Guild Wars 2

… in the new living story. You get new ori nodes? What do you want to happen there? Please compare and contrast to Southsun.

Why does anyone go there after the release?

Edit: Also compare to Orr, which has tons of events, nodes and a dungeon and is still dead.

Orr is dead because the enemies are annoying as hell condi/imob-spamming sods.

So your added map is like Orr but with easier enemies?

Not at all, it’s not like the enemies in Orr are hard anyways. It’s just annoying when you’re trying to get from point A to point B and every single enemy you pass seems to have either a teleport attack or a ranged attack that effects your mobility.

In a new map, I don’t really mind what it is, something new to explore would be good enough, but if it looks nice, has interesting events and maybe a dungeon or 2 thrown in there then I’d be more than happy.

So you explore it and it satisfies you for half an hour? Are you ever going back?

Yes. How would it differ from any other zone? People go back because they like certain events, there are dungeons, there are world bosses, they do gathering runs.
If it was some sort of magical map that was a million times better than all the others and everyone loved it, then every other map in the game would be empty.

ShibVicious.9681:

Yes. How would it differ from any other zone? People go back because they like certain events, there are dungeons, there are world bosses, they do gathering runs.
If it was some sort of magical map that was a million times better than all the others and everyone loved it, then every other map in the game would be empty.

People don’t go to any map. That’s the point.

They add this new amazing map and people leave it after half an hour. Neat.

What I’m asking is, they are almost certainly going to add new maps. Why would anyone populate them though? Past the initial exploration phase.

I think the biggest problem with a map like Southsun Cove is that it doesn’t scale well. Many of the events are not solo-able, and so people get frustrated that they can’t explore alone and leave, making it even harder to find groups there. There’s never enough “critical mass”.

I think Orr is actually pretty good for a high level map. It’s dead because the current LS has made most places dead except for Lion’s Arch and Gendarran Fields. There are still events that you can solo, though they may culminate in ones that you can’t. At least there are events people can do while waiting for the critical mass to do, say a Temple event.

My biggest gripe with some areas is that monsters may be too densely pact and re-spawn too quickly, especially if you’re by yourself. This doesn’t make the game harder or more exciting, just annoying and frustrating. You want to be able to take a breather and talk to an NPC or salvage some loot without continually being interrupted by monsters.

I’d like most events to solo-able (they can be hard to solo, but it should be possible). Then, as more people join, they should scale up so that they’re still challenging for a zerg.

I’m hoping they will be “fully fleshed”, just like the original leveling zones, with stories, tons of events, PoI’s, jumping puzzles, etc.

Not like Southsun which is very bare bone.

Half hour after release, all players will never come back in an act of coordination unseen until now in the whole humanity, so then you can claim you predicted it and won a global-coordination-mind medal.

Basically, this whole “the map will be left abandoned” depends on the map itself, not on the fact that is a new map. If it is a new attractive good map, it will attract pplayers. If it has reason to players to stay, they will stay. If it’s unfair or bad designed, it will not maintain or attract enough people.

So, instead of make an statement that the map will be abandoned no matter what, it would be better to ask:

Which characteristics should a new map include in order to not be abandoned after initial exploration?

Another possibility, observing that you canonize about how the map will be abandoned, and how inevitable it is that fact, is to suppose that you have internal knowledge about map’s attributes and structure, and that using that internal knowledge, you can predict that the map is not worth to explore after half an hour.

So, how you did obtain that internal knowledge?

What I want to happen in new maps…

-Interesting event chains (or single events that aren’t escorts)
-Jumping puzzles that have a moderate difficulty, but aren’t annoying to go through (Southsun Steam puzzle – which makes you start over if something goes wrong)
-Hidden dialogue or just dialogue with NPCs
-Beautiful environment (I personally don’t like Orr because… it feels dead/looks dead)

Randall.7306:

nonsense

Maybe ease up on the sarcasm and reading in to what I asked. All I want to know is what people want and expect from a new map. Do you personally, Randall, expect to return to a new map? And for comparison do you regularly return to the Harathi Hinterlands?

