Guild Wars 2

ElenaDragon.8401:

I finished the jumping puzzle once, but I’m not sure how often I would make it now. The bell choir gives me 4 presents every time… in 10 mins.

Jumping puzzle gives you 3 in approximately 2 minutes.

Ohoni.6057:

The zones are just not that densely populated and the boxes either need to be scaled to solo players, or scalable to fit the number of players around.

If only the game had been coded with that kind of thing in mind. Oh, wait…

Zero Angel.9715:

No timed aspect (or a very generous one), allowing the player to jump the puzzle at their leisure.

And keep everyone else waiting? The puzzle is timed, so other people can’t start before the flakes respawn, and they won’t respawn until the timer ends.

Anyway, there are already puzzles with different difficulties in the game, just as there are dungeons with different difficulties, world bosses with different difficulties, mobs with different difficulties, etc..

Should there also be difficulty selectors for all those things?

What’s the advantage in having 3 different versions of the same content, with slightly different timers, instead of having 3 different puzzles, presenting different challenges?

It’s not like this is the only jumping puzzle in GW2. And I bet most people asking for an easier version haven’t done many of the other JPs in the game.

Conncept.7638:

Churning Earth

And half the times you’ve just killed yourself because the first thing they do is put 2 stacks of confusion on you (each – so up to 12).

They have more than enough time to cast it while Churning Earth is channelling, even if your Earthquake hit all of them (which it didn’t, because they spread out beyond Earthquake’s range after spawning, and are immune to CC until they’ve done that).

As elementalist it’s generally simpler to summon your two elementals (either stone or water – they last about the same since the water elementals will heal each other) just before opening the box. That way most of the dolls will attack them (and cast confusion on them) instead of you, and after that you can kill them in pretty much any way you want (as long as you’re fast enough).

LFk.1408:

I don’t find I struggle with them. […] With 2 dodge rolls and help from a few skills, grabbing the present and running should never become an issue.

So you don’t find that you struggle with them… because you don’t struggle with them, you just run away.

See the title of the thread?

I can generally kill them just fine as long as I have a way to summon a pet or two. As long as I don’t get 10+ stacks of confusion cast on me every 5 seconds, I can actually damage them as fast as they damage me (and, unlike them, I can heal, so that’s usually enough to tip the scales). If I’m playing a class with no pets, the best trick I found is to aggro a couple of mobs (deer, wargs, spiders, whatever), run through the middle of the dolls, and hope they start attacking those mobs instead. Then just proceed as above.

For an engineer, if you can’t enlist some nearby creature as a disposable tank, drop as many turrets as possible (including Supply Drop) and hopefully some of the dolls’ attacks will be directed at the turrets instead of you.

Siphaed.9235:

It’s not a bug.

Since you are not an Arena Net employee, and since there have already been developer posts acknowledging that the ventari were tougher than intended, I’ll assume the dolls suffer from the same bug (or a related one).

It’s one thing to have mobs that are “tough”, it’s another to have mobs whose degree of difficulty bears no connection to their displayed level. If a single level 27 regular mob is intended to be harder than 3 veterans one level higher, then the level displayed in their portrait (or the “veteran” tag) is meaningless.

Siphaed.9235:

I don’t think these boxes are by any means meant to be soloed by a single person.

Well, it would be even harder to solo them with two people – I’d go as far as to say impossible.

They’re like micro Dynamic Events for several players been 3-5 estimated.

There is no “group event” pop-up (there was with the Halloween doors, BTW, and those were scaled correctly for each zone) and, again, the issue isn’t being hard. The issue is they don’t match the displayed level. If they were meant to be this hard, they should be labelled with a higher level and a veteran tag. One of the two things is a bug (either the scaling or the description).

My issue isn’t tactics; like I said, I can kill them easily (well, not easily, but reliably) by using pets or pulling nearby animals.

The issue is that this looks like a bug, but comes right after a patch (a patch released after the developers acknowledged scaling issues with the toy mobs). If anything, the dolls are tougher than the ventari.

Maybe they fixed the ventari (which don’t spawn anymore, AFAIK) instead of fixing the dolls? Maybe tomorrow we’ll get a patch that fixes the dolls while replacing them with a new (unfixed) toy…?

