Guild Wars 2

Let me preface this with saying that Colin Johanssen (sp?) stated years ago before GW2 came out that there would be NO GRINDING. A GW2 developer said this, not me.

For one of the recipes for the Bifrost Part III you need 10 vials of Manganese Dioxide. These vials cannot be purchased in the TP. The ONLY way to get them is through gathering/harvesting coral (you get a vile during the act of gathering IF you have Bifrost Part III active).

I’m not sure if anyone has ever actively gone out and tried to harvest coral but there are VERY few nodes on the world map. The drop rate for these vials, even with the achievement in play is atrocious. I am 7/83 (8.4%). This IS grinding. I have now memorized all the node locations and have to wait for them to reset.

This is tedious and boring gameplay. Many of the other objectives simply require skill and research but you do have control over them. This particular requirement is Las Vegas. The Legendary achievement tracks are plenty hard enough without this sort of nonsense thrown in.

Anet either needs to improve the drop rate (like on the globs of ooze that are also needed – it was fun hunting ooze down) or offer an alternative method of acquiring the ingredient.

For example I needed 400 obsidian shards as part of the track. I had saved up over 1.4 million karma. This paid off as There is ONE vendor that will sell you obsidian shards for nothing more than karma at the Temple of Balthazar. Of course the temples are almost always contested so I joined a squad that was taking the temples one at a time. Not only was it a blast running with the squad (love cooperative pve), but I got my 400 shards at the end.

THAT is how questing should be. Not this luck of the draw nonsense that harvesting coral time and time again and coming up empty is turning out to be. This is not whining about difficulty, whining that this is too hard. For something to be hard, skill has to be involved. There is no skill involved here. Simply luck. I like hard, I don’t like random. Random turns into grinding which was the WHOLE point of changing how Legendary items are acquired.

Please fix this Anet.

The whole build up to GW2 was that there would be this epic battle against Zhaitan. Now it seems that whole construct has been relegated to players’ personal story in favor of the whole Scarlet thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of an evil Sylvari wreaking havoc across the land (villains should always come and go). I just feel it would have been less confusing and disjointed to put the dragons to bed once and for all before moving on to the next new threat.

I thought the idea of the dynamic event is that it comes and goes. If you miss it, you miss, oh well. And I’m okay with that. In life, you cannot possibly be witness to every major event that transpires so it should be in a “living” game.
How much more exciting is it to stumble upon a onetime event. I missed the tower coming down. That’s okay. I was actually kind of bummed it is a replayable event, that totally killed my suspension of disbelief.

Living story, dynamic events. They need to come and go and be gone for good. Change the world and leave it changed. That is evolution, THAT is a living story and a living world. How can we talk of the “good ol’ days” if certain content is simply rinse and repeat and hangs around forever (can the Boar at least spawn in a new place?)

End the threat of the dragons and let us all focus on clearing Scarlet’s corruption from Tyria and then surprise us all with the next new threat. And for the love of Lyssa, introduce some new DE’s already. They aren’t very “dynamic” if you can wait 15 minutes for them to start again.

Update: I deleted the entire GW2 folder in my C drive (saving my DAT as a back up) and reinstalled from the CD ROM. I didn’t crash at all tonight even during a crazy DE in Orr, with my graphics set to auto detect and the camera zoomed in on all my glorious mesmer glamour action.

I did DC once but my laptop never shut down and instead of just a black screen, I got the tell tale black screen with “the client was unable to connect, blah, blah, blah…” then I got a white screen withe game’s mouse pointer still visible and movable.

The new DAT file is on gig less than my back up. When I logged back in I was exactly where I was the last time I crashed before trying to reinstall (good and bad as I was surround by risen and had to race to a cliff to escape). Having lost no progression or accomplishments, I’m leaving things as they are. Especially since, if there were corrupted files, they may live on in my DAT backup.

I was able to happily shut the game down on my own tonight

LONGA.1652:

I find that this is memory intensive.Since I ask some of my guildmate that can play WvWvW without a crash most of them have a lot of RAM on their PC
Maybe upgrading to 8 GB might solve the problem.

No go, I already have 8GB of RAM. Even after running a client repair, is just crashed on me again. I meet the min system requirements for sure and I’m not getting an error message or any kind of warning.

My screen just goes black and then about a minute later my laptop just shuts down. I’m starting to think is a heat issue only I crash even when I am not taxing the system with a lot of combat.

