Guild Wars 2

I rather have the 3-10 guys afk on my team than the 20-25 guys who have no clue what to do. There are a lot people doing this event who have no idea what to do. Even after explaining and other players trying to explain they choose to /ignore and run around. I have failed several times because of this. Do I get report those people who I deem not “good” enough to do this event. They wasted my time, I know what to do, so wouldn’t that be fair?

Drizzt.5867:

I rather have the 3-10 guys afk on my team than the 20-25 guys who have no clue what to do. There are a lot people doing this event who have no idea what to do. Even after explaining and other players trying to explain they choose to /ignore and run around. I have failed several times because of this. Do I get report those people who I deem not “good” enough to do this event. They wasted my time, I know what to do, so wouldn’t that be fair?

You are presenting a false choice. I cannot choose between 3-10 AFK and 20-25 clueless.

I get 3-10 AFK and 20-25 clueless.

The solution for the clueless is to politely try to explain, in chat, how the encounters work.

The solution for the (long-term, in it for the rewards, leeching) AFK is to politely ask them to contribute. And then report them if they do not. They are welcome to auto-attack while untuned and I will not report them for that.

Performance is not required. Participation should be.

I’d happily stop reporting them if I were asked to stop by anybody from ArenaNet. Until then, I will continue to report people I believe to be violating both the letter and the spirit of the Code of Conduct.

Anyway, as we’re really just talking circles around each other, I might move on to other conversations. It has been an enlightening thread, I’ll say that.

timmyf.1490:

Azreell.1568:

When you design content that requires 50-60+ pug players that I have to rely on in order to get any rewards for an hrs time investment – Yes , people will get discouraged after wasting that much time.

I can play my heart out, do my rotation properly, maximize my dps and utilites, bring all required consumable food to ensure I preform at 100% , have the most optimal spec and gear and at the end of the day it will not effect the fight outcome at all since you have people who can’t even dodge as an example.

So yes I am using that as a defense as I can understand why people would sit afk in the corner.

Right, but idling in the corner just EXACERBATES this problem. Going AFK makes you considerably less reliable than people who are at least attempting to do the content.

Or rather, you’re reliably useless.

You obviously don’t understand or have the inability to understand my replies.

Doing the event is an exercise in futility.

One hour of my time is totally dependent on the performance of 60+ pugs as well as my ability to gain a reward for my time investment.

I also do not have the option to group myself with more competent or like minded players to achieve my goals for this event. The only option I have is to waste hours on end and hope I get lucky with a main or overflow group that can see huge pulsing circles on the ground or at least remembers how to dodge.

That is the definition poorly designed content with no options.

I could try hard or not try at al and have absolutely no impact what so ever on the event.

GW2 due to it’s simplicity attracted the lowest in the food chain in terms of PvE players.

If “scaling” means that an event’s difficulty (or boss health) is increased by the number of players present, if a player is present but idle and does not contribute anything other than his/her presence, wouldn’t that player be scaling up the event difficulty? While I’m not exactly sure how Anet works scaling, I’m pretty confident that those 3 afk/idle players REALLY ARE negatively impacting the chance of success, as their presence increases boss health/event difficulty without the benefit of their DPS contribution that the game expects the afk/idler to contribute.

I won’t mention any names, but if some posters on this thread have so much contempt for this game and its players, why do you even play?

OP read your own post and the answer lies within:

Option 1: Cater to 4 players.
Option 2: Cater to 7 players.

So?

A ‘legitimate’ AFK/leech situation. I could roam the whole map without being touched.

Sinbold.8723:

If “scaling” means that an event’s difficulty (or boss health) is increased by the number of players present, if a player is present but idle and does not contribute anything other than his/her presence, wouldn’t that player be scaling up the event difficulty? While I’m not exactly sure how Anet works scaling, I’m pretty confident that those 3 afk/idle players REALLY ARE negatively impacting the chance of success, as their presence increases boss health/event difficulty without the benefit of their DPS contribution that the game expects the afk/idler to contribute.

I won’t mention any names, but if some posters on this thread have so much contempt for this game and its players, why do you even play?

