Guild Wars 2

I’m a European player homed on a NA server so I can play with friends from USA, EU, Oceania. This means that (when I’m not working) I usually get to play at off peak hours. I’m a member of one of the largest guilds on the Server, and we’re international so we’re active all the time. It’s players who make choices like this who allow a 24hr WvW presence and use the off peak times to keep the world running overnight. We’re the night shift if you like. So why are we being discriminated against?

I know that GW2 needs to challenge lvl 80 characters who’ve been everywhere and done everything but some of the more recent changes need a better balance. Take Tequatl – the subject of several threads here. I’ve done Teq in the past with 3 other players. It took time, but was really too easy for a world boss, and meant there was no point doing Jormag which took much longer and gave the same sort of loot. The changes to Tequatl now mean that I’ve never seen it go down. Not once. There’s very few people bother now (see other posts for evidence). Why?

Look at the solutions given:
“Guest to another server” – so are Anet saying that only some servers will do Teq? and why should off peak on another NA server be any better than off peak on my home one?
“Try at a different time” – I play when I can. Anyway the standard advice for guesting to a high population server is… try off peak times. Same problem.

What happened to the original GW2 ethos about wanting the new game to be one where any class could solo the world? OK I’m not expecting to solo a world boss! But why does Teq need 80+ players? What about the off peak times when there aren’t 80 available?

How about some sort of off peak scaling for world events? I thought that events scaled anyway but trying Teq since the update, and the Fire Elemental among others, shows that actually quite a large zerg is needed for any chance of success, so something has changed here, and not necessarily for the better for everyone…

I’ve made a choice to balance the load on an off peak server and keep the World ticking over; isn’t this part of the GW2 community spirit? Part of the permanently active world GW2 is promoted as? So why do I feel like the new updates are a disadvantage for people in my situation?

My choices (being realistic): play on – with only some of the game content suitable at the times I can play; quit – and abandon what I believe to be the best MMORPG; or post here and hope that someone at Anet takes note and thinks about the off peak players for a change…

Sorry if this sounds like a rant – but where else can issues like this be raised? And I can’t believe I’m the only player in this situation!

/sits back and waits for help…

ANet faces challenges with regard to open world content.

• Anything that’s designed to be challenging can be outnumbered, making it easy
• Many players won’t repeat content unless they consider the rewards worth their time

Scaling is supposed to fix the former issue, but setting the scaling properly seems to be difficult. Some events (e.g., Teq, the Hydra Queen) seem to require a minimum number of players in order to have a chance to beat the timer. Also, events don’t seem to scale past a certain point. Thus, we see things like Teq being downed with half the time left on the timer, or Teq being taken from one phase to another while stunned.

When players go to events like these and don’t have the minimum numbers, they are going to fail. This applies not only to off-peak players such as yourself, but to servers which cannot muster enough people who want to do the event for its own sake. Those who do things for the rewards are not going to show unless the return on the investment of their time makes sense to them.

ANet recently put in some fixes to the Teq event, but did nothing with scaling. I suspect there are certain events they just don’t want small numbers of players completing. I wonder if events languish unfinished enough, it they will do something.

Given how long the Karka Queen sat undone on my server, and how many servers rarely or never opened Grenth or Balthazar before the Ascended mats thing, I have to say that they consider the situation OK. My server can’t even seem to muster a FGS champ group except during peak times, never mind groups dedicated to clearing Teq or the temples.

Not what you want to hear but you left one option out: Decide if you would rather have access to more content, which leads to moving to a different server where your playtime falls into the servers prime time.

Whether you prefer to play with your existing friends and skip some content or have more content while having to make more friends on a new server is your choice.

Mastruq.2463:

Not what you want to hear but you left one option out: Decide if you would rather have access to more content, which leads to moving to a different server where your playtime falls into the servers prime time.

Whether you prefer to play with your existing friends and skip some content or have more content while having to make more friends on a new server is your choice.

This is very, very antithesis to what Anet has said is their philosophy. They have said many times that they want people to be able to play with their friends.

I guarantee you that the state of the listed events is not as Anet wants them. There is, however, a problem in execution and in their development cycle.

Here’s another option that I don’t see mentioned: Organize the required number of players to do the event.

Would that be easy? No; it would probably be a lot harder to do than getting a group together during peak hours. You might need to organize a guild, or recruit a team from an existing guild to make it realistic.

That seems like the nature of playing during off-hours, however: Lower population means you’re going to have a harder time finding people to do particular content, particularly high-difficulty content, particularly if it requires a lot of players. I play during off-hours pretty frequently, and back when I was doing more dungeon-running, it was a lot harder to find a group than it was during peak hours. (One reason I don’t run dungeons much anymore.)

Is it a drag? Absolutely. Can it scale down further than it already does? Probably, to an extent. Just be aware that it can only scale down so far before it fundamentally changes the experience of the event. If an event is supposed to have an army to take down a boss, the only question is whether it should need a huge group or a large one.