Guild Wars 2

Cheers for the vote of confidence SKiNBuS, Chain and Amaterasu.
Where would you order these points chain?
I can certinly share your frustrations with polish and optimization too skin, especially when so many seem to think things are fine they way they are.

Kaaboose.3897:

Competition at the time. WoW may have been released years ago but it’s still the competition. Just the way Everquest was WoW’s competition when it was released. Seems like solid comparison to me.

Then later:

Well seeing as the bug comparision and polish was refering to release in the first place I don’t see why I should waste my time.

1. We’ve already been through this. WOW had alot of bugs and problems at release.

2. Make up your mind. Competition at the time or release state. Which is it? Because release state is not what Guild Wars 2 is in competition with, if it was you’d have been laughed out of here already. Things really have come a long way.

What I will do next time is be a bit more picky with my wording so it cannot be picked to death by every GW2 player you gets upset when somone compares the game to WoW.

That won’t work. Stick to one story and making accurate comparisons based on facts instead of nostalgia and information you do not even know yourself. Phrasing won’t fix either of those.

Instead of saying look to WoW for as an example I should say “Look at what WoW does right” next time I’ll say “Look at what WoW does/did right” and save myself the time replying to comments like these.

But you are not saying either of those. You are saying “look at what Guild Wars 2 did wrong, WOW didn’t have those issues, you should be like WOW.” But that is blatantly false. Seriously for cysts sake choose a story to stick to.

I did indeed dislike WOW. I’ll even go as far as to say I hated it. BUT, it did alot of things right. It also did alot of things wrong and got very lucky that it had the interest of a large franchise to start it.

IIRC the only other game that had a franchise before it that released was Final Fantasy XI and it wasn’t very accessible, yet still had quite alot of success. Kitten, at the time I was an MMORPG noob and I liked the game alot. At the time I thought it was a great game. Haha, I was silly. It was a terrible game with alot of good elements. Not even competitive for it’s time. Had I played WOW first it would have been pretty similar. Only in fairness WOW is a better game than Final Fantasy XI by a large margin.

I forgive and forget most buggy situations, but this video did make me LOL at the stuff you’ve seen before.

On the whole I strongly agree with the points made. Especially about how the servers work, dungeons and pve events. I would a million times rather a system of open world events relating to personal story line or event chains than the living story. Not that I dislike the living story, it just feels a bit like “heres a check list of a couple of achievements, see how quickly you can run in and out and get them done.”

hopefully some staff at anet have had a watch, and looked past the swearing etc and genuinely got out a pad of paper and gone “we should definitely look into working this stuff into our game” rather than think along the lines of “We spent months on that Zaitan battle, its awesome and we’re never changing it”.
Implementing these points and keeping doing what your doing is what I believe will really give gw2 the edge.

Ralathar.7236:

SNIP Sorry ral, wouldn’t let me post with the full quote again.

Let’s take some quotes from the video:
10(Advertisement): 2:11 – “In this case GW2 should look to WoW for some ideas on how to better promote their game.”
8 (Loot & MF) 8:13 – “If you want a good example of loot management in a game you can’t go past WoW…or at least what it was like before everything got dumbed down.”
6 (Dungeons) 17:16 – “I hate to say it but WoW does a much better job with its bosses and dungeons, even when fighting bosses that are pretty much part of the scenery”
4 (Events) 23 :19: – “I’m more infurated by the fact there has yet to be an MMO to really do justice the task of taking down a giant being… and don’t you say a word WoW players! Having someone a 10th the size of his oppent stand in front of it tanking while his mates stab it’s flank until it falls down is not epic!”
3 (LFG) 27:30 – “Something similar to WoW’s LFG system would be even better.”

There’s a pattern here, do you see it?

Now lets get to the meat of this aguement: Point 1 – Which is it?
33:33 – “We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again. Anet: Look at WoW. There are many reasons for it’s sucess but the thing that blew me away when I first played it – Everquest being my previous MMO – Was just how polish and bug free it was.”
34:01 – “I stopped WoW during the WOTLK expansion because of a bug that caused my game to crash and freeze my system at random intivals. The frustration that bug caused which was due to my Graphics Card being unspoorted caused me to stop playing what was then my favorite game.”
In case it’s not obvious yet the pattern I’m refering to is we’re only asking anet to look to WoW for inspiration when it’s doing something RIGHT, and we take the time to point out if that’s changed at some point too.
WoW does a lot of things WRONG and that’s why I play GW2 now instead of it.

But you are not saying either of those. You are saying “look at what Guild Wars 2 did wrong, WOW didn’t have those issues, you should be like WOW.” But that is blatantly false. Seriously for cysts sake choose a story to stick to.

But I am Ral, and I have been the whole time. MMO’s are in an ever-changing state. Differnent things worked differntly at differnt stages of development. Changes, both old and new effect the game both positivly and negativly. I can’t just choose one point of wows lifetime to compare all points to for an example of something done right because it’s a differnt stages in WoW’s lifetime that different points WERE/ARE done right.

Also, I’m going to sum up why WoW was chosen for the example of ploish and optimsation. (Well alongside The Witcher)

On relaese, WoW was a buggy game (even if it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competiton it still had faults, No-ones denying that.) As time went on WoW worked on the optimization issues holding it back and it rose to become (for the most part) a well polished and bug free game.

On release. GW2 was a buggy game (even if it was leaps and bounds ahead of other recently released MMO’s) As time has passed Anet has addressed some, but not all, of these issues.
See the similaraities? GW2 is already on a similar path to WoW’s accent to a well polished and optimzed game. But it’s not there yet, and until it is it belongs on the top of the list in my books.

10 additional dev’s with a completely different take on the direction and stylizing the game should go in. #creativity #gamebalanced

Alex.5286:

I forgive and forget most buggy situations, but this video did make me LOL at the stuff you’ve seen before.

On the whole I strongly agree with the points made. Especially about how the servers work, dungeons and pve events. I would a million times rather a system of open world events relating to personal story line or event chains than the living story. Not that I dislike the living story, it just feels a bit like “heres a check list of a couple of achievements, see how quickly you can run in and out and get them done.”

hopefully some staff at anet have had a watch, and looked past the swearing etc and genuinely got out a pad of paper and gone “we should definitely look into working this stuff into our game” rather than think along the lines of “We spent months on that Zaitan battle, its awesome and we’re never changing it”.
Implementing these points and keeping doing what your doing is what I believe will really give gw2 the edge.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Alex, and for the analogy on why No. 1 is at top spot

Really nice video. Anet should learn from it.

