Guild Wars 2

ANet couldn’t ever begin to justify why people who play at off hours shouldn’t get the same opportunities to play the game (capture objectives, work on achievements, rank up, participate in PPT) that people who play at prime time do. It’s never going to happen.

The title says it all.

You know you want it, ArenaNet.

Not to get this back on topic or anything, but no, you don’t need to do fractals to get it, nor is it even likely to be the easiest.

You can get the ascended salvage tool for skirmish claim tickets and memories of battle. You can acquire an ascended weapon or piece of armor in a variety of ways for the ball of dark energy, and I don’t think farming up fractal levels until one drops is probably the most efficient, time-wise. You don’t want to use a trinket because the drop rate is too low. You can just buy the stabilizing matrices.

This way is probably not the cheapest way, but it bypasses the bulk of the grinding in an area that you don’t want to play.

I don’t often reach diamond and probably never will. But the chest should be repeatable, including all the little benchmarks along the way. Rewarding play is not a sin or going to break the game.

Seems to me like the obvious happy medium is having the gear sort by rarity into different stacks. Then people can ID what they wish and not what they don’t, and save bag space at the same time, and not take unnecessary risks.

ID-ing in GW1 increased the value of items, guaranteed. If that isn’t a guarantee now (and I will offer freely that I don’t know how it works; I was out of town for the trial), then people aren’t going to like it.

I thought everything was going to be a flat 15 minutes, but I never see 15—just 10 at max, and just now I killed some guards and got 2 minutes, a lord and got 5, and a tower take put at 10. Can someone clarify it for me?

I’d like to suggest overlap on some territories, not into the objectives themselves, but if you have SE and your enemy has Hills, you’d both have gliding over some stretch of land between. Or some such—I haven’t thought through exact placement, but I think being able to have two or more teams gliding through certain areas would be interesting, tactically.

I like it, except for the part about not being able to advance with exp in HoT areas if you’re not a raider.

I’m excited, as someone who not only likes gliding but also likes playing the game mode as intended. This will help make holding objectives more useful.

Hey, I’d be all for this…just as soon as they put reward tracks in the open world and WvW/PvP for magnetite, fractal skins, stabilizing matrices, etc…..

It seems to be most vulnerable to retaliation…I cheesed it on my mesmer using the very dull and lengthy process described above—it can’t damage above the ability of the signet to heal you. But I had some retaliation on and that sped things up a bit. It doesn’t seem to have any reduction against retaliation.

Liked:
-Livia’s dynamic with the PC
-the wyvern event & Dwayna area in general
-the jumping puzzle
-the manifestation of self-doubt fight, reminds me of GW1 doppelganger; liked having to rethink my build to get both achievs.
-unlocking the shrines! res shrines! so much easier to get around!
-the new map generally
-easy, fast ways to do hearts
-puzzles in story instances
-putting to bed the Lazarus thing FINALLY
-no Braham

Didn’t like:
-the new mastery, too much tomfoolery with it
-the boss fights in the story instances are too frenetic and kind of hard
-Livia dies too much
-haven’t attempted them, but probably going to be a nightmare to try not to get struck by lightning and doing the boss in 9 minutes (I hate “Don’t get struck by X” achievs.)
-can’t see the pages until you’re right on them—I get if you don’t want to have something’s name viewable, but at least give it sparklies, a more noticeable visual, better clues, or sound effects (like the LA karka thing from way back when)—it’d be nice to be able to figure these things out instead of just go to Dulfy

Tiny Doom.4380:

It’s not a question of the puzzles being difficult to figure out. Of course they aren’t difficult. Even with the poor presentation of in-game information (mouse-over is not a great choice at the best of times, let alone in combat) these are all very straightforward, even simple puzzles.

The issue is with the replacement of Class and Weapon skills with one-off or temporary skills. It’s with playing the character as you, the player, conceived, and built it.

