Guild Wars 2

Mimizu.7340:

Fasalina.6571:

Knotty.1750:

Fasalina.6571:

Stop beating around the bush.
The items were op, and they were not meant to be spammed in combat like that.
The faster people admit it the faster you’ll move along.

I got zero problem with Anet saying so & making a change. Spouting bs to a paying customer is a different story. The faster they admit it the faster everybody will move along.

If people would stop kittening about every single good change they make because they had to nerf something in the process then I would expect ANet to treat us players with better respect.
The thing is you (and by you I mean a lot of people on the forums) as a paying customer (a kittenty one for that matter) for some reason expect to be able to trash talk the devs every time you (again, by you I mean a lot of players) don’t like something. Honestly if I were them I’d file out bans in bulks. Remember it’s a mmo and you are paying for their services, you don’t own anything in this game, and they can choose to terminate their services at any time.

I have never done “Teq”, PvP, WvW, or any Dungeon in this game.

I just like to meander through open-world-pve and level up my nine characters slowly.

I use the consumables to aid my solo play but only where they fit in with the character i am currently playing.

My elementalist specialises in fire magic summoning and i like to use both fire elementals all the time, having a third through the use of a consumable was like christmas for me ( i have a fire imp mini and they share the same animations, all 4 flying summoned fire creatures flapping flames around her).

Why is my casual play nerfed because of something happening somewhere else?

How is this a “good change” for me?

MMO, mass multiplayer online. If you want everything to resolve around yourself, please go play a singleplayer game. They can’t fix a game keeping in mind every single player’s needs.
Lemme put it in other words. Other people used the consumable to make certain parts of the game trivial (and maybe there are performance issues aswell, due to bad coding ofc). The only way to quickly fix it was to slap that timer on them.

Extra short answer:

Deal with it.

Fasalina.6571:

Mimizu.7340:

Fasalina.6571:

Knotty.1750:

Fasalina.6571:

Stop beating around the bush.
The items were op, and they were not meant to be spammed in combat like that.
The faster people admit it the faster you’ll move along.

I got zero problem with Anet saying so & making a change. Spouting bs to a paying customer is a different story. The faster they admit it the faster everybody will move along.

If people would stop kittening about every single good change they make because they had to nerf something in the process then I would expect ANet to treat us players with better respect.
The thing is you (and by you I mean a lot of people on the forums) as a paying customer (a kittenty one for that matter) for some reason expect to be able to trash talk the devs every time you (again, by you I mean a lot of players) don’t like something. Honestly if I were them I’d file out bans in bulks. Remember it’s a mmo and you are paying for their services, you don’t own anything in this game, and they can choose to terminate their services at any time.

I have never done “Teq”, PvP, WvW, or any Dungeon in this game.

I just like to meander through open-world-pve and level up my nine characters slowly.

I use the consumables to aid my solo play but only where they fit in with the character i am currently playing.

My elementalist specialises in fire magic summoning and i like to use both fire elementals all the time, having a third through the use of a consumable was like christmas for me ( i have a fire imp mini and they share the same animations, all 4 flying summoned fire creatures flapping flames around her).

Why is my casual play nerfed because of something happening somewhere else?

How is this a “good change” for me?

MMO, mass multiplayer online. If you want everything to resolve around yourself, please go play a singleplayer game. They can’t fix a game keeping in mind every single player’s needs.

No need to state the obvious, i think i know that already.

I asked how you thought this was a “good change”?

i shall also edit some extra into this post:

your tone is overly dismissive and confrontational, this isnt a battle.

there are several other ways to have altered these items, the worst way was chosen.

they could simply be culled via the graphics settings and made unable to be summoned on certain maps and instances.

this is just a clunky quickfix that has done more harm than good.

There had to have been a better way to handle the performance issue. Adding a 30 minute timer to these items takes away a lot of the fun factor of using them. I know some folks will say this is a Smiter’s Boon type of thing, but I’ll give the team the benefit of the doubt and say this was a quick fix to handle a performance issue. Hopefully after more time is given to develop a better solution, this 30 minute timer will go away.

I’m more curious to know if this change will affect Tequatl completion rates. In each and every Tequatl kill I’ve been in, the OF relied heavily on spamming of Embers during the burn phases to deal massive amounts of damage to Tequatl, possibly pushing him right from one defense phase to the next. Players might now stagger their Ember usage to compensate, but that’s going to require a lot more coordination than before.

The performance issue was just an excuse to cover up the fact that people were spamming them at Tequatl fights. Why not just make the fire embers unavailable in that certain area.

if you wanted to nerf the pets just say so. Dont give us an excuse which only happens for 15mins each hour.

As for the charzooka i really hope it is fixed because i think its a bug. If it isnt whos genius idea was to nerf it?! It was more of a novelty item any ways to run around firing rockets in every direction but not really doing serious damage compare to our main hand weps.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

Could you explain this sentence?

