Guild Wars 2

So, I queued up and never got let into the arena. 6 tickets down the drain, and I’m unable to get a refund for the tickets. Yay.

Gambits should not take tickets in the first place.
Gambits are used to make the fight more difficult in exchange for a higher profit.

With gambits requiring one ticket, you basically gain the same reward per ticket as you do without gambit, but the possibility of failing becomes higher.
You just save a minor amount of time…

I agree that gambits shouldn’t use tickets. Like Varonth says it doesn’t make sense to use gambits solely for the reward since you can just use that ticket that you used on the gambit to do another round without gambits.

TL;DR: I agree, it’s beyond silly that it costs a currency to give yourself a negative effect, making fights harder, without really having rewards jutifying the risk.
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This is one amongst several reasons this update, that has me standing at the door, contemplating quitting the game for good, taking my money with me, and saving myself further bi-weekly frustration, annoyance and anger over a game I used to love playing.

It’s beyond ridiculous that it should cost you a type of currency to give yourself negative effects, something which makes the encounters much more difficult. Sure, the rewards are increased ever so slightly, but it is also increasing the rate of failure much more than the rewards justify. The single reason I have even used Gambits, is because of the achievements, where upon using five in a third tier fight it is incredibly difficult to manage pulling off.

And what in the world was the designer(s) thinking, when they made the arenas small glass domes, in a game that already suffers from poor camera control in confined spaces. Several of these fights require spacial awareness, and the camera is working against you constantly, due to the contrained space. It’s just terrible game design. And the flooring, do you even have a single person on your team(s) that are color weak or color blind? It is near impossible to even see the red circles when trying to rely on those, instead of the camera, that’s clearly not working together with the player, but are rather spending its time, giving you bootie-shots of your own behind.

Throw in a mix of bugs, like Meatless Murderer not triggering, even though Chomper never gets to chomp up any of the meat Strugar throws out, or that two players gets teleported into the same arena. Invisible tornadoes left over from Kieldia, leftover slimes from Subject 7. The gauntlet is bug-infested, and clearly not tested properly.

Don’t ArenaNet believe in making games, you know, fun? Why are you throwing in achievements like killing Liadri with 8 orbs, when most professions/players can barely kill her before the floor opens up below them? Picking stuff up, makes your character pause for a split second. Throwing stuff, same deal. And the five Gambits in a third tier fight is not exactly a cake walk. Perhaps for some professions it may be, but for most, it really isn’t. Expecting players to play professions they are not familiar with in order to do temporary content is just a bad design philosophy.

These achievements would be perfect if the content was permanent, and not tied into some factory of bi-weekly updates that has content that’ll just disappear again. They are challenging, which I find great, but you feel stressed out, frustrated, annoyed and angered when you have the feeling that these things are here for a limited time. I doesn’t lend itself to allowing you to enjoy other aspects of the game that you may like. Like World vs. World, sPvP and what not. You are trapped working on those achievements until you get them.

And yes, I get the people saying achievements are not required, that you don’t need all achievements for a meta, and so on forth. Yes, that’s fine, you may not care about not getting all achievements completed, but several players do, myself included. They are completionists, and wish to complete everything, in due time. That doesn’t mean they don’t wish to enjoy the game otherwise. And with these short-schedule constant updates, it’s hard to enjoy anything else, especially when they make some of these achievements so grindy (Southsun Survival, 2500 points) or frustrating (Liadri, hit with 8 orbs and kill her).

I just think ArenaNet really needs to consider what they’re doing with these constant give and take updates, instead of adding to the game and keeping content around forever. I sure don’t feel “Living Story” makes the world feel more “living”, and I almost get sad thinking about all the content we’ve had, that’s just poof’d out of existence for new players.

I don’t care that you bet.

I lost 6 tickets because the arena bugged after I queued and there’s no way to unqueue (or requeue at a different arena).

If you slay some T3 enemy 5 times, you’ll be rewarded with about 50 silver and 25 sprockets. Since 5 tickets cost 20 silver and 15 sprockets, you’ll get a net gain of 30 silver an 10 sprockets.
Assuming a great build wich kill fast and do not use long CD skills (aiming at about 4 min mark for 5 kills), 100% success rate and a free cage all the time, we get a 4,5g (and 150 sprockets)/hour at best result, which is far from impressive.

This gain can greatly increase however if gambits are used.
If the previous fights were done with 3 gambits on, we would be talking about something like 18g/hour, which sounds pretty insane.
There’s an inherent time sink on activating the gambits one by one, so the net gain may be a bit smaller. You also have a harder fight, maybe requiring a high CD like an elite (that would absolutely ruin the numbers) and maybe decreasing your succes rate from 100% (every failed attempt is going to be severeley punished since we were using a free cage).

All this mean that the current gambit system can be potentially used for a really good revenue, but also that it would consist on an obvious grind and that requires a free cage (something that can’t be controlled by the player) in order to work.
Without this, if you can only have fight every 2 minutes or so, you’ll need a near 100% success rate with 4-5 gambits active all the time in order to achieve really good farming numbers.
100% success rate with 3 gambits on outputs a good reward, probably on par with good AC or Arah runs, but’s still grindy as hell.

IMHO the biggest issue with this is not the reward but the fact that gauntlet tickets can just be bought, so in the end we get nothing but a gold/time ratio based on success rate, amount of gambits and fights/time.
If non-buyable tickets were recovered on success and discarded on failure, then a much more interesting reward system, with exclusive skins and so on, could be possible.

So gambits are good for farming.