Guild Wars 2

Errant Venture.9371:

Ascended:
+50 power +18 Power
+50Precision +18 Precision
+10% Magic Find

Exotic:
+48 power +15 Power
+48 Precision +15 Precision
+7% Magic Find

That’s a TOTAL increase of +5 power, + 5 precision, and +3% magic find.

Combat stats in the ascended piece are 8% higher and Magic Find is 42% higher. And that’s without counting the new “infusion” slot, or the likelihood of a gem / rune slot being added to the ascended piece in the future (which I would say is very high).

Even if we assume Magic Find is irrelevant (which it isn’t, unless you think getting 42% more rare drops has no influence on your purchasing power), that’s an 8% power increase, clearly contradicting their fundamental design principles and pre-sale promises. After the game has been out for 3 months.

Eini.7095:

That preview of the ‘new armor with better stats’ clearly contradicts both GW1 AND GW2 philosophy. So what we need to do BEFORE picking up pitchforks is to WAIT until official statement will be made.

The official statement has already been made:

Exotic:

• 63 Power (including gem)
• 63 Precision (including gem)
• 7% Magic Find (including gem)

Ascended:

• 68 Power
• 68 Precision
• 10% Magic find
• + 1 slot for “infusion”

That’s an 8% increase in combat stats (42% increase in Magic Find), not counting the infusion, after the game has been out for 3 months. And I have a feeling these “ascended” items will be getting a gem slot later, since jewelcrafters would complain otherwise (they wouldn’t be able to sell anything at all once the majority of players was wearing “ascended” armour).

And yes, you’re right, it contradicts GW philosophy. But so does the fact that we can’t trade gems directly with other players (Mike O’Brien said we would be able to), so does the fact that we are stuck in a single server for 7 days at a time, unable to join our friends on other servers to “play together at any moment”, as Arena Net promised during the pre-sales period, and so on.

I guess “GW philosophy” isn’t what it used to be.

And I guess I’ll be saving £20 a month from now on.

Shadow Gathering.5649:

What we need is a counter to cloak, but there simply is not one.

Of course it is extremely unlikely that Anet will give us a new skill that reveals nearby cloaked foes.

Some conditions could reveal the position of stealthed enemies. For example, if the enemy is burning, even if he stealths, you would still see the flames. If he was poisoned, you’d see a faint green cloud. If he was bleeding, you’d see drops of blood appear on the ground.

I don’t see the problem with having some hoods where ears stick out and others where they don’t. Gives people more choice.

What’s really weird is when Charr “comfortably tuck their horns” into hoods, aviator caps, etc..

douceline.2741:

But what people are saying in this thread is that they aren’t spawning, which is the problem.

Yes, we’ve established that there’s a bug affecting some servers. That’s not what I was replying to.

TrojanKilla.6382:

FYI the start is easy compared to the later golem bosses.

I have done the instance dozens of times. The golems don’t have much HP and once you learn how to manipulate their aiming you practically won’t get hit at all. The issue is the bugged spawn time between the waves at the start (same bug that was introduced in the Halloween patch and which had supposedly been fixed). Maybe sometimes they spawn at the right interval, but the last time I was there they were back to 15-20 seconds, which is unplayable. And I have no intention of checking again before the next patch where (hopefully) it will actually be fixed.

TrojanKilla.6382:

The first boss can be burned down pretty quickly with enough dps before adds become a problem.

If you can kill him in 20 seconds, I want to know what spec and gear you’re using, because it takes me 3 or 4 minutes…

Removing the dyes will show you the “default” dyes on the item, which might indeed be colours you don’t have in your dye palette. I’m pretty sure that is working as intended.

Crashing, though, probably isn’t working as intended.

Aiming for the middle (between the water jets) is the safest bet.

GW2’s “fall damage” code is strange to say the least. I once died from falling damage after going down a 4" step, and several times I take falling damage 2x when I land (each corresponding to the full amount of damage of one fall).

