Guild Wars 2

• The way the map handles resets removes any pre-meta planning. You can form up and join tags, but the map reset splits everybody up and sends them to random instances. It’s common for only half of a squad to get back into the same map before it’s full due to all the other random players dropped in who weren’t in the squad.
• The full reset, the timer and the duration it takes to complete it creates this mad rush at the start of a reset to get into a map. Map fill up very quickly and it’s common to join multiple groups in LFG only to find the map full and you suffering a penalty for joining too many groups.
• Groups fill up so fast that you can click join, but not actually get in the group and still get hit with a penalty if you joined. I’ve been locked out of LFG for so long that I couldn’t get into a map.
• Once that initial rush is finished, if you failed to get in a map, you are SOL to some extent. Grabbing a new instance and starting to organize is difficult since the pool of players looking for maps is small at that point. Your main chance is just watching LFG for a random organized map who needs to taxi in a few players due to disconnects, but those are rare. Usually, you just don’t see DS being advertised in LFG until the next reset in two hours.
• Speaking of disconnects, you have a meta that takes a minimum of a hour to complete and if you get disconnected out of squad, you have no chance of getting back in. Even if you disconnect in squad, the map can still taxi in more people and you won’t be able to get back in, because it’s full.

The real issue here isn’t the design of Dragon Stand as a whole, but rather the tools we are provided to find these instances and organize a large number of players are incredibly deficient. Like, when was the last time the LFG tool got a serious revamp?

You gotta provide us better tools, tools that allow us to search and target the instances themselves instead of groups in those instances.

Otherwise, you are going to have model these large scale meta maps after SW where the start and end times have enough variance that you can always find a map in LFG.

Currently, it’s like Black Friday with DS. You wait 2 hours for a reset and then join in the stampede to try and get a map and hope you don’t get trampled in the process.

To be fair, it’s like 1 out of 5 resets that I have trouble getting into a map, but it’s still a kittenty user experience when it does happen.

It same in every HoT map. And even the daily world bosses and SW. These unfinished megaserver mechanics and broken LFG tools should of been fixed long ago, even before HoT was released.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s happened to me 3 times this weekend so far. Want to play, but can’t.

I am so tired of being on an organized map, ready to go, beverage in hand, with time to play, and, merging parties into a squad of 40 people. Only to be kicked from the map when the map resets, and it kills everyone, and you need to way point. And then you, and all of the original merged party members, now in the squad, are all kicked from the map. And, none of you can get back in. It is truly a rotten, no good, crappy experience.

The only option is to hope for a secondary map to frantically organize, which rarely happens, and becomes stressful, an outright maddening experience. "I WAS THERE! I WAS IN THE KITTEN KITTEN KITTEN MAP! I WAS IN THE KITTEN SQUAD!….. " Yeah, we all know how it has been going down. For many months, everyone knows. Our poor dogs, and cats, and wives, and children, and neighbors have to listen to it… lol. We all know. It has probably sold a lot of keyboards.

At that point, our original party is usually done playing. Because the event has to be played “at that time”. You’re not waiting 2 more hours, knowing it will just probably happen to you again. Your available game time is often over by then anyway. And other events you might want to do are not happening either. TD isn’t for another hour, and rarely ever organizes. AB is the same kind of mess, and isn’t for another hour and 15 minutes. WvW is totally ruined, and is no longer an option. Etc… We wanted to play that map. Period. And now we can’t!

If you are on the organized map, it should not kill everyone to reset, and force you to way point. Nor, boot you from the map in any way, shape, or form. If you’re on the organized map, you should be able to stay on the map. Period. But instead, people are inviting outside party members. And squad members are leaving the maps, allowing the map to be over full. At the same time, taxiing is happening, with people that can’t get onto the map, and spamming the map, at reset. Which lets people who are not on the map to get on, and causes others to get kicked. It’s pure 100% garbage. You don’t even know what instance you are in, (Districts topic). It shows yet again, people WANT to play, but they CAN’T. It’s a complete failure of implementation. (Doesn’t anyone at Anet get that? Or, know what that means to maintaining loyal playing and paying customers?)

