Guild Wars 2

I think perhaps the difficulty level for a player in Malchor’s Leap is currently far, far greater than I suspect the developers intended. Perhaps this only applies to non-max population servers (like mine) or maybe it’s across the board, but it is extremely common for this region to have a grand total of 1 uncontested waypoint in the far east of the map and for it remain that way for hours if not days. I don’t think I’ve seen the Cathedral of Eternal Radiance or Cathedral of Xephrys under pact control any time in the last…um…at least a month, probably longer.

As I’m sure was intended, the Pact can never capture any of the waypoints or Cathedrals without substantial help from players. There are a few where even one or two players might be enough to turn the tide and allow them to accomplish it, but many waypoints require at least 5 or 10 to capture (the one just NW of the Theatre of Delight is a prime example) and the minimum to have a decent chance for the Cathedrals is probably closer to a dozen. Trouble is, there are rarely even half a dozen players in the entire region, let alone all grouped together and willing to try to accomplish it.

Then, even if you do get enough people together to capture one, the Pact will lose it again as soon as the next counter-attack comes from the Risen. In most cases, even having one or two players who happen to be there when the attack comes will not be enough since those events tend to be “medium” level ones that usually require at least 5 or 6 people to have much chance of holding out.

The bridge that’s a little north-west of the Theatre of Delights is a good example. I got a handful of guildies to come and help me when I was levelling through this zone and the five of us, plus a couple other people who happened to to join us, we just barely able to liberate the waypoint (the spawn rare of Risen there is…very high and any of the 15-20 dead Pact NPCs you rez get pretty much one-shotted by even the trivial mobs so all they do is provide a momentary distraction). Our little group of 5 moved on and within 10 minutes I noticed that the waypoint was lost again.

To help me get the PoIs and skill points, the other 4 members of the group ran interference just long enough for me to ninja them, but in most cases we didn’t bother trying to achieve anything there (no chance we could do a cathedral).

All of this makes me feel sorry for a new player who wasn’t around in the first month or two of the game when this zone actually had enough people in it to do these events…they were pretty fun and a new player is never going to get to see them (other than to unwittingly attempt one and be ripped to shreds within the first couple minutes).

It also means that for new players (and people levelling alts) this region is now essentially a “run for your life from east to west, don’t stop to kill any mobs because you’ll be overwhelmed, and make sure you go through the portal to Cursed Shore and get the waypoint there, otherwise you’ll have to run across the entire zone again to get there because none of the other waypoints will ever be in Pact control” and anyone going for 100% map completion will be ninjaing it, not “playing” it.

Again, I’m sure the difficulty level is intended…the developers probably felt that it ought to be a group of players that liberate those places and establish the foothold in Orr; and that premise would work fine if there were enough players to contemplate doing that on a somewhat ongoing basis. Even at peak hours, though, Malchor’s Leap is deserted on my server so that’s simply never going to happen. Nobody stays there for any length of time…they do the absolute minimum and move on to Cursed Shore because at least people farm there so there’s a chance of being able to complete those events.

I feel like the developers put a lot of time and effort went into creating this zone — all the artwork, some very cool medium level dynamic events, and a couple “epic” large events — and it’s a shame that a new player is never going to be able to see, enjoy and appreciate that effort because they’ll be too busy running for their lives, and existing members will only be able to look back and fondly (?) remember how they did it back in the beginning. Perhaps that’s not the case in max-pop servers, but even then I somehow doubt it.

Hopefully this is something that the Anet folks are aware of, consider to be a “problem,” and are actively thinking of ways to address. I do have one or two thoughts about possible solutions…

1. One thing that might go a long way to helping is a little toning down of mob density, respawn rates, and possible skill sets for the generic mobs you encounter in this zone. Their present settings make this zone an absolute nightmare to be in by yourself and are pretty challenging even for a pair of players running together. They make you very much not want to be there. Stylistically this makes sense — Orr shouldn’t be a place you’d like to build your summer cottage in — but the effect of it is to drive players out of the zone as fast as their swiftness can take them. This strongly promotes the utter lack of a player population. By tweaking the difficulty down a bit, players would at least feel less disinclined to being there.

