Guild Wars 2

Anet can really learn from the recent success of their Super Adventure Box. Here are the top 10 lessons:

10) Anything in 16 Bits are fudging AWESOME.
9) Consumable Healing potion.
8) 1 pointy stick in hand is better than 10 legendary on a credit-card commander.
7) A monkey with a brown pineapple is more fun than 10 risen with knockdown.
6) A simple story line is better than a boring story being drip feed.
5) Players like shinny weapon skins.
4) Killing Giant Frog King is fun.
3) One word “baubles”.
2) Jumping puzzles that is original and creative can be lot of fun.
1) If you can’t think of anything original for your mmo, copying ideas from past successful games are a sure win.

This top 10 is brought to you by the courtesy of Claw of Jormag’s 1 hr 15 mins window.

I agree with zenonseth

If I twist #8 around and interpret it to mean what I want it to mean, I think I can come up with a vague value statement like “Pay 2 Win is poor game design — it’s best to assure everyone has an equal chance.”

The rest of these points are either trite, or mere descriptions of things that happen inside the S.A.B., or things that ArenaNet obviously already figured out. Maybe you could flesh out some of these, or clarify what you mean..?

Like, #7: Are you saying you want all the undead in Orr to start throwing pineapples? What would you suggest, to fix the problem?

Or #3: Okay, baubles. What about them? Is this something you think should be extended to the rest of the game? Do we really need yet another currency? What else would we buy with baubles, and how would they coexist with laurels, karma, guild commendations, gold, etc.?

Fyrebrand.4859:

[snip]
Or #3: Okay, baubles. What about them? Is this something you think should be extended to the rest of the game? Do we really need yet another currency? What else would we buy with baubles, and how would they coexist with laurels, karma, guild commendations, gold, etc.?

They would be the ultimate currency, of course. Making these new ‘baubles’ be different from the current ones dropped in SAB, and define new exchange rates:
100 Baubles = 1 Legendary weapon
1 Bauble = 10 Laurels + 50,000 karma + 1 gold + 10 guild commendations + 10 battle commendations + 10 Dungeon tokens from each Dungeon

Not sure if this will be less or more grindy than current legendary weapon setup …

xyz) that the Frog King encounter is 100x more challanging and entertaining than “fighting” Zaithan.

Those sweet skins are so much better looking than those terrible Legendaries, and so much easier to acquire…i love them..

How about these:

In a day where 4k res and quad SLI GPU’s are available, graphics don’t make the game, fun game play makes the game.

Simple can be more fun than complex.

Working for rewards rather than 100% RNG works well.

If something is found to be fun by your player group, expand on it!

Josh said earlier that the SAB team is rather small. I’m hoping all the hoopla around it and the very minimal complaining about it would cause Anet to take notice. Give the team some resources!

There’s only one thing that really needs to be taken away from the SAB, and I hope ArenaNet keeps it in mind for the future:

Fun things are fun.

I personally saw it as just another silly thing in the game. I kinda would like to see some more serious content added (Also not really old enough to enjoy the SAB, the game its based off of is before my time. I like combat, I like risk. I don’t like the wannabe Zelda box.

Personally hoping Anet releases something more serious soon.

Khyber.2693:

I personally saw it as just another silly thing in the game. I kinda would like to see some more serious content added (Also not really old enough to enjoy the SAB, the game its based off of is before my time. I like combat, I like risk. I don’t like the wannabe Zelda box.

Personally hoping Anet releases something more serious soon.

I just have to say:

Y SO SRS?

If you hat SAB, ask yourself this:

Did you ever explore another GW2 dungeon like this one before?
Did you ever hunt down enemies for a chest instead of skipping them?
Did you ever had environmental puzzles leading to secrets?
Do you like a shovel better than a radar guided mining pick?
Did you ever quit a dungeon because you ran out of rez?
Did you ever encounter music shifting to the mood of the scene?

The SAB simplified the combat, it simplified the visuals. But it made a powerful statement about the fun of the game being in the gameplay.

Even if all points listed existed before, each and every one advanced the game. The Fractals were a step up from regular dungeons. The SAB is a step forward from Fractals; not including combat. So far the dungeons are very strict when enforcing the “all players stick together because monsters are tough” rule. Going into SAB is like herding cats with five players in five different corners of the map. Great new dungeons will come from this silly box.

I’d love to see more of these kinds of secrets and jumping sections be ported to the normal PVE environments. Using bombs to find hidden caves? It worked for Zelda, and it works for GW2. Its just a ton of fun. And it is not so combat focused.

