Guild Wars 2

Mag hasn’t been able to do it in the last 16 hours, I was able to get into an overflow that beat it after guesting 10 times to blackgate till I found an overflow populated.

Either revise the event, make the event scale or develop some kind of underflow system.

It makes no sense that the scarlet boss can scale to 8 players and be defeated but the knights cant scale to 20.

/second.

We’re having the same issues on CD too. It may be possible to complete it at reset or something, but by the time I get on there are just not enough people around to clear it. This is especially true now that a lot of players have realized this and don’t even bother to show up anymore.

Well said OP and agreed.

I’m personally on TC (high population T1 server) and we are barely able to get all three knights down in the allotted time, and sometimes even fail to do that. While I feel this is perfectly balanced for us, as you should always have a possibility of failure, it is only balanced for high population servers / overflows.

I’m confident ArenaNet are aware of this persistent problem with open world events, but it never hurts to constructively remind them as the OP has done.

Btw, which servers are still viable these days? I mean even the low population ones read as “high,” so that function is useless. I know Blackgate seems well populated on the NA side, but which other servers have at least enough players to attempt the current content?

Ohoni.6057:

Btw, which servers are still viable these days? I mean even the low population ones read as “high,” so that function is useless. I know Blackgate seems well populated on the NA side, but which other servers have at least enough players to attempt the current content?

Desolation on EU. That’s the go to server if you want event completion.

Underworld on UW didn’t manage to do it after the update either. I would rate it as a medium PVE only server. But unless your server is really actually high you won’t really complete it.

I can’t play on the EU side, I just wanted to know what other servers on NA were reasonably populated.

I was in an overflow yesterday (I only go to LA when the dailies reset, when I went multiple times in one day for EfLA) and there was such a bad lack of coordination that “OMG TOO MANY PEOPLE AT GREEN, GET LOST LOL”.

I agree. This would be a fun event if it scaled better. But as it stands, it is almost impossible to complete because there are never enough people to complete the event. It needs to scale down.

In fact, that has always seemed to be a problem in events, be it big ones, or little ones like the engineer rescues. They don’t scale well.

Saephaan.7285:

They wont listen, they will say they are but they will keep releasing content for TTS or top tier servers. I understand your post and I support it but let’s get real, they don’t care because you can guest to another server.

You’re so right. What happened was, IMO, the players found a way to consistently defeat the knight portion of the event to reach the Hologram fight. The devs apparently did not like the the fact that their precious event was going down on a normal basis through actual thinking by the players and decided that only a TTS style group should be able to defeat the knights. Now there are players on many servers who will never be able to finish the content.

So much for play as you like. Now it appears to be “Play as you like, unless you defeat the event we designed too frequently.” Really, ANeT, if you want people to enjoy the content you release, quit trying to make everything TTS style. I was enjoying the content and my server was coming to together on it. Now they only farm the zone for champs unless the zone is full. They IGNORE YOUR KNIGHT EVENT COMPLETELY!!!!!!!

It seems to me it may be time for Anet to consider some server merges. I understand why any game resists doing this since it can be a bad sign. However this is fairly normal for any game as people congregate to certain servers and populations balance out leaving some servers empty. I do agree though that these events seem to be made for the largest servers leaving the smaller servers feeling very left out.

They should have merged most servers anyway by now.
Got a feeling they want to grab more profit from selling gems for transfers though, so they can make a win out of the loss of all those players.

Anyway, this is just a bulletproof way to kitten their costumer off.

Why doesn’t this stupid epic finale scale down? I wasted so much of my time today getting 2.x Knights killed in the main instance, or getting kicked into an overflow where there is no chance. The one time I made it past the nights last week, I ended up in another overflow against the holograms. (Not even going to get started on that buff and dodge fest.)

