Guild Wars 2

MMOs are based on playing for rewards. When the reward is non-existant, I have no intrinsic value coming out in new content.

Mastruq.2463:

Honestly I think your plans are too sophisticated. I believe all it takes is a pre-event chain that is triggered (transporting Mega-laser charges) and takes like ten minutes, then another event or a lull for 5 minutes, then start the Tequatl encounter. Similar to Shatterer, basically. That would give players time to organize or get more interested participants into the zone. Thanks to the API there wont be any hours-long waiting for him once the Overflows subside, a guild or coalition of players can see when he is due and go there at the right time.

I agree it is more than needed, but that’s because I also threw in some ideas there to actually make the event matter to the zone should it succeed or fail. When Tequatl was first shown at various trade shows it was asked what would happen if we failed. Arena Net’s response was that Tequatl’s influence would slowly spread over the zone until players had to respond to the threat. As you well know, this doesn’t happen with any major event. They are on simple, cyclical timers and have no effects on the world should they succeed or fail.

Hule.8794:

Main reason why Teq will be dead is because new PvE content every 2 weeks.

I’m sick of new content/achievements.

Just let me get my WvW on without needing to go all OCD on achievement points. *pbbbt*

Mastruq.2463:

Treeline.3865:

Karka Queen is done at least twice a day on Seafarer’s Rest. Get your server in gear!

It’s done on Piken Square too – not sure if twice a day I dont keep that kinda record on daily server activity. I do it like once or twice per week myself and its kinda unlikely it only happens when I do it.

How often were you two doing it before the crafting update? Wait until most people get their ascended weapons, which should be right around now.

You can use the event API to check timings on event triggers. This does not tell you if the event was completed, only if someone cleared all of the camps. If you look at most servers, the timer has gone for very long. Roughly half are in the 50-200 range, which would not be a healthy level of activity. Some servers have gone for over 1000 hours with no trigger.

That said, I did notice an large uptick on that event, as well as many of the other metas, following the crafting update. People want that dragonite for their weapons. Still, we are talking about the difference between completely dead and mostly inactive. People are now reaching the amount of materials that they need and activity is going down again. If a server can not reach a critical mass of 30 people, then nobody gets to do it. Then the event is completely dead.

Back to TQ, an event with a critical mass of 200 people. Anet has stated that it should be 80, but I doubt anyone can do it with that few. Here we are already getting baren screenshots less than one week from patch day.

So what is the point of analyzing all this data?

I really think the key is Dynamic Scaling. This is a revolutionary system that was invented by Arenanet years ago, which they have not been fully utilizing. The events and activities that still have solid activity a year later are the ones that are fairly scalable(either from 1-50, or 5+).

With the knowledge that no expansions are being worked on, I think the big question is whether it is worth it for Anet to spend its development time on content that dies out so quickly and only a tiny portion of the player base gets to participate in.

It might be good that the teq battle will be dead soon, since it will leave more space for organisation, less people afk upscaling the fight.

So if you have plans with guilds joining together beating teq in an organised way, you just may want to wait till everything around him is calmed down and not everyone is being pushed into overflows

It baffles me how the developers thought this was appropriate open world content… and that it would have any life expectancy in the way that it is now. Once the novelty wears off or once there is less awful content people will stop camping. And once the people stop camping, you can kiss any organization goodbye.

Rammie.2843:

It baffles me how the developers thought this was appropriate open world content… and that it would have any life expectancy in the way that it is now. Once the novelty wears off or once there is less awful content people will stop camping. And once the people stop camping, you can kiss any organization goodbye.

I don’t think so. There will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it, or that have the will and an informal alliance with an other guild or three that will do it. It will, however, be done by a small percentage of in-game players, unlike now.

If it was designed for guilds, it should have been implemented as a guild mission.
Instead it is an open world event, and it fails in being a successful one.

