Guild Wars 2

With all the discussions around mega-servers and people complaining that they won’t be able to have as much control do what they want with who they want, an idea came to me for a new service ArenaNet could offer using this technology…

Custom Adventure Zone Starter Kit: “Create your own customized zone for PvE adventures. You can configure the zone’s base map, password, event spawn timers, monster density, challenge level, and many other options. Adventure Zones start with 30 days of active time.”

Custom Adventure Zone Time Token: “Each token adds 1 day of time to a Custom Adventure Zone”.

Custom Adventure Zones work similarly to Custom Arenas, but for PvE content instead of PvP matches. With a Custom Adventure Zone you can create your own personal instance of many of the PvE maps throughout Tyria, including the capital cities, and customize many of the map’s settings.

Want your own private copy of Divinity’s Reach for your weekly guild meetings? Now you can!

Are you part of a role-playing group and want to have a private copy of Queensdale for your group’s in-character adventures, with many of the random events disabled and without the distraction of non-role players? Custom Adventures Zones can provide the ultimate RP playground.

Want to give your friends a real challenge and organize a raid on the temples of Orr where every enemy on the map is at least a Veteran? A Custom Adventure Zone will let you do that.

Do you want to offer Tequatil training sessions to the community, where novice players can take on a scaled down version of the encounter (with minimal to no rewards) so they can focus on learning the mechanics? A Custom Adventure Zone can serve as your virtual classroom.

The possibilities of what you can do with a Custom Adventure Zone are nearly endless. The world is literally yours to command!

Getting Started

To get started, you need to purchase a Custom Adventure Zone Starter Kit. This will let you set up your zone and gives 30 days of access time. Time Tokens may be purchased by you or other players and applied to your zone to extend its active time by 1 day per token.

The first choice you’ll need to make is which map to base your custom adventure zone on. Most of the PvE maps are available, with a few exceptions for those maps with mechanics that wouldn’t work well for this type of customization system.

You can choose to make your zone public or private, and may change between those options at any time. Private zones may be password protected or you can grant specific players access by adding them to your member list (you can also add entire guilds to the member list).

Customizing your zone

There are many other options available to you to customize your adventure zone to your liking:

Maximum Players: The maximum number of players allowed on the map at any time.

Number of Reserved Slots: Reserved slots may only be taken up by players who you explicitly add to your member list. This ensures that if you make your map public there will still be a few spots reserved exclusively for your friends.

Level Scaling: Sets the base level range for the map. Monsters and events will scale in strength according to the level range you select, and players will be level scaled accordingly as well. Alternatively, you can disable level scaling. Disabling level scaling or lowering a zone’s level range below its original value will significantly reduce the quality and quantity of rewards.

Challenge Level: This will provide you with several options to increase the overall challenge level and strength of monsters. “Easy” makes all monsters on the map normal-tier, but rewards from loot and events are significantly decreased. “Standard” uses the default monster tiers. “Expert” uses the default monster tiers but increases their health, defense and damage. “Master” upgrades all monsters to the next tier (normal becomes veteran, veteran becomes elite, elite becomes champion). “Ambient Only” removes all monsters from the map, except for ambient creatures.

Respawn Time: Allows you to set the respawn time for normal, veteran, elite and champion monsters. Decreasing respawn time will also decrease loot quality and quantity, and will trigger diminishing returns more quickly to prevent rapid farming of monsters.

Event Timers: You can adjust the respawn timers on any of the events on the map, or disable specific events entirely. Decreasing the respawn timer on an event will decrease the quality and quantity of rewards which players receive from that event to prevent exploitative event farming.

PvP Mode: "None” = you cannot attack other players. “Squad” = you can attack players outside of your squad. “Party” = you can attack players outside of your party. “Free for All” = you can attack any other player.

Weather Cycle: enables or disables random weather cycling

Custom Adventure Zone Administrative Commands

These commands can be used by the custom adventure zone’s creator or other players designated as administrators for the map.

– add/remove the specified player as an administrator
– add/remove a player to the list of members for the map (if the map is private, only members may join)
– add/remove a guild to the list of members for the map (if the map is private, anyone representing that guild can join)
– bans/unbans a specific player; banned players are removed from the map and cannot rejoin
– remove the specified player from the map
– remove all players except for yourself and the map’s owner from the map
– immediately activate a specific event on the map (there would be a limit to how often a player could claim the rewards from an event to prevent rapid farming)
– immediately terminate the specified event (it neither succeeds nor fails, it simply de-spawns and no rewards are given)
– cycle time of day between dawn, midday, evening and night
– choose the weather: sunny, overcast, fog, light rain, heavy rain, light snow and heavy snow; if you have weather cycling enabled your chosen weather type will remain in effect until the next cycle, if it’s disabled your chosen weather type will be permanent until manually changed
– activate big-head mode, as seen in the 2014 April Fool’s Day joke
– trigger a glorious fireworks display across the entire map
– broadcast a message to all players on the map which will appear as yellow text in the middle of their screen

A few notes

Skill challenges, points of interest and vistas will not be present on the map. Renown tasks, jumping puzzles and other challenges will be present, but completing them will not count toward World completion or achievements, and any rewards associated with them will be significantly reduced. These types of activities are intended to take place in the open world to receive full credit.

There is no cost to use waypoints on the map.

If you use an administrator command to manually start or stop an event, you must wait a certain amount of time before restarting the event again (to keep server performance in check, and prevent exploiting events).

There is a two week grace period at the end of your custom adventure zone rental time to apply additional time tokens. After that two week period the zone will be shut down and you’ll need to purchase another Starter Kit.