Guild Wars 2

Orpheal.8263:

Rollerbeetle Racing together with several different racing tracks all over tyria, like basically 15-18, different tracks or so, including rollerbeetle championships

Rollerbeetle Racing does not need to be added into GW2. Sanctum Sprint is already a racing game better suited for GW2, taking advantage of things like the Z-axis and endurance bar. Sanctum Sprint is not as fleshed out, balanced, polished, supported, or successful as RBR was, but there is abundant room to expand upon it and make it even better than RBR. The ceiling of success for Sanctum Sprint is much higher, yet remains untapped. Its improvement should take precedence to adding RBR, which should really just be left alone altogether as far as GW2 is concerned.

Nine Rings could be also reworked into some kind of minigame, which could work then as a LA Minigame, while beign eventually at the same tiem also a good money sink liek in GW1

Nine Rings and all games like it can and should stay dead.

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

I can say you will like the new pack coming out fully . it will be full of mini games .

I’ve seen videos of Mount Races. It’s extremely watered-down compared to Sanctum Sprint or Rollerbeetle Racing. Not at all a vote of confidence for anything ANet may do with the format.

Randulf.7614:

I imagine the lack of popularity is behind any further development.

You are casting a symptom as a cause. I’d ask you to read this, but since you glossed over it the first time it was linked in this thread, let me go over here why these games aren’t populated:

• Weak rewards: Activity rewards are garbage. I understand that their purpose is not to be farmed or to make great money and that they are essentially accessible to all characters, but what is earned for playing these games is so paltry that I doubt it even enters anyone’s mind as a reason for playing. No rewards are exclusive to any of the formats or genre as a whole (except for the Kegmaster title by some people’s standards).
• Time-gated rewards: Related to the last point, the existence of so many time-gated rewards like certain refinements and chests competes with activities due to their limited nature. If a player neglects to play an activity on a given day, they can go back to it another day when it’s open and play it, spending as much time as they wish to catch up on achievement progress or earning their meager rewards. If they skip their daily refinements though, they can’t make it up. They forever lose that day’s potential for that reward. This kind of content is a strong draw away from any content not like it, like activities.
• Easy, lack of driver for skill: Being multiplayer games, activities are as hard as the people who play them are skilled. However, the incentives for becoming good at any of these activities don’t exist. Each game has a reward for winning that is only slightly better than those below it. Neither the difference nor absolute amount are so great as to justify anyone spending time mastering the game to earn that reward. There is no other prestige or recognition for it either. Good competition doesn’t blossom because the stakes are so incredibly low and the effort-to-output ratio is so tremendous that hardly anyone bothers.
• Buggy and broken: Glitch abuse is ripe in every daily activity mode, the details of each you may research yourself. Some glitches have existed as early as the specific game’s introduction. Abuse of these glitches can quickly cheapen or ruin the experience of some players. Some, by the way, can be used to considerably improve reward gains, and if you do that, you are still miles and leagues behind anything respectable for income.
• Fundamentally flawed: Three of the four daily activities have winning strategies that go against the spirit of the game, and the last one can be bug abused to force a win in under ten seconds. Every team game is ruined by team switching and leavers. Achievement tracks in some games reward and promote bad play and, for lack of a better term, toxic behavior.
• No parties: You can’t enter games as a group, have private rooms for your group, or find your friends in any of the active instances and join them. Yes, I am aware of ANet having talked about technical limitations to doing this. No, that does not excuse it from being something players want.
• Critical mass: The one area where population actually does matter as a cause for a lack of popularity. Nobody wants to play a multiplayer game that nobody else is playing. When you enter activities on any day that isn’t a daily participation day, they are ghost towns (perhaps with exception to Keg Brawl). Even on daily participation days, everyone clears the room when the game ends.

