Guild Wars 2

Right now there are certain events that can not be lost. In Kessex Hills the Centaurs are never going to repair the bridge, in Norn land the Sons of Sanvir will never take any territory. Thing is, the losing events have some cool things that happen that most players will never see, like when Centaurs siege the human town. I think it would be a bit more interesting if events scale up in difficulty as they are beaten. To keep events (and event chains) from seesawing in difficulty maybe not have it based only on the last event only, it could be a percentage of wins and losses in a certain amount of time, and maybe even include surrounding events in the difficulty scaling.

Your thoughts?

I support this idea, events are WAY too easy right now, I almost never see the failure part of event chains because well, we never lose. I think DEs should scale harder so that the difficulty is always similar to a 1vs1 fight against a veteran (not that hard but enough to weed out victories if every single player plays badly)

i just made a topic suggesting the same thing.I fully support the idea of increasing difficulty..Right now many events are a joke and dont do the game justice

Agreed. I think the main reason events are so easy is because too many people show up. Here’s a solution I propose:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/The-broadcasting-of-events-should-be-removed/first#post57155

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

But then what do you do when you have finished the higher lvl content? Go back to the lower lvl again?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

The point is not that it feels easy for us .The point is that since events never fail you have the same stage repeating over and over again which is more boring than a normal quests
The centaurs in kessex hills have been trying to make that bridge for hours and never managed to even touch it yet.Seriously thats a major flaw of the system ..People right now are everywhere and they are not only trivialising everything but they also make whole chains of events worthless since they never come up.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

It works for a single person but I think what the OP wants here is events that challenge the whole community so we get to see the harsh consequences of a failure. Anyway higher level events are maybe harder for you, but the players doing it with you who are appropriately leveled will make sure you won’t fail anyway.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

a vaild point, however its not really a solution. The issue is that failure events are never going to happen. Centaurs will never get back their camps in harathi hinterlands, and so on.

Events where things like centaurs attack to retake their lands, need to get harder and harder with each sucessful defense until eventually they win and the event chain moves the other way, Right now the events seam locked in ultimate sucess mode.

Failure needs to not only be possible, it needs to be probable if people dont play well and work together.

kostbabis.8791:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

The point is not that it feels easy for us .The point is that since events never fail you have the same stage repeating over and over again which is more boring than a normal quests
The centaurs in kessex hills have been trying to make that bridge for hours and never managed to even touch it yet.Seriously thats a major flaw of the system ..People right now are everywhere and they are not only trivialising everything but they also make whole chains of events worthless since they never come up.

^^^This^^^
It’s not that the content is too easy, it’s that some events NEVER move to the next stage (if there even is one). The suggestion was to have the content increase in difficulty with each time the “bad guys” are beaten, giving them a chance to actually “win one” :-)

Cameirus.8407:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

a vaild point, however its not really a solution. The issue is that failure events are never going to happen. Centaurs will never get back their camps in harathi hinterlands, and so on.

Events where things like centaurs attack to retake their lands, need to get harder and harder with each sucessful defense until eventually they win and the event chain moves the other way, Right now the events seam locked in ultimate sucess mode.

Failure needs to not only be possible, it needs to be probable if people dont play well and work together.

Heck, I’d even be for the following events to keep the difficulty of the previous one, so going back on the winning route is a challenge.

I have lost a event before and few times due there was not enough players but there one even with a lot of players still did lose pretty cool though when event change back to try take the area back again.

But i kinda think so too maybe be easy one moment then harder next time. Like they went retreat back to think of other way to get it. :P

I totally agree with these points posted here, Events need to scale more to the amount of players in an area, and each time an event is won, the event should become harder, just to give the enemies a chance, so we can actually see the failure side of Dynamic Events.

I am on the fence on leaving pve for good..or at least until they either modify this or population drops enough for the events to actually fail

Maybe if the events stay in the “winning” state for a long time the difficulty keeps ramping up until the players finally lose it. So if you’ve pushed the centaurs all the way back and you’re just defending all the territory now, they will keep attacking on a timer and each time they are defeated it will increase the difficulty.

I think the Devs should certainly look into a method to periodically adjust the difficulty of events so that at the least the possibility of them failing exists. I would not want this increased difficulty to be present ALL the time and it’s certainly possible this already exists.

Or maybe if an event succeeds 10 times in a row, the next event is made very difficult by the introduction of a boss or some increasing number of sub-boss spawns during waves of the event?

All of my suggestions border on the game “cheating” to insure that the event fails occasionally, so that is a slippery slope to start down (and I’m sure the Devs realize that).

