Guild Wars 2

Joey.3928:

I think ArenaNet should focus on making a game for the people who actually LIKE the game.

THIS! SO VERY MUCH THIS!

I’m a huge fan of indie games because they are not polluted by the boardroom mentality. That’s not to say that an MMO should ignore getting people logged in. I’d much rather have a game that focuses on delivering a unique experience than something that is everything to everyone.

Kings X.5082:

ANET needs to make the game solo friendly. Maybe they should look at GW1 for inspiration.

In what ways is GW2 NOT solo-friendly? I’ve had absolutely no issues playing through the game several times, alone. In fact, I was the first in my guild to get 100% completion BECAUSE I played solo. I’ll give you that playing with others make the game easier, but IMO it is incorrect to say that it’s not solo-friendly.

As for seeing less population in the high level areas, I suspect many of the people who were grinding Karma in Orr are now grinding FotM. Although I’m not denying that some of the recent changes may also be causing people to leave too.

Narkosys.5173:

I cant believe how botched this is.

Funny way to define ‘botched’ since it was clearly stated in the release that all times given were PST. Pass the popcorn.

I agree! There is so much less elitism in this game because those ‘required’ carrots don’t exist. It reminds me of when I first picked up GW1 and just enjoyed exploring and trying to get all bonus objectives on missions. Eventually I got ‘elite’ gear, but the only reason to get it was because I wanted it, not because I needed it to access a particular dungeon or keep up with the ‘status-quo’.

I agree, I like them as-is. If it were to change, I’d like to see one WP per map that could not become contested and would be free to travel to from anywhere. I also would like to see WP become ‘lost’ when defense events don’t succeed. I want more ebb and flow of battle lines across each map, not random WP being unusable for a few minutes.

Xsile.2915:

I like that idea as well, instead of banning a gold buyer. Punish the account by taking all its illegally gotten gold from all characters on the account.

Take ALL the gold from the account, not just that which was purchased in violation of ToS. If there’s not enough gold, take the difference in market value, from items held by the offending player, starting with the most valuable. It’s meant to be punishment, not a slap on the wrist. Second offense, permanently remove the ability for that account to mail gold or use TP in addition to gold removal. Perma-ban on third offense.

Amiron.1067:

In short, stop nickle and diming us. It isn’t fair and it makes players feel like you’re abusing their time spent in your amazing online world. Please, remove this system.

This is the bigger issue. When players feel like a game is ‘work’ they are more likely to stop playing or find shortcuts and exploits. Because people desire items they can buy with gold, they strive towards those items. The root of the issue is that gold is transferable coupled with the ability to purchase desirable items with gold.

The “remove the ability to mail gold” is an attempt to address the transferability, but the real issue is that there are really expensive items in the game that can be acquired with gold. I support the idea that there is a non-transferable type of currency (badges, tokens, bound-drops) for the highest tier items. Those that desire those items are forced into gameplay to acquire them. As expansions are released and new content comes out, you devalue these tokens by introducing new ones. I think the system WoW has for dungeon tokens works quite nicely. While I don’t enjoy the game, essentially the hard-core players get their rewards, and those of us who are more casual, are content to wait until the next patch to move up. This seems to be a reasonable way to provide a good gaming experience without tying the high-level rewards to the economy.

Further, allowing gold/gems to be sold for real money would be a colossal mistake. This will wreck the economy by binding the in-game economy to the real-world economy. When this happens, every piece of new content is released with a black-cloud over it where players know the rewards are tweaked based on ANet’s cut from the RMAH.

Here’s something of value: Prove that changing the DR will sell more games. There is no debate here. You either enjoy the game and keep playing, or you don’t. If you don’t stop playing, nothing will change. ANet needs a healthy player-base to keep peddling gems and expansions. If you log in, you are a potential revenue stream. If you don’t, you’re not. It’s as simple as that.

Until you can prove that the number of players dissatisfied with the DR significantly impacts ANet’s bottom line, you have NO argument. The best we can do is play or leave. ANet can not guarantee an amazing experience for everyone. The last thing we need is a game design dictated by 10 year olds in a forum.

Reevax.2510:

Enoch.1058:

He can’t play the way he wants because that’s NOT the game. The game is GW2, not I deserve to have ANet as my personal video game studio.

He is being punished by unnecessary arbitrary systems.

He is not asking for a personal game studio. He wants to play the game in its current form minus the ridiculousness of the DR system.

A system that is supposed to punish bots but instead punishes everyone else instead.

No he is VOLUNTARILY playing a video game. If he chose not to play, he would not experience this ‘punishment’. That’s like saying Breaking Bad punished me because I did not enjoy Season 3. His argument makes NO sense and is just kittening because a few things aren’t to his liking. I get that the current tuning of the DR makes players upset, but to call it punishment is wrong.

You can’t possibly know what is small and what is easy to fix unless you personally know the codebase. If this game isn’t up to your standard, come back in a year.

He can’t play the way he wants because that’s NOT the game. The game is GW2, not I deserve to have ANet as my personal video game studio.

