Guild Wars 2

just to make something clear, zergs are NOT the core of the game, they are the bad brother of team play.

Ohoni.6057:

The law of averages. If you design content to work for large groups, then you design it on the assumption that a certain portion of them will completely kitten it up, but that the rest will figure it out.

If you design it properly then the mechanics will become obvious enough over a short amount of time, such as the Ogre Birdseed mechanic, which I figured out for myself on the first day and spread to the other players (several of whom likely also figured it out themselves). We won that boss fight, but lost the encounter because we had played the game how ANet had trained us to over two years, by grouping together and taking each threat out one at a time.

If you design it properly then the punishments, and the reasons for it, are obvious to the user, and without having to be told, or trial and error it, players would know automatically “this event has too many people at it, some of us should leave, but we will still receive full rewards for completing it.”

Yes and no. Depends on difficulty. Harder content = less room for error. Easier content = more room for error. It is like running full zerk dps Ele versus something with a bit more passive defense. More passive defense means more room for error.

My original reply was to you saying that you want difficult content but less coordination required which I find borderline impossible since some mechanics have to be simpler or dumbed down in order to increase the margin of error in case people mess up.

Trial and error are part of the game. How did people figure out what is good in dungeons for over a year now. Trial and error. Mathematical analysis (dps and such). It is part of the game. It states it clearly in the top right that you have x time remaining for gold reward. Like iono how it cannot be any more obvious. The problem is simply people don’t want to listen.

And while QP last year didn’t bother me, I don’t mind the mechanics changes to this years either, EXCEPT for the scaling issues. I’m not complaining that they gave the bosses more unique effects to worry about, I don’t think anyone is, I’m complaining that they ALLOW the entire map to zerg a single boss, but harshly PUNISH players for doing so, by making them scale to take ten minutes or more each if you let them scale up like that. They should either NOT allow it, or NOT punish players for zerging it, I really don’t care which, but I am by no means advocating that they nerf the bosses’ unique mechanics or allow players to “spam 1” to complete it.

Scaling issues exist last year. The only difference is that you were rewarded for zerging it. This year if you zerg a boss then your rewards will suffer.

They punish players for doing something incorrectly. The point of the event is not to zerg the point is to split up. If you don’t punish players for zerging it then you are by definition allowing people to zerg without consequences. Not allowing over X amount of players to join a side looks great on paper but poses some problems. How can you guarantee certain numbers on each side. And how will scaling work if you have less than a full map to split into 6 areas.

Ohoni.6057:

When dealing with content choice though, if the champ trains have been allowed to run for about a year now without destroying the game, then surely they could either add new content that is similar but different in a way they’d prefer, and not nerf champ trains until a better alternative structure existed. I didn’t do those trains much myself, but I recognized their value.

The context changed, however.
The removal of repair costs gives everyone more money, the less personally skilled players slightly more so than the more skilled ones (since on average they’ll die more often).

I suspect that whoever does the economy at ANet decided that a one-time cost for unlocking triats – correctly – doesn’t offset a permanent reduction in outgoing money.
So they needed something which impacts economy income across the board, and they most likely decided that taking from the pure grinding players and giving it to everyone (via the lack of repair costs) was the way to go forward.

You’re right, on an atomic level there’s no reason to change the champ train. But that ignores the game around, which is no longer the same as when Champ loot got patched in.

Larynx.2453:

Conlcusion: do NOT hate the zerg. Teach the zerg the good practices. Using brain is a difficult activity and people have to be shaken so that the head starts working. And everyone starts winning shinies (or tokens)

you know a zerg is a brainless thing, so you can’t really hate the zerg for dooing something not in the right way, coz if they would do it in the right way that would imply a brain.

I do hate the zerg for coming out of WvW, that’s where they belong and should stay.

PS. this is not meant as to be disrespectful toward the people, but it can be seen that way toward the mechanism.
I loved zerging in Starcraft and Total Annihilation Kingdoms, but that coordinating one. I cannot understand the joy of being part of a Zerg. sorry for that.

Lambent.6375:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Ohoni.6057:

OP obviously does not realize that it’s less about HATING the ZERG than about doing the event properly to earn BETTER rewards….. Then again, maybe some players want to use Skill 1, die repeatedly and be AFK for 40 minutes than actually FIGHT a boss (maybe 2) for less than 10 minutes and earn much better loot…..that seems typical of some of the GW2 player base.

Again, not paying attention, but at least some other people are actually reading.

I fully read your OP. You are stating that because YOU like to ZERG no content that does not SUPPORT the Zerg mentality should exist….. You emphatically imply that everyone should enjoy Zerging and it’s not “GW2 cannon” if you don’t “embrace the Zerg”…..total tripe.

No, he is saying anti zerg content was implemented poorly, and shouldn’t be implemented while there are still no in game tools to aid with the coordination that these events require.

That is NOT what the OP stated….re-read it. Him changing his tune after being called out for his OP is does not change his original, “ZERG IS CORE OF GAME….EMBRACE IT!” statements…..THAT is what I am commenting on (not his backtracking and changing his story later in the thread).

Brother Grimm.5176:

Lambent.6375:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Ohoni.6057:

OP obviously does not realize that it’s less about HATING the ZERG than about doing the event properly to earn BETTER rewards….. Then again, maybe some players want to use Skill 1, die repeatedly and be AFK for 40 minutes than actually FIGHT a boss (maybe 2) for less than 10 minutes and earn much better loot…..that seems typical of some of the GW2 player base.

Again, not paying attention, but at least some other people are actually reading.

I fully read your OP. You are stating that because YOU like to ZERG no content that does not SUPPORT the Zerg mentality should exist….. You emphatically imply that everyone should enjoy Zerging and it’s not “GW2 cannon” if you don’t “embrace the Zerg”…..total tripe.

No, he is saying anti zerg content was implemented poorly, and shouldn’t be implemented while there are still no in game tools to aid with the coordination that these events require.

That is NOT what the OP stated….re-read it. Him changing his tune after being called out for his OP is does not change his original, “ZERG IS CORE OF GAME….EMBRACE IT!” statements…..THAT is what I am commenting on (not his backtracking and changing his story later in the thread).

Im not sure where you see “Zerg is core of game…Embrace It!”.. I do not even see that between the lines of what was typed. The OP clearly shows concern for changing the gameplan without providing the necessary tools or putting the necessary utilities in place, to do so. If they would have thought this all the way through maybe they would have made it so you have to do a different event first, or maybe a few different events first, before getting an item that would “unlock” the boss blitz. (Instead of forcing you to spend gold on it..) You, like me may also wonder why they didnt just make a registration NPC that you could register with. Novel idea incoming.. Give us alliances for the event. 1 Party = 5 people. 1 Alliance = Up to 6 parties with a cap on 2 Alliances being able to join together for a total of 12 parties. We wouldnt need to show each additional party on the screen, just the one you are in. Party chat can incorporate all parties together, or make another channel labeled Alliance. Party leader invites other party leaders to enact the alliance mode… etc.. Registration NPC registers your alliance.. Use item/s to start the boss blitz after discussing which party is going where. (If you dont have multiple party leaders with commander tags, use a ctrl T target on them) I understand this may cause issues for pugs/randoms.. incorporate it into LFG then.

Seriously, if the time was taken to make this functional this thread wouldnt exist. It would be a different thread with the title “Boss Blitz is rad. Alliances are the ish.. Thanks Anet” or something along those lines I imagine. Instead we have people disagreeing over something that was never stated due to their inability to decipher what they are reading. Ohoni, we fight perception everyday, hang in there.

chronometria.3708:

I was surprised at the level to which this event has been degraded in its design.

1 – Doesn’t drop tier 5 and 6 mats (which we desperately need due to horrible pricing at the moment)

2 – Apparently expects group splitting, but lacks any means to assist players in doing that.

3 – Terrible rewards that in no way match the time and effort the event requires.

4 – Bosses that are uneven in difficulty and that usually punish melee.

5 – Having to pay to begin the event.

Needless to say, it could only really be worse if it, say, permanently killed our characters on death or something similarly disastrous. As it is, there is just no reason to do this and I`m already seeing people simply going elsewhere.

1. Why would they? This complaint is rather out of nowhere.

2. What exactly would you propose as a “means to assist players in [splitting]”? You’d think the fact that you can’t succeed without splitting should be enough.

3. Once a proper group has actually got their act together, the actual event takes ~5 minutes to do. So, they could just constantly pop the events and have them done rather quickly; for as many times as they are willing to do it, since there is no cool-down on starting it and no limit to how many times you can do it.

4. The difficulty of the bosses is close enough that roughly equal sized groups can get them all to ~5% health within 1 minute of each other. Don’t expect any one build to be effective against all enemies; players should be aware of what kinds of builds are best against different enemies.

5. You don’t have to pay for the event to start, just to speed it up. If you really want to speed it up, getting everyone to chip in probably makes the cost to each person rather small.

Romek.4201:

but joining a ts with 100+ ppl trieing to organize for 2 hours all this ppl to do one supercool arenanet-world-event is more fun?

Organizing shouldn’t take anywhere near that long. The hardest part of getting a Gold attempt together is getting everyone into the same instance and finding an instance that isn’t stuck with a few bosses still up.

Once you’ve got everyone into the same instance, the actual organization shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

people seem to forget where the term zergin evne comes from.
zerging is a starcraft stratigy of the zerg race. they can build very cheap units called zerglings. these can be built to hundred of units in a game. and their onyl purpose is to attack in a mass without any big stratigy other then micromanagment. how ever witht he right stratigy you can destroy it with more powerful and less units.

and a zeg in MMOs is basicly the same. not much stratigy and does only one thing. many on one and hitting with simple not much dmg hits.

zerg as ONE SC palyer might be a strategy, but if each zergling is controlled individualy its not. its just un satisfying wave. and until recently the best way to farm kitten.

and thats what really bugs all of you. you have to do kitten to get somethin done. you can´t jsut mindlessly go into a boss fight and exspect good lootz and legendaries OMGZ.

but thats what gw2 lacked since launch what people from traditional MMOs missed. THAT kind of end game that requires skill then just mass.
or were those complainers people who had no idea of raids? where jsut expsecting big HP bosses they can down with hundred men?
in either case if a MMO relies on zerg to much to often it becomes boring. i mean how many of you siad i finshed this and that allready. i have my fractales up i bought all skins i wanted? many of you do because it was easy to farm the gold and mats to do so.

The problem is with the players, not the game design. If you can’t follow something as simple as “split groups”, you need to either skip these types of content or go back to playing your Fisher-Price toys.

just to make something clear, zergs are NOT the core of the game, they are the bad brother of team play.

But they are still the core gameplay mechanic for 99% of open world content in this game, and have been so for two years now.

Yes and no. Depends on difficulty. Harder content = less room for error. Easier content = more room for error.

In a sense, but GOOD harder content does not require failure to teach. That is, if difficult content is well designed, you shouldn’t have to fail it to figure out what you did wrong, much less fail it several times (or look it up online). Good difficult content teaches you AS you play, so that you can recover and win. You might die a few times and have to run back, but you shouldn’t receive nothing for the event.

My original reply was to you saying that you want difficult content but less coordination required which I find borderline impossible since some mechanics have to be simpler or dumbed down in order to increase the margin of error in case people mess up.

I think difficulty should be measured in how often YOU die, not in whether the event in total fails or not. I think that when you have events that require dozens of players to cooperate, they should almost never fail, everyone should always get a reward, the difference between doing it skillfully and doing it lazily should be defined by how often you die, and by how long the event takes to complete. The better players die less, and the better zergs complete the event faster (giving them more time to do other stuff).

