Guild Wars 2

+1

At some point in the distant past they were just making ALL updates about these bulkitten minigames that have nothing to do with MMORPG, but at least it was their own thing. Now they are making it part of character progression. Jesus christ, anet.

Also, it’s bad enough that my elite spec’ ascended weapon comes from a disjointed collection of random items that screams “we are not designing this so you think it’s cool, fun and meaningful, but to spread everybody’s gaming time evenly across the content”, you still had to add stupid minigames as part of the already stupid collections intead of some cool mission/story or whatever that has remotely anything to do with my class or my elite spec.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I never thought I’d care enough to comment on adventures. That’s until I sat down last night and focused on completing a few for the mastery points and the achievement of doing them to gold. Now I feel very different about them. And not in a good way.

Some are genuinely fun. Salvage pit, Drone race and Wings of Gold were enjoyable and with practice it didn’t take long to get gold. They’re even fun to replay.

Ley line run… not so fun.

I was determined to beat it last night. I watched videos. I practiced the run slowly to get the hang of the skills. And after two hours I got my gold. But those were two hours of frustration and swearing I’ll never get back. And I never want to do this ‘adventure’ again… which is a shame. It’s ostensibly a fast-paced race high above the ground. That sounds thrilling. The reality isn’t.

I live in Australian and I definitely felt the ping/lag other Australians have reported. Skills fired inconsistently. Sometimes pressing 1 would dash me forward immediately, sometimes it would take a second. When you have to press jump soon after to fly across a gap, you’re likely as not find yourself falling because you pressed jump before the skill fired.

I knew the course and the best path through it by heart after half an hour. I was pressing the right buttons. I was following the gold video almost exactly. And I was fighting the interface the entire time. What’s weird is that Salvage pit, drone race and wings of gold don’t seem to have this issue, or at least it isn’t significant enough in those to be noticeable. They’re perhaps more forgiving of lag. But when you’re racing a spark high above the ground to beat a 45 second countdown, suddenly every second is very important. And an unreliable interface becomes deadly.

I don’t know if it’s lag or something else, but several times I would also find myself stuck inside the models of the rocks after a dash or teleport.

And then there’s the final insult to this adventure: to get gold, it seems like you have to do it in 45 seconds. I did it in 45 seconds and didn’t get gold. I did this several times. It showed my score – 45 seconds – and below it showed the gold time – 45 seconds. But it wouldn’t award me gold. Now I know that you don’t get gold for finishing in 45 seconds. You get it for finishing BELOW 45 seconds. I tried again and again and eventually got it down to 44. Mission accomplished. Enjoyable.. not so much. And why the misleading time? If you want it done in 44 seconds, just write 44 seconds.

I don’t know how I feel about gating mastery points behind adventures. It felt satisfying to finish Salvage/Drone/Wings and get those mastery points. It felt …not satisfying, but earned.. to get them from ley line run. I worked really hard for those, and I don’t mind working hard, but in the end victory depended more on luck more than work and repeating the same actions over and over until you get a run where every skill fires when you use it. Some adventures aren’t a test of skill. They’re a test of patience.

I agree that lag makes adventures a bad experience. However, as somebody who got gold on almost all adventures in less than a week, I can honestly tell you that adventures are only about your skill as a player. Yes indeed, bugs in branches, ley run, lava floor are all about memorizing routes. That doesn’t make it bad. Dungeon mechanics, raid mechanics, pvp mechanics are all about memorizing stuff and reacting to it within a certain time window. Just as adventures are. And again, for the 81025th time, you do not need to have gold on all the adventures to reach 166 mastery. Getting silver on all of them is a piece of cake, and there’s some adventures that just give free gold for literally 0 skill(salvage pit, flying circus, wings of gold, the one where you drive a motorcycle thingy i can’t remember, the beetle one). There’s the medium tier(bugs in branches,punchomatic, the drone one, lava floor). With gold on these you should have absolutely no problem reaching 166

Raizen.7981:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Stuff..

