Jeromai comments on the lessening population concerned with Tequatl’s incursion on some south beach. Basically the Living World event focus is starting to blur. It’s to be expected since ArenaNet seems publicly aware that during the second week of something new player activity starts to diminish.
On the other hand, I am enjoying beating that rotten face every night around server reset. It all depends on community and personal focus. The people are there; it’s just a matter of finding them.
Sanctum of Rall community leaders came to a decision based on the leeching slots of many AFK’ers who stand around Sparkfly Fen without a hint of participation. We would head to an overflow. This is the first time I’ve seen overflow used like a tool rather than a reactive artifact of overpopulation. People were using it more like a “district” of Guild Wars 1 old.
Now, Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a nice district interface to choose an overflow. The best it has at the moment is guesting to servers, which is another tactic I’ve heard used by other servers. A bit before Tequatl lands the commanders announce a low-pop server to join, and everybody heads there. The AFK’ers are none the wiser anyway. With Sanctum of Rall, it’s a little more difficult and a little easier in that we have to ferry every interested body across the party channels to get them in overflow because we keep taking people out of the main server map. Ultimately we end up with a map to ourselves. We use Raidcall (search: Tequatl) to coordinate this effort.
And we’ve definitely invited Tequatl to become farm material. Since I’ve started doing this, we haven’t lost once. One night our south turrets just crumbled, and we still won. Last night we had the bone wall go up once or twice, and we still won. For all the people complaining about “never going to beat Tequatl”, I find this statement to be a cry of self-pity.
For an event requiring massive community coordination, a player has to start coordinating from the start. After the initial Living World new content frenzy a player cannot simply rely on showing up. I feel with Tequatl this is a greater echo of the small community I saw built around the Aetherblade dungeon near the end of that bi-week.
As a small aside, I simply can’t believe that ArenaNet really thought that it would take weeks to down Tequatl. This is one instance where I really ask “do they know their own gamers?” Personally, while I find Tequatl’s mechanics a tad dry since I do not enjoy the stack tactic, I find it to be a great, difficult event for the open world.  I can imagine a world boss where it takes weeks to get that coordination down, but Tequatl simply does not need that much coordination. It need 6 people of some intelligence on turrets, and the rest is pretty much obvious.
Anyway, if you still want to see a dead Tequatl, join us up in Raidcall. We’ll be having tea over dead Tequat’s anchor nightly.
–Ravious
I’ve been getting a daily kill of Tequatl, though I’m depending on the my server which has 50% chance of success these days, but I ended up in an overflow by chance this afternoon with an organised group and no AFKers, which creates the dilemma of whether to seek out the coordinated groups or have more faith in my own server.
Thinking about the dwindling numbers, it’ll be interesting to see how things will develop. I believe the rewards are in the right spot, ~2g in coin plus plenty of loot, dragonite ore, a chance at a desirable mini-pet, ascended weapons for 15 minutes play is nice, the only drawback is reliability, but I think successful attempts will become the norm as long as there is a critical mass of players turning up, which can be determined ahead of time if it is worth sticking around.
Unfortunately server reset is 2am my time so no Teq kill for me. I might possibly stay up on Sunday night, the only opportunity I have this week since I’m working all weekend, but there’s no certainty Yak’s Bend will down him even at reset. I’m only interested in a YB kill, really. Killing him on OF or while guesting would seem somewhat hollow.
At the times I play it is now unusual to see more than twenty or thirty people there. The idea that non-obsessive GW2 players will ever see Teq killed other than by the sheer fluke of happening to be in Sparkfly when the obsessives are doing their thing seems highly unlikely to me. Still, that’s no different to how many people ever see Raid Zones in other MMOs, which, prior to functions like LFR in WoW, generally used to be quoted by developers as of the order of 10% or less of the playerbase.
We did, by intent, get the Flawless Defence achievement last night though with only maybe forty of us there, if that. That was nice.
I stand by my original comments that the Tequatl 2.0 fight is a poorly designed fight for open world in GW2. Even the original Azuregos boss in WoW wasn’t this awful. Having to chase empty overflow servers is not representative of good design however you want to spin it Ravious.
