PvE: how to increase map relevance?

Due to this game's design, characters don't have to "outgrow" an area, like it would happen in traditional mmorpgs. However, players don't spend time in several older maps, and I don't mean just core Tyria maps like Queensdale, but even the more recent expansion and living story maps. In particular, you hear complains regularly in this forum that LS maps feel "throwaway", as they come out, players get the meta achievement, and never return again. To me this seems like wasting the game's potential, so I ask what suggestions does the community has to increase the replay value of maps?

LS maps have specific rewards to grind for, but once you have them (or don't want them), there's no reason to go back (or worse, they have an excruciating grind like Draconic Mons did and players burn out from the process) unless there's a way to make gold out of it (see Istan), but there's no way one can add such metas to every single upcoming map due to various reasons.

Thus, how could ANet get players to play in a more diverse number of maps?

Your answer would be in the form of HoT map wide Metas. Toss an infusion into the rng of the meta, instant population boom.You do not want to lock people in that map 24/7 like silverwastes if your aim is to keep a bunch of different maps populated so map-wide meta event spaced out to occur with a space of a couple of hours in between itself is probably ideal. But once again, nothing draws in the crowds like rewards, so appropriately adjusting investment of time vs loot is key. (Thinks of Serpent's Ire and why almost nobody does it regularly)Also getting rid of repeatable yellow hearts will make people feel less disdain for the map. (Or at least for myself)

Outside of map wide metas, the only aim that would keep people in maps would be achievement hunting because this game is not centered around exp gain from mindlessly grinding mobs or quests, so realistically it's either go the reward route or just await the eventual death of the map.

There is nothing they can really do as this is a reality in all mmo's. Unless there is an equal way to make money in all the maps then maybe that can change. Lets be honest that isnt going to happen nor should it. The way it is now is fine. And i never seen a completely dead map where i was the only one there. Compared to WoW our old maps are thriving and theirs is a damn wasteland of old content that isnt really useful anymore.

Overall, I think Anet is doing a good job keeping maps relevant. There are things I think they can improve on, though.

I think beginner areas are pretty well populated. However, mid level maps (mostly Ascalon) are very dead. I think I've done map completions in mid level Ascalon areas without seeing other players. If Anet ever does a revamp of older maps (kind of like WoW's Cataclysm, but not as drastic), I'd like to see Anet reduce the total number of low level zones and turn some of the low level zones into higher level zones for the revamp expansion. Another option is to simply reduce the total number of hearts in each core Tyrian maps and add some metas with good rewards. I think a lot of players who do world completion would appreciate a reduction in total number of hearts.

HoT and a lot of LWS3 maps are still very populated. The only thing I recommend is make nearly all HoT's outpost/daytime event chains soloable. Majority of players only come for meta so some outpost event chains can be hard to complete alone.

PoF aggro range is too long. I stay away from PoF maps except when I absolutely have to. And when I have to do PoF stuff, I just quickly do what I need to do then get out ASAP. It's very disruptive having enemies so far away (that I can't even see on my screen) aggro, then when I kill them, more enemies aggro just before I can mount. I then kill those and before I can mount, yet MORE enemies aggro. SO ANNOYING! I'm an open world player, but exploring in PoF is a real test of patience and tolerance.

It would also be nice if there are other active sources for Elegy Mosaics. I get bored doing nothing but fight, fight, fight in a spam-of-blinding-camera-flashes-bounty train.

I never attempted Serpent's Ire meta, but from what I read, it sounds like it can be toned down a bit and the rewards upped a bit. Either way, until PoF aggro range is reduced, I personally have no interest in anything PoF other than bounty/farming trains.

Making rewards equivalent for the time invested across metas would be the ideal. However, it is very difficult to balance all of them. There is also the problem that as more maps are added, the population spreads out more and more. The best way to make sure that all the maps are still played a couple of years from now would be to incorporate GW1 style weekly bonuses and daily Zaishen quests. They could tailor them as to encourage playing specific maps more on specific weeks or days, for extra rewards.

