Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only AP hunter that likes:

• Permanent achievements that grants us AP.
• Hard achievements that grants us AP.
• Non-repeatable achievements that grants us AP.

and hates:

• Temporary achievements that grants AP only if you are not away for several days.
• Easy achievements that grants AP by just spending gold or talking to a NPC.
• Repeatable achievements that grants AP if you spend several hours doing something that was fun the first two hours.

Last halloween’s Lunanic Inquisition was a good example of bad achievement choices, but this wintersday you created another repeatable, temporary achievement that forces us to play more than 15 hours average to get all the APs.

In Snowball Mayhem, you don’t choose to give us APs for returning 20 gifts, or for killing 20 enemies, or dropping 5 enemy gifts. You give us a simple, extreme easy, enter-and-do-nothing achievement that only requires one thing from us: stay on the computer dozens of hours “playing”.

This post pretends to be constructive. I know that AP hunters are not the majority of the playerbase, but we exist too. Repeatable events that grant APs are not funny. If you remove the extra APs I don’t think that anyone else in the game would complain.

Please, make everyone happy.

On a side note, if you are going to continue with the easy talk-to-the-NPC achievements, I suggest a name change for “Achievements”. “Tasks” fits more properly.

Yea its annoying but its still better then last WvW where you did 5 events per week. From extreme to extreme.
Just watch some show on overlay while semiafking there like me:-P

So, SO obsessed.

And I am sure there also are many AP hunters that exactly feel the opposite. I like farming and I like repeatable AP.

Life is always a matter of tradeoffs wherever and however you look at it. It is up to you to chose whether you prefer to enjoy time away from the game or to obsess on some temporary AP, but you can’t be perfect at both. Better get comfortable with that idea.

Gilgalas.7860:

And I am sure there also are many AP hunters that exactly feel the opposite. I like farming and I like repeatable AP.

Life is always a matter of tradeoffs wherever and however you look at it. It is up to you to chose whether you prefer to enjoy time away from the game or to obsess on some temporary AP, but you can’t be perfect at both. Better get comfortable with that idea.

Of course it’s a choice. I’m just trying to make the game better for everyone. You say that you like farming and repeatable AP. If the APs were removed from repeatable (only given at the first “pass”) will you be annoyed?

I’m not judging, I’m trying to clarify if you enjoy playing several hours all the available content in the game.

25373 achievement point here.

Yes, I agreed. And this patch finally makes me realized it doesn’t worth my time wasting my life on farming those “points”.

They are not achievement, just same as those new collections. They are not achievements, but just a trap to makes you farm more gold and in the end —- waste your time in this game.

I was a dedicated AP Hunter for a long time. I got all Temporary achievements done, and I mean EVERY single one including the famous 8 orb and I do pvp and wvw and even brought Gw1 just for achievement points.

Last year’s wintersday was brutal but this year was a nail in the coffin. I finally gaved up.

Finally I am free from this hell and I hope you realized how stupid it was and give it up too.

I agree about the repeatables, at least ones that are also temporary. Things like the salvage kit or dungeon runner repeatable are fine, and I think most of the WvW achievements should be modified to have much lower limits but become repeatable (with AP capped at X times of course).

In general though I don’t mind the temporary or easy (give gold to NPC) achievements. A big part of the reason for achievements is to point players towards things. For example a player might not know you have to donate to the NPC to get the dolyak escort event running, but they see it in the achievement list and can find out about it from there.

I’ll still try for most of the achievements, but I’m not going to bother with the repeatables.

Horo.7395:

25373 achievement point here.

Yes, I agreed. And this patch finally makes me realized it doesn’t worth my time wasting my life on farming those “points”.

They are not achievement, just same as those new collections. They are not achievements, but just a trap to makes you farm more gold and in the end —- waste your time in this game.

I was a dedicated AP Hunter for a long time. I got all Temporary achievements done, and I mean EVERY single one including the famous 8 orb and I do pvp and wvw and even brought Gw1 just for achievement points.

Last year’s wintersday was brutal but this year was a nail in the coffin. I finally gaved up.

Finally I am free from this hell and I hope you realized how stupid it was and give it up too.

Don’t take it wrong but seriously ANY game is not worth spending your life on.

There was another thread discussing this same thing. How they had nearly tripled the grind to cap out the achievements. It appears it was deleted.

What is going on? These aren’t progressive changes, and the criticism is fierce. Can’t we scale this back somehow?

Tis the season of giving, c’mon Anet. Please.

24.9k ap here, I was hyped about hitting 25k this patch. But oh man is it going to be hard.

What OP is talking about.

Snowball mayhem: Requires 150 games. At 10 minutes/ game, takes 25 hour to finish.

