Guild Wars 2

This Time Stop is a very unusual “power” to have, but I can understand it must be troublesome to have! I hope they fix it soon

Btw Talon, could we know the reason that made this happen, after it has been fixed? As a software developer, I’m very curious to know what kind of huge loop triggered this.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Things that must be in a template:

• Weapons
• Sigils
• Rune
• Amulet
• Skills
• Traits

These are ofc absolutely necessary, no brainer here

Evan Lesh.3295:

What could be in a template:

• Skins
• Dyes
• Outfit
• Finisher

These would be very useful for a completely different reason than ones above. For some player BUILD is more important, for others it’s STYLE. For most it’s BOTH.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Things to consider:

• Sharing (chat links? codes? urls?)
• Viewing (seeing some else’s vs. seeing your own)
• Saving (notepad vs. local vs. account vs. web)
• Building (one spot in UI vs. multiple spots)
• Websites (third-party sites should work with in-game)
• APIs (Could expose an API to third-parties)
• PvP vs PvE vs WvW (each mode requires different configuration options)

One incredibly important feature should be LOADING templates on your character. To do so, the system should automatically try to equip armor, weapons, skills, traits the best it can, depending on what you have in your inventory and unlocked, and warn the player on what it “failed”.
For example, if a player tries to load a template that uses a Tormented Berserker Staff with Fire and Accuracy Sigils, the system should automatically check for which items are available, starting with stats, sigil, quality and skin for last.

It’s also very important to VIEW templates SHARED by other players, SAVE them (ingame if possible, on hd otherwise). Less important is to BUILD templates ingame, but would still be nice.

Lannah.1283:

We don’t have all the details yet. Things might not all turn out to be quite that tragic, but Agent is right to raise these concerns now and not after the patch. Still, I’m inclined to trust Anet to come up with something that will work for both TxS and the general community.

Best post in this thread, thanks Lannah! You summarized so well every worry I have about megaservers and timer changes.

I am software developer (and aspirant game designer), so I can appreciate the huge effort made to completely change the server structure, with the purpose to improve open world experience for many players. We have only a very vague idea about how megaserver system will really work (and it’s inevitable because of the overall complexity), so I’ll wait to comment on that.

However, I must agree on many worries that arised in this thread:
1. New spawn times are seriously bad. I agree on limiting them, but they should be at least on a 4/6-hours cycle and moved a couple of hours forward. I’m on CET and from tomorrow I’ll be able to make it for Wurm only if I come back home soon and postpone dinner. I guess developers decided on those based on statistics, but… well, maybe better check again?
2. Triggering those events manually would easily solve the issue above, except… how we are supposed to run those events 6 times every day, like before? The only possibility would be for costs and research times to be relatively low, at least.

I know ANet devs are reading this thread and just gathering idea to make an official statement. I trust you will make the right choices to improve GW2… you did it all this time, you will do it again

1. Elementalist – Pretty good in PvE, but their overall usefulness isn’t enough compared to how squishy they are and how hard they are to play compared to other classes. Simply horrible in PvP. Focus especially needs reworks.

2. Thief – Too much reliance on zerker builds and stealth. In PvP I never saw a thief play another role.

3. Mesmer – Very good in PvP, but the difficulty of keeping illusions alive make them not-that-good in PvE… aside from reflections and Time Warp.

Please stop whining. Everyone knew nerfs were coming, especially to a content so destructive as Deadeye farming. Opening all the bags and stopping buying tickets were the very basics things to be safe against these.

On a side note, I really like the new reward system, as promotes variety and gives a reason to re-fight bosses.

Erasculio.2914:

cesmode.4257:

To Arenanet: I WANT to farm. Why can’t I do this? This is how I want to play the game. Isn’t that what you have been preaching? “Play how you want to play”?

Actually, if you watch the Manifesto to see what ArenaNet was preaching, you would have heard they saying “We don’t want players to grind”. Not “we don’t want to force players to grind”, but rather “We don’t want players to grind”. They have stated with all letters that they don’t want you to grind, and still you claim you want to?

The issue isn’t that ArenaNet nerfs farming. It’s that they don’t nerf farming enough. Farmers and grinders are the ones responsible for how mediocre MMORPGs are – they tell developers that they don’t want fun and deep content, rather they want to be Skinner rats mindlessly pressing their tiny levers for shiny rewards. ArenaNet has made many bad design decisions, but the original idea was that this game was going to be something for human beings, not for rats. Each nerf on farming pushes some of the mice away, but doing things like the entire Southsun event (horrible storytelling, but 200% magic find and quick spawning events with unlimited reward chests) is like adding a big piece of rotten cheese in the game: the rats love it, but it’s still putrid.

ArenaNet should cull all the farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters. This not only would improve significantly improve the community, but also allow the studio to focus on building good content, instead of Farming 101.

A bit extreme, but THIS is the painful truth. Farming is not fun, and it cannot be as it’s simply reapeating the same actions again and again and again. What it fun are the rewards you gain from farming, but wouldn’t it be better if you got those from doing content that require your brain to work and challenge you in some way?

