Guild Wars 2

Currently, my server, Borlis Pass, is unable to kill even one of the Knights.

…so thanks, Anet, you once again…ruin an event by assuming every single server has the population and coordination to take down Legendary Boss mobs.

This also means I will not be able to get past 10/15, possibly even 12/15, on the ‘This Is My City!’ achievement.

…when will you learn.

If the meta achievement is your biggest concern you can still do it by completing the daily achievements.

so, you are seriously insinuating that any server has less than a reasonable multiple of 150 players? If that was the case, the game would have been shut down already a long time ago. The high fail rate and the meagre rewards compared to the time needed are the reasons people don´t show up. Bad players are frustrated they cannot even dodge a 3 second attack animation and by the fact they have to coordinate their attack instead of running to some random mob and hit 1, good players are frustrated they have their success ruined by bad players. So they both stay away. Not great game design, but certainly not a measurement of server population.

When I want to do the event I just guest to another server. Mine is not very good at this event either. I don’t like your title though it doesn’t do justice to their efforts.

If servers do not have enough players to get 150 people together at LA for the living story event, the great final, something is seriously wrong.

Why is ANet so resilient to the idea of server merges. The population of those servers must be abysmal.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

If servers do not have enough players to get 150 people together at LA for the living story event, the great final, something is seriously wrong.

Why is ANet so resilient to the idea of server merges. The population of those servers must be abysmal.

Because they know the exact numbers and you don’t.

kokiman.2364:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

If servers do not have enough players to get 150 people together at LA for the living story event, the great final, something is seriously wrong.

Why is ANet so resilient to the idea of server merges. The population of those servers must be abysmal.

Because they know the exact numbers and you don’t.

And from what I experienced ingame, they really do not want to share those numbers ever.

Algreg.3629:

so, you are seriously insinuating that any server has less than a reasonable multiple of 150 players?

Well, duh. There obviously are servers that do not have 150 players interested in playing current living story content at the same time anymore. There’s no need to insinuate anything – it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

If servers do not have enough players to get 150 people together at LA for the living story event, the great final, something is seriously wrong.

I’m sure every server has at least 150 people on it. The problem is how many of them want to participate in the event.

In this case, they’ve transformed what was a relatively straightforward and fun final chapter of Living World into an annoying nightmare. People get frustrated and don’t want to participate any more, which then creates a vicious circle — fewer people makes it harder to win, so more people leave, and there are fewer people still, and so on.

I’m on TC, a large server, and last night was surprised to find myself not in an overflow. Because people are bored and/or fed up with the event. I ended up leaving myself after trying a couple of times — why sit there auto-attacking for 15 minutes to get a few boxes? If I wanted to do boring crap for boxes, I’d run around in circles in Queensdale. At least there, I know I’ll actually get the boxes!

I’ve been playing this game for 5 months now, and the destruction of this event through the most recent patch is the most inexplicable thing I’ve witnessed. They’ve taken what was a fun climax to the living story and ruined it.

Astralporing.1957:

Algreg.3629:

so, you are seriously insinuating that any server has less than a reasonable multiple of 150 players?

Well, duh. There obviously are servers that do not have 150 players interested in playing current living story content at the same time anymore. There’s no need to insinuate anything – it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows.

that may come as a shock to you, but those are two different things entirely.

No doubt those servers have more than 150 players.

But what is the point in designing content for 150 players if you can not even find enough for a temporary live event in one single zone (no other story events going on elsewhere).

If not even 150 players are interested in the LS on a server, than one of two things is wrong.

1. Server population is not healthy enough for these events
2. The event is so bad, noone wants to do it

Maybe it is both though.

For starters, I’m not sure how many BP players go into the event. I just know that after 4hrs Friday and 1hr Sunday (crossing over into Monday). I’ve yet to see just one of the Knights downed.

And the Knights appear to be nothing more than phallic blocks. So I don’t blame people for not bothering with them.

@kokiman: Checked the daily and monthly tabs I didn’t see anything specific to the Event. Just the usual (ie Skill Interupt; Veteran Slaying, etc).

