Guild Wars 2

Sigil of Rage isn’t a stacking sigil, so not really an issue.

Removing the shared cooldown with other proc sigils will make it a viable option though, especially paired on a two handed weapon with something else.

All in all, great changes to sigils across the board.

Ramiel.4931:

It would be cool but we all know ANet are anti-fun. Won’t happen.

Anti-fun?

We get to turn people into a giant squaking bird and cause them to kill themselves with their own abilities. Not sure “anti-fun” is a good description, especially with mesmers.

Turrets can be very useful if you practice where to place them and how to use them – and, yes, there are plenty of engineers in the game who do.

This change adds (for those wanting to take the trait) an interesting strategic option for turret engineers. I can think of quite a few situations (in all game modes) where this will be very strong.

I’ve been playing a lockdown mesmer in PVE for months and have found it very fun and useful. Obviously, it does nothing on dragon fights, but in pretty much every other scenario, it is pretty powerful.

Even with dungeon/fractal bosses, I find I can cycle and time dazes and interrupts often enough to make a real difference in the fight. Few things in the game are as satisfying as interrupting a major boss attack at just the right second. Love the control options we have as mesmers.

You dont need a huge mob of players to enjoy Orr, Southsun or Frostgorge. They are much more fun with guild groups of between 8 to 20.

To be honest, I don’t want the farm groups to invade Cursed Shore again and I like that they have Queensdale for that purpose. Farm groups tend to be less friendly (“why did you kill that champion out of order?”) and can take away fun with the zerg mentality.

As for downleveling, it is a major plus in this game – not because of entry level zones like Queensdale, but because of mid level zones like Harathi Hinterlands and Fireheart Rise. A group of 5-15 can have a blast doing event chains together in many of these zones.

I see two sides to this.

If large sections of the community are exploiting or taking advantage of boss mechanics in obviously unintended ways and changes are implemented to punish that behavior, then stealth nerfs are warranted and welcomed. Those players deserve a repair bill or two.

On the other hand, I agree that if mechanics are changed to upgrade a fight for the sake of upgrading the fight (which is still a welcome change) then they should probably make it into the patch notes.

And a guild event calendar with sign up/decline functionality to make it easier to plan and organize guild events, please (please).

(please)

All of the examples you give are racial skills, which they have said from the beginning are supposed to be a little underpowered and more about flavor than actual utility.

Some professions aren’t balanced around having a pet out permanently. It just isn’t what those professions are really about.

Palador.2170:

mrstealth.6701:

Beldin.5498:

The question is, what exactly you have to do for that .. fine if it is all soloable, but would be bad if in the end you have to “buy” these skills maybe later from other players because you need to kill champs or do things in Dungeons that nobody else does anymore.

One of the screenshots in the announcement/article shows a trait that is unlocked by defeating the High Wizard guarding the entrance to Arah. I’m sure there will be a surge of players doing all these events for unlocks shortly after the update hits. But good luck getting that later on.

I would like to point out this part of the blog:

All major traits will be locked on characters created after the feature pack. All existing characters created before this feature pack will be have all previously existing major traits unlocked.

Given that, I think there will not be a real rush to do most of these events, because all existing characters will already have those things unlocked. Only the events for the new Grandmaster traits will be locked for exisiting characters, and only those events will get rushed.

Adept and Master trait events, as well as ones for currently existing Grandmaster traits, will stay as ignored as they currently are, until some new characters reach a level to need to take them on.

Im hoping this is what the changes to Looking for Group are all about – a way to identify groups across servers (and then easily move/guest to that server – or, even better, a copy of the zone similar to an overflow for people interested in that event) that are working on select dynamic events or zones. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but there is potential there.

Beldin.5498:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Two things to think about:

• Will they tweak the areas, given how there’ll less stats available?
• Will they be implementing China’s 1 – 30 experience (the only logical explanation for moving traits up to 30)?