When the new skills become something that’s permanently added to the character, like the additional Downed skill, for example, that’s another matter. That adds depth and options to the character and the class. Temporary skills that are never seen or used outside of the specific instance do the opposite.

But that isn’t the issue with this particular update—no class and weapon skills are replaced in the self-doubt fight, and you don’t lose your skills while doing any real fighting in the little puzzle where you throw the bloodstone shards…and “pick up an object to throw, then return to your regular skills” is totally vanilla GW2.

The bloodstone puzzle was patently obvious how to solve, and the self-doubt thing had a lot of clues. Short of an in-game message saying “GO TO EIR AND PRESS F NOW,” they did everything they needed to do to communicate what needed to be communicated.

And if a player doesn’t want to press F or can’t figure it out, they can run back out of combat and change their build so it’s suited to the debuff/buff situation, which they then have time to read and think about and design a play style that can still defeat the manifestation of self-doubt (which is what I did for the “Fearless” achievement, so I know it’s possible). And that’s just buildcraft. For a very unique situation, yes, but still just buildcraft.

As far as the general situation—that many of these LS fights have given a skill that comes up above the profession-specific skills—for the most part, if you just punch the thing when you get it and then return to normal play, you do all right. It still doesn’t require you to learn how to play anything differently, just be observant.

Honestly, years ago it was all “more mechanics, more mechanics! we hate bosses that just take a million years to fight down” on these boards. Now it’s all “less mechanics, less mechanics! we just want to fight!” IDK, maybe the devs have gone too far the other direction in listening to advice on these boards, but mostly I’m less bored in these instanced fights than I used to be. (That doesn’t make them all balanced perfectly to my tastes, which is another issue.)

Oh, it’s bugged—my husband and I were in the same instance, and I got it, but he didn’t. That should be impossible. (Neither of us got a hit on every single statue.)

I don’t like the skins, can get ascended gear easier in other ways, and don’t care for most of what’s in the chests, and nor do I think I’ll be playing as much when I go back to work in the fall.

So, I guess I haven’t given up on getting the tickets—I’ll keep playing because I always do, because I like WvW—but I’ve no idea what I’ll do with them. I think they’re not worth much, and nor is the other stuff in the chests. Maybe if the repeat chest at the end had mystic coins in it every time, I’d be more excited. Every sixth time would be okay, but probably still not worth the time investment.

I played this system last night for several hours on a mostly dead map because of the login issues, and this is what I found.

• It is not that hard to get and maintain participation on a dead map, but if you encounter even small groups of enemies that kill you before you can do much, especially when you have to run a long way to find an objective you don’t own, you’ll decay in spite of being actively playing. If this system is designed to encourage participation rather than winning, it is missing the mark.

• The system encourages people to make dumb decisions, like killing an enemy NPC rather than focusing on objectives.

• Any prolonged siege is going to be hard on the members of the zerg. There will be pressure to disobey commanders in order to keep participation up.

• The timer for escorting yaks should at least equal the time it takes to escort the slowest yak on the longest path.

• Most importantly, if this was designed to reduce people afk-ing at spawn to run down their decay timer, it doesn’t work. When I got done playing at T6, I still had a long time to sit around and wait before that participation meter decayed enough for me to stop getting rewards. Maybe it was less time than before by one tick, I don’t know, but it hardly makes the issue go away.

WRT the whole issue of the #GAMEPLAYPURITY being threatened by people wanting rewards…first, get over yourselves. Second, what I honestly don’t get is why the devs were (and in some ways, continue to be) so reluctant to reward this game mode in the first place. I mean, before reward tracks and pips and all of it—if they’d just given good rewards from events and killing lords and give more rare gear and stuff from just, yanno, doing the gameplay like normal, at least to match boss trains in PvE when those rewards were first added, then we wouldn’t be in this situation.

