Guild Wars 2

Ahhh it’s that time of the year, Wintersday! My favorite festival!

But now I wonder, how much will change this year? If anything at all?

I understand that Halloween was ‘rushed’, some devs pulled a few all nighters to save Halloween, and in the end it was the same thing like every year, except they added the Ascent to Madness from the first Halloween back (still nothing new). And removed the Lunatic thingy where you chase players through the labyrinth (what happened with that pumpkin game we had at the first Halloween though?).

Yeah they had to revamp the new new Lion’s Arch to fit the festival and added a new item (Nightfury) which is locked behind a wall of gold. But that’s it, the content was the same, even the achievements were a copy paste (maybe I’m wrong but I think the ones from last year completely reset so now we had to do them all over again to regain the points we lost?)

So now I wonder, will the same happen to Wintersday. Will they actually have the time to make something new with it? And no, I don’t count LA decorations and new skins (props to the devs who are working on those of course, don’t mean to devalue their work).

Will they copy paste the achievements again, unlock Toypocalypse, the jumping puzzle and that PvP arena thingy with guns? Will they add some Nightfury rank item for Wintersday as well to make people farm like crazy to make it feel like there is something to do during the Wintersday too?

What are your thoughts guys, do you think that festivals should receive some love as well? What would you like to see added to Wintersday, do you have some idea for a new game that could be very fun?

First thing that comes to my mind is how awesome it would be to have some kind of a race for Wintersday, snowboarding race for example.

Please don’t mistake this post for whining and/or bashing of the content like Halloween or things that ArenaNet give us. Even if Wintersday comes with nothing new I know that I will spend a lot of hours just playing the JP and Toypocalypse cause I love em. So please, discuss about your thoughts and things that you would like to see changed or brought back.

I would be surprised to see any major updates to Halloween or Wintersday going forward. Traditionally festivals are recurring year on year, with the same content, albeit new rewards. This cuts down on development time for something that is released for a short window in a given year.

At the very least, activities should always carry over and not be removed or changed year on year. There was a complaint last years Wintersday about one of the activities. That will hopefully be rectified this year.

As for rewards, I think Nightfury was a bit extreme for a festival item, but there is no reason not to continue to do things like this with a big emphasis on “discovering” the recipe. Look how much fun the community had with John Smiths forum short story which gave clues on unlocking a Mystic Forge recipe for example.

In the spirit of your thread though, I will at least suggest 1 new activity.
Wintersday Gauntlet.
An all new set of enemies to take on which are Grentchs in various Wintersday themed disguises

One more thing that came to mind was a snowball fight that requires you to use first person view with the action cam.

Don’t forget that they said Wintersday will stay in Divinity’s Reach so there should be no needing to change the decorations from last year unless they add more I guess, lol.

I expect nonstop complaining about the Ringing the Bells again. It happens every year. It’s become something of a tradition on these boards.

I get your point, its nice to have new content for the holidays, BUT they did do Wintersday pretty much fine last year. Toypocalypse maybe needs a few tweaks though but thats just minor. As long as I get to spend hours of my life on that JP and hours more wondering around Divinities reach throwing snowballs I will be happy lol

omg, I still haven’t opened… stuff from last year’s Wintersday.

I was doing an audit of all my character’s inventories and ran across some boxes. And… stuff.