Guild Wars 2

My main annoiance in this game would be the almost manic devotion to a “healthy economy”. Man, this is a game and I have enough of this bullcrap around me in my real life. It shouldn’t even be possible to just sit around in town and receive shinies by rearranging wealth. Go out, kill something, for crying out loud.

Chinchilla.1785:

You can also see how Arenanet sold WvW from the beginning here, and compare it to now: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/competitive-play/

“Join World vs. World (WvW) for an epic PvP experience full of cunning strategy, earthshaking sieges, and pitched battles between hundreds of players.”

It seems to me that siege and blobs were exactly what they intended to do. So we have what they promised. And now?

I find it much easier to define what I don’t want in the next expansion.

I don’t want players thinned out in the existing maps, leading to more and more failing current events. As such, I’d rather like re-use of current zones more than a ton of new ones.

Having said that, obviously there will be new zones. So please, make them NEW. I seriously don’t want to go back to things of the past and instead move forward. Please, bring new landscapes and NOT Cantha or Elona. No matter how good you design it, the only comments in the public will be “but it is not as good as it was in GW1” anyways and I can live without that.

Personally I neither need a new race or a new class. I don’t even enjoy all races we have now and I cannot see space for mechanics of a new class, at least not in a way that it would make balancing even more of a pain. Instead, focus on splitting skill effects for the 3 game modes, much more important.

Story, hmm… I don’t care of the story. In 4k hours played I finished my personal story only once, played through LS2 and HoT stories only once and am doing LS3 only on one character, just to advance.

Being a player who hates instanced group content with a passion (I came to GW2 because of its open world, there are dungeons where until this day I have not even done story mode once), I can totally live without new dungeons or fractals or raids. I know however that for some strange reason something as immersion breaking as instances are a thing that is expected from an MMO somehow. So if there are any new instances, why not add them ARPG like, randomly generated with a preselectable group size starting with 1 and with a preselectable difficulty setting? Maybe I would do those.

I have given up on PvP in this game, so whatever will be added or removed there is of no interest to me at all. WvW however is a different piece of cake, it is the game mode I enjoy most lately, so there are some things I really do not want to see happen. Please do not do server merges. WvW needs a lot of improvements for sure, but server merges will only make things worse. Instead, maps with an intense, strategic layout and not too much verticality would be much appreciated.

All in all personally I cannot think of enough things that I want so that it would fill up an expansion. I found my niches in the current game, am happy playing the things I like, am happy ignoring the stuff I don’t like and I am quite sure whatever it is that will be in the next expansion, I will just do the same then as well.

I think the idea is reasonable and waaaaay better than server merges, but it will not work if you rely on players voluntarily distributing onto new, smaller servers. The “me-wanna-win-no-matter-how” crowd paid to stack on the top servers, they won’t go away on their own – and you know that. If you want to solve the problem, you need to upset some players and push them out of their comfi zone.

I think you need a clean slate. Servers are gone from PvE anyways, so kill the current servers for WvW, create new empty ones with a quite low max player limit (but an unconstrained number of them), don’t call them “server” anymore but “WvW Team” and make those players, who still want to do WvW register for them (it could be an option to register players guild-wide for a team, so they end up on the same team). Heck, big guilds could even fill up their own team. Then, start doing matches, about the samber number as we have now and assign teams to the match colors (sides), starting with a fresh glicko rating and putting as many teams in the same side of a match so that you can reach your desired number of matches (eg: Europe, 5 matches ie. 15 distinct sides; if you had 150 signed up teams you could put 10 teams into each side, so 30 teams would participate in a single match, 10 for each color).

I seriously do not believe that changing single aspects of the current system will do any benefit. Start from scratch. According to the most voicy forum goers, it can’t become worse anyways (I have to admit that I disagree with that, but I would still find fun in a completely new setup, I’m sure; I mean, I even enjoy siege, as it is what this game mode has always been made around).

