Guild Wars 2

A zerg of 24 picks up a roaming strider… “No, no… go away!”
“Ok, we’re here. Before we attack let’s do a headcount…”
/M Zerging Bay… DO NOT APPROACH!

How ridiculous.

The number should be set to 2+, 5+, 10+, 25+ with different symbols identifying the size. Give more info, rather than give it while hiding it. And refresh those sword positions every second, not every 10 secs.

Latest update says:
“In order to address certain exploits, the following changes have been made to summoning Guild Vault Transports:

Guild Vault Transports are now unlocked with Economy level 5 instead of Economy level 2. The cost has been increased from 50 influence to 1 Guild Merit and 50 influence.

Guild Vault Transports can no longer be summoned in instances."

Are you certain all of those changes are needed to stop the exploit? or are you just being extra careful and covering any unforeseen cases?

Because requiring 1 guild merit is like condemning small guild, who will never see a guild merit in their lives, to losing out on yet another game option.

When you want to stop an exploit, make sure you do just what is necessary to stop the exploit, especially making sure that you won’t carelessly change things for thousands of people who are not exploiting anything.

Vayne, I don’t have Ascended gear and don’t intend to get any. (I believe the true wealth of real content in this game is in the variety of playing the different classes and revisiting the vast and varied world content with each class and in WvW.)

And I haven’t done any comparisons recently (shows you how much I’m interested in Ascended stuff), but I don’t believe the difference in stats with Exotic is just 10% as it was claimed. The OP, Skylightmoon, is demanding “hardcore content with proper rewards”. I’ll let you guess what “proper” means to him, and what it’ll mean to you and me if that gets implemented.

Also, from a certain chat with the devs that occured a couple of months ago, I was left with the impression that Ascended gear was not going to remain just a requirement for FotM. Can you imagine all that variety of ascended gear right now, with more introduced on a regular basis, just to be used in one dungeon? Do you really believe that?

They said there won’t be another quality of gear (higher than ascended), but did you look at the infusions? +4 Power?? Do you honestly believe they intend to keep those upgrades like that? Of course the players will ask for more, and then they’ll comply, with a good excuse. When the infusions start giving 3×50 stats, will you be sitting here saying you don’t feel you need Ascended gear?

LOL, I don’t agree at all. It would be a huge unjustified nerf to those sigils. Those sigils do nothing after they’ve reached a full stack. It’s just as if you had an empty sigil slot after that. Whereas other sigils continue to do their thing. Compare the constant +5% damage sigil to the volatile +250 Power which disappears when you’re down. They’re already very much uninteresting in many situations where you can expect to go down very often, including WvW. The time it takes to build up that stack in suboptimal conditions, and the uncertainty of ever getting the full stack, is the price you pay for choosing that type of sigil.

If the stack is to go away when the weapon is swapped away, then 2 things have to happen as well:
- The stack should be back when you swap back to that weapon
- The stack should not be deleted on down.

PS: The subject of this thread should be changed to reflect its content.

Go troll on someone else, mate.

Those stacks aren’t only used by min-maxing OP players to kill you 2 seconds faster. They’re also used by people who want a balanced build and have to sacrifice power, as a way to get some of it, hopefully, back during the fight, and hopefully keep the buff for some time. And of course, you then want to switch to sigils that actually do something after you’ve painfully gotten that buff. This game pretends it wants to encourage different builds. Taking that away will not be a step in that direction. Why not lower the stat cap while we’re at it? That way those stacks will do nothing if the stat is already too high.

How does that stop the gold sellers? The vault transports are just more difficult to get now for large guilds, and impossible to get for small ones.

I’m not here to think of solutions to exploits. And neither should you. Exploits are the result of bugs usually and the devs are the only ones who know exactly how a situation is being exploited. They should take care in closing just the exploit cases and not collapse the whole roof on everyone just to kill a bug in the house.

Ageed. Preview of all equipment, irrespective of class, has to be the norm.

I would even ask for a feature to be able to switch race and gender while previewing so as to be able to see all versions of the armor. This is very useful to keep in mind interesting items for my other characters.

Not having the most powerful PC around (although I do intend to get a better one soon), I and I suppose many others have experienced the extremely frustrating delays in making large enemy crowds visible before it’s too late. (I think it’s termed “culling”, i.e. the game’s client/server software/hardware’s incapacity to quickly draw a large number of fast moving players at a far enough distance).

I don’t want to blame neither the software nor the hardware of neither the servers nor the player PCs. The last update did slightly improve things for me: instead of seeing the hoard after I’m dead, I now see them about 1 sec before impact. But I do think there is a very easy and quick solution to this problem.

What we need to see from a far enough distance is really not a full rendering of enemies, but just their names in red. Text is a lot faster to draw. That will be sufficient to see how many and how far, and is a lot lesser of a load than rendering whole characters in 3D. However, we need to be able to see those red names from a greater distance than they currently show.

