I never intended or expected to have to ever post on these forums, but in light of the overwhelming impact the megaservers have had on my server I felt compelled to log on and give my 2 cents. I apologize in advance if this seems like a long rant, but have a seat kittenes, it’s story time…
Megaservers have had an absolutely negative effect on my gaming experience in general and imo on my server as a whole. I play on a relatively low population server which just recently became an even lower pop. one due to a few major WvW guilds transferring off to another server. While the majority of my time in game was devoted to doing meta events, it was more or less a way to fund my WvW expenses, gear up each of my toons with ascended equipment and look kitten sexy in whatever skins I purchase to use on them. Despite WvW being the primary reason I play the game, I’ve come to appreciate the small community of PvE/PvX-minded individuals and guilds devoted to spending their time doing whatever content they enjoy while appreciating the game we all love. Now while I may slightly look down on this community and these ppl that choose to spend their time on what I personally may think to be less enjoyable content that’s not as fruitful in representing our server, they do represent an important part of our server which is ultimately our recruitment pool. With megaservers out in full force, this community has been utterly fractured with these PvE/PvX players and guilds feeling lost in the clusterkitten that we now have to deal with having had this megakitten shoved down our throats.
It’s probably safe to say that a large portion of my server and its community is very well rooted in PvE…MY server and MY community that anet claims to want to see flourish is now shattered. I won’t go into detail about how much my personal gaming experience has suffered from crippling frame rates, toxic personalities, childish trolls, afk meta-event bots, inefficient players and the general skill lag that has resulted in being forced to play along side far too many people that, to be brutally honest, I really just don’t want to know, play with or even help, if they’re not from my server. NOW… with megaservers, recruiting for guilds or even asking for support in WvW from our community is laughable and almost completely pointless.
A good step in mending this problem would of course be removing megaservers from the major cities(as many people have already suggested), but I personally don’t think that’s enough. To suggest that server communities are formed and revolve around major cities or WvW(which atm is really the only place you can be with players from JUST your server and has since become my only refuge) is ridiculous…there are a kitten-ton of people that WANT to spend their free time doing PvE and WANT to see the same familiar names around doing it with them, despite being from different guilds but still being able to say that these are my ppl and this is my server/community.
So..my feedback is…megaservers suck balls dude.
Whether or not guesting(which is now pretty much redundant) will be completely removed, joining a megaserver should, imo, only be made an option at the character selection screen as guesting is now. By default all characters created are placed on their home server with always the option to log out to character select screen and hop onto a megaserver for whatever reason. I can appreciate the reasons behind megaservers and that some players(probably mostly casuals) would want to hop onto a vibrant and bustling world full of random people with which they have no ties and perhaps never will, but I think creating more incentive in different ways for people to populate near empty zones or take part in various content in a sociable manner is the better alternative to strong-arming people into simply accepting megaservers as the only solution and future of gw2. Just give us the option kitten …plz don’t kill my server.