After 4 years I still have troubles understanding the difference between the two. Both are instanced group content with fixed layouts and encounters, some gimmicks might vary, but that does not make a big difference.

So, basically, my answer would be: neither.

Btw, thank you A-Net for focussing more on open world content during LS3 than you did in LS2. Of course for me LS1 is unrivaled, but it is also gone, which is what every living story does, being only available during ‘its’ time.

blitzkrieg.2451:

1. Adding a GvG environment that really supports that sort of play ALONE will bring back a lot of guilds and players to WvW.

2. Get rid of Desert BL , do you need a poll to really see that this was a horrible idea? Statistics alone from the time it was implemented should be enough to tell you it was a disaster.

3. Bonuses for roaming parties to encourage roaming again and small scale fights

Personally I think you should look for a different game. Short notice: my server had queues on all maps yesterday and the opponent servers had them as well. Didn’t happen to me for a whole lot of months. Stop making yourself believe this game mode is dying. It isn’t. It’s just you being salty because it is not what YOU wanted. That’s ok, but accept that there are way enough players out here who do make your opinion look not so important in the big picture. The same happened to me with raids. Hated them, still hate them, hate the idea that items are hidden behind what I consider a crappy instanced group content, had to accept that I won’t change it. Moved on.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I don’t have exact numbers. I went in and found a busy map and started farming. Going by memory and not having noted exact times and numbers, what I saw was I killing mobs and getting bones and doing doors on my guardian with traps and staff and getting a couple of tot bags. I stopped after about half an hour or so and had ~19 tot bags. I don’t know if this is average or not, but it looked low to me. The char I used had had DR in there previously but should have been removed as I did events with it.

Maybe that’s average or my memory is faulty. Next time I go in I’ll use a different char and note the times and numbers.

Strange. I just logged in during breakfast, played for ~ 15 minutes in the lab and had around 80 bags. Well, I played my WvW wells Necro, so I can tag a whole area at once and it was an organized map that did Visc and Lich. Additionally it may have been a fresh map, 15 minutes is not too long etc. but there is a distinct difference in my loot figures and yours.

Behellagh.1468:

And you still have to WP to somewhere that has an armor repair NPC/node, it doesn’t repair simply by WPing. As they state, the penalty is the time sink to go to a repair location and since there are only a couple on each map, the time to make your way back to the area you were.

Open guild window, go to guild hall, repair, open guild window, leave guild hall. No walking to repair station, no money used, no walking back.

Rauderi.8706:

lots of seriously true stuff

Frome me its a /thread here.

Beldin.5498:

After stopped playing last wintersday, i wonder if its now really time to delete
the game from my disk ?

If i think back at the days of LS1, i really wonder if only a quarter or a 1/10 of the
team is left, or what the hell is going on.

I am very worried that LS3 will be another chain of story instances and nothing else. LS1 was soooo much better than LS2. I rarely ever do instances in this game at all – no raid, no dungeon master title, fractal level below 20. I only did personal story and HoT story on one character so that at least I have seen it. LS1 however I played the hell out of it.

If “mixed borderlands” means that there will be no matchups with only desert ever again, I am all for it. I can at least go the borderland which is alpine then.

I am extremely happy with our current world link partner, it works out brilliantly, so from that point I would vote for “never again” for a relink schedule. But if it has to be, I would be happy with “once every 3 months is sufficient”, because otherwise the coordination and getting to know each other becomes more complicated. I think having a different link each matchup destroys server pride quicker than everything else because you lose any type of identification at all if you constantly keep fighting with players you have fought against last week. Additionally, please consider that the environment is different in EU where you have loads of “national” servers and you cannot simply mixup any combination of servers.

On the siege topics, in contrast to almost everybody else I think that it is the siege which makes WvW special. The best fights I can recall became special because of siege and/or keep lords. So I don’t see where this is a problem. Having said that, I still think that mortars and cannons should remain static, as there is already enough deplyoable siege types around. I would love however to see siege being reapairable.