Toypacalypse: Require 150 successes. At about 40 minutes for 10 successes, this achiement takes 10 hours to complete

Bell Choir: Requires 210 successes. This activity is easy to fail when laggy, and takes time to master. Still, at 5 possible successes in 10 minutes, takes 7 hours to complete.

Winter’s Wonderland: Requires 75 successes. Depends on skill I guess, but I note that the puzzle has a lot of artificial “wait for other players” delays. It’s buggy this year with fall damage and the “somebody has to die so the gifts reset” bug returns. I estimate it will take me 9 hours to finish.

In sum: 51 hours to max achievement on activities that are rehashes from last year, and get tediously boring after say, a dozen, hours.

nekretaal.6485:

Winter’s Wonderland: Requires 75 successes. Depends on skill I guess, but I note that the puzzle has a lot of artificial “wait for other players” delays. It’s buggy this year with fall damage and the “somebody has to die so the gifts reset” bug returns. I estimate it will take me 9 hours to finish.

Took me 4-5hrs to get it maxed

Wranglerist.5489:

Horo.7395:

25373 achievement point here.

Yes, I agreed. And this patch finally makes me realized it doesn’t worth my time wasting my life on farming those “points”.

They are not achievement, just same as those new collections. They are not achievements, but just a trap to makes you farm more gold and in the end —- waste your time in this game.

I was a dedicated AP Hunter for a long time. I got all Temporary achievements done, and I mean EVERY single one including the famous 8 orb and I do pvp and wvw and even brought Gw1 just for achievement points.

Last year’s wintersday was brutal but this year was a nail in the coffin. I finally gaved up.

Finally I am free from this hell and I hope you realized how stupid it was and give it up too.

Don’t take it wrong but seriously ANY game is not worth spending your life on.

Nope. Many games are worth spending my time and I don’t regret at all.
Even half of the time I spent on Gw2 is worth it. But when it becomes a grid and a job instead of having fun, then it’s not worth it.

I’m also an AP hunter, although I’m of 2 minds about this patch.

On the one hand, I’m glad that the Daily AP is much easier to get now. (Now that I’ve done a runthrough of several Dailies from yesterday, I have an idea now of which ones are quick/profitable and which ones can be skipped unless I happen to have a character in the map.) I’m also glad that the base Halloween achievements are fairly easy to complete (did them all yesterday), since it allows me to get them done and go back to my usual playstyle.

However, I find it a bit annoying (and somewhat amusing) that ANet has made the Daily AP easier to get, then introduced high grind AP repeatable achievements in the very same patch. Last year the Wintersday repeatable achievements were capped at 3x (and Toypocalypse wasn’t included, I believe). This year it’s 5x, and the requisites have gone up for a few of them. At an average of 8 mins per Snowball match, for example, getting 150 games would require 20 straight hours of playing Snowball Mayhem. And that’s only one of the four!

The thing that bugs me the most is perhaps how a lot of these achievements are basically repeats of last year. Why not simply have the same achievement category be reopened up, but tie the requisite criteria to the new events? (This was how the SAB achievements worked, so it clearly can be done.) That way, you don’t need to have “Wintersday 2013”, “Wintersday 2014”, “Wintersday 2015”, new AP hunters don’t feel like they can never, ever catch up to the veterans, and veteran AP hunters don’t have to grind the same activities every year.

Agreed. These should work like the other activities or GW1"s lucky title: You can only work on the achievement during the festival, but progress is cumulative.

Meh, serious case of I don’t really care since AP means little. Furthermore, I did it all the first Wintersday (I thought I hadn’t as I had to fly home to see my grandmother one last time, but turned out while waiting for various bits of paperwork to come through, I did them all) last time so there’s nothing encouraging me to do it all again.

Anet failed bad with AP from start. They failed more with ‘buy to get ap’ as know as black lion collection. They still didn’t understand after XX thread of QoL and add for xmas boring (they are only) old long activity.

I personnally just thx anet for the respect they have for players trying to ‘push’ them to play the way they want ( = anet want )

My advice, stay with your familly and leave the AP where they are

Gotta be honest, I never saw the fascination with raising some arbitrary figure in a database which is meaningless. The whole concept of “AP hunting” seems quite strange to me. I play the content I enjoy for fun. The rest I don’t. Doing stuff you don’t enjoy just to increase some number or getting obsessed with logging in daily just to get +1 point etc. is just… odd. Why turn the game into a chore/job? lol.

