Guild Wars 2

I read an interesting article a few days when ESO announce they are going to be subscription based. The article mentioned that subscription provide a more stable and predictable funding and this usually translate into bigger development budget and hence why games like ESO and Wildstar are going subscription. B2p/F2p games usually have fluctuating funding and hence may limit what can be allocate for the development of ongoing content.

Looking back at the past MMOs and GW2, this kinda explain some things like why GW2 tend to release temporary content as they are usually easier to produce (and probably much cheaper to develop as well as maintain) and can occupy the players for long period of time, or cosmetics that translate into direct gem sales in the store. I think it will be harder for B2P/F2P MMOs to produce large permanent content areas compared to subscription based games unless they do it like DDO/LOTRO style where each new content area are bought with gems.

Only time will tell if the next wave of MMOs like ESO and Wildstar will be successful with the subscription based model as it seems MMOs players are starting to demand more involved content that F2p/B2p modem might have difficulties providing.

I think the main issue with culling is not that your PC is taking too long to render the other players, it is that the server itself is not sending the other players’ data to your PC at all, so your PC’s rendering play very little part.

For example, let say the server is configure to sent to your PC data of 10 nearest players, at every 5 seconds it rechecks which players are 10 nearest.

Let say 5 of those 10 players move away and another 5 new enemy player move closer to you and begun attacking you within the 5 seconds, the problem is the server won’t even tell your PC about those 5 new enemy players till the next recheck cycle kicks it to change what are the closest 10 players.
Another problem is let say if there are 20 players move close to you, the server will still only send data of 10 of those 20 players.

I imagine that by the time they rolled out ascended gear for all 16 slots several months down the road, it will be time for a major content release via an expansion. Most probably it will come with a new level cap which Anet said will come eventually like for example L100, we can begin all over again with L100 ascended rings+back first, a few months later, L100 ascended amulets and so on.

akanibbles.6237:

From an oceanic point of view, which server is best to join?
Do both IoJ and CD have reasonably presence at this time (around 1am to 5am PST)?

Both IoJ and CD have reasonable presence around oceanic timezone, I think the difference is IoJ is more a purely oceanic playerbase due to their unofficial oceanic server tag whereas CD is more of an oceanic + asian playerbase. As such, I think IoJ do tend to have more concentrated population band during oceanic peak hours whereas CD tend to have wider spread of population throughout the oceanic + asian peak hour timezones.

Krosslite.1950:

Pure speculation, but I would guess to check your level of input to the event that allow said chest to appear. So in turn determine your reward quality

This is not what the OP meant though.
He’s saying that as soon as you interact with the chest, the loot already appears in your bags, then the cast bar appears and begin counting down, but it serves no purpose other than making you stand there as nothing happens when the cast down reaches the end.

I’m guessing it’s probably a generic function they used for item interactions and someone forgot to set the cast time for chest interaction to 0s.

Awesome.6120:

Will anet pop up one day and tell me I’ve been to the mists 5000 times and never engaged in a spvp match so goodbye forever?

This is a serious question.

Actually would appreciate an Arenanet representative answer to this question, today I saw there was a discussion over at LA chat whether this is consider as an exploit by Anet. Usually, I’m not bother by it but recent events seems to have made many people re-consider whether it is safe or not to use mist as a free port to LA since this does seem like what the mist was not intended for and can be seen as exploiting the system.

Karizee.8076:

Busting at the seams on my server.

Hitting overflow at 8am PST. How many other MMOs have this kind of traffic?

Pretty much most of them are at this time of the year with the holidays.
Currently in 2 other MMOs besides GW2 (one of them supposedly to be dying) and they all are bustling with people and server queues.

Most probably it’s something like 72 hours online timer for it to wear off, kinda pointless if bots can just logout and login another toon to defeat the DR.

Probably because GW2 uses an enhanced version of GW1 game engine (rather than a different new one) which at it’s core have issues handling large amount of people within an area. Culling is probably added in to help the game engine handle the mass of people.

No real way to tell now during the holiday seasons. Many MMOs, even the half dead ones will experience a surge in numbers during these times.

Plus GW2 was recently on sale so many new players bought the game for $20 to see what the game was about.

