Guild Wars 2

Your problem is that in GW playing support is not the same as playing a dedicated healer / buff bot.

In a support role your main job should be to act as a force multiplier. This means many things beyond throwing heals. You should be healing, but you should also be buffing your allies, removing debuffs on your allies, debuffing your enemies (which often involves damaging them), throwing down combo fields for your allies (many of which will also damage enemies), and interrupting/CC’ing enemies to give you allies room to heal themselves with the many powerful heals that every class has. The classes are designed so that you should also be contributing damage while you do most of this.

I do agree that it loot drops for supporting characters might need some more investigation, but you really should be contributing enough damage to tag enemies in the majority of cases. If you choose to play a dedicated healer / buffing role you’re missing out on a lot of the abilities that your class has to offer, and you’re objectively contributing less to your group than someone who plays their support role to its fullest potential. In many cases multiplying your allies’ damage is more valuable than healing them (especially since many players let their health run low before popping their own heals).

I just stop by one of the dozens of contested waypoints around the map and rez some NPCs while doing the event. It takes about 5 – 10 minutes and I very rarely need to go significantly out of my way to find a contested waypoint.

critickitten.1498:

Yeah, clearly, it’s all about dyes: something I’ve said at least three times in this thread that I don’t actually care how they choose to implement it.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to read what I’ve said, but I’ll say it yet again: the problem is not with dyes specifically, it’s with the fact that the devs made announcements in the past, then chose not to go that direction and didn’t feel it was important to rationalize it to the players. This attitude is what sparked much of the conflict that boiled over in November, and it’s why all of a sudden “communication is being worked on” now that the player count and sales figures have declined significantly because of it. If they had just been on the ball from the start, they might have avoided this problem entirely. No one’s saying they can’t make amends, but now they’re having to fight an uphill battle and it’s their own faults for it.

If you’re fine with the current dye system I don’t see what your problem is. A minor deviation was made from a post by one of the ANet artists over two years ago, and a rationalization for the change was posted by an ANet employee in the official forums. What else do you want from them exactly? Maybe a line by line personalized email for every set of patch notes?

critickitten.1498:

My point, the one you still have not refuted, is this: why did they not immediately tell the players directly what had changed about their policy? Instead of using their blog system or their forums to let us know “hey, we’re changing X because Y”, the “answer” (which, again, I’ll note isn’t actually much of an answer at all, and is rather easily refuted by pointing to other design choices in their game) shows up on a separate gaming website in a special interview that not everyone knows about. And those who do know about it see a) that instead of the original staff who told them about dye, there’s this Nexon employee telling them about it; b) that the system was changed because of “progression”, which doesn’t actually explain any mechanical reason for the change at all.

And hang on, I thought that if they “waste time explaining every detail they change”, they’d not have time to make the game. So how is it that they had time to do a formal interview for a gaming website, but not a minute-long blurb on their own forums? How did they manage to get any content done back then if they were doing interviews all the time, and by your own words, doing things like that to inform their players would make it impossible to get work done?

I love how you’re acting like you’ve somehow “won” this discussion simply because you found a link to a separate website where a Nexon employee explains why she changed the dye system. Problem is, you still haven’t refuted valid complaints about all the other garbage you’ve said. You still haven’t explained why they didn’t post that information in their own forums like Colin has now been doing for months. You haven’t explained how they found time to do interviews with major media, but didn’t have time to talk to their players. And I can see that you’re avoiding those questions on purpose, because we both know you don’t have a response to them and that if the discussion focuses on these aspects, then your “victory” is quite fleeting indeed.

You realize that the linked article is just quoting posts from the official forums, right?

Your real problem here isn’t that ANet isn’t addressing player’s concerns, your problem is that you didn’t like their answer to this particular issue. You’re entitled to your opinion of course, but personally I see no problem with rare dyes remaining rare and being used to distinguish particularly advanced characters. On the more practical side, ANet is a business, and personally I see no problem with them setting up the system so they can make a little extra money off a purely cosmetic feature.

Sky.7610:

This update is like multi-Gigabyte, WTF, do the dev not know how to optimize coding?

The actual game code makes up a tiny fraction of that file size. The bulk of that download is the new content for the living story.