Guild Wars 2

yeah I noticed this as well rather quickly. Really dissapointing compared to the portals/tanks and flame legion/dredge, that system worked great and was more fair to people coming to help.

As iv said in another thread;

If the holograms actually scaled with the amount of people in proximity to them it would not only give us more group content but promote community at the camp spots.

This in my eyes is way better than having them like the gw2 crafting nodes, in which is instanced to each player. That would mean yet another kittening grind for kitten all challenge.

The holograms’ health is so ridiculusly low, a single shatter or hundred blades can kill everything that spawns. Just another failure in this completely screwed up update.

I completely, 100% agree. It’s also fair to balme horrible game design, because in the preview video for Dragonbash on Twitch.tv, the dev touted the changes to the holiday nodes vs. how they worked during Wintersday and April Fools day.

They took a fun, pro-community, grief free element and made it into a frustrating exercise in node camping and griefing. (Someone already has a video guide to farming a projector while minimizing the chance than anyone else will be able to tag for loot).

If they want to restore a bit of faith in ANet as a design studio, they will make these node work just like the Wintersday nodes asap. If not, it will be more proof that 2013 Arenanet doesn’t much resemble the studio that developed this game.

I don’t see how this is terribly different from the last two events…

I agree.

I’ve been running around Queensdale and every single one had someone camping it. At first I assumed they’d let people know when it spawned, like people always do with regular events, but they just kill it themselves (very quickly and easily) and go back to waiting.

Which pretty much means unless you happen to come across one in an isolated area or claim one to camp yourself you’re never going to see a holograph. Especially if, like me, you can only play at peak time.

It would be much better if they either spawned more regularly and had higher health so there’s a chance more people could join in, or if they spawned for each player individually so you only have to find the holograms instead of also waiting your turn camping them.

I said it earlier in map chat — for a game that’s really good about providing cooperative play styles (such as individual resource nodes), this seems like a really poor idea.

Side note: ArenaNet, please hire someone that’s colorblind. Dark red indicators on green maps make it hard to see the projector locations in the first place, then I have to fight with other players to get there first. It’s really evil.

Same thing happened with the Xmas boxes.. dont QQ about it please

The holograms die far too quickly for the amount of people camping them. This is nothing like the Halloween door events where mobs would pour out and it took a large group of players to take them down. That was actually fun, and everyone at the spawns had a chance to get items.

With this event, you have to hit a aoe or other multiple-target skill and hope to god it hits before everything is melted. Forget about running to far away spawns from a waypoint, you will never get them in time. Your only option is to camp them.

Sajuuk.6420:

Same thing happened with the Xmas boxes.. dont QQ about it please

They made the same bad decision twice, so it’s ok?

NightShadow.1429:

I don’t see how this is terribly different from the last two events…

It’s completely different. The nodes no longer spawn community drops, the mobs have miniscule HP and the only way to get anything from the node is to qualify for loot, which is hard to do when some people are exploiting strategies to kill the mobs before anyone else can even tag them.

Each change seems to have been a deliberate move to take a fun, community supporting, grief free element and make it just the opposite.

That ANet has developers who could make such changes is bad enough, but that management didn’t catch and thwart those changes is ominous. The studio is looking rudderless this year, or the navigator has been tasked with scuttling the ship. Either way, it’s frustrating to see this game that had the very real potential to be a $billion title over it’s life time continue to squander it’s opportunity at greatness.

Well I’ve had a fun hour being a jerk in chasing Holograms, basically having to screw over myfellow players to rush in and aoe spam to try to kill stuff to get loot, and thereby annoy everyone else going for that one.

Good job Anet, in one fell swoop you recreated the situation wow made with dailies in MoP. PLayers have to actively compete with other players to get credit….

What was it your manifesto said about that kind of stuff again?

This is absolutely horrible, what is going on ANET? The Crab Champion game which was not fun being it was smear the kid with the ball (you know the name of the game) that kids played long agos and now we have holograms with 2 hps?

People are grief / camping these because they HAVE to to get credit, how do you not do 1423242134 damage to them?

How are these not behaving like events and scaling up like they should? If not in HP along, in HP AND the amount of mobs spawning?

Absolutely you want to slap a dev in the back of the head and say, THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE DOING FOR A SECOND.

All it takes is one warrior, full berserkers, balanced stance, “for great justice”, frenzy, hundred blades, and the things drop in about 3 seconds without getting a chance to even move from their spawn…so everyone is just being selfish about them.

