Guild Wars 2

There’s already a racing minigame with Sanctum Sprint. The way it works is fundamentally different from what you’re describing, but it’s unlikely that they’ll add another racing game when the first one they put in has so much room for polish.

Back when they removed the map with underwater combat from sPvP, that was their way of saying that they’ve given up on making it work for players.

Neat concept, shame it didn’t pan out, but there are bigger fish to fry.

The unwritten rules were made by a group of players that were so unhappy about me wrecking them every single match that they had to band together and declare open season on anyone who could effectively use Lob, potentially even sending it right into their keeper from half-court.

Below are two examples of what the scoreboard would look like after I was done with a match. The quickest of games could be over in two or three minutes. The third pic is the moment after I finished each of the achievement tracks, only about three weeks after I’d started playing the activity. When I was getting close to 500 wins, I was coming up really short on recoveries and intercepts, so I just got some help with those, which you can see the effects of in the fourth pic.

They’ve since booned Lob to the point where the whole format is not even fun to play anymore (I guess Throw 1.0 and Lob 2.0 were the only things fun enough to keep me interested in it), but it’s still possible with some practice to Lob a keg into the keeper from max range, which still seems to make some people rather mad.

Just as people can throw kegs into walls or carts to make them disappear, there’s a way to fool the game into spawning more kegs, if you really want them. If you throw the kegs to the south, “out-of-bounds” on the other side of the fence, and there aren’t any kegs left “in-bounds”, the game will chuck out another keg. You can then go to the other side of the fence, pick up the kegs (which don’t despawn), and throw them back into the game. If you score with them, the game does the usual thing of throwing out another keg. So if you don’t like people dropping the keg count, there’s a way to increase it too.

Check out this video I made a long time ago to show off the old way keg throwing/lobbing worked and some old bugs/exploits in the game.

Don’t expect any changes to Keg Brawl or support for any other activity in the future. ANet doesn’t care about them(/has better things to do/doesn’t think anyone else cares about them/<insert BS excuse here>).

Tumult.2578:

This is not a race.
This is not a race by any definition.

Yes, it is. Participants are asked to make their way from a start to a finish in a given span of time, which is all there needs to be for it to be a race. Perhaps you think that by being a race, there has to be direct competition between participants. In that sense, there is no competition between players in this event because nobody interacts with each other in any way and, as you say later,

The rewards are not awarded according to which position you finish in.

It’s still a race though.

There is extremely little talent involved.

By that, I can only assume that you mean that it takes very little skill to reach the finish line with the amount of time available to reach it, and I would agree. However, to say that trying to finish first takes no skill would be silly.

The skills are intentionally glitched.
Actions that normally work every time, only work most of the time here.
Each time a skill fails, (and at least one will every trip) you usually start over.
The 3 elemental spirits generally only block normally good moves of the leaders.

Tinfoil hat conspiracy.

Maybe, “The Generally Intentionally Glitched Dolyak Experience” would work for a name.

They could replace “race” with “rush” since it’s basically the same thing as a guild rush.

Perhaps then more people will try it.

No, anybody who is looking to blow some time racing is already spending time in Sanctum Sprint and not wasting their time waiting around for >8 minutes to get a reward that isn’t even necessarily gold because they can’t race more than once or guarantee enough participation for a gold reward or by having to suffer moving around invisible traps.

Sanctum Sprint is what exists for people who want to race. If the devs want to start paying attention to caring about activities, maybe you can convince them to improve that instead with better placement-based rewards or less-frustrating global attacks.

eekzie.5640:

Exclusive =/= hard.

No, you’re wrong. The more scarce (exclusive) something is and the greater demand there is to have it, the more effort will have to be put out to acquire it, in order to outdo the efforts of everyone else who didn’t get it.

It’s already impossible for a lot of people to collect all skins. For a variety of reasons.
Therefor adding one more to an already incomplete collection isn’t as bad as the miniature.

This is also true for miniatures. There are miniatures in the game which are not obtainable anymore, and thus adding another to an already incomplete collection is not a concern.

