Guild Wars 2

Hello,

So I figured I’d talk about my little review of Scarlets Invasion event.

So the event is fun. It is very cool to see something added to the game permanently. However, it does have a few problems

1. The event itself is dreadfully boring. I find myself just spamming AoEs at mobs of enemies. I get bored very quickly during the event.

2. The event fails quite a lot. There isn’t a lot of strategy involved with doing the event. It is mostly a dps race of players. Some may say that you need to spread out more, however that is very debatable. I’ve had 7 at a twisted portal and have a few nightmares spawn.

What should we learn from this event? For starters, don’t just make objectives killing stuff. It seems like every world boss or event involves killing X then killing Y then killing Z. Look at pvp and pvp from past games. Capture the flag mechanics, capture point mechanics, siege weapons, npcs, things like that. These can all be used as objectives in a world boss to make it a bit more fun. The combat in this game is moderate. Not bad, but also not amazing. In large zergs in PvE it becomes dreadfully boring. So relying purely on combat (killing objectives) causes it to become stale rather quickly.

Secondly, you can’t make these events “hard” or complicated. Events require coordination. Getting a bunch of pugs to coordinate with one another is a HUGE chore for players trying to organize people. There are also those people who ignore you, tell you to stop talking , and all this other stuff.

Randomly spawns. I find timed spawns really boring. My favorite events are queen, ogre wars, and centaur. These all have a lot of pre events you need to do and it allows you to get a bit more immersed in the game instead of it just feeling like a timed farm.

Overall the event is OK, however I do find it could be better from the points above.

2. The event failed often because players farmed aetherblades. If all commanders worked together and there was no farming, then the chance of success would be quite high. But there was no reason to win, because you get rewarded regardless.

I agree that there should be more variety to events other than killling mobs, it’s lazy design and one that encourages zerging rather than strategy. However, Anet is trying to make harder content with multiple objectives. We’ll have to see if this works in the open world with the Teq revamp, though I highly doubt it will be popular in the long run. Once the farmers/achieve hunters move on, there won’t be enough people able to complete such a complicated event.

The number one “lesson” I’d like the devs to — finally — remember from last month’s content is that certain people will find any way to exploit content for maximum gain. That must be taken into account when designing events and encounters. Really consider risk and time versus reward. Consider loopholes. Consider the sheer egotism that is guaranteed to rise when profit is concerned, especially if you also introduce limited-access content like the gauntlet that puts people in direct “competition” with each other.

And please, no more zergs. Or at least, no more rewarding zergs over smaller groups of players in the same event.

Also, I agree that timed spawns are a nuisance and that events that pop up out of nowhere, with no buildup and no effect on the zone, are boring and tiresome.

Given the repeated issue of event spawned mob farming, i suspect one thing to learn from this is to have events mobs not drop anything and instead incorporate a reasonable amount of items into the event completion awards.

The short descriptions of the events were not clear enough. Stage progression was sometimes based on killing minions and sometimes based on completing events and there was no explanation of that difference.

This led to zergs rushing away when a portal spawned the last creatures when they could have killed them in 15 seconds, leaving handful of people struggling to deal with it. I’m guessing this is a major factor in the repeated failure of these invasions. A handful of people can clear a portal but not once it has spawned a zerg size army with the floor littered by cogs.

What they should do is hold all bags they get during the event hostages until the end of the event. They lose half if they don’t win.

The Scarlet events are fun. But they still suffer from one design flaw that plagues the game since day 1 : the event rewards are crap compared to mobs loot. So players prefer to farm the mobs that spawn (especially the champions in this case) instead of actually completint the event.

If they could just remove all aetherblades/molten events as soon as their morale bar are depleted, it would already help a lot.

Ouroboros.5076:

The Scarlet events are fun. But they still suffer from one design flaw that plagues the game since day 1 : the event rewards are crap compared to mobs loot. So players prefer to farm the mobs that spawn (especially the champions in this case) instead of actually completint the event.

If they could just remove all aetherblades/molten events as soon as their morale bar are depleted, it would already help a lot.

This. This was the major problem with the implementation of the event. It’s much more profitable to farm mobs than to complete the event. It should be majorly the other way around.

Chadramar.8156:

The number one “lesson” I’d like the devs to — finally — remember from last month’s content is that certain people will find any way to exploit content for maximum gain. That must be taken into account when designing events and encounters. Really consider risk and time versus reward. Consider loopholes. Consider the sheer egotism that is guaranteed to rise when profit is concerned, especially if you also introduce limited-access content like the gauntlet that puts people in direct “competition” with each other.

And please, no more zergs. Or at least, no more rewarding zergs over smaller groups of players in the same event.

Also, I agree that timed spawns are a nuisance and that events that pop up out of nowhere, with no buildup and no effect on the zone, are boring and tiresome.

Perfect. Not going to hold my breath that Anet will learn from the Scarlet invasions, but who knows. I’d say reduce the Champs at the Pirate Captain to 1-2, instead of the ability to get 3-4. Keep people moving along, and increase completion success reward.

The only problem is, if you reduce the ability to get too much loot you may risk having the numbers to complete it because a sizable chunk of people there are farming. That’s the environment of players they have created for this game it seems.

Ouroboros.5076:

If they could just remove all aetherblades/molten events as soon as their morale bar are depleted, it would already help a lot.

Agreed. Also, don’t let Captains spawn with champions, and have leftover enemies from individual events vanish upon event completion. In fact, that is how leftovers are usually handled in the game, so I am baffled why it’s different in this case. Those three changes would go a long way to “fix” invasions, IMO.

Indeed, the failrate is cause of two things
1: The zerg is too big. A squad (30 players) is enough to spawn the maximum amount of champs in any group. If the zerg gets bigger then 30 players it is time to form a second zerg. Above 30 players, the amount of champs doesn’t increase but the amount of health they have do. So you are only slowing things down.
2: people keep farming Aether’s (and to a lesser extend shaman’s) after the bar is gone. This is called greed. I do think Anet should stop this. But to (help) solve this yourself I have found a somewhat effective method. Just starting a flame in mapchat doesn’t work. But what I do is, when the aetherbar is done and gone, I start farming minions myself. I ask in mapchat to ping minionchamps and off course
I do that myself as well. This very often tempts the farming zerg to start paying attention to the minions instead of the left over aetherblades.

mercury ranique.2170:

But what I do is, when the aetherbar is done and gone, I start farming minions myself. I ask in mapchat to ping minionchamps and off course
I do that myself as well. This very often tempts the farming zerg to start paying attention to the minions instead of the left over aetherblades.

Social engineering the zerg? nice. Wish it worked on their namesake in a certain other game