(edited by Axiom.9742)
My number one issue with this whole thing is that it completely destroyed any sense of community for me. Server solidarity has always been important to me. It makes or breaks whether I want to play a game. I was extremely attached to the community of Tarnished Coast, even if it was quiet outside of a few cities. I knew who most people were and when they’d be on. We had trivia in map chat for prizes. People were proud to be from TC even if they didn’t roleplay (which I don’t.)
Now, it’s gone. There is no server pride because there isn’t really a server. TC as a concept is pretty much dead for me. Yes, there are tons of people all over running around and stuff, but it’s usually not anyone I recognize. Map chat is either incoherent blathering or eerily dead for the amount of people in the zone. If any “map chat events” such as trivia happen anymore, I don’t see it because it’s never in the same shard as me. I have a feeling, though, that people simply no longer try.
In the end, this is breaking my will to log in and do things. In the past I could sit around in LA and talk to people from the server if I didn’t feel like doing anything else. Now it’s all business. The only pocket of a community from TC that I have left is my guild, and people aren’t logging in as much now for various reasons. I log in, do my daily, and usually log back out. It’s sad. I hate to admit it, but at this point I’m strongly considering switching back to a game that still has defined servers that I am familiar with. Community is everything in an MMO, and this patch pretty much killed it.
Sylvari: 7 Humans: 3 Charr: 2 Norn: 1 Asura: 0
“Tarnished Coast” since head start!
“Tarnished Coast” since head start!
I have no illusion that they will roll the system back, even for a time while they get it to work as it should (even though i wish they do that). However, i think it is important to point out how mindless their development process and how unpolished and not at all refined their actual releases appear to be each and every time. That is a thing to improve as well, not just the actual releases.
I really don’t want to be rude about A-net, but looking at the “News” section, it feels like they don’t really care about our feedback or suggestions, and instead, they release shiny and brand new items on the gem store.
So A-net, i would appreciate next week in the “News” section, to see a “Fixed several Megaserver issues” post, instead of advertizing new vanity items for quick cash grab. Your attitude and silence about our concerns and issues is simply insulting and irritating, considering the support we gave you from launch to the present day. We have patience, yes. But it’s starting to fade…
If what’s been said about you guys “lurking” in the forum and reading what’s been said is true, then i’m probably not wasting my breath. An MMO is a community, a “human body” if you think about it. You are the brain, we are the heart and limbs that allow the body to move and live. If you chop off the limbs, do you still expect the body to be as effective as before? And of course, if you keep mutilating it, do you honestly think that even the heart will survive? It’s common sense, so please act. Don’t be in denial.
The reasons we love the new downgra…..er….feature patch :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqJlKjwrKB4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqJlKjwrKB4
There are some obvious problems. There are some less obvious problems. Which of these do you do:
1) Quietly evaluate the effort it will take to fix the problems, make quick fixes where you can, and determine a strategy for moving forward.
2) Bow to the pressure of your community forums and tear the system out entirely, negating thousands of man-hours of work and taking an embarrassing public image hit.
I’d likely go with the obvious first choice, as you propably assumed. And if Anet did the same, we might be now in a better situation. Unfortunately, they didn’t. What they decided was to go with a different option:
3) Announce slow and incremental introduction of the system, according to the first option, but then decide that it’s not really necessary, because obviously everything is working fine, and decide to shorten the (originally planned for months) introduction time to a week, without actually fixing any of the problems that appeared on day one first.
Basically, as the matter stands now we don’t see that:
- they are doing any fixing
- they are evaluating anything
- they even are aware there is a problem.
In fact, what they did manage to say so far suggest they are not aware that their system is not working as advertised and is receiving mostly negative feedback.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Please note that this is their first time opening the Mega Server. Think of it as a rough draft. They’ll fix these issues, I’m sure. Putting players/friends/guildies together in one server seems difficult to do though, don’t you think. I can’t imagine how to even program that. But regarding the lowering the caps, that is an easy change. So can anyone here give an example of how to bring all friends/guildies in one server without passing the map’s cap by ten fold? (example of having a super super large guild of course).
If they do it based on their “guild size”, how would they know how many of his/her guild member would be there with them? So assuming 100% of their guild would not be good. Any ideas?
Quote taken right out of their “reveal”:
Does it work the way it was presented. I’ll help you with that answer: No.
And how’s that a draft in your opinion? It would be a draft if they were still testing it. If they just rolled it out only to some maps and monitor how it works. But they already rolled it out to every single map in the game. They didn’t bother actually testing if their “smart new system” work. Rather everything was basically devoured by the whole thing. They were supposed to roll it out slowly and be done by the later of this year.
Quote:
“As mentioned in the original blog about the megaserver system, on April 15 we’ll start by rolling out this technology to level 1–15 maps, the PvP lobby, and major cities. Later in 2014, we’ll expand this system to the entire game.”