I myself farm world megabosses daily, most of the time a boring activity, and I fully know I am addicted to it because of the guarateed rare. I look at the yellow timer, go there, press 12345 for a couple of minutes and get my rare. Much like a mouse presses a button to get water; on a much evolved level, but this is the substance.

There in ONE redeeming quality for thise kind of activities: they are relaxing and allow you to do other things meanwhile. When I am too tired after a day of work, sometimes it’s nice to kill some megabosses while chatting with friends. But that’s it.

Same. Error codes: 42:6:3:2158 and 26:11:5:506

Dungeon tokens are an extremely good idea to keep RNG to a minimum.

Acended Rings both dropping with RNG or exchanged with Priestine Relics are also a very good idea to use both systems.

Then we have Fractal Weapons available only thought RNG, which is very very frustrating. I have 300 fractal done, with at least half of them lv20/30, and got a single weapon. A friend has 150-200 done and got two. Another friend is standing close to 500 and still has to receive the first one.

If you really want to keep the randomness on Fractal Weapons, you could use a hybrid between tokens and RNG: every lv20+ Fractals you get one or more Splendid Fractal Relic tokens; when you have X turn them to an NPC (or Mystic Toilet) that gives you a random Fractal Weapon… but at least you are guaranteed you’ll get one after N runs!

(The same frustrating RNG concept applies to precursors… but that’s another topic)

We had the same problem today on Aurora’s Glade: no barrels at all. If it’s a bug, please fix as soon as possible.

I’d also like to add that this boss is way way harder to find than any other, basically being impossible to track in advance and not even having a path you can search him on. We have a medium sized guild, so we have been able to dispatch him a couple of times, but a smaller guild getting him means automatic fail.

It would be cool, but very hard to realize with the kind of setting GW2 has.
Sons of Svanir want Jormag to win, Inquest want to use the Dragons’ powers instead of fighting them, Nightmare Court welcome the despair brought by them… hard to fight the Elder Dragons with these groups.

Anyway, something so complex would require at least a good story to start with. And storymode in GW2 was a big letdown for most players, despite having such a good world background and experience from GW1.

Jemmi.6058:

I agree that rewards in this game do not match the effort!

However, lack/less of reward is not the same thing as punishment. Your title is misleading.

You’re right, changed title

caiomacos.1694:

@Topic: One thing to note is that Fractals are the only place (besides dailies / monthlies and Guild Missions) that rewards players the top tier equipment (Ascended). So, if not only this is the place to get top tier gear, but it is also the most profitable one, we could close down all the other dungeons. People already just do the fastest / easiest ones (CoF path 1 & 2, HotW path 1, etc).

What should be done, in my opinion, is add ascended gear as a reward for all dungeons – not only Fractals – and improve the difficulty of dungeons paths that are far too easy, making them comparable to the difficulty of Fractals.

While it’s true that ascended rings is one of the reasons than brings people to do Fractals, that stops being the case around lv30. At that point most players have already fully equipped three/four characters with acended rings, and when they get more of them it’s like “Meh, one more ring that will take place in my storage”.
Take me as an example: I’m lv32, my four lv80 characters have two infused ascended rings each and 10 more are taking dust in the storage. I run Fractals mostly for weapons (that never drop) and the challenge, and couldn’t care less about getting more rings.

Let’s be clear: I don’t want FotM to go back to how it was at release, with rares raining everywhere even at lv1 and people farming it like they are currently farming megabosses. That would be just wrong.
But the current situation is exactly the opposite: there is so little loot progression that running a lv12 or lv30 will net you very similar earning… with much more time spent on the latter. Compared to how easy and rewarding are megabosses… why should I run Fractals anymore…?

I completely agree in increasing the difficulty of some dungeons, like it has been done with AC (I didn’t like most changes, but for other reasons). ANet is revamping them, but they should really start with the ones that are either too easy or too boring. Namely CoF p1 and HotW p2/3.

I am not sure about ascended items in dungeons. They already give money for completetion and tokens, which is really great to get exotics!

caiomacos.1694:

Darkever.9732:

I was relieved when I heard about the daily bonus chest for bosses, that would at least keep farming at a minimum… too bad the normal chest loot has been buffed too, so now it often drops one or two more rares. If the purpose of this change was making these events less farmed, I’d say it failed.

Actually, from what I’ve seen, the number of people farming world bosses has significantly reduced today. The Jungle Wurm lasted more than 5 seconds, less than 15 people doing Fire Ele, and so on.

Yes, I also saw a slight decrease in numbers, but I wouldn’t call it “significant” if just before reset Jormag was still crowded up with people. They never did it today either? Or they simply noticed that normal chests frequently dropping one or two rares are still worth doing it even without bonus chest?

Anyway, this was only a side-note. What I wanted to stress is that doing these beyond-easy events is more rewarding than much harder contents. I’m talking about in-game money rewards of course, as “fun” isn’t something you can measure.

Yesterday I went with some friends in Fractals lv34. It took us about 120 minutes to complete because we got Cliffside and was quite hard… especially because we messed up at the arms seals, but in the end we managed to do it (many parties just quit if that happens). At the end of the run we got on average 4 rares, 1 core and two players got an infused ring, which they don’t need and only takes place in their storage. And of course no fractal weapons. This was not a bad run loot, it’s the average and anyone who regularly run Fractals can confirm it.

