The Skyscale Epidemic in Open World

[Yasi.9065]

As seen today:

One lonely warrior, valiantly fighting a bounty boss in Desolation. Above him, at least 10 Skyscales circling like vultures, shooting a fireball every now and then, waiting for the warrior to do the work.

Warrior dies. Skyscales move on to the next poor player, trying to get an event done.

 

Some time later in Silverwastes, two Vultu... eh.. Skyscale-Players in squad-chat:

A: I love that you can get participation with Skyscale fireballs

A: xD

B: ye haha

B: even in 3rd lane works

A: feels like cheating

A: but got me luminescent shoulders

 

 

Id never have thought this moment would ever arrive, but:

I actually prefer the afk-Engis and afk-Necros to this epidemic of skyscale-leechers. At least they were on the ground, providing a meatshield and more DPS.

 

Anet: Heres two easy ways to fix this:

1. Increase participation threshold.

2. No participation for skyscale fireball damage.

[Omega.6801]

Well, people whined for combat mounts without end so now we have a useless turtle that does nothing and a skyscale that people won't dismount from. You're welcome.

[Healix.5819]

Back in 2012 when people first started complaining about the lack of contribution requirements, ArenaNet said they didn't want to discourage people from participating, including scenarios where someone would come across an event that was almost over. The simplest thing they could do is base participation on the number of actions performed (skills used, dodge, etc) over time, which would mean this, auto attackers and players who stay dead wouldn't have participation, but it'll never happen.

29 minutes ago, Yasi.9065 said:

2. No participation for skyscale fireball damage.

They probably can't, otherwise they would have made all pets and passives have 0 contribution, which is something other MMOs figured out decades ago to combat the simple pet bots. If you want to solve this, what you're going to end up with is no mount areas dynamically added to events.

[Randulf.7614]

Sounds like the warrior needed to "get gud" 😉

I mean it's Guild WARS after all. The Warrior should be leading by example....

*runs*

[Mell.4873]

Syscale afking farming stuff is fair game since most things are not that hard with enough players. There is good chance you will not even get drops during most events these day since power creep means anyone with have decent armor set can one shot everything. 

I would prefer Skyscale participation over 10 second boss fights. 

[DanAlcedo.3281]

5 hours ago, Randulf.7614 said:

Sounds like the warrior needed to "get gud" 😉

I mean it's Guild WARS after all. The Warrior should be leading by example....

*runs*

Thing is, you are correct. 

If its like 11 players on a bounty, as long as it is not legendary, a good warrior on a good Openworld build should be fine. 

Given that the 10 skyscales are doing not THAT bad of dps for a normal PoF bounty. 

Would personally not see it as annoying but cool AF to fight in a barrage of fireballs 1v1 against a bounty boss and winning. 

[Ashen.2907]

44 minutes ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Thing is, you are correct. 

If its like 11 players on a bounty, as long as it is not legendary, a good warrior on a good Openworld build should be fine. 

Given that the 10 skyscales are doing not THAT bad of dps for a normal PoF bounty. 

Would personally not see it as annoying but cool AF to fight in a barrage of fireballs 1v1 against a bounty boss and winning. 

Could be very fun, and look epic. The only annoyance would be that the skyscale players scaling up the boss.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Just now, Ashen.2907 said:

Could be very fun, and look epic. The only annoyance would be that the skyscale players scaling up the boss.

10 players should not be enough to make it to difficult. 

[Phyb.6704]

Should require you dismounting to get credit just like in wvw how the capture progress bar is not effected by those on mounts. 

[ShadowKatt.6740]

Skyscales are probably the worst addition to the game. Hands down. Period.

But, it's done. The genie is out of the bottle, and Anet has shown they are all about making the problem worse.

[Sweetbread.3678]

8 minutes ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

Skyscales are probably the worst addition to the game. Hands down. Period.

You're gonna get confuse reacted into oblivion, but you're right. Being able to fly over everything has made interesting level design and pathfinding almost impossible, and the sksyscale has trivialized a lot of the old world content (poor Mordremoth :c).

[AliamRationem.5172]

7 hours ago, Yasi.9065 said:

As seen today:

One lonely warrior, valiantly fighting a bounty boss in Desolation. Above him, at least 10 Skyscales circling like vultures, shooting a fireball every now and then, waiting for the warrior to do the work.

