IIJM = Is it just me, kitten title length.
I’ll start by saying that I dislike this update as a whole, but not everything in it. The minigames are pretty fun to start with.
However, it feels like after a vast improvement in the Zephyr patch, they’ve fallen into all of the traps that have been complained about over past updates.
For example – Grind. A large portion of players severely dislike the grind in achievements, and they made steps to address that. The Crystal hunting thing was fun and let you explore, the achievements for sprint were fairly reasonable, and the Drinking game achievements were a lot of fun. The kite hunt too was nice, although it’s understandable that people disliked obsidian sanctum.
This set does not include even one new content based achievement that isn’t grind. And what’s worse – They’re all doubled. There are two achievements apiece that require doing a fractal and a dungeon, and they are about the only half decent achievements there. However, it’s not at all new content; it’s literally just standard runs of old stuff.
You then have the “Log on every day for a week and play the game” achievements, they’re ok I guess, but it’s not new content. It’s literally just doing the daily. In addition to this there is the event complete one, which again, isn’t new content.
Then you have the achievements for the minigames, which are literally “Play these things until you’re bored rigid of them.” 2500 points in survival? A quick estimate puts that at about 16 hours worth of play. 16 hours playing one thing gets very tiresome very quickly.
And then, we get to the trials. Which, for the first couple of levels, are a nice fun little concept. Now – I have a personal gripe with difficult achievements that are time limited, and it seriously surprises me that with all the complaining over the AR cheevies they would do something like this again. I’m all for difficult content, but PLEASE make it permanent. Heck, even month long is alright, but two weeks is seriously horrible. My other gripe with this is that the trials aren’t very… Fun. They just throw an arseload of vets at you faster than you can realistically kill them, without any actual difficult mechanics or an executable strategy. At present, the current strategy is to literally try and ignore as many mobs as possible, and from a design standpoint, if people are having to do that then the content isn’t balanced right. I do not know of a single 5 man group at the time of this post that has completed tier 4 without standing by the plunderer spawns and ignoring the mobs for as long as possible.
So yeah, I’m not too impressed with this update. The whole politics thing is cool, but considering the outcome really is a fractal in a few months that will obviously be followed by the other one a bit further down the line is a bit… eh.
/rant