[Suggestion] Force Close Maps Daily

This suggestion is entirely because some map instances encounter bugs with events which can block players from progression on things that rely on everything working correctly. Some notable examples being the meta chain for NE Diessa to get into the mini dungeon and the event in NW Kourna that’s part of the story.

The only recourse players have is either to wait until patch/update or hope that enough players hop onto it to force a new instance. The latter being almost near impossible.

My suggestion is to have all maps routinely closed on a daily basis during a time that it would have the least impact on players. Perhaps 3AM Pacific time for NA servers as an example.

There will never be a "good" time to close a map, there will always be someone trying to do something there and resent the interruption.

Maybe a better idea would be some way to flag a map as "needs reset". When enough people flag a map, it opens a new instance and stops putting people into the flagged instance. Then it would be easy to jump to a new map, but you wouldn't be forced to do so right away. Instead, once the map is depopulated enough, it'll go through the normal closing procedure with the 1 hour window to jump over.

I've been in favor of this since the first time I realized it wasn't already implemented. Time of day would necessarily vary by map since you wouldn't want to mark a map for closure just before a meta starts, for example . . .

Putting closure in player control would yield to exploitation I think . . .

I tried a similar suggestion last year.https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/347832

@"Palador.2170" said:There will never be a "good" time to close a map, there will always be someone trying to do something there and resent the interruption.

Maybe a better idea would be some way to flag a map as "needs reset". When enough people flag a map, it opens a new instance and stops putting people into the flagged instance. Then it would be easy to jump to a new map, but you wouldn't be forced to do so right away. Instead, once the map is depopulated enough, it'll go through the normal closing procedure with the 1 hour window to jump over.

They likely wont go this route because it becomes abusable rather easy. Get a squad of people to do this and spin up many instances of new maps for whatever "resource" you desire to farm.

The idea of routinely closing them is a good one though. The issue is doing it in a mostly non-intrusive manner. Maybe they just have servers marked after 12hrs to close but they spin up new servers every 6hrs to there's always two fresh instances and one on the way out depending on map activity.

@"TexZero.7910" said:

They likely wont go this route because it becomes abusable rather easy. Get a squad of people to do this and spin up many instances of new maps for whatever "resource" you desire to farm.Ah, yes. I forgot to take "the Kitten factor" into account. That is a problem. There are ways around it, but... Maybe a set closing time would be the best way to go after all.

There may be betters ways but I figured this may at least start a discussion about it.

There doesn't need to be a set time. Just whenever a map has been open for say 24 hours, all players in the map get their 1 hour notice to change maps and then the map closes. The notice would include the creation of a new map for players to populate. Although, to prevent any kind of player shenanigans, the 24 hours can be a random time from 24 to 48.

@"Palador.2170" said:There will never be a "good" time to close a map, there will always be someone trying to do something there and resent the interruption.

Maybe a better idea would be some way to flag a map as "needs reset". When enough people flag a map, it opens a new instance and stops putting people into the flagged instance. Then it would be easy to jump to a new map, but you wouldn't be forced to do so right away. Instead, once the map is depopulated enough, it'll go through the normal closing procedure with the 1 hour window to jump over.

This is the right approach. I actually think they could build newer maps around this concept -- sort of like DS, the map has a fixed direction in time rather than a bunch of little loops, so event chains are one-off, and the map proceeds to some sort of stable state, for better or for worse. After that, the map could be locked to new players, but would still not forcibly close for an hour or so unless everyone left. It could be meta maps, but it could also just be an exploration map where things happen and stay happened for the existence of the map (ie, if you let an NPC die and fail their event chain, they are just dead). So there's a little more weight to people's actions and choices.

Don't use a set time, just have a countdown timer on every map instance that counts down from 24 hours as soon as it is first created. Once the countdown expires, pick a random number between 1 & 12 and whatever number comes up, you close the instance that many hours later.

This will add a small amount of randomness to the map closures in order to prevent the kind of server strain that will happen if you do all of them at the same time, while still ensuring that they close often enough to prevent long term problems.

The reason why I suggested at set times because otherwise it could impact meta events during prime time.

I admire the goal. I just don't think this is the right approach.However, I'm inclined to agree that it's time that ANet reconsidered their hands-off policy on addressing the overall situation. The more maps the game has, the more we spread out, and the more likely that players are going to run into stalled events, thus blocking progress both minor & major.

Here's what we can be sure about:

• Some quests/events on some maps sometimes stall.
• The reasons don't matter to those who need the events for achievements or fashion wars.
• Some maps are less affected by intermittent stalling, because instances are frequently created, mostly due to local metas.
• If there are multiple instances, most players cannot access them unless there is an LFG to taxi lyft them to the new map.

There are lots of ways to address this. The OP's approach is the most obvious one and has been suggested since shortly after the game launched (even before there were collections gated behind events). ANet has never gone for it, perhaps because they agree with the posters above: there's never going to be a universally good time to close any particular instance.

