Guild Wars 2

I’m not talking about the Shooting Gallery not being fun, but about the implementation not being anywhere near how they announced it. They describe gameplay elements as well as storytelling elements that just aren’t there. That write-up gave me certain expectations about the “adventures” that weren’t met by a long shot.

They’re just a pole you click for a mini-game. Some of the time.

Which brings me to the announced availability of adventures, which is no small thing, far from it. Also nothing but misinformation.

I said I didn’t see them advertised. I knew about them, and I thought they would be fun side content. I had no idea there would be 15 and they would be insufferable, and ties into character progression. They made them sound like fun, with some story integration that would make them seem “adventurous”.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/adventuring-forth/

Compare that with the Shooting Gallery we actually got. I know, it’s sad.

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t blame me for not being informed if the information they provided that I did pursue to inform myself turned out to be false.

You’re moving the goalposts. I was saying I never saw the “adventures” advertised. They either are or they aren’t.

Whether or not they were discussed on places that don’t interest me has no bearing on that. Furthermore, every iota I found about it on the guildwars2.com blog/news were lies and misinformation. Heck, they made the shooting range adventure look interesting in a news article.

Here’s another bit of misinformation:

As you progress through outposts and event content in the world, more Adventures will open up. This means that when you or other players clean up events in an area, there will still be readily available, on-demand content to experience, regardless of the current state of the open world.

So I have to scour the internet for information and also try to guess what is true and what isn’t?

I don’t frequent either Dulfy or Reddit.

You mean the blog that said they were on-demand challenges?

I read the news blog. I don’t watch any video at all. Video is a dreadful way of taking in information for me because I read much faster than people can talk and I can’t stand to listen to most people anyway.

Interestingy, this is what the blog said this about adventures:

“By their nature, dynamic events are not always available and occasionally have some downtime. Guild Wars 2 has many content opportunities and challenges beyond events, but most are well hidden. Those that aren’t well hidden tend to be available only once per character.

Adventures are the next level of repeatable, on-demand content challenges in the open world."

Terrible misinformation. “On-demand”? As opposed to the dynamic events that “are not always available”?

What a joke.

Joining games in progress can go either way. I’ve joined games on the side of the obvious winners. I guess if a game starts 4 vs 4 and most of one team leave, the empty spaces on either team can be filled by new players after the rebalance.

I tried to play this thing for real, but after experiencing how disastrously bad this is implemented, I just play two games a day, for the achievement. I don’t attack people other than to interrupt them for another achievement, or to attract their attention if no one is attacking me. Because I need to be attacked so I can farm health for yet another achievement. Well, I only farm health now because I’ve got my 20 interrupts.

I’m close to my next multiple of 5,000 AP, so I’m going after achievements a little more aggressively right now. And frankly, farming health globs while the only other player still left in the game tries to kill me for the win for a solid 18 minutes straight is somehow quite entertaining.

Well, you learn something new every day.

Could’ve done without this insight in self-indulgent kittenry though. Definitely.

Why would I know anything about streaming websites? Is that a requirement nowadays? I know ANet does some video streaming on what they call twitch.tv, but I never watch that. Is twitchcom another name for that? I’m not alone in not knowing twitchcom. Google didn’t know it either when I looked it up.

Your side note is very amusing.

Twitchcom? I don’t even know what that is.

They were advertised? I hadn’t seen that. To me, they were unexpected, but not in the form of a pleasant surprise. Quite the opposite.

No… I go there to do what I want to do and what everyone else is doing doesn’t interest me at all. The last 2 times (out of a total of 3) I went there, the event failed, and I was perfectly fine with that. I got 4 achievements out of it and that was for the “work” I did. No one else contributed to that or carried me.

Vargamonth.2047:

I can hardly see how that’s supposed to be a win for those who like adventures, as I see no difference to what we have right now.

If you like adventures, you’ve already won. There’s 15 of them.

Learning the mechanics to a trivial and rather boring open world event that lasts a few minutes is a bit of a waste of time in my book. I’m perfectly content to let other people figure it out and do the heavy lifting while I drop by a few times to finish some achievements, and then never again.

