Guild Wars 2

Add a simple option in settings or something, ‘lock bag dimensions’ and save it in some line of code somewhere, I’m sick of having to mess with the UI every time I open my bag. It’s impossible to keep a bag organized when my bag goes all Mad Hatter and plays games with me.

shadow.6174:

I see in that map a line going to Infinity Coil and for that it crosses through Timberline Falls… On the vid we see a fort at Timberline being attacked then yeah.. it’s possible the next part will be in that direction

I am interested in seeing how it all comes together. This has been quite a fascinating episode, such minute details. The only downside is that NPCs don’t take notice, you’d think vines taking over the WP and entangling them like they have would cause a lot of concern. WPs have always been stationary, spinning in place but once entangled they’re off balance.

The screen shot of Concordia even shows it split in half. Perhaps it has to do with draining so much energy that the WP structures can no longer maintain themselves or Mordre is trying to cut off reinforcements. Can’t wait to see the pieces all fall in place.

Is it me, or is there a real element of horror being introduced this time out? These insidious vines slowly appearing, the way they’re being shown in the teaser to attack and strangle people…it has an almost Lovecraftian feel to it.

And for some reason I’m sharply reminded of the movie version of Stephen King’s The Mist.

As I said earlier, lovin’ it.

Ronin.7381:

onemantankwall, nobody likes excuses. Stop using them. Either you have information we don’t know about that confirms your claim or you’re misinterpreting ambiguous sources out of information we already know of, to state claims of truth that are unconfirmed by the devs.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Enough-of-your-GMPC-please/first#post4173255

Angel McCoy.1832:

The whole “Commander” topic is another discussion entirely.

Personal Story spoilers

hide spoiler

Bottom line is that, at the beginning of the Pact (almost 2 years ago in-game time), you were “The Commander.” After Zhaitan was killed, the Pact continued on and you went off into the world to do stuff. At that point, other commanders were brought on, and you become “A Commander.” And you became a commander who had lots of other things to do besides running an army that was repairing, preparing, and stocking up for the next big battle with the Elder Dragons. We could not build a story on that alone, not a good one that made sense, not considering where we want the story to take you. Any time anyone calls you “The Commander” now, it’s someone being nostalgic. It’s perhaps more correct to say you were “The First Commander.” That helps us explain why you’ve been running around the world saving people as opposed to being locked in a war room with Trahearne. I’ll see what I can do to get this explanation into the game.

In conclusion, I’ll just say again that we do pay attention to the forums, and thank you for posting your thoughts.

BobbyStein.2315:

Zin.1673:

The character is indeed voiced. Did you ever played your personal story ?

Warning: nerdy devspeak ahead!

The player character (PC) hasn’t had new voice recorded since the game launched, so you’ll only hear your character speak in the following circumstances: conditional chatter, in cinematic conversations in the Personal Story, and in painterly “full” cinematics. We retired cinematic conversations with the Living World, so right now the PC can only “talk” through unvoiced dialog trees.

We’re exploring some technical improvements that may allow the PC to speak under new circumstances, but it’s actually a bigger undertaking than one would imagine due to the complexity of player voice implementation (10 possible voices, currently shared lines of dialog that we want to split out, scene timing per language, etc.). That’s about all I can say at the moment.

In short, we’re looking to make the PC speak again, but it’s going to take a bit of time to redo the code and content pipelines to make it work, not to mention updating our tools to allow us to generate PC lines that deviate based on race & gender, prior accomplishments, etc. We’re not ready to announce what those changes will actually be or when they might be deployed, but we’re seriously looking into it.

As always, thanks for playing.

If this is true, then you have no idea how happy that made me to read. I had the first fan girl moment of a lifetime and I don’t normally squeee at all considering I’m usually so pessimistic.

But yay! This would be incredibly awesome if my characters can speak again. Even if it starts off as being generic dialogue at first…. but to just have a voice again and not be the invisible person holding the door for other characters to walk through.

?

?

?

Braham: Hey there.

Me: Hi, how are you doing?

Braham: Did you… just talk?

Taimi: What’s going on?

Braham: I think he just talked.

Me: Hi, shorty.

