Guild Wars 2

EU and NA worlds are on totally different data centers. There simply isn’t the tech to guest cross-data center, and, honestly, I’m not sure why you would anticipate that there would be. It’s the very same reason why there are even different overflows between the two data centers and why people on one data center’s overflows can’t move to overflows from the other. They are legitimately totally cut off from one-another. Connecting them would require a massive single server for all worlds, which would be at enormous cost to ANet, or a sizable amount of tech for some interfacing, which is a lot of work for very little gain.

I’m sorry that this has negatively impacted some of you and playing with your friends, but maybe you and your friends should coordinate which data center you’d like to play together on. I, personally, anticipated this limitation. In the meantime, before the patch comes out that introduces this, you could always move your account to a different data center so that this is no longer an issue. They recently increased server population limits to ease world transferring in these last days when it is free. That’s the best I can offer.

Like most I’m very grateful for implementing guesting. A bit shame about restrictions. While most of my friends are in UE servers I always liked visiting american servers in GW1, people there were really colorful bunch Hope some day (year or so) guesting will be trans-continental. Fingers crossed.

I’m disappointed. Back when Guild Wars 2 was still in the making, I pitched it to many of my friends in the US saying “and unlike in other MMOs, we will be able to play together!” Guess I should not have put as much faith in Anet, after all 8(

Not impressed, guys. Not at all.

Really great
I also hope that later on we will be able to guest on all (american and european) servers like we were able to switch die all servers an GW1 after some time

Not a bad start I like it. I await more great features you come out with in the future.

OK, I am stunned.

From the elation of finally getting word of guesting being a reality, to the realization that it will be absolutely useless to me and most of my longtime friends. I’m in an international guild (and alliance) who carried over from GW1 and we have been hanging in there for months unable to play together on the promise that “guesting is coming”, and now this…

I don’t usually use these words, and never before in reference to a gaming company, but I feel betrayed.

ANet has taken the international communities who followed them to GW2, and stomped on them. Not happy, ANet. Not one little bit.

“I am sure many of you are happy to finally being able to play on other worlds with your friends without having to leave your home world…”

And if all my friends are in the EU and I am in NA? Oh, guess I am out of luck, huh?

As it stands, this feature is useless to me and my friends, and to most of the Roleplay community who waited months to be able to guest across regions.

Very, very disappointed.

It’s broken. Fix it please. And keep it out of the game until it’s fixed. It isn’t ready yet.

guesting cross region would be no different than a server transfer. they’d have to transfer your account to a new data center…and they already have that system in place and will charge for it.

Rising Dusk.2408:

In the meantime, before the patch comes out that introduces this, you could always move your account to a different data center so that this is no longer an issue. They recently increased server population limits to ease world transferring in these last days when it is free.

So, if you PAY you can fully transfer to another home server in another region , but if you DONT PAY – aka guestsing – you can’t. Woow, really big “technically” issues here called “money” LOL.

Rising.

They managed perfectly well to do this in GW1 and the power of servers now dwarves that of those in 2004 when it all would have been in place. Other games manage to do it perfectly well.

I think also perhaps you are mixing up terms. A server in MMO terms is a logical thing. It does’nt mean one physical box sitting in a datacentre. Nowadays it’s more likely to mean a virtual system of which a physical box can run many.

If you listen to the tech talk by Anet you’ll see they load balance across many systems and that it’s really scaleable.

When you enter overflow all you are doing is having your character moved to a different set of systems/virtual systems

The tech was all there in GW1, it’s advanced a lot more in the mean time. While it’s not a demand I am curious to know exactly what the limitations were/are as this is a pretty big downside to the architecture of the game.

I am thankful for the option to guest at all, but I agree with all those disappointed that EU and US servers can’t guest together. As many have said, Guild Wars 1 had a sizeable international community and it’s saddening to see that the first game was designed to allow for it, but not the second.

Some of the finest people I knew and gamed with in Guild Wars 1 were not from my region.

I have to admit, the non guesting over continents really does scream division of communities, if we are able to transfer accounts over there then I don’t see why we may not guest there too?

One other issue that may come up is node farming. Just out of interest for the people that actually do this, when they whip up all the Ori in their home world can they then guest to another and farm there too? Will this triple players income of materials?

