Guild Wars 2

One word:

Elitism.

And this is why the game, which prospered so much at launch, didn’t feature any kind of “elite” or arbitrarily “difficult” content. And also part of why, HoT, an expansion featured as pleasing the “hardcore” crowd has failed in the eyes of a bulk majority of players when looking at sheer numbers.

Strictly speaking, not many people care. And those that do are likely too exclusive to not care about anyone not involved in their personal affairs.

I’m just trying to grasp the purpose of why these exist.

ArenaNet creates a poll for which class they want to perform a major rework on, Rangers win by a landslide.

The thread gets created and is totally dominated by pet reworks/stow pet options, beastmastery buffs with the pet removal option available, and AI update requests – everything which has been asked for for a very long time which was nicely compiled and discussed as intended, with plenty of proper reasoning provided.

And the developers formally dismiss all requests as not aligning with their vision of what the class should be like.

If there is overwhelming support for certain changes, why are these ignored when feedback was asked for to begin with? Why waste everyone’s time if the community’s opinions do not matter regardless of their magnitude and merit?

Anyone feel like possibly explaining this absurd behavior?

Having played and worked for a Korean grinder import for several years, all I can say is from experience this isn’t going to sustain peoples’ interest, especially now, when those who remain are largely people who like or liked the speed of leveling. In said prior game, ten thousand hours didn’t even get me close to maxing. It was a breath of fresh air being able to enjoy GW2’s endgame features without first needing to grind all the way there.

Even games which do feature such long progression systems now are failing rapidly because of them. Wildstar? Archeage? BDO? Quick bursts and lots of hype followed by mass migration away when people realize they don’t have the time nor do they care to commit the time to reach just the beginning.

That’s not to say GW2’s endgame doesn’t need some adjustments (dungeons and other earlier content really could use changes, class balance needs huge adjustments, etc.). Extending the grind isn’t fun, especially with the current level-gated trait and skill system, and making it take longer for people who’ve already made several characters and just want the 80 to do things on won’t achieve really anything. Plus, it doesn’t fix endgame boredom; the people who get there after all that grinding still have what exactly to do? Go grind just like they would have been leveling up? It’s not logical.

Absurdo.8309:

Doam.8305:

Game isn’t balanced for beans.

The reason so many people raid percentage wise compared to other games is because other games are balanced. Dungeons, WvW, and so forth are all dead people leaving in swaths due to esports balancing their classes for all modes and crunching the visual flair. Anet can’t do more than one thing at a time and even SAB goes away the 19th leaving us back at square one afterwards.

But like others have said elitism the white knights and rampant elitism that grows from raids has ended with the destruction of more than it’s fair share of MMO’s. Many people came to Gw2 as a haven from that type of thing but after the elitsit killed their own games they came to GW2 and are now trying to destroy it usin the same type of raid rhetoric used in so many other games which lead to their own collapses. I’d say go back to your old heavy raid oriented game but I’d say it either doesn’t exist anymore or is a complete and utter ghost town right now which is the fate of any game that caters to the elitist and not the casual and history proves it as such.

If you don’t like raiding as content, then, well, don’t raid?

Raids have been generally well received by the players that do them. They are one of the most polished parts of this game.

Honestly, the only “elitist” attitude I’ve seen is from non raiders. It seems selfish to me to demand that all content cater to your skill level. The real problem is the severe lack of content since HOT.

That said, I’ll be in SAB all weekend. Not sure whether I’ll want to beat all the wing 2 bosses this week.

I wish it was a matter of skill. That’s the thing. Raids are not at all indicative of skilled play. It’s just optimization and then executing on it. There’s not much intrinsically difficult on the personal level so much as build-dependent and so long as the raid leader knows how to order people around. Removing the timer would make them a lot more approachable and remove much of the elitism associated with fixed builds. The pug dungeon community was quite large. I’ve never joined a zerk/AP requirement dungeon group nor have I started one, and some of the pug groups I have joined have rivaled some guilds’ speed clear times, despite the groups not being fully optimized or people abiding to a strict strategy deemed by the community as “necessary.”

Given the opportunity to play as they want to, they’ll complete the content together. Raiding should be hard on skill, not hard on build-dependence and composition.

I’ll pass. This is how you’ll get even more people to quit.

Fix professions and gameplay in general, and I’ll return to my 30-60 bucks a month in gems for aesthetic items.

Otherwise, like many others, I’m just boycotting ANet until the essentials get fixed.

ANet has pretty much ignored all concerns associated with the format since release, done many things that people actively didn’t want and requested against, defeated the purpose of playing in a small guild entirely in WvW, and pretty much designed maps that are awful to play in and consumables locked behind huge paywalls for guilds which trivialize combat with the release of HoT.

Not to mention the absurdity that is the state of class “balance” (more like imbalance) right now leading to unfun and unskilled gameplay.

pdavis.8031:

Thie question is would you rather them push out a “balance” patch right away, or take their time and do a much more complete patch?

Seeing as quality from ANet’s balance team is almost completely unrelated to the amount of time between patches because they don’t know what they’re doing… immediately.

The animations on the evades and the staff are TERRIBLE. By far the worst of all of the classes and all builds. These need to be completely redone and made a lot more fluid.

No access to Fury and initiative restoration puts too much emphasis on Trickery, still. Not much really changes the way this profession is played in this spec, seeing as there are a lot of other equally-evasive ones that can offer still-better damage or sustain.

The Dash trait dodge animation applies an animation that makes no sense for any of the weapons (looks like Rush) and also removes any existing weapons from the character while dodging.

The rush animation is just extremely awkward and does not properly depict the responsiveness of a dodge or its proper animation time.

Most of the traits only synergize within an evasion-based build; aside from the leap finisher availability, there seem to be no meaningful ways to use this trait line with anything other than specs using an offhand pistol.

The staff feels weak in its entirety with poor animations except for skill #5. This skill feels overly-strong in regards to its damage potential and too easily-spammed with the other skills offering limited purpose in comparison.

Did I mention that none of the functionality in this spec synergizes with other trait lines found necessary or required to have a build be competitive at anything?

Staff auto-chain 3 comes way off of the character such as the staff is floating almost a foot forward. It looks poor.

Overall, in its current state, I’d argue that this spec does not feel like any kind of change whatsoever to the style of play for the thief except giving a few underwhelming options to x/P builds. It feels unfun.