Warrior dies. Skyscales move on to the next poor player, trying to get an event done.

 

Some time later in Silverwastes, two Vultu... eh.. Skyscale-Players in squad-chat:

A: I love that you can get participation with Skyscale fireballs

A: xD

B: ye haha

B: even in 3rd lane works

A: feels like cheating

A: but got me luminescent shoulders

 

 

Id never have thought this moment would ever arrive, but:

I actually prefer the afk-Engis and afk-Necros to this epidemic of skyscale-leechers. At least they were on the ground, providing a meatshield and more DPS.

 

Anet: Heres two easy ways to fix this:

1. Increase participation threshold.

2. No participation for skyscale fireball damage.

Can't say I've encountered this.  Certainly, I've seen people use skyscale for tagging, but what's the point of tagging if you don't complete the event because nobody helped?

[Buzzbugs.1236]

I brought this up years ago on this forum back when Skyscales first got introduced and I got nothing but confused ratings as a response. Now it seems the honeymoon phase has worn off and the chickens have finally come home to roost. I hate to say I told you so..

Edited January 25 by Buzzbugs.1236

[Tiamat.8254]

How dare the game evolve and people use features added by the Devs. This is preposterous!

Edited January 25 by Tiamat.8254
Spelling

[Shuzuru.3651]

1 hour ago, Buzzbugs.1236 said:

I brought this up years ago on this forum back when Skyscales first got introduced and I got nothing but confused ratings as a response. Now it seems the honeymoon phase has worn off and the chickens have finally come home to roost. I hate to say I told you so..

So you brought up a subject that didn't existed yet at that time and you are surprised you got confused reaction?

That seems kinda normal to have those reaction

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

i don't want to be mean, but some players do more damage with the fireball on the skyscale than with their entire rotations on the ground. its easy to use leaching as your reasoning for something being nerfed or removed, but there's many different forms of leaching in this game!

Edited January 25 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Parasite.5389]

10 hours ago, Yasi.9065 said:

One lonely warrior, valiantly fighting a bounty boss in Desolation. Above him, at least 10 Skyscales circling like vultures, shooting a fireball every now and then, waiting for the warrior to do the work.

Warrior dies. Skyscales move on to the next poor player, trying to get an event done.

except none of this happens, because no one is stupid enough to think a single warrior is enough to Solo a bounty

[Ashantara.8731]

Just limit the Fireball attack to SotO - problem solved. I couldn't care less, as there is no fun in dealing damage from a flying mount. What's even the point to it, other than leeching?

[LSD.4673]

1 hour ago, Parasite.5389 said:

except none of this happens, because no one is stupid enough to think a single warrior is enough to Solo a bounty

This is a safe space and I will not tolerate warrior related bigotry.

[Buzzbugs.1236]

4 hours ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

So you brought up a subject that didn't existed yet at that time and you are surprised you got confused reaction?

That seems kinda normal to have those reaction

The subject is that Skyscales are an epidemic in open world. They were a bad idea long before fireballs were added. As someone else said, the genie is out of the bottle.

[Shuzuru.3651]

6 minutes ago, Buzzbugs.1236 said:

The subject is that Skyscales are an epidemic in open world. They were a bad idea long before fireballs were added. As someone else said, the genie is out of the bottle.

No, that's the title, the subject is "tagging with fireball and out of danger while others do the work is bad", that's an entire different subject

[Buzzbugs.1236]

36 minutes ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

No, that's the title, the subject is "tagging with fireball and out of danger while others do the work is bad", that's an entire different subject

You mean I can't post my own grievances about Skyscales in a thread about Skyscales unless it is DIRECTLY about the OP's grievance regarding Fireballs? You are going to need to come up with something better than that..

Edited January 25 by Buzzbugs.1236

[Cyninja.2954]

7 minutes ago, Buzzbugs.1236 said:

You mean I can't post my own grievances about Skyscales in a thread about Skyscales unless it is DIRECTLY about the OP's grievance regarding Fireballs? You are going to need to come up with something better than that..

Not if you want to take credit for a complaint which did not exist at the time.

You could differentiate the issue and make a seperate claim: in this case about how you disagree with skyscales.

Alas details and context matter.

[Vavume.8065]

15 hours ago, Yasi.9065 said:

As seen today:

One lonely warrior, valiantly fighting a bounty boss in Desolation. Above him, at least 10 Skyscales circling like vultures, shooting a fireball every now and then, waiting for the warrior to do the work.

