Guild Wars 2

I know the title can be misleading, but hear me out.

For those new or revamped world boss encounters to succeed, you will need enough players that participate, enough players that know what to do, some players to organize it (often with commander tag) and preferably voice communication outside of the game.

If it does work on your server, soon players from other servers will try to get in on it, creating overflows that prevent people you want to play with from joining. If it does not work, your server will soon abandon this event and you will feel the need to join another server doing it.

These are, in my opinion, just the problems WvW had from the beginning. Either your servers does badly and no one cares to join and help out, leaving the maps deserted and your rating falls or your server does really well and people start to join the winning team, creating waiting queues of several hours in prime time.

You are depending on random people for your personal success, that means if you want to ensure success you will try to form a large group you can kinda rely on and then avoid as most random factors(players) as possible. To solve this you have to move servers yourself with that group or be there hours before prime time/event time to reserve your spots and then try to trick or spam the queue system to get all in that same instance.

When people have to do this, the content cannot be that well designed. Most are not willing to help others that cannot pull their own weight through content, basically holding themselves back. And especially you should not try to force them to do so.

Those that seek competition or big PvE challenges are bound to become specialized in this content, and giving them an environment to do so would be an easy step to take.
The guilds and player groups are there, only the content is not. Imho we need guild versus guild battles and we need instanced PvE boss encounters for larger predefined groups.

You should have to invest skill, time and organization for difficult content, but within reason. Say “open world” and “casual friendly” as often as you like, but many people do not want to be forced to play with people they can not choose and maybe lose something they could have managed easily to achieve without outsiders.

P.S.: Maybe PvE players can now understand what bugged a lot of WvW players from release on without being addressed.
P.P.S.: I am posting this here, because the theme include different game modes. Also the devs seem to ignore the WvW threads about similar problems, leaving nearly all of them unanswered.

So, I do not mean to criticize harshly, you have valid points in that if a difficult encounter can be done in an instance to reduce the strain of trying to ‘carry’ those less involved or interested, that it should be. The wurm fight in particular is definitely throwing me back to early Tequatl, and we all know how it is now.

However….

On that same token, provided you put enough interest to come to the event, you should be willing to learn, listen, and pay attention to some degree to everything. It is an absolutely terrible argument to suggest that content should be designed about not being a learning experience, that everyone is not capable of pulling their own weight. Every single encounter so far in this game has ‘dos’ and ‘donts’. If interested parties are not willing to, even after repeative attempts, learn what they are doing wrong, or taking a lesser role in the fight, then it is the fault of the player in question and NOT the encounter.

Going to use the Marionette for an example. Aside from the ‘tower defense’ portion, one of the lane’s each phase has the honor of going up onto five platforms with randomly distributed comrades (This is bugged, you could have one person stuck on a single platform alone lol). With each platform comes a champion boss mob, with its mechanics literally legible UNDERNEATH ITS NAME.

I can understand some mechanics are vague, but it takes no real amount of common sense to see that if a mob has “Takes no damage from attacks to the front”, on top of having a giant red arrow show its facing for the player to figure out a few things:

- That the arrow shows which direction it won’t take damage from.
- That the player should try moving to its rear.
- (A bit more thought) That a player with its aggro should keep it still for their teammates.

….I agree with what you say FreshM, players should to an extent have the most difficult content available in an instanced form perhaps in the future. However do not doubt the tenacity of players on the Server who actually WILL inform and try to teach others on how to do the content. It is better for the long run if such encounters remain in the open world to help pull the server together rather than apart.

The problem is with players who absolute refuse to learn, who waste everyone else’s time and openly insult any criticism they receive. My only wish is for more means to deal with such toxic players who make entirely feasible encounters much harder than they should be. There seems to be too much player entitlement imo, people have gotten too cozy with easy content that they think open world bosses should be a cake-walk.

And the worst part? Some of these players to some degree have done prior ‘difficult’ content and have piggybacked on solid strategies that were not around back when the content came out. Back then, people did not originally stack for Subject Alpha, they spread out to mitigate the damage and play it safe. Kholer was killed always, having a single person tank and ready to dodge behind the pillar every other ranged person was using to LoS his pull.

People really need to stop being stubborn and make actual attempts to learn from their mistakes, and if they can’t perform the job, to try to find an easier position in the encounter to still get credit for.

I fully agree with your comment.
The content I am asking for is needed simply because of the type of player you are describing. There is no way to influence which players will be present for that type of content given to you by the game.

Some examples could be:
I was on Lane 1 with a guild party of 5 during the marionette encounter and we cut the chains two times successfully, all other lanes failed -> whole event failed. We could not influence the outcome no matter how hard we would try.
But it can come down to even one player:
All platforms succeeded, except for one. It was the one with the Wasp Champion that you mentioned. One player had aggro for the whole fight and kept running in circles->the Champion kept spinning->dps was reduced immensely->event failed->no chain was cut. It was explained by several players and commanders in mapchat before the whole encounter started, it is stated under the bosses name and he was told in say chat to stand still or at least stay in front. That was all one could do, he did not listen.

And you can still compare that to WvW fights. Two evenly matched groups fight. One group manages to down one player, then two and more of the enemy group while barely staying alive. A single random player joins the fight and dies, giving a rally to some or maybe all of the downed enemies and in the end making the group lose the fight.
Tens of players, maybe even 100 on some maps, spend hours capturing first camps, then towers then keeps. Paying with their hard earned gold for upgrades. Running in small organized groups to escorts dolyaks and slowly upgrading a central keep. One single player comes along and starts using the supply of the keep to build one ram or one trebuchet after another. The waypoint never finishes, the defenders can not repair or build last minute siege to defend and the whole server loses points.

A single individual can ruin the work and thereby the fun of literally hundreds of players who invested gold and manhours and there is no way to stop that. Not even a simple votekick system. Reports stay unanswered by anet, months of threads with thousands of comments stay unanswered and the only thing you see is a few nerds on a stream, giggling about a few useless changes for a few minutes, and back to silence while still people unwilling to learn or outright trolling can do as they like.

My experience so far has been decent. While there’s always players that don’t listen, overall, more people want to listen and get the rewards than not. BG usually gets around 100 people into the teamspeak channel for wurm to try defeat it, regardless of the hour. That alone, shows that people WANT to cooperate.

But yeah, that 1 kitten can come and ruin everything.