For one thing, the living world season maps also need to be possibilities in the daily event competer goals. Whatever map has that each day is always very populated, so those maps would get a flood of attention every now and then at least

@"Ganathar.4956" said:Making rewards equivalent for the time invested across metas would be the ideal. However, it is very difficult to balance all of them. There is also the problem that as more maps are added, the population spreads out more and more. The best way to make sure that all the maps are still played a couple of years from now would be to incorporate GW1 style weekly bonuses and daily Zaishen quests. They could tailor them as to encourage playing specific maps more on specific weeks or days, for extra rewards.

But thats how they are doing Daily achievements, but still only getting mixed results. If the rate of new maps is too low, people tend to get bored. Too fast, and achievement based content becomes a long term problem after the fact. LS1 attempted to reuse and permanently change the maps, but creates an issue with scaling due to lvl80s just being so powerful due to access to more skills and traits, as well as the massive compounded power from Build synergy. The Mordrem invasion of the lvl 15 zones were almost a disaster, since the the Mordrem were not made with profiles that scale down correctly. Lvl 80s were struggling to fight them, while actual lvl 15-20s wandering the area would be destroyed due to the power disparity of the mobs. While one could argue this framed the Mordrem as a real threat, low levels were not given intuitive options to participate at their combat level.

This whole problem of population movement started because of the reward system, and thus can't be "solved" through the reward system itself. This is why most LS maps are only relevant for a couple of weeks (exclusive rewards), while Istan deviated from this because of its lucrative gold (universal) reward output. And before that it was Bounty Trains to get mosaics, and eventually fell back on Daily HOT meta farms for Amalgamated Gems. And before that Silverwastes for the chest runs..... which makes it all the more ironic that Istan's gold output is accomplished through Silverwaste's MF bonuses. Everything we do is far too focused on rewards, so its not surprising that we focus heavily on maximizing those efficiencies. Its a sad truth of MMOs, but was something GW2 had the potential to avoid..... until we just ran out of things to do.

Adding these to a world-boss train, or something that works in a similar way (doesn't necessarily have to be worldbosses) might help.

I enjoy having a huge world to explore, but I have to admit that if I wanted to go back for any of the group content, it wouldn't be much fun now.

What if GMs and devs had the capabilities of just doing crazy stuff for the fun of it? Like invading a quiet map with saurians and raptors or summoning a dragon boss in a starting zone or turning off gravity in an odd place? It wouldn't be announced or planned and would require players spreading the word for more players to join in. Not an every day thing, just a community fun thing.

...or is this thread about rewards?

Something to keep in mind is that there is an inevitable critical mass. Even if you could make everything equally relevant, that would just mean that everyone is spread too thinly to accomplish anything. Having more reliable scaling is probably the best future-proofing. You need a failsafe so that, if something happens to not be populated, it doesn't become impossible, because there's no real way to guarantee that it will always be populated. Population strain will come some day no matter what, whether because there's too much content to support a playerbase of any size or because the game is simply aging. Putting together a group manually is often a solution, but it's not particularly reliable.

Otherwise, I like the current idea of "pick a reward, go to the map/fulfill the collection that grants it". It's part of the horizontal progression resolves so much of the issues I have with other MMOs these days. I don't have to feel like I'm falling behind or don't have access to things, because everything's equally available. And if something isn't my style, I don't have to feel compelled to do it just because it's necessary for something later. I actually don't play Guild Wars 2 that much, but it works for me and for Arena.net because it means I'm never stressed out about it so I'm always willing to get into what's new.

I don't want to feel compelled to finish the things I don't really want to, but it would be nice to feel comfortable that things will still be possible even when they're not the focus at the moment.

