Guild Wars 2

MAGpie.7962:

We have heard, and loudly and mostly in all caps, the voices of the entitled generation, the folks who believe… actually, I dono what they believe.

Now, here is the voice of the other side, the side that feels that Anet has set a fair price. The side the believes it is not just a novel idea, but ground breaking to release an expansion with the base game (They were not first. Distant Worlds did it as well… but certainly in the MMO side I think). The side that do not feel they are being robbed because someone else is getting something they did not get (Not even sure how you logic that out). The side that supports the game and acknowledged that Anet employees do not work for charity (Gasp!).

The side that will… Buy 2 copies of HoT!

Yes, I will do that, and I will gift one copy to a friend, and bring someone into the game I would not be embarrassed to see talking in map-chat.

Cheers Anet. See you in HoT!

You forgot the side that doesn’t care that new players are getting the game for free but feel that HoT is too little content to warrant a 50$ price tag and that the only reason it has a 50$ price tag is because they bundled the value of the core game into the price of the expansion. All these people want is good value for their money but so far they aren’t seeing it. Entitlement has nothing to do with it.

• Arenanet’s admission of wrongdoing, and refusal to revert. This is an outstanding issue that became writ large in the series of patches stretching from September 2013 to December 2013, but really started with the Dhuumfire/Aetherblade patch.
  • As an example, take the rework of Diamond Skin for Elementalist into a condition immunity. This was a change widely protested by the community, yet was implemented anyway. The change accompanied severe nerfs to active condition cleansing in Water Magic to be replaced by a passive trait with hard counter gameplay. No proposals are on the way to revert this change.
  • Subsequent changes, including those outlined in the February 18 Ready Up show, do not propose reversions of previous changes and instead introduce new changes like Evade frames on Burning Speed for Elementalist, or an 8% shave instead of a full revert of Healing Signet for Warrior, or making Dhuumfire proc on Life Blast – yet leaving the Bleed and other Condition application nerfs for Necromancer intact, or alterations to Deceptive Evasion that affect all Mesmer builds instead of directly nerfing Clone Death traits out of hand.
  • All of these changes reflect a lack of root cause analysis in determining sources of problems – whilst introducing new potential problems by simultaneously altering other mechanics. If you make a mistake, you undo its damage rather than try to do something else entirely. This is not what is happening.
  • An admission of wrongdoing along with a refusal to revert should by all counts, be socially unacceptable, if not rationally inadvisable in the context of balance. This is an attitude and point of pride that Arenanet needs to eliminate if it is to regain community trust.

• Certain balance changes are being coupled to Feature patches whilst the meta stagnates
  • The most obvious examples here are the Healing Signet 8% nerf along with the bug fix to Spirit of Nature to alter healing from 480 to 320 as stated on the tooltip. Both of these changes are to be coupled to the March Feature patch – the same patch which will introduce double Sigils to two handed weapons and remove the GCD of dissimilar Sigil procs, along with a rework of many Rune sets.
  • It should be obvious to outside observers that this coupling will not only delay much needed balance affecting bug fixes, but will also muddle the balance picture. The effects on the meta of the Healing Signet and Spirit of Nature changes will be lost in the wake of the Rune and Sigil changes. Arenanet not only does its balance team a dis-service by making their jobs harder, but also fosters frustration by acknowledging an issue, yet dithering upon fixing it.

What can be done:
What can and should be done is simple. I’ve stated the same at the beginning. Change the attitude that pervades Arenanet’s current project management.

• Decouple Balance changes and bug fixes from Feature patches. Dhuumfire/Aetherblades was a lesson that should have been learnt, yet March 2014 aims to repeat the same mistake.

• Iterate on balance more frequently. You know those fortnightly Living Story content patches? Why is balance iteration not of the same pace when database coding should, by all rights, be less labour and wage intensive than content creation? The GDC presentation I linked at the beginning demonstrates that Arenanet prides itself as a “programmer’s” company, that their coders were their backbone. It would seem the other way around at this point, with art and content teams outperforming their erstwhile colleagues by leaps and bounds.

