Guild Wars 2

Tree.3916:

I don’t rez anyone. Use the WP and learn to dodge.

As schoolteachers like to say: “It’s your own time you’re wasting.”

P.S. – Always funny when I see someone post something so douchy in a forum that I decide to add them to my block list in-game, only to find they’re already there.

Start your own party, add “alts welcome” or “any level”. And optionally add the players who join and then leave to your block list – you probably wouldn’t want to play with them anyway.

I never join parties that say “level 80 only” – it suggests the players in question think they’re playing WoW (where stats inflate insanely at max level). In GW2, a level 80 player can easily have lower stats than a level 75 player, and stats aren’t very relevant anyway (you get downleveled inside the dungeon, so the real issue is whether you have access to superior sigils and all talent tiers, and that happens at level 60). For AC, I’ll take an experienced player on a level 35 character over an inexperienced level 80 any day.

The OP isn’t going far enough. I’d say that moving allows people to skip things and go into places they shouldn’t, so the game should not allow moving. Jumping is fine as long as you only jump vertically. Think about it, you know it makes sense.

rainynoble.6531:

It is actually Launch.

I think he’s talking about scavengers, not stalkers.

This is an issue with GW2’s CC in general. AC actually has far less graveling scavengers than it used to. Arena Net chose to simply remove most of them, instead of fixing the flawed game mechanic.

Just about every other game with CC has mechanisms to deal with this (temporary CC protection / diminishing returns), in GW you’re basically at the mercy of the RNG. Get lucky and you don’t get stunned at all, get unlucky and you’re hit with 8 CCs in a row right after you’ve used your stunbreaker. That’s why they removed so many scavengers from AC.

Player CC is also nearly useless against many mobs, because their “defiant” buff stacks too high (which was Arena Net’s hamfisted solution to prevent players from chain-stunning mobs). There’s another thread about that.

Cynz.9437:

uh there is more than 3 at lv 48, more like 10…

Yes, but they still come out in waves. Which is just dumb (from their point of view). If they were really all in the APC, they’d all come out as fast as possible to overwhelm you, instead of giving you time to kill the previous “wave”.

Cynz.9437:

that 10+? min killing dredge from clown car……zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

With a flamethrower it’s almost fun.

But yes, it’s too long and a bit silly (why do they come out only 3 at a time, and why does the car drive into the door afterwards…? it’s a bit nonsensical).

That part would be a lot funnier if the car wasn’t there at all and, after you killed the boss, the “clown APC” burst into the room and started spilling very weak mobs at a really crazy speed (think 60 mobs in 20 seconds). You could kill them (which would just be fun, not necessarily challenging, but also not boring), or you could just ignore them and go up the ramp to the final boss.

But whoever designed GW2’s dungeons seems to have a health bar fetish. Fractals are actually not as bad as the original dungeons, but some encounters still go on for far too long, and just become boring.

Errant Venture.9371:

SOMETHING is necessary to make it impossible to chain-stun mobs, but simply making it impossible to use any interrupts strategically is silly.

Not just mobs, players too. It’s not even that complicated, and most other MMOs have solved this. There are basically two ways:

1. CC protection (after recovering from CC, the player or creature becomes immune to that type of CC for a certain period – ex., players get 1 second immunity, mobs get 2 seconds, veterans get 4, champions get 8 ).

2. Diminishing returns (if the player or a creatures is hit with a CC ability while another is in effect, the duration of the new one is halved, the third one is divided by 4, and so on; the diminishing returns wear off after no CC has been applied for an identical period – i.e., if a player or creature spent 4 seconds stunned, then the diminishing returns only wear off after he’s been CC-free for 4 seconds).

The exact values can be tweaked, but either solution seems better than the current “you can’t use CC at all / mobs can use infinite CC on you” approach.

Casmurro.9046:

About dungeon selling, you see that most of the selling spots are for arah path 2

You see them for every Arah path, and for a few other dungeons too (mostly high-level ones, since people do the low level ones to get XP while leveling characters, so they’re not as interested in skipping everything).

Effectively, the way the game currently works lets people sell dungeon tokens (reach the last boss, charge a fee to let someone join, then they get dungeon tokens despite not having done anything in that dungeon).

