Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

The PvP team is investigating opportunities to update the sigils available in the game mode. This means removing, adding, balancing, and reworking. Our high-level goals include reducing RNG gameplay, promoting counter-play, reducing raw damage output, and removing ineffective choices. Some example changes would be removing on-kill stacking sigils and changing proc sigils to on-next-attack effects.

We are looking for feedback on these goals and potential changes. Feel free to suggest new sigils, sigils that exist in other game modes, or feedback on current sigils.

It’s probably broader than your design ambitions, but if you want to remove RNG, and add counterplay, then maybe consider sacrifice or symbiotic type sigils.

A sacrifice sigil could be
Increase Condition Resistance by X%, but increase Power Vulnerability by Y%
Increase Condition Damage by X%, but reduce Power damage by Y%

A symbiotic Sigil could be:
Convert X personal Skill into a group skill. For example, Healing heals your team, but reduces personal heal by X%

Someone up above mentioned a sigil for revealing stealth if you hit a player while stealthed. I quite like that. A counter to it would be a sigil that makes you immune to reveal, sacrificing other sigils that enhance different styles to gain that.

It might not work in practice, but if you want counterplay, you need to change how classes interact rather just stick to which conditions or durations you tweak.

If you know the opposing team has warrior, he’s likely going to take something that enhances blocks. A sigil that pierces block (maybe on weapon swap to avoid RNG?) might be a worthwhile swap during the prepare stage. For a warrior, i might want to be able to strip resistance too. As the warrior, i need to predict whether these sigils will be used, and prepare appropriately.

These aren’t developed ideas – just concepts based on the goals you state you wish to address – maybe they can inspire an iteration that works!

Going to add a plus one to this drop taking forever to acquire… i’ve decimated more grawl than grawl deserve – they just want to worship some pink rock…. I just want my fragment!

I’ve had this happen twice in recent days.

I use a black lion key to open a chest. I get a Black Lion Ticket Scrap in the loot table.

The scrap is not present in my inventory.

I’ve asked in guild. I’ve googled. I can’t find any reference to changes that might mean the scrap went into my wallet or that it was deposited with my other scraps in the bank.

Where are the scraps going?

i’ve submitted bug reports on both occasions so it generates a time stamp at the approximate time. On the second occasion I made sure to have a screenshot which includes inventory and a filter for scrap or something else.

Surely if this is happening someone else would have noticed too?

What am I missing?

GM Kveldulf.4790:

Hey, can everyone check again? Thanks!

I got in earlier on a character and then failed with another. And then I managed to find an instance that worked some 30 mins ago. Not sure if it was luck or your fix, but I definitely appreciate you looking into it if it’s resolved!

Unable to log into any character currently in Diessa – The Mordrem must have corrupted the code!

I replicate the above a couple of times every week on Rhendak. And it happens when I don’t open my JP chests consistently in the mornings too – if you log in later in the day and then the following morning it won’t have reset yet.

OS puzzle is the same.

This has been bugging me for absolutely ages – Apologies in advance if it has been discussed to death, but I couldn’t find anything from the brief search that I did.

Can we please align all chest / boss resets to a single time in the day? This has certainly happened for a lot of events, but there are still those out there that only reset on a 24h cycle from the last time that they were opened – Rhendak is one example that comes to mind for this.

It means that rather than going there once a day you need to keep a tally of what time you opened the chest the previous day before going there. Go too soon and you miss out on the loot.

A related bug that means that if you opened it at ALL within 24 hours causes the reset timer to not restart, so you have to either do Rhendak again later in the day (after your previous reset), or wait two days to fully reset the event.

Example:
Day 1 – Loot Rhendak @ 5pm – receive all bonuses
Day 2 – loot Rhendak @ 3pm – no bonus loot
Day 3 – loot Rhendak @ 4pm – still no bonus loot – the reset timer is still tied to the day 1 limit.
So you either need to loot him again after 5pm or wait two days to loot it. AND you have to know what time you looted him when the reset timer was set.

It’s absurd, and contrary to the “play your way” ethos of GW.

Now, I acknowledge that some time back many bosses and rewards were realigned to a daily reset time, but this was not fixed for everything. Is it not time that we considered doing that?

I cannot see any value added arguments for a time lapsed 24 limit being better than a fixed time. If anything, it must be increasing per character / account data storage as ANet need to track what time each chest was opened by each player. So from a data management point of view having a fixed reset time means no need to store date / time of last loot for that account, only whether they DID loot it. End of day, tables reset, let people loot again.

