Guild Wars 2

You had this in game at start – the ability to join on other servers as “guest”.

Imo, the cross-server features you have (and had) implemented are what is truly revolutionary about GW2.

It is not the graphics, it is not the combat, not the skill system or the animations – though these are very good too of course. But other games have nice stuff too and in abundance.

One key thing that GW2 has and (afaik) no one else has as well implemented – is the open world cross server funcionality. Aaand it’s not working…such a shame. It works for dungeons but that’s nothing revolutionary at all, though it’s good that it does ofc.

So my suggestion is – don’t forget to actually implement (or fix) the guest-functionality. It’s one thing that really put you ahead of other devs and made for some awesome community possibilities.

Imo using overflow functionality as an option for leveling is simple and great.

This is how I would modify OP’s suggestion:

Skip all the automation and population-treshold algortihms. Just make the choice to “join overflow server” available from a menu in the same way you can choose to go to HotM.
- If you want to join a multilingual overflow server in hopes of finding more people – you can.
- If you want to stay in home world for whatvere reason (influence, language etc etc) – you can.

This idea does not need anything more, it is fine as the great idea it is. If you add too much “detail” to it you raise too many new problems, and some very valid ones as can be seen here and on reddit.

This “overflow” solution does not per automation imply that you shouldn’t do more to populate low level zones – like modify DEs loot or whatever – one good suggestion does not exclude the other.

The reason we need this overflow-mechanic is that there are likely few other ways as simple, elegant and most importantly effective to solve the leveling zone population issues. It directly deals with the heart of the problem: Too few players populate the leveling areas on individual servers. It is a simple enough solution – I think – it is already “almost” implemented in the game. We need this, it’s gonna be great

But key to make it happen imo is: Simplicity, Choice