They punish players for doing something incorrectly. The point of the event is not to zerg the point is to split up.

Yes, but my point is that they do a bad job of explaining that to the players, otherwise you wouldn’t SEE zergs trying to train it. Players don’t want to play bad, if you show them how to do it right, they will do it right. If you teach them over two years to do it wrong, they will do it wrong.

Not allowing over X amount of players to join a side looks great on paper but poses some problems. How can you guarantee certain numbers on each side. And how will scaling work if you have less than a full map to split into 6 areas.

I explained the system above. It could be an attunement system in which the players in each slice was carefully tracked. It would start off only allowing 5 people into each slice until each was 80% full, then allow 10 per slice, and so on. This would guarantee that if there were only 27 people in the zone, then 4 people would be in each slice with three of them having 5, if there were 83 people in the zone then there would be at least 12 people per slice and no more than 15. Each slice would scale based on that number. As people died they could return to their slice or join a different slice if there was room.

The removal of repair costs gives everyone more money

Don’t bring up the repair cost thing as an excuse. Repair costs were always negligible, and WP costs are still in, which were always a MUCH bigger expense. Removing repair costs does not in ANY way justify reducing rewards.

I do hate the zerg for coming out of WvW, that’s where they belong and should stay.

I think the WvW team would tend to disagree.

1. Why would they? This complaint is rather out of nowhere.

I don’t think the QP needs to drop T5-6 mats, but I can understand the complaints, because 1. T5-6 mats are in some cases fairly high right now, and could stand to have some mechanism take the wind out of their sails, and 2. since the previous version had that effect people were counting on the return of the event also having that effect. The lack of this is not devastating, but I can see it as a clear negative change.

Once you’ve got everyone into the same instance, the actual organization shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

But trying to join organized instances is, eve you will admit, a huge hassle in this game. Again, EVERY instance should be organized automatically. The content should not allow for disorganization.

and thats what really bugs all of you. you have to do kitten to get somethin done. you can´t jsut mindlessly go into a boss fight and exspect good lootz and legendaries OMGZ.

No, that’s not really it. The problem is, with the tools available, the zerg is the best way of coordinating multiple players. “Where do I go? The same place all those other guys are going.” Simple. Once I get there, I have to figure out the tactics to deal max damage and not die myself, and if ANet has done their job then that will require layer skill regardless the size of the zerg, but the zerg is the simplest strategic organizational structure for a ton of players.

If ANet wants us to give up the zerg, then they need to provide better organizational tools, such as more informative event tracker details, or better Commander tag functionality. I make for a half decent lay-commander when there aren’t enough commanders around, but I’m not going to spend 100g to buy a tag, and they’re even talking about making it harder to earn a tag, maybe even requiring you to WvW to earn one, which is completely incompatible with their seeming goal of making tags essential for PvE content.

Zerging is a strategy. Strategy is not something GW2 players should concern themselves with. The event design should set the strategy. Players should concern themselves with TACTICS, and zerging has nothing to do with tactics.

The problem is with the players, not the game design. If you can’t follow something as simple as “split groups”, you need to either skip these types of content or go back to playing your Fisher-Price toys.

The problem though, is not whether I can split groups, but whether enough OTHER players can split groups, and the fact that if they can’t, then I am punished for it. If 99% of the players in the instance decide to zerg, and I decide to run off and solo one of the other bosses, that really doesn’t do anything for me.

Ohoni.6057:

But they are still the core gameplay mechanic for 99% of open world content in this game, and have been so for two years now.

Just because that is the status quo doesn’t mean that is the way it should be. Under that argument nothing will change because things are this way for a long period of time.

In a sense, but GOOD harder content does not require failure to teach. That is, if difficult content is well designed, you shouldn’t have to fail it to figure out what you did wrong, much less fail it several times (or look it up online). Good difficult content teaches you AS you play, so that you can recover and win. You might die a few times and have to run back, but you shouldn’t receive nothing for the event.

Each boss has information under their HP bar. At the top right corner there is information for gold reward: X time remaining for gold reward. How in any way would you receive nothing for the event. Event starts, you split up into 6 groups. Each group take cares of their boss. If someone dies then they run back to their group they were assigned to. If they finish they just wait for everyone else. Then everyone else gets the reward. I fail to understand your logic of how people will receive nothing for the event.

Good games teaches you basic gameplay mechanics. It is your job to use those tools (knowledge, skill, active play, coordination, utilities, traits, and weapon skills) to maximize your success. Everyone you need to succeed is already there. People just refuse to use it. How would you make boom boom boss show everything. There is information under the hp bar. You look around and pay attention instead of mindless zerg. And on the top right it gives you information in terms of rewards. Then on top of that you have map chat to communicate. Refusal to use what is in game doesn’t mean something is bad.

I think difficulty should be measured in how often YOU die, not in whether the event in total fails or not. I think that when you have events that require dozens of players to cooperate, they should almost never fail, everyone should always get a reward, the difference between doing it skillfully and doing it lazily should be defined by how often you die, and by how long the event takes to complete. The better players die less, and the better zergs complete the event faster (giving them more time to do other stuff).

Yes and no. If someone is in PTV and never dies and is able to tank mistakes does that mean content is difficult or said player is good/skilled? No. Simply dying isn’t a measure of anything by itself. If you make it so that there is no fail then there is no reward for playing better or coordinating better. You instead encourage zerging. Being lazy in PTV versus being lazy in berserker. Big difference. Being lazy on staff guardian versus another profession. Being lazy range versus being lazy melee. These are not all equal to each other and dying in one case versus not in another is not representative of anything related to skill or difficulty.

Yes, but my point is that they do a bad job of explaining that to the players, otherwise you wouldn’t SEE zergs trying to train it. Players don’t want to play bad, if you show them how to do it right, they will do it right. If you teach them over two years to do it wrong, they will do it wrong.

Players play bad regardless. Example is Marionette which as a PuG friendly event is much better than any other event. Yet people still fail or refused to play as a team. Bad players will always be bad players. The point is to get them to stop doing that. Stop encouraging them to do certain things. You see zergs because people are lazy or don’t want to listen. You can put the most advanced designs in and people will still be lazy or they won’t listen unless you punish them for not cooperating. Gotta start somewhere.

I explained the system above. It could be an attunement system in which the players in each slice was carefully tracked. It would start off only allowing 5 people into each slice until each was 80% full, then allow 10 per slice, and so on. This would guarantee that if there were only 27 people in the zone, then 4 people would be in each slice with three of them having 5, if there were 83 people in the zone then there would be at least 12 people per slice and no more than 15. Each slice would scale based on that number. As people died they could return to their slice or join a different slice if there was room.

Still would fail like Marionette even after 4 weeks. Problem 1: scaling. If you design a boss to be challenging at 40 man groups then smaller groups will have problems. If you design a boss to be challenging at 20 man groups then large groups would make it trivial.

Second it doesn’t change how players will play bad or wouldn’t coordinate. Sure you balance out the system for a thing like boss blitz but you limit the mechanics you can have. There are 10 in each shard for example. But if you don’t coordinate against the mechanics then you should fail regardless. The only way you wouldn’t need coordination is if the mechanics or simple. Which really why make this system. Since you can just change the scaling instead of wasting all of this resource.

The problem though, is not whether I can split groups, but whether enough OTHER players can split groups, and the fact that if they can’t, then I am punished for it. If 99% of the players in the instance decide to zerg, and I decide to run off and solo one of the other bosses, that really doesn’t do anything for me.

No the problem is if players are willing to do what is needed to succeed with the means and tools they are given. Other features will come over time. But that doesn’t mean that it should be an excuse not to organize and play better. TTS shows that you can. People are just lazy and in general don’t want to work as a team in a game that is an MMO strangely enough.

It is the same with players in dungeon lfgs. They simply don’t read and when they come in and you talk to them they say nothing. Until down the line later when everyone is frustrated because said individual is not doing what they need to be doing and leading the group to wipe.

No amount of design can save the simple fact that people want to play Skyrim in GW2.

Larynx.2453:

Autoattack AFK in a zerg is very dynamic and interesting gameplay…

When someone can literally tab out for 30-60 seconds at a time, not die, and do 90% optimal performance, you done messed up somewhere.

Agreed but ArenaNet is trying to solve a problem they’ve created and it’s not simply “auto-attack in a zerg to win”. Look at the evolution of “challenging” Open World content in GW2.

Tequatl was the first big attempt and in many ways its a good encounter but it still has that big flaw ArenaNet is trying to combat – everyone stacks in the same position to be optimally efficient. Tequatl does have a handful of other roles (ten players on turrets, a handful of people at boat/hills defending turrets) but the majority of players are sitting in the foot zerg. I think ArenaNet wanted players to use both feet (that’s why there are north and south turrets) but that proved to be unnecessary and arguably less efficient. The problem persists – too many players are stacked in the one place, this is bad for system performance and it doesn’t feel particularly challenging either.

Then we had the Marionette and the three header wurm. It’s no coincidence the wurm has three heads and the marionette has five lanes, the message from ArenaNet is clear with this release – Open World content that has the entire map in one place is not OK, we want you to split up.

Here’s why it’s an unusual problem – the gameplay experience when split up is almost identical to a single experience if the map had less people on it. All ArenaNet is doing is creating scenarios where you have an artificial cap on the number of people in a single event. A marionette lane with 20 people has very different gameplay from a marionette lane with 150 people. A Crown Pavilion sector with ten people plays very different from one with 75 people. If the maps had a smaller number of people on them, there would be no need to create scenarios which artificially limit the number of players in one space, a map with 50 people on it has the same gameplay as a map with 150 people in three locations. The only added experience with the current system is the most frustrating, tedious and unfun problem of herding 150 people into three wurm heads, five lanes, or herding 75 people into five (or six?) sectors of the Pavilion. That organisational experience is hurting the community imo because it’s something a lot of players don’t enjoy, it’s something you have little to no control over, it has that problem the WvW team talks about – never wanting you to view an extra player as a bad thing and it locks players out of content not because they are bad players, but because they didn’t level up their “organisation” skill and log into GW2 to manage other people (which is a gamble even if you leveled up your “organising players” skill to 500).

Suddenly the challenge of Open World content becomes less about the gameplay and the content itself. Learning the encounters, dodging the red rings, resing your allies, mastering the content mechanics and optimising your DPS all become less important than getting the zerg to not be a zerg (in a game that trained players to zerg) using your cat herding skills.

I think “splitting up the zerg” is a symptom of the core problem – 150 people on a map is fantastic for ensuring players can run into other adventurers when they explore the Open World, but it’s terrible when it comes to gathering players together in the same place.

Just because that is the status quo doesn’t mean that is the way it should be. Under that argument nothing will change because things are this way for a long period of time.

And again we go back to my initial point. They can try to change the zerg mechanics if they want, but this particular attempt was a poor way to do it. First, i they want to split the zerg, then they need to have better communication tools.

Have multiple color coded Commander tags, and make the tags easier to get, so you don’t have to spend 100g or be big on WvW. You should never end up on a map for an event like this in which there aren’t six people who can’t tag-up. It’d also be helpful if the Commander tag showed on the map and mini-map how many players were within say 2500 range of them or so. Then you could just glance at the map, see one commander at each boss, and know how many players were at each.

It’d also be great if the event trackers did a better job of showing this information.

It’d also be great if players could better manage who they end up on a server with, more easily pare down players who aren’t helping, and add players that want to really try.

Lacking any of these tools, it’s cruel of them to even attempt to break up the zerg.

