GW2 events are very incredibly new and innovative and the developers should get a round of applause every morning on arrival at work.

There, you can stop hyperventilating into a paper bag now.

Originally posted by RefMinor

GW2 events are very incredibly new and innovative and the developers should get a round of applause every morning on arrival at work.

There, you can stop hyperventilating into a paper bag now.

Thank you, thank you... I feel more relaxed now.

Personally... I don't care where they got their inspiration from, be it War, Tabula Rasa or the ladies room wall. They work incredibly well in the game now, giving the world a much more organic, living feeling than those based around a static questing system to me, and really that's all that matters. I enjoy them.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

I also don't know what is the prejudice against Tabula Rasa.

Even before Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa had a form of Dynamic Events.

What is a Tabula Rasa? Sounds like an STD.

I'm just kidding of course.

The fact that people count enjoyment by the hour now is hilarious to me as well. Do you guys have any idea how many actual days I have spread across 3 accounts on EQ1 since 1999/2000? Just checking my 5 most played characters I have 467 DAYS of real time played on them. Not counting bazaar mules while im offline and such either. I'd be pissed if only got a few hundred hours out of an MMO.

Originally posted by Aeonblades

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

I also don't know what is the prejudice against Tabula Rasa.

Even before Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa had a form of Dynamic Events.

What is a Tabula Rasa? Sounds like an STD.

I'm just kidding of course.

 

The fact that people count enjoyment by the hour now is hilarious to me as well. Do you guys have any idea how many actual days I have spread across 3 accounts on EQ1 since 1999/2000? Just checking my 5 most played characters I have 467 DAYS of real time played on them. Not counting bazaar mules while im offline and such either. I'd be pissed if only got a few hundred hours out of an MMO.

I've 416 days of GW1 (10K hours) and I've seen people with over 20K hours in there.

I'll probably acquire similar amount of hours in GW2, albeit at a slower pace.

But 1K hours in any game is clearly hardcore gamer.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by Aeonblades

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

I also don't know what is the prejudice against Tabula Rasa.

Even before Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa had a form of Dynamic Events.

What is a Tabula Rasa? Sounds like an STD.

I'm just kidding of course.

 

The fact that people count enjoyment by the hour now is hilarious to me as well. Do you guys have any idea how many actual days I have spread across 3 accounts on EQ1 since 1999/2000? Just checking my 5 most played characters I have 467 DAYS of real time played on them. Not counting bazaar mules while im offline and such either. I'd be pissed if only got a few hundred hours out of an MMO.

I've 416 days of GW1 (10K hours) and I've seen people with over 20K hours in there.

I'll probably acquire similar amount of hours in GW2, albeit at a slower pace.

But 1K hours in any game is clearly hardcore gamer.

Cool, I'm hardcore again! :D I can't imagine playing any game as much as I have EQ because it came out when I was in high school and let's just say I had a lot more free time haha. That's an impressive amount of time on GW1 sir, I bet you pwned many faces.

Every once in a while the events system in GW2 will surprise me.

Like yesterday, I'm randomly wandering around a level 40-50 zone or some such and stumble upon a frog-people village that's been overrun by the Krayt or whatever.

Slaughter a bunch of them, revive the frog people, they actually help me finish killing the Krayt and reviving the rest of the town.

Shortly after, call is placed to attack the Krayt village/tower thing and free slaves they took, so I go and do that.

Then I get to the top of this tower thing to find a Vista, and I now have a Champion Krayt queen standing between me and an inticing looking treasure chest.

So I solo the Champion down, takes a good 4-5 minutes of pretty difficult combat, had to use my Elite twice in the fight.

But I get her down, loot the chest, get a nice Rare lvl 80 Axe (TY Salvage for Globs!) 

Do I know that eventually the Krayt will get themselves together and attack and reclaim the frog-people town?

Probably.

Do I care? Nope. I've moved on.

But it was a good, fun chunk of content.

The real problem I think all along is that Anet didn't have the balls to up the challenge enough to counter the zergs of players roaming around during the launch and such.

Some of the stuff I did was quite tough, and it was because I was solo.

Though I did another chain in some Asura research camp that was a lot of fun and challenging and it was me and 2 other random players.

So TLDR -

Event system would be much, much better if it was better balanced to be more difficult and scale up properly to combat the large player zergs.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
The is true, there was much more variety in wars pqs. And you could actually fail them.

