Guild Wars 2

it is ridiculous that in plain 2016 a player has to spend 5 minutes spamming right click, left click to try to join a map… even more ridiculous when someone joins the party and 10 seconds later gets a taxi in front of someone who has been trying a long time.

nothing more lovely than DCing in a guild map and not being able to rejoin until after the event is over…

Anet just needs to learn from themselves and do the district system from GW1.

GW2 basically does have the district system from GW1, they just don’t call it that and don’t let you pick from all the available copies of a map to switch to.

And it had the exact same problem the OP is referring to here: if your friends were in a full district you couldn’t simply switch over to join them, you had to keep spamming the button and hope you hit it in the time between someone leaving and someone else joining.

It was less of an issue in GW1 simply because all the explorable maps were private instances, so districts only applied to the cities and it was rare that anyone wanted to be in a specific district. But every time something like Canthan New Year was going on you’d see people complaining that their guild had an organised district and they couldn’t get in because it was full.

Danikat.8537:

GW2 basically does have the district system from GW1, they just don’t call it that and don’t let you pick from all the available copies of a map to switch to.

And it had the exact same problem the OP is referring to here: if your friends were in a full district you couldn’t simply switch over to join them, you had to keep spamming the button and hope you hit it in the time between someone leaving and someone else joining.

It was less of an issue in GW1 simply because all the explorable maps were private instances, so districts only applied to the cities and it was rare that anyone wanted to be in a specific district. But every time something like Canthan New Year was going on you’d see people complaining that their guild had an organised district and they couldn’t get in because it was full.

So much this, classic queue system isn’t a real answer as much as people like to think it is… when mega servers still were not a thing and world selection and guesting were real game wide mechanics. Even if we had more of a “real” queues back then it still had fair share of issues (yes I know the queues back then weren’t actual fair queues).

Even these days, with mega servers, all adding selectable districts would do is add a UI to a system people have been trying to work around ever since the start of the game (nowadays I believe people call it map “jumping”). The fact that such a UI would exists doesn’t actually solve any systemic problems.

Even if you could select a target district or a map from a list and queue for it the game would still dump you in a random overflow mega server while you are sitting in that in queue.

In my opinion they should just focus on making the actual tools they have given for us for mass transit better. These tools being squads and the Guild Portal (I don’t know what all the destinations for that thing are, but they should just add a whole bunch more destinations to it). In doing this they would allow guilds to spin up map instances for themselves if they need to while using an existing instance if one has enough room. I don’t think there is a strict need for a system where we can force new instance by explicitly requesting a new map as long as the systems we have can be better utilized.

For the record I wouldn’t be against adding a “guild” portal style mass transit portal in LA for ad hoc squads to use when they need to.

i say queue system in this sense: you click to join a party member in a map, then instead of getting a message “the map is full” and having to click again and again, you would be asked: “would you like to be placed on a queue for this map?”
and then when someone left in your queue time, you’d get a message saying “there is a spot on the server, would you like to join?”

that would solve the problem of some people spending 5 minutes to join and having someone else who got there 10 seconds ago “stealing” their spot.

Danikat.8537:

GW2 basically does have the district system from GW1, they just don’t call it that and don’t let you pick from all the available copies of a map to switch to.

…the bolded part is the whole point of the district system. It’s dumb you can’t get into a particular map without already knowing someone who’s in it inviting you in.

>2016
>Client crashes on high end PC
>Map full when try to join squad
>Thinking this patch was amazing until then

Shinzan.2908:

Danikat.8537:

GW2 basically does have the district system from GW1, they just don’t call it that and don’t let you pick from all the available copies of a map to switch to.

…the bolded part is the whole point of the district system. It’s dumb you can’t get into a particular map without already knowing someone who’s in it inviting you in.

Actually, the point of a such a system is ultimately load distribution and/or balancing. Manually being able to select district or an instance is actually counterproductive in terms of that particular goal.

The megaserver system as we know it aims to distribute players evenly, it doesn’t really benefit the mega server system at all to cap a map entirely before spawning a new instance and starting to direct players to it (because then the Join in command would work even less than it does right now). The aim is to create maps with healthy population, not necessarily full population, while trying to get the most out of the actual map servers which are transparent to us.

Being able to move maps on demand, for potentially no particular valid reason, is actually undoing some of the work the algorithms trying to balance the load on particular map servers are trying to do as part of the mega server system.

The way the system exists as it is right now simply ensures you have a reason to try and go to any particular map. The megaserver system is already weighted to try and group people together when possible, the current manual options are just for edge cases.

Is this putting too much faith in an automated system? Probably, however, the system as it exists right now has rationale behind it (whether mine is exactly accurate or not, I don’t know) but some people probably spent a great deal of time when these kind of decisions were made, you don’t make decisions that directly affect scalability and efficiency on a whim.

The GW1 district system was probably working fine for the kind of game and server architecture GW1 had (ie. it had very few maps that can be compared to what all of GW2 PvE open world is like). We can’t simply say that the same system could ever work in GW2, because we don’t know why they arrived at the current system during development exactly.

Do I think the system we have has problems, hell yes… but do I think the solution to it is as trivial as “do what you did before” definitely not.