Guild Wars 2

My biggest gripe with the game is a lack of team-oriented content. We have dungeons and we have WvW, but the heart of the game play is dynamic events and personal story and both can be accomplished without any strategic team play. While this system is great for solo play and sometimes it’s exactly what I want, most often I find myself missing the team play. Open world team play (but dungeons are niche and require long term commitment, etc..)

People need incentive to play in groups and I think the lack of this is hurting GW2.

My suggestion is to make it so all dynamic events have an instanced option. If I see Claw of Jormag is up and I’m in a party of 5 I should have a window of time at the beginning of the event where my team is prompted to enter an instanced version of the event. The instanced version should be be scaled down for 5 (10 would be awesome but I’m trying to be realistic given the current partying system and think of how this could be added quickly).

This would make it so all the existing events have an option that provides real strategic team effort. There should be higher payout for winning the events in this way too (a nominal increase in payout, these aren’t dungeons). I’m also envisioning an achievement path for clearing all events with group play and special awards at the end for doing so.

This change would have no impact on current mechanics. The only one I can think of would be everyone going into instances and leaving the open world instance of the event vacant. A solution to this problem is to only provide X number of instances first come first server. If you have 30 people in a zone when the event starts 1.) You only provide instance options to people who are in party 2.) You only provide a few instances once they are taken up it leaves some people behind. This sounds much more complicated that it would be to implement.

I have noticed this too seems like this game might as well be single player most of the time. The people playing around you have no need to work with you

Well, I have said this from the first Beta Weekend Event. The idea of non grouping is great but the sociability of players hurt the game. A-net designed the game with social people in mind, but it seems the game attracted most of the so called “antisocial or single player gamers”
Second thing. With the evolution of VoIP programs, most people if not all who are actually playing with friends (guildies, school/work mates, relatives, etc) are not paying attention for the chat and rarely even read it. So i guess that chat is very outdated and sooner or later only loners will try to find eachother in there.
(Note: a loner is not an antisocial but a player who has no gaming friends because of different real life reasons which he/she can’t change)
Even the dungeon grouping is a chaotic LFG system where in a few months it will be hard to find 5 people to join a group without special requirements
Ok, so we say the game is not promoting sociability the way it is now, but what can we do to change that? The answer are the missions as in GW1.
As the personal story goes now, when you want someone to help you with your story, they don’t need to do it because either they are too low level, either they dont want to get in a film in the middle of it.
The idea of personal story in a MMO is also great, but somehow the game needs cooperative missions – a lot of them – other than dungeons in which players have the same goal.
I would add “Order Missions” which will be the same for all who join a specific order and which will reward players with special order tokens they can use for the order armors /weapons
These will be instanced groped quests (misisons) that will happen in precise location marked on the map. They should be daily or weekly so there wont be an end to those quests and people can play them anytime they want. Anyway, you got the idea.

The problem here is you think the dynamic events drawing people together isn’t good enough.

People will always have a tendency to not group up in the open world because they don’t want to be restricted by a group. They want to wander as they please, which is what the game allows for. And that is a good thing for the gamer experience.

People will only group up in the open world because they know the person specifically and want to hang out together, or want to start a friendship – And even then, there’s always some negotiation required to establish which direction the group wants to move (unless some big event attracts everyone’s attention).

GW2 is NOT suppose to be a team-oriented game

GW2’s PvE is not made to be “team” oriented. If you want teams, that’s where dungeons and sPvP is for.

The PvE is made to be social-oriented. It allows players to encounter each other, and choose to head the same direction and help each other out or socialize without any serious obstacles like KSing which could only be solved by grouping in other MMOs.

So, giving reward-boosts to group up is not a good thing. It can be interpreted as punishing players not grouping up.

Instances for dynamic events are especially a no-no for the reason you pointed out. It would leave the open world vacant, and hurt the game more then help; this is a bigger issue then you think.

However, achievements for accomplishing stuff in a group would be fine, since it has no major economic impact on the game experience.

The PvE world of GW2 isn’t made to bottleneck people into working together or applying strategy.

It’s made to let us explore, have encounters, and make our own choices – To freely have fun.

The game already encourages socializing. You and anyone else supporting this suggestion is just impatient and expected everyone to suddenly be friendly.

Remember – This is the internet.

There’s a massive history of sites, games, and communities that encourage anti-social behavior. That’s not going to go away overnight because GW2 is different.

Being social is up to the players to do so, and that will take time.

If you want the game to feel more social, start with yourself.

• Say “Hello” more.
• Group up with people who seem to be headed the same direction (for Skill Points, Events, etc..)
• Praise people for stuff like bringing down a boss. “Nice work, guys!”
• Loads of people are eager to group up, but don’t have the priming to do so.

That’s what I do, and I’m having a great time.

DreamOfACure.4382:

GW2 is NOT suppose to be a team-oriented game

• GW2’s PvE is not made to be “team” oriented. If you want teams, that’s where dungeons and sPvP is for.

I understood going in the game was more solo focused, there are two problems 1.) It’s an MMO so by definition it brings players together 2.) The dynamic event system as designed does not require strategy. Take a good third-person action game, for example the God of War franchise. You have these huge bosses, you also have to implement a great deal of strategy to get to a win scenario.,

When you have a game like GW2 where you have large groups attacking the same boss and you haven’t built the game to be team-oriented it all falls apart. It’s fun the first 2-3 times you do that event, but after 5,6,7 times of fighting Claw of Jormag or the Shatterer you realize it doesn’t really mater what you do. It’s the collective (zerg) contribution of damage being delt that’s bringing the boss down. The bottom line is anyone can run through these events and they aren’t challenging enough. On the plus side the events are beautiful, we have giant dragons coming out of the sky and amazing effects but that something missing so many of us have noticed is strategy. Without you really don’t have much of a game.

I am not trying to attack. I am trying to state facts. I would to challenge someone to explain how some of these large scale 3-hour cycling meta events challenging.

• They don’t branch.
• I’ve never seen one fail

I played through one time a good friend recently. His first time at Claw of Jormag and he commented “is this thing over yet. kind of boring”. I’m thinking… “yea they need to fix this and quick”