Guild Wars 2

I’ll definitely second this. I like getting lost in the ambiance and would like a way to prevent combat music from jarring me out of enjoying the scenery.

Especially when the fight only lasts a few seconds….

The 1-10 slider idea is perfect.

If only… I’d LOVE to get this back!

Thank you, Anthony, for clarifying a bit. That does help assuage some concerns, but I have to say that I still can’t really support this change for servers that have a tight knit community unless there is a means for us to reliably congregate.

As others in this thread have brought up, we have already made our decisions on who we want to spend our time with. Adding a load balancer to re-make this decision for us on a day-to-day or hour-to-hour level does not respect our choices, and in fact, alienates us from the communities we’ve built.

At large, your playerbase is already leveraging the tools we have to bring our communities together.

We:
1) Use ferry groups to bring native players into their home instances
2) Wait around on underpopulated overflows in order to reach the end of our home instance queues
3) Use 3rd party utilities like websites, viop and IM to coordinate across overflows
4) Transfer and guest to servers with the communities we want to be a part of

Instead of load balancing us into groups using data you’ve mined, why not support the decision we already made when we selected a home server?

We want to be with “those people”. Not just the people in our party, not just the people in our guild, but the people on the home servers that we look forward to seeing on a daily basis.

You’re right about the population being “unbalanced” by nature. That’s the way we want it!

Taking that away will not bring us closer.

On the technical front:
To really address this issue, you need to have variably sized nodes. Larger server nodes for the high population zones/servers and smaller nodes for the lower population areas.

Load balancing will reduce infrastructure waste, but it won’t eliminate it.

Re-sizing your infrastructure to accommodate the variable load is the only way to really address this issue without damaging the community.

I, too echo the concerns of the OP. Walk up RP is a huge part of the experience to me, and I think that the new load balancing system is seriously threatening that experience.

I’d like to offer a couple scenarios to illustrate:

1) I log in during peak hours, so I get placed onto a server that has a low population of people who are “related” to me. I now have no means of reaching that core community if none of my friends are on to “join” or if the server is totally full. With the overflow system, I was at least placed into a queue so I could reach that community by waiting my turn.

2) “Shard A” is at 50% capacity when my home server peak hours begin. In just a few minutes, “Shard A” is at 100% capacity having been filled with players from my home server. “Shard B” is created to accommodate the influx of population, and fills to 50%, again mostly with players from my home server. Since foreign players are not being transferred off (“kicked”) of “Shard A” and “Shard B” players are not being transferred to “Shard A,” the community has now been cut in half. 50% of the players are now sharing an instance with people who have nothing (or very little) in common with them and the other 50% of them are alone on their own Shard. This scenario can be expanded to 3 or more servers depending on the order that people log in. Sure, you’re more likely to be paired with people from your server, but you’ve just been split into isolated groups among a populace of other isolated groups. Small cliques does not a community make.

Your playerbase as a whole, and RPers in particular, need a place to congregate en masse and take part in the community we’ve all worked to create since launch. To that end, we need tools that can ensure that we see the people we choose to be with. In my opinion, a load balancer cannot be trusted to make this decision for us.

I like the idea of the RP tag, but I can’t help but think that most of us have already “tagged” for RP by joining RP servers. We’ve already chosen the community that we want to build, and we should be allowed to participate regardless of what others have chosen. By “load balancing” us across multiple instances, you violate the choices your playerbase has already made to be a part of a common group.

I regret that we don’t have more detailed information on how this system works. Perhaps more details would help assuage some of our concerns by dispelling our collective assumptions.

On a technical note:
What Anet needs has not changed: Larger server nodes for high population servers and smaller server nodes to accommodate low population servers.

The “one-size-fits-all” approach can only lead to infrastructure waste unless you have enough abstraction to dynamically scale your infrastructure on the fly. Load balancing like this is a band-aid that will not address player isolation and will not address the root of your infrastructure waste.