Which is more negatively effecting the encounter:

Three afk players?

or

15 Players who have no idea what the circles do and keep dying by standing where they shouldn’t?

I personally have yet to come across an encounter were afk people were the reason they event failed. Also, the reason why people complain is because they want things fixed.

You should be more worried when things go silent because that means people are quitting.

Raids.

Yes I said it.

Make guild instances where guild leaders can taxi in guests and all those in the guild can enter.

Xia.3485:

Raids.

Yes I said it.

Make guild instances where guild leaders can taxi in guests and all those in the guild can enter.

Exactly.

For pugs nothing has changed.

For guilds or like minded players we now have options to play as we like as well.

The architecture is already there with overflows for this to be viable.

Lishtenbird.2814:

You enjoy watching “aspects”? No problem, but the “aspects” you watched would be the only thing you carry out of the event areas. No AP, no loot for you, sorry. If it’s fine with you – it’s fine with me; but please be considerate enough not to do it in the main server as I and other 149 players come to play there and it is really hard to get in during LS releases.

Exactly what I said, people not participating should not receive the rewards. When Anet includes code to require participation in a zone event in order to be allowed there (not enough people for Teq because there are others in the zone enjoying other aspects of the game ?) I agree that events such as the battle of LA should be included.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Sarcasm aside, people participating in zergs should either be (properly) made a part of the global event or excluded from the global event reward altogether. As long as people are encouraged by both fight mechanics and rewards to zerg everything, people will keep coming to the forum to protect zergers because that is the path of least resistance and highest reward.

No sarcasm. If people zerging are providing no (or little) more benefit for the global event than spectators, idlers, or true AFKers, they should be considered no better in terms of reward or punishment.

I do agree with the OP here but there are so many reasons why the LA LS became afkworld. The main issue was you had to spend so many hours in there to complete the meta and to obtain 250 heirlooms. The day it launched I ran LA at least 13 times and maybe 6 times the day after. The third day I didn’t go in there at all because it was the same thing.

The event wasn’t dynamic in a sense that perhaps each day the content would be slightly different. Also didn’t help that the whole thing only had 15 minutes of downtime. After taking a day off I went back at it but it no longer for fun but to work. Work to get the rest of the 250 heirlooms and achievements. It was no surprise that it became afkworld the second week because everyone was burnt out. So it just became a matter of show up and collect.

As one poster mentioned the general populous of this game is bad. Majority of the players stand in stuff, don’t dodge don’t try to survive downed state, bad gear choices , bad build, bad computers, bad internet, three button mice, no field awareness and so on.

I have to stand next to these players in lieu of those who want to win, who want difficult content and not expect reward.

The day we took back LA back patch I became a bad players myself because I resurrected the same player 9 times(yes 9) because they could not dodge or heal themselves.

EFWinters.5421:

OP read your own post and the answer lies within:

Option 1: Cater to 4 players.
Option 2: Cater to 7 players.

So?

The answer is:

• cater to the 7 lazy zergers/AFKers for the first 50 bucks they paid – which is already done by personal story, story dungeons, world bosses etc.;
• and then cater to the other 4 dedicated players who want challenge to stay in game and who will provide X amount of new 50 bucks gem purchases with new story items in the store.

I do agree that average player skills (as confirmed by the knight’s pull once again) are rather low; but this skill level is generally taken into account when designing any content (apart from Tequatl and Wurm), and that’s why we had the 1200 citizens limit and not 3500 (and even the 1500 one was changed). However what is not taken into account is the ability of players to AFK and do non-contributing tasks in such amounts that they eventually lead to failure. Or rather, the measures to naturally discourage zerging are not thought out enough.

Let’s think for example of why the children event was infamous. The reason is simple: it’s the event closest to the main entrance, thus the most lazy zergers can farm it without spending “unnecessary” time (and money!). A simple solution to that:

• All waypoints are uncontested; zerg can travel freely and easily split throughout the map to contribute to any event they want.
• All waypoints cost 0 copper to use. With the previous election promotions in mind, this makes sense lore-wise: while Mister Evon is “contributing” to equip the army, Ellen pays for waypoints.
• If contesting was that important story-wise, some waypoints might have got contested, with their uncontesting saving extra citizens, creating extra events and further splitting the zerg.

