Is guild wars 2 spread too thin?

One thing I really like about gw2 is there is a lot of level 80 content to see from lots of different updates. I saw some posts asking a question I didn’t think Of which is, with the rate with are going with new zones, are players spread to thin between all them to enjoy them? I’m not advocating for zones to be made obsolete but do you think this true? Or do you think this is good the way things are?

I can't remember the last time I couldn't complete something because there weren't enough people around. Admittedly sometimes it involves using the LFG tool to get a group together and so it can take some planning in advance, but that's been the case since day1 (and was worse back then because there was no LFG tool).

I understand the concern and I think it's definitely something Anet need to be aware of as more maps are created, but I don't feel like it's a problem yet. Recently I've been spending a lot of time on POF and Season 3/early Season 4 maps and even there it's fairly common to see commanders and mentors leading squads through various things (sometimes 2 on the same map) and there always seems to be people around doing different events and achievements.

In my opinion they did a good thing with implementing Aurora, there were still many people on the old maps working on it

@"Danikat.8537" said:I can't remember the last time I couldn't complete something because there weren't enough people around. Admittedly sometimes it involves using the LFG tool to get a group together and so it can take some planning in advance, but that's been the case since day1 (and was worse back then because there was no LFG tool).

I understand the concern and I think it's definitely something Anet need to be aware of as more maps are created, but I don't feel like it's a problem yet. Recently I've been spending a lot of time on POF and Season 3/early Season 4 maps and even there it's fairly common to see commanders and mentors leading squads through various things (sometimes 2 on the same map) and there always seems to be people around doing different events and achievements.

Agreed. I've gone back & done old collections without notable trouble by asking for help in /map or /lfg.

Plus, I think GW2's system is better than some of the alternatives. For a lot of games, after an expansion, the only "relevant" content is the new stuff. Without downscaling and targeted rewards, there's no benefit to remaining one moment too long. So players still get concentrated in the new areas, but the old areas become obsolete.

I think it's a valid concern in a theoretical sense; I also think that in practice, it need not be an issue.

Surprisingly no, but the game does have a healthy playerbase, with lots of alts running around and zones are varied enough to keep people in different areas. It will become an issue and I do think Anet should be more proactive with tweaking and changing some older stuff (which they seem stubbornly against doing), but overall I think the spread isn't hurting the game.

The game has a system for this: it's called dailies. Even if the playerbase can be spread thin at times, the dailies focus them to certain areas, zones or events.

I think a thread like this pops up about once every couple of days. It's never been an issue and as long as the playerbase is healthy, there's no reason to believe it ever will be. I can barely even find an HoT map that doesn't have an HP train running through it or commanders organizing the meta these days and people have been predicting the imminent death of those maps pretty much since the beginning!

See you in the next thread on the subject two days from now where I'll say the same thing!

Lower level zones are always occupied with players since level 80's scale down to map level and for me the open world bosses, certain events and achievements pull me back. As well as helping friends :)

Speaking from experience in other games, there does come a point where you need to consider the size of the world vs. the number of players. And based on what I've seen recently, GW2 might be getting to that point. Too many maps, and the player population becomes too spread out and diluted. In GW2, some of that can be solved by changing the min/max population of map instances and minimizing the number of map instances allowed to be open. But if you keep adding maps without adding players, then yeah, eventually it will be an issue, if it's not already.

When alting I'm usually pleasantly surprised by how well almost all the zones are populated, with some obvious exceptions like Southsun Cove* and (maybe) Draconis Mons. Low level zone populations are certainly much better than non-capped WoW zones have been since forever.

*And at least SC gets some play when cycled into the daily... like today :-)

It used to be far worse, before the megaservers were implemented. Unless you played on specific servers or went to the cities you could go days without meeting a player.

I think the first signs are starting to show. Generally it's not a real problem yet but there are some meta's that do get problematic and there are some zones that are lightly populated and I do have to come back for certain things because there is nobody there or not enough rather. PoF maps also are a bit light often times. However, I do feel that the more zones we will be getting, especially when there's talk about a new expansion, the bigger this issue will get. So I do think it's the right time to think about this going forward, because a next expansion with many new zones might be the time to do something about this in some way.

Last night I attempted Palawadan at an insanely late time (around 03h00). There were just a couple of players waiting near the door... I decided to tag up and give it a try: I made a lfg post for it, and called in map chat for help.

By the time we beat the door guardians the squad had 10 members, we were in the end no more than 15. We still got to the last boss and took him down to 50% before the time ran out, but that's probably because we took our sweet time killing every champion on the way even after the related events were done (PS: it was much more fun this way than having a zerg of 50).

The point of this story is that, thanks to event scaling and megaserver technology, there's no need to worry about the population running too thin unless there's not enough players to have five on each map (as the majority of group events are designed with five participants in mind). As we currently have nearly 50 maps, you'd be hinting at an active population that's 250 or so (assuming even distribution). Well, I think we are quite far from getting to that point, as just looking at the number of views each forum thread from ANet gets, it seems we have easily thousands of players who check the forums (and that's what? Maybe 10% of the actual active population?).

The only content which I've been unable to do is because it's in a not very attractive map (eg: core Tyria maps for doing a bandit bounty) at a really late time, or because I got tossed in an empty instance. :P