Guild Wars 2

Hello all.. just a question about the megaserver stuff. I started with Launch.. but have played on and off since.. and just started playing again this holiday season after many months away. So it seems the Megaservers have changed some of the rules.. so I just wanted some “clarification” please.

I joined up initially with Borlis Pakitteneason was the lower population at launch. I was hoping to avoid queue times to login (like I had with WoW years before).. It’s never been a problem in GW2. I do some PVP/ WvW also (beginning).. so I’ve never had too long a queue in WvW it seems.. BUT I’ve been wanting to do more PVP and WvW (mainly to level my characters).. and feel I’d get more XP going with a server that fares better than BP….. but with no level 80 character yet.. I don’t want to be “unwelcome” for joining WvW on a more competitive server.

But other than WvW, my current server has NO impact on my playing in sPVP or PVE right? As far as the megaserver goes.. I can group with players/guilds on other “servers” right? I have friends on JQ.. so even without guesting I could even meet them in game and group with them? Is that understanding correct? Would joining another server now with the Megaserver cause me to have to “queue” up to LOGIN or just shoot me to overflow servers? I would imagine WvW queue times might be longer on more active WvW servers.. how long would that be? Just curious…

Thanks all.
Aenielida

There are no login queues that I ever see, and I’m on Tarnished Coast, the perpetually full NA server. Your understandings stated in your third paragraph are all correct. The only impact your “home” server has is on which WvW team you join.

There are no overflow servers any longer, not exactly. Basically everyone from all servers get tossed in a map until it fills, then another map is generated. Sometimes the map you’re in will tell you it’s empty, and offer a 10 minute boon for swapping. That’s a bit wonky, though, it seems to happen even on large organized maps and if you say no, you’re not leaving, you only have an hour before it will boot you (I think some have lost out on Tequatl kills thanks to that).

I have no answer to WvW queue times since I almost never go there. I believe they have EotM available to do some variant of WvW while waiting for your actual server to open up, though the impression I get is that’s turned into an event farming place, not a way to get more Honor etc.

Your choice of server ONLY affect WvW and literally nothing else. Nothing in PvE, nothing in sPvP, not your guild, not your map, not your loging, nothing.

Tbh its suppose to affect which overflow you end up in, but party and guild have a FAR bigger impact so unless you are guildless or in a really small guild, it won’t affect you.

Up uptil tier 3 in WvW, your server won’t have any queue WvW map outside of some exception like on reset or during WvW season, so no problem there.

At tier 2, you start to see a big difference. For the first 2-3 hours of reset, most map are queues. Some are difficult to get into, but you should never have difficulty to find a map to play (at worst you gonna wait 15min). Outside of reset, you will see queue on map on a regular basis, but its usually fake queue or really short one, and its usually only on 1 or 2 map.

Never played in tier 1 so I won’t comment.

Confirming that there are never login queues – anytime you log on you’ll be able to jump straight in the game.

For WvW, I don’t know how it is in NA but I’m on SFR in Europe which is T1 and while there can be pretty big queues at prime time and during tournaments, it’s reasonable and off-season mostly it’s Eternal Battlegrounds that has a queue, the other maps have none or only a small one (right now for example, it’s 10pm and EB has a queue of 76 people and two borderlands have a 4-6 people queue). I’m guessing NA servers in high tiers might be a bit more intense due to population?

You will never have to queue simply to login, no matter what server you’re on. That’s actually been the case ever since launch. It’s one of the things GW2 got right IMO – they set it up so the game can dynamically create and delete copies of all the maps, and share them between servers. If the map you’re trying to login to is full you’ll simply be moved to another (largely identical) version. Now, with the mega server system, you may not even notice any difference.

The only exceptions are the 4 main WvW maps – the Borderlands and the Eternal Battlegrounds. (Because the score depends on the number of points held there can be only 1 copy of each map per matchup.)

To answer your other questions: Your server does make a slight difference in that it’s one of the factors used to determine which of the available maps you load into. As I said most of the time you won’t notice a difference, but for example if you were on a French language EU server you’d be more likely to be in the same map as other French speakers.

But you can play with friends on other servers by joining the same party, going to the same map and (if you’re not already together) right clicking their portrait and picking ‘Join in map’. If you’re in the same guild or on each other’s friends list there’s a chance the game will put you into the same map anyway.

Thanks everyone.. I appreciate the information and the education. =) All your information has been helpful in my understanding of GW2. =)

Thanks
Aenielida