Megaservers, Sanctum of Rall, and the Death of Community - Updated

Hey Everyone,

I'd like you all to please read my post on the official forums. If you also feel this way now is the time to voice your concerns. We have very few days left to stop this from going into play.

Reply to: Game Updates: Guild World Events, Megaservers, WvW

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Game-Updates-Guild-World-Events-Megaservers-WvW/page/8#post3924566

I originally posted this in the last Megaserver thread. Since then I have seen megaserver in all its wonder and feel it’s much worse than I thought. Please see this additional post describing the issues we face. This patch essentially Killed any chance of ever hosting a public community event in Guild Wars 2.

Megaserver = Megamess for Guild Missions
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/guilds/missions/Megaserver-Megamess-for-Guild-Missions/first#post3924070

ORIGINAL POST—-

Greetings,
Many of you may know me as the leader of Gaiscioch [GSCH] a 13 year old gaming community who has spanned 4 games and now entering our 5th. I am also a man whose life was affected by Roger Oldroar Rall and organized a group of his friends and family to help influence ArenaNet to get a server named in his memory.

I understand the goals behind the MegaServer:

1. Avoid Server Closures / Mergers
The Megaserver concept pushes servers together so that they are 1 group of people sharing the same game world. This is a fantastic concept and from a PR perspective brilliant. Instead of the gaming press reporting about server closures and mergers (as you know they would) putting a negative tone on your product and usually causing a snowball effect, you can avoid all this by megaservering up.
2. Putting people in empty zones.
As the population has progressed and spread out, population in non-champ farm zones or Orr has dwindled. This system would allow everyone who IS playing in a zone that’s not as popular as it once was to have people to play with. This is a great concept.
3. Putting more opportunity to make new guild mates.

By pushing the community together guilds can have a much larger recruiting pool. However the problem then becomes how to get them to be able to play with you in WvW.

All of these concepts are great on paper however in application there are some things that you need to think about.

1. The Death of Server Communities.
By Megaservering if your server is not a 100% WvW dedicated place, such as Sanctum of Rall, your zones will be filled with foreigners, people who you have fought against for over a year and a half, who’s blood boils at the mere sight of you. We’ve all seen it, you’re in an overflow and someone starts up with the server bashing. This is going to be day in day out every day in Guild Wars 2 from this day forward. The bad blood is going to be spilled out all over our capital cities, our formerly friendly zones, and fill our chats.

2. Public Community Events
In addition think about events like the Great Tyrian Adventure where 150 people from all of the guilds on Sanctum of Rall pull together for a few events per week to play together and make some epic memories. In the new system all of the servers flood into instances of the zone. Getting those 150 people into the same 2 overflows will become increasingly more difficult. See the Lion’s Arch event for example. Getting into the same instance with 30 of your friends was impossible. Imagine trying to do that with 150+. The megaserver will prevent things like Great Tyrian Adventure from happening altogether. Imagine trying to talk 150 people into getting into the same map to complete as task. Can we say migraine?
Goodbye to Server Climate
The server climate we all have come to love over the years will now be gone. You’ll be mixed into all servers and the feeling of server pride will solely be one for WvW players. For the better part of the past 2 years I have been giving bags out to new players on Sanctum of Rall to thank them for calling us home. On April 15th that will no longer be feasible as every player in the game would also share that zone. There is no way for me to communicate just to the Sanctum of Rall players.

Server Communication
Before every WvW event I travel around and let people know where we’re going and encourage them, no matter the level, to come out and have some fun with us in WvW. I hit queensdale, divinity’s reach, vigil keep, and a few zones in Orr. Come April 15th I will no longer be able to do that as people will not be from Sanctum of Rall and will be unable to join us in WvW. With no way to communicate with your allies this will become an even more difficult feat for non-wvw focused servers to mobilize forces.

I see you objective and it is a valued one however I strongly feel that this is a bad move and will negatively affect the game in the coming months. You’re changing Server Community to Game Community and putting barriers in communication which will hurt those servers who have been struggling.

On top of that I’m pretty sure this is just the tip of the iceberg and soon WvW will be to follow. At which point there will be nothing left of the houses we built.
Please reconsider this option until you have some time to think about all the repercussions and the long term effect on communities.

Concerned,

I read just about every post including yours Fog; I think though your concerns are worth noting; however this implementation is going to improve the overall player experience tenfold.  In the games current state there are map limitations and as stated this feature will alleviate those issues. Think about this way would you rather be limited to playing a game with a fraction of the playerbase or 90% of the playerbase?  I know I want to play with 90% of the playerbase and not just a small percentage.  Also your still going to be able to do the tyrian adventure; the megaserver is going to take into account friends, guilds etc... and with their being better server load-balancing megaservers will be able to handle more people in a zone making the need to shove people into overflows not necessary.

