Guild Wars 2

So discussion went a different route, and spawned this response: So I’m just going to change the topic.

Here is an idea/suggestion for end game DE’s.

The idea is to create a unique and different experience for players every time they enter the area.

Also from a development angle, it allows them to add new content at a leisurely pace and add it directly to the end game without the need for a zone overhaul or new content.

Orr should be a giant zone of tug and war, ending with a battle with a dragon, occupation of its hold that grants bonuses, and an increasingly difficult amount of monsters (which drop rarer and rarer loots), which will eventually push you back to the start.

Now, you asked for this, and my creative prowess is flowing, so I will deliver:

Imagine 3 Stages of a zone: Front, Middle, End.

You are always in a Stage. Imagine for now, we are in Middle. Now, chains of DEs pop up at the same time.

1. Someone tells you to “Fetch boulders for siege weapons”
2. Someone needs you to help set up an encampment closer to the End.
3. A mysterious light was spotted, investigate
4-infinity : The devs could add an infinite amount at their leisure to add to the depth of this end game encounter. The rarity % dictates what events have a better chance of spawning.

In summary, when creating an event, it would have the following details:

a. Event Trigger Rarity
- what is the chances for this event to be part of this Stage
b. Contribution % towards next stage
- Based on the success and failures of the players actions in the event chains, how much does this event affect the next Stages events. See below example for more info
c. What special items can be found (or bosses spawned).

Example:

The 3 events above happen to spawn for the Middle stage. You are now ready to choose which you want to contribute to. You decide the mysterious light is important.

Situation A: Everyone goes to the mysterious light
- Because everyone goes to the mysterious light because they think its ‘rare’ no one helps with the other 2, they fail, your Stage 2 encampment gets over run, and halfway through the mysterious light event, it fails, and you enter the Stage 2->Stage 1 retreat DE.

Situation B: Everyone splits up equally.

You head to the light. You find it, and it begins spawning waves of monsters. You and your team repel them. The light transforms into a door. You and your team enter it. A jumping puzzle! You read the wall, it explains, “We need the blood of <variable> heros” So, <variable> number of your group needs to reach the top and provide a sacrifice of your blood.

a. You Fail
- Ok, light goes away, you return to Orr, and you go help someone else

b . You Pass
- You summon a giant monster which begins to attack your encampment. Its level is based on heroes in the ZONE, so everyone needs to come help.

You kill it, and it drops a rare component for a rare item.

Assume then, that you then only completed half of the other events to the point of ‘success’ You still make it to Stage 3, but you have no boulders for your catapults. Yeah…well realistically, you only contributed 50% ‘strength’ level to stage 3. Which means, lets say, it sends only 10 NPC soldiers out every 30 seconds to help battle, rather than 20.

As you can see, this model is scalable (at whatever pace they want), and is randomized, offering a new experience every time you go there, and provides great incentives to actually participate.

Everything the current dev team failed to do.

“It turned out that all their ideas were implemented rather poorly and showed me that a.net, excluding their incredible art department) simply wasn’t as talented as I was led to believe through their hype (They are still talented! just not enough to fulfill their promises)”

How so? It’s so easy to get BIS items and end-game stuff simply by playing – not to mention there are alternatives.

If you want to ‘farm’ yourself to get other items then that’s your choice because you want it faster than others.

But the difference between grinding and farming is that the former is required an the latter is desired. I think you’re mistaking people farming cof or orr events for grinding.

edit;edit

Vol.5241:

“It turned out that all their ideas were implemented rather poorly and showed me that a.net, excluding their incredible art department) simply wasn’t as talented as I was led to believe through their hype (They are still talented! just not enough to fulfill their promises)”

How so? It’s so easy to get BIS items and end-game stuff simply by playing – not to mention there are alternatives.

If you want to ‘farm’ yourself to get other items then that’s your choice because you want it faster than others.

But the difference between grinding and farming is that the former is required an the latter is desired. I think you’re mistaking people farming cof or orr events for grinding.

edit;edit

First off, their dungeons were and are terribly designed. The exclusion of the trinity was supposed to be something interesting. It turned out the devs simply removed it with no suitable strategical replacement. ie. Enemies should ‘turn’ Enemy actions should be more telegraphed (i still don’t know why this is so hard). Boss fights themselves could have been (and still can) be more interesting. Unfortunately, I think this is one of their weakest teams.

Another thing they failed to deliver was interesting end game dynamic events. There is no war, no struggle. Orr is the worst zone in the game. They had set up a great system of success and failures, however, they never go past a single instance. I don’t know if this is an engine limitation, or just the designers being short-sighted.

