Guild Wars 2

i cant find anyone in the tower has everyone beaten it?

Weird. Pretty full where I am. Have you tried looking for a commander?

no commanders at all must be my server

Guest to a full server – worst case you’ll find yourself in an overflow which should have enough players.

My first impression of this was frustrating. It was basically: LOL→overflow, no one around run for your life! Died lots of times and only made it solo because I retraited into full survivability. Only till day 2 of event that it was no more overflow. It was something to do but I don’t like that it takes a zerg to make it from floor to floor.

I feel your pain. Guest out to different bigger server if no one or smaller server if constant overflow.

I’m on a tier 1 server and it’s a ghost town. Odd thing is, I’m still getting bumped into overflow occasionally. I’ve climbed the entire tower from bottom to top and ran into maybe 10 players. At the top, about 5 more players. No doubt a few more that ended up behind me. It’s as if the requirement to bump people into overflows is 20 people suddenly. Yesterday at launch there were TONS of people everywhere. Now, blowing tumble weeds and a completely dead map chat.

All living story updates that have added challenging content, or content that requires a lot of players to complete, have ultimately been abandoned by the community in a very short time.

• Southsun is mostly vacant even though the mega Queen event was added.
• The Queen’s Pavilion became a ghost town for the last two weeks it was in the game.
• Scarlet Invasions were only popular enough when people got a lot of champion bags (and then they wanted to farm instead of win).
• Tequatl is (almost) only being killed by organized guilds specific to that purpose.
• SAB World 2 had low player numbers due to the difficulty and length.
• The Halloween labyrinth became a ghost town rather quickly.

The tower is already starting to be abandoned. People will do it for the achievements and that will be it. If you cannot get in there now to get the achievements, you’ll have a hard time trying to do it later.

Part of the community asks for more challenging content but they abandon the content quickly when it does not provide interesting rewards that match the risk involved. Everyone else who wants to try to do the more challenging content after the others have abandoned it are just left frustrated.

Sounds like the tower will be there forever then, if no-one will be injecting antitoxin after getting all their achievements. ;-)
Maybe this will be a clue. Progress bar only at 10% after week 2. People don’t return to living story content after completion.

As someone who relies on piggybacking with zergs and random groups, tower level 3 is virtually inaccessible to me with it’s not prime time. I can get up to the clockwork portal event if I put in the effort, but that’s a group event and not really meant to be solo’d. It’s 5:45 on a weeknight and the activity in the tower is still sparse.

I’m lazy. Add a port for me at the top, if you please~

SoulCrystal.2186:

All living story updates that have added challenging content, or content that requires a lot of players to complete, have ultimately been abandoned by the community in a very short time.

• Southsun is mostly vacant even though the mega Queen event was added.
• The Queen’s Pavilion became a ghost town for the last two weeks it was in the game.
• Scarlet Invasions were only popular enough when people got a lot of champion bags (and then they wanted to farm instead of win).
• Tequatl is (almost) only being killed by organized guilds specific to that purpose.
• SAB World 2 had low player numbers due to the difficulty and length.
• The Halloween labyrinth became a ghost town rather quickly.

The tower is already starting to be abandoned. People will do it for the achievements and that will be it. If you cannot get in there now to get the achievements, you’ll have a hard time trying to do it later.

Part of the community asks for more challenging content but they abandon the content quickly when it does not provide interesting rewards that match the risk involved. Everyone else who wants to try to do the more challenging content after the others have abandoned it are just left frustrated.

The karka queen event is a pain in the behind to get started, and it shafts anyone defending the northern camps by filling the center one with karka once the event starts.

As for the pavillion, i think the overlapping invasion meta had a part in that.

As for the rest, yep.

Taco is a special case tho, as the difficulty there is front loaded. You can pretty much tell it is going nowhere when your hitting the half-time point without the first sub-event happening yet. That’s not difficult, it is just a DPS gate.

Plenty of people have figured out that you only need to ascend to the top 2 times in order to finish all of the achievements. I for one won’t be ascending from level 3 to the top ever again, keeping a character at the top until I’m done with the tower.

Honestly, after getting all the achievements, I don’t really have a reason to go again.

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

This isn’t challenging content; it’s badly designed content (the open world tower; the instances were fun, albeit easy).
I completed this meta in about 2-3 hours and I’m by no means a skilled player. It’s just frustrating with all the cc in a cramped place.
Many people like me will not be heading in there again any time soon, so I can see why it’s already a ghost-town in low population servers.

