Guild Wars 2

Preface
After having a full weekend to test out this new event scaling system in Cursed Shore, I must say I’m very disappointed and hope that this scaling changes back to the way it was before – or if possible, tweaked. I was so turned off by this change that by Sunday I was already playing another game rather than playing GW2 (which I haven’t done since release).

As a hardcore farmer who would spend hours upon hours running shelt/pen, the event has turned from the steady 5g/h farm into one less than half of that.

If the purpose of this new scaling system was to make the content challenging, then yes, I would agree that it succeeded in that objective. But by doing so it has made it unrewarding. And it is by no means efficient in scaling.

POINTS OF CONCERN
#1: Champions
Problem:They are a huge time sink .On several servers it can take more than a minute to kill them. It also doesn’t help that some players will outright ignore them and would rather tag the regular mobs – I know cause I do it. I can get more loot simply by tagging that cluster of 7 mobs than focus on 1 champion who will most likely drop a blue.

Solution: Remove champions entirely. They are not worth the effort and they are a nuisance. If you must include better scaled mobs, I suggest replacing champions with veterans or more risen classes with more special abilities. If you must include champions, then please limit them to the highest scale for events (say +15 people) and to make sure no more than one is alive at any time.

#2: Waves being blocked
Problem: Related to the above, the waves for shelt/pen are blocked until the preceding wave is completely killed (this system has actually been in place before the patch). This unfortunately involves killing off all veterans and champions. Theoretically, if you had the first wave of mobs spawn with a champion with them, and if you never killed that champion until the end of the DE, that side would not spawn another wave again. And while that system alone would be incentive to kill the champion, it still takes too long for the event to be rewarding loot-wise, especially when you’re on a low-pop server.

Solution: This can be solved simply by removing champions entirely. But if you cannot do this and must keep champions in the DE, then please let waves spawn after a set period of time. Now of course, you don’t want a low-pop server to have the camp being overrun – you could turn off this spawn system when there are <10 people at the event.

#3: Event scaling is not accurate/representative
Problem: Event scaling seems to be spawning champions even when we have very few active players to take care of them. I remember having five people around me one time at pen and saw a champion on the first wave. Of course though, it’s entirely possible that there were people afk’ing back in the camp that were pushing up the scaling.

Solution: Scale the events more appropriately – with the huge boost in champion damage, as well as having to deal with 5-7 extra upscaled mobs, I think it needs to be toned down. Something more realistic for five people – 5-7 regular mobs along with 1-2 veterans. For 10 people – 10 regular mobs, 2 veterans. For +15 people – 10 regular mobs, 1 champion. Also, only 1 champion at a time! In shelter, you could have three champions available all at once! Ain’t nobody got time for that! As for dealing with afk people who are boosting up the scale, I’m not entirely sure how to deal with that or if it is technically possible to keep them out of the calculation :/

(continued)

: OTHER THOUGHTS
#4: Bring back the old scaling system
Ideally, I’d love if this whole system was scrapped and put back to the way it was for the past 6 months. Now, I understand that the old system wasn’t pefect. Countless times I’ve seen people fail to get loot because they couldn’t tag a mob taht died in less than 1 second. Well, why did they die so fast?
Problem: Mobs had insufficient HP to deal with zergs
Solution: Buff up Mob HP. The old system had an appropriate scaling system up until a certain point. I think you could add more lvls above lvl 84 which will just add more HP to the mob.

Problem: Waves were all clustered together, making it possible for players to wait at a spot and aoe one very small area.
Solution #1: Spread out the waves so that mobs are not clustered together and instead ‘fan out’ or are not clumped together. For example, both penitent and shelter currently have four spawn points that have 5-10 mobs spawn from. Unfortunately, they’re all clumped together. Instead, at pen you could have 10 spawn points but have 2-3 mobs spawn from those and arrive at the camp all spread out.
Solution #2: Have waves spawn simultaneously so that it splits the zerg up. The more simultaneous waves, the better and less spiking

#5: Champion loot is terrible
Problem: The time it takes to kill the champ is not as rewarding as tagging a wave of mobs.
Solution: Make it so that the champ drops not necessarily better loot, but the same # of loot that tagging 5-10 mobs would bring. I.e. Killing one champ will make me loot 2 heavy moldy bags, 50c worth of trash, and maybe a blue and green. This will make it worthwhile to spend time on the champion.