It’s certainly not a high impact bug, but some indication that it’s acknowledged and that it will be looked at one day would certainly be nice. I wanted to post this in the bugs section, but really it’s a design decision that just really needs revisiting.

I’m sure anything I’ll add in here will already have been mentioned, but as Arenanet gave us an opportunity to be part of their beta it seems only fair to offer reciprocity and share some comments!

Overall the beta was a good experience – performance was good and the environment shows great promise!

Wyvern Fight
I noticed that each time the wyvern took off it kept glitching and reappearing randomly on the arena – I assume that this was happening to most players. The fight itself was moderately entertaining, but, for my part, I still didn’t feel much in the way of risk from it – buffeted off a couple of times at the start, but once you account for that and as long as you have some basic nous to stay out of the fire it was another usual fire – maybe consider adding some additional threats from other NPC’s or mini wyverns that lay down further fire if some players don’t keep the numbers down – maybe they spawn specifically for higher zerg numbers? Or maybe swarming npc’s that render areas of the arena as permanent buffets as the fight progresses, or destroy parts of the arena, providing mobility challenges? I’m sure there’s a million ways to add challenge to it, but most of the 5-10 minute fight was still kitten kitten shoot shoot.

What about letting players vote in a higher difficulty? If x% of players vote, they get a harder version of the fight with marginally better rewards or reward chances? (that’s just me going crazy on ideas! Not sure how practical that would be.)

Revenant
As far as the Revenant is concerned I think the scaling and compact map size made it hard to get a real sense of the impact and power of the revenant, but fighting some siamoth’s from out of the way allowed a slightly better glimpse of what we have to look forward to – congrats on creating something wildly different from what we have. The traits also look very interesting and I can’t wait to get my hands on one in PVP. The swings between legends, the recharge rates and expense offer some real versatile gameplay options with what I expect will be a challenging skill ceiling.

Mastery UI
I thoroughly disliked the Mastery UI – I couldn’t find it at the bottom right (if you’re going to keep it separate from the Hero panel then give us a keyboard shortcut to it), and very unintuitive – I couldn’t really tell what each option offered me, and the mushroom skill progression was really vague. Not sure what clicking the icons on the left did and why I would want to lock a track to the bottom of the screen.

Much as I love how you guys reinvented the MMO genre, you might want to consider looking at something like the talent trees from WoW (ugh I said it!) or even just mirror the wvw progression model and descriptions – that makes a lot of sense to me compared to what I saw yesterday. If I can’t undo my selections then it needs to be REALLY clear what I’m spending my points in or I’ll just hoard them until i’m sure or get some guidance from peer research.

Gliding
Love the idea, but I didn’t find it entirely intuitive – the deploy message always felt like it showed up slightly later than I wanted it to which prevented me from going where I wanted to at the height I wanted to – I concede that it could just be an acclimatisation issue on my part though.

The adventure was fun – I’m looking forward to more of these!

And your beta design is genius – no download of a copy of the client? No separate login? All concurrent with my main game client? AND I can talk to folks on the main game? You’re all architectural geniuses!

cpg.7140:

Can you mix approaches 1 and 2? As in, say, the longer you go without getting a drop of a certain significance (I don’t know how you classify things on your loot tables or if it’s just as simple as rarity), the more likely you are to get it the next time? Obviously starting out with very very small increases to your chances… or is that just too much to deal with, changing every individual’s chances based on time? Does the current magic find system allow something like this to be implemented (even for loot normally unaffected by magic find)?

Building something like that into the logic, you have to consider at what point it kicks in, what the different tiers would be, and when it deflates… is it based on 15 whites means the next one has a 93% to be a blue? And if you get a blue you’re then reset back to whites…. how do you multiply upwards in a fair way… unless you track drops per player, and multipliers per loot tier for each player (and character?)

Other variables then kick in – if you don’t get a white then does that increase the chance of getting one of THOSE because you’re having a lucky streak? I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but I’m no maths guru!

Tokenisation, as per the black lion scraps, has made a huge difference to the experience of opening chests.

Magic find clearly has a huge impact too. I actually like the current balance of things as they are. Yeah, sometimes you feel you don’t get the loot you’ve been waiting for, but it gives you that constant excitement that the next time you’ll have a better run.