Orr should be a giant zone of tug and war, ending with a battle with a dragon, occupation of its hold that grants bonuses, and an increasingly difficult amount of monsters (which drop rarer and rarer loots), which will eventually push you back to the start.

Now, you asked for this, and my creative prowess is flowing, so I will deliver:

Imagine 3 Stages of a zone: Front, Middle, End.

You are always in a Stage. Imagine for now, we are in Middle. Now, chains of DEs pop up at the same time.

1. Someone tells you to “Fetch boulders for siege weapons”
2. Someone needs you to help set up an encampment closer to the End.
3. A mysterious light was spotted, investigate
4-infinity : The devs could add an infinite amount at their leisure to add to the depth of this end game encounter. The rarity % dictates what events have a better chance of spawning.

In summary, when creating an event, it would have the following details:

a. Event Trigger Rarity
- what is the chances for this event to be part of this Stage
b. Contribution % towards next stage
- Based on the success and failures of the players actions in the event chains, how much does this event affect the next Stages events. See below example for more info
c. What special items can be found (or bosses spawned).

Example:

The 3 events above happen to spawn for the Middle stage. You are now ready to choose which you want to contribute to. You decide the mysterious light is important.

Situation A: Everyone goes to the mysterious light
- Because everyone goes to the mysterious light because they think its ‘rare’ no one helps with the other 2, they fail, your Stage 2 encampment gets over run, and halfway through the mysterious light event, it fails, and you enter the Stage 2→Stage 1 retreat DE.

Situation B: Everyone splits up equally.

You head to the light. You find it, and it begins spawning waves of monsters. You and your team repel them. The light transforms into a door. You and your team enter it. A jumping puzzle! You read the wall, it explains, “We need the blood of <variable> heros” So, <variable> number of your group needs to reach the top and provide a sacrifice of your blood.

a. You Fail
- Ok, light goes away, you return to Orr, and you go help someone else

You kill it, and it drops a rare component for a rare item.

Assume then, that you then only completed half of the other events to the point of ‘success’ You still make it to Stage 3, but you have no boulders for your catapults. Yeah…well realistically, you only contributed 50% ‘strength’ level to stage 3. Which means, lets say, it sends only 10 NPC soldiers out every 30 seconds to help battle, rather than 20.

As you can see, this model is scalable (at whatever pace they want), and is randomized, offering a new experience every time you go there, and provides great incentives to actually participate.

Everything the current dev team failed to do.

I agree. Dynamic events should have more of a tug of war feel to them. At present, DEs just feel like a “heart” quest (not really dynamic at all). And event, yes, but not dynamic. There should be more “change” in the world.

OK, that’s a well-thought out event chain.

But put on your dev hat and think about the limitations
-what happens when there are so few people on the map to do such an event chain? They won’t go anywhere and they’ll be stuck farming the same events over and over until there are enough people to complete it
-what happens to low population servers? Nothing will get completed
-what happens when you have a huge zerg? Event completion will be easy and completed soon. And what after if you complete the meta chain? Restart all over and farm faceroll the chain?
-Programming isn’t easy. If you start building a huge event chain with steps and substeps as well as prerequisites, nasty bugs are going to come about which will most likely stall the chain. Yes, “well then they should fix those bugs”. It’s more difficult than it seems and it could take months. There is less risk of content-prohibitive bugs with non-connected events. Go look at how bugged Warmaster Chan escort is and how many events it prevents fom happening (8 by my count, including opening Arah)

Vol.5241:

OK, that’s a well-thought out event chain.

But put on your dev hat and think about the limitations
-what happens when there are so few people on the map to do such an event chain? They won’t go anywhere and they’ll be stuck farming the same events over and over until there are enough people to complete it
-what happens to low population servers? Nothing will get completed
-what happens when you have a huge zerg? Event completion will be easy and completed soon. And what after if you complete the meta chain? Restart all over and farm faceroll the chain?
-Programming isn’t easy. If you start building a huge event chain with steps and substeps as well as prerequisites, nasty bugs are going to come about which will most likely stall the chain. Yes, “well then they should fix those bugs”. It’s more difficult than it seems and it could take months. There is less risk of content-prohibitive bugs with non-connected events. Go look at how bugged Warmaster Chan escort is and how many events it prevents fom happening (8 by my count, including opening Arah)

My Dev hat is ALWAYS on. I will gladly (and easily) solve all your problems.

1.what happens when there are so few people on the map to do such an event chain? They won’t go anywhere and they’ll be stuck farming the same events over and over until there are enough people to complete it
-what happens to low population servers? Nothing will get completed
-what happens when you have a huge zerg? Event completion will be easy and completed soon. And what after if you complete the meta chain? Restart all over and farm faceroll the chain?

