Guild Wars 2

storiessave.3807:

Wait, so we’re not going to be able to know when temple events are up when this gets to Orr? The blog says temple events aren’t being synchronized…so they’re going to be random on every map and thus impossible to get timers for?

With the fact that a whopping one waypoint in every Orr zone will be unlocked (since you’re locking all possible contested WPs until you load into the map), this is going to be extremely inefficient, having to constantly run around to see if any of the meta events for the temples are up.

Who thought this was a brilliant idea, again?

gosh ppl…start reading the complete text:

Temples of Orr—The cross-map mechanics of these temples will be disabled. Instead, god statues will be active only when the nearest temple is contested.

so, you port to an orr-map and then you just have to look if one of this little yellow statues on the map is active…

While I like the change in general, it’s going to destroy the larger world events. Tequatl and the Wurm were specifically designed only to be winnable with a large, coordinated group. There was even a stealth-buff to tequatl’s health a few weeks ago, possibly because it was considered too easy.

Now imagine you have the required 100 to 120 people in a teamspeak, as coordinated as it gets. But you have no map to do the event on.
Every map that’s being joined is already half-full, there’s no low-population world, no empty overflow, nothing. You cannot do the event, because your group cannot play together.

What we need for those two events is the ability to create our own map instances. For guilds and/or commanders. Those instances can only be joined by partying with someone already on the map.

While I understand that the first rollout will not impact Sparkfly Fen or Bloodtide Coast, I hope that such a feature will be implemented prior to the full rollout.

…

Some people have expressed negative feelings towards making these events invite only. The open world is for everyone. And I generally agree.

But Tequatl and the Wurm are very unforgving, to the point of being griefable. I’ve seen either event fail for no other reason than a single (malicious or clueless) person doing the wrong thing and failing the event for everyone. You need everyone to be coordinated, and that unfortunately excludes random passerbys. Note that this exclusion wasn’t decided by the guilds, but by ArenaNet when they designed the events.

Some people worry that they won’t be able to do the bosses any more, but worry not. There’s barely any guild large enough to do these events on their own. Either boss has plenty of coordinated groups where the only barrier to participation is the ability to join a teamspeak server, request a taxi into the overflow and listen. For an event that requires coordination, that cannot be asking too much.

Mathzz.7501:

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.

They can only spawn the three mega bosses. So yes, in theory, they could queue up three of the consumables over time, and then use them back to back (if the normal map spawn time isn’t about to come up). But it’s something they’d have to prepare for by creating the consumable.

I am disappointed with a few design choices and really hope they will be reconsidered before they are applied:

- Scheduling of world bosses:

Why didn’t you choose to implement a rotating schedule so that somebody playing 2 hours a day at fixed time for example could get a shot at all of the bosses, the currently presented schedule basically means some players will never have a single shot at some of the bosses.

- Waypoints

I Dislike the idea of having waypoints contested if you’re not in the map as it basically means that you won’t be able to port from one side of the map to the other. You’re basically removing fast travel there and forcing players to run everywhere which outside of the time needed to cross a map also means that you will have all of the cross map load times. Or will we be able to port to contested waypoint when coming from another map (In which case it would make more sense to represent all points as uncontested)?

As i feared, the big minus HUGE minus in this system will be the dynamic event systems limitations.
World and map state are going to be minimized.

So essentially doing dynamic events will matter even less than they do now. Whereas people talked about systems where the entire state of the map shifts as people play through it, this is less likely with so many random shards up all the time. So for content that they want people to play they will have to use slow timers.

The guild spawning is nice, but the whole thing is kind of EHHHH from a design standpoint and from a standpoint of what you guys said you wanted to achieve for dynamic events.

The idea that the world may change and new and different things may happen based on what the players do, is essentially out the window. I know that for many maps you never realized this goal, but i was hoping you might get more into this as the game/world evolved.