Today you can see a mob/character from far away, but their names only appear when they come a lot closer. How about doing it the other way around? Show us the red names at a distance of minimum 8000-10000 units, and let the rest of the character render at whatever speed the hardware can manage. That is not too big a distance since you can see trees/buildings/trebuchets that are at least that far away. Whatever the distance decided upon, it has to be reasonably large to give time to react, and realistic in terms of range of sight. After all, 10000 units can be crossed in about 10 secs with speed boosts. If you can see a zerg rushing in at you, you can at least decide whether you want to continue on a collision course or do something else.

Here is an additional request:
To make it clear who is fighting whom, the 2 enemy teams need to have names in different colors. I suggest the following:
- Our team: green
- Enemy1: red
- Enemy2: violet (sufficiently different from Enemy1)
Right now all you see is red-red-red-red. How many of each team are there, approximately? Are we being attacked by both enemies at the same time? Different enemy name colors will make it a lot clearer than having to actually read all those names one by one.

Corollary:
Team/Map/Icon/Tier Rank colors can also be changed to correspond to the above:
- Our team: always the green one (green camp/fort/… icons, green name text)
- Enemy1: red
- Enemy2: violet

I think the above changes make sense and will solve the culling problem while the clever brains at Anet look for a better solution to full character rendering of large groups at far enough distances.

Finally, I have a last request. Currently, we are shown a crossed-sword icon on the map when a battle or skirmish is taking place. However, there are 2 problems with that icon:
- It does not tell me who is fighting whom
- It does not refresh fast enough (only once every 10 sec AFAIK)

If we’re not supposed to know who is fighting whom from a large distance, then the crossed-sword icon should not be displayed at all unless one of our team is close enough to observe the battle. Since it has been deemed necessary to display it, then why not make it more useful? Drawing crossed swords of different colors can tell us who is fighting whom (red+violet swords or red+green, violet+green, red+violet+green). And updating the icon more frequently (once every second or two) will make the information a lot more useful. What harm can come from us all having more useful information?

Thank you for your attention.

We are a 5-person guild (like Destiny’s Edge)

Do I understand it correctly that we have to spend 50,000 influence just to open up this stuff in one tree? And we can’t get the Guild Merits otherwise, so we can’t ever hope to buy anything that requires them?

50,000 influence would require about 1 year for us.

Dante.1508:

Nemui.6753:

makes me wonder why it was introduced to PvE in the first place.

Agree i never had these issues when Guildwars 2 opened, PvE now is pretty bad with culling too, as bad as WvW..

I think some decisions were made, in the numerous “server updates” we’ve had, to switch to less costly and less powerful servers or less bandwidth, and introduce intensive culling to pve. Right now I go to where a drunken npc should be out there in some camp with some 20-30 other npc’s, and have to wait 3-5 seconds for him to appear. This never happened when the game was launched and there were hundreds of players in the area. Only reason it could start to happen now, even with the lower number of players, is due to a cost reduction decision.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Alad QB.8904:

How does that stop the gold sellers? The vault transports are just more difficult to get now for large guilds, and impossible to get for small ones.

How is it impossible for small guilds to get guild merits? you only need 5 people in your guild to unlock and complete Bounty, Trek, and Rush. They also added training missions to make it easy for you to obtain the required influence.

The cost in influence (and then guild merits too) of opening up those features which earn merits is simply prohibitive for small guilds. Plus we not even have 5 people there to kill one of those mobs.

From what I understood in the infamous Manifesto, GW2 was/is not supposed to be just another WoW. Therefore, it’s not supposed, nor was intended, to satisfy players who enjoy WoW and the hundred other copycats, but those who are, on the contrary, disappointed with that model and who are looking for something different.

The Wikipedia page on Guild Wars states:
ArenaNet believed that players would not pay subscription fees for every online game they play and that paying a fee would cause players to make a “lifestyle commitment” to a particular game, rather than the usual behaviour of playing many different games and switching between them. Jeff Strain, a founder of ArenaNet, said, “It is our opinion that the free online gaming model combined with frequent content updates is the optimum online paradigm for interfacing with consumers and creating a significant, enduring gaming franchise.”

This suggests that they’re people who know and accept that their players will not be hanging around their game forever, as is perfectly normal. It would therefore make perfect sense that they not try to create end game grinds such as FotM, or Ascended gear, or anything which requires the majority of players to feel they have to do some boring grind to not be left behind. It also suggests that they will produce more paid real content for the game on a regular basis, attracting back those players who leave to do something else. This is a game, after all, not a full time hard core occupation.

The current 180° direction trend from the Manifesto seems to imply to me that so many WoW players, or traditional MMO players were attracted by GW2 early on, and put so much demand on Anet, that they lost their vision, the one they spoke of in the manifesto and which they were able to preserve during development as long as they were isolated from those masses. It seems almost like they were overwhelmed with traditional demands, and lost hope in being able to realize their dream and promise. (The alternative would be ugly to consider.)

Now the real question is, how much has ArenaNet’s vision changed, and how satisfied are they with their accomplishment as compared to their initial goals.

URGENT: An option to hide player titles. Don’t need more confusion on my screen.
While you’re at it, an option to hide player guilds as well, please.

Thank you.