Guild Wars 2

OK, I’ve done my complaint thread. This isn’t a complaint thread. Let’s talk about this seriously.

I’ve seen many comments along the lines of: “I did not have fun doing this but I felt I had to do it for the achievement.” “When I complete this, I won’t be happy – it will be more like having a tumour removed.”

Then there are those who say, “Quit whining. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.”

Let’s talk free will for a second here. If a person feels they ‘have’ to do something, but is getting no reward or compensation from it and is not enjoying it, what has happened to make them feel thus compelled?

The definition of a game has been put something like this: “a serious of obstacles we attempt to overcome voluntarily”. So what happens when we don’t feel it’s entirely voluntary? Is it a game anymore?

I’m just thinking of the sinister applications. Just imagine that instead of designing a clocktower, ANet had designed a mini-game/puzzle which involved, I dunno, say, high-speed maths. Sums come up and you have to use you character to jump on tiles that spell out the answers. And imagine that it turned out that by doing these sums in the game, players were actually doing the real life accountancy work of a firm of accountants.

I know it’s a bit of an awkward example, but refine it as you wish. Don’t you think it’s possible to imagine a situation whereby, as players, we actually end up doing the kind of work that other people are actually being paid for? And many people wouldn’t even be enjoying it – they’d be doing it because they felt compelled to by the structure of the game. The playerbase would effectively be enslaved.

I’m not trying to make a specific point – this is more an open topic for discussion. But if you really want this post to have something you can simply agree or disagree with, I’ll add this: don’t just dismiss people who feel aggravated by this puzzle as ‘whingers’, because there are interesting issues surrounding computer gaming and psychology.

Seems to be you’ve been watching to many SOA :P

Still interesting though.

Honestly I expect that you’ll just get a lot of the same people doing their needless posturing and berating you for feeling “entitled” regardless. One of my biggest problems with the puzzle is that it brings out more of those people. >_>

Honestly it is the carrot at the end of the stick.

People will keep running , there is an achiv and a exo boots to be had.

And most will keep going even if they hate it , simple to get that.

feeling compelled to invest time and effort into something we’ve already invested time and effort into…isn’t this the sunk cost fallacy?

We spend time trying to finish the JP. We fail. We fail some more. We fail to the point of it being a pain in the behind. We continue to try because if we say to ourselves “ok, I’m not having fun anymore, I’m just gonna leave it and do something else” we feel as though all our previous effort was a waste, so we continue to invest because we hate that sense of loss when we admit to ourselves we’ve wasted our time and effort.

People are funny that way.

“a serious [sic] of obstacles we attempt to overcome voluntarily”

This is an incomplete definition, as it is missing a key concept: fun. I voluntarily overcome obstacles every day to attain a paycheck. That is called work, which is typically far from a game. Let’s amend it to the following:

Merriam-Webster online

“activity engaged in for diversion or amusement”

Merriam-Webster

Starting with this definition, the over-arching motivation for players to participate in games is to have fun. Then, the real question, IMO, becomes:

Why do players seem to consistently set themselves up with in-game goals that are not focused on having fun?

“I did not have fun doing this but I felt I had to do it for the achievement.”

“When I complete this, I won’t be happy – it will be more like having a tumour removed.”

If the process of attaining the achievements or the achievements themselves are not satisfying and/or fun, why is the person doing it?

“Quit whining. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.”

While this quote is rather brusquely stated, it holds more truth than most forum-dwellers care to admit. Games are not work. When they become work, the player needs to realize it and go do something else that is fun. Unfortunately, it is that step that typically fails. We, as players, fail to rectify that we are not having fun.

ANet has to include content that appeals to a wide variety of players, so there will be inherent dissent among what is or is not enjoyable. It is not fair for players to expect that every feature of every game is going to be to our liking. As players, it is up to us to play the game in such a way that the game IS fun, or to realize that there is no such possibility and to choose another game. We need to learn, as a wider gamer culture, to take advantage of those aspects of games that are fun, and disregard those that are not.

Dissatisfied forum posts generally do not help anyone, not because the opinions are not valid, but because they are expressed in ways that are not constructive. The prevailing negativity in game forums is appalling. Giving ANet feedback is great, but feedback is not just stating the problem, or worse, simply telling them they need to get their kittens in gear. Making suggestions means proposing a possible solution and expanding our point of view beyond our own.

I wonder if it’s a trained reflex, from games like “that other MMO”.

