Gaia Rocks! Not Always a Good Thing

Not all is Happy Happy Joy Joy in the TSW anniversary event. Some problems might be endemic to the type of activities Joel and his devs at Funcom planned. Seems like it would be better to plan around that sort of thing, rather than ask the players to grin and bear it.

It's totally awesome to have so many folks together in one place for a single purpose. However something that causes enormous headaches to most players is the atrocious framerate caused by having everyone and their sister in on these major boss fights. Most people, even on high-end rigs with graphics turned down, are lucky to eke out FPS in the teens. On my machine, an above-average-but-certainly-no-longer-top-end Asus G73, I had to downgrade to DX9, low graphics, and turn off particles, to get anything close to motion during these fights. The pic below shows really good fps (in the upper right corner), but I had just barely arrived. Typically it dwindled from the teens down to 2 -5 fps by the end of the fight. Otherwise, I'm looking at a slide show; which wouldn't be that bad except I often end up dead because I don't see ground-effect boss damage until it's too late. Other players' bad habits don't help, but neither does the core design of the fight.

Some of the choices made for loot drops are not great either. Considering each boss fight is on a two-hour cool down, getting a stack of flares isn't exactly anything to write home about. The signets aren't much better, considering how many drop all over the place anyway. The huge number of signets being received has also had the side effect of collapsing the signet market on the auction house. I will say it was nice to see a few major talisman signets, but they are few and far between, considering how many total I've picked up over the past few days.

It's rather ironic that Gamespot puts out this lovely quote regarding Issue 7:

How refreshing that The Secret World continues to hew its own path, building tension through storytelling, and requiring you to exercise brainpower rather than just tap some keys until things fall over dead.

I'm sure that's true, given the awesome storylines of Issues 5 and 6. However, each Guardian of Gaia fight is about ten minutes of button mashing, coupled with "Don't stand in the fire." The XP and Pax (currency) are decent, I suppose; though that has been masked by the admittedly great double AP/SP boosts they've have running over the weekend—which ended Sunday :(.

I personally only want thing more for any of my toons, and that's the glowing green eyes for my dragon, the only avatar I'll use them on. I got them within the first couple of fights on my other two characters. In fact, they were the first thing that dropped off the Transylvania bosses for my Templar. But after something like 12 Transylvania fights on my dragon, I have yet to see the glow. I'll keep plugging away I suppose—like a rat in Skinner box—though I'm less and less happy about it.

Finally, we come to the last aggravation of the anniversary event. There is a Guardian of Gaia rampaging (occasionally) through the Fusang Projects PvP warzone, as well as a piece of lore. While the Guardian has been dropped from the achievement required to the T-shirt (seen in the pic of Karl toasting, above), the Lore object is still in there, and required for the other achievement. So what is the problem? No one I know has been able to get into Fusang. The other night, Scooterz and I waited for over an hour in the queue. Then on Sunday and last night, I spent the entire time I was logged-in in the queue. Luckily you can do other things while waiting. My buddy, Tententacles has been queued whenever he's logged in since Thursday or Friday. I have a feeling Joel and the devs either need to fix the queue or move the Lore object. (EDIT: Apparently, Fusang has in fact been broken this whole time. But that was in no announcement or FAQ I saw.)

Anyway, much like the STO summer event that is currently going on, what started out as a fun lark of a few different activities in TSW quickly became grindy and not worth my time. At least Funcom is not trying to extend this anniversary business out a month. After a brief update this morning, the servers are back online, and we've all got "A Dream to Kill."