Yeah I fail to see how people who play a MMO expect single player content to be a main stage of content…
You mean the way nearly the entire rest of the main game (except for the very final part of the Personal Story, which is the same Design Failure problem as the LS ending) can be done by a group of 1 or more?
I think its a well designed dungeon, fun to play, wish it was going to be here permanently. The dungeon does scale you up to 80 (“The Molten Facility is a level-80 single-path dungeon experience where players fight alongside Rox Whetstone and Braham Eirsson. All players who enter are scaled up to level 80”). We ran a pug with four 80’s and one 70 just fine. Final boss fight- (Bosses looked epic btw-gratz to designers) easy to complete. imo. Went in knowing nothing about it, completed it in one run.
In the dev’s defence, from all reports it is a well-designed dungeon (I presume, since I’m not going to see it past the first room). It is not, however, a well-designed ending to a multi-month storyline that has from the beginning to this point been perfectly enjoyable by a group of 1 person.
So much whining about having to group up for this dungeon. How can so many antisocial people be playing this online game? Go play your Wii if you don’t want to play with other people. That’s like going to a steakhouse and then complaining that you had to eat steak.
I had a blast in this arc and the final bosses are so much fun, it was nice to share that “Oh man this is so cool.” moment with the other people in my group.
Is it really that hard a concept to comprehend the difference between ‘Interacting with other people and teaming up if I want to’, and ‘You have no other choice but to team up with other people, some or all of which may be losers, creeps, or jerks, and lodestones holding you back rather than helping’ (I deal with that enough at my job—why would I ever want that here??) ? To respond to the ‘Go play SP games!’ whine, I’d equally respond with ‘Well why aren’t you playing CoD and TF2, then, if you’re so bent on having to be part of a group?’
What if we’re not around on May 12th? I have no idea what I might be doing that day. I did all the other story achievements, and I don’t want to miss out on my Fused Weapon Skin just because I might not be able to log in on that day.
It’s available for multiple days right?
Nope, 24 hours only. Good luck!
I think the Frost is likely the cold-shoulder reaction a major chunk of the player base is going to give to any future content if their only options are going to be ‘Run a forced-group dungeon or have your entire effort be worthless’. Just before I logged in last night, I was considering buying some more Gems and getting stuff in the store. Not a chance in Hades I’m going to bother doing that now, though.
You assume theres only your way or the dungeon way there.
Nope, there’s only the dungeon way, period. That’s the whole problem. I’ve got no problems with people who like the stuff, or have a solid enough clique to do it. But to force that as the ending of content that up until then has been nothing of the sort, and provide no opprortunities to do the content in the same fashion you’ve been doing the entire rest of the content? Gamekiller, really. It’s not a ‘Your way OR the dungeon way’, it’s calling for ‘Your way AND the dungeon way.’
Because a lot of players would have skipped it. I would like a refund please.
I wasn’t aware that we had to pay for the living story.
Oh wait, we didn’t.
If I can get a refund for every game i’ve played for about 80% of the content I’d be a millionaire.
Heh. I’m kinda torn here. Part of me agrees with the whole ‘Want a refund’ thing (and yes, we did have to pay for the Living Story…see that bit where you paid $40/$60/$80/whatever for Guild Wars 2?
OTOH…for once you’re actually quite right—what’s really aggravating about this whole situation is that for the 99.9% of the game before you hit these two points (the end-of-story dungeons for Personal and Living Stories) is great, and well worth the price.
That’s the primary factor that’s making people so frothingly livid about the situation, to be honest—the entire rest of the game is wonderful, and then it gets pants-on-head/thumb-up-backside stupid right at the finish line.
This is a game we pay to play, not a military style boot camp designed to change our behavior. You are exactly the type of person the causes me to dislike forced groups.
That’s ok, nobody is forcing you to do anything.
If you miss out because your too shy to play with others its your loss, not mine.
snip
That was the whole point see, we ARE being forced to do dungeons, – if we want to see the end of our personal story and the living story, all which up to then had been soloable. Otherwise it’s like having read a whole book and then had the last chapter torn out. Of course we would like to see the ending.
And you still don’t get it, .there are many who hate doing dungeons with a passion, and those who can’t do them because of health reasons, like myself as I said previously. It’s not because we’re SHY. If we were that shy we wouldn’t have picked a mmo to play , we’d only be playing solo RPGs were we were sure to never have to interact with other people.