Second, if they want to teach a new behavior, they need to actually teach it. They can’t just throw players in there and hope they don’t fail, it’d be like taking a match class that had never worked subtraction before and just asking them “what’s 67-38?” and punishing them until they get it right. If they want players to split up, then they need to force players to split up, prevent them from doing otherwise, not just leave it to the players to do it themselves, and slap them if they don’t.

Then everyone else gets the reward. I fail to understand your logic of how people will receive nothing for the event.

You clearly have been lucky enough to avoid any runs that imploded completely, with players giving up at 4/6 remaining, or with it taking so long that even after killing the last boss you don’t get the Bronze reward. Each is a possibility and each is out of any individual player’s hands. Neither would be the case if the boss scaling did not make for such a frustrating experience.

Good games teaches you basic gameplay mechanics. It is your job to use those tools (knowledge, skill, active play, coordination, utilities, traits, and weapon skills) to maximize your success.

And when we’re talking individual skills, tactical skills, the individual skills of each boss, that’s fine, but strategic skills should not be left so open to interpretation. The whole group should not fail because some of them refuse to learn the layout of the entire map.

Yes and no. If someone is in PTV and never dies and is able to tank mistakes does that mean content is difficult or said player is good/skilled? No. Simply dying isn’t a measure of anything by itself.

In big zerg battles, most damage that a PVT can survive a Zerker could survive too, the stuff that takes you out is one-shot effects that don’t care what your stats are. In any case, the difficulty should still be based on personal skill, not on the average skill level of the mob. If you base it on the mob then it means that a player who is worthless can still get credit if the rest of the group is great, or a player that is great can still get nothing if the rest of the group is terrible, and neither is fair. ALL the “challenge” in the Blitz is in beating the boss skills, the whole coordinating six zergs elements is not “challenge,” it’s just something that works out for you or it doesn’t. You may as well roll a die when you enter a Pavillion map, on a 1-3 you get Bronze reward, 4-5 you get Silver, 6 you get Gold, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Players play bad regardless. Example is Marionette which as a PuG friendly event is much better than any other event.

Marionette is not terribly pug friendly. It had complex boss fight mechanics that relied on every platform succeeding, and in pugs, the chances of two or more failing was very high. It also often involved juggling players between lanes to maximize the odds. It was better than the Blitz in a lot of ways, but still had some serious issues for an uncoordinated mob.

You can put the most advanced designs in and people will still be lazy or they won’t listen unless you punish them for not cooperating.

Again, don’t punish them for not cooperating, PREVENT them from being CAPABLE of not cooperating.

Still would fail like Marionette even after 4 weeks. Problem 1: scaling. If you design a boss to be challenging at 40 man groups then smaller groups will have problems. If you design a boss to be challenging at 20 man groups then large groups would make it trivial.

That’s why the game has scaling. If 20 people are on him, he’s hard enough for 15-20 people. If 30 are on him then he scales up. The mobs already do that, they just currently scale too aggressively, so that a 40 man zerg causes them to scale to be a challenge for a 60-man zerg.

No the problem is if players are willing to do what is needed to succeed with the means and tools they are given. Other features will come over time. But that doesn’t mean that it should be an excuse not to organize and play better. TTS shows that you can. People are just lazy and in general don’t want to work as a team in a game that is an MMO strangely enough.

TTS represents a failure of this game, not a success. Players should not need something like TTS to accomplish the same successes.

I think “splitting up the zerg” is a symptom of the core problem – 150 people on a map is fantastic for ensuring players can run into other adventurers when they explore the Open World, but it’s terrible when it comes to gathering players together in the same place.

Again though, the simple solution there is to lock players into one “task” of the meta-event each, and hard cap the number of players that can do each, rather than punishing players for surpassing an invisible soft-cap. Organizing the Wurm fight would be no issue so long as each player had to “tag” one of the escort guys before the event begins and then is locked in to that route, and only those tagged can enter the combat area (latecomers could tag in at the entrance if slots were available, and available slots would be displayed on the map).

Prevent players from playing it “wrong,” don’t just punish them for not figuring out what you think “wrong” is.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s why the game has scaling. If 20 people are on him, he’s hard enough for 15-20 people. If 30 are on him then he scales up. The mobs already do that, they just currently scale too aggressively, so that a 40 man zerg causes them to scale to be a challenge for a 60-man zerg.

Not sure if it is overly aggressive scaling, or simply ANet overestimating the average DPS boost a character will bring to the fight.

For example if the person that shows up is playing a condition build, quite a bit of his DPS will be lost thanks to the hard cap on condition stacks.

never mind that there is something like a 30% difference between zerker and cleric, meaning that if you get something like 4 guys in cleric you are one short compared to the DPS from the same number of zerkers.

Not sure if it is overly aggressive scaling, or simply ANet overestimating the average DPS boost a character will bring to the fight.

The problem is it’s very inconsistent from fight to fight. Some enemies, such as Hydra Queen, scale about right (although her mechanics just flat out BREAK when too many people are around), and they’ve got Shatterer about right too lately. Claw of Jormag also seems to work PERFECTLY with groups of almost any size. Some are currently a bit high in the presence of too many players, like Svanir Shaman, Triple Wurms, and most definitely Priestess of Lyssa. That one’s horrible when you overload it, not difficult, just tedious. I assume most of those are just accidents of poor balancing.

And yes, the Blitz bosses are in that category, if you overload them then they just become a slog, and I highly doubt that was an accident, but as no dev has commented on what the hell they were thinking with this update, I can only assume.

never mind that there is something like a 30% difference between zerker and cleric, meaning that if you get something like 4 guys in cleric you are one short compared to the DPS from the same number of zerkers.

It’d be nice if they could balance based on the stat combos of the players around a mob, like a Clerics character would only count as 1/4 of a person for mob scaling purposes, but in lieu of that, I think they just need to scale on the median assumption, that the result is the average of the possible stat combinations. I also tend to think that the longer a boss fight goes on, the enemy should sort of auto-downscale a bit, like a “ok, clearly we overestimated how good you guys are, so we’re going to cut you a break here.”

I think one issue is that scaling usually means HP and to a degree damage. Not mechanics.

Boom-Boom, instead of having that much more HP, should have only slightly more for each player. But, at some point she gains more healing turrets, other turrets, her turrets get projectile shields, spawn with other adds, she gets more grenades per volles in a much wider area, more types of grenades, etc etc etc. Have 5-10 of such additions for a boss.

That would be nice too, of course. The HP scaling is somewhat necessary though, as you can tell with enemies that fail to scale well. I mean, an enemy that is near impossible to solo and a challenge for a pack of five could be crushed in seconds by 20-30, much less 150, so the bigger the zerg the more damage they need to take, by necessity, because what I think would be ideal is that they time out a fight to take maybe ten minutes or so with a group of five, and get progressively shorter the more people are added, until a huge zerg can drop them in maybe three minutes, perhaps up to five if there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. Instead, they are more likely to scale so that what takes five people ten minute might take ten people seven, but then twenty people makes it twelve, fifty people makes it fifteen minutes, and a hundred people makes it twenty five.

Ohoni.6057:

And again we go back to my initial point. They can try to change the zerg mechanics if they want, but this particular attempt was a poor way to do it. First, i they want to split the zerg, then they need to have better communication tools.

Again other features will come with time. That is another issue. You have access to tools to use. Yet you don’t use them. This event is very very basic yet people don’t try. People simply are lazy and don’t want to do what is needed. Plain and simple. You can have the most advanced UI or grouping but guess what the same people that are lazy will always be lazy. People that don’t communicate will not. Regardless if you drop them every form of communication possible.

Again you can have instanced but then the problem is that other instances are empty. Why do you think MegaServers were created. To solve the problem of being empty.

People teach others through map chat and other communication means. Other people are just lazy and don’t want to listen. Using math example it is like teaching variables. X + 3 = 10, solve for x. Now if you change that to X + 7 = 13 you should be able to solve that. People are already taught that Anet doesn’t want mindless zerging and that started with Tequ events. Then you have the Scarlet events. Basics are taught but people refused to do it. On top of that it clearly states gold rewards need to be done within x time. If you fail that would you redo it using zerg method again? It is like if you hit yourself against a wall would you run into that wall again clearly knowing what the result would be? Of course not that would be stupid. But guess what this is exactly what people do by continuously zerging.

They force players to split up. Not splitting up = bad rewards. Pretty obvious to me. You notice that when you zerg you can finish it within gold rewards (which is information located in the UI at the top right). Very obvious to me.

Ohoni.6057:

You clearly have been lucky enough to avoid any runs that imploded completely, with players giving up at 4/6 remaining, or with it taking so long that even after killing the last boss you don’t get the Bronze reward. Each is a possibility and each is out of any individual player’s hands. Neither would be the case if the boss scaling did not make for such a frustrating experience.

Because people don’t use their heads. That is ArenaNet’s fault how? If the boss doesn’t take damage and is healing. Wouldn’t your first logical thought be hey what is going on how can we stop it from healing. Or would a logical thought be hey lets just continue to zerg even though it is healing to full hp. It isn’t frustrating. What is frustrating is just plain bad players who play mindlessly.

Ohoni.6057:

And when we’re talking individual skills, tactical skills, the individual skills of each boss, that’s fine, but strategic skills should not be left so open to interpretation. The whole group should not fail because some of them refuse to learn the layout of the entire map.

Click on boss. Read boss description. How is that open to interpretation. Heal is heal. Group should fail if they don’t learn. That is the point of group play. If they don’t like feel free to go play a single player game like Skyrim. Even then those games punish you for not willing to learn and play better.

Ohoni.6057:

In big zerg battles, most damage that a PVT can survive a Zerker could survive too, the stuff that takes you out is one-shot effects that don’t care what your stats are. In any case, the difficulty should still be based on personal skill, not on the average skill level of the mob. If you base it on the mob then it means that a player who is worthless can still get credit if the rest of the group is great, or a player that is great can still get nothing if the rest of the group is terrible, and neither is fair. ALL the “challenge” in the Blitz is in beating the boss skills, the whole coordinating six zergs elements is not “challenge,” it’s just something that works out for you or it doesn’t. You may as well roll a die when you enter a Pavillion map, on a 1-3 you get Bronze reward, 4-5 you get Silver, 6 you get Gold, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

There is not a lot of one shot stuff in this game you know. That is mostly a myth. It is called group play. If I am good but the other 4 players in my dungeon plain suck and we wipe. I should be rewarded for that right because I did really well. Or should group play require coordination and good play as a group to succeed. Again you are asking for solo play versus group play.

On top of that how can you reward a good player but yet don’t reward someone who isn’t bad. If you require little to no coordination then bad players will be rewarded because nothing special has to be done. If you add coordination so that bad players who play mindlessly don’t get rewarded and skilled players do then you consider that bad.

I stated coordination goes hand and hand with hard difficulty group play events. Never said blitz was difficult. In fact it is simple but people just refuse to do it.

Ohoni.6057:

Marionette is not terribly pug friendly. It had complex boss fight mechanics that relied on every platform succeeding, and in pugs, the chances of two or more failing was very high. It also often involved juggling players between lanes to maximize the odds. It was better than the Blitz in a lot of ways, but still had some serious issues for an uncoordinated mob.

Marionette was extremely easy. Boss fight mechanics weren’t that hard. Again people just played bad and didn’t read the description. I have seen people just straight up fail at dodging. There was information everywhere about it. JQ Main had good success rates. On top of that TTS easily beat Marionette with very little knowledge or experience with it. The same can’t be said of Wurm where TTS had to do it over and over again to get the mechanics and strategies down.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, don’t punish them for not cooperating, PREVENT them from being CAPABLE of not cooperating.

