Guild Wars 2

(Continued from above)
- PvE elements:
Planetside 2 has absolutely no PvE elements; there is not even NPCs.
WvW has a lot of PvE elements, between vistas, POIs, skill point challenges, jumping puzzles, NPCs both involved and uninvolved in the fighting, PvE events, and so on.
My issue is that I don’t like to mix PvP and PvE, so while I usually like PvE, I don’t actually like it inside the PvP maps. Thanks to this, the PvE elements in GW2’s WvW maps mostly frustrate me, while not really adding anything I actually want to the game.

- Cash store:
This is something that is merely a promise for now, but while stuff purchased for cash in Planetside 2 is currently character bound, the stated intent is to make everything account-wide without increasing the prices. I’m already reserving half a hundred dollars to spend on that game as soon as this change is made.
GW2, on the other hand, has most things obtained from the store character bound, with no intent to change this. Given that I don’t usually purchase character bound items, this makes me unwilling to consider most purchases in GW2’s store, apart from account wide things like the shared bank tabs (which I already have all), the digital deluxe items (which I already have), and the extra character slots.

- Server restrictions:
This is merely a promise for now, but while Planetside 2 currently restricts each player to just one faction per server, it’s devs have already promised to remove this restriction. This means that I will be able to actually play with anyone else, no matter which server he plays or what is his preferred faction, by merely creating a new character in the worst case scenario – a new character that should have access to everything I’ve ever purchased from the cash store, BTW.
GW2, on the other hand, only allows players to have characters on one server, and the server can only be changed once per seven days. It’s way more restrictive, and a huge issue for anyone that has friends on more than one server.

I never liked GW2’s WvW, even though I do love sPvP. In other words, I really like GW2’s combat per see, but I can’t get myself to like the WvW format.

Interestingly enough, for the last week I’ve been playing Planetside 2 and loving it, despite the fact I don’t really like FPS combat.

So, I went to compare GW2’s WvW with Planetside 2 to find why GW2’s large scale PvP turns me down while I’m loving Planetside 2’s large scale PvP. The caveat is that those are my preferences, I can’t speak for other players on this.

- Time to get into the action
Planetside 2 allows the player to spawn and respawn very close to the action; between the fixed spawn points, the vehicles that provide mobile spawn points, and the squad leader’s beacon, the player can usually spawn within half a minute of the action, or respawn there after a 10 seconds cooldown if he is in the middle of nowhere. Finally, the player can spawn a fast vehicle to get into the action faster.
In GW2’s WvW it usually takes way more time to get to the action, which – for me, at least – gets boring fast. The waypoint upgrade should help reduce this, but I’ve never seen anyone purchase that upgrade.

- Death penalty:
Planetside 2 has virtually no death penalty apart from waiting a few seconds to respawn and running back to the front lines. The player might also lose some resources if he had spawned a vehicle or something similar, but those resources are easily replenished and only used to spawn said vehicles anyway. There’s no further penalty to fighting a losing battle apart from the losing part.
WvW has gear damage on death, which makes fighting a losing battle a way less attractive; the repair bill can easily get out of control.

- Character flexibility:
In Planetside 2 players can change between any of the 6 classes, with a few stored build presets for each class, whenever they spawn or go back to most spawning points; changing classes or builds don’t even require changing the character. This helps break any potential boredom from having always the same play style.
GW2’s WvW follows the same class and build restrictions of GW2 itself, meaning I’m mostly stuck with a single play style for extended periods, and absolutely can’t change the class without changing the character itself.
Given my preference for having as much variety without changing the character itself, I find the Planetside 2 system way more pleasing.

- Toys:
In Planetside 2 the “toys” (vehicles) cost only resources, the resources are awarded individually (so I don’t have to worry about hamstringing my own team by using them), and the resources are only used for those “toys” anyway (so no regret from wasting something I could otherwise use to permanently improve my character); plus, the resources are easily replenished. The end result is that I can play with the “toys” without worrying about wasting in-game cash or harming my own team.
WvW requires resources shared by the whole team, plus gold, in order to get the “toys” (siege engines, upgrades, etc). The end result is that, between not wanting to waste gold on the siege engines and not wanting to waste my own team’s resources, I never had a chance to play with the siege engines.

Didn’t even start.

