The dart traps aren’t invisible, nor hidden. They blend in the surroundings but will never escape to a keen eye. The whole point of the dart traps is for you to slow down and start analyzing your surroundings. You can’t dash through that section at full speed and come here calling it bad design when it kills you.
Not to mention that ninjas and dart traps rarely are present at the same time.
You may have missed the bit where I noted that I saw them but they killed me anyway. They’re not hard to spot, though they make a long level even longer. It’s that they’re placed in ways that make them hard to avoid even if you know they’re there, and in the instances where enemies and dart traps are placed together the combat system is essentially built so the enemies will knock you into the dart trap.
I guess they managed to capture that aspect of 8-bit gaming, so well done.
It’s instructive to compare SAB to Rayman Legends, which has plenty of tricky traps as well. The problem with instant-death traps is that, in a 2D game, the designer can guarantee the player can see the trap coming. I blew an entire continue coin dodging into traps I knew were there but couldn’t see at the time. (And another continue coin or so on traps that would activate underneath me but would still hit me, and a couple of memorable deaths where I got between dart traps with no way out.) It’s especially problematic given that GW2’s combat engine assumes mobility, and you need a certain amount of room to fight the assassins.
I’m particularly incensed because I didn’t have a lot of trouble spotting the dart traps, except for the one between two push blocks you can’t see from the angle it kills you at, but died anyway, over and over again. It killed a lot of the goodwill I had for SAB, although I’m told that now I have the glove I can skip two thirds of level 2 and cut it down it a sane size. But the same design sensibilities are making future levels, and I’d prefer it if it felt like one of the good platformers of the era rather than the ones that are only remembered due to shared trauma.
(edited by Merus.9475)
I feel like we really should have believed we understood Scarlet’s motivations, particularly because it’s entirely in character for Scarlet to lie about why she wants what she wants.
The biggest problem with Scarlet is the assumption that the driving need for our characters was to stop Scarlet, but for many players the driving need was ‘who is Scarlet?’ The story pacing is very different for those two motivations, and if the driving need is ‘who is Scarlet?’ then the story on the website ends up being critical plot information.
I’m disappointed in general with how little environmental storytelling ArenaNet does – particularly with a vehicle like the Super Adventure Box, where the environments are generated based partly on Moto’s subconscious. Why couldn’t we go ‘behind the scenes’ or, even better, drop into an 8-bit representation of Moto’s struggles? ArenaNet wants to put the plot into the world, but the current approaches aren’t always effective.
With the current rating system, we can easily tell when a server that has been matched up against a much more effective server has turned in an above-average performance – their rating goes up.
Why not reward that? It’d take the sting out of losing a matchup where a server was outclassed in terms of coverage.
Servers that ‘beat the spread’ – they lose the matchup, but have their rating go up anyway – should receive some form of a bonus, tied to the size of the rating jump. What it is could be anything, but it should go to all accounts that meaningfully participated (probably something like ‘anyone who ranked up that week’).
This could be tied into the incoming league system – there could be an achievement track that contributes progress to the season meta, or even amplifies the end-of-season reward.
Instead of allowing players to carry the orb, have an NPC escort event spawn that heads to an appropriate altar.
Holding an orb would provide nice QoL buffs in the borderlands, combat or supply buffs in EB, and if they hold all 3 orbs, Stonemist becomes much more attractive. The idea is that teams who hold the orbs will be encouraged to capitalise by taking EB by storm, which will leave them more vulnerable in the borderlands.
With the new matchup system, uneven matchups are much more likely. It can be pretty demoralising to lose a matchup because the other server is way out of your league, and it’s confusing when that server loses ranking and your server moves up because they didn’t beat the spread.
So why don’t we factor that into the scoring?
When a matchup is created, each team will have all their scores handicapped by a factor that reflects what Glicko thinks each server should score if their rating is accurate. A server that’s expected to stomp the other servers earns far less points from objectives than teams that are expected to lose in a landslide.
Internally, the scoring stays the same (and the raw scores might be available via API or via hover in game) but what players see is that whoever has the highest score goes up in ratings, and whoever has the lowest score goes down. It’ll also mean that servers who rally against a mightier force and beat Glicko’s prediction get to see themselves actually win, instead of get kerbstomped but go up in the ratings.
However, this also means that one week towers might be worth 23 points while another week they’re worth 4, and that servers who field a massive force might see themselves actually lose because they didn’t win enough to impress Glicko, even though they held much more territory.
Why rares specifically? There’s already a demand for them. There’s far less demand for uncommons and masterworks.
I have a Windows 7 desktop and a Macbook Air, both running Chrome. On the desktop, I don’t need to log in to read the forums, and my login is remembered.
On my laptop, whenever I try and read the forums (and, more irritatingly, when I follow a link from an external site to the forums), I’m prompted to login. This login pushes me to the front page, forgetting that I was trying to read a specific thread, and forgets me after a few hours.
Is this inconsistency a bug or intended? What’s going on here?
Not really. Winner of the Tier moves up, the loser moves down, and the middle stays. This happens every week. Worst case is you play the same teams every other week if the previous week’s loser always wins and the previous week’s winner always loses. Best case is servers make a big push for a couple weeks and climb the ladder. Slack for a couple weeks and you may wake up in Tier 8.
No complex math involved. Not sure why this wouldn’t be the solution selected………
There’s a few reasons: firstly the constant kerbstomp-being kerbstomped that would result is hardly an improvement. The problem isn’t with the rating system, it’s with the tier-based matchups. Secondly it’s pretty likely, given the design of EB, that the matchups are still going to put the highest-ranked team in green and the lowest-ranked team in red, and part of the goal would be, I imagine, to have most servers go through red, green and blue so WvW stops being a blocker for world completion. Thirdly, your plan breaks down with the lowest and highest ranked servers. If you keep the tiers and junk the rating system, the highest and lowest matches are going to involve the same two servers basically every week.
Because when ANet find it, they check to see who’s been milking it and ban them?
It looks like maybe players who can’t handle an entire zerg of enemies on the screen at once are seeing worse performance because previously the game wasn’t even trying to draw them all. Now it is, they’re chugging even more heavily. So it’s a two-pronged problem: streaming player movements, and making sure the game client can display all that data given limited resources.