This is a good functional change, but i feel like its going to limit dynamic event/world design even further. Looks like EQnext may carry the torch that you guys started on that tip, then again its pretty early and maybe no one can pull it off. Sad to see that one of your strongest features will never get evolved.

To be clear under this system pre events and chains are things of the past for any big content. The permanence is gone. No more people in a city zone saying hey guys, we re gonna do dwayna now.

And i cant really think of any benefits from a design standpoint to the world, or the event system with this change, Other than getting more people in low end maps. I think the problem here is your engineers came up with a cool engineering feature, but its not a good world design feature.

I ll try to make a post for possible solutions to these issues under the new system

Zine.2136:

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.

Thanks Zine for saving me the time to write all this out myself. Mirrors my opinion exactly at this point.

Okay, I waited until we got this blogpost on world bosses and yeah… I don’t think this whole mega-server is such a good idea. If anything, I’m foreseeing the destruction of the PvE community that has been growing on all the different servers.

First of all, and perhaps the smallest of my problems is the loss of a home. I’m from Gunnar’s Hold and even though I’m not really into WvW (I think it’s a great concept. Just not really my thing ^^ ), I’ve still always felt like Gunnar’s Hold is my home, and now we’ll be losing that :/

The waypoints, dungeons and temples always being contested unless you’re on that specific map is also another big issue. It will be a big gamble every time you travel to that map and then hoping your map will have an uncontested waypoint/temple/dungeon. Also, the double waypoint costs will be very troubling as well, especially in Orr.

The scheduled world events, while it would solve the introduced problem with not knowing whether or not your current map is about to spawn the fire elemental or not, it does not at all help people who aren’t able to be online very much and the like.

But those problems are nothing compared to what the Karka Queen, Tequatl and 3-headed Wurm are gonna introduce now. I am glad that there is at least a way to activate these events manually, but this is only for the larger guilds who have been around for quite some time already. Small guilds or guild-less people will be dependent on the bigger guilds in order to activate those events for them, and especially for the 3-headed jungle wurm and Tequatl, this is going to introduce a major issue. These are difficult events that will require a LOT of organization and tons of people that all come together on TS3, and if you’re in a guild large enough to take on Tequatl, then this guild will be like ‘screw these pugs and randomers. This is our attempt and ours alone’. Other people who are in smaller guilds of are guild-less will most likely be screwed when it comes to the likes of the 3-headed wurm.

Organized events themselves will be over as well. On Gunnar’s Hold, we gather together every monday evening in order to take down Tequatl. Hypothetically, we’d still be able to do that with the guild event starter, but again we’ll run into a problem. Currently on Gunnar’s Hold, Sparkfly Fen isn’t usually all that busy, and most of us will be able to join the map, no sweat, but that will also be over now, because rather than just 20 random Gunnar’s Hold people in Sparkfly, there will be 100 random people from several servers, who are not there for Tequatl and we’ll hit the map cap much sooner. Other organized events will also just be a lot harder to do for things that attract a lot of people.

Overall, yes, this megaserver idea will help solve the problem of maps like Brisban Wildlands where there’s just not that many people online, but it will most likely introduce a lot more issues than necessary.

Personally, I’d like it if we as players had more of an option, much like in Guild Wars 1. We’d still be put in our own server maps, we’d still be on Gunnar’s Hold, but if we reach map-cap, you wouldn’t be thrown in an overflow, but rather in an ‘international’ map, where you will be placed alongside other servers. It would also be great if we had the option of going to that international server whenever you want, in case you just want to enjoy some random group events that aren’t being done on your own home world. I think this would be a better solution than this megaserver idea, because it looks like it will just introduce a lot of issues rather than solve them.

Lankybrit.4598:

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.

Well, it’s not like we dislike your opinion. People just usually expect reasoning for having an opinion. So they can understand your viewpoint, and continue further discussion.

Personally, I think the idea of a schedule would be vastly improved by providing some form of content rotation. People who can only log on for a few hours after work probably don’t want to do the same things, every day, in the same order.

