Guild Wars 2

Had to make a new shortcut to get it to work, but work it did. Don’t forget to add a space between the quote and the -assetsrv statement.

It would seem the GW2 team made a few changes themselves. I just checked my account data, and in stead of the one IP address I myself approved, it now lists 2 IP ranges, one in which my original IP falls, and one that’s my VPN provider’s… and which I myself never added.

While I understand that adding a range might make it more convenient for people with variable IP addresses, it rather makes the whole ID of ‘safe’ identified IP addresses laughable. I’m removing both ranges, and we’ll see what happens…

Healix.5819:

Have you checked what IPs have been remembered and compared it to the IP of the VPN?

Ashantara.8731:

Have you tried activating SMS verification? Faster and better IMO.

Email authentication is actually the most secure option for advanced users. SMS is the recommended option because it’s the easiest to setup. If you want speed, an authenticator is the fastest option.

The funny thing about 2FA is that it’s not going to make a difference if your email is compromised.

There’s only one approved IP address for my account, and that one is for a different country than the IP addresses my VPN provider uses. I think everything rather points to the system being offline or malfunctioning.

As to my email being compromised: nah. It’s a company address, and we’d know if the email server had been meddled with. Paranoia setup and all that.

I just changed the IP address again before heading back to this forum (after closing down the browser). The forum is normally too protected by the verification system, but it just let me in again, still logged in, and not asking to redo the login. That alone points to something being decidedly wrong.

Uhm, no it is not. Phones easily get lost and/or stolen, and do not always have enough charge. They also tend to have utterly laughable security.

My primary computer is a monster gaming PC. Email is always on in the background, without the slightest loss of performance, and generally the code arrives within seconds. IF the system’s working, that is…

To top it all off, my primary e-mail address is a COMPANY address belonging to a security conscious IT company. So er yeah, I’ll stick with email….

I play from behind a VPN. Which means I always have different, NON-verified IP-addresses. Since I have email verification enabled, that means that by rights I should be asked for a login code before being allowed access to my account.

Oddly enough, this hasn’t been happening for the last week or two: I am not receiving emails with codes, and I’m not asked to enter a code before the login proceeds. Since I most certainly do NOT approve my VPN provider’s IP addresses, it would seem your verification process is currently disabled. Which I can only HOPE you’ve noticed by now…

I’ve recently bought a new gaming rig. I finished installing/configuring/updating it yesterday, and decided to run GW/2 and see how it looked with the new graphics card. And promply ran into issues. While the client itself does NOT crash, any and all display does, within 2 minutes of starting the game. The screen goes black, even when I tab to Window. I do hear the game’s sounds.

specs:
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00GHz
16 GB RAM
nVidia GeForces GTX 970 (3,710 GB video RAM)
Windows 7 64-bits
64-bits GW/2 client
dxdiag: no issues found
DirectX 11

Please note: upon first starting the game, all the graphics settings were automatically maxed. After crashing-to-no-display three times, I lowered all these settings drastically, and have not had issues since.

While the settings were on max, memory use for the client was running up fast (I monitored in Task Manager after the first time). I couldn’t determine the exact ‘crash point’, but I suspect it’s around the 3.5 GB mark.

I’m not sure what is going on. It’s a high-end system, it should be able to handle max graphics with ease, and the 64bits OS and client should make full memory use possible.

Any suggestions?

It’s not just Cassi. I tried the activity NPC in Hoelbrak, he’s saying ‘no games today, try soutsun cove’. I mean seriously… I hate ALL the activities as is, and now they don’t even work?

Can we please just have the OLD dailies back? The ones with the ‘kill 20 mobs’ and ‘harvest 10 nodes’ type of things?

Also, I should add this:

- For long-time players, the whole ‘spreading out and do different things’ or ‘getting to know different things’ is a completely bogus argument. We have this title ‘Been there, done that’ for a reason.

- Judging from reactions in these forums, a fairly large part of the population hates the adventures with a passion. Adding them to the dailies – and thus restricting other PVE choices – is a rather stupid move.

- The same can be said for Fractals. Those who want to do them, are doing them, and they have their own dailies to boot.

- The claim that ‘people can just go do PVP or WvW’ is stupid. The actual percentage of players who enjoy PVP/WvW is far smaller than the actual percentage who enjoy PVE. The two blood groups don’t happily mix, there’s LOTS of people who will never, ever voluntarily engage in PVP/WvW for any reason. (Please note: I’ve been leading a multi-game PVP/WvW guild since 2004, I DO actually know what I’m talking about here.)

Personally, I loathe what they’ve done with the dailies. Once again, they are trying to ‘force’ people to participate in game elements they think under-utilized. And that’s just wrong for a game that essentially said ‘to each their own, have fun any way you want’ at launch.

Heart of Thorns turned out to be WAY too click-intensive/stress intensive for me. It’s more like a first person shooter – especially those ‘adventures’ – than a real MMO. It also lured you into playing WAY too long at a stretch, making rewards only available if you completed long-winded zone events. As a result, I ended up in physiotherapy with severe shoulder complaints (still ongoing, 4 months now).

