Guild Wars 2

So Im standing out by Wizards Fief, haven’t been to this place since I did my story quest here (forever ago). The place is a ghost town, I could probably stand here all day and not see a single other player go through. Of to the side I see two rock golems fighting each other and it struck me. Why cant I place a bet on this? Id bet you my whole armor set that if you stuck an activity in that place, that could only be done there, with a prize (no matter how arbitrary) that could only be gotten there, people would pop up. And this is the same for -alot- of places. Just earlier I was playing with one of those iron legion cannons (ya know the ones that shoot bombs) picking off moa birds, it was fun, there’s just no reward for it. As a level 80 character all I really do is run dungeons, do the occational fractal, and knock stuff over the head in spvp and wvw. Theres ALOT of PvE area that people dont visit twice simply because theres no reason to, and I honestly think adding more activities to the game would give players a reason to get off their train, out of LA, out of that dungeon run theyve done a million times before, and stretch their legs a little, do something new.
So I would suggest 3 new activities to be added to the game

Golem fights-Something that can be gambled on. Vote on the elementals you want to see fight, then place a wager, maybe have different elementals have different chances of beating one another due to the way they fight
Cannon Birds- …I dont really know just anything that lets me get rewarded for blowing up birds
Plant Tower defense- Lets make some use of those mortar seed turrets

if I understand you right, those are not golems, they are earth elementals.

that aside, i agree there should be more activities scattered around the map. keg brawl used to be in hoelbrak. not quite sure why they removed it from there, other than simply “it’s more practical to have them all on one npc”

makes no sense really and it removes much of the game’s flavour for each area/race/culture

It just kills me that theres these high end graphics, beautiful towns, they take all the time to have the world constatly ebb and flow with events, give npcs character and detail,and then have no reason for players to interact with it because “the good moneys elsewhere”

There is another reason for this as well, dare I say it, yes I dare… the waypoint system … the ‘skip the game until here’ points that let people totally miss entire parts of the actual game because once they gone through there is no incentive to go back…

Would travel have been mount based, there would have been a lot more players en-route to places. Actually stumbling on states of the game they haven’t encountered b4. And thus there would have been a reason for Anet to put new stuff in (events mainly) because there would actually be a reasonable chance that players would actually stumble upon this content… other then, here is an email go there, there is a big obvious plant tower there, go deal with it for loots!

While I personally have no intention to turn this into a mount thread, I hope people can see that the ‘skip-game-point system’ is turning out to be much worse in this regard.

Anyways, I can’t see Anet add these kinds of things (anymore) seeing that nobody would find these events, and for people to actually do them the reward should be ridiculously high in comparison to other content, and receive an email to be notified about them… Sadly enough games are turning into instant gratification systems with ‘congratulations! you found the 1-button on you keyboard’ rewards… Sadly enough the big market is where the big masses reside, and that is not en-route pondering about 2 elementals, they are running the ‘said’ highest-copper per press 1 dungeon they can. So they have a slight chance to keep up with the ‘inflation per press 1’-rate they cause themselves…

Anyways, I hope you actually stuck around to see if the Elemental you would have placed a bet on actually won …

Ppl actualy play the moa races just to get the mini. I think as long as there something to obtain people will appear. Skins, dyes, minis, heck even a silly title, anything of these things would promote a player to go off to a long deserted corner of the game just to retreive them.

You do realize that there is a large amount of these ‘empty places’ in the game right? And that once you add an activity to the most starved places, the next in line become the most starved places… etc and so on…

I would be all for more content, for one I suggested (2x in different threads) to reset the heart events every month to add more replay value to area’s and thus give people more incentive to go back to certain areas, which in turn would give Anet a reason to put more content (events) in these area’s, because the events in there would become stale at some point…

I mean, I see your point, but after everybody has gotten their mini, the place is a ghost town again …

smekras.8203:

that aside, i agree there should be more activities scattered around the map. keg brawl used to be in hoelbrak. not quite sure why they removed it from there, other than simply “it’s more practical to have them all on one npc”

Wait…you want people to have to leave LA?!?

/s

@Arghore: Unfortunately, going by that view, nothing new would ever be added. Yes, content eventually becomes stale, but if they gradually add small permanent things to do in the empty corners of the maps, the world becomes much more vibrant as a result. The important thing is that the additions be permanent so that it entices new players, too, rather than making them feel like they’ve missed out on the whole game before they even start, like the Living Story does.

I almost wish they would add small activities like this without announcing them so that people could stumble across them, similarly to the way they hinted that something was happening in Kessex Hills by silently changing the landscape. That was one of the few times the Living Story actually had a glimmer of life, and it easily created its own sense of excitement.

@Vick I fully understand the reasoning behind the idea, and in a sense I am all for it

Thing is though, is it to be expected? There is always a balance between resources put in, and amount of impact or (how to say this correctly) the amount of people that these resources are spend on.

And that is mainly what I try to bring across in my posts, so again, I am all for it but the chances to see this suggestion to take off are highly unlikely. Mainly due to the reasons I put forth, one of which, beyond a shadow of a doubt is the ‘skip-game-till-here-points’ that make a large part of the content to be skipped by a large percentage of the gaming populous, and thus the chances for them to see these new content to be relatively slim (as opposed to big changes like in the Living Story). Hence it is not to be expected that they will add in new things in remote corners of Tyria

Unless maybe they are part of a bigger thing … f/e lets say they add in ‘master crafters’ at some point, that have their working stations all around Tyria, and where you can do certain quests to obtain crafting recipes. Now all of a sudden there is a large ‘system’ that needs to find its place in Tyria, and as such warrants new additions to remote area’s. As part of such an update it may be deemed necessary to ‘fluff’ up these area’s a bit, if there is no other content in that area yet (f/e the very north/easy of gendaran fields, in that snowy area behind the animal fighting pits).

So again, I would be all for adding more persistent content to Tyria, but just adding a few titbits here and there is, in my opinion not the way to go, and also not to be expected to ever happen…