Today I did three megaboss events, which required skill ZERO (0.00), 60 minutes (most of them just waiting) and got me 7 rares.

Now, is it acceptable that hard content like high level Fractals requiring focus, skills and time reward less than world megabosses??? Or that hard and long dungeons like Arah give way less rewards than CoF p1, that also requires minimum skill?

I’m not the kind of elitist guy who thinks only good players should get the nice stuff, but at least keep rewards for hard challenges on par with mindless farming contents. If I decided to use those 120 minutes to jump around the world killing megabosses, I would have gotten probably at least twice the loot with ZERO effort. And ZERO fun too, sadly.

I was relieved when I heard about the daily bonus chest for bosses, that would at least keep farming at a minimum… too bad the normal chest loot has been buffed too, so now it often drops one or two more rares. If the purpose of this change was making these events less farmed, I’d say it failed.

I would also like to hear an opinion about this from ANet.
Why a game rewards me more for doing lame and repetitive stuff instead of activities that actually need brain, reflexes, planning, patience and focus?
Thanks for your time.

Sorry if I’m sort of necroing this, but I feel this is a relevant issue.

In my guild there are a lot of people that like to roleplay and feel part of the story (not too good past level 50 to tell the truth), but this becomes a bis obstacle when going into story mode dungeons. Aspecially Arah.

We’d all like to be the protagonist, or at least be the “second in command” of a main character that has no charisma whatsoever, but 4 out of 5 people just can’t. They’ll just become the unnamed party of the second in command. Wow, so epic.

Both suggestions in the posts above are pretty nice:
1. Let every player see his/her own character speaking
or
2. Cycle spoken lines between players.

Option 2 would be very nice, but I guess it’s be late to implement it, since it would mean rewite and re-record most lines to give them some sense and allow all five players to talk.
But first option should be obvious for a game that advertizes it’s great persona storyline! And should also be fairly easy do implement, since everyone is watching his/her own cutscene.

haviz.1340:

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

how do u do it right?

3 people use lasers and everyone goes down to kill the boss.

Ok, you mean the new version. I was talking about the pre-patch one, when shield regenerated in 10-20 seconds… which meant three players had to stay on lasers all the time.
If it now really takes 30s… they may have nerfed a bit too much. A good boss must be a challenging one, else there is no satisfaction in deafeating it.

Orpheus.7284:

CoE:
Agreed on the Alpha. I feel the Norn and Husk gimmick fights are not as fun as the destroyer one.

Imo all these three bosses are “do this action again and again until it is dead”, rather than exciting battles against strong enemies.
- Norn is boring as hell, and his threat level is minimal.
- Husk doesn’t feel like a boss, but rather a task like deactivating the alarms… but in that it’s not bad. A good variation I would say.
- Destroyer, in its pre-18/01 patch incarnation, was basically dooming three players to eternal boredom and the last two to the same dodges again and again. I’m not sure now, but before patch was clearly the worst boss in CoE (no wonder few groups did p3…)

Writetyper.1985:

Bascially in short:

Good bosses: Something that encourages player skill. Dodging, using utility, working with allies. Generally something that moves about and discourages auto afk 100 bladesing. Something that does a bit of damage too, so that it’s kind of a challenge. Lupi, Kholer, Alpha. Good bosses also tend to be pretty low in health because hitting something for 5 hours is not fun.

Bad: Damage sponges that encourages this passive “4 warriors 1 mesmer” all DPS min/maxing play. Bosses that require no utility. Boss that don’t even move and just repeat one or two low damaging attacks that a shouts warrior or a guardian or some other healing ability can just out-heal, like the flame effigy or hotw bosses. Damage sponges fall into this, because they are repeditive and boring.

I want to be challenged, I don’t want to play the numbers min/maxing game. I want to be kept on my toes. I don’t want my toes to get RSI.

QFT.

A GOOD boss keeps you active, makes you use most skills, gives value to the skill choices you did before the battle, and encourages teamwork.

A BAD boss is something that does few of these things, or even none.
I am quite certain that HotW underwater boss in p2 can be beaten by a naked character lv1 with a ranged weapon and a lot of patience!

Since ANet is doing a complete rework of many bosses, I though it would be nice to write a list of GOOD bosses and BAD bosses, and the reason why. The key for a good boss is usually original and funny mechanics, and that does most of the work.
Feel free to disagree, these are my personal thoughts as an experienced dungeon runner (I don’t dare to use the word “pro” ).

