The new rewards

I don't care if the rewards are high (they are high) or if this devalues the gift items, what I do care about is:
- both SD and crush are farmed with exploits. Is anet capable of making ANYTHING in this game that does not have an exploit? I didn't think so.
- inflation is fine but the game was not designed to handle this: opening thousands of gifts really hurts my index finger.

So, you would rather the game dosnt evolve or change in design? If thats the case then Factions, NF should have been in the same model as Prof, and EoTN wouldnt have been introduced as well. A game that wont evolve to accomodate a wider player base wont survive. I certainly hope you wont take advantage of the HoM rewards if you chose to play GW2.
BTW, Remember when ShadowForm was "GodMode"?

Eh don't really care. It's there and much to late to change it.

What are you guys doing with your gifts, Selling or opening?

At the risk of a total derailment of the thread, I didn't say they were profitable farms. Although, prior to the nerf snowman lair yielded 5 hm chests, monk tomes and plenty of mob drop unids in a nice short run. Not to mention the endchest and seasonals. They are two examples of how SF is far from GodMode. As an SF farmer, without sweets there is potential for death even on the most cushy runs.

Good move to make some more of the grind titles less grindy. Of course the real thing they need to kill is the stupid minutes rule for alcohol. Just let people spam it, the current requirement is just really really REALLY bad game design. (And before the trolls start, I already have ale hound)

x2 all around.

its a great chance for everyone to get a load of stuff and have a great time.
isn't that the point?
only you care if your not getting rich ~_*

What exploit? SD is working exactly as intended.

And yeah, my fingers are killing me.

Autoclickers are your friends.

Until they stab you in the back and get you banned.

I hope you're right. I'd been hoarding alcohol/sweet/party items for over a year for myself, until I could decide which character would use them. As soon as I got my total, I was going to start selling additional items to fund my elite armor. Now that I'm ready to do that, it looks like the market is crashing. Just my luck!

They're going to drop down to 50g or lower by the end of wintersday. And if canthan new year continues the absurd generousity then I wouldn't expect them to ever rise again. Sell your stock now because it isn't going to get any better.

^^This is probably true. But, its not a bad thing imo. With GW2 in a year(give or take a few months), we will all laugh at how trivial we made the increased gifts seem when we are sending arrows through an eles fire wall for extra damage. Meanwhile, players that prefered to enjoy the game rather than farm can earn their titles.

to make one thing clear: grind titles never become easier, they become shorter, which is not at all a bad thing imo. Also, if the rewards for the wintersday quests were as low as they were a few years ago, it would just not be worth doing, you could make a lot more presents by just farming something random, then buying presents for your money.

That's simply not true. With the current state of Sweet and Party points you can buy titles for about half the price, farming 500,000g is easier than farming 1,400,000g no matter which way you look at it.

Plus VQing MQ over and over is considerably easier than playing AB/FA as well as being shorter.

In the majority of cases the grind titles are now easier AND faster, except Drunkard which is slower due to the closing of the "windows" trick, but it's still easier because it's cheaper.

I maxed party and sweet before this event and had enough alcohol going in that I won't need a single drop to max that one too.

Never spent even 1 gold piece on any of it - just used what came along in the course of events and what I got from nick.

Nor will I sell anything I get from this festival - just give them away to guildies still looking to max their titles.

So if the rewards from this festival make it possible for some to get those title a few months earlier than they would have other wise done - I say it's a great idea.

I'd say Wintersday this year is on par with rewards from Halloween. Having seen Wintersday 3 years ago and thinking what a dreadful bore it was as the rewards weren't that amazing, I love this new style. It's meant to be the season of GIVING.

You want a challenge? Get a mini polar bear. They haven't devalued so there's still something out there to shoot for if you want to make a ton of cash. The masses of presents: how is this any different from ToT bags? I actually prefer the rewards from the presents. Currently stocking up on DP removal for my resumption of my VQ title after the holidays, not to mention accumulating points for drunkard/party.

I think people are forgetting that this may well be the last Wintersday before GW2. Why not make the festivals memorable and give those a chance who haven't played for 5 years to get something out of it? If you've maxed the titles already, why should it concern you anyway? You've done it, got it, good for you. Don't be Grentches about it :P

Would also like to see Drunkard involve spammable alcohols or at the very least show counters for how long the drunk effect is lasting per drink. To me that's something so simple and already possible with sweet/party items. I don't see why alcohol items don't have that (I know grog does but why not the others?)