BillFreist.1527:

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

Then a necro with a lot of summons is preventing 5-6 players to join that map if it’s full?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

Everything we think is clever use of game mechanics (use of teleport guns and spy kits in fractals, embers in boss fights) is being marked as bugs and nerfed to smithereens. Where’s the fun in that? “Play the game the way YOU like” was what sold this game to many people in the first place. Why don’t you just admit that you only want us to kill content the way you intended when designing it, that you don’t like creativity or surprises?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

Doubling/tripling the amount of players in a map? So you’re telling me everyone was using this on every map? The only place I saw this happening was at Tequatl. And the cooldown won’t prevent people from summoning these pets at the same time anyway, which was causing the performance issues, right?

Also, why exactly 30 minutes? Why not 10 or 15?

I’m also curious what your stance is on Minion Master Necromancers, since the server strain is 5 times as much because of them. What would you guys do if people started doing Minion Master Tequatl runs?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

Uhh….wat?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

I can understand why for open world but would it be possible to have it the old way in instances like personal story, dunegons, and fractals?

I, as for a few times, definitely agree with the PoV.
Though it was not only for performance issue, you guys can’t contest the fact that it’s heavy for the server. I would not say triple since I think it’s overexxagerating it but doubling the amount of players yeah definitely it does not help the server.
Furthermore, the fire eles are the huhe problem since they spam fire fields, so AOEs which is pretty heavy for the server too (its the biggest problem for skill lag in WvW).
Stop complaining guys and be glad it was not just removed from the game or something like that.
I do agree the CD is a bit long but meh, better than nothing.

I didn’t know that an entire item in the game could be a bug. As though someone just, didn’t know that the code was written? What?

And then who knows what we will learn next?

“Guys, dungeons are blatantly a bug. Oh well, actually PvE as a whole is a bug.”

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

Are you drunk ?? You implemented them !

I was one of those people who RP’d around with Embers, but there’s no point to doing so anymore—you can’t command them so in open world they WILL aggro something and they will die and waiting 30m to summon another one is ridiculous. Whole aspect of my RP character removed—thanks Anet!

You should have removed them from the game, and given us something to compensate. Disable their function entirely and double their resale price to the vendor so we can dump them. People buy full stacks of these things and making them useless with no warning is… pretty rude.

30m resummon timer feels like you just wanted to be able to say “be glad we didn’t remove them completely”. But you did. You ought to have the decency to do it right.

As for the whole “these items were a bug” thing, that sentence doesn’t even really make sense to me. They didn’t pose any problem until people were using them for Tequatl. You could have put a limit on how many Embers can be out in a given area or something.. you have the code, there is such a thing as siege cap in WvW, you could have made an item summon cap.

But whatever. I’m a ranger, I’m used to baffling disappointments from this game

Anyway… With the ember “bug” off the table, at least the debug team has time to move on to actual item bugs. Like, Ghastly Longbow being bugged since game release. I can totally see how that one ended up lower on the priority list than this “bug” noone ever knew it was a bug.

What will we learn next? All the food is actually a huge bug! It was only meant to take up your space in inventory and take your money! :O

Lol…omw that response xD

Why were consumables even put in to the game in the first place if you were just going to make them all completely useless anyway?

Your logic is flawed. Period.

Well kitten that’s a bad way of putting the statement.

I think what he means is that the implementation of the items are bugs, because they effectively add much more NPC calculations than usual to the server, and it’s given that while the summons do act simple, there’s pathfinding and behavior to factor in. Coupled with the fact that the game is object heavy (what with all the fields, projectiles, hit-scans, and physics to track), and that instances are particularly run in similar server spaces with worlds, the decision to limit NPC summoning might be a band-aid fix to server lag.

Elrey.5472:

BillFreist.1527:

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

Then a necro with a lot of summons is preventing 5-6 players to join that map if it’s full?

I think that’s a very serious question, especially for this event that has two world bosses as main focus.

Do necro summoned minions count toward max players in zone or are they spawned on top and counted separately?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

In all respect, I think you need to google what that term means.

BillFreist.1527:

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

Sorry, but no. These are not players with 10+ skills syncing with the server, those are mobs with mob AI which sync at most the player’s position and the player’s target and act just the same as spawned ads in all the other regards.

Confirmed, karma quest rewards a bug. People abusing karma reward bugs to be permabanned.

To be honest they were overpowered and needed nerfed. And they were also a performance hog. Just wish patch notes wouldn’t treat us like idiots.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.
-Bill

Was this wording a bug?….Definitely gonna have to call you out on this as it is 100% an impossibility that the coding required for these to exist was a bug.

Simply put that statement is a lie or at the very least extreme poor word choice.

