Guild Wars 2

Is there ever going to be more uses for karma that level 80’s would find useful? The gem boxes are ok I guess to get the karma spending daily done but I’m finding that from doing the daily I’m stockpiling tons of karma I have no use for (already got 1 legendary).

Maybe something fun with the upcoming fire and frost content, I don’t know… Or maybe a vendor that sells T6 mats for karma!

Sovta.4719:

Just remove her, good players killed her long time ago (only injustice would be for new players, but i doubt there are many since ESO and NWN are going on soon)

Anyone who has complained on the forums about the dungeons in this game probably will jump ship as soon as ESO goes live.

An easy fix would be to incentiveze people to farm other DE’s besides the usual suspects in Cursed Shore. Why there is no decent DE farm in Frostgorge is anyone’s guess.

[quote=1371209;Vol.5241:]

Wish there was a mobs vs players visibility slider. Lol

Ever since the January 28th “polishing” patch I have been seeing whole packs of mobs spawn right on top of me during the penn/shelter/jofast DE chain. This very much resembles the culling you used to see (or maybe still see) in WvW when large numbers of players are in one spot. Has anyone else seen this or is my client just bugging out? If the problem exists is anything being done to correct it?

I don’t usually crash. The game just doesn’t seem to close completely after I quit.

Ever since the Jan 28th patch I have been having an issue with the gw2.exe process not closing after I quit the game. To restart the game I have to go into task manager and manually end the process. Its pretty annoying and is a slight drain on system resources. Has anyone else been experiencing this?

I guess this is more of a question of game design than anything. Why is it that if you DC in a dungeon you are kicked out to the entrance? What is the point of punishing someone for a bad internet connection?

I think this is the only MMO that does this. Is this really by design or is this on the list of things that is going to be fixed in future patches?

DeathPanel.8362:

Go play wvw or FOTM 40+.

Raising the challenge just to satisfy a hand full of people like you while ailenating a lot more other casual players is not a smart thing for ANet to do.

A race towards the bottom, aiming for the lowest common denominator, or whatever term you would like to use is a great game design philosophy. Anet’s fear of alienating casual players has hobbled content design in GW2 and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Wesley.4590:

Lot of negativity here, let’s see how the first half of the year goes first. Then see if there are reasons to complain…

I think one major source of negativity towards the game at this point was that it attracted lots of hardcore MMO gamers that went through the content shortly after the game went live and are now bored/disappointed at the direction the developers seem to be wanting to take the game in 2013. If the game was originally intended to be targeted towards casual gamers they should have said so in Beta so people that spend 30+ hours a week grinding PVE content could have saved $60.

Issues not mentioned despite community interest:

*Dungeon bugs that take months to fix.
*Continuing inflation of legendary precursor prices when T6 mats have stabilized.
*Champ/Vet vs. normal mob loot improvement and normalization.
*Transparency on how magic find and diminishing returns actually works.
*Allowing third party addons.
*Premium monthly accounts that boost karma/xp instead of gem store purchases.
*More skill based PVE content with tangible rewards. Getting 10,000 killing blows with a dagger or farming 500 blueberries takes no skill and should not have a tangible reward. Soloing a champ does take skill and should be rewarded.

The general malaise felt by people who have been at 80 for months and aren’t interested in world events is tangible in the game now every time I log on. The same crowd farming DE’s in Orr, the same gags about the odds of fractals crashing midway through the set have gotten old. Transparency in the game mechanics and increased reliability in the game itself would be more appreciated than any achievement farming scheme that Anet could devise.

For a game as complex as GW2 I’m still amazed by how little data arenanet shares about the TP. Anonymous trades, no trade volume data published and no disclosure on the amount of gem/gold conversions done. Knowing any of these things would allow most people to have some idea of what’s going on in the economy.

haviz.1340:

Cirroq.2531:

Hey,

The fractal DC bug that was fixed during the Wintersday event is back now after the patch to remove the event was applied. Having functional fractals was terrific while it lasted. Actually it was probably the best “quality of game” improvement since the game went live. Please get on this Anet.

What fix? There was no fix. They only announced that fix is coming at the end of January.

You are right. It seems like fractals were marginally more stable in late December. I never dc’d. Maybe there were fewer people running fractals during the winter event?

