Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

That is how I feel about DE's - saw them in Warhammer and then we saw Rifts in Rift and now we see DE's in GW2.

DE's in GW2 are the evolution of Rifts in Rift which were the evolution of PQ's in WAR.

If you don't / can't see the differences, you aren't looking very hard.

You are seeing what you want to see.

Tell me, how truly dynamic is the DE's?   Are they randomly generated content where no two DE's ever are the same and will the DE's change locations?  

There is no such thing as randomly generated content when it comes to programming a computer - someone will always and has always figured out the variables/conditions.

They are "dynamic" in that the adjust their size/difficulty based on the number of players and they have multiple win/loss conditions and phases, like a tree with multiple branches wtih multiple branches branching off of those branches etc.

As such, there is no "linear" path from start to finish, as the path from start to finish is varied based upon what branches are "chosen" based on player interaction.

There are "absolute win" and "absolute loss" conditions at the end / beginning of each chain.

So are they truly dynamic? No.

But as I was saying they are the evolution of Rifts in Rift because they are far more complex.

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

Originally posted by Distopia

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Distopia

Originally posted by aesperus

 

 

..

Have you seen the layered events?

The reactor place in Asura lands was my first real exposure to a crazy area with multiple DE's running simultaneously on top of each other.

All indications point to that as you level up, there are more/better/layered/longer DE's and less Heart quests.

In my limited experience, this is true.

I didn't hit the asura areas this weekend, I was too busy in the human areas (Only got a few hours in there last BWE). I spent most of the weekend PVPing though which I think is the games real strength. The PVE is fun and so is the world itself, I just didn't see things around to hold me down to one area for long, on top of that I seemed to always arrive at the end of an event, lol.

 My recommendation would be to not worry about chasing events or what not so much and instead just explore the world and talk to NPCs that you find.  I actually triggered a few events this way, and I found it really rewarding to see a horde of players rush to my aid to defeat the cave troll that found me, or help me escort an NPC.  It makes it feel like you actually made an impact (albeit temporary) on the world.

Originally posted by Distopia

Originally posted by BadSpock

Have you seen the layered events?

The reactor place in Asura lands was my first real exposure to a crazy area with multiple DE's running simultaneously on top of each other.

All indications point to that as you level up, there are more/better/layered/longer DE's and less Heart quests.

In my limited experience, this is true.

I didn't hit the asura areas this weekend, I was too busy in the human areas (Only got a few hours in there last BWE). I spent most of the weekend PVPing though which I think is the games real strength. The PVE is fun and so is the world itself, I just didn't see things around to hold me down to one area for long, on top of that I seemed to always arrive at the end of an event, lol.

Later zones have a lot more permanence too. Obviously a lot of it depends on player population - lots of players means lots of activity and a higher probability events will be completed successfully and advance to "win" conditions.

Later zones have elements of territorial control / capture - unless players are there the "good guys" will lose ground to the "bad guys" and the "bad guys" will hold that ground until players take it back - and if they hold it, it's theres.

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

That is how I feel about DE's - saw them in Warhammer and then we saw Rifts in Rift and now we see DE's in GW2.

DE's in GW2 are the evolution of Rifts in Rift which were the evolution of PQ's in WAR.

If you don't / can't see the differences, you aren't looking very hard.

You are seeing what you want to see.

Tell me, how truly dynamic is the DE's?   Are they randomly generated content where no two DE's ever are the same and will the DE's change locations?  

There is no such thing as randomly generated content when it comes to programming a computer - someone will always and has always figured out the variables/conditions.

They are "dynamic" in that the adjust their size/difficulty based on the number of players and they have multiple win/loss conditions and phases, like a tree with multiple branches wtih multiple branches branching off of those branches etc.

As such, there is no "linear" path from start to finish, as the path from start to finish is varied based upon what branches are "chosen" based on player interaction.

There are "absolute win" and "absolute loss" conditions at the end / beginning of each chain.

So are they truly dynamic? No.

