Guild Wars 2

.. but I’ve found I’ve already gotten bored and moved back to doing other things. And that never usually happens for me with LW content.

I like the idea of a challenging boss that requires a lot of coordination from a group.. it is an MMO after all. But these events just aren’t fun to participate in after trying them a few times:
- Too much waiting around.
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
- Too much failure.
- Too little reward when you fail.

I’m glad they don’t give out oodles of drops for each kill, as that would just encourage farming rather than trying to beat the event. But spending an hour and getting almost nothing for the effort stinks. And while I felt we should wait a bit before passing judgment on the difficulty, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that these are too difficult for most people to be able to participate in a team that actually beats them.

I hope this doesn’t become yet another example of what’s all too common in MMOs: great content that clearly took a lot of time and effort to make, that gets ignored by most players because it needs to be tweaked but isn’t.

- Too much waiting around.
→ So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
→ Overflows exist for a reason. It’s an inconvenience you will have to deal with
- Too much failure.
→ If you fail to utilize strategy and coordination, you will fail. There are other easy bosses in the world if you are not skilled or too lazy enough to commit
- Too little reward when you fail.
→ You obviously didn’t reach the threshold that gave you loot, which is killing one of the wurms’ body.

Some nice snippy little responses there, which may make you feel smug and clever, but don’t actually address the bottom line.

And that is that, even though I usually enjoy most of the LW releases, I don’t enjoy this one. I’m not alone in that.

I have a few hours a day to play GW2, at most, and I don’t want to spend them standing around, constantly trying to switch overflows. And the times I’ve participated in trying to kill the marionette we have coordinated and planned.. and then failed usually because of issues such as 1 or 2 people being put on a platform.

But by all means, please pretend it is my fault for not somehow single-handedly controlling the behavior and ability of 100 strangers, while also having to fight against some very poor game design that often makes success as much about luck as it is about skill.

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
-> Overflows exist for a reason. It’s an inconvenience you will have to deal with

There’s actually several constructive suggestions on this board now on how to avoid these inconveniences. If ANet ignores the suggestions, then of course we have the choice to either live with the situation – or decide that other hobbies are more fun. The point of the feedback threads is that we’d rather have fun and play guildwars at the same time.

It’s tough for me. I love this game. I’ve logged 1350 hours and just made my legendary Monday night (Moot!!!!) after a grind-free farm-free process. (I hate grinding. I hate farming. Getting a legendary, then, was quite the process!)

I want to do these events. I want to coordinate and organize and gather people and beat them. I love that concept!

But guess what? Yelling at people on mapchat and hoping they listen to you is not a fun or compelling game mode. No matter how many commanders or how much explaining we do, there will still be people who ignore it. As far as I can tell, this event is pretty unforgiving, especially when dealing with the portal/champ fights.

There were some issues with the Tequatl fight and I hoped that would prompt some re-evaluation, but this fight seems to have all the same issues.

(That said, the execution of this flawed idea was tremendous. The fight is really cool, the design is great, the music is great, etc. So props for that.)

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
-> Overflows exist for a reason. It’s an inconvenience you will have to deal with

There’s actually several constructive suggestions on this board now on how to avoid these inconveniences. If ANet ignores the suggestions, then of course we have the choice to either live with the situation – or decide that other hobbies are more fun. The point of the feedback threads is that we’d rather have fun and play guildwars at the same time.

I have seen several and they do not address the issue and even make things complicated and exploitable.

One such suggestions people keep throwing around was the districts that we had in GW1.

Ignoring the fact that GW1 is not an MMO and can never be compared to technically with GW2, being able to create custom districts/servers would not help you cause since you would never have enough people to complete the event.

You want to have an empty instance for your 20-man guild? OK, but good luck trying to complete an event that requires 100 players.

Or how about the possible exploits involved with this?
We can talk about botters using their own servers to get away from getting reported and caught.

Or how about the financial costs involved in this?
Having an unlimited number of districts/servers is expensive and uses valuable computing resources. And don’t bother using the ‘anet needs to buy more servers’ argument

@ the OP:

Yes, this is your opinion, and I am absolutely sure you speak the truth when you say others feel as you do.

In response, I say that this is a LS chapter and it will be over soon, and on to another one. As far as the Jungle Wurm, it will be permanent, but you are not in any way required to do it.

Now, let me address your points individually.

Too much waiting around
If you watch the Map chat, there are some good people trying to organize. The time passes relatively quickly for me simply be paying attention to the chat.

Too much annoyance concerning Overflows (paraphrased)
Yes, trying to pick the “right Overflow” can be an issue. Personally, I recommend getting there a bit earlier than you usually do, and seeing if you can get a party in the “right” overflow and then “join” them.

