Guild Wars 2

Just wish there was more people who’re as upset as I am because I’ve got less reason to play this game now and there’s nothing I can do about it. :/

So now at the end of the day, according to you Vayne, this daily mini game rotation likely only exists to gauge the current playability of all the mini games. How many people will go and play them on the day they’re scheduled. Mind you, it’s not what they do, just that they go play them, so they can cycle mini games out for being unpopular, regardless of why that is?

There’s literally nothing good about this.

Vayne.8563:

They’re not making people play Keg Brawl. They’re moving Keg Brawl to a rotation for people who do like it. They could have just taken it out of the game completely. They’re giving it a chance. If enough people like it, they’ll keep it.

The point is, you have an agenda, because you love the game. But I don’t think that many people do.

There are many ways to get dailies and those who like keg brawl will be able to get one of their dailies every four days that way. That’s all. It’s just an end to an achievement.

But it will make it harder for people to just go and farm the achievements. I don’t see how you can plausibly deny that.

Lol, wow. Maybe because you’re not actually looking, or you’re just saying things after running out of things to say?

You’re saying the people who like Keg Brawl are in the extreme minority, enough so that ArenaNet could’ve just removed the game (which is also really really stupid so I’m not sure why you said it), but there’s enough of them there to keep the entire GW2 player base, people who’ve been given reward after reward and many incentives to go and gather achievement points or dailies in order to progress, at bay across the entire mini game?

Never mind the opportunity for farmers to corrupt those who would otherwise play an ordinary game of Keg brawl. What you just said literally made zero sense. And no, they’re not forcing them to play Keg Brawl, but they’re making it so they can’t play the game because of Keg Brawl, a game they don’t like in the first place. How is this a good thing for those players? "Sorry that you liked Southsun Survival, but you can’t play right now because Keg Brawl, which according to our mighty metrics has an astonishingly low population in comparison, is active right now. Please come back in 24/48/72 hours.

You also just said they’re moving Keg Brawl to a rotation for those that do like it, but have already said that this update does in-fact disadvantage those players that like to play Keg Brawl. Because seriously, why is saying “Sorry you like Keg brawl, but you won’t be able to play for 75% of the time due to this rotation we just put in.” good for people who like Keg Brawl? Oh yeah, because it’s now focusing all the other people who played Keg brawl for ulterior motives than enjoying it, into a strict time frame! Which should definitely turn out well given Keg Brawl’s history of being exploited for ulterior motives than enjoyment of the game.

Kain Francois.4328:

Because ANET thinks we care about time-gated “progression”.

’Tis a sad story indeed.

This thread exists already, in case you hadn’t seen it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Mini-game-rotation/first

Also, explain how Keg Brawl wasn’t a team sport from the beginning. It has a lot of avenues for team based game play. Which can still show past all the lobbing that goes on.

Vayne.8563:

Serelisk.6573:

Vayne.8563:

There’s enough people to support the LS minigames and probably one other a day. I don’t know that there’s enough to support the number of mini games Anet has put out there.

And you don’t know that either.

You keep backing away from the important stuff… there’s other options they could’ve took to achieve the exact same thing you’re saying they’re achieving now, but they decided to inconvenience people without even a response.

The problem: they (apparently) want more people to play mini games but won’t put any effort into making their mini games appealing.

They’re forcing people to play in a very strict schedule, breaking previous freedoms of choice & variety, the whole point of having multiple mini games.

They’re encouraging people to farm/boost and ruin the experience for others by turning it into time gated content, meanwhile not providing any tools for players to not have to deal with this. (Private instance)

They’re disadvantaging those who have a spur of the moment, casual play style as it relates to the mini games, which are a change of pace from the regular game. If you have to schedule around playing your favorite mini game, then something’s clearly wrong.

But you keep saying that I don’t know the numbers, and I guess I’m supposed to think that means something? So what? Every MMO developer has metrics of some kind on their player base, so I pose the question: does this make all their decision making infallible?

You do so many gymnastics to defend this studio, but this is a harmful update. It goes from encouragement to play unique and fun mini games to forcing players to either not play or schedule around supposedly fun & casual content. Instead of taking steps to expand their current player base, they’re taking the lazy route and focusing it with asinine content blocking and cutting off mini games people love for large periods of time.

Keg Brawl should have been a team sport from the beginning and lob should have been less important to the game. These are major issues I"m not thinking they’ll fix.

The problem with random is that it’s random. If you get a crap team against a good team you can get shut out, no matter how good you are, but you can’t choose your team.

So the game isn’t fulfilling for a lot of people, in spite of the fact that you like it. Anet doesn’t feel it’s worth investing time into, because they DO have metrics. You don’t.

If it had been made better from the beginning, they might have a different metric, but obviously they don’t see enough interest to fix it. YOU like it so you think they’re wrong.

I don’t think you (and those like you) represent a big enough portion of the game’s population for Anet to make decisions based solely on that.

So then you now have to explain, why is it that making people, who don’t like Keg Brawl but like other mini games, have to play Keg Brawl a good thing? How is that good? They did nothing to fix its appeal… you’re not making any sense. The point is that this is a terrible solution to the population problems, why is taking content away from people going to make them suddenly think Keg Brawl is fulfilling?