Not sure where the punishment is. Most people work on the basis of the reward principle. If you are not being rewarded, stop that behavior. Unless, of course, you are a masochist.

Anyone who wants a release cycle of less than a week has never worked in software development. As a general rule the faster you patch the lower the quality. When you see patches breaking things that’s a sign their team is moving too fast.

I feel the exact opposite.

I’m a level 80. At no point have I not had enough gold. Current bank – 8G

I’d like to see more titles and achievements. I know there are a ton of achievements already, but I’d really like to have better rewards around this (even if it’s just money).

IMO, there is a TON of under-utilized content (certainly in every MMO). One of the things I’m looking forward to is completing jumping puzzles. I’d like to see a little more structure around them (perhaps some NPCs and lore to hint about locations?). I like the idea of 100% map completion as part of the current end-game, but ANet could build even more incentive into going back to lower level areas.

One way to do this would be to reduce the travel cost after your story quest is over or increase monetary rewards to be on par with your level rather than the area. One thing that was sad was how the PQs in WAR went from awesome at launch to abandoned after a couple months. I think it’s key to either keep the new toons progressing through content, and add incentive for the single-toon-players too keep revisiting ALL the content. It’s disappointing to see the huddled masses of lvl 80s outside Arah rather than engaging the game.

I think SWTOR was onto something with how the legacy system provided a way to weave all your alts together, but they have yet to take it far enough. I think ‘end-game’ should focus on ACCOUNT-based rewards that are both significant and worth playing for. End-game rewards should be more than just gear (cosmetic or otherwise).

I guess I’m not being super specific here, but players enjoy a lot more than gear in their games and the ‘end-game’ should reflect that. I think some minor tweaks can be done to the heart and event systems to keep the rewards scaled to the players so that the content that wasn’t part of my initial play-through can be just as fun/valuable. Also, achievements based on account can be key here, too. Kill 1000 Risen? Counting that on a per-toon basis discourages alts (in fact why should we feel the need to call them ‘alts’?). There are numerous ways to allow achievements to aggregate over your account stats in ways that encourage alt rolling with out also detracting from people who only want to play one toon.

That’s my 2 cents.

nachdenki.2637:

It is absolutely right that gold can be taken out of the game in other ways, for example by reducing gold drop. But what was gained then? You end up with the same amount of gold as before… . Additionally, gold is dropped in many many ways (items, events, mobs, dungeons, …). So if mobs don’t drop gold, people will get money by farming events and so on. That’s why money sinks exist so everyone has to lose gold regardless of what he does all day long..

When you reduce the rate at which gold is dropped, you reduce the inflation rate. Here’s the situation, if you remove WP cost, and don’t create another gold-sink, the inflation rate will go up. Prices will rise at a faster rate than if there was less money in the economy. The root of the issue is that, as long as players play, gold/resources are added to the economy thereby devaluing all existing gold/resources. SO, reducing the amount of resources going into the game via rewards/drops/gathering by an equivalent amount to how much is going out of the game by WP travel would mean that it would have no impact on inflation.

Let’s not also forget that devaluing gold devalues gems which is a revenue stream for ANet. Which leads to another way to get money out of the game economy, let players sell gems for cash…. but we all know how that worked out for D3.

Look in the options, it’s a setting. Uncheck it and zoom on the magic mouse will work!

SpyderBite.6274:

Agreed! Much better performance in the Mac native client. Now, make zoom work with a Magic Mouse.

Uncheck Mac Beta: use scrolling gestures to change direction

Or do what I do and give up on the magic mouse for gaming

I’d check your graphical settings to see if there is one that is causing serious FPS issues. I’m on an 2011 iMac and my performance is better than BootCamp, but I tend to run shadows and reflections on low or off b/c they aren’t worth the performance hit.

Check out the screenshot:

Same here, I thought it reset my graphical settings at first, but I compared them and they are the same. I’ll take better performance and no rebooting any day!

45-70+ FPS

I was getting a little less FPS (40-50) when running this on the same hardware in BootCamp with Windows 7 using the SAME graphical settings.

Not to be “that guy” but Cider or Wine IS NOT EMULATION. It is merely a system call translation which is completely different. “Wine Is Not an Emulator”
This has been a public service announcement from the Technical Correctness Police.

An admirable attempt, but I’ve given into try to convince people of the truth.

It has to do with how your security settings are configured, not where you are installing it. You don’t want to protect yourself from malicious software, change the setting (administrator password required)

You are installing a program downloaded from the internet. You SHOULD be prompted to verify you have rights to install it! It’s not ‘bad coding’. It’s GOOD PRACTICE and it’s how the OS works, not anything on the part of ANet.

So, people who are ok using BootCamp, will continue to use Windows to play. I, for one, do not care if the performance is less than running it that way. I do not want to be forced to reboot to play.

