D.O.A. 0 subs on launch.
In seriousness the game wont die until well after all the ascended and legendaries are out OR another good game comes around.
Neither of which are happening soon.
If Anet continues their stream of poor content updates with their bi-weekly living story updates, the latter is going to happen a lot sooner than you realize.
Continued from last post
Except than came Dragon Bash, and this is where it became clear of the direction your living story update would take in the future, though we didn’t know it at the time. Ask anyone about Dragon Bash, and the first words out of their mouth will be “Grind for Achievements!”. The story content was minimal, and the emphasis was on clicking 100 of these, 250 of those, 50 of that, and also 100 of those as well. That was literally the content. Dragon Ball was an alright diversion, but beyond Dragon Ball and the 10 minute long story instance, there was nothing else.
Sky Pirates of Tyria at-least began to remedy things, even if the dungeon was no where as well polished or balanced as the Molten Facility. But it was atleat content with some meat on it’s bones in comparison to Dragon Bash.
Than we had Zepyhr Sanctum and Queen’s Jubilee, both of which were amazing updates, rekindled my interest in the game, and made me think “You know what, Anet’s learned from their mistakes, it’s nothing but gravy going forward!”.
I was wrong.
After Clockwork Chaos and SAB 2, which I personally believe was the last of your pre-made content that you had on hand before starting full throttle with the idea of bi-weekly updates, your content patches quality has gone down, horribly.
Let’s take a gander at each living story update after that, shall we? I warn, it will not look pretty.
Tequatl Rising involved a revamp of a world boss that was clearly neither balanced, nor was the concept well understood by your team, as we now have a world boss no one runs anymore on most servers, essentially killing one chunk of content. Outside of that, we had a scavanger hunt and an achievement grind. Following that was Twilight Assault, a fun enough dungeon, but with no real reason to run multiple times, and also had, once again, an achievement grind as the focal point.
Blood and Madness was even worst, with two story instances that each were 5 minutes long, a gutted version of the previous year’s event, and once more, an emphasis on grinding achievements for a meta.
Tower of Nightmares is, without a doubt, the worst of these thus far. You redid an entire zone, yet the actual meat of the content update is, well, bad. You have three events, the majority of which are more or less the same (Kill adds while defending NPCs who will blow up the offshoot), copy-pasted into a few other maps with no uniqueness between them, a story instance that lasted 10 minutes, yet ANOTHER scavenger hunt with no challenge to it what so ever, or even any real depth to it other than a pointless collect ’em all-a-thon, and an emphasis on Achievement Grinding once again.
The other problem is the achievements aren’t even comeplling anymore. Almost everyone in Tower of Nightmares is “Kill X of these, destroy Y of these, and collect Z of those”.
Tell me, how is this compelling content? The answer is it’s not. You’ve begun to use Achievements as a way to skip making deep content, and I know it’s not because you don’t want to, but because of the two week release schedule.
If you remained on a monthly release schedule, we’d be getting MUCH better content, of this I am positive, and less filler content that involves grinding achievements, none of which are even remotely compelling anymore.
The Living Story idea was a nice experiment, as was the two-week release structure. But it’s become very obvious that your team simply cannot keep up with it. You’re trying to get so much out at any given time, that the content’s no longer compelling, fun, or even worth doing to me and a lot of others that are echoing this same statement on the forums.
So, here’s my two cents when it comes to what you guy’s have done with the Living Story Update experiment, and yes, I’m going to refer to it as an experiment hence forth, simply because that is what this is, an experiment.
First: The good.
To begin with, I do have to commend you for being able to roll out updates at an accelerated pace like this. It is something that’s been interesting to see if nothing else, but I wont lie, the quality of the updates have suffered.
Mind you, when I say quality, I’m referring to the actual content in the updates. From the technical stand point of things, Anet has come a long, LONG way from Lost Shores. I’ve actually rarely seen any bugs now in the updates, and that makes me very happy to see that you are more fiercely QA testing your updates. Gone are the days when we have broken achievements, broken events, and pretty much broken everything. And for that, I have to take my hat off and say “Well done!”.
