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GW2 running into the same issues that Rift and WAR had
Z3R01
Member UncommonPosts: 2,426
Dynamic events, Rifts, zone invasions, Public Quests... all fail once the games population out levels an area or the games population dwindles.
I've seen this happen with three games now. First with WAR public quests. They were great at first and then after a month or two you were left soloing them or skipping them entirely.
Then Rift came along with its Rift events and even with population scaling they failed once populations dropped.
Now here I am... in a mid tier zone in GW2 and i can't kill a orange event/mob because no one is around. I find myself avoiding content as I level.
Sure everyone loves open world content. its great when a game first launches and everyone is leveling together. WAR, Rift and GW2 were all great the first month or two.
But in hindsight was it really a good decision to put these mechanics into the game? Now that GW2 is mostly top heavy, even with down scaling people are left skipping events or begging for help in map chat.
I'm sure at this point A-net is second guessing their decisions now. Same as Trion and Mythic did back then when the game worlds became ghost towns.
You would think after watching two companies fail with on the fly open world group content that A-net would have design GW2 to be adjusted later on when populations dipped.
They didn't and now anyone thats leveling gets to suffer...
So what do they do? What could they do that Mythic and Trion couldnt? You guys have any ideas? because right now im at the point of wishing Gw2 was a tad more traditional with its leveling content and didn't entirely focus everything on massive zone popluation.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
Comments
I agree whislt many of these upcoming sandbox and sandpark games sound great in theory I want to see how they pan out in practice.
I've always wanted to live in the Land of Theory because everything works there.
How long have i been saying that for now....
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
1. you don't need DE to lvl at GW2, you have tone quests, personal story and gathering/crafting for it.
2. chain events resuming with reward chest still very popular, shame are few of such.
3. Cursed Shore offers lot of events as end game content. =XD You can farm all time there.
4. If not, try WvW, they have events too.
try before buy, even if it's a game to avoid bad surprises.
Worst surprises for me: Aion, GW2
or may be not levels themselves, but this channeled world
you play this map at this level, you play this next map when youre bigger and then this map when bigger still.
one of the things i like about skyrim is - it doesnt have that kind of world, youve got dead easy wolves for new players and big feck off giants for high level players in adjoining areas.
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
I'm focusing on very specific mechanics within each game, not how the games failed over all.
Gw2 Dynamic events, Rifts Zone invasions/Rifts and WARs PQs all suffer from the same problem they require a large zone population.
As for why each games population reduced, I never brought up why as every game had its own issues. Just saying that every game sooner or later has a population issue in low to mid level zones andhaving mechanics that rely on zone population may not be the best thing for these types of games.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I came up with a theory and idea on a change to the progression system take note that most of the time spent in a level based MMO is at endgame. Not leveling content. Which lead to this original issue in the first place. Well instead of trying to remove progression like GW2 tried, but instead switch what is being progressed into something else of progression. Simple really. Just rarely if ever done...
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
What?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Getting too old for this $&17!
I'm still playing a game that's focus is leveling up skills rather than player level. And the population has not dropped. Nobody is leaving this game that has been out since March 27, 2008. Skills is where it is at.
Yes you can pretty much skip one of the most hyped features of the game, this wasnt a how do I level post give me some suggestions please. It was a post specifically questioning their implementation.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
It's not a problem of levels.
Rather, if you're going to design content around the assumption of a particular number of players participating in it, then you'd better have some awfully strong measures in place to ensure that you've always got that number of players participating.
One way to do this is making an event scale all the way down to a single player so that it's realistically soloable if there's only one player there. Another is making the number of active instances scale with the number of players doing the content, so that there is always about the right number doing your content unless your playerbase is too small to even fill a single server. A third approach is creating NPCs to help you out if there aren't enough real players there. There are probably others.
But if all you do is to assume that players will magically distribute themselves the way you want for no real reason in particular, then your game will quickly end up broken.
You can easily solo like 90% of DEs in GW2.
Besides that ANet apparently is working on some systems to make people revisit older zones.
I agree.
Having mixed level content within a particular zone/area in conjunction with a mentoring system which provided real and tangible benefits to the high level player could help too. The mentoring system would have to create true incentive to mentor down.
GW2 events scale to the number of participants, with only the very final events in a chain requiring a group (although these are still possible to solo by high level characters, my Mesmer can solo pretty much any Champion under level 70).
It isnt even close to being the same as Rift or WAR, which required large numbers for public quests.
If anything, the events are now far more enjoyable that you only have a handful of players completing them. They actually pose a challenge rather than mindlessly tagging mobs in a zerg.
[Group Events] are one of the few remnants of "forced grouping" in this game as far as levelling up is concerned. Yes, it sucks that you can't solo Group Events, and God knows how many of these I had to skip because there's no one else in my immediate area. I can either do an LFG for this Group Event, which is what I do sometimes, or I could just skip it, since there's a lot more soloable events lying around. I wish ANet will never make these Group Events soloable.
It's not an issue as it is not intrusive to anything other than your desire to do that particular event.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
Normal events scale down to a single player. If you can't solo them, it's a L2P issue. Group events usually require a group, although I have soloed a few champions. I don't know the actual number, but I'd say less than 10% of events are group events.
Get a friend, level up together and you'll be able to play through most group events. Few of them require more than two players. GW2 is a solo-friendly game, but grouping is always better and faster.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.