No more open world 'raid-hard' content ala TriWurm?

[kharmin.7683]

Well, I pretty much disagree with the entire premise but I'm not going to waste more time arguing in a vacuum.

[Kurrilino.2706]

Why would they create more 150+ player content?They barely have 150+ players

[Psientist.6437]

@kharmin.7683 said:Well, I pretty much disagree with the entire premise but I'm not going to waste more time arguing in a vacuum.

You don't care about the sacred function of combat prowess? Without holy combat prowess we would be left playing games that don't hold combat prowess sacred. I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't understand combat prowess. Obviously, if you did, you would submit to Its divinity.

Snark aside, I think open world raid-light bosses resonate with GW2 as a social, serialized drama focused on the LW much better than raids. I think strike missions also resonate well. There is a lot of territory to explore where strike missions and complex world bosses resonate with each other.

[Teratus.2859]

Tbh one of the only reason to run world bosses is for the loot but all the good stuff drops so rarely that it's very discouraging after you've run it hundreds of times and never gotten anything worth a damn.

I've probably killed teq over a thousand times and no a single horde has dropped for me, yet i've several friends and guildmates who've gotten one literally the first time they ever did the boss.. others have gotten several of them.. while us poor unlucky folk seem forever cursed with bad RNG luck XD

There's just a point you hit where the bad luck makes you give up and just stop bothering with some content.Now days I only do a world boss if I happen to be in the area and feel like joining in.

If Anet decided to boost up some world boss again and bring back that Teq upgrade feeling then sure I'd start doing it for a while just because it's new and I really enjoyed the early days of a whole map trying and often failing to beat a boss, that really was a lot of fun and so was the rush to get that worlds first kill.Definitely worth doing however the only bosses added since Teq's upgrade and TT have been overall pretty easy to beat.. I've never seen a map fail Death branded Shatterer or Drakkar and I was hoping they would be tougher.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

@Deihnyx.6318 said:People complained because legendary armors were for a time limited to raids... they'll complain about anything they can't or don't want to play.They're still limited to raids, since there's no other way to get it in PVE (like, say, crafting like you can with the weapons!)

[lare.5129]

you need buy pof and hot. problem solved.

[Noobix.3958]

@Deihnyx.6318 said:Also TT is not raid difficulty. Not even close. It however requires an organized group.

Note how i explained what i meant by 'raid-hard'. TT is not mechanically hard no. It is logistically and coordinately hard.

Balanced player distribution between 3 geographically separate and mechanically different events, with a tight synchronized component that ties them together. Its a different kind of hard than other events even though they have some or all of the aspects of TT wurm.

[Omega.6801]

Anet tried it, the community whined about it, ANet never went back.

Open world will most likely stay in the "press 1 for instant gratification"-meta.

On the other hand, there's challening content in raids, fractals and possibly strikes, so everything has its place i guess.

[thepenmonster.3621]

@"Kulvar.1239" said:The issue with open world hard content is that it's on a timer.

TT is...

1. Never active when I play.
2. On a dead map when I do.

So I'm still missing two worms after all these years.

I'm a big fan of "it doesn't happen until you get your asses in there and make it happen" but I can't see it working this way without major overhauls to that map.

[TPMN.1483]

Add a more lucrative reward like an infusion that can drop every time the event is up- I can guarantee there will be much more interest in the event.

Silver wasted is still busy and Chak Gerant (which is on-par) to TT complexity.

[mindcircus.1506]

@"BunjiKugashira.9754" said:Imagine the outcry if there was a new mount and the 3rd collection required a specific raid boss...Or if they did something absolutely awful such as gate a mount behind competitive play like WvW.Right?

You gate a mount behind raid content and I guarantee you people will raid.The outcry would be loud for sure but it wouldnt be enormous. It would be the same group who lights up these forums whenever they decide they are "forced" to do anything more than get carried by a zerg on their Apothecary Soulbeasts and Cleric's Shoutheal Warriors at Fire Elemental.The same group who lost their collective shizzle when an emote got gated behind strikes would flood these forums with the usual rhetoric, anecdotes about pretend people and threats of lost revenue to Anet.

The majority would raid and the merged complaint thread would fall off the first page in a week.

[Joe Farmer.2063]

@thepenmonster.3621 said:...TT is...