So, if not merely a matter of population, what’s the real reason behind developer resources not going towards activities? I can think of two:

• Bypasses business model: Activities are what I spent the bulk of my time in-game on after becoming disgusted with so many other parts of the game. The upside was that activities are mostly shielded from any changes that ANet makes to the game proper. You don’t care about ascended gear, infusions, trait changes, specializations, or any sort of character progression because none of that affects you or the game in any activity. The downside is that by ANet having nothing to sell you, they have no incentive to market towards or develop for you. Working on activities does not bring in any cash directly to ANet.
• Lack of developer skill or vision: Basket Brawl is the worst minigame in Guild Wars franchise history (Nine Rings and Rings of Fortune don’t count) and, being their most recent work with activities, paints a very grim picture of the studio’s understanding of not only what makes their minigames succeed or fail, but of what minigames they’ve even made in recent past. Whoever is working on these games now is either an amateur or doesn’t know what they’re doing, or both. I remember Basket Brawl being introduced as a test bed for other things ANet might have wanted to do in the future with activities. If that is indicative of the kind of quality or approach the studio intends to take towards activities, then the games would likely be better off left untouched.

How do we, the players, solve this dilemma? We don’t. At least, I don’t. I have a long enough history of putting out ideas for the improvement of modes like this that have gone unheeded to not want to bother drumming up new answers for ANet. Let them first show me some genuine interest and progress in the format. Basket Brawl is not that.

If you just look at PoF’s Mount Races and compare them to adventures like Ley Line Run and Flying Circus, and then compare those to Sanctum Sprint, or look at Basket Brawl and compare it to Keg Brawl, you’ll find that the quality, complexity, and creativity of activities/adventures/minigames has gone way downhill. If you look at how seasonal events have been handled over the past couple years and how everything is pretty copy-paste despite not being all that rewarding or demanding, especially for or of anyone of decent skill, or how games like Aspect Arena and especially Reaper’s Rumble do not make consistent returns to the game, or how broken two of the four daily activities are and have been since their inception, you’ll see how little interest the developers have in improving or showcasing this kind of content.

Orpheal.8263:

I also don’t know why anet just made this kind of Basketball like minigame for lettting us play it just for a few weeks and then just removign it again, instead of keeping it and giving it likle all others their own achievements, especially when its something thats appreciated and liked by most of the community – havent read here anything bad about it.

The reason you haven’t read anything bad about it is because this forum is a terrible place for honest, critical feedback. You can find mine in the link above. Also, nobody actually cares about that game.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It was missing some skills and there were a few bugs.

It’s missing no skills, the number of bugs is not outstanding, and the impact of the bugs is trivial by comparison to those found in other activities.

It otherwise got positive feedback.

That’s some nice revisionist history.

Amaimon.7823:

Lahmia.2193:

3. People would QQ so hard as they get facerolled by 5 man premade teams. Then anet would have to split solo and team queues to balance it out, which is too much effort for a minigame.

Do you think there would be that many? besides, it’s not pvp, everyone is equal in this minigame, so other than better communication you have no benefit. You can still play with friends and lose 10 times over

I take it you didn’t play Guild Wars. Skilled players meeting up with VOIP and sync entering to join the same team and steamroll randoms was commonplace. It was hard enough on people who played that game. It would decimate the average team composed of players of this one.

You don’t know what “pvp” means.

Amaimon.7823:

Ayrilana.1396:

You just said everyone is equal. If everyone is equal, wouldn’t that include skill? If people don’t have equal skill then how could they all be equal?

Equal in oppertunities. Just like chess, everyone gets the exact same pieces to play with. Meaning you have only have yourself to blame

You are so out of touch with the social issues of team games that you should just stop talking now and go do some research.

LSD.4673:

“WvW: New Borderland. Experience epic battlefield combat like never before inWorld vs. World’s latest core addition, the new Borderlands map. Navigatetreacherous heights with traps that blow your foes to the depths below andferocious defenders to help keep the enemies at bay. Map objectives will be moreimportant than ever before, as they’ll unlock new strategies, tactics, and playmechanics that you’ll want to use to your world’s advantage!”

Hahahahahahaha.
And it’s not even a HoT feature.

The core game also advertised features that were nonexistent, late, or underwhelming. Any future expansion will be no different.

@OP: Here’s a super-short summary explaining ANet’s history for you: they made Guild Wars, it was a great game that became really successful, but the devs didn’t know what to do with it after that, so they made some changes that they didn’t know how to manage in the long term and were otherwise bound by restraints in the game’s engine, prompting them to mostly give up and make something else that was “better”, which they then hyped up and marketed at being tons of things to a lot of people, ended up delivering on little of substance, but kept all of the people who wanted to stay high on hype, which they continued to use to sell further goods and services and continued to lose people when they finally got tired of hype never materializing.

