Guild Wars 2

Paraphrase

For those of us that can’t sit and read this whole post, my idea is a major overhaul of the current Dynamic Event/Meta Event systems to allow the players to have the ability to really interact with the major wars in the war. Each race has a Racial Enemy (Asura/Inquest, Sylvari/Nightmare Court, Humans/Centaurs/Bandits, Charr/Flame Legion/Ghosts, Norn/Sons of Svanir) and I would think it would take things to another level if players could take the frontlines of the war against these groups and push them out creating actual physical change in each region.

Introduction/General Sucking Up

You’ve made many strides in the right direction with this game, and from what I can tell it is taking the genre to a whole new level. What you have accomplished here, as a small video game design company is spectacular, my only hope is that you don’t stop now. What you have done, as I said, is a good many strides in the right direction, but it is definitely not complete. Many of the zones within the world are dead, with most players doing dungeons, fractals, Cursed Shore, or WvW, so how do you bring life to these zones that are dying?

Player Rewards

Well for a large portion of the player base, the biggest need is drops, and in the end there aren’t as many high caliber drops in the low level areas, and the massive chests that you find after killing a dragon are nowhere to be found. But this isn’t the only reason that people don’t come back. The other reason is the story. You see when moving throughout an area there is a story playing out. You learn the story of each region as you play through the renown hearts, and skill challenges, as well as through the exploration of the region as you collect points of interest and vistas. The portion of the player base that doesn’t care as much about the loot drops are the ones that want to do something with purpose. The sad thing about the way the world is set up, though, is that the longer you stay within a specific zone the more you begin to realize that nothing within this world really changes. It, again, brings down the purpose of constantly revisiting these old zones.

The Solution

Now I understand that large overhaul changes can’t be made to the world because of the fact that you can’t have players fighting off risen in a world where the risen have been killed off, or fighting centaurs in a world where the centaurs have been fully pushed out, but I have an idea that continues to give the flexibility of the dynamic events system to the world, while making the world feel like the individual players are making a difference, which is something you specifically wished to achieve within your MMO Manifesto back in the olden days.

My idea is to bring in cross-zone events that work to show the overall extent of the conflict between each of the main races and their rivals. The best way to explain this idea is through the use of an example, because without specifics it becomes hard to describe. Alright there is a major conflict between the humans and the centaurs, this is well known and you can find the centaurs throughout Queensdale, Kessex, Gendarran, Harathi Hinterlands, and Snowden Drifts. My idea is that there should be frontlines for each battle against the race’s enemies. These lines would show where large parts of the battle are taking place, while the areas behind these lines would become more peaceful. This would give players the ability to take the battle head on and work hard to bring peace to the lands that they come from.

(continued)

Examples

Now how would this progression work, well it would start with the world map. The map would have frontlines drawn on it to show players where the frontlines of each battle are taking place, these frontlines could range anywhere from the enemy’s fortress to the race’s main city. This allows players to look on the map and see where they can go to have the most impact on the battle in place, and it gives storyline players more motivation to play if they get on to see that their homelands are under siege. So how do we move the frontlines, well all of the ally controlled locations along the frontlines would have constant battles against it that the players have to work to help defend. In between these battles, players can choose (on their own) to move ahead and conquer an enemy fortification. During this event, or afterwards, the players would have the ability to send up a “signal” that the location has been conquered, and the allies will move forward to help reinforce this location. Once it has been reinforced it is considered conquered and the frontlines will move. This can work the other way as well though, should the locations that the allies are holding be lost the frontlines will move in the opposite direction. Now eventually the frontlines can move to either the enemy or the ally’s main city/outpost/fortification. This kind of brings the region to a standstill, and I must admit this needs to have a little more work to it in my mind. I personally would like for players to be able to conquer the enemy’s fortification (obviously if the enemy reached the player’s racial city it would most likely just end up in a siege, not the enemy conquering it). The problem here is where would the enemy then come from in order to keep the battle going. The most likely scenario is that players can push the enemy back to their greatest fortification and then hold them in a siege, until they can break free.

Now I know a big question going on here is, what do you do after you push the enemy all of the way out and the region is safe? Well there are lots of possibilities. There are many other baddies that are not the main racial enemy, perhaps they are causing problems, perhaps farmers wish to go back and reclaim their long lost farms and you help them rebuild, or possibly you help your allies take the newly conquered locations and build them into fortifications to protect from future assaults. There are many possibilities in a world as large as Tyria.

