Guild Wars 2

Josh Foreman.8250:

The timers and mob HP were balanced and rebalanced several times in an attempt to find a sweet spot that would ensure people couldn’t faceroll the event, but wasn’t so difficult that no one could do it. Everyone’s mileage will vary. And as with any group activity, virtual or real life, there is luck inherent in that. Some people hate that dynamic and some love it. If someone has an idea about how to ameliorate the inherent luck factor in group events, please speak up!

I’d suggest two things:

1. Improve the overflow system to allow players/parties to select which overflow they want to join
2. Introduce events/mechanics to allow players to trigger the World Boss (in a certain time window)

This will allow Guilds/Raids to more easily get all of their players into the same zone and will alow them to start the event once they’re ready. It’ll facilitate organization, make the World Boss more accessible, and reduce some of the dependence on having to rely on completely random people to complet the event.

Personally, I LOVE the Marionette, the tactics, strategy and all that!
It’s the first LW event I do even though it’s not necessary for my meta achievement (I could just do wurm once for 11 days), or daily reward.

And I can’t stand Scarlet!

I think the root of all the complaints is that people dont like relying on others that they dont know. The problem with that way of thinking is that these are OPEN WORLD events and are by definition OPEN to ANYONE. Do I think there should be some 25-man style uber dungeon (raid) content? Yes. Do I think they should stop doing these events? No not at all, they are unique in their own way.

Also to the complaints about overflows failing and having to wait, I have tried this event maybe 6 or 7 times and succeeded on two of them. I have NEVER been in the main server instance and have never waited longer than 15 minutes before the hour. I think the real problem may be YOU in most of these cases. Stop being so negative and try to get the general population up to snuff.

- Too much waiting around

I agree with this and I don’t. The thing is that the idea, pretty obviously, is to be able to cycle from Marionette to Wurm. They run on pretty parallel timers, so if you’re doing both, you have maybe 20-30 minutes downtime between events.

In -practice-, the overflow prevents you from safely doing that at high traffic hours, so you end up camping one or the other. More likely the Marionette because I was not very fond of the Wurm. But that wasn’t their intent, so I don’t fault them for it. We’re choosing to wait around.

Even if we’re doing the Marionette, we could do stuff like grind the Power Core stuff in the interim, right?

- Too little reward

I disagree here. The cipher chests give you a ton of stuff – the problem is that the reward is backloaded, not that there’s too little of it. Win or lose, you get a ton of fragments towards your chest. I’ve failed a bunch of times but I still have enough cipher keys to get like 30 rares when I do finish getting the cores.

While I agree it can be annoying to do admirably jsut to watch someone else blow your work to hell, it has a good side: When everyone counts on you, and you bloody kick puppy and win! Of course being able to come to aid of those who are still struggling on the platform would be nice…

Fluffball.8307:

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.

It would be nice if we all could whittle away many hrs for zero rewards , however my time ingame is precious so I have to make every minute count. I don’t have time to stand around while everyone holds hands & sings songs pre event to feel co-ordinated.

Many of you seem to crave this mass co-ordination & communication & feeling of community, its quite simple to find, its called a life, go live it & let us play playable content LIVE not in 2 hrs. Thank you.

possessed.2036:

Fluffball.8307:

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.

It would be nice if we all could whittle away many hrs for zero rewards , however my time ingame is precious so I have to make every minute count. I don’t have time to stand around while everyone holds hands & sings songs pre event to feel co-ordinated.

Many of you seem to crave this mass co-ordination & communication & feeling of community, its quite simple to find, its called a life, go live it & let us play playable content LIVE not in 2 hrs. Thank you.

My time in game is precious too, which is why I spent it playing the wurm and having fun. I’m honestly confused what you’re getting at, other than taking the time to insult people who like to play the wurm.

Fluffball.8307:

possessed.2036:

Fluffball.8307:

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.

It would be nice if we all could whittle away many hrs for zero rewards , however my time ingame is precious so I have to make every minute count. I don’t have time to stand around while everyone holds hands & sings songs pre event to feel co-ordinated.

Many of you seem to crave this mass co-ordination & communication & feeling of community, its quite simple to find, its called a life, go live it & let us play playable content LIVE not in 2 hrs. Thank you.

My time in game is precious too, which is why I spent it playing the wurm and having fun. I’m honestly confused what you’re getting at, other than taking the time to insult people who like to play the wurm.

He’s trying to say that the overflow system for these events is a problem. In order to have a reasonable shot at downing the boss you need to get into your overflow more than an hour ahead of the boss spawn, and then just sit there waiting for the timer top pop.

First of all, you absolutely do not need to be there more than an hour ahead of time. To get on to the native server (i.e. if you’re from BG and want to play on BG) you might have to, but you could show up 5 minutes before the fight if you already know how the fight works. “Hey guys, which group needs 1 extra person that knows what we’re doing?”

