Guild Wars 2

Sup guys, I know this may sound like a bit of a rant, but its really just a small disappointment in what Arena Net calls Dynamic Events.

Before the launch of GW2, I remember in the news how they spoke of Dynamic events where their would be things such as centaurs randomly attacking a town, then taking over the town or setting up outposts, and then proceeding to send out scouts or attack other villages.

The truth is, this isn’t how its set up at all. Before launch, I found a map which had area’s scribble on it on what “events” happen there. Thats when I got my first let-down on what I thought or perceived to be true dynamic events. Perhaps I just didn’t read into it well enough, but let me give you my thought process on how I thought the system would work.

As of currently, the system is designed in “bubbles” or geographical locations. In these bubbles, the same event will happen over.. and over.. and over.. and over again. If you win or fail, you will spark down a chain, but thats it. Consider it like a static roller coaster ride with the option to take a nice turn once in awhile, but you know no matter what you do in the world, that roller coaster will always be there, everyday for you to experience which does not give me the feeling of have accomplished something. Oh I slayed the undead in this area? Not a problem, they will spawn and attack again in the next 5 to 15 minutes. My achievements are just a illusion of real progress.

Now here is how I thought it would work and the best description I could describe it is that I thought dynamic events would more work like a virus. Centaurs would inevitable hold a “you can never die” zone so you couldn’t wipe them out from existence and the other playable races would hold their own small “you can never die” zone so you can’t be completely wiped out.

The centaurs would not wait for players to arrive to start any event. They would automatically be given a order by the game to go scout a area, gather forces, launch a assault on a town, set “real” traps (not tapping the F key to disperse a trap that will never trigger or hurt you), or perhaps even fortify their own position.

Eventually they make their way town to town, and as they conquer more towns, you lose benefits for not holding those towns. Eventually the players realize its a battlefield of territorial control. You just can’t walk in and do your thing, you have a horde of centaurs running around.

The objective is to ultimately take back and control as much territory as possible and with every centaur defeat, the difficult could be ramped up intill you have a inevitable defeat for the players and their “zerg” fest, which by then will reset the difficulty.

Eventually the chain could lead down to centaurs attempting to lay siege to divinitys reach and breaching its walls. You would hear screams and crys in the streets and citizens are being butchered, all thanks to your failure to keep them safe. The more you do not contain the centaur threat, the more they become a threat to you.

Now of course, thats 1 example in 1 zone. Obviously multiple zones could have multiple area’s where enemy npc’s have dominated control and its up to you as your players as a team to tackle each area at a time. Then, not only would you feel like you achieved something, but you would actually really see the change in the world, as opposed to knowing in the back of your head that the same event will happen over and over and over.

So I would call the static bubbles we have now dynamic events, but more like repeatable quests. I was hoping for a more free-form events.

But the dragons will always spawn where they spawn at. They will never take or hold territory and to be honest, the kind of setup feels like i’m on a tread mill, just looking for the next roller coaster to ride, rather than feel like i’ve made progress, took ground, and holding back a force that desires our destruction.

Perhaps my “virus events” in theory wouldn’t work well in practice and thats why we have these bubble type events, but I would like to hear your thoughts and opinions on this.

If your curious about my level or where I am in the game, i’m level 55 and currently at the zone where you fight the first dragon, taquala something the sunless.

Yeah, it’s kind of a shame how it was advertised like that, resets in almost 10 minutes, but that’s how they build hype

Imagine you are alone in the zone having to prevent a centaur horde from taking divinity’s reach.

That’s why it wouldn’t work, people move on from zone to zone, some zones will inevitably be less populated.

Now imagine that you need a certain cafting item to lvl your crafting and it is found in a less populated zone which is totally taken by centaurs and you can’t get that item, this topic would be just about that.

There are a few areas I have come across so far that after revisiting have had different circumstances then they did the first time I strolled through.

It seems right now that with the population so high we aren’t seeing many events fail and many changes on the map because there is always people beating back the enemy asap. As things start to even out I would imagine we will start to see more variables in play.

