Guild Wars 2

When I first started playing this game two years ago, the average number of players that you would expect to meet in a PvE map was maybe 10-15 at a world boss and if you went to WvW then you would see a zerg of maybe 50 players.

These numbers have slowly increased over the years. These days at a world boss it is not uncommon to see an entire map’s population there (something like several hundred players minimum) and WvW zergs tend to be of similar size on T1.

I know that zergs occur in all games, however it feels like Anet has done absolutely nothing to curb the tendancy to ball into huge zergs for all content. In fact, I would say that everything they have done since release , such as living world, megaserver, map event dailies and Silverwastes have just asked more and more people to all gather into a single location for a part of the game.

My issue with this is it seems to completely break the mechanics of the game. For those of us old enough to remember, the game was highly balanced at 5-10 players (25 max). But due to issues with downscaling, poor event scaling, etc. zergs have rendered all existing content completely trivial and less than 1% of a challenge.

There’s also the fact that this game engine is aging and yet Anet seems to ignore this, constantly pushing more intensive content that even larger zergs can participate in (rather than more solo or party content). I remember a time when world events demanded strategy discussion in local chat, and these days the only kind of discussion I ever see in local chat at world events is how low everyone’s FPS is, how much they are lagging and how they can barely move or use any skills.

I am really wondering where the game is headed and if HoT will be even worse…

They haven’t ignored this at all. I’m the first to complain about lack of challenge but they are trying. Years ago MMO developers found out about the zerg issue and came up with the only answer to address it, instances. It’s really the only way to force people to play in smaller groups, however it comes with the loss of having a giant open world to play in. Instead everyone is in their own tiny little world and you might as well have a “diablo” style system where you find a group and zone into the game together and only play with them.

But, again, ANet has been trying. They’ve done things like Crown Pavillion requiring us to break into smaller groups to tackle things together. They’ve done Silverwastes and Dry top that require the same type of thing for the best rewards. It’s honestly the best attempt I’ve seen for open world content. However, this still simply divides the groups up, it can only be so many parts before it gets to be more of a hassle on the gamers than a help. If you’ve ever found yourself on a low pop SW map I’m sure you’ll understand that being the only one or maybe 2 at a tower is pretty painful, it’s tough to design content that both engages 20+ players and a single player both in a fun way. A single or maybe a couple bigger fights is more fun as a solo player, but having a swarm of enemies is more fun than afk ranging a boss down in a group. Again, they’re trying.

If you have a better idea that can encourage not grouping up together, well… I’m sure they’d be interested in hearing it.

Every attempt I’ve seen has had it’s own issues. Caps on how many people can be at an area and you can cut friends off from playing with eachother, we even see this on the large scale with megaservers and map caps. Spread out the required events too much and low population might not even be able to do it. Design an event for a couple players and bringing a bunch might make it unfun, and the reverse is true also. It’s just not an easy thing to do.

Hannelore.8153:

These days at a world boss it is not uncommon to see an entire map’s population there (something like several hundred players minimum) and WvW zergs tend to be of similar size on T1.

i don’t know of a single place in PvE where you could see a zerg several hundred players strong. Perhaps in WvW if 3 server zergs meet in one spot (though i believe the WvW maps individual server caps are actually lower than on PvE maps,so maybe not even there). I believe the current cap estimation for PvE maps is somewhere around 120 people for soft cap and 150 for hardcap (i can be wrong , but i doubt i would be off by much).
That would put the biggest zergs at no more than a hundred people, usually lower than that.

A couple of things they could do.

1) change the daily events to any 5 events or make them in a region instead of a map
2) have the meta event bosses not be sequential but have 2, 3, or even 4 all start at the same time. Spread out the zerg that way. (All except the ones that need a full map. Those should have a separate time).

Only way to counter it is make it instance with max player aka a raid,but they dont want to be WoW killer for some strange reason.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

A couple of things they could do.

1) change the daily events to any 5 events or make them in a region instead of a map
2) have the meta event bosses not be sequential but have 2, 3, or even 4 all start at the same time. Spread out the zerg that way. (All except the ones that need a full map. Those should have a separate time).

1) Would help with people zerging map content for dailies, although, in all honesty i’ve rarely experienced that.
2) It would devolve to people just ignoring a few of the world bosses to do the 2-3 fastest ones so they can maximize the profit.

I’m not a big fan of zergs, stacks and trains, but they are simply how players exploit the game to maximize efficiency. If you don’t wanna be efficient, you can always try and see if you can switch to a zerg-free megaserver.
In fact that might be the best solution, a chat command (or even a button on the Menu) to switch between servers to find one better suited for you (like when you get stuck in a SW instance with people farming chests and you want to do the meta-event.

Megaservers and coordinated world boss events have been introduced on april 15th a year ago – you can’t be without a zerg in pve anymore, except if you are on a deserted orr map, then it’s possible to fight a boss without an gigantic zerg.

But, I have once been to behe and was advised to change maps, surprisingly we had no problems to defeat him.

Edit: grammar

ReaverKane.7598:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

A couple of things they could do.

