The latest Guild Wars 2 update has opened up a new Megaserver Map Queue beta, and formally ended support for DirectX 9, marking the mandatory transition to DirectX 11.
ArenaNet is working on some server improvements that will let you queue up to join party members in open world maps that are otherwise full at the time you join the queue. They’ve opened up a beta to test out this upgrade to the megaserver system that was originally opened up back in 2014. Nearly a decade later, they’re testing out these changes.
You can queue up through the party and squad UI and clicking on a player that is in the instance you want to join. Once you click join instance, you’ll go to the instance if there’s room, but if it is full, here’s where the new options come in. If that particular instance is full at the time, you'll get a pop up that asks if you want to join a queue for the instance. You can refuse to queue if you prefer, and nothing will change from before. However, if you accept, then you will get an alert when the instance has room and have the chance to travel there.
Another major change in this update is the arrival of the promised change to DirectX 11 being required to continue playing Guild Wars 2. Now that the update is live, everyone has been migrated over permanently. This process began several months ago, with warning that support for DirectX 9 would be done around this date in April. With that, the Chromium embedded Framework has been enabled to replace Coherent UI when it comes to web-based UI, like the game launcher.
We have a fix for this issue! We are testing it and preparing to get it to you as soon as possible. #GuildWars2 https://t.co/t1UDVuENZS
— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) April 18, 2023
There were some other updates, including a couple of bug fixes, but this patch does not fix an exploited glitch that led to two elementalist traits being temporarily disabled pending a fix. The good news is that the team has confirmed that they do have a fix, and are in the process of testing that separately.
See the full patch notes at Guild Wars 2.
