Guild Wars 2

Iridiana.9078:

Hi!

I’m really concerned about the bounty boss Sotzz the Scallywag.
[…]
It was so frustrating you can’t even imagine.
[…]

Dear friend -allow me to call you friend, we share the same pain- believe me, I CAN imagine! My guild, too, has fallen victim to this boss’s erroneous behavior. As a result we also decided to instantly abandon (‘let fail’) any bounty should Sotzz pop up in the list. As an extra measure, we only do T2 bounties now – to save on both money and time.

If you ‘Search’ this forum you will find numerous threads discussing this problematic NPC. You will also find that the developer(s) have stated that they’ll look into this and include a fix in the upcoming (April 30) patch. We can only pray for the best!

Astralporing.1957:

thevalliant.4563:

Yesterday we failed 5 Bounty events, four of which because of Sotzz coming up! I know the odds of getting 4/5 times Sotzz -or any other target, but only HE is a real issue- selected in the draw are very slim, but that does not change the facts.

Actually, the chance of getting him in one attempt at t3 is 1/3. The chance of getting him 4 times in a row is 1/54, which is not that small.

I would have to take a look in my copy of Schaum’s “Probability and Statistics”, but I decided to take your word for it instead^^
Anyway, what you say translates to: “you have a 30% chance to blow a T3”. Is that supposed to make one feel better about it? No, I didn’t think so.

@Anthony: I am sorry I had to use such harsh language, but I thought that would be the only way to bring forth some response from one of you, fabulous people. Dirty ol’ trick, I know, but it still works
Seriously now, my feelings towards both this game and your enlightened minds is known to anyone who has ever read any of my articles on DragonSeason.com. Having gotten that out of the equation, let’s get back to the matter at hand – Sotzz.

I am happy-happy-happy that you promise to take a look at the whole matter.
I am dumbfounded that you managed to locate Sotzz as easily as you claim. I am sincerely unable to believe it, when literally the entire server population has been unable to find him over the course of at least 3 days. Either that, or…

… People decided (for a good reason) to stop being helpful towards members of other guilds, in fear of failing their own missions. I believe this is an even bigger issue here and you definitely should look at it with a higher priority.

Thank you immensely for both your honest reply and the time you (will) take to help resolve this clearly unpleasant situation.

We have come to a worrying conclusion after our painful encounters with the Bounty missions: it leads guilds to alienation through competition.

In the first couple of days since it was launched, people would ask on the /map channel “have you seen Bounty Bob recently?” and someone was sure to jump to answer right away. Lately it is quite the opposite: radio silence. People, members of a guild doing preparations (aka. pre-scouting) for their bounty can be seen stalking Bounty Bob and none of them will reply to the poor guy who’s desperately looking for him.

We believe that as they stand now, Guild Bounty missions do nothing to promote guild cooperation. If I am not terribly mistaken, the primary reason they were conceived and introduced in the game was to make guilds work together, like one big team/alliance.

What are your thoughts on this?

No replies/suggestions here, not from devs (not that I was expecting any, judging from the narrow-minded denial with which they choose to ‘deal’ with this major issue) and not from fans either

Anyway, as a closing (?) note:
we, DragonSeason of Aurora Glade, have decided to stop doing T3 Bounties until the entire feature is fixed.

Yesterday we failed 5 Bounty events, four of which because of Sotzz coming up! I know the odds of getting 4/5 times Sotzz -or any other target, but only HE is a real issue- selected in the draw are very slim, but that does not change the facts. And the facts are that, aside from any other problems that may or may not exist, this specific NPC is bugged. Period. Last time ANY barrels have been spotted on our server were sometime last week.

For the record, we use pre-scouting and we’d scouted out ALL non-random spawning targets prior to starting the event. It was supposed to be a sure success. We had an excess of 40 people attending. Pretty darn well organized operation. Sotzz comes up, we let it fail. Second attempt, Sotzz again. Third attempt -and that was our big break- we blew it on 2-Mult, underestimating its powers. Fourth attempt had Sotzz again and we let it expire once more. Our final try again had Sotzz but we decided, just for the sake of our justifiably frustrated and even outraged members to do the other 5 targets. Needless to say that during the 2 hours we wasted, other guilds were killing off our targets as we were stalking them and we would have to locate them again, etc.

