Guild Wars 2

So this is a stupid question, yes I do know this…what with the megaserver and how it behaves.

However, I am on Fort Aspenwood currently and it seems to take longer for my loading screens between maps than it used to when I was on a medium server. I used to have some WvW friends who had me transfer to the larger server (this was long after the Megaserver update btw), but I find that my load times are way longer than they used to be. Loading into LA takes so long it’s ridiculous! I don’t remember it taking so long on the medium server. So I was wondering if I should just swap back to my old medium server and if I’d get my faster loading times? The group I was running around with doesn’t play anymore so me being there is pointless if it’s gonna give me the grief that it feels like it’s been.

Am I just seeing things, that my loading times aren’t affected by the amount of people on my current server? Don’t want to waste the 500 gems swapping back if doing so won’t change a thing.

It’s not a stupid question by any means. (Unless you are familiar with client-server, MMO, distributed network systems, etc.)

Short answer: no, it wouldn’t help.
FA and the rest of the NA ‘worlds’ use the same US data center and each open world PvE uses the same technology to be created. The LA you log into isn’t specially created just for FA members. In particular, the population of FA doesn’t determine how many people in your instance; on the contrary, whether you load into instance A or instance B is determined by how many people (from any server) are already in the instance (with priorities changed to put you together with friends and guildies).

Load times are influenced by a variety of factors and generally speaking, if your load times are longer than that of others, there’s probably something you can do to reduce it. I strongly recommend you work with Customer Service to troubleshoot your long load times (follow the links starting with ‘Support’ at the top-left of this page).

You could try repairing your .DAT file (see the wiki article). A full or fragmented hard drive can matter (although that’s less likely these days). You can also try using the so-called “streaming client” option. Or you can start trying to diagnose the issues yourself, by using the -maploadinfo command-line argument -- this will give you an idea of what particular assets in the game are slowing down your client, when you load into this map or that.

Good luck.