Guild Wars 2

I just wanted to thank you for ruining rare spawns in Dry Top. Just for this one stupid collection item you ruined the interesting rare spawns? Why did you not just change it to the Champion Windrider in Southsun instead?

What got ruined?
1) Element of suprise when finding such a rare spawn. Before you never knew when, where and which rare spawns. On lucky runs you could have 3-5 rares. Now just one, always at the same time and predetermined rare.
2) The value of the monkey tonic and miniature is crashing like no tomorrow because now everyone can farm them with a simple timetable and it is getting broadcasted on map (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slay_the_rare_creature)

In conclusion I think this patch was really fail.

you’re quite welcome

Now only if they could do this to the Legendaries in The Silverwaste.

Yah, all the people who were waiting for a particular mob to spawn somewhere on the map within a 6 hour window every 12 hours in order to move forward on the Legendary collection feel your pain OP.

Or maybe they don’t.

DeWolfe.2174:

Now only if they could do this to the Legendaries in The Silverwaste.

Good idea. 100% of the game should be running on a shedule and be 100% predictable, that will surely make the game more interesting and fun.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Yah, all the people who were waiting for a particular mob to spawn somewhere on the map within a 6 hour window every 12 hours in order to move forward on the Legendary collection feel your pain OP.

Or maybe they don’t.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Yah, all the people who were waiting for a particular mob to spawn somewhere on the map within a 6 hour window every 12 hours in order to move forward on the Legendary collection feel your pain OP.

Or maybe they don’t.

Blame Anet for the lack of foresight to even make this a requirement for the collection. There would have been plenty of alternatives like the Champion Windrider in Southsun Cove. The rare spawns existed well before this stupid trident collection anyway, so I see 0 valid reasons to change it now.

So your economic scheme comes to an end. Viva E Pubricus!

DGraves.3720:

So your economic scheme comes to an end. Viva E Pubricus!

Economic sheme? It was not even good gold per hour, just was just some nice extra every now and then when farming geodes. They were not even guaranteed to drop. Now the miniature dropped from roughly 3g to 80s and the tonic from 1,2g to 25s in just two days because anyone can farm it without any effort.

Malediktus.9250:

DGraves.3720:

So your economic scheme comes to an end. Viva E Pubricus!

Economic sheme? It was not even good gold per hour, just was just some nice extra every now and then when farming geodes. They were not even guaranteed to drop. Now the miniature dropped from roughly 3g to 80s and the tonic from 1,2g to 25s in just two days because anyone can farm it without any effort.

So a near worthless item is even cheaper. Oh, the horror!

Malediktus.9250:

2) The value of the monkey tonic and miniature is crashing like no tomorrow because now everyone can farm them with a simple timetable and it is getting broadcasted on map (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slay_the_rare_creature)

Excellent news.

The price of the tonic is crashing? You mean the one that was worth 70 silver when I got it a couple of months ago? I doubt it’s going to seriously affect anyone’s life savings.

Admittedly the mini was worth a bit more, almost 2 gold last time I looked, but again I don’t think anyone is going to be hugely upset at the price drop.

By comparison I suspect people trying to make legendaries and people who want to fight all these enemies (yes, believe it or not there are people who are mainly interested in playing the game) will be very happy with the change.

I know I am, there’s some of these I think I still haven’t seen in spite of spending a lot of time in Dry Top.

Well you havent spent “much time” in Drytop if you havent seen them all yet. Or you stay (for some reason) away from any possible rare spawn locations. There was rarely less than one spawn per hour, sometimes 5 when very lucky. 2 was pretty common.
Anyway it is just another boring zerg event now now. I am sure dulfy will add them to the world event timer now.

Malediktus.9250:

I just wanted to thank you for ruining rare spawns in Dry Top. Just for this one stupid collection item you ruined the interesting rare spawns? Why did you not just change it to the Champion Windrider in Southsun instead?

