I don’t hate my ranger, but when I play with my lower level thief, mesmer and elementalist, they just seem so much more versatile, with a lot of fun/interesting moves.
The most painful things that ranger lacks, for me, are realistic escape options and speed. In PvP, I just haven’t found a way to disengage from a battle when I’m outnnumbered. I can use shortbow 3 for swiftness, activate the signet of stone for invulnerability (a level 30 trait transfers its effects from your pet to you), and a drop spike trap, and I still get chased down every time. Thief, mesmer and elementalist all seem to have stealth and speed options that actually give you a shot at getting clear.
Oh! I didn’t realise it was giving me skill points.
It feels like such a waste watching the experience bar go round and round pointlessly once you hit 80. I really wish the experience awarded would auto-convert into something more useful – a bit of extra karma or gold perhaps.
Too much to ask?
I think a real life Norn woman would be comparable to this..
Our beloved Xena
Careful there, Focks gets cranky when you make real world analogies that don’t fit
his perception.
I get cranky when people use real world comparisons in some misguided attempt to prove that all women have the same body structure. Or when people who can’t debate civilly resort to snide remarks. ;-)
I’ve just given up on this mission in fury.
- Auto-attack flat out does not work on the boss. My character is a Norn ranger, and she only ever fires a couple of arrows before stopping.
- I’m constantly being knocked down by invisible attacks. Yes, the floor is full of flying energy arrows and I can just about avoid them, but that doesn’t matter in the slightest because she just randomly flies through the air and falls down even when there’s nothing around her.
- Whirling defence fails to reflect anything. What’s the point in a situational attack that you decide to nix when it becomes too useful?
- Trahearne disappears. Just doesn’t show up as a downed ally or anything.
- The boss regularly goes invulnerable for extended periods, usually at the exact moment I’ve finally got close enough to him to do some burst damage.
I think that’s it. Oh no, one more thing:
- When I restart from a checkpoint, the boss has, naturally, got all his health back, but he doesn’t return to his initial dormant state – he maintains his mesmer allusions spewing arrows all over the floor, and his regular energy beam, and all his other crazy attacks.
Then again, if you’re a Ranger and haven’t learned to swap your pet after you’ve run through a group that managed to hit you in order to exit combat mode by level 80, I don’t know.
This doesn’t work. I do it all the time to stop the pet taking too much damage, but the ranger won’t disengage combat mode and get a move on.
I have no problem getting from A to B in Orr; I just don’t enjoy the process one bit. Repetitive fights, constantly getting knocked down or rooted, delay, delay, delay. It’s like swimming through treacle.
BrunoBRS – are you talking about the jumping puzzle that ends in a veteran fight on a tiny ledge?
I quite enjoyed that one, but yes, it’s sadistic – firtly, it’s one of the jumping puzzles that relies on dodgy physics – some jumps are only possible through mid-air turning and landing on thin air. Secondly, to put a vet at the end in such a tiny space (and one that turns into lots of little creatures half way through the fight) is just plain evil.
There are three types of Dredge on the way up, and only the Oscillators have knockback. The knockback has two characteristics: it knocks you back a few feet (1/3 to 1/2 of a ramp length), and it knocks you straight back from the direction of the attack. Knowing this, it’s simply a matter of positioning yourself so the Oscillator is at the top of a ramp, and you are facing straight up the ramp while facing him. Doing this, his knockback will send you straight down the ramp, but not over the edge.
I think you’re mixing up two different zones (as I was when I made that post). It sounds like you’re talking about the vista where you have to go up straight ramps that turn at right-angles to one another, making your way towards a central area with a veteran and the vista. I also did that and had no problems with it.
But I’m talking about a dredge area where the ramp is a tight circular spiral. What happens is you get stuck with two enemies right in front of you, and an oscillator will come down the spiral from higher up, hitting you consistently at such an angle that you go flying far, far off the edge. There’s absolutely no way he can hit you back a little way down the spiral because, as I say, of the tightness of the spiral.
edit Here’s a picture. Imagine an oscillator standing at any point up the ramp from you. His attack is always going to hit you off the edge of the ramp, not down it.
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I believe you’re meant to strategically use the bombs strewn about the area to take out the larger groups, without running in head-first. Assuming it’s the mission I recall, at least!
I wish they could be a little clearer on that. I remember those, but thought I was meant to use them to help take down the catapults, seeing as that’s what we’d spent the whole mission attacking up until then!
The design flaw is mistaking hassle for challenge, using complicated travel to make the world seem bigger than it is. It feels like a design from a decade ago.
We need to articulate this more clearly.
For me, ‘good’ difficulty (what you call challenge) is when the player has a feel for how to solve the problem, even though the execution is difficulty. The player should always feel: “If I keep trying, I’ll get the hang of it.”
‘Bad’ difficulty, which causes hassle and frustration, is when you can’t see any way of improving your chances – the game is designed to trap you in a pattern you can’t break free from, and deliberately so. I feel most negatively towards GW2 when I can almost picture the developers play-testing an area like Orr and saying, “Hmm, if they fight through this front, they’ll be able to cut through this route here quite quickly – drop a few more root and knock-down mobs around that point to make sure there’s no alternative to the slow, laborious fight.”
Here’s a theory that I believe trumps all others:
The humans/Norn in this game simply do not look realistically human. They’re deep into the uncanny valley and they remind us of shop window mannequins.
Now, when it comes to the men, many of us find this weirdly unsettling – just enough so that something in us feels put off. But because Western culture is already overloaded with images of women photoshopped to look alien-skinned and dead-eyed, most of us are actually fully acclimatised to seeing women this way. Ergo, we don’t find it quite as off-putting.
