Guild Wars 2

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

If you don’t believe any Dev participation is forthcoming, and you aren’t interested in what they have stated previously, what would be the purpose of your question? =)

Well, I am asking in the hope that they will respond but, based on experience, I am not that hopeful.

The best outcome for a thread like this would obvously be to get a response with the date that LS2 will land on but a more realistic outcome (IMO) will be that someone in ArenaNet notes the thread, passes on the question to someone else and it and other similar threads (throughout the various forums) will hasten a response from someone.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

That’s about as exact as you will probably get until they make the announcement, I would guess.

Maybe you will be fortunate and a Dev will pin down the exact times in your thread, though! =)

Hehe, yeah, and maybe I’ll be judging a snowman building contest in hell.

I appreciate that Inculpatus cedo, but as it’s been a 10 or so weeks since they added any new content their fortnightly schedule is a thing of the past and I hope they announce something soon as the game feels like it’s slowly grinding to a halt.

Well, thanks but that’s not really an answer to my question as we don’t know how long this festival will last. A month would be a good guess but it would still be a guess.

lordkrall.7241:

Events that means zerging: Bad design.
Events that means stop zerging: Bad design.

Will anything ever not be bad design?

Stopping zerging isn’t the problem it’s the way they try to stop zerging that’s the problem here. So, it’s the actual design that’s bad, not the intention behind that design. Got it?

They’ve gone to such lengths to create a game where people are encouraged to jump in to help people out and now they’ve completely turned that on its head so that you’re supposed to stay away from fights? Any design where they want us to AFK in the middle of the arena because otherwise the boss will scale up to a ridiculous level is completely counter intuitive; more players and more damage should not mean longer fights.

Basically the real “boss” here is the wonky, nonsensical scaling mechanics. That should never be the case.

MauricioCezar.2673:

Or just not here yet? Usually, the bi-weekly update used to give us a shot one week before a new content was coming out. But nothing yet so… whats up?

Yes, they appear to have abandoned their fortnightly updates, I’d like to know when they’re going to kick off some new content too.

I have two questions for ArenaNet.

When will we be hearing about the next, new content patch?

Will you be getting back to regular releases or have you scrapped the fortnightly schedule?

I’ve seen at most 3 commanders in the pavilion at a time, one of whom turned off their tag and left as soon as the event missed gold. Last two times I went in there were no commanders and about 15 people. If you’re being lucky and getting a good overflow/megaserver then that’s great but don’t assume that everyone else is doing it wrong, in Europe at least the event seems to be dead at this stage.

Shizlam.4310:

Nope but i’m smarter than you kitten because i went and joined the biggest guild in the game to make events like this. It’s not like i’m even in their guild, they have non rep guilds for almost all the servers’s players to come.

Yeah, I’m in one of the European Tequatl slayer guilds, no-one from mine is interested in the pavillion at all.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

You’re right, it’s perfectly reasonable to blame people who play the content A) the way they did last year and the way Anet built most of their content for 18 months C) introducing mega server before people became acclimated to their new philosophy!

Yep, it’s always the players fault, never ArenaNet’s for not actually communicating the change in direction or putting any effort into “retraining” the players in those changes or giving them tools to better organise themselves in the multi-lingual, multi-server mush that the megaserver system created.

MatthewMedina.5419:

Upscaling now does add significant complexity to China players, as their leveling curve and the points at which they unlock features and systems is completely different from the experience in NA/EU. The Labyrinthine Cliffs was absolutely designed with both territories in mind, and with those considerations, everything from the decorations to the content was geared towards providing a fun festival for everyone to enjoy.

But you up-scale them for the Queens Pavillion, right? Surely the same complexities exist there and are probably greater given that that is a purely combat zone and the Labyrinthine Cliffs is mostly about exploration?

MatthewMedina.5419:

The level drop on the map from 80 to 15 was definitely done so as to not throw our new players from China into the “deep end of the pool” just a few days after the game opened to all on 5/15.

What “deep end”? Up-scaling or down-scaling would add 0 complexity for them? Aren’t they up-scaled to 80 in WvW and the Queens Pavillion anyway?

Seems like a pointless change made because you I don’t believe your player base is capable of handling simple concepts.

Miroe.2054:

Really? Yet another whine thread 12 hours after the release? Masses of free T6 Mats…

You want a broken economy? Because thats how you get a broken economy…

How would T6 mats from here be any more or less “free” than T6 mats obtained anywhere else? How would it “break” the economy? The price of T6 mats has been steadily increasing over the time since the game launched, surely that’s more damaging to the games economy?