The Living Story Updates have also been a great way, if nothing else, to roll out system updates and gameplay updates to the engine. And really, I think that’s where the Living Story updates should remain. Getting new quality of life updates, or tweaks to things like SPvP, WvW, or even things like tab targeting on a bi-weekly basis is great, and if anything needs to stay the same, it’s that.
However, with all the said, that’s pretty much all the good I can really say to the Living Story Updates. For now, we come to the bad, and yes, there is a good deal of it.
To begin with: Bi-weekly updates are having a very obvious affect on the quality of the content you’re releasing. While I will say that Secret of Southsun was a mess of an update, it did open up a very beautiful new zone, albeit it a rather dead one. The first Halloween update was leaps and bounds better than this years, which was missing several key features from last, including Reapers Rumble, which everyone was both upset and confused about it’s lack of re-appearance. I’m also pretty sure people would have loved to slap around Thorn again. Holiday Bosses are fun, we like them! To be honest, this makes me concerned for Winter’s Day as well.
But there was something else that bothered me, and I’m sure a lot of others, in regards to this update, as well as the past few updates, and even Tower of Nightmares:
The game is becoming less about the content, and more about an artificial carrot on a stick through the achievement system. Let’s look at the Flame and Frost storyline first, and than we’ll compare our later story bits. Flame and Frost went over the course of three months, with little emphasis on achievements, and instead added things like new Story Missions, new Dyanmic Events, and of course, the end-dungeon as well, which everyone seemed to love, and for good reason, it was fun! It was a great way to end the storyline! We also had Super Adventure Box during that time, which was also less about silly achievement points, and more about the actual game it’s self.
And that’s when things started to go south, no pun intended. Secret of Southsun came, and the content we received was…minimal to be said in the least. A scavanger hunt, a few achievements, and that was it. Than we got the second half, which had a temporary dungeon which contained a single room and a single boss on both difficulties… Okay, well it’s Southsun, we can kind of forgive that.
They’ve already said there’s no use in discussing the frequency of the LS updates. I have a feeling that they’re dictated by marketing/corporate and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Than I really do hope Anet is prepared for the backlast and loss of players that it’s going to bring.
Not only is telling the community “We’re doing it this way, and there’s no changing that, so deal with” more or less a PR disaster, but as the TC said, these living story updates are starting to get progressive worst again instead of better. The quality of content we’ve received in these updates peaked with the Queens Jubilee, and has since started to plummet into a downward spiral of bad, worst, and terrible.
Before long people are going to simply stop caring about the game, and move onto something that offers them more engaging and compelling content. GW2 being Free to Play isn’t enough of a selling point anymore, and it never was when the game first released either.
This isn’t 2005 when the idea of a Free to Play MMO is a novel idea. We’re reaching a point now where the subscription model MMO is on it’s way out, and it seems like Anet was still banking on GW2 being free to be enough of a selling point to keep people interested, and it’s starting to become very obvious that it’s not.
Someone in Anet needs to hire this man.
This should be something Anet’s Developers are showing off to rekindle hope for what’s to come in Guild Wars 2. This is the direction the game should be taking, not the direction it currently is taking.
But alas, we’re most likely going to be stuck with Scarlet until next July, when we might, just maybe, get to see a new Dragon…maybe.
One month. It’s what we’re getting at the moment anyways, just behind a thinly veiled curtain called Time-Gating content.
Seriously, think back to the previous Living Stories.
Dragonbash? It was essentially one large update split over two updates.
Zephyr Santum? Again, one large update split into two.
Queen’s Jubilee? Seeing a pattern here?
Tower of Nightmares? Well you needn’t really think about this one, considering we are literally being given half of a content patch, since we can’t even interact with the twoer until the next update.
