. . . and how ANet ignored every one of them.
The new maps (at least Verdant Brink and Auric Basin, I haven’t done much with the later ones), clearly show that every lesson learned from Silverwaste and Dry Top was completely ignored by the dev team. For example:
1. Do not have a large map with a map encompassing meta chain. These meta events only work when you have large portions of the map focused on them, and in a real open world map, you cannot have everyone focused on those tasks. People have their own things to do, like story chapters, hero points, etc. I actually heard some guy on map chat saying “this content isn’t intended for pugs,” well sorry, but ANYTHING in an open world map should be designed for pugs first.
2. Don’t have hours-long metas. People don’t want to get stuck working on the meta chain for hours at a time. If they wanted that sort of experience they would be in dungeons or raids. Open world content should be "drop in, do a mission that takes 10-20 minutes, and then leave. You should not feel pressure to then do the next mission, and the next, and so on until all the missions are done. Having maybe one of these per map, taking a total of 30-40 minutes, can be fine, but to have 4-6 of them at once, all of which contribute to a shared reward pool, is just nonsense.
So how to fix this mess?
1. Tighten up the meta missions. in VB, shorten the day/night cycle to a total of an hour. Thirty-five minutes day, fifteen night, five minutes between each. Keep the existing event chains, but remove some of the bottlenecks. Spawn less waves of enemies in “defeat X waves” events. Require less collected bits during collection missions. Make them so that each can be completed in a fraction of the time, and if they are truly pointless to the plot of the mission, cut the phase entirely. Have only one round of night defense and then it’s over.
2. This one is vital to the game as a whole, have better map selection tools. It’s criminal that this hasn’t been done already, but the game needs the ability to manually pick which instance of the map you want to be on, to select from a menu of open maps, with populations visible, and ideally meta-progress visible as well, or at least let players label their map as being “meta progression map.” Do not rely on “join in on party” to move between maps.
3. The further away an event is from you, the less it should matter to you. Do not base personal player rewards on events that they cannot participate in. Players should only be rewarded based on the progress of the events they are working on, and if players halfway across the map drop the ball, that should not reduce the individual player’s rewards.
4. Do not penalize people for showing up late. A player logs in when their schedule permits, do not dump them on an empty map halfway through a meta chain that cannot possibly be completed. If a map is spawned late, perhaps shortcut the mission chains, so that they are already mostly done, but base the player’s personal reward on his own participation. So basically, if a new map would be spawned ten minutes before the end of a meta phase, then advance the missions to a point where they can be completed in that remaining time, but the players who do so would only get a portion of the total reward that a player would get for starting from the first event.
5. Do not have hours-long metas. This bares repeating.
6. Do not have too many things to do on a single map when there are goals that require significant engaged player populations. Don’t have a map that has a mapwide meta chain AND hero points AND story chapters AND hidden secrets to find, don’t give players fair distractions and expect them to ignore those distractions to pursue the meta instead. One or the other. If you want them to share the same physical space, have two different versions of the map, the “meta chain” version of the map with the meta event, and the “no metas” version that has everything else. Let players decide which version they are interested in.
7. Do not have hours-long metas.
8. If none of these are feasible, then at the bare minimum, raise the existing map population caps to about three times the current level. This would ensure that even when most of the map doesn’t care, at least some of the players would.
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”