Guild Wars 2

WoW players who play GW2 are spoiled by GW2 to the point of WoW not being much fun anymore. That is as it should be… what should NOT be the case nearly as much as it is, is that GW2 players who played GW1 feel spoiled by GW1 (and therefor disappointed by GW2). When you’ve already seen that a company can do better than what they’re currently doing, you can’t reasonably blame people for complaining.

Alliance chat (a technology from 2006) could be used for up to 1000 players, while also having subset chats of the individual guild chats and party chat (also whisper if needed). That made communication quite a bit more efficient than the current incarnation. An alliance could assign each guild a task easily, the guilds themselves could then chat amongst themselves to accomplish the goal while easily switching the chat channel to discuss things with the entire alliance. Years later, not only has Anet not improved on that system, they have actually gone backwards in the chat design.

Vorch.2985:

Broadicea.8294:

Vorch.2985:

From what I’ve been seeing, you need 4 commander tags: 1 Left Turret, 1 Left Ranged DPS, 1 Right Turret, 1 Right Ranged DPS.

The Turret commanders lead players that are protecting the turret users. Their job is to direct the destruction of fingers, kill mobs, and ensure the safety of the turrets.

The DPS commanders are markers. they stand IN FRONT of the turrets while the turret users spam 4 and 5 on them and the mob surrounding them.

Players on turrets are VERY important. They need to understand that they are pressing #2 for scales, # 4 for buffing the DPS commander markers, and #3 to remove poison. Throw in #5 on DPS commander markers to make add heals.

That sounds like a very solid strategy.

Actually, what blackgate did was have only ONE commander for DPS, that way ALL the turrets focused on a very small area, giving permanent swiftness and easy access.

It was beautiful

So, in other words, the grand strategy to defeat the dragon is … to… stack. Who’d have guessed it.

If the expectation from Anet is that we have a highly coordinated effort required to beat this boss (or any other) coming from 80+ people, would it not make sense for them to give us some better way of communicating than MAP CHAT? Even GW1 had alliance chat which could help serve to organize and communicate in groups… GW2 has no real means of achieving that level of coordination.

I see a deliberate pattern of removing the rewards that have been added in the recent past. First, magic find was heavily nerfed (seemingly without a corresponding increase in drop rates) and now the best approaches to getting better loot (such as world boss events) are being nerfed to be much more likely to fail.

Anet, why did you listen to people demanding better carrots a few months ago if you were just going to take them away anyway?

I just took the time to do the Scavebger’s Chasm Jumping Puzzle in Malchor’s leap in the hopes of getting ascended mats from the three chests at the end. It was my understanding that JP chests always drop a few ascended mats (up until I did this puzzle I had gotten them 100% of the time from about 18 other puzzles and mini dungeons), but NONE of the three chests here dropped them. Seems to me like the chests drops did not get upgraded when the others did.

Adding a new tier above exotic to crafting without upping the amounts of tier 6 mats is like marketing beef jerky to people without teeth. Who the hell is making decisions at Anet these days? It seems like the decisions get worse and make less sense every time I new one comes out.

Promising one thing and delivering another is the core philosophy that GW2 is built on. No surprises there. Really though, this magic find fix was a disaster for other reasons. Anet took action to fix a problem, but didn’t seem to understand the problem before doing so.

Why do so many people want magic find? Because the drops in the game by default are so god-kitten ed awful that people feel like they NEED magic find the feel properly rewarded. Having it as an item stat was a bad idea, undeniably. However, having it at all is the real bad idea. Why should one person have a better chance at good loot than someone else simply because he ate some omnomberries?

Moving it to account bound doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes anyone who invested in MF gear annoyed because they almost certainly wasted a large amount of resources (laurels, time in fractals, gold, whatever) to get something that now has been significantly downgraded. There were also people with over 500 MF who are now at less than 100, and the drop rates don’t seem to have been fixed.

Also, its likely the crafting material market will crash, since everyone is salvaging to get the stupid luck mats.

I’m starting to get a feeling of desperation from ANet. It’s subtle, but noticeable in their recent updates that have tried harder and harder to push people into the cash shop while causing parts of the game to unravel at the seams.

Minami Kaori.2548:

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that my main character Minami did not receive her present. All 7 of my alts did.
It seems to be a bug for many players.