Give them an exclusive statue. Name a skin after them. Name a miniature after them.
Do something that does not conflict with what people like to do in your game.
The reason people care so much about the miniatures has a long history dating back to GW1.

Another game with collectable items in such scarcity that not everyone was going to have one.

I also wouldn’t mind a hard miniature to get in PvP. Like, really hard.
Look back to how GW1 handled this. The miniature Ghostly Hero had a chance of dropping after winning in the Hall of Monuments.

Hall of Heroes.

The Hall of Heroes had a tournament-like structure in that you often (without gaming the timer for skips) had to fight several other teams before reaching the final map where you could make an attempt at claiming a prize. The Tournament of Legends is similar, except with limited entry, limited frequency, and guaranteed payouts that extend below first place. The difficulty in both comes from matching your skills in and knowledge of the game and coordination with your team against those of everyone you face.

But I guess that’s not hard enough. Pre-nerf drop rates for Chaos of Lyssa are what should determine difficulty for acquiring miniatures. Got it.

You totally missed the point. Miniature collecting should be hard. Should not be exclusive to participating in random one time events. That doesn’t mean it’s hard. It means it’s put behind a wall.

Scarcity of individual items and volume of content are what make collecting hard. Some things that people collect are just very limited in quantity. The people who get to complete their collections are the ones that do the work to make it happen.

This may not be the last Tournament of Legends and may not be the last time for people to get this item. If they don’t get it this time around, they can try again next time, and if they never end up getting it, then they didn’t want it bad enough, and that’s too bad for them.

AysonCurrax.3254:

I find it odd that those who support this “exclusive” reward are people who dont even collect minis themselves, and hence dont seem to understand what it feels like for us who do, or maybe they just dont want to understand, i dont know. All this comes across as is on the level of “haha you cant have the shiny stop whining”. A collectible should never be that near impossible to actually achieve, seeing how it is limited to, at best, 640 Mini Llamas total, or more realistically, a mere 40. One or the other per X Million players. that is far from fair.

And I suppose you just don’t understand the viewpoint of those who vie for limited edition or limited quantity items and the notion of having something so rare, or maybe you just don’t want to understand. Your own stance is a demand for every thing to be shared just because someone might otherwise not be able to satisfy their ambition of having every opportunity open to them, even though there are others who, because of its scarcity, are willing to put that much more of themselves into getting something.

If the item is that rare and the competition for it is that fierce and you want it that badly, you’re just going to have to up your game and get it.

eekzie.5640:

I don’t get this obsession from Anet to make ’’exclusive’’ miniatures.
There’s loads of people who collect them. They even pay gems to collect them.
You’re just giving them the boot.

I honestly would not have an issue with a limited PvP reward track to give out an exclusive miniature that’s only available for 2 weeks.
I don’t see the correlation between miniatures and PvP though.

So exclusive minis are bad because then minipet collectors will have a hard time collecting all the minis, but exclusive skins are fine because nobody cares about skin collectors. Or maybe it could be an exclusive title, because nobody cares about title collectors. Or maybe it could be an exclusive tonic, because nobody cares about tonic collectors. Minipets are of course the only thing that anyone could ever collect in this game and it is such a travesty that an exclusive prize would be a minipet instead of any other thing in the game, which couldn’t possibly be collected.

You wouldn’t have a problem with a PvP track only available for two weeks because that’s doable with time and effort and has nothing to do with scarcity and demand for skill.

Teckos.1305:

Well when you guys are complaining on the forums pretty sure there is some guys really into miniature forming his team for TOL.

Whining is easier than winning.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

I find this the least entertaining activity in the Festival by far. The spamming is incredibly annoying (and Stability only stops the first one) and the lag and bugs only add to the frustration.

Gosh, really? You mean it’s not a good idea to give everybody behind first place easy access to pickups every ten seconds that are the equivalent of MK lightning bolts? No, that couldn’t be right… I mean, if players couldn’t have that, then they might actually have to get good at managing their endurance and using their dash skill. Or worse yet, the devs might have to actually spend time thinking about how to better design those skills.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

I find it doubtful that increasing the rewards will get more people to play this, removal of the bugs and lags would help but fundamentally I don’t think this kind of activity works in an MMO that prides itself on limiting player griefing. MarioKart is fun when played between friends all together in a room, that fun is lost in an MMO.