What got ruined?
1) Element of suprise when finding such a rare spawn. Before you never knew when, where and which rare spawns. On lucky runs you could have 3-5 rares. Now just one, always at the same time and predetermined rare.
2) The value of the monkey tonic and miniature is crashing like no tomorrow because now everyone can farm them with a simple timetable and it is getting broadcasted on map (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slay_the_rare_creature)

In conclusion I think this patch was really fail.

I mean, you’re just mad because you stockpiled a gazillion of those items and can’t cash in. Ain’t that the truth? Overall the change was useful though. Camping the same boring map for hours on end just to get an RNG spawn isn’t what most players would consider fun, I wager.

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Amaranthe.3578:

you’re quite welcome

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Your gold well has dried up. Time to move on.

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Disregarding the fact that apparently the people who designed the collections indeed didn’t know what kind of events were tied to them (which shows how well people employed to work on things know the subject matter at hand), all of Dry Top’s events were already running on fixed timers. If you were really running Dry Top regularly it was already boring by that definition, since 99% of the time you knew exactly what happened when. So what gives.

Malediktus.9250:

Blame Anet for the lack of foresight to even make this a requirement for the collection. There would have been plenty of alternatives like the Champion Windrider in Southsun Cove. The rare spawns existed well before this stupid trident collection anyway, so I see 0 valid reasons to change it now.

The problem with moving it off to some other mob is that the description of it in the Legendary collection is tied to the Dune Soarer. Now, I expect that you’ll just wave that off as a negligible problem, but the fact that they mentioned it specifically as a problem indicates that it was not something easily solvable and that changing the timers turned out to be a better fix than rewriting the collection.

Here it shows where he is discussing the options, a rewrite or a change in the timers.

Legendary Bugs

ANet mattp

So, I would like to let you all know that we’ve been looking a lot at Dune Soarer. With the first reports I thought it may have been bugged, or on a big variable spawn time, but it wasn’t, it was just a very long respawn (cough 6 hours cough). I can’t just change the respawn time on it as it is tied to a lot of other content that I would uncomfortable risking breaking. What we are doing, is using this as an example for “best practices” for future tie-ins, and won’t be using it, or events like it for legendary collectibles in the future. Additionally, we’ve been working on figuring out some alternate sources for this particular collectible. The issue with that is that the theme of the item is very specifically tied to the Dune Soarer, so it may require a re-write of the item.

Apologies for the quick “everything’s fine” response. I just got excited that it wasn’t a bugged event when I looked into it.

Later as he continued to work on it he shows that he decided to go for changing the timing rather than the rewrite, even though the timers had problems.

ANet mattp
Oh, yes, I do have an update. Turns out I was a bit off. The spawn conditions were some random time in a 6 hour window every 12 hours. Good news though, there are some changes coming to that… SOON!

Azure Prower.8701:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Your gold well has dried up. Time to move on.

Did you even bother reading? It added maybe 1g per hour to your Drytop loot on average if you were religiously looking out for them. Calling that a gold well is stupid. All Anet did was destroying a nice suprise mechanic for this map for no good reason.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Malediktus.9250:

Blame Anet for the lack of foresight to even make this a requirement for the collection. There would have been plenty of alternatives like the Champion Windrider in Southsun Cove. The rare spawns existed well before this stupid trident collection anyway, so I see 0 valid reasons to change it now.

The problem with moving it off to some other mob is that the description of it in the Legendary collection is tied to the Dune Soarer. Now, I expect that you’ll just wave that off as a negligible problem, but the fact that they mentioned it specifically as a problem indicates that it was not something easily solvable and that changing the timers turned out to be a better fix than rewriting the collection.

Here it shows where he is discussing the options, a rewrite or a change in the timers.

Legendary Bugs

ANet mattp

So, I would like to let you all know that we’ve been looking a lot at Dune Soarer. With the first reports I thought it may have been bugged, or on a big variable spawn time, but it wasn’t, it was just a very long respawn (cough 6 hours cough). I can’t just change the respawn time on it as it is tied to a lot of other content that I would uncomfortable risking breaking. What we are doing, is using this as an example for “best practices” for future tie-ins, and won’t be using it, or events like it for legendary collectibles in the future. Additionally, we’ve been working on figuring out some alternate sources for this particular collectible. The issue with that is that the theme of the item is very specifically tied to the Dune Soarer, so it may require a re-write of the item.