Hey,

The fractal DC bug that was fixed during the Wintersday event is back now after the patch to remove the event was applied. Having functional fractals was terrific while it lasted. Actually it was probably the best “quality of game” improvement since the game went live. Please get on this Anet.

Being able to amass large amounts of any commodity for reasons other than either creating a legendary or making some kind of big trading post transaction is hard to understand. You can always just form a bank alt guild with friends or make an alt with huge bags. If you are holding onto things just for the sake of holding onto them you might just have a hording disorder.

Being able to stack dungeon tokens would be helpful though since several items require more than 1 stack of tokens to purchase.

Astraea.6075:

OmniPotentes.4817:

The main problem with the economy is inflation which is caused by power traders that speculate and try to manipulate the market by buying stockpiles of whatever they think they can make money off. These people dont contribute one iota to the gaming community.

Your underlying premise is incorrect. Although inflation may be a problem with the economy (and I’m not convinced that it is), it is not the result of the actions of power traders.

Where is price inflation happening? From what I can see, it is with Precursors and other materials required for crafting a Legendary. It doesn’t appear to be happening across the whole economy. As someone who buys materials on the TP and sells items crafted using these materials, I’ve noticed that prices on the materials I buy is relatively stable (they fluctuate up and down of course, but usually within a certain range).

The items you see price inflation occuring tend to be those with limited supply relative to demand, and it is perfectly normal for prices to rise in those circumstances. The higher prices will encourage producers to supply more of the affected items to the market (if possible) and encourage consumers to look at possible substitutions for the original item.

What you are proposing will actually limit the high volume trading activity that helps stabilise the prices of the most commonly bought items such as basic crafting materials and will not change the underlying reasons behind price inflation on the items with low supply relative to demand.

Another variable is the gold dumped on the market from gold/gem conversions and probably to a lesser extent gold sellers. This gold absolutely does cause inflation of prices.

Legendaries only appeared on the Trading Post last month. I’m wondering if gold sellers are cashing out before going on to another game?

Nappychappy.7046:

I’d like to see the legendary shift away from people buying gold whether legit via gems, or other means. Legendary’s should be centered around the skill and dedication of the player, rather than the ability to spend money, and loads of time farming.

Why would A-net risk the wrath of all the casual gamers by making getting a legendary a skill based process if no other PVE content in the game is skill based? Why would they discourage people from buying gems if that is their secondary income stream?

I think the answer is that they are trapped by how they promoted this game and its design. That, or they are content to pander to the people that support the game through gem store purchases. A real solution to this would be a pay for premium account with free to pay basic accounts. Being able to directly pay for gold and then using said gold to unbalance the economy is something they should have foreseen.

I made a spreadsheet to calculate the cost of crafting 400 level items vs the profit of selling the components on TP while farming for my legendary. In most cases selling the components will bring you as much profit as crafting something and then selling it. The only exception to this that I’ve seen is if you happen to get an event related crafting recipe drop AND you get the mats for it quickly then put it up on TP. For whatever reason people buy new items regardless of the stats for higher prices than you might expect. The karka event was a good example of this.

Generally my strategy for dealing with mats while farming is this:

Sell: All cloth and leather blues and all green items, salvageable generic leather, T6 mats.

Savage: All blue metal, wood items and all rares that sell for less than the price of an ecto on TP

TP: All sigils/runes/rares that sell for more than the price of an ecto on TP. Put ectos on TP if the price is good. You can also get a decent price for the bags that contain T6 mats (moldy bags from Orr, ect).

Craft: Carrion (xxx) rares and salvage for ectos. I’ve found that I get more mithril than elder logs so i usually make shields because they use the least mithril. Other crafts might have an even lower mat intensive recipe.

Sellonic.1798:

Why are some dungeons more rewarding then others. Lets compare armor set vendors of CoF and Arah, both sell berserker set affixs. CoF is way more farmable than Arah. While Arah is a end game dungeon, it’s rewards and benefits are the same as CoF. It also takes longer to finish Arah. I would love to see Arah as a more rewarding dungeon compared to other dungeons.

A possible way to make Arah more rewarding, is to give it twice the amount of badges it gives already. Or simply make it drop fractal shards or increase it’s drop rate to fractals mob’s drops rates.

The argument could be made that Arah takes longer and is more difficult so there is more prestige in sporting the dungeon skin.

