Guild Wars 2

Pandaman.4758:

For a team vs. team activity I’m actually kinda curious why it’s a “hotjoin” activity and not an alternate mode in sPvP. Having map listings, segregation by skill level, and a mechanism to balance team sizes would have been beneficial to keg brawl.

(Not saying ANet should invest time and effort to do this now, just found it odd this wasn’t how it was designed from the start)

So people cant just go “wanna farm keg brawl AP?” Honestly i find the mini games rather boring. Even south sun cove which is a hunger games rip off which was nicely done I might say but just not my cup of tea.

Mini games are just eh. Theyre not meant to be just a mini game not where you spend 99% of your time. There were even keg brawl guilds before they restricted access. Lol

Expanded thoughts on issues and improvements, to avoid tl/dr on my first post:

Kegbrawl languished with a lot of nasty bugs for a long time, and though many were fixed as of a few patches ago, there still remain issues:

1. The ice fields don’t show up anymore. This is new and extremely frustrating. They were hard enough to see before, but now they just don’t render.

2. Similarly, the kegs don’t render during many transitions anymore. You can’t follow the flight path of a lob, it just disappears when it leaves a character’s hand and appears on the ground later. When someone puts a keg down or it ends up on the ground other ways, it takes a couple of seconds to show up.

3. As was pointed out earlier, there’s a longstanding issue with occasional crazy, crippling lag that I just don’t see in other game modes.

4. One of my other longtime peeves is that switching targets or detargeting is very unresponsive. If I swap targets and dash quickly, it will ALWAYS charge me at my original target, despite showing the new target in the UI. Same with detargeting, it will charge me at my last target.

5. The #3 skill when you don’t have a keg needs to have the evade added as described in the tooltip. As it is it can be interrupted and ice fields will still hit you.

6. Still occasional issues with passes shooting in the complete opposite direction intended. (Although this is always funny when it happens to lobbers.)

And if we want to talk general improvements:

1. I’ve learned to peacefully coexist with achievement farmers. I don’t understand farming most things (e.g. steals), because you will get them organically by playing enough for the assists and wins, but I’ve found it’s better to just let them do their thing and be polite and they will either play normally after finishing or leave. But recoveries is really out of whack. If you are playing “correctly,” (that is, skilled play) you will almost never get them. I had 50 of them by the time I had finished everything else just playing normally. With the requirement of 500, playing once a week, you HAVE to farm them for the title. That’s bad design and removes people from play. Worse, it removes an unbalanced number of people (you need 3 to farm this)

2. Which brings me to the power of unbalanced teams. One of the things I like about KB is that it’s an activity where the teams are small enough to where your personal skill matters a lot and can singlehandedly turn the game (unlike, say, Snowball Mayhem), but not so overpowering that a single skilled player can dominate and troll everyone else (unlike, say, Crab Toss). There are counters to almost everything. But it’s still a team game, and to that end, two halfway decent players who can pass can easily beat a highly skilled player stuck on an island. The matchup engine is actually pretty decent about splitting up the good players, though sometimes it seems to get stuck and pair the same couple for a long chain of wins. The worse problem comes with uneven teams. Because the red team ALWAYS fills first, and because a lot of the time games aren’t full, and because people tend to bail on the losing side or teamstack winning side, there is an inherent advantage to red. It’s most pronounced with smaller teams (1v2 is basically impossible if the 2 have any clue), but even 4v5 carries enough power to where it will shift a win, prevent a good comeback, or turn a good game into a blowout. I’m not sure what the solution is – new players always added to lower score side first? Buff giving you reduced cooldowns when you’re outmanned?

3. Too many kegs. As I’ve gotten better, I’ve really come to wholeheartedly adopt the PUNT ethos of playing with fewer kegs. In fact, I prefer just 1, with everyone working together with skill to advance/stop the keg, and no minibattles or random cheap scores. Sometimes the game just decides, you’re getting kegs, and just rains them down and unless others are likeminded, the game just devolves to who can lob better/faster. I’m not even talking about that, though. I’m talking about even the normal pace where three kegs get shot. If you’re not right on top to kick the extras out, a little luck can turn a fun, hard-fought game into a laugher in a few seconds.