The MMO aspect is only very slightly to blame. It is much more the fault of the game’s design. You might run into and be “forced” to play with more griefers in an MMO setting, but much of why they’re able to grief so effectively is because of how easy it is to do here. If something is done like limiting offensive skills to “radar range”, it can put a pretty hard stop to a lot of the abuse, and anyone still feeling it can avoid it by being faster and breaking distance with them.

Increased rewards will definitely get more people to play, but only if they do it right.

ANet won’t do anything about how easy it is to stun other players when you’re six places behind and can’t even see first place on your screen. That would make it too hard for bad players to harass others that are far better than them, and might actually demand that they git gud.

Sanctum Sprint could use a hefty design pass, which won’t happen because ANet doesn’t care about activities.

Venirto.4208:

2. Keep aspects, remove orbs and make it a deathmatch type of game, or king of the hill.

Here’s a good example of what not to do.

You can get around this problem after you finish by jumping off a cliff and turning on autorun. Autorunning from the last checkpoint will eventually send your character to a “death”. The game reads your repeated “deaths” and return to checkpoint as activity, bypassing the inactivity check.

Watch and learn.

Nabarue.3290:

How do we get this to happen?

You don’t. We don’t. No attention is given to activities, and when it is, it’s usually to do something meaningless. Clamoring for reform on them is a waste of time.

Across all the hours I’ve played it today and yesterday, I’ve only lost a single match. People are really bad at understanding what the most important objective in this game is.

This is a good enough activity that it deserves to replace Keg Brawl (which is no longer skillful) or Crab Toss (which is all-around garbage) in the daily rotation, despite that making three of the four games in the daily rotation originally from the Bazaar.

It took them less than nine hours to fix a bug that’s been around for over a month, which people have been complaining about for a month, using for a month, and was known to cause trouble in content that would return in this major patch.

Only after the patch hit and people could see in real time how much damage this bug did on the state of one of the returning games that some have been waiting to get back to for almost a year was anything done about it, and it took them not even nine hours to address.

Every complaint that anyone had about any impact of this bug between the times of the last two major patches was for nothing. No attention was given during that whole time to the quality of life in activities. Only after content that was expected to return and was part of a big celebration (and opener for China) and the bug could stand out like a sore thumb was it even recognized that there was a problem, and it was addressed the same day.

There is no love for activities on this team, and there is no retribution for any of you who spoke out about any of this for all of the last month.

Turns out they didn’t fix it after all.

And I was right – this was absurdly funny to see play out in Aspect Arena.

And then twenty seconds passed and the real disgust of it all settled in.

There is a trigger around the campfire that removes the immobilize state on players and marks them as “in the game” when the game begins with Evon’s announcement. Visually, this is the light that players around the campfire give off at the game’s start.

If you wander too far away from the campfire, or you are killed and re-spawn too far away to get back to the campfire in time, you will not be counted as “in the game” and your immobilized state, if you simply walked out of range, will not be removed. This will void your ability to claim a prize at the end and any achievement credit towards game participation. You can still earn scavenge, trap, and kill credit as normal.

Your solution: don’t wander too far from the fire at the start, and don’t get killed.

They’ll probably have it fixed for the 20th.

Or maybe they won’t, and then hilarity will ensue over Aspect Arena, as 100-point health pools would be too easy to drop with this gear.

The Zephyr Sanctum Model does not work properly; attempting to use it will result in nothing happening.

Just go play GW and get it.

It probably did, but it’s a moot point. Nobody will have hit the cap of either of those by now.

Electro.4173:

I’m glad they’re trying to fix it. They just need to fix it a bit better, heh.

I hope they also fix the music while they’re at it. Every time I do Sprint any more, the actual Sanctum Sprint music track cuts out halfway through and the normal area music starts playing, and that music just doesn’t fit the race very well at all.

I can think of several improvements that could be made to or problems they could fix in the arena. What’s interesting to me is that this was the one thing they chose to do something with, instead of wait times, practice mode, or power-ups 5 and 0. Stuff they might get around to in the future, but don’t count on it.

