Guild Wars 2

Dont’ get me wrong: I think this was a very cool event in concept and in ambition. And the new Fractal dungeon is awesomesauce and is also VERY excellent design that is casual-friendly and about 100x better than the first 8 dungeons, which are still a mess of confusing, bad overall mechanics except for a few really good ones like the CoF story mode. (and possibly some of the CoF explorables, but I haven’t tried those yet.)

But… Please consider the following feedback the next event, which I assume will be around the Yuletide holidays:

1. Throttle total instance pop in Lion’s Arch and any zone where a big group fight is mean to happen. The lag and rendering issues for Friday’s event was simply NOT fun and NOT exciting. Throttle the normal instance pop to roughly 10% of normal. Simply spawn a lot more overflow instances and spread everyone out.

2. Please dear FSM in the sky: Give groups an easier way to get into the same instance together! For both the Mad King event and this one, it is nearly impossible to get a group of 5 people from the same guild into the same instance to enjoy the event together. It took my group of 5 nearly 40 minutes of trying to coerce the system to put us all in the same instance of Lion’s Arch together before we could sucessfully get all of us into the same Fractal dungeon. And we couldn’t fight off the first main invasion together, because we couldn’t get into the same instance together. This really bites for immersion and camraderie. Why on earth don’t you have an instance number menu like you had in GW1? Or at least, why don’t you iterate your zoning code to prioritize/ensure that people in a group end up in the same exact instance together when they zone in?

3. The beach investigation portion of Tyriel’s investigation question was TERRIBLE, LAZY puzzle design. It’s not a “puzzle” if you can’t apply logic to figure out a sequence. Instead, this was just 100% random to arrive at the correct order to open things. No clue about what you’re looking for. No clue about the correct sequence/order. Nothing. BAD BAD BAD. Don’t do that kitten again!

4. Don’t make a special event quest chain (ala Tyriel) required to be finished within 24 hours. That’s just stupid given the nature of unforeseen bugs when promoting to production environments, and the time required to investigate and get hot fixes pushed out. You should NEVER make a time-constrained quest chain any shorter than 3-4 days.

5. And finally: I’m in Texas USA but show some love to your global audiences. Why are you prioritizing convenient workday hours in America, during the workweek, to kick off your special one time events? Why not START such events on Saturday at about noon PST so you can at least get overlap with European evening primetime? On a weekend day when more people have a chance to attend? And END such events on a Sunday at the same time. Friday at noon/1pm/2pm/3pm USA time? That’s crazy: half of your American audience are at work. And why not rotate your event starting times to cater to USA/Europe > AsiaPac each time? Give some love to down under folks and let an event every now and then start at a time that’s good for them (and let the Americans/Euros wake up in the middle of the night if they want to be there). You could easily be “fair” to everyone by doing one event at Saturday/Sunday noon PST for the American/Euro audience, and then the next event at some time convenient for the AsiaPac audience, then the next at noon PST and so on.

+1 for this entire post, and +1 for FSM.

To address the last point, there is simply no reason why the events can’t start during prime time in their respective timezones. I have not heard one compelling argument to convince me this isn’t a good idea.

+a zillion. Well said. Especially not constraining time-limited events to a single day. Usually, I have a couple of hours here and there. Sometimes I can get a whole day. But, if I need about 10 hours of playing time to complete something, it might take me a week to do that.

A weekend, one-time event, is not friendly for the casual player with family, kids, picnics, soccer, homework, etc. (Honestly, I have more time to play during the week, evenings, than I do on the weekend.)

Nice post! If they don’t want to give us a month to finish the event, they should do a better job beta and stress testing the events. 24 hours to complete an even that is broken isn’t my idea of enjoyable.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

To address the last point, there is simply no reason why the events can’t start during prime time in their respective timezones. I have not heard one compelling argument to convince me this isn’t a good idea.