Also in regards to WvWvW, strategies really shouldn't be isolated in map chat because even in the games current state any person from any server can guest to any server and see those strategies should anyone start making statements in mapchat for everyone to see.  The majority of server communication across all servers happens on that server's VOIP anyways so again this issue I really don't see being that big of a problem.  Also who cares if people from other servers see you welcoming SOR players to join you in WvWvW; it's no different now when you welcome players to join you and people from different servers are guested to SOR and see your welcome request in chat.  All you have to do is communicate a message like, "Rallians please join me in WvWvW," simple as that.

I'm gonna have to take the opposite side of the spectrum on this one.  I think this change is a great move and will make the community better and stronger once it goes live fully after their initial test of the starters zones and cities

vunter, from a solo player perspective it will appear nice. From a logistics perspective of running a community and large scale events it is absolutely terrifying.  How will we get 140 people on the same map for teq or great tyrian adventure?  With the new system that becomes impossible. Hosting community events is going to create a whole lot of heartache. 

Imagine showing up for great tyrian adventure and not being able to get on map to get credit for anything. This is the reality at our door. All maps have a hard cap. It will be like lions arch event. We're you there when the family tried to run that as a group? None of us could get on the same map together. Totally made it impossible to play together.

this is a change i dread i want to put a stop to beucs if the sor comunity is destroyed im gone and i dont want that to come to pass

To answer your rhetorical question fog, home servers will retain highest priority.  The likely of all 150 people being in the same map is extremely high because everyone is from the same home server making them have highest priority.  I can't talk too many specifics but I was able to test this environment and the algorithm they use for load-balancing and player matching in this new system is actually pretty impressive.  Of course I can't convince you before you see it in action but these concerns are addressed on a development / implementation level.  In a tested environment we put this issue to the test and over 93% of players were on the same map almost all the time.  The other few percent of players were able to get into the map upon re-logging as the dynamic system has more chances for player matching.  Also the method used for highest priority have players that are lower priority matched dynamically live ingame.  This means that if a handful of people are in a map and highest priority people enter the people that have lower priority will be moved live to other maps that will better match based on their specific priority and player-matches.  They way the system is designed however has players matched appropriately in the first place making this scenario a rare occurrence

This is a system that they will continue to monitor and adapt as more and more people get on the system; in other words when it goes live their database that is used will get stronger and stronger the more it used.   Even in large scale communities i think most will be pleasantly surprised.  The reason why they are launching the system in stage type process is the algorithm and player-matching databases can only get stronger the more it used, thus they want to allow for the time needed before they launch it in it's final stages.

Oh.

My.

God.

LOL I just saw this and ironically, last night during WvW, I was going to make an April Fools prank about hearing that ArenaNet was going to convert WvW into a single "megaserver" system, with just 3 colors, like they did with EotM.

Somehow, after reading this, I think that my "prank" idea may not be too far from the truth.

So when there are 150 people already on Sanctum of Rall Queensdale, if 150 more people come from various other zones on SOR to Queensdale they will kick those 150 people off Sanctum of Rall Queensdale?

Your post seems to have been deleted. I only found a reference to it where someone quoted at least part of it. Anet does say that their posts over the next couple of days will answer a lot of the questions in the massive merged Feedback about Megaserver thread. Will be interesting to get the details of how this would work. So far, I'm not thrilled with the idea of trying to get pve guild group events together with this new system. Seems like a lot of people may not be able to find me when I'm grouping people up during event. This isn't so terrible with the guild since we can use guild chat to coordinate, but if I ever wanted to open my events up to the community it would be very difficult to get everyone together. Plus, our server community often knows who were are, or learns who we are from community events. Getting thrown in with a bunch of random people from the entire game population isn't the same. They don't know us and how we operate (respect, family friendly language, etc.) and could be potentially be very disruptive and trolling during events.

"So when there are 150 people already on Sanctum of Rall Queensdale, if 150 more people come from various other zones on SOR to Queensdale they will kick those 150 people off Sanctum of Rall Queensdale?"

That's not how I am understanding it.  You're still thinking in terms of the current "hard capped zone" design, so you will need to think outside of that box.  They are getting rid of that design, we should now be able to fit more into a zone and have priority and move folks to us without need to do all that stupid grouping voodoo to bypass the overflow system.

