Guild Wars 2

So, I hear alot of people complaining about the Candidate Trials. A few weeks ago, I made a post stating that the problem with Aetherblade retreat was a bad dungeon: it was Hard, Temporary, AND Story-related. Any two of those aspects are fine, because they don’t offend any (logical) casual player. All three is a problem because it then steps on the casual player’s toes a bit. I will admit it: Candidate trials t4 was too hard for my voice-chat enabled group. We’re decent players, but not the best. And you know what? That’s OK! That’s better than OK, in fact, it’s good! There are better players than us. They need stuff to do too! And this content (tier 2/3/4 of Candidate Trials) is perfect for the hardcore players! It’s challenging and rewarding, but casuals miss nothing besides an achievement by not participating. No story, nothing that would be ultimately missed. And achievements aren’t supposed to be something every player can/does get. they represent time, brainpower, or skill which the player has displayed. Some are easy, others are not. Complaining about this achievement is like saying ‘anything I can’t get without a lot of work/skill shouldn’t be in the game!’ If that’s the case, should everything be at the same skill level as the lvl 1-60 open world? Easy and simple enough for any old player to get no prob?

Now, don’t get me wrong; Anet has made content which is bad; they have made dungeons which glitch and become harder than it should be (TA Forward/Up), as well as content which is inappropriately hard (like Aetherblade Retreat, despite being story related, was a very difficult dungeon, with limited time to complete). But Candidate Trials was a good piece of content. That’s coming from someone who couldn’t beat tier 4! I hope Anet continues to make content of all levels; hard, easy, and everything in between, keeping the main story content at a level most players can do given an hour or so per day for the 2 weeks it’s available, but having side quests which are harder, or longer to complete.

EDIT: My argument here is not concerning if temp content on the whole is a good or bad thing, and is under the assumption that if Anet does this again, they will have their act together and not have to fix exploits/bugs half way through. Those points fall outside my base argument here that hard content that the average player, even the average ‘good’ player, can’t beat is perfectly good content.

No, it is not.

I really do not like “It’s fine make it harder trolls”. Specially when they talk about content that has bugs and issues exploited to win instead being done the way it’s mean to be played.

It’s content that was exploited and then ‘fixed’.

Now the achievements have no merit for those who do it the right way as people will assume they exploited, and those who did it exploiting bugs get to keep their reward.
In the other hand, those who would want to do it the way it’s mean to be be done: illing the waves as they come, are left out.

There’s only a fix to this:
- Fix it and adjust difficulty to a reasonable degree for temporary content.
- Keep it for another week so people can do it after it’s been fixed.
- Never again make an temporary content harder after it has been done already by players, unless they reset the rewards.

Harder content is fine, even for temporary things.
It’s also OK for cyclical content that can be retried once a year.
As long as there won’t be permanent records in your account and it’s nothing missable.

For example, like they do with Monster Power in Diablo III. You can put monster power all the way up to level 10 and you’ll be rewarded for it, but you can still play at your own pace, and there’s no achievements for it.

It’s never ok for something temporary that has been done already by players, as that creates a rift between legitimate players (both who did it and did not do it) and those who play the system instead the game.

@MithranArkanere, Well, I am not trolling. Neither was my post a few weeks back. Yeah, Anet kinda screwed up with the bugs involved here. It happens. It’s not good either. Maybe this time it should be nerfed to the level it was at before the patch. That’s not the topic of discussion. The topic is this piece of content AS INTENDED. Not as it was, being buggy/exploitable.

Your intention may not be trolling, but it feels exactly like that.

If there wasn’t the bugs and exploit, you’ll see way more people coplaining about the difficulty in the forums, and, of course, still the occasional “It’s fine by me, make it harder” troll.

“It’s fine by me” is not a good and reasonable reason to make anything harder, when builds can so radically change a player’s experience, and getting a new gear set takes much more time than the temporary content.

The point is that the achievement is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and you don’t miss out on any story content by not doing it or failing to complete it. Sure, maybe you have bragging rights, and maybe some players that used exploits will be able to brag about achievements they shouldn’t have had. But you can’t fault people for looking for creative solutions to difficult problems either, and I don’t foresee a situation where someone would say “if you weren’t good enough to get this one achievement then you will be kicked from the group.”

So yeah, there’s no real reason to complain about it.

dreadicon (OP), you’re absolutely right. The ‘trinity’ you suggest should be a staple of any new content/gameplay ANet wants to pull out of the Living World updates. As someone who enjoyed Aetherblade Retreat (as in I finished it when I ran it, and still did it a couple more times), people who couldn’t enjoy the dungeon should have the opportunity to at least get better at it, or finish it for the story at the very least.

As for Mithran, I’m not sure what you’re complaining about: the content or the exploiters? If the latter, OP wasn’t talking about that, he was saying tough content is welcome when it doesn’t interfere with the ‘pick two of three from the trinity of Difficulty, Duration, and Story’ principle of content. If people choose to exploit it, that’s not ANet’s fault.

Edit: This was in reply to dreadicon’s and Mithran’s original posts, they’ve (mainly Mithran) clarified what they mean since then. I still think that Mithran, you’re getting a little fussed over nothing dreadicon has really said. He thinks that hard content is good, as long as players aren’t forced into playing it, which they’re not with CT t3/4; unlike AR, where anyone who wanted to see the story (any sane person following the LS, basically) was forced to play it through.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Your intention may not be trolling, but it feels exactly like that.

If there wasn’t the bugs and exploit, you’ll see way more people coplaining about the difficulty in the forums, and, of course, still the occasional “It’s fine by me, make it harder” troll.

“It’s fine by me” is not a good and reasonable reason to make anything harder, when builds can so radically change a player’s experience, and getting a new gear set takes much more time than the temporary content.

I never said to make it even harder than it is now, I apologize if I came off that way, rather that the level of difficulty intended was fine here. My argument is that there is a group of players who crave extremely challenging PvE content, and they shouldn’t be ignored. The way in which this was implemented was generally appropriate, as it had nothing related to story, and the event rewards (the minis from x amount of achievements) could be obtained through other means than these specific achievements. My argument hinges on the idea that all players, no matter what their skill level, should have content appropriate to them in a game like GW2. It is designed so that “All players can enjoy the game how they want to” as Anet has stated. This is the reason for level scaling, for loot from open world events as well as dailies and dungeons.

Of course there should be such content.

And the idea for it already exists.

It’s called challenges. And they were endless challenging content that kept getting harder and harder.

They had leaderboards and all.

This mission would actually be a great challenge. Endless waves, slower progression between each wave.

And the best ones each month, week and day got registered as high scorers.