But as I was saying they are the evolution of Rifts in Rift because they are far more complex.

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

 You have that option, sure, but you don't have to do it.  There is more than enough content in the game so that you never have to repeat a DE, but if you really liked one, you may actually want to repeat it.

I know that I did the flame shaman DE in the Charr land a ton of times because I found it fun.  But I could have just as easily moved on to something else.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Define successful.   We can't measure subs, so that metric is out.

I'm sure it will sell zillions and zillions of copies and be financially successful.

But what I wonder is if 1 year from launch, will it still have the same number of people playing on the servers, or perhaps more than there were at launch,  (a la EVE or WOW) or will the number of active players fall off substantially making the servers ghost towns? (like most other games)

The latter is how I measure success, but I'm sure ANET prefers the former. (along with how well expansions/cash shop items  sell)

 

 

^ this is true. However, GW1 while a different animal alltogether, had the same pricing structure. And while I did not enjoy the game I do own it, and recently reinstalled to reserve my names on GW2. I dont have or know any numbers, but from what i saw of the game I would never call it a failure based on retention... as it feels like it's busting at the seams still. Maybe they're just good at hiding the drop off there, dont know. I dont even know how many GW1 sold at launch or over time.. so I can't really cpompare those things.

Originally posted by Myrdynn

how I know it will be successful comes down to one thing

its B2P, meaning roughly 50% of the people will buy it just in case and not have to worry about subs.

there isnt a way to track subs, so they can always say over 3 mil copies sold!!

A bit like blizzard and their 10 million subs most coming from asia whcih has a pay per session model.

Originally posted by Mithrandolir

Originally posted by Kyleran

Define successful.   We can't measure subs, so that metric is out.

I'm sure it will sell zillions and zillions of copies and be financially successful.

But what I wonder is if 1 year from launch, will it still have the same number of people playing on the servers, or perhaps more than there were at launch,  (a la EVE or WOW) or will the number of active players fall off substantially making the servers ghost towns? (like most other games)

The latter is how I measure success, but I'm sure ANET prefers the former. (along with how well expansions/cash shop items  sell)

 

 

^ this is true. However, GW1 while a different animal alltogether, had the same pricing structure. And while I did not enjoy the game I do own it, and recently reinstalled to reserve my names on GW2. I dont have or know any numbers, but from what i saw of the game I would never call it a failure based on retention... as it feels like it's busting at the seams still. Maybe they're just good at hiding the drop off there, dont know. I dont even know how many GW1 sold at launch or over time.. so I can't really cpompare those things.

 

 

I'm sure ANet and NCSoft will be using the actual money they make on the game to judge its success...not any crazy estimate that we players can come up with.  And really, you can even use this metric as well.  NCSoft always publishes their earnings in their quarterly reports.  It will be plenty easy to judge GW2's success or failure.

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

Tell me, how truly dynamic is the DE's?   Are they randomly generated content where no two DE's ever are the same and will the DE's change locations?  

There is no such thing as randomly generated content when it comes to programming a computer - someone will always and has always figured out the variables/conditions.

They are "dynamic" in that the adjust their size/difficulty based on the number of players and they have multiple win/loss conditions and phases, like a tree with multiple branches wtih multiple branches branching off of those branches etc.

As such, there is no "linear" path from start to finish, as the path from start to finish is varied based upon what branches are "chosen" based on player interaction.

There are "absolute win" and "absolute loss" conditions at the end / beginning of each chain.

So are they truly dynamic? No.

But as I was saying they are the evolution of Rifts in Rift because they are far more complex.

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

Yes of course, I have no misconceptions.

I know exactly what DE's are and what they offer - and it's leaps and bounds over what WAR or Rift or any other theme park or sandbox MMO offers in terms of PvE content.

You have to remember that low levels during testing = lots of player/population concentrated into a single area, so more players = pushing events towards "completion" a whole hell of a lot faster, so you'll see more resets and less events in "fail conditions."

