Guild Wars 2

I feel like one of the sole things that the game needs is better endgame, and what better place to put it than Orr?

I was talking about this in my guild the other day and we pretty much agreed that Arah could’ve been quite the epic raid (yes, i said raid).

There needs to be a reason for people to go to Orr other than some mats and the Temple armor. You can only cleanse temples for so long before it becomes stale.

This is just an opinion, not saying this needs to be implemented ASAP or anything to “save the game”, just giving my two cents.

Ok I Did It.2854:

I totally see what the Dev is saying that they are going to revamp ORR to make temple chains better rewards etc, and that’s great I guess if you are online in time for when a temple event is occurring, if you are at school/work to bad you miss out,

They have acknowledged the problem that ORR had but completely side stepped the situation about NO LOOT dropping at all, its all well and good to say that these changes are coming in the 2nd half of the year, but your players are leaving the game NOW because they cannot farm/get the mats/gear they want from your so called end game zones,

There is no point in trying to fix the rewards for events, if everywhere else is no drops at all, its beyond stupid,

I understand that you do not want it to go back to the old way but for the love of god, put the loot back into normal enemies in ORR,

Me and a guild mate cleared all of Straights, Mal’s Leap and Shore 2 days ago, ( on new toons ) we did events etc as we came across them, other than the zone completion rewards I got 1 RARE drop and 5 T6 mats out of the 3 zones, we also did frostgorge sound last night and I got 1 rare, 0 T6 mats, this was even with about 150% MF, its beyond a joke, where is my incentive to tell my friends etc to go pick this game up and play it.

Infact a few friends that I got into the game from the trails etc, have no left the game because they cannot farm the mats they need for there gear they want, friends take other friends with them, its not all about $$$ u know.

So much this. I had a friend/co-worker ask me about GW2 about 2 weeks ago (right after the introduction of the Karka Queen event). I told him not to bother at this point, and wait to see what happens in 6 months or so. There is just no good reason to invite friends to get the game at this point.

Orr isn’t even difficult. I’d like it to be much harder. Arena net has a hard time adjusting risk vs reward. Increasing difficulty without rewards will be a guaranteed failure.

I am confused no matter how much you say it Exotics are better than greens and blues. Blues and greens are useless stop dropping them. No one uses them and since you are making the game harder it is impossible to actually use blues and greens effectively. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot make weak gear worth more increase difficulty of game therefore demand of better gear. Do you guys even play your own video games? It’s comments like these that make me wonder if anet workers have ever even seen a green or even play the game lol.

I really enjoy Orr. I actually enjoyed it more when it used to be more difficult – before the nerf earlier this year. I liked how I had to always be careful about not getting too close to any groups of mobs and to always be wary of their CC skills.

Yes, I’ve been killed there many, many times while soloing but the danger was part of the fun and excitement. It’s just a pity that ANET had to cater to those who had no business being in the more challenging zones, and rather than suggesting that said players stick to other zones, ANET simply nerfed the place.

And what did that change or improve? Nothing. Orr is still a deserted place, devoid of players, and instead of being one of the only challenging zones, we have clumps of 1-2 mobs scattered around sparsely. So not only did ANET not make this place more appealing to the people who asked for the nerf, they made it unappealing to those of us who were happy with the difficulty.

I look forward to this place being challenging and interesting again.

The question is : Why should i do Orrian events for a pathetic 2 silvers + drops per events when i can do more money just running CoF path 1 over and over?

Also, spanking champions that give little to no rewards, like Plinx’s event chain Champion Abomination, that no one want to do anymore , those champ chickens that throw 30k damage eggs , champ spiders that spawns veteran hatclings that give no exp and drops , events that automatically fail once a champion Risen Wraith appears etc.

Orr was a okay before the nerf/ “optimizations”. It wasn’t optimal, but it had its own incentive to go there.
You could have made it more challenging and rewarding, but instead you choose the path to shoo away most of the players by removing rewards, the fun and increasing the “difficulty” (it’s not really challenging.. I know you wanted to improve the challenge feeling, but for a lot of people that didn’t work.. it feels more like we have now stupid and dull fights (it feels like the only point was to artificially lengthen the fights) against creatures that most of the time don’t even give loot).
You wanted to create more FUN, but we tell you the fun has decreased!!! (Yeah, there are players that might like the “new Orr”, but I think most people have been driven away from Orr by your changes.)

From my own opinion for example:
1. Grenth is not worth doing.
2. Melandru is fun (unless you are morphed into these little animals, but that is okay, too), BUT the spider hatchlings that do not give loot are nonsense! (Do these even count to event contribution? When you fight them – instead of the loot giving enemies on the right side – it might happen you receive a bronze medal…)
3. The nerfed penitent/ shelter/ etc…. well not only have you first nerfed the loot, no you now needed to completely kill the fun there.
etc.

In my very opinion ORR IS NOT FUN.

If you listen to your players, see that there exist players NOT liking what you did.

Ah well, another point is that you cannot really explore and enjoy Orr. Even if I really want to see what your game artists created and do a little sight seeing.. that’s not going to happen with your current (Orr) game design.

Navi.7142:

Ah well, another point is that you cannot really explore and enjoy Orr. Even if I really want to see what your game artists created and do a little sight seeing.. that’s not going to happen with your current (Orr) game design.