That they conceived of a gameplay mode that was supposed to be “endgame” in nature, more or less, but then continuously drag their feet about rewarding it on even a casual level…well, it just boggles my mind.

marelooke.9708:

Balthazzarr.1349:

Agreed that it’s too aggressive… BUT… Perhaps that will filter out the big amount of people that seem to hang around spawn for 10-15 minutes gathering their pips before logging out of WvW.

Just calculate the rewards left based on the current state of the map and pay them out, give debuff that makes one ineligible for WvW rewards for the time it’d have taken for the participation to run out (to avoid hopping in and out of WvW) and be done with it.

Like, fix the problem instead of tossing in a half baked “fix” and breaking everything else…

^^^^ This. ^^^^

I, for one, would prefer not to feel like there’s pressure to wait for participation to run out before logging out because I’m losing rewards. Just pay it out and be done with it. Other than this, the decay timer wasn’t broken before and shouldn’t have been “fixed.”

ETA: Basically, this “fix” is punishing everyone for sins only some people commit.

I’d rather let a few people stand around in spawn that have to work this game like it’s a job.

I am also a veteran who has been playing since launch, and I’d love better rewards. XD

I don’t have an opinion about the conversion rate or process, but I think trading badges, proofs, tickets and marks for each other in some way is a good idea. PvE has some versatility across its various currencies. I don’t see why that can’t work here.

Spartacus.3192:

To prevent shopping for outnumbered buff why not just make it so that you dont get the full outnumbered pip bonus unless you have been on that map for at least half the time of that round. That way no one can just jump in on the last minute.

I’m with this suggestion, although I think one minute, or a minute and a half, on that map ought to be enough. By then, the wait is long enough that you might as well be contributing.

WRT OP: As someone who plays in the middle of the night in the US, the extra pips for playing outnumbered help offset the slow acquisition of ranks. I’m kind of in a place where I don’t think I’ll ever see rank 2000 because there’s no zerging activity or k-training when I play, for the most part (and thus the participation sharing concept doesn’t work either; commanders are few and far between), but at least I can get the chests and maybe the backpiece (if it wasn’t so hideous—gonna reskin that sucker if I do ever get it).

I wouldn’t object to more base pips overall if the outnumbered buff pips were reduced, but if they are reduced, there needs to be some incentive to play in off hours or on unpopulated maps, and just taking any pips away would be a horrible idea. At least now I feel like I have something worthwhile to do on Desert BL and I’m not completely wasting my time there, and I feel like it’s actually worthwhile to play outmanned instead of going somewhere else.

Aury.1367:

Bridget Morrigan.1752:

Death does not always equal failure, and living does not always equal success.

Overall its basic failure. Yes you can “use” the view from your corpse etc. But this “use” is the reward. Not the loot in this case. You can get a rewarded item for every single thing. Yes you even get rewarded for logging in.
Maybe we should get rewards every 1min we’re alive in combat.
Maybe we should get passive rewards when around a CMD.
etc etc.

The actual reward of staying alive is playing the game and killing more. Your death is already rewarded. Not for you, no. For the enemy. You now have to get your butt up and WP. Penalty. Even minigolf has it. Saw no one complain there yet.

If it is better or wiser for team play for someone to take a death and/or stay on the ground once dead—as it sometimes is in WvW situations—then that person should not be penalized for their kamikaze maneuver. Period, end of story. That is not “losing,” because the game that is played in WvW is played on a macro-level, by and large.

Tactics (such as a better view when dead and the ability to report back to the commander) are not a reward in and of themselves, and sacrificing for the good of the group should not come at a monetary cost to the individual.

Gaile seemed to be unable to picture a concept in which dying =/= losing (and the opposite, living = winning). But that kind of simplistic thinking is a basic misunderstanding of the way in which tactics and situations can work in WvW, in the game that ANet designed.

Past that being understood by Gaile and her colleagues, I don’t really care what happens with this particular request.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Well, Justine, I have to mention I’m not really in a position to draw any sort of line in the sand, because I’m not a developer and I wouldn’t be making decisions on this sort of thing. But as a player I kept scratching my head at this thread until I decided to give a personal opinion on the matter.

