In Anthem, you will be guided during activities and reminded of your tasks by NPCs and text pop-ups. Micha wonders why players still cannot stay together in a circle for a few minutes.
The Anthem community has recently been talking mainly about bugs and errors in the game. While I cannot escape this either, I don’t have too many problems and enjoy jumping into my Javelin every now and then to take a few spins.
A patch with many fixes and changes for Anthem was released on March 9th.
However, I keep noticing one thing that annoys me even more than the technical issues: instead of staying in a designated circle until a task is completed, players prefer to run around the map.
This is what it’s about: In Anthem, there are several tasks that require players to cooperate and stay together in a designated area. For example, a region needs to be scanned or an artifact contained. You come across these activities at world events in freeplay and also in strongholds, such as in the Mine of the Tyrant.
These goals are indicated by a relatively large green circle on the ground around an artifact or another object. Players receive an audio message from an NPC indicating that they should stay close by. Additionally, there is also a pop-up on the screen.
If at least three players are in the circle, everything is fine and the activity progresses as planned.
Players hardly react: During the entire time I have spent in Bastion, I have not once experienced all players standing in the circle until the activity was completed. This would actually have only advantages: the more players participate in the task, the faster it is over.
Progress is even displayed with a bar. If this bar is green, the task is progressing quickly. However, if there are too few players in the designated area, the bar turns white, which should actually be a warning sign.
Why this is annoying: The bad thing is not only that the whole activity is unnecessarily prolonged due to the lack of teammates. Especially at higher difficulty levels, it can happen that a freelancer overestimates themselves and gets taken out by an enemy. If that player is far outside the circle, someone else has to leave the area to pick up the teammate.
And even if nobody dies outside the circle, the team is still affected when players are fighting all over the map: if large mobs of enemies are defeated away from the circle, the freelancers at the target may be missing life-saving orbs or even ammunition.
What do the players say? The community is also constantly discussing this topic. With a joke post in the Anthem subreddit, a freelancer wanted to convince the task refusers that the drop rate of legendary items increases when all players stay in the circle.
One player suggested that the offenders should receive a debuff during the circle phase that gradually drains their health. This can only be prevented by standing in the green circle.
Others joked that BioWare should introduce a penalty for players who do not want to participate in tasks. They should lose -1 chance for legendary items each time. Players who accumulated too high a negative score would then lose their already acquired powerful items.
Does it annoy you that players in Anthem never stay in the green circle? Or are you more relaxed about it?
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