Fearmongering of that nature just gives supporters to this system more traction. Their “goal” has nothing to do with actively hurting RPers. It simply has nothing to do with RPers at all. Which is part of the problem, that we’re being ignored among other subsets of players. The whole point of this thread was to bring light to the fact that we’re not being accounted for with this system. Please don’t turn it in to more fear mongering, lest I have to reply to another person attempting to make their case off of the most extreme posters here.
So we’re almost universally confirming that Megaservers are functioning as glorified overflows right now. People aren’t getting matched together by the supposed metrics the system is using, or more likely: the VERY FIRST server being made with the system is using those metrics, but subsequent servers are basically just dumping grounds. And yet they’re just pushing forward to make the whole game like this when it’s not even working properly on one map yet.
(And “deleting” Anvil Rock by merging it is not a very humble suggestion at all. “Low population servers shouldn’t exist!” I fail to see the logic of that vs the megaserver, which at least lets old, smaller communities to continue to exist , while not really destroying your own-no, me existing along with you on your cities won’t destroy your RP experience.)
Our communities are destroyed because we exist among you, not because you exist among us. If the lower population servers were filtered into the higher population servers, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the higher population servers are broken up and scattered into a random grab bag of players.
I don’t understand why we still have to explain to you what it means to have your communities unable to interact with each other because the game has split them unwillingly across servers. This doesn’t even apply the RPers exclusively. Larger guilds can’t possibly filter themselves to a single map because each map fills up evenly. At least with the old overflow system there would always be a low population map to go to, but now that’s not the case and there’s no way to have everyone together. Hell, last night it was hard enough just getting 10 of us on the same server.
Also, “Low population servers shouldn’t exist!” IS the motto of megaservers. Your server doesn’t exist anymore. If it seems to you like more of you stuck together in this glorified overflow, it’s because there was less of you to scatter in the first place.
I understand what hurts you, but you don’t understand what hurts everybody else. Or at least won’t acknowledge it. I know what your perceived problem is. But you don’t care about other people’s problems , and replying angrily does nothing for your case.
AR exists, as lowly as they may be. It’s insulting that you chose to reply in that manner to state your case.
And larger guilds shouldn’t have been able to sequester maps all to themselves in the first place. It was something that happened out of perceived necessity as well (no offense intended to them, and as usual feel free to disagree.)
It’s a server identity crisis more than a real problem. You think they “dissoluted” TC by virtue of the megaserver existing. And thus, that they “don’t care” about RPers. Which is a lie, and insulting to them quite frankly. Then they don’t also don’t care about “hardcore guilds” either, that arrange to do the mega events, and which are not always RPers. Does ANet hate/ignore random groups of players or love GW2? Hope my point is clear.
I never said that they “hated” anyone. They don’t care IS accurate. They’re ignoring the needs of specific communities in order to implement a system they perceive is a benefit to all. The current implementation of that system is NOT a benefit to all, because there are factors that are not being taken into account in order to accommodate different subsets of their playerbase. The fact that ArenaNet’s replies to both this thread and threads involving mega-guilds have been entirely dismissive, and that no further feedback has been given despite the concerns demonstrated in these threads have been proven to be accurate upon yesterdays release, proves that ArenaNet is in fact ignoring those concerns. The fact that they’ve released an untested system like this in public play at all is also proof that they intend to move forward with their plans regardless of player response. Other developers don’t do that. Other developers use things like beta servers and public test realms in order to test high end features before subjecting their player base to them. ArenaNet chooses not to. They have demonstrated a clear lack of concern for issues brought up by their own playerbase. And the proof of this is in their lack of response during the entire time between the announcement and release of the megaserver. The argument that they are in fact taking our concerns into account has no justifiable grounds to stand on, as ArenaNet has done nothing on their end to prove that.
And you keep referring to me insulting your server. I said AR doesn’t exist, in the sense that the megaservers have merged it in the same way that they merged our servers. You don’t exist any more than we do at this point, and if you don’t see your community being split, it was likely small enough that it didn’t get fractured multiple times like larger servers. You admitted yourself that your sever was low population, so what about that statement is insulting? A smaller population is going to get fragmented less times than a larger population. The game isn’t properly using the metrics that it’s supposed to be using to place people by server, so bigger servers are just going to get split as often as there are gaps in peak log-in times.
I wouldn’t be pushing to remove Megaservers from cities if they actually worked. If they were filtering properly based on server priority, if they kept a portion of the player count locked specifically to allow more people from the server to get in (which it should be doing, that’s the only real way to actually filter based on server), if it properly filtered by guild, if there was a reasonable way for guilds to even get on the same server together (let them essentially form another overflow map? One that starts to populate with random people AFTER alloting slots for the guild?), if there was the type of filtering metric we’ve been asking for (An RP filter, since apparently there’s already filters for dungeon running/world events/etc). Hell, if even ONE of those things was present it might be okay to wait it out. But none of those are functioning how they should be. So we’re forced to wait out a broken system that’s been added to the kittening town hubs of all things, and hope that it gets fixed.
Remove the Megaserver from towns NOW so that you can fix it and add it back in LATER. Don’t just leave it in and let people suffer while you figure your kitten out.
(And “deleting” Anvil Rock by merging it is not a very humble suggestion at all. “Low population servers shouldn’t exist!” I fail to see the logic of that vs the megaserver, which at least lets old, smaller communities to continue to exist , while not really destroying your own-no, me existing along with you on your cities won’t destroy your RP experience.)
