Guild Wars 2

PopeUrban.2578:

Can’t you just turn off the tag? I mean, if swiftness is damaging to your RP, is’nt a giant apple floating over your head like a lot more damaging to immersion in a visual sense?

The speed boost – and swiftness movement lines – are always on, whether you are wearing the tag or not. Anet, could we get an acknowledgement of this request, please?

+1. This effect is not needed – we have plenty of other speed boosts in the game without visual effects. It is disruptive to RP, it’s visual clutter as the OP stated, and it serves no purpose.

Please either remove the visual effect, add a toggle to the mechanical effect somewhere (perhaps have obtaining the mastery give the character a “Commander’s horn” item that casts 30m of swiftness on his party when activated in a city, or the like), or refund the mastery for myself and others that request it. I RP a lot, and don’t need any of the Pact Commander mastery benefits – I would prefer not to have them than have this visual effect permanently on.

My guess would be that some things are set in stone – the megaserver system is here to stay, for one. The devs have said that they’re going to roll it out in phases over the first couple of months, assessing its success and feedback, then modify it. However, because they’re still in the assessment stage, they refuse to stop the test midway through to adjust things – which to be fair, is an intelligent approach in some ways.

The devs (and marketing / media teams) cannot possibly be unaware of the backlash this patch is causing, and I still don’t believe that all of Anet’s staff are moustache-twirling Bond villains – they probably want to a) make money, but b) have their creation enjoyed by people. They (arguably) brought out the megaserver in the first place to help fix PvE players’ dissatisfaction with empty zones on graveyard worlds.

The two big problems are that any change or tweak won’t happen until they’re done “gathering feedback” (which they claim to be doing) and, as a sales-based business, they’re not allowed to admit failure or acknowledge fault with their own product. So discussing solutions with the playerbase, admitting that the megaserver has perhaps done more harm than good, or even just saying “we’re aware of your concerns, we’re working on fixing them” are all marketing taboos, and probably won’t happen.

They -might- be listening to our concerns, they’re likely as not working on fine-tuning the megaserver system to keep as many players as possible happy, but the first we’ll hear of it will be a positive, upbeat blog update in a month or so’s time, full of exclamation marks and words like “awesome” and “amazing!”

I’m not giving up on the game yet – other games have brought out disastrous patches that’ve backfired horrifically, and managed to put out the fires before they do too much damage. That said, I might find myself RPing somewhat less until the megaserver is out of beta, and we can see clearly what direction it’s going in.

Dear Arenanet,

As you must certainly be aware, your megaserver update has… ruffled some feathers, to put it lightly.

When it was first announced, the forums were littered with questions and concerns as to how it would affect roleplaying. The response to this was to compact all the different threads and topics into one giant thread, and to give two vague messages from Arenanet – one saying that “most of your questions will be answered in the later blog posts,” the other, famously glib and disinterested response being from Colin – the infamous suggestion to “just guild up.” Other than the above, our concerns were neither responded to, nor apparently taken into account.

When the update hit, the same happened again – our worries were realised, people swarmed this forum with post after post asking for a rollback, suggesting tweaks or additions to the megaserver system to cater to the roleplaying community’s needs (not to mention other niche communities). While I am sure that you have people reading the forum posts, we – the worried players – received nothing, no word, no response whatsoever.

Today, you’ve continued to roll out your changes as planned, adding the megaserver system to city hubs, something that has – if you’ll forgive the hyperbole – obliterated any roleplaying community opportunities. RP hotspots such as Minister Wi’s mansion and the Maiden’s Whisper tavern are deserted, Piken Square roleplayers are scattered to the four winds, and even those in the same guilds and friends lists – let alone those who are just familiar faces and acquaintances – are sent to other instances repeatedly.

There has been no word whatsoever (as far as I know, please correct me if I’m wrong) from you to the RP community since Colin’s “guild up” comment at the start of the month. Suggestions or requests haven’t even been dismissed – they’ve just been, as far as we can tell, ignored.

You’re already beginning to bleed players. With ESO’s emergence, WoW’s ever-present lure and countless other MMOs, the RP community that you’ve allowed to fracture is drifting in separate directions. The main “Megaservers and RP” discussion is one of the hottest and most-viewed threads in this forum subsection. You must realise that a respectable proportion of your playerbase are angry, hurt, and feel like their requests and thoughts are being utterly ignored. Even if they’re not, and you’re planning to reveal some fantastic fix in the near future that’ll redeem everything – it doesn’t seem that way. Instead, the aforementioned thread just continues to fill up with upset people bleating for something to change, and getting more and more irate as no answer is offered.

