Guild Wars 2

So I just read something that was awesome about another game title and wondered why with the tech they are using in this game was it not possible to make this happen.

The bosses on this other game just randomly show up in the world. All over the world in various locations.

There’s no waiting time, no timers for them appear, they just poof fly in and bam attack whatever is around until players come together to destroy it.

Wouldn’t this have been a better model then having a designation location for a boss to show and then have people standing around waiting for him to show up 1 hour after the time he’s supposed to show?

Well many bosses in GW2 are tied to a certain location, but even they could use random timers instead of fixed ones.

That said, I’d love some truly random world bosses.

We have something similar to that with Guild Bounties.

Tbh you could have left out ‘truly’ in the title because as is the DE’s aren’t dynamic in the least bit and they do nothing to tell the story of the zone or make it feel ‘alive’. I agree that random timers would lend to unpredictability and would be better able to give a ‘dynamic’ feel than static timers, but with the current limited state of DE’s I’m not sure it would make that much of a positive impact.

I hoped/thought the dynamic events would be like (using champ troll in queensdale as template) having a looming threat over a district-champ troll. If players push back nearby bandits into their caves they (the bandits) might breach the troll’s territory and aggro it. Troll will go on a rampage destroying bandits, outposts and nearby towns until player interaction. Destroyed bandit cave could mean harpies/centaurs invasion. Supply dolyak routes to towns could be intercepted and resources used to uplvl the hostile npcs relative to the player (when downlevelled) thus making the entire zone a battlefield if things are left to deteriorate. Maybe doing the grub event depletes the troll’s food supply and it starts to venture out-in this case since the player-bandit interaction didn’t directly lead to the troll maybe temporarily the bandits become allies to take on a bigger threat…you know, that kind of thing. Of course the outcome of the ‘looming danger’ of this district can affect another and another and eventually the entire map becomes a web of events. Also the state of affairs and challenges the map poses will alter rewards accordingly-fighting uplevled mobs give mf boost or teaming with bandits give gold find boost or something.

Unfortunately what we got was a theme park; at noon this ride will occur, at 12:45 this ride will be open. That means the events themselves (barring farming where applicable) has very little impact/significance apart from that champ-so if the champ is random in this setting it would destroy the entire event imo. It wouldn’t even be a boss event anymore-just boss instances. Additionally, with no global chat in game it would be difficult to inform other players as to where a boss was spotted if it was just randomly pop up anywhere on any map (large guild will obviously have an advantage). Finally ask yourself why ppl boss-event hop? It’s because those events are the most worthwhile-not just in rewards but in impact…in other words every other event in the zone is boring and yields nothing of note (again, not including mf farming horde mode). Take away the one worthwhile event on the map and drop it on a random timer and ….well…it’s going to be messy.

You see it’s not a matter of tech as a matter of how the game was designed imo.

well the only boss in GW2 tats able to do "spawn everywhere on (planet) Tyria " would be Primordus, cuz we could assume the lava core of Tyria is expanding everywhere like our Earth?Problem with the other game title that u mentioned OP is tat GW2 hasn’t revealed all areas of Tyria on a planetary scale while the other game u mentioned (assumed) would already revealed all its area on its world!

I think the “Dynamic” part of “Dynamic Events” refers to the mechanics of the event itself, not to the locations.
I agree that it would be cool to have it spawned in random places, however it would be much harder to make it so cool as it is if they did this way.
Jormag for example. It spawns in a specific place because it makes sense to do so, since all the place is used as part of the event. The ambient is part of the event itself.
Would Jormag have spawned, lets say, in Queensdale for example, the place wouldn’t be “prepared” to receive the same event that occurs in the FrostGorge Sound map.

Well, I don’t think it’d be too much to ask for zone-specific randomness. Does the Champion Bandit in Queensdale ALWAYS have to spawn in the cavern? Do the pre-events for Shadow Behemoth ALWAYS have to be at the same locations? What about the wasp and boar? They can easily be moved to other locations as well, as the same with the spider. And yes, I think the timers definitely need a re-work to be more randomized and maybe even longer between occurences so people won’t camp out so much and make it harder for others to get in on the event before it’s over. Gets kinda’ irritating when somebody calls an event but as soon as they call it, it’s already over because of all the campers.

*And also Cave Troll! He’s another one that can easily be relocated from time to time. Come on, peoples!

**And that giant barracuda, too! All those bodies of water on that map and you’re telling me we can’t make him pop-up elsewhere?

My personal secret is that i move outside of Queensdale. Little to no camping on any other areas except for the world bosses maybe (but those should last long enough for anyone with the nearest WP unlocked to reach). IMHO if people would just stop going for the easiest bosses on the easiest areas and started to move to more challenging places, it would feel a bit more like it was meant to feel.

