Guild Wars 2

This is fairly long and attempting to be comprehensive on the issue, but TLDR; If they have new maps that are “densely packed with content,” they need to make it easier than the tools currently allow to engage in these activities with other players.

Reading the interviews about this, it sounds like the new maps will have tons of stuff going on, similar to Silverwastes on steroids, where they have the awesome JP and gold badge hunt to do, the dozen or so different story missions, the map completion elements, the chest farming, and of course the Forts->Breach->Vine->Lab meta progression.

This is all very fun when you hook up with like-minded people, but the problem is that the meta requires a certain level of critical mass. You need a certain amount of people at each fort to progress to a Breach. You need a certain amount of people at each Breach boss to 5×5 it (and a large proportion of those players need to know what they’re doing). You need a certain amount of people to take down each VineWrath boss (and most of them need to know exactly what they’re doing), and you even need a certain amount of people to complete the Lab metas, since you can only score around 15 mini-chests during each phase yourself, which means that to clear the 200/200 meta (which I haven’t seen done in weeks), you need at least 15 or so really dedicated Lab players, or twice as many slacker ones.

So these limitations alone are not terrible, if you get on a map that is dedicated to these goals they work out fine, and I’m not arguing that they need to make any of these goals easier. . . necessarily. The problem is, the game is very poorly set up to create these conditions. VERY poorly. If you just randomly log in to a SW map, 9/10 it’s a map that is either most of the way through the lab phase, or at the very beginning of the fort defense phase. If you then jump in and throw your heart into fort defending, you can maybe hold one fort, but if the map you are on is not behind you, then it will take hours to reach a Breach.

And there’s no reason why the map should be behind you. They might be doing story steps, they might be doing the JP. They might be chest farming, they have things to do that may not be the thing you want to do, and there’s no reason why they should have to do what you want, but you should be able to easily find maps that are doing the things you want. And then we hit the core problem, map selection is randomized, there is a map cap of around 150 people, and there’s no good way to pick a map.

Yes, you can taxi people in, but you have no way of telling how close you are to cap, and if you’re at the start of a SW fort phase, and start wildly taxiing people in, and it turns out that only 60 slots were open because a lot of people were doing story content, JP, chest farming, etc., then there won’t be enough to adequately progress the meta, and you’ve just wasted aaaaaall those people’s time. And sure, you can use the LFG tool yourself, and jump to a map that is already in progress, but then we hit the next problem, that you have to find people advertizing a working map, and they only have four slots at a time so you have to JUMP on that taxi ASAP, and then sometimes even if you get into that party, the map might be full, and your only option is to give up and try another team (but not too many in succession or you’ll get a “you’ve joined too many groups” error). Or if you really do want to get on that map, you can keep spamming “join” on a party member, and maybe get in as someone leaves, but this is the most boring activity in the entire game, you can’t go AFK and do something else with your computer, you can’t participate in any actual content with that or any other character while you wait, you just keep hitting “right click, left click, left click, repeat” until you get too bored and give up entirely.

This cannot stand for the new maps. After the break, how may apply to the new maps, and how to make it right. . .

We don’t know a lot of details about the new maps, so I have to make a few assumptions based on the interviews, and I’m prepared to be proven wrong on them. We don’t know the characters per map limits, but they would need to be twice the current limit to be adequate for a map that’s even no more content-dense than Silverwastes is. Whatever the minimum amount of players you would need in one place doing one activity, the map cap would need to be at least 3-4 times that much, especially if it’s possible for more than one of these activities to be happening at any given time.

The map joining tools need to be better. You should not have to roll the dice and hope that you end up on the ‘right’ map, the one doing the thing you wanted to do, nor should you have to locate a party on such a map and join in on them. Instead, you should do what other MMOs using “megaserver” style systems do, name your maps, and let people pick them. Have a “Silverwastes 1,” Silverwastes 25," etc., in a list, and you can just click on whichever one you want. Show the map’s current population next to each, so people know how close it is to cap. If there’s a meta, maybe automatically show what meta phase it’s on. Maybe even have some mechanism to allow players to “name” the maps, maybe involving a vote or something. If they want to name a map “Silverwastes 7: Chest Farming” then you’d know what you were getting.

In this way, even without the naming thing, you could go on LFG, say "I need a SW 50%+ map, and other players could contact you and let you know if theirs was, without you needing to directly join up on them. But what if that map is full? QUEUES. We used to have these and they worked. You should be able to say “I know that map is full, but I want to be on it anyway!” And the game should say “yes sir, I shall inform you when there is a space, please continue enjoying your gaming experience in the meantime.” And so you shall. Minutes later, when a spot appears, into the new map you go. No hassle.

So just to paint a picture of all this, if there’s a giant map, with three vertical tiers, two different map-wide JPs, a half dozen possible story chapters, some kind of mini-dungeon, some kind of village/fort one might hang out in, a dozen different DEs, and some sort of zone wide meta/world boss, then here’s what needs to happen. You need to be able to log into the game, and go to map selection. You want to do the meta, so you select from the list “Maguuma Falls 14: Canopy Assault ¹⁵⁰” This means the map is mostly populated by other meta-attempters, and is also full, but that’s fine by you. You queue up, and within a few minutes someone drops out and you hop in. You complete the meta, and then you decide you want to just do some open world achievements, so you hop over to “Maguuma Falls 3: Casual ⁶⁴” which is only half full anyways, and you get that stuff done.

I love the idea of these maps, I love how Drytop and Silverwaste work, when they work, but they can be frustrating as anything when they don’t work, and controlling whether they do or don’t is largely out of any individual player’s hands right now. We need tools to make that better if you’re going to double down on this map design philosophy, otherwise it’s like giving people a piece of Ikea furniture without the Allen wrench.

I dunno, I’ve actually seen maps pretty consistently get up to Vinewrath. it’s actually pretty remarkable design in that regard. I’ve seen no egregious problems.

If that’s been your experience then that’s great, and I wish you all the luck in the world, but my experience has been anything but. I mean, if I taxi into a map that’s already at 40%+ then it usually gets to Breach, and if it does, they tend to succeed maybe 60/40, and if then they do the Vinewrath and tend to succeed about 70/30, but I almost never just randomly zone into a map that is going anywhere already, it requires taxiing for me to get only a valid map.