Guild Wars 2

This will be interesting, my guild has pretty much stopped doing dungeons due to there being only 3-4 people available requiring at least some PUG needed. Group then tends to zerg as players that join often don’t co-ordinate well (I’d swear they have chat turned off sometimes), or do actions which causes unneeded losses. Because of this, I rarely run PUG dungeons anymore on top of early functionality left a bad taste, any drops I’ve won have been useless, and I feel I can do better with the 2 hours, with world events or WvW, as a complete failure of eg AC story mode run can be when you have keymashers in the party… occasionally optimism drives me to try and be let down…

I can see this mechanic driving far more ‘forced wipes’ much like other MMOs with a no res-run option where its just easier after a point of attrition to just stop fighting let everyone die so the event nulls out and start again. which causes a lot of rage quits with PUG groups. I’d be willing to bet dungeon play drops significantly as a result of this change (can see CM becoming near abandoned on a PUG level).

If it were my option I’d add this as an ‘elite’ mode on top of explorable modes.

nexxe.7081:

This has been an amazing event. I loved all the Acts, minigames, and achievements. Keep up the good work.

+1

I’m having a very addictingly fun time thus far, and have made a point of being online at all the act starts and will be there on the 31st as soon as I’m off work. Having a complete blast, and leveling, getting some upgraded gear drops, tonnes of mats while doing so!

As was mentioned this is probably a first go for world changing events. The cinematic allows for the map to dynamically change without booting people out of the game and it also allows them to test live changes with a ‘simpler’ event.

I for one thought it was kitten cool to watch happen, especially with all the speculation and the ‘gawking mob’ gathering around and the chaos of everyone diving headlong into the dungeon and at least with us the utter humiliating wipe on the first try solo before our guild actually went about getting into groups and whatnot, was very cool.

Seeing the ‘backlash’ on the forums by what is a very vocal, and significant portion of the games population, it seems that what created the ‘confusion’ boils down to the pressure put on the BLC chest reward skins in the event release info.

Were there to be a rewind button or as an idea for future events, from my opinion, one might take a different approach to the marketing details (if all other things were the same, as I feel the event has been rather well designed and implimented, drop rates are appropriate etc)…

Push the free content as the primary interest. There is a LOT in the Halloween event, doors, the quest chain, jumping puzzle, costume battle, candy, craftables (and I’m sure by the other acts even more to come)… which have been overshadowed in the forum conversations by the very few skin items in the BLC system which had the marketing focus. Had the focus been on the other parts with the BLC content being put in amidst as a declarative added bonus on top of the event, something akin to ‘And for those who are looking for even more Halloween trick or treats, as an extra bonus, we’ve added ‘X’ rare skins into our BLC system, not available anywhere else, for that added unique flare for the adventurous. These coveted prizes will only drop for the very lucky as an added seasonal reward to the existing Chest offerings!’ with the old * item skin availability is intended to be an extremely rare drop from the BLC. Players should not expect to receive these items but understand they are there as a potential award offering similar to our permanent TP/Merch/Bank items.

This could have driven just as much fervor for the items but players would be told from the start they are super rare and that they are somewhat an ‘outside’ of the main event and are intended as gamble play incentive, there would have been less (some is always inevitable) complaint about availability and the BLC tie-in.

Cheers!

P.S. Thank-you for the event so far, its fun! and thank-you to those in support who are working hard with all the complaints, and the dev’s who are trying their best to mitigate the mess.

Why does everyone expect to get a RARE dropping item, its like everyone expecting to win the lottery. Guess what if everyone gets it, the item is no longer Rare by definition.

Everyone now has a chance to get them without buying keys (adds more actual $ fairness to the player base and the ‘newer’ players that have not amassed enough gold to buy the gems), and gets ‘please play again’ opportunity to those opening regular chests (and also adds some value to mystery tonics and boosts), any more access devalues and changes the RARE state of said items. And also, you know what happens when EVERYONE wins the lottery, everyone gets a bit annoyed that their hard to get grand prize is now everywhere it no longer is winning the lottery, take that Spanish lotto a while back where the city held a lotto and due to a glitch everyone won, and thereby won 1 Euro… but hey you won the lotto so you wouldn’t feel cheesed now would you…

Anet wants you to see someone with (eg) the Great Sword Saw and be in awe that they’ve got one, in sort of a slightly more common Legendary. And as far as the “I didn’t get anything” arguments, you get the horns, Act 1 you can get the book, you get food, recipes, theme’d mats, FOR FREE or with little to no work… and odds are you got some holiday items in that mix of stuff you did get, just not that one Rare (there’s that word again) item that you were hoping for… next time you buy a lottery ticket and don’t win (guess what you have a 99.99% chance of that happening!) go storm the lotto office and see if they give you ANY concession other than having security throw you out the door.

