Guild Wars 2

Speedmann.5269:

Simplicity.7208:

Hate it. And here’s why: I’m part of Attuned, a guild focused on fighting those “Hardcore” mega bosses. While it’s nice we can start the boss whenever we want, it’s terrible that we can no longer commandeer a map for ourselves.

Let me explain. Fights like the Triple Headed Jungle Wurm require coordination by 120~160 people with at least 110 of which in the same teamspeak. To accomplish this, my guild has been guesting to empty servers or forcing an overflow for private use. This ensures that we have only people who we know we can count on in the map and furthermore ensures we can actually accomplish killing the Wurm on a regular basis.

With the changes to the current system, it sounds like there will be no such thing as overflows, and no such thing as “empty maps” to guest to. In this case, it seems impossible to purge our runs of PUGs who are either geared incorrectly or unable/unwilling to follow commander instruction. Thus, this system makes future endeavors at killing the wurm (or any future, more-difficult boss) futile and impossible. Our guild is very dismayed over the fact that there has been no considerations for this situation and are skeptical that when this patch hits we’ll be able to kill wurm at all anymore due to the excessive amount of incompetent PUGs that will always be inside our (now merged) Bloodtide Coast.

While reading this i’d like to puke all over you. People like you are the worst thing which could ever happen to a game!

If anet didn’t design the content to be so hard then large guilds like this wouldn’t need to take over overflows and keep casuals and randoms who 9/10 times ignore instructions and cause a risk of failure. Blame your god Anet and not the guilds who actually challenge their ridiculous content in the only way possible.

So the waypoint system is a huge gold sink now? We cant teleport to waypoints until we’re on the map so we’ll have to teleport to the farthest waypoint, zone into the next map, go to the next farthest waypoint, and repeat?

Anet not all of us are filthy rich ingame you know. While I have played since launch I prefer to do other things I enjoy, those things jut happen to be not as profitable. Why am I getting punished because some people farm and have stacks of gold?

As a member of TTS, I have to say this kind of screws us even though we’re a Guild dedicated to this sort of content at least until December 2014.

-Our leadership and membership is scattered across different servers and 12 different guilds that means it’s extremely difficult to acquire any merits which seem to required in order to create the idea in order to maintain our current schedule. I like the idea of summoning teq or the wurm any time you want but over time the merit cost will be huge. Since the new system to unite guild influence won’t come into play until December 2014, we’re screwed until then.

-As stated there is no way of making a new empty instance with this system, I do know this won’t be a problem until Anet rolls out the server system to Sparkfly Fen and Bloodtide coast (and it seems southsun coast) but unless they’re planning a new system this is a huge problem for us.

Summoning Teq or Wurm whenever we want will be great but it seems like Anet didn’t fully think of our concerns when thinking of this system. This will be a bit of a logistical nightmare for us when the update hits.

It should have been a 22 or 26 hour schedule or something like it that would rotate the start times around during the day every week or two, i.e. monday claw goes off at 5 pm, tuesday 7pm, wed 9pm, etc.. People tend to play at consistent times and as it stands now you will just see the exact same events over and over each day. Play from 7pm to 9pm US eastern? Sorry, no mark II golem, teq, KQ or Claw of Jormag for you. What do you gain? You will be able to shoot at Shatterer’s foot at the same time every day. Not an even tradeoff.

Abaia.1365:

So in the Economics blog, JS said he balanced the removal of repair costs with a reduction in champ payouts. Will anything be done to balance the cost of increased waypoint usage, reduced access to events (and their rewards), and less efficient harvesting? Seems like characters will necessarily be poorer in the new megaserver system.

Of course not. Rebalancing in this game is always done downward only, after all…

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

1. removed repair cost =
2. doubled waypointing cost =

Ô_ó

You forgot to mention about 1) and about to reduce gold obtained from loot. Double penalty for players.

Oh the schedule, I would recommend “doubling up” the minor bosses, so two of them always start at the same time (so, for example, Fire Elemental and Svanir Shaman could be both on at the same time). This would give people more choice about which one to go to and allow them to repeat every hour rather than every two hours and you will more easily be able to do a boss if you’ve had to drop off for a bit (but a “full run” of all the bosses would still require you to play for at least two hours).