- If only people learned to dodge and those 10-20 people searching for Peter the Chatspam and doing the half-hour Cannoneer came to help us, we would’ve managed to take down the last knight…
- You selfish elitist, don’t force people to play how they want!!11oneone
- Where is Peter?
- But you want and can do Peter and events for 60 minutes out of 60, and we can do knights (the thing REQUIRED to experience the finale of the whole LS and to get Scarlet’s chest) only for 15 minutes out of 60! Why can’t we play how WE want and have 4 knight fights per hour? How fair is that?
- silence
- Where is Peter?

That’s what I get from the chat every now and then during the Battle for LA. The reason for it is yet another game concept with contradicting goals in a whole-map event. The issues of this release as I see them (as of current patch and bugs aside) are as follows:

• The knights do not scale, thus requiring the whole map to participate.
• Searching for Peter, doing half-hour Cannoneer and other events is allowed to be done during the knights phase, and because of the non-scaling issue, the 10% percent of people doing these events (who “want to play how they want”) put the experience of the other 90% of players (who “want to play how they want”) at risk.
• Constant rewards for any amount of defeated knights do not really motivate people to try doing more knights if they feel they can fail. This is a controversial issue however, because a) it also can be a penalty-free motivation to do the event for low-pop servers, and b) the largest reward (Scarlet’s chest) is still there as a motivation.
• As mentioned earlier, during the Holo fight, both In Tune and No More Tricks achievements are counter-productive: the easiest way to obtain them is to hit the Holo a couple of times and then disengage for the rest of the fight. Anti-AFK lasers made it harder to AFK, but people who want to exploit achievements can still scale the event but not contribute to DPS.
• And even if you want to contribute throughout the event but get the achievements, you will still be counter-productive because a) not getting hit by scorches requirement means that you will spend ~75% of time without the attunement (you’re cut from it) and thus would not be doing full damage, b) requirement of hitting only with attunement makes engineers, mesmers, rangers and necros highly inefficient as their minions/pets/turrets/illusions count against them and often cannot be controlled.

Now how I see this event should’ve been done:

• At :55 minutes, the map-wide text changes to: “Scarlet’s knights are being configured for assault. All current events will halt in: [-5 minute counter]”
• At :00, all current events stop, their mobs (including Peter) despawn, the map-wide text changes to: “Knights are assaulting Lion’s Arch! Static Knight Health: [hp] Dynamic Knight Health: [hp] Synergetic Knight Health: [hp]” All players can see what is happening and understand they should go help fight knights (and then get their 5 champ boxes and cores and Scarlet’s chest).
• At :15 or when all knights are defeated, events and mobs spawn back/reset. People can decide whether they go help slay Scarlet (extra 15 minutes for average organised fight) or farm mobs for another 45 minutes. All people who participated in any knight event get champ boxes (2-4-6) based on the amount of the defeated knights, plus a chance of cores.
• Optional: unslain knights can still be slain for another 5-10-15 minutes, not giving event exp/karma/champ boxes, but still giving a chance of cores. That would also motivate more people to participate in the event even in overflows and low-pop servers.
• “In Tune” achievement is replaced by “In Sync” achievement, which requires players to kill 3 colored microholos together – which is a mechanic that simplifies further fighting and thus is productive.
• “No More Tricks, Scarlet” achievement is replaced by “Not in Charge” achievement, which requires players to kill all ultraviolet microholos during the last stage before they charge the main holo – which is also productive. Now I know some people are always against achievements which rely on other players, but between an AFK achievement and a group one I choose the latter. Furthermore, unlike Warden dodge achievements, these cannot be abused and always lead to a shorter/easier fight.

Lishtenbird.2814:

The answer is:

• cater to the 7 lazy zergers/AFKers for the first 50 bucks they paid – which is already done by personal story, story dungeons, world bosses etc.;
• and then cater to the other 4 dedicated players who want challenge to stay in game and who will provide X amount of new 50 bucks gem purchases with new story items in the store.