Ahem, quotes taken from thread directly from the mouths of WOW players themselves: http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=169306/what-was-vanilla-wow-like-i-am-curious-to-know

Vanilla was very very much more “grindy” than the game is now. Leveling took more effort and gold was so very much harder to come by. Raid experiences, while they still could be fun, took many more hours dedication than raids do now and often a lot of that was spent wading through trash mobs.

The biggest changes in my opinion have been made to the multi-role classes. Classes like paladins and druids were effectively pigeon-holed into one raiding spec and those roles were often tedious to the point of insanity. (i.e. Holy Paladins on 2min buff duty for their 40m raid).

Another big change is the amount of information available to the average player. Sites similar to wowhead were in their infancy and access to information like caps, talent builds, and optimal rotations were known by relatively few players.

As zdouse says, the game has pretty much been steadily improving. And although we had good times back in those days, if we take off our rose-tinted glasses its pretty clear it was a rough road back then.

Another quote:

Vanilla was a lot like other MMOs in there infancy , cept we didnt know what A fully fleshed out , well thought out and properly executed MMO looked like , There where pit falls , Long "grinding " sessions , think farming but just for XP , Terribly itemized drops , breadcrumb quests every three lvls , Some of it was a nightmare , getting 40 ppl for raids was like herding narcoleptic cats . CC was mandatory even in lower lvl stuff . Mobs hit harder , you didnt hit near as hard , Retpallys sucked , 200 dps endgame was fantastic , Shadow priests melted faces . But a lot of it was really fun , St , Strat , Scholo , Brd , took HOURS to clear and had rewarding loot for everyone , Bgs could last for days , you knew a good player from a baddie at a glance. to be honest , i do kinda miss it , but i love properly itemized gear .. I suppose it is a trade off .

Yet another:

It is wholly a myth that Vanilla was more hardcore than WotLK.

Vanilla was actually much more casual than any expansion since. To get by in the game, it was not necessary to have an in-depth understanding of, nor even any interest in, game mechanics, itemization, or weird and intrusive design elements like difficulty settings or LFD or stat weighting or the hit/crit/defense caps. There was not a feeding frenzy whenever new content was implemented. There was no rush to the top or to the end of the game.

WoW as a whole moved much more slowly in Vanilla. Gear never really became obsolete. Class balance changed very gradually. You could log off for a year of Vanilla and pick up where you left off.

The outdoor environment was more significant than instances, to a dramatic extent players who did not play then cannot comprehend. Content in general seemed to meander, and was sprawling, rather than linear, or having what I call “Disneyland syndrome”, where you travel between discrete, surreal vignettes – Borean Tundra and Grizzly Hills are acute examples of this.

Most importantly – and I think this will be the most common sentiment in the thread – Vanilla was more of an adventure. It was about discovery, interacting with a diverse playerbase, finding interesting things like the sharks off the coast of Silverpine or Purgation Isle or the countless rare spawns or weird quest chains.

Some will say this was merely because it was “new”, and I don’t buy that. Vanilla followed a very different design philosophy that emphasized the experience of the game over the game itself, that put heavy emphasis on the journey rather than the goal, that fundamentally treated instances as a diversion from the outdoor environment and the interface as something to be marginalized as much as possible, except to the extent desired by individual players.

Vanilla had many grave design flaws – most of them directly attributable to its being made in the long shadow of Everquest – but I think players and developers tend to overlook the many things that were done so right in Vanilla and have been neglected since.

More!!:

most of whats stated above is true, in 40 man raids, when a tier item dropped, youll see billions of rolls and whatnot, it was insane and yet, somehow funny looking back to it

on the other hand, vanilla wow was the host of many npc’s that became legends, people reallized what Varian was, the awesomeness of Saurfang on AQ40 gates and his impassable defense when alliance tried to raid orgrimmar by the front gates (his chained cleave one-shotted entire raids), also directing onyxia 40 man on such a small place drove many people insane (see onyxia wipe video on youtube), leeroy jenkings (may not be liked by some)

Having more than 3 mounts was considered eccentric too, now ppl over 100 mounts boast it in trade

all in all, vanilla wow saw some of the greatest raids, npcs and players (merit to whose deserves it) of all time, and thats what people miss, even with its insane grind hours, in short, it was harder than the current, yet the fun factor remains for the most part

One last quote:

I think Aetsu pretty much summed it up quite well.

While the game was a lot simpler, it required a lot more dedication. In this sense, I guess it could be described as both being casual and hardcore; the game in itself was very easy to understand, yet required an immense investment of time to reach the top. Questing and leveling was simplistic, repetitive and non-streamlined. In many cases, as Aetsu described, this would make the world feel more like a sandbox. It was not uncommon to find low-level quests in high level areas, and vice versa. Of course, initially this made the game feel more like an adventure, but after experiencing it for a while one quickly realises that this made for poor, convoluted gameplay.

Overall, the game had a really haphazard feel to it; for all intents and purposes, Vanilla felt much like a Beta. Certain game mechanics were inexplicable to the point of feeling ‘broken’ and the unrefined nature of the game made it feel more like an experiment.

So yeah, to answer the OP’s question, the game was – for all intents and purposes – harder. Not so much because the game was designed to be challenging, but because the game mechanics of the time were unintentionally unforgiving and frustrating.

It seems that the WOW community itself on WOWhead disagrees with you and uses the phrase “rose-tinted glasses” many many times.

Kaaboose.3897:

Number 10: Poor Advertising – 1:01
Number 9: World Vs. World – 2:54
Number 8: Loot and Magic Find – 5:27
Number 7: Personal Story – 8:22
Number 6: Dungeons – 13:48
Number 5: Guesting and Realms – 17:45
Number 4: Events – 21:49
Number 3: No LFG Tool – 26:52
Number 2: User Friendlyness: – 28:24
Number 1: Polish and Optimization – 30:47

I especially agree with the Zhaitan fight from number 5….the ending to this game actually frustrated me so badly that I stopped playing for about a month and a half. It was very boring and complete fail after the large buildup to it.

Number 5 was proposing an idea very similar to the mechanic from Guild Wars 1, and I have to be honest, I liked their “universal-world, different districts” mechanic much better. As an officer in my guild, it’s actually relatively difficult to find new recruits, since the server is basically dying down, besides two large guilds on the server.

