Guild Wars 2

Can events scale down when there aren’t enough people in the vicinity to do them?

Like, if a champion is up for about 60 minutes, and in that time only 4-5 unique players are in range of the event, could he maybe drop down to a veteran?

If only 2 people have been in the vicinity of an escort quest for the first 5 minutes of it, could the event send fewer than 18 mobs from 3 different directions to gank the escort and fail the event?

This game simply does not work and is not enjoyable when there isn’t enough population to sustain the completion of “dynamic” events.

Again with the under-population?

And the answer is no, they can’t scale to one person. Not all of them at least. To give you an example why: by that logic the Shatterer should be able to scale to one person too. But that would be stupid. Some are meant to be hard and/or impossible for one person to handle.

alfista.6094:

Again with the under-population?

Yep. The only 3 hours I spent logged in last night were with a friend and across two zones in two different level brackets, we were unable to complete all but 2 of the events we came across.

This game doesn’t work right when the zones aren’t flooded with people. The PVE content for the average player surely cannot be “Just run around and fill up heart quests and ignore events” and I’d hope that ANet is at least aware of the issue that their game simply isn’t any fun when you have to ignore event after event because nobody is around to do them.

I think a time-based system could work for some events, where the target is up and stationary-ish until killed. That way he can’t spawn into “easy mode”, people still ideally encourage others to show up for an event, but when an entire chain is stalled for over an hour because nobody is coming to kill a champion, he should get bumped down a few notches so the handful of people that are there can actually take him.

I think the starting weeks are really not what the game is going to be in a few months or weeks even. We were all rushing through the same maps (which may contribute to the complaint a lot of people had, GW2 just being a mad zerg rush). There will be more people actively seeking parties to do maps, more guild team activity to seek out events as people are more spread out through the game. Which isn´t necessarily all bad, it will bring more personal ties to the game and improve the challenge a bit – as well as actually being able to notice wth is actually going on in these event chains apart from a lot of colours flaring up

Quested through the Brisban(e?) Wildlands today with a friend. We never saw more than 1 other player in the same place as us at any given time except for one time, when we saw 2 people in the same place as us.

Luckily, we managed to duo about half of the events we came across, sometimes by the skin of our teeth.

HeartQuest Wars is not a very fun game.

Endlos.4852:

alfista.6094:

Again with the under-population?

Yep. The only 3 hours I spent logged in last night were with a friend and across two zones in two different level brackets, we were unable to complete all but 2 of the events we came across.

This game doesn’t work right when the zones aren’t flooded with people. The PVE content for the average player surely cannot be “Just run around and fill up heart quests and ignore events” and I’d hope that ANet is at least aware of the issue that their game simply isn’t any fun when you have to ignore event after event because nobody is around to do them.

I think a time-based system could work for some events, where the target is up and stationary-ish until killed. That way he can’t spawn into “easy mode”, people still ideally encourage others to show up for an event, but when an entire chain is stalled for over an hour because nobody is coming to kill a champion, he should get bumped down a few notches so the handful of people that are there can actually take him.

I too am seeing this as a pretty serious design flaw. We’re 10 months into the game’s release and it doesn’t require rocket science to see that Guild Wars 2 PvE is heavily dependent on maps being quite heavily populated to consistently and effectively complete many of the Events. Sadly, they simply are not (at least on Borlis Pass, besides the starter zones) and as the OP loosely said, the game then becomes Heart Wars. Which really means: go do quests like any other standard mmo.

Unfortunately, the developers’ zeel for, “Oh, oh, there’ll be tons of people running all over the place taking part in these dynamic events!” = yeah, well, if the population’s there to support it. When the population’s not there it = pretty major flaw in a core aspect of the game’s PvE.

Don’t know what to suggest here. I think Event Scaling would simply open itself up to the group(s) that would figure out how to exploit it. The Boss leveled down… everybody get him! But, I do know it’s a problem that can’t be whisked away with temporary fixes (the key word being temporary) such as: Guest on other servers and see if a particular zone has a higher population (which seems to be pretty difficult to ascertain since there’s no population list for any given zone…the game seriously needs a Who’s Who type function).