Can you please provide evidence as to which demographics actually spend real money on gems? Take your time, I’ll wait.

Lishtenbird covered a lot of my feelings in the above post. But I also want to say:

I’m shocked that the same development team that figured out loot sharing and shared resource nodes and downscaling and dynamic events and all of the other “cooperate-don’t-compete” functionality would seem so lost when building new content and new mechanics.

I understand that your goal is to bring players together in game. You are (mostly) succeeding in bringing us to the same area, but when we get there, the result is toxic and non-productive.

I want to play with my friends and guildmates, but often I’m stuck playing with elitist jerks or AFKers or people who have no idea about the mechanics and seemingly no interest in learning them or straight-up trolls.

I’m not sure that the whole system needs to be thrown out, but it needs quite a bit of refinement.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Can you please provide evidence as to which demographics actually spend real money on gems? Take your time, I’ll wait.

I would be ultra happy if ANet rep jumped in and shared some playstyle-to-gem curves, even the most vague ones * hint-hint *, but we know they won’t.

However I believe what I say is true for two reasons:

• Psychology and common sense. No matter what you do, you get tired of it after 1000 iterations. If you do the most grindy and profitable and easy things, you grind enough gold not to buy any gems with real money. If you’re here for mindless zerging and grinding, I highly doubt that you’re with a mature mindset of consciously supporting the game you love; what you actually do is come to the forum to whine how every patch is the worst ever because you have to dodge, to eat dirt cheap potions and to help other people.
• This is actually what ANet is doing at the moment. They do not generally revamp old content, but the things they add (Tequatl, Wurm, recent LS events) are anti-zerg to a large degree. You have to learn mechanics and you have to coordinate to succeed. I really feel they’re trying to cater to those people who like challenge – and if they do it, it means that it has proven to be profitable. The amount of “cheap” newcomers is finite (as seen in financial reports), and dedicated players who are interested in the game is what they need at the moment and will need to hold on to in the future when other major titles hit the market.

timmyf.1490:

I’m shocked that the same development team that figured out loot sharing and shared resource nodes and downscaling and dynamic events and all of the other “cooperate-don’t-compete” functionality would seem so lost when building new content and new mechanics.

I understand that your goal is to bring players together in game. You are (mostly) succeeding in bringing us to the same area, but when we get there, the result is toxic and non-productive.

I do feel they’re trying to change content (and they come up with really nice and enjoyable things actually), but just as you, I am surprised that at the same time they fail at some simple and well, pretty predictable points. To an extent, it feels like GW2 devs are good at coming up with excellent “spherical horse in a vacuum” mechanics, but are terribad at dealing with real-world human psychology.

upscaled events with only deter the players and you end up with dead content

remember the new TA path? yeah… no one goes in there anymore.

Charak.9761:

upscaled events with only deter the players and you end up with dead content

remember the new TA path? yeah… no one goes in there anymore.

IMO it’s rather a problem of effort-reward balance which is very often what ANet is bad at (see FoTM 50 rewards). ANet is afraid to give good rewards for hard content (probably because good teams can benefit “too much” from it), thus nobody is doing it.

I visited Aetherpath not so long ago with a half-guild, half-pug group. It took about 2 hours to complete. It was totally fun for me, but a guildie said “I would never ever step in there again.” The thing worth mentioning however is that I buy gems and the guildie doesn’t (and would’ve preferred to run 4-5 other dungeons for the extra 4-5 gold).

Yeah, definitely a sad truth about rewards in this game thus far. Its one of the huge turnoffs for most content, if its not making me x amount in a certain timeframe its a waste of time.

Time to resurrect the thread.