Taimi: HEY! He did talk. Hey wait a minute, did you just call me shorty? You do remember I have Scruffy here.

Me: (laughs) Never Change.

Kasmeer: Hey guys? Ready to move on? Is something wrong with our friend here?

Me: Taimi is threatening to flatten me with her Golem.

Taimi: It was only a warning.

Kasmeer: Did… he just speak?

Braham: Yeah. All this time and I thought he was a mute.

Jory: I heard talking, what’s going on here?

Kasmeer: The Commander just…talked.

Jory: Right. You didn’t just talk, did you?

Me: I might have, the verdict is still not in yet.

Jory: @#$%?! Does Rox know?

Me: Well -

Rox: Oh I knew already. Why do you think I’m sitting way over here. That guy can’t shut up for two minutes.

Me: O:-)

I can’t agree more. In fact, being a big gw1 player I remember how I used to dislike the basic heros in Nightfall (Koss and co.) because of this forced “friendship”. However they were much more legit than this “Band of brothers” coming out of nowhere.

And please Anet, if you want to introduce lesbians (‘cause lesbians are more politically correct and gay guys, y’know) I’m cool with this, but please PLEASE stop making them look stupid and cheesy as kitten.

So far, I really like the next season of Living Story. Except for one really blatant and grating detail.

Once again, it’s about these obvious GMPCs that are single-handedly hogging the spotlight from who is supposed to be important here (you).

That dialogue scene before the Festival? Where they congratulated these people I don’t care about at all for the death of Scarlet, but failed to mention the PC at all? I was hoping that’d be the end of the special snowflakes.

But here we are once again with The Superfriends while the player gets to be the goofy side characters following the real superheroes.

It’d be alright to have your GMPCs if the PCs got just as much spotlight as they did, but we don’t. We’re referred to in these off-hand ways. Last I checked we’re supposed to be the Commander of a worldwide alliance that killed an Elder Dragon. Not the GMPC’s “friend”.

As a side note, your two female characters Marjory and Kasmeer are becoming extremely grating. I absolutely do not like having to stand there for unskippable dialogue and wait for these awful pet names and painfully forced gushing to end. It’s completely incongruous to what is going on around you. In case you guys forgot, a whole lot of people died a horrible death and there’s looters all over this mass grave.

It’s getting real tiring watching the dungeon master wax on about his NPCs while we all wait for our turn to speak, you know what I’m saying? Whatever happened to those great one-on-ones from the Personal Story?

Whatever happened to us mattering at all?

FlamingFoxx.1305:

They are working on looking into making the first living story available through the story journal, it just may take some time/may not be possible since it was not designed with the journal in mind.

Anet should have considered this problem when they first came up with the Living Story idea. If a new or returning player comes into the LS, how do they know what is going on? Since this new Season is a continuation of the First season, how do new players know what happened in the first season? Yes, they can read the Wiki but there should be a in-game resource that not only explains the situation but gives some cinematics to provide the flavor of what has gone before.

maha.7902:

Dry top and all of the other loading screens in the new style look like trash. Kessex hills loading screen was forever ruined by whoever this guy is.

I still feel sad whenever I load in Kessex hills that this art isn’t there anymore :

http://i1223.photobucket.com/albums/dd518/drosera123/KessexHills.jpg

:(

I find it abstract detracts as loading screens.
With loading screens I feels were supposed to get an feel for the area it should be a proper representation of the area not something that looks like it should be in a gallery in a museum or on a wall.

There is no high level content that you can just stroll in and complete that easily.

But there should be. And again, your definition of “easy” is not the same one I’m using. I am NOT arguing that you should just be able to faceroll content, that it should not take effort, skill, and perhaps practice to be successful at it. What I am saying is that once you know everything there is to know, once you have YOUR skills on point, you should be able to engage the content, do your best, and win without a bunch of standing around or set-up hassles.

I’m not arguing that I should have gotten a gold Blitz run on my first try, first day, but within a couple days of the last patch I had Blitz DOWN, I knew all the skills I needed to know to do my role perfectly (or at least close to it). I was not any better at it in week four than I was by the end of week one. Even still, the last day of the patch it usually took me the better part of an hour of tedium and poor gameplay before I could be in the position to put any of my skills to use. As soon as I was in that position, gold, gold, gold, gold, for an hour or more until I decided to leave, but the hassles of setting that situation up was NOT a fun use of my limited gameplay time.