Exactly
Every time I see someone reply with that ‘Wah, if you don’t want to be forced into a group, why are you playing a MMO’ garbage, I want to reach through the net and smack them upside the head. There’s a lot more to playing and interacting with other people in a game than just forming Raid Groups, after all.
hhmmn you are ok playing with 100 players taking down Jormag but oppose the idea of playing with 5 players to take down the dungeon boss….
do you see your own contradiction?
There would have to be a contradiction involved, first. There is a major difference between a dynamic event where you just show up and fight, which scales to how many or how few are there, and where you can drop out at any point without concern, and a dungeon where you have to specifically and explicitly create a group in order to do the run. If there was a ‘queue for PUG’ system similar to the Alerts in DCUO, it might be vaguely tolerable (other than being stuck in a formal group with 4 random goobs, potentially having to carry them), but if they dropped this Dungeon garbage and made both the LS and PS enders into dynamic events that’d solve the problem entirely.
Thsi does also beg a question, BTW—why in blazes can you fight Jormag with a force 100 strong, but only 5 at a time can fight Zhaitan? ;-) That Personal Story ender keeps making less and less narrative sense every time I look at it.
I don’t understand why you guys are so opposed to dungeons. You don’t have to speak to anyone, and in this case you don’t really have to wait for a party either—someone will post LFG every couple minutes, you type their name in the invite box, and done. If four other people were doing the same dynamic event as you, you wouldn’t mind, and might actually welcome the help. So why not just think of this as a dynamic event with four other players in the vicinity? It’s just about that easy
In that case—why not just make it a dynamic event, like the Maw, Fire Elemental, and the like are? That’s what’s so disgusting about learning that the end of the Personal Story is a WoW-Raid. It would make far more sense to make it an event like the above, placed in an instance/zone you can only access once you’ve completed the rest of the Personal Story. Or for that matter, make it solo to begin with—after all, it’s the Personal Story, not ‘Personal + 4 other random goobers + Failed-Raid-Group-After-Their-Afterschool-Special-Reunion’.
see you’re exactly the sensitive type I’m talking about. Actually forcing people to work well with others can be good for people. It breaks them out of their shell.
I’m just glad there are people out there that enjoy meeting and playing these dungeons with others otherwise this game would be one depressing MMO where everyone just runs around doing everything solo.
Forcing people to work with others (as opposed to encouraging them but not requiring them to, like the various open-world ‘group’ events do) is also a way to drive them further into their shells—or worse, into a psychotic breakdown—as they’re reminded there was a good reason they couldn’t stand being forced to work with others in the first place.
As for the other bit—that sounds like pretty much the ideal way to play, myself. You run around getting things done without either having to worry that you’re messing things up for someone else, or they’re messing things up for you (You should try DCUO holiday event Alerts sometime—getting stuck with an endless stream of people who fail to comprehend the concept of ‘Use the interactable before the boss releases a room-filling attack’, despite that very instruction being put in LARGE BRIGHT LETTERS on their screens is an excellent way to burst blood vessels and cause cerebral hemmoraging.) You can chat with others with related interests (mutual interest in the game, at least), and if you want to, can buddy up with a friend to do shared tasks (unfortunately, the people I would have wanted to team with, either burned out on the game not too long after release, or are too busy doing other things to play), but aren’t forced to do so against your will just to finish a story.
I think there is a big misconception: Casual player (which I am too) doesn’t equal a bad player. I feel offended when you say: do something for the casual and make content easier. I love that the dungeon is harder than open world stuff (which imho is much too easy because doing autoattack isn’t really that fun to me) and wished that there are more challenges in the non-instanced areas of the game too, to prepare everyone for dungeon-difficulty.
Your suggestion is good, the team did it in SAB already: the easy-mode cloud. It could be done very easily: give Rox and Braham unlimited health and let them hit very very hard. It’s that easy, don’t care for balance, just make the npcs gods and lock away the rewards for the group running this. The reward for them is experiencing the story. Even if players die constantly, the heroes clear out the area and revive the players afterwards. Meanwhile the downed players can watch the epic battle. In this mode it doesn’t matter how many players are in the group, you can go in with 1 friend and experience the story. Or even alone.
I don’t agree that you should get the story-achievement for that though, since achievements shouldn’t work like that. I hate that you get an achievement for everything nowadays: log in —> achievement; get lv.10 --> achievement. Achievements should show off accomplishment of managing difficult barriers in the game imho. Something to work for, not something that falls from the sky.
The fact that the dungeon is only available for a short time is also devestating for bad players. They can’t take the time they need to become better in this dungeon. Drift here can try it two times (he plays together with his group 2h / Week) and then it’s gone. Meh.