IN CLOSING
That’s all the suggestions I can think of at the moment and I hope the folks at Arenanet will look at this and take these points into consideration. I love this game very much up to this point, and I’m afraid that these changes from the Feb patch will make me move towards other games. I play for fun and I have a lot of fun grinding out gold and farming. But now that this area is removed from the game, I’m having trouble finding other things in the game that are fun for me.

This game was built on playing how you want to play and I hope Arenanet continues to build this game with that mantra in mind.
Some people like to do dungeons and do fractals and cof1 farms
Some people like to do open world exploration and wvw
And some like me find fun and relaxation in grinding/farming. Heck, I’ve met all of my in-game friends through farming shelt/pen.

TLDR:
-remove champions or replace them with veterans
-let waves spawn without having to kill champions
-fix scaling – champions spawn even when we have insufficient #’s to kill them.
-bring back the old scaling system please, but add some improvements:
-increase mob HP
-introduce more spawn points to spread out mobs rather than clustering them
-have waves spawn simultaneously

I should also add that I’m totally fine with bringing back the old system, + increasing the event respawn timer to prevent mass farming – at least this would encourage me to do the other cursed shore events while waiting for shelt/pen to pop.

man, i didnt know hardcore farmers existed.

anyway, when “1” activity is more rewarding than anything else and doesnt have any chance of failure.
i think the game failed.

thats a personal opinion obviously..

Avatar.1923:

man, i didnt know hardcore farmers existed.

anyway, when “1” activity is more rewarding than anything else and doesnt have any chance of failure.
i think the game failed.

thats a personal opinion obviously..

Mesmer LF4M zerker war – ping gear on join – $$$ CoF P1 speedfarm. $$$
Look familiar?

Anyway, Vol, I get why they tested this. But the changes can now be reverted because nobody I’ve spoken to in-game likes it and very few people actually go to CS now, because of this.

No. Plain and simple. Learn to do more than just AE tag mobs. These changes were made because people sat there all day tagging mobs. Champions were the perfect addition.

Vol.5241:

#1: Champions
It also doesn’t help that some players will outright ignore them and would rather tag the regular mobs – I know cause I do it.

Exactly why they implemented it the way they did. Now you can’t freeload while others kill the vets/champs. This is one of the only changes in the patch I like.

im all for making the game more challenging and actually rewarding = everywhere at endgame.

there is no farmer in CS now because theyre busy with jormag.

i hope anet can balance the reward so that even the farmer’s favorite place would be like only “slightly” more than other places.

and i also MUCH Prefer all the farmer stuck into a dungeon than screwing too much with the open world. (they will go there for dailies anyway..)

at best; make a new dungeon with only 1 room and a closet with monsters coming out.
thats all they want anyway.

i dislike everything they bring to the game.

Avatar.1923:

im all for making the game more challenging and actually rewarding = everywhere at endgame.

there is no farmer in CS now because theyre busy with jormag.

i hope anet can balance the reward so that even the farmer’s favorite place would be like only “slightly” more than other places.

and i also MUCH Prefer all the farmer stuck into a dungeon than screwing too much with the open world. (they will go there for dailies anyway..)

at best; make a new dungeon with only 1 room and a closet with monsters coming out.
thats all they want anyway.

i dislike everything they bring to the game.

So you would say CS farming was ‘end game’? If that was indeed Anet’s intention, we have bigger problems than we realized… If you want challenge, go run Arah with pugs.

