Guild Wars 2

Thanks for all the feedback everyone and please keep it coming.

I don’t know if its been mentioned or not but this stress is pretty much exactly what was designed for the show floor. Difficulty was tuned accordingly and pretty much reduced to a level that wouldn’t be overwhelming for someone who’d never played the game. So I apologize if it wasn’t very engaging for veterans like yourselves. Rest assured that we’ll be coming up some challenges a bit more commensurate to a level 80 zone. For example, if you were to encounter that wyvern at the proper difficulty it would be on a platform roughly 60% smaller or share something that size with a buddy or two.

Thanks for playing today and I look forward to more testing in the future!

Just wanted to say I had a great time. London was great, Rezzed was a lot of fun, and everyone who showed up made it an amazing experience. I’m very thankful to those of you who patiently waited in line all day (or several times a day) to play. It was a lot of fun talking to everyone and I’ll be passing along all of your kind words and feedback to the many people who worked really hard to make the demo possible. Even though it was a busy week, I feel more refreshed and energized to get back to work than ever before. Here’s hoping we’ll cross paths in Heart of Thorns soon.

GoldenTruth.2853:

…I’d like some clarity in what happens to mobs when you deplete their defiance bar….

I believe we’re still balancing the broad-reaching solution but yes, a significant stun will be applied. Pretty sure we’ll be releasing more details through our channels real soon.

As a big fan of Nochtli myself I’m here to tell you that there’s still going to be plenty of unique and unexpected things happening in the jungle. I think Steve’s point was simply to illuminate the premise that we’d like to build on our epic map stories with events wherever possible. That doesn’t mean crazy hylek won’t play a role in say, surviving in the jungle.

Given that the expansion isn’t released yet you guys have the chance here to give your feedback on what you’d like to see in Adventures.

Bear in mind that the we what we’ve seen so far is content tuned for the show floor being played by someone who’s already had a few tries.

On scaling: it is true that we have a certain amount of “magic” scaling in the game, commonly seen in dynamic events. The intent of that system is to keep difficulty consistent across a variety of player counts. The sticking point for myself on raids and scaling is that while we can scale enemies, it is far more difficult to meaningfully scale objectives.

To elaborate, in a 10-player raid, each player is responsible for approximately 1/10 of challenge. As you add players, that challenge share diminishes, so in a 20-player raid, the individual role is about half as important as it would have been with 10 players (challenges of coordination aside).

Of course, group content is rarely so singular and for a good reason. If we have 3 objectives, we divide the focus of the group and your ownership of a 20-player challenge goes from 1/20 to 1/6ish.

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

Thread explosion! Thanks for all the (rapid) responses. There seems to be a fairly consistent feeling that yes, these fights can be more engaging without becoming as difficult as the jungle wurm.

I like some of the ideas being presented, feel free to keep the discussion going. It’s also helpful to hear not only what’s working but why it’s working for you.

On the topic of using siege weapons as a role mechanic in these fights, is that something we want to see more of? I often worry that siege weapons can be just as boring as standing in the safe corner pressing the same attack. Do you feel that they can also cause some contention between players?

Thanks for all your comments, everyone!

I’ve been checking in on this thread pretty regularly and I appreciate the thoughtful discussions. I wish I had time to reply to everything but it’s a busy day and the thread is growing larger so as a quick alternative I’ll throw out some potential takeaway points to summarize the discussion:

• The reward structure in Dry Top is desirable for many people. But Dry Top lacks some favorable elements from earlier open world maps such as chaining or random events. My thought here is that one does not exclude the other and in the future we could incorporate both the best of both designs.

• Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

Lastly this:

LunarNacht.8913:

@AnthonyOrdon.3926: How hard is it to create dynamic events? I thought to remember an article back at release that your systems allowed to create new events in a short time.

Good question! The answer: it depends. Largely on the complexity of the event and the experience level of the event designer. I can create a very simple event very quickly. Things such as interesting characters, voiced scenes, event criers, new mechanics, new items, finely tuned scaling, new bosses, new boss abilities, world impact, and chained events are examples of things that will give an event higher implementation cost. Some events feature none of those and some are all of the above. Complexity is also deceptively difficult to perceive. Clockwork Invasions, for example, appear to be many, many events but conceptually they were just one very large event, which is much less expensive. When I implemented those, I deliberately sacrificed depth to achieve breadth. In retrospect, a little more depth was definitely in order. But we were able to create what was more or less a brand new experience and we have those lessons to apply if we revisit the concept in the future (which I intend to do, at the right place and time).

But in specific regard to this thread, your question asks the possibility: could we keep maps fresh by adding tons and tons of events? In my experience, a large complexity factor in event implementation is other events. Any time an event is placed near another, we have to at least consider how they will interact. There’s one interaction between two events, two between three, five between four, nine between five, and so on. Returns definitely diminish. Over time we’ve come up with some effective techniques and patterns to mitigate this, but the cost is greater than zero.