Heh. Extremist much? Speaking of misconceptions—the ‘Infantile’ mode in SAB does absolutely nothing with regard to the enemies. All it does, as far as I can tell, is provide shortcuts across the harder jumping puzzles, and safer places to stand in the Toad boss fight. That’s it.
And as far as the rest of your suggestion—like I said, extremist much? People aren’t asking for a cakewalk here, they’re asking for a reasonably challenging instance for a single player alongside Rox and Braham. They accomplished this nicely with Rox and Braham’s individual missions in the previous LS section, they accomplish this nicely with pretty much every other single instanced mission in the game outside of the entirely optional (except for that blasted last one. :-( ) Destiny’s Edge Dungeons, and they accomplished this with all of the dungeon-like story missions (as opposed to the handful of actual Dungeons) in GW1. So what’s their problem (or perhaps I should say, poor excuse?) here?
I had a lot of fun with the previous pair of instances, since despite being sent to respawn quite a few times, I was able to keep making progress—unless something changes, I can’t even get past the first room in this one, with how quick all the NPCs I’d be expecting to help me—including Rox and Braham—go down, in places it’s impossible to get them rezzed without getting taken out yourself.
some people need to man up and stop being such anti social introverts. It took me all of 2 seconds to join a group of random strangers and we all stepped in there and had a blast.
its not like you have to manage a friggin 20 man raid and organise healers, tanks etc.
Funny, that same situation of being forced to group with random strangers you have no interest in being teamed with is part of why I’ve ended up so ‘anti-social’ and avoid WoW-type raid dungeons like they were leprous plague-ridden harlots with HIV. Funny, I actually like ‘Public Events’ (the open-world events in GW2, Rifts and Invasions in Rift, the handful of Public Events from Champions, and heck, even some of the Bounty Mob missions in DCUO) where you just show up and do things, without having to be forced into a ‘group’. Maybe I’m not anti-social—I just react poorly to being rubber-hosed into groups.
…our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.
If that was really true then the game should have either been released with an in-game party dungeon finder, or better yet dungeons wouldn’t be limited to 5 man instances. Won’t comment on dungeon yet till I give it a try, but is this going to be the “standard” fare in the future? Ending stuff with a 5 man instance, so that we can play together but separately?
And funny, they do a great job with getting people to play together in the open-world events without resorting to forcing people to group. If anything, forced-grouping makes a good many people play together less, becuase they’re sick of being put into the position of having to group instead of doing if they want to group. Very important difference there.
Honestly? I didn’t see any competance at all. First room, they’re both KOed along with the other NPCs in the room—I couldn’t even go res them, as the Veterans kept lurking right on top of their bodies despite me trying to pull them off. Eventually got tired of having my armor damaged and gave up. They were a lot more useful in the previous pair of instances, really. :-/ Bad enough this is a Dungeon, but you could at least make the Heroes as worth working with as the ones you get in GW1.
Do Guild Wars 2 developers really want their game to be known as the game that never seems to grow since every new addition is taken away weeks after it is introduced? New players have to dig into the game’s archives to even find out if you’ve added any new content!
It looks more like they want it it to be the game that provides weeks of wonderful solo content…and then caps it of with a WoW-clone forced-group raid as an ‘ending’.
Or maybe it’s just a cry to NCSoft that they want to explore the same job opportunities that the Paragon team currently is, given how they’re effectively just throwing away all the manpower, resources, and finances being put into this temporary content. I suspect they’ve locked their accountant in a closet or something.
I think Zojja finally snapped…
I wouldn’t blame her, given Destiny’s Edge is a stereotypical Raid-failure group.
Rytlock is the guy with no life at all outside the game, throwing hissy-fits because Logan spent a night with his girlfriend instead of raiding—and as a result, his best friend Snaff rage-quit after the group wiped. Eir is the Leroy Jenkins type, running off to do ‘clever’ ideas. Caithe I feel sorry for, being the diplomatic type desperately trying to keep the group together instead of writing them off and finding some new friends. And Zojja—I’m amused that she’s the one I most identify with, since I run Asura anyway—she’s just plain digusted with the whole thing and would rather just run the raid by herself, even if she has to buy more accounts and bot them to do it.
So I definitely wouldn’t blame Zojja for snaping. Heck…I’d be tempted to go ask the Elder Dragon if it needs a new Champion, rather than dealing with these losers.
I’m sure this was a wonderful dungeon—if I’d be allowed to see anything other than the first room and the respawn point.
