but then I don’t know their infrastructure and can’t say for sure. I’ll let them be the judge.
The game already keeps track of servers that the player has an affinity for based on home world, guild, friends list, and who we play with most frequently. When you open your map they should be able to let you know which waypoints are available or contested on your current map without any problem. They are, however, claiming that they can’t tell you which waypoints are available on any map you currently aren’t on. This needs to be remedied. By using the same algorithm they already use to determine which server you will load on when you go between maps you can do the following:
1. When the user opens the map, run their affinity for each zone adjacent to their current zone, even if only when zoomed in to the point waypoints are fully visible.
2. When the user moves their map, recalculate the zone affinity as necessary based on the current map position and adjacent maps to that position. This should be fairly simply when using an R-tree since you have the dimensions of the user’s screen, the position of the map, and the zoom level. With that you can create a rectangle of what they are currently viewing. Narrow that done to zones that intersect with the viewing port (should be very simple since all zones are rectangles anyways) and, if the zoom if far enough in, determine which waypoints are contested based on the server affinity that we have already calculated.
3. Maintaining the current waypoint polling interval (or, better yet, a push interface) you can update the current viewed maps as necessary, so that if (for example) the version of Caledon Forrest that your affinity places you in fills up while you are on the map, it could update to show the runner up’s available waypoints.
This will let the players see which maps and waypoints they can get in to quickly and not place too much additional stress on the servers. If you only update the check each time enough map movement has happened to require it (a new zone has been added to the view port for instance) it won’t even be a very frequent poll.
Now, potential problems that may arise from this idea:
1. What if I see a waypoint is available, port there and find out that it has become contested since I ported?
— This is the same thing that can happen today. I have had it happen a number of times in PvE, and even more notably in WvW, where I have ported to a waypoint just to get a popup on my screen once it is done loading that says something to the effects of “the waypoint you attempted to access has become contested”. I hit “okay” and go on with life. It doesn’t even redirect you to a different location, which I don’t have a problem with.
2. What if the server I have the highest affinity for is full by the time I port?
— Again, I see this as a non-issue. Just let the transaction complete as it had with the runner up, pop up a message if necessary on the screen telling the user that their waypoint has become contested, and move on.
3. I got in to the map I had the greatest affinity for, but the rest of my party didn’t… what now?
— Right click ? “Join in map”, or if that isn’t available/ a valid option because, say, your map has the dungeon open and their doesn’t, but your map is full, then you can always try to find another/ wait until they can get in to the map. I don’t see this as being any different than getting caught in an overflow as the current system works in which you don’t have the dungeon open.
Are there possible problems with this solution that I haven’t thought of, or just don’t have enough insight in to the game infrastructure to account for? Very probably, but I am hoping that it can at least provide the devs with a possible solution to the problem a lot of people seem to be having with today’s blog post and lead to something people can be happier with. Plus, I don’t overly enjoy the idea of having 1/2+ of Orr contested at all times unless I am on the map.

Now, we also have screenshots available to us. I am standing in the Black Citadel and this is what I see for Plains of Ashford (attached image). As you can tell, only 3 waypoints are available, and they are all the ones right outside of town.

What is the point of having waypoints if the majority of them are inaccessible?

When finding a large group to do an event and doing one or two, I will sometimes end up in a new zone with nobody in it when we move on to another event. Is there some way to avoid this? I don’t mind ending up in a smaller group, but an empty map is a bit grating.

Issue with megaserver

I was doing guild bounty with my guild and we only kill one bounty target for commendation. One one occasion, the megaserver system fail to put my entire guild on the same map instance.

Also, the megaserver seems to overlap our missions with other guilds’. We are not a small guild, we are capable of completing our mission by ourselves and these overlapping is causing delay in the missions, causing some degree of inconvenience for us as it is already sleeping time for some members.

Europe players will be glad today. Their language issue was fixed.

Added a chat option – enabled by default – that shows only the messages coming from players sharing your client’s text language.

Still there is still a mass communication issue for organized events. However that can be solved as a community.

Well ArenaNet solved one issue with the latest hotfix:
Added a chat option – enabled by default – that shows only the messages coming from players sharing your client’s text language.

Well that really solved the issue with different languages on one server which made it difficult to communicate with each other. Now we simple don’t see the other messages anymore.

/end sarcasm

I will disable this option immediately. I rather see French, German and Spanish in the chat so that I know there are others who want to communicate.

So far no sign that ArenaNet is aware of the fact that their placing algorithm doesn’t do what it should do. No post Yeah we know it does not work flawlessly, but we are working on it. Nothing. Or did I miss a post?

I am very disappointed. I should probably play some other games this weekend. I hope the Easter weekend give the employees of ArenaNet some time to think. Hopefully about a solution for the problem. Or they going to realise that the current implementation simply isn’t good enough and destroys communities.

Happy Easter everyone and see you next Tuesday.

Mustafa.7684:

Now that we have mega servers, how are we supposed to keep tabs on members. If we put out a message in map chat and we get members to join how can we ensure these members are not part of WvW??

If they do WvW and they are the enemy server what will stop them from spying or hindering us? Anyone else feel this way or am I a bit PARAnoid?

Uhm, make sure you pick better people for your guild is the only solution I can see. I started a multi-server guild even before this megaserver stuff kicked in, and while not often, 2 of the servers have faced each other in WvW before. I don’t know about anyone else, but enemy server or not, if I was in WvW and saw my guild’s tag running around attached to an enemy player, I wouldn’t attack that player.

Turning megaservers off will turn me on

Bandaid fix. " Added a chat option – enabled by default – that shows only the messages coming from players sharing your client’s text language.
This option is only applied in to the /map and /say channels, as well as the /team channel in the Edge of the Mists. Other channels are not affected."

Should work well now. Doesnt change the fact that your map may be full of people who you cant communicate with

Speckly.3729:

(I don’t feel like listening to a bunch of 16 year old boys scream about their genitals)

This is the reason I left EQ2 and came to GW2 4 months ago, now it’s an epidemic of adolescent spammers at every WB. There’s nothing that can be done about it except strict moderation and prompt response to player report.

In the scheme of things i think from a business perspective it’s less costly to lose some offended players than it is to devote manpower towards enforcement and then ultimately lose the banned players who commit the act.

But i would like to see an Anet representative to go spend a while in vigil keep and witness the lengths that some of these trolls go to in order to disrupt other players, even to the extent of only using emotes. Is this the game you had envisioned when you decided that megaservers was the best trend to follow?