Guild Wars 2

What I would have done as a Dev was had a giant Karka attack in every zone with beachfront. I would have had announcements that encouraged players to go to zones that were level appropriate to them with the exception of level capped characters which should have been encouraged, in some way, to spread around and help in lower zones.

If you want one of these events to be successful you want to encourage players to move, not en masse, but as small groups to lots of areas. I think WoW learned from this with their pre-Cataclysm event. Instead of launching a full-on elemental invasion in Stormwind/Orggrimar, they instead had the invasions happening all over the world with level appropriate rewards so that you were encouraged to spread out and look for the events not congregate and wait.

This event would have been so much better if simultaneously the Karka attacked all zones with ocean beach property.

This issue is not entirely related to the machine running the client, it boils down to a few things.

1) The game engine. It’s been a known issue for a while that the coding for GW2 is done in such a way that the game actually limits what you see on the screen in crowded areas and it takes awhile before it decides to render everything in your field of view. This issue has been around since Beta. Until these last 2 events it has been most noticeable in WvWvW, in big battles where quite often, regardless of your machine, you cannot see people attacking you. Anet has spoken on this subject before and said that it was going to require a major update to the game engine to fix and that they were trying to figure out the best solution.

2) The delay you experience between key press and resulting action is controlled by 2 things, your connection and the load the GW2 servers are under. This issue has been around since the dawn of MMO. Whether it was the Hamidon Raids in City of Heroes or the Gates of AQ events in WoW I’ve never seen any game server able to stand-up to the punishment of having hundreds of people all in one space. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Lion’s Arch or if they had it take place on some remote island in game (or even in an instance) once you dog pile hundreds of players all spamming their attacks in a small area a server gets clogged. What I’ve never understood is why do Developers insist on doing these kind of events when they know the results are so poor?

If you get disconnected chances are that is your connection not able to handle the amount of data being piped to it. If you have huge delays between keypress and resulting action that could be a combination, but it’s more than likely a result of their servers prioritizing the communication and yours being queued back to the point that it seems like never happens.

Personally I switched from Chat to Event log during the event so I could see when the server was indicating my actions took place. I could see that my attacks were making it through, but I could also see that the client and the server were not syncing which would cause these like my Heal never appearing to be on cooldown though it was.

In the end whether it was those on really high end machines or those on the lowest accepted system (if you are playing with a below recommended system it’s on you) everyone was experiencing issues with latency and Anet should have known this would be an issue.

I sympathize that you are frustrated you missed it. They tried to tell a story in 4 acts and in order for them to do that, it was necessary that they closed the portal and ended his threat so that during Act 4 he could be walking around LA. By doing this they put the story before the action. It’s an unusual choice for game devs.

I do think they could have handled it by giving access to it through the Mad King’s realm. Like a portal inside the labyrinth would have worked.

This was the first real major event of the game and to be sure between the broken achievement, the general frustration with the jump puzzle, and the tons of feedback about things like item drops, expense of crafting items, and yes, the removal of the dungeon before the event ended there were a lot of lessons for ANet to learn. Hopefully the next big event they have planned to launch later this month will benefit from this experience, and hopefully next year they will use this same event again so that people can get a chance to see/get what they missed.

I completed the puzzle on a character of every race, except Charr.

Asura – this was by far the most difficult one at the beginning because indeed if you had large characters around you it was impossible to see where you were. This made the first few jumps difficult but once you got past the jump where you have to turn and jump on the first small block to the stairs(?) most people had failed and it was easy from there on out.

Human/Sylvari – very similar in size and easiest to complete it on. I learned the puzzle on my main, a Sylvari then was able to do it on the third try with my human.

Norn – I kept running into the same problem at the part of the puzzle where you had to jump to a block, then turn slightly and jump on a thin rail the Norn consistently could not do this. Eventually I had to decide to not use the block and try to jump from the large chunk straight onto the rail, this was much more difficult because the rail was heading a different direction than the jump had to be. Norn seem to be more prone to getting stuck on geometry.

