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[Column] Guild Wars 2: If At First You Unsucceed - The Evolution of Guild Wars 2's Zones
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
I've certainly not hidden the fact that I love the new age zone design for Guild Wars 2. It looks as if what we've seen in Dry Top and the Silverwastes will continue in Heart of Thorns, and I couldn't be happier. Well, I could be happier, strictly speaking, but it's not ArenaNet's fault that I haven't won the lottery yet (#&*@$ real-life RNG...).
Read more of Jason Winter's Guild Wars 2: If At First You Unsucceed - The Evolution of Guild Wars 2's Zones.
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Comments
My only major gripe on some of these events, in particular Vinewrath, is the general attitude of many players in the map.
Events like the Marionette and Vinewrath have a large potential for failure, which is a good thing. The problem is that players don't really face any failure scenarios until the end game, since the events in all of the zones are more or less designed for success. Very rarely does anyone actually fail an event in PvE in the "leveling" zones.
So now when we have the Vinewrath event pop and the first lane fails to kill the champion, you'll see incessant whining and comments like "Just WP another fail map". Which is extremely detrimental to the rest of the group that is there. I've seen groups who probably could have succeeded snatch defeat from the jaws of victory due to how poor the community can be during these events.
Couple of things need to happen. First, some of these events need to scale a touch better for smaller groups. Everyone gets unlucky while playing map roulette at times, but it would be nice if these large events could still have success even with only 4-5 people per lane. Secondly, ANet needs to keep this higher level of difficulty for their zone events as well. If players face probable failure more often, it should increase the level of play...or at least, get people more active than just standing there and dumping aoe every now and again to get gold on an event.
Honestly I think the pacing is all that's really necessary.
There is a bit of a difficulty spike between lvls ~20-60ish and lvl 80. Players simply aren't driven enough to try and be better. And that's something I don't should be catered to any more than on a basic (low) level.
The thing about things like Vinewrath is that they've been out for a while now. Most people know how to do the encounters, and if you yourself don't there are still a lot of people happy to explain it to you. The problem is that a lot of newer players don't do this. They expect to just autopilot up to a big event boss and win. And when they don't, drama ensues.
While I have seen some maps succeed that should've failed, that's hardly the norm. In fact there is usually a good indication of whether a map will succeed simply based on the prep event. Things like communication in map (how may people at each lane? Do we have enough reflects in mid?), having a commander, etc. all help.
Absent of those I tend to just roam to the various lanes and get a feel for what we're working w/. And I'm not ashamed to say that I have bailed on some maps, because (for me) it's not worth dealing with the frustration involved in trying to force a large group of uncoordinated, unexperienced, and possible unskilled players to do something you can do in your sleep. And, similar to dungeons / bosses in most games, that's why people rage. After a certain amount of time it becomes expected that most people will know what they are doing for the most part. When that stopped being true, it gets pretty frustrating.
Oh that attitude is reflective of the community of the game, no matter where they are.
Losing by 50pts on an sPvP map? "GG, game over."
Doors busted down on a tower in WvW? "WP, it's lost."
Got the swamp Fractal? "Leave and reset."
Fighting an uphill battle seems to be an impossible task for the community. And fighting an uphill battle -contrary to the term being coined for impossible feats- is not an impossible feat. It's a challenge to overcome.
Not all the community is like what I perceived above, as I have had the joys of a rare experiences of 'The Alamo' scenarios. 10 players holding out a tower against roughly 30 thanks to a few siege, endurance, and just general willpower to succeed. There have been sPvP matches were the turn around was astounding with the finishing score within single digit points. It is just that those things are such a rarity to a point of being sickening when looking at the overall bigger picture of the community at large.
I didn't like Dry Top for several reasons, and Silverwastes is much better. There's actually more organization required in these zones though, than the previous launch zones and southsun.
The events weave together in Silverwastes, allowing access to the final boss, Vinewrath. Dry Top allows access to chest farming though, which made it less appealing to me. There were also some champions in Dry Top too, during the sandstorm, but chest farming was considered the end game.
Southsun is still active also, because people farm for karka shells and mini pets off the Queen, which sells for a lot of gold. I wish they would've continued with the Southsun approach, but instead they gave us Living Story.
Not a fan of having my entertainment/success being determined by a collection of random strangers.
I'm not going to defend the toxic player's attitude but try to look at it from their perspective. They're good players putting in maximum effort, they arrive early, they organize as best they can, they try to teach but it doesn't help. They fail....everyone fails....Because a small group of players in south lane want to put in no effort and just afk collect loot bags.
I've done so many VAs where a player walks in, double downs on Inc and just lays there spamming 'REZ ME NOOBS' over and over again. It's morally crushing for those of trying to succeed and yes, it does bother me that he and I get the same reward in the end.
WvWvW design while it looked good on paper its awful if your a lower tier server where you came back after a hyatus and there are little people playing it....
in fact it just ruins the experience....they should do away with tier 8 and shove those tiers up to the next 3 servers above and then those places can have better numbers OR give the bottom 3 servers chance to move...charging me 1800 gems to move is not only an insult but just short of me remembering why i left this game.
oh and when you have diff times when your on that are not related to others it gets hard to coordinate at least some friends and then you have issues of instancing to be with friends....
it also negates guilds ina big way as the WvWvW is now just everyone paying to get to the higher numbers and better tier WvWvW servers.....
i am not going to pay 1800 gems for that....
