Guild Wars 2

I know this is not really a new issue but it is getting worse and worse.

Starting tl;dr: It is not possible to organize big meta events with people you know without a lot of frustration and hassle, and the newer megaserver system seems to try to actively hinder such efforts.

First of all, a short description of the problem: To be able play together in a bigger group (let’s say 80+ people) there is no good way of getting together into a map. The megaserver system will most of the time spread out people to the different instances of the map. This is fine and good if you want to casually run around, do some dynamic events, farm a bit or whatever you want to do. This is however not at all desired if you really want to work towards a goal together, that goal being a meta event.
We have seen this with Tequatl and Wurm where the bigger communities mostly try to provoke the server to spawn a new instance by filling the old ones up and ferry/taxi their people over. That in itself is really bad since it obviously is not fun at all to click on ‘join server’ for up to 10 minutes until giving up frustrated.

You might want to say that this is not the way ANet intended us to play the content, that you should gather up with random people and find greater joy in doing the challenge with people you meet along the way and not steamroll everything with a ‘streamlined power group’. But that is not at all how most of the meta events are designed except for a small few (silverwastes comes to my mind). On the contrary, you cannot possibly do the Triple Trouble event with a load of level 50? players on the map, having no people to care for special objectives (e.g. husks), having only mapchat as means of communication between the three groups. Even Tequatl only works with pug server right now only because everyone and their grandma know the encounter by now and those two that don’t – don’t really matter in the mass.

This is true for most of the new map’s meta events as well as far as I have seen although it seems they are a bit easier. Still, you will only really get the ‘big’ rewards when you actually succeed. I personally am not willing to commit 2 hours which might get me the reward I am really looking forward to if I could do it in a community, experience the same stuff on the way (and probably get to experience it more since bashing dragons is fun, bashing dragons hard is way more fun!) and have a way higher chance of succeeding. Don’t get me wrong btw I do not want content to be really easy so I can get my stuff (really hard such events would be great but then again I haven’t looked into dragon stance yet) but I am surely not gonna do them the hard way when I can do them easier with more fun.

So all together it really seems the event design really encourages prepared Organisation (like a community) while the technical side of the game strongly discourages it.

This became even more of a problem with the new Maps where the megaserver system seems to have changed a bit. The “bottlenecking effect” (server artificially reduces the number of players at the beginning to probably allow party members, guild mates and/or friends to join prioritized) is even worse and I have seen cases where almost instantly the ‘the world you join is full’ message appeared for 80+ people of which most of them came in after a few minutes of join spamming… This happened not only once so it seems the server reserves way more spots than in any way logical.

I have heard and seen proposed many possible solutions for this over the last few years but no reaction at all. Instead there now is a new system which absolutely tells e those have not been recognized in any way whatsoever.

Personally, I put my hopes in Guild Halls and the new squad system to solve this problem (A system where everyone can join a squad in a guild hall and the commander can transport his whole squad to a map, the players not being treated as individuals for the megaserver system but rather as a cluster) but I do not see that happen anytime soon.

The only time I have heard ANet even recognize this problem is when I think it was Colin said something about ferrying when introducing the new SquadUI.
Please tell me if I overlooked some statements, I would really want to see some comments from devs that something is happening at that front.

That, combined with the issue that you’ll lose your spot if you should get dc’d (which seems to be a bug as far as was communicated to us) really ruins the fun for me some times. I personally think this is really sad since I love all the new stuff and the way it is designed but when running around I rarely see a real effort to push the events further; it mostly simply lacks players and people decide it is not worth the effort other than farming a bit exp.

Please share your opinion on that matter, if you are feeling the same way as me or not, and I woulld also love to see how Arenanet thinks about it.

It was for the best of the community. It was a problem in the Marionette event, and became more apparent in the Crown Pavilion event in 2014. I think in the CP event, there’s a map instance for each world, and you had to wait for a long time for one of the maps to fill up. After that it’s a frenzy to get in that map. Now it’s far more easier to fill up maps and do events, which is great. Just look at Silverwastes and the new HoT maps.

Maybe anet could introduce a “buy an overflow” system, where you could reserve a map for your guild members, then after 15 minutes it becomes an open map once again.

HaxTester.9816:

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Maybe anet could introduce a “buy an overflow” system, where you could reserve a map for your guild members, then after 15 minutes it becomes an open map once again.

That would probably put a huge load on the servers since everyone will want to get a new map. It’s ideal, but don’t see Anet doing anything like that.
They can barely cope with the server loads as it is now.

I think (actually fairly minor) changes to the otherwise brilliant mega server system are vital for some of these new meta events.

Every day hundreds of people are spending from 30 mins to an hour, right-clicking on a squad commander and choosing (for example) ‘join in Tangled Depths’, trying (and mostly failing!) to squeeze into a map, rather than actually playing the game! Typical gw2community events have 200-500 people trying to join 1-3 maps.

If people knew if they were in a “meta squad” (limited by map size) they would get on the map, then, if not, they could get on with playing the game – surely what ANet want!

Here’s an idea:

1. Change the party/squad system slightly to allow 3 ‘modes’: ‘party’, ‘raid’, or ‘meta event’. ‘Meta Event’ will allow members up to the map limit. People can ‘squadjoin’ or be invited, as now.

2. If the group is set up as ‘meta’, once you are ready, you can ‘start new instance’, with a tick box option to ‘make private’, but these options will only be enabled if more than the map minimum are in the group (say 60).

3. I’d also change the lfg, so you can advertise such big events; maybe make an option in the squad UI itself, to advertise. However, to allow organised groups (eg. Using TS) publicly advertising shouldn’t be required.

If creating a new instance requires a group of more than the number that would normally spawn a new instance it should have negligible cost on Anet, it merely allows people to choose, if they wish, who they play with.

This has got to be a win-win. It will make the job of joining these big events much, much better for the players, without significantly increasing the number of instances. And those that can’t fit into the organised maps can get on with doing other things in the game, or advertise their own meta event, instead of being stuck in the Squad UI, with hundreds of others, fruitlessly trying to join an almost full map.

Please, please Anet get on the case with this before Maguuma is old news