In those games the reward is heavily backloaded. You’re told “here’s the awesome thing you should strive for” (end game, reward etc), “now here is a painful, frustrating grind you must endure to earn it” – and people’ve been conditioned like a good little skinner box mouse to do it, because that is what they’ve been told is “fun”.

Is it possible that skinner box games have had a profound long term effect on peoples perceptions of what a game is. It’d also explain the backlash and frustration seen when people don’t get big rewards for voluntarily enduring things in the game, apparently forgetting it was only ever voluntary.

(I personally found the clocktower to be genuinely fun, i even ran it several more times for my own amusement. But this obviously isn’t a shared position)

Yay, i like kitchen pscyhology!
I seriously do, people come up with most amazing things.

Games try to compell (is that even a word…) you to play them, that isn´t news.
Some games do it in rather questionable ways, that isn´t news either.

I did have a point i was trying to make but i´m still laughing at the absurdity of this thread….

Vick”

This is an incomplete definition, as it is missing a key concept: fun. I voluntarily overcome obstacles every day to attain a paycheck. That is called work, which is typically far from a game.

A game isn’t the same thing as fun, although there is an overlap. A lot of people play chess as a serious test of their mental resources, not as a diversion or for amusement. Similarly, I can have fun drinking with friends, but it isn’t a game.

Your job is excluded by the definition I gave because, strictly speaking, it isn’t voluntary. You have to work to eat. If you had a regular income regardless but still went to a job, then it would be more like a game, and it would affect your expectations of the job as well.

The prevailing negativity in game forums is appalling.

You make a lot of good points, but I wonder if proper analysis yields a more complex explanation than ‘people are whiny and spoilt’. Games like GW2 demand a huge investment of time, and it might be argued that players enter into an unspoken contract, whereby they are led to expect (and enter under the assumption) that the game will provide a challenge at the correct level, the correct level being one that puts them in the right mental ‘zone’ where they are employing all of their faculties in order to secure a positive outcome.

GW2 complaints fall into three broad categories: something is boring because it’s too easy, frustrating because it’s too hard, or not worth it because the reward is negligible. The first two complaints are complaints that GW2 is not delivering on its implied promise to provide the right level of challenge – it’s falling one side or the other of the right zone. Now, you can say (as you do) that it’s impossible to please anyone, but I’ve got a strong feeling that truly inspired game design moulds its audience and players to play at similar levels. The trouble, of course, is when you’re simply borrowing tropes from an established genre whilst also trying to introduce that genre to new people.

The third complaint is almost unique to MMOs, and carries with it the expectation that nothing is fun for its own ends, that its justification lies in the reward. This is still in part a failure of the game, since if it truly was providing the right level of challenge/fun, people wouldn’t worry about the reward – in fact, they’re generously saying, “Hey, I don’t mind that you failed at the fun part; I just expect you to compensate me for my time some other way.”

dislocated”

feeling compelled to invest time and effort into something we’ve already invested time and effort into…isn’t this the sunk cost fallacy?

Think you’re right about this. It’s at least part of the motivation.

Speaking for myself, what I’m a little scared by is this: I tried the puzzle. I quickly assessed that it would take me a long time to complete and that I wouldn’t have much fun doing it. I also realised that I was going to get infuriated by the smog of people, camera, collision detection etc. So I stopped.

But now I feel like I want to go back and do it. Why? Why is there some kind of urge in me to do something I would not enjoy, for no reward? I feel like it’s the ghost of all those years playing Tomb Raiders and console platformers – something deep in me associates completion of the puzzle with completion of a narrative.

This puzzle took me over 8 hours to complete (I stopped keeping track).

There were moments where I really just wanted to quit, and so I did. I would take a short break, but during that entire break all I would think about is trying to complete the tower. Was it obsession? Maybe a little bit, but more just that desire to complete it.

The first couple hours of playing went by pretty fast. It was after 3 hours that I became pretty frustrated. I wasn’t just going to give up though. I had already spent so much time doing it. I wasn’t playing for the boots anymore (I couldn’t care less about that). I was playing partly for the achievement, but that was also pretty unimportant because it didn’t count towards the title I wanted. At this point, I was playing for self-satisfaction.