I’ve gotten 3 out of 8 so far… though I THINK one of my characters was created a week or so later, just because I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to play an engineer. Still 3 out of 7 is a bad track record for most things outside of baseball…

Blude.6812:

Should have been 1 or 2 gold a day since you registered your account/game when you purchased it. Simple and easy to administer. If you had the game for year—sweet!! If you’ve had the game for 10 days—still sweet.

Maybe that was sarcasm, if so I’m afraid it didn’t translate very well into text. If not, let’s just readily admit that that idea is terrible (though it would have been more enjoyable than what we actually got). I personally would have been satisfied with something like what we got in GW1 (so long as it was not account or soul bound) or even just a random lvl 80 exotic or 2… whoever made this call about the birthday presents should really not be in a position to make calls like that in my opinion.

The presents are extremely disappointing to me. As someone with 8 characters (one of each prof) the presents after the first one were pretty much worthless. Why do I need or want 8 copies of the same ACCOUNT BOUND mini? Why do I need 8 more XP scrolls that none of my characters can even use that are also account bound? I can only assume they gave those with a nudge-nudge idea about buying new character slots, but they give me no reason to do so; the game is somewhat alt-unfriendly and there are no new professions to be interested in.

Finally, we have the boosters. So for playing the game a year (even pre-ordering and getting the laughable digital upgrade “rewards”), buying extra character slots and gems along the way, I get to have 8 boosters that each work for a day and grant a modest bonus to magic find, even though the exotics drop about once a month for me even with lots of magic find.

I’m sure there will be those that say “you should be grateful to get free stuff at all!” but right now, all the b-day presents have done is convince me to not send any more money in Anet’s general direction.

Let me preface this by saying that I am generally better informed about the content of updates than many other players. I’m not bragging here; I pay attention to the various forums and fan-sites and usually know what will be included in updates prior to their release by a day or so (though sometimes its only a few hours).

That being said, I just got screwed by Anet because they didn’t tell us more ahead of time what was planned. Specifically, I lost out on close to a million karma because of the changes to boosters with respect to karma containers. If it had been mentioned to the community that these changes were being planned for today’s release, I could have easily made sure this didn’t happen.

Anet, the previous max bonus on karma containers was 95% with all possible bonuses. It seems as though you increased the amount on containers by 50%. There’s a huge flipping difference between those two percentages…. and all that would have been required here is a little transparency.

tolunart.2095:

The ironic thing is, blue/green gear is so cheap because it’s so common. I get a dozen pieces a day and most of them I can’t even sell on the TP because they go for 1c above vendor price, so I vendor them to save the in 15% tp fees. Even the ones that eventually sell often sit there for a week or more.

So, if yellows and oranges were more common, I would get a dozen rares and exotics a day and most of them I couldn’t even sell on the TP because they would go for 1c above vendor price, so I’d vendor them to save the in 15% tp fees. Even the ones that eventually do sell would often sit there for a week or more.

There are a LOT of people playing every day, and the TP is cross-server so it all dumps into the same pool. This, more than anything, is responsible for the drops in prices. So increasing the flow of loot does nothing to help.

Sorry, but that’s overly simplistic. There are lots of ways they could make the game feel more rewarding without significantly affecting TP prices of most things. For example, if once per day/week there was a mega-mega event the came with a 100% chance of an exotic that was account bound, the only way that could affect the TP is from the rune/sigils/ecto that could be grabbed off it. As the prices of all of those things are really higher than they should be (runes and sigils are needed just to kit out your character and ectos are needed in MASSIVE quantities for all kinds of things), that’s an effect I’d be perfectly willing to live with. If anet decided that would be too strong, they could just make the drop unsalvagable the way karma loot is and it WOULD STILL be an improvement to the current system.

I came up with those ideas in 30 seconds… Anet has had years to think about it, meaning we should expect something even better.

Mirta.5029:

False. Currently stats on a legendary are exactly the same as exotic stats. Ask someone to link you a legendary weapon and compare. Or even better preview off the TP. Legendaries will only jump in stats when Ascended weapons will be released. Currently there’s no, so for weapons the highest stated weapon is still an exotic.

Right you are. It seems they’ve been slow to update the official wiki. However, my point wasn’t merely that legendaries are not only skins. Gear rarity is still important all the way up to exotics, yet exotics drop only VERY rarely (to the point if being absurd really).