Ralathar.7236:

It seems that the WOW community itself on WOWhead disagrees with you and uses the phrase “rose-tinted glasses” many many times.

Thanks for finding all thoese quotes just to confrim my previous post for me ral!

Kaaboose.3897:

On relaese, WoW was a buggy game (even if it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competiton it still had faults, No-ones denying that.) As time went on WoW worked on the optimization issues holding it back and it rose to become (for the most part) a well polished and bug free game.

On release. GW2 was a buggy game (even if it was leaps and bounds ahead of other recently released MMO’s) As time has passed Anet has addressed some, but not all, of these issues.

See the similaraities? GW2 is already on a similar path to WoW’s accent to a well polished and optimzed game. But it’s not there yet, and until it is it belongs on the top of the list in my books.

MOUNTS! and custom UI!

Could not agree more, as much as I enjoy Guild Wars 2, they urgently need to sort out these problems. From memory, since I watched your video yesterday, I agreed with all of the points made. I do have some things to add though, in case they have not been brought up yet:

On the topic of loot, I think as it stands players get far too much from trash mobs and not enough from bosses. You covered the point about loot scaling to difficulty and appropriate rewards for bosses in the video, so I won’t bring it up again, but trash mobs…

They drop too much gear, all the lower tiers of gear (white/blue/green) seem to blend together in memory as they are all equally common and thus equally worthless.

Why not make blue and green, though not white, drop less frequently? They don’t have to be super rare, but at least rarer, that way there would be an actual sense of reward when you do get them and it would make gear made via crafting actually useful while levelling.

Crafting also needs to provide more useful and fun items in the first place, as right now only cooking and jeweling seem to provide things people actively use at lower levels. Being able to randomly discover extremely rare but useful recipes now and again would also help to make it more interesting, rather than only ever getting one specific recipe from a specific combination of ingredients.

All this might help to stop the other problem, where people sell gear for prices one copper above vendor on the TP, though to fix that properly ANet would, at the same time, have to go and buy out all the gear currently listed at those kinds of prices.

On the topic of the TP, personally I would prefer a more auction house-esque one – one that resembles that of World of Warcraft – as while you can still make some money flipping items on this one, it is nowhere as enjoyable to do so. While I personally prefer Guild Wars 2 by a mile, in spite of the issues and having played both games, I know quite a few people where the main reason for them being uninterested in this game is the fact they cannot flip items on the GW2 TP the way they could with WoW’s AH.

Another improvement would be an account-wide mini interface, where players can summon any mini they own from anywhere in the world. That would not only make them less inconvenient, but also more desirable.

A minor change, which is not that important in the the grand scheme of things, but one I feel many people would like to see, would be the ability to dye weapons – just like in the original Guild Wars.

Drakonhammer.2148:

Could not agree more, as much as I enjoy Guild Wars 2, they urgently need to sort out these problems. From memory, since I watched your video yesterday, I agreed with all of the points made. I do have some things to add though, in case they have not been brought up yet:

On the topic of loot, I think as it stands players get far too much from trash mobs and not enough from bosses. You covered the point about loot scaling to difficulty and appropriate rewards for bosses in the video, so I won’t bring it up again, but trash mobs…

They drop too much gear, all the lower tiers of gear (white/blue/green) seem to blend together in memory as they are all equally common and thus equally worthless.

Why not make blue and green, though not white, drop less frequently? They don’t have to be super rare, but at least rarer, that way there would be an actual sense of reward when you do get them and it would make gear made via crafting actually useful while levelling.

Crafting also needs to provide more useful and fun items in the first place, as right now only cooking and jeweling seem to provide things people actively use at lower levels. Being able to randomly discover extremely rare but useful recipes now and again would also help to make it more interesting, rather than only ever getting one specific recipe from a specific combination of ingredients.

All this might help to stop the other problem, where people sell gear for prices one copper above vendor on the TP, though to fix that properly ANet would, at the same time, have to go and buy out all the gear currently listed at those kinds of prices.

On the topic of the TP, personally I would prefer a more auction house-esque one – one that resembles that of World of Warcraft – as while you can still make some money flipping items on this one, it is nowhere as enjoyable to do so. While I personally prefer Guild Wars 2 by a mile, in spite of the issues and having played both games, I know quite a few people where the main reason for them being uninterested in this game is the fact they cannot flip items on the GW2 TP the way they could with WoW’s AH.

Another improvement would be an account-wide mini interface, where players can summon any mini they own from anywhere in the world. That would not only make them less inconvenient, but also more desirable.

A minor change, which is not that important in the the grand scheme of things, but one I feel many people would like to see, would be the ability to dye weapons – just like in the original Guild Wars.

Thanks for the post Drakonhammer, Nice to see someone with so many of their own ideas to add.
I agree with the loot distibution on whites etc being kind of worthless but I think This is just to encourage the use of salvage kits and an incentive to buy more inventory space.
However I can’t agree with the greens because I always stockpile these and at the end of the day head to the mystic forge to try my luck and making them into golds.

The usefullness of crafting is a pretty big concern, But I think that’s more due to the economy and I’ve stated before I terrible at econimics so I can’t really comment on how to best fix this, sorry! Though I do think the prevention of ‘flipping’ items does help with the overall economy as it helps keep the gulf between rich and poor from getting too extreeme.
I love you account wide mini idea, I remember how much more fun minis where in WoW when they introduced that feature.
Dyeing weapons? Where do I sign up!

I gotta agree with number 8. Killing champion should be rewarding! Getting same items from champ/veteran as normal enemy is just silly.

Several people in this thread asked for a reason for the dwarves being gone. All of those people need to start paying attention to the GIANT PIECES OF LORE ALL OVER THE GAME that tell the story.

Others mentioned wanting more lore. Those folks need to stop standing in AFK queues next to dragon timers and get out and actually explore, reading text and listening to NPCs along the way. The amount of lore in here is insane.

Kaaboose.3897:

Thanks for the post Drakonhammer, Nice to see someone with so many of their own ideas to add.
I agree with the loot distibution on whites etc being kind of worthless but I think This is just to encourage the use of salvage kits and an incentive to buy more inventory space.
However I can’t agree with the greens because I always stockpile these and at the end of the day head to the mystic forge to try my luck and making them into golds.

