Guild Wars 2

The same thing happened to me this evening, AFTER the latest patch.

I had previously successfully made the elixir as part of the story, yesterday. When I tried to make it today to reacquire the buff, it took my mats but did not give me a buff. I re-gathered the mats and went to try again, only to be told I wasn’t ready yet. I gave up for today.

It does seem a bit glitchy this year, but I wouldn’t assume it is perma-busted for you.

Last night, I successfully reached the top and jumped through…only to find myself back in the “lobby” with no credit for the success. It happened twice, so I gave it up for the evening. However, I completed it repeatedly with no glitches the previous night and again tonight.

I saw someone on reddit speculating it might be a position synching problem between the client and server, so maybe restarting your game will help.

This happened to me tonight as well. I logged in shortly after reset and cycled several chars through the “tree temple” in Malchor’s Leap. There was an ori node above the nearby waterfall, near the JP, and I logged out there. When I came back a couple hours later, I got a “bad game data” dialog, chose not to allow the repair tool to run, logged in and found all my characters’ position had reset to where they were when I logged in after reset. NOT a nearby waypoint.

After logging into each one of them and then restarting the game, the game data error dialog was gone, and the positions “stuck” where they should.

AFAIK, the consumed-on-map-full always happens. I thought it was intentional (if super-annoying). I’ve heard guildmates grumbling about it ever since HoT came out and they started to be used more frequently, but it is not new behavior. For example:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Teleport-to-a-friend-BL-Consumable-question

It would be nice to hear it’s a (fixable) bug.

HoT has been a mixed bag for me. There are things I like about it, and things I don’t. I think that it demonstrates a consistent problem I’ve seen with the design of this game: They go overboard a lot.

Timers for metas seem like a good idea? Great, lets put timers on EVERYTHING. More challenging content seem like a good idea? Great, let’s make it a PITA to even walk across the street. New gear obtainable by obtaining map currencies? Great, let’s make it take thousands. There are similar examples from pre-HoT, too.

None of the ideas are bad, IMO, just the degree to which they’re taken. It’s a difficult thing to balance because the threshold of pain is highly subjective, but this game seems to have more trouble bracketing my sweet spot than most.

I still like the game, and I’m still here, but it is increasingly hard to find things to do right now that I’ll enjoy since I’m neither a cheev chaser nor a grinder.

Thank you, Sharm and Sammpo, that is delightful! I’ve been an admirer of yours for many years and across multiple games. Thank you for sharing your talent with the rest of us.

Timers. I’d get rid of the fixed world/meta event timers. I don’t want my play to feel like catching a train. I didn’t like it when they put all the world bosses on a fixed schedule, and I like even less that the whole of the HoT zones are that way.

I have no regrets. There are things about the xpack that I like and things I don’t, but I do not regret purchasing it.

Now that the expansion has been out for several weeks, I would rate it around a 6 or 7. I’m sort of a “hardcore casual”, which is to say that I play a lot, but it’s not especially driven play. I’m not competitive or AP motivated, and I don’t do things I find grindy.

Things I like about the expansion:

• Lots of long term goals to work towards in the form of armors, masteries, etc.
• Beautiful maps to explore (even though TD is my idea of personal hell).
• Increased difficulty of open world mobs
• Specializations

There are only a few things I don’t like:

• Too many bugs
• Scribing feels poorly conceived and implemented
• The map metaevent cycles are too long and too hard

That last one is the killer for me and why I say 6/10.

• I don’t like playing on a timer. I didn’t like it for world bosses, and I like it even less here.
• The 2-hour cycle is too long.
• Success requires too many players.
• Success requires commanders and organization.

I’d be OK with one of the maps being like that, but they all are. Weeks into the expansion, I’ve never yet seen a successful TD, and I’ve only stumbled on a successful DS twice. One night my timing is bad, another there are no organized maps running (yes, I use LFG), another the organized map is full, etc.

