Some or all of the following will go great ways to improving encounters:
- Dead people don’t count towards event scaling
- Dead people who have been dead for more than 30s from the end of an event get reduced (or zero) reward
- Reduce or remove waypoint costs if you are dead
- Balance this via repair costs
- For PvE only, make resurrections faster
This is the problem these suggestions work to resolve:
Currently it seems to be popular for groups of “elite” members-only clubs to roam around clearing world bosses. They will actively avoid the general populace of players and play the overflow system to try and get an overflow all to themselves such that “idiot random noobs who don’t listen” cannot interfere with their success/failure of an event.
This behavior goes against what an ‘open world’ should be – open, and instead serves to separate the community into two camps, “the elite” and “the rest”. Such division is a terrible aspect to have in a game such as Guild Wars 2.
The underlying problem is to do with the conflicting issue of making events accessible (open world) to all, and trying to present an elite challenge that tests the most dedicated players (which really deserves to be instance based much like elite missions in Guild Wars 1 were). However, if we want to make difficult open world events accessible we need to do a few things.
Players will fall into one of two categories – those who actively seek to complete the event, and will be organised, arrange team speak etc, then theres those that will wander around in mass confusion, don’t know what teamspeak is and generally get killed.
When these players get killed, they do NOT get up. They do not go to the waypoint either. Instead, they will wait until the event is complete in order to mitigate their waypoint costs (via player resurrection, which won’t be forthcoming during the event).
This in turn, makes the event much more difficult for everyone involved as the event scales even with a plethora of dead people. So lets see how my propositions work out:
- Dead people don’t count towards event scaling
If people want to lie around being a corpse, it shouldn’t affect the organised people who actually want to clear the event and are in the right places at the right time doing the right thing. Of course, if they’re in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, they’ll still fail.
- Dead people who have been dead for more than 30s from the end of an event get reduced (or zero) reward
Potentially, someone could wand the boss for ‘participation’, die, and wait. Let’s not allow that behavior. If they want to participate, they need to participate. 30 seconds is sufficient time for someone to resurrect, if the event completes, they should still get a reward. If they were unluckily killed at the last moment, they should also still get a reward. If you’re dead for a long time doing nothing but being a corpse, you shouldn’t get a reward.
- Reduce or remove waypoint costs if you are dead
This will encourage players to actually use the waypoints rather than be a nuisance during events by upscaling them needlessly for all the players who actually want to clear it.
- Balance this via repair costs
Waypoints are a double tax if you are dead. First you pay the waypoint cost, then you pay for repairs. People try to avoid this by just staying dead until someone resurrects them. Just make the armor repairs a little more pricey, I would suggest half the cost of a waypoint currently, so those who were resurrected by another player aren’t so harshly penalized.
- For PvE only, make resurrections faster
If you really want us to resurrect players on the battle field, you need to allow us windows of opportunity to do so in events. The timing on a resurrection if you are in combat is as such that you cannot feasibly resurrect another player during an encounter. Bringing downed people up is always feasible though.
This slight timing difference encourages people to completely ignore dead people during combat, thus encouraging them to use the waypoint. If resurrection is the order of the day rather than using the time consuming rush back from a waypoint then this needs to be enacted.
On Graveyard Zerging:
Potentially this solution could be argued that it may encourage graveyard zerging. But lets realistically observe the behaviour of an organised group doing something such as tequatl. Most organised players will already hit the waypoint and rush back to join the group if they completely die, which isn’t at all different to graveyard zerging in that respect. However, even with these events, if you graveyard zerg as a whole (very large amounts of people dead and waypointing), failure is still a possibility.