Guild Wars 2

Please stop the timer madness! All of the HoT maps are on a schedule and it’s exhausting. It wouldn’t be so bad if the metas were shorter. The one-hour cycle works for Dry Top because it’s only 60 minutes. Imagine if it was two hours. How frustrating would it be to complete an event you need during the sandstorm only to realize you have another 60 minutes to go before it begins? That’s how the HoT maps feel.

Verdant Brink: Need a night boss for an achievement? Well too bad, you have to wait at least 60 minutes until night cycles, plus another 20 for the copters.

Auric Basin: Want to work on map completion? Not going to happen because the pillars haven’t progressed far enough to open the area.

Tangled Depths: I don’t know. Avoid this area like the plague.

Dragon Stand: Want to complete the boss at all? Sorry, the meta started 30 minutes ago and you won’t find a full map now.

My routine now includes opening an external site as I log in to the game and checking the event timers. VB-still in daytime cycle, I want night. AB-middles of Octovine, no point in going there as I won’t get into a decent map now. TD-skip. DS-middle of the meta, won’t be able to find a good map. What do I do? I go back to the old world and work on map completion. Why did I buy this expac again?

Easy fix: Drop the timers and make the maps more like SW. Have the events themselves progress the meta. That way there will be less failed maps and every time you log in, you have a chance of finding a map at a different point in the meta. Give us options!

I absolutely agree. It was nice at the start, but it got dull pretty fast and now it feels like work. Iam now at a point where I do the old content again because it does not force me to do things at certain times so I can play at my pace and do not have to plan my day around the game.

Especially Dragon Stand has to be changed. It should at least only start its timer when the event chain is triggered, not when the map opened.

Tangled Depths – Takes 15-30 min to do the meta event if you spread out. Then you need to wait for 1h+ or so until the next meta boss.
Usually that means that the map you start doing the meta event on will be completely abandoned when the gerent spawns, because people just don’t want to wait that long.

For TD, my suggestion is to change the cucle to 1h or 1.5h instead of 2. It’s way too long to wait.

Dragon’s stand could just have the timer start on map creation or when the first event is done, instead of having it on a global timer. The global timer means that there is no point what so ever to go to the map when there’s 30 min left on the timer. And it means that when you’ve done the boss, you’ll likely have too little time to start up a new map, which means that you’ll have to wait around unnecessarily.
When a map becomes organized, it fills up fast anyways and after the initial 30 mins, it’s very hard to find an organized map. Having the timer start on startup would mean that if you want, you can, at any time, just start a new organized map and still have time to taxi in people and figure out who’s commanding and all that. Unless you’re a guild or community, that’s not very easy when there’s like 1h left on a map because there’s quite a bit of logistics.

For Dragon’s Stand, my suggestion is to start the timer on map startup or first event completion and have it as long as ANet feels is ok. This way, the after-boss timer can also be changed to allow for more time to get your well-deserved loot.

If you don’t have much time on the day, you can’t afford to “wait around to have fun”.

For most of the above reasons, I’ve just stopped playing in the new areas until something changes. They’re just not worth the trouble right now.

Fully agree. 2h cycles are NOT casual friendly.

And plz shorten the race phase before tarir defense.

I remember when they said player action would matter:

Colin Johanson: “Cause and effect: A single decision made by a player cascades out in a chain of events.”

Nope. Everything now just trudges forward toward the goal. If it makes it there in time and succeeds, it resets to the beginning. If it doesn’t, it resets to the beginning too. It’s been this way for a while now. Silverwastes operates this way. Dry Top is, logistically, an incoherent mess, just disconnected events happening all the time on a schedule. The Megaservers introduced a boss schedule and added timers to many of the world bosses.

At release for the original game there were several events that operated as a chain of cause in effect and had events that if failed, would push the event back a step (e.g., Straights of devastation). Now this idea of cause and effect seems to be yet another promise of the manifesto trampled upon.

It is great when a topic is grabbed from Reddit but then you do not link to the actual source. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3u2lxs/thoughts_and_ideas_about_hot_open_world_being/

There is this continual, underlying anxiety I experience while playing against these timers on these new maps. I should not be feeling this way in a video game. I understand the need for timers and a sense of urgency and the ability to fail but it’s tacked onto everything. I cannot even grab a glass of water while sitting idle in Exalted armor. Going to the bathroom means I will now get under 200% participation because I did not tag some mobs in a chain event.

When I go back to the old zones I feel this sudden weight off my shoulders. I guess I will be spending my time there for the -time- being.

Zypher.7609:

It is great when a topic is grabbed from Reddit but then you do not link to the actual source. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3u2lxs/thoughts_and_ideas_about_hot_open_world_being/

Thanks for implying that I stole this topic from Reddit. I had not, I rarely visit that forum. But it does go to show I’m not the only one that thinks this is a problem.

However, thanks for providing the link to this thread, as it makes a lot of great points.

What I find a bit sad is that all maps have more or less the same timing of 2 to 2.5 hours. For VB it is totally fine and makes sense since the day/night cycle is the same everywhere in the game but the other don’t seem to have a real reason.
What annoys me more is that there is no “play well and it goes faster” map like SW is. Some timers are ok but DS for example doesn’t need one and could work like SW : a new map opens and fills slowly until at least 15 people are in to start the event. When more people enter they spread in different lanes. Once the map is full, a new one open in which people have to wait to be 15 and so on.
Like SW people would want to fill the map when the three lines approach the commander fight by lfg’ing.
AB could have the octovine pop only when all towers are freed.

I’m not saying nothing should be on timer but having everything is not good either and only make people stressed about LFG which in the end doesn’t ease guild life. For example if we want to do DS with the guild, we ungroup to each find a map and once one seems to have more people we invite each other and then taxi people in. If somebody arrives 5 minutes later, it is too late, map full… see you tomorrow my friend, tonight you are excluded.

Zypher.7609:

It is great when a topic is grabbed from Reddit but then you do not link to the actual source. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3u2lxs/thoughts_and_ideas_about_hot_open_world_being/

Not everyone uses reddit, I don’t I find the place a mess.

SirMoogie.9263:

I remember when they said player action would matter:

Colin Johanson: “Cause and effect: A single decision made by a player cascades out in a chain of events.”

Nope. Everything now just trudges forward toward the goal. If it makes it there in time and succeeds, it resets to the beginning. If it doesn’t, it resets to the beginning too. It’s been this way for a while now. Silverwastes operates this way. Dry Top is, logistically, an incoherent mess, just disconnected events happening all the time on a schedule. The Megaservers introduced a boss schedule and added timers to many of the world bosses.

At release for the original game there were several events that operated as a chain of cause in effect and had events that if failed, would push the event back a step (e.g., Straights of devastation). Now this idea of cause and effect seems to be yet another promise of the manifesto trampled upon.

While I agree with you they went away from this system because players were using this system to their advantage – purposely failing events in order to get more loot.
Somehow they look down on people doing that so they went with a system in which you can’t really break anything because you don’t get anything to say – it just happens.

Here here!
Agree on all points.

I didn’t particularly like Silverwastes, but I honestly would like SW on a timer even less.

Shift meta event participation to daily achievement. As long as a player finished a whole cycle, it does matter s/he start at which stage should get the best reward.

There is only one meta, and his name is “Clock”. And there is only one thing we say to Clock: “Not today.”