Guild Wars 2

My problem with Dragon Ball is that the timing on all the skills feels INCREDIBLY disjointed. I will throw a fireball or activate a kick, and it takes a good 2 seconds for everything to register, throwing timing extremely off, and that’s one reason Dragon’s Gaze is as frustrating as kitten to get.

With Lunar New Year come and gone, so too has Dragon Ball. As hectic, fun, and frustrating as it was, there was no doubt a feeling that some of the achievements were rather grindy, almost like how Crab Toss was during the Southsun release.

So, just curious. Are there any plans to add Dragon Ball, as well as other seasonal activities, to the daily activity rotation and expand/bring back the Seasonal Activities achievement category? You’ve brought back achievement categories in the past with new releases, such as Super Adventure Box.

None of the ones you mentioned are retired, proving my point. Adding new achievements instead of modifying the old ones to fit the new wardrobe system felt like a cop-out. So what about those players who never got a chance to save up all their gold to put the minis in the bank, or couldn’t find friends who would let them borrow some? Hello, ugly incomplete ‘Retired Achievement’ category.

Now if they had actually removed previous mini sets entirely from the game, then I would see the warrant for them to be made retired.

When you hear the word, “Achievement”, what sort of image pops into your head? What does that word mean to you? For me, an achievement is something I consider a reward for going above and beyond what is deemed the standard requirements of completing a task. Achievements are a testament of your skill and diligence, your commitment to pushing yourself past your limits and improving your own strengths.

The Miniature Collector Achievements, on the other hand, required you to fork out tons of real life/in-game cash and/or be very lucky. I have no problem with the achievements as a whole, and I’ve personally splurged now and then at a chance to get a miniature I really wanted, but the Achievements to collect them should not have been duplicated for the new wardrobe system and made Retired Achievements.

I feel that this goes directly against what Achievements are supposed to be about. Everyone can complete a challenging Living Story achievement with enough persistence and dedication, but not everyone is able to shell out enough coin to complete purely aesthetic collections. By creating an entire new set of miniature achievement to coincide with the wardrobe instead of recoding the old ones, us players who didn’t have the money to complete their collections before the September Feature Pack were cheated out of a rather impressive 120 AP.

I feel like the Miniature Collector category falls more in line with the Hall of Monuments. Veteran players who put lots of money and hard work into their mini collections are greatly rewarded, but at the same time new players are able to access these rewards too if they wish to put in the extra effort. They are not the same as Historical Achievements, as Miniatures were never tests of skill during releases of limited content. They are like the Cultural Armor Achievements, fun goals to gradually work to in your spare time when you can afford it.

In conclusion, I feel the implementation of the new Miniature Collector Achievements to bring it in-line with the new Wardrobe feature was a huge misstep and could have been handled differently. Miniatures themselves have not been removed, nor has the joy of slowly building up your collection. So why punish the players who were unable to complete their collections before the implementation of the Wardrobe?

This happened to me with Echoes of the Past, even though I have completed it (and all the achievements). It’s really bothersome. Choosing to ‘continue’ it drops me off at the very first instance of the story, which would be Trouble at Fort Salma. I went through it again just now, to be sure, and it still won’t mark complete.

The problem with the duplicates is that it wouldn’t make sense to move them to the historic tab, given how the new wardrobe-based mini achievements are EXACTLY the same, from requirements to rewards. In my opinion it feels like ANet meant to switch over to the new achievements and completely remove the old bank-based mini achieves. Unfortunately it seems the transition fell halfway, leading to a terrible AP exploitation scenario.

It wouldn’t be that hard to recode the old achievements so that putting them in the wardrobe counts instead, right? I’m perfectly fine with taking a rollback and losing the ill-gained AP I’ve gotten from this.

They honestly should have just recoded the old achievements so putting them in the wardrobe counted towards it instead of the bank, cleared up this whole mess instead of giving perfectionists with tons of gold to spend 120 free AP…

I had this exact problem with some of my miniatures, Set 2 I believe. It seems weird that they added completely new achievements rather than rewrite the conditions for the old ones…

Hrm, still doesn’t really make sense… I mean, the rewards are exactly the same, right down to the title awarded from Set 1. Why didn’t they just reprogram the conditions for the original achievements?