TPMN.1483:

If they nerfed difficulty.. I would consider uninstalling.

And ten other players would consider coming back? Who wins this?

Look, personally I find the difficulty of the HoT maps just right. I have a love/hate relationship to snipers. I think the majority of player casualties on these maps are caused by these critters. One or two of them – no prob, they are fun to fight. 4 of them in a bunch of other mobs somewhere during DS lane progression and you can finish your Combat Healer achievement, if you haven’t done so. Very nice design combined with rooting husks etc.

But nevertheless there is a ton of players out there who think it is too much for them to enjoy the maps. And the majority is more likely to pay the money needed for this game to continue than a tiny minority of players who can solo everything (or claim to do so). Let’s be honest: if you are on the lookout of real challenges, this might not be the game where you find them, at least not in open world content and it’s ok that way. GW2 should find its way back to its core strength: enjoyment, exploration, cooperative gameplay. Please let’s get away with that “challenge” stuff. Even if everybody on this forum wanted challenge (which is definitely not true), it would still be only a tiny minority of players. Stop caring for minorities if it is an either/or decision.
Raids are ok, since most can stay away from them (although I found it irritating that they scraped the legendary weapons team to help others and not the raid team, but that’s another story).

Annika.7084:

The ammount of players needing resurrecting is never very large in any event so I fail to see how it puts the progress at risk.

Have you ever done DS meta or Tequatl recently? The amount of defeated players not porting somewhere else makes it difficult to rezz those who are only in down state.

Annika.7084:

“a small malus” – with the current flawed system of filling low pop maps there’s no guarantee you’ll end up in the same map after wp’ing, especially not in HoT maps, resulting in no reward and the malus becoming other than small.

If you use a waypoint in the same map, you are never sent to a different instance of the map. That has never occured to me or anyone I know in game.

Annika.7084:

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to punish bad players.” – LOL

Well, if you don’t believe this, I can’t change it.

What if the game had been like I propose from the beginning? Everybody would say “down state is a short time where others can help you, after that… well, you died, so get back here”. Nobody would see a drawback because they had to run to the same place again (like it is in almost any other game anyways), nobody would be upset because they had to do that jumping puzzle again (maybe more people would rage about that awful camera collision system), it would not cause players to not go to more complex events.

And does anybody complain that SAB is like that? You’re dead, back to last checkpoint?
I personally find it a lost opportunity that we don’t have that.

I don’t know figures that compare number of casualties in the situations you described vs. meta/open world events.
But the current implementation has trained players not to care for their own survival. I don’t see how that is any good.

Ubi.4136:

OR….they could do this and make the game like GW1 again and possibly win everyone back.

I cannot tell you in words how much I love the fact that this game is exactly NOT like GW1.

1. Switch to “hard” trinity (bleed the requirement from 1 optional game mode to all others)
2. Watch your game shift from “unique” to “umpteenth copy of the same old”
3. Read player comments on how other games that have been designed with this concept from the start are doing it better
4. See player figures fade
5. Switch off servers, since you have just nuked yourself out of business.

Yeah, I know it has been brought up before and I know it’s kind of a hopeless case, but nevertheless, I need to get this out:

I vote for a change to defeated mode, potentially in all game modes. I’d like it to be changed so that once a player is defeated, he can no longer be interacted with, i.e. rezzed. The player himself/herself would only be able to view map screen in that state so he/she can select a waypoint to respawn.

Reason:

• it will end all this toxic discussion about “if you’re dead, pls waypoint” because it would no longer be an option to do this;
• it will teach a lot of players to take more care of themselves during events, either through reactions or gear more appropriate to their play style (let’s put it that way);
• it will at least re-introduce a small malus for dying after repairs have no cost anymore.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to punish bad players – in the end it will affect everybody, including me. But I seriously think that in the long term the player awareness and therefore capability would benefit from such a change. It seriously strikes me to see how many players simply don’t care for sniper crosshairs above their heads or even their aoe lines on the floor, since it is soooo easy to rely on someone rezzing you. And in some events rezzing is even a problem, since players who rezz defeated players (out of friendliness) put the event progress at risk.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

LS1 failed because it was temporary.