Clearly I’m willing to ramble over this, so maybe someday we should have a thread on event complexity vs fun vs replayability. ;]

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Anthony, can you tell me why karma seems much less important now that it has been at release?

We have added a few karma sinks along the way but typically new content comes with a new currency, eg. candy corn or geodes. I haven’t personally implemented all of this content or currency but if I had to guess I would say that this pattern exists because we actually want to give you specific rewards for specific content.

I definitely agree that in-game world boss availability messaging is something that should be implemented and it’s something we would like to do.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about map completion is the abundance of things to do in any order I wish. Events could sort of have this nature if we showed them map-wide. But even telling players about events that are across a single map can be tricky business depending on the nature of that event. A number of events can be completed well within the time that it would take to travel to it from even the nearest waypoint. Yet a good argument for showing them anyway would be a map such as Dry Top or the Crown Pavilion, wherein you might care about the state of the events even if you don’t plan on participating in them.

Do you think that showing all of these events makes the map feel cluttered? Would it make finding the information you care about more difficult?

This is a neat idea. Personally, I’ve always felt that having some extra Order based objectives during open world events like Battle for LA or even a whole map like Dry Top would also be interesting both storywise and gameplay. It’s something I hope we’ll have time to touch on the future.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug where if the Shadow Behemoth is defeated while the portals are active, they will get stuck on the next iteration. We are working on a fix.

hchadw.1097:

Is there a reason why the District system wasnt adopted from guildwars 1 and used for the instances in GW2 map zones instead of the original overflow idea.

Guild Wars 1 is a very different game both in design and implementation. That’s all I can really say here.

On the schedule:

• It is not written in stone. We will adjust it as necessary.
• There’s lots of ways to go about this, but the current thinking is that it would be more convenient to plan for specific daily times rather than have a “sliding” rotation. We felt this was particularly necessary for larger events like the Triple Wurm and Tequatl.
• Although the old system had certain advantages, it had some major disadvantages as well:
  • Although non-scheduled events are more dynamic, you have a low chance of encountering events with long cooldown periods. Although it was originally thought that big events would be happenstance and rare opportunities that players would stumble on and become immersed in, we found that many players enjoy this type of content as a mainstay of their GW2 experience. When they can’t access that content regularly, we have a problem.
  • On the other hand, you may be aware of the external event tracking sites and have been using them play on regularly basis. This is a good approach in concept, but there’s some major pitfalls if you miss an opportunity to play because of a new build or encounter an overflow server.
• The intent of the schedule is to:
  • consistently provide access to large scale content for players who want to play it
  • deliver that content in such a way that players can plan and organize to prepare for it
  • help ensure that there are always enough participants in the content
  • help ensure that there is always enough server capacity to for all of the participants regardless of overflows, megaservers, etc
• There are still and will always be a large number of meta-events and bosses that are not on the schedule.

At some point, we would also like to introduce a messaging system in-game so that it’s always clear what world event content you participate in without having to utilize a resource outside of the game. I have no guarantee or ETA of when we might actually see this though.

A few answers:

• Guild World Events are the same as the public activation except they occur when you want them to start. Any bystanders can participate.
• You can still use the party UI to join someone in a different map instance.
• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.
• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.
• It’s very difficult to understand this situation if you’re not willing to look at the big picture. Similarly, you can’t really explain urban traffic by using a metaphor about seats at a dinner table. Server populations are big and they are not concrete. Players flow in and out all of the time, even when it seems like a map is completely full. The major change in the way the game is handling population is that it’s making better-informed decisions about where to direct you. If only my GPS did that.
• As the blog post mentions, we’ll be monitoring this very closely to make sure that the end result is positive.

Thanks for all your feedback. I look forward to tomorrow’s blog post and answering more of your questions.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Community isn’t just guild/friend list. Community is essentially everyone on your server, and that is being messed with.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new system is that it gets you playing with members of your home server more often.

village idiot.1436:

I see from the blog the implications the mega server has for event timers has yet to be addressed.

We will be addressing this in part 2/3. Sorry for the delay, I’m guessing it was decided that each portion of this announcement was big enough to deserve it’s own news day. Given the volume of posts in this thread, it might be for the best.

I’ve definitely simplified the way it actually works with the above description. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say that when you travel/log-in to a map, the game finds the best instance to put you in at that time. But the game won’t remove you from a map forcibly and put you in another.

Player density. Let’s say there are an average of 5 players in each world’s version of Iron Marches. In the new system, the game server will temporarily merge those players together into a few maps.

Make sure to check back for part 2 and 3 of this announcement for more details.