I am attaching a screenshot for reference. As you can see, Miniature Collector for Sets 1 and 2 are listed twice, with one Set 2 achievement being higher than the other, most likely because I had obtained some new Set 2 minis after the patch.

So while I was going through the long and tedious process of removing my miniatures from the bank and right-clicking to add to my collection, I was surprised to see after finishing adding Set 1 to my wardrobe that I had gained at least 40 more achievement points.

I looked at my achievement tab, and it has the Miniature Collector achievements for all the sets listed twice: apparently one for obtaining the mini like before, and then yet another achievement for adding them to your wardrobe.

I’m assuming this is a bug? If not, it’s one heck of an achievement point exploit at least.

All your miniatures are still in your bank. Once removed and added to your wardrobe, the miniature tabs will disappear from your bank.

Ah, okay. Thanks. The in-game description of ‘maximum amount of suspicion’ was a bit misleading. Maybe I was just overthinking it. Thanks again for the help.

If I’m understanding the achievement dialogue correctly, then I have to complete this chapter with a full (or 99% full) suspicion meter without being kicked out. Any suggestions for how to do this, like what wrong thing to ask how many times?

Warriors can pop Defiant Stance right before the quicksand kills them to have the damage ticks heal them up enough to survive long enough to get the achieve. The Sure-Footed trait in the Defense line can help with the timing somewhat.

Thanks for the input, everyone, and I’d be happy to elaborate further on my ideas for retroactive scaling of zergs.

In essence, my core reason for suggesting the implementation of retroactive scaling would be to prevent the higher-population worlds from being able to steamroll over everything with almost no opposition. I could see how NPC scaling could be beneficial in some cases, but one of the main problems is that massive zergs are able to accomplish tasks in roughly a quarter of the time as the opposition, and are also able to easily thwart any offensive pushes against them with little to no effort.

The repercussions of NPC scaling could also work against the weaker servers. If they do manage to muster enough players to stand a chance at taking a keep or castle, there’s a good chance that they will have to deal with a scaled-up NPC commander in addition to the hundreds of players running in to defend. This would naturally cause even more disheartening among the servers.

The goal would be to ensure that incredibly large groups are scaled down to have the same efficiency as the average amount of players that are needed to successfully capture or defend areas in WvW. A few underlevels joining in would not cause the entire group to fail horrendously, and at the same time a huge group would never downscale enough to be destroyed by a small group of 5 or so players. The key would be to crunch the numbers and find out how reasonably large your average WvW group is, and tailor the scaling around that.

Here are just a couple of suggestions I’ve come up with to possibly improve the WvW experience for everyone. Let me know what you guys think and feel free to give your own opinions and suggestions.

1. Outnumbered buff needs improved
It’s nowhere near enough to be efficient when given the exact population requirements for it. The boosts should be at least doubled for it to be viable.

2. Reward transfers to low-population servers, restrict transfers to high-pop servers
And by ‘restrict’, I don’t mean make expensive. I mean don’t let it happen at all. As of right now there is absolutely NO incentive for people to leave their comfy ‘steamroll everything and come out on top with absolutely no effort’ server and join the ones that actually need the help. Instead of making low-server transfers free, why not offer some incentive like a gem bonus or the like for helping a lower-tier server and sticking with them, not abandoning them when it’s all over and done with.

3. Retroactively scale zergs
I’m not sure how well this would work, but here is my suggestion on how to deal with zergs. Retroactively scale them so that the more players on the same side in WvW there are in a given radius, the weaker each individual member of that zerg is to compensate for their higher numbers.
Ideally teams of 15 or so players are enough for any given objective in WvW, and 50 players swarming around the map taking everything faster than it can be taken back like a horde of locusts in no fun at all. But if that swarm of 50 players was scaled down in strength to where they would only have the efficiency of about 20 players, that would make things much more manageable for the opposition, and would also encourage groups of players to think things out and strategize rather than mindlessly consume everything in their path.

