The question: is ArenaNet ready to punish this failure? It becomes every bookah for himself really quickly.
The Helpful Asuras are all squabbling over the various tasks leaving the bookah rabble they had collected over the past few hours to construct their own chain of command and task management. The four Helpful Asuras leaders are really good at each leading their quadrant of the map, yet when Tequatl comes out and smashes some things. I have no idea how long ArenaNet plans the chain to be, but let’s assume 1-2 hours of zone-wide activity.įor 1-2 hours, Helpful Asuras, a mega-guild chartered to “lead all bookahs” is making sure that Tequatl the Sunless will be unlocked. These are big, huge bosses that take time and dedication to unlock. Just for purposes of the demos they were set to be individual events. So we have the two dragon bosses, The Shatterer and Tequatl the Sunless, that lead dev Colin Johanson, has stated in multiple places would basically be a boss based on a culmination of zone-wide events. So even if an event punished a player, there was always the on-level daisy picking, rat killing, goblin skinning quests to give players a quick win. And most importantly, they weren’t quests. They were usually very compartmentalized. The biggest difference was that events in Rift, at least when I played, were very sterile in comparison to the more organic events in Guild Wars 2.
Yet, I must say every time we lost it felt like more of an issue of rallying what little player population there was rather than failing to hold the line. I would say that during whole zone invasions if it was to be believed that the system fairly planned things out based on active player population, then we were punished for failure. The rare times the fight seemed fair but we were failing, the system allowed time for us to recover, replan, and attack again. Yet, it mostly seemed like it was a balancing issue rather than a problem on our part. In Rift I saw failure a plenty in open world events. Those occurrences are more like branching scenarios than actual failure. What I am talking about is an occasion where the players are simply too ragtag, unskilled, uncooperative, or not lucid enough to beat the event. There is also the scenario of an elite event occurring with only one or two active players. If centaurs are attacking a fort and there is no player defense, then the system is set up so that the fort will fall. We know that events can fork when there is failure. Is there room in the design for player failure in the event system in Guild Wars 2? It’s an evolution of The Essential Scatter found in Rift.