Guild Wars 2

Am I the only one finding it frustrating that mastery points are tied to these difficult and annoying mini games? It’s nigh on impossible to get even bronze on many of them. Coupled with the fact that they’re often closed, I have given up hope of ever getting enough mastery points to max my level.

Not only masteries but collections too.

All those minigames are continuing the massive success of activities like Crab Toss and Sanctum Sprint. I mean the lines in LA to enter those are endless…

I tried a few, didn’t like them. I’m sure there are people who do like them, but I’ve not seen anyone doing them in a long time. By that I mean launch week.

I like them alot. I love mini games and think some of these are really fun, especially bugs in the branches. Im glad you can sort of do them with a friend too.

Personally I like i can earn mastery points for playing them. Something id like to know though is if its necessary to do the challenges to get enough points to unlock everything. If its 100% necessary id agree that its not a good system, but if they can be ignored, and enough points can be earned elsewhere I dont see the problem.

zombyturtle.5980:

I like them alot. I love mini games and think some of these are really fun, especially bugs in the branches. Im glad you can sort of do them with a friend too.

Personally I like i can earn mastery points for playing them. Something id like to know though is if its necessary to do the challenges to get enough points to unlock everything. If its 100% necessary id agree that its not a good system, but if they can be ignored, and enough points can be earned elsewhere I dont see the problem.

It probably is.

Not a fan of the adventures either. On the topic of mastery points, I feel they are used to force you into certain content. Why isn’t it good enough to fill the mastery bar with experience to get your mastery? Why are mastery points necessary? I don’t think adventures would get much play if they didn’t have mastery points dangling over them.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Not a fan of the adventures either. On the topic of mastery points, I feel they are used to force you into certain content. Why isn’t it good enough to fill the mastery bar with experience to get your mastery? Why are mastery points necessary? I don’t think adventures would get much play if they didn’t have mastery points dangling over them.

I think you answered your own question there, and you are probably right.

Adventures are just terrible and I hate every one of them, even the easy ones. Locking mastery points behind them is cheap.

zombyturtle.5980:

I like them alot. I love mini games and think some of these are really fun, especially bugs in the branches. Im glad you can sort of do them with a friend too.

Personally I like i can earn mastery points for playing them. Something id like to know though is if its necessary to do the challenges to get enough points to unlock everything. If its 100% necessary id agree that its not a good system, but if they can be ignored, and enough points can be earned elsewhere I dont see the problem.

You need to do them if you want 100 percent mastery completion. I saved these for last and is no way around it.

I don’t like most of them. Just not my style.

I do like the Salvage Pit, though. That one’s lots of fun.

I don’t get to play it very much, though, because it’s usually locked on the maps I get into.

I do think that they are perhaps harder than they need to be. Like others here, I hardly ever see anyone doing them now. It seems that the vast majority of players (me included) just did them to Gold once to unlock the AP and Mastery points, and then never touched them again.

And that would be fine, if the standards for getting Silver/Gold were fairly easy to get with a bit of practice, but it varies quite a lot from adventure to adventure. Some of them I still cannot get Gold on, despite hours of trying (and that’s after having to grind an event chain to open up the adventure, only to get kicked out 10 mins later because of the map’s meta-event changing).

I honestly feel the adventures need a balance pass. The high scores can stay the same, so that players who are genuinely competitive about that sort of thing can still feel the pride in their accomplishments, but I think that the leaderboard and bragging rights should be its own reward, not something that most players desperately need more of.

Yes, please a solution about thoses adventures is needed.
Many of them are tight to the second so it is getting very annoying to spam “space” and “f” keys in “Is the floor lava?” for instance and nothing happens … on a brand new Logitech G710+… a mechanical keyboard (!!!???!!!)… and before asking childish questions, I don’t have any problems with “space” and “f” in any other game I play, and there’s a lot, so obviously the problem comes from Guild Wars 2.
As many other players, my wings don’t open when I order it quite often. Obviously this is a connection issue, it is a big problem that you don’t have the ressources to sustain your very game … and yes I already verified (traceroute and so on …) that the problem doesn’t come from my end.
So rent servers in Europe, or make adventures instanced, or buy some servers in Europe !