Speaking for myself, I have two male characters and two females, but the males are Asura and Sylvari. I’m pretty sure the fact that they’re more obviously fantasy creations makes me more comfortable with them.
I also think it’s partly to do with the ability to flaunt individuality: give players the ability to make human/Norn characters right off the bat who have an array of scars, eyepatches, wild haircuts, prosthetic limbs and other clear identifying features and the ratio will change. At the moment, every single human and Norn male seems to be the same rigid, jowly looking Ken doll (humans) or steroid abuser (Norn).
Is Dredgehaunt Cliffs the area where you try to foment a dredge revolution and have to go up spiral ramps?
If so, I agree. I really want to take to task whichever dev decided that you can’t knock enemies off ledges, but they can knock you off – a terrible way of compensating for limited AI that makes it feel like mobs have more tactical options than players.
I think I see what happened – one bunch of devs did the level architecture, putting in all these thin ramps and spirals and focusing on how cool and intricate it looked. Another bunch of devs were tweaking the combat system for the harder zones, and the two groups (or possibly individuals) didn’t notice that the overlap of their effort resulted in an area that’s no fun at all.
I expect the person who modelled all the tiny walkways didn’t imagine that they’d be crammed with mobs who have knockback attacks, or they might have put railings on.
And I expect the person who gave certain mobs knockback attacks didn’t think they’d be dumped en masse into such an area.
And I expect the person who dumped the mobs with knockback attacks into an area filled with narrow ledges and walkways didn’t realise how powerful those knockback attacks were.
And here we are. Almost anywhere in the dredge lair, it’s case of one close-range hit from a knockback attack and you fall to your death.
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I wonder if people realise that they wouldn’t have to contend with crowd control if they didn’t run through groups of enemies in the first place? It’s not rocket science and it’s the price people need to be prepared to pay for trying to rush through content.
I hate rushing through enemies, because it breaks realism – a proper warrior would fight their way through, or at least sneak past, using cunning.
However, after a couple of days in Orr, this is what I resorted to doing. I expect it’s the same for everyone. There is no reward for slowly picking your way through – mobs are so dense that the ones you’ve just killed respawn behind you while you’re killing the next one, and you end up proceeding at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Added to that the cheap tactic of having semi-camouflaged extra enemies leap out at you when you’re trying to pick them off one by one, and the tried and trusted method has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Rushing through is the only viable tactic.
My suggestion? I believe for this and so many other reasons every class should be fitted with a stealth/creep mode that slows down your running pace but reduces aggro range. There would then be the genuine challenge/fun of trying to cleverly pick your way through mobs without getting spotted. This was marketed as a game which you can play your way – maybe, as a thief or ranger, my way of playing once I’m past level 80 is to avoid repetitive trash fights and concentrate on helping NPCs and fellow players against more worthy opponents?
In the penultimate act of this mission, you have to sabotage three catapults and then clear out the rest of the shore defences. By the time I got to the second catapult, there were probably about 50-60 mobs around me and my allies. We all died very swiftly.
I restarted some way back down the beach and quickly took off all my armour, realising that I would inevitably die repeatedly and the only thing to try to salvage was the repair bill. The mobs came right for the checkpoint, and the rest of the battle was me standing there in my underwear, dying in a matter of seconds, and restarting again in the same spot. It was sort of like god mode, but also infuriating.
Is this some kind of bugged instance where far more enemies spawned than should have? What makes it even more infuriating is the amount of interrupt/force-move attacks the Risen mobs have. I couldn’t fire off a single ‘slow’ attack because it would be interrupted. I was pulled this way and that, and then repeatedly made to run away from them with that floaty black skull over my head. They had more control over my character than I did!
To add insult to injury, when you’ve completed the mission, Trahearne storms the beach with a massive assault force that would’ve have been very useful when we were outnumbered 10 to 1 back there.
My Norn always says this like she’s angry with me for not doing my job, but it’s always always always when I’ve run out of healing options.
She also goes on about how she’s practically invincible when she’s about to die.
So …
Anyone else feel some of the in-battle voice work is a tad ridiculous?
I like to imagine all my character’s conversations with him are only how he sees it in his mind, because he’s high on some kind of Sylvari drugs. What’s actually happening is he’s rambling about some nonsense, and my Norn character is sighing and shaking her head.
Speaking as a British person, his accent makes him sound like someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I dislike him because he doesn’t do anything whatsoever to deserve the prominence he gets – I wouldn’t mind him as a bookish secondary character who helps you out with his knowledge of Orr but to have him as a military strategist and leader is just taking the kitty!
I did it with a tall Norn, but you’re right, it’s a nightmare. My arms ached from retrying and my head hurt from the spinning, freaked out camera. And the jump between two stalactites is impossible to judge because you can’t see your character at all. You just have to keep getting to it and learn from painful experience where the sweet spot is to not clip a stalactite and fall down.
It wouldn’t make sense to see a Norn who muscle builds only and has poor cardio due to not exercising the other muscles evenly…
Firstly, realism is out the window in this game. People can’t use wooden longbows or swing giant metal swords without being pretty ripped up. Human females are way too willowy in general.
Secondly, women simply come in a wider variety of shapes and no amount of muscle-toning changes your basic frame.
No one chooses to be angry and impatient. That’s self-help waffle. You have some limited control over your emotions, but it’s foolish not to look for the exterior source of them and try to confront it.
Uhh… what? How is being an adult and taking some responsibility for your emotions “self-help waffle”?
That’s a separate proposition to ‘choosing’ your emotions. Don’t conflate the two.
Taking responsibility for your emotions just means managing them and not using them as an excuse to be unkind to other people. It doesn’t mean that when you have to deal with extremely frustrating situations you can simply ‘choose’ not to be frustrated.