Overall I would say the two changes I thought were necessary to make it a more successful puzzle would be:

1) The speed of the green ooze filling up the area was too fast, especially in the beginning when you had the largest group of people to deal with. In particular it would have been advantageous to have been able to not rush after the first small pause (when the small gear appears). If it had been slower people would have been able to stagger behind a little and let the “big” characters go first. Once you knew you weren’t going to have individual zones you should have slowed the ooze, or just got rid of it completely. I think for a lot of people even not having the ooze chasing them would have found the puzzle still to be a challenge.

2) If you cannot do individual maps for puzzles like this, then you need to sort people by race. The speed of the ooze problem caused at the beginning was never an issue for me when there was no Norn or Charr characters and when I did it on my Norn, other Norn and Charr did not bother me. Simply sorting us by size would have been great.

Anyway, even though I was bothered by the design flaws (and I’m glad the designer in charge did too) I still thought it was immense fun. However, I know for sure there must have been a large group of players that never did successfully climb it. Had my wife tried she would have broken down in tears, she is a keyboard turner, not mouse, and I shudder to think what that puzzle was like for players who steer like that.

Revolving Ocelot.6270:

The specific achievement that broke for me and didn’t update the counter were Trick-or-Treat bags opened, which I did during Act 3.

I am almost positive this is the same for me. As my post said I did ToT bags last night During Act 3 with bags I was getting inside the Labirynth

I basically completed everything last night (10/30)

ToT bags, kills, and Events I did from within the labyrinth

Pumpkins I did by running 3 of my characters around LA over and over.

Exploration went to each area and I did the dungeon twice the day it opened.

When I was done last night I was 3/5 instead of 4/5.

I logged in today to get the “Attend the Party” and I got moved to 4/5. I have logged in and out and restarted the client multiple times, I’ve done the Mad King Says event and got my hat, I got the second book today, and I completed the jump puzzle on all 4 of my characters, plus I went to each area still accessible.

I read a post somewhere that some of the achievements were taking a while to show up, sometime not until the daily reset for achievements.

So what I wonder is, how many of us completed like the Kill or ToT achievements within what is basically still the same day?

I’m one of the people listed as 4/5 though every achievement on the list states Completed. I’ve logged in and out and restarted the client to no avail.

edit: 10:48 pacific – I went ahead and got the mad kings book from the second scavenger hunt, and I did his Mad King Says event and got a witched hat from the chest, logged out and in and I am still 4/5 for my title. There is nothing left to do at this point.

How can anyone say a majority of players are dissatisfied?? Do you realize what small percentage of players even use the Forums?

Secondly, it’s a player’s decision to spend $50 on keys which can open 32 boxes. If they decided that after opening even 10 boxes with zero reward it was a reasonable thing to keep going, then that’s up to them, but it’s there decision based on nothing but their expectations on how it works.

The Black Lion Chests have always been random rewards, there is a chance at getting 1 of 200+ different dye colors as well, would you complain if you needed one particular dye color and opened 100 chests and never got it? Chances are no, because you realize that the chests can drop dyes, not the chest will drop a particular dye.

In the end the chests are performing just how they always have, they randomly generate rewards based on a loot table that now includes some holiday items as well. I don’t think Anet was ever thinking, these people are going to save 100 chests and the minute the event goes live they are going to spend $150 on keys and expect that they get every reward, we better make sure that happens.

In fact I wonder if any chests generated by the game prior to the event even have a chance of getting a holiday item in them. I’m not sure how the loot rules work, does the chest look at the loot table when it is dropped, or when it is unlocked, or when it is opened?

The idea was as you played during the event you could get chests, and if you opened the chest there was a chance you could get a holiday only item. That still remains true.

The axe will start bouncing from target to target making you prone to pulling aggro. This is not ideal when you have spirits up as inevitably that aggro is going to get your pet, the spirits or worse, get you killed. I personally just prefer the precision, safety, and overall better DPS of the Shortbow.

Unlike world Dynamic Events in a dungeon you are typically not under the benefit of overkill heal and dps, so managing your own survivability and aggro is of major importance and I find the Axe to be sub-par for both. The shortbow has such great utility with a stun, cripple, and the self-knockback. Even plate wearing warriors and guardians can get hit super hard by those dungeon bosses and we don’t have their mitigation.