Yeah bad design.. I try to wait for people if I see they are incoming, but it is not rewarding at all, I get much less loot this way. I can kill the whole bunch in 3 seconds with grenades, so if only 1 other is around, and does the same, we both get less since some mobs will die instantly before both of us can tag them. And 3+ people? Haha.

The mobs should be veterans at least, with a champ here and there, scalable to the amount of people. So that they have time to come and get the loot. These holo mobs are like a bunch of harmless bunnies..

Honestly, the problem is a bit worse than straight up griefing. You can’t NOT grief with these things. I’ve seen people patiently wait for others to arrive and when it’s finally started the things are dead before anyone can get a hit on them. I try my best if I’m one of few people there: hit them once with a bouncing attack then turn around to stop auto-attack but it doesn’t exactly help the life span when it’s already measured in milliseconds.

why not make the mobs:
A) have more health
B) spawn round the projector and not ontop of it so they cant all be aoe’d
C) make them spawn in waves if more players are around. A wave of small ones, then a smaller number of big ones, possibly even a tough one if there are lots of players.

Sajuuk.6420:

Same thing happened with the Xmas boxes.. dont QQ about it please

Ash, more rage please. Your angry level is dropping dangerously low.

This is why I felt incredibly uncomfortable doing this achievement. It sounds pretty silly I know, but I am not a competitive person and don’t want to be in PvE. But there was multiple times I like instantly kill the spawned holograms and then someone runs up like a second later.

I got to the point where I looked around and if someone was near then I waited, but then its a competition to actually get credit for the kills. So you either hold back or one shot. I did eventually join a group and it helped a bit. But that was when we the only 3 people on the map.

It does seem significantly worse then the Halloween or Wintersday spawn things though. I do recall they did do community drops but they seemed to not die so easy either so there was a time frame longer then a couple of seconds for some.

Or they should make it like for Halloween when events would spawn out of the doors instead. So then it could scale properly and you could do them in groups better. And large groups would allow better farming for people. So it’d be a win win.

100% agreed. It’s an absolute nightmare to kill the holo minions for the exact reasons described in this thread. They’re so incredibly easy to grief, and like the Dragon Ball food exploit that existed before the last patch, people are doing exactly that.

These things need to start scaling, or drop loot a la Wintersday. The way it stands at the moment, we almost need to be selfish because it’s so hard to tag these things with their HP. I want to wait for others to arrive and often link the WP in map chat, but I know that every person who turns up dramatically reduces my chances of getting a kill. GW2 isn’t supposed to be like this, is it? I’m used to being happy when I see another player, not wanting them to go away.

And of course, it’s brought out folk actively griefing. Thieves in particular will just shadow step ahead of the crowd and take down all the mobs. Folk are getting really angry in map chat, and justifiably so.

Given that this is going to be our main way of farming the weapon tickets and wings, it really needs some kind of hotfix.

This is getting very frustrating.

Feel alot like shared mining nodes from other MMOs – something I was hoping we were done with for good.

I understand them wanting to make some of them easier than the christmas dolls (which I personally loved) – but they could have at least let the ones in higher level zones keep a decent difficulty level.

I don’t like this at all.

It’s so contrary to the manifesto that it’s either a sign that the person responsible is one of the worst game developers ever, or they’ve decided that now that the champions of the Manifesto are gone, it’s time to dismantle it and morph this game into another genre clone.

I’m not sure which yet.

I know that sounds harsh, but sometimes developer actions are so beyond the pale that you feel like you have to metaphorically shake them for signs of life.

Honestly…if you go to low lvl zones to have an easy farm, you better be competing with hundreds of people. Move to high lvl zones, barely anyone around there and most people that are, are actually waiting a little before activating. So – maybe instead of QQing about the system, you should think about finding your own solution?

Blaeys.3102:

This is getting very frustrating.

Feel alot like shared mining nodes from other MMOs – something I was hoping we were done with for good.

I understand them wanting to make some of them easier than the christmas dolls (which I personally loved) – but they could have at least let the ones in higher level zones keep a decent difficulty level.