If they want the dolls to be (a lot) harder than the skritt (or any other creature in the zone), that’s fine by me, but label them correctly (ex., as being 7 levels higher than the zone).

Yes, always happens after logging in and frequently happens after teleporting, entering a new zone, or coming out of water.

nelopp.6140:

Because kittens cry for a free wizard hat,which is just a reskinned witch hat.

Actually, it’s a completely different model.

Not sure what was supposed to have changed in the patch applied a couple of hours ago, but this is what happens when I try to open presents in Gendarran Fields, now:

1. Open present.
2. 6 dolls spawn.
3. Dolls are immune to spells for about 2 seconds (“Immune”, no damage, impossible to CC).
4. Dolls spread out (while immune) so they’re out of range of AoE (at most, AoE spells will hit 3 of the 6).
5. Dolls instantly give me 12 stacks of confusion, so if I hit one of them, I lose half my HP (the confusion can be cleared, but they do it again within 5 ~ 10 seconds).
6. Dolls give themselves protection and fury.
7. Dolls do about 200 DPS each, or 1.2k DPS as a group (my HP in this zone is ~3k).
8. Their attack uses homing projectiles, so it cannot be avoided by moving.

The obvious counter to this would be damage reflection, except:

a) Not all classes have it.
b) Reflected projectiles do almost no damage to the dolls, which suggests they either have a huge HP pool or a ton of toughness (probably both).

The only way to kill them seems to be to use pets / minions, or “enlist” some of the local fauna as disposable tanks (i.e., pull some wargs to the present and hope the dolls target the warg while I kill them).

If I don’t cast anything at all after opening the present (just as a test), I’m dead within 4 seconds (2 of which were just the dolls spreading out, so I’m effectively dead in 2 seconds).

Just for comparison, I walked into the cave at the NW corner of Gendarran Fields and pulled every mob in there (including 3 veterans, IIRC). I killed them all without ever seeing my health drop below 70%.

I’m all for a challenge, but if I, as a level 80 character in exotic gear (with plenty of toughness), am having to use other mobs as distraction just to be able to kill these dolls, I can only imagine how they must seem to “real” level 27 players.

I’m fine with having some high-level creatures in low-level zones (to keep players on their toes), but label them correctly. It doesn’t make any sense to label these dolls as “level 27” when a single one is harder to kill (and does more damage) than three level 28 veterans.

Iason Evan.3806:

Getting the overflow message mid-jump

As with the fact that players still block each other’s view (which would be easily fixed by rendering all other players as small snowmen, for example), that’s another example of Arena Net not paying much attention to the feedback they got from the Halloween JP.

Overflow pop-ups are horribly implemented to begin with (they should just be a small icon that pops up on your minimap, not a huge modal dialog box in the middle of your screen that interrupts control of your character), but having them inside an instanced jumping puzzle is too dumb for words.

I think I know why they removed it. But I’d like to see the Official Justification™ anyway.

CapN Biku.6024:

Arsenic Touch.7960:

I just went over them twice, where is it located?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2012-12-14#Guild_Wars_2_Wiki_Notes
It’s the last one.

Those are comments added by players. There is no mention of it in the official patch notes, found here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012/first

Torguish.4786:

So basically what you are saying here is that: ‘’Maybe i don’t want to work for the things i want? Specially if i have the money.’’ Some people work for these things. If you want it the do something.

I guess you built your own house, built your own car, designed your own CPU, coded your own operating system, and so on.

Right?

Or did you just use (pfah!) money earned by doing something else to buy them from other people?

Been asking for this since beta. It’s hard to believe that everyone at Arena Net is a keyboard turner / screen clicker.

DreamOfACure.4382:

Infinite gold-circulation will always lead to inflation in any and every game.

Actually, no. Circulation never leads to inflation (on the contrary; because some people will always accumulate gold, removing it from circulation, and increasing the value of the remaining currency).

What leads to inflation is the injection of more currency into the economy.

If the game had a proper closed system (where gold is never generated; where merchants keep track of how much gold they got and send that gold to other merchants, etc.), there would be no inflation. That would, obviously, be incredibly complex to code, and would put a lot of extra load on the server, so the economy is greatly simplified, with a lot of gold injection and removal.

