Guild Wars 2

Topic says it all, why didn’t they do this? Wouldn’t it allow for people to meetup and congregate better if we new the right server to choose for our time zones?

Discuss.

Too limiting for game population. A spectrum of players from acrosss the globe or even your region is ideal, since it gives a better chance of your server being populated continually, rather than mostly around 5-8pm everyday.

@ Transparently

Ahh ok that makes sense. See I am a bit frustrated because the last 2 days I have gone to two different level 40-50 zones and both of them had very little players in them.

A better question would be why did Anet create servers at all..

GW1 had a serverless, district architecture. Servers, even as implemented have a number of disadvantages all of which has (IMHO) negativley impacted the game and the community.

• The game can shrink and grow without the users notcing. No need for server mergers and the bad publicity and feel that entails. Not to mention the complexity of merging servers themselves both from the player and Arenanet.
• MMO’s are moving away from servers, if servers are such a good idea why are games moving away from it?
• Players can go anywhere they like, with no restrictions on needing a friend or having to play
• Guilds Influence buffs no longer need to be restricted to a server.
• Friends, guildies and players are seperated and split up across the game.
• You have no easy way to meet new players outside of your server, as you need a friend to guest there
• Players can choose where to meet up (‘Anyone who wants CoE, come to CoE waypoint, AM2’)

Now ofc we’ve been given the ‘we want server pride’ answer but there are imho better ways of creating pride than that. How?

Quite simply the player chooses a ‘team’ to play for. Said team has all the restrictions we have today. All that happens is that teams fight each other in the mists instead of ‘servers’. Everything else stays the same.

In other words you de-couple your WvW team from where you play the rest of the game. I realise pride is important, but surely pride in your team is as good as, if not better than server pride. After all the whole of sports generates a huge amount of pride in your (insert sports) team. I would argue sports team pride transcends nationality and patriotism.

By de-coupling where you play the rest of the game from WvW and using a district style system you get rid of all the downside mentioned above in a single stroke.

Let’s look at what systems are in place that would help go to a serverless way of playing?

Players can already go from server to server in a matter of moments. Substitute the word Server to District and the mechanism is the same

Load balancing already happens in terms of the overflow system. Simply allow the player a choice of ‘Overflow’ to go and we’re most of the way there.

All servers share a central DB, otherwise guesting and the tradepost would not work.

As for the technical side of server load etc we cant tell for sure, but it would be logical to assume that if one physical hardware server can say handle 1000 users at a time then it does’nt matter if users are organised into server or districts you’ll still need the same amount. We’ve already seen about stuff auto load balances and shares the same Databases.

In short Anet have based the entire game’s way of playing, socialising and community around a single game type. One which, although fun is not where the majority spends it’s time.

So. why do we have servers again?

Would it matter? I mean in GW (I’m from the UK) I played on the US servers along with most of the globe. I kind of had two clocks, real life clock and my GW one. After 8pm UK time was party hour for my GW clock because all the Americans/Canadians got on and the chat would explode

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

So. why do have servers again?

You answered your own question. WvWvW. It would mean a lot more if they didn’t allow unlimited free server transfers back in the beginning.

With free server transfers every 24 hours, and the ability to right click “Join” anyone in your friends list (even people on other servers), I think the setup works great.

To the OP, I suggest you make a post on the forums looking for people in your time zone, and then add some of them to your friends list. You can then either transfer to a server that has active players in your time zone, or you can just right click Join them when they are on.

Stevoli.8795:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

So. why do have servers again?

You answered your own question. WvWvW. It would mean a lot more if they didn’t allow unlimited free server transfers back in the beginning.

With free server transfers every 24 hours, and the ability to right click “Join” anyone in your friends list (even people on other servers), I think the setup works great.

But on considering the downsides the server system brings, having to deal with all of those just so a single game type works. In which one in which not everyone plays, and yet that compromise affects everyone all of the time seems to me to be illogical and counter productive.

Especially when there are alternative systems that could have been used that would remove all the disadvantages at a single stroke.