NOTE: Warning! Walls of text ahead! This was pieced together after long days of thinking and from other points made in other suggestions. Please keep this thread constructive on the topic! If you disagree with these suggestions then please explain why in a polite manner! If you agree +1 this post! Thank you!
Some Background/The Problem:
So there has been a problem that has started to slowly creep up on Guild Wars 2. The issue is a slight issue that upon first glance isn’t too menacing, but can really downgrade the game and if scrutinized can seriously hamper the game’s progress to becoming better. The problem is empty lower level zones. So first of all, I need to give some reference here to help explain the problem. Yes, i will mention WoW (gasp!) not because it is “the best” but because that is the only other MMO I’ve played extensively.
After the GW2 hype had died down and all the one timers, rage quitters, everyone else, and the general population hit 80 and spread out, lower level zones (20-70) became emptier. This is normal in any MMO (even in WoW it is very common to find a mid level zone just completely empty of people except for the occasional few). So no, the game isn’t dying because of empty zones but rather this is a typical issue in MMO’s. So what’s the problem you might ask?
Well when someone compares many of the typical quest-hub genre’s of MMO’s and Guild Wars 2 you notice something different. Guild Wars 2 quest system is structured differently and is more about cooperation and others helping you via hearts and dynamic events, while as in quest-hub games you are relatively independent and can do most of the quests by yourself with no trouble. Here is where the problem starts to occur. In games like WoW you can easily level up from level 1 to max level all by yourself. This is easy, as quests are centered around your character alone, meaning you don’t need the help of someone else. GW2 is different. GW2 promotes and rewards cooperation between players in hearts and events. During the early months of the game, I flew to level 80 in a breeze because of how the game works. You work on hearts and other players will come along to aid you, then if you are lucky an event will spawn nearby and then you and your rag-tag team of players would finish the event and it’s possible chain-leveling up considerably. It was quite enjoyable.
However, because most zones are empty with only a few (1-5) players spread across ONE map, the leveling is extremely hindered. Since cooperation and help with dynamic events speed up the leveling, when no one is helping you the leveling is slowed down tremendously. I’ve had multiple occasions on alts where it can take anywhere from 10-30 minutes to complete one event because no one comes around to help (even if i point it out in map chat). Or I simply can’t do the event because it is too difficult to handle by myself. One could say to ask your guild mates for help, while I have done so it still doesn’t address the issue at hand (either way, why would my guild mates come to help me when there will be only 2 silver rewards? That won’t even cover their teleporting fee! It’s more like a band-aid rather than a fix to a problem). Other events are simply just left there and are finished once every couple of hours or days if no one comes around. It puts a huge slow-down on the leveling process and makes it much more of a grind than it really is. A side-affect of this is that many events never get to see the light of day, as they are never completed or rarely finished.
The solution: Simple yet effective:
GW2 has a unique system (which I don’t know why they use more often). This is the Overflow system. Basically, when there are too many people in one map on your server you are sent to an overflow- a mish-mash of other people from different servers. You are then put into a queue for your server’s map and can join if you want to when it has room. My question is this: Why don’t we use this system for all the maps? Do away with server based maps and make them overflows. Let each server have multiple overflows for maps. This concept has also been addressed as “underflow” in other suggestions. Let me get a little more in depth here and show an example:
Let’s assume i want to go to Blazeridge Steppes to level up. When I enter the portal, the game could use an algorithm to determine where I end up. It will first check to see if i have any party members in one overflow. If i do-it puts me there. If i don’t it checks to see if i have friends/guild mates. If i do- it puts me in the one with the most and if i don’t meet any of those requirements-it puts me in the highest populated overflow. This ensures that I will always end up on a map with large amounts of people in it. Ta-da! Now whichever zone i go into, i can always expect to see a lot of people in there.