To keep the amount of currency in circulation more or less constant (or constant per capita), all a game needs to do is adjust the gold injection to match the removal, or vice versa.

For inflation control purposes it doesn’t really matter where the gold is added or removed, but the choice of mechanism does have an influence on the game economy as a whole.

For example, the 15% fee that GW2’s TP charges is enough to make crafting unprofitable in 99% of the cases. The only profitable items are raw materials (especially rare ones) or drops (which essentially cost nothing, and are mainly a matter of chance). Without that fee, crafters would be able to make a profit (as you can confirm by checking GW2Spidy, for example).

However, if there was no fee, you could simply put all your items for sale for 10000 gold – ensuring that no one would buy them – and then take them out of the TP whenever you wanted to use them. And no one would buy bank tabs (or bag slots, etc.), which are one of Arena Net’s sources of income.

DreamOfACure.4382:

If you want trading in this game, you’ll have to agree to built-in taxing when exchanging gold. Something along this sort of line:
Less then 10 silver = 5% tax
Less then 25 silver = 10% tax
25 silver or more = 15% tax
1G or more = 20% tax
5G or more = 25% tax
10G or more = 33% tax

No, you wouldn’t. Trading doesn’t generate any gold, and therefore never increases inflation.

Besides, it’s already possible to trade at the TP and there is no increasing fee (it’s a flat 15% fee, in case you hadn’t noticed). Survival is not an issue in MMOs; there’s no need for “social justice”.

Your proposed system also has the obvious flaw that players could make two transactions of 20s instead of a single transaction of 40s and save 5%. All that would lead to would be a lot of smaller transactions, increasing server load.

Anyway, the idea is wrong to begin with, so no point in discussing the (pretty obvious) flaws of its implementation (or the difference between “then” and “than”). Inter-player trade never causes inflation because it doesn’t generate currency.

Sales tax / VAT can be used as a gold sink (at the expense of the economy’s vitality as a whole – and crafting in particular), but it’s perfectly possible to put that sink somewhere other than trading. For example:

• Crafting materials obtainable only from NPCs (thread, runes of holding, elonian wine, etc.).
• Expensive armour, pets or other items available only from NPCs (ex., cultural armour).
• In-game gambling (ex., lottery tickets, roulette).
• Cost of armour repairs.
• Quests, titles or achievements requiring players to pay NPCs.
• Recipes bought from NPCs.
• Etc..

Lots of MMOs (in fact, nearly every other MMO) supports direct trading between players and doesn’t charge a fee. Even GW2 allows players to trade directly, without deducting a fee (using mail); the only thing it lacks is a safe mechanism to do so (i.e., a CoD system or trade window, where the transaction is done in a single step, and accepting the item automatically sends the money to the seller).

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Which games actually have people storing items in the trading system ?

Which games have a trading post or auction house with no listing fee? Show me one that does that and I’ll show you a game where any smart player uses the trading post as storage.

To use the obvious example: WoW allows players to trade directly with each other (with CoD or a fully-featured trade window – even allows enchantments, etc., to be performed directly on the window), and does not charge a fee on transactions. And yet still has a listing fee at the Auction House. Why?

Because, if it didn’t, people would use the AH as infinite storage.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

So could you give me an example that can actually rely on the security of a trade window ?

I could. Thousands, even.

I won’t, though, because it’s pointless and I have far better things to do with my time.

You obviously think that human contact has no place in MMO trading, and either have never played other MMOs or never bothered to make proper use of their trading system(s). I think it does, and have.

If and when this forum supports polls, we’ll see which view is more popular.

Minos.5168:

I recall someone posting that they contacted support to get a refund in order to re-buy the game and get the bonus items.

Which makes perfect sense.

You’d think someone at Arena Net would have figured that out, or at least learned from the mistakes of others (cough*blizzard*cough), who managed to alienate a significant chunk of their playerbase by systematically giving better deals to new players (or players who had previously cancelled their subscription) than to players who had faithfully spent a ton of money on the game.

