Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen this come up here and there, and it’s been something that occurs to me time and time again while playing. I’ve been curious if others have the same feeling or if it’s more something which people are happy without and which I’m just being nostalgic over (from other games).

This is the concept of “public grouping” or at least some easier way of forming parties than what’s in the game right now. I find it very strange that the game, as it is now, lacks some easy mechanism to group up — either dynamically or at least in an easier fashion.

I find it a great strength of GW2 that you actively seek out other players in the PvE world to fight with. It’s advantageous in so many ways. But… I often find that when I randomly join in the fight with someone, we travel together for a short while but never get into a conversation because we never bother to form a party. For this reason, GW2 ends up being a bit of a silent game, which I think is unfortunate.

So I’m curious if others have this same feeling? and if there’s some suggestion we could put forward to Anet about how to solve it if so?

In interviews with the dev staff as recent as last year ArenaNet was pretty firm on an anti-party design philosophy. That is, they worked hard to remove the need for people to have to party up. As part of that design they removed most incentives for people to party up.

Without partys Guild Wars 2 gets the benefit of being largely a solo-able experience and the team required situations like dynamic events end up either abandoned or zerged. When you play with others you’re all after a common goal, but you really are completely detached from their actions in the open world. For combat oriented events or guard events, You’re all trying to DPS the boss or incoming mobs to get the event cleared. Let’s be honest, this is horrible design because there is no challenge. If you disagree then explain where is the challenge?

The solution is to provide reason to party up with people without destroying the current play mechanics. I think providing the option for a party of five to enter a private instance of any given event would be a solution. That would allow ArenaNet to use existing scripted content and simple provide a new layer on top of existing design to accommodate those looking for team-oriented play.

To maximize the benefit of this effort they could lock it down to only max level characters. Buff up the monsters and make the loot generally better. Effectively make the instanced events, endgame hard mode content.

For the big events like Jormag or Shatterer, allow three partys of five to enter a given instance (15 players) considering these large events scale up to 100 players, it should be pretty challenging for 15 to go after a win.

IMO this is all they need to do to create endgame content. My suggestions would allow them to recycle existing content without impacting current design. It doesn’t break anything so it’s low-risk. For the players crying for endgame content it would provide reason to go back and revisit hundreds of existing dynamic events in the game world. It creates a hardmode without requiring enter maps to be instanced.

I would suggest they do they long running chain events first and allow the instance to continue through the event chains. This would creates cooperative missions for max level players, again we’re talking about giving the game the endgame content it deserves without bowing to the hordes who want WoW type raids.

Hawken.7932:

I find it very strange that the game, as it is now, lacks some easy mechanism to group up — either dynamically or at least in an easier fashion.

As Sam pointed out, GW2 is designed not to require parties, as essentially everyone around you is already part of your party. If you feel like starting a conversation then go ahead on /say or /map, I’ve personally found players to be very receptive to it.

As for his points about the challenge involved, we agree that events could deal with large numbers of players better, but we disagree on how to do it, so I’ll leave it at that.