Guild Wars 2

Adding a new tier of gear goes against the design manifesto that convinced me to buy this game. Slowing down the release of new gear with higher stats does not prevent it form being a gear treadmill no matter how much you try to convince yourselves otherwise.

Also, you need to expand your profession balance team or just fire them and hire new ones. Things like completely removing the blast finisher on Evasive Arcana killed the class for most players and made the class far less dynamic for the ones sticking around. Just because something is unintentional doesn’t mean it should be completely removed without considering the balance ramifications. Sometimes unintentional bugs deserve to be reclassified as features.

The new dungeon seems fun, however the enjoyment it would of granted has been greatly diminished by your company turning into a bunch of liars.

However on the positive side, you have saved me a great deal of money, as I will no longer use your gem store. I will continue to play and drain resources from you but you will no longer get any financial benefit from me doing so.

My feedback: read the 10,000 post thread of people pissed off about ascended gear, take it very seriously, and reply to your customers soon and honestly.

The rest of patch was fine, and the lag can be forgiven.

Well guys i dont think tha lag is a major problem, remeber that currently with this event they are running the invitational event… So even if this patch is unpopular, for now we have much population then before in game, and keep in mind that some grinder is returned to grind in the new shiny dungeon. So we cant attack Anet for the event lag, is a series of unfortunate events…

But for the ascendent gear project, is another story.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

The new dungeon seems fun, however the enjoyment it would of granted has been greatly diminished by your company turning into a bunch of liars.

However on the positive side, you have saved me a great deal of money, as I will no longer use your gem store. I will continue to play and drain resources from you but you will no longer get any financial benefit from me doing so.

I also agree with Cactus – even though my feedback on the CONTENT is positive so far despite some technical problems with lag on the live events, I will not spend one more cent in your cash shop for now since you’ve broken your promise of not going the gear grind route. The new dungeon is awesome and should stand on his own without the new more powerful gear.
By hoping to get a couple of people back or joining, you betrayed your loyal customers – and you will pay for it. I gave 80 Euros (beside the initial digital deluxe edition purchase) to the game through the cash shop, that’s 40 Euros per month, more than I ever gave to a 13 Euros ($15) subscription game, because I liked the philosophy and wanted to support your effort to be different. If you go back to the standard gear grind MMO model, you lose my support. Simple. Voting with my wallet. Go back to the initial promises, and I will gladly fuel your game with more of my hard earned money in return.

Ganzo.5079:

Well guys i dont think tha lag is a major problem, remeber that currently with this event they are running the invitational event… So even if this patch is unpopular, for now we have much population then before in game, and keep in mind that some grinder is returned to grind in the new shiny dungeon. So we cant attack Anet for the event lag, is a series of unfortunate events…

But for the ascendent gear project, is another story.

You can’t really say “well it was a bunch of circumstances that were totally beyond anyone’s ability to fathom or predict!” and shrug it off.

ANet chose to make the initial invasion event only happen in one city, which is already the most crowded city for a variety of reasons.

ANet chose to introduce their new gear grind dungeon on the heels of the initial invasion, and to stick it in LA, which was already crowded.

ANet chose to have their invitational weekend on top of their new patch and big invitational event.

ANet chose to do all of these things while apparently making no additional considerations for how much extra strain this would put on their server resources.

It was a perfect storm of lag, but it was one they chose to create.

My patch feedback: Anet is moving further and further away from gw1 which isn’t good.
This patch sucks so far. Unplayable lag buged npcs. The fractal dunegons are desined well and interesting but the whole concept behind it is dumb. I entered it 4 times and din’t finish it once coz of dcs or ppl just quiting it coz they are to dumb to figuer out what to do. And you moved the entire pve end game to this one dunegon, great.
I wouldn’t care so much if the spvp was decent but after 2h of same maps and objectives i just get bored. So yea instead of giving us some dumb gear you should have given us gvg and expand the calsses (similar to gw 1) or something in that direaction.

Feedback:

Betraying their loyal fan base in favor of the mmo content locust. A very unnecessary upgrade in gear tier that bridges no gap whatsover in the first place. For what it’s worth, I wish Anet the best of luck with their changes to gw2. My time spent on gw1 and gw2 was priceless. I hate leaving the game, but I simply do not want to play another gear grind mmo.