I have already posted a couple of ideas that would make the bounties more entairtaining, but that’s not the topic here. The point is that Sotzz is, plain and clear, bugged and just not good enough and has to be reworked or removed. This whole despawn on timer concept just makes things worst.

This is getting weirder and more frustrating by the patch, but I’ll ask the question anyway: suppose 2 guilds are each running their own individual bounties. A member of guild A discovers Sotzz and fails to engage him, so after X-time he de-spawns, causing ALL the barrels in the area to respawn. Where does that leave guild B, whose members may already have gone through half the barrels in GF without any luck, only to see them ALL respawn again?

This is a follow-up to my previous post aiming to offer some ideas proposed by members of the DragonSeason [DS] of Aurora Glade, with the intention to make the Guild Bounty a better working and more fun to play experience for all.

@Redstar said “What bugs me is that most of the time, guilds aren’t doing the bounties “blindly” : they use guides. Which is understandable because the hints don’t really match with the routes of some monsters.”

The general feeling is that Anet has introduced a game mode that is heavily dependant on guild intercommunication without first implementing the necessary tools for this. Using the /map chat and multiple voice communication programs simultaneously, combined with out-of-game guides/maps is far from fun and efficient. It’s anything but. It also shutters the sense of immersion which is of the utmost importance to any genre of game as everyone knows.

Also the UI needs to be re-designed asap: being able to monitor the names of the targets and the total time remaining is a must-have, even if this involves temporarily turning off other displayed info – such as the daily achievements – to make room for it.

On top of these, there is always the chance that your tracked target will be hunted down by members of another guild doing THEIR bounty. This is something that may make sense from a real-life aspect, but totally sucks in terms of entertainment. Just because of this fact it is getting pretty common lately to NOT see anyone reply to your question “Have you seen X recently?” on the map channel. There was even one case when someone tried to mislead me, by linking a waypoint in Cursed Shore – but this was an isolated incident. @Talindra offers a solution along the same lines presented in detail by our member, Achilles, here. Basically both of them suggest the use of instanced mini-dungeons where the bounty will take place.

Last but certainly not least is the matter of pre-event scouting being so isolated from the event itself. Some people have suggested there should be no pre-scouting needed for the execution of the event, while others proposed an extension of the time frame to make the scouting process part of the main event. We are in favor of the latter approach – this is a bounty hunt anyway (remember “Django” anyone?). However, our feeling is that the whole scouting process needs to be re-designed.

One idea is to have a ‘scout’ role (costume) available for the duration of the event only. This could be purchased with karma or merit and, like any other costume, will provide a set of skills to the wearer suitable for locating the target: Long-Range Scan (North-South/East-West indication), Short-Range Scan (ping on map, long cooldown), Rabbit Chase (obvious) – these 3 should suffice we think. This will be a lot of fun, they create a dedicated role that people would love to play and it is also within the game’s capabilities as it stands now (minimal programming effort, some artistic workload required).

An alternative would be to have ‘snitch’ NPCs scattered throughout each map, offering hints leading to the target’s location: “he just walked by, heading north”, or “rumor has it he was spotted crossing the Cascade Bridge”, or “someone told me they saw her passed out on Bad Omen Beach” etc. This will make people think and also learn the names of a lot of Tyria’s beautiful places. As far as we are in any position to know or estimate, this solution wouldn’t be very difficult to implement.

Please contribute to our… brain hurricane here! Help make Bounties as fun as they were intended to be.

[continued]

Highlights:
a) Coordination, both horizontally (among leaders) and top-down (leader to groupies)…
b) …(via) many means of communication, used simultaneously (at least 2 VOIP applications, in addition to the in-game chat)
c) Extensive use of dulfy’s indispensable guide/maps
d) A lot of pre-event preparation

I believe most guilds who have successfully completed one or more T3 will agree that this is a solid and relatively fail-proof strategy.

