Guild Wars 2

This is what happens when all content gets designed around mega guilds.

Time to start rewarding quality over quantity unless you want all the small servers and guilds to simply die out.

Exactly. It seems like they didn’t even try to dynamically scale this knight event. Today I had 20 players fighting blue knight for over 7 minutes and barely a nick in the health bar. I knew it was 20 because that is what the dynamic calibration says.

There needs to be multiple tiers or levels of scaling going on. I guess it was an oversight when they made the content. If it wasn’t then Anet is reallllly lazy.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

Exactly. It seems like they didn’t even try to dynamically scale this knight event. Today I had 20 players fighting blue knight for over 7 minutes and barely a nick in the health bar. I knew it was 20 because that is what the dynamic calibration says.

The dynamic calibration counts down from 50, so you have 30 people calibrated.

Weird thing is the scarlet fight on the airship scales to the amount of people, I did it with 8 but the knights don’t at all.

Not every server is blackgate, not every server can even get near creating an overflow. I think this is the third update I’ve said this for.

Arenanet designed a fantastic scaling system, use it.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Weird thing is the scarlet fight on the airship scales to the amount of people, I did it with 8 but the knights don’t at all.

Not every server is blackgate, not every server can even get near creating an overflow. I think this is the third update I’ve said this for.

Arenanet designed a fantastic scaling system, use it.

Have they?
Out of all the things they mentioned pre-launch the scaling system was one of the things they really delivered on with mobs scaling horizontally(new skills/tactics) instead of just vertically (hit harder, get more HP).

>.< we had 5 people attacking blue (including me) while red had 120 and green had 145. it was too funny. then the majority gets mad when we fail the event.

Seems like they balanced their hotfix around Blackgate once again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the scaling in these events is problematic and Anet continues to ignore it.

Allowing us to blob and kill the knights that way, allowed us to brute force the problem of the terrible scaling system. By forcing us to split up, you can now only overcome the scaling issues in the most optimum of conditions.

Anet, you can’t take away the only solution to a problem that you haven’t managed to resolve yet and you don’t like the solution players came up with. Get rid of the problem first, then remove the solution to that problem. Otherwise, you’re just screwing over your players.

I, too, got tired of the various issues with scaling. I’m on Northern Shiverpeaks, but I guested on Blackgate and completed the Knights and the Holograms (sounds like a ‘70s pop band) in overflow. Unbelievable. Couldn’t do it on my home server in regular but an overflow on BG did the events. I wonder if there are any stats on the number of times certain events were completed successfully per server? That would certainly be eye-opening.

Overflows are across all servers. The irony is that due to poor scaling algorithms, on low population servers, you need to guest to a server you know will be full, just so you can get into an overflow, since you know it has more people than your home server.

I agree that the scaling isn’t that great. I just went on an attempt that had at least 30 on every knight and failed on two of them. I want to tell people not to group at one, but knowing that everyone gets loot if one is downed, and that its very unlikely for any to be downed unless its maxed, its hard to justify.

Just failed the holos with a decent group that should have been able to do it. This is the future of the game, the devs love this content. I am absolutely certain there’s a lot more of this to come. At least some people like it.. but I am not one of them. Spoon

Just failed all Knights, had about 40 on each and they all had about 40% health left when the timer ran out. I remembered it being different before so checked the forums. Why on earth was it changed? It wasn’t like it was even THAT easy before. Never saw it succeed before patch, and now i doubt I’ll see whatever is supposed to come after. I do less than half the damage I should with the buff, and the extreme lag makes it impossible to dodge reliably which cuts down the dps even more.

ooklah.1640:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

Exactly. It seems like they didn’t even try to dynamically scale this knight event. Today I had 20 players fighting blue knight for over 7 minutes and barely a nick in the health bar. I knew it was 20 because that is what the dynamic calibration says.

The dynamic calibration counts down from 50, so you have 30 people calibrated.

Oh I did the math alright… the calibration number was 30. So there were only 20. I worded what I said wrong before. But yah it was 20 , definitely.

While I have very little sympathy for anyone too lazy or stubborn to guest to a server that has enough people, I agree that the downscaling is terrible. Especially when they have an exact counter of how many players are capable of damaging each knight at any time – ie. the number of players with each calibration buff.

i think the problem with scaling is it does not take into consideration upleveled players

Problem is that soft cap for every server is about 100 players or something. So overflows will usually have a hard time. And this is definitely overflow content.

