I came.
I saw. 😦
I took a portal.
—
I leave out the in-between steps of:
I jumped. (A lot.)
I died. (A lot.)
I raged. (A lot.)
Part of it was no doubt my fault for thinking I would be able to make it through without reading or watching a guide.
I ended up painstakingly working through (and falling and dying and being rezzed) bits and pieces of the path (with an odd portal here and there) all the way towards the goggles (though I consistently fell off at the last sequence of platforms.)
Absolutely stumped by the lack of visible chest, and wondering why there were so many portals up to the top of the blimp which seemed to go nowhere, I chilled out with the rest and alt-tabbed to discover that I had been missing the chest several times while up there.
That was followed by multiple attempts at the diving goggles, made palatable only by kind mesmers who had set up a sequence of portals up to the goggles. It got so bad I was freeze framing Dulfy’s video guide second by second, trying to figure out the exact spot to jump to.
Eventually, 3 hours and 20 minutes later, I lucked into somehow missing all the pipes and landing in the water alive.
I never want to do it ever again. I’ve died less times in the Aetherblade Retreat.
—
It started out fun, step by step trying to work out the next part of where to go. The holographic walls were a neat trick. The jump pads were fine when they worked right.
Between the cramped camera angles in some places and the jump-forward pads shooting you downward slightly when the camera wasn’t angled right, it began to get annoying.
As the jumps got less forgiving, and ended up with repeated splatters on the ground instead of being able to respawn, and tracing back long obnoxious to execute jumps in sequence, I proceeded to move on to frustration, anger and being very cheesed off.
I didn’t dare leave it for later, because of how difficult it looked, and the fear that once people had done it and moved on, there wouldn’t be others around to rez or port.
Eventually, after I sorta kinda did each stage and sequence long enough to understand the theory of what to do, even as I repeatedly failed at the execution, I gave up and made use of all the portals. Thank goodness for the community building, inclusive aspect of those things.
I pity those who will be doing this puzzle out of season, without the crowds in place. It’s doable, but it’s going to be a frustrating experience, to say the least.
Many many thanks to the generous mesmer souls who had set up portal chains from the ground to the chest, from the ground to the blimp and from the blimp to the goggles.
Many thanks to all those freely rezzing in that place – it was sometimes trickier to figure out how to get to a dead body than the next jump.
This latest batch of content is very strange. It’s hard to the point of only being able to please the small subset of people who really really like a specific sort of thing, with a small leeway for the better souls of the GW2 community to help some others who are struggling with the content, and sorry, too bad, for all those who happened to miss that sweet spot conjunction of friendly people.
(Aetherblade Retreat is like that. Obsidian Sanctum jumping puzzle is another one – I got that one because my server’s pretty populous and strong in WvW and hit a sweet season of an entire zerg in that locale, which I am sure frustrated our opponent servers at the time. Now Not So Secret too.)
I’m just relieved that’s over.
Was the jumping puzzle fun?
Hell, no.
Why I Game 
Thanks again for writing this stuff up so eloquently. I started a reply but it grew to the point where I turned it into a blog post. I’m past the point of trying to work out what the roadmap for GW2 is meant to be. I just do the bits I like and ignore the rest.
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I`m doing this in September 2013, I have never ever been so frustrated with a game in my life……
I want to destroy my PC and boil my head in an acid bath….
I need therapy and strong drugs…..
I have decided to leave this until season, it’s SKY PIRATES isnt it???
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I think the secret word is “bits”: they have diferent teams working at diferent features. We know for sure they have two living story teams, but too a sPvP team, a WvW team and some devs are working at jumping puzzles and SAB and whatever they like to add to game.
Well, diferent team will complete features at diferent times. Only the living story teams have a fixed schedule, Anet want a new living story each two weeks.
We don’t have any idea how many teams exist, how many people work at each team and it is probable each dev work at more than one team same time.
From ou side, players, it is very dificult see what the direction of implementation, I just hope Anet management have a better idea. But I guess we will see some patches giving us more jumping puzzles and dungeons, other patches giving us more WvW and sPvP, and again other patches giving us more pve DE (maybe?).
Take note Anet is trying make the living stories better and they are hearing what the players say they want. And it is good to remember that when we had Halloween event some player were vocal to ask for make that jumping puzzle permantent.
Well, the Aetherblades jumping puzzle is a permanent hard jumping puzzle!!!!
We get what we wanted….
😛
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I was definitely not one of those who asked for an even harder jumping puzzle. Mad King’s Clock Tower was about all I could do, after about 5 hours of practice at it, spread out over repeated days. I enjoyed the Winter Wonderland one. I gave up on Skipping Stones until the last revisit to Southsun.
This one is beyond me. If only by just a little. I can see myself getting to the blimp fine. Tis the glowing blue platforms up to the diving goggles that are insane. It could be due to my geographical location making the jump pads wonky and unpredictable. And it could be due to the fact that I main a Charr, and the camera angles are apparently bad for tall bulky characters in this one.
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I haven’t tried the new jumping puzzle yet, but having recently started a charr alt, Troll’s End is harder with the camera positioning compared to the asura I’ll regularly run through it for the odd daily. It is disorienting as there are spots in Trolls End that aren’t first person view with an asura, but are with the charr.
For any race in game, the field of view you are stuck with is pretty bad, I’ve take to finding poles/chimneys to stand on to look up or even get a good view of the horizon. I wish they’d give a control to adjust FOV out in PVE lands.
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Thanks for this feedback. I will definitely not bother with this jumping puzzle. Imo jumping puzzles, in general, have an intrinsic flaw. This is that higher difficulty = higher frustration to the player. I have never bought the idea that the sense of achievement on completing a difficult jumping puzzle is increased by the levels of frustration one reached to get there. For me the golden rule of gaming is fun. Irrespective of how difficult the content is, the game should remain fun to play. For me, jumping puzzles in gw2 are a source of irritation. As part of the game content, I feel I ought to do them (I cannot rid myself of this feeling), even though obviously the game does not require their completion. Your description of “annoying” is about right. The way that the more challenging jumping puzzles are designed too readily invokes frustration in the player. ArenaNet need to address this. Something needs to be injected into jumping puzzles that makes the actual process (no matter how difficult) of doing the jumping puzzle fun. The basic premise of jumping puzzles is that “it doesn’t matter if you die.” Why? Because you can start the puzzle from the beginning again (Dark Reveries, anyone?) and you don’t take armor damage (wait for some-one to res, or spend the silver to hop to a way-point?). This premise is faulty. It does matter if you die! If there is a boss or a dungeon or some part of the game that keeps killing me, the thing I love about gw2, is that you can work it out. With jumping puzzles there is nothing to work out – not really. You know the jump you have to make (as you say, you have seen it done on youtube), but well, some people are more skillful with their keyboards I guess. So I die and die and die, and hope that by fluke I will get it right next time. That is not fun, that is just plain annoying.
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For what it’s worth, I had a blast. A group of us formed a Red Cross team, spent several hours rezzing. Chatted, jumped around, gave advice. Never did all the puzzle myself.
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