Guild Wars 2

When you said the 20th was the last day for SAB i thought you meant that either it would go away on the 21st, or I’d at least have till reset on the 20th. I ONLY HAD TO GET 4 MORE GREENS. I WAS GONNA GET AN ASCENDED ORANGE AND YOU’VE ROBBED ME! Why would you cut it before reset? Why?

Well, they kind of plainly told us it would end early in the day on the 20th.

“Festivities will begin on March 30 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (UTC -7) and are scheduled to end April 20 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (UTC -7).”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-March-28-2017/first#post6539268

As for “why”, probably because most festivals tend to be put in and end around that time.

Most festivals as well as most updates in general tend to happen at the 9:00 am – 12:00 pm pacific timeframe. Not always, just most of the time.

So, yeah, kind of expected that it’d end at that timeframe.

There even was a timer on your screen!

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

There even was a timer on your screen!

That, too.

I’m sorry, OP, that you didn’t finish your goals this year. ANet did everything they possibly could have to ensure that we knew the precise time the festival would end; I don’t think you can hold them responsible for missing the deadline.

A lot of people didn’t even realize there was a timer. I think the timer should show by default and when you click it, it would then close.

What is this SAB you’re talking about? Didn’t play it, won’t miss it.

Sorry OP, alot of us had the same problem. I myself only needed 1 more token for an orange, but alas I knew I wouldn’t make it to 8 a few days ago, so I started focusing on saving baubles for another blue before SAB ended, still doing dailies just in case it got extended by a sheer stroke of luck.

The timer was in fact there, but was collapsed for me because of other UI info, I suspect that was the case for alot of other people’s displays as well. If nothing else, it would’ve made it easier for those planning, if the timer had been more visible, that is my only complaint.

Until nextra year though, 7 assassin tokens for a jump start…Unless they aren’t usable next year, to which I’ll complain at that time.

there was a timer that was ticking in hours for the past 48 hours, so you knew it was going to go.

Chingiz.9167:

What is this SAB you’re talking about? Didn’t play it, won’t miss it.

I said the exact same from the time SAB first released up until this season. But I decided to give it a shot, finished both W1 and 2 metas successfully. But missed out on some of the weps. So gonna have to wait next time.

You’d be surprised what you might end up getting into in later years.

Amaimon.7823:

there was a timer that was ticking in hours for the past 48 hours, so you knew it was going to go.

There was a timer? Was it collapsed? I never saw it (not that I cared about SAB but the timer wasn’t that obvious).

I didn’t see the timer either and I’ve been playing SAB every day – right up until I was kicked out when it ended.

Fortunately I knew from the announcements SAB would end today and from past experience I knew it’d end shortly after I got home because that’s when patches normally hit, but I never noticed this timer.

I didn’t see a timer, but I assume it was on the achievements tab like they used to do for time limited content. If that’s where it was, it’s good to see it return.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Amaimon.7823:

there was a timer that was ticking in hours for the past 48 hours, so you knew it was going to go.

There was a timer? Was it collapsed? I never saw it (not that I cared about SAB but the timer wasn’t that obvious).

when there were 48 hours left, there was a second precise timer live in the event box (top right corner) but you had to expand it. It used to day how many weeks left, then how many days, and then it counted second-specific from the last 48 hours. I watched with glee as I saw the timer die, and laughed as SAB died with it.
It wasn’t a hard timer though, people in the SAB lobby were kicked to Rata Sum, people in maps were allowed to continue, booted to Rata Sum if they left the active map.

Just tell yourself, “It could be worse.”

After all, on the last day of Living Story Season 1, the servers crashed. All progress toward certain things in the tower was erased (if not already completed), and there wasn’t enough time left to complete it once it died.

We all thought they would return the content, but that proved impossible (apparently), so many were stuck with 90% complete achievements and dozens of tokens, and no way to use or complete them.

Over hyped jumping puzzle anyway. Good riddance.

They should have left it in the game instead of making it a festival. I have not been playing a lot of GW2 lately and SAB was one of the things I did want to get into again, but have have been very busy lately, so did not manage to play. Now I am supposed to wait another year? It’s just yet another reason to lose interest in the game.

Making an upgrade to it every year would be a good idea. But having it only available once a year is a terrible idea. But what did Anet? They made it available once a year without an upgrade.

Got my trib world 2 infusion to go with world 1, plus both hardcore boom boxes and my red sword n board. I learnt to have everything done before patch day ever since the karka event chest debacle. There’s always next year OP

Same as the OP …

a long week gone to waste,
the reward snatched away from within grasp
and I feel cheated:

I had looked for an indication of the remaining time,
found the SAB dailies tab counting down the full remainder of the day (UTC)
and I believed it.

Torviss.8041:

When you said the 20th was the last day for SAB i thought you meant that either it would go away on the 21st, or I’d at least have till reset on the 20th. I ONLY HAD TO GET 4 MORE GREENS. I WAS GONNA GET AN ASCENDED ORANGE AND YOU’VE ROBBED ME! Why would you cut it before reset? Why?

