Guild Wars 2

I liked the solo adventure and thought it was nice even though it was very short. Nice cutscene at the end…on a side note why are there no vistas in southsun and why isn’t there a map completion for it?

Merchant

Highly disappointing. The stat spread was nice in that it’s not something that can be gotten though it’s just a swapped around Apothecary set. Lets see something new next time in stat distribution.

The merchant doesn’t sell anything interesting. No mini pets, no transformation tonics, no unique looking weapons or armor.

The Skins are generic and ugly and the costs are way too high. Why wasn’t the “island/tiki” theme continued like was started when Southsun came out? Why wasn’t stuff like the “Tribal light armor” sold here seeing as you can’t get that in game, outside of I believe spvp. So much potential to only end in Fail.

• They can’t be mystic forged.
• The Exotics cost too much gold. Should have been a few more shells and less gold.
• They’re soulbound on acquire not account bound. Thought you guys learned that lesson already.
• The Exotics come with a MAJOR rune? Really? Really! Completely lame.
• They can’t be salvaged.
• THEY ARE UGLY and the looks can be obtained for free/few coppers elsewhere.
• EDIT (added): It is telling that karka shells went from 3.5s down to 2s as soon as people saw what the merchants had to offer.

All I see in map chat is how terrible the stats and looks of these items is.

Queen Event

This event has a lot of potential but it’s probably going to end up another Fail and here is why. Once southsun has little reason to be visited, such as the removal of the 200% magic buff, which will probably come at the end of the event, and the merchant issues above, this place will become a ghost town. Will this event scale for a group of 5-10 people? Probably not which leaves anyone attempting it frustrated. I’ve already heard people saying they’re done here due to the instigators being removed and the reduction in karka & skale spawns in some areas.

• Currently, there are invulnerable mobs. I assume those are bugged. If not that is a terrible design.
• Queen is a Mega bag of HP
• Terrible culling. Invisible mobs steamrolling players before they even know they’re there.
• Ranger pets are useless in this fight and die instantly, even the ranged pets and with 30 in BM. It’s so nice to have the damage split I’m forced to use dead all the time.

Bonus chest with 2 items to try and draw people here still may not do it, though it is nice addition for sure! Does the boss chest guarantee an exotic (EDIT: No it doesn’t) If so then people will come here just for that.

This ending is a great disappointment. I expected far better for a finale from you ArenaNet.

Suggestions to Save Southsun – Not that any of the devs will care…

• Retrofit the skins to the island theme that was started when Southsun was released. Tiki / Polynesian style for weapons and armor. Skins could be for the rare/exotic versions only.
• Account Bound weapons/armor.
• Superior runes in the weapons/armor and salvageable.
• Reduce the cost by 50% and increase the shell cost by 25%…and make sure that karka drop shells a bit more often now that instigators are gone.
• Make sure the town/queen events scales to a small group of players.
• Add a waypoint to the driftglass settlement. It’s the largest settlement with no waypoint.

My views on the recent update…

• In-Game Letter
  I got the in-game announcement – this is a great way of getting players to involve themselves in new content, especially when that works with “last night’s patch”.

• Holding four settlements
  Slightly confusing. Apparently Kiel’s Outpost counts as a settlement, while Pearl Islet doesn’t (and is never under attack). However, later Kiel’s was under attack by crazed wildlife but the meta-event indicator still said that all four settlements were under player control. Still not sure how this is supposed to work.

• Issue with disconnects
  I was in the unlucky position that today my client got dc’ed a lot. (My boyfriend, who plays on the same network, didn’t have these issues.) I realise that this is my own problem and it doesn’t have anything to do with the living story update. I’m bringing this up because each time I got back into the game, I was put in overflow, where I was immediately swarmed and killed by crazed wildlife, while the rest of my party was still on the server that already fought or held the settlements. Then I had to wait for someone to revive me before the “join” option became available, or waypoint to a non-contested waypoint, then “join”, and fight my way back on my own.
  How to fix this:
  This is obviously not something that is under the control of the living story team, but maybe you can pass this on: When I enter the game and I’m still part of the party, PLEASE spawn me on my party’s server.

