Guild Wars 2

Suggestion: More events, Make events a bit harder and give them a large reset time.

What is the fun in the same thing happening over and over?
/kill a champion, same champion spawns 10 min later.
/Collapse a cave of skritt, skirtt re-attack village with reset cave 5 mins later.

Events should be spontanious, whats the point in a “Living World” when realisticly you shouldn’t be able to sit in a village and say centaur will attack here in 3, 2, 1 because the timer said so?

Events need alot of thought because they are just plain boring now.

As a new player running through the game I have to agree – The system is place is brilliant I thought as I ran from event to event in chained up ‘story’. I had pushed back the centaur and captured some new waypoints – I went afk for 10 minutes to make something to eat and get a drink in preparation to move on and find another area to help out only to return and find it all back the way it was before I started.

I understand the need to have these reset just to give other players something to do but it gives me a feeling of dissatisfaction knowing really I have not helped at all.

Also as a side note why also must every chain end in a group event which I cannot do – I destroyed a couple of cannons, fought my way into a bandit camp, stopped the miners from delivering ore to the centaur then a boss spawns which one shots me and that is it I had to move on and grind somewhere else.

At this point I just can’t be bothered to do any of them any more. Same with Living World stuff. I just don’t care. Champs are supposed to be tough, I get it, but when you can’t even beat them solo with appropriate level anymore? Or what was the whole point of defeating the bandit raid on the resevoire when the same bandits try the same thing 15 mins later because a timer said so? This was supposed to be a game that is different from World of Warcraft. Right now the only thing to reccommend GW2 over WoW is the fact that you don’t pay monthly subscription fees.

If I beat back a bandit raid, the same event shouldn’t spawn 15 mins later. The chains need to be longer, or the respawns longer. I get that designing long branching chains is a challenge and time consuming, but I’d rather see that and have living world events last like Flame and Frost did. I don’t mind waiting a month or two between Living world updates if it means that my actions make a difference in the game and that the living world events are more intricate. Right now it’s find X hideouts, kill Y of Z and blah blah blah…

I’d love to see it where an event could be started by finding plans to attack the resevoire, so what happens if you go and clear out the cave? The attack doesn’t happen, but instead, survivors now infiltrated the local constabulary and start sabotaging the town. Now you have to track them down… or you build defenses or you have to scout for outposts or massing centaur attacks or whatever. Anything, even if the event chains were on a weekly cycle and much longer, it would make the game interesting to play, or even make the non-pvp elements more player driven. Let players establish businesses and trade routes, give the option of doing “carebear” stuff like in EVE Online. Instead of dealing with regular bandit attacks, blow up one of the back cave entrances, and establish something else in there.

Much of this is already around in PVP where you can build fortifications, repair walls, build seige machines, disrupt caravans and so forth. I understand the balance concerns for PVP, but GW1 actually had PVE and PVP specific versions of skills, so when you enter WvWvW your skills are switched to the more controlled PvP forms maintaining balance, while you don’t have to worry as much about that in PvE.

The problem with the suggestion is that the event reset times are intended to make the events pop for the person coming just after you. Consider this: If I’m ahead of you in the game by just a minute or so and we are both travelling in a linear fashion; as I complete each event I encounter then as you arrive at that location, there would be nothing for you to do until that event resets. With any significantly long reset time, that would just make the game a ‘non-experience’ to you. I get what you’re asking for, but that design is really best suited for a single player game.

What I think would be nice to add to the game is some additional story lines using instances, such as was done with the main storyline in the game. This way, you could have some instanced event chains that you only do once per character and where you have an effect on which direction that story chain goes.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem feasible to have players’ actions permanently change the content nor to have events that aren’t on some type of loop system within the open world without adversely affecting the game experience for other players.

@CattivoUomo: Not necessarily. Let’s say you finished the defense of Falias Thorpe and routed the Nightmare troops. I arrived just after you finished that event. Now the next event in the chain is triggered, while I did not help with the attack, I can help building palisades and bulwarks to make the next attack harder, or I can infiltrate the nearby Nightmare Court outpost, or if the game has “Carebear” options for players I could be a merchant and establish better supply lines to Falias Thorpe, or tend to the wounded, and so on. That’s what I meant with the longer chains. Have gradual rebuilding activities that go on for a while, where one can see the landscape change. This way even if you beat the major attack before I get there, it’s not a non-event for me, just a different event. This would be closer to the immersion ArenaNet claimed they were going for when they designed the game.

As I said before: PvP already has it in limited fashion where you build siege weaponry or repair walls and so forth. I have no problem with the content changing and thus my experience changing. If I fought the Champion Troll and defended the outlying farms in Shaemoor while you defended the Garrison, I did something different. I would like to see a game where there are no fixed quests that EVERYONE does the same thing, but where they change. Have it on a loop, reset after a week or a month, then if I come back with a different character or the same one, the event chain could unfold differently for me. I know that this is much work to design the flow-chart for these quest trees. Much of it is already there in basic form/proof of concept form already with Guild Wars 2.

I hope this clarifies what I was getting at in my previous post.

so dynamic!

CattivoUomo.7198:

The problem with the suggestion is that the event reset times are intended to make the events pop for the person coming just after you. Consider this: If I’m ahead of you in the game by just a minute or so and we are both travelling in a linear fashion; as I complete each event I encounter then as you arrive at that location, there would be nothing for you to do until that event resets. With any significantly long reset time, that would just make the game a ‘non-experience’ to you. I get what you’re asking for, but that design is really best suited for a single player game.