First of all, my own experience says that the poisoning of the well in Queensdale has repeated in my personal playtime 11-15 odd times.

That said, this is a game. Yes, its a persistent world but there is also a lot of player churn. I roam through Queensdale and I participate in a dynamic event. The next player who just signs in after victory will not see the well poisoned. Typical quest hubs would simply keep the well poisoned forever with a constant stream of mobs forever.

Does the whole thing repeat 5 minutes later? Maybe, but then in a starter zone like Queensdale, there could be tens or hundreds of new players who have just arrived. This is where ArenaNet hopes you have an imagination.

Personally, I role play. I go through a zone, uncovering the map and doing renown hearts. While I complete those, I help in some dynamic events. Once I’ve cleared that map, my own story in my head is that I have helped save that part of the world. Of course its all illusion, its a fantasy game! But that certainly beats sitting around in a zone new to me that is utterly destroyed and unrecoverable for 5 days. Or perfectly peaceful for that long too.

Perhaps they could tune and tweak the frequency of the dynamic events, but my personal opinion still stands. Even if it repeats every 5 minutes, there is 5 minutes of impact that other players will be affected by. And that is better than a static quest hub any day.

dynamic =/= persistent

And its a computer game, these things have to be coded, so of course they are scripted….but the main issue right now is that they are all locked in ultimate sucess mode. We dont see the failure state where the centaurs win an attack on the fort, be just see the sucessful defense and the counter attack.

Not sure if my timing was just right but when i got to 50 i started venturing even further out and seeing villages taken over by the lvl 60 krait, I tried to fight them off as best i could with the help of the guards just trying to hold up till a rush of people came. No one came i fought valiantly, and had to retreat. Barely making it out of there i look back later and its still overrun.

It is very correct, right now, to be saying that there is just such a massive influx of players that we really don’t see these events fail ever, if at all. Now that isn’t to say they don’t have some effect if they are failed, but the amount of players going through almost every zone sort of detracts from seeing any sort of change and I can imagine that Anet changed a simple variable in the code so that people wouldn’t have to wait so long for an event reset or anything else. They would do that because we aren’t even a month into release and new players are still flooding into the game.

In some of the higher level areas, like Fireheart Rise actually, a lot of those Dynamic Events go untouched because hardly anyone but level 80s doing CoF explorable mode go there, and they really don’t care about anything more than getting badges from the dungeon (I’m one of them). Hell the Claw of Jormag event up in Frostgorge Sound tends to just sit there for 10-20 minutes with no one bashing on the corrupted ice shards to trigger the dragon landing because hardly anyone is in the zone or in that immediate vicinity.

You have to give these things time to just even out and simmer down. The game has literally thousands of players going through these zones daily, its bound to just be like this for a little while.

Kikz.5097:

Imagine you are alone in the zone having to prevent a centaur horde from taking divinity’s reach.

That’s why it wouldn’t work, people move on from zone to zone, some zones will inevitably be less populated.

Now imagine that you need a certain cafting item to lvl your crafting and it is found in a less populated zone which is totally taken by centaurs and you can’t get that item, this topic would be just about that.

They actually advertised that as working – They said that it would scale if there were only a few players around. If more showed up more mobs would spawn and the difficulty would get increased.

The event scale is not as severe as it should be..then you do the hard transition from boringly easy pve to hard dungeon encounters.
On the other hand theres something nice about this system.The most populated zones feel like they prosper and are different than the not so much populated.That at least is a very nice feeling

Seriously I also saw a map of the dynamic evens triggering pre-launch and it showed a zone in the example and that dynamic events might start in the top left corner of the zone and begin to move across the map. If they met with resistance it would turn into an event. If not they would push onward until they hit a settlement or outpost and attempt to take it over. If they did – they would take ownership of it and continue gaining strength to move out and capture more player run territory.

