Where is everybody?
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For me it’s kinda silly that you have to use carrot and stick to lead the players from one zone to another, and yes, I’m talking about chest rewards. I’m getting a bit tired from jumping from one meta event to another just to get some rare loot.
It would be better if you’re limited to only one bonus chest per 24h on a character, but there should be a small chance of getting bonus chest from a random events. That way people would stop farming bosses and hopefully they would focus on events.
I enjoy doing events, and I don’t care that much about the loot, although I’m happy if I get yellow item as a random drop from a mob.
I am at work right now
GuildWars 2
Currently playing Heart of Thorns.
Currently playing Heart of Thorns.
In my opinion, most of the “world is empty” problems can be fixed, and in about the same time it took to put out the 5 or 6 hours of Living Story content we just had. Put a chest event in each area, link the chest events to area spanning meta’s, tie rewards in to the amount of time completing the meta or how many events completed out of the meta, have an enjoyable finale to the meta. And also have vets and champions give effort based rewards.
with the current map boss events the yellow prices have plummeted right down. More chest events and one day a yellow will only be worth 2 silver.
Now I do agree about vets and champions. They did say that the loot on those is broken and that they will eventually fix it.
It does mean something is wrong in game if people are mostly only doing certain things. There’s something wrong when people bunch up to farm the tunnel, or the WEB’s, or CoF. And it’s not only because of greed. Money helps you get legendaries. Legendaries and other top tier rewards are a quantitative process, meaning if Subject A does enough of Activity B they can reach their goal. In simpler terms, if I can farm whatever to get whatever then why shouldn’t I? The normal defense here is “Because it’s not fun”. For some, being or having the best is fun. Being the best is what two out of three game modes are all about here. I don’t follow this philosophy, but gaming has always played to these desires.
Well most farming locations were made so much more harder (look at all the crying in the forums). I do agree that CoF should be made much harder. I mean, come on, the first dungeon in the game (AC) was made really hard and tricky to run, most people have problems running CM for the first time, but CoF can be auto attacked trough.
Really no matter what you do, if you will just continue to put your money away you’ll probably be able to buy a legendary one day. The mentality of “I want it now!” is really wrong, but you can’t do anything about it. On the other hand some people only enjoy certain aspects of the game. You can’t force them to give up their likes to do a broader variety of activities.
The cost of rares or their effect on the economy is not my concern. The effect of farming WEB’s on zone population density is. As far as the cost of rares go, they are mostly only important to either throw into the Mystic Forge or to salvage for ectos. One of the ways you cut down on rares is to include these chest events in a larger zone covering meta. Most of the typical “I’m only here for the chest” players will either adapt or no longer run them at all. Removing Legendaries from the farming process and adding another mechanic for them is also a possibility. There is no easy fix. Some people will be left out, the same way they are now.
I’m not advocating for more rares just by adding more events, or more farming. I’m advocating for a change to the entire meta of the game to make the world more relevant than it is, with farming happening naturally as you play the game by killing mobs anywhere instead of bunching up in groups to wait for a WEB or doing the tunnel.
What I currently see is a trend in the meta that depopulates entire zones in favor of other, more lucrative areas. To older, established players this is not as big a deal because we have “been there, done that”. New players who have just entered the world though are wondering where this “thriving community” is, and it’s common to see these threads pop up once a week or more.
I’m not one to pop in on the forums and decry how the game is all gloom and doom, but this trend in the meta is disheartening for new players and some older ones. The first impressions a player gets in the first forty hours of gameplay shouldn’t be “Where is everybody?” The devs should take this to heart, and the established players should offer more than a checklist.
What I currently see is a trend in the meta that depopulates entire zones in favor of other, more lucrative areas. To older, established players this is not as big a deal because we have “been there, done that”. New players who have just entered the world though are wondering where this “thriving community” is, and it’s common to see these threads pop up once a week or more.
I’m not one to pop in on the forums and decry how the game is all gloom and doom, but this trend in the meta is disheartening for new players and some older ones. The first impressions a player gets in the first forty hours of gameplay shouldn’t be “Where is everybody?” The devs should take this to heart, and the established players should offer more than a checklist.
my friend is leveling a necro. Yelling “champion wasp is up!” on the map chat was enough to get 19 players instantly there. There are people. If we would want to see people even more often we would have to make zones way smaller.
