CJtheBigBear.9610

Small Update: Managed to get it this time, but the exact same thing happened. Same part of the event, same area near the POI, only this time she didn't die, and teleported back to where she was supposed to be. Judging by that and the other posts I've found about the event on the forums, I'm assuming this consistency means that this glitch is very much /not/ a hiccup in the code. If this could be fixed, myself and other firebrands would be very thankful.

So I was doing the event to follow Jeppa around to gather supplies with my Firebrand, since that event was the last thing I needed to do to finish the Expurgation collection. The first 2 gatherings went fine, but the event bugged out on the third. Right after I finished subduing the dolyak, Jeppa suddenly teleported across the map! She went from the cliffs south of Fortune's Vale, into the middle of the Awakened Garrison POI in Salt Flats. https://imgur.com/qIQJODB ^ Couldn't stop to take a proper picture because of the timer, but here you can see that the icon for the event is in the middle of the garrison POI. With the garrison full of awakened, she died very quickly. I was able to get to her in time to revive her, thankfully, at which point she automatically teleported to the area leading up to the last supply drop. Unfortunately, that was once again all the way across the map, and some enemies got to her before I could revive her, since the timer for reviving just continued where it left off, instead of restarting at 2 - 3 minutes. As you can imagine, this means the event failed, and now I have to wait for it to come up again. Kinda frustrating, y'know. :'( Not sure what caused this bug but I hope it gets resolved, and hope that it doesn't happen to me on my next attempt too. :#