Why shouldn’t they be punished for not cooperating in a group based game/event. GW2 is an MMO. If you want to not cooperate and play like it is a single player then my suggestion to all of these people is to play Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Skyrim. It suits them more. Why ruin it for others? How can you force someone to listen? You can’t. You can’t prevent someone from being capable of not cooperating. But you can make it less rewarding to do so.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s why the game has scaling. If 20 people are on him, he’s hard enough for 15-20 people. If 30 are on him then he scales up. The mobs already do that, they just currently scale too aggressively, so that a 40 man zerg causes them to scale to be a challenge for a 60-man zerg.

Again you don’t understand the issue. Scaling won’t solve every problem. You can’t have perfect scaling since there are too many variable. Do you scale against all PTV? Scale against all DPS/Berserker? Scale against high number of necros? Guardians? Eles?

So designs should take this into consideration but then if you look at it if you design for large groups then it is hard for a small group to do it. If you design for a small group then it is trivial for a large group. No design is perfect.

TTS represents a failure of this game, not a success. Players should not need something like TTS to accomplish the same successes.

Under this logic, all guilds are useless. Dedicated WvW guilds? Failure to the game because you shouldn’t need something like that to accomplish success in WvW. sPvP dedicated guilds/teams. Failure of GW2. Pro GW2 teams? Failure of GW2 since you shouldn’t need these groupings to accomplish the same level of success. DnT, rT, SC for dungeons. Failure of this game. Shouldn’t need these dedicated speed running groups of like minded individuals to accomplish speed run level success. Specific guilds for guild missions like OwND? Failure of this game since you shouldn’t need something like a guild to have success in guild missions.

I don’t agree with that people should just be forced to do things the right way. That’s bad design. That’s like many modern games where a single context action just does whatever you should be doing at that place according to the dev, because heaven forbid a player wanders out of the designated “main story place” by virtue of jumping up a sidewalk, or doing something equally crazy.

Games where players have to do stuff themselves are good. The event could make it easier to realize what you need to do, yes. It’s not difficult to figure out, but could be made easier.

But players should still consciously make the choice to do the fight the “proper” way, instead of spamming 1 and having their character automatically hit the correct boss from the centre of the zone.

With every update I lose more and more faith in humanity. Even a brainless monkey would realize that if
a)spread takes 10 minutes and gives gold rewards;
b)zerg takes 1 hour and gives “You tried” rewards;
then option “a” is clearly the correct solution of the puzzle. For some inexplicable reason however people are too lazy/stupid/drunk to look at these facts and react accordingly. Anet implemented a “wall” to stop zergs from happening and instead of looking for a different solution people decided that bashing their empty heads against this wall is a great idea. The only mistake Anet did in designing this event was their assumption that players possess at least as much intelligence as the AI of critters, apparently they were wrong.

Carighan.6758:

I think one issue is that scaling usually means HP and to a degree damage. Not mechanics.

Boom-Boom, instead of having that much more HP, should have only slightly more for each player. But, at some point she gains more healing turrets, other turrets, her turrets get projectile shields, spawn with other adds, she gets more grenades per volles in a much wider area, more types of grenades, etc etc etc. Have 5-10 of such additions for a boss.

If ‘kill the turret’ is already beyond the capability of the general playerbase, having extra, more complex mechanics will just be absolute havoc.

Again other features will come with time. That is another issue.

My point was, they shouldn’t add new requirements until THEY implement the tools necessary to make them work. If they want to split the zerg, the onus is on THEM to add the UI tools to make that work BEFORE requiring players to adapt their playstyle. The current system is like pushing people out of a plane and promising to work on developing a parachute at a later date.

People simply are lazy and don’t want to do what is needed. Plain and simple. You can have the most advanced UI or grouping but guess what the same people that are lazy will always be lazy. People that don’t communicate will not. Regardless if you drop them every form of communication possible.

You say “people” are lazy, and they are, which is why ANet needs to develop tools which make the right way INTO the lazy way. You don’t have to agree that “people” are right in being lazy, but if you’re stuck on a server with lazy “people,” it’d be nice if they weren’t ruining the event for you.

On top of that it clearly states gold rewards need to be done within x time. If you fail that would you redo it using zerg method again? It is like if you hit yourself against a wall would you run into that wall again clearly knowing what the result would be? Of course not that would be stupid. But guess what this is exactly what people do by continuously zerging.

The problem is, I learned that lesson in the first run. Then I did a second run later, but none of the people who were with me on the first run were with me on the second, so they still needed to learn, and the event still failed, even though I’d already learned everything I needed to learn. They can’t count on experience as an educator, they need to teach players in such a way that they get it right the FIRST time, because in multiplayer content, it’s almost always someone’s first time.

They force players to split up. Not splitting up = bad rewards. Pretty obvious to me. You notice that when you zerg you can finish it within gold rewards (which is information located in the UI at the top right). Very obvious to me.

The UI information in no way tells you to split up. All it has is a timer. It gives absolutely no information on how best to beat that timer. It may involve splitting into six equal groups, or it may involve everyone teaming up to kill each boss as quickly as possible. There’s no way to know without failing. And further, if you do decide to split up, there’s no UI element to tell how many players are at each boss, nor how many players each boss needs. The only way to find out is to run around the inner ring and try to gauge how many players you can see at each, which is not always easy due to LoS issues.

Because people don’t use their heads. That is ArenaNet’s fault how? If the boss doesn’t take damage and is healing. Wouldn’t your first logical thought be hey what is going on how can we stop it from healing. Or would a logical thought be hey lets just continue to zerg even though it is healing to full hp. It isn’t frustrating. What is frustrating is just plain bad players who play mindlessly.

You seem to be talking about the Baines fight. I wasn’t talking about the Baines fight. Nobody has a problem with the healing turret mechanic, it’s fine. I’ve never had a run fail because players could not figure out the healing turret, I have had runs fail because even fighting the turret as early and often as possible, both Baines and the turret itself had very high HP that was taking forever to whittle down. Again, it’s the anti-zerg scaling that is the issue here, NOBODY is arguing that the individual boss tactics are at fault.

Click on boss. Read boss description. How is that open to interpretation. Heal is heal. Group should fail if they don’t learn. That is the point of group play. If they don’t like feel free to go play a single player game like Skyrim. Even then those games punish you for not willing to learn and play better.

Again, you seem to be wandering off course. I specifically said that I wasn’t talking about the tactical elements of the individual boss fights. Baines summons a turret, the ogre needs his birds drawn off, that’s all fine and they don’t need to change anything about that. The problem they have is at the strategic level, of helping players to coordinate into six roughly even groups. THAT is currently the hard part of the event, and would be made far simpler if they had better UI tools in place.

There was information everywhere about it. JQ Main had good success rates. On top of that TTS easily beat Marionette with very little knowledge or experience with it. The same can’t be said of Wurm where TTS had to do it over and over again to get the mechanics and strategies down.

You’re defeating your own arguments. You were claiming that Marionette was a very pug-friendly challenge, which you back up by pointing out that very organized guild and main-server communities did fairly reliably with it. For it to be pug-friendly would mean that a bunch of RANDOM people, without ANY coordination would be capable of doing it, just by everyone following the UI queues on an individual basis, and their individual efforts adding up to a group success. One of the key elements to making an event pug-friendly is to design it in such a way that individual failures matter very little while individual successes add up strongly. For example, if the Marionette platforms had succeeded on best 3/5 platforms rather than needing 5/5 platforms, it would have been a much more pug friendly event, while still being just as much of a personal challenge for each player engaged in it.

Why shouldn’t they be punished for not cooperating in a group based game/event.

Because the punishments hit everyone. If there are 80 people engaged in the boss blitz, 70 insist on zerging as one, and the other ten “play it right” by tackling a different boss, or splitting into two parties, or whatever they can manage, then they all still get punished equally, even though the 10 players were doing everything they possibly could to “play it right.” That’s why you don’t punish for paying it wrong, instead, if your design goal is to have players split into six groups, then you FORCE players to split into six groups, you make it actually impossible for all of them to zerg a single boss at a time, that way, the players who are willing and able to do it right are not punished for the behavior of the ones that insist on doing it wrong.

How can you force someone to listen? You can’t. You can’t prevent someone from being capable of not cooperating. But you can make it less rewarding to do so.

Which is a valid argument only IF you can come up with a way of punishing ONLY those players who are unwilling or able to cooperate, without at all punishing other players who happen to be running the same event with them, something which you claimed was impossible.

Again you don’t understand the issue. Scaling won’t solve every problem. You can’t have perfect scaling since there are too many variable. Do you scale against all PTV? Scale against all DPS/Berserker? Scale against high number of necros? Guardians? Eles?

Scale based on average damage. You scale based on the average of the highest DPS class in Ascended Zerkers to the lowest DPS class in Rare Clerics. This would mean that if the party is overloaded with high Zerkers it would die faster, and if it was overloaded with Clerics then it would die a bit slower, but still should kitten. Of course ideally there would be reasons in the game for Zerkers to not be the ideal stat build.

So designs should take this into consideration but then if you look at it if you design for large groups then it is hard for a small group to do it. If you design for a small group then it is trivial for a large group. No design is perfect.

Not true. Sometimes you do need to scale the mechanics as well as just HP though. Like say an event requires you to stand on a button to advance it, for a small group, one button might be enough, for a large group, several buttons might be better, ideally events would add more conditions to them as the number of players increased, but it would have to adapt and lower the number of conditions if players quit the event.

Under this logic, all guilds are useless.

Yes. Guilds should be useless. They should be a social network, to help you stay in touch with people you want to hang out with, but you should never NEED them for anything. This game has entirely too many perks and functions that are locked behind guilds.

I don’t agree with that people should just be forced to do things the right way. That’s bad design. That’s like many modern games where a single context action just does whatever you should be doing at that place according to the dev, because heaven forbid a player wanders out of the designated “main story place” by virtue of jumping up a sidewalk, or doing something equally crazy.

In a single player context I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer, I disagree. In a single player portion, if I do something “crazy” and fall off the map, that’s on me, I get punished for it, and that’s fair. In a multiplayer setting, if YOU do something crazy and it results in US falling off the cliff and WE get punished for it, how is that fair to me, especially when I never chose to work with you, the server just paired us up at random?

No, when other players are held accountable for each others actions, it’s the responsibility of the game to limit as best it can the possibility of other players screwing things up for you.

Ohoni.6057:

Scale based on average damage. You scale based on the average of the highest DPS class in Ascended Zerkers to the lowest DPS class in Rare Clerics. This would mean that if the party is overloaded with high Zerkers it would die faster, and if it was overloaded with Clerics then it would die a bit slower, but still should kitten. Of course ideally there would be reasons in the game for Zerkers to not be the ideal stat build.

Even then you can’t guarantee anything. That is the point. Scaling will never be perfect. On top of that you have to design things with certain groups in mind but then it won’t be perfect. Some encounters are difficult small man but a joke for big groups. Some encounters are hard for big groups but easy for smaller groups. You try to make a perfect design but it can never be perfect. It isn’t a problem with scale it is simply a problem that you can’t create something that will fit in every case. That is impossible. You try to come close. Nothing can solve this core problem. You try to lessen its effect.

Ohoni.6057:

Not true. Sometimes you do need to scale the mechanics as well as just HP though. Like say an event requires you to stand on a button to advance it, for a small group, one button might be enough, for a large group, several buttons might be better, ideally events would add more conditions to them as the number of players increased, but it would have to adapt and lower the number of conditions if players quit the event.