If Arena Net wants this to be possible, they should simply make the dungeon tokens tradable, maybe even sell them at the gem store.

IMO, dungeon tokens and achievements should require that you actually participate in the dungeon run, not simply that you join at the end and stand at the dungeon entrance when the last boss dies.

Vespa.1790:

Who cares?
One person spent time to solo the dungeon

What makes you so sure they soloed the dungeon…? That’s a bit naïf…

A lot of the people “selling the final boss” are the ones kicking players just before the final boss.

1. Get 2 or 3 guild mates.
2. Go into LFG and recruit more players.
3. Play through the dungeon (make sure you are the first to enter).
4. Just before the final boss, you and your guild mates kick the other players.
5. Advertise “last boss for sale” in LFG
6. Profit!

Vespa.1790:

just your own ethical code you are trying to force down other people’s throat.

How, exactly, am I trying to “force” anything down anyone’s throat? “Atse” there (and you too, apparently?) is the one trying to tell me how I can or cannot use my own block list.

As I wrote above, people “are absolutely free to keep on doing it [selling paths]”. Can I be any clearer than that?

Or were you replying to some imaginary post, written by someone else?

And the comparison with drugs was merely to point out that supply and demand are connected. You can’t say “consumers are lame” while ignoring the fact that suppliers advertising their product increase that very same demand. If the mention of drugs confuses you, replace with “fake diplomas”, or anything else. You can’t criticize buyers while praising the sellers – the two are connected.

P.S. – Are you really that desperate for attention, Atse?

Oxxy.7068:

Account.9832:

I guess you’re not familiar with the concept of “space” (spell aiming, relative position of party members, effects visible on your party mates – as opposed to icons in the UI – and so on).

Are you one of these weirdos who wants to play a completely different game instead of GW2?

I’m one of those weirdos (like Arena Net’s president, Mike O’Brien) who thinks you should play the game and not the interface.

Since LFG is full of people “selling” access to the last boss of dungeons, so players can get the dungeon chest with its respective tokens without having to fight a single boss (they just need to be in the party when the boss dies), then either:

a) Change the dungeon reward mechanics so that players who didn’t actually kill the bosses don’t get the rewards, or

b) Allow players to trade dungeon tokens with each other directly (this is effectively what’s already happening – players pay to join a party, the party finishes the last boss, and the buyer get the tokens in exchange for the joining fee).

The current situation is just hypocritical.

Silver.3284:

Even if 1) was implemented ppl would still sell paths […] getting a competent team to carry you through p4 is much faster

I’m fine with someone charging a fee to guide you through a dungeon. The issue is that, given the way the game works, you can buy the final dungeon achievement (and the chest / token reward) without actually participating in the dungeon run at all. That’s why I mention people “selling the last boss” (i.e., the end-of-dungeon reward and achievement) in point #1.

Implementing (a) and (b) would get rid of that.

As long as you actually do the full dungeon, I couldn’t care less who you pay (or give a massage to).

Oxxy.7068:

stacking or not i’d be paying attention to the exact same things.

I guess you’re not familiar with the concept of “space” (spell aiming, using the room geometry to block spells, kiting, keeping track of the relative position of party members and effects visible on those party members – as opposed to icons in the UI – and so on).

And considering many boss fights are doable simply by everyone standing on the “right spot” and pressing random buttons, the fact that you’re “paying attention” to those things (none of which require any spatial awareness) isn’t even relevant. You don’t have to pay attention – that’s exactly the problem (or, to some people, the boon, because they wouldn’t be able to do it any other way).

Oxxy.7068:

So… yeah i don’t agree with anything you’ve said

If you don’t understand there’s a significant difference in skill requirement between standing still in a corner casting everything in the same spot, and having to move around, aim abilities, pay attention to what other party members are doing, and coordinating with them, then… I’m glad we disagree.

a t s e.9614:

What’s wrong with path selling? Are you angry because somebody makes tons of cash out of it ? That mentality is ridiculous , that’s why people get banned everyday because of people like this , they block and report everybody that has a different mindset.

Yeah, it’s horrible how they persecute the poor drug pushers / fake ID sellers / weapon smugglers / etc., too. After all, they have no responsibility in the matter, right?

