Guild Wars 2

Long time player, first time poster. Hopefully this isn’t in the wrong section, but it is more of a discussion as to what the major cause of frustration is for me in this game rather than a suggestion on how to change the game. I will happily repost elsewhere if the moderators feel I have posted this in the wrong place.

This game has occasional difficult content, such as Liadri and the Mad King’s Clocktower. As an initial disclaimer, I want to point out that I successfully completed both of these challenges, but I found them incredibly frustrating at times and it reduced my enjoyment of them.

Failure is never going to be as fun as success and these were difficult encounters that took almost everyone who completed them multiple attempts. Feeling like you failed for no reason can be frustrating. Knowing you lost whatever resources it cost you to enter a challenge in the first place can be frustrating. These frustrations are, in my opinion, acceptable. Everything does not need to be handed to players on a silver platter, but something drove me to rage far more than any of these common factors that I have seen people complaining about.

What did I find most frustrating about these encounters?

Forced down time after failure.

During the Mad King’s Clocktower failure resulted in being returned to the start of the tower, where you had to wait for a timer to tick down before you could attempt the puzzle again. There was more or less nothing that you could do during this period and the earlier you failed in your attempt, the longer you had to wait.

Even after getting almost to the end of the puzzle multiple times and reasonably consistently it was not usual for me to fail one of the first few jumps in the clustercuss of giant Norn trying to get ahead of the pack and be forced to stare at nothing for a couple of minutes. This got me out of my jumping rhythm and tended to put me on tilt, making it more likely that I would fail at my next attempt.

For this reason, I opted out of the Wintersday jumping puzzle completely. The rewards did not seem stellar and I did not want to go through the frustration of watching a timer bar tick down after each failure again.

During the Queen’s Gauntlet, failure resulted in death and teleportation to the edge of the ring. At peak times there would be multiple people standing around waiting to resurrect you, but that usually meant you were at the back of a queue and would have to wait several minutes before trying again. At low times, you had no option but to waypoint back to the centre of the pavilion and run all the way back to the arenas, assuming no one had started a challenge in the interim.

An easy way to remove this frustration would be to make all of these kinds of events instanced as a majority of the delays arise from waiting for other players. This would kill one of the greatest social elements of these kinds of events. The quipping and camaraderie that occurred during the Mad King’s Clocktower almost made the downtime bearable, at least when I was consistently making it almost to the end of the puzzle. For this reason, instancing all of these kinds of challenges is not an ideal solution.

What I would like to see is an option for players to remove themselves from the communal rooms for practice or achievement chasing purposes. I had a friend who left his account logged in to a Mad King’s Clocktower overflow overnight to ensure that he was the only person within that overflow when he came back in the morning. This allowed him to finish the jumping puzzle without his vision being obscured by the other players, the aspect he had found most frustrating.

Something like running back to the NPC required to start a challenge after failure should not be part of the challenge. My Queen’s Gauntlet experience could have been much improved by failure resulting in me being downed at the location I was teleported to after death instead of being defeated. If this were the case I could have immediately bandaged myself up and attempted to crowd control Chomper away from that meat for the 18th time immediately instead of waypointing back and running back for almost as long as the fight itself took. I realise this may make failure seem cheaper, but this could be easily fixed by increasing the cost of entry and the size of the reward for winning.

I hope any discussion in this thread can be limited to frustration related to forced down time after failure as opposed to the other frustrations that occurred during these two particular challenges, but the internet will be the internet.

Anyway, tl;dr: For me, the most frustrating part of difficult challenges is when I am forced to wait before I can attempt them again.

Hi misery and welcome to the forum

Let me start that I understand your issue, but not your frustration. I don’t really like jumping puzzles, so after 4 tries at the mad king clock tower I gave up. The wintersday one I actually only tried once to see it was the same deal. The same goes for the gauntlet. These are not the challenges I seek. The point is that the game is made for many different people.. Some are much better players then me. I do most things with logic and knowledge and being inventive, cause I lack good gaming skills (this has also to do with a physical handicap).