The whole “take out the breakbar when it appears” mechanic that’s so prevalent on bosses since HoT is rather stupid. It adds nothing but artificial difficulty. “How long does it take before enough people learn to press the right button at the right time”, that’s the whole of the challenge . It reminds me more of the experiments they do with monkeys to have them operate simple machinery for food rewards, than of interesting game play.

The wisest path would’ve been to not add these so called “adventures” at all and instead add some more actual MMO PvE content to the tiny smattering of it we got.

maddoctor.2738:

A game trying to get players out of what they are already doing and presenting the players with new and unique challenges is a good game, not a bad one. A game that keeps players inside their comfort zone all the time and never tries something new is a boring/stale game.

It’s not an either/or proposition. Adding some challenges is fine, but there’s nothing stopping you from adding some “comfort” for the people who just want that and who have come to expect it of this game.

HoT is just too sparse on content to offer a variety of it, which is a problem in and of itself.

cranos.5913:

On top of that they negated all progress to pre-HoT fractal players since all the skins, including the gold ones are stupidly easy to get, destroying all value it had.

You must be playing a different game. I’ve done 5 dailies almost every day since they launched HoT. I’m still only at 7 golden relics and most of those are from achievements. At my current rate of getting golden relics/weapons from drops/chests, I’ll need another 3 months before I can forge the one weapon I want.

The only change I’m expecting is that next year, some aspect of the mini game won’t be working because of some general change in the game engine that they didn’t test for dragonball.

Yep, and now that you know that, next time you won’t volunteer, and you’ll be forced to move. And then you’ll lose interest in even trying to win. Like so many of us before.

Another thing about the breakbar: if you don’t have the Shatterer targeted when it goes into “break mode”, it’s probably going to be over before you get in position to contribute. When you’re being hounded by some elite branded, for example, the big dragon doesn’t come first anymore. You deal with them. And if you need CC to deal with them, so you don’t die, even if your CC’s cooldown is 3 quarters of the way done, the breakbar may come and go before it’s fully recharged. CC skills take a lot of time to cooldown.

It’s not just that the breakbar is too tough, it can also be argued that it’s not active long enough to give everyone a decent opportunity to contribute.

I hate the phrase “supporting the game”. A good game doesn’t need “support”. A good game will make money because it offers value for it. A proper, successful game will have a “supplier-customer” relationship with its players, not a “beneficiary-benefactor” one.

Having said that, I’ll throw in that I never spent a penny on gems. Because I don’t support games, I only spend money on what has value to me. As to HoT, it has a whole lot less than I expected.

That’s what I do, 2 per day, and I spend those “farming” health and interrupts. I only attack people to alert them to my presence. I need someone to damage me to be able to pick up health.

I interrupted 2 people with one kick earlier. That was awesome.

Galen Grey.4709:

Manasa Devi.7958:

Vayne.8563:

Manasa Devi.7958:

What’s sad is that there’s no longer even a pretense that they care about the players. Content that takes 2 hours without even a player’s choice in the matter of when they want to start their 2 hour sessions, that’s insane. There’s no other word for it.

In the age of the rise of on-demand media, this is an abomination I really can’t get my head around. I’d post what I really thought of it, but I’d get infracted.

That’s just ridiculous. They don’t care about their players because they made a meta event that’s long that’s liked by a whole lot of people? That doesn’t make sense.

When you thoughtlessly (or maliciously, I don’t know which) create content that anyone with a shred of common sense could predict will rub a lot of people the wrong way, you certainly don’t care about your players. If some do like it, that’s fortunate, but I file that under “even a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn once in a while”.

You’re way oversimplifying the issue.

You say “When you thoughtlessly (or maliciously, I don’t know which) create content that anyone with a shred of common sense could predict will rub a lot of people the wrong way, you certainly don’t care about your players.” okey fair enough but lets take a minute to look at the opposite scenario…. If you created content just for people who enjoy short bursts of play and always ignore people that like long stretches of content does that make you caring of players? Cause I dont know but seems to me when you create some content for everybody you’re being way more caring towards players then if you had to ignore a subset of players all the time!

Dont forget, this is an MMO, millions of players play it, some players like X some players like Y and more often than not X is opposite of Y.

