Guild Wars 2

I have been underleveled for Renown Hearts in the level 15-25 areas for all races, and I think I’ve finally found the problem. Since you have added only one renown heart per level and the vistas / POIs / skill challenges in the area won’t get you to the next level, it’s natural to assume that you want us to level up via Dynamic events.

However the problem is that dynamic event chains are the ones that will get players to the next level, not a single dynamic event. What’s happening right now is that most of the time, there’s only one single dynamic event being played from the entire chain, because the rest of the chain only plays out if the first one fails.

For example, in Diessa Plateau, players must stop the Flame Legion from performing a ritual to pollute the water. If the event succeeds, it all stops right there. If the event fails however, a new event will start prompting players to defend the purification machines. If that event partially (1 machine gets destroyed) fails, players still get maximum reward for succeeding AND another event, asking them to defend an NPC while she performs repairs. All of these events will get players very close to leveling up for the next Heart, if they haven’t done so already.

Unfortunately, Dynamic events only fail during the night when no one else is playing (I myself have only discovered this in the dead of night while trying these events solo). There are simply too many players most of the time and the events never fail (some are way too easy to fail even solo).

I think that while the problem of events never failing will sort itself out in the long run when less people will be in the low level areas, a huge XP gap remains if they do succeed.

My suggestion is that more XP is given when players win the 1st event of the chain (at least half of what players would have got if they have done all the chains). This seems excessive, but at this point I have leveled 8 different characters up to level 25 and they all run across the same issue. I always get 100% map completion and always explore all skill challenges / vistas / POIs and even the jumping puzzle is enemies aren’t much higher. My crafting skills are always way ahead of my level (I have gear 5 levels higher in the bank waiting for me always). This simply makes players either grind the same dynamic events or leave the area and do Hearts somewhere else. I don’t like either.

LE: I forgot to mention personal stories. Those are always 2 levels ahead of me, because I play them as soon as I can. I think this should cover all of the “lol noob l2p” resoponses I get when trying to discuss this.

I agree about how frustrating it is given the current situation with dynamic events. It’s obvious they encourage the dynamic events to be more of the bulk of the leveling experience than renown hearts, but typically due to the influx of people in all the zones I’ve been in currently, I’ve yet to see but a handful of events fail. As a result, most of them stop in their tracks. Some don’t, and play out further, but most of them stop immediately and either go in a loop (which I refuse to grind dynamic events back to back) or there’s simply silence in that region of the zone for a dreadfully long time.

Would like to see more options available with a successful finish on more dynamic events.

As I’ve suggested in another thread, event chains need a way to circumvent choke points, when the player base keeps on beating them.
This would especially help fix event chains/meta events, where you have 2 groups fighting over territory. If those event chains get stuck in a particular position, the chain should throw in events, that normally would not appear at this stage of the chain.

This would provide additional variation and in general more events for the player to participate in.

they said the events would shape the world, they said we would notice

They do. The problem is…
That event very, very rarelt fails, and you very rarely see event pushing from ultimate failure state.
What you usually see is event about defend ultimate victory state. Which is sad, as this really breaks any illusion about chaging world.
World never change because people do not let it change.

The only way to see it happen is to actually force events to go back to ultimate failure.

iniside.4736:

They do. The problem is…
That event very, very rarelt fails, and you very rarely see event pushing from ultimate failure state.
What you usually see is event about defend ultimate victory state. Which is sad, as this really breaks any illusion about chaging world.
World never change because people do not let it change.

The only way to see it happen is to actually force events to go back to ultimate failure.

I couldn’t agree more. I think if we get to the ultimate fail state, we’ll get way more events to fix the failed one. But everybody is focussed on preventing that so we don’t get that many events, which is kind of sad.

Actually i dont agree.

1,You are Rushing levels. You will be underleveled. When i run araund explored, crafted and done stuff i was always ahead of myself. Unlike when i was just rushing.

2, The mechanic of Event chains is good. Somethimes it continues when you fail, somethimes not. And that makes it bit more exciting. Try not to “calculate” when yo uget the most exp, and try not to look at them as “experiance source” they are EVENTS (its in the name) that make the game more exciting, then a “quest araund to lv” game. If you like stable leveling process i suggest WoW or a gen 1.0 Mmo.