1) change the daily events to any 5 events or make them in a region instead of a map
2) have the meta event bosses not be sequential but have 2, 3, or even 4 all start at the same time. Spread out the zerg that way. (All except the ones that need a full map. Those should have a separate time).

1) Would help with people zerging map content for dailies, although, in all honesty i’ve rarely experienced that.
2) It would devolve to people just ignoring a few of the world bosses to do the 2-3 fastest ones so they can maximize the profit.

1) every time I do the dailies now, there are crowds of people running from one event to the other. Many times, by the time I wp to one and run to it, it’s over. I’ve stopped doing the daily events because of this.
2) make them the ones equivalent in difficulty and adjust the times of the pre-events. Such as all the starter bosses at one time; shadow behemoth, jungle wurm, the Maw, fire elemental; those could have the pre-events adjusted then all start at the same time.
Also if people are running bosses, once they do the easiest ones, if they want to continue they will need to do the others to get the full amount of profit.

meanwhile in other games.

people cry that that game is doing bad because there are no players in the world.

be happy there are ZERGS everywhere that’s a good thing.

Zoltreez.6435:

meanwhile in other games.

people cry that that game is doing bad because there are no players in the world.

be happy there are ZERGS everywhere that’s a good thing.

It’s called, everything in moderation. A game empty of players has its problems and so does a game with maps filled with too many players, all trying to do the same things but the game isn’t designed for it. Just because maps being too full don’t have the same problems as maps that are empty doesn’t mean the problems of too full maps shouldn’t be solved.

I personally don’t have any problems with the population in maps except for daily events and the meta bosses. Those two things have problems with too many people trying to do the same things at one time and the game being unable to scale to handle the number of players. Either the scaling needs to be looked at or the map population.

ReaverKane.7598:

In fact that might be the best solution, a chat command (or even a button on the Menu) to switch between servers to find one better suited for you (like when you get stuck in a SW instance with people farming chests and you want to do the meta-event.

That’s sort of an interesting idea. What if they had a place they could put some meta data that defined ‘something big was going on’ for that area. Could be that the zone is tagged for the entire day as something that needs to have events completed, or it’s around the time of a world boss (+/- time around the event). During those times, it makes some different decisions about closing empty instances and asking you to leave. Rather, we all have a setting that we can set to indicate how sensitive we are to zergs in outdoor areas. Two (three?) settings. If you don’t care, then you get what we have today. If you indicate you are sensitive, you get an indication that the map is breaking your threshold, and would you like to move (reverse empty instance message). If you select yes, anyone in your party can then join you, if they choose, or disband.

They’d have to come up with some threshold numbers. There might also need to be some sort of ‘escape’ rule to not spin up way too many instances if the entire player base says they are sensitive to zergs. Though, that would be some interesting information (I actually kinda like all the people myself).

I suppose there are hardware issues. I’d be curious to know if mega-servers allowed them to reduce hardware or if they ended up having to add hardware. At any rate, something ‘kinda’ like that might be an interesting way to handle it. I wonder how many instances are fired up now at each WB at peak times as it is now? I wonder how many more would need to spin up to handle a setting like that?

If the current total size was a problem, they could easily reduce the population cap – ergo, they do not consider it a problem.

Consider however that the limits are placed per map. If 80% of players WANT to zerg, then for a map of size 120, you have 96 in the zerg and 24 spread everywhere else in the map. Assume you are someone that is spread elsewhere – that means you would, on average, meet two people per way point – or two people per heart, on most maps. That allows you to have some company.

If the size was cut to 40, maybe the 32 man zerg feels more natural, but it would mean that if you explore alone, you meet one person every TWO hearts – which would feel completely deserted.

For the problem of a giant zergball to be solved, you need to reward people for splitting up, so they do not ball up – such as, for instance, creating objectives that they have to complete simultaneously such that it is impossible for any ball to complete them because it would never move fast enough. It also helps to reduce the number of waypoints to reduce any ball’s possible mobility.

As you might have already noticed, the most recent PvE updates of Dry Top and the Silverwastes fit this archetype EXACTLY. Expect more of the same in Heart of Thorns.

And while I cannot comment on the number of instances in existence for ‘every’ world boss, I know that Tequatl generally has 4-5 instances (2 highly-organised, 1 last-minute organised, 1-2 guaranteed fail maps), Taidha Covington has 4 instances (3 successful, 1 last-minute spawn) and Triple Trouble generally has 2-3 (1 highly-organised, 1 attempted-organisation partial success, 1 guaranteed fail), while most maps outside of world bosses tend to contain exactly 1 instance. As every map has at least one instance, the number of instances in total are approximately equal to the total number of maps plus four during normal bosses, and the total number of maps plus eight during times when the Three Great Bosses (Teq, TT, KQ) overlap with the normal rotation.

Formerly, every server used to have one instance of its own map (and occasionally an overflow), leading to a minimum of the sum of servers multiplied by the sum of maps. Without a doubt, mega-servers would have allowed them to reduce hardware.

notebene.3190:

ReaverKane.7598:

In fact that might be the best solution, a chat command (or even a button on the Menu) to switch between servers to find one better suited for you (like when you get stuck in a SW instance with people farming chests and you want to do the meta-event.