The usefullness of crafting is a pretty big concern, But I think that’s more due to the economy and I’ve stated before I terrible at econimics so I can’t really comment on how to best fix this, sorry! Though I do think the prevention of ‘flipping’ items does help with the overall economy as it helps keep the gulf between rich and poor from getting too extreme.
I love you account wide mini idea, I remember how much more fun minis where in WoW when they introduced that feature.
Dyeing weapons? Where do I sign up!

The reason I feel there are too many greens and blues is because if there were less, the ones made from crafting would be genuinely useful. As it stands right now, most of the low level things made in weapon/armour making disciplines are not used or only for a very brief time – with exception of a few that people keep for their appearance. Another solution would be giving crafted items a bonus, like food has, to make them useful while levelling, or otherwise increasing the craft XP earned from each item so you can get to suitable ones faster.

Salvaging is not that appealing to players as it stands, I get the impression, I know quite a large number of people who play Guild Wars 2 and never salvage because often it is more profitable to sell the unsalvaged items on the TP. Part of the problem is many do not want to spend the time and effort levelling a crafting profession, as they tend to be quite tedious to level and offer little reward for the time, effort and money, you put in. I myself will only ever salvage if the components I get out of it are likely to possess a higher TP value than the item I am salvaging, which seems to be rarely these days.

A friend of mine suggested removing the character experience gains from crafting and having you only get craft XP, that way final products would be worth more than the materials used to make them – as it stands right now, in many cases, people simply want the reagents so they can gain character levels through crafting, instead of actually wanting the gear they get as a result of it. This also makes cooking and jeweling, which tend to be more useful at lower levels, suffer the same problem where even good finished products are worth far less than the materials used to create them.

And I still do not think the prevention of ‘flipping’ is a good thing, it allowed even people with very little money to make a lot of they knew what they were doing and, while it does reduce the gulf between rich and poor, it makes it very difficult for new players and casual to make money. Making money on the GW2 TP involves spending ages finding the best items to flip and there are already large disparities in wealth as it stands currently, plus trying to make money off it alone is very difficult and most players will only use it to sell the rarer items they get from dungeons etc.

While a more AH-like system could potentially worsen the disparity in wealth, it would certainly help pull a lot more trade-focused people back into the game and would allow for a more flexible market – plus as the trading post spans all servers, it would make it difficult for just one or two people to make money out of flipping items. At the very least we need face to face trading.

And, while this is an entirely different game, I could not help but feel like a crafting disciplines able to make things kinda like alchemy, engineering or inscription (from WoW), would be a nice addition to the game. At the very least the current crafting professions need more utility and fun items, particularly in the case of amour-crafting and weapon-crafting disciplines.

On an unrelated note, this game really needs the beginning zone/missions to behave like more of a tutorial. I’ve seen many people complain it took them ages to learn certain things which are key aspects of the game and while I myself had no problems learning the basics, I only learnt certain things like how to split up stacks of items several months down the road. That is pretty late for something as simple as that and I could not help but feel it would have been nice if they game told me how to do it, rather than me having to figure it out. I like having to figure out strategies and such for myself, it’s part of the fun, but I do not like when it comes to convenience I like to know the basics early on. iirc, the on-screen tips were sufficient in most regards, but left out a few important details that would seriously help newer players.

Of course not every MMO will be entirely polished upon release. But:

“No game should ever ship with game-breaking bugs”

There really is no excuse for that. And don’t get me wrong, I love GW2, and I enjoy it very much. But the state in which the game shipped was pretty bad. It had several progression blockers in various parts of the story, tons of dynamic quests didn’t work at all, almost all traits were not working as intended in one way or another, guilds were not working on release (a pretty big blunder in a game called Guild Wars), and several really big problems regarding the game’s core game play persist to this day. I think they clearly shipped this game in an unfinished state.

Kaaboose.3897:

Number 10: Poor Advertising – 1:01 (not very importent to me at all couldnt care of the advertisement was bull.)
Number 9: World Vs. World – 2:54 (Yes i would love have a beter rotating system in WvWvW. if you at the top you always battle the same servers = boring = move servers)
Number 8: Loot and Magic Find – 5:27 (loot could use some improvement. expecially from dungeons)
Number 7: Personal Story – 8:22 (Good idea having the personal story effect your world your running in.)
Number 6: Dungeons – 13:48 (i think they made a great leap in the last patch. for me this is the way dungeons should be. but there is always room for improvement.)
Number 5: Guesting and Realms – 17:45 (yes would love to goto my friends in US and EU servers like in GW1)
Number 4: Events – 21:49 (they could use a tuneup. make it a little harder then stand in one position and kill it.)
Number 3: No LFG Tool – 26:52 (hmmm not really nessesary if you have friends. but i can see it can help a little to get quicker groups.)
Number 2: User Friendlyness: – 28:24 (i only miss the ingame support. like a ingame GM or something)
Number 1: Polish and Optimization – 30:47 (Yes a little more cleaner but imo they are getting there. compare to SWTOR they are way beter. i use SWTOR because the releasedate are about the same. WoW had like 10 years to polish. and GW2 about 1. not really fair is it?

I would like to the wishlist Housing on the PVE maps. buy pieces with gold or gems. Plus upgrades Guards. make this a piece of the dynamic world.

[quote=1935061;Drakonhammer.2148:]

Drakonhammer.2148:

SNIP.

I understand where you’re coming from Drakon but, as I stated before, I’m terrible with in game economy so i really can’t get behind something like this as I only have the vaugest inklink of knowledge reguarding these things.
Another reason i think GW2 makes it hard to make cash from the TP is they need a very tight grip on the GW2 economy to maintain the gems vs gold ratio.
That’s about all I can add I’m afraid. I have to sit on the fence with this one because I feel I just don’t know which option is better overall or how to percieve what consiquences may arise from eitehr system.
A few more tips for new players would also be helpful too.

if i remember right in gw1 early years (1st) u were given like 3 turns to switch between eu and us and the only way to meet both were international. But as the population dropped they did remove it so hopefully we can see something similar take place maybe wind down some servers and merge it.

(easier said than done) there is always hope

1. - a balance team larger than 2 people.

The Betrayer.4893:

if i remember right in gw1 early years (1st) u were given like 3 turns to switch between eu and us and the only way to meet both were international. But as the population dropped they did remove it so hopefully we can see something similar take place maybe wind down some servers and merge it.

(easier said than done) there is always hope

Ineed, And seeing as it’s not too disimilar from the current overflow system I’m confident it’s not too far fetched a suggestion.