SW worked for me precisely because it wasn’t locked in like that. Also, the lead up defense events felt quite different, depending on how many people participated, while the pre-events for the HoT maps feel exactly alike every time I do them. I feel like the designers learned the wrong things from SW.

I have started to be concerned about the maps as well. In general, I’ve had a good time with the expansion so far, but I took my time through VB and AB, and I didn’t want to hit DS until I was done with TD, so it wasn’t until last weekend that I got serious about TD and dipped a toe in DS.

Several failed TD attempts over the weekend. The past 2 nights, I’ve been unable to find a TD or DS map with any action at all. I didn’t sit in LFG all night (‘cause at the end of the day, I’d rather be playing), but I’d camp it for a few minutes periodically, as well as popping into the zones. Crickets… IDK if I just have bad luck or bad timing, but it makes me sad that these maps already seem deserted, and I fear what it’ll be like in a few more weeks.

AB and VB are well and good, but I’d hate to think they’re the only viable zones.

My guild did a rush and a puzzle tonight with about 50 people. In the puzzle, not everyone got personal rewards, and the guild did not get credit. The rush was borked six ways to Sunday:

When we arrived, one guild was just finishing up, and a couple other guilds were waiting to start. When they started the next rush, the rush course displayed the guild emblem from the previous rush’s guild, while others showed the current one. As others have reported, we ended up with many people getting stuck in wolf form at the end. That seemed to get somewhat unblocked near the end of the time period, so quite a few people got their personal rewards, but one of the participating guilds did not receive guild credit. I think it may have even been the guild that started the rush! Our guild did get credit, though we were not the ones who started it. The last flag kept phasing in and out of existence, too.

And don’t get me started on the timer starting when you start the rush in the guild interface instead of when you start the rush on site…Perhaps that is WAI, but it is very frustrating to have the clock ticking down while you wait for some other guild to finish up.

I’ve quite enjoyed the ones I’ve played so far, but I have to admit that I don’t engage with them much because they’re usually unavailable when I come across them. It’s a shame, really.

I just finished this, and I have to echo some of the feedback here.

The idea is very cool, but the implementation is unfortunate. The attempt to make you feel a sense of urgency by giving you no time to learn the skills, look around, or think fails in its goal because it devolves to die, rinse, repeat. Several times.

I enjoy a challenge and I don’t mind dying or getting downed during the stories, but the mechanics of this segment were such that it totally breaks any sense of immersion, and I can’t see some of my less capable guildmates getting through this. Unkind to slam cheap one-shot road block into the middle of the story.

I am having the same problem. Shortly after the patch, I couldn’t get in at all. Now I have twice entered only to find myself in an instance in which it has not been claimed – no NPCs, no facilities, just vines. The first time, after a few minutes it said the instance owner had left and force-ported me out. The second time it popped up the little “zone closing” dialog with a 5 min. timer, but would actually let me accept the “changes maps” choice.

I was in the guild hall earlier this evening before the patch that changed the elite spec system and the one that came shortly afterwards.

This is going to be a problem for us, as well, if it stays like this. We usually have 30-50 members show up for guild missions. More than half the fun is just goofing around together, so I’d hate to think this is anything but a bug.

@bLind – if you go into the Guild Initiative HQ in LA, you can trade influence for Favor, the new, similar currency. It’s over by Postern Ward wp, I believe.

The Aetherblade puzzle (Not So Secret?) in Gendarran is the hardest for me. I can do all the rest no problem, even the LA one (after sufficient practice).

I think the problem with the Aetherblade puzzle is that it is very unforgiving. The LA puzzle is as long or longer, but it has lots of nets and places to get back up if you put a foot wrong. In the Aetherblade puzzle, one misstep and you’re done. And getting back to where you were is such a lengthy business that it discouraged me from the repeated attempts I need in order to improve.

The Clock Tower is cake by comparison to me because it’s spammable. Think of it as piano practice.

Add me to the “new war horn” crowd. Ugh.

Edit: Ick = kittens, but Ugh = OK. Sigh.

