Guild Wars 2

I’m writing this while waiting out yet another Lunatic Inquisition, maxing the repeat APs before the event goes away, and it occurred to me that minigames are entirely defeating their own purpose when it comes to their respective achievements during the Living Story arc in which they are introduced.

Mini games are a fun diversion from normal play with quirky rules that apply only in their respective arenas. I’m all on-board for that type of activity. In and of themselves, they’re a great time.

However, when it comes to the grindiness of the achievements, it puts the absolute worst taste in my mouth regarding the games that I otherwise would probably enjoy. This isn’t a new development:

Crab Toss, Sanctum Sprint, Southsun Survivor, Aspect Arena. ALL of them had ridiculously grindy achievements that went along with them. Now, I don’t mind the permanent activity achievements. Those, being always available, I view more like the WvW achievements. Still stupidly high, but at least in manageable chunks, I could imagine getting there eventually.

I believe this is defeating the purpose of minigames because people should be able to come and go as they please, with reasonable requirements to the achievements, people will be able to come in, get their feet wet and understand how you play the games. Then, they can play AS THEY CHOOSE TO.

The difference is, as it stands, I get entirely burned out on the minigame in question until WAY after the event has ended. I have done all of the achievements for all of the Living Story updates so far, but the only memories I have of the minigames are frustration and total apathy by the end of them. That isn’t right. I should be excited when I run up to the daily activity NPC, and after the horror (har har) that has been the Lunatic Inquisition grind, I will. not. be doing activities for a good long while.

This doesn’t even take into account that there are a lot of people who join in this activity, ask innocently the ‘how do i do this?’ questions, and get really flippant responses because people are forced to grind on this before the activity is taken out in the next update

Who is forcing you to grind through achievement points? No person other than yourself.

The real issue is people with the mentality of “I need to get every achievement point possible!” Burning themselves out on it, not the players who play the Minigames as intended IE for fun/to take a break from the rest of the game.

You’re essentially complaining saying that it’s boring, and “grindy” it’s totally optional dude, don’t play it if you’re getting burnt out.

I really hate the response of ‘if you don’t like it, don’t get it’, but being limited availability, and some of them being worth the entirely ‘monthly’ category, it’s kind of a non-starter to me to suggest completely ignoring it. Not even factoring in that Achievement rewards are chests that contain gold, badges, GEMS, boosters, Karma, and a smattering of PvP skins.

Achievement Point chests are, in my opinion, one of the best reward-per-time things you can get, because of the wide range of items that you get that come from them. To completely ignore minigames are to forgo hundreds of temporarily-available APs at this point. It’s completely off-kilter to me that someone would suggest ignoring them.

The reality of the matter is, these need to be toned down. If someone wants to play a minigame after they’ve already achieved all of the LS stuff, it’s because the game has its own merits. That should be the goal, not burning out players based on a tiny portion of what the LS updates should entail.

The way I see it, the high-cost achievements are meant to reward players in the long-term.

Players can play the mini-games on a somewhat regular basis, a few times a day every few days, and still get rewarded months down the line. Just the other day I got the Tier 11 Sanctum Sprint crystal-obsessed achievement (even though I’ve played quite a bit of SS already) and it was like “Oh, cool, an achievement, nice little bonus”.

That some people feel the need to get ALL the achievements right now, making those people feel “forced” to grind out extremely high numbers all at once, is a problem with the players, not the achievement system. The numbers are high because they’re meant to continue rewarding players for months or years. Not because Anet “wants” players to grind for a few days straight to get them right now.

Electro, we actually agree on that, as I mentioned in the first post.

I’m referring to the LS portion of these, which have players grind out tons of wins/collectables/whathaveyous during a single 2 week period.

Pinkunicorn of Dethecus.3217:

Electro, we actually agree on that, as I mentioned in the first post.

I’m referring to the LS portion of these, which have players grind out tons of wins/collectables/whathaveyous during a single 2 week period.

Some of the LS minigames were fine. Sanctum Sprint was reasonable with its achieves. So was Aspect Arena. Dragon Ball wasn’t too bad either, aside from the fact that people were just AFK’ing to get the requisite number of plays because there was nothing to prevent that at that time.

The only ones that really stand out as unreasonable are Southsun Survival (that point achieve >.<) and Lunatic Inquisition. And for LI, its probably poor planning due to the fact that it was sort of last-minute to add in that achievement (didn’t even get added until after the initial release), and so they just used their recurring “Activity Regular” code without considering that it doesn’t really work with a limited-time activity.