Mirta.5029:

That’s exactly the same in every MMO. When you end up doing everything the game has to offer you either do it all over again because you like it, or you put your game away.

You missed the point. Obviously every game will run its course eventually. The problem is that the end term goals here are about GEAR… and once you’ve got it there’s nothing left to do with it. Not all other games are like that. And again, there’s not nearly as much reason to compare to ALL other games as there is to compare to Guild Wars 1 (this is supposed to be a sequel after all, or so the name says), and in GW1 you could get an equip max stat gear at level 1 if you were creative. The systems in GW2 are a step in the wrong direction as far as I’m concerned. Saying “its just like most of the other bad/mediocre games out there, so why are you complaining?” is a really shallow argument.

Deamhan.9538:

Legendary weapons are skins. They offer no stat benefit over exotic. They are something you save up for as you play when you already have full exotic and ascended gear.

That’s false. Currently, that stats of Ascended and Legendary weapons are 175% of those of basic (white) weapons. Exotics are 165%, rares are 145%, greens are 135%, blues are 125%. So, as you can see, rarity makes a very real difference in effectiveness of the weapon. This makes legendaries and all the rest more than simply “skins”. If it were as you say, I would have no problem with that at all. (It was that way in GW1 for example)

Deamhan.9538:

And if all you have left to do is save up the mats to get the skin, well then what happens once you have it? A few days of flaunting it and then you’ll be bored of the game with no more goals for you to strive for? Hence ANet wants it to take a lot of time to get’em so that it keeps people playing.

Right. Grind to keep playing, but have nothing to do when you get the thing you were grinding for. That’s bad design.

Deamhan.9538:

I will say though that doing dailies on the pve side of things does require you to go out of your way to do it. This is because too often you have to go to specific maps to kill vets or do events there. So unless you are pve’ing there already, you’ll have to go out of your way to do it.

Some agree and some disagree with this. For myself, I find its usually easy enough to do 3 or 4 of the 5 daily requirement without playing unusually.

Deamhan.9538:

Oh and you get tokens and/or karma for completing the dailies/events/etc. I haven’t been around from the start but have they reduced the amount of tokens/karma you get for completion? If you keep doing events, is there a reduction on the amount of karma you’ll get? Doesn’t that mean if you do the same even or same series of events, you get 0 karma for completing it? I’ve yet to see a diminishing return on karma (in WvW pretty much everything you do will earn you karma and you are doing the same things over and over).

You get LAURELS, (not tokens) and jugs of karma for doing dailies. Those two currencies are radically different… laurels are needed for highly desired objects, whereas karma is readily available and currently has little of worth to spend it on.

Olba.5376:

They are not planning an expansion because they’re focusing on polishing out the do’s and don’ts for the Living Story.

As for the money, there was a lot of talk about an NCSoft earnings report that stated that there had been enough cash flow to warrant an expansion.

This is false information. What happened was that incoming revenue for GW2 dropped sharply (as in more than 30%) in the first quarter of 2013. As a consequence, an NCSoft official told media that an expansion was being planned, not as a conclusion that sales were strong enough to justify one, but the other way around: that an expansion would help bring up falling sales. That being said, the sales figures were that from January to March of 2013, GW2 still brought in more than 33 million U.S. dollars for Anet/NCSoft… Its speculation on my part, but to me the numbers suggest that most of that money came from gem sales, (as otherwise it would equate to something like half a million near players) and the earning report does mention sharply decreasing “box” sales for GW2.

Deamhan.9538:

What loot are you going for?

Armor:

Run dungeons for the tokens (not the loot drops) and use the tokens to buy armor that covers most (if not all) prefixes.

-snip-

Weapons:

Dungeons and WvW, same as above.

Trinkets:

The ascended trinkets will cost you laurels. Sure there are the accessories that require ecto (which only requires 80 I think for the pair) but you can also get ascended accessories with just 5 gold and guild accommodations. I also heard that they are putting a vendor in WvW.

What you’ve just described show one of the fundamental flaws in the design. To get the gear which is “best” (excluding legendaries of course) requires that you play/replay/grind through the content most of us see as “end game” stuff. (Even if you don’t see it that way, its hard to deny you’ve just listed virtually all the challenging content in the game, as well as the most replayable content.) So you do that stuff and you get your exotic stuff. THEN WHAT? You chase gear all the way to the end of the game, but once you have it, you don’t need it for anything! In addition, you’re describing significant work/grind for only a few options… as you point out, you can’t get the stats you may want and weapon wise, you’re limited to very few skins for any single weapon choice.

