The Twisted Marionette is literally dead!

[Odysseus.6317]

A meta event that no one does, it is currently impossible to get an achievement related to The Twisted Marionette. I understand that it is an event that requires 4 commanders and it is not certain that the event will be successful, apart from the reward for finishing it is mediocre, it would be nice to put a bonus event to reactivate these events, The Tower of Nightmares, The Battle For Lion's Arch just as dead.

The other day I had to do The Tower of Nightmares SOLO, I spent more than 1 hour with the tag open and no one came to help.

[MercurialKuroSludge.8974]

6 hours ago, Odysseus.6317 said:

A meta event that no one does, it is currently impossible to get an achievement related to The Twisted Marionette. I understand that it is an event that requires 4 commanders and it is not certain that the event will be successful, apart from the reward for finishing it is mediocre, it would be nice to put a bonus event to reactivate these events, The Tower of Nightmares, The Battle For Lion's Arch just as dead.

The other day I had to do The Tower of Nightmares SOLO, I spent more than 1 hour with the tag open and no one came to help.

ToN/BFLA are definitely not AS dead as Twisted Marionette, since they are required to be done for story progression, even if few ppl are willing to do it.
That being said...all 3 can use some reward buffs, or just proper content adjustments to make them less annoying to solo.
There is also a very weird problem, where if you progress the instance past a certain point, it becomes locked to other ppl who are trying to come in, instead preferring to generate a new instance, like Dragonstorm locks out after you initially defeat both Champions.

And finally, a LOT of ppl put up a tag, but never put in the LFG, so make sure you don't make that mistake.

[Ashantara.8731]

Maybe there will be another "Return To" soon? Then the dead content will be revived for a while.

[phandaria.4891]

Possibly some rushes related to old content.

On the other hand, I successfully did Battle for Lion's Arch and Twisted Marrionette just yesterday. It was a private squad instead of public though. There are some people running meta trains including those two almost every day.

[Kozumi.5816]

18 hours ago, Odysseus.6317 said:

A meta event that no one does

This is what happens when the "rewards team" makes sure to remove all rewards from content. Something they've been doing  since EoD's release. They get better at it every expac, too!

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

5 hours ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

This is what happens when the "rewards team" makes sure to remove all rewards from content. Something they've been doing  since EoD's release. They get better at it every expac, too!

The best part is that the Marionette was added back to the game well before EoD.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

2 hours ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

The best part is that the Marionette was added back to the game well before EoD.

Not really "well before". It was added back as part of the Return To series that was just a filler to buff out the lack of content between IBS and EoD. TM was released about 6 months before EoD, very much during EoD's development cycle.

That said, TM didn't lose any rewards - the issue is that it didn't gain any rewards either. There was nothing new or worth farming for other than 2g per completion, and for the high level of difficulty TM has due to the double 5-way split and limited map size, everyone is essentially relying on not a single person messing up. For 2g and zero unique drops that haven't been cheap af for years due to being available through other, reliable means (e.g., the Mini Twisted Moa being available from laurel vendor + Festival of the Four Winds), that amount of effort just isn't worth it.

There was a small buff to rewards when they brought back the public version after it was originally temp, but currently the biggest rewards for TM are the achievements, which are one-time rewards. If Anet simply buffs the rewards a bit, it'll be done more reliably.

Edited September 24, 2023 by Konig Des Todes.2086

[Farohna.6247]

The rewards are meh for the time involved and they're not especially fun.   I'd rather do Dragonstorm or run a world boss any time over these.   They just are not return worthy for the most part.  

[Timey.6853]

Up until SotO's release, there was a group of players that would do the public Twisted Marionette instance at one specific timeslot every day like clockwork. I usually made it to that and always had a blast. We'd fill up in 2-5 minutes, timer starts, then there we go, boss time. But after SotO dropped, the population just vanished. We'd get maybe 30-40 max waiting for the fight, 15 minutes pass, people start leaving and that's that. The fight won't even start without hitting a count of 50, so the rest stopped showing up too. Now when I peek in there'll be maybe 10-15 people there and that's it. Sad to see, since I really liked having that as a part of my daily activities...

