Guild Wars 2

From my perspective, a challenge is based on a player observing a pattern, or seeing stimuli/tells, and reacting to it, a challenge tests their reaction timing, their memory, their strategy, and their ability to improvise and recover from mistakes (if the challenge allows for recovery, some are unforgiving), and their dexterity at playing the game.

MOST of Liandri’s fight involves that, there’s strategy in mauvering around the clones, since you can’t just dps her down, there’s a pattern to he AOE’s, quite obviously the unforgiving nature of the fight tests dexterity and reaction time, and that’s all fair good challenge, I wish I could enjoy it.

However I’ve always considered things like low or no visibility, unhelpful UI, poor cameras/angles and RANDOM instant kills to be Artificial difficulty.

Now some people will even say that shadowfall is random and hence artificial difficulty but there is a pattern to it so I will throw that out.

However, I consider the bad camera in the arena (if Liandri spawns a white vortex at the edge of the arena, good luck, you’re going to need it), along with the wire floor making the aoes difficult to see to be artificial difficulty and I ESPECIALLY think that Liandri’s attack that blurrs the entire screen (unless you turn off post processing) to be straight up artificial difficulty and INTENTIONAL artificial difficulty at that.

I do want designers to have a take home message that this is not a good source of challenge, if you pay attention to your players, almost across the board they recommend turning off post processing. You might even consider that cheating (like turning up the gamma in a dark jumping puzzle room, now, dark jp rooms can be legit challenge IF you have a mechanic involved in them to use a torch, or a timed lighting up of the room that is on a distinct pattern, as long as the area is done in such a way that you don’t HAVE to jump while it’s dark but can in fact wait for the pattern to bring the light back).

If players are looking to EXPLOIT a challenge, they’re not finding the challenge fair or fun. Remove the blurred screen attack, it’s pointless to leave in because people turn off their post processing to avoid being affected by it and it is raw artificial difficulty (since it prevents you from seeing something that will instantly kill you, and you can’t just wait it out, you have to act, and act blind).

Personally, I’d also like the arena floors to not be wire, but solid, so the aoe rings show up better, and I’d like the walls of the arena pulled back from the edge of the actual playable area, so tha you can get a decent FoV, either that or make the walls of the arena invisible to players in the arena, so the camera never gets obstructed.

How about we just take the dome off of the arena? That’s the main camera problem with me.

BTW agree with everything about artificial difficulty.

shadowfall is not random, it follow a pattern..
and… yes it is a poor design

it is not fun at all, maybe in 100+ try I can succed, but I don’t like wasting my time… so I’m not doing that; maybe, once thay see that after 2-3 days no-one is doing it they will acknowledge that they failed with this “arena”

oh.. and I forget another important point… I don’t like to frenetically smash buttons on my keyboard to just do it in time; like many of us, I want to play my character the way I always liked to play it, so I will not change my build, equip and traits and then just see that this can be easily facerolled by a berzerker warrior…

Surprised this got buried so fast, I wanted more discussion on it, or does this mean pretty much everyone agrees that visibility limitations are artificial difficulty?

Yeah, ANet seems to simply NOT learn from past mistakes when it comes to things like the camera.

We’ve been telling them since beta that the camera sucks and to stop designing content that causes the real fight to be against the camera rather than the enemies. Yet it happens again and again. Liadri would be a great, fun fight if not for the camera and really, really, hard to see red pixels on the floor.

Hate to say it, but I think they need to replace their testers. Their current ones have missed glaring issues is most every update that are obvious to everyone except them for some reason. They are either not doing their job, not capable of doing the job, or choose to not do the job all of which warrant replacement.

Essence Snow.3194:

Hate to say it, but I think they need to replace their testers. Their current ones have missed glaring issues is most every update that are obvious to everyone except them for some reason. They are either not doing their job, not capable of doing the job, or choose to not do the job all of which warrant replacement.

Got to quote this. I mean, no one of them had ever gone near the border?
And it makes me wonder if they even tested with norns and charrs. You can’t see anything with the firsts.

Poor UI, bad camera angles, hard-to-see circles, stuff obstructed by nothing, screen blinds, are all things that are artificial difficult in my opinion. These things should get fixed, and by fixing them, ArenaNet could present us with better challenges than Liadra.

Artifical difficulty is needed in almost any game that doesn’t have an AI implementation. To a degree it’s fine (eg. cheating npcs), but UI fighting is generally something that shouldn’t exist.

Devildoc.6721:

However I’ve always considered things like low or no visibility, unhelpful UI, poor cameras/angles and RANDOM instant kills to be Artificial difficulty.

Yes. And cruddy design — especially if it affects some people more than others. (example: camera issues in tight spaces on charr/norn versus asura). I’d really like to see some acknowledgement of this. I can’t weigh in on the Gauntlet yet, but issues like spell effects obscuring enemy AoE circles or obscuring the whole enemy so you can’t tell what it’s doing are extremely frustrating. The camera getting shoved in your face by the flimsiest obstacles during battles (or jumping) is aggravating as well.

Essence Snow.3194:

Hate to say it, but I think they need to replace their testers. Their current ones have missed glaring issues is most every update that are obvious to everyone except them for some reason. They are either not doing their job, not capable of doing the job, or choose to not do the job all of which warrant replacement.

It has very little to do with testers. Speaking as a tester (Not for ANet) Testers generally find 100s of more issues than actually get fixed. It is a Testers job only to identify them, not to determine what does and does not get fixed. That decision is left to the Devs. On the projects I work on, we have deadlines that have to be met. And we have more issues than you can imagine that we identify and the developers deem “Known Shippable” something they know is broken, but they don’t have the time/budget/resources to fix. So lets not hate on testers <3

I just tried the Liadri fight about 10 times, I think that half the time I was killed by the camera and a couple of times I couldn’t see the circles on the floor. If they removed the dome and had a solid grey floor I’d be a lot happier (I’d probably have got her a couple of times too).

Artificial difficulty.

Visibility problems themselves can be legit difficulty – darkness or rain come to mind. In the case of Liadri I consider it artificial/fake difficulty because its caused by camera movements that are often outside of your control or unpredictable.

Take the dome off and make the floor solid and the fight is more about dealing with the encounter design and less about the camera (that this affects races differently is icing on the cake).

I’ve tested on games before, and found dozens of bugs and glaring flaws that negatively effect the game- reported, and then find out all those bugs and flaws have made it in.

I wouldn’t be surprised if testers found most of these things, and Anet just ignored it. Ignoring testers seems to be a tradition for mmos.