Our communities are destroyed because we exist among you, not because you exist among us. If the lower population servers were filtered into the higher population servers, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the higher population servers are broken up and scattered into a random grab bag of players.
I don’t understand why we still have to explain to you what it means to have your communities unable to interact with each other because the game has split them unwillingly across servers. This doesn’t even apply the RPers exclusively. Larger guilds can’t possibly filter themselves to a single map because each map fills up evenly. At least with the old overflow system there would always be a low population map to go to, but now that’s not the case and there’s no way to have everyone together. Hell, last night it was hard enough just getting 10 of us on the same server.
Also, “Low population servers shouldn’t exist!” IS the motto of megaservers. Your server doesn’t exist anymore. If it seems to you like more of you stuck together in this glorified overflow, it’s because there was less of you to scatter in the first place.
(edited by VoiceOfUnreason.5976)
I am not a RPer myself, and havent really read this huge thread, but I do understand and agree with the problems that are being faced. With this being said, I dont now if my idea has been mentioned before, due to not reading this HUGE thread on the subject.
My idea: it’s really simple too, very easy to implement. Give RPer’s their own chat color, a special RP chat that can be seen or not seen across the whole wide game, and I mean that one specific chat option is linked to all servers/worlds. This one thing would most likely make RPing even more fun than it ever was before, would it not?
It is like I just read someone saying in another thread that the megaserver is amazing due to that dead cities are now teaming with life, making our world feel so much more alive than it ever was before. Once this is added game wide, it will be like nothing before. So please Anet do something to not ruin it fora large part of that worldand comletely ruin what it is that your are trying to do.
Remember…one simple chat window fix, and this whole problem can be a forgotten nightmare.
We have said so many times that the issue has nothing to do with flooded chat. That isn’t even remotely going to solve any of the problems we’re facing.
The megaservers effectively killed any desire I had to even look at PVE. I would say maybe I’ll keep doing WvW, but that’s gotten pretty dull for me. Chances are I’ll just log on for scheduled guild RP (since any other RP is out the window now) until we collectively decide to leave for another game.
It’s a lovely post. Iterating one of the things we’ve been asking for since the start of the thread, but lovely nonetheless. It’s unfortunate that our most mature and level headed responses end up taking on an undertone that sounds like you’re begging someone who’s putting a gun to your head not to pull the trigger.
And for the record, solo RPers from various non-RP servers: Whether by guesting or through this new megaserver system, you are benefiting from the pre-existence of RP communities. These communities were built up because there were centralized areas for RPers to gather. While anyone can just randomly one-off RP, in order to have a real constant flow of overarching stories and multi-guild events, a strong thriving community is required. These communities were built on those RP servers. You all can RP alone without that stuff, you’ve made that point very clear. These communities however, can’t. They can’t exist if they’re unable to even keep themselves together. You all would benefit greatly from the continuation of these communities, as they would create many more opportunities for even solo RPers to participate in grander events. The implementation of these megaservers is a severe block to any attempt to create such events, which means it’s a detriment to our way of life, so to speak. It’s odd that you keep telling us to think of your needs when you seem to be dismissively waving off our own.
It’s bad enough coming from TC and being fractured among hordes on non-RPers constantly harassing any attempts to RP in the cities. I didn’t even realize EU servers would be clumped together regardless of language. I’m sorry to those effected, but that’s pathetic on an almost hilarious level. Like… really ArenaNet? You didn’t even think to account for language barriers? Holy kitten. What the absolute kitten were you all thinking?
It still baffles me why you thought the cities were the areas that needed this system the most. There is no gameplay benefit to having megaservers in the cities. The only thing it does is give new players the illusion that the maps (and game itself) are more populated than they really are. But there’s no real benefit to players there. It just hurts a subset of players while providing no tangible gameplay benefits to others. So… can you just remove the system from cities? Please? Like, before your RP community walks away from the game? It’s going to have to be sometime soon. After the fiasco that was last night, I don’t see how anything but complete removal of the system from cities would be acceptable at this point.
This is what they were “thinking”: they are implementing it steps at a time. Needlessly negative remarks won’t yield the results you desire. Give feedback, just don’t hate.
And I don’t want them to remove it from the cities, and am a roleplayer. If anything, they should improve the way the filtering works. Seeing cities alive is great for the game-it only doesn’t affect you and your people because YOU never had that problem before (empty cities). And I LOVE RPng and RPers-hating on the developers does NOTHING at all for your purposes, and actually makes RPers look bad and close-minded (truly no offense intended, for you may not be close-minded in real life and may just be overreacting.)
So it good for me or my people because we were in higher population servers that saw our cities full anyway. So… why were the megaservers added to our servers to begin with? You know what also helps to repopulate low-pop servers? A server merge. The kind of thing other MMOs have done successfully in the past. I keep seeing solo RPers from random servers arguing about how the Megaserver was good for them, but it’s at the expense of a much larger population. Why couldn’t your needs have been met with a server merge, that wouldn’t actively break apart existing communities from servers that did not need this change?
I’m “overreacting” because I started this thread on the day of the announcement of this system, detailing out the problems that would arise from its implementation. I was correct on every account. The one dev post here basically brushed us off and told us everything would be fine. It wasn’t. Even his suggestion didn’t work. We were told that they were going to change plans on how they rolled out megaservers, and that they would focus first on HotM and low pop zones. They lied. They added it straight into capital cities, which was the #1 concern from roleplayers. What possible reason should I have to trust them? I gave them time to come up with some kind of response and they didn’t. I gave them time to create a better implementation and they didn’t. I believed that they would do the right thing and roll out the system gradually (because they don’t have proper public test realms) but they didn’t. Trust and respect need to be earned, and they’ve done everything in their power to break what little faith many of us from this thread were willing to give them.