Because of this same type of implementation, I find that there are so few things that are enjoyable anymore in the game, and this totally ruins the events that would otherwise be truly enjoyable. The event(s) itself is great fun. The rest of the experience across the board, since HoT, is primarily just a series of; hoping in vain, frustration, anger, and logging off, and cursing the entirety of it’s design and implementation. And, lack of fixes. We want to play, but, so often we simply can’t. Which is pure garbage.

Every topic like this, only brings to mind the “The laughing man”, (Juan Joya Borja), in the “Shocking interview with Anet developers” meme, on you tube anymore. I really do wonder if he might actually be running the show at this point.

My career depends on my ability to correctly diagnose, correctly fix, and upgrade things to prevent future failures, in a timely fashion. Which makes it even more frustrating for me to play, when this kind of stuff never ever gets fixed. It is apparent that they desperately need an A-team that is dedicated solely to fixing stuff. A team that has the unhindered authority to dig in, and get it done, and make it happen. The problem gets written up. Someone gets assigned to fix it. The work order doesn’t get closed until it’s fixed. Done, solved. Next problem.

Whatever the reasons, I highly suspect that until something changes, the massive list of things, like this, and things like the final story line, which unbelievably hasn’t been fixed yet. The “Oh well, gee whiz”, “Not my problem.”, “What should we do?”, direction will probably reign supreme on this topic as well. It’s surely a complicated system, with complicated problems. But, someone there knows exactly how to fix this stuff. I’d say, get out of their way, clear their desk, and LET THEM fix it! Until then… Well, I’d log on now, but, nah… too stressful, I’ll probably just get kicked from the organized map again anyway. Please, by all means, I’d love to be proven wrong. Fix it.

Whoever came up with the idea of the map reset for Dragon’s Stand should be strung up by their short and curlies and beaten about the head with a wet fish. It’s the worst idea ever and I can say that with confidence, because if there had been a worse idea, ANet would have implemented that one.

I’m a little confused by DS. So.. if you defeat the dragon, there’s still a map reset, right? And the map reset is described as the dragon kicking everybody out of his domain, right? Even if he’s dead? Maybe I’m reading that wrong but it’s confusing.

I’m not sure what the big deal is. It is only on the rarest occasions that I can’t get into a DS map of some kind. If I don’t squad taxi or just automatically group with people on a map reset, I usually end up in an ancillary map that other people also have been grouped up in. Then we taxi for a bit to fill our new map, and get things under way. After every reset there are countless maps that are filled with people, so even if I don’t end up on one of the big maps that’s already filled, there’s a lenient taxi time for which I can either port to another not-as-full map, or I can fill my own map.

What about the map design itself? Running around in endless circles again and again and again. Somebody will make a mistake at some point and you will have to continue running around and around until frustration, boredom and tedium keep rising and more people start screwing up. Then it’s the “blame people” phase and then everyone leaves. I don’t know who can possibly find that fun.

Its pretty simple we should be able to see the instances and manually choose them. Other games do this.

That’s because you are playing content designed for instances without proper tools to find/manage those instances.

kolompi.1287:

That’s because you are playing content designed for instances without proper tools to find/manage those instances.

Cant help feeling that its deliberate though.

Cosbuster.4379:

What about the map design itself? Running around in endless circles again and again and again. Somebody will make a mistake at some point and you will have to continue running around and around until frustration, boredom and tedium keep rising and more people start screwing up. Then it’s the “blame people” phase and then everyone leaves. I don’t know who can possibly find that fun.

Sounds like you are describing the blighting towers phase. That is a bit different. Has anyone actually tried just splitting into 4 groups? I haven’t seen any map do that but I wasn’t around when people were first figuring things out.

Khisanth.2948:

Cosbuster.4379:

What about the map design itself? Running around in endless circles again and again and again. Somebody will make a mistake at some point and you will have to continue running around and around until frustration, boredom and tedium keep rising and more people start screwing up. Then it’s the “blame people” phase and then everyone leaves. I don’t know who can possibly find that fun.

Sounds like you are describing the blighting towers phase. That is a bit different. Has anyone actually tried just splitting into 4 groups? I haven’t seen any map do that but I wasn’t around when people were first figuring things out.

3,5/4 of the people are braindead 1 spammers, you can’t ask them to guard the points with a staff 1 spam right?

Khisanth.2948:

Cosbuster.4379:

What about the map design itself? Running around in endless circles again and again and again. Somebody will make a mistake at some point and you will have to continue running around and around until frustration, boredom and tedium keep rising and more people start screwing up. Then it’s the “blame people” phase and then everyone leaves. I don’t know who can possibly find that fun.