But is it fun to play? Or have our members already begun to think “omg, there’s another T3 coming tomorrow…”?

Unfortunately, it’s the latter. Anyone who has played a couple of T3’s, successful or not, can read behind the lines above and see their true meaning:

a) YES, it takes a lot of coordination so ArenaNet got this one right – they aimed to bring lots of people to work together towards a common goal
b) It is a VERY confusing and tiresome and stressful process, for leaders in particular, and totally not-fun, unless hardcore
c) Requires the use of an out-of-game ‘utility’, which completely ruins the ‘living’ experience
d) This is an extremely critical phase for the success of the entire operation – and it runs OUTSIDE the event’s time frame!

Did anyone complain about Half-Baked Komali and her fight mechanic? No. Why? Because she requires a certain approach or even certain professions to down her – we have failed an entire T3 once just because of her and our lack of giving our members in due time instructions about the correct way to deal with her. We did not complain; a few heads fell of course (on their owner’s keyboards mainly) but a valuable lesson was learned, and we tried again.

…Only to find Sotzz the Scallywag in our path (list, actually) and fail again. This time around though, the Mighty Axe of Flaming Blame fell heavy on the developers’ heads.

@AnthonyOrdon
“This is unlikely to change. In fact, the new content is only going to take us further down this road.”

I am terribly sad to hear this Anthony. It only spells grief and more frustration to all of us.

p.s. I aimed to submit some ideas proposed by our members during the long talks we have each time we fail a Bounty, but I am going to refrain from doing so until I see what fate awaits this post. If it does not get wiped from the e-face of the internet, I will return with some honestly constructive ideas.

It was my true intention to not post a wall-of-text but my feelings towards Guild Bounty are very strong and my expectations for them very high.

There are 2 key-phrases that keep popping up throughout this thread, both in the words of the developers as well as the fans’:

“Coordination” & “a sense of accomplishment completing (the) mission”

I’m all for “coordination” and I don’t mind successful completion being difficult to accomplish. But there are many ways to make something ‘difficult’: there are fun ways and then there are annoying ways.

AnthonyOrdon said their testers did it with 30 people.
I was going to say “impossible” but I choose “improbable” instead, to reflect the luck factor included in the equation. An equation which, at this point, is severely malfunctional due to two parameters mainly:

Sotzz the Scallywag & Ander “Wildman” Westward

I’ll start by saying that we, the members of DragonSeason [DS] over at Aurora Glade pretty much operate in the way Diviner described , when executing our own Guild Bounties:

Us, the leaders, gather (at least) half an hour in advance of the pre-determined event start time and begin scouting with whom ever wants to join us at that point. Typically, when we’re going for a T3 event we have at least one more guild (allies) representing us, yielding a total of about 40 people give or take. When the launch time approaches we start splitting people up in groups. We use RaidCall and have multiple channels set up so each team leader can talk to his/her members without interference. In addition, group leaders are on Skype talking to each other. Finally we use the /map chat to ask for help from other players (“have you seen X today?”) and the /guild chat to link waypoints in the case a team needs assistance. Typically we will launch the bounty when we find at least 5-6 targets, one of which will be Sotzz for certain (to eliminate one of the RNG factors from the equation).

Now, while all these sound very coordinated and orderly, what actually happens during the event is the following:

- the event starts and we begin clicking wildly to get to the insanely deeply-hidden Missions panel to see what our targets are
- the leaders quickly decide on Skype which party goes where, so that at least two groups engage each target
- each group leader orders his/her party members to the appropriate waypoint, over RaidCall and also linking it on party chat
- after a target is down, the leaders of the parties who downed him receive further instructions (through Skype and sometimes through guild chat) as to where to go next, typically to reinforce another group or to look for a target not tracked down during the pre-bounty phase
- this latter case is wildly frantic as it involves the leader looking at a second monitor where dulfy’s map is displayed (Alt+Tab-ing is so inefficient…), informing the other leaders where s/he’ll be searching (Skype) and ordering his/her members which waypoints to get to (Raidcall and /party chat)
etc.