The day before they brought out the Queen’s Jubilee with its apparently game destroying “T6 farm” August 5th 2013 a Vial of Powerful Blood cost 30 s 84 c (29 s 49 c on buy orders) today the same Vial of Powerful Blood costs kitten 94 c (42 s 90 c on buy orders).

They’ve increased the demand for these through Ascended crafting but have nerfed the supply, surely that’s just imbalancing the economy further?

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24295

Surely, having people spend their time here rather than out in the world where they would be earning gold and getting mats would have a worse (inflationary) effect on the economy.

Anyway, for me the true problem here is that this event continues the trend towards meaner reward systems throughout the game, changing the mobs so they drop the same loot and reward the same XP as any other level 80 mob couldn’t destroy the games economy. If it could (in the same patch that they get rid of several champ farms and potential champ farms) then surely the economy is too fragile to save?

The complete lack of loot and experience is ridiculous and makes the whole thing largely pointless. Why should anyone waste their time here? I mean doing almost anything else is a better use of your time.

If you were looking for a way to remove zerging you finally got there!

mginn.4502:

Crystal Reid.2481:

It is not retroactive. You will have to defeat her again to unlock the title.

You’re fast. I was logging in to say it’s not retroactive.

EDIT: I can’t tell you how happy I am to see that they updated the AOE circles from that heard to see red to those highly visible orange circles from the marionette fight! Thank you ANet!!!

They have? By Ogden’s Hammer! What changes!

Thanks A net, I died more times to “hidden” AOE in there than I care to recall, time to get back in I think!

Kyrel.8942:

To me they released a lot of content temporary or not.

If you can’t do it any more then it’s of no use to people like the OP, which has always been one of the major issues people have had with temporary content.

Aeolus.3615:

Its not griefing, its called to interrupt enemy actions and objectives.

IF players dont want to be killed, Queensdale is open 24/7 i think.

Enemy actions? We’re talking about the PvE train in Queensdale, are you talking about EotM? Because that is a PvP zone and, yes I agree, any red nameplate is a fair target in PvP.

Donutdude.9582:

Pifil.5193:

So you ran this counter train with the specific purpose of disrupting the main train?

I’m not surprised you received positive comments, lots of people who play MMOs seem to like this kind of “griefing” especially when they have some kind of objection to whatever activity is being disrupted.

I didn’t do it intentionally to begin with. I was leveling an alt. character and I happened to run across the Oakheart. A few low-level characters were around so we all decided to kill it.

The train arrived, flamed us MASSIVELY for it then continued on their way. It was then that I decided to purposefully antagonise the main train because, at the end of the day, that kind of behaviour is something I won’t tolerate.

Yes, you can make the argument that I’m as bad as they are but at least I was simply playing the game for fun without any sense of entitlement. The train, on the other hand, believes that every train champion is THEIRS and theirs alone, something that really gets under my skin.

The train is not a single entity with some kind of hive-mind: most of the people in that train will feel mildly inconvenienced if they arrive and someone has already killed a champ but they just move on to the next one without comment, a couple of the people in the train may flame those who killed the champ yes, and that is wrong (although, in my experience, I’ve normally seen people try to get them to join the train rather than run against it) but you’re going out of your way to attempt to disrupt the game for everyone in that train, not just the flamers.

So yeah, I’d say you’re as bad as the flamers, probably worse in some ways because your actions are indiscriminate and affect the “innocent” as well as the “guilty”. Even more so if you come to a zone with the express purpose of creating a “counter train” regardless of whether or not anyone flames anyone.

But hey, either way it’s not a capital offence.

Donutdude.9582:

I remember during my Far Shiverpeaks days that I would run a “counter-train” to the main train. I received a lot of positive comments and even gold via mail!

So you ran this counter train with the specific purpose of disrupting the main train?

I’m not surprised you received positive comments, lots of people who play MMOs seem to like this kind of “griefing” especially when they have some kind of objection to whatever activity is being disrupted.

Vitus Dance.4509:

Isn’t that just asking to further dumb down an already dumbed down system?

How? It’s just asking for a way to “remember” different sets of traits so you can easily switch between them.

I fail to see how the option to remember or bookmark builds has anything at all to do with “dumbing down” anything.

Iluzija.1798:

Its not the train thats the issue its the people.