The content up until this point was great, and the missions you run with Rox and Braham were excellent—a solid challenge for a solo backed by whichever Hero, but fun. A shame that you couldn’t bother do do the same with this one (especially given the work accomplished along similar lines with the missions in GW1). Even an alternative mission that gave credit so people won’t be shafted out of the glove reward would have been nice. I paid for Guild Wars, not WoW—so why are we being forced to do WoW boss raids?
The Flame and Frost has been great—right up until the last segment that requires a mandatory raid dungeon, with no alternative methods, or alternative support to let you do it by yourself like the old GW1 mandatory ‘dungeon’ type missions did. Given that they’ve demonstrated time and again they can provide instanced missions that can be played by solo and group alike, this is a pretty bad failure on their part. Though learning that the Personal Story ends in a similar fashion makes it somewhat disgusting—if this is how they’re going conduct any future arcs, they shouldn’t bother—put all that creativity and effort into permanant content instead. Stories that I’m not going to be able to finish due to this kind of stupidity aren’t worth my time.
I wish I didn’t have to do a dungeon to finish it, before that it was fun:)
Agreed. I will never run the dungeon so the story is over for me. It’s a terrible feeling not being able to finish the story. I would have liked to see how it all played out.
Just to warn you—don’t bother progressing too far in your Personal Story, as they pull the same thing there as well—the big fight against the Elder Dragon is another lousy 5-man WoW Raid. :-/ Very bad ball-drop by ArenaNet, given that and the F&F ender are the only places in the entire game where forced grouping is mandatory. Literally everything else is either soloable, a drop-in/drop-out public event, both, or the completely optional ’Destiny’s Edge getting the band back together’ side-story dungeons.
According to the new Massively article, you get A ticket for some Molten-skinned gauntlets, which can only be gotten ONE time. So yeah it is ‘unique’ I guess, mainly since there can be only one on anyone’s account. God I hate how Anet keeps removing any reason to have Alts and keeps ignoring/punishing us Altoholics.
From article:
The dungeon rewards two boss chests and a handful of money, karma, and experience (thirteen silver, 760 karma, and 88,900 experience for my level 80 Warrior). Additionally, finishing it and seeing the cutscenes with Braham and Rox afterwards will, in conjunction with a couple of the other living story titles, grant you a ticket for some Molten-skinned gauntlets. So that's kinda neat. As far as I know, you can only get those once -- altoholics, know that you have my deepest sympathies and condolences. We're all in this together
If that info is correct, I’m not seeing much reason to rerun it all after the first time. Overhyped again…
Worse—you have to run a lousy dungeon in order to get it.
Does anyone have a clue to why we were given given a taste of this content for months and months only to get this event till May 12th? 0,o
I for one love it, and I am a bit happy you can run it and get the chest more then once a day. (Why only 13 days?)
Then there is this info that is listed info page.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-guide-to-flame-frost-retribution/
- The Flame and Frost epilogue will be active from Sunday, May 12 at 12:00pm Pacific until Thursday May 16 at 12:00am Pacific. The epilogue will mostly consist of conversations and story elements; there are no exclusive rewards to be given at this time.
This makes me fell like screaming like Capt Kirk, “ArenaNet!!!!”
Because someone is lazy, maybe? The content is going to be in place for less than half the time the ‘joke’ Super Adventure Box content has been been up. Plus, it’s a dungeon capping what has otherwise been rather good soloable content.
Between this, and what they’ve done with the Personal Story, the mental image I keep getting is Arenanet making a wonderful full-course banquet…with the last course being steaming piles of dog excrement. It may be made by the finest bovine testicles being passed through the Top In Show purebreed for multiple years running, as well as being exquisitely sculpted into an exact likeness of Marge Simpson’s head (iconic coiffure and all), but it’s still dog excrement as a finisher.
Frankly, if this is the stunt they’re going to be pulling over and over again, I’d just as soon they quit wasting our time and effort as well as their time, effort, manpower, and budget, and work on making permamant content instead—if there’d going to be no way to finish it without being stuck in WoW-raiding garbage, why bother?
You know, it occurs to me that Arenanet must be making a lot of money off of the GW2 sales to be able to basically flush it down the toilet like this. It may be 24k gold gilt paper scented with lilac and lavender, but it’s still getting flushed away without a trace other than the hole in the bank account. I’m half wonderering why there’s not an accountant over at Arenanet or NCSoft West having a screaming fit over the waste.
They backed off the “expansion worth of content” fairly quick. It was a gimmick that the marketing department forced the devs to use, against the devs wishes. Once the backlash started (almost immediately) they convinced the marketing department it was a bad idea and to drop it.
So if you want to blame someone blame the marketing department. All this was hinted at in a dev post shortly after they brought it up.