It has been slow recently, but I’d guess it was because of the push to get that last patch out, then give people a little chance to recover and enjoy the holiday weekend in US. I expect news will start flowing again very soon.

Edit: And by “people” here, I mean their employees, not us.

This has happened to me and my usual groupmates numerous times since the last patch. I’ve reported it as an in-game bug each time, so I won’t repeat here, but I’ll share a perception I have:

The other thing that has been happening frequently since the last patch is the game getting confused about your position. For example, in the middle of the new LA JP, suddenly you get the “a strong current” messages, as when you’re at the edge of the map in the water. Log out and back in, only to discover you’re in the water past the lighthouse, instead of in the JP.

Couple this with randomly taking non-fatal fall damage while just strolling or standing about, and I perceive the random deaths might be caused by this positional confusion. The game suddenly decides you’re up in the air somewhere, drops you, and you die if the distance was sufficient.

I’ve /bug’d the unexpected deaths, unexpected fall damage, and unexpected repositioning in the past.

I would love to see these added back into the daily mix. IDK why, but now that they’re no longer part of the daily, I rarely think to go do one, and I always enjoy them.

Multiple reports of this from guildies tonight:

After Shatterer, the whole map got dc’d, wound up in LA, with all event credit and rewards rolled back.

Working on Dry Top events, event progress towards the daily randomly reset.

Running around in South Sun, booted back to LA, with a reset.

I do not expect to see this in HoT myself. I think someone asked about it back when the HoT announcement first came out, and they said something to the effect that they weren’t holding back info on any other significant changes.

I’m in my fifties. My guild is full of “older players”, about 350 of them in GW2. So, yes.

I’m an officer in my current guild, and have been a guild leader (in another game) in the past. I’ve never been a fan of the notion that people can only belong to a single guild (or, the GW2 equivalent of 100% representation of a single guild).

People play games for different reasons. This one wants to WvW, that one wants spvp, this other one is into dungeon speed runs. Another example is that our guild is adult-only, and some of our members also want to tag up and play with their children. One guild doesn’t necessarily scratch all itches.

My guild is a casual, mostly PvE guild with a great social environment. I want my members to feel like they can be part of our community, but still find a sufficient number of like minded people to join them in specialized activities. Why force them out by being hard-nosed about rep’ing?

We do ask that members rep during guild events, and we’ve been known to boot people who never, ever rep, but the reality is that most of our members rep most of the time just because they enjoy the atmosphere and take pride in their membership.

I can kinda understand a hard-core guild insisting on representation, but IMO it makes no sense for a social guild like mine.

Oh, oh, can I play?

• I’m on the wrong side of fifty, so I help put the “old” in Old Timers Guild.
• I’m fond of saying I’m from nowhere because my father was in the Navy. I’d attended 6 schools by the 3rd grade.
• My first PC game with any pretensions to graphics was Wizardry I, and I’ve been gobbling up FRPG games ever since.
• I thought I was hot stuff in college because I had a home-built PC with 48k of RAM and no disk drive, plus a 300 baud modem. The bad old days.
• I used to read tons of SF&F books before MMO’s stole my soul. Favorite authors include C.J. Cherryh, Jim Butcher, Mercedes Lackey, Robin Hobb.
• I get most of my reading done while commuting now. I would surely have been jailed for road rage long since if not for Audible.
• I have pretty eclectic musical tastes, but absolutely no C&W allowed.
• I was a software developer for 25 years, but threw it over for technical writing after the obligatory mid-life crisis. Best decision I’ve ever made. (Go for it Rauderi!)
• I love to cook. And, sadly, to eat. I wish I had a kitchen slave to wash up after me.
• I got my mother into MMO’s at age 76, which just goes to show you’re never too old to be corrupted.

They get less of my money by putting out outfits. There is usually at least one part of each outfit that I really, really hate, so I won’t buy it. Like the Lunar New Year outfit – loved everything but those huge fan shoulders, which I wouldn’t be caught dead in. Totally killed it for me. Not to mention the whole “put together your own look” thing.

