Arena net is trying to make world events more meaningful and challenging to the players. However, they are tackling this at one angle. They are increasing the difficulty of these events as to up the stakes of these fights to try and promote people to work together. However, the opposite seems to be happening. I see the Tequatl event mostly abandoned on my server and I haven’t had the change to be able to complete it because no one wants to do it.
There are a few problems here, and I don’t the event being harder is the problem. Arena net build this solo mentality into the mechanics. So players are more often playing beside each other rather then with each other. Which is a real problem, but I’ll discuss that later. The other problem is consequence. And this is what I want to talk about today.
Consequence is what happens if you succeed or fail the event. What is the consequence of you and your allies if you should fail? Well, the boss goes back on a timer until it is to respawn later. This isn’t very interesting and makes the game feel more like a shooting gallery rather then a living breathing world. What would actually happen if you failed to stop Tequatl at the beaches? I doubt a General of a dragon would just go away for a while claiming the beach for itself until it gets bored and pops up again.
So here is something I suggest. I think that you should still be able to get the reward from each of the world bosses if you fail to beat them the first time. But here is the catch. Beating them the first time would still be the goal. If you fail, a new chain of events would kick off that could take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to complete. These events would be trying to push the world boss into a corner in order to succeed the event after the first time. And if you should fail that? Well the world boss gains control of the entire area and anyone events that would normally be in that area would be replaced with events pertaining to that world boss.
How amazing would it be if the fire elemental got out of hand and started to destroy the surrounding area? How about Tequatl actually flying around Sparkfly Fen as more undead spawn in the area and you work to keep them at bay, living dead style. What about the skies blackening up at Frostgorge Sound if the Claw wins also allowing the to create a freezing wind like in the Snowblind Fractal, forcing you to stay close to camp fires as much of the normal wild life begins to die off.
These ideas would definatly take a lot of work, I know. But at the same time the experience would wow the community and make people want to complete these events.
Another idea I had is if each of the Dragon minions where defeated it would open up a new map for people to travel to that would be like a giant elite dungeon everyone would want to help out in. An area extremely dangerous that would have creatures actually using stronger and stronger agony depending on how close you got to the center of the problem. And completing this could give your whole server a buff for PvE along with amazing loot.
These world events should take priority over minor events in the area. It doesn’t make sense that the dredge would be coming out of their holes in a raging snow storm created by a dragon minion. These events should be put on hold until the area has returned to normal.
My point of this is the world events can be more meaningful and interesting to the players. And I’m sure you have a long term plan as well as a short term plan for them. So please take some of these ideas into consideration if you haven’t thought of some of them yourself.