Once again: ArenaNet are wise enough to know that you should avoid frustrating players, and that while this is, to some extent, unavoidable with such a wide playerbase, it would be foolish to simply wave away angry players with, “Oh, they should just deal with their emotions” when the root of the problem is often design, and when there are often solutions that mean you can avoid annoying players without ‘nerfing’ difficulty.
Players who think that the reason they aren’t frustrated is some kind of superior human quality (whether you call that being more ‘mature’ or anything else) should take their own advice and practice some humility! ;-)
I would love a skill-based MMO. However, I feel GW2 falls short of this to an extent. The combat system is simultaneously too complicated (the rules governing when you miss and hit are opaque and seemingly arbitrary) and too simplistic (WvW matches always seem to come down to numbers and quickly descend into zergfests).
Or, to be more accurate, I feel it’s a skill-based MMO with a low skill ceiling. I’ll reconsider that position when I see youtube videos popping up of players demonstrating how they’re able to solo three competent enemy players at once in WvW using their superior skill! In any game with a decent skill ceiling, this calibre of player will emerge to inspire the rest of us.
(I’ve done many of the other jumping puzzles and I don’t believe they adequately prepare you for a timed one at all – they can all be done first time by carefully lining up the camera for each jump.)
Have you done Spekk’s lab? That one’s timed and is great practice for this. It’s a bit easier, but it prepares you for the “can’t stop moving” aspect of the clock tower.
Thanks for the tip. I haven’t done this one yet but I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Ultimately, I worry that I will always struggle with the timed ones because of how awkward I feel the controls are, but I might surprise myself.
@ Focksbot
The point that you’re missing is that it’s not about people being unable to do the puzzle. It’s about their reaction to being unable to do the puzzle. Coming onto the forums and complaining that their whole Halloween is ruined because they can’t fill the achievement pane in the first year is childish. Making the poor guy who designed it feel bad for upsetting people because they can’t accept the fact that they were unable to do it is wrong.
I’m not missing that point; it’s just a bad point. ;-)
No one has ‘made’ the guy who designed it feel bad; he feels bad because, out of his own judgment (good judgment, I might add), he feels he unnecessarily gave people a hard time and can do better next time. I’ve said my piece about the nature of choice and I’m not going to repeat it again, except to say I don’t accept the defence of “Just don’t do it” and my reasoning is above.
Yes, some of the responses were unnecessarily rude. Others have been a fair and reasonable reaction. When you’re promised fun and given frustration, you feel cheated. It’s useful to ANet to convey those feelings, because sometimes (not always) one articulated negative response speaks for many more users who simply turn around and walk away. Only a foolish company would shrug and say, “Who needs ’em?” instead of thinking about how to keep people onside.
The puzzle is not impossible.
I would say it was impossible for me, given my time constraints and aforementioned RSI issues, this year at least. That’s not to say anything I can’t do should be stricken from the game, but it seems like there are many ways to make it something I could have done, or at least enjoyed attempting, without sacrificing the ultimate challenge. It could be a less physically painful experience, certainly. It could also be presented in a way that brings players up to speed much more effectively, resulting in less frustration.
But no-one is responsible for your moods other than yourself. People demanding it be removed because they felt too stressed, angry or impatient is wrong. You choose to be angry and impatient with the puzzle.
No one chooses to be angry and impatient. That’s self-help waffle. You have some limited control over your emotions, but it’s foolish not to look for the exterior source of them and try to confront it.
You’re playing an MMO. If you don’t have a bit of time to invest, this probably isn’t the type of game for you. Yes, they stated that they didn’t want players to feel they had to log in constantly, but we are talking a couple hours of your time. I think you’re blowing this all out of proportion.
I have time to invest over a long period. I did not have a seven hour span in the last week, and that’s how long I’ve been hearing it’s taken people to complete the puzzle. I might have done it quicker, but I don’t know – of the attempts I made, my best was the first one, getting me up to that steel girder you have to jump from. I hesitated too long and after that I couldn’t get anywhere near as far, and that’s usually a bad sign for me (if I’m getting worse, not better!)
I also have mild RSI problems which makes repeating complicated gestures with too many fingers at once a real strain. I’m pretty sure I could not have attempted the puzzle for more than 10-20 minute stretches at a time without risking my health. I don’t have a similar problem in timed platform sections on other games, because they usually have an auto-follower camera, or at least the mouse on auto-look, meaning I don’t have to be pressing with my right hand whilst stretching my left over the keyboard. Generally, I only like to platform with a gamepad, but it seemed weird to program one in just for one section of this game.
edit
Also, GW2’s slightly unresponsive controls make me instinctly feel I have to press everything harder than in other games. It’s a reaction I can’t seem to shake. My character feels ‘heavy’. Very bad for platforming!
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Rock climbing is a challenge. I don’t think I want to ever do it. But you don’t see me hating on it. Look at guild wars 2 the way you look at the world. There are tons of things to do in it, but you don’t have to do everything. Some people do, and those people are crazy kittenes.
Imagine in the real world there was a bar above your head and everything unique you did filled it a little more, and when it’s full, you’ll get a small reward. One day you find out you need to go rock climbing to fill it up completely.
Still feel it’s a completely free choice?
Psychology is odd. We all tend not to weight things up rationally. Gaming capitalises on how responsive we are to things like getting a full quota of ticks, getting a 100% score and lots of other things. It’s a wonderful motivating factor that could be tapped into to make us more productive in real life.
But it also makes it not a simple case of take-it-or-leave-it. I’m not talking specifically about the Halloween achievement here – I’m talking about how games like GW2 inspire a completionist urge in much of their player base. We feel a sense of ‘progress’ from ticking things off the list. Having sections of the game that practically exclude us because of time investment or too much, too soon is simply bad tactics. Rationally or not, players will feel it’s bait and switch – you made them feel they could complete everything over time and then you decided: actually, no.
