Guild Wars 2

Well, regardless of how I feel about the future of PvP (and I think it’s clear I don’t like it), thanks for jumping in here and talking to us Justin.

BeardRex.6739:

evilapprentice.6379:

The PvP in this game was marketed around skill based play, not grind based. Equal footing for everyone from the getgo. Skill and trait unlocks is directly opposite this idea. No one is complaining because things aren’t being handed to them, they’re complaining because the focus of the game was supposed to be Skill, not skill as long as you have grinded out the necessary abilities/traits beforehand.

So League of Legends is a “grind based”?

Even if it is, it’s the most popular PvP game in the world. People obviously like having progression like this. You might now. A small, vocal portion of the community might not, but people having been asking for this, and it is already proven to be successful in other games.

Just because people are now complaining, doesn’t mean there weren’t twice as many or more complaining that sPvP didn’t have a horizontal progression system.

First, correct me if I’m wrong, but LoL hasn’t been telling their player base that they would have all characters/skills unlocked at start like ArenaNet has.

Second, I would argue that LoL is succeeding due to merits other than having to unlock characters/skills/etc. I bet a lot of LoL players would love to have that aspect of “progression” removed, but they still play it because of all the other things that the game is doing right. DotA2 is also extremely successful and they haven’t had to introduce any horizontal progression that wasn’t cosmetic.

Justin ODell.9517:

Nineaxis.1826:

snip.

Please do not presume to speak for all players. As a PvP player, I disagree with you, and I know others that do as well.

If you want to turns this into a numbers game, please do keep in mind that the vast majority of PvP players play PvE and WvW as well. We definitely want to make the game fun and enjoyable for PvP-only players as well, but we need to keep a broader context when designing systems.

So if you’re catering to the majority of PvP players who PvE and WvW, then unlocking a trait in PvE should also unlock it in PvP, right?

jcbroe.4329:

So let me get this straight.

Players who have been playing the game and winning gold from PvP should have the resources to be able to purchase any new traits and the intellect and experience to know whether or not any build they would want to play will even need the trait.

New players will log in, see that there is some sort of progression to be able to use everything, and psychologically be encouraged to play a few hotjoins to earn the resources to unlock the traits and experiment with them so that instead of logging in, seeing everything unlocked and ready to go, and then immediately queuing into Solo Que or even Team Que, they are encouraged to and feel as though they need to play a few games to unlock everything they are going to want to use, while gaining more experience in the process, and therefore aren’t queuing into a game and potentially hindering a more competitive game mode.

It seems like this should be everything that the competitive community has been asking for, discouraging new players from “ruining” more competitive game modes through some sort of need to make it through an introductory phase of PvP, while players who currently have experience should have all the resources they need to continue to play the game completely unhindered.

It’s the same model that many video games that are successful have implemented and the outrage against it seems completely unjustified. Yes, sometimes companies have to change their business models, and if that’s what’s bugging you, then tough, but it’s something that needs to happen sometimes in order for a company to be more successful.

First of all, yes, it bothers me that a company says they’re going to do something and then does the exact opposite without offering any reasonable explanation. I don’t care that other companies have successfully pulled it off – they never claimed the things ArenaNet has claimed. If ArenaNet really feel this is necessary to the future of GW2 PvP, they should be able to explain why.

On that note, I do not agree with your explanation of why this is a beneficial change for PvPers. If the problem with tPvP is that there are too many inexperienced players hurting more experienced players, the solution is better matchmaking rules. Not some weird artificial progression. I have no data to back this up, but I believe the biggest influx of PvPers are PvEers, not new purchasers of GW2. Having to unlock the same traits all over again will discourage them from ever trying out tournament queues. Truly new players who jump straight into tournament queues will not be swayed but their lack of traits. They will expect, reasonably so, to be limited in builds, but still on even footing.

What happens if some of these new traits become cornerstones of meta builds? At that point, you will need be forced to PvE – that alone will cause many people interested in PvP to not even buy the game – or, even worse, be forced to lose to the meta builds X amount of times before you’ve acquired enough resources in PvP to unlock the skill yourself.