Stability: By far the most annoying thing in dungeons is the bugs. Specifically the disconnect bug in Fractals and the various intermittent bugs in Arah are the most egregious. Everyone would like to be confident that if they start a dungeon that technical issues won’t be the thing holding them back from completing it.

Loot: I’m not sure why this is difficult to understand at Anet but people don’t do dungeons simply to kill the same mobs over and over again. They want loot. Clearing a leg of a dungeon then killing a boss can take a decent amount of time. Being rewarded with a chest that has a handful of greens and blues in it is ridiculous, even if you have a chance at getting an exotic. I would personally give up any chance at gear loot for guaranteed wondrous bags or some other known quantity.

Some good suggestions to the boss chest loot tables have been made here, but I’d like to make one more: have bosses drop something not available outside dungeons. It could be a special crafting mat, boe mini, something for the mystic forge, whatever. Make it more worthwhile loot wise.

LFG Tool: GW2lfg.com is not the answer here. Many people actually find it amusing that the post directing people there was given a sticky. Why an in game grouping system does not exist despite the ability to form groups across servers is confusing to everyone except the rabid fanboys that desperately don’t want this game to incorporate features found in WoW and other competing MMO’s.

Polish, Polish, Polish: Friends, people in my guild and many people from pugs have said the same thing about GW2 dungeons: they are gorgeous to look at but the bugs make them unplayable and downright painful to play.

From the start it felt like the the explore mode dungeons were an afterthought in the overall game design of GW2. It seems to many people who were accustomed to dungeons being the center of the game experience in other MMO’s that GW2’s buggy and frequently unbalanced high level dungeons weren’t given as much thought and attention as the story line dungeons were given despite the fact that explore mode is the most frequently used mode on the dungeons.

Dungeon Difficulty: Assuming a dungeon doesn’t bug in some way all of the dungeons are fairly easy if you are on voice chat and have exotics (which regardless of what anyone says are also easy to acquire). Most (but not all) bosses can be graveyard zerged and that is just silly. A more legitimate chance of failure when taking on a boss would be much appreciated.

Boss Design: Why are complicated boss skill mechanics only really present in a few bosses in the highest level dungeons? Many of the bosses, even in Arah are little more than a few dodge rolls with 5-8 minutes of auto attacks away from victory. It seems like bosses fall into one of two categories: either the huge health pool with an instant kill mechanic or a novel avoidance mechanic that trivializes the boss’ dps. Part of a satisfying dungeon experience, aside from loot and everything else mentioned above is having bosses that are fun to fight. Working together as a team and coordinating attacks is more fun than whittling away at an enormous health pool.

Twill.6217:

swiftpaw.6397:

Well, it’s not impossible,
Just very challenging.

there’s a difference between challenging and “requiring everyone to push max dps”.

i’m a tanky guardian. that’s my thing. that’s how i choose to play and i don’t play long enough to have a dedicated glass cannon dps set.

so why am i being punished for my choices? isn’t this game supposed to be about freedom? about choosing what you want to be?

wasn’t this game about throwing off the chains of min-maxing? about getting rid of holy trinity to prevent those “need heal last spot” shouts?

well, no one’s shouting for healer, however, you can’t swing a cat in path 4 without everyone shouting “only accepting true DDs. no support please”.

how is this different? are we getting rid of healers and tanks just so that kids could play dodge style glass-cannons only?

are you serious??

You can chose to play whatever build and profession you want but bear in mind your choices do have consequences. To my knowledge no dungeon bosses in this game have enrage timers so theoretically you could do any boss regardless of how low your dps is assuming you have the skill to stay alive long enough. If you lack the skill to hang in for a really long fight there may be issues.

Bruno Sardine.2907:

It’s just a pursuit devoid of skill…. I’d much rather it be minimal farming to craft gifts to put in the forge to get a precursor (account bound), followed by a unique quest (or chain) in order to “upgrade” the precursor -> legendary. The chain could be a combo of solo and group that’s pretty tough, but it’d be fun and unique and really say something about actually getting a legendary item other than “gg that your grind-hell is over”.

Being rewarded for skill would be going against the general end game design of GW2. PVE content in this game for the most part is designed more like a console action game than a MMO. They basically want anyone who has the time or the cash to buy gems and convert into gold to be able to sit down and farm or buy a legendary. Skill doesn’t really factor into it.