• With more frequent balance iteration, balance can be achieved faster. Make a mistake? It’s fine, there’s only going to be a fortnight of abuse. Right now, players in all 3 areas of PvE, PvP and WvW languish in the wake of the balance errors following Dhuumfire/Aetherblades – nigh on 7 months ago. This is an unacceptable pace of change in any industry, let alone a digital one where agility in development and iteration has been market demonstrated and market proved to be superior in outcome.

• Let the community test the changes instead of testing internally for months and releasing a disconnected series of changes. The current stance reflects an astonishing lack of agility and is reminiscent of developer attitudes in the 90’s where development of software was similarly inflexible.

• Admissions of wrongdoing should be accompanied with reversions, not ancillary changes. A lack of willingness to revert casts community doubt on the competence of the balance team and introduces the potential to cause new problems in the future. Working in healthcare, to give an example: Doctors don’t prescribe a medication, then prescribe 3 more to treat the side effects – they withdraw the problem medication and use another. A similar stance should – and must – be taken.

Balance and build diversity:

Overall, build diversity in GW2 has been severely curtailed by the fact that entire lines of Utility skills and Traits have been underwhelming – yet balance has focused almost exclusively on the rare few “meta” builds and skills. This often comes to the detriment of multiple skills and Utilities. Arenanet’s insistence on “letting the meta settle” has resulted in patches coming every few months that iterate on balance – yet the changes within reflect an increasing disconnect of balance intention and balance result.

Community Frustration and perception

The lack of iteration has bred community frustration and resentment towards Arenanet who feel that the pace of development is glacial. Features like PVP Leagues, new game modes and even basic features that have been promised for nigh on a year are only just now coming “over the horizon”.

In terms of balance, builds relying upon a confluence of traits and procs that emphasise great reward with little risk dominate the field – Healing Signet/Cleansing Ire Hambow Warrior, Decap (CC bunker) engineer, Spirit Ranger, Minion Master Necromancer – these are all builds that put the burden of skill upon the defender – overwhelmingly so – that “off-meta” or inferior builds with higher risk-reward ratios have to struggle to survive and yet contribute less to the outcome. The state of the game has teetered upon the brink since the introduction of the Dhuumfire/Aetherblade feature patch and despite a multitude of changes since, the same builds are still dominating and team compositions are looking increasingly similar – Bunker Guardian, Soldier’s Hambow Warrior +/- another Warrior, Thief, Spirit Ranger, (option of) Decap or Condition Bomb/Nade Engineer or Necromancer.

This is not to say that such builds should not exist, but balance should be in such a way that more builds than those listed above can have a place in a team composition without those builds shutting out others to the point of exclusion.

For PVE, the so-called “Damage, Support, Control” alternative trinity so trumpeted as the innovation over the “Tank, Healer, DPS” trinity has dissipated in favour of “DPS, DPS, DPS”.

Defiance has stripped the Control archetype of its teeth, whilst providing no reward for controlling Boss mobs.

Slow, extremely hard hitting attacks have negated the need for Support – there is little need to support allies with healing if taking a hit means almost certain death. DPS with just enough Support through Boons has become the one true god and PvE encounters have devolved into a “stack mobs, cleave to death” DPS race over thoughtful, deliberate challenges that tax a group’s ability to co-ordinate and problem solve.

Finally, there also exists the issue of balancing errors, and bugs affecting balance being unaddressed for significant periods. A few examples:

• Sigil of Paralysation was found to prolong Fear and Stun duration by a full second as opposed to the intended 15% extension. The bug was found, reported and admitted to be an issue soon after the Dhuumfire patch, yet remained unfixed until soon after the PAX Tournament. In the mean time, Terror Necromancers and CC Warriors exploited the Sigil for months.