Now I’ve mentioned a lot about the story aspect, what about the loot? I mean what’s the point in taking part in these battles if you don’t get any rewards for it right? Well in my mind each battle would be a dynamic event, thus players who are involved in these events will gain the normal coin/karma/xp, but I want to take this even further. Players really want those exotic weapons, those ascended rings, that cool looking helm, etc., so I would say that the best way to encourage their involvement would be to reward them with each conquest. Now I’m not saying that players should receive a grand chest at the end of each minor outpost that they capture, but that instead the size of the chest should be comparable to the size of their conquest. So players conquer a small outpost, perhaps they receive a 2 item chest, they take a large garrison, they receive a 5 item chest, so on and so forth. And so that players that can’t make the move into the next region because of their level do not feel left out of the content, I would recommend that there would be a grand chest at the end of each region as a reward for removing the threat to the region. I would also place allies at the portal to warn players that are under level that they would be outmatched on the other side, but their help was very welcome.

Now I understand that these is a MASSIVE idea, and that it’s not something that will be implemented right away, heck it could be years down the road, but I think it is definitely a system that would bring back a lot of life to regions that are going without at this point in time, and I would say it’s a long term goal that will bring many benefits to the game as a whole.

I wholeheartedly agree. The world isn’t really “dynamic” now, as Anet said it would be.

Thank you, I placed this a few months ago, but I didn’t get any responses last time.

Even if there are no player responses, the devs are still reading your posts.

Anywho, I struggled to read wall’o’text. Any chance you could revise it into something easier to read? You’ve done great with the paragraphs. There’s some more possibilities here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/A-Suggestion-On-How-To-make-Suggestions

Oh, I know that it’s a long post, but in my head, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense if I cut it down too much more. It’s hard sometimes when you have a specific thought in your head, and you want to make sure you convey it the right way.

I love your front line idea. I had a similar idea for expanding the map based PvE experience. I originally posted it in gw2 guru, and I’ll paste it here (instead of creating new thread).

tl;dr: I suggest more Harathi style gameplay, and I’d also like there to be both more challenge and reward to going deep into enemy territory.

Harathi Hinterlands was one of the most fun experiences for me in GW2. Why aren’t there more zones like Harathi? I’d suggest 50% of the zones should be Harathi style, dangerous to explore and constant events etc.

As I said, I loved Harathi especially how it became more dangerous as I went deeper into centaur territory. I wish I got more of a reward for going deeper. I realize bonus exp is something of a reward, but I’d like (and I think most people would appreciate) something more tangible: either more random chests, more rich veins, secret vendors or better drops. If more rewards were implemented the difficulty could also be increased, I like the idea of having to be in a party to go deep into enemy territory, or to have to be very sneaky. This idea could have the added benefit of expanding ‘end game’ content. this is where my idea ties in with OP: Why not expand the enemy camps to make it similar to a dungeon experience. That is make the depths of centaur / undead territory require high level gear / a party to survive in]

I have a somewhat related idea (I’m separating this idea because I think it may be more difficult to implement than its worth) why couldn’t crafting mats become better as I go deeper into enemy territory? Either better by volume, or higher quality. Better by volume would be much easier to implement, but what if there were different tiers of crafting materials for the same item (think: rotten blueberry, blueberry, juicy blueberry)? Higher tiers of the crafting mat would give you slightly higher stats on the crafted item (by a small amount: ~2%).

That brings me to a related (bit of a stretch, I admit) point: I’d like items to have variable stats more Diablo 3-ish, as the game stands right now any time I think I got a good drop I check AH and see … oh yea I forgot 50 other people also got that drop, its nothing special. Having some stat differences in items (probably not as extreme as diablo) would be more rewarding.

Disclaimer: My characters are 65, 30 and sub 10, so I haven’t seen a bunch of the map. I hear Orr is similar to Harathi? Even if all 70+ zones are ‘Harathi style’ my suggestion stands, more lower level 20-65 zones should be similar to Harathi.

Thanks to the OP for the lengthy post, it looks like your post wasn’t appreciated by very many people based on the number of replies, but I love the idea of a border / frontline. I hope the GW2 dev team takes both of our suggestions into consideration.

I was recently reading a post about implementing WvW mechanics into the game for the war in Orr, and I personally believe that a mixture of adding WvW mechanics to the PvE world and the implementation of this idea would really bring the game back to life, especially in the lower leveled areas.

I edited the first post to give a paraphrase of my idea so that players can read a quick snippet and understand what this post is about.