Beldin.5498:

The question is, what exactly you have to do for that .. fine if it is all soloable, but would be bad if in the end you have to “buy” these skills maybe later from other players because you need to kill champs or do things in Dungeons that nobody else does anymore.

You can buy traits from a vendor, so if there’s a specific trait you want, but you don’t want to do that bit of content, you can still get it.

Of course we don’t now the prices till now. And if they want to “force” us to “enjoy” content we maybe don’t want to play, i believe these price could be quite high and its maybe less expensive to buy a dungeon path from other players or whatever.

Unless I overlooked it, we also dont know the currency that will be required. Im holding out hope that it will be skill points rather than gold.

I think “facilitating friendly play” will involve addressing the issues with overflows for large events and friends getting separated in the process. My hope is a change to the server architecture system – possibly implementing a system where you choose the version of the zone you want to play in and can move freely between them (with friends) rather than dealing with random overflows.

I like the direction this is taking us. It will add more diversity and a fun feel to how we build our characters.

The thing that interests me most is the direction of the new traits. They definitely arent afraid of giving professions unique abilities to better define their class. A turret engineer should be able to defend a point versus ranged attacks better than just about any other character. I can think of alot of utility for that in all three game modes.

As others have mentioned already though, I think these changes make build templates almost mandatory. The idea of changing builds between fights in fractals or dungeons to maximize efficiency is not an attractive or fun prospect. Hopefully this is something they are working on getting into the April 15 update.

> New guild missions and new guild mission types

> Some fun new traits and skills

> Better scaling on large open world PVE battles (properly scaling down to 30+)

> Dungeon revamps. I would love to see at least one path in each dungeon given the same treatment they gave Twilight Assault.

There is absolutely 100% nothing for the players to worry about. GW2 isn’t going anywhere just because other games are launching. A few people may play those other games, but not enough to actually hurt the gameplay (and many who play those other games will still play GW2 – beauty of no sub fee).

Finally, competition is good for the market and the games therein. GW2 has held solid in the face of the competition so far (and the competition has been much fiercer than the games coming out this year will ever be).

Sure a tiny percentage will leave to try out the shiny new thing (like trying out a new restaurant when it opens in town), but unless there is something groundbreakingly different about them (there isnt), most of them will be back.

Flytrap.8075:

I’m beginning to think that Colin is a robot or an A.I. because he seems to be stuck in a repetition loop.

That’s what happens when people ask the same question over and over.

Robot or not, if we get new guild missions, I may just fly to Seattle and kiss him on the mouth.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Blaeys.3102:

They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging)

Don’t compare the Knights to the Wurm plz. The LA events are bugged. The Wurm is Elite content. Fixing the first is the solution, but no easy mode for the Wurm.

No one is asking for easy mode.

Were just asking to be able to do the content with a reasonably sized group.

Requiring more people does not equal more difficult. People need to quit thinking that way. It’s what got us into this in the first place.

But that is only a tiny part of the bigger issue. Scaling is broken and needs to be fixed.

Those of us on lower populated servers just want a little love too.

It works on some fights, but on others it just feels broken.

The biggest issue is now which server you play on. Some servers have enough people to do living story and other events and others do not.

Its time to fix/adjust scaling (every fight in the game should be doable with groups of 30+ organized players, imo) or merge servers (or, even better, implement something like the shard system from GW1), simple as that.

We need to start making a lot more noise about this.

The last step in the Scarlet storyline should be designed to be fun for everyone – not just those on large servers who are lucky enough to avoid overflow.

Smaller population servers have been left out of the last few updates in really big ways – to the point where it is demoralizing a HUGE chunk of the community.

I still have faith in the scaling system – which is where they are failing the hardest right now. They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging) in order to fix this.

If they cant do that (and do it before the end of April, imo), then it is time to merge servers – simple as that.

Designing fights for TTS and the 2-3 largest servers will destroy the fun of the game for everyone else.

They really need to fix this.