Its physically impossble for any developer to create content thats tailored for every kind of player. A caring developer splits their effort between content for all their players. Naturally they cannot do it all at one go but its unfair in my opinion to say they just dont care about their player cause they happen to release some of their content targeted at player who like Y when you enjoy X when overwhelmingly the game still happens to be made of X.

They could easily have created content for every type of player that likes some content in the original game. The expansion fails to deliver variation. They pretty much knew the types of players they had after hosting the game for over 3 years. They chose to ignore several segments of them.

If there was enough there to enjoy to warrant the price tag, I’d have no complaints. I knew I wasn’t going to go into the raid. I knew I wasn’t going to do the new sPvP mode. I haven’t complained about either because I knew going in that it wasn’t for me.

The problem is, the content that I thought was for me, turns out not to be for me either. The open world PvE content is pathetically scarce and single-mindedly tied to timers I abhor. The original game wasn’t like that and I had no inkling that the expansion would depart from it so drastically.

Also, if I’d say that the fractal revamp is also on the light side, I’d be describing it too favorably. It’s just a repackaging, there’s nothing to “expand” it. The only thing the expansion does with regard to fractals is to lock the rewards and split the player base. It’s not “buy the expansion and gain access to exciting new content” If only. It’s “don’t buy the expansion and our fractal revamp will inconvenience you!”

The precursor crafting is also completely void of new content. It’s basically nothing but shopping lists of old content with some excursions to HoT content thrown in for good measure. Neither fractals nor precursor crafting offers anything new and worthwhile.

I dare say they made no effort at all to appeal to all existing types of players even though they were acutely aware of them. If they had, there would be more in the game to show it.

This is the zero effort festival. Just some new items in the envelopes and it’s a wrap.

Coulter.2315:

Manasa Devi.7958:

Coulter.2315:

Manasa Devi.7958:

When you thoughtlessly (or maliciously, I don’t know which) create content that anyone with a shred of common sense could predict will rub a lot of people the wrong way, you certainly don’t care about your players. If some do like it, that’s fortunate, but I file that under “even a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn once in a while”.

Can you please post the poll you took which seperates people who agree with you into “a lot of people” and those who don’t agree with you into “some do like it (but rare).”

“(but rare)”

Your words. Don’t ask me to prove your words.

Oh sorry do blind chickens hit with startling accuracy? How disingenuous of you to even try to claim I was putting words in your mouth, paraphrasing yes, that is EXACTLY what you meant.

You read the metaphor the wrong way. Creating expansions is the thing I’m equating to the pecking of kernels. The players aren’t the kernels . It’s not as if they’re coming after every player individually. If only, I’d have told them. What I meant was, they created something dreadful and luckily for them some people like it regardless and any quantification you read into that is just you wanting to read that. It’s absolutely not in my writing.

Coulter.2315:

I love the bit at the end where you say that you live under a bridge though.. Really makes your opinion have weight.

My presentation doesn’t affect the veracity of what I’m writing. Every opinion I express is sincere.

Vayne.8563:

This is a ridiculous overstatement. I’ve gone to the movies to watch movies that require more than two hours to see. Most people who see movies, watch them in one sitting. They don’t watch them 20 minutes at a time. They make the time, they watch the movie. This isn’t some evil plan created by Dr. No. It’s an event chain in a video game. That’s all it is. It’s an event chain that’s meant to be the epic end fight of the expansion. Is it long? Sure. Is that evil, no? Does it mean they don’t care. No.

Movies are a different medium that has adhered to the “show at 8pm and 10pm” for a century. Games never have. Useless comparison. Incidentally, I haven’t seen the inside of a cinema in almost 3 years. I watch my movies at home. On my own time.

And “It’s an event chain that’s meant to be the epic end fight of the expansion”? Really? There are two hour long event chains every step of the way in this expansion. There’s nothing else. And some of them don’t even make sense. Take Verdant Brink. It’s all so arbitrary. Camps are only assaulted at night. Sure, but when did Mordrem become nocturnal? Oh wait, they aren’t, we also fight them during the day. They only pointlessly hang around during the day but fight just as effectively. Is there any reason other than “designers want to tie things to day/night cycle”? Why do we automatically lose all base camps when day breaks? None of it makes any sense at all, unless you suspend your disbelief really, really tightly and assume everyone in Verdant Brink is in a perpetual Groundhog Day. But I guess it’s “epic” and it’s got “loot” so who cares?

