Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I quit shortly after Gorseval was released. Too many people had quit. Recently some former friends have been discussing returning. I’m an EU player so if you’re not from the EU please don’t reply; I want to know what’s going on for EU situation. Please don’t link videos or make off hand remarks. I’m looking for your tone as much as how clearly the replies are answered. Stupid or offensive comments is a reflection on the state of the community and will just make me and friends who read the replies think more negatively about the game than we already did when we left.

WvW:
1. How’s the state of WvW?
2. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough WvW Guilds can afford it?
3. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough Small Guilds can afford it?
4. What’s the cost of Scribing now?
5. Who’s footing the bill to the Scribe or has the been fixed?

Community:
6. Are there Community Maps again like Silverwastes or has Anet not addressed that?
7. Does Dragon Stand continue to randomly send half the players to a new map with half its timer lost and thus no way to complete it wasting everyone’s time?

Content vs. Time-Gating to Keep the Rat on Wheel:
8. Have they stopped making ‘content’ that’s just Time-Gates?
9. Have they apologized for any of that?

Legendaries:
10. What’s the state of the new legendary weapons?
11. What’s the state of the legendary armor?
12. How much of a Gear Grind has the game become or stopped becoming?

Spirit Vale:
13. Has the only content released been about Spirit Vale?
14. Have the developers added selectable difficulties for the content or community improved to where the average player can participate?
15. Are the developers still pushing for Ascended Gear to be necessary?
- already have it on all characters, but not all friend do
16. Is the economy fixed enough people can acquire enough gold and materials to do the Ascended Crafting?

Fractals:
17. What’s the state of Fractals?

Dungeons:
18. Did they replace these with something else?

State of Toxicity/Saltiness:
19. Is everyone still in exodus, are people returning, or what’s going on?

A Place for Girlfriend, Girl Friends, and Couples?
20. Have the Devs stopped making the game such a grind/time-gate everyone’s girlfriend will quit?
21. If you’re a couple playing the game do you feel it’s fair again to play or is still difficult to do things together?
22. Have Daily’s or some other reward been linked to players revisiting Mastery Point locations?
23. Anything else impacting couples negatively or be prepared for?
24. Any work-arounds for negative issues?

Population:
25. How’s the population?

WvW:
1. How’s the state of WvW?
it was great the first few weeks, and it’s back to business as usual. people still stack winning servers. it’s not a problem Anet can fix.
2. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough WvW Guilds can afford it?
Somewhat, but you could fund multiple legendary weapons with what it costs to fund scribing, still.
3. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough Small Guilds can afford it?
no.
4. What’s the cost of Scribing now?
still in the high hundreds, if not thousands.
5. Who’s footing the bill to the Scribe or has the been fixed?
this problem, again is a result of scribing not being changed. I don’t like how it works, I don’t like the fact that i have to donate items to a single person so that they may provide items for a guild hall/claimed objectives. it’s still a lot of trust to place on someone you do not, and probably will never know. it’s a horrible system.

Eirdyne.9843:

A Place for Girlfriend, Girl Friends, and Couples?
20. Have the Devs stopped making the game such a grind/time-gate everyone’s girlfriend will quit?
21. If you’re a couple playing the game do you feel it’s fair again to play or is still difficult to do things together?
23. Anything else impacting couples negatively or be prepared for?

I found a lot of your questions to be answerable by a little research on the wiki, or so subjective or biased as to be unanswerable or just a little out of left field, like the couples questions.

On the subject of girlfriends (why the plural? Do you mean friends who are girls or that you have multiple girlfriends?) or couples, my girlfriend and I see no negative issues at all. We sometimes play together, and sometimes play apart while talking on the phone as the fancy takes us. We have different interests and time availabilities, as do you and your girlfriend (or girlfriends). We don’t feel any particular need to play together to enjoy the game. There aren’t any negative issues that would keep a couple apart if they decided to play together.

If I may be honest, the phrasing of your questions suggests that you have a bias against the game. You’re already looking for problems. If you come into it like that, you’re not going to enjoy it. Maybe it’s not the time to come back. Give it a little longer and come into it gently when the animosity dies down.

Everyone’s opinion differs, the only way to know for sure is to just play it for yourself.

