Guild Wars 2

On my server, Anvil Rock, most of the high level zones are almost dead. Is it like this every server, or is my server simply depopulated?

I think everyone left us for a higher pop server. Though we do have plenty of bots left!

even on another server sometimes I want to just wander around a region but I find noone around to do events with. but at other times, there are enough people. (depends on the region too i guess.)

it would be interesting to see some graphs about when players are most active on which server so that you can log in when there are many others online if you plan to do group things.
additionally, something about which zones are the most populated etc.

I pretty much like statistics, it would be nice if the dev team shared some that they surely have!

There are quite a number of events that I start alone, but very few of them that I finish alone. Usually once the event gets rolling people start showing up. Many is the time I, all alone, have followed a Priory or Whispers agent into a cave and before long there are half a dozen players there to help out.

Also keep an eye on the /map chat. I see people shouting out chained event starts and especially spawns of champions all the time.

Yeah I have been leveling two alts 1 is now 70 the other is about to hit 40 and it is more often that I am soloing an event (with a mixture of failure and success depending on how well balanced it is for the solo player) or I can occasionally find another person come over (which is far far more rare). I often see champions but there’s no point in trying to solo them.

My guess is Plinx, Arena, Tar, Meddlers, Jofast, Shelters those are where most high level players on my server are at now. Doing the DE chains since they pop so fast and cater to what you need quickly.

Plinx,Arena,Tar, Brood, Abom Karma farm and the other for loot/rare drops/money.

Wish there was a call to arms I agree I find myself alone, especially when its a group dynamic where your fighting a champion mob, it would be nice if you could hire allies from your order. * Vigil, Priory or Whispers *

CoffeeShtoun….. shhhh don’t give them another idea of a gold sink in the game they have plenty of those already

I just finished my 2nd toon – didnt like the play of my first and the zones are empty. It seems the cursed shore is the only populated place left on my server

Drunken Mad King.8193:

CoffeeShtoun….. shhhh don’t give them another idea of a gold sink in the game they have plenty of those already

i think maybe they meant like in Guild Wars 1 style of henchmen. i mean this would be nice, because you did kill Zhaitan, and none of the NPCs in Orr seem to recognize you for your achievement.

If you took part in the Vigil storyline, and shot down Zhaitan, a few vigil lackeys can be beneficial, as a special elite summon, or something. it could be like those summoning stones from Guild Wars 1 (summon fire imp or assassin).

this could lead to new “relevant” content.

I’m on a busy EU server and the same… what I’ve noticed is ppl do certain events in the high level areas the rest no-one bothers with. Straits of Devestation for example the WP’s are always contested I rarely see another soul and if I do they’re loooking for Orichalcum nodes.

Ppl seem to be looking for a quick repetive zerg Plinx on Cursed Shore always has tons players and there are about 5 events close together there… Easy zerg. Same as the dragon events always full – It would be so much better if dynamic events were just that dynamic the events what we have so far are mostly timed so players can go from one to the other without ever interacting with the rest of the world or just sit in one spot waiting for them.

Same with dungeon story modes and even explore mode on some of the less popular dungeons (HoTW and SE) hours or even days lol to get a group which often falls apart before completion.

And all this on a full server /sigh! I want heroes and henchies back badly at least my alts would be able to do the content!

This happens to me all the time, I either have to solo events or just ignore them because there are too many mobs for me to solo, basically I end up going from heart to heart because that’s the most consistent thing you can do when you’re practically the only person in a zone.

Yeah same deal here. I actually kind of miss the henchmen from guild wars 1 they helped fill holes when you couldnt get people to help you. Its probably not worth the time and effort to make them for this but dead zones like higher level have hard DEs that you cant really solo.

I just don’t want to have any of these suggests that will reinforce the notion its all soloable.

What we need is more players doing stuff together, but how do we go about that?

The problem I’ve noticed is two-fold:

First, in zones with less people in them (such as Snowden Drifts and Gendarren Fields) there don’t seem to be many events at all. I’ve leveled two characters through both zones I listed, and both times it was an awful drag because there were no events to boost XP (and fun) gain. Without events, leveling is incredibly tedious.

Second, in zones with a higher population that is generally centered in certain areas, there are a lot of group events that you can’t find people to help with. This tends to be true of lower-level zones with dungeons in them. I did Caledon Forest yesterday and it was really bad. Champions up all over the place and just myself to take them down. Needless to say, I didn’t do many events, and the people waiting at TA were not interested in helping out.

