The Problem
Have you been to one of the five starting cities lately? If you have, one thing probably struck you attention: the five starting cities are empty!
Excluding for the usual NPCs, the only place where it’s possible to see people is near Storage and Trading Post, and even there it’s not so common. The sense of walking around these huge beautiful place, that took hours and hours of design and development, and meeting no one is quite discomforting. They often look like huge ghost towns rather than actual capital cities. Which is a shame because, in my opinion, they are much better that LA in many ways, both in style and practical utilities positions (Storage/Trade Post/Merchants/Crafting).
Why this happens? Because everyone is in LA, of course! ANet wanted to make it the gathering point for all races, and they did it… all too well! Everyone who uses the Heart of the Mists “trick” to not paying waypoints ends here, LFG for dungeons happen here, special events like Halloween happened here and will happen here in the future, there are 3 jumping puzzles in LA and none in the others… and so on.
The Solution
Now the question is: what can be done to drive people from LA to the other five beautiful cities less empty? Here’s some ideas:
- Free travel to any major city: right now people use the Heart of the Mist “trick” to avoid paying waypoint fees (check this thread about it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Free-travel-to-major-cities/first), and inevitably end up in LA. Most just stay there, not wanting to wait for another loading screen, even when they’d like to do what they have to do in other cities (I always craft in the Grove, and I’d always use the Divinity’s Reach Storage if I hadn’t to go through another portal for that).
- A LFG interface system interconnected between all cities: how many people are standing in LA just to search for dungeon groups? Being able to do in from any major city, with an graphic interface, would be amazing. And would also resolve 90% of chat spamming, message suppression, and stuff like that.
- Jumping puzzles in all cities: I know many peoples that enjoy jumping puzzles so much, that they often repeat the ones in LA daily. Adding them into other racial cities, with rewards at the end, would surely intensify players presence.
- Special activities and mini-games: activate that Polymock portal!!! Except for keg brawl in Hoelbrak, other cities have nothing of that sort of activities. Add Polymock, and I will spend the next month there! Give rewards for wins to incentivate players in trying them, and make them various: for example, if keg brawl is action-oriented, Polymock should be more about strategy. Other possibilities to keep variety are jumping puzzle races in Mario Kart style in the Grove, golem battles in Rata Sum (Polymock first pls
), and who knows what else!
- Wandering merchants: put some special merchants around cities that move around every patch, much like orichalcum node. They should be non-charted on map to be harder to find, and could sell items at discounted prices, karma prices, or even have in stock special items hard to find anywhere else (make sure to make each character/account able to buy only 1-of them every time).
These are just some ideas, but I bet the community has many more!
(I will update this OP with other good ideas… that I’m sure will come up!)
(edited by Darkever.9732)