Guild Wars 2

This thread is not about the timing it is about the re-spawning of enemies in general.

Games are not supposed to be realistic, but how ridiculous is it to fight your way through a cave, win a battle against a mighty Boss opponent and while the heroes celebrate their victory, all the enemies the party just killed pop out of the floor one after another and soon the whole cave entrance will be full again with the ones you just killed. While you think that is an effect of the adrenaline in your veins that blurs your imagination and you drink one more ale the once and for all defeated mighty troll King will resurrect and attack you while you dance on his corpse. The fresh blood on the fighters armor has not even started to dry, but they think, OK, he wants to know it, so we will kill him again. Guess what happens next? Say hello to Mr. once and for all defeated King n°3… if your friends have left the party already you might even get killed by the one just killed several times!!!

As a 1st of April joke that would be really fun, but as a game-wide bug this is just ridiculous and actually also embarrassing if you show that to someone that is not used to this malfunction. This can not be a feature I hope?

For quite a while I thought that this would be a major GW2 game design shortcoming that can not be easily repaired. However I only recently noticed that this might be programmed on purpose like that!!! The database saves the information that a certain enemy has been killed by you because when you kill it a second time it will not drop anything anymore. You can kill the same enemy popping out of the ground hundred of times a day without moving, but the spreadsheet will only reward you once per day for it.

Why on Earth – if the game knows that a foe has already been killed by a player – is GW2 programmed in a way that a foe that has just been killed returns as empty pocketed zombie to fight the players that just killed it again and again and again?!…

GW2 is not supposed to be a zombie-shooter game, why is it made like one? Is this such a deep flaw in the game design that this can not be repaired and this will only work properly in GW3? Will this be put on the repair agenda once the beta testing of GW2 is over? Is there no workaround that could be implemented a bit sooner like reducing together with the loot size the screen size of the opponent to 0 and the hit points of that enemy to 0, so that at least it is not seen and it won’t attack anymore? Is there really no way to make a foe invisible or friendly for the ones that just killed him?

This is an MMO, not a single player game.

If you mean that a foe does not come back when a party kills it, that’s not the case.

If you mean GW2 is just an MMO and not an MMO RPG, so the rules of roleplay do not apply and a foe is just a dummy that pops out of the ground every 120 seconds so that the next in the queue can hit it… maybe you are right, but GW2 developers promised an MMORPG with an intelligent environment.

Here and there you can see that already. The environment sometimes adepts to the number of players. But killed foes returning to attack after a minute. That is not an intelligent PvE design. In the Stone Age of online games this probably could not be solved any better, so WoW players had to get used to it. But nowadays that’s an irregularity.

So if someone kills a mob it should never respawn, and in the end the world is empty and for all new players there are no mobs left to kill ? This simply don’t works in an open world, it only works in personal instances. Or do you want Mob camping like in Everquest where some rare mobs only spawned once in a week, and so you needed maybe years to kill them for your quest, because 1000s of peoples also needed to kill him.

I don’t have a problem with mobs spawning, but I don’t care for how they can respawn before you’ve finished tapping that rich ore. I just slaughtered all the mobs, there should be a bit more time before they re-populate a spot.

If I kill a mob and I am not in a zombie game I expect the thing to be dead and not stand up smiling in my face a minute later. If I enter a cave with 30 enemies and I start clockwise at the left side I expect the cave to be empty once I have killed 30 enemies. I find this to be a pretty normal expectation. But when I reach the spot where I started in GW2 I look in the smiling face of the one I killed first when I entered. This is so ridiculous!

As the GW2 spreadsheet has obviously a value dedicated to track who killed which enemy, because an enemy will not drop anything when it’s “re-killed”, I do at least expect that the game mechanics make sure that an already killed foe does not attack the victorious party anymore and turns green for the victors in the next let’s say 2 hours.

I would have hoped for a more intelligent environment behavior like seamless micro instances in the open world. That would have also made balancing possible and eliminate the need to zerg world bosses and scale enemies stats according to opponents DPS.

Marcus The Cube.3872:

I would have hoped for a more intelligent environment behavior like seamless micro instances in the open world.

Oh, that would be a dream come true. I’m still waiting for a game with such characteristic. I mean, if the old green marks over NPCs has been always “instanced” for each player, why mobs can’t be like that?

I don’t want to fight the same mob again and again. If at the end, the world become empty of enemies good, I’ll start a new char or move to the next map.

Also, mobs re-spawn and people still complain about having nothing to do, so, what’s the point of re-spawning anyway?

Well to be fair there is a giant dragon zombie making tons of zombie minions, so if you really want to get into the RP element you could just actually consider recently killed mobs zombies.

You are not alone in the world. Okay, the respawn timers might be a bit too low, but respawning is a feature every MMO needs to have in order to provide the same content for every player.

Justdeifyme.9387:

You are not alone in the world. Okay, the respawn timers might be a bit too low, but respawning is a feature every MMO needs to have in order to provide the same content for every player.

