Guild Wars 2

SirMoogie.9263:

I think it’s no more difficult than the marionette, but does require people to show up and organize for it; which is a problem for several reasons:

- There are competing events going on at the same time
- People have suffered a string of losses and give up
- Waning interest as people complete the meta
- Some players have anti-log out scripts going to farm the events. Not many, but in a fight where these players increase the difficulty by being present it just adds to the previous problems.

Some suggestions to fix the situation:

- Have the fight scale down further. It doesn’t require 50 per knight as others are claiming (maybe for the achievement) as I’ve done it with groups as small as 35. Though group composition probably makes this vary substantially.
- Decrease the time it spends invulnerable to conditions or introduce a mechanic that condition players can work on to remove the shield early. As it is now many condition players are avoiding doing damage or doing their small amounts of direct damage with lots of condition removal utilities/traits.
- Add a report function for inactive players

As for player interest, I generally don’t like carrots and prefer letting people do what they find fun. As such just adjusting the scaling would allow those of us who find it fun to do the event without needing roughly 90-120 interested people.

In general, other popular MMOs have realized it’s hard to organize even 40 people to do raid content (it can be like herding cats) and only fraction of the player base was enjoying the content they were creating. Open world raid content should be doable by small groups and scale appropriately. Even Tequatl could be reworked to require 20 people. Instead of having six turrets, have a number of turrets that can be built/repaired based on scaling of the encounter. Have Tequatl build stacks based on scaling. Have his health and timer adjust based on scaling. Adjust rewards for smaller groups as it is easier to organize smaller groups than larger groups. As a bonus, keep track of sever success at the world events and make them easier for servers that fail more and harder for servers that succeed more. Scale awards based on difficulty. This way no server is ever in a state where they consistently fail at Tequatl, the Wurms, or the Living Story events; and there is incentive to rerun encounters and improve your skills on them. Early on most servers seem to muster the numbers, but after a string of failures it becomes difficult to get people interested in the encounters again.

Wow. You know your kitten. Maybe Anet should hire you.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I stopped reading after you said Teq was one of the best patches. Best? It effectively killed that zone. Hope that was sarcasm. I’d rather have Carebear easy than zones that are deader than the Dallas reboot.

What do you mean it ‘killed the zone’? I see people there all the time, and all the events still work. Are you on a low-population server?

I’m not against tough content—I thought Tequatl was one of the best patches of the game. But this particular piece of tough content locks me out of other content I very much enjoy: the Hologram fight. I really enjoy that fight, yet I can’t play it because I haven’t been able to kill the knights in days. Some people just have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re bringing the group as a whole down.

I know I’m not alone on this. We don’t want you to make it care-bear easy, just doable to the layperson.

This particular patch has some good and some bad to it, I think.

The Good:

Elite mobs and downed mobs are a great improvement. They both add just a bit more challenge to the game without making the whole affair extremely difficult. The AI for the downed state is well executed (they’re actually trying to rez each other!) and the elite mobs are pretty fun to bring down.

The world is actually changing. Even though Kessex hills looks terrible now, at least A-net is finally setting out to do what they wanted to do in the first place. I hope some of the changes are reversed in a later patch (for example, the fact that we can’t see the sun anymore) but I also hope that the west side of the lake remains permanently scarred after the Toxic Alliance has left. Something to leave a mark, right?

It’s an interesting arc lore-wise. Krait lore has been overlooked for a long time now and it’s good to see them in the spotlight. I really want to see what their motivations are. Are they being tricked into working with the Nightmare Court by Scarlet, or are they so desperate that they need outside help? Both possibilities have interesting implications.

The Bad:

We’ve been there and we’ve done that. The gameplay is very similar to previous Living Story stuff. Even the NAME of the enemy faction is similar; Toxic Alliance, Molten Alliance. These things need more diverse content.

Gameplay-wise, Kessex Hills hasn’t changed a bit. Centaurs are still attacking Fort Salma, Draithor is still murdering Black Lion merchants and bandits are still hanging out in the woods south of Godslost Swamp. If a big, sweeping change is going to be made to a zone, something needs to happen gameplay wise. I refuse to believe the kitten necromancer Aria Venom would twiddle her thumbs in a Lionguard fortress while everything around her is slowly dying. And what are the quaggan still doing in the lake? Shouldn’t the krait have killed or enslaved them by now?

The gameplay is probably going to disappear in a month or two. We’ve seen it in Flame+Frost. This spontaneous event gameplay simply isn’t meant to last. It’s going to vanish as though the Toxic Alliance never happened, and even though I don’t like the gameplay content very much, I hate it that A-net keeps doing that.

In short, it’s not the best patch in the world, but it’s an improvement on other patches. I really hope A-net keeps listening to our feedback and continues to improve Living World. The idea is solid, they just need to work on the execution.