Too much failure
Many things were difficult when you first learned them. AC dungeon used to take 3 hours to run. Now a 30 minute run is considered a long time. Learn the encounter, and along with everyone else, you will find that completion gets easier.

Too little reward when you fail
This is one I have a hard time with. I have a personal opinion that if you get any reward at all when you fail, then it only encourages you to fail more. I do think the rewards when you succeed need to be tweaked up a bit, but rewarding people for failure is simply wrong. I think we’re getting more than enough when we lose.

Keep at it for a few more tries, and try to get a good bunch. I would bet that as it gets a bit easier, that you will find it’s not quite as annoying as it was for you.

Good luck!

Qaelyn.7612:

Some nice snippy little responses there, which may make you feel smug and clever, but don’t actually address the bottom line.

And that is that, even though I usually enjoy most of the LW releases, I don’t enjoy this one. I’m not alone in that.

I have a few hours a day to play GW2, at most, and I don’t want to spend them standing around, constantly trying to switch overflows. And the times I’ve participated in trying to kill the marionette we have coordinated and planned.. and then failed usually because of issues such as 1 or 2 people being put on a platform.

But by all means, please pretend it is my fault for not somehow single-handedly controlling the behavior and ability of 100 strangers, while also having to fight against some very poor game design that often makes success as much about luck as it is about skill.

You want them to address it? Then add some constructive criticism and suggestions. Otherwise this post is a one-sided complaint, and Anet can’t do anything about those.

My little ‘snippets’ show that your comments just scratch the surface and weren’t thought through at all.

I don’t even want to win it anymore. Simply because it would not be my doing anyways. Done it twice now and the group I happened to be in was successful – but it matters not in the least.

Just going to see that I get some achievements and that’s it. Which is a shame because otherwise I think the idea and presentation is great, only the execution not appealing.

At least I don’t get an adrenaline rush thinking: “Yay, four other groups managed not to screw up as well, awesome, yay.”

Vol.7601:

You want them to address it? Then add some constructive criticism and suggestions.

The forum is filled to the brim with them. Do I really need to repeat them, especially when most are so bloody obvious?

Think about a common problem with the marionette, which is a group of 20 people going in but ending up with an uneven distribution of players on the platforms. Do I really need to explain why this is ridiculous? Or lay out the obvious solution, which is to distribute players by parceling them out one platform at a time like a poker dealer rather than selecting platforms for them randomly? Really?

As a programmer myself I was astonished when I found out that it was possible to have 5 on one platform and 1 on another. I mean, this is really basic stuff!

Do I need to be the 100th person to say “let people on platforms who have already completed help out with other platforms”?

Do I have to explain other obvious solutions, at least in the short term, such as lengthening the timers a bit?

Do I really have to be the 10,000th person to say “make it easier for parties to be in the same overflow where there’s actually enough people to win”?

Or the 1,000,000th to say “have the event scale in difficulty based on the number of players”?

Okay, fine, I’ve now repeated all those points. Sheesh.

I agree, I would much rather it have been a smaller type affair that wasn’t a giant zerg of strangers. It was very frustrating when my party members were all in different overflows. The visuals, mechanics etc, were great, but I simply had to log out after a few attempts to group in the same overflow. All I really want is to play with my friends, not a couple dozen strangers. We have all sorts of open world events for socializing, why can’t we get some more content aimed at guilds and organized groups? So far, not a fan of the “GW2 answer to raids”. Why is it that each living world release is all aimed at zergs? I know its an MMO, but can’t we include the players that like content aimed at smaller (10-50person) groups? Other than guild challenges, which haven’t been added to since they came out, what do we have?

Qaelyn.7612:

.. but I’ve found I’ve already gotten bored and moved back to doing other things. And that never usually happens for me with LW content.

I like the idea of a challenging boss that requires a lot of coordination from a group.. it is an MMO after all. But these events just aren’t fun to participate in after trying them a few times:
- Too much waiting around.
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
- Too much failure.
- Too little reward when you fail.

I’m glad they don’t give out oodles of drops for each kill, as that would just encourage farming rather than trying to beat the event. But spending an hour and getting almost nothing for the effort stinks. And while I felt we should wait a bit before passing judgment on the difficulty, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that these are too difficult for most people to be able to participate in a team that actually beats them.

I hope this doesn’t become yet another example of what’s all too common in MMOs: great content that clearly took a lot of time and effort to make, that gets ignored by most players because it needs to be tweaked but isn’t.

Sounds to me like you might be on a less populated server. Even our overflows get filled up. Personally I think the difficulty level is in a good place. It requires good coordination, but it also requires a higher skill level among players that most PvE people are not used to and should learn. It does not succeed every time (nor should it), but it’s also not impossible. Dragonbrand beat it four times yesterday, once flawlessly, and once in overflow. And it’s also only been out for 2 days. The success rate will only go up.