When will they understand, fighting a boss with a gazillion HP and a screen overloaded with graphics and LAG IS NOT FUN! Wasting attempt after attempt and getting next to nothing for it doesn’t help matters. Same thing for the worms. It doesn’t matter how neat the individual boss mechanics are when they are so kitten overloaded. (Just because the game will ‘mostly’ handle 50-150 people in one battle doesn’t mean it’s desirable. Oh look, we almost got it…. CRASH!!!)

The Marionette was perfect. It took a lot of people, but each battle was reasonably sized, and success was still possible if a few players where not quite doing what they should have been. There was also levels of partial success, and a decent amount of loot to make it worth your while. (Where are those Scarlet chests BTW?)

I am on Blackgate and have yet to see Blackgate’s none overflow map during Teq, wurm, scarlet and now LA living story.

So I am not sure if it makes a difference because you can play in overflow like everyone else….

Hisuichan.7983:

I feel like I shouldn’t need to say this, but the various patches to this event have made it clear that I have to: not every server has the population to max this event, so please try not to design and scale it based on the assumption that they do.

Please understand that the “zerg assault knights individually” strategy did not develop (entirely) out of greed, but of necessity. On Ehmry, at least, I can say that we weren’t doing it to get 3x the loot. We were doing it to clear the event at all……

Finally seeing someone else from EBay on here discussing a very real problem on the server (though I’m sure it’s not the first time). We’re either low population or low engagement. I think I’ve seen the Knights go down once, maybe twice. I think I’ve seen us do middle to decent in WvW, once (we did awesome for like 18 hours a few months ago with having the 90% of 3 of the 4 WvW maps…) People show up for most world bosses… unless something like the LS Fight is going on at the same time, then it’s a ghost town anywhere but the LS fight… and even then we don’t win in those LS fights lately. I remember we took out the Marionette once the whole time. I still don’t know if we’ve beaten Teq though, I assume at some point we have.

All that said, I love Ebay as a server. Very friendly in chat most of the time, if you do need help in a map people will usually help out, heck, I’ve had people just up and send me crafting mats and stuff before just because I said I was trying to get to 200 at the time.

People saying “just guest!”. Guesting in that case is a bandage to cover for poor scaling. It’s great when you want to play across servers with friends, it should not be the way to actually play the game simply to beat story events.

They should have merged most servers anyway by now.
Got a feeling they want to grab more profit from selling gems for transfers though, so they can make a win out of the loss of all those players.

I think all this talk of losing “lots” of players is a bit hyperbolic. It’s not that dire. Really I think it more comes down to them having so many different things going on that the players are harder to concentrate in one place, and also that active players have started their own migration over to the more populous servers. Even still there are plenty of players around for most ingame activities, just not enough for some of these massive open world zerg battles that demand a full instance. And on top of that, they typically demand that every player in the zone be actively engaged in the zerg content, when in fact during the Knight battles there tend to be plenty of people just running around looking for Peter or collecting Heirlooms or fighting the smaller battles, so you almost never end up with the full map capacity working on the event.

We haven’t hit the colony collapse phase quite yet, but we might if they keep adding in content that demands full maps to complete them and refuses to scale down to the level of the map.

I am on Blackgate and have yet to see Blackgate’s none overflow map during Teq, wurm, scarlet and now LA living story.

So I am not sure if it makes a difference because you can play in overflow like everyone else….

I wish that you could more easily jump directly from an underpopulated main server into an overflow though. Elric was talking about the Marionette, the last week or so that was up my server was a ghost town, I would pop in and there might, at best, be around 20 people or so, maybe capable of pulling out a lane 1 victory but never anything more. It would have been nice to shift into one of the near-maxed out overflows instead. A simple button to do that would be great.

I really miss Gw1’s district system. Really tired of being the kittenty overflow. Tired of being paired with people who don’t speak english. Just so tired…

Wasn’t scaling of mobs/bosses to the number of people present supposed to be one of GW2’s big features? So much for that.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Wasn’t scaling of mobs/bosses to the number of people present supposed to be one of GW2’s big features? So much for that.

You mean like those event chains that alter the world depending on how the DE progresses?