As for a ‘native’ app, as long as the performance is acceptable, I couldn’t care less how they do it. I’ve played MANY games using this method including GW1. There are quite a few Windows games being released on Steam and in the App store which use this exact same solution. You just didn’t know that because no one told you

I have been using Wine (the foundation of Cider) for years to run Windows game in Linux and Mac. Indeed, it’s how I ran GW1 for a long time. Your mileage with compatibility layers will vary depending on the quality of the source application. Cider is a very straightforward piece of software and a lot of the performance issues, crashes, and memory leaks are the result of the application, not Cider, being poorly written. Sure, it might be that City of Heroes ran poorly on top of Cider, but both Cider and application development have come a long way since that game was released.

I truly hope that Guld Wars 2 was written, from the beginning, to be delivered this way. Given that this soon after release they are offering this solution, it indicates that they had this in mind for a while now. I hope that GW2 proves to leverage Cider with little to no issues.

Given how well GW1 ran in Wine and the fact that many games in the App store and Steam are running using this SAME technique, I’m hopeful this will be fine. I can understand the nitpicking about ‘native’ or not, but if it’s 80% as performant and stable, I don’t think native is necessary.

It’s NOT an emulator http://transgaming.com/cider/frequently-asked-questions

What specific, measurable problems have been experienced in this application by running it on top of this compatibility layer? Are those issues, in fact, caused by said layer, or is there a more optimal way to address the issue in the GW2 source code?

Personally, if I were a game developer, the calculation to build a native app comes down to these questions. If you can gain acceptable performance with little/no effort by wrapping your existing binaries with a compatibility layer, why would you ever maintain two different codebases?

So, again, what is the ‘gain’ for running natively? Further, if it just means you can squeak out 5-10 more FPS, don’t expect that to be reason enough for ANet to invest development resources in such an endeavor. (Personally, I’d gladly sacrifice performance for compatibility, but that’s getting off topic)

Using Wine/Transgaming is not emulating. It’s a wrapper between the game binaries and the OS. You’re not running it in a ‘self contained Windows disk’, you’re not even running Windows at all. Just because the directory structure is the same in Windows and on OSX doesn’t mean that it’s a ‘Windows setup’. Hell, the ‘real’ file organization is hidden in the .dat file anyway (it’s application specific, not OS specific).

The only difference between running it in OSX and Windows at this point is that there is a translation layer between the app and the OS that proxies commands from the requested Windows functions to the equivalent OSX functions.

It’s too early to say if performance will be limited due to running the game on top of this adapter. It very well may be that all the optimizations needed can be achieved within the game itself, not this compatibility layer.

I’m curious as to what you mean by ‘native’ for OSX. This installs and runs on OSX natively. Also, what’s your real question? Are you implying that something about this current solution could be improved? If so, what?

I don’t care if there are minor issues or even lower performance when I run this in OSX compared to Windows and BootCamp. I HATE rebooting to play my Windows games.

hugs ANet

So the argument that traveling is a gold sink is a bit onerous. I’d gladly trade lower gold drops for free travel. Sure, it’s a calculated gold sink, but there are other ways to prevent inflation, #1 being: Don’t give us the gold in the first place.

As for ideas on how to fix this, put one location in each zone that is free and charge for the rest. At the very least travel should equal around 50% of one event completion in that zone. I love that I’m not ridiculously OP when helping lower level guildies, but if it costs more than I’m going to make running a couple events, the cost is too high.

Hmm…. no reward? So what’s the XP, Karma, and Gold I get added to my character after an event? In dungeons, I’ve never gotten an empty chest.

To the contrary, I found a veteran troll the other day and decided to kill him, got two gold weapons and found a chest behind him… too bad I wasn’t rewarded.

There is no way you are ‘supposed’ to play. Play the game the way you enjoy it. If/when you can’t do that, move on.

I too run GW2 with BootCamp, but some people are getting really close to being able to run this using Wine-based solutions. Running BootCamp is just running Windows, not OSX, on your Mac.

Given that it seems very doable, I’d love to not have to reboot every time I want to play.

The only gear comparisons that matter, in terms of gear, are cosmetic ones. This game has max-stat gear that is easily accesible to anyone. So… because the gear stats aren’t important, what other information would an ‘inspect’ feature give you?

I agree the cosmetic stuff has a steep price. How do you think it measures up against the material cost for cosmetic gear in GW1? As for the ‘grind’, it only really exists if you think playing this game until you can afford the cosmetic gear is boring. If you don’t enjoy playing a dungeon 100 times, then don’t. Move on. That gear is there for the people who love grinding or are going to play this game for years (one run a week for 2 years would get you 104 runs).

I’m wondering when a game that is nothing but gear progression is released. I’m tired of every MMO I try to play end up with whining about lack of end-game after it’s only been out 2 weeks. Someone should just make a gear grind game and let everyone who wants that kind of thing go there.

It amazes me how many people say they want something new in an MMO and when they get it, do nothing but complain about how it’s not like their old MMO. GW2 is GW2. If it’s your cup of tea, enjoy it; if not, move on.

I think we can only speculate at this point as to whether there will be an increase to the level cap. In GW1 the cap was 20 and you reached that at around 2/3 of the way through the first game, even sooner in the other two releases. My guess is that, if they do increase the level cap, it will be just as easy to acquire max-stat gear.