“Kill Zhaitan” would have been a reference to one of the players’ personal stories. For some reason the game shows those lines when players enter the dungeons, instead of showing it only when they enter story instances.

Detha not starting the event is an old bug, supposed to have been fixed a long time ago, but still happens sometimes. Hodgins (path 1) sometimes does the same thing on the step “locate second scepter”.

In some cases, pulling some mobs onto them end getting them killed “resets” them and clears the bug, but other times nothing you do will fix it. They just stand there, at their waypoint, but will never trigger the next phase.

I’ve never seen phase retreat send mesmers through keep walls. Into rocks, yes. Under the ground, too. Through keep walls, never. It might happen occasionally, but I doubt it’s controllable / reproducible enough to use reliably.

Chances are the mesmer was simply hiding inside the keep and created a portal when his allies approached, then ran out and linked to a portal outside.

The spawn rate of adds at the start of Sorrow’s Embrace explorable path 1 is still bugged. New waves are spawning every 15 ~ 20 seconds. New waves often come before one mob from the previous wave is dead, let alone all three (which means no time left to actually attack the boss). At one point we had three waves “alive” (12 mobs, plus the boss and 2 guards), all covering the walkway with AoE while the boss pulled and stunned us.

Yes, there was a bug that made them stop spawning after 12 waves or so. But was it so hard to fix that without breaking their spawn rate?

Or is this deliberate, to force everyone to just keep respawning at the WP and running back? Is that the new definition of “tactics” ?

Infinite spawns is a bad design principle to begin with (if the enemy has an infinite amount of soldiers, surely they’d just attack with a big force and wipe you out, not send in three at a time), but this is ridiculous.

My “Hint Completion” achievement is showing 80/82 but every item in my “hints” panel has a checkmark.

Anyone else with the same issue?

munkiman.3068:

I would like to address the fact that there is little to no info that i could find that triggers this event.

Every few hours (around 2 or 3, I think – although this changed from beta and then again soon after launch) portals will spawn in a nearby zone (near the ettins, at the oakheart grove, at the monastery, etc.). Kill those portals and 3 “special” portals will spawn in the swamp. Kill those and the Behemoth spawns.

At least that’s how it used to work at around launch; I haven’t really been back in that area for a while.

If you saw the number of gems go up, then the gem transaction worked correctly. Your issue would be with the delivery of the transmutation stones (or rather, “transmuation” stones – they haven’t had time time to fix that typo in the last 6 months, apparently, it’s been there since beta).

Maniac.5163:

I don’t understand this response.

I think he’s saying the counter on the tooltip is bugged. The actual effect is (presumably?) working correctly.

Happens a lot to me in a specific place in Twilight Arbor (path FF, shortly after the second group of dogs).

The problem seems to be caused by the same sound (perhaps some ambient sound?) being played multiple times just very slightly out of phase. I wonder if it’s some kind of race condition with the thread starting the sound (not realising the sound is already playing, and starting it multiple times).

In Ascalonian Catacombs, twice now Hodgins has “pulled a Detha” (i.e., done what Detha used to do at the Flooded Temple – and sometimes still does at the Hall of Champions) and simply ignored his waypoint.

He still follows players around but doesn’t trigger the “second scepter” script, so everyone is stuck. And since the tokens come only from the last boss now, all the work killing every boss until then goes without any useful reward.

So:

a) Please fix Hodgins or add some guaranteed way for players to reset him (we tried killing him, killing ourselves, killing every single mob in the instance, going out and back in, nothing worked).

b) Give players tokens for the work they actually did in the dungeon (i.e., X tokens for each boss kill, plus some tokens at the end) , instead of simply rewarding the player’s presence in the dungeon at the time the last boss dies. If someone plays through the dungeon, kills every boss, and then gets kicked (or disconnects, etc.) at the last boss, then that person obviously deserves to get tokens, while the guy who joined and just happened to be at the dungeon entrance when the final boss died doesn’t deserve to get 60 tokens (and yet that’s exactly what happens with the current system).

