Guild Wars 2

Hey all, Mkkoll here. The following words represent nobodys opinion other than my own.

The current situation regarding organisational complexity of World-Boss events ever since the introduction of the Megaserver system has become quite unbearable.

Before the Megaserver system, my group would congregate on the Main map of a server. This acted as a fantastic muster-point and players knew their destination map. Commanders would usually have joined up to 45 minutes early and players would naturally form upon their commander stackup points. Besides the problem of map capacity, we never ran into the problem of ‘finding a map’.

Now, because of the Megaserver system, Bloodtide Coast and Sparkfly Fen are now well populated maps at all times of the day. This forces the hand of World Boss slaying communities and guilds as we require as empty a map as possible to ensure we get as many players of our own as possible into the map.

To accomplish this we try to coordinate a mass maphop to a waypoint in Sparkfly Fen/Bloodtide Coast in an attempt to pop a fresh Megaserver map. We kill Tequatl first which imposes a self-inflicted time constraint problem but we feel our hands are tied by the current natural spawn times. We only really get 20-25 minutes to do pre-event coordination. Now I don’t suppose the mass maphopis the best solution to handle the Megaserver system – I’d love to hear alternatives – but it is the solution we have developed to ensure we get our own people from our Teamspeak into our own map. This causes a number of issues we have not yet resolved within our community.

1. Not all people are guaranteed to get into the ‘correct’ Megaserver map in the first place. This was an issue before the Megaserver system of course as our community is large and maps population caps are small in comparison but it is worsened by the following issue…

2. People are not sure if they are in the correct map. Even when informed of the commander tags they should see on their map, they get confused and panicked and general chaos erupts in the TS and Mapchat.

3. The necessity of the taxi-to-join system is higher than it was before. The amount of whispers and party-join attempts in pursuit of a taxi has increased substantially since the patch. This was always the burden of being ‘The Commander’ but is becoming absurd at this point. My own motivation for doing Wurm is reducing daily as I feel I am fighting the games’ technical design rather than the Wurm itself. Too much of our organisational effort and time is popping a map and getting all our players into it.

4. The “which map should I be in?” problem is exacerbated when we attempt to organize multiple Tequatl and Wurm kill attempts on multiple maps. When I say exacerbated I mean like trying to organize a D-Day landing in <2 minutes when nobody knows which beach they are going to land on or who their superior officer is going to be. Pre-organisational effort in this regard is impossible when even the commanders don’t know where they are going.

5. As we (as a community) are coordinating the maphop, our commanders are being held responsible by other players tagging along who do not get into the main map and are being accused of ‘player preference’ which simply doesn’t happen.

My solution: Players have been clamoring for some more control over which Megaserver they are placed into. ‘Defining’ the Megaserver map may be a good partway solution to that. A naming convention for Megaservers would be ideal. This could be displayed on the Minimap just as the old ‘Overflow’ text string was displayed. The Megaserver system can be inherently immersion breaking when its technical operation is exposed in such a way, but players are coming up against this anyway. Instead of just ‘Megaserver 1,2,3…" etc we can name them after ingame characters. Example: ’Megaserver Caithe’, ‘Megaserver Ogden’, ‘Megaserver Marjory’ which is much more aesthetically pleasing. This provides instant clarity to players and gives them context of where they are.

The dream is that Guild-spawned Worldbosses also need to create a new Megaserver. Possibly named after the Guild that spawned it or something. But alas, I feel this will never happen.

With this update, I honestly feel that Anet is trying to break up the world-boss communities by design. They made the Wurm much easier and in future I can honestly see kills with full PUG Megaservers and no Teamspeak. Thus World Boss Killing guilds and communities are simply not required. As far as I know, all of the World Boss communities and guilds are very open and welcoming to new players of this content. We need new people playing and learning to survive as a group. I think we give the impression we are exclusive groups in which you have to know the right people to be able to do the hard stuff and Anet want to fix this. However, I play on in hope that my community can survive and have fun in a Teamspeak where mass coordinated effort is required to accomplish something hard rather than ‘enough people, in the right place, at the right time’ content.

PS We really need Tequatl to spawn after the Three-Headed Wurm. Our organisational nightmare of having no time to organise the Wurm after Tequatl is self-inflicted, and I have pointed this out to our community. But changing the skritt-like habits of a few hundred players seeking as many shinys as possible is not easy. Help!

PPS If my Megaserver naming convention is implemented I want a ‘Megaserver Mkkoll’