Guild Wars 2

I’ve given the matter some thought and I’ve decided that I’m willing for y’all to release the expansion early.

Will tomorrow at noon your time be ok?

There’s a couple of different ways to look at this:

ANet’s Point of View

• ANet needs to pay for new content, so they charge a nominal amount for LS chapters, $US10 max (for all chapters & maps in LS3), same as the cost of a new character.
• To make the cost more attractive, the maps are also gated (along with different local map currencies that offer various benefits).
• ANet would like to reward loyal players and one way they can do so is by making the LS chapters free for those who logon just once during the release period.

New Player PoV
For a new player, it can be difficult to see the logic: “I bought the game, why don’t I get the entire game?” And to be fair: the distinction is a bit arbitrary.

On the other hand, when you buy either HoT or PoF from ANet, it’s made clear that there’s an extra cost for the LS.

Alternatives to Charging for LS & Maps
The alternative is that ANet charges more for the base cost of the expacs — that doesn’t go down well with veterans, who probably spend the most RL money on gems, one of the major sources of revenue for the game.

In the end, ANet needs to accept that they are going to alienate a few people by gating maps behind the LS (& its costs). At the same time, players are going to have to accept that ANet is a business — they have to charge for more things than we’d like.

Colorblindness comes in various forms. The most common, red/green, affects nearly 8% of males and .5% of females. By adding an option to allow colorblind individuals to add/change a colored ring on AoE circles, the game would be much more enjoyable (and fair) to colorblind individuals. I realize the coding for this is not simple, but all of us colorblind folks would hold up our drinks and toast the developers if this option ever makes it into the game.

If you have questions about types of color deficiency or would like help in creating options that will help those that are colorblind, I’m absolutely available and willing to help test/provide feedback on potential improvements.

Well this thread has been informative.

From reading it, so far I’ve found that if I play female chars then it’s because of feminine aspects of my personality and if I play male chars is because of masculine aspects of my personality.

What this all means that a female playing female chars I’m expressing female personality traits. But I’m spending my time staring at female butts, so… I’m expressing male sexuality? I’m exhibiting latent lesbian traits? But if I play male chars, while I’m now being sexual normative by staring at male butts I’m expressing masculine personality traits.

Hmmmm.

Nowhere in all this contradictory mess am I allowed to play which gender I want based on nothing more than aesthetics.

To all the deep psycho analysis some have made I say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (that is, you’re looking too deep into a shallow choice).

“I don’t care about your sexual orientation therefore I will write a whole essay about how much I don’t care about it.” — OP

Using Polymorph Moa on … a Moa

hey at least it changed its color

Every month or so, someone starts a thread about this topic and the responses quickly fall into three categories:

• Those who think multi-guild hurts their guild’s ability to recruit, retain members and to be the go-to place for guildies.
• Those who think multi-guild is great for recruiting, since folks can e.g. be in fractal guild and a wvw guild, without getting frustrated by being in one guild that doesn’t do both.
• Those who don’t care because they don’t join guilds, they only join with a small circle of friends, or they only join one guild anyhow. For them, multi-guild = one guild per account.

There are digressions about storage guilds and per-character guilds, which don’t really change the main points above. Multi-guild supporters don’t see why the game should restrict choice, because guilds can choose to be 100% rep (or nearly so); one-guild fans don’t see how it’s even possible for someone to belong to multiple guilds and be a loyal member to them all.

I’ve yet to see one of these threads end up with someone changing their mind about the topic.

Danikat.8537:

Just for fun I set myself the challenge of putting together GW2’s most prestigious costume – all the rarest, hardest to obtain skins and most expensive dyes together. Surely a thing of glory to behold!

My attempt is below and since a lot has changed since I last tried this in 2014 and I think there’s many more options now I’d love to hear your thoughts and maybe even see some alternate takes on it.