Good bosses
- Kholer from AC. Probably the first serious dungeon boss most player encountered and got steamrolled by. The key here is simply to learn when to dodge his wires, so he becomes very easy once the teams gets the mechanics and timing. Still, he’s always fun to fight because it requires attention, and with a very bad team it’s still possible to mess it up. His HP are also ok.
- The Howling King and Colossus Rumblus. Two pretty solid bosses, with many different mechanics, they require players to avoid standing in the way of their scream and their tunnelling, clean the spawned mobs, and know when to chain stun to remove “Defiant” stacks.
- Samus in CM. Team needs to keep distance from him, spread out, and possibly getting behind him whenever possible. It’s easy to spot an inexperienced CM player just by looking at the Samus fight.
- Bloody Victoria in CM. While not the most difficult boss around, she is different from others because she stealths and reappears dealing tons of damage, and that is enough to make her somewhat original.
- Frost in CM (yes, I like CM). Requires heavily use of condition removal, or the team will experience many deaths. Also, factors like rocket turrets and golems add something different to the fight, forcing a player to distract Frost while the others deal with other threats.
- Nightmare Vine in TA. Pretty tough fight, even after getting the basics. Can become frustrating at times, but neverless a pretty good boss with different strategies available, depending on the team. The enviroment here is also a very important factor, with blossoms that can both be your death or your salvation.
- Subject Alpha from CoE. Another difficult but extremely tactic fight. If you don’t know the boss patterns, you die: simple as that. And even once the groups knows what to do, it still remains challeging. Definitely one of the best boss designs in GW2.
- Gigant Lupicus in Arah. Except for the nearly invisible green “things”, that are usually dodged merely on intuition, this fight is very solid: three different phases, with different tactics to use. I did this boss with an experienced group from the very first time, but newcomers in Arah would be trashed again and again by big Lupi for their lack of strategy. Only problem is health, that is stupidly high.

Very bad bosses
- Bridgette in CM. Incredibly boring boss, which only difficulyt consists in stop attacking when her retailation is hitting too hard.
- Vallog in CM. One of the weakest and boring bosses around, all he does is standing still, deflecting projectiles from time to time, and knocking back melee attackers. Never a real threat, and nothing to worry about except stopping auto-attack while he reflects.
- The Defiler in TA. As he does very little in terms of damage, the only thing to do is rolling when the green icon appears on bar. Other than that, it’s 5 minutes of ranged boredom.
- Fyonna and Laurent Nightmare Trees in TA. While the tree is visually impressive, the fights are incredibly boring, and just consist on staying at the chamber entrance and slowly taking down the huge pool of health. Fyonna in particular is really terrible as AoE attacks must be avoided at all costs, making it a 111111 spam with occasional dodge.
- Basically ALL bosses in HotW. Very pretty dungeon, with ice, underwater sections… and terrible bosses. I seriously can’t remember a decent one, with maybe the exception of Ginva, which still wouldn’t describe as “fun” anyway.

Has anyone in this thread ever did Fractals? Because the concept is exactly the same.
Dungeons are supposed to be something that involves strategy and a lot of teamwork, and if a player dies, that means the strategy wasn’t good enough, the players weren’t good enough, or the coordination was extremely lacking.
Rez running is (was) the noob way of doing dungeons, and completely removes any form of improvment. “I died, what did I do wrong? Who cares, I’ll just run back in”: this won’t happen anymore.

I did TA once after patch, with a team that included two terrible pug players. Nightmare Wurm was the bane of most bad teams, and often involved rez running. And yet, this time it was litarally a joke, after the damage nerf of puddles. I still have to try other bosses, but I’m quite confident I won’t have any problem with a decent team.

CM Story is completely doable, but I agree that some parts are somewhat slighty harder than explorable. It may be because I’ve been steamrolling explorable for months and did story mode only twice, but when I came back to story mode to help a friend it clearly wasn’t a walk in the park.

TA Story has a similar issue: very very very very very easy, except second boss (the one who summons a herd of exploding minions) which can be really frustrating. Could be because not every person in our group was fuly geared, but compared do Arah’s Lupicus this boss was much harder. Doable ofc, but imo story mode shouldn’t have these sudden spikes in difficulty.

Short version

Karma is currently underused.
Here’s some items and services that could be made purchasable with karma:
- Cultural armors
- Black Lion items
- Waypoint fees

Long version

Let’s face it: karma is a good idea, but it’s currently very underused.
The good thing about karma is that you have to play the game to get it. No trading post shenigans and no gem exchange: it really rewards the time spent ingame.
The bad thing is that currently very few things are worth buying with karma, and most karma merchant just sell a lot of trash that nobody will never ever want.

Things currently worth buying with karma:
- Orr armor (252k karma)
- Cultural weapons (63k karma at tier 3)
- Cooking ingredients (very cheap)
- Some karma armors to transmute (very cheap)
Basically, after getting a set of Orrian armor and maxing cooking, karma just begins to pile up without any real purpose. This has become even easier since the introduction of karma rewards for dailies, dungeon completion and dungeon bosses. In theory cultural weapons could also be interesting, but being only rare quality they are used only for transmutation, and the same skins are also sometime available thought story mode or cheap karma vendors.

Here’s some ideas to make karma a little more useful than it is now. While many of the items proposed can be also bought with gold or gems, they cannot be sold to other players, making sure karma won’t be converted into gold and will not get into the economy circuit.
Cultural armors: With gold already needed for far too many other things, and considering they are just rare quality equipment, very few people are willing to pay 119g for a Tier 3 Cultural Armor. Make them purchasable with either gold or karma: the gold sink loss will be minimal, since I expect few people will ever buy those they way they are now, but will give karma an additional use. Making them cost around 250k like the Orr armors and upgrading stats to exotic (they lack the runes anyway) would also be a good idea. Also, cultural weapons are already sold with karma, why not armors, too?
Black Lion items: They are currently bought with gems, that can be bought with gold or real money. Why not make them available for karma, too? The prices must of course be very high, and not every item should be buyable, but it’s something worth considering.
Waypoint fees: I realize wp are a huge gold sink, so without proper data I don’t know it this is a good idea or threatens to ruin the economy, but using karma for traveling around would be nice.

awe extender.1908:

That’s just fine. They (Anet) can be true to the story of Orr and the spirit of the war zone but still make it a little more fun by at least increasing the re-spawning time of common foes.
Also, I’m sure there will be expansions, it’s just a matter of time. Therefore, personally, I would really love to have more level 80 maps like Frostgorge.