I can’t play more than maybe 30 minutes a day without pain now. I definitely cannot do anything that causes tension in that shoulder. PVP and WvW are straight out. Things that take too long at a stretch to do are out. And those very adventures … yeah, screw that, if I want to become permanently disabled, I’ll go do those again. Seriously, not happening.

So is everyone like me? Probably not. But equally probably, there’s more people with physical issues in this game than you’d think.

I’m underwhelmed at arguments like ‘then don’t do them’ and ‘the login reward should suffice’. The login rewards are completely meaningless for me, they’re junk. Didn’t ask for them, wouldn’t let a tear if they vanished.

But since I’m a 4 year veteran, the dailies are pretty much the only source left for AP. It’s maybe a small thing, but it’s one of the (very few) things that keep me logging in. And since I’m one of those people who have extreme bad luck looting anything valuable, those two gold are actually something NICE for once.

Seriously, what’s wrong with giving people a bit more choice in each category?

Try having a small guild, with all the upgrades…. and then not being able to even get banners anymore. So sorry, but I can’t PAY people to do those boring ‘guild missions’, and after they heard about the cost, people completely lost interest in the guild hall. Whoop-de-doo. And then, to add insult to injury, people say ‘well, small guilds don’t count anyway, join a big one’. We’ve been around since 2003, in multiple games. What on earth makes people think that ANY of us think joining a bigger guild would be a good idea…

Update.
I now have map completion on all HoT maps on nine characters. I played all zones extensively. And I still only have 2 reclaimed metal plates.

My luck in this game is horrible. I tend to average 1-2 exotics per week (low value ones, mind) with 40 hours of play. And I dare say I quite obviously loot WAY fewer reclaimed RARES. And I actually loot fewer blue/green quality reclaimed weapons than I loot ‘regular’ rares.

I run into people who’ve gotten over 15 of the things. I dare say there’s something hideously wrong with the entire RNG system, and with the drop rate of reclaimed weapons in general.

I suspect that somehow your in-game luck IS account bound, some values tying into one another that should not. And I really think this should be looked into, but like I already said in the OP, this is NOT fun. What’s the use of collections if your chances of ever completing them is close to zero?

So you made a Wintersday achievement out of boozing. I really cannot say it amuses me in the slightest. Several of my relatives were alcoholics (past tense because they’re dead now… it’s not something that can be cured). I’ve seen what alcohol does to people and I think it’s just plain wrong to showcase the over-consumption of alcohol as something festive and desirable. Let alone in a game rated PG 12, when in many countries 12 is WAY below the legal age for alcohol consumption.

Ashen.2907:

Celtic Lady.3729:

Broom.2561:

Obtena.7952:

Kerin.9125:

Healix.5819:

Mitch.4781:

Welcome to play the game “your” way LMAO

That only ever applied to required vertical progression, leveling specifically. You’ve never been able to play however you wanted to acquire the extras.

There’s nothing you can do against latency, but adventures are a simple skill check. If the average player can’t handle silver, they’ll nerf it. For everyone else, find someone you trust and get carried.

That’s a heck of a business model.

Not sure if sarcastic or not … this is an MMO. It’s not all that unreasonable to ask someone better or more knowledgeable than you to help you out.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read the EULA, but I think you should. Adventures are individual achievements, NO ONE can do them for you or help you with them, unless they log into your account. Which is prohibited under section 9b of the EULA. And could get you banned.

Interesting, considering they have no way of knowing if I’m playing my account, or if my sister is playing it, or my niece, or a friend, etc.

They are probably just trusting that you were not lying when you promised to abide by their terms. Not much else they can do really.

You’d be surprised. Logging in from a different IP address is a dead give-away, but so is e.g. talking about helping a friend this way in chat. And if they really want to put in some work (not likely in GW2 I admit) they can analyze things like keystrokes and movement patterns. They do in some other games, it’s a part of the bot detection algorithms used.

MikeyGrey.2496:

You have to complete all the pre-meta events for the lane that you want achievement for. Then stay in the map, defend that lane and kill the gerent for that lane. Best start right after a meta completes.

You don’t personally have to do the events for that lane.

Most likely he’s like me, and didn’t know there was an actual ‘physical’ chest spawning at the leyline confluence waypoint. It’s not marked on the mini map, so it’s easy to miss.

Obtena.7952:

Kerin.9125:

Healix.5819:

Mitch.4781:

Welcome to play the game “your” way LMAO

That only ever applied to required vertical progression, leveling specifically. You’ve never been able to play however you wanted to acquire the extras.

There’s nothing you can do against latency, but adventures are a simple skill check. If the average player can’t handle silver, they’ll nerf it. For everyone else, find someone you trust and get carried.

That’s a heck of a business model.

Not sure if sarcastic or not … this is an MMO. It’s not all that unreasonable to ask someone better or more knowledgeable than you to help you out.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read the EULA, but I think you should. Adventures are individual achievements, NO ONE can do them for you or help you with them, unless they log into your account. Which is prohibited under section 9b of the EULA. And could get you banned.

