Guild Wars 2

My groups can do the CoF #2 in 10 minutes. I whole heartedly agree with difficulty increase, but I completely hate that diminishing returns on rewards. It’s not what Anet promised its fanbase as his goals to allow players to enjoy the game any way they want. With this you just pulled a Jay Wilson.

I remember a quote from a video that 2 people from Anet discussed “end game” and it being “whatever we want it to be”

sure i have my guild back and some crafted exotic armor/jewelery, but I want the Teir 3 Cultural armor, sure 1390 shards for the orrian set is alot, but hell 119 gold for some rare stated armor that i have to either A spend gold to get gems or real money to put good stats on it either way its ridiculous, to spend now 100 more times the amount of time to get the gold for such a thing. i mean really :/

SO here we have an awesome game, with tons of things to do. Spvp, wvw, dynamic events, hearts, jumping puzzles, exploration, crafting, personal storyline, ect. And poeple say they will quite the game becuase they made a 1 of the 4 paths in 1 of the 8 dungeons harder to bring it up to par, and becuase if you run that 1 path more than 2 times extremly fast you get half xp/gold.
Wow QQ much? Heres an idea… explore some of the other dungeons, explore the others paths. You all sound like little chiildren that are told they can not have 3rds on their desert.
People just want their “I win” button. I play EVE online and thankfully children don’t play that game. There is kittening but theres also the adapt and overcome crowd. SO adapt or quite. I dont care, this game has so much to offer and i’m sorry but nerfing speed running a dungeon will not break suddenly make this game crap.
I here WoW just luanched a new expansion please go try that. I’ll be having a blast here.

GenericName.5046:

SO here we have an awesome game, with tons of things to do. Spvp, wvw, dynamic events, hearts, jumping puzzles, exploration, crafting, personal storyline, ect. And poeple say they will quite the game becuase they made a 1 of the 4 paths in 1 of the 8 dungeons harder to bring it up to par, and becuase if you run that 1 path more than 2 times extremly fast you get half xp/gold.
Wow QQ much? Heres an idea… explore some of the other dungeons, explore the others paths. You all sound like little chiildren that are told they can not have 3rds on their desert.
People just want their “I win” button. I play EVE online and thankfully children don’t play that game. There is kittening but theres also the adapt and overcome crowd. SO adapt or quite. I dont care, this game has so much to offer and i’m sorry but nerfing speed running a dungeon will not break suddenly make this game crap.
I here WoW just luanched a new expansion please go try that. I’ll be having a blast here.

You do that, the rest of us that enjoyed doing the dungeons for various reasons would like to see some changes. Starting with their crappy reward system.

@GenericName.

i have 100%map completion, all paths done, 100% explorer achievements, i do wvw on the side, i have 3 mastered crafting and finished 3 storylines.

I still dislike this CoF patch.

I cant even begin to fathom that the guy who created this dungeon does not realize that the timed event mobs hit from anywhere from 6k-10k in full tough gear stacked. The spawn is insanely fast and the HP pools of these mobs are very high. They have silver rings not the normal reds. If you intended this to be the real fight then I am sorry to say you have lost a huge portion of your dungeon fan base.

I also need to mention just how badly designed the Magg escort AI is. He sits there in the middle of the lava/fire/mobs make it nearly impossible to res or defend. We cleared the whole room, res’d him and he still would not follow us to the end to the magnacite. Sure the speeds runs needed adjusting and I agree that seeing these people with full sets is pretty outrageous.

Currently your dungeon is not rewarding at all. You really need a generic currency that is shared with ALL dungeons so that players can enjoy all the content you provide. You are separating players and guilds and forcing people to pug. I don’t just want to run CoF. I would also enjoy Nightmare, Arah and the others but no one wants to do them. It would take me hours to find a group and I only get 20-30 tokens for two hours of work? 20 hours of work for one piece of cosmetic gear? Did you really think this through.

I love this game. It is a refreshing change to modern mmo’s and I do enjoy the difficultly as an older player. You have to reward people for the hard work they put in if you wish them to stay. Currently as is your explore modes are borderline impossible. I don’t plan to play them anymore until some sort of balance is met. I will try to enjoy the exploited pvp and huge server imbalance as long as I can. I hope it can keep me here because this is a beautiful game and the people I have met along the way are really awesome.

No one enjoyed running COF over and over and over. Plain and simple, anyone saying so is lieing out therekitten

You only chain ran COF for a few reasons:
Gold Per Hour
Tokens for Gear
Massive Exp

Mainly we chain ran it because it did all 3 of those things extremely well.

I’m so tired of hearing people complain about “the grind”. Every single MMO out there has a grind, the difference is… are you required to do X before you do Z?

