Here’s my idea, since Megaserver isn’t going away. We need a taxi service.
My scatterbrained thoughts are to code this up as part of the LFG tool, OR code it up as part of the Commander tag and incorporate its advertisements into the LFG tool. For now I’ll describe this as special Commander-only functionality coded into the LFG Tool, but I don’t care how the scope changes:
- Add special functionality to the Open World Content section of the LFG tool.
- Commanders bring up the LFG tool, go to Open World Content, and announce an event.
- Commanders can opt to flag their announcement as private, which means only their guildmates will see it in LFG.
- Joining that LFG does not put you in the Commander’s party.
- Instead, joining them moves you to their zone and instance if there is room in the instance.
This allows people to more easily converge on Commanders. It allows the LFG tool to act as a taxi service.
“That won’t work.”
Okay wait wait wait, let’s consider a proposed scenario with TTS and Tequatl. Here’s how I’d envision this working:
- Commanders from five TTS guilds join party and go to Sparkfly Fen.
- (If there are more than five, they just subdivide appropriately and do it as two little parties.)
- Next, those commanders converge on the same instance through the normal “Join in Sparkfly Fen” option in Party.
- Each commander then opens the LFG tool, goes to World Events, and announces their own private LFG.
- Their individual guildmates join the visible LFG.
- The LFG Tool knows, based on how the LFG is defined, to transport the participant to Sparkfly in the right instance if there’s room.
- If there isn’t room, the LFG Tool says that there’s not enough room and to try again later.
- Once TTS Commanders are sure they have all their desired participants, they can opt to flag their LFGs as public to invite others!
- Unaffiliated players are then able to see the LFGs and join up until the instance is hard-capped.
- Last, Commanders take their advertisements down so as not to be harassed by /whispers facilitated by the LFG tool.
What will happen with Megaserver load-balancing in this scenario? My expectation is that it would work as designed!
- The instance in which the players begin to converge will go out of balance on the high side.
- Megaserver will automatically bias to low-count instances for non-participating players, assuming load-balancing is determined by some load-weighting metric on the server side.
- People who get caught in the candidate instance and who don’t want to participate can just rezone to bounce to a less populated instance automatically.
Thanks for reading!