Alright, it's 3 AM EST now, and after a week and a half, I've just finished both unlocking, and fully training my Skyscale. Now that I've experienced every single part of the journey from start to finish, I figure I can give a final weigh in on the situation. Spoiler; this post is gonna be long, since it's gonna be the culmination of my experiences from the last 11 days. So, starting off; the good. Collections 2 and 4, as well as the non-feeding parts of 3, I thought were genuinely fun and interesting. It was nice to return to the older S4/PoF and even Core Tyria maps, if only for a moment. Those bits, as well as with the second half of Collection 5, actually made me feel happy that I took the time all that while ago to do 100% map completion, because it made facilitating these trips all the more easier. It also made me do some content that I had neglected in the past, most notably the Augury Rock meta in the Riverlands, and I ended up enjoying that as well, despite never doing it. For all its issues, the Collections did what I'd imagine one of their primary focuses was to do; bring players back to older maps. People were all over, doing metas, helping others with ports to difficult collection spots, and the like. It's the first time in a while that I've felt a connection to the community like that, knowing that we were all working towards a common goal. However, this is also with the caveat that a good majority of map chat most of the time was also filled with people talking about the negative sides of the Collections, which leads me to; the bad. For as many highs as the aforementioned parts of the gave me, the other parts, gave me equally harsh lows. There's a few things I'd want to mention, and even though I'm typing more about these, doesn't mean I want to discredit the fun that the stuff before gave me. I just want to devote more words to the stuff that needs talking about, y'know? So, keeping things organized; Firstly, Collection 1. Just gonna say, I didn't hate it, but I don't necessarily wanna do it again, y'know? The scales were fine, and I didn't really mind doing the events for the medicine. The main issue started right after, where Gorrik has you go give the Sick Skyscales medicine. Already, that step was a bit difficult for me, because unlike the Scales and Eggs, the Sick Skyscales didn't have a nameplate when I tried to look for one, so I had to spot them manually [since there was no guide at the time I was doing this part], which made things take quite a bit longer. The part that really got me riled though, was when I spent all that time doing that, only to go back to Gorrik to have him tell me, "Whoops! I was wrong and you just did that for nothing! :D Now go back to the same places you got the scales and get me some eggs!" It was at that moment that the collection turned from a scavenger hunt, to a slog. And that didn't feel good. I understand it would be difficult to rework it since there's voice-lines from Gorrik's VA tied into the whole thing, but I'd personally think it best to let players pick up the Eggs at the same time as the Scales and Medicine, so that once you administer the medicine and find out the "truth", you can immediately move to incubating the Eggs. Again, not expecting it, but would be nice. Secondly, Collection 3. Now, for reference, any statements made about this part are with the assumption that you didn't have any your bank upon starting this collection, as myself and many others did, but boy... those Charged Quartz Crystals, huh? I get the general idea of why but, to have two of the items in the Collection require a once-a-day gated material just seems... way too much. Maybe the 10 for the Grow Lamp, I could understand, but when you already have a time-gate on how many times you can feed your Skyscale per day, I don't really see why the food itself requires a time-gated material in its recipe. So it's no wonder that everyone decided to buy them off the trading post instead. Now, people can argue and say that we don't have to buy the items, and they're right, we don't. But given the choice between 0 gold and 22 days of wait time, or 100g and 4 days of wait time, it seems like there's a clear winner if you have the gold at your disposal. I know that prices for the Food and Lamp have significantly dropped due to the increase in people crafting and selling away their stock of CQCs, but whether you pay 200g or 100g for the items, it seems a bit ironic that any gold would need to be spent at all. Seeing as how its been mentioned that one of the time-gate's goals was to replace the Griffon's gold sink, its odd to include such a long time-gate that you know people are gonna wanna skip with the gold anyhow. I know you've already stated that you'll be dropping the day requirements for feeding it from 4 to 3, but that doesn't really address the issue of the people without enough gold to skip the 22 days worth of crafting. Thirdly, Collection 5. Hoo boy, how to put this...? If we again assume that you're going into this with little to none of them, 250 of each LWS4 map currency is the kind of idea that sounds good on paper, but in practice, is a bit flimsy. See, myself and others have a habit of using spare map currency before a Living World episode to gain some bonus volatile magic, to purchase the new goodies the new map brings. Imagine our surprise when it turned out that we needed it this time, badly. While I don't mind revisiting the maps, as most of them are quite beautiful [my favorites being Sandswept Isles and Thunderhead Peaks], there's still such a thing as map fatigue. When you spend enough time on a single map, you tend to... get a bit bored of the scenery after a while. And when you have to bring all your alts onto a map to 100% it 9 or so times in a single night, that fatigue shows up pretty quickly. Like I said before, this did bring people back to the older LWS4 maps, and it was nice to see them full of activity again. But I think in the process of coercing players back, it kinda ended up backfiring, and making people not want to revisit the maps after they'd finished collecting their currency. I can't even say how many times I saw people in map-chat saying stuff like "Goodbye forever, [mapname]." or "Never coming back to [mapname] again.", which is a shame, because I think those maps' metas are still fun to do from time to time. This could've been a chance to remind people what was waiting for them in those maps, but instead, pushed them away. I don't mind the currency being part of the collection items, I do think it should be lowered a tad bit, maybe somewhere in the 150/175/200 range, rather than 250, since that would still encourage play, but also let players get what they need before they get hit by that map fatigue. And lastly, the biggest error in my opinion, as it ties into my previous points: communication. If there were proper communication and clarity about exactly what we'd need to to before the the Skyscale launch, we could have prepared ourselves accordingly, dodging some of the issues I mentioned above. Had we known that we'd need 22 Charged Quartz for Collection 3, we could've spent the time between the release of that info, and the release of the Skyscale, farming and charging the crystals instead of just waiting. It also would've given the in-game market time to compensate for demand before launch, so the prices wouldn't have spiked and dropped as drastically as they did. And the same goes for the currency. We could've been farming that in the mean-time too, or at the very least, known not to do anything with the currency we'd already had saved up. I've been stating this since the beginning; we know that this amount of effort and time isn't new to Guild Wars 2, I've personally done stuff like this plenty of times already. But the main difference between those times and now, is that I knew what I would need to do before I did it. If I didn't know what I had to do, how could I have known I wanted to do it? Personally, ANet, while I do still think you're a huge cut above the sleazy, unfriendly devs of games I've played before, I'm honestly disappointed with how this launch was handled. I know you can do better, because I've seen you do better across the rest of the game. I fell in love with your game for a reason, and I still am in love with it. That's why it hurts so much to see something like this. I'd not be here if I didn't care for this game, or you all, as its dedicated devs. I truly do hope this is a moment of learning, and in the future, we have much better communication when it comes to big, upcoming content updates. So, closing out, I just realized it's almost 5 AM now, and I've just spent the 2 hours typing all this out, so I should probably cut this off, since it's already miles long as it is. To all the ANet devs or fellow players, thank you for taking the time to read my rambling, and I hope I did a good job explaining my issues with the whole situation. And to those who couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing; honestly? I don't blame you. It's looooooooooooooong. So to simplify things waaaaaay down, I'll leave it off with this summary: TL;DR: The Skyscale launch had many high points as well as low points, and while I don't think that the low points are enough to ruin the high points, I also don't think the high points are enough to justify the low points. The main issue in this all was lack of communication, as I believe that alone spurred into a lot of separate issues, dampening the experience of what could have been. I personally think that if we want to avoid another incident like this, clearer communication is required next time around. G'night everyone. See you all in Tyria.

That's the same guide I'm looking at. He says there's an account limit, but I'm pretty sure he means you can swap characters and maps to farm nodes until the cap is reached. Whatever he means, I know the cap exists, because I can see it on maps I've farmed today. Branded Mass nodes stopped spawning for me about 3 hours ago in Thunderhead. I went back, even on a character that hadn't farmed there yet, and no nodes spawned. Even moreso, I finished doing Diflourite in Sandswept about 7 hours ago. I saw the mini-map, as the other nodes all disappeared after farming my last node then. 7 hours later, and I see absolutely no nodes. They haven't regenerated, and they aren't even spawning for me. Not sure how you could just keep mining them. Either my account's glitched, or yours is.

The TacO guide I'm looking at still says there's an account cap at 80 nodes, regardless of character, at least for Mistonium. And I know Diflourite has it too, because I saw the limit get reached when every node disappeared from my map after farming with my 6th character.

