Don't Cancel Super Adventure Box!

I'm as uncomfortable as anyone else about the recent news, and I'm doing my best not to overthink the situation, but this is the one event that I'm always MOST excited for every year, and I always encourage as many people as I can to play it with me.

Super Adventure Box is by far the most exciting event in the game for me, so it makes sense for me to say something about it. I bought as much as my wallet would allow of SAB gem store stuff last year, and if it's still on, I'll be getting what I couldn't get last year, and if there's anything new.

Of course, in the long run I'll still enjoy the game with or without SAB, but I really am hoping to see it again this year! Even if nothing's changed since last year!

What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

@Haleydawn.3764 said:What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

I don't get the mass hysteria, either. People need to calm down.

@Thundabolt.8541 said:and I always encourage as many people as I can to play it with me.

Wait, this can be done in a party? :o And I was wondering why it was such a pain in the behind when played solo.

SAB should be on automatic now. I really wouldn’t be worrying about festivals

@Randulf.7614 said:SAB should be on automatic now. I really wouldn’t be worrying about festivals

It is on Automatic, it doesn't even need a full patch to activate/deactivate now.

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@Haleydawn.3764 said:What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

@Thundabolt.8541 said:and I always encourage as many people as I can to play it with me.

It's actually harder in a party because everyone has to make it through the challenges. In fact, on tribulation mode you can't activate a checkpoint without all players in the party present! But it can be a lot of fun listening to everyone flip out when they miss a jump, sharing each other's pain! LoL

SAB is a pretty unique event that I always look forward to. I just wish we had more of it! I've already unlocked all of the tribulation mode skins and achievements. There's not much left to do. So a new world or two to play with would be awesome (I know, keep dreaming!)!

@AliamRationem.5172 said:It's actually harder in a party because everyone has to make it through the challenges. In fact, on tribulation mode you can't activate a checkpoint without all players in the party present! But it can be a lot of fun listening to everyone flip out when they miss a jump, sharing each other's pain! LoL

Each year, I keep telling myself to finally play SAB properly and try tribulation mode and do the achievements - but I always get demotivated by the whole thing quickly. (I don't care about the skins, as I'd never use any of them, but I am a completionist and would like to finish this at least once as well.)

I find the maps majorly confusing. Any advice?

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@AliamRationem.5172 said:It's actually harder in a party because everyone has to make it through the challenges. In fact, on tribulation mode you can't activate a checkpoint without all players in the party present! But it can be a lot of fun listening to everyone flip out when they miss a jump, sharing each other's pain! LoL

I am EXACTLY the same. I don't think I've progressed at all since the re-release of it. And yet I get excited every year...

I was mostly grinding for the home instance node.. for no reason other than having it I guess? Haha

But I agree. Tribulation mode isn't something that excites me at all. I find normal hard enough because I get very frustrated when I can't find my way around.

@Blocki.4931 said:I was mostly grinding for the home instance node.. for no reason other than having it I guess? Haha

But I agree. Tribulation mode isn't something that excites me at all. I find normal hard enough because I get very frustrated when I can't find my way around.

I normally dislike jump puzzles and things like that. But something about SAB really appealed to me. I especially enjoyed learning tribulation mode for W2Z3!

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@AliamRationem.5172 said:It's actually harder in a party because everyone has to make it through the challenges. In fact, on tribulation mode you can't activate a checkpoint without all players in the party present! But it can be a lot of fun listening to everyone flip out when they miss a jump, sharing each other's pain! LoL

Last year, I actually downloaded TacO for SAB routes solely. They show you a precise route and where to jump to avoid lava pits, to get to the shops in that mode and to get to the hidden rooms while avoiding all traps. I deviated from them on tribulation mode to get checkpoints with the help of Dulfy Video guides and did all Trib achievements with minimal pain. Totally worth it imo. I’ll be firing TacO up again to complete both weapon collections this year.

@Haleydawn.3764 said:Last year, I actually downloaded TacO for SAB routes solely. They show you a precise route and where to jump to avoid lava pits, to get to the shops in that mode and to get to the hidden rooms while avoiding all traps. I deviated from them on tribulation mode to get checkpoints with the help of Dulfy Video guides and did all Trib achievements with minimal pain. Totally worth it imo. I’ll be firing TacO up again to complete both weapon collections this year.

I've managed to avoid TacO thus far, but it seems inevitable for SAB, since orientation there is zero without assistance or previous knowledge.

Thanks a lot! <3

They did cancel SAB (or rather they didn't bring it back) for a few years and there were huge campaigns and parties/protests (depending on who you asked) in Rata Sum each April to try and persuade them to bring it back. I can't imagine they'd take it away again, especially not now they've got regular events mostly automated so they can be easily started and stopped.

@Haleydawn.3764 said:What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

I mean future production on it is pretty much canceled.The mode is in maintenance Festival Mode where it's going to be left to rot and die like it was in years past.

@"Danikat.8537" said:They did cancel SAB (or rather they didn't bring it back) for a few years and there were huge campaigns and parties/protests (depending on who you asked) in Rata Sum each April to try and persuade them to bring it back. I can't imagine they'd take it away again, especially not now they've got regular events mostly automated so they can be easily started and stopped.