I’m not mad about RNG in chests or the difficulty in obtaining keys. I’m not mad about the huge lagstorm that happens every time you decide the only town worthy of an event is Lion’s Arch. I’m not mad that you’ve decided to nerf my class .

I am mad about ascended armor. It goes against everything that made me a loyal GW1 fan and it goes against everything that made me wait for Guild Wars 2 for five years while you guys were saying “when it’s ready.” When it came out, I believed it was ready. Now that I know you guys don’t have any incentive to follow through on your promises, I don’t think it ever should have been ready.

I have tryed the new island… well… its good, kitten good…

THe island is an hard place, but not like orr, its just, BETTER. when i was wandering in orr, ill just pull everything, mob are annoying so its useless avoid them…but in southsun, you have to step carefully, you can pull one mob or two. but with 3 you are Dead. i have to say that i love that island.

and this make this update more sad… because a such good contents, like southsun cove and the fractal one, are ruined by that ascended set and the step on the grindy MMO.

tbh this is not a flame post.

I was not keen on the new island,seems real small.
mobs are a pain but not as bad as orr at least i can move about without 10+ pulling me back and forth.

No quest on the new island as far as i can see,only events.
anyway there are many more places to be unlocked by anet so hopefully they will be better ones.

As for the ascended set i do agree,we should not be forced to do dungeons with random groups just to be on par with armour stats.

Hi,

first, thank you ArenaNet for some new content. Second, the fractal dungeons are really, nice, as well as the new Lvl 80 area. I really like to go somewhere else instead of Orr and the Sound.

Some of the bugs are annoying (like players not being able to reconnect to their group in the fractals or stuck events), but since you are aware of those and surely have someone working on those, I can still wait a little while for the fix there.

But… Please, do not let this new gear grind set in. Let ascended items have the same stats as exotic and legendaries. Just add the anti-agony option, if you have to, but please do not “force” another grind besides the legendary upon us!

The lack of real grind and the many possibilities even with high level chars in low level areas participating in evets there, too, is what made GW2 so different from other MMOs. Therefore, just don’t go down the gear grind road of other MMOs. You were on a very good track and events like Mad King Thorn were really a whole lot more fun than most other MMOs had installed in their seasonal activities. Keep up these good things and don’t worry about item progression. Pressuring people into an item grind won’t help keeping them interested in the long run, new discoveries and new challenges will.

So, have a good time, and sleep over the problem of item progression. I hope you will come to the right conclusion. I myself am already quite anxious about what might await us during the yule time season… :P

So long,
Curu…

Positive:
Idea of the scavanger hunt in LA
Boat to the new zone.
New dungeon (infinite)
New zone (sea of sorrows) scenery looks nice, jump puzzle
Mail hint/location info during event
New SPVP map

Negative:
Vertical progression.
Npc bugs/stuck.
Mass invasion in SE of LA for older hardware/broadcasts.
(rather spawned a few bosses on different spots, then to murder everything)
Npc broadcast infinite, rather make it on delayed interval.

Was fun exploring the new zone and opening it up
(this should be also based on a interval)
Went sour real quickly in phase 3 after 30min (mass logout)
(lacking rewards, player find it even worse then Orr)

General Suggestions:
Stick to your manifesto !
Nerf 1 shot skills/Aoe from mobs (dungeons)
Improve xp rewards in lower zones <40, increase money in higher zone’s >50
Adjust respawn times on most commun places.
Stop the mega ninja nerfing of drop rates.
(Reduce DR, better remove it completely)
Reduce travel costs to explored/lower zone’s
WvWvW shards based on opposing team playersize (que it up).

End:
You guys where on the right track with the halloween event !
(this could span over to other capitals and holidays)
This also got you some income/support from the gems.
(cosmetics/skins/pets/etc)

Game can be saved, only requires some editing !

1 – The weekend event, so far, simply hasn’t worked, that I’ve seen. One time events and their associated side-quest should probably actually work in the timeframe they are live. If that’s not possible for you guys to do (and it hasn’t been with this event), then I’d recommend you guys simply stop doing them.

