Guild Wars 2

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not demanding anything. I’m just curious, since I opened up the game today, and decided to do some area completion, and I’m having a hard time because I have to solo the events most of the time. I’m asking this because this game is just so much fun when you find 2 or 3 people to do events with. Especially since I’m a solo player, grouping up and such aren’t really my thing.

It doesn’t have to be the huge zergs from launch, I just think Arenanet should do something to make people not feel like they have to stay in Orr, and go to other areas, making it fun for everyone! Orr is a lot of fun, but obviously it must get super boring doing the same events all the time.

From what I understand, even areas in Orr are plagued by lack of people. They’re all farming karma with the zerg in Straits of Devastation. I was running around Malachor (sp?) and Cursed shore yesterday and rarely saw anyone. Couldn’t do any events because of it.

I’m running around trying to get map completion and I rarely see anyone in any of the lower zones as well. They’re usually all in zones that have dragons.

This definitely needs fixed. Everywhere I go feels like an instance that I am soloing anymore.

Hmmm, if that’s the case then something needs to be done urgently, so much Tyria to explore and people just sit there doing 2 or 3 events

I have wondered why they dont just make all leveling zones like overflow servers : /

It would fix the population issues, give more people to interact with.

Thats what happens when you cant grind out mobs for xp

I agree, way too many people just following zergs, leaving a lot of the game feeling deserted, despite healthy population. I wish they’d do something about it, but not sure what. Maybe bonus xp/karma in underpopulated areas?

similar to TSW – hit 80 and you can look forward to running dungeons over and over, exploring the world (which is just a grind and a time sink) and then be required to spend countless hours in a wvwvw system that is badly designed such that servers with a 24 hr in-game presence (Oceanic + US mix) rofl stomp servers without large Oceanic guilds.

And the kicker is you can’t complete world explorer without doing the pvp. The only choice is to server transfer twice in a week to pick up all the missing crap you can’t get when your server can’t compete.

So – where are the ppl you ask? In Dungeons and wvwvw – just like what happened with WAR and is happening with TSW.

This model is fail.

Icecat.4528:

similar to TSW – hit 80 and you can look forward to running dungeons over and over, exploring the world (which is just a grind and a time sink) and then be required to spend countless hours in a wvwvw system that is badly designed such that servers with a 24 hr in-game presence (Oceanic + US mix) rofl stomp servers without large Oceanic guilds.

And the kicker is you can’t complete world explorer without doing the pvp. The only choice is to server transfer twice in a week to pick up all the missing crap you can’t get when your server can’t compete.

So – where are the ppl you ask? In Dungeons and wvwvw – just like what happened with WAR and is happening with TSW.

This model is fail.

Boldly stated, but yeah. Maybe they could make a WvW explorer title, or something like that.

Why do a few people keep bringing up TSW?

That game was just bad… not just bad, it was quite awful.

OP you exaggerate too much. The zones aren’t empty, but less populated. What did you expect? Did you want everyone to stay in the same zones and never progress to lvl 80? I was just in the charr starter zone earlier and i was seeing people everywhere.

The game is fine. People are everywhere, except people like the OP want to see everyone for every second of their online time.

A few more patches like this and you won’t see any players at all anymore, the word of unplayable professions will get around fast on the net. The point of having classes is so that you can choose what suits you best, now you’re forced to choose between the two or three only viable professions available. If you want to play seriously then you’re forced to choose between warrior, thief and mesmer.. two of which just got nerfed hard as well heh.

Zsymon.8457:

A few more patches like this and you won’t see any players at all anymore, the word of unplayable professions will get around fast on the net.

Doesn’t matter, they’ve already got your money. Things that have been issues since beta haven’t been fixed yet. I believe a lot of people fell for marketing hype and buzzwords.

nexxe.7081:

The game is fine. People are everywhere, except people like the OP want to see everyone for every second of their online time.

Those are bots

I would be curious to see how ANet plan to deal with player retention due to what the OP mentioned because at the moment working through on a second character I am skipping quite a large amount of content purely because there is no one around to do it or the scant few players I do see are not interested. This essentially has reduced me to soloing what content I can and doing reknown hearts which is frankly becoming boring and annoying.