What kept me going? The truly non-deserving elitist in me. I’m only level 44, so I certainly don’t have much to brag about. But I think everybody has a small superiority complex. I didn’t want to rub it anybody’s faces that I completed the puzzle; that’s just not how I roll. But I did want to post in the “completed Tower” thread on the forums, and I did want to be able to say, if anybody asked, “Why yes, I did finish what may be the most difficult jumping puzzle in the game.” It gives me internal bragging rights, and during the time I was doing the puzzle, that was really important. It made me feel important. It also made me feel (I know it sounds super lame) “special” because I was able to finish it. Sure, lots of others did too… but even more people won’t be able to finish it. It put me in the minority.

That’s what kept me going at it.

Right now camera and people alongside/occluding your view is a very annoying thing which I am forcing myself to cope with before I actually manage to do the real tries. It’s an agonizing process devoid of fun still I feel like I have to do it out of my ambitious nature which is driven by being unforgiving and merciless towards myself! And…10 kittening points…

Look at it this way. A game is a pasttime for recreation, you’re right; we’re not getting paid, we are ostensibly doing it for “fun” or “want.” No one probably “needs” to be playing this particular game. It was just released, even if they had the full 50/50 HoM points, it would be a questionable motivation to pick this game out of another investment of time at launch if one did not prefer it over other investments of time for pleasure’s sake.

Then consider what affords an individual the sense of recreation, or re-creation. It is as varied as individuals. Some may be dysfunctional or co-dependent and find their recreation to be co-dependent in turn. Others may simply have unique or iconoclastic or off-the-wall definitions of fun or find atypical things to be rewarding.

Games like GW2 that create a ‘virtual environment’ this thoroughly, and in fact have dynamic environment that attempts to exist whether the player interacts with it, can be quite immersive. If someone is roleplaying it may add an additional layer of investment into the game. Anyways, it’s sort of pointless for me to try to list all of the ways that a game could be ‘won’ or a player could try to enjoy or win a game like this. One thing is certain; if designers implement something there are going to be outliers who try to find a way to have fun that wasn’t covered in a use case.

The complexity for finding ways to have fun is going to be all the more vast when the game isn’t linear or on rails.

Now, take this rich, diverse world and culture around the game, into which players have a great amount of time, money, emotion invested, and plop down this jumping puzzle (or any other ‘new feature’).

There will invariably be groups of people who feel excluded. There will also be people who invariably say “Just don’t do it.”

Now I don’t know how many people actually do study psychology or marketing, but it is not a smart idea to invest a great deal of time into an activity which generates more frustration than fun. This is why user engineering and user-centered design are such hankittenen things.

There would have been any number of ways to implement this puzzle without creating the level of furor, but at the same time still maintain a high degree of difficulty and even a low rate of completion. They could have done this and let people feel more included, more like they were achieving and participating.

Doing this isn’t dumbing down the game. When working with something like the 80-20 rule, catering to the 20% and making the 80% unhappy is ultimately inefficient for a number of reasons.

Think about it. It’s one thing to say “I succeeded where others did not.” It’s another thing entirely to say, “I succeeded and because you didn’t and are unhappy about it, you’re a whiny entitled brat who should just learn to cope with disappointment and go do something else.”

No, not quite. I still maintain that the game designers failed. I don’t care if the puzzle is fun for a few, what needs to be acknowledged is that many players will spend 20-40 hours over the course of the holiday failing, perhaps not improving, and walking away miserable. Why is this something to gloat about? It’s not. It’s bad for the community, it’s bad for the game, and the development time that went into the puzzle could have gone into something just as difficult but fun for a higher percentage of players if only the developers understood their player base as a whole rather than catering to a smaller subset.

It’s been mentioned time and again by those who are in the subset who will stay in the pot of boiling water and not get out, that there are camera issues. Many of the things that are not fun or could have improved fun for more people have been mentioned. None of these things would ultimately make the puzzle less difficult, but they would have made it more fun. People would have walked away hopefully with a sense of accomplishment even if they failed, and a sense of fun.

This would have been a better design and a better contribution to the community.

And I really do think one of the reasons it is so shocking to so many players is because of the lengths to which ANet has gone to make the game overall friendly to players and community.

I’m wondering if this is a new generation of gamer or just a fundamental shift in the way games have developed over time.

I’m 31 years old and back when I was a kid games were harder. Games required practice and involved repeating the same scenario over and over again until you succeeded either through improving your own skills or tackling the problem in a different way.

Maybe a lot of gamers are either too young to remember/have experienced this kind of gameplay, or maybe you have become so used to MMO’s that you don’t enjoy the challenge of this “older” style of gameplay.