The moment you first set foot in Orr you’ve already seen all of Orr already. There is nothing worth seeing in Orr.

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are indeed!

We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks asking for more difficult places in the game that can be more rewarding to play in. Our intent with Orr (and Southsun) is to create areas that are more fun/difficult for groups to play through event chains, with events that scale better when larger groups of players show up than the rest of the game, rather than the old versions that fell apart when more than a group or so of players showed up.

Thus the continual updates this year to make the creatures in Orr have more varied skills, the swap over to the new event scaling system that creates veterans/champions as content scales up, and the updates to Southsun to have more playable content. The one thing that’s really missing is the rewards to help make playing in these locations more even exciting and rewarding than they are now.

We want champions to be more rewarding, so places like Orr/Southsun where events can scale up to create champions become one of the more fun and rewarding places in the game to play, since events there can be champion on demand generators to an extent. We’d also like to tie in additional unique rewards to the temple chains, to make those more worthwhile and differentiate them from the giant boss encounters (which we’ll also be upgrading to be more exciting) to give a reason to do each in a day. We’d also like to add more value and use to blue/green items, so things like killing vets feels more rewarding when those type of items drop when doing those events in Orr as well.

And of course, we’d like to remove culling from PvE as well so you can experience these events in all their glory when they do scale up.

We’ll go into specifics on all of this in an updated version of the Gw2 in 2013 blog post sometime in July focusing on our plan for the 2nd half of the year and how we plan to improve the core game experience. As a reminder, you can find the original detailing our high level plan here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

Thank you very much for replying. I really look forward to see what you bring to Orr later on down the road.

Well, Khisanth, you might be right, but I think there are some spots that deserve a closer look. I’ll never know for sure if they do not let me have some sight seeing. ^^ Each other map (southsun cove not completely, but better than Orr) does allow to be enjoyed and visited.. but maybe Orr is that ugly and bland designed that there is really nothing to see (what I do not believe!)…

I think it’s bad designing.. they just wanted to make Orr “hard”, but forget about a lot of other things. Well… ^^

Orr was supposed to be a land free of hearts but with events firing all over the place so you’d never run out of stuff to do.

In reality, there’s only a few events if any going on at any time, and thus nobody cares about 80% of the map.

The solution is to simply load up the whole map with stuff to do, so that you don’t feel left out if you dare wander off and shelter/pertinent starts and you feel you just wanted your time.

Lévis.5489:

The question is : Why should i do Orrian events for a pathetic 2 silvers + drops per events when i can do more money just running CoF path 1 over and over?

Also, spanking champions that give little to no rewards, like Plinx’s event chain Champion Abomination, that no one want to do anymore , those champ chickens that throw 30k damage eggs , champ spiders that spawns veteran hatclings that give no exp and drops , events that automatically fail once a champion Risen Wraith appears etc.

Yep, IMHO they actually hit something of a sweet spot in the Feb update I think, where they first introduced champions to the penitent/shelter events etc, and at the point the loot bug was fixed. At that point it was harder but not impossible and it was still rewarding.

They then kept adding to the difficulty but not through better mechanics but just through overwhelming increases in power and health pools and it got less rewarding cause they started adding more summoned mobs which don’t reward any loot. Plus they nerfed the timing of events.

Calae.1738:

Orr isn’t even difficult. I’d like it to be much harder. Arena net has a hard time adjusting risk vs reward. Increasing difficulty without rewards will be a guaranteed failure.

They can only make it so hard before the “Holy Trinity” is needed. Making it to difficult without the trinity will drive people away even if there are higher rewards. So a careful balance is needed.

Orr isn’t that difficult (DE’s), it’s true, but there is still a challenge (people who do not do them will disagree), especially when the champs/certain vets start to spawn, it is nice to see people actually being downed and/or killed. Champs could hit a little harder making players use more of their utilities to properly counter their certain mechanics.

Temples are a nice challenge as they are now. I see them fail more than they succeed right now.

Julie Yann.5379:

I loved Orr until they nerfed the kitten out of it. Now is deserted and since many of the events can’t be soloed there is no point in even visiting it.

LOL you really just said that…. It’s a level 80 area, of course you’re not supposed to be able to solo the events.

Inverted.7439:

Julie Yann.5379:

I loved Orr until they nerfed the kitten out of it. Now is deserted and since many of the events can’t be soloed there is no point in even visiting it.

LOL you really just said that…. It’s a level 80 area, of course you’re not supposed to be able to solo the events.

And therein lies the issue when the players desert the area. Anet has to either account for it or entice players back. It should be the main endgame hub IMHO.

Inverted.7439:

Julie Yann.5379:

I loved Orr until they nerfed the kitten out of it. Now is deserted and since many of the events can’t be soloed there is no point in even visiting it.

LOL you really just said that…. It’s a level 80 area, of course you’re not supposed to be able to solo the events.

I know they are not meant to be soloed but what do you do when go there and find out that you are alone? I’m all for group content but you need people to form a group and how do you form a group when you are the only 1 on the map?

I want an actual revitalization of Orr.

Zhaitan is defeated… or not, i never see the body…

Orr is cleansing……..

SHOW IT!

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are indeed!