I’d rather they just release new updates every month in large, bulk sizes, and perhaps do some minor mechanical and gameplay tweaks every two weeks. Right now, they’re not really fooling anyone with this “New content every two weeks”, when it’s pretty obvious they’re simply taking one month’s worth of content and cutting it in half.
Translation: “Give me my shinies! I want instant shinies when I tag a champ in a zergtrain! I don’t give a rat’s abs about stories and lore and all that sheep.”
Well, considering that this particular living story can be finished in about 45 minutes to an hour if you’re not interested in the meta…than yeah, it would be kind of nice to be given rewards for continuing to destroy Toxic Offshoots.
..Why do people obsess over Achievement Points anyways?
In the time it takes you to farm enough to get the 5K and 10K rewards, you could have just as easily gotten the bonuses from those (rare skins aside) by playing the game normally, which is to say nothing about the almost worthless rewards every 500 and 1000 levels.
They already said they’re going to add permanent areas next year. Meaning we’re getting that for free.
The problem is we don’t know what those permanent areas entail.
It could mean we get one or two areas like Southsun (where it’s used for one or two living stories, and then becomes a ghost town) over the course of the year. It could mean we get an entire continent’s worth of content (highly unlikely). It could also mean things like the WvW map they’re adding.
An Expansion, however, would be a guaranteed permanent addition of content at a level similar to that of Factions, Nightfall, or Eye of the North. And yeah, you’re kitten right I’d happily shell out $50 for that.
I’m going to just echo what everyone has said:
We LOVED the idea of ‘ole Taco John being a hard boss. I personally loved his mechanics, even if they were fairly simple, and the fight it’s self was enjoyable. What we DIDN’T like is the fact that he was an OPEN WORLD BOSS.
People have been saying this since the game launched: Overflow causes only tears and sorrow when it comes to organizing group events on any server, simply because Zone Limits are just to kitten ed small. Look at the issue we’re having in WvW right now, to the point where Anet has to now develop a border map for it’s border maps just so people can actually PvP in WvW without sitting in a queue for hours on end.
Take Taco John, put him in a 10-man Raid Instance, and watch as people not only do him more often, but have a much more enjoyable time doing it. He’d still be puggable, it wouldn’t require a large raid guild to complete, and he wouldn’t have become content that no one does anymore.
This is why I’m worried about the next Living Story update. If it’s another “Here’s a uber hard world boss that you have a high chance of failing at!”, it’s going to be another kitten ed fiasco, and we’ll be right back where we are now in a month.
Simply put: if Anet is going to make more Raid Content in the future, it needs to be done like a traditional MMO. None of this “We’re trying to be different” nonsense. Instance it, make it either a 10 or 20-man raid dungeon, don’t gate it to guild missions or some other artificial barrier of entry, and let people just go at it whenever they want.
This is the epitome of the old saying of “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”. Which is ironic, considering GW1 also had traditional raid content, and people loved the hell out of it too.
For those of us who love to be punished, we need to have a Hard Mode/Tribulation Mode for the Clock Tower. The mechanics from last year are ok, but could be improved to induce more stress this time around!
What do you think about having PvP unlocked while we do this Jumping Puzzle? There’s nothing more punishing than being pulled off a platform by a Thief’s Scorpion Wire. Or a Mesmer’s greatsword knockback. Wouldn’t get anymore challenging than that!
:3
I really like the idea of adding a free-for-all PvP mode to the Jumping Puzzle. There’s just something fun sounding about griefing one another on a desperate climb to the top of an already forgiving tower of death.
Harkens back to the old MMO’s where people waited for many hours (I’ve heard days) to be able to tag the outdoor boss. Maybe that’s what they were going for?
If it is, than I have no idea what Anet is thinking, as there’s a reason developers have stopped with that nonsense. It’s simply not fun, and as the TC said, no one wants to spend more time waiting to play a game than actually playing it. That is, by default, bad game design.