The kind of thing you are asking for is currently impossible unless you have dedicated human beings inventing and running events on the fly 24/7 - oh and they all have to be just as "good" as each other and never have "bad days."

Originally posted by Creslin321

 My recommendation would be to not worry about chasing events or what not so much and instead just explore the world and talk to NPCs that you find.  I actually triggered a few events this way, and I found it really rewarding to see a horde of players rush to my aid to defeat the cave troll that found me, or help me escort an NPC.  It makes it feel like you actually made an impact (albeit temporary) on the world.

Yeah I'm not typically the type to chase down content, I think that had a lot to do with having limited time to play. When the game releases and I have as much time as I want I'll surely dig deeper. I was more or less trying to see as much as possible before the only option is to buy the game :).

Originally posted by Distopia

Originally posted by Creslin321

 My recommendation would be to not worry about chasing events or what not so much and instead just explore the world and talk to NPCs that you find.  I actually triggered a few events this way, and I found it really rewarding to see a horde of players rush to my aid to defeat the cave troll that found me, or help me escort an NPC.  It makes it feel like you actually made an impact (albeit temporary) on the world.

Yeah I'm not typically the type to chase down content, I think that had a lot to do with having limited time to play. When the game releases and I have as much time as I want I'll surely dig deeper. I was more or less trying to see as much as possible before the only option is to buy the game :).

 Hehe me too.  I basically tried to maximize exp gain through a lot of the beta just to try out different classes, but I found that I had much more fun when I just wandered around :).

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by Mithrandolir

The difference between Heart Event hubs and Dynamic Events in GW2

http://youtu.be/_3gp8SmzYYs

edit to make it clicky :)

Reminds me of Crocodile Dundee when he turned on the TV in his hotel room, when the reporter pointed it out to him.   He sees I Love Lucy and he makes a quip regarding that - yep - that's a TV and that's what he saw. 

That is how I feel about DE's - saw them in Warhammer and then we saw Rifts in Rift and now we see DE's in GW2.

DE's in GW2 are the evolution of Rifts in Rift which were the evolution of PQ's in WAR.

If you don't / can't see the differences, you aren't looking very hard.

You are seeing what you want to see.

Tell me, how truly dynamic is the DE's?   Are they randomly generated content where no two DE's ever are the same and will the DE's change locations?  

I know this argument well, I don't mean this specific one but the form it takes.

You have two things usually one is "the status quo" and something new in competition to it, where the new thing is always nitpicked into pieces but the same base logic is never applied to the status quo.

Originally posted by Teala

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

It really comes down to what you consider 'dynamic'. If you use the word as it's defined:

affected by the passage of time or the presence or absence of power:

Then yes, the events absolutely are dynamic. Whether or not an event is repeatable, has nothing to do with if it's dynamic. Those are two separate things. Dynamic Events were also never presented as 'random' events. They were presented as a questing system in which player action or inaction determines the end result, and how the quest progresses. That's exactly what they do in the game as it is currently.

This has also been explained multiple times, not the least of which can be viewed here: Overview of Lvling in GW2

Point me towards an mmo currently on the market that is more fun than guild wars 2 and i'll gladly play it. Until then guild wars 2 it is.

Originally posted by Creslin321

Originally posted by Mithrandolir

Originally posted by Kyleran

Define successful.   We can't measure subs, so that metric is out.

I'm sure it will sell zillions and zillions of copies and be financially successful.

But what I wonder is if 1 year from launch, will it still have the same number of people playing on the servers, or perhaps more than there were at launch,  (a la EVE or WOW) or will the number of active players fall off substantially making the servers ghost towns? (like most other games)

The latter is how I measure success, but I'm sure ANET prefers the former. (along with how well expansions/cash shop items  sell)

 

 

^ this is true. However, GW1 while a different animal alltogether, had the same pricing structure. And while I did not enjoy the game I do own it, and recently reinstalled to reserve my names on GW2. I dont have or know any numbers, but from what i saw of the game I would never call it a failure based on retention... as it feels like it's busting at the seams still. Maybe they're just good at hiding the drop off there, dont know. I dont even know how many GW1 sold at launch or over time.. so I can't really cpompare those things.