The deluxe edition is currently cheaper than the standard edition was two weeks ago. And yet, people who bought the standard edition (and possibly spent a lot of money on gem store items since) get nothing to make up for that – not to mention people who bought the deluxe edition at full price just before the promotion.

Well, now they get an ugly hat. I’m sure that makes them feel a lot more valued.

Frotee.2634:

The only thing that’s puzzling me, at this point, is the challenge-seekers who are soundly against difficulty levels because they don’t want people lacking their particular skill being able to enjoy part of the event.

Have you done every other jumping puzzle in the game?

No? Well, there are your “difficulty levels”, then.

Maybe we should also have multiple difficulty levels for every dungeon path? What about multiple difficulty levels for every world boss? Or multiple difficulty levels for each renown heart? Or maybe whenever you’re exploring and a mob attacks you, it should start by asking which difficulty level you want…?

Or maybe (here’s a crazy idea) we should just have several different dungeons, each with several different paths, and populate the world with several different bosses and creatures. Some easier, some harder. And then let players explore and fight the ones they want. And maybe we could do the same with the jumping puzzles.

I for one prefer a game with 30 different jumping puzzles over one that has 20 puzzles with 3 different “difficulty levels” (meaning rehashed content with a slightly different timer or whatever).

If you can’t climb the Everest, don’t ask God to make the Everest shorter; try climbing the Kilimanjaro instead.

Fraktyl.3187:

Everyone wants to be the one to turn in the present because.. YOU TIED an achievement to it.

At least those are helping the team win.

Wait until you see the other achievement, that encourages players to let the enemy team take the gift, and discourages them from protecting their own gift-carrying teammates.

Shadow Dragon.9874:

Rather random it seems :/ Opened 10, got 10 sweaters.

Actually the problem isn’t that it’s random; it’s that it’s extremely predictable.

9 out of 10 times, you “exchange” 10 unwanted sweaters for… 1 unwanted sweater. I guess it saves some space, but it seems kind of pointless. The gifts could definitely use a bit more variety.

Even casinos make sure the odds are around 40-49% in favour of the punter, to give the addicts some hope (while ensuring that the house always wins, on average). If the chance of winning at roulette was 5%, very few people would play, and the casino would actually make less money than with balanced odds.

The value of what you get out of gifts should, on average, be just slightly lower than what they cost. In other words, if a certain type of gift costs 10 sweaters, it should, on average, contain about 8 sweaters (or something of equivalent value).

Shimapanda.5793:

They would NEVER wear something like that.

Where did you get your Charr sociology degree?

Oglaf.1074:

25 Gems is essentially free.

No, 25 gems is essentially 25 more than free. It might not be expensive, but it’s certainly not free. And if they did say it was going to be free (I didn’t see it), then it should be free.

I’m not really interested in the earmuffs (or the wizard hat), but I do think it’s a bit odd that the free item for Wintersday has nothing to do with Wintersday.

Nevermore.5487:

Icipher.6078:

seems to be bugged atm. i did so many last hits on gift carriers, but never got gift stopper after step 1

It’s not bugged, I got it done like an hour ago.

So if it worked for one person, it can’t possibly be bugged, eh? I guess that means there are no bugs at all in AC, since sometimes the NPCs trigger the events properly…

I downed 4 gift-carrying enemies with fully charged sniper shots today. Got one point of Gift Stopper.

It’s a dumb achievement to begin with (encouraging players to let the enemy get the gift, and discouraging them from protecting gift-carrying teammates), and on top of that seems to lack the ability to count.

Mathim Caim.8930:

Can you please make it impossible to manually drop the present if you pick it up in Snowball Mayhem.

I got Gift Bringer in the first day. Since then, every time I pick up a gift and bring it to our spawn, I drop it so that a teammate can cap it and advance his achievement. If there was no way to drop it, every gift I pick up would essentially “steal” an achievement point from my teammates.

The problem with Gift Stopper is that it is a stupid achievement (encourages players to let the enemy grab the gift first, and discourages players from helping teammates who are carrying the gift – since they are preventing you from advancing your Gift Stopper), and should be replaced by something that actually encourages team play.

Breaking a cooperative part of the game just to make a bad achievement easier is a step in the wrong direction. It’s the Stopper achievement that needs to be changed.