This is a topic that I’ve been debating with myself whether to open or not for the longest time. I feel that it’s important to bring this up because it strikes at the heart of one of the flaws of GW2’s product life cycle – project management. But for those that will TL;DR, the basic argument is this:
Balance is about iteration, and Arenanet is not iterating fast enough
Fundamental profession, PvP, PvE and WvW bugs and problems remain unaddressed in lieu of fortnightly content updates

I will touch on a few key points:

1. A preamble
2. Some problems remain unfixed
3. New content is pushed in lieu of iteration and polish
4. Community perception of paralysis and disconnect
5. Community frustration and responses
6. What can be done to address the issue

I was finally pushed to make this topic when I saw Cameron Dunn’s GDC lecture discussing Guild Wars 2’s server infrastructure – and what is possible using Guild Wars 2’s Duo system to iterate on the game. Click the quick-link to the “Iterate” bookmark or skip to 35:47 timestamp if you don’t want to spare the 45 minutes to learn about Arenanet’s amazing infrastructure and their metrics that they like to talk about. This thread is also instructive and discusses why more frequent iteration is essential for balance

I want to bring this up because the game is now well over a year past its launch. Despite teething problems, GW2’s launch was one of the smoothest I have ever played through and it is a great game at heart. The trouble is, well over a year past its launch, some of its teething problems are still writ large. Despite fortnightly Living Story releases to support the game, fundamental profession issues and bugs remain unfixed; while community response to Feature patches that include sweeping Balance Changes has not been actioned for months – often until the next Feature patch.

This is a bad trend and it needs to stop.

Arenanet has coded this groundbreaking infrastructure and it is being squandered on providing temporary content instead of fixing and polishing and iterating on their game. This kind of project management has lead to dozens of threads of negativity and more than a few veteran players quitting the game. In some cases, whole teams. Team Paradigm (recently started playing again), Absolute Legends (disbanded), Made in Meta, to name just a few.

Preamble over. Onto persistent problems and QoL issues that remain unaddressed.

On the various forums one can find dozens of threads, often pertaining to – and addressing and re-addressing – the same issues, over and over. This is a problem, because it leads to a community perception of paralysis, which causes:

1. A perception of neglect
2. Accumulation of negative PR
3. A perception of broken promises

As an example, here are a few outstanding issues on PvP:
Leaderboards and/or leagues. Leaderboards were released somewhat buggy, whilst promises for Ladders and Leagues stretch back a few years

• Leaderboards
• All is vain
• A stale (condition) meta
• Glicko 2 flaws (a review of the current flaws of the GW2 Glicko 2 implementation and leaderboards
• Lack of iteration on PVP

• Matchmaking remains hit-and-miss for some. 4V5 and being teamed together with new players has been a source for considerable angst.

A warrior complaining? Are you even kidding me? I 100% thought you were trolling at first. Did you forget about the +1000 toughness on stunbreak? Because warriors need to be even more tanky. And did you forget about the 100% crit chance on burst skill? This means warriors don’t need precision for bursts in PvP. That leaves them open to stack all those points in another stat. Warriors have been nothing but buffed for the last year which leads me to believe all anet devs are terribad warriors who can’t pvp to save their life.

Anet, I have to ask a question, Do any of you actually play a Ranger?

Because I’m looking at what other Classes are getting for GM Traits, and i’m looking at the Ranger ones.. and i’m confused exactly what you’re thinking with the class you just did a CDI with?

Marksmanship: Read the Wind: Longbow and Harpoon Gun projectile velocity is increased by 100%

Will not be used, Both Longbow Range increase and the Piercing Arrow Trait are better then this trait… If you weren’t going to run Piercing Arrow Trait, you’d run Beastmaster probably or Spotter…There is no room for this trait

Skirmishing: Strider’s Defense – You have a 15% chance to block ranged attacks while in melee.

Again, Who is going to use this trait? Trappers won’t use it because they’re already investing points into making traps better, Interrupt Builds grab MoC, Berserker Rangers won’t use it because no one sane runs a bloody melee weapon with berserker gear

Wilderness Survival : Poison Master – Poison you apply deals 50% extra damage. Poison your pet’s first attack when they are swapped to.

