Guild Wars 2

It’s quite obvious that the Tequatl fight has split the community into a “love it” and a “hate it” camp. I think the game is now at a crossroads of whether or not it wants to be a raiding game, replacing more and more “easy” content such as world bosses or dungeon Explorables with versions at a lot more challenging, giving the hardcore players something to bash their heads against for exclusive loot and bragging rights (raiding-game style), or it can remain what it sold as: A game that locks nobody out of anything even if they are average players, focusing story, entertainment and fun (casual focus).

Since it’s not realistic that it can be both and since discussions on the forum are not representative of the general playerbase – I am going to propose having an election! (Like the one we recently had)

How about this?:

Knut Wildbear needs to pick an ambassador to Lions Arch. The person needs to be a great representative of Norn spirit. Here are the two candidates you can support!

1. Hardcore Hans
Hans is a legend among Norn. Strong, mighty and courageous, he will back down from no challenge. When he hears of a mighty foe named Boris the Bold moving into a nearby cave, he grabs his greatsword and sets off. Will you stand by Hans and become a legend?
[Description: Boris the Bold is a Tequatl sytle raid boss. Uncoordinated groups need not to apply. His mechanics will require hours and hours to master, even for a guild team of great players. He will spam enough red circles of doom to make even Alpha Subject dizzy and without boon stacking and bringing the best game you have, he will eat your group alive etc.]

2. Casual Cathy
Cathy is also a legend among Norn, but she has never touched a weapon in her life. She is famous for the best brew and the best drinking parties of all of Holbraek. But Boris the Brittle has stolen her ale recipe and she can’t remember the secret ingredients, for she was always drunk when she brewed it. Boris isn’t exactly a legendary foe, but Cathy needs help. Will you be the one to save the best ale ever made?
[Description: Boris the Brittle is more bark than bite. While he has a number of tricks up his sleeve, he has no one-shot mechanics and will telegraph every halfway dangerous move he has quite clearly so, so people can counter it or move off (think the Dwanya fight in Orr). A group of five strangers can complete this fight with very limited trouble.]

Here is the catch: You can support only ONE of these characters during the entire event – siding with one of them counts as a vote what sort of content you want to see in GW2’s future. Except the challenge level as described above, the two dungeon paths are 100% identical. The Hans dungeon offers no loot the Cathy version doesn’t. This is about the type of content you really want to play, not about your price that makes you try content you otherwise won’t do. The only difference is that for Hans you get a displayable title “I live for the challenge” and for Cathy you’d get “I live for the party”. So you -do- get bragging rights for completing the challenge if that’s what you’re after.

“The Hans dungeon offers no loot the Cathy version doesn’t.”
Screw that! Give me the same loot for easier obviously!

While I do love a challenge, I also like creative gimmicks. So far, tribulation mode in the super adventure box is the best thing in guild wars 2 and Casual Cathy sounds closer to that.

Raids in general suck because once the number of players reaches past a certain point you feel like you no longer matter. Small 1-5 man scaling content is great and can still be challenging.

Also, I hate joining a public/guild circle-jerk teamspeak so anything that forces that is a thumbs down from me.

CASUAL CATHY FOR PRESIDENT!

#HARDCOREHANS4LYFE

It is not that simple to say half love it and half hate it. There are many reasons why players like it and why not.
Lot of players would have no problem with its difficulty. But they have a problem with 4 biggest things that makes people to not like tequatl – No reward, AFK, turrent trolls and overflow.
Tequatls problems are far more bigger then just ,,You want hard content or not?"

No loot? This is an MMO, let’s be realistic. People play MMOs for loot, certainly not for the “amazing” skill mechanics and gameplay they offer.

Overflow otto is more realistic, i have no problem with hard content if i get to play it, my guilds 500 man, i imagine getting 50 players in an instance isn’t a problem for me on paper but the game would cause mass overflows and separate us into 10 areas.

I vote of casual cathy. If i wanted a hardcore game,i play something else. lets not ruin this casual game any further

Overall I’d vote Casual Cathy, but Hardcore Hans should at least become a minister / enter the government to pull something spectacular as Tequatl occasionally.

