Guild Wars 2

Ok enough with the Aspects already as well as the ever present jump here to jump there to jump up to jump down. Not everyone is of the Mario generation and not everyone grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog. A Living Story where your skills are secondary to some skills picked up from finding crystals just does not appeal to me and in my opinion they are already well overdone.

Take for example the Dive Point in Dry Reach. To get to that point you have to be extremely quick with the keyboard/mouse combination and hope you can get tot the top before your Aspect runs out of charges. This is all fine and dandy for a Mario super achiever but for us aging folks with slower reflexes it is frustrating as all hell. What is wrong with having the character you decide to use in these Living stories use their own skills?

To put it bluntly I have given up on the Living Story for this episode. it is just not worth the aggravation to get the achievements.

What bothers me the most, is that none of the geometry in that jumping puzzle in Dry Top was specially designed for platforming. It’s more like ice skating. Dozens of tiny poles that characters constantly slide off for no apparent reason. It’s infuriating. If they had just dropped a couple of normal platforms in there, this wouldn’t be so frustrating.

Then you need to get to the Goggles, and you are in a hurry, but there are no platforms what so ever! Just angled pieces of bamboo that your character randomly either slides down from, or sometimes lands on. The collision is bizarre, and most of the time it is not the player’s fault that he’s sliding off.

This is just bad design.

I do think that they could have made Dry Top to be more friendly to people not good with aspects, especially places like the climb up to the western valley of the map with the tricky vertical Wind jumps.

That said, this has always been a more vertical, jump oriented MMO than most, and they can’t cater to everyone. If you aren’t good at jumping then there are plenty of Viewpoints, not to mention JP achievements that are unachievable from the vanilla game, so it should come as no shock that they keep introducing more jumping elements. It’s not as if they made Super Adventure Box a core gameplay element, you just have to use a few jump skills, mostly to access optional objectives.

I agree with you regarding the random sliding off. I remember having problems with it back at Labyrinthine Cliffs when I first encountered the evil bamboo last year. The collision detection is quite unforgiving – but you get used to it.

However, if you have the time and nerves to do so, you could still try to get up there without using any aspect skills, as soon as the time on your aspects runs out – just for the rest of the way up.

Here is a video of how to do that, I hope it helps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwChlYPCHDY

I have an obsession with jump puzzles. Just ask my guild leader after I dragged him through about 12.
However, I STRONGLY agree that they should not be part of LS or dependent on any crystals with timers or spinny gears throwing you across gaps (I’m looking at you, Not So Secret). I thought the Stepping Stones puzzle pushed it too far with having to have perfect timing on the entire first half just to have a chance, but if those stones drop then you’re done.
And dive spots? I just had to make sure it was an LS achievement and not linked in with the explorer achievement for getting all the dive locations. I glare at that 37/38 every day since they added that Aetherblade puzzle. I could probably get it after several tries, but climbing and having to fight my entire way up EACH TIME just isn’t worth it to me.

This is why I always tip a friendly mesmer. He was helping some of his guildmates with the jump, but after I tipped him 50s, he stayed for another 30mins porting me up until I got it.

GW2 was not presented as a jumping game when I purchased it or when I purchased gems. Jumping is a significant part of the game, but those parts are almost entirely optional. Legendary weapons are so out of reach for me that I don’t care at all for Map Completion. Therefore I simply don’t complete the Vistas after several tries and all Jumping Puzzles.
Yes, MMOs change over time but adding jumping as a requirement to experience the general map is a huge change to mechanics that is either a physical or mental barrier for many people. It is equivalent to taking a game with optional PvP and suddenly deciding to have Open World PvP. Some of the players say “cool, a new challenge” and some say “hey, I didn’t sign up for this.”
I understand that the devs are trying to add new, fun mechanics to the game but I think they are all in the camp of the players who simply don’t understand how physically or mentally challenging constant jumping can be for some people.