Again, will not be used, Because Empathetic Bond is in its place..Its the same reason Barkskin is not used

Nature Magic: Survival of the fittest – Remove two conditions and gain fury when using a survival skill.

Spirit Rangers will not use it, Shout Based Regen Rangers again will not use it, So who’s this trait intended for? There is no viable builds that’ll go for it.

Beast Mastery: Invigorating Bond- Your pet heals in an area when executing command abilities.

Unless its an amazing heal, Who’s going to use this ability over Natural Healing, Since like Natural healing, it’ll probably be based off the pets healing power.

So My question stands, Do any of you actually play the class? Because I’m doubting you do

Really? Our Marksman Grandmaster is basically to allow rangers to hit targets with the reliability of warrior and engineer rifles or thief pistols?

The kitten arrows don’t even hit a sidestepping target beyond 600+ range. The velocity should be increased baseline.

It’s incredible that for 1.5 years, Rangers have been telling you that they suffer because all their traits/utilities/weapons need heavy point investment to even function, and you go ahead and waste a grandmaster trait slot on a fix that should be baked into the weapon instead of paid for.

RANGER WEAPONS AND UTILITIES SHOULD FUNCTION WITHOUT TRAIT INVESTMENT, LET ALONE 30 TRAIT POINTS.

Moreover, the power line grandmaster only covers the longbow, when bows are not used to begin with in most game formats?

Bows are of little worth in PvE, where melee weapons will always be favored over ranged ones. And in PvP bows are at a disadvantage because of their crappy defensive capabilities.

And the longbow and shortbow not only have a failure in hitting moving targets beyond 600+ range, but unlike the engineer rifle the arrows don’t even pierce baseline, which they should.

Rangers lack immensely in the aoe department. It’s that plus utility and their low innate base weapon damage and power scaling that has made them undesirable for any group content, especially WvW.

3. The PUG experience
Using this in a broad term, I’m applying this not just to dungeons, but also open world and WvW. Dungeons were a means of getting tokens, but they were also a demonstration of mastery. It’s very easy to tell when a group of people are good, or bad, and why. Some groups were agonizing, torturous affairs I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Some were absolutely heavenly. That level of uncertainty, that sense of expectation, was a primary incentive for doing them, to me. My favorite groups were mildly competent to supercompetent, with good raport between members. Classes, gear, builds, didn’t matter. A group where we were having difficulty could be a blast so long as everyone had good humor. There’s nothing like adversity to really encourage bonding between total strangers, and the sense of glee when the other person in your party finally makes it through the laser trap in CoE after groupchat is full of swearing and onomotopoea for two and a half minutes. That was the real reward.

It was a very, very big thing that kept me playing GW2.

I would search the old third-party LFG website, looking for groups who had promising headers out of the dozen or more options presented at peak hours. “Looking for some sexy, slippery, warriors,” “LF3M, prose accepted, poetry not permitted.” Even in the middle of the night there was at least two or three groups running, or trying to run.

Where have they all gone? Dungeon rewards have been “buffed” but it feels like fewer and fewer people do them.

On top of that, the groups have become more and more machiavellian. Less people do dungeons, so there are fewer and fewer opportunities for new people to learn how to do them. The number of groups forming to help new players has plummeted. Half the postings seem to be “LV80 EXPERIENCED ONLY.” Many times these are the very people who are the worst, looking for other people, more experienced, to carry them. It is often, needless to say, a humorless affair much of the time now.

The quality seems to have dropped. There’s less emphasis on pure community involvement, and gold is has come to define progress. Getting to WvW now, briefly. The number of commander tags seems to go up every month, but the WvW seems to get worse. People are just buying them because they can.

Maybe the two things are kind of unrelated. The next one-half is completely unrelated.

3.5 Living story
The two-week development thing is a cool idea. It’s a lot of work to impliment, and it has been implimented consistently, and I appreciate that. This is a completely personal perception, and not as major of a contributor as the others. But Scarlet irritates the crap out of me. I’m sorry to all of those people who created and love her, but she seems like the pinnacle of a mary-sue villain. Good at whatever she tries to do. Always getting away. She reeks of deus ex machina, shoehorning, and story convenience. This, like the regular personal story missions, could easily be avoided. But more and more I feel like this content, too, has become unavoidable.

