Guild Wars 2

3) Reduce resource requirements for those recipes either by decreasing required amounts of finished goods (e.g. ingots) or required amounts of raw materials (e.g. 2 pieces of wood to produce 1 plank).
Although, I personally don’t understand the logic behind wood refinement. Always thought that a plank is made out of a single piece of wood, but hey I won’t get picky.
Let’s say that wood refinement has to be on par with ore refinement and shake hands on 2 pieces.
We’re not gathering splinters, right? At least it seems like we’re felling whole trees in the game engine. Those should be long enough for a single plank at the very least.
Otherwise, we’ll need a ton of glue and nails to put those splinters together. Not to mention that the rigidity of a weapon handle made out of splinters is dubious.
Anyway, having to gather 360 instead of 480 logs for a single weapon sounds somewhat more reasonable, eh?

4) As a continuation of point 3 above – swap multitudes of ordinary materials in ascended and legendary recipes with single pieces of ascended and legendary materials.
I’m not saying that we have to chase realism fanatically in a fantasy RPG but there are certain advantages in simulating realism too. Let me elaborate.
How about adding a handful of special trees/ore nodes at the end of jumping puzzles which yield a single log of wood/chunk of ore for an ascended recipe which in turn requires a single plank/ingot of that same special wood/metal?
Or maybe the recipe requires one plank/ingot of several types of special woods/ores, and a single tree/ore node for each of those exists somewhere.
Does not even have to be a JP. Any place in Tyria that is hard to reach and requires jumping skills or thorough exploration will make things more interesting.
May also be at the end of a dungeon path or in a chest at the top of a tower in WvW.
Again, difficulty is not in the number of pieces required. It is offset by the difficulty and, more importantly, the diversity of the trip to the resource.
Similarly, the only way to obtain special leathers and pieces of cloth may be to kill a rare monster or a magus,
special gems may be scattered in chests all around the world, special plants taking root from the depths of the ocean to the ridges of the tallest mountains and so on and so forth.
Let’s work for those materials as part of a vivid journey, not a sleepless night at the Black Lion Trading Post with a calculator in hand and a spreadsheet open in the background.

Please share your thoughts and opinions.

The requirements for achievements like “Saving the City of Gold”, “Realm Avenger”, “Connoisseur of Confection”, “Koda’s Blessing” among others have to be reconsidered.
In a similar fashion, most master artisan, ascended and legendary gear recipes are so resource and time-gated that they turn people away from crafting rather than make it interesting.
Those shout out: “To get me, I want you to live in the game for months on end, drop school, leave your job, sell whatever you can, forget everybody you’ve ever known”.
This is a bad way to make people play in the long run.
Asking for a task to be repeated 250,000 times or huge amounts of an extremely rare resource to be acquired is just rude.
Like waving candy in front of a child’s face then taking it away while laughing maniacally.
IMHO, there are smarter ways to make people stay and play on a regular basis.
For starters, the solution for those achievements with the huge counters is simple – just reduce the numbers.
As for the those that ask players to acquire a lot of rare and expensive materials, here are several suggestions:

1) Make tier 6 resources more abundant (e.g. replace some Mithril Ore nodes with Orichalcum Ore nodes).
Why place so many mithril nodes in new 80+ zones when the material is in excess already?
At the same time orichalcum is so desperately needed and scarce even without the constant addition of more legendary weapon and armor recipes as well as rare collections.
Respectively, salvaging high-level equipment should yield 2-3 pieces of metal, leather, wood, orbs, globs etc. instead of a measly 1.