I don’t think I like the rigid schedule for Tequatl, Evolved Jungle Wurm and Karka Queen. The problem is that it will mean that some people can never have a shot at a particular boss during the week. For example, Karka Queen starts at 3:30, 9:00 and 18:00 on the West Coast and in central Europe so it will rule it out for a lot of people because they’ll either be sleeping or commuting when it’s on.

I would recommend rotating the boss order from day to day, so that different bosses are in different time slots.

Day one: Karka Queen at 16:00, Tequatl at 19:00, Evolved Jungle Wurm at 20:00

Day two: Tequatl at 18:00, Evolved Jungle Wurm at 19:00 and Karka Queen at 20:00

Day three: Evolved Jungle Wurm at 18:00, Karka Queen at 19:00 and then Tequatl at 20:00

Then back to day one, that way people can try the different bosses at times that may be better for them.

Will there be any sort of manual control over which instance we join? Or are we limited to partying people and joining their instance?

Beldin.5498:

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

What a joke .. why is it an exploit to learn actually where what ressource is ? That would be as if the randomize the whole map everytime and you have to manually search the way to CoF each time because it changes it location whenever you enter the map.

Because mining the ore on one character and then immediately switching to another character to mine the exact same ore is an exploit. Plain and simple. It doesn’t make sense logically, or RP wise or anything. Randomizing makes much more sense. It’s just that people are upset they can’t gather in the same places over and over.

All IMHO of course.

I’m not worried about 2-5s per travel, but I do feel the coming update is trying to get as many goldsinks in as possible. I am worried how-ever about the inconvenience of having double loadings screens for most of the places you want to go to and having to guess if you can even go to the desired waypoint. My laptop is decent, but it’s a laptop, the loadingscreens are annoying. I can’t get a desktop either since I can’t sit in a chair without pain due to my disability.

The waypoint system was one of my favourite parts about gw2, it was so convenient, now I’m unsure it will still be.

Abaia.1365:

So in the Economics blog, JS said he balanced the removal of repair costs with a reduction in champ payouts. Will anything be done to balance the cost of increased waypoint usage, reduced access to events (and their rewards), and less efficient harvesting? Seems like characters will necessarily be poorer in the new megaserver system.

^^ this

The World Boss Schedule (WBS) should have overlaps. I see no reason why 2 bosses can’t be out at the same time in different zones for the sake of variety. Especially because now the number of scheduled times for the 3 mega-bosses will be drastically reduced.

At 1900EST on the WBS the Megadestroyer will be up. If I’m only playing for an hour or 2 that evening I’ll have no chance of seeing the Evolved Jungle Wurm at 2300. Why not have that boss run simultaneously? They’re in different zones anyway, so I see no issue. Running 2 events at a time over different zones, especially with the mga-bosses, would be hugely beneficial for anyone who wants to take on specific world bosses.

Even with Guild triggered mega-bosses, that’s still contingent on enough active guild members being on at the same time, having enough merits, and wanting to do it. Gives a single player no control over their content choice.

Speedmann.5269:

Eladamri.2437:

Speedmann.5269:

I’d really like to have them on there own map. But the attitude “incompetent player, noobs, casuals suck” etc makes them bad players to me. I’d even like to give them their own game so no one needs to ever get in contact with them :-P

The problem is not incometence, inexperience or noobieness. The major problem – after doing the new jungle worm successfully for quite some time now – is that not all players on the map are willing to do the boss.
Thus we end up with too small numbers and failing. Having only one opportunity/day (without guilds starting the event) this gets quite frustrating.

This is something i can accept and think which should be kind of addressed by Arenanet. Of course you can’t forbid any player to be on a map and do something else, there should be a way for those who want to do the event to “meet with other players”

Maybe get an feature like LFG for world maps to get certain things done? I’d appreciate it as i do not have to use it if i don’t want to and everyone who wants, can to.

As much as I do like the idea of opening a new map that is “restricted” to those answering the lfg, it still misses the excitement of trying and gathering.
I imagine the boss could become very badly overfarmed: Once you find a good map full of people and the guilds big enough to have enough unlocks it would be no problem to do the jungle worm every hour for 6-10 hours a day.

Thing is the balancing very easily tips at this point.