Honestly, I think all they really needed to do with Twisted Marionette was what they did with Drakkar and Dragonstorm: add it to the World Boss Portal Device. With its daily 2G and chance of an ascended drop + heaps of decently profitable watchwork sprockets, it has comparable rewards to Tequatl, Triple Trouble, and Dragonstorm while also arguably being easier than TT. There may be five lanes, but you don't even really need comms since none of the mechanics are particularly complicated. All you need is population, and the device would likely be enough to nudge people into checking it out. It's not nearly as punishing as people tend to think anyway; if one lane fails its boss for any reason, it just rotates back around to lane 1 again. The event won't start with less than 50 people on map anyway, so if it does fail it's from everybody stacking in one lane and ignoring other ones-- which would fail Triple Trouble or Tequatl too. Heck, Chak Gerent is easier to fail, and people run that all the time despite it having even more lackluster rewards (it DOES have one unique drop, but I've never once seen someone actually get it).

ToN and BoLA definitely could use way better rewards though, and need some other adjustments too just to make them less painful to engage with. I actually enjoyed BoLA back at release when there was a large enough population to beat the bosses, and never found it particularly difficult to navigate. It's a nice place to go when you just want to beat up mobs for a while, and the rewards were pretty decent before they got nerfed into oblivion. But unfortunately the bosses' health doesn't scale properly according to the population, so unless you have a full map you'll never beat them-- and the rewards for actually beating the bosses just aren't that great. After the first couple weeks what'd usually wind up happening would be a small band of us pounding our heads against the 3 bosses for nearly the entire timelimit, one finally dies while the other 2 are still 50%+ and there's only 1 minute left. No way we would've been able to kill them all, let alone at the same time. They need scaling, big time. ToN meanwhile is the opposite issue; the navigation is painful, hard-hitting mobs everywhere that respawn constantly, difficult terrain that they keep slapping you off of, and unlike BoLA, the waypoints aren't even free. You fall behind, you're just out of luck. Might as well just let them kill you at that point because you can't TP in combat and there are barely any safe zones you can escape to.

My personal suggestions for those two: buff the heck out of the daily end rewards for ToN and BoLA, maybe add something unique to ToN(toxic infusion maybe?). BoLA already has the skins so it's at least got something. Next, make the waypoints in ToN free and slow down the enemy respawns so people can actually breathe. Finally, make the triad's health in BoLA scale with player population to some degree. This doesn't mean it should be clearable with just 3 people on each boss, but 6-7 each should be plenty. They nailed this scaling on Dragonstorm, BoLA could definitely stand to have the same QoL imo especially since Dragonstorm has much better rewards for less time and effort.

Anyway, that's just my two cents. It's a shame to see content that took so long to return die off so quickly, and I hope they do eventually come back and give it another pass at some point.

[Randulf.7614]

Marionette would be better in open world and reworked slightly to accomodate not needing a precise number of players. Trying to do a min 50 players with little incentive and in an instance was naive design

[Dayra.7405]

Only needs to be added to WV-weeklies 😇

[firedragon.8953]

To be fair, Marionette was added as a permanent boss because a loud majority was asking for it on the forums. Some people foresaw that it wouldn't a popular event once the novelty wore off though. 

But yes, both twisted Marionette and the Tower of Nightmares need to be added to the Wizard's vault periodically in the short term.
Realistically, Tower of Nightmares needs to have a daily system that awards a daily bonus chest with a couple gold and a few high price RNG items (rare weapons skins, infusion, etc.). Not sure how they will implement something like this with the dungeon-like design, but maybe something like dragonstorm with a timed schedule for public events and locking the party after the second floor to the tower is opened.

Making the Marionette competitive with other events considering it's design for greater coordination is difficult. More rewards is of course good, but there are already a lot of boss/meta events with good rewards and lower effort (e.g., dragonstorm). Offering a daily Hero's Choice Chest (amalgamated gemstone) and a roll for ascended weapons/armor at the final chest might be a good start. But doing "return to" or "rush" events or just putting it in the special tab for 400AA would drive players there in small intervals. 

Trying to do the achievements for S1 to get the item to unlock old lions arch is super hard for this chapter due to low interest in the repeatable content...a Nightmare as it were....