I understand that outfits are probably much, much quicker and easier for them to create, and it must be working out for them financially, but it almost never parts me from my cash. I was very, very glad to see the carapace armor set. There’s hope!

I don’t really need the game to change dramatically. I’m still here after 2 years, so they must doing something right!

My biggest problem is that I get seriously bored when there’s a big break in LS, like during the WvW tournaments or long holiday breaks. I think this is partly because I’m not the primary target audience. I don’t engage in pvp or wvw, and I’m not a cheev chaser. I’ve self-selected myself out of many activities. What would fill those gaps for me are things like:

Introduction of a new class. I enjoy leveling, but I have one of all the classes I enjoy (and some of the classes I don’t!)

A new reason to run instances. We don’t need the gold or the 2 year old skins. We don’t avoid instances, either, but they never spring to mind when having that “Whatcha wanna do?” conversation, either.

Some new guild rush/puzzle/challenges. There’s not enough of them so they all feel pretty stale by now and we often end up getting the same one or two several weeks ina row.

I think login rewards are BS in any game, but I guess I’m glad they added them because I doubt I’ll do the dailies much now, which is OK, but I’ll miss the old, loose framing of my play time.

Previously, I thought the GW2 dailies were the best I’d seen in any game because they were so unstructured. I usually got my daily finished organically, by just running around doing whatever I felt like. Worst case, I’d end up 4/5 and have to pay attention for 5 min. to finish up. On nights when I wasn’t feeling particularly goal directed, I could use the daily to add a bit of structure to something like map completion on an alt.

The old system fit my play style like a comfy sweater. The new one is more like a tight shoe. Fortunately, I don’t have to wear them since ANet hasn’t tied the dailies to anything compelling to me. I still think it’s a shame, though, that they wrecked what felt to me like a near perfect system.

Though my sample size is small, in the games that officer chat and in which I was an officer, the officer chat primarily ended up a back channel for snarky remarks about members. It’s not actually very beneficial.

Real guild business gets conducted in voice chat in my current and previous guild. If your guild is too small to have voice chat, odds are decent that your needs can be met with whispers or by simply partying up and using party chat.

I do think the chat system in GW2 could use some improvements (custom chat channels, please!), but I’ve not missed officer chat. Of course, if they did add custom chat channels, that’d solve your issue as well.

Some of us (who most assuredly aren’t ANet employees) like JP’s just fine. They are, in fact, my favorite part of the game. Quite a few people in my large guild enjoy them as well. I have my own list of activities I dislike, like WvW, but I’m happy they’re around to keep others entertained.

Having a variety of activities available that appeal to a wide range of players is what keeps a game alive.

I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of thanks. Two friends and I did this for the first time tonight, and though it took us freakin’ forever, it was great fun.

It’s really more just a puzzle than a jumping puzzle as there wasn’t a lot of jumping per se, nor was most of the jumping at all difficult. It was great fun puzzling out where to go, though.

I thought the skritt mechanics were brilliant as a way to make mistakes not too punishing. Jumping puzzles are my favorite part of this game, but I don’t do the aetherblade puzzle because the consequences of a slip are so dire. This was a nice compromise between “it sucks to be you” and no consequences at all. I definitely plan to head back into this puzzle to learn the way better.

As someone else mentioned, my money is on Josh Foreman being behind this brilliance. Whoever it might have been a deep /bow of gratitude and respect to you!

Many of my most memorable moments are tied to jumping puzzles. The first time I did the pirate JP in Lion’s Arch, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming. Afterwards, I hadn’t had that much fun in a game in a long, long time. It converted me from “Kitten platforming” (coming off of SWTOR) to “When can we do another one?!”

My first Pig Iron JP. I was so nervous that my hands were sweating. Scare me some more, please!

The first time I saw the Griffonrook Run JP. It’s still one of the most beautiful settings in the game to me.

SAB. That is all.

Scouring the Bazaar of the 4 Winds for crystals.

