Dynamic events, Rifts, zone invasions, Public Quests... all fail once the games population out levels an area or the games population dwindles.

I've seen this happen with three games now. First with WAR public quests. They were great at first and then after a month or two you were left soloing them or skipping them entirely.

Then Rift came along with its Rift events and even with population scaling they failed once populations dropped.

Now here I am... in a mid tier zone in GW2 and i can't kill a orange event/mob because no one is around. I find myself avoiding content as I level.

Sure everyone loves open world content. its great when a game first launches and everyone is leveling together. WAR, Rift and GW2 were all great the first month or two. 

But in hindsight was it really a good decision to put these mechanics into the game? Now that GW2 is mostly top heavy, even with down scaling people are left skipping events or begging for help in map chat. 

I'm sure at this point A-net is second guessing their decisions now. Same as Trion and Mythic did back then when the game worlds became ghost towns.

You would think after watching two companies fail with on the fly open world group content that A-net would have design GW2 to be adjusted later on when populations dipped.

They didn't and now anyone thats leveling gets to suffer...

So what do they do? What could they do that Mythic and Trion couldnt? You guys have any ideas? because right now im at the point of wishing Gw2 was a tad more traditional with its leveling content and didn't entirely focus everything on massive zone popluation. 

Originally posted by lkc673
user generating content would probably be the key, see what EQNext has to offer. Things usually sound good in paper but when implemented it doesnt work out. Theres just too many mmos out there, and more coming out this year. Especially sandbox mmos.

I agree whislt many of these upcoming sandbox and sandpark games sound great in theory I want to see how they pan out in practice.

I've always wanted to live in the Land of Theory because everything works there.

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Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

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How long have i been saying that for now....

1. you don't need DE to lvl at GW2, you have tone quests, personal story and gathering/crafting for it.

2. chain events resuming with reward chest still very popular, shame are few of such.

3. Cursed Shore offers lot of events as end game content. =XD You can farm all time there.

4. If not, try WvW, they have events too.

or may be not levels themselves, but this channeled world

you play this map at this level, you play this next map when youre bigger and then this map when bigger still.

one of the things i like about skyrim is - it doesnt have that kind of world, youve got dead easy wolves for new players and big feck off giants for high level players in adjoining areas.

The only event content I pass by when I'm alone is that I don't want to do or for some champion bosses because it's not worth the effort to take down most champs alone.  Just last night some random dude mentioned in local chat a boss was up so I headed there and we ended him ourselves.

Just because you can't do everything solo doesn't mean that nothing can be done in the zone.  Your OP sounds like gross exaggeration to me.

WAR never had the population GW2 has and had many other severe design flaws most of which centered around pvp, not pve levelling.  Rift was also criticized for their DEs but rifts (of all types),  invasions, and zone events (all of which make up their DE system, not just rifts) are extremely popular.  Rifts population problems don't really center around their DEs.  What percentage of people that have left the game or plan on cancelling their sub do so because rifts weren't engaging enough or they couldn't find enough people to complete them?

You need to come up with better reasoning and support for that claim.

Originally posted by Nitth

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Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

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How long have i been saying that for now....

So how do you plan on providing a tangible and measurable sense of progression.  We've already had the horizontal progression discussion and there are a decent number of people who want that in some form.  Taking away levels removes that.

In TSW I can see what % of the wheel I have completed and my level for each aspect of the wheel.  I'm gated on where I can go and adventure and what equipment I can use.  So a leveless system that uses skill points is not really any different than character levels.  They're just displaying the "level" and progress in a different place.

Originally posted by Torvaldr

The only event content I pass by when I'm alone is that I don't want to do or for some champion bosses because it's not worth the effort to take down most champs alone.  Just last night some random dude mentioned in local chat a boss was up so I headed there and we ended him ourselves.

Just because you can't do everything solo doesn't mean that nothing can be done in the zone.  Your OP sounds like gross exaggeration to me.

WAR never had the population GW2 has and had many other severe design flaws most of which centered around pvp, not pve levelling.  Rift was also criticized for their DEs but rifts (of all types),  invasions, and zone events (all of which make up their DE system, not just rifts) are extremely popular.  Rifts population problems don't really center around their DEs.  What percentage of people that have left the game or plan on cancelling their sub do so because rifts weren't engaging enough or they couldn't find enough people to complete them?

You need to come up with better reasoning and support for that claim.

I'm focusing on very specific mechanics within each game, not how the games failed over all.

Gw2 Dynamic events, Rifts Zone invasions/Rifts and WARs PQs all suffer from the same problem they require a large zone population.

As for why each games population reduced, I never brought up why as every game had its own issues. Just saying that every game sooner or later has a population issue in low to mid level zones andhaving mechanics that rely on zone population may not be the best thing for these types of games.

Originally posted by Torvaldr

Originally posted by Nitth

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Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

---

How long have i been saying that for now....

So how do you plan on providing a tangible and measurable sense of progression.  We've already had the horizontal progression discussion and there are a decent number of people who want that in some form.  Taking away levels removes that.

In TSW I can see what % of the wheel I have completed and my level for each aspect of the wheel.  I'm gated on where I can go and adventure and what equipment I can use.  So a leveless system that uses skill points is not really any different than character levels.  They're just displaying the "level" and progress in a different place.

I came up with a theory and idea on a change to the progression system take note that most of the time spent in a level based MMO is at endgame. Not leveling content. Which lead to this original issue in the first place. Well instead of trying to remove progression like GW2 tried, but instead switch what is being progressed into something else of progression. Simple really. Just rarely if ever done...

Originally posted by MMOExposed

 

I came up with a theory and idea on a change to the progression system take note that most of the time spent in a level based MMO is at endgame. Not leveling content. Which lead to this original issue in the first place. Well instead of trying to remove progression like GW2 tried, but instead switch what is being progressed into something else of progression. Simple really. Just rarely if ever done...

What?

Originally posted by ShakyMo
perhaps levels are the problem

I'm still playing a game that's focus is leveling up skills rather than player level.  And the population has not dropped.  Nobody is leaving this game that has been out since March 27, 2008.  Skills is where it is at.

Originally posted by Lovely_Laly

1. you don't need DE to lvl at GW2, you have tone quests, personal story and gathering/crafting for it.

2. chain events resuming with reward chest still very popular, shame are few of such.

3. Cursed Shore offers lot of events as end game content. =XD You can farm all time there.

4. If not, try WvW, they have events too.

Yes you can pretty much skip one of the most hyped features of the game, this wasnt a how do I level post give me some suggestions please.  It was a post specifically questioning their implementation.

They did put the best gear into dungeon running. I'm not just talking about fractals either. There were dungeons already that had entire sets of gear. They funneled people into positions that they think people wanted.

Of the 3, I think Rift tried harder. Didn't zones get overrun when people didn't finish events? At least that was an attempt at getting people to participate. Again though, I could not talk my guild there into running events, at most they would do group daily/weekly events. They wanted to grind the dungeon because it held all the best loot. Those raids were scheduled. I still remember the last invasion I did in the game. I was in one town protecting the NPCs for four hours. People would come and go but there were never enough people to finish the thing. Meanwhile, I gave up and went back to town, there were people all over just standing around and talking or banging on the test dummies testing their raid builds. That was necessary too because they had an enrage timer on these two guys were fighting in a dungeon. If you didn't DPS them down using kegs or something, they would kill you off and you had to avoid wisps, it's been forever but I remember that DPS was a big deal on the fight. This guy was it probably. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH4y4FQOGDA I was always on faerie duty too on one of the first fights, again, DPS mattered.

Anyone into gear progression goes where the best loot is, the rest doesn't matter to them.