Guild Wars 2

Please post your feedback on Mad King Memories quest here. I’ll add my comments in a separate post below, but I only did first act so I won’t be able to comment on later Acts.

Nominally this quest is exactly the sort of quest that I like, but there were so many design issues with it, that I ended up disliking it intensely.

Scavenger Follow Other Players Event: This has been called a ‘scavenger’ event, and nominally it looks like its supposed to be a ‘go uncover the hidden objects event’. But the problem (and this is especially true for a limited duration hunt) is that what you actually end up doing is finding the group of players who have found the quest item. I.e. I would be in an area looking for the ghost, but few players are near me. Then I see a group of players standing around at one point – which of course is where the ghost is. Most of those players have either done the ghost before, or have looked up the answer in a guide.

The thing that ticks me off about this design flaw is that’s so obvious. How would the designers not see that find-the-object quickly becomes find-the-other-players in an MMO?? Just thinking about it a bit, not to mention group testing would reveal it.

Invisible Ghost: The first ghost to find (Serene near the quest giver) is almost invisible even when standing quite close to her. This depends somewhat on camera direction, but even knowing exactly where she is, I still lost her. (See attachment, yes she’s in that picture, and no, nothing is wrong w my video card.)

There are several issues here: 1) Lighting is probably poor. Other ghosts can be hard to see, but the light in the area is particularly bad for seeing ghosts. 2) Obscured by players. While in other areas, the ghost tend to be revealed by the player clump, here there are many players running around doing random stuff, and thus blocking the ghost. 3) Obscure option setting: Not having the option to ‘Always show NPC names’ checked makes a big difference. If ‘show npc names’ is checked, then you’ll at least see the ghosts name plate — but of course not everyone has this checked – and obviously the visiblility of the ghost should not depend on an obscure options setting.

Misinformation/Poor Design on Starter Ghost: We’re told right off that ghost is hidden and will be revealed by an etheric scan. Problem 1) the ghost usually is NOT hidden because another player has already revealed her. 2) If the ghost is hidden, then scanner doesnt actually reveal her, but rather a suspicious object, which when clicked reveals her.

Result: new quest player gets the equipment, starts trying to figure out how to use it, triggers the ethereal scan, and… nothing changes (because the ghost is already active). Humans are good at visually perceiving changes to a scene, and the player has been told a change will happen, and the equipment itself indicates that something will be revealed. So, the player is expecting to see a change, which then doesn’t happen.

And again, the ghost is nearly invisible. I’ve stood near the ghost and watched people start using the scanner and then start running around looking for here, when she’s already active, and even within arms reach.

Part of the issue here is – it didnt seem tested with groups in mind: 1) Didn’t consider that large groups of players would obscure the ghost. 2) Didn’t notice that the ghost already being up contradicted the npc’s claim that the ghost is hidden. 3) Didn’t notice that having the ghost already up provided no feedback (no ‘flash’). 4) Didn’t consider that having the ghost already up provided no ‘scan reveals a suspicious object first’ teaching moment (I was on my third or fourth ghost before I determined that scan revealed a suspicious object, rather than the ghost itself.)

This really bothered me – how would ANet miss such obvious group related problems? Shouldn’t part of the design/testing procedure be to ask/test, “How can this go wrong when a bunch of people are doing this at the same time?” It just looks like that question wasn’t asked.

(continued below)

Other Scanner Issues:
1. Button 5 is confusing. It occupies a skill slot, but its not a skill. The tooltip’s double message is also confusing (tooltip shows both Cold and Hot messages, which looks like a chain skill, but isn’t. Just having one message showing at a time would have been less confusing.
2. Button 5 icons are not that different from each other and are confusing. While it was not a great idea to re-use a skill button slot for a non-skill, at least if the icon was more obvious (e.g. RED: Nothing to scan for. GREEN: Use scan!) then it would not have been as bad.
3. No hot/warm/cold scan info. Given that many of the areas to scan are large, the lack of hot/warm/cold feedback from the scanner is painful. Unless you’re looking for the clump of players, then trying to find the object by scanning the entire area is just time consuming and irritating. (Contrast scanner quest with Wow’s archaeology site investigation, which works very for a very similar goal.)
4. Unnecessary scan variations. Player’s are given four scan types — but usually essentially no clue as to which scan to use in a given area. An underwater ghost: Water because its underwater? Etherial because its a ghost? Or Corporeal because thats what you want to make it? Or the other one because you just don’t know and can’t tell? Moreover if you have to fight anything in the area, then you’ll have to drop the scanner (thus wasting any remaining charges). So the end best use is: activate the scanner, use all scans, then move on.
5. However: missing info — Does using one type of scan hide the results of another type of scan? We’re not told and it’s not at all obvious. If it does invalidate, then popping all 4 scans at once is not a good strategy.
5. Tedious inventory access. Every time you want to use the scanner, you have to open your inventory and re-use the scanner object. If you’re trying to scan a large area, you’ll have to do this a lot.

Scanner Fuel Issues: A lot of the scanner issues are tied to its using fuel — if it didn’t use fuel, then you wouldn’t have to keep reactivating it from inventory, and scanning large areas would be a lot easier.

