Guild Wars 2

I proposed this briefly in the “Lack of events in Gendarran Fields” thread, but I want to expand on this a bit. It might help ameliorate the “events always succeed” problem.

As I see it, a significant part of the problem with event chains seldom, if ever, firing off is that the initial event is way too often mobbed by players in the area – the infamous “zerg”. We know that the difficulty of events is scaled up to match the number of players, though this is occasionally more theoretical than real. So I don’t see any reason, at least in theory, why what I’m about to propose couldn’t be put into effect.

Simply put, could ArenaNet not set up some programming to monitor the number of players doing a certain event, and if it exceeds a certain number threshold for a number of iterations of that event, unleash a zerg of its own upon the event the next time an overly big mob of players is doing the event? Think about it. You have a big mob of players mowing their way through the usual enemies on their way to succeeding an event. Then, all of a sudden, a NPC shouts a warning: “Look out! BIG army of (centaurs, dredge, Risen, krait, Svanir, Nightmare, Inquest, hylek, bandits, pirates, Flame Legion, ghosts, whatever) heading in to reinforce the enemy!” and BOOM, the player zerg is fighting for its life against an even bigger enemy zerg.

This might cause some events to fail, which would in turn cause the event chains that require an event failure to properly trigger, and at the very least would result in some truly epic battles. What do you all think?

I like! I would also like to see use-timers on the stationary turrets, cannons, etc that people farming these areas never seem to leave. I never get a chance to partake in most of these types of things in game because I refuse to sit in an area for hours to get a good place before the event starts.

This sounds like fantastic fun and a great fix. However, I could see the amount of loot drops that the extra mobs bring detrimental to the economy. That would be the only reason why ANet wouldn’t like this idea.

I would really enjoy this as well. Adding some other types of spawns such as VET/Champs would really spice up the DE’s when there are too many players.

Sounds fun. Definitely need to see more events failing. The fact that they rarely do shows that something is wonky with event scaling.

I want to feel like the fact that I am an experienced, skilled player makes a difference to the outcome of the battle. Right now my presence is irrelevant, events will always succeed if there are players present. Who they are and how well they work together is just not a factor.

Throw an enemy counter zerg at a group of players and suddenly it might matter if they are skilled and working together or not.

Well isn’t this essentially how event scaling does work? i.e. events are mostly scaled by increasing the number of mobs. As we know that doesn’t necessarily work if the mobs pass through a bottleneck where they get showered with AOE immediately they spawn. If the idea is to multiply spawn points and generate new bunches of mobs from them, then that does seem like one way of scaling some events and one that’s been mentioned before. I doubt that these types of ideas have escaped the notice of Arenanet’s devs, since they are really pretty much the essence of what scaling is.

The mobs need to be given more health when there is a very large amount of players.
That way they survive the initial burst of AoE.

Something like the Claw of Jormag event, where there are veterans and champions mixed in.

Right now the more players there are, the easier it gets.

Increasing the amount of enemies there is wont help, but making them tougher/stronger will.

OP: ANet already has a system monitoring the amount of players and “scales” events accordingly. Considering you have apparently not noticed that events scale in difficulty, then I propose that ANet has done a pretty poor job implementing this system (which in my opinion IS poorly implemented).

Your suggestion is fine and all but I think you already have a fantasy about how its suppose to look. But it wont work well within the confines of the current system. Mobs follow a simple waypoint system, and is thus extremely susceptible to AoE attacks, more of them wont make it harder. We need them to spread out and move like say, a big group of zerglings move in Starcraft 2: Move like a group, and less like a train on the railroad tracks.

roqoco: You are correct, and I agree.

MassDelusion: More mob health is not a good solution (which is what we have now).
Is a LAZY design choice. Make the mobs smarter, not tougher.
Let them be able to dodge, make them step out of AoE and make them work together like they did in GW1.