Its the main reason why world events are bad designs, they expect you to have full maps, but not every server is capable of that, only like 1-2 can and then some overflows, other than that its just futile.

Scale events to 25 MAX, more people should make it easier not harder. By making the knights only give 50 people buffs, and 60 people there, than 10 people are doing no damage but are still scaling the event further than it should of.

I want to go back to instanced encounters because you know who’s in there with you, not some random afking in thje corner but because of the unsuccessful attempt with the new TA path, I doubt that will be the case.

Olvendred.3027:

While I have very little sympathy for anyone too lazy or stubborn to guest to a server that has enough people, I agree that the downscaling is terrible. Especially when they have an exact counter of how many players are capable of damaging each knight at any time – ie. the number of players with each calibration buff.

So, every time an event start, all the players from the low population servers need to come to Blackgate/Tarnished Coast/Jade Quarry to do the events? Then ANET should just merge all low population servers into BG, TC, JQ and the other tier 2 servers. This should not be the way to do event.

“Oh, we don’t have enough people? No sweat. Let’s guest to BG!!!!” Seriously, I have no problems with people guesting. But I have a problem when you are forced to guest to another server to get an event or achievement done.

It’s like I want to eat my dinner, but I have to go over to my neighbors house to have dinner!

Olvendred.3027:

While I have very little sympathy for anyone too lazy or stubborn to guest to a server that has enough people, I agree that the downscaling is terrible. Especially when they have an exact counter of how many players are capable of damaging each knight at any time – ie. the number of players with each calibration buff.

Guesting was never intended for this purpose, it was so you can play with others with different servers. If we have to rely on guesting in order to do world events outside of our own server, does that not make the encounter inherently flawed?

This event is designed poorly in multiple ways. It’s not rational, fair, and can be very difficult. Although guesting was meant for playing with friends, now a lot of people must guest because their server performs poorly in events due to a flawed scaling system. This definitely isn’t the first event that does this.

Gotta agree with the majority here .. the scaling is so bad and is far from dynamic.. on the flipside I wonder when ANET are going to fix the minor text error in the achievement panel – - I am convinced it should be 60mins to Knighfall after the patch

Fungalfoot.7213:

This is what happens when all content gets designed around mega guilds.

Time to start rewarding quality over quantity unless you want all the small servers and guilds to simply die out.

They died, over a year ago. And are still dying out. But new players keep coming, so the servers population is theoretically high or very high. But where are the people? They aren’t playing endgame content or living story at all. Anet doesn’t have a choice now, quality of most GW2 players is the lowest I’ve ever seen in any mmo, and they reward it with events like this.
I want pre-Scarlet LS back…

Agree completely.

I love this game and, unlike many on the forums, have loved most of the Living Story steps they’ve implemented.

However, this issue of scaling on the Knights has all but killed the fun of the scarlet patch (which should have been epic – so that makes me really sad) because my server simply doesnt have the people to consistently spread between the knights.

It really feels like they design the fights for a tiny number of servers with huge populations and forget about the rest of us.

They need to design these fights with smaller groups in mind, then scale them up from there. The current method ends up leaving huge chunks of people out of the fun.

I like this event as well. Or liked it. Hologram Prime is a really cool fight, but uh, now I can only get crap-loot and event fail experience for fighting damage sponges.

The other events are cool, but end up being a consolation prize for failing Knights.

They really need to fix this.

We cant even kill one Knight half the time because the fights are designed solely for high population servers.

I wish devs would play more in these events when they are scaled down (on low pop servers) to see what we are going through.

I want to have fun when I play. This is just frustrating and drama inducing.

50 well organized players should at least have a chance at beating this event.

Were being punished for server loyalty, and that is bad design, simple as that.

Its not even about guesting anymore, because even if you guest, you’ll get thrown into overflow, which most of the time on EU at least is an autofail.

Instead of LF Healer, we got LF Mainflow now. Wonderful.

If Anet is reading this: if you want to make open world events, be realistic and condition for the map not being full when the event pops.

I agree with Dyno!!
1st 3 nights beat 1- 2 knights and no loot.
Friday night beat some knights and finally got loot.
last night “NO LOOT” again and now not enough people on to beat them.
I was really looking forward to this and now its been ruined!
Maybe time to head back to Diablo 3

It’s obvious that they don’t care about LS quality, overflow was a problem since couple of patches before.