I think people are just used to MMO’s in that they reward people for time spent. There is very little actual skill required in earning things in MMO’s and people have become accustom to being able to throw time spend at a problem and they will succeed with a nice little progression tracker along the way to let you know you are being a good little gamer.

This jumping puzzle is a throwback to another era of video games in my opinion. A time when the development of muscle memory and practice were more important than the time you spent grinding the next tier of gear to overcome an obstacle.

In my opinion this jumping puzzle is a very different gameplay experience from the rest of GW2 and other MMO’s because of the explanation given above. As a result of this you will find a lot of gamers that expect the game to hold their hand and tell them that if you just keep doing something you will eventually be guaranteed to achieve success eventually and you are x% on your way to achieving that goal of yours so keep up the good work. This expectation can obviously lead to frustration, anger, or feeling betrayed when faced with a jumping puzzle that gives you nothing until you show you have mastered it and any time spent up to that point offers progression only in the form of honing your skills.

I believe Anet executed this very well. They made it a side game in side content (limited holiday content outside of main game) and made the reward suitable for the achievement.

Anet is not some evil corporation compelling you to do something you do not want to do. They are putting in a wide variety of mini games and content for a limited holiday release and putting it in for fun with a meager reward at the end.

My personal experience with the JP was that it took me about 2 – 2.5 hours with my little Asura Necro and I was frustrated when I failed and cursing myself for making mistakes but I steadily improved with a few minor regressions along the way where I messed up on earlier parts. When I made it farther and farther than before I was filled with adrenalin and excitement followed by more frustration when I failed, but I knew I was improving. When I finally succeeded I shouted out loud and pumped my fist in the air and that was a feeling I’m not used to from an MMO.

I would be fine if they completely stripped away the achievement and recycled most common skin exotic boots if it would remove the compulsion some players feel to do the mini game if it means I will have an opportunity in the future to be challenged similarly so I have the chance to feel my own personal sense of accomplishment.

I’ve quite enjoyed reading this thread and would like to contribute a little to it. Unfortunately for me, all the points I wanted to make were already touched on.

So here is what I related me experience to:

A while back, I found a game on the Xbox LIVE arcade called “The Impossible Game”. Intrigued, I decided to give it a shot. The controls were simple, press A to jump. The little square you controlled scrolled to the right at a fixed pace and required you to time your jumps perfectly. Falling off or hitting spikes would force you to restart as there were no checkpoints.

If you enjoyed this jumping puzzle, I suggest you try this game for a strangely similar challenge.

As far as what motivated me to finish this jumping puzzle. I just wanted to be able to say that I finished it; to myself, not necessarily to others. I strongly agree with the idea of sunk costs in time and effort (I’ve come this far, I can’t stop now) the biggest payoff for me is that dopamine release that us gamers get when we accomplish something; that lies in stark contrast to the frustration and anger it takes to get there.

Unfortunately there’s no clear way to offer assistance to others, besides offering advice and encouragement.

Grim.6415:

I’m wondering if this is a new generation of gamer or just a fundamental shift in the way games have developed over time.

I’m 31 years old and back when I was a kid games were harder. Games required practice and involved repeating the same scenario over and over again until you succeeded either through improving your own skills or tackling the problem in a different way.

Maybe a lot of gamers are either too young to remember/have experienced this kind of gameplay, or maybe you have become so used to MMO’s that you don’t enjoy the challenge of this “older” style of gameplay.

I think people are just used to MMO’s in that they reward people for time spent. There is very little actual skill required in earning things in MMO’s and people have become accustom to being able to throw time spend at a problem and they will succeed with a nice little progression tracker along the way to let you know you are being a good little gamer.

This jumping puzzle is a throwback to another era of video games in my opinion. A time when the development of muscle memory and practice were more important than the time you spent grinding the next tier of gear to overcome an obstacle.

In my opinion this jumping puzzle is a very different gameplay experience from the rest of GW2 and other MMO’s because of the explanation given above. As a result of this you will find a lot of gamers that expect the game to hold their hand and tell them that if you just keep doing something you will eventually be guaranteed to achieve success eventually and you are x% on your way to achieving that goal of yours so keep up the good work. This expectation can obviously lead to frustration, anger, or feeling betrayed when faced with a jumping puzzle that gives you nothing until you show you have mastered it and any time spent up to that point offers progression only in the form of honing your skills.