It what?!? Just because several people on this forum complained, which is true for every other attempt at giving them content?

Hell no, it did not fail. To this day it was the best content that has been delivered BECAUSE of its temporary nature. Things could change on wide scale. Leave me alone with that instanced story content, bah.

BTT: I think SAB would get old quickly if it was to stay permanently. I think it’s ok this way.

I think that the discussion “casual” vs. “hardcode” does not do the population reality of this game (or any other game) justice. It divides the player base into those who can and therefore do and those who cannot.

That’s not how it is. There is also those who can, but don’t care for that particular type of content. Or those who can but are not willing to accept the “environmental” consequences like waiting for a complete group, toxicity, requirement to join a guild etc. Or those who can but prefer “true” competitive gameplay. Or those that can but are not willing to follow one single min/max scheme. Or… Or… It is not true that those who don’t do raids are exclusively those who are not able to do them considering their abilities.

I think this group of players is a large group. Maybe it is time to step away from the current black/white view, although it is obviously comfortable for some to simplify in that way.

I recall John Smith talking about fixes to the way megaservers handle population and map closing, so it has been realized officially that there are issues. The type of thing OP has reported has happened to me on any of the new maps in the last months.

Additionally the guild halls have a very similar, but opposite behavior: they want to close if there are more players joining the map. This has been found out by our guild around guild mission times over and over. You are alone in guild hall, all is well. Then some more players join and all are asked to join a new map. You go to the new map, more players join, rince, repeat. It seems that megaservers can fire up a district server for a given player count and, when there is a mismatch between target player count and live player count, they will restart a new district, regardless of whether it is the upper or lower target player count that is violated. Maybe this also plays a role.

I just find fixed-size group content in preset instances incredibly boring, no matter how “challenging” that content might be. You know you are doing the same as every other group before or after you. After 3.5 years I still haven’t even done all dungeon paths and my fractal level is somewhere around 19. Why would I do something, that is as boring to me, only more demanding on the ppl around me and myself?

Fermi.2409:

Lanaeris.3845:

Most players are casuals that don’t care about the elitists or try hards who want to fight other players. Most of us want to enjoy things as a community and work towards common goals.

Do you have any source for that?

Oh right, no. You don’t

Of course he does, at least more than you do. Log in and go to any map. Players playing the game who just are there and enjoy their time.

I call it a tempest in a teacup. All those who are upset are on the forums now (and I’m not trying to play your issues down, only your numbers). The rest is busy playing, as usual. The WvW debacle IMO has caused many more players to quit. No, they were not busy with the HoT PvE maps. They didn’t like the changes and gave up. Without megaservers, it was easy to see the downslope in player numbers.

Cooperative PvE has to be my number one.

coso.9173:

I don’t really get the whole legendaries stuff. I don’t yet have any but arent they basically special weapons with beautiful skins tied to a bunch of different achievements and items? I don’t get why they’re actually hard to design.

The weapons themselves are not hard to design. The “journey” around them (aka the ting ANet came up to overcome the problems using a RNG drop approach) is the problem.

Simple:

do not put all your hope in the April update.

While we do not know what it will contain and fix, one thing is a safe bet: it cannot by any means fix everybody’s issues, simply because that’s too much and there are even contradictory issues between different types of players, so a fix for the ones might even be a new issue for the others.

I’ve seen an unhealthy dose of “let’s wait for the April update” in the forums recently. Don’t be surprised if it is not the best thing since sliced bread. It can only do so much. And work for this update surely started some months ago, so a lot of recent “trends” may not even be covered at all.

I look forward towards April with interest, but a reserved from of hope. Not falling for another hype train. I think it is best to accept that there is no silver bullet, progress will come in steps. It will come, but not all upfront.