Well there is money. That is what it is all about. Maximizing profits. Inorder for them to have events happen at different times they would need to have a staffer on to insure event went off at said time. Not that I agree with issue. Considering the sold over 1million last I read. They had 1 million preorder so that is 60million dollars. And they will not even spend money on a test server.

I would also like to add that if you get an email (or say 6 different ones) directing you to go to a location, that there is some kind of feedback, zonewide notice, or something to let you know that the event is completed, or will be resetting or whatever.

My experience with this entire event has been traveling to a spot and finding nothing, and not knowing if I should hang around, or I missed it.

Why do people just complain when new content comes out? I mean ‘really’ this is a bonus upgrade that we didn’t pay a monthly fee for.

1. Good idea, and I suspect that they actually ‘did’ throttle the instance population to a much lower than normal amount for LA. But how low exactly could that first battle have been removed to? It’s a pretty confined battle area, so it was unusual in the amount of players in the same space casting skills. Even with the population density it was really hard, yes lag made certain skills hard to cast, and you had to actually press attack buttons rather than auto attack, but if there were 90% less players involved, this thread would be complaining about creating events that are too hard.

2. Right-click party member, join overflow, seems pretty simple and worked fine for our party. It was only complicated because there was such a high population density in LA due to the timed event start. Your first suggestion to reduce instance population, doesn’t work with this at all. You can’t throttle the population in an instance while still making it easy for people to join the instance.

3. There ‘was’ a logic to the beach investigation. It started off a little random until you investigated the small piece of jetsam. That then directed you to look for a larger bit of broken crate, which directed you to look for a large unbroken crate, which directed you to come back with a crowbar. Perhaps reading the text would have helped you work out the order, but I had zero trouble working it out after finding the first clue.

4. This was about releasing a new PVP map, a new dungeon and a new PVE map. The 3 day event is just a bonus which they could quite easily have just not bothered with. That first laggy battle has happened, and will never happen again. Yes it was laggy, but how do you test hundreds of thousands of people logged onto a one-time event at the same time? I enjoyed it.

5. Going back to your, last point about bug fixing. When the event kicked off at 12pm PST and they were at work and being paid to work on Guild Wars 2, they were also physically located with the servers and able to do more than connecting remotely from home. Why should they have to do everything in their spare time? Are GW2 developers not entitled to a life too?

THANK YOU!

These are the sort of posts Arenanet needs to improve the game and others would do well to emulate your example.

I think on the point of being in the same overflow as the rest of your group perhaps to expand we could have an option to form ‘raid’ style groups of up to lets say 50 people and when reaching past the 25 mark allow the ‘raid’ leader to choose to create a new overflow for their group, this might not be possible with the tech Arenanet have available to them but it’d be one of those more ideal situations.

Maybe this is crazy talk, but how about making these 1 time events for solo and/or small group play rather than 100k man zerg fests? We all know that GW2 is at its worst when being zerg rushed, so let’s avoid the problem rather than finagle a work-around.

Mini-missions or some such could be available for a limited amount of time (24-48 hours or so) so people group up and do the LA fight on their own time. We all get to see the cutscene at our leisure, we get to feel like big kitten heroes, and so on.

Also, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, design should definitely move away from single points of failure. No more npc’s like Canach who need to be fought by thousands of people all at once. It isn’t a compelling event, nor does it convey the intimidation evident in the dialogue. It just bugs out. If there does need to be npcs with which to interact then it should be dialogue only. There’s obviously some malicious piece of DE and skillpoint code that keeps causing these things to break when pushed too hard.

The NPCs for the questline need to be instanced; that way, debugging them should be much easier. Plus, you don’t have to worry about not getting credit for participating when 50 other people nuked the boss with AoEs within a couple seconds.