Apparently, ArenaNet does not think that their waypoint change deserves its own thread as they closed and locked my attempt to discuss this. Pity, this is a pretty big issue, not just a after note on other changes.

The new perma-contested waypoints (for outside maps) will create a significant time separation for activities. Most high-level areas only have two non-contestable waypoints. Thus you will be required to map twice in order to travel successfully. On people not running off of a T1 line, that will easily double their travel time. And for high level characters, it will jump costs to around double for short travel (2 sil each for two close waypoints) and 1.5 for long travel (4 sil for the distance, 2 sil for the intra-map waypoint).

But that is not the big problem I see.

Although each map will hypothetically have a higher player count, I believe this will make it vastly more difficult to gather players for a specific event.

Consider the Temple of Lyssa (aka Cathedral of Eternal Radiance) event chain:
The typical method to proceeding with this event is to clear the Garden of Ilya event so that others coming from LA, DR, etc. can map directly to the meta-event. This change will make clearing the Garden useless.

Similarly, the Modniir Ulgoth chain naturally clears the Cloven Hoof Waypoint, allowing other to map in to attack the final series of Group Events. Again, this change will directly slow anyone attempting to join the rush.

No doubt, this is not a game breaking issue. But in an update that will yield so many quality of life improvements, this is a large, simultaneous step backwards.

Ugh, too many cons outweigh the pros.

1. Waypoint contestation is terrible. As much fun as it is to double the cost and load times, why can’t you guys just fix the waypoint redirect to actually work? The mechanic already exists in the game.
2. Primetime or GTFO! I’m on Anvil Rock. During non-prime time, bosses (besides starting zone bosses) don’t happen. One of the greatest things about tier one servers is that they serve as a meeting ground for high scaling bosses. You can actually get a group to do them. There are enough people. Now you are completely removing this option for a reason I don’t understand. Events can overlap! Maps can scale! Why are you removing them from time slots? Do you guys just hate non prime time WB players? Put the megadestroyer and karka queen at 9pm at the same time! If people don’t show, the map scales. I thought this was the entire point of the system.
3. Synchronous spawns. Why are the spawns synced like this? To get all the standard events will take hours. So much for a decent efficient run. Guess you guys want to make us go champ farm instead. Kudos.
4. What happened to the other WBs? Where is the dredge commander? Where is the fire shaman? Where is ogre wars?
5. Trying to do temples is going to be horrendous. We can’t know the progress since we can’t know the map.

Honestly, your system causes just as many problems as it fixes. Here’s an idea, leave the maps alone and just megaserver the living story zone. This is coming from a guy on a small server. This is not an improvement.

Guilds starting world boss events is cool. BUT …

But way how overflows works will make it suck big time. I wonder how easy will it be to get 100 guild members into same overflow, even with all those ‘smart’ AI changes which will pick overflows fo us. I’m sorry , based on current experience with guild missions when there is world event in map, I simply cant see it work properly.

Seriously dear Anet, i dont understand you. Gw1 was/is wonderfull game. Why do you insists doing everything differently in gw2 ?! In gw1, what you had in cities was basicly overflow system, but you called them districts and there was this neat little feature you know, ability to pick in which district you wanted to be in. So why we still can’t do this ? Instead you choose to do overcomplicated system for automatic picking, when the best solution is incredibly simple – let US to do it, let us pick overflow …

Thomas Kaira.7863:

The change for mega-bosses will not work, and this is why I feel this way:

1. It can potentially force a rep requirement for these raid guilds due to how expensive it will be to unlock the world event unlock. Furthermore, this is EXTREMELY damaging to TTS which ranges across multiple guilds. They would likely need to unlock the trigger on multiple guilds to maximize the number of leaders who can actually trigger the events. This would take an incredibly long time.

2. We can’t even instance our raids anymore. There is a very good reason we do this: randoms have proven on multiple occasions that they have no intention of following directions, refuse to come onto a public Teamspeak server to listen to the instructions given, and get in the way of other guild members who might want to do the content as well. The reason TTS and the like uses overflows and dead server maps to do this content is to maximize guild participation and minimize randoms who might cause problems and fail the run. But the megaserver system is completely obliterating our ability to do this.