I ran this dungeon this morning with some of my friends in guild while on skype. We did have some serious issues with the extinguisher run and the kite/kill event, but otherwise, it was fine for us. Pretty much every dungeon I do, I expect to drop about 20 silver in repairs due to the difficulty or needing to adjust tactics after a wipe and new tactic doesn’t pan out. I ran this path once before the buff and once after, all with the same group. It is noticeably harder, but I feel these things should be hard and require a large amount of time having to spend on working out kinks in your own group as well as general strategies posted online and how you execute them. That being said, I’m not one of those OMG I NEED EXOTICS people. I like taking my time and set aside a good portion of time when we decide to run a dungeon in E-mode. Here’s some of the personal observations.

Personally, I feel that adding 100 seconds to the already-tough gate event was probably a poor choice because it does really make us struggle to keep team cohesion even fighting 4 elites and one slip and someone dies, which can cause a pretty nasty chain reaction if we have to run over and rez that person without any breathing room..i.e. the room keeps spawning during the event.

I think there may be something generally off with the fire statistic. I’ve noticed that the AoE ground, whether it’s the things I need to extinguish in CoF, or even just a normal Ember mob’s AoE, to the infamous fire elemental in Metrica, it just wrecks me if I take a tick of it(not killing, but it friggen hurts bad), and it does the same to Magg in this case.

I really appreciate the insight you gave us into your perspective of why you made X change and what you did to it. That being said, I feel that this change was needed as any time people find an easy win to exotics without much work needs investigating. However, I feel that the amount of time spent in dungeons does not yield the reward necessary to make my 2 hours -/+ worth it. The money is miniscule in all dungeons, and the token amount is a tad too high for what you get each run added into the time it takes to formulate a solid strategy to complete it with the least amount of stress from dying over and over.

I think that’s about all I have for now. I would definitely enjoy seeing more perspective on some of the backend things you guys change to attempt to balance out the reward system and why you guys make changes to something you feel is too easy. It can of course be argued, but it gives the second side of the coin so to speak.

well, Robert Hrouda.. I am glad that you are happy with the changes you made to your dungeon. I won’t be visiting it ever again.. but i am glad you’re happy with it. have a good day.

I swear I played a game months ago in a similar vein..

Gear-grinds, gold grinds with similar carrot on a stick approaches. The developers for some god-known reason had a penchant for blasting anything deemed “exploitable” by them (i.e., activities that bypassed EXTREME gearchecks and allowed certain classes or player-types like white-collared night-time gamers and parents to have their share of casual enjoyment) to hello-kitty land.

They also had this little habit of not giving players any warnings, flat-out castrating certain stats like Haste by less than nominal amounts and throwing extreme curveballs such as giving out patch notes 20 minutes before downtimes.

Suffice to say the playerbase, as fervent as it was(mostly due to brand recog), eventually nosedived. That game’s developers were INITIALLY pompous in their assertions and justifications of course, that “they know better”, that their idea of “fun”(as easily bandied about nowadays by the uninitiated) should be universal. That certain things like opening TREASURE chests for TREASURES, or penalizing players for suicide-rushing as a means to efficient speed-running is heretical according to their bible of game design.

Fast forward 6 weeks, playerbase took another nosedive. Sanctimonious dev-kitties panicking. Out came the most melodramatic 2500-word essay in blue-tracker history.

Changes were reversed, and ACTUAL content added, and not unpleasant diversions meant to emulate some pseudo game design theory. Devs pleaded players for chances, and a second look.

But by that time the entirety of my friendslist on that game was either back in Azeroth, or here in Tyria.

I’m seeing the pattern again, really. And I don’t like it at all.

Ghostly.4162:

No one enjoyed running COF over and over and over. Plain and simple, anyone saying so is lieing out therekitten

You only chain ran COF for a few reasons:
Gold Per Hour
Tokens for Gear
Massive Exp

Mainly we chain ran it because it did all 3 of those things extremely well.

I’m so tired of hearing people complain about “the grind”. Every single MMO out there has a grind, the difference is… are you required to do X before you do Z?

There is really nothing to do in this game…

100% completion? WhoopEEEEE!

All the dungeons once? been there done that.

Complete story line? It was ok … End boss was stupidly disappointing.

Jumping puzzles? I can do them with one hand tied behind my back .. and i did! The rewards suck, why would i do it twice?

DEs? they are just quests. I can do daily quests in WoW that are the same thing, yet I actually get an improvement in gear that allows me to do it faster.

WvW? It is awful. Queues or no queues…the whole setup is just plain poorly designed. Its not fun, and having to rely on a hundred other players to accomplish anything is the EXACT nightmare they were moving away from in regards to WoW’s raid system.

This game is flop. More crappy game designers ruining more games. Its a horrible feeling knowing you can do a better job but not being in the position to do so.

I guess i’ll just quit games, because the industry is doomed.

