Guild Wars 2

With HoT hitting the streets last Friday it has been a wonderful and refreshing experience and I’m not anywhere remotely close to the halfway point of my HoT journey across my character pool. The expansion has really breathed new life into the franchise and I can’t really point out a non bug-related complaint about it at this time.

However, as I was taking steps to prepare for the expansion I have been upgrading my computer to get ready for this and other games coming out this quarter and I was out of the game for a while. Coming back at launch and starting a Rev that I only managed to boost to 42 or so I started out in Queensdale and Rata Sum respectively.

Even though I’ve got a pool of 18 characters at this time and only 12 are level 80, after playing the new map and starting a character over… I noticed just how different and barren the central maps were compared to how incredibly dense the expansion zones are – both in population and in “stuff”.

Now, we knew this was a problem beforehand, it’s not a new issue, but we’re currently solving it with migrating to a new area to spend our time there. It will solve the problem for a time… But after the players finish the parts of their legendary crafting in a random central map or fractal and leave it for God knows how long… I’m concerned that these areas aren’t going to have new life because they’re…

1. Lower Level
2. Lower Threat
3. Lower Reward
4. Less immersive
5. Don’t have a world boss
6. The one’s that do are old hat
7. Don’t have the population to push events

And on and on.

I don’t know, it may not be a problem for many players at this time, and I’ll be honest, HoT will occupy me for many, many months… but do we just forget these places exist? it’s an entire game swept under the rug and I don’t know how to feel about that.

Thoughts?

People join GW2 all the time. Sure, everyone is flocking to the HOT zones now because they are starved for content. You will be getting people who have not been all over Tyria yet though.

Menadena.7482:

People join GW2 all the time. Sure, everyone is flocking to the HOT zones now because they are starved for content. You will be getting people who have not been all over Tyria yet though.

That’s definitely true, and I want to say that with the combined power of both an expansion and and the Free to Play platform we’re finally getting that population climb out of the plateau – or even decline from people bored of the vanilla game – that an argument could be made in that direction.

That being said, I’m still uncertain that these central areas are going to see any touching up in the future, but I suppose we’ll see.

There is certainly NOT a population problem in some of the core tyria maps.

Silverwastes is still poppin’. for exp and materials and karma and stuff.

Orr is busier than it was before due to the map rewards(I expect an increase when more people catch on to the ammount of T6 and other stuff you can get from map rewards)

Cursed Shores and uhhh…the middle Orr map were pretty well populated enough to where events were doing quite well.

Materials YAY.

farmy farmy moldy bags yay!

powerful blood/vicious claws/armored scales= lovely map rewards.

The old areas wont become barren . Right now there’s new content that people want to check out and the Halloween event on top of that so its natural for Central Tyria to be empty . As is the nature of all things though the novelty of the new maps will wear off and some people will simply not like the new mechanics of the vertical maps and go back to what they did prior to HoT. I would be more worried that HoT maps would become abandoned since you pretty much need a decent population to do those events and even some Hero Points .

I honestly think they’re fine as they are. They’re solid leveling zones and the events are actually much better balanced for less populated maps than zerg pops.

I don’t really think every zone should have huge pops all the time you know? It’s really jarring to go to queensdale and see 50 people doing a single event, as the conflicts there are so much smaller in scope and don’t scale well. Watching half an army defend a farm from bandits is odd, but watching 5-10 players, or even just one seems appropriate.

I think if they just touched up the map rewards system (maybe some kind of hefty daily chest per zone tied to supply mastry in addition to the current system) itd would be just about perfect.

Contrast that with SW and all the new maps that were really designed around high pops, and specifically designed to spread that high pop around the map so that event scaling works better and there’s a better sense of the map zerg as an army rather than an unneccessarily huge blob of players.

I spend more time in the old maps than the new and I see plenty people about everywhere. The new map reward system is quite good for bringing people to empty maps, I think. Never seen Straits of Desolation as populated as this week.

Hedge.8760:

I spend more time in the old maps than the new and I see plenty people about everywhere. The new map reward system is quite good for bringing people to empty maps, I think. Never seen Straits of Desolation as populated as this week.

but many of them also only there for hero point or map completion they stopped before cause of no reward for lvl up, i guess

To be honest, I’m glad to see so many opposing views. I dunno, maybe it was simply time of day, who knows, I guess boiling it down I just wanted to say that there seem to be less unique and exciting events in these other maps.

I personally don’t consider SW to be part of central Tyria though mechanically it is, and Orr really was the only place before LSs2 that people farmed a lot, but I’m not addressing farming in this post necessarily, though it does factor in where you chose to go at a given time.

I was in Orr over sunday and had no problem finding a lot of people and events. Last night I was doing map completion in Brisban Wildlands and a couple tags were poped on the map doing events. I have seen no issues personally from the Core maps.