Guild wars 2 is a computer game that for the most part is fun to play. The primary core of the game, revolving around developing a character that is capable of defeating monsters of varying degrees of toughness, is relatively satisfying. As one advances in the game one becomes conscious of various achievements that serve to identify one's status as a Guild Wars 2 player. Many of the achievements are of the type that one does, not so much because they are fun, but because, well, you are playing Guild Wars 2. I don't think there are too many serious Guild Wars 2 players who have not been frustrated by jumping puzzles along the way. While not central to the game, in the sense that one needs to complete them to advance, they do serve as an achievement and grant a not insignificant amount of achievement points. If one plays Guild Wars 2, you will keep coming back to jumping puzzles because they are there. Of course, the Guild Wars 2 developers could have put a giant turd on the screen, and if shoving one's head (or at least one's character's head) into it granted an achievement, then players would do this as well. Personally, I would prefer a giant turd to a jumping puzzle.
So, then, what exactly is a jumping puzzle? Simply put, there is a point on the landscape of the game that your character has to reach. This point is not specified and unless one is actually told by another player or some helpful advice from the Guild Wars 2 wiki, it would generally not even be evident that this point was reachable. Reach the point and you complete the jumping puzzle. Reaching it may involve navigating ravines and mountains, killing monsters of various difficulties, overcoming simulated effects such as winds that knock you off high ledges and so forth. Usually though, jumping puzzles just involve hopping from point to point over a series of rocks and branches etc. The mechanics of jumping puzzles is relatively straight forward. Just point your character in the relevant direction and jump. In my case this is largely accomplished by pressing the W key (in order to move forwards) and the space bar (in order to jump). The existence of a jumping puzzle in the game is not necessarily self-evident. One can be hopping up a mountain and, as has happened to me more than once, be granted an award for completing a jumping puzzle. Most jumping puzzles, however, don't present themselves in an obvious manner. In fact, the way that I have completed jumping puzzles is not by merely playing the game, but rather noting the existence of the puzzle on an in-game achievement list (that credits you with having completed it or not, as the case might be), and then getting a bit of guidance from the guild wars 2 wiki.
So how is one to complete a particular jumping puzzle? In some cases, one can just have a shot at it. Some jumping puzzles are quite intuitive and just bouncing along to the next obvious rock will get you home. Others, however, are a bitch. For these, I tend to be quite dependent on you-tube clips. These are posted by the experts who have shown the way. Of course, anything, once you can do it, is easy, and there are thousands of Guild Wars 2 players who are fucking amazing when it comes to jumping puzzles. I take my hat off to them. As for me, well I am OK, better than most, I would suggest, but no expert. Once, I have done a jumping puzzle, in general I will not return to it - except for possibly a daily or a monthly achievement, but then, of course, I know the jumping puzzles that I can do. I am not doing them for fun, I am doing them for the achievement.
Fair enough! Watch a video of some-one doing the puzzle and just copy what they do. Sooner or later you will get there. It could take you hours, but you will get there. And this would be fine, if the "getting there" was fun. But it tends to be quite the opposite of fun. Of course, frustration levels are relative to the amount one is invested in the task at hand. I accept this. If the reward of having completed the task gave one an equivalent sense of euphoria, then well and good. Congratulations to the Guild Wars 2 developers for a job well done. Would that this were the case. My reaction is thank God I don't have to do that again, a feeling not unlike having gone to the dentist. I am still feeling a bit sore, but glad it is over.
