Guild Wars 2

I haven’t been keeping up with this thread and I’m not gonna read through 12 or so pages to see if this has already been suggested, so…

With some rare exceptions, each chest event gives the chance for the same rewards. Yet I’ve only been in overflows for Shadow Behemoth, Claw of Jormag or (just once) Tequatl. Never for the Frozen Maw or the fire elemental in Metrica Province.

I think one fairly easy way to ease the problem some is to shorten the time between spawns of several of the more infrequent and co-incidently more popular events (Claw of Jormag and Shadow Behemoth, maybe Tequatl or The Shatterer). Same limit per character/per world boss + more opportunities to reach that limit=more spread out player base for each spawn.

Thus less need for overflows, less lag, less xenophobia and less complaining without an economic effect or the major kittenfest that would come with a nerf to guesting or the chest per character limit.

(In other words, instead of Shadow Behemoth’s spawn window opening every three hours have the window for Shadow Behemoth every 1.5 or 2 hours – I’m just making numbers up to illustrate my point, Idk how long it normally is between windows)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this change for the Frozen Maw, the Fire Elemental or some of the more frequent spawning chest events. Or some would be popping every few minutes and perhaps disrupting the normal flow of a zone.

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One other thing I’d like to see is a toggle in Options to tone down spell effects. Idk if this would lower the stresses on Anet’s end, but for people with less than brand new/high end machines a large zerg ball with flashing spells everywhere makes my computer cry. You could keep the sounds, white and red circles and grey combo field hearts. But I think if some of us could tone down the visual explosions and flashing lights of a major zergball at an event or wvw battle it would help.

I have no problem with guesting. That is until it messes with my game. Until the last few days I had no problem going and doing the dragons. Timer counts down when it turns yellow pop over and wait for the dragon kill him get your loot and go do something else. But lately on Tarnished Coast your gonna get put into overflow. I spent 3 hours trying to do a dragon yesterday, only to finally get to do Jormag and poof in the middle of the battle disconnected and sent to purgatory or should I say overflow no chest for me. This is new and wasn’t a problem on my server until guesting. So something is Rotten in Denmark. Perhaps if its your server you should get priority over guesters and they should be sent to purgatory or overflow instead of me. I don’t go to other worlds, one is enough for me or at least it was.

I would like to do the temples down in Orr but the timers never seem to work and I haven’t been able to figure out how they work or where they start. But I guess I better start.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

I would like to do the temples down in Orr but the timers never seem to work and I haven’t been able to figure out how they work or where they start. But I guess I better start.

Unlike the dragons, the temples take a bit of effort to complete. I’m not sure how active they are now, but before the chest change it was common to head to orr and see the temples ready to be activated.

You can check the state of the temples by looking at their icons on the map or by looking at the statue icons to see if they’re contested. Porting to the grove usually updates the map, allowing you to see how it really is.

For how to do them, http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple

Conner.4702:

All a fixed timer will do is make it easier to schedule it. It will do nothing to fix the problem which is everyone flocking to these events which in turn causes overflows. Guesting is not what causes overflows a servers own population does. You are under the impression that people will spread out. Well the opposite will happen people will do them even more, which will make the problem even worse.

Which is why I said ArenaNet needs to decide on if they want these events to be rarely done or farmed.

I fully expected a fixed timer to cause the events to be massively zerged like clockwork. They would be officially scheduled after all, occuring in the same way the daily resets. My intention, along with the assumption that these events were intended to be daily rewards, was to remove the waiting so that I can actually go back to playing the game. I also assume these changes were meant to bring people into the zones with the intention that they would actually play in them to make them look alive, but that’s simply not happening.

I don’t care how they handle it but personally I’d like to see the chests reverted if they’re kept the way they are. I don’t want to know that reward-wise, playing for 4 hours in the open world solo is going to probably yield less than AFKing for 30 minutes and then killing a boss for 2 minutes.

They can’t just go and do something like improving the drops in the open world, because that would only increase the problem if chests stayed the same. Plus, drops are already unfair to solo players, while in comparison, extremely rewarding to zergs. They first need to implement a loot system that doesn’t encourage zerging, but I don’t see that happening since it’s currently a feature.