Again my response was to the original comment that you can have difficult content with little to no coordination. What you are saying is to have more coordination. Even for something this simple. Boss blitz is simple yet people fail to read information on the UI. People fail to read chat.

Such system you are trying to promote is flawed. Here is how. You can have people quit the event so that it scales down really hard. Then have the small man burst it down easily and then everyone comes at the last minute for reward tag.

Yes. Guilds should be useless. They should be a social network, to help you stay in touch with people you want to hang out with, but you should never NEED them for anything. This game has entirely too many perks and functions that are locked behind guilds.

Your logic is flawed. You are by definition wanting to play an MMO without an MMO aspect. MMOs are designed so that you need to play and work together. If it was only social network then why not just play Skyrim on Steam. You have Steam friends. You can use Teamspeak/Skype/any VOIP to chat with friends.

On top of that this logic is saying teams should be useless. That means Pro gaming teams. These teams should be useless because random people should be able to do what the do. Sports teams? Should be useless because normal people playing football or basketball should be able to perform at the same level. Project teams at work. Should be useless because you should be able to combine random people together with no thought and accomplish the same thing as having a project team. This doesn’t make sense and it seems you have chosen the wrong game to play.

In a single player context I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer, I disagree. In a single player portion, if I do something “crazy” and fall off the map, that’s on me, I get punished for it, and that’s fair. In a multiplayer setting, if YOU do something crazy and it results in US falling off the cliff and WE get punished for it, how is that fair to me, especially when I never chose to work with you, the server just paired us up at random?

Because it is a group event. Group play is design so that people have to work together to succeed. Again going to a simple example of dungeons. If someone’s action doesn’t matter then think about it. If 4 people wipe then the 5th should easily be able to carry everything. If someone uses a turret badly on Tequ then your chance of success should go down. You cannot have zero punish then have a situation where it isn’t mindless gameplay. If mistakes aren’t punish then you can just mindlessly play. The reason why you can’t mindlessly do something is because such actions will lead to group failure. Now as for the margin of error that depends on the event. Boss Blitz has a low margin of error. Sure if your group zergs then you get worse rewards but at least you get something. Don’t past a phase on Tequ well you get zero rewards. Wurm if you don’t past a phase you get no rewards.

No, when other players are held accountable for each others actions, it’s the responsibility of the game to limit as best it can the possibility of other players screwing things up for you.

No it is the responsibility of players to play better. No perfect or ultimate design can change how badly people play. Trying to accommodate bad players is making easier game designs which in turn continues the cycle of mindless zerg content which is a no no. At some level people just have to want to play better. No more excuses such as I don’t have chat on during a group event.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, you seem to be wandering off course. I specifically said that I wasn’t talking about the tactical elements of the individual boss fights. Baines summons a turret, the ogre needs his birds drawn off, that’s all fine and they don’t need to change anything about that. The problem they have is at the strategic level, of helping players to coordinate into six roughly even groups. THAT is currently the hard part of the event, and would be made far simpler if they had better UI tools in place.

Again you say things then back away from them. You talk about making difficult content with little to no coordinate which I stated is not possible.

You have tools in place. People don’t use them as others have admitted in this thread. You can have the most advanced tools and UI it won’t change the fact that some people’s mentality is to play an MMO as if they are playing a single player game. Plain and simple not sure why you can’t understand that basic fact. You can add VOIP service to GW2 it won’t change the fact that people will have it off. You can have two dozen different commander tag features. It doesn’t stop people from simply ignoring them or paying no attention.

Boss Blitz is easy to coordinate if other people had the intention of actually trying to succeed in the event. However, that is far from the case. Problem isn’t tools (although more would be nice), the problem is a player’s mentality in this game to not play as a team and not trying at all.

You’re defeating your own arguments. You were claiming that Marionette was a very pug-friendly challenge, which you back up by pointing out that very organized guild and main-server communities did fairly reliably with it.

You are defeating your own arguments by stating something that completely counters your argument. There is never an area with ZERO PuGs. We have no system in place to create instances. Server communities =/= coordination. Just pointing out that if you were on JQ you would have seen success. There was only at most 50% of JQ on teamspeak for the event. Everyone else were PuGs. Even for TTS runs they had trouble with other players not listening anyhow. If I have one other guild member in my party and 3 PuGs for dungeons that is still a PuG group. That is still dealing with random people. Do a I complete my dungeon runs? Yes. Does TTS complete that event with randoms on the map. Yes. Did JQ complete that event with randoms in lanes? Yes. Just because you don’t experience it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

For it to be pug-friendly would mean that a bunch of RANDOM people, without ANY coordination would be capable of doing it, just by everyone following the UI queues on an individual basis, and their individual efforts adding up to a group success.

Past events were done on overflows before. Just because you don’t experience it doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur. I have seen it happen a lot.

One of the key elements to making an event pug-friendly is to design it in such a way that individual failures matter very little while individual successes add up strongly. For example, if the Marionette platforms had succeeded on best 3/5 platforms rather than needing 5/5 platforms, it would have been a much more pug friendly event, while still being just as much of a personal challenge for each player engaged in it.

Might as well create an event like this. 10 minute timer. Success regardless of what happens. Because anything more will be PuG unfriendly. Why not 1/5 platforms maybe 4 platforms had a bunch of people that failed. How about 2/5? How about 0/5? Your definition of PuG friendly is flawed. You might as well make GW2 a single player instance game at that point because anything that is remotely challenging or that requires coordination is bad and PuG unfriendly. That way you can make things as a personal challenge while requiring zero coordination.

Because the punishments hit everyone. If there are 80 people engaged in the boss blitz, 70 insist on zerging as one, and the other ten “play it right” by tackling a different boss, or splitting into two parties, or whatever they can manage, then they all still get punished equally, even though the 10 players were doing everything they possibly could to “play it right.” That’s why you don’t punish for paying it wrong, instead, if your design goal is to have players split into six groups, then you FORCE players to split into six groups, you make it actually impossible for all of them to zerg a single boss at a time, that way, the players who are willing and able to do it right are not punished for the behavior of the ones that insist on doing it wrong.

Definition of group event. Team plays = success. Individual plays aren’t what defines success in group play. Again flawed design. You can Force but you won’t guarantee it will be good. Can you guarantee specific numbers? Nope. And that leads to other design and scaling issues I have stated.

Ohoni.6057:

My point was, they shouldn’t add new requirements until THEY implement the tools necessary to make them work. If they want to split the zerg, the onus is on THEM to add the UI tools to make that work BEFORE requiring players to adapt their playstyle. The current system is like pushing people out of a plane and promising to work on developing a parachute at a later date.

They should add things. Under your logic dungeons should have existed until like almost a year after the game came out because an in game LFG tool was not available. Instead what did players do? Use/create tools to find groups and succeed in dungeons. gw2lfg and map chat.

UI is already there to split groups. Map chat. Hey guys split into 6 different groups, stack here, here, here. Not very hard. Again it is the player’s fault because player mentality is bad where people are lazy or don’t want to contribute to the team.

You say “people” are lazy, and they are, which is why ANet needs to develop tools which make the right way INTO the lazy way. You don’t have to agree that “people” are right in being lazy, but if you’re stuck on a server with lazy “people,” it’d be nice if they weren’t ruining the event for you.

What tools? More commander options? What if someone doesn’t listen then? More UI? What if they turn off those UI elements. Again you can’t design a perfect system. Players need to change. And you need to have incentives for good playing styles that you want. Which is what is done with Boss Blitz. Plain and simple.

The problem is, I learned that lesson in the first run. Then I did a second run later, but none of the people who were with me on the first run were with me on the second, so they still needed to learn, and the event still failed, even though I’d already learned everything I needed to learn. They can’t count on experience as an educator, they need to teach players in such a way that they get it right the FIRST time, because in multiplayer content, it’s almost always someone’s first time.

Communicate. People have to learn how to play better. They have previous event which said “zerging it is bad” . Boss Blitz wasn’t the first one. Read what information you have. If you don’t read then it will fail. Is it the fault of the dev or the players. It is the players who refuse to do things needed to succeed. Should bosses just be like “Watch out I’m throwing a healing turret and healing I suggest you destroy it or toss poison on me” . “Watch out you should dodge I’m about to lay down a bomb at my feet” . “Watch out X I’m about to shadow step to you, you should dodge” . “Watch out X I’m about to shadow step to you, it is unblock able you should use a block, reflect, or projectile absorption” . If this doesn’t fit you then if you read the boss it states what it generally does.

The UI information in no way tells you to split up. All it has is a timer. It gives absolutely no information on how best to beat that timer. It may involve splitting into six equal groups, or it may involve everyone teaming up to kill each boss as quickly as possible. There’s no way to know without failing. And further, if you do decide to split up, there’s no UI element to tell how many players are at each boss, nor how many players each boss needs. The only way to find out is to run around the inner ring and try to gauge how many players you can see at each, which is not always easy due to LoS issues.

That is the point of the game, not to be spoon fed information. You have a timer, figure out the best way to accomplish the task at hand. Devs have an idea of what strategy they would use. But is that the correct way? Maybe not.

Communicate. The event has been out enough that people can say what people can do to succeed. Yet the problem remains that people don’t communicate and don’t listen. No amount of design will change player mentality unless they are punished for bad plays or in other words only rewarded for good plays.

Again use map chat and ask as simple as that. People refusing to communicate are the reason why it doesn’t work well.

You seem to be talking about the Baines fight. I wasn’t talking about the Baines fight. Nobody has a problem with the healing turret mechanic, it’s fine. I’ve never had a run fail because players could not figure out the healing turret, I have had runs fail because even fighting the turret as early and often as possible, both Baines and the turret itself had very high HP that was taking forever to whittle down. Again, it’s the anti-zerg scaling that is the issue here, NOBODY is arguing that the individual boss tactics are at fault.

Because if you zerg it turns out really long and you don’t succeed within time.

Again you punish people for zerging and not thinking about it. Mindlessly zerging is punished. Nobody is saying that there isn’t anti-zerg. I’m saying player mentality is at fault for what happens and that should be punished. Now if you find it frustrating to do group play then find other individuals to group together. Then again you are against guilds and any form of community. So last suggestion is to find a great single player game on steam and just play it and talk to people on Steam friends.

If you find that scaling is too high would you just keep on staying and attacking? Or would you actually think and not be mindless and say hey maybe I should leave because this isn’t working.

Even then you can’t guarantee anything. That is the point. Scaling will never be perfect.

You can’t guarantee anything. It will never be perfect. That’s no excuse for it to not be better.

There are some encounters that scale very well, and others that scale very poorly, all they need to do is adjust the poor scaling ones to scale at the same rate as the good scaling ones. If they take too long to kill with lots of people, they adjust the scaling modifier down a bit, if they die super fast with lots of people then they adjust the scaling modifier up a bit. Simple math.

Again my response was to the original comment that you can have difficult content with little to no coordination. What you are saying is to have more coordination. Even for something this simple. Boss blitz is simple yet people fail to read information on the UI. People fail to read chat.

Again, I’ve never had a Boss Blitz boss fail because players could not follow the encounter mechanics. Yes, you have some people ignoring the turrets, but plenty pay attention to get that job done. My complaints with this event are ALL at the strategic level, the coordination of groups throughout the entire map, rather than at the tactical level.

Such system you are trying to promote is flawed. Here is how. You can have people quit the event so that it scales down really hard. Then have the small man burst it down easily and then everyone comes at the last minute for reward tag.