Alk Trio Fan.6357:

But, in order to increase your achievement you must land the ‘downing’ blow on the enemy carrying the present.

I assumed as much, but today I downed 4 enemy present carriers (scout slingshot, fully loaded, when the enemy was at about 20% HP – no way I didn’t get the downing blow) and I only had 1 “stopper” point at the end.

A bad achievement (encouraging players to go against the interest of their own team), badly implemented. Don’t think I’ll bother with this one at all.

Hopefully next year someone with a clue will have replaced it with something more interesting (ex., win a match without letting the enemy score any points, revive X teammates, etc. – something that actually promotes teamplay).

She’s busy being the announcer inside Tixx’s dungeon.

han.9042:

At first I was having problem figuring out what color team I’m in too. I’m sure most people also have that same problem. After a few games I notice there’s a background color in the party window.. If it’s red, you’re in the red team and blue for blue team.

Yes, but if you’re in the red team, members of your team (red) have their name in blue, and members of the enemy team (blue) have their name in red. It doesn’t make any sense.

If they want red to always mean “enemy” then make it so that every player see his own team as blue and the enemy team as red. Don’t call the enemy “the blue team” and then show their name in red…

I’m pretty sure the items reset at midnight UTC.

Basically, the first time you should get a karma flask, a random booster or snowman tonic, and some presents. After that, just the presents.

I’ve killed about 10 present carriers, and in most cases even stole and capped the present after that. I got credit for capturing but my “stopper” counter is still at 1. I guess someone else got the killing blow in the other 9 cases (seems odd, but I suppose possible).

The main issue I have is that this is a stupid achievement to begin with. It seems that whoever came up with it didn’t even spend 10 seconds thinking about the consequences.

• If you play well and always get the present before the enemy, you will never advance the achievement. You’re forced to play badly and against your own team’s interests (i.e., let the enemy get the present) if you want to get it.

• If one of your teammates has the present, you can’t get credit towards this achievement, so it becomes beneficial for you to let your teammate die and let the enemy grab the present so you can (try to) advance your achievement.

• If you already have this achievement, killing the enemy present carrier effectively prevents your teammates from advancing their achievement (I assume only the person dealing the killing blow gets credit). At least with the capturing achievement, players can drop the present near the base and let others capture it (I’ve been doing this since I completed the achievement).

Also, no way to kick or report AFK players.

Electro.4173:

Its a misnomer. They should have called them something else besides “Jumping Puzzle”

Other than a few times where you have to go back to get some attunement or a few where the entrance is hidden, none of the “jumping puzzles” in GW2 is particularly puzzling. They’re really more like “jumping challenges”.

They are significantly harder than the skritt, which makes me think they’re probably “overtuned”. Still doable for any class, but tougher than pretty much any non-veteran of the same level, namely because:

• You get 6 enemies, all with ranged attacks, firing very frequently, and casting AoE. If you dodge the projectiles you get caught by the AoE, and vice-versa. Shields and projectile projectile reflection shields typically last for less than 1/5th of the time it takes to kill them.

• They spread out after spawning, so you can’t AoE all at the same time. This means that, even after you burn all your AoEs, you’ll either have half of them still alive, or all still alive at half HP.

• They cast retaliation on themselves, so even if you manage to avoid their projectiles and AoE, you still take damage just from damaging them (and there are 6 of them, so that 6 potential sources of retaliation).

Some of them drop extra presents, though, so it’s worth taking the time to kill them. Using a pet to keep them “busy” works pretty well. If you don’t have pets or minions, try getting them to attack a nearby animal (deer, moa, whatever). The animal will then run towards them and take most of the hits.

Azure Prower.8701:

Probably lag. On your client, you’re jumping normally. To the server, you’re walking off a ledge.

Then you’d eventually see your character walk off a ledge on the client too (just with a delay). This doesn’t happen outside of this specific JP, anyway. There’s another thread about this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wintersday/Getting-randomly-teleported-in-JP/first

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Bypassing a gold sink means more inflation.