Not at all. Alot of the adventures while being really awesome in theory, have so many bugs and hiccups that it makes them impossible to play.
In the “Floor is Lava?” Adventure, about half the time when I hit “F” to interact with the spores, it doesn’t launch me in the air like it’s supposed to. Thus leaving me on the ground to gain 2-5 stacks of the debuff.
The worst one is “Sanctum Scramble.” Honestly, they’ve had 2 years with the Zephyrite crystals to work out the bugs. Yet, the “1” skill doesn’t make me jump half the time, and the “3” skill almost always either under or overshoots me. And no, I’m not colliding with objects before you ask. After spending 5 hours trying to complete 1 round, the best I’ve been able to do is 8/11.

I run several of the easiest adventures (Drone Race, Salvage Pit, Flying Circus, Beetle Feast) every day for quick xp but other than that I don’t really care for the adventures. There are several that I can’t even get Bronze on. And even some of the easy ones are buggy. I could gold Flying Circus every single time…except that there’s an updraft that bugs out frequently wasting tons of time and the final circle bugs out on me all the time wasting precious seconds that usually result in Silver.

Most of the adventures need to be completely re-balanced and have their bugs fixed.

Minigames are only annoying when you HAVE to do them to gain access to specific rewards, or when they offer an unbalanced quantity of rewards.

So long as you’re free to say “I am not enjoying this, I will do something else instead,” and NOT be penalized for that choice, the mini-game is fine.

Unfortunately, HoT’s mini-games have failed this very simple test.

What’s more, since I will not be able to fully upgrade my masteries, I will now give up wanting to make Astralaria, since I see from the Wiki that it will need all mastery lines fully upgraded. Such a disappointment, I was keen to build it, having already made 5 of the original Legendary weapons. Oh well, at least now I won’t be forced to play pvp…..
Fallout 4 is looking increasingly tempting…..

Eh, they’re kind of fun at first. The ones that aren’t the mushroom race. Getting EXP, loot and mastery points is satisfying. The leaderboards are buggy as hell though, and it defeats the purpose of a leaderboard if you can’t see who the freaking leaders are at all times. Which you can’t, unless you happen to be friends with the top 10 for some impossible reason. And even then, it often shows rank as 0. Sigh.

Getting silver in every adventure really isn’t too bad. Gold is obnoxious for some, but at least you don’t need all the mastery points either.

I haven’t seen one I’ve liked yet. I haven’t seen many of them yet. Because they’re almost always locked when I’m in the jungle.

Yeah, locked adventures is the worst part. They are almost always locked when I feel up for doing one.

I will make quick summary for any devs looking at this thread:

• move all adventures to LA under activities
• make them all instanced-based (can be all players in same instance just as long its not related to big HoT map)
• make them available at any time (or if you must, recycle them at daily basis but still available for 24h)
• unlock mastery points based on total lifelong score, meaning if I really suck at the minigame, I can still grind trough it by sucking at it many-many times
• any collection that requires playing minigame should get unlock when you first finish it, no matter what score
• all of them need to be rebalanced so gold in one minigame is equally easy or difficult as gold in other minigame

im more of an action guy

my favorites are 1v1 chalenging fights and actions

i hate jumping puzzles and group mobs that the only chalenge they have is to survive the booredom while taking down that 23524724727273 HP and survive those auto attacks for 70% of your HP/hit….

i want FIGHTS and Action

I personally love the Adventures. They’re a great source of experience, you get mastery points for doing them and they breath fresh air into the game by giving you access to stuff you can’t do elsewhere.

Sure, I get frustrated when I end up running myself off a cliff for umpteenth time, but nothing to do but bite down and deal with it.

Among my favorites are Sanctum Scramble (Ah, the good ol’ platforming. Not as easy on a keyboard, but I got gold after 23 attempts so it’s all good), Drone Race, Ley-line Run (Though that one’s just an easy Gold medal) and Haywire Punch-o-matic (Can’t get gold on that one, though.)

I don’t like Shooting Gallery. Not really that good at FPS stuff, even with Action Camera silver is a challenge.

If you’re having trouble, just hang on a bit until Dulfy posts a guide about Adventures, once you know the routes, tricks and shortcuts it’s quite easy to get gold on a lot of them.

What’s the answer to players choosing not to play the gimmicky mini-games like Keg Brawl that you’ve introduced previously? Why, just force them to do them to completely unlock their masteries. It’s like the old carrot and stick, except that the carrot is also a stick.

