Showing Highly Rated Posts By Kamui.3150:
As far as the story content on this patch, I’m liking it pretty good. The core/cipher grind isn’t as bas as I first thought, after 3 times going up against the Marionette and an hour with guildies going to probes, I’ve now opened 2 of the chests, and am close to opening the other 3. However, I have to say that the Twisted Marionette fight itself is very poorly designed, particularly how Phase 2 works, and the way that the achievements can mess up for you no matter how good your individual skill is.
Phase 1 has the player population separate into 5 lanes, each one effectively cut off from the other, unable to interact. This is okay, the players determine the groupings, so they can effectively set themselves up to work on a lane-by-lane basis. When the event starts, Twisted enemies spawn at the entrance to the lanes, with other Scarlet minions spawning scattered throughout the lanes. The players have to stop the Twisted enemies from reaching the centre, and thus powering up the failure metre.
All of this is just fine, the tower defence aspect works great, encourages players to co-operate in smaller groups, and lets the players figure out what can work best. The point where this falls apart, is when Phase 2 begins. From bottom to top, each lane gets a portal opened in turn, so the bottom-most lane gets its turn first, while the other 4 lanes continue to fend off the Twisted enemies. Upon going through the portal, the individual lane is then randomly split onto five platforms, each one with a Champion enemy with some kind of gimmick. Each platform, composed of randomly divided members of a single lane, must defeat the Champ on their platform, and then destroy the power node.
The issues with this event arise in three factors, the random allocation of the players can severely hamper the effectiveness of a single platform, such as when a platform is left with too few people. Second is that if any of the platforms fails to destroy their power node, the entirety of Phase 2 for that lane fails, and the fail metre for the entire event fills by 25%, meaning that Phase 2 can only fail 3 times, after that failure of a Phase 2 means the entire event fails. Finally, the biggest issue with this, the fixing of which would solve the other 2 issues quite handily. Is that once an individual platform is done with their Champion and power node, they can do nothing but dodge any Marionette attacks that come their way, and either cheer their lane-mates on, or watch in horror as they see a losing battle or a platform with a solo player due to sheer luck of the draw as the timer ticks down and they lose the Phase, are now locked out of any achievements tied to Phase 2, and as the entire event is pushed 25% closer to a fail state.
The solution to this issue, IMO, is rather simple. The core problem is that the players on a completed platform can’t DO anything, they can only watch and hope that their allies on the other platforms can do a decent job. One thing that needs to be remembered, is that not everyone is in full Zerker Exotic/Ascended gear, and not everyone is a veteran player that knows all the tricks to their class. Some of these players might be in simple blues or greens, and saw this fun event and thought it might be fun to check out, after all, it’s only going to be here for two weeks, so better check it out while you can. This player now likely feels either saddened or angry that they are now the entire reason that the event failed, and rightly so. It’s not their fault, they’re playing a game, trying to have fun, and the game they’re playing is Guild Wars 2, one that prides itself on players working together, helping each other out, and riding to victory as a GROUP. So the solution is this, once a platform has completed the destruction of their power node, teleport them to one of the OTHER platforms which has not yet finished. It makes sense, it lets the players on completed platforms continue to contribute, and it no longer makes luck of the draw and/or lack of one or two players’ skill/experience mess the entire event up for every single player participating in the map. GW2 is a fantastic game that encourages players to actually cooperate, unlike in many other games where you snub the other players unless they’re actually in your party, so let us actually cooperate with our fellow players, let us help them up when they’ve been knocked down, and let us actually be grateful for every single player that chooses to participate in this limited-time event, no matter their level of skill.
tl;dr: Players on completed platforms in Twisted Marionette should be teleported to one of the remaining active platforms, this will help the event work better, and improve camaraderie.
Hope this made sense, and I sincerely hope that ANet looks at this post and considers making this change.