Now I might forgive this thing if not for the fact that every single Event has been nothing but: Some Fun, Platforming, Phallic Blocks.
…at least with previous events you didn’t need to complete most of the sub-achievements to get the Meta.

illutian.7630:

@kokiman: Checked the daily and monthly tabs I didn’t see anything specific to the Event. Just the usual (ie Skill Interupt; Veteran Slaying, etc).

Look for the daily that has a special icon next to it. It’s there.

illutian.7630:

For starters, I’m not sure how many BP players go into the event. I just know that after 4hrs Friday and 1hr Sunday (crossing over into Monday). I’ve yet to see just one of the Knights downed.

And the Knights appear to be nothing more than phallic blocks. So I don’t blame people for not bothering with them.

@kokiman: Checked the daily and monthly tabs I didn’t see anything specific to the Event. Just the usual (ie Skill Interupt; Veteran Slaying, etc).

Now I might forgive this thing if not for the fact that every single Event has been nothing but: Some Fun, Platforming, Phallic Blocks.
…at least with previous events you didn’t need to complete most of the sub-achievements to get the Meta.

Today’s should be to look at any Lion’s Arch vista.

Most servers easily have the population needed. Hell, ALL servers do easily.

It’s simply called “Most of the population isn’t in LA” Where are they? dungeons, WvW, scattered across the world of Tyria doing hearts and exploring, fractals? Who knows.

Kalavier.1097:

Most servers easily have the population needed. Hell, ALL servers do easily.

It’s simply called “Most of the population isn’t in LA” Where are they? dungeons, WvW, scattered across the world of Tyria doing hearts and exploring, fractals? Who knows.

What does that tell us about the LS?

Well, they were there in spades before this patch. You know, when it actually was worth doing.

Sera.6539:

Today’s should be to look at any Lion’s Arch vista.

Really? Excellent, I only need one more and it’s a work night tonight so I was dreading something actually hard

dances off into the sunset
Mama’s getting some LOOT TONIGHT!

What I don’t really understand is that if they’ve designed the knights around having 150 characters in a map…

Why don’t they institute “underflow” style maps for servers with low populations?

Or just abolish individual servers entirely? (Which would likely be bad for the overall community feel.)

Make it all one server and have overflows as necessary.

AS others have stated. There is a daily for the LS every day. Kill 10 aetherblade, 10 molton, visit a vista. Look all the way down on the list of daily tasks.

Minos.5168:

What I don’t really understand is that if they’ve designed the knights around having 150 characters in a map…

Why don’t they institute “underflow” style maps for servers with low populations?

Or just abolish individual servers entirely? (Which would likely be bad for the overall community feel.)

Make it all one server and have overflows as necessary.

Mmm, gimme single-shard universe, gimme gimme!

Clear.8512:

AS others have stated. There is a daily for the LS every day. Kill 10 aetherblade, 10 molton, visit a vista. Look all the way down on the list of daily tasks.

This isn’t about the silly Meta achievement. The Liberator’s Bag wasn’t really any better than an Ultimate Citizen’s Bag.

The fact is, the Knights prevent you from accessing content that, honestly, should have been instanced.

If the Knights had been instanced dungeons (even if, say, you got paired up with another two teams randomly… like certain missions in GW2) then they could have been better balanced.

The Hologram isn’t really that difficult. Any time a map has made it to the hologram, they always seem to win.

Basically, the Knights can be a complete waste of 18 minutes because of a poorly designed and poorly balanced encounter. (If you fail, you get nothing for your time investment but the “event failed” reward.)

Minos.5168:

What I don’t really understand is that if they’ve designed the knights around having 150 characters in a map…

Why don’t they institute “underflow” style maps for servers with low populations?

Or just abolish individual servers entirely? (Which would likely be bad for the overall community feel.)

Make it all one server and have overflows as necessary.

Yes, because that’d make a great press release. “Okay guys, we are getting rid of your server.”

“What? Why? We have very high rating on the list.”

“Oh, you don’t have as many people arrive for these specific events, regardless of time of day, what day it is, or other factors (Like guilds doing their missions, or commanders leading various runs in other areas of Tyria).”

