As my thread dedicated to megaservers in cities got shot down, I will post my opinion here again.
Let’s start about Megaservers in general. Megaservers are a good idea, as is, but the execution is poorly. That shouldn’t be the topic here, so we will move on from there. The main idea behind megaservers is to get rid of the drastic differences between servers. While there are “full” servers, where every map can generate an overflow, as soon, as a world event starts, there are rather empty servers, where nobody shows up for world events.
While guesting to Vabbi, my guild tried to make a joke of killing the shatterer with a 5 man team. It didn’t work, but that’s beside the point. The intent of these changes is to make large content more accessible to the masses. While this is a great idea, I have no idea, how this relates to cities in any way.
In cities, there is no large scale content, no events and no hearts to complete. From this standpoint, there is already no reason to merge the cities.
I will now present a couple of reasons, why introducing the megaserver system to cities is a bad idea.
First off: Language barriers.
While in open world zones, this matters far less, in cities, the rule of thumb was generally to speak in the language of the server, you have chosen. For our server, Drakkar, that language was german.
We chose german servers to be able to communicate in german. There are even people on our server, who can’t even speak english or at the very least are not very fluent in it. Even more, getting the map chat spammed in french or spanish is not really helpful either.
The main purpose of cities is to:
1) Give access to services
2) Give an area, where one can communicate with others.
That second point is severely influenced by the megaservers. You could happen to be the only german speaking person on a server full of french people. What if you have some questions to ask, because you are new to the game?
Someone new to the game, who has chosen a german server will surely find this a bad joke, when he has to use his bad french from way back in school to communicate with others. Heck, I may still be able to understand some basic french senteces, but as I never needed to communicate in french, I am not able to form a single sentence in this language.
Let’s turn it around. A french player landing on a megaserver dominated by Germans.
Second point: Roleplaying
While I surely do not belong to the group of players, who are actively roleplaying, there are many, who do. Outside of dedicated roleplaying servers, they are generally shunned or belittled. Even on Drakkar, which was once hailed as the german rp server, the irrational hatred towards roleplayers runs deep.
The problem at hand is, that especially the cities are like hubs for roleplayers. They mostly meet in the cities, they mostly rp in the cities. With the megaserver system in place, those players will have difficulties meeting up with other roleplayers. They will sometimes be thrown into hostile environment, where every attempt at roleplaying is met by snarky remarks from the bystanders. It will be hard to get any active roleplaying done, and while it does not seem important, the game will also be less immersive. If multiple people are roleplaying on their own in masses, the city will become “alive”.
An experience like that is also prohibited by the megaserver system, which brutally rips apart those rp communities and seperates them over different overflows.
Third point: World vs World
For lower tier servers, the cities are the only place to effectively recruit people. If some special event is going on, like in the case of Drakkar, for example, the 24 hour raid, there needs to be a way of telling the people who don’t frequent WvW as often, that you need people for a large scale offense. There may also be cases, where you need more people for defense, in which case, some people may also go to the cities and ask for help.
During the first season, this was more prevalent than it is now, but especially servers from even lower tiers than Drakkar will surely find it difficult to field people for WvW, when there is no place, where you are guaranteed to encounter people, who are mainly from your own server.
heck, with the megaserver in place, the probability is there, 80% of the players on the map are from your enemy server and decide to go to wvw themselves.
Especially for the lowest tier of servers, where there is no centralized teamspeak(which fortunately Drakkar has), the cities might be a place, where you can discuss and plan strategies for WvW. You are basically disconnecting the WvW community from its own server.
