Guild Wars 2

Minx.7521:

QUESTION: do we have to finish 10k drinks by end of Wintersday, or do we get all year to try and finish it?

ANSWER: Read it. It’s not vague on this point. You may not like what’s there, but it’s there.

They should cut it down by half. I would be ok with that. 10k is simply ridiculous.
People have jobs and spend time with family during this time of year. This is the time of year where people are the most busy, do they seriously think doing 10k drinks in 2 weeks is sane?

It should be 500 drinks max. This is a game, anet needs to remember that.

For a casual gamer spending between 1 and 3 hours gaming a day someone should be able to get the achievement within a week and actually Enjoy the gift for the remainder of Wintersday.

Hakuryuu.8634:

You’re complain about grinding for COMESTICS. They’re entirely optional, and no one force you to do so. No one is going to crap on you for not having one. You won’t die without it. You choose to commit to the grind yourself, and even though ANet has been a kitten lately, don’t stab yourself and blame it on them.

The thing is, though, that if this is putting people off even trying for any of it, why even bother to add it, in the first place?

Are there really enough whales to carry something like this, alone?

…and even if there are, should Wintersday be about that?

I haven’t done any of the Wintersday stuff, yet and I’m reading this thread and thinking “I probably shouldn’t even bother, then.”.

Surely, the aim with something like this should be to encourage as many people as possible to (happily) participate and harvest, just a little, real money from as many of them as possible?

Rather than to put most people off even bothering and then try to harvest as much time and/or gold and/or real money as possible, from just a few intense grinders (gold sellers?) and/or whales, all the time?

Riku.4821:

Straight out of the patch notes ,
“•There are returning and new permanent Wintersday achievements as well as new daily achievements.”
I’d assume it is to stay.

Till we have a red post that explicitly states that the drink/CC achievements are permanent, we have to assume they’re temporary, since that how Anet works.

And the permanent in your post could just refer to recurring holiday achievements (ie drink one will be back next year, so technically permanent).

You don’t need it for the meta. There are more than 18 achievements that count, so you don’t need to complete the 10k and the 2.5k achievement to get the meta.

10k drinks in 28 days (the probably number of days Wintersday will last) is 358 drinks per day. If you don’t get that, you won’t make it. That would make a roughly need of ~30k regular Wintersday gifts, considering the RNG, or 700-1000 gold, depending on day, luck and offer. If you sell everything instead of doing this, you can buy any item from 99% of the tradeble items in-game.

You can all thank me later for getting easy money from poor Fashion-addicted ppl.

TL;DR on OP’s post: nerf the things I DO want to do and make what I don’t want to do a lot more effort to ‘balance’ it.

Cyrotek.7019:

Wait, what? You want to replace grind by even more grind?

Only for those activities he doesn’t want to do or those he loves so doesn’t consider a grind, obviously.

Oh, my bad then. Just saw it on the list and figured it was needed. I think it’s fine then. You don’t wanna waste gold, you don’t do it.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

They’ve done this sort of thing for a long time now, dating back to Guild Wars 1. For whatever reason they want some holiday rewards to be out of the reach of most people and since its baked into their reward philosophy then asking for a change is wasting time.

Wintersday 2007: Mini Polar Bear. Drop rate chance from Wintersday Chest is 0.02%. Wintersday Grab Bag, maybe 0.2% (if I remember correctly you could get 2 Grab Bags per account per year)

By Mini Polar Bear standards of access, they are handing out these shoulders to everyone who wants one.

You are forgetting that Mini Polar Bear was considered to have outrageously low drop rate by GW1 standarts. Though i agree that it was the first sign of the bad times to come.

And where did you get the notion I was forgetting anything? I didn’t discuss the players reactions to the mini in that post. I’m only pointed out that having holiday rewards restricted to a few is something they’ve been doing for years and that its part of their reward system and not likely to change.

And i was pointing out that the example you brought up was even more out of place then, than it is now. It wasn’t something that was “life as usual” then. It wasn’t even a norm through the first year of the game. Though i agree that currently it isn’t anything new in GW2 – there were other ridiculous cases before (jorbreakers, Mini Gwyn, pricings at the previous halloween in general).
Which doesn’t mean we should accept it as the norm. It’s still as outrageous as the first time.

FireCrescent.6512:

If they don’t nerf it the only way to get it is buying gold.

Nah, if you do 500 boxes a day you’ll get to 12,500 boxes (10,000 drinks at 80% droprate) in 25 days. 500 boxes = 50 jump puzzle runs @ an average of 2 min per run every day = 1h40 min a day. Factor in fails and call it 2-2.5hrs a day. A bit less if you’re willing to drop 150k of karma a day on the vendor boxes

It’s very doable without buying any gifts with gold, it’s just mind-numbingly monotonous and drawn out.