I think you are better in these things, but not as good as some. The way I see the gauntlet and the clocktower are as things designed to entertain a different breed of players. Same goes for the super adventure box. I just don’t like it. But I don’t get frustrated trying. I still have 5 of my 11 characterslots to level to 80.

As for forced downtime after failure.
For the mad king tower, I do think there is an additional benefit to having the zone for multiple players. It also helped me to follow others. You can argue that there where too many, but a solo instance is not something I would prefer. So let less people in the zone and maybe give something to do during the waiting time (e.g.helping others by doing a simpler puzzle in the waiting room that makes the destruction (or whatever is chasing the players) go up slower). That would make the waiting time and the cooperative part of the game better.

As for the gauntlet. I do think that after defeat there should be death (and not downed) inlcuding damaged armor. However a means of teleporting from the waypoint to the ring would be very welcome indeed.

So tl;dr : don’t frustrate your whole gw2 experience by two activity’s that you like less then others.

I don’t recall being particularly annoyed with the seasonal jumping puzzles (quickly gave up on clock tower because it wasn’t fun, completed wintersday), but a friend of mine did complain that completing the jumping puzzles on a computer with low specs was very difficult when the areas were crowded. I think he ended up waiting until like 3 AM to finish them. That would be another very good reason to add an instanced option for this type of event.

The Clocktower and Gauntlet are two different situations although they share the downtime between resetting. (checking says I go over some similar points as misery).

For clocktower, the goal was to have people compete against themselves and each other to complete the puzzle. Obviously there are issues when you implement it so you compete with people in the same overflow shard and the event starts at regular intervals and doesn’t end until every player in the puzzle finishes or dies. They would have to implement it differently to remove the queue for the next attempt, likely with random grouping, but wasn’t worth not being able to compete with the same people repeatedly. They did the same with Crab Toss activity, for example, except you are competing against other in a contest, rather than a time raced, which works better for the format. Anet needs a solution that will satisfy allowing people to race together in a jumping puzzle and not have excessive queue times.

They added snowballs to the Wintersday puzzle as one solution, but that’s a distraction. I would love a solo instance as a solution for the downtime. They did this with Canach’s Lair, where the player learns the mechanics in a basic setting before pushing them into the MMO version. That provides a medium between making completely solo instances for the activities against participating with other players.

For Queen’s Gauntlet, they went a completely different way, which I have reasons for criticism, many which relate to the queue and downtime. The battles can easily be an instance, they did just that for Poyaqui in Belcher’s Bluff. The reason it isn’t is so other players can watch you while they wait their turn. But they aren’t given the choice to watch you or fight, they are forced into a queue. They also don’t have a camera view, which could easily be done because this was done in Sanctum Sprint. If they really thought people would watch the fights, this was a mediocre effort and wasn’t worth the drawbacks. You are required to pay a fee to attempt like a gamble, and need to raise the stakes to get greater rewards. This isn’t a moa race however, and people gambling on their skills is guaranteed to cause issues somewhere. Time is spent acquiring the tickets, which are from activities/achievements related to the release, the goal being to attract people to Queen’s Gauntlet. The problem is, these activities are open world dynamic events that focus on the PvE crowd. This is not the same crowd that enjoys the high stakes, high skill solo play with mastery of the character. This pretty much forces people who don’t enjoy open world activities much to participate in them because the ticket was made account bound.

In addition to the time it takes to acquire the tickets, the players are forced into the queue by design, for the reason for other players to watch, the only reason. If you are defeated, you are teleported outside and require resurrecting. This relies on other people 1) being in queue waiting or 2) watching you. Both can be unreliable at best, especially when players lose interest in the Gauntlet or get distracted by the new release. Now it would make some sense to be defeated, as it will cost you time and coin to make your way back, but if you design the matches to take many attempts, this will quickly become tedious. This could’ve been completely avoided by doing like the rest of the game and putting you in downed state. That way you can participate in an activity designed to be solo by yourself without relying on others. You can’t rely on other people just because you designed the release to get people to Queen’s Gauntlet. This ends up wasting time for the people attempting the Gauntlet and people being pushed towards it without no significant benefit.