Featured in my attempt is:

• Celebration Hat (free give-away during the headstart weekend)
• Glorious Hero’s Shoulderguards (place 1st in a PvP tournament)
• Perfected Envoy Jerkin (legendary armour)
• Fire God’s Vambraces (30 Hall of Monuments points)
• Mistforged Triumphant Hero’s Legguards (1900 WvW rank + purchase earlier versions)
• Invisible Boots (about 2,000-3,000 gold)
• Eternity (combine both other legendary greatswords)
• Warbringer (legendary WvW backpack)

Dyes are Permafrost, Shadow Abyss, Scorched and Bloody Red with a combined price of about 1,550g (and that’s using buy orders).

Yeah, that’s certainly an abomination all right, good work.

MagneHyakulegger.1064:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Sorry to hear you find it lacking. It would seem, though, that tens of thousands, if not more, find it, at the very least, adequate. Even preferable to being led around. It’s a core principle of the game, this freedom to do as one desires.

I desire to be at the same level as high-end raiders. I imagine everyone wants to. However, without putting lots of effort outside the game to learn how to have the same equipment they do, it is impossible. All I am asking for is an in-game path. Do you disagree that new players should have a guide to creating ascended equipment?

Name me one MMO that doesn’t require a little research outside of the game itself in order to get up to speed on becoming raid-ready.

If you don’t want to google such information, ask other players. This is an MMO after all, not a single-player game. There’s plenty of other people walking around in the same game as you and many of them are very helpful.

Mounts mean the game is borrowing from WoW? I played an MMO prior to WoW that had mounts: Ultima Online. Maybe Blizzard has a time machine. :P

Ardid.7203:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Ardid.7203:

I would buy a couple outfits only to get their boots and headgear. It would feel awful, but I would for a few specific ones.

Or you could have what the gemstore offers now, which is buy the items separately without the required outfit prepurchase, such as the Braham’s shoulder piece.

I have already bought what separate armor pieces the gemstore offer that I like. (I have bought most of them, really…)

But they don’t offer the Arcane or Ghostly Outfits cowl or boots in the gemstore, nor they offer Taimi’s, Sentinel, Lyssa or Balthazar boots.

Of course, the ideal for me would be to simply buy these as separate armor pieces and thats it. But I could EVEN be willing to buy the outfits if by doing that I can access that parts as mix’n match items. Just because decent boots for asura are so rare…

No doubt people would if that was the only option.

However nothing is stopping ANet from making armor pieces now and selling them separately. Artificially tying outfits and armor pieces together won’t make more armor pieces appear in the gemstore. People already snap up individual armor pieces so lack of sales is not the reason they aren’t in the gemstore.

At this time I think I should point out my signature. I personally see no reason to tell a company that they should change their current practice and stop selling individual $1 items and instead tie an unnecessary $8 prepurchase to the $1 item.

What you should be doing instead is asking for more individual $1-2 armor pieces in the gemstore, including parts of outfits as armor. Not asking for a company to artificially tie two purchases together.

I like how you gave your idea the adjective “best” in the post title. It’s a great start for a discussion

I’d say the point is to put a big neon sign on “this is play acting, just part of the ritual, you aren’t actually getting swarmed by White Mantle.” It’s something you get in a lot of movies where a character is acting within the show; somehow the “acted” part comes out extra cheesy, or a villainous person has all sorts of I’m a villain tells, just to help the audience along.

Fluffball.8307:

I’m not assuming anyone’s age, I’m telling you these games were commonplace before the internet ruined all childhoods.

You’ve assumed all sorts of things. Re-read my post. I understand exactly what sort of ‘game’ this is and it is precisely the sort of thing that is hard for people like myself with poor spatial relationship abilities; it’s got nothing at all to do with familiarity with the game.

I’ve done Rubrik’s cubes, which are much, much more difficult versions of the same puzzle. But I can’t do it visually; I had to do it mathematically. I imagine some people haven’t done Rubrik’s cubes because they don’t like those sorts of puzzles.

So again, I’m happy that this was easy for you. I ask only that you accept that it might not be that easy for other people, for reasons that have nothing to do with their childhood gaming or lake thereof.