All I see now are events firing that I can follow for maybe 1-2 steps and they finish (the event NPC turns into a vendor)

I have also seen some settlements under attack, we always repel them. I have walked into towns and, yes, there are red’s in there but they aren’t making defenses or looking to press out and actively attack other locations.

They also made mention of the enemy retreating back to the prior event once beaten and I don’t think I have seen any of that. If a band of centuars own one of our settlements and you beat them – it seems to end and you get a thank you.

Maybe it is us players? Maybe after beating an event we need to fan out and explore the area looking for where they pushed back to and continue to push them back?

I agree with the OP – unless we are missing something, this doesn’t seem to be working like advertised.

I had thought about this long and hard as I too am not satisfied with what Anet has passed as “dynamic” events.

The issue really is what they rely on spawning these events and how they designed each one. They’re too ‘hand crafted’ if you must – as in, everything is already pre-designed by whoever made this specific event and that event can never change unless a human re-designed it.

I think the whole zone should behave a bit more fluidly and allow the AI to make decisions to respond to player actions. The best analogy I have is something like an RTS AI. Yes they have predictable behavior patterns, but they do respond differently to different things that players do.

This could add a whole lot to the later Orr zones where the struggle between Tyrians and the Risen is very similar to a large scale RTS battle.

Apparently Arah works as advertised.

However, I can’t help but think that the “guidance” of Renown Hearts actually severely detracted from the impact of Dynamic Events. According to some interview a fairly long time ago, development originally planned for EVERYTHING to be a DE. People were getting lost, so Anet decided to throw in Hearts. Problem is…I really can’t help but think that the Hearts themselves weren’t put in addition to DEs, but rather were replacing certain DEs.

I think the biggest culprit I’ve run into so far is the Gendarran Fields. When you’re on your first pass, there seems like there’s tons of stuff to do. On the second pass though…there are MASSIVE deadzones where the only options are farming (nodes or monsters) and the few areas that still proc DEs are tiny sections carved into the north side of the map. Even more annoyingly, all the Heart-specific trigger points (like Suspicious Bushes and whatnot) are still there, yet you accomplish absolutely nothing for triggering them.

Anet’s iterative process is great and all, but I can’t help but think that they completely overdid this iterative pass. They should’ve used the same mentality they had with Vistas – put something MORE there. Because from my perspective, if they did Vistas like how they overhauled the all-DE world, we’d have lost several Points of Interest in the process.

theyre not too “dynamic” currently because people are facerolling through them. we’re not seeing the branching events that arise from failing the opening DE. it’s not an issue with design/content…they need to fix scaling..asap.

nerva.7940:

theyre not too “dynamic” currently because people are facerolling through them. we’re not seeing the branching events that arise from failing the opening DE. it’s not an issue with design/content…they need to fix scaling..asap.

shakehead

The issue isn’t that it’s too easy to beat DEs. The problem is that repeatedly beating a chain results in only one event ever happening. That’s a bigger design flaw than just being easy; it’s a case of not considering that the chain structure isn’t optimal.

Currently, DE chains are basically A <> B <> C <> D. A causes B, which causes C, which can be pushed back to B, etc. The design flaw is that if AI only ever pushes from A to D, and you’re stuck at A, BCD end up being completely unused.

Because there’s no real way to force the players to not do content (and even then, a lone player soloing a DE can force the chain to stop) what Anet needs to do is remedy the coding which causes A to be stuck. In my opinion, there are two ways to do this:

- Use a Tree/Map structure instead of a Chain structure. What this basically means is that any given state (ex: state A) has more than one progression option (ex: instead of just A <> B, you can also A > C). This means that there isn’t a solitary line that the progression moves up and down; instead, it flows more freely between various states.

- Create events that divert players away from the main chain. This can be anything from parallel event chains to random events. The idea is that instead of forcing Event A to fail, you create Event Z to pull people away. This could also get chained into Rift’s idea. For example, if Chain A is Centaurs and Chain B is Undead, forcing A into a stuck state can open up options for B to progress more easily.