Third year in a row for no Sanctum Sprint or Aspect Arena achievements during FotW

[Shayne Hawke.9160]

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.

[mercury ranique.2170]

I think there is a difference between sanctum sprint and aspect arena.

 

Sanctum sprint is one of the four daily activities and is available all year (twice a week). It is also featured as a daily achievement once in a while. It is the only daily achievement that originates during a festival (one was there from launch and the other two originated from living world releases in season one (sprint was also a release during season one).

 

Both activities are relics from the time that festival of the four winds was a living world release. It was later turned into an annual festival. I doubt if arena would be a proper activity for an annual festival. I would suggest having it reworked and polished before it could get that status.

[Pifil.5193]

> @"mercury ranique.2170" said:

> Both activities are relics from the time that festival of the four winds was a living world release. It was later turned into an annual festival. I doubt if arena would be a proper activity for an annual festival. I would suggest having it reworked and polished before it could get that status.

 

But Aspect Arena _is_ part of the Festival of the Four Winds, it's just a neglected part that is not well signposted.

 

Adding some achievements would be a good way to do that.

[DaFishBob.6518]

I'll admit, this is exactly why I've never played Aspect Arena. I just see no reason for me or anyone else to play it if there's nothing to gain and lots of other things that need to be done.

[kratan.4619]

This sounds more like people don't play for fun, only rewards.

[HotDelirium.7984]

I keep getting AP for which ever event has you running and dodging other traps aka Mario Kart with crystals.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

There are a lot of things you can do in this game that are fun and that do give rewards. It's a simple choice: will I do something fun that gives a reward, or will I do something fun that doesn't give a reward? Then there's the fact that it's quite debatable where this thing falls on the scale of "fun" things to do. The very real chance to end up with unbalanced teams shifts it to the lower end of the scale for me.

[Shayne Hawke.9160]

> @"mercury ranique.2170" said:

> Both activities are relics from the time that festival of the four winds was a living world release. It was later turned into an annual festival. I doubt if arena would be a proper activity for an annual festival. I would suggest having it reworked and polished before it could get that status.

 

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.

 

> @"DaFishBob.6518" said:

> I'll admit, this is exactly why I've never played Aspect Arena. I just see no reason for me or anyone else to play it if there's nothing to gain and lots of other things that need to be done.

 

> @"kratan.4619" said:

> This sounds more like people don't play for fun, only rewards.

 

> @"Manasa Devi.7958" said:

> There are a lot of things you can do in this game that are fun and that do give rewards. It's a simple choice: will I do something fun that gives a reward, or will I do something fun that doesn't give a reward?

 

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.

 

> @"Manasa Devi.7958" said:

> Then there's the fact that it's quite debatable where this thing falls on the scale of "fun" things to do. The very real chance to end up with unbalanced teams shifts it to the lower end of the scale for me.

 

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.