That's what I thought.

No, simply not. If you can farm 1g, you can also farm 1,400,000g, just by repeating the 1g farm. It's not any harder, since you are doing the exact same thing, but then more times. Every grind title is this way. You can pick something that gives you a small amount of, for example, reputation points, and then repeat it. Repeating it more times doesn't make it harder, just longer.

By the way,

the mobs in "You're a Mean one Mister Grenth" and "In Grenth's Defense" drop gifts instead of candy cane shards this year. So you get an extra 5-10 above the reward for each of those.

Not that it makes any difference since they take so long it would be pointless to farm them. (unless you want globs of frozen plasm)

It looks to me that ANet has decided to relieve a bit of the grind that they (hopefully unintentionally) added by introducing titles. I think titles were originally a quick and easy (lazy) way to add pseudo content. Having rebalanced some of the titles a couple of times they are running out of options here. Upping the rewards to make them more achievable is another rebalance of the grind titles.

Looking at HoM rewards it seems they are assuming that most regular players will be aspiring for 30/50 and that the real enthusiasts will go for 50/50 which might explain why they want some titles to be easier whilst keeping a few at the nasty end of the grind spectrum. I don't mind this idea, though I do think some of the nasty grind titles are still too nasty.

Grind? What grind? No grind unless you want it, anyways, or you consider taking the bounties and doing quests as they come up (not even going out of your way to kill everything) while actually playing to be grinding in order to get to the few mandatory bits of Kurzick/Luxon faction or Sunspear rank (r7/2500 faction) to continue the story.

ANet want you to do it, say hello to HoM and GW2 :P

It's completely optional, but if you choose to max a title, there's no title (except Protector) that can be maxed without grind.

Methinks you should brush up on the difference between exploits and strategy.

How are these farmed with exploits? Please explain.

Hmm, well kinda makes the 1 cc shard for running that present to that kid in LA or Kamadan look lame :0

These exploits have only been deemed 'not against terms of service'. When a game company declares something an 'exploit', they are typically using a second legal definition that does not invalidate the other meaning. An exploit of something is independently determined from a punishment system. For decades, games existed around no punishment system being in place, and yet certain things were designated as exploits. For example, there was a football game where you could use a certain play repeatedly to complete passes, but since this game was offline, you would not be banned for exploiting it on your own.

There are clear AI and map exploits being used to farm these quests. Foes that turn hostile around a sacrificing necromancer and ball up while wasting Ice Fort is AI exploitation (they form a semi-arc and often wipe your allies if you don't cheese them at the start). For the second quest, if you've ever played a game similar to it's design (I've started League of Legends only recently), it's pretty obvious that both the map and AI are being exploited to farm this quest.

Strategy is still not the only place to look for problems. A majority of complaints about this game have not been based around the strategies drawn up around a table, but about the tactics used (i.e. game play complaints, build wars complaints, certain classes being far more viable than others). The game has some strategic depth based around class and skill selections, while the tactics available to the player are often far inferior to the advantages of strategy, because not all strategies can execute the same tactics. Throughout the game, people have been using a strategy of taking particular group members and using particular skill combinations to do things. This isn't 'game' making success.

But tactical flaws are often bad enough whenever they occur, and I would highly doubt any statement that Guild Wars is 'reinventing combat successfully based on defying the mold of tactics defined by similar contests'. More than a few of these things are completely stupid: Why is it often advantageous to stand in layered AoE that foes intended to kill me with? Why are these foes letting me sneak by to kill their leader when we can all see each other? Why does pulling more groups result in a faster clear, instead of my group getting overwhelmed?

The tactics chiefly used to farm these quests are also skewed to favor exploitative strategy. A pre-emptive strike by a suiciding necro has a greater macro level value during a snowball fight than having a second teammate do anything else. Apparently the foes also keep thinking the necro is an honest diplomat, no matter how many times he does it. In the other one, you can walk by everything and take out essential defenses while using no cover, and there is no threat of an enemy response like; losing your base at the same rate by going all in against one side.

You might as well say pulling and balling up enemies is an exploit. In which case this entire game is played with exploits which doesn't make a lick of sense.