Obviously b) isn’t a true bug fix (just a less nonsensical design), but it would make the dungeon-breaking bugs a lot more bearable if people could at least get some tokens out of these bugged dungeons.

Tallis.5607:

If A has 50% of the points, B 45% and C 5%, A will get the same ranking as when A has 50% of the points, B 25% and C 25%.

In other words: a server gets the same ranking boost for taking out the camps of the weakest enemy than they get from taking out a camp from the stronger enemy.

You’re ignoring the sine transform. It essentially applies “diminishing returns” to larger score differentials.

If A’s final rating in your example above was always the same, then there would be no need to evaluate two separate “matches”, the result would simply be based on A’s score, ignoring the other worlds’.

Stealth and invulnerability should make you unable to capture or block objectives or cast finishers.

The “sides” would be dynamic. As soon as enough people were queued (ex., 45 people), that would create a new instance with 15 vs. 15 vs. 15 (or up to 25 vs. 25 vs. 25), preferentially grouped by guild – or by realm, but I think it would make sense to have this one grouped by guild, so we could have some actual guild wars in Guild Wars 2.

And match duration should also be dynamic. A maximum duration of X hours (I would suggest eight), but it would end sooner if one side managed to control more than a certain percentage of the map, or managed to score more than a certain number of points. A “typical” match should last something like 4 hours.

The idea is to create a game with the same basic mechanics as WvW but where people can join and play a full “match” in one sitting.

This would give the developers a place to test some ideas to be applied later to the “full scale” WvW, and would give new players a place to learn the fundamental WvW mechanics with faster feedback.

Raap.9065:

WvW, being made up of different maps, should easily be able to see more maps of different sizes and even playstyles added.

Adding more zones to WvW wouldn’t really solve the issues with match length or population imbalance.

The idea is to create something that uses the same mechanics but is more balanced and “faster” by design (i.e., where people can actually play a match from start to finish in a couple of hours – or at most over the course of half a day or so).

It could even have an option (“guild village”) that would limit each team to members of a specific guild, and we could finally have some guild wars in Guild Wars.

You can already join any server you want; there is no player segregation. The “EU” and “US” designations are simply an indication of where the server resides physically.

Latency is an issue, especially in high-bandwidth situations such as WvW fights (where data has to travel back and forth and the game client needs to wait for replies from the server before rendering some things). A difference of 100 ms can easily be multiplied 2 or 3 times in practical terms, due to that back-and-forth communication.

It makes perfect sense to have localized data centres, and if Arena Net matched worlds from different regions people would whine that the ones connecting to the “local” data centre had an advantage (“I’m on a US world, why is my connection in WvW being routed to a server in the EU…?”).

The issue of “night capping” is just a symptom of a specific type of population imbalance. The “fix” for that should be a generic fix for population imbalances (such as giving the outmanned team extra supply and reduced build times, which would improve their ability to hold objectives without affecting 1v1 combat directly – as would happen if they gave players a stat boost).

Yes, “borderlands” map design has always puzzled me a bit. It’s far easier to take over enemy borderlands than to defend your own. The design of the citadel makes launching attacks from it extremely slow and doesn’t even give significant advantages in terms of defence.

The northerns supply camp needs to be harder to steal and the citadel needs some southern exits to give the “local” world some advantage.

As it is, it’s not uncommon to see world A control all of world B’s borderlands and vice-versa. It’s not that one server is clearly better than the other, it’s just that it’s much easier to take over (and control) the enemy borderlands than your own.

Punny.9210:

I think they only need to add a option
" to turn off the blue mark on commander that u dont want to see on your monitor"
and that’s it

Currently the game shows commander icons even in PvE, all the way across the map, and even if the “commander” in question is in your block list.

Ashes.6418:

A popularity contest is worse than gold driven commander titles.

Join the feudalist revolution!