You do not think that Guild Wars 2 is as buggy and flawed as WOW at release. I’ll say it.

List the top 10 biggest bugs and Guild Wars 2 release and put your money where your mouth is.

Ralathar.7236:

You do not think that Guild Wars 2 is as buggy and flawed as WOW at release. I’ll say it.

List the top 10 biggest bugs and Guild Wars 2 release and put your money where your mouth is.

Hmm, let’s see.
1. Trading Post Woes – No trading post on release coupled with no player to player trade system, TP when releases was buggy, Gem store transactions could take weeks to go through with no indication the order had been processes.

2. Overflows seperating players, friends and guilds from one another (The “Join Player” Option was bugged.)

3. Right click targeting and other funtions not being able to be rebound. (Still an issue)

4. Personal Story bugs preventing progression. PS also refering to events the player had not done ie. Thanks for saving the skrit when you saved the quaggans etc. (Still an issue for some PS combinations.)

5. Getting stuck in the tutorial area and not being able to progress.

6. Bugged Events, Skill Points, Dynamic events (there’s still a few of these but it’s a HUGE improvement compared to release.)

7. Game crashes and infite loading screens

8. Scaling issues on events (STILL a problem but you should have seen the Fire Elemental on release)

9. Skills, Talents, Tooltips and Traits not working as described/intended. (Still an issue, but improved)

10. Various game exploits. Often resulting in player bans (Though they probably deserved it)

I’ve done my best to make the points as wide and inclusive as possible. It would be quite easy to make this MUCH longer if I went over the bugs point by point.

1. Trading Post Woes – No trading post on release coupled with no player to player trade system, TP when releases was buggy, Gem store transactions could take weeks to go through with no indication the order had been processes.
This is true. not gonna argue about this.

2. Overflows seperating players, friends and guilds from one another (The “Join Player” Option was bugged.)
Yes i remember this very well. kinda awefull but fixed.

3. Right click targeting and other funtions not being able to be rebound. (Still an issue)
Not sure what you mean by this.. but very well…

4. Personal Story bugs preventing progression. PS also refering to events the player had not done ie. Thanks for saving the skrit when you saved the quaggans etc. (Still an issue for some PS combinations.)
I was prob lucky anough not to have this issue.

5. Getting stuck in the tutorial area and not being able to progress.
Again i was lucky.

6. Bugged Events, Skill Points, Dynamic events (there’s still a few of these but it’s a HUGE improvement compared to release.)
Yes they were bugged not sure if they are still bugged. got my 100% mapcompletion

7. Game crashes and infite loading screens
Lucky me again.

8. Scaling issues on events (STILL a problem but you should have seen the Fire Elemental on release)
Yes this is correct. Fire Elemental was dreadfull.

9. Skills, Talents, Tooltips and Traits not working as described/intended. (Still an issue, but improved)

not sure.

10. Various game exploits. Often resulting in player bans (Though they probably deserved it)
no comment

I’m fairly new to GW2, only been playing for little over a month but I have noticed a lot of the points you made. I too played WoW, I played it from launch to Cata; I bailed on it right before MOP mainly because the content was gradually getting worse and lvling up in WoW was a drag but GW2 I actually really enjoy lvling.

I feel the AH system is a lot better than WoW’s, there is almost always what you need on there and everything sells pretty quickly and you don’t end up with one person getting a monopoly on an item and charging ridiculous amounts for it. I saw someone comment about being able to sell legendarys, I agree that shouldn’t be sellable; legendarys should require a quest line like Thunderfury did in vanilla.

I haven’t had the mailing problem you mentioned yet but I do hate that you can’t directly trade with someone. And no inspecting gear was a disappointment too, and I haven’t even seen a spot where it tells what class they are, as a new player I haven’t got to the point of recognizing classes by their looks in high lvl gear, I would like to be able to say to myself “Hey they’re same class as me and are geared, I’ll just look at their gear to get an idea of what direction I should go in geming and gear stats.” It would also be nice to just be able to preview someone else’s gear on yourself without them linking every piece.

The diplomacy thing you mentioned about WvW sounds like a good idea but how would they do it? A voting system might generate the problem you mentioned about dialog box popping up you have to close, it would really suck to have something pop up blocking your screen while in a fight. I guess there could be a NPC that is activated once one team gets lets say 70% of the pie chart that gives players the option to join forces with the other team that isn’t doing so well and those players that choose to do so can’t attack the team they allied with and can’t be attacked by those on the allied team.

I haven’t completed my story lines yet so I can’t really give much on this yet but your ideas on it sound interesting and very well thought out. I believe those changes would improve it if they worked out.

The one shot in the dungeons you mentioned I’m by no means a stranger to, in the lvl 60 instance the next to last boss’s second golem would one shot me over and over again, it got to the point where when the boss himself came out that was a resting period where we could pick up our down players and heal up. I believe the boss should be tougher than his/her adds. In that particular instance I believe the golems should be slightly weakened and the actual boss buffed.

The big boss events like the dragons is what made me want to play GW2. I saw a youtube video of a group fighting the ice dragon. The dragon you showed looked awesome but you’re right it should move around and harder to beat.

The lack of lfg was the first issue I noticed and was extremely disappointed. There are no servers that the populace speaks my mother tongue so even asking for a group in /map can be a bit awkward and takes a long time.

As far as bugs go I haven’t seen much at all, I guess I’ve just been lucky so far. The only “bug” I’ve noticed would be in the AH occasionally it will get an error when trying to post a sell but I just count to 10 and try again and it works.

Kaaboose.3897:

Ralathar.7236:

You do not think that Guild Wars 2 is as buggy and flawed as WOW at release. I’ll say it.

List the top 10 biggest bugs and Guild Wars 2 release and put your money where your mouth is.

Hmm, let’s see.

snip

11. Guilds were not working on release.
12. Most traits were not working as intended (still an issue).
13. Guesting not working (still buggy, but at least possible now).
14. Performance problems (still an issue occasionally)
15. Joining groups was buggy (still doesn’t work lots of times, try right clicking someone’s name and joining their party. Half of the time it doesn’t work).
16. A horrible camera system that isn’t fixed to this day.
17. Excessive message blocking (still not fixed).

Across many forums and planes of the internet I have read basically the same thing from most people.
Fix the issues first before adding more quaggan back pack gem store items.
The right click targeting is a fundamental issue of gameplay but is still not even addressed to the userbase at all!!
The lack of polish after 8 months is absolutely astounding and if I was in their company, I could guarantee that heads would roll.