Sure, why not? Ideally it should be scaled based on the number of people around, so it shouldn’t take less time to kill him if it scales down for five people than it did when scaled up to 50. There might be some way to slightly increase kill times using some sort of yo-yo effect, but it really shouldn’t amount to much and you’d almost inevitably take longer.

Your logic is flawed. You are by definition wanting to play an MMO without an MMO aspect.

No, I’m wanting to play GW2. I’ve been playing it for two years now, none of that time in a guild, and at launch, that was perfectly fine. Since launch they’ve added numerous features that have put me more and more behind those who choose to join guilds, and I resent that. MMO does not equal “guild members.” I’m really sick of people saying “if you don’t like this or that feature then you shouldn’t be playing MMOs.” You play the games you want, I’ll play the ones I want, neither of us has any business telling each other what to play.

On top of that this logic is saying teams should be useless. That means Pro gaming teams. These teams should be useless because random people should be able to do what the do. Sports teams? Should be useless because normal people playing football or basketball should be able to perform at the same level.

Also hyperbole and strawmen! Because why not?!

Again going to a simple example of dungeons. If someone’s action doesn’t matter then think about it.

Don’t use the simple example of dungeons, it doesn’t apply. Dungeons have a lot of tolls that large scale events don’t. You form groups to enter dungeons, which can consist only of friends if you like. You can kick people from dungeon groups that underperform. You can do neither with large scale events.

If someone uses a turret badly on Tequ then your chance of success should go down.

That’s another event I have problems with. Each turret and its operator have too much influence on the outcome of a 150 player event. If I were to design it, the turrets would be NPC operated, with the player’s role being to keep the turrets alive. That would still give the players in aggregate a lot of responsibility, but would give the 150 players more control over the outcome. 148 great players can be brought low by 1-2 bad turret operators, which is poor group content design.

You are defeating your own arguments by stating something that completely counters your argument. There is never an area with ZERO PuGs. We have no system in place to create instances. Server communities =/= coordination.

When well coordinated servers or overflows with guilds succeed at certain tasks, they almost always have teamspeak and plenty of commanders. That doesn’t mean that everyone is on it, but enough are to coordinate things. You can form your own argument, but my argument, which you shouldn’t try to speak for, is that no one should need to be on team speak, nobody should need a commander tag (unless they are free), and nobody should need to “take charge” or issue orders, the strategic organization should just be obvious from the UI alone so that everyone can figure out a place to be useful. You might need people shouting out tactical tips from time to time, like “pick up the birdseed and throw it to the side,” but you should never need to hear “we need X more over here,” or “we have too many at Y, some of you move to Z!”

Might as well create an event like this. 10 minute timer. Success regardless of what happens. Because anything more will be PuG unfriendly. Why not 1/5 platforms maybe 4 platforms had a bunch of people that failed. How about 2/5? How about 0/5? Your definition of PuG friendly is flawed. You might as well make GW2 a single player instance game at that point because anything that is remotely challenging or that requires coordination is bad and PuG unfriendly. That way you can make things as a personal challenge while requiring zero coordination.

And we need more more hyperbole and strawmen too!

Can you guarantee specific numbers? Nope. And that leads to other design and scaling issues I have stated.

That’s my point, you can guarantee specific numbers, using a system like the one I explained, and again, scaling can work. If you can design an event to be balanced with five people, and balanced at ten, and balanced at 20, and so on, then you can design it to scale between those tiers.

They should add things. Under your logic dungeons should have existed until like almost a year after the game came out because an in game LFG tool was not available. Instead what did players do? Use/create tools to find groups and succeed in dungeons. gw2lfg and map chat.

To be fair, they really should have had LFG in from the start. Still, you didn’t need LFG to run dungeons, they didn’t help you run dungeons, it was just something to prep beforehand.

UI is already there to split groups. Map chat. Hey guys split into 6 different groups, stack here, here, here. Not very hard.

Nonsense. Those commands are meaningless. “Split into 6 groups?” I’m one guy, I can only split into one group. Which one should I be in? If you say a specific one, are you talking to me, or one of the other dozens of players? Map chat can work to coordinate people, but it’s fantastically inefficient for that purpose.

What tools? More commander options? What if someone doesn’t listen then? More UI? What if they turn off those UI elements. Again you can’t design a perfect system.

And again, no you can’t, but that’s no excuse to not try and improve it.

Because if you zerg it turns out really long and you don’t succeed within time.

Right, and that’s the problem. The scaling is too aggressively tuned to make it take way too long with large groups. It should scale more lightly.

If you find that scaling is too high would you just keep on staying and attacking? Or would you actually think and not be mindless and say hey maybe I should leave because this isn’t working.

I would leave, but as I keep pointing out over, and over, and over, and over, my leaving means very little. If I leave and everyone else stays, then the event takes just as long to clear as if I’d stayed with the zerg. Maybe they’re stupid and lazy, maybe they just think the fight’s meant to take that long. Nothing tells you that over-scaling is the problem, one could see the fight and think “this is taking forever, we need more people!”

Ohoni.6057:

Right, and that’s the problem. The scaling is too aggressively tuned to make it take way too long with large groups. It should scale more lightly.

Again seems like you aren’t reading what I wrote. That isn’t the problem. If you scale it to light then you encourage zerging because it will be easier to kill as a zerg rather than a small mans group. And you don’t want to encourage that.

I would leave, but as I keep pointing out over, and over, and over, and over, my leaving means very little. If I leave and everyone else stays, then the event takes just as long to clear as if I’d stayed with the zerg. Maybe they’re stupid and lazy, maybe they just think the fight’s meant to take that long. Nothing tells you that over-scaling is the problem, one could see the fight and think “this is taking forever, we need more people!”

It is like saying it doesn’t matter if I vote or not therefore it is ok if I don’t vote because what I do doesn’t matter when everyone else I assume will vote. 1 vote wouldn’t make a difference. Yet image if everyone thought the same way you did. Then 1 doesn’t become 1 vote but it becomes 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. If you look at any local measure, ballot, or election you will see sometimes that a few votes do matter.

Again you have a timer if you zerg and find that you don’t have enough time maybe that is not the way to do it. For example, timer is 8 minutes for gold reward. You zerg 1 boss and you find that the boss is only at 80% hp and you wasted 4 minutes already. Logical reasoning would be like hey how can I finish this event in 8 minutes if I have 5 more bosses to kill and this current boss I’m trying to kill is only at 80% hp with 4 minutes left to get gold rewards. It shouldn’t be like hey I think it should take this long it makes logical sense when I don’t have enough time to complete for gold rewards. This is what I call mindless zerging or plain laziness.

On top of that people are specifically stating information in map chat and if someone truly wanted to learn we live in an information age. The information is out there someone just has to look if they really want to get a leg up on the content without actually doing it by trial. And ArenaNet has created events that haven’t encouraged zerging and encouraged coordination since Tequ. Even for recent living story such as the weapons test boss and the LA events. There are no excuses.

Ohoni.6057:

Don’t use the simple example of dungeons, it doesn’t apply. Dungeons have a lot of tolls that large scale events don’t. You form groups to enter dungeons, which can consist only of friends if you like. You can kick people from dungeon groups that underperform. You can do neither with large scale events.

There are a lot of trolls in large scale events. People that don’t listen even if you type their name in map chat asking them to do something. They don’t listen to say chat if you put their name and it is right in front of them. You whisper them directly and they don’t listen. They bring up levels to the event for no reason.

Dungeons are the perfect example. You can kick but this individual already wasted your time and everyone’s time and decreased the rate of your rewards. In a similar sense boss blitz is this way. You kill 6 bosses you still get a reward but the rate just sucks compared to gold reward. Doesn’t matter if you kick or not. Just the fact that the person is in your party and completely not playing as a team or not communicating is already hurting you. Happens in dungeons. Happens in WvW. Happens in sPvP. Happens in PvE events. No difference at all. You assume that boss blitz you won’t get a reward if you kill 6 bosses in a very long time. You do get a reward but it just sucks. Considering the reward/rate of time. Same with dungeons if someone messes up and you wipe once or twice. Then you finally kick that person. You have to wait to find a new person. On top of the fact that the person messing up already lowered your reward over a rate of time.

That’s another event I have problems with. Each turret and its operator have too much influence on the outcome of a 150 player event. If I were to design it, the turrets would be NPC operated, with the player’s role being to keep the turrets alive. That would still give the players in aggregate a lot of responsibility, but would give the 150 players more control over the outcome. 148 great players can be brought low by 1-2 bad turret operators, which is poor group content design.

Then the complaint is that the npc has too much control and you can’t tell if from doing something stupid. How will you get it to cleanse instead of lowering the debuff on Tequ? You can’t. So now you have to dumb down the mechanics by removing either the debuff on Tequ or the fact that Tequ fingers apply AoE conditions are you. What you are suggesting is to make easier content. What I’m suggesting is to make harder content that requires people to play better and coordinate better. On top of that making it npc based doesn’t change if someone stacks too many people by turrets and scaling the mobs up so much that they easily kill your npc. Your plan has flaws and new problems that you are introducing.

When well coordinated servers or overflows with guilds succeed at certain tasks, they almost always have teamspeak and plenty of commanders. That doesn’t mean that everyone is on it, but enough are to coordinate things. You can form your own argument, but my argument, which you shouldn’t try to speak for, is that no one should need to be on team speak, nobody should need a commander tag (unless they are free), and nobody should need to “take charge” or issue orders, the strategic organization should just be obvious from the UI alone so that everyone can figure out a place to be useful. You might need people shouting out tactical tips from time to time, like “pick up the birdseed and throw it to the side,” but you should never need to hear “we need X more over here,” or “we have too many at Y, some of you move to Z!”

Untrue and that is your own baseless opinion. My experiences tell me that this is far from the case. The problem is the players itself not the form of communication. I have commanders in WvW that succeed based solely on map/team chat. Others use teamspeak. The success is based solely on the fact that players who are on the map are willing to play as a team. When you have players that aren’t willing to play as a team no amount of UI or forms of communication will make you successful. The same bad players will still be bad.

I get you speak about your argument because when you argue a point you are saying this is what I believe in and why. On top of that you are explaining what that means. I can counter by saying I see that you are saying x but what you are saying is flawed because you don’t consider factor y.

So what you are saying is that coordination is bad and that you should build GW2 more in line with a single player game like Skyrim where you can succeed individually without any coordination instead of creating an MMO where by definition it involves playing with other people. And further it requires you to coordinate with other people to succeed. Even games with 2p mode you see they call it co-op cause you are cooperating and coordinating with someone to succeed.

Strange you ask for more group UI then in the same line you say people shouldn’t need to coordinate to succeed. Honestly, might as well remove 90% of the content in GW2 and just have Orr farm all day because everything else requires coordination which is bad for you.

And we need more more hyperbole and strawmen too!

So that is what people call it when they can’t say anything productive. 5/5 is hard for some easy for others. 3/5 like you said is hard for some and easy for others. 1/5 is hard for some and easy for others. Who gets to define these numbers. Who gets to say what partial success is better? It is easier to just have X event and have you must do Y, Z to succeed otherwise if you don’t you fail. That means complete all arenas for all bosses otherwise you won’t succeed. But hey if you don’t do as well but complete some here are some minor rewards. Now try again later. Nothing wrong with that. But you seem to have a problem with that which I can’t understand why except wanting easy non challenging rewards.

That’s my point, you can guarantee specific numbers, using a system like the one I explained, and again, scaling can work. If you can design an event to be balanced with five people, and balanced at ten, and balanced at 20, and so on, then you can design it to scale between those tiers.