I agree that lag makes adventures a bad experience. However, as somebody who got gold on almost all adventures in less than a week, I can honestly tell you that adventures are only about your skill as a player.

Don’t you think those statements are mutually exclusive? If you agree that lag has an effect, then you can’t honestly say adventures are only about skill. I’m all for skillful adventures. We just need to get the lag out of them so they can be all about skill.

Raizen.7981:

Yes indeed, bugs in branches, ley run, lava floor are all about memorizing routes. That doesn’t make it bad.

Not at all. I’m fine with that. Had the route for ley line memorised quickly enough. Just couldn’t execute it reliably.

Raizen.7981:

And again, for the 81025th time, you do not need to have gold on all the adventures to reach 166 mastery.

I know, I know. But it’s not just about the mastery. I want to be able to conquer all adventures to gold. I want that achievement. The mastery points are just an added incentive.

Raizen.7981:

Getting silver on all of them is a piece of cake, and there’s some adventures that just give free gold for literally 0 skill(salvage pit, flying circus, wings of gold, the one where you drive a motorcycle thingy i can’t remember,

You’re thinking of Drone racer. Yes, did salvage pit again just yesterday and it’s easy as cake.

Raizen.7981:

There’s the medium tier(bugs in branches,punchomatic, the drone one, lava floor). With gold on these you should have absolutely no problem reaching 166

The drone one? You don’t mean drone racer again, do you? You mentioned it as easy above. Is there another drone related adventure?

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I don’t know how I feel about gating mastery points behind adventures. It felt satisfying to finish Salvage/Drone/Wings and get those mastery points. It felt …not satisfying, but earned.. to get them from ley line run. I worked really hard for those, and I don’t mind working hard, but in the end victory depended more on luck more than work and repeating the same actions over and over until you get a run where every skill fires when you use it. Some adventures aren’t a test of skill. They’re a test of patience.

There’s a secondary point here: Mastery Points don’t have the same level of time/skill/effort required to get them.

• Finish story
• Find a box
• Vista/JP-like scenery
• Beat a particular boss
• Finish a particular story event chain

All those are fairly simple. They require exploration and participation in the main content, but they aren’t overly unwieldy or obnoxious. They use what’s already in the game’s mechanics. They’re also likely to get bug fixes on a short queue.

• Botched-Execution Minigame (Gold)
• 10 storyline objectives
• As the line above, including “absolutely perfect” runthroughs without quick reset
• Depend on meta-event success

These events are, by point value, equivalently weighted for points, but also aggravating, buggy/inconsistent, and most likely to be cited as “stretching sparse gameplay content” because they force wasting time and emotional investment. They often rely on “unique” mechanics which don’t fit the fluid nature of GW2’s movement controls, and are influenced by precision-wrecking ping times.

Last night, I gave Scrap Rifles a poke. I went through a weird cycle of “hate this crap, this is kind of fun, g’kitten this garbage” in the span of about an hour while working on Silver.

Turns out that I ran into some critical issues that made this thing unnecessarily obnoxious:

1. Chak drones are friggin’ cowards. I could break their eggs, insult their mothers, and leave a flaming bag of poo on their little sisters, and they would still hide in a corner while only 3 or 4 of them actually take offense. In a mini-game with time-limited mass kills, the enemies need to actually come at me en masse.
2. Restarting a playthrough immediately after failure doesn’t quite work. I had an entire post-fail run that had almost no enemies in it. Reset ought to include spawns. This is really important in reducing iteration time.
3. The number of times I’ve clenched my teeth and muttered “Why. Won’t. You. Just. Die.” to a bunch of drones tells me they might have too many hitpoints. Or I need shorter cooldowns on my 3 & 4 abilities.
4. Less critical, I could do without the rifle blowing up eggs I happen to be nowhere near. When I’m planning wise heat management, it screws with my plans when an egg I’m not even facing explodes.

Beyond that, not too terrible an adventure. #1 fun killer in it is the AI wandering off instead of trying to kill me.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Raizen.7981:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Stuff..