What an utterly ridiculous design this place is – Without largish groups of players available to beat the champions that bar progression through the levels, 3 days in, now that the population has thinned it is TOTALLY impossible to make your way up the tower solo with a character that didn’t unlock the waypoints in the first few days.

What on earth were the devs thinking when they decided to put barriers in that stopped people from at least running through the mobs?

I’ve found people in the tower, they tend to straggle together and eventually form into something resembling a flock/zerg if you’re lucky.

IMO this is an interesting effort to cater to the zerg/flock gameplay which is not a bad thing. Unfortunately, the experience is inconsistent. The first time I did the Tower I was lucky and was able to easily hook up with zergs. The second time I was not and any fun about it vanished, it became a chore that I wasn’t going to stop because I had gotten to mid-way point with one of my alts so I just bored through it. But after those two times I don’t think it’s something I’ll want to do much more given the rewards.

The Tower seems intend on removing so many elements that make GW2 fun. Enjoy dynamic, mobile combat? Here’s scaffolding and narrow hallways restricting movement. Enjoy helping other players by rezzing them? Here’s mob density and respawns that will kill anyone staying behind to help someone left behind by the zerg. Enjoy playing as part of the zerg like you do in WvW and champ trains? Here are maze-walls to make is as hard as possible to stay with the zerg, insta-kills to get anyone falling behind and knockbacks to throw players off scaffolding so they can die alone.

The intent of Tower is clearly based on the zerg gameplay, it’s the only way anyone can get through the mobs so I really don’t understand why we aren’t given mechanics to help people play together.

Like the WvW radar so we can see other players. Or more (clearly indicated) gate areas where the zerg need to stop to get them opened combined with a more reasonable mob density/respawn after the zerg passes so players can catch up to them. Or a timed respawn area like the start of Sanctum Sprint to make people gather together and move off as a group.

I think the Queen’s Pavillion and The Labyrinth were abandoned because new content had come out drawing people away, otherwise they seemed quite popular IMO. Both of those took place on terrains that allowed free movement of players and ease of keeping together rather than terrain designed to insta-kill and separate players. I do wonder if the Tower will remain popular and for how long.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

I think the Queen’s Pavillion and The Labyrinth were abandoned because new content had come out drawing people away, otherwise they seemed quite popular IMO. Both of those took place on terrains that allowed free movement of players and ease of keeping together rather than terrain designed to insta-kill and separate players. I do wonder if the Tower will remain popular and for how long.

Did you forget about all the CC from the mummy and skeleton armors and sugar crash from the candy elementals? Push, pull, push, chilled and if there isn’t enough people in there to deal with Labyrinth Horror … yeah great fun.

Oh and you might want to check out http://youtu.be/Eh97jGEGA7g . It was designed to split people up.

pretty lonely where I’m at as well

didn’t have a chance to play much before, looks like I missed out on this update

Creeper.9360:

pretty lonely where I’m at as well

didn’t have a chance to play much before, looks like I missed out on this update

suggest guesting over to populated server. might just be a case of bad timing for your server.

Just guesting on a high pop server ( to finish ), even here its dieing.

The tower is essentially a no go zone for many hours in the day. This is bad design.

Cina Reas.6938:

Just guesting on a high pop server ( to finish ), even here its dieing.

The tower is essentially a no go zone for many hours in the day. This is bad design.

You know you can go solo right?

Cina Reas.6938:

Just guesting on a high pop server ( to finish ), even here its dieing.

The tower is essentially a no go zone for many hours in the day. This is bad design.

It is a good/fun place to go within a 5 man party and find other players and join them also, altough it feels it could be more difficult and better end reward at least raise the challange and reward.

Khisanth.2948:

DoctorOverlord.8620:

I think the Queen’s Pavillion and The Labyrinth were abandoned because new content had come out drawing people away, otherwise they seemed quite popular IMO. Both of those took place on terrains that allowed free movement of players and ease of keeping together rather than terrain designed to insta-kill and separate players. I do wonder if the Tower will remain popular and for how long.

Did you forget about all the CC from the mummy and skeleton armors and sugar crash from the candy elementals? Push, pull, push, chilled and if there isn’t enough people in there to deal with Labyrinth Horror … yeah great fun.

