Guild Wars 2

The Problem
As exploits concerning the use of terrain in Arah to skip / avoid certain parts of a path keep popping up, I’ve noticed that the solution to preventing the abuse of them is to place invisible walls in the “problem” areas hoping to halt their use.

But wouldn’t it be better in the long term to just fix the triggers so that you have to complete the events in order to progress to the end of the dungeon?

How Events Currently Work

It seems that how the events are triggered currently has to do with the npc which you take along with you… meaning that the events of other paths won’t trigger because you don’t have the correct npc with you. This also means that the event areas are often triggered just by having the npc with you at the moment you enter the area. (ex path 4 lupi event will trigger even with dead npc, but the event wont be completable unless you enter the fight while npc is alive).

Example: Path 3

This path is a problem area that I’ve noticed in the past, here is how the event triggers currently work…

A) First boss must be completed before second boss will trigger (working)

B) First and/or Second Boss must be killed before Lupi will activate (not working)

C) Lupicus, first 2 bosses must be killed in order to kill and trigger the final 2 events (finding the chicken and ritual event) (not working)

So in this case the entire dungeoncould potentially be skipped to the final boss as long as you get there with the npc. And there are ways to do it… through terrain exploits.

My Suggested Solution

My proposal though much more time consuming than simply placing invisible walls to prevent exploiters, would be to change how the events are triggered by making them sequentially triggered so that you are “forced” to do the dungeon in proper order.

A —-> B —-> C (in the above example)

This would halt the terrain exploiters in Arah from simply skipping entire sections of the dungeon by exploiting, and would potentially save time in the long run by removing the need to constantly add in invisible walls.

Conclusion

Any way, let me know what you guys think. Too be honest I don’t know how difficult it would be to recode this stuff, but i know it would save development time in the long run by fixing the root of the issue rather than all these invisible wall bandaid fixes.

TL;DR:

Fix Event triggers to remove necessity to keep updating the dungeons with invisible walls.

-Sincore

EDIT: Formatting…

I don’t like the invisible walls for mostly aesthetic reasons. I hate seeing accessible areas that I can jump to, but then find myself blocked by an invisible wall. Have those lovely terrain artists of yours put in a new boulder or something, anything, but don’t just add invisible walls!

If you were to just put boulders and such to block paths, people will just find new paths and as long as the vertical wall jump is still not fixed, those boulders wouldn’t stop you anyway.

Invisible walls are a temp fix, the only true fix is to require the bosses be done in order.

How to Fix Dungeons/Exploits:

Step 1: Require all previous bosses to be killed to move on.
Step 2: Adjust leashing and reset ranges to prevent exploits.
Step 3: Adjust invuln mechanic on bosses to prevent z axis manipulation (every boss should just be given a “teleport” ability if the they are unable to damage someone with an autoattack for x amount of time..
Step 4: Lastly… the final thing that could be implemented in a matter of minutes…. increase out of combat regen for bosses to 100x it’s current rate. This prevents people from just being able to outdps the OOC regen.
Step 5: Hire me to test a boss before it ‘s released lol… I’ve found atleast 1 gamebreaking exploit for every single boss in the game so far within 10-15 minutes of looking…

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The sure-fire method is the one you describe, and the one put into practice on Honor of the Waves explorable paths. It is a two-part fix though – to block the area off that is prone to exploit, and then fix the events so they don’t trigger when not intended.

We’re working on this issue in all our dungeons.

Thanks for the reply! Keep up the great work

-Sincore