So, you telling me people can’t mine the ore I just depleted because it doesn’t re-spawn right away?

Timing of respawns is faster because of the intent of multiple people to wander through the zones. In earlier MMOs I would sit around for upwards of an hour waiting for respawn.

As far as the system knowing things are dead and it is not realistic to have to fight things you just fought. Eventually you would kill everything and run out of things to do. It would be more realistic but put an end to your gameplay and areas to obtain loot/resources/money/experience/fun.

Going forward to the idea of trash mobs are ok to respawn but named mobs should stay dead or randomize so it isn’t the same exact guy every time. They have not given things specific names in most cases but titles, such as “Bandit Leader”. Also remember there are other players in the same game world so they would like to experience the content you just cleared as well.

So to cater to more people, they break your immersion. Lesser of two evils in the games eyes as they want more people playing.

I agree though, that events respawn too fast and are fairly static and repetitive. Better than I have seen before and more dynamic of a world yes, but it doesn’t let me impact “enough” to get me to want to keep doing the events short of just farming.

The events are supposedly on a local population adjustment. So if there are few people in the area you get less mobs and maybe less respawn. If there are a lot of people you get more mobs and more respawn. That is specific to events though, so unsure of general world mobs.

As far as the ore, not sure if it was a sarcastic remark or not. But everyone has their own resources, so you do not compete for ore like in other MMOs. This way you don’t have people sniping your orichalcum ore out from under you and you are now left with nothing.

edit:

A better game design would have a flow of the map so you would not have to exit where you came in, thus preventing the loss of immersion and having to fight your way back out. Scripted space is a big thing in design and is used in vegas a lot to control the population/traffic/and even to encourage sales & gambling. So the world could be a better scripted space instead of just an open world that we can wander around in.

Good and bad for both I guess.

There are a few issues I see.

1. “This is a MMO and not a single player game”

2. “and in the end the world is empty and for all new players there are no mobs left to kill”

3. “but respawning is a feature every MMO needs to have in order to provide the same content for every player”

Developers need to get over the above mindset. They simply need to provide an experience for the players. They don’t have to provide the same experience to each and every player.

Imagine a game where there is always new quests/events to do and if you make an alt and play again, you will have played completely different quests/events than you did the first time through.

Image a game that has no “end game” because there is no end to the game.

Sure you still wouldn’t advance in levels, but imagine that there is always another quest/event to do. I don’t mean the events they patch in for a month at a time then remove, but rather the game itself is capable of generating new content on the fly and is influenced by the outcome of previous quests/events. Pass or fail, and not just by you but by the player base as a whole.

You come across a cave that is home to a pack of wolves. You kill the alpha and collect a pelt of fur that is a quest item. You then return it to the npc that wants it and collect your reward. That cave is now empty. That is until the game generates a new quest. You or someone else may come across the same cave later but instead of wolves, it’s home to a champ troll instead.

In the long list of promises I recall how we were promised that mobs wouldn’t just popup that they’d fall out of the trees, come running up from a far location to get into their normal position, and that they’d have about a ten second window before they’d aggro. That would have been great had they done that, but no POP instant aggro every time. Especially in Orr.

tigirius.9014:

In the long list of promises I recall how we were promised that mobs wouldn’t just popup that they’d fall out of the trees, come running up from a far location to get into their normal position, and that they’d have about a ten second window before they’d aggro. That would have been great had they done that, but no POP instant aggro every time. Especially in Orr.

Well, I saw this a few times, often with centaures. They come from somewhere and ride to the location I killed their friends a few minutes ago. But for other mobs, they often just appear with a animation that wants to look reasonable. For example the Bandits fly out of the ground like they came from the shadows, or Flame Legion Soldiers appear with a smokegrenade out of the ground. But that isn’t very well done.

I don’t see a huge problem with the re-spawning as such as long technology is not able to make re-spawning enemies invisible for party members that just killed them.

Also I don’t see the risk of running out of opponents because of that. Maybe that ruins some farm strategies when things killed only come back for you the next day but as far as I know the wait times for loot from the same foe are anyway quite long. As for emptying the game I doubt that it’s possible to kill everything in GW2 on a day.

What I have troubles to understand is why just killed opponents can not “turn green” together with the setting that sets their loot to zero for those that just killed it.
Once they drop loot for you again they would “turn red again”.

Just because old/most/all MMOs do it that way is not really convincing.

If there would be really a need to be able to re-kill mobs just killed – I really don’t see why, but who knows, people enjoy the weirdest things – the game could “turn them red” again when attacked by those that just want to kill again without a loot chance.

For me those enemies we need to slaughter again and again in some areas are really killing the atmosphere the game is trying to build up with graphics and stories. Especially when you are playing with guild teams and you need to stop somewhere. It’s fun at the beginning to laugh about the “bugged game” but later when you need to organise re-spawn guards for those who get a phone call that is really crazy… As I have played GW before a lot this is irritating on an almost daily basis. I thought that feeling would go away, but it doesn’t

We’ve finally come full circle – complaining about an MMO being an MMO.

