Guild Wars 2

Yes I realize I’m late for the party, I didn’t play PvE for quite a while.. and I also realize that this is a “casual” game for casual people, that’s one of the reasons I like it.. and I also realize that the event might have been a bit too hard for your average Tom, kitten and Harry to complete…

But did you really have to lobotomize it and marginalize it to the point it became yet another “spam 1/press f/spam 1/good job, here’s your participation award, everybody’s a winner” world boss?
From being too hard to becoming probably the easiest meta event in new maps? Could someone explain this to me, because all I got so far from my friends and map chat was knee jerk white knighting?

I prefer it this way. This map is very annoying for the majority of the player base. If they know there is a meta that is easily doable, at least they go in there and you always have someone to play with.

Supposedly, there was a bug that was causing the Gerent and events to scale up too much, making the event twice as hard as it should be. There is evidence for this, as Nuhoch Lane in particular was hit the hardest by having additional players.

After waves and waves of complaints about the event being too hard, the “bug” was fixed. Which is unfortunate, because I went out of my way to write a zany guide on how to do the thing, all for it to become nearly obsolete.

I did it before the patch at the scaling sweet spot, it was just as easy as it is now.

Mortifer.2946:

I prefer it this way. This map is very annoying for the majority of the player base. If they know there is a meta that is easily doable, at least they go in there and you always have someone to play with.

Does it have to be one way or the other? Is there no middle ground here? I don’t think so.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Supposedly, there was a bug that was causing the Gerent and events to scale up too much, making the event twice as hard as it should be. There is evidence for this, as Nuhoch Lane in particular was hit the hardest by having additional players.

After waves and waves of complaints about the event being too hard, the “bug” was fixed. Which is unfortunate, because I went out of my way to write a zany guide on how to do the thing, all for it to become nearly obsolete.

Well, I was on Nuhoch lane, remembering that one was the hardest.. Bosses HP is at least 3 times lower then it was before, goo pools have improved visibility (which is nice, that was one of my biggest gripes) but they don’t expand and are basically stacked one atop another making them useless.. I think even the timer for the rocks is higher then I remember, I didn’t have to dodge even once.. I could go on but pretty much everything apart from sporelings guarding the nodes has been reduced to non-issue..

I mean, I get it, the fight was a bit too hard. Last time I participated, we needed at least 50 organized people and a full map to finish it. But this is ridiculous..

They need to nerf more of it if they want those maps to become, you know, popular.

The imminent arrival of gliding in core maps did make me pull out my finger and go into HoT to unlock gliding but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. It felt more like playing Metal Gear Solid than Guild Wars, sneaking around hoping most of the mobs didn’t notice me. I died and died and died again but I’ve got gliding now so the rest of HoT can return to its slumbers in the box of unfun. Life’s too short to spend game time on stuff I don’t enjoy.

Really looking forward to gliding in the maps I do like though…

The worst part are the lane achievements. If you play “properly” you cannot get them because the Gerent dies in Phase 2 more often than not, and to get the achievement you must reach Phase 3. It’s pathetic that you must “slow down” in order to get an achievement.

DoctorDing.5890:

The imminent arrival of gliding in core maps did make me pull out my finger and go into HoT to unlock gliding but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. It felt more like playing Metal Gear Solid than Guild Wars, sneaking around hoping most of the mobs didn’t notice me. I died and died and died again but I’ve got gliding now so the rest of HoT can return to its slumbers in the box of unfun. Life’s too short to spend game time on stuff I don’t enjoy.

Look, I get it. TD is probably the hardest map ANet has ever published. But I’m going to share with you an anecdote, take from it what you will.

Today I was getting my Revenant specialization, for which I was hunting some champions. Halfway through killing one of those an elementalist joined me and was downed a few seconds later. Ok, I’ve wasted several cooldowns to bring him up, no big deal, except he falls down again 2 seconds later.. Repeat 3 times till some veterans made me choose between letting him die or dying with him. WP was fortunately close enough that he managed to get back into fight less then a minute later and sure enough the scenario repeats itself with me dying along with him when I underestimated the adds.
Next try some other people joined him and we managed to kill the boss without a hitch.