 

It's the new meta, Warrior tank, rest Hi-gh Dps.

Edited January 25 by Vavume.8065

[ShadowKatt.6740]

Ah, and here we have that age old dichotemy: Those with foresight and those without foresight.

46 minutes ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

No, that's the title, the subject is "tagging with fireball and out of danger while others do the work is bad", that's an entire different subject

I'm gonna hit you witha metaphor. I want to spell that out because I want ABSOLUTELY NO CONFUSION as I do this. You, and the OP of this thread, are complaining about having their feet cut off because of gangrene. Just in case you need a bit of foundational context for this, diabetes patients are at high risk of gangrene from poor blood circulation and it tends to happen in the feet first. So you're complaining about the fact that gangere is taking place and now amputation is necesssary.

6 hours ago, Buzzbugs.1236 said:

I brought this up years ago on this forum back when Skyscales first got introduced and I got nothing but confused ratings as a response. Now it seems the honeymoon phase has worn off and the chickens have finally come home to roost. I hate to say I told you so..

And this person was the one that 6 years before now was warning that if you do not change the eating and lifestyle that there were going to be dire consequences, probably diabetes, which could lead to a whole host of other problems later on down the line, which could include poor circulation, gangrene, necrosis, and possible amputation. Do you see how one of them dovetails into the other one?

See those with foresight, myself included, are capable of looking not at the immediate reaction today, but the potential ramifications weeks, months, years down the line. It's an exercise in congitive ability, logic, critical thinking, abstraction. To look at something and say "If I do X, Y will happen, but what about Z?". In this case, X is Skyscales, and Y is a really cool mount to fly around on. But so many people never even considered Z. Z is the fact that now that you have a skyscale map design is basically worthless because you can literally fly over and skip everything. Don't need roads, don't need maps, don't need to navigate. Just straight line. You could replace the map with an empty blank canvas and nothing would change. It also means, as we saw with Amnytas, that if you do make a map with skyscales in mind it will be literally inaccessable to anyone or anything else, so now you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And this is on top of the fact that we already had a wide variety of mounts. And the skyscale renderd all of them useless. "But wait!" I hear you cry as you jerk your knee so hard you dislocate your hip, "The skyscale hasn't replaced all the other mounts! They still do things better than skyscale!" That's not the point. Raptor is more maneuverable, jackal can portal. Skimmer can float, roller beetle and gryphon are fast. But none of them do what the skyscale does: EVERYTHING. They can cross vast swaths of land, hover in place, climb, cross land, sea, and air. They are the jack of all trades mount and the statistics bear that out as the skyscale is the most used mount. And that's why Anet has been pandering to the skyscale so much. Even the seige turtle wasn't immune as it was touted as the combat mount with a driver and a gunner so you could stay mounted and engaged, and then they gave that to the skyscale as well. And if you do a cursory search on the forums you'll find people begging for skyscales to get a second seat as well for passengers, because why should ANY other mount be able to do something the skyscale cannot? The only reason they haven't demanded the skyscale use portals is because none of the portals actually go anywhere.

See, this is where game design comes in, and this is why game designers and engineers have to be smart. Because every time you add something to the game you need to think of the broader ramifications of your actions. There's a similar conversations happening right now over in the professions forums with people wondering when the core specs will be brought up to par with the elite specs, because the developers when making them kept upping the ante and creeping the power so now if you're not using an espec then you're just wasting everyones time. That's not right. The specializations, and I'm going to remove the "elite" part of that, were never meant to make the core specs irrelevant. They were supposed to provide options, choices, but never replacements. But they did. Skyscales were supposed to be a new, fun mount, dragon themed to go with the dragon fight, but they ended up replacing so many other parts of the game until we landed here, getting right back to the OP of this thread. Now, because of Anets choices we have people who aren't even playing the game anymore. They just fly to the event, skipping everything from point A to point B, and then just hover in place pressing 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2, and why not? Obviously no one in charge cares about what's going on, in fact they seem to encourage by adding more and more to skyscales. So not only is the genie out of the bottle, but Anet is granting IT wishes instead.

So in conclusion it because not enough people both in the player base and more critically in the dev team had the foresight to see how this was going to affect the game and thus here we are. So to summarize what has been a long enough diatribe already I'll just paraphrase what someone else said above: We told you so.