Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

I would love to have your opinion on something. I have talked about this issue with my guild and they seem to agree with me.
It involves the event chain where you escort a group of Sylvari snipers trough the jungle to then eventually end up at great vine end boss where you had to hold a sniper area at one side, while shooting it with mortars from the other side. While the end boss of this, with the mortars and holding the area, was tons of fun (even tough it was still buggy as hell) i want to talk about the vines popping up before that, during the first escort quest.

The idea is that you hold the sniper area, the snipers take out the vinetenders and then you can damage the big vine that they were shielding and kill it so your escort quest can continue. However during the BWE we had occasions of this event bugging out, where the snipers would not fire even if you held the area.

And this is where i think we could learn a lesson from a bug, because playing it with this bug made this event allot more engaging for me, and my guildmates playing with me at the time, we were on teamspeak and we all agreed this was actually cool.
So when the snipers didn’t fire, we looked for a way to continue the event, even with it bugging out right there, and we managed to do it, by killing the vinetenders within seconds of eachother, burning them down equally. I was commanding at the time and i instructed people on wich tender to burn harder so that they would go down equally, people who understood what to do damaged the tenders themselves, and most new to it just followed my commander tag to the target i was attacking and this way we managed to down these mobs within seconds of eachother, getting the shield down and then burning the vine. The first vine we did we had to try a few times cause one vinetender died to soon compared to the others, but as we went allong, people started getting the idea that these mobs had to die together and by the last event i didn’t even have to swap targets anymore, since they all went down equally fast due to people just getting it.

I then again did the event the next day, and it didn’t bug at the vines, and i was sad to see that an engaging event, while it had a bug, became way less engaging without it. The tenders died within seconds of holding those sniper areas and the event just progressed way faster, but didn’t feel nearly as engaging to me, as it was basicly again, holding an area, and then killing something. I also thought the bugged version prepared us way better for the splitting up and coordinating the big vine with the mortars, then the normal one did, since there was already some coördination required.

Now i don’t mean to say this event needs to change to resemble more of the bugged version but i do believe this bug can actually learn us something about how high we can raise the bar for doing events in the open world. It was proven during this bug that for example burning down 4 mobs right at the same time to remove a shield, ins’t something that is to hard for players. Coördination in a small way, like what was needed with these vinetenders if the snipers bugged out, was to me what made this one of the more engaging event chains in GW2, and i hope we can learn from this, to have simular chains that require just that tiny bit of working together and doing different things at the same time, not only during the final boss, like we saw with the big vine at the end where you had to basicly hold 2 areas quite far away from eachother (mortars and snipers) but also just during the event chain itself.

Let me know what you think about this!

The first raid in Wildstar (Genetic Archives) has this mechanic exactly as it appears in the bug for some of the trash mobs. They would come in pairs and you would have to kill them at precisely the same time or else they would revive (with an enrage mechanic). I always thought it was a really fun mechanic for trash mobs, and would definitely be fun here too!

I almost disagreed, but I think I get your point.
I don’t think this event should change, they should fix it and make the snipers kill the vinetenders, for me it was not fun breaking the game and playing coordinated ultra HP sponge with the vinetenders.
But this bug shows how players are not dumb and should not be treated as such. We need more inteligent events and puzzles.

as much as i understand the good will behind your observations..

something has been greatly overlooked here.

All events, no matter how easy and dumb they seem to be, have to have a “minimum” player threshold to complete. If this event stayed bugged, imagine trying to complete it with only 2 or 4 players doing the same thing you did.

How well would that have worked out for you? No commander tags, no organization, just you and a few others.

Swish.2463:

as much as i understand the good will behind your observations..

something has been greatly overlooked here.

All events, no matter how easy and dumb they seem to be, have to have a “minimum” player threshold to complete. If this event stayed bugged, imagine trying to complete it with only 2 or 4 players doing the same thing you did.

How well would that have worked out for you? No commander tags, no organization, just you and a few others.

I agree, wich is why i said it shouldn’t be applied for this event, but maybe there can be a lesson in it for future events, of course working with proper scaling.

I did find the bugged version of the event more engaging than the intended version. However, it’s worth noting that the bugged version goes against one of GW2’s core event design principles: A player should not be able to cause an event to fail for everybody else.

If I had a dollar for every time I saw people killing the low health Vinetenders either due to trolling or an inability to understand people around them saying some variation of “Please don’t kill!” or God knows what, then I would have enough money to, I don’t know, fund a nice night out where I could irritate my friends with tales of The Irritating People Who Didn’t Understand The Concept Of Waiting To Kill The Mob. Apolus argues in an earlier post that this is evidence that players aren’t dumb and should not be treated as such. And I mostly disagree. This is evidence that MOST players aren’t dumb but there’s still that small contingent of players who can, and will, ruin everything for everybody else and they’re why we can’t have nice things.

Where I would agree is that I would like events that are more complicated than stand in the blue square and kill all the things. But I don’t want events where players can introduce a fail state for everybody else. Whether through malice or stupidity a player shouldn’t be able to ruin events for everybody else.

The “zerg” on that bugged event that knows what needs to be done can handle troll players easily though. Just always attack the mob with the most health., switching constantly as needed as soon as the HP difference gets a little too big. That way, if a troll player is finishing a low health mob, it also means that ALL mobs are low health anyway and the even will proceed as normal.

I only knew this quest in it’s bugged state until know

I really like it the bugged way. It works nicely to bring all vinetenders down simultaniously, instead of one by one. This way there would need to be more than 1/4 of the group working against the quest to fail, instead of 1 or 2.

Sorry, but it was awful. Wistfully talking about a group tackling it with TS is all well and good, but when you’ve got people showing up and ignoring instructions, you’re left stuck in a painfully dull event, that’s doomed to failure (and very grief-able) . Could work in a group instance, or maybe a less important side event, but we don’t need ANet to learn how to let a handful of people ruin event chains.

Tapioca.9062:

I did find the bugged version of the event more engaging than the intended version. However, it’s worth noting that the bugged version goes against one of GW2’s core event design principles: A player should not be able to cause an event to fail for everybody else.

I believe there have been several instances of this in game where someone can cause an event to fail for everyone else. While GW2 PvE is a co-operative game there is no obligation to play like that, even though most open world events are biased that way. On a number of occasions I have seen players pull extra mobs onto already pressed people in an apparent attempt to get an event to fail.

In the Guild Challenge event Deep Trouble it is possible, if the mission starter does not select guild members only, for someone else to maliciously start the quaggans on their escape before letting them die.

Maybe you could build in a mechanic to detect that the event isn’t going well (due to griefing or not following instructions) and compensate for it. For example, if one vinetender goes down and then respawns because the others are still up, it triggers the defend the area portion of the event to get the snipers.

I wouldn’t want to see it make events always succeed, but something to allow for a more engaging event that can then fall back to an anti-griefing set up if needed.

For those saying that changing this event would make it easier for Trolls to grief it, I have a simple solution that would even work for less than optimal group numbers. It would involved a slight change into how the Vinetenders work in erecting the shield around the large vine. Instead of having to kill all the Vinetenders at once, each Vinetender represents a percentage of the shield. For example, if there’s 4 tenders, then each one is providing 25% of the shield, and as each one is killed, the shield loses 25% of effectiveness, allowing you to do 25% of the damage on the great vine.

This provides the additional engagement you get from allowing coordinated attacks of the Vinetenders(if you wanted to apply this mechanic to this particular event) while also allowing smaller groups(though not solo) to still complete the event, though it would take smaller groups a longer amount of time.

There’s always a simple solution if you just think about it, and by doing this slight change you get the best of both worlds here.