Other than that, nothing really bothers me or delights me about this update. Not being able to check on the status of locations is inconvenient, and I hope that the contested location content can be improved, but I have no recommendations as to how.

I haven’t played for a few months, but this new feature pack is bringing me back in. Even if I have some complaints, that doesn’t diminish my excitement from seeing interesting new changes.

Sera.6539:

Lankybrit.4598:

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.

Well, it’s not like we dislike your opinion. People just usually expect reasoning for having an opinion. So they can understand your viewpoint, and continue further discussion.

I stated why.

I believe that using the same nodes over and over on multiple characters is an exploit in the design of the game.

Lankybrit.4598:

I believe that using the same nodes over and over on multiple characters is an exploit in the design of the game.

On what grounds can you claim that using the same nodes over and over on multiple characters is unintended behavior?

On the topic of commanders, one thing that could help out there potentially: commander Squads would be factored into the map-join algorithm.

So if you want to stick with a particular commander, join his squad and the algorithm will do its best to keep you in the same map as him.

So how it would work: you get a commander, you join his squad. When the commander moves maps, it checks if the current prime candidate for the commander would accommodate everyone in his squad. If it does not, it would continue down the list until a map is found that does have enough space for everyone who is following him (and there would be a buffer-zone too to allow for random hot-joins to not affect the squad trying to zone in). Once the commander moves maps, if you are in his squad, the megaserver would prioritize putting you in the same map as the commander you are following.

Were server communities organising world tours offending you so much that you had to bring in this mess of a system to not only stop them but destroy those communities?

This is no good. This is no good at all. You guys should really step back and re-think this entire thing.

Merging players across server together in low pop zones is awesome. Great idea. Everyone but super paranoid RPers love the idea of a more populated world.

But setting bosses to a twice a day schedule while merging multiple communities at the same time? That is nightmare fuel. The bi-hourly schedule was fine. It would have allowed people to adapt and given everyone that isn’t necessarily a “peak player” options for events.

Letting guilds start the event was the right direction, but implemented horribly. Colin, Anthony, and the other devs there know it takes ~150 highly coordinated people and preparation to kill Wurm. It does absolutely no good, at all, to be able to trigger the encounter when you are in a server that consists of a hodge-podge mix of players from all over the place. There is no consistent way to get all of your members or guests on the same instance. Yes, yes, I understand you can “right click join”, but what if there are 30 people in the map that aren’t interested in the wurm and are doing their own thing? The guild cannot succeed.

The ability for guilds to trigger events, and PvE instances becoming server agnostic directly conflict with one another.

Finally, not being able to see the state of waypoints on the map? I’m sorry, but that seems like a very half-kitten implementation. You look at the map to find where you want to go, and to see what the closest waypoint is to that place. If we can’t get that simple information, then you have broken the absolute most basic point of having the map to begin with. There has to be a more elegant and functional solution than “make all the contestable waypoints contested all the time!”

Consider that for a moment. At a fundamental level, this approach has broken the freaking map and player’s world awareness. That is a big, bold, screaming, blatant red flag that this is going in the wrong direction.

I generally support you guys. And I am a huge fan of the “wait and see, have faith” approach. But conceptually this is bad man. This is very very bad. You need to not do this.

Unless they do something like put in a time lock of some kind, this should allow guilds/organized groups to build up 4-5 unlocks and restart a fight like the Worms or Tequatl until their group gets the fight down pat.

I still wish these events started scaling at 40 instead of 80 or 100, but this is a huge step in the right direction.

In my experience contested waypoints are normally open for most areas, closing them off from outside map travel adds additional in game cost and load time delay (my big concern).

The system was built with the idea that those contested points were placed in relation to open waypoints in a way that made sense. If additional waypoints were placed near contested area, but just outside the range, that would make more sense. Or maybe move the existing waypoints out of the contested area, have them always on the fringe. As proposed the plan is going to make getting around a chore, and it already is.

