What is your view of GW2 having a non-instanced explorable world?

Um I think a lot of you people have been playing the wrong persistent world games.

In LOTRO I have no problems with the world being persistent, I would expect Guild Wars 2 to be just the same. Sorry instancing is for the lose and GW 2 will be a much better game overall if it has persistent worlds.

Kill stealing can be prevented. Camping can be prevented.

Being in a persistent world isn't forced grouping and I don't see how you think it could be.

Gareth, persistant worlds do force you to interact with other members of the gaming population. While this can be a good thing, it can also be a bad one.

Imagine you are out on your own exploring and an (or a bunch of) idiot players decide to grief you. They can't kill you, they can't kill steal, but one (or more) players can keep you bottled up in corner of the map.

People can follow you around, begging for help or money, all the time. In a persistant world there is nothing to stop them doing this.

I agree that instances can detract from game play, but given the general community of late, the "griefing" would make the game unbearable.

How would they do this when you can walk through them ???
That's where ignore comes in. That player can follow you around sure but he can't do any harm to you, plus you can always report them for harassment if it's deterring from your gameplay.

I hold out hope - I think it could work. I like the idea of an explorable area that is similar to an enormous town with more to do. I don't see why they couldn't keep the district model; too many people trying to kill a boss? Jump to District 2!

I run into people I know in towns on a daily basis - running into them in the wilderness would be that much cooler.

The way that they are talking about it reminds me of many other games. I don't have any real complaints. At least, I don't care enough to actually care.

They can't at the moment. Collision detection between characters has been asked for by players since day one. If they implement this (and they do have it in other games) griefing in this manner will become a possibility.


I've been subject to this type of griefing before. Characters that run around you in circles and side to side in front of you. It can only be ignored for so long before it actually gives me a headache. 6/10 they give up before then - but look at the GWG community, players here would do this for hours just to get a rush out of someone logging off because they can't stand it anymore.

Reporting takes a long time, and often the punishment for this type of griefing isn't particularly severe (in the games I've played). I don't see it being any different here - especially since I doubt that they will implement GMs in game.

Yes.

Also the other good reasons:

When you log off, you don't get sent back to town having to make your way out to where you needed (killing all the mobs in the way) to finish a quest or get to an area, you can just come back in where you logged out at.

People can join your party from anywhere in the world, town or explorable area (in a persistent world) meaning you can talk to friends and be in their party as soon as they get on, not really that great but I think it's cool.

You can have people help you if you're having trouble on a mob instead of having to go all the way into town and going through it all again. How you ask? Well you transport them to you, there could be a skill or item that does that. Friends mostly for that but also random passerbys. Meaning you can also help people who are in need of it.

Kill stealing can be prevented by having enemies tagged as soon as you hit them. Camping can be prevented by faster spawns for mobs that would be camped and/or more spawns. Quest mob camping wouldn't really happen and if it did you could report the person.

I'm pretty sure Anet will know how to make persistent worlds work as well as they do in the other game I play and not have all your negative effects you guys are complaining about, around.




They can very well take it off in PvE like they have it now. So I still don't see the problem. Seeing as PvP will be separate from the PvE worlds.

I've never experienced that type of griefing in the persistent world I play. Even in the free MMOs I've played I've not witnessed that kind of griefing and I doubt it would even happen at all if often in GW 2 and I'm pretty sure Anet knows and have something planned out for it. Besides you're not even sure this would happen you are just guessing at most. I don't want to take a chance and have Anet pass up on something amazingly fun like persistent worlds.

There might be solutions to the problems of a persistant world but what are the benefits again?

I think the negatives outwiegh the positives and the positives like helping others on the fly or getting help can easily be replicated on an instanced world just by adding dynamic grouping options.


I played a number of MMO's with persistant worlds and I havent had much problem, then I came to GW and to my suprise rrealized how much better instanced worlds were in comparison. Especially in a game that seperates pve from pvp, theres really no point to a persistant world in a pve game other than grief.

I see 1-2 negatives if that, that cannot be fixed with persistent worlds. I listed more than 1 positive up above.

You guys are too focused on grief when it's a very small outcome of things. Plus Anet has already said GW is going to have more persistence to it, so it doesn't really matter.

I'd love random attacks from Dragons. They have like 1,000,000 health, and you can only fend them off by meeting several requirements (ie, surviving for a set amount of time, dealing 100,000 damage, capturing strategical points... ) It could be like the new Alliance Battle. =D

I hate this idea. This is exactly why I preferred Guild Wars over over online games: privacy. When I walk outside I DO NOT random people coming up to my mesmer and saying "ur hawt" and spamming me for party invites. Persistence also has a lot of problems...

Queueing for a boss... wow that's exciting
Trying to do something with 50 other idiots surrounding you... just no.
Being harassed wherever you go... is this meant to be fun?