My advice is just to forget about your AP, focus on playing the content you enjoy, ignoring the stuff you don’t and only logging in when you feel like it. You’ll probably get more enjoyment in the long run and won’t get burned out doing pointless stuff for a few extra, meaningless points or getting angry at ANet for adding some stupid achievement which takes ages and gives AP. If you find it a grind or don’t want to do it because it’s not enjoyable, just don’t do it. Just go do something you will enjoy or have fun doing. Games are meant to be fun. If you’re not having fun yet feel the need to obsess over grinding out some “achievement” for a few extra AP anyway, you’re doing something wrong imo.

@Tiffany. There’s a leaderboard. I’m #1 on my server and #30 NA right now.

Wintersday is going to be around for 4 weeks, that’s 28 days or 672 hours, so even if the max time needed is 51 hours for all of the Wintersday achievements, that will still only take 13.2% of the total time Wintersday is around, compared to how we waste the majority of our lives sleeping and working, I don’t think a little over 13% is really excessive,

Zaklex.6308:

Wintersday is going to be around for 4 weeks, that’s 28 days or 672 hours, so even if the max time needed is 51 hours for all of the Wintersday achievements, that will still only take 13.2% of the total time Wintersday is around, compared to how we waste the majority of our lives sleeping and working, I don’t think a little over 13% is really excessive,

In fact it builds character! It’s a necessary part of our time. Just like:

• NPCs who talk for 20 seconds in a dungeon when we’re all ready to move to the next part.

• Videogames which always start up with an unskippable cutscene.

• Those scenes that keep reappearing in old Sci-Fi movies where the same computer animated nebulae effect runs past the screen real slow over and over with the exact same animation.

• Reading a book to find that it just explained something you understood already. Then it explained it again. And again.

Nah, that’s just life. No need to improve on any of it.

I will take aps any way that I can get them. /shrug

Zaklex.6308:

Wintersday is going to be around for 4 weeks, that’s 28 days or 672 hours, so even if the max time needed is 51 hours for all of the Wintersday achievements, that will still only take 13.2% of the total time Wintersday is around, compared to how we waste the majority of our lives sleeping and working, I don’t think a little over 13% is really excessive,

Using your numbers as a base, imo it is excessive. Even if spread out evenly over the 28 days, that’s over 1.8 hours a day, every day, logged in and working just on that. That’s a fair amount of time, each playing game day, to dedicate to that. For many people, that’s way more time than they can give. I would suspect many can only give an hour a day here and there, or less.

These numbers makes this achieve only reachable for the truly dedicated. I’m not sure that making holiday achieves and rewards are best served as a reward for the relatively few who can reach them. Other parts of the game can be a massive grind (the badges for the new armor is a good example), but holiday stuff should be easy for casuals to get to reward them for logging on and playing. A frustrating long grind for a reward is not a good idea for the holidays

My 2 cents.

Astral Projections.7320:

-snip-

I think it’s good that they’re providing content for both the casual and more hardcore players with each release. It seems like a pretty good model to me.

DDRitter.1872:

I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only AP hunter that likes:

• Permanent achievements that grants us AP.
• Hard achievements that grants us AP.
• Non-repeatable achievements that grants us AP.

and hates:

• Temporary achievements that grants AP only if you are not away for several days.
• Easy achievements that grants AP by just spending gold or talking to a NPC.
• Repeatable achievements that grants AP if you spend several hours doing something that was fun the first two hours.

Last halloween’s Lunanic Inquisition was a good example of bad achievement choices, but this wintersday you created another repeatable, temporary achievement that forces us to play more than 15 hours average to get all the APs.

In Snowball Mayhem, you don’t choose to give us APs for returning 20 gifts, or for killing 20 enemies, or dropping 5 enemy gifts. You give us a simple, extreme easy, enter-and-do-nothing achievement that only requires one thing from us: stay on the computer dozens of hours “playing”.

This post pretends to be constructive. I know that AP hunters are not the majority of the playerbase, but we exist too. Repeatable events that grant APs are not funny. If you remove the extra APs I don’t think that anyone else in the game would complain.

Please, make everyone happy.

On a side note, if you are going to continue with the easy talk-to-the-NPC achievements, I suggest a name change for “Achievements”. “Tasks” fits more properly.

I feel like this topic was posted at a bit of an odd time on the forums…..

Lots of players are going to think this thread is related to the most recent update.

Anyway…. I completely agree with you.

Players who craft a legendary weapon are awarded the same amount of AP as someone who makes a donation to the Ho-Ho-Tron.

Killing a thousand giants is going to take months of dedicated giant slaying….
…but hey i opened 5 wintersday presents… that’s about the same right?

That is kittened up.

Dailies and monthlies have a cap…. and Wintersday sort of urinates all over the value AP system.

It causes AP inflation…. and devalues achievements that are extremely difficult to earn.