What is the actual experience of doing a jumping puzzle? Imagine that a jumping puzzle consists of fifty jumps getting ever higher. Imagine that each time you miss a jump you have to start again. Imagine it takes you ten minutes to get to the twentieth jump for the first time. You fall on the twenty-first jump. Because you are not particularly high, you do not die. So, when you fall you just start the puzzle again. A little irritating, but it is all part of the learning process. You go again. You fall at the same point. Why? Clearly you are doing something wrong at this jump. You pause to examine the you-tube clip again. What are you doing wrong? You think you have figured it out. You bounce up again. This time you fall on the fifteenth jump. This is simply because you are going quicker now, getting careless on jumps you would normally make. No matter, you are careful the next time. This time you make the twenty-first jump. Thank God! You think you know what you did wrong. You fall on the twenty-fifth jump. This time you are higher up. This time when you fall you die. Thank God, there is no armor cost associated with falling to your death, but you still need to pay over 150 copper to resurrect at a way-point. Unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately, there is no passing Samaritan to resurrect you. In any case, you feel like a complete twat falling to your death and 150 copper is a small price to pay for your injured pride. The way-point is an irritatingly long trek back to the start of the jumping puzzle. You are pissed now, because you died, but you think you know how to get past that twenty-fifth jump. You don't! This time, however, a Samaritan resurrects you. Fuck! The Samaritan also happens to be doing the jumping puzzle and is a helpful soul. God bless his black heart. He has been sent by the gods of computer games everywhere to rub your nose in shit. He is about to show you how it is done. He bounces up and back and all around the fucking twenty-fifth jump. You plummet to your death again. You don't bother waiting to see if he descends to resurrect you. You exit the game. Maybe another time.
The above process could continue for several hours depending, of course, upon the personality of the individual playing. I know many Guild Wars 2 players who just don't bother with jumping puzzles and this allows for a similar mentality with regard to all Guild Wars 2 achievement tracks. For others, like myself, it is like a crawling bug under my skin. I actually loathe jumping puzzles with as much passion as one can generate for something that is, after all, just a game. One has the sense that you are the butt of a joke devised by Arena-net for their own amusement. I don't think that this is completely the case although I am sure that the developers have frequently had a good laugh at the frustration they instil in their faithful customers. Such is human nature, and the attitude is not unique to game developers.
But what really is the frustration with jumping puzzles? I have mulled this over in my head because there are naturally many frustrating things about games that have relatively difficult to master content. It is frustrating, for instance, when a monster kills your character. It is frustrating when you are farming in an area and (rightly or wrongly) feel that you are the victim of diminishing returns. It is frustrating when your character no longer performs as well because its profession has been hampered by yet another nerf desired to secure "balance." Yes, there are frustrations, but I don't actually feel victimized by them. These are also part of figuring out the game and, in this sense, part of the fun of the game, part of the reason that I keep playing.
So what makes the frustration of the jumping puzzle different? Firstly, I don't think anyone (even the people that like them and are good at them) actually started playing Guild Wars 2 because of jumping puzzles. There may be exceptions to this, but I think it is a fair assumption. Many, like myself, probably migrated from Guild Wars and had no conception of the jumping puzzle, simply because the mechanics of Guild Wars didn't allow for that type of content. In this sense, jumping puzzles are an incidental addition to the game that one could argue add a certain degree of depth and color. They are something else to do in a game that already has a tremendous variety of content options. They are limited in number and indicate that Arena-net did not feel it could dedicate too much time, money and effort to this peripheral part of the game. Perhaps it is for this reason that they are quite badly done. This latter though could be the problem. Jumping puzzles, I think, could be fun, but for the majority they are boring and frustrating, and wouldn't be missed if they were deleted from the game.