The problem has nothing to do with trying to separate our chat from trolls. The fact that most RPers are now split across multiple instances of the map is far more pressing. Not only are trolls in greater abundance, but there’s far less people to even RP with.
Give it a few days and see what happens. TCRP is a community guild trying to gather up rpers, so if things dont get better you can always rp in guild chat. There might be a limit to the number of people in the guild, but if the meta guilds work together or merge they could salvage the RP somewhat until we see what happens next.
In case you don’t know what that type of guild is. It’s simply a guild who’s only purpose is to connect every possible rper to another. You can always keep your main active guilds. You’ll just have one on the side with many other rpers you can talk to without having to find them by chance. So if you RP it’s good to be in one. Plus you can invite others looking for it too.
There comes a point though that it’s just not worth the effort. If you’re in a pretty tight-knit guild, then it’s very likely you’ve already discussed other MMOs that you’d like to try out as a guild (even before this megaserver nonsense). At this point, it’s increasingly more appealing to simply move to a new game that already has “features” (and I use that term loosely, it’s more like the basic functionality of an MMO) that lets us stay together and meet similar people, rather than trying to jump through hoops and use workarounds just to get your guild in one place, not even mentioning finding other RPers.
Also, to any moderators currently reading these threads:
You’re clearly going to have a busy day closing a lot of threads in order to “consolidate feedback.” Just realize that there are very large issues present that really warrant their own individual attention. RPers are one issue, addressed in this thread. The Language Barrier problems on the EU side I would argue is a totally separate issue that NEEDS to be addressed immediately (regardless of what you all intend to do about RPers). Seriously, that needs to be high on your list to find a solution for those people, because that’s gamebreaking for everyone over there. The problems with boss events and large multi-server guilds is its own problem too. It’s not going to help anyone to lump everything into a single thread, as that’s just going to get individual issues overlooked.
It’s bad enough coming from TC and being fractured among hordes on non-RPers constantly harassing any attempts to RP in the cities. I didn’t even realize EU servers would be clumped together regardless of language. I’m sorry to those effected, but that’s pathetic on an almost hilarious level. Like… really ArenaNet? You didn’t even think to account for language barriers? Holy kitten. What the absolute kitten were you all thinking?
It still baffles me why you thought the cities were the areas that needed this system the most. There is no gameplay benefit to having megaservers in the cities. The only thing it does is give new players the illusion that the maps (and game itself) are more populated than they really are. But there’s no real benefit to players there. It just hurts a subset of players while providing no tangible gameplay benefits to others. So… can you just remove the system from cities? Please? Like, before your RP community walks away from the game? It’s going to have to be sometime soon. After the fiasco that was last night, I don’t see how anything but complete removal of the system from cities would be acceptable at this point.
They lied, it’s in the cities right now.
Of course I agree, since none of the suggestions from RPers were actually taken into consideration from the devs, at the very least they could disable megaservers for cities until they figure something out.
Guild Up.™ didn’t work at all Colin. So what are we supposed to do now? kitten it, right? Every single fear not only justified, but actually far worse than I thought it would be.
Are you sure you guys actually have metrics determining ANYTHING? Are you sure this isn’t just straight up overflow? Because now I don’t see any TCers at all, my guild is entirely on a different server, and the only person that I recognize is the one that I was partied with on entering the city.
It seems to me, if a map happens to be even remotely popular, or if it happens to be a busy night, your whole megaserver system just breaks down into a bunch of overflows.
(edited by VoiceOfUnreason.5976)
Logged into Black Citadel, saw that Megaservers were indeed implemented there (I thought the post said they wouldn’t be). Saw fellow Tarnished Coast players along with other servers. Noticed that I was not in the same instance as my guild, so I partied with one member and joined his instance. Noticed TC people here as well.
So, not more than 5 minutes into logging in I’ve found that megaservers DID in fact split TC’s playerbase like I feared. It DID NOT group me with my guild like they said it would. So far so… very, very, bad.
*Edit: So far my guild mates have been split up across 4 different versions of Black Citadel.
(edited by VoiceOfUnreason.5976)
Which cities are used sometimes depends heavily on what server you’re on. RP servers tend to populate racial cities much more.
…i have seen enough legendary-wielding 10k+ AP players kissing the floor every two minutes to realize, that some players are just bad, and no amount of AP is going to change that.
…or they may be full-DPS glass canons who’re used to killing bosses in seconds with 25 stacks of might, perma fury, timewarps, blinds/aegis/reflects but go down if a PUG is not as coordinated as their usual guildies/friends party with Teamspeak/Skype.
Are they bad as players? No, they’re probably better players than many “casuals” because they’re playing with instincts that they’ve been sharpening for thousands of hours. Are they bad in suboptimal PUGs? You may say so, or you may say that the PUG is not good enough for them – it all depends on your mindset.
I used to measure the skill of my fellow healers in WoW by how well they could react to situations gone awry, not just by their healing output. Anyone can repeat a task endlessly until it becomes a mechanical second nature to them. I don’t believe that’s a measure of skill though. Skill is determined on a more moment to moment basis, how you react to different scenarios. So if a person is completely unable to react to a change in the way they’ve repetitively performed in their dungeon runs, then I’d argue they were never really skilled at all. I’m not saying the rest of the group isn’t also at fault for not performing at their best, but at least they can survive a bad situation. Whereas this person who only knows how to succeed in the most optimal scenario will likely immediately go down if something changes.