2. There’s nothing in this region that can’t be obtained more easily somewhere else. Any crafting mats you can get here are also farmable (and more plentiful) in Cursed Shore with the added bonus that Cursed Shore also has more potential to drop/spawn nodes of T6 stuff. Or you can go back to Straits of Devastation which is a little easier and has a little higher population (because there is one event chain that people run there with some regularity when it isn’t bugged out) and also has the same stuff. Mob drops are also no better, or different than anything that’s likely to drop in those other two zones, so why expend the extra effort? I don’t have a suggestion for this other than perhaps adding unique armor and weapon skins that only drop here, and/or rebalancing the mats distribution a little to up the T6 chances, have a couple “dens” that are in the ~L75 range and populated by things that regularly drop cores and have a semi-decent chance to drop lodestones that people need to farm for their legendary weapons.

3. Make the Pact a little more resilient and a little less cannon-fodder. They shouldn’t be able to achieve new objectives by themselves, but perhaps scale the acquisition events downwards just a little so more of the medium scale events can be done by 3 or 4 players instead of 6-10. Perhaps allow some “reinforcements” to spawn for a limited time and join the fray when there aren’t many players participating. Perhaps just beef up the existing ones so they are a little more effective than they currently are.

4. Related to #3, make the Pact less defensively inept. A player’s desire to help the Pact capture a waypoint or Cathedral would be a lot greater if they had some reasonable expectation that the objective wouldn’t be lost the instant the player goes on to questing elsewhere. Give the Pact enough wherewithal to actually withstand (by themselves!) the first event or two where the Risen try to retake it. Waypoints on the road to Orr are key strategic objectives so why is the Pact so under-committed to holding them once they’ve been taken? Over time (an hour or two? half a day?) they should gradually weaken and fall, but once initially established they ought to at least be self-sustaining for a little while without a group of players being forced to baby-sit them. That would give the players more incentive to help them initially, and a sense of having achieved something that actually lasts a little while even though they’ve moved on. (Cathedrals wouldn’t need to hold out as long as waypoints, but also probably shouldn’t fall the instant they’re left unattended by players).

5. As a possible mechanic for #3 and #4 above, and an added “bonus incentive” to draw players to the region, have any of these “capture X objective” DEs immediately followed by a “defend X against the Risen counterattack” DE and then a “help fortify the Pact’s position” DE to provide (or extend existing) mini-chains that players will be interested in doing because of the karma/exp rewards. That also means that at the end of the fortification event the Pact would have some sort of added defences to help them hold those positions. You can then have “resupply position X” DEs (like the popular one in southern Straits of Devastation) and if those aren’t completed by players then successive (but reduced scale from the 1st) Risen counterattack DEs will initially fail even if players aren’t helping but will gradually destroy those extra defences and ultimately succeed in recapturing the position. That also opens up possible DEs to “repair the defences” when the Risen have destroyed some/all of them, and those ones should require player help to succeed.

The above would, I think, give players a little more incentive to consider spending some time in Malchor’s Leap even after they’ve levelled through the zone, thereby increasing the region’s base population back to a level where it increases the chances of having enough people around for one of the large scale events.

As a side note, many of the mid-level regions suffer from the exact same problem…as I’ve leveled alts through the L30-70 range in the past month or two I’ve almost never been able to do any of the major group events since there aren’t even remotely enough people around to attempt them. It’s not so bad for me since I got to see/do them in the first couple months when the region populations where high as people levelled their main characters through them, but any new players are going to be missing out on a lot of really good content that required a lot of Anet’s resources to create and are now almost never appreciated.

I don’t know what sort of incentives could logically be implemented to draw people back to those zones — particularly ones that don’t require large additional investments in design/implementation time — but it’s a shame that all that initial labour and investment is going to waste so perhaps at least some attempt at doing so would be justifiable. How about changing the monthly achievement for PvE to remove the “kill 50 players in WvW” (which isn’t really appropriate to a PvE category anyway) and replace it with a “complete 5 DEs in at least 10 different regions” achievement instead? You need to do 5 events to complete your daily already, so extending this to 50 total isn’t in any way onerous on the player, and making it require 10 different regions would give players the extra incentive to spread themselves out a little and go back to some of those zones. (though to get L80s to go to zones below 55 you’d need to tweak the loot tables a little again such that the medium and large scale events can drop stuff that isn’t worthless to them).