You must be new. All festival stuff ends at 9 AM PST on the date announced it’s going to end. Not once in the history of GW2 have they ever stopped a Festival at reset time.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Good riddance.

Someone’s salty lol

While I did do The Box™, I’m glad it’s over and won’t come back for another year. I can focus on my regular gathering and crafting again.

Vegeta.2563:

Torviss.8041:

When you said the 20th was the last day for SAB i thought you meant that either it would go away on the 21st, or I’d at least have till reset on the 20th. I ONLY HAD TO GET 4 MORE GREENS. I WAS GONNA GET AN ASCENDED ORANGE AND YOU’VE ROBBED ME! Why would you cut it before reset? Why?

You must be new. All festival stuff ends at 9 AM PST on the date announced it’s going to end. Not once in the history of GW2 have they ever stopped a Festival at reset time.

They extended halloween once, but that was for secondary reasons, so it doesn’t count as a normal situation

Devata.6589:

They should have left it in the game instead of making it a festival. I have not been playing a lot of GW2 lately and SAB was one of the things I did want to get into again, but have have been very busy lately, so did not manage to play. Now I am supposed to wait another year? It’s just yet another reason to lose interest in the game.

Making an upgrade to it every year would be a good idea. But having it only available once a year is a terrible idea. But what did Anet? They made it available once a year without an upgrade.

I can’t find the original quote now but apparently every update breaks SAB and they have to do a bunch of updates to it to get it working again. Once a year that’s feasible, but keeping it up all year round would be too much work.

I think it’s because it wasn’t originally intended to be part of the game – it was built by a small team for their own interest and they used the GW2 engine just because they worked at Anet so that’s the engine they had access to and knew how to use. So it was built however they could make it work, not how it was supposed to be done. (I want to call it a bodge job but I’m not sure anyone outside the UK would understand that.)

Sorry to hear, head up, that’s barely any “work” for you to do and next time SAB comes around you’ll get a kickstart and loot.

Ther timer was indeed in the top right colapsed under the Super Adventure Box orange message. I get how dailies and so on could have been misunderstood.

Good, I wish ridiculous minis would go away too.

Bazompora.2635:

Same as the OP …

a long week gone to waste,
the reward snatched away from within grasp
and I feel cheated:

I had looked for an indication of the remaining time,
found the SAB dailies tab counting down the full remainder of the day (UTC)
and I believed it.

It’s not completely gone to waste – all progress from last year carried over to this year, including the repeating achievement for the orange weapon boxes. There’s no reason to assume the same won’t happen next year. It might feel bad now, but that reward snatched from your grasp will suddenly be right in the palm of your hand when SAB opens again next year.

Danikat.8537:

Devata.6589:

They should have left it in the game instead of making it a festival. I have not been playing a lot of GW2 lately and SAB was one of the things I did want to get into again, but have have been very busy lately, so did not manage to play. Now I am supposed to wait another year? It’s just yet another reason to lose interest in the game.

Making an upgrade to it every year would be a good idea. But having it only available once a year is a terrible idea. But what did Anet? They made it available once a year without an upgrade.

I can’t find the original quote now but apparently every update breaks SAB and they have to do a bunch of updates to it to get it working again. Once a year that’s feasible, but keeping it up all year round would be too much work.

I think it’s because it wasn’t originally intended to be part of the game – it was built by a small team for their own interest and they used the GW2 engine just because they worked at Anet so that’s the engine they had access to and knew how to use. So it was built however they could make it work, not how it was supposed to be done. (I want to call it a bodge job but I’m not sure anyone outside the UK would understand that.)

I know, heck I even talked about that before it was an issue in some comment. When SAB was just released a developer told (In some blog I think) that they had to do a lot of things to get SAB working. One example he gave was that normally when you fall you take damage and slow down. In SAB this should not happen so what they did was just after you did fall increasing the speed again for x second to undo the decrease. I might have some details wrong, this was a few years ago and doing it by memory but this is close to what was told.

As a developer myself that sounds like a horror-solution (that is what I mentioned in some comment) and you know it will create a lot of problem in the future. For example, what if the default speed changes, now you temporary increase is incorrect. You should never solve a problem in such a way. In the development-world they name that a Quick and Dirty solution.

Developers sometimes get forced into doing that because of deadlines, but it’s really something you want to avoid at any time.

Later they indeed gave that as a reason for not having it in-game for a long period. That is what you are referring to, I think.

However that is imho not a good excuse. What they should have done (and maybe did?) at some point, was fixing those Quick and Dirty solution for good more dynamic solution. For example, linking that type of behavior to a category. Then when you are in SAB you will be in the SAB category and so movement will always be based on a set of rules that you created once. The PVE category uses other rules and making a change there does not effect the rules in the SAB category. So now the one does not effect the other anymore.

I don’t know if they did make such changes but I would think so knowing they wanted to use it as an festival. Else it would mean that event time before the festival they had to fix for a year of changes.

Nonetheless, I don’t see this as a good reason to only have it once a year. If they still have that issue, they should solve that. It might cost some time once, but will safe them time in the future.

Eh? They said it was an April Fools joke, not something done on the side intended to be separate from the game that somehow made it in.