I’m expecting nothing good to come from this company again at this point. Seems GW2 has hit the end of the road. Time to move on.

Communication is so poor it’s rivaling or worse than a lot of Asian imports that have no local development staff. That’s so disgustingly pathetic for the western market that it pretty much defines poor management and bad business.

Such a shame, too, considering this game had amazing potential and started out so strong, and has a lot going for it still. But I expect silence to continue and the complete lack of understanding of where to focus attention and resources to only get worse as recent trends incline.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but I sincerely doubt I will be. Until then, the search for a new game to give my business continues. Hell, I’d love a worthwhile sub game like this to ensure quality.

I’d say its lost identity isn’t inherently the type of content they’re releasing but kind of the nature of how they’re releasing it.

GW2 was originally all about fun no matter what you did. Very open and exploratory systems in general.

The case now is just it seems very narrow in its scope and intentions for each piece of content while not considering the greater game, with many of these narrow-scope releases, and many of these new releases just aren’t fun for a large number of players. At least not to the initial mass-appeal crowd the game tried to cater towards at release. This is particularly true for sPvP/WvW and the casual PvE scene.

So while I don’t necessarily think they’ve totally lost their vision, I think ANet has lost control of its game. There are many “un-fun” things still around from multiple years ago. Critical reworks to keep the game fresh and exciting and just generally more fun for everyone have yet to come. The game’s stagnation is very much against ANet’s original philosophy of trying to make the game very lively and ever-changing.

So while LS’s may not be a maintainable content delivery model due to the stress, the issues extend into almost every aspect of the game. ANet’s trying to do too much while pushing out new content, and not fixing what is in some areas a crumbling underlying foundation.

Completely agree. This change makes no sense. EOTM was a testing zone/WvW experiment zone to begin with. Let them get access here beforehand if they want to buy the game.

OriOri.8724:

@Xyonon that might be true for Engies, but a tempest did a DPS test and they found that perma alacrity + quickness from a chrono was less of a boost to their damage than either Druid or Warrior buffs were.

That’s based on the mathematics of coefficients, cast times, and the likes, and how the party group is made and what skills are used. Quickness, for example, doesn’t affect the DPS on Meteor Shower.

Lol. Wow. Just wow.

Seriously ANet, that’s really pathetic.

So now we’re cash-grabbing and with a game with no sense of balance at all. Might as well pick up BDO or another Korean grinder ’cause GW2 just lost its edge.

WaveyDL.6945:

How is it “better” though?
Makes new players progress slower and the game less appealing. I looked forward to leveling and getting a bit better. now I need to level 5 times to do it?

I don’t understand why it’s a “better” system?

Absolutely. And for some classes, waiting until 80 for GM traits is just too painful. This is especially apparent for stab thieves, as one can no longer take HK at 60 and actually kill things properly for the latter 20 levels.

I also find this new system way more confusing and worse for new players. When do I get my next trait point? What do I spend it on? How do I figure out this new UI? One per level WAS easy. Five levels for an upgrade WAS easy. Skill books every 20 levels WAS easy.

That’s also not to mention how the new trait system is horrible for new players just because of the sheer cost to get traits and the SLOWNESS of progression, now. Levels feel totally insignificant and not even worth the grind. The grind feels more apparent and you don’t even notice improvements until you hit this absurd thresholds. Traits being part of one’s build should be achieved through leveling up, not as a gold sink targeted towards high levels.

And this is horrible in conjunction with the dungeon gold restrictions. One needs to now pay 43g for traits when their daily gold gets reduced to around 1/8 of what it used to be. It’s like all of the different devs were trying to solve all of the problems at once but refused to communicate and created an absolute clusterkitty.

The entire thing is abysmal.

Ferocity is a failure. People are hating on me for having said it two months ago when they released the early details, and are still yelling at me because “it’s only a day after patch.” Systematically, however, it’s a failure, and will remain a failure. It did nothing to address build diversity, and if anything, reduced it. It also ruthlessly killed the effectiveness of several other stat combinations and various builds.

The wardrobe system is alright. I feel for the people who had town clothes before, though. That was discussed extensively and it looks like it wasn’t properly executed. I like the treatment of the wardrobe and account bound items, now, but the UI is awful. Opening the character menu should bring up your gear as it used to and the little dye icon for dying. Dying shouldn’t be part of the wardrobe, just because it adds so much extra clicking. The wardrobe should be a whole separate panel in he character menu, and should always require clicking out of the character panel to get into, not the other way around.

And the megaservers? Great if you all speak the same language. Horrible for EU if you don’t, though. Quite a shame to speak French and be plopped in a German map.

The intentions were amazing with this patch, but the implementation could have almost not been worse.

C’mon, by now you must realize ANet doesn’t prioritize important aspects of core gameplay.

Friday at 5pm PST/8pm EST (the original time) is still preferable for NA for me. Fridays are still better even if necessary at 6/9, however the 7/10 hours are simply too late for EST players or even the few EU who stay up for an hour or two on those nights.

“Why isn’t my iPod mini worth $300? It’s a new definition of sleek in 2006!

Never mind the ten years I’ve had it for. Nobody should be able to get one for anything less than what I initially paid."

stephanie wise.7841:

A lot of total BS that is completely being misunderstood.

I’m sorry, but almost all of what you have been claiming for the past several pages has been completely false aside from the mentioning of a few random statistics which promote that the DX12 API is faster than DX9 in certain hardware configurations. That said, this has nothing to do with why the game runs poorly. This is the engine not being written in a way to take advantage of multiple cores for performance gains. Simply adding DX12 API calls will do nothing.

DX12 will do absolutely nothing in the game’s current optimization state. Nothing. Zero. Anyone claiming there will be some magical performance gains has clearly no knowledge of parallel computing and writing code for distributed systems.

This is an expensive, difficult, and slow-moving fix which would probably take years to complete. You’re better off asking ANet for an updated engine for GW3, because it’d probably take that much staff, that long of a time, and that much funding from investors to complete.

Please, go read up on Shavit and Herlihy to get the basics down before you talk as though you’re some kind of parallel systems expert.

Zanshin.5379:

What kittenes me off the most is people who haven’t spent a dime on the gem store calling veterans who have spent hundreds/thousands of dollars “entitled” and saying they shouldn’t complain because the game is free.