I had very little interest in them to begin with and of the ones I’ve tried, there wasn’t a lot there to endear me to them.

I will make quick summary for any devs looking at this thread:

I like it. They don’t have to make them available in LA, but it would be convenient, and all the other stuff, or suitable substitutions, would be vital towards making them non-objectionable.

The adventures are great and there are many other ways to get your mastery points.
Even then, if you can’t get at least silver after a couple of tries, you really should consider stepping up your game.

Krag.6210:

The adventures are great and there are many other ways to get your mastery points.
Even then, if you can’t get at least silver after a couple of tries, you really should consider stepping up your game.

There always has to be one. Always.

I have a suggestion. Why not a mini-game in which you have to answer advanced math questions – and you have a time limit? How would that fit in? When you fail at it, should I say “…you really should consider stepping up your game.”?

I don’t like arcade-style games. I don’t. I don’t play platform games. I don’t want to do these adventures, but if I want the mastery point, I have to. Horrible, horrible design decisions.

And the absolute silence coming out of Anet? This should worry us all. From the lack okittennowledgement of the overall design issues to a clear lack of announcements about the success of HoT (numbers, etc.). This is the kind of silence that comes before a company goes belly up or has a major shake-up.

Krag.6210:

The adventures are great and there are many other ways to get your mastery points.
Even then, if you can’t get at least silver after a couple of tries, you really should consider stepping up your game.

you will not get to mastery lvl 161 without doing most of the adventures/nightmares

While I like some of the mini games, I really don’t like that mastery points are tied into them. It makes MMOs players have to be arcade game players and it’s not fair. For me, it’s not much of a problem. I grew up playing arcade games and like quite a few of them. But making people play an arcade game to get mastery points? That’s not a good solution to the problem.

Though someone in this thread said they’re needed for map completion and AFAIK that’s not true. You only need hero points for map completion not mastery points. And there are more mastery points in the game than you actually need, so you may be able to skip most of them, I haven’t done the math. You can skip at least some of them.

Im on 161 and got all the insights and strong boxes,there are only 4 mastery points in the hot story.ye you can skip some of the adventures but will need get gold in a few to make up for that.Being forced to do these so called adventures was a nightmare for me,im getting on in age blind in one eye and bad arthritis in both hands.

eldrin.6471:

Krag.6210:

The adventures are great and there are many other ways to get your mastery points.
Even then, if you can’t get at least silver after a couple of tries, you really should consider stepping up your game.

you will not get to mastery lvl 161 without doing most of the adventures/nightmares

You not really need lv 161 honestly. I mean itzel and nuhoch last tier is not needed for any collection. (what’s the point of nuhoch last tier anyway.) that’s 24 mastery save.

But if you really need it. I don’t think you need to gold everything and silver is easy enough once you learn to do it. (Except noscope gallery and golem one.)

My recommend tactic is throw your bad mood away and have fun playing it.

Adventures ought to be like jumping puzzles. Achievements and some shinies for those who enjoy it, but not a necessary evil if you don’t.

I wonder why ANET thought their customers bought HoT if they’d rather be playing a platform game.

Anka.3675:

Adventures ought to be like jumping puzzles. Achievements and some shinies for those who enjoy it, but not a necessary evil if you don’t.

I wonder why ANET thought their customers bought HoT if they’d rather be playing a platform game.

Ah, but there are masteries locked behind jumping puzzles too though. They probably oughtn’t be, but just saying, they are like adventures in that respect.

This is the most anti-fun thread I’ve ever read. Seriously, guys, you’re damaging my faith in humanity right now. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy! Adventures are bad and mastery points shouldn’t be tied up in them, huh? Yet if I told you I shouldn’t have to grind masteries or do map completion for collections or whatever, we all know what kind of response I’d get. Why, just the other day, I saw a thread complaining about a timegate in a legendary collection, and the respondents basically told the OP to suck it up and deal with it.

Is maxing out all the masteries really that important to you? If so, suck it up. Deal with it. You want the rewards, you gotta do the content.

i do not have a problem with normal mmo content,its this adventure rubbish that has no place in character progression.its immersion breaking,why do i want to play a mushroom?
did not notice mushroom on character creation when i made my human warrior.

