Guild Wars 2

Not sure if this topic has come up in the past, but here goes.

Since megaservers was introduced, each map can get several instances running at more or less the same time, with world bosses synchronized across these instances (within minutes of each other). Functionally, this has the same result as districts in Guild Wars 1 – players could choose which instance they want to join using a drop down menu.

The key difference here is that “districts” in GW2 are dynamically created and destroyed; implementing a drop down menu to select the megaserver instance you want to join (assuming it’s not full) would be a logical next step. The drop down menu will have a list of all megaserver instances currently running (instances flagged for completion won’t be on the list).

This gives players a guaranteed way to enter a specific megaserver instance without having to rely on a party member on that instance, which is a way of getting around the lack of a server selection drop down menu. Obviously if the map is hardcapped, it won’t work. With a guaranteed way to enter a megaserver instance, the events API can be re-enabled with an additional field containing the IP address of the megaserver instance a particular event is running on (obviously tied to the particular zone as well). Events trackers can then have the same drop down menu allowing players to track events on specific megaservers, then join that megaserver via the drop down menu. One of the reasons the events API was disabled was due to not being able to guarantee getting onto a megaserver instance for a particular map, which would make it very difficult to do an event that pops up in a specific map. Having a guaranteed way to enter a particular instance should fix that issue.

Not sure where this topic belongs (maybe API development would be one place), so thought I’d post it here.

Thoughts?

E: Well, it seems like a dev posted a response about it about 7 months ago – the same concept apparently doesn’t work well for GW2.

They have that option in GW1, in the outposts.