Apologies for the quick “everything’s fine” response. I just got excited that it wasn’t a bugged event when I looked into it.

Later as he continued to work on it he shows that he decided to go for changing the timing rather than the rewrite, even though the timers had problems.

ANet mattp
Oh, yes, I do have an update. Turns out I was a bit off. The spawn conditions were some random time in a 6 hour window every 12 hours. Good news though, there are some changes coming to that… SOON!

The name of the item is just a string in the localisation database. Probably takes 1min to change. Just like they could have moved the dune soarer tentacle to another lootable. Probably also very low amount of work considering they can change droptables without doing patches.
If changing the whole mechanics of this rare mob spawns was less effort than changing this dune soarer tentacle item, than the game is indeed very purely programmed. Like below intern level of programming.

Sourde Noire.5286:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Disregarding the fact that apparently the people who designed the collections indeed didn’t know what kind of events were tied to them (which shows how well people employed to work on things know the subject matter at hand), all of Dry Top’s events were already running on fixed timers. If you were really running Dry Top regularly it was already boring by that definition, since 99% of the time you knew exactly what happened when. So what gives.

There are several areas of Dry Top with their own event cycles. Of course with shedules, but rares were a nice suprise always. Also if you do the events too slow they skip respawn timers and your map wont reach t6. Rares also added to the map tier. But since it is just 1 fixed spawn for sandstorm, you can no longer kill a rare or two to boost your map tier.

Malediktus.9250:

Azure Prower.8701:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Your gold well has dried up. Time to move on.

Did you even bother reading? It added maybe 1g per hour to your Drytop loot on average if you were religiously looking out for them. Calling that a gold well is stupid. All Anet did was destroying a nice suprise mechanic for this map for no good reason.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Malediktus.9250:

Blame Anet for the lack of foresight to even make this a requirement for the collection. There would have been plenty of alternatives like the Champion Windrider in Southsun Cove. The rare spawns existed well before this stupid trident collection anyway, so I see 0 valid reasons to change it now.

The problem with moving it off to some other mob is that the description of it in the Legendary collection is tied to the Dune Soarer. Now, I expect that you’ll just wave that off as a negligible problem, but the fact that they mentioned it specifically as a problem indicates that it was not something easily solvable and that changing the timers turned out to be a better fix than rewriting the collection.

Here it shows where he is discussing the options, a rewrite or a change in the timers.

Legendary Bugs

ANet mattp

So, I would like to let you all know that we’ve been looking a lot at Dune Soarer. With the first reports I thought it may have been bugged, or on a big variable spawn time, but it wasn’t, it was just a very long respawn (cough 6 hours cough). I can’t just change the respawn time on it as it is tied to a lot of other content that I would uncomfortable risking breaking. What we are doing, is using this as an example for “best practices” for future tie-ins, and won’t be using it, or events like it for legendary collectibles in the future. Additionally, we’ve been working on figuring out some alternate sources for this particular collectible. The issue with that is that the theme of the item is very specifically tied to the Dune Soarer, so it may require a re-write of the item.

Apologies for the quick “everything’s fine” response. I just got excited that it wasn’t a bugged event when I looked into it.

Later as he continued to work on it he shows that he decided to go for changing the timing rather than the rewrite, even though the timers had problems.

ANet mattp
Oh, yes, I do have an update. Turns out I was a bit off. The spawn conditions were some random time in a 6 hour window every 12 hours. Good news though, there are some changes coming to that… SOON!

The name of the item is just a string in the localisation database. Probably takes 1min to change. Just like they could have moved the dune soarer tentacle to another lootable. Probably also very low amount of work considering they can change droptables without doing patches.
If changing the whole mechanics of this rare mob spawns was less effort than changing this dune soarer tentacle item, than the game is indeed very purely programmed. Like below intern level of programming.