I experience the same. Completed the mini quest last year, and this year I DID get the letter, but find no NPCs. Sloppy.

Coulter.2315:

Broom.2561:

tom.7468:

It take 2 minutes to do those adventures … I got got to 161 , 3 days ago.

That’s nice for you, dear, but there’s quite a lot of us who are unable for one reason or another to get those adventures done at all, let alone get all on gold. Please never start thinking that something that is easy for you should automatically be easy for others at well.

You only need Silver for max Masteries.

Also at what point would you stop nerfing adventures?
Until you can do them easily?
Until everyone playing the game can do it easily?
Do you think this will make adventures engaging for most of the player base?

Adventures will have been designed to offer some challenge but still be doable by a large portion of the player base – you might just be in the bottom % and so will struggle (you could improve with practice though).

Never assume that because something is challenging for you that it will be automaticly be challenging for others, the game needs to contain challenges to be engaging for the majority of the player base.

This entire thread is full of people who have difficulties with the adventures. Some have physical issues, others have connectivity issues, and some just think the entire concept of platform mini games in an MMO is absurd. Whichever way you look at it, a lot of people have issues, and pretending those don’t exist is fairly insulting.

Your claim I and others could improve with practice is more than insulting, it’s infuriatingly dumb. Fact of life: older people tend to have slower reactions than younger. Getting younger is alas not an option. People from areas with bad ping have issues with reacting at the wrong moment because of the delay. Moving to another country for a game… er… yeah, not happening. And physical issues do not just go away with practice.

Pretending most of the player base does not have issues is… let’s say uninformed. Without actual figures, neither of us can claim most of the player base is on our side of the argument. The fact quite a number of people post here that they have issues, however, is indicative that enough people dislike them that they need looking at.

As to needing only silver for masteries: nice in theory, but I and others have found we cannot even get bronze in some of them. That automatically means you HAVE to try and get gold on at least a few.

The point here is that things we can do and like to do are locked away behind something that really should be there as a side adventure at most. We paid a lot for content that can only be fully accessed with masteries. Those masteries, this character progression, should be accessible to ALL. Keep your leader boards, your gold achievements and your bragging rights, just get the mastery points out of there.

tom.7468:

It take 2 minutes to do those adventures … I got got to 161 , 3 days ago.

That’s nice for you, dear, but there’s quite a lot of us who are unable for one reason or another to get those adventures done at all, let alone get all on gold. Please never start thinking that something that is easy for you should automatically be easy for others at well.

Cyrotek.7019:

I do not understand how anyone is “forced” to do them. No one needs every mastery unlocked, thus no one needs to do every minigame.

Leyline gliding is required to access some areas (poi, hero points) you need for map completion. Map completion is required to get components for legendary weapons.
Leyline gliding is required to get some mastery points.
Leylines gliding is required to participate in some quest in the most efficient way (using leylines between islands in DS is SO much more efficient than using the updrafts).

Full Nuhoch mastery grants you an ability to shake off Chakk poison effects, which makes you more efficient in open world combat.
Full Nuhoch mastery is required to buy a component for the new legendaries.

Full Itzel mastery is required to buy a component for the new legendaries. It also gives you the ability to use adrenal mushrooms, which makes you more efficient in the open world combat.

Full Exalted mastery is required to get a component for the ascended specialization weapon collection.
Full Exalted mastery is required to buy a component for the new legendaries.
Full Exalted mastery gives you a chance to gather some of those components from mining.

So please… don’t come telling me ‘no one needs every mastery unlocked’. Personally, I want to have max combat efficiency and I would really like to get those specialization weapons some day. And MAYBE a shot at those legendaries eventually.

Sthenith.5196:

I think he want’s to see a banker (summoned one) to have a name like
Sthenith.5196 Banker, or merchant.

So he can report those ppl for…..i dunno, standing there ? No frikkin clue.

And since we’re on topic, i want banners to have the name of those that put em there, so i can report em for not aligning those properly. It’s very very disturbing for my OCD.
Show some equilibrium ppl, please.

lmao.

People think they’re funny by putting merchant, boxes ’o fun and other stuff on top of e.g. rich oricalchum nodes, ancient saplings, NPCs you need to talk to and reward chests. I think the OP has a point, being able to ban griefers like that would be a good thing. Even better would be if items like that had an exclusion area around them, so you could not place anything near them.

papry.8096:

Bee.7081:

Yea, I also believe that if you want to max out the masteries, you need all the mastery points from adventures aswel. I have all strongbox and regular mastery points, and it is nowhere near to being enough for maxing out the HoT mastery lines.
I’m kind of alright getting silver, but gold from all… some really looks impossible atm.

No you don’t.
I haven’t completed all adventure on gold & I am lvl 161 with 4 unspended points in maguuma.

