Guild Wars 2

Hey all

I know for most people activities are probably a very minor thing and perhaps not even worth thinking about, however… I believe that we need to take a look at them. They should be a great way to do something different from the rest of the game… however, what we end up with doesn’t seem to fullfil the purpose. Let’s look at each activity to see how much problems it has.

Sanctum Sprint:
The goal is SP is simple. Race to the finish with powerups. Fun concept and it actualy used to be fun wen it just came out… now? Now it’s just a rotting Risen corpse slowly decaying away. But what are the problems that need tackling?

1. The acievements:
When your achievements in a racing game encourage you not to race… you know something is terribly wrong. More often than not, people end up just farming as many crystals and powerups and do not even care about the race at all. This problem is easily tackled. Remove all the crystals that don’t serve any other purpose than doing the “Crystal Obsessed” achievement, change the numbers on this achievement and make only orange speed/vigor crystals count towards this. This will make people that want to do this achievement still want to race. As for the powerups, bundle them all into a single pickup box at each spot you currently have pickups. Upon picking this box up you get a random powerup (don’t split between offensive/defensive pick ups, all in 1). This will also stop people from just picking up all the powerups instead of racing.

2. The race:
Sometimes… there’s just only you racing, you joined a game where all people left. Other times the race just doesn’t start due to the game needing atleast an x amount of racers. I’ve had this a few times, especialy when it’s early/late hours. Also… it’s really not fun to be thrown into a race that has 1 minute remaining. How am I suppose to finish the race!? Sometimes you do get thrown near the end… but what’s the point of even being in the race then?

Keg Brawl:
Keg Brawl I have the least experience with so I don’t have much to say here. This game seems to be somewhat inspired by American Footbal/Rugby/whatever you want to call it. It’s a good idea… too bad I always end up in a 1v1 scenario. It could be fun to play with 6 v 6 teams or something. Please, if you have more experience with this one, give your feedback in a comment

Crab Toss:
Crab Toss pits you in a free for all arena where you need to carry the “ball” for as long as possible to score points. Now, this game almost always have enough players but… it just seems way, way too chaotic! Once multiple karka start rolling all arround and players tossing lots of stuff at everyone… too much just seems to be going on to make it competitive, too much randomness. I honestly think this game would be better would the karka rolling all arround, perhaps instead have a trap or two that players must activate. I know this might just be a personal opinion, but let me know if you also think that this one just has too much going on at the same time!

Southsun survival:
Last man standing ala Battle Royal/Hunger Games. Great idea and my favourite. Too bad there’s a few problems with it that end up ruining some games. Often this mini game ends up in 2 people with 10 stacks of food camping in area where you’d never find them, areas where you shouldn’t even be able to get in the first place. It makes for a boring game, especialy for those that want to play more after that, they have to wait too long for a new game to start. I think it would be more intresting to have a “poison” zone arround the map, instead of karka coming to make the map smaller, this poison would slowly make the zone smaller and smaller. This would force people to end up having to share the same place near the end… thus having them end up having to fight eachother to win the game.

Belcher Bluff… well, this one works differently from the others so I’ll not discuss it here.

That’s my thoughts on each of the activities that are available, however, I think a lot could already be fixed by doing the following:
Make the activities not cycle per day. Instead put servers up like Spvp. Perhaps have some servers that are bound to 1 activity, while others shuffle through the various once available. It just seems silly to me to have a random activity each day, it serves no purpose (imo). With this system, perhaps people will stay in the lobies long enough so that you can actualy enjoy a few full games, instead of always ending up in empty games/half finished games.

That’s all I can think of right now. Please post more feedback if you have any and share your toughts on activities and my post… and most of all, keep it cool!

Sanctum Sprint
I’m not sure about your point about achievements for Sanctum Sprint. There’s an achievement for placing in the top 3, so shouldn’t that be encouraging people to race/win? Any time I play Sanctum Sprint, I see people duking it out pretty heavily, only if they enter late do they play around. But that’s just what I’ve observed.

