Guild Wars 2

TL;W(on’t)R
Make old living story (ls) content reappear as instanced versions for ~40 players with rewards bound to the participating players’ success – also supply a public instance (casual) as well as a version where squad members are invited individually.

By “past ls content” I mean foremost: the tower of nightmare (itself – not the release, optionally including the chambers + a teamfight version of the toxic hybrid), the twisted marionette fight, the “Under attack” version of Lion’s Arch (LA) during “Escape from LA” and the fight against the prime hologram (optionally including the dynamic, static and synergetic assault knights).

While I am quite positive that we will see this content again in one way or another; I decided to write this post in order to point out that this content can be presented in a way that caters for both casuals and players who look for a challenge. The TL;WR summarized how I would try to achieve this but in the following I will present my ideas more detailed.

Lead Question: How to interest both casuals and hardcore players for the same content?
The means at our disposal are twofold: a) providing two structures for the same content so that both groups don’t interfere and b) Rewards which are scaling with success.

1. How to provide two structures without wasting resources?

I suggest making a second fractals (non instanced). This is in order to make sense lore-wise. In the end all we need is a place with (atm – I reckon we will need more after the next ls) four portals. These lead to an instanced version of the content I listed above. When entering, the player can choose between joining the public server or opening a private one.

1.1 Public servers (casuals)

Will work like overflows. When a server is full it creates a new one. The timer and content starts when the server is full. Be able to join as a group – should work like joining the personal story instance of somebody else.

1.2 Private servers (casuals or hardcore)

The player who opened the server can invite other players that can join via the interface (no need to set a time limit). The opener can give other players the ability to invite/kick others as well. Helpful tools: friendlist, guild roster, lfgtool

2. How to scale rewards for the content in question?

This already started with rewards being given out at 100/300/600/… citizen rescued during escape from la. Basically, you pick a criteria that can be converted into numbers and scale loot according to how high the squad scored. Other release-specific criteria are the status of the bar when the marionette dies or the number of Light Feedback received by the whole squad. More general criteria could be: time spent (would make sense for the tower of nightmares), squad members defeated, having less players than maxium, etc. Maybe the sum of several such criteria could be turned into one value which could determine the loot/leaderbord position.

2.1 Loot

More blues and greens I guess – acutally, the loot is something anet economists have to agree on.

2.2 Leaderboards

Self explanatory. A high position at the end of a day/month could yield extra loot. (Like when in gw1 the top 100 rollerbeatle racers in gw1 received a mini.) Maybe have titles associated with holding or having held a leaderboard rank as well.

2.3 Achievements / Titles

More conventional achievements could be: save 1000 citizen; clear all chambers + kill the toxic hybrid within 25 minutes.

3. Addressing concerns

3.1 This addition might draw people away from the current living story
? Time gate it for the public servers (which I reckon would make up at least 80% of those playing it) for only being available for the time between two seasons.

3.2 Waiting times till a server is filled might be a problem

– for more transparency let the portals to the respective content display how many people are already in there (e.g. 32/40)
- provide mini bosses like those roaming in la during “battle for la” for the time till the content starts
-Unbind the public servers from the server (e.g. blackgate) but let the player choose a language when entering.
-Scale down the content for 40 player sized squads. I would recommend scaling all the contents for the same number of people (less confusing + communities can stay together) anyway.

-If filling the server turns out to be a serious issue (maybe after a while): make a daily rotation which blocks 3 out of 4 maps.

4. Applicability to the 3 headed wurm

Nerf the open world wurm and open a fractal to the past where the wurm was still wreaking havoc.
It’s not necessary to scale him down to 40 people.

All good ideas but it’s never going to happen.

So you want instanced raids… oh… ok…
Also elitism under the euphemism of hardcore… oh… ok…

I would like to address the point “elitism” brought up by CureForLiving.
First of all, I have to admit that the term “hardcore” was not chosen well. What I meant was “people who like to be challenged”. I do not judge anyone on the basis of how he or she likes to play. However, in case you find the proposed “private mode” in itself elitist I can not agree with you. Firstly, there is no system that blocks anyone out. No gearcheck, no achievementpointcheck, nothing. It’s just content that caters for people who like challenges – nothing different than the triple-headed wurm in that regard. Secondly, and even more importantly, the private mode is meant to be another experience in the sense that the goals are differently set– not something that requires more skill, since it is exactly the same content. 150 mlg proplayers (metaphorically) that farm champions won’t be saving more citizen than 150 random gw2 people who want to push this number. Actually, this mode is my approach to incentivise players to do the content as it was intended by the developers rather than simply maximising their own profit and as such to address the “Social Dilemma" (confer: http://whyigame.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/gw2-social-dilemmas-in-the-ruins-of-lions-arch/). While players could self organise themselves most of the time group dynamics/the current reward structures prevent it. When I speak of “20% of players” in my post I already estimated that while there might be a lot more who would like to do the content “properly” I fear that only a fraction of that number would be ready to organise themselves via the private mode. If there were not a restrain against this additional work or the fear to take responsibility it would not be necessary to integrate a private mode in the first place.
I hope I could ease your concerns. If not please be more specific, so that I have a fair chance to defend my idea.

This is a good idea, however I doubt this will ever happen as Arenanet (Colin) stated. That instanced content would likely never see more than a five man party system. He claimed it was a dynamic that works and they liked, I think it stems from the idea that Arenanet thinks content such as “Instanced Raids” would fracture the playerbase. Also there will be a lot of people who will claim you are an “Elitist” because you want such a system. But besides all my useless banter (Sorry) you have my full support for this idea.

I’d love more instanced stuff. This would solve the problems we have now with open world “raids”.

The point is: my propsoal resolves around reusing existing content (or rather providing an infrastructure for it). The content in question is for (at least) 40 people. The reason why I use an instanced version in my proposal is that I just do not see how they could implement past (lore) content in an open world setting since that would cause severe problems for lore & logic.

They are increasing world map size by 225% which means 400 people now can fight so now everything is going to be super easy. Don’t complain about difficulty till april 15th update cause they are changing everything.

I think it would be pretty cool to have past events like The Ancient Karka (And the colonization of Southsun), The Tower of Nightmares, The Battle of Lion’s Arch(Parts 1&2), And the Marrionette as “Fractal Raids.” The fractals are a neat tool for keeping “old” content in the game long after its gone. It would be silly to only restrict it to small group dungeons.

Great that you mention the old karka/southsun stuff – I forgot about them entirely! They surely belong to the content that my idea would apply to.

Looking at the new Megaserver feature…

I think this kind of lays the ground for different kinds of “mega” side-events.
Just have a “fractal” (or whatever you want to call it) for LS content as its own map.
Maybe alternate the “story” depending on the hour (like with boss battles)?