Guild Wars 2

This release has been decent in my eyes since it at least changes things up. The LS mobs/events aren’t just tacked on to an existing zone of little consequence, they actually change a zone completely. Escape from Lion’s Arch is a step in the right direction, if Orr had been done in a similar fashion it would have been much much better. The transformation of the city is incredible and creates the atmosphere of war.

The problems though are with the events themselves. Most of them are just waves of trash mobs, which got boring months ago. Now I fully realize that you need trash mob events but there needs to be variety to offset the grind feeling. There needed to be a bit more structure to events and their chains. Currently I can see an escort event pop(lighthouse, moa, ogres) and by the time I even get there it’s over.

In my mind the way things should have gone is upon entering the first event for each entrance would be establishing a base of operations or a safe area so to speak. The 3 defense points that already exist work in this capacity already but you don’t capture them and they don’t feel like base operation area’s. The operation area’s would be constantly under attack dishing out a reward every 2-3 mins you defend them. Meanwhile other events would kick off, 1 for each of the 3 area’s. That way it’s never escort the XXXX, Escort XXXX, and stop the deployment all at the same time in the same area. Every 10 minutes or so there should be a boss event at the defense locations that becomes the only event running in that area.

The deployment of miasma should be a 2-3 part chain, the first part being scarlets forces have been spotted carrying a miasma tank stop them before they reach their target, scarlets forces have reached the target stop them from deploying it, and they have deployed the miasma destroy it! Obviously the first part would have the enemies spawn at random locations and path towards a target, this would split up the zergs into searching for the enemies.

To further develop the feeling of being pushed out of the city the events should get harder, right after the boss event is a perfect time. Now instead of stopping 1 enemy group deploying miasma you have 2. More mobs could spawn at escorts or the NPC’s could have the crippled debuff, which would give players the option of removing it or applying swiftness. Clearly harder bosses or multiple bosses. Once a defense point is lost and miasma fully deployed it should be gone for good.

Other changes would be no heirlooms. This just dilutes the population and they make zero sense. Most of the rubble piles are in off the beaten path places where citizens would never have been with heirlooms. It just feels tacked on for achievement hunters and brings nothing to the experience and actually takes away from it considering the scenario. When you have half the population running around sewers and caves looking for heirlooms it really kinds of takes away from the whole city in peril, rescue everyone thing.

The citizen rescue thing needs to be made into an event as well instead of a constant vague meta, It just isn’t very informative or intuitive in it’s current form that it is how you get the good reward. Make each event rescue 100 citizens, so if all 3 areas complete it that’s 300 citizens and make it run 4 times in the hour and there is your 1200 citizens.

Rewards should be better. Currently we get a lot of tokens (Shards, found belongings) but the rewards for them are bad. The marionette cyphers at least gave decent loot for a lot less work if I may say so. The best you can really do outside of the 1200 rescues is the endless quaggan potions and they really aren’t great loot for a lot of people. Let people turn in 25 found belongings for a “good service” bag that drops the same loot as the cypher chests. Make citizens give bags as a thanks for rescuing them.

If I had to sum it all up I’d say that the atmosphere is amazing but gets wasted due to hastily thrown together events and poor reward scheme.

The problem with most of those suggestions is that it looks good on paper, but players, at least the majority, had always and will always gravitate towards the path of least resistance and best loot. Harder events that require more coordination will make it more enjoyable for the crowd that wants that and is willing to put in effort and accepts a failure as a challenge to do better next time.

But your average joe player will just do it once, fail, then never come back. Because the champion train in Queensdale or Frostgorge yields better rewards with no risk.
Open world content is just not suitable for really hard content / content that needs a lot of coordination. Because open world is suggesting it’s for everybody. Tequatl, the Wurm in Bloodtide and the Marionette to some extent showed that people swarm it at first, but in the end only a few people remain, those that are willing to adapt, learn and put in effort. But that seems to be a minority, at least on my server (Underworld).

My problem with this update is that the goal (saving citizens) is diametrically opposed to everything you feel like doing in LA. All achievements are about events that you need to rush and tag to get any credit for or that scale up so badly you can run in a huge zerg and get dozens of bags from the high-level mobs. Why should people run around LA and save citizens, you know, the point of all this, when they get better rewards for less running and effort?
Yes, you get a huge bag at the end with a chance to get previous LS rewards (which I really desire), but it’s behind a huge process of coordination and lack of loot. And then you only get a chance to get something worthwhile. So why would the majority of players choose the path of higher resistance, more effort and less loot only to maybe have a chance at rolling a dice?
Since it’s too late for this one, my suggestions for similar future content would be to:

- reduce drops from upscaled mobs in events, so that they just get harder, but not much more rewarding. Huge zergs at events already lead to failure of Miasma events because people keep dying left and right, focusing on a few mobs and not draining the enemy deployment waves

- have the lasers target groups of people, not single players. While they are somewhat easy to dodge, they fry saved citizens and when you’re the only one doing a search and rescue in a sector, you get constantly targetted by one or two lasers. Having them target the huge groups would make perfect sense, gameplay- and lore-wise

- add (one or more) repeatable achievements for encouraging / saving citizens. Again, it may look good on paper, but most players in MMOs are ultimately drawn to raw numbers, not good gameplay. And achievements and rewards are a way of pushing them in desired directions. Right now, there is no incentive to rescue citizens. I bet everything in my bank most people don’t even know you get tiered rewards for saving citizens, because they never read any patch notes and just run into events. A repeatable achievement that would yield a number of Supply Bags close to what you would get just running with a zerg would encourage people to split up and achievement hunters to participate once they got all one-time achievements because they want their additional AP.

- make heirlooms drop from bags (more frequently) and maybe make it so you get them for saving citizens, not running around LA trying to rescue rubble piles from the miasma. It’s quite ironic that the best way to get a Selfless Potion is to run around not actually participating and saving people. I always see people running around and running past citizens or people engaging in fights to help said citizens, because they look for the next rubble pile.

- look into giving out rewards to people that don’t do anything but just idle on the map. Right now you can join the map, stand at the entrance for 46 mins and get bags according to how many people were saved by the people actually playing the game. I saw people standing at the entrance repeatedly doing the dance emote and nothing else because they get credit anyway. While it’s frustrating that you may do something and not get anything, rewarding people for not doing anything and actually clogging the map isn’t the way to go either.

Otherwise I really like this LS, feels like stuff is happening. Atmosphere, tone and gameplay-wise I find it pretty good, save for said points.