Then it’s a good thing the clocktower wasn’t mandatory, right? It was put there for people to enjoy. I believe someone mentioned that they only expected 5% of people to even complete it. No one told them they had to play it.
Yet again, I suspect Josh understands the problem with this statement, reading between the lines in his statement.
He understands that when you put a puzzle like this in front of players as part of a big event, it’s a dare. It’s an invitation. It pulls people in. In the context of the game, it was put in the wrong place for most players in the span of their play experience. It’s simply good game design to place difficult challenges in places where you can expect players to come to it prepared. That’s the philosophy for much of GW2 and it only makes sense to keep it consistent.
So there is a point in pushing for a change, and again, I say Josh has taken the right lesson from it. I respect both his skill as a designer and his insight in understanding that the nature of the mistake wasn’t a case of ‘too hard’ versus ‘too easy’, but the context in which you place certain challenges.
Your analysis of the nature of choice and freedom is one I see all over these forums, and with respect, it’s misguided – or it would be if you were applying it practically. Go into business or art, or a combination of the two, and carry on with an attitude of “It’s the customer’s/reader’s/player’s fault if they don’t choose to ignore things that I offer to them that they find overwhelming” and I really doubt you’ll succeed.
[quote=606443;Criminon.8432:]
There are several other jump puzzles located in the game to “get them up to speed”. It’s a jump puzzle. There are many jump puzzles.
As I say above, they don’t do an adequate job, because they can all be solved first time by analysis, which means going at your own pace.
Asking people to develop an instinct for a jump puzzle is a huge leap. I’ve played dozens of platformers in the past with puzzles that are just as hard, and I’ve also played GW2 for 80+ hours now, and the combination of those experiences made me look at the clocktower and think, “OK, I can probably do this, but I’ll spend the whole time pleading inwardly for controls I’m more used to, and I can’t spare the time between now and next week.” I still find the GW2 controls in general rather unresponsive and weird, but I put up with it because you can usually take things slowly, or feel a sense of progress. I shudder to think how players must have felt coming to this puzzle without having much of a background in platformers, because that was something of a cushion for me, and I still felt I was effectively excluded by lacking the seven+ hours of free time.
@ Focksbot
That’s true for some things but not this puzzle. There’s nothing to be confused about or any way to be unaware of what you’re supposed to do. You enter a jumping puzzle and literally all you can do is keep going forwards and jumping or you fail it and go back to the start. They can’t make that clearer.
You’re thinking too literally about the nature of challenges. As I said before, I have friends who literally sit down in front of a 3D game and become frustrated with controlling the character. It doesn’t feel intuitive to them at all. You can say, “Look, it’s obvious – foward, back, left, right”, but the brain doesn’t build its connections by logic alone – it needs experience. We take it for granted that it’s easy, but you and me have been playing games for years.
Similarly, although visually the puzzle is a simple case of “Keep jumping rock to rock”, in reality, you have to be comfortable with:
- The particular vagaries of terrain in this game, what slant constitutes a surface you slide off and what can be stood on.
- The collision detection, which knocks you off things when your foot clips them at the wrong angle, but often lets you stand up right on tiny, angled areas.
- The way the camera reacts to being put in a particular place, and how the directional controls change depending on where the camera is swinging (this still surprises me a lot, many hours into the game).
- Reading your model through other models.
- How holding/letting for of W affects the distance you jump.
- How much of the goo touching you means the game is ended.
- The sudden shifts to and from loading screens before and after the challenge.
Not being used to any of these things confuses and frustrates the player. Why did I miss that rock? How can I go forward when this pole appears too thin? Where can I jump to? Do I wait here? Can I afford to wait a second to line myself up? Where am I? Wait, it’s started already?? In normal jumping puzzles, you have a long time to calculate. This is the first one to demand you build up an instinct, and for many players, that’s a big ask.
It’s not a valid comparison to compare the clock tower to things like unresponsive controls. My pet’s F2 skills are unresponsive – that’s Anet’s fault and I await a fix. If I get stressed and grumpy because I can’t finish a puzzle that’s my fault.
Except the camera, controls and collision detection could all be greatly improved. My first feeling about the clocktower after a couple of attempts was: “Please give me Mario and a game controller so that I can do this properly. Or even Tomb Raider type controls.” Because those game engines are better in all these respects (even though TR is old and clunky, it’s still got a more stable camera and jump mechanic) but also, of course, because I’m used to the idiosyncrasies of those game engines.
Personally, I have no problem with the pet controls, because I’ve used them extensively and have learned to account for the delay.
As for most players liking a challenge as long as it’s clear what they must do, well that’s debatable either way without statistics. I’ve seen plenty of people rage quitting dungeons and raids on the first wipe and that was not because they lacked instructions or ways to measure progress.
Of course it’s debatable. Everything’s debatable. But as far as debates go, my instinct, based on research I’ve read and my familiarity with lots of different types of people, is that we aren’t so different that there’s a split right down the playerbase representing people who ‘like a challenge’ and people who ‘need to be coddled’. I think it’s highly insulting to the latter. All the research points to the conclusion that games attract players because they put you in a ‘zone’ where you feel you’re being tested and challenged but see the possibility of success while understanding the nature of failure. I think it’s called ‘fiero’ – a state of total concentration. I don’t believe that anyone likes things to be ‘easy’, but things inevitably become easy once we’re used to them. So games like GW2 have the tricky job of trying to bring players who are used to certain mechanics and players who are new to them together in the same arena without frustrating some and boring others.