Events should be harder.

The Shatterer was a complete push over and most events end up turning into brainless zergfests.

Swap the difficulty of Stories and Events I say.

AdamLiborio.8436:

Maybe if the events stay in the “winning” state for a long time the difficulty keeps ramping up until the players finally lose it. So if you’ve pushed the centaurs all the way back and you’re just defending all the territory now, they will keep attacking on a timer and each time they are defeated it will increase the difficulty.

I love this idea.

I actually would like ANet to look at fixing event zerging. The main issue is that I’ve gotten bronze on several events simply because there are SSSOOOOOO many people zerging the event that I can’t do enough damage fast enough for it to count.

Its so bad in some places (Queensdale Cave Troll) that I just pass on by if I see more than 10 people at an event. I’m pretty sure that is not the intended affect. Making the event “harder” is not the only solution. More events is what needs to happen. There are vast sections of land that have nothing but grinding mobs. Add more events.

Also, lets take the Kessex Hills bridge as an example. What is several centaur warlords were to show up if the player numbers were really large? What about another line of catapults hammering the players defending the bridge?

Anyway, I agree that most events in zones 1-25 will never get to the failed stages.

The thing is that we cant expect that the population will drop in the starting zones (<30)
The game is new and there will be enough amount of people for events to never fail for months..

I agree with the OP. I think a pretty simple solution would be if every time an event repeated where you had to defend something, the difficulty (HP+damage) of the monsters would increase slightly until eventually the monsters are able to achieve their goal. That or anything to give monsters an edge in achieving their goals with large meta event chains.

It would be incredibly refreshing to see the losing side of things though, and I would love to see increased difficulty for events in the future.

kostbabis.8791:

The thing is that we cant expect that the population will drop in the starting zones (<30)
The game is new and there will be enough amount of people for events to never fail for months..

I think this problem is only going to get worse over time, not better. The down-scaling that occurs when a high level player enters a low level area is not severe enough stat-wise. Despite the down-scaling mechanic, there is still a ridiculous difference in power between a level 80 player fighting a level 5 event mob and a level 5 player fighting that same mob.

That alone is really a problem because it messes with a few philosophies GW2 is supposed to be built on. We are, for example, supposed to be excited when more players arrive on the scene rather than frustrated. But when really high level characters (who are down-scaled) join a fight they turn a potentially challenging encounter into a joyless cakewalk. That’s not fun. That makes me wish they weren’t there.

We’re also supposed to feel like the entire world is potentially end-game content. That’s difficult to sell when you return to lower level zones on a high level character and are two-shotting every mob (despite being scaled down).

i support this post on increasing difficulty, events need to be more challenging.

I think difficulty should scale slighty to how many people are in the area doing that dynamic event. Cause I find during off-peak hours, it’s quite hard to complete some of the events with only just one or two people and I believe people are forgetting about that in this topic.

Not all events are a faceroll, but there a many that should be made harder. The giant encounters are nastyyyyy and fun because those guys hit like tanks. But events like the Shatterer look visually great but are just cakewalks because you can stay well away from him and either range/AOE him down.

Short answer; Yes.

Yes, events need to scale at least a tad better otherwise the zerg groups will take over everything. Not that it’s a bad thing but eventually it grows tiring when it’s so easy. (But I guess it might fix itself over a course of time since the game is still new.)

I mean there are some events where there is a zerg group and there are almost no enemies at all and you mostly just stand around and wait for the next event. An example would be the event in Wayfarer Foothills at Svanir’s Dome.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

That’s not really the issue here. Whilst part of it is desiring a personal challenge, the other part of it, and the more significant part, is missing out on the consequences of events failing because regardless of level, most events can be easily done by people. I’ve gotten to L55, without really dodging that much, instead just kiting and using CC like in any other MMO, even if the content is a few levels higher.

Clearly, regardless of wanting to keep events accessible, the open world events are too easy, as they demand little in terms of mobility and tactics, causing the world to be in a fairly constant state of “success” even though I’m on a medium server – I can only assume this problem is worse on a high/full population server. A comprehensive rebalancing of events is in order.

When events get more “difficult,” it seems that the event simply adds more to kill. This can be taken care of with a few good lures and a bunch of AOE slams. I think the actual AI of the enemies should increase, in the way that Veteran enemies are stronger and smarter. Just a thought.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

Because events are such kind of no-brainers, I even played in lvl 47 events with being lvl 38 myself without any real problems. And I’m certainly not a hard-core gamer, there just have been anothe players around, so that I actually had to be lucky to get the attention and any damage of those event mobs/bosses!