The one where there are no disconnects.

Why not discuss whether it makes sense to have a MF stat in the first place?

Please make a use for thick leather: This drop is essentially vendor trash loot because of total lack of demand on the trading post. Generally making the armor professions less generic by making leatherworking valuable to all armor classes might help.

Chained Dynamic Events in Frostgorge Sound: Everyone farms DE’s in Orr. Why not Frostgorge?

Make a high level salvageable wood drop: One might exist but I’ve never seen it after months in Orr and Frostgorge. Fabric, leather and metal all have an item. Why not wood?

Randomize all T5 resource node spawns: They are the magnet for the new bots

This happened on path 2 for me today but not on path 3.

It would be awesome if you could optionally bind different keys to talk, loot and use. The default could still be the all in 1 use button but for those of us that are annoyed by talking and rezzing npc’s in a pile of loot some diversification of the use function would be much appreciated.

Writetyper.1985:

The fractals DC I admit is an annoying issue, but it’s an engine limitation. I hope there is an overhaul of the way it works soon so I can start running fractals safely again.

Is this the official word from Anet as the reason why fractals are messed up or is this a rumor?

Someone from Anet please explain why the game was designed so conservatively when it comes to preventing farming dungeon tokens? A new game build came out while I was in Arah and of course, I DC at the last boss. I log back in after the game forces me to patch 2 hours before the time limit and of course I have the new build and can’t get back in.

I can see discouraging farmers from killing mobs over and over again for loot but seriously how difficult is it to program the game give some sort of grace period for someone that has been in the instance for over an hour? And seriously, weigh the amount of anger people feel after wasting so much time doing a dungeon to the trivial amount of irritation people farming feel on the trading post when they can’t undercut power farmers doing dungeon runs. I wish you guys would seriously rethink your priorities, or make the dungeon group system more intelligent.

Many MMO’s and other games have a patch note summary with a link to more detailed notes on the game’s website right on their launcher. It would be great if GW2 had something similar. I understand the need to advertise new content and gem store stuff on the front, but a tab placed behind that stuff on the launcher giving some clue as to what was fixed/patched/nerfed/buffed or whatever would be great. Even something as simple as anet going in and resetting bugged events in Orr would be much appreciated.

Thanks

TheDaiBish.9735:

You are aware that the people:

• developing content
• in charge of the cash shop
• working on bugs and issues

are not all the same people, right?

I think that what he is implying is that the division of labor lopsidedly favors content development and cash shop junk at the expense of fixing bugs. Its not that hard to believe since the DC issue with fractals has existed since they were introduced over a month ago and nothing has been done. The same argument could be made for all the other dungeon and dynamic event related bugs that persist despite 3 major content patches so far.

Anet has said the DC bug in fractals is a very difficult issue to fix. I would guess that means that either it is a bug involving a systemic flaw in the game itself or maybe they are BSing and hoping that people will get distracted by new content and forget about or give up on fractals. Either way its not good.

Has anyone noticed a reduced drop rate for bags, dyes and other non gear loot since the winter event started?

I thought it was mob attack speed but you can time it for when a mob should be attacking based on previous attacks and it doesn’t attack when I block.

I’ve noticed that I’m getting significantly fewer heavy moldy bags farming dynamic events in Orr. Are the gift boxes crowding out other loot on mobs’ loot tables or are they a separate roll when calculating loot? Of course the drop rate for the bags could have been nerfed as well. What gives?

I’ve been trying use shield block to block mobs and I’ve noticed that it only seems effective with their special attacks. If they are just swinging at me they tend to wait patiently for the shield stance to wear off then they immediately attack.

I could see a mob that is supposed to be “intelligent” but everything does this from stupid elementals to cows in Queensdale. Any thoughts on this?

The fire blast should proc regardless whether you break stealth or not after the timer runs out. In PVE I’ve noticed that mobs can still single target you (as in not aoe), especially the stuff in Orr.

The mage is mostly worthless except as you mentioned in a melee heavy situation but because of the phantasm summing delay and the slow attack speed it its usefulness is debatable.

The torch with a Mesmer like several other offhands should be revised to make them less situational.

Is the fire blast supposed to not go off if you break stealth before the 3 second countdown? The tooltip seems somewhat ambiguous.

