Rant: Why do we bother doing solo missions if...

Okay this is a rant, a complaint, a way to vent.. and perhaps learn something.

I was in Gunners hold and people are trying to finish the magni tournement. Okay, business as usual. I figure most want the crown, as not all are casters so the primary reward of the bison cup focus item is not something they will use unless they put it on a caster hero. Okay, still no problem, just another day in game.

Now here comes the part that bothered me. If the tournement is made difficult so you feel a sense of accomplishment, why do we bother if all we need to do is buy 5 bison tokens and get the crown?

I was like.. "WTF?" I felt like a real idiot for facing magni all those times and finally beating him, ok I had my moment of "I beat the sob", and even bragged in chat only to hear "so what you can buy the tokens and get the crown easy noob".

TILT! why do we bother? Shouldn't the tokens be bind on acquire and non trade able like z coins etc? Pretty soon people will buy the game, go buy gold (and violate the TOS but they still do it) and have all the best stuff, hire runners to all the camps, and stand around bored. I guess GW doesn't care because they got their money so who cares right?

i for one didnt buy bison coins. the crown is more fugly then togo's face in my opnion. lot of peeps buy the coins because he is to hard to beat. sadly i bested him on some girls of mine but others cant even give him a stubbed toe. so who cares if you can buy the tokens? it not like it hurting anyone and its only for a head piece not many people wear.

What they (GW) should do is sell the tokens in their online store LOL

It's just silly to me, if all they need to do is buy them, where is the challenge? At least make it so they must defeat Bison once.

It's a single player mission in a team game.
The real issue with it is that it's even in the game.

Take rit secondary, beat him easily, and see that there is no challenge.

That's what you earned from beating him - that feeling. I don't think the crown or cup are worth that much trouble, but I too beat him for that feeling. It seems that your issue has more to do with other people not caring about having that feeling than the actual item.

I think it's cool that you beat him and cool that I beat him, but it's like the guy that runs around speaking Klingon - he thinks it's really cool and quite the accomplishment, but other people just don't care. When you tell the guy you don't care if he learned Klingon, he gets upset. It's the same thing. They could make the coins bind to the character or account, but I don't think the intention was to make the crown/cup a trophy (though that would seem to be the definition to me of a cup like that). Instead it's more of a tool. Had they made the cup with no stats then it would be purely a trophy.

I think what you need (or anyone else that desires a way to show off this accomplishment) is maybe a title for it (Bison Cup Champion) - maybe one for the Kilroy quests as well. After all, you can't really show off the cup in-town (or the brass knuckles), just the crown.

As long as you're happy with the accomplishment, there's all the reason in the world to do it instead of buying it - on one character. It's up to you if you wanted to repeat that X times. Since it's the same player, I don't see it as much of an accomplishment repeating the championship on X characters, though others may feel differently.

you answered that one in the first quote.


Let them stand around bored - don't try to force them to be happy. Who knows, maybe they are happy with buying all their stuff (though I wouldn't be). That's no different than ANet forcing you to play the game a certain way that you don't want to play it. If you worry about other people's happiness all the time, you'll never be happy yourself :-)

Of course the buying gold bit seems to affect other people's happiness, but buying runs/etc doesn't necessarily do so.

Thought occurs, they (GW) know it is very unbalanced and a great many builds will not work. So they made it so all can have the crown. It would be silly to just balance it... It's like the glacial griffon mission, a SS necro with minions can beat him very VERY quickly. While others try and try and try.

People have been doing that for years, nothing new there except the ugly crown reward.

Personally, I did get the crown on one character just because I want to (eventually) do all the quests with her, but the crown's been sitting in storage ever since I got it.

yeah, I agree totally. Balancing classes for team based play is somewhat different than balancing classes for individual play. I don't even believe that classes should be balanced against every other class. If you do that you knock out their uniqueness - kinda like balancing a queen in chess against a pawn.

I don't know why you bother, but I want the "Finish him" skill. Plus its an interesting exercise to do it for my different professions, each having to devise and execute a different strategy to win this thing.