From days of long ago — well, in a gaming sense, anyway — I came to expect a death penalty. I came to respect it. I treked across Dereth to retrieve my best item, when the #^$%^@)$ Lugians took it off my corpse and tossed it aside. I braved Diablo in the catacombs below Tristram to get back all the stuff that spilled out around me when that beastie bested me. To have essentially nothing bad happen — to get all the goods around me whether I live or die — just doesn’t make sense to me.

Maybe I RP it in my head. Kill monsters + live to tell about it = get rewards afterwards. Maybe I don’t see it as aggregate acquisitions while I’m fighting, but an end-combat reward, picking over the battleground after my victory? I don’t know, but it makes sense to me that I would potentially get less when I fail!

The thing is, sometimes the strategic or best team gameplay is to lay dead where you are: for example, in certain WvW situations or in PvE in a fight with the Legendary Bandit Executioner. So that means that the selfish, less active choice is to WP and stop giving yourself a chance to contribute in the most useful way by being resurrected in place. Penalizing players for lying on the ground when that might be the best thing for the group is not a good design choice.

And I mean, seriously—if you run away from a big zerg fight but still get loot while you’re turning tail and going AWOL, how is that fair or better than giving your all for your team and then dying, but losing access to five or six loot bags that might drop a few seconds after your death?

Death does not always equal failure, and living does not always equal success.

As long as these kinds of situations are in the game, then people should be able to get the loot they earned via delivering sufficient damage to the enemy, whether they themselves are alive or dead.

Vayne.8563:

I think fantasy where people talk like real people is better than a lot of fantasy. Why? Because none of these people are actually speaking English. They’re speaking some other language.

Why wouldn’t they use colloquial speech, or slang, or casual sentences. This is how people talk after all.

I don’t think this makes the dialogue more childish at all. What it makes it is less formal. Pretty sure it’s intentional and I, for one, like it.

I’m with you.

I think people think that if there are popular colloquialisms in fantasy game dialogue that it’s somehow anachronistic, but Tyria isn’t Earth: it’s not part of our history (or our present or future), so if we are to suspend our disbelief that it’s being translated into an Earth language from a Tyrian one, one would expect it to be translated in modern terms.

Additionally, characters like Canach and Taimi et all should speak differently. That’s a part of characterization. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a slippery slope that would happen if the writers took the OP’s advice, but a variance in speech is good writing, whether any individual subjectively likes it or not.

Because to an Asura, an 87.489641% chance of cataclysmic failure is well within acceptable parameters for any given endeavor.

“Limited time offer” is a standard sales practice. ANet hardly invented it, and it must pay off or companies wouldn’t keep using it.

ArchonWing.9480:

SkyShroud.2865:

I don’t see how introvert you are when you are willing to start a thread about it.

I think it’s because they treat social interaction like ascended gear. It’s nice to have, but it’s not required in most cases, and it can be quite the pain to deal with at times. Whereas more extroverted people consider it more mandatory and kick people from dungeons.

And just for fun, I wonder if this thing actually works: https://www.uclassify.com/browse/prfekt/myers-briggs-attitude?input=Text

It mostly classifies expository nonfiction texts as introverted and prose fiction as extroverted. I’m a writer and I got very consistent results, putting in a variety of writing samples. It probably is checking for active vs. passive verbs, phrasing like “I think” or “I feel,” presence or absence of quotations, numbers of verbs and nouns vs. numbers of adjectives and adverbs. As I am introverted regardless of whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I’d say the test is bunk. But then, so is MBTI.

To keep on topic: I play mostly with relatives, a few long-term friends, or alone. I do make an effort to maintain relationships within my guild because I know group content is a fact of life in MMO’s. But I don’t like the “hurry up and wait” aspect of group content or the commitment of things like static groups, so I just miss out on stuff like raids.

