Guild Wars 2

Hello All,

I am looking to come back and play. I am not quite sure i want to buy the expnsion yet. Is there a decent size community that plays in non heart of thorn areas?

Thanks,

-Bark

you can still lfg dungeon groups and fractals pretty easy. And with mega server pve maps its not hard to find people everywhere, and ya still plenty for world bosses. In wvw ya you find many people of course.

Free to play players have no choice but to play the core game, so plenty of people.

I see people all the time in the core maps. Most of them have Mastery Numbers on their name plates, so they own HoT, but are in core for whatever reason.

For the simple pleasure of it I did a full world completion on an alt recently, and I don’t think I was ever more than about 10 seconds away from seeing another player.

The game is literally designed for every area to be relatively profitable in some way, so people are all over the place doing different things constantly

I probably, over all, spend more time in Core Tyria than elsewhere. I always see others, no matter where I go.

The base game is F2P, and there are always people running around on the base game maps because of this. If anything, I would say the base game maps are MORE populated than HoT maps

I just log into the game to keep the story unlocked for when I want to play it again, otherwise I just play Guild Wars 1.

I play nearly every day

As other people have said this isn’t one of those games where once you’ve finished a map there’s no reason to ever go back to it, so the vast majority of people are always in the newest maps and the older ones are abandoned.

People seem to be pretty evenly spread around. I think the mid-level maps are slightly emptier, except when there’s a world boss or something happening, but even then it’s highly unlikely you’re ever going to find yourself in an empty map.

Most importantly whenever I’ve decided to do something that needs other people I’ve been able to find other people doing it. Not at all times, when I had a day off and decided to go and do the Orrian Temples at 10am on a Thursday I had to give up because there weren’t enough people around. But I went back at 3pm (still well before peak time) and the Balthazar Temple had already been taken and the others I checked out were in progress. It’s the same with things like Drytop, Silverwastes, Claw of Jormag etc. – any time I decided to do it I find there’s plenty of other people there too.

I’m doing map completion for the ump-teenth time. Otherwise, yeah, I don’t see many people in pre-expac. You can usually find some people hanging out at a few of the dungeons though.

Barkloud.3584:

I am looking to come back and play. I am not quite sure i want to buy the expnsion yet. Is there a decent size community that plays in non heart of thorn areas?

Welcome back, Bark.

It is not just about the new maps, you know? With the expansion comes a ton of content that makes life in old Tyria better and more exciting as well. For instance, the gliding ability and the masteries. Also, many events connected to what lies beyond the old main campaign.

So, in any case, I do recommend getting HoT. You won’t regret it.

I am often in Central Tyria because I like the different themes of it (when I am sick of jungle themes), the smooth performance (my GTX970 is having a hard time in the Jungle) and the hilarious NPC chatter. You will see so many people with masteries there that is a good evidence the “regular GW2” is full with new and veteran players.

Excelsior.

I rarely play in the HoT or LWS3 areas and I see lots of players at boss events. However right now it’s Wintersday so there’s a lot of players in Divinity’s Reach doing the Festival content.

The keep adding collections, achieves, even and LS stuff that forces you to go to core – so yes, there is plenty of players in core game.

I am all over the place. Just came back from legion wow (holy crap you cant imagine how boring that game become) and having a blast!

Half the time I don’t see any one doing the Heart of Thorns maps either, granted I do play on off hours but it used to be that Auric Basin and Dragon Stand always had active maps.

For example last night my wife and I were pushing AB and by the time the assault portion started the map was D E A D, we even got another option to switch to a more populated map which again was D E A D.

Keep in mind AB is the place to go where gold rains from the sky it seems so If I’m in AB between 10PM and 11PM on a Saturday night with a dead AB map then Houston we’ve got a problem, I was flabbergasted and apologized to my wife because I had been hyping this thing up.

Keep in mind this isn’t the first AB I’ve seen dead maps. I’ve also yet to ever see one of these fabled Verdant Brink progression maps, ever, nor have I ever seen advertisements for the map in LFG.

So if you buy the expansion you’re going to have one hell of a bad time trying level your masteries unless you’re lucky and you fall within the slim window of prime time.

Perhaps this can be explained away by Wintersday, but then seriously it’s the same old stuff every year with a new infusion to RNG for.

Perhaps all the masses are doing Season 5 PVP, personally I never saw the appeal, I mean if I wanted to play a PVP game I’d play League of Legends.

The only thing I know is that I never see the zergs that I used to in HoT areas, or Orr.

I’m not even going to offer a Salty response like play something else because frankly even with other GW2 competitors they do not hold a candle to this game, how ever we need P E O P L E in order to make this game POP!

The problem with maps like Auric Basin and Dragon’s Stand (and some older ones like Silverwastes and Tequatl) is that they need a nearly full, organised map to succeed, which means you want everyone concentrated into as few maps as possible.

But the game is treating them the same way as any other maps – if lots of people arrive at once it will create several copies and spread people between them so there’s lots of 1/2 full maps and people on them can get their friends/guildies in to join them and other new arrivals can drop into any of them.

Players counter that by using the LFG tool to move everyone to one or two maps (or for something like AB which is even more highly organised they’ll do it through Team Speak so they can keep track of where everyone is). Which leads to 1 or 2 full maps and lots of dead ones where anyone who is in the map is looking to move to another one. Because it’s new, lots of people recently entered it and there’s still several there the game still sees it as an active map and will continue to drop people in.

However the time of day was probably a factor as well. I’m in the UK and play on the EU servers and I wouldn’t try to do a big meta-event like that after 10pm because I know there’s a lot fewer people around, even WvW empties out. It’ll be 11pm or midnight for the people in mainland Europe so they’ve mostly gone to bed and the chances of all the UK players doing the same thing is pretty much zero. By 11pm my time it’s dead. But that’s fine because I’ll normally stop playing around then too.

You’ve got a good point, I just assumed it’s on the weekend and just because it was 10PM to 11PM EST doesn’t mean it isn’t way earlier in the evening on the West Coast, just saying. Funny enough after complaining about VB I log in to see VB is the event daily so naturally there were people around for a change. The LW Maps are active so I guess that’s the new it girl in GW2.