That’s sort of an interesting idea. What if they had a place they could put some meta data that defined ‘something big was going on’ for that area. Could be that the zone is tagged for the entire day as something that needs to have events completed, or it’s around the time of a world boss (+/- time around the event). During those times, it makes some different decisions about closing empty instances and asking you to leave. Rather, we all have a setting that we can set to indicate how sensitive we are to zergs in outdoor areas. Two (three?) settings. If you don’t care, then you get what we have today. If you indicate you are sensitive, you get an indication that the map is breaking your threshold, and would you like to move (reverse empty instance message). If you select yes, anyone in your party can then join you, if they choose, or disband.

They’d have to come up with some threshold numbers. There might also need to be some sort of ‘escape’ rule to not spin up way too many instances if the entire player base says they are sensitive to zergs. Though, that would be some interesting information (I actually kinda like all the people myself).

I suppose there are hardware issues. I’d be curious to know if mega-servers allowed them to reduce hardware or if they ended up having to add hardware. At any rate, something ‘kinda’ like that might be an interesting way to handle it. I wonder how many instances are fired up now at each WB at peak times as it is now? I wonder how many more would need to spin up to handle a setting like that?

Or we could have the option to could “zap” (as in tv-channel “zapping”) through active servers until you find one that suits you.
You know, pretty much what we do with “taxi” but without having to ask someone in your guild, or do/find a LFG to get there. You’d just switch around till you found one that suits you.

Anet should have used the chance of April first and removed all aoe target limits for one day.

Zerg free wvw ftw.

world bosses are not fun because of the massive lag , fps drop, and insane number of people…

ReaverKane.7598:

notebene.3190:

ReaverKane.7598:

In fact that might be the best solution, a chat command (or even a button on the Menu) to switch between servers to find one better suited for you (like when you get stuck in a SW instance with people farming chests and you want to do the meta-event.

That’s sort of an interesting idea. What if they had a place they could put some meta data that defined ‘something big was going on’ for that area. Could be that the zone is tagged for the entire day as something that needs to have events completed, or it’s around the time of a world boss (+/- time around the event). During those times, it makes some different decisions about closing empty instances and asking you to leave. Rather, we all have a setting that we can set to indicate how sensitive we are to zergs in outdoor areas. Two (three?) settings. If you don’t care, then you get what we have today. If you indicate you are sensitive, you get an indication that the map is breaking your threshold, and would you like to move (reverse empty instance message). If you select yes, anyone in your party can then join you, if they choose, or disband.

They’d have to come up with some threshold numbers. There might also need to be some sort of ‘escape’ rule to not spin up way too many instances if the entire player base says they are sensitive to zergs. Though, that would be some interesting information (I actually kinda like all the people myself).

I suppose there are hardware issues. I’d be curious to know if mega-servers allowed them to reduce hardware or if they ended up having to add hardware. At any rate, something ‘kinda’ like that might be an interesting way to handle it. I wonder how many instances are fired up now at each WB at peak times as it is now? I wonder how many more would need to spin up to handle a setting like that?

Or we could have the option to could “zap” (as in tv-channel “zapping”) through active servers until you find one that suits you.
You know, pretty much what we do with “taxi” but without having to ask someone in your guild, or do/find a LFG to get there. You’d just switch around till you found one that suits you.

That would be like the district system in Guild Wars 1. If you never played it, the map shards were called districts. There was a panel on the UI and you could use that to find out how many districts there were on that map right then and you could click on the UI to ask to go to any district. If it wasn’t full, then you would be transported there. In general, the ones at the top were the most full and the ones at the bottom had the fewest people.

Picture shown below is Lions Arch in Guild Wars 1 (and Gaile Gray) ^^
At top left of the UI is the district icon bar. As you can see it has an arrow for a drop down option to access any other districts in the map.

I was always interested in the idea of some bosses casting the Guild Wars 1 version of Spiteful Spirit on players. That would at least force players to spread out a bit and not all stack.

Astralporing.1957:

Hannelore.8153:

These days at a world boss it is not uncommon to see an entire map’s population there (something like several hundred players minimum) and WvW zergs tend to be of similar size on T1.

i don’t know of a single place in PvE where you could see a zerg several hundred players strong. Perhaps in WvW if 3 server zergs meet in one spot (though i believe the WvW maps individual server caps are actually lower than on PvE maps,so maybe not even there). I believe the current cap estimation for PvE maps is somewhere around 120 people for soft cap and 150 for hardcap (i can be wrong , but i doubt i would be off by much).
That would put the biggest zergs at no more than a hundred people, usually lower than that.

How to miss the OP’s point in superstyle.. focus less on the numbers and more on the effect. The OP has a point.
With the exception of 3HW and maybe TEQ and Jormag every world boss event is no more than a 3minute washout offering nothing but #1111,AFK .. grab a coffee then loot and WP’ to next AFK event.
Then add the same issue to pretty much every WvW map, EoTM karma train and any map on the openworld event daily.. the game mechanics simply offer nothing to combat it, heck even most basic openwolrd events cant even upscale to warrant it being trashed in 30 seconds or less.
Yeah there is something to say for instanced events and raids at least they need some organising and possibly tactical nowse instead of button crunching your 1 key a few times before relaxing for the rest of event.