Vayne.8563:

They probably thought most people wouldn’t do it thousands of times, and they could make the meta longer, because people could find the time to do it. Even people who work have days off. It was an oversight that probably affects a relatively small percentage of the population. If you’re one of them, I feel for you, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing to do.

I don’t know what they probably thought. Your guess is as good as mine.

Vayne.8563:

Because there are people who do like it. It’s a popular and populated event. You wouldn’t by any chance of the numbers of people who don’t like it compared to the people who do, would you?

I don’t know what that means.

Vayne.8563:

It’s sort of funny because all the world bosses are on timers and you have to be there when they’re there to do them. If you can’t make it for certain world bosses, you can’t do those bosses. And though some people did complain about that, world bosses are still one of the more popular features of this game.

I don’t do world bosses except when people ask me to join them and I’m not doing anything at the time, or they added a new reward you need to make progress on something else to them, like they do every few updates. Do you think they’ve taken into account how many people don’t do world bosses before they decided to put the entire expansion on a ridiculous schedule?

Vayne.8563:

Just because a design decision negatively affects a percentage of people (and I maintain that decision isn’t killing a large percentage of people), doesn’t mean Anet doesn’t care. At the very worst it was an oversight. They were TRYING to provide an epic experience. That’s all this was.

You don’t make these kinds of oversights when you care. Anyone could tell you that these schedules won’t sit well with many people. Design decisions like this can only spring from indifference. And indifference is the opposite of caring.

Vayne.8563:

Unless you have evidence to the contrary I won’t be replying to you again on this.

Please get off that high horse. You’re embarrassing the poor animal because it realizes that you don’t have any evidence either.

Vayne.8563:

Manasa Devi.7958:

What’s sad is that there’s no longer even a pretense that they care about the players. Content that takes 2 hours without even a player’s choice in the matter of when they want to start their 2 hour sessions, that’s insane. There’s no other word for it.

In the age of the rise of on-demand media, this is an abomination I really can’t get my head around. I’d post what I really thought of it, but I’d get infracted.

That’s just ridiculous. They don’t care about their players because they made a meta event that’s long that’s liked by a whole lot of people? That doesn’t make sense.

When you thoughtlessly (or maliciously, I don’t know which) create content that anyone with a shred of common sense could predict will rub a lot of people the wrong way, you certainly don’t care about your players. If some do like it, that’s fortunate, but I file that under “even a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn once in a while”.

Vayne.8563:

It’s a long meta, which took a long time to design. They build a whole map just for that meta. From one point of view, in my mind the most reasonable, is that they wanted to give people the feeling of an epic events and for me, it is an epic event. Lots of people seem to like it.

And lots of people seem to dislike it. When you build something starting from a flawed concept, the result will be bad, no matter how painstakingly you put your heart and soul into it. It’s actually sad that so much obvious work went into something so inherently flawed.

Vayne.8563:

They cared enough about the players to make an event chain epic. Those horrible terrible Anet people.

No, they didn’t care, or they’d have considered the very, very, very obvious problems 2 hour meta-cycles would bring with them. They didn’t care enough to think of different mechanics for different maps. They made something up and went with it, completely indifferent to how many people were sure to receive it. It’s not rocket science that these rubbish 2 hour cycles wouldn’t work for many people.

Vayne.8563:

They used to be totally caring about us, and make really short events so we wouldn’t get hurt. Now they want us all to destroy our bodies so we can’t play their game any more and spend gems.

Going from “Hey, haven’t you been playing too long? You’ve been here for an hour.” to “Hey, better get online when we tell you to and play for 2 hours straight!”, something sure changed.

Vayne.8563:

You and I live in very different universes apparently.

I live in a sane universe where games are supposed to bend to my whims, not the other way around. How is yours?

Well, 2 runs today, and 2 failures. But I finished 3 achievements, so I’m not complaining. There’s so much more time to work on them when the event goes on for the full 15 minutes.

What’s sad is that there’s no longer even a pretense that they care about the players. Content that takes 2 hours without even a player’s choice in the matter of when they want to start their 2 hour sessions, that’s insane. There’s no other word for it.