@"Leo G.4501" said:What if GMs and devs had the capabilities of just doing crazy stuff for the fun of it? Like invading a quiet map with saurians and raptors or summoning a dragon boss in a starting zone or turning off gravity in an odd place? It wouldn't be announced or planned and would require players spreading the word for more players to join in. Not an every day thing, just a community fun thing.

...or is this thread about rewards?

Modern MMO audiences won't stand for that anymore. Casual heavy populations don't like any form of disruption... not even the fun kind. Right now there are people (thankfully few) that are complaining about the new Map taking population away from their farm routes.

Plus if you look at the postmortem complaints over LS1 not giving everyone (including late comers to the game) a chance to experience it at their leisure, this will just turn into another argument about "wasted Dev resources" and/or "unfairness" depending on what that person wants. And I'm not even going to some of the social engineering opportunities that can pop up from this (even the most on point GMs can get tricked).

As for the threads being about rewards...... theres only 2 possible things at the root of every threads. "My class should beat up your class", and "Rewards should be easier and have more of them".

If they want to increase PvE map relevance they would first need to figure out what brings people to maps.

There's a few general things that i'm sure they know in that being rarity of rewards, income(gp/h). What i've personally noticed is that while those are nice the reward types are often things that don't motivate people either due to being excessively rare or things they're not interested in. Now rarity aside because that's not likely to change, there is something that can and that is types of rewards. In my opinion there's not enough differences in rewards per map, it's generally map currency, salvage fodder and 1 unique item or Aura. Given the vast amount of "things" in the game you could start varrying rewards by adding things like gizmo's, mini-pets, toys, tonics(permanant), etc... to the potential loot of these meta's and make them thematic.

Very simple:1~ Add a worldboss (not a meta) (tequalt type) with the same amount of rewards. (Note: not needed to be a dragon)

2~ Add more quests, that way more heart vendors, and so more rewards and tonics tradable for karma. But stop with repeatable hearts.

3~ Add more side-achievments that take time or some with titles.

Honestly I'd go back a step further: How many maps does a game where we don't outgrow maps actually need?

The more maps you add, the less possible it becomes to keep them all relevant. It's similar to how the slew of skills, traits, item stats and all the billions of combinations cause balance issues: there's just too much, you could cut 95%++ and lose nothing of relevance because all these combinations would be factually sub-par.

With maps, it's that the sheer volume means you cannot find a sensible reason for each map to be around. Even if each were needed for a farm material which can only be obtained there, you can't freely repeat this, plus it leads to plenty fan-ire as it is quite obvious how forced this is.

A smarter solution, IMO, would be:

• Use new maps as sparingly as possible. Adapt the story and progression to either remove zones for story/lore reasons as new get added or transform existing zones into what you need them to be, effectively being replaced by a new map which just shares a few similarities and the name.
• Given the reduced pool of maps, categorize them into "farm maps" (you'd only need a handful of endgame materials since you don't have so many maps), "dangerous maps" (hold big metas, don't enter alone, like old Orr - higher money pay-off in a group in certain farm spots however!), "money maps" (efficient farm solo, less total income than dangerous maps of course). Each of the latter two types can exist once per common currency as farm maps are for materials.
• Re-align maps to the new balance, effectively giving one optimal spot for each context and desire.

@starlinvf.1358 said:

@"Ganathar.4956" said:Making rewards equivalent for the time invested across metas would be the ideal. However, it is very difficult to balance all of them. There is also the problem that as more maps are added, the population spreads out more and more. The best way to make sure that all the maps are still played a couple of years from now would be to incorporate GW1 style weekly bonuses and daily Zaishen quests. They could tailor them as to encourage playing specific maps more on specific weeks or days, for extra rewards.

The dailies that we have now are a joke compared to the weekly bonuses and Zaishen dailies that GW1 had. They only give map currency for that specific map, and barely any at that. You only do these if you still need things tied to that map. Zaishen dailies had their own reward system with their own currency with which you could work towards exclusive items as a long term goal. They also had decent exp and gold rewards. However, these quests changed every day so that they encouraged you to visit different zones. Weekly bonuses were similar because the activities you had to do for the bonus also changed every week. Though admittedly, the weekly bonuses only made you get more of the same reward you were already getting.