Furthermore, there’s actually solutions to not being able to play full games with randoms when things are pretty slow. It’s the entire reason [PUNT] exists. And if any of you played Keg Brawl as much as you claim you have, then I know you’ve seen [PUNT] members before. I don’t remember anyone from this thread coming to me for an invite to the guild, or added to the friends list to message when you want to brawl…

But I guess this doesn’t matter, because it’s better to make it so the players have no opportunity to fix the situation themselves. Rather, you would have people just not be able to play so they have a very limited amount of time to enjoy the content because of ridiculous speculation about the impact of player population in the mini games.

Vayne.8563:

There’s enough people to support the LS minigames and probably one other a day. I don’t know that there’s enough to support the number of mini games Anet has put out there.

And you don’t know that either.

You keep backing away from the important stuff… there’s other options they could’ve took to achieve the exact same thing you’re saying they’re achieving now, but they decided to inconvenience people without even a response.

The problem: they (apparently) want more people to play mini games but won’t put any effort into making their mini games appealing.

They’re forcing people to play in a very strict schedule, breaking previous freedoms of choice & variety, the whole point of having multiple mini games.

They’re encouraging people to farm/boost and ruin the experience for others by turning it into time gated content, meanwhile not providing any tools for players to not have to deal with this. (Private instance)

They’re disadvantaging those who have a spur of the moment, casual play style as it relates to the mini games, which are a change of pace from the regular game. If you have to schedule around playing your favorite mini game, then something’s clearly wrong.

But you keep saying that I don’t know the numbers, and I guess I’m supposed to think that means something? So what? Every MMO developer has metrics of some kind on their player base, so I pose the question: does this make all their decision making infallible?

You do so many gymnastics to defend this studio, but this is a harmful update. It goes from encouragement to play unique and fun mini games to forcing players to either not play or schedule around supposedly fun & casual content. Instead of taking steps to expand their current player base, they’re taking the lazy route and focusing it with asinine content blocking and cutting off mini games people love for large periods of time.

@ Vayne, I wasn’t passing anything as fact. I implore you to point out where I did. But if you want them now, here:

75% of the time, I will not be able to access Keg Brawl, as opposed to the previous 0% of the time that I wasn’t able to access Keg Brawl. This is negative. This is a fact.

25% of the time someone who doesn’t like Keg Brawl will have to spend the day doing something else that is not Keg Brawl until their favorite mini game happens in the next few days. This is negative. This is a fact.

The supporting or satellite elements of Keg Brawl are either non existent, or have been and still are in a poor shape since launch. ArenaNet has done next to nothing to fix any of it since launch. It’s also not advertised at all. ArenaNet has done nothing except dailies to let the player base know that Keg Brawl exists. This is a fact.

For most of the game, Keg Brawl has had poor to average population levels. It was also the only permanent mini game for all of that time. We’ve pretty much agreed in this thread that these are both facts.

These are facts. None of these are refutable.

Now from here, we can use reasoning, which is the more accepted form of speculation because it is based on facts. You can reason that Keg Brawl’s population issues are not because of player dilution, and we can reason that it’s likely because of Keg Brawl’s poor, unsupported state and the fact that it got no advertisement from ArenaNet, that it has had the population issues it does. This is reasoning based on fact with personal testimony from someone else in the thread.

So the issue is likely caused by a certain problem with the game type. Being reasonable people, we can make a pretty good guess that if you solved the problem, you would be able to or be closer to fixing the problems associated with the one that was just solved. That would be, actually trying to make their game appealing instead of leaving it in (what I’m guessing is a 2011 version of the mini-game that they hardly touched since) the state it’s in. I would think this is a reasonable conclusion based on fact, and the given example of SPvP from earlier.

This is not what they’re doing. Instead of fixing what is potentially the problem, they’re instead causing even more problems with the people who actually like the game as it is now. See the top of the post. This is a fact.

The opposing speculation to why this will be a benefit is unfounded and based on personal experiences which hold no merit because they differ wildly from others’ experience. That is; apparently when more people are playing Keg Brawl overall, there is less achievement hunters and exploiters. This is just speculation based on anecdotes.

However, the reason people farm the achievements is to get them quickly. It’s efficient play. Time vs Reward. Simply put, it is not worth the reward for them to spend the time getting the achievement the correct way, so they resort to abusing exploits in order to gain the achievements faster. This is a fact.

Keg Brawl will be up for 75% less time than it was previously. Which means they’ll have a 75% opportunity, time-wise, to get the achievements they want. This is a fact.

One can reason, based on the above facts, that Keg Brawl will see more exploiters and achievement farmers since ArenaNet has done nothing to actually make the game a better experience to play, have not directly confronted the exploiters, and have further limited the time amount the people will be able to acquire the achievements. This is reasoning based on facts, and this mentality of achievement farmers in the new temporal content has already been mentioned before in numerous other threads.

There’s more reasoning I can provide about who this game of GW2 is trying to appeal to vs who is actually enjoying the mini games, but I’ll leave it at this. The end result is that you now have concrete negatives, which is the only factual thing to come out of this. And you have reasoning that predicts a bad outcome for this update. Whereas anything good to come out of this is baseless speculation or opinion based on baseless speculation.