I believe Anet executed this very well. They made it a side game in side content (limited holiday content outside of main game) and made the reward suitable for the achievement.

Anet is not some evil corporation compelling you to do something you do not want to do. They are putting in a wide variety of mini games and content for a limited holiday release and putting it in for fun with a meager reward at the end.

My personal experience with the JP was that it took me about 2 – 2.5 hours with my little Asura Necro and I was frustrated when I failed and cursing myself for making mistakes but I steadily improved with a few minor regressions along the way where I messed up on earlier parts. When I made it farther and farther than before I was filled with adrenalin and excitement followed by more frustration when I failed, but I knew I was improving. When I finally succeeded I shouted out loud and pumped my fist in the air and that was a feeling I’m not used to from an MMO.

I would be fine if they completely stripped away the achievement and recycled most common skin exotic boots if it would remove the compulsion some players feel to do the mini game if it means I will have an opportunity in the future to be challenged similarly so I have the chance to feel my own personal sense of accomplishment.

This^

I am 31 as well and I remember when games where hard and werent spoon fed to us like what most these whiners want now days.

After completing that clock tower myself I had a sense of satisfaction I have never experienced in an MMO.

Keep it up Anet I expect more like this

My 17 year old sister runs this event and completes it every time, wtf is everyones problem?

I am 31 as well and I remember when games where hard and werent spoon fed to us like what most these whiners want now days.

I’m 29 and I also remember those games. They were built like that because there was limited space on a tape or disk, and so unless you stalled players and made them repeat the same steps again and again and again, it was all over pretty quick.

We liked them then because there was nothing better. Now there is, and no one plays those games anymore. The games we remember best from that era, not coincidentally, are ones that got around the problem of disk space through the device of a high score, making the game essentially unwinnable, but challenging players to do a little better than their best every time.

With that in mind, we would probably all enjoy this challenge more if it were an infinite tower that challenged you to get higher every time. The fact that it’s simply a singular task with a win/lose binary that requires half of your waking hours or more to complete makes it something akin to one of those old games where no one ever got past level 1.

Speak for yourself, Focksbot, I still enjoy games like those I recently replayed the entire Mega Man series for fun. Know what’s odd? The higher the number, the easier they are…

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys punishingly difficult games, give VVVVVV a try.

As for the rest of this thread… the clock tower is not required for anything. I did it because I enjoy that sort of thing. My wife doesn’t: platforming isn’t her strong point. She took one look at the clock tower, made a couple of attempts and said “Nope, not happening!” and went on to have a blast playing Reaper Rumble.

Games are for fun. If you’re not having fun playing the CT, why on earth are you wasting your time on it? There are lots of other things to do that will probably give you greater pleasure!

Curiously, people who are addicts and people with compulsions tend not to derive much pleasure from engaging in their addictive/compulsive behavior.

I watched my son beat the tower. Of course he’s young, and teenagers are weird about most things. But he enjoyed it, figuring out each step along the way, except for having to wait between attempts.

Grim.6415:

I’m wondering if this is a new generation of gamer or just a fundamental shift in the way games have developed over time.

I’m not sure. But, as a guy pushing 50, I had zero interest in many of the games of the 80s and 90s for the exact reason = the difficulty. They were just too hard for me. I tried them for hours, failed, and came to the realization that I’m just not that good a player, and left it at that.

I’ve never liked Risk vs Reward or Skill vs Reward because I wasn’t skilful. Those games aren’t bad, they just aren’t for me. When Time vs Reward games started popping up, I loved it. I had no skill, but Time I had.

For most new single player games, I struggle at the Easiest setting, and I consider it an achievement to finish the game on Easy. That’s why I tend not to like MMOs. Actually every single one of them, (EQ, CoH, SWTOR, GW2), I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming by my wife and/or best friend.

I’ve learned that the best way to enjoy them, at least for me, is to set my own goals, and ignore what “should” be done. Yeah I’m one of those that never dodge (by the time I see the mob power-up, and double tap the arrow key, I’m already hit, so I might as well shooting… that’s right, I’m a Key-1-spammer).

So when it came to jumping the clock tower… ha! No way. I Chevy Chase’d it (cf Grand Canyon). Saw it. Jumped. Couldn’t get past the starting staircase part. Then I left. I have problems with most L40+ Vistas, so this was just a “I saw it” part.