Amaimon.7823:

As it stands, we’ll be left with a LOT of unused Maguuma mastery points.

That’s good. Thanks to that you don’t need to feel pressured to do all of them and can skip those that are most annoying for you.

Samnang.1879:

Could they please release a relevant legendary weapon like longbow or sword, not warhorn or something irrelevant.
I need a non-flower dropping longbow for my warrior.

Doesn’t relevance depend what you play? I always use a warhorn for my Ele, or a focus for Ele and Mesmer. They will all be released in time.
Saying it’s irrelevant because you don’t use it as much doesn’t mean it’s actually irrelevant.

I don’t think people recognize just how much effort it is going to be to make a repeatable version of LS1. Of course it’s possible; it would just take an enormous amount of resources. And that seems like an unnecessary distraction, given that people are already jealous of ANet diverting any resources to anything that doesn’t fit their idea of a better game.

Out-of-Game, Historical Context

LS1 was designed and implemented as temporary content. It was part of a (since-discarded) plan by ANet to constantly introduce new content and gradually evolve the game, so that many existing maps would be unrecognizable (in terms of challenges, foes, etc). The idea was: much better use of resources to re-use the same zones and so much more exciting to keep adding new life to the existing world. Hence: the term Living World.

It was a great, epic idea and I wish it would have worked. I think part of the issue was ANet’s implementation (they bit off more than they could chew and there were lots of scaling, technical, and reward issues to start with, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about the concept). Part of the issue is also what we’re used to: we like repeatable content. We like being able to be absent from a game, without feeling that we missed something important (reward and lore both). We like having the chance do ALL THE THINGS in the game.

LS1 disrupted all our expectations and its implementation was rough (whether flawed or just slow to get going no longer matters). And ANet, sensibly, dropped the idea and turned LS2 into repeatable content.

Background, In Game Experience

There are three aspects that made LS1 epic:

• It was not repeatable. You had to be there at the right time. (Notice this is exactly one of the primary issues that got ANet to drop the original concept: it was both a great idea and a fatal flaw.)
• The open-world battles were epic. Unlike Auric Basin (which has an achievement for defending the city one hundred times), getting in a single victory was a combination of great mapwide teamwork, individual skill, and a bit of luck. It felt amazing each time (compared to DS, which feels disappointing if it’s not over quickly enough).
• The instanced content was extremely challenging for nearly everyone. People scrambled like crazy to find ways to beat it. Depending on who you talk to (and how good their memories are), many would say it’s comparable to today’s fractals (perhaps T3-4 or less).

Final Background: To Make it Repeatable

To make it repeatable, we’d have to drop all three of the things that made it epic: it won’t be dynamic, it won’t include open world mega battles, and it won’t be super challenging for five people. So let’s presume that the only thing we can get is a facsimile of the story, told in chapters.

The original instances were designed for the mechanics of the day. They were designed to be temporary, so little thought was given to making them last. That means: they’d have to be redone, nearly from the ground up.

There were dialogues that took place in the open world, in areas that don’t exist anymore (or have different NPCs, foes now). Those would have to be turned into instanced content.

The open word battles would have to be included somehow, so that’s new cinematics or entirely new encounters meant to model the idea, with shorter cinematics to show the impact on Tyria.

To do all of the above requires rewriting parts of the story, rewriting the instances, redesigning encounters, adding new cinematics. All of that would need to be translated into French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Some of the voice actors are no longer available, so ANet would have to hire substitutes (and decide whether to redo old dialogue or not — probably not).

In short, it’s an enormous amount of work to get us … another Living Story, which some people have already seen (and can’t possible meet expectations for epic-ness).
———————————————
So, sure, it’s possible. It’s just not practical given the pressures on ANet at this time.

Asking people to pay 10g upfront just screams “scam” to me anyway.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Masteries are the endgame progression…….

ehhh if only it was what they marketed it as, character progression passed lvl 80

It is absolutely character progression. Just like adding new skills and title unlocks was character progression in GW1. If you removed the broken and overpowered title skills added in EOTN, the title track bonuses were very similar to mastry tracks. They were a form of progression that gave you specific advantages.