We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks asking for more difficult places in the game that can be more rewarding to play in. Our intent with Orr (and Southsun) is to create areas that are more fun/difficult for groups to play through event chains, with events that scale better when larger groups of players show up than the rest of the game, rather than the old versions that fell apart when more than a group or so of players showed up.

Well one of the subcurrents within people asking for more difficult content is indeed the notion that group-play start to matter in the open world, at least for some of most high-end of zones. But realistically, I doubt it’d be easy PR to include something like that, not with the current mindset the audience has (and is being encouraged by some game design choices). The complaints about not being able to solo would be endless.
Next to improving Orr, Southsun and future areas it might be a worthy idea to look into your past for inspiration. I. e. an instanced “elite” area for groups (be it 5-man or more) like Fissure of Woe or UW. That could provide a much more custom-tailored experience for groups.

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are indeed!

We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks asking for more difficult places in the game that can be more rewarding to play in. Our intent with Orr (and Southsun) is to create areas that are more fun/difficult for groups to play through event chains, with events that scale better when larger groups of players show up than the rest of the game, rather than the old versions that fell apart when more than a group or so of players showed up.

Thus the continual updates this year to make the creatures in Orr have more varied skills, the swap over to the new event scaling system that creates veterans/champions as content scales up, and the updates to Southsun to have more playable content. The one thing that’s really missing is the rewards to help make playing in these locations more even exciting and rewarding than they are now.

We want champions to be more rewarding, so places like Orr/Southsun where events can scale up to create champions become one of the more fun and rewarding places in the game to play, since events there can be champion on demand generators to an extent. We’d also like to tie in additional unique rewards to the temple chains, to make those more worthwhile and differentiate them from the giant boss encounters (which we’ll also be upgrading to be more exciting) to give a reason to do each in a day. We’d also like to add more value and use to blue/green items, so things like killing vets feels more rewarding when those type of items drop when doing those events in Orr as well.

And of course, we’d like to remove culling from PvE as well so you can experience these events in all their glory when they do scale up.

We’ll go into specifics on all of this in an updated version of the Gw2 in 2013 blog post sometime in July focusing on our plan for the 2nd half of the year and how we plan to improve the core game experience. As a reminder, you can find the original detailing our high level plan here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

OMG! You have no idea how much you have renewed my faith… Thank you -SOOO- much Colin! I’m so happy to find out this bit of information… I know I have been in kind of a griping mood as I opened up on the forums, but to see this kind of information makes me -truly- a happy person. So much so, that I think you will begin to see a better side of me on these forums. Again, Thanks a Ton… Even if it isn’t NOW that this stuff is coming out, simply knowing that the End-Game areas are going to receive another look at them is enough for me. That coupled with the next quote, has made my day, if not my week or more…

Vayne.8563:

You don’t have to leave your guild to join another, unless that particular guild insists in it. I’m in five guilds, personally…one main guild and several guilds for specific reasons.

I had -NO- clue that you could join another guild… Thanks a -TON- for that information! Now I just need to figure out how to into these separate guilds, possibly form my own guild, and actually be opened up to an entirely different style of gameplays and people!

Oh Happy Day!
Oh Happy Day!
When Quaggan washed…
When Quaggan washed…
Quaggan washed the Skritts away!
OH HAPPY DAY!

I’m definitely excited for people to return to Orr, but I am honestly a bit tired of it thematically. Zhaitan is dead timeline-wise now, so I hope that eventually we will see Orr evolve from here on out…The idea of reverting to mass mob density and all that doesn’t really make much sense.

Orr was really annoying before, it’s still annoying but depending on where you are it can be to a lesser degree…But the annoying factor is what caused a lot of people to avoid it at all cost anyway.I don’t think that “switching back” solves anything.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

Just a note: when you make encounters more difficult to attract more players, remember that it causes lag. Lag makes it harder for people to engage in active combat. Ideally, the hardest content in the game would require everyone to be active in combat, rather than ‘afk 1-spamming’. To achieve this goal without making the encounter itself unplayable, you may have to end up spreading the content out so that not everyone is mashed into one little room, or limit the number of players at these events. At the moment, I enjoy the way the Orr events work, but I know that if people are zerging them and I get targeted by a monster, there is no way for me to survive, due to lag.

ColinJohanson.2394:

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

A major problem with your new event scaling is that champions turn into “one-hit-wonders” as you put it the more players are around, but the little visual indicators giving a clue for an incoming attack, if at all, can barely be seen because of the amount of players, additional mobs and effects around, which means you’ll likely get oneshot by a random attack you just couldn’t see coming.

ColinJohanson.2394:

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

That’s what dungeons and factions are for.
why should orr be so hard to plz the elitist when there not there anyway now.
The place is empty most of the time(on most servers),where are these so called players that want a challenge?

I tell you where on this forum complaining i want things harder but no intentions of playing there.
I agree with some ppl here put it back to the way it was.
if ppl or guild wants a good harder challenge go do the dungeons that’s what they are there for.Also they have guild challenges now as well.
It’s us solo/pug players that are suffering all the time with these stupid updates.

This is meant to be a casual game not an elitist game.
Even wow had it right,if you want a big challenge go do the dungeons or raid.
Solo players can just carry on doing what they like doing in pve environment.