Any changes they could make to accommodate us won’t be going in with the initial implementation anyway, so don’t let the current lack of response deter you. If you have any ideas on how to improve the system to help RPers or to help maintain community within this new system (outside of guilds, since they’ve apparently got plans to cover them), then this and the other feedback thread would be the place to post them.
The problem with the algorithm?
Not all RPers are on RP servers. (They just guest)
Not all RPers are in RP guilds.
Not all people add Rpers to friends lists.New players are going to struggle to get INTO the RP scene.
Until Anet says otherwise, I’m simply going to continue to reiterate the fact GUESTING STILL WORKS and the vast majority of baseless complaints are just that, baseless complaints. Try to hold in the panic when you’ve only been handed what amounts to a ToC. Panic after you get all the information.
Enough of the complains, enough of the crying, move on guys. It’s time to head to the phase where you realize it’s time to start hammering out ideas for solutions based on the severely limited information available. In fact, why not expand on the very idea I brought up? Yes, people RP in cities. No there isnt always enough room. To my knowledge, there’s a handful of low-capacity instances in each city. Think about that for a moment, you’ve got precedence for extra zones in a city due to those areas (one of which is the home instance), and precedence for zones being able to hold a large number of people (you’re probably standing in one reading this thread). There’s plenty of other ideas along this vein waiting for people to bring up. I shouldnt be the only one doing so. I’m one of the last people that one benefit one way or another.
People have been coming up with solutions. An RP tag is one of them. Most of the posts here have been suggesting solutions to the issues, not just crying about them. Posts like yours are the ones that seem to be constantly whining (about how we’re blowing things out of proportion). It’s fine if you want to present some ideas as well but don’t talk to us as if no one’s even bothered to be productive until you showed up to steer the conversation.
Mind if we keep the RP thread where it is? The new blog posts haven’t addressed those concerns yet, so everything in that thread is still relevant.
With any luck, the second blog post is meant to address feedback to the initial announcement. I’d like to think this thread, as well as the comments made in the general feedback thread, have made it clear that Colin’s initial suggestion (Guild Up) isn’t a sufficient solution to the problems being created here. So maybe they’ll have an actual solution that can be implemented. Or maybe they’ll ignore it and let the system ride until the problems become apparent.
I don’t believe we’ll see the issue of RPers suddenly getting scattered immediately. When this system goes live, there will likely not be any additional weights factoring into player placement. So everyone will be grouped first and foremost with their server. The problem will come later on down the line when players start doing other activities that will inevitably draw them further away from that initial placement. So I really REALLY hope everyone here is smart enough to recognize that it’ll take time before we see the full effects of this system (good or bad). The purpose of the thread was to identify potential issues ahead of time so that maybe they could be accommodated before the system goes live. But neither side is going to be justified based on the results of the initial release.
Well, I was mistaken. Those new posts didn’t address these issues at all. Soooo… maybe tomorrow they’re planning on addressing feedback (and maybe that’s the reason they moved the third part of the blog post to today)? Am I just grasping at straws here?
(edited by VoiceOfUnreason.5976)
With any luck, the second blog post is meant to address feedback to the initial announcement. I’d like to think this thread, as well as the comments made in the general feedback thread, have made it clear that Colin’s initial suggestion (Guild Up) isn’t a sufficient solution to the problems being created here. So maybe they’ll have an actual solution that can be implemented. Or maybe they’ll ignore it and let the system ride until the problems become apparent.
I don’t believe we’ll see the issue of RPers suddenly getting scattered immediately. When this system goes live, there will likely not be any additional weights factoring into player placement. So everyone will be grouped first and foremost with their server. The problem will come later on down the line when players start doing other activities that will inevitably draw them further away from that initial placement. So I really REALLY hope everyone here is smart enough to recognize that it’ll take time before we see the full effects of this system (good or bad). The purpose of the thread was to identify potential issues ahead of time so that maybe they could be accommodated before the system goes live. But neither side is going to be justified based on the results of the initial release.
And also I can’t even begin to think how will the system sort people who like to do different things, many people enjoy EVERY aspect of the game. How will the system sort let’s say hypothetical Johnny B., a guy who is a roleplayers, also does jumping puzzles, map completion, hearts, event chains, and big world bosses, but usually focuses on one aspect for some time, then moves to the other as the previous one becomes stale for him?
Will he be forced into the crowd doing whatever activity he was endulging when the update hits him in the face like a big bag of “nope”? Or just get assigned totally randomly by a system who doesn’t know what to make of him and bugs because of wide variety of the mans activities?
Is Johnny playing the game wrong suddenly because he likes to enjoy the WHOLE game, not just a select aspect?
Okay, so you know how this system is supposed to sort you by the activities you do? Like dungeon running and world events? As you do more of them, the system recognizes that and adds a weight to those activities. So it will more likely pair you with people who do those things. The RP flag is just another weight. It gets weighted against everything else, just like any activity. The difference being that this flag doesn’t dynamically change (cause there’s no way to track that). Therefore, the flag itself would have a high weight, likely close to the server/guild weight. And you can turn it off an on at will, so if you’re in towns looking for RP you’d turn it on. If you’re going to dungeons or open world stuff, you turn it off.
I think I replied to the wrong post. But whatever, this is how I’d expect the RP flag to function anyway.
(edited by VoiceOfUnreason.5976)
I don’t see how an RP flag can be viewed as favoritism. As it stands, there are in-game methods of tracking all other player activity EXCEPT for RP, because it doesn’t involve actual gameplay mechanics. All the flag would do is put us in line with everyone else.