Most nodes can be used by each character on an account and will reset (for that character) a few hours after gathering. Exceptions:Some nodes take approximately 23 hours to reset, including permanent rich metal veins, node farms, and those that produce Orichalcum Ore or Ancient Wood Logs.Each account is limited to gathering three Blooming Passiflora nodes per day. Each character is limited to gathering 15 Passiflora nodes per day.Temporary rich metal veins can be used in each instance of the same zone. Yes, but you claimed to do that for 3 maps over the course of 2 and a half hours, I doubt they reset that quickly.

Sorry, but I have a problem believing that when there's a daily account cap for each type of node, and each node strike only has a chance of giving you 1 of the currency. From what info I could find, you're limited to about ~80 or so nodes for each currency across all characters, which means that the only way you'd only get close to having enough if you're starting from zero, is if you get super lucky and manage to get 1 for every single swing for about ~240 total. And that's statistically improbable. Also, not to say the metas don't give you anything, but considering that, assuming you only spent about half an hour farming nodes,, you'd've only been running each maps' meta for less than ~45 minutes, which doesn't seem anywhere near enough time to get enough to get a good enough payoff from doing metas, since most events in metas will only award you with 1 - 5 of the currency.

If you go back and read the actual criticism in the thread, you'll find a good majority of it falls into the first category of players. And if anyone falls into category two, assume that we disagree with them too. ANet isn't listening to the people who are ranting with "if this doesnt change im gonna quit!!!", because they shouldn't. What they are listening to, is calm criticism, like myself and many others have been trying to provide over the past few days, as more and more info about the collections comes to light.

That's the Jackal, not the Skyscale. I don't care who complained about what in the past, it's not at all relevant to this situation. If people want to complain about that, they're more than welcome to, I personally don't care even if I don't agree with that. But this is a separate situation, and overlooking every legitimate criticism from this just because someone complained about something else once is completely ridiculous.

It's amazing how just one phrase can immediately prove someone hasn't bothered to actually read legitimate complaints. My guy, no one wants the mount instantly. Collection 1 is a 3x map circle, Collections 2, 4, and 5 actually have you go out into the world and play. The main one people were criticizing was Collection 3, because of the Quartz. Cutting a time-gate from 22+ days down to just 4 is an improvement, but it's not instant whatsoever. At the current point, the main issue people are taking is the lack of transparency from ANet, since the time-gates denied us of any info of the later collections, and thus people are unprepared for what they entail. If you're going to bring legendaries into this, at least understand that when someone starts on a legendary, they know exactly what they need to do and can manage their time properly. They don't find out what they need to do 7 days later, like we did for this. Also, word of advice, stop assuming that every criticism is a slippery slope that leads to people wanting to remove any effort from the game at all. That's just unnecessary hyperbole and derailing actual constructive comments. And, despite the fact I've not even seen a single person asking for that, if someone is asking for ArenaNet to do all that, then myself [and a big majority of the 1.7k comments in this thread, I'd imagine] completely disagree with them. We don't want that. We just want to voice our opinions.

If you really can't wait, why don't you just farm gold and buy the food from the trading Post ? You can have it with the time gate but spend little money, or without the time gate, but then you have to pay. Where's the problem ? You have the CHOICE. It's not like you were forced to do those Cristal things.Removing the time gate from the crystals is the same as giving you the collection for free and doing nothing. I don't understand :/ It's really not. All the collections involve some kind of work, even without the crystals. The main contradiction here is that they said themselves that the timegating was supposed to be an attempt to replace the gold-sink collections of the Griffon. Kind of counter-intuitive when that same design makes players pay gold because they don't want to wait 22 days :\

Disregarding the issues with the map currency part of the collection for a moment, I actually have a request. Would it be possible to change it so that we can buy 25 of any combination of the map currencies from the vendor in Dragonfall, rather than just 5 of each 5? I know that some maps don't give as much of their currency for meta rewards and node farming, so I'd like to be able to spend my volatile magic on those maps, and just grind the ones that are more easily obtained.

500 Trade Contracts250 of each LWS4 Map Currency1500 Volatile Magic35 Gold This is very manageable. The 500 Trade Contracts is the only steep requirement, and 35 Gold is relatively cheap. All in all this mount requires about 125g (50% less) than the Griffon. This is fine. These are kind of a case of "seem big but actually easy to get." The main gripe I have though, is that we didn't know about this 'til just now, which means these last few days I've spent just feeding my Skyscale could've been spent farming the proper materials. Oof.

If you're going to come on and talk about how many comments there are, please take the time to actually skim/read them before commenting, so you can actually know what our criticisms are before considering them "baseless complaints."

These changes aren't an insult to people who have already done it, it's a compliment to those that'll start after us. The whole point of this was to use our criticisms to do exactly that. Even though I won't benefit from the change, I'm ecstatic that the friends, guild-mates, and other affected people who haven't started yet because of those reasons will now have motivation to do it, now that they've become more accessible. I consider that my compensation.