Hopefully I’ve convinced at least one person reading this that this change negatively impacts PvP. Now, this requirement may very well benefit the game as a whole, although I have yet to see a good reason why. If that is ArenaNet’s goal – to benefit the PvE base at the expense of the PvP – then that’s that. The PvEers very likely pay the bills, and at the end of the day I won’t fault any company for catering to its largest consumer base. But that base will probably not include me for much longer. Me being someone who has bought more than $100 in gems but cares deeply about PvP.

djooceboxblast.9876:

Have you thought about trying out EU? If so, I am forming a team with top players.
Let me know ingame – djooceboxblast.9876

Really tempting. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I have RL friends in NA that I don’t want to leave. If my search for a team remains fruitless for another month or two maybe I’ll buy another account so I can PvP in EU.

Good guy and solid player. Sad to see him leaving NA.

Updated original post with more current info. Since this thread was originally opened, I’ve played with a number of teams that I enjoyed playing with. Unfortunately none of them have stable schedules and many have disbanded due to some members losing interest in PvP. So I’m still looking for a team!

Maybe my google is especially weak today, but what is a Mistforged Hero’s Weapon? I imagine it’s an ascended weapon with a unique skin, and that the Hero’s Weapon is the exotic version of it?

Played with Lux’s pug groups a few times. Treats less experienced players with respect. thumbs up

What with the server instabilities thanks to the DDoS attacks that have been plaguing this game all week long.

Updated original post with some videos of me playing.

I can dedicate three nights (after 6:30 EST) a week – pretty flexible as far as which days those are.

A little information about myself: I work as a developer and I’m in my 20s. I’m in the central time zone. That’s about as much personal information as I feel comfortable giving out on the forums – please contact me in-game if you want to know more.

Personality-wise, I’m pretty open minded to criticism as long as it comes with reasonable explanations. I get frustrated with teammates sometimes, but I’ve never showed disrespect because of it. I try not to let trash talk lure me into making decisions I wouldn’t make otherwise.

Experience/skill-wise, I used to run a team that usually placed between top 1000 and 500. I’m rank 39 and have about 650 team arena games played. I could probably type a wall of text describing my general strategy, build choices, and tactical use of skills, but I will take some time this weekend to record some of my games instead. I will update this post when those games are uploaded.

Feel free to play a game or two with me!

When you ask for “games played as Guardian” are you asking for the number of tPvP/sPvP games played or are you looking for streams/recordings of actual games we’ve played?

Erebos.6741:

Opc.4718:

If you’re playing competently in an out-manned group, you know that the people rezzing are going to be free kills doing no damage.

I’m not going to back & forwards argue about different counter abilities that could fit the scenario.
What I will argue is that down state (mechanically), demotes skill as a determining factor of combat, which is unhealthy for the competitive prosperity of the game.
…

Down state adds a bit of volatility which I think is valuable in the context of WvW (since we’re on the WvW forums). While I would argue skill should highly correlate with battle outcome in sPvP, I’m okay with giving less skilled players a free pass here and there in WvW.

The rally mechanic, on the other hand, adds too much volatility and should be removed or nerfed.

I’m a r43 guardian named Marmalee. I have 800+ team games played, mostly on guardian. I have 300+ solo Q games played between guardian, warrior, and mesmer. I’m on about 5 nights a week and can probably dedicate 3 nights a week for 2-4 hours per night. I’m fairly open to criticism. Feel free to contact me in game and play a few matches to see if I’m a good fit.

Here are some videos to show how good (and bad) I am:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9NwbijCNmw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyTgmWTGjL4

No, not a failure.

Most of the problems people have mentioned in this thread are WvW problems, not seasonal league tournament problems. Just the fact that you have all these angry people who suddenly care about their WvW status when they didn’t give a kitten before is a huge success.

I voted 0-5 minutes. I’m willing to wait, but 5 minutes is already a pretty long time to wait. I’ve never played a game other than WoW where >5 minutes was normal.

I agree with your general argument. Just look at MOBA games where the matchmaking system makes two teams even by making sure each team has one beginner – you might end up with technically even teams, but you also end up with both teams trashing their noobs and often comparing out loud which one is worse in all-chat.

A level floor addresses this problem, but is only effective if the population is large enough. If the population of PvPers is too small or the distribution of ranks is too uneven then queue times could increase to the point where people start to drop out because they’re unwilling to wait. That in turn decreases the population further and soon you’re caught in a cycle that ends up with nobody PvPing.

