Guild Wars 2

Bottom line is that one of the primary metrics they show investors is the number of logins per day (one of the reasons for the daily login gifts). One day sales contribute to the daily login metric.

chemiclord.3978:

…You are a CUSTOMER…

Sorry, in the corporate world, the customer is the shareholders. We paying peasant players are nothing more than a revenue stream. The company sets revenue targets based on operating costs and put metrics in place to measure the results. As long as the revenue targets are met, there is no incentive to change anything.

A good percentage of this game’s population do not like doing grouped, instanced content. The dungeon community here is toxic, especially to beginners. The party management system (kick function in particular) leaves much to be desired. Is it really that surprising that players are pushing back against this?

I’m probably just feeding a troll, but it needs to be repeated often. You don’t retain a player base by forcing them into undesirable content for desirable items – they tend to rebel and find something else to do, and probably not your game. “Thank you please may I have another” doesn’t work. Never has, never will.

“1 Mists Stone (5 Pristine Fractal Relics)”
“16 Agony +1 Infusions”

Nothing like being forced into fracking fractals to dampen the enthusiasm to make this. /sigh

The area where the mystic forge resided previously should be back to normal by early December. I cannot see them spending very much time restructuring the holiday decorations and events that have been designed over the last two years.

Honestly, if the developers thought there was an issue with the party kick system they would have changed it by now. And seeing how they haven’t, they are not interested in improving the dungeon participation rate of the community. The metrics must be acceptable to them.

I see no reason to continue this thread other than to allow players to vent because it is obvious the party system in place is here to stay and suggestions to change it are falling on deaf ears.

Scrambles.2604:

I am happy to hear you take more issue with the presentation of my argument rather than the substance.

Here is my reply to the “presentation” of your argument:

(1) You dismiss concerns posted by others about how they have been treated in the past in other games that offer the feature that you want. You call it fear mongering, exaggeration, etc. How do you know? What makes you the arbiter of which past experiences matter?

(2) You want no, or very little restrictions on the feature. GW2 has nearly two years of experience with the lack of this feature in open world PvE. Some players have even stated they chose this game specifically due to the lack of this feature.

(3) You dismiss claims that this feature will cause additional harassment in the game by an equivalency that harassment is already in the game and that there are mechanisms to deal with it already. Others, including myself, have offered various solutions that will limit the potential for harassment. Any that causes even the smallest restriction to your wanted feature you dismiss.

(4) Other players have made you aware that specific PvP areas are available and already set up for what you want. Your major argument here is that the current offerings don’t permit using PvE equipment. Perhaps you should propose that PvE equipment be permitted as another sandbox in these areas instead of bringing it into an area that was not built for it?

tldr: You want unrestricted dueling in PvE and nothing anyone presents opposing it is a valid counterpoint to it in your opinion.

Scrambles.2604:

Please keep real world politics off of this forum such as references to “fox news-esque hyperbole.” I don’t expect to see them here and I doubt may others do either.

BTW, they tend to divert attention from your main argument and cause at least half your potential audience to dismiss what you are trying to say.

Scrambles.2604:

I would love to squash the idea that dueling automatically equals harassment. Anytime a good tool/feature is suggested for GW2 people are up in arms about trolls and harassment.

DPS meter – Nope! elitism, bullies, kick from groups, i play how i want, harassment, etc.
Gear inspect – Nope! Elitism, harassment, belittlement, kick from groups, etc.

Yes, harassment may occur around those things, as well as duels. But harassment also occurs everywhere else! All the while, reasonable folk go unnoticed when using these things properly and only the trolls stick out, so i guess only trolls must use those things!

People are up in arms for good reasons with certain tools and features by way of experience with them in other games.

DPS and gear checks split the FFXI community into a small segment of elite players that absolutely would not play with anyone else and a large group of disdained casuals. Due to this (and the uniformly hated iLevel gear progression system), new FFXI players are almost extinct and the game has to resort to login campaigns and introduce many, many solo activities to keep the existing player base.

