Guild Wars 2

So earlier just below this post someone suggested that GW2 should take Neverwinters Forge concept (user created dungeons and quests), to which I disagreed (no offense your idea was okay) because I believe further segregating players into instances wouldn’t fit in well with GW2s living world concept.

What I believe is the core of GW2 are the Dynamic Events, I remember in a press conference Anet once stated that DEs will obviously loop and repeat because, well, they have a limited number of designers and programmers and they can’t make a million of events, to which I was ok because that’s reality. I was however disappointed to see that each zone in the game only has about 10-20 events which appear to loop just about every 5-10 minutes, making the world feel not so much alive anymore, especially at higher levels where we already had many opportunities to see and complete these events over and over again. Returning to lower lever maps often results in same experiences being repeated day in and day out again and again.

The Living Story updates are fine, but unfortunately they only added about 2-3 events in only 2 of the zones, I believe that making GW2 stronger lies in populating the world with much much more Dynamic Events which will in turn repeat less often to provide a better feeling of a lively ever-changing world where no one can foresee what will happen next, this will make the game much more exciting. Unfortunately I understand it’s not easy and that it takes quite a lot of time to create 100+ events for each map, so this is where my suggestion comes in:

Instead of making an event one by one yourself, you need to let us help you, create a way, an application so that players can design and create Dynamic Events for you, once ready before publishing these will be uploaded to your personal private database where your team can take a look and approve events (to assure good quality), and even tweak them in ways you see fit, then they would just be transferred to your private testing servers where your testing team can see if they don’t cause any problems or bugs with that particular area.

I know it sounds like a big deal which will take a while to design and execute, but I believe this will do good to GW2s future, especially in the long run, taking a couple of months to design this will be worth it, as then new events could be added faster and faster, especially so if you let the community take some of the workload of your shoulders. Think about it.

The only problem with this would be the saturation of events.

Lots of people would enter these events, and then the testing team would have a much increased workload.

TheDaiBish.9735:

The only problem with this would be the saturation of events.

Lots of people would enter these events, and then the testing team would have a much increased workload.

Doesn’t matter how many entries get submitted, if they only take one per day, or like 10 per month, they can still manage their workload and time. Some kind of schedule would definitely be in order, for example maps and areas with less events should have priority over those with many, like Orr for example doesn’t really need any more events at the moment. The point is they would pick themselves which ones should actually get in the game and which should be scrapped, and that’s basically all they would need to do at that point, unless they want to use some of those for their grand story purposes they could tweak the dialogue a bit for example.

I think this idea is worth exploring.

Many of the dynamic events are formulaic enough (escorts, defend x, capture x) so I assume that they can be put together with some sort of point-and-click toolkit (ideally) or simple script language (hopefully) or combination of both.

New events or event chains of these types would add flavour to the world even though the mechanics won’t make for any more interesting gameplay. (It’s completely new things that would make the world even more interesting but there is no way these could be contributed by players.) I would settle for a bigger library of events of existing types, though.

Implementing a tool kit that would be usable by the average player would have to be, err, idiot-proof as well as reasonably bug-resistant would probably eat a lot of resources. I don’t know what the bottle neck is in implementing new events at ANet right now (the writing? the scripting?) but since all events, all NPC dialogues etc. would have to be proof-read, lore-corrected and approved, ANet may be better off putting in their own new events after all.

Then even if the technical tools as well as processes would be in place, for every player that got a kick out of seeing their own event in game. you would have dozens of disillusioned players who end up waiting endlessly for approval or have their ideas rejected. Maybe it’d be better if new event chains were added as part of competitions, this way players would be able to deal with the low chances a lot better.

However – after seeing some brilliant user-submitted portal levels… this is still worth exploring.