Guild Wars 2

Most of the new events and meta events are ton of fun when I can find an organized map of people who actually want to achieve the highest tier of success. It’s a great blend of individual contributions to the smaller events an overall co-ordination as a community when all the events on a map succeed and we get tier4 rewards.

That said… I haven’t ‘naturally’ landed on a map that was able to successfully complete a meta event since the expansion was released. I’ve had to resort to using the LFG tool every time I want to participate in a map’s meta event. The LFG tool is by no means well suited to this purpose. Once a group of 5 fills up the LFG posting disappears, so filling up a map requires a ton of people taxiing at once. Furthermore, there’s no way for me to know when browsing the tool how full the map actually is, whether it’s being organized by a particular guild, or what most of the players on the map are actually trying to achieve.

The game already has a tool that does a pretty decent job of this: custom pvp arenas let the host put up a name/description, and tell us how many players are in there. Why not have a similar UI for finding an instance of a map to play on? This would go a really long way in transforming the game from what often feels like a ghost town into something with a stronger sense of community by giving players more choice about what content they want to play (and finding others with similar goals) as well as greatly reducing the frustration a lot of players feel (seriously, read map chat during most meta events) at players who aren’t as committed to succeeding in the event.

To build on this idea, it would be fantastic if guilds or even just players could spin up their own private instance, taxi in their own guild members/friends to seed the population, and then open it up to the public. I can imagine a lot of people would be willing to pay some small amount (1-2 gold) to spin up their own map for an event, which will then also benefit all the other players who join after it gets made public.

The long waits associated with finding a decent map for meta events are the biggest factor limiting my enjoyment of the game right now. The content itself is fantastic when it’s playable but sadly it’s often not. I’m really hopeful that something like this can be implemented to reduce the long wait between logging in and actually playing enjoyable content.