Exactly this. I’ve spent more money on this game than 3 years subscription to WoW at the highest possible rate and all of the expansions ever released for the game at full retail price, because I think the game we got at release was good enough to warrant those purchases, and what I got in exchange for the gems was also worth the money spent.

Yet from what I’ve seen so far in HoT, I do not think $50 is a reasonable price. Not to mention the additional $10 needed to even play the new class, one of the features of the expansion.

The need for a character slot is different from releasing the game with fewer slots than classes. This meant a player on a budget would have to try and then decide to keep their characters by what was most fun to play and what they liked, maintaining at least one free spot as testing. They knew all of the class info and how the classes played before spending an immense amount of time maintaining that character.

With the revenent release locked behind HoT and without an extra character slot, there is no definitive way to even experiment if you like the class without either sacrificing an established character and all of its progress, which is rather stupid, or having content locked behind a paywall be locked behind another paywall, which at $50/$10, is a lot of money just for what is basically a trial.

I’m not entitled to anything being released with HoT because I’m a “veteran.” I am entitled to getting my money’s worth as a consumer by the company selling me their product, just as much as I’m entitled having the option stop giving them my business altogether (and thus getting nothing in return) if I do not think I am getting reasonable value for the product I’m buying.

From what we know about HoT so far, I do not deem this expansion as providing me reasonable value, and as such, without more information on further expansion content, I will not purchase it.

I’d gladly spend more money on GW2. I want to support GW2, because so far the experience has been worthwhile. That said, ANet’s good decisions they’ve made in the past only cover the content they released in the past. If they want me to continue being their customer, I expect them to maintain said business model. I’m fine with spending money on the game. The problem is I don’t want to waste my money on it.

The difference is most notable in the PvP formats.

If you play in those formats without an elite spec, unless on a very few set of specific classes/builds, you instantly become absolute trash. There are very few core builds that come even close to viability. 9/10 times you might as well just play without traits is how big of a difference it makes there.

Until they nerf the elites massively, there’s nothing to be done. More powercreep will just kill the game outright.

I disagree. Roles reduce diversity in the end since there will be optima and people will not only get forced into builds but into builds within roles and vice versa. Typically speaking, diversity is a big boon for any given game, and was a major selling feature of this one.

I think people are just satiated with the fact there’s something new to do for those who like to dungeon/raid in PvE. Given the launch population and demographic, I’d bet there would be more criticism about the move than praise, and I think a dungeon redesign/rework would have been seen in a more positive light than 10-man raids.

My own perceptions, though. I can’t speak for a majority since the nature of the subject is all subjective with next to no data supporting any claim’s merits.

What a disappointing interview.

Without WvW, there’s zero reason to play this game.

Well, you’ve pretty much figured out now why most seriously competitive players have dropped GW2; A lot of the defense in this game is passive and requires little thought or little resource management. It was always around a little bit, and bad players will still not do as well as good ones, but it makes for a large number of issues in the PvP systems that are for many, not considered fun or engaging. Even in the case of the Daredevil, it’s still not exactly requiring acts of brilliance to fuel repeated dodges and negate most incoming damage and recover from big misplays. All of the core builds are much more punishing of mistakes for the most part.

HoT definitely exacerbated this via the power creep – notably through just bringing in more numerous potent defenses in general to match the massive damage power creep, but the big culprit, passive defenses, is something which people have been asking for the removal of pretty much since day 1.

ANet refuses to let go of the notion of Build Wars 2, sadly.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Lots of passionate feedback and discussion in here on either side, and a friendly reminder that constructive feedback helps us make better games (please do keep it constructive!) We don’t always get every detail perfect the first time, but I like to think one of our strengths is we’re always open to and listening to feedback from our community and making good decisions based on that feedback.

Ultimately, we’re thrilled with the parts of HoT everyone is enjoying. Your passion is awesome, and it’s part of why we all love creating this game. In particular, in game we’ve seen a really positive reaction to the game from folks who are busy playing, which has been really cool to see.

While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!

Thanks again!

Most of the arguments and justification for feedback have been stated so many times already that it’s pretty much just boiled down to a list of “sign me up for the complaint list” rather than bringing new discussion. People are clearly flustered because pretty much all of their time, effort, and anticipation has been nullified.

I think it goes without saying that this isn’t something that needs to be looked into so much as it is something that needs to be changed altogether. Clearly there’s a massive upset, so acknowledging the need for change and expressing something will be done is much more important for damage control in the short term while a solution is devised.

While I mean no disrespect, I strongly advise resolving this issue ASAP as it seems (based on forum threads, reddit, personal experience in-game, etc.) that this is a tipping point for the game very much downwards if nothing is done quickly as to keep players around, bolster short-term sales, and perhaps start re-gaining some consumer trust. Whether or not I can speak for other people here, I don’t know, but I’m definitely holding back on any subsequent purchases from ArenaNet despite literally having planned to have charged gems a few days after the expansion prior to the expansion’s release. It’s also raising huge concerns over the legitimacy and accuracy of what is stated by your company vs. reality based on the massive difference between the content we were marketed and what is now available in-game.

I do commend your staff for a seamless release. Only thing to go down was the wiki for a short period :p

I’d suggest making the elite specs still require hero points, but only 60 or maybe even 100, just for the skills and traits. The cosmetics should be locked away which is fine, because they’re cosmetic. Cutting the HP cost also lets you develop more elite specs during the period of HOT’s release without needing to add more hero point locations, add a new currency, or inflate them again or add new content to allow for expansion into the future. This way, unlocking all of them requires a bit more completion, but accessing only a few is quite reasonable and acceptable for those not interested. Recall this system is a framework; best to keep it as consistent and sustainable as possible, no?

I understand the communication policy is to keep it close and not say much, but I think this is a situation where you’re gonna have to bust out the stops. I say this as someone also worked in the MMO industry, and I wish I had done so much better when I had the chances to.

Oh on a side note, it might also be wise to tone down some of the champion hero challenges to be a bit more solo-able. The champions are still super easy to blob down, anyways, but are nigh impossible for solo players as the baseline stats are just too high.

Omega Zoa.3859:

DeceiverX.8361:

Lazy? BS. How many hours a week do you work? I bought this game because it could still be fun with a packed schedule and not leave me in the dust as a consequence for my life taking priority and requiring most of my time and effort.