• Karka Queen fight
  It was pretty busy over there so I didn’t actually see the Karka Queen until just before she died (culling issues). So if there was anything special to this fight (special attacks or whatever else) I will have to find out later. (I just heard that there were karka eggs? Didn’t see them. Or players. Or the chest. Only an ocean of particle effects.)

• Rewards
  I think 1 rare item (same as the other world bosses) would have been good enough.

• Special Merchant Items
  Armour: I don’t think I’ll be buying anything from the merchant myself; the stats aren’t worth 2g per item to me personally, with or without karka shells.
  Weapons: Same… plus I think no one wants the starter weapon skins for anything.
  Potions: the only reason for me to get the karka potions would be to farm more karkas… since there’s nothing else for me to get with karka shells, I have no incentive to go back to farming them. It just sort of fizzles out right there.
  Special items: I knew that there weren’t going to be any from reading forums, so I didn’t end up disappointed, but I could tell that many people in /map were. If there would have been even a single item (karka shell shoulder pads that are the same in light/medium/heavy) for a ridiculous number of karka shells, then people would have had something to focus their attention on. (It would also have made the karka potions somewhat useful).

• That feeling of not getting a reward when in fact I did
  I already got 2 sweet backpack skins and several titles to show – but I got them all early on. It’s a little like getting paid for work on the first of the month and then not wanting to go back into work, because there’s suddenly no reward at the other end of this.
  How to fix this
  Hand out the special skins (and possibly titles) to players at the end of the event (like the Molten gauntlets), no matter whether they reach the required number of achievements early or not.

• Karka Queen Achievement
  Didn’t get it, but I hear the bug is being worked on. After other achievements were already bugged in the last few days (is this related?) I heard some people say that they saw this coming. This leaves a bad impression, but as long as it is sorted out and people get their achievements later, it’s good enough for me.

• Epilogue with Ellen Kiel
  Slightly disappointed that I couldn’t do this instance together with my boyfriend (we usually do our personal story ones together). The instance itself was okay.
  At the end, there seemed to be a sound problem; Captain Magnus’ voice was only half the volume of Ellen Kiel’s.

All in all, the new content didn’t blow me out of the water, and it didn’t make me angry either. (Just the overflow issue spoiled the fun for me today.)
It would have been nice to walk away from this with a greater feeling of accomplishment; better timing of the existing achievements and rewards would have fixed this for me.

Terrible!

I just spent a bunch of time (and silver), running from various waypoints just to get insta-killed by a wall of crazed Karka.

The first time I fought the queen, I couldn’t see anything at all due to culling, and I didn’t get the achievement due to a bug.

Now, I find out the final instance is solo and I can’t experience it with my girlfriend.

I’ll perhaps expand later, but right now I just want to be anywhere but in Guild Wars 2.

I added an edit to the original post, which I will expand upon here.

It is pretty telling just how disgusted the player base is with the new items/merchant in that Karka shells, needed for the merchant have DROPPED in price as people unload the ones they’ve been hoarding. Prices went from 3.5s down to 2s roughly as soon as people saw the merchant items. That’s pretty bad when people are dumping their stock instead of spending it.

Imaginos.3756:

I added an edit to the original post, which I will expand upon here.

It is pretty telling just how disgusted the player base is with the new items/merchant in that Karka shells, needed for the merchant have DROPPED in price as people unload the ones they’ve been hoarding. Prices went from 3.5s down to 2s roughly as soon as people saw the merchant items. That’s pretty bad when people are dumping their stock instead of spending it.

I had hoped things would be different, but to be honest, I didn’t have high expectations. It’s like they put all the bad ideas on the dry erase board, and pick the worst one. I’ve never played a MMO that “shoots in the dark” so much.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

At the end, there seemed to be a sound problem; Captain Magnus’ voice was only half the volume of Ellen Kiel’s.