Now, I know that watching big red 5k-10k damage pops on your screen is awesome, but if you wanna play a glass cannon ele you’d better either learn to dodge or get arcane shield and other defensive utilities/traits. Or, you could go the sensible route and gear up for your skill level. Not everyone is top tier PvP 360 no-scope, and that’s perfectly fine, ANet’s got you covered.
Alternatively, bring a friend and face roll pretty much anything GW2 throws at you.

They fixed a bug first of all, but even if it was a deliberate nerf, it was unsustainable to have a major map event so hard. It pleased the hardcore crowd, but it was causing so many people not to even bother trying. That is not something healthy or sustainable in an open world format. It needs to have a chance to fail, but not to the extent where it was failing almost every time.

Challenging content exists, but in raids, where it should remain, otherwise maps will die very quickly, especially when the meta rewards tokens and leyline sparks which are a necessity for a wide array of things including guild halls. Culling an opportunity to gain those is folly.

I agree the Chak Gerents were overnerfed. Was much more fun before.

Coldtart.4785:

I did it before the patch at the scaling sweet spot, it was just as easy as it is now.

I agree, the challenge before the patch wasn’t so much the event itself than it was getting right number of people on the 1 or 2 lanes where the scaling was the worst. That and getting people to stay put after finishing their lanes.

I assume that at the very beginning the no CC thing was also important but then that too became just something enough people knew about and stopped being an issue on most lanes.

At the end of the day, considering the Tangled Depths meta was an only outlier as far as HoT meta’s go, the fact that the difficulty was unintended at it’s original state is likely or at the very least plausible.

Open world content should never be balanced around full maps, but rather the average map with the consideration that not everyone is going to participate. That’s basically how they’ve done it. You need 1 group per objective (each lane in this case) to do these metas. Unfortunately however, too many people seem to think that zergs are required so they don’t even try, or they just want to play on easy mode in full maps.

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

Raids so far are way easier than in other games I played and the current fractals 100 feels easier than the old fractals 50. So what is your point?
The current raid difficulty is what I wish dungeons would be and Anet work their way up from there to fractals lvl 100 and raids.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this. It’s a difference of opinion so we likely will never agree. The one thing I do want to know is where it was stated that open world is meant to be for the casual player and that it must be easy. Casual does not equate to skill level.

Ayrilana.1396:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this. It’s a difference of opinion so we likely will never agree. The one thing I do want to know is where it was stated that open world is meant to be for the casual player and that it must be easy. Casual does not equate to skill level.

It’s not stated and it doesn’t have to be. However, open world is far more accessible than instances and is the play area of choice for the widest array of players. Therefore, it needs to cater to the broadest skill level, which almost always sits at the less challenging skill level. Most MMO’s which have had hard and challenging open world areas, have had to nerf or de-clutter their maps to cater for a wider audience for sustainability.

Lotro did this as a classic example – it removed group zones and added soloable mobs as the game grew and the playerbase became split, it became less and less sustainable to have challenging open world areas, as the majority of players were being put off. They moved all their challenging content into instances – using a tiered difficulty system to break up the challenges further. Whilst I can see how the quality of the experience suffered, many embraced the changes as they felt less shut out from the areas of the game they shouldn’t have been.

So it’s not catering for casuals, since you are right, casuals is the wrong term and doesn’t equate to low skill, it’s catering to the widest possible audience.

I think it’s fine now.

Map metas are this game’s “casual” content and should be much more about having enough people in the right places using the right mechanics than having a meticulously designed strategy that you need a highly coordinated guild map for the simple reason that open world maps do not offer you the ability to pick and choose your teammates and thus simply having enough teammates, and everyone playing reasonably well individually should grant a reasonable shot at meta completion

I get it. I like hard content, but I also agree that the high end of challenge should be in raids where it belongs, and not out in open world maps where you’re on a team full of people you don’t know, and that you can’t control. Simply having a map full of people that know the mechanic, play individually at a level sufficent to do content in the map normally, and want to complete the meta should usually be sufficient to complete the map meta.