I believe that ultimately, rewards should be based on the tactical level, rather than the strategic. The rewards that you, as a player, achieve, should be based on the work that you, as a player, put in. So for example, instead of having a zone-wide meta-reputation that is based on the efforts of players you’ve never met on the other side of the map, the reputation should be based on the events YOU participate in. If YOU complete a half-dozen or so events over the course of the chain then YOU have tier 4 access to rewards and vendors, and maybe someone who was doing Lost Coins at the time would only have T1 access. You still need to play alongside the other players to make the most of the events, to complete them as fast as possible, but the rewards you get are based on the work you put into it.

If they want to have a zone wide meta, then just have it be a pride thing, a “good job guys, you completed ALL the events, here’s a fireworks display!” pat on the back, rather than a material reward that creates a practical imbalance between those who complete it and those who don’t. It’s like speed-running Tequatl. You don’t get any bonus loot if you complete Teq in the fastest time possible, and well that you don’t, but it’s at least bragging rights to try and that’s fine.

You have an option of improving the OF you are in and bettering it for yourself and the others around you willing to stick around long enough to make it worth being a part of. Do this, and people will then flock to your OF.

If that actually worked for you then you were VERY lucky. Even on coordinated TTS runs, where they hand picked an empty map and stuffed it with their own people, they would tend to break down over time, going from gold runs to barely silver, to bad silver, a problem they could only solve by abandoning that map entirely and finding someplace else. If you were able to take a bronze map and whip all the players there into gold shape then you were lucky enough to end up on a bronze map with very unusually malleable and engaged players.

Honestly, I don’t mind working hard for the time that I play, but I do mind wasting time. I can’t play for 4+ hours per day most days, and solutions that involve “failing” for an hour or more to get things “into shape” don’t work for me. I want to be able to log in and instantly get started on a successful run. I’m willing to do my part to make that happen, to be working 100% of the time towards that goal, but if the content is designed in such a way that it takes a half hour or more of just standing around on the map to “get set up,” or if it requires repeatedly failing content for a half hour or more to “work the kinks out” each night, then I see that as being a content design failure. Assuming I know what I’m doing myself, I should be able to jump right in within minutes of logging in, and succeed on that very first run.

Many players at these events have no motivation to give their full effort because the rewards are tied 100% to groupwide success. As a result you see people afking, refusing to res, autoattacking, etc.

And the thing is, you can’t blame people for not giving 100%, 100% of the time. I certainly don’t want to. Of course I feel compelled to sometimes, to not let others down, but that’s part of the problem. I mean, if I’m in Dry Top, it’s not always because I want a T4 run. Maybe I’m moving between story modes. Maybe I’m shopping at the unique vendors. Maybe I’m collecting coins. Maybe I’m grabbing available harvest nodes. Maybe I’m opening chests during a storm. There are numerous things to do that have nothing to do with getting a perfect T4 run, and players should not be blamed for doing those things when ANet created those distractions.

Even the Pavilion had a few distractions, like the Gauntlet, which reasonably lowered the Blitz participation rate below 100%. It would be nice if players could join a “serious” map, run that content for a bit, but then pull back to an “unserious map” as easily as hitting a button, get some of the “non-serious” tasks done or go AFK for a bit without messing anyone else up, and then hop back on to a “serious” map without any waiting time.

It’s also worth noting that I don’t like the content that is based on 30-60 minute timers, because that basically forces you to stick around for that entire time doing one activity, not doing any other activities the game has to offer. Ideally the Dry Top reward chains would only be on a 10-15 minute interval, allowing you to pop in, do a chain, and then pop back out to do something else.

CP showed us that you don’t need to be part of a big guild to get into an organized situation. There were a dozen+ folks who used the TTS TS server but weren’t even part of TTS that were leading boss blitzes daily.

Including myself. They were great folks, by and large, but that sort of hullabaloo just shouldn’t be necessary. It should just work using the tools ANet provides, you shouldn’t need access to outside organizational tools.