Stormcrow.7513:

Across many forums and planes of the internet I have read basically the same thing from most people.
Fix the issues first before adding more quaggan back pack gem store items.
The right click targeting is a fundamental issue of gameplay but is still not even addressed to the userbase at all!!
The lack of polish after 8 months is absolutely astounding and if I was in their company, I could guarantee that heads would roll.

They are steadily making progress, And unfortunatly thoese backpacks and such help pay the wages to get these things fixed. I do know EXACTLY how you feel though and I share your frustrations. That right click issue (And not being able to rebind all functions) drives me up the wall and it should be such a simple fix.

Kaaboose.3897:

Number 5: Guesting and Realms – 17:45

I really liked that idea.

Vaffelman.6954:

Kaaboose.3897:

Number 5: Guesting and Realms – 17:45

I really liked that idea.

I’m a big fan of it too! Maybe I should make a video specific to it and throw up a suggestions post to it here.

Great video! Anet should watch it. +1 for the overflow idea.

Even though I really love this game, I have to agree with you.

Kaaboose.3897:

NornBearPig.9814:

Number 5: Guesting and Realms
Because dynamic events have a persisting effect on the world (ok they really don’t, but they’re supposed to), each overflow will have their own different little world. Every time the player re-enters the zone and gets put into another overflow, everything is different, the village he saved against the centaurs in the previous overflow is burned down, etc.

Because most events reset to fast I didn’t even consider that an issue. And for the larger ones that are (like the world bosses or statues) the algorithm could put you in a server that had compelted them. I breifly mention this at 20:52.

I think the bigger events should be linked to smaller events and those events to the quests you do around the area. Based on stuff you do and whether you succeed or fail, those events should transcend to medium ones or bosses in area which then the bigger bosses say, “well, I guess I have to do it myself” and then they appear rather than on timers. I hate timers. I really do. They kill everything. Why can’t there be other mechanics trigger various things other than stupid timers. If anything timers should only be used as a minimum so a boss can’t spawn too quickly back to back from multiple quests being done over and over to spawn something. I’m not sure how it would fix the current content but it would definitely benefit future content. Also if someone is alone in zone, huge bosses would’t block them from doing quests to get to those points. A level of gear and certain variety should be on easy stuff, medium increases the loot a tad and hardcore bosses spawned should give even better unlike how it is now. Plus, working towards a huge event would make your guild wanna work together or server to help spawn the tyrant again. I think there NEEDS to be consequences if you fail also. And all game open world events seriously need a challenge. The challenges in the game make me faceroll to often.

Kaaboose.3897:

NornBearPig.9814:

Number 4, 6, 10
These things are limited by available resources and developer time more than anything else. WoW excels in these areas over Anet because Blizzard has these resources to polish their game until it shines.

And even WoW took YEARS to get it right.

This is extremely true. I remember being logged out for server issues often in Vanilla wow. I remember lots of stuff broken and lag. I remember painful wait times in que. The game to me has it’s audience because it was there when it all got started. It made the right turns when it should have and because of subscription, it was able to keep players who didn’t wanna pay for another possible fail game. People to me go back to wow because of the investment already and the fact they got some things really polished up like their dungeon mechanics. Even with crappier graphics, the dungeons play precise and require team effort so they are more fun and challenging.

This game because of it’s easy/casual approach didn’t get me invested in it. And I had no problem stepping away for a bit. I played Aion from start and still playing now and I have a hard time walking away from game cause of the time invested in it because it was rough. The grind, some of the gear was tough to earn. I feel proud about my char. So when 4.0 comes, I’m probably going to be stuck for again some time.

neoplasmax.4286:

Kaaboose.3897:

NornBearPig.9814:

Number 5: Guesting and Realms
Because dynamic events have a persisting effect on the world (ok they really don’t, but they’re supposed to), each overflow will have their own different little world. Every time the player re-enters the zone and gets put into another overflow, everything is different, the village he saved against the centaurs in the previous overflow is burned down, etc.

Because most events reset to fast I didn’t even consider that an issue. And for the larger ones that are (like the world bosses or statues) the algorithm could put you in a server that had compelted them. I breifly mention this at 20:52.

I think the bigger events should be linked to smaller events and those events to the quests you do around the area. Based on stuff you do and whether you succeed or fail, those events should transcend to medium ones or bosses in area which then the bigger bosses say, “well, I guess I have to do it myself” and then they appear rather than on timers. I hate timers. I really do. They kill everything. Why can’t there be other mechanics trigger various things other than stupid timers. If anything timers should only be used as a minimum so a boss can’t spawn too quickly back to back from multiple quests being done over and over to spawn something. I’m not sure how it would fix the current content but it would definitely benefit future content. Also if someone is alone in zone, huge bosses would’t block them from doing quests to get to those points. A level of gear and certain variety should be on easy stuff, medium increases the loot a tad and hardcore bosses spawned should give even better unlike how it is now. Plus, working towards a huge event would make your guild wanna work together or server to help spawn the tyrant again. I think there NEEDS to be consequences if you fail also. And all game open world events seriously need a challenge. The challenges in the game make me faceroll to often.

Kaaboose.3897:

NornBearPig.9814:

Number 4, 6, 10
These things are limited by available resources and developer time more than anything else. WoW excels in these areas over Anet because Blizzard has these resources to polish their game until it shines.

And even WoW took YEARS to get it right.

This is extremely true. I remember being logged out for server issues often in Vanilla wow. I remember lots of stuff broken and lag. I remember painful wait times in que. The game to me has it’s audience because it was there when it all got started. It made the right turns when it should have and because of subscription, it was able to keep players who didn’t wanna pay for another possible fail game. People to me go back to wow because of the investment already and the fact they got some things really polished up like their dungeon mechanics. Even with crappier graphics, the dungeons play precise and require team effort so they are more fun and challenging.

This game because of it’s easy/casual approach didn’t get me invested in it. And I had no problem stepping away for a bit. I played Aion from start and still playing now and I have a hard time walking away from game cause of the time invested in it because it was rough. The grind, some of the gear was tough to earn. I feel proud about my char. So when 4.0 comes, I’m probably going to be stuck for again some time.

