GW2 going to China

[Gray_Matter]

You have said some really silly things in the past, but thinking that GW2 has 3.5 million active players takes the cake.

Anyone can connect and play at any time. If people who have bought the game only play on average for 1 month (which is unlikely), there would be 450k active players. It's absurd for someone to say that there are only 100k active players. GW2 is in all likelihood selling more than that every month. Personally, about 40% of the people I know who bought the game at launch are still playing. One of the players recently started playing again. Of course all 3.5 million who bought the game are not still playing but to say that 100k people are playing is equally absurd.

[Valeron]

The problem is people actually paying attention to infiniteretro.

Please stay on topic. Infracted. -Edge

[InfiniteRetro]

The problem is people actually paying attention to infiniteretro.

yes because if we paid attention to all the white knighting gw2 folks around the place we'd believe every copy sold has a player online every night, that everything in gw2 was a brand new innovation and that somehow gw2 has completely changed the face of mmo gaming AND had many upcoming mmos change to mimic the style LOL

face the facts, read the OFFICIAL forums, not places like this if you want to actually see the truth about crap. sub-forums like this are here to entertain that SMALL minority of mmo gamers who need their own space to cry about why they're game is being victimised. game is dying, hence why people are asking, on the OFFICIAL FORUMS, to merge servers, that most zones are dead except for Lions Arch and whatever favourite botting zone is currently available.

lol people blaming me because I quote on truth, then I get my ass banned because people cant handle it and consider it trolling.

funny how theres no Final Fantasy 14, The Elder Scrolls Online sub forums yet, yet apparently gw2 still needs its ass being entertained.

You get banned because you are trolling, there's a difference. And in quick response, if FFXIV or ESO can maintain active threads for a long period of time, they may get a forum just as SWTOR, GW2, LoL and D3 did. Infracted. -Edge

[Karizee]

Oh dear, it's back.

http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1148704

[Gray_Matter]

face the facts, read the OFFICIAL forums, not places like this if you want to actually see the truth about crap. sub-forums like this are here to entertain that SMALL minority of mmo gamers who need their own space to cry about why they're game is being victimised. game is dying, hence why people are asking, on the OFFICIAL FORUMS, to merge servers, that most zones are dead except for Lions Arch and whatever favourite botting zone is currently available.

lol people blaming me because I quote on truth, then I get my ass banned because people cant handle it and consider it trolling.

I am sorry but you are trolling. I have spent the last 2 weeks in the US for training and I have been playing on my home server (European) at some really odd hours. At no time have I been in a zone that is dead. Not once, regardless of the time. I have played in WvW and in a whole lot of different zones and I have not been playing on my own, not once. Any chest event has had at least 10-20 people doing it. This is at 4am-5am in the morning European time. At popular times, I can't even get into some zones but end up in overflow. The last time I saw a botter was about a month ago and I reported him/her. I have seen a lot more posts on other official forums about merging servers than I have on any office GW2 forum.

You don't play the game, you spout your drivel without any substance and then you expect us all to believe you and if we disagree then we are "white knighting gw2 folks". Well, I have news for you, no one is forcing you to look at this or any GW2 sites. If you don't like the game (which you obviously don't) then why bother with it? The only answer is that you are trolling. Well, welcome to my ignore list.

[Valeron]

Nice I get an infraction. I have no regrets

[Zeek Daniels]

@infiniteretro

You know that all forums no matter were you go are the minority. Some are bigger than others but even the official forums is a small minority of players compared to the whole. Also theres no way the game needs server merges. Lower level zones may be sparsely populated but zones with chest events, and end game farming zones always have alot of players running around. If you close servers not only is it going to effect WvW but also gonna over crowd farming zones and chest events. We all saw how a recent change to the way dragon chests rewarded players increased activity so much that players were getting pushed into overflows. They had to change it again so players did not feel they needed to do every chest every day on every character.

[Kelesti]

@infiniteretro

You know that all forums no matter were you go are the minority. Some are bigger than others but even the official forums is a small minority of players compared to the whole. Also theres no way the game needs server merges. Lower level zones may be sparsely populated but zones with chest events, and end game farming zones always have alot of players running around. If you close servers not only is it going to effect WvW but also gonna over crowd farming zones and chest events. We all saw how a recent change to the way dragon chests rewarded players increased activity so much that players were getting pushed into overflows. They had to change it again so players did not feel they needed to do every chest every day on every character.

A few points to add to this discussion:

Yes, forums are the minority. But as a minority that actually speaks, you can follow trends through them. A much more valuable statistic than people who silently play, silently play, and then drop off the face of the earth without so much of a whisper with no reason why. This happens a lot more than anyone on forums ever do, so when the "minority" starts speaking up en masse, despite being a minority, it often warrants looking into how hard it can/does affect everyone else regardless.


But your logic of "Dragon chests are fine so it's okay if the rest of the server is dead so long as the dragon chests are crowded" is pretty shitty to be quite honest. Pushing people into overflow for those works because that's why there's an overflow to begin with. But for the other 89% of the time that a person's logged in and running around, having empty zone after empty zone after empty zone is pretty lame. Yes, I could and often did fight my way from one end of Orr to the other, but when seeing so few people outside of the three-even-farm circle it's not really feeling like an MMO anymore, and almost less of a co-op game than even GW1 was.


The game needs to feel alive. Not just sitting in LA waiting on dragon timers. And if server merges push people into overflows on Dragon Timers? [sarcasm]Oh no, gods forbid the game use a feature it designed to handle large groups of players in one area[/sarcasm]

[Karizee]

Popular events will always have a higher concentration of players than less popular events, whether due to difficulty of the event or value of loot or ease of access.

