Guild Wars 2

Yes a 1000x yes. I would love to play with my friend in these activities ,but it’s just not possible.

Not to be mean Paul but we’ve kinda heard that before and often due to things others at Anet say. It is often implied you worry greatly about things being rigged with friends for achievements among a few other smaller things.

So if we go by that I wouldn’t hold my breath over these words at ever seeing it. Even if things such as the Toymaker fun would have been made better 5,000% by being able to play with friends in tower defense. Even when we are working together with other players you penalize us it seems. You toted this game as being all about teamwork so what changed that made mini-games to avoid it like the plague?

it would just destroy balance if you could run with 5 of your friends vs. soloplayers. The biggest friend-group would have an easy win in every minigame. I currently like that I have equal chance of winning against others.

What I would love to see though: leaderboards for minigames, where you can see your friend’s highscores.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

it would just destroy balance if you could run with 5 of your friends vs. soloplayers. The biggest friend-group would have an easy win in every minigame. I currently like that I have equal chance of winning against others.

What I would love to see though: leaderboards for minigames, where you can see your friend’s highscores.

Southsun Survival is a minigame against NPCs. I see no unbalance there.

Organizing Sanctum Sprint races with my friends/guildies would be so great. We could hand out rewards to winners.

Just disable all achievements/rewards while playing with friends.

I’m glad Anet is listening. I can’t wait to see the day we’ll have mini-games to play with friends!

Simplest solution is to enable a “friend mode” which disables all rewards and achievements but lets you play with friends for guild events and competitions.

The rest of the system is already in place for regular PvP.

Paul Belz.7351:

Thanks for this post. There have been many people who have requested something like this, and I don’t want you guys to think we are not listening. We have been, and currently are, exploring what would need to happen in order to make this a possibility (it is more complicated than you would think), and while I cannot guarantee that it will happen or when, we definitely understand the draw of playing activities with your friends are not dismissing this as something that will never happen.

How about a lobby system similar to the one already in SPvP. Most of the work is already done in SPvP.

This lobby would not be tied to the SPvP one.

Also could a dungeon lobby work using this model?

xCrusadentx.2784:

Southsun Survival is a minigame against NPCs. I see no unbalance there.

From the release page:

Scheme, kill, and scavenge your way to the top in this new competitive activity! Armed with only a bow and whatever supplies you can find, you’ll face off against other players in a battle to be the last one standing.

Southsun Survival will likely be a reworked version of the Hunger Royale beta event and would be terribly unbalanced if organized groups were allowed to compete against solo players.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

it would just destroy balance if you could run with 5 of your friends vs. soloplayers. The biggest friend-group would have an easy win in every minigame. I currently like that I have equal chance of winning against others.

What I would love to see though: leaderboards for minigames, where you can see your friend’s highscores.

This is not SPvP/TPvP. If I don’t misunderstand the description of this mini game, it’s a FFA battle. Which mean you need to kill someone and survive alone (If there is 2 survivor, it is unlikely if the winner decided by the highest score, both is the winner, or a death match begin).

Now if the map is big enough (if they use whole/half southsun cove), you and your friend will waste your time to take down this single person (band together will lead to accidental shot, while looking him alone will result dead (if this solo player is pro enough)).

Then the same would happen like in PvP. People would start crying for facing premades and would cry for a separated solo que (rightfully).

Paul Belz.7351:

Thanks for this post. There have been many people who have requested something like this, and I don’t want you guys to think we are not listening. We have been, and currently are, exploring what would need to happen in order to make this a possibility (it is more complicated than you would think), and while I cannot guarantee that it will happen or when, we definitely understand the draw of playing activities with your friends are not dismissing this as something that will never happen.

thanks for replying!

i am looking forward to the day that this happens!

Have my +1 sir. Playing minigames with friends would make them 100x more fun and would have close to no repercussion for certain ones ( such as Sanctum Sprint )

Wolfheart.1938:

Have my +1 sir. Playing minigames with friends would make them 100x more fun and would have close to no repercussion for certain ones ( such as Sanctum Sprint )

It would allow people to get the first place without winning.
Mini games as/with friends sounds like fun, but should be without rewards. People are lame, remember that.

aspirine.6852:

Wolfheart.1938:

Have my +1 sir. Playing minigames with friends would make them 100x more fun and would have close to no repercussion for certain ones ( such as Sanctum Sprint )

It would allow people to get the first place without winning.
Mini games as/with friends sounds like fun, but should be without rewards. People are lame, remember that.

