Guild Wars 2

In the new version of the Crown Pavilion, there’s a potential for a protracted end battle against one of the bosses. I encountered this situation last night where it took over 90 minutes to do a blitz. Our map didn’t have a lot of players (at first) and was unable to split to tackle bosses. We made solid progress on each of the first 5 bosses, averaging about 5 to 6 minutes per kill. However, the last boss then took over an hour. That boss was Boom Boom.

By the time this final boss was reached, there was a steady in-rush of new players joining the map who greatly scaled up the fight. Despite focusing on the healing turrets, we simply could not kill them fast enough to prevent Boom Boom from recovering nearly all of their health each time. Some players attempted to leave the battle to scale it down, but the steady in-rush of new players joining the map kept scaling it up even further. By now, players who see a single boss icon on a map have been well-trained by Anet to head there and help. So you can’t blame players arriving on the map for doing exactly what ANet has trained them to do.

Some people were claiming this was great, and anti-zerg and the way it should be. However, that narrow viewpoint misses some key issues here. For example, new players joining a map should not be punished so harshly for the current state of an event. Instead, a new player joining a map should be rewarded for trying to help. However, in this case, attempts to do that by joining the fight actually lead to the reverse situation since more players arriving will scale up the enemies even worse. There isn’t a good “go sit out this fight” mechanism in GW2 to encourage players to stay away, at least not one that directly earns rewards. Meanwhile, trying to switch to another instance of the map to avoid a bad end-state may not be obvious, or even possible.

Each end state (such as the case of Boom Boom being the last boss just as a flood of new players arrive and scale up the fight hopelessly) needs a viable completion mechanic. With the current setup, this case ends up similar to forcing a chess match to go on despite neither side having enough pieces to achieve mate. A couple of solutions for this would be:
- When there is only 1 boss left, start a timer. If the timer runs out before the final boss is killed, the event ends with minimum rewards.
- Once bronze level is guaranteed, eliminate scaling for the final boss.

This way, the event would have a built-in completion mechanic to avoid such meaningless protracted battles.