Guild Wars 2

Now before people start freaking out let me say that I am not some hater or detractor of the game, but neither am I blind to its flaws. Yes, there are some in the game, such as the ones which I will now point out.

Let’s face it – Dynamic Events are great. They’re fun. Unfortunately, for the most part, they don’t quite work as intended. In areas where few people other than completionists such as myself go, Dynamic Events can in fact be something of a hindrance to gameplay. One recent example came about when I was 100% completing the Iron Marches. There was an event which occurred where the flame legion attacked one of the towns in the region. I figured I’d go out and give it a shot. Unfortunately, myself plus the NPCs was not enough, and the town fell. When I returned to town to try and liberate it, I found that even having revived all the NPCs in the town the Flame Legion enemies just kept spawning too fast for us to deal with. I put out a little advertisement for the event, yet nobody responded, and the town remained firmly in the grasp of the enemy.

Now, I realize that ANet is currently doing work on trying to get more players out into the open world, and I highly appreciate that. Even if it works though, it’s not going to solve everything. Even in areas of moderate population, where you’ll see several fellow travellers wandering about, events often go uncompleted as people just waltz by them, not taking time out of their day to stop and help. This is why I propose a few changes to Dynamic Events, and the solo explorer’s experience in the open world.

The first change – increase the power of allied NPCs somewhat. This is something which I believe is crucial to many events, and has significant bearing on personal story missions as well. Let’s face it – your NPCs often do jack kitten all in a fight against enemies. The best they can hope to be is a meatshield, or, in the case of some engineer NPCs, a meatshield which spawns more meatshields. Most, if not all the damage dealt in a fight will come from the player. Allowing the allied NPCs to become combat viable at the very least would be a welcome change. I’m not saying make it so that they can hold off assaults on their own – I’m just saying make it so that they actually do something.

The second change would be to scale the events better in accordance with how many people are present. As it is now, the events do change depending on the number of participants (I think?), but it’s a limited scale in comparison to the fluctuations of people participating. Sometimes you’ll get the feared zerg rush event, especially in the dragon events – so many people clog the screen that the enemies die in seconds. Other times it’ll be you and maybe one or two others, futilely trying to stem the tide of enemies. An increase in the variation possible for events would go a long way in helping this.

The third and final change is something which will likely never be implemented, and that would be reintroducing the hero system, which itself opens up a new can of worms, and I’ll not elaborate further as it is unfeasible.

No comments at all?

You’re saying that sometimes the dynamic event scaling doesn’t work right and the events are too hard to be completed solo. You further take the stance that things need to be buffed so that those events are my easily completed solo.

I’m making the assumption that these are not labelled as group events. I’m also giving you credit that it’s not an L2 kitten ue. In which case…. shrug no controversy here. I don’t know that every event needs a buff, but I’m sure the devs would appreciate a list of the ones that you’ve encountered where are too tough to solo.

I personally haven’t had a problem soloing events (Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer, Engineer), so I can’t really comment on this.

I do agree on the upper level of events need adjusting though.

Maybe adding more sides to the event the more players there are:

1 – 3 players: Mobs just attack
4 – 6 players: Mobs also attack out of normal range (2000+)
7 – 10 players: Mobs attack with siege from a near high point.
10+: The event has the additional factor of you need to prevent fires + buildings being destroyed. Failing this will fail the event.

Of course, they can add additional things such as Veterans, Champions, Mobs that are invincible due to an effect (i.e. a banner that needs to be destroyed first).

Adding more sides to the event, and making these sides a requirement to do should split up the zerg, meaning everyone can participate, and everyone needs to participate in some way.

Of course, the issue with this is development costs and time, but yeah. It’s an idea.

I have noticed this recently too. Sometimes the scaling is off it seems, and 2 people (for example) doing an event will be totally overrun by waves of enemies. Sometimes it does not happen, maybe it depends on the event. But it seems different than previously.

Also some places have npcs that seem to have super fast CDs on abilities, usually CC abilities…and really fast respawns ( despite the claim that respawns are 95 to 120 seconds; maybe true in general but I have seen really rapid respawns in places, usually ones with high mob density too…and they are NOT respawns of other mobs killed within the alleged time frame…but the mobs just killed). This seems new also.

I suppose they are experimenting with new changes. Maybe these things are all related somehow.

Well hopefully they’ll manage to get it worked out in the game’s future. I’ll take Jairon’s suggestion and record all the events I come across which may be in need of a tweak.

As a fairly new player, I noticed a decent bit of this while levelling. There were certain events (often at the end of their chains) that were basically impossible to finish due to the included enemies. Certainly they were labelled as Group Events, but there just weren’t enough players around to comprise a Group. The worst part of this was when you were able to complete the early rungs of the chain without any issue but then a Champion rank enemy would show up as the final step and it was nigh on pointless to try finishing it up if you were the only one around.

I certainly don’t advocate complete nerfs of all group events, but it definitely seems like something could be done with the scaling now that there are less players around in many of the mid game zones.