Guild Wars 2

With the Halloween event this year you showed us that you can make Dynamic Events trigger based on players being in the vicinity of the event. My suggestion is to do this for events throughout the whole of Tyria. In Orr for instance, trigger the event to take the gates of Arah when there are enough players in the vicinity to efficiently complete it. But don’t have the event to defend the gates occur if no one or only 1 person is there.

Why? Multiple reasons really.

1. It would add to that sense of accomplishment the player(s) get when they complete a dynamic event in an area to take or hold a location. Or to drive out the leaders of the opposing side.
2. Because 99% of the friendly NPC’s in this game were made with down syndrome and die like a candle flame in a hurricane.
3. I think it would promote people gathering together for a group to take locations, since the event wouldn’t trigger unless there are enough people.
4. Defend location events shouldn’t trigger when no players are in the area, because of the previously mentioned terrible friendly NPC’s. If 20 players took a location, it should stay taken, until such time as a group of players in the area are unable to hold it.

Now this wouldn’t prevent people from doing events. Sure, you may not be in the area for the event to take the location, but if you’re alone you weren’t exactly going to do a group event and succeed all by yourself. If enough people are there to do the defend event though, you will be there to do that. If there aren’t enough people, well you’re not exactly going to hold it by yourself either.

Also, as for the constant defending of a location once it’s taken. The defend event shouldn’t always be the same. It should go up in difficulty the more times that players are successful, without increasing the numbers of players needed in the area. That way you will eventually have to retake the location because the number of enemies assaulting it just became overwhelming.

Basically, once a location is taken, it shouldn’t be lost while no one is around to actually defend it. Non group events wouldn’t be affected by this mind you, just ones that are labeled [Group Event]. This would promote players to group up if they’d like to do a group event for the rewards, and I think it would be nice to see that.

I don’t think their proximity-trigger is all that refined.

A lot of events have only a 1-player-requirement for it to trigger, or the range is huge and they expect you to be willing to run for a full minute to get to the event…

It’s true that the proximity trigger could use some tweaking, but that could be done along with this.

Braxxis.7062:

Now this wouldn’t prevent people from doing events. Sure, you may not be in the area for the event to take the location, but if you’re alone you weren’t exactly going to do a group event and succeed all by yourself. If enough people are there to do the defend event though, you will be there to do that. If there aren’t enough people, well you’re not exactly going to hold it by yourself either.

But how would this affect regular events?

Also, as for the constant defending of a location once it’s taken. The defend event shouldn’t always be the same. It should go up in difficulty the more times that players are successful, without increasing the numbers of players needed in the area. That way you will eventually have to retake the location because the number of enemies assaulting it just became overwhelming.

Granted, if you’re sitting in a location that gets a lot of defends, such as Lone Post in Straits of Devastation or Penitent in Cursed Shore, it does get a bit repetitive.

Basically, once a location is taken, it shouldn’t be lost while no one is around to actually defend it. Non group events wouldn’t be affected by this mind you, just ones that are labeled [Group Event]. This would promote players to group up if they’d like to do a group event for the rewards, and I think it would be nice to see that.

This is the biggest problem I see with your suggestion.

Right now, a lot of events of taking a location in Orr result in followup events, which result in the camp becoming empty. Or people just leave after they take it. Your suggestion would make it so that the camp wouldn’t be attacked at all, until a sufficient number of players got there. Now you have to ask, when would this be? What would be reason enough for this group of people to go there? For an organized group hitting multiple events, there is no reason to go to a location they’ve already been to. It’s better if they march on towards the bigger events, such as Gates of Arah in Cursed Shore or Temple of Balthazar in Straits of Devastation.

Add in your suggestion of consecutive defenses resulting in more difficulty, and you got yourself a zerg train. There’s no reason to defend multiple times as it gets more difficult and you run the risk of losing the camp, which often resets the whole chain back by a lot. Instead, it’s more profitable to move forward, thus leaving the camp unattended and, due to your suggestion, completely unattacked.

The result would be near extinction of the lower levels of an event chain. For example, for the Lone Post, this would mean that defending the trebuchet camp or assisting the weapons delivery. The reason is simple: The only way for you to lose the pivotal point, in this case Lone Post, would be for a group to be present and for then to fail to defend it. And when does that happen? When the group is too small or when the difficulty is too high. Your suggestion makes the former simply disappear and the latter unlikely because the larger groups will either dissolve as they do now, or go forward in the chain.

With event chains such as that, or again the Arah gates chain, the event to defend the pivotal point from the start of the chain shouldn’t occur, ever, during the chain event, which it does and it can be infuriating for that event to fail and auto-fail the current event being done in the chain.

Instead you should have to defend the most current location, and if that defense fails, you should be pushed back to the previous point, not all the way to the beginning of the chain. It should be a progressive back and forth from point to point. That way, eventually if the players get pushed back enough, they have to do the first step in the chain and get back to the end of it. This keeps the event going back and forth but only so long as players are there to participate, and as is the case with event chains, once the chain is completed there are generally a number of players in the area so the defend event would occur. They can choose to do the event and try to hold the location, or they can bail out and lose it. But losing say, the march to the Temple of Balthazaar, should not push the entire chain back to doing the north, south, and central invasions. It should push it back to the Rally point because that was the previous point in the chain.

Eventually the event will get pushed back to the start through sheer numbers, but it shouldn’t be immediate. And it wouldn’t become a massive zerg train if they changed the frequency of events occuring. As it is now, there are some zones that have events that practically never end because as soon as you complete them, 10 seconds later they start again.