I agree but just to refine this a little, it’s some of the people. Most people running the train are polite and well mannered, we should be careful not to tar them all with the same brush just because one or two are behaving badly.

I personally think the train is fine, I sometimes hop on it if I have little time to do my dailies and need events and/or champs but I find it too dull to stay on it for long.

lordkrall.7241:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Here:

With the launch of the April 2014 Feature Pack, we’ll be activating the megaserver system on our level 1–15 maps, main cities, and the PvP lobby. We’ll monitor and test the system to verify that everything works correctly. Later in 2014, we’ll activate our megaserver technology across the entire world of Tyria.

Obviously, from the player’s experience with regard to precursor crafting, new legendaries, guild halls, “large projects cooking in background”, QoL features etc., “later in 2014” was not “in 1 or 2 weeks”, but rather “sometime in early 2015”.

I am fully aware of that post. And nowhere in that post do they say that they will SLOWLY roll out the mega-server. They only say later in 2014, and technically one day after the patch is later.
As far as we know the system worked well enough with the first zones they tried so they figured they might as well turned it on for all zones and working on tweaking it from there.

That’s undoubtedly what happened however I think a more measured approach would have been better.

I wouldn’t have imagined much of a problem with low pop zones anyway.They’re largely irrelevant here as they’re still low pop for the most part. High pop zones were always going to be where the issues would occur (the fact that guilds and even parties are being scattered when zoning onto heavily populated maps, for example).

These problems were flagged well in advance and will have to be addressed soon. Lets hope they can fix it (almost) as quickly as they deployed it.

KOPPER.1458:

Is it just me or does anyone else get a constant feeling like AN simply doesn’t have enough man power. I am not taking a shot at anyone here or trying to be overly negative but this is how many posts on a variety of topics comes across. On the forums, in interviews, at conventions, etc.

I don’t think you’re being negative there at all.

I agree that they don’t seem to have a lot of spare capacity at all and they appear to simply drop off the face of the earth whenever things get busy. I think this is partially due to the fact that they don’t have someone on the development dedicated to community interaction a liason between the company and the community at large (the mods and CMs here police the forums, herd people into feedback threads and gather feedback from those but themselves have no ability to address peoples concerns or comment on anything, they’re just not involved in the design/development side of the business).

Now, undoubtedly they have been busy since the feature patch getting things ready for China and so on but that does little to change the appearance that they have pushed this patch and simply left it while they move on to the next thing. The fact that they are willing to do that doesn’t indicate that the issues that this patch has introduced will be fixed any time soon.

This is my main issue with ArenaNet’s communication (or lack of it) people are left with no idea if the problems that they consider to be major will ever be addressed by ArenaNet.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-rollout-is-complete-2/

The Megaserver Rollout is Complete!
by The Guild Wars 2 Team on April 25, 2014

We’re pleased to announce that now all PvE maps and the Heart of the Mists have been moved over to megaserver technology!

Although we’re excited that you have more players than ever to explore the open world of Guild Wars 2 with, our work is not yet complete. Our megaserver team will continue to monitor the performance of the technology on live and evaluate your feedback. We will continue to tweak and update the way the system works until it is providing even better megaservice!

Thanks, and we’ll see you all (literally) in game!

There you go, not exactly satisfying IMO (I’d have preferred if they listed the areas that they were planning on tweaking) but they’ve said something at least.

epborden.7492:

Which just goes to show how broken and backwards this game really is. Yeah! Let’s let our mage class use a two-handed sword that is probably three times as heavy as they are! That is so awesome even though it doesn’t make any sense what so ever!

Those two-handed swords weigh between 4 and 6 pounds.

timmyf.1490:

Please don’t be upset by this, but I’d like to pick at what you said because I think it’s important.

Pifil.5193:

In my case I tried using the current megaserver system to do a few bosses, half simply didn’t spawn

Bugged events can be fixed. This is not evidence that Megaserver is a bad idea or unworkable. Plenty of events bugged before Megaserver. This isn’t even a new thing.

Pifil.5193:

the other half died so quickly in a hail of fire that it felt pointless, 10-15 mins prep for the Fire Elemental then it died in 30 seconds.

World Boss event scaling has always been a mess. My server routinely had tons of people in these events and all the bosses melted like this. This isn’t a problem caused by Megaserver, it’s existed for awhile.

World Boss event scaling can be fixed even if Megaserver remains.