For me the Axe (but I should look into another 1h as well) is good for a quick swap so you can use both the warhorn spells, then Winter’s Bite and like APaperbackHero said, try to get in close for Splitblade, then get back on shortbow asap and get out of range.

Until they make spirits (and our pets) more robust we simply have little choice but to try to stay ranged imho.

I am a 0/0/10/30/30 Ranger. It was my plan all along. I use Shortbow and Axe/Warhorn. Far too much survivability is sacrificed if you don’t have a shortbow to be able to stay ranged.

I don’t have my build up atm, but basically I have 3 spirits up all the time with bonus health, bonus to applying their buffs, having their effect go off upon death, and allowing them movement, however even with those bonuses the Spirits are still far to squishy and they will not survive for long if you try to take them into melee range of anything other than normal trash.

If you can manage to stay on the move and keep on the outside range of the fight I find the spirits to be very helpful.

I think they are going to find that in the near future they will simply have to make the Spirits immune to damage. Right now it is just far to difficult to keep them alive unless you spend your whole time staying as ranged as possible, but if you do that their activated abilities are pretty much useless.

Glad I’m not the only one noticing this. I’m going through BC right now on an alt and there are certain areas where I come crashing down from 45-60 FPS to 2-6, if I just keep moving it goes away once I clear the area.

Since the first time I experienced this was about 4 am on a Sunday morning I had thought my computer was running come kind of maintenance in the background, but this is definitely a case of bad geometry as I am having the same drops in the same areas.

I’m not a Theorycrafter by any means but I believe Marks is going to give you better damage than 10 points in Nature Magic.

If you look at like, 5 posts down from yours you can see an entire thread devoted to this issue, which includes a Dev response.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/100-world-completion-bug

look carefully at your Traits they almost always include something that indicates what you may want to favor.

Nature Magic has one that is 5% of your Vitality boosts your Power and since each point boosts your Vitality, it’s probably trying to point you towards Power above Precision

Whereas Beast Mastery has one that converts Healing into Power so it’s actually beneficial to get the gear that has +Healing (though that may be only advisable if you plan on being Support all the time)

In both cases the traits are boosting your base damage output by converting a third tier stat (Vitality/Healing) to your base damage.

but for me, since I am 10 Skirmish / 30 NM / BM 30 and I feel I already get enough Power boosts from 2 sources that I am currently favoring Precision/Crit gear, because I feel it will help me round out a little more than just stacking straight up Power.

I am, however, apparently one of those few Rangers with a Support designed build.

I started as Shortbow / Longbow but once I got to the Orr zones I really began to love Shortbow / Axe+Warhorn.

The Orr zones no longer have “hearts” and instead are a rolling set of DEs along with much more emphasis on exploration. I believe there are 15/16 Skill Points in each zone.

Having a Warhorn means that you get an incredibly nice buff (Call of the Wild) which includes swiftness at those times when you just want to travel faster to get through mobs. I’m not a huge fan of Axe mainly because solo it can get you into trouble, but it is good for staying ranged. The Axe/WH combo doesn’t give you much in the way of CC and the Axe will bounce to other targets in the area causing you some challenging moments solo.

In effect you run around with shortbow as you explore only swapping to WH for the speed buff, but once you run into a DE and decide to jump in, swap back and forth for buffing everyone, getting the poison cone off the shortbow, and getting bounces off the Axe for nice AoE between Flame Traps. It’s super effective and I find fun to boot.

My “rotation” on a “Veteran” NPC if you want to call it that is typically:

Start in Axe/WH,

Call of the Wild (buff), Hunter’s Call (summons Hawks to take alpha), send in pet (I am 30 BM and my pets do not take much damage at all)

Swap to Shortbow. poison them, stun them, get in close and drop Flame trap, then Swift Shot myself out and cripple them.

Go back to Warhorn when I think the CotW is about back and repeat.