Previously we had the ability to guest to lower population servers at the very least, but now it’s all guess and keep trying to find an empty map to have people jump to and hope they can get in. It’s very annoying.

One thing that would be nice is a “change map” button, rather than just entering and exiting the zone and trying for the best, you should be able to just hit a single button and load a different map than the one you’re on. Ideally it could be more like other “megaserver” games, where you can just see a full list of the available instances, and just pick the one that you want.

One other issue with Dry Top is that if you load up a new map, how do you tell how good it is? I mean, if you load one right as the clear phase begins, it could be ten minutes or more before you have any idea how well you’re doing, and by then it would be too late to try a different map with a reasonable chance of it being a good one. There’s no way to really tell whether your map is a good one until the sand phase begins.

I have no idea how the tier system in Dry Top even works. Though from reading this thread I can guess its something to do with everyone on the map doing X amount of events within a certain period of time or something.

There’s a good Reddit thread about it, but the short version is that basically you need to be doing ALL the events in the zone, of which 2-3 of them spawn at any given time, and complete as many bonus objectives as possible (like preventing the Inquest from scoring a single point in the crustal game), the reward being that the higher the tier, the cheaper the stores are, AND the more loot you get from each event completed.

So if it’s not hard, why aren’t you getting T4 maps all the time?

As I said, luck. The difference between success and failure does not always have anything to do with difficulty. Chess is difficult, Snakes and Ladders is not difficult, but you can lose at either, because while the former takes skill, the latter takes luck. That doesn’t not make it difficult.

Saint.5647:

One day, while Crown Pavilion was active, my guildies and I were bored. We decided to host a Gold OF.

We did just that. For hours we tagged up and coordinated Gold-Run after Gold-Run.

OP is looking at this the wrong way. As if there are two options; you either get lucky with a Gold OF or you get unlucky in a non-Gold OF. It’s not the case at all and you present yourself as a helpless person devoid any drive.

You have an option of improving the OF you are in and bettering it for yourself and the others around you willing to stick around long enough to make it worth being a part of. Do this, and people will then flock to your OF.

Again your options are not (1) Be Lucky (2) Give up. There is always that option of (3) Fight for what you want. Of course C is harder so many feel content to blame their misfortune on their luck instead of taking some personal responsibility for their situation. No one owes you a Gold OF. The only one who really wants you to have one, is you….so go make it so.

My two cents on GW2 and life. Enjoy.

And if you can’t get your whole guild team into the map you’re on? Do you find a new one? What if after 30 mins of trying you find one but have 5 people unable to get in? do you keep trying or say “tough luck keep hitting join”?

What if a griefer comes in and continues to train one of the teams just for his own pleasure? How do you deal with that?

I’m all for the “put in the work” attitude, but there are very real issues that need to be resolved.

I like the idea. But I just wish it wasn’t so determined by luck from getting into a good map. Especially now with the megaserver.

Spamming “join in” for hours isn’t really my idea of having a good time.

A list of available servers (megaservers/shards/districts whatever you want to call them) with the WvW queue system would fix all this. Relevant data for the list would be meta-event status and number of players queued.

This would allow players to continue enjoying the game while waiting for a map rather than spamming the join function for an unknown amount of time. It would also allow players who just want to gather some nodes and do story or explore to select a low population map for their needs.

