Newcomers and Dynamic Events, what you have to know

[barackopala]

As far as I've seen on this forum, new players have been commenting about their experiences with this game, some are rather positive in certain aspects that others consider them their weakest spot, but now lets talk about a big mistake everyone is doing (even I did it when critizicing the game and lots of people too) this is the way Dynamic Events work and how they have a "lack of storyline or depth" claiming that the game just throws you random events to protect the dolyak or do A-B-C without any context whatsoever... let me tell you this idea is wrong, why will you say? It's quite simple: It's the mentality you're used to play with.


"Mentality" we are used to play with?

-This image sums up pretty much what we're used to see on our common MMO-RPG, directed questlines, you can be helping farmer johnson to kill his bears while your friend that's 1 level ahead of you already killed those bears and is now helping him to repair his lands, this breaks the immersion from a "global perspective", the idea of phasing is amazingly good when looked as a single player experience but if you look it from the outside it ends up a bit too immersion breaking. Keep in mind guild wars2 is not totally safe from this idea, having hearts as this sort-of single player model can be also critiziced by it, but you can say the hearts end up being sort of "war efforts" where you have to help your desired "heartgiver" (still can be critiziced, traditional mmo-rpg style is a bit too stagnant in this point).


Now up with Dynamic Events and it's storyline:
-Dynamic events (as the name says) are events, they are meant to be done not individually but as an event it's meant to be done with other people, it's not necessary to have a party or some sort of communication, people will help you, this game does this extremely well (you can discuss if newcomers have more trouble finding lowbies but that's up for another discussion that A-Net will have to lead sooner or later).
The way Dynamic Events work is that they end up happening without your necessary intervention, some cases might not apply, some scort events have to be "triggered" by talking to the starting npc, which ends up making a Dynamic Event chain! Which ends up being a STORYLINE that you can follow if you're cautious, the storyline is "hidden" in the events themselves by talking to npc's or following the start of the chain (which most of the time it's complicated due to you not arriving at the start but you can get a general idea on what you have to do and why you do it in that specific moment).


Now let me present a video that explains how dynamic events work, this will present some examples and the idea I presented above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes



PS: Sorry for any spelling mistakes, english is not my native language, if anyone would like to correct me on the exact wording please do so.
PS2: Could a mod change the "Dinamic" wording on the thread into "Dynamic"? Just notticed my typo error

[Zilong]

Yay. Another post to tell people who don't like something about the game that they're "wrong" for not liking it, or they only dislike it because they're Trained WoW Puppets or something.

I don't think it's about liking or disliking, this post is about perspective of the event system. Which you like it or not alot of people still do and still complain about it here and the official forums. And as the poster said, and I second it. I too came to the game with the "WoW" mindset as many did and still do. No one is saying that you cant dislike it, I have a few issues with it myself, the thing is that alot of people say they dislike it because they are playing it the wrong way to actually be able to enjoy it (and people seem to read that and ignore what's being said). After playing it how "its supposed to" and you still don't like it, then sure.

[barackopala]

Yay. Another post to tell people who don't like something about the game that they're "wrong" for not liking it, or they only dislike it because they're Trained WoW Puppets or something.

The idea I tried to present is why the critic is there and where it comes from, I'm not calling it a wrong mentality but a wrong analysis on what you did, the game does show you a story in each Dynamic event.

I'm not talking just about WoW, I'm talking about most (if not all) traditional MMO-RPG, I didn't even talked about WoW, just presented the classical RPG Question mark (it's even on single player RPG's) in a way that we are used to takling to the NPC with the question mark that tells us a story.

All I wanted to state is about how we got so used to the traditional MMO-RPG model that we don't even see that the npc's are talking and giving us some insight on the future events, that's when the game comes to "life" (if you want to call it that way, It's still artificial and it's still a "questline" but it gives some flavor and doesn't break the immersion).

IDK why you acted so defensive without even understanding the purpose of my writing claiming that I'm just BS'ing for calling people wrong on their mentality, neither I get why you talked about WoW when I only talked about the traditional model, if I haven't put the exclamation mark (which is from WoW), would you have said the same about WoW? then let's add another exclamation mark! simple as that, there are a fuckton of images of questmarks from other MMO-RPG's in google, just presented the most popular (come on, we all know WoW is the most popular MMO-RPG)

[Maarius]

Nice post there.

I see quite a few people complaining that an event occurs in the same place a few minutes later. That another invasion follows after you've successfully defended a place. I'd like to tell those people that for me it makes sense. The NPC stays in a hostile environment and - if he is not moving on - is quite aware that follow-up attacks are probably happening. As it is now the npc is thankful and offers some kind of reward (heart-karma rewards or rewards for coin). Not only that, in a few cases a success-state has the possibility of other events to spawn nearby, so a reward for players who don't rush on to the next event-farm.

Now imagine that events wouldn't cycle. You'd do your checklist-thingy and the world would stop being alive. Backscaling would make no sense, since you'd probably have done all events in a few months and find nothing else to do besides repetitive daylies. The way it is now, you can choose to do fun events again... with friends... alone... just have fun. The world offers more variety, the longer I play the game. In checklist-mmos the opposite is true.

Furthermore this makes a true MMORPG. Tons of people wouldn't have experienced this same event before you. The next time you come along you have the choice to help other players (and have a quite new experience, because maybe there are less players this time and the event scales for lower numbers, or it becomes more epic because more players are around and the event scales up for those big numbers with more enemies or veterans this time). And you still have the choice to move on.