Guild Wars 2

Why is Orr so underpopulated these days? Is every player seriously in it for the karma and gold? What happened to just playing for fun?

It isn’t fun. It is less fun to get very little/nothing for it.

There are players who will do events for fun. However, this is a subset of all players. I once did temples and other Orr events for fun. However, the fun has been for the most part removed.

Scaling is such that events can be completed with very small numbers of players or with very large groups — if player numbers are in between the two extremes, you’re likely looking at event failure and maybe a repair bill. Doing some of these events solo or in small groups takes skill. Gathering a large group takes organization — just doing a map call-out may not work. This means a guild effort and/or a trip to LA plus people willing to come if you do an LA call-out.

Too many chains requiring “Protect the NPC” or fail when NPC’s stand in the plethora of Risen AoE’s. Ditto on protecting Jones or the Aetheric thingamabob. The game provides little recourse for drawing aggro away from the NPC targets. Healing them requires plenty of water fields that do a burst heal, since multiple fields that apply regen only increase the regen time, not the strength of the healing. Thus, the only alternative to success is a combination of healing plus massive DPS. For the DPS, see large groups above.

PvE culling on mobs that can take half or more of your health with one attack. For some strange reason, some people seem not to enjoy this.

Event timers on the non-meta events have been increased, at this point nearly across the board. This was done (taking the charitable view) to entice players to move around the map more rather than camping a few events. The problem is that most of the events you see running around the Orr maps are group events, so the only things to do in Orr are explore (assuming you haven’t already), harvest nodes or do the occasional event that can be soloed/small grouped.

Now, maybe the upcoming reward revamp, intended in part to give players incentives to kill Champions, will bring players back to Orr. We’ll have to wait and see. For now, though, the wasteland is truly a wasteland.

Orr is not fun in any way, shape, or form.

Lane.3410:

Orr is not fun in any way, shape, or form.

I just completed the south meta event in the SoD and I had a blast. :P

Lane.3410:

Orr is not fun in any way, shape, or form.

I disagree with this completely.

IndigoSundown.5419:

There are players who will do events for fun. However, this is a subset of all players. I once did temples and other Orr events for fun. However, the fun has been for the most part removed.

Scaling is such that events can be completed with very small numbers of players or with very large groups — if player numbers are in between the two extremes, you’re likely looking at event failure and maybe a repair bill. Doing some of these events solo or in small groups takes skill. Gathering a large group takes organization — just doing a map call-out may not work. This means a guild effort and/or a trip to LA plus people willing to come if you do an LA call-out.

Too many chains requiring “Protect the NPC” or fail when NPC’s stand in the plethora of Risen AoE’s. Ditto on protecting Jones or the Aetheric thingamabob. The game provides little recourse for drawing aggro away from the NPC targets. Healing them requires plenty of water fields that do a burst heal, since multiple fields that apply regen only increase the regen time, not the strength of the healing. Thus, the only alternative to success is a combination of healing plus massive DPS. For the DPS, see large groups above.

PvE culling on mobs that can take half or more of your health with one attack. For some strange reason, some people seem not to enjoy this.

Event timers on the non-meta events have been increased, at this point nearly across the board. This was done (taking the charitable view) to entice players to move around the map more rather than camping a few events. The problem is that most of the events you see running around the Orr maps are group events, so the only things to do in Orr are explore (assuming you haven’t already), harvest nodes or do the occasional event that can be soloed/small grouped.

Now, maybe the upcoming reward revamp, intended in part to give players incentives to kill Champions, will bring players back to Orr. We’ll have to wait and see. For now, though, the wasteland is truly a wasteland.

Best i can tell, NPC health do not scale with the event while mob DPS do. I wonder how many times i witnessed the “defend Steampipe” event get one shot to failure by a scaled karka, while it could survive for some time if the event never scaled.

Orr is just meh, nothing rly interesting there except gathering runs which ppl do not for fun but cuz of need.

If Anet gave some attention to Orr instead of wasting time on that karka island, things would be much better.

All that “living story” and “evolving world” but nothing rly evolved except one dead island they made…

They should start revamping Orr since we defeated the dragon, there is no1 to rise dead bodies anymore, thats what means world evolving.

Velimirius.7018:

Orr is just meh, nothing rly interesting there except gathering runs which ppl do not for fun but cuz of need.

If Anet gave some attention to Orr instead of wasting time on that karka island, things would be much better.

All that “living story” and “evolving world” but nothing rly evolved except one dead island they made…

They should start revamping Orr since we defeated the dragon, there is no1 to rise dead bodies anymore, thats what means world evolving.

The existing zones kinda have to stay since they represent orr before zhaitans defeat and are very integrated into the story of the original GW release. The way to represent time passing on orr is probably to make new, post zhaitan zones. I guess Southsun was an attempt to sort of do this, even if it isnt technically orr it represents some sort of opening up of the world as a result of Zhaitans defeat. Shame they dont really see to know how to make it work though.