Takoyakii.2146:

eldrin.6471:

Krag.6210:

The adventures are great and there are many other ways to get your mastery points.
Even then, if you can’t get at least silver after a couple of tries, you really should consider stepping up your game.

you will not get to mastery lvl 161 without doing most of the adventures/nightmares

You not really need lv 161 honestly. I mean itzel and nuhoch last tier is not needed for any collection. (what’s the point of nuhoch last tier anyway.) that’s 24 mastery save.

But if you really need it. I don’t think you need to gold everything and silver is easy enough once you learn to do it. (Except noscope gallery and golem one.)

My recommend tactic is throw your bad mood away and have fun playing it.

You need them for gifts for new legendary weapons I believe.

eldrin.6471:

you will not get to mastery lvl 161 without doing most of the adventures/nightmares

You will not get to mastery level 163 without raiding.

ye im fully aware of that. and resent the fact that content has been made that only 1%-5% customers will be able to do what we all payed for.

Gold is not required for max mastery level. You will need silver on about 60% of them however, if you want to reach level 161.

This is a feat in itself if like me, you have a 300+ millisecond ping. In this situation most of the adventures are broken. The haywire punching is absurdly broken in particular.

If you need to tie rewards to content to get people to play it (particularly content that was supposed to operate on its own merits with leaderboards!), then you know that content wasn’t very good to begin with.

But in the spirit of being nice, I don’t think the content is that bad (personally, I’d probably enjoy it more if I didn’t feel the reward tug). It’s just that they are sort of like JPs. They appeal to a niche audience. And you have locked mainstream rewards behind niche content, which is a big no-no.

The breakdown between arguments is pretty ridiculous here.

Side A: Adventures are fine for those who enjoy them, but we’d rather not have to do them, thank you.

Side B: No, we like adventures, so you have to do them.

Seems fair.

Fortunately, we don’t have to do anything, which is what I’m doing in HoT.

Molesworth.1684:

Am I the only one finding it frustrating that mastery points are tied to these difficult and annoying mini games? It’s nigh on impossible to get even bronze on many of them. Coupled with the fact that they’re often closed, I have given up hope of ever getting enough mastery points to max my level.

Same here !

Some of the comments don’t make too much sense here. Apparently ‘’all content that is tied to rewards is forced content that is ’’garbage’’. That’s why people are forced to do them.’’

Going by that logic, I wish people would stop complaining about rewards. Because apparently it is enough to enjoy the content that is fun. Rewards are only given when the content is bad to motivate people to do it.

There is nothing wrong with adventures. Aside from being bugged sometimes (which is an issue), they are fun minigames and I am confident that alot of people enjoy doing them. They are simply different, and just because they are different doesn’t mean they are bad.

The complaints here remind me of those who were strongly against jumping puzzles and Super Adventure Box. And that no rewards should be exclusive to these ’’garbage’’ gaming types.

I find the argument ‘’I don’t enjoy this part of the game, I don’t want exclusive rewards tied to it’’ to be really biased. Because I am sure there are people who don’t enjoy the content in HoT but want the masteries regardless. It means that those people also have the right to get full masteries without playing much of the content in HoT. There are those who only play WvW for the most part. Why do they need to grind PvE content to get masteries?

nGumball.1283:

Some of the comments don’t make too much sense here. Apparently ‘’all content that is tied to rewards is forced content that is ’’garbage’’. That’s why people are forced to do them.’’

Going by that logic, I wish people would stop complaining about rewards. Because apparently it is enough to enjoy the content that is fun. Rewards are only given when the content is bad to motivate people to do it.

There is nothing wrong with adventures. Aside from being bugged sometimes (which is an issue), they are fun minigames and I am confident that alot of people enjoy doing them. They are simply different, and just because they are different doesn’t mean they are bad.

The complaints here remind me of those who were strongly against jumping puzzles and Super Adventure Box. And that no rewards should be exclusive to these ’’garbage’’ gaming types.

I’m gonna assume you were partly referring to what I said:

1) There is nothing inherently wrong with adventures having rewards, BUT

2) There are what I’d call “mainstream” rewards and “niche” rewards. Mainstream rewards are stuff that basically everybody needs and wants. Mastery points, for example. Masteries are highly mainstream content. Mastery levels are something you almost can’t not gain if you’re playing the game for any length of time.