I agree with this post. I managed to reach hologram boss when zerg tactic still worked, but barely even then. Now…yesterday we had 40-50 ppl per each knight and still failed each time. If all is perfect even then it takes ~14mins to kill them all.

Blacktide stopped trying, yesterday we had fail after fail after fail with almost full ppl and today I see like only 15-20 per knight even trying, ppl just gave up and went to guest better server or smth. This is just bad and the knights are so incredibly boring, so much health…and the fact that they reflect conditions while im conditionmancer is brilliant. Use staff to do 300 dmg per sec is mega effective.

“I want pre-Scarlet LS back…” Ummmm…. I dunno how to break this to you, but “LS” was all about Scarlet, even when we didn’t know her name. Holidays, Southsun, SAB and Teq are the only LS (and are they really LS with their content?) updates that weren’t about Scarlet. Check the list at http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release.

Back on topic. So, maps are capped at 150, right? 50 people on each knight means you have a CHANCE of success. Oh, but wait…. 10 are farming heirlooms, 12 are farming champs, 5 are working on dailies and killing whatever is needed there and don’t have time for the knights event, 3 are AFK and still thinking they’ll be leeching rewards somehow, 7 are still looking for Peter cuz that’s the only achievement they need for the meta, and 3 are doing jumping puzzles and vistas so they can compare screenies from “pre-searing LA”. So the Knights event is short 40 people and doesn’t scale down, leading to all the complaints above.

How to fix this going forward? Districts, just like GW1 has. Give us the ability to switch overflows like we did in GW1 events. Dwayna & Grenth had even/odd districts for Wintersday, and WE could CHOOSE which we went to. If we could switch which overflow we were in, we could find one filled with like minded people. Want to get a dedicated Knights event overflow? District 1. Farming champs only? Dist 2. Heirlooms? Commander leading a route in Dist 3. Why, after this game has been out over a year and a half, does it still lack this one little thing that could make things so much better?

Klonex.4562:

>.< we had 5 people attacking blue (including me) while red had 120 and green had 145. it was too funny. then the majority gets mad when we fail the event.

One thing I wonder about when seeing the mob is “Does everybody have the calibration” because otherwise they deal no damage.

Like I said once, we were like… 10-20 low on Blue, so the rest of the area SWARMED blue. 120-150 at blue means 100ish people doing nothing, and if the event scales to be tougher? They are just making it harder.

Kalavier.1097:

Klonex.4562:

>.< we had 5 people attacking blue (including me) while red had 120 and green had 145. it was too funny. then the majority gets mad when we fail the event.

One thing I wonder about when seeing the mob is “Does everybody have the calibration” because otherwise they deal no damage.

Like I said once, we were like… 10-20 low on Blue, so the rest of the area SWARMED blue. 120-150 at blue means 100ish people doing nothing, and if the event scales to be tougher? They are just making it harder.

I don’t know if it scales to be tougher. Maybe the knights get more health or damage resistance, but as far as I can tell, nothing much really changes. The main issue is that these knights don’t scale down. They have just as much when 10 people are fighting it kitten people.

The prime hologram appears to have the same issue, even though I’ve heard people say it scales too. Really, it just seems like both bosses have fixed amounts of health, which is why zerging them worked so well in the first place.

Sinbold.8723:

“I want pre-Scarlet LS back…” Ummmm…. I dunno how to break this to you, but “LS” was all about Scarlet, even when we didn’t know her name. Holidays, Southsun, SAB and Teq are the only LS (and are they really LS with their content?) updates that weren’t about Scarlet. Check the list at http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release.

Well I don’t really care what was this about, I care about quality. And by pre-Scarlet I mean before she appeared personally. Her invasions ruined this game, whole event was a giant brainless zerg pressing 1. Since that moment people only care about champions and trains, and LS encourages them to do so. It’s really sad considering this IS the endgame and theres nothing better to do.

Klonex.4562:

>.< we had 5 people attacking blue (including me) while red had 120 and green had 145. it was too funny. then the majority gets mad when we fail the event.

Thats not possible as a map has a cap of 150.

Paciunek.2496, I see your point, and agree with you 100%.

I think the best thing in the whole LS was the F&F dungeon with it’s awesome final boss encounter. Great NPC dialogue, fight mechanics, the works. Its a small shame that the whole thing wasn’t saved for posterity. Sure, you can get part of it in Fractals, but not all of it. And you can’t pick that one if you want to do it.

