Showing Posts For Misery.4912:
Long time player, first time poster. Hopefully this isn’t in the wrong section, but it is more of a discussion as to what the major cause of frustration is for me in this game rather than a suggestion on how to change the game. I will happily repost elsewhere if the moderators feel I have posted this in the wrong place.
This game has occasional difficult content, such as Liadri and the Mad King’s Clocktower. As an initial disclaimer, I want to point out that I successfully completed both of these challenges, but I found them incredibly frustrating at times and it reduced my enjoyment of them.
Failure is never going to be as fun as success and these were difficult encounters that took almost everyone who completed them multiple attempts. Feeling like you failed for no reason can be frustrating. Knowing you lost whatever resources it cost you to enter a challenge in the first place can be frustrating. These frustrations are, in my opinion, acceptable. Everything does not need to be handed to players on a silver platter, but something drove me to rage far more than any of these common factors that I have seen people complaining about.
What did I find most frustrating about these encounters?
Forced down time after failure.
During the Mad King’s Clocktower failure resulted in being returned to the start of the tower, where you had to wait for a timer to tick down before you could attempt the puzzle again. There was more or less nothing that you could do during this period and the earlier you failed in your attempt, the longer you had to wait.
Even after getting almost to the end of the puzzle multiple times and reasonably consistently it was not usual for me to fail one of the first few jumps in the clustercuss of giant Norn trying to get ahead of the pack and be forced to stare at nothing for a couple of minutes. This got me out of my jumping rhythm and tended to put me on tilt, making it more likely that I would fail at my next attempt.
For this reason, I opted out of the Wintersday jumping puzzle completely. The rewards did not seem stellar and I did not want to go through the frustration of watching a timer bar tick down after each failure again.
During the Queen’s Gauntlet, failure resulted in death and teleportation to the edge of the ring. At peak times there would be multiple people standing around waiting to resurrect you, but that usually meant you were at the back of a queue and would have to wait several minutes before trying again. At low times, you had no option but to waypoint back to the centre of the pavilion and run all the way back to the arenas, assuming no one had started a challenge in the interim.
An easy way to remove this frustration would be to make all of these kinds of events instanced as a majority of the delays arise from waiting for other players. This would kill one of the greatest social elements of these kinds of events. The quipping and camaraderie that occurred during the Mad King’s Clocktower almost made the downtime bearable, at least when I was consistently making it almost to the end of the puzzle. For this reason, instancing all of these kinds of challenges is not an ideal solution.
What I would like to see is an option for players to remove themselves from the communal rooms for practice or achievement chasing purposes. I had a friend who left his account logged in to a Mad King’s Clocktower overflow overnight to ensure that he was the only person within that overflow when he came back in the morning. This allowed him to finish the jumping puzzle without his vision being obscured by the other players, the aspect he had found most frustrating.
Something like running back to the NPC required to start a challenge after failure should not be part of the challenge. My Queen’s Gauntlet experience could have been much improved by failure resulting in me being downed at the location I was teleported to after death instead of being defeated. If this were the case I could have immediately bandaged myself up and attempted to crowd control Chomper away from that meat for the 18th time immediately instead of waypointing back and running back for almost as long as the fight itself took. I realise this may make failure seem cheaper, but this could be easily fixed by increasing the cost of entry and the size of the reward for winning.
I hope any discussion in this thread can be limited to frustration related to forced down time after failure as opposed to the other frustrations that occurred during these two particular challenges, but the internet will be the internet.
Anyway, tl;dr: For me, the most frustrating part of difficult challenges is when I am forced to wait before I can attempt them again.