Randulf.7614:

Ayrilana.1396:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this. It’s a difference of opinion so we likely will never agree. The one thing I do want to know is where it was stated that open world is meant to be for the casual player and that it must be easy. Casual does not equate to skill level.

It’s not stated and it doesn’t have to be. However, open world is far more accessible than instances and is the play area of choice for the widest array of players. Therefore, it needs to cater to the broadest skill level, which almost always sits at the less challenging skill level. Most MMO’s which have had hard and challenging open world areas, have had to nerf or de-clutter their maps to cater for a wider audience for sustainability.

Lotro did this as a classic example – it removed group zones and added soloable mobs as the game grew and the playerbase became split, it became less and less sustainable to have challenging open world areas, as the majority of players were being put off. They moved all their challenging content into instances – using a tiered difficulty system to break up the challenges further. Whilst I can see how the quality of the experience suffered, many embraced the changes as they felt less shut out from the areas of the game they shouldn’t have been.

So it’s not catering for casuals, since you are right, casuals is the wrong term and doesn’t equate to low skill, it’s catering to the widest possible audience.

But why must nearly all open world content cater to those of a lower skill set? Many people enjoy large scale encounters such as Teq, Marionette, vanilla Gerent, TT, etc.

Maybe Anet should create map-wide instances for those that want large group oriented challenges. They can then increase the rewards.

Ayrilana.1396:

Randulf.7614:

Ayrilana.1396:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want a challenge go to raids or fractals. Open world is meant to be fun for the casual player. Before it was not fun, not it is.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this. It’s a difference of opinion so we likely will never agree. The one thing I do want to know is where it was stated that open world is meant to be for the casual player and that it must be easy. Casual does not equate to skill level.

It’s not stated and it doesn’t have to be. However, open world is far more accessible than instances and is the play area of choice for the widest array of players. Therefore, it needs to cater to the broadest skill level, which almost always sits at the less challenging skill level. Most MMO’s which have had hard and challenging open world areas, have had to nerf or de-clutter their maps to cater for a wider audience for sustainability.

Lotro did this as a classic example – it removed group zones and added soloable mobs as the game grew and the playerbase became split, it became less and less sustainable to have challenging open world areas, as the majority of players were being put off. They moved all their challenging content into instances – using a tiered difficulty system to break up the challenges further. Whilst I can see how the quality of the experience suffered, many embraced the changes as they felt less shut out from the areas of the game they shouldn’t have been.

So it’s not catering for casuals, since you are right, casuals is the wrong term and doesn’t equate to low skill, it’s catering to the widest possible audience.

But why must nearly all open world content cater to those of a lower skill set? Many people enjoy large scale encounters such as Teq, Marionette, vanilla Gerent, TT, etc.

Maybe Anet should create map-wide instances for those that want large group oriented challenges. They can then increase the rewards.

I don’t disagree with that bit – some amazing raids can be had from wide open areas, but as I said, it is unsustainable to have a game’s open world limit itself to the gamers who want challenging content. Lower skill level players make up the majority of most mmo’s. It is good business sense for Anet to avoid limiting their maps to just those of higher skill – that’s why they put in the raids.

The only way that can change is if the metrics for the raids show that equal numbers of different players play open world vs the raid over a period of time – something very unlikely to happen, but would show that challenging content is more desirable in a wider area of their game.

Also, except TT, most of those prob no longer count as challenging content. Teq and Marionette perhaps at first, but they had decent learning curves. Gerent’s learning curve prior to the change was way too steep and unforgiving.

This leads to quantifying what is challenging content. Teq and TT are vastly different skill levels for example. Some will argue neither go far enough, some may see as too hard. Where does Anet draw the line as to what is challenging and what is not. If Gerent was deliberate and people simply did not play that zone, the game and expac suffers and 25% of the open world starts being abandoned. And that has knock on effects. That leads to nerfing. It’s easy to blame Anet, but they need to work on the bigger picture – catering for the broadest possible audience.

Again, why does it have to be one way or the other?

The facts of the matter is that Gerent was probably too hard for most pug groups out there. As I said, the times I’ve done it we had more then half of the map being experienced players using TS for communication.

