Twisted Marionette Update

[Fire Attunement.9835]

Hi all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Twisted Marionette bonus event this past week! We’ve been keeping a close eye on our internal analytics and the community discussions during the event, and we wanted to share what’s next for the Twisted Marionette.

The Marionette is a demanding fight and individual players have a huge impact on the outcome of the event. It requires significant coordination and collaboration – much more so than most of the other world events. We think it’s fair to say that it’s taken some players outside of their comfort zone. However, we’re happy to report that the community has risen to the challenge. Successful event completion rates continue to tick upward with each passing day and are nearly double what they were a week ago. The number of players participating in public encounters also increased every single day over the past week. We expect that these numbers will climb even higher, given the chance.

When we started planning to add the Twisted Marionette back to the game, we were concerned that the difficulty level and the player counts required for the encounter would make it challenging to keep in the event rotation. After reviewing the data we mentioned above, we’re feeling a lot better about it. While the Marionette’s public entry option will close today as planned, we’re going to make some changes to the encounter so we can bring it back into public rotation permanently.

• Squad Mode: We’re updating the event start timer to only begin after  the squad leader confirms that the group is ready inside the instance.
• Public Mode: We’re updating the event start timer to only begin after a minimum number of players are present in the instance.

The updates will take some time to go through development and testing, but we’re hoping to get you back into the fight by late summer. Squad entry will remain accessible between now and then.

-The Live Team

 

 

[The Boz.2038]

1 minute ago, Fire Attunement.9835 said:

Successful event completion rates continue to tick upward with each passing day and are nearly double what they were a week ago. The number of players participating in public encounters also increased every single day over the past week.

One naturally has nothing to do with the other. 😛

[Taelac.7036]

Glad to hear it!

[Jijimuge.4675]

Thanks for the update - it's nice to have communication like this.

 

I really enjoyed the marionette fight, especially the regulator elements - was a nice throwback to the days of GW2 when people had to be more self-sufficient with their builds/setups.

 

Great ideas re starting the event only after there's a degree of readiness (or at least sufficient numbers) amongst the players doing the event.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Happy to hear Public mode is coming back permanently.

Thanks! 

[supa.8593]

Just ran 3 runs with a ~~~mildly organized LFG group. Commander really did try their best. We got to the end but 2-3 either AFKing or being in the wrong lanes ruined it for everyone. 50 man version is much less forgiving for people who did not give the event full attention.

[nopinopa.4861]

10 minutes ago, The Boz.2038 said:

One naturally has nothing to do with the other. 😛

This.

Edited July 20, 2021 by nopinopa.4861

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Thank you!

[Raknar.4735]

Nice to hear that public is here to stay!

[Seremela the Elf Mage.1748]

I immensely enjoyed the difficulty of the private Marionette instance. The coordination and player skill required in the 50 man set-up made the encounter more challenging than any raid boss in the game and much more satisfying when you got the kill. Thank you for bringing it back, it was a great fight back in the day! I hope we'll get to see more instanced fights that require more skilled play in the future too ^_^

[Tulki.1458]

Loving the increased level of communication with the community lately and responding to feedback so quickly.

 

I'm also liking the jab at the fact that success rates have increased substantially after launch. This is an obvious indicator that "too hard" group content is actually a good level to target. Challenging players will make them get better, and then we can all have more interesting encounters.

[Dante.1763]

Ehhh, thank you so much for telling us whats up and for keeping the public version of Marionette after it gets updated!!! 😄

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I had a lot of fun with the Marionette mission last week. I missed the original event during LW S1 because I was doing newbie thing back then like doing hearts, figuring out what all the weapons do and trying to kill the shadow behemoth. Last week I went full in and got all the achievements I originally missed. A nice chance to catch up a bit as achievement hunter.

Edited July 20, 2021 by TheQuickFox.3826

[Gwylen.3462]

This is fantastic news, I absolutely love this encounter and have had a fantastic week with public :) I'm so glad to hear it'll be returning soon! 😃 I'm glad changes are being made to the squad countdown timer too, It's much needed and will make organising it a lot less annoying for those commanding it! Thank you for the updates!

[Jajo.1428]

If public groups have been smashing it, why take it out of rotation?

[Infusion.7149]

10 minutes ago, Jajo.1428 said:

If public groups have been smashing it, why take it out of rotation?

They're doing revisions to have it start with a minimum player count. That should help with the empty platforms occurring.

"we’re going to make some changes to the encounter so we can bring it back into public rotation permanently."

[Mr OlsOn.7824]

Good news, hope you will also take another look on the rewards. Not much to come back for after you are done with the achievements.

[Blaeys.3102]

This is great news. Thanks for the update.

 

And I know the reward I want you to add. I want to hang the marionette in our guild hall :).

 

Edited July 20, 2021 by Blaeys.3102

[AysonCurrax.3254]

I feel that the rewards could use a little touch-up as well. I am not sure if it's worth all the effort for a daily 2 gold, a bunch of sprockets and the usual handful of unidentified gear. Achievements might be a motivation to some, but once they are done, there is not too much to gain here, unless you are in for the sprockets to craft the Tempered Spinal Blades Backpacks, although you can't really do that without a proper way to earn the different Assault Knight Power Cores (Battle for Lion's Arch soon™?).

 

Just a thought. I would hate for it to come back into the game after years, only to become content no one does because it's not rewarding enough.

 

Other than that, thanks for the great communication as of late!

Edited July 20, 2021 by AysonCurrax.3254
forgot to be grateful

[radium.7350]

This is great news! Thank you so much! 😍

[ZionGal.3768]

I agree, rewards should be included, because the achievements won't keep it alive. For a new player they are not easy to obtain but eventually people will get them and the instance will die out, this will not happen if good and interesting rewards are added. Also thanks for bringing public back, private is way too hard for players with regular gear.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Yeah for 15-20 minutes worth of gameplay 2g seems low, particularly after people get all the achievements. Not sure what a good amount would be though...

[KitTheTraveler.6193]

I'm happy overall to have it back. That its nice you guys are willing to keep trying things to keep it around.

[SteveMND.1754]

22 minutes ago, Jajo.1428 said:

If public groups have been smashing it, why take it out of rotation?

All of the metas/raids/Big Events require a certain population density in order to be realistically viable.  Only a few are reliable for the casual player (i.e., "person with a job and family and real-life responsibilities") because the coinciding windows of 'being able to get online' and 'enough people around to run it' are smaller.  Taking it out and reworking it will help make it more viable for everyone, and not just those with Huge Guilds or Huge Time Allotments.

Heck, it wouldn't be that hard to tweak it as a solo/storyline chapter either, honestly, if they ever decide to rework and bring back Scarlet's War as actual repeatable storyline campaign -- which would be great for those of us that missed the live run of it the first time around.

[SamKablam.6241]

The biggest issue some people experienced was that in some instances when a lane would go through the teleporter to fight the mini-boss, some players wouldn't be sorted onto the platforms evenly. We would end up with platforms that have 1 or 0 players on them, causing our lane to fail that would have otherwise succeeded.