Guild Wars 2

Hello. Not 100% sure if this belongs here but I’m very curious. With HoTs several previously inaccessible portions of the map opened up, but all of them are Level 80 content which does certainly make sense for the lore/event involved.

With all these other still as of yet unopened locations all over the map though, I want to know if any of them will be anything but Level 80 content? Now this might slip in with any potential new race added in way later on, since they would likely get around 2-4 starting zones of their own just like the current races do.

Also curious, any idea if there will ever be a ‘major world changing event’ such as ‘If Enemy A is not killed by the end of the month this entire region changes permanently in the game forever.’ Whichever version of the map that ends up not becoming the ‘canon reality’ ending up as something to visit in the Mists or the like, since we wouldn’t want a huge amount of work in making two versions of one zone to go to waste. Enemy A being something so monumentally huge that it would take hundreds of players days of rotating shifts and constant dps to even have a chance of downing it.

I think the super boss idea won’t be done.
They did something similar to what you describe with the Ancient Karka event when SouthSun was introduced. It was a one time only boss battle over several hours. It was laggy, tons of players disconnected and couldn’t get back onto an active map. It was a disaster.

Thanks for response. Good to know, I completely missed that event. Heh.

yes from the latest guild chat they did it sounded like the lesson they took from that was NOT to draw every single player into the same map at once and to try to spread them out a bit by adding content in different places. I do not expect anything like that to happen again, also while some people probably have good memories of attending that once only event I just have the memory of not being able to make it.

Also in my opinion I think there is only value in creating pre level 80 maps IF they are for new race. Even with the scaling system in place to keep some challenge to earlier maps there is still a stigma towards them that level 80s should be doing level 80 content as opposed to pre level 80 content

I was able to attend the Ancient Karka event (in was in November 2012, about 2 months after the game came out). You didn’t miss much.

Like Onevstheworld said it was laggy as all hell. The fight basically consisted of going to Southsun, running to the fight, getting disconnected, logging back in, running towards the currently location of the fight until your FPS dropped so low you couldn’t see what was going on then spamming skills, hoping you hit something until 1 of 3 things happened:
1) you disconnected again, restart and repeat as above.
2) your computer caught up and you were dead and had to waypoint and repeat as above.
3) You’d survived and the fight had moved on, you got lucky and had slightly less distance to run before repeating the above process.

And that was the culmination of a weekend of special events which were basically a short Living Story chapter where each bit could only be done at a specific time, so you had to hang around the computer all day waiting for permission to continue the storyline. Oh and a lot of it was bugged so you had to skip over parts, then do them later on out of sequence.

I think the original plan was that all new content added to GW2 would be like that. One-off “special” events only for those who happened to be online at the time. Best decision they ever made was to scrap that and shift to the 2 week or 1 month releases, and then eventually to permanent content.

However the fact that they won’t do 1-off big boss fights where everyone has to go to the same location and spam skills until it’s dead does not mean they won’t have storylines which permanently change maps.

Since then they’ve changed Kessex Hills (twice if you count the tower before destruction as separate from after), part of Lornar’s Pass, parts of Timberline Falls and Iron Marches, Prosperity in Dry Top, and of course completely destroyed and rebuilt Lion’s Arch. There may be others I’m forgetting as well.

I think it’s safe to assume we will see other maps changed in future too. But without knowing the specifics of the storylines I don’t think it’s possible to say which ones or how they’ll be changed.

In their defence, they also massively improved their tech to handle so much more players in one space after that event. If they re-ran that event now, the problems would be vastly reduced in terms of the % of ppl affected by the lag. Some good did come out of that event.

Having said that, the concept of one time events should never have been put onto the table in the first place. I am also glad it never expanded further, although unfortunately it did evolve into LS1. I don’t mean unfortinately because it was terrible, I mean unfortunately because it was temporary in nature and caused the big story hole we have now.

Map wide boss is an interesting idea, but I am unconvinced the appetite exists in the game amongst a large enough portion of the population for it to have sustainability. I can forsee a time where bosses/maps like DS and Gerent are going to struggle 1-2 expansions down the line as it is.

I attended the event, too. No disconnect. Just hours of wait during the event chain to lure the Ancient Karka into the hive to drop it into the lava.

There was one particular step where the players had to fight never ending hordes of Karka until the Ancient Karka would move on (a bar had to be filled). Because of insane upscaling by the large amounts of players doing this event, the bar went up so slowly… It took nearly an hour and I nearly felt asleep (the event was during evening/night in europe).

Then another event started, felling a tree to let it move on… It was done fast! Plugging geysirs… Fast! Again, hordes of Karka… Sooooo slow. All players on map chat just hoped this event would never repeat. Getting the Karka to the top of the hive, dropping into the lava… Finally done. A nice cutscene… And players shouting their nice fresh precursors from the event reward, while I got nothing (just garbage exos). And I still haven’t got one til today.

Southsun Cove event was fun, but please Anet… Never do something like this again.