2 – The new zone seems to be functional, and looks a LOT better than any of the Orr zones (lack of zombies, lack of desolate landscape, etc). Seems rather lacking in much else, though (exotic karma vendors – yes, yes, I know exotics are substandard now with ascended, but still upgrades for some toons of some of your players). I was hoping to be able to completely avoid all of Orr with the addition of the new zone, but it doesn’t look like that’s 100% possible.

3 – The dungeon seems to be largely functional. I haven’t been there, yet, and honestly I don’t really like your dungeons that I’ve tried. But most of my guildmates seem to have mostly unbugged runs.

4 – Vertical progression – possibly one of the worst decisions (for me) that you guys could have made. Been there, done that, wanted to get away from that, and I believed your Manifest and all the pre-release dev quotes. Shame you guys have decided to do a 180 on that. If I wanted to grind a gear treadmill, I’d do it in a game that, for the most part works (hint – that’s not GW2), and also does it really well (hint – that’s also not GW2).

I so eagerly anticipate the days when your playerbase is divided by how much Ascended gear they’ve grinded (whether they wanted to or not, and whether they found it fun or not).

5 – So much of the game that’s been around since day 1 is still bugged. I don’t get the logic of leaving this content broken and adding new broken content.

6 – A friend/co-worker of mine was convinced, by me, to try this game this weekend (before I knew the full details of Ascended), and just called me laughing at me for having “wasted so much time in this POS game”. Based on his experiences this weekend, I don’t think he’s all that impressed, and I gather he’s not going to be buying any gems in the near (or distant) future.

My feedback: I like the new zone, a lot, I am a farmer and these mobs drop good loot/bloods. I like the new dungeon it is very well thought out. I don’t like how unrewarding the dungeon is with fractal shards, instead of 5 per boss it should be slightly higher. The new zone and dungeon to me out weigh the bugged event, I don’t do events often and when I do it’s just for fun, not a game breaker for me.

I give this patch a 9/10 mainly because my class wasn’t nerfed into the ground like others, if it had been I would simply quit.

Really like the new zone.

I like the addition of the new dungeon/zone, however my excitement for these 2 new additions are completely overshadowed by the decision to change GW2 into a gear focused treadmill. There was no “gap” between exotics/legendaries so how does creating one solve a problem that never existed?

My feedback: Horrid patch. Destroyed several class builds and almost the entire mesmer class. Nerfs implemented without replacing/modifying skills to make up for the nerfs. Bugs abound, not many of the fixes actually fixed anything. Event not working properly.

This feels as if it’s still in an early beta phase.

Further testing before full launch is needed. More people need to be on board as far as what is decided to be nerfed and how. Too many nerfs had too many consequences for builds that didn’t need to be nerfed.

New level of gear added that wasn’t necessary and only adds to a grind for ever higher stats on gear.

1/10

Feedback: I endured the day one lagfest and swore that was it for the event weekend. But, I went back today and liked the island. My ranger got a shiny new reef drake pet and was pretty happy. It’s a drake so it dies instantly but it’s red and looks pretty cool in town.

My advice is to read the thread on Ascended gear as that’s where the most important feedback on the patch is to be found. I bought GW2 to get away from the treadmill and you just introduced one that dwarfs the competition. In WoW it was easy (and cheap) to gear up; Ascended will take ages and cost a fortune. But, it’s not the difficulty in acquisition that is the problem; it’s the violation of your word that is the problem. I don’t want easy gear upgrades, I want relief from having to consider gear stat upgrades and gated content and the creation of classes of players based on the gear they are willing to grind. There you go.

You make me sad Anet.

My feedback is that you have betrayed your customers and fans. The new gear tier is ridiculous. What happened to the vision? You guys used to literally make fun of other MMO companies for their gear treadmills. Sigh.

My feedback:

Love the game, love the new patch/content, love the ascended gear! Thanks Anet, and ignore all the complainers. There are 100x more people that are satisfied with what you’ve given us.

moose.6973:

My feedback:

Love the game, love the new patch/content, love the ascended gear! Thanks Anet, and ignore all the complainers. There are 100x more people that are satisfied with what you’ve given us.