You also left out crafting, which is really a better way to get that gear, but for crafting the skin choices are generally not appealing to many people AND you still have to FARM/BUY mats to make them (which includes ECTOs… something you only get from the rare+ items that are hard to get). Thus, the only choices are really, 1) buying gems and getting what you want from the TP or 2) Farming for gold/mats or 3) Framing/Grinding for tokens and/or karma.

Since the game’s releases, we’ve seen significant nerfs to both the 2nd and 3rd approaches above, but not the first. What does that tell you?

AntiGw.9367:

I’m sorry, but if you don’t like dungeons or events, you don’t like 90% of non-PvP GW2. And since you don’t even like WvW, and by the looks of it sPVP as well…

What are you doing here exactly? Farming was never a selling point of GW2.

It sounds like your point is that, if we don’t like it we should just stop playing. Now, for the record, I have no problem with your view on that; I don’t think its a stupid suggestion or that you’re just trolling.

However, ask yourself this: are the people disagreeing talking to YOU or trying to tell Anet how they feel? Unless you’re some paid stooge for Anet, why do you feel compelled to defend them so much? Let them speak for themselves (or as is often the case, not at all). Here you see players trying to communicate with the designers about what they feel is wrong with their game… If you disagree with those views, say so to Anet, I’m sure they’ll want to hear your thoughts. But I’m pretty sure Anet doesn’t want to lose customers simply because you as a player think other people’s demands are extreme.

In GW1, when a quest/mission rewarded an item, those were available for every single character you chose to play through them with. Plenty of people did a lot on alts because they wanted to continue to get the rewards. The new loot from living story is generally welcome, but why are we able to get one item per account?

I have 8 characters who need back-pieces, Anet, not one. Getting max stat gear shouldn’t be something you have to spend hours doing AFTER reaching max level, it should be given early on so that we can actually use it for challenging content.

Then we see closed down farms in a game already designed to have almost entirely crap rewards. Yeah, thanks for all the rare drops in meta events… except that other than maybe getting an ecto or a few silver from the TP, these are pretty much worthless. Why did dungeon chests drop max level golds in GW1 instead of mostly Purples with a small chance at something better? Anet, you and I both know its because doing so would chase people AWAY from doing it because of the poor reward per time investment. How can anyone think that getting lvl 78 exotics for completing level 80 zones is how it should be, or that getting a statistically inferior pact weapon for killing a world threat is how it should be?

GW1 had other ways of making money besides farming: running, running dungeons/missions, chest running, special quests with big rewards, being able to buy merchant items cheaper and then sell them if you alliance controlled places in Factions, and farming spots that could be reset at will if you found a way to speed things up and thereby increase your profits. Why, then, is the direction GW2 takes so lackluster and unrewarding in comparison?

A lot of the “drops defenders” who will undoubtedly post here insist on comparing loot in GW2 to other MMOs and noting that the grind is better, etc. Why not compare it to a game Anet already made, where we see GW2’s systems got worse?

darkace.8925:

phabby.8945:

I think the op means bring back the fun of farming to gw2 that we had in gw1.

I don’t know who “we” is, but I’m certainly not one of them. I played through all four campaigns and earned enough 30/50 HoM points, and I never once had fun farming in Guild Wars.

You might not be among them, but if you ever perused PvX, you should be aware that one of the most popular sections was the farming builds section. In a broad sense, almost everyone plays these games because of “farming” whether they’re farming for loot, prestige items, kitten, or jukittenn.

I frankly don’t understand why their “fix” to the Lyssa farm was to eliminate drops. That’s just idiotic in my opinion. Wouldn’t it have been simpler and less idiotic to simply add a timer to that event so that it would fail after a certain time instead of letting it stay open and continue to respawn risen indefinitely? How about if it only respawns so many foes before stopping while the event is up? The way they “fixed” it makes even players who weren’t farming it not see much incentive to do that event anymore.

There are easier temples to complete that have the same giant chest filled with insta-merch. Why waste time on Lyssa’s event when we know the foes won’t be dropping anything?