Sorry for what turned out to be a far longer post than I’d intended. I just feel that the existing barriers to new players (and to some degree to existing players levelling alts) in those regions is something that will hurt the long-term success and replayability of the game and foster a fairly high degree of stagnation — people such as myself who are interested primarily in PvE will tend stick to a couple zones or just run dungeons and the rest of the world you’ve devoted so much time and effort to create will remain sadly unused and unappreciated. Regardless of what solutions you implement (or not), I hope I’ve communicated what I see as an important issue that’s worth your time to consider and hopefully address in the not-too-distant future.

Really like your ideas lori, especially points 3 and 4. The thing is that if they do hold for half a day, then what’s left to do for the next party that comes along? Fix walls?

I play in Sorrow’s furnace and the other day I decided to go further than the Cursed Coasts (I have run the zergs various times and I honestly find it very boring). I was expecting zero players in that zone, luckily I found some, enough to make a party. But lets be real here for a second: it is really unthinkable for such an AWESOME zone to be empty. There were 20 or so players scaterred in the land, which I find to be a little too few.

Event chains like Malchor’s are events that define Gw2. Something must be done to atract players to the depths of Orr.

Maybe have some Asura scientists across the land that give you some kind of magical GPS device on which you could see like blue dots on your map the location of every player in a defined radius. (haha, that would be freaking awesome).

Yeah.. you missed the main point, I’m afraid. The OP’s main point is that the zone is generally too deserted on lower population servers. So, there’s almost no chance of getting a decent group of people there to accomplish anything.

Yeah.. you missed the main point, I’m afraid. The OP’s main point is that the zone is generally too deserted on lower population servers. So, there’s almost no chance of getting a decent group of people there to accomplish anything.The OP offered several suggestions and spent a lot of time trying to maintain the level of difficulty that the zone has. I believe he agrees with you that it SHOULD be challenging. It’s just that with so few people in the zone (and I share that opinion on my server) that the zone becomes almost impossible to do anything in.

I think this is a general problem ANet has with event reward balance and respawn rates. Everywhere I go, events don’t reward enough to pay repair cost, except for the super-easy ones that don’t create repair costs. Mobs respawn so quickly that it feels like very little is accomplished. Just tweaking those things would draw me into other zones, but as it is I rarely go to unfamiliar zones because it’s actually a detriment.

Aside from that, I really like the idea of seeing near-by players on the minimap. It could be a new event chain to get them in one of the mid-level zones.

I also really like having event impacts last longer. For some events just extend the time between, so people can take a breather. For others, extend the timer and have mini events start up to keep players in the area. For the Orr areas, after the pact takes a waypoint there’s setup that needs to be done, probably supplies need to be gathered, reports need to be made. Use different game mechanics for this.

Examples:
1) Send mail reporting the victory back to Trahearne, tell him to send more soldiers
2) Put on a dance party to keep up soldier’s spirits, which gives them bonuses
3) Crafting for the Pact soldiers – make or repair armor, cook provisions, build guard turrets, etc.

If a waypoint isn’t contested for a really long time (measured in days or weeks), have a huge army of Risen gather with a champion leader and have a huge battle. If the Pact keeps the waypoint, all the mini events start over. If the Pact loses it, you have to retake it.

TL;DR: ANet events aren’t rewarding enough to cover the costs of playing, so player focus on profit. Making mini events that don’t have costs would help, as would extending timers.

Malchor’s leap suffers from being number 2 in a trilogy of zones. The novelty has worn off by the time people get there, but there’s no reason to stay there because number 3 has better rewards and is more epic. Accordingly people tend to just ignore it entirely.

It needs some identity of its own and a reason to stay there.

Once you get used to it and get geared properly it’s not so much hard as annoying.

