Guild Wars 2

what happened to dynamic scaling? there are so many events in lower population areas that have become simply impossible because you’ll never manage to get 10+ people in the same spot to punch a giant for 10 minutes for a mere event reward, that they just remain there, not doing anything.

the most common example are the giants, like the one in diessa plateau and the one in harathi hinderlands. they take forever to die, don’t scale at all, require a ton of people to be taken down, and give little to no reward beyond the event medal.

this has me worrying about the future of the game, as the population spreads out to all the different new places, what will be of these events? will people just ignore them, and that fearsome boss will just stay there, looking at players passing by it as if it didn’t matter? the straits of devastation already suffers a lot from that. at least half the events there are never, ever dealt with (risen megalodon anyone), simply because they’re impossible to solo and not worth the effort to bring a group together.

BrunoBRS.5178:

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what will be of these events? will people just ignore them, and that fearsome boss will just stay there, looking at players passing by it as if it didn’t matter? the straits of devastation already suffers a lot from that. at least half the events there are never, ever dealt with (risen megalodon anyone), simply because they’re impossible to solo and not worth the effort to bring a group together.

Yep, already happening. Lot’s of group DEs go unanswered. My thread about an unofficial leveling server once guesting gets implemented is a failed attempt to come up with an alternate solution. Right now I’m leaning toward server hopping until I find one with people playing in it.

Well actually giants can be easily solo’d. Their attack pattern is quite simple and if you time your dodge right you can kill them without taking a single hit. (Stay close to him and dodge when his foot is in the highest position just before his stomp) It does take a long time though.
The real problem is like you said, the reward is not worth the trouble. Why would a group bother killing a boss monster if it only gives white/blue items and negligible karma/experience? It was fun killing them the first few times, but after the novelty wears off it’s simply not worth the time and effort.

They really need to bump up the rewards…or make it more consequential so that maybe if not dealt with the boss will come attack captial towns or such. Though that will annoy a fair amount of people. So more rewards. If they gave at least one guaranteed rare per 24 hours or so it may help the lack of people challenging them.

Why not cap the scaling?

There are two problems with the giants.

The lack of reward has already been mentioned. These fights need good chests at completion.

The other is that even if you time your dodge right, you can still get hit by a stomp due to the massive radius. Differences in server/client latency can really kill you.

big mobs aren’t even worth fighting in Orr. That risen champ abom with 5000 people attacking it isn’t even worth sticking around for.

It took some shouting to get 3 players to fight one of those giants. After about 20 mins we finally killed him (after he reset once and with a lot of deaths for the low level player helping out). Not worth it.

Yeah, I’ve been totally disappointed in the supposed event scaling. Events barely scale at all, and what little they do scale, just seems to be up, for the times when you have a huge zerg. Except that then, it doesn’t matter, because it’s so easy no matter what.

I wish they’d work on events scaling down, to deal with reality of zone populations. Even higher level zones have relatively few players, 20 out of 24 hours a day. There’s tons of content all over Tyria that’s just impossible the rest of the time, the way its currently implemented. It’s a huge frustrating waste now, unless they do something to make it scale more effectively.

Or, add cross-realm zones, reverse overflow, or something along those lines.. but even then, that would only go so far.

I really expected a lot more from event scaling…

ALl they need to do is make it give 5x the rewards of normal DEs.
If i spend 20 minutes on a DE vs 3 minutes, I should get waaaay more for it.

the nageling giant is an easy kill if you dodge his stomps. it will just take about 2 hours to do alone :P

his HP is pretty intense, but remember that not every event is made to be run alone. A champion should not really be a solo fight. Veterans and defending points can be solo.

vespers.1759:

the nageling giant is an easy kill if you dodge his stomps. it will just take about 2 hours to do alone :P

his HP is pretty intense, but remember that not every event is made to be run alone. A champion should not really be a solo fight. Veterans and defending points can be solo.

Yeah, in some cases, the event isn’t technically impossible. Just crazy tedious and difficult, without enough players. That’s not really much of a counter point.

the point is it’s not meant to be done alone. not every DE is a solo event. I don’t see you complaining about the Ulgoth event in Harathi hinterlands even though it requires about 20 people to even attempt.

it’s an mmo, and to an extent it’s made to be played with other people. some dynamic events are easy and some are hard. if you can’t do it alone, bring friends. i don’t believe every event should be able to be done alone.

Giants are nothing but a nuisance to fight that’s why. They have an absurd attack range that KO’s in two hits and they don’t even drop anything.