Jrunyon.3012:

This is an MMO, not a single player game.

And people wonder why there are so many WoW clones.

I really wonder why people think an MMO needs to be as badly made as WoW. Especially since WoW is a very old game and in those days it wasn’t possible to do it any better. But MMO stands for people playing together and not about re-spawning enemies!

In our last guild rush at Southsun Cove this was really getting annoying to the max. Here we are talking about MMO gaming in its core. In those 15 minutes I am sure we have killed the same ennemies 10 times and even the broodmother boss several times, to the point that the strategy is to stand on the spawn points to kill and re-kill…

That really feels dumb and totally ruins what could become a nice MMO feeling in terms of playing together to achieve a goal It gives me a stupid farming of enemies feeling and that without even moving!

I just wish all the normal spawns of mobs inside the Areas that Dynamic Events occurs, would STOP SPAWNING or be removed immediately when the Event starts there. Anyone who’s ever tried to Solo or Duo “Brassclaw Landing” knows exactly the levels of Rage caused by Anet’s lack of forethought in this mechanic…

OR

…if you kill the same mobs in the same Spawning point a a third or fourth time, they just STOP spawning there for a good 10 minutes or so. …It’d be so much more Immersive & may even balance the economy a bit

Marcus The Cube.3872:

I really wonder why people think an MMO needs to be as badly made as WoW. Especially since WoW is a very old game and in those days it wasn’t possible to do it any better. But MMO stands for people playing together and not about re-spawning enemies!

In our last guild rush at Southsun Cove this was really getting annoying to the max. Here we are talking about MMO gaming in its core. In those 15 minutes I am sure we have killed the same ennemies 10 times and even the broodmother boss several times, to the point that the strategy is to stand on the spawn points to kill and re-kill…

That really feels dumb and totally ruins what could become a nice MMO feeling in terms of playing together to achieve a goal It gives me a stupid farming of enemies feeling and that without even moving!

I dunno what your talking about, WoW is probably the most polished MMO out there. People hate on D3, as well, but you cannot deny how smooth it plays. Polish is kind of Blizzard’s thing.

I agree though, enemies respawn really fast. That just means more people have access to the enemies—but IMO i would take slower respawn rates over more accessibility. If i have to wait 5 minutes for an area to repopulate, so be it. It’s not like there is a ton of competition for mobs in the open world anyway.

I can see the OPs point — it would basically be like meshing together the instanced sections of GW1 (be kind of hard to claim the vanquisher title if everything in a zone kept respawning) with the open world feel of GW2. And it would def give it a more immersive feel to it overall. I’d venture to guess it would take a HUGE amount of development/programming to reach a point where every possible situation like the one example of the alpha wolf cave then becoming the den of a champion troll could come into play, but as was mentioned, if the beasties can re-spawn with a “do-not-drop-loot” marker tagged to it, could it not also be set to having been “vanquished” for lack of a better word and cannot aggro or be aggroed for 2 hours/4 hours/24 hours, etc.?

Marcus The Cube.3872:

I really wonder why people think an MMO needs to be as badly made as WoW.

Because to most people, when you say “MMO”, they hear “WoW”. It was not the first, but it was the most popular, so it was the first MMO for a lot of players. And as a game focused on keeping people addicted (and thus paying monthly fees), it was a huge success.

So huge, in fact, that it has created a big mass of players who want nothing else other than WoW clones to give them one more fix. That’s what MMORPG players are. That’s why MMORPGs are such bad games – because their players don’t care, they are not annoyed with the “kill 10 rats” quests as long as they get a shiny reward for their +1.

In the end, the biggest reason why WoW is a bad game is due to how it taught developers that making a fun game is not a good idea. Fun is subjective, so not everyone will enjoy a given piece of content. But addiction… Well, we know that at least 12 million people were willing to pay monthly in order to pay content they were addicted to. And it’s far easier to make addictive content (aka, grind) than to make fun content.

OP, I completely agree with you. It would be hard, but it would be doable to make the world react to what you do (you went to a cave and killed all the zombies in there? The wild animals that used to kill it will return, giving you different enemies to kill. Those have been killed, too? Carrion animals will appear to eat the dead flesh. Carrion animals killed? Zombies followed them and now fill the cave once more). This is an issue mostly in closed spaces like caves, since they often require you to leave from the same place where you entered, and so you will see again the same enemies you have killed. Doing a fix specifically for those caves would be hard, but doable.

The issue, OP, is that people like you and me are a minority. The great majority of MMORPG players don’t care. Give them something mindless to farm, and they will be happy, no matter what kind of respawning enemies have.

This thread is still around? Well, I think we should give the OP a break. It seems he confused GW2 for something between the real world, where dead things don’t respawn, and a single player game, one where you stop playing once you kill the end boss.