What I think would be nice to add to the game is some additional story lines using instances, such as was done with the main storyline in the game. This way, you could have some instanced event chains that you only do once per character and where you have an effect on which direction that story chain goes.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem feasible to have players’ actions permanently change the content nor to have events that aren’t on some type of loop system within the open world without adversely affecting the game experience for other players.

You don’t have to be present from the beginning of an event chain in order to jump in at any moment and participate in it and feel like you’re doing something. The same concept applies in real life. People get swept-up in the goings on around them and just go with the flow. It doesn’t lessen their experience that they weren’t at the first bar in a bar crawl.

I like the idea of different events happening, too. For one, the bandit attacks at the reservoir in Queensdale do have a couple different possibilities. The bandits can either come with bombs, or they can come with poison. I’d like to see more of that in other parts of the world. Foes should not take the exact same path, and perform the exact same attacks and dialogue each time. If bandits are attacking a fort, for instance, the first attack could be a wave of warriors. Then if that fails, 30 mins later they would try a different attack and send in a group of archers. And then maybe engineers with flamethrowers. Something different each time with each different event.

It sounds good the way you described it, but that would be a heck of a lot more events in order to have week or month long quest chains throughout the world with events that never repeat for that entire length of time. Considering the world operates 24 hours a day all year round it would be a ton more events.

Let’s do some math. Let’s just say in each event chain, every event pops every hour. Now firstly, that means that after you complete the first event and I arrive just after you, that means I have to wait an hour for the next event in the chain, which leaves me nothing to do for an hour at least for that one event chain. I’m using the 1 hr spawn just as an example here, ok? In a single day, that one event chain would have 24 different individual and unique events, as I’m hearing you describe you don’t want any repeats. So in a week, that’s 168 unique events. In a month that’s about 720 unique events that make up just that one event chain.

Now let’s just say you only plan on having only one event chain per map, such that the event chain traverses the entire map having events pop in different locations all over that map. Now I don’t recall exactly how many maps there are in PvE off the top of my head, but let’s just say it’s 20 to make the math easy. I think it’s more, but whatever. With only one quest chain per map, with each chain having 24 unique events per day over the course of 1 month, that is 14,400 unique events that the developers would have to come up with, in order to keep any of these events from repeating within a single month. If you did a weekly rotation, that’s still 3360 unique events where the chain only repeats once every week, and this is only assuming each map has only one event chain. That’s quite a lot.

Sounds great in theory, but it’s not very feasible when you consider it takes the developers weeks just to design the biweekly Living Stories that consist of a handful of events. And since I was only using an hourly spawn for these events, if they were to pop any more often than that, the number of non-repeating events within a month or a week would skyrocket exponentially with the frequency of the spawns.

I like your ideas, however the likelihood that the developers can come up with that many non-repeating events is unrealistic. So, they developed the game to have very regular repeating events in all of the maps to give players something to do while they are working on some new content. Hopefully a new expansion pack and the story line to go with that. Now as a final note, you do know that you don’t have to stay in the same areas after you finished an event, right? I mean you can kill the bandits at the camp, then go to the troll. Then go to the next area and work on the events there, etc. The point is, you don’t have to stick around and see the event you just did repeat again because after all it’s only repeating for the next person coming behind you, and then the next and the next….

Xanatos Chimera.5029:

At this point I just can’t be bothered to do any of them any more. Same with Living World stuff. I just don’t care. Champs are supposed to be tough, I get it, but when you can’t even beat them solo with appropriate level anymore? Or what was the whole point of defeating the bandit raid on the resevoire when the same bandits try the same thing 15 mins later because a timer said so? This was supposed to be a game that is different from World of Warcraft. Right now the only thing to reccommend GW2 over WoW is the fact that you don’t pay monthly subscription fees.

If I beat back a bandit raid, the same event shouldn’t spawn 15 mins later. The chains need to be longer, or the respawns longer. I get that designing long branching chains is a challenge and time consuming, but I’d rather see that and have living world events last like Flame and Frost did. I don’t mind waiting a month or two between Living world updates if it means that my actions make a difference in the game and that the living world events are more intricate. Right now it’s find X hideouts, kill Y of Z and blah blah blah…

I’d love to see it where an event could be started by finding plans to attack the resevoire, so what happens if you go and clear out the cave? The attack doesn’t happen, but instead, survivors now infiltrated the local constabulary and start sabotaging the town. Now you have to track them down… or you build defenses or you have to scout for outposts or massing centaur attacks or whatever. Anything, even if the event chains were on a weekly cycle and much longer, it would make the game interesting to play, or even make the non-pvp elements more player driven. Let players establish businesses and trade routes, give the option of doing “carebear” stuff like in EVE Online. Instead of dealing with regular bandit attacks, blow up one of the back cave entrances, and establish something else in there.

Much of this is already around in PVP where you can build fortifications, repair walls, build seige machines, disrupt caravans and so forth. I understand the balance concerns for PVP, but GW1 actually had PVE and PVP specific versions of skills, so when you enter WvWvW your skills are switched to the more controlled PvP forms maintaining balance, while you don’t have to worry as much about that in PvE.

I’m in the same position as you. I think more of the events should have a consequence. Maybe let the player decide what to do, instead of tying him to a series of events like a puppet? I will add my own suggestion about this.