As I understand this new system, it will not affect a SORC event, it will actually help us avoid the overflow problems that we've been having.  If I am understanding all of the current data that I am finding, this change will be a good thing.  Its a necessary evolutionary change for this game and gets rid of a lot of the population issues that have been frustrating us.

My only real concern is the loss of "server identity", resulting in having your (Fog's) friend's server memorial discontinued.  I realize that this is a business for ArenaNet, but a promise is a promise and I hope they do strive to honor that to the best of their ability.

No they wont be kicked, highest priority takes precedence; like I said this is a rare occurrence, but when it does happen if people from other servers try to join a server and have low priority meaning that server isn't there main they will only be matched to that server if there is available room which most likely there will be.  Keep in mind under the new system these megaservers will be able to handle 30-40% more people on any given chance without effecting server or client performance.

In the scenario your talking about fog when everyone is rdy to enter the adventure the system is going to identify GSCH as a guild and each individuals friends.  In this circumstance also it will pay attention to friends of friends also; basically the system is going to see for instance all 150 people who are like minded, same type of friends, home-server, guilds and it will place all of you on the same server.  It will also keep track when players are trying to enter too.  So lets say joe bob comes to the tyrian adventure late the system will dynamically see this and place him in the correct map where all joe bobs friends, home-serverians, and guildies are.

Basically what I'm saying is if 150 tyrian adventure players are in one map and other low priority players / non home-server players enter the map they wont even be placed on your map to begin with.

Melchom Rper's have also been addreesed.  Here's the megaserver rp link.

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

ColinJohanson

Game Director

Well I will just leave it here, I think many of you are jumping the gun and getting worried over nothing.  This is typical in many games and well in life people tend to resist change and adapt.  The advice I would suggest is to welcome change, resisting will only make the transition rough for many; also finally I will say this for sure inst going away.  Expect to see this change permanent whether it be in its current form or edited in the future when deemed necessary.

Vunter, this isn't the first time I've seen this kind of change. The last time I saw the tides change like this was RIFT and over the course of the 2 months following activity dropped 80%. The time before that was Warhammer and the activity and population dropped 90%. Sweeping changes like this that effect community culture are very detrimental to the health of a community and I have yet seen something like this actually do what the intended effect was. 

well im scared and barly moivated to play gw2 becus of this i dont know what to do?

Threw in my nickel.  Not sure what good it will do.  The world is run by beancounters...

Freaky Friday on a Wednesday:  Sekk is seeing this as a positive change, while Fog is seeing it as detrimental.  Next will come Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!  I'll have to pocket this for the next time I get PM'd about my being too negative re: comments about a game's design.  :)

Mood-lightening humor aside (well, attempted at least), we have no choice but to let this play out and see if they can deliver on their promises.  Why?  Because it sounds like Anet already has this thing developed, tested and read to go, which means at least 1,000+ man-hours charged and they seem confident that they've taken all of the community's "cons" into consideration and have addressed and tested them during development.  I just don't see them discarding it.

I told folks a while back, that this was possibly coming.  How so?  Well, Zenimax showed us that a unified MMORPG server design was not only possible, but feasible (well, EVE technically did, but its a little different) and that I believed that the Edge of the Mists was actually a test by ArenaNet to see if they could develop and implement their own version, with PvE and WvW to follow if it was a success.

To me, it seems like they're moving more towards the design of Guild Wars 1, which has worked well for a decade and tbh, I was surprised that, for GW2, they went the route of the multiple server design and pop-capped map instancing.  It just seemed like they were taking several steps backwards, considering the modern technologies available to them.  I dunno, maybe these unified persistent world techs weren't available when they first developed the server architecture for GW2.

Anyway, I think it will all work out well and that we'll find these new changes to be beneficial for large scale events, and even for the RP'ers.

I think it's still quite a bit early to speculate: they haven't made available the structure of the changes they intend on making happen.  I think with the shard selection for zones that this won't be that big of a deal to get guilds together for events.  The server charity that Fog mentioned will surely take a hit to the face as there will likely be a lot of non-Rallians in the individual zones.  We could look at this from a different view, however, and that is one that we open our arms to an even bigger community.  I'm not sure if any of this will flow into the WvW so I can't really comment on that: I'm not sure how they would manage to change whats already there into a megaserver of sorts because you have to create a team out of whats existing.  I guess they could match weaker servers with stronger ones (possibly by using the ranking at the end of the tournament).

Overall I'm taking a wait and see approach to this.  Anything is subject to change and our views can only be based on what is existing currently in the game.  Hopefully so many changes at once doesn't negatively impact the game too badly.