1. Never active when I play.
2. On a dead map when I do....Are you on NA?My guess would be to look for communities that still organize it there.If you're in Europe, look for gw2community.de, they not only still organize it, but also in English now, hugely popular, you have to be there in time to get on the map.(like in the old days)

In general also TT etc. has been nerved actually. When I started doing it with gw2community it took us very much longer to beat the heads.In the beginning you could not hit it critical for example. Consumables like Fire Element Powder etc. were requested back then, still have half a stack on my mains.HPs were not nerved, but you can do more damage now.

Regarding loot, they should think about making more of it sellable on the TP.Disadvantage off course, you can simply buy it, no need for the specific boss, advantage, more people might want to do that boss for a chance of gold.The specific loot would go a little the way of the infusions, but not that extreme in the long term. And you can still always try to get it yourself.

[kharmin.7683]

@mindcircus.1506 said:

You gate a mount behind raid content and I guarantee you people will raid.Maybe so, but I believe that players would raid only long enough to get that mount. I wonder how many people stuck with WvW once they got their warclaw? I know that the very small sub-set of casual players that I game with didn't.

[Dante.1763]

@mindcircus.1506 said:

@"BunjiKugashira.9754" said:Imagine the outcry if there was a new mount and the 3rd collection required a specific raid boss...Or if they did something absolutely awful such as gate a mount behind competitive play like WvW.Right?

You gate a mount behind raid content and I guarantee you people will raid.The outcry would be loud for sure but it wouldnt be enormous. It would be the same group who lights up these forums whenever they decide they are "forced" to do anything more than get carried by a zerg on their Apothecary Soulbeasts and Cleric's Shoutheal Warriors at Fire Elemental.The same group who lost their collective kitten when an emote got gated behind strikes would flood these forums with the usual rhetoric, anecdotes about pretend people and threats of lost revenue to Anet.

The majority would raid and the merged complaint thread would fall off the first page in a week.

Not to be that person, But i was one of the ones who objected to having story content(meta achievement) locked behind strikes and i for sure raid, and do t4s etc. Clumping all people into a group when they voice complaints over X is seldom brings forth good responses.

A new mount for raids would be fine, like the warclaw its main use would be in that mode. But, Kharmin is probably the most correct. the vast majority of players would do raids enough to get the mount and stop, its what i did for the warclaw. Now im back to doing WVW only when i need a GOB. If i wasnt already interested in running raids that same thing would happen there. i wasnt active on the forums at the time the warclaw was added, but i dont recall seeing to many people demanding it be obtainable in WVW. What i have seen is people asking for it to be made useful in PVE, not a bad request IMO.

[kharmin.7683]

Also, what would be the point of locking a mount behind raiding? The warclaw is the only mount available for WvW, so it makes sense there. Raids don't really require mounts, do they? And wouldn't a "raid mount" be another variable that might be demanded in LFG?

[Solvar.7953]

If they locked a mount behind raids, and that mount was necessary to have (better in some way than other mounts, such that I'm at a disadvantage of not having it), I would probably quit play GW2 as that would be an indication to me that Anet doesn't understand what the players want and are taking the game in the wrong direction.I've done/completed a few raids. I just did not find them fun at all, so quit doing them (the guild I'm in was organizing them for a while). So it is not as if I have never done them.But that is getting off the original topic here. I suspect on general problem is that as more and more maps get added with expansions and LWS episodes, as well as the likely slowly bleeding out of players, keeping maps well populated becomes more of a challenge. So I can imagine there may be some design decision to keep events completable by a smaller number of players.

[uberkingkong.8041]

The next expansion needs more open world content. PvE and PvP.Just look at newer games going from instance to open world.Dynasty Warriors 9. Very bad feedback, but everyone agrees "Open world is a step in the right direction".Just look at the reviews, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dynasty-warriors-9/bwmb5js5x7xv?activetab=pivot:reviewstabThe only people who dislike open world is because it is done wrong, they don't say they hate it in general, it wasn't done right. But they all love the direction from instances to open world.GW2 I feel is going from open world to instances.

Having a lot of instances, raids, strike missions, fractals. Not good thing to focus on.Open world is the way to go.

The thing a lot of MMORPG's tend to do is start open world aka GW2, and then go into instances. New expansion? Most of the important stuff is in instances.That is the mistake MMORPG's always make after a few years after launch.

People play GW2 because of open world. When GW2 launched all it talked about was dynamic open world. Due next expansion they need to remember their roots and go back to it.