By the Gods, a challenging game? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

HyruleanHyroe.1473:

By the Gods, a challenging game? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

Challenging? The puzzles are linear, find point A and get to point B. The ONLY thing stuff like the current living story challenges is eye to hand coordination. The majority of the Achievement points granted in this Living Story are dependent on it, not on anything challenging such as thinking.

HyruleanHyroe, it’s certainly not a matter of whiny debilitated persons.

I personally don’t mind a lot of eye-hand coordination to win a peculiar achievement/reward, or to access an alternate (optional) content. If I can’t finish a given jumping puzzle, I’m fine as long as to finish it is not mandatory every day.
I don’t mind either if the new game design involves a bit of coordination (along with a better knowledge of the professions, and some fighting techniques, not necessarily some public, written by others meta-game data) to get the action more varied, dynamic, lively.

It’s another matter to need a higher than normal coordination or hardware, or play time, in order to win a meta-achievement or to access/advance a LS content in due time, though.
Unless this achievement is specifically and openly designed to reward a better coordination, the ownership of a better computer, or a better/longer involvement in game. And only if the overall achievement system is balanced accordingly to this design choice.

GW2 was not presented as a jumping game when I purchased it or when I purchased gems. Jumping is a significant part of the game, but those parts are almost entirely optional. Legendary weapons are so out of reach for me that I don’t care at all for Map Completion. Therefore I simply don’t complete the Vistas after several tries and all Jumping Puzzles.

And it remains optional. The jumping elements that are absolutely required for the recent patches are minimal at best.

The problem with the aspects in dry top is that they last all of about 30 seconds, which gives you little margin of error to figure out where you’re actually trying to go.

^ Basically this. The actual jumps/crystal use to get through the story (at least so far. Haven’t played Entangled yet) are quite simple and should not prove an issue for the majority of players, even ones who don’t like jumping puzzles. The JP and goggles are tougher to do, but they’re optional, and if they’re just beyond your ability, you can always ask for help from a Mesmer with Portal.

EDIT: This was written in support of Ohoni’s comment. Hyper replied while I was replying. XD

Ohoni.6057:

And it remains optional. The jumping elements that are absolutely required for the recent patches are minimal at best.

You can’t move around the map without jumping, so your comments about “optional” are completely wrong.

The jumping elements here are “annoying at best”, and “impossible at worst”. I got all the usual map elements done tonight with help from guildy pros and mesmers. I don’t like to have to rely others and I refuse to do the actual JP material here. It’s not worth my time or patience.

I’m not going to spend my gaming time yelling at my computer screen because I just slid off a stick, and died. That’s not fun, and it’s not interesting.

I’m not going to spend my gaming time yelling at my computer screen because I just slid off a stick, and died. That’s not fun, and it’s not interesting.

But that’s the point, you don’t need to “slide on a stick” to get anywhere you need to be. Those are all in the optional content. Let’s say you just want to reach Prosperity, what do you need to do? You need to use a Sun aspect once, then a Lightning aspect twice (no skill needed), and then jump up one rock with a Wind aspect. That’s it. You then need to make a couple of little hops that don’t require any aspects, and if you fail them you just end up where you jumped from, so hit jump again. Then you just hop into the water and jog over to the Prosperity WP. Done.

If you want to get the SP and Vista, then you’ll need to make one wind jump in the middle there, then a lightning jump, then a couple wind jumps, but again there are a ton of wind aspects over there and if you fail you just drop down a tiny bit. Once you get onto that level you can snag the vista and the SK and then hop back down.

If you want the second vista it’s a bit trickier, since you need to do a few wind jumps and the wall to the upper plateau is a bit much, but still, the aspect is right there, so you can miss the jump dozens of times and still barrel through.

If you want to keep up with people running between events you might need to have at least decent jumping skills, but just getting around is no acrobatic feat, most of the jumps are just straight up onto broad ledges, and even if you can’t jump once you’re at Prosperity there are a dozen or so events within walking distance that require ZERO jumping.