I don’t want to see a reduction in the type of content which requires and benefits from organization. It’s incredibly fun for many people and adds a new layer of challenge to PvE.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Lasica.5068:

~~~ snip ~~~

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

Maybe you should work on your reading skills then. Denying his arguments without properly answering to them is of no interest.

“You must not understand the implications to what a “private map” would do. The whole reason for the private map or shard is to exclude players. "

You must not understand what “open world” means in ANet mouth, as they already explained their thinking.

Things lacking are basically a queue for joining / a guide (events shown on whole map, indicating number of people at the event, etc.). There is none of that. The event is not hard, it’s made hard. Completing it without proper tools and with tools so we could actually do something productive without needing a freaking teamspeak would be day and night. Plus it’s boring aswell since it requires you to complete it again and again for the rewards and the events in themselves are not quite fascinating.

But all you’ll read is it’s too hard

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Jerus.4350:

I feel like people exaggerate when they say that private maps would exclude people. CP had TTS creating a new teamspeak just for random people to organize runs. I’m not part of TTS but I used that channel to much success (outside of spending far too much time clicking “join pavillion”). Let players, guilds, and organizations work towards success, stop letting players get in the way of eachother, it’s annoying. THere’s already a philosophical divide, let us actually divide up between those who actively try to get into an organized situation and those who want to just do their own thing.

You must not understand the implications to what a “private map” would do. The whole reason for the private map or shard is to exclude players. Why would you pay money/Gems to have a personal map, only to open it to the public? If this were a TTS group, I would give preference to guildies first, meaning all pugs would be left out. Why? Because if you have 200+ TTS guildies wanting to do a map, and the map only has room for 150 players, there’s no room for everyone. That’s why Anet would probably not do personal shards, even though it would be profitable.

Oh, and having a Teamspeak server is not the same as having a server shard in game. Feel free to come into the TTS TS anytime though.

I feel it’s more to exclude a philosophy than the players themselves. If you don’t care to work together, and can’t bother to join up into some kind of organization running it on a private map, then you probably wouldn’t bother to actually work with the groups running it. It’s that philosophy of gameplay that I’d like to be able to avoid when trying to do organized stuff.

Personally I could care less about dry top, when I do it it’s just for fun, I’m not interested in farming this like I was CP. So when people start barking orders or calling people names it’s very annoying. So on the side of someone who simply doesn’t care it’s annoying to be in the same map as people that do.

On the flip side, during CP I did care, and it was very troubling seeing half a map at wiggins afking on the wall while they leached credit from the people actually pushing to do things the fastest they could.

It’d be nice if the players could separate themselves.

So I guess it is about excluding players, but it’s not “hey I don’t want to play with Jim” it’s “i don’t want to play with people who aren’t putting in at least a little bit of effort” Or the flip “let those people have their own maps, I don’t want to deal with them calling me names for starting an event early because I’m just doing my own thing and I don’t want to have to worry about that kind of thing right now”.

I have no idea how the tier system in Dry Top even works. Though from reading this thread I can guess its something to do with everyone on the map doing X amount of events within a certain period of time or something.

All I know is that I’ve never seen it go about T2, and about 80% of the time I log into the area its not even past T1. I’ve yet to see any attempt at organization or even event call outs for the most part. I see an occasional “Champ X up” in map chat and that’s about the extent of it.

There’s a lack of feedback for individual players about their contributions. A bigger problem is that there isn’t much in the way of proper tools players can use to join up together. My time in Dry Top so far has been fairly casual and I don’t care if we only get T2. Why should people who want T4 get stuck with me? And if I wanted T4, why should I get stuck with people who don’t really care?

There is also a lack of feedback for players about their individual contributions, and players who don’t contribute are rewarded just the same (in terms of map rewards).

The first solution that pops into my head are raid sized parties where people can group up and start new maps if needed.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Lasica.5068:

~~~ snip ~~~

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

Yes, it is ‘too hard’ – too hard to coordinate the whole map without reading up on where the individual events spawn and when, and getting enough people do go to the right places at the right time – because it is just not intuitive.
I am perfectly fine with events requiring coordination – so long as the game shows you the way to succeed if you just care to look. I adored the Marionette events, which were very easy to coordinate and explain, yet had a hardcap of players required to have a decent chance at succeeding (who had to have some idea of what to do, but could learn that from other players or from reading the boss-info on the bosses). There was no guaranteed win here, yet most people agreed that they were very much doable. Most of all, the majority of coordination required was intuitive.
The Boss Blitz (in part due to the fact that it was already there last year and worked differently then) and the Dry Top ‘events’ are not.

And really, why would every player always work towards gold – maybe they are just following the story, or trying to get the diving achievement, or find the legendary lama, or all of the coins, or enjoy the landscape?

A selection mechanism of some kind which asks you if you just want to hang around or if you want to work towards gold would really be kind of cool. Even better if it’d kick you out if you weren’t participating in any event for a specific length of time (say, 7 Minutes).