There’s no good reason for anyone to bother fighting them. Even with a group of 10 or more, it takes way too much time for the meager reward.

vespers.1759:

the point is it’s not meant to be done alone. not every DE is a solo event. I don’t see you complaining about the Ulgoth event in Harathi hinterlands even though it requires about 20 people to even attempt.

Is that just an event, or is it a meta-event? I think meta-events should be different. They should still scale down, but yeah, not as much.

As for the ideal that this is an MMO, etc, etc.. it’s a nice ideal, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I think at a certain point, it’s better to be realistic about it. If the content isn’t getting done, it is a problem that needs to be addressed, one way or another.

Giants were pointless when zones had people, now there’s just more reason to ignore it.

It depends on your server….

Lol underwater group events are literally untouched 99% of the time. In all my time of Orr I can honestly say I’ve never taken part of, or even seen anyone attempt them. Who would want to.. underwater is horrible.

Regular veteran giants are easy, but I’d like to see you solo the undead one in Orr that summons grubs(the boss version)

i see it as a personal challenge! when i see a champ and there’s no one else around, i’ll try and solo them. lol. and if i see a ray of hope i will keep going. if i notice it’s un-doable on my own, it’s usually too late.

then if i REALLY wanan get the event done, i’ll call o ut in /m and often i’ve been lucky enough where one or two people run and come ot help. REALLY lucky then a group forms : )))

but agreed, they need more incentive somehow to bring more players, in general, back to certain low-level areas or participate in certain DEs if not most of them.

If events were worth doing (aside from the karma farmers) then I’m sure more people would partake.

Personally, I’d love to join in and help out with group events. There are three main problems:

1. Unless I happen to be very close to it, I’m faced with spending more coin traveling to a nearby waypoint than I’ll net from the event rewards (if I even have a nearby waypoint — otherwise I’d have to run and hope I get there in time)
2. There is no guarantee that even if I do show up there will be enough people to complete it
3. After the event, there’s no good way to get back to what I was doing without spending more coin on travel fees (or a chunk of time running across a zone)

I’d say that well over 50% of the times I see players taking on a group event, it’s a guild doing it versus random people who just happened to be in the area.

the scaling is fine, I don´t want to see giant monsters (or enemies of apparent fame like the map bosses) been trivialized just because someone happens to come across them solo. The major problem is the ridiculous reward system. Yes, I can solo most veterans and a few champions in the game, but why would I invest like 20 minutes when I get the chance for 1-2 junk items – or maybe don´t receive anything at all. If champions and veterans had guaranteed loot of noticeable quality dropping or maybe a few coins, people would proabably not ignore them. And I am not talking of guaranteed exotics and pieces of gold, just anything reasonable. Currently I can kill 50 or whatever normal monsters in the the time I´d waste on a champion, guess which acitivity is favored by our beloved loot tables?

BrunoBRS.5178:

what happened to dynamic scaling? there are so many events in lower population areas that have become simply impossible because you’ll never manage to get 10+ people in the same spot to punch a giant for 10 minutes for a mere event reward, that they just remain there, not doing anything.

the most common example are the giants, like the one in diessa plateau and the one in harathi hinderlands. they take forever to die, don’t scale at all, require a ton of people to be taken down, and give little to no reward beyond the event medal.

This is just not true at all. First, some of the events are clearly flagged as group events and you shouldn’t be expecting those events to scale down cleanly to a point where they can be soloed as easily as they can be handled with a group.

As for the giants, they do scale. Three of us took down the champion giant in Harathi with very little effort.. just took time. But it takes time whether there are three players or thirty fighting him. The more players are involved, the larger his health pool gets.

As for players saying it’s not worth it, the giant is part of an event chain that eventually gives you access to a skill point in an area you normally can’t access without participating in a much more difficult centaur meta event. It’s odd he’s being used as an example of events that don’t work well with smaller populations when he is literally the back door to that skill point for players who don’t have enough numbers to take on the centaur meta event.

I haven’t run into a normal event (not flagged as a group event) that can’t be beaten with one or two players.

There’s usually a ton of people that show up for giants and other stuff on Gate of Madness in my experience. Love the server.

Edge.4180:

BrunoBRS.5178:

what happened to dynamic scaling? there are so many events in lower population areas that have become simply impossible because you’ll never manage to get 10+ people in the same spot to punch a giant for 10 minutes for a mere event reward, that they just remain there, not doing anything.

the most common example are the giants, like the one in diessa plateau and the one in harathi hinderlands. they take forever to die, don’t scale at all, require a ton of people to be taken down, and give little to no reward beyond the event medal.