3, A lot of events fail when there are no players araud? Ok i agree with that, but they do must fail somethimes. They cant always succeed.
-If you want to handle this as problem (its your personal opinion) i undertand it, but its a problem that is more likely cosued by not fine tuned “difficulty scaling with palyer numbers”.
-A lot of players (me to ) complain that events where centaurs attack in a waves, they cluster up and 2-3 aoe brings down the entire wave, and the 8-9 player is just stading ther and wait till next wave instead of fighting.
This is coused by the same problem(and by another)….The attacks dont scale with players strenght = to few centaurs come, and they die in 2-3 hits. And becouse they cluster up and dont have the inteligance to spread out when they get AOE-d.

-I undertand that its hard to scale the events to the player strenght, but please understand this Anet : We (players) would struggle and fail in a hard battle that is exciting (maybe we would even work harder and make insane efforts to succeed then), then get bored becouse we always win in a easy battle.

But then again i must say it : EVENTS ARE FOR FUN, not for leveling. It exists to bring excitement to the game, thats the whole reson i want them to scale better with players strenght.

SO if you next plan on making an post abaut “bad design” (wont matter if its true or not) then you better point out the problems broken down to points and also point the way to solution, not only “moan” abaut i am short on exp becouse this is bad design.
(you clearly state this in the first paragraph)

And i see that you suggest " more exp" as solution, for the first chain event, but thats just bad idea. If i ware you i would suggest “same ammounts of chains if you succeed and if you fail to”
But you keep forgetting 1 thing : if oyu win if you fail then you get 4 options of events next and after that 8 and so on. You cant keep this up in the long run. Exspecially its only for the sake of good exp? As sead events are for fun not for getting you leveled. Just go to other area. And try to go above 50.

I respect your honest opinion, and dont want to offend you, but sorry i cant fully agree with you. Trough the thout on the Chain event fails and sucsess rewards is an interesting. Worth a full topic if oyu detail it out to problem, solution. Please do so. So this game can inprove. (thats what we all want since we “moan” to make it better)
for aurself)

O and sory for my misspells (keyboard broken a bit)

Im so happy that people are starting to realise this flaw of d.events.
I personally LOVE this form of questing but its current implementation needs serious tweeks to work..If they would fix that then Tyria would truly come to life

@Nekroseth: You have completely missed the point of both the original post and what came before. By design, dynamic events are meant for leveling. “Fun” is a by-product. No one said anything about rushing. I fully explore the map, gather nodes and do everything there is to be done in an area except grind mobs. It is not enough to do the next heart. Of course you CAN do hearts that are higher level, and I have tried that on two characters, but in the end instead of being level 25 after finishing Diessa Plateau you will be level 23. It’s not enough for story or for moving to the next area. Although I plan to reach 100% world completion and do the other low level areas as well, I don’t want to do it NOW. Now, I want to be able to progress naturally.

This whole idea of sending players to “other areas” is simply exhausting. I’m tired of telling people: I don’t give a crap what’s happening in Snowdrifts Haven when I’m playing Brisbane Wildlands. It’s a different story arc, and I don’t want to mix them up. I want to advance my personal story and the game used to be able to provide that (it does even now in certain areas of the game, for example the 1-15 areas or Fields of Ruin).

But the main focus of this topic is the viability of the dynamic event system when faced with the fact that events will always succeed. I ask this to ArenaNet: Isn’t it a shame that you have put so much work into world-changing event chains that never play out? I remember back in beta testing when I was alone in Queensdale and bandits poisoned the water, how the sprinklers started killing crops by spraying poisoned water. I remember how beautiful it was when the water was purified and I really felt like I did something good for Tyria. After launch I have played through Queensdale 5 times with 100% map completion and I have never saw that event fail again.

I would very much appreciate an answer from the developers. I’m not expecting a major redesign of dynamic events now, but I would like to hear that you know that this isn’t really working right and we can at least expect improvements in future expansions.

they should focus on event chains that continue when it succeeds. i’ve personally encountered a good one:
1. it starts with collecting dwarven artifacts for an innkeeper
2. then fighting off bandits that wanted to get one of the rare artifacts
3. then escorting a caravan that will transfer the artifact to someone who knows what to do with it
4. then after arriving they would do some sort of ritual that then summons a big boss that can be defeated by a group

in addition, i would like them to have looooooonger quest chains maybe up to 10 or so that can last for an entire day. that would be epic.