Second, the wurm is not general content. If you don’t like it, it is almost certainly not meant to be played by you. I think a warning that it’s not normal content, but rather an extreme challenge, would help prevent random people like possessed from trying to beat it and then getting frustrated by losing. In GW1 they had text warnings that some things are extraordinarily hard and you might not want to try them.

Josh Foreman.8250
“Having 5 on one platform and 1 on another could only be a very edge case requiring several people to drop out at the right moment. Our script does exactly what you said, poker dealer style.”

This has problems in and of itself. But, the big one is that you’re actually “zoning” on and off the platforms (load times be kittened). It’s definitely not an edge case. I’ve done the encounter 5 or 6 times, of those, i’ve been either alone or with one other person 2 or 3 times. When i look across the other platforms, some have 6 or more. So clearly this poker style script isn’t functioning as intended.

@Josh – part 1

I made a thread about it, basically cause of the achievements, but they are naturally also a great part of the event and I greatly dislike most of them, because they are very simila,r and due to their design, that is so full of you needing to have the luck to get first what you want and then you need to have the luck to play with competent skillful players that can do the job, otherwise you can instantly forget your achievements, what is the point that really makes alot of players mad and angry at this bad achievement design, because we already had something similar liek this with Tequatl and the 6 cannons, that everbody has to rely on just 6 players to do a good job, which leeds to the massive problem of TROLLING.

The Marionette is absolutely no exception fro mthis problem and that the achievement design team repeats the same mistake now again is just terrible and shows, how much less some people of you seem to listen on us, that you repeat one and the same mistakes again.

Players don’t like to rely on other players, that they don’t know the lsightest bit, can’t estimate anything about them, be it their playign skills, their technical things like how good their DSL is and so on, if there simply might be a very high risk for them to DC out of a sudden when its crucial to maintain in a very short timeframe of laughable 2 minutes as much as DPS, as possible, where every single missing player in those champion battles can make up for the very important difference!!

These kind of silly achievements PUNISH more people, than they do anythign good for the game.
I know that you seem to want that this game also provides something, that someone could name “Group Achievements”, which simply can’t be done alone and require many people to work together..

But the design of the latest achievements with the design of the battle, just doesn’t work together. Thats why i defenitely think and how I suggested it in my thread about it, thats why I think those Dodge Achievements need to get changed, not only to make them overall more interestign with 5 different tasks, rather than just doing 5x the same thing what is boring and uncreative, but also to remove this heavy dogma of “I have to rely myself on others and hope for playing with perfect skilled players that know what they do and don’t dc, otherwise I fail at achieving something, thats designed to be PERSONAL”

Theres nothing personal anymore about achievements, if I have to rely on like 124 other players from begin to the end of an event, having absolutely no control over what happens.

That makes every fricking battle against the Marionette, like playing a god darn LOTTERY.

I want to achieve my Achievements due to my PERSONAL SKILL and not due to having such incredible LUCK, that I and 124 other people did something right at the same time and at the same moment in a tiny time frame of 2 minutes, without that any single person of the 125 disconnected, without having being hit by a single attack and so on ..

Do you understand this ?? This isn’t madness anymore, this is just ridiculous and worser, than any RNG of this RNG plagued game so far that wants to be a game without grind and reinvented the circle new and locked the grind behind RNG items and mechanics to massively articifically slow down everybodies progress in this game to the point, that the game feels worser in many things, than a 0815 Asia Grinder with its horrible 0,001% drop rates.. but thats an other topic..I get OT out of emotions.
—-

Back to topic and the inherent “luck” factors in group events…
You talk about teaching us a new skill – self organization.
If you really want to teach us this, then I think you should better start to design also the bosses after this philosophy.
Give us the tools in the game to organize us, without that everybody has to rely on something, like external programs as like Team Speak.
Isn’t there any way to integrate such Features like TS into the Game, without that we have to use external programs.
Communication is KEY for more self organization, but self organization will never work, as long the community is fractured by players that use TS, and those that don’t use it, or don’t want/can’t use it out of various reasons.

So the key point for better self organization for GW2 is to develop systems and mechanics for boss battles like Tequatl or the new Wurms, that we have much better communication in the game that allows for better organization.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Having 5 on one platform and 1 on another could only be a very edge case requiring several people to drop out at the right moment. Our script does exactly what you said, poker dealer style.

Very edge case? Players complain on chat about that “very edge case” almost every time im doing that event.

Happends. Period.

Is the reason to lose the whole event. Period.

Fix it. Period…

Fluffball.8307:

First of all, you absolutely do not need to be there more than an hour ahead of time. To get on to the native server (i.e. if you’re from BG and want to play on BG) you might have to, but you could show up 5 minutes before the fight if you already know how the fight works. “Hey guys, which group needs 1 extra person that knows what we’re doing?”

If you show up 5 minutes before fight, you are almost guaranteed to fail as the matter stands currently. The overflow you will end in will most likely not have even close to enough people.

