Guild Wars 2

The game engine doesn’t seem to be the best for jumping puzzles but it’s doable with vistas, being a matter of time and patience.

This Halloween seem to have brought an escalation in importance for this type of activity. The Clock Tower is a good event for players apt at jumping puzzles but an aggravating one for those who aren’t. A few have been able to do this in a matter of a few hours (or less) while it took a substantial amount of time for others, or not at all. Lag made it not possible for me to do it.

Besides that, what caught my attention in this puzzle was the end reward. It seems unfair that it offers an exotic item after a couple of hours of effort to some players. Whereas the Personal Story, which took a great deal of time and effort to finish, and despite the expectations of some players (me included), offered no exotic item.

With all due respect that ArenaNet developers earned with their fantastic work, I ask this: are the RPG elements of GW2 less important than a puzzle? If the maximum reward at the end of the PS is a rare item, shouldn’t the clock tower puzzle have had the same level of reward?

Strictly considering special activities, jumping puzzles can’t be the only benchmark for this type of high level reward. It would be nice to see a special activity in PVE involving actual thinking puzzles and where players could get a similar prize, given enough time and effort. Something that wouldn’t cross the line from challenging to frustrating (too much).

Note to moderators: If this is not considered relevant to the community, just let me know and I’ll take this subject elsewhere.

The only thing that makes this hard is other players.

Its just a part of the event. Doesnt really change anything if you dont do it, they prize is just a couple of slippers. Remember that there are 2 phases more to come!

Sirevanac, I get what you’re saying.

I just think that the scale of this one activity wouldn’t merit the kind of reward they’re giving. Or if it does merit, then the PS with a much greater scope should’ve had something similar.

My advice is stop obsessing over loot. I did the personal story because that’s what I felt like doing while leveling. I did the halloween jumping puzzle because it was great fun talking with other people as we failed on our way up the tower. Did I care that I got an exotic better than anything i got from personal story? No. I just look back on the two experiences and remember the fun I had doing them.

I’m going in that mad clock because im already mad for not being able to complete it. I really dont care the final reward, in fact, imo it sucks. I just want to get inside the kitten tower XD

Taihaku.8412:

Did I care that I got an exotic better than anything i got from personal story? No. I just look back on the two experiences and remember the fun I had doing them.

Congrats on finishing that challenge.

I wish I could have a chance in trying but latency doesn’t allow it. It’s not my type of activity anyway. PVE and RPG are areas that I care about the most. I certainly remember the fun I had with the PS when I finished. Now there’s the disappointment in seeing a “cool” reward I’d like to have gotten in the end story that’s being added to an one-time event I’m unable to participate.

I certainly hope that jumping puzzles aren’t the new standard in challenging additions to GW2, where the high end rewards are placed.

It’s emphasised because it’s quite an interesting and different kind of gameplay. Otherwise it would be another generic “go & collect” or “go kill # monsters”. It throws in a little variety into the bowl.

I’ve ignored the heck out of the jumping puzzles, and done pretty well. The dev who made the Halloween JP has stated he didn’t expect more than 5% of players to finish it. So, basically it’s the GW2 equivalent of a raid. So I treat it as such, and ignore it like I do raids in other games. While it’s an unfortunate precedent for there to be a nice prize most players aren’t intended to have a shot at, it’s a very standard type of game design. If it’s any comfort, I’m told it isn’t really that nice, since the skin for the set is lifted from sets already in-game, and the stats aren’t that impressive.

Je l’ai réussi!! après 6 heures de souffrances! j’ai réussi!

hum… Sorry…

I passed! after 6 hours of suffering! I made it!

I like the puzzle jump, it gives a challenge up!

Groonz, I’d think too much of one thing spoils the novelty and can increasingly take away interest of the game from players who dislike it. More variety in novelties, like thinking puzzles would be nice to have too.

Hope there isn’t yet another jumping puzzle waiting for us a the event special in Christmas.

Making it a rare vs exotic comparison misses the point. It’s really comparing a unique weapon skin with a generic magic find pair of boots.

I agree with you though about jumping puzzles in special events. A puzzle this hard ought to be a permanent fixture, perhaps introduced in a festival but not necessarily part of it. Festivals should be easy in my opinion because a lot of casuals players like to do all the achiements. They should definately make more puzzles like this though and make them even harder but put them permanently in the world so that you can go and do them at your own pace.