If there’s one thing for Anet to take away from this, it’s that we’re perfectly fine with having challenging encounters. They just need to be instanced into raids. With the Overflow system, and the requirement of X amount of players on the same map at any given time with Y amount of coordination needed, large scale, difficult outdoor raid encounters simply do not work in Guild Wars 2’s setting.
If Teqautl 2.0 was instanced, and the old version was kept out in the world, I think alot of people would have found this update to be one of the best yet. As it stands, however, it’s quickly becoming the worst for the majority of people, and only the “Best” for those on populated servers that can organize an effort to kill him consistently while not on an over flow.
Pretty much agree with everything you said in your post.
Next time they redesign a World Boss, leave the current incarnation as is, and add a Raid Portal where the boss spawns that groups of 10-25 can enter and work as a group without things like a 2 hour re spawn timer, or interference from the outside world.
Difficult raid content needs to be instanced, plain and simple.
It is annoying yes, it is frustrating yes. That is the point of a true MMO, it’s to provide emotion and make you feel like you ARE a part of this “living world”. If it’s all smiles and dulfy.net easy guides(sorry dulfy I do like your guides sometimes), then what is the point of playing? It is all said and done for you. Get over it, band up and beat this beast!
Again, I will not respond to any troll remarks, etc.
There’s a stark difference between progressing through wipes, and simply having frustrating wipes with no progress. Take a wild guess at what category Tequatl falls into. I’ve been in progression raid guilds in past MMOs before, and hell, I’ve LEAD them several times as well. Wiping was an inevitability, but we were able to pick up, rethink our strategy, and try again within 5 minutes with a STATIC GROUP OF FRIENDS. And if that still didn’t work, we’d farm easier bosses to gear up, and try again next week with more success. Regardless, every attempt generally brought us closer to the kill.
That’s not the case at all with Tequatl. You wipe on Teq, you don’t get to run back to the Instance, dust yourself off, and try again after a quick huddle. You sit on your hands for two hours waiting for him to come back and praying you have the same organized people you had prior to try again.
That is the biggest complaint most people have right now with Tequatl. You either spend your entire day praying you stay in your server’s zone and you have a Guild there that’s willing to organize to get some attempts in, or you simply face the facts that each attempt is going to be a gamble, with no real sense of progression being made.
Simply put, Teq in his current form just is not fun. Is he hard? Yes and no. His mechanics are far more simple than most raid encounters in other MMOs, with the only real difficulty being his 15 minute enrage timer. He would be perfectly balanced if he was a Raid Instance where you had control over who got the turrets each attempt, always had the same group of friends, and were able to try again consistently.
As a world boss, where anyone can zone in, he doesn’t work. Period. End of discussion. Anet needs to either move the entire fight into a Raid Instance, or re-work to acknowledge both Over Flows, and the fact that there are going to be random puggers running in with no idea what’s going on that may throw a kink into your best laid plans. If they don’t, I can guarantee that this encounter will become as deserted as the Temple of Lyssa was prior to the addition of Dragonite Ore.
These negative posts about the hate for Tequatl are exhausted. Get over it, many servers and even OVERFLOWS have beaten it, multiple times. That means the content isn’t that hard, you just dislike hard content and people wouldn’t have made their negative posts if they were in one of the successful runs of killing Tequatl. I’m over reading these negative posts, if you don’t like hard content go play Pac Man. Welcome to MMO’s. I’m not gonna respond to this or feed into the trolls of this post, or any of these kinds of posts any longer. If you want to beat this, do what I’m doing start an organized group, etc. Whining about it doesn’t change anything. If it gets nerfed all the qq kids are gonna be the blame for making a fun challenging event into another daycare event where you just whine to get what you want.
Here’s the thing: Games don’t get better without feedback, both positive and negative. Something you don’t seem to fully understand. Yes, there are some aspects of Teqautl that are good. But there are also a large number of them that are not good, and should not have been implemented. If we all simply praised what Anet was doing without giving them any criticism, we’d still be getting updates like the first Southsun Cove. Also: Making childish insults towards other players for saying they don’t like the encounter does not help your point. In fact, it makes you sound a lot more like the trolls you don’t want to respond to.