And the "random events" thing is a load of rubbish! It's like in-game spam... leave me out of it. Unless they perfect persistence I will be very aggrovatd / disenchanted with Guild Wars.

Oh, and:

Care to explain how?

I don't mind persistence... but only if we can still used instanced versions of the maps.

Spamming a mez for party invite? Where do you have that problem?

One thing these persistant world games couldn't do is prevent someone from "pulling harder mobs on top of you". The ole fun and grief trick in the Everquest series was to long range attack a mob or root it, then turn yourself invisible and wait for root to break and then run it past some unsuspecting noob and then zone out by either the entrance or exit or gate. Then zone back in as the agro of the mob changed to the unsuspecting noob. I saw more train wrecks like that in Everquest and while some were funny to watch, I know it wasn't fun for the noob. But, them being a noob, meh who cares. lol

While kills stealing can be prevented with first to hit which flags player/group and that player/group gets loot no matter who kills it, the camping problem still persists and then it becomes a battle of he with the fastest reflex and internet connection as to who owns said camp mob. I've seen this done in the Everquest II series and it always comes down to squabbling over the spawn. The only way to prevent camping really is to have random spawns of at least the boss mobs or any mobs that have valuable items on them that drop. Random spawns is a way to eliminate camping and random loot type drops as well.

im sure Anet will implement a report system to handle these problems. Their staff will be larger once they successfully sell GW2, which i think they will despite all the players that say they won't buy it for whatever reason.

on topic. i can't wait to play in a non-instance world. GW is my first MMO PC game and other non-instance games didn't catch my eye to wanna try them. So since i love guild wars, im very excited to experience a persistance world in guild wars. I have faith in Anet to diminish majority of the flaws a persistant world can have, that i at least read about.

I like that idea personally...makes it feel more real in that you can run into people, you might stumble upon a noob and help him when he's about to die or something, might run into a friend on his way back to town. I just like the idea overall...havng instanced zones just gets lonely sometimes.

We already know for a fact that they don't want another version of WoW, so I think we're worrying too much. While they're talking about larger persistent areas, they already stated that things like missions/dungeons etc. will be instanced.

It feels like, to me at least, over-sized towns that can have attacks from monsters occur in them while maintaining the instancing in critical areas that is the heart and soul of GW.

There HAS to be enough instancing that private parties have plenty of opportunities to escape the inevitable idiocy of excessive group settings, or GW2 will fail as just another WoW attempt.

Keeping assigned drops in instances and in persistent areas - vital.
Keeping PKing out of PvE persistent areas - vital.
Keeping level caps irrelevant - vital.

Anything else is selling out.

I'm betting that the entire persistent world will also include as many different, unique instances. It may even be you'll need to play through the many instances to unlock, move forward in, the persistent world.

It'll be a nice change.

Something many people over look is the fact that WoW is a good game, criticize it all you want but 10 million people still play it, and a good amount of them really love it. The fact of the matter is both WoW and GW have great elements of gameplay, I see no harm in meshing the two to create an almost near perfect MMO experience.

i would prefer a non-instanced world (instanced missions and dungeons of course) its just more interesting than allways being by urself. Also the farming thing wouldnt be too bad, the world will be massive i would imagine, so there will be lots of places to farm. thats what i found in WoW, since there was 2 points where people had to farm there was allways a fairly decent portion of the population farming (I found) im talking about farming for mounts, ur first and epic. besides there were all those gold farmers who had obsene amounts of gold because they farmed non-stop and i never saw 1. anyway what im saying is if they make the world itself big enough with enough variety but with lots of spots with similar priced loot dropping e.g. 1 place drops boots= x amount, another place drops gloves worth the same amount, well every1 can find their own place but know they're getting good loot.

I'll start by saying i've played both WoW and guildwars both for 2+ years. so i have experience with both types of worlds.

I see moving to an non-instance explorable world as a VERY good thing. looking through this thread, it looks like the two most common worries are (1) griefing, (2) loot camping/stealing.

greifing, yes. it can be a problem. but it's not near a big a problem as some people want to imagine it will be. I have an embarrassing amount of hours logged in WoW. sure occasionally members of the opposite faction /spit on you if you did or killed something they thought they were entitled to (on a PvE realm so they can't kill me).

but i've never had anyone follow me around actively trying to annoy me. even if they did try, it's pretty easy to loose someone if they aren't in your party. highly doubt ncsoft is gonna create a flat world with no objects on it...

boss camping/loot stealing. first off, i can almost 100% guarantee the best loot will come from instanced dungeons and/or missions. I play on a full realm on WoW where there's a queue during peak hours. full day leveling on an persistent world, maybe a couple times a day you'll come across something where you'll actually actively wait for something to respawn to kill it. in those cases, you either skip that quest, or you just invite the other people waiting to your party so you all get credit at once. most of the time, all the stuff you have to kill, there are many many of them spread out in an area, and the more people there are, the faster they respawn. it's not a big deal...

you won't have 50 people waiting for some boss to spawn because he drops some unique "green" weapon. Anet isn't that stupid.