I would just like to say the opener of this post: very well done.
You listed most major concerns and the central criticism that players have with the current Living Story events and have kept your post neutral and without insults. The post is well structured and comes with constructive suggestions on what to do better.
If there’s just one post in all this Soutsun-Mania that the developers look at, I hope that this is it.
And if not, I hope that a lot of players will at least take this post as an example of how to properly voice constructive criticism.

Once again, they should hand over boss design to the Molten Facility team. I don’t mean to insult Robert Hrouda and his team, but after receiving feedback about both the bosses in Canach’s Lair and the Karka Queen, it should be clear that some change is needed.

Feedback Part 2:

Queen Event

Throw eggs to break the queens armor down faster: This seemed like a pretty cool mechanic but it was very counter intuitive. When I saw eggs on the ground they were surrounded by red circles and the game has been constantly teaching us to GET OUT OF THE RED CIRCLES, not run in and pick an egg up and throw it at the boss. Maybe it was just me or the really bad lag but every egg I saw was in a red circle.

I also didn’t see anything that told me they were dangerous to the queen. No hint from our local Law Enforcer or her Studious but whacky Asura….wasn’t in the letter either.

Magic Find boost

I’m on the fence about the magic find boost. It was a huge draw for people to go farm there so they’d get more fine materials. I didn’t notice a huge difference in fine mats myself or even in rares/exotics. Farming daily for about 3 weeks with MF ranging from 230% to 370% I received a total of 6 of the southsun crates and got about 4 rares total. Others talked about getting 20 crates or more in the same amount of time with similar MF levels so…

• I think it was great that it was added to Southsun to make killing stuff there more enjoyable/profitable.
• I think it’s terrible that 200% was needed on top of my other gear just to get more greens and maybe a couple more yellows then I can get normally playing and I have to sacrifice stats for MF.

I’d rather see MF of that level integrated into the game in increased drops across the board in all categories from blue to orange items and have MF itself done away with entirely.

Other Stuff

• Settler/Consortium fights were fun enough. Liked doing those. Bags would spawn in the ground at times when they would drop, which wasn’t every kill.
• Crazed Animals were ok. The drakes have a terrible drop rate for how tough they are to fight as you get pulled/stunned/confused like crazy with them. Very annoying mob to fight with little to no reward. I killed 20 of those in a row and got a couple scales and that was it. IF a mob is going to be more dangerous then others, it should have a higher drop rate of stuff.
• The new Blooming Passiflora nodes are nice. 5 would be far better then 2 but I’ll take what I can get.
• Consortium Box drops too rare for the boxes and for what was in the boxes. Getting the “blue minis” far too rare. I’d rather turn in a sclera ticket for one of the minis but I can’t sell the ticket and the minis aren’t on the merchant.
• Crafting: Crafters need drops that stay around after the events are gone to make these new stat combinations which we’re not getting with these updates.
• Instigator fights had nice rewards and good respawn time. They also required you to be careful of the high fire dot and aggroing too many neutral settlers. Targeting sucked though. If I have 20 yellows and one red mob and hit target nearest, it should always target a red mob before a yellow mob even if that yellow mob is right next to me. This wasn’t the case and you can’t call target if you’re not grouped so that you can hit T to regain a lost target. Very Frustrating

Canach

• Canach was ok. Not great and not bad. Didn’t like being forced to dump my whole build just to use some weapon. Smacks too much of being in the Priory and all those “use this or fail” missions. Disarming was interesting none the less. Would have liked to have seen something in between. Also when you changed canach to be immune to conditions you destroyed people using the other two mines on him. That should have been changed so that they did a good packet of damage up front if the conditions they were supposed to apply were suddenly made moot. Bad form there.
• Canach Reward: was very nice. Not happy that it was changed to once per account but I understand why it was seeing as people were making throwaway characters to farm that instance. I’d rather have seen the reward go down every time it was run until it gave nothing. Like second run 75s, third 50s, fourth 25s, fifth 10s (default number of character slots) after that 0. That would have given people the option to run it for a couple more gold tops but not abuse it.

EDIT: Fixed an error

I’m pretty disappointed too, the OP put this criticism into a very well designed post.

