These are the commandments of Dwaynacommit these sins and be sure to forever keep Abaddon company:

1. Be a squadleader and keep a full squad in LFG.
2. Be a squadleader, know your squad is full, and write 'full' in the description, instead of making ammends for the first sin.
3. Be a dev and strip people of the power to get off dead/empty maps.
4. Be a dev and do not allow free travel between instances.

In all seriousness, megaservers, and the constant spamming to get into almost full maps is just plain unforgivable.These problems have been around for aeons, and while they have their peaks and calm times, events like the Pavillion just show how bad the system is, really.If you have time to make silly amphibian goblins, or cactus goblins, you have time to fix the megaservers and LFG.

we've been shouting these problems for ever since the megaservers came out

What's the hold up!? !?

Okay.. I can rant all day without offering solutions, but that will not help anyone.So these are things that need to be added to avoid future grievances:

1. Identify the map your on. And allow a person to switch to another existing map.
2. Add a queue on instance traveling. No more spamming "join instance" with the chance someone else cuts the queue.
3. Remove squads from LFG when the map is full, and make it impossible to post squads/parties when you're on full maps.
4. Make it a reportable offense (for the time #3 isn't added) to report squad leaders for having squads with the tag "full" in the description, because from my point of view, that is LFG abuse. (the point of adding groups to LFG is to create an opening to play together, making a post knowlingly to a full map defeats the purpose of playing together).

Being on a dead map, and being unable to get off it due to a lack of taxis is badSeeing 30 squads on LFG, which you have to filter through one by one to find out which one (if any) doesn't lead to a full instance is bad

Apologies for the salt, no one likes salt, but I want to see the game improve as much as you do, and stuff like dead maps and dead LFG is just a BIG thorn in the way of that progress

As a long-time player, I have also noticed these issues, and think that solving them would improve quality of play for those players who run into them a lot.

As a long-time GW2 cynic, I expect, were this thread to see a dev response, it would be along the lines of, "Yeah, we've looked into these issues, but changing the way the systems work would require starting from the ground up, and would be too much work."

so, youd rather commis constantly monitored the number of people in the map and lfged and unlfged every single time someone left and joined a previously full map?its that, the current state, or people not being allowed into maps that wer once full becasue

@"Ayakaru.6583" said:These are the commandments of Dwaynacommit these sins and be sure to forever keep Abaddon company:

1. Be a squadleader and keep a full squad in LFG.
2. Be a squadleader, know your squad is full, and write 'full' in the description, instead of making ammends for the first sin.....
3. Make it a reportable offense (for the time #3 isn't added) to report squad leaders for having squads with the tag "full" in the description, because from my point of view, that is LFG abuse. (the point of adding groups to LFG is to create an opening to play together, making a post knowlingly to a full map defeats the purpose of playing together).

if you did make it a reportable offense (im assuming here that you meant to write that it should be a reportable offense, and not that re;portting it should be reportable) then either you're restricting people by threatening commis until they no longer lfg maps. wouldnt that be fun, youre comming a meta and suddenly youre banned because the map became full and you wanted to give people the chance to join if someone left, becasue, fun fact, even on maps like ab not 100% of the people are there for the meta and some of them will leave over time. so yes, lets get rid of the ability for people to squeeze into a map, thats great, good qol feature.And you want to know something REALLLLY good. you're wasting the time it took me to write this for no good reason. you dont want lfgs that say full? you type '-full' in the searchbar, and it filters it out, so stop being so melodramatic about people being given the chance to hop into a recenty vacated spot.

edit: i wrote teh instead of the like 10 times

OP, please clarify your post...when is this a problem? Sometimes I like being on empty maps, at least until it boots me to the next available instance...or are you specifically referring to maps that have map-wide and/or meta-events that people might want to group up to complete?

@"Ayakaru.6583" said:

1. Be a squadleader and keep a full squad in LFG.
2. Be a squadleader, know your squad is full, and write 'full' in the description, instead of making ammends for the first sin.

While I tend to agree as a whole that it is frustrating to join group after group and find they are all full, I have found that those who amend their message to "Full" while including the IP can save me the time from checking the other groups with the same listed IP. Of course this wouldn't be an issue if they'd all been taken down when full to begin with~ I rarely lead maps, but I will sometimes add a "May be full" notification to my LFG messages when I see players leave the group before entering the map without telling us.