Oh and you might want to check out http://youtu.be/Eh97jGEGA7g . It was designed to split people up.

Why that tower on the live looks like have no mobs at all? :|

I think the issue with the mob density is within the mob respawn mechanic.

While they have a initial spawn point assigned, they seem to just look for a vacant point of their respective group upon respawn. So if you are unlucky, mobs in the respawn queue can spawn on a point that you recently cleared of another mob.

Worst case scenario is that you keep clearing the same spot over and over, with just enough time between them for the old mob to respawn there yet again. If so the impression will be one of a never ending stream of mobs.

Never mind that if you have a couple of other players doing the exact same thing off in the distance, you may be pingponging mob respawns between each other.

digiowl.9620:

I think the issue with the mob density is within the mob respawn mechanic.

No, its because players still think this is Mario Kart instead of a mob slaying game. They still want to skip everything to “maximize” their efficiency… Zerk players, built to kill, not killing and dying because of it.

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

digiowl.9620:

(…)

Never mind that if you have a couple of other players doing the exact same thing off in the distance, you may be pingponging mob respawns between each other.

When i entered here on NSP the spawn is really amazing compared with those on the live, just got suprised becouse it looks like they are on very easy mode :/, i tryed to solo but the number of mobs were overwhelming when i entered, wich was one of the thing i liked on this LS, actually felt good providing some mob control.

There’s no point being in there after day one and AP list is done.

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

You can access bank in WvW, logout and back in and be at the chest

Charak.9761:

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

You can access bank in WvW, logout and back in and be at the chest

That didn’t even occur to me, thanks for the idea. I’m not sure whether this is a practical solution for me (generally long queue times for WvW) but it might help people on low pop servers.

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

What a waste of instant bank access.

Charak.9761:

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

You can access bank in WvW, logout and back in and be at the chest

More correctly, you can access crafting stations in your home borderland. And those also provide access to the bank.

And yep, what i have been doing the last day or so.

Zanshin.5379:

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

What a waste of instant bank access.

Yeah you’re right ofcourse. I’d better let them rot in my bank again, all 35 of them. Like I’ve done over the pass year. Please enlighten me when using them would NOT be a waste.
Alternative is the WvW trick, which demands that I’m in a WvW queue for about an hour and a half while waiting near the chest. That surely is NOT a waste.
Anyway, I’m not saying I’m burning loads of bank access items this way, I was just explaining how you COULD use a character parked at the chest to open the chest once per day. You could save up a bunch of keys before using 1 bank access ofcourse.

Khisanth.2948:

Did you forget about all the CC from the mummy and skeleton armors and sugar crash from the candy elementals? Push, pull, push, chilled and if there isn’t enough people in there to deal with Labyrinth Horror … yeah great fun.

Oh and you might want to check out http://youtu.be/Eh97jGEGA7g . It was designed to split people up.

Good point, the Labyrinth did overdo the mob density and CC. But at least a couple of people could run through the maze to get to the zerg even if was tedious and annoying. Plus the Labyrinth provided guidance through the mini-map showing events where the zerg was likely be to be instead of making players run around blind.

I haven’t watched that Developer guide but I’ll take your word that they actually said this content was designed to split up players. Which is frankly dumbfounding. I thought the whole point to GW2 to encourage player cooperation. That is one of the most refreshing and enjoyable things about the game is that sense of cooperation with others.

Now they’re making content deliberately gets in the way of that by separating players? (Last I heard, you need other people around to be able to cooperate with them). I suppose they should be congratulated on achieving their goal. Now we’ll get to see the player reaction to content designed to interfere with something so appealing in the game.

For my part, I’m not going to bother with the Tower once I get the story instance done and I’ll eagerly use all of the tricks suggested in this thread to circumvent this horrible design (great idea to park a character and use WvW Charak). Meanwhile I’ll go back to champ farming and WvW where the game mechanics aren’t actively trying to prevent player cooperation.

At least we got to see Marjory and Lady Kasmeer as NPCs again. They make for an entertaining duo.

Aeolus.3615:

digiowl.9620:

(…)

Never mind that if you have a couple of other players doing the exact same thing off in the distance, you may be pingponging mob respawns between each other.

