The game’s problems will shift over the next few months. Some things will be fixed with further development, like the trading post. The grouping issues that so annoyed me seem better, at least as I type this. What more interests me are the problems caused simply by the size of the Day One population lump: some will go away and some will transition into related endgame problems.
For example, take the human-centaur war. For the next month, the centaurs are screwed. They are just going to be completely and utterly oppressed with a few little wins and a small chance for a tiny bit of glory at server reset if states are not saved. Beetletun is utterly safe. There are too many players in that level range for the good guys not to win that war. But if you are at the front of the leveling wave, you can see areas where the players are not dominating the meta-events, and that will become more spread over time as the population lump moves.
The next question is how much better it will work out at level 80. I have yet to see the highest level zones. We have a problem if they replicate the same situation when we get a lump of level 80 players, although without the leveling incentive, you might have fewer people just hanging around those zones. With increasing levels, the meta-events seem to be getting slightly more complex, so there will be multiple fronts and a larger area covered. Players learn as a zerg, and they still join into a massive wave for a frontal assault, but you will see multiple events going at once as part of the meta-event. This could work. There will also be so many events available that the players will likely be losing some because they are happening unseen. You see this on a small scale all the time: you come upon an event where the bad guys are 80% of the way there; it fails within a few minutes; you move to the next step, fixing whatever just went wrong. I have yet to see that “fix it” step fail in a way that leads to an even worse state, but I have seen the grawl complete human sacrifices and the bandits successfully poison the water supply.
Place your claims now: which current problems are transitory because of development, transitory because of population, or permanent because the same design will fail at level 80? This is your chance to lock in “I told you so.” Please include a specific “I was right” condition, including a “the bet’s off if the devs…” Beware of untrue Scotsmen.
: Zubon
http://goo.gl/KsW9L
My prediction is the population levels will smooth out amongst the zones. This will allow for my tightly focused groups to take on the dynamic content. It will be quite refreshing to enter a zone where the player isn’t the winner and has been overrun by centaurs. I also predict there will continue to be high activity in the earlier zones as many people are rolling other classes to try for many months to come.
During this time the live team will continue to add and change content in the game. Due to the modular method of adding events this shouldn’t be a difficult task for the live time. I have seen player fail states in the 55-65 zones and it is quite impressive.
Here’s what I’ve seen in Orr (I haven’t done much in the 70-80 area in the Shiverpeaks). The major event chains (temples of the gods, getting to Arah) need to have enough people that know how they work, or they’ll fail. (Grenth might be the best example of this.) But as more people learn enough (or the wiki gets filled out), this won’t be an issue. It would not surprise me if we get to the point where you don’t get much of a chance to do Arah unless you were on shortly after a server reset.
That might be okay, though; at least, it’s probably better than needing to do 30+ minutes of an event chain (which is restarted completely if it fails after the first couple) that requires lots of people (so you might fail once or twice as the group gets big enough and then learns how to do it, and failing can take longer because you’re only failing when you hit the end of a 10, 15, 20 minute timer) just to get to the last dungeon.
The temples of the gods are a little different, because they’re spread out over three zones. You might still regularly have too few people in a zone when one there is being lost, which could give more people the chance to do the events. (I don’t actually know how losing them works; I’ve never seen the events for it.)
There is at least one section of the level 80 area where there’s basically always one event going, so if you just want to farm for items or karma or something, you won’t run out of max-level events.
But also, there isn’t a huge reason to hang out in these areas in the first place. If you want to farm, maybe, yeah. (Maybe not? I haven’t worried too much about farming, and I don’t know if there are better spots.) But if you want to get 100% map completion, or want to farm a dungeon for your legendary, or want to level up another crafting discipline (and don’t want to just buy all the fine materials), you want to be somewhere else.
I do worry about map chat getting too spammy, though. Right now, it’s great for knowing where an event is going on, so you can get there fast. As the areas start filling up with people, though, I imagine the signal to noise ratio will get lower, which will make more people turn map chat off, which will be a shame.
And of course, when you’ve done everything–when you’ve gotten 100% map completion, and you have all the karma skins you want, and you have your cultural armor, and you have your full set of legendaries (ouch, that’s a lot of skill points!), and you’re bored of spvp and wvw–then you do need Anet to create more content. But that’s an entirely separate issue, and I don’t think it’s one unique to GW and GW2, and anyway we knew it was coming from the way GW’s endgame played out. And I’m at least hopeful that if I ever get to that point with pve, spvp and wvw will keep me going for a long time. It was hard for me to even decide whether to start by focusing on pve or spvp when I first got the game.
Whoa that got long, sorry.
Well apparently the Centaurs are fighting back with full force.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/zfh1e/guild_wars_2_status_wednesday_september_5/
The zone pushing to horrible states is not a bug it is a feature.
What better place to be with a PVE-centered group than a dystopian place that you CAN push to the glorious happy-state all by yourself?
With the possibility of reducing your group to content-appropriate lvl (and fitting loot on top) I envision a future where you can pick your favorite world-event and push it.
I predict a game, where specific all-time favorite meta-events are regularly pushed by PVE Guilds. The groups will be mixed with twinks and highlvl Characters.
The dev-team will not only balance and improve highlvl zone content but also all other popular low and mid-tear zone events in a holistic approach to even out the needs of the beginners and the experienced veteran PVEers.
This will be truly difficult for them.
Bonus prediction: RP-PVE-Guilds will find a lot of fun in pushing specific events in heroic/hilarious fashion. Some will post their adventures on youtube.
Unless they up the limit or something similar, once the masses hit 80 and focus on WvW, the queues will make the 2004 WoW wait seem instant on servers that care about WvW.
From what I’ve seen at the highest levels I’ve reached so far (50-60 maps) the events seem to be tuned fine for individuals, small groups. Of course, I absolutely love it when friendly towns are taken over and it’s up to me and another passer-by or two to take them back. That’s close to my favorite adventure gameplay in MMOs. If I end up playing in highly hostile zones as the less-than effective guerrilla resistance it will suit me down to the ground.
I wonder if Anet couldnt buff or nerf DEs based on repeated successes or failures. That way if players keep beating an event, it keeps getting harder until eventually it will be unbeatable.