Not all gold, but most silver. I’ve got all masteries with 1 to spare, but only because I did adventures till my joints hurt (quite literally) and I got silver on a lot and gold on a few. I had at that point pretty much run out of other viable options. The +1 was due to an unexpected Chak Gerenth win (the strongbox behind the wall).

edit: viable as in I would not be able to get the 3 still locked behind story achievements (too twitchy for me) and the 1 behind completing Hearts and Minds (bugged POS). I had everything else in non-Raid HoT.

I feel for you. I just inadvertently succeeded that one, not knowing people actually NEEDED it to fail. It’s the stupidest piece of game design I’ve seen in my life. And to do something in this zone while it’s one of those that frequently has the ‘event completer daily’ assigned to it… that’s just malice.

Morfedel.4165:

Aren’t achievements, including story achievements, also a source of mastery points?

On my main, I completed all stories except the final one (which bugs out on me… cannot get the air vents to work). That gave some mastery points, yes. The additional achievements only award a mastery point (per zone) if you do them all. In some cases, that is as bad as adventures, because it’s a lot of twitch. Either way, even with that added to the mix, you STILL need adventures to max all masteries (which is required for e.g. the legendaries).

roelvanesch.2817:

How are they forcing you? For the spec collection, you need 1 completed with silver, that’s nothing. So the only situation in which you are forcing yourself to complete them is FULL HoT mastery completion. Aside from Nuhoch alchemy, adrenal mushrooms and some other not-so-needed tracks, legendary collections stand out. To craft a HoT legendary, you have to grind a kittenton of materials, and are forced to do tremendous amounts of other content. But somehow, doing these adventures for them is not-done? I apolagize, I do not quite understand…

The idea of an expansion is that it offers new content. People have paid quite a lot for that content. And then they find that in fact, the content for this expansion is interlocked, making it so that you have to participate in things you might otherwise never WANT to participate in if you want to do the things you DO like doing.

The personal story outright refuses to proceed at points because you do not have certain masteries yet.

Map completion is locked behind masteries (AND behind story arc completion… cannot do Auric Basin completion unless you progress the story arc). Some areas are inaccessible without e.g. leyline gliding, poison mastery, exalted markings, nuhoch wallows, exalted acceptance… the list goes on.

Participating fully in Dragon Stand means getting leyline gliding, poison mastery, shroom jumping. And yes, speed and adrenaline mushrooms are also very helpful.

There are 9 professions, each with a specialized HoT weapon collection tied to the elite skill for that profession. Each of those collections requires silver in a specific adventure. I personally will never get the Herald’s shields, because I cannot get even bronze on Sanctum sprint.

Some people like the idea of being able to get the new legendaries… which means maxing out those masteries.

Personally, I don’t give a rats bottom about the raids and haven’t even tried them or read up on them … but somehow I expect not having the correct masteries is a problem there as well.

So yes… a LOT of the content requires you to have masteries. For which you need mastery points… which you’ll find you need quite a lot adventures completed for. And other content outright tells you ‘participate in the adventures or else no content 4U’.

Which is why we say these adventures are forced on us.

1 KB per second… seriously?
And it is NOT my connection. I work in IT, thx, I know how to test it, the connection is just fine. OTHER internet applications run just fine, laying the connectivity issue squarely at Anet’s doorstep.

Restarted the download that had been running for 20+ minutes (closed client, restarted) and it’s working now.

Ayrilana.1396:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Mega Skeleton.8259:

No, silver.

Nobody is making you do adventures, man. There are plenty of sources for XP and you don’t need to finish any specialization collections. IDK what to tell you.

Yet if you want to finish your mastires, you do have to play them. you see you need to get gold on them to unlock the points that are locked behind them.

I don’t know what to tell you, other than maybe read the OP and have all the facts.

You don’t need to get gold on any adventures to max all of your masteries.

Theoretically, you could get by with getting all silver. Practically… there are adventures that I personally cannot even get bronze on, and others (like the shooting gallery) where I find myself unable to get silver. In which case your only option becomes getting gold on a few.

I stopped playing platform games 30+ years ago, when I was 17-ish. I stopped playing FPS games when I was about 23. I stopped enjoying them. If I still wanted to play them, I’d buy a game that SPECIALIZES in them and has the right interface/mechanics.

I’m 48 and have RSI. Too much tension while gaming causes me pain. These adventures cause me actual physical pain. The only reason I touched them at all is because they were the only source of mastery points left and there’s content I DO want to participate in (or at least have a look at) locked behind those masteries.

We killed the Chak Gerenth in all 4 lanes earlier today, and the wall to Dragon Stand was blown away. My first success after many attempts. I got the Gerenth Slayer achievement.

What I did NOT get was the Mistward Helm Casing (the last item missing in the headpiece collection… of course). I’ve contacted Support to ask if this is a bug, and they say it is, and told me to report it.

So there you have it, another fine bug.

On the whole, I think it’s rather ludicrous that the only developer posts made in the recent months seem to be in reddit, and not in the official forums. I repeat, the OFFICIAL forums. There are legitimate complaints, and there’s no one even saying ’we’re looking into it’. That’s bad.

