I HATE Mega Servers
I can sympathize with the frustration of the game crashing during the Dragon’s Stand last fight. It’s happened to me many times and many others report it being a common occurrence. I don’t think megaserver is the problem though. I think having a disconnect recovery system like what GW1 had would be the best solution. The game should “save your spot” for a few minutes if there’s a disconnect or crash. Whether you’re in a party/squad or not, as long as you can get connected again within the few minutes, you should be back in your same map with your participation progress preserved.
I was not in a party, but I was doing Dragon Stand Mordermoth fight…
Join a squad if there’s a commander around (Mentor can have no squad as far as I know). It works (if you dc) and you don’t have to ask someone if you can join, you don’t have to say anything, you can make your own subparty if everybody is targeting everything, or if you want to target everything, and you can leave without saying anything.
Without megaservers,you would never even do DS anymore,all maps,all servers would be empty
Well some of the servers would be empty. Back when I first started playing I was on Devona’s Rest. You could never get temple armour back then because the temples were always contested. Orr was mostly deserted. I guested to another server once for the Maw fight and I couldn’t believe the people at that fight. I had never seen such a crowd.
I seem to remember overflow maps though and if you crashed in a fight you could end up in a different map anyway when you came back.
No thanks, OP. Join a party or a squad. Megaservers are the best thing since sliced bread.
The same thing happened before megaservers. If you were on a full world (say BG|TC|JQ in NA, back in the day) and you left the map (DC or otherwise), you couldn’t back in. In fact, it was a lot harder to /join on party members then (and there were no squads).
In other words, the problem isn’t megaservers — the problem is that when you leave for any reason, there’s currently no way for you to continue your progress from before. That’s a hard issue to address, both for technical reasons and because there are lots of ways to exploit it (as people did in GW1, where it was possible to jump from instance to instance and get extra rewards during festivals).
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
This has nothing to do with megaservers. Nothing at all.
First you could have joined a squad, and you’d have at least a chance to get back in. The choice not to join a squad is your own.
Then, you crashed and didn’t get back on the same server. That really doesn’t have much to do with megaservers.
I remember crashing on my home server, before mega servers ever existed and ended up on an overflow because my home server was full. Lots of people used to guest to TC to do events.
The fault is in the crash itself, not in megaservers.
Without megaservers,you would never even do DS anymore,all maps,all servers would be empty
This.
There would not be DS or any other HoT map at all without megaservers. Except maybe sometimes in the few fullest worlds.
I remember back before megaservers when people used to guest on the full servers from low population servers, and how frosty the people from the high population servers would get on the forum about those interlopers on their server and how those people doing their events was throwing them off their server on to overflow maps. They were downright territorial about their server.
You don’t get those threads and posts on the forums anymore, now that megaservers tore down the barriers. Just as well in my opinion.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
I’d be very surprised if the megaserver and disconnect recovery stuff is not very high on the dev priority list.
It seems a fairly obvious thing to “reserve” a slot for a few minutes for anyone who disconnects and then try to place them back in that slot when they reconnect, even if they were not in a party. Maybe there is a technical issue with doing this but surely someone will be looking into it, especially as we now have hugely long event chains in HoT.
Imo megaserver is the best thing ever implemented. Back then i was playing on blacktide, which was totally empty so with megaservers i actually got to do world bosses outside the starter zones. Megaservers made the experience the same regardless of which server you and your friends randomly chose several years before that.
Though i understand the issue you are facing, megaservers are not the problem. Don’t know if you remember but say you were on a good map without megaservers and get a dc, you will get replaced instantly and get to say hello to an overflow map instead.
The solution at hand is rather a system that reserves your spot for say 2 mins after you log out/dc so you have a chance to get back in. Might even get a pop up asking if you want to join the same map i you are within the tineframe.
The Megaserver system needs changes. But without it too many people would be alone in too many maps.
Right now what I see the Megaserver system needing is:
- To keep your current map slot in the current instance of the map ‘reserved’ for at least 10 min when getting disconnected, and making it so when you reconnect you are sent back to the same instance.
- To keep current personal participation in meta-events when disconnecting and getting connected to a different instance of the same map with the same character. When volunteering for another instance participation should also be kept, plus a 20% bonus for volunteering. But not when swapping maps, since that allows leechers to jump between maps keeping participation in several maps while not really helping much.
- To ‘pardon’ instances marked for closing if enough players enter them.
- A list of current instances of the map, including things like:
- The max population of each instance.
- The current population of each instance.
- How many of your friends are in each instance.
- How many of your guild members of each guild (/g1, /g2, /g3, etc) are in each instance.
- Whether the instance is private or not by showing or not a lock icon like in the PvP arena browser. Guilds would have a upgrade to scribe a new, relatively expensive guild consumable that allows them to create private instances of open world maps, set a name for the instance, and a privacy settings for it (public or guild only), and even give them a password, kind of like with custom arenas. A guild would only be able to hold one private instance at a time, and only for up to 3 hours. If the instance gets too empty, or if about 3 hours pass, the instance closes automatically.