This. In GW2 all the events are the same with differents names and mobs, also, they are statics like the PQs on War, to be honest is just a quest with a timer. In GW2 you can just die and run back or not even that and you´ll get credits and xp anyway, i remember in war when you died and that was pretty much a fail.  

GW2 DE are a copy and paste of warhammer PQs from a casual and cheap point of view.  

Originally posted by BadSpock

Every once in a while the events system in GW2 will surprise me.

Like yesterday, I'm randomly wandering around a level 40-50 zone or some such and stumble upon a frog-people village that's been overrun by the Krayt or whatever.

Slaughter a bunch of them, revive the frog people, they actually help me finish killing the Krayt and reviving the rest of the town.

Shortly after, call is placed to attack the Krayt village/tower thing and free slaves they took, so I go and do that.

Then I get to the top of this tower thing to find a Vista, and I now have a Champion Krayt queen standing between me and an inticing looking treasure chest.

So I solo the Champion down, takes a good 4-5 minutes of pretty difficult combat, had to use my Elite twice in the fight.

But I get her down, loot the chest, get a nice Rare lvl 80 Axe (TY Salvage for Globs!) 

Do I know that eventually the Krayt will get themselves together and attack and reclaim the frog-people town?

Probably.

Do I care? Nope. I've moved on.

But it was a good, fun chunk of content.

The real problem I think all along is that Anet didn't have the balls to up the challenge enough to counter the zergs of players roaming around during the launch and such.

Some of the stuff I did was quite tough, and it was because I was solo.

Though I did another chain in some Asura research camp that was a lot of fun and challenging and it was me and 2 other random players.

So TLDR -

Event system would be much, much better if it was better balanced to be more difficult and scale up properly to combat the large player zergs.

That is clearly a thing that should be improved.

The problem lies in the fact that 1 player is much more powerful than the extra 1 or 2 mobs its added to conter that player.

Even 5 mobs per player wouldn't do much.

AoE, the fact it will be so easy to get combos (even if people aren't thinking about it), the rez power, the extra dodges, etc, mean that events will be best with 5-10 people.

I hope that going forward they add mobs with different abilities and tactics to counter more players, mobs with mortars and whatnot.

An event like the one in the below screenshot will always be not be that hard - even if somehow the champion decides to tag you, it is easy to just run around while the others kill it.

Originally posted by Hrimnir

You're arguing semantics.  The simple fact is whether they move across the map or not. They are the same exact repetitive staged content.  There is nothing dynamic about it.  The same amount of mobs spawn in the same amount of waves in the same amount of stages and run along the exact same paths EVERY time you do it.

Now, had it been a case where it could truly have branched off into different possibilities,  i.e. stage 1 was kill this wave of centaurs, and depending on how quickly and easily you crushed them determined whether next stage was the centaur captain coming after you, OR, you then had to go take the fight to the centaur camp yourselves.  THAT would be dynamic.  [mod edit]

 

I have to assume you don't play the game then considering the part in red? One of the main features of DE's is dynamic scaling of mobs based off of contributing players. This is extremely evident when comparing DE's from launch day zerg rush to the current less zergy population.

Also I assume you haven't made it to the Harathi Highlands...that meta event is what you are describing in your second paragraph. Granted it doesn't give you bonus stages based off of speed but that meta event is a series of stages that push Centaur or Human control both ways across half the zone.

I had forgotten about this video that demonstrates what GW2 dynamic events can do at times.  Some people who haven't played GW2 or only gave it a short glimpse might not understand how involved DE's can actually get.

Wandering into Awesomeness

Originally posted by Roxtarr

I had forgotten about this video that demonstrates what GW2 dynamic events can do at times.  Some people who haven't played GW2 or only gave it a short glimpse might not understand how involved DE's can actually get.

Wandering into Awesomeness

That video demonstrate how DEs works to it's fullest.

What many people miss is really stick around and see what happends next, that's why I've seen so many write on this boards that DE are just circles on the map and they run there do em and win win and then run off and don't see the whole circle why this DE began and it progressed and how it ended.

Um... you know that a chain = Series of events that occur one after another.

Stages = Series of events that occur one after another.

You kind of discredited the notion with that line...