What I currently see is a trend in the meta that depopulates entire zones in favor of other, more lucrative areas. To older, established players this is not as big a deal because we have “been there, done that”. New players who have just entered the world though are wondering where this “thriving community” is, and it’s common to see these threads pop up once a week or more.
I’m not one to pop in on the forums and decry how the game is all gloom and doom, but this trend in the meta is disheartening for new players and some older ones. The first impressions a player gets in the first forty hours of gameplay shouldn’t be “Where is everybody?” The devs should take this to heart, and the established players should offer more than a checklist.
my friend is leveling a necro. Yelling “champion wasp is up!” on the map chat was enough to get 19 players instantly there. There are people. If we would want to see people even more often we would have to make zones way smaller.
I’m starting to get the feeling that you are saying “There is no problem here, move along” Am I correct? I’m not quite sure of your view, some of the things you post sorta say there is a problem, and some say there isn’t. What exactly is your view?
Queensdale is always populated like that, too bad it’s not indicative of the rest of the zones. You can try that same experiment in Harathi, like the OP stated or many other zones, or even better try it in a zone with a WEB. Try yelling in map chat about the giant shark in Sparkfly and see how many show up.
I would also be curious to see how you’re friend’s experiences change over time as he leaves the starter zones and moves out into the wider world. I just started a new toon as well, and it will be interesting to see how my leveling experiences will stack up to what I went through near the beginning of the game.
(edited by killcannon.2576)
random thoughts
toon1 lvl 80 map completion 83%
toon2 lvl 80 map completion 97%
toon3 lvl 80 map completion 51%
toon4 lvl 80 map completion 43%
toon5 lvl 80 map completion 36%
toon6 lvl 80 map completion 24%
toon7 lvl 21 map completion 17% have all the needed skill points for build
toon8 lvl 9 map completion 4% doubt these last two toons will ever be leveled. If they are it will be by staying in starter areas running dynamic events and dailies unless they need more skill points.
@killcannon The first impressions a player gets in the first forty hours of gameplay shouldn’t be “Where is everybody?” Concur! My daughter-in-law gave up after just 3 days of playing for this very reason.
Another reason: A lot of people are taking a break, some are off playing other games one of which is in open beta(which has some nice features but also major flaws).
My son and I were discussing activating our WOW accounts. We both miss flying and the sense of power from soloing dungeons. We wont but sometimes things really draw you to a game and its that draw that keeps you playing it for years. For some, GW2 provides that draw, for others it doesn’t and the areas outside the beginning and ending become relatively devoid of other players. This seems to be true for most MMOs. In some games the leveling was so slow that you could not skip areas as easily as in GW2 thereby giving a sense of more players.
Even Orr is dead on my server now, I checked in yesterday and today just to confirm and yeah the game totally feels abandoned at this point. In map chat I kept getting told “just join another server” … when only 4 people show up for melandru that is just pathetic. Both times I was logged in at 4 PM PST.
Goes to show how unrewarding gameplay is.
Back to WoW, make GW2 fun please.
I’m not playing as much GW2 right now. Being a hockey fan, I’ve been watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.
not playing much either, but it is spring and being spring I just finished planting the garden. If I was younger and didn’t hurt so much from gardening I might be thinking of other indoor sports
Strangely I was in Horathi today, getting all the WPs on a toon, having read this thread I expected it to be a ghost town. Hit a WP that was getting attacked by centaurs and there were half a dozen people, carried on all the way to Ulgoth and by the time we got there we had a mini zerg. Thought that was really cool, but maybe they are only here for the Chest event. So I carried on collecting WPs, came across maybe 3 or 4 Events on the way each had half a dozen people on them.
I was really pleasantly surprised.
I’m starting to get the feeling that you are saying “There is no problem here, move along” Am I correct? I’m not quite sure of your view, some of the things you post sorta say there is a problem, and some say there isn’t. What exactly is your view?
Queensdale is always populated like that, too bad it’s not indicative of the rest of the zones. You can try that same experiment in Harathi, like the OP stated or many other zones, or even better try it in a zone with a WEB. Try yelling in map chat about the giant shark in Sparkfly and see how many show up.
I would also be curious to see how you’re friend’s experiences change over time as he leaves the starter zones and moves out into the wider world. I just started a new toon as well, and it will be interesting to see how my leveling experiences will stack up to what I went through near the beginning of the game.
I would say that I don’t see the problem of lacking people on Underworld, but I can’t talk about other servers, because I don’t play there.