Inflation is far more easily controlled by limiting the amount of money entering the game (i.e., the gold rewards from dungeons, events, renown hearts, etc.). Using the TP is entirely optional. If you want to reduce the amount of gold in circulation, you simply tweak the game to generate less gold in the first place.

The fee on the TP is there to prevent people from simply using it as temporary storage. Direct trading cannot be used for that, so the problem wouldn’t exist.

this interaction is mostly something like:
– Seller in map chat: WTS x for y gold
– Buyer in whisper: I’ll buy
– Trade happens
– Both players say thanks.

That’s it. No meaningful interaction

Thanks for summing up all possible human contact in four lines.

I guess now we know it’s absolutely impossible that one might add the other to his or her friends list, that the buyer might ask the seller if he recommends some other item, that the seller might spontaneously say “I have something else which might be better for your class”, that the buyer might ask the seller for some item he doesn’t have, prompting him to go look for the recipe (and maybe discover something new about the game or his own crafting profession in the process), or anything like that.

Nope, none of that can possibly happen and in fact never does in any other game…

the trade spam makes meaningful interaction in map chat much more difficult.

Yes, it would certainly make it harder to track all the “LF1M FOTM 27” lines. And it’s not like it would be possible to have a separate trade channel or anything like that.

allows crafters to suggest items that casual players might not even know about,

I never saw that in my years playing GW1. Why would GW2 be any different ?

I saw it (and did it) all the time. I have no idea why GW2 would be any different for you (other than the fact that it’s a different game, with a lot more players, etc.), but I also see no difference why it should be different for me. We’ll call that a tie.

and which might be useful to them, improves the RP aspects of GW2 (which was advertised with the line “Putting the RPG back into MMORPG”),

Be more specific. How does flooding map chat with trade spam help RP aspects ?

“Hear ye, hear ye! Pierre Van Hoelbrak, the great norn chef, has come to Divinity’s Reach! For a limited time only he will be offering his services for free near the cooking station. Bring your ingredients and watch as he turns them into works of art. Tips appreciated, a norn’s gotta drink.”

Specific enough for you?

allows sellers to link items so that buyers can actually preview them, and so on.

also something which can also be done with the Trading Post. Therefore it doesn’t count.

Really, you can preview on the trading post? You must be running a different version of GW2.

Most MMOs have at least 3 forms of trading (face to face, CoD mail, and a marketplace / AH / TP).

So what ? Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good.

You have it backwards. It’s not good because it’s popular; it’s popular because it’s good.

And anyway, you do realise that when discussing the desirability of a feature, being “popular” is the same as being “good”, right…? That’s kind of the definition of “popular” – something that a lot of people like.

You probably meant to say “common” instead of “popular”, but there was some freudian slippage (i.e., you know that it is popular).

Shame this forum doesn’t support polls, or we could see just how popular it would be (and the same with the ability to mail items to your own alts).

Pedra.4381:

But, Mr. Vaughn, in practice, you need not even participate in combat, much less risk death, to achieve this. Ergo, any time spent making it “cheat death proof” was wasted effort and an unnecessary complication for the vast majority of players.

Looks like Arena Net hasn’t quite mastered the art of the “PR bug fix” yet.

If you’re going to pass off a bug as a “feature”, make sure that presenting it as a feature doesn’t hurt your image even more than admitting it’s a bug.

Electro.4173:

Not sure why this is in the Wintersday forum, but…

Because it’s a “feature” added in this patch.

Maybe its to eliminate possible issues with people previewing armor, not realizing its not their class, then being disappointed when they find out they can’t wear it.

Maybe the next update checks the cost of the armour and refuses to preview stuff we can’t afford, so we’re not disappointed when we find out the price…

Actually I suspect I know the reason for this change (it’s yet another knee-jerk reaction to something that wasn’t a problem in the first place), but I’d like to hear the Official Justification™.

It’s now impossible to preview armor that your currently logged-in character can’t wear. Why? What kind of benefit does that bring to the game? And why wasn’t this mentioned in the patch notes?

When someone links an item in chat, or when I come across a karma vendor somewhere, I want to be able to preview those items (even if they can’t be worn by my current character) to see if I would be interested in getting them for my other characters.