There is no “doing it better” for ANet than they did with Guild Wars if you’re looking for a quality game. That’s not the point though. The point is that GW2 is a cash cow for ANet and NCsoft that was way more profitable for them because of the game’s larger scope, the prominence of the cash shop (including gold and gem exchange), the lack of player-to-player trading, the audiences they marketed to, the hype they milked in the years between Eye of the North and GW2’s release, and the political landscape of the last six or seven years. You can talk about how GW2 faded faster than GW did and that ANet might have been able to do something to make GW2 not fade so fast, but the sad truth is that they couldn’t. Hype was their greatest weapon, and they wielded it well, but in order for them to deliver on such things as you would have liked them to, they would have needed the talent to back it up, which they didn’t have, or the time to pull it off, which would have clashed with their use of their primary weapon of hype. They’re starting to cast aside their weapon of hype though, trading it for a weapon of sympathy. It’ll work about as well as their hype trains did, given the caliber of people who have stuck around supporting them.

Also, if you wanted real answers to your analysis, you shouldn’t have brought it up on the official forum. I would offer you an alternative, but given how eager you are to fight the uphill battles you do of arguing against people who frequently post here, it’s not worth it.

EthanLightheart.9168:

Talk about lack of communication….

Let’s be fair: all of the complaints about Lunatic Inquisition (or even Reaper’s Rumble) missing from the event boil down to a witch hunt against ANet, and ANet has a history of not answering to witch hunts.

Of course, what they often fail to accept is that they bring this on themselves. This wouldn’t be an issue if the content was never removed. They probably also don’t see what they’ve done (or what they’ve lacked in doing) as a big issue because the ruckus over it isn’t all that big, but this again is a symptom of their terrible support of activity modes in general that is misdiagnosed by them as a genuine and original lack of interest in them.

Most activities are ghost towns. If you took your guild into an activity, you’d probably all get into the same instance. Why would you need a private room?

Why would you even want to see the return of the second-worst activity in the game?

maddoctor.2738:

It was a fun activity when played properly

It was never played properly, by design.

but villagers could jump and get to places that the ghosts couldn’t reach and that was outright broken.

There are lots of broken things about the game that are in the ghosts’ favor. In the face of so many disadvantages, jumping out of bounds was the only way to compete. If all of the holes allowing that were patched up, villager win rates would drop to single digits, but there are reasons why someone like you wouldn’t find that to be a problem, by design.

Of course instead of fixing those issues by adding a few invisible walls, they scrapped it.

It is likely that when choosing to do anything with this game mode, ANet asked themselves, “Is there a problem here that is going to negatively affect the economy?” This relates to the AFK farming of ToT bags. Depending on their answer, the following happens:

• There’s no significant impact on the economy – Do nothing.
• There is a significant impact on the economy. Choose one of the next two options:
  • Spend developer time on fixing the issue.
  • Cut the game mode.

ANet doesn’t care about activities, so it was an easy decision for them to choose to scrap it rather than fix it. They don’t have to worry about how polished that part of the game is if they don’t let anyone look at it anymore.

JanNier Kryn Yaren.7968:

I think it was removed due to the fact that the last time it was on people used afk bots to farm it. And that issue has not been fixed

That’s what you get when you reward participation instead of performance.

Absolutely nothing of value was lost. That game was terrible.

Reaper’s Rumble, on the other hand, is worth mourning.

The festivals don’t need to change or even be added to every year if they have enough fun stuff to do already. I agree with you though that the limited time content for Halloween in GW2 is pretty awful.

All they need to do is bring back Reaper’s Rumble and promote Costume Brawl more, not by providing people with more tonics, but by giving people reasons to do things with their tonics.

Collect candy corn, play all of your favorite Halloween activities, and earn sweet new rewards.

There won’t be any of my favorite activities, since Reaper’s Rumble was canned and Lunatic Inquisition is buggered as hell.

It’s really awful, but that’s okay, because today is Sunday, which means you can go play a much better game just like it.

Here’s everything wrong with Basket Brawl.

Basket Brawl is just Keg Brawl with worse mechanics, a new coat of paint, and no incentives to play. Waste of everyone’s time.

What are your opinions on activities, and do you think they have much to gain from parts of the adventures system?