As for waiting, yes you do have to log in early to avoid overflow, but the time of spawn is exact (5 minute timer starts on the hour, every two hours) so you don’t actually have to wait around like you used to for Teq. You can just afk until 5 minutes before spawn time.

Not much can be done about OF other than logging in early or trying to get a taxi to bypass the soft cap. =\ It would probably be the same with any world boss that requires those kinds of numbers.

As for rewards, I think they’re decent but require a bit more legwork. For each Warden you defeat on the run (even if you fail) you get a bag of cypher parts. The real rewards are waiting in Scarlet’s lab where you can open the chests for dragonite and rares. Other than that, the massive amount of greens you get is just meh.

If I could make one suggestion, it would be to prioritize putting people in the same party onto the same platform. There is too much randomness and risk of failure otherwise. You could get all your squishies instantly downed on one platform and all your warriors with warbanners watching helplessly while the event fails on another.

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?

Why do you think a shorter boss timer means no timer at all? Waiting around for an hour and a half isn’t fun.

JohnnySupernova.9182:

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?

Why do you think a shorter boss timer means no timer at all? Waiting around for an hour and a half isn’t fun.

There is no uncertainty in when the boss spawns. It’s every two hours on the hour (it alternates with Wurm). If wurm spawns at 7pm, marionette will spawn at 8pm, 10pm, 12am, etc.

Actually I can see the reason for the 2 hour timer rather than 1 hour.. it is to prevent players from being split between the two events which would make the numbers problem worse on some servers.

The real issue for me is that you have to invest an hour of your time, but it’s mostly boring time AND you get few rewards. I can handle one or the other, but not both, when there are simply better things to do both within GW2 and outside it. I mean, here’s a typical time distribution for the marionette event:
- 30+ minutes trying to get into an instance with a party / changing lanes / standing around bored.
- 20 or so minutes spamming AoE damage in a corridor.
- 5 minutes actually fighting something meaningful.

Maybe some people enjoy that, but I’ll bet they are in the minority.

Honestly, the dialog in the Lion’s Arch instance is by far the best part of this update for me so far. It also has no useful rewards, but it was fun to watch and I don’t have to waste an hour of my time only to find myself lying dead in the snow.

Qaelyn.7612:

Vol.7601:

You want them to address it? Then add some constructive criticism and suggestions.

The forum is filled to the brim with them. Do I really need to repeat them, especially when most are so bloody obvious?

Think about a common problem with the marionette, which is a group of 20 people going in but ending up with an uneven distribution of players on the platforms. Do I really need to explain why this is ridiculous? Or lay out the obvious solution, which is to distribute players by parceling them out one platform at a time like a poker dealer rather than selecting platforms for them randomly? Really?

As a programmer myself I was astonished when I found out that it was possible to have 5 on one platform and 1 on another. I mean, this is really basic stuff!

Do I need to be the 100th person to say “let people on platforms who have already completed help out with other platforms”?

Do I have to explain other obvious solutions, at least in the short term, such as lengthening the timers a bit?

Do I really have to be the 10,000th person to say “make it easier for parties to be in the same overflow where there’s actually enough people to win”?

Or the 1,000,000th to say “have the event scale in difficulty based on the number of players”?

Okay, fine, I’ve now repeated all those points. Sheesh.

One constructive criticism point may not make a difference. But ten, twenty would indicate that a good portion of the playerbase on this forum (which may or may not be a vocal minority) is interested in this change. Just cause it showed up already doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post.

-Do I need to be the 100th person to say “let people on platforms who have already completed help out with other platforms”?
→ this fight promotes small-scale strategy and fights. You end up having people transferring platforms and then it becomes a zerg. I don’t think Anet intended it to be that way.
→ As a programmer myself I was astonished when I found out that it was possible to have 5 on one platform and 1 on another. I mean, this is really basic stuff!
Yes, this annoys me, but you have to understand WHY that happens. Players end up being ported in one by one, and they fill in the platforms by sequence.

Now see here, instead of complaining, you should offer a suggestion. And I have one. Instead of porting people in by spamming key, players should get into an aoe circle which will port them all at once. This way the server calculates how many players are in the circle and then divides them by 5, rounding up. 20 people in the circle? Allocate 4 each. 29 people in the circle? Allocate 5 players each while the remaining 4 people are spread out through the first four platforms.

^ That wasn’t hard, was it? As a programmer, you should be thinking of solutions instead of panicking and saying, “THIS DOES NOT WORK!!!!”. Well, why does it not work, and what can be done to fix it?