Only time I’m seeing a massive zerge group in PvE (EU), is either in SW, Tequatl, or during daily map events.
“Several hundred” though? Not very often do I see a hundred in Desolation in one little area. Other than people afking, or in WvW. The last time I saw a mass of players was for SW and for the Escape from LA battle.

Megaservers FTW

The zerg exists because the game is designed for it. Take a look at world bosses. Go to a site like the following….

http://dulfy.net/2014/04/23/event-timer/

The fact that the bosses spawn like they do, the fact that such a website can exist, is the problem. If these spawns were random, unpredictable, and have multiple bosses spawning at the same time, this would make it harder for zergs to form.

It shouldn’t be about standing around at the next spawn waiting for it to spawn. It should be about going about your own business and OMG WHAT IS THAT COMING OUT OF THE SWAMP?!

It shouldn’t be about going on a website and finding out when and where the next boss spawns. It should be about the boss pre-event is up spread the word.

It shouldn’t be about following the order listed on the website. It should be about “what? Karka, Shatter, and SB events are all spawned at once?”.

Mix it up, shake it up, make it unpredictable, make players have to choose, etc.

That is, of course, if they insist on leaving it an open world event.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. With the personal story you go to some point on the map and click on some green marker which puts you in an instance portion of the map.

These world bosses would be way better as raid bosses where you form a raid group, click on the map marker and face the boss in an instanced portion of the map.

As for WvW, that is a different beast. It’s all about the bigger blob and all about capping stuff. Only few places are defended for strategic purposes. Keeps for the purpose of the way points.

Camps and towers swap back and forth constantly because there is no real benefit in defending. You flip a camp and you take supplies directly from the camp. Same with towers if it has supplies in it. While taking towers that don’t have supplies, we have actually allowed yaks to drop off the supplies first then kill it.

Deamhan.9538:

The zerg exists because the game is designed for it. Take a look at world bosses. Go to a site like the following….

http://dulfy.net/2014/04/23/event-timer/

The fact that the bosses spawn like they do, the fact that such a website can exist, is the problem. If these spawns were random, unpredictable, and have multiple bosses spawning at the same time, this would make it harder for zergs to form.

It shouldn’t be about standing around at the next spawn waiting for it to spawn. It should be about going about your own business and OMG WHAT IS THAT COMING OUT OF THE SWAMP?!

It shouldn’t be about going on a website and finding out when and where the next boss spawns. It should be about the boss pre-event is up spread the word.

It shouldn’t be about following the order listed on the website. It should be about “what? Karka, Shatter, and SB events are all spawned at once?”.

Mix it up, shake it up, make it unpredictable, make players have to choose, etc.

That is, of course, if they insist on leaving it an open world event.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. With the personal story you go to some point on the map and click on some green marker which puts you in an instance portion of the map.

These world bosses would be way better as raid bosses where you form a raid group, click on the map marker and face the boss in an instanced portion of the map.

As for WvW, that is a different beast. It’s all about the bigger blob and all about capping stuff. Only few places are defended for strategic purposes. Keeps for the purpose of the way points.

Camps and towers swap back and forth constantly because there is no real benefit in defending. You flip a camp and you take supplies directly from the camp. Same with towers if it has supplies in it. While taking towers that don’t have supplies, we have actually allowed yaks to drop off the supplies first then kill it.

Could not agree more.. I have always said that have an egg timer boss/event rotation is just lazy game development and it breeds lazy players that, as you say simply log onto a timer, then wp and #111AFK loot wp..
That kind of openworld concept make a mockery of it supposedly being a revolutionary concept.
Making these things random and unpredictable make the game more interesting and might actually populate maps at times other than when the daily zerg award is on or the timer bell rungs to let players know to wp there… heck to start with all they have to do is alter certain boss timer rotations to cause a clash of bosses and make players choose… but this is GW2 that kind of creativity is way of the radar.

World bosses used to have semi-random spawn times, there were still sites that told you when they were starting and zergs following commanders from boss to boss.

Bloodstealer.5978:

Deamhan.9538:

The zerg exists because the game is designed for it. Take a look at world bosses. Go to a site like the following….

http://dulfy.net/2014/04/23/event-timer/

The fact that the bosses spawn like they do, the fact that such a website can exist, is the problem. If these spawns were random, unpredictable, and have multiple bosses spawning at the same time, this would make it harder for zergs to form.

It shouldn’t be about standing around at the next spawn waiting for it to spawn. It should be about going about your own business and OMG WHAT IS THAT COMING OUT OF THE SWAMP?!

It shouldn’t be about going on a website and finding out when and where the next boss spawns. It should be about the boss pre-event is up spread the word.

It shouldn’t be about following the order listed on the website. It should be about “what? Karka, Shatter, and SB events are all spawned at once?”.

Mix it up, shake it up, make it unpredictable, make players have to choose, etc.