Part 2:

Also the LFG tools needs to get improved I think for better organization. The servers need to finalyl get improved so that we willl see lesser Overflows in the maps where Mega Bosses appear, so that more players can get into the Maps than usual, if such a boss appears.

Overflows are a huge issue for self organization, because they mostly make self organization impossible with the big language barrier that will hit everybody instanly in overflow servers. Thats a reason, why alot of people already believe, these mega bosses should be turned into Instances – but one thign is also importan,t they need to scale down also better, so that these bosses become also organizable and beatable for smaller groups that participate in those battles, otherwise will be these mega bosses just someday dead events, because simply nobody will do them anymore cause of not enough players wanting at all to participate…
These kind of events especially punsih all the players on low population servers, where Tequatl already became a quick dead event after the massive hype wave was over and most people got their achievements and loot drops that they were interested in for.

That way, this poker mechanic can be removed also and the champs can get scaled up to legendaries where up to 25 players can fight together against the boss.
No luck mechanic any more needed to randomly split up everybody, if the battles are simply designed to let 25 players fight together…
Increase the time limit to make it fit to the new more powerful bosses and naturally increase the size of the rings, so that the 25 players have space in there.
The place is so big and you cage us in like chickens in such small rings to battle there. oO

Larger Space allows also for more different Marionette Attacks and more spots where the Marionett can attack at all, other than it does always attack the same spots.
—-

To me, the whole battle design and the achievements just feels rushed and not very well thought out and that, after you had due to Wintersday given yourself more preparation time!

If you want true Group Achievements, that are playing out good, let people really work together then.
These achievements should truly reward players for their organized gameplay, without that they had to rely themself from Begin to the End permanently on everybody else countless times in a battle, whose design simply INVITES griefers to troll the battles, so that nobody will get the achievements, by getting out of pure will to troll getting hit or not participating in the battles, so that the group lacks in DPS to beat the champs right in time, or even worser – just are LEECHING from the efforts of everybody else and get rewarded for not having done anything for everybody else to earn the achievements/reward chests

Group Achievements, that simply can’t be trolled or affected by bad inherent luck designs are Achievements, like “Beat the Marionette within a Time Limit of 10 Minutes”

That way you have a Group Achievement, that can’t be trolled.
Everybody would have to work for it together so that all get that achievement at the end, because if not everbody is pulling towards that goal, people will be too slow and if the battles are designed for 25 peopel to combat against a boss, the chances are much much lesser, that among those players are griefing trolls that will ruin the group’s DPS to kill the boss fast enough, or that out of a sudden your DPS gets too low due to 1 player getting DCed in the battle in a most crucial important moment

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

This game was never made for well-defined combat roles.

First you make a game which (aside from a very few select cases) throws out the concept of well-defined combat roles (“Everyone can do anything!” “No healers!”). Now, I’m not arguing that that was a bad idea, but what you’ve done with encounters like Mai Trin, Tequatl, the TA path 2 boss, and now these new bosses is attempt to pretend that you didn’t design THE ENTIRE GAME around the fact that it effectively HAS NO COMBAT ROLES. So now that we have long since realized—2 years into it—that everything in PvE (and effectively PvP as well) is nothing but a big DPS spank while we do the maypole dance around a target, you want to rectify this. How? “Let’s give all of the bosses tedious invulnerability and team-timer mechanics to counter the fact that zerker is by far the most viable spec in PvE!”

You make a game without combat roles. Then you introduce a bunch of encounters that artificially define combat roles for players that they have to learn on the fly without any practice because their own DPS mechanics simply don’t work anymore. That’s not “teaching self-organization,” that’s lazily side-stepping your game’s core mechanics in an effort to make a boss that doesn’t die like an HP-sponge dog to people that know how to dodge and use damage mitigation skills.

Best of all, once completed, these bosses are touted as perfect inserts into overworld PvE despite, once again, breaking the core elements of a lot of players’ profession mechanics. If anything, these ridiculous bosses should have just been made into party instances given how tedious they can be in the overworld. In the end, GW2’s core fundamentals regarding “combat roles” undermine any attempt to make an interesting boss that can deal with damage.

If you want to make an interesting boss, give the boss several targeted weak points. Make opening a single weak point part of a separate event. When that separate event succeeds, a single weak point will randomly activate and be temporarily susceptible to damage. Getting to the weak point requires going through a brief jumping puzzle with obstacles to knock players off. None of that takes away from a player’s profession mechanics, but it also exploits the z-axis, the globally available act of jumping and a player’s sense of timing and situational awareness as a means to challenge encounter participants.

PainShot.7154:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Having 5 on one platform and 1 on another could only be a very edge case requiring several people to drop out at the right moment. Our script does exactly what you said, poker dealer style.

Very edge case? Players complain on chat about that “very edge case” almost every time im doing that event.

Happends. Period.

Is the reason to lose the whole event. Period.