ROFL @ Overflow Otto. xD Sad but true – he is the future of this game.

The Spiral King.2483:

No loot? This is an MMO, let’s be realistic. People play MMOs for loot, certainly not for the “amazing” skill mechanics and gameplay they offer.

You misread it. What I said is that both versions offer loot. The -same- loot and the -same- drop chance. There is no ‘exclusive’ loot in the (more difficult) Hans dungeon. Otherwise you’d falsify the election results by encouraging Cathy supporters to do Hans for the more awesome loot, despite they’d otherwise not wish to do that sort of content. This is really all about what content people really would want to play, other things being equal except the difficulty.

PS: I love Overflow Otto! :p

@Kimyrielle

If you love Overflow Otto, then you should know your thread is nonsense. There should be both casual and hardcore content in the game, just like now, the way HOW the content is presented is the problem. I would like to do Tequatl, but I won’t camp in the map for an hour or two just to do it. And I would not like to be forced to go into an Nth Tequatl Killing Guild just because of this. I don’t want to feel I killed it just because I was carried by a mass guild. This is not real challenge. The event is not hard, but it still can’t be done casually, because if you go there casually, you’re on an overflow…

Helobelo.2470:

@Kimyrielle

If you love Overflow Otto, then you should know your thread is nonsense.

I can’t appreciate a funny and creative line made by some other poster without thinking my own idea is nonsense? Hm…ok…if you say so.

There should be both casual and hardcore content in the game

From a purely philosophical point of view I can agree with this, but I have yet to see any MMO where hardcore and casual content would co-exist peacefully, without causing arguments and/or either side feeling left out. It’s just not realistic.

Mind you, the new Tequatl -replaced- his own casual version. It was a clear either/or decision in this case. According to the interview, ANet obviously plans to replace at least some dungeon Explorables with versions a LOT more challenging than the existing ones. Also, it’s either/or. Not both.

In the end, developer time is limited. It’s just not realistic to ask for a meaningful amount of -both- hardcore and casual content. I couldn’t name you -any- MMO having raid-style content where the casual side of the game was equally meaningful and satisfying. Most often, the casual side is then the red-headed stepchild, getting a handful of boring dailies with meaningless rewards to do and not much else. This is then emphasized by the presence of challenging content in the game making the designers tend to make everything remotely desirable drop there and only there. Which alone will divide the playerbase. If a casual player isn’t allowed to ever get the good stuff – why play the game in the first place?

Personally I would be all for having both (although -personally- I’d still argue that Tequatl is not really a fun fight – as far as challenging content goes, I liked the old GW1 instances Urgoz, FoW and Underworld much better), but like I said, it’s not a realistic thing to ask for. The game won’t be able to please everyone, particularly not when the master plan is about -replacing- existing content with harder content.

Kimyrielle.3826:

2. Casual Cathy
[While he has a number of tricks up his sleeve, he has no one-shot mechanics and will telegraph every halfway dangerous move he has quite clearly so, so people can counter it or move off.]

That describes Tequatl which is what makes the fight great, bad design is the Frost Wolf champion at the start of CoE, Tequatl tells you what he’s doing.

Teq has stuff for casual players too. Just defend the turrets. It is no different of the rest of the open world events that need you to kill monsters to protect someone or something.

For people that can dodge well, stack and do not mind spending a few silver waypointing when dead, there is the zerg ball

For people that can pay attention to what they are doing and follow orders, there are turrets that they can control.

If your problem is that your server do not have enough people, you can guest.

If your problem is that you are stuck in the overflow, you can ask people to ferry you to the main server. Party up and spam join. It will get easier the more people start using the LFG tool.

This is not hardcore content. The fight have roles that can be performed for all kinds of players. Also, you do not need a voice chat if you are protecting the turrets. You just have to kill stuff or to aggro stuff away from the turrets.

Gabby.3205:

This is not hardcore content.

The fight requires a lot of practice and coordination to win. That’s the very definition of hardcore content.

