Guild Wars 2

Every 6months to a year we should be seeing a new zone added through the living story.

Now you may be asking yourself, how do we populate these new zones?

For starts world bosses. An important part of world bosses though is that you must make all world bosses hard. A big issue with tequatl and Queen is that they are hard, they offer rewards that can be easily bought with gold, and there are a ton of world bosses that are wayyy easssieer. So I’d recommend adding world bosses to the new zones after you buff the other world bosses so they’re not just afk facerolls.

Then rewards in the. With the new weapon and new armor post. you should implement these with the new zones. New dungeons are another way to get people involved with the new zones ( you could also make a way to unlock new fraclals by obtaining a piece of history for that fractal from its respected ruins or area in the open world and then giving it to dessa).

Now how to get into these new zones? I would go as far to say that add no waypoints inside the zone. Put one outside the entry. Link the entry to an event. Don’t make the event too hard, but make it engaging enough to be fun. However, inside the zone it is hard. You could traverse it a lone, or with a group. Don’t make it so hard that you Need a group to explore it, but make it hard enough that you need to know how to play your class. Kind of like Queen’s Gauntlent. You can make the zones have a theme so people can start forming builds around that theme. In these “hard” areas, exotics and rare items that you choose have a higher chance of dropping. Then you have armors and weapons that are considerably harder to get in these zones. There are towns, and safe areas, however there wont be a ton of waypoints so that dieing does have some punishment to the player.

Every zone you populate is another depopulated. This is the key issue you’d need to resolve before adding more. My personal recommendation would be simultaneously opening and closing zones, to keep the population density constant while still bringing new content. This could most easily be accomplished by tying these old and new places with the living story.

I think the best thing to do is to simply accept that some zones will become abandoned, and allow dynamic events to scale accordingly. This constant dropping of Living Story parts in old zones, can not disguise the fact that many of us are kind of getting tired of the lack of new zones.

Requiem.8769:

Every zone you populate is another depopulated. This is the key issue you’d need to resolve before adding more. My personal recommendation would be simultaneously opening and closing zones, to keep the population density constant while still bringing new content. This could most easily be accomplished by tying these old and new places with the living story.

This is true, but closing and opening zones could have a bit of a bad affect on the levelers. Maybe the “Endgame zones” like frostgorge and orr could be closed/opened. However, this messes with the living story.

I think what is important is giving players a reasonable thing to go to each zone daily. With the new zones and the rewards I discussed in other threads players could go to each zone and do one of the hard events to get a token for some daily gold. They could go in there and help people looking for a group for it. This combined with guild missions and world bosses would lead to a pretty good fluctuation of population in zones.

Players will only go to these new zones as long as there is profit then leave when it runs out. Southsun being the perfect example because it was immensely popular during those living story updates when there were achievements. Once a new update came out it was deserted. The world boss there is more rewarding than most but not done because it’s too hard and time consuming. Anything less is face roll easy. A change in player mentality is needed to fix this issue

Heta.8629:

Players will only go to these new zones as long as there is profit then leave when it runs out. Southsun being the perfect example because it was immensely popular during those living story updates when there were achievements. Once a new update came out it was deserted. The world boss there is more rewarding than most but not done because it’s too hard and time consuming. Anything less is face roll easy. A change in player mentality is needed to fix this issue

agreed x10. That is why I’ve been pushing for so many new reward systems that do not center around the current currencies like karma, money, and somewhat skill points (less of a problem with skill points). This games horizontal progression is HEAVILY dependent on gold. As a result players will look for every avenue to get the gold because they only way you can progress is through long hours of grinding and farming (things like legendaries, crafting weapons, etc). Dungeons help, but because they are tokens on a DR they do their daily dungeons for tokens then get to farming. I knew that if they were to go this route with the champion loot that it would end badly. I knew it wouldn’t be good for the community, I even created a post expressing my concern before release and how I think each champ should have a unique tied to itself to prevent these farm trains https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/17-events-should-award-skins-champ-rewards/first#post2480166.

TO create a different change in the mentality of people is I’d offer more concreate ways to gain gear that isn’t just tied to gold or long hours of grinding. More to perform tough actions or a combination of skill points with laurels and stuff like that. I’d really like to see people move away from the whole karma and coin system.