I’ll bring up Aion again as an example of dueling harassment – it happens in all popular cities in that game and causes all sorts of chat based arguements.

The primary reason for DPS meters and gear checks is to permit segregation of the player base by the players. Dueling can also be misused as a “recruitment” tool for membership application to guilds or dungeon parties – i.e. we will only accept the winner of a duel between two applicants.

Again, what harm is it if methods of implementing dueling can be done in a way where it is transparent to other players? Sure, harassment can be accomplished in many ways for many activities, but why not try to make it more difficult when possible?

Scrambles.2604:

Without duels, players spam their abilities all the time, everywhere. The bank, crafting, TP….without duels. I really doubt this is a serious issue. In fact, this is about the only place you see costume brawls occur…yet i have seen no complaints about that.

If you can’t be bothered to see other peoples spell effects, even in non-combat areas, you are definitely in the wrong game. No mana cost and no target needed for spell casts encourages useless spell spam more so than any other MMO out there, yet it’s only an issue when duels are mentioned >_>

I’ve read the majority of your posts in this thread and I guess I don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish. You seem to object to any implementation that would place restrictions on the players executing the duels.

Would you use the ability to duel as some sort of public challenge event in or near a populated area such as a popular city such as one-on-one challenge fights for gold, etc.?

Your earlier posts seem to indicate that you wanted PvE dueling so that you could easily use any PvE zone to check out PvE gear and builds with friends. Why would you care if others not involved would be able to view your duel or observe your chat?

I tried to present a solution for what you seemed to want, but from your recent responses there is something else in play that you are not disclosing.

BTW, I have been playing GW2 since launch and I have yet to see a costume brawl. Players do not frequently spam skills around crafting stations or frequently used NPCs either – it has never been an issue. Players do spam skills, shoot fireworks, tell jokes, do emotes, etc. while waiting for world boss events, but all others in the area are there for the same reason and no one is harassed or annoyed.

The biggest issue with dueling is the resultant zone wide (or nearby) channel chat that it inevitably causes. It is as welcome as the Queensdale champion train trash talk when someone decides to try a champion outside the train.

Sartharina.3542:

With my experience, I’d rather not have duels be isolated from the rest of the game. Trash talking and abuse are trash talking and abuse. Ignore works, as does reporting troublesome players (If that’s an option). People taking duels seriously is also a problem, but it’s hard to properly implement a more open approach to intercharacter aggression that doesn’t allow griefing.

In my experience while playing other games, ignore only helps with player to player verbal abuse and it does not prevent the initial unwanted communication. It also does nothing to eliminate the constant barrage of zone wide trash talk in populated zones such as cities (Aion is notorious for this).

Players dueling around crafting stations, NPCs, events, etc. are annoying and unwelcome. Again, if a way can be found to permit consenting dueling using PvE zones without affecting players there for other activities, I have no objections.

Atlas.9704:

Audrey.7246:

If ArenaNet is willing to code the above rules to create a “duel mode” in PvE modes, I’d say go for it since the net effect on me is that I would not see it or even know it is in progress. Now if it is worth their while since PvP zones already exist is another matter.

So all those steps lead to what essentially is: “Allow duel, remove them from PvE, put them back afterwards, environment doesn’t affect them nor they it.”

All the more reason to stick duels back in the Mist.

It could be coded to use the existing MegaServer zones – making objects viewable or targetable does not require a separate instance and neither does eliminating them from scaling calculations. The advantage is that the duelers could use any PvE zone without affecting anyone else and they could use their PvE gear while doing so.

I’m generally not in favor of PvE dueling since it usually leads to verbal harassment or “trash talk” spam using zone wide chat channels that no one other than the duel participants wants to see.

I would be all for it if the following were in place before it was enabled:

(1) Auto decline in place and on by default. If you want to duel you should have to turn it on.

