Guild Wars 2

I’ve done a share of the new living story events, but so far, i don’t truly see their appeal, outside of being a decent farming event with with loads of people, it just feels a little lackluster on the whole “challenge” deal, it can all be won easily with greatly increased numbers and mashing skill 1. I like the idea of playing with others more than doing dungeons but this is just repetitive and overall just a mindless button masher for each event, you just run to it kill stuff and done.

Also on a side note, a list of maps that you have alredy done would be nice, so people can be more aware of what maps they need for the challenge to be complete.

Personally i find it all boring and frustrating and disorganized. Any commander isn’t actually commanding. Rather, they run around all willy nilly like the res of us. The fights are completely mindless and the whole event is not fun. I think another forum poster said it best…anet thinks because we do it we like it. But no…i am doing it only to get achievements. I dont care about farming the gold. The boring nature of it is not worth it.

I think the biggest problem with these invasions is that there isn’t much invading going on. The invaders appear in a field and stand there until they get killed.

Why aren’t they attacking towns, disabling waypoints, and setting up fortifications. It would make the gameplay a hell of a lot more interesting.

The worst part is that nothing happens if you fail. If you fail to fend off the invaders they just leave anyways, what’s up with that? That seems to go against everything GW2 events are about. When you fail an event there are supposed to be consequences, like every other event in the game.

I’ve been in four or five of the invasions. That was enough. I’m not going to pursue them even if it means being unable to see…

…the rrrrrest of the story.

They don’t feel mindless, they are mindless.

Don’t skirt around the issue. If it is X, then call it X. Don’t twiddle your fingers and go “Oh, isn’t this maybe sorta X?”

Namica.2951:

They don’t feel mindless, they are mindless.

Don’t skirt around the issue. If it is X, then call it X. Don’t twiddle your fingers and go “Oh, isn’t this maybe sorta X?”

And then i do that and everyone starts calling bull on that because they think i’m being entitled/trolling the issue by being blunt.

I don’t see a difference between these events and every other DE in the game in terms of difficulty, strategy, or even realism for the most part. You talk about failing an event and that having consequences, that consequence is usually them standing around waiting for you to come back and kill them. There’s a whole game full of enemies standing around waiting to be killed.

I find them fun, and there’s plenty of personal challenge to be had if you aren’t lazy and mindlessly following people around spamming 1 with a ranged weapon. Break off to the sides and go after the stuff other people aren’t fighting yet. Surprise, they fight back. How long can you survive with half an encounter agroed on you while everyone else is auto-attacking the champ?

Sukor.1236:

I think the biggest problem with these invasions is that there isn’t much invading going on. The invaders appear in a field and stand there until they get killed.

Why aren’t they attacking towns, disabling waypoints, and setting up fortifications. It would make the gameplay a hell of a lot more interesting.

The worst part is that nothing happens if you fail. If you fail to fend off the invaders they just leave anyways, what’s up with that? That seems to go against everything GW2 events are about. When you fail an event there are supposed to be consequences, like every other event in the game.

I agree. I think enemies standing around the map everywhere, not just this particular invasion event, is terrible. It makes the world not seem alive. It’s just a perfectly laid out arrangement of things that mean you harm and it’s silly.

But the problem is nothing can change in the specific zone if it were to fail. If it was an overflow zone and let’s say every merchant was disabled because of failure, it wouldn’t matter. People would just leave the zone and if the WP back they would be in their normal world zone. The outcome there could be different. It’s a big cluster because by packing 100’s of players to the same zone and putting things on a 1 hour timer, Anet in effect bottlenecked themselves from being able to make any longer lasting changes. Maybe that will change after the 4 weeks are up and people spread out and the timer is stretched longer.

Ingway.5106:

Namica.2951:

They don’t feel mindless, they are mindless.

Don’t skirt around the issue. If it is X, then call it X. Don’t twiddle your fingers and go “Oh, isn’t this maybe sorta X?”

And then i do that and everyone starts calling bull on that because they think i’m being entitled/trolling the issue by being blunt.

A sad sad culture indeed when people aren’t permitted to be honest.

I don’t even participate. I just go to the zone, do one closing, and then do the normal dynamic events that actually have build up, enemies attacking objectives, and consequences. I wouldn’t even have to take up a slot if some genius didn’t decide to wall off story progression behind 6+ invasions.

Until zerging and downed state are removed ( never going to happen ), open world pve will always be mindless.

Don’t think about it. FARM FARM ZERG!!!!!

Anet unfortunately figured out that if you just make mindless zerg content the majority of players will zerg and farm for 10+ hours a day. They don’t need any backstory or cool mechanics or any thought at all. Just spawn hordes of static mobs and players will beat on them for days on end.

If you don’t follow the Zerg and use your mind, no they don’t. If you stick to the Zerg, you’re just gonna end up as mindless as they are.

Basically. Do your own thing and you’ll feel like you’re actually doing something. For example, if I see people already hitting a portal, ill switch on the swiftness and get to the next least populated one.