So what I’m asking for is a response. A direct reply, to this thread. No, don’t click the merge button and throw this post into the melting pot with the other 700-odd replies. Talk to us directly, and at the very bloody least, let us know that our pleas are being seen and considered.

Or leave it, and continue to keep your playerbase in the dark as you heap change after change on them. But be aware that every day another fifty or so suggestions and requests go ignored in the main Megaserver and RP thread, you anger and drive your RP community further away.

Aidan Savage.2078:

[…] Because you, as an RPer, have an infinitely easier time adapting to changes. How? Discuss it with the community you RP in and suddenly everyone reaches the consensus that because these changes are ONLY IN CITIES AND WEENIE AREAS you can decide to move to SIMILAR areas, such as Ebonhawke, that is in essence a city that is not an instanced zone. Oh, there’s also a second benefit, it’s unaffected by the megaserver change.

This idea doesn’t work in the slightest. As RPers, our characters – that many of us have been playing as, fleshing out and developing since release – have homes, jobs, families and so on. One character might be a Noble who’s part of the Divinity’s Reach elite, another a guard in the Ministry, and another yet a member of the crime syndicate that lurks in the Ossan district. Whole areas of the city itself have developed personalities and histories – the Maiden’s Whisper is considered a reputable inn for well-to-do folk, the one in Ossan is more of a seedy Mos Eisley Cantina, and so on. Just upping and leaving to another zone and being told “well, go do your weird RP thing over there instead” makes zero sense for our characters, and zero sense for us as players.

My tuppence worth:

Yes, we need RP flags. Desperately. But more than that, we need an absolute guarantee that the megaserver will find the RP instance for us. And/or (preferably And) we need the option to manually select which instance we go to. A system that maybe sometimes prioritises grouping players by its own internal logic is no substitute.

The reason – for Colin, or others who might have spectacularly missed the point here – is spontaneous RP. At the moment on Piken – the closest thing we have to an official RP home world – I know that any zone I go to, I’m going to meet other roleplayers. They’re not necessarily “in character (”IC)" or “acting” when I encounter them, but they’re members of the same community as me. This means that if I do an event in a far-flung zone and then slow to a walking pace as I’m leaving, odds are they might do so too, switching to being “in character” and striking up spontaneous RP.

In short, we already have this close, friendly community that Anet are apparently trying to make standard across the board – but its fragile existence only continues because a) we have a persistent home to connect it to and b) meeting each other is guaranteed, not just ambigiously “likely.”

So in short. We need an RP flag for the megaserver’s search engine, but it needs to be absolute – i.e., we can tick the RP flag and set it to “only find other RPers,” and it will do exactly that.

bluestocking.6148:

It’s kind of a pity that this is upsetting to the RPers. I’d actually like to see more RP and no one seems to do it outside of those two servers. I was hoping that this change might spread it around a little more.

The problem with spreading it around is that it dilutes it. Currently if you go to anywhere in Piken Square Divinity’s Reach (bar the Minister’s Waypoint), virtually everyone you meet will be “in character” – acting, if you will. This facilitates random, spontaneous RP – if you see someone walking (not running or jumping) around Divinity’s Reach, you can assume that they’re IC and thus RP with them. If roleplayers are scattered across the many, many instances the megaserver will create, that simply won’t happen, because the vast majority of GW2 players are not roleplayers. Most people you’ll meet will -not- be “in character,” and even if they don’t troll you (a fair assumption, most non-RPers are actually polite and respectful to those who do RP, or even inquisitive about it), they won’t RP with you either.

Again, though – this could be fixed (or the problem could be avoided entirely, depending on what the details of this update are) by giving the players some control. If I can flag that I -only- want to be put in instances with other roleplayers, that’d actually be a fantastic addition for the roleplaying community. And if said flags and criteria can be changed at will by the players, then that’ll help draw more attention. If you, for example, wanted to try out RP or even just quietly spectate and see what it’s about, you’d just toggle your RP flag and relog.

Orpheal.8263:

Its just the first of 3 parts ..