Did they take their time in slowly implementing the system, making sure it works? No. The whole thing took them roughly about a week. That’s not testing the waters, seeing if it all comes together. It’s just splatting the whole thing everywhere. Nothing has been adjusted to this day. And rather than hold back and address issues presented by hundreds of people on forums, they just kept going.
3,197 hours played over the past 605 days – that’s how much time I’ve played Guild Wars 2. So that comes out to about an average of 5 hours per day since game launch. During this time I’ve never felt it necessary to express my concerns on the forums until now.
My complaints about the implementation of the megaserver pretty much mirrors everyone else’s in this thread. I wanted to add a couple more things to this discussion:
1. Deindividuation. In a 1976 study by Univ. of Illinois professor Edward Diener, Diener studied the connection between antisocial behavior and anonymity. For his experiment Diener and his team set-up an experiment at several homes during Halloween. Each house had two bowls, one containing candy, the other containing money. The experimenter greeted each trick or treater at the doorway, then said they had to attend to something and left the children at the doorway while going to a hidden room to see if a child would steal money. In order to test the impact of anonymity, some children were asked their names and addresses, while other times the researcher did not. The results: children who arrived at the door alone and were asked their identity stole the least, 7.5% of them stole. When children arrived in a group and were not asked their identity, 57.7% of them stole. While this relates to onine behavior in general (Penny Arcade famously stated, normal person + anonymity + audience = total jerk), but the Megaserver further exacerbates anonymity because players no longer have to worry about alienating their own server community – they are now just one name in the large and flucuating pool of players on a megaserver map. This is why we’re seeing an uptick in complaints of griefing and bigotry.
2. Change and listening to your players. At the 1995 Austin Game Conference there was a panel discussion entitled “MMO Rant”. The panel was moderated by former Sony Online VP Gordon Walton, and the panelists were Jessica Mulligan (former executive producer of Asheron’s Call), Brian Green (creator of Meridian 59), and Jeff Hickman (former executive producer for Dark Age of Camelot). On the topic of change, Hickman stated “As a player, it’s effecting me in the game I play right now. As a developer, I’ve done this and made core changes and probably didn’t achieve the goals I wanted to achieve. As I make these games, we attract a certain type of player. It’s because of the things we put in – the gameplay – for whatever reason, we see another game that’s cool, doing something better, or we want to change the billing process. For whatever reason, we make a change and it alienates people. The people playing right now. We go out and want those 3.5 million (players) from the people over there. Instead of sticking to what we love, we change it.”
Mulligan continued, “Jeff touched another one, changing after Launch. I’m guilty of this too, and have nerfed and wasted millions of player hours and have learned since then and haven’t done it in a long while. How many people had it done to them in WoW? I almost feel ashamed to say this, but you can’t ignore the community. The forums are an indicator (a vocal one) of where your game is going. But we’re scared to death of players. Who can blame us? We’ve seen you at conferences. We don’t meet the majority though, anywhere, and those are the people playing and having a great time, You can’t ignore the community and you have to find ways to communicate because they can be resources.”
This last quote is something that ArenaNet should really keep in mind. Hickman: “You should really communicate with your players. Take polls. Tell them what you want to do. If they say it sucks. Don’t do it.”
Megaserver and the other related changes, such as the rigid scheduling and rotation of world events are dead giveaways – Anet has projections for the future player base and future income that do not look good.
Similarly, I think the Anet team ducks and deflects talk about expansions and new, permanent world areas opening up because they know the numbers. And the numbers tell them that this grand, (and it really is grand and lovely) open world they designed has not captured enough sustaining players or enough new ones.
They positioned this update as giving players a better game experience. For low population server, off-peak players, megaserver may provide a temporary benefit. For those of us with lively guilds and great servers, not so much. As many on this forum have said, showing up to a sort of dental appointment to spike down a champ with a horde of players I’ll never get to know, never chat with and certainly never game with in any real way is so underwhelming, words fail me.
Anet is laying the groundwork now to automate much of the game maintenance and content, and of course, consolidate the declining player base. This is akin to papering over the cracks in a wall – looks okay for a while but just hides the fact of it needing serious repairs.
Orr (especially Malchor’s Leap) is a mess right now under megaserver precisely because the zone and its major events are still dynamic and alive. Unlike the world events in the rest of Tyria, what the players do matters, even if the outcome is negative in terms of spawning the climactic boss or failing the event. This was always part the intended shape of the game, but it won’t be around much longer.
Anet is abandoning its original, creative vision of the game, quite early in its planned life cycle. I find this regrettable and well, I am sad. I had hoped I would have a longer time to enjoy the game and see it grow.
Am I the only one that feels like this is just a containment thread to keep the forums clean of all the complaints?
They don’t respond, they don’t care. I doubt they even read these threads.
Most likely the problems are here to stay and the usual answer applies, as always, “Deal with it!”.
You are definitely not alone in that feeling. This isn’t a feedback thread, it’s a quarantine zone.
Also, I’m unsure why everyone’s bought into their marketing buzzword. Server Merge is Server Merge, no matter what they want to call it. It’s just that the server they merged us all with was the kittening Overflow.
