Guild Wars 2

Guesting is being abused and I cant even get into dynamic events in my home world server because “Guests” are over-populating the server and I get pushed into the overflow.

To add insult to injury I don’t know I wasted my silvers until I get there and find myself in overflow.

Please fix Anet.

P.S. – Could you bring back a good grouping system like GW1 so we don’t have to use a third-party website for this. (Genius idea eh)

How about just limiting guesting to once per 24 hour period? Anet has already done this in the past so it shouldn’t be hard to re-implement. That would fix the problem of mass zerging to world events. Home players shouldn’t have to compete with guests for their own events.

You can always guest at less populated servers for your events. Changing guesting won’t fix your problem. The problem is a game design issue. You can’t fit all the people in the server in the same zone. When they are giving out rares for 10s of work, everyone online with a brain will be at your zone. The only solution is to significantly nerf the rewards, or fix the technical issues that limit the players in the zone. Which do you think they will choose?

Not giving ‘bonus’ chests, even for a character that has not received one that day, to guested characters would instantly solve the abuse. This shouldn’t interfere with the designed goals of guesting unless you literally only ran dragons etc. on a different server and never your own.

While I think Yalan is on the right track there, I think that’s the wrong way to do it.
What I think should happen is that if someone on the home server is zoning into a zone, and that zone is full, it should kick a guest in that zone and put them into an overflow to make room for the person from the home server. Obviously enough if there are no guests to kick the person who’s home server it is still goes to an overflow.

In normal maps this is not going to cause a problem at all and likely never activate except in places like Lion’s Arch. But for world bosses it should make it so that only members of that actual server will likely be attending the world boss, this makes it even less likely people will abuse the guesting system. As I can see trolls just staying in these zones to take up spots on the world bosses (and likely not even participate) just so that people from that server don’t get to participate in the world boss.

LunaticChaos.7138:

What I think should happen is that if someone on the home server is zoning into a zone, and that zone is full, it should kick a guest in that zone and put them into an overflow to make room for the person from the home server.

So I’m guesting on my friend’s server, in a group with them going through Queensdale when suddenly behemoth arrives. “Cool!” we all exclaim as we run towards it. Suddenly I’m booted out to a loading screen, and when I get back in game I’m back on my home server, alone. All because, while farming events in Orr, a “resident” found out behemoth was up and rushed to get his loot.

How about no.

And you say its right that people on their own server should be playing second fiddle to guests on our own server? That we have to camp out 2 hours ahead of time doing nothing but standing there not playing the game just so we can participate in our own world bosses? That we have to hope the game doesn’t randomly disconnect us five minutes prior to the boss popping and then we’re out of luck and have to wait three more hours for another shot?
How about no.

Guesting is not ruining the game.I never have been in an overflow after the patch and i play on a high server.There are just a lot more people doing open world events.That is the new monthly’s trend.The dungeons are not crawling with people as they used to be.

Got to agree with Jrunyon, booting someone already there just because they’re a guest isn’t the answer. As is making it so you can’t get chests while guesting and so on and so forth. It seems like every suggestion I see regarding this issue is to punish guesters. I’ve even seen people making nasty comments about specific servers because they’ve seen a few people from that server on their own.

No really.

Well I’ve seen every, or very nearly every, NA server showing up at these events, so none of your servers can claim “it’s everyone else”.

You’re frustrated, I get that, I’ve experienced similar! I even had an event I barely made it out of overflow to attend lag so badly I lost my connection, and then when I logged back in the chest wasn’t there, so I figured I’d simply not gotten credit, no prob.
Tried again a few hours later, less lag, got credit, but…no chest.
Which means that event I lagged out of? Yeah, the game gave me credit, and counted it as my daily opening of the SB chest even though I never even saw the freaking chest.
Which coincidentally means the “once a day” part is tied to completion of the event and not the actual opening of the chest, which I find incredibly stupid, no matter how many times I do the event, if I don’t open it it should still be there the next time.

Talk about angry.

But. Being angry at people guesting trying to get the same reward I was there for is stupid. (okay, I will admit minor annoyance at the guy talking about getting his second Final Rest when I logged back on). That’s not going to solve the problem, and I would downvote any suggestion made out of anger sight-unseen.

There are too many reasons someone might be guesting to focus the solution on that.
Playing with a friend, and all of a sudden, booted so you can get your shiny.
The event is broken on their home server, too bad, no chests for guests (hey that rhymed!)
People blame it on greed, saying I can’t have it because he’s here trying to get what I want, so make it so he can’t have it so he’ll go away so I can have it.
Which looks an awful lot like the frying pan and the pot if you ask me.

The problem has a couple of core points. First, major event chests got buffed and are now actually worth doing. This is a good thing, something we needed very badly, however, this makes the rewards from the chests better than a lot of other sources, and it’s amazing the number of people I’ve seen saying the rewards need to be nerfed back to where it was, what if those other sources simply got a bit of a boost as well?
Might help some, but a minimum of a rare is hard to pass up.
Second is how each server’s world events are independently timed, which means that at any given time only a couple major events are running at once, so it’s only natural that people flock to them. There’s also the consideration that if two major events pop at the same time on my server and I can only hit one of them, and don’t have 3 hours to wait for the other to respawn, but other server X has that event going on in 20 minutes why not grab that other chest in the time I have?