I swap between a Fern Hound and a Jungle Spider for +regen and then Weakness on the target.

I’m currently 10 Skirmish / 30 Nature Magic / 30 Beast Mastery

It’s a build I don’t really see many people doing, but i feel my survivability solo is exceptional and in groups I can swap into a Spirit/Buff build that makes me very helpful in groups as Support. It also allows me to root a little more when I can and not just rely on just Dodging.

I hit 80 last night, and it was actually a bit faster than I had hoped, but I’m not complaining. I’m at about 66% world completion so I still have a lot more to do for just that. Plus I have rolled an alt to play with friends going at a slower pace than me. I can’t imagine the time you have been putting in to get almost 100% World Completion at this point, plus a full set of Exotic. Is all your crafting capped as well? There are lots of achievements you can be working on.

Lets do some basic math here to put things into perspective. I hit 80 last night about midnight, that’s 16 days since head start. According to my /age that took 115 hours. If you got there sooner than that then your numbers could be even higher. That means on average I spent 7.25 hours in-game per day since I created this character. That’s skewed by the fact that I was at PAX Prime for 4 days, so really we are looking at 9.66 hours a day. Keep in mind I still only have 66% world completion and ZERO exotic gear since I just hit 80.

It’s safe to say if you have a full set of armor AND almost 100% world completion then you have been playing nearly 12 hours a day for 2 weeks. It’s no wonder you are left with little interest. It’s called burnout. It also means you were ultimately grinding, the only way to get that amount of Karma (252k?) is to spend hours and hours in a Zerg group grinding events in Orr.

The tone of your post seems to indicate that you are of the mindset that this game should be about proving your worth through gear, it’s simply not. Everyone has the right to set out playing the way they want, but your progression has been unrealistic to the vast majority of players. According to one study, the average MMO players only plays for 22 hours a week (www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html and yes I know that study is very outdated at this point), but SWTOR backed up this data early after release when players had the same complaints you do (that there wasn’t enough content). The fact is you are playing for that much time in a couple days.

If you played like an average player (and that is who devs tend to design for) it should take you about 2 months to get to cap not 2 weeks. Based on other MMOs the cycle for new content tends to be about 3 months. Which seems quite fair, 2 months to level – a month to gear – new content – 3 months of exploring new content – repeat. Now that kind of cycle is also based on a vertical gear progression. GW2 is not based on that.

In the end it’s not the devs or us you need to ask “what should I do”, it’s yourself. Why did you feel compelled to put in such unrealistic time in-game, then wonder why you are getting bored. What is it you expect? If, and I am guessing here based on on other MMO data, you are 80, fully geared and fully world explorer at a time when the vast majority of players are maybe closing in on 40, did you want the game or devs to somehow reward you for being the anomaly? The goal was never to get to 80, in fact I got to 80 fully by accident. Before I had even reached 20 all I had done was get 100% exploration for the capital cities. Then I did all the racial starting areas. By then I was in my high 30s and I felt kinda bad that I was skipping level appropriate content because I was having too much fun just exploring.

At a certain point I made a decision. I would have to come back to content. If I continued on getting 100% explored for every area, level by level, I was going to end up 80 and still not even reached Orr. I certainly could have, but I decided I’d rather get to experience my story more.

So at 80, and 116 hours, I still have 34% of the world left, all of the story mode dungeons except AC and SE, and all of the EM versions and I haven’t stepped foot in SPvP and only enough WvWvW to get a few areas explored.

I consider myself an anomaly too. As a stay-at-home Dad I can play far more than the average player. I have learned over the years that it needs to be tempered. I learned about burning out early on when I had 22 level 50s in City of Heroes and even now I have 13 raid geared level 85 in WoW and 2 level capped in SWTOR, plus a few characters in many other MMOs.

The suggestion others made about playing other games is wise. If you are bored, play something else, but if you really want to keep playing there are many other classes and other races with unique stories to experience. If you feel you are done because you have the best stat gear you can get, then I’m sorry to say, you have missed the whole point of a game like this.

One last thought, there is always the real world too. Think about what you could be doing if you applied your time and focus out there.