Guild Wars 2

I just tried to do one, but it was me and another guy. Nobody else shows up because unless you’re many going together you can’t farm the champs, and if you can’t farm the champs, it’s basically an event without a reward. Just like Tequatl, unless you hit a great number of people it’s a complete waste of time and effort. This is a flaw in your open world content you’ve made recently. If it’s too easy people will join and farm it and it becomes a giant zergfest where you try to get credit for a champ kill. If not enough people show up it’s not going to be much of a point trying.

I propose you design something like the gw2stuff event map but in-game for everybody. Tie in some kind of tool from living world that allows you to see events going on. It becomes more open world than now, right now it’s closed off unless you’re there. It all just looks as usual from Lion’s Arch. Unless you know a world event is going on you’re none the wiser.

See if that helps getting the numbers up, and go forward from there.

Scarlet invasions already give a huge in-your-face notice when they begin. Everyone knows they’re happening.

The real problem is that they aren’t fun and don’t give good rewards (anymore) to make up for being unfun.

New, permanent open-world content added through Living World is going to have this issue. The way around it would be for ANet to design such content for anything from a solo player on up to the zone-sized herds that the content will see on roll-out. Unfortunately, that seems to be harder than just designing for the herd.

Another way to entice players to participate en masse in such content is to make it the most rewarding thing in the game. However, that only works for one piece of content at a time. Another would be to place exclusive rewards in different content, but again, that only works if the content scales properly.

I was at one of these invasions about an hour ago and we only just got through the thied stage. People seemed to be playing well enough there just weren’t enough to speed through the events. There will never be enough people willing to go there until the invasions can be won so it becomes catch-22.

Near the end someone mentioned in guild chat that the world event Golem was up. I realized that I might as well ignore the end reward of the invasion I’d been fighting for 45 minutes, because the rewards for spending the next five minutes at the golem would be better. I think that sums it up.

The invasions have the same problem as Tequatl in that they’re designed with a minimum player threshold in mind. If you don’t have at least about 80+ players, you can pretty much forget about completing the content.

ANet needs to go back to the system that worked at the beginning and scale the events down so they can be completed by small groups of players as well as bigger ones.

How often and what times do they pop

Zaxares.5419:

The invasions have the same problem as Tequatl in that they’re designed with a minimum player threshold in mind. If you don’t have at least about 80+ players, you can pretty much forget about completing the content.

ANet needs to go back to the system that worked at the beginning and scale the events down so they can be completed by small groups of players as well as bigger ones.

This, or at least failed events should again get some reward, since else people don’t even try it if they think there is no real chance to complete the event.

I actually really like the scarlet invasions. Very challenging in a solo to
small group context. In larger groups (4 on up), it gets much, much easier.
Both situations (undermanned, and strong groups) are a lot of fun.

I especially like very small groups taking on scarlet, it really gives you a
chance to test yourself against a difficult enemy, in an informal
situation.

Whenever I’m solo attacking a scarlet pack, and someone notices,
they invariably join in. And nearly 100% of the time, we win!
By that I mean, we have a great time. And that great time is
enough for me to try to figure out how to get to any announced
scarlet attack.

I have no idea what to do with all the watchworks and whatever
else. Perhaps they’re just vendor fodder, for now, I just save them.

Running Down The Clock

At the end of Clockwork Chaos, they greatly increased the difficulty while keeping the timer the same, making successful completion of the meta-event impossible for anything other than well-organized teams working together, while simultaneously nerfing the loot into the ground, thus eliminating any incentive for well-organized teams to do them at all.

My impression at the time is that they were essentially “parking” the invasion events by giving them enough of a delta between risk and reward to minimize the likelihood of exploits emerging and players farming them in a way that might affect the economy (the way they did when they were featured in the Living World). Doing that prevented the invasions from becoming a problem for them as they work on other things.