How about if someone DCs mid event? How about up levels? How can you guarantee perfection? You can’t. It all comes down to players playing better and coordinating better through communication. Again you aren’t reading but scaling can never be perfect. I won’t repeat it again but feel free to read above since you can’t seem to understand this simple fact.

To be fair, they really should have had LFG in from the start. Still, you didn’t need LFG to run dungeons, they didn’t help you run dungeons, it was just something to prep beforehand.

That is like saying you don’t need more UI to coordinate Boss Blitz.

My 3 man group can clear dungeons faster than most 5 mans on LFGs and even if I do use the LFG I filter it because some players won’t play well in my group or won’t contribute anything. You asked for more UI for Boss Blitz because you need players to understand. On top of that you suggest that you aren’t guaranteed who will be in your instance so you cannot properly coordinate. Yet for dungeons you do a 360 and state that LFGs don’t help because it doesn’t really matter who you get in dungeons.

At the end of a dungeon you get rewards. Just the rate is different. At the end of boss blitz you still get a reward. Just rate will be different. Doesn’t take someone with 6 PhDs to know that these are similar if you ask for better grouping tools in one you can’t say it is useless in another area (dungeons) where it is needed and serves the same purpose.

Nonsense. Those commands are meaningless. “Split into 6 groups?” I’m one guy, I can only split into one group. Which one should I be in? If you say a specific one, are you talking to me, or one of the other dozens of players? Map chat can work to coordinate people, but it’s fantastically inefficient for that purpose.

Everything is inefficient. VOIP is too. If someone has their headset down or speakers muted then it won’t work. Tools are tools. Not using them isn’t an excuse to say something is bad. It is like saying I can’t nail boards together because you refuse to use a tool (hammer). On top of that it is like saying the internet is nice for information but it is meaningless because it is inefficient and that I should have something else better otherwise the idea of gathering information is bad. I shouldn’t require to use the internet to gather information. Yet people do just that it is not the perfect way since there are things that are untrue on the internet but people still make the best of it. Map chat isn’t like the #1 communication tool in the world. But it is a communication tool and people need to make the best of it. Stop being lazy and making these excuses. It just shows that people don’t care. For those people I say punish them. Make sure they have no gold. Get kicked from parties. Because honestly they don’t try when people have tried every possible means of helping these players. Zero sympathy for these players.

And again, no you can’t, but that’s no excuse to not try and improve it.

Again you are not understanding. Never said you can’t improve. I am saying as it is improving it doesn’t excuse people from not using what tools are already available to them. Which people do. People have stated they don’t pay attention, they have chat off, they just plain don’t care. Bottom line it is bad player mentality which you should stop finding excuses to defend them.

Ohoni.6057:

You can’t guarantee anything. It will never be perfect. That’s no excuse for it to not be better.

There are some encounters that scale very well, and others that scale very poorly, all they need to do is adjust the poor scaling ones to scale at the same rate as the good scaling ones. If they take too long to kill with lots of people, they adjust the scaling modifier down a bit, if they die super fast with lots of people then they adjust the scaling modifier up a bit. Simple math.

Better in whose’s opinion? What if it scales fine for me in all berserker gear with 4 other people running full berserker gear. But it scales bad if 5 people did the same thing with PTV. Scaling isn’t the end solution to anything. You are making it seem like scaling solves all problems which it doesn’t.

On top of that if you scale where if x group regardless of levels, gear, builds, and such would scale down if a group doesn’t finish it something within a specific time limit like say kill Boom Boom in 2 minutes. That would dumb down the mechanics and allow anyone to just complete it. Encouraging mindless zerging because it doesn’t really matter if you stack a lot since it will descale if it takes too long anyhow. If this shouldn’t be the case then you run with scaling problems I have stated above. What it comes down to is design which is never perfect rather than scaling. More importantly the issue is just player mentality.

Again, I’ve never had a Boss Blitz boss fail because players could not follow the encounter mechanics. Yes, you have some people ignoring the turrets, but plenty pay attention to get that job done. My complaints with this event are ALL at the strategic level, the coordination of groups throughout the entire map, rather than at the tactical level.

It has a little of both. My experiences show both.

Part of the encounter mechanic is the time. There is no such thing as a fail for Boss Blitz. Your rate of reward is just lower for not doing it well you still get a reward. Fail conditions would be like Tequ or Wurm where lack of coordination could potentially mean no reward.

Sure, why not? Ideally it should be scaled based on the number of people around, so it shouldn’t take less time to kill him if it scales down for five people than it did when scaled up to 50. There might be some way to slightly increase kill times using some sort of yo-yo effect, but it really shouldn’t amount to much and you’d almost inevitably take longer.

Boss has 1 million HP for 10 man group to kill. Design scaling for 20 man, 30 man, 40man. Tell me what should happen. How much more hp and/or damage. One problem you will encounter is how to scale against different builds? PTV versus berserker. Condition damage? How about something in between. How about if people with berserker but just range versus melee berserker? No system is perfect. If it were then we’d have perfect softwares. Professions in GW2 will be completely balanced since launch. That isn’t the case. And scaling is no different. You will find that implementing any type of scaling has its problems. ArenaNet tries to minimize those problems but some problems will always exist.

No, I’m wanting to play GW2. I’ve been playing it for two years now, none of that time in a guild, and at launch, that was perfectly fine. Since launch they’ve added numerous features that have put me more and more behind those who choose to join guilds, and I resent that. MMO does not equal “guild members.” I’m really sick of people saying “if you don’t like this or that feature then you shouldn’t be playing MMOs.” You play the games you want, I’ll play the ones I want, neither of us has any business telling each other what to play.

This is why you cannot fully experience GW2 and you don’t understand MMOs. You chose to play a game that by definition requires you to play and coordinate with other people. You join groups, teams, and guilds to be with other people who enjoy a specific play style or do certain things so that you can do it together well. That is the whole point of MMOs. Without that you might as well play Skyrim.

I can suggest to you what you should play. You can accept it or not. My thoughts are simply you are suggesting GW2 change to be in line with a more solo instanced based play or single player type play style. As a result, this goes against the core foundation of MMOs and specifically GW2. If you find that this coordination or grouping isn’t what you want then I am suggesting that you move to a different game more to your liking because GW2 will never be what you want it to be. It will always require coordination, team work, and grouping. Guilds maximize this.

Also hyperbole and strawmen! Because why not?!

Such comments show to me how weak your arguments are and how inexperienced you are at the game. Your lack of understanding of basic game mechanics is showing. You argue that all forms of grouping is bad. My counter is that if that is bad there is no reason to have any form of group at all in games and beyond games. Groups serves a specific purpose which you find is flawed. As a result, I pointed to other examples including gaming where grouping is used and needed. And that if it was bad as you said it was then why do you see group or teams being used to group people to coordinate and accomplish things together. Based on my understand the only reason why you would not want such activities is that you are a solo players and prefer to get easy rewards in an uncoordinated way. In that case, I suggest you play a game like Skyrim because obviously what you are suggesting is against the core of what GW2 is all about and more generally what MMOs are suppose to do.

Maybe you should take some time and think about what is being said maybe that way you will understand it more.

Again seems like you aren’t reading what I wrote. That isn’t the problem. If you scale it to light then you encourage zerging because it will be easier to kill as a zerg rather than a small mans group. And you don’t want to encourage that.

In this specific event, perhaps, but in many events they still scale aggressively even when there is nothing to split up for. Specific to this event, I return to my earlier point, that if they don’t want to actively punish zerging then the scaling is too much, but since they do at least appear to want to punish zerging (they’ve never actually confirmed this but it’s a fair assumption), they lack the UI tools to make up for it, and need to add those tools to the game.

It is like saying it doesn’t matter if I vote or not therefore it is ok if I don’t vote because what I do doesn’t matter when everyone else I assume will vote. 1 vote wouldn’t make a difference. Yet image if everyone thought the same way you did. Then 1 doesn’t become 1 vote but it becomes 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. If you look at any local measure, ballot, or election you will see sometimes that a few votes do matter.

Yes, yes, except that what I said is literally true. I have done it. I have spent fifteen minutes yelling over mapchat “zerging doesn’t work, we need to split up, I’m over here at Pyro, I need like five other people, etc.” and still ended up with 80% of the active players swarming Kurei or whatever. If the rest of the map doesn’t want to play ball, then there’s nothing I can do about that.

Again you have a timer if you zerg and find that you don’t have enough time maybe that is not the way to do it. For example, timer is 8 minutes for gold reward. You zerg 1 boss and you find that the boss is only at 80% hp and you wasted 4 minutes already. Logical reasoning would be like hey how can I finish this event in 8 minutes if I have 5 more bosses to kill and this current boss I’m trying to kill is only at 80% hp with 4 minutes left to get gold rewards.

That’s easy. I’ve been playing this game for two years now, and when faced with a boss that isn’t dying fast enough the solution is simple, MORE DPS! Let’s get some more people in here and really crush the guy! Then once he’s down we should have enough DPS together to roll right over the other bosses. Right? No? That’s how the game’s trained me to play, at least, I might need some hints if they’d like me to do otherwise.

There are a lot of trolls in large scale events. People that don’t listen even if you type their name in map chat asking them to do something. They don’t listen to say chat if you put their name and it is right in front of them. You whisper them directly and they don’t listen. They bring up levels to the event for no reason.

Yes, you’re agreeing with the point I was making. Large scale events have a lot of things that can go wrong that the individual player cannot prevent, while in dungeons, you have a lot more control over the outcome by being able to choose who is with you, and who is not.

Dungeons are the perfect example. You can kick but this individual already wasted your time and everyone’s time and decreased the rate of your rewards. In a similar sense boss blitz is this way. You kill 6 bosses you still get a reward but the rate just sucks compared to gold reward.

Actually it’s not. You get “Gold reward” on CoF path 1 whether it takes ten minutes or 100 minutes. You don’t get a reduced reward for taking longer, although of course it’s less efficient the longer you take to get the same reward. Boss Blitz double dips on the reward, offering you both an efficiency loss AND a lower reward AND it also gets more difficult the longer you take as the bosses get harder and harder. Imagine if CoF path 1 were set up in such a way that if even one member of your group was doing certain things wrong, it could result in the run taking three times as long, offering 1/3 the reward if you do beat it, and each time he fails it doubles the HP of the Fire Effigy and adds new combat mechanics to the fight, making it considerably harder and more time consuming, again for a vastly reduced reward if you beat him. Fun.

You assume that boss blitz you won’t get a reward if you kill 6 bosses in a very long time. You do get a reward but it just sucks.

Not true, actually. If you take too long you get no reward at all. I’ve had it happen to me, killed the last boss after about an hour or so and nothing whatsoever.

Then the complaint is that the npc has too much control and you can’t tell if from doing something stupid. How will you get it to cleanse instead of lowering the debuff on Tequ? You can’t. So now you have to dumb down the mechanics by removing either the debuff on Tequ or the fact that Tequ fingers apply AoE conditions are you.

This is really a whole separate discussion, but my idea at the time was to split the turrets into each having a specific role, four in the middle would ONLY drop scales (but of course the shots per second needed would be adjusted to allow them to do as well as the current six turrets), and then the two outside ones would only be doing buffs/cleanse. It might even add some strategy to the event, as the players would have to react to the cleanse fields rather than assuming they were targeting the zerg. Of course if they did this they should add a new UI element, green circles at the location similar to the current boss orange circles.