We cant even kill one Knight half the time because the fights are designed solely for high population servers.

I wish devs would play more in these events when they are scaled down (on low pop servers) to see what we are going through.

I want to have fun when I play. This is just frustrating and drama inducing.

50 well organized players should at least have a chance at beating this event.

Were being punished for server loyalty, and that is bad design, simple as that.

Agree completely.

I love this game and, unlike many on the forums, have loved most of the Living Story steps they’ve implemented.

However, this issue of scaling on the Knights has all but killed the fun of the scarlet patch (which should have been epic – so that makes me really sad) because my server simply doesnt have the people to consistently spread between the knights.

It really feels like they design the fights for a tiny number of servers with huge populations and forget about the rest of us.

They need to design these fights with smaller groups in mind, then scale them up from there. The current method ends up leaving huge chunks of people out of the fun.

My problem is the chances of my server having 50 people at each knight is pretty slim.

Ive been out of town on business all week. I really want to see the boss fight without having to wait for hours to do so. If this keeps up, I will never get to see it.

This is very disheartening.

So low pop servers are excluded 75% of the time again?

This is getting old.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

MokahTGS.7850:

I also would like Fractals (and to a lesser extent, Dungeons) to evolve to allow for 2-5 player scaling. I know they are currently designed for 5 people, but I’d like to see the balance code reworked in such a way that 2 people could run through a fractal and be rewarded for that level scale. Obviously 5-man fractals would reward more, but I personally just want to run through them with my wife…currently that isn’t possible.

Call it “Casual-mode” for Fractals.

Personally I would like to see Fractals be able to be 5+ as well with associated risk/reward mechanics.

Chris

This is something I didnt even consider as part of the discussion, but love seeing it and think it deserves more attention/discussion.

The idea of fractals with different sized groups would go over insanely well in my guild. Just last night, we had 7 people wanting to do fractals and had to arbitrarily leave two friends out of the run.

Been doing this for so many years in MMOs with 5 man content that it’s become the norm. This single change would really set GW2 apart and give us a way to better play with friends (and as a GM of a large guild, it would allow me to schedule a guild fractal night without having to worry about leaving people out).

DevonCarver.5370:

A short recap of the first few pages of discussion.

Probably the most contentious issue has been the talk of getting rid of world’s and replacing the system with just the three colors. I think there is some merit to the idea, although I believe the worlds have a lot of value. I’d be curious to know if the folks who argue against and world pride feel that way because of being on underperforming worlds or not. I also wonder if there isn’t some work that could be done to restore that world pride without completely overhauling the WvW system. Someone mentioned alliances, which I think would work fairly well. If the less populous worlds were grouped together, does that seem like something that could reinvigorate them?

The biggest reason so many think the three big blobs idea is a good one is because the difference between the gameplay experience differs greatly depending on server population (both over all population and active WvW population) and after hours coverage. This is exacerbated by the constant transferring of more and more wvw guilds to T1 and T2 servers.

Melding WvW would probably alleviate that – and it should probably happen. The disparity between the fun of the game depending on which server you choose is very bad for the game. We’ll eventually find ourselves with 3-6 active servers and the rest not having the people to do anything (in WvW or in PVE).

To the point of server pride, ArenaNet has to make a decision – are you more interested in making servers happy with the game or are you more interested in making players happy.

If it is the latter (which it should be), then you need to come up with a system that, as much as possible, removes server choice from the equation. Anything else is a bandaid and will just lead to the situation getting more and more lopsided.

Proposal Overview
Give groups the ability to choose the fractals they wish to run rather than leave it to chance.

Goal of Proposal
To make fractals as fun, rewarding and challenging as the players want while creating an even playing field not tied to random chance. For example, in the current setup, a group getting lvl 33 instability (hits from behind and sides do more damage) and drawing the dredge fractal is going to have a much different/more frustrating experience than a group getting the aetherblade retreat fractal.