Boss Blitz. Different open-world whole-map event, same problems:

• AFKers who stand at waypoint or (worse) at bosses taking up the useful capacity of the map while people who are useful are unable to get in.
• Leechers who autoattack a boss a bit several times and then just stand there, upscaling the boss and making it hard to kill and the event easier to fail.
• Farmers who still need to “farm ogres” and “farm centaurs” for achievements right in the middle of a gold run. (Thread about counter-productive achievements in Boss Blitz.)
• Taggers who go from boss to boss pulling tons of mobs to tag every boss for easy XP and randomly upscaling them. Those are usually upscaled (and now traitless thanks to the new trait unlock system) low-levels who hurt more then help.
• Blind and deaf puppies who can play a video game but obviously cannot read at all (even whispers) and kill bosses too early, leading to a chain reaction of early kills and an eventual fail, or go “help” other bosses just to upscale them to enormous levels. Taggers can do it as well since all they need is to do damage to get credit. The same “blind and deaf” thing happens with donations which start event sooner than groups are formed.

New problems came with megaservers:

• Blind and deaf puppies can now be people who a) don’t speak your language (usually even English), b) have their chat language filter on (which is on by default).
• It’s next to impossible to find a fairly empty map to which all players from the guild/alliance can fit in (since there is no more option for guesting to a low-pop server). Taxiing people in is a frustrating waste of time, as well as spamming “join in world”. Trying to organise a run, then rage-switching an instance, rinse-repeat-quit Crown Pavillion is not a rare scenario. Having Gauntlet in the same map with random amount of people there doesn’t make it any better.
• Any disconnect or crash (which happen a lot with megazergers) now results in loss of your place in a full map and effectively ends your game session. If you were a commander, that’s twice a problem. It also leads to being always forced to play on lowest graphical setting as otherwise a chance of client crash is very high.

The worse fact is that after several rounds of gold runs you are forced to resort to dirty tricks to shake off the freeloaders who gradually make it harder to do proper and efficient runs. So, what can ANet do about it?

• Think hard, very hard and come up with a balanced system of limits similar to colour calibration buffs at Assault Knights and platform fight debuffs at Marionette which would discourage selfish behaviour, as well as fail-proof systems which make sure that 1 “play-how-I-want” puppy does not spoil the game of the other 79 players.
• For Dwayna’s sake, just make instanced raids! That doesn’t even require hard thinking. With megaservers, it is now really easy to a) spawn a new instance – can be done as a guild, and b) taxi people who know what to do from your guild/alliance, and then taxi in everyone who wants to help via “Open World Content” LFG.

This is exactly why I don’t play Tequatl and Wurm. Sure those fights are interesting and all, but I don’t want to carry leechers, afkers and people who don’t want to listen or cooperate.
There should be an option to instance the whole map for your guild/party.

Nick.6972:

This is exactly why I don’t play Tequatl and Wurm. Sure those fights are interesting and all, but I don’t want to carry leechers, afkers and people who don’t want to listen or cooperate.
There should be an option to instance the whole map for your guild/party.

You mean instanced raids? They were created during the era of everquest mmos, because they worked, and they solved the problems of open-world raids/events, and that design avoided the leechers, griefers, dis-organized groups, etc. GW2 went back to the open-world design model though, but Anet never properly tackled all the negative issues that came with it.

I like this. I personally would like to add that we need a whole map event tracking system for the current maps especially in places like Orr because people who aren’t within 5 feet don’t know that a temple run has begun and thus don’t port there because there’s nothing on the main map about it. Same goes for all maps.

Typically it’s the FPS games that have used open world events systems and they’ve learned that it’s absolutely necessary to track these things on the main map across the whole map so that players can at least plan, this is true now for RPGs that use the same system. We need a main map event tracking system for the entire map so long as players are on the same map.

tigirius.9014:

I like this. I personally would like to add that we need a whole map event tracking system for the current maps especially in places like Orr because people who aren’t within 5 feet don’t know that a temple run has begun and thus don’t port there because there’s nothing on the main map about it. Same goes for all maps.

Typically it’s the FPS games that have used open world events systems and they’ve learned that it’s absolutely necessary to track these things on the main map across the whole map so that players can at least plan, this is true now for RPGs that use the same system. We need a main map event tracking system for the entire map so long as players are on the same map.

I had a large post on how to make low-level maps better (including map-wide and game-wide event tracking), but it got merged into the megaserver megathread by mistake. Maybe I should rework it and repost it.