(edited by Astraea.2981)
Hail and hark!
I am Snow, a warrior from the Mists, who has come bearing grave news pertaining to the stability of the world itself!
There is trouble in the mists, and the different shards of reality are colliding! I have travelled the breadth of the lands, and it is clear. The mist invaders, those evil mockeries of ourselves, are everywhere and claiming everything as their own! These fiends that hesitated no moment to slit the throats of good men now take the guise of warriors that seek justice in the world. But be not fooled, fellow warriors, for these demons will still murder yourself eagerly if not for what meager security our numbers and presence of the dragon minions provides!
However, there remains hope! We must use the very nature of this strange occurrence against it! Unite under one banner for but a brief moment, demons and men alike, to cast the shards apart, and restore the uniqueness of each shard of reality, so that every man knows man and every beast knows beast!
If we do not do this, the Mist War itself will spread to the world, not in its form of glorious combat, but in the form of treacherous poisons and foul play. If this were to be allowed to happen, I see no end to the madness and misery. If you, brave warrior, thought that the controlled war was terrifying, then wait until the day comes when the war spreads to every inch of the land!
We must cast this evil back into the pit from whence it came. And we must do this, together!
Do this unthinkable deed once, and we can return to blissfully murdering each other without it having morale repercussions, and no longer need fear that our fellows in arms are actually snakes from another realm!
As someone who bought and plays this game entirely for roleplay, I don’t want to be in a position where I feel my notable expenditure to play this has been wasted. What sort of message are you sending out when you have created a situation inhospitable to a large number of players? If you want to make the game feel more alive, more active, then cull dead servers to consolidate server usage, don’t try to mash them together in this… ham-fisted farce of a system. Sure, this system might be more tolerable on the NA servers, but for us on Piken Square, in the EU servers, it’s a more evident problem because there are language barriers. I’ve heard accounts of my friends being caught between the French and the Germans and being unable to pull the pieces of their guild back together.
As much as a person’s pride and determination seek to drive them forward, sometimes it’s only right to reassess your choices and turn back. This has been a very poor system from the outset, a clumsy way to avoid the inevitable – that servers need to be consolidated. It’s easier to move a community from one world to another than to have to play a puzzle game across a number of shards to have even a single roleplay. And that’s just roleplay events, as this change is tantamount to lethal to spontaneous roleplay.
So really I’d like to see a U-turn. There’s precedent for it in MMO developers to reverse a planned change, and there’s no shame in it. It’s just about doing what’s right to keep the integrity of your communities and thus maintain the quality of the game.
I haven’t really posted anything on these forums before but with the recent Megaserver implementation being so game breaking, I felt I have to chime in as well.
First off, I appreciate the effort the GW crew has put into this update. However, with so many new features they tried to jam in and experiment with, some things were bound to go wrong. And one such problem was forcing the Megaserver on everyone and all the changes that such a concept brought with it.
Now, the Megaserver did help a few select areas in the game, namely leveling and map completion. However, it, as many people have commented, it has destroyed server communities, wrecked traveling and waypointing, made guild mission organization impossible, made WvW and guild recruiting not only impossible but in some cases outright hostile, and made champ and event farming utterly annoying.
I used to marvel at how much there was to do in GW2 and how I felt that I could accomplish so much in a little span of time with the dailies and the boss events. I loved coming to my server’s aid on WvW calls. Now, for the first time in a long while, I just kind of logged on and sat there doing nothing. All major events were locked on perma-completion, major boss events every 15 min were zerged out. I cut down a few trees then logged out. There is actually less incentive to do anything now.
At any rate, the solution is simple. Make the Megaserver optional. If you want to map complete or explore a new area with more people, activate your megaserver. If you are new to the game, or want to help newbies, by all means active your megaserver. If you don’t have the population to do an event you want, jump to the megaserver. But in all other cases, you should just be able to stay in your home server or guest as a default option. In other words, the megaserver should be just like a optional overflow server.
I understand the need for megaserver in pve maps where the population is low. I recently levelled 2 characters (pre-patch) and found certain maps quite humdrum and most certainly empty. But the insane amount of people now doing world bosses is ridiculous. I’ve never had any problem with lag, rendering or low fps but this is abysmal. A few things that really concern me:
- Too many people. It has gone from a decent amount for world bosses, to far, far too many (I understand that this might not have been the case on all servers).
- Orr temples are utterly destroyed. There is no way to track what is going on. I assume that Cursed Shore is now part of the megaserver, because it was just an ugly mess this morning. No communication at all. I had to turn off my english filter to see that it was just French people speaking. In fact it had just the opposite effect, it was like a ghost town. I suppose because no one knows when temples are starting now.
- Waypoints. Oh my kitten, waypoints. They are dreadful.
Yes, megaserver was needed in a handful of pve maps, but please do something about Orr temples, waypoints and the over the top amount of people that turn up to world bosses. Maybe its just me, but I kind of liked not having my computer want to implode whilst doing something like fire ele (yeah, yeah get a new computer…i’m a student and i’m poor and I have no idea how the insides of computers work).