On top of that making it npc based doesn’t change if someone stacks too many people by turrets and scaling the mobs up so much that they easily kill your npc. Your plan has flaws and new problems that you are introducing.

It still makes it a problem based on a lot of people messing up rather than one based on one or two individuals messing up. It’s much easier for a bunch of players to “fix” a bad turret defense team balance than it is to fix 1-2 trolling or completely incompetent players on the turrets. There should be no “heroes” in 150 player events.

Untrue and that is your own baseless opinion.

It can’t be both. It can either be untrue, which is a factual argument, or it can be my opinion, which I’m entitled to but you aren’t obligated to agree with.

So what you are saying is that coordination is bad and that you should build GW2 more in line with a single player game like Skyrim where you can succeed individually without any coordination instead of creating an MMO where by definition it involves playing with other people.

Again, you should probably avoid trying to speak for me, because when you do you tend to get it quite wrong. I have never even suggested that GW2 should take on elements of a single player game. Of course it’s a multiplayer game and multiplayer action is a fundamental element of the game, I just feel that the game’s mechanisms should be designed to push players into “doing it right” without each player having to be particularly clever, or requiring some players to “take control” of them and nudge them in the right direction. Most events in this game do that just fine, the way the UI announces them and the mechanics in play are obvious enough that 99% of players “do it right” automatically. When large numbers of players are “doing it wrong,” I don’t see that as being entirely the fault of those players, I see it as a failure of the event’s design to communicate its mechanics.

So that is what people call it when they can’t say anything productive. 5/5 is hard for some easy for others. 3/5 like you said is hard for some and easy for others. 1/5 is hard for some and easy for others.

I’m not really sure what you’re talking about here. 5/5 is hard because it means one screw-up or poorly balanced platform can kill the attempt for everyone. It doesn’t add “challenge” to the event, because even if the other four platforms handle it perfectly and kill their champ in minimum time, the attempt still fails and there’s nothing they can do about it. Their “challenge” is the same either way. If it were best 3/5, then that would allow for a couple screw-ups, but would still require the majority of platforms to succeed. Events that require 100% success of every player, or every player fails are just innately unfair to the players that do it right. You could argue that 3/5 is unfair to the 1-2 that fail the event but get rewarded anyways, and that’s true enough, but I would always err on the side of rewarding those that deserve it over punishing those that don’t.

How about if someone DCs mid event? How about up levels? How can you guarantee perfection? You can’t. It all comes down to players playing better and coordinating better through communication. Again you aren’t reading but scaling can never be perfect. I won’t repeat it again but feel free to read above since you can’t seem to understand this simple fact.

If someone DCs then the event downscales a bit. When they return it upscales again. And again I repeat that I agree scaling can never be perfect, but that’s no excuse not to make it as good as it can be. Some events in the game ALREADY scale very well to groups of all sizes, they have the model that works, they just need to make sure to apply it to all content.

Stop being lazy and making these excuses. It just shows that people don’t care. For those people I say punish them. Make sure they have no gold. Get kicked from parties. Because honestly they don’t try when people have tried every possible means of helping these players. Zero sympathy for these players.

And again, I don’t particularly have sympathy for those players either. If you can punish them without any collateral damage then be my guest. Who I feel sorry for is the people who just happen, through the mysteries of the megaserver, to be placed on the same server as those people, and who’s success or failure is based on those people. The people who are not lazy, who do care, they do not deserve to be punished along with the lazy and stupid, but the current mechanics assure that they will be.

Better in whose’s opinion? What if it scales fine for me in all berserker gear with 4 other people running full berserker gear. But it scales bad if 5 people did the same thing with PTV.

Then they should have it scale better for the PVT gear, probably even better than that since PVT is the second best DPS gear in the game. The content should never be scaled based on everyone having peak gear, unless they have mechanisms in place that can actually take player gear into account, scaling an event with 5 zerkers to be balanced for 5 zerkers while scaling the same content facing 2 zerkers and 3 Clerics to be good for 2 zerkers and 3 Clerics.

Scaling isn’t the end solution to anything. You are making it seem like scaling solves all problems which it doesn’t.

Again, you do a terrible job as my spokesman, I don’t think scaling is the only solution (especially not just HP scaling), but I do think that poor scaling does a lot to make certain events worse than they could be. Lyssa is a prime example, that event chain is pretty fun with a small group, but a dreadful slog with 20-30+ people, when her HP rises to the point that it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to drop her, and she starts summoning those champ gorillas that auto-kill anyone who gets close and drop no loot. It doesn’t make the event impossible by any means, it just makes it more annoying and tedious. If they redesigned it to make her HP rise at a slightly lower rate relative to the number of players present, such that her TTK when face with 50 players was the same as when faced by 10, and if they replaced the champ gorillas with either glass cannon versions that were just as dangerous but died very quickly, or with versions that lacked the massive damage attacks, then the event would be much more enjoyable when scaled up.

Part of the encounter mechanic is the time. There is no such thing as a fail for Boss Blitz. Your rate of reward is just lower for not doing it well you still get a reward. Fail conditions would be like Tequ or Wurm where lack of coordination could potentially mean no reward.

Again, I’ve had three early Boss Blitz events fail. One was because it took so long that the last boss did not drop any loot, the other two it was because by the time the zerg got to the 4th boss he had scaled up massively, it had already been a half hour past Silver, and everyone just started to give up, making it impossible for the remaining players to continue. If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid such a scenario then good for you, but they do exist.

Boss has 1 million HP for 10 man group to kill. Design scaling for 20 man, 30 man, 40man. Tell me what should happen. How much more hp and/or damage. One problem you will encounter is how to scale against different builds? PTV versus berserker. Condition damage?

If he’s designed well to fight 10 PVT then 10 Zerkers would kill him slightly faster. If you scale that up to 40 man, then it would be the same. My instinct would be that if he has 1 million HP at 10 players then you would want 4M HP for 40, but that would require testing to determine. If it turns out actual TTK is noticeably lower or higher then you just tweak it up/down a bit to compensate. Most bosses are immune to condition damage, but that does need fixing eventually too.

How about if people with berserker but just range versus melee berserker?

Depends on the mechanics of the fight. If both have a role to play, then you balance for 50/50, if melee is very risky then you balance for 25% melee, if it’s almost impossible then for 10% melee. Does this mean that if more people melee than was intended then the TTK will be lower? Yes it does, and that’s fine. Again, you swing “it can never be perfect” around, nobody is expecting it to be, stop that.

This is why you cannot fully experience GW2 and you don’t understand MMOs. You chose to play a game that by definition requires you to play and coordinate with other people. You join groups, teams, and guilds to be with other people who enjoy a specific play style or do certain things so that you can do it together well. That is the whole point of MMOs. Without that you might as well play Skyrim.

And you should be playing WoW. Again, don’t tell me what to play, I’ve probably been playing MMOs longer than you have, I just like different aspects of them than you seem to. MMOs are NOT about guilds.

My thoughts are simply you are suggesting GW2 change to be in line with a more solo instanced based play or single player type play style.

It’s more that I’m suggesting that GW2 NOT change from what made GW2 so great when it launched, its “pick up and play” openly cooperative and friendly gameplay. The more exclusionary they make their cooperative content, the more focused they become on “punishing failure” over “rewarding success,” and the more they reward coordinated raid guilds, the more they lose the magic that makes GW2 so much better than games like WoW or WS.

You argue that all forms of grouping is bad. My counter is that if that is bad there is no reason to have any form of group at all in games and beyond games.

Again, hyperbole and strawmen. I’ve never suggested that all forms of grouping is bad. All I’ve said that’s even remotely in that vein is that grouping should not require absolute coordination, it should be many people acting towards a common goal in their own way, and that through their combined efforts success is achieved, rather than that they are each cogs in a machine, performing specific roles that are determined for them. Players in an MMO should not be like units in an RTS, moved around by some guiding force to do their task or fail at it.

Maybe you should take some time and think about what is being said maybe that way you will understand it more, is what I would say if I were a more condescending person.

Vargamonth.2047:

IMHO, the only missing thing is every boss HP bar being monitored under the Boss-Blitz event timer.
This should be enough indicative of which boss needs reinforcements and allow a proper split on an unorganized megaserver.

More important than Boss HP would be “Number of non-defeated Players on each boss” – especially because some bosses have high HP remaining (Boom Boom, I’m looking at you) because there are TOO MANY people on that boss.

The biggest problem with the event is that it’s nearly impossible to self-coordinate even for players willing to try to do so – it’s impossible to tell how many people are on each boss, it’s impossible to tell how other bosses are faring, and it’s impossible to fix a scaling mistake caused by people piling onto one boss (Either by overreacting to a call for reinforcements – You need 3-5 more people for a boss, and get 20, etc, or people just coming by to see what the state of the boss is) – once you’re in the fight, that boss is scaled up for good.

Ohoni.6057:

And you should be playing WoW. Again, don’t tell me what to play, I’ve probably been playing MMOs longer than you have, I just like different aspects of them than you seem to. MMOs are NOT about guilds.

Assumption and personal attacks. Maybe you should focus on the argument at hand unless you have nothing better to say which seems like that is the case.

MMOs are about playing together and grouping together. Not sure what world you live in. Tell me an MMO that doesn’t have that aspect. They might call it different things, alliances, worlds, teams, nations, etc. If you don’t like guilds then Skyrim on steam and you have Steam friends for social network. That fits your bill more. I’m not telling you how to play. I’m suggesting you are wasting time in GW2 when you could play another game for more enjoyment. Stop trying to change my MMO to fit your single player style of play. Nobody wants that.

Again if you don’t have Skyrim I suggest you buy it now. I hear it is on sale.

I think I have played MMORPGs longer than you have been gaming. EQ anyone? Ultima Online?

It’s more that I’m suggesting that GW2 NOT change from what made GW2 so great when it launched, snip

Yet you are trying to change. Every means of team work or cooperation you have toss it out saying it is no good. Guilds, nope. Teams, nope. This is what you said not what I said. You bashed on TTS. You bashed on people organizing. This content doesn’t exclude anyone. Oh wait that is wrong it does exclude people who are bad and aren’t willing to communicate. Map chat? Not good enough. What other forms of communication? Native VOIP? Well people will complain it can be abusive to players.

You are suggesting you should be reward in group content the same way as a group that does it well. Might as well normalize rewards so that if I earn 10g/hr doing dungeons fast someone doing 1 path in 1 hr should get 10g. Doing bad in world events well they should get rewarded just as well as people who coordinate well. If this isn’t good for you then look at boss blitz. Bronze reward is minimum. So what is the complaint all is well.

You argue that all forms of grouping is bad. My counter is that if that is bad there is no reason to have any form of group at all in games and beyond games.

Again, hyperbole and strawmen. I’ve never suggested that all forms of grouping is bad. snip[/quote]

Maybe you need an english refresher course. Because obvious you don’t understand what you are saying. Either that or your logic is so flawed that you are religiously defending it to no end.

You called out TTS for being a bad way to play. Having groups or guilds is bad. You said that not I. And I’m calling you out for it. You stated that grouping shouldn’t be needed. Meaning you are moving towards non group content like solo instance or single play style. MMO is about playing together and succeeding as a group. If you can’t understand that then I suggest you move on to Skyrim because GW2 is obviously not for you. I can be 100% sure of that. So stop wasting time in GW2.

Maybe you should stop and check your logic because it is obviously flawed to no end. On top of that you lack experience playing GW2 truly the way it is suppose to be played as an MMO. You said you never join a guild. Well you judge others before actually taking a step back and seeing it from that point of view. You are like an arm chair theorist with no backing at all.