These are clear exploits designed into the game to make things easier for people. I wasn't making a value judgment against players when the exploits are intended for people to use. But saying they aren't exploits is unnecessary denial, because it's not being called cheating or hacking. Exploiting is about legally taking advantage of design/rule flaws. If it wasn't an exploit, the reward would be consistent with similar things, a default snowball skill would do AoE damage, and the ranger/necromancer aoe wouldn't be so much better that everyone farms on these two classes (it would be balanced into the game).

You aren't pulling and tanking in Snowball Dominance, you are jumping a spawn point. Spawn camping is one of the oldest exploits in gaming. On top of that, when you flag anything into the big group and leave it there long enough, it causes every foe to blow his ice fort and path in a giant ball (instead of forming a better attack arc to surround your allies). From going through most PvE areas, most enemies stagger usage of important skills instead of using all of the same skill at once. Then there are 2 classes best at damaging foes with snowball skills when balling happens, so everyone is switching to these 2 classes to exploit. There is also a massive inconsistency between the reward output of this quest and other things in the game, when you consider how quickly a certain 2 classes can farm it. This can be measured by merchant/zaishen values of alcohol/sweets/party points, drop rates in regular PvE of holiday items, or fruitless efforts into PvP.

There are a number of skills designed around mitigating damage like a tank, and a number of skills designed around small range aoe damage that become useful when you ball enemies. Then there are a number of caster classes that would completely fail if the aggro of certain pve areas in hard mode were spread around on everyone. Mitigating through tanking and balling are obviously a game mechanic.

But permanent immunity is a tanking exploit. It isn't even needed, especially not when we see how badly AI falls for something like 10 seconds of immunity in an ice fort on a character that doesn't move when foes are programmed a certain way. But permanent immunity is available to so few classes, and it gives them a much higher reward earning ration than other classes. Game designers even know permanent immunity everywhere is broken, which is why when they first made the game they didn't allow it. The best you could do is tank a group of foes (Warrior/55), and you would die if you took on too many or chose the wrong areas. Even if the later content is more closely designed around immunity, you still exploit Prophecies and Factions when you use it.

Yes definitely. With SD they made party pts, drunk pts, and sweet pts easy and very affordable. This was a right move for them.

I mean there 3 titles but 3 titles that cost a LOT of money w/o SD.

How exactly is anyone supposed to beat Snowball Dominance without manipulating aggro? Even the "old fashioned" safe method of beating it is standing to the left until your entire team is dead so you can pick em off one by one. Other methods are simply part of the R/N method. I've been farming it with my mesmer (which is useless in pve snowball fights) by using a pet to pull the enemies out of their ice forts and having a ranger hero flurry them to death.

And are you seriously QQing about some classes being better at a certain thing? Come on man, specialization is why we have professions in the first place.

They purposely made permasins, etc, possible by making shadowform maintainable. They still have their weakness - no tank is invincible. These things are being played the way they were meant to be played.

No combination of skills should be considered an exploit. The way GW is designed is this: The developers give you a bunch of skills and say, "Play with these. Be creative." And we do.

By the way, there are two definitions of "exploit," simply taking advantage of something -- or -- the same, but unethically. The first should not even be an issue. Using anything to your advantage is an exploit. The latter is the only matter that would be of any issue, and I would say that the situations you illustrated do not represent "unethical" actions.

I did the quest straight up, using Snowball/Mega Snowball and no class specific skills. Not moving during the start sequence, and throwing snowballs from behind my allies. There were 6 hostiles and 2 allies left after the opening skirmish. I had my hero to help take them down (used a monk). The timer still said 4 minutes after I finished. Maybe it takes 5 minutes sometimes. This is the same way I did it the first time, and I'm sure there are others who didn't have wiki to tell them how to exploit the mission the first time they did it as well. It was easy before like this, and it's still easy. It takes maybe twice as long, but time spent was never a measure of difficulty.

Farming it less than every 2 minutes with a Necromancer and Ranger is not simply 'beating' it. It's exploiting it to allow it to become a highly profitable farm. That's why there are several threads inquiring about what this is doing to various parts of the game.

