Guild Wars 2

after people had a problem with past living story special events having extremely vague clues, the answer is not to make an x marks the spot system…. you can have good clues and use location names and compass directions but an x marks the spot basically takes any fun out of discovery and is the same problem but the opposite end of the spectrum.

Unfortunately, Arenanet has to play to the lowest common denominator, and that is the people who can’t follow directions worth a kitten and need to have their hand held as they are slowly walked through everything.

It’s one of those things that a game developer can never win. Your suggestion is good but people would still be complaining that it just wastes more time. This event I think was made to help the more casual players/new players do achievements. I’m a good example of this. This is the first update (I’ve only been playing a little over 3 months) that I have been able to accomplish most of the tasks as all my alts are relatively low level and I’m only 19% map completion. I still had little idea of what general area I needed to go to for some tasks but figured it out from exploring until I saw the star icon.

While I don’t want to appear as I am judging play style as I feel every one should play the way they want, many players want to complete every achievement as fast as possible. See holograms and effigies. There were several responses the first day the holos appeared where people said they were camping them to get it done as fast as possible despite having an extended time period to get the achievement done. The same feedback occurred with the effigies and some were unhappy with the 10 second cool down it took to light them.

I’m sure there are many players in the middle that would prefer your suggested approach. I think making a mixture of both for events would be a good way to balance them. There are some achievements I felt were a bit too grindy like the pinatas. I think some of the reasoning behind this particular achievement was to have newer players explore the cities and maybe for others to have a look around for the first time in a while as well. Unfortunately the number of pinatas required to complete it was rather high. I just didn’t do it. I think I smashed 1 that I just saw in passing.

Well…it is a MMO, you can’t expect everyone to know something that you consider as common knowledge.

It also doesn’t help that most doing their “discovery” on google/youtube, yes there may be some actually trying to solve problem on their own, but for the rest of the community, good hints/clues are generally just favor text to them.

Not to mention, many in MMO community won’t bother to read text and skip cutscenes, which may contain key information, then complain on forum because they can’t figure out the mechanic at first glance.

I also think it would be a lot more fun to actually have to look for the objectives. Part of me thinks the people that don’t enjoy that would have the wiki to turn to anyway, which you know would have all the answers up within hours, but another part suspects that there would still be a deluge of complaints. Although, the Halloween scavenger hunt worked a bit like that, and I’m not sure what the player reaction was to that. Anybody else know? Was it loathed? Loved?

Yeah to you guys there is a point between both extremes. You seem to have missed that part when you commented in thinking x marks the spot is a requirement. There is a point between both extremes. Even a setting that you could turn off to tone down (not remove good clues directions). An npc who you can ask where a place name is would be helpful. There is a lot you can do between both extremes.

The truly sad/funny part is that some people still stood in Lions Arch asking where Vorrk was when there was a very obvious star burst pattern on the map.

Vanthian.9267:

The truly sad/funny part is that some people still stood in Lions Arch asking where Vorrk was when there was a very obvious star burst pattern on the map.

Ugh. I had someone asking where the sylvari rep was while in Caledon. Simply told them to look for the star. I mean, the letter even has a button that you can press that’ll show you where they are! Really shows that some people don’t read anything…

/RageDone