-Do I have to explain other obvious solutions, at least in the short term, such as lengthening the timers a bit?
→ Why should they? The timer is more than enough. That’s part of the skillcheck. If you want to flail away at that boss that takes no damage from the front, then you don’t even deserve any rewards. I saw that happen in the first few runs and it’s why we failed.

-Do I really have to be the 10,000th person to say “make it easier for parties to be in the same overflow where there’s actually enough people to win”?
→Once again you throw this line out without understanding why overflows exist

-Or the 1,000,000th to say “have the event scale in difficulty based on the number of players”?
This is a world boss event. Scaling has a minimum and a maximum. Do not expect to have an easier fight with 20 people compared to 100.

Qaelyn.7612:

Actually I can see the reason for the 2 hour timer rather than 1 hour.. it is to prevent players from being split between the two events which would make the numbers problem worse on some servers.

The real issue for me is that you have to invest an hour of your time, but it’s mostly boring time AND you get few rewards. I can handle one or the other, but not both, when there are simply better things to do both within GW2 and outside it. I mean, here’s a typical time distribution for the marionette event:
- 30+ minutes trying to get into an instance with a party / changing lanes / standing around bored.
- 20 or so minutes spamming AoE damage in a corridor.
- 5 minutes actually fighting something meaningful.

Maybe some people enjoy that, but I’ll bet they are in the minority.

Honestly, the dialog in the Lion’s Arch instance is by far the best part of this update for me so far.

Honestly, I can see the logic behind the timer with the updates, but it still ends up splitting people anyway. I know last night I had to miss out on the wurm because I didn’t want to lose my spot in Lornar’s pass, and I’m sure everyone that was in the map with me missed out too.

JohnnySupernova.9182:

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?

Why do you think a shorter boss timer means no timer at all? Waiting around for an hour and a half isn’t fun.

OK, let’s put it on a 1 hour timer. The fight lasts 20-30 minutes. That would encourage players to stay in their zone for the next boss, leaving little room for other players to escape their overflow to get in the main server. Man, if people complain about overflows now, how about if they implemented that?

Vol.7601:

JohnnySupernova.9182:

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?

Why do you think a shorter boss timer means no timer at all? Waiting around for an hour and a half isn’t fun.

OK, let’s put it on a 1 hour timer. The fight lasts 20-30 minutes. That would encourage players to stay in their zone for the next boss, leaving little room for other players to escape their overflow to get in the main server. Man, if people complain about overflows now, how about if they implemented that?

People are already staying in their zone for the next boss, so really, the only difference is that people have less idle time, which is a good thing!

Vol.7601:

-> this fight promotes small-scale strategy and fights. You end up having people transferring platforms and then it becomes a zerg. I don’t think Anet intended it to be that way.

I said a group should be able to help out AFTER they finish their platform. Not that it should be 25 people zerging.

Vol.7601:

Yes, this annoys me, but you have to understand WHY that happens. Players end up being ported in one by one, and they fill in the platforms by sequence.

What are you talking about? That quite clearly is NOT what is going on here, or you couldn’t end up with 5 on one platform and 2 on another.

Vol.7601:

Now see here, instead of complaining, you should offer a suggestion.

I already did: as people enter the portal they are assigned to platforms 1234512345… etc. This is basic stuff.

Honestly.

Vol.7601:

^ That wasn’t hard, was it? As a programmer, you should be thinking of solutions instead of panicking and saying, “THIS DOES NOT WORK!!!!”. Well, why does it not work, and what can be done to fix it?

To quote a famous NPC: “you’re kidding, right?”

Vol.7601:

Once again you throw this line out without understanding why overflows exist

I know exactly why overflows exist.

And I’ve also figured out that trying to have a discussion with some people around here is a flat waste of time.

Qaelyn.7612:

The real issue for me is that you have to invest an hour of your time, but it’s mostly boring time AND you get few rewards. I can handle one or the other, but not both, when there are simply better things to do both within GW2 and outside it. I mean, here’s a typical time distribution for the marionette event:
- 30+ minutes trying to get into an instance with a party / changing lanes / standing around bored.
- 20 or so minutes spamming AoE damage in a corridor.
- 5 minutes actually fighting something meaningful.

Well idk, I think it’s fun haha. During the lane event I’m usually running around trying to direct people to man seige, or repair barricades/seige. Although I guess if you have a good enough zerg melting down clockworks at the spawn it’s pretty moot. Maybe your server’s just better than ours (wouldn’t be surprising. I think the skill level of our PvErs is not that high. Seriously, who sees seige weapon and doesn’t immediately jump on it?!) I think a lot of the fun during the lane defense for me comes from the tension of whether or not the team inside will fail. Teamspeak is nice in this regard cause you can hear the reports from inside.