When i entered here on NSP the spawn is really amazing compared with those on the live, just got suprised becouse it looks like they are on very easy mode :/, i tryed to solo but the number of mobs were overwhelming when i entered, wich was one of the thing i liked on this LS, actually felt good providing some mob control.

Since you are on a NA server you can guest over to Stormbluff Isle to see how it is now. That should be the same server the stream was done on.

I’m not saying these criticisms are not valid, but those who are having trouble might consider forming 5-player groups to go up the tower together, like a dungeon.

This has provided some good group play for our guild. The events are doable with only 5 people.

Though I have always had the opinion that open world events should scale from 1+.

SoulCrystal.2186:

All living story updates that have added challenging content, or content that requires a lot of players to complete, have ultimately been abandoned by the community in a very short time.

• Southsun is mostly vacant even though the mega Queen event was added.
• The Queen’s Pavilion became a ghost town for the last two weeks it was in the game.
• Scarlet Invasions were only popular enough when people got a lot of champion bags (and then they wanted to farm instead of win).
• Tequatl is (almost) only being killed by organized guilds specific to that purpose.
• SAB World 2 had low player numbers due to the difficulty and length.
• The Halloween labyrinth became a ghost town rather quickly.

The tower is already starting to be abandoned. People will do it for the achievements and that will be it. If you cannot get in there now to get the achievements, you’ll have a hard time trying to do it later.

Part of the community asks for more challenging content but they abandon the content quickly when it does not provide interesting rewards that match the risk involved. Everyone else who wants to try to do the more challenging content after the others have abandoned it are just left frustrated.

Well part of that is because new stuff keeps coming out every two weeks. Also, more challenging content (ie. Tequatl) makes the game less fun for some people, thus they do it for the achievement and then abandon it because its not fun or rewarding.

SoulCrystal.2186:

Everyone else who wants to try to do the more challenging content after the others have abandoned it are just left frustrated.

And that is why people have chosen (or need to choose) to blow threw each of the new content. Its either do it early or don’t have have a chance (or beat your head against the content).

Run it with your guild, that’s the best suggestion I can make. Before I even attempted it (I assumed it would not be solo friendly and PUGs are a pain sometimes), I gathered up everyone I could in guild. Got 7 of us and we cleared through to the top without issue.

If you aren’t in a guild, or are in a dead guild, I would highly suggest finding a new one or recruiting. I can honestly say that the support from my guild is what keeps me playing GW2. Having people I can call on to do WvW, sPvP, dungeons, world bosses, literally anything is the difference between me playing and not playing. If I didn’t have a great guild I probably wouldn’t be playing MMOs in general. It really does make or break this game, IMO, whether you have a good guild or not. To me this applies to any MMO.

Since the living stories are not fun, the only thing that would make people play are good rewards. But since the rewards in this game are so bad compared to the time involved, people just stop playing and go back to WvW or champion farming.

Looked at the rewards for the meta, nothing I really want. Looked at the rewards for the next achievement chest, nothing I really want. Tried the tower first day, wasn’t all that much fun running thru with the zerg and I don’t care enough about the LS “plot” to worry about missing the instances.

Went back to my usual activities.

devnull.6085:

•Southsun is mostly vacant even though the mega Queen event was added.

What about Timberline, Diessa, and Brisban? Those zones are normally just as empty as well. Aside from guild missions (like in Southsun), the only other reason that people go to those zones is for world exploration. Other zones would be the exact same if champ farming or world boss farming didn’t exist.

devnull.6085:

•The Queen’s Pavilion became a ghost town for the last two weeks it was in the game.

A lot of what’s in the game as really no replay value unless there’s a reward tied to it. After people get their achievements, they really have no incentive to remain in Queen’s Pavilion unless they could get good loot and experience. This was the case until Scarlet Invasions came out providing better loot. This was why it was abandoned.

devnull.6085:

•Scarlet Invasions were only popular enough when people got a lot of champion bags (and then they wanted to farm instead of win).

You are correct. Players do not want to farm/grind content if there’s no reward for their efforts to justify it. They get more champion bags by farming aetherblades than they would have gotten from trying to win. I believe there were a few posts back during that time where people did the rough estimate on how many bags you would get farming compared to if you tried to win.

Yes, this is unfortunate for those trying to get the single achievement for beating Scarlet. However, without these farmers, you’d have empty zones and would be even further from completing it.

devnull.6085:

•Tequatl is (almost) only being killed by organized guilds specific to that purpose.