I’ve always felt in this game, though, that sometimes you have a bad “login” – everything you do on that character during that login has an awful RNG, and then, days later, you have a fantastic one. It’s led me to speculate that GW2 might have a “seed” generator on login that modifies your overall luck for that session. I have no idea if that is true or not.

Some great comments on here, and I like John’s thinking already from the post he made a few pages back on initial ideas.

I’m not a big fan of exhaustion as I’m concerned about penalties for groups that roam without a commander, but I can understand the benefits. The 5 rules / constraints on exhaustion outlined by John could work.

I’ve read / scanned most of the thread, and there’s a few other ways that we could embellish on or consider to tackle the troll problem: (apologies if I’m duplicating)

- We can use WvW skill points in a siege line to improve siege allowances – doesn’t remove trolling, but forces some wvw investment by players using siege regularly.
- Granting a commander greater siege allowances per squad size is a good win
- Colour coding on siege to match the commander tag (as an example) would definitely help – the filtering option is great too if that could be achieved
- Look at Guild Unlocks / Influence items that increase siege allowances for members of a guild – those that wvw often will have this enabled and all members will benefit.

The above are around usability.

How do we remove the trolls from having an impact?

- Enable reporting on Siege for wvw trolling – increase / apply exhaustion to players that prevents further siege or supply being used
- It’s possible, I guess, that one guild may mass report a pug commander’s siege as they want to take over – allow endorsement votes to remove the exhaustion from players by other players. Restrict these to same server individuals to avoid cross server griefing.
- If enough siege placed by players (quantity of siege not volume of votes only, so that the player must have placed several siege items that have had many votes each) is reported then apply a tempban from wvw arenas for the player. Remove them from the environment and they won’t bother anyone. Maybe their own inconvenience will make them better team players. Obviously griefing of this system would need its own consequences, as does troll reporting today. I don’t know how much this is a problem for GM’s in game.

Any siege reports must be restricted to own server items. Obvious requirement, but let’s not miss it!

It seems like a good opportunity to express my thanks to all of the account issues support team, but Gaile in particular for really having a huge visibility and impact in the support forums – every time I’ve been in there (and I pop my head in often) she’s always updating people and making sure that the SLA promises made are kept to.

I totally wish her all the best in her new role – it’s more than clear that it’s an awesome fit! Congrats!

I’m very appreciative of Colin’s post in this thread. I think it is definitely needed and overdue.

I haven’t experienced the new content yet, but the posts I’ve seen and what I’ve read has impacted me, how I feel about the game, and how I feel about recommending it to other users.

Without the context that has been provided here it is easy to get sucked into the hype. I still have concerns. But now I understand more clearly that this is still a work in progress, and that ArenaNet acknowledge that it requires refinement. That is huge. And important. And it wasn’t clear before.

My recommendation to the community is that we take this to heart, continue to provide constructive feedback and let’s allow ArenaNet the time needed to refine this a little more. I’m not going to lie. I have expectations that this will be done soon so that the team can start investing in the content that’s going to keep me and my friends playing for years to come. It’s out of the gate now and in the public domain, and that introduces social media challenges that need dealing with.

I think you guys at ArenaNet have some reconsidering to do too. I applaud your intent, your vision, your goals, and we allow that mistakes will happen. I love the hugely understated changes addressing the performance issues from the original SouthSun launch to the sheer scalability and culling fixes and the mega events we saw towards the end of season 1. It shows that you listen, and that you are responding to community requests. Wardrobes show this, Reward changes show this (yes I know there’s still an unhappy crowd), PVP and WvW changes show this. These are great and positive things we’ve had.

It’s great that you want to bring in and engage new players. But…. to sell something like this you need to manage dialogue better. You need to look at the client experience (us!) and you need to consider the worst possible outcome, and consider how you manage that. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. You also need to enable your players to deal with change. That is a continuous process, and it starts well before launch, its built up around launch, and then followed through AFTER launch with commentary and quick acknowledgment of where things could be better if those points are made. Colin’s post needs more profile, media outlets need some comment to stem articles like that PCG one, or at least some channel for 2-way discussion (constructive of course). I know you have your policies, chaps. Don’t get rid of them, but PLEASE REVIEW THEM like you do the game mechanics and reconsider how you bring us on your journey!

Manage the journey and hopefully we don’t need to have another incident like this.