I usually just log on about 30 minute beforehand, when most people are still at wurm, get into the main server, and then just afk until the start of the event. Doesn’t really address your complaint, but it works for me. =)

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
-> Overflows exist for a reason. It’s an inconvenience you will have to deal with
- Too much failure.
-> If you fail to utilize strategy and coordination, you will fail. There are other easy bosses in the world if you are not skilled or too lazy enough to commit
- Too little reward when you fail.
-> You obviously didn’t reach the threshold that gave you loot, which is killing one of the wurms’ body.

1. Yes. Whenever I complete the preevents the boss should spawn, period.

2. Unacceptable, if they can’t get real servers then that is their problem not mine.

3. I have 50 people who are skilled and coordinated, it is the other 100 that are the problem and shouldn’t be. Solved by instancing the boss. My fun shouldn’t be dependent on strangers.

4. I personally think the loot would be fine if the above 3 issues were addressed.

bladeofky.3067:

I usually just log on about 30 minute beforehand, when most people are still at wurm, get into the main server, and then just afk until the start of the event. Doesn’t really address your complaint, but it works for me. =)

Well, sure, I’ve done this too. But then I realized: why am I doing this? It’s not fun, it’s not likely we’ll succeed, I’m not going to get decent rewards when we fail, and I might have to choose between being with my party and being in an empty overflow.

I left my last MMO in part because I got tired of spending as much time standing around as playing. This is not a good direction for GW2 to be going in, IMO.

As for the lane defense, it was fun the first time. It gets boring very fast, because, well, it’s pretty boring.

The new content is nothing more than the Karka event in a different skin. – By this, I mean about the whole Lag Fest… Once again, the server issues are a huge problem when it comes to overpopulated areas.

Great for people in the USA, or Europe, but the countries further afield suffer huge latency drops, resulting in game errors, severe enough to crash the game itself…

So having que’d up for 2 hours for this event, I then get kicked out of the game, and lose the whole event as I get put into the overflow.

Once more, this is a HUGE issue, and it’s still not been addressed by A-net, and quite frankly, it feels to me like they couldn’t give a monkeys about it either.

Qaelyn.7612:

bladeofky.3067:

I usually just log on about 30 minute beforehand, when most people are still at wurm, get into the main server, and then just afk until the start of the event. Doesn’t really address your complaint, but it works for me. =)

Well, sure, I’ve done this too. But then I realized: why am I doing this? It’s not fun, it’s not likely we’ll succeed, I’m not going to get decent rewards when we fail, and I might have to choose between being with my party and being in an empty overflow.

I left my last MMO in part because I got tired of spending as much time standing around as playing. This is not a good direction for GW2 to be going in, IMO.

As for the lane defense, it was fun the first time. It gets boring very fast, because, well, it’s pretty boring.

I see your point. There are other things you could be doing in game during that time.

Maybe what they should do is instance the boss and implement a queue system similar to WvW and PvP.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Vol.7601:

- Too much waiting around.
-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.
-> Overflows exist for a reason. It’s an inconvenience you will have to deal with
- Too much failure.
-> If you fail to utilize strategy and coordination, you will fail. There are other easy bosses in the world if you are not skilled or too lazy enough to commit
- Too little reward when you fail.
-> You obviously didn’t reach the threshold that gave you loot, which is killing one of the wurms’ body.

1. Yes. Whenever I complete the preevents the boss should spawn, period.

2. Unacceptable, if they can’t get real servers then that is their problem not mine.

3. I have 50 people who are skilled and coordinated, it is the other 100 that are the problem and shouldn’t be. Solved by instancing the boss. My fun shouldn’t be dependent on strangers.

4. I personally think the loot would be fine if the above 3 issues were addressed.

I liked the Flame and Frost LS, because the dungeon instance was what topped it off, so we relied as a group/guild on who we wanted there, and not who we were left with out of 100’s of random players.

Every patch that A-net bring out, is another insult to MMORPG gaming, as it’s undeniable proof that they have NO IDEA how to make and continue to run a successful MMORPG..

Qaelyn.7612:

.. but I’ve found I’ve already gotten bored and moved back to doing other things. And that never usually happens for me with LW content.

I like the idea of a challenging boss that requires a lot of coordination from a group.. it is an MMO after all. But these events just aren’t fun to participate in after trying them a few times:
- Too much waiting around.
- Too much annoyance trying to get a party into an OF that actually has a decent number of players in it.

Know what? I agree. There’s a lot of waiting around and that’s not ideal. In MMORPGs with traditional raiding, you set a time and the raid gets together prepares itself and starts working on content.