Yeah, all that stuff…

Lord Kuru.3685:

Wasn’t scaling of mobs/bosses to the number of people present supposed to be one of GW2’s big features? So much for that.

It was. Then mega guilds happened. Now they figure everybody can just join one of those and shuttle into overflows instead of doing the event on their own server as originally intended. This is exactly what is killing smaller servers off and they’re just letting it happen.

I hate to say it but this game has never been in a sorrier state than it currently is.

Thank you for making this post.
I’ve been worried about this as well but I’ve always felt useless to complain since people just say you can guest.

While we’re on the topic; I wish arena net would change the population texts on logging screen already. I’m pretty sure that Underworld does NOT have high population anymore. Making Underworld medium sized server on the server list could also bring more people in since the gem cost would be little less (800 gems?) instead of the 1800 gems… Who would choose Underworld over Desolation anyway if the price is same? In desolation you have activity in all aspects of the game: pvp, pve and wvw.

Hopefully things will change.

Kapina.9012:

Thank you for making this post.
I’ve been worried about this as well but I’ve always felt useless to complain since people just say you can guest.

While we’re on the topic; I wish arena net would change the population texts on logging screen already. I’m pretty sure that Underworld does NOT have high population anymore. Making Underworld medium sized server on the server list could also bring more people in since the gem cost would be little less (800 gems?) instead of the 1800 gems… Who would choose Underworld over Desolation anyway if the price is same? In desolation you have activity in all aspects of the game: pvp, pve and wvw.

Hopefully things will change.

Hello fellow Underworld member!
Fortunately for us a week of transfers to our server will be free soon enough.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/get-ready-for-wvw-spring-tournament-2014/
We’re currently in 25th. I don’t know how much it will help our population though.
And yes, the server doesn’t feel low, but it doesn’t feel high either. I would guess that we are actually on medium.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

They should have merged most servers anyway by now.
Got a feeling they want to grab more profit from selling gems for transfers though, so they can make a win out of the loss of all those players.

Anyway, this is just a bulletproof way to kitten their costumer off.

I’ve kinda wondered this too. If low pop server players get annoyed enough and spend the money to move to expensive servers then that’s someone who doesn’t get a free transfer if servers merge. I really hope it’s just paranoia though because that’s really crappy.

Soulstar.7812:

Shhh, it’s ok… A-Net doesn’t listen to us, it’s time for GW2 to die…

I’ve been critical and quite vocal of the living story the past two weeks. Considering how many of us have been, I think the Dev’s have been doing a good job of responding. We had not only received bug fixes, we received actual revisions to the events every day this week. Can’t ask for much more than that. And, I don’t think we should expect them to be working over the weekends either. I’m assuming we’ll have another revision on Tuesday. That’s doing a pretty good job of listening and responding. I know we’re all supposed to be OCD gamer’s with little patience but, we have to be semi-reasonable about it.

I’ve been critical and quite vocal of the living story the past two weeks. Considering how many of us have been, I think the Dev’s have been doing a good job of responding. We had not only received bug fixes, we received actual revisions to the events every day this week. Can’t ask for much more than that.

But they weren’t patching it for us, they were patching it for themselves. Each change they made made things worse for the players. This LW was in it’s very best state on Tuesday night, each subsequent patch has only made things worse. It’s been in it’s worst state since Friday and there’s no sign that they’re even doing anything about it, making the whole weekend a waste for people who mostly play on weekends.

The least they could do is revert the game back to an earlier patch when the events actually worked.

Ohoni.6057:

I think all this talk of losing “lots” of players is a bit hyperbolic. It’s not that dire. Really I think it more comes down to them having so many different things going on that the players are harder to concentrate in one place, and also that active players have started their own migration over to the more populous servers. Even still there are plenty of players around for most ingame activities, just not enough for some of these massive open world zerg battles that demand a full instance. And on top of that, they typically demand that every player in the zone be actively engaged in the zerg content, when in fact during the Knight battles there tend to be plenty of people just running around looking for Peter or collecting Heirlooms or fighting the smaller battles, so you almost never end up with the full map capacity working on the event.