I defintly agree with you on getting rid of timers. World bosses should require events like the blathzar chain, or any of the other statues for that matter. I know the timer would still exist (to prevent quick respawns) but having events leading up to the end of a world boss makes much more sense.
Unfortunatly, as long as there exists bosses like the maw, tequattle, claw, shatterer etc. that have next to no pre events and give the same rewards as the ones that do most people are going to stick to the easy money. That’s the risk vs. reward thing all over again.

Loved the video and only disagree with the order of the problems (Dungeons are no.2 for me).

KingMos.5479:

Loved the video and only disagree with the order of the problems (Dungeons are no.2 for me).

I have no problem with that whatsoever. They’re no higher becuase they are “optional Content” the same way PS was. If it was up to me PS would be number 2, but I felt it fairaer overall to list it lower since it’s optional content.

What this game needs is more Guild Wars 1 and less World of Warcraft. I really wish you wow players would go back to wow and help the developers mess up that game even more.

10. What advertising?

9. Player vs Player is such a small part why even bother sinking more money into it and player vs player as advertising stinks since you are trying to sale items to a hardcore group that already have it.

8. Loot is fine, you are not supposed to handed everything.

7. Personal store seems ok maybe tweak the difficulty of some missions (some you are way too easy and some are way too hard).

6. Unless they develop a way players can run dungeons solo and not be bothered by other players don’t bother with tweaking existing dungeons.

5. Only one person I play GW2 with and I don’t want to be bothered with the rest of the world of warcraft players. Guesting seems to have been a total waste of resources since only hardcore players use it.

4. Events happen often enough and scale so that I can solo most of them and avoid the group events until Arena Net realize the game is called Guild Wars and not World of Warcraft.

3. Why would I be looking for a group? A group is only going to slow me down.

2. Not being able to trade directly I am fine with since I don’t see anyone standing in Lion’s Arch trying to run an ecto scam.

Kaaboose.3897:

Number 10: Poor Advertising – 1:01
Number 9: World Vs. World – 2:54
Number 8: Loot and Magic Find – 5:27
Number 7: Personal Story – 8:22
Number 6: Dungeons – 13:48
Number 5: Guesting and Realms – 17:45
Number 4: Events – 21:49
Number 3: No LFG Tool – 26:52
Number 2: User Friendlyness: – 28:24
Number 1: Polish and Optimization – 30:47

Kaaboose.3897:

1. Trading Post Woes – No trading post on release coupled with no player to player trade system, TP when releases was buggy, Gem store transactions could take weeks to go through with no indication the order had been processes.

I’ll actually agree with you here that this was unacceptable. While it might not be equivalent to the WOW-fail that happened in that area on release, it is not acceptable for a game released in this day and age. Furthermore it took way too long to resolve.

If gear in this game was as important and hard to come by as it was in WOW Vanilla it would have been a game breaking issue. Luckily you could still easily gear out and gear is not as critical as in WOW-styled games. So this was just an extreme annoyance.

Judged by comparison to WOW vanilla you’d be half right with this point. However I’ll call it completely right as again this should not happen in a current day game.

2. Overflows seperating players, friends and guilds from one another (The “Join Player” Option was bugged.)

This was annoying for sure and the work-around obtuse. Much like the first point I’ll give you full credit even though WOW vanilla had worse failings. WOW vanilla your friend wasn’t even in game, he was waiting in cue. Guild Wars 2 both of you were in game and had to jump through a couple hoops if you got separated.

I’m uncertain of how much to dock for this however as it would have been difficult to break this alot during beta tests with partial population.

3. Right click targeting and other funtions not being able to be rebound. (Still an issue)

While I agree this should be an option, more options is better, I’m not sure that this is anything more than a small QOL issue. Certainly nothing that would have even registered on the scale of problems back in the old WOW Vanilla days.

4. Personal Story bugs preventing progression. PS also refering to events the player had not done ie. Thanks for saving the skrit when you saved the quaggans etc. (Still an issue for some PS combinations.)

Yup, there were some bugs with personal story quests that got fixed pretty quickly. Now the best you refer to is typographical mistakes. Not quite up there with the empty zones, complete lack of quests, AND broken quests of vanilla WOW, but minorly annoying nonetheless.

5. Getting stuck in the tutorial area and not being able to progress.

After researching this apparently it was a party related issue and was solved by quick google searches or threads already created by people. Leave party or restart. Certainly annoying, but easily remedied as well by anyone willing to put in more effort than complaining about it. Heck, even getting frustrated and logging would fix it if someone wasn’t wise enough to try and troubleshoot.

6. Bugged Events, Skill Points, Dynamic events (there’s still a few of these but it’s a HUGE improvement compared to release.)

Totally agreed, this one of the few bugs that actually had any sort of real impact, just like the trader. While not game-breaking and not required by any means these were extremely annoying.

Considering that they kept re-breaking after they were fixed, and I do have some amateur programming knowledge, I can’t be too hard on them from a programming perspective. They spent alot of time trying to fix it and the bug was something more elusive than normal. It happens.

It would be more annoying from the lay gamers perspective by far I’d imagine though.

7. Game crashes and infite loading screens

]

I’ve crashed perhaps a half dozen times in over 1,100 hours. Had an infinite loading screen once. They were always 1 time affairs with no common denominators that I could see.

Not only is this pretty reliable, and moreso than the internet I actually pay for monthly, considering that it is an intermittent failure that only happens extremely rarely it would be one of the highest difficulty bugs to squash. Intermittent failure is a dirty word in the IT world because the failure can take years to fix in some cases. You just don’t get hardly any information to work with.

8. Scaling issues on events (STILL a problem but you should have seen the Fire Elemental on release)

People complain about the scaling not going high enough these days because it was nerfed down for them. But in reality people don’t want very high scaling. It’s difficult to give this proper credence with the vocal population having so much of a hand in it.

If it actually becomes a challenge people gripe until its nerfed. If it gets nerfed into being easy, then the other half of people complain it’s too easy. OR you get level 80’s camping a level 17 world boss wondering why it’s easy.

9. Skills, Talents, Tooltips and Traits not working as described/intended. (Still an issue, but improved)

Ongoing battle. I don’t personally understand why this is so hard for games, but I haven’t seen a game that isn’t constantly plagued with this. This includes WOW, which had these issues at release continues to have these issues today.

My only conjecture is that companies back-burner this easy, but time consuming, job to fix more important things first and that there are always more important things.

