About World Boss Events and PVE in General
To me, the Megaservers + Boss synchronization takes away any feeling of personal achievement, initiative and self-organization.
It’s just hitting a boss as part of a massive zerg until we get the loot. And doing boss events seems to be a lot less profitable right now, which is a huge problem for casual players who want to get some ascended gear; or do not have the time to play several hours a day.
To me, PVE Gameplay is close to non-existent in the moment.
Since I love this game, I’d like to make some suggestions what could be done, not only about bosses and megaservers, but PVE in general.
1) create events which encourage self-organisation. The big wooden tower in the Kessex Hills was a good example for that.
2) Give Players more choices, start at least 2 boss events any quarter hour.
3) My guess is that at least 80% of all existing “normal” events are nearly never played – what a waste of design and ideas. Give “normal” events a “reward level clock” (should be visible on the map), and give them much higher rewards if they weren’t played for a while – let them scale accordingly, with Champ enemies, etc. This would make “Questing” fun (and profitable, which is a Prerequisite given economical goals like ascended gear or legendaries). Give Players a chance to self-organize and communicate / cooperate, see Events like the Nagling Giant, or the Wolf Master Champ. Doing “normal” Quests could and should be much more challenging and at least as rewarding as doing boss events.
4) To populate lesser played maps, reward levels should be pushed on that maps. For example: Queen Jennah could announce that the people in the Gendarran Fields need some help, and that reward levels will be higher for a day (and enemies tougher). The announcement could even be done by a lonely herald in the cities, so the news could be spread player to player.
5) Big Events like Tequatl might be interesting for huge guilds (which is perfectly ok, imho), but for casual players, they offer a hard choice: should I really spend an hour or more on that map waiting for the event, hoping it will be organized , missing other opportunities, and in the end, the event might even fail? Imho, events should be more rewarding right from the start.
6) Give Players a (visible!) Incentive to form groups, play with guild members, and doing events from the start; sort of a personal reward level: +10% for playing in a group, +10% for playing on the same map on the same events, +10% for playing with guild members, +10% for any part of the event that was played, etc.
8) To promote playing with a Guild, You could create a guild event that gives higher rewards for some hours on a map for a certain guild, for all activities on that map.
9) Dungeons / Fractals are mostly boring. Either somebody did a dungeon path a gazillion times before, or he / she is more or less dragged through that dungeon by a group who has done that dungeon … a gazillion times before. Use Your existing designs, and open dungeon paths and fractals in a way the wooden tower in the Kessex Hills worked.
10) Open World Chest. Assume an open world chest like the one close to svanir shaman starting point would suddenly be guarded by a bunch of really though svanir champions… could be something nice in that chest…
To reiterate, the world boss synchronization, although maybe necessary, has killed a lot of what I would call “Meta-Game”. For a much better PVE Experience (this is what a lot of Players look for, imho), the Game Design should promote communication, ad-hoc self organisation, cooperation, grouping and possibly guild activity – and this could be visible as a “Reward Level” on the GUI.
Events should be designed in a way that makes them rewarding right from the start – not more “binary” events like Tequatl or the three headed Wurm.
The reward level should be high enough to be encouraging. It should be as high as the more or less profitable, but boring PVE activities like World Event Hopping or Dungeons. After all, economical goals like creating a legendary weapon is a huge incentive to keep playing Guild Wars 2.