Guild Wars 2

Awesome expansion. tl;dr – exploration and paced content is great. Improve in-game LFG to solve map population and event coordination problems.

One of my all-time favorite games was DK64. Tons of areas to explore and things to discover. But very little of the game world is accessible at first. Gradually, as you unlocked new abilities and solved more puzzles to get more bananas, you’d realize that something you’d been wanting to check out was now available!

HoT does this, and it’s very satisfying. It’s exciting to finally get the ability to check out something that you’ve been able to see but not use yet, and (I.e. updrafts!), and new areas and challenges connected to them. I don’t have any alts right now, but if I did, I’d be excited to unlock the masteries by playing a variety of chars.

I am worried about the meta-events. They are really cool when on a full and organized map. I had the privilege of doing VB to Tier 4 with an amazing group (Dulfy was there!). The kind of cooperation and communication inspired among players has been fantastic.

I think that kind of experience is possible with 100 players or with 8 players, but not if the content is at a fixed difficulty level that’s only balanced now because the expansion is new and a lot of people are playing. I don’t like playing 6 hours a day for a month and then being burned out, like some folks seem to do… I don’t expect to have hit the intended number of runs on these events for months yet, and by then, I worry there won’t be enough people playing. It would be really cool if a large party (i.e. 10 players) could instance these meta-events and take them on at an appropriately adjusted difficulty (I wouldn’t expect to succeed every time, and especially not at the first few attempts).

A better in-game tool for forming large parties is needed. The taxi concept was a smart way for players to take advantage of the server structure, but it’d be even better if LFG could accommodate the huge groups for meta-events.

Heck, rather than have the meta events just be constantly rolling on a timer, the maps could be open and easy to navigate when population is low (to satisfy players that are unhappy about not being able to solo steamroll every enemy in the jungle), but when player count is high enough, it triggers the event sequence to start. Even makes some sense from a flavor standpoint (Pact forces rallying? Mordroth gets ticked and launches his attack!)

It really is a good thing they just released a few new areas and gave them some good replayability and depth. If people are already scattered as it is, more maps would have spread players far too thinly!