Well, I still like GW2. Or, to put it another way: after having played GW2 for 3.5 years now I cannot go back to other MMOs. And that tells me something about the standards this game has set, let’s not forget that. No more half screens full of skill bars, no more tab targeting, no more don’t move while you’re casting, no more “we have to wait for the healer; oh no, that tank sucks”. I’m over this and I thank A-Net for that.

I think they have an architecture problem. Their code and configuration base seems fragile, errors that were long gone pop up here and there, things are changed which break other things in completely different places (and that’s only the bugs that slip through QA; I can only imagine how it is during development). Their tooling for creating and testing new content seems to be labor-intensive. The engine seems to have performance flaws, which make it necessary to control extremely well what you’re going to change with a new feature as you might kill the small headroom that may make the difference between go and no-go for the average player rack and so on.
Even from the distance of a (technically versed) player it seems like a mine field.

I think they have found out that they have neglected some of these spots (term is “technical debt”; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) for too long and now they really hurt. And therefore they need to concentrate on fixing these things. And that is not something you are mentioning publicly. So what they are doing now is trying to mitigate the damage. But at least they started doing this.

And while you’re at it, make the new precursors and legendaries account bound on acquire. For the old ones it’s too late anyways.

OP, I don’t share your definition of the term “style”. In my book “style” with regards to quitting a game that cannot be quit since there are no subs at all would be “relax, take a break, don’t look back in anger”.

Beldin.5498:

Vayne.8563:

Kastiel.1947:

swansea.2453:

Very poor video, he total misses the points why people are upset, and he is pulling numbers out of his kitten , he even says that he doesn’t have figures.

Agreed. Actually wanted to dislike the video, but apparently he hid behind a safe wall.

Actually I think he made a valid point. Anet knows how many players by percentage have even 1 legendary. They know how many have 2.

If they create 16 legendary journeys, what they’re doing is creating content that most people will never do. It’s not really like a dynamic event or even a dungeon or fractal. It’s a long term goal that many people either can’t reach or can’t be bothered going for.

Saying that he doesn’t have numbers is quite irrelevant because Anet does have those numbers and they made the decision.

Maybe they should have made the journey more of a journey and less of a
material / gold grind .. since that was what a lot people expected i think.
So yeah .. they wanted to do quests instead of pay 1000g or whatever, but
what they got is do the quests and pay still 999g .. lol

Did you do some of the collections for the elite spec ascended weapons? Man, I hoped the precursor journeys would have been like them. I have completed 6 out of 9 and enjoyed them a lot.

The problem with legendary weapons started with them a) being tradeable and b) them requiring an also tradeable precursor, being an extremely rare drop. To outweigh the pain of acquiring one they decided then to do an overly complex, time and material consuming alternative way of getting a precursor to “keep the effort high”. I don’t like that “economical balance” reasoning at all. Why did they need to make such complex collections, which turn out to be expensive to implement and unnecessarily error prone?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Halvorn.9831:

Ashen.2907:

Halvorn.9831:

MO is definitely changing the way the company responds publicly, he is not hiding behind silence.

MO is the one who set the policy of silence in the first place. Colin wasnt hiding behind silence, he was following his boss’ (MO) directions.

How do you know? Has this been announced somewhere?

Last I checked, you have to follow your boss’s instructions. They’re the ones who either create policy decisions or who decide which policy decisions the company must follow.

Isn’t a game director a management position? A company is very often not led from the front, but by delegation. Too much work for a CEO to do every decision, therefore there are other executive employees, who have their own responsibilities. At least that was the case in all companies I worked for so far (and I am a software architect, so also tech companies).

Ashen.2907:

Halvorn.9831:

MO is definitely changing the way the company responds publicly, he is not hiding behind silence.

MO is the one who set the policy of silence in the first place. Colin wasnt hiding behind silence, he was following his boss’ (MO) directions.