 

 

I'm sure ANet and NCSoft will be using the actual money they make on the game to judge its success...not any crazy estimate that we players can come up with.  And really, you can even use this metric as well.  NCSoft always publishes their earnings in their quarterly reports.  It will be plenty easy to judge GW2's success or failure.

Again, financial success is how ANET will measure the title, but I use a different yardstick, basically seeing whether people are still actively, regularly playing it after a year or more's time or have they moved on to something else.

Originally posted by Teala

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

It's just the evolution of those other games mechanics that makes this special to us. we obviously enjoy the movement away from static questing into a more dynamic environment for questing. Not "a dynamic" environment, just a more dynamic environment than the last batch of mmo's, it's just an evolution. 

For somebody who dislikes these types of events, this wouldn't be seen as a good move, but for us that love it it;s a great move. Arenanet has really taken it to the next level, but people that experience the heart events and think that's the DE's of GW2, they are missing a lot of what makes a DE more dynamic. The branching out of the events and the way it plays out if you succeed or fail are really neat compared to both WAR and Rift.

Are you sure that what you saw that guy running over and over wasn't a heart event? Because in my experience I could not run the DE over and over, there was a very substantial delay in it resetting, if it ever even did, as the branches of it just kept going on and on for a long time. Even when i think it was completely over, I could not restart it...

But the heart quests just restart over and over, as you can see from the video I linked to above.

Originally posted by BadSpock

DE's in GW2 are the evolution of Rifts in Rift ...

That's not entirely accurate. Rift was in development in parallel with DEs being in development at ANet. It's possible the DE system actually predates rifts, it's just Rift that was released sooner, before DEs became public.

DEs in GW2 have no influence at all from rifts in Rift. Parallel evolution with markedly different results.

Originally posted by BadSpock

The kind of thing you are asking for is currently impossible unless you have dedicated human beings inventing and running events on the fly 24/7 - oh and they all have to be just as "good" as each other and never have "bad days."

It's funny that you mention that, because Anet does have a team dedicated to swapping out events.

This doesn't mean that they won't have bad days, and it also doesn't mean that they will be able to crank them out at the rate that some people seem to want, but it does mean that the events will be getting swapped out regularly, and replaced with fresh ones.

It will be successful........for me, it's a FRESH experience and new world to explore.  I haven't played a MMO for a few months now due to MMO burnout so I am excited to start again!

Originally posted by Volkon

Originally posted by BadSpock

DE's in GW2 are the evolution of Rifts in Rift ...

That's not entirely accurate. Rift was in development in parallel with DEs being in development at ANet. It's possible the DE system actually predates rifts, it's just Rift that was released sooner, before DEs became public.

 

DEs in GW2 have no influence at all from rifts in Rift. Parallel evolution with markedly different results.

Yeah I can get behind that statement from a purely factual standpoint I am sure you are right.

But as a player, GW2 dynamic events "feel" like an improvement/evolution of the Rifts in Rift - as Rift was released over a year ago.

So having experiencing Rifts first, DE's feel like an evolution of Rifts, just as Rifts felt like an evolution of Public Quests.

Originally posted by Teala

OK,  But will you admit that they are not truly dynamic and that eventually, you'll no doubt run the various DE's and they will start repeating - like what we saw when the guy playing on Twitch TV kept doing the same DE over and over again.

This is not entirely inaccurate at all. I saw a few DEs that had repeated. What's actually rather nice about that is that I had the option to do them again and get rewarded if I so chose, instead of the way it is in your generic quest-based games where you do the quests once and the content in the area is now dead to you. in the future, as more DEs are constantly being injected into the game, current events (giggle) will spawn less and less frequently as more unique events spawn.

Not truly dynamic... disagree with that phrase however. They're not static quests. They're dynamic, moving, self-spawning. Maybe you're using a different definition than I am, but dynamic is the opposite of static, stationary, non moving.