Sounds like you are describing the blighting towers phase. That is a bit different. Has anyone actually tried just splitting into 4 groups? I haven’t seen any map do that but I wasn’t around when people were first figuring things out.

It was done in the early days.

Requires 5-10 good players at each of the 3 preservers, and everyone else at boss. Some runs had a team in the poison pit to control mobs at the source. Unfortunately the mobs are very sensitive to scaling (notice the insane number of mobs during circle start) so if extra people join the preserver groups, the mobs scale to the point it becomes impossible to keep preservers away. Its challenging but do-able by a large, disciplined guild but you only need a few clueless pugs to turn that encounter into a very frustrating exercise.

Now that interest in DS has waned and fewer guilds are able to motivate enough members, I don’t know of anyone who does this strat on a regular basis. Also there were regular map chat arguments because there’s always the random person who didn’t agree with or understand the strat.

Circle strat is easier to teach and requires less skill and coordination. It works because the preservers are on a consistent re-spawn timer, hence the need to “reset” when it all falls apart.

Unless Anet changes the fight (e.g randomizing preserver spawn timer/order), I doubt anyone will go back to the 4 group strat.

“The only option is to hope for a secondary map to frantically organize, which rarely happens, and becomes stressful, an outright maddening experience. "I WAS THERE! I WAS IN THE KITTEN KITTEN KITTEN MAP! I WAS IN THE KITTEN SQUAD!….. " Yeah, we all know how it has been going down. For many months, everyone knows. Our poor dogs, and cats, and fish, and children, and neighbors have to listen to it… lol. We all know. It has probably sold a lot of keyboards."

This….so much! It takes a long time to scrounge up those Crystalline ores to buy inscriptions, or weapons for machined weapon making from those vendor’s at the end of DS, going through this makes it even MORE fun.

Knowing I’m not done with all my characters insignia’s (druid’s insignia, reaper’s insignia, mesmer’s insignia ect) to get the elite spec ascended weapons, then each one to make a machined weapon as part of that, I only have three so far.

I have run DS many times or as many times as blackjack odds get me back in the map after reset with my group, don’t DC, all that jazz to MAYBE get to the end, and well, never seem to have enough crystallized ore to get what I need and to have to go through this every stinkin time, the blackjack odds of actually getting in to give it a run makes it bad on top of getting what noxious pods for crystalline ore I need for the vendor, well it’s not a pleasant experience all around. (I changed one word in the quote cause no wife…just fish lol)

What gets me is that Guild Wars 1 had a district system so peeps could manually select a map instance and meet up. If the district was full then it was full but you could try.

All we have is the “Join in…” method which requires another player to be an anchor. Many of us are familiar with the “map search” people that try various methods to land on a certain IP and then ferry people over. It’s so crude. The technology now is worse than it was over 10 years ago in the previous game.

Not only were GW1’s districts dynamic in adding additional districts as player demand for a map grew, I’ve seen this stuff in other games like TERA where they have a district list at the top centre of the screen. The system will assign a player a district automatically when they first enter the map, but there’s always the manual option to attempt to get into a particular instance.

Why on earth this type of tech isn’t in GW2 when it’s old tech is beyond me. It’s not even like the megaserver system is incompatible with it, it’s just not there. I can only assume some form of institutional memory loss through staff turnover else why would something so basic and useful be missing?

morrolan.9608:

kolompi.1287:

That’s because you are playing content designed for instances without proper tools to find/manage those instances.

Cant help feeling that its deliberate though.

I can think of a couple of reasons not to allow such choice.

1. They set up the game engine without having mega-server in mind, just overflows. It’s possible the underlying structures either don’t allow for choice, or that adding choice would be too resource intensive for the benefit.
2. If everyone could see how many instances there were, players would have a better idea how many are playing. Mega-server as it is disguises how many.

Cosbuster.4379:

What about the map design itself? Running around in endless circles again and again and again. Somebody will make a mistake at some point and you will have to continue running around and around until frustration, boredom and tedium keep rising and more people start screwing up. Then it’s the “blame people” phase and then everyone leaves. I don’t know who can possibly find that fun.