Yes, I am a aware that players can beneficially leech the fight by showing up and auto-attacking some mobs near the cannons, which obviously doesn’t require a lot of skill or knowledge about the mechanics. But the same could be said for most raid content in other games – there always are really easy to play roles other than healing and tanking, and hapless players are getting dragged through said content all the time, carried by better ones. Same as with Tequatl, only that with Tequatl nobody can prevent people from leeching.

Baseline – If Tequatl isn’t hardcore, nothing is.

Oh no, not another election..

If they are killing the monsters and keeping the turrets safe, how is that leeching? Oh, there is not enough people zerging Teq’s feet? The DPS is not enough? That happens, and that can even happen to a PUG in a dungeon. Dungeons are hardcore content too?

The coordination necessary is between the zerg ball and the turret users. The turrets users need to know when to cleanse the zerg, when to use the second skill and when to cleanse other turrets. The people in the zerg need to drop banners and conjured weapons (and other people have to pick up the weapons). The people protecting the turrets do not need that.

Other than that, all you need is someone to say on /map when to leave the batteries and the laser and start running back.

Old Tequatl, Yeah I can see that being considered too easy. I can recall times when he was taken down by 4 random people who were just in the area when he spawned in.

But Gabby, you say new Tequatl is casual? Firstly, you need to get onto the main map, really, not an overflow, which IS a problem now. Then you need to have 100+ people dedicated to offing Tequatl, which isn’t a problem now, but will be in a matter of weeks. These 100+ people need to be coordinated and skilled. And even then, the success rate is statistically insignificant. How is this not Hardcore? Know what you’re doing, and want to get on the turrents? Gotta be on Teamspeak, say the people trying to herd 100+ cats.

Honestly, I have no objections to Tequatl, or indeed other world bosses being hard and challenging. BUT. They need to scale properly, and be reasonably beatable. Short timers, and a high number of mandatory players needed, all of whom are required to act perfectly to win? Not the way to go. Yes, it should be possible to fail. Even unlikely to win, say set to be so difficult that maybe only one in five attempts succeeds. 20% victory rate, say, not 0.01% victory rate (Numbers not exact, but from the reported victories, and estimated number of attempts, the actual victory rate is certainly only a fraction of a percent)

So yeah, I think that whilst the situation isn’t as clear cut as Hardcore Hans and Casual Cathy would like (Made friends with Overflow Otto more than a few times, myself…), Tequatl’s fight does need looking at, and tweaking. Not much, but some. And ANet can learn a valuable lesson here for the future as well…

Noooooo please not another election!

Can we have an vote on whether to have another election? :x

Kimyrielle, by casual and hardcore, we mean other things. Tequatl is not challenging, only the organizing is challenging, not the fight. It’s easier than a WoW-raid for example, but harder to organize… I would like to do the fight, but not in this mass “fun” way. It’s really discouraging that the “challenge” in this fight is to find 100 people who can jump over a wave and not Akitten a cannon. Why do I have to find another guild just for this? Why do I have to guest? This is the same as with the instances of GW2, where you have to find re-routes to do something. We get LFG at last, and now we organize again outside of the game… Why can’t I just go there and do it as it’s supposed to be? I only want to do it as a time-sink anyway, since “random” loot means “I’m not allowed to have it ever” in my dictionary, but it’s not worth my time, bacause you cannot just go there casually and do it, you have to get another guild…

Kimyrielle.3826:

Gabby.3205:

This is not hardcore content.

The fight requires a lot of practice and coordination to win. That’s the very definition of hardcore content.

…

Baseline – If Tequatl isn’t hardcore, nothing is.

Tequatl is a trial in organization, not actual difficulty. There is no way to guarantee progression via practice and coordination. One stray player picking his nose on a turret can jeopardize a kill. Since you can’t choose who shows up for a kill, the amount of coordination required is beyond respectable expected levels.

Hardcore content requires strategy and stability and the ability to learn and progress from your failures. Tequatl has none of these beyond coordination to a degree that could be confused as strategy.