After reading a few posts... some people are worrying about their green drops. I totally agree with that.

What I think will happen, if ANet makes GW2 non-instanced, is that they will add group-dungeons in... no doubt. Most uninstanced games that have dungeons usually will have a random named mob here and there on the non-instanced part.

Atleast, that is what I've seen in my gaming experience.

The main issue is spawning of bosses and mobs for quest completion...this was something that I did not like about WoW. On the other hand, it does seem like you are disconnected when you are out in your own explorable area and not interacting with others.

Hopefully it will be done in a way that doesn't interfere too much with the ability to progress and complete quests.

I don't play WoW either. I was just saying that the idea sounds pretty good.

There are so many MMORPGs out there that I don't even know what's the difference. I just picked up GW because it's the second biggest game after WoW and you don't have to pay. Though I was a little disappointed that the world is instanced and you can't do anything non-combat related.

Yep. Anet will do something about that, as pretty much everyone knows that's one of the problems of instanced worlds.

Poster at the top of this page knows what I'm talking about. Mobs will spawn faster if there are more people in the area, goodbye quest spawn camping. What if a higher level comes in and does it to grief? Most likely wouldn't happen but you could report then. It'd be a rare occurrence. If someone same level is on the same quest as you, just group with them for a bit. Won't even half to talk to them it'd be simple.

Most likely bosses with important quests will be instanced.

*Sigh* I think you missed the point.
WoW, EQ2, L2, they have the sort of mechnisms that you are looking for in a game. GW does not. Never has. If the pay factor is what attracted you to play this game, then no wonder it is such a huge disappointment.

GW never pretended to be a persistant world. In fact it was advertised specifically as instanced. It was advertised as not needing to spend hours doing unrealated tasks (like fishing) in order to get ahead in the game. It was advertised as non-gear centric. It was adverstised as not having world PvP - and anyone who picked up the game hoping that it would be both these things clearly didn't do the most basic research available: reading the box.

word of advise:
get info about a game before you say "you want this game to be like that game".
- WoW has a bunch of QQ kiddies on 1 half of the map. The other half is full of pricks. just to let you know.
- WoW pvp sucks because the QQ Kiddies always scatter themselves. The pricks win because they atleast know "stay with atleast 3 at all times".
- WoW pve sucks because after you hit lvl 70 it is a big fight-fest of staying up at night just to get gear. The QQ kiddies complain if they don't have the right gear. the pricks have no life and get gear 24/7.


also... SOGWTT has opposed this topic.

QFT

Anyways non-instanced explorable areas would actually be quite refreshing when compared to the boring and dull explorable areas GW already has.

SOGWTT has opposed threads of this type.

i'm confused though. you pretty much just described any mmo game with a fanbase. you have the "GW pve sucks because the QQ kiddies use Ursan and mashing 3 buttons ... " and I could go on and on.

also has ZERO to do with whether non-instanced explorable world is a good idea or not.

I think most people welcome the fact that it will be non-instanced. there have been plenty of games out there that have tested the waters and shown what what works and what to avoid. the downsides to an persistent world are easily workaroundable (and much as I dislike some of their decisions, i'm pretty sure anet is smart enough to work around them. especially since their original game was strictly instanced and they know what their playerbase expects).

GW is not a disappointment. In fact, I like it a lot. I'm just saying I would like it even better if it becomes non-instanced.

It will be rather fun to start over.

*only read the OP before replying*

I don't like it, sadly. Mainly because there are times I want to play the game alone, or I'll be roleplaying with someone or even talking to them, and some dumb jerk can just walk up and start emote spamming me or getting in our way or doing SOMETHING to annoy me. But then again, I'm anti-social.

I would imagine the best way to "oppose" thread topics you don't like would be to, er, not post in them maybe?

if you read the actual topic...
i clearly stated that if we just add the "SOGWTT has opposed this thread.", it'd would be considered spamming. so that is why we respond.
get your info right before flaming.

I like the idea of a persistent world, for multiple reasons.

1) You meet other people.
2) Areas will likely be more open and larger.
3) By seeing other peoples' playing styles, you may get inspiration for certain builds and whatnot.
4) Since people are in the areas all the time, there is room for lots of "randomness" in the world. It's not like GW1 where you memorize every spawnpoint. There may be a time where you wanna get to this town but cannot pass through this big bad tunnel full of bad guys, but one time you come over and see a higher levelled player and his buddy clearing it, making things easier for you and also creating a sense of surprise.

The only way I am not big on a persistent world is that lots of quests which affect monster spawns heavily/rely on you killing certain monsters will be a pain. I am glad missions and dungeons will still be instanced though. Those would not even make sense in a persistent world!