Theftwind.8976:

Ok enough with the Aspects already as well as the ever present jump here to jump there to jump up to jump down. Not everyone is of the Mario generation and not everyone grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog. A Living Story where your skills are secondary to some skills picked up from finding crystals just does not appeal to me and in my opinion they are already well overdone.

Take for example the Dive Point in Dry Reach. To get to that point you have to be extremely quick with the keyboard/mouse combination and hope you can get tot the top before your Aspect runs out of charges. This is all fine and dandy for a Mario super achiever but for us aging folks with slower reflexes it is frustrating as all hell. What is wrong with having the character you decide to use in these Living stories use their own skills?

To put it bluntly I have given up on the Living Story for this episode. it is just not worth the aggravation to get the achievements.

Are you talking about the optional dive goggles spot at the very top that has nothing to do with Living Story but is just an optional JP/dive point of the zone?

The Living Story is taking place in the zone, the zone isn’t the Living Story. The zone is a new zone. It will have diving goggles/JPs/POIs/Vistas like a normal zone. Do you complain about dive goggles in other zones? Probably not because they are optional as well.

Some of this content is meant to be hard for players with more skill. That’s why they make it optional. At no point in the Living Story do they tell you to get to the diving goggles, you don’t even have to go to the platform below the diving goggles in the Living Story.

Draknar.5748:

Are you talking about the optional dive goggles spot at the very top that has nothing to do with Living Story but is just an optional JP/dive point of the zone?

The Living Story is taking place in the zone, the zone isn’t the Living Story. The zone is a new zone. It will have diving goggles/JPs/POIs/Vistas like a normal zone. Do you complain about dive goggles in other zones? Probably not because they are optional as well.

Some of this content is meant to be hard for players with more skill. That’s why they make it optional. At no point in the Living Story do they tell you to get to the diving goggles, you don’t even have to go to the platform below the diving goggles in the Living Story.

Considering I require 1 more Dive point for Dive Master (World wide) and also considering that they tie Achievement points to such dive locations (Dive Master, Prospect Valley) is it truly optional? If they tie achievement points to eye/hand coordination is it fair to others that lack that twitch skill? If they want to make it truly optional then give a title for it without the achievement points.

I believe that the Dry Top diving goggles does not count towards the Dive Master achievement, as it has its own separate achievement. Same way that the “Best. Dive. Ever” and “The Goggles Do Nothing!” do not count towards Dive Master.

Theftwind.8976:

Considering I require 1 more Dive point for Dive Master (World wide) and also considering that they tie Achievement points to such dive locations (Dive Master, Prospect Valley) is it truly optional? If they tie achievement points to eye/hand coordination is it fair to others that lack that twitch skill? If they want to make it truly optional then give a title for it without the achievement points.

Achievements are always, always 100% optional. They are generally additional sets of circumstances under which to complete a task in order to increase difficulty and replayability. If all achievements were easily obtained by every player, they wouldn’t be achievements. They’re there to recognize and reward players who put enough effort in to get them. That effort may take the form of an investment of time or gold, puzzling out some sort of riddle, or honing their skills in order to complete a more reflexive task. If you can’t be bothered to make the same investment, you under no circumstances deserve the achievement. So yes, it’s fair.

Theftwind.8976:

HyruleanHyroe.1473:

By the Gods, a challenging game? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

Challenging? The puzzles are linear, find point A and get to point B. The ONLY thing stuff like the current living story challenges is eye to hand coordination. The majority of the Achievement points granted in this Living Story are dependent on it, not on anything challenging such as thinking.

Only some of the puzzles are linear. Quite a few are multilinear. In addition, several can be shortcut. The greater challenge seems to be using your eyes to judge possible paths and not relying on videos.

Theftwind.8976:

Ok enough with the Aspects already as well as the ever present jump here to jump there to jump up to jump down. Not everyone is of the Mario generation and not everyone grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog. A Living Story where your skills are secondary to some skills picked up from finding crystals just does not appeal to me and in my opinion they are already well overdone.