If a new map has a dungeon, it should have a hub outside of it. Profession and Crafting Trainers, Bankers, and Trading Post NPCs. Not quite a city, but with a number of the amenities. And of course, things need to be placed close to one another for convenience. No one wants to run for a minute to go from the bank to the trading post like in Lion’s Arch ( though there’s a Waypoint near the Bank).

I will just ctrl+c, ctrl+v one of my older threads on how new zones should be added to the game.

“I think many players want new areas to explore in this game whether it is Tyria, Elona or Cantha. The hard thing here for Anet is to give us something new in these new zones without raising the levelcap and still be worth while to explore and spend time in.
I believe this was something they tried to do with Southsun Cove and the result is that that zone isn’t that much worth to be in.(except the karka queen)
Now Guild Wars 2 has one thing common with pretty much every other MMORPG out there and that is grinding.

I’m a pve player and the places I see most players at is in either Queensdale or Frostgorge Sound where they’re champion farming, FotM and people farming worldbosses. Now we can argue pros and cons about things Anet release in LS but it’s quite obvious the champion boxes were a success along with the weapons that can be dropped in those boxes.

So here comes my list with things that would makes new added zones worth playing and exploring without splitting playerbase up too much and still leave the levelcap at 80.

Unique
Make the new zones unique, something that can only be obtainable through that zone. Like the Orr temples vendors armors but also weapons and trinkets. This game needs more models obtainable through pve. The dungeon armors is almost 16 months old now and when we see new sets it’s through the gem shop.

Grinding
The karmagear was easy to get and Anet did explain that they didn’t know people would get that much karma in such a short time. Raise the price for the pieces from 42k karma(Orr prices) to maybe 84k or 126k. Players like to feel unique and legendarys and dungeon armors are more than quite common now and when you see someone with gem shop armor it’s sometimes quite good looking but it’s not hard to get if you have money.

Dailies
An RPG is much about seeing progress through stats and aesthetics and seeing your character developing in generall. But make the new zones have daily events that maybe occurs once or twice that will lead you to a chest which contains a token/tokens for something you want to buy. A slow progress that’s not RnG based. Again this makes the zone unique. However we can at first point agree that this games doesn’t need more currency but with the new wallet system it doesn’t need to be so inconvenient. Say we get to travel in to Dominion of Winds or to a heavily populated Kodan zone. The tokens can represent some sort of honor value of some kind that shows the faction that you’ve helped them which gives it more rpg-feeling to it.

New enemies
I gotta say I loved the karkas. But that’s a personal preference. However this game could use new enemies. Something that ties the enemy to the region. Pretty basic but not as effective as previous suggestions but I always find it quite nice to see new enemies in game whether it is karkas or twisted.

Lore
This game needs more lore for old veteran GW players but still be enjoyable for those who haven’t played the first GW. It’s always nice for the experienced eye to see that they are running around in a world they took their first step into in 2005. Make relics, books or ruins or just a place in generall that might be preserved. This was something, which for some, made Southsun Cove a bit… meh… Just because it came more of a shock. Give the playerbase something we want not something we maybe want.

That’s my opinion regarding adding new zones. Bare in mind that this is something I was thinking could fit in a LS as much as an expansion but since we’re pretty custom with the LS it thought of it out of that perspective."

tl;dr

Make new zones have obtainable stuff such as armor, trinkets and weapons unique to the zone and have them available through things such as meta events, daily events tied to something cool.

I’d love to see new Areas opened up. I love new maps and places to explore.

I don’t know how long it would take before I got bored of a new area. More than 30 minutes, but probably not more than a few hours. The basic answer to your question is that I will go there if there is something there that I want to do. After finishing map completion, I usually only visit maps if they have:

1. Harvesting nodes I want/need.
2. Jumping Puzzles I want to do.
3. World Bosses I want to fight.
4. Living Story content I want to complete.

