Guild Wars 2

A friend of mine plays on EU to be with her friends, but I’m a US player, and I hate it here. It’s always empty when I’m around playing, no one to help with tasks, no one to talk to, nothing. I can’t be social here without staying up till six in the morning.

If I was to move back to my US server, what exactly wouldn’t I be able to do with her? Would I be able to be in a party, whisper, hang out? What exactly are the limitations?

You’d be able to send mail…not sure about whisper. But you wouldn’t be able to group, guest, or even do a dungeon together. You would not be able to play together if you were in different server parks (e.g. one in US and one in Europe).

what he said, you can whisper, you can “group” to use the same chat channel (team chat); but you cannot do dungeons together, you cant do areas together, if you go back to US servers you cant do anything together but just chat

apparently US and EU servers are completely linked off aside from comunication options

you can’t cross-guest either…..

I wish you could guest across the pond, TC is the best rp server ever and there’s not really an EU equivalent

I don’t understand why you can’t, I don’t mind some lag..

emikochan.8504:

I wish you could guest across the pond, TC is the best rp server ever and there’s not really an EU equivalent

I don’t understand why you can’t, I don’t mind some lag..

WvW, a notional idea that little boxes called servers are more important than long term established friends

No one has yet answered why if lag is such an issue that it would ruin peoples experience they still allow people from different regions to roll on a server in that different region. People would put up with extra latency if it could mean they could play with friends

Best solution I can think of. Seperate your WvW server of choice from the server you PvE on. Allow free transfers to your PvE server and paid transfers to your WvW server. see here for more info https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/An-idea-for-making-cross-region-guesting-work/first#post1258012

The decision to region lock gutted entire communties, gave people a horrible choice of who they can play with and is without doubt the worst aspect of GW2. It is imho a reprehensible design decision with obvious negative consequences that I personally have never seen any postive outcome benefits that outweigh them

Back in the real world. the real issue is, is that Anet don’t currently have enough trained people to rework the system (even if they wanted to) and these people are maxed out doing other back end stuff.

Anet has answered about lag, and it’s not just about crossing servers. It has to do with where the information about you and your account is stored.

A person in Europe has all there info about their characters in a European server park. If they were to guest from American to Europe, the ping would be much higher than just playing on a European server, since the actual data about your character is no longer local. When you play long distance, the update you’re waiting for is that of other people.

If you could guest from Europe to the US, you’d have to have your own data double ping back and forth to sink up…the results are far less reliable than just playing on another server.

They’ve tried it and couldn’t get consistent enough results to allow people to guest.

Then perform a server transfer instead. The mechanic is already there and people could freely do it at launch.

The reason why it was stopped was because of WvW(see above on how to fix it)

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Then perform a server transfer instead. The mechanic is already there and people could freely do it at launch.

The reason why it was stopped was because of WvW(see above on how to fix it)

I’m not sure you’re following me, because I’m not sure I explained the problem very well. The way this game is set up, you can only have data in one data center, which is how it was set up. I’m not sure how hard it would be to change or how much it would cost to change it.

What it means is you can transfer to and play on any server and that’s fine, because your data is still in your server park, and that might give you a bit of lag, but it’s still basically playable.

To move you to another server park, would involve copying the data from server park to server park, giving you two characters in the main system that are identical. The way the architecture is setup, it just won’t work.

I’m sure I’m not explaining this very well, but if someone can actually track down the dev quote, I’m sure it’ll make it clearer. After all, I’m going by memory here.

But at launch you could freely transfer servers to and from EU to US and vice versa(it only took 2 mins too) .. If it were a data location issue then that would have not been possible.

I think what they meant was temporary movement was’nt possible. But by transferring it is. As I said, the only reason we still cant transfer at will was because of WvW.

You could keep the existing with region guesting system, but perform a server transfer across regions to keep network usage down.

Seperate your WvW server choice from your PvE server choice and it solves a lot of issues

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

But at launch you could freely transfer servers to and from EU to US and vice versa.. If it were a data location issue then that would have not been possible

Exactly. You could TRANSFER.
You could however NOT do dungeons and whatever across the two datacenters.
What we could do at release was freely transfer our accounts. Transfer != Guesting.
With transfer you move your whole account to another data-center (if transferring from EU to NA) but when guesting you are simply sending the character information.

Transfer there, transfer back when you’re done…. The mechanic is already there , in place and working.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Transfer there, transfer back when you’re done…. The mechanic is already there , in place and working.

Yeah, the mechanic is there and it does cost gems to use it at the moment. Simply accept that, it won’t change.

I wonder where we would be not only in this game but in RL if people just said “oh that’s how it works, accept it it wont change..”

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

I wonder where we would be not only in this game but in RL if people just said “oh that’s how it works, accept it it wont change..”

So, please tell me another MMO that allows free, unlimited, transfer?

We have known since release that there would be paid transfer.
The biggest issue was the fact that Guesting took so long to implement.
Had it been around at release with paid transfer as early as that this would most likely not be seen as an issue.

The topic is being able to play with any player anywhere in the world. Not if server transfers should be paid or not, which is an entirely different issue.

Furthermore it’s not for us to say if something will or won’t ever be changed. The best we can do is offer well reasoned constructive suggestions (like the link I posted above I hope) for them to take into account when planning future changes.

But the thing is that the cross region guesting is not there just to annoy us.
It is there because of technical reasons. They most likely need to completely rebuild their server structure in order to get it to work.

Did you actually read any of the suggestions people made at the time? There were loads that would not need a ground up re-design and that would use the existing mechanics we already have and have been proven to work at launch. Now ofc we dont know the cost of doing these etc etc but on the face of it, some are less work than the culling changes.

Now while i’m sure no one designed it to annoy people. At design time, the negative impact (community fragmentation, friends being forced to choose which set of friends they can play with etc etc) was IMHO deemed less than whatever positives (at a guess WvW and some notion of server pride)

I.e we are so clear that we want WvW linked to the servers people actually play on in other game types we’re prepared to have friends, guilds and the like split apart to allow that to happen

The hope is, is that Anet can take a long look at the so called positives weigh them against the negative effects on the community and perhaps decide the equation does’nt balance anymore enough to make the effort to change it.

We know they do can and did do this because they did it in GW1 with the way favor worked and the freedom to choose a region whenever you liked and now they’ve done a complete overhaul of the engine in the culling changes in GW2.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Did you actually read any of the suggestions people made at the time? There were loads that would not need a ground up re-design and that would use the existing mechanics we already have and have been proven to work at launch. Now ofc we dont know the cost of doing these etc etc but on the face of it, some are less work than the culling changes.

Do you actually read any posts at all that don’t agree with you?

The mechanics you are talking about did NOT exist at launch. You have NEVER been able to join a dungeon run on a EU server while playing on a NA server, while it has always been possible to join a group from another NA server at all times.

This is simply because you CAN’T have your data on both the NA and EU data-centers at the same time.
When you TRANSFER you delete the data from your original data-center (if you move across regions) and inserts them on the other one. When you are GUESTING you do not delete any data.