Arcanorum Ignis.9218:

The ‘Commander’ abilities suggest some kind of skill in leadership and tactics, but at present they are a sign that the people that have them either:
a) Milked their guild members for money.
b) Have no life and just farm all day.

c) Bought 100g from Arena Net (by buying gems and then using the black-box “currency exchange”).

Cloudwalkernz.1328:

I am not sure why Anet seem to have so much difficult in banning bot farmer since they collect IP address of all the players and most gold sellers seem to come from 3 web sites.

And you think they’re sitting in front of the web server, running the game on it…?

ColinJohanson.2394:

What we don’t want to do is have someone report you as botting, we ban the account, the bot appeals, and we have no data to prove they were botting on file so we have to give them the account back.

You don’t “have” to do anything. Doesn’t your EULA basically say you can terminate anyone’s access at any moment for any reason? At most you could be legally required to return the money they paid for the game (if it was a relatively new account), but you could never be legally forced to “unban” people.

Of course, you don’t want to make mistakes and ban people who weren’t botting, because that’s terrible PR, but that’s a different issue from being “forced” to return account control to a known botter.

Also, as several people have pointed out before, you’d get rid of 90% of botters and gold sellers if you did what Mike O’Brien said before launch, which is put gem-gold trading “in the hands of players” (meaning let players trade gems with each other, setting their own prices or making their own offers). This is what Eve Online did with PLEX and it reduced 3rd party gold sellers’ margins so much (because it made every player into a direct competitor for them) that most simply gave up. Mike O’Brien seemed to understand this (and mentioned it specifically in that pre-launch blog entry) but somehow it was forgotten when the game was actually launched, and, as the cool kids say, “obvious result was obvious”.

LithePanther.5027:

Thief rendering problems are caused by the rendering bug. When they fix the rendering bug, it will fix thief rendering.

Not quite. There are generic rendering bugs in GW2 which seem to be a mix of two problems:

• Poor netcode, not informing the client of the presence of enemies (in this case, you can’t see them or target them at all, but they might be able to see or target you). This can never be fixed 100% due to bandwidth constraints, but can be improved in a couple of ways. One is to tweak the netcode’s priorities, naturally. Another (which doesn’t fix it but makes it fairer) is for the server to keep track of which entities it has informed each client of, and make it so that entities unknown to the client cannot affect that client – in other words, if a player’s presence is unknown to your client, then you should be immune to damage from that player).

• Client rendering issue, causing some player models (and their attacks) to not be rendered, despite the fact that the client is aware of them (you can see floating names, target them, and even attack them, but you can’t actually see the models, so you have no idea what they are casting, etc.). This seems to be caused by the client not rendering players unless it has fully loaded their models and textures. Since loading is deferred, players can stay invisible for ages. This should be solved by rendering players using some generic model, and then updating it with the correct armour / weapons / etc. when they are loaded.

However, the issues above only affect players “entering” a fight. If a thief was visible at one point, then your client is aware of him and has loaded his model. If he then stays invisible for longer than he “should” after casting each stealth skill, the issue is not the netcode or the model loading, it’s a different bug.

It’s common for some anti-cheating mechanisms to actually stop sending player coordinates while players are cloaked (so that client hacks can’t force them to be visible). I wonder if that’s what’s going on here (coupled with an excessive server-side delay). I doubt it, though; from what (little) I know about them, GW2’s engine and netcode do not seem to have been designed with cheat detection / prevention in mind. It’s probably just an “involuntary bug”, not an over-zealous cheat protection system.

Note: All of the above is based on my knowledge of other game engines and some discussions about GW2 network packet inspection; I have never had access to GW2’s actual source code and the interpretation could be completely wrong.

“Night Capping” is just a symptom of (temporary) of population imbalance. What the game needs is an effective way to balance things when different sides have different populations (and giving more karma doesn’t really do anything to improve balance).

I would suggest something along the lines of giving one of the teams free supply (generate it at keeps / towers) if they are outmanned and / or if they hold less than a certain amount of structures in that map.