I would kill it every day if it would be efficient way to get ascended weapons for all my characters.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Rammie.2843:

It baffles me how the developers thought this was appropriate open world content… and that it would have any life expectancy in the way that it is now. Once the novelty wears off or once there is less awful content people will stop camping. And once the people stop camping, you can kiss any organization goodbye.

I don’t think so. There will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it, or that have the will and an informal alliance with an other guild or three that will do it. It will, however, be done by a small percentage of in-game players, unlike now.

How does that make for great open world content? Open world content should be accessible in its very nature. And I am talking about the mechanical aspect. And for Tequatl that simply is not the case. If you say “there will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it”, you are saying the event has failed. It does not belong in the open world. As an open world event, Tequatl is garbage and the sooner the devs see it, the better.

And yes, I do quite like the fight, but I cannot defend this abomination the way it is.

Rammie.2843:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Rammie.2843:

It baffles me how the developers thought this was appropriate open world content… and that it would have any life expectancy in the way that it is now. Once the novelty wears off or once there is less awful content people will stop camping. And once the people stop camping, you can kiss any organization goodbye.

I don’t think so. There will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it, or that have the will and an informal alliance with an other guild or three that will do it. It will, however, be done by a small percentage of in-game players, unlike now.

How does that make for great open world content? Open world content should be accessible in its very nature. And I am talking about the mechanical aspect. And for Tequatl that simply is not the case. If you say “there will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it”, you are saying the event has failed. It does not belong in the open world. As an open world event, Tequatl is garbage and the sooner the devs see it, the better.

And yes, I do quite like the fight, but I cannot defend this abomination the way it is.

The problem with designing content designed to challenge players who embrace such challenge is that you are designing for a niche population. That Teq will likely only be done by a small demographic makes it no different — in that regard only — than raids in other games. That Teq is in the open world is due to ANet’s design intent for endgame stuff and their initiative to try to provide something for everyone. It may not fit your — or my — definition of what belongs in the open world, but it apparently fits theirs.

Once the rest of the population goes bye-bye off to the next new thing, organization will get easier, not harder — because the large player numbers that are causing overflows won’t be there. For the record, contradicting a point about the feasibility of players being organized is not a blanket endorsement of the content. If you want to look at my recent post history, I’ve been saying they should have fixed the back end issues before implementing this event.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Rammie.2843:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Rammie.2843:

It baffles me how the developers thought this was appropriate open world content… and that it would have any life expectancy in the way that it is now. Once the novelty wears off or once there is less awful content people will stop camping. And once the people stop camping, you can kiss any organization goodbye.

I don’t think so. There will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it, or that have the will and an informal alliance with an other guild or three that will do it. It will, however, be done by a small percentage of in-game players, unlike now.

How does that make for great open world content? Open world content should be accessible in its very nature. And I am talking about the mechanical aspect. And for Tequatl that simply is not the case. If you say “there will be some guilds that have both the will and the numbers to do it”, you are saying the event has failed. It does not belong in the open world. As an open world event, Tequatl is garbage and the sooner the devs see it, the better.

And yes, I do quite like the fight, but I cannot defend this abomination the way it is.

The problem with designing content designed to challenge players who embrace such challenge is that you are designing for a niche population. That Teq will likely only be done by a small demographic makes it no different — in that regard only — than raids in other games. That Teq is in the open world is due to ANet’s design intent for endgame stuff and their initiative to try to provide something for everyone. It may not fit your — or my — definition of what belongs in the open world, but it apparently fits theirs.

Once the rest of the population goes bye-bye off to the next new thing, organization will get easier, not harder — because the large player numbers that are causing overflows won’t be there. For the record, contradicting a point about the feasibility of players being organized is not a blanket endorsement of the content. If you want to look at my recent post history, I’ve been saying they should have fixed the back end issues before implementing this event.

You can’t really create challenging content for the open world. There are simply too many variables. The way Tequatl is for most servers isn’t challenging, it’s punishing. Challenging content you create for a closed environment. And it’s that exact reason why you cannot compare them to raids, and shouldn’t treat them the same. It is the mistake the developers have made. The sooner they admit it, the better.