Fog, I sincerly hope that Colin actually takes the time to read your post on his forum regarding this disaster.  You and the other leaders of the guild have worked very hard to establish an Esprit de Corps on our server and now with out much thought Colin has managed to throw that all into kaos.  If they have already made the announcement I doubt that there is little that we can do at this point in time.  As always I will respect and follow whatever your wishes are regarding SOR. If they continue along the lines they have indicated it will be no longer be the place where a sense of pride means something. A server that we are proud to call our own, for it wont be our own after all.  Do you need us to write letters to Arena Net and express our feelings on this upcoming change? I doubt there is little that can be done at this point in time, but it would seem there is little support for this "MegaServer concept" among the GW2 community after reading the posts on the forums in GW2.

Caitlin

I couldn't find your post Fog, but i agree this is very disconcerting in terms of how i personally feel about this.

When Jessica first told me about it, i was like "wow that's awesome!"  but then i was reminded about the various Events that this family has put a lot of hard work and countless hours into -as well as the SoR community and it's amazing people, and then my heart sank.

I am sure there are other large-scale Guilds, and Communities across all the other servers that are probably feeling uneasy about this.

All i can think about is that night where Fog and his merry band of elders spent a great deal of time helping out those people stuck in over-flows during a GtA event, and i felt for you guys, because to me it looked like a large community was being bogged down and limited by technology.

I can't even begin to imagine how this change in technology is going to affect things,  and all i can do is pray that things won't go negatively.

I just want to voice my opinion here, since I no longer post on the official GW2 forums and effectively ended my long run with Guild Wars 2.

This is a change that is quite unexpected in terms of what they previously stated. I was originally on Anvil Rock and we suffered massive player hiatus and transfers which effectively killed our PvE zones and most of our competive WvW. There were questions and fears that individual server population was starting to dwindle on many servers, leaving top tier servers to pick up the slack.

This was stated to be false by ArenaNet employees and thus all fears were dismissed by the staff, stating all servers had a healthy population. As you can see now, this was a series of bloated statements from ArenaNet yet again.

I read through many of the posts, and yes for many of the players on small servers (AR, Devonas, etc.) this will be a great change for them since most are running with extremely small guilds and/or no community that holds value.

On the other side you see communities such as ours, Gaiscioch, which holds many players and also has many friendships outside of Gaiscioch. Now this community becomes "compartmentalized" due to the transition to this new system. This completely creates chaos for large organization. You also have to note that forming Guilds will be much harder, especially if said Guild has a WvW focus.

I have always been of the notion that if the game itself cannot support a system within the game without means of outside entities, then said system is not a solid system. Almost like how the Guild Wars lore/story has gone, with many portions being explained outside of the game, creating confusion and dropped plots.

Tring to form a WvW team within a a town or area will now become more sporatic due to many players from different servers.

Another thing to note here, is the 2nd large feature in this "Patch" that is hurting the overall idenity of Role Players. First they introduced the merge of the "wardrobe" which many RP'ers stated would hamper their authenticity, and now the overall effectiveness of community organization.

And yes Fog is right in the sense of termoil starting in central locations about WvW. I can recall many instances where players would physically travel to our server just to cause commotion. This will happen.

I also agree that this is another move towards merging many of the worlds that was feared over a year ago. With ArenaNets release of "Edge of the Mists" I feared it would hamper the motivation for true World versus World, which did infact effect some servers. I wouldn't rule out that it could be possible to see a similiar system taking hold of the traditional WvW, especially due to the Collaborative Development Initiative (CDI) that was specifically for EotM and what could be brought from there to traditional WvW.

In closing, I feel this large "feature" patch is nothing more than a series of "fixes" that was lacking from the start, which many of us stated "long" before it would creat problems. I tried to be vocal and provide the best opinions and feedback I could, but was pushed into a corner and eventurally badgered by a few devs (whose names I will not mention here). I think it's a shame in the direction the game is going.

Respectfully,

Daniel L. Rose (Antara.3189 in GW2, @Whitetailusa in ESO)

I have to leave for work so I will make this quick. I didn't get the chance to know Old Roar but I was so impressed with how you guys and gals came together to have a server created in his name. I am so proud to be a part of GSCH and the Sanctum of Rall server. This does not have to end because of the Megaserver. This SOR server isn't just a piece of hardware made of metal and wires. It is a spirit that we take with us no matter where we are playing. I think it is a good thing that we can now open our arms and share this with more people. People that may be on servers with low populations.