Mag choir bell works much better than it did before. I feel like I can play notes faster without them being put on recharge, and I can actually listen to myself play music with it now instead of having to memorize songs and mute my audio before playing to avoid throwing myself off.

I don’t know. Could you repeat the question?

Jovel.5706:

• The Labyrinthine Cliffs, though now lacking a Zephyr Sanctum, was a very beautiful area. Surely it can be repurposed to act as a zone for another festival? There was a lot of trade going on at that part of Tyria so it must have some significance even after the Zephyr Sanctum’s demise.

Maybe the Zephyrites can take a page out of the jungle’s book and put up a timing record for Sanctum Sprint.

But if they don’t, then don’t bother coming back.

mauried.5608:

The TP isnt fair because of flipping or any other mechanism which allows players to make gold from the TP by simply buying and selling items.
Where do you think the gold that these players are making is coming from?

Are you saying profit isn’t fair?

Try universalizing that.

Suicidal Hamster.4816:

so, because you arent aware this type of transaction happens daily, then it must have no bearing on the topic. gotcha.

I looked up the kind of transaction you referenced and provided you with the definition. It is not what you stated it is and the difference invalidates your use of it.

you can have (valid) contracts in both written or verbal form. i see no difference between 2 players verbally agreeing to an exchange. or are you asking for Anet to cover your butt provide insurance for making trades that is trying to sidestep the existing system?

Contracts are only meaningful if they are enforceable. There is no ability for a player or group of players to enforce any contract with enough consequence to deter its breach in GW2.

I don’t recall ever asking for anything. Please address my arguments and not strawmen.

i like how you assume i even click the links you post. i dont. they are “not an arguement” and as such, are not a valid use of my time. you should trade mark that sentence, it works for you, it really does.

This is not an argument. Also, you were never a person I was trying to convince.

FrenzyApe.5809:

Gw2 economy is a free market. You write so much that you dont understand what you write.

From wiki:

Wiki

A free market is a market economy system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between vendors and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. It is a result of a need being, then the need being met. A free market contrasts with a regulated market, in which government intervenes in supply and demand through non-market methods such as laws creating barriers to market entry or price fixing. In a free-market economy, prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy, and it typically entails support for highly competitive markets and private ownership of productive enterprises.

It’s very clearly not.

Please take at least twenty seconds to look up these definitions and read them to make sure you know what is being talked about before you claim someone else doesn’t.

Astralporing.1957:

Who exactly is going to enforce those contracts? Remember, as you have already said, just mentioning “government” (so, Anet, in this case) makes a market not free anymore. And “Free market” was something you specifically asked for. So why Anet should enforce those trades for you when you said you didn’t want it in the first place?

Governments are not the only agencies which are capable of enforcing contracts. However, in the presence of a government, any option to enforce a contract that is used by the government may not be used by any inside that government. (At least in the real world, not without consequence brought down by that government. While real world restrictions are like “should not or else”, game restrictions can also be “can not, ever, in any way, at all”.) ANet may ban players, but players can not ban each other. ANet may silence players, but players can not silence each other. ANet can restrict players in exchanging goods, but players can not restrict each other. ANet may seize goods it determines to be obtained illegitimately, but players can not seize any assets from each other. ANet may pass negative judgment against a player, but players may not pass negative judgment against each other. If, for some reason, you feel that a player has done any of these actions, then it is only thanks to a sanction for a use of power granted by ANet that this is capable. No player independent of ANet could do these things.

To figure out who is going to enforce contracts in GW2, you need to recognize how many means of enforcing a contract have already been stripped from players by rules set in place by ANet. The same is also true in many other MMOs, except in many other MMOs, there exists a system of direct player trading. This system doesn’t require any oversight or enforcement from the developer because the contract is written up, agreed to, and carried out automatically by willing parties by design. Just take GW’s system of player trading for example.

• Box pops up, items and money are placed inside – the contract is written.
• Items or money inside the box changes – the contract is rewritten.
• Players press accept – the contract is agreed to.
• The trade window closes and the goods are exchanged (unless this is impossible for some reason, like one player not having enough space to accept the trade items, which results in no exchange occurring and the contract being nullified) – the contract is carried out.

