The real world is governed by chaos.
Order is humanity’s attempt to rationalize it.
Randomizing the world of GW2 would be a significant step towards a truly living world in my opinion.
Imagine this:
You are out in Mount Maelstrom, running about gather mats. Suddenly, Logan appears and ask you to help him as he ran into some trouble. He brings you to Bard’s Valley and you get ambushed by the 50 champion mobs in there. You promptly got downed and Logan casts Retreat! and runs away.
What just transpired was a simple random event that occurred out of the blue. Such random events are the trademarks of games like Skyrim and GTA where immersion is very well implemented in them. On a side note, immersion is also very well done in the horror genre where the element of surprise is key.
We could also take it further by making Logan not always perform the same task. He could just appear and give you an unidentified dye for absolutely no reason but you get the point.
So, in addition to the current Living Story updates that are targeted at the larger world as a whole, i think it would be great to also add in these small touches to spice up the experience. Most importantly, they are permanent in the persistent world of GW2.
This idea could also perpetuate to other areas like world bosses. Currently, world bosses are like a grind precisely because they spawn and die like clockwork. The new Tequatl experience is exciting and challenging but once the novelty wears off, it is actually coordination for a specific method to kill him. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is a countdown timer to kill, if not he escapes. This is not good because it not only pigeonholes people into using the fastest and probably the only viable method to kill him, it also leaves a bad taste in the mouth of players should they fail and discourages anyone to take part in the event again.
So why not randomize it? I was in Lion’s Arch and Tequalt looms above head and drops risen spawns everywhere. He doesn’t have to land and fight us, but it suddenly becomes an event and upon killing the risen, we get the world boss chest. Alternatively, Tequalt roams the watery plains and perhaps lands in bloodtide coast. Players rally others to the spot and a fight ensues. Thus, in my opinion, we should get rid of the spawn timing of bosses and kill countdown timings because they are actually detrimental in the long run.
Of course i do understand that from a programming standpoint, it might be hard to make tequaltl AI roam the lands etc but hopefully these ideas can serve as a stepping stone to other greater ideas.