If there are Rare items, I want them to be Rare. They rightly should be either very low drop rates or stupidly hard to craft (if at all)… Why? so I can say I’ve got something a bit truely exotic, that won’t be seen every day. I played an MMO years back that had UNIQUE items, as in 1 per realm EVER, someone got it and destroyed it or quit, its gone, done… too bad, and traded for years of work worth of gold. Resulting, they were without question absolute best gear and would draw people to follow a holder around just to see it, you’d be all over your guild chat and forum with ‘doood I just saw some guy with ’X’, it was Awesome!’ … If I have a Rare, I want someone checking my char out and drooling at it, not going ‘meh I’ve got 6.’

Hey Space,

I doubt anet will give a response on specifics until after each act is unveiled… judging from the look of it I’d gather that there will be parts that span the entire level range with the Mad king finale being or having some lvl 80 component.

I would suggest if you want to run the Act 1 segment, go with a guild group and effectively get body guarded, as you can do the entire scavenger hunt out of combat and would only need to worry about the last page and any random encounters. (also having weapon/skill setup with protective skills and a run boon/skill would also be beneficial).

I worked with a couple others to bring a level 5 player (friends young kid) to get through to the last page and he was able to complete the chain, died a few times out of bad luck and AOE’s but it is doable (and he leveled a few times in the process).

Must commend whomever thought this up as a ‘solution’, it creates a (hopefully) balanced ‘please play again’ approach that also helps deal with the glut of mystery tonics many of us have.

Anet, you once again have shown that your service/support staff and dev team members are doing the best I’ve seen in active community response and feedback.

Cheers,

Kasen.9032:

As the title says is it worth doing on all my alts?

On one hand I would hate to find out at the end of the event It’s a really nice reward that I could have gotten for all my alts but on the other hand I would hate to spend days doing the whole event on alts only to get some crappy reward

Any devs want to comment either way

There is only 1 reward, a funky backpack/book piece that is equal to the personal story lvl 40 one (but far cooler IMO, and works well with a necro/engi look, dunno if its transmutable).

Regardless of the reward the running about is fun and you get some quirky back story to the mad king as well, and the whole candy meter which you can use to get more trick-or-treat bags. Run it once, decide if you want to farm trick or treat stuff and if you want that piece of gear for that alt (and the benefit towards the achieves from the bags, kills, etc).

Additionally, completing the Act 1 scavanger hunt and getting the reward may be a pre-req to a further achieve, rewards, mystic forge recipe etc that when combined at the end of the event may be worth while for your alts, you won’t know until it happens. You have the opportunity, either take it or not, you can’t be spoon fed the final outcome if prior to deciding to take part.

Donari.5237:

I also found some toilet paper in the mansion east end of Gendarran, just lying there. That’s the only place I’ve seen it, though.

I won’t spoil but when I did the Scavenger hunt quest yesterday, I found a couple in very close proximity to a couple of the ghosts randomly on the ground. Gotta admit its a riot of a random event ‘toss in’

+1 Ba-Gillion for the basic premise.

Falls in perfectly with the ‘we want you to explore and learn’ feel Anet has with the game, tying in some further GW1 lore as well would be great for those of us who didn’t play it. Putting events in other races home/main centers its neat (I just realized my 50+ necro had never been to Metrica last night!), and possibly putting the GW1 events out in the ‘wild’ where they would have been in that original world would be neat too (Old Lion’s arch event underwater anyone?)

I for one had 18 chests, opened them all with 3 sets of keys. Got no Halloween specific items, but don’t feel ‘robbed’ as I knew the chances of getting ‘winning’ one of the skins was highly unlikely but felt like giving it a try anyway (as the way I see it the real money I spent on keys in the end equates to what I could have spent on a monthly subscription to another MMO, and at worst I am contributing to the further success of Anet and GW2 which I am enjoying).

Constructive feedback:

The feedback I can give is the understandable feeling some have gotten from the fact that the Chests are not a given (heck friend of mine’s guild pooled 500 chests and only pulled 2 skins). As a multi prize lottery structure (which is what the chests really are) nobody advertizes you have a 1-10 chance of a free play as the major marketing ploy, no they push the grand prize up front and center . With the dynamic structure that Anet has with the chests (can turn up/down the reward rates), published specific chances don’t make sense, a little " *these items/skins are extremely rare and you a very limited chance of randomly getting one/any of these items. " could have saved a bit of face for some users, so instead of player ‘x’ feeling robbed by not getting a weapon skin from # of chests (and understandably no matter what, there will always be those who even with standard lotteries are incensed they did not win, even with published 1-10 Billion odds or such, the ‘I bought a ticket I should have won’ response).

At any rate, some type of message around the Black Lion Chest system being a type of ‘lottery’ would be a good move especially given that GW2 has such a diverse population of players that your chances of success may vary and that no specific rewards are guaranteed.

“Bad Gameplay The mobs seem to have far more hitpoints that normal world mobs. They don’t drop any loot and they don’t provide any experience. This generally makes the fighting a very negative experience and makes me want to run passed every mob I can. This is exactly what I did in my second more ‘savvy’ play through.”