I tried several invasion events after Clockwork Chaos ended, but never saw a meta even make it past the second wave, and the drops/rewards from the individual events is now so dismal as to be unappealing. Thanks to ArenaNet’s unfortunate “timeritis” syndrome, players have learned to simply leave and do other things when it’s clear an event can’t be completed in time.

These days, if I’m in a zone and Scarlet invades it, I leave immediately. The penalty for not doing so is to have Scarlet randomly spawn and attack, often while heavily engaged with other mobs. This typically results in death with no prospect for additional reward, which renders the zone much less attractive than any other zone until the invasion is over.

Not sure if that’s what they intended, and maybe it’s better on Blackgate, where everyone seems to be transferring these days, but that’s how it plays out on my server.

Solution to this has always been to make some kind of underflow so pool in all players into instance to complete it.

Okay here is the fun:
It is designed to be anti-zerg – a Zerg mentality will guarantee failure of this event

So how on earth is it possible to win?
Each spawn of mobs is designed to be attacked with about 5-10 players (Max) – through all phases until Scarlet appears. If there are more players than this the span scales up and tends to take a lot longer to complete the overall event sequence.

Phase I : Clockwork – it’s essential that each spawn is attacked simultaneously and all baddies are cleared to lower the counter.
Why this number of Max players/spawn?
-> Champions start to appear and more baddies on the map which take longer to clear.
I have seen groups of 3 take out a single spawn effectively and progress events quickly.

Phase II: Dredge – once again each spawn should have a maximum number of players around it. Unfortunately people want to Zerg the few champions at this stage so this often results in missing the aether stage. The idea is to get as many different groups killed at the same time to prevent a single group scaling up.

Phase III: Aether Pirates – This is where it often goes horribly wrong and all the pins will concentrate on a single spawn. This results in many champs [up to 3-9] appearing (depending on numbers of players in the single spawn). What should be happening here is players should be taking down multiple groups on the map simultaneously.

If these groups are killed simultaneously as they appear with small teams (up to 10- I prefer groups of 5/spawn) – scarlet should appear for the final kill.

Now the big question is Why do players want to Zerg to make this event fail?
1) Twisted Clockwork Drops – bigger single Zerg = more drops/more tags (Price of these drops is now very high)
2) Champ Boxs – bigger single Zerg = more champ boxs (Especially pirate phase).
3) People have been conditioned to play “Follow the Pin” and champ box train (Frostgorge etc) – and these events need a different strategy.

How could this be fixed?
1) Do we need to increase the end reward – eg exotic % chance chest like Tequatl?
This might revitalise the event and get people interested in doing it again as designed.
It is an event which requires people on the map working together independently until the last final stage to guarantee the “win”.

This is only one suggestion I have to get people doing the event again which takes a long time to complete.

I suspect even “high population” servers have been failing this event for a long time – due to many of the reasons above.

This event needs to scale with amount of people on the map, including the difference in a level 80 map compared to a level 40 one

The other problem I have also seen with this particular event is that sometimes on certain maps (Frostgorge is a good example) it is impossible to get certain spawns killed as the enemy doesn’t appear easily or is hidden,

In other maps the spawn might require a long run to navigate terrain to kill a few remaining foes which can sometimes significantly reduce the chances of success. I think all spawn spots should be rechecked that they don’t bug out – especially where there may be deep water nearby,

Anet really needs to adjust this event. For something with a 3 hour respawn timer and an event that lasts 45 minutes, it’s not rewarding. The majority of drops you get are watchwork sprockets which are worthless.

If you guys want a server that regularly does Scarlet, go to TC. They don’t complete it, but TC usually gets to the 2nd Minion phase and there are usually 3 commanders on the map. It’s also incredibly good for leveling.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Scarlet invasions already give a huge in-your-face notice when they begin. Everyone knows they’re happening.

I think they also need to add a quest/story marker in the corner of your screen. If I happen to be afk or looking at the TV or distracted, I won’t know the event is taking place. I go days without see a warning.