That being the case, there are a couple of maps I go to every day I play. There are 2-3 more maps I go to once in a while for periodic harvesting/farming. There are 2-3 other maps I go to once in a while for periodic JPs. There are several maps I go to just for a few minutes to kill a World Boss. Living Story might take me to any map at all, but how long I stay depends on the content.

For me to keep going back to a new map area, it would have to have some of those things in it. The more of those things it has, the more likely I am to go there, and the more often as well.

What I would like to go to maps for is interesting Dynamic Events and Event Chains, but unfortunately these Events give no reward for my time, and they just aren’t very fun in general. Most Dynamic Events are pretty linear and become tedious if repeated.

Right now, Dynamic Events give XP, Karma, and Gold. The Gold isn’t enough to be worth the time. XP is useless right now (My main has about 300 unused skill points). Karma is more useful, but only marginally. There just isn’t anything I want to spend Karma on, so it accumulates and is largely ignored.

If Dynamic Event completion dropped a chest like a World Boss, then I would do them because there would be a reward involved. And since there are so many Dynamic Events in the world, I could cruise around the maps, trying different ones at different times to keep it fresh and interesting. I would much rather cruise around an interesting map farming micro-events like that than, say, Champfarmzerging Frostgorge Sound, even if the hourly “pay-out” were slightly less.

As for Orr, well, I just don’t like the area. It has events/bosses/nodes that I would do, but the area just isn’t very appealing for a number of reasons:

1. It’s ugly as kitten.
2. It’s too far away from everything else I want to do (WP fees).
3. Getting to Orr the first time is so time-consuming and irritating that I decided 1 character with Orr WPs was all I needed.
4. Getting around Orr is annoying because the areas are huge and packed to the gills with the most annoying mobs in the game, and WPs are often contested.

Thank you for starting this thread. I think it is something ANet spends a lot of time thinking about and dealing with.

If the new zone is added through the LS, it will have loads of new Living Story based achievements, and maybe some permanent ones too (new exploration achievements, new vistas, skill points etc). So at least for the 2 weeks of the LS that will open up that zone, everyone will be fighting there and cause many overflows to be created.

Now after the 2 weeks pass, the zone design will play a key role to bring players there.
First question to be asked is if the Skill Points/ Vistas of this zone will be counted for map completion, this will bring loads of old and new players there to at least finish the zones, although I doubt this. The new zones will either not have vistas/skill points like Southsun (and don’t count for map completion) or they might add multiple zones at a time, like the whole Maguuma Wastes, and offer exploration rewards for those who finish it all.

Jumping Puzzles will attract some people, if they are easy enough, because sadly difficulty doesn’t affect rewards of JPs for some reason. Maybe some unique usable items like the Teleportation Gun, or the Ogre Powder might attract players to finish the events and get the rewards.

Lots of champions so players can form champion trains? It might become a better place than Frostgorge. If it’s not a max level zone, it might have chains/events that reward lower level materials that are very much needed for crafting, like Linen.

Big World Bosses attract people too, either Tequatl-like (they will attract the Tequatl killers) or random easy mode World Boss types, they all have various people hunting them.

There is lots of activities that they could add to the new zones to make them important. Notice that most of the above don’t apply to Southsun Cove. The Karka Queen is a waste of time, her rewards aren’t worth the effort, the zone is packed full of hard mobs that give little to no reward, one JP is very hard, the other one is probably done by many for dailies/monthlies and then gone, there is no Champion Train, Ori nodes are scarse and because the mobs are hard they are not worth the time to find and get them, etc. And of course, Southsun has no Exploration value, no Vistas, no Skill Points, no Hearts, nothing, so Southsun is a waste of time.

Queensdale with a different motif, that’s what people want.