I was thinking last night as I went to bed about Guildwars not feeling much of a mmo etc like other games.
I came up with a few reasons the biggest one being waypoints.
I’ve played other games, Priston Tale, WoW , Final Fantasy XI, Lineage 2 and tried a couple others.
Granted these games were mostly on private servers but still felt more mmo and world ish, FFXI each zone is similar to ours being its own area with a load screen between them.
The biggest thing I can see in Guildwars 2 causing zones to be empty and lack of interest in Anets dynamic events which they said they added hundreds of since release that wasn’t well received are primarily the waypoints and how they’re used.
Waypoints in this game means you can instantly travel anywhere in the game to right to near your destination as there are 15 waypoints each zone or more.
What this does is eliminate the need to actually go through the zones unless you have a quest etc or doing hearts etc or are collecting certain craft materials.
The random encounters with other players aren’t there as much because why do you need to go through into a zone when you have nothing to do there or no champion etc to farm?
Point, there is no need. Because once you have all the areas you can just port right to that area like a dungeon or in this fortnights case the exact zone scarlets invasions are skipping everything between a town and that zone.
Also once you are done you can just port right back to LA without having anything else to do with that and other zones.
While I love waypoints as much as the next guy, its eliminating the need to go through zones bump into people and randomly come across things in the zone like a event or a player which you can lend a hand to and help out on your way back to or from LA etc or even do some casual gathering, mining etc as you make your way to your destination.
These encounters are what brings the main life into a mmo eliminate the need by being able to port everywhere on the map to roughly a few buildings from your destination you remove the need to run through a map bump into people and help people out and that takes that random social encounter aspect out of it.
When the game was first released no-one had the waypoints so they were all going through and doing the zones together but once they have the waypoints and areas they no longer need to return to most of the game they just port to the waypoint closest to there champ there going to farm etc or dungeon.
The cost of waypoints also once you get into the game is cheap 1-2 silver each way, a cost of about or less than 5-10 drops.
So we are seeing players port everywhere and not going back into zones unless they have to.
Another area is the fact that each area has soo many mobs and the difficulty of them compared to other games, in other games you level just above the areas level then you can gather and mine without there being too many issues.
In Guildwars 2 you are too busy to worry about the mobs to farm or craft in Guildwars 1 you could go back to ascalon at level 20 casual go through the area with no issues.
Imagine is Guilwars 1 was turned persistent where the instancing would just be modified like or zones and the Guildwars 1 towns.
It would be more filled with life in the zones out of the towns with people going through the zones to actually get somewhere than porting straight there. bumping into random encounters and making friends along the way.
Now looking at these things how could Guildwars 2 have been improved to bring life into zones and more random encounters.
.Get rid of waypoints only allow you to port to the nearest town to your destination for a fee like 20 silver free based on distance from that town, as we are between towns means easy travel and less reliance on zones.
Bring back res shrines as the new alternative to waypoints this way you spawn at the nearest shrine to your death place. -This way death is still handled in game responsibly.
Allow personal Asura portal devices for crafting and limited to a certain number of uses also make them require a fair amount of materials that way you can port to and from a certain area on a per use basis like an Asura portal waystation in that area.
Allow people o go through areas at a slightly less difficulty as you can do that in starter zones already once leveled up so roll that out more across other worlds.
Changing the game to this can be achieved in a living story avent where the Asura waypoints start failing to transmit portal and data information and become map resurrection points instead and the Asura then work out that a personal portal device would be better but comes as a cost etc.
(edited by drguild.2045)