This isn't a proper example of class specialization either. 8/10 classes do not need to exist in this format if this is how it was designed. Just turn us into Melandru or Grenth so anyone can group for this on their main. My main is a Ranger with maxed Vanguard, but I can exploit this on a Necro when I feel like it. Not that the vanguard points even matter. Why is everyone being stuck on certain classes when we may need to be stuck on other classes for title farms? This leads to wasting more drunkard and tonic spamming time instead of playing.

Shadowform has weaknesses because exploits have weaknesses when you don't use them properly. If it's you standing on the spawn point in Snowball dominance as a necro, and your hero is a Ranger flagged with allies, obviously you are going to fail with the most successful method. Gold or ectoplasm exploits can not be used to beat high level bosses alone in this type of game, so they have weaknesses too. Even hacks and cheats can have weaknesses. If I could hack the PvE game to give me a Warrior with 5 pips of regen, stacking vigor runes, and use of the primary attribute from my secondary: I could try to claim hacks are much weaker than a default Assassin (as long as I couldn't do something with Shadow Form). 'Doing it wrong' doesn't make something not what it is. If we do this glass half-empty stuff with Shadow Form and Snowball Dominance farm having weaknesses, then other stuff in the game still has far more weakenesses.

Camping the spawn point of Snowball Dominance is not a 'skill' given to play with. It's something that needed to be confirmed as legal with the developers. The way Guild Wars is designed does not create a genre wide precedent and change the meaning of a word already in use. If you were testing this game as a job, you would obviously report what could be done to a person making the game. Lots of offline games end up having intended end game money exploits; Guild Wars has this somewhat with Ectoplasm, War in Kryta, or Hearts of the North. This one is accessible to new players. It really needed to be asked about, because newly created accounts are more popular in Real Money Trade.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm guessing I wouldn't have criticized that statement Vazze made about exploits if I knew this.

What?

12charsformessage

Could you at least be clear on what you are asking about, instead of purposely circumventing the 12 character filter? There's a good reason that filter is there, because communication that short is almost always very poor. He was talking about skills on your bar and that's how I used the word: Sprint, Frenzy, Mending, etc. Only you know what you are asking. Maybe it is something already addressed outside of a quote not taken properly in context?

Guild Wars is one of the few MMOs I have seen where they often say "We intended this exploitable flaw", but even they don't do it all of the time. There is still a rule in place that says don't exploit bugs. Maybe it could have been a bug that players and heroes were granted free movement and not locked into place for the start of the quest. Maybe using Ice Forts at once is an enemy AI bug. Maybe they weren't completely aware of what was being done with the farming. There's not always clear intention when only 2/10 classes can capitalize on something that's easily accessible to newly created characters. Any person intelligent enough to be among the first exploiters likely has the ability to reason that mechanics that seem too good to be true may be bugs or unintended. But in any case, it's not always the best idea to train masses of players to exploit your game, and then punish them when they can't distinguish the difference between legality. There are already several threads on this: it was not a minority opinion to wonder about whether something wrong was happening. Long term game players recognize this as a confusing policy shift.

Blurring the lines between legal and illegal exploits in a game is very confusing to the playing base that knows how to follow rules and plays other games. Before, I was trying to specifically address issues related to whether I thought this was a good move by A-net, but I don't see how this branched 'discussion' will lead there. If you don't have the investment in a conversation to say any more than one word (or to be clear), you probably aren't a real participant. And the OP has a request that protects trolls from getting flamed.

I'm terribly sorry, I thought my question was pretty clear. I was asking the plain question 'what?' in relation to your statement that confirmation as to the 'legality' of spawn camping in snowball dominance was needed from the developers, as I have never heard such an absurd statement. Can you clarify that statement?


Anyway, a necro in SD is as much an 'exploit' as a tank in a tank'n'spank tactic, absorbing all the focus of the enemies while the rest of the team can mop up. It's just about knowing game mechanics and adjusting your tactics to win against predictable AI targets.

double post.......

So you and your hero took out 6 npcs, which had to have been done by losing aggro first then, pulling them one by one or by twos - which is manipulating aggro like I said.

So you make roughly 50k an hour in all the loot and gold rewards -- for a couple weeks out of the year. This sort of profit during events is nothing new and is to be expected when you offer items that can only be obtained for a limited time.

There are two optimal classes, much like there are optimal classes in everything in the game. As long as you take a ranger or necro hero, you can still get a 2 minute run -- other classes aren't irrelevant, they're just sub-optimal.