I feel the game world is empty now, the largest groups of players (pve) I encounter are one of two:
World Events.
Bots.

Not particularly inspiring I think.

@nexxe
I apologize if I really did exaggerate, but the world population seems to be concentrated in Orr mostly (MOSTLY). There are zones with a bunch of people yeah, however there are zones that you’ll only see like 1 person doing the same event as you every hour. It’s not that I want to “see everyone for every second of my online time”. That doesn’t even make any sense. Isn’t the point of the game to make the whole game endgame, and make all content viable for max levels so they can do whatever they want? If so, then why is everyone in Orr? Obviously some people would rather be there, but after some research you can see it’s more efficient (reward wise) to stay in Orr. What I’m trying to say is that, while Orr is a really good zone, and I can see people wanting to stay there, there are people who stay there merely for the fact that they feel like they will be left behind reward-wise if they decided to go somewhere else.

Two things I can see that would help the mid-level areas:

1. Scale travel costs around those areas back to as if you were that level. What I mean is for level 80s, it costs 2-4s to warp pretty much anywhere. If you’re trying to save up for something, you really can’t afford to freely port around. If it was set up so that once you entered, say, a level 40 map, travel costs would be the same as if you were level 40. That way, it’s not so taxing for higher level players to go down and help others in lower areas.

2. Give some sort of incentive for higher levels to be in lower areas. Maybe a small bonus for partying with a lower level and completing hearts or events. Only issue with this would be possible abuse among friends/guildmates, but then again, ANet doesn’t seem to have any issues imposing restrictions on fair players to try to curb cheaters (DR and bots).

Personally, I have a number of alts at various levels that I play on depending on how bored I am. I do see a fair number of people, excluding bots, in each map on my server (Sanctum of Rall), but most of them tend to be alts.

It makes sense that most people are concentrated at Orr. The scaling of the level by the zone you are in was very cool. Now give those people a reason to go back to those zones. Add some low level crafting mats to high level recipes might help. May also be an idea to adjust event rewards to actual level instead of the level of the encounter to encourage high level people to spread out a bit more. Lots of events in Orr are extremely crowded actually.

I was doing my map completion in the map “Timberline Falls” and literally waited over 7 hours for someone to come along to help me with the skill point in where you have to kill the little creepy asura acting like a god to manipulate the grawl.

She and I were definitely not enough to kill the bugger as he is a champion, she a mesmer and I an elementalist, so we took turns aggroing it and communing.

Seven hours though, no joke. I watched 2 movies on my other monitor and listened to some music. It was a pretty sad affair really, kinda a black eye on ANet’s face if you ask me.

They either need to force us to play the lower lvl maps, or make it ACTUALLY rewarding for me to take my lvl 80 character and others like me to these maps. Or maybe they can make all mobs/bosses weaker and in lesser numbers in lower lvl maps to allow people to solo them, I don’t like this option though, I don’t like easy games at all. Not really that many options here that I can come up with that are logical.

ONCE WE GET OUR MAP COMPLETION IN A MAP WE HAVE ZERO MOTIVATION TO RETURN WHATSOEVER!!

Well, it looks like the whole game is NOT end game as ANet promised huh? Or did they just fantasize it? Either way it does not fit their vision of what this game was supposed to be.

It depends on the server, I think. I’ve heard other people complain, but on my server (Desolation, EU), I go back and forth between zones (yes, straits and orr as well), and I never run alone. Sure, the server is a bit quieter right about now because a lot of people have Real Lives to take care of, but I never see totally empty zones or abandoned map chats.

Honestly, on my second playthrough leveling a Thief I’m having a blast.

There are less players, but I am having more fun doing the events with 2/3 players than I ever did with 10-20 people just steaming through.

Not to mention I have actually interacted with more people too. Asking for help with certain events/responding to others asking is great fun.

They really need to balance some events. Spawning 20 Ettins when there are only 2-3 players there is stupid. We all know how ridiculously hard they hit as well.

what server are you people playing on….tuesday evening (US central time) I started a new Elementalist…did defence of shaemore, loaded into Queensdale and was put into an overflow! on tuesday evening…..and this is on Tarnished Coast. I see people everywhere (and not just bots, tho I have seen a few of those) and to be honest I like a smaller crowd as it makes the DEs actually fun and not just a giant firework zerg

I see lots of people everywhere I go. And not just bots. There’s always people in Frostgorge, too. So no, not everyone is concentrated in Orr once they hit 80.