How do you know? Has this been announced somewhere?

Loxias.2375:

Halvorn.9831:

Loxias.2375:

It was a scam from the first hype and this game will never recover, quit kidding yourselves.

I spent nearly 4k hours in this game, truly entertained. I don’t know what you are talking about.

I’m talking about the expansion, the subject of this thread. Don’t derail with generalizations.

That was not clear to me from your wording.

OK then. Spent several hundred hours in HoT. Truly entertained. Still don’t know what you are talking about.

I find it very interesting how somebody who brings up unproven phrases like “scam from the first hype” and “never recover” requests that others please should not “derail with generalizations”.

Loxias.2375:

It was a scam from the first hype and this game will never recover, quit kidding yourselves.

I spent nearly 4k hours in this game, truly entertained. I don’t know what you are talking about.

Azure.8670:

Colin leaving was huge to me

And I personally more and more have the impression that it was a necessary step to start solving the issues. MO is definitely changing the way the company responds publicly, he is not hiding behind silence. Things are changing. Things are adressed. Not all is going to be well immediately, but it seems that finally the ship is moving again.

There will still be more unpleasant news coming up and things may be advancing too slowly. But the only way out is to move ahead.

Merging servers is the exact opposite of what should be done. If you merge servers then players will still stop playing so you have not solved the problem, you keep merging servers again and again.

Instead servers should be split. That way, the difference between a highly populated and a lower populated server becomes smaller. More servers, more variance, easier to maintain.

Fade to Black.7042:

People who like playing MMOS like to compete against other players,

Just no. Maybe you have not noticed, but the vast majority of PvE in this game is cooperative, not competitive. That is what made this game the success it is. It is not very clever to turn away from that.

Hi Vayne, just wanted to drop in an thank you for this post. It puts down some of my wories in words I as a non-native speaker surely would not have found.

I come from a different perspective with my own MMO experience, but in the end it boils down to more or less the same point.

When the hardcore/raid guys repeated their desire to have parts of this game support their way of gaming, I thought to myself “well, why not? I will never again set foot into something that is responsible for the worst experiences in my MMO history, but I don’t need to. So if they then finally kitten when they get what they want and it does not cost too many dev resources which are then missing in the parts that are played by the majority, I couldn’t care less.”

Well, it turns out that there will be raid-exclusive rewards and now that players who belong to the “non-hardcore” say “well, can we then have a normal mode for this please so that even the players who may have disabilities or are not so much into this stuff can do it at a slower pace?” it shows (again) which box of pandora this whole business has opened. It turns out that several of the tolerance-demanding hardcore players do not have much tolerance in them towards others themselves. Some simply seem to need to feel superior to others and therefore feel an urge to lock others out.

While this may be a personal problem and there is for sure professional help for that, it is something ANet could have foreseen and countered before it became obvious, because it can quickly become toxic for “the best MMO community around”. Therefore I think it is really time for the countermeasures:
a) raids need an adjustable difficulty setting
b) raids should not have a raid-exclusive gear rarity level

Goatjugsoup.8637:

the way people figure dungeons as unprofitable is by efficiency
if i could earn x amount of gold doing dungeons for an hour but can earn x + 5g for doing fractals for an hour then by spending that hour on dungeons i would be ‘losing’ that 5g

And in my book a GAME should never even be about such decisions (unless it was always supposed to be an economy simulation). It should be about enjoyment, relaxation, heck even challenge if you want, but not about profit maximization. We have that already in our crappy real-world economy. But the way this game is set up turns it to be like that, since so many things of value are buyable + there is a gem/gold conversion.

I have long since given up on maximizing my profit while playing and I guess that is the reason why I still play. I don’t care for the expensive stuff anymore. I am glad the elite spec weapon collections where introduced, most of that stuff you have to acquire by playing the game without regards to profits. Good stuff, that.

quagganzilla.6450:

I love how the devs say “RNG is even” yet I known several players with under 3 months with 1-5 pre drops form both in game and forge yet many many long term players who have never gotten one.