[Tails.9372]

They really could improve upon their design for OW bosses and metas in general. I liked the Amala fight but A-Net made sure to kill that one. The most interesting map in terms of meta design is probably Dragon Stand, issue is that the boss fight is boring (it feels more like a mini game collection than an actual bossfight) and it's way to unrewarding to justify the time you have to commit.

[Kulvar.1239]

@TPMN.1483 said:Add a more lucrative reward like an infusion that can drop every time the event is up- I can guarantee there will be much more interest in the event.

Silver wasted is still busy and Chak Gerant (which is on-par) to TT complexity.

It would have to be a reward that you has a finite reuse and endless use so interest never drop.

[thepenmonster.3621]

@Joe Farmer.2063 said:My guess would be to look for communities that still organize it there.

Getting an achievement and a pile of dragonite ore isn't important enough to me to base my play time around it. It's the same with all the events with lengthy timers on them TBH. Maybe once they start letting you sell ascended materials...

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

To be fair I think Dragon's Stand an Dragonfall do fit into this category, maybe we'll get another "open-world raid map" this season. But if you're looking for individual encounters, I wouldn't count on it.. Drakkar shows that they've lost touch with it.

They want to push Strike Missions too much it seems.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

It got done if there was a commander there leading it and explained how to do it. A guild leading it wasn’t necessary. Also, just in case you bring them up, TTS is nothing more than a bunch of random players with the same varying skill level that you’d find by using the LFG to bring players onto a map instance.

You only needed a minimum of two bosses covered not including the one with the zerg providing its own CC. More is better of course in order to increase the DPS and slow the bar but it was far from a requirement.

Hello there. That guild-less commander covering it was probably me. I'm glad that it was nerfed, and it saddens me that people still struggle with this event even post nerf. As the person behind the logistics of herding 50 cats, I can tell you that it is not as easy as you are making it out to be.

1. Just explaining how to do the event wasn't enough. This is because all of the minutia was too long. Players would tune out all of the instructions, assuming that everything would be alright if they just spammed buttons. They would do this over and over again, leading to people waiting for weeks to complete the event and yet never bothering to contribute meaningfully. Even with a half-hour long furious typing session before every event with a half-hour extended Q&A session during the hunt, my success rate was only 50%.
2. It required far more than just using CC skills. It required knowing how to do good DPS, good CCPS (which was poorly balanced), and how to navigate the squad UI and the mini-map. This may not seem hard, but it meant that for every single attempt about half of the players had no idea where the heck they were supposed to go. It also required a certain personality, because the more indignant players would just publicly fight you rather than follow instructions. Seriously, I would get into a fight trying to explain CCPS to players in every other run.
3. TTS is more than a bunch of random players. Trust me, I've been only TTS maps, and the number of competent players there far exceed the general population. This is because they're a group of people who've volunteered to join a PVE guild, and thus have already taken several mental steps that the rando's wandering the overworld have not.
4. The few players that I would set aside for the CC groups had to run dedicated builds in order to spew out enough CCPS in order to matter. It couldn't just be any five players, because the hard CC required to break the bar of each Serpent was insanely high. These people also had to volunteer and move themselves into the CC squads, because anyone I appointed to do CC wouldn't listen. Having been on the CC squad several times myself, I can tell you that the serpent's spent the majority of their time standing upright and channeling, because their bars were so strict that all 5 players would blow all of their CC on the first break and then would stand around panicking while waiting for cooldowns.
5. Though it technically didn't require a full map, it did require basically everybody on the map. Even for the far superior 3-pronged strat, it still took about 25 players to pull it off. This is more than what most players can pull together, unless they had a guild dedicated toward doing it. So far, the only exception to this rule that I've seen is... me. And boy, you do not understand how hard it was to do this. I had to appoint criers to go around every PoF and LWS4 map advertising continuously, as well as all main cities. I had to do it at the same time every day to build up recognition. If I couldn't get those criers out, then I wouldn't get enough people to do the event. I had to stop hosting Serpent's Ire because it would make me physically ill to run.
6. There was a severe skill bleed for this event. Once players completed it once, they vowed to never do it again. This meant that I was stuck with perpetual newbs while running it. This lead to two things: First, 1/3rd of the squad was always necromancers; the worst class to take the event. Second, I basically had to explain how to play the game from scratch each time. This made running the event insufferable to host, because eventually I was stuck dealing with players who couldn't grasp concepts like DPS and CCPS.
7. We developed the zerg strat because of widespread incompetence. If you have a group of 25 players with competent DPS builds who know how to use CC, then evenly spreading players out was the best strategy. The problem is that, unless you had a PVE guild running this event, you never got those players. Instead, you got players who would auto attack in tank gear or mash their buttons wildly with no understanding of what their skills do. I had to create a document that quick-linked a high CC build for every single class in the game, and even then most players didn't do CC. With every run, I had the splitting instructions set as the daily squad message, and people still follow the dorito blindly. The three-pronged strategy was also hard to do, because a significant portion of players don't know what north is.