So RP’ers DON’T want to be grouped with their RP’ing friends and guildies on maps when population is being distributed? I’m ignorant of how this concept hurts anybody.
The current system people end up by themselves on maps either because of overflow or a combination of server population and map popularity. If anything this will allow RP’ers broader options. You have a better chance of being in the same instance as your friends or guild mates + surround by more players who could also potentially be RP’ers.
How is this worse than what is currently in play? I can understand wanting a feature to role play better. What I’m not getting is how this MegaESOserver is hurtful.
Nobody loses their server, it’s just an option better than the 2nd class citizen “overflow”.
Let me be clear. This does NOT create a ‘better chance’ than what we currently have. Tarnished Coast, as one of the unofficial RP servers, ALWAYS had us grouped with fellow RPers. So long as we were on the same server, every player around us was potentially an RPer. And more specifically, most of the players hanging around in capitol cities (not LA, where most normal players gathered) were all RPers. This new system isn’t adding more chance to us, because we’re the main RP server of this region. What it’s doing is actually splitting us up, and potentially filling our server with non-RPers while at the same time sending some of us to other servers due to overflow.
They talk about servers being weighted so that fellow Tarnished Coast players would be theoretically put together, but what does that really mean? It’s not a guarantee. The guarantee is the current implementation. When I log on, I’m guaranteed to be on the Black Citadel in Tarnished Coast. With this new system, I’d be very likely to log on to the Black Citadel with Tarnished Coast people, but the possibility exists that I won’t. And the more I do other activities, like dungeon running and world bosses, the more the system will try to push me towards servers doing that instead of specifically focusing on Tarnished Coast. Because again, there is nothing in that system to represent RP as one of the weighted options. That’s what we’re asking for.
I’d also like to apologize to the devs if my initial reactions were too hostile. I don’t expect you to consider RPers in the development of this system, which is clearly designed for the mechanics of your game (not the mechanics of the player community). I don’t expect that any of the devs would understand what it takes for an RP community to thrive. So it’s unreasonable to expect that they would have thought up a solution before-hand to the issues we’re discussing in this thread.
However, I think it is reasonable to expect more communication with the community. This system is probably already complete and ready to launch, so any talk of features in this thread or the other feedback thread won’t be able to be implemented before patch day. But if ArenaNet had made mention of this earlier, like even a month ago… if they had just said “This is the direction we’re headed towards” and gathered feedback on potential community needs for it, then RPers could have made their concerns known then. It would have been a calmer situation, these ideas could have been suggested, and ArenaNet could have probably found a solution before they were ready to release.
But instead this major change was dropped on us so soon before it’s going to be released. That’s why everyone’s a little panicked and aggressive. Because they know it’s probably too late to even address their concerns before launch. And they feel unappreciated by the developers because no one bothered to get their input on the matter before-hand. This really, really could have been easily addressed if it was simply discussed a month or two earlier.
Seems to me that a lot of people have the same idea of a tagging sort of system that would help players (not just RPers) better specify how they want to be grouped. Seems like a valid solution to me; I hope the devs are still looking at this thread as it would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the matter. Really, the system they described in the blog post should cover most player types. People that run dungeons will be recognized as dungeon runners and people doing world bosses will be recognized for that. So we really only need the tag for RP, as there’s no way for us to represent to the game’s code that we’re RPers (unless it wants to check for people who hang out in one of the main city bars for upwards of an hour).
Dear anet, What you are seeing happening to this topic. Is why roleplayers are some what concerned about Mega servers.
That’s one of many reasons, and why I’d like more of an answer than a simple brush off and a “wait and see” from ArenaNet.
Also I would like to ask the roleplayers to please give us non-roleplayers the benefit of the doubt. So far my experience with the GW2 community in game is that it is very mature and the majority of us is not out there to ruin your roleplay experience. Please give us a chance to play alongside you and have us exposed to your roleplay as well. We will not know how this new system will turn out without giving it a try. I will be happy to see a bit more of your roleplay and help report any troll I encounter.
It’s not really about us getting paired with non-roleplayers. I see non-RPers all the time, and for every 1 person that trolls us, there’s at least 5 or so more that are respectful. Most don’t feel the need to troll, and some are generally interested and even try to join in. This isn’t about us wanting to be separate from you, it’s about ensuring that we stay together. We’ve already formed a strong community within our own server and just don’t want people to be torn apart. Like I said in a previous post, our community relies a lot upon random RP interactions with people we run into in the world. If we get separated to the point where we’re only ever consistently paired with guild mates, it’s going to kill that level of interaction and severely hurt the RP community as a whole.
“Guild Up” is a really poorly worded thing to say and points to a fundamental misunderstanding of the RP community, as well as an acknowledgement that you didn’t take us into consideration at all when developing this system. It’s not possible to include everyone from the RP community in a single guild, or a single friends list. And the community itself thrives on experiencing “random RP” throughout the world and cities. “Walk Up” was another term used in this thread. Basically, being able to see other people RPing in the world and joining them. If the only consistent way we’ll see RPers is within our own guild, that pretty much destroys the RP community as a whole.