Roger Smithee.4730:

I swear I played a game months ago in a similar vein..

Gear-grinds, gold grinds with similar carrot on a stick approaches. The developers for some god-known reason had a penchant for blasting anything deemed “exploitable” by them (i.e., activities that bypassed EXTREME gearchecks and allowed certain classes or player-types like white-collared night-time gamers and parents to have their share of casual enjoyment) to hello-kitty land.

They also had this little habit of not giving players any warnings, flat-out castrating certain stats like Haste by less than nominal amounts and throwing extreme curveballs such as giving out patch notes 20 minutes before downtimes.

Suffice to say the playerbase, as fervent as it was(mostly due to brand recog), eventually nosedived. That game’s developers were INITIALLY pompous in their assertions and justifications of course, that “they know better”, that their idea of “fun”(as easily bandied about nowadays by the uninitiated) should be universal. That certain things like opening TREASURE chests for TREASURES, or penalizing players for suicide-rushing as a means to efficient speed-running is heretical according to their bible of game design.

Fast forward 6 weeks, playerbase took another nosedive. Sanctimonious dev-kitties panicking. Out came the most melodramatic 2500-word essay in blue-tracker history.

Changes were reversed, and ACTUAL content added, and not unpleasant diversions meant to emulate some pseudo game design theory. Devs pleaded players for chances, and a second look.

But by that time the entirety of my friendslist on that game was either back in Azeroth, or here in Tyria.

I’m seeing the pattern again, really. And I don’t like it at all.

would love to know what game youre talking about so i can read the apology.

would love to know what game youre talking about so i can read the apology.

Oh, it’s a pretty obscure game. You’ve probably never heard of it.

I really do not find anything holding me to play this game any further. Sure there is alot of things to do.? Not really … yes lets explore get achievement points… participate in a pvp system that really depends on how big your zerg is. Dungeons? Get the = in crafting! I guess i can go farm endless hours for a simple skin thats supposed to show hardcore i am.

Thing is you think the dungeon system is challenging and something fresh but it really isnt. You have made the PVE approach to your game mind numbing and frustrating because of the awards it yields.

here is an idea evryone likes to do different things me personally i like to farm dungeons and earn money. there is no other way to make money since everything costs silver ie teleporting, armor repairs that cost around 20s for higher end armor everytime it breaks. i want to do dungeons and make more money than i spend on armor repairs what is the point of you do a dungeon and spend 20s just to run it. cof offers nothing now except spending money leave it the way it was let players actually earn money if thats what they wanna do. where do you earn gold in gw2???? from your actual pocketbook in real life. they have anti farming stuff hmm well what if i want to do events in the area my level is hmm im srry u have done those a cpl times u get nothing here spend more gold. never have i played a game this condescending towards players. DO NOT PATCH THE GAME TO MAKE PEOPLE SPEND REAL LIFE MONEY TO GET GOLD. game geared towards players right maybe geared towards their pocketbooks. fix what you patched or take out armor repair and waypoint fees all together. doesnt matter if you have lots of gold who cares. make the game player friendly and what players want not what some random developer wants. thanks

That random developer is the one that made the dungeon. :P

Just to put how broken this dungeon is into perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsAbj3Xly0&feature=youtu.be
This is not working as intended Mr. Dev. And yet this is what we have in CoF

Danmaro.7453:

Just to put how broken this dungeon is into perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsAbj3Xly0&feature=youtu.be
This is not working as intended Mr. Dev. And yet this is what we have in CoF

That made me and my TS lawl HARD! LoL!

Kikz.5097:

Danmaro.7453:

Just to put how broken this dungeon is into perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsAbj3Xly0&feature=youtu.be
This is not working as intended Mr. Dev. And yet this is what we have in CoF

That made me and my TS lawl HARD! LoL!

While i did giggle at it as well. This is still a VERY serious issue. And i would love some answers from Devs, as to what they plan to do, to keep half of their player base.

Just to summarise for the dev, the respawn time between mobs when you defend Magg needs to be longer, or simply add in a hard mob that is challenging but not impossible to kill and by challenging, not 100k health, that’s just tedious.
I never had fun farming Citadel of Flame explorable and now that I see I have to grind even more, I find myself losing interest. I will however admit, that the cosmetic gear shouldn’t be seen on every single person walking around in Lion’s Arch but I wish the dungeon was really challenging and not necessarily time consuming, that just ruins all the casual gamer’s chances of getting cool armour. I don’t understand why you’re trying to increase the time spent on it as much as possible as this is not a sub-based game, if it’s to make it harder to get the entire set of armour, make the dungeon really really hard but not needing to complete it 80ish times.

ANet.

Listen to me.

• If you didn’t want people doing speed-runs.
• If you wanted people doing more environments. More instances.
• If you wanted this to not be a grind.