4. Lobbing. All skilled players hate lobbing. I have only encountered one other player who I consider a true shot specialist, who can hit with the 2 skill anywhere on the field. Unskilled players just use the 2 to chuck it ahead, which is easy to deal with with 1 keg, but with a bunch can ruin the game. Slightly more skilled players know the max range of the 2 skill and fire scores from there. There are counters to this – I LOVE the reactions when I intercept a long lob over an ice field, and if they aren’t accurate kickouts are very effective. But they are much harder to do than making the shot. Lobbing kills good games.

^^. What he said.

Most players are unaware that there’s a whole guild dedicated to keg brawl, and unaware that they can do real competitve games on Sundays against Kegmasters (players who loved Keg Brawl enough to get all of the very grindy achievements and still come back)

(Meanwhile Sanctum Sprint is empty and Crab toss is sparse.)

Play with the experts and they seem to police house rules (as absurd as this seems it happens). No lobbing, toss out extra kegs.

But keg recoveries and keg assists need to be fixed, and auto balance shouldn’t be stealing wins from players and graphical bugs should be looked at.

ANet does not care about activities. It is not by the fault of the playerbase nor their responsibility that activities are so unpopulated.

• ANet has so oversaturated the rest of the world with incentives that nobody wants to spend their time there instead of earning better rewards just about anywhere else. There are no unique rewards (barring Kegmaster) or systems set up to justify the time investment (particularly through intangibles) over anything else.
• Daily Activity Participation is a joke. It doesn’t encourage anyone to play activities, it only gets them to show up and stand around for a match. Many game-specific achievements are awful too, either being easily manipulated (Keg Brawl intercepts, steals, recoveries) or promoting terrible play (hit racers with offensive powerups in Sanctum Sprint, kill yourself and lay nothing but teleport traps in Southsun Survival).
• Bugs have cropped up over time of ANet changing things in the background and breaking parts of activities as a result (Sanctum Sprint fireworks, Lunatic Inquisition villager triggers, any start of match to Southsun Survival) and some bugs have gone forever unaddressed (guardians getting free aegis that works like normal if you enter late, crab gets stuck in ref box in Crab Toss). During the feature patch in April when PvP gear was changed, no check was done to make sure there would be no spillover effects in activities, resulting in incredible gear abuse in Southsun Survival and Crab Toss, and despite people pointing this out and complaining about it for the months it was around, no fix to it was done until the FotFW when people were one-shotting each other in Aspect Arena and ANet realized how stupid it made them look (particularly to their new Chinese audience).
• Competitive avenues for activities go unexplored. There’s no time-based leaderboard for Sanctum Sprint or tournament mode for Keg Brawl despite both of these avenues having been explored in Guild Wars and being successful and the infrastructure already existing in GW2. Some games are so poorly designed that playing to win is best achieved through terrible gimmicks (collecting rations and running to the southwest corner in Southsun Survival, skipping checkpoints in Sanctum Sprint, sabotaging your team and then switching sides in any team game where team switching is possible).
• Reaper’s Rumble, a DotA-style activity, was such a good idea that they are making a whole PvP mode out of it (Strongholds) despite canning it after the first Halloween and never making it available since. Instead, they brought back a broken Lunatic Inquisition.

ANet talked in their last PoI that they are introducing activities that they initially promised in the base game, such as the shooting gallery, as adventures. They talked about this new system as a separate addition to the game and made no other connection with it to activities. This demonstrates several things:

• Minigames, things which play within the base mechanics of GW2 but with a different focus and ruleset and smaller scale, just like all activities are, are something that ANet wants there to be more of, and it stands to follow that they’ve recognized they have players that want to play them.
• ANet would rather build adventures tied to expansion packs that people have to pay for than develop new activities or fix old ones.
• Old ideas that ANet had for activities will be relegated into adventures instead (shooting gallery, bar brawl, Polymock).

There is also little to no reason to expect ANet to adapt their system for adventures into one which also enhances current activities, either by providing more rewards or competitive leaderboard. All adventures that have been discussed thusfar and some highlighted aspects of their design, particularly their being instance-based, show that they want to have players compete by proxy through the leaderboard, but don’t want them competing within the same game like how every activity is set up.

It’s over; activities are dead, ANet killed them, they only serve as a stepping stone for them to develop something like them that they can make people pay for instead of polishing their old work.

People should have stopped paying attention to the shill in this thread years ago. I don’t understand how people keep falling for his bait.