Guild Wars 2

I would like your opinion of events (like Tequatl) on timers. Do you prefer the way it is now or could you come up with some ideas which could elevate theses battles to a more engaging fight?

The events show massive player-activity because they happen on a clear schedule.

some thoughts:

• tons of players trivialize the bosses/events
• players wait for 30+ minutes for the “big bosses” in order to get a shot on a successful coordinated run
• living world feels too predictable and people jump from one boss to another just auto-attack farming “bad loot” (which would maybe be better if the challenge was greater)

some thoughts that might play into changing that scenario:

• what if players could work for participation in a bar which summons the boss once it’s full? Only if you’ve done enough (e.g. fight undead in several different events on sparkfly fen in order to enrage the dragon in the waters. Your weapon charges with each successful event, while each successful event fills the zone bar to summon Tequatl. Only a fully charged weapon can hurt Tequatl. The more the weapon is charged, the better the rewards.)
• a progress bar which summons Tequatl – to be filled with Karma. Donate your karma to fill the bar.
• follow up idea: the more karma you donate, the better the reward-chance (this system needs restrictions)
• Progress bar to summon Tequatl. Filled with successful events in the zone. The more unique events you do, the better the zone-magicfind grows. Each unique event = +1% MF. The last 5 give a bit of a bonus MF. Your zone-magicfind gets reset after the final battle. (—> this would be a good way to farm stuff like crafting-mats)
• follow up idea: after a number of events the reward-tier rises. You get higher tiers of crafting mats for example… like t6 blood in a t5 zone.

do you have any ideas? Or do you enjoy the way it is – maybe with some little improvements?

I don’t like any of that. I feel you should be able to show up right when an event is scheduled to start and join in. You should not have to mess around before the event. If there are pre-events, they should be part of the event, that is, if an event is scheduled for XX:15 then you show up at that time and have to do the pres for the boss to start.

I do think the schedules could be better though. With the megaservers, there’s no need for only one or two bosses to be up at a time. I think that every “level 15” WB should be up on every XX:15 and XX:45, so if you want to do a particular boss, you get two chances per hour. Every mid-boss should be scheduled once every hour, either at XX:00 or XX:30. This means at any given time you would have 3-5 boss fights to choose from.

It’s also important to make the rewards reset daily, not on 22 hour cycles, because sometimes you need to do the boss late on one day, and early the next, and you’ll miss that window and bug out the rewards.

I generally think timers are bad for the game and would prefer a more truly dynamic/random system.

I also think random and varied world bosses should periodically wreak havoc throughout the zones. They could start out in a remote map location and slowly make their way to an outpost or village, this would give players in the zone some time to holler for help. The key is that this needs to not be schedule driven, Rift had this element, but the Rift Stages themselves became somewhat repetitive overall, I’m just suggesting some varied BOSS monsters to spice up the open world.

The game needs some unpredictability, maybe the Bosses could drop Trait Unlocks, even.

I generally think timers are bad for the game and would prefer a more truly dynamic/random system.

While the idea of that sounds good, in practice I know that I don’t like it. The Orrian temples, for example, are currently random, and they are a pain in the kitten, because if you want to do one you can never find one that’s active, and when one is active, chances are you’re elsewhere. Pre-Megaservers they weren’t on a strict schedule, but you could still use event trackers to find when they were active on your home server. Now with megaservers that can’t work.

The only way I’d be fine with them removing schedules is if they allowed you to hop from megaserver map to map at will to find the ones with the events you want active, and had a tracker API to track them, so I could keep a tracker page open and say “ok, it looks like someone’s running the Modnir meta on Hirathi Hinterlands #7,” open my LFG tool, click on Map #7, and pop right over there.

Random sounds nice, but I’d like the events to be ready for me when I’m ready for them, otherwise I’d just spend a lot of time standing around and not having fun.

Now, one way they could add randomness, although it’d be a lot of work on their end, would be to have more varied boss options in any given area, so that there are maybe 2-4 different attack patterns, sub events, and other factors leading into each boss, so while you might know that you’re going over to the “Thermanova boss” at a specific time, maybe it’s the current FE, maybe it’s a flaming golem that runs around with an entirely different attack pattern, maybe it’s an Inquest hoard that have an entirely different mechanic to it, so long as they take about the same amount of time, challenge, and reward, they could add a lot of variety to the actual mechanics.

Ohoni.6057:

I generally think timers are bad for the game and would prefer a more truly dynamic/random system.

While the idea of that sounds good, in practice I know that I don’t like it. The Orrian temples, for example, are currently random, and they are a pain in the kitten, because if you want to do one you can never find one that’s active, and when one is active, chances are you’re elsewhere.

Of course, that’s why it’s a bloody awful idea to tie a random event to things players rely on, like karma vendor access.