Many ppl i know are thinking of moving over to rift and tbh i don’t blame them,as that’s f2p now at least there pve environment is a lot fairer to us solo players who don’t want to join guilds just want to enjoy the fun without the impossible champion one shots.

Don’t get me wrong i love this game,but even i feel maybe it’s time to move on for now unless things changes for the better.
btw grenth has not been done on the server i’m on for months now,that must tell you something,when it was always done,before that stupid patch.

Michael Fejervary.8576:

Something else the development team could work toward is allowing Orr to shift and change for those who have defeated Zhaitan.

This can be done in a similar fashion to how they implemented game changing code into GW1 with “Winds Of Change” where the afflicted are no longer in the zone and the zone is replaced with more of the non-afflicted mobs of that area.

This would allow the introduction of post-Zhaitan event chains to reflect having removed his corruption and working toward new things coming back and a rebuilding of Orr, etc.

Not only that, but then they could add an NPC (or other way) to allow you to change between pre and post-Zhaitan Orr.

In a way I almost expected that at some point it would maybe work like this instead of having a perpetual pre-Zhaitan.

Probably one of the better ideas I’ve seen on these forums. That’s a great idea. GW1 did that amazingly and I have no doubt that’d make Orr more exciting at least for a while. But then what if people want to farm nodes in the “old” Orr and farm events in the “old” version, or the like.

Great idea, probably a nightmare to get to work.

ArchonWing.9480:

Orr was supposed to be a land free of hearts but with events firing all over the place so you’d never run out of stuff to do.

In reality, there’s only a few events if any going on at any time, and thus nobody cares about 80% of the map.

The solution is to simply load up the whole map with stuff to do, so that you don’t feel left out if you dare wander off and shelter/pertinent starts and you feel you just wanted your time.

That’s another problem I have with this “endgame” in GW2. The hardest zones are not only void of players but also void of any activities. There’s nothing going on. I could stroll around the map for 30 minutes without finding a single event anywhere. That’s basically Anet telling me to get out.

weren’t they talking about adding some sort of scavenger hunt to give players another way to get precursors? They need to make it so the scavenger hunt has a lot of stuff in Orr…then you’ll see a lot of players there

and tweak the rewards there as well lol

Michael Fejervary.8576:

Something else the development team could work toward is allowing Orr to shift and change for those who have defeated Zhaitan.

This can be done in a similar fashion to how they implemented game changing code into GW1 with “Winds Of Change” where the afflicted are no longer in the zone and the zone is replaced with more of the non-afflicted mobs of that area.

This would allow the introduction of post-Zhaitan event chains to reflect having removed his corruption and working toward new things coming back and a rebuilding of Orr, etc.

Not only that, but then they could add an NPC (or other way) to allow you to change between pre and post-Zhaitan Orr.

In a way I almost expected that at some point it would maybe work like this instead of having a perpetual pre-Zhaitan.

I would like this too, but it would require splitting the player base in two: those who have and haven’t defeated Zhaitan. Which would make Orr even emptier.

Kilaelya.1420:

Every day at 5PM server time the NSP server does a temple run starting at Meddler’s if you want to come see in person the headache these guys are. The only way we get around them during Grenth is to let them despawn, but it takes several minutes to convince everyone to get the heck away from the wraith and stop attacking it.

Actually I think most of them DO play on NSP and that might be part of the issue with their Rose Tinted glasses. Yeah you might have a few people that don’t listen but I still see a much higher success ratio for those Temples playing on NSP than I see on other servers…

Another thing that might help… is giving us some other recipes for these darn Clovers. A bunch of us started making them just for the Mats instead… And as we know, the only real “throttling” ingredient we can’t buy off the TP for their creation is basically the Obsid shards themselves which are most directly linked to both these temples with the most gimmicky win mechanics (keeping extremely frail NPC’s who can’t be rezzed, ALIVE). So yeah…I hope Anet has a complete solution here that addresses all of these things at once b/c only addressing 1 at a time just sets the “Meta” back and leads to more gimmicking and people blaming eachother.

Colin, the problem with Orr is that you guys nerfed it to the ground on your early releases. Let me just share it chronologically on how I remembered it during the release:

1st Month: Awesome place, lots of players, helping each other with events (Zerg at Straits, and groups at Malchor’s, and pushing Arah at CS)

2nd Month: Players complain, the place is full of bot trains, players can’t even tag (Penitent and Shelt). But very viable drops of rare, Plinx is wildly popular due to drops (coins and rares) and starts every 5min or so. Broodmother, Balt Arena and Tar in between. This area almost has no bot due to Broodmother that can be pulled very far away from the spawn location. However, creeping issue about DR started to show, but still awesome.

3rd Month: A few bots remain, then the loot was nerfed down to the ground. Plinxx zerg is far and few, and FotM was introduced. Anet’s decision back then was that “griding those areas are not intended”. Would have been good, but Anet only replaced the grinding/farming with FotM. Events takes way longer to spawn, and lot of wait time happens. I mean, what gives?

4th Month: I personally abandoned Orr. The place I once call home. It was back then, if iirc, that Orr mobs has been nerfed too. Because a lot of players complain of how hard the place is, of how you can’t move an inch without being CCd by enemy (and I posted a video of how doable the place is, even soloing group events prior to nerfing the area). I ran with the other “zerg” to the new farming area: FotM till you drop.