Then you should have thought about what you were doing. You should have thought, hmm, possibly lets make a system, where you can only do X once a day, but the rewards for X are much greater. This solves every problem above. Everyone does every instance they can in that day. They get all their instances done and are left with loot that would have had them grinding for a dozen hours in one instance over and over. They start seeing more of the game naturally.

You do not, in the shadows, implement a secret debuff/condition that most people will only notice after the finish an instance. You do not punish the player. This is BAD DESIGN. People will LEAVE THIS GAME in droves as they get to endgame and realize there is nothing really enjoyable anymore. Just a leveled out drip-feed of moderation and meh. We need epic. We need spikes of WOW and WTF DID YOU SEE THAT and OMG THIS LOOT IS AMAZING. This will be Warhammer and Conan all over again and I don’t want that. LEARN from the mistakes AND the accomplishments in past and present MMOs. You dont have to disregard everything that a game like Wow has to teach just because you want to be your own thing. They have a longevity and experience. People still play them in the amount they do for real reasons. I want those special aspects in this game.

This game has the potential to be far better than any MMO in history, but for some reason it is being utterly smothered by a severely wrong mentality in how limitations and reward systems are distributed.

Needs more attention devs

I would like to see a video with commentary on how this dungeon is supposed to be run. Last night was the first time in CoF and I actually had fun. I died a few times, but the benefits of completing the dungeon far out weighed the deaths and subsequent repair costs. I do see how people were just farming the instance and gearing up very quickly. In the end though, it still requires the same amount of carvings to get the gear – you still need to farm the instance to get the gear.

Moreover, no dungeon should require repetitive death. How is that fun?! My group attempted CoF tonight and the farthest we got Magg’s completion was to 91 percent. As a mesmer, the mobs were killing me in two hits. I just don’t understand how it is possible to dps down those mobs before more spawn and the room is quickly out of control. Making dungeons challenging is one thing, but this seems…insane.

Also, I have to say it infuriates me seeing someone in full flame legion gear knowing the only reason they got it was because they got hip to the easy mode runs first.

Finally, instead of patronizing your players saying “…I hope we can all move past this” (which is not the attitude I expected at all from an Arenanet developer), could we get some constructive advice on how to best accomplish a successful run?

Bosses like SE golem 2 are the reasons why people look for easy fast grinds, bosses like the ED infused eiffigy/golem in SE are the reason why and how dungeons should be made.

all the text under here is just my banter about it in a longer format

Just to say its ok to give bosses a instakill move without taunt on explo mode if he has it in a chain of spells he always uses and isnt random, its ok to swarm us with 4 vet mobs and 20 normals that chain cc you thus making stability the only viable move even if most classes dont have a reliable source of it, its ok for deathtraps with really really small animations or the red circles that blend wit the background, wipes are part of dungeons, but whats not ok is having to go trough it 10 times to feel like you got something worth out of it, every dungeon run thats difficulty is based on nintendo hard mechanics should give you a twice as rewarding feeling as the BS you went trough *e.g. AC explo mode, spider/breeder room and the spin2win guy are really nice, hard but fun since you know that if you die, its because you didnt dodge – even if the pull wires of the spin2win should be more visible, hard to notice on highest settings, but the godkittenburrow rooms that are based on how many guardians, how much burst with auto attacks and if your team can dps at exactly this and this time to manipulate the spawn of the next burrow are just bs, also such rooms make condition builds and necromancers cry because structures dont take cond damage thus forcing lich form to get the dps out to destory a burrow.

Robert HroudaContent Designer

Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.
The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer.
I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:
1. You just need 1 person to get to the magmacyte across the magma field. This will cause an invulnerable Magg to run across the entire field through mobs and progress the dungeon. Then this person teleports back.
2. Instead of fighting the enemies in a timed event at he door buster, you just circle strafe them or leash aggro them to “kill the clock” since it was only a 100 second timer on the event.
3. Final Boss encounter isn’t threatening.
So what did I do?
1. I made it so that Magg has to get to the other side of the Magma field and close to the magmacyte – not just a player. Magg not taking aggro from nearby enemies was a big reason for this issue to be resolved. By giving him aggro, and forcing you to escort him to the ending, I fixed what I considered to be a bug/exploit that I introduced through poor planning.
2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them. I also added 1 additional mob to the encounter at the very middle (a bow dude) to account for you now having twice the time to defeat the waves that come in.
3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.

I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.
I hope this helps a bit, but I understand you’re upset. For all it’s worth I’m sorry, and I hope we can move past this.

Hello Robert – Thank you for coming forward in this post but now I am unfortunately going to have to break this down for you from a design aspect again on “What you did wrong; and how things should be handled.”

