Guild Wars 2

These invasion events are the first thing in gaming that make me understand how those Korean kids die playing Starcraft. They are fun, definitely, but they are too much at once. It’s 45 minutes straight of nonstop running from red circle to red circle, trying to hit as many mobs as I can before the zerg finishes them off. In small doses it’s great, and those 45 minutes pass like they’re only ten, but by the end of each invasion cycle I feel a little dizzy, and the mission cycle strongly encourages players to go through six 45 minute sessions as soon as they possibly can, so they can do the dungeon and get access to the coliseum again.

I don’t know, I really like this event in theory, I enjoy it’s core mechanics, but if there are future versions of this one, maybe aim more for 15-20 minute cycles rather than 45 minutes? Like 20 minutes on, 20 off, repeat?

Its like in school – you simply must hold your pee 45 minutes to break:-P Diapers helps a lot:-P

Seen worse. On the extreme end, there’s the infamous 18 hour boss fight in FFXIV before they patched it down to a ‘sensible’ 3 hours (lol).

i support a 20 minutes session instead of a 45 minutes session.

at least, in the future.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Seen worse. On the extreme end, there’s the infamous 18 hour boss fight in FFXIV before they patched it down to a ‘sensible’ 3 hours (lol).

“People were passing out and getting physically ill. We decided to end it before we risked turning into a horrible new story about how video games ruin people’s lives.”

Oh god, good thing they knew when to call it quits.

In general I think the Living Story is too fast-paced. I’m really craving a good 2 – 3 week period where NOTHING happens and we can just get back to exploring the world, doing activities, dungeons, fractals etc. for a few hours a day without worrying that we’re falling behind on farming gold, completing achievements or what-have-you. The holidays like Halloween and Wintersday were fun because they were UNUSUAL. Now every two weeks it feels like there’s another big crazy “festival” we have to take part in.

We need some down-time, ANet! You can’t keep people on an adrenaline high all the time; it burns us out.

Yes..yes..and more yes. I’ve been saying this for a long time. Gaming in itself isn’t the healthiest activity. This game goes out of it’s way to be even more unhealthy. Simply by encouraging the duration of play and the frequency it attempts to trigger a stress response.

Zaxares.5419:

In general I think the Living Story is too fast-paced. I’m really craving a good 2 – 3 week period where NOTHING happens and we can just get back to exploring the world, doing activities, dungeons, fractals etc.

Remember the first Flame and Frost LS updates… all content done in 1 or 2 days, 12 days spent waiting… people complained; I’d much rather have this intensity level and then just opt out from time to time to do other stuff.

You still have plenty of time to do it all and the other, regular content – just mix and match to suit your playstyle.

i think we’re hitting a peak here anyway, it’s going to simmer down a bit now

I would not want 2 weeks of nothing. There isn’t really enough perm content to occupy a lot of people, especially the item hunters who aren’t interested in Legendaries.

And I think 45 mins is just about right to make the event feel like a huge invasion without it being so long that people get bored.

Dondarrion.2748:

Zaxares.5419:

In general I think the Living Story is too fast-paced. I’m really craving a good 2 – 3 week period where NOTHING happens and we can just get back to exploring the world, doing activities, dungeons, fractals etc.

Remember the first Flame and Frost LS updates… all content done in 1 or 2 days, 12 days spent waiting… people complained; I’d much rather have this intensity level and then just opt out from time to time to do other stuff.

You still have plenty of time to do it all and the other, regular content – just mix and match to suit your playstyle.

That really depends on how much time you have to play to begin with.

I get 3 hours in the evening, if I do nothing else with my free time, and a bit more on the weekend if I’m not doing anything else. Ever since they started bi-weekly updates I’ve felt like I’m rushing to keep up with just the Living Story stuff. I rarely have time to do anything else.

Personally I don’t feel like 3 hours a night is exceptionally low play-time, I would have thought that would be about average and considering I’m on a computer all day at work too probably a lot more than is good for me.

But this update is particularly frustrating. Last night my 3 hours consisted of: Log on, have a quick look around the new features, do the instance and run to the two ‘check points’ for the first 3 achievements. Then find out that although the UI says an invasion event is going on it’s actually finished already, so I wait 1/2 an hour for the next one, can’t get into any of the right overflows and spend another 1/2 hour waiting in the queue or logging in and out to try and change overflows. Then wait for the next event, finally get into the right map, run around doing it for about 20 minutes and then get disconnected so I get absolutely no credit, realise I don’t have time to wait for the next one to start and log off feeling like I’ve wasted my evening.

Especially when all I actually wanted to do was try my new build/plan against Liadri, but I’m locked out of that until I do get lucky with the timing, popularity and connectivity issues of the events 5 times over.

Especially when all I actually wanted to do was try my new build/plan against Liadri, but I’m locked out of that until I do get lucky with the timing, popularity and connectivity issues of the events 5 times over.

I do think that there were some flow hiccups involved in this event, and agree with most of your points, but I do like the concept and the general idea of new content being constantly available. It probably was a bad idea to “lock” the old Jubilee content behind six rounds of this new stuff though.