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’m sorry Focksbot but unless you are asking for him to give you a “practice” clocktower where you are there alone and there is no green goo, you are wrong, as others who have mastered it did not have that option and had to fight for their win. There are plenty of puzzles in this game where people can practice and fine tune their skills, Griffinrook run is a fine example.
With respect, your thinking seems very short-sighted. It’s easy to envisage a clocktower-type puzzle that starts off easy and gets gradually harder, so as to accommodate users playing at a lower level. As you get higher, the green goo starts rising faster and faster, and the jumps become harder.
Those who ‘mastered’ it did not possess some special human quality; they were acclimatised to the nature and specifics of this type of challenge, and felt comfortable undergoing the process of refinement. They could see clearly the route to mastery, while others could not. Yes, they fought for their win, but the difference is that their brains innately understood how to take on the challenge, rather than feeling hopelessly out of their depth.
(I’ve done many of the other jumping puzzles and I don’t believe they adequately prepare you for a timed one at all – they can all be done first time by carefully lining up the camera for each jump.)
I am sick and tired of games that coddle me, and was thrilled to finaly be playing a game that was trying to kill my character.
You’ve been coddled just enough to feel comfortable with an increased level of challenge. The only difference is preparation. You wouldn’t feel this way if the nature of the puzzle was new to you – you’d be on here saying it made no sense and was unfair etc.
I’m sorry to spoil any theories people have here about their quality of character, but there’s no such dichotomy of players who like a challenge versus players who like to have their hand held. The vast majority players – nay, of human beings – need to have their hand held through strange, new experiences in order to acclimatise themselves to a new environment, and the vast majority then get fed up of hand-holding as soon as they feel comfortable with that new environment. Everybody likes a challenge, but nobody likes bewilderment. The only difference between you and other people who hated this challenge is preparation, something that could be resolved by changing the way a puzzle like this begins, giving it a difficulty ramp, rather than a difficulty cliff-face.
Good game designers know this. Even Super Meatboy starts off with easy levels.
Please stop demanding anything challenging be turned into a schoolyard swingset game.
Straw man. I’ve said repeatedly that challenge can be retained while providing a set-up that brings others up to speed. It’s difficult but it’s also just plain good game design.
I’m sorry, but I feel your ego is getting in the way of compromise. I also feel that ANet are going to be on my side about this – Josh has seen the feedback and he’s taken the correct lesson from it: retain challenge and difficulty, but place that challenge and difficulty in an environment where those coming to it will be acclimatised. It’s all about hitting people at the right point in their play experience. Sorry, but you are not some kind of hardcore veteran type; you’ve just been pre-coddled, where others haven’t.
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Nope, he’s taking the right lesson from it. You guys begging him to stop have got nothing to back you up – he’s not saying he’s not going to make challenging events in the future, but he recognises that throwing people in at the deep end was a mistake, and that making a significant proportion of your playerbase feel frustrated is not something to be proud of.
The problem with your POV and that of others swarming this thread to say, “No, it was great!” is that you fail to recognise that everything you liked about this puzzle can be accomplished whilst still giving an opportunity for other people to get to grips with it. Obviously, not everyone likes everything, but there are ways to design games and games-within-games so that the majority of players can get something out of them.
‘Difficulty’ isn’t some quantitative concept, where making something more accessible necessitates removing the challenge for others. It’s about ‘arming’ your players equally, so that those coming to something new or with less experience of certain systems can get up to speed with those who are seasoned, and those who don’t have as much time to waste can still get something out of an event, while those who have all the time in the world can find a proportionate increase in reward.
So please stop treating it like an oppositional binary. My hope is that Josh and ANet have the wisdom to see this as a problem that requires a creative solution, rather than a supposed choice between pleasing two different types of player.
The problem I have with that is that it’s not Josh’s fault if people get frustrated. It’s entirely their own fault. They can either practice until they can do it or they can go do something else. This stuff about having to have every achievement, even for things they don’t have the patience or ability to do is ridiculous. So is blaming others for your own lack of patience (using the general you there, not anyone specific).
Sorry, but you’re wrong. It is Josh’s fault – but that’s not to say he didn’t do a great job in many respects. Game design is hard and he overlooked something, just as anyone would in any tough job. I’ll bet he doesn’t need me or anyone else to tell him this.
The rationale you roll out here could be used to justify all and any bad design in the history of gaming. Terrible level design? Wild camera? Unresponsive controls? Not clear what to do? Hey, player, it’s all your fault – just be patient and learn to deal with everything the game throws at you.
Sorry, but that’s not how strong game design works. If you do it right, the majority of players will not get incredibly frustrated, because frustration only comes when you can’t see the route to mastery. If you show a player how to gradually improve and what skills to implement, the majority will happily fail and fail again in order to succeed. Human beings in general relish challenge. What they do not relish is confusion. It’s the reason the TF2 designers put in a killcam that zooms in on the player that killed you – a specific game design decision to help players understand how they can avoid a messy death for longer next time.
With the greatest respect, players like you are somewhat deluded in thinking you possess distinct human qualities that elevate you above the ‘whiners’, be it patience or anything else. The truth is you’ve been prepared, by other games or other experiences, for a certain type of challenge, and it leaves you comfortable taking on events like the clocktower. Others have not been similarly prepared.
Patience is something we are all capable of when we are put in the right situation. Impatience and frustration is what happens to us all when we find ourselves in more bewildering situations. I have friends who get immediately frustrated as soon as they sit down to play games as complex as GW2 because they’re plunged too suddenly into something new with little instruction (some of them can’t even get their heads round controlling movement in a 3D world), yet in other aspects of life, they are far more patient and intelligent than me. It’s all about context and what you’re used to. Well-designed games do as much as possible to bring you up to speed.