No one is going to fill in that questionnaire. I mean, I have opinions about all the things, and then you might just brand them stupid because you disagree, so that would be a wast of my time, and yours. Plus some people are always going to be confrontational, including me, it doesn’t say anything about the game, if anything people are still people and you won’t like every single one of them

The best thing to do is to log in and play really. But since you keep asking about the state of the game itself, I would say it’s mildly positive because of all the changes. You can easily look those up yourself, and make your own judgement.

The cheapest way for scribing is about 500 gold btw. And that’s not counting the new resonating sliver recipes that make them into 3 Finishing kits (once per account per tier), and Basic Decorations for everyone with a workshop, which IMO are pretty huge.
Just to correct that first reply there.

@ Lightsbane
- Thanks for answering without being a jerk.
- \o/ for life in WvW again
@FrizzFreston
- Thanks for the information on Scribing
- Hostility isn’t helpful, but just to be aware there’s no single source of information on
Guild Wars 2 so… ya, easier to ask players who are playing.
- There was a time when people thought answering another human being, however briefly was just what communication (forums) are all about. I guess communication could be used for diaper rash (directed a certain others) but who wants that in their mouth?
@ Zoltar MacRoth
- You’re right.

Eirdyne.9843:

Hi,

I quit shortly after Gorseval was released. Too many people had quit. Recently some former friends have been discussing returning. I’m an EU player so if you’re not from the EU please don’t reply; I want to know what’s going on for EU situation. Please don’t link videos or make off hand remarks. I’m looking for your tone as much as how clearly the replies are answered. Stupid or offensive comments is a reflection on the state of the community and will just make me and friends who read the replies think more negatively about the game than we already did when we left.

WvW:
1. How’s the state of WvW?
2. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough WvW Guilds can afford it?
3. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough Small Guilds can afford it?
4. What’s the cost of Scribing now?
5. Who’s footing the bill to the Scribe or has the been fixed?

Community:
6. Are there Community Maps again like Silverwastes or has Anet not addressed that?
7. Does Dragon Stand continue to randomly send half the players to a new map with half its timer lost and thus no way to complete it wasting everyone’s time?

Content vs. Time-Gating to Keep the Rat on Wheel:
8. Have they stopped making ‘content’ that’s just Time-Gates?
9. Have they apologized for any of that?

Legendaries:
10. What’s the state of the new legendary weapons?
11. What’s the state of the legendary armor?
12. How much of a Gear Grind has the game become or stopped becoming?

Spirit Vale:
13. Has the only content released been about Spirit Vale?
14. Have the developers added selectable difficulties for the content or community improved to where the average player can participate?
15. Are the developers still pushing for Ascended Gear to be necessary?
- already have it on all characters, but not all friend do
16. Is the economy fixed enough people can acquire enough gold and materials to do the Ascended Crafting?

Fractals:
17. What’s the state of Fractals?

Dungeons:
18. Did they replace these with something else?

State of Toxicity/Saltiness:
19. Is everyone still in exodus, are people returning, or what’s going on?

A Place for Girlfriend, Girl Friends, and Couples?
20. Have the Devs stopped making the game such a grind/time-gate everyone’s girlfriend will quit?
21. If you’re a couple playing the game do you feel it’s fair again to play or is still difficult to do things together?
22. Have Daily’s or some other reward been linked to players revisiting Mastery Point locations?
23. Anything else impacting couples negatively or be prepared for?
24. Any work-arounds for negative issues?

Population:
25. How’s the population?

Why don’t you click a few links and login to see how the state of the game is. As a few responders have said we aren’t responsible for keeping you up to date on GW2.

As for the population – decreasing. You don’t need an analytics expert to see the drop in activity. That’s to be expected given how much time has past since HoT was released.

Not sure why 2 (or more) players playing together would have issue. Not sure why female gamers would be expected to have less ‘gaming stamina’.

Maybe some of your questions did not encourage others to be as forthcoming with their opinions/advice as they could have.

As noted above, the best way to ascertain how the game fulfills one’s own preferences is to actually play the game.

Good luck.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Not sure why 2 (or more) players playing together would have issue. Not sure why female gamers would be expected to have less ‘gaming stamina’.

Maybe some of your questions did not encourage others to be as forthcoming with their opinions/advice as they could have.

As noted above, the best way to ascertain how the game fulfills one’s own preferences is to actually play the game.