Fix it. Period…

Without seeing the server logs i could not say for sure, but from personal experience what may look like a single person on a platform may have been a 5 man band where 4 died early and waypointed out.

I personally experienced this on lane 4, where the champ is a clockwork horror.

One moment i was dancing around it with 4 others, the next i noticed multiple downed/defeated markets that quickly vanished as they noticed i was unlikely to be of any assistance. I had enough trouble with keeping myself out of the AOE filling the platform, never mind stopping to aid any of them all the way from Defeated.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Qaelyn.7612:

have the event scale in difficulty based on the number of players

It scales quite a bit. The more people there are in a lane will change the number of vets and champs that spawn, and the platform boss’s HP scales based on how many end up on the platform.

It needs to scale down some as well though. Especially for those servers with small populations (or most went to guest on the top 1-3 servers, like they do now, instead of trying to do it on their own server) or for people in the weird timezones when theres very little player population on.

Here I was thinking I bought gw2 to play the game but instead I am covertly being taught to “self organise”
What prey tell is in store next for us, self discipline maybe?
Could that time could have been better used by adding a pit near the event start with mobs akin to mad king / pavilion & have something truly for everyone rather than trying to program us to your desires Mr Developer?

Josh- I have a theory as to why you might get only 1 player in a circle. One time, going through the portal, I was maybe a bit overzealous in whacking the interact key to take the port. I was ported in, but then a split second later, I was kicked out and given a message that I couldn’t enter because of the energy field sickness debuff.

I believe that, if you interact multiple times with the field before the server responds, the second interact will cause the debuff to be added and kick you out.

I don’t know if this is helpful as a fix suggestion, but if you can, try applying the sickness debuff about 5 seconds after you’ve gotten onto the circle.

Also: thanks for coming here and responding. I really hope you guys solve the overflow issue soon. I’ve been trying to do this event with about 8-10 guildies and have found it basically impossible to get in the event together. We can’t get everybody into an overflow before it fills up half the time!

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!

Qaelyn.7612:

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!

Having 5 on one platform and 1 on another could only be a very edge case requiring several people to drop out at the right moment. Our script does exactly what you said, poker dealer style.

Qaelyn.7612:

let people on platforms who have already completed help out with other platforms

We tried really hard to get this in. Every solution we came up with had technical constraints.

Qaelyn.7612:

lengthen the timers a bit

The timers and mob HP were balanced and rebalanced several times in an attempt to find a sweet spot that would ensure people couldn’t faceroll the event, but wasn’t so difficult that no one could do it. Everyone’s mileage will vary. And as with any group activity, virtual or real life, there is luck inherent in that. Some people hate that dynamic and some love it. If someone has an idea about how to ameliorate the inherent luck factor in group events, please speak up!

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.

Qaelyn.7612:

have the event scale in difficulty based on the number of players

It scales quite a bit. The more people there are in a lane will change the number of vets and champs that spawn, and the platform boss’s HP scales based on how many end up on the platform.

You should be making sab world 3 get back to work

I’m sorry, but did I read the Anet dev’s post correct in that they intended to make it so that groups could help others out, but it didn’t make it into the release due to technical restraints?

So..the fight was designed with that in mind, but due to this ridiculous two week release schedule, the development team didn’t have time to fine tune the encounter and iron out the kinks to make sure this feature went live?

If this was intended to make us feel better, I would say it’s done the opposite. No we more or less know that content is rushed out, finished or not, to meet this ridiculous 2-week schedule.

Stop it. Just. Stop. It. If this is the result of the two week release cycle, it needs to end.

Having 2 of the 5 lanes that are easier to complete and draw players with less than 80 lvl + non exptic gear + they have more downstate ratio in world bosses events , might help the the old geezers

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

If we are moving to world events that require us to be organized, then why are we restricted to a party/ group of 5 ?

Swagg.9236:

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

This game was never made for well-defined combat roles.

First you make a game which (aside from a very few select cases) throws out the concept of well-defined combat roles (“Everyone can do anything!” “No healers!”). Now, I’m not arguing that that was a bad idea, but what you’ve done with encounters like Mai Trin, Tequatl, the TA path 2 boss, and now these new bosses is attempt to pretend that you didn’t design THE ENTIRE GAME around the fact that it effectively HAS NO COMBAT ROLES. So now that we have long since realized—2 years into it—that everything in PvE (and effectively PvP as well) is nothing but a big DPS spank while we do the maypole dance around a target, you want to rectify this. How? “Let’s give all of the bosses tedious invulnerability and team-timer mechanics to counter the fact that zerker is by far the most viable spec in PvE!”

You make a game without combat roles. Then you introduce a bunch of encounters that artificially define combat roles for players that they have to learn on the fly without any practice because their own DPS mechanics simply don’t work anymore. That’s not “teaching self-organization,” that’s lazily side-stepping your game’s core mechanics in an effort to make a boss that doesn’t die like an HP-sponge dog to people that know how to dodge and use damage mitigation skills.