1 – You claimed you felt this dungeon was to easy, so you buffed it…fantastic.
2 – You wanted it to seem REWARDING to have Flame Legion gear.
3 – You did absolutely no testing on this patch in-house.
4 – You only made guessing judgement calls on the entire update.

Lets break it down:

1 – I don’t mind you fixing bugs and buffing content don’t get me wrong. But before you buff something why not make sure it is do-able “PRE-BUFF” before buffing it even more. The largest reason everyone “Kited” the kite room is because you CAN NOT kill the spawns fast enough with most standard groups. So if you want to implement the “Trinity” into GW2 then by all means put in a Threat mechanic give us tanks and a Cleric class so we can have someone tank the 10+ Mobs that spawn within 10 seconds of the event starting which all hit for 12K+ and have ridiculously high HP pools in a game where you only have 3 cooldowns on LONG timers to burst them down.

2 – You want Flame Legion gear to feel like a REWARD. Well lets see…now you have an impossible 2nd chain, that gives little to know gold in return after the obnoxious amount of repair bills, less than 5% chance for Rare drops and even lower for Exotic drops in chests from bosses, No token increase per completely a 3 times as hard / long instance to manage the fact that it takes 90+ runs to get Flame Legion gear. And a segregated group of players of those who got to 80 within 2 weeks and farmed it and those who will never obtain it in its current form.

How should you of handled this? You bite the bullet and you learn from this…you don’t release instances / content without much PTR/BETA testing so you have it perfectly tuned by release. You should of left Flame Legion as it was let everyone use it as their starting instance to get gear because it was already being used by most people for that. This was your meal ticket to get people involved in Dungeons at an entry level to the game, it was your meal ticket to get people into WvW and playing your core gameplay mechanic, and it was your meal ticket to then release harder content down the road knowing that people now got the jist of the Dungeon raiding runs.

What is now the issue is you have made it so that new 80s have no where to grind gold, no where to grind mats, no where to get dungeon gear easily and efficiently because even at a casual level (99% of the playerbase) no one has a ton of time to run 90+ runs of the same instance. YOU NEED TO REVERT CoF IMMEDIATELY. You have your largest competitor about to release a new expansion and you’ve ALIENATED and peaved off your core audience (Casuals) by this change.

3 – As was stated as an immediate reply, there was absolutely no testing with this change and you can’t even deny there wasn’t. This was a “This sounds harder, click click, coded. That should fix those silly grinders.” change.

I am with the others, please get a group of Developers/Designers together in entry level 70 greens/blues and try to run the Magg event your way of intention which is killing the mobs as you cross the lava pit with Magg and then Try in greens/blues to face tank / kill the Kiting event mobs. Video tape it with Fraps and put it on the GW2 Youtube page if you feel that it is anywhere near doable.

What you are going to find is it is IMPOSSIBLE and proper “MMO” testing environments would of told you this IMMEDIATELY instead you released content in a hot fix on a whim with absolutely no notice / patch notes / or care of the resulting outcome.

Test this in house and tell me it doesn’t need to be re-tuned. And if it stays as is I can guarantee in todays MMO market next Tuesday when a ton of your casual players leave for WoW because of the CM / CoF buffs that the person who will be getting a knock at their cubicle is you as to explain why you did nothing about the issues of your changes.

4 – This should be a lesson for you as well as the GW2 team. You can not hotfix content without notifying people, without testing the changes, and without a proper PTR setting. These are normal procedures in game development. You did like 20 betas pre-release for stress testing…where has that core mentality of perfecting product before releasing it gone within 2 weeks? This is a colossal failure on ANETs part. And this will single-handedly have a dollar for dollar impact on your product.

I am sorry but you should of taken lessons from SWTOR’s disastrous development cycles and not done something that reminds so many freshly aggravated MMOers of the same environment they just got shafted in.

I see everyone complaining and comparing the game to wow/swtor/other games but there’s a fundamental difference you forget:

In other games you have to do the dungeons, if you don’t your progress is blocked. In guild wars 2 you don’t.

And stop complaining about casuals and groups, the game is called “Guild” Wars and not “Alone Casuals” Wars. You don’t even have to pay for a subscription, in wow you pay so if you don’t run it it’s your loss…

I would love nothing more then a video of the dev playing in CoF getting owned by his own bugs and LOL 10k fireball damage timed event. Oh yeah, escort Magg too buddy. Put your money where your mouth is. Dont hate on players because you screwed your own dungeon up that YOU designed. Be man and stop acting like a 4chan troll.

@litz.8690 ahhh so when we don’t pay a sub we can’t complain about content that is let’s just say broken. Put in whit out any thought?

Congrats to Robert for killing his own dungeon!

The mobs hit like a truck and he made them stronger… REALLY!? Magg AI is non-existing, dungeons in general are bugged beyond belief. The game is bugged beyond belief… This is actually depressing.