You really need an algorithm that takes into account population, average wait time, specific wait time for each player in the queue, and maybe more variables I haven’t though of in addition to the rank of each player in the pool. It’s a hard problem and you only need to go play a few games of DotA/LoL/GW2 to see that it’s far from being solved.

It’s been really awesome reading the responses from devs on this thread. Just listening to some of these posts tells me that the devs are in touch with the meta and gives me confidence that they see the same issues I do (even if we might not agree on the fixes).

I know time spent reading and writing on the forums is time not spent on development, but, personally, I haven’t felt this confident about a patch moving the game in the right direction since I started playing PvP.

Just want to chime in that Skull Crack (and mace skills in general) are already hard enough to land in tPvP. If you’re going to make it more readable to boost the rate of intentionally avoiding this skill, you should at least increase the range to lower the rate of unintentionally avoiding this skill.

The real question is what is ANet going to do about all the farmers who abused the Executioner? Honestly they should have their winner crowns retroactively deleted, but I bet ANet will probably do nothing to punish them.

It’s noticeably different for me, but I think it’s a good change. While PoV was bugged I felt that playing a shout support guardian was overly easy. With the CD on shouts fairly short I felt like guardians could do their shouts any time they saw some red squares on them (or their teammates) regardless of whether the cleanse was necessary.

One thing I would be interested in would be what would happen if PoV cleansed more conditions but increased shout cooldown? Then guardians would cleanse more effectively, but they’d have to make smarter decisions about when to do it.

I like this idea as it happens to me sometimes.

@LeeroyNimoy: I’m surprised at your comment. I run the game at fairly high settings and I find all the fancy lighting and shadow effects do sometimes obscure the cursor. If anything I would think people running at lower settings would have less of a problem in this regard.

Banewrath.5107:

Geniekid.2645:

Banewrath.5107:

While I like the idea of being bale to switch stats I don`t understand the need to always have to pay for something. this a game, we should have fun with it, not worry about economies or charges in a fantasy world.

Maybe an alternative solution would be to have the ability to unlock stat sets kind of like how you unlock beserkers or knights insignias for crafting. That way you own the stat set and apply it whenever you want to, to whatever you want. Crafters could sell insignias on the tp and non crafters could consume the insignia to unlock the stat set.
So you really are paying for the stats but it`s a one time buy for each set.

That is what I was trying to communicate with the second method – one-time upgrades that would unlock an affix and permanently allow you to switch to that unlocked affix.

With regard to fees – I don’t like fees either, but I recognize the need for gold sinks in this game to maintain a more stable economy.

Yeah that`s why I mentioned getting the stats from craftable insignias so the money that is spent is kept in circulation. whatever someone gets from selling something, he will just spend that on something else. Eventually the gold will be exhausted from various things over time. That way too you don`t need to visit vendors or trade tokens, you could just buy and learn the insignia and have a right click menu on items to select learned stat sets. The more user friendly and simpler a system would be the way to go for me.

I agree with your preference for the one-time upgrade system over the fee-per-switch system (although I’d take either right now). And yes, a craftable upgrade would be good – I only mention token spending because I don’t want to decrease the existing incentive for max level players to continue running dungeons. But I see no reason why we couldn’t give the player both options (crafting vs token spending) for unlocking the affix.

Banewrath.5107:

While I like the idea of being bale to switch stats I don`t understand the need to always have to pay for something. this a game, we should have fun with it, not worry about economies or charges in a fantasy world.

Maybe an alternative solution would be to have the ability to unlock stat sets kind of like how you unlock beserkers or knights insignias for crafting. That way you own the stat set and apply it whenever you want to, to whatever you want. Crafters could sell insignias on the tp and non crafters could consume the insignia to unlock the stat set.
So you really are paying for the stats but it`s a one time buy for each set.

That is what I was trying to communicate with the second method – one-time upgrades that would unlock an affix and permanently allow you to switch to that unlocked affix.

With regard to fees – I don’t like fees either, but I recognize the need for gold sinks in this game to maintain a more stable economy.

The problem I’m trying to address is that the super-awesome way GW2 allows you to change your build is offset by the super-grindy way you have to obtain new armor sets (arguably still part of your build). My idea is to make gear stats switchable on ascended and exotic gear, like how they are on legendaries. Unlike legendaries, there would be a cost to switching stats – either 1) a fee per switch (similar to resetting traits) or 2) an upgrade cost to unlock an affix.