Compare WoW. Running somewhere sucks for time, but you get to see the world between point A and point B seamlessly. In GW2 you get loading screens if you try that over distance. It’s decidedly worse. But GW2 has the leg up on WoW in fast travel. The waypoint system is fast and efficient, but suffers from loading screen downtime. Flight points in WoW are pretty, but ultimately a time to sort your bags and get a drink. Nearly as bad as loading screens. I I could have windows open during loading screens, things might be different. I frequently have a 3-5 minute wait on loading screens, though usually somewhat shorter in map.

Something more has to be done than locking down contested waypoints. This is the easy solution, but there has to be a clever or at least elegant one.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

How will this work with rich/orichalcum/ancient wood nodes? These are currently limited to being harvested once a day per character.

Will we be:
- limited to harvesting each potential location once a day?
- have a max number of harvests of these regardless of location?
- something else?

Well with all the stuff coming in the April 15th patch I was pretty excited to get back into the game, mess around with skins and my appearance, respec with the new traits and stuff…

And now this? Bosses and events were my bread and butter man, they and the community around them were the mains stuff I would do, even if I could only get on for 2 hours a day, I could still do everything.

But this? This is ridiculous, pretty much every problem with this system has already been brought up. What’re smaller guilds even supposed to do? Just, forget about world bosses I guess…

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have ALL waypoints UNCONTESTED by default, then if someone tries to port to a contested waypoint, it drops them at the nearest one that isn’t contested?

Where is Fire Shaman, Foulbear Chief and Dredge Commissar?

Yeah, sorry, this just sucks. I farm world bosses. I do multiple instances with my alts every day. Now I’m going to fight them once or twice a day. Instead of once ever hour for some events, it’s now once every 5 hours. And bosses start every 15 minutes. So if you haven’t finished Jormag, you can forget about Maw for another 5 hours. This decision is absolutely awful. I can’t believe you think it’s a good idea. No wonder you didn’t want to tell us anything last night. For my part, world bosses are done, and so is this game, perhaps. What do you expect us to do all day if we can’t farm world bosses? You sure aren’t giving us any new content worth playing.

Daef.1860:

Well with all the stuff coming in the April 15th patch I was pretty excited to get back into the game, mess around with skins and my appearance, respec with the new traits and stuff…

And now this? Bosses and events were my bread and butter man, they and the community around them were the mains stuff I would do, even if I could only get on for 2 hours a day, I could still do everything.

But this? This is ridiculous, pretty much every problem with this system has already been brought up. What’re smaller guilds even supposed to do? Just, forget about world bosses I guess…

Have to agree with you. Prior posts on the apr 15th patch sounded good. Exciting, yeah! can’t wait! This boss change is like a bucket of cold water on that excited feeling.

And for Peeta’s sake, just get rid of the closed dungeon entrances already.

Guilds starting top-tier bosses as they wish… reminds me of some other games and a little thing called “raids”, which brings the monster called “progression” that destroys the game for every non-robot-i-want-to-be-the-best-of-all player…. and here i thought GW2 was good because it was different from said games….

Logged in just to echo the ‘this is bad’ sentiment you’re seeing over and over. Yesterday’s announcement was well received, until you dropped the fine print on us. In short, the benefits don’t outweigh the costs here. The obvious issues of making several popular dungeons hard to get to, as well as waypoint visibility adds up to major headache for your gamers.

GW2 is now a year and a half old. Other than some episodic content (ie LS) that for the most part hasn’t stuck around, there’s very little new to do in game. People that have stuck around make use of quick dungeon runs and the world boss train to fill in the gaps of something to do. You’ve completely turned that on its ear, and not for the better.

As others have mentioned, the increases time spent waypointing around the map is a hassle, but the real issue with the new waypoint/dungeon visibility is loading times. Not everyone has a high end system, and spending an extra 30+ seconds every time you try to get somewhere isn’t ok.