ANet has implied they've already solved this, with the usual, "tell us about the bug, we'll fix it." That would be the 'best' solution ... except, historically, these stalls are hard to track down (I'm looking at you, Ogre Wars) and typically it takes ANet weeks, not hours or days. (I don't fault them for that: it's a big game; it's unrealistic to expect them to resolve every vexing issue in our time frame.)

ANet's also rejected other suggestions: give us more ways to reach existing instances, allow us to "vote" on closing an instance, and of course the OP's idea. They haven't said "no, no, no," in as many words, but it's nearly impossible to imagine they haven't considered any of these, so they are "rejected" by implication.

Where does that leave us? I see two ways the community can contribute.(1) Respectfully & frequently remind ANet that this is an issue that they need to address differently. We don't offer them answers and instead do as developers generally ask: state the problem; leave the solutions to them. That has worked ...sometimes.

To drive home the point, I'd recommend starting a mega thread to document every known stalled event in the game. These are the ones that can be documented to stop working for more than a few people more than a few times, between game patches. Sure, it could eventually get cluttered with people using it to report bugs or "user error" of folks misunderstanding mechanics. We can always start a new thread to keep the main list 'clean'.

(2) Use Squads to force new instances to form. We've seen this work as a proof of concept: a large guild gets 80+ of its members to invade a specific map. At some point, the game decides the map is full and creates a new instance. People needed a fresh map drop squad, rep a different guild, re-enter the map, and voila: pristine instance, where the event is working.

To pull this off, we'd need a "guild of guilds" like [EVOS] or [TTS] that exists just to create new maps. People would put out a request and the organizers would schedule a time, advertising as needed in a variety of maps. Maybe call it... [WWRD] (What Would RNGesus Do). I'd imagine it would need a Discord channel as organized as [RiT] with some spiffy bots to handle requests, calls-to-arms, and privileges.

When maps close, you get an hour to move over, which is more than long enough to finish whatever you're doing on any map outside Dragon's Stand, which doesn't remain open for 24 hours anyway. Forcing a daily reset is easily the best solution from a dev standpoint because it doesn't require significant development hours to do.

@"Ben K.6238" said:When maps close, you get an hour to move over, which is more than long enough to finish whatever you're doing on any mapActually, no, it's not with the way "closure" works now.

What can (and does) happen is that a map gets scheduled for closure, and then it gets fresh blood, with people entering the map, perhaps for a meta or a hero train. These people do not get the "volunteer" warning, so they have no way of knowing that there's less than an hour to finish whatever they are doing. They can start something without realizing there's a time limit.

That's a bug. Bugs should be fixed.

I thought of a simpler alternative to my longer post above. Instead of closing maps, why not change the mechanic to make sure that a new instance is opened every day (or maybe every 48 hours)? Players entering the map for the first time after reset would be directed to the fresh instance.

If the map attracts little attention, then splitting traffic isn't going to hurt it. If the map gets more attention, then people will enter the new instance anyhow. The main constraint would be that it would require more resource management by ANet, because a lot more maps would have an extra instance than we do now. (Historically, that didn't seem to be a problem during peak periods of gameplay, but maybe it is these days.) However, one of those instances would be likely to volunteer itself for closure, presumably the older one.

@Ben K.6238 said:That's a bug. Bugs should be fixed.

I'm not sure it's a bug -- the point of scheduling it for closure is based on population, not making maps cycle. If it gets more population, then it gets a stay of execution.

If the purpose was to force cycling, however, it would make sense to lock entry once it hits that 1-hour to close state.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Ben K.6238 said:When maps close, you get an hour to move over, which is more than long enough to finish whatever you're doing on any mapActually, no, it's not with the way "closure" works now.

@Ben K.6238 said:That's a bug. Bugs should be fixed.ANet set it up that way by design. I'm not sure they think it's a bug.

Even so, the stalled events are also bugs. Those should also be fixed; if they were, then few people would care about whether more instances got created or not. I would hope it's obvious that if ANet could address these issues, they would have already have done so. The fact that they haven't yet suggests that it might be time for a different approach to help reduce the number of times someone is blocked by stalled events.

@perilisk.1874 said:

@Ben K.6238 said:That's a bug. Bugs should be fixed.

Sorry, I'll clarify. The bug is that the closure warning is removed due to increasing population, but the map remains flagged for closure anyway. It should either cancel closure or the transfer option should not be removed.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:I thought of a simpler alternative to my longer post above. Instead of closing maps, why not change the mechanic to make sure that a new instance is opened every day (or maybe every 48 hours)? Players entering the map for the first time after reset would be directed to the fresh instance.

If the map attracts little attention, then splitting traffic isn't going to hurt it. If the map gets more attention, then people will enter the new instance anyhow. The main constraint would be that it would require more resource management by ANet, because a lot more maps would have an extra instance than we do now. (Historically, that didn't seem to be a problem during peak periods of gameplay, but maybe it is these days.) However, one of those instances would be likely to volunteer itself for closure, presumably the older one.

To add to this just make it so the old map cannot get new people at all, so that no matter what the size of the population on that map keeps going down.