You know why so many people love Portal 1 and 2? It’s because those games teach you everything you need to know to succeed, while still challenging you. What they don’t do is throw you into the last level with nothing but an instruction booklet and a message board full of people calling you a whinger if you can’t figure it out straight away.
As a Norn follower of Raven, I wanted to pick only the raven form and stick with that, to honour my chosen spirit.
Now I find that the Snow Leopard is the only really decent one, and the Raven lacks all characteristics of corvines. No flight, nothing that suggests intelligence or wisdom – just a ball of black feathers slashing at things aimlessly.
What a swizz.
Josh, you did the right thing. Seriously. There will always be people who complain. It’s very rare these days to come across something that is challenging, yet fun.
Nope, he’s taking the right lesson from it. You guys begging him to stop have got nothing to back you up – he’s not saying he’s not going to make challenging events in the future, but he recognises that throwing people in at the deep end was a mistake, and that making a significant proportion of your playerbase feel frustrated is not something to be proud of.
The problem with your POV and that of others swarming this thread to say, “No, it was great!” is that you fail to recognise that everything you liked about this puzzle can be accomplished whilst still giving an opportunity for other people to get to grips with it. Obviously, not everyone likes everything, but there are ways to design games and games-within-games so that the majority of players can get something out of them.
‘Difficulty’ isn’t some quantitative concept, where making something more accessible necessitates removing the challenge for others. It’s about ‘arming’ your players equally, so that those coming to something new or with less experience of certain systems can get up to speed with those who are seasoned, and those who don’t have as much time to waste can still get something out of an event, while those who have all the time in the world can find a proportionate increase in reward.
So please stop treating it like an oppositional binary. My hope is that Josh and ANet have the wisdom to see this as a problem that requires a creative solution, rather than a supposed choice between pleasing two different types of player.
Read what charlie posted above your posts, i completely agree with what he said on there. Also you are the one being narrow-minded here, it almost seems like you don’t want slim characters and find it “crude” that other people do, lastly athletes aren’t all extremely buffed up and a lot of them are slim toned depending on what sport they do.
Always a sign of a bad argument when you have to ‘make up’ what the other person thinks in order to have something to lay into.
Of course I have no problem with the option of ‘slim’ characters in a fantasy MMO. I have a problem with there being no choice whatsoever outside of slim characters. Charlie is totally wrong to suggest those two thickest available female bodies are anything other than slim. They might not be skinny or willowy, but nor are they curvy; they’re neat and slim, just a little thick-necked.
The fact is the range of bodies is absurdly restricted. You can change the waist to boob size proportionally by an inch here or there, widen the shoulders and hips by an inch or so, and that’s about it. Women have a multitude of healthy body shapes. So do athletes, depending on their event. Neither range is represented here; we’re restricted to pole-vaulter and super-model type shapes.
So don’t make my opinion out to be something it isn’t, please. You can still have your precious skinny wench – but other people, women players in particular, should have a choice of body shapes which better represent the real range of shapes healthy women come in. I’m a male player and I’ll probably always pick slim women myself, realism be d***ed , but I’m tired of this widespread cultural discrimination against the majority of women.
And before anyone comes up with the old ‘men are equally stereotyped’ nonsense, nope. I’m a scrawny scarecrow of a guy and I can find my exact body double just by playing a Sylvari, and not get too far off with humans either.
(edited by Focksbot.6798)
I posted a suggestion that I hope will reconcile those who thought this event was too frustrating with those who are worried about future events being too easy.
It’s been moved to the suggestions forum however:
I thought this deserved a thread of its own just for a very short discussion of a specific aspect. It’s been rightly pointed out that while many users (inc. myself) judged the clocktower too painful to bother with, others were ‘farming’ it. So it’s been suggested that there should be two difficulty settings, so that everyone feels invited to take part, without nerfing the challenge for others.
My suggestion instead (after sorting out the camera, player visibility and collision detection issues) would be a gradually increasing level of difficulty, so that people don’t feel completely thrown in the deep-end and spend more time waiting in a holding pen than playing an actual puzzle. As the puzzle became trickier, so too would their skills for handling it improve.
My feeling is that successful game design is all about teaching the player how to be good at playing your game. Many of you will have come to GW2 with ingrained skills from other, similar games. Others are trying MMOs for the first time. The key to not making it too ‘easy’ whilst also not excluding those who haven’t been taught how to play by other games is the difficulty ‘ramp’. Make it so that by the time the challenging content emerges, those beginner players know almost as much as those who are already experts.
This is exactly GW2’s approach in terms of its general game layout; they just need to transfer the philosophy to event items like the Clocktower.
FWIW, I don’t have anything against the designer whatsoever – it’s a skillfully constructed chunk of platforming.
It’s the game engine that made me give up after ten minutes, knowing that, as with many of you, it would take me hours and hours of attempts, during which time I would be constantly cursing the camera, collision detection, FOV and other stuff.
There are different kinds of challenge, different kinds of difficulty. I like having to think fast. I like having to think carefully. I like having to learn something. I like making gradual progress over a long period. I don’t like doing the same thing to the same general competency over and over and over whilst compensating for a dodgy set-up, under pressure of real-world time (ie. the event ending), just to proceed by an inch every hour. That’s too much like my real job, thanks.
Big props to Josh for taking the right lessons from the experience.
Imagine how much good ANet could do if they could harness that willingness to spend 7+ hours leaning a mundane jumping sequence for something truly productive and positive. Just imagine offering a reward and achievement for a game that involved getting the place names right on a map of the (real) world. Then one based on historical dates. GW2 players could become the most knowledgeable people in the world.
Example 1: The six worms and worm boss in TA
Example 2: The torch section of Rhiannon’s path in CoF
Example 3: Mark I and II golems in SE.I can keep going…but just looking at those three you can see how stopping, deciding where people will go and what they will do before running in mashing your face on the keyboard will make the encounters smoother and faster and leave you with less of a repair bill at the end of the dungeon.