Grumwulf, I value stats more than cosmetics and could later on use a transmutation stone to have a better skin. It’s also easier to get a skin I like than gear with exotic stats. But that’s a fair POV you make and I wholly agree with your opinion regarding the nature of festivals.

some people don´t like exploring, some dislike pvp, both are things also in the event. If all events had everything taken out someone dislikes, there were no events… or a game for that matter.

Fancy that, the mad king made a maddening puzzle that made you rage.

Mission accomplished if you ask me.

More JPs I say.

I loved the clock tower. It took me about 1:30~2:00 hrs to complete it (mainly due to interruptions). Timing and a bit of luck is all you need. And I even play with a Charr! :P

I say keep these kinds of events, and make more! Its a really interesting addition, and it brakes the standard “kill/fetch/collect” types of tasks. Maybe make them not necessary for the title, or make several titles so that players that can’t complete it don’t feel left out.

And btw, that exotic is nothing special, you can earn better boots by running Ascalonian Catacombs three times.

I dont understand gamers.. they want challenge, arenanet gives them an awesome hard puzzle and they complain because they cant beat it?

I can easily do the clock tower over and over again without failing, and I am a pretty casual player myself… learn to move the camera with the mouse and stop asking for free stuff

Nayru.3947:

Alice.8694:

Fancy that, the mad king made a maddening puzzle that made you rage.

Mission accomplished if you ask me.

Except the point of a game is to have fun. Stop trying to act supreme.

But what nayru said is true. Im mad also, i got twice to the end just to fail at the last jump. AND IM GOING TO KEEP kittenING TRYING BECAUSE I WANT TO END IT.

Sadistic fun, yeah, yet still fun for me ahahaha

This whole event to me seems more epic then any other event I’ve seen in a game. This is a part of the event. It takes some very good jumping skills, I will probably not get through it, but that is okay. It is what it is, I don’t have to have everything cater to my exact needs and skills. This to me is showing how round the game is, in real life there is plenty I can fail at as well. If many enjoyed it, to me it’s a success. No reason for us who can’t, bring everything down.

I think the golden rule to be wary of here is:
Don’t let one person ruin it for the rest of us.

I like jump puzzles but not when they’re timed. I have fear of heights and I can’t do it like that.

On the other hand, it’s not big deal to me. Yes it’s disappointing in a sense but you can’t like everything. The good thing is that for the Emisarry title you need to complete 5 achievements and there are 7 to complete.

I would’ve prefered something else for sure. But maybe they’ll do something different the next event.

Nayru.3947:

Alice.8694:

Fancy that, the mad king made a maddening puzzle that made you rage.

Mission accomplished if you ask me.

Except the point of a game is to have fun. Stop trying to act supreme.

Get off your high horse. The term “fun” is ambiguous enough as it is, so it’s funny that you use that ambiguity here to pointlessly attack me for what is essentially a sarcastic schadenfreude joke. White knighting abit much are we?

Due to the ambiguity of fun, one persons fun can be another persons torture. As we see here with the clocktower. Catering to everyone’s definition of fun is literally impossible.
An easy, unchallenging jumping puzzle wouldn’t be fun for anyone except those obsessed with getting rewards.
Arenanet have made it very clear that their focus is on playing for playings sake. Gear and cosmetic rewards are secondary to that and serve as a complementry system rather than a main gameplay focus in almost every way. This tower is basically the epitome of that philosophy. The reward and point of the clocktower, is to beat it. If you don’t enjoy trying to beat a challenge of this nature. Don’t do it.

CelticWish.2314:

This whole event to me seems more epic then any other event I’ve seen in a game. This is a part of the event. It takes some very good jumping skills, I will probably not get through it, but that is okay. It is what it is, I don’t have to have everything cater to my exact needs and skills. This to me is showing how round the game is, in real life there is plenty I can fail at as well. If many enjoyed it, to me it’s a success. No reason for us who can’t, bring everything down.

I think the golden rule to be wary of here is:
Don’t let one person ruin it for the rest of us.

It’s a shame more can’t think this way, there is content here for everyone. Deliberately so in many ways. And yet here we have people complaining too many people were catered too.

Jump puzzles are fun to play with the right race.

My Asura who is the size of a pixel can hop from pretty much anywhere to anywhere without issue, while my charr, whose feet are bigger than an entire Asura can barely jump from stone to stone.

Really it would be nice if we could have a small bone as a bigger race as half the jump puzzles all I can see is a wooden shield on the back of my guardian as I cant zoom out anywhere due to terrain, and due to funny walks it is nigh on impossible to judge foot position to line up jumps even on open terrain.

