Guild Wars 2

When guild wars 2 came out they wanted to be an MMO, but fix all the things that people didn’t like about them. Travel times, no incentive to play in lower level areas, world vs world combat that has some impact on the world, and people being forced into certain roles if they chose a specific character class. I’ll ignore the last one for now. The first two are currently causing a major amount of griefing and the third plays a role in it too.

There are physical limitations of how many people you can actually put in a map and make it playable. This is disguised in other MMOs because there are a select set of areas that interest your character at any given level and they make it so it takes a long time to go from one side of the map to the other. However in GW2 they threw both those natural limitations out the window. Now I can get good loot at a noob zone on my lvl 80 char, I can instantly travel there, and if certain events are happening i am guaranteed to make significantly more gold than I spent getting there. So when there are Santa Claus chests everyone in the server will go to loot them with their level 80 characters. This forces people to overflows, they don’t get their rare item for 10 seconds of auto attacking a boss, and mass griefing begins.

The intent was to have zones with event chains that were fun to do and had varying results. The problem is there are soo many zones only a small fraction are used. The events are not fun to do by yourself since they take forever to do solo and aren’t terribly rewarding. Since they have already proven they can track events completed in a region, why not add that to a prerequisite for getting a chance at a dragon chests for the day. The current chest mechanic clearly needs balancing. Having the entire server warp to events for 30sec to 1min of autoattacking for a chest and leaving will quickly bore people. They need a mechanic that spreads people out and encourages them to stay in the region. Personally, I would up the rewards for the chest, but make a daily/weekly/monthly set of prerequisites that must be completed in that region before you can get the reward.