I couldn’t care less how much “cash” (?) they make. They are enabling a kind of behaviour I don’t like, and if that’s the only way they can think of to make gold, they are probably not very smart, and not someone I would ever want in my party or guild.

They are absolutely free to keep on doing it, and I’m absolutely free to hope I never meet them (and use my block list as a tool to ensure that).

The bombs do take a bit too long to spawn, yes. Even if done properly, you need to pull back and wait ages for more bombs to spawn (and what’s the justification for bombs appearing out of thin air, anyway?).

I don’t like infinite spawns as a game mechanic in general (I think it’s just stupid; if the enemy has 500 soldiers, they would simply attack at the same time and crush you, not send a couple of new soldiers every 10 seconds), but I like the idea that some obstacles can’t be beaten simply by killing everything first.

I think a better solution for the bombs (and for the room with the switch) would be to have a fixed number of enemies, but give them armoured suits that made them almost impossible to kill, so players would have to deal with the door / switch while keeping those enemies busy. The end result would be similar, but it would avoid the silliness of “physical” enemies just infinitely spawning out of nowhere.

I’m fine with ghosts appearing out of nowhere because everyone knows real ghosts can do that.

You might as well say that “buying drugs is lame but selling them is a fast way of making money”. One wouldn’t exist without the other. The people selling “fakechievements” know exactly what they’re doing, and are every bit as lame.

Besides, I have no way of knowing, in LFG, which of the people in that “selling last boss” party are buying and which are selling. And since I don’t like either of them, I simply block them all.

It has already been updated (the end bosses have been changed). And it actually has several interesting mechanics, that require parties to work together and pay attention to what they’re doing, instead of just stacking in some corner and spamming blindly until loot happens.

I agree the uncategorized fractal needs a few tweaks, though; sometimes the red circles don’t render at all, and you can get knocked off by an attack you had no idea was even aimed at you. The AoE should be smaller than the platforms, so it’s always guaranteed to render (even if only near the edge).

Also, GW2’s camera definitely doesn’t make it easy to play while looking up; one solution would be to make the players go down the platforms, but personally I’d rather see the camera itself fixed. How hard can it be to add an option to adjust the camera target height, so we can see more of the stuff above without losing sight of the ground in front of us, instead of wasting half our screen showing the ground behind our character?

a t s e.9614:

You are right , the title can be bought which is lame, but I think selling dungeons is a great option if you want faster gold.

It’s certainly a very fast way to get on my block list.

a t s e.9614:

people would QQ if the most damage gets more reward , I would QQ aswell because I’m not gonna buy the fail ascended gear .

I never suggested that “the most damage should get more rewarded”. I said don’t give people an achievement simply for being in the party when the boss dies – require that the player is actually involved in the fight and does some damage (ex., minimum 5% of the boss’ health and / or 5% of the total party healing).

I play every class in GW2 (same as in most other MMOs / RPGs).

Ranger isn’t my favourite, and I think it could definitely use a few more support abilities (I mean different ones, to add versatility, not just buffing the ones they have), but it’s perfectly possible for a ranger to do (more than) his or her share in a dungeon or group event.

People who complain about rangers “not stacking” are kind of missing the point. The design problem there is that GW2’s combat system is flawed, and (unrealistically) benefits players who just stand in a corner blindly spamming their abilities. If boss AI / AoE mechanics were a bit more realistic, players would benefit from moving around and alternating ranged and melee attacks (as originally intended), and the ranger’s LB distance bonus wouldn’t be wasted. Anyway, rangers can use melee and short-range weapons too, so that’s not really an issue (I mean, it is an issue about bad encounter design, but not about rangers specifically).

The pet system definitely needs to be improved. It’s not just a matter of AI, it’s a matter of control as a whole (you can’t even prevent a pet from popping out if you take damage, this is just moronic in a game released in 2012), both for rangers and other classes (necromancer pets actually tend to cause more problems than ranger pets, because there is even less control over them).

I don’t find that people who play rangers are, on average, any worse than other classes. I have far more warriors in my block list than rangers, for example (but that’s probably just because there are more warriors as a whole). People who play a single class are nearly always bad players, because they don’t understand how their actions affect others, and people who play three classes or more are nearly always competent at all of them.