I don’t believe for one second that any of the changes were the result of a misguided attempt to make these things easier/more fun. Every change to the nodes, plus the limitation of nodes to fewer zones than before, was clearly intended to produce the current situation. Add in the fact you need 100,000 Zhaitaffies for the wings and the odds of getting a weapon skin ticket from the normal chests seems to be less than 1 in 1,000, it becomes pretty clear this is just the result of a crass decision to sacrifice good will and the game’s founding principles in an attempt to try to get people to buy more gems.

What’s the respawn rate on them? I think it’s faster running small farming parties hitting all in the area

Dual.8953:

What’s the respawn rate on them? I think it’s faster running small farming parties hitting all in the area

8 minutes. If you go to obscure maps (AKA NOT QUEENSDALE), you can easily grind off mobs and run circles, grabbing the Holo’s.

Firefly.5982:

Honestly…if you go to low lvl zones to have an easy farm, you better be competing with hundreds of people. Move to high lvl zones, barely anyone around there and most people that are, are actually waiting a little before activating. So – maybe instead of QQing about the system, you should think about finding your own solution?

That’s a good idea…except that it doesn’t work because the same exact problem is happening in obscure zones as well.

Ah, the good old days of racing people to craft nodes and resenting other players when you see them. Maybe that’s what they were trying to evoke with this design, but it feels like a very conventional choice for GW2. It’s something I would expect from Blizzard, not ArenaNet.

I haven’t actually been able to get in game to do these yet, but from what I’ve read here, can’t you all just ask to group up with the ppl already camping and agree to take turns killing the holograms? Or coordinate your attacks so you hit them together?

Completely agreed, this design allows kill stealing. I hate WoW for a reason.

Alleluia.1320:

I haven’t actually been able to get in game to do these yet, but from what I’ve read here, can’t you all just ask to group up with the ppl already camping and agree to take turns killing the holograms? Or coordinate your attacks so you hit them together?

That’s a good idea in theory. The problem is all it takes is one person to not care about anyone else in the area and kill them before you have a chance to tag the enemies. They drop insanely fast if you have a high damage build. It’s griefing akittens finest.

Edit: Why is a swear filter being applied to my post? The word “at” followed by “its” is swearing? lol

titanlectro.5029:

Completely agreed, this design allows kill stealing. I hate WoW for a reason.

Kill stealing – that is the phrase I was trying to think of. Yes – it describes what is happening with these things perfectly – and has no place in GW2.

The Wintersday boxes werent as big a deal because it took a while (and a little thought) to kill those enemies, giving people time to get there. These holographic emitters are just plain frustrating, easy to the point of being ridiculous and a griefer’s paradise.

I really hope a developer reads at least one of the many posts about this and does something. Everything else in Dragon Bash feels so solid – it’s a shame this one little element (tied to an achievement) is creating a vitriolic environment.

Zedd.8239:

Alleluia.1320:

I haven’t actually been able to get in game to do these yet, but from what I’ve read here, can’t you all just ask to group up with the ppl already camping and agree to take turns killing the holograms? Or coordinate your attacks so you hit them together?

That’s a good idea in theory. The problem is all it takes is one person to not care about anyone else in the area and kill them before you have a chance to tag the enemies. They drop insanely fast if you have a high damage build. It’s griefing akittens finest.

Edit: Why is a swear filter being applied to my post? The word “at” followed by “its” is swearing? lol

Take away the “a” in the beginning and notice what is spelled. lol

And I still think that simply talking to the campers will help, at least in many cases. Or camping a spawn yourself and then offering to group with people you see around. If you want community, it just seems you’ll have to put some effort in to it this time instead of just the passive sense of community that occurs with, say, dynamic events. At the least, don’t just assume people camping the spawn points are going to be jerks about it before you even bring up the suggestion of working together. Talk to them, give them a chance. I find life tends to go easier that way.

/2cents

DanteZero.9736:

Heavy RNG is in some ways tolerable

Nope, but I agree with your other points/concerns.

Please please make these like gathering nodes. This is rage-inducing.

Blaeys.3102:

The Wintersday boxes werent as big a deal because it took a while (and a little thought) to kill those enemies, giving people time to get there.

Sort of. The Wintersday boxes definitely had stronger enemies, but the primary problem with those was that you didn’t need to kill the enemies to get the gifts. Open the huge gift, pick up the smaller ones inside, run away — leaving the toys inside to fight someone else (and of course by the time someone else got there, the spawned gifts would be gone).

So the holograms are an improvement in that respect, so that you do have to actually kill the things that appear. They just die too quickly.