These new features will actually be detrimental to the guilds they are trying to support. They need to be changed and fast. And also, this needs to be addressed too:

THESE RAIDS NEED TO BE INSTANCED. The organization required is too much to expect a group full of randoms not communicating to be able to accomplish them.

What is desperately needed at this point is a guild map, which would allow the mega-guilds to create private maps to perform these events. the only difference between that map and the public maps are that you would need to enter a password to be allowed in. This is so to not affect multi-guild guilds like TTS and also to allow randoms in when the guild decides to allow it (anyone can enter so long as they know the password). The guild map would need to be purchased outside of the guild menu (again, because making it influence and merit based would be extremely kitten raid guilds who typically don’t do guild missions and potentially force a rep requirement).

Yes yes yes, the core problem here is, specialized “super mega hyper hardcore events thingy” guilds often don’t require full time rep AND are formed by several guilds, TxS has 4, TTS has an insane number, I have no clue about the other teams so I can’t speak about that, but they’ll have the same problem.

I very much agree with an option like a “guild map” from the gem store or something and the ability to research the boss spawn upgrade without having guild challenges

With everything scheduled is there any way we could get an in-game UI to see the schedule or at least which events are currently happening / about to happen instead of having to shell out to a web browser and constantly refer back to this post?

I totally HATE this changes on world bosses. I have around 3 hours to play everyday (mon-fri, on weekends i can barely log on) which means that i will no longer be able to complete almost all world events as it is today, which means less gold, which means it will take much more freaking months to craft a legendary. You already nerfed the gold received from champ bags without any good reason, and now you are even lowering our chances to get them. Do you ANET really want us to do freaking stupi, meaningless, boring, annoying CHAMP train farm in FG and QD? I mean, seriously? It has been hard enough to me to craft my first legendary with the limited amount of time that i have to play (thanks precursor RNG), with these changes that you have just announced, i feel like being forced to spend money on gems to convert to gold, otherwise i won’t ever be able to finish my freaking Incinerator.

One more thought: You gave us the Wardrobe which would “save” money/gold from us with one time buying skins, and now you want us to spend the same money/gold to get anything else related to gold in the game?

I was pretty happy with all announcements up until now, but this last one just made me realize that GW2 is not the game i want to play anymore. This is not EVE online, come on, i don’t want to play a “monetary” game, i just want to do the stuff i was supposed to be enjoying while aiming for a goal (legendary for example).

Waypoints being contested is probably the worst thing possible ever. It will just waste everyone’s time. We will have to go through the loading screen twice for no reason when it should normally be once.
It is just lame that this system will be implemented before that technical difficulty can be resolved.

World events I really liked the way it was before. I’d look at the timer and see when it would be up. I wouldn’t have to go and do all pre events all the time and all that boring stuff.

I like all the other changes in this feature patch except this. You should not rush something like this before you make it better. Rather have something good than something rushed.

Oh dear.

As excited as I was about the megaservers meaning easier times doing bosses, now I’m disappointed. Teq (the one I do most often) will now not run on JQ at 7pm Eastern. So all the friends I made doing the event will probably not be able to do it all on the same map anymore, if it only runs a couple times a day. That’s extremely disappointing.

This all seems unnecessarily complicated.

Sorry, I give up, here is a Straight up Complaint

Dear ArenaNet,

You have given us a lot of new information on changes. Literally, dozens of new aspects we can discuss. But we have to discuss all of them in a single thread. This is not conducive to an intelligent conversation. This only promotes one-and-out whining.

I already asked for suggestions to fix what I feel could be a significant new waypoint problem, but you closed the thread. So now I ask the same thing here. But note, rather than answer me, you will find a lot of responses that are ignoring my request to reiterate what they like/dislike/hate about other unrelated changes.

If you actually want a discussion, let us discuss the separate changes separately.

The other thread was closed but please remove contested waypoints from pve, when players hit one they just go ugh and this change makes them even worse. Maybe make them usable but still have the enemies there so you need to break out.

Same goes for dungeon opening events.

So we can start our own Tequatl runs at our leisure, but we still can’t have our own instance? Please make it so!

As a senior member of a mid-sized guild on a underpopulated server, I’d say the proposed changes sound nice in theory, but the key will be how they actually work.