Arenanet have made it very clear that their focus is on playing for playings sake. Gear and cosmetic rewards are secondary to that and serve as a complementry system rather than a main gameplay focus in almost every way.

This is a rather dubious philosophy. You say it’s for playing sake but yet there are different different levels in gear and cosmetic designs. Why are they there? Players like this. Doing an activity with a high end reward that a specific type of player is able to get more immediately is hardly a balanced experience. Other activities could be made to give other types of players a chance in getting a high end gear besides the normal methods.

I think these jumping puzzles are Arenanets revenge for all the bad publicity everyone gave it in GW1 for not being able to jump at all.

“You want to jump? OKAY! We’ll give you jumping… LOTS of jumping XD MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH”

the camera could use some improvement, but jumping puzzles are some of the most fun you can have in the game. i can’t complain about seeing more and more of them.

Sadly most of the hidden areas (like to goonies pirate ship) require insane jumping puzzles.

Amon.5042:

Arenanet have made it very clear that their focus is on playing for playings sake. Gear and cosmetic rewards are secondary to that and serve as a complementry system rather than a main gameplay focus in almost every way.

This is a rather dubious philosophy. You say it’s for playing sake but yet there are different different levels in gear and cosmetic designs. Why are they there? Players like this. Doing an activity with a high end reward that a specific type of player is able to get more immediately is hardly a balanced experience. Other activities could be made to give other types of players a chance in getting a high end gear besides the normal methods.

You seem to be under the delusion that the halloween events are a permanent feature. Let alone the fallacy of comparing older content to newer content. But lets ignore all this for a moment and get to the crux of your argument.

Whilst also ignoring that the rest of the mad kings armor is from the PvE content. That’s 5 pieces out of 6. Which lends itself a significant bias to those other types of content, that you seem to be attempting to claim don’t have a sufficiently valid amount of ‘reward’ to justify rewarding the slippers at the top of the tower.

While yes, those pieces are on a drop rate. Considering most people easily burned more time on the tower practising to hit the top than it takes to find one piece of the mad kings armor set by purely grinding the same amount of time. I fail to see how your argument even makes sense, let alone holds water when compared to the actual content.

Alice,

I see a lot of work being placed in jumping places. That’s definitely something you don’t see everyday in MMOs and it’s understandable why they’ve been focusing on that; especially when they have designers that can make something like the clock tower. Unfortunately, the execution wasn’t the best. I think I’d be able to do it solo or with less people concurrently connecting to the puzzle but that’s another story.

The point is that jumping puzzles isn’t to everyone’s taste and they shouldn’t be the only novelty that’s cool and challenging being added to the game. That’s the main topic of this thread. You have Xenite in the above post indicating that the goonie ship requires a difficult JP. I think that players less apt at JP would appreciate a break from all of this crazy jumping.

Then there’s this latest upgrade in jumping puzzles giving out a reward more in tune with what I’d like to have gotten in my favorite part of the game. By saying this I’m not feeling like I’m entitled per se. I probably wouldn’t be making this thread if the reward in the clock tower didn’t open a precedent or if we had more cool activities with high end rewards that aren’t jumping puzzles.

Cheers.

@Amon.5042

Reaper’s Rumble
Lunatic Inquisition
Scavenger Hunt
Clock Tower

These are the four events added to the game for the Halloween event.

Can you please explain how 3 of these are jumping puzzles? Because I’m clear as to how 1 is a jumping puzzle- but since they ‘only’ added jumping puzzles to the game I must be doing the other three incorrectly.

Reaper’s and Lunatic are PVP and Scavenger a PVE activity. I enjoyed doing them and I’m still working on pumpkin carving. They go well with the festival and are additions made from a fairly standard MMO template.

As for the novelty of jumping puzzles, I don’t like them that much. I try to do them because of the rewards they have. It’s more of a chore than fun for me. Are there no other fun novelties they could add to the game?

Risingashes.8694:

Reaper’s Rumble
Lunatic Inquisition
Scavenger Hunt
Clock Tower.

Also event from phase n°1 and 3. And there’s still phase 4 that didnt appear yet.

So, i think there are enough non-jump puzzle features this halloween.

@Amon.5042

I’m sorry- I clearly have missed something.

You stated that jumping puzzles were the only thing added in the Halloween event. Yet now you seem to be saying that only 1 jumping puzzle event was added.

So essentially your argument is that the only things that should be added to the game are things you like.

I happen to not like pvp, and since I’m not a 2 year old I have no inclination to throw a tantrum and say that there shouldn’t be pvp events in the game just because I don’t like them… But let’s follow your argument through.