You will never see players evenly carpeting maps throughout all levels like so many trees dotted throughout a landscape - just ain't gonna happen, not in any game.

(what's this have to do with China?)

[Rhywolver]

Kelesti you have a point here. With all that Dragontimer stuff, the game feels like a Jet-Set party sometimes.
Kill Dragon -> Hop into next zone.

On the other hand server merging isn't the answer. Some events / zones will always be more attractive than others, no matter how many Chests / Daily rewards / Guild Bounties you put in.

[Valeron]

they can't really do server mergers

and as far as it not feeling like an mmo? well I'd argue that most "mmos" don't feel like an mmo

[Kelimbror]

they can't really do server mergers

Why not?

and as far as it not feeling like an mmo? well I'd argue that most "mmos" don't feel like an mmo

Agree, but unlike most people here I don't have a problem with it. However, in GW2 it's alarming because of the need to have bodies around to accomplish certain things. I've been level 80 for one week on my Ranger. Do you know how many larger events I've accomplished in max level zones? One. Just Jormag, while I was guesting on someone else's server.

All the other events failed because there weren't enough people and the game doesn't equip me to solo things of that nature. It doesn't bother me in the slightest (yet) because I'm having fun just doing my own thing, but at some point my continued play in the game is reliant on others. At that point I expect I will become disenchanted with my activities. Already the dungeon situation (especially coming into it so late) is pretty crummy. I don't expect I'll do one unless I find an active guild and really push to be a part of that circle, which I have no desire to really do.

Part of it is the design of the game, since you can be anywhere and do everything...that's what people playing do. Another I'm sure is that the game has less staying power since there's no demanded progression and many people have been rocking their legendary and all exotics since the first month the game came out. A lot of those people don't have a need to play until content patches, devour it, then leave for some more time.

It's a great design for the players, but they have to back it up with design and tools to enable anyone left to still enjoy the game without everyone else.

[rhandric]

Why not?

WvW, for starters...which, to be honest, is the only reason there need to be discrete servers. What they could (and perhaps should) do is have everyone have a home server, which literally only applies to WvW, and the PvE world is universal. I'm sure there are issues that would need to be worked out with that design, but for 10 seconds of thinking, that's what I've come up with

[Kelimbror]

WvW, for starters...which, to be honest, is the only reason there need to be discrete servers. What they could (and perhaps should) do is have everyone have a home server, which literally only applies to WvW, and the PvE world is universal. I'm sure there are issues that would need to be worked out with that design, but for 10 seconds of thinking, that's what I've come up with

It would be a good solution and I don't think it would be that tricky since it would work like overflow. You fill up one, then fill up two, then three, etc. And WvW is jazzy and all, but you could server hop like a madman before it was cemented, merging servers isn't going to ruin the world. They have numbers to know what servers could be merged appropriately. They wouldn't draw names out of a hat or anything.

Seems like it would be more important to solidify the longevity of the game in the face of less people than to put their heads in the sand and hope it gets better when patch x.x comes out. Utilizing overflow priority programming to fill all servers would work regardless of how many people were playing. Some would still need to be held in overflow to prevent any awkward 1 person servers for a few minutes.

[rhandric]

Well, you'd also have to figure out a way to minimize any community fragmentation. While I personally don't pay much attention to the community outside my guild, it's possible that people on some servers actually have some form of community outside, or between, guilds. So if groups X and Y are used to playing together, and then the servers merge and you get overflows separating the groups, it could be annoying. One thought would be to make overflows be home server dependent, such that in a fully overflow-filled set it ends up the same as it currently is, while in less populated areas it becomes a single server, similar to WoW's CRZ.

[Kelimbror]

Well, you'd also have to figure out a way to minimize any community fragmentation.

That part is easy, just using guesting as a basis for their system capabilities. Move guesting to be passive features for guilds unless overidden by actual guesting would solve that problem. It would mean that some form of reserve must be held at all times on each server, but that's not an impossible thing to ask in such a system.

That's just throwing out ideas to piggyback on yours, but there's certainly plenty of solutions they could go after as opposed to using the WoW approach and ignore the problem for 7 years and then implement a feature that makes people angry after all this time and tell them 'tough luck, it should have been like this the whole time, but we're lazy'.

[Valeron]

Why not?

rhandric pretty much covered it but WvW is really the problem. If not for how they set that up I imagine they would have had the game as a single server with different districts like in GW1.

Edit: as far as the mmorpg thing goes, way too many of them nowadays are themeparks that just guide you into one certain direction, whether through leveling or finally at the end when it changes focus for raid/dungeon/gear grinding. They are not online worlds to live and play in. Personally that is what I'm looking for in an mmo, a sandbox game that allows me and a million of my closest friends to live and shape in an online world. When I first heard about ESO I thought that's what they might do, but it really looks like a typical themepark. Wildstar definitely is a themepark in the mold of wow/eq. I've pretty much given up on mmos except for playing a bit in GW2 a few times a week until that game I'd like appears.

[Kelimbror]

rhandric pretty much covered it but WvW is really the problem. If not for how they set that up I imagine they would have had the game as a single server with different districts like in GW1.

It's just not a very compelling reason why they won't change it to prevent more negatives as time goes on. Especially since there are solutions for that, like having a home world just for WvW, but not for anything else. And then all that other stuff we talked about.

Seems like they have some decent tech, but aren't putting it to very good use. Time will tell though. Normally these things don't magically get better on their own though. I know from playing what a less than robust PvE side of things looks like. Though we seem to always be winning WvW, so that's probably where all the players are..idk.

[Edge-]

And we've strayed off topic. Let's keep discussion on GW2 releasing in China and all that jazz.

[Valeron]

then just close the thread if you want to do that, there is nothing to discuss