I agree with you there, the difficulty nerf in the last beta weekend made this happen. Events did fail in plenty before that but then the difficulty of everything got so easy that even massive bosses never wins against the playes with a few exceptions.
I never even once seen the claw event fail or even being close to mention one world boss that should be hard. In fact is the few events that often fails stuff like escorting the dolly with dynamite in SF since there usually is few players there and the dolly actually blows up and can't be revived.
All this is easy to fix in the new expansion though, just make the difficulty closer to what it really should have been in the game the entire time.Let us work for the epees, loot and mastery points. This is a top level only expansion so it wont turn off any noobs and the game really need some harder open world zones.
Don't worry, a single person couldn't be responsible for an event fail. It just makes it harder when a group of people scale up the event when they remain dead (not to be confused with downed state), instead of running back. That's the major gripe most players have.
DarkPony expressed it best with GW2 Dynamic Event paradigm shift?
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
I'd pay more attention to how they plan on fixing the inherent problems when they release HoT what you're witnessing from most of us are 3 years of promises we've been told several times were coming before they announced HoT and some of us are tired of waiting frankly.
If you're having fun don't let us stop you some people do continue to enjoy it. I stopped playing because of the lack of rewards for those of us who happen to have unlucky accounts that seem to be in eternal DR downstate as well as the design flaws with condition/support builds but it looks like they are paying attention to those major issues from their latest posts so I'd continue playing honestly giving them a chance to pull this game around if you're new.
Don't let our dissatisfaction of having to wait so long interfere with your newness to the experience.
"ArenaNet could completely re-do Guild Wars 2, the big event chains would be completely revamped to include more of the zones and feel a bit more epic than short-term encounters."
They had this in beginner zones at launch. With an end result of people killing out of sequence and anet scrapping the whole thing in favor of vets that are killed in seconds!
I liked Anet's approach to keeping players in the same map. They obviously designed SIlverwastes to be a farm-heavy zone, and upon successful completion of the Vinewraith you get a magic find bonus. They could take this one step further by applying an incremental magic find bonus percent to those who complete more events on the same map. Maybe even throw in a few extra rares and T6 mats. The logic being: the longer you stay here and the more you complete the better your loot will be.
The reason finicky players jump ship from a map in trouble is due to the fact there's no consequence. Show them a really big carrot and threaten to take it away if they leave...see how many stay put and try.
The main difference is that in the random MMORPG the bandits are standing still or wandering around aimlessly while in GW2 they are going around burning things and kidnapping people.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Yes, and then after you kill all of them and burn their stuff, 2 minutes later they all respawn and start said kidnapping/burning all over again. Remind us again how this is somehow "different"???
"Why would I want to loose a religion upon my people? Religions wreck from within - Empires and individuals alike! It's all the same." - God Emperor of Dune
First, when it is happening it actually makes sense.
You are killing the bandits because they are really doing stuff and there is no "sure you killed the bandits but you hadn't the quest yet".
Second, generally when you finish a quest in a random mmorpg, you can't redo that quest (repeatable quests aside).
Of course in that random mmo the bandits never were a threat and that is why you pass them by again and don't kill them.
So I prefer to have that extra immersion when I'm actually doing the dynamic event even if it all happens again 2 minutes later than never have the immersion to start with.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
There is a notable difference in how repeatable dynamic events are chained together compared to static and usually standalone quests in other MMOs.
A basic example as follows:
Event A: Escort/gather supplies to help nearby settlers defend their property.
Event B: Repel attackers and defend the settlement.
(if you succeed in A-B)
Event C: Help rebuild/clear damaged property.
Event
After a while an NPC starts to talk about stuff and sometimes he or she heads to somewhere else triggering another event.
(if you failed
Event E: The settlement is invaded. You have to clear the area, destroy the invaders' weapons and then resurrect friendly NPCs.
In GW2 you see players jumping into all the dynamic events that are triggered around them while in traditional MMOs players tend to walk by many of the standalone quests so GW2's system seems to be better the way it's making large group of players participate in everything they notice happening around them. Of course events are usually triggered by many and not a single player so one can just stand in a single spot to repeat an event while the others do the rest. There is diminishing return in loot though so it's not advised to repeat a single event in the chain for too long. Some events espacially boss event chains can only be triggered within a given time frame while most of the event chains can be circulated as endless farming possibilities if players wish to use them that way.
Vinewrath is easy as peasy unless the people you play with are not very good.
You know to be honest, i've heard a lot of people talk a LOT of trash about GW2, HOWEVER most every game site and game review gives this game GREAT reviews.. I've been actually playing it lately and I really enjoy it.
I heard it lacked a lot in endgame and PvP balance, however i've heard they've corrected a LOT of it.. PLUS, it's the 2nd (arguably?) most popular MMORPG behind WoW. If not, it is easily top 5, and for a game that came out in 2012 with NO expansion shows that it still has the entertainment to hold onto the playerbase.
I've played just every major MMORPG. (WoW, FFXIV, Rift, Tera, Aion for example) and so far i'm really digging GW2.
I can see what the person is trying to convey here, but using one of the low-level dynamic chain events to visually demonstrate his/her point, seems to me like this person has not experienced Guild Wars 2 past the level 7 mark; and it's a bit insulting.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
Well at least everyone gets to complete it, not like any other MMO where they are camping spawnpoiints with 10 players looking foul at each other stealing kills thus prolonging their quests while they could also just form a group and do it like that.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"