The first time I saw Shadow Behemoth and the first time I saw Jormag. Epic fights back when the game was new. Fire Ele pre-launch…though that wasn’t necessarily positively memorable…

Omadd’s machine and the Eternal Alchemy.

Every single time I go “what’s in/under/behind here?” and there actually is something. Look, a secret! It delights. I don’t mean loot, just little things like an NPC with an interesting tale, a cave full of bunnies, or a fabulous view .Even after 2 years, I still stumble across such things now and then.

I cannot thank the developers enough for creating this beautiful, detailed, interesting world that so richly rewards exploration. If you had asked me prior to playing GW2 if I was the explorer type, I would have told you no, but that’s because other games had never rewarded me with things worth finding. My favorite part of GW2 is simply…Tyria.

1. Guild message on login
2. Last Representing time
3. More guild missions (rush/puzzle/challenge)

Nitross.6987:

mosselyn.5081:

Proposal Overview
Add a “build queue queue.”

[snip]
Could you elaborate on what you think is missing? Do you want to be able to queue up items even when the amount is full and have them start as soon as there is room? Or is it something else?

Sorry, that was poorly explained. Thank you for asking. I’ll try to correct it.

The problem we have is that you can only queue up one at a time (or have one) of some things. For example, we cannot queue up several days of karma buffs.

Proposal Overview
Make it easier to tell who has joined or left the guild when reviewing roster history.

Goal of Proposal
We have a large, fairly active guild, so the roster history can get pretty busy. I do roster maintenance once a week, and it is often hard to sift out comings and goings from promotions/demotions/kicks, especially since each invite generates multiple log events. I care about who leaves for obvious reasons. I care about who joins because the officers who do the inviting rarely remember to set ranks properly.

Proposal Functionality
Make the “so-and-so has left the guild” and “so-and-so has joined the guild” stand out more or make it possible to filter/search on these events. The leaving notices are usually easy to spot because of the “:accountname” prefix. However, the joinings do not follow this same pattern, and I have noticed that the leavings do not always, either. Why the latter is sometimes true is beyond me.

Associated Risks
Interface bloat if you add a filter options. None I can think of if you do it by change the font, font size, color, or format to make the events more prominent.

Proposal Overview
Improve intra-guild messaging support.

Goal of Proposal
As others have mentioned, it would be useful to be able to send out a guild-wide message for events or other important guild happenings. I’ve played other games with this capability, and it has not been abused.

I am also very, very, very tired of getting blocked by the spam throttle when trying to send out inactivity warnings to a dozen or more members. It takes me half an hour to send out a couple dozen warnings every month, simply because I’m twiddling my thumbs for a few minutes between each message.

Proposal Functionality
Mail-to-guild capabilities, permission controlled. Others have touched on this, so I won’t belabor it.

Ease up the message throttle when sending messages to guild members (or party members!), or enable creating a message with multiple recipients who are in the guild.

Associated Risks
Compromised accounts and irresponsible officers could spam members.

Proposal Overview
Add a “build queue queue.”

Goal of Proposal
The current build queue is too restrictive in what/how many of an upgrade can be queued. Every time our CL goes out of town for a few days, there’s a fire drill related to who is going to queue up buffs and guild missions to keep things rolling. An example for us is the karma buff. We try to keep it up all the time, but we cannot queue several to built at once, so it becomes a maintenance headache when officers are not available.

Proposal Functionality
I would like to be able to queue up multiple upgrades, even if the max permitted is already met. When “space” becomes available for a given upgrade, it is added to the queue. Adding things to the queue consumes the required influence. Removing something from the queue refunds it. A similar queue for lining up buffs as they run out would also be nice.

Associated Risks
None I’m aware of.

Proposal Overview
Improve the upgrade interface.

Goal of Proposal
The current upgrade interface is confusing to new users. It almost always gets screwed up when someone other than the usual bag holder has to queue or activate upgrades.