Secondly, jumping puzzles suffer from something that has become standard in computer games - the inability to save. I remember in games back in the late 1990s (I am showing my age), if there was a difficult piece of content to come, one would ensure that you saved your game before advancing. This enabled one to redo the difficult bit without having to redo the content you had to go through to get to that point. No doubt mmorpg's don't really allow for saving. In any case, it doesn't really matter what you are doing, no-one really likes to repeat exactly what they have already done. This is why Arena-net have to come up with new content for Guild Wars 2 all the time. Very few people want to redo the same content over and over again and yet this is exactly what the jumping puzzle requires. Keep doing exactly the same thing over and over and over. What is more this content can be quite laborious and time-consuming in itself. One entitled Dark Reveries is a case in point. This jumping puzzle follows a relatively tricky jumping puzzle entitled Morgan's Leap. Morgan's Leap has one or two jumps that will cause dismay and, standing below the tree one has to climb to reach the end of it can be instructive about the frustrations of other players, as you watch bodies drop from the sky. It would be humorous were it not for the fact that you feel for the poor bastards, particularly some noob who has no idea what they are getting into (keep in mind that the Dark Reveries jumping puzzle is in Caledon Forest, a level 1 starting zone). Morgan's Leap will take a goodly while for one to do, but one has to complete it in order to do Dark Reveries. Dark Reveries, itself, provides many opportunities to die by various monsters that will undoubtedly take down an inexperienced low level character. No problem, just wait until you are level 80 then you don't have to bother about the monsters. The real problem is the jumps that come close to the end. To miss one of these jumps often means certain death and there is nothing about being a level 80 character that can mitigate falling damage. Now you are lying prostrate at the bottom of the ravine. You have a choice. Do you just lie there and hope some-one will come past to resurrect your character, because if your character is not resurrected you will have to map out to the nearest waypoint (costing the requisite silver), and this means redoing Morgan's Leap (quite extensive content you have already done). I did not mention earlier that the tree that you have to climb in order to complete Morgan's Leap is frequently "dead" and cannot be climbed. When it is dead, no-one can climb the tree, and no-one can do the puzzle. This means that you are lying at the bottom of the ravine waiting to complete Dark Reveries with no way of knowing if anyone is coming soon. Needless to say, there is not a stream of players routinely walking through this hidden piece of map, even if the tree is alive. I once lay there for half and an hour futilely waiting for some-one who did not come, all the while thinking that I would rather do that than labor up Morgan's Leap all over again. It was while I was lying there "playing Guild Wars 2" doing nothing that it came home to me how poor this content of the game really is. The content itself was causing me not to want to play the game. I was playing the game by not playing. Quite simply my character lay at the bottom of a ravine for half an hour doing nothing because this seemed like the best option open to me. All the while, my irritation grew. I think I took time out to write a few emails keeping an eye on the screen to see if another player passed by. They did not.
Thirdly, the jumping puzzle, unlike, the general content of Guild Wars 2 is something you have to complete alone. It is a solitary task (unless you are dealing with a Mesmer exploit at Stepping Stones, or perhaps carting some-one around to resurrect your character when you fall). Even in one's personal story line, you can commission your guildies to help you through some difficult content. This doesn't really matter to me much, but it does put the jumping puzzle out of step with the nature of the majority of Guild Wars 2 content.
Fourthly, jumping puzzles punish the player. If a jump is missed, the player is often punished by having to start over or by death. In the case of Dark Reveries, the punishment is quite severe (after all this is a game that one plays for fun). Obviously, the degree that a player is punished varies, but nevertheless, punishment is a basic ingredient. If you fail, start again, and keep doing it until you get it right. I just do not think it is wise to devise content of a game that revolves around this idea. I really think that Arena-net need to consider how a player feels in the process of repeatedly failing a jumping puzzle. The brilliance of game developers, and I think Guild Wars 2 is fucking amazing in this respect, is in developing content that absorbs and enthralls the gamer. Jumping puzzles make me ask myself why I am playing Guild Wars 2 at all. Fortunately, I can find a positive answer to this in the general content of the game. In my opinion, jumping puzzles are the product of incomplete and flabby thinking. Strictly speaking, jumping puzzles are not a game in their own right, and so as a Guild Wars 2 player, I am not thinking that I need to play a different game that has jumping puzzle type content that is done better. In this sense, jumping puzzles present the type of content that is not threatened by the competition (WoW for example), because jumping puzzles are not the element of comparison. If jumping puzzles were the prime element of comparison, I have no doubt that their construction would be dramatically improved to ensure a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in participants, rather than disappointment and frustration.
Fifthly, the rewards don't matter. At the end of jumping puzzles there is usually a chest of some type. The loot from these chests is purely secondary. The time it takes to complete a jumping puzzle can never justify the reward at the end. One just needs to wander around killing things in a level 80 area for ten minutes or so (and enjoy squashing undead in the process) to more than match the loot found in jumping puzzle chests. No, the reward of completing a jumping puzzle is simply the fact that you don't have to do it again. You have the achievement. Like having a dentist drilling in your mouth, doing it was painful, but thank God it is done. If the only way to get people to do and redo jumping puzzles (and thereby actually get good at them and, possibly - who knows - start to enjoy them) is to give adequate rewards, then this might be a way forward. However, there is something else broken about jumping puzzles that needs to be addressed and I don't think the mere giving of bigger rewards is going to solve it.