[Solvar.7953]

They could certainly add daily achievements for the Tower that has a reward chest when completed, no AP, and is not repeatable.  So once per day, you can do it , get the reward chest that hopefully has good enough items to make it worth it, but make it so it can't be farmed 5 times the same day.

I believe they already use this type of logic during the festivals - some task you do each day that gets you decent rewards, but after that, you are just down to the event rewards.

 

[Pomdepin.7068]

I followed the game's history, so I know it exists, but I haven't really bothered trying it once or found any portal to the event in the game.

So people who also took a break at this period of time and didn't necessarily follow the game might not even know it exists.

Also, rewards must be there if it wants some play. A few raw gold, a unique infusion and some rare ascended drops would probably do the trick. I see people swarm events dropping unique very rare infusions all the time.

Now Anet just has to care about it enough to do something.

[kharmin.7683]

On 9/25/2023 at 11:13 AM, Randulf.7614 said:

Marionette would be better in open world and reworked slightly to accomodate not needing a precise number of players. Trying to do a min 50 players with little incentive and in an instance was naive design

But, we got what was wished for when people were clamoring for season one and the related events.  This is one of the reasons why I had preferred Anet had spent their resources elsewhere rather than re-create content for nostalgia which never works out in the way that players wanted.  See also Bunny Thumper spec request for Rangers.

I do agree, though, with the premise of your argument that this might have worked better as some kind of open world content.

[Randulf.7614]

2 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

But, we got what was wished for when people were clamoring for season one and the related events.  This is one of the reasons why I had preferred Anet had spent their resources elsewhere rather than re-create content for nostalgia which never works out in the way that players wanted.  See also Bunny Thumper spec request for Rangers.

I do agree, though, with the premise of your argument that this might have worked better as some kind of open world content.

To be fair though, you want every idea to have resources spent elsewhere. We’d have no fun content 😉

Recreating ls1 was a must and they did mostly a good job. But we knew when we fed back that ls1 instances needed either to be redone as solo instances or made into long term sustainable content. They were on the right track, but Tower and LA have no incentive and marionette requires the highest number of organised people of any instanced content with no payback. They need daily and weekly rewards or made into strikes and added into the strike rotations

Marionette in the open world, retuned slightly with high quality rewards would be at least a semi regular attendance 

Unfortunately, they didn’t think long term about it - probably because they had too many plates to juggle

 

 

[kharmin.7683]

42 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

To be fair though, you want every idea to have resources spent elsewhere. We’d have no fun content 😉

 

I get what you're doing here. 😄   Still, it is my opinion that many of the suggestions that grace our forum are ones that I believe would benefit a small sub-set of the playerbase which is why I often state that I would prefer resources to be spent elsewhere.  Fun is subjective, as we all well know, so what one poster suggests as "fun" may not equate to others' definitions.  Did the game really need fishing?  Or, would those resources have been better spent with the PvP or WvW communities who are begging for it?  Conversely, would putting resources into those mode generate the revenue to keep the servers running or was fishing really what brought in the big money?  We have no way of really knowing.

I disagree that LS1 was needed.  I missed out on it having started a year and a half or so after initial release and it didn't really affect my gameplay or enjoyment of GW2.  Yes, I agree, that it could be confusing to new players, but would not having LS1 remade really make or break GW2?  I don't think so.

There are a lot of things wrong with GW2 that should have some higher degree of focus, but I feel that Anet is too zeroed in on the next dollar to the detriment of making more of the existing content better received by the playerbase.  Yes, they have to create new content to keep the engine running, but I question whether some of the decisions that have been made realized the return on the investments made.

But that's just my opinion.

[firedragon.8953]

Although I think the permanent instanced Marionette wasn't needed, I do think LWS1 was very much needed. For many players, they play the game because they are interested in the story/characters/lore and having LWS1 missing for so many years was a glaring error on Anet's part since nearly 8 years of story was built upon it. Besides rewards and rotation of repeatable content, I think LWS1 was an excellent (necessary) addition to the game. For most, it is also "new content" since they haven't played LWS1 when it was live or weren't able to play it in it's entirety due to the nature of it's release. For the longevity (new blood / new player experience) it was needed. Without it, the game just came off as "incomplete" from the very start.