What they’re not is an endless pile of numbers that just adds meaningless power to characters that necessitate every new bit of content also having higher numbers. That’s the model a lot of games use, and its boring. “progressing” in to +400 more DPS only to fight enemies with 400 DPS more damage mitigation doesn’t add anything to gameplay. It just adds bigger number to combat logs.

Playing Dialbo 3 with more paragon levels doesn’t appreciabley add anything to gameplay. You just stack bigger numbers so you can fight enemies with bigger numbers, but its still the same repetitive content.

While not every mastry is amazing, Mastries are meaningful progression that actually adds new functionality to the character by accessing new content or new methods to interact with old content. That’s a lot more fun than 2% more armor or 5% more crit chance.

Endgame means the end of the game. It’s over. No more to do.

Been playing since Beta over 4 years ago, almost everyday and I still have loads of stuff to do. I do not want an end to a fun time!!

pretty sure all items in the shared inventory will be retained, since it is an account-wide feature

The problem is, there is no “100% win” scenario here… Or even a 75% win. Because what is appropriate for some won’t be appropriate for another. Every player and character has their own circumstances that differ. Although the main voice I find has been fully adopted by my main (asura ele) and translates well to my 2ndary (charr war), it doesn’t fit for any of my other characters.

At some point, you just have to learn to understand and separate what would be optimal from what is feasible. For those circumstances where it won’t work for a character, the simplest solution is to rewrite what is said and done to close fit with the decisions of your character but within the limits of the story.

Also, remember that Legendary gear is not more powerful than Ascended, so if it’s Best in Slot you’re after, there are a lot easier and cheaper options than legendaries.

Half the people in the game have below average luck.

Copy pasted part of my post from the Leather Armor feedback thread:

Well, to be fair, I think leather armor has the most challenges to work with. Especially the chest pieces, which is the only real complaint I ever hear of.

Light armor is not armor, so it can literally look like anything; or nothing.

Heavy armor has the advantages of having a high substance ceiling, the biggest surface area(for details), and highest variety of real life bases to work on.

Crafted medium armor is based on Leather. And the only leather armor that ever existed was Cuir Boulli, which would look like plate armor. Then you’d have the problem of armors looking like boring Heavy Armor, largely because hardened leather can’t support the same level of ornamentation. Standard fantasy armor leather armor is usually limited to studded leather(which really has no variation to speak of, and a few exist already in game) hide-type armor(which I agree are underused), but the variation of those are limited by fur patterns, and also, honestly, would be the hardest to animate, and has limited ornamentation; since this kind of armor’s aesthetic isn’t “fitted”, its just kinda thrown onto your character. Leather jackets I suppose are underused, but they are literally just coats without the bottom half, meaning less room for ornamentation.

Another option, which isn’t consistent with leather material is chain or ring coats and shirts. The material really is a non-issue with non-crafted armor. This option would work fine with vendor, reward, collection or Mystic Forge skins. But variety is very limited inherently. I personally don’t see how you can make ornamentation on it aside from arm or neck flair.

I think that the reason that they use Coats so much is because they have the following advantages 1) They are consistent with the materials used to craft them, leather 2) they have a high surface area for more ornamentation 3) they animate most impressively

I bound TeamSpeak push-to-talk to 1 on the number pad. While chatting to a guild mate, I tried to instantly sell a 2s rune, and wasn’t really paying attention to the screen. I accidentally listed it for 1111g 11s 11c, and ended up paying over 50g as a listing fee.

I don’t use push-to-talk any more.

Hitting craft all and getting dowels due to not paying attention.
Just starting the game equipping axe on ranger, attack one moa and wonder why all of them are attacking me.
Opening threads by people who I know have been saying the same thing for years and finding them saying the same thing and wondering why I open and read the threads (not this thread by the way).

Dawnbreaker.6215:

How coincidental that super adventure festival takes place at exactly the same time…

It is a bit, considering April 1st is the same time every year, and Easter isn’t.