If you want to see actual hardcore content, go play RIFT in a raiding guild, then come back and look at Tequatl without laughing. This isn’t a x game is better than y… this is a request to seriously show how out of a league the opinions of difficulty are here.

@Fiendish Puppy: Oh no, I never said it was casual. I said that *there is a role that can be filled by casual players*, which is completely different. There is also a role to be filled with hardcore players (turret users) and there is a role for people that, like me, are "in the middle" (the zerg ball). That’s what I think about the Teq fight: Not hardcore, not casual, but something in the middle of the two concepts.

I talked about the overflow problem, too. Getting someone to ferry you to the main server is going to get easier with time, since not everybody can use de new LFG tool right now.

Helobelo.2470:

Kimyrielle, by casual and hardcore, we mean other things.

Yes, people have different definions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’. For the scope of this thread I created, I used “hardcore” in the context of “content with a higher difficulty level that requires practice and organization to overcome, aimed at players who play games mainly to prove themselves against hard challenges”. While “casual” in this context would mean “content with a lesser overall difficulty, that focuses on fun and entertainment, aimed at players who love a good story and exploration rather than overcoming challenges”.

In short, if an average player will find the content difficult to overcome without significant practice and organization, it’s hardcore, if an average player can complete it without much practice and organization, it’s casual.

My election idea is basically about finding out what sort of content players rather want. ANet used an election as a means to do something like that already, and given this is a very, very important decision, it might warrant another one.

The problem is that Tequatl is not hardcore content. Not in the slightest. It’s not a proper challenge, it doesn’t require skill, only organizing masses. Awesome “fun”. I would like to see more challenge in GW2, but this is hardly what I see as a good challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I like team content, for example it would be awesome if we could try Tequatl with our guild (although I’m not sure if the fight in it’s current form would be any challenge then…), the problem is, we can get together 25-30 people, so it’s a no go because we are not a big mass…

The definition of challenge may change, but since Tequatl is so hard to kill, we can quite definitively say Tequatl IS a challenge. And the fight has the potential to be fun, but, quite frankly, isn’t for a lot of people. Dunno about some people, but spending ages on a fight, getting repeatedly one hit killed (or close enough), only to fail because we couldn’t get enough people, or people were afk/didn’t know what they are doing, after having to wait possibly over an hour just to be able to even take part in a randomly timed fight? Not fun for me.

As I said, I don’t object to hard, or challenging, but make it scale properly, and make it interesting. (Also, 55-65 open world area? Not the best place to put a hardcore (By either of the two main definitions bandied about in this thread) boss that requires such organization…

Nothing about Teq has brought out a divided player base simply because it started out as diverse as you can get. Welcome to the contemporary MMO. And, in a gaming genre with a wide, diverse player base, the open world should be designed for the player you find there. Challenging content should be delivered in instances of tiered difficulty. Voila, everyone gets what they want—at least in terms of challenge. It makes no sense whatsoever to design crushing challenge within the open world were you can’t even kick the afk—yes, I do think challenge should be pugable—just not delivered within open world PvE.

I vote for Fiveman Frank and more challenging content designed for smaller groups. Zerging is boring.

Fungalfoot.7213:

I vote for Fiveman Frank and more challenging content designed for smaller groups. Zerging is boring.

I am not against big group fights if done right, but better qualite 5 man content then bad zerg fight.

I really don’t understand any of this. Why can’t it be both? Why can’t the majority of everything available to play be easy for casuals, while simultaneously having hardcore content for people that want that? No one is making anyone do the new Tequatl, and anyone who doesn’t care about the content or the rewards of it shouldn’t be having a problem with it in the first place.

Or we could all just accept that not all content is going to be for either the casuals or the hardcore players… and that’s a good thing. It gives a wider variety of players something to do. Just let other people have fun with the different types of content and play how they want.

A-net knows they can’t please everyone all the time, so instead they are pleasing the different types of players at different times. There is no reason to fight over this.

Seriously…

Ya’ll mother kittens need Dwayna.