I think whoever thought and designed the original Orr, was somehow removed from the “sustaining” team. The idea of Orr, as Colin described, is to be a harder content than usual, where players can be rewarded. It has achieved that goal back then, on the original release. But it was so nerfed down, either to combat bots, or to appease complaining players, to what it is now.

Orr is now a good activity place for guilds, to do when there’s nothing else do to (i.e World Bosses not spawning) but the meaning is lost. It was awesome to follow the lore back then, being part of the big group to push the fight to the temples. Back then, very few knows that each temples have “wide” impact to the whole Orr zones. That information was reserved to the most astute and persevering players. I remember I will run with a group to push the fight at Cursed Shore, starting at Caer. Of course, the whole chain will culminate with the retaking of Arah.

It was awesome, because along the way, you get a lot of coins, heavy moldy bags, other mats, and of course rares, rares, and more rares. You don’t even have to jump to world bossed to get your fix of rares.

And if players found Orr too hard as their “end game” zone, I will usually recommend Frostgorge Sound. It even has Claw (and no dragon in Orr maps, except for dungeon area).

Colin, you lost your track at Orr. Almost every event, your team will say “Orr is not included” or something similar. Every content, pulled players away from Orr.

This was my post 6months ago: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Anyone-else-miss-their-Orr-runs/first#post849030

TL;DR:
Love new contents that Lost Shore brings, but hate what it took away.
Please bring back the old Orr…

I want the Old Orr. If you can’t, then do what you are saying in your post. Make it hard but rewarding for those who persevere, for those who spend time to learn. You don’t have to make it hard for casual, just make it so that it is “rewarding” to do (rewards can be anything: from good drops, to decent money making, to making events fun, etc). Bring back in your team, whoever designed the old Orr map, and make sure that person gives his full feedback and insight in to what you’re going to implement. I loved Orr, but not anymore. If only you guys can bring back the old Orr…

TC Server. People back in Cursed Shore already.

Not sure about Malchor’s Leap and Straits of Devastation though.

Calae.1738:

ArchonWing.9480:

Orr was supposed to be a land free of hearts but with events firing all over the place so you’d never run out of stuff to do.

In reality, there’s only a few events if any going on at any time, and thus nobody cares about 80% of the map.

The solution is to simply load up the whole map with stuff to do, so that you don’t feel left out if you dare wander off and shelter/pertinent starts and you feel you just wanted your time.

That’s another problem I have with this “endgame” in GW2. The hardest zones are not only void of players but also void of any activities. There’s nothing going on. I could stroll around the map for 30 minutes without finding a single event anywhere. That’s basically Anet telling me to get out.

There are events in Orr … but nobody really bothers doing the. What is the point of doing them? The event reward is the same as everywhere else. Loot is the same. Event NPCs that turn into vendors offer nothing worth getting once you are all set up in exotics. The convenience of opening out a waypoint is completely negated by the fact that the events reset after a couple of minutes anyway making any effort to open a waypoint practically worthless.

Khisanth.2948:

The convenience of opening out a waypoint is completely negated by the fact that the events reset after a couple of minutes anyway making any effort to open a waypoint practically worthless.

+1

It takes way too much effort and Zergs of players to actually ‘Change the Landscape’
…and then it just resets itself a few minutes later b/c the NPC’s guarding anything blow over in a soft breeze. Even the Temples chase you out after only 90 minutes with a Stupid Lich boss thing that heals itself back to FULL on all the NPCs who rush into Melee Range against it b/c they’re NPCs and we can’t control them like we used to be able to control our Heroes.

What the heck is the point of D.E.s again Colin? He needs to come back here and actually answer that question. This doesn’t feel at all different from every other MMO that just respawns everything right back in the same places a few minutes later. Infact it’s worse b/c it’s also a lot more empty and devoid of other players with crappier drops (or no drops at all) now at the same time.

Yeah, but that is not easy to solve. If the events do not come back in a “short” time, a lot of players that came after the event ended will just go away, if there is nothing to do for them. (The nerfed respawn time of shelter/ penitent is a very good example for it.. now it it just too much time in between..)
On the other side it really doesn’t make much sense that every waypoint seems to be contested most of the time.
Maybe they should have made the waypoints a short distance away from the events.. (like the waypoint at shatterer.. it does not become contested when he is there)

Repeating the most farmable ones never should have been where the fastest rewards were to begin with though. …Eventually we actually saw Shards(Obsids) becoming very valuable because of all this stuff coming to a head and the shortages of Dust/T6’s. This meant that completing the entire CHAIN was much more important than simply farming. The only problem is that the materials produced are still at the mercy of RNG just like all the Coffers & Chests we keep seeing every month. IF the Crafting system itself was more robust, then we wouldn’t need this constant farming and “Precursor Lottery” system as the only viable means in the first place. …then Events could happens hours apart, last longer, and the populations wouldn’t be so fractured all the time.