Event scaling is a mess when there are a lot of players around.

I was part of the fight against the Shatterer for 1 time and I was shocked… Apart from the extreme lag, I just stood at his food the hole 10-15 minutes with 20-30 other melee players hitting his foot, not moving at all, no dodging, nothing then spamming my 1 and 2 skill of the warrior greatsword… I took exactly 0 damage in that hole fight! It was ridiculous!

In general, events with too many players feel like that… I’m not bored yet, but they aren’t easy, they are no-brainers and won’t be fun for long with that difficulty level!

Fix it, please!

I agree with the OP, but I don’t think this hits the core of the problem.
The major problem with the event chains are the choke points.
Instead of increasing difficulty, event chains should start circumventing choke points, when they get completed by the players all the time.
Centaurs keep on repairing the bridge over and over without any success?
Have them attack another location, they normally wouldn’t at this stage of the chain!

Well yes and no,

I think DE difficulty is ok with a small number of players. Anything up to 4 seems to be ok.

But once you reach a critical number it turns almost every DE into a massive zerg-fest where monsters die within seconds of spawning and everyone only triggers a handful of abilities.

But we’re still in a super-busy phase during GW2s life-cycle and I expect things to settle down a little in a few weeks time.

I think events need to scale better. There seems to be a hard cap for scaling of events where they won’t get any harder with the addition of players. Many events in Orr have turned into mobs dieing so fast you aren’t able to DPS them enough to qualify for loot drops or experience before the rest of the zerg kills them. They literally die to everyone’s AoE faster than you can use most skills.

I saw the feedback about the centaurs more than once during the BWEs. I think at the time we were expecting the situation to change the further you progressed. Even in Orr, once you have so many players in an area it becomes impossible to lose, yet the rest of the map becomes starved of players.

One of my problems with events is they are adequately (and often too) difficult for people on their own or in pairs, but once a critical mass builds up, and that happens to be the experience all over the game atm, they are outright broken. And I’m on Ehmry Bay, one of the lower populated servers.

i always thought the more players doing the event, the more difficult becomes, but i think it only applies to a dragon lets say, so yeah those centaurs wont win, ever.

sCor.8069:

I agree with the OP, but I don’t think this hits the core of the problem.
The major problem with the event chains are the choke points.
Instead of increasing difficulty, event chains should start circumventing choke points, when they get completed by the players all the time.
Centaurs keep on repairing the bridge over and over without any success?
Have them attack another location, they normally wouldn’t at this stage of the chain!

I was actually hoping high level PvE zones would take gameplay elements from WvW where the monsters are actively fighting against the players instead of wandering about and spawning in with events. That’s another thread though. I do like the idea of a different objective. Only an insane person would keep trying to the same thing expecting to get a different result, maybe those Centaurs should find a shallow place in the river to cross.

There are a lot of ways to scale the difficulty of an event, but in most events they scale by adding more of the same monsters. They don’t add new objectives, new monsters don’t appear, and monsters don’t use new tactics. In my opinion ,events for a single person should be fairly easy unless there is a gameplay reason to make them difficult, like the difficulty scaling we’ve been discussing or because there is a story reason that the event is difficult. I don’t think anybody would expect to beat a “stop the invading hordes” event all on their own.

Anyways, back to increasing difficulty. As difficulty scales up monsters should start to use new tactics.

Imagine this, a horde of monsters are heading your way, your group readies theirselves as the horde approches, it will be a tense fight, then everybody fires off their AOEs and kills everything within seconds, not counting any veterans that may have made their way in, they will take about 10 seconds to take down.

Now imagine this, the same horde of monsters are coming, but you see some enemies you’ve not seen before, obviously a programming mistake since we can only have one type of monster in an event, maybe two if we wanted ranged and melee. It will be a tense fight, then everybody fires off their AOEs and suddenly the new monster puts up a reflective wall that bounces the ranged attacks straight back at the caster (only the caster, I don’t want griefers killing me with this) and stuns any melee attackers.

The wall goes down and the melee attackers get back up, we’re in hand to hand combat, the monsters use some more tactics that keep players from being able to just AOE spam, but sometimes the players can get an AOE attack in. As you’re fighting, off in the distance you see a group of monsters running your way, obviously not part of this event because monsters can only attack in one group at a time. Down to one monster, this will be easy! You close in for the kill, only for that group of monsters to come through with their own AOE spam from behind.

This is just an example, no need to make it that annoying, but it’s a bit better than harder means more monsters that can be easily dispatched. I’m not saying you can’t make an event filled with monsters, those guys in LOTR could kill the heck out of Orcs.