Love everything about Super Adventure Box. Amazing addition.

Would love a “Mario Party” like feature in the future. Playing with/against other players in innovative unique ways would be finger licking good.

But most importantly.. Where are the other Weapon Skins? I was dying to see the Super Adventure Rifle of Fun…:(

FourthVariety.5463:

Did you ever explore another GW2 dungeon like this one before?
Did you ever hunt down enemies for a chest instead of skipping them?
Did you ever had environmental puzzles leading to secrets?
Do you like a shovel better than a radar guided mining pick?
Did you ever quit a dungeon because you ran out of rez?
Did you ever encounter music shifting to the mood of the scene?

I just want to correct a few discrepancies there that you really cant put in the same category.

• Dungeon explorable modes are dungeon sequel story mode. I agree on dungeon exploration, I expected GW2 explorable modes to be more like what SAB now is, I wanted to dive myself into a dungeon where there’s a whole tree of different paths you could take towards the end-boss. And even if you didn’t take another path, you could still go there for the simple sake of exploring the dungeon.
  Sadly, the dungeon maps aren’t really cut out for exploration, they don’t have that much hidden areas, and they are very story based and really linear instead.

• Player behaviour vs design intend. I doubt players would try to find every nook and cranny and fight every boss. I personally don’t like to skip every boss in a dungeon simply to get to the end faster, but this is how players work. Even in SAB, people (myself included) rush towards the end battle, to get the chest, and ignore every side path. You could say, that the dungeons could make use of the achievement system SAB has, though I would say that is one big load of achievements to track, and I dunno if they wanna track that much data per player per dungeon.

• Environmental puzzles = Jumping puzzles. I would say that is kind of the only thing that GW2 already had before. Perhaps not in dungeons, but certainly out there in the world. This being a jumping puzzle dungeon, makes it unique towards players that liked jumping puzzles, but not that many people like the jumping puzzles.

• Shovel isn’t the same as a mining pick. The mining harvesting tools really aren’t comparable here. But I agree here that the shovel is great, and that something similar would be amazing in dungeons. We need to go back to Guild Wars 1 for this, but: Light of Deldrimor. Best thing ever. I have NO idea, as to why this hasn’t been included in Guild Wars 2, because it was an amazing skill and amazing gameplay enhancing mechanic to me in Dungeons. It basically did the same thing as the shovel did. Give you more “baubles” or in GW1, gold.

• Running out of rezzes doesn’t hurt a jumping puzzle, but does hurt dungeon play. I don’t think that restarting dungeons is all that good. It works in SAB only because it’s per player. And even then, getting back with the party is fairly easy. It’s a jumping puzzle, so you can simply do the same jumps again.

• Music actually does change in dungeons. But it’s perhaps not as noticeable outside SAB due to the music not being super recognizable.

Overall you have some good points there, but some people just hate jumping puzzles, OR don’t like that a 16 bit world is added to Tyria, instead of making the actual dungeons better. (Cough CoF cough)

I did not mean jumping puzzles as environmental puzzles. I was referring to using the torch to burn the carpet and then a bomb to open the floor and find a secret. Those are “puzzles” which regular dungeons miss completely. Neither do they have an items progression aimed at increasing the level of world interaction, nor do they have any room off the main path to place such puzzles there.

As you said it, dungeons might have different paths, but each one is a linear action tunnel if you will. If you skip something in a dungeon it approaches glitch territory and you exactly know what you skipped. In SAB you can “skip” or miss out on something without even knowing it was there in the first place.

Speedruns will always be speedruns. The question is not if they can be done, but what is lost in the process. Regular dungeon, not that much. SAB → quite a few corners. If you boil your motivation down to “gimme skins” then, sure, speedrun it is, all the way from now to May

Fighting the frog king is the worst god kitten thing in any game I have ever played.

I have fought him once; and only once. Couldn’t even be bothered getting to him in infantile mode after the zerg death rush I was forced to do against him in normal mode.

Might just be my Australian lag though.

(on the lag topic; the hit dodge after jumping timing is freaking horrible while playing from australia also).

Another Australian here. King Toad is a cakewalk once you understand his pattern. If I don’t screw up, I can get past him solo without taking any damage.

Dodge-jumping is also unnecessary, at least with SAB the way it is now. Any jumps that require dodge jumps can also be made with a normal jump made at the very last second.