Sure, I could believe it if say, a server was constantly failing things across the board for every style possible, but you REALLY have to ask yourself this question

“Is it truly a low population issue, or is it a LOW interest issue for our server?”

Also, you know, Anet has GUESTING ingame. You can easily guest to another server if yours isn’t beating the bosses or you need a specific achievement.

Algreg.3629:

Astralporing.1957:

Algreg.3629:

so, you are seriously insinuating that any server has less than a reasonable multiple of 150 players?

Well, duh. There obviously are servers that do not have 150 players interested in playing current living story content at the same time anymore. There’s no need to insinuate anything – it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows.

that may come as a shock to you, but those are two different things entirely.

So?

The percentage of people interested in LS should be stable across the servers. For high-pop servers that percentage is enough to have LA zone relatively full, but there are a lot of servers where the same percentage is just not enough to have a knight-killing group. Of course server population discepancies are not the only reason why it is like that, but it is an important factor. And Anet seems to behave as if they were unaware any such server differences exist at all.

TL/DR: the fact that some servers cannot manage enough people for the LS anymore is an effect of a low population of those servers.

It’s sad to say that I kind of agree with the OP. I understand that Anet wanted to remove the zerging of events, but I don’t think they should have attempted this IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EVENT. While everyone has already played through the event and figured it out.

Now like most players I don’t want to play the event again because it is highly unlikely that my server will even GET to Scarlet again. Here’s hoping that Season 2 will be better!

Although it is fun to see a server get together and beat down something big, making it a gate to complete goals, achievements, or move the story forward is a flaw. This removes personal ability from the equation and stress reliance. Although a noble thought, I think more than a few people can agree that relying on a large PUG (IE, your hosting server), could essentially be a hit and miss situation.

A 5 man-instance would have been a better solution. By all means have the larger events, as, they are fun, but do not attach as much (if any) goal, achievement, moving the story along, to it to reduce the overall reliance on eternal factors beyond your personal control. The krait-tower was a pretty solid design in that direction. It had the “zerg” aspects, but also the small instant based events. It was not perfect, as reaching the top levels without a large force was very hard, but it was doable.

My recommendation would be to avoid large group reliance type gates. Make them side evens, or separate events as a whole, such as the marionette or Teq. Rather consider the small-party focused instances for gates.

There has definitely been a marked decrease in the successful Knight’s attempts when I’ve been playing. Typically now we can down 2 of them, but that 3rd one is at 75% or something ridiculous with no time left.

I’m very disappointed with the change. I like the idea of a server working together, but if the event pretty much requires 50 people at each Knight to succeed, there is going to be a real problem. The same thing happened with Marionette. Week one was easy to get those numbers. Once EoTM came out, you’d be lucky to get 3full rows of people. It’s the same thing here. You might get one or two of the Knights going with 50 people at each, but then the 3rd Knight has 10-20 people. By the time two Knights are down, there just isn’t enough time to play catch up because there’s a cap on the number of people that can DPS the last one.

Overall, poorly implemented change. Looks good on paper, fails in practice.

Well, I’ve done it a couple of times with 50 on each knight. It’s not impossible. People need to learn once the Knight counter gets to 0 they need to move to another Knight. And they need to check their tool bar to see if they get a colored x buff above their skills when they run through the colored circle on the ground and if the got it they are good to go for that Knight. Anet has made it confusing I must say. Anet would make this a bit easier if the opened up the Way Points. Your at the blue Knight and its full it’s a long run to the Red one.

The only good thing about the rewards is the chest does give some Dragonite Ore and maybe a shard.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

..once the Knight counter gets to 0..

.. which doesn’t happen at all on a lot of servers now.

NSP struggles to get sufficient interest in the patched LA event. By that, I mean a lot less than 50 × 3 active players for it. On the other hand, NSP developed a reputation for zerging Orr so players from other servers regularly guest to participate and I would love to see guilds from other servers join NSP.

Arenanet really should offer a transfer bonus for individuals and one for guilds whenever performance on large-scale PvE or WvW becomes an issue. Then do mandatory mergers without a bonus for stragglers in the two lowest populations. I have already run into problems on the two dungeons that require they be opened where group members need someone who can begin the instance. I suppose Orr could be patched to open with a group battle instance rather than a zerg, though.