Proposal Functionality
I think something as simple has adding tooltips to the major section headings would help. For example, hover help for the Build Queue, Unlocks, Boosts, Consumables. Move the directions that are at the bottom of the window to the top. (The text that starts with “This is where everything your guild has available for use is displayed.”)

Associated Risks
None.

Proposal Overview
Separate social options and administrative options on the member name right-click menu.

Goal of Proposal
Accidentally gkicking someone has become a right of passage for all new officers in our guild because it is too easy to click the wrong thing when attempting to whisper or invite someone. There have been a few accidental promote/demote incidents, too, but gkick is the big one.

Proposal Functionality
Put administrative functions into a sub-menu of the right-click menu so that you have to work a little harder to kick, promote, or demote someone.

Associated Risks
Mass kicking/promotion/demotion becomes more work. Speaking as the person who does roster maintenance for a large guild, I’m OK with that.

Proposal Overview
Improve the roster search and make it harder to accidentally ginvite someone while searching.

Goal of Proposal
The current search is somewhat finicky. It sometimes doesn’t find members even when I know they’re there. You cannot search by full account name (x.1234). Worst of all, it is way, way too easy to send a ginvite to a random person when you are searching the roster.

Proposal Functionality
Add the ability to search by account name. Decouple roster search from guild invite functionality.

Associated Risks
None.

Proposal Overview
Make the roster tab for your currently active guild the default view when you open the guild UI.

Goal of Proposal
The current UI, with two views of membership (Main and Roster) is quite confusing. Members often don’t realize the second, “Roster” tab is there, so they don’t know additional information and functionality is available on the Roster tab. If you’re not in multiple guilds, the distinction between the Main and Roster tab is baffling.

Proposal Functionality
Ideally, I’d like to see the two tabs consolidated into one, but if that is not feasible, then at least make the roster of your currently active guild the default view. Add some text to the “Main” tab that clarifies what it is for, perhaps at the top of the guild list column.

Associated Risks
Players who switch between their guilds frequently probably would not approve.

I am making the back items, and I’m not outraged by what’s required to make them, but I am somewhat disappointed in the “recipe”. Part of it is fun, most of it is just an uninteresting time sink.

Because I’ve been playing since launch, I was lucky enough to already have some of the harder-to-accumulate items like the +5 agony infusion, the pristine fractal relics, and the heaping piles of crafting mats.

That mostly leaves me with the power ups, the geodes for the special items, the foxfires, and the plant food.

The geode requirements weren’t too bad aside from the clay pots, which I chose to buy. I wasn’t thrilled about grinding out geodes, but that was mostly because it was in contention with saving up for a bug weapon recipe.

What I didn’t like about the geode requirement was that we didn’t know when Dry Top was a lot livelier that there would be something besides bug weapons to spend geodes on. I would have worked harder at acquiring them when the zone was more occupied and the events were more fun. Now, they’re kinda sad.

The foxfires are just ugh, any way you look at it. After trying to gather them by roaming around and average only 2-3/hour, I gave that up. Now I just shuttle my 80’s between the two tree shrines in Malchor’s and Straits 2-3 times per night. Better yield, less time. Utterly boring.

The plant food is just irritating. To be fair, I would probably find it less so if there was more to do right now. With no LS on the horizon for weeks (months?), there’s nothing on my personal checklist besides work on the back item. The plant food and foxfires devolve that into “log in for a few minutes to chop trees and make plant food”. The time gating also makes it difficult to help someone else since I’m, um, insufficiently noble to put off my own goal repeatedly.

On the plus side, I liked that the some of the components were woven into the LS. I really liked the power up portions sending us to mini dungeons, fractals, jumping puzzles, and other events. (I might have felt differently if I had no fractal relics or agony infusions. I pretty much quit fractals when they made every run require 4 of them.)

It’s great that most of the mats are aren’t bound so I can help friends with theirs, and people who aren’t interested in the back item can earn some money.

TL; DR The fun bits are soon over, but the boring bits go on and on.

I have both and enjoyed both, but ultimately made my mesmer my main and shelved my ele. (I only PvE).