Yeah, I figured you would blow it off as negligible, and you did. I have to admit that I’m not often surprised when I read your posts, and I wasn’t surprised on this thread either.

You might as well give it up. The chances of them redoing this is zero and the chances of them giving your complaints about this on future similar problems serious consideration is also around zero.

If 80% of your fun came from 1 rare drop that was only worth 3g at it’s max, then maybe it’s time to move to another aspect of the game.

OP grabs his pitchfork every time some exclusive thing becomes more accessible

Clearly the Dune Soarer event timing was bugged — it was only showing up randomly twice a day at most, which is nothing close to the kind of mechanics ANet aims for. I’m not sure why the OP thinks that shouldn’t be fixed, especially since it’s tied to collections.

It’s completely immaterial that this affected the supply of a couple of items tied to these events — that’s never been a good reason for maintaining the status quo, especially if collections are affected by it.

I’m more sympathetic to the idea that it removes some of the “surprises” from Dry Top. However, for all the time I spent in that zone, I never saw most of those bosses — I think the game should err on the side of making sure that events are around for most people, not just the ones that are willing to do the same events for hour after hour in the same zone.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Clearly the Dune Soarer event timing was bugged — it was only showing up randomly twice a day at most, which is nothing close to the kind of mechanics ANet aims for. I’m not sure why the OP thinks that shouldn’t be fixed, especially since it’s tied to collections.

It’s completely immaterial that this affected the supply of a couple of items tied to these events — that’s never been a good reason for maintaining the status quo, especially if collections are affected by it.

I’m more sympathetic to the idea that it removes some of the “surprises” from Dry Top. However, for all the time I spent in that zone, I never saw most of those bosses — I think the game should err on the side of making sure that events are around for most people, not just the ones that are willing to do the same events for hour after hour in the same zone.

It was not bugged. They are rare spawns. RARE. It is just that Anet devs often have no clue about their own game as a lot of precursor collections show. Otherwise they would not have made many mistakes they made with picking targets for precursor collections. Like events that were buggy since release (eg. only working once per map Ip than require a new instance to open or patch). Events that only happen if people let other events fail. Events that have long respawn times (30min+) but can be soloed by anyone coming by in 30 seconds or less. I know what I am talking about, I already have 58 of 72 precursor collections done.
And if you never saw a rare spawn you basically missed nothing of importance. They are just champions of other existing creatures with an unique name, no special combat mechanics, no special visuals, just two unique bonus items on the droptable you can loot with about 1/3rd chance of them. Just some spice to the map.

And even the 6h respawn window is nothing compared to oldschool MMOs. I remember rare spawns with 1 week+ respawn times there. People are so impatient and entitled nowadays, it is disgusting.

I have seen people choose some strange hills to die on, but this is one of the strangest.

Not really seeing an issue with this.

The patch fixed stuff. I had no idea those things even existed in the game, now I have actual reason to vist Drytop again. Good job, Anet

Why i’m not surprised that the one (and possibly the only) person that would be disappointed by this change would be you?

If unpredictability is what appeals to you then Dry Top was already the wrong map for you.

I don’t know how it works on the US servers but on organised EU maps there’s usually one person (either the commander or someone else) listing the times all of the events will start so people can plan ahead.

I suppose you could ignore that and just run around hoping to come across one, but the fact that players are able to do that shows it was already running on a schedule, with the exception of these 5 bosses. And if this upsets you this much I can’t imagine the chance for 1-5 rare spawns was enough to make an otherwise fully scheduled map exciting.

Well, I agree that this makes the game more repetitive/predictable/less nice to explore or whatever you call it. It’s the same reason I still don’t really like the world boss schedule. It becomes as exciting as waiting for the bus.

But I don’t think completely random spawns are that big of a deal. If not plain impractical, while adding little to their experience. They’re easily killed. I think i pretty much saw them all and never really thought much of them.