@ litz

of course you see people complain cuz they freaking paid to play this game and they want their money’s worth, if you don’t want comparing game developers should have made every game the same then… these 2 things are inevitable

then they should have called it “WORLD WARS 2” then ?

we may not have to pay for subscription but we still bought the game.. meaning we paid to play it

So? Learn the mechanics and play it -_- there are groups playing it without dying.
That’s how the dungeons are meant to be played. It’s not a zergfest easy mode. These dungeons, right now, are akin to raids.

ill only reply to the first post as i have no time to read peoples opinions on that, need to farm alot more now..

you forget that level 80 exotic gear is a must have to matter in the game, if its dungeon running or pvp.. you should not run arah if you are not full exotic, it will make things unnesseary hard, with exotic gear your able to enjoy the full dungeon.
it still wont be easy.. but its way more comfortable to do.

same with wvw, people now do have exotics, ull have a hard time in wvw if not in a zerg with exotics, because ull get wiped…

so you finally reached level 80, what you now need is exotic gear..
so you have to start farming it…

now i dont see whats wrong with a 15min cof run.
i can make AC in 30 min, but only get level 60 gear.
i always can farm the first boss only wich gives 5 token in 5min

i saw cof as a starter dungeon, everone who reached 80 wanted to run dungeon like arah, get the best things, but nobody was able to defeat lupicus, noone had exotics.. untill we figured the fastest way to farm our first set (to finally matter in the game) it was cof.. 3-4 days, full set… now we could keep on farming it for the money, or anytime we need some cash..

or just concentrate on all the other stuff to do, dungeons to farm and sets to collect, cuz now we are full exotic and only have to worry about looks.

now let me talk about your “fixxes”:

reduce the reward of story modus?
-sorry but the reward of story modus is salvage or vendor material basicly it already was trash, the rare set that you introduced shortly befor launch do suck, i bet noone ever has spent any token on that, i dont know if you noticed, but they all look the same, now you even reduced the rewards? i mean cmon…. you NEED TO make the player want to play the game, give the boss a great sword, at the end of the fight let the player loot the sword, that kind of stuff, make it rewarding to play the game.. currently we dont see any rewards, thats why we speedrun, to get the real rewards which you put a incredible amount of time needed to farm it anyhow..

it is not right to run a dungeon for 3-4h and only get 20-30 token where you need 1300 for a full armor set.. it is just not rewarding enough

too much other things to do in the game, too much other characters to play… so people will always use the fastest way to get what they want..

sure i see your problem, if people farm 1 set in one week, after 3-4 month they got them all.. but i think its up to you then to introduce more set, more weapons, now you can start make them hard/long to get.

stop trying to stop people from shortcutting, work on ways to keep them busy after they reached the goal of the shortcut.

like i looted exactly 1 moten lodestone while farming 1000 token in cof…
and i need how much? 100 stones? now it will take even longer…. i mean cmon, give me a reward for spending the time playing….

They don’t seriosuly expect people to kill all the mobs do they? They’re saying chain then together, but they also always said that you can run dungeons with the same classes, but to chain mobs together you would need a specifict class… and the spawn on the mobs in that room is too fast for us too kill then, make a video of you killing all of then without running back to spawn… i highly doubt you’ll do it.

For the timed event, the I guess 2 times I happened to see my group attacking the mobs, we could only kill 1 before the next wave spawned if even that, felt completely pointless.
So, stack that per wave, 2 remaining, 4, 6, 8, 10 you’ve got a mess of a room so people are still kiting around, what changed exactly?

how can you complain about farmers when you have to do a run at least 30 times for a simple weapon

Robert : "So we all thought the bomb planting event was challenging, and no one could beat it by killing mobs….

….and we doubled it."

Time to play the metagame by taking off all my armor and chain suiciding in until the event is complete, just like I did through every personal story quest!

No need for repair bills if you don’t wear anything to repair.

I want Robert to post again with a Video of him doing the event “The intended way”.

Until then I am done with GW2. First time since launch i am loading up League of Legends to play on my off hours from work. Your game is now sitting next to SWTOR on my shelf until you figure out that you made a massively bad move with this patch.

Changes are good imo but if u taking it harder why the hell u punish player take half or even more money. Making this way harrder is ok and i understan why u make it hard but make reward better cos after 50 run on difernt dung i got maybe 10 rare item
is this for real? Not even one exotic. In this case pleas tell me where this item drops so I can go there and be sure I got one
Now when this path is so hard ppl dieing more if u go to repair you pay 11silver ( red yellow) and you got 13 silver from reward – this is not rewarding but is punishment.
After pach my guild mate went to TA and after 5-6, 1 memeber from our team got always 26 silver , me 13 ( after secound run ) and one got 13 ( first run!!! ) 3 and 2 after next.
So now I ask WHAT THE HELL??? This is joke ? First time in dung after pach and he got 13 silver secound run and 3 sliver ?