But other than an achievement (and +~2s and a little bit of extra karma) there is no benefit to winning Sanctum Sprint (especially when the achievement for winning goes away). Most people have already formed winning pacts with the random people in their race. Sure having a group of friends would make that easier, but people already do it with strangers. At least when the game rewards you for your time playing, not for your placement it’s easier to justify that playing with friends wouldn’t cause any additional problems.

But I do agree, if there are extra/substantial rewards for winning people will find a way to cheese it.

I support this 100x over. I do, however, agree with a few others that if there are achievement points related to the mini game, they should be deactivated when playing other friends/guildmates. Personally, this wouldn’t bother me because I’m not wanting to play with my friends so I can “cheat” my way to the top (not that I have anything against organized groups among strangers to help each other out) – I want to play with them because it’s more fun.

GoddessHrist.8472:

xCrusadentx.2784:

Southsun Survival is a minigame against NPCs. I see no unbalance there.

From the release page:

Scheme, kill, and scavenge your way to the top in this new competitive activity! Armed with only a bow and whatever supplies you can find, you’ll face off against other players in a battle to be the last one standing.

Southsun Survival will likely be a reworked version of the Hunger Royale beta event and would be terribly unbalanced if organized groups were allowed to compete against solo players.

Meh, misread, my bad. However, my point still stands that we should have some way to play with our friends. Right now the system only works for soloplayers. Great for them, bad for everyone else who can’t enjoy the games with their mates. I do see your point, and thats why I’m asking for some kind of alternative.

A cooperative non-pvp mini-game would be a lot of fun (a la SAB).

On a similar note: As someone who plays a lot of WvW, I’d enjoying having a few less competitive mini games for times when I feel like taking it easy.

Vick.6805:

A cooperative non-pvp mini-game would be a lot of fun (a la SAB).

I think you’d like Candidate Trials Challenge then. Looks like a solo or co-op survive wave/hoard mode type thing.

New Activity – Southsun Survival – Begins July 23
Scheme, kill, and scavenge your way to the top in this new competitive activity! Armed with only a bow and whatever supplies you can find, you’ll face off against other players in a battle to be the last one standing. Earn karma and coins for each round you play, plus a rare chance at an exclusive Back Item!

New PvP Activity – Aspect Arena – Begins July 23
Pick one of the Aspects of Sun, Wind, or Lightning, and face off in teams to collect crystals. Each Aspect will grant you different skills with which to maneuver and fight. Earn karma and coins for each round you play, plus a rare chance at an exclusive Back Item!

Candidate Trials Challenge – Begins July 23
Enter into the Candidate Trials alone or with a group in support of your chosen candidate. You’ll test your battle skills by facing off against waves of Aetherblade pirates – hold out for as long as you can to earn Support Tokens and loot! The challenge is great, but so are the rewards – you may even earn a rare chance at an Aetherized weapon!

Paul Belz.7351:

Thanks for this post. There have been many people who have requested something like this, and I don’t want you guys to think we are not listening. We have been, and currently are, exploring what would need to happen in order to make this a possibility (it is more complicated than you would think), and while I cannot guarantee that it will happen or when, we definitely understand the draw of playing activities with your friends are not dismissing this as something that will never happen.

Did you just say…

Paul Belz.7351:

We are definitely adding the option to join your friends in future activities.

yay

On a serious note, i fully approve of making it playable with friends, it just makes games so much more fun ^^.
Maybe even make some guild only servers where you can do the activities with guildies :O. like a custom arena :o I would not even mind paying gems for that ;D.

Hello! Thanks Paul for your answer! I’m sure it’s not easy and I appreciate ArenaNet trying to listen to our requests. GW2 is a great game!