For example, if your team holds only one building in a map, they get 1 “free” supply per minute at that building. If it holds two buildings, they get one free supply every 5 minutes at each. If it holds three, they get one free supply every 25 minutes at each. If it holds more than three, they get no free supply.

In addition to that, if they are outmanned, they get 1 free supply every X minutes at every building (ex., outmanned 4:3 and they get 1 free supply per hour, outmanned 3:2 and they get 1 free supply every 30 minutes, outmanned 2:1 and they get 1 free supply every 15 minutes, and so on).

The numbers above are just examples, of course, this would have to be carefully balanced, but I think it would make the game more interesting by making it very hard for a team to control 100% of any map even if the other team(s) only have a handful of players online, while at the same time not giving the smaller team a significant offensive advantage, or an advantage in 1 vs. 1 fights (which would happen if the game gave one team’s players a stat boost).

Yes, the idea is that the server would launch a new instance of VvV as soon as there are 45 people queued (15 vs. 15 vs. 15). The next 30 people to join would be sent to the same instance (making it up to 25 vs. 25 vs. 25. The actual numbers would depend on the size of the maps, of course, but this is the general idea.

The server could try to keep people from the same server together (on the same team), but only if that didn’t have a significant impact on team balance or queue times. In fact, this being “Guild Wars”, I think it would make even more sense if the server tried to keep people from the same guild together, regardless of their server.

Thanos.2970:

As long as other classe do need LoS to cast the mesmer should, too.

As long as other classes have cooldowns on their weapon skills, theives should, too. As long as other classes don’t have multiple attunements, neither should elementalists. As long as rangers have pets, every other class should, too.

Have you spotted the flaw in your argument, yet?

Different classes, different mechanics. Sometimes there are even different mechanics for different skills within the same class. Shocking, isn’t it?

As someone put it above: mesmer phantasms are basically killable DoTs. And just as AoE effects (such as Entangle, Well of Suffering, Ring of Fire, etc.) can hit players without LoS, so can mesmer phantasms be cast on enemies without LoS.

Thanos.2970:

Unless a Dev states that this is intended I do consider it a bug.

Developers have made no statements (one way or the other) about 99.9% of the game elements. If that’s your yardstick, you must look at GW2 and see nothing but a collection of “bugs”.

Of all the things to whine about or describe as “bugs” in WvW, mesmer phantasms would be pretty far down on my list.

So… where’s guesting? Really getting a bit fed up with the way (obvious and predictable) WvW design mistakes keep preventing me from playing with my friends in PvE.

During the pre-purchase period we were promised that GW2 would allow us to party up with our friends on other servers to do PvE content together at any moment.

Seems like dishonest advertising to say the least.

Malicious.6742:

Why not make server tarnsfers available whenever you want BUT add a 2 week WvW joining cooldown to it.

Because that would make sense. And GW2’s designers seem to make decisions with their knees.

Independently of the many ways of dealing with cloaked thieves (though I think the real issue isn’t even the stealth, it’s the rendering bugs that give players – not only thieves – “free” invisibility), stealthed or invulnerable players should not be able to cap objectives or prevent them from being capped.

Stealth (and damage immunity) should be combat mechanics, not ways to score points while essentially being “out” of the game.

draculthemad.6273:

So eventually, a single mesmer WILL kill the siege.

Taking about 20x longer than it would take one of the defenders to kill the mesmer.

If they could be bothered to move instead of just sitting behind a catapult firing boulders at a door and magically killing people on the outside without damaging the door, anyway.

Currently I find WvW close to unplayable due to the long queue times, rendering bugs (which seem to be a mix of bad netcode and actual rendering engine bugs – where players aren’t rendered at all until the game has loaded all their armour model textures, instead of simply being rendered with a default model and texture until the “correct” ones are loaded) and the huge casting delay (or, quite often, complete casting failure) whenever there are more than 20 or so players on-screen.

