I think your logic is out of whack. In the beginning, Orr was the most rewarding place in the game and people were there. Anet is now making other places more rewarding, by making it so the reward is more spread out.
Not to interject myself into your argument but I feel that their effort to uncluster people on the map has not worked as planned . It seems they just moved the clusters around a bit. The maps are 98% empty with clusters at certain events.
Ex- you mentioned Hairathi Hinterlands. I’m there a lot too. You know why? There’s people there for the chest. After I’ve done the event chain a 100+ times, I’d like to do something else. There’s a ton of empty events.
If their aim was to get people out of Orr then they were sucessful. The events are virtually undoable now. The problem still exists, they’ve just shifted it a little. I love the chests and loot, but I think it may be part of the problem now.
Here, Vayne:
Seriously. Get a character. Come to somewhere like Stormbluff Isle. Now just go into an area like Lornar’s pass, or any map that is large, and preferably one that does not have an event chest. Now, explore a bit. Tell me how many champions you encounter that sit around for ages without anyone killing them. FYI, this generally only gets worse as you go to higher level zones. Try tracing the route you would go to get to the second dragon (forgot his name) for the first time. Tell me how many zones you go through where you could go almost half the map without hardly encountering anyone, or how many champions you see just sitting around, with no one to fight them. I have done the same on my warrior, and I will tell you that my list is huge. I encountered no less than four to five champion events, probably in the same map, that had absolutely no one fighting them.
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1. Places near event chests.
2. Areas with a high population (Queensdale, Norn, and all places in #1).
3. Dungeons, all that other stuff.
You should quickly be able to see that the issue here is that issue #2 CAUSES issue #2, and without any reason for people to drain from areas that have issue #2, issue #2 just keeps getting worse and worse, aside from the few oddballs that are either going for a legendary weapon or actually care about exploring enough to hinder their progress in the game.
Lornar’s Pass is a perfect example. It’s such an incredibly beautiful map, but so empty. And while I was pushing my Norn through there, I had used the map to ask for help in defeating champions… And on a “Very High” population server I usually did not see a response. Not because I was being ignored, but because people weren’t there.
On my higher level characters, I go to the first area zones to complete the daily achievement events. People are always going to go back to the beginner zones for this reason, and offering higher rewards in higher zones won’t change this. During the week, I don’t have the time to do those so even if the reward is weaker, I just want to get my dailies done in the beginner zones.
Also, something important to remember about the low reward for the higher zones is the cost of WPs. WP cost increases the higher level you get, and the rewards you receive in the high-end zones do not compensate the costs of travel. If you read any WP complaint threads, people talk about this. They are discouraged from hanging around away from major cities, grouping up to go to a higher-level area, etc. because the WP cost is just too much and the reward does not balance out.
This is a problem in every single MMO I’ve ever played. Every one, no exception. Some maps are popular, because of some great reward/quest chain/reason to be there and some maps are empty.
If you take the population of most MMO servers and divide them amounts every possible location, no one would have anyone to play with. That’s why MMO developers work hard to keep people in specific zones.
High end zones are normal to be in, for high end mats and end game content. But the question is how do you get people to other zones. And again, this isn’t a Guild Wars specific problem, this is an MMO-wide problem.
So you put stuff in other zones. Dragon events. Shiverpeake killer. Guild missions. Whatever you can get to people to go back to other zones. Because if you don’t, they won’t. It’s human nature.
There are people who dont’ care about those things and just want to go where they want. The rewards don’t matter to them (like me). Those people are going to be the minority.
Saying this is a problem is legit. Saying it’s different in any other MMO isn’t. The game is trying to get people to gather at certain spots, because that is the only way to get people together.
I don’t really see any other way to fix it.
