Guild Wars 2

Sorry Jaken, I slightly changed the order of your items, to make a shorter post. I hope you don’t mind.

How about adding these things:
- design an item
- design an item from the ground up

Yes, there is an icon to draw. Those are often close to an existing one. A name. <Part of monster>. A description? “An item that was taken from <monster> hint: you can find it at <location>”.
What is the difference between “designing” and “designing from the ground”?

Jaken.6801:

- create a story surrounding that item

If they want to make a collection for a precursor without having already figured the thematic of the legendary, well… Besides, “story” is really a big word. For that shiny great-sword of light, we say you are a hero and must save some villagers. <includes list of events where you save villagers>. For that fishy weapon, you have to kill fishes <includes list of fishes to kill>.

Jaken.6801:

- work with other members of the big teams, which means you have to coordinate with them, which can be hard. This includes the lore team, the art team, programmer, etc…

The art team? Well, if they make the icons, just put a place-holder meanwhile. Not blocking.
The lore team? Considering how the precursors collections seem to have been done, intensive interaction does not seem required. And the main lore aspects should already be known.
The programmers? Well, yes, if they have been waiting for two years for the tools to make collections, that can definitely be a problem. My list is mainly referring to that aspect.
The economist? Sure, the price-tag comes from John Smith.

Jaken.6801:

- fail at things
- scrap the item

You aren’t supposed to chain-fail for 6 months. Especially if it’s not the first time you’re doing something.
If you scrap an item, then the item goes under the “failed at thing” aspect?

Jaken.6801:

- reorganize things

Like? A collection seems like something that is already structured.

Jaken.6801:

- get better ideas

Sure, they will be able to use them for the next 13 precursors. Oh wait, they wont.

Jaken.6801:

- get hold up somewhere

Sure, it happens. Not for months, though.

Jaken.6801:

- having writers block

What is there to block on? They aren’t writing a book. The dialogues I’ve read from the precursors hunts were not particularly complex. “You after <shiny>? Me give <shiny> if you give <insert item>”. I’d say that the heart quests from the core game were (far) more developed.

Jaken.6801:

And all that for 8+ items all at the same time

We’re not talking “balancing 8 classes at the same time” complexity here.
The technical part, which my list does refer to, should be trivial. For the design part, considering it’s a set of items with the same thematic and following the same logic, it should not be a problem. (Item1:killfish1, Item2:killfish2,…)

Jaken.6801:

while staying up to date with development in general

Irrelevant. If someone works 40h per week, it does certainly not mean he works 40h per week on his project. At least not in any medium/big software related company. But that should have been taken into consideration from the start.

Jaken.6801:

- actually create the system that allows them to implement that
- and trying to fix things that were broken, after release.
If any of you had looked into the collection you see a vast amount of things there. Part old, part new.
Some of them even require new interactions or maybe new coding.
As far as we know the whole system has been build from the ground up, just using the collection system as a base.

That’s my point. All this should be available in the content editor. If those adding the precursor collections had to manually dig in everything to do their job, I can only pity them. And to have so many bugs at release, I can only imagine the “Add conditional thing to” from my list were not available. Poor souls.

I’m not saying there is no work involved in the process. Just that the collection part does not seem to justify insurmountable time/manpower problems. Especially since they should have some experience with it now.

On a side note, I may sound critical concerning the depth of the precursor hunt, I just call it as I see it. And since 95% (random guess) of the players only see it as a check-list, I wouldn’t have expected them to make it more developed.

Cuchulainn.7421:

I think, Anet should implement a MVP option or something like this that losing, but skilled people, can pip-up nevertheless.

There is nothing more frustrating if u “feel” (maybe real) u played the match of ur life and still lose cause of other players.

So, they could implement a MVP which reflects the “value” of this player and give him 1-2 pips.

It would solve the problem of 4-5 matches or players goin afk/sabotaging matches because if u play good, u are the MVP and get 1-2 pips anyway.

This would be so motivating.

Anet could reward the best or maybe the two best players with it and progressing would be much faster for these good players.

Just my 2 cents

What if all the players performed similarly ? No pip for anyone ? Or pip for everyone ? Rewarding one if he was just 3.14% more efficient seems quite a bad idea.