The influence ANet has on this exchange is minor – a cap of seven item slots and 100 platinum, both of which are arbitrary or aesthetic choices and the limitations of which were answered by player-driven solutions. Players aren’t forced to trade one way at a time or charged a fee for their agreement. They aren’t fixed to one currency or without recourse in breaching the limit. Purely free market, it is not, but it is far closer to that than anything remotely like the GW2 market.

Though, of course, i do agree with what you said there. Which is why TP is a superior system for any reasonable customer.

There is no way you could agree with me and reach precisely the opposite conclusion.

Shayne Hawke.9160:

Suicidal Hamster.4816:

TP is far and away the best system for general trading. its non-intrusive, easy to use and most importantly, FAIR FOR ALL.

This is not an argument. You can easily make the same statement about direct trade systems.

Astralporing.1957:

Ah, but you didn’t make any such statement. Quite the oppsite, you did mention how direct trade systems favour those with skill in trading, letting them exploit everyone else (so, a majority of players). In fact, you brought it as a high point of the system.

You are conflating equality with fairness. In almost no place in the real world will you find true equality amongst human beings. To have that standard, you must believe the entire world is unfair because there is so much inequality. If you believe there is fairness in GW2, where would you find that equality? Are people on the trading post equal because they all must sell their goods through that system and incur the appropriate 5% and 10% fees for selling things? Why would this be any less equal (or fair) than a system where no player accrues a fee for conducting their business? Or a system where players interact directly than by proxy?

You’re also using “exploit” to describe a transaction between two willing parties. You can’t universalize this thought and not have your head explode. Well, maybe you can. Let me put this another way: do you or your parents shop for groceries during the week and feel like you are being exploited because you’ve chosen to purchase food? When you purchased GW2, did you feel like ANet was exploiting you for letting you give them money for a game you wanted to play? If you or your parents fill up a car with gas and find that the price per gallon has dropped 20 cents the next day, do you feel exploited by the gas station for choosing to buy gas the day before? The point I’m trying to get across is that there is no exploitation here. If one party has one thing and the other has another, each party wants what the other has instead of what they have themselves, and they agree to trade that which they have for that which they don’t, then they each find themselves to gain from the transaction. It’s not as though one person gains at the other’s expense.

Maybe you should try to be consistent?

That would have been a good standard to try to hold me to if you had actually pointed out an inconsistency, which you didn’t, because there isn’t one, because I’m not.

Cyninja.2954:

I think someone needs to read up on government responsibilities and duties. No, free markets are not absolutely free, not even in the real world. There are rules and laws to adhere to.

Governments are monopolies on and initiators of force. As soon as you start talking about governments, you are talking about coercion and no longer talking about free markets.

The TP fee allows arenanet to:

- prevent a more than necessary devotion of human ressources to the subject of ingame scams. ressources better used on other parts of the game -> good for the player

- allows them to better manage and controll the ingame economy by keeping gray and blackmarkets to a minimum -> good for general balance

- allows for better control of RMT -> technically part of scaming, but I’ll put this as a seperate point since it is a majoy one -> good for the player

At the cost of:

- disallowing two-way exchange between willing parties -> bad for the player

- disallowing spontaneous adoption of useful and common resources as alternative currencies for players who wish to trade in something other than gold -> bad for the player

- neglecting to further utilize a system that already exists that is superior in the aim of not allowing exchange -> bad for the player

- legitimizing the unbounded printing of new currency through no spent effort -> bad for the player

- binding all regulatory forces on the market to a single party that also directly profits from the regulations they put in place -> bad for the player

All you suvival of the fittest hacks need to get out more. This is a game with rules, just as society has rules.

This is not a matter of rules vs. no rules and also not an argument.

Thrist.9046:

Yes the world was a much better place when the strong ruled the weak. Feudalism was all the rage.

I suppose you think the weak would have been far better off left to their own devices? Or that today’s societies don’t function on the same principle?

At any rate, Guild Wars 2 isn’t real life, it’s a game, and people who don’t know better should not be subject to trade scams.

This is not an argument.

The lack of player trading by reason of scam prevention is an excellent example of running a market on socialism.

In a free market, you get some people who are intelligent enough to not get scammed and know how to best sell their items to get the price they want. These people get the full value for what they sell. You also get other people who are impatient, who don’t do research on the market, who don’t know how to sell or buy things in the best ways, and who are stupid enough to fall for dumb tricks. These people lose value constantly. Instead of supporting a system where skilled players get rewarded and dumb players get punished, ANet spreads the pain of being scammed onto everyone.