My favorite living story events were, in order, Secret of Southsun, Adventure Box, and Zephyr Sanctum. Secret of Southsun was great, not just for the crazy loot, but because if you did pay attention to the story, it was actually a pretty gut-wrenching look at the way refugees from the previous event were exploited, and presented their justified desire for liberation in conflict with the order imposed by the Consortium.

Adventure Box World 1. ’Nuff said.

Zephyr Sanctum, and more specifically the election, were cool events, and again there was subtlety to find if one looked. Kiel, as the well-intending, do-gooding, candidate inexperienced in the matters of administration and trade vs. Gnashblade, who was essentially a corporate CEO with questionable ethics, who no doubt had much greater experience, and possibly ability.

Conversation with Gnashblade would reveal him to seem rather more oblivious than at first imagined, but under the original impression the election seemed like an interesting choice.

There was nuance in these, nuance which seems to be completely absent from most of the new content. It’s ham-fisted and in your face, and the lack of subtlty really turns me off.

So there it is. I’m not saying I’m leaving forever. I don’t think I could. Maybe things can still be done and the game will move in a direction back towards its roots. But until that point, I think I’m done with GW2.

Does anyone else feel this way?

1. Ascended crafting
It is a grind. That is a fact, especially regarding the new armor. Look in the crafting subforum if you don’t believe me, the numbers are plastered all over many posts on the topic. It’s absolutely insane. On top of that, it’s fueled this massive BLTP speculation mini-industry that has completely gated out new players (more on that later).

Now I’m sure some people will say, “Hold the phone here. That stuff’s not required, it’s completely optional, its just a 5%(?) stat boost, and you only need it for fractals!”

Maybe that first part is technically correct. But even then, a 5% boost is a 5% boost. Why should I play for so long and settle for sitting on 95%?

Also, ascended stuff has also been tossed at us from every angle since its release. Dragonite from meta bosses and WvW, empyreal from dungeons… and wvw.

Bloodstone dust. ’Nuff said.

So let’s put this in perspective, the “optional” argument. A good example of “optional”? SPvP.It’s a button, next to other buttons at the top of the screen. I don’t like PvP, but that’s just my personal preference. GW2 has so kitten much content, that button remains a mere button. There’s never a reminder, or a poke, or a shoehorn shoving SPvP in my face, aside from the section for SPvP in the patch notes. But reading those is reeeally optional, and one can easily just skip over that section anyway. Fractals was much the same way, once, where you could completely avoid that little corner of L.A. and its concerns of ascended gear and agony resistance.

Now, you want to do a dungeon? WvW? Ascended mats. Meta events? Ascended mats. The only way to completely avoid it is to do PVE or WVW while deliberately never tagging meta bosses or champions, which means missing out on the best loot, which, if we’re honest, is a primary reason for engaging in those activities. There is no option to ignore this crap, because it piles up in your collections bank, and then it piles up in your bank, and then before you know it one of your alts becomes nothing but an ill-used bloodstone dust depository. That, unless you just toss it all out-but you went through the trouble of earning it, didn’t you? It feels like a waste. That brings me to my next topic.

2. Earning rewards.
One of the major selling points of this game, for me, and my friends, was the fact that exotic gear was the top tier, and there were many ways to receive it. You could craft it, get it with karma or, best of all, dungeons. You could get it in drops but by no means did you, or should you, have relied upon that method.

The reason I call dungeons the best method is because the amount of grind was not too much, not too little- it felt just right. It’s the porridge Goldilocks would have chosen. In addition to the rewards/loot, the PUG experience was a blast. Was. I’ll get to that later, too.