(2) Anyone who requests a duel with a player who has auto decline on will be unable to personal chat with that player for a 60 minute cool down – makes personal channel harassment hard to accomplish. Nearby shout and zone shout harassment would be handled as usual with the reporting mechanism. Same for “friends” of the duelers sending followup harassing personal chats.

(3) While a duel is active, participants would not be able to use the nearby shout and zone shout channels. A special duel chat channel or the usual personal chat channel would suffice and no one else would be showered with annoying duel chat.

(4) While a duel is active, player models of the participants would not be viewable/targetable by non participants. Likewise, all non participant player models would not be viewable/targetable by the duel participants.

(5) The duel participants would not count towards event scaling or be able to affect open world mobs and events in any way while the duel is in progress. This would help eliminate the ability of the duelers to grief open world events.

(6) The duel participants would be returned to the exact position they started the duel when it is complete. This would eliminate using the duel mode to gain a positional advantage in a jumping puzzle or other event that uses mobs as part of the challenge.

If ArenaNet is willing to code the above rules to create a “duel mode” in PvE modes, I’d say go for it since the net effect on me is that I would not see it or even know it is in progress. Now if it is worth their while since PvP zones already exist is another matter.

JustTrogdor.7892:

It would be nice to see a red post on this given the impact this change has on all of us. I’m not expecting it but hey I can dream. LOL

This thread has over 6000 reads. So for all you lurkers, you need to speak up about how you feel regarding this change. ;P

Un-lurking

I too would like more options for each play mode and would not object to being limited receiving credit for five each day.

rstripn.8697:

3) The silence could mean they don’t consider anything in this patch to be a mistake, and that they have chosen not to explain their reasoning to us, nor to discuss changes. This would be bad, not just for us, but for the future of the game.

As I speculated in an earlier post many of the changes in the patch may be due to a desire to reduce operating costs via hardware consolidation. Naturally admitting such is not an attractive option.

I may be wrong, but many of the decisions made in implementing the MegaServer patch appear to be based on hardware consolidation. Removing a guaranteed spawn for each zone on each defined world implies fewer computing resources are needed. Letting only one world boss spawn per time slot removes the need to support multiple highly populated zones simultaneously.

If this is the main reason for the patch, it could be that some of the Guild Wars 2 hardware is being redirected to another project or consolidation is being performed to reduce operating costs. Perhaps the current number of simultaneous users does not justify the original hardware configuration.

I too agree that the inflexible world boss schedule is not ideal for those who have a limited but consistent time slot to play each day. Multiple world boss spawns does not appear to be a solution (would require more computing resources) but rotating the schedule on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis would help.

There are easy solutions to this issue, some require extra server resources per account and some do not.

One possible solution requiring additional server resources would be to implement a daily counter for each account which increments at the reset time and decrements when a set of daily requirements is finished. As long as the counter is greater than zero after the decrement a new set of dailies would then appear. This new set could be randomly generated or repeat the current daily set. The daily counter could be set to one at the beginning of the month reset or just incremented if it is desired to let a player “catch up” on prior month dailies.

Another solution, similar to the first but not requiring a daily counter per account, would be to use the mail system to send a consumable “daily token” each day at the reset time that would start the daily when used. Multiple “daily token” items could be used per day. The “daily token” items would stack to minimize inventory space. This solution has the drawback of sending mail everyday to every account. The limit on the amount of unread mail per account is also an issue that would “gate” those not able to login often enough to retrieve the “daily token” item from mail. A new type of “daily token” could be generated each month if it is desired to limit the usable accumulation to the current month.

According to the official wiki:

“Daily and Monthly achievements — they reset back to zero at the start of each day and month respectively, at midnight UTC (4:00 PM PST/5:00 PM PDT).”

If you are playing in a region that practices a time change, your reset time will change accordingly. If it doesn’t (such as Arizona in the United States) the reset time will remain the same.