That is, of course, if they insist on leaving it an open world event.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. With the personal story you go to some point on the map and click on some green marker which puts you in an instance portion of the map.

These world bosses would be way better as raid bosses where you form a raid group, click on the map marker and face the boss in an instanced portion of the map.

As for WvW, that is a different beast. It’s all about the bigger blob and all about capping stuff. Only few places are defended for strategic purposes. Keeps for the purpose of the way points.

Camps and towers swap back and forth constantly because there is no real benefit in defending. You flip a camp and you take supplies directly from the camp. Same with towers if it has supplies in it. While taking towers that don’t have supplies, we have actually allowed yaks to drop off the supplies first then kill it.

Could not agree more.. I have always said that have an egg timer boss/event rotation is just lazy game development and it breeds lazy players that, as you say simply log onto a timer, then wp and #111AFK loot wp..
That kind of openworld concept make a mockery of it supposedly being a revolutionary concept.
Making these things random and unpredictable make the game more interesting and might actually populate maps at times other than when the daily zerg award is on or the timer bell rungs to let players know to wp there… heck to start with all they have to do is alter certain boss timer rotations to cause a clash of bosses and make players choose… but this is GW2 that kind of creativity is way of the radar.

The problem with these comments is after you go “OMG WHAT IS THAT COMING OUT OF THE SWAMP?!”, you realize there are only 10 people on the map with you and most of them are new, so by the time you get enough people at the event its already over. You think a bunch of leveled toons are just going to hang around queensdale until SB randomly pops, so they can do it for 1 rare? Doesnt seem likely, just seems like it would make it like SW, where people hop from map to map in lfg, skipping the pre’s and only doing the bosses. If you changed events to be random youd also have to overhaul the pre’s and the events themselves + the rewards and make it scale correctly so 10 people or 100 people could do it with reasonable difficulty

I guess calling it “lazy” isnt wrong since they could somehow put in hundreds and hundreds of hours designing some kind of system to fix this but seems like they have higher priorities right now. Still would be cool if they found time to do something, but i wouldnt bet on it this year

Not everyone can play for hours a day. I love the world boss schedule. I find it to be very convenient.

Bloodstealer.5978:

Making these things random and unpredictable make the game more interesting and might actually populate maps at times

You must be new. World bosses were originally random and it was possible for various ones to be up at the same time. If you were lucky, you could even do the full boss rotation in under an hour. Originally, these bosses didn’t even give decent loot. Two blues and a green was pretty much all you got. Later, they revamped them by giving them a daily bonus rare and increased rare drop rate.

People relied on others to tell them when a world boss was up and websites were created to help organize it. At the time, guildwarstemple.com was the popular choice. As soon as someone said it was up, people would flock to that server to join. If you got into an overflow, you lost your chance, which resulted in people complaining about guesters stealing their spot. People used the last known spawn time to estimate when the next spawn was. Some of the spawn windows were quite long however and people would sit there AFK for hours, both to secure their spot and to wait out the RNG.

While playing an alt in Queensdale one day, I remember the server restarting moments before the Shadow Behemoth was expected to spawn. The restart of course reset its spawn time, but people didn’t know that. This resulted in ~100 people AFKing for 3 hours until it spawned. Funnily enough, I recently watched a friend play WoW and they still do stuff like that there, waiting upwards of 10+ hours with a lot of people for a rare mob to spawn that drops a mount.

Later on, the GW2 API supplied event timers, allowing people to find out exactly when an event was up. It was still random, but you would know exactly when it actually spawned.

After the megaserver change, the API no longer functioned and instead of going back to the archaic system of AFKing for hours, ArenaNet instead chose to schedule them. Truly, nothing is interesting about random spawns and it doesn’t give players any incentive to actually play instead of just standing there, because you MIGHT miss it.

Healix.5819:

Bloodstealer.5978:

Making these things random and unpredictable make the game more interesting and might actually populate maps at times

You must be new. World bosses were originally random and it was possible for various ones to be up at the same time. If you were lucky, you could even do the full boss rotation in under an hour. Originally, these bosses didn’t even give decent loot. Two blues and a green was pretty much all you got. Later, they revamped them by giving them a daily bonus rare and increased rare drop rate.

People relied on others to tell them when a world boss was up and websites were created to help organize it. At the time, guildwarstemple.com was the popular choice. As soon as someone said it was up, people would flock to that server to join. If you got into an overflow, you lost your chance, which resulted in people complaining about guesters stealing their spot. People used the last known spawn time to estimate when the next spawn was. Some of the spawn windows were quite long however and people would sit there AFK for hours, both to secure their spot and to wait out the RNG.

While playing an alt in Queensdale one day, I remember the server restarting moments before the Shadow Behemoth was expected to spawn. The restart of course reset its spawn time, but people didn’t know that. This resulted in ~100 people AFKing for 3 hours until it spawned. Funnily enough, I recently watched a friend play WoW and they still do stuff like that there, waiting upwards of 10+ hours with a lot of people for a rare mob to spawn that drops a mount.

Later on, the GW2 API supplied event timers, allowing people to find out exactly when an event was up. It was still random, but you would know exactly when it actually spawned.