Overloading functionality like the jump/land/slow mechanic is pretty common, and creating a “category” would have required either premptive knowledge that a mod like SAB would exist (evil, evil over design) or, probably, a massive undertaking affecting their core engine to introduce now… And only a feature used by SAB.

I think the solution they came up with to update all of the places where SAB hooks into and overrides GW2 is a perfectly good one; sometimes you must make the best of what you have.

Incidentally, at my shop people are adding a new game to an engine, and it has been decided to totally redo the engine because Reasons. Naturally, all of the back end stuff this engine hooks into remains the same. Moving forward, we will be supporting two engines instead of one, just because someone’s ego trip required it. That’s your “category” solution right there, put into effect. God. kittening. kitten it.

nosleepdemon.1368:

Eh? They said it was an April Fools joke, not something done on the side intended to be separate from the game that somehow made it in.

Overloading functionality like the jump/land/slow mechanic is pretty common, and creating a “category” would have required either premptive knowledge that a mod like SAB would exist (evil, evil over design) or, probably, a massive undertaking affecting their core engine to introduce now… And only a feature used by SAB.

I think the solution they came up with to update all of the places where SAB hooks into and overrides GW2 is a perfectly good one; sometimes you must make the best of what you have.

Incidentally, at my shop people are adding a new game to an engine, and it has been decided to totally redo the engine because Reasons. Naturally, all of the back end stuff this engine hooks into remains the same. Moving forward, we will be supporting two engines instead of one, just because someone’s ego trip required it. That’s your “category” solution right there, put into effect. God. kittening. kitten it.

I did not say they had no good reasons to do it the way they did at the time. I said that by now they should have (and probably have) come up with a more clean solution that would prevent the type of problems they had before.

And indeed the idea that it was a temporary joke could be part of that good reason. On the other hand, even in the first release the door for the second world already existed so it looked like they already played with the idea of expanding on it.

And no, using something like a category is not the same as supporting a completely different engine.

At best it’s having multiple dynamically selectable configurations for the same engine.

Devata.6589:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Eh? They said it was an April Fools joke, not something done on the side intended to be separate from the game that somehow made it in.

Overloading functionality like the jump/land/slow mechanic is pretty common, and creating a “category” would have required either premptive knowledge that a mod like SAB would exist (evil, evil over design) or, probably, a massive undertaking affecting their core engine to introduce now… And only a feature used by SAB.

I think the solution they came up with to update all of the places where SAB hooks into and overrides GW2 is a perfectly good one; sometimes you must make the best of what you have.

Incidentally, at my shop people are adding a new game to an engine, and it has been decided to totally redo the engine because Reasons. Naturally, all of the back end stuff this engine hooks into remains the same. Moving forward, we will be supporting two engines instead of one, just because someone’s ego trip required it. That’s your “category” solution right there, put into effect. God. kittening. kitten it.

I did not say they had no good reasons to do it the way they did at the time. I said that by now they should have (and probably have) come up with a more clean solution that would prevent the type of problems they had before.

And indeed the idea that it was a temporary joke could be part of that good reason. On the other hand, even in the first release the door for the second world already existed so it looked like they already played with the idea of expanding on it.

And no, using something like a category is not the same as supporting a completely different engine.

At best it’s having multiple dynamically selectable configurations for the same engine.

If they started off designing SAB from scratch, of course they would do it differently. But since they built it as a temporary joke, they had to decide if it was more sensible to restart or attempt to re-kludge. None of us know the time or resource constraints when they made World 2 nor when they fixed some stuff for this year. It’s possible that you would have made the same decision given the same options (maybe not, too), given that the choices were “do it quick or cancel it altogether.”

It’s easy to second guess developer decisions (regardless of the software involved); it’s hard to actually build enterprise systems, especially one as complicated as an MMO.

Danikat.8537:

Devata.6589:

They should have left it in the game instead of making it a festival. I have not been playing a lot of GW2 lately and SAB was one of the things I did want to get into again, but have have been very busy lately, so did not manage to play. Now I am supposed to wait another year? It’s just yet another reason to lose interest in the game.

Making an upgrade to it every year would be a good idea. But having it only available once a year is a terrible idea. But what did Anet? They made it available once a year without an upgrade.

I can’t find the original quote now but apparently every update breaks SAB and they have to do a bunch of updates to it to get it working again. Once a year that’s feasible, but keeping it up all year round would be too much work.

I think it’s because it wasn’t originally intended to be part of the game – it was built by a small team for their own interest and they used the GW2 engine just because they worked at Anet so that’s the engine they had access to and knew how to use. So it was built however they could make it work, not how it was supposed to be done. (I want to call it a bodge job but I’m not sure anyone outside the UK would understand that.)

This should help, I think.

Greener.6204:

Here are some links:

• Blog post from when it first returned
• Discussion with Josh Foreman:
  • Timestamp – 5:06
  • Timestamp – 8:28
  • Timestamp – 26:37

tl;dr: Maintaining SAB and ensuring that it continues to function outside of a small time-frame is too resource heavy.