The reason the Order of Whispers stuff has that “eastern” style is because the group was introduced during the Elona campaign of GW1, which had a significant aesthetic from various regions around Africa and nearby, and included literary allusions to African literary traditions. The art design supported that as well. Elona was the African-inspired campaign, Cantha was the (mostly) Asian-inspired campaign, and Tyria was the European-inspired campaign. GW2 (and, by extension, Heart of Thorns) doesn’t seem to have as much cultural variance because it’s set in Tyria (though Orr had kind of a Persian thing going on).

Whether the politics that shut down any use of Cantha in GW2 would have any effect on Elona’s design or design in general in the future, I couldn’t say. I would be surprised, though, so at the moment I suspect that you’ll get what you’re looking for.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Bridget Morrigan.1752:

The footsteps are changing just fine, just not the blade. At least, the Sunrise version doesn’t become the Twilight version. The Twilight version goes to Sunrise like it’s supposed to.

Your statements are a bit confusing. Your first post says it never changes from Sunrise to Twilight (in other words it’s fixed at Sunrise and unchanging) and now you say it does correctly change from Twilight to Sunrise, which means it’s changing sometimes and therefore sometimes switches from Sunrise to Twilight.

Each subsequent response is adding information I didn’t have at the time of the OP, as I continued to look into the problem.

At the time of my first post, I had yet to see the Twilight skin. After I made the post, I tried WvW, which showed Twilight correctly. I did not notice a problem again (as someone pointed out, it’s daytime so much in game that it’s not always testable for nighttime) until today. Today, in Sparkfly Fen, the skin did not change from Sunrise to Twilight in spite of being nighttime for a full fifteen or twenty minutes as I was watching. This prompted me to make another response, with the images. I then participated in the Tequatl event, and when that was over (still with Sunrise skin), I mapped to Mount Maelstrom. Upon appearing in the new map, I had the Twilight skin (correctly). I ran around for a while and ended up doing the Megadestroyer event, around which time the skin returned to Sunrise again (on schedule, I believe). Does this make sense now?

(I’ve put in a bug report.)

The footsteps are changing just fine, just not the blade. At least, the Sunrise version doesn’t become the Twilight version. The Twilight version goes to Sunrise like it’s supposed to.

Okay, so I noticed it again in Sparkfly Fen today. I got there when it was daytime, and it transitioned to night while I was there waiting for Tequatl. It’s definitely nighttime, per wiki, and I waited a good fifteen minutes to see if it would shift, and it did not. Do you have to change maps to make it shift skins? If so, that’s really lame.

Aeolus.3615:

i actually dontlike the fire effect :\ wich they could be turned off or would be cool if they had several colors depending the class.

for some reason i hate the barbecue armor designs….. can i do some meat on your back? o_O

Dyeable fire effects would be fabulous. Alas….

I’m interested in seeing the commander tag thing sort out in practice before making a judgment. I understand the concerns of too many tags, but as someone who is super tired of blobbing, I think this is a fairly creative way to discourage blobbing and spread activity around.

I think we should see it in action for at least a few weeks to see how it works out instead of lambasting it here already.

I’ll keep watching it, and thank you for the transmutation idea. I played a good long time in the open world at night on several occasions (which is easy to keep track of because I’m playing a half-naked Sylvari so I’m always looking at my glowy bits) and I’m sure it was showing just Sunrise. I switched to WvW and it displayed correctly. But I’m going to double check in the open world again to make sure I wasn’t mistaken or it wasn’t that 5 minute time period between day and night where it counts as day but looks like night, etc.

Thanks again!

I recently crafted Eternity, and it was my understanding that, in addition to adding some flashiness to the footprints and whatnot, the skin would show like Sunrise during the daytime and Twilight during the night. But all I ever see is the Sunrise colors on the blade and handle, day or night.