I did notice that guilds with vet players are becoming more inactive while those newbie guilds in Queensdale are booming. That could explain why different people are experiencing different things. What happens after the holiday season though is anyone’s guess.

Quarktastic.1027:

The level of entitlement in this thread is staggering.

Why must everything have a super awesome reward attached to it? What happened to playing games for fun?

Most of that crowd that play for fun have left after the Nov 15 patch.

Many of the crowd that stayed behind are those that wants shinies with better stats as their main goals.

If they are to implement this, then they have to either implement single characters on that server or all characters on that server share whatever ’PK" flag/status from other characters. Player regulation of such activities in other games tend to fall apart because players are able to hide behind alts with no consequences.

Ansultares.1567:

Rannulf.9417:

Vasham.2408:

Rannulf.9417:

Vasham.2408:

Nurse.1085:

I realize Anet must have done something to increase the cap or filtered it out or something, since the other week they all went from Full to Very High.

However, now they’re filling up again and I can’t get on the server my husband and Guild transferred to (which is Tarnished Coast). Neither can my sister-in-law.

Are these servers stuck at Full? Every time I look, it never moves from Full. Any Tarnished Coast members know what times I should be aiming for to camp the World Select screen?

Server status is based on the number of accounts tied to a server, not the number of players actively online. Even if Tarnished Coast was completely empty of players it would still read full. Shame Arenanet chose to lie about their subscriber numbers like that. : /

Not sure if serious or trolling. anet doesn’t have subscribers, and the server status do base on number of players online.

One of the community managers admitted to it being based on number of accounts. Denying the truth won’t change it. It’s probably all Arenanet can do to prevent NCsoft from shutting the game down after it failed.

Show me a link until then you’re a troll.

That’s how they managed to open up so much space on the servers; not by upgrading them, but by cleaning out inactive accounts.

The Beast.4350:

so there is no chance that i could enter a full world due to the fact that it has the maximum amount of accounts tied to it?

The best advice I could offer is to check the server status during a patch; I think that’s the most likely time they’ll clear accounts. But it may be some time yet before space like what was created recently will be available again.

The clearing of inactive accounts are probably done daily, that’s why free spots are open daily at non-prime hours. What they did before Winterdays was probably a combination of tightening the criteria for inactive accounts (maybe accounts not login in for last 2 months instead 3 months) and increasing the server ‘full’ threshold.

I think those ‘full’ servers are not going to open up anytime soon until after the holiday season is long over, many accounts that were previously ‘inactive’ are probably active now as people come back to check out the new stuff. I suspect servers like Tarnish Coast are probably way over their ‘full’ threshold and will take some time before enough inactive accounts are pruned to make room to drop below the limit.

Paponzi.1637:

Ned Stark.9356:

Daring innovations my foot. Would love to see you name at least 1.

Underwater combat, weapon based skills, skill>equip, non esponential leveling, crafting gathering and ressing gives exp, mesmers.

Be sure to ask if you need some more ^^

Those on the list might have true 1-2 months back but recently many current MMOs have already taken the better mechanics of GW2 and integrate into their games. If GW2 wants to thrive, it better start looking at what the other MMOs have been doing and start adopting some of the better features of others.

Right now, the only thing GW2 have that is somewhat different is probably no holy trinity and the auto-scaling of both directions.

BG got a bunch of Oceanic transfers in when the capacity of all servers was increased.

There is also a possibility that previously we able to preview armor that we cannot wear was a bug that was recently fixed while the weapons is yet to be fixed but eventually it will be ‘fixed’

Or the bots are back in Sparkfly Fen, there are a couple of sweet spots in that zone previously where the bots love to hang out.

Probably both parties are correct, the population is growing and declining depend on what activity you are doing.

If OP prefer to grind instances, he would find the population booming in LA.
If OP prefer to do any other activities, he’ll probably find the population declining.

yurtshone.7325:

A problem I see is that the rewards for doing these “dynamic” events is appalling. So people have learnt this now and simply do not want to waste time on it. A group of five only the other day were with me in The Iron Marches and did the Fire Shaman boss. We took around 15 mins to down him. A really fun fight in fact, I would say one of the best I have come across in open world. But after the fight, we got nothing at all for a reward. And I mean nothing. Not even some grey junk to sell. I am all for having fun and epic battles but please, reward me for time spent.