As to the World Bosses, what you’ve suggested is going to dismantle a fun and vibrant community that transends guilds and worlds. Whoever built the schedule of bosses did very little to take into account work and sleep schedules of people in different timezones. The lack of any sort of overlap or choice structure is also a big letdown. While I’m sure the new scheduling won’t completely ruin what’s because several enjoyable hours in a large group (can you say that of any other content in the game right now?), I’m sure it will have an adverse effect. Please revisit your overhaul of this.

While I agree that better populated zones are a nice idea, you risk alienating a large chunk of your player base with the downside to these changes. Go back to the drawing board, put your thinking caps back on, and come up with better solutions that don’t hurt a majority of your player base.

If the even and world bosses are going to happen at 1/8th the frequency, can we get 8 times the loot…?

Will an instanced map exist indefinitely as long as there is someone in it? So can a map with opened dungeon just exist for months at a time as long as there is a consistent replacement of people?

Chameleon Dude.1564:

Thanks for a sensible reply, as opposed to ‘let the huge guilds do it’.

I gave you sensible replies and even tried to help you buy telling there are guilds who will let you tag along even though you don’t actually join them.

It’s not my fault you ignore what I say and instead reply with more questions (which I also answered mind you).

Chameleon Dude.1564:

Jski.6180:

I am not sure if your responding to my post with a quote from your post but i addressed it you cant do these events in a small guild as is your more or less tagging along with other larger guilds to do them in a way you already joined a large guild to do these events you just did not ask or your not flying there tag.

Again, how am I supposed to know what another guild is doing and when?

I already told you.

No matter how you look at it, this last update is totally awful..

People worrying about Orr temples and dungeons: the mega-server means that they will always either be open or in the process of being opened. You are still thinking that there are going to be a bunch of empty maps with dead temples and closed dungeons. However, only maps full of players will exist – new shards will only be created when all previous maps are full. Depending upon how popular a map is, there might only ever be one version of that map for the whole game.

This leads into people complaining about gathering. There will only be a handful of copies of each map – maybe only one for a less popular map – and they are not random each time you enter. They will persist and can be mapped. I don’t know if each shard will be visibly identified somehow or not (FGS1, FGS2, FGS3, etc.)

One suggestion I would like to make is that there be one uncontested waypoint in each map that is free to travel to if it is still going to take a second hop to get to anywhere in particular.

The new system for the larger world bosses says that they will be on a 3 hour spawn timer. This means that, including prep time, players have to wait up to 4 hours for a single encounter as well as limit the chance for this encounter to every 8 hours. The problem here is that people don’t have 4 hours to sit and wait. We have jobs and families and other obligations, and limiting the people who are actually able to do these events is simply a bad decision.
Change the actual spawn timer to an exact time, then have the encounter occur then. This allows for planned attempts with plenty of time for prep.
Change the spawn time to every 4 hours instead of 8. This allows for people who are not able to play at certain times to have the ability to at other times.

I don’t know who thought that a 3 hours spawn window was a good idea, but I’m sure there are people to talk to about the final decision, so please use some sense before making a decision and consider everyone instead of just the people who are able to play for hours and hours without stopping, because the number of those is few.

Liking almost everything about this, but waypoints should be made free.

Blaeys.3102:

Anyone else notice they snuck a “TBD” into the world boss rotation schedule

Im guessing that stands for “The Big Dragon.”

More likely To Be Determined.

In all honesty, I find this setup for the World Bosses to be a step backwards. Being a casual player and only having the ability to play during the same block of time a few times a week, I enjoyed the variability of World Bosses I could encounter.

Three nights ago I did the Shatterer and the Fire Elemental in a one hour block. Last night I did the Golem and the Dwayna Event in a one hour block. Post feature patch, I will only be able to see the same World Bosses again and again.

This was one of the last few things that I really enjoyed in this game.

Jack Angelfoot.2697:

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.

This is a great idea and a perfectly reasonable request.

