Guild Wars 2

The Tequatl fight is great fun, it really is! The fight mechanics are fantastic, I love that the fight has phases and I love that fighting a dragon feels just the way it should – terrifying, a vertical difficulty wall, exciting, with just a glimmer of hope for success.

What isn’t fun was my ability to experience the event. …Or should I say lack of? Never before have I had to wait so long to play the game. The first wait, of course, was the infamous Overflow wait. The system worked comfortably-ish for the Scarlet events, with Overflows doing their job, albeit with a lack of server pride. (Keep in mind Scarlet events also offered a consolation prize upon failure).

However, combined with other mechanics in the Tequatl Rising content, the thousand naysayers in mapchat (those who’d somewhat understandably already given up before the fight had even begun and were actively encouraging others to do so), it became an exercise in frustration and futility.

The only glimmer of hope then, of course, lay in getting into my server’s Main map. I’m from the Tarnished Coast – a large server with a decent rate of downing Tequatl. Of course, this means getting through about ten bazillion Overflow maps – which is exactly what I did. I stood. I stood. And I stood for four flippin’ hours before I got into my server’s Main. Hours I’d have LOVED to be spending actually, yknow, playing the game maybe? But stand in Sparkfly is what I did. Tabbed out to, yknow, not play the game or have to look at that same old level 66 dragonfly while waiting. And I was absolutely ecstatic when I finally got through.

This, unfortunately, was only the beginning of the wait. See, the way the event is designed, it’s only possible at the RIGHT time of day when EVERYONE’s online, playing and god-forbid putting half a heart into it. It’s much like having to catch the moonlight that one day each year to read the runes on Thorin’s map (The Hobbit). At most other times, the map is comprised of 1. AFKers holding their spots for “later tonight” 2. People whining about AFKers and spewing all kinds of unwholesome content in mapchat 3. People who’ve given up due to #2. It’s absolutely infuriating.

“Give it a few hours” they tell me in mapchat. “THEN people’ll be online and Tequatl will go down”, they say. Unfortunately, it’s 4am, I’ve stood in Spark flippin’ Fly for about infinity hours now – a map I’ve completed and REcompleted about 70 times and I’m sick, disappointed and tired. I’ve dedicated a good 3/4 of my day to this thing with not a single anything to show for it but my new white hairs and frown wrinkles.

The absurd 1.5 hours between spawns that absolutely HAS to be spent standing in Sparkfly (or you’ll lose your place in Main, see), that closed content designed ONLY for Peak-Time America (that I’m not a part of), all the waiting while tabbed out just to be disappointed by an event whose success depends on naysayers and understandably angry folks on mapchat…

That, is the complete opposite of fun. Designing challenging content is great. Designing challenging content that one barely gets to access….feels downright awful. Super Adventure Box’s Tribulation Mode was awfully difficult, and it had me going at it for fabulous, enjoyable hours. Because I could!

The same way I could be a Sunbringer.
…If they’d only let me try.

I agree wholeheartedly with this thread. I literally stop playing the game for a week to wait till it died down to see if maybe I could get to a non-overflow attempt. I finally got a kill on my home server (Blackgate) last night and it was a blast. This is event has clearly shown the failures of the overflow system, the guesting system, and trying to put raid-esque content in the open world.

I just find it cramps on the typical motif of don’t wait around to play. Event failed? Ok cool, wait around for awhile because if you leave you are not getting back in. All said I think the timer was the prime mistake. It still would have been an engaging and active fight without the timer. That’s what I want. Active and engaging content that is doable. This world event is what I want from a world event minus the time constraints of waiting and failing because of an arbitrary number. That and overflow, which I’m not sure that is something I can realistically expect to be solved.

On the bright side though. The fact that Teq is no longer a stand here and hit the 1 key boss is great. Haven’t been this engaged in an mmo boss since PSU; which is more like a gw1 “mmo” than an actual mmo.

what makes it even more sad. Is sticking around for 4 tequatl events (3 failures and 1 win) only to get to the reward chest to receive the 1 rare, 3 blues and 2 greens. :-(

I don;t think there’s anything wrong with the overflow system, because that’s actually there to avoid you waiting in a massive queue for the event, which is even worse.

The problem is most people don’t want to do the event on overflow, because they assume it will fail. They try for a long time to get into the main server. Spend hours going back and forth through the portal between Darkweather Waypoint and Govoran Waypoint to get into the main server. I’m sure this is not what Anet wanted, people wasting their time going through a portal non-stop for hours. Hardly fun. It’s stuff like this that will drive poeple away. Why on earth this event is in open world and living story is beyond me.

Harkens back to the old MMO’s where people waited for many hours (I’ve heard days) to be able to tag the outdoor boss. Maybe that’s what they were going for?

IndigoSundown.5419:

Harkens back to the old MMO’s where people waited for many hours (I’ve heard days) to be able to tag the outdoor boss. Maybe that’s what they were going for?

If it is, than I have no idea what Anet is thinking, as there’s a reason developers have stopped with that nonsense. It’s simply not fun, and as the TC said, no one wants to spend more time waiting to play a game than actually playing it. That is, by default, bad game design.

If there’s one thing for Anet to take away from this, it’s that we’re perfectly fine with having challenging encounters. They just need to be instanced into raids. With the Overflow system, and the requirement of X amount of players on the same map at any given time with Y amount of coordination needed, large scale, difficult outdoor raid encounters simply do not work in Guild Wars 2’s setting.

If Teqautl 2.0 was instanced, and the old version was kept out in the world, I think alot of people would have found this update to be one of the best yet. As it stands, however, it’s quickly becoming the worst for the majority of people, and only the “Best” for those on populated servers that can organize an effort to kill him consistently while not on an over flow.

Part what did not work out other than the waiting for timer BS is how unable even the best zone full of people are able to compensate for just a couple of bad/afk/bugged turret operators.

The event supposedly scales but those sure as hell do not. If we had a more on demand version of the turret mechanics, there would have been a lot less failures.

Then instead of putting an event like this on a timer that just encourages AFK’ing in the zone and adding to overflow frustrations, make it triggered by player activity so that it is on demand and only when enough are there to feasibly do it.