I’m a big promoter of this game (my friends think I must be on commission), and I truly want people to see everything this game has and CAN offer to them – as much as you do, truly. Emotionally, I’ve been on this journey with you for many years (even before the game launched) and I have an interest in its success. Work with us by explaining your thinking and let us share our concerns and let’s show how the most friendly MMO community can enable this game to blow every other MMO out of the water.

The surprise events and story stuff – keep that secret, but these basics of playability don’t need to be so hush hush.

Yeah – I can see how the current model can lead to the perception of a lower score and therefore counter-productive behaviour.

Your statement holds so true… “enjoyable feelings make the game enjoyable for players”. While I love the PVP tracks we now have, I confess I enjoyed the game more before we had them. We were there for the love and the fun of it – we had hundreds of thousands of glory that we didn’t spend, but we had fun. The tracks introduced a change in culture as well as the rewards, and it’s that which we, as a community, are adapting to now.

I don’t have an easy answer to this particular conundrum apart from encouraging you to focus on changing your perceptions.

I know ArenaNet read a lot of these posts but there’s the chance they will take something they like from this and find a way that works without imbalancing the game, but I wouldn’t count my quaggans on it!

I can confirm xista’s comment.

With that context your suggestion starts to make a lot more sense – thanks for taking the time to explain it!

There are two views to this I guess.

On the one hand the team victory is the reward. True, you scored the lowest in your team, but your team won, and that was down to you. You received your win bonus, and possibly your top defender bonus. You signed up for a team activity and your team won. It’s a perception thing, and you can change yours and feel better about it for that reason.

But hey – you and I and all of us know that, in a game, we all want to be that top scorer!

In that context your idea is great, to a limit. I think that earning points for standing on point with nothing going on is over the top and, as suggested earlier, I feel it would lead to some counter-productive gameplay. Nevertheless, they could introduce ticks by defence time. Maybe use the events system like they do in WvW with 30 second cooldowns on point defence. Contribute to the event and earn a few points towards the glory counter.

It even adds some interesting dynamics to the game as a failed offensive could prove more costly to the attacking team than leaving the defender on point. (e.g. thief attacks bunker guard but cannot finish him – the fight lasts 1min 30 in which the guard has been earning points). That could be good OR bad.

Another way to recognise it is to look at bonus personal glory at the end based of the match on time at defence (for a victory). But that won’t show on the scoreboard and so you will feel the same as you do now – that you received the lowest points, if not the lowest glory.

Maybe a UI change – Team Points as they are now, and a second column for sum bonus points earned by each player – could that address the human need for recognition on a role well done?

Thoughts welcome!

Yasha.5963:

We both (all?) agree there is a problem, and while your suggestions are not without merit they focus on rewards, and a lot of the problem is due to the desire to win, rather than just the desire to get rewards.

So even Geeir’s extreme “remove all rewards” idea is unlikely to make a large difference – except perhaps to totally kill hotjoin. El Gaucho I think your idea’s would discourage such behaviour, but wouldn’t really effect people that that change so they can win.

It should be reasonably simple to tweak the system so the players cannot manipulate it for their own gains/to win.

The randomness of hotjoin in the past was one of its strengths- you could be on a strong team or a weak team, but that was usually due to luck since it was previously more difficult to force autobalance and rejoin the team of your choice.

You raise a very good point, Yasha!

I do agree that my recommendations won’t address a fundamental desire to win.

I guess we ought to look at the metrics that show whether winning is the desire over the rewards? You could be totally correct and we make the change and it doesn’t fix this. I expect that ArenaNet may have access to this data, or be able to derive this by comparing pre and post reward track concurrent hotjoin users.

I feel (<-opinion here) that the PVP reward tracks changed things – more people definitely jumped in when these were added. Thusly, removing these rewards in this very specific scenario may help to alleviate the problem, if not eliminate it. Even if it ONLY removes 40% of team-swappers then that might just make hotjoin playable again.

If that fails then, of course, we need to look at other options.

Complete inaction isn’t going to remedy the problem. My recommendations attempt to be non intrusive. I can’t think of a way to address the balancing issue that doesn’t include these or similar penalties.

We can put a cooldown on spectate rejoins, but that will penalise players who legitimately need to jump out for a few minutes.

We could restrict players to only rejoining the team they joined unless they are autobalanced, but that penalises those players who like to join with one or more friends to be on the same / opposite team.