Best of all, once completed, these bosses are touted as perfect inserts into overworld PvE despite, once again, breaking the core elements of a lot of players’ profession mechanics. If anything, these ridiculous bosses should have just been made into party instances given how tedious they can be in the overworld. In the end, GW2’s core fundamentals regarding “combat roles” undermine any attempt to make an interesting boss that can deal with damage.

If you want to make an interesting boss, give the boss several targeted weak points. Make opening a single weak point part of a separate event. When that separate event succeeds, a single weak point will randomly activate and be temporarily susceptible to damage. Getting to the weak point requires going through a brief jumping puzzle with obstacles to knock players off. None of that takes away from a player’s profession mechanics, but it also exploits the z-axis, the globally available act of jumping and a player’s sense of timing and situational awareness as a means to challenge encounter participants.

the game was designed that people survive, kill, control and keep their friends alive, how you go about doing this is up to you, however working together and learning mechanics has ALWAYS been a part of the game.
If you can kill, survive, keep friends alive and control the enemy, you will win. What he means by self organization is learning to work together as a large group, which isnt like a specialized role, its like. Hey attack this now, help this guy, teach this player what to do etc.

I think the big events are getting more refined, i do think they need to design for lower numbers than 80 people, im not saying 5 man, but at the very least scale down to be doable by 50 people.

I also think some events can have a starter event, where when you get say 60 people together some npc will start a pre event rather than be like 2 hrs or something. However, the very specific on odd or even hour works for now. Some solutions to the under/overflow issues should probably be considered.

I look forward to seeing how Anet can get even more creative with the large scale events, perhaps some not focused on One large boss, but say a massive army attack, or large dungeon like thing. Even a group of powerful enemies of different types spread out throughout the event.

UnDeadFun.5824:

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

If we are moving to world events that require us to be organized, then why are we restricted to a party/ group of 5 ?

like i said before, he isnt talking about 5 man organization, hes talking broadly in terms of hey you 20 guys protect this while these other 40 guys attacks this, and these 6 guys defend this while these 10 guys use this item.

It might be nice if they gave commanders more functionality like, being able to write a mission parameter (might need larger squads) and draw arrows etc on the map of people with them, but we arent talking about small group type organization here.

Blade Syphon.4325:

I’m sorry, but did I read the Anet dev’s post correct in that they intended to make it so that groups could help others out, but it didn’t make it into the release due to technical restraints?

So..the fight was designed with that in mind, but due to this ridiculous two week release schedule, the development team didn’t have time to fine tune the encounter and iron out the kinks to make sure this feature went live?

If this was intended to make us feel better, I would say it’s done the opposite. No we more or less know that content is rushed out, finished or not, to meet this ridiculous 2-week schedule.

Stop it. Just. Stop. It. If this is the result of the two week release cycle, it needs to end.

this patch didnt happen on a two week schedule, it was 6 weeks, and it was in development for like 4 months. It would be good if people could help after beating their zone though. However, when something isnt solved, it is sometimes because there isnt a good solution. thats development, dunno what to tell you.

timmyf.1490:

Josh- I have a theory as to why you might get only 1 player in a circle. One time, going through the portal, I was maybe a bit overzealous in whacking the interact key to take the port. I was ported in, but then a split second later, I was kicked out and given a message that I couldn’t enter because of the energy field sickness debuff.

I believe that, if you interact multiple times with the field before the server responds, the second interact will cause the debuff to be added and kick you out.

I don’t know if this is helpful as a fix suggestion, but if you can, try applying the sickness debuff about 5 seconds after you’ve gotten onto the circle.

Also: thanks for coming here and responding. I really hope you guys solve the overflow issue soon. I’ve been trying to do this event with about 8-10 guildies and have found it basically impossible to get in the event together. We can’t get everybody into an overflow before it fills up half the time!

Pretty sure it’s a timing thing or at least it seems like one. It could be that the poker style dealer is resetting if too long a time has passed between people entering. I haven’t played it enough to say for sure, but it does seems the last one or two platforms seem to have the least amount of people. I wonder if the dealer style is even counting the cards dealt before it deals out more. If not, there really should be a check in place to see how many are on which platform and spread them out accordingly.

Qaelyn.7612:

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

Josh Foreman.8250:

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

^ I am glad to hear this. Of all the things that I hear people having issues with and I think is the biggest problem, is the Overflow issues and being able to coordinate and be present in the same overflow with the other community members that do want to collaborate constructively to achieve victory. The districts from GW1 and/or being able to choose from different overflows does come to mind as a solution or maybe part of a solution.