But adventures are not mainstream content. In fact if you set aside the idea of any mastery points being attached to them, the average player can ignore them forever. While I don’t like that the elite spec collections require some silver adventures, it would be harder to argue that those collections are mainstream content, so that’s not so much of a problem in the context of the argument.

The main problem here is the overlap between mainstream and niche. Does that make sense?

I am with Labjax on this one

Ohoni.6057:

The breakdown between arguments is pretty ridiculous here.

Side A: Adventures are fine for those who enjoy them, but we’d rather not have to do them, thank you.

Side B: No, we like adventures, so you have to do them.

Seems fair.

Except no. I am all for mini games yet i said if they are required in order to access other content then its a bad system. Im on the side of the people that dont like them and may be forced to do them. If they can be ignored however then the complains are unjustified.

Adventures are absolutely annoying, I am a completionist minded player and having to do this extremely annoying Minigames is just makes me rage. I exploited, glitched and Dulfy’ied my way to many gold rankings now. And feel zero accomplishement from this. They are like the JPs after people done them once for the achievment they wont ever ouch them again.

They seem to be absolutely unbalanced too. Whereas collecting scrap can be done w/o any videos or guides on less than 5 tries in Gold ranking, Collecting Exalted masks is pure RNG.

I find it O.K if there are players who like this kind of things, let them play. They have their own ranking too if they want a little competition, but hiding Mastery Points and Achivements behind those are absolutely no-go. Let people who enjoy them get their daily Rares from it. Is ok Bu please remove them from the map section of achievements.

Alchies.1984:

This is the most anti-fun thread I’ve ever read. Seriously, guys, you’re damaging my faith in humanity right now. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy! Adventures are bad and mastery points shouldn’t be tied up in them, huh? Yet if I told you I shouldn’t have to grind masteries or do map completion for collections or whatever, we all know what kind of response I’d get. Why, just the other day, I saw a thread complaining about a timegate in a legendary collection, and the respondents basically told the OP to suck it up and deal with it.

Is maxing out all the masteries really that important to you? If so, suck it up. Deal with it. You want the rewards, you gotta do the content.

Anet had to make decisions about what content to develop, and what content to not develop for the expansion – since developing content requires a commitment of resources, man power and money.

Is Adventures the best they could come up with? What made them think that the core group of players would enjoy this type of repetitive, platform gaming?

A couple of Adventures for people do do on the side (like jumping puzzles) is fine. But to make them play such a prominent role in the expansion?

And, lets face it, they truly lack creativity or imagination. They were an inexpensive way of seemingly introduction “new” content into the expansion. The Hearts in the core maps at least attempted to have some “story” about the region in which they were located.

The Adventures however are just outright platform gaming. If I wanted that, I’d go play other games that do it better.

I’ve got to agree with the thread title on this. Mini-game does not mean adventure. I’m not sure why they aren’t just called mini-games. Seriously… calling them adventures is one way of Anet telling us “this is what we think qualifies as exploring new places and challenges in inspiring and unusual ways”.

Sure, they’re (partially) unusual. Nothing inspiring though. If I wanted to be jumping on mushrooms and kicking spores around, I’d be playing Mario/Zelda. I was legitimately hoping that adventures were actually adventures. That’s why I created a hero. Why is my character (who is endowed with a long list of titles, including Hero of Lion’s Arch) jumping up and down on mushrooms and calling it an adventure? If Anet had simply called them mini-games I’d not have been disappointed… as it stands, I’m somewhat disgusted. =/

I find that some of them are ok, at least in smallish doses (don’t mind the vine-flamethrower one, for example, or the bug collecting) and some are quite frustrating (struggled quite a lot with flying circus today; kept getting two-shotted by the snipers apart from anything else, and sometimes the boosts didn’t fire when I flew through them.) I find anything with tight timers very anxious to play because it boosts my stress levels through the roof. Much like with jumping puzzles, if I can take my time and pause between jumps, not a problem; if it’s like the holiday ones I end up grinding my teeth down to nubs and giving myself a stress headache. My tolerance limit for repeating them regularly is quite low.

Doing one now and again for some mastery xp or whatever is fine, but I hadn’t realised I needed to gold a lot of them for max mastery. That’s disappointing. (Mind you, I am already hitting the point of feeling worn out repeating events for mastery at this stage. I may wait a bit until we get some new zones, although I suppose they may bring even more new masteries to unlock with them.)