Pretty much this. There are usually people in the zone but with the best loot coming from FOTM, most people in the zone are just there to level up faster or clear map completion, group events usually are not time efficient to do or worth it unless it is along their way, no one is going to go out of their way to do them anymore even if they drop a chest at the end of it.

They should make all group events drop bags containing fractal tokens, that would get people to go out of their way to help with these group events.

The main problem for new players is nowadays, any server that is not full is pretty much ghost towns.

All servers with people are pretty much full all day except for like 3-4am when new slots are open up briefly before they are snapped up by people camping those slots.

xiv.7136:

PowerCat.5738:

I have answered it in my previous messages. Read up.

From a programming standpoint, you have to make it the amount of registered users on the server.

You’re not answering the question. Still.

Why do the servers go down from full to high every morning.

There is a simple answer to this, they are probably counting registered users on the server that have login recently (definition of recently only Arenanet knows), any account that have not login recently are probably archived. And then they count all accounts that are not archived. The archival processes are usually fairly heavy on their databases so it’s probably done only daily at a time when there are less people using the servers like early morning.

Hence this results in early mornings there are always slots open in servers after the old accounts are archived.

After the experience in the Karka event, I can imagine LA can be cleared out in seconds during Wintersday if someone were to yell over map chat
“Tixx dropping loot chests in Divinity’s Reach right now”

Or for a few days, open account-bound ingredients for trading in the trading post, let us players clean it up ourselves

Considering that you can get to level 80 from level 1 in 4-6 hours if you willing to spend the coin, I doubt hitting max level was ever considered as an achievement

Depends on the design of the game.

Games that rely on groups to get stuff done (like getting gear and so on), friends. Once my friends are gone, I’ll probably go too.

Games that are soloable where most of the content (including endgame) are solo friendly, I might stay on long after my friends quit the game if the storyline and gameplay is good.

The server population is probably accurate, but whether it is useful number for what you need is in doubt.

It does measure number of people that had selected that server as home server, but I think it counts everyone from those that are currently actively playing to those that played 3 months ago and have long since quit.

But since this is a non-subscription game, Anet have no choice but to include them as technically they can still come back any time.

I think the people on OP’s guild is probably staying because they don’t have to leave unless they need more guild slots, OP might as well do the guild members a favour and let them know before kicking them.

MrsAngelD.6971:

They Left for LOTRO? (having left LOTRO for GW2) I have to say that would scare me ….lol.

There have been a surge in LOTRO population recently, but I think this is more due to coming Hobbits movie when the world goes Middle Earth Mania. I think on some servers (probably the RP ones) there are some player events being plan.

Back then Wow also got this many complains. The main difference is a few years back, there were alot less alternate MMOs/games than today. Wow could afford such problems as people don’t have as many choices to go to if they do not want Wow. GW2 no longer have that luxury.
As Diablo 3 and SWTOR have found out, once people quit a game they have so many other choices to go to that they may never ever need to return.

Arenanet no longer can afford to run the same way as it was a few years back.

Most probably you join one of the dying servers. There is a weekly free transfer so I suggest you find a more populated server to join. People have been migrating servers as there is a very big difference between the dying servers and a populated one in player experience.

OP’s idea won’t work, people will always find an easy solution to all problems. if they make starter zone give better loot but harder difficulty, what will happen is people will grouped in a big zerg going around the starter zones in circles to farm them. Then the new players will never enjoy their starter zone experience as every event will have 20-40+ people simply wiped out everything on sight.

According to the post by Anet, looks more like the latter

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first

It’s a form of server merged but initiated by players instead of the company. Players are moving on their own from servers that are getting abandoned to the more populated servers.

nofo.8469:

QuadJunky.2736:

nofo.8469:

Something off about the system, as there are a few servers who are borderline ghost towns and are still marked as full.

My guess is they tuned it to stop people transferring off servers to the more popular ones.

Besides, how can a server be more “full” than another one?

Its off because at any given time Anet can change what those meaningless indicators of low, medium, high and full represent. If they wanted full could mean 10 players.