Pifil.5193:

Given that and the fact that we can no longer use gw2stuff to let us know when a boss or temple is up so I’m operating in the kind of informational limbo that existed when the game first launched prompted me to pretty much give up on PVE for now while I try sPVP for a while.

You don’t need gw2stuff. The boss schedule is posted. I agree that Temples are more difficult.

I like sPvP, but don’t expect to get the love and attention of devs over there either…

Pifil.5193:

If/when they start fixing the megaservers I’ll give it another go but they really need to get a move on. Rolling “broken” software out that removes a bunch of features that people are used to and just leaving it there is never a good idea.

But it’s not broken. You just don’t like it.

Don’t worry, I’m not upset about any of this.

But it is broken. For example, the events worked fine before they were changed for the synchronised event schedule introduced for the mega-server. The bosses spawned when they should, now they don’t. So they broke those world boss events when they made the changes for the megaservers. Sure there were always broken events before but the point is that they broke these particular events as a side effect of implementing the megaserver system. The timeline was: events are fine, megaserver, events don’t work.

Similarly the world boss scaling was fine on my server before this. Now they’ve “broken” that scaling too by ensuring that there’s a huge number of players at them. Again a change that came about with the megaserver.

I needed gw2stuff for the events and the temples but they broke their APIs when they added the megaservers and made the associated changes to the world bosses so they no longer work. And yes the boss events are now listed on their website (some don’t work all of the time, now) but the temples are a complete mystery.

Sure, these can all be “fixed” in some way or another but how long will that take? ArenaNet don’t have a great track record in following up on these things and chances are that a lot of the feature pack team has already been reassigned to new teams for the upcoming season 2 of the Living Story.

timmyf.1490:

If there’s a statement you can make about how “all” players feel (and I don’t believe you can), I’d say it’s this:

EU players hate it. NA players like it.

That’s the reason I’d guess a ton of you keep saying that literally everybody hates it (on EU). When I ask around, responses are moderately positive (I am in NA).

I agree with you that these kind of generalisations are always incorrect but it’s possible that a lot of the people who truly dislike it have just stopped playing or just stopped playing PVE or simply can’t be bothered responding.

In my case I tried using the current megaserver system to do a few bosses, half simply didn’t spawn, the other half died so quickly in a hail of fire that it felt pointless, 10-15 mins prep for the Fire Elemental then it died in 30 seconds. Given that and the fact that we can no longer use gw2stuff to let us know when a boss or temple is up so I’m operating in the kind of informational limbo that existed when the game first launched prompted me to pretty much give up on PVE for now while I try sPVP for a while.

If/when they start fixing the megaservers I’ll give it another go but they really need to get a move on. Rolling “broken” software out that removes a bunch of features that people are used to and just leaving it there is never a good idea.

Gwenryth.9450:

Ramon isn’t Dev, he’s German Community Manager
His post in few words for non German speakers (sorry for bad english, I’m no native speaker). Maybe later there will be an official english post.

He says A-Net is reading our feedback and they work on the Megaserver.

1. Chatfilter is only a temporary solution.
2. They consider feedback from large guilds and Server organisations, they don’t want to make organisation of big events impossible, but dont have a solution at this time.
3. They are looking what can be done for RP community, some changes in algorithm were done especially in towns, but isn’t finish yet.
4. Megaserver system wasn’t made to save Server costs, it only redistributes serverloads.
5. They’ll rework schedules for world bosses, especially Karka Queen, Tequatl and Worm, for getting a better time frame for EU.
6. They are watching the max. number of people on one map and will make adjustments if necessary.
7. Devs are working active to improve the Megaserver, and watch our feedback, so keep on posting, especially EU feedback because of the different languages problems. Keep on posting, we are listening.

It’s really, really great to read this and I truly hope we see fixes for these problems sooner rather than later, however I have to wonder why any company (MMO or otherwise) would knowingly introduce and roll out “broken” solutions to their servers. These problems were highlighted before the patch when they (and other problems introduced by the patch) should have been fixed before these changes hit the live servers. Even if (especially if) that means either delaying the entire patch or delaying certain features from it.

Other people have called for a public test realm and I really think this shows the benefits one could bring; all these problems that were apparently missed by ArenaNet would have been caught and highlighted before the changes went live. Also the simple knowledge that features I really wanted were on the test server in other games was enough for me. Sure it’d be a while before they arrive but now at least know they’re coming!

So how are you going to get, for example, the Superior Rune of Melandru at all now? Before the patch you could use a transmutation crystal to “merge” the gear with your armour or to “merge” it with something that was salvageable. Now you can’t get those runes out without using an upgrade extractor?

