Guild Wars 2

I am extremely disappointed in ANet team this patch and here’s why:
Me and a lot of other player have been waiting patiently for a new patch for quiet a while. I thought that ANet was working on something really special behind the scenes on new content and even maybe an expansion since it was taking so long. Instead I log in and find two new features in this patch:
a) Gem Exchange had been changed to fluctuate at a per min interval and we were only given the option to exchange gold/gems in a specified amount of values.
I am personally ok with this change as opposed to many other people since this doesn’t change much for me. I buy gem store items by buying gems and ingame items by earning gold ingame. However, What disappoints me is that the developers were working on unexpected content which doesn’t really add something solid into the game. This patch isn’t supposed to be a feature patch yet we got this feature which does absolutely nothing other than limit the players capabilities for no apparent reason. This change may be reverted but what can’t be reverted is the time the developers spent on this which might have been used on something special.
b) A new gambling system has been introduced. There is a new skritt vendor which takes wrappers from the cash shop(or RNG drops) and after two weeks the item bidded upon is randomly distributed in limited amount to a few people. I’m not going to lie here. I really want the ghastly grinning shield. But seeing that theres only a hundred available puts the equation of me getting them out because I always lose RNG…. always. In addition, this promotes low population in the game because, the lower the population the more the percentage of people who get these rewards. This RNG feature was another feature introduced in a content patch and more of the developers time was wasted in something so useless which didn’t add anything solid to guild wars 2. This feature will be used in future patches and everyone will still hate it and the bad feelings about this game whenever people see something like this will only increase.

In addition to the new features mentioned we saw some new content in this patch:
Its good to see additional new content in the patch. I like the new lich and count costumes. However, the cat and the chinese witch costumes are just retextures of previous content and that’s almost fine but I have noticed that some of the new content in the recent past has not been up to the mark with the old past content. Take hairstyles for instance. All the initial hairstyles have hair physics where the hair is long but many of the new ones don’t. These are small things but its the small things that add up to make a large impact.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that it is preferable if development is done more on the expected content and less on unexpected content. There are a lot of expectations by the players on the content and quality of what we get and these expectations are there only because GW2 does come up to a certain standard. I feel that the current patch does not meet the standard of the previous releases considering the time that it was given.
This is, of course, only my opinion.

It was a Halloween yearly fluff event that is demanded by players in every game. It is not and was not said to be anything else. New content hits in Nov, you can at that time talk about how you like or dislike added new content.

The festival events were always supposed to be recycled events that give ArenaNet room to work on other content. They even blogged about it.

If anything, their mistake was adding too much to the second Halloween event which set an expectation different than the original intent.

The true test of the recycled holiday content is not whether it is fresh and new, but whether it is really allowing ArenaNet to step up their game with the new content that is being developed with the time saved by being able to switch a holiday event back on.

It might be a ‘fluff event’ but the main point of the post was that dev time was wasted on Gem/RNG feature which will make a reappearance in all future patches.

Light.7493:

It might be a ‘fluff event’ but the main point of the post was that dev time was wasted on Gem/RNG feature which will make a reappearance in all future patches.

If money comes into the game then from a business perspective it absolutely was not wasted time. This is a business.

While I agree that the time could have been used elsewhere, I am glad they got the message regarding the custom option. I’ll complain about lost time when the LS rolls out. right now im having fun playing ghost tag before it vanishes.

OK, I really hated the gem exchange but they listened to us and, if I understand correctly, we will soon be able to select how many gems we want. If this is true, it will be an improvement over the old system in which you had to enter the gold you wished to spend and then tinker with the amount to get the right number of gems. If this happens then I do not consider the time spent working n the gem exchange wasted – it will be time well spent in the end.

I’m not thrilled by the lottery but I doubt it took much time at all.

Yes, the minis are reskins but I happen to like the new candy corn coloring and the black kitten better than the old. And, frankly, there are too many minis in this game anyway.

On top of that we got batwing potion and maize balm, both of which are a blast and a wonderful loot drop rate in the labrynth.

So barring the initial problem with the gem exchange, I am far from disappointed with this event – it was a job well done.