Just my feedback, anyway. Probably worthless, but i’ve felt really disheartened about the game today.
It’s true, I’m not dangerous. But these golems are!
ASURA POWER!
ASURA POWER!
Personally I feel Mega Servers are simply a terrible alternative to closing down some servers. It simply seems like a clever way to avoid bad press but at the expense of the death of community.
A.Net would have gotten bad press for closing X number of servers down and giving everyone on those servers a free transfer to any remaining server of their choice, but it would have solved the population issue without destroying everything else the Mega Server has ruined. You’ve essentially punished your existing players to avoid looking bad for potential new ones. The problem is, if you upset your current players, you lose them referring their friends to this game.
I really think the better choice would have been to close down servers and just give everyone from those servers a free move. They would have been upset they lost the community they built, but they would at least have a chance to join a new community that felt similar to their old one. Now everyone is without a community and just thrown together in one big mess. Not to mention this did nothing to solve WvW’s population problems and closing servers would have actually had a pretty significant affect on that. I really think this issue was addressed in the wrong way. Bite the bullet and close servers, do what is right for the game and stop trying to sugar coat and hide the issue.
Whether they’re working on something or not, they need to say something. Going this long without acknowledging the feedback threads they themselves created is really harmful to their relationship with their customers.
I don’t think they even care. Every single thread about megaservers has reached many hundreds of posts with people voicing multiple concerns, and they are just going full steam ahead with the plan anyway.
My possible solutions to make it less of a giant lag autoattack spamming anonymous drama:
- Reduce the number of people that are mixed into each map. Stick to that +225% figure you mentioned in the feature pack preview and not +2250% which is what happened now. Compared to the maybe 5 others I saw prepatch in Rata Sum there are now at least 50-100 others.
- Add extra areas with target golems to the Hearts of the Mists. There are not enough of those to test damage or builds with this number of people.
- Do split up language servers from international servers. I don’t want to see German, French or Spanish randomly chatting everywhere I go and I don’t want to risk turning all of their chat off through that new option. I’m sure some of them do adapt to a mostly English map and can have something useful to say.
- Add a drop down list of servers/maps to choose from like districts in Guild Wars 1. Make it so that the next district is created at a minimum of ~50 people in the other districts so you still save some on server space, but also let players have the choice of picking what district they play in. Easier for guild missions and mega bosses. Close a district if there are less than 20 people in it for over 15 minutes, then show a popup like the inactivity kick or new build available thing “This world is closing down in 5 minutes. Finish your business here and move to another district”. Only if this was an extra copy of course, don’t close maps that only have 1 copy running anyway.
- Keep at least 1 map/city with access to most services server based. This gives us the possibility to stay in touch with the server community many of us have been working kitten. Advertising for WvW events for example is crap with people of the enemy servers in that same map. And no, don’t make this the home WvW borderland because I guess some servers have constant queues.
- I have no solution for this yet, but is one of my most important issues. I want to feel like I actually contribute to an event. I have not done much random exploring on megaserverized maps yet, but world bosses are awful and I imagine more events will be like that. I can do my best and do all I can for one of the world bosses or I can set autoattack on the world boss and make dinner, it’s no difference. The world boss will die in record time regardless of me being there. I have no individual value and no fun. I am now useless, as opposed to a month ago where I could for example be last man standing in a struggle of 4 players against the fire elemental. I now feel more like trying to mess things up to not be like everyone else. I dont care if someone downs that I dont know and will probably never see or at least recognize again, they dont matter for the event anyway. (theoretically speaking of course, because I have learned to revive downed players or risk failing the event due to the lack of players)
TL;DR
Lower the amount of people megaserver puts together, make map districts dropdown list, split languages, keep at least 1 city server based and bring back individual value.
Isn’t it obvious? It’s cheaper to create maps as needed. This change had nothing to do with being able to play with more people, it was about saving money. Someone who probably doesn’t even play the game decided that they could save a bunch on server costs by doing this and that the total annihilation of individual server communities was an acceptable loss. Then, they told the marketing team to write up a bunch of posts to convince customers that it was actually about them.
Welcome to everything that is wrong with this industry.
So I have just learned that without announcement, ANet has pushed forward the Megaserver onto all maps.
SHAME!
This is not even close to the “We’ll test things out and see,” approach promised. This is “whack-a-mole” implementation if I have ever seen it, something ANet has time and time again spouted off about wanting to avoid.
I am an RPer, a guild leader and had my doubts. Even still, I welcomed a limited test to see how Megaservers turned out.
By the first test it was entirely obvious they were broken. Parties and guilds are being scattered to all different instances. Home server doesn’t even seem to fit the equation. RPs are being trolled mercilessly by people from outside the unofficial RP servers. The forum reviews are overwhelmingly negative from all sides of the game, regardless of interest.
WvW people, PvE people, RPers all in the majority hate this change.