Way to completely disregard my statement about Shadow Form being purposefully designed to be maintainable and use it to address a non-relevant topic. Positioning yourself in the middle of enemies is not a Skill -- thinks for that.

You're QQing about people maintaining Shadow Form, but using skills in beneficial combinations is what this game's about.

And you are the first I have ever heard complain about "spawn camping" npcs.

Way to end a quote mid-sentence.

See what I did there?

Stop theorycrafting and just do the quest that you claimed could only be done by 'necro camping the spawn' or 'running to the left'. The 6 remaining hostiles were just standing there doing nothing because you have range to attack with. I didn't do anything to make them stand there. The snowball mobs aren't linked. Why would it be intuitive to aggro all of them at once when I am a smaller team using no AoE during my test? Pulling and body pulling are such natural thing to do. Fire a ranged attack at an enemy and he comes with linked mobs. I don't see one enemy/group coming and decide I need to aggro another because the second one isn't coming. No idea where you are getting this evidence that seems to claim that I consider 'pulling' that can be done by any class an exploit. Only AoE classes need them to ball. And to ball them, people use a spawn camp exploit to pull them off pre-programmed pathing. Just try 'pulling' them into a ball and see what happens.

Snowball Dominance was changed from a 10 Candy Cane Shard reward to a 10 Wintersday Gift reward in 2010. Nothing new? Expected? There were holiday events for several years before this, and by those standards, the rewards can be considered high. This is not 'history' or 'expectation' you speak of, but it's about personal entitlement to Hall of Monuments and titles. The opening post asks questions about economics, because things have most definitely changed.

I could tell you about class relevance, and about how 8/10 classes doing something sub-optimally enough cannot be 'farming' when the bar has been raised so high by the classes that define farming in the format...

Or I could tell you about how Shadow Form was once designed specifically to NOT be permanent, how areas were designed before the true power of permanent Shadow Form was available to be known, and about how permanent Shadow Form came about because it was requested by players who wanted to farm (Arcane Echo/Shadow Form)...

But based on what you quoted me saying here, and your response to my quote, you might want to review why I ended this mid-sentence and mid-argument. Yea, 'I' 'missed' the 'context' on that one. Your quoted response ends this all very nicely...

The biggest question is why the hell do you even care? How could this POSSIBLY affect you, other than bringing prices DOWN? It affects everyone else the same way...making these titles easier to obtain. Oh QQ, people with max titles didn't have to work as hard for theirs as people did earlier. But big deal...we got them earlier, and we have the pride of knowing we did it the "hard way".

the only other way this could possibly affect you is if you were planning on making a profit from these items. Oh well, you still make a profit, and it's still the same AMOUNT of profit...because although prices have fallen, the supply has increased. Buyers are getting more for their money, but you have more to give for that money. Net gain has not changed. If anything...prices aren't falling at the same rate as drops have increased.

As far as it being an exploit...oh well. It's not like you have a chance at a mini polar bear doing SD. I think you should bitch and moan about being able to avoid all grentch aggro during Strength of Snow at the end and just wait in 100% safety for the chest to pop.

Well it's pretty clear what's happening with the economy. It's being exploited. There's a legal game exploit in place that is increasing supply. Exploitation-earned surplus is flooding a previously less exploited supply that was harder to earn. Exploiters are happily exploiting this exploitatious exploit. I heard next year that the quest is going to be renamed "Exploit Dominance", and that the gifts are going to be called "Wintersday Exploits". Necro skill is appropriately going to be called "Holiday Exploits" as well. Then when you start the quest, one of your teammates should whisper, [Hey, flag a necro into the opposing team before they turn hostile because spawn camp exploits are the only way we can beat them]. That will really help the newer players out.

Alot of people are using this exploit. I call it an exploit, because it is an exploit. I haven't requested that this exploit be fixed unless it was defined as a bug (it has been clarified that this is not classified as bug exploitation). AI exploitation is not bug exploitation. Now if only they threw the word exploit in various parts of this quest, I guess people would completely avoid doing it because of the complete denial over facts that they are exploiting.

However, I'd be careful because there's some kind of forum AI bug here. The Guru forum censor does not detect the blatantly offensive word exploit. I hope this bug gets fixed before it gets exploited. But not before I say it a few more times. Exploiters. Exploit. Exploits.