Guild Wars 2

I was in Harathi Hinterlands for the first time in a long while (pre-megaserver) and was surprised by how much of a difference the experience was. I remember the various camps of centaurs being in a constant state of flux between human and centaur control, but now the megaserver is ensuring, even on a random evening in the middle of the work week, that there are enough players around to keep those centaurs firmly in check. Everywhere I went the centaur camps were filled with human NPCs calmly standing around. Dynamic events would kick off and the players would defeat them without breaking much of a sweat. That meant to complete the various hearts, if a DE didn’t initiate, I spent more time breaking down centaur weapon racks than ever fighting centaurs.

This got me thinking about the problem of public events and success/failure. I remember Rift having this same problem. Early on (beta events), their rift assaults would take over entire zones. Players complained that they couldn’t quest because the NPCs were dominating everything. The rift attacks got heavily nerfed, and it got to the point where there wasn’t much challenge in people doing them.

Back to GW2, and since the first beta event, there’s been fluctuation in what it feels like to play in zones. Their difficulties have been adjusted (I remember when the reactor Flame Elemental was significantly more difficult) and we’ve had population changes from the massive levelling zerg at launch to dwindling mid-zone populations later, and back to heavy populations with megaserver.

It seems like there is a terrible catch-22 with public events like DEs. Too few people in an area and events all around are failing, too many, and things like the centaur camps stay permanently cleared.

I’m wondering if anyone has ideas on how make DEs a little more dynamic. Is this just a case of needing scaling to be more significant so even large groups have a chance of failing? Or just general open world difficulty needing to be adjusted up to compensate for the megaserver?

Random event modifiers could work. Such as a chance for an event to be more difficult or improved champion mobs with special abilities a-la Diablo.

Before introducing the rushed and faulty megaserver system they should’ve reworked the scaling. Truly, the open world just turned into a giant autowin.

I wonder, could anyone with significant game programming knowledge weigh in on how difficult it would be fore event scaling to shift based on how often or how recently said event reached its success or fail state?

Could each event track this, then use it as a modifier for scaling so that events that failed frequently would get easier, and events that succeed frequently would keep getting harder? That way the DEs across the game could dynamically adjust themselves to find an equilibrium with player ability in that area.