I also find it hard to care about WvW when all my “work” capturing a keep or building defences is likely to be undone within the next 6 hours or so, and then done again and undone again, over the course of a week or two.

So I would propose the creation of a third form of PvP in GW2:

Village vs. Village (vs. Village)

Basically, think of it as WvW on a single map (a smaller version of the Eternal Battlegrounds), with much smaller teams (ex., 15-25 players per “village”), and a much shorter duration (ex., 8-hour matches, ending sooner if any village controls >75% of the map). Each village could belong to a different server, but they would be paired randomly, and multiple teams from the same server could be in different instances of VvV. Alternatively, they could all be from the same server, or mixed. I really don’t think it’s relevant.

It would include all the WvW mechanics, the same siege weapons (possibly with slightly shorter range – and definitely with weaker walls and gates), maybe even a (smaller) jumping puzzle. It would basically be like a training ground for WvW. No resource nodes, to prevent abuse.

Due to the reduced number of players, rendering issues and lag should be less problematic, and the shorter duration would make people care more about what is actually happening at that moment.

It would probably reduce the number of players in WvW but, given the huge queues in some servers, I suspect this would be a good thing. It would also introduce a lot of new players to the WvW “game mode” in a smaller, faster, and more digestible format.

Anyone else think this would be a good idea?

Maybe the format could be tested as a mini-game (like the Lunatic Inquisition / Reaper’s Rumble) in the next seasonal event. If made permanent, it would also allow the developers to test ideas for WvW on a smaller, more iterative environment before applying them to the main WvW mode / maps.

Korgov.7645:

Guardian spirit weapons fail to go through gates and up the walls beyond LoS. Is this a bug then?

No mesmer clones or phantasms “go through gates” or “up walls”. Berserkers, specifically, are created at the mesmer’s target. They never go “through” anything (unlike some AoE splash damage that does go through walls and gates without damaging said wall or gate, which is a bit silly).

The “hitting outside the AoE ring” issue affects PvE as well. I’ve reported it (all the way back in beta), I mentioned it to an ANet developer in game, and he saw it (and got hit outside the circle), but so far no fix.

It’s really just a matter of making the red circle a bit wider than the AoE (or making the AoE radius slightly smaller). Specifically, change it by the radius of a player’s hit-cylinder, and damage will be confined to the actual red circle.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

But now that we’ve got that straight, I’m super interested in learning what you guys think you should be getting out of activities. […] Keg brawl doesn’t have anything like that, but it does have achievements. Would that compel you to play? Something else?

Titles, titles, titles.

They have no real impact on gameplay, and let people wear a “badge” related to some part of the game they liked.

GW2 has a major shortage of titles.

For example, even if I’m obsessed with cooking and have every recipe in the game, I can’t wear the title “Chef” or “Master Chef”. Same for other professions. The only thing I can get is the extremely bland title “Master Crafter”, which doesn’t even tell other players which craft I take more seriously (meaning I’m more likely to have rare recipes for that one).

There should be at least one title for each craft (possibly two; one for reaching 400 and another for having more than X recipes learned), and possibly different titles for different numbers of crafts maxed (ex., master 2 crafts and you unlock the title “Crafty”; master 4 and you unlock “Jack of Some Trades”; master 6 and you unlock “Jack of Most Trades”; master 8 and you get “Factotum”).

And, of course, when you add fishing I expect to have a chance to proudly display my title of “Master Baiter”.

The same could / should apply to events. For example, the clock tower could have given a different title for each chest opened. The Inquisition and Rumble could have given a title for beating the enemy team within a certain time limit, for reaching a certain score, or for winning a certain number of matches.

I think it’s the simplest way to give players something unique (and connected to an activity they liked) without having to create new items or worry about the reward’s impact on gameplay or on the economy.

Would be nice if events had a “winnable” pet, too. Complete all Halloween achievements (not just the ones required to get the title), and you get a mini mummy, for example. But that obviously means a lot more work for you than a new title.

