Showing Posts For Phoenyx Ascendant.1320:
First of all, I love this game. I’ve played since a couple months after launch and on average I play 4-5 hours a day. I love the many ways you can play; whether I feel like running around gathering and crafting (love the many cooking recipes), tackling dungeons, solo exploring, fighting in groups, squaring off against a fellow player, or spending hours trying to figure out investment strategies for the trading post.
I love the communities I’ve become a part of. I’ve been part of small guilds and big ones; run solo and in 150 person groups that fill up maps to the brim. I’ve run WvW for 2 different servers. I seen friends come and go (and hopefully come back for some of the new content).
In short, I love the vibrant and nuanced world Anet has provided for us and the wonderful people who have joined together to become the beating heart of Tyria.
And since the megaserver patch, I have considered walking away. And that is all due to megaserver. The balance patches and new traits have given us new builds to play with; the account bound legendary weapons are something I’ve begged for since spending many, many hours building mine; the wardrobe system is fun as heck to play with. Even the new gated traits, which at first seem tedious, really brings exploration back to the game.
This is not to say I don’t understand the purpose of utilizing megaserver architecture, I do. The 2 key items I see are
-Anet saves $ because Server resources are allocated more efficiently- not utilized to maintain empty or near empty shards
- New players are less likely to quit due to player isolation. Any zone that players enter are as populated as possible. For major world events, being on a small pop server or playing in off hours does not reduce chance of success.
In short, this is merging servers without the negative PR of merging servers. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Retaining player base and reducing bottom line expenditures makes it a better for all of us in long term. It may even allow Anet to move forward on the long awaited expansion; with megaserver’s combined maps, old GW2 maps wont feel like ghost towns when expansion maps open up.
However, and this is the big however, the current implementation of the megaserver is suboptimal and is rather discouraging. As follows:
The mega server system is geared towards solo adventures and small groups that stay in a single map and penalizes other play styles.
-Trying to meet up on a different map with someone outside of your group is a crapshoot. Several times in the last week, I was running solo and a friend (on friend’s list, from same server, but non-guildee) whispered me that a couple people were meeting up in a different map. I waypointed to join them, but almost every time I was put on a different shard unless I was actually in their group.
-Trying to organize large groups is disastrous. Preceding user posts have detailed how attempting guild missions with large guilds split the guild into multiple shards.
-With non-persistent shards, the feeling being in a living world (a feature heavily trumpeted by Anet as differentiator vs other MMOs) through dynamic events is gone. It now feels random. If I way point to another map (or disconnect), I may end up in another map where the dynamic event progress is completely different. Often times, I have ended up on a newer shard where every dynamic event is failed or at its starting point.
-Trying to organize major events is disastrous. I love that anet gave us challenging events like tequatl and the 3 headed wurm, but by LIMITING THE SPAWNS everyone piles in together and trying to get an organized group to take over a shard (like TTS did with the old overflow shards) is very difficult. Since organized groups cant take the shard, the groups on each shard do not have the necessary coordination to do the challenging content.
-Server identity is starting to die. The only affect that I can see of your home server is WvW. As I adventure, I used to get to know a lot of the people around me from other guilds because I kept running into them. When I left my old guild, one of the reasons I joined my new one is because of people I met on the map. Now, I recognize fewer and fewer people (and its only been a week).
-Gathering/crafting. with constantly changing shards, resource locations are constantly randomized, making attempting to gather inefficient.
- Waypointing is a pain- by contesting every contestable waypoint, I have to waypoint twice. I don’t have the best computer, and this adds much loading time. Additionally, this makes the world feel less alive; as I saw waypoints around the world open and close (or opened them myself as launching point for my friends and members of my guild to join me) I felt part of an alive community.