The thing about elections is they normally come down to two choices. In politics, it seems that it’s often the case that neither choice is optimal. The player-base is not just divided into hardcores and casuals (whatever your definition of those are). The player-base is fragmented. There are people who want harder content who dislike Tequatl due to the technical issues that impact whether the event is fun. There are people who want harder content, but don’t want it to involve massive stacks of players. There are people who want their harder content instanced. There are “casuals” who don’t care for harder content but who don’t mind if harder content exists — as long as it only involves things they’d feel they can do without.

Just because a game has difficult content doesn’t mean that it is a raiding game.
Just because a game has raid-like content still does not mean that it is a raiding game.

It is a game which has raids.
It is NOT a raiding game.

There is nothing wrong with adding difficult content to appease to the end-game player base.

I am an intermediate player. I know too much of the inner-workings to be casual, but lack the skill of a hardcore player. I find the difficulty of Tequatl to be fine! I have given up attempting it, however, because of the reliance on six turrets who are always either griefers, AFK, or do not know what they are doing. This means every attempt I have made was impossible because the 6/150 players that matter hamstrung the whole group.

Even when we have six good players on turrets, we have never gone close because of all the dead/AFK players meaning we do no DPS to Tequatl. The fact it takes so long to drop the first 25% life seems to be the biggest issue. If you could do it in 5 minutes, rather than the 14.5 minutes it usually takes my server, the battle would be pretty epic.

I’m both camps…

Love: Soo want hard, layered fights with lots going on. This has been the big thing this MMO has been missing, for me & many of my friends that gave up.

Hate: That it’s not instanced, Map full, means you can’t get in with your guild/buddy’s unless stuffing around trying to get into a ‘overflow’.
Then you got random people, who prob not in your VOIP, prob are going to AFK, and I’ve noticed, there’s plenty that will ‘Turret Troll’ and brake the game so ya’s can’t actually do it.
Then there’s the reset time. In say ‘hero mode raids’ which are wow’s hardest tier, there’s usually a 3min rule in guilds I’ve had and enjoyed, where resing/rebuffing/explaining strats – things we did wrong-what next plan is. All have to be done and boss has to be pulled and attempted in 3mins or less, or it brakes up the continuity.
Up to 2hrs a attempt, without being able to leave the map in case of not being able to get back on due to overflow… Well that’s pretty f’in boring!

Love: All the build diversity per class in this game.

Hate: That Condi/Crit/CC/Support builds are all penalized for doing this (Or most ‘hard’ content)

If it comes down to such a back/white decision, I’m going with Hardcore Hans.

Cathy’s game sounds like one where you quit out of boredom because every new addition is completed within 1 hour of the patch, leaving you with the same old content for the rest of the time.

I do not want such a black/white decision though and I’m sure Anet can do better.

I would definetly go with Overflow Otto even if it was not one of the choices the OP offered

This really saddens me. Why. WHy can’t we have both challenging content for those who want it, and easier/medium hard content for other. Why?
Everything should be made just to please your play style, or everything’s should be made only for so called supposedly majority of the players ignoring the supposedly minority.

Nick.6972:

This really saddens me. Why. WHy can’t we have both challenging content for those who want it, and easier/medium hard content for other. Why?
Everything should be made just to please your play style, or everything’s should be made only for so called supposedly majority of the players ignoring the supposedly minority.

Judging from the teq turnouts every single spawn (overflow problems anyone?) it’s not just a tiny minority that enjoys this content.

Nick.6972:

This really saddens me. Why. WHy can’t we have both challenging content for those who want it, and easier/medium hard content for other. Why?
Everything should be made just to please your play style, or everything’s should be made only for so called supposedly majority of the players ignoring the supposedly minority.

In an ideal world it would be like that. In real life, we have limited developer time/budget. Like I said above, I have never seen a MMO that managed to please both hardcore and casual players alike.

Aberrant.6749:

Judging from the teq turnouts every single spawn (overflow problems anyone?) it’s not just a tiny minority that enjoys this content.