@"Leo G.4501" said:What if GMs and devs had the capabilities of just doing crazy stuff for the fun of it? Like invading a quiet map with saurians and raptors or summoning a dragon boss in a starting zone or turning off gravity in an odd place? It wouldn't be announced or planned and would require players spreading the word for more players to join in. Not an every day thing, just a community fun thing.

...or is this thread about rewards?

I agree that would be fun, and I'd love to see that happen when I'm on the map, but I'm not convinced it would help with this problem. For it to work you're relying on the few people who are on that map recognising that these enemies are not normally there and that it's something unusual enough to be worth mentioning so they tell their guild/s about it (since that's the only way to get the word out without leaving the map), and the people they tell being interested enough that they'll drop what they're already doing to come and see.

Imagine you're in Iron Marches and you suddenly see loads of Inquest golems, or pocket raptors or something else which obviously does not belong there. Would you tell everyone you know to come and see? Now imagine you're on the other end - you're in the middle of doing your dailies or completing a story instance or doing a meta-event or whatever you typically do in-game and someone in your guild says "Hey guys, there's loads of pocket raptors all over Iron Marches!" Would you stop what you were doing to go and see? Or say "ha, cool, that's so random!" and carry on?

As much as I genuinely think this would be a fun surprise I have to admit my reaction would vary, and lean more towards thinking that's interesting and carrying on with what I'm doing. Because what would happen if you did go? You see there are indeed pocket raptors all over Iron Marches. You kill some, maybe help someone else survive them, maybe spot the dev who spawned them somewhere on the map appearing to be afk because they're busy spawning raptors and answering whispers. Then you...go back to what you were doing. (Not to mention the inevitable player who just wanted to get in, get map completion done as fast as possible and get out again who is now absolutely furious that someone from Anet is deliberately trolling them by making it '10,000x harder' than it should be just because they're bored and want to show off their dev powers.)

Also, like the suggestion to add a world boss to each map I'm not convinced it really helps the people who are trying to play on under populated maps. You're on a 1/2 empty map and suddenly a massive influx of players comes to kill a world boss, or everything is covered in pocket raptors and people show up to fight them, look at them, whatever. Then what? Do they also stick around to do hearts and events with you? Or are they all going to leave again once they've done the 1 thing they came for?

I think the answer will vary, because people aren't all the same - I'm very easily distracted in games so there's a good chance that having come to a map to do 1 thing I'd hang around for some other stuff if I came across it. But I also know I'm in the minority there and most people are much more goal focused, they'll do what they need to do and then leave again.

Overall I think the best solution is for Anet to monitor populations and adjust event scaling so if you can't rely on more than 2 or 3 people in an area you don't need more than that to complete the content (but if possible allow for the other end, so events can scale up if a lot of people do show up for whatever reason). I certainly wouldn't object to something like the Zaishen dailies from GW1 or more new content in older maps like the ley line anomalies, bloodstone beasts, roller beetle racing etc. I think all of those can be a lot of fun, I'm just not convinced it would make any difference to people who are there doing map completion or levelling up.

I think the issue is much deeper than rewards. Map design, flow and details all play significant part. Most of the new maps look flashy, but once the flash wares off, you realize how bare bones these maps are. Adding well designed and rewarding meta(s) surely helps.

If we are getting one with every episode ofc the maps will feel like throwaway content.

We could compaire lw2 and lw3/4 for example: Silverwastes and drytop both have traffic years after their release.

Equal parts because they are rewarding but also because they are bussy with events and a map wide event like structure makimg playing in them better overtime.

We also didnt get more maps back then so they cpuld go back on these maps and simply expand them or add more content.

If they have to make and release a new map every 3 months that simply wont happen.

The more zones the game gets, the more this will be a problem. Aaand, we're still getting more zones.