But true varied random world Bosses throughout the zones would not be keyed to such things.

Of course, that’s why it’s a bloody awful idea to tie a random event to things players rely on, like karma vendor access.

But true varied random world Bosses throughout the zones would not be keyed to such things.

But it depends on how you have fun. One of the more fun things for me in GW2 is open world bosses. If they were not scheduled and were completely random, then trying to find one that was active would be nearly impossible. You might encounter one every few days, rather than several per day like I do now. The rest of the time you’d spend wasting time in random zones hoping a boss might pop, and when it does, it would likely be way underpopulated because nobody would know about it that wasn’t also randomly in that zone. No, it’s terrible.

Timers totally remove the dynamic from “dynamic events”. When this game was coming out I understood that players would be influencing what was happening where and when. But instead everything just keeps getting reset on timers. This didn’t end up nearly as dynamic (interesting) as it sounded like it would be.

Well people are used to their daily kill every day, but this also means that the rewards / reward-chances have to be quite bad because else everyone would get that good reward in a matter of days.

Doing it on schedule is also a guarantee that there are always too much people at the event.

What I would like to see, starting with one map:

• Instead of having the meta-boss on schedule remove it from it BUT give people incentives to play in that map more.
• add dynamic zone-champions that have random spawn times and wander around a zone (like the guild-bosses but available for everyone around). Give them desireable rewards that are more rewarding because of the rarity of the event.
• Make the more trivial world bosses much stronger so that there is a good chance of failure while at the same time significantly increasing the rewards for it.
• Make them more punishing. When being defeated you can’t return to this battle. It’s brutal, but imho that’s what an epic encounter should be.

World bosses shouldn’t be farming-food imho, they should feel like something special. I’d rather see a too strong Shatterer than a too weak one which dies too fast while no player died.

Timers totally remove the dynamic from “dynamic events”. When this game was coming out I understood that players would be influencing what was happening where and when. But instead everything just keeps getting reset on timers. This didn’t end up nearly as dynamic (interesting) as it sounded like it would be.

I really didn’t like dynamic events at first though, because to someone who doesn’t know them all by heart, they are too dynamic. I was hearing stories about Queensdale and players running into all sorts of cool events, but I would be running around for fifteen to twenty minutes and not hit a single one, because they were all starting and stopping outside my field of view. If you try to do most heart quests while the relevant DEs are active, they are a lot of fun, while if you try to do them while they’re on cooldown, they are super tedious.

Events should always be active for the players that want to play them. Variety should come from having multiple events in the same area, and who knows which one is up, rather than events that might only be up every hour of so and the rest of the time there’s no point being there.

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Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I would like your opinion of events (like Tequatl) on timers. Do you prefer the way it is now or could you come up with some ideas which could elevate theses battles to a more engaging fight?

I do not like the timed events as they are now.

I liked the “miasma timer” of the lions arch event (miasma/poison build up) so you can only be in LA a limited time before you must have to go out, because the timer was part of the story/event.

But the actual timers are just artificial to the story/lore as a consequence of the megaserver. Fixed schedules are easier for some farmers, but are not good for the immersion of a “living dynamic world”.

Greetings.

Ohoni.6057:

Of course, that’s why it’s a bloody awful idea to tie a random event to things players rely on, like karma vendor access.

But true varied random world Bosses throughout the zones would not be keyed to such things.

But it depends on how you have fun. One of the more fun things for me in GW2 is open world bosses. If they were not scheduled and were completely random, then trying to find one that was active would be nearly impossible. You might encounter one every few days, rather than several per day like I do now. The rest of the time you’d spend wasting time in random zones hoping a boss might pop, and when it does, it would likely be way underpopulated because nobody would know about it that wasn’t also randomly in that zone. No, it’s terrible.

There were websites that accessed the API and showed which world bosses, and temples, and actually all events, were up at any time, on any server. It was actually easier to get to the events you wanted prior to the megaserver, because chances were it would be up on at least one server (within a reasonable amount of time, anyway).

I definitely don’t think it would be a good idea to make Tequatl and the Three-Headed Wurm random.

Anet deliberately designed these events to need large, coordinated groups with the intention that players would then have to get together and plan in advance to do them. Which a lot of people will do, and presumably really enjoy doing.

If they appear randomly that all falls apart. Relatively few people can hang around all day waiting to see if an event comes up and even fewer are willing to do so. They would have to scale the bosses down so whoever happens to be there can just spam attacks until they’re dead, like the other world bosses, and that would be a big loss for the game IMO.

(Note: I’m not one of the people who does the coordinated fights. I can’t actually remember the last time I fought either boss. But I like the idea of them and I think anything which that many people go out of their way to complete on a daily basis should absolutely be kept in the game.)

@Danikat: well I don’t think they should suddenly appear out of the blue, instead I think that the whole zone should work for a while to unlock the great finale. There’s plenty of time to accumulate players while this is going on.