I’m sure as the population decreases in the game they adjust the values for each level of population to give the impression there are a lot of people playing.

And why wouldn’t they? New player buys the game logs on to pick a world and 2/3 are low and the rest full. Not a great sign for a 2 month old game. Now if they “adjust” the indicators then that same new player see a different picture.

What is funny is 3 weeks ago I saw more people activily playing through the world, in towns, in wvw when the server had a medium pop than I do now that my server is full.

Anet must have borrowed some phasing tech from blizzard and I am on a different phase of the server than the rest of them.

They also can fiddle with them to keep people from transferring to specific servers just by setting a server to full 24/7.

This sounds much more likely than the capacity being based on registered users.

Most probably it doesn’t totally count just registered users but also take into account of last account login (etc registered accounts that have login within last 1 month for example) and very likely, the process which they remove accounts from the server population count occurs at off-peak hours so more server capacity is open up at that time.

Still it doesn’t help things as it seems like after the lost shore patch, alot of people are not really playing the game but just poke into the game once in a while to see what have change, but they are still counted as part of the server’s ‘active’ population as many servers remain full.

Give everyone a cap for number of siege they can drop maybe like 1-3 per person.

Give everyone the capability to transfer their siege allowance to someone else so that known commanders and siege masters can be given higher cap by other people. These also allow more capabilities to leaders in WvWvW that is ‘voted’ upon by others on their server rather than just bought with coin.

If that person transfer servers, any transferred allowances is reset back to their owners.

Reverse the logic on culling for portals. Make anyone that comes out of a portal first to be rendered instead of last and we would solve alot of the portal complaints (Well maybe except those that use portal bombs as means of ‘cloaking’ since they would see each other first as they come out of portals while their targets are culled).

Awesomesauce.9528:

If you’re interested, come to Tarnished Coast. I server jumped a lot when I first bought GW2 because I felt like there wasn’t a world I could call “home” — at least until I went to Tarnished Coast. The community is great, the people are really respectful of one another, and we’re always having lots of fun in WvW. I’ve never found a more accepting community in an MMO than in Tarnished Coast. Come swing by if you’d like; we’d love to have you!

(If you’d like to talk to me, my username is Conflagrated on Tarnished Coast. )

Is there still space in Tarnished Coast? I got a friend that have been trying to get in for days.

Plus there is this
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Full-Servers-Problem

which seems to indicate that Tarnish Coast is full to the brim with a long queue of people trying to get in.

According to this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first

Connor, when you see a server FULL means that the people who’ve chosen that server as theirs, or players who have moved to that particular server, have reached the cap, independently of where did they create their accounts.

Looks like your only way to get into TC is hope that an active player from TC transfer out so that you can grab their spot (if they were planning to transfer out temporarily and then back in, then tough luck for them).

Ryuujin.8236:

Whether he’s right or wrong about this being a bad thing, he is right about the change in market value. See for yourself on spidey; November 18th (Day the hive is opened) the price dives and carries on going down.

It’s also the day where Arenanet signals that exotics are no longer the best gear around. Less people need to use orichalcum to make rings as Fotm gives better rings, there will be some that stop gearing their alts in craftable exotics and wait for alternate means for ascendant gear to come. Overall, this will lead to less demand for orichalcum .

Unless Arenanet indicate that there will be craftable ascendant gear which uses orichalcum, I doubt the trend will reverse anytime soon.

Duke Darkwood.4237:

“They’e called Graboids!”

Or if you have played the Dune games before, the anti-worm techniques in the show and game works here, which is basically stay off the sand (I guess at this point people will start to realize that area do have alot of small rocks/crates scatter all over the place).

Near the jumping puzzle, there is a cave where there is an event with a veteran karka egg layer. When there are players nearby, it will start laying eggs which hatches into hatchlings. With some careful pulling, you can just get the hatchlings, I think they come in 5-10 hatchlings per batch of eggs. Get a level 80 friend to help kill off the hatchlings after you have tagged them.

Karizee.8076:

Just go play any other MMORPG and you’ll come running back, arms outstretched, begging for forgiveness like a bad boyfriend that dissed his best girl.