Anvil Rock was only getting 1, maybe 2 of the Knights down during any given event over the weekend. I found if I wanted to get to the hologram fight, I needed to guest, which is disconcerting. Sadly, a good chunk of the people on AR just aren’t interested in pve in general, which tends to make large scale events like this a tad troublesome.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

Well, I’ve done it a couple of times with 50 on each knight. It’s not impossible.

No, it’s not impossible – after all, hardcap is about 150 ppl, so just enough. Theoretically.
Now, imagine yourself on a server that didn’t trigger an overflow (that’s at least about half of them at the moment). Let’s generously assume it means as high as 110 players (again, there are servers that do not have even that much). Say, 10 (or 11, for better rounding later) of them is doing other things, like looking for Peter.
You are left with 33 people on each knight. Which in most cases is simply not enough.

illutian.7630:

Currently, my server, Borlis Pass, is unable to kill even one of the Knights.

…so thanks, Anet, you once again…ruin an event by assuming every single server has the population and coordination to take down Legendary Boss mobs.

This also means I will not be able to get past 10/15, possibly even 12/15, on the ‘This Is My City!’ achievement.

…when will you learn.

when will YOU LEARN that you need to do dungeons, then give arena all ur gold in exchange for gems and buy a transfer to one of the high pop servers

Arena is trying to teach you a lesson here.

Or maybe you can just guest on another server like Desolation (EU), to do it… Ok… then you will probably go to an overflow, but at least one or 2 knights are always dead

I would of liked the holo fight be a 5-man instance, world events are inherently flawed in gw2

I don’t think SoR gets full teams on all three knights, but still manages to get to the holograms.

illutian.7630:

Currently, my server, Borlis Pass, is unable to kill even one of the Knights.

…so thanks, Anet, you once again…ruin an event by assuming every single server has the population and coordination to take down Legendary Boss mobs.

This also means I will not be able to get past 10/15, possibly even 12/15, on the ‘This Is My City!’ achievement.

…when will you learn.

I’m on Borlis Pass also and was very frustrated with our inability to get enough people to down the knights so this weekend I guested to Jade Quarry. I ended up in overflow 4 out of 5 times, but we succeeded in killing all the knights as well as holograms 5 out of 5 times. I learned getting into an overflow from a high-pop server was superiour to doing it in the main of Borlis Pass for this event. Too many people quit doing it on our server (or just farm Heirlooms and Champs).

While I cant speak about other servers, in general BP is more of a disorganized farm server than anything else and if it cant be zerged, then its ignored. Even temple runs can be frustrating at times because people will fail to follow simple directions….

Very frustrated but Sunday Borlis Pass actually defeated the knights and the holograms. I was able to get to Scarlet and defeat her. But all attempts after that failed. So persistence pays off. I do agree the Knights are quite hard to kill.

GRUE.9754:

While I cant speak about other servers, in general BP is more of a disorganized farm server than anything else and if it cant be zerged, then its ignored. Even temple runs can be frustrating at times because people will fail to follow simple directions….

They removed my post about players simply becoming worse at actually playing MMO’s, but this is a side effect of that.

No matter how long an event has existed the unwashed masses will be terrible if there are any mechanics at all.

You can see it especially at something that has an interesting mechanic like Lyssa temple.

How often do you see people never looking away? All the time…

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Thank you for reporting this, we realize that is is difficult to get full maps during non peak hours or that it is hard to get a full overflow to coordinate for these fights, we are currently working on easing the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights to better allow servers to participate in the Hologram Fight.

Hopefully the fix for the achievement itself will roll out at the same time?

thank you anet this shoould be better with 25% reduced health in servers with lower pop, and these menders healing was demoralisating

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Thank you for reporting this, we realize that is is difficult to get full maps during non peak hours or that it is hard to get a full overflow to coordinate for these fights, we are currently working on easing the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights to better allow servers to participate in the Hologram Fight.

An easy fix would be to change the ‘buff zones’ for the Red Knight to also remove conditions on you.
…I haven’t faced the Green or Blue to see what they do.