Agree on increasing the mob respawn time. When I was farming Orr (stopped long ago to do something that is actually fun) the main activity was running with permanent swiftess and dodging enemy snares. I would have gladly cleared my way, but that is currently impossible, because the respawn rate was too fast. Oh, and I was using an Elementalist glass cannon build, so they were falling pretty fast.

Agreed, many times the preview of weapons and some pieces of armor is utterly useless because they are hidden or clip into the rest of armor.
Getting the ability to remove non-previewed armor could be nice, as it would be to have a combat-stance preview. It would be nice to have special effect in preview, too: anybody that previews AC weapons will NEVER realize they glow at night, and will just think “Yuk, these sucks!!!”

Before, when unidentified dyes drops were commons and their value was 3-5 silvers, it was ok to have them character bound. But now, with reduced drops, and consequently a skyrocketed price of 12+ silver, buying colors has became an overkill.

Either reset the dye drop as it was before november 1st (easier solution), or make dyes account bound (and face the right complaints from people who already bought abyssal on multiple characters).

Before, when unidentified dyes drops were commons and their value was 3-5 silvers, it was ok to have them character bound. But now, with reduced drops, and consequently a skyrocketed price of 12+ silver, buying colors has became an overkill.

Either reset the dye drop as it was before november 1st (easier solution), or make dyes account bound (and face the right complaints from people who already bought abyssal on multiple characters).

Updated 2nd post with some new solutions for the Fractals problem.

Strangely enough, I realized the only things that currently keeps people away from Fractals are the huge technical problems with disconnection and the hadships in finding a party. If those were solved without fixing the reward issue, even more people would swarm to Fractals, leaving the rest of the game even emptier. ANet, you don’t want that, I assure you.

- Implement diminshing returns in Fractals, like it was done with dungeons. Why farming was prevented in dungeons with this system (which I’m ok with), but Fractals have been introduced without this feature? Sure, they are supposed to be more difficult contents, but that doesn’t justify the absence of some anti-farm measure. These kind of limits may seem a restriction to gameplay, but in truth they prompt players to try different contents, instead of repeatedly grinding the same. With this system in action even on other contents, like events, thinks like Plinx farm wouldn’t have been a problem at all from the beginning.
- Move Fractals entrance away from LA. Seriously, stop with this obsession about this kitten city! It isn’t even that great, compared to other major cities. Simply put, move the entrance in one of the underpopulated zones and give a break to LA. Pick any zone in the lv30-70 range with no dragon events nor other dungeons, since they are already ghost places; no need to worry too much about minimum level, since non-80 are already ostracized when trying to join any Fractal above lv1.

Let me know if I missed some key problems created by the introduction of Fractals (which, I repeat, is very funny despite the problems), or if you have other suggestions!
And most of all, let ANet hear your voice, or they will never realize their mistakes!

ANet really messed things up with Fractals. The content is GOOD, but the way it was handled down to players is so poor that completely destroys a core aspect of GW2: socialization. To put it bluntly, I think the people who created the paths are great designers and have all my respect, while the ones who ideated the level system are incompetents who don’t even seem to understand the key selling points of GW2, and should be removed immediately from their position. There are a lot of problems tied to Fractals that negatively impact the rest of the game making it unfun for many, and should be addressed asap!

Let’s quickly list the key problems with the Fractals:
- Extremely wide spread of difficulty levels (over 30), with no real incentive to play at lower levels. So players will seek only other people of their exact level… we already know the consequences. Just a couple of weeks after the update finding a party for Fractals is more challenging and time-consuming than the Fractals themselves.
- Higher Fractals levels require ascended items, which require grind, which can’t be done by people who don’t have a lot of time. So I could be the best Fractals player around and know everything about it, but can’t play above lv15 because I don’t have time to farm ascended.
- Rewards in Fractals are much superior than in any other activity: this basically attracts most people to Fractals, completely taking away people from normal PvE maps and above all from other dungeons. Mid-level area are even empier than before, and finding parties for explorable dungeons is becoming harder, not to mention for story mode.
- Lion’s Arch constantly in overflow. Brilliant move putting the entrance of a heavily sought activity in the most crowded place of GW2. This of course makes all other cities even more desolated that already were, not to mention the additional difficulties in searching a party in LA to run any other dungeon. People began to spam lfg for AC in Bloodtide Coast… just telling.