1) A fee. The fee could be fixed or variable, but the point of it would be to create a gold sink that would be more stable in the long term than the current gold sink associated with obtaining multiple armor sets (storage costs and possible TP fees). So if I wanted to change my helm from Soldier’s to Carrion for a new build, I would have to pay.
2) Upgrading to unlock an affix. For exotics, this could be as simple as having to pay the equivalent dungeon-token cost for the piece with the stats you want. For example, if I wanted my Soldier greatsword to be switchable to Berserker, I could give it to the CoF vendor and pay a certain number of CoF tokens – then my greatsword would be switchable between Soldier/Berserker. For ascended items, it would be almost the same except the cost wouldn’t be CoF tokens – it would be some ascended items.

The actual fee/upgrade cost is up to the designers, but I believe that using either of the proposed methods (or both) would allow the game to maintain a gold sink and incentive to run dungeons equivalent to what exists now.

P.S. Maybe if you unlocked all the affixes on your ascended item then the item could be upgraded to legendary for a subset of current legendary costs!

Caledon Forest wins my vote. Every section feels like it has a uniqueness to it in terms of assets (lighting and texture) and terrain. In general, all the starting zones are very interesting and offer a lot of mood contrast in their various sub-areas which the higher zones tend to lack.

I suggested this before, but I still think a good idea is to separate the legendary skin from the legendary item (guaranteed best-in-slot). Make the latter easier to get.

I’ve never supported the idea of having to farm for months in order to stay on top of the gear curve. I don’t have any problem requiring people to farm for years for a cool skin. And yes, I understand ascended weapons are already best-in-slot. That doesn’t mean they’ll be that way a year from now, despite what ANet has promised.

The actual effect doesn’t bother me as much as the “clarification” response. I don’t believe the original blog post was an intentional lie, but telling us it was confusingly worded instead of a complete internal disconnect IS a lie. We’re not stupid.

This doesn’t even really affect me. I don’t care if the gear in question remains soulbound – in fact I thought it was really generous that ANet was going to convert them back to account bound. It just makes me really angry that the blog writer messed up and is trying to downplay his error as a minor wording issue instead of a complete misunderstanding on his part.

I have many complaints regarding this release, from design decisions to bugs that won’t be fixed to outright lying about MF gear conversion.

But credit where credit is due. SAB is really well done. The difficulty makes me curse without making me feel helpless. Pain Cliffs was amazing from a visual perspective. The whole thing feels epic. Great job on this!

khani.4786:

well currently the price for all of the precursors is skyrocketing. I bought Venom for 19 gold….it’s now 70+gold. The legend has doubled in price, all of the others are going up too!! What is this world coming to?!

I noticed this as well. With a year of farming under my belt I’m getting closer and closer to completing all the Gifts I need and I’m becoming more and more sensitive to changes in precursor prices. Hope ANet gives some more information about this so I can adjust my plans accordingly.

“And stop smiling when I’m threatening you.”

I like Rox

Interesting. I assumed the act of buying the item was what triggered the achievement, but I guess it’s the act of losing karma from your inventory. I bet the system is still monitoring individual character wallets, which all have zero karma now. I wonder if the achievement system works like an interceptor that checks every player action on the server side or if it’s a passive system that routinely compares a player’s data to a previous snapshot. Maybe the client notifies the server that an achievement has been completed and the server verifies this. In any case, it feels like maybe the wallet system wasn’t designed to be accessible to the achievement monitoring/triggering/verification system. That’s the only reason I can think of why this wouldn’t be a simple fix.

I hope Thaumanova explains something about the Uncategorized (Harpies) fractal. There is a dark story behind that abandoned Asuran city and I want to know what it is. Hopefully it involves dragons or gods.

Honestly I hope Ellen turns out to be evil – that would be a very interesting storyline. But until then…

bartmoss.5107:

We really have NO TIME to throw barrels at each other, drink each other under the table or – for that matter – hunt each other for sport.

That line made me lol.

Agree with OP. It was not as much fun as a hero defense (survive X waves) would’ve been. Even though I completed all tiers (but out of order which means I don’t get the achievement), I didn’t find any of it fun at any tier.