I’m one of those new players, I’m in full Exotic aside from 1 ring and frankly the zone is close to making me stop playing. I can walk across it just fine, but there are group events overlaping half the skill points at any given moment. It’s HEAPPED with group events and there’s no groups out there. Its exactly the wrong mix of level and rewards to get anyone to stick around, but its required trudging to get the map completion done. Its anti-fun. It’s tedious. I don’t feel like there’s a sense of accomplishement hiding behind all those impoosible activities, I feel like ANet is telling me if I don’t want to join a mega-guild to round up 10-12 people to help me advance my personal activities, then I’m stupid for even trying to explore the world they’ve created and should go find some other way to spend my entertainment hours.

Better population detection is all I want – if there are 4-5 people around, great, spawn a champion squating on that skill point. If not, 2-3 veterans and a pitched battle for 1-2 people is better serving the near nonexistant audience the zone is attracting.

Nike.2631:

Better population detection is all I want – if there are 4-5 people around, great, spawn a champion squating on that skill point. If not, 2-3 veterans and a pitched battle for 1-2 people is better serving the near nonexistant audience the zone is attracting.

Oh the game does that. It’s just that the champ spawns, and the 4-5 don’t kill it and leave to the next area. The problem is that it doesn’t despawn unless someone kills it.

My only problem is warping into the Lyssa shrine when we control it, only to find it absolutely swarming with undead and the pact NPCs not even lifting a finger to prevent it.

So yeah we control the shrine, but you still need a raid group of 20 people if you want to use the karma vendor (and most of those people that’ll show up just want to grind mobs, which doesn’t help with the hyper-spawn).

It’s also incredibly not fun to be using the vendor and suddenly you get flung across the pedestal (sometimes into monsters) because apparently controlling a shrine doesn’t mean the siege goes away.

I just wanted to buy a pair of kittening boots. Why did it take me nearly an hour to do that? WE CONTROLLED THE SHRINE.

Only 70+ area i have yet to complete because of the first stated item in this thread.

I personally love Melchor’s Leap. I understand the frustration with Leap, it takes a bit of doing…. but I love the zone.

Most recently, I planned a guild event to deal with the huge number of contested waypoints in Leap. Durring the week, I asked people to get what waypoints they could, and I queued up several guild banners to build. On Sunday, we kicked off our event.

To start, Wren was contested, so we captured Wren with a 4 man party (one person had just dinged 80 and was still running over from straits.) We started chatting in /map, letting people know what was going on and asking people to get involved and help. Once we secured Wren, we planted a set of 4 banners and started the Lyssa event.

It took a few tries to get the map organized enough for Lyssa. We lost the cannon and had to retake it, and I have never seen that many adds spawn at Lyssa herself…. but, we brought Lyssa down. Then we moved to that far eastern waypoint and… you guessed it: planted more banners.

Around this point, our guild group hit it’s staggering high… 7 of us to go after the collunade and begin the march across the map. More chat in /map and we started seriously wishing we had someone with commander to organize a squad…. we split the guild up into multiple parties so we could organize with people who were on the map and get a few non-guildies in a party with at least 2 of us.

We hit the Doric waypoint and event like a steamroller, and there go another set of banners. Off to the Dwayna event! Most of us (myself included) had never actually gotten to do the event chain, and it was a hoot to do from the beginning.

Everytime someone needed a SP, a WP, a PoI along the way, there was help to do it, and not just us, because really, it felt like everyone on the map got involved. Someone asked to hit the Champion Eye of Zaitan… so we did. Giant risen chickens? Sure, them too!

And here’s the kicker for me…. not once did we have to abandon an event because of a glitched or stuck NPC. Not once, and we hit pretty much the entire map (yeah… we ignored the Inquest on the map, but that’s about it.)

Does it take a guild to do this? I don’t know…. there were 7 of us, and we used Banners to generate interest in other players on the map. Coordination is big, communication is huge, and generating interest is a must….

But if you asked me, I would wish that we had more zones that were this good to play in. Poeple say that it’s hard to feel like you did anything to make a difference in GW2…. but for a few hours, I felt like we made a difference on that map.