But it can’t be a goal to have rpers filling their friendlists with non-friends, joining guilds for the server-purpose only or always ask around if they just want to dive into RP as they’re used to. This will only make bubble and group RP even worse…
Well not to mention that most RP guilds have their own story and purpose and aren’t open to people who don’t belong there at all. :S
That appears to be the solution they’re expecting, yes. I really don’t think considerations were made, the system was developed more for general PVErs in mind. It sounds like it works just fine when you’re running dungeons. Dungeon runners get paired with more dungeon runners, map completionists get paired with more people doing hearts and dynamic events, champ train people will likely get paired with more champ train people, and people who regularily do world bosses will get paired with people who do the same. But there’s no in-game representation for RPers. So the only thing we can do is “cheat” the system by friending as many fellow RPers as possible, joining guilds for the sole purpose of staying on the same server, and hoping that doing any sort of other activity won’t push us more in another priority in the system’s eyes. I personally don’t want to spend a night fighting world bosses and Orr Temple events, only to find that I’m now prioritized for that over being paired with RPers. That’s why I suggested having an RP flag that we can set. It’d be the only method we have of properly marking ourselves as RPers in the Megaserver’s eyes.
To maximize your odds of running into other RP players more often, you’ll want to make sure you’re on the same world (generally TC is viewed as the RP world), and in guilds with other RP members also on that same world. For example, everyone from TC currently will be set to high priority to sort together, same thing goes with people from RP guilds who are from TC.
We’ll continue to monitor, adapt and update the system as we go forward as well, for now I’d suggest seeing how it works once we enable the mega server system across all maps and then giving comments and feedback when you see it in action!
I would hope that it works out, I guess. My suggestion still stands though, to be able to somehow flag yourself for RP so you are more likely to be paired with other RPers. That would allow RPers that maybe aren’t part of TC to be more often paired with people of similar interests as well.
I don’t understand where the assumption comes from that you will face more non-rp players after the implementation of this megaserver than before. ArenaNet claims (we cannot test this yet ofcourse) that the chances of you ending up on the same map with people from same homeworld, guild, friends and party increase. And most roleplayers are already concentrated in specific homeworlds and guilds.
Yes, they’ve said that. But in cities, we’re already matched up with people from our homeworld all the time. Aside from Lion’s Arch, there was almost never an overflow inside a main city, so we never had to worry about us being separated from the RP community. With this new system, that possibility exists. Yes, they’ll attempt to match us with the same home world, but what happens if the Black Citadel that contains most of the TC players becomes full tonight, and I log in? Are they going to kick a non-TC player from that instance of the city in order to accommodate me, or am I going to be forced onto another instance? If that instance has already been populated, it doesn’t matter how heavily I’m weighted in favor of joining it.
Is anything going to be done to accommodate RP communities with this new Megaserver system? Most RPers have already migrated to a select few servers (Tarnished Coast for example). Will these people be potentially separated into different versions of their cities? Most RP groups aren’t all going to be in the same guild, and interacting with different guilds across the server is a crucial part of maintaining a stable RP community. So relying on the “players in the same guild” to match RPers together is sort of out. I assume right now that the only thing that’ll potentially keep us together is whatever weight you apply to people from the same server. Even still, I foresee a lot of RP guilds getting split up and not being able to interact with each other. That might kill the RP community in GW2 altogether, even if it’s not a common occurance.
Not to mention that the cities will now be filled with tons of new non-RPers, which will surely break a lot of immersion and clutter common spots for player interaction. I understand this is a necessary part of the update and I can deal with a new influx of non-RPers (who knows, it may even introduce new people to the concept). But if those players somehow take priority over established RPers, I feel like the community would die before we even get the chance to convert new people.
So… has there been any thought as to how you’d support the RP community with this new system? Is there maybe like… a checkbox we can have on our character select or in-game to say that this is an RP character? Then people with that option selected will have much higher priority for getting grouped in the same city as other RP players? I honestly doubt any considerations were being made here, as ArenaNet was probably more focused on just getting players together in general. But wouldn’t something like that be a fairly simple solution to the problem?
I’ve seen a lot of comments about stances and suggestions on how to make them feel more like stances you’d see in other MMOs, though a lot of what I’ve seen doesn’t try to deviate much from their current implementation. I’d like to suggest a more drastic change to their mechanics.
I’d like to change warrior stances into a two-part skill, similar to how engineer turrets or guardian summoned weapons work. You would activate the skill once to enter the stance, gaining strong passive effects that last so long as the skill is active. Then you can activate the skill again to BREAK the stance, gaining an increased effect (that would be similar to what you get currently when you use them), but also putting the stance on cooldown. This behavior is also similar to signets, except that only one stance could be active at a time and ideally the passive effects would be stronger to the point of “build defining”. Some of the effects I list clearly take from existing Warrior traits, as my goal is also to take some of the passive sustain we have and move it to more of an active role. Also, forgive me for not including a lot of specific numbers. I’m not going to pretend I’m an accomplished theorycrafter here, I just wanted to throw out some ideas.
Frenzied Stance – Increased attack and movement speed, increased damage received. Burst skills remove up to 2 movement impairing conditions on use (based on adrenaline).
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that grants drastically increased attack speed at the cost of more increased damage to the player for a short duration (same effect as the current form).
Berserker Stance – Increased adrenaline gain per condition on the warrior. Burst skills refund part of their cost when used. Warrior receives reduced healing from self and other sources while stance is active. Successfully landing burst skills can remove up to 2 damaging conditions (based on adrenaline).
Breaking the stance grants condition immunity. Its duration depends on your current adrenaline.
Balanced Stance – Reduced Stun duration on the player, increased stun/daze duration on their abilities. Reduced movespeed on the warrior. Burst skills refresh existing daze/stun on the target when used at max adrenaline.
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that causes an aoe knockback on use and grants stability.
Enduring Stance – Player takes reduced damage from direct attacks and gain adrenaline when struck. Player gains less adrenaline from their own attacks. Burst skills grant protection to yourself and nearby allies.
