Megaserver - The Verdict : GW2

An interesting thing happened on Yak's Bend yesterday. The King Over The Water came back. Or maybe it was Arthur, returning at our time of greatest need (except that was last week, so if so he's late...).

Yak's Bend did far better in WvW's Season One than most people expected, even most people on Yak's Bend. It was a team effort, of course, but much of the credit went to a handful of commanders, one of whom, already popular and well-known, pretty much wrote his own legend during those weeks. He may not have been Space Famous but he was as World Famous as you can be on a GW2 World.

After the party came the months-long hangover. A lot of people drifted away. A couple of big guilds upped camp and moved worlds. Our superstar commander hung around for a while then just vanished. It seemed no-one knew where he'd gone or if he'd be back, not even his guild.

Gone he was but very much not forgotten. As Season Two drew nearer there was much speculation. Surely he'd return? Every day in WvW people would be asking about him. I asked about him. No-one knew anything. The Tourney began and there was no sign of him. Weeks passed. We won. We lost. Other commanders stepped up. The war machine rolled on. Still, now and again, his name would be invoked.

Then, with no fanfare or warning, yesterday there he was. I got home from work and I'd hardly got my coat off before Mrs Bhagpuss said "Guess who's back!". He was my second guess, after our missing guildmate. Apparently word had spread so fast and wide that people were logging into GW2 from work just to say "welcome back". When I got on and went to WvW his name was all over map and team.

He wasn't online right then but even without him other commanders were leading while acknowledging tactics they were using as ones they'd borrowed from him. When he did appear later in the evening, while we were cataing Northern Shiverpeaks' inner garrison, I felt sufficiently moved to welcome him back personally even though he has no idea who I am.

In GW2, since the coming of the Megaserver, this is something that could only happen in WvW. Why? Because under the Megaserver the rest of Tyria has become the place where not only does no-one know your name, no-one knows anybody's name.

Ravious gave his impressions of the megaserver earlier this week. Broadly he seems in favor although his wife very much is not. Jeromai offers a much more critical view and it's his analysis with which I find myself in sympathy. I have tried to be open-minded and positive about this huge change and there are some good things that can be said about it, but the more I see, the less I find to like.

As I've been playing this week I've been making a list of Megaserver pros and cons:

Pro

• Cities bustle and buzz the way cities should

• I've seen more roleplaying in cities in a week than in the previous year and a half

• More events run in general, infrequently-seen events run more often and more group events can be completed 

• Very unpopular maps with no desirable large events now feel moderately well-attended

Con

• Load times for most maps are much longer. For busy maps they measure in minutes not seconds.

• Map chat has degenerated appallingly. Maybe we were lucky on Yak's Bend but open channel conversation used to be mostly polite, intelligent and respectful. Now it's an earsore that needs to be switched off after a few seconds in most maps.

• Wilderness areas feel like crowded city parks.The attractive xp bonuses for hunting and exploring in out-of-the-way places has become elusive in the extreme.

• All major events with desirable rewards are massively over-attended. Any previously required tactics or gameplay no longer exist. Every "fight" is an 80-strong zerg and lasts seconds. Scaling cannot compete. The only factor slowing these events down is massive lag. I was getting 3FPS at Jormag last night, for example. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose computer has begun to complain if there are more than 50 other players on screen, can't attend some of the big events any more without suffering screen freezes. 

• Genuine lower levels and even some downleveled 80s struggle to get credit for most stages of a large event because they either can't do enough damage or the stages finish so fast.

•  According to most reports, although I haven't attended one to see for myself, the more complex events like Tequatl and Three Headed Wurm, always hard, are now barely possible at all.

•  Community  as a concept and communities as entities have been destroyed. Jeromai's post linked above covers this extremely well. The overall effect has been as if the earliest version of WoW's Dungeon Finder had been applied to an entire MMO. Everyone is a stranger, all sense of responsibility or fear of consequence has been removed.

So, a lot more Cons than Pros. Even so, some of the positives are worthwhile and the worst of the negatives could be mitigated if most of what ArenaNet had claimed about how the Megaserver works had turned out to be true. It didn't.


"The megaserver system is a weighted load balancer for players. It aggregates data about you, like your party, guild, language, home world, and the map copy where people you like to play with can be found. Using this data, it ranks all possible versions of a given map by attributing a score to each. You’re placed in the map with the highest score, which is the one with which you have the most affinity." Source

That's the high-falutin' claim and it's nonsense. Either it's just PR guff or whatever algorithms they're using simply don't work. In my experience so far, many hours on many maps at many different times of day, not only does the system not place me with people I recognize from my home world, it can't even place me in the same map as someone I'm grouped with if we cross from one map to another. It just doesn't work.

I question whether there really is a "Megaserver" at all in any meaningful sense. This seems to me more like a clever smoke-and-mirrors rebranding of the existing Overflow technology. We're all just being pushed onto overflow servers far more frequently than before and the experience is just what you'd expect.



Using "Megaserver" to describe this effect is highly misleading. It's a term that brings to mind something like the single shard universe of EVE Online. I'm personally a big advocate of individual servers for MMOs but if we are moving to a future where all players must share a single common game-space then it has to be done the way EVE does it, with meaningful repercussions and consequences and with everyone genuinely in the same space. It has to be done in such a way that someone like the Commander I began this post by talking about would become more Space Famous as a result, not more anonymous. 

The upshot is that, post-megaserver, GW2 is a chaotic mess.

If you're pottering around on your own leveling up it's arguably better than it was, although I'm doing exactly that and my argument would be that even then it's at best a neutral change. Most events were always soloable and most events are more fun from a narrative and role-playing perspective when soloed. Other people around very definitely make them easier but they don't often make them more entertaining. 

If you love to run in a huge zerg, waypointing from event to event to autoattack something you can't clearly see, at single-figure fps rates, for thirty seconds before clicking "Loot All" and moving on to rinse and repeat, all the while chortling at sexual innuendo and scatological puns then this is probably the best update GW2 has ever had.

If you're anyone other than a leveller who hates to solo or a dedicated zerger with an adolescent sense of humor, however, there's not much good to say about any of it. My only hope is that the old ANet iterative process (if they still have that going on) might eventually come to shape the "Megaserver" into something resembling what we were promised. Some hope.