I feel like everyone has said most of what I feel, but hopefully united voices will get us some change.

These holograms are the most horrible activity I’ve yet encountered in GW2. I thought running around and hitting the pinatas was slow, mindless and grindy, but at least I was constantly moving.

Your choices here are to stand around and wait what feels like forever for something to spawn or spend money to waypoint back and forth and risk not getting there in time to tag the spawns and get credit for the kill. Even if you have a group waiting for you, if one non-group member runs up and activates the spawn, everyone pretty much has to rush to kill them to get credit and if you were waylaid for one reason or another… well oh well.

I’m all for a challenge. I’m not saying I want this to be easy. But I think I’d rather bash my head against a wall or watch paint dry than wait around for 8 minutes for one of these to respawn. I definitely don’t want to keep draining all my money on waypoints because I’m still a fairly new player to the game and money is something of an object for me (I very rarely use waypoints).

This activity doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of GW at all. It isn’t active. It isn’t fun. It doesn’t encourage me to work with other people. And I’m not a fan of the Dragon Ball either. It’s not the kind of activity I like and people are away from keyboard in there making it an even more frustrating exercise. But I’d still rather be frustrated by that than trying to kill these holograms.

(Edited to include that I don’t mean to sound like I hate everything in the new update. I’m sure people like the Dragon Ball activity, PVP just isn’t my thing.)

Please, please fix this. Give them more health and make them spawn more often. I actually liked the way things were in South Sun where you could run from event to event and there was always something going on. The key words there being there was always something happening. The achievement encourages farming in the first place so why make it so mind-numbingly difficult?

While I don’t like spawn camping any more than you guys do, I feel it’s worth pointing out that it’s the first day of the event, so EVERYBODY is busy trying to get their title and/or farming Coffers. Things should settle down in a day or two. The holographic mobs having such low health/not scaling to the number of players in the area is a quality of life improvement that ANet can certainly look at though.

I kinda like the competition, it’s funny. I always wait for people before initiating if I see them nearby but otherwise I like racing around the map grabbing spawns (it’s not even hard if you know their locations and when they last spawned) and maximizing my profession’s capabilities (Guardian) to do it faster than everyone else, it’s kinda like the finale of GW1’s Dragon Festival with the celestial charges; people rushing around trying to beat everyone else and stack up their gifts.

On a side note, I also like how the drop rates of these boxes are actually reliable. One thing I loved in GW1 was finding areas to farm and creating builds around them, GW2 lacks hugely in that department (why farm the world when you can just run COF?), but farming these coffers at the moment is a lot like GW1 and I hope ANet makes the rest of the world this lucrative at some point.

Alleluia.1320:

Take away the “a” in the beginning and notice what is spelled. lol

Oh geez. lol

And I still think that simply talking to the campers will help, at least in many cases. Or camping a spawn yourself and then offering to group with people you see around. If you want community, it just seems you’ll have to put some effort in to it this time instead of just the passive sense of community that occurs with, say, dynamic events. At the least, don’t just assume people camping the spawn points are going to be jerks about it before you even bring up the suggestion of working together. Talk to them, give them a chance. I find life tends to go easier that way.

/2cents

In many cases I think that’s fine. The issue is the random person running up, activating the holo emitter, and then killing the mob before anyone can say anything. I’ve had people repeatedly do that to me. Talking to the people that do that has usually resulted in a very rude comment. It’s people like that that this needs to be changed for. Most people are fine with it. It’s just the jerks that run up and steal the kills that are the problem. This is really like resource nodes in other MMOs. Guild Wars 2 is above that kind of approach, IMO.

Affirmative. I’m pretty disappointed overall with this event. They dolled up LA real nice but I don’t get how clicking on things in town can be justified as an achievement. The ‘camp a node’ mechanic is pretty antithetical to the game’s intended design and the expectation that people will want to get 100,000 candies is mind-blowing.

Don’t even get me started on the Perfect World boxes gating skins (which to be fair are great skins…which makes it even worse). Couldn’t we put the ‘click on me’ achievement stuff at the end of jumping puzzles and dungeons and things that would actually connotate an achievement? Couldn’t we make the effigies a large group event as was suggested a few posts up?

I haven’t had the chance to check out dragonball yet so maybe there’s some redeeming quality to the event.