Surely the simplest answer is to establish a chat channel that covers ALL the zones, as opposed to just /M (Map). That way when a world/group even opens near you you can call across the entire server to see if anyone’s interested.
I was really suprised to find that the chat was only for the map you were in when I first started to play.

Well, on my server (Stormbluff) I see less people overall, yes, but there are still enough to make every single event fun. Actually I believe I could say I find the events even funnier now because of the amount of people doing them. I hate zergs.

I’m yet to find a zone that feels empty and I have alts from all over the level ranges.

The only thing I’m seeing from the OP is “I have no friends, ArenaNet should make it so people want to play with me.”

Honestly, join a Guild dude, at least add some people to your friends list, find some people who have characters in the same level range so you can run together.

Scale karma rewards and money rewards to level in all zones on dynamic events.

- Problem fixed.

I for one, would love to go to other zones than Orr and farm my karma. Because:

1 – Orr is overpopulated. Every event is a lag fest, more or less. (The bugged events are not overpopulated) Enemies don’t even render before they are killed, some times. (Grenth event comes to mind.)

2 – Killing risen is only so much fun. Some times I’d like to kill something else. A wolf or something, perhaps.

3 – The gloomy look of Orr is pretty depressing, tbh. I like the look of the jungle styled zones a lot more.

4 – Events get very repetitive after a couple of days of farming in the same place over and over and over again.

My 2 copper

BhornRheady.5738:

Surely the simplest answer is to establish a chat channel that covers ALL the zones, as opposed to just /M (Map). That way when a world/group even opens near you you can call across the entire server to see if anyone’s interested.
I was really suprised to find that the chat was only for the map you were in when I first started to play.

I would hate, hate, hate it if they added world chat channels…all that ever does is gives the trolls a world stage to spew their stupid crap out and when the audiance is that much bigger the trolls are that much more vocal

I am constantly doing events with 1-3 other people in the lower level zones. It actually is more fun than when I got my main thought those zones.

so I have no idea what your talking about.

also whats up with people not able to do events solo. I mean I’ve never in the whole time since beta had to skip an event because it was too hard (unless it was a [group] event). Even in orr I had no problem soloing events.

I can hardly blame players for farming a few DE’s all day long. It is so hard to make money in this game that many dont have a choice. Even crafting gear for an alt can leave you bankrupt fast. Things wold get better and cheaper if they would up the rate of crafting drops from monsters and maybe ectos dropping off of broken down green items. It is getting to the point where named dropped exotics are cheaper than crafted, because of the cost of crafting mats.

wollie.9751:

also whats up with people not able to do events solo. I mean I’ve never in the whole time since beta had to skip an event because it was too hard (unless it was a [group] event). Even in orr I had no problem soloing events.

It depends on the event. Just about every map has a world event (like the swamp monster, or the dragon) that require a pretty good sized group. No way you can solo those, or do them with 1 to 3 people.

I’m on Jade Quarry, and there’s no lack of people in any zone I’ve gone in recently. I’ve been playing a Guardian for the past 3 weeks or so, at L55/35% Map Completion, and there’s always a bunch of people around to help with everything. Granted, I mostly play during EST prime time (7-10 PM), so that probably helps a lot.

Aurora Glade is fine. We tend to use map chat a lot to alert people to DE’s, especially the Champion events.
I’m level 80, but spend a lot of my time exploring all the zones so usually pop up anywhere and I always find people.

Here’s my routine: I do my Daily in a newbie zone, and for the rest of the evening I stay in the zone that I am exploring for my 100%. Why? Because of WP-costs. I do not WANT to only visit 2 zones in an evening of play, but I can reach a newbie zone without cost, and then only have to spend silver once to get to my explore zone.

I know I sound cheap, and I know there are millionaire TP-traders here, but for this casual level 80 player with no economic wits, that is trying to gear up, being poor is my reality. And it keeps me from hopping to other zones constantly, something I always loved to do in for instance EQ, with all the ports available there. The modern EQ, off course. Anyway, maybe some day I wil get rich and start traveling again.

