Guild Wars 2: Introducing the Megaserver System

"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."

I don't like the sound of this. Please correct me if I am wrong but from what I understand we are goin to mix with in an NA megaserver and the only way to be in "Sanctum of Rall" is goint to be the WvW maps? i dont really care about the pve maps... but the main cities that I fear is going to take away a lot of that feeling that you are in SoR and not in any other server or nameless megaserver with no identity?

Sorry my bad english.

It will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out. Colin posted a bit more info in response to some similar concerns from RP communities on the official forums:

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Megaservers-and-RP/first#post3847854

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 and Piken are viewed as the RP worlds), 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 who are all a part of the same guild (so guild up RP folks!)

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!

This is likely an April Fool's joke or ANET is high on something other than common sense.  

This "Megaserver" nonsense would be tantamount to dissolving ALL of the server/world communities leaving only guilds as the remaining constant  community unit with servers/worlds being just a name plate for a WvW group. 

PvErs from our server will less likely encounter a nice helpful Rallian along the road, and will more likely be confronted by trolls at every bridge, ERPers along the coast and guild recruiters at every corner (as its gonna be ridiculously hard to recruit for WvW and I see a lot of hardcore WvWers taking their business every where else but here or wildstar).   

Lastly I question the usefulness of such a move as there IS this thing called guesting in which you can leave your empty world and go find more fun across other borders.  

I think you post has been merged and "lost"(?) in the Feedback-Questions-MegaServer :(

The need for chat channels now becomes even more vital for communities.

I'm none to thrilled about this at all. 100% agree with you Fog on everything you stated in your post.

No one will have a home anymore and things that made a server unique will be totally lost outside of WvW. The chat is going to go downhill, grouping is going to be a nightmare for community run events... Tyrian Adventure being one. Never mind the logistics nightmare of trying to get everyone into one instance... We're having the same issue with TTS as if/when it goes live we'll have no way to get all our guys into a specific map :\

ANET would be much better server by a district system as in GW1 where you could pick where you wanted to go.... this feels like a whole new pile of RNG suck as to whether or not I get to play with all my friends/guildies...

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LGN: Soren the Always Lost
Gaiscioch Family [GSCH]

i dont want this to happen the community that keeps me coming back will be so damaged that i wont reconise it and im going to stop playing gw2 if it comes to pass because i do not agree with this horrible dision by anet The mega server is Dooms day for me in my point of view

I think we have to see how this will interact with WvW before making any judgement, as I would say that's the core reason for servers existing. For instance, what if their system doesn't mash _every_ server together? What if it separates servers into three groups (red, blue, green) which is where the zones pull people from to fill? So say SoR gets put into the green group. We would share that group with seven other servers (24 servers / 3 groups = 8 servers per group) for both PvE and WvW content, and be pitted against the blue and red megaservers, never interacting with them outside of WvW.

Honestly though, they should have touched on server communities a bit more. I know they said servers and guilds would be prioritized when joining and instance, but that really kind of messes things up if you need to get a large number of people to meet up in the same spot. You end up with the people joining first filling up an already-existing instance, then everyone else goes into a new instance, and one of those groups gets left out of the event.

But I think we should definitely wait and see. The devs stated that servers are still going to be important, so I don't think they'll be removing them. Instead, it seems servers will become more of an abstract mega-guild (more than they already are, at least), and when there aren't enough people to fill out an instance with SoR players, they'll pull from somewhere else. It's not a perfect solution, but it seems to be a good one for solving the issue of empty zones and disparities between server (and WvW) populations. They just need to make sure they talk about the ways they're protecting server communities.

I'm not exactly sure why cities are on the list of initial places to be combined.  These places are already some of the highest population areas (Even the empty cities have more people than many of the maps), and are the place where the server identity is created.  

I promised myself I'd hold judgement until they finished the 3 days of blog posts.  As it stands, our opinions are irrelevant anyway, so the options are to find out if the changes break the gameplay for us, or if we have to find another game.  Writing about it in the forums isn't going to change anything.

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Archangels Haven [HALO] - WvW Command Team. Purchaser of the Golems. TS Administrator.

I fully expected something like this to happen in wvw first, at least for the low-coverage servers. Kind of scratching my head as to why they would introduce this in PVE land. Do people flood anet's inbox with complaints about being sooooooo lonely in Caledon forest as they level up their 12th alt? 

The recent decisions regarding the game (mainly new features) have troubled me a bit. I no longer actively play the game primarily because its not fun to play.

Why didn't they discuss the issue and their other imminent fundamental game changes more openly to gather feedback from their players before they even consider implementing their ideas?

Why didn't they just make the game like this in the first place?

More importantly what will happen to the Sanctum of Rall community and other server communities?

What are the current plans for this website/community?

What are they intending to accomplish by effectively eliminating servers?

What has caused them to make these changes to their game?

Why are they fundamentally changing the Spvp and other game modes through creating barriers for accessing new items/ traits/ etc in spvp?

All the current explanations, at least in my opinion, are greatly lacking in a adequate and sufficient explanation of why these changes are occurring. I would like to have a better understanding of Anet's point of view so that I can arrive at a better conclusion. I understand these changes are very likely meant to generate allot of profit for the major shareholders, but I wish they would have at least discussed these changes with the broader player base FIRST, maybe even through a Public Beta Environment of sorts, announcements, or a discussion series.

I've generally found the updates from ArenaNet to be a positive influence on my overall gaming experience, but this latest announcement has me concerned. As the leader of a small guild I don't expect my opinion to carry any weight, but when major concerns are already being voiced by the leaders of our server's community it gives me pause. The main question that springs to my mind is how will this effect the guilds I see when I play? I may not interact with them on a regular basis, but I can at least recognize many of the names and identify them as people I've grouped with, or dealt with in some fashion or another in the past, and blending servers together sounds like that identity will become virtually impossible to maintain. For instance, will I see members of GSCH massing for an event I can join, or be able to seek them out for assistance without first having to have a contact name, or, worse still, need to use an outside method of communication (RaidCall, SanctumofRall.com, etc.) to find them?

Our guild may be small, but it still has an identity in the SoR community, however minimal, and I would not like to see us get lost in a maelstrom of ever-changing guild names.

Signed,
-Thracecius, a concerned Rallian
AKA Belden Surestrike
POTE Guild Leader

More details about how the system is intended to work are coming out through the forums. There's a nice recap in this thread on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2224tx/more_details_on_the_megaserver/

Here's a relevant snippet:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.


• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.


• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.

Also regarding the WvW speculation:

To quell speculation early, that is not what we are doing. The announcement will have more info, but we are absolutely not getting rid of worlds and putting everyone into an EotM type system.

There are obviously a lot of details yet to be revealed, and hopefully the posts over the rest of this week will clarify some of the important points. At this juncture though, we're really just speculating on how it will play out. No point in jumping to conclusions over an announcement that was, to be fair, extremely thin on detail.

So, the last post is out and as far my concern goes it just not only does not fix it but it gets worse.

"The changes covered in this blog will not be included in the April 15 release and will likely come online by December 2014"

Nothing about Alliances, server chat tabs or any other way to make up for the lost of the main cities or starting maps. They just not give us a half megaserver but they make it the wrong way. Is the maps from lvl15+ to 80 that need more people for events or leveling and suff.. not the main cities and the starting area maps. I just dont get it.

I am loving the rest of the patch. But the Megaserver...