Sanctus.8350:

Until zerging and downed state are removed ( never going to happen ), open world pve will always be mindless.

Was that backhand slap at 80% of the player base absolutely necessary?

“Murf errbal tokna ekas larn”

“He says that it is”…..

I’ve found the events to be fun, and you cannot play it totally mindless since it pays to focus on the type of enemy in the current wave. Too often players will ignore the event to farm champs, or continue fighting a certain type of enemy when we’ve moved on to a different wave and need to focus on a new foe or on minions in general. Also if the zerg gets too large, closing the portal can take longer. It pays to split up and have groups of 7 to 10 take on a portal. With map-wide strategic playing, the event can be cleared a lot faster than large mindless zerging.

IMO zerg content is always going to be mindless. To me, zerg anything is extremely boring and repetitive… whether that is orr farming or WvWvW zergs or these invasions. It almost always comes down to mashing 1 and facerolling your AoEs on CD.

I can’t think of many ways to make combat/encounters interesting when you have 50 random people spamming dps on an event that requires you to kill something. At most tactics can be introduced at a macro level (see invasions and spreading out), but the fights themselves will continue to be uninteresting when they must be designed to allow 30+ unorganized people to participate in them.

The Scarlet fight at the end is the worst offender. Here she is chanting die, die, die while 100 people wail on her, and yet not one single person goes down.

Group or solo organized content will always be more intimate, because it can be custom tailored for a set, small amount of players.

Orion Templar.4589:

I’ve found the events to be fun, and you cannot play it totally mindless since it pays to focus on the type of enemy in the current wave. Too often players will ignore the event to farm champs, or continue fighting a certain type of enemy when we’ve moved on to a different wave and need to focus on a new foe or on minions in general. Also if the zerg gets too large, closing the portal can take longer. It pays to split up and have groups of 7 to 10 take on a portal. With map-wide strategic playing, the event can be cleared a lot faster than large mindless zerging.

I feel most of the brain power used is to calculate how many more champs can be killed before the timer runs out.

Oddly enough, faster in this case is less profitable.

Yes, these invasions are mind-numbingly boring, and disappointingly have no effect whatsoever on the game world.

CHALLENGING, PERMANENT, CONTENT THAT REWARDS YOU BASED ON RISK PLEASE.

rjnemer.7816:

CHALLENGING, PERMANENT, CONTENT THAT REWARDS YOU BASED ON RISK PLEASE.

So, more Deadeye. Yep, we saw how well that went…

Also, your capslock key seems to be stuck. You should probably try to get that fixed.

It’s open world PvE. There’s only so far you can push the system before “zerg moar” becomes an auto win.

This is the first time since launch that we’ve seen them work on open world zerg events (aside from the Orr rebalance to the temples). I don’t think it’s perfect but they have built themselves a very solid framework to build upon. I’d really like to see where they can take the invasion model a year down the road, it’s something that could work very well with an Elder Dragon with a lot more polish. A lot of the gameplay of Living Story has been getting better as the updates tick past, in particular I think the achievements have become far better (there are less “press f” achievements and more content based achievements). I don’t feel like I’m going out of my way to do things I don’t want to do just to finish the achievement lists. If the Invasion events can be polished and developed (things like having them actually invade instead of standing around waiting to be killed) and more complex objectives (similair to how Orr works – a very ambitions and possibly impractical task to fit it onto every map) to reduce the zerg feeling and enhance co-operative and impactful gameplay, the Invasion style of content has a lot of potential.

This month has been filled with a lot of mindless zerg gameplay (champion farming, pavillion farming, invasion events) and the game begins to feel a lot like tag wars, but I have hopes that they are taking notes and looking at what can be done better. Until then, forming smaller groups to take on the less populated invasion events on the map is actually rewarding.

You plan to disable our atuo attack? There is nothing that can be challenging in the face of 70 players dealing damage to it at the same time.

Most of the people are there for the achievements, once those achievements are done, the events will start to get a little more interesting.

The real thing that makes the zerging worse is the waypoints and speed boosts. When you can be at any location on the map in a few seconds with an entire zerg behind you there’s not much challenge.

JK Arrow.7102:

I feel most of the brain power used is to calculate how many more champs can be killed before the timer runs out.

Oddly enough, faster in this case is less profitable.

You’re right, although I feel it should be otherwise. Such as the rewards from defeating Scarlet would go up based on how much time was left on the timer. That would encourage strategic playing to clear the event faster.

PMilkos.9103:

rjnemer.7816:

CHALLENGING, PERMANENT, CONTENT THAT REWARDS YOU BASED ON RISK PLEASE.

So, more Deadeye. Yep, we saw how well that went…

Also, your capslock key seems to be stuck. You should probably try to get that fixed.

Nah, Deadeye didn’t reward you based on risk, because with the correct strategy there was no risk whatsoever. Hell, he was lucky to land one hit on my Guardian. Nothing risky about that. Granted, they probably never intended for him to be so easily killable, but… still.