Is this a glitch, or was I mistaken about how it was supposed to look, and it’s working as intended?

Odokuro.5049:

Blockhead Magee.3092:

SloRules.3560:

Problem is that there were in ve farmers karma training eotm whole day, so by using ranks to limit stuff you are aimply rewarding them

Its true it would reward the eotm train, but it will also draw others in for the goods. They may end up liking the game mode and move over to standard wvw. It could be a way to infuse new blood – we sure need it.

You’d also be attracting people who are there purely for the loot, and rank-up chest. They wouldn’t work with a commander, or a team, and most likely would allow towers to be taken, ect. just to re-cap them for the xp, and getting more rewards. Getting more numbers is great, but it’s not so great when those numbers don’t care about anything but loot.

Also all this talk about, well if you where in pve it would take 1/3 the time, ect. ect. Well if it would only take 1/3 of the time, you might as well do it. Taking 3x longer to achieve the same thing, seems a bit, unintelligent to me.

It seems like every time someone suggests making decent loot for WvW, people seem to think that this is going to ruin the play environment somehow because people won’t be playing for the #purity of the game mode. In the meantime, the population dwindles and the people who remain get more and more disillusioned. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Also, I really don’t think people who are just there for the loot will play against their server’s interests. They’ll probably just ball up and zerg and flip enemy towers and camps; that’s usually the best way to advance your rank. People already just let towers flip so they can flip them back.

You say on the one hand that people would be attracted to play purely for the loot and then would play in a way that’s detrimental to the game, but then argue that it would be “unintelligent” to have the loot take three times longer than PvE because any idiot could see that they should just go do that instead. You can’t have it both ways. If the time commitment turns off people who would purely want the loot, then they will just go do PvE in 1/3 the time and NOT be a detriment to WvW because they won’t be here. Obviously. If they’re willing to spend the massive time commitment to get up to Platinum or Mithril Legend (or whatever), that extra time commitment would ensure it would ONLY be worth it if they like the game mode and want to play it. You can’t argue that people would come AND that they would stay away.

Really, as suggested here, it’s just about rewarding players who are involved in the game already. I like to do a variety of things, but the reality is, I’d prefer to play WvW most of the time. Yet if I need cash for something, it’s just not practical to stay here, so I end up doing something else. I know a lot of people that do a variety of activities, but would spend more time in WvW if it was just more economically feasible. This would get more people, who like the game mode already, playing it more often.

Whether it’s this plan or something else, improving individual rewards not going to hurt WvW.

I can’t speak to EotM because I never play there, but who really cares if people go play there a bunch? How is that hurting anyone else? It’s not. At least some people will be in the regular maps, and we only need enough people to get close to a creating a queue. We don’t need an unlimited supply.

Any chance we could get the adventures put into instanced content? Or at least ones like Shooting Gallery, which are only available during the day, after the outpost has been secured, and that usually only leaves a few minutes before night falls and the thing shuts down. I don’t mind if the outpost has to be clear to allow you to enter the instance, but once in, it’d be nice if you could just stay there and play the adventure for as long as you want without interference from the map meta.

Just to be clear, I’m not here to complain that the adventures are too hard, or that I don’t have enough mastery points (I have more than enough, thanks), or that the map events too hard, or it’s too hard to find a group, or any of that stuff. I’d just like to be able to play the adventure for longer than 15 minutes once every two hours.

I think there are some places (like the sides of cliffs) where the node has to be active just by brushing against it. But why some of the ones on the ground require you to interact with the node, and that one in the Inquest area triggers when you’re like 300 away from it—whether you want to or not—is beyond me. That particular one they need to set to “touch.”

Please just don’t make it a raid. Having story content I’ll likely never see is already frustrating enough. Don’t end up making something that people have been waiting for twelve years to see be only available to a few.