But that doesn’t mean it should become just another world boss fight. I think this quote speaks volumes about the ridiculousness of the fight in its current form

maddoctor.2738:

The worst part are the lane achievements. If you play “properly” you cannot get them because the Gerent dies in Phase 2 more often than not, and to get the achievement you must reach Phase 3. It’s pathetic that you must “slow down” in order to get an achievement.

And didn’t ANet themselves repeat multiple times that they don’t want failure to be the one thing required for anything? Purposefully hampering your self in order to achieve something is counter intuitive, which is another thing ANet speaks frequently about.

Freeelancer.2860:

And didn’t ANet themselves repeat multiple times that they don’t want failure to be the one thing required for anything? Purposefully hampering your self in order to achieve something is counter intuitive, which is another thing ANet speaks frequently about.

To be honest, before the “nerf” it was hard to beat the Gerent, let alone beat him in phase 2, so the achievements didn’t need adjustment. But now that he dies in phase 2 more often than not, they need to either change how the achievements work, or make the Gerent go invulnerable (underground) at a set amount of hit points, and not only with time. Although the latter would cause different kinds of problems.

The entire King of the Jungle meta is full of problems, it’s the worst designed meta of all the 4 maps. For example, even when you beat the Gerent early, you have to wait for the timer to expire in order to get the last couple of rewards. Waiting to have fun isn’t fun.

And the other problem with it, there is no reset period. If the event fails, the map can reach T4 before the timer reaches “Secure the Outposts” part, which means it’s harder to jump on a “good” TD map. The new meta should begin once the Gerent timer (the full one) expire and have a reset period like AB. Much easier to organize full events that way and if you port to the map at reset you are guaranteed to enter a map without progress.

The Rata Novus event where you collect golem parts (first in the meta) frequently bugs out, meaning there is no way to reach T4 if that happens, unless you change maps.

The entire map might shut down without warning, TD is the only map that does that. Even FULL maps shut down and players are ported to empty maps, without any progress, and all their participation lost. Why it happens only in TD is anyone’s guess.

And the new mini map makes it considerably harder to see party or squad members… great work there.

tl;dr FIX TD please

DoctorDing.5890:

They need to nerf more of it if they want those maps to become, you know, popular.

The imminent arrival of gliding in core maps did make me pull out my finger and go into HoT to unlock gliding but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. It felt more like playing Metal Gear Solid than Guild Wars, sneaking around hoping most of the mobs didn’t notice me. I died and died and died again but I’ve got gliding now so the rest of HoT can return to its slumbers in the box of unfun. Life’s too short to spend game time on stuff I don’t enjoy.

Really looking forward to gliding in the maps I do like though…

They should make maths easieryou know. Learning to sum is more than enough for anyone and my head hurts when trying to multiply. Don’t tell me about calculus, please, that’s hardcore content that makes my ears bleed.

Reading is also fine, i finished cinderella and little red riding hood (not the perrault version, as i’ve been told it has hardcore content and i am a casual reader). Poe? Come on, it’s not fun. After the first paragraph i have died many times and have to ghost walk all the way to my corpse. Nerf poe, give me pages full with pictures so i can understand what’s going on.

Music is cool. I mean, have you played simon says? That one is rad. Tachaikovsky? Nah, that one is boring except the part with the cannons firing to that tune if i ever bothered i would know it’s the national anthem of France and then some typical russian tune, but that’s for hardcore listeners only. Give me a nice ringtone and nicki minajs analconda. Thats content everyone can enjoy, specially with the volume downso i can watch tv and tweet at the same time my toon autowalks from point a to b, undisturbed in the old maps i have grown to love.

There was a time when lazy people would be ashamed of their attitude. Welcome to the century where the standards conform to the slowest and, if not, they are brought down.

They nerfed it?

Great! Maybe I’ll go check out Tangled Depths now.

Believe it or not. This meta still fails.

Aenesthesia.1697:

They should make maths easieryou know. Learning to sum is more than enough for anyone and my head hurts when trying to multiply. Don’t tell me about calculus, please, that’s hardcore content that makes my ears bleed.