One thing I will say is that I don’t agree with having all of the achievements disabled when playing with friends. I actually want to be able to work towards achievements with my friends. One recent example is the “Crowd Favorite” achievement. It bummed me out that I couldn’t join a Sanctum Sprint with my friend and be together in races as we worked towards our 25 race count.

I’d suggest that when you group with friends for the mini-games you can work towards most things, and only things that would encourage folks to completely play the game incorrectly would be disabled, or substituted with an alternate goal.

Some of us are achievement-hunters and like to do that with friends, too.

My two cents, anyway. Thanks again for listening!

Yessss, this really needs to happen. Honestly I only played sanctum sprint and crab toss for the achievements, it would be actual FUN if I could challenge and play with my friends- even if it was in a non-achievement earning mode.

Yeah this has to happen. Couple of my friends who casually tried GW2, are sometimes considering coming back to try the new activities. And when I show them, then they ask ‘can we play together’ and all I can answer is ‘umm.. i think.. not?’. Needless to say they don’t usually stay long if they have to play solo.. Very odd this was not a priority.

Team based mini-games vs. solo has a loophole.

One guy on your team can afk and reep the rewards from the work of others. (Which is why dragon ball was a disaster)

In solo play you can work for that 1st place.

well, the ability to play aspect arena and southsun survival with friends or guild members is still not available yet.

but, i’m confident that one day, they will be!

xCrusadentx.2784:

Hello,
I have heard about this new minigame and wish to make a request. Can we finally have a minigame that does not use PvP mechanics and that we can play with our friends? So many of these minigames you cannot play your friends with. There is some issues that people have with people farming achievements and whatnot, but let us be realistic here; is it not the truth that people have more fun and do better when playing with their friends? My guildies and I are always irked that we can never get into the same matches.

hell no i would rage so hard if they let people team up in this game its already filled with cheaters the last thing we need is an entire guild or even a group of 2 ppl coming after us and not fighting eachother, NO NO NO NO NO

If one day they kitten guild halls, they could give players the possibility to join an instanced version of the mini game reserved to guild members. Would be so fun to do Crab Toss or Southsun Survival with only guild members and hear them rage on vent ^^.

Including a way to join standart mini games with friends would deeply imbalance things because people would team-up in solo games like Southsun Survival, Crab Toss or Sanctum Sprint resulting in great frustration from “standard” players.
We can already see this presently : I ran into a couple of players from the same guild ganking players together in survival and making the game lasting really long cause they didn’t kill each other, it wasn’t exactly fun. So if they ever had a way to join mini games with friends it should be restricted in some ways to prevent this kind of abuses (that’s why I talked about guild hall based mini games which could solve this issue nicely provided you have enough guild members to make it fun^^).

Paul Belz.7351:

Thanks for this post. There have been many people who have requested something like this, and I don’t want you guys to think we are not listening. We have been, and currently are, exploring what would need to happen in order to make this a possibility (it is more complicated than you would think), and while I cannot guarantee that it will happen or when, we definitely understand the draw of playing activities with your friends are not dismissing this as something that will never happen.

I would think it’s actually pretty easy. Take the clock tower. That was not PvP, and some of the best moments in that event were me doing it with my guildmates. While not necessarily a minigame, it’s the same basic concept. A large area that’s shared where all the players are moving towards the same objective, even without necessarily aiding each other. I also think what set it apart from other JP was the lobby, if you fell you didnt have to go to a waypoint,walk back, fight things along the way, just to possibly fall again; you went back to the lobby and just waited a bit for another shot (Also the thing that was wrong with the aetherblade JP IMO but that’s another topic) Also I considered the SAB to be pretty much a minigame rather than a proper dungeon and it was great fun that wasn’t PvP.

as for the random matchups and team building, we originally asked for that for the toypocalypse for wintersday, so assuming anet has been working on it since then and it’s been over half a year, it must not be that easy to do.

I agree with this SO much. I am not a fan of PvP and the rage that seems to come with it from immature players. I am glad people enjoy it, but would like games I can play with my friends that aren’t PvP oriented.

Paul, would it be possible to get any light upon topic what would need to take place it to be possible? Would be interesting to hear, even on high level