Do knights scale at all?

No they do not, one of the reasons the event is dead on most servers. If they do scale it’s poorly tuned, I’ve never seen one beaten with less than 35 players.

I am going to say this. In my opinion Living Story Killed Gw2 and the game has a long way to go to improve their destroyed image. Bugs exist in this game that have been around since beta. The content has been literally a joke and a half. The rewards are terrible. Content is so un-engaging. There is nothing living about this “Living Story”. Our actions only made an outcome during the election. Please stop this psuedo content and fix your game. Add the core features that were promised. Then you can re-evaluate the idea of a “Living Story”.

Taygus.4571:

Klonex.4562:

>.< we had 5 people attacking blue (including me) while red had 120 and green had 145. it was too funny. then the majority gets mad when we fail the event.

Thats not possible as a map has a cap of 150.

yeah sorry, i forgot to mention it was during two attempts to try and take down the knights. 1st..red had 120, blue 5, green 0 2nd.. red had 0, green 145, blue 5. either way it was horrible.

We just had a knight fight on my server in which we managed at least 50 on one knight by the end and still failed to kill it,, and it was the only one even being attempted.

Yeah, I have a feeling the Knights are currently bugged where they are automatically scaled up for 50 people, regardless of how many players are actually there to begin with. This really needs to be addressed, because it means smaller servers struggle to even get the numbers to beat one Knight, and even larger servers need to cajole every other single player on the map to come join in for the Knights (woe to you if you post in Map chat asking for Peter’s location or help with another of the Champions. You’ll be ignored at best or attacked for “not helping” at worst.)

majority of devs play on BG…. do i need to say more?

as far as scaling goes, there is no scaling, it is designed for 50+ ppl or go home

The knights do scale, but the minimum requirement seems to be somewhere around 25 good dps. I’ve seen as few as 20 people keep on track with the timer to be able kill the knight on time.

Here’s an example from earlier today (I went from green to red). Blue started full, green had around 25 slots open, while red had about 20. Green finished first and rather quickly compared to the norm, even though it had the least amount of people. Very few people were downed on green and considering I’ve seen the same amount of people fail, the majority had good dps.

It’s not that the knights don’t scale.

I think they scale like the worm.

To explain, the game counts all three knights as one event. And hence scales based on the total amount of players in any way involved in the event. So even if you’re only 20 at blue, if theres’s 50 each at red and green you are 120 people total, and hence the event scales for +20% players (if 100 is indeed softcap on LA). But since you’re only 20 at blue, your specific knight will feel nigh-invulnerable, you should be 40 per knight.

This is how wurm scales. It counts as a single encounter.

I wrote this to another thread, but fits here as well

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/escape/Knights-Boring-Waste-of-Time/3742241

Carighan.6758:

the game counts all three knights as one event.

As my example shows, each knight scales separately.

The problem with blue knight is there is a swarm of twisted menders roaming around and healing the knight like crazy if they are kept alive. I’ve seen some cases when blue knight was close to 50% and suddenly started to fill up health without losing agro. Menders.

The knights do scale, but the minimum requirement seems to be somewhere around 25 good dps. I’ve seen as few as 20 people keep on track with the timer to be able kill the knight on time.

There seems to be some randomness to it though., like I don’t think +1 player = +1 difficulty, I think it works in batches, and at some uneven pace, because I’ve seen even 50 players fail it by a mile, which should be impossible. That’s why we’re saying “the scaling is terrible,” it seems to behave oddly based on how many people are around at different times in the fight.

Carighan.6758:

It’s not that the knights don’t scale.

I think they scale like the worm.

To explain, the game counts all three knights as one event. And hence scales based on the total amount of players in any way involved in the event. So even if you’re only 20 at blue, if theres’s 50 each at red and green you are 120 people total, and hence the event scales for +20% players (if 100 is indeed softcap on LA). But since you’re only 20 at blue, your specific knight will feel nigh-invulnerable, you should be 40 per knight.

This is how wurm scales. It counts as a single encounter.

Even if that would have been true, they don’t scale like temple events for instance which scale up from 5 people. In about 10 minutes of soloing green knight on pretty much empty overflow I’ve reduced his hp by about 5% while at the same time you can kill temple bosses (also legendary mobs) in 5 minutes.

That means that they scale up from 30-40 people which frankly is not fair for something that’s intended to be easily completed.