For the most part, I really would like to thank the developer Josh Foreman for being present in this discussion. To me, it shows that they really do care about the opinions and ideas of their customers/players.

munkiman.3068:

Pretty sure it’s a timing thing or at least it seems like one. It could be that the poker style dealer is resetting if too long a time has passed between people entering. I haven’t played it enough to say for sure, but it does seems the last one or two platforms seem to have the least amount of people. I wonder if the dealer style is even counting the cards dealt before it deals out more. If not, there really should be a check in place to see how many are on which platform and spread them out accordingly.

If people are not getting kicked or voluntarily leaving, no platform should have more than 1 player more than any other.

I can’t say for certain that it’s the portal time-out thing that’s causing an issue, but it’s certainly something they could look into. Hard to replicate in test environments, though, unless you have a way to simulate lag.

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

The only trouble is it’s not really self-organizing. It’s Commanders leading and that puts HUGE pressure on the Commanders that most people aren’t really comfortable with.

So at least give Commanders more power and rewards.

Having a power like a local public chat channel that is broadcasted in by the Commanders only would be a start.

Trying to use /local on the wurms when it’s full of people spamming is annoying.

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

I don’t think people need to feel heroic nearly as much as they need to feel like they’re doing something. You could give someone the simplest task possible of pushing a big red button every 5 seconds without fail, and if they’re doing it right and other people are bringing down the boss they’ll be happy.

The trouble with a lot of GW2 boss encounters so far to me, is you don’t really feel much of what’s going on. You mosh around a bit and there’s a lot of confusion with all the adds, but you don’t have that moment of feeling like “yep, I’m the guy doing something.” It would almost be better if you guys thought SIMPLER in terms of mechanics, simple but people need to be dedicated and do it right. And also, Commanders can throw someone doing it WRONG out of there. That’s important too and not really addressed.

I like the idea of the simpler mechanic, like the Asura fractal boss with the fan. But, giving commanders more power, no way. More tools sure, but being able to kick players around would led to some serious blow back, people will abuse extra power, especially if it only costs em 100g.

TurtleofPower.5641:

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

The only trouble is it’s not really self-organizing. It’s Commanders leading and that puts HUGE pressure on the Commanders that most people aren’t really comfortable with.

So at least give Commanders more power and rewards.

Having a power like a local public chat channel that is broadcasted in by the Commanders only would be a start.

Trying to use /local on the wurms when it’s full of people spamming is annoying.

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

I don’t think people need to feel heroic nearly as much as they need to feel like they’re doing something. You could give someone the simplest task possible of pushing a big red button every 5 seconds without fail, and if they’re doing it right and other people are bringing down the boss they’ll be happy.

The trouble with a lot of GW2 boss encounters so far to me, is you don’t really feel much of what’s going on. You mosh around a bit and there’s a lot of confusion with all the adds, but you don’t have that moment of feeling like “yep, I’m the guy doing something.” It would almost be better if you guys thought SIMPLER in terms of mechanics, simple but people need to be dedicated and do it right. And also, Commanders can throw someone doing it WRONG out of there. That’s important too and not really addressed.

commanders do it because they enjoy it. I think they could use more tools, but rewards/power will lead to elitism problems.

Good commanders will be able to lead without such tools. part of the point of GW2 open world development is to create the community epic level events, without the rigid entry policies and hard separation that instances bring. Its worth it for anet to refine this process than to go with the old instanced/commander kicks/rules etc that you find in other games.

TurtleofPower.5641:

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

The only trouble is it’s not really self-organizing. It’s Commanders leading and that puts HUGE pressure on the Commanders that most people aren’t really comfortable with.

So at least give Commanders more power and rewards.

Having a power like a local public chat channel that is broadcasted in by the Commanders only would be a start.

Trying to use /local on the wurms when it’s full of people spamming is annoying.

Josh Foreman.8250:

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.

I don’t think people need to feel heroic nearly as much as they need to feel like they’re doing something. You could give someone the simplest task possible of pushing a big red button every 5 seconds without fail, and if they’re doing it right and other people are bringing down the boss they’ll be happy.

The trouble with a lot of GW2 boss encounters so far to me, is you don’t really feel much of what’s going on. You mosh around a bit and there’s a lot of confusion with all the adds, but you don’t have that moment of feeling like “yep, I’m the guy doing something.” It would almost be better if you guys thought SIMPLER in terms of mechanics, simple but people need to be dedicated and do it right. And also, Commanders can throw someone doing it WRONG out of there. That’s important too and not really addressed.

Once the fight starts I haven’t seen a commander do a single thing other what everyone else is doing. Other than helping people find their lanes they really don’t need to do much except get on with it.

Make them instanced in a way…done

zenleto.6179:

Once the fight starts I haven’t seen a commander do a single thing other what everyone else is doing. Other than helping people find their lanes they really don’t need to do much except get on with it.

