Shayne Hawke.9160

My New Year's Customs achievement category has not reset from last year. Along with the (Annual) Lunar New Year Customs track not being reset, meaning I am unable to earn the Fortunate Chest or Dragon's Descendant's Helm Box, the Annuals of Celestial Racer, New Year's Resolution, and Light Up the Sky are all marked as completed despite me not having done a single racing event or set off a single firework yet this season.

"Activities" predictably missing.

I have no clue what you're on about here because these are two different systems. Dragon Ball does not function with rating-based matchmaking. Just because they have a common element in autobalancing teams does not mean you can talk about both modes like they're the same. In the case of Dragon Ball, you do not have ten players of roughly similar accumulated/aggregated/weighted ratings facing off against each other. You have up to ten people that happened to get sifted into the same server to play together, not based on any known measure other than perhaps server availability and connection quality. You also don't queue to get a new group of ten players next round, but stick with anyone who stayed around from the last match plus whoever decides to drop in or out during the match. These are important qualities for how the format works, so going on about a format that works in an entirely different way just because it has one similar quality makes no sense. Perhaps these kinds of key differences are what slip the mind when you don't play a mode for seven years, yet still feel qualified to talk about it. In my experience, the people who tend to stick around between matches of Dragon Ball fall into two categories: the skilled, and the desperate. It becomes pretty quickly apparent who has a good head on their shoulders and who doesn't. If someone is sticking around match after match, and they are facing a losing streak, then rather than blame the matchmaker that does little more than swap two people at random between matches, it's probably because that player is doing something wrong. Further, if the excuse being made is that autobalance is ripping them off the winning team, I would argue that if they were actually a fundamental asset to the winning side, they should be able to win games after the balance for bringing that asset with them. If they're instead losing every time, they probably weren't the reason why that side was winning anyways, and their score may only have been on top because they happened to tag knockouts that their other teammates were making happen. Volunteering to switch teams used to award glory in even activity modes, but this got removed a long time ago. It was also suggested long ago to use this system to award credit for wins, which I believe applied to PvP but never was done for activities. None of this matters though because it misses the point that it's a problem that teams are autobalanced as much as they are. Rather than address what to do with the people who get balanced, the deeper issue would be to address why balancing needs to happen so much in the first place, and deeper still would be to look at the incentives in place that drive player behavior to cause imbalance in teams. Better yet is to recognize that ANet won't address these problems anyways, but a choice that can be made by the player is to either get better at what they're doing to where the broken system doesn't affect them as much, or leave it be and find something else to do with your time.

If someone is losing eight games in a row with seven of them as top scorer, I have to believe that their wins aren't their doing either. This is certainly a sign of someone whose feedback should be listened to. 🙄 The problem is that "the autobalance system is broken and should be fixed" is something that people have noticed and put forward since not long after the game's release, so you're putting forward ideas that are now almost ten years old and not implemented. This also speaks nothing to the details of the format and the incentive structures that cause snowball matches. If you're going to come up with ideas to fix the problems, at least have an idea of what the problems actually are and come up with some answers that haven't been bounced around for a near decade. Don't worry about putting forward bad ideas either - nothing is being done about these modes anyways. Nor will any of your suggestions help OP because they are trying to illustrate a situation in which they're the victim of a bad system when they are really just a victim of their own inability to make wins.

The common element to your losing streak is you. You should seek to address that first. "top scorer" for a losing team could also mean something like 5-10 points, depending on how badly your team is getting stomped, which is a pretty awful result and doesn't seem worth rewarding in itself when I'm constantly raking in 14-21 points on my wins.

This is probably for the best. ANet is notoriously bad with designing incentives that promote a healthy competitive atmosphere in activities - just look at the Sanctum Sprint, Southsun Survival, and Keg Brawl achievements for examples of this, plus the whole design of Lunatic Inquisition. The primary goal in these games should be to win, and incentives should encourage behavior that leads to winning. Unfortunately, when you get things like Dragon's Heart, you get people who run around for the entire match playing pacifist and gobbling up all the health they can find as they get hit. Or Dragon's Gaze, which causes people to camp spots that are in the open for a powerup on a long cooldown, and then try to spam the skill aimlessly and hope they get interrupts. The players that do this sandbag and frustrate their teams, so the less reward there is for those kinds of achievements, the better.

Peak naivete.

Whether you like it or not, this is the same reasoning used by millions of people every year to exploit broken systems or break rules they don't like. Welcome to the human race. Maybe instead of trying to shame people out of that behavior, you could design a system that actually works. That would at least put you one step above ANet.

Is suiciding as a villager to join the inquisitor team cheating? No, but it absolutely ruins the balance and tempo of the match, and it happens every time, and there's no way around it because it's baked into the terrible game's design. So, given that the mechanics are stacked to heavily inflate the team size and favor the inquisitors, I see no problem with terrible game design being offset by terrible map design that allows villagers to sometimes climb out of the inquisitors' reach. Additionally, since ANet has previously patched out spots in the map where villagers can hide, but does nothing to stop villagers from suiciding to join the inquisitors, it is all the more justifiable to find solutions to a problem ANet does not address. The better answer is to just stop playing Lunatic Inquisition altogether, because it is an awful game, one of the worst activities of the GW franchise, outshined only by Basket Brawl.