People farmed CS for mats and gold. Now people can basically only farm CoF and a hand full of other places for gold. And no, lol, the old CS farmers are not all at Jormag. Do you really think a rare or two every few hours can be compared with farming?

Your last statement is pure ignorance, sorry. What would happen to the economy if farmers didn’t exist. Remember what happened to mats prices after the first few rounds of bot banning?

the most challenging content should be the most rewarding.

thats it.

Xaaz.8472:

No. Plain and simple. Learn to do more than just AE tag mobs. These changes were made because people sat there all day tagging mobs. Champions were the perfect addition.

.

That and the loot changes.

Everyone crying because they no longer make 5g and hour tagging mobs has to realise the loot system was broken and has been for months.

Half the people there killing the mobs were getting xp/karma credit but no loot credit.

In effect for the last three months you have been getting my loot.

Loot now drops as it should have back in november your free ride has ended its not coming back

There are so many challenging jumping puzzles yet the rewards for them are worth jack compared to these ‘big boss’ event chests.

It’s a disgrace to the skilled players. Disregarding the effort of skilled players will doom this game.

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Avatar.1923:

man, i didnt know hardcore farmers existed.

anyway, when “1” activity is more rewarding than anything else and doesnt have any chance of failure.
i think the game failed.

thats a personal opinion obviously..

Mesmer LF4M zerker war – ping gear on join – $$$ CoF P1 speedfarm. $$$
Look familiar?

Anyway, Vol, I get why they tested this. But the changes can now be reverted because nobody I’ve spoken to in-game likes it and very few people actually go to CS now, because of this.

I wonder what kind of ghost town server you play on. CS is loaded with people on SFR pretty much from noon too midnight.

And to be fair, Anet has upgraded the rewards for the temple events and dragons. So making the others less rewarding is not more than right. You shouldnt get insane rewards by grinding an easy mindnumbing event over and over.

They want us to experience more things of the game, last patch has turned the game in the right direction.

Vol.5241:

As a hardcore farmer who would spend hours upon hours running shelt/pen, the event has turned from the steady 5g/h farm into one less than half of that.

Mileage varies, I like the new system and with the better chances of good loot it has encouraged me to farm CS more. I make plenty of gold doing it, and the fights are more enjoyable. IMHO its the best recent change they’ve made to the game.

Yes we should make changes in the game based around farming rather than fun, meaningful content.

K.

So is this why Cursed Shore is completely devoid of players since patch? I thought I was going mad!

Since patch I’ve been trying to buy a piece of karma gear (my last piece) for my ranger and not one of the event karma merchants has been unlocked in my server the entire time (unless I was just unlucky not to log on if they had been). What I ended up doing last night was guesting to several other servers until I found one that was…

Before the patch I used to do Grenth a few times per day, but since the patch I’ve tried it 3-4 times and everyone got wiped easily, and since those wipes (2-3 days ago) I haven’t seen barely a soul in Cursed Shore let alone doing Grenth.

What’s going on with Cursed Shore???? Even the smaller events are impossible now (I used to do several on my own and now can’t).

As someone with no max level characters, I found this an interesting read. But it’ll probably be changed again by the time I get there, they seem to like tweaking this sort of thing. xD

But I must admit, I clicked on this topic expecting a humorous account of one of those poor NPC farmers whose farm keeps getting swarmed by bandits or something. Naturally, such farmers would think scaling was useless because it just means that the more help they have the more bandits and more chaos there are to deal with. Poor farmers.

StormageddonBK.9842:

So is this why Cursed Shore is completely devoid of players since patch? I thought I was going mad!

Either you are or your server is weird.

On my home server and those I guested on since the change, CS and Malchor’s Leap are packed like they’ve never been before and Balthazar Temple is run regularly as well.

I agree that Champs should be unrelated to events.
30 Veterans are actually harder (you can’t just lolkite them all like easy champs) and don’t create design flaws.

The purpose of the changes was to promote people to go and explore the world outisde of Pent/shelt. Its there guys, you just have to look.