My two suggestions to fix this are simple: make events trigger more often or make more of them trigger by user interaction, and provide NPC help and environmental weapons to deal with group events when there is no group around. The first is rather self explanatory, I’ll go into more detail about the second.

Say you have a champion krait witch that takes over a hylek village. This village has defenders and fire lobbers. However, the krait witch kills the defenders easily with her PBAoE poison cloud that they don’t move out of and die to even though it says they’re immune to poison, and the fire lobbers get taken out easily by the other krait that spawn in the area. Basically, the environment is of no help.

Make a force of hylek, maybe a few veterans, that will engage the witch if/when you ask them to. Have plenty of rocks and boards and things laying around to stun or otherwise disrupt the witch. And have lobbers set aside where the krait won’t normally go so you can get extra damage from them. Basically, if any one person can effectively use all of the tools to defeat the champion, it should be possible. For 2-3 people it would be easy, and a group could do it as normal.

That way when all you come across is champion event after champion event, and there’s no one else in sight, you can still give it a go and accomplish something.

I’m on Stormbluff Isle and it’s about the same here too -_-

I have spend a lot of time in low-mid level zones, when I hit 80 my World Completion was only like 40%, and back then I didn’t even set foot in 65+ zones. Almost everywhere I go, I see all these Champions wandering around that I couldn’t take out alone, and so many DEs or group events that no one seem to care. Sometimes I saw a boss or event that I couldn’t do and logged out, and when I logged back in after 2-3 hours, guess what? It’s still there…-_-

Just yesterday I have finally entered Strait of Devastation, I had thought maybe the situation would improve a bit better here since it is a 70-75 zone. Well, still the same…I see these Risen Captain or Megalodon boss that no one bothered for hours, all those submarines taken out repeatedly, and even if they managed to land, because there’s not another single soul out there other than me and a bunch of NPC, the landing events always failed.

I’m really losing faith now, must I go and stay at the highest level zones to see more people?

I hope Anet solve this issue soon, or at least make Guesting available as soon as possible, so I can maybe start a server-crossing guild with people that likes to do PvE regardless of the reward or DR bs.

This has happened to me many times and it makes me sad. I would love for the more difficult events to scale down further so that anyone with some degree of skill has a chance of finishing them alone if literally nobody else is around. As it stands right now some events just cannot be done solo and nobody even cares in map chat, they are too busy grinding hearts believing that everything gets better at 80. I love this game but it really bothers me that the current scaling system is still tailored towards large groups of people still actually being in every zone.

Blizt.3086:

Just yesterday I have finally entered Strait of Devastation, I had thought maybe the situation would improve a bit better here since it is a 70-75 zone. Well, still the same…I see these Risen Captain or Megalodon boss that no one bothered for hours, all those submarines taken out repeatedly, and even if they managed to land, because there’s not another single soul out there other than me and a bunch of NPC, the landing events always failed.

Straits of Devastation is particularly bad. DEs (and DE chains) are like self-contained mini-quests. In other zones, this works reasonably well. But this piecemeal approach to DEs doesn’t work thematically for SoD.

The DEs in this zone should be tied together to reflect the logical progression of the Pact invasion over the Strait. For example, the DEs available in the western landmass should depend directly on the number of beachheads held. No beachheads, no events. Aside from making more sense, it would focus more attention on DEs currently being ignored.

If the DEs in Cursed Shore ever get redone, I hope some sort of logical zone-wide progression features heavily in the design.

This will be fixed in a future expansion. They’ll raise the level cap amd create a new end-game zone. The problem with everyone farming Cursed Shore will be solved. Everyone will farm the new end-game zone instead.

I am hoping for them to start merging the lower population servers as time goes on.

Skolvikings.5132:

This will be fixed in a future expansion. They’ll raise the level cap amd create a new end-game zone. The problem with everyone farming Cursed Shore will be solved. Everyone will farm the new end-game zone instead.

How would that solve the problem? Most people will just farm in the “new end-game zone” when it happened, instead of whatever zone they’re farming in right now.

Blizt – my point exactly.

IoJ here, pve population was massive on my first char, mostly dead on my second char (both 80, 100%) and on my third … well yer, pretty kitten quiet.