Who knows what Anet maybe has up their minds for exactly the RP’ers…
Who knows, maybe they announce with one of the next 2 blogposts tomorrow or the day after official RP-Servers that will get an official [RP] Flag which will be excluded from all those Megaserver-Changes.

Just a wild guess, but it could happen as it is something, that really alot of people are also wishing for as it is also something thats considered being standard.
Other games like LotRO or FF14 for example also have official RP servers.
So I see no reason, why GW2 shouldn’t have also some for the EU and the US

Don’t get me wrong – I’m optimistic (blindly so according to some) that Anet won’t shaft a sizeable chunk of its community. And as there are two more parts to this update to be revealed, plus the “beta test” in a few weeks’ time in the city hubs, I’m not panicking or throwing my toys out of the pram yet.

But based on what we’ve been told so far, I’d say my concerns are still valid. The thread’s purpose is to raise our concerns, in the hope that – if Anet hasn’t already got a solution up their sleeves – they start considering one.

Right. I’ve just read over the enthusiastically written news post about the megaserver update and, to put it -very- mildly, I (and most of the map chat of my home server, Piken Square) am somewhat worried.

For those who don’t know, Piken Square – and our US sister server, Tarnished Coast – are the unofficial GW2 roleplaying servers. We have something of a persistent world co-written between the rather large number of RPers and, for that to continue to work, we need to be able to almost guarantee that we’ll encounter each other. Not just our fellow guildmates or friends, but any of the many, many roleplayers who frequent the server.

Let me explain. At the moment, if I take my character out of Divinity’s Reach (the main RP hub of the server) and go for a wander around the Fields of Ruin, I’m likely to find other Piken Square inhabitants, ones I’ve never met before, RPing their characters. I might encounter characters who’re RPing being part of the Ebon Vanguard, Separatists, Charr troopers, etc – any of whom I could stumble across and start up a spontaneous in-character (“IC”) conversation or scene with. This is only possible because the world we’re all playing on is publicly recognised as the RP server for the EU.

The general worry in my guild, /map chat, frenzied curse-ridden forum posts and so on is that the megaserver update will, with the noble intention of creating tight-knit and fun ingame communities, actually obliterate the one that already exists for us. For our community to continue to thrive – or even exist – it’s essential that we have some controlled way of ensuring that we can join the “RP instance” of whatever zone we’re in (and not just the hubs like Divinity’s Reach – a lot of the most enjoyable RP comes from bumping into IC strangers while out in the combat zones). Note that this cannot be done by just joining our guildmates or friends – it needs to be far larger scale than that.

This thread is not just meant to be me (and others) complaining about the incoming update, as that’ll serve no purpose. Instead, I’ve endeavored to come up with some ideas as to how to make this work.

Firstly, by all means have the megaserver system, but have a manual instance selection. Much like how GW1 had its districts – you should be able to let the megaserver analyse your data and find you an instance, -or- manually join the RP instance of the zone you’re in, assuming it’s not full, of course.

Alternatively, when you roll out the megaserver patch, let us manually dictate what data and filters to send to the megaserver. I.e., I want to filter by language (English), location (Europe), and game type (Roleplaying), with the last as a priority. This won’t be as good as a fixed roleplaying instance, and will still splinter the community somewhat, but will at least help roleplayers find each other in the megaserver system. And perhaps, if your tech works as amazingly as you suggest that it does, it will naturally result in roleplayers gravitating back toward each other over time, eventually restoring the community to its current state.

Closing thoughts – this is meant to be constructive. While a lot of people are angry about this update and feel that Anet is neglecting or disinterested in its roleplaying community, some of us recognise that simply raging about it won’t accomplish anything. I’m also personally of the opinion that this update isn’t actually -designed- to shaft roleplayers, but that Anet hasn’t really considered the ramifications of it on said community. That said, it’s worth stating that a great many of the roleplayers on Piken Square do so exclusively – they don’t really play PvE or PvP – and thus, if roleplaying becomes difficult or impossible in GW2, they -will- leave for other games. Something nobody wants to see happen (particularly as a lot of roleplayers spend a quite frankly preposterous amount of money in the gem store).

If anyone else has any suggestions – or simply wants to make their voices heard and make it clear to Anet that this is going to be a serious problem – please post below. And while it’s a long shot, if we could get a response from an Anet developer or community GM, that’d be grand.