Public Convergences, Issues & Solutions.

[Oliverrr.4139]

I think its safe to say that there are a few problems with public convergences, the most glaring being the Sorrow and the associated bugs and general quality of the fight, but I think another problem many overlook is how most of the repeatable achievements which reward essence nuggets essentially reward people who sit in the middle and farm tags rather than contributing to the instance as a whole, which often leads to instances having far too many people staying in the middle in the first phase with very few spreading out.

A fairly simple solution to this would be to change some of the repeatable nugget achievements and add another. The one I think could be changed is instead of the achievement tracking essence picked up, it should instead reward the player for actually depositing the essence to Zojja, this change might also help the ever present problem of people ignoring essence unless being yelled at in map chat in the boss phase, and even then its a coin flip.

As for the new achievement, I think one should be added so that if you clear an island you are rewarded with an essence nugget, so for ever 5 champions killed or something similar.

 

Curious to hear others thoughts as it seems to be the common opinion that public convergences can be pretty awful

[Trejgon.9367]

26 minutes ago, Oliverrr.4139 said:

The one I think could be changed is instead of the achievement tracking essence picked up, it should instead reward the player for actually depositing the essence to Zojja

This would encourage people camping middle even more, because they would have way less distance to run to deposit the essence, than going all the way from side islands.

That being said I cannot say I can relate to the notion of too many people camping the middle. Maybe time of day, or zone case, but in my experience so far, everytime I join the public run, someone tags up (at couple occasions had to tag up myself), usually most if not all of the instance join that tag, and blue dots tends to be somewhat decently spread around. The issues of island phase taking forever usually comes to uneven distribution of people with sensible offensive capabilities - longest I had, basically all of dps on tag (happened to be me) and in the end I ended up participating in clearing of at least half of every single island. Sorrow was going down pleasantly swiftly afterwards tho.

[TheNurgle.4825]

Only issue with Sorrow I heard of is not dropping essences when in water and it is easy to prevent that, but it should be fixed anyway. No other issue with Sorrow.

Public of anything will have always some issues. Ppl just join since they can without any requirement to join and it is good thing. DPS check for convergences is next to nothing. Hardest thing to do is for ppl to spit so you do islands in parallel. Some ppl just follow tag since they are used to it others just do not want to miss out "rewards".

What would help is little improvement of sqaud management. For example add icon similar to comm tag to lieutenant and make it that ppl in same group see highlight of other ppl in their group and lieutenant. That could help with ppl splitting up and make some events a lot easier.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

The problem with convergence is that is that good players don't want to deal with the public version and make their own squads. 

This means that the bad players are left alone. 

From my experience, doing the public version is not worth my time. Not when publics can last 33min and fail. While organized squads starting to break the 17min barrier. 

It was obvious that the complains about convergence would start to roll in now. 

Now that the bad players are on their own with nobody to carry them. 

[Trejgon.9367]

24 minutes ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Now that the bad players are on their own with nobody to carry them. 

I am doing public nearly daily and the only fail was literally the first one, which was like day or two after patch has dropped.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Just now, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

I am doing public nearly daily and the only fail was literally the first one, which was like day or two after patch has dropped.

I failed once. Not because of a bug mind you. The biggest problem for me with the public version is the time it takes. 

Organized is simply so much quicker. 

[Farohna.6247]

1 hour ago, TheNurgle.4825 said:

Only issue with Sorrow I heard of is not dropping essences when in water and it is easy to prevent that, but it should be fixed anyway. No other issue with Sorrow.

Public of anything will have always some issues. Ppl just join since they can without any requirement to join and it is good thing. DPS check for convergences is next to nothing. Hardest thing to do is for ppl to spit so you do islands in parallel. Some ppl just follow tag since they are used to it others just do not want to miss out "rewards".

What would help is little improvement of sqaud management. For example add icon similar to comm tag to lieutenant and make it that ppl in same group see highlight of other ppl in their group and lieutenant. That could help with ppl splitting up and make some events a lot easier.

I had one Sorrow fail yesterday because of the water issue.  Just not enough essences to keep Zojja healed during that time.  So yes, that needs to be fixed.   

The biggest issue is people not just standing and dps'ing.....run those little orbs!   I actually really enjoy the public convergences.  Let's keep in mind, some people are just on day one of trying them, they're learning.  Some just don't catch on quickly.  It helps a lot to have a tag who gives a few quick pointers, like how you really only need about 10 people per island, and to run essence, and take out sieges.  

Sorrow is not a hard fight,  people just need to pay attention and read, imo. 

[Gustavef.6730]

All my fails have been with Sorrow, and recently it was due to not the orb drop bug.  In one section we got maybe half the orbs for the whole quarter HP.  We were doing well enough till then

As to encouraging more island hoping, put an achievement counter for champions and set it to about 10 or 15.  

 

 

[BlueJin.4127]

But then wouldn’t that just encourage some people to tag as many champions as possible instead of actually spending time killing it?

Those repeatable kill achievements should be removed completely and more rewards should be given for overall participation/completion.

[Omega.6801]

Have not seen a public fail so far and I've done maybe 8 of them. As others have said, maybe time of day play a role here.