I am on ET and those bots are definitely going to ruin this game if left untreated. Now that Halloween is finally over, please take this situation seriously. This is so much more important than those Nov/Dec big patches.

I decided to travel to the low level areas (1-15) and almost every single group event was active. Nobody even attempting to do them, and map chat was simply empty. My attempts to gather even a small group of players willing to clear the events was met with silence. I did see a couple of people attempt to take on the flame shaman in Ashford but they died within seconds, as the event is tuned for more people. :/

I was playing with an alt yesterday trying to get my daily coin.
Its pretty much hopeless to try and complete a dynamic event while you are leveling because your only option is solo.

Im glad I leveled up a toon in the first month when it was fun.

I’VE been talking about this for weeks now. Its not just low lvl zones that are empty. From what people are saying its all because of the free server transfers going on. But i think that’s only part of the problem. Its getting to the point where i can be playing for an hour before i see anyone. When i got the game at release there were so many players around. You never had to ask for help in mc. I’M starting to think that people are leaving the game. I know people don’t want to here this but i think that’s whats happening here.

An idea that people will vastly “nope”, but will solve the problem of getting high level players in lower level areas:
Remove Waypoints.
To get around you have to actually run from place to place, there would still be the asura gates, but to get to the farthest reaches you actually have to run there. It may just be me, but I had a natural aversion to waypointing and thus ran everywhere. I got resources, hit events, and saved a small bit of money while making some.

Doesn’t most server still say high pop? If so is it a lie or is everyone doing WvWvW? But then isn’t there a rather shallow limit of how many people that can do WvWvW at a time? Not understanding the math here.

Guys, the problem is not the low population. It is high still. The problem is that the players spreaded over Tyria. When we started, everyone was in the 1-30 areas. It was cool, lot of people. Everyone leveled time to time, hit lv80 in a month. Now, the players doing pvp, wvw, dungeons, and few people leveling alts, but these are not that much. There is a solution for this I think:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Do-you-remember-when-the-game-is-started-and-the-areas-had-a-lot-of-player-I-want-it-back/first#post622484

The problem with dynamic events is that once you outlevel particular area there is simply no point in doing them unless you want karma and for that you can still do lvl 80 events. Even if the game downscales your level, the loot still stays the same and you will keep getting lvl 35 loot even at lvl 80 so what’s the point? Characters are scaled to an area, which is fine, but the area should also scale to the player (karma, gold and loot in particular).

Another thing – karma and all equipment should be account bound – “soulbound” should be removed entirely from the game. Let me give you an example: I have lvl 80 mesmer, which I play all the time and lvl 18 engineer which I touch like 1-2 times a week. If i had more ways in which I could help level my engineer while playing my mesmer I would have more incentive to play in lower level areas.

tl;dr – Make rewards and loot scale to player level throughout the game, implement better rewards for events, remove “soulbound” – it’s just annoying. Also, make karma “one pool” for an entire account.

If lower level events awarded the same amount of money and karma points as Orr’s then I’m sure perople would spread trough all the maps, but in order to do so ANet has to implement a true downscaling system: currently an exotic geared level 80 will probably one/two shot many low level mobs turning DEs into jokes.

Personaly I’d love if I had to put the same effort while killing mobs regardless of level.

As a level 80 because I dont realy like trivial content, oneshotting mobs might be fun for the first two minutes, but it get boring fast.

Also as a low level in some extreme (and rare, still it happened) case I had to ask higher level players to hold their attacks to let me at least tag mobs. Luckily for me most of the people will be nice enough to let me score a couple of hits before the carnage, but there’s allways tha particular person yelling “LOLOL L2TAG NOOB!!111”

P.S. Sorry for grammar errors, English’s not my main language

GhostDF.2610:

The problem with dynamic events is that once you outlevel particular area there is simply no point in doing them unless you want karma and for that you can still do lvl 80 events.

Or you want to be a completionist and want to see everything the world offers, that is me fwiw. My end game is making it through all the content and not re-running content unless it is PvP. I can say that about all my mmo’s. There are a few different kinds of players who play for different reasons. Playing an Alt is also a possibility of the content was fun and the alts unique.

In DDO the top players race to top-level, reincarnate (which is an amazing option for gamers like that) so they are a little stronger when they max out that next life, then reincarnate again for that additional tick of greatness. As they do that they are also grinding for top loot and the game is built to take massive time and money to get the absolute best of everything. Takes X of this to get one piece. To get X you have to run this area/series of quests X amount of times in hopes for a random drop you need. That is your A-Typical End Game for a MMO, that and PvP.