I work about 38-46 hours a week, will work more with Christmas coming up with peak. I never claimed you as a person are lazy I ment in game, the whole concept of unlocking perks for your class is too hard please give it to me on a silver plate is dumb..plus this is a free mmo..not like you are forced to squeeze in 40 hours of gameplay a week to get your months pay, slow and steady, what’s the rush?

I’d love ~40 hour work weeks again. To put it simply, my free time to play usually hovers about fifteen hours per week, which is often spent doing things like… laundry and cooking. Some weekends I get to indulge more, but unfortunately this isn’t common.

And that’s it; when I have the time to entertain myself and indulge in playing video games, I don’t want to have to work in the game to get to the fun parts. If I wanted to work to get to the “fun parts” of things, I’d just spend all of the rest of the time I have working to retire sooner. And even further, I do like to do other things with my free time than dedicate myself to a single online game.

And then, being an old person at the end of things doesn’t really sound like fun, either.

While yes, there should be a certain amount of “work” for things – accomplishments, titles, skins, and the likes – this game was designed around play-ability being number one and the achievements as mentioned above being nothing but achievements, which were intended to let some people go as far as they want to, and play the game in any way they wish to get to those goals in due time. I’d like to think of unlocking things being more appropriate to aesthetics and minor details rather than preventing access to an entire way of playing said content.

While I’d be okay with 400 HP to unlock the specializations account-wide, it’s just the need to put forth such an immense effort per character feels completely unnecessary and arbitrarily labor/time-intensive, not to mention account-based systems would scale better into the future with yet-released specializations. It’s not like the story progression gives any reason for the specializations to be unlocked, either. The gating is just arbitrary for people to be locked into playing the new content.

Trahearne’s sword. It’s name Caladbolg.

Caladbolg.

Saladbolg.

Saladbowl.

CC Danicia.1394:

Nynuwe.5893:

PS: I am deeply concerned no moderator has yet to appear here to intervene. That no developer has peaked in to aknowledge some of the concerns brought up here.

The thread was doing remarkedly well for a long time, which is why it had little interaction from the Moderation Team. There has been plenty of debating, only a tiny bit of off-topic, which quickly got back on track.

We saw the first reports about this thread this afternoon. Thousands up thousands of posts are made every single day and although we wish we could review them all, it’s just not physically possible, so any assistance we can get from players using the report function is greatly appreciated.

All this said, we have cleaned up the thread. Please keep it on-topic and clean. Thank you!

If the feedback was actually ever taken into consideration, we wouldn’t be here right now.

I’m not trying to de-value your position (I worked for another game company doing Community/Forum interaction work, ironically the “CC” title is the same there, so I am well-aware that this isn’t a fault of yours), however the bottom line is that there’s such an immense detachment from reality between the players and developers that simply stating that a lot of posts are made justifies a lack of attention is simply covering for what is a broken company dynamic. I’ve been there, said the same things you have, and totally understand why you’re saying these things, but the community shouldn’t simply be appreciable for a response stating that the concern has been noted.

I was revered for my work (and I started as a player) because of what I managed to achieve and do for the people who asked for my assistance. Until those in charge of major decisions like these make educated ones and actually start acting and making good decisions which are demonstrated through good game update implementation, no amount of sugar-coating PR is going to stop cynics like me from actively eschewing people away from GW2.

Rather than telling your developers and decision-makers about some of the discussed topics, pitch them the prospect of trying to comprehend the player perspective and come up with creative solutions to resolve these issues while still bringing money to your studio.

Good solutions and implementations make money. Until that actually starts happening, you’re on a sinking ship. Better to replace some planks before they break while docked rather than trying to plug leaks while out in open water.

Rashagar.8349:

Zero Day.2594:

Drakz.7051:

Because it is all about the Meta, if you are not playing meta for min/max stats you are not wanted in parties, hard to believe from the game that wanted us to play how we wanted.

…

It’s not really the game that imposes the meta on players…
It’s the players imposing the meta on players.

If you get into, say “hardcore” raiding, then one would expect from other hardcore players to be on top of the ball on builds and such… But it’s your choice to push your self that far to hang with the “hardcore”…

The others that you meet in pugs and demand that you play meta, are somewhat understandable too. By running the meta, the thought is that it will take less effort and time to overcome a task, so pugs tend to favor that religiously – even if the players aren’t performing well enough to bring out the “meta-ness” in w/e meta build their running, and could perform better on a non-meta build. But it’s the belief that the task will be easier to over with a meta build that defies their reasoning – and beliefs are hard to change.

gets kind of teary eyed
very carefully replaces the intended reply with a simple…

+1

Nothing to add except for appreciation of eloquence.

Something that I wish more people recognized a long time ago when I posted walls on this topic; the existence of the “berserker (gear type) meta” is entirely player-made and in terms of run consistency, sub-optimal. It just came down to people demanding efficiency for gold gains or people who were dumb and senselessly copied the hardcore scene. Nothing’s going to change that demand for raw efficiency, ever, as even the concept of the trinity and roles are just an exacerbated and design-enforced meta-optimization done on the developer-side of things.

The only thing to offset this is to frequently update and change the existing PvE content and provide alternatives for other builds to potentially save time (tank thief in the old Thaumanova fractal crossing the fume chamber to skip a boss, for example).

Otherwise you’ll just end up in an infinite cycle of emergent optimizations, which, let’s face it, are very easy to achieve in this game to the blatant trait-power disparity and the half-dead-snail-crawl-pacing of the profession changes.

As for the optimization in PvP, and lack of viability, well, there’s going to be similar optimization for the top-end, but the meta is set in stone just because the game as it stands is horribly balanced and most elites are just abysmally-designed, major power creep.

Xernth.8561:

Its so simple.

Don’t gate what lets you personalize your character abilities. (how you play)

Gate status symbols, achievements and progression intended to provide very long term benefits (masteries).

I’ve never seen a game expansion do such a terrible job of recognizing this concept.

And here we have a winner!

