GW2: SAB – The Lemonade Perspective

I’m more or less killing time while waiting for tweaks to arrive to the Super Adventure Box, so I thought: I’ve already spent the last three posts kvetching, let’s try a positive post for a change!

I mean, if I didn’t like the SAB at all, I would have opted out like Bhagpuss and save myself the bouts of occasional grumpiness.

I’ve just been mostly puttering around in the World 1 levels because they’re a lot less stressful.

One piece of good news: The secret rooms are not once a day only like the dig locations.

The earlier rooms unfortunately only give 5 baubles or thereabouts, minus the one bauble spent on the bomb, which isn’t much profit for time spent but there are a few exceptions I’ve been marking out. Presumably someone else will figure out the most optimal route for least amount of time, but that someone ain’t me.

This one in 1-1 yields a 15 bauble profit.

This one in 1-2 is worth 24 baubles.

I suspect World 1-2 will still be the friendliest one to farm even after all the dig locations have been used up.

The other thing I think will become popular is unlocking chests. If you slaughter stuff until a key drops, the chests deliver anywhere from 20-40 baubles.

I mentioned before that I really appreciate the Quality of Life tweaks made to the earlier levels.

Much ❤ for this barrel, since I can now take the “pro” route without pressing dodge-jump and praying to the latency gods.

These trees now have friendly outgrowths so that all the monkeys are accessible, if you don’t like being pelted by them.

Maybe they’re used in Tribulation Mode, who knows, I haven’t watched a video yet or attempted it, since I do want to buy an Infinite Continue Coin for that mode, but am holding back until normal mode is less crazy.

(I have certain principles about contributing to datamined statistics, especially where a cash shop is concerned, and I strongly suspect the amount of people who flung their hands up and bought a convenient way out is already high enough. Slippery slope and all that. We may rant a lot but sometimes it boils down to numbers and wallet votes.)

I like that they’ve got a Mini Moto for 20 baubles and Mini Miya to forge. It’s a casual’s sort of reward, being less costly to accumulate than the weapon skins and thus easier to strive for.

The components for Mini Miya seem to be fairly readily available – they’re also avaliable on the TP. The wig seems to drop just by killing random mobs. I believe I got a dress out of a jumping puzzle chest. My tiara came from a Metrica Province Fire Elemental chest, so it looks like it’s a reward from chasing dragons (ie. the open world bosses on a timer).

Information for obtaining the nunchaku or chain-sticks from the secret shop have filtered their way into the Reddit hivemind, so today’s mini-goal was to farm up World 1 for enough baubles to revisit the World 2 level on Infantile and buy that upgrade.

With dig locations, which are sadly, once a day only, I got about 465 by the time I hit the Queen Bee Dog area in World 1-3 so I left before King Toad and slooowly clambered my way on rainbows to the correct location. (Seriously, still too large a map, as much as I deeply appreciate Josh’s enthusiasm and willingness to put in excessive overtime to make the SAB an epic experience.)

The chainsticks were absolutely worth it though. I tackled a few assassins after that and felt like I had better reach and slightly faster animation time per swing, which does help in scrums.

I finally noticed the sword assassins had a knockback – which led to a few deaths hurtling involuntarily from a long height – but did my best to try and position myself with back to walls and so on.

If I successfully dodged their first swing, the fights generally went well. Things tended to get more difficult if I caught their charge with my body because I would get knocked down, frozen in position with invulnerable on, and then slowly clamber up in time to catch another charge from the assassin, sometimes just as invulnerable wore off. I wonder if the charr getting up animation is slightly longer than other races, or just a latency problem?

Sorry, got diverted for a sec there. Back to positivity again.

You know the one part of the SAB I really really like? As a Bartle Explorer first and Achiever second?

Discovering nifty secrets.

Sometimes I just stumble into them without really trying because my eyes are always going, “what’s that funny thing over there, why is there like a path here that doesn’t seem to go anywhere?” then before I know it, I’m gambling away lives trying to get to places that maybe were unintended to get to, or maybe absolutely were intended.

Why is that flower all the way down there?

Aiming in the most probable and suspicious location (always look behind waterfalls, you know?) and voila, secret passageway with cool stuff.

Bears’ secret sign stash

That eventually leads to a chest and bypassing of the first bit of annoying rapids via high platforms. (WTB: More ways to bypass moving water.)

I told you all I was waiting for someone else to nicely compile dig locations in a guide for me, right?

I can’t help it, I am sometimes magnetically attracted to these things. Maybe why I take so long in levels is that I sometimes succumb to the urge to compulsively dig per square inch, because those dig locations are so finnicky, y’know? Maybe there’s something here no one else has found yet…

World 2-1: Just before the long bridge with the assassins that leads to the raft, take a right and slip down the edge of the cliff…

…Sliding down all the way here and digging reveals a chest of 50 baubles! Yes, 50! Once a day, but still, not 5, not 20, 50!