The music cuts out because the song isn’t long enough. It’s barely over two-and-a-half minutes long, whereas my fastest time through the course has been just barely under two minutes and 40 seconds. I don’t think the song should repeat, but maybe the next tracks played should be selected from the combat tracks that drive a stronger beat, rather than tracks used in general world exploration.

Last bump. Sanctum Sprint is the current activity in the rotation, so give yourself a chance to go in and make yourself familiar with the new shortcut.

I want to know how to get where you are in that first picture.

Bump for the morning.

Let me say that, at the very least, this is a sign that the devs are paying some attention to Sanctum Sprint. It’s possible that they’d like to do something more with it in the future, like if the Bazaar was coming back this summer. However, given how effective this rock was at fixing whatever problem they perceived this to be, I’m not getting my hopes up for any incredible things happening with the arena down the line.

Bump for the late night eyes.

Ayrilana.1396:

Sinbold.8723:

Holey Moley, Shayne! That 2nd video is IMPRESSIVE! I wonder how long it will take them to nerf your method?

The time it takes to add another rock.

It won’t be so bad if they just get rid of the backdoor into the finish line by adding more rocks. I’m sure that if they force me to go around the whole spiral, I’ll figure out what the fastest way of doing it is.

The skip route I use in the second video is a combination of shortcuts, all of which would need an obstacle put in their paths to render each one impossible. Not every shortcut possible in the arena is shown in that video. I’ve got other videos that demonstrate other, slower tricks.

In any case, skipping any checkpoint in the arena means forfeiting the prize at the end, so there’s little reason to do it. The reason why they tried to stop the one near the finish line is because it doesn’t skip any checkpoint.

Thanks, I’ve been putting a lot of work into figuring out what the quickest finish would be like, and I think I really hit the mark on that one. The new rock in the way will cost a couple seconds now, but the rest of it still stands.

Next time the arena comes around, I might try to improve on my 100% time.

I know what you were trying to do when you put that rock at the finish line, but I don’t think you understand how effective that method actually ends up being.

Besides, there are stronger methods to break the arena than that one.

Re-posted from GW2Guru.

Over the past month or so, I’ve spent a lot of time playing Sanctum Sprint, making an effort on my own part to see how fast I can finish the race. In that time, I’ve witnessed a lot of something that I’ve seen happen in the other activities – people don’t stick around. Over the course of one match, the room might fill up to have ten or more people participating. Once the match finishes though, everybody evacuates, save for perhaps a couple people. This is clearly from people coming in just to get their daily requirement. If people do stay at the end of a match, I typically won’t see them play more than three or four matches in a row.

This leads me to believe that many people don’t see value in playing activities (referring for now only to those within the daily rotation). When people see value in something, they invest into it, either with their time or their money. There’s no way to invest money into activities, so if people think playing an activity is worthwhile, they’ll spend their time playing it. It would seem then that the only value that most people can find in playing activities is to get the easy participation award for their dailies, because again, they come in for one match, it ends and gives them their daily, and then they leave. If there were no daily requirement for doing activities, such as during previous achievement systems where doing things in Keg Brawl would only sometimes show up, then very few people would end up playing them at all. Any regulars to Keg Brawl back in the day would have noticed this as well.

It’s not to say that activities have no value to people outside of their daily achievement, but perhaps they don’t have enough value. If time is the only means to invest into activities, then there must be other things which are a better use of their time. Or, perhaps some people have so little time to spare that they feel compelled to do other things that are more time-sensitive, such as anything time-gated. In the first place, what makes activities such a poor use of people’s time? Is the demand for coin and karma so great that the paltry participation rewards aren’t good enough? Are the games just not fun somehow? Is the problem not with the activities being un-fun or worthless, but instead with heavy pressure being placed on doing other things in the game over some span of time?

I’d like to hear what people here think of activities and why they themselves or others don’t spend more time with them. Specifics on each activity are okay, but I’m really looking for an answer on the general scope. I could give my own spiel on why I think Sanctum Sprint isn’t drawing in a bigger or better crowd, but that’s a topic for another time.