Thing is, especially in an MMO, I’m not the target market, and that’s fine with me. I read the boards of all the above MMO and the “lack of content” “too easy” complaints are pretty common. So I’m glad there’s an OMG hard jumping puzzle, just like I’m glad there’s PVP (I’d be skeet if I tried) or other activities I’ll never do.

But, to finish off with a return to Grim’s post, if things went back to the 80s-90s gameplay difficulty, that’d be fine, but I wouldn’t play the games. I’d go back to card games.

Because I’m part of the 1%… the BOTTOM 1% hehe… and I’m ok with that. But I wouldn’t expect a game to be catered to me. As long as I can jump some Vistas, and live through some fights with Spam-1, I can be happy the high end crowd have their Clocktower jumping puzzles, or PVP, or Explorable Dungeons, or whatever is the top tier difficulty in this game.

It’s not all about me, heh.

theres no need in an in-depth psychology analisis here.

People DONT LIKE to fail, so, if you fail you gonna keep trying until you succed because its our nature to “get better and compete” this time we arent competing with someone else but with ourselves si in that case its mostly a “i have to beat this”

i spent 7+ hours doing JP and when i completed it i didnt care anymore for the reward, there was a personal satisfaction by doing that i cant explain.

sorry for bad english.

Dalris: That’s definitely understandable and just like everything in MMO’s not all content is for everyone. You enjoy PvE exploration and leveling. Some enjoy structured PvP, some enjoy explorable dungeons, etc….

Luckily this little mini-game is a small part of what the game offers and is completely optional content so it sounds like you have the right attitude towards it, but won’t have to hand up your GW2 hat anytime soon as there are other aspects of the game you still enjoy.

Those who want to see the jumping puzzle changed or removed should instead ask themselves why, if others very much enjoyed that content, should it be changed to accomodate you when instead you could simply ask Anet for more content that you like instead next time and not force out or alter the content you don’t enjoy.

Absolutely agree with some of the posts above – I would have spend a couple of nights “grinding” this even if there was NO reward. I quite like the achievement badge because it shows that I did it, I can be proud of it. No matter how much time, how many friends, or how much of the previous tier some random guy grinded, he won’t be able to do what I just did unless he is actually good at this minigame.

lookitsandrea.8531:

What kept me going? The truly non-deserving elitist in me. I’m only level 44, so I certainly don’t have much to brag about. But I think everybody has a small superiority complex. I didn’t want to rub it anybody’s faces that I completed the puzzle; that’s just not how I roll. But I did want to post in the “completed Tower” thread on the forums, and I did want to be able to say, if anybody asked, “Why yes, I did finish what may be the most difficult jumping puzzle in the game.” It gives me internal bragging rights, and during the time I was doing the puzzle, that was really important. It made me feel important. It also made me feel (I know it sounds super lame) “special” because I was able to finish it. Sure, lots of others did too… but even more people won’t be able to finish it. It put me in the minority.

That’s what kept me going at it.

I found this post to be so refreshingly honest. To be sure, we should all be as self-reflective when examining our motivations.

Looking over these forums, I have seen blatant elitism, modest elitism, indifference, denial, anger, projection (the failure isn’t mine—it’s Norns and Charrs!) and everything in-between.

This is the psychology of the Clock Tower. The Mad King has in the palm of his hand, and the true terror comes in looking at our own frail egos.

Mad king clock tower needs to be made instanced… it is impossible to see your character and/or where you are jumping when there are massive norn and charr blocking your sight.

OR ATLEAST GET RID OF THE ACID THAT KILLS YOU

Joshmans.8937:

My 17 year old sister runs this event and completes it every time, wtf is everyones problem?

we are out of adderall.

I’m a completionist and achievement oriented. That empty space in the achievement list taunts me. I bought myself some exotic boots just so the reward wouldn’t taunt me anymore. Now I have 50% less taunting from the event. I think I have enough points in my taunt resistance trait line to avoid being eaten by green goop any more.

Actually Adderall and its ilk aren’t terribly helpful for twitch games. It might have helped a bit for the route memorization (i.e. taken fewer initial attempts to get the route figured out), but it doesn’t really do jack for reflexes or muscle memory.

It seems to me that ANet has succeeded in making us look like lemmings. All running for that cliff that we think we won’t fall off of THIS time. Stand in line and wait to do it again.

