Guild Wars 2

sorry for the odd thread title, that’s the shortest i can make it however

anyways, my question is about the overflow issue people seem to have

is it a guesting issue or a population issue?

i’ve seen alot of people complain about getting booted into overflow lately, and i’ve seen a bit of it myself

cities are somewhat crowded, there’s people wandering around and grinding events, people are rushing to the dragon events for loot, and of course, me going into overflow channels during said dragon events

for a game that’s both dying and dead, that’s quite a feat

i realize alot of people are pinning this on people guesting certain servers, ESPECIALLY TC, but it seems to be affecting a large number of “very high” population servers, which is like, 90% of all the american servers

has it ever occured to anyone that maybe gw2 as a game is actually growing in population?

if you really think about it, even if there’s one “official pve server” that alot of people guest to, large groups people don’t just miraculously show up to other servers like JQ without any reason what so ever

so, what do you guys think? is gw2’s population growing? or are people just all flooding to high population servers through guesting

It’s guesting. TC is overflowing. Every zone that has a chest-related boss event now has an overflow. Wasn’t like this before the Guaranteed Rare chests. Coincidence? No.

A little of Column A and a little of Column B. People know that on the high-volume servers there’s a likelihood of Temples being open or attempted regularly, so they will guest over there.

I think the new recently added challenging content in the guild missions has brought veteran players like myself back to take up these supposed nearly unbeatable challenges with their guilds.

yup, i know TC is overflowing, there’s a new thread about it every half an hour

but what about other servers like JQ?

Its redundant tangent threads, they are like condition stacks and dragging everything to a halt.

But yeah – careful what you wish for guys, too many people demanding guesting be rolled out ASAP, and look at that it is exploitable as hell…

PTR is looking better each week.

Guesting is at least part of it on already heavily populated servers. But I think the dailies and dragon loot bring buttloads of people all to one place. Everyone needs events and other daily stuff, so it’s actually in some cases a competition to get all this done…when veterans are needed, there are so many people trying to get them that often they are dead before you can even hit them once.

On TC, I’ve heard in map chat that people are guesting because supposedly TC is the place to be. I have no clue why that is

thisolderhead.5127:

Its redundant tangent threads, they are like condition stacks and dragging everything to a halt.

But yeah – careful what you wish for guys, too many people demanding guesting be rolled out ASAP, and look at that it is exploitable as hell…

PTR is looking better each week.

I don’t think PTR would have caught this issue, particularly. This was always a potential issue in the back of my mind ever since they said “this will be on discrete servers but you can guest onto others”.

I actually turned to my brother who lived with me through EverQuest and said: “Say if they’d let you do that . . .”

“Everyone’d be on only one server anyway. Unless it was completely full, then they’d go to a second one. Nobody’d actually stay on their home server.”

Vlawde.1895:

On TC, I’ve heard in map chat that people are guesting because supposedly TC is the place to be. I have no clue why that is

Roleplaying. It’s why I’d guest there (did guest there) but it was apparently off-hours so nobody was around for me to observe. And now I probably won’t guest over there and get lumped in with the “bad” guests :P

thisolderhead.5127:

Its redundant tangent threads, they are like condition stacks and dragging everything to a halt.

But yeah – careful what you wish for guys, too many people demanding guesting be rolled out ASAP, and look at that it is exploitable as hell…

PTR is looking better each week.

Except for in this case it’s not being exploited. You can only 1 chest per character per day. It doesn’t matter if you go to a different server or not.

The concept of guesting is fine, but just like you can’t transfer to a full server, you shouldn’t be able to guest when a certain population threshold is reached.

Or instance/overflow events at a certain point so the unplayable events on TC don’t happen. TC is just like any other server, same events etc, no reason for everyone to think there’s something special about it

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Vlawde.1895:

On TC, I’ve heard in map chat that people are guesting because supposedly TC is the place to be. I have no clue why that is

Roleplaying. It’s why I’d guest there (did guest there) but it was apparently off-hours so nobody was around for me to observe. And now I probably won’t guest over there and get lumped in with the “bad” guests :P

Some people apparently decided to use TC to RP, but its never officially been declared by Anet to be an RP server. You can RP on any server. And honestly, I’ve heard very little of it on TC.