Aside from that, fuel is going to be a particular problem for players who have come back just for the event (e.g. me!). Not only do you not have any corn, you also don’t know where to get it, nor do any npcs tell you where to get it. And if you’re not going and doing a bunch of other stuff, then you likely won’t have much.

Its certainly possible to argue that you have to play more of the event to get the fuel, but presumably part of any holiday event is to bring back players who havent been playing for a while. This quest would have been a lot friendlier and fun for returning players if it had not forced them to go out and farm the corns just to use the scanner. If the scanner had not had so many other issues, this would not have been as much of a problem. But still, skipping the fuel requirement would have been much better.

Lack of Info/False Scanner Readings: When going out to scan the ghost sites, the exact same sites contain other objects, which are not related to the ghost. I can see what the thinking was: ’We’ll clue the player to visit the site and the scan will reveal some objects. Some will be mysterious (leading to loot bags) while others will be suspicious (leading to the ghost).’ Problems:
1. The player isn’t told this, finds something clicks on it, but doesn’t get the ghost. Thats confusing.
2. Hot nodes that stay hot even after the object is gone. Essentially the scanner finds nodes, but some of the objects only appear once per day — which the player doesn’t know. And then the player spends time (and fuel) trying to make the object re-appear, when meanwhile the ghost is far away.
3. False hot spots. Looking for ghost in Old Lion’s arch, I first saw what turned out to be one of the ‘once a day’ spots (pylon). Off to the side of that hot spot was what seemed to be another hot spot (swimming around and watching the on/off scanner, it seemed that there was a clear, not too large hot spot centered around a broken aqueduct area. Though I scanned repeatedly there, I could not find anything.

Overall Reaction: Frustrated and disapointed. I have been away playing WoW/MoP for a month and was looking forward to coming back and enjoying Halloween GW2 style. Because of this and some other issues (Clock Tower, etc.) I chose to skip most of the rest of the event and go back to MoP for halloween.

Loved it, it took me to areas I hadn’t been to before and I figured out some of the clues myself.

It was interesting to read all the stories, most of all the book is really cool. I did it on all four of my characters.

Well in short I’d have to say I enjoyed the halloween in general, however the scavenger hunt was likely my least favorite part. I’m not a huge pvp person so the inquisition and reaper’s rumble were fun, but not my type of gameplay really, still they seemed enjoyable nonetheless. The Labyrinth was awesome, and the Mad King battle was nicely done and pleasantly short. However I do have to agree with most, if not all, of the points made here about the scavenger hunt. The concept seemed good on paper I’m sure, however in the mmo context, it struck me as behind the curve compared to the original and dynamic content gw2 is known for. I think it may have even been doable and fun in an instanced context, for groups of five players maybe, a cap of one completion per character would ensure the people you end up with hadn’t done it before, or something along those lines would have cured many of the problems encountered. Very happy with the event over all though, considering the scale of what they were trying to pull off here, I can forgive these kinds of problems pretty easily.

Honestly I never used my scanner once, every time I got to a ghost it was already popped so im not even sure how it might of worked. The quests seemed interesting enough, short and sweet I guess. And I do like the backpack rewards, the only thing I would of preferred is if they were account bound versus character bound as some of my characters were too low a level to attain them.

The content, and the book itself, was great. Finding the content was pretty terrible.

Time limited puzzles
Time limited puzzles are always a fail if the answers can be obtained through Google. I like puzzles, but I’m not going to waste time trying to solve them when there’s about five million other Halloween things to see before the event finishes. I’m sure some people solved them honestly, but I’m doubting that was the usual experience.

Resource consuming puzzles
I appreciate that it was easy to get ridiculous stacks of candy corn, but it still felt punitive to have the candy corn meter use up a candy corn every time you whipped it out. It felt like being punished for not immediately getting the right answer (which was probably the intention) and it created a strong incentive to look up the answer rather than work it out, to avoid wasting corn on incorrect guesses.

Non-specific clues
I can see how most of the clues took you to vaguely the right area of the right zone, but I can’t for the life of me see how most of them told you the actual correct place to look. To be done properly, the clues should have directed you to an area, and then it should have been obvious once you got to that area where to go (a sign or pumpkin or whatever in the location). And I -still- don’t know how you were supposed to work out what kind of scan to use at any given spot! Were you just supposed to try them all?

Didn’t work well with groups
As it turns out you didn’t need to know exactly where to look because most of the time someone had already just spawned the ghost. As a result it meant that a lot of players missed the events / conversations that spawned the ghost. I know you were supposed to kneel in front of that Dwayna statue for one but I never did because the ghost was always up. Also some ghosts (such as the very first one) were hard to see if someone was standing on top of them and body blocking them, which was pretty much all the time.

Vanishing ghosts in dangerous areas
The fact that the ghosts despawned after a bit and had to be resummoned created an incentive to hurry through their conversation rather than actually pay attention to it. The fact that some of them were in dangerous areas where you could be attacked while talking made it even worse. I didn’t really get to take in the lore.

Buggy
Several of the ghosts were buggy, particularly the one that spawns the ghostly flames and the one in Provenic Crypt (saw him get stuck in a wall twice). Very annoying.

Summary
So yes, I liked the intent, I liked what parts of the lore I got to see, and I absolute love the reward item. But the execution itself had a number of problems that stopped it from being great.