And now some possible solutions and advices for these insane design faults:
- Global LFG interface, accessible from anywhere in the world, or at least from all major cities, to remove all chat spam and making ten times easier to find a party. This is CRITICAL for socialization! Want to do AC but today you’ve already done path 2? Create a party search with “AC, paths 1/3” that will be visible from anywhere on your server. Likewise, any player may open the LFG interface and immediately see which groups are preparing for which dungeon, and ask to join them. This feature could be available even intra-server, but this aspect needs a bit more consideration.
- For Dwayna’s sake, remove or fix the acended tier. It’s an incredibly bad idea to begin with, being basically an artificial way to prolong the game’s life for no reason (Agony mechanic? What’s the point?), and goes aganist any form of socialization. Gear check was already happening with exotics, and when people begin to acquire ascended it will become much much worse. Since only ascended accessory items are currently in the game, it’s not too late to at fix it, if removal is not possible. A good idea to fix it without removing the tier completely would be to put stats back to exotic levels, remove rune/sigil slot, and keep the infusion slot: this way it becomes a different type of item (horizontal growth) instead of a better one (vertical growth, BAD).
- Merge Fractals difficulty levels: for example, 5-10 current levels could be merged into one, and progression would be possible by playing it on current level and the previous one. For example, you may need to run Fractals on lv1 five times to get to lv2, and then five times on lv2 or ten times on lv1 to progress to lv3 (the two things can be combined ofc, such as running it four times on lv2 and two times on lv1 to reach lv3). While it still won’t be the best socializing content, it will become much better than it currently is.
- Restore drops in PvE, to encourage players to return to non-Fractal activities. With drops from PvE monsters basically nonexistent there is no reason to go to PvE, except for zone completion and resource gathering. Make sure to improve rewards expecially for champions, that usually need a decent effort even with 2-3 people. Unrelated to the Fractals problem, the excessive raise in price of dyes is also due to the reduction of drops.
- Balance rewards between Fractals and other dungeons, and improve rewards for completion of story mode (also adding dungeon tokens) to increase replayability and consequently the ammount of players running it. Being generally easier than explorable, rewards should be lower in story mode (30 tokens against the 60 from explorable), and still affected by the DR system. Right now story mode is usually played one-time only, which is without doubts a waste.

The solution proposed is not perfect (Fine Transmutation Stone are already quite expensive in terms of gems, adding a Skin Extractor Kit seems like an overkill), but I agree that something must be done for this issue.
I already have two bank tabs full of weapons and armors I like, and maybe someday I will want to reuse… what happens when I start using those dungeon tokens?!

AmBoSS.7129:

On the other hand, with non-exotic-equipped players, I feel like…those people could waste my time. Because we die more often. And I have to repair my equip more often etc.

While on one hand it’s true that some more stats can give some advantage, in your reasoning a key point is missing: skill. And in dungeons, skill is everything.

Since exotic gear can be bought by basically ANYONE with less than 6 gold, it doesn’t require any skill in doing that. I saw plenty of people in dungeons that had exotic gear and still had no idea on what to do and what NOT to do. Another story would be people with dungeon exotics, like TA armor for example, that guarantees they ran a dungeon so many time they know how it works.

I personally have still rare magic find gear on my main, and I’m working to get dungeon exotics. Up until now I ran AC, CM and TA more or less 15 times each, often leading the group, so I can say, to some extent, I know how to play those dungeons. Yet, following this gear selection, a dungeon noob who just bought exotics on TP for 6 gold and is setting foot for the first time in dungeons would be better accepted than me.

monepipi.5160:

this?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/I-m-Sorry-Anet

Yes, I just saw this thread, too.
If it’s true, then I feel sorry too for ANet who are looking at their game being ruined like this. And I’m also sorry for us players, because it’s somewhat out game, too.

The last seven days of GW2 have been a COMPLETE DISAPPOINTMENT for me and some thousands other players. ANet, please look at the forums raging, once in a while.

A small list of things that FAILED miserably, in no particular order:
- Ascended gear, that basically betrays the most important promise in the manifesto
- Ridiculous ammounts of bugs everywhere, everytime
- Unplayable phase 1 karka event due to lag
- Bugged events in phase 2, suddenly removed after just one day
- Boring, unplayable, boring, bugged, boring phase 3 “epic” event with the ancient karka
- Terrible issues with players disconnecting and not being able to come back to their overflow server, and consequently missing rewards
- Total imbalance in reward chest, with some people receiving 100g+ precursors and the rest stuff worth 2g if they are lucky
- Fractals dungeon promoting elitism, due to ascended armor and levels
- Drops almost completely disappearing from normal PvE, including the promised champions that should have had “sure drops”

The good things:
- Increased rewards in dungeons to prevent boss skipping
- The basic concept of Fractals is nice

WHAT ARE YOU DOING ANET???
Are you willingly trying to throw this nice game down the hatch?!? Begin to listen to the player base, or in a very short time I expect there will be NO player base left! And, I am honest, that would be a shame.

Edit:
This thread came to my attention: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/I-m-Sorry-Anet. I’m not sure if it’s true, but if it is I feel sorry for ANet, too.

Guild Wars 2 is a game where the player base is extemely important, no doubt about that. This means that making changes that upset a lots of players can have dramatic effects on this game’s future.

My suggestion for ANet is to send close-ended question surveys to the player base every one or two month, to get feedback on game progression and opinions on future development.