But this isn’t raiding. It’s open world content. I like that aspect of it, but as a result there are going to be complications. In order for open world content to be both appropriately difficult and doable, it’s going to need to be on a schedule so that people know when to gather. These two bosses are on two hour long timers and set up so that one of them is starting at the turn of the hour. Both of them take about half an hour or so so there’s 30 minutes of downtime between content.

I think this is a necessary evil, however. Lets say that instead of timers, these events have previous chains that reset whenever the group fails. That way, when the group fails it can restart the event almost immediately. No waiting. No downtime.

This would mean that both events would be going on at the exact same time, splitting the population between the two potentially making them both impossible.

Overflows are an entirely different matter. Over flows are extremely problematic and I’m personally not sure of a good solution to them.

Qaelyn.7612:

- Too much failure.
- Too little reward when you fail.

I’m glad they don’t give out oodles of drops for each kill, as that would just encourage farming rather than trying to beat the event. But spending an hour and getting almost nothing for the effort stinks. And while I felt we should wait a bit before passing judgment on the difficulty, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that these are too difficult for most people to be able to participate in a team that actually beats them.

I hope this doesn’t become yet another example of what’s all too common in MMOs: great content that clearly took a lot of time and effort to make, that gets ignored by most players because it needs to be tweaked but isn’t.

I’m going to disagree with you here. A lot. If there was no chance for failure, then these wouldn’t be that rewarding to play. The harder they are, the more exciting the possibility of success is. I’m on Maguuma. We took down the Marionette today and it was great. It wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fun and rewarding if it wasn’t for all the times I’ve failed the attempt previously. Since its been released, everyone has gotten a bit better and better at it and now we’ve done it.

While we haven’t beaten it, the same is true for the Jungle Wurms. There was a late night attempt at them. There weren’t anywhere near enough people to do all three events, only about 20 or 30 so people, so we decided to do the escort quest and then have everyone just focus on one of the heads so that we can get understanding and practice at the boss. We got the head down to 10%. The people who’ve done that attempt can try it again and with the knowledge and experience gained be more successful at it in the future and that’ll apply to the entire server over time.

Rewards for failure is something I find to be completely backwards. Rewards should be for when you complete content successfully. Failure in games is something to be learned from. If you want rewards, you try again. And you don’t come away from failure completely empty handed. You’ve gained practice and experience.

Quite frankly, these bosses should give out oodles of drops for each kill. That’s the tangible motivation for beating these bosses. I personally think the rewards are underwhelming. There needs to be tons people regularly trying to beat these boss. If people get good enough at the event and they start to be killed regularly. Good. The players would have earned it through skill and knowledge of the encounter.

There are a lot of issues with these types of events. They’re impossible for small servers to complete, which makes lots of people guest to over populated servers getting stuck in disorganized overflow servers. This type of content also requires a lot of communication, especially early on and the game doesn’t really facilitate that easily. In other MMORPGs, raiding guilds usually have their own ventrilo or teamspeak. That isn’t really going to work here because again, open world content and overflow servers puts a damper on any guild that wants to primarily organize for doing these kinds of events.

Well again, the difficulty by itself I don’t think is a problem. I agree with you that it’s good for them to be challenging, and even posted a thread a couple of days ago saying exactly that.

The issue for me is the difficulty combined with the other problems. I like the idea here, I just think it needs some refinement. And the rewards, for either success or failure, seem insufficient for the effort involved.

Oh, also: the thing where people are split unevenly among the platforms – I have NO clue how that got through QA. It’s shockingly bad.

Perhaps theses events should be in lvl 80 areas.Why do they have to be in places such as Queensdale or Lornars Pass?Does not compute,unless of course its because lvl 80 areas are so empty of players.Content with the amount of difficulty thats apparent doesnt need to be available to players with my ability.

Okay, so I tried again. Here’s what I did to try to ensure success.

1. Went to LP 90 minutes early to try to get into main. Yes, just after the previous marionette finished. Never popped once. That’s ridiculous.

2. I went to a lane and listened to the commanders. When another lane was low, I volunteered and went to that one instead.

3. I killed tons of mobs spamming healing bombs.

4. When we got on the platform, our group killed the boss, and I raised at least 3 people by myself. We still failed because some other group ran out of time.

5. That was our map’s second failure. When we got out, I (and others) discovered 1/4 of the people in our lane had simply given up and left.

End result? We only got 2 chains cut, and I was left once again thinking: “why am I doing this?”

The goal should be for this to be challenging but completable by typical players. It’s not. Period.

If Arenanet REALLY wants to spend its time creating content that 1% of players can do, well, they shouldn’t be surprised when what they hear is 99% complaints.

So people punked out. When they could have stayed and got the stuff for cyphers.

