Guild Wars 2

I’ve already replied with this in 2 threads, but I felt the need to make a topic about it, so I can actually see peoples opinion about this.

As we all know, the current event chains are cool in theory, but don’t really work, because they are for most of the day stuck in one place. From all those cleverly designed events you are only getting so see a very small fraction.
Events aren’t changing the world, because people are doing their best in beating them over and over.

I personally believe, that the main problem isn’t the difficulty of the events (some of them are in lower level areas and should not be crazy hard to do, although event scaling still needs more tweaking), but the fact, that there are “choke points” in the chain.
One example is in Kessex Hill with the centaurs trying to repair the bridge. If that particular event does not fail (which it currently never does), you are going to miss the majority of all the events in that particular chain.

What I would like to see in those big event chains is a system, that detects, when players keep beating a particular event in a chain over and over. If that happens, the system would unlock parts of the event chain, that would not happen at this stage.
To continue with my example, the centaurs would find a way to cross the river and attack settlements behind it. This would trigger events, that you would normally only see, when the centaurs have successfully repaired the bridge.

This system would not only bring a lot more variation into the events, but would also prevent excessive zerging to some extent, as the stage of the event becomes a lot less predictable and thus people won’t be able to camp bosses ahead of time.

I agree that Anet succeeded perhaps too well in getting players to do events. Many events turn into zergfests and currently there are only a few events that are at all possible to fail once you get more than ~4 people doing them. However I don’t think the solution is to simply bypass the event chain system by triggering events in the failure chain when you haven’t actually failed. I think it would be annoying in-game to see (to use the centaur bridge as an example) that the centaurs just decided to walk across the river (which honestly I don’t get why they don’t do anyway…) after I spent 5 min preventing that bridge from going up. I mean, why should I have even bothered if my actions in the end meant nothing?

I think some better solutions would be to:

1. Make events scale better. Increasing the number of enemies does not work very well because AoE simply destroys them. Give enemies more abilities, spawn tougher enemies (more Veterans/Champions), or introduce more obstacles. For example in the bridge event once you have 20 people introduce a secondary objective: maybe the centaurs start building a SECOND bridge that you now have to attack, or maybe they realize that sending 3-person teams into a death trap of marks, wells, meteor showers, and turrets isn’t the best idea and starting sieging you with catapults from another location. I think that the last option is the best because not only does it up the difficulty, it also makes things more interesting and dynamic – in the middle of events now you have to spin off separate teams to go take secondary objectives. Also I’ve read that most events scale up to 10 people. Increase this cap. I see 15-20 people doing events often enough that a 10-person cap in scaling is not adequate.

2. Increase difficulty of events the longer they go without a failure. This ensures that event chains never get stuck at the “win” stage. There are problems with this, however, as a person who just entered the zone might be put off with how difficult events are, and people might start to consciously wait for failures to happen before they start participating just to get easier loot/karma/gold/xp.