Consulting the base is an invaluable tool for many things, and especially useful for a game like GW2 that tried a jump into the void trying something different from the usual WoW clones. Possible question could be “What is your level of satisfaction with this game?”, “Did you appreciate the X change?”, “What aspects of the game should have priority right now?”, etcetera.
This is especially important right now, since it’s quite obvious that the Lost Shore patch made a large section of the player base very upset (204 pages of forum thread, right now). Is it really a misstep, or the vast majority of the player base actually like the ascended gear stuff? No way to know without a survey.

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”

– Colin Johanson

Finally, since combat is such a core part of the gameplay of any MMO, we’ve put a lot of emphasis into rethinking combat. So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral.

-Mike O’Brien

This is basically what makes so many people dissatisfied (and maybe even angry): ANet broke their promises and introduces a tier of items that requies LOTS of grinding to get, with better stats (apparently +8% than exotics, which is quite a lot), and everything just to please few thousands people who play the game 12 hours per day and already did everything there was to do.

I don’t know who inside ANet came up with this horrible idea, but whoever did, please realize this: ascended gear will NOT be enough to satisfy grinders. They will get their full set of it, and then begin to whine again about the lack of contents. Grinders don’t care about restarting the game with a new character to experience a different personal story, nor getting different armor/weapon looks, nor actually trying to overcome other players in skills only by playing PvP, nor doing mini-games just for fun: grinders only want to get the best gear, and once they reach it the games become empty. This is a horrible mentality created by WoW, and it’s really sad to see ANet giving up their good intentions in escaping from this line of thought and do something different, where the focus is not on stats but on FUN.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the problems with this Lost Shores patch, but if ANet doesn’t even realize it, it’s pointless to talk about the other stuff.

Bolthar.7192:

I still wish Anet implemented cloaks. Someone posted some ideas back before release that I thought were really good:
http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h413/Baktwerel/capes_1.png
Backbraces in their place is kinda… unexciting. IMO anyways.

I’d like to see capes too, and the design you linked is very interesting.
I realize that developing fluttering capes can be harder than static objectd on the back, and that different races only increases this problem… but thery were there in GW1, and I kinda miss them. Plus… capes are cool

The thing that keeps games going on is FUN and only FUN.
The way this is achieved differs from person to person, and that is why it’s impossible for everyone to like a game, as it’s impossible for a person to be liked by everyone.

Guild Wars 2 is, or SHOULD be, a game more focused on doing things for the playing experience, with the reward being a nice ending of that experience.

That said, it’s currently not exactly like that. I’ll make an example for dungeons, but there are many others: dungeons are fun for the first ten times you run them, when there is the challenge, and the satisfaction of learning how to deal with the situations. But after ten times, when you know how to win every encouter, they become almost mechanical, with the only struggle being teaching inexperienced teamates what to do and what not. That is because, despite ANet’s original intentions, most of the routes never change. That may sound odd, but I rejoyce every time a troll breaks the wall in AC, because it actually gives variety and changes what the team must do to succeed. EVERY dungeon should have lots of events that may happen or may not happen, to keep the experience fresh even after ten or twenty runs! It works this way for normal dynamic events, and I’m quite upset that this same system is not implemented in dungeons!!!

Oroborous.2694:

Asura; we already know that they like to watch golems fight, so why not let us fight our golems in the golem arena? One possible approach is to build a golem with different parts, and then send it off to fight, either directly controlled, or possibly with programmed moves like Robo Rally

Sylvari: a racing game, either team or single, across platforms, where you can trip, shove, etc. your opponents.

Liked those ideas, added to the first post

I realize there are issues with more priority than refilling the cities, like addressing bugs, balancing PvP, and a lot of other stuff (and still ANet is working on new contents… well), but I think the first two points are quite critical: free travel to any major city has zero implementation time, and a LFG interface system interconnected between all cities is critical to put people together… in a social game like this, I am surprised it still hasn’t been implemented, forcing people to resort to old-style map shouts.

Zaxares.5419:

Darkever.9732:

Zaxares.5419:

I’m still holding out hope that ANet will eventually make unlocked dyes account-wide instead of per character. If that change goes in, you can bet dye prices will tumble a fair bit.

Ummm, that will hardly happen… what about dyes that are duplicated on many characters between accounts? The guys who bought 8 Abyssal for each of his characters won’t be happy. It would have been nice but, sadly, I think it’s too late.

There will always be people who will be worse off due to changes by ANet. Case in point: the upcoming change to make Precursors easier to obtain. There are a number of people who are grumbling that they paid hundreds of gold for their Precursor and that they’ve “wasted” their investment. At least with an account-wide dye change, it’s unlikely that somebody will have bought 8 Abyssal/Celestial/etc. dyes across all of his characters, and even if that happened, the amount lost is still nowhere near the amount the early Precursor buyers did.

I’m speaking as somebody who has probably 50+ dyes unlocked on each of 5 different characters, by the way, and who has a considerable amount of overlap already.

True, if they wanted to do it, there is still time to make few people angry. Still, I think they will keep it this way: if they make dyes account-wide, once you get all colors you stop buying dyes, and the mechanism brokes. Having to get them again for every new character makes the mechanism go on as long as you create more characters.