B2P
Art style
Jumping puzzles
Lore (not story, there’s a difference)
…

Zero Day.2594:

No one likes the gearing? no?

Nobody since November last year.

I like the way you’ve fleshed everything out over a year and gave the development of the world a sense of direction and scheduling, something which the story as of late has lacked. Knowing that you’re going up against the forces of a dragon with full intent of taking them down gives you a sense of purpose. Fighting rag-tag enemies with seemingly no connection or explanation of why each of them sprung up gives no purpose at all. It didn’t even make for a good surprise when it was revealed that one person was behind it all, because nobody knew who that person was or why they should be seen as a threat, particularly when every faction they put together previously had been promptly stamped out.

I think panning out the story across the year the way you have would give a developer a proper sense of when to focus on story-driven content and when to focus on other things like mechanics or loot.

Also,

>Polymock
>August 2016
>implying ever

RedSpectrum.1975:

1:35, you balanced when you could have pressed 1 and 2 at the same time

True enough. That’s a little bit of a risky play that I haven’t experimented with quite yet.

http://youtu.be/EjNI4HPoe3M

In the first of my 25 sprints, my best time of reaching the finish line was with 4:27 left on the clock. A recent decision to capture some of my faster runs since then has produced this: my fastest sprint, completing the course in only three minutes.

People who are slow or don’t know what to do in this arena, I suggest you watch and learn a thing or two! People who are fast, I encourage you to take this and use it to make improvements to this not-yet-perfect run.

Shocker, right? Our highest scored MMO is also our current Best MMO of 2013. Even if you’re not a fan of ArenaNet’s sequel, you’d be hard pressed to deny the team’s dedication to adding to and improving their game. In the six-plus months since its launch, Guild Wars 2 has added more content and features than any other MMO on this List has in the same amount of time. And there are no signs of the pace slowing down… in fact, they only seems to be speeding up their output. Oh, and all of it has been free too, let’s not forget that. We wish more developers offered this much value with your purchase, and gave you so much quality content for so little investment. ArenaNet stands head and shoulders above the pack for 2013 so far.

While it may be true that it’s been free, having cash shop promotions shoved down our throat with every update makes saying something like that sound a little disingenuous.

Vayne.8563:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Lexandro.1456:

You can get fine stones from BL chests for free. I have done so myself using keys from the personal story. I have also bought 5 via the gem store with in game gold. It is not expensive in the slightest.

Again, the feature of changing armor prefixes is already in the game. If you want to do so, spend game gold on it there is no need to spend any cash.

Gold>gems exchange>gem store>job done

If there was a “free” way to change prefixes on exotic 80 gear, no-one would buy mutation stones.

Argument is invalid.

well if anet made my suggested LIVING EQUIPMENT system into the game i am sure a lot of people would buy fine transmutation stones.

forcing players to use fine transmutation stones like this is wrong.

But it wasn’t the case in Guild Wars 1 at launch. You had to wait 2 years to get that into Guild Wars 1. It didn’t happen at launch.

Actually, you’re acting quite entitled. It doesn’t MATTER if it was in Guild Wars 1 or not. It’s completely irrelevant. The inability to jump was in Guild Wars 1 too. Second professions were in Guild Wars 1. Energy was in Guild Wars 1. Dyes were in bottles, and you had to buy a new one every time you used it. There’s a lot of stuff in Guild Wars 1 that’s not here.

Whether it was in at launch or not is irrelevant. There’s no reason they couldn’t have looked at the systems currently in place in GW, recognized that they worked and were well liked, and used them again in GW2. By restricting them to what they had done with the game at launch, you’re making it seem like they’re not allowed to learn anything from the development choices they made after the game’s launch.

And it’s fair enough that if something was in GW, it doesn’t have to be in GW2. What doesn’t make sense is why they had a system in GW that worked and that people liked, but they sidelined it in favor of a different system that’s more like every other MMO on the market.

Lexandro.1456:

Its unreasonably to demand that Anet now change a fundamental part of the games equipment system to suit you.

What do you think Ascended gear is?

