Guild Wars 2

The third floor of the tower is anti-social. Stopping to help other players is extremely risky. Players running past things bring monsters onto other players, causing strife and frustration. Players set off the mines and kill other players (ok, that’s all the floors). Hell, as I was writing this someone brought a whole mess of things to the purifier I was resting at, almost killed us all.

It’s annoying, and I hope future content doesn’t make me frustrated when other players show up. Seeing other players should always be a good thing. It’s a mixed bag in the tower.

Ressing players who died in a minefield is pretty hazardous to your health, even (perhaps especially) when you have a good number of people available to keep the mobs at bay.

I will admit the mines seem like a poorly thought out idea for group content in an enclosed space. While not entirely bad, especially if you get everyone to run together. But that doesn’t happen always, so if you are behind or someone just decides to zoom past you, you can end up in some trouble.

I know its hard to take into account how players will play the content they make. But they definitely should look at how content like this is done by players and maybe apply some things learned in the future. People rushing through is a side effect of bad design imo, which only exacerbates the existing issues you mention (Don’t get me wrong, I think the tower was a good idea, and even quite enjoyed it, but its not something I would touch now that I am finished just because of some of the problems that have developed).

The 3rd floor doesn’t naturally group people up like 1 and 2.

If it helps you to know, I’ve died many times over by trying to undo those clumps of mobs. The leash range of mobs in the tower appears to be quite long.

For the mines, yes, you have to be careful and stagger out your pacing with those in front of you. I try to run ahead and plow the road, setting off as many as I can.

It’s really as social as you make it to be. It’s all about communication.

I don’t agree that the third floor is anti-social. If anything, it encourages commanders such as myself, to revive everyone, and leave no one behind. The third floor pretty much demands that players work together, and move as a group. That’s a good thing. If people leave players behind, then that’s simply a poor strategy on their part.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I don’t agree that the third floor is anti-social. If anything, it encourages commanders such as myself, to revive everyone, and leave no one behind. The third floor pretty much demands that players work together, and move as a group. That’s a good thing. If people leave players behind, then that’s simply a poor strategy on their part.

This on so many levels. If I see people that have died on the way up, I frequently pop my commander tag and start reviving them, as there is generally quite a few and by the time I am done, we more often then not have a zerg milling about waiting for us to start moving. Seems many people can’t figure out how to work together without the magical blue dorito to congregate at.

From my experience, the third floor works best when people work together, kill your way through and support each other. If you’re being anti-social there you’re doing it wrong.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I don’t agree that the third floor is anti-social. If anything, it encourages commanders such as myself, to revive everyone, and leave no one behind. The third floor pretty much demands that players work together, and move as a group. That’s a good thing. If people leave players behind, then that’s simply a poor strategy on their part.

It doesn’t matter if the optimal solution is for people to work together. People won’t always do that, and the game needs to handle that case. The game should be designed so that even if people are just mucking around, they don’t make it a worse experience for other people. The game should encourage you to help other people (like it does in nearly all other parts of the game), not make stopping to help a big personal risk. That’s how nearly all the other parts of the game work.

I found that floor 3 actually increases player solidarity. It was hard for me to solo that area, and it seems others were having problems too. So we started forming impromptu groups of 4 or 5. Most pugs will stick together if they know they can’t survive on their own.

That is, if there are people around at all. At 3:00PM on a weekday you might be SoL. Gotta wait for primetime to get past level 3.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I don’t agree that the third floor is anti-social. If anything, it encourages commanders such as myself, to revive everyone, and leave no one behind. The third floor pretty much demands that players work together, and move as a group. That’s a good thing. If people leave players behind, then that’s simply a poor strategy on their part.

This, with a side of if you’re lagging behind and keep dying multiple times because you’re incapable of saving your rolls or speed boost for mines, don’t expect many people to stop and help you in the middle of a minefield.

I do not agree. IT IS social! First of all in most of the cases you cannot pass through alone, you need a team. Furthermore, if you fighting your way in (as it supposed to be), not just running (which is really inefficient whether you alone or in a group) you have plenty of time to rise fallen players on the way. And it happens all the time that I travel through the 3 level.

Floor 3 is an oddity.

Its undoubtably MUCH easier to progress with a group killing things as you go. That way you can revive people rather than leaving a trail of player corpses of unlucky people who took the hits from mobs as you ran past and don’t have to worry about 20 mobs at once (usually). In that way it encourages cooperation and teamwork with other players. People complain about the respawn rate, but any decent size group WILL kill things fast enough to progress. The respawn isn’t that high. Its high enough that it’ll screw people following behind the group, but not enough to impede the actual group.

However, for some reason people have gotten it into their heads that running is the best strategy and continue to do it. I dunno if its the typical “skip all mobs” dungeon mentality, or if its something psychological stemming from the spore DoT (people don’t want to wait because OMG constant damage need to get to the next safe zone!!!), but something about it makes a lot of people just want to run through, even in a group, and even when it ends with them dead on the floor repeatedly.

Yeah I agree. With group it really is easy to revive and kill enemies. Noticed this when I ran with group instead of running past enemies. Much easier and you take less damage even though you stay longer in that toxic debuff.

I found it easiest when I needed to hike up floor 3 to guest to Vabbi and solo the portal event myself. The mobs have a lot less hp and I only needed to kill like 5 menders to proceed.

The third floor is the most likely one I will skip a body. Got downed a number of times trying to help and having made the situation worse. If your running beside me I will pop what I can to help but in most cases it is not much.

The OP is actually correct the other floors summon champs that are tedious to kill. The portal event on the third floor is soloable so often I just run up there with no party and do the event by myself if it is empty (playing zerker guardian). If you have a bit of mobility and know when to dodge if the event is done the whole thing is a solo run for some.

The third floor is mob dense. Players not running builds meant to be dodgy need other players to get through most of the time. It is not rare to see a group of player recruiting to get through there so think it is social enough.

I find the third floor actually discourages player cooperation in smaller groups, large groups are fine as you have helping hands ready to rez but in smaller groups the risk is too great to wait. It is almost always better to just run ahead and don’t look back which I think goes against what this area is about.

People group up on the earlier floors because they WANT to be there (with respect to people who are starting late) but the 3rd floor people HAVE to be there to get to the top. Naturally people want to shorten the trip, and while it would make sense to form a group it is lower risk to get to the top by climbing over the corpses and keep going instead of dying and having to repeat the ordeal.