The only reason I did that tournament was to unlock heroes and I have 10 pve characters so I did it a number of times (hate when they don't spawn).

Yup, I beat him as well, use rit spirits and you're done. Helps being an ele, with all the energy.

Same here, I also had Zehtukas horn in my vault and got the green one by beating him.

As for the looks of the crown, it reminds me of the hat Jughead wore in the Archies that was made of cloth with lil points. It is not very attractive and is very odd looking indeed. As a graphic designer myself, I think the reason is not everything looks good when it it reduced to that small of an image.

I originally did the tournament to get the Norn skills, unlock the heroes, and to get Zho’s Journal for three of my characters.

Now they each have Zehtuka’s Horn in their inventory so someday they’ll do the tournament again to get the green version, which will probably end up in storage along with the Bison Cups and Brass Knuckles that they collected.

If all you want is the crown then, yeah - you don’t need to do the tournament because you can buy the tokens. I got the crown for my Elementalist because he was the first to get through the tournament. When I saw that the crown made him bald, I didn’t get one for my other characters.

There are a lot of players who can never say anything positive and always have to call people “noobs” for not taking the easy way out. Hopefully you’ll never have to get on a team with the slackers who buy their way through everything in the game.

I beat bison during the gwen preview event, I was kinda wondering where that skill came from. Finish Him! alone is worth beating the tourney. My helm's long been trashed, but I use that skill alot.

As for the people who buy the tokens, some players are just lazy like that I guess. I think it's absured that people would pay 20k for a dungeon run, but they do it so they can pretend they beat it.

*sigh* From your mouth to Dwayna's ear.. I can proudly say I got protector on my warrior in all 3 campaigns BEFORE they added normal/hardmode (44 months in game). But I'm sure someone will say "so what" you could have paid a runner LOL.

This is because you take off your hair and replace it with a hat, crown, helmet etc.. All games are like this, the devs can give you a 10 page reason for doing it, but it comes down to the speed of loading and resources used. Blame the graphics engine, that all games swear is their own design yet all games have the same problem. Funny that.. LOL

They beat him for the pve skill rewards actually...

They had no way to make items 'customized account wide' until now.
And they forgot about it, so items that should be account customized stay as they were instead being updated, like the Nesting Material or those tokens.

Now it's time to fix that and make quite some things like Keys: account wide but restricted to the account.

I feel good when I crank up a build,a pure warrior build that beats anything in the tournament also Magni himself.

Finish him. After that, it's just to get xandra and kahmu. The crown was just cause I had the tokens lying around and don't care about drunkard.

People actually want that crown? That fugly thing? Only use for tokens is alcohol. There is no issue with that.

Real actual desirable tournament rewards (heroes & pve skills & certain items) can only be gained by actually playing it.

The major reason to beat him is the norn skill reward. Personally I think the crown is fugly, the bison cup goes to a hero, zehtukas horn goes to a hero, I don't really use derv and rit heroes much, and I couldn't be bothered to do the black moa quest more than once.

Actually the crown looks decent on some outfits.

As for magni, run an EDA derv and the thing is a joke too.

One of my favorite characters is my paragon. The paragon is pretty much the definition of "team player" as they work great in teams and pretty much horrible solo. Then I go to Eye of the North and find out that they shove in more solo quests than I've ever seen.

Personally, I think that the Magni tournament is a perfect example of bad quest design. If the rewards were just those lousy tokens and maybe a small amount of Norn faction, then it would be okay. But they also tied in heroes and a really great PvE skill into it, so anybody that wants any of that junk has to enter the tournament and waste their time.

I just want the Norn PvE skill because it's very powerful, especially in Hard Mode. Then I found out that the only way that a paragon could possibly survive more than a few rounds of the tournament is to basically use skills from other professions and just go for a gimmick win. How brilliant.

Believe it or not, some people want the Burger King crown.
Or "Finish Him!".
Or Zho's Journal.
Or Kahmu.
Or Xandra.
I'm out of ideas.