2) Change the mechanic of “play-GW2-for-5-years” collections altogether. Instead of asking for resources that cannot possibly be acquired in months, and that is for a single piece of equipment, try this:
Longer scavenger hunts that send players to multiple zones. Not necessarily involving new item icons and effects.
Use old code and art, just change item names and add more events that end quickly but spawn more often.
These hunts may even be tied to new expansions and Living World releases, i.e. one may not be able to complete the hunt right away because the last 3 pieces of the puzzle are in Cantha for instance.
Similar to what was done for the legendary armor collection.
This will give players something to do in between story, promote exploration and revisiting of old areas.
Such a hunt has a feel for natural progression to it, evolving alongside Tyria and the story of its characters.
Let’s make a quick comparison. On the one hand there is a collection/recipe that has nothing special and unique about it, just grind the same old resources in ever-increasing amounts.
On the other hand we have an activity that has a distinct sub-story and community-oriented mechanics (hello, we’re still playing a D&D-like MMO, not a pretty stock exchange UI, right?) – a real adventure.
It’s all about mentality really. With the scavenger hunt, you may not be able to do it on Xday because you have to go to school or work, your friends are not online or you’re just not in the mood.
On Yday however, you’re all free, well-rested and hungry for adventure. You go in and do part 5 out of 12 of the collection for the latest legendary sword.
In contrast, with some of the current achievements/collections, no matter how many mornings in row you get up, make a cup of coffee and brace yourself up, after you log in the counter will still be at 3,047/100,000.
More time and more friends to help don’t make things better because the counter ticks with one where you need thousands. Its depressing, discouraging and feels exactly the opposite of rewarding.
Back to my point about mentality – make people look forward to a long scavenger hunt with a couple of slightly different and marginally exciting new steps each month/quarter rather than the same old resource grind forever.

I’ll second that. If there was a puzzle involved, like say make the little hounds attack the alpha, this would be a cool achievement but this is just ridiculous.
What if I don’t have friends and I still want to play your game?

Excruciating. Even with a perfect set of utility skills, strategy and good timing.
I have been playing MMORPGs for over a decade now, but never had to make 80 tries to achieve something. Bought a second set of gear and respecced for max dps to no avail. To me this event is imbalanced and thoughtless.

Call me a hater, but I hate you for doing this to us.

Crovax.7854:

Avanglion.3598:

And if you somehow manage to get up to the diving goggles, you cannot tell which is the right direction for the jump. On my server, the pad is above a mountain top which blocks the whole jumping puzzle below from view. Several poor souls made the leap of faith in front of me in three different directions and always landed on solid rock. So where’s the water after all?

to your west. just run off, you don’t need to jump and you should land directly in the little pool of water.

Exactly as you said. Almost met with one of the girdles head on but made it. Thank you!

And if you somehow manage to get up to the diving goggles, you cannot tell which is the right direction for the jump. On my server, the pad is above a mountain top which blocks the whole jumping puzzle below from view. Several poor souls made the leap of faith in front of me in three different directions and always landed on solid rock. So where’s the water after all?

Please, oh please put the pickaxe back for sale at least for a couple of days…. ;O

Only 4 objects for me as well. Made an experiment with my guild. Split Diessa Plateau in sectors among 30 people and everybody scoured, and by scoured I mean scrutinized their sectors and looked at every pixel on the ground.
We found only one dirt-covered object on the whole map. Used it to get 2 of the items on different days. Does not work for the third, though.

Hydra Queen is problematic for me too.

Today I gathered a full party with guild members to help Bill and Hekja. It is only normal that after the escort event started for the 4th time my guildmates left. We know that the Taidha event is a random occurence but, come on, this is too much. The champion from the pre-event is tough enough even without a dozen companions following him. Killing him again and again with no palpable progress makes this meta event repulsive.

My game client crashed at the very end of the event too, just as our group entered the cave. The strange thing is that I was disconnected 3 or 4 times during the fight but was able to return fast each time. I must also admit that somehow I was put in the same overflow as before and allowed to continue the event. Sadly this didn’t work for the final crash which was actually the most crucial of all…

Someone may find this funny but I thought Story mode was for solo players. Imagine my surprise when I entered my first dungeon today just to be turned into pulp.
What do we do now ArenaNet? I want to finish all dungeons but need 4 more people to do that. The problem is I don’t want to wreck my nerves over a bunch of teens who don’t care about the story, who are running around aimlessly, smashing things and doing exactly the opposite of what has to be done.
Why don’t you make some kind of a setting that allows solo players to enjoy the marvellous story you have created without the need to put up with ignorant younglings.

I, for one, would be eternally grateful.