I have spent a LOT of time in HoT. I maxed out all masteries first, got Verdant Brink map completion on all 9 of my characters after and am almost done with Auric Basin (again on 9 characters).

In all this time, I have only managed to get 2 reclaimed metal plates. Worse, I seem to loot fewer and fewer reclaimed weapons. I did Tarir and the AB event chains roughly 8 times this weekend, and if I got a total of 20 reclaimed weapons (blues and greens) it’s a lot.

My ‘luck’ in this game is horrible. I’ve played since the April beta for the core game, and I’ve never looted a precursor. If I play 8 hours a day, I get maybe 2 exotics from loot PER WEEK. Considering the launch date of HoT, I’d say my luck getting the reclaimed metal plates is LOTS worse.

I’d like to submit that this state of affairs is bugged. Maybe in several ways.

First, I think something happened to the drop rate of reclaimed weapons. I seem to be getting way fewer than in the beginning. This may of course be subjective, but if an inventory of 140 fills up with loot and there’s only 2 reclaimed weapons in the bunch, that’s a VERY low drop rate.

Second, I think there’s something desperately wrong with the loot mechanics. There’s a forum post where developers themselves state that 20% of the customer base are ‘outliers’ on the bad luck end of the loot graph. This was about precursors, I think, but based on my personal experience, I dare say it’s not just precursors that are affected by this. To me, it very much looks like there’s something in the account data that predetermines luck with RNG. Which means something in the loot programming is really, desperately wrong.

In effect this means that 20% of your player base are dealing with a LOT of frustration, because by now there are tons of things that are locked away behind the ability to loot specific items. Legendaries are only the start. Does anyone think it’s healthy for a game when 1/5th of its players never get the carrot, but only ever the stick?

rchu.8945:

SuinegTsol.1729:

Hi,

I’m doing ds events for some time now to get this rune. By now I’m at about 150 crystalline ores.
Aint 600 ores a very very very little bit to much for sth like a runeset? If it’s a recipe ok, but for runes…
Apart from “farming” the hot-story, where you get 40 in the end, the only way by now is to open pods at dragons stand map. Apart from ~6, they only spawn after map event is completed. This means you need to wait up to one hour to get on a map doing events/ got enought time to start new map, then need about one to 1.5 hours to hopefully finish (seen so many fails last days) it. Now you got a 15min race to find and open all pods. Without a ton of luck this leads to 40 to 50 ores.
So all in all you need to do 15 times the story with different characters, or do 13 times success on ds meta event (without dc!!!). For ds thats best case two days without break dc or fail doing this event. Just for runes…
If they just were buyable, but….

so everything must be easy and less time consuming? I wanted the whole set of auric weapons, instead of farming AB meta events, I use one of my extra character slot, created few 80’s to run the HOT story to chapter 8 to get the ones I’m missing.

Sorry, zero sympathy for this type of whining.

In the most enjoyable MMO I ever played (and I played it for 2.5 years and would still be playing it if they had not completely rewritten it), you could get full template in 1 day and best-of-server gear in a week. “takes ages to get” does not necessarily equate to more fun/better gameplay.

I’ve just gotten the last mastery point required to max my masteries. Needless to say, I will NEVER EVER touch those &#)&!$)&#$ adventures again. I did not enjoy even one second of it and never will. I can’t imagine for the life of me why the developers force people into content they KNOW a lot of people don’t enjoy (as demonstrated by the aforementioned long lines of players waiting for the old ones in Lion’s Arch cough).

This is just my opinion, but please do keep in mind I’ve been playing PVP centric MMO almost exclusively since 2003 and was, in those games, pretty hardcore.

And I really think Guild Wars 2 is not a PVP game. Trying to pretend it is, is laughable. And I can’t really imagine watching other people doing it online either. This when I am an avid watcher of the EVE Online streamed tournaments (where billions of ISK get blown up in each match never to return).

Just my 2 bits, for what it’s worth.

Map closing is an issue overall. Even if the map IS underpopulated, 200% contribution is 200% contribution, and that’s just wiped away each and every time you are forced to change instances.

The air vents still aren’t working. A “we’re working on it” would be nice…

SkyShroud.2865:

Astralporing.1957:

Devata.6589:

So if that are the types of problem small guilds are running into I can understand it. But that’s not what people have been asking for in this thread.

People in this thread have been asking to make the upgrades cheaper and more easily accessible. Scaling is just a idea introduced to leave the size 500 prices at the current level, since the big guilds apparently like them so much.

The main beef with the current system is that Anet balanced upgrade prices around assumption that every guild is max size, and upgrade unlocks aroud assumption that no guilds would want to specialize, instead preferring to raise all upgrade lines at the same time. Both of those assumptions are, of course, wrong.

You need to stop convincing yourself that anet balanced it around 500 size. All who followed the streams knows they didn’t. Of course, you didn’t. Anet made a target of 6 mths for a guild of 10 to max the guild, naturally, the 10 must be active, hardworking and contributing players.

I am pretty sure that you prefer to max the guild within 1 months.