Conner.4702:

People will be able to run even more characters through these events than they do now.

More people would have a chance to run the event, but the same person on multiple characters would find it harder to do. If all the world bosses occured simultaneously, you’d only be able to kill maybe 2 of them before the rest were killed because you can’t stop an entire server. You could try guesting, but they’d also be killed, unless the server was really slow. It would take you several attempts (the 2 hour blocks they would spawn in) to kill all the world bosses, which would take you all day for just 1 character. Compared to now, you can kill all the major world bosses within a single 2 hour window if you can find good timers, allowing you to do multiple characters a day.

Although there would actually be more people runnning the event all day, the total loot for each individual would be far less.

If they didn’t occur simultaneously, but rather every 30 minutes, then yes, they could be easily farmed all day using multiple characters.

So guest on some lower pop servers to do the events instead of kittening constantly???

When going to a spawn point at an event on your own server, you should have priority to guests on your server. It realy is unfair, that you get bumped to an overflow untill the event is over. Even though it is a small amount to travel, you must wait up to possibly 3 hours till event spawns again, very frustrating. I think it should automaticly bump guests for the local server population.

Ever since this change, I’ve not been able to pop into a dragon event without being thrown into overflow…and missing that event entirely.

Not fair when it never happened before.

…and no, I do not guest. I do not feel it necessary to guest since everyone I play with is currently on my own server.

Fixed for me, no more overflow at all on Drakkar Lake.

Iruwen.3164:

Fixed for me, no more overflow at all on Drakkar Lake.

hehehe…most likely everyone else guested elsewhere then…

Lucky you. :=)

Our guild did the level 1 bounty this evening.

Our first target was Bookworm, which we killed no problem. Our next target was Tessa in Frostgorge Sound. With 10min on the clock left, we all ported to our targets location only to be moved in to the overflow map.

Because of this our guild didn’t get the reward for killing both targets. We also lose influence because we used influence to queue it up and we didn’t get the commendations. This is something that definitely needs to be fixed.

Since the introduction of the 1 chest pr. boss pr. day pr. character, almost every single world event/world boss creates so much pressure on the zone that all players that arrive around the time of the pre-event/event get thrown into the overflow (almost always long enough for the event to end).
This is a serious issue that takes a big chunk of the fun out of the game. I don’t mind the fact that as a player you can’t “camp” events for the chests by making the limitation, but it does become a problem when a fair share of the players can’t even participate in events when you hear about them being about to start in your guild chat – because of the overflow of players for the events.

The pleasure for us PvE players is serious, we can’t sit around for 2-3 hours just to have a shot at encountering a boss ikittenone. Once we have finished the quests and puzzles in an area, it’s not really that interesting to sit around doing nothing, waiting for a fun encounter to turn up.

Please adress this issue or make some sort of announcement on what you plan to do to resolve this in a future patch.

lynspottery.6529:

Iruwen.3164:

Fixed for me, no more overflow at all on Drakkar Lake.

hehehe…most likely everyone else guested elsewhere then…

Lucky you. :=)

Funny thing, I just went to overflow at Jormag. 11:00 is a very, very unusual time for that to happen considering not many people play then in Germany.

Aaand overflow again, no really not solved…

i think this is getting beyond a joke , off to kill jormag on THE SERVER IM ON , and lo and behold i have to join a an overflow to kill it with about 50 others , well done arenanet round of applause , bury the server even more!!! , the overflow lasted the length of time the jormag was there till after it died , this among other things has finally put the nail in the coffin , i just wished id had the insight to see all this b4 i wasted hard earned cash on this badly put together mmo ………………….

The overflows are still out of hand. I’ve only been able to do a few events total in the past couple of days. This could be in part because I can only play during prime time, but I’ve even tried guesting on lower pop servers and I still get put in overflows. I don’t know if it’s guesting or just the servers not allowing enough people into the zones. I even got to a zone 30 minutes before the 1 hour window and still got put into an overflow!!

