Guild Wars 2

what parts of the game is fun even when server population is low?

I like wandering around doing good deeds and stuff.

Pretty much everything is much more interesting with less (not necessarily solo) people.

If there is an event around or something you want to do and none is currently around you could just advertise on the lfg under open world. We all share the same page area now. NA and EU are split. Even at odd times you should find people. For WvW your best bet would be finding a WvW guild for your home server.

PvP

/15characters

trash talking on map chat

Vargamonth.2047:

Pretty much everything is much more interesting with less (not necessarily solo) people.

Yeah .. even Svanir Shaman was really fun before Mega Servers, when done with only 3-4 people

Almost any event chain. High population just zergs everything, events either never fail or are forced to fail for loot. Hell, it can be hard to wander into some events seeing as megaservers have filled up the maps, so the event’s always just been done five minutes ago. =/

Any events except for ones that need high pop, like Silverwastes.

Daily events.

I hate the daily events now. Hordes of people and the events ending just as you get to then. I stopped doing them.

Vargamonth.2047:

Pretty much everything is much more interesting with less (not necessarily solo) people.

This +1
Megaservers are huge turn-off for me and a huge part of the reason I left the game for a year or so.
This huge, throw everyone into the same zerg content is not very fun. I know what they were trying to do, beef up numbers on maps, but it makes the experience very lackluster. Given they want an immersive, living, breathing game, it seems contradictory to throw huge amounts of people together in situations where their presence doesn’t matter at all.
Smaller groups are far more fun and I tend to stick to more remote areas of maps and do events with a few people, where you can actually contribute and have an effect on the outcome of what you are doing. World bosses and the like, I pretty well stay away from as I don’t find the experience of being one of a hundred people auto attacking some boss (with a stupid amount of HP to accommodate the ridiculous amount of people) to be very engaging.
Even in WvW, I gravitate toward either solo or small group roaming. A small group of 3 or 4 having skirmishes with other similar group is far more fun than the zerg mindset of a lot of this game.

An exception to this is the Silverwastes, in my experience thus far since returning to the game. Yes, it takes alot of people to do the VineWraith, but there are different tasks across the entire map, defending the forts, escorting supplies, rebuilding fortifications and the people are spread out trying to accomplish the same task, not clustered together auto-attacking.

Temple of Lyssa. It goes a lot faster and you don’t get those dumb champ gorillas.

Once upon a time, I liked to do my daily events in random mid-level zones. There were plenty of events, and the mob numbers in some meant more challenge than usual if player numbers were small. I use the past tense because mega-servers put one nail in the coffin (finding events is now less easy) and the daily changes put another, by removing one of the rewards for doing events unless you follow the great herd.

JP’s don’t scale up, and even those who don’t know them can do them solo or by following one other player who does know the puzzle.

If you like the challenge, there’s soloing dungeons. However, regular dungeon use seems to involve the LFG tool, and a higher dungeon running pop is better for that. If you’re in a small guild with a core of runners with similar login times, small pop works fine.

I also used to do champ kills solo or with one friend. Mega servers put a dent in that, too.