Eh, I would love to be able to guest on EU servers.
Alas, guesting is only region specific :s

As I mentioned above, just stop people harvesting on servers other than their own.

If you can meet up in overflow or do dungeons across servers why even bother with guesting at all?

Very, very disapointing and a huge step backwards towards a global GW2 community.

They should have delayed it until the cross region things was solved or just said sorry we cant do this at the moment and it’s better you get something right and make do.

As a few people before me have said, this is really, deeply disappointing to all of the RP community. We are in the thousands, and many of us were waiting all this time on guesting to switch between the EU and NA server, as we’re one community, but on two different servers, one on each region.
And now it turns out this long-awaited feature is useless for us.

It was no issue in GW1, so what gives?

Disappointed, disappointed, disappointed.

so if guilds are gamewide will a character be able to guest on another world and have access to the current buffs and upgrades available to the guild on that world (server)?

WvW is just a fundamentally flawed concept to begin with. There’s no good solution to it once you’ve decided to implement it. There shouldn’t even be a need to pick or transfer between servers. This is a network logistics issue, thinly disguised as a gameplay mechanic and while making customers deal with it might have been acceptable in the fledgling MMO industry, developers need to make this problem transparent for users (as Anet had the brilliance to do in GW1). You can have big zerg battle maps without having to restrict teams by server. Yes I know people loved RvR in DAoC but this is a throwback, not an evolution of the idea. Innovation was sorely needed here and unfortunately WvW was a slavish copy that sacrificed one of the best community features of GW1, the fact that everyone around the globe could play together.

Meanwhile, players will now need to take a guess on which server to make a permanent home without really knowing how things will turn out in the long term future. If they guess wrong, they’ll have to pay money out of their own pockets to address GW2’s antiquated server architecture.

No guesting on different regions servers? Guess guesting is totally useless then, was really looking forward to this as well.

Another big step back from GW1.

You forget one major thing about GW1: All content was instanced. That’s not the case with GW2, where there are any hundreds of thousands more things to keep track of, handle, and so on. From an engineering perspective, it is a far more daunting task to handle GW2 than GW1. In GW1, they could have all servers on a single data center because all content was instanced, and the only interactions you ever had with people outside of your party was in controlled districts. The districts being split into ‘regions’ was merely a formality for those of similar languages to congregate together, rather than throwing all languages into one place.

‘World’ is what we choose to be on, with the data center being the server within which the world we choose resides upon. The tech, despite being clearly improved since GW1’s days by being able to handle GW2 at all, just isn’t at the point where merging two data-centers is a feasible task. Yes, they can move you between data-centers, as is shown by changing worlds, but the point with guesting is that they don’t change your world, they simply allow you to play on other worlds within your data-center, AKA region. This makes perfect technical sense, and while I am no ANet employee and cannot speak to their specific situation, it makes sense to me given my industrial experience working with these sorts of things.

I agree, it sucks, I can’t play with my European pals, but this is something I anticipated back when guesting was first announced at all, and planned for. They are even giving you 12 days before this whole ordeal goes down to get your affairs in order. The server transfers are still free until guesting goes in, and the server caps have been raised; there’s really no reason to fret. Now you know what’s up, and now you can make it work with your friends.

It was asked many times, so how we will complete world exploration without free transfers?

Since server color is tied to it’s rank, it’s would be simply waiting weeks or months for time when our server drop/rise enough to get for example emerald borderlands where we can get it’s garrison vistas?

So i need to pay gems if i ever wanted to finish world completion and works toward legendary? I’m stuck on 99& for weeks already and miss only one point and one vista in waiting for my server to get emerald.

Very much dissapointed in Arenanet.

I know that I am probably in a minority but seriously. Why can’t we play with people in NA servers.

Very dissapointed.

me and my partner (she is australian) can’t even play the game together now unless one of us accepts dead hours in the game.

Oh cool, now I can harvest the rich ori node even more.

All in all, very happy to see this move. Yes, I think it sucks for those EU/NA guesting restrictions. That would impact a portion of the community, but the overall move to have guesting in place is welcomed. Gem fees on world transfers too, that’s a big+ imho.