Getting exotic gear is a bigger grind than I care for, so I’ve stopped playing a bit before lv80. When I do return, I’m likely to just get 100% completion on all maps below lv80 and then leave to other games.

For my part, as soon as GW2 starts having a gear threadmill, with gear “tiers” above what the game launched, I’m likely to just abandon the game.

I started playing mostly because I thought GW2 would have a very strong gear parity, similar to GW1, with everyone capable of obtaining gear that is effectively BIS gear soon after dinging max level and content access being based exclusively on skill. The grind to get exotic gear was already a let down, and a major reason I’m not playing for the last month or so; as soon as I started the grind, I lost most interest in the game. If ANet then goes and add new, higher gear “tiers”, I’m most likely leaving the game permanently.

Even worse, from the blog post, that “Infusion”/“Agony” mechanism is an almost identical rehash of LotRO’s old, failed experiment with a “Radiance” stat on gear and a “Dread” mechanic that uses that stat. It’s an intentional gear threadmill intended to prevent players from completing the content without gear grind; from the blog, “Players who wish to delve deep into the Fractals will find that Agony makes progress increasingly difficult, until they reach the point where some defense against this condition is a must”.

In other words, ANet is not only adding a larger gear grind / threadmill, but resurrecting some kinds of stat-based restrictions to progression speed that LotRO, and even WoW (with resistance gear), used in the past and discarded as being harmful to the game. It’s turning a game where, up until now, skill was the most important thing for progression, into a game where how much time the player has spent grinding gear is more important than skill, at least when it comes to progressing in the new content.

What I would do is turn the orbs into a two edged sword:

- Give them a point value, and a fairly high one; perhaps something in the 50-70 zone.

- At the same time, give the server that is holding the orb a penalty (or give the other two servers a bonus, it adds up to the same thing).

The intent would be to force any server that wants to win to get the orbs, but at the same time make it easier for the other servers to attack whoever holds the orb.

Apart from the usual ways to give a debuff to the server that has the orb, or to give a buff to whoever doesn’t have it, another idea for making life hard to the server that holds the orb would be to make the orbs into something a NPC faction wants back; whoever has the orb has to deal with increasing NPC attacks on his holdings in that borderland, attacks that the other servers should be able to exploit to their advantage. It could also affect the EB; for example. if a server gets a second orb it would have to deal with mild NPC attacks in EB, which would increase in intensity if the server holds all three orbs.

Just got stuck in Arca Lake, Harathi Hinterlands.

You can see the artifacts from rendering the cliff from inside in the screenshot.

Skill used: Deception (Mesmer downed skill) from inside the water.

Worse yet, it also got me stuck in combat, and I was able to send clones outside (did so to try and kill a mob to see if I would drop out of combat; no luck there). In the end, I had to log out of the game, wait a few minutes, and then log back in order to be able to even use the waypoint.

Oh, yeah. I really want this.

I made my character with a specific color scheme in mind, but changed it afterwards – but the accessory color is stuck at the initial color scheme I was going to use. It’s not fun to be forced to use a hat just to avoid my accessory from breaking the color scheme I’m using.

Sincerely, GW2 doesn’t do much to help with finding other players:

- It’s LFG tool is a bad joke. It’s so useless most players seem to have given up on using it.

- There’s no centralized way to find groups for a specific dungeon; you might find players looking for a group in the dungeon’s map, players trying to use the game’s LFD, players in different cities, etc. The closest thing to a de-facto system is the chat spam in LG – which is something I, personally, won’t use, because I flat out refuse to just sit in a city instead of actually, you know, playing.

Also, players have been trained by most games nowadays, including most recent MMOs, to just queue for group content. WoW, LotRO, DCUO, TOR, Rift, STO, and so on allow the player to just enter a queue and be mostly guaranteed a group. Lots of MMO players never had to manually assemble (or look for) a group before, and even if they are willing to do so, they might not be used to it.

BTW, my preference lies heavily with an automated grouping system. Even though I actually like doing group content, I’m too shy in chat to ask for a spot in a dungeon run or to assemble my own run. As a result, I tend to do dozens of times more group content in games where I don’t have to ask for a group – and I’m not actually exaggerating; I went from roughly one dungeon run per month in WoW, before it implemented an automated queue, to over a dozen weekly dungeon runs after the automated dungeon queue.