And then, with no notice, ANet you have gone and made it game wide.
Such customer service, in any format and any industry is completely and totally unacceptable. Most of us, would be out of jobs and out of clients if we worked in such a manner.
I do not know if there is a road back at this time, other than withdrawing Megaservers entirely and reworking the entire idea before trying it again. But ANet, something has to be done here, just look at the multiple threads on this forum by and large decrying this mess.
Megaserver is ruining this game.
My guild is PvX and having to make sure someone is on our home world before inviting them is getting quite annoying. I feel terrible having to deny someone for being from a different server, but we just don’t want to risk spies for WvW purposes.
We have organized Temple runs that we only do twice a week, but since the megaserver we haven’t been able to do any of them. We used to get a whole lot of other guilds on the server to come with us and we always succeeded in our runs. Now, no matter how hard we try to set it up, we end up on a map with way too many people. They constantly fail Gates of Arah because they don’t listen when told how it upscales. We can never get onto the same maps as other guilds from the server because instead of being able to wait for everyone to gather, there are randoms from many other servers trying to do all the events all at the same time. It’s incredibly frustrating for guildies to have to ferry or be ferried over to the same map because of population. People used to look forward to our temple runs, but now it’s just bringing disappointment.
It’s hard to do guild missions with such high population maps. So far we’ve only had this issue with the bounty because we picked one to kill in Kessex Hills for the lowbies and we had to ferry a lot of people onto the map. I’m very worried about randoms interfering in a guild challenge or puzzle and causing us to fail them. We’ve never had much of a problem with that because of the general lack of people around to mess stuff up.
I miss my server. Yes, I can still see people I know in cities, but out in the open world I’m surrounded by strangers. Even if the map has some people from the server and then is filled with randoms from other servers, it really ruins the community. And this is especially true for those of us who play a lot in WvW; it instills a lot of server pride and things just feel less like home with so many other people from other servers all over the place.
Please ANet, megaserver is NOT a good idea. I understand your intentions, but this just isn’t working. I’ve read through most of the first page and I’m sure you’re seeing how this is ruining the game for a lot of people. This idea needs to implemented in a different way.
TL;DR : My guild is suffering. No more server pride. Megaserver sucks, please fix.
(edited by Cherry Ace.2493)
When I first read about the megaservers before being implemented, I was excited because I love doing events and thought that this would mean they would occur more frequently and there would be more people to complete them with. After a week or so of testing them out, I can say with utmost confidence I’m hating megaservers and all they’ve brought. My reasons:
I) Events like Lyssa or Dwayna (or any temple event in megaserver) have become impossible to know when the event chains are starting unless you’re constantly zoning in and out of the map, or standing around and waiting for them to begin. I would like to be able to do other things while waiting for them to respawn (assuming I even get put in the correct megaserver).
II) There are way too many people at events. Not only do things die incredibly fast, but the lag from the oversized zergs makes it difficult to tag anything (and my computer can max graphics with no problem in major zergs in WvW on Blackgate, as well as having a fast internet connection). Events are no longer challenging – the hardest part of them is trying to mash buttons as quickly as I possibly can so I can actually tag mobs for loot. It makes it feel more like some cheap arcade game where I’m fighting the clock, as opposed to a fighting game where technique is required.
III) I really miss the group I used to do events with, and have only seen one of the ten to fifteen usuals in megaserver. It make me feel completely disconnected from my home server and community (the “being lonely in a crowd” effect). There are so many people in these zergs that people have become disposable, which completely severs the idea of a community. Even if it exists in one megaserver, the chances of it being carried over into the next are slim to none.
….Just my two cents. Maybe if they develop some sort of API system to let us know when temple events occur in megaserver zones (like it worked before) would fix some of the issue for me, as well as making it so that the population cap of each zone is less. If I had my druthers, megaservers would be removed and we’d go back to the way it was before. For those in low population servers, I would simply remove them and give those players free server transfers.
The more I have to deal with it, the more I’m convinced the megaserver idea is the worst thing they have implemented into the game in a long time.
Zelendel
I submitted a support ticket, but I was told by support to post this here instead. If any other players have experienced please chime in:
Hello!
A little background: I’m on Tarnished Coast and run a 30 person guild. We do Guild Missions with 15 people every Thursday night.
I thought that with the new megaserver technology we would have a huge issue with other guilds from other servers polishing off all the bounties before my small little guild to get to the bounty. I did not run into that last night, which was a pleasant surprise.
However what I did run into was a lack of guild member priority via the megaserver system. We were in maps such as Lornar’s Pass, Dredgehaunt Cliffs, etc. and had EXTREME issues with trying to get all oour members onto the same instance of the map. None of these maps appeared to be “full”, however we had to drop parties and re-add people and wait a solid 3-4min before we could start the bounty that we found because of having to make sure all of our members were on the same map. This is a HUGE inconvenience to guilds and guild missions. I have no clue how larger guilds can manage this, but we as a 15 person guild struggled with it.