Maybe we shoudnt ern money from dung, maybe we need to go to Orr and do all event there , maybe u need to farm ore and sell on trading post cos from dung u get trash loot and no money.

This suck so hard, thanks but no thanks.

Adding artificial difficulty to an event such as this which is already being completed in counter-intuitive ways only gives elitists a further chance to be elitist (under the guise of being on the side of A-net which will no doubt keep their comments from being moderated).

Everyone who farmed the hell out of it still has their armor, that’s not getting changed. Entry-level gear for max level players just got harder to get for everyone who doesn’t already have it and those who do get to call everyone whiny, childish, bad at video games, etc.

The fact is if I want fake difficulty I can go play Contra or Simon’s Quest or any other number of NES era games, and I won’t get harassed by this pig elitist scum playerbase for doing it.

I’m all for making CoF harder, but how about some testing before just throwing it to live.

Well. Let’s assess the situation.
1. Dungeon difficulty has been “increased”
2. People are saying it is near impossible (I agree, It is difficult for the casual player and dungeon is still filled with bugs/response issues)
3. Dev posts Response.
4. Players respond to Dev Post

and a loop cycle ensues.

“It’s bad!, drop the patch”
“It’s good! keep the patch”

The thing I, and I think a lot of players on the forum, see is that all the Developer (of the CoF dungeon) did was put a big “Sit down, shut up, and play what I made for you”. At least, that’s what I took away from the Post.

Communication and compromise is the key to success. However we are lacking both.
Those that voice their opinion, and rightfully at that, have been silenced. And those who say “Yay, the developers did something right” get to shut an argument down. We argue that “hey, something isn’t right”, and all we get is “silence fool!”

By now, it’s almost 24 hours since the patch. We do not have an official post or response to the huge uproar that happened today. Granted, ANet has their own “priorities”, but losing a lot of players doesn’t seem to be one of them. I personally would like to see just what they were thinking when implementing the dungeon patch. And i don’t mean just the dev who toyed/made the dungeon, I mean the people who tested and responded to this patch before it was released.

Having 1 single post hidden within a large thread which voices ONE dev opinion is not very convincing, In fact i find it highly unprofessional and irresponsible. We expect a proper response along the lines of "Well we did this because _ . However, we are still __ " not "We did this because ___-, Be quiet, and ignore this update"

Nobody likes to hear “I did this, it was easy for you, now i’ll tweak it so only a small percentage of people can finish the dungeon without dying 982 times.”

I have been reading this thread since about half hour after it was posted. I have seen NOTHING on the forum/facebook/wiki about how the devs are going to reason with the players, and i think that is what a lot of people arekitten off about.

There will always be “the easiest dungeon” in any mmo/game but that does not mean it should be “the least impossible dungeon”. I have done all the dungeons (before the patch), and I must say there are more important things to worry about. I like many others have also run CoF over and over for gear/money/tokens and Magg just had too many bugs.

Applying a patch that makes the dungeon more difficult or has a different goal (i.e. Kaboomium lava jumping) without covering the fact that it has bugs and Magg glitches out half the time is unacceptable to a lot of players.

The Dev’s claims of what they implemented, aside from the increase in time and needing all 5 players to cross the lava, are not even close to the truth. The average player does NOT have 15-25k hp. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I’m an 80 guardian with 30,20,10,10 and i only have 11.3k hp when downscaled to 75 (at 80, i have 13k with full exotic set, accesories, runes)

You should realize something is wrong with the logic when you make claims and 90+% of the players say it isn’t true.

I for one have lost interest in CoF since it is frustrating (yes i have run it since the patch) due to the new “updates”. All I do is run around in LA or just hunt a few Risen in Orr.

It has given me an opportunity to level up my other characters but that really isn’t a reason why the patch should be kept.

We would like to see some real evidence of what has been going on vs. what you will do to fix/change it.

In some games, such as League of Legends and a few select MMO’s, they have “Spotlights” where they would show what was coming up and why/how it was implemented.
More than just having “tada! update!”, a heads up would be nice, or rather a group discussion (forum) to say “hey, here’s what’s going on, what do you think of it” and we’d probably take kinder to things like this.

No one likes to be surprised by something that would infuriate them.
If devs are making claims, we expect to see proof/evidence of what you believe to be true rather than just finding out or knowing that it obviously isn’t.

I could go on forever, but I’d rather leave it to other people to fill in

@Cheezycookie
Exactly what I am wondering.

Not telling the players what’s going on is how Arenanet operates. If you get banned, they won’t tell you why. If you need customer support, they won’t tell you how long it is likely to take. If you want in game tooltips that have specific information on what abilities do, too bad. If you want more information on game mechanics and changes, go have fun somewhere else I guess.