If that is the case that severely limits the usefulness of this offhand. The burn isn’t that huge because the dot is spread over 4 seconds. The fire blast should proc at the end of 3 seconds regardless whether you break stealth or not. Come on Anet throw us a bone!

From the title of this thread I thought it was advocating helmet style hair like an 80’s news anchor.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Redscope.6215:

They’re committed to change…

Change is good! We have some interesting changes coming to FoTM involving the ascended rings we hope will resolve the problem at its core. Expect it soon!

As for my means of playing the game… I actually don’t play with other Anet people. I play with my small casual guild of old friends, but more often than not I am PUGing it since I am a bit more hardcore than my buddies. I don’t typically represent Anet when I do it so I can play the Meta with random people and find out all the neat little tricks that the community comes up with to solve difficult problems.
I experience dungeons and such from the PoV of the average player. As a designer it’s important to experience things like everyone else does, so you can make better informed decisions when moving forward.

Have you ever had a party member get disconnected and had to 4 man a fractal?

I can see why a public test server doesn’t exist given Anet’s game design philosophy. Revealing new one time event content before it goes live would diminish the sense of wonder of said content. That’s fine and understandable.

What is not fine are the persistent bugs that go unfixed for weeks after a content patch is released. Recruiting players to play test dungeons and dynamic events and then fixing the majority of the bugs they find prior to releasing the live build would improve the game experience for everyone.

You are missing the point of Orr. It is for farming, turning in Karma for obsidian shards at the temple of Balthezar and for doing Arah occasionally if the events that you need to do do open it aren’t bugged.

TheUndefined.1720:

Dradiin.8935:

Things avoided with a test server.

I can understand why ANet hasn’t implemented a test server yet. Look how much trouble they have running the servers they do have! I honestly feel that they just do not have enough time to invest in developing, testing, fixing, testing, fixing, testing, then implement on a test server, player test, fix, player test, fix… you get the idea.

I’d be extremely surprised if they didn’t implement a test server after about a year though. They just need time to get into the groove of things, and fix what they have first.

The fact that they don’t have a public test server is in keeping with the general game design philosophy that prefers secrecy and wishful thinking over putting out tested, robust content.

Hi,

Ever since the December 3rd patch the game has been hanging a long time, about 20 secs or so. I still see players doing things on screen but I am frozen. While in this state I can’t open the options menu to log out or quit. After a while I disconnect and go back to the character select menu where I can’t log in or quit the game.

This never happened before the last patch. I haven’t changed anything on my machine. I’m running internet radio in the background and it doesn’t DC so I’m pretty sure the problem is with GW2 and not my internet connection.

Tier 3 cultural armors are there for looks, not stats per se. They are priced so high to maintain rarity similar to legendary weapons. If they were to price them in karma I would be willing to bet they would be in the hudreds of thousands per piece for this reason.

FOR GREEK JUSTICE!

Blueshield.6291:

matenzo.9518:

Problem is by now a lot of people have moved up the fractal scale a lot. As many players have moved on to fractal lvls 10+ it is getting progressively harder to create parties at lower scales. The longer this bug is present the more frustrating it will be for players most hit by this issue to catch up. It already takes well over an hour to create a low level fractal party.

This illustrates one of the most annoying aspects of the design of FotM; that it breaks the player base up into small groups unnecessarily. Coupled with the problem that losing a player to DC, CTD, or just plain quitting can mean derailing the entire enterprise, FotM really doesn’t look like a good direction for GW2 at all.

My cynical take on this: Anet doesn’t want to fix the DC issue quickly because it effectively reduces the amount of players in the higher fractal difficulty tiers, thereby reducing the number of ascended items earned.

My concern: They lack the ability to deploy hotfixes for issues like this so waiting weeks between large updates will become the norm for major bug fixes.

Anet would reduce the gem supply and inflate the gold exchange rate back to their target rate.

The primary failing of Fractals is disconnects blocking progression. Spending 45 mins or so doing a set of 3 and getting dc’d and booted on the last one tends to demotivate people.

Server: Emhry Bay and everywhere else
Dungeon: Fractals

DC’ing a fractal blocks progression. This has been a known issue since the first day of Lost Shores but no action has been taken. Is this really so hard to fix? Even explaining why this mechanic exists would make it somewhat less frustrating.