By giving the choice to the players, you let groups that wish to tackle specific challenges/go after specific achievements/experience specific fights do so. Additionally, players/groups just wishing to move through quickly (which I am not one of) can choose the quicker fractals.

Proposal Functionality
- As each fractal tier begins, the group is asked to vote (similar to picking a dungeon path) from the fractals in a particular difficulty tier.

- Potentially associate specific loot rewards or drop chances with specific fractals to encourage groups to do different fractals.

Associated Risks
The biggest risks are a. people not wanting to do specific fractals, which could become an issue of contention in pugs and b. people finding exploits on specific fractals and taking advantage of them more easily. I do think that these are both issues that could be dealt with easily though.

Three Things
To the request, here is my list:

1. Player choice in the fractals they do (the idea outlined above).
2. Let us salvage rings from fractals
3. New Fractals as fast as possible based on past LS steps (love the potential this system has).

This is a very positive direction for the game to take.

You can easily survive through these attacks using a combination of active defense (blocks, aegis, blinds, ccs, etc), dodges and a few survival stats on your gear (and if you can team up and get some active support from team members, even better).

If you insist on rushing in like a bull and just throwing out AOEs while in full zerker, then you will most like die often. Ive gone full sessions in the Lion’s Arch event without dying once.

It just takes knowing your profession and being willing to sacrifice a little dps (either through gear or by using more defensive traits/skills/weapons) to ensure a little survival.

It doesnt matter if a mob hits you for 27000 if you block or the target is blinded.

This just happened on HOD

My guild is having a blast – and we have more players online doing this content than we’ve ever had before.

Yes, it can feel a little zergish, but its an INVASION (led by a lunatic, no less). Its supposed to be chaos.

It may not require the coordination/organization of something like the marionette or Tequatl, or the strategy involved in something like Twilight Assault – but it does create a fun mid ground that most players can enjoy (and those who just hate the zerg have things to do as well – moving through the city in smaller squads rescuing civilians – which can be alot of fun).

Most importantly, for those who were there, it’s hard not to draw parallels to the last major LA invasion – the first Karka event – and see that Anet is learning from their mistakes/making the game better each time around. I’m genuinely excited for what may come next.

I think it was a good first start – but it is just a start. They saw what worked and didn’t work with the community.

The latter steps have shown great improvements in both storytelling and playability – a good sign that they are getting their sea legs with this type of game development.

I have high hopes for the future – not necessarily based on all of the past living story steps, but instead based on the steady improvements we’ve seen since the first Karka invasion event more than a year ago.

It still isn’t perfect and there are some rough edges to sand over (most notably, catching people up on the story if they missed steps and some annoying reoccuring minor bugs), but the future is definitely bright.

Same recommendation I made in the closed post -

Scaled down, this fight would make an awesome guild challenge mission.

stale.9785:

Vol.7601:

stale.9785:

There has been virtually no content added – one dungeon path got changed, one dragon event got broken, and they added fractals and southsun – but there’s nothing to do in southsun.

What an absurd comment to make.

How it is absurd? It’s the objective truth. There has been no permanent content. Take someone who played in September of release, but hasn’t come back till today, and what are we going to show him?

“There’s been a lot of living story updates, but there’s nothing to show for it, and you can’t replay them.” Otherwise, there’s fractals and Southsun. That’s it.

Twilight Assault Dungeon Path (this wasnt “changing” a path – T Assault is an awesome addition to the game for people wanting a real dungeon experience. forward up needed to be done away with)

Fractals (with a major addition to them a few months ago)

New sPvP maps (multiple)

Vexa’s Lab

Southsun

New healing skills (tiny addition, but new none the less)

Karka Queen world boss

Tequatl (major addition – raid style boss – very important to many people)

Triple Threat Worm World Boss

New Minigames (all but Kegbrawl are new since launch – and add moa racing to this)

Guild Missions (huge addition for guilds)

New Champions in Kessex Hills

New Jumping Puzzles (Skipping Stones, Hidden Garden and Not So Secret)

New World Dynamic Events (toxic stalks, scarlet zone events)

Ascended Weapons/Armor

WvW progression system/rewards

Edge of the Mists WvW map

Cosmetic fun additions such as PvP finishers, various tonics, minis, etc

And these are just off the top of my head. An argument could be made that most of the holiday stuff is permanent (or at least semi-permanent) as well since most of it will be cycling back around every year.