It’s poor design to make a World boss mob reflect all conditions…knowing that most of us have builds that do passive (ie on Crit) conditions that do damage.

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Thank you for reporting this, we realize that is is difficult to get full maps during non peak hours or that it is hard to get a full overflow to coordinate for these fights, we are currently working on easing the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights to better allow servers to participate in the Hologram Fight.

Would that mean that you’ll descale it slightly? I would say that 90 people is what Underworld gets normally but the last time it was only 70 or so during peak. 50 on red, 10 on green and 10 on blue.

illutian.7630:

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Thank you for reporting this, we realize that is is difficult to get full maps during non peak hours or that it is hard to get a full overflow to coordinate for these fights, we are currently working on easing the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights to better allow servers to participate in the Hologram Fight.

An easy fix would be to change the ‘buff zones’ for the Red Knight to also remove conditions on you.
…I haven’t faced the Green or Blue to see what they do.

It’s poor design to make a World boss mob reflect all conditions…knowing that most of us have builds that do passive (ie on Crit) conditions that do damage.

All three have the same mechanics.

Even if you don’t inflict conditions on crits, many players carelessly lay down combo fields around the knights, leading to most of the damage I personally take during these events.

Gulesave.5073:

All three have the same mechanics.

Even if you don’t inflict conditions on crits, many players carelessly lay down combo fields around the knights, leading to most of the damage I personally take during these events.

Ah, then my suggestion would still work. As you would just run into one of the buff zones that already spawn. In order to be cleansed of conditions.

My 2 cent:

Future events should not be designed in a manner that requires 150 people to always be present and fully knowledgeable about all event details. At present, there is no means to play Teq, jungle worms or the LA event (meaning to achieve 6 min to Knightfall) on my server Piken Square. Anyone who aims to get these has to guest to Desolation, and such is the picture each time there is a boss or achievement that implies high coordination among a vast number of random players. Recent examples include:

- Marionette stage 4 and 5 achievements were unattainable a week after the patch, two weeks in there was no one to be seen there at all;
- Escape from LA achievement for simultaneous miasma deterrence was unattainable a week after the patch;
- 6 minutes to knightfall isn’t attainable at all as we get 25 players max. per knight on prime time and we’re very lucky if we get them down at all. The mechanics that hate cnd-damagers contribute to this by a good margin too.

It is obvious that such goals in the present picture do not promote anything other than frustration and disinterest in the events whatsoever (off topic: of course, poor general plot with inexplicable and misplaced emphasis on homosexual relations between NPCs multiply this by a score – I never return to the backroom of the drill ship just to avoid the horrid cut scenes). And that means fewer and fewer people playing them with each passing day. To a certain extent – fewer people logging in whatsoever. And that’s a ‘High’- populated server.

So just an observation. I hope some thoughts get noted and considered while planning future content.

P.S.: plot-wise: Scarlet? Molten/Toxic/Aetherblade? Inferior NPCs with superficial sexual issues? What is this, why is it called Guild Wars? I just bough Guild Wars Trilogy, now THAT has story! Charr destroying human realm of Ascalon – heart-breaking! There is plenty of story to expand on in this game, that can easily make people engaged and feel epic about participating in the World’s development, including through large scale events. Current story just feels repulsive.

Overall population will continue to dwindle as the game ages. Merging servers is really unavoidable. However, making large-scale events instanced may also correct the server population and interest imbalance.

Some servers focus more on WvW while others lean toward PvE. Some have more large, well-organized and active guilds than others. Treating all servers the same is what causes this disgruntlement so please, either make all servers the same through population adjustments, or account for the differences in the event construction. I was personally frustrated with the new Tequatl event on NSP where 40-50 sequential failures caused me to just give up. That was an enormous waste of time and caused me to take a few months off from the game. I only succeeded in the more recent Twisted event by guesting. Again, failure after failure on my home server was highly frustrating when other servers made it look easy.

Please merge servers so traditional PvE events like opening Arah are regularly completed on all servers and please at least offer the opportunity to instance some of these special events. Perhaps, ask players if they would like to join a special overflow.

“Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”

Looks like the casuals won.