Okay, so it’s great that we’re getting this update and that traits are merging away from stats, however I find it bothersome that our character stats are now going to be derived solely from our gear choices. This is really concerning for players who have made ascended armor, though, for now the desired stats on armor will not necessarily properly coincide with their desired build performance. Some of my characters will require entirely new sets of gear with this implementation due to the synergy (or lack thereof) of the stats gained from their trait lines. While this doesn’t totally break builds using exotic gear easily-obtained through dungeons, I would like to make a suggestion which attempts to resolve this issue by preventing the need for players to have to make entirely new sets of gear. With infusions alone running some people an upwards of 1800 gold, or time-gated behind laurels, I’d call it very unfair to change the stat distribution system so drastically and thus wasting many peoples’ efforts, time, and possibly real-life cash.

Consider the necessity of getting whole new sets of accessories as well, even for those without ascended weapons/armor

My suggestions for handling the issue:

OPTION 1:
- All soulbound exotic equipment and ascended equipment pieces get the blank template for stat choice, allowing for the player to select a stat similar to what was done upon the removal of the Magic Find stat. Accessories subsequently are updated into a blank ring which once activated allows for stat choice as well with the corresponding ring name, art, etc.

OPTION 2:
A character-based dialog menu which allows for the input of bonus character stats which would equate to those roughly obtained from the existing trait system, allowing for the selection of three primary stats and two secondary ones and to not adjust stats from gear.

Anyone else concerned with this new implementation without adjusting for existing armor and weapons?

Now that we’ve been officially screwed over, I’m glad I can confirm all of my suspicions about HoT being a terrible release with the elite specializations. Hope I get my $50 back. Anyone else do this and have any luck, or are we screwed out of cash?

As I’ve mentioned, the more interesting figure and subsequent analysis will be Q1 2016 compared to Q3 2015 (pre-HoT) and Q4 2014 (pre-HoT-hype from PAX).

Anyone claiming the expansion itself didn’t sell well is an idiot. What matters are going to be the churn rates thereafter.

Hopefully they disabled the bloodstone fen gliding skills lol.

Still means smc will be brutal to defend… Need to watch out for third-floor smc drop veil bombs now as well.

Still very stupid, however. Corner someone into top floor garri while you siege it and they can just jump off a cliff to ooc glide and re-enter through various gaps. So much mesmer abuse in keeps… The list keeps on going.

The combat and balance alone is already laughably bad. The matchmaking process is poor. Now we have broken fight and territory mechanics to boot.

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

But until then, I would love another mini skirt or Daisy Duke shorts for summer, considering how some people complain about “objectification”, I doubt I will get it. I belong to an all female GW2 group with thousands of members (close to 4k of us), and many many of us like revealing armor, so don’t blame that on female players, it is a vocal minority that are offended by that.

I’ve found a lot of the criticism comes from the male population when it comes to this topics in western games. Everyone’s too afraid about being politically correct or not offensive on other peoples’ behalf such that in many instances proponents have collectively turned themselves into more-easily-offended versions of the groups they’re trying to assist. The biggest case in GW2 recently being the bunny-ears discussion about the affiliations to “adult entertainment”; however, I found on server-teamspeak several males complained about the ridiculousness of the attire, while a majority of people with them and excited about the sale were female, defending the notion of the silliness and whimsy that would be “[adult trademark name] combat bunnies.”

Eastern games definitely have their fair share of issues with needless amounts of sex appeal, but including revealing attire options isn’t something everyone should freak out over objectification for. That’s not to say it isn’t an issue or that everyone should be complacent, but more options for everyone are always better imho. We’re in a place of fantasy and real-life anonymity. If a girl wants to dress her character up sexy-like, she shouldn’t be flogged for inexcusable behavior, and if a guy wants to create a female character and dress her up sexy-like, that’s his prerogative which he shouldn’t feel obligated to justify without needing to feel like a scumbag objectifying women, and the same applies in vice versa; I know of quite a few females who are quite fond of the steamy appearances of Lord Farren(heit).

In this game, I run around with a sword bigger than I am cleaving in half pretty much everything that I pass by. As have people playing fantasy games since the 1970’s. We haven’t seen any increases in greatsword-based, game-induced violence. There’s little reason to believe the things we see and do in games should be what we aspire to see and do in the real world. As long as people can make that distinction, we might as well all be entitled to our own visions of fun. If someone else’s existence in skimpy armors upsets someone, they have the capacity to turn all models into standard ones. Otherwise, let people be people, because that’s the truest representation of the real world.

TL;DR: More diversity, skimpy, unrealistic, or not, because options are always better than none.

I’d like to just comment on Jack’s first statement as I did on another thread regarding a very similar subject.

When it comes to sPvP, mesmers and elementalists simply just do not perform in the roaming roles as well as thieves do. The drawback is that the thief in general is more vulnerable in any situation outside of 1v1, making its role EXCLUSIVELY for roaming.

The problem is not about the thief class but it is with the current metagame and some issues pertaining to mesmers and eles in sPvP.

While on the contrary, mesmers can hold a point and even aggress far better than thieves. Ultimately, mesmers shouldn’t be running backdoor roaming stealth builds on par with thieves seeing as that’s literally the niche role the class is designed to fulfill.

Thief, when compared in combat ability to other classes like guardian, engineer, warrior, and ranger, actually doesn’t have too much going on for it. Nothing’s inherently overpowered about the class so much as it is the lack of usefulness mesmers have in the current sPvP meta and the obvious underpoweredness of elementalists.

Ultimately, traveler runes need to be accessible in sPvP to make the mesmer more mobile and subsequently more viable. And of course, eles just need a rework so that the class can fulfill a chosen role if built for it instead of just being bad at everything and being required to run a particular build for semi-viability.

I’m gonna say something that you’re not gonna like:

Curtain operates differently from most reflect walls in that it only blocks up to the height of its visual which is fairly low to the ground, as the trait only indicates the skills themselves reflect projectiles.

This has nothing to do with the ranger but is a problem with the mesmer. A rifle warrior has the same potential to kill you.

You need to utilize distortion and evade frames like Blurred Frenzy, and use blink to teleport behind them to cancel their attacks as arrows cannot be shot beyond 180 degrees and will not hone. Also recall you have a boon steal on GS and 1200 range interrupts with no cast time on mantras. You can steal stability from Rampage as One or Signet of the Wild and during the theft while they’re beginning their RF snag an interrupt on them and force a cooldown.