This is just not true at all. First, some of the events are clearly flagged as group events and you shouldn’t be expecting those events to scale down cleanly to a point where they can be soloed as easily as they can be handled with a group.

As for the giants, they do scale. Three of us took down the champion giant in Harathi with very little effort.. just took time. But it takes time whether there are three players or thirty fighting him. The more players are involved, the larger his health pool gets.

As for players saying it’s not worth it, the giant is part of an event chain that eventually gives you access to a skill point in an area you normally can’t access without participating in a much more difficult centaur meta event. It’s odd he’s being used as an example of events that don’t work well with smaller populations when he is literally the back door to that skill point for players who don’t have enough numbers to take on the centaur meta event.

I haven’t run into a normal event (not flagged as a group event) that can’t be beaten with one or two players.

i don’t think you get my point.

without being scaled down, to soloable levels, eventually the whole map will be full of events no one does, because it takes too much time and gives too little reward. the centaur chain you mentioned gives a ton of gold, karma and exp, because you’re fighting multiple enemies across multiple events. and it takes just as long as killing the giant to complete that entire chain.

if you want to see an example of what the outcome of bad scaling does, open you map, and look at straits of devastation. half the waypoints are contested (literally half), because of event chains that are impossible by yourself and have no relevant rewards, so people just run straight through them.

the issue here is that all of the content the devs have put in the game will become less and less relevant, or even doable, with time, because as they add more content to the game and the population spreads out, less people will be around in each area to do those events.

as a result, you’ll have a map full of events you’re supposed to ignore, and now we’re back to the static, unchanging game world of other MMOs. because if there is no way to complete an event, it might as well not be there.

also, the giant is just an example of an event that goes ignored most of the time. there are plenty more, and that’s quite worrisome.

yeah it does seem like there is a huge lack of scaling. I died 2-3 times trying to complete one event, but I just couldnt by myself. I gave up.

BrunoBRS.5178:

if you want to see an example of what the outcome of bad scaling does, open you map, and look at straits of devastation. half the waypoints are contested (literally half), because of event chains that are impossible by yourself and have no relevant rewards, so people just run straight through them.

No relevant rewards besides retaining access to the waypoints, you mean?

I disagree that events intended for groups need to be scaled for solo players. At that point they are no longer group events. There are plenty of events (most of them, actually) that do not require a group and can be completed by a solo player. If you run across any that can’t (despite not being flagged as a group event), reporting them on the forums in the appropriate board will usually result in a designer taking a look at the balance there and making adjustments if needed.

That said, sometimes it’s the player that needs to make adjustments on their end. Some would insist that no event can be soloed and that is simply not true. It may be true for their methods combined with their build, but that’s a problem with not adapting to the challenge.

Just last week there was a player on my server complaining in map chat that they couldn’t beat an encounter using the weapons that they wanted to use. When it was suggested they try different weapons, they complained the game was broken if it didn’t allow them to play with the weapons they wanted to play with. There will never be a fix from the developers to counter being stubborn or laziness.

I’d like to toss my coin in this bucket as well.

It’s not just giants btw, there have been a hand full of events I’ve run across where they’re impossible to do with only 3 people. For example, there is an event in Fireheart Rise, and I’m not quite sure if the event was working as intended; either way myself (74 thf), my husband (76 warrior), and another thief that was scaled down could not complete the event. Basically it was a defend a point event, 4-6 (ranged and melee) veterans spawned along with waves of regular mobs, and as we were finishing up on one target a couple mobs slipped through. Personally I had assumed we’d have time to go, and kill those mobs before they claimed our base. Nope. As soon as those mobs went in there not, but a few moments later the event failed. All three of us just looked dumbfounded.

Now I’m sure someone will come by this post, and say ‘Yeah I did that, and it was super easy. No problem with that event!" However, three of us fought and rallied about two – three times each for 5-10mins, and failed. Now I’m not saying it’s impossible to take on multiple veterans (especially since I specialize in blinding), but with those particular types of mobs there wasn’t anyway we could have won with just the three of us.

That’s just one event as well, there were two others that were impossible with two – three people (one of those situations we had a guardian) due to infinitely spawning mobs, the ranged flame turrets that apparently have the HP of two champions put together (I may be poking fun here… but those health pools are way too high), and of course veteran attacks that completely ignore blind / stealth.

Those events’ scaling were absolutely miserable, and you know what? They went unfinished, and a good chunk of waypoints were contest. People just ran right past them.

The rewards are a MAJOR issue for me playing this game right now. Everything in this game comes off as ‘Hey cool you did it! Here’s some silver…’ which ends up costing me more money from time I could have spent on a heart.