None of this is a good idea. I’m glad there’s so few people in here who think it is – and even those who like it have some pretty severe reservations.

I’m really going to miss doing Tequatl.

AlexEBT.7240:

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.

If the only way you can make your idea work is through using a ton of clumsy workarounds (every one of whose makes game worse for players), then it is a sign that this idea is nowhere close to implementation and that you should go back to the drawing board with it.

I don’t post much here because generally I accept the game as it comes and sure, not everything about it is great but on balance it all works out.

But this… This I Do Not like. At all.

One of the first things that I thought was cool about this game was the flexible approach to world bosses… and although yes, some of them do seem to occur with almost mundane regularity at least it means that everyone gets a shot at doing some of them whenever they log in to play for an hour or two.

Now you’re basically enforcing the same old tired metagame aspect of making sure you are able to be online when the boss spawns, (rather than the boss spawning while you’re online for your gaming convenience). I fail to see why it has to be a fixed time every day… I can see that you don’t want people ‘farming’ Teq by jumping from one map instance to another, but surely the current limitations on getting event loot only once per day per event could easily (?) be extended.

If world bosses are only going to be available at certain time ‘windows’ then it is going to make it impossible for some people (including myself) to ever participate in certain events due to RL commitments – some of us do have proper jobs with regular hours; other people have things called ‘families’ (I think). Added to that the fact that people might not want to do Teq at the same time every day… Never mind RL commitments, what about other in-game commitments? Like many other people I do Teq in an ‘umbrella’ guild comprising a loose federation of smaller guilds. It’s already hard enough getting them all to commit to the event at the same time. If half your friends / guilds are running in WvW zergs or doing the next Living Story arc events then dragging them away in the middle of primetime to do Teq for the Nth time isn’t going to be easy. Currently if you don’t get enough people at least you can postpone until the next spawn time.. now if you miss the window you’re pretty much done for the day(?) Most of us don’t play at 3am. Many of us are at work / school etc at 1pm. Some of us are busy feeding / clothing families at 7pm.

The other aspect with the megaserver vs. world megaboss events is control of the events. We already see Tequatl being ‘spoiled’ by people who don’t know the fight mechanics (e.g. causing champion mobs to spawn near the turrets then getting killed and whining for a rez instead of waypointing), not to mention people who turn up just to leech the event loot. Those people who either don’t read their chat window or choose to ignore what they’re being told are a liability – and now we’re going to see even more of them because you’re compressing the event into a smaller window of opportunity.

I personally love this. But that’s because I’m part of a large and organised guild.
I can understand the complaints of people in small/without guilds though.

So the officer can trigger the mega boss world event, but there will be no way to make the map exclusive for that guild. I guess everyone should try and move to the instanced map before activation…

It could be much better, with a few simple improvements. I think it would be nice to have a system in place to exclude stalkers and randoms/bystanders from the map, who may be taking the place for guild members. This would prevent a lot of grieving caused by unwanted players trolling an event or taking up a place of a guild member if the event attracts more guild members than the map capacity.

It still seems someone will have to go look for an existing empty overflow, instead of being able to just create one. A suggestion would be to create exclusive map instance where joining can only be done by team invite or by guild members’. If a large guild is in fact say 3 guilds, a few ‘seed’ members from each is all it takes to have an exclusive instance.

I don’t thinking the megaserver weighted system for grouping related people together will be enough. It will certainly not help fix the issue with stalkers.

Mathzz.7501:

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.

It is only for the big 3 bosses, not the others. additionally it takes merits to activate which are limited to 5(?) a week and have an overall cap for 250, so that will limit the amount they can spam.

I think it is funny that people are complaining about not being able to completely take over a portion of the open world in an MMO for the private use of themselves and their friends.

What you really want is instanced content, so just ask for that instead of trying to argue for maintaining a broken and empty MMO world that you have become used to squatting in.

