Guild Wars 2

Hi,

This is not a complaint. I want to emphasize that.

I’m beginning to think I’m seeing something in Guild Wars 2 that is a Maguuma issue only. It has to do with Gliders and most gamers who are older will recognize it.

The issue is flight.

When traveling around Maguuma during Beta I genuinely enjoyed it. It was quite a lot of fun. I died a lot. I wanted to scream a lot, but this was a beta and each new beta things got better.
The one thing about beta that really stands out to me was I basically never got gliding. I didn’t want it. I didn’t understand how to get it and so when I finally did betas were just about done.
This meant I spent most of my time running between location A and B. Now more recently I threw most of my time on here into getting Gliding. This was entirely under the presumption it would be a good mechanic to have and it would remain fun for me long after everything else flattened out.
I was right about this for myself . Now more recently I’m noticing that Gliding has impacted me in other ways I really didn’t anticipate. Instead of leading me to more content, I’m actually missing out on a lot simply because I’m not running around. Most important of which is Experience gain.

So, I stopped that. Then I noticed I was pretty lonely. It wasn’t just that I was alone and this was bothering me. No, that would have been fine. Rather, there is rare a moment when I’m seeing people.

This causes me a little anxiety. Where is everyone?

After a night of more going nowhere and finding no events being done I turned around and said, "The heck with Maguuma right now. I’m going to focus on leveling up Legendary Crafting in Central Tyria, getting done with the Achievement Points I need for that and then I’ll take a look at scribing
I went off with some groups doing obscure places for the huge exp bonuses these could bring. I soloed some areas formerly I couldn’t be bothered with. A very healthy thing to note!!!

Then I noticed something wholly absent from my Guild Wars 2 experience before now… I was running into quite a lot of people. They were doing events, leveling up just like me, and then it hit me… No gliding.

Since then I’ve been looking up a lot in Maguuma. The maps aren’t dead at all. It’s just there are a lot of people doing a lot of flying around.

This may just be a trend for the time being. Some sort of lull in anyone getting anywhere because we’re all doing the perpetually in transit thing and goofing off with it too.

However, this happened in World of Warcraft and, as most probably already know, Blizzard too flying out of their most recent expansion at the start of launch and it was generally received as an improvement. Later people wanted it back and it came back, but for a good while they didn’t have it.

I’m not sure how this is going to turn out. Gliding is a lot of fun, but in the future it may be the issue of how to get people together will be more complicated by it. Right now Central Tyria is booming, but Maguuma is starting to feel a little bit like a ghost town.

One of the things I remember from 2006 when Burning Crusade came out was a lot of people really loved it for all the new land. Then about week 2 people started getting not just their fliers, but epic mounts.
The new areas became something like giant farming zones and areas where (if you weren’t on a PvE server very high levels perpetually ‘ganked’ people trying to level). Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have ‘ganking’ to worry about so I’m thinking people have reached some sort of weird space right now where they have travel options/conduits that are making things feel far less populated than they are. This is complicating things a bit further since then people say, “Well, if no one is here I guess I should go try to find them…” And then people really think things are hollowing out.

This should be something to watch. I’m not sure what more to say about it.

If anyone has anything kindly constructive to say about these thoughts or have some of your own this is probably a healthy topic to explore.

Gliding is not the reason maps seem “empty”. The reason, is the maps are just so much larger than any Tyria map. If we had indefinite flying like burning crusade, then you might have a point, but gliding means you will be on the ground again very quickly.

I see your point— a fair amount of distance is introduced with people gliding from A to B but your observation of ghost-town likeness might also be caused by use of WvW commander tags in map.

I noticed if I ran around with my tag on near pact encampment in VB or any of the main meta chain outposts and just hit the events in a string with it on, people were quick to flock and zerg through the meta events pretty easily. When I was playing with it off, I could sit in the middle of the beginning meta chain in pact encampment and notice not many people coming to complete the defense event. Just me and less than a handful of people.

Why is it that way? Maybe its because people are so used to the last few years of “go to the tag, that’s where people are gonna be” mentality. It’s pretty substantial. If you’re flying around VB or AB or even TD trying to find people just roaming hero points and mastery spots, of course you’ll only run into the one or two every 10-15 minutes.

I think with the actual expansion out for such a short time still, there is a saturation of players still stuck in VB trying to figure out the nuances of the expansion. Like why the frog HP is swapped with the airship HP… why axemaster gwyllian seems to kill everyone without reasonable counter strategy. There’s a lot of people organized in VB hitting those meta chains over and over again and trying to get their first map completed.

The lack of people is also because of the way the zone metas are designed specifically to break up large zergs in to smaller strike teams. In the old maps, you’d have a handful of events with massive groups of players present, and the majority of the events on the map failing because nobody wanted to do small scaled events which didn’t pay off very well.

The new system rewards the entire map for every single event that gets done, and events don’t sclae their rewards based on the number of participants, but rather scale rewards based both on the number of map-wide events being completed and the number of events you’ve done personally since joining the map.

People have adjusted to this (pretty fantastic) design of zone meta levels, and so during the prep phases they are actually extremely spread out through the zone, and are more inclined to hit events nearby than WP to wherever the biggest zerg is. The map design then eventually funnels the whole map in to larger zergs for meta boss events naturally.

It works! The event system now properly rewards doing what events were designed to do in the first place: reward you for assisting nearby NPC problems rather than waypointing to wherever the largest concentration of players is.

The maps aren’t less populated, the players are just more spread out because it benefits two players and everyone on the map if thos two players tackle a nearby event that nobody else is at more than if those two players go find a large group on the other side of the map to zerg with.

I think that gliding is the prime feature of HoT. This is the most fun.. not bloodlust or big treasure drops but actual fun.. I’ve had in GW1 or 2.

My hopes were high for Chronomancer. History repeated itself and Mesmer is once more heavily outgunned. Gliding though!

In Verdant Brink, I think there are some issues of events not being telegraphed well enough. It’s a large map with a lot of ups and downs, and it’s not always clear where to go to find people.

This may, in some instances, create the sense that everyone is gliding around and ignoring events. But my guess would be that it’s more likely people are gliding around lost or ending up in an isolated area that is across the map from the rest of the players.

Tangled Depths has similar issues because the map is a giant maze, even with Nuhoch Wallows and Updraft. (I’ll fully admit my navigational skills are mediocre, but even after traversing that zone the whole way over several times, it’s still 90% mystery to me.)

In theory, gliding would mean people help each other out with events more because flight is faster than running. But due to the complex map design, that’s not really the case.

Even Auric Basin, which is probably the easiest to navigate of the 3 I’ve named, is largely easy to navigate because there isn’t a lot of room for gliding in the first place. The first wp in the zone leads into gliding if you go off the edge and then that’s about it. In the future, more small hills, more fair-sized cliffs, and less extreme dropoffs would make a big difference, I think.

Gliding is a pleasure and both VB and TD capture the atmosphere of free-falling, punctuated by a fancy parachute, but now that those zones are in place and the experience is there for people to have, I think it’s time to make navigation the priority for future zones.