A lot of people are trying it because it is new, or because it is part of the Living Story, with many new achievements. Or perhaps they want the new loot. Once people get what they want out of it, or get fed up with it, they’ll stop doing it. Which means that anyone else who still wants to do it, has a lot less chance of succeeding, because there will be less attempts with any chance of succeeding, due to lack of people, regardless of how well those people coordinate and are on the ball with turrets, draped in exotic gear or better, and with builds specifically for killing Tequatl… The issues here are more long term than just “Oh, it’s day X and we still haven’t killed Tequatl, he must be too hard.”.

But, look at it this way. A lot of people play GW2 because it is different to games like WoW. If ANet add instanced raids, they risk becoming more and more like their competitors, but on the other hand, raidlike bosses clearly don’t work so well in the Open World, set on a random timer.

I think they can come out of this smelling like roses, with a Tequatl fight that is challenging, yet interesting, and reasonably beatable. They’ll need to handle it carefully, but I reckon it is actually possible to make this World Boss pleasing to a significant portion of the playerbase, without alienating most of the remaining players. And once they find something that works here, I’m sure people will welcome similar adjustments to the other World Bosses.

(And, it goes without saying, fights that have other ways to win than stacking/zerging are always good…)

Gabby.3205:

Teq has stuff for casual players too. Just defend the turrets. It is no different of the rest of the open world events that need you to kill monsters to protect someone or something.

For people that can dodge well, stack and do not mind spending a few silver waypointing when dead, there is the zerg ball

For people that can pay attention to what they are doing and follow orders, there are turrets that they can control.

If your problem is that your server do not have enough people, you can guest.

If your problem is that you are stuck in the overflow, you can ask people to ferry you to the main server. Party up and spam join. It will get easier the more people start using the LFG tool.

This is not hardcore content. The fight have roles that can be performed for all kinds of players. Also, you do not need a voice chat if you are protecting the turrets. You just have to kill stuff or to aggro stuff away from the turrets.

The difference is that most fights don’t involve you protecting NPCs or resources from enemies that have geometrically greater amounts of health than their normal counterparts before scaling is applied.

A single grub in the fight is enough to wipe several dozen players, not to mention every turret in an area.

Aberrant.6749:

Nick.6972:

This really saddens me. Why. WHy can’t we have both challenging content for those who want it, and easier/medium hard content for other. Why?
Everything should be made just to please your play style, or everything’s should be made only for so called supposedly majority of the players ignoring the supposedly minority.

Judging from the teq turnouts every single spawn (overflow problems anyone?) it’s not just a tiny minority that enjoys this content.

The number of people that show up during a Living Story has NOTHING to do with whether or not they enjoy the content. People want the AP and loot (bahahaha, but no, seriously), and are willing to suffer through crap they despise in order to get it.

Having an instanced hard mode version wouldn’t lock anyone out unless the exclusive rewards are too good or unique or something.

It’s the same boss fight.

Wouldn’t it be great if those that are ‘casual’ found they were capable of running with those that aren’t and learning new things so they can function better in other groups?

For those that do not consider themselves casual, take a deep breath, step back, remember how you came up, and help educate those asking for it, rather than ignoring their requests….or worse, ridiculing them.

inb4 “Cathy only wins because she’s a woman!”

Roybe.5896:

Wouldn’t it be great if those that are ‘casual’ found they were capable of running with those that aren’t and learning new things so they can function better in other groups?

You confuse being casual with being bad. Being ‘casual’ means that you don’t WANT to do hardcore content, not that you’re unable to.

RvLeshrac.2673:

The difference is that most fights don’t involve you protecting NPCs or resources from enemies that have geometrically greater amounts of health than their normal counterparts before scaling is applied.

A single grub in the fight is enough to wipe several dozen players, not to mention every turret in an area.

If it is labeled as a [Group Event], then yes, yes they do.

Love the fight, hate the fact that it’s not instanced.

I approve of more challenging content.. that requires less players.

I felt no accomplishment whatsoever when I killed Teq the first time, because I was 1 out of 150 players.. and I was just doing the same thing I had done every attempt before that. The only difference is more of the rest of the raid didnt suck.