It’s 4 months post launch, obviously there were many technical challenges they never expected, which also could have impacted or caused some of the restrictions between data-centers. But even now, I’m happy to see this go live. Prep your servers from now till the 28th, as I’m certain there will be many moves.

Rising Dusk.2408:

EU and NA worlds are on totally different data centers. There simply isn’t the tech to guest cross-data center, and, honestly, I’m not sure why you would anticipate that there would be.

Well, I think most of us were anticipating it because ArenaNet implied it.

Such as in this blog post from April 24, 2012 – “your characters can play on any world where you have friends”. (http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2)

The next line says that there are certain restrictions, such as not being able to participate in WvW. Cross-region restrictions were never listed, which one would expect it to be if it were restricted.

That would have been a prime, responsible time for them to disclose that information, so that cross-region guilds and communities could plan accordingly. I am disappointed that they chose to obscure this information instead.

For most people the new system is better than the old one.
Not for me.
I usually play a week of pretty hardcore WvW (on Gunnar’s Hold), then transfer to Tarnished Coast for a week to RP.
No more.
Now I won’t be able to do that. I’ll just leave WvW, as for me it’s less important and fun.
I’ve been hoping, since the headstart, for a guesting system. To WvW on Gunnar’s Hold and RP on Tarnished Coast.
You ruined my hopes.

Shame on you ArenaNet.
Why do you make game worse than it is?

Guesting is useless! How can we not cross regions? My partner and I are usually in two different regions and we can’t play together because of this? I have friends all over the globe and GW1 was all about different districts and worlds. This is so ridiculous. I’m so disappointed. ANET could have at least made this clear at the very beginning. MMO’s are meant to be global. I’m SO angry about this guesting system. It’s not even guesting!

I’m really dissapointed. I was really looking forward to jump between the two RP communities Piken Square and Tarnished Coast. Guess I’ll have to stick to Piken now.

What is the point of global guilds by the way. Why should we be allowed to make international guilds when the only way to actually have a guildmeeting is to ask people to pay Arenanet gems for a transfer? This is really beyond silly.

“When Guild Wars 2 launches, you will also have the option to play with your friends on another world with our free “guesting” feature. With guesting, your characters can play on any world where you have friends—with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting.”

http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2

Truths – Can’t participate in WvW.

Falsehoods – At launch
Any world

The RPing community chose Piken Square and Tarnished Coast as unofficial RP servers because we knew, thanks to quotes like this, guesting would let us play together.
Now we’re sorely disappointed.

Liraz.8062:

The next line says that there are certain restrictions, such as not being able to participate in WvW. Cross-region restrictions were never listed, which one would expect it to be if it were restricted.

That would have been a prime, responsible time for them to disclose that information, so that cross-region guilds and communities could plan accordingly. I am disappointed that they chose to obscure this information instead.

This is a fair point, however, you make a proverbial leap of understanding by claiming that they obscured the information at all. It is far more likely that they didn’t realize such a restriction at that point (or thought they could overcome it and didn’t want to say one thing which would later be incorrect). Either way, 12 days is ample time to prepare as a community with our friends. It is not like the patch comes out tonight and we are all out of luck.

I too am disappointed that guesting will not work for WvW. It punishes cross-server guilds in the same way the regions are punished. Our guild was hoping to be able to WvW together without requiring members to transfer. I think I understand the potential strategic downsides to guesting in WvW, but consider that even without guesting in WvW there will still be the problem of spies. And it really ties the knot on equating guilds with servers, thus completely removing any amount of prestige being in a certain guild can have. ANet might as well remove the ability to have cross-server guilds at this point since server=guild.

I feel about the same thing as many players.

I won’t be able to play anymore with friends from Europe and America at the same time

- Guesting won’t work as promised
- Server transfert will now cost money

So, until now I was still able to play with them, now I will have to pay because of this new feature? Playing dungeons was already possible with other people from the same region, this feature is totally useless if we can’t play with europeans!!!

Please, let me pay the game again if you so much want money but SIMPLY let me play with my friends! I coudl’nt care less for WvW, I just want to PvE with them!!!!!