Right now, when we run Guild Missions, all of our participating players end up on the same map instance, because the map population is low enough that there is no risk of an overflow. The only catch is some players from other servers have to guest. There is no way this can be improved except for eliminating the need for some players to guest. If the new system works as advertised, we will all be able to pile in to the same map without having people shunted into a different copy. If it doesn’t work, we’ll be split with no easy way to link up, and it will take some valuable bounty-hunting time to link up.

Likewise, it’s hard to find an open dungeon or a pact-controlled temple in Orr due to the limited number of PvE players on our server. With this new system, ideally, I should have a decent chance of ending on a copy of the map with more people (and therefore a higher chance of having an open dungeon). If it doesn’t work, I can’t fall back on guesting to another world for an open instance.

We don’t do most of the hard-core events because we can’t get enough people on our server. In theory, this makes it more likely that I can find a group of people to join for an event, and if ANet is right, the system should put most of the hard-core-event-guild groups together for events based on guild affiliation.

The devil is in the details. If ANet is right, most of these complaints will be non-issues. We can’t know until tested by actual play conditions whether their predictions will hold. Let’s see what actually happens before we complain too much.

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Something else to point out is as these nodes will be considerably harder to farm the scarcity will naturally increase. So I would expect prices to rise drastically, thus equalizing the time invested / profit ratio.

Thank you for making it so I will never get to do Teq again because of my play time. … same with my world boss run. You’ve also hurt communities like TxS and TTS whose member base is spread over 12 guilds and multiple servers. The way it feels now makes it like if you can’t play prme time sucks to be you.

Ill update with better feedback and issues one I fall into a disappointed numb state aand am thinking more with my head and less with my heart.

The absolute lack of api support made this a terrible thing for me. I liked those user created tools that helped you figure out whether or not a boss was up, or whether a temple or dungeon was open. If a guild decides to trigger an event, other than going onto the map, how are we supposed to know what is going on in the world anymore. API support was one of the better features of this game.

The contested waypoints also seems like it would be terrible. As convenient as it is to have a set schedule, there is also a major inconveniences to the players to support it.

I have to say I’m not a big fan of this, like so many others. I run the Ulgoth chain all the time. It runs about every hour and takes less than half an hour, most times. Now instead of just logging in and waiting a little bit for it to inevitably start again I’ll have to hope I can play at the precise time it’s scheduled to start. I might be able to do 8:30, but there’s no guarantee.

I think this system would be much improved if there was a fourth category between the lowbie and normal events. I would call it frequent events and these events would overlap many, or even most of the other events, just not themselves. So rather than happening four times a day, an event like the Ulgoth could happen twelve times in conjuncture with other major events.

You can only go to one event at a time anyway, this would just let you choose which event that is.

Lankybrit.4598:

Because mining the ore on one character and then immediately switching to another character to mine the exact same ore is an exploit. Plain and simple. It doesn’t make sense logically, or RP wise or anything. Randomizing makes much more sense. It’s just that people are upset they can’t gather in the same places over and over.

All IMHO of course.

I disagree that it was an exploit. The game was deliberately designed to work that way: if it was an exploit then they could easily have changed the nodes from once per character per day to once per account per day to prevent it.

It’s largely moot as if I mine the nodes in a map then change to a different character and waypoint into the same map then their sorting algorithm will probably sort me straight back into the same instance of that map as I was on so I can still mine the same nodes on different characters.

Also, because it’s randomised for each map with some effort you will be able to get to the different versions of the maps and harvest the nodes on each and every map there is (the LFG tool will help there) once per day. That is far more of an “exploit” than the old system was.

The thing that made me quit WoW was the fact that we had strict times to Raid and do some progression, and now the same is happening with GW2.

Time to give a shot on those new releases for 2014, cause now i can see that nothing really good will ever come, bad choices will always overcome the great news.

GG Anet, GG

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Holy kitten, you heard it here people, using an external site like orrmaps.com was an exploit and you should be ashamed of doing it.