On what do you base this? The feedback in this forum alone says otherwise.

Ascended gear…

You guys were better than this….

Ascended gear has killed any enthusiasm I had for this game. I managed to log in today and I can’t really bring myself to do anything after just sitting around for an hour in LA watching nothing but, “LFG/M Frac lvl #” be spammed over and over and over again. After watching a group fail to find anyone to fill in their Lvl 6 party in that hour I started to remember the annoyance of waiting around for the healer. I would have joined, but I only cleared up to lvl 5 and so it made it so I couldn’t help out if I felt like it.

Also once I found out that I couldn’t even use my tokens to earn the fractal exotic weapons like every other dungeon before and instead needed to grind up to a certain level and then grind that level until I’m graced by luck and it drops and really stopped caring at all about doing any of the lower levels.

Really all this patch did was leave me extremely disappointed. I’m annoyed that I used my fine transmutation stones on soon to be pointless gear and have lost any will to spend money on the gem store. On the bright side I finally have freed up time to finish up the whole library of unfinished game I’ve had sitting around for months.

You can’t serve 2 masters Arena net, splitting you’re resources into horizontal and vertical progression could be much more challenging than you can expect.

I’m mad primarily about the stat jump introduced and to a lesser extent agony. There was a gap between exotics and legendaries but there was no need to raise the stats of the new pieces of gear said to fill that exotic, they could have been halfway points on the way to achieving a legendary and just be a very fancy skin. That way your goal of a gap filler from exotic to legendary is still achieved and the stat ceiling is still in place.

As for agony, its already been mentioned a fed times in this thread to LotRO’s Radiance and WoW’s magical resistance being abandoned because it was hated in both communities.

If you want to please the hardcore PvE crowd trying to push their limits with better numbers and such why not separate it in a similar manner to that of sPvP? A separate gear tab for them in which they can acquire gear and utilize the mystic forge; just add new fractals every now and then as you add new spvp maps and there you have it.

My feedback:

If you must keep ascended gear, please make it reasonably attainable after exotics.

Currently, the method of acquisition is just terrible.
1. 70+gold in resources and RNG for the back
2. 10+ FotM difficulty and RNG for the ring

For the back piece alone, you could buy several sets of exotic gear…

This jump in cost is not feasible for the average player and diminishes the importance of skill.

Please create an option with a generic skin and equivalent stats.

People shouldn’t be forced to have to go for the prestige/obsidian armor to stay competitive in both PvP and PvE.

The dungeon – what little I’ve done of it – looks fun and relatively well designed so far. I can even forgive the Swamp Fractal – it’s a cool idea, it’s just needs some sort of a balance pass.

But I do agree with what’s already been said. The reason I played this game is because of the lack of a really involved gear grind – and the idea of playing the game how I want to play it and still be relatively viable, my skill as a player being the main reason for success. So, Ascended gear and Agony is completely against the reason I played this game in the first place. Not that I don’t like gear-grinding mind you, but it’s not the reason I played this game. I play LoTRO for that.

That being said, being a long time and current player of LoTRO, I can confirm what people already mentioned. Radiance was so badly received that Turbine apologized for it (in a Dev Diary no less) before removing all traces of it completely. Please do not make the same mistake.

As an aside – the new way of acquiring current end-game gear in Riders of Rohan (by rebuilding a destroyed town with daily quests) is an infinitely more fun grind than what I’ve seen in GW2 so far. Not only because it fits the story of the landscape so well, but also because you can actually see visible signs of your progress (the town being rebuilt).

Nobody is buying the spin about how “filling a gap” for a cosmetic weapon upgrade is necessary by creating a statistical gap for all slots.

So now we’re on course for eventually having this new tier of gear that is going to be obtainable every way that current exotics are? When is that supposed to happen by? Are you going to raise the level cap too? If you do, is ascended gear going to be available right away with the new level cap, or is it going to phase in again?

How is this not sounding like every other MMO model? Why did you bother making legendaries cosmetic in the first place? You know the answer; we know the answer. The spin is insulting.