[Solvar.7953]

I enjoyed being able to play LWS1 (I had moved on to other games when it first came out).  But I also know I needed to play it when it was re-released, because I figured it would become fairly dead content after a little while, which seems like the case.

In terms of resources, I think it is reasonable to think that it took a lot less effort to release that content than come up with something completely new with similar amount of content.  Now something new might have been better, but I can also believe it was a decision made to provide some 'new' content with less effort so more development effort could got into other areas.

 

[Hesione.9412]

On 9/29/2023 at 1:22 PM, firedragon.8953 said:

To be fair, Marionette was added as a permanent boss because a loud majority was asking for it on the forums. Some people foresaw that it wouldn't a popular event once the novelty wore off though. 

But yes, both twisted Marionette and the Tower of Nightmares need to be added to the Wizard's vault periodically in the short term.
Realistically, Tower of Nightmares needs to have a daily system that awards a daily bonus chest with a couple gold and a few high price RNG items (rare weapons skins, infusion, etc.). Not sure how they will implement something like this with the dungeon-like design, but maybe something like dragonstorm with a timed schedule for public events and locking the party after the second floor to the tower is opened.

Making the Marionette competitive with other events considering it's design for greater coordination is difficult. More rewards is of course good, but there are already a lot of boss/meta events with good rewards and lower effort (e.g., dragonstorm). Offering a daily Hero's Choice Chest (amalgamated gemstone) and a roll for ascended weapons/armor at the final chest might be a good start. But doing "return to" or "rush" events or just putting it in the special tab for 400AA would drive players there in small intervals. 

Trying to do the achievements for S1 to get the item to unlock old lions arch is super hard for this chapter due to low interest in the repeatable content...a Nightmare as it were....

If they made the lane and circle mobs scale with player numbers, that would encourage more players to do the event. The requirement to have 50 players when even 10 organised (either pre or at the time) players can do Dragonstorm, and that Dragonstorm remains hugely popular, suggests that large player numbers is the barrier.

The same likely applies to the other two ls1 metas introduced. If you don't have a large group, you're stuffed.

[Gendalfs.7521]

Beauty of Dragonstorm is thats its relatively easy, not long, gives good rewards and scales awesome. I dunno if it can be soloed but I did it once with 2 other people.

[MedievalThings.5417]

Go to Gyala Delve.  The good thing is that Marionette isn't a map that one could complete for map completion.  I would venture to say anyone that doesn't already have Gyala Delve done for map completion will NEVER get it done.

[Rainbird.5960]

There's a group on the EU server that does it at 20 CEST everyday or so. The map fills up pretty fast so if you're late, you'll be re-routed to a map with no one in it.  

Also, the reward for it isn't mediocre. You get around 6g (at the time of writing) for about 10-15 min of time, making it almost as good as octovine.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

Best advise in general is to play content when it is new/hot. Ofc, you cannot do this when you just created an account but keep that in mind.

For now you will have to find a guild that runs these events (There is a guild that is literally called Twisted Marionette and regularly runs this mission) or keep an eye on LFG to join on peak times. Usually in weekends and in the evening.

Return to ... events would very much help to revive less-played content.

[Luthan.5236]

There should be some regular thing for this. "Return to" achievements ... not sure. They are once and then done until ArenaNet decided to do another one. And with them having given out the living world seasons for free again during that time ... I doubt they will do ecactly the same thing again soon.

They want to sell more. (Therefore they changed to the yearly expansion thing.)

They could add add another set of achievements - but then it might get too much at one point. (Old return to stuff should still be completeable for the legendary amulet?)

 

A daily and/or weekly  maybe. Not in the vault. (But the vault could be nice here as well.) An own category. Like the strikes select a different one each day ... the events like Dragonstorm and Marionette - and simlar stuff (instanced 50-man squad stuff) with a rotation for extra rewards from a daily achievement chest. The hot-join instanced stuff (Tower of Nightmare and Escape from LA) probably also will die out slowly. (If it has not already. Have not tried it after doing the main achievements when it was re-released.)

Edited November 16, 2023 by Luthan.5236