Alistair Cardozo.2560:

Its rare because the drop rate sucks. I spend $60 on keys and only got tonics, some boosters, black lion pickaxes. That’s all I have to show for the money I spent. Never going to buy anything from the store again.

Not all items at the store are aimed at gamblers. The witch’s outfit, for example, is great. The look alone is worth 400 gems or so, and the extra abilities (summon cat, create cauldron, and fly around on a broom) definitely bring it up to the 700 it costs.

Of the items introduced in Halloween, I would also buy the aviator helmet if a) it looked good on charr (looks good on all other races, but on charr it covers the eyes and makes horns disappear – wtf?) and b) it was an actual armor skin, and not a piece of town clothes.

The Halloween pets are cute, too, but overpriced.

Alistair Cardozo.2560:

Who thinks the greatsword skin got too much attention while the rest got ignored?

I like the overall look of the staff (The Crossing) but the animation kind of kills it. The lantern just bounces all over the place like it has no weight, and the glow is far too small.

Also, the scythe skin is interesting for necros, but the scythe’s blade doesn’t line up with the “shadow blade” that appears on necro staves while casting, so the end result is you get a scythe with two blades (one grey, one black), which just looks weird.

P.S. – I think the chainsaw would make a great engineer kit, with unique abilities (ex., “ride the saw” to charge towards the enemy, “rev it up” to overcharge the saw motor and create a could of blinding smoke, etc.).

What got you motivated to beat the Clock Tower?

It was there.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Jalad Lantana.3027:

I think it is unfortunate that they design an event that puts you at a disadvantage based on choices you made during character creation.

I agree that this was unfortunate. But it was not intentional. When I designed the map I thought we were going to be able to have single-player instances.

Wait, so the puzzle was designed to be single-player, and then someone decided to put 15 players in each instance?

Er… why ?

Because if the issue was just the server not having resources to launch one instance per player, there was really no need for that. You could have kept exactly the same code and simply made every other player invisible (i.e., tell the client to render only the local player model, and not the other players). In other words, each player would effectively think (s)he was in an individual instance, while the server would have exactly the same load it has now.

Personally, I like the idea of having other entities running up the tower (it adds to the sense of a mad rush), but I hate the way players block and confuse each other, so my suggestion would be to render all other players as small plastic spiders. That way they wouldn’t block the view; each player would clearly see his own character in the middle of a bunch of spiders. Maybe transform the others back to their normal models if / when they reach the last staircase, so you could see who else had made it.

The actual jumping puzzle is fine, BTW, with the exception of two places where the camera tends to get stuck (but I’d classify those as camera bugs). The issue really is the way some players (especially norn and charr) block everyone else’s view (especially of asuras).

Also annoying is how the game pops up the “overflow” message boxes right in the middle of the screen during the puzzle, but again, that is just bad design of the game UI itself (overflow messages should just be small icons on the minimap, not in-your-face modal dialog boxes), it’s not something specific to the Clock Tower.

Edge.4180:

I participated in the event, even stayed until the event complete notification appeared. No hat.

And did you open the chest…?

The issue isn’t how long it takes; the issue is why do town clothes become armour. If the forge is going to accept them, it should return an item of the same type (town clothes).

Redamz.5038:

@account
Horns don’t work because you can get an unlimited amount of them.

You can get an unlimited amount of witch’s […] hats too.

Maybe Arena Net tried writing “witch’s … hat”, it got replaced with “kitten” by the censorship filter, and they decided to make a hat that summoned a kitten.

It’s all connected…

Keeping the original hair style would probably cause parts of the hair to clip through the hat, which would look pretty bad, but they could replace your character’s hair with a new hairstyle, specifically designed to fit in with the hat.

Of course, then players with bald (or nearly bald) characters would complain that their character had suddenly grown some hair.

John Lithgow with spooky echo.

The forge doesn’t accept the celebration hat, for example (and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t accept the horns, either), so if the witch’s … hat is “working as intended”, the celebration hat is bugged.