Even if this is my first post, I played the GW franchise since early days of Prophecies and I must admit I really enjoied that new (lost) game concept, my favourite class has always been the Ranger and having the Ranger as my main class in GW2 seemed to be a natural step (and I guess you already know where I am aiming at).

My general feedback is positive, I mean the game itself has been well-presented and well-sold, but it seems that patch after patch it’s going to be a big load of meh all around. Pve is rewarding, you got fairly good stuff from exploration completion, the social part is enjoyable and lots of nice things all around.

About the latest patch my feedback is as follows:

The event wasn’t that bad after all, I won’t complain about the lagfest because I still don’t know what happened at LA, I just saw this Karka coming out the water and GG the game got frozen, but this happens and ok; I am sure Anet will manage a solution for all the other upcoming events.

About the nerfs and the buffs, you made playing the ranger in spvp and wvwvw a chore. I won’t talk about statistics or techical issues because they’ve already been largely discusses, ignored apparently, but discussed; but from the first gw where the ranger was a good midliner it has became an underpowered class beyond measure: it feels like playing the part of a clay pidgeon because everybody is ready to attack and kill it with few hits. I HAD TO GO HIDE UNDERWATER!! So here’s my constructive critic: change the ranger class into the scubadiver class: no one will complain.

Sorry if my English is kinda bad but I am not a native speaker.

The Fractal Tier-design is totally broken, i have waited hours in Lions Arch to find a Level 6 Group or Players without success on a heavy populated Server. Nobody wants to group with eachother if they are not on the same difficulty level.

Only 2 days in and already people are being general kittens in chat, it’s impossible to find a group doing your level and people are bored of the 9 levels.

About dungeon

• In general, they are interesting.
• The level check sux. It significantly makes people to behave “if you sux (not have enough level), I’m not goint to party with you”.
• Agony, a gear check system, sux.
• The rewards are not good enough. If I can only play 2 hours a day, I can earn a piece of exo dungeon equipment in 3 days; I may be able to gain a exo temple armour in 10 days by karma farming; but I probabely need a month to gain a tiny Prototype Fractal Capacitor.
• I hate grind.

About Ascended gears

• They are unnecessary.
• We don’t see the wall (or gap) you mentioned is mitigated. The worse is that people now need extra resources for ascended gears.
• What are the other sources of ascended gears?
• I hate grind to top. DO NOT FORCE ME TO DO IT.

We didn’t need a feedback thread since this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Thoughts-on-Ascended-Gear-Merged-threads was already being used for such.

This event has not worked very much. With the amount latency and broken quest chains it has been a very painful experience. The addition of Ascended gear was a poor move imo and goes against the game philosophy we followed you to the game over. Many of us feel duped with this patch/event as it goes against the very spirit of the game we have been supporting for years now. Keep all gear at the level of Exotics and make Ascended/Legendary maintain being only cosmetic upgrades. This way the game stays the same as we agreed to when we showed you how much we liked your game. If you want to keep Infusions, then do it similar to GW1 with the small quest or just create a quest to add Infusion slots to existing gear. It’s not a very hard thing to work toward keeping your fanbase from being alienated by the current look of gear progression and “grinds”.

We didn’t need these things in GW1 and we don’t need them in GW2.

This patch has put an end to 7 years of playing with ArenaNet.

Gear grind progression was horribly unexpected and I want nothing to do with it. I was already displeased with gambling and MF in gear, and now this. This is not the kind of game I’m interested in playing.

I’m not about to go through all these pages of butchered merged threads to see if this has been mentioned before. If it has, consider this my “vote”.

- New crafting materials need “deposit” function with proper slots in crafting bank
– Fractals of the Mists needs to be more forgiving of player disconnects/quits
– Love the dungeon drops thus far, finally seeing some “inbetween” gear is real nice
– Fractals of the Mists should let us chose up to the max difficulty any player in group has reached. Give a warning or whatever.
– New zone is kinda small, could have used some of the other blurred islands right nearby
– New zone’s mobs are too bursty. They’re all one attack then nothing, survive it and the mob dies easy enough.
– Tweak Veteran and higher Kraka respawn rate. It’s a bit fast as is. With a duo you can down them easy enough (a little effort depending on the players), but all the time to kill them twice makes it so that you’re finishing one off for good and the last one is back again.
– Change prices on “donation” gear

So after playing the new patch I’m going to sum it up as being a moldy cake. It looks pretty and there are parts that are tasty but then you have all these mold spores ruining it.

