Guild Wars 2

Good summary, this is.
Read it, ANet should.

Teq is not too hard and I am sure the worm won’t be too hard either once it has been “solved”

I disagree about the NPC, I actually like it that we (the players) need to figure out what to do, thats just natural. Today we stuff games with tutorials and hints and whatnot so that all players immediatly get what to do, but sometimes trying and failing some times is just as much fun as being told what to do.

Good feedback, but I disagree with the part about an NPC telling yu what to do before the fight.

That doesn’t make sense, no game does that. It doesn’t make sense from the ‘story’ point of view wither, I mean, how could people know what will happen?

It would ruin the discovery of the mechanisms for yourself – NPC shouting during the event (like at teq) – now that is OK.

Edit: windwarrior is apperantly a ninja.

wayy ahead of you man

The wurm event is terrible. No one knows what to do. We aren’t even sure if we have enough players to complete it. Dungeon style puzzle boss events don’t scale up well.

The wurm event is fantastic. I’m having so much fun working it out and being among the first to work it out. Where would the fun be if people just told us what we should do? :P

Amok Threeohthree.8501:

Teq is not too hard and I am sure the worm won’t be too hard either once it has been “solved”

It requires too much organization, as it evident by the amount of servers where people have stopped doing that event. The wurm bosses will not be any different, since they arguably require even more organization than Tequatl.

I logged on, just a few hours after this went live, and, when I asked people in map chat if they knew what to do to defeat the worm in Bloodtide Coast their response was, “Read the guides online.”

Are these raids? Because if they’re raids then I could understand having to research and prepare in order to defeat them. But these don’t appear to be raids, these appear to be open world content designed for what are essentially PuGs.

So, despite being part of the “Living World Story”, there’s no story. There’s just these two boss fights in two different zones. Both of which require more coordination than can be achieved by PuGs. And, once again, the story isn’t conveyed to the players [b]in game[/i].

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Amok Threeohthree.8501:

Teq is not too hard and I am sure the worm won’t be too hard either once it has been “solved”

It requires too much organization, as it evident by the amount of servers where people have stopped doing that event. The wurm bosses will not be any different, since they arguably require even more organization than Tequatl.

All three wurms must be defeated within one minute of each other

Kanto.1659:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Amok Threeohthree.8501:

Teq is not too hard and I am sure the worm won’t be too hard either once it has been “solved”

It requires too much organization, as it evident by the amount of servers where people have stopped doing that event. The wurm bosses will not be any different, since they arguably require even more organization than Tequatl.

All three wurms must be defeated within one minute of each other

I know…

We just had 2 down to 5% and 1 head dead… so close

My feedback -

Events need to scale down to numbers that are realistic FOR EVERY SERVER. I worry that Anet is designing the game around servers like Blackgate and specialized guilds like TTS.

After a week, these fights die on 80% of the servers and players have to resort to guesting or playing with people other than their friends/guild members to even have a chance at the fight. I cant see how that is acceptable to them.

Simply scaling them down to 30+ (but retaining fight complexity) would alleviate the issue nicely.

We’ll get the wurms beaten.
And then have words with Anet about how this needs some minor nerfing/extra time tacked on.
Still fun though :P

windwarrior.2690:

I disagree about the NPC, I actually like it that we (the players) need to figure out what to do, thats just natural. Today we stuff games with tutorials and hints and whatnot so that all players immediatly get what to do, but sometimes trying and failing some times is just as much fun as being told what to do.

Thanks all of you for the feedback. I will respond to this one though, as in, I firmly believe that there are many ways to implement such a feature to the players. Seeing as there is no native voice chat ability in GW2 it behooves ANet to make clear what we should be doing within a major boss fight. I realize that discovery is the bread and butter of good MMO’s but in this case leads to the last point I made above in that killing your player base over and over again because they are unsure what to do is not how it should be done for such a large scale event IMO.

The “lore master” (might even be an ancient tome) could be well hidden behind puzzles and need to be sought out within some archive somewhere thus being part of the chain of events needing to be done to start the boss fight. I am not asking ANet to hold our hands here, but being forewarned is to be forearmed.

I see the wurm fight being part of NSPs nightly rotation. It’s not very long and a couple people even got precursors yesterday. Once the mechanics are down and more people know what to do, it would make for a nice addition to our orr temple zerg. We managed to fit the Karka Queen in with as well, which actually takes longer.

windwarrior.2690:

I disagree about the NPC, I actually like it that we (the players) need to figure out what to do, thats just natural. Today we stuff games with tutorials and hints and whatnot so that all players immediatly get what to do, but sometimes trying and failing some times is just as much fun as being told what to do.