Now if they were stealthed until someone successfully tracked them down (or something thematic like that), that would be interesting. And maybe the mapwide event marker is pushing it. Its a bit more entertaining if it didn’t just pointed it out with a huge marker. It would add some teamwork/community map chat organisation which in my opinion would have been a bit better. (Like a guild bounty) I mean, its for a legendary collection, so it doesn’t need THAT much handholding.

But it’s not “ruined! The end of the world! It needs to change back now!”

@Danikat: Most events are cycling in x amount of time. Its usually less noticeable, as they usually are event chains and they stop cycling if an event isnt done. Dry Top is possibly the worst map regarding event scheduling. But that is not a reason to NOT diversify the event scheduling/cycling/occuring. ArenaNet luckily saw in HoT that event chains are alot more interesting. Though that goes in the other direction, where there are little to no single events. Anyway, going off topic. ^^

My God, some people love to hear themselves complain.

I’m not sure what you had hoped to achieve with this thread, a vast majority of players welcome the change, I’m sure you’ll get over it with time.

Obviously to be heard, maybe making sure they don’t make changes tied to timetables too noticable. Or making such changes with more than the convenience in mind.

The vast majority of players haven’t given it a single thought, because they simply get what they want more reliably, which is good! But that doesn’t mean it’s automatically amazing, no need for criticism, its all well.

I can agree it’s definitely an improvement concidering all the aspects of these bosses (i think its nice that the collection is tied to it, its not completely random, they are supposed to be rare events, etc) But I understand where the OP is coming from. Which most reactions here totally fail to see because it’s not important to them, its just a detail in the design.

It’s obviously not going to change back, but I think that too obvious time tables are too predictable and less enjoyable. The OP just raged over this detail in the change of a fairly small part of the game. In that sense, it’s sounding pretty ridiculous. In the grander scope of things, it’s definitely not something I prefer to see though.

Zadist.5410:

I’m not sure what you had hoped to achieve with this thread, a vast majority of players welcome the change, I’m sure you’ll get over it with time.

It is just as bad as the world boss events on shedule. I complained when it was introduced, too and I still hate it today.
The GW2 open world is becoming less and less a dynamic open world and more and more shedule. I cannot believe so many people enjoy playing after a shedule waypointing around Tyria from one thing to the next just to quickly zerg it down to reap some rewards for no effort.

Malediktus.9250:

I cannot believe so many people enjoy playing after a shedule waypointing around Tyria from one thing to the next just to quickly zerg it down to reap some rewards for no effort.

You mean like people who join world events like Tequatl only to AFK all the time, letting others do the work and then collect their loot? Yeah, why would people do that, I don’t get it.

And I wouldn’t necessarily call ‘afking on the same map for hours on end in hopes of maybe getting an RNG spawn’ effort, at least not in any sense that anyone would defend that. It would be effort if the boss were really hard to defeat or if it were an instance that needed to be beat. The difference is that those things offer something to work towards, with measureable progress states, as opposed to a binary RNG flipswitch.

But as it stands it’s just a lame champion mob that only gained significance due to a badly designed collection. So what gives that it’s on a timer now.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Clearly the Dune Soarer event timing was bugged — it was only showing up randomly twice a day at most, which is nothing close to the kind of mechanics ANet aims for.

Malediktus.9250:

It was not bugged. They are rare spawns. RARE.

The evidence doesn’t support that the previous mechanic was intended. The developer stated clearly that the timer was in a long window that reset rarely — that’s not “random”, that’s an event that no one sees, except those spending hundreds of hours in the zone. And even if people are in the zone when the events spawned, the other mechanics (the very narrow timing to get to higher tiers) also make it hard for people to participate.

I get that you enjoy (as do I) seeing stuff that most people never encounter. However, that’s not how ANet designs their game — they avoid exclusivity solely based on being at the right place at the right time, with very narrow exceptions.

ANet makes a lot of design decisions that I question. This isn’t anywhere close to being one of them; I’m always in favor of everyone having a reasonable opportunity to enjoy the same content.