You have to realize something as a whole. Smaller communites are only getting larger by the day. This is the fastest selling MMO of all time, meaning your “low population server” is only getting bigger. So instead of qq’ing about your low pop server, start making friends and band up with people and organize to kill this beast. Or better yet, get into an Overflow and beat it.
You don’t seem to realize what’s going on yourself. GW2 was the fastest selling MMO when it launched, and it had some rather strict criteria to that title to earn it. It didn’t count expansions of other MMOs, nor did it count sales of games like Diablo 3, which are not considered MMOs. Right now we don’t know how much the servers are growing, and telling people to stop “qq’ing” about their low servers and try to get people who may not even be interested in doing this content to do it does not help. And as people have stated time and time again, people are getting into Overflows, but the vast majority of them are completely random PuGs, there is no control over which over flow you get into if you’re going there solo, which for a lot of people is their only option.
There are two hand pointer things that I believe can easily be missed. In zone 1, there’s one before the bridge where the samurai or whatever are that leads to the raft.
In zone 3 there is a hand pointing to a portal on a ledge that is out of reach.
Just checked both areas, neither gave credit towards the achievement, and I’m still stuck at 31/33.
I’m going to go with the rest and say that, currently, this is bugged.
I’m not going to re-type out the massive wall ‘o text I had in the last thread, so I’ll just summaraize:
Day 1 – Marred with bugs that have been present in other Dynamic Events since day 1, lag that Anet should have prepared for, poor communication between GMs and Players when they tried to come in and “Fix” the broken bits.
Day 2 – A total fiasco that ended with many not seeing the starting events that lead to Southsun Cove. There is also a painfully large lack of content to do on Southsun Shore now that the event is over, and the mob balancing there is ridiculously bad. I doubt many are going to spend much time here when they can have a much easier time farming mats for their Ascended and Legendary gear in Orr or the FoM.
Day 3 – Terrible pacing and overly-long segments of the Dynamic Event to simply “pad” for time made for one of the most un-enjoyable experiences I, and many, have had in this game. Couple that with the DC issues, the horrible lag, and the lack of fun from the event and you have one of the most unforgettably awful events to “Grace” an MMO in a very long time.
The short of it is: Guild Wars 2 needs a Public Test Server so players can test this content and give feed back and report bugs before it goes live. There is no reason this mess should have reached the live servers in the state it was at launch.
One Time Events like this also need to stop if this is what the future of them is going to be. The events would be fine occasionally to mark the launch of a new expansion or what not, as long as these events lasted for a week or two with repeating Dynamic Events so those that are unable to attend (for whatever reason) on one day can still participate on another without missing out on anything.
So…yeah, still not getting into the tower even though I’m making the final jump. I gave up for now, so I’m not sure what’s going on with it, but it would be nice if people who are actually making the jump would explain what they’re doing to get in instead of posting a picture of their victory.
It’d be nice to know if the event is bugged for certain races/body heights due to how small the hole is or not so if there is a problem, Anet can fix it.
I’m still not zoning into the tower when I jump into the face, despite waiting for the lighting to zap it and shatter it and making an otherwise perfect jump.
Not sure if something’s bugged or what with it right now.
After dozens of nerve-wrecking attempts…
Mind explaining how you made the last jump into the face?
Every time I Try I hit a invisible wall and fall into the goo.
I think there may still be a bug or two with it.
I made it to the top of the tower, where the face is supposed to shatter. It didn’t shatter, the green goo reached me, but instead of tossing me back I just started falling over and over, re-loading into the map constantly until it finally punted me into the next group’s ascent.
Then I fell through the floor again (literally, fell through solid ground), and continued falling a handful more times before finally returning to the lobby.