Guild Wars 2

I am relatively new to this game, having just played it a few weeks. I have a level 80 engineer, and noticed that in the lower-level zones, there are tons of people. As you progress to the upper levels… not so much. Then I step into WvW and it is a ghost town for most of the time. Then a small battle ensued with two realms involved. That was very fun, but short-lived. It just seems like everybody levels and hangs out in the starter zones, and doesn’t do much of anything else. If I’m wrong, great, but I don’t see much to do at 80 given the population of people doing max level activities seems nil.

Depends on the server you are on. Some servers are PvE centric, others have queues 24/7 for WvW. And some are just low population overall.

Game took a pretty hard population hit last fall. You can still find people at peak hours and certain servers have healthier populations than others (the guesting really made this even more extreme). So, bout all i can say to the matter.

To be honest i thought it was much busier than when i took a break when MoP hit, im in a ’’lull’’ zone at the moment but i popped into my next heart zone and it was bustling to the brim was real fun, WvW is also very active on my realm but to be honest i have more fun taking a small select few with me to take bases from behind opponents, much more fun than the BIG zergs and i feel we get more loot and coin too.

For large events in the open world, people use:
Dragon Timer: http://guildwarstemple.com/dragontimer/

For dungeons and fractals, people use:
gw2lfg: http://www.gw2lfg.com/

Also, SOME level 80s like to go to low level zones for their daily to make it easier. I prefer higher level zones because of the materials, tho.

Also, some guilds are doing guild missions right now as well.

Hope that helps you decide what you want to do post 80.

Some of the top level 80 activities are running dungeons, zerging boss events that now guarantee a rare drop, and FotM. The big thing since the last patch has been the boss events. This morning the Fire Elemental in Metrica and the boss at the Maw went down in maybe a minute each. The more challenging boss battles are the temples in Orr, with Cursed Shore being a very popular map. Aside from dungeons, Grenth and Lyssa are two of the most difficult PvE events. As mentioned above, gw2lfg is one way to find dungeon and FotM runs. Hanging out on the map containing a dungeon entrance will also pick up some PUG requests and seems less impersonal to me. The amount of traffic depends on how popular the dungeon is. For example, Plains of Ashford is the place to be if you want to PUG Ascalonian Catacombs. An active guild can also be helpful for dungeons.

Guesting on TC (please don’t hate me, just couldn’t resist saying it)

Culling is a big issue which may affect how many people you can see on your map. For example, in Lion’s Arch the map almost always feels like I am the only person there (apart from NPCs) even though it is full all the time . And in world events it only appears like 3-5 other people are playing, but when I show player names I am surrounded, I just can’t see them.

Also, I think the reason the higher level areas seem empty is the re-balancing of enemies has screwed up a lot of farming areas. On my server Orr has become a ghost town since the patch but I have noticed on other servers it isn’t a problem. Maybe everyone is guesting to a few select servers for high level content?

My friend last Friday was going to buy this game and decided to check the forums out before taking the plunge and read a post just like this one and decided to spend his money on something else. Because he read this game is dead in low levels.

Yesterday he was over and told me about how he wants to play the game, but not if he has to “grind” alone for a month before he could have fun with others because he feels the point of an MMO is to play with people, so, I did a test.

I let him pick any spot on the world map and I would teleport there and we would see how “Dead” the game really was. After about the fourth waypoint he just shook his head and said “I am never reading forums again.”. He is buying the game with his next paycheck.

Every WP I used had at least one guy standing AFK in the spot you spawn and others running around nearby doing events. If the game feels dead you are just on the wrong server.

They are in a very few select zones waiting on timers for bosses to spawn to press #1 and collect loot.

I’m being facetious about it but I am not lying either.