Lots of refining needs to be done in this game, and really we need it now.

Edge.4180:

BrunoBRS.5178:

if you want to see an example of what the outcome of bad scaling does, open you map, and look at straits of devastation. half the waypoints are contested (literally half), because of event chains that are impossible by yourself and have no relevant rewards, so people just run straight through them.

No relevant rewards besides retaining access to the waypoints, you mean?

I disagree that events intended for groups need to be scaled for solo players. At that point they are no longer group events. There are plenty of events (most of them, actually) that do not require a group and can be completed by a solo player. If you run across any that can’t (despite not being flagged as a group event), reporting them on the forums in the appropriate board will usually result in a designer taking a look at the balance there and making adjustments if needed.

That said, sometimes it’s the player that needs to make adjustments on their end. Some would insist that no event can be soloed and that is simply not true. It may be true for their methods combined with their build, but that’s a problem with not adapting to the challenge.

Just last week there was a player on my server complaining in map chat that they couldn’t beat an encounter using the weapons that they wanted to use. When it was suggested they try different weapons, they complained the game was broken if it didn’t allow them to play with the weapons they wanted to play with. There will never be a fix from the developers to counter being stubborn or laziness.

You see, this is where I feel most of us gamers come at odds with one another. You may see this as being stubborn or lazy (and tbh, maybe it is), while others consider this a developing flaw within the game itself.

Personally, I’m kind of used to builds that are either subpar or completely useless from playing GW1. However, there’s really no excuse in this game. You’re limited to weapon combos, and very specific trait builds. If a build doesn’t work with the situations given to you, then really it shouldn’t be in the game. Those traits / weapons should be replaced with something that is viable.

Now, I can understand a lot of people getting upset with my statement, but honestly it’s the truth. Putting in useless game mechanics that do not enhance your gaming experience is really just wasted space for something that can provide better enjoyment. GW1 had a really bad habit of poor editing with their classes as well, but the job combinations made up for it. This game has very little room for so much error. I have high hopes by the next expansion ArenaNet will refine these classes to offer players more substantial builds than, ‘No, the only good weapon for this class is this one.’

Not to ruffle feathers, because I really do want this game to thrive. Yet, I always want to offer another way to look at problems as well.

They should improve their difficulty scaling and just make Group Events normal events. One person can tackle it, but when he brings a zerg, the difficulty scales up accordingly. I had the impression that every event was like this, but the difficulty scaling needs a lot of work.

Madrox.2306:

There’s usually a ton of people that show up for giants and other stuff on Gate of Madness in my experience. Love the server.

I experience a different Gate of Madness than does Madrox. Perhaps the difference is that peak time is family time for me. In any case low population zones means missing out on a lot of content while leveling (especially mid-levels). Group events go unplayed for hours or days. Some events don’t even initiate until there’s enough people in the local area, and there rarely is. It’s a bummer.

Edge.4180:

BrunoBRS.5178:

if you want to see an example of what the outcome of bad scaling does, open you map, and look at straits of devastation. half the waypoints are contested (literally half), because of event chains that are impossible by yourself and have no relevant rewards, so people just run straight through them.

No relevant rewards besides retaining access to the waypoints, you mean?

I disagree that events intended for groups need to be scaled for solo players. At that point they are no longer group events. There are plenty of events (most of them, actually) that do not require a group and can be completed by a solo player. If you run across any that can’t (despite not being flagged as a group event), reporting them on the forums in the appropriate board will usually result in a designer taking a look at the balance there and making adjustments if needed.

That said, sometimes it’s the player that needs to make adjustments on their end. Some would insist that no event can be soloed and that is simply not true. It may be true for their methods combined with their build, but that’s a problem with not adapting to the challenge.

Just last week there was a player on my server complaining in map chat that they couldn’t beat an encounter using the weapons that they wanted to use. When it was suggested they try different weapons, they complained the game was broken if it didn’t allow them to play with the weapons they wanted to play with. There will never be a fix from the developers to counter being stubborn or laziness.

Lol, if people cared about the WP’s they wouldn’t be in a constant state of contested limbo. The only Orr WP’s that get cleared are cursed shore because they give the best rewards.

And frankly, can the “learn2play” nonsense. There is a huge difference in complaining that your silly fun build can’t cut it and not being able to do an event because the entire zone is a ghost town and you can’t possibly kill the target solo just the same as it’s an entirely different issue to point out that “kill the brickhouse champion” style events give ridiculous rewards for how much time and manpower it takes to complete them which leads to most if not all people simply walking past since it isn’t worth the effort.