These are dungeons, right? I’ve only done the first two so far, so can’t comment on these. All I’ll say is I’ll be very surprised that they saved deep tactical play just for dungeons.
You know those “tricks” you talk about? The ones where people know “stand here and have the thief do this in this room…”? You think they just made those up? No. That stuff comes from people that play and actually think about how to complete something and the information trickles down to all of the other players.
Sorry, but if we’re talking about the same thing, the point is: it’s negligible. Utterly negligible. I’ve worked out a bunch of interesting things to do with my ranger by combining different traits, moves etc. It makes so little difference – I could still take down most mobs with just auto-attack and key mashing while kiting. And the ones I couldn’t take down, or the groups I couldn’t take down, all my carefully worked out combos will buy me maybe a couple of extra seconds.
You want to narrow that down to single mobs? Groups of Wardens and Necros will chain KD players and can easily wipe a party in TA if a group just rushes in. The pack of Icebrood wolves at the beginning of HoTw will at best be a long chaotic fight, and at worst kill half the party if the group immediately aggoes without stopping to consider them.
’Don’t aggro a load of mobs at once’ is incredibly basic. It’s not what I’d consider a strategy or something that taxes me to think much.
I’m looking for something beyond: proceed carefully, try to aggro mobs one at a time if possible, take out weaker ones first, save AOEs for multiple foes, and then various strategies for burst damage or evasive action. We’ve all worked that out by level 30.
Oh, but what about smaller meta events that require communication beyond “3…2…1…”, well you can get the light passing or golem escort sections of Arah done on the first try or you can die a few dozen times hoping you get lucky.
Not done this either, so maybe just maybe they’re saving all the stuff I’m asking for for those sections of the game I haven’t encountered, despite roaming widely and moving gradually up to level 80. The two dungeons I’ve done involved a section with flame throwers on the wall, some snipers at the back and two bosses that you had to keep apart by throwing rocks at them. I’ve also done a puzzle in an underwater dungeon requiring people working together. But it seems to be spread awfully, awfully thin and rely on gimmicky, awkward mechanics (like the laborious process of picking up and throwing rocks), rather than inviting of strategy and fast reactions.
I am 31 as well and I remember when games where hard and werent spoon fed to us like what most these whiners want now days.
I’m 29 and I also remember those games. They were built like that because there was limited space on a tape or disk, and so unless you stalled players and made them repeat the same steps again and again and again, it was all over pretty quick.
We liked them then because there was nothing better. Now there is, and no one plays those games anymore. The games we remember best from that era, not coincidentally, are ones that got around the problem of disk space through the device of a high score, making the game essentially unwinnable, but challenging players to do a little better than their best every time.
With that in mind, we would probably all enjoy this challenge more if it were an infinite tower that challenged you to get higher every time. The fact that it’s simply a singular task with a win/lose binary that requires half of your waking hours or more to complete makes it something akin to one of those old games where no one ever got past level 1.
The content doesn’t fake difficulty. It forces players to stop for a second. Think. Adjust and engage. Who’s fault is it you are impatient or joined an impatient group and got shot in the face?
Come on, give me an example when stopping to think before engaging will make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome of the battle. The boss fights are so long and the effects of buffs so short that you’ll have used up every single trick up your sleeve – no rolls left, no stealth, no reflect, no nothing – before the health bars a quarter of the way down. Same with massed groups of mobs.
Sure, I might be missing something, but I’ve not seen a single youtube demonstration, post on these forums, wiki page or anything anywhere that suggests an actual cogent, clever, interesting strategy beyond the obvious “Here’s a neat trick that will get you out of a jam once every three minutes.”
It doesn’t help that the collision detection in battles works on a completely different basis to the visual representation of what’s happening, so you frequently won’t know if you’re ‘out of range’ or ‘obstructed’ until your weapon has actually made contact with an opponent, and likewise be hit by an AOE or projectile that looked like it was nowhere near you.
This is an incomplete definition, as it is missing a key concept: fun. I voluntarily overcome obstacles every day to attain a paycheck. That is called work, which is typically far from a game.
A game isn’t the same thing as fun, although there is an overlap. A lot of people play chess as a serious test of their mental resources, not as a diversion or for amusement. Similarly, I can have fun drinking with friends, but it isn’t a game.
Your job is excluded by the definition I gave because, strictly speaking, it isn’t voluntary. You have to work to eat. If you had a regular income regardless but still went to a job, then it would be more like a game, and it would affect your expectations of the job as well.
The prevailing negativity in game forums is appalling.
You make a lot of good points, but I wonder if proper analysis yields a more complex explanation than ‘people are whiny and spoilt’. Games like GW2 demand a huge investment of time, and it might be argued that players enter into an unspoken contract, whereby they are led to expect (and enter under the assumption) that the game will provide a challenge at the correct level, the correct level being one that puts them in the right mental ‘zone’ where they are employing all of their faculties in order to secure a positive outcome.
GW2 complaints fall into three broad categories: something is boring because it’s too easy, frustrating because it’s too hard, or not worth it because the reward is negligible. The first two complaints are complaints that GW2 is not delivering on its implied promise to provide the right level of challenge – it’s falling one side or the other of the right zone. Now, you can say (as you do) that it’s impossible to please anyone, but I’ve got a strong feeling that truly inspired game design moulds its audience and players to play at similar levels. The trouble, of course, is when you’re simply borrowing tropes from an established genre whilst also trying to introduce that genre to new people.