After the megaserver change, the API no longer functioned and instead of going back to the archaic system of AFKing for hours, ArenaNet instead chose to schedule them. Truly, nothing is interesting about random spawns and it doesn’t give players any incentive to actually play instead of just standing there, because you MIGHT miss it.

I completely disagree with your entire post Helix. It was more fun when it was random, and it was different random on different servers… so if you couldn’t make it on one server you could guest to another and get it done at a different time. People still AFK for hours for the bosses like Teq and Triple Trouble. You could see which servers had which event pres up… and guest to that server to get it done. The problem was when it was full the overflows would be on a different timer.

Hundreds of people zerging down world bosses in a matter of seconds is no fun and is the curse of the megaserver. Along with sheduled events meaning you may not be able to make it to the events if they are at inconvenient times.

The old system had problems but the new system is way way worse.

Arenanet, please go back to the old system… or fix this one so it isn’t so terrible!

Well they tried to a counter it with the stability nerf. Anyways, I am just waiting for another game to appear since GW2 has lost its direction when it comes to game balancing and new expansions. Elemental borderlands and range heavy armor classes do not really make me want to play this game anymore plus the living story sucks, it really does… not to mention other critics I could also make about the game (mounts being the biggest). I must congratulate their account/interface updating team which has done a great job adding great features over the years now but balancing not great especially recently and story has not interested me at all since the beginning which I was actually excited after the dev interviews when GW2 was close to release.

micmartin.7465:

Well they tried to a counter it with the stability nerf. Anyways, I am just waiting for another game to appear since GW2 has lost its direction when it comes to game balancing and new expansions. Elemental borderlands and range heavy armor classes do not really make me want to play this game anymore plus the living story sucks, it really does… not to mention other critics I could also make about the game (mounts being the biggest). I must congratulate their account/interface updating team which has done a great job adding great features over the years now but balancing not great especially recently and story has not interested me at all since the beginning which I was actually excited after the dev interviews when GW2 was close to release.

I haven’t decided my opinion on the stability changes… in some ways they are nice… in some ways they suck…. I don’t like mounts and don’t want them added to GW2 so I am ok with that too… Living story had its ups and downs… don’t really like how Season 2 ended but other parts of it were ok. But the megaservers are in my opinion the worst thing they have ever done… and my opinion is not improving over time it is getting worse.

I have mixed feelings about megaservers. On one side, they ensure an event will always have some population. It helps players leveling and event farming. On the other side, events can get over-farmed to where they cannot reset fast enough for the next group to run them. That is where instances and IP maps come into play.

Overall, making each event or quest do-able because there are other players on the map, if not in the same area, is better than ensuring zergs are separated from each other by their own maps.

Arkinos.7245:

Anet should have used the chance of April first and removed all aoe target limits for one day.

Zerg free wvw ftw.

This. Remove the AoE cap. That said, the reason they won’t is a technical one, not a gameplay one.

As someone else said, it’s not like they’re “pro zerging.” I think they want to see it go too but they have technical limitations. I would really love to see zergs go too.

In my opinion, they contribute so heavily to low player skill. In a huge zerg a single player has no ability to meaningfully contribute. Their damage is worthless and their attempts to CC cleverly are also worthless. This leaves many players just stacking tank gear and not bothering with good rotations.

Anytime I dare venture back into open world content I see many players get downed instantly by random champs and immediately cry, “Need more at X, Y, Z champ” instead of trying to just figure out the fight with their traits and utilities.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

ReaverKane.7598:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

A couple of things they could do.

1) change the daily events to any 5 events or make them in a region instead of a map
2) have the meta event bosses not be sequential but have 2, 3, or even 4 all start at the same time. Spread out the zerg that way. (All except the ones that need a full map. Those should have a separate time).

1) Would help with people zerging map content for dailies, although, in all honesty i’ve rarely experienced that.
2) It would devolve to people just ignoring a few of the world bosses to do the 2-3 fastest ones so they can maximize the profit.

1) every time I do the dailies now, there are crowds of people running from one event to the other. Many times, by the time I wp to one and run to it, it’s over. I’ve stopped doing the daily events because of this.
2) make them the ones equivalent in difficulty and adjust the times of the pre-events. Such as all the starter bosses at one time; shadow behemoth, jungle wurm, the Maw, fire elemental; those could have the pre-events adjusted then all start at the same time.
Also if people are running bosses, once they do the easiest ones, if they want to continue they will need to do the others to get the full amount of profit.

One word: Megaserver.

Even if there are 5 things going on at once, each of those things will be zerged. It’s not enough to split players up between different maps. You have to split up the players who are on the same map.

Back when megaservers were introduced, I (and others) tried to request low-pop shards, which would have a map cap of eg. 40. Along with requests for RP shards and anything else, though, Anet has not responded to any ideas to add functionality to the megaserver system.

Make it 100% totaly RANDOM

BUT !!!!!! <<<<<<<<<<<<

Make the bosses drop better rewards.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

World bosses used to have semi-random spawn times, there were still sites that told you when they were starting and zergs following commanders from boss to boss.