I wanted to start saying I love every single thing about this game I’ve encountered so far and I’m having a blast! I do see this thread as addressing the only noticeable issue I’ve had. At launch and for weeks the game was very exciting and busy. Events made sense and were accessible. Fighting along side other players happened frequently and it was fun. I would much prefer to wait on overflow for a bit to get into a packed zone then have every zone be empty and most of the content unachievable.

On Blackgate which is the only US server listed as FULL atm 9:30AM (Monday Morning) est starting from around 10pm last night I worked on Iron Marches and Fireheart Rise. Almost every event and some skill points were unbeatable solo, I encountered 2 other players the entire night, and not a single word in map chat the entire night even after I tried to start a dialogue. A fair share of the few events that were possible felt very clumsy and I had to preform elite tactics such as jumping into the water and swimming back and forth until my heal came off cooldown praying the enemies would not reset, while dodging packs of 15 hyenas running around the map.

I dropped a few hits on some of the events in Fireheart to see if and when the credit would eventually go out (to see if they were being finished at all), after around 5 hours in the zone none of the 4-5 events that I fought in ever completed

I am on Gunnar’s Hold and there are loads of people on all the maps- I completed Mt Maelstrom and Fireheart Rise this weekend and there were so many people you had to move off a bit if you wanted to be just 2-3 people.
We saw a lot of the same people very frequently and had a great time doing Font of Rand with a random player that me and my husband kept running into.
So in Sparkfly Fen, Plains of Ashford, Mt Maelstrom, Fireheart Rise and Blazeridge Stepps there were lots and lots of people. Ironically the emptiest map I have seen is Frostgorge Sound.
Heck I was even on the overflow server in Lion’s Arch!

This game has one option when you hit 80. Do everything you’ve already done 1000 times again for less items, karma and cash in order to merely change the appearance of your armor or weapons, preferably in one place, and only in 30 minute segments. I’m still shocked daily at this philosophy, and the vast difference in the number of people that stand up for it on forums vs. the number of people logging in and playing at this point. I’m used to MMO’s taking 5-10 years to get to this point.

I have noticed a pretty big drop in players around for events, however I’ve never had any trouble soloing events.

Luckily for me I play with a partner almost exclusively so I never really feel alone. I’ve also got a pretty strong guild that I’m a part of that goes out of their way to hang out with people that aren’t 80 yet. If there’s a champion or something that needs killing and I can’t duo it (which often times we can duo champions (guardian/ele)), I just guild message for some to come help me kill a champion and 2-3 people will group up with us, port over, and help me out.

I guess that would be the guild part of GUILD Wars. Find a decent guild and you should be good to go. They make all the difference. If you’re a loaner who strictly does PUG stuff, then you may find yourself wanting more.

We do regular guild dungeon runs too which makes for a much more pleasant experience.

The problems with the Orr zones are also due to bugged events. Once an event is bugged in one of the major zone event chains, the whole zone becomes somewhat undesireable, sometimes for days. That would be a first priority to adjust the population.

easy fix, if less than x players from 1 sever are in a zone or over flow. toss the whole lot into over flow

As I said, some areas are pretty busy yeah, especially the lower level areas like Queensdale, however this issue is mostly seen in “mid-level areas”. For reference, I play in Jade Quarry, and yesterday I was completing “Brisban Wildlands”, only saw a group of people like, twice. And it was two people. Two.

I am not bashing this game by any means, I love Guild Wars 2. I care about it, that’s exactly why I decided to make this thread. I know the game is definitely NOT dying, but it has some issues, which is only normal, everything has issues. However we need to make problems like this more known so Arenanet has a “direction” on what to do next.

I’m on Anvil Rock. I see more bots than people in the high level areas, and rarely encounter people in the mid-level areas.

Lornar’s Pass doesn’t get any more solo than it is right now on Anvil Rock, and I might as well be playing solo in Cursed Shore, because Cursed Shore is so full of bots. I’m almost ready to start farming bot kills – tap, let the bots kill, loot, repeat – just to break the monotony.