It’s no surprise that the “add more mechanics” idea comes up a lot for difficulty scaling. Not only does it sound really great, it was also the original plan. Unfortunately it’s just about the heaviest approach we could take because it implies that every boss in the fractal needs to be updated and rebalanced for every tier that we add. Assuming 2 bosses per Fractal (and we never added new Fractals), every time we add a tier of difficulty we have to do this 30 times. I’m not saying we can’t do it; I’m saying it would be slow. Much slower than say, adding one or two new Fractals per tier with entirely new content.

What I actually don’t like about that approach is that it has a lot of filler progression. Hypothetical levels 51-60 would effectively all be the same. We thought the advantage of assigning an MI to every level was that it literally made every level unique and also avoids the re-rolling problem that fractal selection has.

Back on randomness/replayability/rewards: I think the intent has always been to make the Fractals a very replayable experience by using random to create semi-unique iterations through the content. But the extrinsic reward motivators work to the contrary, making random unfavorable for optimal gain.

I’d like to see more speculation on middle ground solutions which both add meaningful variety to the Fractals without forcing players to feel like they’re trudging through non-optimal reward paths.

Also, this is all just speculation. I’m not advocating or declaring an official re-work of any system here. Just exploring possibilities for the evolution of this and future content.

I have a few questions for the thread. Sorry I’m a bit late (though I have been reading)!

First, I want to stir the pot on Instabilities. It’s been brought up a few times but never really discussed. In the conceptual phase they seemed like a great way to add replayability to the Fractals. Simple math seems to concur. Even though we built roughly 90 Instabilities, we were only able to ship about 20 because QA had to test approximately 300 configurations of content. That seems like a lot of variety, but obviously there’s some problems. Admittedly, some aren’t very good and they’re sorted in a less-than-stellar manner. They might have been more appealing and/or made more sense had we been able to implement to full plan. But then again, maybe not. I’d like to know what you think. Is this a good system? Does it add to the Fractal experience? Would you rather have 30 new Instabilities or 1 new Fractal? Which ones do you like/dislike? From reading the feedback, I’ve already been gathering some assumptions:

• Additive content is generally well received (extra creatures, environment effect)
• Slightly less popular are combat modifiers (exploding enemies, flanking)
• Stat modifiers are the least interesting. Specifically DPS reducation is a terrible idea.
• It’s more interesting to make builds instead of break them. For example, make condition damage more important than negate it.

Next is the difficulty/progression question. Personally I’ve always felt that the difficulty scaling in Fractals is a bit redundant. After all, once the creatures have started to one-shot you, does it continue to matter that they keep hitting harder? I know this has been commented on, but I’d like to hear some thoughts on alternatives. If not difficulty scaling (or supposing difficulty scaling simply stopped at a certain level), what else would add meaning to progressing through higher level Fractals? How does that align with your goals, whatever they may be (rewards, defeating hard content, discovery, etc).

Finally I have sort of a meta-question which is: what place, if any, does random have in the Fractals? While it’s easy to dismiss it because of the drawbacks, I think it’s important to talk about the drawbacks of not having it (or having another system) would be. Assume we solve re-rolling and make Dredge more reasonable, does random fractal selection add or detract from your satisfaction of playing in the Fractals? Was it more interesting at one time than it is now? Can we compare that with Instabilities, which are very predictable? Imagine if we completely strip random out everything possible and conjure a system where you complete specific sets of combinations of fractal/instability/difficulty to build specific items. Does that entice you or sound like a big grind?

Thanks in advance for reading and I look forward to continuing the discussion.

On cooldown length:

• The 30 minute length is based on the effective duration of the items (5 minutes). Compared with the Glyph of Lesser Elementals (Elemenatlist utility skill, 1 minute duration), 5 minutes is quite long.
• It’s possible that we could go to something more like 1 minute duration, 5 minute cooldown, but that’s getting back into re-balancing the item. With a re-balance we stand to raise equal or more controversy. Currently you can at least continue using the item to whatever end it was used before, albeit in a more limited fashion. Had we changed it completely, you may have been able to use the item more frequently but no longer in the same capacity as before.

On dungeons/instance:

• Yes there is a cumulative cost of having tons of these in instances. Without getting into too many technical details, 150 people in 30 dungeons using this item is just as bad as 150 people in 1 public map. Even if you have not experienced skill lag personally, there are constraints and instances do hit them.
• It is therefore completely unfair to assign blame to players who enjoy the large open world events. The events represent drastic instances of the problem, but the change was made to address the entirety of the issues that are being caused across the game.

On consumable design, in general:

• It’s not really my place to comment too widely on this aspect of the game. I do know for certain it would not be consistent with some of GW2’s fundamental design pillars to create an environment where everyone is expected to have on-hand some elaborate set of consumables needing to be laboriously maintained and activated. This is why, for example, you are allowed only one food buff at a time.

I’d like to shed some additional light here since I actually made the change to the summoning items.