I almost fell asleep on these events running back and forth to different locations. That’s a not a good thing.

neon.4863:

PMilkos.9103:

rjnemer.7816:

CHALLENGING, PERMANENT, CONTENT THAT REWARDS YOU BASED ON RISK PLEASE.

So, more Deadeye. Yep, we saw how well that went…

Also, your capslock key seems to be stuck. You should probably try to get that fixed.

Nah, Deadeye didn’t reward you based on risk, because with the correct strategy there was no risk whatsoever. Hell, he was lucky to land one hit on my Guardian. Nothing risky about that. Granted, they probably never intended for him to be so easily killable, but… still.

Deadeye could one-shot you and you fough in a tiny arena filled with mines that could one-shot you. That, in my book, is risk.
Unfortunately, for any kind of risky fight, there will ALWAYS be ways to cheese it. Although I will agree that Deadeye was, apparently, too easy to cheese.

neon.4863:

PMilkos.9103:

rjnemer.7816:

CHALLENGING, PERMANENT, CONTENT THAT REWARDS YOU BASED ON RISK PLEASE.

So, more Deadeye. Yep, we saw how well that went…

Also, your capslock key seems to be stuck. You should probably try to get that fixed.

Nah, Deadeye didn’t reward you based on risk, because with the correct strategy there was no risk whatsoever. Hell, he was lucky to land one hit on my Guardian. Nothing risky about that. Granted, they probably never intended for him to be so easily killable, but… still.

Exactly, at least the intent behind Deadeye (and the rest of the Gauntlet) was good: more reward for more risk and more reward for better skill. Anet just happened to botch a couple of the bosses and made them too easy — they should have persevered and fixed those bosses instead of simply giving up (zero rewards for all!).

This newest chapter of the living story, however, is completely mind-numbingly boring: just use your AOE tagging skill until your health suddenly decreases by a large percentage (why did it decrease? it doesn’t matter.) then dodge twice backwards and heal. Rinse and repeat.

Is the world saved when you win? No. Because if you lose, nothing happens.

This current event IS boring. seems like all our 1st aniversary party in game counts for is a massive boss farming zerg rush, a chance to buy temporary weapon skins we missed again, and a rather boring mini-pet of Queen Jenna. I never thought I’d be pining for the excitement of 9 rings….

Maybe removing instanced maps like in gw1 was a bad idea …. There is no real challenge in this game, we just call more zergs and somehow we lose all fun. This event show the most worse part of gw2.

Well, shucks, I decided to keep going with this so I can see the thing with Scarlet. Ugh. Did get some decent drops, though, for a change – and! – in an overflow where the invasion wasn’t happening, a bunch of people got together and took out Taidha Covington. That was cool.

Twice tonight the invasions popped in a zone I was in already. Whee.

In Dredgehaunt Cliffs, there was a portal by Wyrmblood Lake, with very few of the twisted things around. Myself and a few other people killed all we could find – and then I found one stuck inside the hill beside the lake. I was able to kill it, but that made me wonder if something similar is causing some of the individual events within the event to be ‘spawnless’, as it were.

Anyway, I’ve got to do at least one more invasion to finish out the Field Assistant thing. So I can finally get to the (ahem) fun stuff.

Yes, this event – seen as a string of nearly hour long invasions – repeated ad nasium is boring if you farm the hell out of it. My suggestion is don’t. I’ve got my meta achievement and now plan on doing only 1 invasion per day for the boss chest and am going to try to tie it into my daily.

Less than 2 weeks from now this event will slow down substantially. I don’t know what the pace will be, but it will be less frantic and act as a more permanent piece of open world content. It will be like claw or SB, but on a grander scale with a global alarm sounding and rallying the people to a zone. Concurrently a new piece of The Living Story will be released filling a larger chunk of our time. Anet hopefully has a wide range of events, not all of them being zerg fests like this one, planned out/in development to tie their living story together. Now fast forward 3 months in the future, that’s 6 living story updates and 6 pieces of repeatable content. Throw a Halloween and Xmas in there and we will have content to keep us occupied for a while.

Now, would I be happy if every piece of the living story was like this? No. But this is the first installment of persistent content that they have released, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I just don’t like the idea of the living story itself with these new events appearing every month. It no longer makes them feel special but more tedious to grind achievements (which I believe grinding was not supposed to be on the table).

I’d much rather see a special event say around halloween that had something similar to what we have now, but an invasion on 5 separate maps.. then if all 5 maps were successful, it would unlock a special boss on each map. Say an invasion of halloween themed characters enter the world.

To me, that seems better than something every few weeks. By the time halloween rolls around, I’ll probably already be bored of doing special content.

yea, I’m getting drained on these zergfest… it’s not fun, it’s just work now if you’re working towards making gold.

For me this is the worst living story event, and yes the combat is mindless. These invasions are time consuming and getting credit seems to have some luck involved. The prospect of having to do hours and hours of these invasions to complete the challenge isn’t my idea of fun; so I’ll probably pass on this event.

Very poor story and very poor event.