So who do we blame for the idiotic decision to end an otherwise completely soloable event with a single completely unsoloable dungeon, rendering all of the previous effort put into the event worthless? If that’s what they’re going to keep pulling, especially with content that’re basically just going to be thrown away (now talk about a waste of resources, money, and manpower!) , I’d just as soon they not bother with it at all, and instead put those wasted resources into permanant content rather than repeatedly flushing it down the drain with the temporary stuff.
That’s like describing the other dungeons as “forced grouping”. Open world PvE is solo-able, then suddenly dungeons appear which are 5 man parties…
Do you have an issue with the Arah Story Mode dungeon as part of the storyline?
This builds up the same way that does, just on a smaller scale.
Just checked the wiki, and yeah, that’s the one that makes me wish I’d never looked ahead in the wiki, as it makes the rest of the effort leading up to it into a waste of time.
The rest of the dungeons are presented as optional side-stories—they’re ‘Meanwhile back with Destiny’s Edge’, showing what’s going on with the rest of the old group while you’re off doing your Personal Story missions. Arah is required for the Personal story…and it seems like a rather idiotic choice to make it a Forced Grouping Dungeon (about the only excuse is that the rest of the DE stories are dungeons…then again, making those into forced grouping doesn’t exactly make much sense either, outside of the flimsy excuse of needed to justify the dungeons themselves—it really doesn’t reflect well on the abilities of DE that they keep needing a full team of players to get things done, while in all of your Personal missions you’re working with a lot less capablity…). They could have had just you and DE running around the mission, rather than requiring multiple players.
Not to mention, I don’t know how they handle it in dialogue, but how the heck do they justify 5 people all being able to claim to be Trehearne’s personal second-in-command at the same time? :-) Doing it as a 5-person raid doesn’t even make sense in story context. At least the Living Story dungeon does have that much sense to it.
And yes, forced grouping does describe the dungeons—Open world events are soloable (mostly), or have drop-in/drop-out ‘grouping’, with the option of a formal group. Every other instance in the Personal Story is soloable, again with the option (but not requirement) to buddy up with friends to do it as a formal group. That scant handful of optional story dungeons (then again, to a certain degree you could call the Personal Story optional as well, as it’s not mandatory to leveling, exploring, getting gear and the like) are the only ones that require grouping…with Arah being the one and only one required in the entirety of the Personal Story. It’s aggravatingly inconsistant, and the other mental image I keep getting is of someone getting two steps from the end of a 5-mile run and suddenly deciding they need to wear their pants on their head and walk on their hands.
I was ready to let this all go until I read the anet dev comments that they just couldn’t manage to do it without making it a required dungeon event. This is utter nonsense. I’ve lost what little respect I still had for this outfit. There is so much to like in this game if they had just maintained the philosophy of letting people play the way they want too. Guess they aren’t smart enuf to do that. The thing that upsets me the most is that they didn’t tell us from the outset that it would end with a required dungeon. I never would have wasted my time completing the early stages if they had.
A lesson going forward, I suppose. This was my first sample of the Living Story content, and I quite enjoyed the previous months. But if they’re going end it with a forced-group dungeon every time…then as you say, might as well just ignore it entirely, because in the end it’ll be a complete waste of time due to the only way to finish being that dungeon. And I had been looking forward to seeing how the story resolved, too—talk about a major sour taste in your mouth. YouTube’s a poor substitute to seeing it first-hand.
It hasn’t ended, there is still a single FaF achievement to be completed.
“A Rallying Flame – Commemorate the completion of the Flame and Frost story arc in Lion’s Arch, Hoelbrak, or the Black Citadel.”
So there is at least something more to do, even if it is just watch a cinematic, but currently theres a tonne of refugees preparing to move to Southsun Cove. We have had no sight of our personal nemesis, who we are assuming will appear this time around and not in the next installment of Living Story.The dungeon entries move until May 12th.
And to be fair it was clearly advertised as a dungeon, hardly a surprise. For the interest of community building I can’t really fault them for making it a group instance to aid in the discussion of living story.
The ‘Rallying Flame’ is the epilogue I mentioned, that’s only active for one day. (I’m still..amused that this Climactic Ending is only going to be around less than half the time the April Fool’s Day content made by one person has been.)
And yes, I can fault them, for making it forced grouping when none of the other content leading up to it requires it whatsoever, and they’ve well proved they’re very capable of putting in alternatives alongside just a WoW-clone dungeon-run.