Something I care alot about, so wall of text incoming. Guild missions are important to me – and to many in my guild – so Ive put a bit of thought into them.

My thoughts on missions are as follow:

Guild Bounties.
I would make four changes to guild bounties:

- do away with the random draw. Let guilds pick their targets. The analogy would be a bounty hunter looking at wanted posters and choosing which he is going after. This would have three effects – allow smaller guilds to do easier bounties, allow guilds to make sure they do every bounty possible and support the other ideas Ive listed below.

- A guild bounty is just one target (not 2-6), but the difficulty of the target goes up based on the tier (so Tier One targets are easiest and Tier Three are more difficult, with possible new tiers added). Using the current bounties, Trilla would be a tier one target and 2-Mult would be a Tier Three target.

- Make a QOL pass at the bounty targets, giving them more interesting mechanics and improving their scaling for larger groups. They could also look at pathing and possibly even put some bounty targets in stationary positions (such as a bandit leader protected behind his gang in a cave).

- Improve personal rewards and potential drops, especially from more difficult tier bosses.

Guild Challenges:
- Again remove the random element and let guilds choose their challenges. This would allow smaller guilds to do challenges without worrying about wasting the trigger on something they do not have the people for.

- Add new tiers of guild challenges and include massive fights like a downscaled Marionette or the scarlet zone invasions.

- Tie past living story steps into challenges (have us protect/wrangle lost devourers at The Hatchery or clean up supercharged toxic stalks in Kessex Hills).

Guild Puzzle.
- The only change we need here is a QOL change – some way for groups to open the doors in case one person doesnt make it through in time.

Guild Rushes and Treks
Maybe consider a lower tier to guild rushes that only requires 6-10 people to finish, instead of 15. I love Treks (told you I love missions – my guild still does a T3 trek every week) as they are.

New Category: Guild Dungeon.
These would look alot like Guild Puzzles and be similar in length (and could, at least initially, even possibly use the same maps). The difference would be – instead of logic puzzles, there would be a series of enemy encounters (including bosses and an end boss) requiring large group tactics to overcome. This alone would add alot of potential to guild missions.

Ideally, something like this would have multiple tiers with increased personal/guild rewards at higher tiers.

I really hope this thread stays alive. Alot of us do care about guild missions.

Same problem. Same solution.

Dont bandwagon on the same 2-3 servers. These events, at least the first few days, are a lot more fun on the less populated servers.

Stop thinking you have to be on a T1 server to enjoy content. Spread out a little.

I just hope to see a nod to Snake Plissken somewhere during the event.

EDIT: displaced beat me to it.

People can also track via the blocked list – just block someone and you can see where they go all the time – which makes no sense. If you block someone, you should ALWAYS be invisible to that person.

People should not be able to track your location without you knowing (especially in WvW, but anywhere else as well) – whether it be through the friends or blocked list. It promotes griefing and generally unsportsmanlike behavior.

I don’t think ArenaNet thought it through properly when they made these changes. It needs to be hotfixed or reverted back to the old system until they have a solution.

The players are at least partially to blame though – for insisting on playing on the same 2-3 servers.

If overflows are a huge issue, you may want to consider a less populated server.

I know it isnt the perfect answer, but any changes to overflows need to come alongside fixes to server populations.

Nex.2450:

Fact is, you cannot fully test the system against thousands of simultaneous users until you actually release it to the public.

The voice of reason in a sea of knee jerk reactions.

