Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing for a month or two (yeah, not that long), and I have a couple of thoughts about dynamic events – I’m curious if anyone else feels the same.
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1) The heavy focus on roaming (dynamic events/hearts for exp, DR, level scaling allowing revisiting lower areas, etc.) keeps people moving around instead of squatting in one room killing the same baddies over and over. Love it.

However, this also means that people never stay in one place longer than a few minutes – you see a big sea of new faces at every event, then after a frenzy of hacking and slashing, they all vanish into thin air to different WP’s without so much as a “that was fun, bye!”. It’s depressingly anti-social, and starts to feel lonely after a while. There just isn’t really any common thread that connects/encourages people to stick together. Am I missing something here?
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2) I’d expected dynamic events to have “lasting consequences”, in order to make players feel more personally invested in their success/failure, and make the world seem more real/alive. However, the reality is that taking a stronghold takes 5-10 minutes, and if you don’t stay there, it’s lost again in 30-60 minutes. This trivializes waypoint contests and makes it just seem completely futile to even bother taking them.

In my mind, “lasting consequences” means that when territory is taken, it is held for at least a couple days, maybe some minor skirmishes/probing attacks from the enemy in the interim that NPC’s/solo players could hold off, then a big zerg-style push from the enemy that causes a world-wide SOS signal and lasts half a day, requiring multiple tactical objectives to be met to successfully defend… e.g. hold the gates, destroy catapults, light distress signals for NPC reinforcements, defeat champions, build defenses, etc…

This would provide plenty of events that players could choose to participate in any day, depending on which maps/areas have major initiatives (offensive or defensive) happening at the moment. This would make the world much more immersive compared to having hundreds of worthless mini-events scattered around the world that mean nothing.

This would also shift the game’s focus away from loot-hoarding chests from dragon events, to actually trying to meet complex objectives in a role-playing environment.
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These are my own thoughts. Comments/counter-thoughts?

I feel the exact same way. I love that I can pretty much just run around doing whatever I want (which happens to be exploring all the maps inluding WP/Skill/Vistas/POI’s) and I can pretty much just jump into events/do hearts whenever they happen to be near where I am. However it does lead to a lack of community, ESPECIALLY in this era of dragon/maw/SB camping for chests.

I am also in LOVE with the idea of larger meta events, and them having longer lasting consequences. The only issue I could see is if we fail to defend a certain town/fort/what have you, and it stays under enemy control for an extended period of time, that would (potentially) lock out the WP associated. Obviously would need some thought to get timing and everything working, but all I like it!

Wouldn’t hurt to post this over in suggestions as well/instead I would think =)

Emissary

you see a big sea of new faces at every event, then after a frenzy of hacking and slashing, they all vanish into thin air to different WP’s without so much as a “that was fun, bye!”. It’s depressingly anti-social, and starts to feel lonely after a while.

+1 … very very true I’ve played a lot of MUDs and MMOs over the years and find that GW2 has just about the worst sense of community, I had partly put this down to teamspeak (which I cannot use) assuming that players were chatting in ts instead of in game channels .. but perhaps not.

On your other point, I love the dynamic quests that form variable sequences … take this bridge, if you fail then fall back and defend a base camp, if you win proceed across the bridge and attack a fort etc.

To my mind dynamic events should play off each other far more than they do now with strings of 10-20 quests all dependent on the previous ones, you can either drop in / out of part of the string, or stay for the full string with rewards snowballing for more of the sequence you stay for and a big reward if you run the whole sequence to a successful finale. Far better to get a map working together rather than e.g. maw every 30 mins.

I won’t lie. If you’re not in one of the starter maps, Cursed Shore, Lion’s Arch, WvW, or possibly Southsun Cove during prime-time, map-chat/communications tend to be non-existent. Even then, there’s a mix of trolls and miscreants that will attempt to snub any actual conversation. Even being in a guild doesn’t really fix the problem since many of them use some form of voice-communication and forget that they have people in guild-chat wanting to talk.

My best advice is to try and spark conversations or run a lot of dungeons/fractals. People tend to be more talkative when they’re in a group with you. Its still not a guaranteed thing though.

It seems like new content has gotten more people out since the last patch. Unfortunately, it’s made map chat HORRIBLE and I end up turning it off a lot:(

Could a mod move this to Suggestions?

I played MUDs for years and just got back into online gaming with Diablo 3 and GW2. The community seems to be exactly the same as it was 10+ years ago on MUDs to me. Maybe there was a giant sense of community in WoW because you had to spend a lot of time standing around or something, but I think it’s pretty much the same in GW2 as any of the numerous MUDs I played in the 90’s.