The sad reality is that you’re likely taking almost as much damage from fire/air sigils as you are from RF itself if you’re dodging correctly. Those are what is more OP than anything within the class.

LB ranger is weird in that it’s kind of difficult to learn to counter, but once you do, it’s extremely easy to deal with them unless they’re particularly good players, in which case they probably deserve the win for… playing well. I find most of my encounters against LB rangers very binary, either the fight is over in under five seconds and they’re dead on the ground, or it’s an all-out frenzy with both of us trying our absolute hardest not to die and out-play each other in positioning and conservation of resources.

Just coming in here screaming “OP,” though, is a really bad place to start to getting good advice.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Ganathar.4956:

Diversity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in this case it would be completely immersion-breaking. With all of that fighting and running around, I can’t see any character being chubby.

In Japan, Sumo are some of the healthiest and athletic people on the planet. In wrestling, The Big Show can do a moonsault.

Those are pretty loose definitions of healthiest and most athletic. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not just fat, and many of the most muscular people in the world have large guts, but this claim is pretty untrue. They’re in amazing shape for their size, but only because of the work they do and dedicating themselves entirely to maintaining that size through dietary means as well.

Per Wikipedia:

“The negative health effects of the sumo lifestyle can become apparent later in life. Sumo wrestlers have a life expectancy between 60 and 65, more than 10 years shorter than the average Japanese male. Many develop diabetes or high blood pressure, and they are prone to heart attacks due to the enormous amount of fat they accumulate”

Doing a backflip is also considered much easier than a front-flip, per the words of professional gymnasts and slopestyle skiers/snowboarders.

Unless you’re living for the sumo lifestyle, you’re not holding onto that weight with the amount of cardio our characters do in-game.

I’m absolutely fine with the trap if they give the thief the ability to cleanse conditions in better ways via more trait lines.

People need to understand that game programmers are not the same as game developers/designers.

Game programmers fix bugs and create new engine features. These people have strong comp-sci backgrounds and pretty much just delve in code. These people optimize code for performance and develop new API’s for both in-house development use and external API functions for community-driven projects.

Game “developers” use game engine tools build by programmers and assets created by artists to create content. They do animation, make decisions regarding level design, get invested with game balance, asset management, and design for playability with the mechanics behind everything in mind. Rarely is the truly complex code exposed here, and in instances where it would become very complex, this task gets handed to the programmers to work on and optimize for new frameworks.

Many people vouching that making numbers tweaks is “difficult” frankly do not have any experience working in the game industry or in a game engine. Frankly, making these kinds of adjustments is extremely simple, and which is why it surprises me so much time is taken between any balance adjustment patches, as rapid iteration typically works better in regards to competitive games.

The design changes are the more complex ones, and take much more manpower. New assets, animation, concepts, and re-balancing everything repeatedly while not removing existing styles/builds while fixing core problems with old ones is a much more difficult task. That said, we largely haven’t seen any since the game launched, and it’s really getting to the point where many classes and builds desperately need help or are being carried by power-creeped abilities or specs preventing the rest of the class/builds getting love.

As far as financial stability goes, ANet is doing fine. Trust me. The big issue with video games these days is selling the initial copies when the game launches. And they absolutely made their money back with how successful the game was at launch with the $60+ price tag. The cash shop is just icing and to keep it supported long into the future with top-notch customer service.

Katalos.5038:

SNIP
I am casual from a time spent perspective, but not casual from the gameplay perspective.

What you mentioned in your initial post as desirable attributes from a game have absolutely no correlation to “casual” atmosphere. A game can have all of those features and be “casual”-friendly through other systems which force players to be both aggressive but also play on varying schedules/time allotments.

The selling points of this game were announced in the manifesto even before this game launched in 2012. It is meant to be a game where players can achieve the same goals and do so in any way they please and not hit obstructions brought on my mechanics which allow for griefing, harassment, etc. The game is meant to be purely fun with no specified model all players need to go through to succeed.

I’ve GM’ed for a F2P open-PvP player-run MMO for several years, a once-wildly popular Korean import which satisfies the criteria you mentioned above in almost every regard.
While I was a player for the game (later inducted as staff for my community contributions), I clocked in around ten thousand hours playing over almost a decade. I participated in the beta events and have seen that game deteriorate from its own systems since. You may like some of those features, but it is simple fact that those types of systems fail in the western market. I was able to watch user statistics internally for the global and Korean versions of the game, and I can confidently say that such systems are substantially less lucrative and much more poorly received in the west versus Asian markets.

In fact, what has made GW2 so successful is its exact detachment from the more traditional MMO approach; it’s not grindy, it’s not extremely complicated, it’s not at all a treadmill for power that breaks under power creep, and it’s not a full-time job to be the best player.

Your observations are contradictory. sPvP is meant to be as competitive as possible. That’s why there are tournaments, and it’s why everything is to “fair.” It’s intended to be. Thus, it raises the difficulty of PvP. There is no obliteration of your enemies from gear discrepancies (unless you’re playing an uplevel in WvW, but that’s part of WvW). In aforementioned Korean title, gear dictated the success of the player almost entirely. Some players had such ridiculous stats that auto attacks could one-shot full tanks in reasonable/end-game gear tiers. PvP’ing against those guilds is unfun and frankly, near impossible to catch up to.

PvE is as easy as you want it to be. Video games are becoming more mainstream and as such accessibility needs to be considered. There are players with illnesses and physical disabilities that can overcome the PvE content in the game. If you want hard mode because you feel the game is too easy, I’ll make the same suggestion to you as I did to someone else:

Equip a Level 1 white weapon, remove all armor and trinkets, remove all traits, utility skills, and heals. Have fun. Ordinary mobs are now the epic encounters you desire.

HoT plans on releasing level 80-only content with the intent of being more challenging. It’s still open-world, making it accessible, as other players can step in and help, but that’s about all the support it’ll offer for being easy.

And it’s those systems that promote that kind of behavior and ultimately make said games go under. There is a niche market, as people are entitled to have different preferences, but GW2 is in for the big consumer base and to make the big bucks. Sorry, but your open-PvP/PK games aren’t going to ever get that.

The only thing in your posts that I have seen as being agreeable is that this game does lack GvG. While this is partially coming in HoT with the Stronghold mode, I would like to see a free-form arena copying the WvW model (this way characters are the members as they are and represent the successes/monetary power/influence of their guilds and not copies of what builds are in the meta necessarily).