This has been an issue for almost a year now and has still yet to be addressed. For the quest in The Cursed Shores where you must escort Warmaster Chan and his group to Anchorage Waypoint, the event still fails to reset properly in the event of a wipe (which is very very often). The Risen that spawn outside of Anchorage never de-spawn, resulting in a huge mass of around 20-30 Risen just waiting to ambush Chan and the players, causing the event to fail and making the Risen that spawned from that run stick around as well.

With the boss completely resetting to boot. Full health, timer back to 25 minutes, the works. Coincidentally, I disconnected right after I submitted a bug report for all my skills locking up, so I couldn’t even use my basic autoattack on the prime hologram, until I massive lag spike caused me to get hit by the prime laser, thereby disqualifying me from the No More Tricks, Scarlet achievement, and afterwards I never saw the bright orange lines telling me the prime laser was going to hit there until I found myself standing in a huge trail of ultraviolet flames. THANKS, Anet…

Probably should mention I’m a US player, so I can’t access EU servers to guest on them. Sorry.

I never got around to playing GW2 the first week of the release, so now here in the second week my own server is very… empty, when it comes to the new content. Is there a server out here that still has plenty of players doing the bosses so I can get the achieves and witness the events?

We killed the Berserker first, and I didn’t get hit by the Firestorm’s wind circle or bouncing flames.

I’m a warrior, so no pet.

I dodged the shockwaves by jumping over all of them within range.

This makes the third time I have killed the Molten Berserker and Molten Firestorm in the Molten Boss Fractal and have avoided all the shockwave attacks (I had my combat log up the whole time to make sure), and when the battle ended, I didn’t get the Shockwave Skipper achievement! What gives?

Phew, that was an intense DB Karma Train Zombie Apocalypse in EBay’s Borderlands last night!

Hadan.2841:

go to work for 10hrs and come home to this thread. Sad. Mostly sad from BP. shud up alrdy. Do we not have enough drama within our own server atm? The nerve of some of u to post here and and try to speak for the rest of us on BP. First off, no zerg guild speaks for me. Second off, No1 from BP EVER speaks for me. If you want to talk trash and give speeches make sure its address as “my stupid self says….” not “BP will/do this to u”. I will be the first to tell you that u have been sadly mistaken If you thought you spoke for my guild. Chest thumping here is like beating some1 with no arms in basketball.

Thank you Hadan. I’ve seen krew in action, and you guys are really good. Trash-talking idiots give all of our servers really bad rep, and it’s just stupid and sad.

Ryu, enough, that’s not helping.

Ugh, the toxicity on this thread is getting terrible. And people from all sides are just fanning the flames. This is a game, it’s supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, then please don’t throw the blame around the board on why you aren’t having fun. So even if Ehmry Bay does lose this week, what does it even prove? It proves that the opposing teams put up the better fight. Nothing more, nothing less.

I admire everyone’s enthusiasm this week, but some of these comments are taking things way too far. So everyone just relax and have fun. May the best server win, and may they express their victory in a courteous and sportsmanlike manner.

I think the biggest obstacle for Ehmry Bay is our lack of coverage during EU peak times, and both opposing teams are bringing out the heavy artillery right from the start. This is gonna be a hectic and challenging week, and I can’t wait to see how it pans out. I know tension is running high from the 7 week nightmare that was Season 1, but good luck and have fun, everyone!

Your arrogance will make our victory over you only that much sweeter. We’re not as weak a world as everyone thinks we are.

Amen! This is exactly how I feel, and I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Well, the last two weeks of voting and supporting has come to an end, and where there should be sounds of civilized applause and congratulations for the winner and warm condolences for the runner-up…

Instead I find pages upon pages of poisonous insults, meaningless threats, and incessant flaming. I expected better from the community of Guild Wars 2, but this is frankly disappointing and disheartening. It paints a bad image of the game and all who play it as a whole to see all these childish topics thrown around. Come on, people, we are MUCH better than this.

My congratulations to Kiel for winning the election, and also my thanks to Evon and his supporters for putting up a good fight. Now let’s all put this behind us and look forward to celebrating Queen Jennah’s Coronation Anniversary.