I think you make a good point about people running around doing other stuff. The achievement has 15 requirements and while some are pretty easy, many are hard to do alone because there are so many hostile forces in LA now. Plus, so many are time dependent, so if you don’t have enough people to take something down fast, you’re out of luck. Or, the achievements are hard enough—kill this think without getting hit by whatever— that people likely have to try over and over to get the strategy figured out.

All of that divides the population, even if technically there should be enough people to do the knights, for example.

However, I’d be happy even with the buggy content because since the last patch, I can’t even get my log in screen to load. :P —I’ve spent about 3 hours/day for the last two days working on that, not counting having had to re-download ALL the assets yesterday, and then again today.

I think 2 weeks between the first episode and this one was probably not enough time to iron things out…

Ohoni.6057:

But they weren’t patching it for us, they were patching it for themselves. Each change they made made things worse for the players.

I can see where one can say that. Though I think of the updates this week similarly to removing the Flame Kiss light armor from the TP. It appears to be a knee jerk reaction to complaints on the forums. Because already on Tuesday evening there were numerous threads complaining about zerging, the amount of loot, and people being afk. Which I’d argue are the reasons behind all the revisions to the content. If we all came on here and gave praise, they wouldn’t have changed a thing, because we would have been happy customers.

All I can do as a player is get into LA and help defeat the Knights. Which I’ve already done most of the day

Well said and agreed all. I played once on the day it came out, when we zerged from one Knight to the next and even at that peak condition, we didn’t make Knightfall. (Sanctum of Rall) Since that day, I’ve been online almost every day and have only made it to Scarlet ONCE since then. I gave my back plate to a lower level character, so I can’t even get to Scarlet on my lvl80 without the Knights. Which puts everyone at a disadvantage of course. This patch has done nothing but hurt us. The Knights are ridiculously high powered… it usually ends up as about 20 per knight on my server, if we’re really lucky. People have just given up and no one even cares anymore. It’s turned into sort of a scornful thing instead of a fun teamwork thing. I’m unable to finish the event or get any more achievements because of this lack of camaraderie now.

Again, I thoroughly agree with OP and hope you’ll be more considerate in the future before you just immediately patch something. Thanks!

The whole reason why the knights were changed was so that you could fight the hologram prime. Before, hologram prime started a minute or so after you killed the first knight. Hence why you were supposed to kill them seperately. The problem was that people were just killing one first, then moving to the others. This meant that you lost a good 4+ minutes on the hologram prime fight. that is the reason why they did it.

I will agree however that they did punch lower tier servers in the gut by doing so.

We need to start making a lot more noise about this.

The last step in the Scarlet storyline should be designed to be fun for everyone – not just those on large servers who are lucky enough to avoid overflow.

Smaller population servers have been left out of the last few updates in really big ways – to the point where it is demoralizing a HUGE chunk of the community.

I still have faith in the scaling system – which is where they are failing the hardest right now. They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging) in order to fix this.

If they cant do that (and do it before the end of April, imo), then it is time to merge servers – simple as that.

Designing fights for TTS and the 2-3 largest servers will destroy the fun of the game for everyone else.

Zelkovan.2630:

The whole reason why the knights were changed was so that you could fight the hologram prime. Before, hologram prime started a minute or so after you killed the first knight. Hence why you were supposed to kill them seperately. The problem was that people were just killing one first, then moving to the others. This meant that you lost a good 4+ minutes on the hologram prime fight. that is the reason why they did it.

I will agree however that they did punch lower tier servers in the gut by doing so.

Makes sense, a bad decision in hindsight.

Blaeys.3102:

They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging)

Don’t compare the Knights to the Wurm plz. The LA events are bugged. The Wurm is Elite content. Fixing the first is the solution, but no easy mode for the Wurm.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Blaeys.3102:

They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging)

Don’t compare the Knights to the Wurm plz. The LA events are bugged. The Wurm is Elite content. Fixing the first is the solution, but no easy mode for the Wurm.