TL;DR: Give rangers more support abilities and more control over their pets, and fix boss encounters so that stacking and spamming isn’t so beneficial.

[note: this was a reply to a post that has since been deleted]

The people designing the terrain and buildings are not the same people designing the creatures, which are not the same people coding the AI, which are not the same people writing the dungeon story or designing its encounters, which are not the same people coding the party system, which are not the same people creating the achievements.

There’s really not an isolated “dungeon team”, and this post was mainly about general game mechanics (as they apply to dungeons).

Actual dungeon design is a different issue (and has its own problems, but they’re not as easy to explain or fix).

A few problems with dungeon mechanics:

1. Having the “Dungeon Master” achievement (and corresponding title) should mean the players played through each dungeon at least once, right? But it doesn’t. All it means is the player was inside each dungeon when it was completed. As a consequence, LFG is full of people “buying” and “selling” the last boss in dungeons, and the result is a ton of absolutely clueless players (who clearly never killed a single dungeon boss) going around with “Dungeon Master” under their name. That title is now completely meaningless (in fact, it seems the people most likely to “wear it” are the ones who bought it). You might as well sell it at the gem store (effectively, that’s what you’re already doing, because players can buy gems, use the black-box exchange to get gold, and then pay the gold to get the achievements).

2. Let’s say I do an entire dungeon with 4 players from a different guild. When we’re at the last boss, they kick me and invite one of their guild mates (or I get disconnected and they invite someone else). Result? I don’t get the dungeon completion chest (or the daily bonus chest, if it was a first run) and the guy who was just invited (and who was simply sitting by the dungeon entrance when the boss died) gets both rewards, despite not having done anything inside the dungeon.

3. The player who entered the dungeon first has a real-life emergency (or is a troll…) and decides to leave the party half way through the dungeon. What happens? Everyone else gets kicked, and the dungeon is reset. This still happens more than one year after the game was released (and, to be honest, shouldn’t have happened even in beta, if the party system had been designed properly).

How hard can it be to:

a) Make the completion achievement for each dungeon require that the player was present at (and did damage to) each of the dungeon’s bosses (ex., to get SE P1 marked as complete, you must have participated in a successful fight against Impasse Mark IV, Nokk, the Prototypes, and Tazza). GW2 already supports sub-achievements and meta-achievements, so this can’t be too hard to implement (and list, under the achievement, which bosses we have killed and which ones we are missing). Just about every other MMO does this correctly.

b) Give players rewards for things they’ve actually done (i.e., give dungeon tokens after each encounter, adjusted for that encounter’s difficulty, and only to players who actually did some damage during that encounter). Players should never get a reward simply for being in the party when the dungeon ends.

c) Not kick an entire party out of a dungeon just because one of its members had to leave. Even MMOs released almost ten years ago managed to get this right, so how hard can it be, in 2013, to understand that a party and a player are different things, and that you shouldn’t punish 4 people for the fact that the 5th person had to leave?

These are basic design flaws that shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place. Seeing them remain there for more than one year after release is just depressing.

Rufirias.2815:

HOW TO FIX:
1. Delete GW2 shortcut
2. Open game folder
3. Make a new shortcut
4. Play…

That makes absolutely no difference; the error is on the server, not on your shortcut.

The reason why you’re sometimes able to play is that you joined a party where everyone is on the same server, and the error only happens when a party has players from multiple servers.

It’s irrelevant what your targeting options are; these skills are not offensive or targeted, so they should never trigger any attack.

The same thing happened with Elementalists and air attunement (switch to air, to try to run past an enemy, and you automatically attacked the nearest creature, getting slowed down instead). It “only” took them about 7 months to fix it…

No, it hasn’t been that way since launch, but it was changed a pretty long time (several months) ago.

It’s clearly a (design) bug, though, since it works differently for players. If I have an enemy targeted (either a player character or mob), start casting a spell, and my target stealths, I lose my lock and my spell fails.