As things stand at the moment, jumping puzzles in Guild Wars 2 are lame. For a game that is so fantastic on so many levels this cannot be allowed to persist. Why besmirch something so good, with something so shoddy? Arena-net need to ditch all the jumping puzzle content from the game or, alternatively, get their most insightful and thoughtful developers on the case to inject a bit of fun into them.
So, then, what exactly is a jumping puzzle? Simply put, there is a point on the landscape of the game that your character has to reach. This point is not specified and unless one is actually told by another player or some helpful advice from the Guild Wars 2 wiki, it would generally not even be evident that this point was reachable. Reach the point and you complete the jumping puzzle. Reaching it may involve navigating ravines and mountains, killing monsters of various difficulties, overcoming simulated effects such as winds that knock you off high ledges and so forth. Usually though, jumping puzzles just involve hopping from point to point over a series of rocks and branches etc. The mechanics of jumping puzzles is relatively straight forward. Just point your character in the relevant direction and jump. In my case this is largely accomplished by pressing the W key (in order to move forwards) and the space bar (in order to jump). The existence of a jumping puzzle in the game is not necessarily self-evident. One can be hopping up a mountain and, as has happened to me more than once, be granted an award for completing a jumping puzzle. Most jumping puzzles, however, don't present themselves in an obvious manner. In fact, the way that I have completed jumping puzzles is not by merely playing the game, but rather noting the existence of the puzzle on an in-game achievement list (that credits you with having completed it or not, as the case might be), and then getting a bit of guidance from the guild wars 2 wiki.
So how is one to complete a particular jumping puzzle? In some cases, one can just have a shot at it. Some jumping puzzles are quite intuitive and just bouncing along to the next obvious rock will get you home. Others, however, are a bitch. For these, I tend to be quite dependent on you-tube clips. These are posted by the experts who have shown the way. Of course, anything, once you can do it, is easy, and there are thousands of Guild Wars 2 players who are fucking amazing when it comes to jumping puzzles. I take my hat off to them. As for me, well I am OK, better than most, I would suggest, but no expert. Once, I have done a jumping puzzle, in general I will not return to it - except for possibly a daily or a monthly achievement, but then, of course, I know the jumping puzzles that I can do. I am not doing them for fun, I am doing them for the achievement.
Fair enough! Watch a video of some-one doing the puzzle and just copy what they do. Sooner or later you will get there. It could take you hours, but you will get there. And this would be fine, if the "getting there" was fun. But it tends to be quite the opposite of fun. Of course, frustration levels are relative to the amount one is invested in the task at hand. I accept this. If the reward of having completed the task gave one an equivalent sense of euphoria, then well and good. Congratulations to the Guild Wars 2 developers for a job well done. Would that this were the case. My reaction is thank God I don't have to do that again, a feeling not unlike having gone to the dentist. I am still feeling a bit sore, but glad it is over.
What is the actual experience of doing a jumping puzzle? Imagine that a jumping puzzle consists of fifty jumps getting ever higher. Imagine that each time you miss a jump you have to start again. Imagine it takes you ten minutes to get to the twentieth jump for the first time. You fall on the twenty-first jump. Because you are not particularly high, you do not die. So, when you fall you just start the puzzle again. A little irritating, but it is all part of the learning process. You go again. You fall at the same point. Why? Clearly you are doing something wrong at this jump. You pause to examine the you-tube clip again. What are you doing wrong? You think you have figured it out. You bounce up again. This time you fall on the fifteenth jump. This is simply because you are going quicker now, getting careless on jumps you would normally make. No matter, you are careful the next time. This time you make the twenty-first jump. Thank God! You think you know what you did wrong. You fall on the twenty-fifth jump. This time you are higher up. This time when you fall you die. Thank God, there is no armor cost associated with falling to your death, but you still need to pay over 150 copper to resurrect at a way-point. Unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately, there is no passing Samaritan to resurrect you. In any case, you feel like a complete twat falling to your death and 150 copper is a small price to pay for your injured pride. The way-point is an irritatingly long trek back to the start of the jumping puzzle. You are pissed now, because you died, but you think you know how to get past that twenty-fifth jump. You don't! This time, however, a Samaritan resurrects you. Fuck! The Samaritan also happens to be doing the jumping puzzle and is a helpful soul. God bless his black heart. He has been sent by the gods of computer games everywhere to rub your nose in shit. He is about to show you how it is done. He bounces up and back and all around the fucking twenty-fifth jump. You plummet to your death again. You don't bother waiting to see if he descends to resurrect you. You exit the game. Maybe another time.