Jeenks.1348:

What happens is, the game freezes up completely and I have restart my computer. Is this a system problem or is it a game problem?

All of a sudden (like the last week or two) my screen suddenly goes black and I have to completely reboot.

I have an HP laptop running Window 7 64 bit with integrated 3000 graphics. I have been playing since the beta without issue. This machine is only about a year and a half old. Even if my graphics are on the lowest settings and all I am doing is standing around crafting (no combat, no effects), it happens and of course it happens during Zerg/DE’s as well.

At least, when I log back on I usually maintain my progress (get credit for a DE or a daily) but I still miss out on looting the corpse of a champion. Last night I missed getting to a chest before it disappeared.

I wish I could say with certainty this started with the last update but I’m not sure it did. I wish I knew if it was a game issue, Windows 7 issue or hardware issue (maybe a bit of all). Taking small comfort in not being the only one but I sure would like this issue resolved.

I may just try a simple solution; back up my DAT and reinstall.

I don’t do Fractal but I somewhat agree with OP about the Dailies. Though I did not know the daily requirements changed (which is good because I don’t pvp, yet). Still this laurels patch will promote more grinding than ever. In fact, for example, one of yesterday’s daily requirements was healing.

You know how a guildmate and I completed it? We took turns jumping to our deaths and reviving each other.
Wow.
Fun.
Not.

Is this really the kind of play style Anet is trying to encourage? Because it is that sort of GRINDING that players will do just to get the laurels.

And, in my humble opinion, the laurels are worth getting.

Just one laurel got me a bag of Tier 6 mats I was able to use to craft high-end insignias and make some decent coin for about six seconds of work (the crafting NOT getting the dailies).

I dunno, I almost think it might be better if we did not know what the dailies were or how far along we were to completing them. If Anet really wants to encourage exploring and play on lower level maps by higher level players, I don’t know, maybe:

1. SCALE UP the drops. I don’t care if I’m in Queensdale, if I’m level 80 don’t drop white and blue items for me. Especially, if I am fighting a boss.

2. Create random, mystery achievements or DE’s or something for a particular map and change which map they happen on regularly. Make it so a player may never really know where something cool or valuable may happen, drop or appear. That is probably asking a lot, coding/content-wise, but it is the sort of thing it will take to get the Lvl 80 zergs out of Orr and Fractals. Actually, all you would need to do is make a particular foe or material appear ONLY in a particular map and don’t put a WP near it
You could place a high level mat on a low level map because low level chars won’t be able to use the tools to get it, so no scaling required. Just throwing stuff at the wall here. Elite areas should still exist, they just can’t be the ONLY place good end game stuff is.

3. Think MOX. The whole get MOX as a hero thing in GW1 was really fun and required you to travel all over to put together the pieces/achievements to get the reward. With this big new beautiful Tyria why oh why are we not following event chains that take us around the world? The Secret Garden chest is close but each element should have been gathered in very different parts of Tyria which a kick kitten reward for getting them all.

4. Oh and maybe to encourage more interraction between players, figure out a reward for both joining a party AND doing a player combo vs a Veteran or Champion.
Sure, yes people could still turn that into a grind, but there is a greater chance of chatting with another player under that scenario than there is if you just run into a DE, do it, then leave after it done. And it would force players to slow down and figure out how to work together. That wall of flame/whirling defenses combo looked so sweet in the Manifesto video; so sad I have yet to see it in practice (maybe in pvp, it does).

It may sound silly, but it has been my observation that other players are much more responsive and friendly to “say” and “party” chat simply because of those nifty little bubbles that let you know where the person speaking is. So encouraging players to party up might lead to more social interraction as well. Or maybe just get rid of “say” and make map chat produce bubbles. That way you would at least know if the person speaking is somewhere nearby.

I know I went off topic from laurels, but it is my understanding that the 1/28 patch was meant to improve rewards while at the same time improving the sense of teamwork and community.

I’m not sure the laurel system succeeds at this.

If this has already been said, just add mine remarks to the chorus:

1. If no res-rushing, we need faster revive times or better revive buff

2. Before, I might have said something about bosses being over powered (and/or over armored) and how it seems every underling is the equivalent of Lvl 80 veteran but last night we finally found the right team mix mojo (balance) and had one of our most successful dungeons yet. It was still tricky and we all were defeated at one point or another but it was the “easiest” I ever remember a dungeon being.

So I guess this is evidence in Anet’s favor: the right TEAM, can be very successful even in tough situations.