The thing is many people have already gone to other MMOs. I was in another MMO a couple days ago and when the someone suddenly asked about GW2 over the zone chat and suddenly the zone chat became lively with the discussion about GW2 from many ex-GW2 players and at the end of it, I think anyone who heard the discussion will think that game was much much better than GW2.

Arenanet needs to step up and release their alternate means to get ascendant gear soon as the december holidays season is coming. There would usually be many new gamers coming to the MMOs and if GW2 hopes to get a share of these new customers, it needs to correct it’s mistakes that they made from the Nov15 patch.

I doubt they would do this, but if they do, I think such FFA server should have total FFA AOE. It means all AOE will hit anyone, both friends or foe with no immunity on party members or guild members. This would encourage more strategic use of their skills.

This is one aspect I think Arenanet made mistakes. I think most people who played MMO consider gear(stats) is a fundamental need by everyone and should be obtainable within reasonable effort. For vanity items and cosmetics, people are more forgiving even if the drop rate are near impossible to get.

This is one part I think that Blizzard balance fairly well in WoW, they made gear(stats) fairly reasonable to obtain with some effort, but some vanity items for example like some special mounts (strat UD mount) had like 0.1% drop rate but people in general was still okay with it and would mindlessly grind for it.

Seems like Arenanet totally went the opposite way by making the gear much harder to obtain than vanity/cosmetics items.

One thing to note is in vertical progression, although the numbers you output is bigger, very often your relative strength does not really get any better as the developer will require you to fight stronger mobs in new areas for the new gear.
For example, let say you do 1k DPS to a 10k health mob, the mob goes down in 10sec. When you upgrade in gear, so you can now do 2k DPS, but the mobs you fighting now have 20k health, it will still go down in 10 secs.

One of the better system for horizontal progression I have seen is from a very old MMO, Ultima online. In that game, you get 700 skill points total, you can distribute those skill points into various skills up to 100 max.
For example, let say you pick swordmanship, mace fighting, magery, plus 4 other skills more (which I can no longer recall) and you put the maximum of 100 points into each of those skills (7 skills x 100 each = 700).
Let say you gain a new skill called necromancy. To use abilities in the necromancy skill, you need to put skill points into it, to do so, you have to remove skills point from your existing skill as you got only 700 pts max to distribute.
Your skills set/abilities may change but overall your maximum potential skill pts remain the same.

There is also the multiplicative effect when there is multiple people from the same guild doing the same DE.

When 1 person from your guild does a DE, I think you get 2 influence, when there are 2 people from your guild doing the same DE, it gives 14 I believe instead of 4. With an event like plinx where there are multiple people in your guild doing the same DE, the multiplicative effects really adds up.

Hence I think 10 people doing the same DE would gives more influence that 2 groups of 5 people doing separate DEs.

They should just make champions and veterans mobs in the open world drop the tokens from the new fractal dungeon. That alone will certainly make people head for champion when someone does a shoutout over map chat.

JemL.3501:

and for the D3 thing is a top game played worldwide still especially in korea, but couldve been better, NA people are the ones who usually complaint or quit, others play like a man.

I think the koreans have already abandoned D3. D3(US) is much much livelier than D3(Asia) and D3(US) itself have dropped significantly since their launch.

I think it’s a combination of factors besides the recent change that is causing less people to logon, such as people preparing for the year end holidays or just trying the new games that are coming out.

But it is kinda depressing that when I was wondering Queensdales trying to complete my daily achievement that that zone have become so much quiet and I barely saw anyone there.

As a charr, this is one of the few scenarios where the skill “warband support” actually is useful.

Summon warband legionaires
Me: Here’s plan, you two attack the champion from the front while I’ll go around him.
Me: When you give the signal, I’ll come out from the side and flank him
Legionaires: Got it.

Legionaires run in to attack the champion while I run off to the side to mine the ori

Legionaire gives signal

Insert cutscene from Dragon Age Origins: Battle of Ostagar

They should just convert that encounter into something similar to the dragon encounters like shatterer and Jormag. This will keep people coming back to the zone once the novelty of that zone wears off, I notice those zones with these dragons spawns tend to have more foot traffic from people.