The above process could continue for several hours depending, of course, upon the personality of the individual playing. I know many Guild Wars 2 players who just don't bother with jumping puzzles and this allows for a similar mentality with regard to all Guild Wars 2 achievement tracks. For others, like myself, it is like a crawling bug under my skin. I actually loathe jumping puzzles with as much passion as one can generate for something that is, after all, just a game. One has the sense that you are the butt of a joke devised by Arena-net for their own amusement. I don't think that this is completely the case although I am sure that the developers have frequently had a good laugh at the frustration they instil in their faithful customers. Such is human nature, and the attitude is not unique to game developers.
But what really is the frustration with jumping puzzles? I have mulled this over in my head because there are naturally many frustrating things about games that have relatively difficult to master content. It is frustrating, for instance, when a monster kills your character. It is frustrating when you are farming in an area and (rightly or wrongly) feel that you are the victim of diminishing returns. It is frustrating when your character no longer performs as well because its profession has been hampered by yet another nerf desired to secure "balance." Yes, there are frustrations, but I don't actually feel victimized by them. These are also part of figuring out the game and, in this sense, part of the fun of the game, part of the reason that I keep playing.
So what makes the frustration of the jumping puzzle different? Firstly, I don't think anyone (even the people that like them and are good at them) actually started playing Guild Wars 2 because of jumping puzzles. There may be exceptions to this, but I think it is a fair assumption. Many, like myself, probably migrated from Guild Wars and had no conception of the jumping puzzle, simply because the mechanics of Guild Wars didn't allow for that type of content. In this sense, jumping puzzles are an incidental addition to the game that one could argue add a certain degree of depth and color. They are something else to do in a game that already has a tremendous variety of content options. They are limited in number and indicate that Arena-net did not feel it could dedicate too much time, money and effort to this peripheral part of the game. Perhaps it is for this reason that they are quite badly done. This latter though could be the problem. Jumping puzzles, I think, could be fun, but for the majority they are boring and frustrating, and wouldn't be missed if they were deleted from the game.
Secondly, jumping puzzles suffer from something that has become standard in computer games - the inability to save. I remember in games back in the late 1990s (I am showing my age), if there was a difficult piece of content to come, one would ensure that you saved your game before advancing. This enabled one to redo the difficult bit without having to redo the content you had to go through to get to that point. No doubt mmorpg's don't really allow for saving. In any case, it doesn't really matter what you are doing, no-one really likes to repeat exactly what they have already done. This is why Arena-net have to come up with new content for Guild Wars 2 all the time. Very few people want to redo the same content over and over again and yet this is exactly what the jumping puzzle requires. Keep doing exactly the same thing over and over and over. What is more this content can be quite laborious and time-consuming in itself. One entitled Dark Reveries is a case in point. This jumping puzzle follows a relatively tricky jumping puzzle entitled Morgan's Leap. Morgan's Leap has one or two jumps that will cause dismay and, standing below the tree one has to climb to reach the end of it can be instructive about the frustrations of other players, as you watch bodies drop from the sky. It would be humorous were it not for the fact that you feel for the poor bastards, particularly some noob who has no idea what they are getting into (keep in mind that the Dark Reveries jumping puzzle is in Caledon Forest, a level 1 starting zone). Morgan's Leap will take a goodly while for one to do, but one has to complete it in order to do Dark Reveries. Dark Reveries, itself, provides many opportunities to die by various monsters that will undoubtedly take down an inexperienced low level character. No problem, just wait until you are level 80 then you don't have to bother about the monsters. The real problem is the jumps that come close to the end. To miss one of these jumps often means certain death and there is nothing about being a level 80 character that can mitigate falling damage. Now you are lying prostrate at the bottom of the ravine. You have a choice. Do you just lie there and hope some-one will come past to resurrect your character, because if your character is not resurrected you will