I’m also wondering if any consumable is safe now. If they are blatantly bugs, are we exploiting the game by using them?

Are we at risk of perma ban for using seed turrets, the healing trees, etc?

How about the golem missile thing you can get in Metrica? That’s a key component of my own RP. I’m so confused.

I’ll be honest in my approach towards consumables:

The devs said that explorable dungeons were meant to be much more coordinated than story modes, for the experienced, coordinated player. (Whether this was actually ever the case in reality) I was under the impression that such coordinated play would include finding consumables in the vast open world to assist you in your dungeoneering, much like any single player RPG; you find your way into a new, difficult part of the game and go, “Oh! That NPC I encountered here sold that item I thought was useless, but no! I should go back and get some, surely they will help with [X obstacle]”; and such was my impression for things like Spiky Fruit, Healing Seeds, Boulders, Embers, and Torches existing.

Yet, all of these had been nerfed (or almost all…), but only in dungeons (that seemed strange given my personal philosophy above, subjective as it is).

And here we are, at another crossroad with a fairly useful dungeoneering item being heavy-handedly taken away, but it was not even due to misuse in dungeons (using it to take aggro away from yourself, multiplying Feedback damage via extra targets). No, it was taken away because of “server performance,” and just a dozen posts above me, their inclusion in the game at all: LABELED A BUG?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

That’s it, that is the most rich thing I have seen by a development team, and that includes Jay Wilson (the old leader of the Diablo 3 team) condescending the Diablo 2 team with the statement, “**** those losers!” because he didn’t actually like Diablo 2 at all.

Bravo ANet, we see where your sights are.

What about spirit rangers, minion masters and even spirit weapons guardians in pvp? Are there any plans to increase cooldowns to 30 minutes of the skills that allow those builds to exist? Hypothetically, instead of 10 players participating in battle of khylo, there could be even 70 entities, that’s seven times more, not just two.

I’m sad that those consumables got nerfed, it was so fun to run around with then. Sometimes i was lucky to get a bear from the ogre whistle, so i could run around in dungeons with my warrior and a bow saying that i was a “bearbow warrior”, and asking then to not kick me XD

Fasalina.6571:

Lemme put it in other words. Other people used the consumable to make certain parts of the game trivial

Clearly you’re wrong, I’m sure the guy you were an arrogant kitten to will accept your apology …

BillFreist.1527:

The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period.

BillFreist.1527:

The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period.

Get better servers? Improve your algorithms?

BillFreist.1527:

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

Yet ranger and minion master exists. Maybe we finally have a reason why they are so bad: having too much of them would impact the performance ? On the other side, you have no problem throwing 200 more mobs and their AoE on us for the new events.

TL;DR: performance is not the real/only reason.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.
-Bill

Care to elaborate on this sentence?

What’s next? “The fact that critical damage on items ever existed is a bug.” “The fact that magic find was ever on items was a blatant bug.” “The fact that you could weapon swap at all was blatantly a bug.”

What did I just read…

I think Mr. Freist is saying that the summon items are not being used as they were intended by the developers. And yes, there are a tremendous drain on resources especially when you have a large guild group of about 100 doing world events and 50-70 players pop an ember. I have to put my graphics on the lowest setting every day for post reset activities.

As far as embers and/or summons being a player, I think he means as far as rendering and resources are concerned from a server administrator point of view.

Anet nerfing ele powder, pet whistles, spy kits, etc, is nothing new. I’ve been a GW player since the day GW1 was released. Anet has consistently swung the nerf bat at anything which made the game “easy” or in some way created a shortcut through content or otherwise made the acquisition of reward easier than the developers intended. Get use to it. If you plan to keep playing GW2 you will see this happen time and time again. Ingenious players will engineer tricks that will evolve into the meta only to be smashed by the devs.

I fully expect them to nerf Fiery Great Sword to require a target before a skill will activate sometime in the near future. Oops! Did I say that out loud?

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

Just a suggestion, since it’s a server performance issue. Keep cooldown lower in instances? Such as fractals or dungeons? Those wouldn’t affect server performance in any way because of instance owners. Would you consider this alternative?

Wookie.4726:

I think Mr. Freist is saying that the summon items are not being used as they were intended by the developers. And yes, there are a tremendous drain on resources especially when you have a large guild group of about 100 doing world events and 50-70 players pop an ember. I have to put my graphics on the lowest setting every day for post reset activities.

As far as embers and/or summons being a player, I think he means as far as rendering and resources are concerned from a server administrator point of view.

Anet nerfing ele powder, pet whistles, spy kits, etc, is nothing new. I’ve been a GW player since the day GW1 was released. Anet has consistently swung the nerf bat at anything which made the game “easy” or in some way created a shortcut through content or otherwise made the acquisition of reward easier than the developers intended. Get use to it. If you plan to keep playing GW2 you will see this happen time and time again. Ingenious players will engineer tricks that will evolve into the meta only to be smashed by the devs.