In the age of the rise of on-demand media, this is an abomination I really can’t get my head around. I’d post what I really thought of it, but I’d get infracted.

The minimum time required for one complete play-through of the content that the maps are completely built around, is longer than it takes GW1 to remind you that you should ask yourself if you haven’t been playing too long.

Sad.

Vayne.8563:

If I want achievements I hunt achievements. If I want skins I play for those. If I want collections I work on collections. If I want every alt with ascended trinkets, then weapons then armor, I can work on that.

The problem with HoT is, it doesn’t add a significant enough amount of varied content to make all those pursuits interesting.

I was just in a map that failed. It was glorious. I got 18 lightning dodges out of it in one run.

The achievements sabotage the event. Having people line up at the turrets/mortars, or doing nothing other than gliding to dodge lightning regardless of what needs to be done, none of that helps taking down the dragon.

It’s Tequatl’s tail all over again.

If you post about this 7.11.etc. error, you get merged into this thread.

In my experience, the system is terrible. One of the many black marks against HoT.

I did the first tier for Dawn. Colossal waste of time. A lot of WP-ing around the world and standing around waiting for specific events to spawn. Events I’ve done dozens of times before. Often waiting 20-30 minutes for events that last no more than a minute, if that. It was one of the most boring things I’ve done in this game.

It would be a fine system at launch, in august 2012, when everything involved with it would’ve been new and exiting. Now? It’s a dreadful bore, waiting around to repeat content I’ve chewed all the flavor out of long ago.

And then I saw the materials required to continue. I laughed, and bought Dawn on the TP. 650 gold at the time.

My shark is called Feargal.

jeezlaweez.6810:

Elden Arnaas.4870:

I find it both amusing and sad, the numerous people who have (in this thread and the other) basically said “I sat there spamming 1 like I always do, and it didn’t really seem different to me.”
?!?
So you sit there, making no real effort, and not really contributing.(like always) And you expect the event to seem different and better? Hmmm.

Well I’m here to tell ya. There are people that organize and do the pre-events – while you sit there waiting and bored.(and maybe complaining about the pre’s taking so long)
And there people that spam buffs and boons, and use CC when required, and heal people and rez people, and use unique event mechanics and accomplish objectives within the event.
– While you sit there spamming 1, bored out of your skull, and wondering why the heck Anet can’t make better events that are fun. And wondering why the boss is taking forever to die.
But don’t worry-
We will always be there to carry you.
And seriously – stop wondering why the events are so dull and boring, when you can’t even be bothered to make a proper effort.

I have enjoyed the new Shatterer each time. I have always found plenty to do. And I have found it fun and rewarding. And I’m not alone. Why don’t you join us in making a proper effort? Or at least quit wondering why you’re so bored and the event is taking forever.

slow clap

The fight is awesome. The rest is said by this person.

Well, opinions differ. Any fight where my participation doesn’t matter much, cannot ever be awesome in my eyes. That’s why I will never put any energy in events like these except to pursue whatever little gratification I do find there. In this case, I’ll grab some achievements. And then I’ll never go there again. Like I do with every other “awesome” world boss.

They’re also tricky because you often can’t tell where you’re supposed to land. Take one complication away and the whole thing becomes a bit easier.

Glider deployment has worked fine for me every time, no matter how much was going on, opening exactly when and where I want it at the highest point of the launcher arc. I thought it was a client side thing nowadays anyway since a few patches ago, but I may be mistaken. If so, perhaps you guys are experiencing graphics/processing power based lag.

The launcher/turret/mortar achievement is blatantly stupid. How early does one need to arrive (and not participate in pre-events) to have any chance to use a turret or mortar?

About the break bar… Perhaps it will break a little easier when half the people present aren’t spending every second of the event running back to the launcher and gliding to finish the “medic” and “lightning dodging” achievements. The achievements invite suboptimal play. (As is quite usual for new content).

What I do with these kinds of dives where it’s tricky hitting the water and nothing else on the way down, of which there are several now, is to go find the landing spot first, place myself at the center of it, and then place my personal waypoint there. It at least gives you something concrete to aim for.

There’s no obligation for criticism to be constructive. That’s a demand made up by people who can’t deal with hearing bad stuff about themselves or something they created.