Just by opening chest you could easily get 6+ rares or better.

Seems like a people problem not a event problem. Sorry people quit on you.

Vol.7601:

You obviously didn’t reach the threshold that gave you loot, which is killing one of the wurms’ body.

Lemme guess, more blues, greens? hooray! I found King Arthur’s long lost hidden stash of blues and greens. Just what I was hoping for after so much effort!

…Is Vol really defending the god awful design decision of these events, and actually Arguing against people who are suggesting the events be made more accommodating for the players?

Well, whatever faith I had in these forums are now gone. There’s White Knighting, and then there’s this.

I also think it’s adorable, Vol, how you believe that if these were put into Raid Instances, they would still require 100 people. Each of these encounters are already designed in a way where a 25 man raid would fit them just fine.

I actually find it rather painful to think that you have so little faith in Anet, or so little understanding in how development of raid content works, that Anet wouldn’t think to make these encounters 25-mans instead of just putting them in an instance that requires 100 people.

The new events are fine. Who cares about loot if you can play the TP and buy whatever you want.

Guys, there’s an easy solution that has been mentioned before.

Raid instances!!!!!!!

Just give up the unique butterfly thing ANet, and succumb to the superior idea. It’s happened before, you introduced vertical progression 6 months in. This will make players happier and make the boss fights easier to tune, quicker to re-try on a wipe, let guilds have something awesome to do, higher FPS, etc…etc. Do it.

Blade Syphon.4325:

…Is Vol really defending the god awful design decision of these events, and actually Arguing against people who are suggesting the events be made more accommodating for the players?

Yep.

I’ve been on the Internet for almost 25 years, and, well, it never really changes.

If you don’t like the content, don’t do it. I personally hate the easy instanced contents that just give rewards for basically running around a bit. But you don’t see me putting up forum topics complaining about them every single LW update where that’s the case. Eventhough I agree alot of people don’t like the update, there’s also alot of people who DO like it (as seen by the overflows). Just let the people who enjoy it, enjoy it and have Anet making more like these in the future. it’s not like it’s an update like this every 2 weeks, only been 2nd time we’ve gotten rly difficult content.

To OP: your first 2 statements cancel each other out. if you’re OF server hopping the entire time, you’re clearly not doing the whole waiting part. It’s quite easy to find a server where they’re organising it and doing quite well on wurm (people boasting here on forums), it’s just as easy to ask them to party up with you in game, and spam the “join on server” icon once the event ends (as alot of people leave server). then you can just wait for 2 hours (watch a movie whislt opening up gw screen to move so you don’t get kicked). There’s several servers that are doin quite well every run and getting further and further everytime. tomorrow first kill will drop SOMEWHERE (night for me now, going to bed).

lastly, why does everyone expect 100% satisfaction of game developpers. it’s not like you expect 100% win on lawyer or 100% healing from doctors… cut Anet some slack

inb4. everyone here hates me

The events (at least the Marionette) can be done in overflow. Actually my only successful attempt at it so far has been in an overflow, at 2 am, not exactly prime time on my side. The reward even upon failure scales to the number of chains you managed to cut loose. Failure is resulted by lack of organization, which is done easily in the 5 min countdown timer, via map chat.

class.4802:

If you don’t like the content, don’t do it.

Thank you so much for your valuable suggestion.

The point of this thread is to provide feedback to Arenanet as to why someone like me, who normally looks forward to each new LW release, is feeling frustrated and disappointed, and why.

Do you prefer a combination of Factral lvl and an invisible Leaderabord rank that form partys based on your hidden score + win/lose ratio + how many deaths you had/per event on that encounter , and increasing the difficulty + loot + more mehcnaics as you go up ? :P
Max 3 ranks ?

Qaelyn.7612:

class.4802:

If you don’t like the content, don’t do it.

Thank you so much for your valuable suggestion.

The point of this thread is to provide feedback to Arenanet as to why someone like me, who normally looks forward to each new LW release, is feeling frustrated and disappointed, and why.

Most people aren’t giving feedback, they’re just nagging (some do give constructive critisism). On other hand people need to realise there’s a HUGE amount of people playing this game (any game for that matter). Thus every update will have HUGE amounts of people who like it aswel as hate it. Nobody (not even Anet) can tell precisely how many people like it and how many people hate it unless they force you to rate it. (and i think we can agree everyone would hate that :p).

I apologise if my previous post was a bit blunt, but as a game developper i can relate to Anet and their problems and as I say “people need to realise…” I need to realise some people will always be like that, and I just need to get over it aswel, it’s just a shame that those people might spread word to their friends saying gw2 is bad causing people who might love it not to buy it.