We called it a "riot" ;D

I think it's safe to assume the festivals will see minimum impact from this as most of them haven't really seen huge updates and the team in general seems fairly small. They may be impacted in terms of not receiving updates for awhile, but given that they're automated there's no real reason to cancel them. I think a few of them could receive a little bit more love, like Lunar New Year and potentially Halloween, but considering the updates they've made in the past year alone we've had the reintroduction of Queen's Gauntlet as well as Festival of the Four Winds. Obviously there are things that could be done to them to make them more enticing, but they're in a better spot than they were.

And new worlds for SAB would be great, but even without the cuts I doubt we would have seen those either way. They did make a few collision changes though in a recent patch which is kind of intriguing but doesn't mean much. Now that my passion for decorating my guild hall is diminishing due to guild halls in general not getting any love and lack of a steady increase in decorations combined with the general cost of creating them, I'm not really as in love with SAB as I used to be. It's still a great festival to have and a fun time of the year, but I certainly wouldn't put it high up on my list at this point. Especially given how unlikely it would be either way to get new worlds, which they've pretty much repeatedly stated wasn't even on the table.

I'd rather them just put that focus back into exciting new current events like the Caladbolg quest chain, and roller beetle racing, and things that generally make core Tyria and older content feel alive without having to sacrifice living story updates or expansions if they're even still a thing at this point. I think there's a lot more benefit in making the maps seem a little less stuck in time and vacant than simply refining festivals that last a few weeks. It will help with player retention, help create a more lively game for people just starting, and also give us the feeling that outside of story updates they are actually a part of living world whether it be reconstructing things destroyed by Mordremoth or Zhaitan, or even more steady introduction of the living story updates having an impact on something other than the scope of their new map or episode. (I.e. Rift style events in Tyria similar to the awakened invasions. Addition of bounty boards to core maps that show the excess of magic having an impact on something other than the denizens of Elona.) Theoretically, they could even incorporate some of these changes to the abandoned aspects of the game like Guild Missions. A guild mission where, though we already have bounty missions, could have some where we have to defeat a certain number of bounty board objectives. Or close a certain number of rifts. There's just a lot more benefit in the grand scheme of things that I can see of festivals remaining rather consistent and having more focus be put on some of these other aspects.

The biggest problem with that though, is yet again, resources and staffing. For them to have as many developers as they do, it really makes sense now that they probably pushed a lot of people onto these other projects and the constant reasoning behind them not finding time to invest in some of these other aspects is because they were just stretched far too thin. They genuinely couldn't find the time or want to waste resources because the decision was being made somewhere to ensure that every person had to put in 200% just to produce what they were able to. And hopefully with all of this latest news that will change.

@Haleydawn.3764 said:What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

SAB has been canceled before. Last time, players protested both in-game and outside the game in response to the cancelation.

@"cptaylor.2670" said:Especially given how unlikely it would be either way to get new worlds, which they've pretty much repeatedly stated wasn't even on the table.

Let this be a reminder that sitting in chairs was our last "SAB" update. By that i mean they took the festival team off SAB to give us that instead.

Shows how little they care about SAB despite the fandom it has.

@kta.6502 said:

@Haleydawn.3764 said:What makes you think SAB, an established annual event like Halloween and Wintersday, would be canceled?

It wasn’t technically canceled. It was inserted as part of the Living World Season 1 event type system (you know be there or miss it S1) but it was technically just an April Fools joke in 2013. When Anet changed how we get content (via the Story panel rather than event plug and trigger), SAB didn’t work with the new system. So “SAB or riot” was born, to encourage Anet that this event out of the many should be an annual thing, so it was worked on and introduced as an annual thing in 2016. Just like they finally managed to do with the queens gauntlet and festival of the four winds last year, after many years of requests.

So, no, SAB won’t be canceled, it’s an established annual event now.

@TexZero.7910 said:

@"cptaylor.2670" said:Especially given how unlikely it would be either way to get new worlds, which they've pretty much repeatedly stated wasn't even on the table.

I don't think that's how it works. You're right that the ability to sit in chairs was added in April but I think that's because it was finished shortly before then and they decided it would make a good April Fools 'joke' since it's a fairly minor change players kept asking for, so it would be funny to massively over-hype it as if it was the best thing ever.

But I doubt they have a dedicated team of people who spend all their time working on festivals, or that they'd also do the April Fools updates. I've always been under the impression that Anet's teams are more like project teams at my work - where people come and go as needed based on their skills and can be in multiple teams at the same time, or none if their work is more wide-ranging.

@"AliamRationem.5172" said:

It's actually harder in a party because everyone has to make it through the challenges. In fact, on tribulation mode you can't activate a checkpoint without all players in the party present! But it can be a lot of fun listening to everyone flip out when they miss a jump, sharing each other's pain! LoL

Don't forget ppl getting killed at the checkpoints by that falling down "flutes". We laughed quite a bit first time we did this in party. :D

Call me crazy but Tribulation runs are fun because you're made to go through most of the map content while being brutally pressured by traps everywhere.

It has this charm that isn't found anywhere else in the game.

SAB never should have happened, but unfortunately it's here to stay.

I doubt they will cancel SAB.I hate it as much as everyone, and would pay anet not to waste any resources on it, but i know anet and they will go through with SAB regardless

@witcher.3197 said:SAB never should have happened, but unfortunately it's here to stay.

Why should it never have happened?