u/Then-Landscape-1405

EDIT: RESOLVED & VERIFIED! (The 120+ Map Cap is Officially Back)

Final Update: We have officially verified the fix! Our 0100 UTC run with [BUTR] tonight successfully staged in Bloodtide Coast with 121 active squad members on a single AWS instance:

• Defense (Pink): 8 players
• Cobalt (Blue): 32 players
• Crimson (Red): 33 players
• Amber (Orange): 48 players

The instance held beautifully with absolutely no premature overflow queues. The original high-capacity AWS server profiles are officially back online.

A huge thank you to Anet-BogOtter (Richie) and the ArenaNet server engineering team for jumping on this so quickly, investigating the backend templates, and rolling out the fix in under three hours.

Also, thank you to this subreddit for upvoting the thread and helping us get the visibility we needed to bypass the front-line ticketing loop. This was a textbook example of constructive, data-driven coordination between players and developers.

See you all on the maps!

###### ORIGINAL POST BELOW ######

Hey everyone,

I’m writing this on behalf of the active open-world Triple Trouble community (I command and organize runs with BUTR, WHAM, and NOPE). Since early August, our daily coordination teams across the global scheduled runs (0100, 0400, 0800, 1230, 1700, and 2000 UTC) have been hitting a massive, unannounced roadblock.

We have noticed a major, consistent reduction in Core Tyria map capacities — specifically in Bloodtide Coast — that is quietly strangling coordinated open-world PvE.

The Timeline of the Cap Reduction

• Pre-July 28 (WvW Rush): Bloodtide Coast comfortably held 120 to 150 players before triggering hard queues.
• July 28 – August 4 (World Boss Rush): The capacity suddenly plummeted.
• Post-August 4 (Current): The World Boss Rush event ended weeks ago, but the restricted limits have never been reverted.

The Math & Evidence (Consistently Hitting a 100-Player Hard Cap)

Through meticulous tracking of our multi-squad runs and queuing behavior, we have documented the following:

• The Soft-Cap: Once a Bloodtide Coast instance reaches 60–70 players, the game prematurely triggers a soft-cap. It stops routing random zoning players to this instance and instead starts spawning empty overflow maps.
• The Hard-Cap (The 100-Player Ceiling): When we attempt to "taxi" our remaining squad members in via the "Join in..." squad function, we hit a hard wall. Our commanders have documented that the moment active squad members on the map reach 75 to 80 players, anyone else trying to enter is hit with an immediate "Map is full" error or queue.
• The Dilution Factor: When you account for an estimated 15 to 20 non-participating players naturally on the map (casual levelers, resource gatherers, AFK players), this mathematically confirms that the absolute hard cap is now locked at exactly 100 players (a 33% reduction from the historical ~150 limits).

I have posted screenshot proof of our squad layouts and the resulting map queue blocks in our official forum thread here: 👉 https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/175724-has-the-maximum-number-of-players-in-core-tyria-been-reduced/ (my account there is davebb.1063)

Why This Breaks the Triple Trouble Gameplay Loop

Unlike normal world bosses, Triple Trouble is mechanically unforgiving and does not scale down:

1. Strict Coordination Floor: The Amber Wurm requires a minimum of 20 players executing mechanics flawlessly (eating harpoons, coordinating debuffs). There is zero room for error or AFK dilution.
2. The Staging Grind: Because the hard-cap is so low (100 players), casual map occupants dilute the active roster. This leaves us with barely enough active slots to divide among three separate heads (Amber, Cobalt, Crimson).
3. The Idle Wait Penalty: To bypass this, we are currently forcing players to arrive and sit idle on the map 30 to 45 minutes before spawn just to secure a slot. If they arrive at the normal 15-minute mark, they are permanently locked out in a queue.

The Infrastructure Hypothesis: AWS Server Profiles

By using the in-game /ip command, we’ve verified that these dynamic map instances are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual machines.

During high-traffic events like the World Boss Rush, developers typically deploy a temporary, restricted AWS server profile to limit map capacities. This distributes the massive player influx across more virtual machine shards to prevent localized CPU lag.

Our hypothesis is that ArenaNet simply forgot to re-apply the default, high-capacity AWS instance profiles to Core Tyria zones after the World Boss Rush ended. The server orchestrator is still spinning up "Event-capped" shards.

A Polite Request to ANet QA / Systems Engineering

We've tried submitting standard support tickets, but front-line GMs have understandably closed them as "gameplay feedback" because they are trained to use boilerplate macros for anything containing "map capacity" keywords.

We are hoping to bring visibility to this so that a community manager or developer lurking here can flag this to the QA or Systems team. Could you please double-check if the Core Tyria AWS server templates simply need to be reset to their default, pre-event population profiles?

• Are any other commanders noticing premature map queues or smaller instance limits during other large metas (like Tequatl) since early August? Let's get some visibility on this!