Guild Wars 2

Lets face it. This game did not live up to promises. I don’t know what went wrong or why, but it did. (Keep in mind, this post is in regards to PvE only.)

Lets look at the two core problems.

1. There is a HUGE grind
2. DE’s are stale, boring, un-interactive, repetitive, etc etc etc

I’ll explain in more detail.

1. There is a HUGE grind

For a game that wasn’t supposed to have a grind, GW2 sure has a lot of grind.

Because there is no item progression, all new content can be tackled immediately upon release. This makes it impossible for them to release content without adding arbitrary roadblocks, whether its lockouts or a huge list of item components required for a new skin.

This is an extremely BAD idea. The route they took led to extreme repetitiveness. Everything you have to do in this game is repetitive (and realistically, you only do 2 things: farm things for gold, or farm dungeons).

The cause of this stems mainly from their incredibly poor distribution of item components. For some reason, they picked 250 as a good round number for collection goals of rare components. UGH! How completely unnecessary. They had an incredibly intricate dynamic event system in place that to this day, sits unused to its full potential. By incorporating rare item components into DEs, you no longer need to entice the player into grinding to ensure they stick around. So whats wrong with DEs?

2. DE’s are stale, boring, un-interactive, repetitive, etc etc etc

DE’s are(were) awesome. The way they work, the way they are just on throughout the world, the way you can succeed and fail … surely the DE designers couldn’t mess that up!

Or could they.

DE’s, as stated above are stale, repetitive, and just plain dull. No need to go into it further, if you don’t agree with me, you won’t agree with anything else I’m saying. Click the ‘X’ in the upper right please.

Still here? Well then i’ll cut straight to the solution for fixing not just DE’s, but also the item grind, all while saving the entire game in the process: The key? Randomization!

Make DE’s more random. “How will that work” you say? Glad you asked, because I am going to present the exact way to do it below, and explain how it will save this game. Be aware, randomization means a lot of things in this case, not necessarily how they are constructed, or where they appear, but a little bit of it all.

First of all, let me outline the benefits that I will be discussing in my detailed example of ‘implementing a DE with randomization’.

Firstly: It opens up the world. If a DE’s location is random, players must travel all over to find it. Which leads us to…

Secondly: If a DE is hard to find or access, then you can give special rewards for completing it. No one would rely on it, or camp it, or whatever because they simply couldn’t count on it. Coming across it would be a matter of luck, like everything else in this genre. The rewards can be anything from achievements to special items/components.

Lastly: It allows the devs to mix things up a little. Rather than farming lodestones from the same elemental group for 50 hours, instead, you spend 50 hours ‘playing the game’ waiting to happen upon a unique random DE encounter. This also allows them to add content at a leisurely pace and be sure that not everyone will tackle it or even be aware it exists (I thought this was what was going to happen with DEs anyway? what happened?)

Onto the examples:

Example 1: Alignment of the Planets.

Ever have that day where everything just lined up perfectly. Well, GW2 has that functionality as well. Ever see those big orange circles? What if multiple quests could ‘clash’ with each other.

Imagine two orange circles are approaching each other. Okittenup is leading a caravan down the road, another group is chasing a bunch of bandits who stole a key from the town the caravan is headed. If these happened by themselves, each group would finish their task and nothing special would happen.

However, this time, the 2 DE’s clash, and a new story line appears. Suddenly an all out brawl appears on the caravan. The players attempt to kill the bandits, but in the chaos, the bandit leader takes a look under the tarp of the caravan and finds a mysterious jewel in a case. Just so happens the key he stole opens it. Just before the caravan leader can say, “STOP!” the bandit leader touches the stone and starts screaming in agony. He lights on fire and a demonic voice speaks, “A vessel! I will rule this land again!”

Enter the new DE chain. What you just read was an example of a clashing DE. While its scripted, the randomization comes from the idea that the ‘DEs’ must align and be at the right time and place.

We’ll continue with this example and illustrate another form of randomization.

Example 2: The ‘Event Tree’

So the bandit leader has been possessed by an evil terror from a mysterious stone. Enter a success / failure point. He begins collecting the souls of the dead bodies. You have to interrupt him. If you succeed, <see below>. If you fail, he turns into a big monster and you fight him, hopefully kill him, if not, the event ends/continues, whatever.

Assume you succeed though. Now, this is where the game selects a ‘random’ scene from the event tree. Perhaps there are 2 possible outcomes for succeeding, both with a different probability of occurrence.

1. 50% chance: After your party succeeds, he flees. This would open up a new DE Chain. “Talk to Frodo about where he might have gone to”
2. 50% chance: After your party succeeds, he dies. This opens up a brand new DE chain. “Talk to Bilbo about the stone in the village”

See how that works? Not only does this give the devs the ability to spread out content and make sure it’s not conquered, but it also allows them to “add” more intricate storylines to DEs that already exist (whenever they want!). This makes it so players can go anywhere and be in any quest with a chance to see something they haven’t.

Example 3: Combine it all into an end game

Orr stinks. It was so completely underwhelming I don’t know how the devs hyped it up with a straight face. No offense devs, you built an amazing game, but you need to admit you really dropped the ball on Orr.

So whats the solution? Create a tug a war, pass/fail system, truly dynamic system.

(See attachment for more clear visualization.)

The final area should be something you need to conquer. It should feel like a trial in itself…an always on DE that is in constant flux which is affected by players contributions. But how do you do it?

Well, with DE’s of course, and something I like to call, “stages” used in tandem with the event tree detailed above.