And yes, I know the Personal Story pulls the same stunt, which at this point makes me wish I still had blissful ignorance instead of having looked ahead in the wiki—given I’ve really liked GW2 until this point, I’m put in mind of of a banana split with delicious ice cream and freshly made whipped-cream…which is then topped by raw sewage which is subsequently set on fire and presented as a flambe.
Gw2 never advertised themselves as a solo friendly mmo. In fact they did the opposite. They wanted a focus on group play and created the combo+finisher to highlight that. Besides you have no right to complain if you don’t like it leave. You wont be missed.
Ah, the classic troll argument. Sorry, I’d rather see a bad, poorly-designed, or in this case flat-out inconsistant system change rather than just ignore it and do nothing but run away, especially in a case where I’ve paid for it. Arenanet’s shown they can do better than this.
not rly, this dungeon is actually one of the better encounters. and with the way the bosses were designed, it would be hard to scale it to one person which would flat out ruin the experience anyway. But you prolly wouldn’t know that as i highly doubt you’ve ran it.
I haven’t, other than having my head handed to me in the very first room, which is kind of the whole point—I can’t run it, despite everything leading up to it being able to run by myself, unless I deal with that forced grouping mess. I’ll take you at your word that it can’t easily be scaled down…at which I point out that Arenanet has handled that before, too, in the end-bosses of Guild Wars 1. There, they didn’t scale down anything for a solo player—instead, they provided additional NPCs with sufficient stats and skills to fight alongside you. There’s no reason they can’t do something similar here, especially considering they did it with the two heroes in the instances in the prevoious LS segment.
(edited by Vulpis.8063)
It ends MAY 12th. It has NOT ended or even started yet.
You might want to check again. The dungeon instance is already in the game, along with the two ‘cut-scene’ instances that can only be gotten if you complete the dungeon instance. There’s one cut-scene ‘epilogue’ that is on the 12th itself.
So yes, unless Arenanet is going to pull some content-rabbit out of their hat between now and then, it’s effectively ended. Even more so for those of us who can’t stand forced-grouping.
Gw2 never advertised themselves as a solo friendly mmo. In fact they did the opposite. They wanted a focus on group play and created the combo+finisher to highlight that. Besides you have no right to complain if you don’t like it leave. You wont be missed.
Ah, the classic troll argument. Sorry, I’d rather see a bad, poorly-designed, or in this case flat-out inconsistant system change rather than just ignore it and do nothing but run away, especially in a case where I’ve paid for it. Arenanet’s shown they can do better than this.
Feel free to stop playing MMOs…
Find me something with the scope of a Massive MP Online game that’s not Elder Scrolls, and I might consider it. Or better, split the difference and do a clone of .hack or .hack//GU with a setting more focused on the game-world rather than the meta-story, and with different settings other than Magitech JRPG. I play MMOs because in general they have very large and expansive worlds, which has only been matched by Bethesda (granted, some MMOs aren’t that large—DCUO being one that violently springs to mind. :-/ )
Being able to casually chat with other people while I play, I like. Having the option to group if I want to, I like. Having drop-in/drop-out events where I don’t have to group to participate, I like. Being forced to group whether I want to or not, especially when the company has rather quite well demonstrated that they can provide alternatives to that, either through scaling or providing NPC substitutes? That’s a no-go.
(edited by Vulpis.8063)
It’s not currently ended….. Just saying!
Oh? According to all sources I know of, this is the last section, and even that vanishes after the 12th, so yes, it is ended, and on a rather sour note with this forced-group dungeon after all the previous content nicely balanced for solos and groups.
I personally enjoy the story and the guild i’m in actually have RP plots surrounding the Living Story, making it all the more interesting and fun when something new comes along. At least they’re doing what they promised with new content just about every month…WoW could never make or keep that promise…matter of fact not many MMOs can.
True—then again, most other MMOs, when they bring out new content, it stays, rather than vanishing forever within a few months after release. Which is kind of a disturbing thing when you consider ‘new content’ is usually used as means to try to lure ‘new players’. Now imagine when said player discovers that the very content that caused them to come here in the first place has gone ‘poof’. Granted, Arenanet would already have their money by that point, so I guess it probably doesn’t matter anyway.
Hey Donari don’t worry, the dungeon will be available until May 12th
Interesting, given that the April Fools joke ran the entire month. Guess that shows what’s more important betweent he two.
It’d be nice if you made available an alternate path, for those who don’t group. GW1 had no problem with it, not sure why it’s such a problem with 2.lol your such a sourpuss. Its an MMO how dare they force us into group content. RAAAAGEEEE!!!!
