The Halloween Clock Tower Lobby is bad.

[WafflingMean.4351]

Can someone at Anet please change this lobby so people don't have to spend more than half the time they're actually attempting this jumping puzzle standing around doing nothing? I actually like the JP, it's a fun challenge, but the lobby just makes it incredibly painful, because you don't even get to go on the JP most of the time. You have to wait for other players to fail or finish, meaning all it takes is one good person, and four people learning or just average stand around all day. I don't want to hope people playing with me suck. That's not a good dynamic between players unless it's PvP. I know that once I complete this JP once for an achievement I will never touch it again. It's just horrible and boring because of this lobby.

[WafflingMean.4351]

And please make the dialogue stop triggering every time the instance loads. If I could kill that Azura talking about the mouse it would be the first thing I'd do every time I loaded the instance.

[Vayne.8563]

I sorta doubt they can change the lobby. I'm guessing it was designed the way it was to maximum server efficiency. If each person had their own private instance and everyone was doing it at once, it would mean far more instances created and it would have other consequences. I'm guessing mind you, but I suspect it's true. Nor can you start jumping when other people are still going because the poison will be above the starting point.

I agree it's not ideal. But it doesn't stop me from doing the puzzle. In fact, once you make it and learn the puzzle, you're not waiting nearly as much so your statement you'll never do it again once you've done it is not necesssarily true because once you can do it and get further your weight is considerably shorter. I'm just not sure what can be done to fix it, even though it can be frustrating.

[Urud.4925]

Tic-toc, the mouse ran up the clock... I always use /threaten on him, it's a small relief.Try to play at night if you can. Sometimes you are lucky and play alone for 3-4 rounds. But I agree with you, if you have even 1 single good player, all the others must wait. Boring indeed. Although I noticed that when I'm alone, I fail much more.

@WafflingMean.4351 said:I know that once I complete this JP once for an achievement I will never touch it again. It's just horrible and boring because of this lobby.Ehrm, I don't want to discourage you but... one of the achievements asks you to complete it 15 times...

[Graziel.5487]

yeah the lobby is a bit annoying for newbies, i finished JP once and got to do other stuff, but i got most annoyance from waiting even up to 1 min at the start of attempting it, the most progress i got on it (from 1/4th to around 2/3rd of height) was when i was alone in lobby and i could try it as fast as possible.

while the lobby probably will not go away it could be split into tiers - grouping ppl by number of finished attempts so newbs could try it more often.

[ProtoGunner.4953]

It's absolutely horrible. You wait more than you play. I would've done this JP years ago, if it were a single player instance.

[Tommo Chocolate.5870]

I totally agree - I'd be much more inclined to do the clocktower if I didn't have to wait around after every time I mess up. I don't see why having a single player instance would be a problem - we already have single player instances for the personal story, living world, etc. so it's not like the game can't cope with them.

[sasya neko.1985]

it's not even a puzzle, a puzzle let's you take your time, this is simply a jump race but without mounts.

[DaFishBob.6518]

At the risk of sounding like a spammer:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/59265/suggestion-mad-kings-clock-tower-as-a-guild-hall-decoration

[Rauderi.8706]

@"ProtoGunner.4953" said:It's absolutely horrible. You wait more than you play. I would've done this JP years ago, if it were a single player instance.

So much of GW2's early design, especially when it came to achievement hunting, gets a raw "F-" for applying Fail Faster. Things like the Clock Tower or just about anything in Season 2 has such boring, frustrating iteration times, they're not worth pursuing.

[Orion Templar.4589]

Agreed. I like this JP, but the waiting around in the lobby piece of it gets annoying and tends to drive me away from doing the JP.

[timetopat.7921]

I’ve only ever completed the puzzle once but funny enough it being a lobby helped me. There was a more experience player there who showed me how to drop down at a certain point and gave me some tips.

[Solvar.7953]

If you can do it, and get decent at it (I'm maybe a 25% success rate), it isn't quite so bad. But sitting in the lobby doing nothing is annoying.At one time, when Anet had there own servers/datacenter, limiting instances might have made sense. But since they are using other cloud providers, spinning up more instances as needed should be easier than in the past. Plus, I suspect there is a fair amount of churn as players try to find 'good' instances (this one has 3 minutes left, let me exit and re-enter and hope I get a better one).I can see the value of having other people to follow. However, that could be fixed by allowing people to enter as a group. Actually, there are a lot of these types of events that would be better if I could do them with friends instead of a group of random people.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

@"WafflingMean.4351" said:Can someone at Anet please change this lobby so people don't have to spend more than half the time they're actually attempting this jumping puzzle standing around doing nothing? I actually like the JP, it's a fun challenge, but the lobby just makes it incredibly painful, because you don't even get to go on the JP most of the time. You have to wait for other players to fail or finish, meaning all it takes is one good person, and four people learning or just average stand around all day. I don't want to hope people playing with me suck. That's not a good dynamic between players unless it's PvP. I know that once I complete this JP once for an achievement I will never touch it again. It's just horrible and boring because of this lobby.

I have to vouch this ^

The Clock Tower is the only JP in the game that I haven't completed, and it's not that it's too hard, it's that I seriously lose patience with the reset time very quickly. I go in there every year and attempt the puzzle 2 or 3 times, notice the wait for reset, then I say to myself, "yeeeeeeah no" and then leave.

I'd like to point out that I'm not even complaining about not getting an achievement or poor rewards or anything. My comment is coming from the standpoint of a player who would sincerely enjoy being able to play and learn the cool JP, without a ridiculous troll level of wait time to do so ^^ That wait time is an incredibly huge turnoff to the content in my opinion.

I'd like to see a patch next Halloween where I could enter The Clock Tower alone, with very little wait time in between attempts. That would be amazing.

[Urud.4925]

Hmm, yeah, also for Christmas, I remember some instances like the bells, with long waiting time at the end, and people just left earlier, causing other people to join the end of the instance, just to wait... Something might be done in future, to reduce these waiting times.

For example I noticed that if you reach the top of the clock tower and lose few seconds to open the chest, the group starts without you, and YOU have to wait the following run. So maybe we could do like in rally (the sport): a group starts the JP, after 15-20 seconds the gates are opened again for a second group (if you died within this time, you can start again, otherwise you wait for the next group after 30-40 seconds), in a continue running, with ppl that overlap each other. We are invisible anyway, so this shouldn't create any confusion.

[Jarl Petter Hinrik.1409]

I used the lobby to vent, watch videos, relax my fingers and my eyes...

Some players cried, we encouraged each other... And sometimes, we bowed to the tower, lol.

[Ray Koopa.2354]

Tic-toc, a pro ran up the clock,Time swallowed the lobby, waiting wasn't their hobby!