For this example, imagine 3 stages, all of which can be represented in a linear fashion from the ‘front’ of the zone, through the ‘middle’ to the ‘end.’ Each ‘Stage’ represents a hub for DE’s, which pass success of fail, and lead to either a retreat DE, an advance DE, or a ‘hold the fort’ DE.

Imagine you are in Stage 2, the middle. The ‘event tree’ for this Stage consists of 20 different possible DE chains that can appear. To keep things fresh, it chooses only 3 of them (this number can be based on active players in the zone). Players then have something to do…go out and complete the quests.

To make things fun, here’s an example of one of the ‘rarer’ quests that could appear from the event tree. An unmarked NPC appears as he runs into the encampment. He walks up to another NPC and has a casual conversation about a mysterious light he saw in the forest. An inquisitive player notices this, and talks to him. The NPC admits to having seen a mysterious light.

Through dialog choices, the choice comes up, “Sounds creepy, maybe you should tell a captain!” or “Sounds like nothing.” You choose the first choice and the quest begins. You follow him to the captain, who suggests he go back gathers a small group and go check it out.

Keep in mind, the battle for Stage 2 is still raging. Players have to make the decision to branch off and do this quest, or make contributions towards, ‘succeeding’ stage 2 so that they can move onto stage 3 (where the hardest monsters and rarest loot reside).

However, this quest is rare, so
possibility 1)EVERYONE heads to it. Leaving the other DE’s to fend for themselves.
- Everyone gets half way through the quest, the other DE’s fail, Stage 2 fails, and this DE fails immediately, and everyone is forces to retreat.

possibility 2)People learned the hard way that 1) doesn’t work, and split themselves accordingly to fend off all the waves, while exploring the mysterious light.

So they get to 2, and fight monsters off. Then it opens a door, where you enter, and are presented with a map similar to the clocktower jumping puzzle! Cool. Well, this time though, you have 20 minutes to get <a variable> amount of people to the top to ‘sacrifice’ blood.

If you succeed, pause Stage 2, and enter a huge Dragon attack. Kill it, and receive some nifty rewards, or possible legendary components that go to everyone who contributed (no need for random! since the even itself was random!).

So Stage 2 unpauses, you go back to fighting, and succeed! An advancement quest activated, which requires 3 DE’s to be completed simultaneously (you have 30 mins). Just so happens that there are 3 bosses guarding 3 switches, which need to be activated to lower the bridge into the enemies fortress!

Somehow you succeed, and enter stage 3. Where you encounter the end boss of the game, and battle him in a series of DE chains.

Example 4: The Dynamic Dynamic Event.

The whole of Stage 3 is actually a huge DE Chain. But this time, it’s really a dynamic event.

Chain Event 1: You battle the gatekeeper.
Succeed: You move forward to the Catacombs
Fail: You retreat back to Stage 2

Chain Event 1 -> Succeed -> The Catacombs
Object: Randomization portals take you in circles. At least 5 players must make it to the end, where they can active switches to help move everyone else into the next area.
Succeed: You move on
Fail: After 10 minutes, all the portals teleport you into lava. You fail, retreat back to Stage 1! <- a different event from the one above!

Chain Event 2 -> Succeed -> Moving on
Now you battle the elder dragons ‘projection’
Succeed: If you beat it, the Elder Dragon won’t have a special move in Chain Event 3.
Fail: He has a special move that hurts!

Chain Event 3 -> Succeed/Fail -> Elder Dragon
You battle him.
Succeed-> Take over the keep
Fail -> Retreat back to “Chain Event 2 Fail” <-- This DE gives you the chance to ‘recover’ and battle the dragon again, otherwise, you continue the same retreat DE mentioned above.

Succeeding! If you win, you hold the elder dragons keep. The world comes together, the keep changes a bit, and you gain access to either a dungeon, or something else fun. I would actually make it so you can ONLY craft legendary’s at this time, using single item components, not 250 of anything.

It stays like this for an hour or 2, or depending on the time/difficulty it takes to get here, maybe even 12 hours – day.

Then elder dragon remnants start attacking every 30 minutes. Everytime you repel them, a new wave of monsters comes, stronger than before. Eventually, you can’t win, and you retreat back to Stage 1, and the elder dragon comes back into power through some story arc.

And the cycle continues. You hang around, or you go off to find another DE that might be interesting. Either way, the whole experience would be brand new.

This is what I imagined GW2 to be. And this is what it COULD be.

Thank you for reading. I was writing for almost an hour…so please be sure to comment/make suggestions below!

Looking for feedback.

wow, you have great ideas! here is the thing though, i have repeatedlly tried to get people to not kill maw, to wait and see what he summons. its never happened and never will, because the majority of players dont care. pass your thoughts on to the devs though.

This would make zone DE’s work like a living story stages. But the stages would reset instead of just ending after the story is over.

RusShiro.9241:

wow, you have great ideas! here is the thing though, i have repeatedlly tried to get people to not kill maw, to wait and see what he summons. its never happened and never will, because the majority of players dont care. pass your thoughts on to the devs though.

The maw needs to move around and knock players back.

RusShiro.9241:

wow, you have great ideas! here is the thing though, i have repeatedlly tried to get people to not kill maw, to wait and see what he summons. its never happened and never will, because the majority of players dont care. pass your thoughts on to the devs though.

The solution … if they did implement an “Event Tree” selection, as detailed above:

For the Maw Battle DE chain.

Instead of simply spawning the Maw battle, it would have a 20% chance of spawning a more challenging one instead of the current default battle.

This would mean that 1 in 5 times, without proper coordination, the battle would fail.

Either failure would activate the same ‘next step’ in the Chain.

Bumping for more visibility