ANet isn’t being so protective so much as they are being smart. I once believed that open-PK and totally-player-driven systems were the future of MMO’s, but since working on projects that use these systems, unless extremely well-monitored, like CCP’s EVE, they set the game up for catastrophic failure, and even then, EVE has many countermeasures to prevent truly open-PK and griefing for those who just want to fly around and enjoy the game to whatever level of safety they wish.

Menadena.7482:

Swagger.1459:

Colin “Heartbreaker of Thorns” Johanson

Sorry, but that is not really fair to him. He only works there and likely did not make the call that it would be 400. Actually, I consider it a favour that he let us know rather than they kept us in the dark completely.

He is the lead game director/designer. It is well within his control to make this kind of call or make a call to change it. Consequently, if he isn’t aware that this is a problem, or didn’t forsee the reaction of the community be it either disconnection or lack of interaction with those who did make this decision, there’s a huge failure on his end to either get connected with the players or to look over what the hell is going on with arguably the most important, game-changing part of the expansion.

Yea, they’re just broken. WvW’s pretty much in a horrible game-state at the moment and in all seriousness GW2 as a whole is due to just how broken the game balance is. Pretty much play cheese or GTFO.

From most-important to least-important:

1.) Reversion from Desert(ed) BL’s to Alpine or identical design. An overwhelming majority of players straight up hate the maps and would rather just not play. The keeps are too large and too convoluted, over-emphasis on chokes leads to stagnant fights where nobody engages, map gimmicks such as zerg stealth, barricades, etc. inhibit fighting and slow down movement too much, especially for small groups. Keep and tower lords are overly-difficult for small groups to take, even if uncontested. The difficulty and slow speed of movement/accomplishment of frankly anything makes small group play and solo scouting play next to pointless.

2.) Previously-existing Guild upgrades reverted in cost and the new upgrades removed. The new WvW upgrades are absurd, ill-thought-out, and frankly, almost universally disliked. The extensive gating of significant buffs such as +5 supply (essential for small groups) and absurd gimmicks such as banners, airships, etc., have even further fractured small group play. A majority of small guild have disbanded or quit the game entirely with these changes. They need to be much more accessible as to promote more players getting involved in WvW with their own communities. Titanic blobs are fun, but small group play is necessary to PPT and prior to HoT contributed heavily to a server’s success. This empowered more players to enjoy the game mode at whatever speed they wanted to.

3.) More responsive matchmaking, and a smart, data-driven AI to look at ways to merge servers between weeks to invoke better matchups across all tiers using individual server data points contributing to the success of the server/color’s performance the past week. This way top-tier communities and those of similar play patterns stay together while server integrity is preserved, and low-tier and desolate servers can get some help to improve their coverage hours and overall bolster population between weeks. These also help mitigate server-stacking which typically damage the communities which get left behind.

4.) Better rewards across the board through reward tracks, reworked defense objectives, and more affordable superior siege. Reward tracks would allow for players defending structures to get nice rewards over time by completing defense events, while not just handing out loot. Defense participation should have more meaningful scaling, be it through refreshing siege, building siege, killing attackers, and repairing structures. Players contributing to fortifications and maintaining them should be rewarded substantially due to the nature of the job, but not simply get free stuff for AFK’ing in a tower. Reward tracks would allow for this to be done with each track featuring a different defensive goal achievement, and for offensive players, rewards tracks could be used to gain more siege and more consistent rewards for a lot of fighting/capturing success. Superior siege should be easier to acquire and be purchasable via BoH. Superior siege is used in all environments, and again, the bigger the group, the more affordable it becomes. Normal siege has its uses in supply-constrained scenarios, and deciding between which to build should be a strategic choice. Supply cost reductions on normal siege may also be worth investigating to promote its use.

5.) Autoloot. In large and small fights, there’s nothing more irritating than needing to either spam the loot key the entire fight, or simply take a gamble on winning the fight and then run over the battlefield to collect loot, or simply lose all of the spoils on a wipe.

No?… I like my silk scraps, thanks.

Whether or not it’s overpowered is up for debate.

What isn’t up for debate is that the build is stupid, easy, and downright unfun to play against.

That’s why it deserves to go, along with all other source of stealth stacking, non-animation-locking defenses, immunities, passives, and excessive CC.

GBEW.5947:

i play to get gear, Load myself with gold, and achieve near perfect stats.

I don’t see how anyone can say this isn’t winning.

It seems as if the term winning has been lost on the mmo community to be completely honest.

Or your definitions of what you think winning is are not in the majority. And quite frankly, if you are looking for a game where the grind is absolute, you’re not playing the right game. ANet has said many times convenience items will be sold. Not the power itself.

The gold trading feature is also not sold by ANet. Any gold transactions through it are defined by the players, ANet being an intermediary to moderate prices based on supply/demand. The gold came from somewhere; likely, it came from the people who had to take the time to get their ascended armor without purchasing anything.

Basically, you’re complaining about having the ability to “win” on your definitions despite the other people who are selling the money already having “won” potentially years ago.

GBEW.5947:

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

GBEW.5947:

Learn to read.

GBEW.5947:

?? how dense can you guys be? I can literally solve my biggest issue in game right now with my credit card. Yet it isnt paying to win? Wtf.

GBEW.5947:

So your saying don’t play guild wars? Uh no.

I was really trying to look at this and gather others thoughts however most of you just seem like flaming is your pass-time hobby so im just gomna go ahead and throw my opinions out there as fact from now on.

I’ll reiterate:

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

You’ve deviated fast. Seems to me you’re not looking for a discussion but instead just wanted to rally a ton of people behind you to try and scream P2W when in reality, the game is far from it.

By the gaming community’s convention at large, not yours, the game is not P2W. The people selling gold have probably already achieved maxed out everything and are just selling the gold for cosmetic items, because in their opinion, being the best-dressed is very important to them.

GBEW.5947:

i am now a firm believer that the guild wars community either A, Has no idea what they are talking about. Or B, simply likes to argue when their views are questioned.

No, you literally asked for a discussion, and were the first to break of that healthy discussion.

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

GBEW.5947:

the fact remains that this is pay to win in some peoples eyes and most have lost the meaning or concept on what pay to win is. Refer to sig.