Allowing any gear to be salvaged for the runes/sigils alone sounds like a good idea.

They have asked for feedback, but it seems to be a one-way street. There are far too many people on the forums that are intent on dismissing others as white-knights or over-entitled whiners in order to make their own positions seem stronger. If someone enjoys something then let them it’s not your job to stop them, if they want to complain then let them it’s not your job to stop them.

Some people are having serious issues because of the features implemented in the patch. ArenaNet’s refusal to comment on those issues makes some of them feel as if they’re being ignored.

If ArenaNet were to open a frank exchange then most people would accept what comes of that (looking at Josh and John Smith’s contributions here). Saying nothing does nothing except further disenfranchise your customers.

I’d love to see ArenaNet actually respond to ANY of the concerns being raised in this thread or any of the other ones. Unless they have the actual courtesy to respond to us so that we can have an actual conversation about this we may as well not bother posting anything at all. Before someone from the community team posts to say that they’re “gathering feedback to give to the developers” that’s not enough. ArenaNet actively needs to engage with us, had they done so before this was implemented then then a lot of this feedback could have been taken into account during the design phase and fixed before it becomes a problem for your customers.

Now you’ve given us a messy broken pile of servers that may be cheaper for you guys but has stripped a lot of functionality for us the players.

From what I’ve read here about people from guilds and parties being scattered between the maps and the system globbing people together regardless of language used the megaserver sorting isn’t working correctly (what is there sounds a lot like the old overflow system). From the moment ArenaNet tried to tell us that this system would actually increase the chance of playing with people from your server (when you had close on a 100% chance of getting into the same instance of a map as the other people from your server because the vast majority of zones didn’t create overflows) I knew all this was based on PR pseudo logic rather than real logic.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Update-on-the-MegaServer-roll-out-plan/page/4#post3898312

What happened to the previous plans to roll it out so that “the behavior on level 1 to 15 maps won’t change until we’ve seen the positive confirmation from the community as well as from our metrics that MegaServer is working as expected on lower population maps”? Its been less a day since the patch launched and I’ve not seen much positive confirmation from the community yet but I’ve seen quite a lot of irritation and negative feedback over it though so I’m wondering where did you gather that feedback? Is a day truly enough to gather all this information?

Their assurances that this would work better than what we had before are proving false so I have to say that this whole thing smells of an attempt to rush it into place so that people simply have to get used to it.

That kind of tactic stinks up a place.

Josh Davis.6015:

We have A LOT of new players trying PvP out right now, and the best thing we can do as a community is to help guide and teach them. This is our community – let’s make the best of it.

Thanks Grouch, I’ve been playing since launch but have only played a single sPVP match because it’s fairly impenetrable and I don’t like the idea of being “farmed” by experienced PVPers, this guide should hopefully reduce the “farm” time as I dip my toe.

Can we sticky these feedback threads for now? There are a lot of them after this patch and people are putting their feedback into the one they see rather than into more appropriate ones that just happen to have fallen onto page two.

Elrey.5472:

Today i went to The gates of Arah. As a new, there were about 20-30 players around, when the usual would be 3-4 players. The people was doing the events, the temples, etc…

But the problem is…?
- 3 players speaking in german
- 2 speaking in french
- 15 speaking in spanish
- 10 speaking in english

And then eventually someone asked: What server is this? And 5 different server names appeared into the chat…

I thought the megaserver system was only in the PVP lobby now? Has it been rolled out to other areas already? If so then they haven’t given us a lot of time to gather feedback.

D best.3547:

RoyalPredator.9163:

I would like to see the SKIN’s NAMES clearly. As was before!
For example, “Azureflame” instead of “Zojja’s Greatbow of Fail”
Guess I’m not alone with this… Please support me! w/+1

I’m sorry to say this is literally impossible the name of the original item must be kept here is an example why. In PvP there is a skin which shares the same as the precursor “The Hunter” the only ways to get this skin was through PvP before or by owning the precursor. If the name of my rifle was to change back to the name of the skin I would have a precursor which I never had.

I know someone has already cleard this up but if what you were saying was true then changing the skin would change the stats too.

The name is purely for display purposes. The underlying weapon/armour’s identity (a unique ID number) is maintained in the databases, so regardless of what’s displayed (and the skin being shown) the game knows it’s really a “Berserkers Pearl Rifle” (with an ID of X) with the skin from “The Hunter” (with an ID of Y) and not actually “The Hunter” itself.