We could change the auto-balance rules in a variety of ways, but a determined team swapper will likely find a way of manipulating this.

Danzel – you too make good suggestion. Again, these begin to be slightly more obtrusive to the end experience, but they would support Yasha’s views too.

That said, I don’t want to be forced to be in Tpvp on a class I’m not very comfortable with. I play for fun – win or lose, I don’t especially care. But it does bother me when others are upset by winning or losing. Sometimes it’s just pvp trolling, but that also depends on my own ability to kitten when I can make a valuable contribution to a team game.

I understand what you’re proposing, but I’m not sure that I understand what the problem is that you are trying to solve.

Are you trying to encourage bunkering? Boost personal rewards? Surely the win bonus should already acknowledge the team effort that was being targeted?

Geiir.7603:

Remove all rewards in hot join. It is a place to test builds, duel and just don’t do anything serious. Add a solo queue without leaderboards that have decent rewards. And for the love of god, fix matchmaking and uneven match starts!

/rant

Hi Geeir – Thanks for your comments!

Can you explain how removing all rewards is better than penalising those using spectate to re-balance as I suggested? I don’t want to remove the incentives people have to play pvp, nor do I want to drive them to the solo queues where more experienced players already rant about inexperienced players joining. There should be a place for all types of players, and appropriate rewards for the time spent. My suggestion attempts to find a balance between those.

I’m curious to hear your rationale

Exactly Pamat! So if we fix what’s broken then we start back on a path toward greatness!

tbh I had no idea how bad hotjoins had gotten until I started up this week. I pity anyone trying to jump into the current games without abusing the system.

I recently decided it was time to spec a new class out and jump into some hotjoins and try it out. It’s been horrid.

In the last few days playing between 6 to 10 games I’ve had ONE game where it could have gone either way in a 4vs5. The rest end up 5 Vs 2, 3 or, if you’re lucky 4 people, plus teamstacked. Not infrequently one of the losing team stays at spawn and waits for the timer for the purposes of getting their three daily maps.

You can’t learn a new class if you’re being ganked by 2 to 5 players at spawn.

I’m sure it’s been raised before but could ArenaNet consider one or more of the following:

- Remove playing 3 rounds from the daily rotation so people don’t just idle for the hell of it. This incentive to pvp is no longer required now that we have reward tracks.

- Once a player has joined the game – if they enter spectate then have them forfeit ALL bonus glory rewards at the end of the match.

- If you enter spectate after joining a team have the player forfeit reward track progress for the match.

True, there may be a slight inconvenience to players in the above, but those of us who care about PVP surely would prefer this? It removes all the benefits of team stacking (unless you’re absolutely adamant that you can’t be on the losing team even if you lose your rewards – fair game to you if that’s your preference!)

I had also considered a cooldown timer on being able to re-join, but that feels more intrusive to the game than the above suggestions.
________________________________________________

Spectate is for:

1. Watching and learning from other players
2. Being away for an extended period of time and allowing others to fill your spot

It is NOT for auto-balancing so you can join the winning team.

I’d welcome thoughts or other ideas from anyone out there!

Hi Zora,

While, as a fellow victim of bank items lost, I am sympathetic to it, I do think it unfair to place the blame on ANet – they have provided security, and the tools to protect accounts with. The loss is no fault of theirs – they are providing a service by restoring user accounts as it is.

I would like it if ANet would consider a guild restore following a hack Where no movement of items has occurred since the hack. I can imagine one of the complexities being working out what was done by the hacker, and what by players.

With regards to timeliness, note that they’re still seeing large volumes of requests for refunds, and a possible increase in hacks possibly related to the recent heart bleed bug. While ANet may not have been vulnerable, third party email services and the like May have been.

It’s just worth remembering context in these situations. Again, I’m sorry for the items you all have lost.

Hi Gaile,

Could you review my ticket 568230?

Access was restored 3 days ago – hoping the restoration might be coming soon!

Thank you!

I’m jumping in on this one – the comments in the other thread suggested it would still be possible to get in (and thereby cash in the tokens left over).

It’s not a value added activity to spend time removing this functionality – there’s a finite amount of currency, which means it could easily have been left for an additional few weeks for people to wind down supply.

Please bring this back, at least to allow people to use up residual keys.

I’m counting on you kind folks at ArenaNet to make it happen!!! I trust you!