have to map out to the nearest waypoint (costing the requisite silver), and this means redoing Morgan's Leap (quite extensive content you have already done). I did not mention earlier that the tree that you have to climb in order to complete Morgan's Leap is frequently "dead" and cannot be climbed. When it is dead, no-one can climb the tree, and no-one can do the puzzle. This means that you are lying at the bottom of the ravine waiting to complete Dark Reveries with no way of knowing if anyone is coming soon. Needless to say, there is not a stream of players routinely walking through this hidden piece of map, even if the tree is alive. I once lay there for half and an hour futilely waiting for some-one who did not come, all the while thinking that I would rather do that than labor up Morgan's Leap all over again. It was while I was lying there "playing Guild Wars 2" doing nothing that it came home to me how poor this content of the game really is. The content itself was causing me not to want to play the game. I was playing the game by not playing. Quite simply my character lay at the bottom of a ravine for half an hour doing nothing because this seemed like the best option open to me. All the while, my irritation grew. I think I took time out to write a few emails keeping an eye on the screen to see if another player passed by. They did not.
Thirdly, the jumping puzzle, unlike, the general content of Guild Wars 2 is something you have to complete alone. It is a solitary task (unless you are dealing with a Mesmer exploit at Stepping Stones, or perhaps carting some-one around to resurrect your character when you fall). Even in one's personal story line, you can commission your guildies to help you through some difficult content. This doesn't really matter to me much, but it does put the jumping puzzle out of step with the nature of the majority of Guild Wars 2 content.
Fourthly, jumping puzzles punish the player. If a jump is missed, the player is often punished by having to start over or by death. In the case of Dark Reveries, the punishment is quite severe (after all this is a game that one plays for fun). Obviously, the degree that a player is punished varies, but nevertheless, punishment is a basic ingredient. If you fail, start again, and keep doing it until you get it right. I just do not think it is wise to devise content of a game that revolves around this idea. I really think that Arena-net need to consider how a player feels in the process of repeatedly failing a jumping puzzle. The brilliance of game developers, and I think Guild Wars 2 is fucking amazing in this respect, is in developing content that absorbs and enthralls the gamer. Jumping puzzles make me ask myself why I am playing Guild Wars 2 at all. Fortunately, I can find a positive answer to this in the general content of the game. In my opinion, jumping puzzles are the product of incomplete and flabby thinking. Strictly speaking, jumping puzzles are not a game in their own right, and so as a Guild Wars 2 player, I am not thinking that I need to play a different game that has jumping puzzle type content that is done better. In this sense, jumping puzzles present the type of content that is not threatened by the competition (WoW for example), because jumping puzzles are not the element of comparison. If jumping puzzles were the prime element of comparison, I have no doubt that their construction would be dramatically improved to ensure a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in participants, rather than disappointment and frustration.
Fifthly, the rewards don't matter. At the end of jumping puzzles there is usually a chest of some type. The loot from these chests is purely secondary. The time it takes to complete a jumping puzzle can never justify the reward at the end. One just needs to wander around killing things in a level 80 area for ten minutes or so (and enjoy squashing undead in the process) to more than match the loot found in jumping puzzle chests. No, the reward of completing a jumping puzzle is simply the fact that you don't have to do it again. You have the achievement. Like having a dentist drilling in your mouth, doing it was painful, but thank God it is done. If the only way to get people to do and redo jumping puzzles (and thereby actually get good at them and, possibly - who knows - start to enjoy them) is to give adequate rewards, then this might be a way forward. However, there is something else broken about jumping puzzles that needs to be addressed and I don't think the mere giving of bigger rewards is going to solve it.
As things stand at the moment, jumping puzzles in Guild Wars 2 are lame. For a game that is so fantastic on so many levels this cannot be allowed to persist. Why besmirch something so good, with something so shoddy? Arena-net need to ditch all the jumping puzzle content from the game or, alternatively, get their most insightful and thoughtful developers on the case to inject a bit of fun into them.