This has really positive implications for new players (hence it being a selling point). Put the work in to level your character, and perhaps at the same time, put several hours in on a dungeon or two (the stat sets are shared across multiple token rewards in several cases) and you can be outfitted in the gear and weapons of your choice, and they can carry you through everything else you do. Exotics were a level of prestige, an end-point, an accomplishment. Everything beyond that was customization: appearance, colors, etc. A complete matter of personal preference. Getting to that end point, of the stat set and look you want, was extremely satisfying, and gave a sense of having earned it, and owning it.

Now, what’s the point of doing dungeons? The tokens are irrelevant; it’s about the loot and the gold now. Exotics have become so undervalued that you can buy them off the BLTP for dirt. There’s no satisfaction to running CoF and CoE for two weeks for full zerker gear (for example) when you can buy the weapons and armor on the BLTP for a gold and a half or less which, in the GW2 economy of today, is pennies.

This, especially, because ascended crafters and tradepost moguls have turned exotics to lead and crafting materials to gold. With the sense of accomplishment, and to a lesser degree prestige, blown off of exotics, what’s left?

Ascended gear. And for that, you have to grind. Given how expensive mats have gotten and are likely to remain, crafting is basically gated off from new players for a long time, far more than it was for me than I started, and for more than it is for veterans who have spent a year stockpiling stuff through passive play.

The past tense is deliberate.

I never played GW1. I wasn’t interested in GW2. A friend of mine bought it for me when it was released, insisting that I would love it. At first, I didn’t. I didn’t quite get it, it didn’t quite “click.”

And then, about a week into playing off and on, it finally “clicked.”

Four hundred and seventy-some days, and nearly three thousand hours of play time (2988 according to /age) later, and I played it chronically, but never posted on these forums. I loved this game to death, it was often the highlight of my day, and I never dreamed that it would ever not be a part of my life in the future.

The environment and design was efficient, whimsical, and self-aware. I never got the sense the game took itself too seriously or expected anything out of its players aside from their own enjoyment. There was the occasional tortuous PUG or game-breaking bug, but if I had to proportionalize that sort of thing it had a rate of maybe .0001% all-told. Nothing to cry about.

That’s why I never really posted here. I was really tempted to, once, after an especially painful Arah run. But I never did. I complained briefly about the Guardian’s virtues, but, meh. I always got the feeling that ultimately, it wasn’t necessary. “If there’s a problem, Anet is on it, so it’s in good hands. Besides, I’m probably overreacting anyway,” I thought. Plus I was too busy playing and having fun, to complain.

I don’t really have a right to complain. I’m not a victim or anything. I didn’t even buy the game for myself, though I donated some money towards a copy for another friend, and I spent money on the gemstore. But three thousand hours is the best value I’ve ever gotten out of any game, period, even if it cost a hundred dollars. My two hundred hours of Skyrim looks absolutely pathetic in comparison.

GW2 is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, and certainly one of the best MMOs. A lot of good people worked kitten this and believe in it, and it shows.

I feel the need to establish this, because I don’t want to sound unappreciative with what I am about to say.

I’m not having fun anymore.

Maybe it’s my fault. I mean, three thousand hours out of anything is bound to run it dry. But the game doesn’t feel stale or old. I don’t feel like I’ve simply played too much, and the urge to get back on and do a dungeon hits me regularly.

GW2 has just become a grind. It’s lost its luster. And it bothers the heck out of me.

I’m going to try to analyze why I feel this way. I’m not an expert in anything, but I think I can isolate it to three and a half major areas.

I miss having faith in the developer.

The only way you’re going to make people leave arcane and water is if you.

1. Make evasive arcana either baseline or put it in the adept section of arcane
2. Make the attunement swap cds even lower
3. Increase class base healing and vitality by at least 150
4. Make attunement swap blast in the 15 trait slots an arcane trait ranging from adept to master, replacing all the 15 trait point buffs with A more buff defined attunement swap affect like Auras.
5. Make decent fire traits.

Seriously I don’t know your thought process behind elementalist’s trait diversity but not a soul is going to take 30 in fire because of how little the damage increase is for the trade off in survivability.

Also moving really helpful things like Cleansing wave when we attune to water, to grandmaster is a big nerf to our survival and extremely lazy on your part.