This quote from the Euro Expo is telling though:
“Q: Tequatl update is nice but it destroys your party, home server due to overcrowded home servers and overflows A: We are aware of it and actively discussing it.We were hoping originally it would take days/weeks for players to defeat Tequatl instead of 12 hrs.”
In a game that ArenaNet designed as a casual gamers paradise do they really expect the majority of players would spend weeks grinding on this boss with nothing to show for it? The much quoted “manifesto” just got shredded and burnt for good measure.
I don’t know how you pulled “good design” out of any of this. I was merely sharing how I was having fun. In the MMO genre in particular people seem to have fun in spite of poor design. I myself have attacked the “stack” dynamic of this fight many times. Regardless, people find fun in hardcore tribulation mode (see how far you can get on one life). Other people stand around Lion’s Arch and roleplay with the NPC’s.
I definitely do not fault those who find zero fun in Tequatl, my better half included. I do though, and you can’t fault me for that.
Well, thanks, now you make me feel like an idiot for still continuing to believe in my server community, warts and all. We thankfully still have a leadership here that is willing to organize things on the main Sparkfly.
I log on two hours before server reset, wrangle my way into main, open up a LFG taxi for people to zone in and so on. The things I do for the sake of inclusiveness.
Though honestly, it would be way more convenient to just join an organized guild and get pulled into an overflow and run multiple fights that way. I will probably be joining up with one within the next few weeks, but still not giving up on my server yet.
The problem isn’t “warts” in your server community. It’s apathy, or rather inactivity. The fight simply cannot be won, at least easily, with so many people AFK’ing around. I feel ArenaNet has now seen a serious impediment to enacting more content like this, and I hope they start to reconsider how they kick for inactivity in PvE maps.
Our server is as inclusive as it can be. We talk about Raidcall very frequently in our main server’s map and have zero exclusivity with regards to ferrying people to overflow. Raidcall is strongly preferred, but I have gotten in to the overflow with just in-game communication. It sucks having to work around what is now a design flaw though.
I think they’ve pretty consistently demonstrated that they don’t understand their playerbase at all. In general, it feels to me like they plan around their playerbase playing the way they want people to play, rather than around the motivations and interests that different people have. Just focusing on pve, it fees like they don’t understand that some people primarily want challenging, single-party content; some people primarily want to organize and coordinate big groups for large-scale fights; some people primarily want to explore and play open-world content; some people primarily want to farm; etc. It’s like they expect everybody to want to do everything, happily switching from one bit of content to another, which makes for great surprise when people focus mostly on the things they most enjoy doing, complete them quickly, and then repeat them anyway because it’s what they like most.
My favorite example of this, probably because I’m in the first group and mostly like running high level fractals and dungeons, is still that they didn’t expect people to level up quickly in fractals. “Hey, here’s this new content; we expect you to maybe play it a couple times a week.” What? But their painfully out of touch expectations about Teq rank pretty high up there, too.
I am sure a good percentage of the game population will eventually have at least one Teq success under their belt. But as it stands it is a painful event and requires people to search for viable groups. I like others have put it out of mind. There are still a ton of other fun things to do in the game (eg, WvW, Fractals, other bosses) so it isn’t fair to drag the whole game down simply because of one poorly designed world boss.
I love GW2, mainly because it is supportive to my type of play : casual !
I think that Dragon were too simple, without any epic scale -except for their size. But the New Tequatl is too strong in the other direction and without any reward before 25%, for even trying to put this monster down, I have not incentive to try it more.
Staying 2 hours to be sure to have a sit in my server, then hoping that someone will find an out-of-game tool to coordinate a big mass of people – and seen noone join the TeamSpeak Server that someone put In, then trying to defend those turrets against champion, to at then end see you have put Tequatl down 10%, and receive nothing… I still try it three times, and I will try it at least one more time. But this seems contrary to the feeling of inclusion that GW2 represent to me.
For me the goal of GW2 was NOT to wait to create the perfect team for Raid, the goal was that open PVE content to be as inclusive as possible to NO create competition between players, etc…