I look it as…

the ap is there to give people who actaully enjoy the “choir bell”, or “toycapplyste” etc an extra some rewards.

But the AP hunter turns it into…. I must have the AP even though I dont’ actually enjoy doing the activities.

I can totally relate though. I spend a majority of my time farming money doing things I don’t enjoy. When I could actually just do things I enjoy and make a bit less money.

22.5k AP here

There is only two things I find annoying about AP

I have to say that I will not be doing the winters day jump puzzle 75 times and probably wont do 150 rounds of snowball for 15AP each. Nor did I do enough rounds of mad king inquisition. Repeating something a ridiculous amount of times is not fun or accomplished. I already decided that achievements like these are not worth my time and are bit silly.

Black lion collections and Miniature AP. It really burns me that gemstone items are part of in game objectives and “Achievement Points”. Things that are advertised to be purchased with real cash really have no place in a objective achievement system. Not to mention that some of these weapons were already discontinued upon release of the collection. I wont be attempting to collect Black Lion AP either.

AP hunters really hunt for different reasons though. Myself I hunt because I want to eventually unlock full radiant. Which is why I don’t mind the fluff AP. We are all drawing from the same available points possible pool, there is only so much everyone can have. Having the hard to get ones plus the fluff ones still puts you ahead.

Anet needs to actually put in a real achievement system thats fair to everyone. There is alot of AP out there that you cannot get if you started after LS1 started. Like one that would be based on only always obtainable non-repeatable AP. This would include Daily AP since there is a cap associated with it. But I don’t understand why they would cap it with the way the system already currently excludes people not playing since day one. Currently it would of been the only hope people would have to catch up to players that were playing since day 1 and had stopped.

Strange, I view myself to be AP obsess (as I typed this I got over 22100) and yet I am not fully obsess to do those repeatable dailies on Winterday despite my obsession.

I guess I just view those repeatable as “optional” achievements, something I can choose to get it or or not and I can lived that I ain’t invested my full time into it despite I will earn more from it

Granted I am doing the repeatable dailies except snowball fight and toypolaypse since most are parts of the Winerday dailies thus I am still getting it at a slower pace.

Can anyone post an ANet source that it lasts 4 weeks? Historically it lasted 2 weeks and we had empty time I thought.

Dimglow.5489:

Can anyone post an ANet source that it lasts 4 weeks? Historically it lasted 2 weeks and we had empty time I thought.

It’s in their blog post and the release article.

DDRitter.1872:

If you remove the extra APs I don’t think that anyone else in the game would complain.

I will. If you don’t want the extra AP’s, you have the option to simply stay away from doing them. It’s a bit like WvW Season 1 vs. 2, where Season 1 took quite a while and Season 2 was finished within a windblow. I wouldn’t mind more achievements like the one you mention in Snowball Mayhem, but nerfing the other ones is just a waste for those who really want to work for them.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Dailies and monthlies have a cap…. and Wintersday sort of urinates all over the value AP system.

It causes AP inflation…. and devalues achievements that are extremely difficult to earn.

Let alone the titles. Finders Keepers must be the most laughable title possible. Took me 10 minutes to earn last year, with no effort put into it whatsoever. Something like Wonderland Wanderer or Dedicated Mayhem Troll would at least make a bit of sense.

Aesir.3192:

DDRitter.1872:

If you remove the extra APs I don’t think that anyone else in the game would complain.

I will. If you don’t want the extra AP’s, you have the option to simply stay away from doing them. It’s a bit like WvW Season 1 vs. 2, where Season 1 took quite a while and Season 2 was finished within a windblow. I wouldn’t mind more achievements like the one you mention in Snowball Mayhem, but nerfing the other ones is just a waste for those who really want to work for them.

Apologies then. I truly did not think that anyone would complain about removing the extra repeatable APs.

DDRitter.1872:

Aesir.3192:

DDRitter.1872:

If you remove the extra APs I don’t think that anyone else in the game would complain.

I will. If you don’t want the extra AP’s, you have the option to simply stay away from doing them. It’s a bit like WvW Season 1 vs. 2, where Season 1 took quite a while and Season 2 was finished within a windblow. I wouldn’t mind more achievements like the one you mention in Snowball Mayhem, but nerfing the other ones is just a waste for those who really want to work for them.

Apologies then. I truly did not think that anyone would complain about removing the extra repeatable APs.

I would complain too.

I play the game for fun, and it’s nice I get some AP on the way so I dont’ look like a total newbie.(not to mention some karama, magic find boost)

It’s not my fault, some person want to get every single AP in the game for some reason I don’t know why.

There should be 100 things you can do daily to gain AP. And you do as much as you can.