Rewarding things attracts people. Festivals are rewarding. Making activities part of festivals won't attract people. Genius. I takes a Genius to master the art of reading comprehension.For example. I never said that festivals are rewarding. And because you didn't say it, it's therefore it's not true or something? Achievement, skin, and token chasers don't exist? Are you somehow not aware of the whole development of the thread where practically everyone admits that rewards drive activity?

Yeah, if only ANet didn't remove the rewards and tracks they used to have for them in the first place. They probably did so because they didn't want to maintain the content, which has all in some way or another become a buggy mess they don't care to deal with, so encouraging interaction with it isn't preferable. Rewarding things attracts people. Festivals are rewarding. Making activities part of festivals won't attract people. Genius. "Fun" for 99% of the playerbase is chasing incentives. Look at every post above yours talking about how rewards drive incentives and the game doesn't get attention because it doesn't offer rewards. Read the threads about Living World zones becoming dead as soon as they aren't the freshest content. Read the threads about bosses and encounters that get no activity if they haven't been updated in years and aren't part of a daily. Fun as in "the part where you control stuff, and have it interact with other stuff" is of no matter to a cultivated playerbase of skritt. See practically every daily and time gated content ever. And like 99% of other people, you are probably gone as soon as you've gotten your credit. No more incentive to drive you there, guess it's not "fun" for you anymore.

ANet does not deserve any constructive criticism from me because everything I have appreciated or hoped to appreciate about the game has, to some extent or another, been wrecked or abandoned. An important requirement for being worth talking to is knowing they have ears they are listening with and a will to do the work. They have repeatedly been lacking in both. Despite efforts in my past to offer such constructive criticism, it has gone nowhere for that very reason.

If you compare to Dragon Ball, I don't think the thing that Aspect Arena or Sanctum Sprint needs to be a "proper activity" is a major rework. The big difference between the two categories in how they grab attention is that Dragon Ball has a whole reward system built around playing it while Aspect Arena and Sanctum Sprint have... nothing. Some bonus festival tokens, sure, but if those are your goal, there are easier ways to make many more of those tokens. Before moving on, I also want to briefly mention that Southsun Survival was also released at the same time as Aspect Arena, two weeks after Sanctum Sprint, as part of combined event and living world releases. Despite this, it has not even been available during this event for the last three years. I can speculate why, but will forego this for now. Now, granted, Aspect Arena, Sanctum Sprint, and Southsun Survival all need more polish. All four of the mentioned activities have received reworks over the years (not always intentionally), and while I believe Dragon Ball has gone entirely in a positive direction, the other three have gone entirely negative. Southsun Survival has not received any intentional reworks, only picking up a few bugs over its years, but some of those have gone unaddressed and made the already trivial gameplay even more silly. Aspect Arena, in addition to a completely unnecessary damage boost to all skills that pushes interaction more towards combat and less towards the crystal running objective, has picked up bugs that also interfere with the crystal objectives. Sanctum Sprint, as someone who has spent considerable time there, has been the most personally ruined activity due to the mechanics of the aspect skills being tied to similar skills in the overworld. When the Maguuma Wastes and Path of Fire expansion updates came out, these aspect skills were changed to suit their new uses in these updates, but those changes spilled over into Sanctum Sprint and made the activity skills behave in a far less "elegant" way. All that being said, people would still show up and play these activities if they had proper rewards and achievements. None of them are so far gone to not deserve those incentives. For all of the bellyaching I've seen over Dragon Ball each year, it still gets constant attention. Other activities escape complaint not because they are flawed, but because nobody bothers to show up and recognize their flaws due to having no reason to be there. In terms of the events, both the Lunar New Year and FotFW have been expanded upon with other things to do. While Dragon Ball remains active amidst all these other attractions, the FotFW activities amount to less than a blip. I have been saying for years that in a game that cultivates a crowd motivated by rewards, areas of the game without rewards won't be played - not because those areas are not fun, but because they are not incentivizing. Players ignore activities because the developers don't bother to reward people for playing them. Dragon Ball gets attention, but nobody cares about Keg Brawl. This is a personal and structural problem not unique to any of the FotFW activities. I have heard the same complaint about Dragon Ball, yet people show up to play it. Perhaps this is just a situation where people are showing up for the rewards despite not actually wanting to play that activity for that reason. The problem is less to do with any of the activities and more to do with every competitive format in GW2 being subject to the same system. However, at the end of the day, if you compare it to another system, it just comes down to some things being better and some things being worse, and discussing those differences is well past the topic I want to cover in this thread.

What gives? Are these modes not worth featuring at all during this event? They regularly received one-time and repeatable achievements in 2013 and 2014. Now they've been relegated to novelties that nobody seems interested in playing after the first days of the event.

In the infinite wisdom of removing fall damage reduction from traits, this firecracker can no longer be reached safely except by gliding or mount. All places from which to fall into the area result in death and require being revived in order to reach the firecracker.