Keep it random though so people can’t say, “we have 10 people so the anti-AOE monster group is next then the group that attempts to draw us into an ambush spawns.” Create different groups of monsters that could spawn in the event, apply tactics that the groups are allowed to use, and let the RNG decide which ones can go in. I know this would be fairly difficult, both for the AI and to make sure it’s actually fun, so it would be a long way off to get anything like that.

Just don’t go nuts like Diablo 3 with the random elites that can kill you in seconds after they stunlock you.

MokahTGS.7850:

I actually would like ANet to look at fixing event zerging. The main issue is that I’ve gotten bronze on several events simply because there are SSSOOOOOO many people zerging the event that I can’t do enough damage fast enough for it to count.

Its so bad in some places (Queensdale Cave Troll) that I just pass on by if I see more than 10 people at an event. I’m pretty sure that is not the intended affect. Making the event “harder” is not the only solution. More events is what needs to happen. There are vast sections of land that have nothing but grinding mobs. Add more events.

Also, lets take the Kessex Hills bridge as an example. What is several centaur warlords were to show up if the player numbers were really large? What about another line of catapults hammering the players defending the bridge?

Anyway, I agree that most events in zones 1-25 will never get to the failed stages.

i haven’t done kessex hills bridge. mainly because there’s no room on it thanks to guild camping.

i think it should.

Not all event, just the botting ones.

so all the bots can die

I think scaling should be seriously looked it, most Dynamic Events I’ve come across are impossible to fail when there are more than 5 players around. Boss fights in particular only get more boring as the number of players increases. If you could find it in your hearts to give bosses some insane AoE abilities that they only use when there’s a zerg attacking them, that would be great. Centaurs also have a very cool charge attack that knocks everyone down, that would also be good vs a player zerg Gives everyone a reason to dodge and move.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

im doing the same, and it’s great for hearts. but when it comes to DE’s…theyre simply too trivial, albeit really cool mostly.

Y u mad its vydia.6324:

I think scaling should be seriously looked it, most Dynamic Events I’ve come across are impossible to fail when there are more than 5 players around. Boss fights in particular only get more boring as the number of players increases. If you could find it in your hearts to give bosses some insane AoE abilities that they only use when there’s a zerg attacking them, that would be great. Centaurs also have a very cool charge attack that knocks everyone down, that would also be good vs a player zerg Gives everyone a reason to dodge and move.

this exactly. fully agreed.

I agree with the OP on this as up till now I’ve yet to fail any event.

The longer the win streak of event is the harder it should get. To the point where wining event is no longer possible. After loosing, difficulty should start to scale down to the point when event reaches ultimate failure state. At this point event back to normal difficulty level.

This thread seems to have two different arguments going on, and it’s going to massively detract from getting the OP’s point across! The thread is about DEs increasing in difficulty in proportion to their success/fail rate because as things are we don’t get to see half the events in the game since we follow the same chain of success, success, success, and many DE series are actually now stuck showing only one event repeatedly, because in order to show any others that one would need to be failed.

I definitely agree with this, we shouldn’t be able to win every time, so the best idea I’ve seen is to have DE chains keep some sort of record of the success:failure ratio and vary the difficulty based on that, to ensure that when an event has been won 7 or 8 times out of 10 it gets more likely to fail, and vice versa. Of course, to me that sounds like a lot of programming, so maybe a simpler solution is to incrementally increase the health/damage/number/skills of enemies after each win, and decrease them after each loss?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Clearly this doesn’t apply to level-capped players, but have you considered targeting content at a higher level than your character? I prefer difficult content, so personally I tend to look for content that’s 2 levels higher than my own.

But what if I want to see the ‘fail’ version of THOSE events? I like the ideia of the event getting increased difficulty as they succeed. After all, you guys spent so much time making these events, it would be a regreat not being able to see everything that’s possible =D

Indeed, i would really like to see a change in the way DEs work. Not having seen everything this game has to offer because everything is in a eternal win loop is kinda sad.
An alternative to increasing the number of enemies or damage would be to add some kind of ‘warlords/heroes’. Meaning as difficulty increases through very though mobs the reward could get up slightly too by beeing able to get better loot out of these ‘warlords/heroes’.

There are many cool solutions to this problem (cause its indeed a problem)
But imo the easiest to implement is increasing difficulty after each success..So does anyone from Anet has something to say about this ? :P

I know anet is reading… would love a response!