Ok…i have a question…..who thought this overbloated, overcomplicated monstrosity of a system was a good ideea in the first place? Not to slide too much in the doomsaying but look just at how many problems you created in order to fix population problems on low pop servers:

1. You scheduled all the events on all servers at specific times. Even with the very short dead times inbetween it still takes 5 hours to make a full time rotation through all of the bosses which means many of your players, who can only play on a very restricted time period, will never get to do the bosses that are out of their play time. Also let’s not forget the added over problem that some of the traits, with the new trait system, need you to defeat specific world bosses in order to gain them. At least with the old system such players could simply hunt the events necessary on other servers, now the only way to get them is for them to organize their life around your timetable, buy the trait, or just forgo it entirely.

2. You’re randomizing each of the map instance’s resource nodes……we on Gunnars Hold had this wonderful thing called the Mining Run. Now it’s dead. Also trying to find all the nodes by yourself will take over 1 hour if you’re lucky. And trying to make map nodes and establishing routes is basically impossible since you have no ideea even if you will hit the version of the region you mapped. Ty very much for kittening with my profits Anet. Love you too.

3. You have no control over what version of the region you enter making organized or playing in a large group even more difficult. See all the complains about Teq and wurm. Also at a smaller scale, with the new system trying to even follow a commander to a region becomes a game of luck if you even going to land in the same map version or wherever this nebulous magical algorithm will put you. Example, on Gunnars we do temple runs in the evening, alongside the problem of getting into the version of the map where the commanders got into we also have to problem of having other commanders from other servers brought into that version, either already running i tor vying for control over the run.

4. Contested waypoints. Outside the fact this means you have to basically play russian roulette if you’ll even get to the wp you wanted, in the dire situation you don’t, hope you like the, basically, doubled loading times (let alone that in between those 2 loading screen you have no ideea on what version of the map you land). Also thanks to the wonderful inability of seeing contested waypoints tracking down open temples, events or trying to enter COF or COE without spending 30 minutes of your life on the preevents (when with the old system it took me 2 minutes to find it open on another server) becomes a question of RNG….also don’t forget to add the lack of control over the version you enter to begin with.

5. Server identity, community and organization. It’s called “server” community for a reason. While my server is open to all newcomers, having ppl added over from other servers at random to reach some nebulous amount of players is gonna create nothing but trouble. I’m going at this one just by the example you gave us on the blog, where you had 30 ppl from one server in a map so the system adds about 30 players randomly from other servers versions of the map. This also makes server organized events like temple runs, mining runs, teq runs etc quite a conundrum to run with all the new ppl who have no clue about how we organize popping up at random.

6. WvW. Don’t think i need to explain this one. Hopefully the next upcoming blog posts will abate my fears. I’m not holding my breath though.

At this point it would have been easier to just merge the low pop servers insted of overhaluing the current system into this monstrosity, let alone that at least we had some form of sure workarounds for the old onw, while with the new one we are left at the mercy of some mystical algorithm. Wrestling our control over our own game experience is not gonna keep many players in this game. Tbh if once it goes live and it is as bad as i make it sound, that population drop problem will become far more acute then before. I know it will be my case.

Marauding Scum.6728:

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Holy kitten, you heard it here people, using an external site like orrmaps.com was an exploit and you should be ashamed of doing it.

How in the name of god was this an exploit? Gathering specific mats would be a tedious and miserable experience without the help of those maps. On the same note world boss timers or temple status sites were also dirty filthy exploits as well?

So I have two comments:

1) I don’t like how this looks like it is going to impact running of dungeons such as Cathedral of Fire (I know GW1 die hard), and Crucible of Eternity. Basically it looks like now you have to unlock the dungeon each time you want to run it since guesting to a certain world appears to be a thing of the past.

2) So my longer comment. To me it looks like (at first appearance) you are treating it like map population is something static. You algorithm appears to look at a snapshot in time (event trigger when someone decides to zone into a certian zone) to decide where to put them. While this is fine in theory, what happens as time progresses from zero to n? Won’t maps get to a state in which, without forcing movement of players while they are in the map will become completely disorganized?

This really reminds me of OS memory management schemes. (Sorry thinking back to my Operating Systems class which was quite some time ago….).

To illustrate what I mean let’s assume each map has a capacity of six, we have three maps [alpha, beta, gamma], we have 5 home worlds [a, b, c, d, e], and 6 guilds [1,2,3,4,5,6].