I think this current system is ok, but drop rate is definitely way too low after the last patch.

42:6:3:2060
I’m from Italy

You put up a good point too: just allow all players to appear in dungeon talk. It doesn’t feel good to closing your story watching someone else getting the hero part!

The Problem

Have you been to one of the five starting cities lately? If you have, one thing probably struck you attention: the five starting cities are empty!
Excluding for the usual NPCs, the only place where it’s possible to see people is near Storage and Trading Post, and even there it’s not so common. The sense of walking around these huge beautiful place, that took hours and hours of design and development, and meeting no one is quite discomforting. They often look like huge ghost towns rather than actual capital cities. Which is a shame because, in my opinion, they are much better that LA in many ways, both in style and practical utilities positions (Storage/Trade Post/Merchants/Crafting).
Why this happens? Because everyone is in LA, of course! ANet wanted to make it the gathering point for all races, and they did it… all too well! Everyone who uses the Heart of the Mists “trick” to not paying waypoints ends here, LFG for dungeons happen here, special events like Halloween happened here and will happen here in the future, there are 3 jumping puzzles in LA and none in the others… and so on.

The Solution

Now the question is: what can be done to drive people from LA to the other five beautiful cities less empty? Here’s some ideas:

- Free travel to any major city: right now people use the Heart of the Mist “trick” to avoid paying waypoint fees (check this thread about it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Free-travel-to-major-cities/first), and inevitably end up in LA. Most just stay there, not wanting to wait for another loading screen, even when they’d like to do what they have to do in other cities (I always craft in the Grove, and I’d always use the Divinity’s Reach Storage if I hadn’t to go through another portal for that).
- A LFG interface system interconnected between all cities: how many people are standing in LA just to search for dungeon groups? Being able to do in from any major city, with an graphic interface, would be amazing. And would also resolve 90% of chat spamming, message suppression, and stuff like that.
- Jumping puzzles in all cities: I know many peoples that enjoy jumping puzzles so much, that they often repeat the ones in LA daily. Adding them into other racial cities, with rewards at the end, would surely intensify players presence.
- Special activities and mini-games: activate that Polymock portal!!! Except for keg brawl in Hoelbrak, other cities have nothing of that sort of activities. Add Polymock, and I will spend the next month there! Give rewards for wins to incentivate players in trying them, and make them various: for example, if keg brawl is action-oriented, Polymock should be more about strategy. Other possibilities to keep variety are jumping puzzle races in Mario Kart style in the Grove, golem battles in Rata Sum (Polymock first pls ), and who knows what else!
- Wandering merchants: put some special merchants around cities that move around every patch, much like orichalcum node. They should be non-charted on map to be harder to find, and could sell items at discounted prices, karma prices, or even have in stock special items hard to find anywhere else (make sure to make each character/account able to buy only 1-of them every time).

These are just some ideas, but I bet the community has many more!
(I will update this OP with other good ideas… that I’m sure will come up!)

Zaxares.5419:

I’m still holding out hope that ANet will eventually make unlocked dyes account-wide instead of per character. If that change goes in, you can bet dye prices will tumble a fair bit.

Ummm, that will hardly happen… what about dyes that are duplicated on many characters between accounts? The guys who bought 8 Abyssal for each of his characters won’t be happy. It would have been nice but, sadly, I think it’s too late.

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

But does it really need to be implemented on the off-chance that you need to visit your T3 vendors? Because after a certain point that’s the only reason to visit your home city.

To be honest, I like crafting in the Grove or Hoelbrak rather than LA. Storage and Trading Post are much better in Divinity’s Reach. And in general I prefer those over LA ten times over!

Also, there is the issue of most big cities being COMPLETELY empty, with the exception of LA of course. Implementing free instant waypoint and some other stuff, like a LFG system interconnected between cities, more activities (we want Polimock!) and jumping puzzle, may ease this problem.

Oh, wait, I’m gonna open a suggestion about this

Thanks for the reply, Matt.
Seems like the situation is back to normal here. I hope it stays this way

Having the same problems too, with Fastweb (I’m from Italy).

Can connect, but HUGE lag (more than 5 seconds) and it’s basically impossible to play. Everything else on my browser and other network programs is just fine. Btw, I miraculously completed my daily in this pitiful state.

Thanks for the aswer Gaile.
I agree with this suggestion too. Can’t count the times when I ended up selecting targets while moving camera and not understanding why.
If necessary, make it an option in the menu, but it would be just easier to deactivate it altoghether.

Also… right now most player would like a more polished game and improvement to what already is there, NOT new content.

While the general tone is a bit too angry, I perfectly agree.
Exotic weapons are already a goal not easy to reach, especially if you run more than one character and want something that looks different that standard craftable armor.

Designers and developers, REMEMBER what you PROMISED:
Guild Wars 2 should be a game about SKILL, not gear. Spending a lot of time playing rewards you with awesome looks, not better stats!

There is already WoW for that, and grinders are more than happy to play it instead of GW2.

I agree, if tech allows it. I would be better to call those servers underflow.
There are some heavy issues to resolve, like deciding when all players should go back to their home servers, but the idea is good.

Completely agree. Was about to post it myself.