Poor Commanders must get frustrated. It’s just nearly impossible to pull your own weight in a battle and type out nuanced instructions, which is why everyone tries to do the info dump before it starts, but that still doesn’t help communicate emerging problems in the midst of it all. There have been times I’ve wanted to communicate so badly to my team, but I’m busy actually, you know, fighting. The extra lag in large events means sometimes I’ve typed half a sentence before it appears on screen, and then of course there’s a typo at the beginning – usually in the highly important “/s” channel chooser element. So I have to delete the whole thing and retype or give up or risk losing my mouse for precious moments selecting the proper place in the sentence manually and in any of those cases I’ve been standing around way too long not using my skills efficiently. Do not like.

Lack of push to talk is killer. Wouldn’t it be great to be on phase 2 and suddenly be able to push to talk with your platform? I definitely see the angle that ANet is asking a lot from us as players without giving us some of the tools required to do it. When you consider there are 3 potential voice chat systems a server or sponsored OF can be based out of (TS, Mumble, Vent), you’re asking your customers to have four pieces of software to complete 5-30 minutes of content.

Very happy to hear they’re working on ways for Commanders to communicate more efficiently. <3

kimeekat.2548:

zenleto.6179:

Once the fight starts I haven’t seen a commander do a single thing other what everyone else is doing. Other than helping people find their lanes they really don’t need to do much except get on with it.

Poor Commanders must get frustrated. It’s just nearly impossible to pull your own weight in a battle and type out nuanced instructions, which is why everyone tries to do the info dump before it starts, but that still doesn’t help communicate emerging problems in the midst of it all. There have been times I’ve wanted to communicate so badly to my team, but I’m busy actually, you know, fighting. The extra lag in large events means sometimes I’ve typed half a sentence before it appears on screen, and then of course there’s a typo at the beginning – usually in the highly important “/s” channel chooser element. So I have to delete the whole thing and retype or give up or risk losing my mouse for precious moments selecting the proper place in the sentence manually and in any of those cases I’ve been standing around way too long not using my skills efficiently. Do not like.

Lack of push to talk is killer. Wouldn’t it be great to be on phase 2 and suddenly be able to push to talk with your platform? I definitely see the angle that ANet is asking a lot from us as players without giving us some of the tools required to do it. When you consider there are 3 potential voice chat systems a server or sponsored OF can be based out of (TS, Mumble, Vent), you’re asking your customers to have four pieces of software to complete 5-30 minutes of content.

Very happy to hear they’re working on ways for Commanders to communicate more efficiently. <3

If there was more of a point to commanders in PvE then this sort of event would be perfect for them. I agree, they do need better functionality for this mode.

Having said that, I haven’t had much time for commanders on my server since the Scarlet map invasion update so I have my own little problem there

I can’t type and fight at ALL. I’ll note, though, that if you realize you left off /s you can hit Home to get to the start of the line, type the /s (with a space after it), and hit End to return to the end without having to delete it all. It’s still cumbersome when you’re in combat and maybe you want to hit enter on half a line then do the next, but at least you got something out.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The timers and mob HP were balanced and rebalanced several times in an attempt to find a sweet spot that would ensure people couldn’t faceroll the event, but wasn’t so difficult that no one could do it. Everyone’s mileage will vary. And as with any group activity, virtual or real life, there is luck inherent in that. Some people hate that dynamic and some love it. If someone has an idea about how to ameliorate the inherent luck factor in group events, please speak up!

I’ve suggested this elsewhere, but you should scale the events (and rewards) not just on player size, but also server success. If a server consistently fails an event, then it gets easier (and the rewards drop). If a continuously succeeds, the event gets harder, and the rewards greater. Unfortunately, I see no easy way of carrying this information over to an overflow as overflows aren’t tied to servers. Perhaps averaging the successes/failures of each server in need of the current overflow would work, but may not be technically feasible.

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.

Did you play test this with 80 people? One run in and most of us could tell you whats wrong and how to fix it (idea wise, not technically.) Some of us have to assume that devs don’t play the game like we do or they wouldn’t stand for some of the things that go on.

For the platform – if you finish your platform, couldn’t a mini tron machine appear that you can talk to that gives options to port to any of the platforms? It only appears on the platform that’s finished. Something similar to that asura lava jumping puzzle.

Vol.7601:

-> So you want the boss to be available 24/7, with no respawn timer?

2 hours is a bit much given that you’ll want to be there 30 to 45 minutes early or even more if you are running with a popular group like TTS.

Using overflows and massive respawn timers makes doing the World Bosses way too time consuming, which is why very few even bother with Teq anymore.

All that said, I love the Wurm. I just wish that it wasn’t so time consuming.

Fluffball.8307:

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.

LMAO so funny!! hahaha…

…because it’s true

Give us INSTANCES for bosses like the Wurm. Having people try and organize Overflows is a terrible, bandaid system.

LostInSmoke.2590:

Give us INSTANCES for bosses like the Wurm. Having people try and organize Overflows is a terrible, bandaid system.

Instances have a stigma in GW2. Basically, people are afraid of elitism creep. So, many people will be against it being an instanced encounter, even though the Overflow system is worse.