Hmm maybe if everyone who has posted on this forum submits a support ticket…. Then we might get a response?
Seriously this is the worst PR I have ever seen from a company. You have very angry customers that have been demanding a response for a week now. you have ruined the in game communities, you have made the tower of Babel in the EU, you have made the game unplayable for people with minimum req computers, and the high end people are now playing on reduced settings, the environment of the game is getting increasingly toxic, prices on things are going up…. And all you do is push more maps (against what people want) and then maintain radio silence. How on earth do you plan on staying in business? I’ve already had friends leave this game because of this change (which made me very sad, and I blame you guys for it). Seriously, own up to the fact that this was a mistake and take it back. It obviously wasn’t ready, and you are going to lose more money over lost customers than you are going to save in server power. I used to respect Anet, but you guys are very rapidly changing my opinion of your company.
All professions level 80| Champion Paragon, Phantom, Genius
Phoenix Ascendant [ASH] | Rank 80
Phoenix Ascendant [ASH] | Rank 80
(edited by eleshazar.6902)
My apologies if this has already been discussed (15 pages is a lot to wade through). It seems to me that one step towards solving this problem would be removing the cities from the Megaserver.
Isn’t the idea behind the Megaserver that underpopulated areas will now have enough players to make them fun and manageable? So when I’m running around outside Queen’s Dale, I’ll actually encounter people to do champions with.
But why do I need to encounter more people than I used to in cities? You aren’t doing anything in a city that requires socialization unless you want to RP. I’m sure there are lots of places RP takes place out in the world, and the Megaserver might continue to make that difficult. But why can’t we have our home servers when we’re in cities?
I’m on TC, and it’s true that I would often be thrown into OF in Lion’s Arch, but not so often that I couldn’t regularly get into the main map. And every other city I pretty much never encountered OF except for occasionally in Divinity’s Reach. If we could at least have the cities as our home servers, RPers would at least have a haven. A place where they could meet and chat and move out into the world from. It would solve a lot of the complaints I’ve witnessed in this thread.
Way in the long ago, in the days of GW1 we had districts. Several people have already suggested a way of moving from map to map which sounds remarkably like districts (IE a drop down menu where you can move between them and each one has labels). Also way in the long ago, for eight long years, we begged Anet to give us RP districts. IE districts with labels that said RP so the RPers had somewhere to go. We never got them.
One of the things I loved about GW2 was that it felt like home servers solved that problem. We had a place to go. Now we feel it’s been taken away from us. The creation of districts, and RP districts at that, would be fabulous. Failing that, having our home cities back would at least help. Surely since no events take place inside cities, it wouldn’t be harmful to remove them from the Megaserver?
I’d say that if you don’t know how the wheel works you shouldn’t try reinventing it.
What is the goal of this trait redesign? Why was it done this way?
My character is level 26 and just lost HALF its health pool. It is a significant nerf for all characters under level 80. The patch notes mention that you rebalanced all monsters to account for the big nerf, but is this conductive to better gameplay?
It seems monsters die a bit faster, but with half the health pool survivability is an issue because very quickly, before I can react, my health pool can go empty now. “Dying a lot faster” is not something I consider an improvement in a MMO.
And if this is a significant nerf in PvE, when it comes to PvP it’s nothing short of catastrophic. By matching pre-patch power levels only at level 80 it means you opened a significant gap in power between a level 80 and everyone below. If pre-patch going to WvW was at least viable with a lower level character, now it’s laughable after the huge talent nerf. How is this a good idea? PvP is fun when the power curve is as flat as possible, but with this patch you made it scale up considerably. Now attempting to go PvP with a character that isn’t already maxed is just not possible or fun.
How is this improving PvE when you remove even that little amount of choice? If allocating just one point every time you level up was a kind of scarce reward, allocating NONE is not an improvement. You just made the experience duller.
What’s even the point of having 80 levels if you offer something only every 6 levels, and only starting after level 30. It’s as if everything has been stretched so thin.
I am fine with as many personal insults as you’d like to throw at the rest of the community that isn’t one of your precious RPers. If you all want to hold hands and pat each other on the back over how wronged you have been and how you are the true reason that MMORPGs exist, then go ahead. It isn’t true, but if that is what this thread is for, then I’ll leave you to your hand holding.
I have played plenty of MMORPGs and participated in RP events and I haven’t seen this level of ‘poor us’ in a long time. I support everyone who said that they are in favor of keeping COMMUNITIES together.. of all sorts.. but not those who feel that RPers are the special children deserving of extra attention and catering too.
I’ve never seen an MMORPG single handedly remove the ability to play with friends in one patch.
No, we’re no the only people affected. Yes, it sucks for anyone in Europe. It sucks ~royally~ for people in Europe. Honestly, I think they have the most valid complaint and knowing the European Union’s record on this kind of thing, I have a feeling legal action will be pursued if something isn’t worked out. European Roleplayers have it worse then we NA RPers do.
