why is story progress locked behind dead group content?

[OhOkYea.5431]

Been trying to solo the tower of nightmare but the progress bar remains at 0% because every event I find requires a full raid from what I can tell. I've only managed to find 1 person so far to join the instance but they gave up after we got repeatedly spammed with knockdowns and wiped over and over again and ran out of opportunities to revive each other. and anet's obsession with making run backs the worse part of every encounter is making me wonder why I would ever buy "story" content again.

I get that this may have been fine when it was released, but the content is borderline dead like all the old group content. at least dungeons are just part of the free game portion, but living world content is paid and I have to potentially just skip out on paid content because it wasn't adapted to a severe lack of players.

[Endaris.1452]

LS1 is not paid and available for everyone from all I know.

Ironically I haven't played LS1 one yet so I can't argue on the difficulty but every 2 hours there is a public instance, check here for the times. I also heard you don't actually have to finish the entire thing to advance story but that's for you to find out.

If you go in at prime time, you might have some more luck with finding a more populated instance.

[Linken.6345]

Use the lfg in the correct  section to find the 100s of players that like you need to do it but refuse to put up a 10 player group for it?

[MercurialKuroSludge.8974]

2 hours ago, Endaris.1452 said:

every 2 hours there is a public instance, check here for the times. I also heard you don't actually have to finish the entire thing to advance story but that's for you to find out.

ToN/BoLA are both active at ANY time of the day, and indeed you don't have to actually get to the top of the tower/finish the trio knights.
However, it is true that the vast majority of the playerbase cannot solo push ToN reliably.
I wud understand if ppl have issues with the Seed Pod/Central room or the Duo, those can go very wrong when soloing if mistakes are made.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

with powercreep you can solo all the groups of elite enemies by yourself. you'll need about four other players (a bit less, if all experienced) to do the big bosses, and that's it. i would hardly consider something doable by a single party to be unapproachable even with its age.

[Fueki.4753]

In the original content format of the Living World, the content was gone from the game after a period of time. This includes the Tower of Nightmare, which was not meant to stay in the game and thus didn't need to be adjusted for smaller groups or solo players doing it later.

Eventually, they put parts of it back into the game. And while there were swarms of players in the Tower of Nightmare early during the re-release, Arenanet didn't consider making a version for the players who want to do it after the swarming period ended.

There have been various threads about making it appropriately scale down to one player or making a single player version of it. But nothing in that regard ever happened.

[Teknomancer.4895]

13 hours ago, Endaris.1452 said:

LS1 is not paid and available for everyone from all I know.

It should be, anyway:

Quote

Each Living World episode is free for all players who logged into a character during its initial release window. Afterwards every episode becomes a permanent addition to the game and can be purchased and replayed at any time, except for the first season which is free for everyone permanently.

Since the release of End of Dragons, all upcoming content releases are no longer labelled as Living World, and all owners of the related expansion will gain access to the content for free upon purchase of the expansion, meaning there is no pressure to log in to unlock it and no gem cost for missed story chapter unlocks.^[1][2]

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World

In that case, since LW is more or less phased out it really doesn't make much sense for some but not all of the legacy content to remain gem-gated. But yes, LW1 should be fully unlocked.

[Nosrorav.4703]

On 7/6/2023 at 11:53 PM, MercurialKuroSludge.8974 said:

ToN/BoLA are both active at ANY time of the day, and indeed you don't have to actually get to the top of the tower/finish the trio knights.
However, it is true that the vast majority of the playerbase cannot solo push ToN reliably.
I wud understand if ppl have issues with the Seed Pod/Central room or the Duo, those can go very wrong when soloing if mistakes are made.

While they're available at any time of day, in Eye of the North there is a 2 hour timer for them to be "promoted". People tend to do a run of ToN/BfLA then, and around reset on NA.

On 7/6/2023 at 8:57 PM, OhOkYea.5431 said:

Been trying to solo the tower of nightmare but the progress bar remains at 0% because every event I find requires a full raid from what I can tell.

ToN is difficult but it doesn't require a "full raid" team at all. To progress the story you only need to do ~10 events, so you can run the first two events repeatedly. The first one is pretty much a guarantee win over time because NPCs progress the bar for you too.

[MedievalThings.5417]

You can complete the tower events with currency.  You don't actually have to do any events.  When you enter the tower, bring 50 of the pristine toxic spore samples with you.  You can turn them in...in groups of 10.  5 turn ins completes that step.  Than you can continue the rest of the instanced content.