And if you’re such a fan of the ‘hardworking’ part (and please note most people play games to, you know, PLAY), you might want to have a look in Age of Conan and see how that worked out for them. The ridiculously huge materials cost for guild city upgrades there pretty much drove out guilds by the dozen.

Maris.3164:

Terrahero.9358:

Maris.3164:

Nope, HoT maps aren’t solo friendly. What do you want Anet to do about it? “Hardcore” players have asked for harder content for two years or so. To nerf the content now would be letting down the players who wanted harder content and were also promised it by Anet. The very people who bought HoT because harder content was promised.

Should Anet make more casual friendly content then? They have already catered for casuals for 3 years now but sure, why not. When they have the time.

Honestly though, I wouldn’t say the actual content on the maps is hard aside from maybe King of the jungle in TD. Some or most of the content just isn’t soloable. Joining or creating a guild (maybe just for casual players?) isn’t a bad idea.

Hmm, its almost like when you cater to one kind of demographic that that demographic grows larger. Then you switch it up, charge people full price for an expansion that is suddenly tailored for the minority of players, and act surprised that people are kittened?

They released an expansion that went directly against what they’ve been building up over the years and hyped their game to be before it even came out. It’s stupid to say “well, you got yours now we hardcore player tiny minority deserve to get ours”, because the hardcore crowd doesnt pay the bills.
If all the “casual” players would up and leave, and just the “hardcore” players would stick around, i can promise you GW2 will be shut down before Q3 2016.

You are right, the majority of the players are casual.

However, everybody knew that HoT content would be slightly more challenging than the central Tyrian content as Anet was very much open about it. It wasn’t “suddenly” tailored to “hardcore” players, this was known all along. This is what was asked of them. Players demanded it and Anet delivered. I didn’t see anyone complaining back then when it was announced that the expansion content would be more challenging.

Furthermore I find it shortsighted and well, selfish to say ‘because we are the majority, we should always get what we want regardless of what others want.’ Anet is trying to cater to both types of players. I don’t see an issue with that.

I personally don’t think the content in HoT is really that hard. The difficulty comes in when you want to solo absolutely everything. You cannot and you should accept it. For random exploring and story all you need is one friend to help you out if you really are struggling.

Would it be too much of a trouble to ask a friend to join in and help with hero points? Or wait around for others to show up? I highly doubt people will stop running the events or doing the hero points on HoT maps anytime soon and there’s always someone willing to help if you do find yourself alone.

There’s one gigantic flaw here. The casual player base too wanted an expansion, because frankly, not much has been added to the game since launch, content wise. What little things were added, were usually either a smallish zone or temporary in nature. Many stopped playing for lack of new things to do.

It’s my assumption this casual player base is the majority. So why have an expansion that caters to a minority, unless you are actually aiming to get NEW players with different preferences. Which, historically, hasn’t exactly been proven the best idea ever for MMOs.

Ulion.5476:

Artaz.3819:

The green reclaimed is probably around 1% maybe 1.5%.

Its higher than that, out of the ~40 plates I gotten all were from blues/greens but the last one. When I was deciding how to get reclaimed plate I did some test. Most of the time I was getting more reclaimed plates from salvaging a large amount of greens for the same value as a rare reclaimed weapon.

It’s RNG at work again, I swear. I’ve got some 141 mastery points worth of skill, so yes, I’ve spent PLENTY of time in the zone, and I’ve salvaged everything, but I still only have 2 tokens. It’s starting to look like precursors to me… 3+ years in game and still none for me.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Argon.1563:

The TD meta has a 2 hour cooldown before it begins again, and my latest attempt at it lasted for 8 minutes and 18 seconds. I hadn’t even finished the first song in my music playlist before the event failed.

So much for ArenaNet’s “No waiting to have fun.” statements. I hate how the devs aren’t bothered with commenting with their thoughts on the event, yet they’re willing to throw out whole blog posts about e-sports, which only 1%-2% of the community actually enter and take part in.

Solution: don’t wait around. Do stuff in the meantime.

Oh yes, because it’s such fun to endlessly repeat the same events, then lose all progression because your map is one of those that has already given up (sometimes after starting out with ’let’s do this’). Not to mention the constant failing.

At this point, all I want is the mastery point in the strongbox behind the wall and the Gerenth kill I need for the mistward armor set. Loot? Pff, I’m one of those RNG outliers on the unlucky side, I can’t even get plated armor tokens.

No fun is being had.

Kal Spiro.9745:

eldrin.6471:

TD meta is a pushover compared to raids. and when did the people that played this game since launch ask for this crap? Anet decided to screw over there own player base to draw in a few raiders from wow.

That’s easy, since launch. People have been asking for Hardcore since launch. It became Hardcore when ANet decided to make an expansion, because people have been begging for Hardcore since launch. There are a lot of casuals and just bads who aren’t going to like it, but then there are also a lot of other people who want to be challenged and have not been since launch. Those people have been begging for and demanding this, and this is the result of that desire.

