Guild Wars 2

The new Vinewrath boss has a lot of good elements, but I think its core design is flawed by the way the meta structure of GW2 functions. If everything goes right, then your map gets to a breach, you kill (or don’t kill) the breach bosses in five minutes, wait around another two minutes, and then fight the Vinewrath. This seems to take a minimum of around 15-20 minutes, which is a reasonable amount of time for the battle to take, and the rewards seem at least worth that time. So when it all goes right, it’s a good thing.

But what about when it all goes wrong? Then the fight ends up taking 45 minutes or more, and at the end of that, you get practically nothing. Certainly less than you would receive doing anything else in the game. And the problem is that you have no idea which it will be going in. You can’t really tell whether you will get a decent reward or whether it will be a complete waste of time until at least ~15 minutes in, when you see that some of the teams are failing, and even then you can’t get a complete picture of what’s going on.

So this seems to represent one of the core problems with GW2’s group content, that it may be well designed for well organized groups, but the mechanics that surround that are horrible for helping players to form those groups. Even if a well coordinated map does form, and fills, players have to “join spam” trying to get in.

I think that for an event like this to truly work well, they need to make a few changes to how the game functions. For one thing, you need to be able to queue up for full maps, rather than have to LFG for people already in them, and spam “join” until you get in. You should just be able to LFG for a dedicated boss kill map (not for people advertising that they are on the map, but for the map itself whether people advertise it or not), and you could be able to click once to queue for it, just like for a full WvW map or PvP match.

And they do need dedicated boss clear maps, ones that are distinct from the maps in which players are just trying to get Mordrem organs, or badge/chest farming, or jump puzzleing. There need to be maps that are defined by the game as being for people who intend to take on the meta-boss, and thus all the people on that map should have that goal in mind. This may not be appropriate for lower level zones, but by the time players are able to hit the Silverwastes, they should know what their goals are, and what they aren’t. A player who does not want to work towards the meta goal can find himself on another map, where he loses nothing, and where the people trying to beat the boss are not passively harmed by his presence.

Also, on events like this, there needs to be less turnaround on failure. Events that take long periods of time should be almost guaranteed to offer a solid reward for that time eventually. Events that you can fail outright, and receive nothing at all, should be relatively short, 15 minutes even if you do everything wrong. If the idea is that you can fail a lane and then get a second chance, then that second chance needs to have better odds of succeeding than the first. Repeated failures should make subsequent attempts easier, like perhaps the bosses only heal up to 50% each attempt. This would still mean that a coordinated and dedicated team could receive their reward much faster and move on to a different activity, but it would at least mean that players willing to stick the fight out are able to get their rewards eventually for their perseverance.

Basically, the game needs to do a better job of letting players know whether they are about to waste forty minutes of their time that they could be doing something they would more enjoy, and ideally it would never waste their time at all.

you didn’t play the marionette boss, am i right? :P

The time/reward is certainly going to be an issue looking forward. Not a problem now since most people will be after the carapace chest piece, but once this is out of the way, chest farming will resume the second the breach is over.

Yeah, the map was already a pain and it is getting worse. It is easy enough to retake a fort or escort a dolyak. But then comes the defense events, and it all goes pear shaped (trolls and griffs everywhere…). But when finally a breach is reached, people pop out of the proverbial woodwork to zerg the champs.

Back before megaservers there may have been worth it to get some server organization going. but now it is every humanoid for himself…

you didn’t play the marionette boss, am i right? :P

I did, and raised many points in response to that one, some of which the new one does better, many of them it does even worse. The Marionette had several advantages over the new one, such as being on a fixed schedule, and only taking about 15 minutes no matter what, but it also had many of the same issues of a “good map” being great and a “bad map” being horrible, and leaving you very little casual control over which you ended up on.