If, if, if.. that’s the problem isn’t it? (not particular your problem, I mean in general..)
It is how it is.. there is no robust crafting system to get the materials that we need.
And nerfing loot/ reward/ whatever AND increasing the “difficulty” (as I described it a few days before for me it is not really more challenging than before by adding stupid and dull enemies/ fights that just neeeeeeeeeeed more time to be killed ) is not a great way to encourage players to spend their time in Orr. I don’t know who thought this concept would be a successful idea.

I had some fun and good times in Orr, but that’s long ago (and I wasn’t just fixated on farming).

And since when have they ever put in every Solution all in the same update??

Sometimes we get the Carrot first. …sometimes we get the Stick first

ColinJohanson.2394:

a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas.

I think it is important to not only add exciting and difficult open world content to top end areas but to all zones of the game – not necessarily on the path from heart to next heart but offsidely. The reason why is because

• a lot of players who reach lv.80 start leveling new characters and are looking for challenge along the way to 80. It’s boring to play trivial content until you’re lv.70+
• the game scales you back. It’s designed to open the whole world for lv.80 players. But why would anyone go beyond Orr if nothing challenging + rewarding can be found elsewhere? The big metaevents are a good start but most of those are much too easy imho.

I think that most players now are veterans instead of new players. I could totally be wrong though. If I’m right those veterans look for rewarding things to do once 80. If they won’t get rewarding stuff in lv.80 zones anymore and nothing to do in low level areas they either lose motivation or start a new character. A new character who can’t find exciting stuff loses motivation quite fast, at least that’s what I’ve experienced.

I’m happy that you work on new rewards, this is what the game needs at the moment. I hope some of it is quite creative and not always “moar power”. Minis are ok but I don’t see how they are top priority for players since the system is a bit clunky and you can’t use them for anything. Completionist who haven’t bought all the holiday minis will never get a full collection now, so that’s not motivating either.

I hope this wasn’t too rude I tried to be a bit constructive.

The fact is that Orr is ugly and people don’t want to be in ugly places. So lets say they would put stuff there that makes it worth to be there Orr they are there for that only but still do not like being there. I can still remember the complains about Orr from people that where farming in Orr when that was still possible.

Ugly places like Orr should be in MMO’s but they should not be so big, they should be in between good looking area’s (not like now, one big area) and it should not be the end-content place.

Best is to add new maps that do look great (Think: Kessex Hills, Celedon Forest, Sparkly Fen, Timberline Falls, Frostgorge Sound) and make it worth to be there in stead of trying them to be in ugly Orr.

Devata.6589:

The fact is that Orr is ugly and people don’t want to be in ugly places. So lets say they would put stuff there that makes it worth to be there Orr they are there for that only but still do not like being there. I can still remember the complains about Orr from people that where farming in Orr when that was still possible.

Ugly places like Orr should be in MMO’s but they should not be so big, they should be in between good looking area’s (not like now, one big area) and it should not be the end-content place.

Best is to add new maps that do look great (Think: Sparkly Fen, Timberline Falls, Celedon Forest) and make it worth to be there in stead of trying them to be in ugly Orr.

very subjective, I find Orr one of the most beautiful places in the game. It’s colorful and at the same time has this death-theme…. I’ve never thought both would be possible at the same time.

I can take Orr but only in small doses. I find it tiring to have to fight your way through every last inch of space you’re trying to get through, and constantly being stuck in combat/stunned/knocked down/pulled/immobilised. It’s a bit better now that I have better gear but playing through it to get all the map completion stuff felt miserable.

I think if there were some more ‘safe’ spaces, as it were, with mobs which weren’t immediately hostile and some less bleak terrain it might be a lot more palatable. It’s understandable that it is the way it is, lorewise, but it can be a little soul-destroying after a while. I keep hoping there will be a sort of ‘regrowth’ to it now that (for a lot of us, anyway) Zhaitan is gone, so the undead should stop spawning, slowly, and the place can rebuild a bit. Not sure how they would implement that apart from phasing, but perhaps as and when another dragon is released, Zhaitan and his minions can finally start to be laid to rest.

ColinJohanson.2394:

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

I loved the open world. It’s an amazing place you guys spent so much time and effort on. But I stress the word loved because after a month or so after launch, people had little incentive to go back there and it has become desolated except for a few places. An mmo is a lot less fun when your running through deserted maps (especially since most of the content is geared towareds group play). You already know this and are working on the new reward scheme to fix it.

But where I think the major spanner is, is that one of your biggest carrots that tie in pve players especially; legendary weps are so dominated by gold. Legendary weps basically = gold. That instantly gets your players finding the most efficient way to get this gold which had the filtering affect of directing your playerbase to cof and (fotm for a while). Because going into the open world and doing dynamic events would be far less efficient, and if there is an easier option, people will eventually take it.

It never should have been this way in the first place and should have been more tied to the actual world. I.e. to get component 1 you need to get 100 pieces of Blah which can only be gotten from chains X of Dynamic Event A, B and C, or monsters Blerg, blerg2 and blerg3. Hindsight is a wonderful thing (and I realise your business direction of gems and in particular gems to gold meant you had to give gold a lot of weight) but this would have filled your beautiful world with players for a lot longer. Players doing a lot more of one of the things that sold me on gw2; Dynamic events.