It’s become even worse recently with the introduction of laurels. Laurels are a reward that can only be earned so many times in a specific window of time. Miss the window, and you miss the reward. Perform within the window, and you can’t earn more than you’re allowed in that period. Some Ascended gear can only be earned by purchase with laurels. This means you have to spend time completing the goals in each of these windows of opportunity in order to get closer to purchasing one of these pieces of gear. At the current rate, it takes about a whole month to get just one of these pieces! Plus, laurels are used to buy several pieces of Ascended gear, and by spending them on one piece of gear, you forfeit the chance to spend them on another piece. That might seem obvious, but it’s worth mentioning again since the time investment associated with each piece is a whole month. One month for a piece of gear is outrageous, particularly when it’s the sole method for obtaining it, it’s the best level of gear, and it has no equivalently performing counterpart. Guild commendations, and also guild merits in a similar fashion, suffer from the same issues as laurels.

The result of all of this is that GW2 has gone from a game which I dearly loved for its first two months to something that has deviated and continues ever more quickly to deviate from the core design of GW that I was so enchanted by. It’s very hard to think about having waited five years past the release of Eye of the North to reach this “finished” product that looked like a nearly pristine gem, only to see it hastily ruined by design choices that I had believed ANet had learned were unappreciated and unwanted by fans of their previous work, and with no signal from them that they won’t continue a focus on vertical progression and time gating over horizontal progression.

The worst part about all of this is the feeling of hopelessness that I have about encouraging ANet to return to the better path. My experience in interacting with ANet during the development years of GW (between the release of Prophecies and the announcement of GW2) and from my time on the Test Krewe has led me to believe that any effort to persuade off or discuss with ANet any of their design decisions is futile. It is for that reason that I am seriously contemplating putting down this game for good shortly after I see what the full scope of March’s update brings. I would rather not be tugged along another five years by their charades than invest what slivers of hope I have left in trying to encourage them to make good decisions.

GW was an okay game that became great with time. Most of the additions to GW really made it better, and the only times it ever lacked in something were often due to developer neglect in terms of skill balance and bug/exploit fixes. The most important thing about GW that made it great was its core design: short time to max performance, tons of things left to do after hitting max, and initially, a segue from PvE into PvP and a connection between the two.

GW2 as of late has just felt empty to me. Now, before release during the beta weekends and for the first two months after release, I was having the time of my life. GW2 was giving me an experience far greater than anything I’d ever gotten from GW. The combat was engaging (even if easy at times), visuals stunning, and the world alive. When I eventually got into sPvP, I had my fair share of fun there, even if its depth or balance didn’t seem quite up to the standards of the best of GW. I had some complaints with how expensive exotic armor was and how absurd having the best-in-slot gear so far out of reach was, but I still had the feeling that that core from GW was there. I could max out my characters, deck them out in top-of-the-line gear after not too long, and then be on my way with really experiencing the endgame, which was basically whatever I wanted to do in GW2.

What ruined everything for me was Ascended armor, but not because of the new tier itself. What the introduction of Ascended armor really showed me about ANet is that it’s not out of their design scope to throw in extra vertical progression over horizontal progression. After all, there were several other things in the game they could have expanded upon to give players more to do if they wanted people to stay in the game longer. However, they opted for the route that I could have found in most any game – giving me bigger numbers to chase. GW did this too in different ways, what with Lightbringer skills giving statistical advantages against certain creatures or improving certain skills, and then eventually with Factions allegiances and racial tracks. This progression wasn’t remarkable, since the largeness of each title controlling the power of these skills made them slow to progress, but one good thing about them is that they gave their bonuses in addition to the core max armor. They didn’t ask you to give up on your max armor that you already had for cheap and instead have you chase after a new maximum performance gear to replace the old set. In fact, the core best-in-slot gear became even cheaper at the release of the expansion. Ascended gear, on the other hand, requires a large time commitment or material cost for a single piece and replaces gear from a lower tier. This runs counter to GW’s design philosophy of maxing out being easy or quick and then leaving you with the rest of the game to experience.