Exotics having strictly better stats than rares makes people see using rares as a temporary measure. (The same is true for many about ascended gear vs exotics). Why are so many people banging their heads against the infinite wall that is FotM? Is it because the visual appearance of the gear there is better? No. Its because the rewards are better AND they can get ascended gear (better stats). Without this really artificial stat differentiation (and by the way NOT having that was one of the trademarks that made GW1 great) you’d likely see players playing all over the place instead of just the places where they have the best shot at getting the best loot.

Very few of us have the mind-set of a hampster in a wheel… we’re not going to just run and run for no reason, and when we have to “run” we’ll find the most efficient way of doing it so as to maximize rewards while minimizing effort, and if the work outweighs the reward, we won’t even bother. Anet should know this better than most, but their design decisions make it seem like that don’t recognize it at all lately.

Mirta.5029:

EXireXs.3602:

Oh then whats your goal in completing lyssa? Bragging rights?

fun, challenge and knowing that I opened the temple for someone.

Captain Bulldozer.9028:

Do you mean the one that drops blues and greens 90% of the time? Because if that’s it (and that’s all its ever going to be) then I must respectfully decline.

You could have said that months ago and maybe I would have agreed, but you can’t really say it when loot has been significantly upped in meta events. Even without the guaranteed rare you have a high chance to get rares and exotics in that chest. Sometimes I got an exotic, sometimes I get up to 4 rares in total from one event, most of the time the average is 2. If you want to complain about chest rewards complain about the still broken ones – dungeon chests, jumping puzzle chests, chests guarded by champions.

Silly me, I thought I was complaining about those too. I’ll happily agree that certain world event chests have better loot than they used to. That being said, with exotics being the most rare gear that drops from any of those places as well as the STATISTICALLY BEST gear that drops just about anywhere (yeah FotM blah blah blah), how many exotics do you see doing those events?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve done pretty much all the world events and dragon champions scores (if not hundreds) of times and I think to date I’ve seen a grand total of 0 exotics drops for myself. The only exotics I’ve ever gotten as drops were from Dungeons (now we’re in the area of 3, and one was an exotic recipe >< for something that would require about 75g worth of crafting materials). Sure, maybe I just have impressively bad luck… except that most of the people I talk to in-game are having the same thing happen to them.

A big chest stuffed with insta-merch that often is not sufficient incentive for many players. Now, if you wanna talk about making rares have the same stats as exotics as legendaries but with more desirable skins, that might go a long way to changing how people feel (or it might not… dunno).

Mirta.5029:

Most mobs in meta events (especially) are there to put pressure on you, not to give loot. The loot is that big nice chest that you get after the event ends.

Do you mean the one that drops blues and greens 90% of the time? Because if that’s it (and that’s all its ever going to be) then I must respectfully decline.

TheOnlyOneNL.3821:

I’m farming in Southsun Cove and I’m getting 4 gold per hour, 1 consortium chest per hour and even a 200% magic find boost.

I’m not saying that you’re wrong or anything, or even that you’re padding your numbers a bit. But I do know that when I spend an hour doing stuff in Southsun cove, I get no where close to the numbers you’re claiming, even with the 200 MF boost.

I don’t about anyone else (though I have some hunches ) but I might actually like to hear Anet’s idea of how they think we should go about earning money in this game. It’s a pretty safe bet that CoF p1 will be targeted soon (as other dungeons already have) as well as any place that proves to be “too profitable” by whatever metric they’re using. For my part, I don’t think that’s all bad, as keeping inflation under control is definitely very important. However, what are we to do to make money?

After these repeated nerfs to farming locations, combined with the somewhat unrewarding nature of much of the rest of the game, its quickly looking like the unavoidable conclusion is that, the only ways they want to see players become “wealthy” is by either playing the game in a way that is not FUN (like not finishing events so we can farm or GRIND our brains out) or to spend REAL WORLD MONEY for GEMS. Players, like me, who have stopped paying for gems until we start to see some of the improvements we’ve asked for (and been promised)… to say nothing of those who can’t afford the over-the-top gem prices … are quickly being left with no FUN alternatives Anet.

If you WANT to alienate your customers and cause them to stop playing, keep it up. (Hey, at least it’ll keep your server costs down). There are plenty of other places to spend money in life… personally I’m starting to think Anet has lost out on any future revenue from me (but I am willing to give them perhaps one or two more chances IF they earn them).