Actually, I’m getting to the point where I’m likely to mostly drop from the game after finishing the story and all zones with one character:

- I’m not really interested in WvW because I dislike the very concept of enforced server loyalty, and also due to the fact I only get to really enjoy PvP when there’s a level playing field – in other words, when higher level and better gear makes no real difference. I’m going to just get into the WvW maps enough to get 100% map completion and abandon that game mode afterwards.

- I’m also currently uninterested in WvW due to how being ahead has a positive feedback on character power and player incentive to play. A server that captures all orbs is even more unstoppable than before thanks to the buffs; a server that starts winning it’s current match often sees a larger number of players queuing, while a server that starts losing sees even lower player interest, typically resulting in the difference increasing. I typically avoid PvP games or modes with positive feedback that take more than a dozen minutes or so. As an example of a PvP game with a negative feedback for being ahead, look at the Mario Kart series; players get increasingly more powerful power ups the more they are behind, and increasingly weaker power ups the more ahead they are.

- I’m disregarding dungeons for the time being. I have no interest in doing non-puggable content; I’m not really into playing with a fixed group and improving as a group. Also, I flat out refuse to sit still spamming the chat in order to get into a group, so unless ANet implements some way to get into groups without having to stop effectively playing to do so, I’m unlikely to ever get into dungeons even if they become puggable.

- There’s a second reason I’m disregarding dungeons for now: how much contiguous play time I can guarantee. Apart from weekends, it’s almost impossible for me to guarantee more than 30 minutes of contiguous play time. Any content that, between first deciding to do it and effectively finishing the content, takes more than 30 minutes – which must include how much time it takes for me to find a group, and time to recover from wipes – is effectively impossible for me to play during weekdays. I can’t even schedule play time during the week, since when my free time occurs is actually quite variable, and even during weekends there’s a good chance for me to have to change my schedule.

- Legendary weapons might be nice, but they seem too grindy for me to even consider obtaining, and also require players to do a lot of dungeons and WvW, which I’m unlikely to do in any significant numbers.

- Creating alts just to see other story paths doesn’t hold any interest for me, though this is actually due to the need to create a too large number of characters to see all the story paths. Seeing them all would require playing 30 characters (6 variations per race, 5 races), so I’ve given up on ever seeing all of them already, which means I don’t feel any need to make any more characters just to see more of the stories. If players could actually see all story paths with a reasonable number of characters – say, just 5 – then I would actually be tempted to do so.

What I’m likely to keep doing after I finish the story and zones with one character is sPvP and some light event running, but after I’m down to that I’m most likely reducing my play time to just a couple hours per week, mostly in short (30 minutes or less) bursts during the weekdays, with my weekend gaming time being used for other games.

I’m currently playing with a custom 1920×500 resolution, shown in a sample attached screenshot. There’s another screenshot at 1920×1080 for comparison, taken at the same place with the same camera zoom.

I keep wondering why this is allowed, while playing the game at the proper 1920×1080 resolution with the same FoV is not. It’s forcing players without access to a 3-monitors setup to do one of:
- Putting up with a bezel in the middle of the screen to use a 2 monitors setup.
- Play the game with black borders above and below it, or in a similarly resized window, to gain a higher FoV.
- Play the game as intended while accepting the disadvantage of having lower FoV.

Like I said in another post, I would really love to see something similar to LotRO’s UI skins. In short, a way to resize, hide, and reskin elements of the UI, but with no way to add extra functionality.

While the UI is, for the most part, good, there are a few things about it that really tick me the wrong way.

I’m currently playing in 1920×500 windowed mode. Not the nicest solution, but for me at least the added FoV makes up for the small window and completely butching the UI.

Whenever I group due to being forced by the game I tend to not care about the other players; we are just putting up with other players so we can do something each of us individually wants and go back on our separate ways. As a consequence, if the game forces grouping on the players, I tend to get into more groups, but to not care much about the other players in the group.

In GW2, since we don’t need to group outside dungeons, I get into way less groups, but for those groups I get into I tend to care a lot more about the players.