Now the game basically forces me to log off, log on with the other character, and walk all the way to the vendor (or, if it’s an item I actually got, I have to walk both characters to the bank, because there’s no way to mail items to alts), and then log off again and back on with my first character to resume whatever I was doing. Result: Over 40 seconds of loading screens and a lot of unnecessary server load, to do something that used to be possible instantly.

It’s bad enough that (4 months after release and 8 months after public access), there is still no way to preview items at the trading post, but now it seems that item preview is moving backwards.

I have no musical ability whatsoever and yet I got all the achievements after three rounds, and always placed in the top 3. This is unacceptable. I demand that Arena Net return all the money I paid for the Wintersday patch!

Hex Kor.4089:

Account.9832:

• A lot of the map is wasted. It would be nice if there were some floating platforms between the two spawns, for example, so that players have a risky but viable “shortcut” when they need to run from one spawn to the other to intercept the enemy present carrier.

I take it you missed the shortcut that’s already there.

If you are referring to the one that consists of one jump, it’s neither particularly risky nor particularly fast. And all the area below (the lake) is also virtually useless. The only thing there is an ability CD booster but it’s so far from the “action” that, by the time you’re near any relevant map objective, the booster has worn off.

Ohoni.6057:

i`m more curious why this is Explorable mode 2.
What/where is the first one?

It may be that these are out of order, like tomorrow’s might be mode four, and then Mondays would be mode 1, or whatever.

Or it could be that it’s an explorable mode dungeon for players level 2 and above.

Roda.7468:

And here I present you with a rifle with different sound effects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3gnNwwuO6w

Nothing like shooting a sniper rifle from the hip.

Dominura.3657:

At no point are you thinking “Is that the way I should go?” or do you ever swing your camera around looking for another path or alternative.

Er… actually, the first time I tried it, I got to the platform before the exploding gifts and, instead of going up, I started following the path back to one of the other starts. Then I saw a platform below mine, assumed it was like in the Clock Tower (were you had to jump down), and got teleported to the lobby (although the fall didn’t kill me).

Also, I’ve seen people turn left at the snowballs, despite the huge red arrow pointing right.

The part I really don’t understand is the mortars. They only seem to hit the ground under the snowballs, so they’re pointless. The only way a player would get hit by a mortar was if he was already being crushed by a snowball.

Parvati.5780:

I really wish that it didn’t remove traited health, I went from 25k Hp to 17k HP. So when I first got to the final box I had 600 hp left and died inches from completing it.

Health and health loss are normalized. If you had more health, you would take more damage. The “frostbite damage” is really just a timer (it matches the timer bar that players see in the lobby). It ends at the same time for everyone, regardless of their health.

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

It would be fine if it were instanced – the problem is that the other players stop you from seeing your own character

It wouldn’t even need to be in a solo instance to fix that; they could simply render all other players on your screen as tiny snowmen, for example. That way you’d still get the feeling of competition but they wouldn’t get in the way, and there wouldn’t be a disparity between races (norns block the view of asuras but asuras don’t block norns).

konosh.4721:

Actually, nope. Finish the puzzle, run to the chest, run to the teleporter, go to the waiting area. If you are reasonably fast (doesn’t even have to be the top player), you can get in the waiting line with 5 to 10 seconds left on the timer.

I found that that worked about 1 time in every 5, at best. Usually the duration of the loading screen between the chest room and the lobby was enough to make me “miss” the next round.

Some issues with Snowball Mayhem:

• Stopper achievement requires that you let the enemy get the present (i.e., deliberately play badly), or encourages players to let their present-carrying teammates die so the enemy can pick it up and advance their own achievement. Not a nice mechanic at all.

• When I’m on the “red team” my teammates are wearing red, I’m wearing blue, the enemy is wearing blue, the enemy name is red, and my teammates’ name is blue. Make up your mind, already. Is it so hard to make the colours match? Add the fact that the game changes players to different teams after each match, and I spent the first 20 seconds of every round trying to figure out if I should kill the present carrier or help him. How about making the red team wear red and have red tags, and making the blue team wear blue and have blue tags? Failing that, make it so that every player sees his team as “blue” and the enemy team as “red”.