Dungeon, great design. Making a group for it is hard due to fractal levels encouraging people to demand the highest level they can do and no lower. Then there is the issue of getting the group in the same instance and what happens if someone drops (I’ve had to four man). I’m not sure how they can fix this.

One time event is great and it makes the world feel more permanent. The bugs and 1 day only timing make it very hard to participate, though. This is easy enough to fix. Growing pains.

Ascended gear. I’m not really sure what to think of this yet as no one really has access to it yet. Gear treadmill yada yada. Frankly, I think the fractal level lfg balkanization is the bigger problem here. I understand how providing some progression for tight nit groups is a good thing. The problem is we have the relentless drive for breakneck progression in lfg pugs. I’d say make fractal progression somehow linked to guilds but that could be another can of worms (for the record I am guildless because I’m trying the whole cowboy route for a while). This is a serious issue and could severely hurt this game.

My feedback:

My guild of up 35 passionate players is now dead due to the treadmill that was implemented. Higher stats and gating are no content to us.

my feedback:

the patch’s substance, in a nut shell, does not live up to the expectations set by the salesmen. it’s is completely underhwelming. i feel like i’ve been sold snake oil.

the controversy this week has not been handled well, and is leading to a drop in the value of the related brands.

the expected longevity and value of this product is also severely reduced due to the above factors.

this has gone from being tupperware to being seasonal joke toilet paper in terms of perception of the product in several different metrics.

I think one of the most disheartening things about this whole fiasco is the lack of serious communication from Anet.

Do we have any image of the Prototype Fractal Capacitor back piece skin?

you want feedback? want to know what players think?
go and read 200 pages of complaints about the Ascended gear

My feedback:

new area is always welcome, new dungeon to do is great thing, events are fine but very laggy. New item tier was a horrible decision, but outright lying and ignoring community is even worse. Apparently those customers who spent money to gemshop weren’t the most dedicated ones. I, for one, won’t spend anything there anymore.

You want Feedback? Okay.

I won’t be playing a game that devalues my achievements through the introduction of a gear treadmill, which not only renders the stats of my gear I specifically worked to get(and not have to worry about upgrading anymore) sub-par, but also promises to keep doing so with each new gear piece and infusion tier release for years to come.

I didn’t spend hours and hours farming the money to get Exotic gear.
I didn’t spend hours and hours farming the money to get the best gear.

Why? Because I hate, hate, hate to have that little voice in the back of my head keep reminding me that I could do or take more damage if only I spend some effort upgrading my gear to the absolute top level. I want to stop worrying about getting more powerful and start looking towards spending my time on acquiring nice skins, dyes and titles. I can’t allow myself to work towards something frivolous as a rare skin if I could be spending that time on getting my gear back to 100% effectiveness. My psyche won’t let me.

It doesn’t matter what kind of stats the infusions carry. They are more effective than what I worked for either way, and what I worked for was the knowledge, the freedom of not having to worry about being sub par every again. When you release higher tiers of infusions when you feel the game needs it, rending the older ones sub par, the cycle is complete. I can not enjoy hunting frivolous things like skins and titles(the endgame I know and love from GW1) as long as there’s this sword of Damocles hanging over my head, threatening to take away the freedom of not worrying about effectiveness.

Of course, you developers know how the mind of gamers, so I’m sure my explanation wasn’t really necessary.

There was no gap between exotic and legendary rarities except for the time it took to acquire a legendary. You thought people would take longer to get legendaries and decided to violate your “no necessary grind” philosophy, artificially slowing down the rate at which they are acquired? That’s all ascended gear and infusions are: A giant time and gold sink.

I have nothing else to say about this update, as the addition of Ascended gear and infusions makes it impossible for me to enjoy the game.