Behellagh.1468:

Shayne Hawke.9160:

I could go back to GW and start a fresh character in Prophecies right now and have maxed out gear in less than a day. I could even shave a few hours off that if I permitted myself access to the expansion.

Show me how to do that in GW2, and I’ll stop believing that Ascended material and time costs aren’t absurd.

Ever considered that capability you had in GW was intentionally left out of GW2 because it’s dumb in terms of retaining players who spend real money in the cash shop?

ANet is in business and need to pay the bills and would like a steadyish cash flow so they can do more work and keep the servers up. Having a whole bunch of players insta-max level/max gear doesn’t lend toward that goal you think?

No, if their goal is to keep players on a hamster wheel of chasing after higher and higher stats, then giving players easy access to max gear isn’t a good idea. However, I would rather that ANet had a goal that is actually meaningful and enhances the game’s experience versus tying players to a treadmill, and a terrible one at that.

Those aren’t skins. Those are weapons without upgrades or attributes. You talk about them like fine transmutation stones are free.

I could go back to GW and start a fresh character in Prophecies right now and have maxed out gear in less than a day. I could even shave a few hours off that if I permitted myself access to the expansion.

Show me how to do that in GW2, and I’ll stop believing that Ascended material and time costs aren’t absurd.

I also just went from 4/5 to 6/5 on my daily and thus got no chest.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bell_Choir

The pitches available to each player form a scale in Dorian mode (minor with a raised 6th scale degree) beginning on D. Pressing 1 will play a D, 2 will play an E, 3 is F, 4 is G, 6 is A, 7 is B, 8 is C, and 9 is a D an octave above the first one. The upper, middle, and lower parts each contain the same notes, only an octave apart.

D dorian is the natural key of both the theme of Guild Wars and “Fear Not This Night”.

If your solution to the problem is to throw more money at it, I don’t see where the incentive is for the problem to be fixed on the developer’s end.

I’m really disappointed by not being able to do this mission as a pre-formed party. I don’t trust random players to coordinate well enough to save all of the dolyaks.

Make the tonics.

Do you not trust the account of the individual that claimed to get a Festivoo?

When you use these tonics and have assumed one of the forms, can you use a different tonic to switch to that different form? Assuming that’s possible, will doing that pull you out of brawl or reset your champion streak?

I’m just thinking about what kind of combos would be possible by jumping between forms. Griffon already looks absurdly good, I’d hate to see something like that comboed with Soldier’s cripple and Doll’s knockback.

With so much cool stuff to see under Rata Sum, I have to wonder why they even put in the instadeath barrier to stop people from exploring it. It would be really nice to just have free roam around that area.

It’s too bad you passed by that asura portal and didn’t go in, or else you could have spent some time at the Polymock Arena.

Every run of Winter Wonderland takes a few seconds over two minutes and yields three gifts per successful run. You could get as many as 84 gifts per hour from it if you played perfectly, considering the delays. It’s what I’ve been doing to get my gifts, and I’d say I can get about 70 gifts or more per hour from it.

STAND BACK, EVERYONE, I’M GOING TO DO…

…

MATH!

Assume that the drop rate of an Unbreakable Choir Bell is 0.01%, or 1 in every 10,000 gifts. Then the probability of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell is 99.99%, or 9,999 in every 10,000 gifts. Since the probability of getting something from any gift is independent from what you get from any other gift, we can express the probability of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell as the product of these probabilities. That is, the chance not receiving an Unbreakable Choir Bell is (.9999)^x, where x is equal to the number of gifts that you open.

How many gifts do we need to open to have a 50% chance of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell? Solve (.9999)^x = .50 for x. Using rules of logarithms, it can be shown that x = ~6931 gifts. So, you must open about 6931 gifts to have a 50% chance of receiving an Unbreakable Choir Bell.

How many gifts do we need for a 25% chance of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell? About 13862 gifts.

10% chance of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell? About 23025 gifts.

1% chance of not getting an Unbreakable Choir Bell? About 46049 gifts.

As you can see, it takes a great amount of gifts to be sure that you will get one of these unbreakable bells. Only after about seven thousand gifts will you be more likely to have seen one of these bells than not.