Zedd.8239:

Edit: Why is a swear filter being applied to my post? The word “at” followed by “its” is swearing? lol

I tried to type “Away From Keyboard” in short hand and it filtered me too. I guess going into that mystical land is forbidden :p

To be honest, I got a LOT more chests just doing map completes in the lower level areas then I did chasing holo’s.

Just not worth the agida dealing with the holos.

Do the holos for the achievement, not for chests. Grind mobs for chests….

zerospin.8604:

The mobs should be veterans at least, with a champ here and there, scalable to the amount of people. So that they have time to come and get the loot. These holo mobs are like a bunch of harmless bunnies..

Holo Bunnies? Are you serious? I remember the SAFunBox. Those Bunnies were vicious, and all I had to kill them with was a dull toothpick. These things are so pathetic I could sneeze and not even notice they’d popped.

I’m not sure about Champs. Maybe in the higher areas, but for the majority the areas are lower lvl ones. I know, they provide a challenge to higher lvl characters. I understand. However, on the flip side, do we really need another Champion Krait set loose in the lake, like in Caledon Forest? No one will ever go kill that thing, and it terrorizes every single new player on the map trying to get completion. Hundreds of lvl appropriate-80’s are in that area per day (and that’s a conservative estimate) on every server to kill the Jungle Wurm. No One Kills That Thing. So what now, there would be rampant Holo Champs in the 1-15 and 15-25 areas on top of the ones already there?
I agree with most of the ideas thus far, save adding Champs.
Add Vets, add HP, add scaling, add ‘doors’ or ‘waves’, add collective loot, make them not spawn directly on top of the hockey puck…. Whatever is needed. I just feel that adding Champs in lower lvld areas is throwing just a little more jet fuel to the bonfire than is truly required.

Also, my thoughts on the (not-so-solid) Loss of Community?
I came here from WoW. Specifically for the lure of working together. Or at least not ‘Screw Your Neighbor’. I’d can’t even begin to think of this game ending up like that. It really makes my heart catch. I have no desire at all to go back to that ‘world’ in any way. I do not wish to see the new world of my happiness degenerate into it’s mirror image.

Sorry for the soliloquy. I am done.

Edit:
I lied, I am not done…
Do we even know if the Holo Projector respawns if the mobs aren’t killed? Say they do add a Champ. That Champ isn’t killed. Will that node then become inactive, until such a time that the Champ is killed? What if it wanders away? I know in my workings w it all day, the stupid Abominations and Icebrood Elementals first objective, even under fire… Was to Wander Off. Some got kinda far away, if other mobs (non-Holos) were involved in the fray. So… What then? What if the Champ Holo wanders off, and then has to be hunted down before the Holo will even reset, much less respawn it’s 8min window?
re-edit:
I am too tired to spell simple words. I am going to bed. Safe Journeys, and Happy Hunting.

One way to prevent this content from ruining regular players’ gaming experience is increase the coffer dropping rate of all the other mobs, and decrease the hologram creatures kill needed for the achievement.

I farmed those hologram creatures just for the achievement, and it was a painful experience.

Nkuvu.2570:

Blaeys.3102:

The Wintersday boxes werent as big a deal because it took a while (and a little thought) to kill those enemies, giving people time to get there.

Sort of. The Wintersday boxes definitely had stronger enemies, but the primary problem with those was that you didn’t need to kill the enemies to get the gifts. Open the huge gift, pick up the smaller ones inside, run away — leaving the toys inside to fight someone else (and of course by the time someone else got there, the spawned gifts would be gone).

So the holograms are an improvement in that respect, so that you do have to actually kill the things that appear. They just die too quickly.

Actually, that’s not a fair representation. Yes, you could get the gifts that popped with out fighting the mobs, but the mobs also had their own loot tables very similar to what we see with this iteration. It was always better to kill the mobs for the loot. Higher HP meant other people had more time to get their and qualify for loot, but they also had a superb chance of getting their before the gifts despawned, so even if they missed the mobs, they got something.

I believe the gifts didn’t respawn for a minute and a half, which was more than enough time for someone in route when someone else popped the node to get the gifts.

It was actually close to perfect that way. The only change I’d have wanted to see would be to have the damage output lowered on some of the spawns. Sometimes the combo of spawned mobs was just too overwhelming for most people, which was why some people started to skip killing the mobs.

It was fun, grief free and community building. The Dragon Bash nodes are the opposite. The difference in design highlights the difference between innovative, thoughtful, experienced game design and something you’d expect from an intern.