Guild Wars 2

I have a question. When I played the Halloween event, I ended up using an online guide to finish the quests because they were way too vague for me to figure out in the allotted time.

I love solving puzzles in games (grew up with Monkey Island, Space Quest, Kings Quest, etc), but I’m not interested in starting a quest that I won’t have time to finish, and be forced to abandon it, or cheat online.

While I realize the NPC’s are bugged right now, I’m wondering if these quests are vague to the point of frustration, or are they worth starting today?

They’re not vague at all, but they are bugged. If you’re prone to frustration I’d just wait, but I can’t guarantee they’ll be there tomorrow.

I haven’t finished them myself (due to bugs blocking progression), so I don’t know if there are any rewards beyond story and lore.

At most you’ll need to look up where places are on the map, but the names of places are given to you.

You have to look at what ANet’s strengths and weaknesses are.

Story quests have been outrageously buggy, all thru beta, all thru launch, with people blocked in progress for months. It’s naive to hope they’d get it right for a one-off weekend thing.

GW2 isn’t about quests. ANet has programmed only dozens of them (compared to thousands in other games), so they just don’t have the tools or talent for it.

It’s not a “puzzle” unless you can apply logic to figure out the sequence or to understand what the goal might be. The wreckage investigation in Lion’s Arch is a prime example of the WORST, LAZIEST so-called puzzle design possible. It was totally random to hit up on the right sequence, and you had zero idea of what you were looking for.

The Mad King “books” quest(s) at least gave you a vague “treasure hunt” type of clue, but yes, even they were far too vague. They all should at least have pointed you directly at the correct zone name to hunt around in.

My frustration is only indirectly related to those event quests. I love to explore. So if I receive this vague description of a location, which forces me to study the map and explore areas, I love it. Especially if it sends me to locations I haven’t been before.

But the maptravel costs destroy this fun, because especially with these kind of quests they become a nuisance when you have to hop around the map a lot.
So because of the maptravel costs I suddenly get annoyed for quests being vague. The maptravel costs also make me look up guides sooner then I normally would.

I could’ve figured out the Mad King book quest on my own, but I couldn’t be bothered the moment I realised that if I were to look in the wrong places, I could end up spending more then half a gold for hopping around the map. So I looked it up and didn’t have that much fun as I would have figuring it out for myself.