Blaeys.3102:

Claudius.5381:

I would like an instanced Marionette fight as a guild mission.

Tier 3: as it is now.

Tier 2: 2 lanes which are alternately called into the arenas, only 4 arenas.

Tier 1: 1 lane, defend for 4 minutes, then be called in, only 2 arenas.

Tone down lanes so that 10 people per lane are the ideal setup and scale from there.

Or something like that. May be you could even get a guild mission out of the Triple Wurm but it would be much more difficult to tier him down.

My guild had this same thought last night during our weekly missions. The Marionette (scaled down) would make an awesome guild challenge.

And I also agree with the above poster about helping smaller guilds. Ideally, I would like to see us able to choose the missions we want our guild to tackle instead of getting them randomly. Even larger guilds like mine would appreciate this – allowing us to trigger the more difficult missions (and it would allow us to actively avoid zones where LS is going on and overflows may exist – eg Lornar’s Pass this week).

In fact, I think there are alot of events/bosses/etc from past living story steps that would make decent guild missions – past bosses becoming bounties, events becoming challenges (helping clean up Kessex, defend Cragstead from bandits or corralling escaped devourers in The Hatchery). Would really inject life back into missions and tie them into the LS.

Claudius.5381:

I would like an instanced Marionette fight as a guild mission.

Tier 3: as it is now.

Tier 2: 2 lanes which are alternately called into the arenas, only 4 arenas.

Tier 1: 1 lane, defend for 4 minutes, then be called in, only 2 arenas.

Tone down lanes so that 10 people per lane are the ideal setup and scale from there.

Or something like that. May be you could even get a guild mission out of the Triple Wurm but it would be much more difficult to tier him down.

My guild had this same thought last night during our weekly missions. The Marionette (scaled down) would make an awesome guild challenge.

And I also agree with the above poster about helping smaller guilds. Ideally, I would like to see us able to choose the missions we want our guild to tackle instead of getting them randomly. Even larger guilds like mine would appreciate this – allowing us to trigger the more difficult missions (and it would allow us to actively avoid zones where LS is going on and overflows may exist – eg Lornar’s Pass this week).

I think they should scale the fight down and turn it into a guild mission (new guild challenge mission).

Guild missions need a little love right now anyway.

With the announcement that WvW, Tequatl and Guild Missions will all have a higher ascended gear drop rate, I’m hoping that is a sign that new guild missions may be coming in the near future (possibly even tomorrow).

Its been a while since they added new bounties, rushes and puzzles (I dont think weve ever gotten a new challenge), so it should be about time to see those – possibly even tied into past living story steps (past bosses, NPCs as bounty targets, defending Cragstead/the Hatchery as a challenge, a scaled downed version of the marionette as a challenge, etc).

I know Im pulling at a really small string with this hope, but I can still pull, can’t I ( )?

This needs to be something they fix – or at least consider when designing future fights.

This past Friday, my server grouped to tackle Tequatl. We had about 50 people and we struggled to get those to participate. During the fight, we had no issue with defending turrets, clearing poison fields or avoiding bonewalls. The fight was fun and we were extremely organized.

But we failed because we just didnt have the damage output to move the dragon’s health down fast enough.

It is devastating to morale and, simply put, stupid to require such huge numbers for these fights.

We didnt lose because of lack or coordination or lack of player skill. We lost because of the arbitrary scaling gateway on that fight. That shouldnt be what keeps players from succeeding when they try hard.

I agree the fight shouldn’t be doable with 15 people, but requiring 80 is simple favoritism toward large populated servers, plain and simple. This fight should be doable with 30-40 well organized people – and scale up for the huge groups. If those groups are able to deal with the actual mechanics of the fight, they shouldnt be held back just because they dont play on Zerggate.

It isnt an accident that world firsts on both Tequatl and the Worm (in both Europe and North America) were on the most populated servers – or that these events are more or less dead everywhere else (unless TTS chooses a server to do it on – but then there is no room for anyone actually from that server to participate).