• Pretty much every class is useless compared to scout, especially heavy gunners. Gunners are slow, have no chance of catching up to other players, their weapons don’t have enough range, etc.. The shield is nice if the team is trying to hold the present spawn but, due to the “stopper” achievement, it’s generally preferable to let the enemy get the gift and then kill them, which makes scouts preferable. In fact, 3 or 4 scouts can stealth the present carrier until he’s out of rendering range of the enemy.

• The squad display doesn’t actually show the players in your squad. If you get far enough from your teammates, they disappear from the list, to the point of only your name being displayed (ex., if you’re chasing the present carrier to the enemy spawn and all your team is near your spawn).

• Knockdown duration is too long. A snowball enemy can basically keep you stunlocked from full HP until you die, because he can re-stun you before you even have a chance to dodge. Losing control of your character for 15 seconds is not fun gameplay; in fact, it’s not gameplay at all.

• A lot of the map is wasted. It would be nice if there were some floating platforms between the two spawns, for example, so that players have a risky but viable “shortcut” when they need to run from one spawn to the other to intercept the enemy present carrier.

Kirby.4951:

In the christian bible David killed Goliath with a slingshot.

There was a second shooter.

Unspecified.9142:

Of course that assumes one skin doesn’t skyrocket while others plummet (which is probably what will happen).

(cough)princesswandandslingshot(cough)

RvLeshrac.2673:

How about eliminating the bullkitten, like health loss, that is just irritating, not “difficult”?

The health loss is the timer. They could make acid rise from the depths or just put a big clock in the corner of your screen instead, the end result would be exactly the same.

The puzzle is on a timer because the server probably can’t handle a separate instance for each player, so, if there was no timer, a single player could basically keep everyone else waiting forever. The wait is long enough as it is (BTW, if you finish the puzzle and want to go again, the game makes you wait the full 2 minutes).

It should be possible to code the puzzle slightly differently and give each person a separate instance (with or without a timer) with minimal resource overload on the server, but I guess GW2’s current engine doesn’t support that.

The generic “jumping puzzle rules” apply (when on slanted platforms, try to jump from the highest side of one platform to the lowest of the other, turn with the mouse, don’t release the run key unless you really have to, remember you can make curved jumps, etc.). The only things specific to this puzzle are:

• Be lucky and get an instance without too many full-size norns. Apparently Arena Net didn’t read the feedback from the Halloween puzzle… (how hard could it be to render other players as small snowmen, for example?).

• Go to your options screen and move the camera position all the way to the right. Just as moving it to the left helped prevent the camera from getting stuck in the Clock Tower, here it’s to the right. If you leave it in any other position, your camera will probably start bouncing when you’re near a tower. Even all the way to the right it still bounces (especially with asura characters), but less.

• You can do full-length jumps onto the candy sticks as long as you jump diagonally. If you prefer to jump perpendicularly, you’ll have to release the run key mid-jump. If you can do the beam jumps in Fawcett’s Bounty, you can do these easily. The main problem with these jumps is the camera getting stuck in the tower (see above).

• Presents shake before exploding, so don’t jump towards one that is shaking, and if it starts shaking while you’re in the air, jump to another one as soon as you land. The ones near the edges are less likely to pop than the ones in the middle.

• Dodge when you run in front of the snowman (after the exploding presents). Sometimes he knocks you off even though the “wind” effect doesn’t seem to render. Dodging should make you immune to it.

• In the snowball section, when avoiding the second snowball (the part with two small platforms on your right), avoid jumping “up path” from the smaller of the two platforms (jump perpendicularly to the snowball path). There’s some bug with the hitboxes here and sometimes you hit an invisible wall.

• Don’t get too close to the second snowman. You just need to avoid the snowball.

• Follow the blue presents and the candy canes to reach the end. The platforms are pretty generous in that section.

Everything else is pretty straightforward and anyone who can do the regular (non-timed) jumping puzzles without stopping for a coffee on every platform should be able to finish this one without being bothered by the timer.

Other than the strange bug that sometimes teleports me back to the lobby for no reason (see other thread), by far the biggest problems I had were the camera position (I normally have it all the way to the left), the non-rendering snowman wind, and the invisible wall in the snowball section.

Enjoy your ugly sweaters.