Guild Wars 2

I have been extremely frustrated recently when playing, due to what apparently is loss of participation.

I find that with the sheer number of crashes (and I was just made aware of and have started using the 64 bit client), and map closures* lead to several losses a day of my participation.

Now, before I complain bitterly and ask that “someone” try and fix instance based participation that is lost on disconnect or instance change, I was hoping that someone would clarify how participation works.

I see my participation slowly grow over time and often get to 200%. Now, this seems to persist beyond one event cycle and is carried over to the next one. This implies that participation continues to give an on-going benefit and is not event cycle driven.

In addition, I am regularly rewarded as the meta-events progress – so as I build participation, I am being intermittently awarded throughout the cycle.

Now – when I’ve been playing for over an hour and I have – let’s say – 200% participation, and I’m forced out of my instance (crash or map closure*) – what have I actually lost? Have I been rewarded for my 200% participation by the intermittent rewards? Or have I lost the fact that each one of these rewards will now have to start from scratch, and I’ve lost 200% of … something important?

*This is a specifically important question when it comes to map closures. When I receive a volunteer request to move to another server, after the first time I have always declined. When I took the volunteer option – which I used to do all the time – my participation was wiped. So, then I’ve begun to stay on the closing server. Sadly, this leads to the map abruptly closing later on, usually right in the middle of an event which I always feel was “just about to finish”.

To gauge when to leave a map, I think it’s important to know how best to mitigate the inevitable loss and nagging frustration. Should I leave after my first meta chest? Should I stick it through as long as possible? Eventually the instance is doomed and the participation will be lost, but what’s the best solution to these cases?

Personally, I’d love to see a way for ANet to preserve instance participation when leaving a closed map, and perhaps even due to a crash. E.G.: Save the participation and if the map being loaded is not the same as the map last left, delete the participation. If the time stamp on the participation is more than the minTime (5? 10? minutes), then delete the participation.