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that causes the player to be immune to direct damage from a short duration (same as the current endure pain).
Again, try to think of these as replacing some of the passive effects of traits, rather than considering them alongside the same traits. Since you can only have one stance active at any time, typically you’d only run with one of these on your bar. Though there could still be benefit to having multiples and swapping stances based on personal need. I also wanted to associate some risk to using them as well to allow some counter play for each stance.
The simplicity of the warrior is its biggest flaw when balancing. Our skills are all very straightforward and highly telegraphed, there’s not much room for any cool tricks and outmaneuvering like what you see with thieves or mesmers. Nor do we have a good selection of utility skills that offer radically different playstyles. Because of this, we USED to be underpowered. We didn’t have enough options for condition removal, or ways to outplay other classes. So they gave us some. But rather than rework the class, they added these things as passive traits or effects to our existing playstyle. That gave us the counterplay we desperately needed, but also made it way too easy to do it. And any increase in numbers just makes us better at what we’re good at or worse at what we’re bad at, there’s no real change in playstyle that occurs from number tweaks on a warrior. So yes, I’ll agree that warrior needs a pretty heavy rework. It’s far too simple of a class to balance properly alongside the more advanced classes in this game.
I don’t know why people complain that they can’t kill bunker builds. Did they kill you? No? Then working as intended. Most bunker builds are totally unfeasible to try and kill with a single person, at least not without a prolonged fight. The tradeoff being that they’re not going to kill you either. But its an important spec in competitive play, designed to either hold a point forever or force multiple people to have to commit to killing them.
A Necro, built to tank, can absolutely outlast a lot of warrior builds. Tanking 10 or so seconds of stability and condition immunity isn’t terribly difficult if they simply stay on the defensive. And once that’s done, they have plenty of ways to lock a warrior down via blinds, chills, weakness, etc. That’s not to say they’re unbeatable, of course. It’s just that people who have experience fighting warriors now and who want to counter them will expect those 10 seconds of “blowing your load” and will wait to punish them afterward. If you’re having trouble dealing with a well played Necro, try not to immediately initiate the fight by blowing all your cooldowns for a quick kill. Try to let them frontload some conditions, cleanse them, then hit Beserker Stance when their cds are almost up. Basically, try to fake them out in the same way they’re trying to fake out your cooldowns.
One other big thing to note is that Necros are actually really good at tanking in melee range. Marks might be unavoidable due to low cooldown, but for god’s sake don’t just blindly run into their wells. If he’s dropped a bunch of kitten down on himself, peel out and then come back in a few seconds. GS users should be able to disengage from a Necro fairly easily. Also, try not to just aimlessly chase around Plague form. They have stability and they will be spamming blind on you constantly. Blind is actually one of the best counters they’ll have against you via wells and Plague, but you can easily avoid those by just disengaging and coming back. Don’t feel like you need to commit to the fight the first time because Necros have a lot of area control that will put you at a serious disadvantage. Aside from that… stuns are still pretty good against them as they don’t have a lot of stability outside of elites. Just make sure you’re not blinded.
If people hate Berserkers it’s because everyone is using that build and they figure if you’re not trying to be unique and build for yourself, you’re not a good player. I haven’t had any “hate” directed at me, though I have had comments along the lines of “Oh, you’re running that cookie cutter GS/Axe+Mace build?” Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? Why not use the most efficient DPS build? Just to be different? I mean, it’s fine if you want to play a build that fits more to your style and all… but I fit my style to THAT build and I can run it efficiently even with PuGs that don’t support it.
The Human-Centaur war is over. You went to harathi highlands, killed Ulgoth, and smashed them back over the pass. Before you killed Zhaitan, natch.
I don’t wish to get into the mess that is this release both lore wise and mechanic wise, but I do want to reply to your comment. It really shows the ultimate failing of what arena net calls a “living story”. Let me ask you, how do you know the Human-Centaur war is over? What proof do you have about this? What area did you concur that drove out all the centaurs from human regions and brought them to their ultimate end? Or what raid boss/instanced boss did you defeat that proclaimed himself the leader of the centaur? None.
For all I know, the centaur war is still going on. In this “living” world centaurs are still raiding, pillaging, and attacking in places they NO longer should be, NPC’s still talk about the attacks, events still trigger OF the attacks. How can one possibly understand where to be at in the lore of this game at any given time? It’s beyond the scope of this game to be able to convincingly point out that what you do, or any of us do, has any effect on the world. Don’t get me wrong.. I’m not guild wars bashing, but as far as I understand it (and i’m barely hanging by a thread at this point) Zhatain has been slain for two years and all events happening now are well after his death. The amount of lore miscommunication, and the inability to bring the story to the players is disappointing.
That’s all I wish to say.
I think that, despite this idea of a “Living World”, ArenaNet is afraid to make huge changes to their existing world (WoW’s Cataclysm-style). They don’t want to remove existing events or scenarios or simply haven’t found a gameplay solution to deal with that yet. The problem is that they’ve already advanced the storyline past the events of the main game, while everything is still referencing Zhaitan as the main threat in the Personal Story. Without removing some of the original content, they’re not able to properly advance the world to a new stage. And no, this isn’t an excuse for ArenaNet. What they’ve done is their own fault; they’ve basically written themselves into a corner. But I’m fairly certain this whole “Living Story” idea, at least in its current implementation, was NOT the original plan for expanding GW2. If it was, then the base story would have been written in a way that would allow the world to advance properly without these blatant holes in the storytelling.