Ohoni.6057:

I really think if we could have our own maps to control things could be much smoother. Anet could make some money by charging a decent amount of gems for it. And Ideally I’d have it be a time based thing (24 hr, 3 days, 1 week maybe as options) and let the map creator purge it clearing the whole map and restarting it when they feel like it so we have the power to deal with griefers.

“Private maps” would work out fine for those who had access to them, but would ruin the game for everyone else. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of a large guild would be completely locked out of most content because any players worth having around would migrate to those maps and everyone else would be left in also-rans. They need a solution that works for ALL players that are willing to put in the effort, not just those in the right guilds.

One thing that came up during Blitz discussions about “AKFers” was that some people wanted the ability to kick AFKers somehow. I think this would likely be abused, but there might be a compromise. Instead, the system should track you as being “AFK” after a minute or two of inactivity. If you are AFK, then 1. you do not scale up anything nearby, ever, and 2. you get no credit for anything nearby, ever.

This would mean that players would have to participate, but that if they weren’t participating, then they wouldn’t in any way harm your experience. Also, whatever the cap on a given map, the content would scale to the point that even if only half the map is participating, they can complete all the objectives (but it would be little easier if every single player on the map were participating). Only those who play, can win, but those who are playing wouldn’t be punished for those that weren’t.

Likewise, challenges should be based on active participation, not DPS checks. The Blitz was far too susceptible to having uplevels and mis-geared characters unable to pull their DPS weight on several of the bosses. The challenge should be in staying alive and avoiding attacks, not in bringing the health bar down in time if you do.

It’s also worth mentioning that the difference in rewards for T3/4 Dry Top isn’t that remarkable. The gold cost for the recipes and items remain exactly the same at all tiers; only the geode cost goes down.

It’s not as big a deal as the Blitz, certainly, but it is still a step in the wrong direction, a sign that they’re still designing content of this type, without yet implementing the tools for players to manage them. I highly doubt they will ever “fix” Dry Top, they’ve moved on to other projects. This is more about fixing whatever content they still have time to mess with before release.

CP showed us that you don’t need to be part of a big guild to get into an organized situation. There were a dozen+ folks who used the TTS TS server but weren’t even part of TTS that were leading boss blitzes daily. It was pretty great. The issue was when griefers or too many AFKs ruined a map we had to spend a good 30-1hour juggling maps and finding a new one. It simply seems to me that they’ve hindered the players ability to organize while also requiring that we do so. Megaservers pushes us all together and says “deal with it”, but then we get these events, which I like, that ask us to perform tasks as a team. It’s just frustrating.

Fixing the AFK problem doesn’t change the leacher issue. The guys running around picking up cactus tagging the event then moving on, etc. Remove credit for an event after so much time? ok, those who die to Colocal Queens one shot no longer get the reward, but leachers just learn to tag at the end of an event. There’s no great fix. Which is why I’d like a little more power put in the players hands to actually be able to organize things themselves. Previously we had the ability to guest to lower population servers at the very least, but now it’s all guess and keep trying to find an empty map to have people jump to and hope they can get in. It’s very annoying.

Sometimes I want to just do my own thing, well if I do my own thing I get in the way if someone is trying to organize people. I don’t want to be in the way but i also don’t want to have to listen to them barking orders. At the same time sometimes I’m in for an organized map and it’s frustrating seeing people do their own thing possibly screwing others over. I can’t help but feel that there should be some way of physically splitting the community that is already split philosophically with the power in our own hands.

I know that Anet is really trying to push open world content, but when the only instances that are succeeding are the ones taxi’ing members in it ceases to be open world content. At this point this content may as well be instanced. OP you’re absolutely right. None of the open world encounters in this game are difficult on an individual basis, and yet despite doing everything right I’ve found myself time and time again failing at Tequatl, Marionette, Assault Knights, Boss Blitz, etc. because I happened to be in a map where the majority of the people didn’t share my mindset. How is it fair that my reward is determined by the people in my map when I have no control over who those people are?