The World Boss guilds have it awful, and really any guild that wants to run missions has it awful. Yes there is overreaction. I think the core idea of the megaserver is fine. Its been done well in other games that have maintained a strong roleplay community. The problem is Guild Wars 2 currently has the worst Megaserver currently in play.
Why? Because as near as we can tell they have had no testing beyond theorycrafting due to GW2s lack of a test server. This is bad, and is likely going to be fixed. I don’t hate Anet for the idea behind using megaservers. It negatively effects RP period until you can select “RP shards” of all areas, or even just of all low level/city zones. (I don’t actually think places like Orr need an RP tag, because while people RP there, usually they do so with Guild Chat or party chat during events in my experience.) But even then, its not actually that terrible of a thing in theory. Upping the average map population without disrupting servers isn’t unknown. WoW has done it with their realm mergers, and other megaserver systems have done it functionally.
The problem is the advertised metrics aren’t functioning, the new world boss spawns are rather carefully timed to function…for China, and be almost unusable for much of Europe or the East coast of the USA. There’s missteps in just about every aspect of this patch. (Except for zerk balance, that may need some tweaking but the idea of it is solid. Tweaks=/=broken on release. Though I think they should have offered free respecs of all zerk and celestial ascended gear. But thats just me.)
Roleplay is only a part of those negatively effected. But the fact of the matter is we’re the mot negatively effected. (Especially EU Roleplay) as our entire community has been destroyed in one fell swoop. Yesterday Divinity’s Reach had multiple filled overflows of roleplayers desperately seeking solace from the megaserver…
And honestly? If DR goes mega. You’re going to see RPers take over WvW…for RP. And then the kittening will truly begin.
First point: Shoving all complaints into one huge dogpile thread isn’t for ease of reference on your part. Every time you trot out that tired old lie, it’s just flogging your flatlined credibility. There is nothing easy or convenient about digging through this heap. This is about containment and suppression.
Containment, to keep our dissatisfaction from crowding all the happy ignorant fluff threads off the front page, and to make sure the only thread titles for actual discussion of your failures are marketing approved, fully sanitized. Suppression, because it’s impossible to have a discrete conversation about a small part of this fairly involved feature change without following the whole enormous messy thread, and carrying out any such discussion contributes to the overall bloat that intimidates others from joining in. You have corralled us all here because you don’t want us to post, and don’t want anyone to notice or care when we do. This isn’t a feedback thread, it’s an Oubliette.
Second point: Gem refunds for items that you’ve broken are worthless. What’s the difference between a bunch of ruined costume pieces composting in my inventory until I take the time to manually delete them, and a big heap of gems? Nothing. There is no difference. Your gems are trash. You have proven that nothing we buy from you is safe. It doesn’t matter what gorgeous things your art team manages to produce, I will never spend gems again, under any circumstance. You deserve to take the hit in cash refunds and chargeback fees. You have earned that penalty.
Third Point: Now that all Transmutation Charges are unified to Transmutation Crystal rates, why not lock Transmutation out entirely until level 80? I’d hate for some confused nooblet to accidentally use a charge on a low level character to keep a neat sword or his starting class headgear without knowing how badly he’s being ripped off.
Fourth Point: Without the PvP lockers to mix and match armor previews, much of my incentive to hunt down new pieces is suppressed. Why would I waste the time, without the advance certainty that the pieces won’t look like garbage together?
That’s all I’ve got for now on Wardrobe, Transmutation and Outfits. Now to go waste time screaming at the wind about how the Megaserver system is an attack on small-guild RPers.
Just seems to be a lot of oversight on so many levels. I really wonder how much they rushed headlong into this without thinking of the consequences.
Town clothes. Sure, streamlined, but a lot of the choice and creativity is gone. They weren’t used by everyone, but everyone who used them did so in a way that made the character and their look appealing to them. I can’t imagine removing player choice was a serious aim or intention, so can only assume they didn’t consider it.
Megaserver rollout – again, not grasping what it means to the established world communities, and some niche communities, like the RPers. Demonstrating very little understanding of those aspects of their playerbase, or at least showing they considered them in the design process. Not bowing to every whim, but at least acknowledging them in a thought process. Thankfully came to thir senses to do a rollout in more controlled areas (i.e lower population) in order to test it live without causing widespread issues to a large number of people, so they can fix before full implementation. But there are now reports that it may still be being activated in some higher pop areas like cities (claimed, but not wholly confirmed). Seems murky.
Apparant removal of alignment system (or at least the visibility of it). As was not announced, can only assume on their redesigns it was omitted. That they don’t have a grip on their own mechanics, however small, is discouraging.
Not having a way of notifying people what they have in town slots. Lack of thought about the transition from the old system to the new. That in itself speaks wonders.
Not being clear about where the free charges are or how to obtain them. Sure, easy enough to find, but the fact people are missing them, as they are with their previously equipped town clothes, indicates some lack of communication and no clear message from Anet.
Feedback. SO much for a dialogue between developer and player. They say they look at the feedback, and while I believe that, it is best to be seen to do it as well as actually doing it. No real engagement at all since these features were announced.
