GW2 running into the same issues that Rift and WAR had

Z3R01

 

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. 

 

 

lkc673

user generating content would probably be the key, see what EQNext has to offer. Things usually sound good in paper but when implemented it doesnt work out. Theres just too many mmos out there, and more coming out this year. Especially sandbox mmos.

Latronus

Well, they could do something along the lines of reducing mob HPs and damage output so that newer players won't have to skip things, but in my opinion that defeats the original design.  Other games have scaled back zones so that alts or newbies can rush through the content to get to the top faster so they can partake of the goodness if you will.

ShakyMo

perhaps levels are the problem

Drakynn

Originally posted by lkc673
user generating content would probably be the key, see what EQNext has to offer. Things usually sound good in paper but when implemented it doesnt work out. Theres just too many mmos out there, and more coming out this year. Especially sandbox mmos.

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.

Nitth

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Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

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How long have i been saying that for now....

Lovely_Laly

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.

ShakyMo

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.

meddyck

Yeah the event system doesn't work well when it's you and 2 or 3 other people alone in a zone. Maybe they need to cluster PvE zones like Mythic did with DAOC when it created Ywain. Then you would have players from different servers in the same zone instance and there would be plenty of people to do events like they were intended.

Z3R01

Originally posted by Torvaldr

The only event content I pass by when I'm alone is that I don't want to do or for some champion bosses because it's not worth the effort to take down most champs alone.  Just last night some random dude mentioned in local chat a boss was up so I headed there and we ended him ourselves.

Just because you can't do everything solo doesn't mean that nothing can be done in the zone.  Your OP sounds like gross exaggeration to me.

WAR never had the population GW2 has and had many other severe design flaws most of which centered around pvp, not pve levelling.  Rift was also criticized for their DEs but rifts (of all types),  invasions, and zone events (all of which make up their DE system, not just rifts) are extremely popular.  Rifts population problems don't really center around their DEs.  What percentage of people that have left the game or plan on cancelling their sub do so because rifts weren't engaging enough or they couldn't find enough people to complete them?

You need to come up with better reasoning and support for that claim.

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.

MMOExposed

This is the issue of having levels, you can have a THEMEPARK MMO without levels. Just most developers don't try it.

MMOExposed

Originally posted by Torvaldr

Originally posted by Nitth

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Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

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How long have i been saying that for now....

So how do you plan on providing a tangible and measurable sense of progression.  We've already had the horizontal progression discussion and there are a decent number of people who want that in some form.  Taking away levels removes that.

In TSW I can see what % of the wheel I have completed and my level for each aspect of the wheel.  I'm gated on where I can go and adventure and what equipment I can use.  So a leveless system that uses skill points is not really any different than character levels.  They're just displaying the "level" and progress in a different place.

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...

Quirhid

Originally posted by MMOExposed

 

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...

What?

Lurv

I still prefer Rift over GW2. GW2 bored me within' the first 5-6 hours of play time. Everything just feels so small in GW2. But of course I have't played as much as others but honestly if a game doesn't capture me within' the first 10 levels, most likely I'll dump it and move on.

Jemcrystal

Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

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.

snapfusion

Originally posted by Lovely_Laly

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.

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.

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Bladestrom

I'm actually playing both rift and gw2 and enjoying both a lot. Gw2 is missing something the keeps you hooked for months on end, but it is great fun when you dip in and out. I have a lot of faith in Anet that they will gradually evolve the game just as they did for gw1. IMO all gw2 needs is a big expansion of skIlls do people can evolve through multiple builds. Rift is great, it's like a matured version of wow tbc, firmly in the progression/meters/instance but a lot better, animation needs some love though.

Quizzical

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.

QSatu

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.

Zorgo

Originally posted by Quizzical

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.

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.

evilastro

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.

KhinRunite

[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.

KingJiggly

I like npcs best. One player defeating say tequatl isnt cool lol

Scalpless

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.

Torgrim

Seems someone forgot that failing an event also gives xp,karma and silver not as much as complete it but still you are rewarded.