I think the soultion of ramping up difficulty for each successful win of the same event is a really good one, but then you’ve got the problem of in stead of one event repeating, now you’ve got two.

You lose the defense of A, and now you’re on the leadup. Then you complete the leadup one time and back to farming A.

I think a better option would be a sort of “wipe event” on chains if its been sitting in ultimate win for too long. For instance, seraph has totally held centaur lands for two hours… the centaurs finally have enough an simultaneously assault everything with massive rock dogs, creating a large scale no-win “survival” event that still rewards participation as a win. Something like “Hold out against the centaur uprising” that tags all involved waypoints as contested. Now you’re playing for a scaling reward based upon how long players can keep a fighting force active until it is ultimately removed.

Now you have an entire metasystem in “full lose” mode and the ecosystem can return back to normal events, minus the players that decided to go to a different zone to camp winning chains for the easy way out.

This would also shake up orr and get it away from the “camp three defenses for infinity” and back to the intent of the zone, which is the packets of players would need to do DE chains up to their objective zone (arah door, god shrine, whatever) and complete the task there, then hold it until it becomes unsustainable.

Heck, you could even put a timer on the ME itself notifying players that this is going to happen. “Zhaitan is enraged. Counterattack begins in 10:00” or somesuch, basically letting people know that they have a small amount of time to accomplish whatever they came to that point to accomplish.

In my mind every trip to Arah should really require players to start at straits and fight their way in, and there shouldn’t really be any “safe” waypoints in Orr proper in the first place.

I think they should absolutely increase the difficulty on a lot of the events..

Tequatl The Sunless can even be soloed, that’s how easy he is.
A group event with an giant dragon, is way easier than the Centaur Boss in Harathi.
Thing is that all the smaller mobs spawn quite a bit away from Tequatl and will never reach the players close to him – The bigger mobs which explodes and leaves a poisnous cloud, is so easy to avoid, you can run to them then dodge away from them to make them explode at places you want them to explode while shooting at his feet.
The spikes that he throws from his wings, are also really easy to avoid – where as having the bonewall up at all times actually helps you not to run to far away from him when he fears you :/

The Difficulty on Claw of Jormag should probably be increased just a little bit, though this one is more on par with what I think seems more difficult, where as the shatterer can’t be soloed due to his self healing, as well as incasing players in crystals, he’s extremely easy as well.

PopeUrban.2578:

I think the soultion of ramping up difficulty for each successful win of the same event is a really good one, but then you’ve got the problem of in stead of one event repeating, now you’ve got two.

You lose the defense of A, and now you’re on the leadup. Then you complete the leadup one time and back to farming A.

I think a better option would be a sort of “wipe event” on chains if its been sitting in ultimate win for too long. For instance, seraph has totally held centaur lands for two hours… the centaurs finally have enough an simultaneously assault everything with massive rock dogs, creating a large scale no-win “survival” event that still rewards participation as a win. Something like “Hold out against the centaur uprising” that tags all involved waypoints as contested. Now you’re playing for a scaling reward based upon how long players can keep a fighting force active until it is ultimately removed.

Now you have an entire metasystem in “full lose” mode and the ecosystem can return back to normal events, minus the players that decided to go to a different zone to camp winning chains for the easy way out.

This would also shake up orr and get it away from the “camp three defenses for infinity” and back to the intent of the zone, which is the packets of players would need to do DE chains up to their objective zone (arah door, god shrine, whatever) and complete the task there, then hold it until it becomes unsustainable.

Heck, you could even put a timer on the ME itself notifying players that this is going to happen. “Zhaitan is enraged. Counterattack begins in 10:00” or somesuch, basically letting people know that they have a small amount of time to accomplish whatever they came to that point to accomplish.

In my mind every trip to Arah should really require players to start at straits and fight their way in, and there shouldn’t really be any “safe” waypoints in Orr proper in the first place.

Why not just have the difficulty rampup branch out with the chain when its starting to go the other direction – such has going a step further down in difficulty everytime players lose an event, and then heads the other direction – that way the difficulty won’t be entirely removed and otherwise be pushed back from the players right away, or atleast not as easily.

PopeUrban.2578:

Why not just have the difficulty rampup branch out with the chain when its starting to go the other direction – such has going a step further down in difficulty everytime players lose an event, and then heads the other direction – that way the difficulty won’t be entirely removed and otherwise be pushed back from the players right away, or atleast not as easily.

So if I am understanding this it will go like this.

server reset DE set to Dif 1
win set to 2
win set to 3
….
win set to 12
lose set to 11
lose set to 10
win set to 11

and so on?