BTW, since in GW2 I can always go help a player without being concerned for the other player getting less rewards due to the interference – not to mention I also get rewarded for helping out – I tend to help other players in GW2 a lot more than in any other MMO. If it will take less than a minute for me to get to the player that needs help I’m almost guaranteed to go help, whereas in other games I would pass right by other players fighting mobs without caring (being shouted at for trying to help can have this effect

I actually like how Blizzard is dealing with this problem: they do temporary merges of specific zones based on population. So, for example, if a bunch of servers has OK population in the max level zones but has the middle level zones mostly unpopulated, it would keep the high level zones separate but “merge” the middle level zones across enough servers to get the combined population at a good level.

It would even work better on GW2 than it can ever work for WoW:

- In WoW there are potential name conflicts whenever that is done; in GW2, names are unique across the whole game, so there is no chance for a name conflict.

- WoW has a mostly seamless world, which can create strange effects when moving between merged and unmerged zones; GW2 doesn’t have this problem due to the zones being separate.

- Many WoW players are disliking the merged zones due to the fact players in WoW effectively compete for gathering nodes, mobs, quest items, etc; GW2 has little to no such competition.

The end effect would be to multiply the number of players at unpopular zones by up to the number of servers, as needed. Multiplying the number of players in each zone by over 20 should fix the problem with unpopulated zones

IMHO:

- Travel to any city waypoint should be free from anywhere, not just from inside the city. This should include Ebonhawke, BTW.

- Travel costs inside a single zone should be based on the character’s effective level, and not on his real level. This would mostly fix the fact playing at higher levels in lowbie zones is prohibitively expensive.

- Only tangentially related, but I would love to see added to the game ways to get to events faster. For example, a “go to a random event” button, which ported the player to a random event that is at the player’s level or lower, somewhere in the world where the player has already explored, and that is at half the progression or earlier. Or else make those NPCs that call us to events also grant a speed buff that lasts until we get to the event or if we go anywhere except the direct route to the event.

Another suggestion for the bugged events:

- Determine how long each event is supposed to take, or else take an amount of time that is guaranteed to be larger than how long the event lasts.
- Multiply that time by 5.
- Add code so that, if the event has been running that long, without progress, it gets reseted, including all related NPCs. Also fire a log message stating that the event was reseted due to apparently being stuck, so the devs can take a closer look.

With that:

- There would be a safety net for stuck events. Doesn’t excuse ANet from fixing the events, but at least they wouldn’t stay bugged for days at a time.
- It shouldn’t ever affect events that players are doing, since their progression is constantly being updated.
- It’s way faster than waiting for a reset at a fixed time. An event that takes 12 minutes would reset after being stuck for an hour, for example.

As a complement, make it so any mob that, for the last 15 minutes, had as the only attacks that landed ones he was immune due to not being able to fight back, is reseted, with the fact being logged somewhere the devs can see. The 15 minutes timer should prevent any feasible exploit.

Sebber.4952:

Last year Colin Johanson the lead content designer of GW2 said this.

“Q: What of the level cap? Have you guys decided whether you’re going to be increasing the level cap in future expansions?

Colin: Yeah. The level cap will be 80 on the initial release of the game, and we absolutely would increase it further into the game, probably through expansions is the most likely place we would do that."

Missed that, otherwise there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have purchased the game.

If this is true, I will most likely stop playing when they release the first expansion that increases the level cap. I’m not going to go through the gear grind twice on the same character.

I often Phase Retreat to under the terrain. I usually immediately send a ticket with an attached screenshot whenever that happens.

More often than not it happens when I’m standing in shallow water but there is deeper water within the range of the skill’s dodge. In fact, it happened about half dozen times under those circumstances, in various zones (including 3 out of the 5 starter zones), and only once when I wasn’t close to water.

The middle of Windrock Maze seems specially prone to that, BTW. Got stuck a couple times there.

I believe if you log into the game just after the maintenance you greatly increase the chances of being able to transfer to the server.

ANet seems to be consistently increasing server capacity, also.

What I would love if someone from ANet answered is: will we get some forewarning before free transfers end?

I would love if ANet allowed, at least, something similar to LotRO’s “skins” (cosmetic only mods that can move, reskin, or remove the existing UI elements, but without allowing behavior changes or any kind of scripting).

While the UI, as a whole, is nice, there are a few things that really irk me (such as the too small out of range indication).

Currently, no. Every guild upgrade seems to be restricted to a single server.