I had fun even amongst all that lag, and laughed a lot at all the funny situations this generated.
But this is me, a personal opinion. Objectively talking, such memorable events may obtain a better result if they are spread over the whole map somehow (although I acknowledge how hard could be to explain how a Karka went to, let’s say, Hoelbrak). Since there is so much stuff to do, more time would be greatly appreciated: many casual players, me included, cannot play 16 hours a day and will lose most of the content due to RL stuff. I mean, it’s ok, I had fun and a lot of it, but since we are talking about potential ways of improvements…

I would just like to not be confused during these special events. I’ve played a lot of MMO’s and I don’t know what it is about this one that I’m failing to grasp with events and dungeons. Everything just seems really rushed and confusing, first of all logging in to see 4 or 5 letters not knowing which to follow first didn’t help at all. I’m not one for hand holding but I don’t like feeling disconnected and irritated, especially after trying to ask for help in unfriendly map chat about any sort of advice.

The event should be experienced by everyone at their leisure. It should have the importance that Personal Story has that was fundamental in the GW2 design.

Phasing would be excellent – its one of the few things some other mmo does really well. For those that aren’t familiar with phasing it allows people to come into an event area, but only see the part of the event that they are Personally on.

An overflow server that is constantly running the initial event with the cut scenes would seem like another way to experience the event. It could be a special selectable overflow such as the “Join (x.player) in (x.location)” option for grouping with party members.

Nothing in the description of the event mentions that One Time Event means only at that One Time. Its easy to confuse what IS said to mean that this event won’t happen next year AND that you will have 24 hours to experience each sequence. It should specifically say “The launching of the event can only be experienced if you are on at 12pm PST while the remainder of the event can be experienced throughout the day” (barring glitches :p).

I would prefer to experience the event as a Personal Story over missing the event by not logging in at a specific time or experience the lag that that encourages. If this method is employed again, even MORE people are going to try to be on at that one time causing an even worse experience.

I’m sympathetic towards ANet and players for this exciting weekend event. ANet wants to share new content that they’ve put time into and players want to enjoy it. On top of that ANet offered a free weekend trial. New players are being introduced with all this going on :(

The game has only been out a little over 2 months and is on its 2nd event. Its impressive. No game launches without bugs especially mmo’s. We can hope that with more time these events will become streamlined and enjoyable by everyone no matter their location or availability.

I agree, there needs to be some adjustment with how these events are implemented. As I suggested on the Facebook topic (but will repost here in case it got lost among the other posts) was that you do like GW1 and have these events be reoccuring events instead of one time events. That way people don’t all come on at once causing large lags. It would stagger things out if people knew if they missed the first time they could just come back in a few hours and experience then.

You could still have the World Changing things happen. It would just be permanent at upon the last of the reoccuring events of that particular day.

I agree with ALL of these fully except your last comment.

I live in New Zealand where we are a day ahead of half of the rest of the world, that meant that the event started on a Saturday for us (thats great right, like what you wanted?) But you have to keep in mind that now all of you get the finale on a sunday which is great for you, while those of us in earlier time zones are stuck with a 9am Monday finale… Which obviously isn’t very helpful xD.

I’m just pointing out there is absolutely no way for them to set times up to please everyone. Oh wait… Stop making ridiculously time constrained events -_-… Halloween I could understand, it’s just one day a year so you don’t want it lingering for all that long. But there was absolutely no reason this couldn’t have been a week long event. I would almost have been happier if Anet did this in a similar way to personal stories so we could have just done the events inside instances with guild members…

1 for post, +10 for #4 since I work 12 hours a day and live in Hawaii so I miss out on all the good stuff.

I simply wasn’t able to do the one-time event because that was already 4am here in my timezone. I logged in the morning (around 10am), received those mails and puzzled of what to do. Good thing there’s dulfy guides, but still, I missed the one-time event. I haven’t seen any awesome Karka events yet. Just the Young Karka DE (only once) at Caledon Forest which only took like less than 10 minutes to finish. And that’s it. I waited there for a while, waited in LA too, and in Kessex that maybe they would appear again. Lol. But someone told me it’s just a one-time event, so I left those areas and entered the Fractals instead.

The finale will also be around 4am Monday my time. I dunno if I could attend that one too because I got work in the morning. I’m from Asia. We get the love least. :<