And yes, technical limitations of the engine and servers should have been fixed before launching an event of this scale. It’s sadly just more of an indication that the developers seem to have little clue of what they’re actually doing and whether their designs are feasible in a real environment. Ah well, we shall see.

You know what would be funny to see in the next patch notes.

Tequatl

• Reduced the amount of damage Ranger pets can deal to Tequatl

And nothing else related to the event.

Rammie.2843:

You can’t really create challenging content for the open world. There are simply too many variables.

I don’t think you provide a convincing reason for this. Why are there too many variables? How many variables are too many? Generally speaking, this doesn’t seem like an insolvable mathematical proof, but an engineering problem to be analyzed and solved with the resource pool Arena Net has. If you provided a more thorough analysis of Arena Net’s resources and why open world content just has too many problems for them to engineer a solution, this would be better. However, all your post amounts to is incredulity that (unspecified types of) open world content can be challenging (for an unspecified population). It’s also highly generalized to all open world content. Surely the problem space of open world content is a vast one and you have not envisioned all types of open world encounters that MMO developers can conceive of… I speculate you haven’t even envisioned 1% of them the space is just that large.

SirMoogie.9263:

Rammie.2843:

You can’t really create challenging content for the open world. There are simply too many variables.

I don’t think you provide a convincing reason for this. Why are there too many variables? How many variables are too many? Generally speaking, this doesn’t seem like an insolvable mathematical proof, but an engineering problem to be analyzed and solved with the resource pool Arena Net has. If you provided a more thorough analysis of Arena Net’s resources and why open world content just has too many problems for them to engineer a solution, this would be better. However, all your post amounts to is incredulity that (unspecified types of) open world content can be challenging (for an unspecified population). It’s also highly generalized to all open world content. Surely the problem space of open world content is a vast one and you have not envisioned all types of open world encounters that MMO developers can conceive of… I speculate you haven’t even envisioned 1% of them the space is just that large.

Well, in context it is mostly about comparing traditional raids to open world raid-like events. But there are just more variables in the open world. The player count varies all the time. In raids you have full control over participants, with Tequatl you don’t. In raids you will generally have a higher skill level than int he open world. Those kind of things. Then again, I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination so I cannot really give anything useful from a pure mechanical aspect. But I can provide suggestions on how to make large open world bosses more challenging/fun rather than punishing.

The punishing part is in the timer and it serves no useful purpose. It is completely arbitrary and making every fight a DPS race isn’t making the fight more challenging. It makes fights more one-dimensional and creates a tunnel-vision on just doing as much damage as possible rather than strategic and tactical victories. take Jormag for example, the most fun I had with him was deep int he night, when I fought him with only a handful others. It took a long time, but everyone’s presence mattered and because of that it did provide a feel of greatness that fighting a dragon should give. Had there been a timer I wouldn’t have had such a nice experience which would have been a shame.

But going back to Tequatl, there are some easy ways to remove the punishing aspect and still encourage teamwork. If the timer were to be removed, (random) events next tp defending the batteries could be added. You can have Tequatl summon a Champion/Legendary (Wraith perhaps) which will heal/transfer health to Tequatl if he isn’t killed before he reaches Tequatl. If such events are spawned randomly, it adds to the dynamic of the fight and the punishment for failing would be a (severe) setback, rather than complete failure. Make winning time a reward within the mechanics. In the long run I believe it will be more beneficial for the popularity of the event than the arbitrary lame timer.

With mechanics such as those, you won’t have to give up after 2 minutes because you can see whether you will have a decent chance or not with the way Tequatl is now.

Rammie.2843:

SirMoogie.9263:

Rammie.2843:

You can’t really create challenging content for the open world. There are simply too many variables.