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

They’ve done this sort of thing for a long time now, dating back to Guild Wars 1. For whatever reason they want some holiday rewards to be out of the reach of most people and since its baked into their reward philosophy then asking for a change is wasting time.

Wintersday 2007: Mini Polar Bear. Drop rate chance from Wintersday Chest is 0.02%. Wintersday Grab Bag, maybe 0.2% (if I remember correctly you could get 2 Grab Bags per account per year)

By Mini Polar Bear standards of access, they are handing out these shoulders to everyone who wants one.

You are forgetting that Mini Polar Bear was considered to have outrageously low drop rate by GW1 standarts. Though i agree that it was the first sign of the bad times to come.

And where did you get the notion I was forgetting anything? I didn’t discuss the players reactions to the mini in that post. I’m only pointed out that having holiday rewards restricted to a few is something they’ve been doing for years and that its part of their reward system and not likely to change.

And i was pointing out that the example you brought up was even more out of place then, than it is now. It wasn’t something that was “life as usual” then. It wasn’t even a norm through the first year of the game. Though i agree that currently it isn’t anything new in GW2 – there were other ridiculous cases before (jorbreakers, Mini Gwyn, pricings at the previous halloween in general).
Which doesn’t mean we should accept it as the norm. It’s still as outrageous as the first time.

Whether or not it was out of place or wasn’t the norm when it first happened is irrelevant to the point that I’m making, which is they’ve been doing this sort of thing since 2007, which is 8 years. If a company has a particular reward system philosophy for 8 years then that is now what is life as usual.

Seems real high, but do we know how long this will run? Given enough time it might not be too difficult.

To those concerned about the “mass drinking of alcohol”, Princess gave me 36 bottles of rum before giving me a lucky pirate rum cork, so it’s not new. Lol

I agree with that logic.
Just because they did it before (followed by many complaints of the community) doesn’t justify it when they do it again.

If you have the time, listen to the first 2:25 minutes of this video.
Even though it’s not about Guildwars 2, you could keep the thought in mind.
Because I think the youtuber really describes my worries well in those 2:25 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT6MtVheSCg

MithranArkanere.8957:

GussJr.1643:

lol It is not hard by any means… you either earn them by hard work inside the game… or earn them by hard work at your real life job…

Yeah. Forget about having fun and playing in a game. Let’s all just work.

Just all what people need from a game. More work.

While I agree 10,000 is a stupid amount to put a time constraint on, I think people really need to cool it with the “this is a game, I’m not supposed to work!” mentality.

Work and effort are not the same thing. Work is something you need to do to support yourself and your family. You will never and have never worked in GW2 (unless you are a gold farmer and sell gold for a living, I guess, shame on you). You may have to put effort into getting the things you want, and depending on the person, the amount of effort you are willing to put in will vary. You are never required to do any of it. You can put in as much or as little effort you want.

For me personally, the amount of effort required to get this skin is too much, so I won’t do it.

But to imply a game shouldn’t have items/achievements/skins that require effort to obtain, simply because we all work for a living, is something I just don’t agree with.

If you ever feel like what you’re doing in game is “work”, then stop doing it. There’s nothing in this game worth feeling like that.

Every item I’ve grinded for has been for something I wanted enough for that grind to not even phase me. But this snowy effect skin? Yea, that’s not worth the effort.

Michael.4079:

If it feels too hard for you than just skip it…

Pretty much this.
This is for a vanity item, you have no obligation to do it.

Draknar.5748:

snippp

I agree with all your post.

I agree with Tigaseye. I’ve read some numbers with 3-4 hours of doing JP only for weeks to get the required amounts of drinks without using TPs and I just shook my head. Not because some things require effort, but that someone have basically nothing else to do, or feel it’s fun in doing the same jumping puzzle for 3-4 hours non-stop.

I’m hardly anyone who has MMO worthy attributes, but I felt already nauseastic when I tried to do daily quests in WoW to get the fast flying licence (during WotLK times I think) or had a headache – not due to the difficulty – after doing (in WoW) a simple 5-man dungeon. In GW2, I’m glad to get the JP out of my way because some vistas are “behind” them. Again that is if you ignore the difficulty/putting effort aspect away for a moment. I’m fine leveling my various characters to 80 because while it’s also the same, I can at least zip through the different zones in doing so.

Before anyone says “Then simply don’t do it if you find it so bad”, be assured I won’t do it. Just my intital train of thoughts after reading the required non-TP-using amount of time.

