I have found out that events are best played with 3 players.

At release i thought it sucked donkeyballs doing an escort quest with 25 other people making the event feel ... quite off ....

Now it's allot better with arround 2/5 people helping you out.

So personally i think it's awesome :)

Originally posted by Zeppelin4
Thanks for the laugh. I don't know why I laughed but I did so thanks. :) To your topic I have no idea though I did login the other day to transfer to a new server for a guild and couldn't because it was full :( The rest of the servers said full or  high so not sure why your having a issue.

He is right tho. I logged in yesterday evening since a long time and pretty much all lower level zones are dead!

I was questing for about an hour or so, before I got totally bored again.... there was not a single player around. :-(

So it seems the game has already become top heavy and no new players joining anymore.

I'm actually playing several alts, among which a little thief (human) and little engineer (asura), and each time I log them to play in low (15-) areas, I meet a lot of people at the events.

Server: Gandara, EU.

Originally posted by Djildjamesh

I have found out that events are best played with 3 players.

At release i thought it sucked donkeyballs doing an escort quest with 25 other people making the event feel ... quite off ....

Now it's allot better with arround 2/5 people helping you out.

 

So personally i think it's awesome :)

Maybe GW2 would be better if it were less populated.  It feels like your a nobody in a nobody world.  No dependance on anyone, everything is automatic.  I was out of town for a few weeks.  When I came home I found that I could not log on to the game.  My Necro is a level 53 and as much as I like it I have no abalities to look fwd too on top of no community.

For now I'm playing on a Vanilla WoW server and loving the community all over again.  First time I feel like I'm playing an mmo in a long long time :)

Originally posted by The_Korrigan

I'm actually playing several alts, among which a little thief (human) and little engineer (asura), and each time I log them to play in low (15-) areas, I meet a lot of people at the events.

Server: Gandara, EU.

I think the lower areas are fairly populated.

Mid areas are quite dead on my server though; Maguum US.

Obvious 70-80 Ruins of Orr is full.

Originally posted by Aquazen
I think Xmas will bring a bunch more people into the game again. You will see more folks starting and making new characters. Its true though, I havent been able to form a party for CM Story in over 3 weeks, even with a guild of 499 players O.o

I am in a small guild of 39 - and never have problems getting a group together within around 15 mins, and we average less than 10 on at any one time.

Getting PUGS together is usually faster than this....

Your need to change Guilds has zip to do with the need for server merges.

It's funny how people don't really complain about WoW's low zones which ARE ghost towns.

For the record I really don't have problems finding people in zones. It's true it's not very easy to find dungeon party, but if you are patient, it's not such a difficult matter too. Thanks to no trinity, there is not this stigma of "3 DPS looking for healer and tank" and dungeon team composition can be pretty much any classes you want.

Actually I\m happy population in lower zones scaled down a bit. It's much more fun for me to do event in 3-10 people instead of 30 man zerg that will smash everything into the ground instantly.

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by The_Korrigan

I'm actually playing several alts, among which a little thief (human) and little engineer (asura), and each time I log them to play in low (15-) areas, I meet a lot of people at the events.

Server: Gandara, EU.

I think the lower areas are fairly populated.

Mid areas are quite dead on my server though; Maguum US.

Obvious 70-80 Ruins of Orr is full.

There is a ton of mid-level areas.

Someone following the personal story while levelling won't visit all the areas - different story lines will take you to different places.

Still I think that is an interesting part of the experience - sometimes you feel very lonely exploring something on the back of beyond and the next day when you resume exploration in the same area there is people everywhere.

That is a strength and a weakness of GW2 - you never know what you going to get.

--------------------------

About the "reverse overflow" thing.

There is no reverse overflow, just overflow servers - Anet can easily direct players to whatever server they choose (vide join party members feature, join party in dungeon and GW1 districts) so they can decide that the Desolation Timberline Falls also become the Fissure of Woe Timberline Falls. 

I made a new char(r) to play with a friend who only just started. So far we are still hanging in Queensdale and it is anything but empty. Whenever the champions near the Hunting Lodge pop, there will instantly gather 10 people to finish these events.

About a week before halloween I went to Timberline Falls and there were always people around to do events with me.

I remember climbing the Krait nest and someone who was with me at that time asked if I wanted to kill the witch, which we did.

Snowden Drifts - I asked if someone wanted to kill the Icebrood Champ with me; got my answer and the champ went down.

And and and .. *insert more pointless examples here*

The only thing that bugs me is that my server Far Shiverpeaks got way worse in WvW. But I can't blame the vikings - always fighting against servers with nightcappers just sucks. 

I completely blame Anet for that. They should have foreseen this huge imbalance created by mixed servers.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

 

There is a ton of mid-level areas.

Someone following the personal story while levelling won't visit all the areas - different story lines will take you to different places.

Still I think that is an interesting part of the experience - sometimes you feel very lonely exploring something on the back of beyond and the next day when you resume exploration in the same area there is people everywhere.