The third complaint is almost unique to MMOs, and carries with it the expectation that nothing is fun for its own ends, that its justification lies in the reward. This is still in part a failure of the game, since if it truly was providing the right level of challenge/fun, people wouldn’t worry about the reward – in fact, they’re generously saying, “Hey, I don’t mind that you failed at the fun part; I just expect you to compensate me for my time some other way.”
feeling compelled to invest time and effort into something we’ve already invested time and effort into…isn’t this the sunk cost fallacy?
Think you’re right about this. It’s at least part of the motivation.
Speaking for myself, what I’m a little scared by is this: I tried the puzzle. I quickly assessed that it would take me a long time to complete and that I wouldn’t have much fun doing it. I also realised that I was going to get infuriated by the smog of people, camera, collision detection etc. So I stopped.
But now I feel like I want to go back and do it. Why? Why is there some kind of urge in me to do something I would not enjoy, for no reward? I feel like it’s the ghost of all those years playing Tomb Raiders and console platformers – something deep in me associates completion of the puzzle with completion of a narrative.
I cracked up at the “8+ hours” bit.
I can’t give you impenetrable logic as to why this just seems so crazy. It just makes me think of Angry Video Game Nerd and how every single one of his demonstrations of ludicrously difficult game design could be countered by someone coming along and saying, “Dude, it’s okay, after 8+ hours, I managed to beat it.”
In the old days, of course, that was the only way to make games last. We only had tiny amounts of space for levels, so you had to make sure that the player had to sink hours into getting past just one screen, otherwise it would be over too soon.
All of us are Sisyphus, fated to push a boulder up a hill and watch it roll back down forever.
OK, I’ve done my complaint thread. This isn’t a complaint thread. Let’s talk about this seriously.
I’ve seen many comments along the lines of: “I did not have fun doing this but I felt I had to do it for the achievement.” “When I complete this, I won’t be happy – it will be more like having a tumour removed.”
Then there are those who say, “Quit whining. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.”
Let’s talk free will for a second here. If a person feels they ‘have’ to do something, but is getting no reward or compensation from it and is not enjoying it, what has happened to make them feel thus compelled?
The definition of a game has been put something like this: “a serious of obstacles we attempt to overcome voluntarily”. So what happens when we don’t feel it’s entirely voluntary? Is it a game anymore?
I’m just thinking of the sinister applications. Just imagine that instead of designing a clocktower, ANet had designed a mini-game/puzzle which involved, I dunno, say, high-speed maths. Sums come up and you have to use you character to jump on tiles that spell out the answers. And imagine that it turned out that by doing these sums in the game, players were actually doing the real life accountancy work of a firm of accountants.
I know it’s a bit of an awkward example, but refine it as you wish. Don’t you think it’s possible to imagine a situation whereby, as players, we actually end up doing the kind of work that other people are actually being paid for? And many people wouldn’t even be enjoying it – they’d be doing it because they felt compelled to by the structure of the game. The playerbase would effectively be enslaved.
I’m not trying to make a specific point – this is more an open topic for discussion. But if you really want this post to have something you can simply agree or disagree with, I’ll add this: don’t just dismiss people who feel aggravated by this puzzle as ‘whingers’, because there are interesting issues surrounding computer gaming and psychology.
It grinds on me that I have an achievement that I cannot complete. I wanted to stop after two hours, but those 10 points on my Hero panel eat at me, so I put in two more hours.
This is how game addiction works. People don’t do it because it’s fun; they do it because they feel mysteriously compelled.
Agree with OP.
Once you’ve played through most of your personal story and put a bit of effort into learning what different things do, you learn how to read an encounter, and every readout is either:
1) I/we can win this without thinking much; or:
2) It’s impossible to win this without more people/better gear.
That goes for WvW, PvP, PvE, dungeons – the lot. There’s not a single point in the game where it’s necessary to stop, think and strategise in order to change the outcome of a battle. You will win or you will lose. When people say certain things are difficult, all they mean is that it takes a long time or requires a full team with maxed out gear. They don’t mean it requires synergy or strategy.
And no, I’m not a WOW player. I’m a TF2 player. More specifically, I’m a TF2 player who bought GW2 because I liked the idea of building a character all of my own and exploring a vast fantasy world, but now I find I’m seriously missing that feeling you get in TF2 of going into a battle knowing you need your wits about you, being able to recognise after most defeats how you could do better next time, being able to pull off amazing lucky escapes and incredibly satisfying kills. GW2, unfortunately, is just mobbing and whittling.
If I did beat it tomorrow, I wouldn’t be happy. It’d feel like having a tumor removed, probably.
In all seriousness, there are studies of the way games and developers essentially use advanced psychological manipulation to convince people they need to do things they don’t need to do. It’s not that they’re evil people who are trying to cause grief; it’s just that games are, in some respects, a complex dark art masquerading as light entertainment.
This means there are a lot of potentially amazing positive uses for games, but it also, unfortunately, leads to what you’re experiencing here. I’ve been there. Eight hours doing something, not feeling excited or engaged, just bored and frustrated with yourself, yet determined not to be ‘beaten’. Then depressed when you think of what you could have done with those eight hours.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day someone successfully sued a company like ArenaNet for putting them through such an experience. I’m not advocating that as a solution or a good idea, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
The problem I basically keep seeing is this.
1. Everyone enjoys the Halloween event
2. Everyone wants to be a completionist and do everything in the event.
3. Some people are good at jumping puzzles/some people are not
4. The prior are happy, the later are not
Sorry, not quite right. It goes more like this:
1. Everyone enjoys the Halloween event
2. Everyone wants to be a completionist and do everything in the event.
3. Some people are prepared to spend anything up to 17 hours (based on the posts here) repeating the same awkward sequence of movements every minute or so in order to complete it. Others feel this is a form of (albeit self-inflicted) torture.
4. The prior are happy, the latter are not