… I’m sure as this process continues we will find better ways to accommodate the communication structures that will emerge.

… 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

When you die , everything around you loose their colors and grey-out and get silent .

What about a system where :
Different teams > different aims (attack the boss-use the cannons and protect them -defend a passage) and meet again to zerg the boss .
When the time of damaging the boss is over , everything gray out and all noises stops , expept a friendlly fully colored NPC that spam yells you : <<Come here m8, we need your help>> .
You can simply ingnore the NPC and keep hitting the boss , while everything is black and white , but you dont get any reward .
(30% reward if you complete the sidequest once and 66% twice … etc etc)

- 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 would agree with the waiting, no one likes to do it. And I have put in a lot of hours.

Over Flow is an issue. AN knows it, they are looking into solutions.

Too much failure? This is going to happen with difficult fights. You simply aren’t going to always be successful.

Too little reward for failure… Not sure what to say. You should not be rewards for failing. You want rewards, then do not fail. I realize that sometimes this is not your fault, outside factor can ensue. But that is what an MMO or even many CO-OPs are more or less about when it comes to tough events or instances.

Really cool to hear responses from Anet! I was a bit afraid, frankly, than you guys were placing some dubious boss ideas out there, but it’s fair to argue that stuff like this is new territory, and will need tweeking.

I’ve gone from a Marrionete hater to a lover. I still think the lane bosses need some tweaking, if only that having all parties fail if one does pretty much breaks the encounter, making actually beating the thing. But evidentaly there wer some techincal issues, and I can sympathise.

I’d vote for making that aspect a 3/5 majority must beat the boss rather than all 5, or maybe making the Aethercannon charge a bit slower so we can recover from losses more easily.Those seem like technically easier fixes than allowing other group to assist.

I REALLY love the Marrionette though, well done! I just hope we can fix it so it’s actually beatable, rather than a coin flip as to whether the 5 bosses can be beaten.

And the idea of progressivly better loot, even if you don’t beat the boss, is great! Feels like I’m progressing, even if we fail. I love getting the keys and opening the chests at the lair, and the secret lair itself makes me geek out at the cool idea of it. I love hidden areas like that.

The axiom that should be learned should be “don’t overestimate the coopeartion of strangers”. This boss actually works because it’s essectially tower defencce and a boos fight, two things that all players should be familair with, even if they simply spam enemies with DPS.

It breaks when we need all players to have the exact same cooperation and skill, hense the good chance at least one group will fail a champion.

It’s why the Wurm is basically unplayable. It’s expecting too much from random strangers.

Plus, there may be some technical issues. I’ve see some arenas only spawn one or two people, or I’ve gotten into a champion battle only to immediately get killed because I spawned onto the marionette’s attack.

Still, I love this fight! I only criticize because I want it to be even better! I just hope it gets patched a bit so we can enjoy it a lot more!

And more fights like this, with people cooperating in simple defense and boss battle roles works really well. Don’t rely on the gimmicks too much, embrace the DPS-heavy auto-attacking nature of MMOs for these large events, save the more complex stuff for instance, more consolidated and organized play.

I like to Puppet and hate the wurm. I like the feel of the Puppet battle, I get to use my skills that I’ve used from the beginning and learned. I don’t mind a new gismo like building barricades but the gismos seem to be the whole point of the wurm. I’ve done the puppet 7 or 8 times and the wurm 4. The puppet battle outsides seem a good pace and has lots of champs you run back and forth killing as much as possible. It’s not easy but doable. The inside battles are good if your not almost dead or dying when you load in.

You should add transporters that appear after the boss is down and the energy thing in your ring is dead so you could transport to other rings to help them. Transporter appears-you click- prompts you what ring would you like to go to- you pick a number between 1 and 5. TA DA! You help !

The Wurm, I get it’s trying to be hard but so is the Puppet. I think. But the Wurm just doesn’t do it for me. I’ve never seen a group have less progress in the time allowed. And every part is some crazy gismo effect to do that has nothing to do with your skills. It’s too much like Tequatl and I suspect that eventually it will be empty too. I’ll keep doing it for a few more times but eventually if I can do it once like Tequatl I’dd be happy. So far every time I did the Wurm I got a big 73 copper. No drops unless you happen to hit a deer. And when it’s over your armor costs more than 73 copper to repair.

But the Puppet gives you a lot better bang for your buck. You get lots of drops and the cyphers add up pretty fast. And the bags you can pick what you want to even out keys are extremely helpful. I hope this Puppet event stays with us and doesn’t leave after the story moves on. The Wurm can go take a nap with Tequatl.

While it’s nice to see you guys exploring new venues I feel like you’re dancing around the most obvious solution.

Raid instances.

I mean that would solve basically all the problems associated with these events and not have any drawbacks. They can still be designed around 100 players, except that they essentially create their own overflow when doing so.

It’s not so vastly different than what we already have, but would need to be formalized.

Josh I am so glad they are letting you post again.