@"TexZero.7910" said:Given the vast amount of "things" in

the game you could start varryingrewards by adding things like gizmo's,mini-pets, toys, tonics(permanant),etc... to the potential loot of thesemeta's and make them thematic.

Its not like they've been doing that since se3.

Thinking some more on this topic, I am reminded of the "Scarlet invasions" which took place in core Tyria maps during LS1, if something like that were to be implemented, and any map (including LS ones) could be picked, and if there were a daily reward for doing it (perhaps a mystic coin, like the daily leyline anomalies), well, that would be an incentive for players to revisit old maps on a daily basis.

Granted, such a meta event would be even better if it involved finishing the regular events the target map already has: imagine they are all boosted in scaling and includes additional adds so that even low level events aren't a snooze fest (as it happens currently with dailies).

Considering the current story involving the mists, such events could be involved easily with the game's lore.

Or just have the daily events include ALL maps, not just non-LS ones. :P

@Danikat.8537 said:

@"Leo G.4501" said:What if GMs and devs had the capabilities of just doing crazy stuff for the fun of it? Like invading a quiet map with saurians and raptors or summoning a dragon boss in a starting zone or turning off gravity in an odd place? It wouldn't be announced or planned and would require players spreading the word for more players to join in. Not an every day thing, just a community fun thing.

...or is this thread about rewards?

But that's the thing. It shouldn't be something that is seen as an obligation to participate in but it should be something people would likely go peek at and possibly chat about in map/guild chat.

It could also be a kind-of testing ground to just try stuff out like giving mobs that have generic attacks, skills that players have or enemies that only show up in some story instance and pop them around the map. Or just some generic lore they want to get people talking.

Then there's also the resource investment. Would such a thing shake the server causing everyone to flock to it? Probably not...but how many resources would it take? In my idea, it'd be like 3-4 GMs/devs for a couple hours. Any other idea in this thread likely would require a team of devs dozens of man-hours.

I'm just saying, people want blanket fixes to problems that have deep systematic issues that likely have no solution except acceptance. If so many maps aren't being used, then let the individuals who can make playgrounds out of them.

As much as I genuinely think this would be a fun surprise I have to admit my reaction would vary, and lean more towards thinking that's interesting and carrying on with what I'm doing. Because what would happen if you did go? You see there are indeed pocket raptors all over Iron Marches. You kill some, maybe help someone else survive them, maybe spot the dev who spawned them somewhere on the map appearing to be afk because they're busy spawning raptors and answering whispers. Then you...go back to what you were doing. (Not to mention the inevitable player who just wanted to get in, get map completion done as fast as possible and get out again who is now absolutely furious that someone from Anet is deliberately trolling them by making it '10,000x harder' than it should be just because they're bored and want to show off their dev powers.)

Very likely.

But how is this different from people playing instruments and showing off their fashionwars?

An invasion of pocket raptors in Iron Marches? Maybe I'd check it out. How about pocket raptors who all have the Burning Speed and Drake's Breath skill? Hmm, That seems rather insane. I'd think I'd HAVE to see that.

Rewards like the Dragonsblood weapons and the Requiem armor do a fine job. They're not going to be part of every release, but stuff like that is good. The Ember infusion for the new shatterer also kinda works, though it isn't the most popular event anymore.

@DoNotBelieveMe.3029 said:Your answer would be in the form of HoT map wide Metas. Toss an infusion into the rng of the meta, instant population boom.

I could make more money selling the Chalk Egg sac, but there was a time when I did the Auric Basin meta 10-15 times per week, while maybe doing the Tangled Depths one 1-2 a month.

Rewards are important, but equally important is the meta be fun to play, and be of reasonable length.

I think in the future when more and more maps will be released they should expand the content available to f2p players. Maybe even give them basic glider and maybe even a basic mount - raptor with no or a few masteries just to be able to traverse the world. This should bring some additional population.