Anzu.5702:

It never should have been this way in the first place and should have been more tied to the actual world. I.e. to get component 1 you need to get 100 pieces of Blah which can only be gotten from chains X of Dynamic Event A, B and C, or monsters Blerg, blerg2 and blerg3. Hindsight is a wonderful thing (and I realise your business direction of gems and in particular gems to gold meant you had to give gold a lot of weight) but this would have filled your beautiful world with players for a lot longer. Players doing a lot more of one of the things that sold me on gw2; Dynamic events.

I think this would have been awesome for the game. Seeing how people grind gold and T6 mats extensively you are so right with your opinion imho.

To add my 2 cents:
Today I found a Jumping Puzzle in Orr where there were a few chests with T6-Mats along the way to the top. Now imagine that those chests would be in every JP across the world and would have a lot more T6-Mats so that it becomes the best way to farm this stuff for every JP-fan. Then add such chests with tons of mats to the open world for completing events too, for everyone who doesn’t like Jumping Puzzles at all… and so on. So that every favourite playstyle has ways to viable farm mats.

In a way it’s already in the game: You can buy those mats chests via laurels. You get laurels mostly for playing the game the way you want. Imho it’s in a very basic state at the moment though. + Ascended items have priority so that no one would waste his laurels for things other than ascended gear. When you have all the ascended stuff it’s maybe wise to safe your laurels for future-implementations to the laurel-vendor.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Devata.6589:

The fact is that Orr is ugly and people don’t want to be in ugly places. So lets say they would put stuff there that makes it worth to be there Orr they are there for that only but still do not like being there. I can still remember the complains about Orr from people that where farming in Orr when that was still possible.

Ugly places like Orr should be in MMO’s but they should not be so big, they should be in between good looking area’s (not like now, one big area) and it should not be the end-content place.

Best is to add new maps that do look great (Think: Sparkly Fen, Timberline Falls, Celedon Forest) and make it worth to be there in stead of trying them to be in ugly Orr.

very subjective, I find Orr one of the most beautiful places in the game. It’s colorful and at the same time has this death-theme…. I’ve never thought both would be possible at the same time.

It’s true that it is very subjective but thats always the case with how beautiful something is. Still I do hear a lot of complains about the looks of Orr and if it is not complains about the looks then it is about all the undeads (not being able to walk a few meter without being attacked).

Anyway, because I was wondering what area people like and dislike I just created this topic: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Best-looking-worst-looking-places-in-Tyria/first#post2255529 Feel free to post your opinion there.

Randulf.7614:

Fernling.1729:

I actually don’t mind it haha. I hate the cliche zombies, but like how it feels as if you are actually in enemy territory. Wouldn’t surprise me if I’m in the minority though.

A minority of two of us

“This is the way the world ends; not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.”
-Amanda Hocking, Hollowland

I second that – I actually kinda like Orr, but I only go there to farm Arah anymore :/

Anzu.5702:

ColinJohanson.2394:

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

I loved the open world. It’s an amazing place you guys spent so much time and effort on. But I stress the word loved because after a month or so after launch, people had little incentive to go back there and it has become desolated except for a few places. An mmo is a lot less fun when your running through deserted maps (especially since most of the content is geared towareds group play). You already know this and are working on the new reward scheme to fix it.

But where I think the major spanner is, is that one of your biggest carrots that tie in pve players especially; legendary weps are so dominated by gold. Legendary weps basically = gold. That instantly gets your players finding the most efficient way to get this gold which had the filtering affect of directing your playerbase to cof and (fotm for a while). Because going into the open world and doing dynamic events would be far less efficient, and if there is an easier option, people will eventually take it.

It never should have been this way in the first place and should have been more tied to the actual world. I.e. to get component 1 you need to get 100 pieces of Blah which can only be gotten from chains X of Dynamic Event A, B and C, or monsters Blerg, blerg2 and blerg3. Hindsight is a wonderful thing (and I realise your business direction of gems and in particular gems to gold meant you had to give gold a lot of weight) but this would have filled your beautiful world with players for a lot longer. Players doing a lot more of one of the things that sold me on gw2; Dynamic events.

You are 100% right. The gold-driven system is doing a lot of harm to the game. And I also understand that the gem-store focus makes them go for the gold-driven play-style but if you scare people away they will not pay anything. So I don’t think it will be good for there wallets in the long run. What would also help is introducing traditional quest. Do not count them for world-completion but put in those quest and reward with gold, or mini’s, or pets (for rangers) or (in the future) mounts or recipe’s or other special materials you need for legendary and other weapons / armor. Now people need gold so those few who are willing to buy it with money do that and the rest farms it in the few places where it can be farmed.

ColinJohanson.2394:

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

There are so many other places I can go and do exciting events. I want the old Orr back. The champs, and over abundance if vets killed solo players and slowed down a players ability to farm, which cleaned out the zone.

Colin your not listening to your player base fully. Yes we want great content, exciting, etc, but not at the expense of what was Cursed Shore. There are so many other zones that are empty to attract players, mean while players are asking for Orr to be as it was.

I just want to go to ORR and solo farm for a couple hours. I don’t want to group. It’s a zone, not a world dungeon? I don’t want to have a zerg of 10 vet spiders on me and a champ.

I’m pretty casual player and I’m not very rich. I need that kind of content we use to have in Cursed Shore to continue progressing. I’m sure there are mixed reasons why others want it back, but regardless many want it back.