I don’t have anything new to add that hasn’t been said but I feel like I need to add my voice to the masses. Magg going through to get the Magmacyte is pretty flawed at the moment. The immobilize from the oozes and not being able to fight them because of the extinguisher is a recipe for failure. Add that to the fact that Magg can’t stay alive for more than 3 seconds means this part of the quest is the source of a lot of my current frustration with the changes. I agree with the OP that this should have been tested prior to launching on a live server. Maybe the fact that you can’t get another extinguisher to go raise Magg after your party dies would have been found sooner and I would have my gold in repairs back.

PTR testing the kiting event would have been a good idea too. And I call it the kiting event because it’s exactly that. A kiting event. No new player in a pug group is going to be able to put out the dps necessary to actually kill those mobs. Not going to happen. I’m a thief with 20 points into the Toughness tree and I get mauled by the thief mobs for 12k in one hit. One hit. And then there’s the bleed damage. There isn’t any way possible an unorganized pug group in yellow trading post or crafted gear is going to be able to kill all those mobs while avoiding the massive amount of damage they put out. Period.

Actually that’s not true, I got banned arenanet for dropping the F-bomb too many time on someone who said dropping Fbombs get you banned in GW.

So I challenged it, I got banned a couple of days later for 2 days and asked why I was banned, they said I was being profane and I said theres a profanity filter if people dont want to see profanity they can turn it on, but instead of doing what you’re supposed to do and getting rid of the problem of bots we have in Fort Aspenwood you ban people who actually play the PVP so theres more room for bots to get in and ruin the game for other people?

And they replied It’s harder to prove if someone was botting.

They’re nice people they just get their priorities mixed up

This new “fix” for the Citadel of Flames dungeon was honestly completely unnecessary and crappy, instead of making the second to last boss so artificially difficult you could of done something else entirely, I am not so sure if Robert is right to handle this real problem of speed dungeoneering. It feels like you didn’t even wait or test out your product before you fixed it. They could increase map completion awards for higher levels if they want us to explore, do dynamic events/ heart quests instead of farming dungeons. Claiming that people were “exploiting” by figuring out how to systematically do a dungeon without sloppily completing it with broken and mangled armor is hypocritical ( I do agree dungeons needed a fix, but not this), when anyone is allowed to exploit under your terms " gems for gold," which could potentially hurt the economy in addition to speed dungeoneering .

I agree that CM needed changes , and badly, but instead of nerfing it (and other dungeons) to impossible levels you could of just nerfed the amount of xp/ silver you would receive at the end. The room before the boss was the laziest change to ever fix a real problem, it is not making this game more interesting, fun, or revolutionary, like you think Robert. Instead it is making a rather annoying instance in a potentially fun and rewarding dungeon impossible.

When somebody can buy $2000 worth of gems and level their toon to 80 and not be called out on an exploit is very hypocritical and terrible for the economy as well, possibly more so than a couple of people exploiting some dungeons. I fear to find a way to kill a boss the most efficient way or I would be called out for an exploit.

Your assumptions on that people can defeat the spawning elites and have way more intriguing battles in CoF is wrong, with all of the knock backs and just the number of elites makes that total instance impossible and total garbage. If you are concerned about the money people are making you could just soul bound some of the drops so that people didn’t just exploit the hell out of a dungeon.

These changes made this game ( which was very enjoyable and fun) garbage because of the delusions of the people creating these “fixes” believing that it would make this game more " intriguing and interesting battles" when in reality people are just breaking their armor and continuously being knocked back into the ground and ripped to shreds by elite mobs leaving them to return to way point and repair for 4 silver because of artificial difficulty. I sincerely do adore this game, but with these changes it has made me very worried that the only way to make gold in endgame would be paying arena net for gems. I think when you are at least level 80 you should be able to make some gold off dungeons though, it honestly should be obligatory source of money.

Im so baffled as to how this much hate for this patch has not caused ANET to get behind their playerbase and rollback the patch.

This shows that they really could careless if any of us are going to continue to play their game after next week.

Crucible

Im so baffled as to how this much hate for this patch has not caused ANET to get behind their playerbase and rollback the patch.
This shows that they really could careless if any of us are going to continue to play their game after next week.

Maybe they deleted the old patch and can’t reroll lol XD

This is completely true. I especially agree with the 5 run a day lockout. 5 runs a day will be a perfect amount, enough for 80s to get the gold they need for WvW guild taxes and a little on the side for whatever they may wanna buy from the TP, also 5 runs also help accomplish what you guys want, players earning less gold. I must say ive ran CoF for 5+ hours before, you do that math for 16 and under minutes a run. This way all players move a good pace together.

You truly need to listen to all these points posted above. I will sign up for your PTR day of release to help test.