I would love love love to be able to choose the instance. Most often to find a populated map of course, but there are times when I would prefer to choose a quiet less populated instance as well. Especially if I'm there for dailies or if I'm doing a JP for the first time and don't want others to spoil it and/or see me fail miserably.

Wouldn't it be easier to be able to jut switch instances if another was open and not full? Why can't we have that feature? We have one that boots you, why not one that boots you into an event?

As a regular commander, no. I'm going to keep my squad in the LFG, whether you want me to or not. I'll explain why.

First, you can't put a full squad into the LFG. Once you hit 50 players, that's it. You're talking about full maps. Now, the issue with putting an LFG up into a full map is that there is no way of knowing if our map is full. I've had people loiter in squad but out of instance, because they'd rather join and taxi later than to taxi now and do whatever. Having a bunch of players standing around in squad isn't an indicator. If we're lucky, a couple of them will attempt to join, and then once they get the "map is full" message, they'll tell us. They rarely tell us. We can be sitting around for half an hour with 15 people outside of the shard, with none of them saying anything.

Even after all of that, we'll still keep our postings in the LFG for a couple of reasons. First, if it is a multi-commander event, having each commander put their squad in the LFG makes it easy to keep track of the number of players in each squad. Second, players leave and disconnect all the time. Just because the map was full now doesn't mean it is full 5 minutes later.. We'll keep the LFGs up in case people want to continue to try and squeeze into the map. Third, just because our map is full doesn't mean that a second map is going to fill. We get this flak all the time, but our LFGs being up isn't always responsible for your instance not filling. Usually, the people who are trying to get in to our map are already standing around in your map.

I'm afraid I have to agree here. The entire process of joining an active meta map should be obvious and transparent. Making this the player's problem hurts map-wide metas, still one of the best (for me the best) distinguishing features of GW2. Never mind that many new players aren't aware of LFG or its use, don't know how to squad up or even change instance.

@"Ayakaru.6583" said:

2. Add a queue on instance traveling. No more spamming "join instance" with the chance someone else cuts the queue.

I've been wanting this for ages, never understood why this isn't a thing. We have queues for WvW so why not for instances? (unless maybe there's some technical reason)

It would also be nice if when a comm forms a squad it automatically put the comm in a separate group, or gave them an icon in the squad menu so we could easily see which instance to join. It annoys the hell out of me the amount of comms that can't be bothered to put themselves in a group 2 to show which instance to join. As does comms leaving full lfgs up without any indication the map is full, it doesn't take long to update the description to 'full/maybe full'. I still wish there was a colour indicator on the lfg that put a red dot on listings where instances are near the player cap, so people can tell at a glance if they're likely to get in.

I'd like them to add a queue too. With a count so you can see how many people are ahead of you in the queue similar to what you get when you're trying to join WvW maps.

That way you know whether or not you're likely to get in in time for whatever event you're joining for and don't have to spam "join in instance" in the hopes that you'll be lucky.

@"Zaklex.6308" said:OP, please clarify your post...when is this a problem? Sometimes I like being on empty maps, at least until it boots me to the next available instance...or are you specifically referring to maps that have map-wide and/or meta-events that people might want to group up to complete?I think he mostly refers to the current events in the Crown Pavilion. There are a lot of groups in LFG and since the "mini-meta" requires something like 5 comms with few members each, it's really hard to say if the comm is in a full map (that's why some of them writes it in the description), so I also keep joining -> try to switch map -> map is full -> leave party -> try to join another group.

But in general there is also some old problem with the megaserver. For example when you join a Maguuma map with a meta running and you ask "is this a meta map?". You don't know it when you join. Maybe there are only 50 people doing the meta and the rest is looking for HP, and you have another map with other 50 ppl on the meta. It's a pity, because you have enough ppl for 1 meta, but they are spread on several maps, so they fail.I don't know how to solve it though, other than giving us the choice to select the instance (possibly naming them according to the content).

@Goettel.4389 said:I'm afraid I have to agree here. The entire process of joining an active meta map should be obvious and transparent. Making this the player's problem hurts map-wide metas, still one of the best (for me the best) distinguishing features of GW2. Never mind that many new players aren't aware of LFG or its use, don't know how to squad up or even change instance.

