The Clocktower and Gauntlet are two different situations although they share the downtime between resetting. (checking says I go over some similar points as misery).
For clocktower, the goal was to have people compete against themselves and each other to complete the puzzle. Obviously there are issues when you implement it so you compete with people in the same overflow shard and the event starts at regular intervals and doesn’t end until every player in the puzzle finishes or dies. They would have to implement it differently to remove the queue for the next attempt, likely with random grouping, but wasn’t worth not being able to compete with the same people repeatedly. They did the same with Crab Toss activity, for example, except you are competing against other in a contest, rather than a time raced, which works better for the format. Anet needs a solution that will satisfy allowing people to race together in a jumping puzzle and not have excessive queue times.
They added snowballs to the Wintersday puzzle as one solution, but that’s a distraction. I would love a solo instance as a solution for the downtime. They did this with Canach’s Lair, where the player learns the mechanics in a basic setting before pushing them into the MMO version. That provides a medium between making completely solo instances for the activities against participating with other players.
For Queen’s Gauntlet, they went a completely different way, which I have reasons for criticism, many which relate to the queue and downtime. The battles can easily be an instance, they did just that for Poyaqui in Belcher’s Bluff. The reason it isn’t is so other players can watch you while they wait their turn. But they aren’t given the choice to watch you or fight, they are forced into a queue. They also don’t have a camera view, which could easily be done because this was done in Sanctum Sprint. If they really thought people would watch the fights, this was a mediocre effort and wasn’t worth the drawbacks. You are required to pay a fee to attempt like a gamble, and need to raise the stakes to get greater rewards. This isn’t a moa race however, and people gambling on their skills is guaranteed to cause issues somewhere. Time is spent acquiring the tickets, which are from activities/achievements related to the release, the goal being to attract people to Queen’s Gauntlet. The problem is, these activities are open world dynamic events that focus on the PvE crowd. This is not the same crowd that enjoys the high stakes, high skill solo play with mastery of the character. This pretty much forces people who don’t enjoy open world activities much to participate in them because the ticket was made account bound.
In addition to the time it takes to acquire the tickets, the players are forced into the queue by design, for the reason for other players to watch, the only reason. If you are defeated, you are teleported outside and require resurrecting. This relies on other people 1) being in queue waiting or 2) watching you. Both can be unreliable at best, especially when players lose interest in the Gauntlet or get distracted by the new release. Now it would make some sense to be defeated, as it will cost you time and coin to make your way back, but if you design the matches to take many attempts, this will quickly become tedious. This could’ve been completely avoided by doing like the rest of the game and putting you in downed state. That way you can participate in an activity designed to be solo by yourself without relying on others. You can’t rely on other people just because you designed the release to get people to Queen’s Gauntlet. This ends up wasting time for the people attempting the Gauntlet and people being pushed towards it without no significant benefit.