Not really, you had to do the events leading up to the spawn of the world boss².
We’ve had a world boss train on IoJ where a group of people would run all over the worldmap to do these events and a zerg of 150 following them. That was cool, actually, and I miss it – the train died with the megaservers. But our zerg was just as big as the zergs are now. But you could do world bosses with a lot less people, we did Jormag with 10 or 15 back in the day and people now think that’s impossible, that’s the downside of the megaservers, well one of the downsides.

² so if no one did the events the boss wouldn’t spawn – so you could kind of decide when you wanted the boss to spawn.

Edit: Added ²

Yeah. I remember I had a couple of people who did the bosses also and if one of us found a boss event starting, we told the others so they could come over. I also had a commander friended who did the temples on a regular basis. He would contact people he knew were following him for the temples and we would get them done. That cooperation died with the Megaservers and the commander stopped playing. Now it’s join the zerg and stand in the safe spot autoattacking until it’s over.

The wiki used to show when regular, non boss events were on and which servers also on the page describing each event. If there was some reason you wanted a particular, non boss, event, you could check wiki to see which servers it was active on right then and guest to that server and do it. For example, let’s say you wanted to do the Lady in White event in Queensdale, which only runs at night. Wiki could tell you which servers it was active on.

I think something could help would be:
– The bosses to have zerg oriented skills. Skills that get stronger the more people are in a spot will make the players to avoid to stack.

- The bosses could be completely “random”, but for that to work the bosses should be something more permanent, do not use timers to defeat them. Also make them mobile, now you only need so await AFK until respawn. If they run along all the zone doing stuff, so the pre events could be directly related to them and not a random event, it is more fun

-The bosses should have some kind of mechanics to avoid players stacking and attacking all at once to the boss. If the boss can spawn minions (tequal or jormag style), and those minions drop stuff (not very pricey but to give a reward like feeling when you kill them) will make the players to disband just to maximize the rewards. Those minions could even help the boss (healing, buffing) so the players wouldn’t focus in the boss and ignore the minions. With this i mean, the minions should be as important as the boss within the event.

They have some examples done already, the champion imp close the megadestroyer, if the altar is not destroyed you do no damage is a good example.

So the mechanics wouldn’t be always #1 AA and AFK. I would like less bosses but more complex to kill with changing strategies (the random minions with different utilities would give that randomness to the game)

I think people have stopped discussing strategies in chat now is simply because people have done the same bosses a million times already. Even in Silverwastes pretty much every class with a reflect goes to the middle lane during the assault out of pure habit. Still, there is plenty of communication when stuff goes bad and people respond to it. That is what I like, but it is typically only in that instance when people talk.

We have megaservers which allows players to always have people in a zone, which is great. As a result we also have zergs. Personally I’d just like open world events to take this into account and make zergs spread out as part of the mechanic, rather than nerf the zerg mentality (which will never happen). It looks bad on the older bosses since they can’t really do much against a zerg and the rewards (in particular the chance for precursors at the present) is too much to pass up.

i would like to see you in a low popu. server with no one to make a single group event

World Bosses are just to press 1 to get 1 rare , who cares?

World bosses spawn according to schedule. I think I’ve seen Tequatl punch a punchcard when he showed up last time.
The new dailies suck, but you have to do them. Of course people will crowd into the target map and zerg.
Megaserver is mega. It’s like being in WoW PUG all the time. You can be as nice or a gigantic kittenbag all you want, because chances are you won’t see anyone you saw today ever again.

You don’t like zergs, what’s the alternative? The dailies can be fixed by bringing back the old dailies. Maybe. The world bosses can’t be instanced, or they wouldn’t be world bosses. Lowering map pop cap will just frustrate people who want to play together – I am personally sick of having to camp the map with the world boss an hour ahead of time just so I can play with my guildmates.

Deamhan.9538:

It shouldn’t be about standing around at the next spawn waiting for it to spawn. It should be about going about your own business and OMG WHAT IS THAT COMING OUT OF THE SWAMP?!

It shouldn’t be about going on a website and finding out when and where the next boss spawns. It should be about the boss pre-event is up spread the word.

It shouldn’t be about following the order listed on the website. It should be about “what? Karka, Shatter, and SB events are all spawned at once?”.

Mix it up, shake it up, make it unpredictable, make players have to choose, etc.

That is, of course, if they insist on leaving it an open world event.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. With the personal story you go to some point on the map and click on some green marker which puts you in an instance portion of the map.

These world bosses would be way better as raid bosses where you form a raid group, click on the map marker and face the boss in an instanced portion of the map.

So in open world its bad to have timers .. but have instanced bosses where they
are there all the time whenever you want them is ok ?

Personally i hate raids but i like open world bosses. The only problem is that
the Megaserver simply brings to much people to those events. But instanced
raids is not the solution .. at least not EQ2 style raids.

Thing is .. open world events prevent you from all the dram you have in instanced
content .. exp, zerk only, gearcheck or kick .. blabla ..

OP, You made some really valid points.