— This shouldn’t be a problem if event scaling is working properly.

However, it would be possible to implement a ‘scaling’ solution for the amount of dynamic quests active. In my example, I had 3. Lets look below for a better example of how it would work out:

Firstly, I would pull the variable of active players from total ‘Zone participants.’ So, use however many people are in the zone, not how many people are near the quest.

10 players -> 1 active stage DE chain.
30 players -> 2 active stage DE chains
50-100 players -> 3
100 + -> 4

Assuming more people are added throughout the “Stage”, I would have a ‘buffer’ timer, based on randomization. If Stage 2 begins with only 10 players, and 1 active DE, then half way through it, 50 more people log on, 2 more quests would ‘appear’ at Stage 2. I personally don’t see it as a problem if they leave. If those 50 people log off, leaving 10 to complete 3 DE chains, that implies lack of dedication and thus, you should fail the stage.

2. Programming isn’t easy. If you start building a huge event chain with steps and substeps as well as prerequisites, nasty bugs are going to come about which will most likely stall the chain. Yes, “well then they should fix those bugs”. It’s more difficult than it seems and it could take months. There is less risk of content-prohibitive bugs with non-connected events.

— I completely agree. Programming isn’t easy. However, probably 1 week after launch when I saw bugs appear, I would have began working on a globally applied ‘reset’ function that resets/ends a quest if no important variable changes after 1 hour. I still can not fathom how something as simple as that did not make it into the core design of the DE system. Assuming that does happen, it would easily provide feedback and data as to what point in the quest the problem occurs as well.

Anyway, bugs are already a problem with DEs, it shouldn’t be a reason not to implement a better idea.

Regardless, the idea I presented does nothing different other than cluster 2 or more DEs under another. While I do not know if this is implemented right now, it SHOULD be.

I.E

Stage2 – Middle:

Variables:
- What DE’s fall under it.
- What DE’s were selected to be active
- Out of the active DE’s what is considered a success rate to move to stage 3 – End? else { activate DE ‘retreat’ to Stage 1 }

(continued example from above post)

total possible ‘success’ contribution is
DE 1 – 50points
DE 2- 30points
DE 3- 70points ( having varying degress allows static functions and doesnt require homogenization of point distribution when creating quests making it easier to VARY them).

These points are added and subtracted throughout the Event chain. For instance, if you succeed, then fail, then fail, and are presented with a tough encounter, but push back, you could receive full points! Its all based on flavor.

Therefore total amount of ‘success’ contribution points for Stage 2 is (50+30+70) = 150. (this is hidden, of course)

They could add a “challenge” multiplier if they wanted, to make it more complicated. Or not, this is just an example. Either way, figure out the lowest amount of points necessary for a Success, 150*.8 = 120 points required.

I’m simply providing a way to do it. Not advocating that its the best way. But its possible, and not very difficult theoretically. Of course, I dont know their system, but it seems like a system like this could be built on top of what they already have, as it wouldn’t interfere with how DE’s function, only with the success and failure call backs, which undoubtedly already exist.

Vol.5241:

OK, that’s a well-thought out event chain.

But put on your dev hat and think about the limitations
-what happens when there are so few people on the map to do such an event chain? They won’t go anywhere and they’ll be stuck farming the same events over and over until there are enough people to complete it
-what happens to low population servers? Nothing will get completed
-what happens when you have a huge zerg? Event completion will be easy and completed soon. And what after if you complete the meta chain? Restart all over and farm faceroll the chain?
-Programming isn’t easy. If you start building a huge event chain with steps and substeps as well as prerequisites, nasty bugs are going to come about which will most likely stall the chain. Yes, “well then they should fix those bugs”. It’s more difficult than it seems and it could take months. There is less risk of content-prohibitive bugs with non-connected events. Go look at how bugged Warmaster Chan escort is and how many events it prevents fom happening (8 by my count, including opening Arah)

For the numbers issues you wrote, the scaled content. This is already a feature, scale the content up high for huge zergs and scale it lower for smaller groups. There does need to be a gate though, you can’t open up an event chain to one player and allow him to beat it. That would be silly and would ruin the experience.’

To the “Programming isn’t easy.”

That’s no excuse, that’s what Quality Assurance is for, and I know bugs get through from the internal build to the live build, but that’s expected when such a transition happens. I would much rather deal with those bugs upon release of the content, report it, and have them fixed within 2 weeks.

Don’t make excuses for how hard programming is, their job is to program and code. I expect them to deliver since I’m paying for it.

I made this up, because I like the idea, and I’m bored at work. No photoshop…its paint!

see attachment.

This kind of got off topic. Maybe i’ll just change the entire OP

As you can see OP clearly put this thread into the wrong subforum