This is great for the idiot who reads at a first-grade level and doesn’t have the mental awareness to avoid being fooled, because 15% loss all the time may be much better than sometimes 100%. The players that know what they’re doing though take a substantial hit all the time that no market ability can counteract. In fact, the only way around such a thing is to use a system that is even more scam prone and no way enforced, which puts a much greater risk on the market player than even the most basic system of two-way exchange. Even if this risk could somehow be accounted for, the recently introduced cap on gold transfers between players outright stops any transactions of considerably high levels from taking place more than a few times.

In other words, like most areas of GW2, players of all levels are robbed of their agency. For bad players, this is a minor loss, and perhaps even a benefit in some cases, while skilled players get completely dumped on. The biggest beneficiary of the whole thing is ANet, because a system which drains the economy so well by doing that every single time a transaction is made makes the most stereotypical scam of purchasing in-game gold with real world currency a sound business opportunity for the studio.

Spook.5847:

This company has a fixation on really bad pvp games as a feature of its celebrations and other events. I hate PvP anyway, but junk like dragon ball, where you get NOTHING as you flail away at it, particularly suck.

I disagree with this notion entirely. ANet has a great history with making holiday PvP formats. Their record for maintaining or building upon them has been lackluster though, and only lately have many of the formats been that awful or dull.

Here’s a nice tier list for all of the PvP minigames that ANet has produced so far:

God Tier:
Pre-2012 Costume Brawl (GW)

Ascended Tier:
Dwayna Vs. Grenth tournaments
Aspect Arena

High Tier:
Reaper’s Rumble
Sanctum Sprint
Rollerbeetle Racing
Dragon Arena
Lob 2.0 Keg Brawl

Mid Tier:
Dwayna Vs. Grenth
Post-2012 Costume Brawl (GW)
Lob 1.0 Keg Brawl
Dragon Ball
Snowball Mayhem

Low Tier:
Southsun Survival
Lob 3.0 Keg Brawl (current)
Great Snowball Fight
Dragon Nest

Dhuumed Tier:
Crab Toss

Please Retire From Development Immediately Tier:
Lunatic Inquisition
Basket Brawl

Gilburt.9146:

• Most games seem to snowball horribly.
• Once a team gets ahead and zergs with all the power ups you become mostly helpless. Power ups can be picked up by players who already have them so good luck getting them reliably on the losing team (and have fun continuing to lose).
• The default auto-attack is so completely worthless you can’t even hit players directly in front of you reliably. If they start killing you before you can pick it up the better auto, you’re as good as dead.
• There’s no movement penalty for attacking and the projectile speed is high so it’s often extremely difficult, if not impossible to Line of Sight or escape from someone who is auto-attacking you to death on more health if you don’t have all the skills.
• No matchmaking/queue. Teams don’t have to be perfectly balanced in terms of numbers and there’s no reason to not just leave if losing (no dishonor, etc.). Players can eventually get auto-balanced onto the enemy team, but this means that a player who had a guaranteed win now gets a guaranteed loss. Players entering the game mode also have to put up with being placed on the losing team halfway through a game for a guaranteed loss. There is no reward for losing and being steamrolled is not remotely fun, so this just wastes players time rather than balancing the teams.

Snowballing is more of a symptom of other qualities than anything in the game itself. The hotjoin system, lack of participation reward, and lack of punishment for quitting is more to blame than anything. Being behind leads to people quitting which leads to low team member counts which leads to slow and certain losses. If people had reason to stay (and play, because two or three leeches standing around doesn’t stop snowballing either), this wouldn’t happen as much. There are plenty of opportunities for losing teams to ball up and wipe out stray enemies, even on no skills. That it doesn’t is often due to player ineptitude and poor team play and what’s been previously mentioned.

• No rewards. Literally no rewards. Unless you win 10 games. Then you get a mediocre reward. It feels like a complete waste of time. The Winter Wonderland JP was fun and amazingly rewarding where as this game mode gives you nothing.

Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I haven’t touched anything in this game for years except the activity formats, and none of them are good investments of time for the sake of making money in the rest of the game. They by and large don’t offer unique rewards either, which isn’t entirely true for Dragon Ball except that you have to pay for those rewards and it’s mostly just a license to buy more of something that other people could get anyways. I’m not a big proponent of leecher tourist participation awards, but would like to see the coffer improved and broken up so that winners get something every round and then something else with their repeat achievement.

I’d also like to see a special prize like what was offered during the CNY in GW through RBR. A scoring system of wins^3/games^2 would strike a good balance between players of high win rates and players of high win counts, and something unique could be rewarded to the players that come away with the top 100-1000 scores. It’s not possible in the current environment where people can ditch games and duck losses though.

• It’s buggy. Players who are 5 feet in front of me on flat ground are often “obstructed” while they have no problem killing me.

Dragon Bombs and better camera work will fix most of that for anyone. It’s true though that projectile trajectory calculation in this game is a bit off.

All that being said, the skills are cool, I like the arena design, and there is a lot of potential fun to be had. It’s just frustrating when some of the problems listed above get in the way. Dragon Ball just needs some loooooooooong overdue improvements and polish. It’s just sad ArenaNet seems to ignore improving recurring content. Wintersday and Halloween saw few major changes as far as I could tell. Some things were added, but stuff that already existed was left pretty much the same, despite having potential to improve.

The game is fun for me. The better you are, the better it gets. The more rewarding you expect it to be, the worse it gets. All I can say is that you shouldn’t hope for any major changes to come to this game format or any others, ever. Knocking the Dragon’s Gaze achievement down from 100 to 20 is little more than changing a few integers, and that’s all ANet could ever care to do when it comes to maintaining their activities.

Participation credit is cancer. The behavior of players who show up during the week to the daily activity is often not that of someone who is trying to play the game to actually win. They show up and need do little more than simply stand around and wait for the match to end. For anyone that actually wants to play the game, this is highly disruptive, particularly in team formats. Leecher teammates on your side make winning very difficult and on the other side make winning very cheap. It’s a case where there’s no incentive to play, because the reward for losing is hardly any different from the award for winning. I’ve already had an experience like this in Dragon Ball this year, where two people on each side decided they didn’t want to play and would rather farm the Gaze achievement. It bogged down the game for everyone.

Dragon Ball is for the winners, for the players who will show up and play. I have no trouble at all winning games, having lost perhaps five times in the last 70 games I’ve played. If this is not your experience, I encourage you to git gud or git lost. There are other ways to get event prizes, and in facing the bitter truth that you’re too unskilled a player to seize your own victories, you’ll have to settle for those.

ANet does not care about activities. How many times do you need to be reminded?

High standards of quality for competitive players are less important to ANet’s budget than skinner box mechanics.

You want to argue semantics?

Tatwi.3562:

forcing them

Show me the guns at everyone’s heads.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

HoT isn’t a game full of grind. It’s a game full of long term goals.

That is some incredible mental gymnastics in defense of content gating through arbitrary numbers.

Just want to remind you all that by buying HoT and spending money on the gem store, you are supporting ANet continuing to do this.

Also, I find the OP’s defense of “having empathy” to make an argument primarily attacking the playerbase for ANet’s design choices to be shallow and wickedly inconsiderate.

mist.9807:

The mini game is similar to guild rushes where you have to go through several checkpoints before you can complete it. There’s so many close enough together that I sort of doubt that you could find such dramatic shortcuts.

Are you certain that it works that way, or does it merely look that way? The only way you’d be able to test such a thing to know for sure is to find a checkpoint on the course that can be skipped in getting up to the finish line, and then seeing if your ending score makes the leaderboard or if the event finishes.

It’s not obvious where you can skip parts of the course in Sanctum Sprint either, but shortcuts still exist – big ones, in fact.

Toastiekins.3594:

There is a screenshot on reddit of someone with a 28s time on the leaderboards. I wonder what this person was doing?

Probably something like this. I couldn’t find the screenshot, but if that is actually the time, they probably found a way to climb other parts of the map to make it directly to the finish line, and that may be all that’s necessary to register for the leaderboard. That or it’s just straight up map hacking, but judging by what I’ve been able to pull off in Sanctum Sprint, the former sounds pretty viable.

I’d like to test this out myself, but I’m not dropping another $50 on an expansion to compete on a minigames leaderboard that should already have been implemented at release for activities.