Good luck.

agreed

I haven’t played for a few months, but I am thinking about restarting.

I’m just gonna browse the forum a bit and play here and there to see if I get back into the game or not. I won’t be lazy and rely on other peoples oppions, as it doesn’t matter in the end, if People enjoy something I find boring.

Stupid comments on a forum will never reflect a whole (in-game) community . It is usually a minority who feels the need to behave in a certain way. If you join with your friends, that shouldn’t be such a big problem anyway. And tbh Eirdyne, I think you shouldn’t play, judging by the way you’ve phrased your text and questions.

Nr 16: I acquired ascended equip and weapons just by playing, so that’s never really been a problem in GW2.

Eirdyne.9843:

@FrizzFreston
- Thanks for the information on Scribing
- Hostility isn’t helpful, but just to be aware there’s no single source of information on
Guild Wars 2 so… ya, easier to ask players who are playing.
- There was a time when people thought answering another human being, however briefly was just what communication (forums) are all about. I guess communication could be used for diaper rash (directed a certain others) but who wants that in their mouth?

I never said anything against communication nor anything for being hostile, I just meant that that ALOT of questions you’re initially dumping on people. It’s alot of time to answer all the questions. Some of those have alot of bias to them, and people are going to argue against those biasses, thus confront you about the additional baggage within the questions. At least that’s what I meant with being confrontational, I don’t mean being rude or hostile.

Just imagine walking into a room full of people playing the game and then you ask all those questions in before anyone can reply. You got to admit that is alot to take in and answer. Though on a forum that is a little more practical, it’s still alot of questions not anyone is likely to answer in one go. Plus it seems to me you’re looking for the most elaborate information as well.

Concisely said.

• WvW has regular player polls on what developers should focus on.
• Alpine BL is back, +5 supply is the first boost instead of the last.
• Scribing is many times cheaper. who pays depends on the players. Some are better at p(l)aying together than others.
• HoT maps are more casual friendly, drop ~4 times the loot
• Little fluff events showing changes in the world that lead up to living world 2.
• Fractals are pretty much the same, Cliffside made shorter.
• New raid wing been released since Gorseval, and still the same-ish difficulty. Ascended gear has already been proven to be not necessary by others.
• Dungeon rewards have been buffed with 5 gold per 8 paths (or something like that), and dailies reward 2 gold.
• Any grind, time-gate and other things were never a huge issue and thus haven’t been changed.
• Any relationship status or gender generally has little effect on ones ability to play the game or ones opinion of the game. I don’t even…

I probably missed load anyway.

Ok…

WvW:
1. How’s the state of WvW?
Better. Servers are busier and I enjoy roaming now that there’s actually a population. Server imbalance is a problem, but scoring changes and periodic server merges should hopefully help a bit.

2. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough WvW Guilds can afford it?
Slightly better. I think a decent sized WvW guild could afford it.

3. Have Guild Hall costs come down enough Small Guilds can afford it?
Not really.

4. What’s the cost of Scribing now?
Much much cheaper, though it still needs work imo.

5. Who’s footing the bill to the Scribe or has the been fixed?
You can fund it yourself, but it’s still hundreds of gold. It has been partially fixed.

Community:
6. Are there Community Maps again like Silverwastes or has Anet not addressed that?
Rewards in HoT maps have improved significantly. The meta timers still exist, but I’d call that a preference, not a problem. Rewards for non meta activities are better too.

7. Does Dragon Stand continue to randomly send half the players to a new map with half its timer lost and thus no way to complete it wasting everyone’s time?
The new map timer was lengthened, so I don’t think that should happen anymore.

Content vs. Time-Gating to Keep the Rat on Wheel:
8. Have they stopped making ‘content’ that’s just Time-Gates?
They haven’t really introduced new time gates, and they’ve improved rewards across the board.

9. Have they apologized for any of that?
Why is that necessary?

Legendaries:
10. What’s the state of the new legendary weapons?
There’s a new SB, others are on hold indefinitely so they can focus on other things.

11. What’s the state of the legendary armor?
No news, but it’s still coming.

12. How much of a Gear Grind has the game become or stopped becoming?
Much less imo. Gold is even easier to make, and again, rewards are much better. Asc is still expensive, but it’s not required, and is honestly easy enough to get from fractals.