Both of your argument rely on a completely unfounded opinion that leans on hearsay and speculation, but has no supporting reasoning to back it. More people playing the mini games at any given moment in time is not a guarantee that actual games will be played, but time gated content has shown already that it increases/exacerbates the issue of achievement farmers and exploiters.

My experience and I’m sure many others’ has been that when they join any given match when keg Brawl’s the daily, people will typically stand around not participating asking someone if they can help them with the daily because they refuse to learn how to play the game and earn it themselves.

You’ve said that people don’t like the content of Keg Brawl, and that’s most likely why it’s population has been so low. it’s unsupported and unrewarding to play normally, meanwhile there’s still the completely broken mechanic of lobbing. Why would these people suddenly be okay with this when they weren’t during the daily days where they would get busy matches?

And why would they need to limit content at all to promote this? They could spend a week over their social media sites promoting it, or reaching out to guilds (such as PUNT) for live stream opportunities or Q&A’s on the game and what we think of it. It’s absolutely asinine that they need to make someone elses experience considerably worse just to get people to be aware this game exists, which is another crucial point of both your arguments

Vayne.8563:

Serelisk.6573:

Vayne.8563:

Serelisk.6573:

But you didn’t give a reason of why and how this is amended in this new patch.

Because it’s much easier to cheat at keg brawl on a slow down when few people are around, and give someone new the complete wrong impression of the game than it is to do so one a day when many people are playing. And this I know from personal experience.

Explain, because that’s a completely unfounded claim. Furthermore, you haven’t actually made a point that guarantees Keg Brawl will have any larger of a following because your argument was that people didn’t like the game… so why would they like it more now? Nothing changed except they were told they can only play it on this days and every 4 days for the rest of forever. Why would there be more people? For the achievements? Those are farmers, and they’re likely to be more insistent than ever considering this is now time limited.

My personal experience on busier days is that you get in there, and every pretty much has to agree to cheat…because once someone starts playing, they’re playing and taking the keg away from you.

On other days, slower ones, when there’s only two people playing PERIOD, who refuse to play at all, it’s very hard to get a game started at all. That’s my experience.

How will it be better? Because it’ll be like the daily days when play actually occurs. And I’d rather play the game then stand around farming achievements.

Your experience differed considerably from mine, and I can guarantee you I played a lot more than you did.

Vayne.8563:

Serelisk.6573:

But you didn’t give a reason of why and how this is amended in this new patch.

Because it’s much easier to cheat at keg brawl on a slow down when few people are around, and give someone new the complete wrong impression of the game than it is to do so one a day when many people are playing. And this I know from personal experience.

Explain, because that’s a completely unfounded claim. Furthermore, you haven’t actually made a point that guarantees Keg Brawl will have any larger of a following because your argument was that people didn’t like the game… so why would they like it more now? Nothing changed except they were told they can only play it on this days and every 4 days for the rest of forever. Why would there be more people? For the achievements? Those are farmers, and they’re likely to be more insistent than ever considering this is now time limited.

Vayne.8563:

Serelisk.6573:

Vayne.8563:

Blumiere.1489:

Vayne If they have a developer, that created a Rytlock SNES mini-game over a weekend, if Anet have team that created SAB over few weeks ( and it turned out to be better than regular dungeons ! At least forum posters said something like that ) how come they cannot think about a sufficent way to promote mini-games in more reasonable manner ?

I ask again : why is it that people did not know about Keg Brawl from the start for instance ?

You do know what I personally think is huge money waster – Living World, but this is a matter of other threads.

Except that the living world is populated by tons of people and keg brawl isn’t…no matter the reason.

Anet looks at their data for who’s doing what. If keg brawl had enough of a following…if enough people were interested in it, it would be in their agenda.

Your argument in almost every post is summed up to: “since the developers have all the data and we don’t, they’re probably making a more informed and better decision than we can.”

It’s really hard to have a discussion when you’re retreating to speculation that always favors the developer. It doesn’t address causes, just outcomes that peopel are using to make a claim that player dilution is the reason why we should funnel everyone into one mini game.

I don’t see how you can possibly think the devs don’t have this metric. I’m not ALWAYS retreating into this logic, but in this case, they have a business to run. It seems to me if their data showed keg brawl was popular and liked, they’d have impetus to do something about it.

I’ve gone many times to keg brawl on days when it wasn’t on the dailies and spent time standing in an arena waiting for an opponent to show up.

No one says they don’t have some metric, but you’re not actually saying anything with it. The issue is that they’re making it so people who enjoyed it cannot play it now 75% of the time, and people who don’t enjoy it are forced to play it 25% of the time with this new update. But they haven’t actually updated Keg Brawl to be any better than it was previously, and they’re likely going to end up with a broken wheel of this mini game rotation, which is already fundamentally broken because it’s restricting content for no coherent reason.

But you didn’t give a reason of why and how this is amended in this new patch.

