Guild Wars 2

There are so many gw2 accounts that are offline for long periods of times and in the same time many of the game zones are empty.
Because the game is meant to be more casual friendly that team based, most of the players run alone and encounter difficulties in succeeding group events that are “in their way” for some PoI or Vista, etc.

Why not turn the offline accounts into actual helpers for the online players?
In this way the zones will not be so empty as they are now

How to implement this.

There will be an account finder tool that will let you search through all offline accounts and you can add a maximum number of 4 to your own party

Offline accounts that are already taken by someone in the party will be marked with a red icon and they are not available anymore until they are “released” from the party.

When you add an account to your party, the game will create a clone of the last character that account played before logging off last time.

The character’s clone will be of the level of the player’s character that has added it to the party meaning that the gears (armors and weapons) will be scaled too but the looks will remain the same.

The clone will have a random choice of skills and traits respective to the new level without any correlation to the original character giving so the element of surprise for the player who added it

Also, the clone will have its name written in white and it will be the same as the original character, plus it will also have the guild tag the character was representing at the time it logged off

For adding the clones to its party, the player has to pay some price. The amount of experience and karma plus other things will be lowered accordingly to the number of clones added to its party:
1 clone makes you get 20% less exp / karma/ gold etc,
2 clones – 40% less exp / karma/ gold etc,
3 clones – 65% less exp / karma/ gold etc,
4 clones – 85% less exp / karma/ gold etc,
In this way, adding clones to your party will be only for necessity like group events and not for having better grinding / farming chances

The clones will follow the character that has added it to the party and it will use their available skills through AI programing and will not suffer any armor breaks to avoid moral issues that might be raised up from the character owner

The accounts whose character has been added as a clone to a party will not receive any benefits to avoid exploits and when the account will come back online, the clone will disappear.

This suggestion does not add “new heroes” to the game, but it makes it like all gw2 accounts are online. There will be times in which no offline accounts will be available for adding into parties either because they are all taken or either because there all players online.

This whole thing creeps me out. How is this better than simply adding heroes? Not that I’d advocate adding heroes.

Er… What happens when an “offline” character goes online?

Wolfheart.1938:

How is this better than simply adding heroes? Not that I’d advocate adding heroes.

When a character comes online, a clone disappears, while a hero doesn’t
The number of offline accounts is limited and varied from hour to hour while the number of heroes is always available in its max.

The only exploit I can see, is that a player can buy 5 accounts and have one account as main and his other 4 accounts as clones, but this is in benefit for A-net because they will sell more accounts and they will add “a hero” system as purely optional one.

uknortherner.2670:

Er… What happens when an “offline” character goes online?

if you read better the OP, you will see they disappear

Ronah.2869:

uknortherner.2670:

Er… What happens when an “offline” character goes online?

if you read better the OP, you will see they disappear

Second to last paragraph. D’oh!

Must. Read. Slower.

nice idea, that would help with some stuff, but what would efficiently control the offline character?

In other words, you want Heroes or Mercenaries back? Mercenaries in gw1 were clones of your alts that you could get to max level and get gear and weapons for while you used them as party members. Heroes were ingame NPCs that you could get to max level, gear up and use in a party. This would be a better system than some arrangement of using other people’s accounts.

HELLruler.4820:

nice idea, that would help with some stuff, but what would efficiently control the offline character?

Offline characters clones are actually NPCs driven by AI. only that they resemble the looks of actual characters made by players which the game already has all data about, so no need to create additional character models to fill up the servers data base

Astral Projections.7320:

In other words, you want Heroes or Mercenaries back? Mercenaries in gw1 were clones of your alts that you could get to max level and get gear and weapons for while you used them as party members. Heroes were in game NPCs that you could get to max level, gear up and use in a party. This would be a better system than some arrangement of using other people’s accounts.

I think a hero system like the mercenaries from GW1 is not wanted and I gave some answers above in here why this “clone” system is better
It is purely optional and it doesn’t help you get better and it doesn’t create new goals for you because you don’t need to equip them or develop them in any way but it helps to solve the population problems when they appear for each player.