No one is asking for easy mode.

Were just asking to be able to do the content with a reasonably sized group.

Requiring more people does not equal more difficult. People need to quit thinking that way. It’s what got us into this in the first place.

But that is only a tiny part of the bigger issue. Scaling is broken and needs to be fixed.

Those of us on lower populated servers just want a little love too.

For many of the recent LS events, I have far better luck with overflow maps than I do with my own server. I guest so I can get into an overflow with more people as my home server simply cannot complete many of the latest events, especially at non prime time hours.

I would prefer that the events be balanced for lower population servers so that I can do these on my home server without having to resort to overflows.

Blaeys.3102:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Blaeys.3102:

They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging)

Don’t compare the Knights to the Wurm plz. The LA events are bugged. The Wurm is Elite content. Fixing the first is the solution, but no easy mode for the Wurm.

No one is asking for easy mode.

Were just asking to be able to do the content with a reasonably sized group.

Requiring more people does not equal more difficult. People need to quit thinking that way. It’s what got us into this in the first place.

But that is only a tiny part of the bigger issue. Scaling is broken and needs to be fixed.

Those of us on lower populated servers just want a little love too.

Nope. The Wurm was meant for large scale coordinated efforts. That should and will remain the same. The Knights however, they’re just buggy and need to be fixed.

I agree with the OP. I couldn’t play on tuesday, or wednesday (wife had a baby this last weekend and we were all still in the hospital) but having tried 10x and repeatedly failing thursday and friday on my own server (BP) because of too many people running around for heirlooms…(we couldn’t get more than 30 at any given knight). I finally guested to JQ on Saturday and Sunday…I ended up in overflow 4 out of 5 times, but succeeded on all 5 attempts since I think 90% of us were guesters from low pop servers trying to succeed (which meant everyone was TRYING).

I really hate guesting to do content…but feel like I have no choice…the only way I have seen the holo-fight was by guesting. My server never does Teq or the Wurm anymore so those are done. We still do Karka Queen every night, so I think the Karka Queen is kind of the sweet spot for how content should be scaled.

Same problems on the Fissure of Woe server.

LadyZaner.9137:

I gave my back plate to a lower level character, so I can’t even get to Scarlet on my lvl80 without the Knights.

The teleporter has been reported to check the achievement not that you have the back piece on your character. If you made the back piece, equipped it, and got the achievement for doing so it should let you in. I haven’t tried it on my alts, but I did not have it equipped when I entered.

The whole reason why the knights were changed was so that you could fight the hologram prime. Before, hologram prime started a minute or so after you killed the first knight. Hence why you were supposed to kill them seperately. The problem was that people were just killing one first, then moving to the others. This meant that you lost a good 4+ minutes on the hologram prime fight. that is the reason why they did it.

Maybe so, but before Friday I was able to get into the Holo fight about five times, and each of those times we beat her with plenty of time to spare. Since the patch I haven’t been able to get into the Holo fight even ONCE out of about a dozen attempts. I don’t consider that an improvement.

On Yak’s I haven’t seen the event succeed since they changed it. I heard rumors that it did twice, but that is all. During the previous, sequential battle we got in a little over half the time. Like many on here, I don’t care about “triple treasure” or anything. I would just like another shot at fighting the holograms.

They should stop making content that is for hardcaped 150 people only. No one likes zerg content, anet can’t make scaling right, kitten gets bugged and everyone gets kittened.

Ditch the whole LS bullkitten, temporary content is bad, and only makes people not want to get back to the game because they missed it and can’t do anything to experience it ever again. Sure most LS is not connected and doesn’t get into main plot, but then whats the point of it. Just add permanent content, even if its only fraction of current LS, but make it good, make it count. Not some cheesy bs lesbian making out… cmon

Fort Aspenwood is having problems. We were doing alright after the 5th patch, but yesterday and today have not been good days to fight the holo.