If the DE scaling is at max then the Champions will oneshot people left and right, which isn’t fun (especially if you lose 25 luck stacks). They also take very long to kill, as mentioned. Aside from that I like the new system much much better than the old.

In relation to that: Plinx endboss in its current form is the most annoying and random/bugged fight on the whole map and I see more and more people just skipping it.

Ran into a oddity down in Timberline Falls. I was escorting a work crew that was supposed to go build a watchtower. Ran into some ettins, elementals and stalkers, no problem, but round a bend up the mountains i suddenly find myself face to face with 2 veteran ettins and 2-3 normals. The crew was wiped before i could blink, and i barely scratched one of the veterans.

cargan.5689:

Xaaz.8472:

No. Plain and simple. Learn to do more than just AE tag mobs. These changes were made because people sat there all day tagging mobs. Champions were the perfect addition.

.

That and the loot changes.

Everyone crying because they no longer make 5g and hour tagging mobs has to realise the loot system was broken and has been for months.

Half the people there killing the mobs were getting xp/karma credit but no loot credit.

In effect for the last three months you have been getting my loot.

Loot now drops as it should have back in november your free ride has ended its not coming back

People are still making 5g+ per hour, just not at Pent/Shelt anymore

Anyway, lets discuss:
“In effect for the last three months you have been getting my loot.”
Because, the way I see it:
Player A optimized for a game mechanic (DE, in this case) same way people optimize for dungeons or fractals. Grouped up, armored correctly and traited correctly for the task at hand. It worked “reasonably” well and Player A got rewarded for the preparation and effort in optimizing.
Player B waypoints into CS with his flavor of the month bunker build and gets almost no loot even though he sees big numbers and gets gold for each event. Player B blames the game design but never stops to think why others continue to spend time farming these events if they are so broken…

Less broken mechanic or more L2P?
Please do explain…

Don’t worry, I did read the entire post. Just quoting TLDR since its good for reference.

Anyways…

TLDR:
-remove champions or replace them with veterans
-let waves spawn without having to kill champions

If you want it easy, why not just replace every mob with ambient mobs that still drop loot? Say you get some “Exterminate the crows that are eating my crops and stealing my shinies” -event. Every crow dies from one hit and has the possibility to drop a legendary. I’m sure that would make everybody happy, eh?

Vol.5241:

-fix scaling – champions spawn even when we have insufficient #’s to kill them.

You can never have insufficient numbers to kill something. I’ve done an entire event chain, including several veterans and a champion, alone. Did it take long (read: Small eternity)? Yes. Was I able to do it? Yes.
You just need better skills, dodging the attacks generally help alot.

Sometimes the issue is not that it takes long to finish, sometimes the event has become impossible to complete successfully because of a combo of the more powerful mobs and the new scaling.

Had another incident in the same area as previous. Was helping a research crew set up camp by cleaning out risen. Went smooth until the final site, where a veteran risen abomination spawned alongside the rest of the risen. Instant crew wipe, instant event failure, and i found myself knee deep in risen because the whole ruin was suddenly populated with them.

I’m happy about the changes. As my server had become more busy after xmas, these events had become a pain to try and participate in. The hardcore farmers moved in such a bot-like fashion between spawns, laying down AoE and making everything evaporate seconds after turning vulnerable – it was so ridiculous to watch and frustrating to play, that I’d started avoiding the tunnel altogether.

Since the changes, these events can still be farmed (easily! I tried it over the weekend), but not in such a trance-like fashion, and are actually more accessible to players passing by. IMO, the Champions are needed and should stay. The vets alone don’t sufficiently disrupt the farming zergs.

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Less broken mechanic or more L2P?
Please do explain…

Explanation was given in the patch notes the admission by the devs that some players/classes were getting credit for kills but despite reaching the required level of damage were not getting credit for loot

So seeing there was a fix for it yes i would say broken now fixed not L2P