Guild Wars 2

I don’t know how it is on all servers, but on my server at least, open world events have become next to impossible. They used to be great, up until a couple months ago, but lately they seem to be attended by less than a quarter the old populations. This tends to make the events impossible, especially with the oh-so-brilliant new timers (which were added at around the same time). The massive drop-offs seemed to happen around the time the Halloween events started, but there was also a significant bleed following the Teq changes.

I’m not really sure what’s causing this mass exodus, but there needs to be a solution. There may be others but I can only think of two:

1. Hard lock the timers on all server events to the same schedule (so they’ll be happening on all servers at once), and allow players to transfer to overflows at will, not just when their own zone is full. There’s got to be an overflow somewhere that isn’t empty. Ideally players would automatically be transferred to an Overflow when their home server zone has less than a handful of people in it.

2. Make group events infinitely scalable so that if only one person shows up to Claw of Jormag (not unrealistic lately), one person can complete it, if one person comes up to a Champ, that one person can beat him in about the same time as a zerg of 20.

If there aren’t enough people around to do the events, you can’t expect the events to take a lot of people, it’s just an unreasonable expectation. I don’t know what solution works best on your end, but the current situation is just intolerable, and the upcoming patch looks like it’ll only make things worse by encouraging even more people to segregate themselves into Fractals.

Ohoni.6057:

The massive drop-offs seemed to happen around the time the Halloween events started,

There’s a glut of content right now – tons of players are running the Tower, finishing up their Season 1 achieves or playing WvW, getting ready for the Fractals update by getting their levels up and collecting Fractal relics, playing on the Edge of the Mists PTR map, plus still running dungeons or champ trains for gold.

I know I haven’t had much time to run open world meta events lately, I’m sure it’s the same for many players. Although I still try to make some time for a Tequatl kill everyday now that he’s on a regular timer

In addition, some guilds have transferred around due to the wvw Season, leaving lower populated servers even lower. Guest to another server for your events. Also, the bosses, aside from teq, do scale. I can recall a few times at Jormag where a smaller group of ~10 has killed him faster than the normal mob of 30+. Champs scale too, but I think only for 1-2 players. Once a third comes along they scale up.

The Golem Mark II scales nicely. In fact, it seems to do very well with just a few people. I was with one where there were just 3 or 4 people and it was able to be done with no problems. If they could aim for that level of scaling on at least the non dragon bosses, that would be wonderful.

The real answer here is guesting. It’s free. It’s easy to do (as long as you don’t accidentally transfer like I did lol), and you can play with more people.

I’m not sure why people resist this. It solves the problem.

Astral Projections.7320:

The Golem Mark II scales nicely. In fact, it seems to do very well with just a few people. I was with one where there were just 3 or 4 people and it was able to be done with no problems. If they could aim for that level of scaling on at least the non dragon bosses, that would be wonderful.

Yeah I noticed this ever since the sweep of boss redesigns, I’ve done it with three players and 50+ and it was a fun fight both ways. ANet needs to study what they did with this boss and do likewise across the remainder of the game.

Jormag scales oddly. I think it picks up people who are nearby (like say fighting the champ troll?) but not actually participating, which makes it very hard to move the ball forward. I was on the other night and by ten minutes remaining we hadn’t gotten him to phase two, which is just the kiss of death because it takes at least ten minutes (barring flukes) to get through phase two. If there were no timer that would be fine, but they decided they had to add a timer. I’ve also seen Shatterer fail the same way. At the VERY least they need to remove those timers, it’s not ideal because it means the events taking longer to complete, but taking longer to complete is preferable to wasting a half hour and getting nothing for it.

And yeah, guesting might be an option, but if I’m going to be guesting whenever I want to play, what is the point of staying on my home server in the first place? Maybe they just need to start offering free server transfers from low to high pop servers.

I missed that ‘y’ when I first read the title. It was quite disturbing.

Vayne.8563:

The real answer here is guesting. It’s free. It’s easy to do (as long as you don’t accidentally transfer like I did lol), and you can play with more people.

I’m not sure why people resist this. It solves the problem.

I don’t understand why you keep saying it solves the problem.

The problem: Low server populations.

Your solution: Make the server population lower.

That’s not a solution, that’s part of the problem.