It is like “calling out for help” the players that are offline when the online ones don’t bother to come to help. Those clones are not yours, you haven’t design them. You never know what character you will get, what profession. It gives a better “social feeling” because you are adding a player’s character not one of yours. Maybe you are adding your best friends or guild mates characters and this will make you feel like they are helping you.

I’m strongly against this. It goes against the spirit of multiplay, it’s a cosmetic fix to an issue, and it has no meaningful connection to the offline accounts.

If there are some underpopulated zones on some worlds, it’s best to create incentives for people to group together. And that’s what ANet has been doing: creating new stories (Frost & Flame), increasing the loot from world events, and creating dailies that give people a reason to head to lower-level or less-populated areas.

I want to see fewer incentives for single-player gaming, not more of them. (Those who want to play solo can already do so for the challenge.)

ANet already ruled out heroes, mercenaries and henchmen for the same reason they would not implement this suggestion. They saw how using NPC characters as party members in gw1 decreased the amount of player-player interactions, as everyone then could essentially solo the game. They want you to group up with other people playing, not with NPCs.

Yeah this is way too complicated and contrived. Why not just add heroes and mercs?

Actually that is very complicated. If they are going to add NPC helpers, they can do it in the same manner as GW1.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

If there are some underpopulated zones on some worlds, it’s best to create incentives for people to group together. And that’s what ANet has been doing: creating new stories (Frost & Flame), increasing the loot from world events, and creating dailies that give people a reason to head to lower-level or less-populated areas.

The Living Story took me 3-4h to complete totally in these 2-3 months . I find nothing else interesting to do there. When the dailies are in Shiverpeaks, I only do them in the green aria to the south and return to Queensadale.

I think its is harder to add incentives to each zone than add this cosmetic suggestion for solving that problem.

Most people don’t play solo because they want to, but because there is nobody around to help them. They don’t need more incentives to be there they need more help to go around that zone.

Get a guild. Problem solved.

Ronah.2869:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

If there are some underpopulated zones on some worlds, it’s best to create incentives for people to group together. And that’s what ANet has been doing: creating new stories (Frost & Flame), increasing the loot from world events, and creating dailies that give people a reason to head to lower-level or less-populated areas.

The Living Story took me 3-4h to complete totally in these 2-3 months . I find nothing else interesting to do there. When the dailies are in Shiverpeaks, I only do them in the green aria to the south and return to Queensadale.

I think its is harder to add incentives to each zone than add this cosmetic suggestion for solving that problem.

Most people don’t play solo because they want to, but because there is nobody around to help them. They don’t need more incentives to be there they need more help to go around that zone.

People playing solo when they don’t want to is a problem. A problem that is not addressed by saying, join a guild or make friends. Even when you join a guild or make friends, that doesn’t mean they are on when you are or can stop what they are doing to waypoint to your spot to help you out. The current “looking for group” feature is useless. People don’t join up with you as they have no idea what you want to group up for.

Maybe a limited range, modified, looking for group feature. You add to it what you are trying to do. When people come into range, it shows up on chat, [Character name] wants help to do [name of what is needed]. That way people know you want help with something in particular and they can either chose to help out or go on. People who don’t want to help can simply not have this enabled in chat.

While this is a creative approach, I doubt it would be possible because of the amount of processing it would take to maintain a temporary clone out in the world. Great concept, though!

No I don’t think this is a good idea. The whole setup of GW2 is not very friendly towards the idea of adding heroes/mercs either.
Personally I have seen there are usually at least a handful of people in the zones I go to so if you are not seeing that then theres a couple things I would point out.

1. Perhaps the server you are on is unofficially slotted to people from a different time slot to you. For example theres one or two that people seem to have decided is an oceania server. Does that mean you can’t go there? Of course not but on the otherhand a lot of people from the time zone would and if you are not from the area you may be playing when they are sleeping.

2. May be on a low-mid population server. This is an issue that will go away with time, either there will be more players or servers will end up being merged but in the mean time if it is really an issue to you I suggest getting some gems and transferring.

3. Join a guild with active members. If you struggle too badly with something ask for help from them.