The tower explosion forces everyone into a bunch for the hardest early part of the puzzle. Wouldn’t know about the rest because I can’t get by those first few tactical jumps. Getting to that part is much easier.

I don’t know if I am skilled enough to do the tower, but I probably won’t get the chance to find out since spending most of my time waiting to get frustrated at all of the players blocking my view of the jumps is just not worth it to me.

The hardest JP in the game should be something you can do if given the chance to practice, but when you can’t see you can’t learn. What was their intent with the intentional grouping?

hahaha I am a completionist. I even have 31 minipets for the sake of colecting. I have over 260 dyes also. And well, anything that is collectible XD and this achievement is bugging me coz I need it. the only others I have left are “attend the party” and the one for getting all achievements “emmisary of the mad king” … so in other words, the only one I need is the clock tower achievent and then the other 2 are sure things. I have been at the clock tower (no life I know) for 3 DAYS… the other night, I spent 6 hours straight trying to do it.

And I don’t want to pay anyone to do it coz I want to do it, it is my character and account.

Grim.6415:

Those who want to see the jumping puzzle changed or removed should instead ask themselves why, if others very much enjoyed that content, should it be changed to accomodate you when instead you could simply ask Anet for more content that you like instead next time and not force out or alter the content you don’t enjoy.

The puzzle may be fine or not – it’s not the puzzle itself I am criticizing anyway or the thing I want to see changed. There’s like a short list of things which would be universally applicable to the game: camera and character model stacking/occlusion.
I pretty much lean towards making it soloable, if not directly then maybe by turning other players into ghosts :p

The idea of more content is nice so the issue of missing out an achievement (I never care for the loot anyway) diminishes. Maybe they could introduce some sort of puzzle which challenges the mind instead your fingers once. Like a complicated tactical puzzle with no preset condition (so you couldn’t youtube your way out of it).

To be honest, it would just be nice to be able to SEE MY kitten CHARACTER. Norn and Charr make it pretty impossible to see my asura…

Ravenblade.7685:

The puzzle may be fine or not – it’s not the puzzle itself I am criticizing anyway or the thing I want to see changed. There’s like a short list of things which would be universally applicable to the game: camera and character model stacking/occlusion.
I pretty much lean towards making it soloable, if not directly then maybe by turning other players into ghosts :p

The idea of more content is nice so the issue of missing out an achievement (I never care for the loot anyway) diminishes. Maybe they could introduce some sort of puzzle which challenges the mind instead your fingers once. Like a complicated tactical puzzle with no preset condition (so you couldn’t youtube your way out of it).

Might be a good idea to work on a suggestion for next event, perhaps there’s a mini-game to be had that is more intellectual skill than twitch. Start something up in the suggestion forum if you can think of something.

Adam, the clocktower achievement does not count for the overall achievement. You don’t need it.

Making it easier would ruin the bragging rights part of completing the tower. I cant favor that.

It is the MAD kings tower, not the NICE kings tower. It is designed to be hard.

Draygo.9473:

Adam, the clocktower achievement does not count for the overall achievement. You don’t need it.

Making it easier would ruin the bragging rights part of completing the tower. I cant favor that.

It is the MAD kings tower, not the NICE kings tower. It is designed to be hard.

facepalm The tower isn’t hard LOL

What is hard is the ability to see your character LOL

Thats the point. Its the MAD tower.

Draygo.9473:

Thats the point. Its the MAD tower.

But it is not the tower making me “MAD” what is frustrating is playing a human only to be unintentionally trolled by norn and charr… then other players are FORCED to make a new norn character so they can actually see what they are doing and then you get mobs of level 1 to 3 norn doing it just because it is unfair to every other race participating.

And I don’t want to HAVE TO make a norn just to do it. I want to “play a game how I want to”, that is guild wars 2’s philosophy. Regardless of the puzzles title, it contradicts what the game stands for. But no matter, if it isn’t done by this afternoon, I will make a norn and do it tonight (-_-)

The camera issues and ability to see your character is not really the point of this thread. There are plenty of other threads to discuss those things. Also I learned and completed the JP on my Asura.

the clock tower jumping puzzle is great, but it confuses me, if i have 15 people running up there, next to me, with big chars and i can’t even see, what i am doing, cause i don’t see my char. i know, that people even did it, with an asura but like i said, the others are confusing me a lot, cause you always pay attention to them also, wehre they are running to and so on. i would like this puzzle more, if i could do it, all alone.