Guilds which anyone can be a part of or on high populated servers at reset. I do agree that perhaps some scaling could be done but not to the point where mechanics can be ignored and you can faceroll him.

devnull.6085:

•SAB World 2 had low player numbers due to the difficulty and length.

The main reason that SAB had low numbers was that there was no incentive to play it after you got your achievements. They also made it very difficult to get baubles and bauble bubbles forcing a grind that turned off players as well. The skins also weren’t as appealing as they were back in April.

Difficulty and length (mainly about W2Z2) was another reason as well like you mentioned. However, it wasn’t as significant as the rewards. A lot of players have very short attention spans when it comes to gaming (not meant as an insult) so the seemingly longer zones of World 2, along with the slight jump in skill level, was a bit too much for them too soon.

I personally found no issues with the length or difficulty but then I’ve played console games way back to the original Nintendo so I’m used to it. The difficulty complaints, aside from the actual jumping puzzle pieces, seemed to revolve around W2Z2 with the ninjas. A lot of players were either trying to run past them or weren’t utilizing strafing and dodging to avoid their attacks.

devnull.6085:

•The Halloween labyrinth became a ghost town rather quickly.

That’s pretty much entirely due to a lack of rewards. People claimed that you could level up quickly farming it but only a small percentage of players had the patience or willingness to do that. The only reason to farm it was for the ingredients to get the recipes/ingredients for the weapons but you need an incredibly excessive amount to do so.

devnull.6085:

• Tower of nightmares mostly abandoned after 3 days. Tried 3 different high pop servers.

Like everything else, there’s a lack of reward. Notice a common theme? The only real drop worth anything is that mini but you can easily farm the gold and buy it rather spend the time to farm keys. A lot of players just park an alt at the top and have another character buy the daily key off the vendor and use their bank to transfer it to the alt.

While it may seem difficult, this can easily be done in a small group. There are even videos of players who solo the bosses for each level. Players that don’t have the skill set will of course struggle so they should probably go to a high population server. I kind of agree with some people that the density of the enemies should be thinned out a little. They’re a bit more difficult than your standard enemy so having to fend off a lot at the same time can be a bit much.

Ayrilana.1396:

While it may seem difficult, this can easily be done in a small group. There are even videos of players who solo the bosses for each level. Players that don’t have the skill set will of course struggle so they should probably go to a high population server. I kind of agree with some people that the density of the enemies should be thinned out a little. They’re a bit more difficult than your standard enemy so having to fend off a lot at the same time can be a bit much.

Every time someone brings up soloing the bosses I feel like that person is missing the point. The bosses are less of an issue than when you are faced with multiple elite plus veterans.

I am not saying the bosses are easy but they can either be easily skipped like the spider or anyone who comes up there will have to stop and kill it before moving further ahead. That kills off at least one extra source of adds. You don’t have groups of mobs running backwards after leashing.

Khisanth.2948:

Ayrilana.1396:

While it may seem difficult, this can easily be done in a small group. There are even videos of players who solo the bosses for each level. Players that don’t have the skill set will of course struggle so they should probably go to a high population server. I kind of agree with some people that the density of the enemies should be thinned out a little. They’re a bit more difficult than your standard enemy so having to fend off a lot at the same time can be a bit much.

Every time someone brings up soloing the bosses I feel like that person is missing the point. The bosses are less of an issue than when you are faced with multiple elite plus veterans.

I am not saying the bosses are easy but they can either be easily skipped like the spider or anyone who comes up there will have to stop and kill it before moving further ahead. That kills off at least one extra source of adds. You don’t have groups of mobs running backwards after leashing.

Read the rest of the paragraph from my post you quoted.

Daroon.1736:

What on earth were the devs thinking when they decided to put barriers in that stopped people from at least running through the mobs?

That its an MMO and that they should force people to play like its one. Good on them, I dont want content I can solo in a hour or two. Its just a shame that the rooms are easier than these barriers.

I get that there should be some solo content in the game, but when its an MMO they really should force people together. Firstly it would give the impression that these champions are acctually hard and tought and that it takes a band a heroes to defeat them. Not a single person.

When we see a huge tower like that in game, we should think “holly crap, thats huge, im gonna need help”. Not “Oh well this should only take an hour or two”