I love the jumping puzzles, and I think there’s a great deal of variety, from pure skill (Clocktower) to explorer (Draconis Mons) to puzzler (Professor Portmatt’s Lab) and some that allow gliding and some that don’t…. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

I agree that I’d like to see more underwater content. It’s so beautiful and interesting to explore. I do think the time spent on making the skills work underwater and balancing so the combat works better would be worth it.

Alternately, there could be less combat underwater and more alternate things to do. Even a mastery system of using currents, lighting dark places (like is already in the game, only via mastery, not interacting with an object), interacting with seaweed kinds of things like mushrooms in HoT, underwater mounts, etc. There’s a lot of potential, and the mastery system could open up underwater content in new releases for things like jumping/swimming puzzles, etc.

It isn’t great as it is, but it’s a real shame to leave it be when there’s so much potential.

I think it’s a good idea, though I’d like to customize their builds, skin their weapons, and allow them to interact with objects (on command). Add the flagging system from GW1 and it’d be just about perfect.

I’m going to buy it no matter what because new maps are my favorite thing, and I’m interested in where the story goes from here.

But, given that we’re apparently going to the Crystal Desert, I’d kill for the return of the Hall of Heroes and Tomb of the Primeval Kings. (Yes, I know HoH was totally toxic and I don’t care, it was still glorious.)

I’d also like to be able to have the raid maps explorable in the open world, with different activities there than raiding. It seems a shame to have all that design and lore and employee hours go into something that so many people don’t get to see. (I’m not suggesting rewards be the same.)

Love it!

Love the story: the god reveal was something I’ve been betting on since the dragons were revealed for EotN! And I also got confirmation (again, more or less) of my theory of what would happen to Tyria if all the dragons were destroyed. Always fun to be right! XD

Map is great—love the look and the vertical design. Would like to have gotten to see the outside of the map from the peak of the volcano at the end of the jumping puzzle, though. That would have been AMAZING (and wouldn’t have to mean a lot of work, as long as you can see off into the distance and you couldn’t glide down from there).

Would like more waypoints. I know the point is to use the new mastery skills, but in the end I’d just like more waypoints on all these maps. I don’t think it’d hurt anything for the design.

The last story instance inside the volcano was great—looked gorgeous and very original, and I liked seeing the head over in the distance. I enjoyed the mechanics and falling.

As with the elixir in Bitterfrost frontier, I don’t think you should have to repeat the whole process of getting the fire shielding from the druids. Just do it once on any character and have that be forever, unless you’re repeating your story steps.

I thought the jumping puzzle was actually pretty easy this time. Hard to figure out what to do, but not hard to do it. Entrance was easy to find. The checkpoints make a very dramatic animation, so that’s good—better than some others where it’s not as obvious whether you’ve gotten it. I like the click functionality of it.

I love the new ancient magics skill. I want to use it everywhere.

Dawdler.8521:

So you’re basicly saying if two 19 man optimised to the teeth guilds are GvGing, I can just go in and go “lololololyou’renowazerglolololol” and cut the guilds offensive power by a quarter?

If we could control players, your idea works.

We cant, so it doesnt.

A change that will inevitable lead to someone yelling “GTFO out of WvW!” is not a good change.

If stopping condis is the issue, I have a much better idea – cap it just like when PvE mobs hit 100 stacks. On players, that would be… say 10 stacks on damaging conditions (torment, confusion, bleed, burning, poision, dont know if I missed any).

It’s simple and only affect those focusing on either one condition, zerging or trying to condibomb single targets. For small scale yeah bursts from a say 15+ confusion stack mesmer will be weaker. A burst from 2 mesmers even weaker. Small scale should easily be able to spread out their targets. Condi has always been about attrition so I dont really see the issue there.

The numbers could be figured differently—that was just an example, it doesn’t have to be straight to 75% at 20 people—but overall I’d agree with you. But I think generally that’s going to be the problem with any of these suggestions: when you punish large groups, there’s going to be a chance for people to tip the scales, purposely or not, in a direction that doesn’t benefit the larger group (or themselves), and that’s going to make people angry and isolate players.

