Guild Wars 2

I love playing gw2, its a beautiful game but I am very frustrated by the HoT meta events maps.

Trying to get into an active map is like playing a game or Russian roulette, except you want to get shot. :p

Pets
4 of the 5 new pets I want to charm in HoT are locked behind content walls I have no personal control over.

Achievements
I have achievement I want to complete but again, I am totally at the mercy of the rng gods placing me on a map which is active.

Mastery Points
Many mastery points are locked away, behind event completions and/or a large player base on the map.

Possible Solutions – A map LFG mechanic which when you join it brags players from the scatter maps into an active one in a squad. To aid this, add an in game timer for starting these events which appears in the upper left-hands side of the map.
There could be automatic squad objectives and the like to help get things rolling.

I want to play, I want to spend the time, I want you support the player base but I’m locked out, please help me and countless other players too.

A-net has already sort of done this by creating Megaservers.
Instead of playing in the map belonging to your world.
You now play in European map 1 or European map 2 of a certain area for example.
This was to counter dead-zones and bring players together.

Squads can already be created and parties as well.
Simply use the map-chat to organize a party.
An automated or system-run squad as you wrote would, in my interpretation, create more forced meta’s not much unlike Dragon’s Stand.

You’re not totally “at the mercy of the RNG gods”.
The Open World tab of the LFG-Tool may be spammed with Raids and Meta-events for HoT but that doesn’t exclude you from using it as a tool to gather players for whatever purpose you like.

You can also make a map active all by yourself if you want, I have often done so myself in Auric Basin for example. Just taxi people in saying you’d like to start a meta map, if there is no meta-taxi present in the LFG-tool. (You don’t have to tell others that you only want to do the meta because there’s a pet locked away in a certain area.)

Try using this handy tool to find the best times to join a meta event.
I agree there are maps which are tough to join or start all by yourself, such as Dragon’s Stand. The best thing you can do is use the timer to find the times when players are most likely to be in a certain map.

http://dulfy.net/2015/11/09/gw2-hot-maps-timer-famme/

I hope I don’t sound too condescending or anything.
I’m simply telling you that I don’t think you’re completely out of options.
Organizing a map is something you can do by yourself, and it’s tonnes of fun! ^^

(inb4 I totally missed the contents of OP’s post.)

The mega servers don’t seem to work right with HoT. ANet said as much shortly after HoT launched. I don’t really play HoT meta maps all that much, so I can’t comment if this has gotten any better over time or if it’s still broken.

I think the timer idea is fantastic. I the core game, World bosses could be announced in it. So those that want to go there can. In Maguuma the boss fights could also be broadcast. Similar to the day night cycle.

A LFG tool for meta events would be handy for when you are trying to do the meta events in the new area. Hard to find a active map to compete on for the achievements. Would be great to see implemented.

Those of us that play solo due to time restrictions or small guilds would like to be able to join a active map without trying our luck in the present LFG tool.

Dead maps are a mathematical inevitability in any system which offers rewards for organized instances:

• If the map is full, it will generally succeed at whatever people are aiming for (Teq, HoT metas, etc).
• If it’s near full and has even a few people organizing, then folks will taxi, turning it into a full map.
• If it’s relatively low pop and no one is organizing, folks will use LFG to find the above types. They’ll leave behind an even lower pop map.
• Therefore, it’s likely that people just entering the zone will end up in low-pop map.

Thus, the issue isn’t “dead maps” — the issue is that people don’t want to be forced to use LFG to find a near-full one; we want that to happen automatically.

The original ‘solution’ to that was the “volunteer” system — if the map is low pop enough, you get offered the chance to move to a higher pop map (and get a minor buff for doing so). That turned out to be an issue just after the end of a world boss or meta event, as folks left numerous instances and you’d get 3+ volunteer requests within a few minutes. It is also an issue for people who start organizing late, as they might not be aware a map is scheduled for closing.

tl;dr low pop maps are mathematically certain to happen; solutions to moving people aren’t as simple as any of us think at first glance.

The only solution to it is better scaling system (without scaling floors), so that even mostly empty maps filled with random players have a chance to succeed.

You can’t, for example, finish tequatl with only 20 people, no matter how good they are, because the event simply doesn’t scale so low. And people know it, so they don’t even try if they happen to be stuck on a low pop map.

As long as this won’t change, ending up on dead maps will always be the case, even with the megaserver system working at it finest.