Personally, the difficulty seems to be the same, no matter where you go outside of dungeons. Or Southsun. But the point is that I’m still waiting to see the “living” part of this “living world” concept. Maybe it’s just me but in the real “living world,” the same things don’t always happen in the same areas. Toss in some more champion spawn points across the zones and randomize ‘em. Keeps things a bit fresher if you ask me. I’d like to be able to venture into an area and actually NOT know what to expect for the most part ‘cause that’d make the “living” part of a “living world” more, well, alive. Also, as far as aesthetics are concerned, I’m pretty sure Oblivion and Skyrim are a couple good examples of how “living” can really be. Notice how the regular folk in GW2 are constantly going around in circles at all times of the day? Wish I could do that in the real “living world” but I can’t…I have to sleep, I have to eat, and just do different things from time to time. Really, this whole concept can be great if certain people would get with the program instead of treating it like another marketing gimmick.

*To clarify the added spawn points, I don’t necessarily mean make more champions, I just mean make more areas for champions to SPAWN and they don’t necessarily HAVE to spawn at these areas. Or at all, hence a randomized timer, too. Making things too predictable is exactly why camping is an issue on larger servers. I mean, really, there’s actually websites that have TIMERS for crying out loud. Yes, know exactly when your favorite boss is about to spawn. How is that “living” in any way, shape, or form?

All I can do is facepalm. And now I must play devil’s advocate for a dev team I’m not particularly fond of.

You guys don’t understand what you’re asking. In layman’s terms, you’re want them to link 3,000 Christmas lights together in a single circuit. You do know what happens when just one of those lights burn out, right? Do you know how hard it would be to find the right one and replace it? That’s exactly what would happen here!

Yes, it is possible to interweave dynamic events together and even to involve all the events in the entire game but it would be a living hell to debug! We’re already seeing events that don’t trigger because another event, sometimes one that aren’t even related, have something go wrong and break the chain. It could be a dead npc, a mob that’s out of place or even a frog that has one too many toes! I’m not exaggerating. It doesn’t take much to break something this complex and stop EVERY dynamic event linked to it!

Now you have to remember there are over 3,000 events in this game. Hell, I’ve played since pre-release and I’m STILL finding some in Queensdale! I swear everyone is playing mind games with me because I have yet to meet this mythical Champion Spider mapchat raves on about! Can you imagine it failing to spawn and thus the Butterfly Effect happens and inevitably stops all the meta-events in Orr? Do you realize that such a feat could keep people from entering dungeons?

To make matters worse, no other MMO has this system. Yes, Rift has dynamic events but they are not linked together like they are in this game. Anet is pioneering and they are going in blind because there is no status quo to follow. Hell, they are creating the status quo as they go! It’s very wise of them to only link a few events and constantly monitor for and work the bugs out before even thinking about expanding. Just like you wouldn’t build a mansion on quicksand, this system needs its foundation to be sound before they can even dream of building upon it.

As for the meta-event bosses and the dragon champions in particular, they spawn in specific spots because they aren’t like normal mobs. If they have any AI at all, I certainly don’t see it. As far as I can tell, they aren’t even targeting specific players. They are just cycling attacks. This makes sense because it’s extremely difficult to create a monster that can effectively take 5 or 50 players into consideration when attacking. That takes some extreme computations and a lot of processing power and that’s on top of keeping track of everything else going on in the zone. They can’t just spawn anywhere either because the areas they spawn in are tailored-made for fighting them. Sure it would be epic for the Claw of Jormag to spawn in Hoelbrak but them they would have to rework Hoelbrak to accommodate fighting him and that takes time.

And these things are in the works. Even though they could shoe-horn Jormag into Hoelbrak in 2 weeks, I guarantee you guys would be bored with that new battle within days or hours for some of you. They have already acknowledged that these meta-event bosses aren’t as epic as they want but it would take massive resources to bring them up to standard. We’re talking new animations, actual AI, new abilities and it has to be balanced so that players will actually want to fight it instead of just ignoring it because it’s too hard or not rewarding enough for the effort involved.

TL;DR – Be patient. It’ll happen. Maybe not this year or even the next but it will happen.

Now, if you want something to complain about, the constant loss of legitimate farming areas, the repeated insistences of limited-time skins in RNG treasure boxes, dumbing down WvW and supporting zerg tactics while claiming to be against them, killing more builds than creating and having to find out future plans for this game from other websites instead of these forums are all valid arguments. Lock and load and knock yourselves out!

@Crossplay, amazing points here. I agree with posters in this thread on the whole about events that could be more dynamic, but as a fellow programmer, your analogy is perfect. I kindof wish Anet would come out and officially say they would be trying out making events more dynamic, but given their progress so far, I think there’s a good chance this will in fact happen some day. maybe not this year, maybe not even next year. Heck, it might even be whenever they decide to do ‘GW2 version 2.0’, reworking all the existing zones 8 years from now not unlike WoW’s Cataclysm.

They actually do listen, they just don’t listen and change in a matter of weeks. And this is smart too! People tend to react to things which aren’t conventional in one way: “It’s different! That means it’s bad!”

Anet waits a few months and if people are still saying “This is bad! fix it!” then they usually either do something about it, or state some fix is in the works. It’s just smart. If Anet gave in to complaints about new things all the time, we would have very few new things in GW2.

As stated also, Anet isnt infallable. They have botched a fair few things, not all of them in the name of innovation (RNG boxes, killing builds, not adding new permanent dungeons/fractals for over 9 months, and removing open world kits from content where they would have mattered among some of my complaints), but I don’t think it’s time to get the torches and pitchforks over this topic just yet. Give it time.