The condi suggestion is interesting, but I don’t think it’d go far enough to fix the overall problem. People would just change builds and still run en masse.

I tend to feel like the simplest way to reduce blobbing (without changing the base game design) would be to reduce the efficacy of all skills—damage, heals, boons, conditions, whatever—as the number of allies in the neighborhood grows. For example, 20 people in 1500 radius would be full power, 20-40 would be 75% power, at 40 would be 50% power, etc. But not effect the design of skills themselves, CD’s, number of targets, etc. Not sure what would need to happen with CC skills.

You’d need an indicator, and the server would have to be calculating when to apply the state constantly. OTOH, if it actually reduced large numbers, it would be calculating a lot less other stuff.

Not saying it should happen, just that it seems like the simplest way.

no, no, and no.

also, no.

I sold off two precursors for 20-some gold (total) back near launch. They were the underwater ones, but still….

I think this is going to be a balance nightmare if implemented as described. I’m not saying you couldn’t have certain…I dunno…rewards or marked responsibilities and slight changes to mechanics for players with “jobs,” but even just scanning down your list, I was like…so which one of these makes sense for X class? Are there three that work for Y class? Only one for Z class? B class is well designed for SEVEN of them???

vesica tempestas.1563:

mmorpg’s raison d’être is an offer of long term goals and the possibility of developing a character that will last for years, that is the genre. Crafting is part of this, you are offered long term crafting goals that you can aim for, aspire to and progress towards. The only thing out of whack is players who don’t understand this and want everything they can see when they think they are entitled to it, they demand it! Ultimately they try to bite their own noses of to spite they face – for short term exclusionary gain (pixels and numbers).

If people hate every minute of having to do a thing and it’s completely ill-matched for new players in spite of being nominally matched by level, then it’s out of whack.

MMO’s have to balance a certain measure of time commitment (which includes expense) and boredom versus player fun in order to make the game perpetual (and make the most money). Tip the scales too far in the direction of the player’s fun and the whole system falls apart, yes, but tip the scales too far in the direction of time/boredom and it’ll fall apart just as surely.

If crafting is only “endgame,” and people avoid it whenever possible (and it only makes sense for people to avoid it, economically speaking), then very likely it is out of whack in the direction of time/boredom.

ArchonWing.9480:

Proof? Why should new players craft to get exotic gear when they can buy the named exotic armors? Don’t forget crafting itself costs a lot, and I would never recommend new players to craft.

Even when I was new running around Cursed Shore in green, I avoided crafting like the plague due the complexity and potential to waste money and materials. If we weren’t forced to craft with ascended gear, I would never do it at all.

I never tell new players to craft, because I feel they are wasting their time. And I’ve helped people plan how to get up. You know, I actually help newer players that you claim to want to help, so I know this is nonsense. .

I think this is the crux of the issue, though—should crafting be only an obligation for high level gear, not a reasonable (or even enjoyable) part of the game itself? Should new players be effectively barred from this part of the MMO experience, due to the cost? Is it good for the game that one major aspect of it is something that players generally avoid like the plague?

I don’t really have an answer to what role crafting should play in the game, but I’d say that the advice that you give new players to stay away from it and the fact that experienced players hate it enough to never want to do it except when they have to—well, these things are indicative that something is out of whack, that this is an aspect of the game that has a negative effect on players, and the leather price situation is the most egregious offender.

I was on and playing when this happened (on the third server, not either of the two directly involved), and I remember thinking when I saw the ANet symbol that in this circumstance, it was basically kicking the server when it was down.

The issue isn’t that ANet shouldn’t be able to claim keeps or objectives. Of course they should be visibly playing the game. It’s just that in this particular circumstance, it was unsportsmanlike. If the employees are repping the ANet guild, they need to remember that they are literally representing ArenaNet and keep their behavior in line with that greater sense of responsibility.