Another idea: if WPs are going to be contested by default, make it so that after entering a map, the next jump to a WP in the same map is free (or put a 1 minute time limit if you must).

Chameleon Dude.1564:

Right… where to begin?

I can’t be on twenty four hours a day and I don’t belong to, or want to be forced to join, a large guild that can invoke the world bosses. Also, smaller guilds still struggle with the insane costs for most of these unlocks – we’re already forced to join larger guilds just to play some of the game’s content and access the rewards.

So, I guess I can summarise it with two questions:
1) When will smaller guilds be able to do… anything?
2) Why do I always get the short straw with every update?

I hope we get some feedback on this; there are plenty of people (like myself) who prefer smaller guilds, yet if we want to get anything unlocked (we are still awaiting enough influence to begin guild missions) it’ll be months until it’s possible to pay for.

Maybe influence cost for unlocks could be proportional to the number of members in a guild? Not sure about all of the pros/cons of this, but this would allow smaller guilds to partake in this update, as well as with guild missions and other influence-based unlocks…

Tasty Pudding.3764:

I think it is funny that people are complaining about not being able to completely take over a portion of the open world in an MMO for the private use of themselves and their friends.

What you really want is instanced content, so just ask for that instead of trying to argue for maintaining a broken and empty MMO world that you have become used to squatting in.

I figured it would be easier to work around the system we already have than to ask for instanced content. It may only affect a small % of players, but the lack of an instance system has resulted in the ugliest, immature and most bitter situations I ever seen in GW.

Uhm… why is the three headed jungle worm only ~40 minutes after Tequatl’s death (given that the event is successful)? And why is that the case thrice a day?

Karka Queen is just as farmeable as The Shatterer or the Claw of Jormag, so the times is not THAT important, but…

You need preparations for Tequatl as well as for the three headed jungle worm. Given the fact that you want, and – said by Anet – still ARE able to play with people from your server (or the people from TS who can join you via rightclick and taxis) you STILL need preparation time. This will either end in a hussle, or in: Well… Tequatl OR the Worm… the Wurm should at least be 2hrs after Tequatl, if not even to guarantee people can kill both if they can only play at a specific time of day.

(And the Guild Boss Event is no excuse here, it will probably be used by massive kill-guilds for themselves only anyway) You know, gathering on TS, gathering on a map copie until it’s full and then start the neat private event…

I, for myself are in a normal sized PvE guild. We wouldn’t be enough to kill a world boss on our own, so we are basically bound to the ‘official’ times, which ar, in my oppinion not that convenient.

I think this system overall is a great change. Coming from a nearly dead server, it will be nice to actually be able to do events again. Guesting was designed to allow friends on different servers to play together, and was only being used as a band aid to server population issues.

People who are advocating for private servers and who feel that using the overflow and dead worlds as private playgrounds for their guilds need to remember something. These were designed as open world events. If they are too hard to run as such, then they may need to be rebalanced.. but that doesn’t mean the correct path is to just exclude people you feel aren’t “elite” enough. You do understand the casual playerbase actually paid for the majority of the game right? The elitists are a small, although vocal, portion of the gaming community. Without the casual “noobs” things like Tequatl wouldn’t even exist.

This is a good move. I understand certain world communities may be a little less close, but this is an opportunity to make new friends. Guild Wars 2 has a whole should be a community. Everyone should work together to have fun, and people need to stop trying to splinter everyone apart. Without ALL of us, this game would not exist.

MMOs change. Its the nature of the genre. I’m telling you, server population loss is the number 1 killer of MMos and the fact ANET is trying something to address the issue is great. I believe some things may need to be tweaked, such as the rigid event schedule, but I have faith ANET will address things like that moving forward.

CowAbductionInc.9687:

Chameleon Dude.1564:

Right… where to begin?

I can’t be on twenty four hours a day and I don’t belong to, or want to be forced to join, a large guild that can invoke the world bosses. Also, smaller guilds still struggle with the insane costs for most of these unlocks – we’re already forced to join larger guilds just to play some of the game’s content and access the rewards.