One way that could have accomplished would have been to treat the Dragons like they were described originally, primordial forces of nature. Zhaitan would not have been killed in the story. The whole Arah instance would not have been related to the PS, and instead function like an explorable where you “defeat” Zhaitan, but he always rises again. Then the PS would have revolved around the founding of the Pact, and involved another villain. One with a more consistent presence, rather than the ever-present shadow that Zhaitan was. He could still be related to Zhaitan, perhaps a certain character from the PS that gets revived as a villain? It would be more impactful than having a bunch of villains that have no relevance to the player. And it frees up Zhaitan to be an ever-present threat to the world.
What this achieves is: making the Elder Dragons in general a constant threat that can never be truely killed, but can be repeatedly defeated in instances. It opens doors to have more relate-able villains in the personal story. And it lets the story of the world advance while keeping areas like Orr intact and in a constant state of battle. And later on down the line, like 5+ years into GW2’s lifetime, if ArenaNet wanted to truely change the world they can come up with a plotline where someone finally figures out a way to stop the Dragon’s ressurection. Then we can have a player-driven world changing event involving the true death of the dragons and a remaking of all the zones they were involved in. Which then opens up doors for a new threat.
But all of this is hindsight. In its current implementation there’s no real way to get rid of Zhaitan without scrapping a ton of content from the base game. And no way of introducing new dragons without creating a bunch of new zones (and then such an expansion would end up in the same boat as Orr). And any new villain they try to introduce will always appear irrelevant against the backdrop of these world-destroying dragons.
I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.
Nice attitude, if it weren’t for the lil issue that those “potatoes and toasters” ran the game for one year just fine until this patch.
Also, “majority of playerbase” – numbers or don’t make claims.
They’ll run the game just fine right now if you TURN YOUR kittenING CULLING SETTINGS DOWN.
If you want amazing, buy a new computer. If you don’t, turn your settings down. You don’t get to drive a Tesla after buying a Honda. New games = require newer computers. No way would I ever expect my 466Mhz iBook (purchased sep 2000) to be able to play GW2, much less at highest settings.
See, you’ve just made a logical point that sounds great, until you take your own advice and actually try to run GW2 on high end hardware.
I have a good computer. My water-cooled i7 is clocked near 5 GHz. My video card is never 100% utilized. I get 20 fps in large WvW battles and dynamic events (like claw of jormag) on high settings. That’s not amazing. The problem, in many cases, is not the hardware people are using but that the software is poorly optimized and/or the developers have been overly ambitious.
If you can show me a reasonable consumer hardware setup that can achieve 60 fps @ 1080p in large WvW battles and dynamic events, on high settings with culling disabled, then you’re a time traveler from the future.
I mean… we COULD do that. Or you can go into your options and turn down the culling settings to be relatively equivalent to a couple months ago (before they removed it from server side). That’s why those options are there. I can’t believe people are even bothering to reply, just turn the kittening culling settings down. You don’t have to turn all the quality settings down, just culling.
And to the OP’s point about the molten alliance and how a woman couldn’t have formed them. Scarlet might just have been able to show she’s that strong. She does say in the invasion text that the Aetherblades follow her “b/c they like living.” She’s strong armed the steam punk pirates in to following her, she can show enough strength to make the Molten Alliance believe she can give them amazing power if they do as she says.
If you knew anything about the Flame Legion, you’d know that “showing strength” is irrelevant in the face of her gender.
Also, the whole:
“GASP! Villain X was behind it all!”
Plotline is only effective if the villain was presented before-hand. You have to get to know the villain, have them be a major part of the story up to this point. That way when the reveal happens it’s an actual shock to the players (if done right). Scarlet’s reveal was basically “Oh no, the villain we met 1 cutscene ago turned out to be behind everything. What a twist…”
I love how everyone here is caught up on the name thing when every single one of your other points is far more worthy of discussion. GW2 has taken a pretty serious nose dive in the storytelling department every since release, and Scarlet has done nothing to bring them back up. All of the speculation surrounding Scarlet BEFORE this latest patch was far more interesting than what she turned out to be. Was she from that alternative future? Were the aetherblades from that future? Was she somehow able to manipulate the Dredge/Flame Legion by showing them something from that alternative reality? Maybe she was doing all this to prevent some major event in the future? Do you see a pattern here? A lot of that speculation exists because you used a steampunk theme that was already being used by that alternative future storyline. You COULD have tied into that story too, but you “chose” not to. I put “chose” in quotes cause I’m not convinced you even realized that such a storyline even existed. All the Living Story content up til now has been such a sharp deviation from the existing plot of the game that I wonder if the team behind it was even part of GW2’s development. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole “idea” behind the aetherblades was simply “We need to sell more armors. What’s cool? Steampunk? Alright lets make a story about that.” There has been so much speculation by players as to the deeper meaning of these Living Story plotlines, but I think all of it vastly overestimated the dev’s storytelling capabilities. There’s no deeper meaning to any of this; it’s all a bunch of individual storylines tied loosely together by a perfectly generic villain. A villain so generic, with such an undefined past, that you could literally attach ANY backstory/motive you want to her and it would fit. So when this story ends, and Scarlet is somehow tied back to the Dragons or some bullkitten, everyone will praise ArenaNet for being so clever. NO! kitten NO! Scarlet was mentioned maybe twice during this year’s Living story, she has no discernible character besides “crazy”, she hasn’t been around enough for players to really become attached and start to question her motives. She’s just a one-off villain with a placeholder backstory, ready to be inserted into whatever kitten plotline in order to add a “big twist” to this whole series of events.