Keg Brawl
Biggest issues I see with this are people taking kegs outside the play zone, or just plain AFKing and causing imbalance in the teams. I almost always have a full team against another full team (minus 1-2 AFK now and then) whenever I do my daily activity (at reset or after I get on my PC after work ~4:30 PM EST).

Crab Toss
I have no real opinion on this other than I’ve disliked the mini game ever since the Crabtacular achievement. This is the only game I AFK during cause I still haven’t gotten the bad taste out of my mouth.

Southsun Survival
Map should probably be a lot smaller. Or maybe introduce a type of debuff that penalizes players for staying in a specific area too long. The poison idea sounds good too. Sorta similar to the tide in Worms or walls closing in during Bomberman.

Point of the sanctum sprint achievement would be to make people race always. I know there’s one to be in the top 3, but it still doesn’t seem to help much from what I’ve seen, and I think the achievement the problem ^^

I never seem to have a problem being alone or lacking competitors, even when doing them at 9AM on a weekday. Activities are cross-server so I doubt you should find yourself alone very often.

Anyway, my take on the actual activities.

1. Keg Brawl – This is one of the few team-activities and can be a lot of fun. Most matches are very one-sided but there can be a few good games. One thing that annoys me about it though is the extent of CC-spam. There is so much CC being thrown around constantly it can get really frustrating. It would be nice to see some of the stuns/dazes/knockbacks replaced with “softer” CC like snares or displacements.

2. Sanctum Sprint – My least favorite activity because it’s rarely a competition. I know it’s inspired by Mario Carts and the ingredients should work, but they don’t. Normally one guy races ahead and there’s nothing to stop him from gaining ground. Meanwhile the mid-field, if there is one, decimates each other quickly and then it becomes a dance routine to the finish. It’s never actually a competitive race though, which is what it is supposed to be. I think they need to revise some of the mechanics of this activity.

3. Crab Toss – The activity I’m surprisingly good at for some reason. Overall I think it’s ok, nothing fundamentally wrong with it. I think the 2nd Karka shouldn’t join the game until a little later but that’s no big deal.

4. Southsun Survival – I love the concept, and it’s my second favorite, but it lacks fine-tuning. First off being a Ghost is not a lot of fun. The revenge nodes seem to spawn at random….or not at all. Often you can’t actually do anything at all. On the other hand being ganked by a group of Vengeful Spirits isn’t much fun either and detracts from the core experience. Also very few matches actually end with a fight. Most of the time the last two players never find each other and just starve to death.

I would like to see the whole Spirit mechanic revised. Maybe allow dead players to control wild-life that can interact with the player, both in good and bad ways. They can attack players, but also provide them with rations if killed.

The boundaries of the map should also shrink over time forcing the survivors to face-off eventually, rather than outlive them. Capping the time-limit at 10 minutes would be good too because at that point it really starts dragging.

The only problem I have with the activities is that they have them only on certain days. This totally destroys them imo. With the new megaservers coming they wont need to worry about people being spread to thin so to speak. So perhaps they can rectify this and make the games more meaningful and be played when WE feel like it. Have them on a par with sPvP/tPvP with rewards/fun and whatever else, I don’t know I’m tired. :P

I don’t have any data on this, but I just wanted to chime in that I WOULD be worried about decreased activity population if they removed the rotation. The rotation (and the fact that it’s a daily) is the only thing that makes me ever do some of the activities. For the people who like these activities, part of the reason they work is the fact that the population is bolstered by people like me who have no choice but to do them on certain days. I fear that removing the rotation would kill some of the activities. (On the other hand, I guess you could argue that they deserve to die if only a few people ever want to do them…)

To be honest, I think that the activities are pretty well put together. I still enjoy running all of them and typically do for the daily. There will always be your achievement farmers, but I don’t think this is due to poorly engineered achievements (but maybe not ideal).

That said there is only 1 thing that really bugs me: Sanctum sprint once you’ve finished. This is the only scenario in all of GW2 that when you finish you have to wait for part of your reward, in this case getting the daily activity achievement. If I finish well in the top 3, I typically have to wait around for up to 5 minutes to get the daily ding – this does not exist for any other reward anywhere in GW2.