I agree that lag makes adventures a bad experience. However, as somebody who got gold on almost all adventures in less than a week, I can honestly tell you that adventures are only about your skill as a player.

Don’t you think those statements are mutually exclusive? If you agree that lag has an effect, then you can’t honestly say adventures are only about skill. I’m all for skillful adventures. We just need to get the lag out of them so they can be all about skill.

Raizen.7981:

Yes indeed, bugs in branches, ley run, lava floor are all about memorizing routes. That doesn’t make it bad.

Not at all. I’m fine with that. Had the route for ley line memorised quickly enough. Just couldn’t execute it reliably.

Raizen.7981:

And again, for the 81025th time, you do not need to have gold on all the adventures to reach 166 mastery.

I know, I know. But it’s not just about the mastery. I want to be able to conquer all adventures to gold. I want that achievement. The mastery points are just an added incentive.

Raizen.7981:

Getting silver on all of them is a piece of cake, and there’s some adventures that just give free gold for literally 0 skill(salvage pit, flying circus, wings of gold, the one where you drive a motorcycle thingy i can’t remember,

You’re thinking of Drone racer. Yes, did salvage pit again just yesterday and it’s easy as cake.

Raizen.7981:

There’s the medium tier(bugs in branches,punchomatic, the drone one, lava floor). With gold on these you should have absolutely no problem reaching 166

The drone one? You don’t mean drone racer again, do you? You mentioned it as easy above. Is there another drone related adventure?

Yes I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the drone racer again, I wanted to say the one where you kill a lot of chak mobs, scrap rifle. Most mobs there are called chak drones hence why I kittened up the spelling. And when I said adventures are only about skill I pretty much meant it when we’re talking about a lag free environment. It’s obvious that it’s not your fault that 2s ping makes you fall down branches.

About completing all adventures on gold – this takes a load of skill(I’m trash at aiming so the target practice thingy is off limits for me) so it might be a pain in the kitten

Raizen.7981:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Raizen.7981:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Stuff..

I agree that lag makes adventures a bad experience. However, as somebody who got gold on almost all adventures in less than a week, I can honestly tell you that adventures are only about your skill as a player.

Don’t you think those statements are mutually exclusive? If you agree that lag has an effect, then you can’t honestly say adventures are only about skill. I’m all for skillful adventures. We just need to get the lag out of them so they can be all about skill.

Raizen.7981:

Yes indeed, bugs in branches, ley run, lava floor are all about memorizing routes. That doesn’t make it bad.

Not at all. I’m fine with that. Had the route for ley line memorised quickly enough. Just couldn’t execute it reliably.

Raizen.7981:

And again, for the 81025th time, you do not need to have gold on all the adventures to reach 166 mastery.

I know, I know. But it’s not just about the mastery. I want to be able to conquer all adventures to gold. I want that achievement. The mastery points are just an added incentive.

Raizen.7981:

Getting silver on all of them is a piece of cake, and there’s some adventures that just give free gold for literally 0 skill(salvage pit, flying circus, wings of gold, the one where you drive a motorcycle thingy i can’t remember,

You’re thinking of Drone racer. Yes, did salvage pit again just yesterday and it’s easy as cake.

Raizen.7981:

There’s the medium tier(bugs in branches,punchomatic, the drone one, lava floor). With gold on these you should have absolutely no problem reaching 166

The drone one? You don’t mean drone racer again, do you? You mentioned it as easy above. Is there another drone related adventure?

Yes I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the drone racer again, I wanted to say the one where you kill a lot of chak mobs, scrap rifle. Most mobs there are called chak drones hence why I kittened up the spelling. And when I said adventures are only about skill I pretty much meant it when we’re talking about a lag free environment. It’s obvious that it’s not your fault that 2s ping makes you fall down branches.

About completing all adventures on gold – this takes a load of skill(I’m trash at aiming so the target practice thingy is off limits for me) so it might be a pain in the kitten

Ah, Shooting Gallery. Yeah, still trying to get that one. I end up firing prematurely and shooting the smoke before dummy even appears.