Guild Wars 2

What Challenging Is Not:
Challenging Is Not forcing players to respawn at a waypoint that costs money in order to play a minigame.
For that matter, Challenging Is Not forcing players to respawn after a failed match at all. It would be super easy to have the time limit just boot players out, and have death do the same (take Southsun Survival, Belcher’s Bluff, Aspect Arena, and other such minigames as examples). Player death is not a necessity for a Challenge, and in this case, it seriously dampens the fun of the content at hand.
Challenging Is Not doing the previous, and then having a dynamic event that blocks the pathways to the Queen’s Gauntlet with very difficult enemies that can easily take you out.
Challenging Is Not giving armor damage for a failed Gauntlet match. Can you imagine if armor damage applied to Belcher’s Bluff, the Keg minigame, Southsun Survival, the Aspect Arena, and other minigames?
Challenging Is Not requiring tickets to play, and then making them cost a boat-load of money (for players of average and moderate means) to purchase in small quantities, or making them requiring farming and grinding. These are for a minigame – they’re not specific grindy titles or pets here. And while Liadri is indeed a pet, that’s only because she’s so dang tough, and thus beating her warrants a reward of some sort for the continued persistence required to do so.
Challenging Is Not allowing awful camera angles to interfere with gameplay.
Challenging Is Not having a queue for a minigame. This wastes time that could be spent playing the minigame at hand. Furthermore, there have been times when I’ve shown a team player spirit by resurrecting people who have fallen, and by necessity (when it was just me and that one person) not queueing myself for a new match while I resurrected said player, and then in the middle of the resurrection, someone runs up, queues, and takes the turn that should have been mine. Or, I finish resurrecting someone, and before I can react, they pop up and immediately queue for a match, again taking the spot that should have been mine.
And as a side note, for the people who enjoy watching, an observation mode would have provided the same benefits without wasting the time of the people who want to take on the Gauntlet but don’t have much available free time (like myself).
Challenging Is Not putting a time and movement critical minigame in the same instance as another gameplay aspect that results in incredibly lag-causing zergs. Queen’s Gauntlet should have ALWAYS, both in conceptual creation and actual development, been tried, tested, and released in its own instance. With something so sensitive, a separate instance is an absolute necessity.
Challenging Is Not allowing dozens of bugs work their way into the “finished” product, and then not fixing them as soon as you could – or at least responding that the bugs will be addressed (I’ve scanned the Dev Tracker for this, only to be very disappointed). This is actually more of a quality-issue deal than a Challenge vs Punishment deal, but it still holds true. Given the quality that usually comes from ArenaNet, I would have rather had the whole Queen’s party event delayed and the Pirate event continued until the bugs were ironed out, than had the awfully buggy mess that the Gauntlet currently is.

These (and more that I can’t think of at the moment) are not Challenging, they’re Punishing. Punishing is not Fun, it is not Challenging, it is not enjoyable – it is complete Frustration (and in the case of less patient players, it is rage/rage-quit inducing). And right now, Queen’s Gauntlet is mainly not Fun, nor is it mainly Challenging – it is mostly Frustrating, painful Punishment.

ArenaNet, I know what you’re capable of and I know that you have great plans for the future.

So please take the time to fix this – as for me, I’m going to go do some other things for a week (maybe some PVE, maybe some SWTOR, maybe some more Star Citizen forum surfing) and then come back and see if Queen’s Gauntlet is less Punishing and more Challenging/Fun.

So I’ve tracked GW2 back since the earliest days of its announced development (which was some time in March 2007, I think), and one thing that always stuck out to me was the idea that it would be built around the concept of “Fun”. Fun was the drive behind the game – if something wasn’t deemed Fun, then it would be revised or eliminated. Now, I know that something can be Challenging and Fun at the same time, and sometimes, there even needs to be Frustration for the Fun to happen.

An example of this, in my opinion, was found in the learning curve behind the Southsun Survival minigame. I came into the update late, so when I’d first play, I’d get one-shotted right off the bat. And this happened again and again and again, and it was very Frustrating. But I stuck with it, and several hours later, I was able to consistently place top in my games, even if I wasn’t winning first place. In this case, it was immensely Frustrating, but because I kept with it and pushed past the Frustrating, it became Fun. If it had been easy right at the get-go, I wouldn’t have had as much Fun when I finally got it.

With the Queen’s Gauntlet, I have beaten Liadri (proper gear and condition application are key) and gotten the Meatless Murder achievement – Liadri took over 300 attempts, so I have spent a great deal of time playing the Gauntlet and I would say that I know what I’m talking about (given that I’ve spent over 20-30 hours alone on Liadri). And with Liadri, it really highly emphasized, in my mind, that Queen’s Gauntlet isn’t Challenging, almost at all. Instead, it’s mostly Punishing. So I’d like to quickly outline what I mean by that – by defining what Challenging Is and Is Not.

What Challenging Is:
Challenging Is having something difficult that can be overcome by persistence and a learning attitude.
Challenging Is having a bar set high and having people need to reach that bar.
Challenging Is introducing new concepts and difficulties that people need to adapt to in order to survive and prosper.
Challenging, in the case of Queen’s Gauntlet, Is having 3 tiers of increasingly difficult bosses that each require different strategies to beat. And for that depth of Challenge, I applaud you, ArenaNet.