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One of the things that has made me pretty sad as a veteran player of the game is the apparent abandonment of what I call 'Open world raid-hard content'. Im talking about TT wurm and Tequatl Rising revamp at its release. These were open world events requiring large player counts (150+), strong communication and coordination amongst the leaders of the event and often days of trial and error to find a workable strategy.
Entire communities and guilds formed around this content in the EU region that went strong for years in the hope that more of this style of content would come into GW2 but sadly they have definitely begun to die off.
I think ANET is missing a trick here. Im pretty sure a large segment of veteran players would come back to GW2 with a new 'raid-hard' open world boss event. The bragging rights of 'world first' was a massive draw to the crowds and personalities that led these events.
I dont describe them as 'raid-hard' in the sense of maximizing dps outputs and precision mechanics fulfillment. But rather in the logistical, coordination and communication challenge in itself which some masochistic commanders and players do enjoy and can be extremely challenging and rewarding.
To an extent, the Chak Gerent was somewhat a return to this style of content but they nerfed the HP and the players got comfortable with the mechanics to the point that a sufficient map population is almost a guarantee of a kill.
Most of the new maps that have come into GW2 with the LW episodes has had some form or large scale meta event with a big boss baddie to kill. Drakkar. Branded Shatterer. But they are all just 'player count' problems. Throw enough players at it...and it dies. Boring. Lazy. Promotes afk leeching of the event.
I want to harken back to the 2013-2014 period of GW2s history. That whole period was a golden age of Anet experimenting with challenging map-wide content. Marionette, TT wurm, the Lions Arch invasion and the Teq Rising revamp. The sense of community and player cooperation was immense and has since barely been matched.
I think the first initial successes of Tarir and Gerent meta i got the same feeling. But nothing in PoF or the LW episodes has since compared.
I think the key was difficulty through complexity (synchronizations, timers, dps checks, mechanic fulfillment) + large scale coordination requirement. It had to be relatively hard and not fully puggable. And the individual player had to feel like they mattered. A few key players or guilds would always step up to tag and provide information in mapchat. We even have squad infrastructure these days that we didnt have then! These modern events are pure zerg blob-fests. You get the sense the event would go the same way with or without your participation because all you really are is some added DPS into the health sponge. The older events you had a real role to play and your individual contribution was valuable and mattered more.
I just wonder if Anet will ever consider actually challenging its open world PvE player base. The players are capable of completing it imo. TT wurm is still killed by dedicated communities and pug commanders to this day. 5 years after its release. There is a hunger for this kind of content.
EDIT: The response to this thread and my subsequent replies has highlighted to me just how jaded this community is with Anets open world content offerings. I think deep down everybody DOES want harder content, but they just dont trust the rest of the community to be actually able to do it. Its the "most people are dumber than me and cant do hard stuff" mentality.
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