The problem isn’t guesting. It’s player greed. It’s an unintended bug that the devs will have to correct. Once that’s patched, the problem will literally go away overnight.

Also, yeah. The people saying the game is dying, low population… interesting how that’s playing out, ain’t it?

Vlawde.1895:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Vlawde.1895:

On TC, I’ve heard in map chat that people are guesting because supposedly TC is the place to be. I have no clue why that is

Roleplaying. It’s why I’d guest there (did guest there) but it was apparently off-hours so nobody was around for me to observe. And now I probably won’t guest over there and get lumped in with the “bad” guests :P

Some people apparently decided to use TC to RP, but its never officially been declared by Anet to be an RP server. You can RP on any server. And honestly, I’ve heard very little of it on TC.

I asked once what server was the RP server, and was always directed to TC for North America. So . . . that’s why I said that.

Actually fair cop – guesting wouldn’t have turned up much on the PTR and the issue doesn’t seem like it is resulting from direct exploit so much as TC apparently having all the cool kids.

Guesting isn’t the issue, all you hawt dancing TC awesome peeps are, I’m jealous (but will just guest over).

One would presume that with most of the servers being high population, people using guesting to “escape” low pop settings would be spread around pretty widely among the other servers in the game. I’d also presume that even on high pop servers, guesting goes the other way. (I’ve used guesting a lot lately to do parts of the daily where too many people around makes things frustrating), so it’s not like people only come to your server via guesting, but no one on your server ever guests anywhere else.

Even with guesting, this were feeling a bit dead the week before the latest patch. This is the second month in a row that the Living Story has driven large numbers of people to return to the game and congregate in two game zones. The patch related influx and the way the content concentrates players are likely much, much more to blame for high pop issues than guesting!

we need to look at it from another point of view, the big picture.

“farming as endgame”

a lot of lower level “stuff”, crafting mats, items etc are not useful anymore.
worst comes to worst, you can always farm gold to buy all you need.
the deep problem is the themepark pattern.
it isnt a good formula for longevity anymore i think.
sure, guild wars 2 is an awesome game, but the “endgame” (dreaded term) is not suitable.
they cant make people farm x amount of scrap for gold to get what they need.
the laurels are a move in the right direction, but the clock is ticking.
the bigger picture “design” isnt suitable as it is for longevity.
the next best mmo will need to have a themepark game to bring people in, but as you go deeper into the game, sandbox concepts will need to be integrated at endgame.
this way you could have the best of both world.
themepark endgame as we know it (farming mostly) isnt the way to develop the next big mmo.
you need to give new players, or levelling up toons, a themepark to play with and hardcore players a sandbox to control that themepark.
ill need to think about it more, but its the right concept for sure.

It’s not guesting or population.

It’s a lack of further server-designation.
Tarnished Coast players marketed their server as the “unofficial” RP server. Now their community has a rep for being the nicest server in the game – Naturally, people are going to want to go over there.

If ArenaNet had labeled 3 or 4 servers as RP servers, people wouldn’t be flocking to a single unofficial server that’s suppose to be nicer then the rest. There’d be a better distribution.

—

The other part of the issue is that people are allowed to Guest in servers where they have no friends, which is not what the Guesting feature is about.

Guesting should be tied to your contacts – Right-click a friend and there’d be a “guest to this contact’s server” thing.
And have it only apply to mutually listed players (No followers adding people just for the guesting-privilege)

—

Reducing the chest-loot when guesting may help, but is NOT the best solution

Why would players bother guesting to Tarnished Coast specifically if all they want is loot?
Even now, it’s pretty obvious that going to a packed server is a dumb move because you’ll just end up in an overflow.