My feedback? You need massive improvements in class balance. You really need to fix the core of the game before adding all this other fluff.

I heard you only have 2 guys working on class balance. This made total sense when I read the changes to the thief.

Instead of adding more viable builds, you essentially have left us with one. Obviously I’m talking about the D/D BS FotM build that you’ll now see every thief running around with. This build is easily the most complained about in the thief sub forum and the source of a lot of frustration from both thieves and non thieves alike. I’m still scratching my head how your so called balancing team could leave this build virtually untouched, while destroying any other build that other thieves might consider.

I see this as dumbing down the game to extreme levels. There is zero variety left not only in the thief class, but most of them! People want variety, not be pigeon holed into 1 or 2 options. The trait system is a sham at this point. It gives you the impression of choice, but when you actually look closely, you realise that there are only a few viable paths to choose if you want to be competitive.

If you want people to stick around, you really need more/better people working on class balance and variety.

So I did the event.

Fractals is a mess, I wanted to give it a shot. Tried joining/starting a few groups, got trolled in LFG for saying ‘level 1.’ So that was a no-go.

I went the island, it was a massive, lag-ridden zergfest that dragged on for close to two hours. I started to get a headache. I don’t know why you guys think that you need to give every enemy a massive amount of AoEs and snares. It was impossible to avoid dying multiple times. Many people got wiped. The lag did not make dodging easier.

Suggestion: Ease up on the upscaling. Giving vet mobs 1 billion HP starts to feel tedious after 30 minutes. Seriously.
Reduce the number of players in a zone into smaller groups. With the culling, disconnects, and lag your game can obviously not handle that many players in a given zone.
The chest rewards were nice, 5 people in our zerg got precursors, which made me seethe with jealousy. lol
Get rid of the ascended gear stat boost. This is a stupid idea. You are dividing your community via Gating and Power Creep and fostering elitism. The sheer degree of snobbery and disrespect in LFG towards casual players is becoming toxic.

Ascended armor is a deal breaker for me. I believe in the tenants expressed in your Manifesto and other pre-release interviews, advertising, and product discription. This game is no longer the product you sold me. If it is not reverted back I will ask for a refund.

Event part 1 – laggy nightmare ending in DC – not fun
Event part 2 – Bugged out NPCs – not fun waste of time
Event later parts – Avoided at all costs but lag generated messed me up in other zones – not fun

I can’t speak to the class changes to much – what little I was on was on my 80 Warrior who seemed to play fine. I didn’t play my 80 Thief or 80 Ranger as my experience with game performance was so bad or I was so upset over the ascended armor fiasco to log onto them after my Warrior.

I didn’t participate in the new dungeon as I dislike playing dungeons, so no coment.

I didn’t participate is sPvP, so no coment on the new map.

I did spend some time in Orr and the drops there have taken a turn for the worse.

From what I’ve experienced and seen of this patch I’d say this warrants an “F” grade. FAILURE

Feedback:

The Fractals are cool, and general basic idea of the new dungeon is okay. The levels (making it more difficult with each try) is not. This segregates the players, and makes it a top farming spot. Especially since the Ascended gear comes from here (see more on this below).

The new area looks nice, but looks empty, as far as events go. The mob population is okay – which is a nice change after Orr (though respawn times might be lowered a bit).

The new crafting drops (as well as some of the old ones) should really get their own slots in crafting tabs in bank.

Event was a zergfest with invisible mobs (especially funny in last event, when invisible groups of 10+ veterans, champion and lower fodder could kill whole group on that circular stairs in the cavern before someone even noticed they are there). Consider cutting down on server/overflow population caps for events like this, or try to divide event into smaller concurrently running parts.

Consider running the event several times during the day, so that everyone can participate (giving the reward once – making sure that it is indeed received, though).

Reward was nice (though i didn’t get a precursor or even any item that would be useful for me, with the exception of the both non-rng box and ring), but it would be better for the future to split it and deliver in parts, at each stage of the event.

Now… the ascended items. I guess the whole 200+ pages long topic on this sums up my feelings on this farce nicely.