My friend already has level 80s, so leveling this alt is not his first experience. I’m leveling my engineer at this point. From the zones I did today I could claim that Bloodtide Cost is quite populated. I entered the zone, saw like 8 or so people from the same guild, they plopped tailoring and armorsmithing stations and ran off. And I just thought “why?”.
I don’t think that the giant shark event is popular, but it’s not because of the loot that it gives or doesn’t give, but rather because people find it not so exciting. The same can be said for krait witch. She’s up every 15 minutes and is not fun.
where is everybody?
Well I don`t know, but they are not in Orr!
Not surprising. Who likes to get massacred by swarms of Veteren Hatchlings, quickly wasted by Champion Risen Wraiths, or one-shotted by Champion Risen Chickens at events like Pent/Shelt?
“You can teach ’em, but you cant learn ’em.”
Problem #1 – Archaic server architecture.
Seriously, this is the age of cloud computing. Red5 have seriously solved this problem with the server architecture they’re using on their game, FireFall.
It runs on Amazon AWS, and players are assigned dynamically to available servers, to keep the population on each server as close to optimal as possible. It tries to log players onto the same servers as their friends, or armys (guilds), and allows people to transfer to the same server as a friend from within the game, should they end up on different ones.
It also saves money, because the number of running servers is matched to the number of active players. If the player count rises, new server instances can be created to cater for the demand.
They don’t even need to kick people off the servers when there’s a patch, because they can stay logged into servers running the old patch, and move to the new ones when they want to.
GW2’s zones are already separate from each other, so why not have people walking between them assigned to servers dependant on load, instead of every single realm’s server, having seveal zones empty except for the few people farming resources, or doing chest events.
Problem #2 – Dynamic events aren’t.
Come on, how can you call these dynamic events? The only thing about them that’s dynamic is the timing. After all the hype, they’re a bit of a let down.
There should be no such thing as a group event, because everything should be scaling to the number of players present. A single player should be getting a veteran mob and maybe a couple of normal adds, where a bigger group gets a champion plus some veterans, and for those inbetween there should be more adds.
If more people show up during an event, it should be having additional mobs in the next wave, or more adds spawning during the fight if it’s a tougher mob.
Respawn rates can also be tuned to match the number of players actively engaging at an event location.
With metrics it should be possible to work out exactly how tough each mob type is, and from there assign the right number and types of mobs to match active players.
In all cases, people should want to do the events as groups. They should have a higher chance of dropping better loot than just farming regular mobs, and that chance ahould increase the more people are involved.
Of course there should be a cap too, otherwise you’d just get massive lag inducing zergs, after guaranteed rares, spawning huge numbers of mobs.
Problem #3 – No reason to play lower level areas once you hit 80.
Except for those kill X mobs, gather Y resources dailys, where people are going to pick the lowest level zones to get it done as quickly as possible.
The daily system could be a major part of getting high level players into low level zones, to help out those who are otherwise levelling solo.
Instead of giving people a list things, 5 of which they must complete in order to get their daily, give them a random selection of 5 zones, where they need to get a certain amount of XP in one of them for the daily (straight mob kills would be at a lower XP rate though to discourage farming). They may be going over something they’ve done before, but there’s enough to the world that it needn’t be repetitive. Just ~15 minutes a day in a random area, with a small bonus for doing dynamic events alongside people who are closer to the level of the zone.
Also, while people are doing these dailys, make the loot drops and XP appropriate to their level.
You could prevent people consistently picking lower level, or more popular areas from the 5 offered, by removing a choice from the pool of zones that may be offered, until a certain number of dailys have been completed.
Basically, instead of having endgame players favor farming a small, high level subset of the game for the best rewards, move them around constantly.
I was on after 11PM eastern last night on Yak’s Bend and there were a half dozen of us doing the gargantula event.
Problem #1 – Archaic server architecture.
Seriously, this is the age of cloud computing.
Don’t mention cloud computing. It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to gaming – latency and lag and having your game run on some system that’s worse than yours. Simcity 5 failed with that horribly.
Instead of giving people a list things, 5 of which they must complete in order to get their daily, give them a random selection of 5 zones, where they need to get a certain amount of XP in one of them for the daily (straight mob kills would be at a lower XP rate though to discourage farming).
and I have full world completion. Do you know how tedious daily would become?
Problem #1 – Archaic server architecture.
This is already how ANet handles things. There are separate servers because of game design(WvW) not because of server architecture.
Welcome to Iron Marches.
Population zero.
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