I was in one of these the other night that should go down in Legend, we were in there almost 2 hours our Blue Comm, who to be fair seemed very organised, failed to make sure the boss team was sorting out the pods, we failed, the other comms got ansty, then they lost their kills and started again only for us to fail on Blue again – chaos ensued, people left the map taxi’s failed, social breakdown, twitter level animosity and declarations of blood feud level revenge.

Thank God I was on an alt and at least got a couple of vistas, I would have been fine and laughed if it hadn’t been for the fact the DS I did before that was ( unknown to me) a map that had had a low pop warning early in the map that I was taxied into which then promptly shut down when we got to the towers.

Joy!

I have my own problem with the map, in addition to the complaints above which I mostly agree with, the explore phase feels like it is barely any time at all AND if there was a timer it was not noticeable to me, trying to get exalted pylon HP last night and just as i was gliding down to it i got shunted back to the starting wp with a timer popping up for map closure (regular map closure not mega server stuffups). This is an HP you can’t get to unless the meta is complete so this means I have to do another full ds meta event just to get to this HP again

My problem is the constant crashes at the final battle. You get on a good server. You are fighting away then the client crashes for no apparent reason. When you reload you end up in a blank map. the map you were in is no longer available. It pretty much ruins the entire game because of this issue. Can the Devs at least look into what causes this instead of trying to worry about a stupid profession PvP leagues. It is making the game dang near impossible to play and enjoy. Before they say it is my co,puter. I doubt that very much. Please for all the is fun look into this. The game has has this problem since release.

The other think that annoys me is the fact that after a 2 hour fight and you probably had to buy some machetes, you are still expected to fight your way through just to get the loot while being on the clock. If the boss chest’s own rewards were actually that might be justified since the pods are just bonus in that case but the boss seems chest more like ‘2 blues and a green with maybe a rare’.

Rococo.8347:

I was in one of these the other night that should go down in Legend, we were in there almost 2 hours our Blue Comm, who to be fair seemed very organised, failed to make sure the boss team was sorting out the pods, we failed, the other comms got ansty, then they lost their kills and started again only for us to fail on Blue again – chaos ensued, people left the map taxi’s failed, social breakdown, twitter level animosity and declarations of blood feud level revenge.

In my opinion, this is not indicative of bad design of the fight itself. Like, the 15 minute window at the end of the fight to find loot when it takes 5 minutes to fly to the final chest and clear out all the garbage in your bags that’s accumulated…yeah…that is bad design.

But this kind of stuff…this is what happens when you want open world events that have more complexity than just autoattacking while afk. You open the door to this type of stuff. 25% of the people in like any open world event are there to get carried; they are there to auto attack, ignore chat, do whatever they want and just hope nobody notices and singles them out individually because of the huge volume of people.

And for the most part, they can get away with it, except in certain events. Like the Vinetooth fight in AB; that fight fails nearly every time, because the break bar scaling requires almost everyone to CC and if you don’t, you lose. Even in the face of total failure unless people contribute, they still won’t contribute.

This is the Pandora’s Box that you open when you want to bring random people together with no way to filter them out or remove them if they don’t contribute in order to complete events that have more complexity than what your average monkey can handle.

The best option, I think, for dealing with it is, if you make a new tool for joining and finding instances, provide some mechanism for voting people off the island. Some form of recourse that you can take when dealing with players who are blatantly ignoring commanders or trolling to make the fight fail.

But outside of that, just prepare yourself for lots and lots of salt and rage. Because you invest like a hour of your time to complete the event and you get to final boss and you stand there and watch people blatantly ignoring map chat and causing the fight to fail and you are powerless to do anything about it….that is frustrating as hell and just blind rage inducing.

IndigoSundown.5419:

I can think of a couple of reasons not to allow such choice.

1. They set up the game engine without having mega-server in mind, just overflows. It’s possible the underlying structures either don’t allow for choice, or that adding choice would be too resource intensive for the benefit.
2. If everyone could see how many instances there were, players would have a better idea how many are playing. Mega-server as it is disguises how many.

B I N G O

I’m surprised this thread hasn’t been taken down by anet yet for being “negative and not constructive” – have they ever acknowledged any of these threads regarding problems with the megaserver, let alone DS?

I guess their definition of being constructive is posting shill threads with rose tinted glasses on how great the game is post HoT.