Guild Wars 2

As I rise in level, I notice a lot more broken events. The most common one I’ve noticed is the “Escort NPC X,” where NPC X is just standing in a field somewhere with no particular interest in moving on (like the researcher in Bloodtide, or many NPCs in Fields of Ruin). I’m not sure how they end up like that, as I always encounter this sort of bug in progress, but it shouldn’t be that hard to fix.

Just give the NPC a dialog option that says “shouldn’t we get going now?” That causes them to start moving again. If it’s a matter of them being stuck in the terrain and unable to move, then have this teleport them forward or back on their path a bit. At the very least allow them to be reset by the players. You could even lock these options until the NPC has been stationary for a minute or so, to prevent abuse of some kind.

Another broken event I noticed was a skill point opponent at the very SE portion of the map, who was “activated”, in a combat state you could detect via the event UI, and yet didn’t appear to be anywhere around. Presumably he fell through the map or something weird like that. In a case like this, make it so that if nobody has hit the guy for a minute or so, and he’s not at his starting location, then he teleports to his starting location. Fairly simple.

Similarly, slightly north of there, there was a mission to “clear the oasis of zombies”, one where you had to kill about 8 of them, but if you didn’t kill all 8 then more would keep slowly spawning in until you got them all at once. The problem here is that one of the zombies seemed to have fallen through the world or something, since his “X” was visible on the map, but he was not visible at all and could not be located. This made the event impossible since you could get it to 1 but never clear it and they would all respawn. This also prevented the chain from moving on to the next event. A simple solution to this sort of error is to just have it so that in a “kill things” event, any enemy that hasn’t been attacked in several minutes despawns and is replaced with a new one at a default location.

I know that the goal is to quash bugs completely so that they never happen, but realistically, bugs happen. The trick is to build in redundancies, so that when bugs do happen, the game automatically fixes them so that they don’t stop the event in its tracks.

Another option i would like to add is certain events where an attack wave is linked to morale (be it the morale of the attackers or the defenders). It would realy help if this morale would deplete based upon a timer (even if it is set on a long one), besides it dealing with just the waves. examples of these kind of events:

- Defend X from waves of Y: 6/8 waves
- Attacker Y morale [ =====——]

- Defend X from waves of Y: 6/8 waves
- Defending X morale [ ====——]

Now if something goes wrong with any of these waves, the timer would deplete the morale of either, and the event would either fail or succeed, but atleast it would move on to the next event…

The lower level areas also suffer from bugs like this on several skill challenges and dynamic events.