Not like currently, where only one pre-event starts the battle. Rather a longer wind-up while people get also rewarded the longer they participate in the “mega-pre”.

This won’t end well…

Really though, this is a bad idea and i have an example right now: Dry Top. The only reason people are on that map is to get the ridiculous amount of geodes needed to make the ambrite weapons, the few quartz/ori/ancient sapling (that always makes me laugh) nodes and some cacti. The other rewards are pretty niche (monkey king tonic, really?) and the amount of running around doing events to get to t5/t6 burns you out after a couple of hours.

There were websites that accessed the API and showed which world bosses, and temples, and actually all events, were up at any time, on any server. It was actually easier to get to the events you wanted prior to the megaserver, because chances were it would be up on at least one server (within a reasonable amount of time, anyway).

Yes, and I liked that, but currently that can’t work, because you can’t pick the map you end up on. If and when they allow you to manually select the map you end up on, they could bring back the old trackers.

How many of those who don’t like timers were playing when we sat waiting the whole ‘window’ for an event? I did not enjoy that at all.

Having a train schedule is helpful in terms of not missing a major event and allowing you to construct your play sessions around it. Before you would have to use sites that dynamically show you what was happening now on your server. I just remember seeing timers on how long since it spawned and crowd sourced when a boss event ended with a countdown timer assuming the timer is correct for the next time it will spawn.

Downside of course is EVERYBODY showing up two minutes before, not doing the meta prelim events, just there to zerg the boss, take the chest and port to the next one just before it starts.

The current system is the best of both worlds. If you want timed world bosses, you can teleport around the world doing timed bosses. If you want dynamic “random” world bosses, you can go to Orr and (wait to) do the temple cleansing events there.

If the Orrian temples are a PITA, then it’s because players prefer the timed bosses and aren’t bothering with Orr. To be honest, I preferred the dynamic style bosses like in Orr, but the dynamic even chains were too long and players frequently don’t know what to do next to progress the event. They miss a step, the event fails, a defense event starts, people lose interest and leave.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple_of_Balthazar

Dwayna and Lyssa are better because the end of one even naturally leads to the start of another. But Balthazar and Arah, and to a lesser extent Melandru and Grenth start off with events that aren’t exactly obvious that they’re leading to a temple cleansing. So the type of dynamic world boss events OP wants are already in the game, they just don’t obviously advertise themselves as a world boss event.

There are other similar event chains scattered throughout the world which end in a boss and give a daily chest upon completion.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chest#Bonus_chest

But like the temples, most of them suffer from obscure and disjointed event chains. The Dredge Commissar is a good example (that and the events to spawn the Commissar are so far away from his spawn spot he’s usually killed by others before the person(s) triggering the event can join in killing him).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Knowledge

Foulbear Chieftain, Eye of Zhaitan, Fire Shaman, and Rhendak the Crazed are other events I’ve run across but never with enough frequency to figure out how the chain works. What might help is if when doing a quest in an event chain, the game would let you browse the completed previous steps so you would know to look for next time.

Ohoni.6057:

Of course, that’s why it’s a bloody awful idea to tie a random event to things players rely on, like karma vendor access.

But true varied random world Bosses throughout the zones would not be keyed to such things.

But it depends on how you have fun. One of the more fun things for me in GW2 is open world bosses. If they were not scheduled and were completely random, then trying to find one that was active would be nearly impossible. You might encounter one every few days, rather than several per day like I do now. The rest of the time you’d spend wasting time in random zones hoping a boss might pop, and when it does, it would likely be way underpopulated because nobody would know about it that wasn’t also randomly in that zone. No, it’s terrible.

There’s no reason not to have both. The existing scheduled robotic bosses can stay as is, but I’d like to see some varied and random ones introduced that are value added experiences.

How many of those who don’t like timers were playing when we sat waiting the whole ‘window’ for an event? I did not enjoy that at all.

I did not enjoy that portion either. My server was low-pop enough that I could typically wait until the event was actually up before jumping in, and yes, that would need to work too.

Dwayna and Lyssa are better because the end of one even naturally leads to the start of another. But Balthazar and Arah, and to a lesser extent Melandru and Grenth start off with events that aren’t exactly obvious that they’re leading to a temple cleansing. So the type of dynamic world boss events OP wants are already in the game, they just don’t obviously advertise themselves as a world boss event.

I for one LOVE the Mel chain, the early bits are even better than the late bits, the problem is that you can never tell when it’s going to start unless you camp out that one tiny area of the game, and there’s not a whole lot else to do around there. If they had it so that you could spawn into the map, and if the temple run was not already in progress then you could just talk to an NPC and start it, even if it had only completed two minutes ago, then that’d be great, but currently it doesn’t work like that.