Orr is quite possibly the most miserable place I’ve ever been in any MMO I’ve played.

It’s aesthetically displeasing on nearly every level. Even if you do find something architecturally worth looking at you’ll be hard pressed to do it safely. All of the enemies are risen. (The fact that this is at least the third major MMO I’ve played where end game is focused around undead does not help. I really feel this theme had already been beaten to death before GW2 even launched.)

Way too many map completion points reliant on owning the temples. The sheer amount of frustration in trying to get a skill point guarded by a circling veteran & entourage + a field that constantly confuses and stuns you (Lyssa) is purely sadistic. Most of the temple points are impossible to do solo and no one else is ever around to assist (not that many can be duoed/trioed anyway). Every time I go to Orr it’s a ghost town (no pun intended :P).

Despite the nerfs, it’s still a nightmare to traverse. Mob density is ridiculous in some areas even after the nerf. Nearly every hub is either contested or overrun. Few if any of those ‘takeover’ events can be done with a small group let alone solo. The last time I did Orr map completion the added waypoints did not help either, I would still have to res at almost the opposite side of the zone from wherever I died.

Loot is practically non-existent. Granted, it could just be RNG messing with me, but for the sheer amount of enemies I’m essentially forced to deal with out there it’s common to not get anything for it, not even a porous bone.

I have such a seething hatred for Orr the single only thing that lured me out there after I completed those gods-forsaken maps was the promise of riches and even that wasn’t really worth it before the nerfs (I certainly never made the gold other people claimed they were from farming Cursed Shores).

I’d be interested if they ever “healed” Orr so it wasn’t a desolate wasteland overrun with the ugliest and most annoying enemies in the game, but as for now I plan to continue to avoid that place like the plague. (I can’t even get my map completionist friend to do Orr again, one time scarred him forever it was such an awful experience.)

Julie Yann.5379:

I loved Orr until they nerfed the kitten out of it. Now is deserted and since many of the events can’t be soloed there is no point in even visiting it.

There’s no point in visiting 90% of the map except to get map comp, then you just wp to certain areas when a meta boss is active or to go into a dungeon.

Anet has said that we can play the game how we want, but they continuously nerf areas so that drops from mobs will pretty much drop absolutely nothing but the grey trophies like the porous bones in CS from the risen, if I want to stand in one area and “FARM” a certain couple mobs for hours on end I should be aloud to without Anet messing it up cause that’s HOW I WANT TO PLAY, or if I want to do a certain few event chains over and over then I should be able to without Anet nerfing the drops there and messing with the timing cause that’s HOW I WANT TO PLAY. But no, they do get involved, and they do mess it up and make it worse for everyone and now there isn’t anything to do but stand around LA and wait for the next frac run.

Now, when other players want to play how they want to play, like continuously running CoF P1 “FARMING” for Gold for hours sometimes all day, I don’t complain, I do think it should be nerfed, but does Anet do anything about it, NO! Does CoF P1 add anything of value to the game that we can’t get elsewhere? NO! When a player stands in front of the bank all day spamming those stupid bells or that stupid new horn, that I can’t stand, I walk away, cause that’s HOW THEY WANT TO PLAY, idiotic imho, but still, they stand in one spot and spam, and it is annoying and Anet does nothing.

So, will Orr be fixed? I highly doubt it, and if it is, it will never be like it was, and the mobs will never have the same drops, so if they ever do anything Orr will never be the same, the Open World population will never be the same unless they rollback the nerfs and be completely honest with us players about it, they think we are stupid but they just don’t realize that there are a lot of programmers and designers that play the game and know when things are changed. They just think we are all mindless players buying gems. I will never buy any gems till they are honest with us. And if there is ever an expansion, I doubt I’ll buy it either.

Laurelinde.4395:

I keep hoping there will be a sort of ‘regrowth’ to it now that (for a lot of us, anyway) Zhaitan is gone, so the undead should stop spawning, slowly, and the place can rebuild a bit. Not sure how they would implement that apart from phasing, but perhaps as and when another dragon is released, Zhaitan and his minions can finally start to be laid to rest.

“Districting” … IE: instead of dividing people up by server, divide them up by the how much success they’ve contributed to it’s regrowth. Not just personal story, but also champ & temple holding. The more progressed (timeline) Districts would of course have tougher challenges scaled for more players, but they’d also have cleaner “thoroughfares” with less obnoxious crap leaping out to snare you every 5 seconds.. It’s basically the way ALL outside zones worked in GW1.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Thus the continual updates this year to make the creatures in Orr have more varied skills, the swap over to the new event scaling system that creates veterans/champions as content scales up, and the updates to Southsun to have more playable content.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

I agree with these, many players even had specific wide range AoE weapons for these events.

However, do you call spawning a Champion Risen Spider and multiple Veteran Risen Acolytes in Temple of Grenth against 3 players a “good scaling” example?

A player had been spamming the mapchat for nearly 30min until I decided to help him, along with someone else who tagged along.
We downed Grenth which was easier than I remember it used to be, just to be crushed by this single spider (as if the huge amounts of mobs + the “unknow explodes” wasn’t enough for 3 players to handle).

Then I regret I wasted time and repair going out of my gathering walk to attempt that.