Reading is also fine, i finished cinderella and little red riding hood (not the perrault version, as i’ve been told it has hardcore content and i am a casual reader). Poe? Come on, it’s not fun. After the first paragraph i have died many times and have to ghost walk all the way to my corpse. Nerf poe, give me pages full with pictures so i can understand what’s going on.

Music is cool. I mean, have you played simon says? That one is rad. Tachaikovsky? Nah, that one is boring except the part with the cannons firing to that tune if i ever bothered i would know it’s the national anthem of France and then some typical russian tune, but that’s for hardcore listeners only. Give me a nice ringtone and nicki minajs analconda. Thats content everyone can enjoy, specially with the volume downso i can watch tv and tweet at the same time my toon autowalks from point a to b, undisturbed in the old maps i have grown to love.

There was a time when lazy people would be ashamed of their attitude. Welcome to the century where the standards conform to the slowest and, if not, they are brought down.

Maybe a bit ranty…

Remember that half the people you meet are below average and most successful business have to cater for the masses. That’s why you don’t see much calculus on prime time TV.

If you sell an expansion that only attracts a subset of players and if that expansion only pleases a subset of that subset then… aw, you do the math. It’s only counting.

I think it’s inevitable that HoT will get nerfed to boost its popularity and no amount of forum posts telling folk to get better or learn to play will change that.

Also, this is a video game. An activity most people consider to be inherently lazy. Attempting to draw a comparison between improving your skills here and in mathematics or music is hilarious.

DoctorDing.5890:

Maybe a bit ranty…

…but deliciously ironic, because the laziest thing anyone can do in a forum is set up a straw man and pretend arguing with imaginary people actually convinces anyone of anything — other than the fact that some people prefer to argue with imaginary people.

Using a lazy argument to lament laziness and imply people should be ashamed of being lazy?

Priceless.

^ IMHO that looks more like false analogy then a straw man. And I don’t wanna get into an off topic discussion about logical fallacies so I’ll just say this :

because the laziest thing anyone can do in a forum is set up a straw man

“citation needed”.

Anyway, on topic: I’ve repeated several times, but divisive nature of man is such that middle ground is more of a no-mans land… The event was too hard, but both maddoctor.2738’s posts put the spotlight on some major issues with the event as it currently is.

Bottom line, I think that people would still try for TD meta even if it weren’t lobotomized, and frankly, I still don’t understand why anyone would agree with let alone defend the way it is currently implemented (which is why I started the whole thread in the first place).

DoctorDing.5890:

I think it’s inevitable that HoT will get nerfed to boost its popularity and no amount of forum posts telling folk to get better or learn to play will change that.

Ah, but there lies the problem. I am not telling anyone to get better or learn to play. Arena net is, by launching new, more challenging content.

And what i find puzzling, is not that people die in these new areas a lot. That’s to be expected because this game didn’t do anything to challenge them so far. No, what’s puzzling, is that people don’t even question if they can beat the new content. They see that they die where they usually didn’t, and then it’s arenanet’s fault for making difficult content, instead of being the players’ fault for not even bothering to think how to beat the new content.

DoctorDing.5890:

If you sell an expansion that only attracts a subset of players and if that expansion only pleases a subset of that subset then… aw, you do the math. It’s only counting.

The lazy or not commited players are also a subset. Admitely very attractive for a developer, because it’s people without expectations except ‘give me something brainless to do while i do something else’. But they are not commited and will leave sooner or later. The demanding players are also the most dedicated ones (not necessarily in time), and the most loyal. Cattering to the vast majority can look good in the short term, and leave you with nothing in the long term.

If all open world content has to be face roll easy, then they need way more mid level diffuculty content in instances.

I lnow you guys like to win with minimal effort, but when thats everything in the game, it makes it fairly boring.

I agree it’s been overnerfed. It needed fixing at the start, but now it’s easier than the Octovine (not that Octovine is hard, but it does need good map communication), or getting VB T4. IMO it just needs more health and old style goo pool mechanics (but keeping improved visibility).