I don’t think you provide a convincing reason for this. Why are there too many variables? How many variables are too many? Generally speaking, this doesn’t seem like an insolvable mathematical proof, but an engineering problem to be analyzed and solved with the resource pool Arena Net has. If you provided a more thorough analysis of Arena Net’s resources and why open world content just has too many problems for them to engineer a solution, this would be better. However, all your post amounts to is incredulity that (unspecified types of) open world content can be challenging (for an unspecified population). It’s also highly generalized to all open world content. Surely the problem space of open world content is a vast one and you have not envisioned all types of open world encounters that MMO developers can conceive of… I speculate you haven’t even envisioned 1% of them the space is just that large.

Well, in context it is mostly about comparing traditional raids to open world raid-like events. But there are just more variables in the open world. The player count varies all the time. In raids you have full control over participants, with Tequatl you don’t. In raids you will generally have a higher skill level than int he open world. Those kind of things. Then again, I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination so I cannot really give anything useful from a pure mechanical aspect. But I can provide suggestions on how to make large open world bosses more challenging/fun rather than punishing.

The punishing part is in the timer and it serves no useful purpose. It is completely arbitrary and making every fight a DPS race isn’t making the fight more challenging. It makes fights more one-dimensional and creates a tunnel-vision on just doing as much damage as possible rather than strategic and tactical victories. take Jormag for example, the most fun I had with him was deep int he night, when I fought him with only a handful others. It took a long time, but everyone’s presence mattered and because of that it did provide a feel of greatness that fighting a dragon should give. Had there been a timer I wouldn’t have had such a nice experience which would have been a shame.

But going back to Tequatl, there are some easy ways to remove the punishing aspect and still encourage teamwork. If the timer were to be removed, (random) events next tp defending the batteries could be added. You can have Tequatl summon a Champion/Legendary (Wraith perhaps) which will heal/transfer health to Tequatl if he isn’t killed before he reaches Tequatl. If such events are spawned randomly, it adds to the dynamic of the fight and the punishment for failing would be a (severe) setback, rather than complete failure. Make winning time a reward within the mechanics. In the long run I believe it will be more beneficial for the popularity of the event than the arbitrary lame timer.

With mechanics such as those, you won’t have to give up after 2 minutes because you can see whether you will have a decent chance or not with the way Tequatl is now.

For one example of variables in the open world, look at the Teq fight itself. ANet’s original info stated it was a fight for ~80 players. I don’t know how accurate the posts are that claim 100+ players were fighting it, but that would be 25% more players than the event was designed for. I’m sure that more than 80 can get into a zone. I’ve been in invasions where there were at least 3 zergs killing Aetherblades, and there were ~80 just in the zerg I was with.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Rammie.2843:

SirMoogie.9263:

Rammie.2843:

You can’t really create challenging content for the open world. There are simply too many variables.

I don’t think you provide a convincing reason for this. Why are there too many variables? How many variables are too many? Generally speaking, this doesn’t seem like an insolvable mathematical proof, but an engineering problem to be analyzed and solved with the resource pool Arena Net has. If you provided a more thorough analysis of Arena Net’s resources and why open world content just has too many problems for them to engineer a solution, this would be better. However, all your post amounts to is incredulity that (unspecified types of) open world content can be challenging (for an unspecified population). It’s also highly generalized to all open world content. Surely the problem space of open world content is a vast one and you have not envisioned all types of open world encounters that MMO developers can conceive of… I speculate you haven’t even envisioned 1% of them the space is just that large.

Well, in context it is mostly about comparing traditional raids to open world raid-like events. But there are just more variables in the open world. The player count varies all the time. In raids you have full control over participants, with Tequatl you don’t. In raids you will generally have a higher skill level than int he open world. Those kind of things. Then again, I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination so I cannot really give anything useful from a pure mechanical aspect. But I can provide suggestions on how to make large open world bosses more challenging/fun rather than punishing.

