Q:
Looking for RP
It’s not likely that you’ll be able to get onto Tarnished Coast, the North American roleplay server. It’s full due to it also being a top-tier World vs. World server.
That said, you still have options. Guilds and guesting. Start out with guesting. You can activate it when logging into the game from the World Selection menu, and it lets you temporarily be on another server for all purposes save World vs. World. You can use this to get better access to Tarnished Coast instances on the Megaserver. Once there, seek out some roleplay guilds and try to join them. The Megaserver tries to prioritize what instance of a map you join based on what guilds you’re in (along with your friends list, with your server being the lowest ranking criteria of the three), putting you in instances that your guild mates are already present in. Once you join a Tarnished Coast roleplay guild, you might find you don’t need to guest anymore, you’ll wind up being put in the map instances your guild is part of, even though you’re not on Tarnished Coast.
It’s not likely that you’ll be able to get onto Tarnished Coast, the North American roleplay server. It’s full due to it also being a top-tier World vs. World server.
That said, you still have options. Guilds and guesting. Start out with guesting. You can activate it when logging into the game from the World Selection menu, and it lets you temporarily be on another server for all purposes save World vs. World. You can use this to get better access to Tarnished Coast instances on the Megaserver. Once there, seek out some roleplay guilds and try to join them. The Megaserver tries to prioritize what instance of a map you join based on what guilds you’re in (along with your friends list, with your server being the lowest ranking criteria of the three), putting you in instances that your guild mates are already present in. Once you join a Tarnished Coast roleplay guild, you might find you don’t need to guest anymore, you’ll wind up being put in the map instances your guild is part of, even though you’re not on Tarnished Coast.
Really appreciate the response! However, a lot of that still sounds foreign to me.
Could you elaborate on the way that guesting, instances, and such works?
A little over a year ago, the ‘Megaserver’ was introduced to help with underpopulated zones. Mid-level zones often didn’t have many players in them at a given time, and with North American players spread over 24 different servers, that meant there were 24 instances of each mid-level map, sometimes with very few players in them. With the Megaserver, that’s no longer the case. Instances of maps are created and closed dynamically based on population demands, across all North American servers. While there’s 24 North American servers, there might only be 5 instances of the Snowden Drifts map, for example, because not many players go there. A more popular map, such as Queensdale or the Silverwastes, might have 40 or 50 instances instead.
Whenever you enter a zone, you get put into an instance based on four factors. These factors, in order from most important to least important, are: Your current party, the guild you belong to, people on your friends list, and people from your server. So if you’re partied with another player who’s in, say, Blazeridge Steppes, and then you go to that zone yourself, you should be placed in the same instance of the zone as your friend (there is a population cap per instance, so theoretically it might be full and you’d get a different instance). If you aren’t partied with anyone there, it will try to place you in an instance other guild members are in, or which people on your friends list are in. If none of those conditions are met, it will put you in the instance that has people from your server in it, though people from other servers will likely be there too.
So that’s how the Megaserver works. All guesting does now is make that last ‘server check’ for determining what instance you go to count as if you were in the server you guested to. So, all other things being equal, you’d wind up on instances with lots of Tarnished Coast players, which is what you’re looking for since you want roleplay. And once you get into some roleplay guilds, the guild preference for the Megaserver will ensure you get put into instances of Divinity’s Reach or Lion’s Arch where your roleplaying brethren are, even if you forget to guest that day.
Finding RP guilds by observing them in situ is likely a good way to make sure they are a guild you’ll enjoy RP with. But you can also go to websites that cater to GW2 RP to find guild postings there.
One such is guildwars2roleplayers.com — it’s the site that selected TC and PS as the unofficial RP servers in the first place. It has a guilds section to help you find the RP fit best suited to you. I’m sure there are others, including a Tarnished Coast specific one, but I haven’t been following them since I’ve been in the same guild since beta on TC anyway.