I fell like Roberts team just hasn’t enough time to develop a interesting boss encounter. I liked the pre-events very much, you had to coordinate with 3 other groups to get the camps clear.

If I’d have to decide what Anet should learn from this living story part I’d say:

• add more like those pre-event to the other bosses. For example: the Shatterer spawns only when 4 areas are under players control. This would pretty much change the whole look-at-dragon-timer-and-wait-for-the-volunteers-to-do-the-pre “disaster”.
• work on real mechanics for bosses. There must be a way to create interesting encounters for more than 30 players…

e.g. learning a rhythm of deadly aoe in order to survive. Best example: Heigan the Unclean http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060913222517/wowwiki/images/d/d8/Heigandance.jpg
this could wipe whole raids when they don’t know the mechanic.

So create this real risky battles and reward them with real good rewards. And be creative with rewards. Always rares is boring – add a chance to get a nice skin. The argument Anet had for not implementing specific skins was that players should feel free to play wherever they want. This isn’t true at the moment, players go to those specific meta-events which reward guaranteed rares. Why not giving them a nice skin with a 1:10 chance? (but only if it’s a real risk, not like it is now)

the best raid bosses in other games won’t require the “holy trinity” so it would be very possible to get ideas from those. It would be wise to learn from others strenghts and weaknesses instead of making all mistakes by yourself and learning much slower.

quite telling that games like WoW have more movement involved in boss battles (not talking about dodging) than GW2 in those.

Even More Feedback!

Protect Towns

• These events are the definition of not fun when there is hardly anyone in the zone. We had 4-5 people trying to keep a village clear and it was impossible. Many deaths and frustration trying to bring downed players back up. People left in frustration saying Screw Southsun Cove.

The events don’t scale properly for the number of people involved in them. Too many mobs, too many quick respawning eggs and far far too many of those crappy hatchlings.

BUG: You can get caught inside an egg as it spawns, trapping you and then you get killed by the mobs that are around you. Fun Fun!…NOT.

Southsun is already becoming a ghost town and the only time this event is going to succeed is prime time when everyone’s online, in NA and that’ll die out as people get tired of how much work it is to hold all the camps waiting for the queen then hoping you can run there and get credit for the fight.

The extra rare in the bonus chest won’t keep people coming back. Far too much effort for far too little reward and nothing but frustration for anyone who isn’t playing during peak/prime time hours, and for what? crappy generic skinned weapons with niche stats. No Thanks!

This really saddens me! I love the look of southsun and the whole island/tiki/Polynesian theme that was going on here, but then that was just dropped. People already hate the mobs and now there is very little reason to come back and if those 200% mf settlers are removed as people expect to happen on the 11th then ALL this development is a waste of time and money.

More Suggestions to Save Southsun

• Again, take the time and put in unique tiki themed skins and the tribal armor set.
• Lower the coin cost by 50% on the Economists items.
• Add superior runes/Sigils to the Exotic armor/weapons on the Economists. Make sure they can be salvaged.
• Make sure that the stuff that’s dropping from consortium chests now will drop off southsun mobs/chests (mini faren, mini kasmeer, the skins, which i’ve never seen drop, etc…)
• Make the stuff in the current consortium chests buyable from the Economist for shells/flowers/coin…a reasonable amount.
• Up the drop rate. They suck.
• Guarantee a yellow from the queens chest (not the bonus chest). With a decent but low chance at an exotic.
• Have the overpowered foes here drop t6 mats more often during the “protect the settlements” events. Drop ALL t6 mats.
• Make sure the egg sacs push people out of the way (no stun) before they spawn so they don’t get trapped.
• Make sure these events scale for when there are very few people online in southsun.

Oh and one more thing. Make it so you can rally off those godkitten karak crablings. Get downed by an egg kittenter and you’re screwed.

+1 to ALL of this! I left yesterday Southsun out of pure frustration after dying four times to those blasted hatchlings in the Driftglass area. And then you have to run back across the map to get to Driftglass again only to die and repeat the process all over. Bashing one’s head against a brick wall is not fun.