There players have a map on how to run the quests to get from 1 to 25. They play a fraction of the overall content. In my case I play every quest the game offers at least once. Different folks, to me that way, I never see a grind.

I go through the content, don’t grind, go to the next game, repeat. Will return to previous game if I enjoyed it and they added a lot of content features since I last played.

Some events are more enjoyable and fun doing solo, some are just a hassle and some impossible. Some zones, no matter high or low seem to have more people in them and of course alot of the time, if there is a dragon, people flock to that zone close to the spawn of the dragon itself. It also depends on when people generally are online.

Having a karma pool is both a good thing and a bad thing though, why do events in an area to get enough karma for a piece of lower level armor when you can just rush to the next and the next as soon as possible? And if karma vendors offered account bound gear, what would be the point of going there again with another character? That could leave the areas even more empty than they already are at some points.

They really do need to introduce ‘underflow’ to merge maps from servers that are underpopulated.

Like Dobi said, population is quite fine, but has progressed way beyond the 1-50 level zones. Anyone new, or starting an alt will have quite a lonely experience.

Some might like this, which is why it should be optional if you want to leave your server map for ‘underflow’, like it’s optional if you want to leave the overflow server you got put on.

Yeah, I guess the problem is the incentive to do the events and also flawed design decisions…

For example, I’m currently in the 15-25 Charr area on JQ and I remember in the beginning there were (of course) plenty of other people around to do the Nageling giant event. But even back then, people were asking why we even did it when we realized it took forever, people died all the time because the majority sucked at dodging its stomps and the big guy never dropped anything for us so we concluded it was just for the exp/karma and it happened every 15 minutes or something. As opposed to the other low-mid level (Harathi, was it?) giant even (Champion Kol Skullsmasher), which is actually part of a chain event with the chest waiting after getting into the centaur encampment… well, yeah. What was the point of the guy at Nageling? The place isn’t worth defending either. And even now, people don’t do Kol much… still more than Nageling but yeah.

I mean, hey, I don’t expect to see a crowd at this point in the game in the lower level areas but even when I see a decent amount of people running around, no one wants to do X event because it’s not worth it.

In my personal opinion DE rewards should at be at least 5 times greater than they are now. Also, they should be tied to your level not the level of an area. That would solve many problems. Another great thing would be if they implemente unique rewards for some DEs.

It’s not only a lack of people, and it’s not only restricted to higher level areas. Look at the Krait Witch that is in Kessex Hills. Very few people will do this more than once. It hits like a train, takes ages to put down and your reward is a bit of karma and less exp than you’d get from gathering a lettuce. I’ve never had anything drop from it and there’s no chest. The only reason for even going there that I can see is the POI.

PS. I had to insert “that is” between “Krait Witch” and “in Kessex” because the silly filter inserts kitten in there!!!

GhostDF.2610:

In my personal opinion DE rewards should at be at least 5 times greater than they are now. Also, they should be tied to your level not the level of an area. That would solve many problems. Another great thing would be if they implemente unique rewards for some DEs.

Before release I was given to understand that this was how it was supposed to work anyway. Harder events gave a fair chance at slightly better loot and more karma/exp as they require longer periods of time and more people.

As it stands right now one has to simply ignore group events and move on to easier ones, due to population problems and population mentality. Also the lack of exp scaling up in lower level zones while being a higher level is VERY noticeable, not even close to what you would get in a level appropriate zone. This leads to people following the typical trail of moving onto higher level zones and forgetting about the lower ones as it isn’t worth their time.

All of the above leads to the problems we have in this post, nobody around to do these events, or to even want to do them as it isn’t worth their time….Anet needs to address this in some way and give people more incentive to take part in lower level stuff and group events in general.

Shameless bump just because

I am also going to throw my voice behind this. I had to give up on Staits of Devastation and Frostgorge Sound today because there was nobody around to do DEs with, and my 74 warrior can hold her own, but it’s either spectacularly unfun (SoD) or a waste of time (Champions, large groups with multiple veterans). I couldn’t even continue with level-appropriate Renown Hearts in FS because there were multiple DEs happening around the area and they were just not worth the hassle of soloing.

This was after slogging through Sparkfly Fen and soloing about 90% of those DEs. It was manageable, but not a whole lot of fun.