We don’t even know how long wintersday lasts. If it’s long enough, it’s doable.
The real problem here is we wont find out how long the event will last until they pull the plug or maybe Gaile will let us know a day or two ahead of time.

That is not good enough.

Thanathos.2063:

You will fail to complete the collection this year.

I’m 10.000% sure that the points won’t reset for next wintersday, as they didn’t in GW1. You absolutely don’t need to aquire 10k points this year. If you really want the shoulder skin, you can grind the presents or buy alcohol, but you don’t have to.

So the new design choices at Anet is to make thing we, as in the majority, can’t have or can’t have for an entire year? Sure, that’s going to go over really well. If the majority can’t have nice things in a prompt manner, then the majority is simply going to say, “Next game —>”. So whomever is making such decisions, especially the past 3-4 months, really should rethink what their point of view. The player base has never been more dissatisfied and vocal.

The best we can do, as a community, is farm the heck out of Wintersday.

How long is wintersday this year, anyone know where to find out?

If you look in one of the other threads, you’ll find one person that has already done it and a couple who are well on the way.
“Do… or do not. There is no try.”

Running the JP, I can easily do ~25 runs in an hour, 30 if nothing goes wrong. Each run gives 10 presents and ~1000 karma (~5k for the first run). In 1 hour, once a day, that’s (@25 runs) 250 presents and another 25 presents purchased with just the karma earned from that. The repeatable achievement awards another 5 personalized presents per 15 runs, however much they’re worth. I personally sell my presents for ~10s each (~27.5g in an hour). Considering drinks are around 9s, so 900g for the achievement, it would take 33 days by just spending an hour a day farming the jumping puzzle, or 27 days if you can do 30 runs in that hour. Spend an extra hour per day and it’s down to 17 days.

Any dedicated player should easily be able to acquire this achievement in the remaining ~25 days (assuming it’s similar to last year).

Healix.5819:

Running the JP, I can easily do ~25 runs in an hour, 30 if nothing goes wrong. Each run gives 10 presents and ~1000 karma (~5k for the first run). In 1 hour, once a day, that’s (@25 runs) 250 presents and another 25 presents purchased with just the karma earned from that. The repeatable achievement awards another 5 personalized presents per 15 runs, however much they’re worth. I personally sell my presents for ~10s each (~27.5g in an hour). Considering drinks are around 9s, so 900g for the achievement, it would take 33 days by just spending an hour a day farming the jumping puzzle, or 27 days if you can do 30 runs in that hour. Spend an extra hour per day and it’s down to 17 days.

Any dedicated player should easily be able to acquire this achievement in the remaining ~25 days (assuming it’s similar to last year).

Good for you.

it is not about being able to get 10 000. Yes, you can farm them. But it takes so much time and everyone realizes it! IT IS CHRISTMAS! We spend our time with our families, not playing a freakin game! And if you consider how expensive those gifts are on the TP, it is plain stupid not to sell them if you are a player who need some real stuff, like ascended equipment…. This Wintersday meta achievement is just wrong. Period.

I finished it last night. Yes, it costs alot to buy the drinks on the TP, but I was lucky to get some good drops while playing the game (few exotics here and there and plenty of rare that I keep in my personal guild bank) as well as materials that I sold on the TP to get the money I needed.

Also, as I don’t spend my gold every time I have it, I had already saved up a nice amount which I used to fund the drinks I needed.

Its not Christmas for another week. The time you spent whining on the forums you could have spent doing a JP or Bell Choir.

haha….for me it was just an “oh! that’s why so many drinks are dropping from the presents!”

I was completely boggled over why these had such a high drop rate!

Zephyra.4709:

As much as I like the title and am working on completing the achievement… I still think a different title would best suite it from GW1..

• Incorrigable Alehound
• Drunkard

Coz you know… 10k drinks speaks for itself.

/agree

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Zephyra.4709:

As much as I like the title and am working on completing the achievement… I still think a different title would best suite it from GW1..

• Incorrigable Alehound
• Drunkard

Coz you know… 10k drinks speaks for itself.

/agree

How about the title for that achievement being:

- Nothing Happening in Real Life

DoctorDing.5890:

Yep, I got that GW1 title. People complained about_ it then too, both from a moral viewpoint and also from a “it’s too hard” viewpoint. In the meantime, a bunch of players enjoyed chasing the title and another bunch of players enjoyed having ready customers for the random booze that dropped at various times. It’s absolutely fine at 10K imo.