Yeah, how dare I get upset because one of the primary reasons I bought GW2 in the first place (other than the ‘pay once, no continuing subscription fees’ pricing model) was that they’d gotten away from the ‘forced grouping’ thing (just like they did in GW1) and with the exception of the handful of optional side-story dungeons (and, apparently, the very last mission in the Personal story, which is equally as upsetting), never requires forced grouping, just balances things to whether it’s one player or many involved in it. Arenanet’s demonstrated time and again that they can scale content to solos and groups. There’s no real excuse for forcing it here.
Wow, are you that unsure of your party’s skills that you can’t trust them for the first room?
I pugged it and wiped 4 times, 3 of them at the final boss due to not knowing mechanics or knowing which one to kill first but we worked through it with simple communication. Have a little faith! A couple silver to buff the dings out of your armor isn’t the end of the world.
Rox and Braham, you mean? They have no skill at all, that I can tell, as I said before they get flattened along with the rest of the NPCs. I managed to take down one of the veterans, but even peeling them off one at a time, I couldn’t manage a second one (I’m wondering if that one guy is actually a Champion rather than an Veteran, though).
Given that I couldn’t get in to revive the in-instance repair person without several more trips to the respawn point, I gave up before things started getting completely broken rather than just damaged. Annoying—Rox and Braham’s instances in the last F&F update were a nice challenge, but this is just undoable without having to Raid-Group. I bought this game because it didn’t require that. :-/
Out of curiousity, is there going to be a different Personal Nemesis based on race/class/whatever, or does everyone in the world have this one really upset person gunning for them personally simultanously?
I ask, because one of the few things I miss out of Champions Online was their Nemesis system, where you design a nemesis and select minions for them, and then go through one of several possible story mini-arcs before finally defeating them..and getting do another arc, either with the same nemesis, or a different one. Granted, that system may or may not work here, but it was still a nice bit of generated content that helped you feel more part of your own story.
I wish they would either scale the content for story dungeons to group size (1 through 5) or give us a few NPC heroes to take with us.
Why not? They gave us Rox and Braham. All they need to do is add add up to 4 NPCs and then everyone would be happy.
Yup! It worked great for GW1, after all—I miss MOX, and the crew that I took in to take down Shiro before I left for GW2 pastures (though how an Asura is a decendant of my GW1 character…I’m not sure I wanna know. ;-) )
I mean, all that really needs to be done is to make Rox and Braham be competent Hero NPCs, and add in an additional set that are either spawned or not depending on group size, to fill in for missing PCs…the same way they did it in GW1. Instead, I try to run the thing, and the entire roomful of NPCs and Rox and Braham get flattened like they were nothing, while barely manage to take out one of the 4 Veterans that show up. :-/
I think that’s what annoys, depresses and somewhat disgusts me about this whole situation—Arenanet’s proved that they can do this, and do it quite well (Competent Hero NPCs. Competant Henchman NPCs. Heck, competent completely uncontrolled NPCs, like good old Togo and crew.), yet for some reason want to make a plain raid instead of showing their strengths. I keep hearing about a great boss fight at the end of this instance—shame I can’t see it except on YouTube. Not really in the mood to keep paying repair costs to see if I can get past the first room (especially when the repair person gets flattened with everyone else).
(edited by Vulpis.8063)
I think you’re confusing two different tokens here. There’s the Fused Gauntlet Ticket you get for completing that last achievement, and then there’s the Fused Weapon Skin tickets that you get from Black Lion chests and such that you spend at the appropriate vendor to get weapon skins.
Stop crying. This content is amazing, it makes the world feel alive. If you dont like it, play something else. Im tierd of people complaining all the time about the great content Anet releases.
Maybe if there was the ability to play all this great content several months down the line, they wouldn’t have reason to complain, hmm?
I like the suggestion someone else made about turning it into Fractal content…much like how City of Heroes added Ouroboros in order to let players see their old content.
‘Great content’ that vanishes never to be seen again except in YouTube videos is not only a waste of the effort put into it, but a frustration to later players who get told about—or worse, sign up because of what they saw in those videos—and never get to experience it.
With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.
Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.
For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!
With all due respect in return—one of the great skills that Arenanet has displayed in the past has been the ability to balance their instances and encounters to allow enjoyable play for both solo and group players. With the exception of the single, very final mission of the Personal Story, and the handful of non-required side-story Dungeons, every other encounter, instance, and event in GW2 reflects this. In GW1, you made your job even simpler to the point that these things didn’t even need to have different balance settings by providing an alternative to other players in the form of of Heroes and Henchman—it was harder to fight the final boss in a mission arc this way compared to having a well-coordinated group of other players (as it should be—you should never discourage grouping, either), but it was doable. Similarly, the two instances in the Living Story arc were obviously designed for groups, but were doable as a hard challenge by an average solo player.