This is yet another one of those weird things about GW2, along with:

a) Mobs can knock players off ledges, but players can’t knock mobs (an invisible wall spawns behind them to save them).

b) Mobs sometimes heal back to 100% in the middle of a fight, or decide to “leash” without any warning, run away for a few metres, heal back to 100%, and then rush back.

It seems that whoever designed the AI thinks the #1 priority should be to “protect the AI”, even if that means letting it cheat in very obvious ways, that add nothing to the gameplay and just annoy players.

Regardless of how many opinions you take into account, a lot of things can only be properly evaluated and tweaked with a test at a realistic scale, so…

Why not make a separate “test realm” (or three, to test WvWvW), that players can clone their characters into, where you can evaluate the effect of large patches for a couple of weeks before applying them to the permanent realms?

I can understand not wanting to release new events early, because it would “spoil the surprise”, but this really is the kind of thing where you can save yourselves a lot of work (and players a lot of frustration) by conducting a medium-scale test before a full release.

sylvari cultural armors have been upgraded […] dye masks have also been altered so that players will have more control over the results of the armor glow. This currently affects Medium Tier 2 (legs will be re-addressed for glow and dye alignment)

Will the medium Evergreen Boots also get fixed? Currently (well, since release) not only are some parts impossible to dye, but they also clip through the characters’ ankles and feet.

See screenshot (I used bright blue and pink to make it more obvious; the idea is to have them in shades of brown, to match my character’s skin).

Shpongle.6025:

press alt+tab and play in windowed mode, you don’t have to leave the game, you just switch windows

Alt+tab works fine in fullscreen mode, at least on my system.

Knote.2904:

They should just give everyone 11/11

No, they should fix the bugs (and test things properly before releasing them…). If players start accepting “bribes” (easier rewards) to overlook broken gameplay, then gameplay is likely to get more and more broken as time goes on.

MedinaRegal.9574:

When I am fighting the queen’s champion, she does this spinning move constantly which gives her perfect evasion, making her much much harder to kill than she should be.

Supposedly, if she misses two attacks in a row, she becomes “tired”, and you can hit her for a while. But it seems that, as long as one of her attacks hits a nearby critter or mob (which keep respawning), she never gets tired. I guess no one at Arena Net bothered to test it in the actual game (with other mobs around).

The way it’s coded, there’s hardly any point in worrying about tactics (especially if there are other mobs or players around). Just make sure you can heal through her attacks, and keep hitting her until she dies.

In fact, the few times when I’ve seen her get “tired” were right after one of her attacks had hit me, so even without other mobs around, her behaviour is a bit buggy to say the least.

You don’t need to do the events to complete that achievement. Just talk to the Lion’s Arch emissary, get the buff, and then kill (any) creatures. It takes a while, but it’s doable solo (unlike the boss “group events”, but those are for a different achievement).

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

It shows just how memorable and epic that JP was, because they still talk about it nearly a year later. It was a challenge, but by no means impossible, just like Liadri.

You should probably read the posts made by the Clock Tower’s designer at the time. The thing that players complained about (having a ton of other players blocking your view) was not part of the original design. The puzzle was designed and tested as a solo instance (and was great fun when done that way, or with only 2 or 3 players), and people were absolutely right to complain about the last-minute changes. It was meant to be a jumping puzzle, not a game of “try to see through that blob of charr meat”.

Likewise, I bet Liadri was tested on an arena without a dome and without glass effects on the floor, so the camera and rendering issues that a lot of players are having were not actually part of the design, they were last-minute problems that made it into the live game due to poor testing (which seems to be a recurring issue with GW2).

It’s not a matter of being impossible (like I mentioned, I got her down to about 30% HP on my second attempt), it’s a matter of confusing “challenging” with “hard”.

It’s trivial to make a fight “hard” by adding a random chance of instant death, or by having the geometry interfere with the game camera in such a way that you can’t even see the fight properly. And that’s what Liadri is. It’s mainly a fight against the camera and the random number generator (and sometimes the renderer, which fails to render the effects at all, so you have no idea where to move), and only last a fight against the NPC in question.

Remove the dome, make the floor opaque (or change the effects so they render properly), and maybe the result is a “challenging” fight. As it is, it seems to appeal mainly to gamblers (who are willing – and have enough free time – to walk up that ramp 120 times and roll dice 120 times, or however many times it takes to get lucky).