There’s someone else on Reddit that has been nice enough to share the other stuff he’s found. There seems to be quite a bit in 2-1 that I’m quite eager to get to… eventually…

…I really can’t wait for the water / rapids / geyser bits to get tweaked a bit more. It actually is fairly peaceful to roam 2-1, if not for the lingering hydrophobia.

The best lemonade from malfunctioning water?

As usual, I got kicked off some rapids or other, flung bodily into the abyss, and somehow between lag and appearing and disappearing in funky locations because client and server couldn’t quite agree on which x,y,z coordinates my character was in… somehow managed to steer myself through a waterfall which I suspect was never meant to be reached.

The prelude to nothingness: a platform going nowhere.

I dug around, threw bombs, didn’t find anything, though granted I didn’t dig in every single pixel or tile.

When I got tired, I threw myself off the side, thinking to commit suicide and… ended up in another world altogether. (Ok, ok, at the very bottom of the map.)

Welcome to the LOVE MMO, GW2 edition.

There was something poetically awe-inspiring about running on all fours as a silhouette.

You know me, I am so easily bribed by a memorable screenshot.

I’ll put up with funky water for a few days if it inadvertently leads to one moment of perfect beauty.

(Just a few days though. I can’t quite reach the end of the level by falling under it.)

I do have this to say, though: One of the best things about the SAB team is their willingness to interact on the forums, share their insights and respond to feedback.

Josh Foreman catches a lot of flak and negativity from frustrated people looking for an outlet, and he’s just right in there, soaking it up and learning lessons and being willing to iterate and learn lessons and make things better.

That’s a special brand of masochism right there, which probably explains why he can make and play through sadistic platformers in the first place. The “live, learn, and constantly iterate” attitude is worthy of serious respect, and for that, I salute the SAB dev team.

Please keep striving to make things better. As a player of your game, I am very happy that my devs care.

—

P.S. My prior grumpiness has pushed me off my arse and gotten me to update FRAPS. Yet another positive. I may actually dabble a little in videos now and then.

I present for your viewing pleasure (please have a strong stomach) World 1-2 cage fight on a charr.

It’s not a complaint, by the way. It’s not something the SAB devs can fix specifically, I don’t think. I’ve lived with it since the previous SAB, and I’ll live with it this time around too.

I just wanted to share, since sometimes people don’t see or think there’s a problem when they don’t see things from another person’s or computer’s persective.

Have a good laugh, give thanks that you main a human/sylvari/asura, and continue to have fun.

Signing off, your furry friend.

GW2: Less Latency-Reliant Content Please

Anyone know someone rich?

It occurs to me that shipping a couple Anet devs to Australia to try out their content on 300 ping or worse might do wonders for less latency-reliant content.

As much as we keep harping on this, there is no experience like actually doing it in two physical locations to -feel- the difference.

With everything else the same. Identical computer, player, characters.

—

I remember the first time I felt keenly how different games played with different ping.

My old MUD relied on spam quaffing heal potions to survive fights. I was studying in the US at the time so my university connection to Canada (where the MUD was) was normally 30ms. Returning on vacation back to Singapore, my ping was 280-300ms. Same character, same player, same client, same computer.

Performance drop, distinctly noticeable. I died a number of times at home because I couldn’t spam quaff heals fast enough. I ended up letting someone else do most of the tanking and looking a lot less cool and show-off-y than I could be with 30ms ping.

Around the same period, different game. I played Team Fortress Classic and Natural Selection a lot in those days – West Coast US server communities were the best, friendly and cooperative. Ping? 30-100ms. Back in Singapore, I tried visiting the same haunts and had 300+ms latency. If not outright kicked by server for bad ping, performance was noticeably poorer. Unplayable, pretty much.

So I ended up in Singapore servers, where nearly everyone played deathmatch in team-based objective games and you got the feeling you were mostly playing against 12-14 year olds who were going to be called away to dinner at any moment.

Poor compromise: Japanese, Korean or Hong Kong servers at 120ms odd ping, where people played a little more cooperatively, but you couldn’t understand half of what they were saying since most of it turned up as square boxes or special characters.

Least sucky option: Australian servers at 200ms or so ping. Still at a reaction time disadvantage but slightly more mature community.

I badly missed my West Coast servers. Suffice to say I didn’t play as much FPSes while on vacation as when one was technically supposed to be studying. 🙂

—

This isn’t my video, as I haven’t built up the determination to try out World 2 normal mode yet.

(There are multiple more interesting competing goals like building up magic find and crafting to 450.)

I suspect my experience might be similar if those fixes don’t arrive soon.

And he’s not even playing a Charr.

Maybe I should look into getting FRAPS working so you can either point and laugh or cringe and vomit. (And I know just the cage and camera angle for that one.)