So, I still fail to see why there was a need to ruin what has been an otherwise enjoyable and entertaining storyline by capping it with content that can not be run at all without a group, when you’ve shown over and over that you could have done otherwise.
Would you prefer spending 15 bucks a month for the same content over and over like in WoW until they decide time for a new patch nearly 5 months later or would you prefer small updates over time?
I’d rather spend another $40 and see the game world double in size, like it did with each of Factions and Nightfall in GW1. I’d also like to see Heroes make a return, if Arenanet is going to stick us with mandatory Raids just to finish a storyline. GW1 was great because you didn’t have to do that mess unless you wanted to, because an alternative was provided.
Lol yet again Anet is finishing a story part of the game with a 5 man dungeon, congratz Anet, you guys really rock !!!
I was so totally sacastic back there >.>
Really Anet, is that all you can do ? end stuff we try to finish ’’solo’’ or with a friend so ’’duo’’ into a forced party dungeon of 5 players…
And it doesnt matter if it is easy or not. Is the fact it cant be done alone, and so far until that part in the story, we could so just fine, so why force us again at the end ? it make no sense at all.
Is just laziness if you ask me, 2 mode could of have been added, Easy and Normal. Like the easy cloud mode in SAB.
That’s the worst part of it, really—more effort was put into making SAB, which is supposedly a joke, playable by either solo or groups (notice that in SAB, you’re ‘supposed’ to be grouping it?) than was put into the end content for a multi-month arc. It could, and should have been properly epic—but instead gets pants-on-head stupid 2 steps from the finish line. Then again, looking ahead in the wiki tells me the Personal Story does the same thing. Very…depressing, since it means that once I complete the map on this character, my only real option is to start another character who’ll never be able to finsih their story, either.
Hey Donari don’t worry, the dungeon will be available until May 12th
Interesting, given that the April Fools joke ran the entire month. Guess that shows what’s more important betweent he two.
It’d be nice if you made available an alternate path, for those who don’t group. GW1 had no problem with it, not sure why it’s such a problem with 2.
Still bugged—it doesn’t seem to downgrade to allow a single player to run it, instead it spawns enemies as if you had a 5-person Raid group no matter what. Considering the previous stage had no problem with balancing the instances properly, I consider this a bug for this one.
And yet it was made very clear quite long before the update even started that this would be a 5-man dungeon and not a solo-able instance (it is still solo-able though, if you are good enough)
Hmm. Is this going to be the plan with any added content going forward, that we’ll only be able to complete 99% of it without having to get stuck with forced grouping (one of the main reasons I liked GW1, and GW2 up until now was because they’d gotten away from that garbage), meaning an endless repitition of unfinished achievement sets?
Wouldn’t be so bad if they had a kitten group finder ~_~
It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d have it properly downscale for a solo. I miss my GW1 Heroes—I didn’t need other players to take down Shiro, just my Heroes and henchies. :-/
You have to do WoW raiding, apparently, as the instances needed to complete the achievement, unlike every other part of the Living Story content, aren’t soloable.
Um WoW Raiding is a completely different experience than a 5-man dungeon that can be done with a PuG and is not super easy nor super hard.
Raiding requires at the least 10 people … To equate the Molten Facility with WoW Raiding is just rather inane.
Given that WoW also does 5-man raids, and every other part of the F&F arc…including the previous pair of instances that were designed for 5-person groups…were still soloable (rather difficult, but still doable, which is exactly the challenge level I’m looking for)? There’s really no excuse for ending the arc like this.
Still bugged—it doesn’t seem to downgrade to allow a single player to run it, instead it spawns enemies as if you had a 5-person Raid group no matter what. Considering the previous stage had no problem with balancing the instances properly, I consider this a bug for this one.
How do we complete this last achievement?
You have to do WoW raiding, apparently, as the instances needed to complete the achievement, unlike every other part of the Living Story content, aren’t soloable.
From all the interviews I’ve seen, they seem to mention frequently that story content will come and go. And players may miss out on the “history” of guild wars 2 if they are not playing during those times. I think this is a development style they are doing, and it sort of makes sense because they want the world to be as living and changing as possible. While some things are on a constant repeat timer, I think story they want to unfold and then end so another story can begin.
You know, I’m reminded of another game that tried to run with the same game-plan. It was called Myst Uru (and Uru Online. And Myst Online, though by that point, they’d alreadygone just running the thing in maintenance mode). Well, you see how well that worked out…