Aaaaaand another wikipedia link incoming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution

I know it’s some tough stuff. But the information is alla available.

The average distribution of the RNG is even. That means, if you have a bazillion of trials, the distribution of random numbers is flat. But you need a bazillion. For everything less it will not have “evened” out. Thus the so called outliers.

Random means something different than most ppl imply. It does not mean “fair”, especially not with the low sample sizes that are typical for the experience of a few players.

Fernling.1729:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/124233/why-is-it-impossible-to-produce-truly-random-numbers

True RNG is not possible, but true RNG is not necessary.

First:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise
http://jayakody2000lk.blogspot.de/2013/09/usb-random-number-generator.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator

Second:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random

Third, as somewhere else stated:

Even when using a PRNG you can draw the numbers from a common pool for all players at the server. This is totally unpredictable since it also incorporates the reaction patterns of players as well as network latencies.

So, no, true random is possible.

moony.5780:

rng for machines is impossible..thats one of the first things electricengineers learn.

If you learned that, change the place where you learn. No good will come from there. This is plain wrong.

1) Find a different metric for winning/losing rather than the PPT we have now; matches should not last a week, but should be closer to the length of a playtime session so players can feel their own influence; make the results of the primetime guys have a similiar value than the night capping crews.

2) I cannot estimate how much effort it is to bring back alpine borderlands but no matter how much at this time it is some of the best time investment you can do for wvw

3) PvP-like reward tracks for WvW

4) Whatever you change to counter the population imbalance, keep in mind that there are players which like WvW, yet are not in WvW guilds. Keep it open for all

5) The current stability implementation does not work for battles of this scale. It needs fixing. The pewpew now is worse than the cc hammertrains before ever have been

Î don’t know whether raids are “good or bad for a game”.

What I do know however is that I personally dislike instanced, fixed-size group content. All the negative experiences I ever had in my MMO history are bound to either this or open world ffa pvp.

I don’t care if raids/dungeons/fractals are there as long as I can avoid them. Of course there may be rewards hidden behind this (and it saddens me somewhat to see that WvW was taken out of map completion, but e.g. dungeon story modes are not taken out of PvP track unlocking). But most of the time I consider the rewards not worth the hassle to cope with content I seriously dislike. In fact that is the only real threat raids offer: if too much desirable rewards are exclusively locked behind something I dislike, I may start disliking the whole thing.

And, to complete this: I have absolutely no problems surviving in HoT maps or accepting the greater challenges there. I still think it was a desastrous idea to give in to the players who wanted more challenge. I have the feeling that the game lost more players this way than if the ones who demanded challenges had left.

Amurond.4590:

Reclaimed drop rates aren’t really that rare if you’re talking salvaging. Masterwork seems to be about 1/35 (regardless of salvage kit – check the talk page on wiki) while rares are guaranteed. You can either take the ‘safe’ route with respect to rng and buy rares for ~6g buy order, or you can take the (ultimately cheaper for most people) route that is reliant on rng evening out and buy out masterwork weapons. This is what I did to finish the Machined collection – I got kind of unlucky, still cheaper than bids for rares and I was buying out masterworks, not using buy orders.

I tried way more than 35 masterwork weapons and did not have a single success. That’s what I meant by low drop (or salvage rates) being a problem. And no, I am not considering to give in to the gold farm/AH path. I would like to play the parts of the game that naturally shell out these rewards and be rewarded while doing so.

mauried.5608:

What do you mean by a drop chance of less than 5%?
RNG has no memory.
You could do an event 1000 times and get no drop and the next 50 players who have only done the event once all get a drop.
Still drop rate is 5%.
Hardly fair though.

A (pseudo-) RNG creates a bit sequence that looks random. In fact, if you use a true RNG it is really random (using e.g. quantum effects), on a P-RNG it is not, but if you don’t know the seed, the next bit value is still unpredictable.

