Conversation with an angry “fan”
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CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE:
(In response to a video of someone –not the person below- running
a very difficult jumping puzzle map I made for Halloween in Guild Wars 2)
Dang,
great job. I built this map and I was thinking maybe 5% of people would make
it to the top. Did not expect success vids within a couple hours!
So
you're the dick responsible for this poorly tested piece of shit. Between this
and the giant middle finger that is the Holiday skins, did you come up with
anything that you intended to simply be fun for everyone? 5%? You created this,
with an estimated 5% success rate? For a holiday event? Seriously, go fuck
yourself. The fuck is wrong with you?
I mean
what the fuck are you thinking, shoehorning platforming into a an engine with
collision and camera as bad as GW2? Then forcing us to do it in a group? The
only reason this thing is remotely hard, is you used cheap ass tactics, and
fake difficulty combined with the limitations of the engine, that you made no
attempt to work around.
That's
fair criticism. I am very aware that MMO's are NOT the best platform (pun
intended) for jumping challenges. Physics and camera simply can't be as tight
as they can be on a dedicated platform game engine. So our JPs do push the
limits where payoff and inherent weakness of the platform are pushing against
each other. That's why we didn't make any JPs part of any critical path and
only a small part of our content. Thanks for the feedback.
No. Thank YOU for making holiday content, that exposes every
technical flaw in the game, and was designed exclusively for a tiny portion of
your playerbase.
Let me ask you this. If you know the limits
of the engine. Why jumping puzzles at all? Couldn't you get creative and come
up with some other form of content as an aside from the grinding?
Why would you design a holiday
event that you assumed only 5% of would fully enjoy? Is a holiday really the
best place for exclusionary content design?
The truly sad thing is, is that you went out of your way to
make it as frustrating as possible.
Even one or two easy fixes would have
prevented a lot of rage.
1. Make it a solo instance (this really is
a no brainer)
2. Remove the wait time between
each attempt. (pointless frustration)
Yeah,
those are indeed no-brainers. And was my initial design. Sadly, the back-end
server realities put the kibosh on that.
and yet you reserve space for the absolutely pointless home
instances. Personal stories, etc.
that also doesn't excuse everything else
that purposefully did to make this event exclusionary, when a holiday even
should not be. It's bad enough you made the skins available only to the really
lucky, or really wealthy.
It is nice to see that you
intended on making it more enjoyable at some point
Well it
sounds like we just have different design values. I agree that we don't have
everything balanced perfectly yet. MMOs are incredibly complex machines with a
lot of constantly moving parts and so many different people working on so many
different systems. We get better as we go. Hopefully someday our intent will be
perfectly implemented and everybody will be happy. :)
Please
for god's sake don't try any of this 'jumping challenge' bullshit on
wintersday. I've spent about 13 hours so far on this crap and still haven't
done it. I have to run it in like a 600x400 box because my PC isn't fast enough
for this and I still only get about 15 FPS. I keep hitting invisible walls or
it fails to jump when I press space. Guild Wars 1 events were good because you
could easily try everything before halloween was over and didn't haemorrage
from the difficulty.
Hey
Valdraya. Can I ask you something? Do you feel like the other Halloween content
is so sparse that you are compelled to do this one map you dislike? I'm just
curious what your perception is. We definitely don't want anyone to feel like
they HAVE to do any jumping puzzles in Guild Wars 2. So if you feel you have
to I'd like to know where that feeling is coming from so we can communicate
better through our design. Thanks!
Well lets see.
You can walk up to pumpkins and press f 150
times.
You can buy costumes for cash that can't be
used in combat.
You can grind in a big square room.
You can look for ghosts that tell you one
paragraph death stories (once).
You can waste money on boxes with joylessly
greedy drop rates. or spend a fuck ton of money trying to craft one.
People WANT to play this map.
Thats the problem, you made it some ridiculous effort, just to give players
some epeen polish.