To me, it just seems Anet had some great ideas, but went heck for leather in putting them in, and as such has done a cack-handed job of it. Just all seems one giant rush job from beginning to end.
Divinity’s Reach is home to some top-tier criminal masterminds.
The kind of people who will set an orphanage on fire after locking themselves inside it.
The kind of people who will set an orphanage on fire after locking themselves inside it.
Sorry for the double post; I suck at not wall-o-texting.
Speaking from a technological standpoint, Twyll, I don’t think it’s possible for them to roll out the Wardrobe and keep Town Clothes going under the old system. The new TC system is already built into the Wardrobe and taking it out/trying to turn that particular piece off, would most likely break the entire Wardrobe.
I think our best bet, is to hope that they’re listening(reading) to everyone and that they take the time to convert the Town Clothes that became Tonics into Armor Skins. I’m not sure if they would do that with Outfits (though I would hope so) since Outfits existed before the Wardrobe anyway.
It might be difficult to implement, but since all the assets for the Town Clothing system already exist, it would probably be simpler to re-implement it for a short time while they work on a better fix than to turn every single piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Armor one by one. They wouldn’t even have to exist as skins within the Wardrobe— they could just be items like they already are. Those that have been put into the Wardrobe would be icing on the cake, of course, since they’re already there— and they’d be able to sell more of them, too, because of their increased usefulness as both a Wardrobe skin and as a piece of Town Clothing. But the tonic’d ones would just stay as items that live in the inventory (just as tonics are items that live in the inventory), no need to add them to the Wardrobe until a better system has been designed down the road.
I don’t think it would necessarily be feasible to turn every piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Armor, but it should be feasible to turn every piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Outfit and create an Outfit paper doll akin to the old Town Clothing one, rather than just a single slot. That way they don’t have to worry about making them compatible with other Armor. They just have to be compatible with themselves, which they already are, although the meshes would have to be redone to work in combat. So, reworking, but no redesign or incongruous combinations of armor and froofy skirts. They would get to stay internally consistent. And that would mean they could re-release all the individual Town Clothing items they took out of the Gem Store that are being turned into Tonics, because they’d become useable again. That would not only appease people who bought them and who would want to see the fix (many of whom have become leery of giving ANet any more money), but allow new customers to buy more of them, so the time and money put into combining the original function of Town Clothes with the new function of Outfits would pay off in the form of more money.
And like I said, I have ideas regarding a better system they can be working on, but I’m still getting it organized into a coherent proposal that will hopefully be less wall-o-textish than my usual posts. It takes more time to write something concise but precise than it does to write something wordy, when you’re trying to be as detailed and explicit as possible to prevent miscommunication.
Town clothes and outfits are actually now equivalent, it’s just people don’t want them to be.
If you were Anet, would you really keep the old one AND introduce a new one? I’m not sure that makes sense. Think long term.
Two, three, four years from now,. what’s the real benefit to keeping the old system, when a new one is replacing it?
They’re not the same thing, but ANet is trying to make them look equivalent by making Outfits that resemble things that were once Town Clothes. Their function, however, is entirely different. Town Clothes allow a highly customizable non-combat look. Outfits allow minimally customizable combat look. Just because there will be Outfit skins that look like some full sets of Town Clothes does not make them a new version of Town Clothes, because they function in entirely different ways and have different characteristics. So whatever ANet intends them to be, the result is that they are not similar enough. One does not build upon the other. Intent does not equal results.
I am thinking long-term in that I say they should keep Town Clothes only until they can manage something better. (I mentioned in my post that it would be a stopgap measure, yes? Not permanent, not present a year down the road.) Ideally, “something better” is an Outfits system that provides a proper paper doll and not just one slot. That would integrate Town Clothes with the Outfits system by retaining their original functionality (mix and match and dyeing individually), but also allow Outfits to be used in combat— making them a true successor to Town Clothes with their own benefits, not a separate thing. Obviously this will take time to implement the improved system, and more time to turn each piece of Town Clothing into a separate piece of Outfit, hence the benefit of keeping Town Clothes around until we can have that second paper doll back.
In future, if they never want to release another set of clothing that’s all in separate pieces, that’s fine; they can just do things like the Bloody Prince Thorn set that eclipses the rest of the paper doll. But they would still keep the potential to make a mix-and-matchable look, if some of their designers ever do decide to do something in separate pieces; and then they could charge more money for sets of Outfit pieces (which take longer to make than indivisible ones), reflecting the extra effort they had to put in to make each different piece. When mining picks became account-bound and thus gained more value than the soulbound ones, they increased the price to match; I don’t see why multiple-piece Outfits should be any different, because they increase in value due to being more customizable while still useable in combat. This gives us more flexibility in what we can use, and themselves more flexibility in what they can design. They just have to invest the time and money to build the infrastructure for it so they can benefit from it in the end, and put in a stopgap to keep people happy while they work on it.