Since I like jumping puzzles but dislike everything else- and you like everything else but don’t like jumping puzzles- what content can the devs add in to the game? Since the only valid content is content everyone likes and can complete without really trying, no content is valid.

Now we don’t have a game at all. Just a white screen (because someone didn’t like black- too depressing). Seems everyone loses in that scenario.

Or is your argument that your preferences are better than everyone else’s to such a degree that anything that you don’t like is a waste of time? And anything that you can’t complete is impossible… or ‘unbalanced’- wonderful doublethink term we have there.

I like challenge and I like jumping puzzles. If ANet was devoting 99% of their resources to JPs then I’d be right there with you. At the moment you just sound like a whiner who refuses to share the sandpit with the other children cause “they’re not playing correctly, wah”.

I’m confused by the jumping puzzles too. They’re creative and implemented reasonably well given the constraints of the engine and the UI. But they’re not done well, mostly because of the camera, but also because they’re poorly integrated into the overall scheme of the game. That is, they’re something separate and outside of the rest of the content. Their loot is rarely useful to any other activity in the game, they don’t advance the story, they’re not particularly social, they don’t tend to give cosmetic rewards, and the achievement system that they contribute towards is one of the less compelling parts of the game.

I mean, again, they’re there, you’ve made them, that’s great, I’d rather have them than have them deleted. But what’s your aim here? Are there really people that say, “I’ll play THIS online game because it has jumping puzzles and the competitors don’t”? Do you envisage there being players who have finished all the jumping puzzles and who are going to switch to another game unless they get more jumping puzzles in the next update? Do you feel that the players who enjoy jumping puzzles are the same players who’ll spend real money at the Black Lion?

I just can’t see the design rationale behind these, or why Anet would spend development resources making more of them. Again – not saying they’re bad or they’re unfun, just that they’re a baffling choice of development priorities.

Risingashes, this is what I stated: "Strictly considering special activities, jumping puzzles can’t be the only benchmark for this type of high level reward. "

The clock tower has been, for better or worse, the main attraction of this festival. It’s not my type of activity but I was willing to give it a shot. Unfortunately, I can’t do it because I’m too far from the datacenter and my connection lags too much with that many players together in a timed event.

My argument is that I would like to see more variety in puzzles which does not have jumping as the main attraction. It’s unfortunate that they didn’t deem the personal story adequate for an exotic but looking at the future, I’d like other lag-friendly activities that are special and with high end rewards.

GregT.4702:

I’m confused by the jumping puzzles too. They’re creative and implemented reasonably well given the constraints of the engine and the UI. But they’re not done well, mostly because of the camera, but also because they’re poorly integrated into the overall scheme of the game. That is, they’re something separate and outside of the rest of the content. Their loot is rarely useful to any other activity in the game, they don’t advance the story, they’re not particularly social, they don’t tend to give cosmetic rewards, and the achievement system that they contribute towards is one of the less compelling parts of the game.

I mean, again, they’re there, you’ve made them, that’s great, I’d rather have them than have them deleted. But what’s your aim here? Are there really people that say, “I’ll play THIS online game because it has jumping puzzles and the competitors don’t”? Do you envisage there being players who have finished all the jumping puzzles and who are going to switch to another game unless they get more jumping puzzles in the next update? Do you feel that the players who enjoy jumping puzzles are the same players who’ll spend real money at the Black Lion?

I just can’t see the design rationale behind these, or why Anet would spend development resources making more of them. Again – not saying they’re bad or they’re unfun, just that they’re a baffling choice of development priorities.

Greg, unfortunately I think we will see more and more of these added to the game. I believe that Anet added them to help with it’s “being different” then other games and now there are a number of people that love them.

Granted if Anet would have taken the time to make sure that camera angles worked and that all races could do them with the same amount of ease then they wouldn’t be so bad. The most complained about features of these puzzles is the camera and size of some of the races.

Now with OPs statement, I agree, the reward at the end of the Mad Kings puzzle is out of line in reagrds to the reward to the personal story and it does set a trend to future rewards to some of these low achievable puzzles.

If Anet even admited that they added this puzzle with the belief that only 5% of their customers could do it, well something is wrong with their logic. Sure the people that make it are fine with the puzzle, but those that dont for various reasons (cant do them, bad connections, etc) will either just not do them or they will get so fed up that they will quit. Now some will say well just quit, but if everyone who gets frustrated quits then you will see a lot less servers and population (see SWTOR).