All this assuming an accurate and non-exploitable way to evaluate player contribution is found. And one that does not promote in-team competition. Current point system would not work for example.

If it was used, you would (more) often see, at least in teams without an obvious win, more than one people capping a point. Even is the amount of cap/decap point was divided between them, they still would.

Instead of +20 to someone else and +0 for you, that would still be +10 for you and only +10 for that other one who is trying to get that MVP that you obviously deserve more. Besides, why help your team in a 5v5 fight at mid with your support elem build? Just leave them to die in a 4v5 while you go decap far. +20 for you. The rest of your team died without killing anyone, +0 for them. Now that’s an MVP. Most Vicious Player.

Anything that does not promote the whole team playing together until the end is a bad idea, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m curious as to why it’s so complicated to make a new collection for a precursor. It seems to only require basic functionalities that should be available in a content editor.

- Create a new item.
- Modify an item.
- Add an item to a merchant.
- Add a conditionally available item to a merchant.
- Create a new recipe.
- Create a new recipe item.
- Create a container item.
- Add an item to a container.
- Add an ‘OnUse’ function on an item to activate a collection.
- Add a conditional item reward for a successful event (collection activated and concerned achievement still not completed).
- Add a conditional item drop from a monster.
- Add a conditional item drop from a chest.
- Add a conditional item drop from a gathering node.
- Add a conditional dialogue to an NPC.
- Add a conditional interactive item/space to a zone.
- Create a new achievement linked to an object.
- Create a new collection object.

Considering the collections were introduced with the “September 2014 Feature Pack”, that they did some rework for Hot and that they knew they would make quite a few collections, one could have expected them to develop the tools to do it efficiently. They had what, 2 years to do it?

When out of fight, shields are already on the back of the character, so it might be within the realm of the possible.

There are plenty of shield skins, and that would add some variety to the current back wingsskins.

I don’t see this making it in-game, ever.

However, I would love to have the word ‘BLOCKED’ or “IGNORED” written on their team window portrait; or across their character as in Anarchy Online.

That way, you would know not to expect anything from them. And if you don’t read anything from them in team chat, it’s not because they’re just silent players.

The bags you get in lower maps will give you material of the map’s tier, even if opened on a level 80 character. Same for the recycle-only things.

I recently and got quite a bit of linen (and some equivalent tier leather, though less) from bags dropped from Flame’s Legion in Fireheart Rise. I also remember getting lots of bags with cloth in the Hinterland, from the pre-events for Ulgoth. The drakes from Mount Maelstrom seem to have a decent droprate for recycle-things that give T4 leather.

To actively farm, the ‘difficulty’ is that you need to find the ‘best’ mobs/events in each relevant zone, since not all mobs/events are suited to drop lots of bags or recycle-things. And some events will require a few additional people to scale up the amount of enemies to truly shine.

Using real life to justify that arrows spawned from nowhere can’t suddenly disappear ? Interesting.

At least now I’m aware of it.

I see, thank you.

However, since you say it’s a “feature”, does that mean Anet is aware of it and consider it “working as intended” ?

I ended up fighting 1v1 against a DH in WvWvW. The problem is, he kept hitting me with auto-attacks from his bow, while being out of range of all GS abilities.

When I asked in map chat, everybody told me Puncture Shot had 1200 range and they wouldn’t believe me.

So which is it ?
- Puncture Shot has higher range than 1200 ?
- GS1-4 skills have lower range than 1200 ?
- A glitch in the matrix ?

Thanks, but I’m not going to run after the very same orphans everyday for the next few weeks. If it was a one time thing, after which they would know where to go to get their free gifts, why not. But as it is…

Thank you for your answer. I guess my two stacks of uglies will rot in my bank.

Those orphans could have the decency of lining up in the The Crown Pavilion to get their gifts.

I still have some Ugly wool thingies from last year (and from the Gift of Magnanimity tree). However, I can’t find the NPC to trade them to.

Did I just miss him, or is there none ?

So, trying to find hidden stuff, it seems I stumbled into the next update and took a few screenshots.

I’m curious about the green glow. Green is Mordremoth’s colour, but up to now, we have seen a purple mist around the vines.