Vayne.8563:

Blumiere.1489:

Vayne If they have a developer, that created a Rytlock SNES mini-game over a weekend, if Anet have team that created SAB over few weeks ( and it turned out to be better than regular dungeons ! At least forum posters said something like that ) how come they cannot think about a sufficent way to promote mini-games in more reasonable manner ?

I ask again : why is it that people did not know about Keg Brawl from the start for instance ?

You do know what I personally think is huge money waster – Living World, but this is a matter of other threads.

Except that the living world is populated by tons of people and keg brawl isn’t…no matter the reason.

Anet looks at their data for who’s doing what. If keg brawl had enough of a following…if enough people were interested in it, it would be in their agenda.

Your argument in almost every post is summed up to: “since the developers have all the data and we don’t, they’re probably making a more informed and better decision than we can.”

It’s really hard to have a discussion when you’re retreating to speculation that always favors the developer. It doesn’t address causes, just outcomes that peopel are using to make a claim that player dilution is the reason why we should funnel everyone into one mini game.

Vayne.8563:

Blumiere.1489:

Vayne yes, because limiting the content is far more better than disabiling it for a while to fix any loophole that allowed to abuse the game /sarcasm. And you should ask yourself why players have not heard of the game form the start . Treat my question as a food for thought.

Nice sarcasm.

Doesn’t address my point at all. It’s not the question of what’s better, but what’s worth the time and energy. Every single developer has limited resources to spend time/money on things. Anet is no different.

So they have to put the money into stuff most people like pretty much by definition. Now it’s possible that if Keg Brawl wasn’t broken in the first place, it would be more popular, but Anet has no way of knowing if that’s the case or not. What they do know is that most people don’t care about it/know about it or play it. Which means putting time/energy into it now is like throwing good money after bad.

But that assessment is based on their poor handling of the mini game in general. They also know that there are people who love and believe in it to succeed if it gets support, or at least they should know, and that they haven’t dropped a dime of thought on giving it basic functionality or exposure to the general player base of GW2.

And your argument doesn’t address the fact that whatever they’re doing now is supposedly for the benefit of the players, but now if the player base doesn’t like the game that they still haven’t fixed at all, they don’t get to play their favored mini game because stupid old keg brawl is in the rotation that day.

@Vayne, no, the content of Keg Brawl is quite great, imo. But there’s so much getting in the way of enjoying it, and you keep over exaggerating the developer resources that must go into fixing any of this stuff because there’s no reason they can’t disable the lob skill, even if they don’t replace it, or prevent people from leaving the Arena with an invisible wall.

And it’s even more ridiculous that they didn’t mention after launch that Keg brawl even existed to anyone except those who hunt every daily, every day.

Vayne.8563:

Let me ask you this, OP. What about all those players who hadn’t heard of it, saw it as a daily, tried it out and it totally sucked because of how the game was being abused. Those are potential players that never get to see the game fully populated or played as intended.

I’d almost wager there are more of them than there are people who love the game.

Idk if you think I’m the OP or what, because I’m not. But that was part of my point. The reason for the unhealthy population of Keg Brawl is more than likely not because of player dilution, but because Keg Brawl is an unsupported, unrewarding experience filled with bugs, achievement point farmers and lobbers. And ArenaNet have done nothing since launch to correct any of that.

Esya.3427:

This change will get me back into keg brawl. I like mini-games. Not just one of them. I like some better than others, but overall I like the difference in them and the complete change from normal gameplay. But when there is no reason for me to play I did not join them. Specially keg brawl. It was played with such a small amount of people that used a lot of exploits that really spoiled the fun. I will play it again when it is the daily as I expect a lot more people to try and therefore the amount of exploits in a game to go down.

I can see why the keg brawl fans don’t like this change. But don’t say that the other side of the coin does not exist, because I am one of the people on the other side of that coin.

I’m going to say they don’t exist still, because you made what I perceive to be a very naive assessment of the content. I’ve pointed out in this thread before that time limited content encourages farmers. Of course, it’s speculation, but why would people all of a sudden think that they can come in and enjoy the game more if they didn’t enjoy it before. All of the same problems, from lobbing to achievement farming, are still there, and will only get worse. Furthermore, the people who never liked Keg Brawl in the first place are not all of a sudden jumping out of their seats to play it.

This system is not about dailies. It’s about one mini game being the only mini game you can even play at a time. I don’t actually think there are gonna be ways to do these mini games for the daily anymore since neither of the two that already appeared supported one.

If a lot more people try, but not many of them enjoy it because it’s a bug ridden and exploited mess, then why would they stay to play normally or not just join the exploiters themselves. After all, they now have a lot less total time opportunity to get those achievement points, so farming is heavily encouraged by this update.

No one’s twisting your words or straw-manning you. You said that this system benefits you. This would lie in support of ArenaNet’s decision. But you failed to explain how this benefits you, because your argument was based on your experiences, which you keep mentioning, with Keg Brawl.

However, it can be inferred that Keg Brawl does not prove to be a basis for any fear of player dilution since all of its population issues existed prior to any other mini games being introduced.