The moral standpoint is always amusing, given that we’re playing a game that basically involves killing anything that moves and taking stuff that does not belong to us. Right now in the game there will be a bunch of folk who are offended by alcohol but who are perfectly happy to repeatedly kick the poor little guys who are trying to steal the Dolyak presents.

There needs to be a title for that too

How about: Skritt Kicker

misterman.1530:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Zephyra.4709:

As much as I like the title and am working on completing the achievement… I still think a different title would best suite it from GW1..

• Incorrigable Alehound
• Drunkard

Coz you know… 10k drinks speaks for itself.

/agree

How about the title for that achievement being:

- Nothing Happening in Real Life

Speaking for yourself there?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

There needs to be a title for that too

How about: Skritt Kicker

Skritt-a-phobe?
Skrittopsy?

I could do this all day I think…

panzer.6034:

To claim that this shifts the gold, is demonstrating a total failure to understand how the economy actually works. It really is keeping the already rich, rich and the poor, poor. As previous poster pointed out, this thinking is a false, proven false and yet repeated anyway.

It shifts gold in ONE very important way – BL fees. Everything sold takes 15% of the sale price into a black hole. Don’t think that Anet haven’t thought about that.

Aomine.5012:

Every of GW2 post HoT is a grind-fest and gold sink. Period.

I’m a GWAMM player from GW1, and I can tell you that aside from things like Lucky and Unlucky, or Party Animal/Sweet Tooth, there’s nothing in GW1 that can be called grind.

Oh, that means you sort of never did Saviour of the Kurzick/Luxon … Lucky/Unlucky means you afk in a circle during event days, Party Animal/Sweet Tooth or Drunkard titles can be bought … Saviour on the other hand (unless you are a Kurzick and botted it from Lutgardis).

What you see as a gold sink I see as a gold mine … just don’t go wanna, wanna … open those gifts, sell the content … get rich.

I love the drinks, raking in the gold selling them.

Pandaman.4758:

Riku.4821:

These skins are suppose to take time to give prestige. I have only seen two people with nightfury, and one with the snow one.

This is good, it adds what the game needs. Just my two cents. I know people will complain about needing to grind for something they want for free or cheap. But it is what it is, and remember it is an optional thing to do. If you want it, commit to it.

I have to question the wisdom in that, honestly. For a genre that’s in a rat race to appeal to as many potential players as possible, it seems self-defeating to implement rewards that only benefit a minority of the player base.

That being said, I’m not advocating anything silly like making every skin available sans any effort, I’m okay with the idea of prestigious skins… but I would rather they actually represent something that reflects that prestige; PvP tournament armor skins, PvP league backpiece, and (eventually) PvE raid armor are good examples of cosmetics that actually have prestige because they’re actually earned – the Halloween and Wintersday shoulders are not, because all they represent are luck and wealth respectively.

I mean, really, anyone who’s walking around with a snowy aura right now 100% got that from buying drinks from the TP, how’s that any more prestigious than the people who bought their legendaries off the TP?

Well you do have a point. I know only a couple of people who are near the 1000s without buying them. On the first day mind you. But your example would show even higher prestige that “actually matters” , while this is more large wallet prestige I suppose.

I don’t mind the drinks at all, it’s not that insane of an achievment IF you have some spare gold to flip off – or time to spend on doing the Choir Bells or JP, that’s the only reasonable way to aquire vast ammounts of drinks without buying them.
The JP netting around 200-300ish Presents / Hour, and Choir around 180 I believe.

What I do really find horrible with the whole Wintersday is that you can’t play the events (Except Trixx.) with a friend, or two. It’s rediculus and pretty much goes against the whole idea of what christmas is. Instead it’s turned into a solo farm of instancing with random people.

Doing the JP and getting to the 10k feels like a very achievable task imo. I’m at 1k drinks just after 3 days and I haven’t even been farming my kitten off or anything.

How dare …

… you apply logic and reason to this madness that is 10k drinks. Who ever thought that would have been alright as a prerequisite had one too many drinks himself.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Hah, kids these days complaining about 10k drinks which they can instantly buy on the TP at any time and then speed through them by consuming a stack at a time…

It’d be really funny to see these guys attempt the oldschool Incorrigible Ale-Hound title in GW1, where not only did you have to drink 10k drinks, but you actually had to stay drunk in-game for 10k real life minutes for it to count, and you had to spend 2 drinks to get drunk for the third to count towards the title. And the drinks were really hard to come by in the early years, too. They changed it though some years ago and now you can just spam the drinks so it’s only a lot of clicking.