At a certain point, you have to make the game for the players. As much as I like to lie back and yell git gud at the majority of the player base, the fact is that they won't. I spent weeks trying to teach players how to do serpent's ire, and ultimately it came to nothing. The reason why it is that things like Triple Trouble and King of the Jungle are easier to do is because they have dedicated guilds with multiple commanders giving specific instructions on every single small part of the fight. I'd love to have something like that for Serpent's Ire, but nobody else showed up or volunteered to co-command.

[Noobix.3958]

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:Hello there. That guild-less commander covering it was probably me. I'm glad that it was nerfed, and it saddens me that people still struggle with this event even post nerf. As the person behind the logistics of herding 50 cats, I can tell you that it is not as easy as you are making it out to be.

Excellent write up, its always nice to hear perspectives from experienced pug commanders, of which there are far too few in the game.I'd wager the primary issue with Serpents Ire at the time wasn't so much the difficulty or lack of general player skill, but in the pitiful rewards it offered (and imho, still offers even after the boost). If you add unique skins, with relatively decent drop rate about 2x as frequent as TT regurgitated chests, then the more experienced players will come and stay and the general community knowledge and competence with the event increases over time.

You see this with TT wurm, I think people would be surprised with how easily you can pull off a map-chat %100 pug run these days. Alot of players know enough about the event that the dedicated condi husk killers and egg blockers are less and less required. Instead, with Serpents Ire you had a 'One and done' mentality with the players because besides a few one-off achievements and collections, there is absolutely no reason to repeat it besides the challenge.

Another system that Anet should implement is some sort of increased rewards for the commander of a squad who successfully participates in the event. Maybe a slightly increased drop chance above the rest of the players or something. Right now, you have these experienced players who are willing to cat-herd an event and teach players how to be successful, and they get nothing out of it other than the players' thanks.

I had a laugh about your description of the indignant players that whine or fight the commander. Met so many of those. Its like they want to be contrary just to 'fight the power!' or something. Like...dude, im just a player like you. Im not your dad or your boss or something. Play the game or dont but stop muddying the message im trying to deliver because you happen to believe that your strategy is obviously superior or everybody should use your cc skill instead of the one I suggested. Im not spending my time here to lord over you my sexy blue dorito, i just want to complete the event same as you.

[Luthan.5236]

Tbh ... I didn't find anything hard at that wurm - when I got back June 2019 to the game. (Stopped end of 2013 and didn't play until 2019.) There seem to be good commanders on the maps regularly - if you are there early enough. (If not then you get in some empty map cause the other ones are full.)

It's basically still dps with some timing needed.

I have most fun in PvP and with solo hard achievements (story and stuff). Also the meta events in HoT (haven't tried PoF and further) are nice at some maps. Though not hard.

The most intersting thing - what you desribe at "hard" - is that players need to coordinate. Yeah I'd love to see more of that. But also where it can fail easier (not only 1 need to time the kill and doing enogh dps during the timer). Stuff where CC is needed. Where smaller and bigger groups are needed. Etc. Should scale though that it can also be done by a smaller amount of people (if they know the mechanics).

For example I enjoyed in Dry Top at the repair station the event where the skritt attacked - where for the achievement (so it's a one time thing and usually nobody cares about it anymore) no supplies must get stolen. (Not a single one.) Allowed for different builds (I play engineer with lots of CC) where it might be possible to solo do it or with a small group of players. (Bigger upscaled there will be lots of elite and most of the zerg that farmed events did not care about the achievement anymore.) I think I almost soloed it when some 1-2 other people joined in as well.

[kratan.4619]

@"lare.5129" said:go try raids .. after few trying you will skip that toxic content, and forget about "changeling"

Open world challenging is not even close to the instanced challenging toxicity and you cannot be kicked from an open world event.