I fully expect them to nerf Fiery Great Sword to require a target before a skill will activate sometime in the near future. Oops! Did I say that out loud?

While I agree that that’s what he meant, what he said was entirely different.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.
-Bill

That’s… That’s a very clear statement.

Lol that arena net comment was funny, but chill. You’re all like little kids in school jumping up and down with gleeful joy as the teacher makes a grammatical error.

I have no idea what he meant. Perhaps just that it’s an error that they exist in their current form. Who knows and who cares. If you’re can’t see that the change is needed for the game to function better, then you’re either blind or in denial.

Gallows.4318:

Lol that arena net comment was funny, but chill. You’re all like little kids in school jumping up and down with gleeful joy as the teacher makes a grammatical error.

I have no idea what he meant. Perhaps just that it’s an error that they exist in their current form. Who knows and who cares. If you’re can’t see that the change is needed for the game to function better, then you’re either blind or in denial.

It’s not a grammatical error.

The issue with it is that, sure, in situations like Teq, Wurm, Mari, these items harm the performance of the game, but what it’s doing, by Nerfing them so harshly, is making these items useless for everything. Useless. Meaning…. No use. No reason to buy. Not even for RP. Not even for leveling.

Vol.7601:

Mimizu.7340:

Vol.7601:

Godzilla.7629:

The embers may have caused some lag but was the solution really adding a 30min timer?!

Well what other solution could they have provided? They could have reskinned the ember to have less graphical movement, they could have retraited its skills to be less graphical and calculation-intensive…or they could have done the quick and reasonable fix of putting a timer so people wouldn’t spam them.

They could also just add a tickbox to the Graphics Options to cull them, just like we have the ability to do with ranger pets and minions and other players.

This should have had a client-side fix, it’s a performance is (in this case) a client-side issue.

Can we cull specific objects? AFAIK we can only change object quantity and quality. We can’t pick and choose who or what to cull.

Particle Effects Slider. It’s not a new concept. EQ2 had one at launch. One was begged for here in beta. Client side options would have solved this, and a lot of other performance related issues.. client side.

I’m still in awe that they took the Charzooka from a useful and fun item to something that is gimmicky trash without having the decency to list it on their notes.

Charzooka is not a ‘pet’ summoning item.
Change it back, or give us a reason for the change.

btw – Did they change the Flame thrower consumable from Cursed shore too?
Darn, I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Now they’ll be looking at that as well.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

May I suggest you elaborate on how you came to that conclusion? It would also be advisable to include a comparison to Minions Pets Clones/Phantasms/ and other player summoned allies.

Thinks its a bit Meh reply. In that case.
Restric amount of mesmers on map so the amount of active players dont get to high.
Same with rangers and there pets >_<
Also dont forget to put a 30min CD on mini pet spawn as they need to be loaded and rendered by player…

…………………………………….

“We are aware that the utilisation of embers in some areas are causing server side performance issues so we’re going to upgrade our servers to handle what the players throw at us, we didn’t think summons like embers and ogre pets would affect the gameplay like this when we first implemented them, me and the other devs appreciate your ingenuity with these kinds of items and this change was in our wishlist for a long time, because we want you to play the game how YOU want to play it.”
Yes I made this up… sadly I think this kind of posts happens not often enough… on every game I played, it seems like the devs likes to “fix” non bugged aspects of their games leaving the item/skill totally useless.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

Fix Arah with invisible walls, fix servers with consumables nerf, fix condi in pve with zerk nerf, fix TAFU with lolscarlet, fix FotM with nerf of FotM, you sure do know how to make stuff right.

If I ever have a car to fix I go straight to u guys.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug.

The existence of the LS may have been a bug, too.

Duanheim.9527:

Fix Arah with invisible walls, fix servers with consumables nerf, fix condi in pve with zerk nerf, fix TAFU with lolscarlet, fix FotM with nerf of FotM, you sure do know how to make stuff right.

If I ever have a car to fix I go straight to u guys.

You forgot the brand new “Fix COF 1” with a wall.

The hostility here is getting a bit out of hand. Cool down if you want to keep the thread open.

zMajc.4659:

The hostility here is getting out of, coold down people, if you want to keep the thread open.

I agree, but frankly after the dev response things just got worse, because his wording was less than stellar. I’m pretty sure they’ll be editing it when they all wake up, it’s still pretty early there at anet hq.

Well as a game programmer he’s not paid to be nice to people. It wouldn’t hurt to be more polite tho.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Wow!
And here I thought ranger pets were the biggest blatant bugs in the game!

Since there are so many of these pets around, are you going to put these on a 30 min CD as well??

Perhaps this is the ‘big changes’ for rangers the livestream muppets were going on about…