This is my experience… first time through. My session seemed to have sat on the ‘Help Lionguard hold the Courtyard’ for a VERY long time (20+ Min) while I attempted haphazardly to kite/outrun excessive number of brutes around with my Necro… died I think about 12 times in the story, mainly due to getting chain stunned by said brutes. Got no experience, no drops from them, spent 6 silver in repairs…

The prior to the courtyard actions of run to the beach, run back to the fort, run back to the beach, with insta-infinite respawns of undead was a giant pain as well. Would have been maybe reasonable with a melee class (or something with higher dps + faster CD’s than a staff / sceptre+horn necro with pets that died in the last ‘wave’) as I’d have to slowly push my way to the beach only to have wiped all my CD’s and then ‘talk’ to somebody only to have to shove back through the same infinite crawl. IF I do priory on an alt I’d want to find a way to SKIP this story event (being said I can’t I’ll probably see if I can get some guild mates to assist), for as it stands this is one of the worst player experience events in the game (Honestly don’t know the story elements, which I plainly ignored after dieing the 3rd time as was getting aggravated).

in short REALLY PO’d at this event.

Best to check the drive’s health (if Corsair has a tool run it) or check it with something like SSD-life, and run a full CHKDISK on the suspect drive AND also on your system drive (will require boot time scan).

With CHKDisk Hang around and watch the scan progress to see if it finds and/or corrects anything and let it do a ‘surface’ scan, despite there not being physical sectors the system still assigns the SSD inodes to virtual sectors as this is how filesystems are designed to function. These may have been reassigned wrong by the drive (through its internal wear leveling) or a reassignment may have been ‘lost’ by doing the secure erase as this clears even the diagnostic data on the drive.

I’m running 2 Sapphire 1G 6870’s in CF (matched model+Firmware) and see 35-90+ FPS with everything set to high and no screaming fans (some glitched textures occasionally max out my cards or would get runaway frame rates causing silly loads, eg staring at the ground deepest spot west area underwater in human start zone would run amok and be pushing 125fps with cards working 100%), but setting in game limit to 60fps and vsync off leaves everything smooth as butter, drivers are set to default except for AA is set to performance. The new beta drivers (along w/ the CAP profile) did wonders for FPS, did a clean driver install.

Rig setup for reference:
i5 2500 (non-k)
16g DDR3-1600 ram
128G SSD for Win7 64bit and GW2
Resolution: 1920×1080 @ 75Hz

running iobit Game Booster to kill background proc’s while playing. (no realtime AV enabled during gameplay seemed to even out some big dips)

This is very much the PUG experience.

Anet made the decision to allow ‘in battle’ respawning with the punishment being in the repair costs. ‘zerging’ breaks the bank, yet still allows the uninitiated to struggle their way through, that is how the system is intended. Players eventually have to learn that this isn’t the best method as they’ll be broke pretty quick if they keep it up. This in turn makes a slightly easier learning curve requirement to an event/dungeon, you can make a few mistakes, still pull through and complete it rather than completely wiping, and hopefully learn from that and do better the next time. This allows for groups of players to run and complete a dungeon without requiring anyone in the group to have previously mastered the run and walk the group through (anyone from WOW who has fought raid bosses knows the ‘do you know the fight?’ chatter in order to have a hope of success is a clear sign of that system is ‘broken’ as there is no way to succeed without pre-studying a battle).

If you’re in a guild group or playing with people who know what to do, how to play their profession and pay attention to the boss and others around, death should generally be a rare occurrence (being downed is different, as there are always cases where you just situationally get the short end of the stick, but others should be able to stagger roles to revive). PUG groups tend to have the ‘zerg’/spam/respawn mentality because, there’s the ‘I don’t know {player} therefore don’t care if he dies’, lack of organization/experience, and some players just plain don’t know better and haven’t learned that spending ‘x’ silver every run on repairs is probably not a good thing.

//

Having a waypoint spawning before the boss is defeated is a bad idea, this would further build the zerg rush mentality to fighting bosses and would be an effective ‘insta res’ leaving only the silver as punishment for dieing; and additionally as the path has not been cleared makes no sense to have an active waypoint available.

Laughing at the people who speed level to 80 and then complain there is nothing to do. This isn’t WoW, the game is the adventure between 1-80, there’s tonnes of neat events, story, dialog etc.

Want end game, play WvW, sPVP, Dungeon runs, map completes, gear collecting, make use of the fact the game scales you and play around in low/mid level and help those leveling.

My advice, roll another toon, and take part in the story, read the lore bits, don’t skip the cut scenes.

Best moment thus far for me has to do with a bot and 2 brilliant players.

Bot in NW Caledon Forest – kitten derp, farm farm…

Then 2 other players come round the hill… kiting… a champion troll. (took a few tries to get the troll to the bot, was right at the edge of his chase range)

Champion troll, meet bot; bot, meet troll. Aww look, the troll is turning the bot into paste, he must like bots.

Was epic and brilliant, left me laughing at the bot and cheering for the troll.

Anet, appreciate the update and the ongoing battle with the abusers/bots/scammers in GW2.

On a related note,

Saw the best player done in game anti-botting by a couple of guys the other night.

Can’t remember the name of the zone, bot standing there swinging; 2 players came around the corner kiting a champion troll over to the bot, got it to engage and slaughter the bot-er. Is it bad I was cheering for the Troll?