Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone, just a quick suggestion about map population.

In the beginning, I LOVED this game due to actually playing with other people. Anywhere I went, someone else was there as well. However, over the past few weeks this is most definitely not the case. Just made a new char and I’m in Queensdale, Yaks Bend and again there are hardly any people. Dynamic events are tough to complete by yourself, and I think this will throw off new players to the game (they will think its underpopulated).

The only solution I can think of for this problem is to have a world system similar to GW1 where they had “Districts”. Players from every server would simply play in districts for pve maps, when a district fills up it would make a new one. This way the maps are always as full as possible, leading to (imo) the most fun experience! If it were me I would just relegate the “servers” to be the WvW teams and bonuses and leave it at that, the open world is too big for the capacity of the servers so in most cases players are spread too thin.

Any suggestions from you guys? I’m just worried that the intro zones are already near empty barely 4 months into the game, in a year they will probably be ghost towns.

i sugest keep only the eternal battlegrounds map,and triple the number of servers

It’s because of Fractals.
A large portion of players have been drawn to Lion’s Arch for nearly all their play time because ANet has yet to implement alternative ways to get Ascended items. This means maps everywhere are going to get less traffic.

In support of raising traffic in low-traffic zones, I’d like for the Fractals entrance in LA to be removed and have 5 to 10 entrances created all over Tyria.
-Each entrance would grant access to a different set of levels of Fractals, so that appropriate players can gather and challenge the same levels.
-None of the entrances would be in the same zones as current dungeons.
-This would spread out the players a little bit more, and lessen the congregation level in LA.

Additionally, I’d like to see more well-established allied camps in the higher level areas.
More specifically – Camps with crafting stations.

But not every crafting station. Just the ones relevant to the area. Like in an area with lots of hunting, the huntsman and cooking crafting stations would be available.
In a place with lots of magma and crystals, we’d see the armor/weapon-smith and jeweler stations.
These would make the zones a tad easier to stay in because craft-stations can also operate as banks.

And this is all excluding Orr. That place has a whole different issue.

To Original Poster:
I don’t know how viable it would be to move to a districting system for explorable zones at this stage. Although, it’s worth considering as a companion piece to the proposed “guesting” system, whereby you can invite players from other servers onto your own. Rolling the “guesting” system and the “overflow server” system into a single mechanic might accomplish what you’re talking about with districting.

Rambling Section 1:
I think another problem is the lack of incentive for replayability of zones. The daily achievement system seems to be well-intentioned, but the way it’s implemented is a little too generic for it to really serve as a method to reinstate de-facto grouping (which is a core concept of this game). I think having the dailies re-worked might help encourage people to re-play old zones, moving the population around the maps more and increasing the chances of them running into other players and helping with map content.

Example: Take the 5 dynamic events requirement out of the daily achievements and replace it with something else. Instead, make the 5 dynamic events be a per-zone repeatable daily. In other words, do 5 dynamic events today in Wayfarer Foothills, and you get a small daily reward. Do 5 dynamic events in Snowden Drifts today and get another reward. Do 5 dynamic events in Dredgehaunt Cliffs today and get another reward. You can’t do the same map twice in the same day, and the rewards are smaller than map completion or the account-wide daily achievement chest. Something along those lines.

Rambling Section 2:
Alternatively, I hate to say it, but the game would probably be better off with something similar to the Zaishen Missions from GW1. In starter towns and in Lion’s Arch, every week have an envoy from some group come to that town. Speaking to that envoy will give you the weekly in-context world bounties, and you can do those bounties once per character at any time during that week. In other words, a guy in Black Citadel will give you the weekly bounties for Charr territory, and those bounties will be dynamic events. So over the course of that week, whatever zone those bounties are in, the population for that zone will swell, increasing the chances of players who are going through those zones for the first time to get help, or just other people to play the content with. Does that sound an awful lot like “traditional questing” where a guy will have an exclamation point over his head? Yeah, probably, but the bottom line is that system worked, and it still does. As long as you provide good context for why those quest-givers are there and why those bounties/events/quests for that week are what they are, then you still accomplish the same thing as dynamic events where John Q. Farmer comes running up to me and asks for help.

I say “weekly” because the problem with the Zaishen Mission system in GW1 was the time constraint turned them into errand-quests where everyone would do the ZM/ZB for that day and then after that day, the same content was barren, leaving people playing it as part of a regular playthrough to Koss-Hench it. Slowing the rotation down to weekly will hopefully avoid a zerg-spike where for a single day an area is booming, but then goes back to being a ghost town.

In Summary:
Whatever they do, they need to think carefully about the rewards system they offer. There are a lot of people blaming Fractals of the Mists and Legendary Weapons for the mass migration of players to one type of content. If that is in fact the case, then putting rewards for doing old map content in the game which can serve as a reasonable downgrade alternative to actually doing Fractals or Dungeons or whatever will probably be the only way to pry players away from that content and get them back into the zones.

I hope they do something, though. It’s pretty kitten depressing to see [Group Event] Big kitten Dragon Has Landed and is Kicking Your kitten #8230;but there’s only you and three other people in the entire zone, effectively putting the content out of reach.