So it can be inferred that there must be some other reason keg Brawl doesn’t have a healthy population of people playing all the time. Conveniently enough, Keg Brawl just so happens to be a bug ridden, unrewarding, non group-friendly, unsupported mini game filled with achievements hunters and people who abuse & exploit broken mechanics…

Your personal experiences, at least as far as player dilution in mini games is concerned, has no basis, and your support for this new system doesn’t make any sense because of it.

Just to point out, the likelihood of ANY of these games making it in at all is very very low since ArenaNet has shown their unwillingness to develop or support a healthy mini game scene.

They even took Bar Brawl off the achievement list. Tis a sad story indeed.

You forgot the part where you attempted to explain or defend your claim that this is a benefit to you versus the previous system, implicitly justifying ArenaNet’s decision with the supposed support of certain types of players who will certainly benefit a lot from this system.

But your entire defense was based on the assumption that player dilution is a definite, and will inevitably negatively impact the individual mini games to a point of unplayability unless you only allow players to play one of each a day.

Your only example thus far, as it relates to mini games, is Keg Brawl, but its state is most certainly not a result of the ‘mini-game crowd’ being spread too thin since, for the longest time it has had population problems but has been the only active mini game in GW2.

I’ve long since accepted that ArenaNet could have very well decided that they’re going to make this move out of fear of player dilution, but at this stage, it reflects wholly negatively on them for not trying at all to mitigate or remove that fear before disadvantaging or driving players away entirely. Not to mention they’ve still done nothing about the farmers, so alert & prepare your local neighborhood for all the boosting that’s gonna happen on KB day.

There’s no way this update can be twisted as a positive, because it indicates that ArenaNet is not going to support their mini games at all or even attempt to broaden support for them. Rather, they’ll just restrict or marginalize the current player base, potentially driving off people from the game itself.

Ursan.7846:

For the same population, with 4 mini games as opposed to one, dilution will occur by definition. This is a fact, not some subjective assumption. However, the severity of it is something we don’t truly know and something I based completely on personal experience. Only Anet can answer the true extent of the dilution.

Again, this relies on the assumption that there’s a fixed audience for people who like mini games. Not Keg Brawl, not Crab Toss, not Sanctum Sprint, or Southsun Survival, but mini games. It is saying that this is a demographic of players who like to play these four games. This is not true. Mini games are such varied game experiences, that someone who likes Southsun Survival could very well not like Crab Toss and Keg Brawl.

A similar argument would’ve been (when SPvP wasn’t popular) that WvW was siphoning all the potential SPvP players because of player dilution, so the only option to increase those numbers would be to have specific days where WvW was disabled, thereby making all those players go to SPvP instead. They have different audiences, they’re different games.

You’re not accepting it or understanding it because you make the assumption that the dilution is not as severe as Anet thinks it is. That’s fine. It still doesn’t change the fact that it is their reason why.

No, I don’t think the dilution is severe as Anet (according to you) thinks it is. Because you know what they did to SPvP? They made it appealing! They added automated tournaments, more reward systems to encourage play, they had state of the games almost every week if not every week, they added custom arenas! Observer mode! They have forums that promote the formation of new teams as well as partnerships with other media sites to host larger viewer live streams of paid tournaments.

My point is that maybe if they actually tried to make their games appealing, instead of bug ridden and filled with game breaking mechanics, then the potential for player dilution would be significantly less if you actually have a bit of content a lot of people want to play.

You’re ignoring things I’ve already said. This may be their reason why, but it still makes no sense and has no inherent positives.

Ursan.7846:

Serelisk.6573:

You’ve only said that it benefits you positively, but you haven’t provided any explanation of how this is the best they could do with this system, or is better than what was there previously… So you just saying it benefits you positively isn’t quite doing anything for me since you haven’t given me reason to believe that and I’ve got plenty of reasons to think otherwise. There were already dailies to draw those who’re looking for rewards, you said yourself that there were days where the games would be good.

It’s great for motivating me to care about mini games without making it too much of a chore. 4 minigame dailies would be a tad too overbearing and be a turn-off to many people. But if they’re not a daily, then there is no time-limiting factor to really coerce people to play.

This is their reasoning. It benefits me, because I’ll be able to have fun 3/4th of the day (not Crab Toss) instead of almost never having fun due to low population. It’s understandable why you’d be upset and why you can’t understand my joy at this change. However, I do benefit.

I don’t know about others, but I’m not accepting this explanation because it still doesn’t make sense.

4 mini game dailies are overbearing? If you enjoy the mini game anyway, then why’s it a problem to have a rotation of dailies for mini games? It’s encouragement, rather than force. Force, in most situations, causes far more resentment than encouraging does. It’s why the dailies are the way they are in the rest of GW2 where players are encouraged to log in to receive limited impact/cosmetic rewards for playing the game, as opposed to similar systems in other MMO’s where players feel forced to log in and complete their to-do list.

Also, the “low-population” bit relies on both assumptions that this will actually happen, since we haven’t seen all the mini games on together yet, and ignoring of the fact that these mini games do not have enough promotion, support, or incentive to be as populated as the rest of the game. ArenaNet has spent the last 4 months or more developing virtually nothing but reward systems for this game, from WvW to dungeon revamps, and living story specific skins to achievement chest rewards, but there’s not a single Keg brawl, Crab Toss, Southsun Survival, or Sanctum Sprint themed reward in the game besides the titles.