Spirit Vale:
13. Has the only content released been about Spirit Vale?
Salvation Pass is new raid content.

14. Have the developers added selectable difficulties for the content or community improved to where the average player can participate?
No selectable difficulty, but if an “average player” dedicates themselves to learning the fights they can participate. Don’t ever expect to hop in a pug, mash 1 and win though. If that is the “average player” then no, they can’t participate.

15. Are the developers still pushing for Ascended Gear to be necessary?
No, they push mechanics. Some groups have done bosses with only 5 people in exotics. 10 in exotics is more than possible, you just need to know the mechanics, your class, and have a good team. You obviously need damage, but exo vs asc is not the deciding factor.

16. Is the economy fixed enough people can acquire enough gold and materials to do the Ascended Crafting?
It’s too expensive imo, but just do some fractals, some collections etc. Weapons and trinkets are the bulk of what matters.

Fractals:
17. What’s the state of Fractals?
Better (rewards to incentivize less swamp fractals) but not much different. Fun, quick, not too difficult.

Dungeons:
18. Did they replace these with something else?
Improved dungeon rewards that incentivize running different paths. Aetherpath also gives a guaranteed dreams weapon.

State of Toxicity/Saltiness:
19. Is everyone still in exodus, are people returning, or what’s going on?
Things are fine. WvW and reward changes made people happier I think (oh, and SAB). PvP players still whine about every balance change, but w/e. “Everyone” was never in exodus. Most of the people I know still played.

A Place for Girlfriend, Girl Friends, and Couples?
Stuff
Just play it and see if you enjoy it.

Population:
25. How’s the population?
Fine.

@ FrizzFreston
- It’s easier to ask a 100,000 people (or whatever number uses the forums) 25 questions because 100,000 has a better chance of an opinion.
- Likewise, 100,000 people are going to have their opinion about what’s good or not.
- I never stated it was obligation to anyone to answer ALL of the questions. The whole point of Guild Wars 2 was to play as you want. It tends to be player A does PvP and that’s it, Player B couldn’t care less for PvP (too confined, for example) so they play WvW as they think it is more ‘realistic’, or another only does PvE because that’s big enough. No matter how much I come back and play I still have to play ALL of that to get the general idea.
-I might have time or have my own opinions about what’s good and what’s not. For instance, I thought HoT was great. The difficulty increase, Spirit Vale, Masteries, etc immediately came on here and said a lot of thanks to the Devs.
- I personally had a hard time understanding people’s trouble with the Masteries, Spirit Vale, and harder difficulty. People had asked for end-game content geared to (geared) level 80 players and we got an entire expansion of that. That was awesome.

@ Anyone
Where the problems started (and where my questions are aimed) are entirely to do with community questions. Again, things you can’t get by playing the game. Guild Hall prices were absurd before.
- That kind of pricing really hurt a lot of the small guilds.
- The bottom line was, as Guild Halls worked with Heart of Thorns you just weren’t going to finish you’re Guild Halls unless you were willing to put thousands of gold at it
- Dungeons (Liquid gold) went away away at the same time
- Silverwastes had it drops rates and population numbers decline significantly at the same time
- In short, the sudden drop off in gold combined with the high costs for this thing was literally asking people to give up the gold and assets they’d saved up to buy a new legendary. That’s… tricky. There’s also a burnout after a legendary is crafted. People do it too fast because they want to “be there” and move on. There’s no way to control that. Asking a whole guild to devote that much time and energy wasn’t doable for a lot of guilds.

That kind of thing has a cascading effect. Little guilds merge with big guilds, the mergers usually weren’t because everyone had gotten to be closer friends (it was an economic merger) so you were still losing people.
- And if you were doing WvW people tended to just gravitate back to their old groups anyway, except that they weren’t a guild anymore, it was a group for group chat.
- Again, easier to ask here than to go play 100 hours of WvW when someone else has already played 100 hours of WvW.

Yes, it’s unreasonable to expect one person to answer 27 questions.
No, it’s not unreasonable to expect 100,000 people to have their own option on any one of those.
- There’s no reason I need to explain this except you didn’t think about. So, yes, I can be justified in saying I didn’t deserve to have people jumping down my throat about it.

@ Vix
Actually, I heard the game is doing much better since Spring Patch.