10. Various game exploits. Often resulting in player bans (Though they probably deserved it)

Unless the exploit is incredibly easy and obvious I do not blame games for this at all. This is a player issue. We should not have to lock the players up in cages to keep them from spinning around 3 times, jumping twice, hitting a key combo, and then doing a back-flip to sneak into a keep.

The amount of effort players spend to find exploits simply cannot be countered as players as a whole have 500,000 more time and resources to find these exploits than the developers.

Even simple oversights like turning karma into large amounts of money is not something I blame developers for. You quite simply cannot think of everything.

I’ve done my best to make the points as wide and inclusive as possible. It would be quite easy to make this MUCH longer if I went over the bugs point by point.

You’ve shown a list of very minor annoyances with a few large annoyances. Certainly nothing game-breaking and not even close to the level of broken WOW released in a long time ago.

Outside of Broken dynamic event chains, overflow silliness, and the Trader issues quite honestly it just feels like you are nitpicking. I’ve seen no game released to date where I you could not easily make a list of this level of nitpicking magnitude.

Ralathar.7236:

You’ve shown a list of very minor annoyances with a few large annoyances. Certainly nothing game-breaking and not even close to the level of broken WOW released in a long time ago.

Outside of Broken dynamic event chains, overflow silliness, and the Trader issues quite honestly it just feels like you are nitpicking. I’ve seen no game released to date where I you could not easily make a list of this level of nitpicking magnitude.

You asked for a quick 10 points and I gave them. It’s off topic to this post anyway.

If you’re happy with the game in it’s current state that’s fine, however there are many of us that would like to see the problems in this top 10 addressed.

Torguish.4786:

Also funny how you talk about resources and developer time when they add things like 1 time events. Which, in the long term, don’t affect us as much as let’s say… bug fixes, UI additions and other smaller things they could focus on.

They are literally throwing away their resources away.

I like these story events but i’d rather have a polished game with awesome everything rather than a mediocre story which lasts for a couple of months and then forgotten about.

Completely agree. 19 pages of engineering design flaws/bugs need to be addressed long before a temporary dungeon with a reward not everyone would receive imo.

I want to:
~ do burst damage on my engineer comparible to the 1-2 shot abilities of the rifle warrior and the D/D thief.
~ have the zerker capabilities of the thief/ranger the other two classes that are called adventurer/scout classes.
~ heal as well and as often as the elementalist.
~ have kits with refinements that make sense (ie magnetic shield bubble on toolkit rather then medkit/AOE heal on medkit, no more redundant glue globs like what they did to EG…for shame)
~ have the focus shift from dungeons to open world where they are adding at least 10 DE’s and 2 metas per month.
~ be able to loot T6 mats (lodestones, gossamer scraps, rares) in the open world again, where it’s not easier to pass a kidney stone then it is to get a lodestone to drop.

And It’s not too much to ask honestly considering this is how the game ran at launch. I could do all these things the first month cept maybe the 1 shot thing.

there’s either way too many chiefs and not enough indians or someone over there in upper management needs to go on a sabbatical for a few months to a year so we can get this cleared up quickly.

tigirius.9014:

Torguish.4786:

Also funny how you talk about resources and developer time when they add things like 1 time events. Which, in the long term, don’t affect us as much as let’s say… bug fixes, UI additions and other smaller things they could focus on.

They are literally throwing away their resources away.

I like these story events but i’d rather have a polished game with awesome everything rather than a mediocre story which lasts for a couple of months and then forgotten about.

Completely agree. 19 pages of engineering design flaws/bugs need to be addressed long before a temporary dungeon with a reward not everyone would receive imo.

I want to:
~ do burst damage on my engineer comparible to the 1-2 shot abilities of the rifle warrior and the D/D thief.
~ have the zerker capabilities of the thief/ranger the other two classes that are called adventurer/scout classes.
~ heal as well and as often as the elementalist.
~ have kits with refinements that make sense (ie magnetic shield bubble on toolkit rather then medkit/AOE heal on medkit, no more redundant glue globs like what they did to EG…for shame)
~ have the focus shift from dungeons to open world where they are adding at least 10 DE’s and 2 metas per month.
~ be able to loot T6 mats (lodestones, gossamer scraps, rares) in the open world again, where it’s not easier to pass a kidney stone then it is to get a lodestone to drop.

And It’s not too much to ask honestly considering this is how the game ran at launch. I could do all these things the first month cept maybe the 1 shot thing.

there’s either way too many chiefs and not enough indians or someone over there in upper management needs to go on a sabbatical for a few months to a year so we can get this cleared up quickly.

I’m not sure all classes should be able to do everything as well as every other class (I prefer each class to have a little identity) but some reworking and balancing would certinly be nice. It’s hard to justify that boon duration increase tree on necros when they have very few boons that can take advantage of it.
But hey that’s just my opnion on that, yours is just as relevent.
If they were going to add some more DE’s to the open world I WISH, dear god how I wish, they would do this though the PS we mentioned 7, two birds with one stone.

+1 to a FoV slider.

This was a great video and made me chuckle. While I don’t agree with all of your points they were fair and given obvious thought and for that I commend you, also for making me laugh. One thing I must make note of and at the risk of being called a ANet Fangirl (of which I don’t care if you call me that or not because I do enjoy and support the company and its games), is that seeing where the game was on its inception and where it is now…. is mind-boggling. Yes they still have a ways to go, anyone can see that, but, the fact that it has improved sooo much and has gone way beyond even what I expected is a testament to their dedication to their game. We may not always like what they do, but so long as they keep moving forward I, for one, am sticking around for years to come. Hopefully, with many more memories of “The Day Guild Wars 2 Died,”

plus 1 for number 3.

Let’s see some other suggestions. Most things for guilds. Yes, we have the missions but they’re what? Once a week for maybe 30 min? Right now, unless you’re a wvw guild there’s just not much to hold a guild together. Endgame content again unless you’re wvw or pvp where’s the end game? You either get all your gear instantly or you have to grind endlessly for months on end for your legendary. There’s nothing in between to hold your interest. Which is funny because they said we wouldn’t grind and that’s ALL I’m doing currently. Moreover, they continue to make farming more difficult thus giving me less incentive to play. What bothers me the most is they said that precursor’s were too far out of reach when they were at like 100 g now the really good ones are 500-700 g. How is a new player ever supposed to reach it? There’s no incentive other than praying it drops off a vet guard in wvw – happened to a guildie.
And I’m sorry grinding out CoF 500000 times for the gold is NOT fun. And your stated philosophy is the game should be fun not a chore.