Guild Wars 2

Candidate Trials is tied to several achievements and Aetherblade weapon skins. When it released, it was very buggy and the enemy AI was easy to break. Most of the bugs and AI problems were fixed in the July 26th hotfix patch.

Before the hotfix, players could easily break the AI and complete any tier of Candidate Trials solo with little effort. Since the fix, very few solo players and even fewer coordinated groups are able to complete tier 4.

Most of the players who completed the Advanced Support achievement did so by abusing the AI bugs before they were fixed.

My question to Arenanet: Do you intend to address this situation so that cheaters aren’t the primary beneficiaries of Candidate Trials?

My questions to other players: What do you think of this situation? What do you think Arenanet should do about it? Keep it civil and realistic please.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

My questions to other players: What do you think of this situation?

I think that it was handled poorly.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

What do you think Arenanet should do about it?

For the future, I would prefer something like this.

To help mitigate things like this, they should max the amount of achievement points you can get from monthlies, dailies, and living world events. All parts of these things should be roughly equivalent, and once you’ve completed the X you need to unlock the big reward (5 for dailies, or 6 each for the current event) you should get no more points.

That way, unintentional or intentional exploitation of a broken item, which is inevitable if they insist on putting things out at this crazy 2 week pace, will have little to no real effects. People can just do one of the other steps and basically get the same stuff, perhaps with a little grumbling but no harm done.

Retroactively punishing players is not something that should be taken lightly, nor do I believe it is something that is easily executed from a developer standpoint. In this particular case, I personally do not feel they need to take additional action beyond fixing the bug. A gold exploit would be a different story, but I can let a few achievement points go, particularly because it’s possible to get the mini-Ellen/Evon by doing other achievements.

In general, I believe that ANet knows some exploits WILL get through their testing process, especially with very ambitious 2 week development cycles for the Living Story. I believe that’s why the Living Story rewards are relatively small/cosmetic – by design so they don’t HAVE to conduct large rollbacks/punishments.

All that said, I’m much more disappointed in the design of the instance. A true hero defense (survive X waves) would have been much more fun and balanced. I did not feel like I was having fun at any difficulty level.

Geniekid.2645:

Retroactively punishing players is not something that should be taken lightly, nor do I believe it is something that is easily executed from a developer standpoint.

No one has suggested that.