Maybe try an RP server?

“2) I’d expected dynamic events to have “lasting consequences”, in order to make players feel more personally invested in their success/failure, and make the world seem more real/alive. However, the reality is that taking a stronghold takes 5-10 minutes, and if you don’t stay there, it’s lost again in 30-60 minutes. This trivializes waypoint contests and makes it just seem completely futile to even bother taking them.

In my mind, “lasting consequences” means that when territory is taken, it is held for at least a couple days, maybe some minor skirmishes/probing attacks from the enemy in the interim that NPC’s/solo players could hold off, then a big zerg-style push from the enemy that causes a world-wide SOS signal and lasts half a day, requiring multiple tactical objectives to be met to successfully defend… e.g. hold the gates, destroy catapults, light distress signals for NPC reinforcements, defeat champions, build defenses, etc…"

This happens to a lesser extent in the end-game zones. Doesn’t last for a day, but a few hours.

The problem you have with this is that you need to have content that is available to all your players to a reasonable degree in all time zones.

It’s not fair that prime-time only players can only experience content that is available in primetime, while off-peak players can only experience content that is available during their time.

That being said, I do wish that we see more varied dynamic events that chain together. Longer chains with longer branches.

But such a task requires a lot of hours invested programming, not to mention a high enough complexity to introduce more bugs.

OP

The entire dynamic is setup to address varied playing styles. Thus the fact that we have dungeons and WvW/PvP.

DEs are now starting to look like they were suppose to from the start and yes it keeps people on the move. This reduces the change that they will be affected by Diminishing Return. This is also a good thing.
Also if you have noticed there as been a major decrease in Gold sellers as of late as well.
Now if Anet can just get those pain in the rear teleporting harvesters caught and banned so we can get the exchange prices we all can make money just not the few cheaters

Prime time is an interesting point. But if a large-scale initiative takes place over the span of several hours, and there are a few major offensives/defensives happening at slightly randomized times throughout the 24 hour clock on each map, there should be content available to everyone. A worldwide chat, alert, or bulletin system would be helpful to improve player awareness of these events happening. The added benefit of this approach is it would encourage people to go to maps they don’t usually, which seems to be the point of the new map-based Daily achievements except in a less tedious/contrived way.

There are more than enough events happening across the world, that I rarely do more than 5-10% of them any day (I see tons of events that sit there stagnant for hours with nobody jumping in to do them). A stepping stone to the larger more epic event chains could be to just create some larger chains from the separate mini events, and expanding the “event discovery range” or having a bulletin. This would channel larger #’s of players to fewer points of interest, instead of players roaming around and solo-swatting mini events in the middle of nowhere.

Another point I’d like to make is that the current event system is basically “NPC babysitting”. The mechanic is “players present = territory is gained, players absent = territory lost”. Totally lame, and makes it feel like a chore. Players’ presence should accelerate territory gained and slow territory loss, not be a forward/reverse gear switch.

One way to do this would be for event scaling to take into account “did players faceroll the last 3 events? maybe we should make the next one harder”, until eventually events start to fail even with player intervention, and the enemy takes back some territory. Similarly, if friendlies have been getting hammered, buff up the friendly NPC’s until they take back a bit of territory on their own.

>>[Vol] This happens to a lesser extent in the end-game zones.
Yeah it seems a bit better late game, but (a) events still repeat on a pretty short timer, unless you’re talking about Orr which I don’t have much experience with, and (b) unless players maintain presence, everything inevitably trends to a 100% contested state.

Krosslite – I don’t really know what gold sellers and teleporting harvesters has to do with dynamic events.

I agree with (almost) everything that’s been said, except for the comments about WoW. Maybe ppl haven’t played it for a while but WoW became a complete flame-fest. Go take a look at the forum. It’s chock-full of trolling and bickering. The game itself is even worse. It seems to attract and even reward that sort of behaviour.

Anyway – that aside. Like I said, I agree – but I’m not sure the AI required to make this game more realistic is cost-effective. Connecting up logical sequences of events into a chain grows exponentially with the number of events. Even a few nodes could have thousands of permutations that would have to be programmed.

Maybe one day it might be possible though.

As much i agree with everyone of you, you’re just asking a deep, complex, different game.
Clearly, a cool game with some cool design, your ideas are adorable.
But as a guy told me on an other thread, when i was attempting to give some epic content suggestions : cool idea, but you’re asking a reprogram from the core. A gw3.
Shape the world, huh? That Anet gw2 PR was funny, hehe