Just to elaborate on what others have said: the “mega-bosses” are pretty much inaccessible to working Irish, UK and (I believe) Portuguese players during the week. For us the “mega-boss” times fall at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 11:30, 12:30, 13:30, 17:00, 18:00 and 19:00 (that’s local time, not CET).

As a working man who (like most workers now, I’d imagine) commutes the only real option there is 19:00 and even that is a stretch. This seems like it might push away a lot of working players.

A fairer way (fairer for everyone, not just people who can consistently make the current times) to do this would be to have more spawn windows that “rotate” and change from day to day.

A given boss needs to spawn every 5 hours or that each boss spawns 4 times per day at predictable, but different, times from day to day. So with this system the spawns for every boss will be one hour later the next day so if a boss spawns at 5 pm today it will spawn at 6 pm the day after and 7 pm the day after that. Every 6 days it will “reset” back to the original time. For example, the 5-9pm 5-hour spawn windows would look like this:

              Boss1   Boss2   Boss3       "Free"   
Day 1   5 pm   6 pm   7 pm   8 pm 9 pm 
Day 2   6 pm   7 pm   8 pm   9 pm 5 pm 
Day 3   7 pm   8 pm   9 pm   5 pm 6 pm
Day 4   8 pm   9 pm   5 pm   6 pm 7 pm
Day 5   9 pm   5 pm   6 pm   7 pm 8 pm
Day 6   5 pm   6 pm   7 pm   8 pm 9 pm

Note: in this system the bosses spawn every 5 hours from these times. So when Boss 1 spawns at 5 pm it will later spawn at 10 pm, 3 am, 8 am, 1 pm, 6 pm and so on.

As there are three bosses (at the moment, this also gives a couple of free slots for future bosses) and 5 “slots” in this system 2 hours out of every 5 there will be no mega bosses spawning, which leaves about 8 or so hours a day without any mega-bosses spawning, in the current system there are 15 hours when no mega-bosses spawn.

Edit: oh and the other, “smaller” bosses should continue to spawn while the mega-bosses do, preferably with a similar rotating timetable so that you’re not facing the same bosses at the same time of day constantly. Not everyone will want to or be able to do these fights so providing people with alternatives is not a bad idea.

Hoping that the players will fix this is a mistake I think, especially as those guilds spawning Teq etc won’t want to advertise the fact that they’re doing so until after their members get into the zone and people trying to join them could be facing a struggle to get into the same map instance.

The problem with the schedule should never have been created by them. I thought they had learned valuable lessons about not using such restrictive timetables from the karka event but apparently not.

synk.8762:

And here we are. Almost a week after the announcement and 20 pages later, we’ve had one weak response from a developer regarding our concerns.

I won’t go the “I’m quitting, you can have my stuff” route, but I’m definitely going to be spending more of my time (and money) elsewhere for a while. I’ve always supported Anet and their business model, but if the sad marketing machine that they’ve become can’t address 20 pages of players concerns in a direct and forward manner, I don’t feel the need to spend any more money with them. Quid pro quo.

I’m right there with you. I like quite a lot of the changes coming with the feature pack and was quite excited with the PvP changes, wardrobe and so on but the limitations and restrictions being introduced alongside the megaserver concept (the event scheduling and lack of any visibility into temple statuses and so on) has soured the whole patch for me.

It’s pretty obvious that nothing we ever could say would have stopped this but the usual ArenaNet “ignore them until they stop talking” tactic doesn’t endear me to them.

Well, according to the livestream the schedule is going live for all bosses on the 15th, not just those on megaserver maps, we may as well make sure you get one last look at those bosses we’ll never see again before that.

You’re not alone in that belief Xenesis and they have stated that it’s not going to be rolled out in the cities to begin with but they do still intend to roll it out in the cities.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Update-on-the-MegaServer-roll-out-plan/first

If they had presented this megaserver idea during development or design then our feedback might have had a place in shaping it. As it is they’ve told us about it less than a fortnight before it releases so it’s happening regardless of what anyone thinks or says.

ArenaNet has presented us with a fait accompli and our feedback and questions go ignored and unanswered.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dwarf

The dwarves as a race have sacrificed themselves to fight the minions of Primordus to delay its return. They’ve been transformed physically into living stone and become mentally linked. I hope that a side effect of us killing Primordus will be freeing the dwarves from their bond and their return to the world (as playable characters).