The ele is fun in her way, but in my hands very squishy. I just ended up enjoying the survivability and versatility of my mesmer more. Also, portals.

Admittedly, part of my problem with my ele is I don’t like playing her in melee, so I never really warmed up to running with daggers, and staff, which I enjoy, is just too weak for solo play. With my mesmer, I can solo effectively and feel like I make useful group contributions, while using weapons I enjoy.

That being said, I was really slow to warm up to my mesmer. The early levels were somewhere between painful and boring. Once I got high enough to get the “clone on dodge” trait and a couple other things, though, the fun factor went way up.

You should definitely give it a go. I’d say that even if you hadn’t already shelled out the purchase price, but since you have? It’s a no brainer. You have literally nothing to lose. Come explore this beautiful and interesting world AN has created!

“Last chance” is a bit too melodramatic for me, but certainly I’m hoping LS2 will rekindle my interest.

With a few notable exceptions like the Marionette and the return of the Bazaar of the Four Winds, I’ve been “living on hope” since before Christmas because I’m so over zergfests. And a girl can only live on hope for so long.

I still think this is a great game, and I would recommend it without reservation to anyone, but if LS2 fails to capture my fancy, I’ll probably fade to black by the end of summer. I barely play right now. I had a good run, so no bitterness there, only regret that all good things come to an end.

Labyrinthine Cliffs was my favorite content last year, so I’m like a kid in a candy shop. While I can’t say the dolyak race or the crystal carry are a huge success, they’re OK – enough that I’ll do them when they’re up, if I’m not in the middle of something else.

While I agree that the rewards for shards are not exciting, they’re still more than we would otherwise get. I tossed hundreds of them out the window before ANet made that announcement. Know what I got for those? Absolutely nothing.

I regret only two things so far: The red flower backpack does not seem to be available, and, as last year, I wish the sky crystals would reset once you get the achievement so that you can do them multiple times while the zone is up.

I believe that is not a bug. It discourage players to do the real event (killing the champs) instead of forcing it to fail to maximize trash mob farming. All the bosses must die in order for the event to succeed. The faster they’re downed, the better the reward you receive.

This is a game that rewards exploration. By exploration, I do not just mean “get 100% map completion”. If that is all you do, then you will have the experience you’ve had of completing the map while still in the level range of the map.

If you approach a zone with curiosity, I think you’ll find it contains more than enough content for its level range. Unlike most games, GW2 rewards you for looking behind that waterfall and talking to this NPC. That’s the best way to uncover dynamic events, jumping puzzles, and other content gems.

It is definitely a different gameplay experience than is provided by many classic theme park MMO’s, especially given how excruciatingly linear many of them have become the past few years. It’s not for everyone. If you’re super goal-directed, I think it can be frustrating, but if you open your heart to the randomness, it can be both fun and liberating.

Personally, I level like a Skritt. “Oooo, shiney!” I’m always veering off randomly for a heart, waypoint, PoI, vista, gathering node, dynamic event, jumping puzzle, or intriguing looking cave/ruin/hole in the ground. I usually out level a map long before I “complete” it.

Remember how difficult it sometimes was to get on the same map as the rest of your party when the game first came out? Megaservers seem to have reintroduced this.

Last week, I listened to a group of guildies, relatively new players all, struggle most of the evening to get their little group of 6 on the same map. They’re not chasing champ trains. They just want to level their little toons together. It was very frustrating for them and not at all a good new player experience.

I usually only group with a couple other people, so I haven’t had as much trouble, but I have pretty much given up on world bosses and the bigger dynamic events because everything has become a huge hairy zergfest. I enjoy group play, but I don’t enjoy a 30 sec. ant pile.

Also, thanks to the new schedules, the same few world bosses are the only options available to me every single evening, which is very boring. This, at least, could be mitigated by changing the way the schedule rotates.

It’s hard for me to begrudge the benefit this has probably brought to players on low pop servers, but as a player on a mid to high pop server, Megaservers have not introduced a single positive to my play.