1) http://xkcd.com/603/
2) #TeamKiel:):):):):):):):):):)

Retroactively punishing players is not something that should be taken lightly, nor do I believe it is something that is easily executed from a developer standpoint. In this particular case, I personally do not feel they need to take additional action beyond fixing the bug. A gold exploit would be a different story, but I can let a few achievement points go, particularly because it’s possible to get the mini-Ellen/Evon by doing other achievements.

In general, I believe that ANet knows some exploits WILL get through their testing process, especially with very ambitious 2 week development cycles for the Living Story. I believe that’s why the Living Story rewards are relatively small/cosmetic – by design so they don’t HAVE to conduct large rollbacks/punishments.

All that said, I’m much more disappointed in the design of the instance. A true hero defense (survive X waves) would have been much more fun and balanced. I did not feel like I was having fun at any difficulty level.

I don’t have a strong opinion on fractals or cheaper waypoints vs keys. I voted Kiel because I like that she blew up the Aetherblades ship, took their clothes, and is now wearing them.

Might not be the best reason to vote Kiel, but hey, if I voted wrong, this will be the least significant mistake I’ve ever made.

I like that she took the Aetherblade pirates clothes and is wearing them. That little exchange in LA made me laugh in a “wait, what?” kind of way.

A live vote counter would be really cool and would probably encourage people to spend gold on tickets given visible competition between the candidates.

I had problems logging into the forums this morning. After contacting customer support, they removed the authenticator on my account and I was able to log-in. I tried to re-enable the authenticator and after scanning the QR code and putting in the test authentication code it said my account was successfully under 2-factor authentication. Naturally, I immediately tried to logout and login, but it didn’t work! I assume the test mechanism is the same as the normal log-in mechanism, but apparently not…

Anyway, I had to contact customer service again and now I’m using email verification for added security. Is anyone else having similar problems?

I’m not hearing any support for this suggestion though, so I will drop it for now. Have a good weekend all

AntiGw.9367:

Geniekid.2645:

Dailies should be designed to keep players actively participating in the game in a way that they enjoy. Being able to complete your dailies in 20 minutes doing things you don’t enjoy is bad. Being able to complete your dailies in 2 hours by doing whatever it is you enjoy doing is good.

The solution is to make daily achievements repeatable. Instead of giving me 1/5 dailies for killing 10 invaders in WvW, let me get 5/5 for killing 50 invaders. That way I can do what I enjoy doing and still get my daily as long as I play long enough.

That would encourage grinding, and would go against GW2 design principle.

Dailies reward variety, not doing the same thing all day.

It wouldn’t encourage grinding unless you enjoyed grinding. There’s nothing that would make people do 5 of 1 achievement over 1 of 5 achievements unless the numbers were incorrectly balanced.

Dailies are not designed to reward variety. If they were actually designed to reward variety then ANet would have never added the additional WvW options to the point where you can do all your dailies in a single WvW map. If they were designed to reward variety then karma spender, recycler, mystic forge, food eating, veteran killer, and various other achievements would all be removed since you can pretty much do anything you want in the game and still achieve those naturally.

Again, I believe that dailies are designed to reward you for playing the game on a regular basis and not to enforce variety. I think ANet has an interest in promoting variety of gameplay, but I don’t think dailies is the way to do it.

CrossedHorse.4261:

Geniekid.2645:

CrossedHorse.4261:

Lol, they are repeatable, but that doesn’t mean you should get rewarded equally each time. Unfortunately, nice as that would be, ANet do need to encourage people to play various aspects of their game.

First, they are not repeatable for the purposes of completing your daily.

Second, I absolutely agree that ANet should encourage people to play various aspects of their game, but I will argue that is not the intention of dailies and it’s certainly not what’s happening right now. After all, even without my proposed change people can already complete their dailies while minimally exploring the game. Eating food? Crafting? Jumping puzzle? Mystic Forge? Salvaging? You can do half of your achievements without ever leaving Lion’s Arch.

I mean, if the only reason people are doing a particular dungeon or are in a particular zone is to complete a daily, that is poor game design and should not be encouraged. Better to incentivize doing a dungeon or zone by offering worthwhile rewards or enjoyable events.

I knew what you meant by repeatable, even if my answer implied differently. I was simply pointing out that they’re repeatable in the other sense.