Mastruq.2463:

Instead of playing the victim and acting like they are entitled to this achievement, they could organize to get it done.

Oh, thank you! If only I had thought of that!

Wait, I did. I’ve spent most of my “play” time in the last four days jumping between the pavillion and Lion’s Arch, asking for more people to complete the group events. In those four days I got exactly one reply.

It’s not a matter of “playing the victim”, it’s a matter of (bad) game design. Player achievements should be achievable by players (although, naturally, the event should scale if more players are present). If an achievement is designed to require a large group, it should be a guild achievement.

If there really were dailies that counted towards the meta-achievement counter, it would be fine (well, not fine, but at least it wouldn’t “block progress”). But first the daily wasn’t appearing at all, yesterday it appeared and didn’t give credit, and today it consists of six group achievements (the same ones that I can’t even find two more people to do with, because 90% of the players got them in the first couple of days).

The worst part is that the same thing happened in nearly all previous events: achievements that everyone steamrolls in the first couple of days (meaning they aren’t even challenging, let alone real “achievements”), and which become virtually impossible to do for people with Real Lives™, who can’t afford to spend 8 hours a day logged into a game, spamming chat.

vhiran xergo.7802:

It just makes me angry that I have ZERO chance to beat her because I have trouble with colors and the circles to warn me of the insta down aoe are completely invisible.

It won’t make you feel any better, but it’s not just you. Quite frequently, on my system, the circles don’t render at all (seems to depend on the height of the camera). The same happens in other fights, by the way (for example, the orbs in the Masticus fight won’t render at all against the dome, so I have to make sure the camera is pointed at the floor, or they’re invisible).

The real achievement here is beating the camera, the RNG, and the game’s rendering engine. Liadri is just an extra.

And, even if they counted, today the “daily” is to do… SIX of the group events inside the pavillion. The ones we can’t even do ONE of, because there are three people in the pavillion at the best of times. /slowclap

Khisanth.2948:

Yes, under “Daily”.
Today’s is Hot-Air Balloonist.

I’ve just done that one, didn’t get any points towards “Queen’s Jubilee Completionist”. Maybe it has something to do with the bug fix not applying to the same date, I’ll try again tomorrow.

And which achievement category would those be listed under (if / when the issue gets fixed) ? Under “Daily” ?

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

You can do the daily whenever you want. It could be a torch run (single player), or representing one of the factions while killing stuff in the pavillion (which is harder now, but can be done in small groups), taking part in the gauntlet (strictly single player), or doing balloon events (easy to solo in low level maps).

So, you are saying that doing balloon events, torch runs, etc., will count towards the achievement “Pavillion Participant” ?

Try reading the original post before replying with something unrelated. I have already done all the balloon and torch achievements. In fact, I have completed every tier of every Queen’s Jubilee achievement except “Pavillion Participant”. But maxing out every other achievement only gives players 14 points, and it takes 16 to get the meta-achievement (as mentioned in the original post).

The only events that count towards “Pavillion Participant” are group events done in the Pavillion (i.e., killing the legendary bosses). Which are kind of hard to do when there are only three people around, and two of them are just banging their head into Liadri (or banging their camera into the dome, to be more accurate).

Individual achievements should not require the presence of large groups of players. That’s what guild achievements are for.

xvalkyrie.6742:

There’s usually a daily that will help count up the jubilee living world meta.

In six days (almost three hours online every day), I’ve never seen that. If it’s a world / group quest (and if it’s a daily, meaning it doesn’t repeat), that probably means it gets done by other players several hours before I even log in.

The whole design of the current Living World achievement seems to be aimed at forcing every player to stay on-line 24-7. Did NCSoft make Arena Net’s budget depend on concurrent user connections or something?

Please reduce the “Queen’s Jubilee Completionist” meta-achievement to 14.

The “Pavillion Participant” achievement is impossible to do solo, and the pavilion is currently completely empty (or, at most, has half a dozen players, none of which ever seems interested in that achievement – probably because they got it in the early days), even in high-population servers.

Even after completing every other achievement, players only get 14/16 required for the meta, which means anyone who wasn’t around at the start of the Queen’s Jubilee will be unable to finish the meta-event.