If Anet is deadset on promoting open world content they must do a better job of incentivizing individual contribution. Many players at these events have no motivation to give their full effort because the rewards are tied 100% to groupwide success. As a result you see people afking, refusing to res, autoattacking, etc. However, if a percentage of the reward were determined by individual contribution you would see players doing more to help out at these events. And even if the group as a whole were to fail, you would at least have the players contributing the most towards groupwide success be rewarded something for their efforts. The funny thing is that a system like this is already in place (the reward medals for dynamic events), but it’s so easy to get a gold medal that it’s completely meaningless.

The main problem here is that there are so many players who want to get the best stuff, but don’t want to take the time to organize or coordinate themselves.

The main problem is people who are on the latter group, and are NO DIFFERENT THAN THE FORMER GROUP, and yet are not getting the same rewards because they just happen to not be on the same map.

I was doing gold runs in the pavilion every day of the last month. I was running them for about an hour or two per day, I wound up with almost two stacks of each type of Champ bag, I know pretty much everything there is to know about doing gold runs.

And yet still, on the last day of that patch, it was a huge hassle to make it happen. I had to hook up with people who were already running a good map, I had to join one of their groups. I had to spam “join on member” for maybe a very short time if I was lucky, but sometimes over a half hour of my time, doing nothing but a very tedious and repetitive task.

And then sometimes those gold blitz maps broke down, started getting lots of silvers because people started going AFK or were replaced by people that didn’t know the drill, and yet all the people who left, the same “worthies” that had been getting gold before, started to get silvers. So then the people involved had to find a new map, which was a complicated process that typically took 30+ minutes to perform, then a few trial runs that often went silver before we were back into gold shape. It was a HUGE waste of time, and that was when everything was working “right.”

Now, you can say “when Gold Blitzes are working they work well,” and that is true, but don’t try to chalk it up to the people involved being a better class of people. They are just people that happen to be on gold blitz maps. Those same people on a bronze map would be hopeless.

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

I know the air might be a bit thin on top of that high horse, but you’re missing the point. This isn’t about “it’s too hard.” Liadri is hard. Never managed to beat it. I’m fine with that, it’s a personal challenge and it’s hard, Fine. Nothing about gold blitz or T4 is particularly hard at all. I mean, some of the events are moderately challenging, but none that I would classify as “too hard.” The only difference between T2 and T4 on the Drytop map is not skill or effort, it’s just luck. Plain and simple luck. “Are you lucky enough to end up on a map with people who are willing and able to reach T4?” If yes, then you’ll get T4 easily enough. If not, then it’s impossible, no matter how awesome you are. There is no particular skill to the outcome, it’s random chance. You can no more reasonably say that Dry Top is “too hard” than you could say that coin flipping is “too hard” if you lose a flip. Nor can you reasonably claim to be awesome because you won the coin flip.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The main problem here is that there are so many players who want to get the best stuff, but don’t want to take the time to organize or coordinate themselves. These types of players are prevalent in all MMOs. We call them leechers. So if there are 1,000 players who all want to get the max tier rewards, and 50 are willing to work together, the other 950 players all try to tag along because now there’s a group. Once the map gets hard capped, the remaining players complain instead of trying to fill a new map with each other.

Not really, the way it is designed it doesn’t make it easy to guide players into getting T4. To do it you need to complete events across the entire map that spawn in a variety of different locations and although they are at set times most people don’t even know where all the events are. A well designed game should not require players to study up on event spawn locations and strategies to complete. That isn’t fun and most people just won’t bother.

The Moa for example needs someone who can consistently stun her (a thief for preference, but a couple of other classes can also do it). And that event goes off every 10mins, so what if the person stunning her goes elsewhere in the meantime, the event now fails. In fact, I’ve rarely seen the Moa event succeed more than once/hour unless I’m personally there on my thief ensuring she is stunned.

The event in the north mine to encourage the Zepherites to escape, almost impossible without a number of people there at exactly the right time because they die too quickly. Even the one in the south mine to rescue the Zepherites from cages often fails because too few people turn up, or they all concentrate in one area instead of spreading out.

Instead what you get are people that move around the map doing event after event but without a visual guide on where to go (e.g. commanders who tag up to show where people need to go) it will rarely get to T4. Most of my attempts at organisation (with no commander tag of my own) get to T3 which I’m satisfied with, but if you gave me 3-4 people with commander tags who are willing to listen to me I could get to T4 all day long because there would be a visual guide for players to go to locations.