Make the chest account bound… problem solved!

regardeless of the chest being account bound , obviously arenanet have put no thought into this process , look how many have commented on this thread and still yet arenanet wont do anything or have not done anything , it will eventually get to the point where people wont log on , and then its to late , and they will have only themselves to blame , they do enough updates so they claim , yet cant fix major issues like this its stupid tbh ………

the worst thing, game can’t handle a lot of people doing an event, so you either get the sound issue, or the game just simply crashes. So by the time you log back in, either the event is over and you miss out on the chest, or you are in overflow and can’t get back to the event and miss out on chest.

exactly it seems arenanet dont listen to the mass amounts of people who did the silly thing and purchased this game on the pretense that the game would be actually worth playing , im guessing quite a few ex players or future ex players are thinking the same thing , what are arenanet playing at , because u try emailing them with ur issues and they suddenly act like they are not there , i have emailed them a couple of times regarding sissues and not once had a reply off them ……….

It doesn’t make sense to say that highly populated servers create overflows within themselves for world event, therefore guesting is not the problem. I don’t know if people are closing their eyes but guesting WORSENS this already existing problem by adding more people into the mix.

So if 150 locals want to get into a 120 persons event, it doesn’t matter if you throw in another 50 guests because… 30 locals weren’t going to get in anyway? Seems legit.

The key problem here is that native players are increasingly unable to attend their own events because of overflows, and it has gotten to the point where overflows are created even 10-15 minutes before pre-events starts.

A few suggestions to mitigate this problem until they increase the limit for these events:

1. Make people bind their servers to a maximum of 2 other servers i.e. you can only guest at 2 other selected servers and not go server hopping farming dragons.

2. Impose a separate limit for guests – e.g. each world allows for 30 guests at one time, and if there are more, they automatically are redirected into overflow until a guest leaves even if the map isn’t technically full.

3. Impose a 2 hour cooldown between each guesting instance. Since the original intention was to allow you to play with friends from other servers, this shouldn’t be a problem. You can alternatively create a link between two servers and not have any cooldown if you continue to go between that server and your own, but cooldown applies to any attempts to guest a third server.

4. Limit chests obtained from guesting to 2 per day, such that any dragons past 2 killed while guesting no longer yields chests. Alternatively, chests obtained during guesting do not guarantee rares; only chests in home servers guarantee rares.

It makes no sense that natives are unable to attend their own events and instead told to go guest for their dragons, therefore kittening another server over and perpetuating the problem.

I just want one thing, give me an option to accept or not that I’m going to Overflow. I know the tech is in the game to do it, you do it for WvW whekittenone is full. You’re taking peoples coin who are expecting to participate in an event.

I’ve said this before, but make guesting invite only. If you have no friends on the server then you don’t have a reason to be there.

Lightning.8397:

It doesn’t make sense to say that highly populated servers create overflows within themselves for world event, therefore guesting is not the problem. I don’t know if people are closing their eyes but guesting WORSENS this already existing problem by adding more people into the mix.

So if 150 locals want to get into a 120 persons event, it doesn’t matter if you throw in another 50 guests because… 30 locals weren’t going to get in anyway? Seems legit.

The key problem here is that native players are increasingly unable to attend their own events because of overflows, and it has gotten to the point where overflows are created even 10-15 minutes before pre-events starts.

A few suggestions to mitigate this problem until they increase the limit for these events:

1. Make people bind their servers to a maximum of 2 other servers i.e. you can only guest at 2 other selected servers and not go server hopping farming dragons.

2. Impose a separate limit for guests – e.g. each world allows for 30 guests at one time, and if there are more, they automatically are redirected into overflow until a guest leaves even if the map isn’t technically full.

3. Impose a 2 hour cooldown between each guesting instance. Since the original intention was to allow you to play with friends from other servers, this shouldn’t be a problem. You can alternatively create a link between two servers and not have any cooldown if you continue to go between that server and your own, but cooldown applies to any attempts to guest a third server.

4. Limit chests obtained from guesting to 2 per day, such that any dragons past 2 killed while guesting no longer yields chests. Alternatively, chests obtained during guesting do not guarantee rares; only chests in home servers guarantee rares.

It makes no sense that natives are unable to attend their own events and instead told to go guest for their dragons, therefore kittening another server over and perpetuating the problem.

