If the Guild Hall new instance business doesn't get fixed with PoF I'm gonna SCREAM

I WILL SCREAM.

Want to explain for those of us not living in your head?

I mean it's pretty obvious for anyone that's ever used a Guild Hall in this game, ever. The instant you get more than just a small handful of people, you have to re-isntance. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over again until you get everyone into the same instance. It's wildly sensitive and buggy and makes it impossible to do any kind of group activities in the guild hall whatsoever.

Guild Hall tends to for no reason create new instance of itself and then kick people on old ones within 5min. It can be very annoying when building decorations or doing any made puzzles that are in air because it ports you to the ground when you change instance. I hope too they find a solution for it.

Yeah this is quite infuriating while do guild mission :(

I don't understand why guild halls don't have an option to open at max capacity of the guild by default.

I've never noticed this myself, presumably all my guilds are too small to be affected by it.

But it does sound impractical for bigger guilds. If I remember correctly most maps can hold 150 people by default, so it seems like a guild hall should allow at least that many before making a new instance.

For my guild it sometimes easily has 40+ people and doesn't make new instance, but some other time there is less then 10 and it makes a new one. So far we couldn't figure out what triggers it at all.

As i understand it, you get the first message of new instance when your hall has more than 5 people in it. The next one is at 20 people i believe. then again at 50. So if you have that message a lot. Now you know why.

@DBZVelena.5186 said:As i understand it, you get the first message of new instance when your hall has more than 5 people in it. The next one is at 20 people i believe. then again at 50. So if you have that message a lot. Now you know why.

Although it's nice to know why it's happening or how... It doesn't really justify the reasoning. :pensive:

@seineith.7048 said:I mean it's pretty obvious for anyone that's ever used a Guild Hall in this game, ever. The instant you get more than just a small handful of people, you have to re-isntance. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over again until you get everyone into the same instance.

Thankfully I do not have this issue having a 1 man guild hall, or as I like to call it, personal housing.

@Vavume.8065 said:

@seineith.7048 said:I mean it's pretty obvious for anyone that's ever used a Guild Hall in this game, ever. The instant you get more than just a small handful of people, you have to re-isntance. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over again until you get everyone into the same instance.

How did you do this?

In our guild it starts when the 6th person enters the guildhall. except if he is from the World the first person is in.

@Eteru Seishin.7125 said:

@DBZVelena.5186 said:As i understand it, you get the first message of new instance when your hall has more than 5 people in it. The next one is at 20 people i believe. then again at 50. So if you have that message a lot. Now you know why.

I suspect that ANet has metrics that show them how many people on average are in a guild hall instance, and that 5 is a decent cut-off point that the majority of instances won't reach. I know my own guildies are all over the place, but rarely are more than five of them in the guild hall at the same time.

Now imagine ANet moved that limit to 10. Assuming resources needed would roughly double, too, you'd already need a whole lot of new hardware to create instances capable of holding (but not necessarily filled by) 10 players. Most of the instances would still only hold 5 or less actual players, but the resources needed to allow for more have to be available anyway.

Like somebody above said, the limit is fixed. If you know you're having a guild activity with more than 5/20/whatever people, the workaround is to get enough people to come early so you can open the right size guild hall and get everybody over in time.

From a technical point of view, I'm still trying to think of a way to fix this pre-emptively without running danger of opening a lot of over-sized instances that tax the system too heavily. Adding an option in guild hall to open one for the whole guild (so instance size would be set for the number of currently logged-in guild members) runs the risk of lots of large guilds opening large halls for convenience despite not really needing them, which means wasted resources and added technical costs for ANet. Basing the instance size on the party or squad size of the player going there crashes the moment people quickly visit the guild hall while in 50-man wvw or world event squads.

Does anyone of you know what happens if 25 people try to enter the guild hall at the same time? Person 6-20 would get the prompt for the 21+ instance, but do persons 1-5 have to move to the 6-20 instance first, then on to the 21+ again? Maybe that process could be streamlined so that at least the double instance switching wouldn't be needed. For example put a cooldown on the instance switch notice so it doesn't show up until 30 seconds after the new instance was created and then points to the largest instance created by then?

The more I think about it, the more interesting (from the technical point of view) this problem gets ;) .

tl;dr: there are purely technical reasons for this problem, and I suspect that the current inconvenience to large groups gathering in a guildhall is the trade-off to keep the resource side of the guild hall system decently cost-effective.

I'm not a programmer, but it seems weird to me that the game can't increase the size of an instance, but it has no issues creating a new bigger version of said instance,. then kicking everyone out of the previous one.

@Ildrid Ildhjertet.2489 said:I'm not a programmer, but it seems weird to me that the game can't increase the size of an instance, but it has no issues creating a new bigger version of said instance,. then kicking everyone out of the previous one.You need to allocate the resources when you create the instance. Dynamically increasing/decreasing the available memory and computing capacity is indeed not as easy as it looks.

There's probably a host of servers running guild hall instances, and a system in place that puts every new instance created on the server that has the resources available. Usually there's a complex load balancing system in place when you have distributed environments (as in: similar computing processes spread across several physical or virtual servers) so all servers have a similar load and can provide similar performance.

Imagine the check-out in a grocery store. You have five cashiers and a queue waiting in front of each of them. There's two ways to handle this: Have a single queue that dynamically sends the next customer to the first available cashier, or spread customers across five seperate queues for each cashier. Once people are spread in different queues and one customer turns out to not only have their trolley full of groceries to process but also two more that are brought up from behind by their kids once it's their turn, then the people in queue behind them suddenly face drastically higher wait times e.g. worse performance.

Our guild hall instance problem is similar. The system tries to spread the guild halls across the servers available for guild hall instances so that each gives approximately similar performance. Now one guild hall suddenly explodes from the 5 people to the 50 people size, thus hogging a much larger chunk of memory and computing power on their server. If the servers are moderately busy anyway this will result in less memory and computing power available for the other guild hall instances placed on the same server, thus worse performance for people not in any way related to the guild with the growing hall other than that they by chance share the same guild hall server today. To avoid this, the small instance is marked for shut down and a larger instance with its own chunk of non-fragmented memory and processing resource is created on whichever guild hall server seems most suitable resource-wise.

Remember this is only an educated guess from seeing guild hall instance behaviour, based on experience with working with (non-game) high-performance distributed software environments for the last 20 years, but I'd say it's a very likely scenario ;) .

Kind of surprised that logic such as "on enter of hall, open hall with size of, number of players on line, if a guild hall instance isn't already open, else try and fit in that one then spawn new hall". I get conserving resources but they have some history now and should be able to better understand guild hall impacts and server requirements.

@TheGrimm.5624 said:Kind of surprised that logic such as "on enter of hall, open hall with size of, number of players on line, if a guild hall instance isn't already open, else try and fit in that one then spawn new hall". I get conserving resources but they have some history now and should be able to better understand guild hall impacts and server requirements.But how often do you actually need an instance that can fit all of the (online) players in the guild? The guilds I am in often have 20+ players online at the same time, but we seldom need a guild hall instance for more than 5 players, since everybody's busy elsewhere. To be precise, we usually need a 6+ instance twice a week during guild mission time when everybody uses the portal, but rarely to never outside of those times ;) .