[Frustration-Question-Suggestion] Full Server, Events, joining groups

The last few weeks I have been getting a lot of my friends online to play GW2,I love the game, and I love how it plays, and getting RL friends to play is even more fun.

But there is one feature which is infuriating to the degree of mind numbing frustration.

When doing Metas, Events, anything that takes a group, - you can usually join the group, but not the server... this, "tiny" fact is beyond me to understand why it's doing so, and it's frustrating.The amount of time wasted, find a group, trying to get into the group, then to join the server - check a few times, then leave the group, try another group, try the server, leave the group, is intense and a waste a lot of time - doing it with 2-3 friends trying to find a group, and joining their server is dishearting and usually leads to 1 getting into the group, and the server, and the rest has to wait it out on a dead server instance - realizing that it's not going to happen when one just want to play the game, and have fun is a kick to the face - multiple times a day.

A feature implemented to check if "server is full" before joining group would make a world of difference, would solve the issue of people joining without participating, and would/could perhaps even make more groups on servers.

Just a suggestion, I can't be the first person in the world to feel this frustration, but for some reason I could not find another topic (searching "server full", "can't join" etc),so either people have given up, or something else is afoot.

//Tallens'out

Solution...... Get the entire community to properly organize themselves, and make all the randos leave an organized map. level of practicality, Non-existent.

Solution...... Take your not filled map, and open a squad to fill it up. Level of Practicality, High.

Solution..... Get to a map BEFORE things start, and catch the first wave of organizers. Level of Practicality, Time Management life skills.

Solution.... go to the forums and complain about it. Level of Practicality, (insert Venom quote).

@"starlinvf.1358" said:Solution.... go to the forums and complain about it. Level of Practicality, (insert Venom quote).

This one, of all the suggestions, is my favorite at the moment - the other 3 are tried and tested, and is far less a guarantee with a slightly busy schedule, taking it to the forum in the offline hours seems like a legit solution.

oh .. and here is a Venom Quote..."Venom: Outstanding. Now let’s bite off all their heads off and pile them up in the corner."

//T

As the poster above me said (at least I think that's what they said ;) ): organize your own meta group and you'll be sure to be on an active shard. Create a squad a bit before the meta starts (5-30 minutes depending on meta), put it on lfg, preferably put a rough description of the mechanics and/or what you expect of people joining in the squad description, and you're read yto go.

Deciding whether a squad's shard is full or not isn't as easy as it sounds. If the squad contains players on different shards or even different maps, which shard/map is the one in question? Maybe the commander disconnected and is trying to get back into the shard themselves (have seen that happen a few times), so not even the commander's map is guaranteed to be the one you want. Players join and leave map shards all the time, too, so you'd have to calculate the map state in real time and transfer that data to all clients in the squad, which quickly adds up to a huge amount of unneccessary processing power and bandwidth. And then you have to take into account hard and soft cap of a map shard (hard cap being the one where no players are able to join unless somebody leaves first, while soft cap just keeps people from automatically being sorted into the map). All of this makes calculating shard high/full costly and pretty much useless because even if you got an update two seconds ago it may already have changed by now. The best you can really do would be a single "join squad commander" button that makes it easier to spam compared to the current right-click -> join way, but the qol improvement probably is too small to justify the implementation overhead (programming, testing, ui design, whatever).

If you want to make things easier on yourself without organizing the events, get there beforehand and don't give up trying to get into the map. I don't do metas all that often, but I get into the map in question pretty much every time I do, although sometimes it takes a couple of minutes before I catch the moment somebody else left the map. Unless you are referring to the labyrinth, the player cap on that map is actually small enough to make it a lot easier to organise a new one yourself (mentor tag is plenty enough to do it, no lfg needed) instead of trying to spam-join an already full map.

@Tallens.6084 said:

@starlinvf.1358 said:Solution.... go to the forums and complain about it. Level of Practicality, (insert Venom quote).

Meta event times are known, so joining the squad and map on time shouldn't be an issue.

Type /wiki ET in-game to be redirected to the event schedule, or check on GW2timer.com.

P.S. If you were referring to the Mad King's Labyrinth, that's a whole different story...

I get what you're saying...

I'm fine with making my own groups, and I'm fine with getting there earlier - even when time is pressed to RL, most of the time, when I'm soloing around it's not the biggest issue, - though I have found myself alone in an meta a few times.

My issue is more with the fact that looking for a group, is usually one big "server full" encounter, which you loose.Currently, when a meta gets going, like Auric Basin there are like 6+ groups going, all of them have 20-50 is people, with only half of the people in the group being on the actual same server, the rest are skipping around hoping to be on "that server" as the group they actually joined - constantly spamming the "join server" button.

What if., the game actually prevented people joining, as long as the server the "leader" is on, is full? - I've seen some skilled commanders clean house, removing people on the wrong server, but that doesn't solve the main issue.

@"Tallens.6084" said:My issue is more with the fact that looking for a group, is usually one big "server full" encounter, which you loose.

While this is a little off-topic, I wanted to let you know that what you are referring to as "server" is actually a map instance. There are no different servers in PvE, only in WvW.

What if., the game actually prevented people joining, as long as the server the "leader" is on, is full?

People have requested multiple times that ANet finally did something about that, i.e. informing people that maps are full and cannot be joined, but so far to no avail. :/

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"Tallens.6084" said:My issue is more with the fact that looking for a group, is usually one big "server full" encounter, which you loose.

What if., the game actually prevented people joining, as long as the server the "leader" is on, is full?

Ah yes, it's just because the error is "server is full" that it kinda stuck in the headm but you're rightly right on that one. :)

Best Regards//T

if u are referring to Mad King Labyrinthg u must scroll a lot and join 25 or less ppl groups.

@"ugrakarma.9416" said:if u are referring to Mad King Labyrinthg u must scroll a lot and join 25 or less ppl groups.

Not entirely - or at least not exclusively , but MKL did highlight the issue , I've observed this in more or less all the popular meta events. My newly joined friends who have just leveled up and started playing the Metas have noticed how difficult it is to get into a group, on a server, and as it is with new people, this kind of frustration could eventually lead to them leaving, - this should not be perceived as a treat, just an observation.

This is an observation from the "new people" - the lifeblood of games - and while it itself might not be the defining moment for them quitting the game, - new players do come to the game with a different view - than those of us who are soaked in game have, and sometimes they shred light on things that aren't perceived the same, and dare to ask in wonder, "why can I join a group, but not actually join the group?" ...

But as I could understand from Ashantara remark, it's something which has been suggested countless times (which I as a programmer feel could be easily fixed - but that is how it usually is, ew the crowd knows better ;) ), so even though I have played for ~6 years now and more or less learnt to "play around it" it's just recently become an issue I thought enough about to bring to the forums.//T

Yes it a little ridiculous and annoying having to join quit , join, quit etc because the "map" is full. Dunno but you shouldn't be able to join a squad if their map instance is full I think.

One thing I don't get though once the map is full why don't squads take the down the squad advertisement?

Personally I do not put up lfm advertisements as I am too new to the game to feel comfortable leading one.