And what is P2W in your eyes is not what the convention of P2W means. That’s not losing meaning or concept. I came from/worked for a popular game a decade ago which had massive stat variance and a literal endless treadmill of grind to being better. It has a system which you could buy characters, gear, money, account-bound items – pretty much anything – and these things were directly sold by the players, set at their own prices, with only a profit tax. Given roughly $30,000 USD, you could outfit a top-tier character. Given around $100 a month, you could be competitive in the PvP. And there was always a way to be increasingly better by spending more money, because the stats always got better, even if only by a margin of .1% (and sometimes as large as almost 200%), and someone was always willing to sell what they got.

And the game was open-PK, meaning people could deny you the ability to farm or do literally anything if you tried to get out of buying things by farming. And they did.

That’s Pay2Win. On your definition, and the community at-large’s.

GW2, you skip a bit of the grind if you spend money to do things. Okay? What does it matter, though? You said you look for optimal stats. Nobody’s stopping you. Ascended gear has fixed stats. They’re not different between players, and they’re never going to improve, and nothing new to power-creep it is coming. As soon as you reach ascended, if the gear grind is fun for you, then you’ve finished the game entirely forever. Time to go play a new game, because then what makes it fun to you is over. If it is what’s fun for you, why does it make you upset other people can do it faster? So what? If you have fun grinding, it means literally nothing at what rate other people play the game. They’re not taking away from your fun. You’re denying yourself fun because of arbitrary jealousy or them taking the “easy way” out of what is pretty much exclusively a time-gated experience. The real likelihood is they’re spending similar time to you, just doing different things, like WvW. Because in their eyes, they see PvP as what’s fun and what matters, and GW2 does an excellent job at keeping the power tightly-sealed at endgame.

To me, you’re playing the wrong game. If you want something about the grind with no shortcuts, go look for a subscription title. Anything that doesn’t take a monthly fee will be selling shortcuts, because that’s how GW2 stays afloat. They need to pay the bills. Better doing that than having expensive item malls which are strict dependencies to acquire the best stats at endgame, which is what most other titles offer. Because then that invalidates the grind, and skews every other facet of the game. That’s the convention of P2W.

“lol ur mad”

Because people do not agree with you, they are wrong and upset. Yup, you’re real fun to have a discussion with, particularly when you tell anyone (and now everyone) who disagrees with you that they’re just mad.

Honestly, if this was a troll, it’s quite the failure. I think the intent is to make other people upset and start flaming while losing their cool, not you

I enjoy posting long-winded replies, since I view the forums more fun than the game currently.

What do I want more of?

The delivery of content based on the original manifesto. The F2P/Expansion DLC/skin-moneygrab is a sad state of affairs for how little we’ve seen aside from some pretty maps in the past few years. MMO’s prosper on persistent worlds. Why do I feel like we’re just on a new map treadmill where the “good stuff” is always-moving to new maps? We’re not on a level or gear treadmill, but it kitten ed well feels like it, because there’s zero incentive to go back to previous zones that nobody occupies.

ANet to start focusing instead of trying to fix everything at once. HoT’s attempts to make changes to everything shows how big of a blunder the mentality of “change it all” can result in. The product feels unfinished, concepts are unpolished, there is a lack of depth in content necessary for an MMO world, content is time and money-gated, prior features were blatantly and insultingly removed, and most design solutions seems half-baked before they were rushed to implementation.

Real interaction between company and players when creating and shaping what comes next. ANet’s no-communications policy has created extensive rifts between community and company. We as players do not know what they are doing as to help them through the development process. HoT and prior implementations have proven there is a definite disconnect between us and those in charge of development decisions. The developers and leads frequent third-party media to interact with players more than their official forums. Developers and designers seem afraid their ideas will get shut down by the community before implementation despite the massive negative consequences that will come from such ideas if they were to be implemented. Various examples for HoT including Hero Points, Guild System reworks, and class design have left us with shoddy implementations with limited or no expressed concern. Only when the situation becomes so bad that their primary showcasing stars start to claim failure are actions taken. This is way too far.

Giving us the whole truth. I’m sick of hearing about how great the future of the game will be via features X and Y, which seem great, but these features come bundled with unannounced features and prerequisites A and B which completely destroy other aspects of the game or what was marketed as being a fun and fair service. A massive majority of the problems plaguing the game could have been prevented if the players were involved in the release process, and development time could be cut down immensely if project ideas could get scrapped at their inception versus post-implementation.

Not being afraid to admit failure and undo effort. Even on the rare occasions we’ve seen ANet admit failure due to their no-communications policy, their mentality has largely been “deal with it for now and we’ll fix it… eventually… maybe.” Some of the new implementations are absolutely abysmal failures. Reverting these changes promptly is sometimes necessary, and even the biggest, most successful companies in the world admit when they screw up and drop whatever they’re doing to fix and undo changes. Change isn’t always good, and when it isn’t, it’s important to go back before even more damage happens.

I feel like all I’m describing is what are considered as good business and software engineering practices. Why a successful company is floundering here I genuinely don’t understand.

Doam.8305:

Most people are going to say they liked HoT because the people that didn’t have left the ones that remained are typically don’t care either way, liked it, or stick to the core maps.

HoT was bad however S3 got me back into the game to a degree the drop in the player base both in game and in these very forums is enough to show that HoT was poorly received. Most of the people I knew left with myself included and some of us came back do to recent events but your still looking at a loss from HoT shown by there quarterly reports as well.

Basically this; you’ll get good feedback because at this point we’re over a year in and the majority of the reasons why people left have not been addressed in the slightest bit, so for the most part, the people who were upset pretty much all left the game and don’t care.

My play time’s probably down to like 10% of what it was pre-HoT. I’d actually spend $60 a month – the whole retail price of the game – for april 2015-era GW2.
And like many others, my gem purchases are down to literally 0%. Never hashing out cash to ANet again unless they fix what they broke. And we’re looking very far from it.

This is especially apparent in the PvP and WvW communities. The game has never been even close to as dead as it is now in these formats, and these formats are dying very, very quickly as a direct result of HoT.

Robert should be head of balance and everyone knows it.

Had I know it’d come to this I wish I’d bought a PS4 or Wii U for their amazing exclusives. Instead the $110.00 on the base games and ~$700.00 in gems feels like a waste.