The idea should never have been introduced. It was a bad decision, one that i don’t believe will work as well as devs expect it to (in fact, i’m certain it will work way, way worse). The best option would be to scrap it completely. I guess it would requre giving people that already got ascended items some sort of meaningful compensation though. I have no idea what it might be. Perhaps changing those items in legendaries or Exotics with some cool visual, legendary-type effects. It should work for backpacks at least. Rings would be a bigger problem.

If for some reason this is no longer possible, make ascended the new easily attainable top tier. Make them drop from level 80 areas and WvWvW, make them craftable (by crafting professions and mechanics, not Mystic Toilet), make karma vendors that offer them, add them to vendor list in WvWvW and FotM. In all these cases, the difficulty of getting the items/their price should be no more than 2-4x the difficulty/price of getting exotic gear.
Change the t3 cultural armor into Ascended. Keep the price as it is (it would be still too high for them even then in my opinion, but let’s pretend that these skins are worth it – it’s a completely different discussion). Fix the stats and make them be purchasable in several configurations (like dungeon armor).

Also: drop the infusion/agony mechanic and make the armor runable as all the lower ones (since it seems you are incapable of adding infusion mechanic to lower tier armors).

And last but not least – communicate with your playerbase. Lack of communications or communication only through blog posts in which you try to explain that you really didn’t do something everyone knows you did (or are full of PR speak that doesn’t convey anything) can only end in PR disaster. Try to avoid that if you are still interested in having a playerbase.

Ryan.6951:

My feedback: read the 10,000 post thread of people pissed off about ascended gear, take it very seriously, and reply to your customers soon and honestly.

The rest of patch was fine, and the lag can be forgiven.

This sums up what id like to say, more concisely than i would have said it.

My feedback: Told you so. I saw the writing on the wall that this is a company devoted to the bait-and-switch and the big letdown. As I said elsewhere in some long-ago-merged thread, I’m sick of being their sucker and I had no intent of doing the new content, instead just playing the original content. I am not at all surprised by the gamerage I am hearing from friends and strangers alike.

I did my one token sampling of the new content by visiting Kessex Hills during the first stage. A mindless zerg of enemies made invisible by culling. Made more confusing by an old-content dynamic event that is still bugged and broken. That about sums it up. Not only no fun, but a laughably stupid joke.

I continued leveling up my second toon. That will be fun enough for me until I hit Arah, which I still have not been able to play on my original toon because it has been broken. I might still hop on from time to time until the grindy Ascended gear wrecks all levels of the game. I don’t see myself leveling a third toon. I won’t ever be their sucker to rush to expansion content and I won’t spend a penny on their untrustworthy game.

Hurling out messy new content like feeding slop to hogs may be a great business strategy for all I know. What I do know is that I’m much more likely to play a cleaned-up original game that gives me lasting reasons to play rather than cheap publicity stunts. I like RP, so I find it odd there is no housing, extremely limited town clothing, an inability to interact with furniture, no character biography panel, and no way for players to create meaningful content themselves beyond chat and crafted items that are literally worthless in the joke of a game economy. People who enjoy the other end of player-created content—pvp—have their own complaints. The games that will be in for the long haul and truly revolutionize the industry are those that realize the main asset of an MMO are the players themselves and empower them to create content. It’s cheaper, and it’s better.

My feedback:

I’m very disappointed with the addition of yet another tier of gear to acquire. I’m also a little irritated by some of the mesmer changes which have been confirmed to spawn some unintended bugs that have made certain builds less than viable. It’s particularly saddening when we already do much less damage than certain other professions are dishing out.

However, to give credit where credit is due I absolutely adore the new island. I find the atmosphere and environment to be incredibly well designed and the karka are a pretty cool addition to the game. Aside from the lag and the difficulty in tagging enemies for loot (which needs to be addressed rather swiftly, in my humble opinion) I found it to very intense and enjoyable!

New Tier of Gear = Bad
Random Drops of Ascended Gear Mats = Bad
FotM Levels / Agony Gating = Bad
No real Ranger Update = Bad

I love GW2, sadly loving it less and less now.

It is like a necro is life draining my enjoyment of the game away, trying to res himself, but is not able to, as he was downed in a pit of fire.