While we’re divided up into arbitrary “servers” for technical reasons and pitted against each other in WvW we’re all here to play the same game and have fun, solutions to problems like this should never punish one segment of the population for anothers profit (which is basically what a lot of the suggestions I see are).

The best solution I’ve seen would be to try to synchronize major events, so they run concurrently across as many servers as possible (maybe break it up into 2-3 groups). Think about it, if Jormag was up on every server at the same time, no one would need to guest to do it, unless theirs was broken, but even then since a lot of others servers had it going they wouldn’t all pile into one place.
Now, I have no idea what kind of technical mumbo jumbo would be required to pull that off, but I think the idea has merit, even if they could only synch up small groups, like 3-4 servers, having multiple places for people to go would spread the crowd out considerably.

If guesting isn’t ruining the game, that its just people are doing more world events. Then a change to make guesting for a world boss would have no effect and we’ll all still have the same issues. So even if my more draconian suggestion (in some shape or form) isn’t done, the other suggestions that have been popping around wouldn’t cause any issues at all and would be “business as usual” for everybody involved. If nothing else a change to make guests not able to take advantage of our world bosses would just prove to us that “we just have bad luck.”

Albeit I would admit, ScribeTheMad you do have a point there in one solution.
Make the world bosses on strict “They spawn at these times” timers. That way regardless of whether you are on the overflow, your home server, or guesting, if you go to the zone at “X” time you have the opportunity to fight the boss. This would remove all the concerns of guests, having to keep track of spawn times, having to worry that you’re getting bad information from someone trolling you, having to worry about random disconnects midfight or right before the fight starts (and thus getting booted to an overflow upon logging back in). This would be a far more elegant solution.
And that chances that it would be the one that gets done? Considerably less than the chance they’ll do something to fix the guests abusing the system.
Edit: Reason why its less likely, because instead of fixing an abuse its making something so that its easier to “Farm” which has is apparently against the GW2 design.

LunaticChaos.7138:

While I think Yalan is on the right track there, I think that’s the wrong way to do it.
What I think should happen is that if someone on the home server is zoning into a zone, and that zone is full, it should kick a guest in that zone and put them into an overflow to make room for the person from the home server. Obviously enough if there are no guests to kick the person who’s home server it is still goes to an overflow.

In normal maps this is not going to cause a problem at all and likely never activate except in places like Lion’s Arch. But for world bosses it should make it so that only members of that actual server will likely be attending the world boss, this makes it even less likely people will abuse the guesting system. As I can see trolls just staying in these zones to take up spots on the world bosses (and likely not even participate) just so that people from that server don’t get to participate in the world boss.

I do like this, ppl that has it as home server should have some kind of priority, to solve some of the problems other ppl mentions, with guest that is actually playing with friends, maybe have it kick guest that are not in a party with a member that ahve that server as home server, before those that are.

Another alternative could be simply having say 50% of the slots of a map not be able to get used by a guest in first place, should increase the chance that you get on your own server as well

Implement an AFK timer once a map creates an overflow (excluding LA). That way, AFK guest campers will be booted after x minutes of inactivity.

Guesting would be not needed if they maybe migrate some of the less populated servers together. I play on a server that seems to have almost no players on it anymore. It seems Anet did not think the population could slink so fast :/

I think guesting is a major cause of the sudden perf drop and spike issues alot of people report lately.

still think best ways would be to:

Reduce cooldown on most the big dynamic events people want, I’ve not seen Maw or Fire elemental go into cooldown because it happens so often you don’t have to go world hopping to get it done in your game time (not everyone has 4 hours to wait for claw to spawn), this means there is less reason for people to guest for that reason.

Limit it 1 chest per boss per account, I know currently you can only get the chests once per character regardless if you guest (at least thats my guilds findings) but limiting it to account would also stop people logging multiple characters onto different worlds to get more loot, sure it would be a bit of a blow to those who really really want to develop 8 different characters at the same time but generally you would be sticking with 1 character to develop in the day, same as daily and such.

Both of these would remove the need for people to guest JUST for the chest loot.

I know a lot of people say the new loot is to blame, but really the core issue is the stupid amount of ectoplasms needed for stuff at end game and the ridiculous rarity of legendary precursors, this makes people want to try and exploit any systems possible to speed up and increase there chances of achieving something, even if ANET made it to try and take time to accomplish.

The predecessor had something called districts where players could travel where ever they wanted without any restrictions and waypoint fees. this was working perfectly. just because guesting allow players to play together doesn’t mean it ruin the game. Latency is a server problem end of story.

Once per Day per Account across servers. That is the only way to effectively stop guesting abuse. If you cannot receive the chest reward a second time regardless of which character you are on and which server you are on then people will stop doing it. The only ones left will be people who have not done the chest yet that day, be they guests or not. It will spread out players more throughout the day and reduce lag without impairing guests who aren’t trying to abuse the system.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Once per Day per Account across servers.

Least intrusive fix. The problem is nobody wants to think they are the problem. Guests aren’t the problem. It’s players, ALL players, who just load alts through the events. The home world campers don’t want their camping messed up so they blame the guests. That or just revert the loot to pre patch. When the loot changed is when the problem starting happening NOT when guesting started.

I’m an alt-aholic and I used to be against making these chests account wide but it seems to be the best answer without hitting hanging out with friends. Stop trying to screw with guesting.

durandall.4968:

How about just limiting guesting to once per 24 hour period?

Already in place (the limit is twice a day).