As an FYI, my server isnt stopping anytime soon. We are going to keep at Tequatl every Friday before WvW reset – but a little recognition that the numbers are a REAL issue from ArenaNet and what they plan to do to fix it would be nice.

Im sorry, but the problem isnt one of difficulty – its one of numbers.

The difference in numbers between the most populated and the least populated servers means that when you design for one, the other is adversely affected. Currently, strong players on less populated servers do not have easy access to the same game that those on higher populated do without guesting or transferring (which makes population disparities even worse).

So please stop saying that is simply about different players looking for different things. Something needs to be done to even out the experience and give all players the same access, regardless of the server you play on.

Either balance servers through merges, implement some kind of smarter “underflow” system or design fights with EVERY server in mind (not just the one or two with the most players).

Scale the fights down for groups reasonable on all servers (there is more to GW2 than Blackgate and Desolation) or fix population numbers, and, yes, it is a good model to use. Otherwise, it sets a bad precedent.

I hate that populations should have such an impact on fight design, but until a better solution for low population servers is found, I dont see these huge fights being fun for large percentages of the population.

Fights that require 80-125 just arent sustainable given the current numbers on most servers. Its that simple and I wish ArenaNet would, at minimum, acknowledge the fact and, at best, let us know they are working to fix the issue.

Neural.1824:

How will EotM work anyway as a WvW map? If it’s a single overflow, that means there will be a lot more than just red/green/blue I would think. Unless they assign you as a color when you get put in there. Is it going to be fully open PvP then? or?

Alot of us are praying (really hard) that this isnt tied to servers – otherwise it is just one more thing that makes the large servers more enticing than those who actually need the people.

This looks amazing.

My biggest concern is that, if this is tied to servers, we are going to have the same issues regarding low population servers – and their ability to enjoy the game due to design decisions based around active populations on the top 3 servers – that we have had with the past few updates.

For many of us, the issue comes back to active server population numbers.

It has nothing to do with the difficulty (unless you count server recruitment as part of the fight). We want hard fights. Many servers just dont have the numbers to consistently tackle the fights they are putting in the game, meaning people are left out or have to resort to guesting (which causes a whole new set of issues – but is absolutely necessary or people would never even get the chance).

It is no accident that the world firsts for both Tequatl and the Worm came from two of the most highly populated servers worldwide.

I think if an issue is important to players, there is nothing wrong with bringing it up again – no matter how many times it has been discussed in the past.

The population issue is the single biggest issue in the game right now, in my opinion – more important than balance, new zones or anything else.

I think when the developer said the game population was healthy, he was speaking on a global scale – meaning plenty of people are still playing.

Server populations are in extremely bad shape right now. I would guess that at least 50 percent of the active population is crammed into 3-4 servers in North America. This causes pretty bad issues for the rest of us. WvW is completely lopsided and major world PVE events are impossible most days/times on most servers. People have to resort to guesting, which only makes the issues worse in many cases (but guesting has to stay – or those servers would be completely SOL).

There needs to be a better system in place. They need to either merge servers or make it easier to find the population we need to down these events. This could be in the form or underflow servers or by giving us more visibility/control over the zone instance we play in (when we zone into an area, give us the option to choose a different version of that zone based on critical information such as how many people are there and where our friends are).

Most importantly, the community needs to keep making noise about this. Arenanet needs to know how important this particular topic is to many of us. Otherwise, the way populations are handled (which encourages bandwagonning and results in dead servers and/or constant overflows, depending on where you are) will only make things much much worse.

This would also eliminate the issue of people having to stand around forever in a zone waiting on a boss to spawn. Large groups could just communicate the instance version they are going to (based on room available at that point in time) and get everyone onto the same map pretty much simultaneously.

I know there are probably massive technical hurdles to doing something like this – I think it is worth them exploring however. It would alleviate many issues with the current system.