It makes no sense to limit something that isn’t the problem in the first place. Guesting is NOT the problem here. If your server would create an overflow of it own regardless of people guesting or not than restricting guesting is going to do crap to solve the problem.

The problem is: more or less everyone and their mothers going out to do boss events. People are going earlier and earlier to secure their spots and it will only get worse unless the incentive to just do these events is removed. Give people a reason to do something else that will yield as good or nearly as good of a reward as these boss events in the same reasonable amount of time and people will spread out again. Thus solving the overflow problem. Either that or making the timers random so waiting for them is actually a waste of time.

Anet seems to be hell bend on funnelling people into specific content though.

Conner.4702:

It makes no sense to limit something that isn’t the problem in the first place. Guesting is NOT the problem here. If your server would create an overflow of it own regardless of people guesting or not than restricting guesting is going to do crap to solve the problem.

I won’t jump to conclusions and say guesting is the cause or it isn’t, because we just don’t know. The ones who say this can’t proof it, and neither can you provide any evidence that the opposite is true.
The only one who knows this because they work with hard numbers is ANet, so just solve this problem. Thanks.

With the combination of guesting and improved loot from world boss chests, there has been a ton of lag, disconnection and overflow issues. There are plenty of arguments here about server hopping/guesting, and I wanted to give proof that guesting is a major contributer of these issues, as well as why some of the suggested solutions would not work:

1." It doesn’t matter if I exploit the system of guesting to get more chest drops, or get them faster because guesting itself is allowed."

Guesting was implemented as a way for players on different servers to play with their friends. If you are using the guesting system to farm events/loot, you are exploiting that feature and not using it as intended. Just because a player has the ability to exploit something in a game doesn’t make it any more legal to do so. With this issue causing so many overflows, this is actually keeping guesting from achieving its original goal-which was to allow friends from different servers to play together.

2. “If you don’t like being kicked out of your own events, come early. First come first served.”

While normally not a bad idea, this no longer works because everybody else had the same idea weeks ago. People are showing up hours early, even leaving their characters afk at the event site allowing nobody to leave overflow, which is very rude. These players are not just affecting others who want to do the event, they hinder others looking for groups to do dungeons with, and people trying to do the lesser events in that zone, who should not have to “show up early”.

3. “You aren’t entitled to a space on your server.”

Technically, everyone who paid for the game (and isn’t a bot) is entitled to play on their home server, which is permanent unless you are willing to pay for a server transfer. So really, “first come first served” applies to the natives of the server here, because they chose their server first.

4. “How do you know that it’s guesters and not natives causing the problem after the chests were updated with better loot?”

By their declaration of intent. On these forums, and throughout the game’s map chat, I have seen ( and I know other people have as well) guesters bragging outright about what they have done to get all their loot, even saying things such as “Well, now I’m off to ‘different server name’ to do Jormag/Teq/Shatterer/SB!” Not just once, twice, or thrice. Many times.

5.“Server natives should guest to other low pop servers if they don’t like the overflow/getting disconnected from the game.”

Again, server hopping to avoid overflows/lag is not what guesting was intended to be used for, and nobody should be forced to guest if they do not want to. Doing this also would mess up other servers causing more population issues. And, it is childish logic to suggest that the people who were there first should be the ones to leave.

This is an extremely frustrating issue for lots of players, but the good thing is that we shouldn’t have to worry much longer because the game developers are probably looking for ways to solve this as we speak. (Probably have been since the issue came up in the first place) I’m sure they want to get rid of this exploit as much as we do.

On Tarnished Coast there was never a problem with overflow until all the guesting started. I don’t always just do dragons. I check to see what dragons are going to pop then decide what to do, if one is soon like in the next 20-30 minutes I might switch to a level 80 and go do that. But lately if you want to do Claw you need to camp for about an hour and a half. Which is boring to all. Then when it finally starts you got about a 20% chance of getting disconnected and sent to overflow when you get back. I waited in overflow last night for about an hour and 15 minutes only to have everyone leave before event started and even I gave up as waiting for an event you don’t know will happen is pretty bad.

Perhaps if you are guesting so you can play with your friends you might want to change to their server!.

Maybe guesters should not get priority over the players who live on that server. So if someone who lives on the server wants into an area it would actually bump the guest to overflow instead of the homey.