Most of the players trying to triple their chest-loot aren’t rushing to TC. They pick any old server as long as they know the boss-timers.

its a question of putting everbody at the same “rewarding” places.

laurels are the smartest currency they have now. you cant find it in a chest (no pun intended).

its a bit too little too late, as most people are going for legendaries now, and it requires gold.
legendaries implementation is actually a problem too.

a lot of these problem seem to be corrected, steering in the right direction (ascended stuff, laurels etc).
but its a bit too little too late.

and it leaves a big part of the game unuseful, like crafting for example.

No it’s guesting. A solution would be to reduce the value of loot obtained from these chests while guesting on a server. That way you’re still rewarded for participating, while likely reducing the number of people who swarm to these events just for more chests.

Overflows everywhere on Sanctum of Rall.

Really, how many places can a player be at the same time?

I would be apt to believe it was just native players flocking in to get their rares, except that slews of people at TC keep admitting in map chat that they’re guesting while the dragon event is taking place. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly.

And I just crashed on Jormag and got kicked into an overflow server. Again. With many other TC natives. While there were admitted guesters there.

Guesting is a minor issue that people like to put the blame on. This is obvious because only the huge population servers are experiencing these issues. The major issue is that they have a huge population base and not guesting.

^ Here comes the forum police. Why are you so sure that the issue we at JQ and TC is facing isn’t a guesting caused issue? Are you in our server? Some of them even admittedly say they are from a different server which is practically dead.

Gosh people never would be happy.
Right now the zones where has chests are the same as when GW2 launched.This means that they are full of people.I don’t mind this.It’s only a good thing in my eyes.

Before the patch people were complaining ooo the zones are empty,farming events,world bosses and DEs is worthless.
After the patch?People turned the other side of the coin.Zones are full of people,many overflows,nice rewards from chests.
What ever Anet do they can’t make everyone happy.

Atleast I like the changes

I was asking around on the servers I guested too today and there were very few if any at all at times. Yet they still had the same issues. IE: it’s not guesting

vince.5937:

It’s guesting. TC is overflowing. Every zone that has a chest-related boss event now has an overflow. Wasn’t like this before the Guaranteed Rare chests. Coincidence? No.

Exactly. It’s not a coincidence. It’s because now, your massive server population, everyone is following the world event timers and hundreds+ are all showing up for the same world event at the same time.
It has nothing to do with guesting.
Before, everyone was in fractals. Now, everyone is doing world events. Flavour of the month.

DreamOfACure.4382:

Reducing the chest-loot when guesting may help, but is NOT the best solution

Wow.

Okay before you kill it for the rest of us, the drop rate isn’t the problem. Thank you Anet for increasing the good loot we can get from these daily chests.

Don’t listen to this guy, please.

People server hop/guest to get the chests again. That bit needs to be fixed where guesting won’t net you more then they intended (once a day), not the drop rate.

Fix that, and the problem goes away. Cool servers have to deal with being cool. You all said go to TC for a good time, they came.

The problem is magnified because of the chest exploit. No one posted with a problem concerning guesting and overflows at the dragon events until after the update.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a simple solution. It is pretty amazing watching some of you trying to reinvent the wheel over this.

Just make sure that the change to chests is active throughout all the servers. So, if you have opened a specific one with a char, make sure that char can’t open it again, no matter what server he is going to join!

FateZero.8536:

^ Here comes the forum police. Why are you so sure that the issue we at JQ and TC is facing isn’t a guesting caused issue? Are you in our server? Some of them even admittedly say they are from a different server which is practically dead.

Someone disagrees with me so they’re the big bad forum police! Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Why are you so sure it’s not? You’re talking about two of the highest pop servers in NA and they’ve been that way since prerelease.

Guesting has been in the game for around 2 months now. The change to chest loot has been in the game little more than 3 days. This has only been a “problem” for 3 days. It’s much more likely the people on your high-pop server(s) are all just flocking to dragon chest events for the better loot.