Take for example the Dive Point in Dry Reach. To get to that point you have to be extremely quick with the keyboard/mouse combination and hope you can get tot the top before your Aspect runs out of charges. This is all fine and dandy for a Mario super achiever but for us aging folks with slower reflexes it is frustrating as all hell. What is wrong with having the character you decide to use in these Living stories use their own skills?

To put it bluntly I have given up on the Living Story for this episode. it is just not worth the aggravation to get the achievements.

I completely agree. This is a RPG: why do my skills matter? When roleplaying, I want to pretend I am someone that is not myself. That character is good at things that I am not. And I don’t want to be constantly reminded that I am not good at something (jumping).

This is a skill based game. If there’s no difficulty, then there’s no point to this game…

You’re not relying defensive stats to survive.

And that you’d still bring a part of yourself, even if roleplaying.

Djinn.9245:

I completely agree. This is a RPG: why do my skills matter? When roleplaying, I want to pretend I am someone that is not myself. That character is good at things that I am not. And I don’t want to be constantly reminded that I am not good at something (jumping).

Because your keyboard and mouse inputs control your character, not your imagination. Players vary in skill and some like challenge. If you do not like challenge, then don’t do the challenging optional content.

Sounds like tabletop games may be more your speed.

Draknar.5748:

Djinn.9245:

I completely agree. This is a RPG: why do my skills matter? When roleplaying, I want to pretend I am someone that is not myself. That character is good at things that I am not. And I don’t want to be constantly reminded that I am not good at something (jumping).

Because your keyboard and mouse inputs control your character, not your imagination. Players vary in skill and some like challenge. If you do not like challenge, then don’t do the challenging optional content.

Sounds like tabletop games may be more your speed.

Eeeeeeeeh, most tabletop games still require some level of skill in order to succeed. I’m thinking this is more a job for a LOTR marathon.

Theftwind.8976:

Considering I require 1 more Dive point for Dive Master (World wide) and also considering that they tie Achievement points to such dive locations (Dive Master, Prospect Valley) is it truly optional? If they tie achievement points to eye/hand coordination is it fair to others that lack that twitch skill? If they want to make it truly optional then give a title for it without the achievement points.

Yes. It’s still optional. How could it being tied to an achievement point in any such way ever make it not optional? It’s a game. You choose what you want to do. You want the achievement point work for it like the rest of us. If you can’t do it, bummer. That may seem harsh but can you imagine how pointlessly trivial this game would be if they made every single bit of content possible by every single person?

Sorin.4310:

Yes. It’s still optional. How could it being tied to an achievement point in any such way ever make it not optional? It’s a game. You choose what you want to do. You want the achievement point work for it like the rest of us. If you can’t do it, bummer. That may seem harsh but can you imagine how pointlessly trivial this game would be if they made every single bit of content possible by every single person?

Difficult jumping puzzles? Mad King’s Clock Tower. Winter Wonderland. Dark Reverie. And then there are the fun ones. Weyant’s Revenge, Hidden Garden, Shaman’s Rookery.

. . . none of them are required. And if you really want to do them anyway, for most of them you just find a mesmer willing to work with you. Jumping Puzzle Easy Mode unlocked!

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Difficult jumping puzzles? Mad King’s Clock Tower.

Still the thing I’m proudest of doing in this game. I’m a rotten platformer (though significantly better these days) and I spent my weekend — we’re talking at least 12-14 hours — slooooowly getting better until I finished it.

I could have gotten my spouse to take my character through for me, but it wasn’t about the stupid rare in the chest, it was about doing it, dangit. OP I sympathize with being a crappy platformer, but you CAN get better if you’re willing to put the time in.

Bump because this is still highly relevant, nothing has been done to make the jumps be actually doable, also i think the top aspect is like 15 seconds tops, it usually runs out even before i get to the platform with the chest.