People said a lot of the overflow to TC was people on WvW servers with rotten PvE. Well, I cannot go to their worlds and WvW so why can they camp my PvE. I picked this server for a reason it was the unoffical PvE and roleplaying server. We pretty much get eaten on WvW and I’m willing to live with that. It’s harder to Map WvW and I’m willing to live with that. I feel bad while mapping WvW that I take a place that someone who wants to play could have but I try to go at open times and if there are battles I can find I always fight. I suck, but I make good cannon fodder.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve done GW and WoW and Rift too. Most of these problems are nothing new and within each game you have factions that each have their own priority. Mine are PvE open world, leveling, quests, crafting, even a bit of WvW is OK some of the time and more and more you can’t have enough dynamic events the bigger the better. You can keep your pugged dungeons and fractals and PvP events. I want to play with people out in the open as I go not make appointments and sit around trying to find a group.

Since the patch for the latest content, and the change of the Chests to once a day, there has been a rash of overflow’s for every world chest boss. I have been doing bosses with the guild and my friends since the game came out, and now am having a hard time doing so.

The players on our server are now being sent into overflow when we want to do the world events together. From what I can find out there is a HUGE increase in players at these events from Other Servers, the Guesting is allowing players to circumvent the once a day chest by guesting for more. This is causing the people that are on their home server to not get into the map with the event, and instead be stuck in an overflow with no way to get a chest.

We need a fix for this, my guild and my friends are not able to play together and do world bosses together because of this and its taking away from the game.

Server: Dragonbrand

Edit: Thank you for the move/Merge, I totally missed this area of the forums.

Still getting an overflow for every single dragon event!!! Increase the amount of people allowed per server or start putting these events on overflow servers. I don’t want to be forced to go to a zone 1 hour before the timer and then sit another 1+ hours waiting for a spawn.

It’s basically unplayable and hopefully this gets fixed soon but I’m not holding my breath.

Anybody who says the problem came with guesting needs to reevaluate that thought. Guesting was out before this problem. The problem came when the loot changed. So why blame guesting? There’s plenty of guests who don’t change servers just to get those stupid chests.

Guesting doesn’t allow for more chests. You can still only get one chest per character. That’s false information that you can get more than one per character by guesting. Some people do it to make it to a more convenient time. I seriously doubt it’s all that many people though.

There were overflows on my server before the loot change. Many people guest to TC because there were always enough people to complete the event. It was mostly people from smaller servers that cannot get the turnout to complete the event. At least this was the jist I got from the guesters before the world boss loot change.

Though the loot change may be a big reason why we’re seeing a lot of servers go into overflow, I do think that the changes made to pent/shelt making it not worth farming anylonger are a part of the problem as well. I’d be interested to see how populated world events would be if pent/shelt were reverted to the way they were before the patch, though I doubt this will occur.

Can we atleast get the info of queue size of a map when pointing at a waypoint to move to the location to do a particular event and maybe a warning that the map is full before entering it? It’s not fun to spend 3s from, say Cursed Shore to Frostgorge and then get thrown into overflow and to spend another 3s to get back to CS because you are doing nothing, and can’t enter WvW from overflow.

How about some coment from Anet on this problem?

I get so sick of posting on the forums and never getting any feedback. They say they read these but I have my doubts.

Overflow is a real big problem and Tarnished Coast is being ruined because of it. If the people want to do WvW on servers that don’t PvE fine. I picked Tarnished Coast because all the PvE and Role Players were going there, so we would not have to be bothered with so much PvP. But now we get to deal with them guesting. If your friends are on another server pay the money and move. It’s that simple.

Now, the big thing is to go to overflow, get mad and mess with the timers. How childish it that.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

How about some coment from Anet on this problem?

I get so sick of posting on the forums and never getting any feedback. They say they read these but I have my doubts.

Thank you, you just made my day. I can’t stop laughing….feedback…on this forum….

phaneo.4597:

Can we atleast get the info of queue size of a map when pointing at a waypoint to move to the location to do a particular event and maybe a warning that the map is full before entering it? It’s not fun to spend 3s from, say Cursed Shore to Frostgorge and then get thrown into overflow and to spend another 3s to get back to CS because you are doing nothing, and can’t enter WvW from overflow.