For me it all boils down to loot (or the lack thereof). Almost nothing drops from mobs, so people are bottlenecked into to doing world bosses for a chest and a bonus chest.

Chests yield mostly junk anyway. In 3 months of play I got one Soros weapon chest from Teq. The rest of it was junk. Ok, I got bonus chest rares to salvage but is that really compelling? No, not for me it isn’t. The cash shop isn’t helping. Buying your skins and dyes hurts the drop rate even further.

You mentioned lag. This clustering people isn’t helping the problem. Maguuma wastes is unplayable for me. Yet its one of the few places you can get loot.

The game originally had random spawn times for all bosses. It was different in each instance and each world was tied to a specific instance.

It was bad. People would crowd the maps for popular worlds to ensure enough people to make the event easy, which would mean: first come/first served, but last to arrive was out of luck.

The current ‘egg timer’ + mega server (always room for one more map) might be dull by comparison, but it’s a lot more fair to the community. Plus, plenty of guaranteed-loot events are still random, notably the Orrian temples, Ogre Wars, Commissar, Rhendak, etc

(That said, I wish they would alter the schedule from time to time or change which are the ‘minor’ world bosses or others add some variety.)

Conaywea.5062:

i would like to see you in a low popu. server with no one to make a single group event

World Bosses are just to press 1 to get 1 rare , who cares?

You hit the nail on the head. I’d rather run around the map and do the smaller events with a couple of players, except then you don’t even get the rare. The smaller events tend to be more fun. There’s more variety and and you get more FPS.

MMO= Massive Multiplayer Online. Why you want small number of player, I don’t get it. If you want small group content, there are dungeons and FotM, or guild mission. Zerg is the essence of MMO. If GW2 doesn’t have zerg, it fails as a MMO.

Battledoll.1803:

MMO= Massive Multiplayer Online. Why you want small number of player, I don’t get it. If you want small group content, there are dungeons and FotM, or guild mission. Zerg is the essence of MMO. If GW2 doesn’t have zerg, it fails as a MMO.

WoW has zergs doing quests (their events) together? I never knew that.

Live and learn.

Battledoll.1803:

MMO= Massive Multiplayer Online. Why you want small number of player, I don’t get it. If you want small group content, there are dungeons and FotM, or guild mission. Zerg is the essence of MMO. If GW2 doesn’t have zerg, it fails as a MMO.

Why? Even though I like zergs there are a few reasons.

1) zergs tend to be at the same handful of events usually with a chest. After a time the same events get boring.

2) There’s a tone of smaller events that go neglected that are actually fun.

3) It can sometimes be a fun challenge.

Regarding number three: Ulgoth event was going on and someone asked for help with a Ogre Champ nearby. (His name escapes me ATM) There were only three of us there and It took everything we had, but we beat him. It was a blast! I missed the Ulgoth event, but so what? I missed out on a rare? Big whoop. I had fun.

The issue is that most bosses (and events) don’t scale harshly enough to prevent zerging. That is most events seem to scale to a certain point, and then either stop scaling, or scale too softly. This results in people bunching up into enormous zergs and getting through event with auto attack. World bosses are prime examples of this.

There is however a very good precedent for a map that is quite anti-zerg. Dry Top has a large number of events that scale absolutely brutally. Doing the bugs solo requires clearing spawns twice, doing it with a full zerg can make the event go through the entire day cycle and include a whole bunch of champs.

So the developers have to tools and know how to use them. At the moment they are simply not interested in utilizing them past what they have done already. I guess the events that ‘bring population together’ to press ‘1’ is their aim.

The issue with this is that the larger the group, the less individual build/spec/skill matters, so people realize that if their contribution doesn’t matter that much they can just AFK. Or run as a nomad’s staff guardian. In the end, you teach players that this is what they need to know to get through content. And then they go into something like fractals or dungeons and make other people very sad.

^

Poor scaling is at the heart of the problem. The daily events don’t scale to the number of people now doing them. The few mobs that appear are instantly vaporized. Most meta bosses not only don’t scale to fit the hordes of players but many have a safe spot where you can stand and use autoattack. The box at the golem site where so many stand is a safe autoattack spot. To the side of the Shatterer is safe. (Anywhere at the Fire ele is safe. That one is a joke now).

The daily events and bosses need a way to scale higher and the safe spots need to be looked at or removed.

Ehh, They can’t really do much with scaling, if it were linear the difficulty while dealing with lag/chaos would make things completely unfun.

If anyone can do Lupi solo but has done it with an inexperienced group I think they’ll understand what I’m talking about with the chaos.

The current system certainly isn’t perfect, but not sure how they could really create one. Right now rewards for many events come simply from scaled up enemies in both numbers and ranks, getting more chances at loot and better loot. This promotes zerging up. We can’t have just rewards on completion otherwise it’d simply become a leaching system where many peopel just go and get credit for participation and afk (looking at you silverwastes).

I think what we need is something in between, something with scaling rewards to make people have to participate for quality rewards, while also not promoting scaling up but simply completion of the event. /shrug I’m sure ANet is aware, it seems as if they’ve been experimenting with stuff to try and find the right system, I trust they’ll find it eventually.