We recently announced the exciting new megaserver project for Guild Wars 2, a system to maximize players’ social experience in our open world. We’ve also talked about what impact the megaserver system will have on world boss events, map-wide events, and more. Now it’s time to look to the future and discuss some of the changes that will be happening down the road.
As mentioned in the original blog about the megaserver system, on 15th April we’ll start by rolling out this technology to level 1–15 maps, the PvP lobby, and major cities. Later in 2014, we’ll expand this system to the entire game. Before the end of the year, we’ll be making additional updates to guilds and WvW to reflect the state of the game with our megaserver system in place.
The changes covered in this blog will not be included in the 15th April release and will likely come online by December 2014. This information is purely to help you understand where we’re going once the system is fully online.
The Megaserver System and the Future of Guilds
Currently, a single guild with members from different home worlds has a unique chapter on each of those worlds. While members from all worlds share a common guild, these chapters unlock upgrades and earn influence and merits independently of one another, which can lead to a splintered guild community. With the new megaserver system, you’ll find it infinitely easier to play with all of your guildmates—and better yet, someday you’ll simply have one guild!
Because worlds no longer separate players, we’ll eventually make sure that guilds are no longer separated either, that every guild member will be contributing to and benefitting from the same unified guild chapter. Until this system is in place, your home-world guild chapter will continue to be the chapter where any influence your character earns is sent and is the chapter visible to you in the guild panel.
Knowing that many guilds stretch across multiple home worlds, we’ll be working to be as fair as possible when combining multiple chapters into one single guild for all members. All members of the guild will remain members when this happens, regardless of what world they called home. Please note that this will not affect the guild cap of 500, and we will not be able to combine separate guilds. This change will simply address how one single guild has a different copy on every home world.
The Megaserver System and the Future of WvW
Though we are moving to our new megaserver model in PvE, it’s extremely important to us that we maintain the level of identity and competition in WvW that we’ve established since the release of Guild Wars 2. The entire game mode is based on battles between different players aligned to the named worlds, and as such we have no plans to remove this concept from WvW.
We’ll go into the very specific details about these changes as we approach the launch of this system game-wide, but we wanted to get a head start on messaging this since these are natural questions the addition of our megaserver system raises.