Alternatively, add a new (soloable) event worth 2 points.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Every map will be invaded at least once per day, probably twice.

In other words, people who need a specific map to complete an achievement “only” need to be online for 11 hours a day (possibly 23) ?

Come on, achievements are supposed to be achievements. Waiting for a RNG to spit out the number (or map) that you need isn’t really an achievement.

By all means require people to close X number of portals, but don’t make achievements depend on which portals we close, when we have no control over which ones will be opened in the first place.

It’s bad enough that players keep getting sent to overflows where “the invasion is not active” (basically meaning that, for one hour, they can’t advance their progress at all).

This is a really lame way to try to boost your concurrent user stats.

Ayrilana.1396:

How difficult is it to just run back?

How difficult would it be to have to type the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” every time you want to open your inventory? Probably not all that difficult, but it’s an unnecessary step that just makes you lose time (when you could actually be playing) and doesn’t contribute at all to your enjoyment of the game.

Characters in GW2 can stay underwater forever because, in the words of an Arena Net designer, “we realized that breathing isn’t fun”. Well, walking across the same ramp again and again isn’t fun, either.

I believe the walk was put there to ensure that every player got a turn when the pavilion was too full, but that is no longer required. The NPCs should simply resurrect players like the OP suggested (ex., at the maximum rate of one player every 30 seconds, just in case it gets full again for some reason).

Ayrilana.1396:

I did it numerous times as have countless others.

I’m sure millions of people all over the world have unnecessarily wasted their time due to inefficient bureaucracy, badly designed machines, and so on. The fact that those people wasted their time is not a reason to not fix the problems.

If you really enjoy running up that ramp, you’d still be able to do it.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Got it in 50-60 tries […] I never had the feeling It was luck at all.

So now you can do it consistently (meaning more than 50% of the times), can you? How many times have you gone back there, by the way?

Please…

Half the difficulty is dealing with the camera (the same applies to many jumping puzzles, by the way), and if you get unlucky with the location of the spawns two or three times in a row (sometimes even a single one), you’re instantly dead, regardless of how well you play, how fast you react or what your character’s build is.

I got to phase 2 (and almost killed her) on my second attempt at this fight. Which made me wonder what all the fuss was about. And then I died almost instantly on the third attempt when a shade spawned on top of me. And then on the fourth when the camera got stuck in a wall and the whole image got blurred. And then on the fifth when a rift spawned on top of the AoE and pulled me, while my camera was busy showing me a piece of the floor. On the sixth try, an orb spawned on the other end of the arena and pulled me. I got knocked down, and the AoE was cast and killed me before my character even got up (in other words, no chance to react). And so on.

And, after about 10 tries, I decided that if I want to play dice, I’ll just go play dice and save some electricity.

Note that it took me a lot more than 10 tries to be able to solo Kholer (for example), but I could see my progress, and I could see that there was a connection between my skill and how far I got. Here, it’s mostly luck and willingness to go through the dice-rolling dozens of times during your leisure time, when you’re supposed to be having fun (yes, I know, some people find that rolling dice is “fun”, but I never got that).

So congratulations on doing it after “only” 50 or 60 tries (I suspect I’d probably get it too, considering I got so close on my second attempt), but I really have better things to do with my time (both in GW2 and outside it) than bang my head on a randomly-moving wall 60 times in a row until I get lucky so I can convince myself that it was a demonstration of skill.

Remove the outer dome (to at least reduce the camera issues), fix the “obstructed” messages when trying to kill the rifts with ranged attacks, fix the rendering of the red circles on the transparent ground (sometimes they don’t render at all), and maybe this can be an interesting and challenging fight. As it is, it’s a RNG-based fight against the interface, not against Liadri.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

The balloon tower only stays open for 2 minutes after the conclusion of the event that opens it.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work, but I’ve seen them close (several times) within less than 10 seconds of the event completion.

Anyway, closing isn’t the issue. The issue is that it kicks out any player who is already inside, and that makes no sense. By all means close the gate, but if a player is on his way up the stairs, let him / her get to the top and use the chest or baloon.