ShawnBuzu.8045:

Why is Orr so underpopulated these days? Is every player seriously in it for the karma and gold? What happened to just playing for fun?

If people are looking for fun, they’re sure as hell not going to find it in Orr.

ShawnBuzu.8045:

Why is Orr so underpopulated these days? Is every player seriously in it for the karma and gold? What happened to just playing for fun?

How can you do the same content over and over again just for fun? I can do it a few times just for the experience and I can do dungeons and raids a lot of times so long as I’m doing it with my guild/friends, cause the fun there is in the interaction. But anything else has got to have a carrot, whether its an achievement or reward.

Oh and I WvW all the time because the combat is dynamic.

I like the orr events myself. There’s something that is just awesome about plowing through hundreds of nameless undead all at once.

Of course, with DR I get nothing but junk skulls half-way through any event chain, with ever greater difficulty it becomes harder to complete the events, with ever decreasing rewards I don’t get nearly as much bang for my buck, and with fewer players it is harder to get people together to do things.

I can understand any one of those things I listed if done by themselves. They work as a solution to “people just grind events in orr all day”:

A)Put in a diminishing return so people will go do something else (least popular option, since it just arbitrarily limits playstyle)
B)Make the events give less rewards because they are easy
C)Make the events much harder so they’re worth the reward.
D)Make the events less frequent so people go do other things.

But all at once? It just kills the zone needlessly.

i went there last night and tried to take on the Champ Risen Abom on my own. no one else was around lol. XDD

i think ANet is still learning, but in the past (like with the Orr “nerf”) they’ve always went too exterme. i.e. no middle ground. so now, most players see Orr as too much effort/time/risk for too little reward.

The champ abomination outside of Caer Shadowfain is easy as long as people dodge it and don’t let it build up stacks which make it move faster.

ShawnBuzu.8045:

Why is Orr so underpopulated these days? Is every player seriously in it for the karma and gold? What happened to just playing for fun?

If you want fun, go do LA/WvW and have a blast with map chat instead. As it stands, the only reason people were willing to put up with Orr was the rewards, which draws people and consequently you do things together. With virtually no reward, Orr was deserted by those people you don’t like, which means you no longer can do things together, and that means Orr is no longer fun.

To be perfectly honest, Orr is full of annoying distractions (5 seconds immo, persistent enemies, lots of swimming, temple statues). The only “fun” part, if there ever was one, was perhaps defending Penitent and Shelter together. Then they killed it.

I took my first high-level character to Orr for the first time recently, so I don’t know what it used to be like, but what I can say is that I felt rather “lost” as an unguilded solo roamer. There are no karma hearts and most events seem to be intended for groups, so it’s even harder to make money there than it is elsewhere. Parts of Orr are also quite annoying to get around in.

Some of the events are fun, but overall there’s just too much of the same. Kill hordes of zombies. Kill even more zombies. Kill some zombies, will you. Guess what — kill more zombies! You want some variety? Okay, go kill these zombie chickens. And when escort NPCs die in AoE or an event fails because the NPCs “ran out of morale” despite there being plenty of people to protect them (which happened the two times I joined the Balthazar chain), it’s just frustrating.

I think I can see how Orr is “supposed” to work, that it’s meant to be this epic battlefield that would maybe feel “cheapened” if most everything was soloable, and that’s supposed to give you a sense of progression from defending Fort Trinity to storming the gates of Arah. It’s a good idea on paper — but three entire zones, all solo-unfriendly and filled with the same enemies, is a bit too much. I wish they’d allow for better scaling when there are fewer people around, add some karma hearts, and increase the rewards from later steps of quest chains. It’d also be good to have a better “base” somewhere in Orr for access to banking and crafting — I was seriously baffled to see that Fort Trinity, at least, does not have that.

Orr has a fundamental design flaw.

Essentially no matter what you do or where you go you are always being attacked and the monsters are relatively difficult to bypass since they have a lot of immobilize and pull types making simply running past them a nuisance. This is something some game designers have noticed and it’s a psychological thing, if you are constantly fighting without end you will get tired of it a lot more quickly than if you have breaks between fights where you just need to move.

If you doubt it try playing Left 4 Dead (L4D) with the dev commentary running. The game is designed so that when players are struggling less common infected will spawn or can even get to the point where you will get a section with no common infected at all and will spawn extra pipe bombs to clear areas of common infected with no effort. This is all to keep the players from feeling overwhelmed and so that they don’t tire of playing. Orr flies right in the face of this. It’s not that the enemies are difficult to beat or are even a serious threat to kill you (see common infected in L4D for example), it’s the fact that unless you are in a big ball like in WvW your progress will be constantly slowed down by fresh attackers, it’s totally exhausting.