Actually, you need to start looking over this code right away to make sure this doesn’t become a problem for Wintersday.

You think you have it bad?

You don’t even know what end game is.

Be sure to buy HoT and more gems if you like seeing ANet treat you this way.

One group is seriously kittened that newbies are getting a great deal

Here’s what’s going on with this: the standard expansion pre-purchase package is valued by ANet at $50. How much of that bundle is valued as the expansion and how much of it is valued as the base game?

If the whole price is valued as the expansion, veterans should be mad as hell that the game they’ve been playing is valued by ANet at $0, that the studio considers the effort put into the game over the past >2 years worthy of dropping the entire initial box price of $50 (or $60?).

If any substantial amount of the price is for the base game, veterans are upset that they have to waste money to pay for another copy of the game which they just… destroy. Or they could make a whole new account with it, if they wanted to deny themselves access to all of the time and money they put into their first account and jump through all of the timegate hoops that ANet jammed into everything all over again.

Does a pricing quarrel justify going apekitten on ANet? No it does not.

It absolutely does. Stop treating people at ANet like they aren’t fully functioning adults. If they make the choice to work for a business where they completely give away any ability to manage their game and how they sell it, they deserve every bit the consequences of their actions. Perhaps if they’re so upset about getting called out on their lack of control, they should look for a career move that allows them the freedom to not make awful decisions like this pre-purchase setup.

Remember: it’s your responsibility to deal with the problems that ANet has created. It is in poor taste for you to to shame ANet for this when they have been so gracious to give you the option to spend money and switch to a different, lower population server where you and all of your friends could play.

:^)

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

This is a complete contradiction of Anet’s assertions that there would be no treadmill, no gear-based power creep. I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone who was around for it of the massive uprising that was caused when Ascended tier equipment was first added into the game.

No, I really think you do.

Completely breaks Sanctum Sprint, but that doesn’t come as a surprise.

Ayrilana.1396:

The activity is not broken.

This is all I need to hear from you to gauge where your mind is. There’s no longer any need to take you seriously.

Ayrilana.1396:

The bug occurs when you leave a decent distance from the starting area before the actual match begins. If you stay until the match begins, like you should, there would be no problem.

Once again, you are placing onus upon the player to work around the bug instead of putting any responsibility on the part of the developer to not leave their game broken, so much so that you even claim the problem is “solved” or doesn’t even exist as long as the player does something about it, nothing of which will actually make the bug go away.

Are you ever going to hold the developers responsible for the faults in their own game?

Please don’t resort to doing strawman arguments either. The argument was about whether the activity was broken or not and the poster gave that bug as an example. I was not arguing about whether the bug should be fixed or not nor whether Anet should be held accountable for it or not.

But you are saying that players are responsible for dealing with the effects of bugs themselves and that being able to do so concludes any issue of the bug being there in the first place, which is to say that the developers don’t need to have any part in dealing with solving the bug – that it’s not their responsibility.

If you don’t want to get called out for being an apologist to ANet’s bad behavior, don’t use language that creates excuses for them and blames players for not being able to put up with things that aren’t their responsibility.

It’s also not self contradictory as moving around that far from the starting position before the match begins really offers zero benefit.

Non-sequitor.

You’re not losing anything by staying at the starting point until the match begins.

Only a fool would not recognize the potential gains in getting away from the crowd at the start. On the other hand, you could be referring to how trivial the outcome of the game is in any case, but I don’t think you’re that good with your words.

Activities are dead, ANet doesn’t care. The daily only exists as a token measure for ANet to act like they think they’re still important. I could go on at length about the bugs and design flaws of every activity in the current rotation, but it would be a complete waste of effort for me and any other player to have that discussion.

Ayrilana.1396:

Southern Survival: Don’t leave the starting area and then you won’t get punished by being perma immobilized. Problem solved.

“Don’t do things that bug out the game and you won’t be affected by bugs” is not only self-contradictory, since you are saying that players can avoid being affected by bugs by letting the bugs affect the way those players play in order to get around them, but it’s also a toxic shift from holding the developer responsible for fixing their own game to holding the player responsible to play around the developer’s bad code. Stop making excuses for ANet.

A better idea is to just get rid of the format entirely. That activity sucks.

Welcome to the GW2 social experience.