“I liked the original game but I think the direction they took with HoT is rubbish”, that’s a lot more meaningful than not posting anything at all.

And how can you be constructive about things you absolutely loathe?

“Well, the one thing I like about the chak weapons, is that you don’t have to use those skins if you don’t want to. That’s a nice degree of freedom.”

“Bladed armor? It’s indistinguishable from armors I do like if I squint until everything on my screen is a giant blur.”

“Those meta-event timers? They’re very punctual, well done. How about using them to determine when to get the cake out of the oven instead, and make event progress tied to player effort instead of the real world clock?”

If I want something, I can usually get it in a reasonable amount of time. The problem with HoT is, it has very little that I want. I don’t want the new armors. I don’t want the new legendaries nor do I want any other of the new weapon skins. HoT offers no rewards I care about. I look at the map currency merchant and I see nothing even remotely interesting.

It’s no surprise. I’m very particular about what I like with regard to visuals. Let’s face it, HoT offers very little in the way of new skins. If there’s hardly anything new at all, chances are, there’ll be nothing in it for me.

The new PvE stuff rubs me the wrong way as well. Every substantial bit of gameplay content is tied to timers. I don’t play on anyone’s schedule but my own whimsy. Games are light entertainment, they have no business demanding when I need to log on to get anything remotely interesting out of them. The notion is preposterous.

So, no rewards and gameplay I can’t be bothered to submit myself to. Yeah, I dislike HoT.

I don’t hate the game, but I have an intense dislike for HoT.

Moa Lith.8140:

I’ve seen a “Juvenile Delinquent”, but I don’t remember for which pet it was.

I use that name for an arctodus. I’m assuming I’m not the only one who came up with that name so you probably saw someone else’s pet.

What’s funny is, I occasionally get whispers asking me where to tame a delinquent.

I just stretched out a game to last 14 minutes, the vast majority of that time consisting of 4 people trying to kill me to get to 500.

I was just farming health and interrupts. Hiding around corners, kicking people in the face when they found me and then taking off on a run picking up health almost as fast as they could take it away. I’m sure they didn’t have fun. But hey, make a kitten game with kitten achievements, and guess what? People will have a kitten experience.

It was four against one, for many many minutes. How is that even possible? Isn’t there a forced rebalance?

Leohart.4610:

Manasa Devi.7958:

“Why do people in general complain too much?”

Why do people give a kitten what other people do? And how much is too much? How many complaints may people file without breaking out of the acceptable norm for amount of complaints?

Because it can affect them. Too much is when it’s common occurrence. Same question as the last except quantity is considered.

Because enough complaints will cause change, i.e. Anet address those problems. Too much is when ArenaNet takes action. Same question as the last except quantity is considered.

kEking hrd
nt

Actually, that last paragraph there, that’s why I complain on these forums. ANet has a history of giving in if people complain often and insistently enough. Complaining effects change. That’s the answer to the question posed in this thread.

“Why do people in general complain too much?”

Why do people give a kitten what other people do? And how much is too much? How many complaints may people file without breaking out of the acceptable norm for amount of complaints?

Just as boring as the original fight except there’s more mess on my screen.

The achievements are disappointing. Many of them amount to “fight the Shatterer often”. All of those could be folded into a single achievement that’s actually called “I fought the Shatterer often”.

I agree, the break bar seems much too steep. I know I’m not helping with my single CC option on my character of choice, but I’ll be kittened if I’m going to change my build for a 5 minute world boss that I’m not even enjoying much. The game needs to account for people running weapons with little CC on them. They can’t possibly balance this for a full map of people fully optimized for CC. That’s not viable for an open world encounter.

I’ve disliked the “personal aesthetics” of this game from day 1. Game looks gorgeous, except the stuff you’re meant to wear and swing at enemies. The vast majority of it looks either horrible or ridiculous and often a pathetic combination of both. Deciding upon looks for my characters usually involves finding the least ugly option instead of the best looking option.

Two matches a day for the daily. Spend all your time working on the achievements and kitten anyone who wants to actually play to win because it wasn’t designed to make that an attractive option to pursue.

That’s how I played it last year, it’s how I play it this year.