Add to that the fact that there are many people like myself who no longer need karma for anything other than Orrian Jewelry Boxes and there is little motivation to have all your energy drained to the never ending sea of undead that covers virtually all of Orr. Even with all the altars uncontested it’s only marginally better.

I know this was supposed to feel like an epic battleground but even the most epic battles end eventually, Orr never does, if you are clearing temples you have to continuously revisit them to keep them clear and all without Fort Trinity having services like bank/TP/crafting.

That’s an interesting point about players being “drained” by neverending attacks, and for myself I can definitely confirm it. It is the heart of Zhaitan’s territory, nothing is safe, and so on and so forth — but I do think it’s just a bit too much.

And that is the basic difference between annoying (draining) and challenging.

Valleria Darkmoon.4506:

Essentially no matter what you do or where you go you are always being attacked and the monsters are relatively difficult to bypass since they have a lot of immobilize and pull types making simply running past them a nuisance. This is something some game designers have noticed and it’s a psychological thing, if you are constantly fighting without end you will get tired of it a lot more quickly than if you have breaks between fights where you just need to move.

Orr also lacks the renown hearts that give (me, at least) a reason to stick around in one part of a zone for longer than the absolute, bare minimum it takes to tag POIs, Skill Points and Vistas for map completion (which in most cases is not long) – and which, in other zones, are often half the reason for getting into combat. Coupled with the Orr design ethos of, “It’s going to be tough, and if you don’t keep moving something else will come along and join in”, I found the game positively pushing me to avoid combat wherever I could and to run past everything as fast as possible. Vista done? Time to move on. Mobs aggro’d? Keep running until they lose interest or you reach safety. Dynamic events were mostly only of interest when they were where I needed to be; it wasn’t why I was there (nor, most times I can envisage finding the need to go back, will it be then, either). Did I take in the (doubtless-carefully-designed) story nuances? Did I heck. Find the path of least resistance, get in, get out, move on. Don’t fight anything that you can bypass – it’s going to be hard going and the reward simply won’t be worth the candle. I’m sure there were carefully-thought-out design decisions behind why Orr is the way it is; unfortunately, they add up to a result that, for me (and for many other people, it seems), doesn’t really work to hook me in and make me stick around.

Yes, I’ve been avoiding combat as much as possible, too. Which kind of defeats the purpose since we’re supposed to be taking the war to Zhaitan — but the constant stream of corpses, most of whom are ranged to boot, just isn’t fun to fight.

Orr was still fun and populated up until they completely killed the events. People like stayed after they put in DR and DS(Really needed). Before DR I would get about heavy 150+ heavy moldy bags during my 1-2 hour farm.

After DR was implemented I once farmed Orr during one of my days off of work and got a total of 195 heavy moldy bags after about 6 hrs+(sad I know)…huge difference but I still stayed because the events were fun.

I still go to Orr sometimes because I like the landscape (one of the few apparently) but when NOTHING is happening why stay?

And I will not be one of the little sheep who play only where Anet wants them to play. I might be going to far…but Anet is being very Tyrannical with their game, they kill certain areas/maps simply to make the current/new areas more attractive regardless if those killed areas/maps are very much like by the players.

Orr was fun for about 1 month, and that was 9 months ago… before DR, before the event nerfs

Vizier.3164:

Orr was fun for about 1 month, and that was 9 months ago… before DR, before the event nerfs

I just want the non-stop action that used to be Orr…more than willing to deal with DR.

ShawnBuzu.8045:

Why is Orr so underpopulated these days? Is every player seriously in it for the karma and gold? What happened to just playing for fun?

Orr was never overplayed because it was any more (or less) fun than the rest of GW2, but rather because (before the, very welcome, adjustment to rewards for downlevelled areas) it was the only place you could get level-appropriate rewards.

colesy.8490:

The champ abomination outside of Caer Shadowfain is easy as long as people dodge it and don’t let it build up stacks which make it move faster.

I think most of the time the problem is that people think they’ve dodged it, or that they’re outside its range, but it still hits them. The attack covers a vastly greater area than the visuals for it suggest it should.

A bit of trivia: there’s actually (I haven’t checked in a while, but I doubt they’ve fixed it) a similar monster by the skill challenge in western Malchor’s Leap (where you fight a Quaggan) which has all the same skills and behaviour as the Champion Risen Abomination, and actually used to look just like it as well, but is called a corrupted Vigil something. It now has the look of a much smaller creature, and the exact same reach as the abomination, which was already bigger than it appeared on the latter. If you haven’t seen it since it looked like an abomination you should go kick it one day and kite around long enough to see it throw that club, just for amusement. Don’t ask anyone where it got that, though.