Your right, failing and learning a fight from your mistakes IS fun…when it doesn’t take 2 hours to try again.

I’ve said this yesterday, and I’ll say it again: I’m all for encounters that don’t spell out what you need to do (but are still obvious about it in other ways), and requires trial and error to complete.

I am not, however, for encounters that have a 2 hour wait time because I learned what to do, but 3/4 of the people are new, didn’t listen to instructions, and failed the event, ruining the experience for myself and everyone else.

Yes, you get one shot every two hours – for most players that means one shot per night, even IF they can play every single night after work. That’s one problem.

The other problem with the trial & error approach is that it only really works for single players or small teams.

In a 100 player zerg, you are just one little sprocket. You try to make sense of what you see through the particle effects. When the event fails, there is another 99 players who probably did SOMETHING wrong. You don’t have “TV view” with an overview of the whole map and running sports commentary.

Like I said in another thread, in the marionette fight last night, I was stuck in 1 lane. Never even saw the marionette. Let along worked out what players were supposed to do or not do next to or on any of the platforms… so… how is trial & error a good way to do this?

Trial and error works in games like Dark Souls or in dungeons, because you can instantly re-attempt it and are a small group, which makes it easy to coordinate.
Trial and error does not work at events which require 100+ (150 in case of the Wurm, as Anet stated) without any coordination. ANet thinks too good of the community. 150 players probably means that EVERYONE on the map has to participate, which will never happen. Some guys are just around to explore, idle etc., hell, sometimes even guilds do their bounties or whatever there. Overflows are even worse for Europe, as we have 4 languages (German, Spanish, French and English) and I know that the former three often dislike speaking in English or are not capable of it because they never learned it. In combination with the “usual” overflow problems, it is close to impossible to get everything coordinated.

I have to agree with most of this, but like some others I don’t agree with the NPC to tell us what to do. I firmly believe that groups need to work out how to take a boss down with out being given a step by step guide, but I also hate the online guides for the same reason.

I think instead of a set time rotation, a way of kicking of the event would be a better idea. At the moment there are plenty of people wanting to do the event and having it running continuously wouldn’t be a problem. Give it a few months and things will have quietened down then people would be able to set it off themselves when they had a group together. I also believe that these events need to scale better for those times when there is only a dozen or so people in the area.

I’ve also always hated the instant death trick as well, not only because I die, that is quickly remedied but because of the lore mechanics. I haven’t been there for this one, but normal problems include:

Only player characters die, how does it know which are player characters,

Intelligent mobs don’t die, again how does an area effect know. (I know all area effects have these problems)

Animals don’t die

What keeps it in the nice confined area defined by the specific zone. and if the mountains stop it spreading then why doesn’t hiding behind a rock.

I guess the standard answer is ‘magic’ but somehow that always seems a bit lame.

Amok Threeohthree.8501:

Teq is not too hard and I am sure the worm won’t be too hard either once it has been “solved”

Agreed – Teq is not hard, really, seeing as winning mostly requires standing stacked in one or two spots and spamming 1.
It is, however, ridiculously difficult to get enough players together who know what to do if you do not go to a dedicated server or guild – which is not what most people want from open world content.
At least the wurm fight (the marionette is ok and well balanced for coordination in my opinion, particularly since it’s limited time content and therefore more desirable to actually complete while it’s there) just requires too much coordination for an open world event.
Yes, the mechanics are actually nice and interesting, and I’d love to see more of this in instanced content, but not as open world events.

As for the trial and error problem: I agree that we should be given some more hints/clues as to how the fight works, but an NPC explaining the fight in detail just doesn’t click. I’m sure there are other ways of making mechanics easier to figure out.

I which they didn’t make epic encounters only as temporary content. Like the ancient Karka and Marionette.

I agree 100%. No one knew what to do on the fights…especially the wurm one. An NPC giving us “battle plans” would be great!

And contrary to what someone else posted, no one figures it out by trial and error in GW2…especially large zerg fights. We all go to Dulfy to figure out the strategy (which should be partially be in-game as stated above) or follow a Dorito head around who went to Dulfy to read the strategy.

The Tequatl fight itself is not hard but does require competent gunners and 2 small groups guarding the gunners. Basically 6-8 people can make or break this fight. Most groups like TTS go to an overflow on purpose to make sure that people are not afk around the guns. Too many players around the guns = champ spawn.

Group chat is still very helpful in this battle, and there is still too much downtime prior to the actual fight trying to get into the right overflow and get the right people to the right spots. I fear the wurms will be this way also….meaning only large cross server guilds will get this done on a daily basis. A small non-coordinated group in any of these 3 fights could ruin it for the other 90+ players….that’s a bit unforgiving for a world event that occurs once every 2+hrs.