Now, what you typically do is take a bunch of those bits and use them as the mantissa for a binary floating number, turning the bit stream into a list of floating point numbers between 0 and 1. If you draw a bazillion of these and plot their values, you see that they are evenly distributed between 0 and 1 (this holds only true for large sample sizes).

What you then do is the following: the value range of the random numbers is from 0 to 1. So, if you filter out the ones between lets say .4 and .5, you have taken out a smaller range that is 10% in size of the complete range. So, you draw a number and if it is between .4 and .5, it represents an item drop for an average drop chance of 10%.

If you instead limit the range to values between say .71 and .72 (because of the even distribution, the real values do not matter), you have a drop chance of 1%. That’s how it goes. It will only create a real drop ratio of 1% if you really take a lot of samples – and that is the exact problem I am talking about.

mauried.5608:

RNGs arnt fair, but they are what players want, indirectly.

Again, I don’t agree. It’s the low drop rates that make it appear unfair and no, it is not what I want and I AM a player.

Look, if I have the choice between “healthy economy” and “feeling rewarded and motivated”, it is an easy choice for me. I don’t care the crap for the economy. I play because I want to enjoy playing, full stop.

I have lost track of the amount of times I did Tequila just to get a hoard. It must be somewhere around 200 or more. Then I finally got it. Guess what? I didn’t feel " oh my, look at that! How good does it feel." I felt “ok, I’ll never do that again. Tick it off, I’m done with it, no way I will try to get another of those weapons”. And I have not been there ever since.

And they don’t even influence the economy, they’re account bound anyways. The same holds true for those cursed reclaimed metal plates. They are only used for the elite spec accended weapon collection, which you only can get once per weapon per account.

See I know: go do a gold farm and buy the rare weapons to salvage them.

Just no. I don’t want to play a game where all you are reduced to is always do the same optimized gold farm then buy stuff from the AH rather than play the content that should give you the rewards just because the drop rates are so pathetic.

In my opinion the drop rates need to be changed. No single drop should have a drop chance of less than 5%. If you want to do something more rare, make it require a larger amount of drops – like you did in HoT in some places, but way not often enough.

OK, so I misphrased that.

Suppose now you have to have 3 reclaimed metal plates to buy one of the weapons at DS. They have an abnormally low drop rate. Now what if the drop rate was increased by a factor of 10, but on the other hand you needed 30 to buy the same weapon? On average it takes the same amount of attempts, but you feel progression.

That’s what I meant.

John Smith.4610:

Ironically, the randomness of the system is significantly contributes to these posts continually popping up.

With all due respect, I disagree.

It is not the randomness of the system. It is the homeopathic low drop rates.

If I have a chance for a drop that averages at 20%, you will not very likely see me complain about RNG, since even an unlucky streak will not be that terrible.

If otoh I have a chance for a drop of about 1%, it is quite likely to see me complain – simply for the fact that a bad streak can be completely demotivating up to the point where I believe that the item in question does not even drop at all (reclaimed metal plates anyone? I did not have a single drop in 2016 so far, and I am playing on a daily basis).

Solution: rather than have a single complete drop of 1% or less, require 10 drops of 10% each and let players advance towards the final reward.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

… Hardest: VB …

An elaborate, detailed, brilliant analysis that completely fails my reality.

I do all map metas on a more or less even distribution (except for TD which is a map that i hate from the bottom of my heart; ok, not as much as desert borderland, but still).

I sit on around 400 unused crowbars with more than 2,000 airship parts. I do have about 60 crystalline ore with maybe 40 machetes left. I simply collected way more events on the run in VB. It is much more likely to dive into VB somewhere, tag an event and get some rewards than to do the same in DS. You only go to DS for a complete meta, everything else is wasted there. Then there is the stupidness that is 15 minutes timer after defeating MoM, which makes everybody rush instead of working together.

I am always short of crystalline ore most.