I honestly don’t really understand why so many people hate this new patch. I stopped playing just around the time Teq came out and last week started up again. This new patch has brought me back to the game that I previously had lost all interest in. The Marionette fight is just fun. I don’t really care all too much if we succeed or fail, I just have fun doing it. I like how the mechanics of the fight are very simply but also require some coordination on the parts of the players to be successful. When I came back to the game and found out that PvE / Dungeons has basically become “shove everyone in a corner and melee AoE everything to death” I was pretty disappointed. Do people find that PvE content more fun then stuff that actually requires some basic in game skills (dodging, avoiding AoE) to complete? Just don’t get it

I mean…if you don’t enjoy it then just don’t participate and the problem is solved. Not a single person is forcing you to do this content whatsoever. If a large amount of people aren’t participating in the in game events, that will tell ANet way more than simply complaining on a forum. People act like when new content comes out with this game you are forced to play it. I just don’t really understand that mentality. Don’t like this patch? Wait 2 weeks for the next one to come out. I for one am really looking forward to what ANet are going to do with the up coming patches and the next chapter in the Living Story.

I don’t hate the event. I just find it frustrating and think it should be adjusted. Okay? Big difference there.

I am having a bit better luck now just focusing on the fact that I can gather drops even if we fail, so the inevitable lack of success doesn’t bother me quite so much. But it’s still really annoying that I’ve now tried this a half-dozen times and the group hasn’t come close even once.

I know others are having more luck than that, and that’s part of my complaint: the degree of reliance on luck.

I like this event, I really do. However I’m a little sour on this overflow problem. Last night I got to sit in an overflow that failed badly clicking on “Join in Lornar’s Pass” for 20 minutes while staring at my wife’s screen where she was on the main server and they managed to take out the marionette. I couldn’t even feel happy about the thing going down because I couldn’t even get in with my party the time it gets taken out. Left me in a bad mood for the rest of the night.

Josh Foreman.8250:

In the never ending quest to improve our design and find ways to please as many people as possible we’re always digging into constructive criticism. We have not perfected the recipe for an open world boss event, probably because we’re pioneering new territory here.

As far as I can tell there are a couple challenges we are trying to overcome. First, we are trying to teach the community a new skill: self organization. And I’m happy to see that in the aggregate, they ARE learning. I’m sure as this process continues we will find better ways to accommodate the communication structures that will emerge.

Secondly, from both a technical and player-experience perspective, it’s best to break up zergs as much as possible. Thematically keeping everyone feeling like they are contributing to a common cause from multiple locations, and still feel heroic is an interesting challenge to balance. Always looking for new ideas on this issue!

These 2 things I am very happy to hear, IMO the Marionette did that amazingly and was more help to the community than both Teq and Tri Wurms together.

Players felt they where getting better and learning at Marionette, it was easy to see if your winning or losing, If your doing the right thing or not.

Having 5 lines with 5 different tasks was a great idea, commanders were able to help the players out better. They wernt to hard, but needed to have some experience at the same time.

IMO the Marionette style was great and if you add more to the game, I feel you will see Players help to understand to organize themselves much faster and better than Teq/Wurm.

Why do I think that? B.c its not EXTREMELY HARD, its the right amount of difficultly, that fact we have LOTS of overflows in many servers of players trying and trying again and again. Ive seeing meany same faces over and over again, all very excited about this event.

Giving us something to have organization with difficulty BUT not SO hard that it discourages players to not even want to do them and try to get better.

Josh Foreman.8250:

In the never ending quest to improve our design and find ways to please as many people as possible we’re always digging into constructive criticism. We have not perfected the recipe for an open world boss event, probably because we’re pioneering new territory here.

It might be new territory for Anet, but open world bosses are nothing new. DAoC did open world bosses very well imo. There were even open world dungeons full of bosses. Some of the differences were:

1) bosses were in hard to get to places. you had to have a good sized coordinated group to even get to the boss, and there weren’t waypoints all over the zone so if you wiped you would have to do a full regroup and go back.

2) bossed didn’t despawn on failure. they would remain in the world until killed and would go on a respawn timer after being defeated. (this worked because of #1)

Josh Foreman.8250:

Qaelyn.7612:

make it easier for parties to be in the same overflow where there’s actually enough people to win

I know there are people working on various solutions to this problem.

Of all of the things you said, the above quoted part is the most exciting. I’m glad there are people working that problem; taxiing is one of the most annoying parts of GW2 at the moment.

The only problem with the wurm being so hard is that Bob the level 37 ele thinks it was made for him. Perhaps a warning similar to ski slopes “EXPERTS ONLY” would have helped mitigate all this criticism of it.

I’ve spent way too many enjoyable hours on the wurm. The people it wasn’t made for hate it for mistaking it for general content.