This was my problem with the pavilion as well. The events were designed for players to split up and tackle each boss at the same time, but it’s human nature for people to congregate together and the design of the map didn’t separate players into different areas. Had I been designing that area I would have got rid of the gold requirement to spawn them altogether and had 6 separate circles that a minimum of 5 players had to stand in to activate the event. Each circle would lead to a ramp down into the area where the boss spawned. That’s all that would be needed and players be guided into the right strategy without forcing them.

Now take the current map, there is nothing that guides players to the events they need for T4. It relies on players knowing where the events are and when they spawn. Now I’ve read a guide so I do know the spawn times for each event and where each of them is, but is it reasonable to expect everyone to know that? No it isn’t. You can’t force players to study to have fun, but as a consequence of this a map without significant organisation will fail to reach T4.

That said, I think the current map is a lot better than the Pavilion because it doesn’t get harder when you fail to reach the T4 level you just get less rewards. The Pavilion was significantly easier if you could kill all the bosses at once than it was to take them down one at a time which is doubly punishing those who can’t get the gold level with less rewards and a tougher fight. That was a poorly designed event, with the current map I see T4 as a bonus to rewards you are already getting anyway so it’s not really punishing people who don’t get T4, so it is a big improvement.

The bazaar itself, I’ve never seen the events not go gold in the first ~2 weeks until people were done with it. Not even in the empty morning hours.

The Drinks one would usually get gold but in the hours I played the Yak races often capped out at silver, just because not enough people participated. It really showed the difference between events where a few players could try extra hard to pull things through (since you could captures as many as a dozen or so crystals each), verses one in which nobody was allowed to contribute more than any other (each player could only cross the finish line once, and if not enough players did, everybody loses).

I fullheartedly agree,

Dont give us things we cant do for ourselves and are dependant on the
“I play how i want play” people.

It would be fine if everyone would get an option ‘do you want to coordinate with your server?’ and it should scale up accordingly.

Some people dont understand english, some people literally dont care, and some people ‘NEED to play how they want to play’

What good is a coordination event if not even half of the people partake?

I really think if we could have our own maps to control things could be much smoother. Anet could make some money by charging a decent amount of gems for it. And Ideally I’d have it be a time based thing (24 hr, 3 days, 1 week maybe as options) and let the map creator purge it clearing the whole map and restarting it when they feel like it so we have the power to deal with griefers.

“Private maps” would work out fine for those who had access to them, but would ruin the game for everyone else. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of a large guild would be completely locked out of most content because any players worth having around would migrate to those maps and everyone else would be left in also-rans. They need a solution that works for ALL players that are willing to put in the effort, not just those in the right guilds.

One thing that came up during Blitz discussions about “AKFers” was that some people wanted the ability to kick AFKers somehow. I think this would likely be abused, but there might be a compromise. Instead, the system should track you as being “AFK” after a minute or two of inactivity. If you are AFK, then 1. you do not scale up anything nearby, ever, and 2. you get no credit for anything nearby, ever.

This would mean that players would have to participate, but that if they weren’t participating, then they wouldn’t in any way harm your experience. Also, whatever the cap on a given map, the content would scale to the point that even if only half the map is participating, they can complete all the objectives (but it would be little easier if every single player on the map were participating). Only those who play, can win, but those who are playing wouldn’t be punished for those that weren’t.

Likewise, challenges should be based on active participation, not DPS checks. The Blitz was far too susceptible to having uplevels and mis-geared characters unable to pull their DPS weight on several of the bosses. The challenge should be in staying alive and avoiding attacks, not in bringing the health bar down in time if you do.

It’s also worth mentioning that the difference in rewards for T3/4 Dry Top isn’t that remarkable. The gold cost for the recipes and items remain exactly the same at all tiers; only the geode cost goes down.

It’s not as big a deal as the Blitz, certainly, but it is still a step in the wrong direction, a sign that they’re still designing content of this type, without yet implementing the tools for players to manage them. I highly doubt they will ever “fix” Dry Top, they’ve moved on to other projects. This is more about fixing whatever content they still have time to mess with before release.