Really I can't see how you can 'claim' Rift fits War but yet you can't consider GW2 the same. Its not a bad thing and GW2 IS taking those elements from those games and expanding on it, which you can even claim War (which popularized it) took it from other games that formed in other methods such as live events in other games. If anything I feel that GW2 takes MORE from War then Rift actually does in terms of making things very stiff and restricted in where it is. The biggest thing they expand on it and make it a scripted event (yes scripted, lets not pretend the events feel very dynamic, they are very scripted which to their credit, would be difficult to really do otherwise) to 'enhance' in some ways how it works.

GW2 gets a lot of its ideas from other games. You know what? All games get elements from other games. Theres no reason to cry and try to defend a game for being original since you know what, there is no such thing. Even the very first video games took elements from elements in real life (pong from table tenis for example as a popular first one). 

Originally posted by Purutzil

Um... you know that a chain = Series of events that occur one after another.

Stages = Series of events that occur one after another.

You kind of discredited the notion with that line...

Really I can't see how you can 'claim' Rift fits War but yet you can't consider GW2 the same. Its not a bad thing and GW2 IS taking those elements from those games and expanding on it, which you can even claim War (which popularized it) took it from other games that formed in other methods such as live events in other games. If anything I feel that GW2 takes MORE from War then Rift actually does in terms of making things very stiff and restricted in where it is. The biggest thing they expand on it and make it a scripted event (yes scripted, lets not pretend the events feel very dynamic, they are very scripted which to their credit, would be difficult to really do otherwise) to 'enhance' in some ways how it works.

GW2 gets a lot of its ideas from other games. You know what? All games get elements from other games. Theres no reason to cry and try to defend a game for being original since you know what, there is no such thing. Even the very first video games took elements from elements in real life (pong from table tenis for example as a popular first one). 

Exactly what in a piece of software isn't scripted?

Even random is a script.

But it has been said before the events chains take into account what happened before.

Number of farmers kidnapped, submarines that survived, etc, are "remembered" by the next event in the chain.

Could it be expanded to take more variables into account to choose the net event in a chain?

Sure and I hope so.

It will still be scripted.

Even a hypotetical random DE generator will be based on a script.

GW2 DEs expand on public events by adding story and present it visualy and real time action, by adding faillure that will spawn a different event, by remembering certain aspects of the previous DE when spawning the next event in the chain, by dynamicaly adjusting the event to accomodate varying number of players.

All those things are enough to call it an evolution, an innovation over previous systems.

And no doubt it changed the way people level and do quests, which is enough to be called revolutionary.

Now, evolution, innovation, revolutionary, don't mean what most people think it means,it doesn't mean unique, it doesn't mean new, it doesn't mean best ever,

The biggest difference between Rift and GW2 is that the "rifts/invasions" are random mob spawners and the mobs are totally unrelated to the local setting. In other words, "rifts" do not tell any story. In GW2, not only the events are much more complex than random mob spawners, but they tell a story related to the local setting, the mobs aren't just generic uglies but are part of that story.

The evolution is HUGE.

The problem with GW2 DEs imo is that they do a pretty bad job of telling you the story.

The stories are on the whole bad enough as it is (hardly ever do I feel emotionally involved in the story or my character) but how many times do you drop into an event as it has already started? Your goals are clear enough but the story is already lost on you.

How long do you wait after an event ended to see if something else is gonna happen? 1 minute? 2? 5? 10 minutes?

Lots or even most of the time nothing is gonna happen or the same DE you just finished. Not very exciting.

Or are you gonna wait and do the event/chain from the beginning again to learn the story? To me that sort of defeats the reason to have chains in the first place.

This might very well be a fundamental flaw in public events and especially chains/stages.

It keeps you busy but it doesnt tell a good story.

I dont see the big difference. Obviously there are differences but fundamentally the same. Chained, staged etc is not all that different. They are all quest type events which are happenning on a persistant map and anyone can join in the "fun" and they all have different stages culimating in a success or fail which resets it back to the first stage.

GW 2 is a bit more complex as they, allegedly have different branches but most are not like that and still linear. In any case they still go around in circles and always reset to the first level. For me the end experience was not that different from Rifts except they were more varied like WAR PQs but more mobile. 

So essentially GW 2 events are like Rift mobile events with the variety of WAR PQs and branches rather than linear progression (in some cases).