Yep. I earned the old Drunkard title that way. I’d set up my laptop beside the TV and just double-click on a stack of eggnog every 2-3 minutes. “Spirited Drinker” is, like, ok and all, but it just doesn’t have the same comedic impact of “Drunkard,” and nowhere near “Incorrigible Alehound.”

Okhu.7948:

Its not Christmas for another week. The time you spent whining on the forums you could have spent doing a JP or Bell Choir.

Meh. When stuff like this happens, sometimes it just kills my enthusiasm. I was actually pretty into Wintersday before the collection stuff. Now I don’t even want to give Anet the activity numbers for my account.

There’s nothing like design that is the exact opposite of holiday spirit to kill your holiday spirit for the game.

DoctorDing.5890:

If you look in one of the other threads, you’ll find one person that has already done it and a couple who are well on the way.
“Do… or do not. There is no try.”

Who already bought their drinks from the TP you mean as it is impossible to get that number without either spending tons of gold on the TP or playing this game 24/7 for the next 2 weeks…

Proposed title: Oi, My Liver!

I thought this thread was gonna be about how the alcohol dependency would destroy our lives, and that of our families.

Valkyria.5408:

People have jobs and spend time with family during this time of year.

Not everyone. Maybe it’s something for the people who don’t.

DoctorDing.5890:

If you look in one of the other threads, you’ll find one person that has already done it and a couple who are well on the way.
“Do… or do not. There is no try.”

Yep, they either:

1. Stockpile presents way back
2. Pay 800~1000g for the presents.

Ofc they can do it lol..

Just because someone did it doesn’t mean the system is legit.

Draknar.5748:

MithranArkanere.8957:

GussJr.1643:

lol It is not hard by any means… you either earn them by hard work inside the game… or earn them by hard work at your real life job…

Yeah. Forget about having fun and playing in a game. Let’s all just work.

Just all what people need from a game. More work.

While I agree 10,000 is a stupid amount to put a time constraint on, I think people really need to cool it with the “this is a game, I’m not supposed to work!” mentality.

Work and effort are not the same thing. Work is something you need to do to support yourself and your family. You will never and have never worked in GW2 (unless you are a gold farmer and sell gold for a living, I guess, shame on you). You may have to put effort into getting the things you want, and depending on the person, the amount of effort you are willing to put in will vary. You are never required to do any of it. You can put in as much or as little effort you want.

For me personally, the amount of effort required to get this skin is too much, so I won’t do it.

But to imply a game shouldn’t have items/achievements/skins that require effort to obtain, simply because we all work for a living, is something I just don’t agree with.

If you ever feel like what you’re doing in game is “work”, then stop doing it. There’s nothing in this game worth feeling like that.

Every item I’ve grinded for has been for something I wanted enough for that grind to not even phase me. But this snowy effect skin? Yea, that’s not worth the effort.

Agreed. I feel that it’s fine as is, and it’s pretty obvious Anet wants this to be something you have to put effort into earning. Much like the shoulders during Halloween.

One thousand is difficult but doable. That said, the fact that you can just buy the things you need to complete a holiday-themed collection and earn a vanity item is silly. The other achievements (15 JP, Toypocalypse rounds, etc) involve actually participating instead of paying.

Lhos.1643:

One thousand is difficult but doable. That said, the fact that you can just buy the things you need to complete a holiday-themed collection and earn a vanity item is silly. The other achievements (15 JP, Toypocalypse rounds, etc) involve actually participating instead of paying.

This has both pros and cons. You aren’t forced to do the events to get the items needed. Or, if you have a buffer of gold saved up (Planned ahead.).

That being said, through JPs you can earn 200-300 Gifts / Hour, and around 180 I’ve heard from Choir bell. Doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me, especially since you could practically head into a usual farm mode if the Wintersday events grow tiresome.

My main issue with the events is that I can’t play them with a friend, otherwise I don’t have any real issues with it. And doing this would make it feel less of a chore overall.

Labjax.2465:

Okhu.7948:

Its not Christmas for another week. The time you spent whining on the forums you could have spent doing a JP or Bell Choir.

Meh. When stuff like this happens, sometimes it just kills my enthusiasm. I was actually pretty into Wintersday before the collection stuff. Now I don’t even want to give Anet the activity numbers for my account.

There’s nothing like design that is the exact opposite of holiday spirit to kill your holiday spirit for the game.

Pretty much this. I’m really struggling to log in, knowing that I’m being excluded from content because I have work, family and christmas. I don’t mind putting in work to get the shoulders, but this is excessive and unnecessary. It’s just cynically put in to push people into logging hours for Anet’s Stats. I wouldn’t mind so much but they would get people logging in for the events anyway.

New low, Anet. New low.