This would become easy to exploit though. Excrpt for just those boss metas, you could just go through instances and kill the same boss champ/do the same event over and over.

At least with lfg it requires some effort and interaction with others.

3. Removing lfg when map is full is BS, do you want squads having to repost every time a map spot opens?
4. yeah, well, no... You are an adult person I suppose, you can find out if the map is truly full if you mistrust the information. We don't need snitch culture in this game.

The other points seem mostly reasonable.

I too would like to see some kind of improvement to make the process getting into the map you want more transparent and simplified. The one that usually gets me frustrated is Chak Gherent. I'll see a few people taxi-ing in LFG, usually for different lanes in the same IP. I join their squad only to find out the map is full. I let them know in squad chat that their map is full. I spam the "join in tangled depths" option but keep getting map full errors. Finally I give up. Sometimes I try to organize the event in the map I'm in, but that rarely works out well.

@"Goettel.4389" said:I'm afraid I have to agree here. The entire process of joining an active meta map should be obvious and transparent. Making this the player's problem hurts map-wide metas, still one of the best (for me the best) distinguishing features of GW2. Never mind that many new players aren't aware of LFG or its use, don't know how to squad up or even change instance.

Except it already does most of this by virtue of there being only a few instances suddenly seeing an huge influx of players. But the bigger problem is contention from players themselves. A long standing issue with organizing a meta, is the fact that other players probably won't cooperate if they're already on the map and have no interest in the event. In fact, the softcap is there to allow squads to deal this problem directly..... but its still up to the squad to be willing to switch to the least populated map to get all their people in (which something the PUG squads are too risk adverse to do, unless the Commanders are willing to deal with the headache... most of which aren't).

Granted the game needs more community education then normal, but I've noticed a strong trend in the problem players always being the most stubborn in the argument. I'm also bothered by the fact that people complain about a lack of tutorial, when most players tend to dismiss anything non-combat related early on. The information is usually offered, but players don't want to explore until much later.... so how to do you reintroduce it later when you have no control over their behaviors or motivations?

Anyway.... back to map mechanics. If the game purposely condensed players more often, players would complain about being kicked off maps and have the meta reset on the new map. Let the system keep maps alive for some time, and we have this problem where 3 or 4 instances can be up, and rando players want an "active Map", but using a primary/overflow priority system causes players to have 1 map filled, and "overflow maps" that no one wants to be a part of.

That was a constantly complained occurrence about before Mega servers; and it being problem hinges entirely on there only being 1.6 map queues worth of population between them. Spread out evenly, and its entirely possible for both maps successfully do the meta. But players are lazy and greedly. So they'd rather stack a map on the assumption of an easy win, rather then put in a minimum of effort to cooperate on an overflow map to make it succeed. I've seen many simply give up and not participate, or stand around and spam join to get on "the good map". It also doesn't help they always show up 5 minutes before the meta starts; leaving no time to properly organize the map.

Before the Metas became "routine", people would put the effort into organizing a map. Now that we're in lazy mode and only showing up for the rewards, its come to not being able to find people to do simple, yet important roles in a Meta to ensure success. Octovine is almost insulting now in how many people won't go to the harder lanes, won't help clear the breacher or frogs (when literally all it takes in dumping damage and CCs), how hard it is to find people who will do the Armor jobs, and more then few who don't even help with slime mechanics and just stand around until theres a burn phase. And then theres the people who won't even pay attention to map chat, and set off burn phases that could throw off the whole event.

Even if you could reliably fill a map, theres still the issue of people who are no longer willing to cooperate for the benefit of the map. While normally you could chalk this up to ignorance, these events occur regularly enough that if you're following the meta schedule, none of these things should unfamiliar to them. More importantly, this gets brought up very regularly in map chat, forums, and other places whenever world boss conversations are brought up. You'd have to purposely ignore a lot of chat/information to not come across at least by accident.

@starlinvf.1358 You describe the problem perfectly: expecting a random group of gamers to somehow 'get their act together' to juggle a half-broken system (which it most definitely is). This needs a technical solution, not a sociological analysis.