I really don’t understand the mechanics of this event either.

Tonight on the Drakkar Home server, at 10PM (aka. peak hours) we barely had enough people to kill each Knight.

Red had probably about 45
Blue had roughly 40
And Green had about 35

Yet Green was by far the quickest, hitting 50% at the 9 minute mark. However the rest suddenly took much, much longer and they only just made it in time.

Blue seemed to have a more predictable pace and only barely got a kill within the 15 minutes.

Red failed, despite having the most players by far.

How does this make sense? Also how is this achievement ever supposed to work? Aside from Scarlet Slaying potions and the Order Buffs I don’t see how you can possibly achieve a 300% DPS increase which would be required to complete the achievement.

It makes absolutely no sense.

Blaeys.3102:

They need to scale all of these fights down (including Tequatl and the worms) to be doable by groups as small as 30 (yet still be challenging)

Worm and Tequatl I don’t worry about as much. When my server gets organized again we’ll be able to do it once a week. My main problem with Knights being as they are is that they’re temporary. There’s no real time to organize a server to do it once a week.

Dee Jay.2460:

I really don’t understand the mechanics of this event either.

Tonight on the Drakkar Home server, at 10PM (aka. peak hours) we barely had enough people to kill each Knight.

Red had probably about 45
Blue had roughly 40
And Green had about 35

Yet Green was by far the quickest, hitting 50% at the 9 minute mark. However the rest suddenly took much, much longer and they only just made it in time.

Blue seemed to have a more predictable pace and only barely got a kill within the 15 minutes.

Red failed, despite having the most players by far.

How does this make sense? Also how is this achievement ever supposed to work? Aside from Scarlet Slaying potions and the Order Buffs I don’t see how you can possibly achieve a 300% DPS increase which would be required to complete the achievement.

It makes absolutely no sense.

I think it’s all about people with green arrow, and condi build, since those knights are mostly anti condi, like 75% of time condi build are pretty much useless and will scale up event, + green arrow people (meaning those that get lvl up for the map like in wvw) that deal dull damage.
So it will be like the 30 people on green were more efficient cause they were less condi and green arrow.

I’m just disappointed about the scaling and also the fact that condition build are really put aside, they are like useless, seem ANet hate condi build =/

I would suggest to tell condi build chara to step aside ( out the event area ) and wait for the condition feeback to be removed before entering the fights.

As a CD native, I’ve since abandon my home server and forced to do this on BG. I don’t understand where they’re getting the metrics that says this is a viable design for this game.

Just stop making world events, if you want to make a challenging encounter, make it instance and increase party sizes to allow something like 10-25man. Don’t make content for 150 players, it doesn’t work, you don’t have the player base for that.

Excellent post. This really does appear to be yet another case of ANet designing content for the theoretical GW2 that they have in their heads and on their drawing boards as opposed to the actual GW2 that is played on their servers.

Charak.9761:

As a CD native, I’ve since abandon my home server and forced to do this on BG. I don’t understand where they’re getting the metrics that says this is a viable design for this game.

Just stop making world events, if you want to make a challenging encounter, make it instance and increase party sizes to allow something like 10-25man. Don’t make content for 150 players, it doesn’t work, you don’t have the player base for that.

10-25?
Do you have any idea how hard some of us have it trying to organise 5 ma parties????

Instanced isn’t the way to go. Proper scaling on the other hand, is.

Taygus.4571:

Charak.9761:

As a CD native, I’ve since abandon my home server and forced to do this on BG. I don’t understand where they’re getting the metrics that says this is a viable design for this game.

Just stop making world events, if you want to make a challenging encounter, make it instance and increase party sizes to allow something like 10-25man. Don’t make content for 150 players, it doesn’t work, you don’t have the player base for that.

10-25?
Do you have any idea how hard some of us have it trying to organise 5 ma parties????

Instanced isn’t the way to go. Proper scaling on the other hand, is.

If organizing 5 people is hard for you, how exactly is the 150man encounters a better solution.