That is a strength and a weakness of GW2 - you never know what you going to get.

--------------------------

About the "reverse overflow" thing.

There is no reverse overflow, just overflow servers - Anet can easily direct players to whatever server they choose (vide join party members feature, join party in dungeon and GW1 districts) so they can decide that the Desolation Timberline Falls also become the Fissure of Woe Timberline Falls. 

Depends on server I guess.

I've got an Ele (70) / Guard (40ish) / War (55 ish) and all 3 had issue with empty zones.

Ele is now in Orr so no problem there; had 2 packs of people go for the 'clear map' which was fun to tag along.

War / Guard is having issues.

Think I might say 'screw it' and just level up to 80 with crafting on my alts.

Originally posted by coretex666

The only thing that this thread showed to me is that it is a good move for companies to make population caps on servers lower (not saying it is what GW is doing, I have no idea what middle, high, full stands for).

But it obviously has some psychological effect on the players considering they blindly post server statuses without any idea what the population really is...

I think many games do that already, including GW2. It's pretty obvious that the population has decayed drastically since launch, and they are fooling no one by keeping the server status as "full". It's also a very valid maneuver. If there are less players, there's no need to keep running big, expensive servers at half capacity when you can run small servers at high or full. And then there is the psychological factor that you mention.

Originally posted by mCalvert
Theres nothing unusual here except the same old flaw with MMOs that comes from leveling progression and static content.

Well, unless you can convince players to rerun lower level content by making it interesting/rewarding to do so or perhaps by adding permadeath so they have to. 

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by mCalvert
Theres nothing unusual here except the same old flaw with MMOs that comes from leveling progression and static content.

Well, unless you can convince players to rerun lower level content by making it interesting/rewarding to do so or perhaps by adding permadeath so they have to. 

Permadeath in games that use time+rng as resources is imo a real silly concept.

In games like XCOM, FTL, CIV, platformers, etc, permadeath is a tool to get better and try different tactics. In an MMO by the time you get to the point you lost your character the game you already forgot what went wrong or the game migth as well been changed.

Permadeath in MMOs is more a tool to make you stop playibg rather than go grind same crap

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by mCalvert
Theres nothing unusual here except the same old flaw with MMOs that comes from leveling progression and static content.

Well, unless you can convince players to rerun lower level content by making it interesting/rewarding to do so or perhaps by adding permadeath so they have to. 

My solution would be to design content which has high replay value, and is irrelevent to how long youve played. OR true dynamic content. FPs games for example have a limited number of maps, but are fun every single time you play just because of the enjoyment of the combast system. GW2 combat is more fun than rift because its active (even though it gets stale). Hardcore PVP games are truly dynamic because you are fighting real people who can think, not dum 1s and zeros. Sandboxes emphasize player created content, which only gets created if someone wants it. Vs dev created content where they make a lot of fail content. Just spitballing here.

So I was playing on my thief last night and I ended up at a skill challenge it Metrica Province with  a veteran fire elemental and 2 lesser elementals. This area is tight, with lots of mobs and of course when I show up a couple people were just leaving, so I missed out on doing it with them.

My first attempt was met with burning death in a few seconds.  I layed there, a lifeless smoldering corpse, for a minute but didn't see anybody else. So I rezzed up and snuck back in there. I was going to leave the area like a pansy  and cry about it to my wife until she come and helped me but I noticed that there were alot of drakes and skelks about, and fire elementals do AOE damage. So I range aggroed the elemental, run into the drakes and skelks, dodged a couple times to keep myself alive then healed an ran away. The elemental damaged the others and they all fought each other. The drakes and skelks were wiped out but so were the 2 lesser elementals and the vet was down to about 10% life, which I handily removed from him.

Much more satisfaction from that fight than I've ever had from running around with a giant zerg of players.  I'm not saying that a low population is ideal, but I think the game plays well enough with a low pop, and maybe better than when it's overcrowded.

Originally posted by Kaleston

It's funny how people don't really complain about WoW's low zones which ARE ghost towns.

For the record I really don't have problems finding people in zones. It's true it's not very easy to find dungeon party, but if you are patient, it's not such a difficult matter too. Thanks to no trinity, there is not this stigma of "3 DPS looking for healer and tank" and dungeon team composition can be pretty much any classes you want.

Actually I\m happy population in lower zones scaled down a bit. It's much more fun for me to do event in 3-10 people instead of 30 man zerg that will smash everything into the ground instantly.

It's difference in game design, I think. In GW2 you want to see other players because the core of the gameplay experience are the events, and the regular events usually can get more loot and better rewards with more people around, and the big group ones, well, you usually need other people to complete, specially since you can't overlevel them.

Actually Blizzard is taking steps to combat this with the cross server zones for lower level areas when there's not enough people in them (something I'd really like other MMOs would implement)... and if you read the forums people are actually complaining about other people being around stealing their kills or their resource nodes.