This has to be the most disappointing announcement Arenanet has given so far. Guess now we wait till they allow guesting across continents for it to be really useful.

Ok all in all i’m disappointed.

Guesting is a great idea, that it don’t work for WvW is perfect due spies. But why we can’t have a ‘Home Server’ and a realm switching like in Guild Wars?

Nor i don’t understand why it ain’t possible to Guest on a NA Server. It can’t be that hard to connect the center in Frankfurt with the one in California, since the LoginServer and WvW Server are there anyways.

Could there be any way of explanation?

Sprawler.5612:

“When Guild Wars 2 launches, you will also have the option to play with your friends on another world with our free “guesting” feature. With guesting, your characters can play on any world where you have friends—with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting.”

http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2

Truths – Can’t participate in WvW.

Falsehoods – At launch
Any world

In the same quote you posted, it says “with certain restrictions”. They neither confirmed nor denied the ability to play cross-region. They gave one example, not every example.

Personally, I am really not looking forward to guesting. Instead of belonging to one world and being able to move to others, they should just eliminate worlds altogether in PvE (you still need to choose a world if you want to participate in WvW of course).
As it stands, people playing in barren zones that want to play with other players will have to manually move to another highly populated world, instead of the game uniting people in the same zone automatically. And since you can’t guest on a world that is full, this solution will not always be available.
IMO this is just a workaround and does not solve the real problem.

p.s. I know that some separation is in order and there are issues that may arise from eliminating worlds.

And yet again, it feels like ANet has missed the mark entirely.

The continued development of this game becomes more and more underwhelming.

Sprawler.5612:

“When Guild Wars 2 launches, you will also have the option to play with your friends on another world with our free “guesting” feature. With guesting, your characters can play on any world where you have friends—with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting.”

http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2

Truths – Can’t participate in WvW.

Falsehoods – At launch
Any world

The RPing community chose Piken Square and Tarnished Coast as unofficial RP servers because we knew, thanks to quotes like this, guesting would let us play together.
Now we’re sorely disappointed.

It’s indeed likely that, since we are one community, the anticipation of the guesting system is the reason we picked two servers instead of deciding on one. That kinda backfired now. There’s no way we’re going to quickly reorganize and all gather on one server. The RP community is bigger than the people on the community’s website ( www.guildwars2roleplayers.com by the way ), so this’d be a big ol’ mess. Especially if we’d go to TC since it’s so hard to get on there already.

i don’t see whats the deal with NA/EU guesting. i don’t wanna play when everybody else is sleeping anyway…

Hawkmoon.5849:

And yet again, it feels like ANet has missed the mark entirely.

The continued development of this game becomes more and more underwhelming.

I generally am happy the direction this game takes but in this instance I definatly agree. I don’t buy the whole “it’s not possible” because of tech excuse, you can transfer to another continent in a heartbeat so guesting should be just as simple. It’s probably just a case of them wanting to finish a feature that was promised at launch and be done with it but in this case it would have been much better if they waited a few more monts to deliver something useful instead of coming with this half baked solution.

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

i don’t see whats the deal with NA/EU guesting. i don’t wanna play when everybody else is sleeping anyway…

at noon time in EU servers there is virtually nobody, while in NA servers are the Oceanic and US late night players.

No US -> EU transfers
The one thing I needed from guesting.
So basically this is going to allow people in the same region to… Map with each other…?
WHELP there’s always next patch…

Rising, it’s great that this does not impact you.

For those of us who have cross-region alliances carried over from GW1 where this kind of social mode was a given, it is a big disappointment.

Since the game opened all of the guilds in our old alliances have put down roots and are growing and thriving. Now we have members who have never met our old cross-region friends, many never played GW1. Is it fair to ask them to uproot from a server where they are happy and selfishly insist they go to the one where our friends are?

For the good of our guilds we’re now staying put. Had we known this from the beginning, we would not have split like this.