But, while I can see exactly where you’re coming from, I also think that a daily achievement should at least have some element of achievement about it. If you just got dailies for 50 kills, which is something you were going to do anyway, that’s not really achieving much at all.

I know that some people do so many different things they can get the daily without thinking about it, but at least one on the list usually has someone needing to go out of their way to obtain, even if it is easy to get it, like gatherer. Which lends to the aspect of achievement.

If it happened your way, then ANet might as well not bother with the daily achievements at all, as everyone would ignore them and just set the achievement to stack around whatever they were currently doing. They’d basically just might as well scrap the achievement altogether and hand me the points straight out for all that I’d be working towards doing any of it.

Does that make my point clearer?

If Anet’s primary purpose is to give people a sense of achievement for doing something they wouldn’t normally do, then I think you’re right – repeatable achievements are bad. I’m convinced that the primary purpose of dailies is to reward people for logging in and playing the game on a daily basis. Perhaps the solution is to make daily achievements repeatable but use the monthly achievements to get people to try new things?

Olba.5376:

Well, they would need to remove some things from the Daily if they ever did this.

In my opinion, the following would cause issues:

• Daily Crafter because you can just sit at a crafting station and get it done within a minute
• Daily Feast because you can just click your way to it
• Daily Recycler because you can just click your way to it
• Daily Laurel Vendor because it’s already ridiculous
• Daily Karma Spender because you can just click your way to it
• Daily Kill Variety because I’m not sure how many types of enemies there are in the game
• Daily Dungeon Completer because it would be ridiculous
• Daily Mystic Forgesmith because you can just clikc your way to it

1) Laurel vendor and feast are already poor achievements and should be removed regardless of my suggestion.
2) I believe forgesmith, recycler, crafter, and, to a lesser extent, karma spender are all things that could stay if the numbers were tweaked. Also, I wouldn’t mind if certain achievements were capped to give 1/5 per day (as they are now).
3) Dungeons would have to change to give 2/5 or 3/5 so you would only need to do two or three dungeons.

But yes, I agree that absolutely they would have to modify existing achievements before implementing repeatable dailies.

CrossedHorse.4261:

Lol, they are repeatable, but that doesn’t mean you should get rewarded equally each time. Unfortunately, nice as that would be, ANet do need to encourage people to play various aspects of their game.

First, they are not repeatable for the purposes of completing your daily.

Second, I absolutely agree that ANet should encourage people to play various aspects of their game, but I will argue that is not the intention of dailies and it’s certainly not what’s happening right now. After all, even without my proposed change people can already complete their dailies while minimally exploring the game. Eating food? Crafting? Jumping puzzle? Mystic Forge? Salvaging? You can do half of your achievements without ever leaving Lion’s Arch.

I mean, if the only reason people are doing a particular dungeon or are in a particular zone is to complete a daily, that is poor game design and should not be encouraged. Better to incentivize doing a dungeon or zone by offering worthwhile rewards or enjoyable events.

Dailies should be designed to keep players actively participating in the game in a way that they enjoy. Being able to complete your dailies in 20 minutes doing things you don’t enjoy is bad. Being able to complete your dailies in 2 hours by doing whatever it is you enjoy doing is good.

The solution is to make daily achievements repeatable. Instead of giving me 1/5 dailies for killing 10 invaders in WvW, let me get 5/5 for killing 50 invaders. That way I can do what I enjoy doing and still get my daily as long as I play long enough.

Obviously a change like this will require tweaking the existing achivements. For example, Anet may have to increase crafting and gathering requirements (e.g. craft 20-30 items or gather 50 materials to get 1/5). That way only the people who actually enjoy crafting/gathering will complete them and they may even welcome not having to do WvW or dungeons to fulfill their dailies.

I’ve said this before in another post, but I wish there would be more instances tailored towards smaller 2-3 man groups. Most people just want to log-in and play with their friends, but most of the end game content in GW2 is focused on 5 players (or more) so you almost always have to play with strangers.

Now, I get that this is an MMO and playing with strangers is a core component of the genre, but there should at least be something fun and rewarding (personal story is neither) that you can do with a smaller group. Just the presence of solo-able content shows that ArenaNet supports the idea of not always having to group up to make progress. I feel like these living story events are a GREAT opportunity to introduce this kind of small-group-focused content. Hopefully ArenaNet is listening!!