Same as others, I did it for the heroes, skills, and Zho's journal.
I got annoyed at one point, but finally beat him on a few chars.
I didn't like the crown.

Who cares either way? A Spirit Spammer /rt can blow through the entire tournament. Magni isn't some test of epic skill or anything.

I can't tell why you're frustrated really.

If you wanted the coins you got them. Could have gotten it with a few plat and less time spent. But that's your own fault for not finding out.

The choice is there for those that wants to work for them or simply buy them. Nothing wrong really.

Screw the crown and the cup. I've got four of the damn cups just because you have to beat that !@#! thing to get "finish him!"

The skill and the two heroes are the only reason to do the tournament, IMNSHO.

it's rather easy, really, unless you reaaaally want to complete it on clean paragon. i can easily farm tokens with clean mesmer with two pve skills and it would be much easier if i used /rt. so i'm rather concerned that people actually buy them because they can't beat the tourney.
if someone wants to buy the tokens, feel free to pm me :3

It's a fun challenge. Finding a skillset for a certain character class that will best each of a wide variety of opponents was great fun for me. The hat is hideous, the Cup I usually drop on a hero.

Now if you're only interested in "Getting things over with.", I can see why you wouldn't enjoy it. But 90% of the missions and quests in this game are simple, and you can handle yourself with a few carefully crafted heroes. Magni Tournament throws a lot of different tactics at you with no chance to change out skills. Working out each classes best way to handle all of those variants and still beat Magni was a blast.

One barely remembers the challenges that they beat the first time through without effort. I, personally, savor the ones that make me think.

Restating the intent of the OP:

I think I didn't explain myself as I had wished. I wondered why they (Guild Wars/Anet) made a mission that can be bypassed and skills aside, claim the crown like those that did all the work. In my opinion, and yours may vary, I think only those that actually complete the mission the prescribed amount of times should have the crown. Be it ugly or not.

(short version , the tokens should not be trade able)

(discuss)

I am surprised that people would actually pay for the crown. I find it quite ugly.

I beat him with all my 16 pve characters across all classes without using the /rit trick for most of them. Certainly not for the crown, but for the PvE skills and also taking part in the tourny gives you a chance to grab the new rit and derv heroes. Even though you dont have to beat bison to grab them, since you take part in the tourny, you may as well just beat bison and grab the pve skills too.

All my 16 characters have all the pve skills in the game now. The pve skills are a proof of accomplishment for EOTN, not the crown, the tokens, or the cup.

It does not matter what other players do with their tokens Enchanted Warrior, it matters if you have enjoy the game. wear your crown proudly knowing you did the tournament yourself.

Welcome to GW you've finally figured out what it is all about. Event the zcoins turn into something that can be traded like those 15/20 slot bags people are wanting 100's of ectoes for plus 100k hahahahahaha So, people buy gold online then come back and buy a load of ectos with it and then get their 15/20 slot bags. It's been a racket like this for a very long time now. There's no longer any value to the game, nothing to be proud of or work for as an accomplishment because you can just buy your way to happiness in GW.

Personal pride and satisfaction. You can take genuine pride in that accomplishment. Those who bought the coins are the noobs imo.

It's just like people who get run through the whole game or fame farming. How do they take pride in that? At least I know that I got my fame the right way and not the cheating way.

Totally. I still have my crown because it represents all the heads I kicked in. It's ugly as sin and I never wear it unless I'm drunk at events, but I earned it. Admittedly I only won the contest that many times because of all the trying and failing repeatedly to get at Zho, but that's another story.

I don't think the tokens should have been tradable, but too late now.

the problem is your looking at the tourney to get a crown its not that anymore the other things you get are more important. i do the tourney to get the skill if it wasnt the skill yes if i wanted the crown id buy it so let those who just want the crown buy it the tourney is for the norn skills. you cant buy the skill so thats what i consider the tournament

TILT! why do we bother?


The skills thats the only reason i would ever do it

since all you need is two skills to beat it i find little need to do it more than once