So, I guess I can summarise it with two questions:
1) When will smaller guilds be able to do… anything?
2) Why do I always get the short straw with every update?

I hope we get some feedback on this; there are plenty of people (like myself) who prefer smaller guilds, yet if we want to get anything unlocked (we are still awaiting enough influence to begin guild missions) it’ll be months until it’s possible to pay for.

If you are going to wait long to unlock guild missions because your guild is small, then GM are not going to be a pleasant experience for you. A few things you can do with 5-10 people; most others, no chance. As a friendly suggestion, start considering a ‘small guild’ to be something a little bit bigger than you currently do…

Yeah, this is, for the world as a whole, a really bad change.

• Schedules suck for a dynamic world
• Map state will be diminished (always starting from Zero) therefor major events will exist outside of map state.
• Schedules put certain bosses in certain time zones
• No permanence or a known shared experience for players. You guys said you had problems with phasing, because it lead to two players seeing different things, but now this is the case for every map.
• A lot of the systems that need to be in place to make this system work well arent in place yet. Like shared Guild influence. There will be ways to work the new system, but they will be cumbersome, and somewhat anti community

I mean im missing some right now, but this is a big change, and it doesnt play well with any of the existing systems. Not only does it not play well, but even in the design solutions, the solutions actually make the world a lot worse. I think you guys need to consider where you see the world actually going in the future regarding dynamic events, and a persistent world ( which you appear to be throwing out)

Overall i think the problem boils down to this. You wanted to create a system that better groups you with your various circles, smart. But in doing so you are severely limiting what you can do with the world that they are supposed to play in when they meet.

One of my big problems with EOTM which is a similar system in terms of what its trying to solve, is nothing in EOTM matters at all, Keep in mind you created a persistent world RPG, you are taking out the persistence here, and diminishing the rp systems ( i dont mean just for RPers, i mean a world that changes with the actions of the players)

Why is Fire Shaman missing from that list? (the one from Iron Marches)

Definitely concerned about the megaserver changes. Many waypoints are now double taxed… (I dislike the idea of waypoint costs to begin with) Not being able to see status outside of map…

I can understand that there may be technical limitations with your solution, but when your limitations are this bad, your “solution” isn’t a solution anymore.
I love the idea of seeing better population spread in zones to prevent dead areas, and look forward to more populated zones…

Finally, the world bosses static schedule feels like the biggest failure of all. I am not a “casual” player, I play a couple hours every day. But these hours are the same couple hours every day. 7-9 PM PST with potential 1 hour variance on either end of that window. There needs to be some variance in the timing of the world bosses…
- Shatterer? It was good knowing you. I fought you every time I saw you come up. But we may never meet again, your colourful crystals will never encase me with your love.
- Golem Mark II? I may have only killed you a couple times. I guess that’ll have to be enough.
- Modniir Ulgoth? Never again will you be able to kill me with a flick of your mind! Your witty banter will be missed.
- TBD? I shall call you the mystery boss! If a boss dies in the forest, and I’m never there to witness it, does the boss even exist?
- Fire elemental? Sorry buddy, you’re not important enough. Jormag is totally cooler, and he is going to overlap your window every evening. Talk to your manager about rescheduling?

I can brainstorm until the cows come home, but it feels like there could have been much more graceful solutions to this.
Here is one such idea brainstormed: WvW already detects low population and gives you a status indicating this. Why can’t PvE zones detect this same condition and simply give you a popup saying “move me to a more populated server for this zone” that uses your friends/guild algorithm but doesn’t use a guest credit? This has the following benefits:
- Maintains server identities
- Maintains ability to guest to specific servers for specific reasons
- Utilizes portions of your existing solution that are good (algorithm for finding a more populated server)
- Maintains current boss timers that allow for variety
- Maintains ability to create overflows for content that clearly should be instanced (teq/wurm)