I hear
you. You forgot about our two activities, Lunatic Inquisition and Reaper's
Rumble. Plus the rest of Halloween still has to play out, and there's more
content with that. All said, it's WAY more content than I've ever seen in any
MMO for a holiday event. But I think I can see where you're going with this. If
you don't find the game fun, no amount of content is going to be fun for you.
On the other hand there are 2 threads with hundreds of thanks gushing over this
particular map. So..
Hey check out IMDB.
It's a really interesting site. It proves
that no matter how bad something is, there will always be an audience that
LOVES IT.
Two threads full of people gushing over it?
What a coincidence, there are tons of people who loved White Chicks! Nevermind
all threads about how badly designed it is.
There would be more threads about how
shitty it is, if your moderators didn't merge them all into one thread.
Don't get me wrong, some of the
holiday is fun. But it's a small amount.
Well I'm glad to hear you like SOME stuff. :) And your White
Chicks line was well played! But the threads I'm talking about are on Reddit.
No mods there. I like the real, gritty, hard core feedback. The kind you're
giving me. Hurts so good. But seriously, I DO appreciate valid negative crit.
Makes me better.
My only point is that some love it and some
hate it. If MOST people hated it, I would stop making stuff that most people
hate.
Your welcome. I'm happy to see you can take it in stride.
Bioware devs could learn a thing or two from you. But one last point, you
can't prove what most people like or hate. You CAN however, choose to make a
holiday celebration inclusive, and save that hardass, pinnacle hair pulling
content for side things.
Though I will thank you, for
not making it part of the meta. Despite what I said before. I actually like
most of the event.
Cool.
Wintersday is going to be much more chill, if that helps. Whoah, another pun!
And you're correct that it's impossible to get an accurate reading of a player
base from forums. Most players don't post, and those who do have statistically
relevant factors that make them non-typical. So... we just do the best we can.
I gotta say, outside this one instance, I think you do amazing
work. The world design in GW2 is pretty phenomenal, especially Lion's Arch.
Very intricate. I must apologize for last night. I acted terribly and there is
no excuse for the level of vitriol I gave you. You don't deserve that. I still
don't like the puzzle, but that's no reason to act the way I did.
Enjoying the boss fight so far.
No
problem. I've got thick skin. And I honestly like to know where people are
coming from. Good chatting with you!
Comments
I actually really enjoy a lot of the Jumping Puzzles, and I think the world design is one of the big selling points of GW2. But I had a serious problem with the Mad King's Tower, because it's so enormously visible. I love that there's stuff in this game that's really honestly *difficult*, and there's some stuff there that I might not ever actually beat (Griffonrook Run, anyone?).
But I have to say that I really don't think that "incredibly challenging" and "holiday event" go well together, as a design decision. You're allowed to disagree, of course, but it just feels inappropriate to me to be crafting content that is going to gate out a huge chunk of the population, and then pushing it as part of a content package that's widely publicized and only going to be available for a week.
If you make a big deal out of the content, and then tell everyone you're going to take it away in a week, then there's going to be enormous social pressure to try to get *ALL* the shinies, as fast as we can. Even if it's "optional" by some rational metric, you can't stop that Pokemon mentality. And when "gotta catch 'em all" meets "only 5% of you can have this"..... 95% of the playerbase is left with a bitter pill to swallow.
I actually enjoyed that puzzle - it was a challenge to figure out how to beat the start without running behind the clock, but afterwards it became strangely relaxing. Switched to an alt account to try it the next night and couldn't believe I managed it on the first try.
By the comments on the GW2 forums I get the impression I cheated by using those awful vision-impairing charr. :]
Good work on this - it's nice to have an unusual kind of challenge in this game, and even better to see there are people from Outrage still working in the industry.
Just so you know, not a fan. Sorry, no one who makes content, holiday content, for less then ten percent of their player base is a good designer.
Sorry dude.
So much so, that's arguably more enjoyable than the main game.