First of all I’d like to say that I did not read the whole discussion hence it is really long. So in advance I’d like to apologize if anyone has already said this but : The new system of ‘Mega Servers’ is going to kill the whloe RP-community if you go trhough with this. That has serveral rather complex reasons.
Firstly : Roleplay exists mainly because of the people around you. Since there are being more players put together that cannot be really viewed as a problem now can it? Well. Acutally it is a really big one. Since there will be serveral versions of Divinitys Reach and Lions Arch players won’t actually be brought together but seperated. You need to be able to interact with other people but you cannot …why? Well because they are in an entirely diffrent world then you are. Due to the fact that there will be simply MORE people there will be MORE versions of each and every city and area which is fine. As long as you give the players the oppotunity to CHANGE the worlds on their own and not wait for the timer to run down. That was a possibility in Guild Wars. Whenever you wantet to travel to an outpost you’d be able to seslect which district you’d like to enter : Eg : Lions Arch – English – District 1 …or 2 …or 3. The player NOT some timer that you cannot even influence had the controll over this. Observing Lions Arch as one of the biggest citys Role Players usually had to wait. Sometimes half an houre to get from the overflow to the original city. Seeing that this is now substituted with Gendarran Fields…one can easily picture what is going to happen with the Mega-Server-System.
Secondly the solution that was given to us by the game-designers simply cannot be described as one. Because Role Players are a community.Yes. But we are NOT all in the same guild. Actually there are multiple guilds, probably even more than PvE or WvW guilds because SOME and not all of them consist of only 5 to 10 people. Only the minority has up to 20 members and thos can be considered as rather large. By explainig that we will be all put on one server as long as we are in the same guild you have a wrong impression. The RP community is vast, large and VERY diverse indeed and it is so good because of it. Because! of the diffrent groups and guilds the interactions between Role Players CAN happen in the first place and by taking that away you are destroying a very nice platform for roleplayers. You are (to describe it simply and shortly) ripping appart a whole web into bits and pieces that may fit together but there WILL be missing parts to the puzzle and in addition parts that were really important.
Thirdly I’d like to concentrate on the fact that some people have been doing roleplay since the release of this game and consequently put a lot of time,effort and blood,tears,heart in this game. We BUILT something here. Something very special and nice,somethin we want to keep and nurture even more, something that we love. Something that makes us laugh, cuss, scream and root four our characters, yell at others and sometimes it even makes us cry. Roleplayers have a completely diffrent and utterly more special connection to their charakter.It a part of us,something that we put together in our minds before creating it and something that we learned to love. And you’re taking that away with this very idea of your’s. Bringing together more players will seperate us.
As for me : Very many people said that there is about ONE WEEK left for us to enjoy our roleplay. To all other ‘kinds’ of players this most likely is not a big change. To us? It’s destroying the game. It’s changing it completely and it’s ripping appart everything we built and tried to achieve during the last year. It’s ultimately come to this… and there is no way this will not affect us in the wa we predicted.
One last word : There are more RP-Servers out there than the two that were mentioned. Drakkar-Lake is the home of humble me and my guild,all my friends and enemys and you are taking that away with this grand idea… One can probably assume from that that I am in fact German. So as for my poor English :Excuse me and keep all the mistakes. Sorry for the long post btw…