Originally posted by Yamota

I dont see the big difference. Obviously there are differences but fundamentally the same. Chained, staged etc is not all that different. They are all quest type events which are happenning on a persistant map and anyone can join in the "fun" and they all have different stages culimating in a success or fail which resets it back to the first stage.

GW 2 is a bit more complex as they, allegedly have different branches but most are not like that and still linear. In any case they still go around in circles and always reset to the first level. For me the end experience was not that different from Rifts except they were more varied like WAR PQs but more mobile. 

So essentially GW 2 events are like Rift mobile events with the variety of WAR PQs and branches rather than linear progression (in some cases).

The main reason why you can't tell the difference, is probably to do with you painting all of them with such a large brush. You're essentially viewing them all with such a generalized perspective, that none of the details are relevant to you (which is indeed what makes them each different from one another).

If you view ANY genre with such a broad perspective, then every single game within that genre will sound the same. Hell, you can trace questing events back to the very beginning of RPGs. The main problem w/ GW2's event system, is that people experience events in bite sized pieces. Very few people remember the whole chain. Most only remember 1 link of an event chain, because they are so used to hopping from one thing to another. For example, the norn snowman video posted earlier in this thread shows an event chain. It's actually 3-4 DEs linked together, determined by the player's actions.

- In regards to the OP, what he says is absolutely correct. I don't know why people have such a hard time with this concept, but most studios tend to develop ideas alongside one another. Yes, there's a lot of situations where a game blatantly copies another (SWTOR), but there are just as many cases where 2+ studios have similar ideas and approach them in slightly different ways.

Questing 'events' are one of those ideas. A lot of companies were toying with this idea when it first immerged. Mythic may have been the company to first release a game featuring this mechanic, but they weren't the first ones talking about it. Anet has been toying with the idea since before Utopia (and yes it was originally intended to be part of Utopia). Blizzard & Turbine started using Quest Phasing, which is a different mechanic born of the same idea.

The main reason why GW2, WAR, and Rift's event systems seem so similar, is because they are all approached from the idea of making quests more of a community-oriented experience. A key difference from other forms of questing, but not one you can reasonably credit to one specific company.

Originally posted by geremady

The problem with GW2 DEs imo is that they do a pretty bad job of telling you the story.

The stories are on the whole bad enough as it is (hardly ever do I feel emotionally involved in the story or my character) but how many times do you drop into an event as it has already started? Your goals are clear enough but the story is already lost on you.

How long do you wait after an event ended to see if something else is gonna happen? 1 minute? 2? 5? 10 minutes?

Lots or even most of the time nothing is gonna happen or the same DE you just finished. Not very exciting.

Or are you gonna wait and do the event/chain from the beginning again to learn the story? To me that sort of defeats the reason to have chains in the first place.

This might very well be a fundamental flaw in public events and especially chains/stages.

It keeps you busy but it doesnt tell a good story.

 

What you see as a problem i see as an advantage. Main culprit: CHOICE.

Events do tell a story, but it isnt shoved down your throat and youll probably have to poke around a bit to get the background. If you want to.

If you dont want to, you know what your goal is and can just "kill stuff" and be merry on your way.

OTOH, WoW and its clones conditioned people pretty hard and it will take a while to break that conditioning when game doesnt shove things down your throath (aka handholding).

Wasnt there a guy on Massively that complained game isnt "handholding enough" already?

Originally posted by Zorgo

.....yeah no previous mmo's ever influenced GW2's design....if WAR had not come out; GW2 would be exactly as it is today....irrefutably. EQ, WoW, GW1, DAOC - no impact whatsoever. This is a completely unique product which would have existed as the first mmo exactly as is if nothing ever came before it. 

- Why is it not OK with you to have WAR be the impetus for the idea of dynamic events?, the GW2 devs thought about how they could take that idea and make it better, y'know, be 'influenced' by it.

If anyone says it is a clone, that would be arguable; but you are on the other side of the spectrum.

The good lord will give you permission to still like GW2 if you admit it was influenced by a particular mechanic in what you consider a 'bad' game.

Its not a sign of weakness, it is exactly how ideas have been born from the dawn of time.

 

It wasn't WAR however.

First game with DYNAMIC events was TABULA RASA with its system of DYNAMIC BATTLEFIELDS. WAR pretty much ripped it off without any major alternation, and its essentially the same system GW2 uses today.