Guild Wars 2

For the 4th time in a row I have spawned into Sparkfly Fen to have a go at Tequatl the Sunless and there’s only been 4 or 5 of us there .

Today A person’s game crashed and when coming back online was thrown into the empty map I was on with no way of getting back to the map that had all the player’s on it.

Is this a normal thing to happen and it’s all about how lucky you are or is this a game feature ?

I would like to know if we can get a feature to spawn into a well populated map or we can spawn into a less populated one at our own desire.

gat.

Get into the map earlier and get on the fuller maps. If you show up just on time, the maps that are doing it are full. 15 minutes early is plenty.

Most of Teq maps fill up, so yeah, you can simply show up 15 mins before, and you should be fine.

Option 2: go to the map, press Y, join a party advertising for the worldboss you’re after, right-click the portrait of your first teammate, and select ’join in <map name>". Easy as that.

EDIT – It’s a shame the game doesn’t save your spots for a few minutes after a crash though, but I guess making the difference between a crash and a player logging out can be tricky, from a dev perspective.

There was a thread about unspecified megaserver problems being fixed on an unspecified date, maybe this will be one addressed.

I’m super paranoid about making sure I make the Teq fights, so I show up 25-30 min early, and then go make dinner and play with my cat.

Not something I necessarily recommend for everyone, because that is a long time to wait for a world boss, and I don’t necessarily want you petting my cat if you haven’t washed your hands.

;)

~EW

This will always be an issue. Any changes to megaservers will have no affect. There will always be potential for just a little more people than what will fit into a map, creating a dead instance. They would have to either make the event scale all the way down for solo play, or attempt to dynamically control the population. For example, instead of opening a new map once it’s full, fill the map to 150%, then forcibly split it into two identical copies. Additionally, events simply shouldn’t be balanced to require more than 10-20 people.

gatling.5319:

Is this a normal thing to happen and it’s all about how lucky you are or is this a game feature ?

I would like to know if we can get a feature to spawn into a well populated map or we can spawn into a less populated one at our own desire.

It is pretty good luck to show up to the Tequatl fight exactly on time and find a populated map. Tequatl used to be just like every other world boss- show up on time, autoattack, loot. He was changed to require some coordination; at the beginning, players would guest to higher populated server (pre-megaserver). Then as we became better, we simply made sure we weren’t in an “overflow” map. The introduction of the megaserver brought about the ability for all players, no matter what server, to fill maps. We learned that maps have a “soft cap” and a “hard cap.” A soft cap is where the game will stop allowing players to spawn into an instance, and instead will send them to a less full version of the same map. But the map is not full yet- players then set up “taxis” in the LFG tool to hard cap the map. The map is hard capped when players can no longer right click on a party member and select “Join in x map,” -they receive an error message telling them the map is full.

When you show up exactly on time, you are likely being sent to a new version of the map because all other maps are already soft capped and/or hard capped. This is megaserver working as intended, by opening new instances when others are full. To prevent being on an empty map, we as players have the option to show up to Sparkfly Fen 10-15 minutes early. During this time players will be organzing defenses and some will have taxis up in LFG to fill the map instance. Your other option is to show up exactly on time and hope there are still players putting taxis up in LFG.

Guild Wars 1 offered a district system, which allowed you to select which version of the map you wanted to be on, without needing a party member to taxi you there. Several players have asked for this system, but I believe the “taxi” system and LFG tool are the only option with megaserver (since maps are always opening and closing, and there is no static District 1, District 2, etc).

TL;DR: Show up 5-15 minutes early and/or use the LFG took to join a “teq taxi” and you’ll never teq alone again. Megaserver is working as intended in Sparkfly Fen.