You keep saying you understand, but you apparently don’t. Your experiences with Keg Brawl is not any indication at all of player dilution. The entire premise of ‘less things to play = more people playing this one thing’ (which is also flawed), doesn’t hold weight because you could’ve potentially had all the mini games functioning all the time with their own dedicated fan base for each.

Kylar.5127:

I would love an actual reason for why they did this

The only reason anyone can even attempt to give is player dilution, but there’s a lot of holes in that logic as I’ve pointed out in this thread multiple times.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Never played keg brawl before, never even heard of it or knew where to find it. Now that it is in the rotation I will probably try it out since it is easier to access.

Seems like a great change to me. no one I talked o had ever heard of this game before… has it really been in since launch?

Yes, it’s been in since beta in fact. And this change is not great, since before, you could’ve played Keg Brawl whenever you wanted. It’s in part your ignorance for not seeing it the numerous times it’s been a part of the daily, and ArenaNet’s issue of not acknowledging that it existed at all after launch some year ago.

Right, except they could’ve explored cheaper and less offensive ways of doing so. Like posting on their official facebook page about Keg Brawl or highlighting the activity on the main page once in its lifetime. But none of that happened.

I understand that, but it doesn’t make sense to limit it from people who’re playing anyway if their purpose was to keep people from exploiting it. That’s actually very likely to make the problem of exploiters/boosters worse.

The SAB isn’t a very fair comparison considering it got out of game promotion in the form of a trailer, plus it was literally the theme of the content update. It was posted about in gaming sites everywhere, and was the topic of a ton of forum posts because it was something big. There’s a lot of people who don’t even know where Keg brawl is because it’s not really explained or incentivized beyond the daily achievement.

I’ll just briefly summarize my point of view on this topic as elaborated on in this thread since I’m sure many people didn’t read most of what I wrote.

I think it is wrong that ArenaNet is going this route. They’re restricting access to the game, supposedly because of the fear of population dilution, but I don’t believe that’s a reasonable answer to it. The mini games are about variety of game play experiences. Not everyone is going to like every mini game, and it’s wrong to try and persuade the player base to do so with time limited content.

If they want more people to play the mini games, they should be putting in a stronger effort to make the mini games more appealing, instead of wrongfully taking them away from the people that enjoy them now.

lol, I like this thread.

Ursan.7846:

EDIT: I like to stress again that I’m not really trying to argue to try to convince you, but to simply lay out the reasons why Anet made these changes, and to present a viewpoint from someone who’s benefiting positively from these changes.

You’ve only said that it benefits you positively, but you haven’t provided any explanation of how this is the best they could do with this system, or is better than what was there previously… So you just saying it benefits you positively isn’t quite doing anything for me since you haven’t given me reason to believe that and I’ve got plenty of reasons to think otherwise. There were already dailies to draw those who’re looking for rewards, you said yourself that there were days where the games would be good.

The only difference between that and this is that I now can’t play on off days, so I’m forced to play on those specific days, which in my personal opinion, causes a heavy amount of resentment considering I really can not play on those days all the time anyway. So even if I and others like me enjoy Keg brawl, I can’t imagine they’d all have schedules that magically line up with ArenaNets visions of who should play what and when.

@Ursan, your repeated argument also relies on the assumption that there’s no other way to avoid population dilution or get people to play these mini games.

You also ignored the potential for Keg brawl to continued to be used expressly for farmers to get achievement points, allowing people no other way to play with people who actually want to play. Something that has already happened and has been said repeatedly by those who participate that way that time limited contents gives no other choice but for them to abuse the game in order to get the achievements they want as fast as possible. And this ruins the experience for even casual players of Keg brawl I’m sure.

It’s not that I simply disagree with the reasoning, the reasoning doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You’re actually trying to tell me that only being able to play it on certain days will guarantee that people will suddenly like Keg Brawl or atleast play it normally, even if they’re only there for the rewards (note: Keg brawl has a huge boosting problem that Anet has not addressed). And what was the difference than just having a daily every 4 days instead of taking it away from everyone for 3/4 days? You yourself said it’s only barren on off-hours when it’s not the daily.

They haven’t even attempted to make Keg brawl appealing, many people (especially those who farm it) have been vocal about how broken/unplayable the game is in it’s current state so it doesn’t bother them to exploit it. It hasn’t had an actual update since launch, just a single update somewhere in October or November that made it so lobbing had a 1 second casting time… This is not how you encourage people to play a game.

So your analogy to mcRib and Beef Crunch doesn’t hold because those are premiere products, they’re more enticing as a product than the other stuff on the menu. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure they’re not for the person who comes to Mickey D’s everyday or the Taco Bell fanatic (regular GW2 players), they’re for the people who occasionally or have never eaten at that establishment (non-GW2 players). So instead of broadening the player base, they’re restricting people who already play.

And because “player dilution” is not problem in restaurants, since I’m pretty sure someone coming to the drive thru don’t care whether their friends eat that specific item off the menu or not; your only example is ridiculously misplaced and doesn’t do anything to explain your statement.