I got the same experience even at head start because I don’t like to level through crafting. This is what I do.
(1) If you find yourself under level, move to the other race starter area and quest there until you catch up there. When you move back to your own race area, you should be well over level.
(2) Try to mine/harvest/log whenever you are close to a node. They give even more experiences than killing mobs and if even you don’t need them, you can sell them on trade post for decent income.

These have been mentioned elsewhere, but In Kessex Hills the meta event in relation to the Fort is usually stuck at the “centaurs are driven back” -> the heart at the fort becomes tedious to complete.

Same thing in Diessa Plateau, the meta event in relation to the Flame legion base with a heart near it, this heart being literally impossible to complete if players are holding the entrance to Incedio temple (that is what it was called I think).

The difference, however, is that in Kessex Hills the problem is at the start of the chain (ie. the heart is easiest to fill when the fort is under siege, which I consider the start because an empty zone would revert to it), while in Diessa Plateau it is at the end so the heart is eventually doable if you are there when they are trying though often still failing to reclaim their camp.

A topic with a fairly similar discussion is here. It is centered around a potential solution though.

I still want to repeat myself from there and chime in though, currently the centaurs in Kessex Hills for example feel extremely stupid, trying to repair the bridge over and over again when it obviously doesn’t work with the amount of players there. Same hardheadedness manifests in the example from Diessa Plateau very often.

However, beyond the difference in problematic hearts the chain in Diessa Plateau has a carrot at the end which will distract players from persistently holding the flame legion camp, nothing like that in Kessex Hills though. So in that sense the Diessa Plateau one is much less problematic chain, although the said carrot at the end would be a great place to farm loot, until the artificial loot caps kick in.

Peopl the point is not about you being underleveled.That could be fixed by higher exp from the hearts…
The problem is with the events and the whole “changing the world concept”
Just ramp up the difficulty one point after each success and lower it one point after each fail..Put notification message like "the centaures are on a roll "or whatever and theres your fix .

Hey guys, while I do agree that dynamic events should be more dynamic (even increase in difficulty, if that suits Arenanet’s design), I have discussed that in the thread you have linked.

I have started this thread to discuss dynamic events viewed from a leveling player perspective. Could I have had more fun? Yes, a lot more, with some design changes. But I am more worried about the experience gap that is caused by this system, and I think that this should be fixed before ‘fun’ issues are dealt with. Of course, what everyone proposes in that thread will also fix the experience gap. However I have suggested a ‘quick’ fix (and perhaps a temporary one) until they hopefully decide to make the changes the community asks to the dynamic event system (not an easy thing to do, I’m sure). From the 10 characters I have created, I have stuck with 2 that are now higher level. My level 25 human Guardian is again underleveled (by one level) when reaching Gendarran Fields, even though I have even completed 100% of Wayfarer Foothills when I was about level 15 (and, of course, 100% of Kessex Hills and Queensdale). Humans in Kessex Hills suffer a lot more than any other race because of the dynamic event system and those silly centaurs getting slaughtered at the bridge.

Btw Crise has made some very good points on Diessa Plateau, I have finished that area as well but was lucky enough to play at night and duo many chains with a guildmate, letting some fail (or partially fail) so that we would get the most out of them. I know however just how badly a character can become underleveled in Diessa Plateau as well, since I deleted a character that was two levels under the next Heart.

Well, I do agree that alot of potential content is being missed because alot of events don’t fail. But, I can’t agree that most dynamic events end if the players succeed. I’ve been in plenty of events that succeed and then proceed onwards towards a boss event chain. Who knows what the failure event chain would be? But there are success chains too.

There are times when they are repetitive because they never fail, which is its own topic, but to say that successfully completing a DE doesn’t lead to a chain is wrong IMO.

Also, even though it may be repetitive, events do repeat if they don’t fail and XP can be gained that way. You may have to move on around the map to find another event, even if it’s one you’ve done already.

The system can be improved of course, but with all the activities that give XP in the game the balance is probably still being tweaked with live metrics.