Either merge servers or nix guesting, period. That starts solving the problem.

The problem is now these world bosses, quite often, take too long to kill, scale pretty poorly, and don’t give enough rewards for the time invested in comparison to other activities in game.

Before the Tequatl update, they were fairly easy, didn’t require a lot of time to get an ok reward, and thus were a regular circuit for a lot of players.

I don’t want to spend 10 minutes killing the frozen maw just for a rare and some junk. Many others feel this way too.

The world boss circuit is just too time consuming with the changes and no longer that great of a choice for spending your time in game.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

The problem is now these world bosses, quite often, take too long to kill, scale pretty poorly, and don’t give enough rewards for the time invested in comparison to other activities in game.

Before the Tequatl update, they were fairly easy, didn’t require a lot of time to get an ok reward, and thus were a regular circuit for a lot of players.

I don’t want to spend 10 minutes killing the frozen maw just for a rare and some junk. Many others feel this way too.

The world boss circuit is just too time consuming with the changes and no longer that great of a choice for spending your time in game.

Since the boss update, Teq is off my list, too time consuming for the reward, and I’ve guested to high population servers to try to do Shatterer on off hours and that will be failing also. No one there and the camp with the mortars overrun. Even the Maw can be a problem sometimes with not enough people. No point in trying with only a handful when you know the timer is ticking.

This has been a problem since about week 2 after release. It has been a problem in every MMO ever created. The problem is the core structure of the genre- level up, grind for reward, fin.

Once leveling is done, all you have left in the world at large is the comparatively rare new player, and old ones leveling alts. For mega-boss events, you are depending on the grind-for-reward crowd. If there is a more efficient place to grind, anywhere in the game, they won’t show up at the bosses because they are at the better grinding spots instead. Proof:

Since the boss update, Teq is off my list, too time consuming for the reward

There is no solution without changing the core gameplay- eg, removing grind. Which ANET originally tried to do and spontaneously started doing the opposite with Lost Shores, two months after release. Yes, I’m still bitter.

This has been a problem since about week 2 after release. It has been a problem in every MMO ever created. The problem is the core structure of the genre- level up, grind for reward, fin.

It really wasn’t a problem until late summer. I mean, any of the major world events would consistantly have 15-20 people, well more than the minimum required, and sometimes well above that. The Temples would get cleared 2-3 times per night, the Karka Queen would be up 2-3 times per night, now it’s going days at a stretch before either is tackled.

Some of this can be blamed on the boss “upgrades” which made many of them not worth the hassle of wearing down their new HP or dealing with their timers, and some of this can be blamed on new content farms like the Labyrinth or Tower, but neither of these places is very well populated either, so that doesn’t seem to make sense either.

As Karizee said, there’s a glut of content at the moment.

New content every 2 weeks keeps things fresh, but I feel that it often detracts from the core game. I think that every so often Anet needs to release a patch that is a return to the norm, a calm between storms, a breather. Removing all LS content like they do when one patch ends but not introducing another. Let the game lie fallow for a week to entice players to play the core game (dungeons, fractals, world events, Orr, etc). Perhaps they can do this when they make changes to various reward systems. When they released the new champ boxes would be a good example of when to do this.

Ohoni.6057:

This has been a problem since about week 2 after release. It has been a problem in every MMO ever created. The problem is the core structure of the genre- level up, grind for reward, fin.

It really wasn’t a problem until late summer. I mean, any of the major world events would consistantly have 15-20 people, well more than the minimum required, and sometimes well above that. The Temples would get cleared 2-3 times per night, the Karka Queen would be up 2-3 times per night, now it’s going days at a stretch before either is tackled.

Some of this can be blamed on the boss “upgrades” which made many of them not worth the hassle of wearing down their new HP or dealing with their timers, and some of this can be blamed on new content farms like the Labyrinth or Tower, but neither of these places is very well populated either, so that doesn’t seem to make sense either.

I still havn’t killed Zhaitan on my first 80 because the gates of Arah were always closed- noone was doing the event anymore. They were doing karma chains in Orr instead. That was about 2 weeks in. Maybe 3. It may not have been widespread enough to stop worldboss kills, but it was already starting.

Yes, I know I could get a guild and get it done and all that. But I don’t really play the character anymore so I haven’t bothered.