The punishing part is in the timer and it serves no useful purpose. It is completely arbitrary and making every fight a DPS race isn’t making the fight more challenging. It makes fights more one-dimensional and creates a tunnel-vision on just doing as much damage as possible rather than strategic and tactical victories. take Jormag for example, the most fun I had with him was deep int he night, when I fought him with only a handful others. It took a long time, but everyone’s presence mattered and because of that it did provide a feel of greatness that fighting a dragon should give. Had there been a timer I wouldn’t have had such a nice experience which would have been a shame.

But going back to Tequatl, there are some easy ways to remove the punishing aspect and still encourage teamwork. If the timer were to be removed, (random) events next tp defending the batteries could be added. You can have Tequatl summon a Champion/Legendary (Wraith perhaps) which will heal/transfer health to Tequatl if he isn’t killed before he reaches Tequatl. If such events are spawned randomly, it adds to the dynamic of the fight and the punishment for failing would be a (severe) setback, rather than complete failure. Make winning time a reward within the mechanics. In the long run I believe it will be more beneficial for the popularity of the event than the arbitrary lame timer.

With mechanics such as those, you won’t have to give up after 2 minutes because you can see whether you will have a decent chance or not with the way Tequatl is now.

For one example of variables in the open world, look at the Teq fight itself. ANet’s original info stated it was a fight for ~80 players. I don’t know how accurate the posts are that claim 100+ players were fighting it, but that would be 25% more players than the event was designed for. I’m sure that more than 80 can get into a zone. I’ve been in invasions where there were at least 3 zergs killing Aetherblades, and there were ~80 just in the zerg I was with.

And at Tequatl, with that many there will be quite some undisciplined ones. Tequatl scales beyond 80, so even if there is proper stacking and cohesion at the start, once the first few break rank people are all over the place and the efficiency is lost. Boom, event failed.

IndigoSundown.5419:

For one example of variables in the open world, look at the Teq fight itself. ANet’s original info stated it was a fight for ~80 players. I don’t know how accurate the posts are that claim 100+ players were fighting it, but that would be 25% more players than the event was designed for. I’m sure that more than 80 can get into a zone. I’ve been in invasions where there were at least 3 zergs killing Aetherblades, and there were ~80 just in the zerg I was with.

I have not heard of TQ going down against less than 200 people. I severely doubt that 100 can beat it.

Rammie.2843:

snip

Thanks for the reply. I think we agree more than we disagree. I too think that the timers are unimaginative ways of adding challenge to open world content, and agree with you that with the way the event is currently structured (e.g., how it is initiated, how it proceeds on failure/success, and how overflows with the fight are handled) the timers are too punitive. I think suggestions can be made to make the fights more challenging (see my post upthread ¹).

I don’t think open world content is doomed to be less challenging than fixed sized, instanced content. It’s just easier to do so for one of the reasons you list (i.e, that fixed size is easier to balance and create objectives for). However, Arena Net does have tools at its disposal for eliminating some of these challenges open world content possesses for dealing with variable amounts of people. Events do scale, but they could probably use a little wiggle room in how they do scale. I’m not familiar with the inner workings of their Tequatl system, but I think it’d be fair for them to scale it in such a way that they assume about 10-20% of the participants in the fight may be contributing to the event scaling, but not actually contributing to the event (e.g., they are AFK, they are not well equipped, they are using the turrets poorly). It’s not the best system, but the alternative requires much more programming work, like obtaining a gear score average for the group and determining player inactivity, and then scaling the event based on this information.

¹ – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/tequatl/Sad-part-This-event-will-die-soon/2902390

AuroraW.7149:

I would love to do Tequatl, not only once but many times … if I just would succeed to enter my home server map and/or a decent TS group during the event … Have tried the whole weekend, without success. Overflow only. Asked in the overflow after a TS group to join, in different languages, no answer. Tried to join my home server TS Tequatl slayer channel – full, too. The fifth or sixth time on an overflow without the chancd to join a group on TS (would have been nice if there would’ve been at least small groups gettkng together for turret deffing, etc …), I started trolling around a little (dancing around and below Tequatl, tickling his belly), as well as farming veterans … I dont think that this was intended by Arenanet. Killing Tequatl needs a group of about 50 to 100 peeps organised on TS, let it be on overflow or home server. Or at least small assigned squads on TS. But our overflows have been hopelessly unorganised. No big fun, indeed.