WHat about making it possible to the players actually work on the FAILURE of an event? Like an evil character, or maybe even some strategic mind that sees that thing as a possibility to change the politics and power of that region?

In response to OP, this problem persists across the entire game. Its especially prevalent in Orr though, as there are a number of “Defend the outpost” events that simply revolve around camping where the packs spawn and AoEing them down in 1-3 seconds after they spawn. They don’t even come close to failing.

This problem stems from poor DE scaling, and has a number of negative effects on the game:

1. As you pointed out, chains that aren’t triggered never happen, and can lead to a dry spell of events in an area if event chains are just stuck on the winning side of the pendulum all the time.

2. Because many chains are stuck on the winning side of the pendulum, the world feels much less alive, and these fantastic dynamic event chains are reduced to being glorified public quests that pop up every 5-10 minutes.

3. Because we are stuck on the winning side of the pendulum in almost every area, we also don’t get to see many of the cool dynamic events that happen when we fail a chain. I’m willing to bet most players who play during normal hours (myself included) have never seen many of the events that happen when we fail, because its so difficult to fail events. This is a huge chunk of content that the main player base for each prime time region haven’t seen, and won’t see in the game’s current state. This is also a chunk of content that I would love to see myself.

4. The poor scaling of certain dynamic events makes it very difficult to get “kill tag” credit sometimes. Events that involve waves of enemies have the enemies spawn all at once and running all bunched up. The scaling that happens here is that we just get more enemies, while the HP of each stays the same. This makes them very susceptible to burst AoE attacks, which puts players who have condition builds at a huge disadvantage. This promotes power builds almost exclusively, especially in Orr where waves die very fast. Its hard for me using a power AoE build to get my hits in sometimes, and there isn’t any way I can see condition builds getting gold consistently at all.

So those are the problems that I’m seeing at level 80, and all of them stem from the fact that events scale poorly, making it near impossible to lose a chain and progress down the negative path.

I do want to say that there is one event that I think is scaled very good and is a great challenge and fun fight, and that is The Claw of Jormag event in Frostforge Sound. This is currently my favorite event in the game by far. Its fun, its challenging, the mechanics are interesting, it scales very well to the amount of people in the area doing it (often well over 100), people go down a lot if they mess up, and while it doesn’t have a failing criteria to support its challenging nature, its the best dynamic event I’ve seen so far.

I do hope these issues are addressed in the future.

If you levelled up to the level of each heart just by doing all the content in an area, then if you did anything else, such as crafting, city exploring, WvW etc, you would always be over level and remain over level for the rest of the game or have to skip content. The fact that areas don’t give all the XP needed to level is an essential part of the non linear gameplay in GW2 and the fact you get XP for almost everything. Even with this XP gap, if you do a variety of other things, it can be hard not to overlevel.

This is one thing that Arenanet really shouldn’t change. Players just need to learn to smell the roses and not get fixated on a sequential path to max level where you have to fill up a tick list of content.

roqoco.4053:

If you levelled up to the level of each heart just by doing all the content in an area, then if you did anything else, such as crafting, city exploring, WvW etc, you would always be over level and remain over level for the rest of the game or have to skip content.
[…]
This is one thing that Arenanet really shouldn’t change. Players just need to learn to smell the roses and not get fixated on a sequential path to max level where you have to fill up a tick list of content.

That’s just not true.
I play a Sylavari and a Norn, and this is a really antithetic experience:
I participated in every event I came across in Caledon and Brisban, did the 100% exploration achievements, and crafted as much as the limited resources allowed me. Until then I did about seven level ups by WvW, simply because I didn’t want to grind events. 7 Levels out of 25!

With my Norn I did not craft, did no WvW, did not repeat a single event, and did no exploration in the Norn capital. However I did not run into a level gap until Lvl 32.

The problem is not the missing level content, but its imbalance and randomness. This keeps players thinking of a virtual tick list, because many things you would do as “fluff” in other games is required to be done in GW2 to keep pace with the story.

I think it would be cool if the encounters got more and more challenging each time you succeed in defending an area. Eventually there would be veterans then champions and bosses come and try to take it out and you the player would experience higher lvl challenges each time and it would be bound to fail eventually.