And of course when people ask who is guesting, only people who are guesting will likely answer. That’s by no means a proper consensus of who is and isn’t guesting.

yup, the endgame is now about checking the spawn timers on the internet and doing them in order.

no risk, all rewards, boring gameplay buy who cares, its to become legendary…

at least laurels, ascended gears and guild merits are a step in the good direction.
legendaries were very badly implemented.
they should be “camp farmable”.
nothing should be actually, makes for a boring endgame.

It’s not guesting. You can guest on 2 servers in any 24 hour period but you still can only kill that boss for rewards once.

It’s everyone came out of the dungeons for this patch.

fellyn.5083:

Except for in this case it’s not being exploited. You can only 1 chest per character per day. It doesn’t matter if you go to a different server or not.

That’s the problem. They want 1 chest per character per day. People are taking one character to multiple servers to cash in on the same chests. This is causing overflow issues and problems with disconnects/lag/powers not going off/people not being properly rewarded for their participation on their own home server. This is a large problem.

People are going around a limitation put in place by ArenaNet. It should be labeled an exploit.

I believe it should be per character, no ones stopping anyone from making alts etc..

But i believe you should only get big rewards on your home server.. i think guesting in this game has broken a lot of things..

Guild used to have 2-3 of us at most for these events. Since the patch 3 days ago we usually have 2-3 groups. It’s a population and loot problem not guesting. I’ve been guesting to dragons since they started guesting and have never been in an overflow. I also would never be dumb enough to guest to a high population server for these chests and I hope no one I know would either since it’s so much better/smarter to do them on lower population servers.

faster more efficient on high pop

Avatar.1923:

faster more efficient on high pop

It’s neither of those things. It’s slower since if you don’t get there plenty ahead of time you go to the overflow. You also can’t use anything other than autoattack most of the time unlike a low population server which has no lag at all.

You people just don’t get it do you. If guesting was the issue here, we would have LONG experienced this issue SINCE guesting was first release since back then, it was actually exploitable since dragon chest spawn more than once a day. IT IS OBVIOUS that it is NOT guesting that is causing the issue but people from your server moving out of dungeon farming and towards dragon farming. Stop trying to blame a minority % of the outta servers, although some people may choose to guest at TC and JQ, not everyone in all 20+ servers are choosing to do so and at the very same moment. We have our own bosses to kill too.

Think about it logically, everywhere is being more crowded not in the outside world due to the increase reward. The two main servers which are experiencing an overcrowd issue most is one of our two biggest servers in the game. Do you think it’s more likely that it is the HUGE population base of players on your server who are crowding up your map or do you think it is ALL GUEST and a minority of your own server people there. It’s like LA, LA back then was so easily put into overflow with people from their OWN server. I don’t know how I can convey this point any clearer. Guesting to events exist but it’s not the cause of lag or overflow. In fact, here on SoS, I’ve never been put on overflow although events are slightly laggier which does seem to be an issue. Anet needs to address some more stable and durable servers. Instead of putting the blame of people who guest, why not suggest we get some better servers on these world bosses.

Again, people who keep blaming it on guesting and saying people can loot the same chest 3 times per toon by guesting clearly knows nothing and is just prove that, we can never be given anything good since continue blame in the wrong direction will just lead anet to take it away for everyone.

THE issue, and the only issue is that the servers can’t handle a mass group of people doing world bosses. The fps is so low most people are auto attacking cause abilities won’t go off but there are so many people the boss dies quick anyway.

I think guesting is a bad idea but I don’t think it is the cause of this situation.

I think the reason people are seeing overflows on the crowded servers isn’t because a bunch of people are rushing to guest over to a crowded server so they can barely move in the lag.

But more that there’s just a lot more incentive to actually bother doing dragons and all that now. I think it’s just the local people on the server not sitting in LA as much (Case in point, I actually see non overflow LA now sometimes heh).