Sakri.7234:

I meant that I see no problems that aren’t hugely compensated by the benefits of this change.

Oddly enough, I can’t see enough benefits of this change to compensate for the problems. Strict schedule for world bosses including making some of them all but impossible for working players to do them in a lot of timezones. There is a loss of transparency over the world status that this merge will bring; the fact that spontaneous groups that form for the Orr temples, for example, will lose one another if they change maps because the game will sort people into other instances. Larger guilds may end up scattering as they try to zone into certain maps, trying to find a server that can hold everyone may prove painful. They haven’t addressed any of these concerns yet.

The sole benefit is that more people will be around in each map. That’s a mixed blessing, especially while levelling, sure there’s people to play with but you will come across fewer events you can start off yourself (including fewer temple fights) and there will be fewer mobs in the world with less bonus XP for killing them. I remember being quite glad when the starter/levelling zones calmed down a bit; it made getting through them on alts a lot easier and more “profitable” from a levelling standpoint (as in more XP and more karma).

On non-scheduled events, they need to make sure that the megaservers are accessible and interrogate-able in the API and that we can choose any megaserver instance we want (space allowing). If you don’t specify one then the game selects whichever one it thinks is best but we can override that if we want.

That would alleviate a lot of concerns. If I look on gw2stuff.com for my server right now I can see that the mega destroyer is about to spawn, and that someone is pushing Balthazar so I know I can head to either of those events and lend a hand, not being able to do that is a huge step back.

digiowl.9620:

2. create a special condition for large mobs that will trigger when damaging conditions hit certain tresholds, wiping that condition and doing solid damage to the mob. We can see some inkling of this in the recent LA boss fights, where damage goes up with conditions at one stage and down in another.

I really like that idea #2, it seems simple and workable.

DiogoSilva.7089:

eleshazar.6902:

If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

Like how it already happens in the current system?

It’ll be different, now the map fills and an overflow is generated, so a large guild can start to taxi into it and get a lot of their people into it removing them from the base map. Under the new system it seems that people will be split up amongst the existing maps so your guild members will be scattered without the ability to gather everyone in one map. Please note this is often dismissed by people as elitism or a desire to “kick out the noobs” because you’re laying claim to a map and for some people it is but it often comes simply from a desire to play together with your guild.

DiogoSilva.7089:

EDIT: At least as the path of some slight compromise can you leave cities alone so that we still have one place where I server community isn’t destroyed?

I’ve been playing GW2 since beta, and so far, this concept of “Server community” has been nothing but a myth. What server community? Where is it? I’ve never seen such a thing in almost two years of playing this game, and the only people I occasionally meet often are guild members and friends… which is not always easy to do because of the existence of servers in the first place.

And the whole RP issue can be fixed by Anet dedicated an server to RP for each region. Which I hope they do.

I’ve seen quite a strong sense of community amongst some of the WvWers on my server. There’s a handful that I recognise again and again but that should stay the same.

That’s it though, there is no PvE server community that I’ve seen either. For example, the LS results in overflows all the time so you don’t even know where the people are from, dungeons are cross realm already so same thing there. When leveling you see random leveling characters so no identity there either.

pulseunit.8296:

This feels a bit like tearing down St Paul’s Cathedral and replacing with a Christian Processing Mega-Facility.

Sure you get to process a lot more Christians, a lot more efficiently but you can’t quantify what you have lost. So it’s impossible to argue against, it happens, we all deal with it and two years later no-one can remember what it was like before.

Stupid progress.

I love that analogy!

I just realised, that as the times are in CET the 19:00 Tequatl option is also pretty much off the table for working Irish and UK players. For Ireland and the UK the mega boss times fall at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 11:30, 12:30, 13:30, 17:00, 18:00 and 19:00 (that’s in IST/BST not CET).

As a working man who (like most workers now, I’d imagine) commutes the only real option there is 19:00 and even that is a stretch. This seems like it might push away a lot of working players.

The fair way to do this would be to have more of these windows that “rotate” from different times. A given boss needs to spawn every 5 hours or that each boss spawns 4 times per day at predictable but different times from day to day.

This means that about 1 in every 5 days you won’t get the boss at all during the 4 or so hours that constitute “peak” times in whatever time-zone you’re in but every one will have days where the bosses spawn during their “peak” times.

Swoo.5079:

Instead of having 51 Brisban Wildlands you will end up with 2 (1 US and 1 EU) and the 1-2 players of each Brisban Wildlands will become 25-50 players in each copy of it.
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It seems to me the really big PvE servers will be able to keep their “own” version of most maps permanently on and the small-medium servers will end coupled with them.