So at t = 0 the maps for x zone looks like this:

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T= 1 Ash[d,6] joins zone placed in map Alpha

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T=2 Tyler[b,3] joins zone, placed in map Beta

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3], Tyler[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T=3 Brenda[a,2] joins zone. At this point Alpha (where she should reasonably be placed is full since this system wants more full maps and placed Ash[d,6] in the spot she should be in. Brenda[a,2] placed in Beta where her guild and home world people aren’t.

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3], Tyler[b,3], Brenda[a,2]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

Now while this is an exaggerated example that doesn’t show people leaving, and limits the map cap drastically, over time this is still a problem that could occur. Especially in high population areas such as LA.

What have you guys done to prevent this “decay” or “fragmentation” from happening?

guardian.6489:

As a member of TTS, I have to say this kind of screws us even though we’re a Guild dedicated to this sort of content at least until December 2014.

-Our leadership and membership is scattered across different servers and 12 different guilds that means it’s extremely difficult to acquire any merits which seem to required in order to create the idea in order to maintain our current schedule. I like the idea of summoning teq or the wurm any time you want but over time the merit cost will be huge. Since the new system to unite guild influence won’t come into play until December 2014, we’re screwed until then.

-As stated there is no way of making a new empty instance with this system, I do know this won’t be a problem until Anet rolls out the server system to Sparkfly Fen and Bloodtide coast (and it seems southsun coast) but unless they’re planning a new system this is a huge problem for us.

Summoning Teq or Wurm whenever we want will be great but it seems like Anet didn’t fully think of our concerns when thinking of this system. This will be a bit of a logistical nightmare for us when the update hits.

Pretty much this. Really killed guilds like TTS/TxS. Repping is required, except for raids, so influence isn’t gained that much, and as far as I know, none of our TTS guilds do actual guild missions, so no merits for us at all to use to start the megabosses.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Let guilds start every boss, open every dungeon permanently. Other stuff is cool.

This. Please ANet.

AlexEBT.7240:

Marauding Scum.6728:

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Holy kitten, you heard it here people, using an external site like orrmaps.com was an exploit and you should be ashamed of doing it.

How in the name of god was this an exploit? Gathering specific mats would be a tedious and msierable experience without the help of those maps. On the same note world boss timers or temple status sites were also dirty filthy exploits as well?

That is what I’m trying to figure out, you might wanna ask Lankybrit.4598 for a good reasoning.

Spoilers: you will be disappointed.

Strongly dislike these changes.

Maybe dynamic events should now be called “Scheduled Events.” Putting world bosses on a strict, rotating schedule completely destroys spontaneity, one of the things I enjoy most in this game. I will no longer be able to roam maps with a few friends and say, “Hey guys let’s go start this event chain to get this boss to pop!”

I’ll wait and see how things pan out, but my time available for play fluctuates wildly day by day. I don’t want a “game schedule” on top of a working schedule. Stupid change, let us be spontaneous and make our own choices.

I do not mind paying double for a wp but I really hate the loading time that this will impeded on my game.

Remove it or double the cost for waypoints.

Marauding Scum.6728:

AlexEBT.7240:

Marauding Scum.6728:

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Holy kitten, you heard it here people, using an external site like orrmaps.com was an exploit and you should be ashamed of doing it.

How in the name of god was this an exploit? Gathering specific mats would be a tedious and msierable experience without the help of those maps. On the same note world boss timers or temple status sites were also dirty filthy exploits as well?

That is what I’m trying to figure out, you might wanna ask Lankybrit.4598 for a good reasoning.

Spoilers: you will be disappointed.

How can i be dissapointed when i had no hopes to begin with? :P

What do you guys mean? Obviously I should say kitten my sleep for work and be up at 5:00 to be able to catch the world events. Because it’s not like i’ve played since launch and still haven’t had a precursor drop, and this won’t hurt my chances more.

What I really don’t get is back with the ancient karka the first time, anet said they’d stop doing one time events because some people might not be able to attend due to other reasons and that it wasn’t fair. But this is the same type of thing, why’d they change their stance on this? We’re already limited by account bound once a day rewards at world bosses, now we’re limited by when we play as well? Not all of us can play whenever we like.

The world boss schedule leaves no room for expansions that contain additional world bosses (Unless they let them overlap).