@ Inculpatus cedo
Guild Wars 2 forums is the troll capital of the world. Better to come off confrontational than to appear vulnerable to it. They dish it out I’m perfectly willing to give it right back.
- As for the female gamer questions. Am one; it’s not a problem of ‘gaming stamina’. It’s more like consistency. I don’t really understand it myself.
- We’re not exactly forthcoming about what we like and don’t like. Until it happens we don’t point it out; as a rule. We tend to just say, “I didn’t like this” or “This was good,” the ‘why’ is rarely footed. From conversations with friends it’s usually a ‘how to’ problem a lot of people have composed against ‘and how much time’ (does it take). About as veiled as that in tone, too.
I have six friends wanting to come back who are all married. Problems come up because (typically) husband is 80 and the wife is 30. She wants to level, but she’d rather do it with him. He wants to level with her, but is out of new toons to make or has raiding obligations.
- Probably it how things were looking with Spirit Vale:
Level 1 to 50, get exotics, get Ascended
That’s three false-starts before a person feels like they are allowed to play with their partner with their guild.
- When that’s over it’s some other tiered system butting heads with their time.
- The more time people have the less they care about all this, btw
- It’s just the way games are designed, but HoT threw in a lot more of them and people get discouraged.
- I think in general people make a lot of paper dragons ahead of themselves, but if you know where they are you can get people to them so that they’re seen for being just paper.
- Again, this is why I tend to ask on a forms 100,000 people have 100,000 points of view on what’s salty, what’s good, whatever. I’m not judging the community’s opinions; I’m using those to say to a friend, “You ought to try this when you get back,” as opposed, “We’ll get you that Ascended armor.” We would, but pointing out that they don’t have brings up all the salty from before – not good.

@ Mike
It’s not lazy. Think about what I said. How many hours have you played? What content have you played? What do you do the most? Have you been doing that just recently or been at it for awhile? By doing that did you miss out on other content? How many hours has everyone else who has replayed played? How many different tiny amounts of perspective and genuine experience is that? There’s a lot of points of view in that I can’t get by just hopping on the game or dredging through a forum.

This is what a forum is for. You make a post. You ask questions or state an opinion. Someone else asks questions or states an opinions. You’re questions and opinions evolve. You change, grow, and constantly have to reassess what you knew. Anyway, it’s a process of maturation or alienation: a bit of both usually.

Every time someone replies that someone taking all of that time of their personal experience and saying, “Whoa, you’re way off. Look at it like this,” or “Mm, didn’t think about that.” A more accurate way to say it is that experience is like a music album. There’s 72 minutes of information on that, but you can dense all of that into one packet of information: “Moby: Play”
To use FrizzFreston as an example: each little bullet points was the stuff they felt was valid and of interest to reply to. Or Inculpatus cedo’s: maybe my phrasing does set people off. Okay… will work on that. Reapex agrees. Zoltar MacRoth (…to your question, friends who are girls) and maybe they’re right.
And keep in mind, where someone is wrong or right in one context might be spot on in another. Hence why I said at the beginning, I’m taking it all in. I’m not sure going to hop on the game, play a bit, and say everything is fine.
- I would btw. If not raiding I’m doing WvW and jumping puzzles. It doesn’t take that much to satisfy me. My friends… I can’t even fathom what interests them sometimes. Like one friend will just Trade… all day. But, they’re an business student. For them, they’re gaming and getting A’s for it. To me that’s the next thing to being a borg, but they have all the legendaries in the game so what’s my opinion worth against that?

Anyway,
Thanks for the replies!

@ Zodryn
You’re awesome, thank you!

Maybe you should start by reading the major quarterly update and see the changes they made there.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-April-19-2016/first#post6122828

There’s a ton of good changes that happened, and a lot of areas of the game were made more rewarding to play.

WvW is a lot more active because of the server links, the return of the alpine maps, and reward tracks. There’s obviously problems with server links, but I’ll let the EU players comment on that situation. For NA, T1-3 has a rotation of servers, with BG going beastmode, and T4 is now locked into it’s own place.

Meanwhile wvw dev TylerB and team has been active in the forums, conducting polls on where the player base would like them to proceed with changes to wvw, with scoring changes recently being the area voted for them to look into next.

The game is still free, log in and try it out again.