It seems that in the end we will have something very close to GW1 districts but without any name or the ability to travel there unless you have a friend in those maps.

I think you’re right and it largely depends on how and when the system decides to close a map… if, for example, in the wee small hours of the night the last player leaves a map does it get closed immediately? Or is there some grace period where they keep the map just in case someone new logs in, or the last player is switching characters because he wants to try that newly created event on a different character, for example?

If it is destroyed then the next time a player goes to that map he’ll get put into some other version of the map where other people are already playing, then all his server and guild mates will be shunted into the same map until it fills up enough that a new version is created, but now half your server mates are in the old, full map, the other half are in the new map.

Although it’s probably unlikely that the really busy maps will be completely empty at any point I’m looking forward to see how they handle these kind of situations: from a software point of view, it’s a very interesting problem, I’m very curious to see how well they do.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On the schedule:

• It is not written in stone. We will adjust it as necessary.
• There’s lots of ways to go about this, but the current thinking is that it would be more convenient to plan for specific daily times rather than have a “sliding” rotation. We felt this was particularly necessary for larger events like the Triple Wurm and Tequatl.
• Although the old system had certain advantages, it had some major disadvantages as well:
  • Although non-scheduled events are more dynamic, you have a low chance of encountering events with long cooldown periods. Although it was originally thought that big events would be happenstance and rare opportunities that players would stumble on and become immersed in, we found that many players enjoy this type of content as a mainstay of their GW2 experience. When they can’t access that content regularly, we have a problem.
  • On the other hand, you may be aware of the external event tracking sites and have been using them play on regularly basis. This is a good approach in concept, but there’s some major pitfalls if you miss an opportunity to play because of a new build or encounter an overflow server.
• The intent of the schedule is to:
  • consistently provide access to large scale content for players who want to play it
  • deliver that content in such a way that players can plan and organize to prepare for it
  • help ensure that there are always enough participants in the content
  • help ensure that there is always enough server capacity to for all of the participants regardless of overflows, megaservers, etc
• There are still and will always be a large number of meta-events and bosses that are not on the schedule.

At some point, we would also like to introduce a messaging system in-game so that it’s always clear what world event content you participate in without having to utilize a resource outside of the game. I have no guarantee or ETA of when we might actually see this though.

Hi Anthony,

I appreciate what you’re saying however I simply can’t plan to be at home for the Karka Queen Monday to Friday, it’s just not possible, at 9 and 6 I’ll be at or commuting to or from work and because of the whole work thing I won’t be making the one in the middle of the night.

If you changed the order they spawn in from day to day like I suggested in my other post in this thread then it’d be possible to at least try her every now and then.

Day 1: Karka Queen → Tequatl → Evolved Jungle Wurm
Day 2: Tequatl → Evolved Jungle Wurm → Karka Queen
Day 3: Evolved Jungle Wurm → Karka Queen → Tequatl

The weekends aren’t much better.

Similarly why spawn only one boss at a time? It’s not like there’ll be a shortage of people to play with now, why have everyone playing on, for example, 6 Fire Elemental maps when you could have 2 Fire Elemental maps, 2 Svanir Shaman maps and (maybe) 2 Dredge Commissar maps attempts? Surely the choice is worth it.

If you doubled or tripled the number of bosses that spawned at a time it’d be more convenient for people and you would be able to spawn all the world bosses on timers. Maybe off peak you can drop the number of bosses that spawn at a time to better suit the server numbers.

Lankybrit.4598:

Because mining the ore on one character and then immediately switching to another character to mine the exact same ore is an exploit. Plain and simple. It doesn’t make sense logically, or RP wise or anything. Randomizing makes much more sense. It’s just that people are upset they can’t gather in the same places over and over.

All IMHO of course.

I disagree that it was an exploit. The game was deliberately designed to work that way: if it was an exploit then they could easily have changed the nodes from once per character per day to once per account per day to prevent it.

It’s largely moot as if I mine the nodes in a map then change to a different character and waypoint into the same map then their sorting algorithm will probably sort me straight back into the same instance of that map as I was on so I can still mine the same nodes on different characters.

Also, because it’s randomised for each map with some effort you will be able to get to the different versions of the maps and harvest the nodes on each and every map there is (the LFG tool will help there) once per day. That is far more of an “exploit” than the old system was.