First of all, I’m sorry that you guys are disappointed with the change. Unfortunately, we knew this was going to happen and we tried to come up with a solution to mitigate the disappointment as much as possible.

Here’s some facts about the circumstances you may find interesting:

• the change was made mostly to address the Fire Elemental Powder and the Ogre Pet Whistle since they cause the most problems. Other items were modified because they had the potential to become problems.
• these items are not the same as pets that the player professions can summon, for these reasons:
  • the items had no cooldown, meaning that the summoned creatures are effectively invincible and can always be alive assuming the player has more items
  • there’s no limit on how many different items you can use at the same time. Meaning you can have both the elemental and the ogre pet simultaneously
  • unfortunately, the creatures were not specifically designed to the constraints we have on pets in general. They are way more costly than your average ranger pet. In fact, they are exactly the same as the versions you fight in the open world which is what makes them so powerful.
• regardless of balance, the change was definitely made to address the various performance concerns that arise from allowing unlimited uses of the item by everyone in a map. Both the client and server are affected by having the extra creatures around.
• the need for the change was identified months ago. Many members of the team were adamantly against making the change because they knew it would destroy a popular strategy.

Given all of that information, and the introduction of two brand-new world events, something had to be done. Ultimately we decided with the cooldown approach because:

• we did not want to debuff/rebalance the potency of the creature resulting from a single use
• we did not want to completely eliminate the use of the item in large events
• it was not possible to clearly and cleanly message why the item would not be usable in large events or when there are too many nearby

The end result was a hefty cooldown, which honestly could have ended up being a lot longer.

Although we do our best to anticipate issues with various rewards designs, occasionally something goes unnoticed until it becomes a large problem. As customers, you probably witness less than 1% of these rejected designs. Of that small percentage that slip by, an even smaller percentage end up needing to be changed. Nothing ever gets removed because it’s fun. It just happens that fun things can sometimes get in the way other people having fun—like an item that cripples an entire server and causes everyone to have skill activation lag.

Tons of ideas get filtered out by discussion, data validation, quality assurance, and performance reporting on development branches. Most of them are good, fun ideas that we just can’t reasonably support. We’ll have to share some stories in a happier thread someday. For now I’ll be happy to answer any additional questions you might have on this topic.

There’s a couple of new bits about the Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle this year that you may find refreshing. The largest improvement is that you no longer have to wait until all of the players complete the puzzle in-between your attempts.

Both of the new boss type Fractals have been re-balanced and tuned to be more consistent with the other Fractals. The fight is indeed easier—at level 1. The original difficulty and more can be found a higher scales.

Clearly my comment has caused some confusion and offense, which was not my intent. For that, I offer my apology and a more literal version of what I mean to say:

Every profession has aspects that make it different than the others. Sometimes those aspects can exclude a player from taking full advantage of certain bonuses from equipment. But that is not the reason those choices exist. The implementation of a signet-related rune is not an oversight, nor is it meant as a deliberate exclusion of the engineer profession. It is meant to be a new, interesting choice for players that want to use to signets and want to play professions that have them.

We’re not changing any existing infusions.

40-49 has been slightly reduced. 50 is no longer impossible, but now represents the requirement for 50-59. More levels will be made available in the future.

Mist Essence is required in the recipes for the new runes and sigils.

For now, 50 is still the maximum level.

Every time you finish a complete set of Fractals (3 Standard Fractals + 1 Boss) you will receive the daily reward, restricted by account, which is consistent with other dungeon rewards. Each 10 levels of Fractals has it’s own daily reward. So if you played level 1, 11, 21, and 31, you would receive four daily rewards.

You only need Artificer skill level 100 to go as high as you can imagine.

Sunrise doesn’t change. Only Infused Ascended Back Items and Rings are getting new slots.

• Your total agony resist will not change. If you had 55, you will still have 55.
• These are new slot types. You can only slot Agony Resist Infusions into them. Agony Resist Infusions are new infusion types like Offensive, Defensive, and Omni. Between the two rings and the back item, you can currently get up to 3 of these slots.
• No changes are being made to Agony Resist on any other item.

See this post on existing weapons, sorry:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/fractured/Skin-acquirement-needs-to-stay-hard/first#post3228429

Yes, two +5’s are easier to attain than a single +10.

You won’t lose any Agony Resistance in this update.

It goes very, very high.

Just keep in mind that AR infusions slots are still limited to Infused Ascended Rings and Back Items. The slot is the real value here, as it has unlimited potential.

We fixed a number of bugs and made lots of balance changes to existing fractals. Also the difficulty scaling has been tweaked overall to create a slightly less difficult curve up to 50.

The weapons are skins now.

Ascended armor is not in the game right now, but if it was, it would drop in the Fractals.

They will skins that do not need transmutation stones to be applied.

Those rewards are not available in the Fractals at this time, sorry.