You can enter WvW from overflow. You just don’t know which border is which.

Guesting is stupid. If you want to play “Guild Wars” with your friends then join their guild, and get on their server. If not…go back to your server and have fun.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

This is new and wasn’t a problem on my server until guesting. So something is Rotten in Denmark.

Guesting has been in place for almost two months, so it’s definitely not to blame for something you’re just noticing now.

I’m going to point out again that there’s been a distinct decrease in population elsewhere in the world, namely Lion’s Arch (which used to be the overflow capital of the game).

It seems like certain servers are suffering from this problem the most. Take a page from EVE online and Jita. Don’t try to fight players congregating in a small number of locations- just buff the hardware by adding some new server machine to the farm for those shards and increase the overflow limit.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em

IMO Guesting and doing a zone boss should not be allowed. People are using it to hop to a server on alts and do them 3 in row to avoid wait times. But this impacts people on server from getting in due to overflow.

THis post belongs here
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guesting-and-Overflow-merged/page/12#post1646751

a simple 7 day cooldown on guesting could fix this problem. there is no need to limit the pve content on guesting accounts, because there are some people that really use guesting in the desired way, so this 7 day cd will impact only the ones that abuse it.

It’s not guesting, 7 day cd won’t change anything, if you really want to stop overflows, make the chest account bound. Also, merge thread.

So we put an overflow in your overflow so you can overflow while you overflow.

Not lying there are currently TWO overflows for Frostgorge Soung for people wanting to do Jormag.

Overflowception…We must go deeper.

This is getting out of hand.

Keep in mind that we have 24 servers. Overflows are the leftovers from ALL of those servers. If an event spawns at the same time on a few servers it will cause more overflows to form once they fill up.

There is a thread for this stuff, please use it
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guesting-and-Overflow-merged/page/12#post1646751

I play on Piken Square, but also guest on Gunnar’s Hold and Blacktide, all Med/High realms and I very -very- rarely get bumped into the overflow even if I turn up during a boss’ spawn window. I’m guessing it’s mainly a problem with Very High population servers, and if so, it’s likely that it’s the actual population of the server and not guesters, has anyone actually found proof that guesting is what causes all these overflows?

Still getting put on an overflow server during every dragon event and every sb event. I’ve done three total in the last 10 days or so and those were not in prime time. Unfortunately for me I usually only get a chance to play during prime time.

Did the new chest loot patch go live yet or will it be with the patch on the 26th? Arenanet should have events spawn way more often on the overflow servers, and they should also let us know we will be placed in an overflow BEFORE we spend 3 silver on a wp and then another 3 silver to get back for each event.

Tidbit.9352:

Still getting put on an overflow server during every dragon event and every sb event. I’ve done three total in the last 10 days or so and those were not in prime time. Unfortunately for me I usually only get a chance to play during prime time.

Did the new chest loot patch go live yet or will it be with the patch on the 26th? Arenanet should have events spawn way more often on the overflow servers, and they should also let us know we will be placed in an overflow BEFORE we spend 3 silver on a wp and then another 3 silver to get back for each event.

That patch isn’t in yet. It’s set for the patch on 26th from what they said.

I really don’t get why people can’t understand the simple concept that guesting exacerbates the existing overflow problem, even if it is not the single cause of the overflow.

Before dragon loot patch – 100 locals, 30 guests – 200 slots in map = everyone is happy, all is fine and dandy.

After dragon loot patch – 200 locals, 80 guests – 200 slots on map = 280 people fighting for 200 slots = 80 people pushed to overflow.

Did guesting CAUSE the overflow problem? No. Did guesting CONTRIBUTE to the overflow problem? Yes. What’s so difficult to grasp?

I for one would be happy to see to loot patch come in.

Soon as the patch kicks in,i can bet it will be worst.
so i guess overflow is not going to be solved by this patch.
As many more ppl will prob start guesting now.
I know i will where i never did before.

The patch didn’t fix the overflow problem. Still getting over flow on every dragon event and sb. Or at least yesterday and so far today. I actually got my first overflow on maw earlier, which was hilarious.