For those of you that don’t know what red resign is, in GW1 there were dailies for the game in the form of Zaishen Quests, and they woudl reward for doing something in the game. There was hero battles and the reward was a Zaishen Key which would allow a chance of RNG to get some really cool rewards or you could sell them for 5 plat, the rough guild wars 2 equivalent of 4-5g.

If one team resigned giving up the match and you have a 50% chance of getting thrown on either side, you could get a Zaishen key repeatedly in roughly 6 games that lasted some 20 seconds each, the resign and the time to restart the match. So would be getting a ton of gold or chances to get rare items in a really short amount of time b not playing the content but exploiting it.

I’m just pointing out that these are the potential issues since those who only want those achievement points or loot bags don’t typically care about the gameplay and will exploit the hell out of it. With the ability to spawn kegs at will by taking them out of the arena, as well as lobbing (scoring from the middle of the Arena) and willignness to just farm matches, one team could just score for red or blue everytime because they get rewarded regardless of the outcome. Just as well, those who just want intercepts can do that too since they only need 1 keg and the rest of the process is extremely quick.

ArenaNet is setting this game up for kitten. I don’t know how the rest of the mini games can be exploited, but farmers never fail to find a way.

Also, there’s still huge bugs and problems with the game that have existed since launch. Maybe more people would like to play Keg Brawl if they could at the very least play with their kittening friends. On top of that simple issues like players being able to leave the arena at all or the fact that Guardian aegis from Virtue of Courage is still active. There’s many more from movement impairing glitches, to Keg brawl being notoriously laggier than any other part of the game frequently.

And there’s still no reward except 200 achievement points and now a loot bag every 30 games which is laughable cause that’s gonna encourage something akin to another red resign if there’s anything good in there. There’s not even Keg Brawl themed PvP finishers or special /rank emote even? These can’t be that hard to implement but even if they are, there’s still near-game breaking issues that aren’t addressed.

People who will be playign keg brawl in the daily rotation won’t be there because they like Keg brawl as a game, and it seems like Anet welcomes this.

Ursan.7846:

Population dilution is a real problem in MMOs. That is their reason.

I have participated in (depressing) 1v1 Keg Brawls on off-hours, when there is no daily for it. There may be a dedicated fanbase, but it’s tiny and brutally punishing for players who enjoy the activity but play at off-peak hours.

Now with a rotation and (hopefully) a mini-game daily achievement, it will concentrate the population a bit more. Because the fact is a majority of players don’t feel very strongly about one minigame, and this change will concentrate players like this in one spot, making the area much more lively.

This is overall great for the health of the minigame. Now individually, you may not like the changes, but overall it affects many people (like me) very positively. I’m very happy for this change because I love Keg Brawl/Sanctum Sprint/Southsun Survival and I know when they are on, they will be nice and populated.

Crab Toss? Nope. Noooo way. Why no Aspect Arena?

I’m tired of this argument. It ignores the fact that not everyone who likes one mini game will like the other. So where’s the guarantee that people are even playing these because they like the mini games.

Furthermore, your argument is that you can’t play the game because you can’t be on at certain times of the day to play with the people who do play, nevermidn that I have Keg Brawl guild dedicated to getting people who want to play into games together when they want to. And you somehow think that making it unavailable 75% of the time GW2 is active is a great solution.

Nevermind the fact that people who’ve farmed for achievement poitns have repeatedly used the excuse that time gated content makes it so you virtually have to farm an already over farmed Keg brawl, so it’s likely you STILL won’t be playing against anyone in 5v5 matches.

I feel like this also has larger implications than just Keg Brawl also; that seem pretty unprecedented to me. To take out content that’s been in the game for such a long time and make it time gated. What else is gonna get hit with the temp stick for no other reason than to kitten off the current player base?

ColinJohanson.2394:

…From the update of mini-games becoming permanent on a rotation…

Are you serious? You took keg brawl, which was permanent, and made it time limited content. It’s actually an insult that you just put that in your post.

Even further, they took out content that was already permanent and made it temporary, ala Keg Brawl. There’s a post here about it.

ArenaNet is going in a terrible direction and are lying to their player base without giving an explanation. Use to be my favorite video game developer too… :c

Blumiere.1489:

I trully enjoy Sanctum Sprint, but why my need to play this game should limit others ? And why should others limit me in a matter which game should I play ? This trully is in opposite to philosophy ,,play the game how you want,, . Well now I can play limited and with little feeling of being a kittenbag because others cannot do their own. What is the purpouse of this ,,feature,, Is it to provoke community, to create an enormous quarrel ?

This a thousand times. It makes no sense that others should be disadvantaged. Someone at ArenaNet is trolling, they have to be. There’s 100% negativity in this update. There’s nothing good that comes from this, but very negative things as a result.

And in my defense to any would be opponents, the reason why I’m personally only mentioning Keg Brawl is because it’s my favorite mini game. it should drive the point home that I don’t actually care about the others, which is why I and others shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of ArenaNet’s kittened assumption that anyone who likes one mini game will like the other.