I know that it will make large events more challenging so I suggest that starting with GTA tonight we don't remove people from SORC. The Megaserver will start with the 1-15 zones so announce a new waypoint in a higher zone to meet at after April 15th. We have time to fill SORC with SOR people for future GTA events. I am going to start sharing the sanctumofrall.com website and try to get more people to sign up there as the main source of communications since we will be losing a dedicated server chat.

The Megaserver will be a challenge but let's face it head on with a positive attitude like Rallians should!

@Neoyoshi

page 8 about 1/3 down.

I'm with Ben on this one, while I don't really play GW2, this is really crappy change.  It could probably work on a system that already was divided into factions, but GW2 chose to not have factions and that will be a issue for people.

I really don't know what to make of it - one hand was attempting to clap but the other hand was busy doing a face palm.

I'm not sure if this can be stopped even if we wanted to... they usually don't make such a sweeping announcement without the full intent of launching the plan.  

As I feared, this patch has essentially killed any hope of having a viable PvE Great Tyrian Adventure. If you don't believe me I dare you to try to coordinate a Tequatl, Worm, or Guild Missions run with 100+ people right now. I'll see you with a full head of gray hair in no time. This is far worse than I could have ever expected.

Guild pairing doesn't do anything at all. We ended up in 6 different maps last night. All inside the same guild. Guild Missions are like seagulls on the beach. Getting everyone credit now is completely impossible now that every guild in the world is fighting for who can start the event fastest. This is a sad sad patch.

The two most noticeable problems for me about SoR has been GSCH playing mostly ESO instead, and guilds transferring to other servers where they won't be grossly out-numbered 24/7 in WvW.  

Just the other night while running with another guild on TS ( because GSCH was either doing a dungeon or playing ESO), two people were talking about how they're waiting for SoR to drop down a couple more tiers, so server transfers will be free instead of all their members having to farm a couple hundred gold.  Wish I had checked TS to see which guild/s the two were in, but there were only a couple of us GSCH in WvW, and I know it wasn't us talking.  

It pains me to see SoR as a possible sinking ship, where some are bailing to other servers and others are jumping into another game entirely.  My dilemma is that I won't pay a subscription fee to play online, so the death of SoR likely means the death of GSCH for me.  That SUCKS!  I'm a die-hard GSCH loyalist.  Hopefully things turn around for SoR.  Sucks that ESO is p2p.  :(

I agree that running a big event is much more difficult than before, I was with us during the guild mission run on Thursday evening. But honestly, I will gladly accept that inconvenience to have more people to complete events with when we are not running server/guild events.  Honestly, those events make up the minority of my playtime the changes have hugely improved the majority of my playtime.  I was not even bothering to log in because of the lack of people in the open world.  There was no PvE server pride that I ever saw outside of the community events.

Hopefully they will make improvements to the guild missions/big event organizing system, but I really hope they do not remove the megaserver.

I've had more RP opportunity and more grouping opportunity since the megaserver took place.

Dealing with trolls during rp, ignore them.  Do your RP no matter what they do or say.  They start getting rude or nasty, report them.

From what I see, ESO is wiping out more of the GW2 play than the megaserver.  Same thing happened to Rift when GW2 came out.  However, people still play Rift and GW2 despite what the new thing is.  People play what they want when they want.

Fog, it's been more than a month, what is the end result to date of this megaserver to the way people play? 

Well Great Tyrian Adventure is no more. There's just no way to run a 100+ person event anymore without wasting hours on getting people to the right map. Just running 50 person events takes twice as long as it used too. Community Events suffer dramatically. Additionally recruiting guilds to SOR has become a whole lot harder because our PvE side used to be the draw. Now people don't have to come here to play with us. So WvW suffers accordingly.

A shift in focus is in order.  Since community based PVE is no longer a viable option to draw guilds and individuals to SoR.  Let community based WvW be the primary draw.  If marketed properly SoR can be the "Rocky" of servers, and once again be the champion who fights with the heart of a lion and the old roar of Rall.

For one.  For all.  For Sanctum of Rall.

GSCH doesn't advertise for the sake of recruitment, that's fine, but SoR can.  Current perception of SoR is everything in terms of its survival, and we have to power to change it.  So let's be the impetus for change.  Let's start a new online GW2 campaign that showcases SoR and all of the active guilds in it.  Let's continue to build a server culture of inclusion and co-operation that results in EPIC WvW dominance and fun.

Also, for those feeling down about SoR in WvW currently...

If Budha can't go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Budha.

So you run a huge event and people are on different maps.  Send a commander to each of the maps and have the rest of the squad follow suit.  Once there, do the event on that map.  You aren't all on the same map, but you are all in Voice and in the same event.

Sylvan have you tried that idea with random people before. Doesn't work as well as you think it would.