I think the point is that requiring players to be in a party to be able to target things efficiently in a solo event (that cannot be done by a party) is just bad game design.

Why can’t we use T / ctrl+T while playing solo, anyway? There’s no logical reason for that to be disabled.

Hunny Bunny.3506:

Why is there a talk about challenging vs non challenging content here? It’s irrelevant, the Liadri fight isn’t challenging, it’s simply broken.

It’s challenging in the same way that rolling dice inside a burning ship during a storm (and having to get ten sixes in a row) is challenging.

Also, it relies on people not asking “what the hell am I doing with my life?”.

Shoe.5821:

Items and materials take money out of the economy, not add to it

Not when they can be sold to NPCs. And the same goes for direct event rewards (coin).

Obviously, trade between players only makes gold change hands (and makes some get lost to taxes), but most of these events generate gold, either directly or by giving players items that can be converted to gold through NPCs.

Sometimes Sturgar throws meat directly at Chomper, and he eats it instantly.

I’m not saying this is the only bug (or the one that you’ve encountered), but it seems like a serious flaw in the encounter’s design. Not only does it make the achievement impossible even if the player plays “perfectly”, but it can make the whole encounter incredibly hard (since it’s easy to run out of time with no buffs) it happens multiple times in a row.

Shumaru.6054:

At first it seem like that insanely impossible clock tower

I think the comparison with the Clock Tower is quite apt.

The Clock Tower was designed to be a solo instance (the puzzle’s designer confirmed this in the forum), and when played as such, it was challenging and fun.

But, for some incomprehensible reason, someone at Arena Net decided to throw (up to) 14 max-size charr and norn on top of you, which made it very hard to see your own character, or anything else, for that matter (it would be trivial to not render the other players, or render them as small halloween spiders), but someone at Arena Net decided that filling your screen with meat and fur made the puzzle better. In reality, it turned it from a fun and challenging jump puzzle into a frustrating mess.

Here (Liadri), we have an encounter that was probably playtested on a different arena (same size, but with a single-layer opaque floor, and without the domed ceiling), and was then transported into the “finished” map, where the geometry causes all sorts of problems with the rendering of the red circles and the game camera. Again, a potentially interesting encounter made frustrating and random by the fact that it wasn’t properly playtested. Simply removing the dome would immediately make it a lot more playable.

Durian.5419:

Not everyone needs to be able to succeed at everything.

Absolutely. But there’s a difference between skill-based gameplay and biased gambling.

Durian.5419:

Not everything needs to be fair and balanced.

Good game design does. It’s trivial to make a game challenging by adding a random chance to instantly kill the player, or by making players fight against the camera behaviour instead of the actual AI-controlled enemies.

But that doesn’t test players’ skill, it just tests their patience (or perhaps their level of autism) and their willingness to put up with bad game design. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this fight gives a mini, and I suspect a lot of players wouldn’t bother with it twice if it didn’t (and won’t set foot there again after they get it). When you have to bribe players with a unique item to get them to play through something, that means that part of the game isn’t very well designed.

It’s fine to give some players a reward based on a random number (like a lottery, or a low % chance of loot dropping), but in that case the game needs to be honest about it. The implication here is that the players who don’t get it “aren’t skilled enough”, which might be true in some cases, but ignores the huge role that the RNG plays in this fight (and also on the Strugar fight, but there it’s mitigated by the fact that you don’t die immediately if / when he throws the meat directly at the hound).

Kholer (in AC) is a good example of an encounter which is both challenging and enjoyable. Liadri’s difficulty relies not on players’ ability to read her actions and react to them, but on the randomness of the spawns / AoE location, and the horrible behaviour of GW2’s camera.

With norn, charr and asura characters, this feels like a fight against the camera (same as many of the jumping puzzles; it’s as if the people creating the environments and the people coding the camera never bothered to talk to each other – or play the game).

With human and sylvari characters, it feels “merely” as a fight against the random number generator (especially phase 2) and the renderer (which sometimes doesn’t render the red circles at all, and sometimes blurs the entire image unless players turn off post-processing).

Having to walk aaaaaall the way back every single time is the cherry on top of the bad game design cake.

Complexity and skill requirement is great. RNG-based instant death followed by repetitive walking is not.