If you do not enjoy hardcore, or even just challenging, then I pity you. It’s your own fault, though, for not paying enough attention. They said it repeatedly. They told you it was coming. They never claimed it would be business as usual, they said it would be harder. That the entire point was endgame content for all those people than felt Orr wasn’t endgame enough and thought Liadri was the bomb. You were warned. It’s not ANet’s fault if you missed the warning, didn’t understand it, or ignored it.

Correction. In my experience, most people were fine with the core game as it was. A group of people of indeterminate size wanted ‘hard’ content, but I don’t think anyone ever did a poll of the game population to find out how large that group was. Personally, I THINK it wasn’t all that large, just very vocal.

It’s nice to shout ‘everyone was begging for it’, but that statement is not substantiated by numbers in any way. WHAT percentage of the population wanted this? And how wise is it to have a core game that specifically aims at casual gameplay and then turn around and to make an expansion that does anything but?

And worst of all, the expansion does it rather badly. It’s truly unwise to have complicated map metas and then not allow people who want to make a serious effort at it to select their own map. It’s just about as stupid as it gets to shove a raid gateway into a zone that depends on active participation to get a meta done. And forcing people to constantly use a badly designed LFG tool to get NORMAL map progression done is beyond words.

I levelled a character to max in AION and got her the ‘legendary’ gear for that game. I’m starting to feel it wasn’t half as bad as HoT is turning out to be.

maddoctor.2738:

Broom.2561:

It’s simple math.

If only it was.

Determine what is a reasonable contribution, multiply by members.

That’s not going to work well because member count changes too much. Tiers should be better but they have their own sets of problems. Also, it’s something that was already mentioned, larger guilds have more inactive players too, especially really old ones that existed for years. Kind of unfair to any guild striving to get big to use total member count as your basis.

Add ‘upkeep requirements’ that lock facilities if membership grows by too much too suddenly, demanding the lacking amount of resources be contributed. Problem solved.

It depends on how you define “suddenly” and “too much”. It’s still similar to what Astral suggested, to lock features of the guild away when guilds change tiers. The same thing everyone is complaining about now and you want to add it again only it will be applied multiple times now?

Please note: I have mentioned both before. So er, yeah.

Please note: I answered those before. So er, yeah

Well, here’s where you simply have to be ruthless as a guild leader. Have inactives? Boot them. If they’re only a burden, out they go, unless they have VERY special circumstances. They’re welcome to rejoin once they’re back.

Vayne.8563:

morrolan.9608:

Broom.2561:

PyrateSilly.4710:

This has been answered so many times as it is now ridiculous to even think about bringing up something that was just a “this is what we would like” and as things change and grow things get cut and added.
As for the grinding …… I have been playing since head-start/beta and I have yet to grind. Not once have I grinded and I have played just about every day. I am not only doing the old Bolt but also every other new legendary weapon in the game at the moment. I am collecting as I go and not worrying about how fast I get them done. For me it is not a contest to see how fast I get them done. I am just letting the pieces come when they come. Having too much fun just playing to think about “oh crap I don’t have this legendary yet”

You may remember that just before release, the company making GW2 was taken over by another one, who had a bit of a reputation for being cash hungry. They made all kinds of assurances that they would stick to the original vision of the developers, but pretty much the first thing they did at launch was to start break promises.

Let’s just say I don’t think the original vision for this game is being adhered to anymore.

NCSoft bought Arenanet long before GW2 was released, I think when GW1 was in its prime. And Nexon never took over NCSoft just bought a stake in it which they sold a few months ago.

NcSoft owned Anet before the first Guild Wars 1 was released, long before it was in its prime. By the way, some would argue its in its prime now, at the height of its playerbase.

It’s been years, and I don’t remember the full details but there was a takeover of some sort shortly before launch which concerned a lot of people, it was all over the beta forums. Not NCSoft, maybe it was another company taking a large interest. However it is, there were assurances from ‘above’ that nothing would change. And at launch we found out that dyes were suddenly not per account – as promised – but per character. I know this was reversed about 6 months ago, but still.

Either way, it’s pretty obvious that ‘play how you want’ has gone out the door. Want to do HoT story, do the big meta fights or raids, or get new legendaries? Have to do masteries. Want masteries? Have to do FPS mini adventures. Where it used to be all about making everything accessible to everyone, it’s gradually shifted to ’don’t have ascended? no raids 4u’.

PyrateSilly.4710:

This has been answered so many times as it is now ridiculous to even think about bringing up something that was just a “this is what we would like” and as things change and grow things get cut and added.
As for the grinding …… I have been playing since head-start/beta and I have yet to grind. Not once have I grinded and I have played just about every day. I am not only doing the old Bolt but also every other new legendary weapon in the game at the moment. I am collecting as I go and not worrying about how fast I get them done. For me it is not a contest to see how fast I get them done. I am just letting the pieces come when they come. Having too much fun just playing to think about “oh crap I don’t have this legendary yet”

You may remember that just before release, the company making GW2 was taken over by another one, who had a bit of a reputation for being cash hungry. They made all kinds of assurances that they would stick to the original vision of the developers, but pretty much the first thing they did at launch was to start break promises.