Edit: Sunday evening I rather accidentally landed on my main map with a friend, for the very first time since release six days ago. But then, we were already to few peeps on the map (Elona Reach) and still disorganized. At least, we made better than all the tries before on the overflows – we got him down to about 78%. 8-] I still haven’t killed that beast and might not try it in future either. I will just sit on a stone when he appears and have a nice chat with him.

FREE TEQUATL !

There is a guy on our server who loves the Teq fight to death and wants to keep doing it as long as possible. He likes to take pub groups and train them to be effective at the fight as he enjoys the challenge. However you would need to get on the TS, fill a roll asked, and keep the negative crap to yourself. His name is Ronny Aldo and as long as he has enough people to do it I believe he will keep doing it.

Sourde Noire.5286:

Astralporing.1957:

MrIllusion.5304:

Think about the Jormag fight. There are two phases to Jormag, but does anyone need any reminder about where to stand and what to hit?

Yes. I still see lot of people dying in the second phase due to zerging Claw when he’s not stunned.

Yes, this. People are sometimes incredibly slow when it comes to understanding and processing onscreen information (I don’t get it, personally, it’s not quantum physics) and you see people dying at the Claw all the time because they don’t pay attention or don’t get the massive DoT debuff when it isn’t stunned.

Tequatl requires a lot more coordination and the ability to understand what is happening onscreen, this somehow disqualifies a lot of people from ever doing it, even if you actively tell them what to do.

The Claw is understandable because people assume he is stunned when the claws become targettable instead of waiting for the “Claw is stunned” voiceover. Happened to me the first few times.

Mistakes and oversights happen. But we don’t nerf an entire event just to compensate for this. I see this happen all the time myself. But so what? Jormag goes down anyway. The point is that enough players figure out the fight to compensate for the mistakes of other players. Even if they fall for it the first few times, can they learn not to the next time?

Tequatl just has a steeper learning curve, but it’s still a learning curve. There is no concrete obstacle like Agony resistance, or a raid cap quota where you must have no more than 40 men, or raid composition where you need a specific class, or gear check where you must have >3000 defence.

There are many comments about how the guesting feature and overflows are impeding success. But these are the same features that allow cross-server guilds like TKS/TSS/TTS to complete the event.

Sure, Anet can put the new Teq event in a raid instance. But I guarantee the forums will still be filled with “why can’t it be a World Boss” and “Anet discriminates against small guilds” comments.

I’m one of those who hasn’t done the new Tequatl, thinking that it will be way too crowded and congested, and I would wait for a while till the hype dies down.

Unfortunately, it’s not the hype that died. The encounter itself died.
I feel like I’ve been hosed, because now I can’t find anyone doing it.

If he appears every 2 hours or so, ironically despite the faster cadence, he would be deader than if he appeared less often, simply because there will be no pressure for everyone actually wanting to do him to show up on time, and is instead spread out inefficiently.
If they only make him appear like once every two days, introduce a ton of obvious pre-events so you know exactly when he’s about to show up and maybe let a NPC town crier in LA (of course, there’d also be an API integration) announce that Teq is landing, there will be enough of a critical mass to fill several servers and overflows, likely.

Jamais vu.5284:

If he appears every 2 hours or so, ironically despite the faster cadence, he would be deader than if he appeared less often, simply because there will be no pressure for everyone actually wanting to do him to show up on time, and is instead spread out inefficiently.
If they only make him appear like once every two days, introduce a ton of obvious pre-events so you know exactly when he’s about to show up and maybe let a NPC town crier in LA (of course, there’d also be an API integration) announce that Teq is landing, there will be enough of a critical mass to fill several servers and overflows, likely.

which will mean that most people wouldn’t get it because they couldn’t get into main? good idea, that.