And don’t even come in here with that loot bag every 30 games bullkitten. If an average Keg brawl game is over in 5 minutes, which is incredibly fast game for normal play, like, a blow out, then you won’t get the loot bag for almost 3 hours of play… and that doesn’t even include the downtime between games.

The OP is completely right too, what happens when you add more mini games. Are you just going to completely cycle out certain mini games or are we gonna have to wait even longer to play our favorite? There’s literally zero positives that come from this for anyone who actually likes any of these mini games.

And they won’t even give any reasoning for it. We should be so lucky. I’m pretty sure they want to avoid posting in this so that it gets buried and no one comes just because of the red post to see their absolute most hilarious kittened game play decision at work.

How do you promise to make more permanent content and then take content that was already permanent and make it temporary!? This probably has larger implications for the rest of the game.

And this absolutely defeats the point of mini games. They’re supposed to be segregated activities done for leisure, not events highlighted so you have the opportunity to get your achievement points.

Please Anet, give me and the OP a reason at least. And one that’s better than a dismissal. I could at least feel better knowing someone could take time out of their day to enlighten me to the magic that is your holy design decisions. Otherwise, I’m under the assumption you just do things to make certain minority player-bases mad just for lulz…

Please ArenaNet, I beseech you to message me and try and justify this garbage. I don’t care if that’s bannable, this is messed up. Like, what in the land of Tyria would convince you that this was a good idea instead of leaving it the way it was? The achievement farmers were bad enough but compared to this, that was far preferred because I could actually go in and play the kitten game.

You can say “if you don’t like it then leave” but like, that would be the only thing to happen. You made a content change so that players could leave your game. Which, no matter how small, is definitely not a good thing when there was no gain from doing this… The only thing this does is let more players know that Keg Brawl exists somewhere in the game, but there were far cheaper and easier ways to do that which don’t kitten off the people who actually found and enjoy it… Maybe take a day where you do a livestream match or something. You give all this attention to SPvP, but I don’t remember ArenaNet challenging PUNT to a match. And I could easily proclaim that PUNT has had the best Keg Brawl players ever to actually be playing it together at any point in time. But no, you take it away from us instead. Where’s the logic?

And that excuse in and of itself doesn’t make any god kitten ed sense. It relies on the assumption that everyone who likes Keg Brawl is going to like Southsun Survival or Sanctum Sprint, but it’s not the case, since I don’t actually like either of those nearly as much as I like Keg Brawl. Keg brawl is far closer to actual SPvP than Southsun Survival is, since it relies on teamwork. Something that’s missing from both of the above mentioned mini games.

So it’s completely kittened to think that everyone who enjoyed Keg Brawl that can’t play it will go to Southsun for their keg brawl fix? or vice versa, anyone who likes Sanctum Sprint will suddenly be able to play keg Brawl instead? No, that’s not how it works. All it sounds like is you’re dumbing down these mini games to excuses for achievement points. You’re encouraging players to come in and break the content in order to farm it. But providing no means for players to make sure they’re playing with others who actually want to play the mini games, or worse yet, play with their friends. Y’know, the social connections that keep people playing a godkitten ed MMO.

Healix.5819:

When too many mini-game are available to play at once, the population playing them is spread too thin, causing games to be empty. Sometimes this can be good, since it makes some mini-games much quicker, resulting in more loot, but it can also make the games boring.

The daily mini-game can be accessed through an NPC near the portals in Lion’s Arch.

Southsun is accessed using a portal in Lion’s Arch. It’s down the path from Claw Island Portage Waypoint, before the fractals portal.

This is an absolute bullkitten excuse, at least for Keg Brawl. Why would you take out a mini game that was already permanent and had fans? If you want more people to play it, then kittening support it instead of just forgetting about it and then taking it away from the people who do like it. I started a kittening guild to play with people who also like Keg Brawl, but now they made it almost completely defunct.

How is it there’s still not an option to play a private instance with your kittening friends. Like, there’s no good reasoning for this. It sounds like someone who doesn’t play this game is saying how it should be. It’s just lazy design, and subsequently terrible content management. I have some 500 hours probably invested in Keg Brawl, it’s my favorite non-WvW thing to do in this game. I didn’t spend 500 hours playing alone running it to the goal either.

How is it good for me and some of my friends, players who still played Keg Brawl in its current state and managed to enjoy it, to now only be able to play once every 4 days?? It’s just bullkitten.

I would’ve liked the Abaddon one because they would’ve had to make art assets for it, and I’d imagine that might influence future development rather than potentially rehashing Metrica Province.

Mostly though, I just don’t like Kiel as a character. I think she needs to die. It’s unlikely two council members in the same seat are gonna get assassinated because that’s just boring writing, but one can hope.

I made this thread already.

Still no response. Guess we’ll have to find out tomorrow. :/

lol @ Dave, love the signature.

Also, you’re totally correct. The skill level requirement for effective lobbing is almost next to zero… all you have to do is aim up and press 2… And the casting time for lob is faster than the casting time for Disarm, so there goes that argument. lol

Vahkris.6847:

On the other hand, they could be making it where all four are going to be available, but each day there’s going to be a focus on a specific activity (say, the daily achievement has items for that specific activity) to drive players to that one.

I would prefer this.