Let’s just say I don’t think the original vision for this game is being adhered to anymore.

Axialbloom.8109:

My main issue is gating mastery points behind these stupid PING RELIANT mini-games. Really screws Oceanic players.

Not just Oceanic mate. I’m Euro, have a decent enough ping, but I keep experiencing lag spikes which all my analyses say have nothing whatsoever to do with MY end of the internet connection. It’s definitely server lag.

GW2 has neither the latency, the interface or the mechanics for decent FPS mini games. They should never have introduced these horrors.

FrizzFreston.5290:

This problem is the same with any world event. You’re years late if you only just play on one map and now complain that the shatterer only spawns every 3 hours or so.

This is no different than it was on launch, except players are hyper focussed on one achievement for which they need this one specific event to not go wrong for. That achievement should be changed, the event itself is probably fine.

What could be interesting however is a mini “worldboss”/mapmeta cycle for just HoT so that lazy players have some incentive to cycle maps.

Shatterer doesn’t FAIL almost every single time, after all the event-ing and organizing
Shatterer doesn’t have a mastery point hidden behind a wall only a successful event can remove
Shatterer doesn’t have half a map’s worth of achievements tied to successful completion of the event

It’s actually even worse than the triple worm.

Draknar.5748:

Here’s a tip: some of the mini-games require certain masteries to get gold rating.

Like that one where you turn into a mushroom. I don’t think you can even get Silver without having the speedshroom mastery. I did a flawless run, no masteries, and was still 15secs from even getting bronze. Maybe there’s a shortcut somewhere I missed. But just normal speed, not getting hit by anything, not missing any jumps (I’m a SAB trib mode veteran, so I’m no jumpin’ fool), constant forward momentum, and I couldn’t get bronze.

I figured bronze would be what you would get by doing bare minimum, not full effort, but not getting lost or falling somewhere, no masteries required. Silver is the same, maybe with masteries enabled. And Gold is very difficult, where you might have to skip areas with clever jumping and masteries are a must.

The only masteries I don’t have are the last two Itzel ones (lack of Mastery points). Still can’t do the adventures. Tried all day yesterday, have a blistering headache, shoulders like concrete and a foul temper as a result.

My reaction speed isn’t what it used to be, lag spikes (???!) disrupt efforts at the most frustrating moments possible and I didn’t think these adventures were ‘fun’ in any way shape or form to begin with.

Honestly, if I wanted to play Super Mario or FPS games, I’d be buying those.

maddoctor.2738:

Broom.2561:

Draknar.5748:

So if they scale the materials requirements based on membership…

What’s to stop a big guild from starting a 2nd guild, moving all members to said second guild, thus reducing their main membership down to 5 members, and then having all members from the 2nd guild supply the now lower-tier requirements until everything is maxed out, and then move everyone back to the 1st guild?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And it would be abused by every large guild in the game. Why kill yourself trying to acquire 10x the amount of materials when you can simply reduce your membership to the lowest tier, fill those reqs, and then invite everyone back in?

That suggestion was not thought through properly, methinks.

Actually, people in this thread suggested quite a few ways to solve this. Might want to, you know, read the whole thread.

Actually they didn’t solve all the problems of the scaling suggestion, because it has many and has been addressed already.

You might want to, you know, read the whole thread.

It’s simple math. Determine what is a reasonable contribution, multiply by members. Use brackets to simplify matters, if necessary. Add ‘upkeep requirements’ that lock facilities if membership grows by too much too suddenly, demanding the lacking amount of resources be contributed. Problem solved.

I think the whole material requirement issue should just be forgotten about, though. They should take it back to influence, so it’s guild ACTIVITY and not guild RL wallet that determines what you get. And no more buying influence scrolls either.

Please note: I have mentioned both before. So er, yeah.

After over an hour of fighting, dying and trying, I got to the mordrem fight… and then was unable to jump off the platform and glide. Reset, rinse and repeat.

I hate the entire mission. The enemies have way too many hitpoints, the entire encounter is buggy, and it’s all WAY too unforgiving. I can’t even bring myself to try anymore.

Draknar.5748:

So if they scale the materials requirements based on membership…

What’s to stop a big guild from starting a 2nd guild, moving all members to said second guild, thus reducing their main membership down to 5 members, and then having all members from the 2nd guild supply the now lower-tier requirements until everything is maxed out, and then move everyone back to the 1st guild?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And it would be abused by every large guild in the game. Why kill yourself trying to acquire 10x the amount of materials when you can simply reduce your membership to the lowest tier, fill those reqs, and then invite everyone back in?

That suggestion was not thought through properly, methinks.

Actually, people in this thread suggested quite a few ways to solve this. Might want to, you know, read the whole thread.

I hate those mini games with a passion. Some, I can’t even get bronze on. Most, I can barely get silver, and that after hours of (VERY unhealthy and tense) trying. But if I EVER want to even TRY those new legendaries, I need more mastery points. And guess where a gazillion of those are tied up?

I seriously seriously hate these adventures, and I loathe the whole concept of gated content.