I'd like to thank /u/Anet-TylerB for trying to breathe life back into WvW and amount of effort and communication he had with the WvW community. While everyone else ignored us you were the only one who actually tried to save us.
Thanks for the callout, I appreciate the support. As of today, I'm no longer with the studio, though my departure was voluntary. My time at the studio is something I'll always treasure. Best of luck to the remaining dev team, and fans alike.
I did this event once, getting all 5 correct with no wrong answers. No achieve.
Second time around I purposely answered the first round wrong then correctly after the guess buff wore out before that round ended. I then answered rounds 2-5 correctly and the achievement popped.
It's not acting the way you say it is.
Yeah, this works because you still had 5 consecutive correct guesses, during a single run of the event.
Guessing correctly is +1, guessing incorrectly is -1. You start at 0 and can't go below 0. So incorrect guesses in the first round don't prevent you from earning the achievement.
Yup, thats exactly what I did both times, no wrong guesses, all 5 correct.
Good to know, I'll look into it.
Three Golem Monte did not trigger for me, I started the event, got all 5 correct and no achievement. Someone joined in halfway through but that shouldnt have any influence on it right?
edit: just did it again, still no achievement, other person in my party didnt get it either, so probably better to wait for a fix before trying this, as it can get pretty hard in the final round.
Just to be clear. For this achievement, you not only need to guess the correct golem in each of the 5 rounds, but you can't have any wrong guesses either.
Meleeing this boss is actually fun. The only real issue with the fight is that the mushroom AoE circles inflict damage immediately on appearing rather than giving you a moment to dodge. The line AoE has a very slow windup and you can simply walk out of its path, and the boss has a pull attack that will target ranged characters and yank them into the AoEs anyway, so why not already be in a safe melee spot to avoid that possibility?
Good point. I'm fixing the instant mushroom damage tick issue now.
hmm.. Did you come back to the WvW team? o.o
No, my primary duty is still Living World. I'm just temporarily covering for McKenna, since she happened to be out of office today.
Thanks for the explanation. Was it happening to just that matchup or all of them?
This issue was only occurring in that one matchup (Tier 4 NA).
This was the result of an extremely rare bug that created "ghost" maps of the green Borderlands in a default state, generating additional points for all teams, but favoring the green team. In the short term, those "ghost" maps have been terminated, while we take steps to prevent this from happening again.
We temporarily disabled two of the fertile soil locations, last night, as they were causing map crashes. One in Draconis Mons and one in Cursed Shore.
When I first designed the suspicious bushes task, you couldn't [F] interact with the suspicious bushes, instead you had to throw a rock into them. The logic was that it'd be a lot safer to check out a potentially dangerous bush by throwing a rock into it, rather than sticking your face into it. However, the early playtesters were confused by this mechanic, so I re-enabled the [F] interact, and decided to leave the 'loose rocks' in as a minor easter egg.
Guide is divided on 4 sections based on area since this scavenger hunt has 60 items.
FYI, #26 was just addressed in the most recent hotfix.
I just finished the new JP and I have to say it was amazing. Just wondering how long it took to make such an elaborate JP. It's just really stunning I love it so much!
Awesome, glad to hear it! It's tough to accurately say how long it took, as we were working on a lot of other tasks simultaneously, but I'll take a rough stab at it.
We knew right away that we wanted our new jumping puzzle to heavily feature the new mastery, and had some ideas of how the it could potentially be implemented. However, we needed to nail down the final implementation of the mastery before we could begin work on the jumping puzzle. Once the mastery was finalized, it took a couple weeks of iteration to get a rough layout in, and setup the checkpoint system. Then another couple weeks of playtesting, iteration and polish. So overall it probably took a little over a month, on and off.
Would those 4 big island have covered the entirety of the rest of the fire island chain? :O
No, not literal islands, rather it was in reference to 4 large landmasses (at varying elevations) attached to the interior of our giant hollow volcano.
I absolutely love the new mastery that came today, maybe even more than I love gliding. What kind of challenges did you have designing the grappling hook?
The biggest challenge was deciding how, if at all, to limit the mastery. The harsher the limitations, the more likely it was to be included in other maps, but the less fun or intuitive it became.
The first iteration was a timed buff, but had unlimited charges. After that, it had unlimited duration but only a single charge. We also tried a distance based system, where you could fire the grappling hook whenever you were near an Oakheart's Essence node. There were pros and cons to each of these attempts, but we ultimately liked the 3 charge version the best.
The other biggest hurdle was getting the character animations and FX to look smooth and polished. As one example, originally if you fired Oakheart's Reach while gliding, the glider would briefly tilt to the side as the character's arm reached forwards.
Hi! Firstly, I want to thank you all for the hard work that you guys do and everything you put up with. It's truly remarkable and your guys' game is simply breath taking. Secondly, as someone who's studied Latin for five years, I was wondering why you chose the name Draconis Mons for the new map. Also, do you all have a Latin expert, or did you use the internet to come up with the name? (If the latter is true, very impressive because Latin is quite the difficult language)
The map was originally named Mantlerock Scald, but we thought it was unrealistic that such a big mountain wouldn't have a name like Mount Everest or Mount Rainier. We took inspiration from Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars. Adding 'Draconis' to the name was a short leap from there.
Im really impressed with the new map!
Did you plan on making it that big or did it kinda just ended up with that size after you implemented everything you wanted to be there?
The map definitely ended up being bigger than we were initially expecting. The original design called for 4 big islands of content, arranged in cardinal directions (to help with navigation), and a little bit of connecting terrain between them. As we worked on it though, the map grew to become more and more layered. Still we are pretty happy with the end result :)
I just want to tell whoever made that jumping puzzle that you're an absolute madman.
In all seriousness though, after trying to find my way around for around 3 hours, I finally finished it! I loved it. Especially at the end where I kept using my charges on the grappling mastery and realizing there was yet another room after I should've saved them for.
Never stop making this kind of content!
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Josh Foreman was the team's environment artist for the jumping puzzle (and the entire Draconis Mons map), and I implemented the jumping puzzle's checkpoint mechanic and the new mastery.
Hey guys, just wanted to say great job on the update!
Only one question, will we be able to use the new mastery outside of the new map?
I'd say that it's unlikely that we'll include the new mastery in other maps, but it's not an impossibility. It's relatively easy to add Oakheart's Essence nodes wherever we want, but the big cost is making sure that the grappling hook mechanic doesn't 'break' any map that it's included in. Draconis Mons was a map that was built specifically with this mastery in mind.
Oh hey, it's me.
I thought I'd just float on over to check out the party. I was like, 'Water you all doing, this craft seems overcapacity.' Then everyone just went Hamm! The hype seemed through the rafters.
*No devs were drowned in the making of this raft party.
Can you tell which team you are working on now? If it's top secret or expansion 2 related we'll understand if you can't say.
I'm working on Living World content now, getting the next episode ready. And no, it won't be WvW related :)
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