That being said, the only difference between private and public is the time it takes to do convergences. I don't like the idea of, oh all the good players are in private squads now and all the bad players are in the public ones. That's just not true. In an event designed for 35-50 players, the single player matters next to nothing. What does matter a lot is how organized and how informed the players are.

About the achievements that OP mentions, well, there should be achis for killing bosses in all areas. That would solve the problem and should distribute the players better.

[Draxian.7945]

Give convergences a stacking debuff that grows over time and requires taking essences to the circle to get rid of. If players hit a cap, send them back to Tyria as a personal failure mechanic. There's no time pressure prior to the instance boss so there's no reason people couldn't dip in and out of islands between bosses to deposit, and during the boss the circle is never more than 3 seconds movement away. We're over a month post-launch and most public convergences with Sorrow are still failing because lazy people refuse to do the one single mechanic the content has. If the only means for consistency is private instances then the public one--half of the content--isn't fit for purpose.

[zeyeti.8347]

This content has pretty much the same problem as soo won in open world on release , the big % of the game players are open world casual and semi casual who encounter barely any precise mechanic , a blatant exemple is one of the kryptis boss doing the green circle and you have 75% of the time ppl running away with it or not stacking resulting in a wipe or huge damage to all ppl around the boss. The mechanics are simple enough but you can't ask causal ppl who haven't encountered any singular mechanic trough their whole run to suddenly deal with it. Remember Mabon and Lyhr event failing just because ppl kill champs with too much disparity , many ppl don't even read the chat .

Problem with this content also is the big difference with an organized squad and a public non organized squad , the organized squad is gonna clear the whole thing in 10-12 minutes while the public event ressemble more of a big chicken courtyard with 2-3 foxes running ammock inside.

[Balsa.3951]

5 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

This content has pretty much the same problem as soo won in open world on release , the big % of the game players are open world casual and semi casual who encounter barely any precise mechanic , a blatant exemple is one of the kryptis boss doing the green circle and you have 75% of the time ppl running away with it or not stacking resulting in a wipe or huge damage to all ppl around the boss. The mechanics are simple enough but you can't ask causal ppl who haven't encountered any singular mechanic trough their whole run to suddenly deal with it. Remember Mabon and Lyhr event failing just because ppl kill champs with too much disparity , many ppl don't even read the chat .

Problem with this content also is the big difference with an organized squad and a public non organized squad , the organized squad is gonna clear the whole thing in 10-12 minutes while the public event ressemble more of a big chicken courtyard with 2-3 foxes running ammock inside.

the green circle run away maybe because of soto teaches u to run from green circles? 

maybe it was fixed but there was the boss who downed u mostly when u stay in the circle.

im probably wrong

[Sobx.1758]

7 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

This content has pretty much the same problem as soo won in open world on release , the big % of the game players are open world casual and semi casual who encounter barely any precise mechanic , a blatant exemple is one of the kryptis boss doing the green circle and you have 75% of the time ppl running away with it or not stacking resulting in a wipe or huge damage to all ppl around the boss. The mechanics are simple enough but you can't ask causal ppl who haven't encountered any singular mechanic trough their whole run to suddenly deal with it.

Doubt this is necessarily what it is. "Organized" squads with subgroups being divided between each boss (nw/ne/sw/se) still have 3-4 players going where they were assigned (except for ~10), while the rest is semi-afknig in the middle. Big part of those are probably people trying to get loot with as little "effort" as possible or not caring about reading chat at all. "OW players don't know the mechanics!!" sometimes sure is true, but what "mechanics" are there to know here? The ones that we get told through the story, which probably every "OW player" played through?

7 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

Problem with this content also is the big difference with an organized squad and a public non organized squad , the organized squad is gonna clear the whole thing in 10-12 minutes while the public event ressemble more of a big chicken courtyard with 2-3 foxes running ammock inside.

People who organize themselves can finish content faster than completely disorganized groups is considered "a problem" how exactly?

 

1 hour ago, Balsa.3951 said:

the green circle run away maybe because of soto teaches u to run from green circles? 

maybe it was fixed but there was the boss who downed u mostly when u stay in the circle.

im probably wrong

Yeah, it was bugged. I'd say people running away from green circles after soto release is on anet.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[zeyeti.8347]

2 hours ago, Balsa.3951 said:

the green circle run away maybe because of soto teaches u to run from green circles? 

maybe it was fixed but there was the boss who downed u mostly when u stay in the circle.

im probably wrong

That was true at the start , now it is +- fixed and if you runaway not far enougb you pratically down the whole ppl near the boss.

[zeyeti.8347]

1 hour ago, Sobx.1758 said:

People who organize themselves can finish content faster than completely disorganized groups is considered "a problem" how exactly?

Sorry my bad a bit of wrong sentence construction here , what i ment is public taking more time is normal but has a big chance to fail , out of the 4 public attempts i have done i had 3 fails , mostly because ppl don't understand you need to bring back orbs to heal zojja, it is ofc normal organized squad were the com take the time to make sure everybody ahs boon coverage take less time. The problem isn't really the content , the problem is the people going in with 0 understanding of what must be done.