I sincerely do not see the point of this being implemented when it’s not ready yet. We could already play with people from any NA server. We could dungeon together, we could FotM together, we just couldn’t WvW together…and we still can’t. I have several friends on EU servers isolated from the rest of our guild, and we’ve been waiting anxiously for the guesting, so we could play together on a regular basis. Now we can’t, and we’ll be even LESS able to play together after this “fix” then we can today. Before this, we could at least transfer for a day or two every so often. The lag is too bad to be able to stay permanently, but it was bearable for short terms. This is supposed to build community and strengthen guilds. Ok, so it doesn’t help us. But…honestly, who is this helping? If you have friends on a different server in the same region, then the only thing you will be able to do on Jan 29th that you can’t do today is…grind out the renown hearts or watch vistas or whatever together. If thats what you’re into, great, but I think more people group up for dungeons and fractals, so most groups aren’t gaining anything with this, but our guild, and any other guild with EU and NA members are actually losing an ability we do have now – because every so often some of us would swap servers for 24hrs so we can team up to do dungeons and fractals, but now we’re just cut off from each other completely unless we want to pay? Forgive me me for raining on this parade, but my guild just took a nasty hit. I would feel better about it if I felt like, say, most of the rest of the game was getting a benefit we just happen to not benefit from, but I honestly and sincerely do not feel like anyone gained anything substantial enough to warrant them severing the already strained ties they imposed on our guild to begin with. I get they’re trying to add good things to the game. I want them to do what they can to add good things to the game. But this isn’t it, and any guild with split membership is guaranteed to be disappointed. And for no reason good enough to justify doing this to us.

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

i don’t see whats the deal with NA/EU guesting. i don’t wanna play when everybody else is sleeping anyway…

Don’t you know, as a regular forum poster you’re required to continually kitten and moan about everything Anet does? And speak, as good drama queens do, as if you’re completely crushed with disappointment and despair, as if Anet took your puppy out back and ran it over?

I thought everyone knew this.

The thing that gets me is this. As of now you’ve NEVER been able to play regularly with ANY of your friends that are on different servers in normal PvE. NONE of them. This feature, while not perhaps letting you play with all of them, will let you play with at least some of them. And yet this is somehow a bad thing?

Some people simply are never happy. Why we continue to allow them to post and fill the forums with endless QQing is beyond me. There’s a reason why the gaming community considers the GW2 forums to be one of the worst, and this is why. No praise, no thanks, no gratitude, just endless complaining.

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. That is, if you weren’t all entitled little kittens.

Oh and mods, feel free to delete this and issue my infraction point, which I’m sure will be any time now.

Hooray, I was looking forward to this feature.

CITIZENS

I see what you did there.

I am EXTREMELY disappointed with guesting how it is announced.
Not at all what we were promised.

In what year are we?? In an age of opening to the whole world, an age of people changing country easily, we can’t play with friends between US and EU? Really??
All my friends are in France, I am in the US. I bought the game thinking I could play with them. I can’t even share the guild upgrades, and now I can’t even play with them without paying gems? Really?
That clearly needs an upgrade.

The guesting feature was delayed for that long, and now it won’t even allow cross-continent guesting? After all that time, that was the best you could do? Really???

This stinks so unbelievably hard, I lack any polite words to describe it! Boo @ANet

Before implementing such a half-arsed, badly, thought-out and flat out bad feature, better keep what’s in place now. At least NOW we can alternate between our groups of friends once per week and don’t get nickled and dimed for it…

Rising Dusk.2408:

Either way, 12 days is ample time to prepare as a community with our friends. It is not like the patch comes out tonight and we are all out of luck.

Unfortunately, I am not talking about a couple of dozen people that I would need to try to round up and get moved to one dataserver or the other. I am talking about thousands of people.

The GW2 Roleplay community is quite large and both sides are well-ingrained on their existing servers. Contacting, much less moving, everyone is a logistical impossibility at this stage, and it’s not likely that either server would have enough room to house everyone who’d try to transfer if we attempted it.

Mr eX.3420:

Great news! I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for this announcement since the BWE’s, this will be awesome to finally have.

Is there a long-term plan to address the issue of NA and EU players being locked out from each other? To be honest I was expecting this, but in an ideal world we could guest across data centers.

Hoping this gets addressed too, with at the very least some suggestion of it being put on backburner development while other features are focused on.

Also agree with one of the posts here regarding the somewhat clunky approach to guesting by going to char select right now. If possible, it’d be absolutely awesome to right click and guest straight from the friends list.