Heron.6859:

I do not mind paying double for a wp but I really hate the loading time that this will impeded on my game.

Remove it or double the cost for waypoints.

Well, thing is, the sytem doesn’t know beforehand in what version of the map it will put you in, so wether you hit a contested wp or not is a matter of RNG. The workaround they are using is the only thing they can do about this.

I like how the megaserver testing will be rolled out slowly for adjustments. There is the possiblity too that people will change play styles in other ways that could be fun. For example, people may run the orr pre events more as groups in the consolidated instances instead of just waiting for the current api to show balthazar is running. This may spread folks out more than zerging, making more of the zone content played overall.

By rolling it out in phases the devs can gauge if this will occur in the later phases if this is intended. Change always causes concern, it is how well both sides of the pc screen adapt and consider the others objectives.

My play style will likely change with this update when all is applied to all maps. Instead of zooming to the events as fast as possible the api says is up, then rotating characters, I will look at the time of the next boss event to go there. If there isn’t one up, I will probably find a zone with event chains to trigger and run. If this is the intention of the devs, I can see them adding more long chained dynamic events like orr to other zones.

I am not worried, and will reserve judgement till after all is implemented. Who knows, we may just like the changes that encourage us to play in different ways.

They may even up scale these smaller events in rewards based on data from the low level zone rollout. With these big events timers changing, they may do this earlier based on datamining. We don’t have data from our side how the economy balance will change with reduced mats, gold, items from these events vs expected spreadout more running of other events. These metrics will likely keep the dev economist very busy the week after the patch.

So does this mean that a guild could in theory do a world boss train? Meaning they can just spawn the bosses whenever they are done with the previous one and move on to the next one?
If that’s the case, at least make a long CD on the activation so they can’t be spammed.

Marauding Scum.6728:

AlexEBT.7240:

Marauding Scum.6728:

Lankybrit.4598:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

To the people complaining about this. You were exploiting the fact that you could know the node routes and thus get the same nodes on multiple characters. I understand that you’re upset they’ve removed the exploit, but it’s good for the game overall.

Holy kitten, you heard it here people, using an external site like orrmaps.com was an exploit and you should be ashamed of doing it.

How in the name of god was this an exploit? Gathering specific mats would be a tedious and msierable experience without the help of those maps. On the same note world boss timers or temple status sites were also dirty filthy exploits as well?

That is what I’m trying to figure out, you might wanna ask Lankybrit.4598 for a good reasoning.

Spoilers: you will be disappointed.

Guys, calm down.

You can not like my opinion all you want. It’s just that. My opinion. You have yours, I have mine.

Peace.

Meh, I think the Waypoint idea isn’t a great one. I mean, I get the frustration of choosing a WP and being dumped to another because that one became contested (or getting dumped to an overflow where it’s contested), but I just would go to another WP and move on. I don’t get how it’s that big of an issue.

I am really lazy, I waypoint everywhere.

Now I am going to get charged twice to get where I am going and suffer through 2 loading screens.

That’s not very user friendly!

This is going to annoy me for a long, long time…so I reserve the right to continue moaning about this for the next couple of years…

Likes:
-Guild control over events (this seems like it would help super guilds like TTS take down teq at a time when not many are in zone so they can get more of their people into their fight.)

Dislikes:
-Seems confusing to get a whole guild into a particular map by partying the whole guild and taxi-ing them in. Perhaps there could be a button on the guild missions menu to say, “join guild event map” or something.

-Double waypointing for contested waypoints. Ok this one annoys me, I have to pay for two waypoints just to get to my dungeon instance and wait for two loading screens. This seems pretty annoying.

-Dungeon contesting events. Ok, I deal with running these events a lot, but they are a huge deterrant from playing cof, when I could just go to another dungeon and earn the same 1 bonus gold without having to escort razen the raider for the 100000000th time. No I cant even have a hope of skipping them by guesting anymore.

Thoughts:
-Boss timers are really the only solution for a mega server, but they limit what events I can play if I can only play in the evenings, etc.
-I really like the game as it is, why is this change needed anyways? I mean, if I wanna play with fewer people, I visit small servers, and if I wanna take down a mega boss, I visit higher population servers. It was never a problem to have different worlds.