Guild Wars 2

It sets a precedent that could serve to make ANY item you have and bought from the cash shop obsolete by mere whim.

What’s next?

- New Bag slots offers which add the regular bag slot + 2 additional ones for the same price as the old ones?

- Increased Bank space

Either you let people upgrade the infinite tools they have for free or you simply don’t offer ones that give you the same thing PLUS a little bonus (whatever that might be).

Because that way, it’s just a never ending story of upgrades and upgrades you are offered from the cash shop.

Who’s to say in 3 months there won’t be one with a 30% sprocket chance? Plus Azurite Orbs?

kitten that. Create proper items for the cash shop that look aesthetically pleasing or are adding convenience and people who love your game will purchase themselves into bankruptcy alright, but if you start screwing people who already gave you their money, you’ll soon be the only kid in your sandbox (no, not a MMORPG sandbox).

Seriously, now that the infinite gathering tool market is saturated and most people have their desired quantity purchased for outrageous amounts of money (for something as simple as that) – they add a new generation with a 20% Chance to get Sprockets Bonus Effect?

Are you kittening kidding me? What a bunch of greedy miscreants!

Tried this just now with an Ascended Weapon and I am getting:

1 Exotic Item with the Skin I put onto the white item
1 White Item
1 Rune

At least that’s what the Transmutation Splitter puts into its Review – so I would not get the ascended Weapon I used previously out of it.

However, my ascended weapon was re-skinned so I assume I would have to use a splitter on that one first and then try it again with the steps you pointed out.

Edit: Worked perfectly fine with using a Transmutation Splitter first, then the Crystal, swap it to another character and use another Splitter.

Might want to add that to your OP as I am sure I am not the only one who put a skin on the base ascended weapon model

Mungrul.9358:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

If outside of Fractals it was the same as Exotic level stats, this would be a massive improvement and would stay more true to what I understood the original intent of Ascended gear was.

The question here really is: To what end?

Why would I want to have a fractal-only carrot which I don’t even get a benefit from whenever I am not inside those fractals with my 4 guys (since most people would probably stick to a tightly-knit group rather than PUGs if any difficulty is involved).

Why wouldn’t people enjoy wailing through those fractals (which aren’t badly designed, just horrendously unrewarding in the status quo), if they got unique skins from higher level challenges that would at least hand them ‘bragging rights’ whenever they are doing anything other than fractals?

Let them drop through RNG for all I care, but PLEASE – for people like myself who have abysmal luck in the game – also provide a way to counter-act RNG when it’s just messing with people. Put in a similar system to the fractal rings, give them a way to acquire that new unique reward through say ascended materials thrown into the forge with one of the components only dropping in the higher echelons of fractals where the unique skin would drop – so that they can build their skin through a recipe if they’re continuously haunted by tough luck.

To me, someone who deems himself rather progress orientated, it’d feel like busy work if I don’t get anything out of fractals but higher stats to beat higher fractals while I still look at 9 Greens and 6 Blues at the end.

The issue with fractals is not that they are too difficult in their current incarnation, they are just not worth the time to do it. As with many other areas there are simply no incentives to compete in them and the up-coming leaderboard will be nothing short of a farce and everyone seems to be aware of that, but ANet themselves.

As someone else said, make Fractals challenging again – not through higher Agony ticks but through additional game mechanics (you did this in a way with the Instability, but adding new layers of difficulty to existing bosses through mechanics would go a longer way, imho.)

To answer the question about whether Asceded Armor or a portion of it, should be sellable via the Trading Post:

I honestly don’t think so, because it would add nothing to the enjoyment of people, they should have means to earn their ascended gear through challenging content, not yet again be offered another investment. Those who really WANT to do that, can do that already – I don’t think there’s anything people either can’t buy or don’t have in abundance that keeps them from acquiring ascended armors but maybe for Dragonite Ingots, which for no apparent reason gets artificially reduced drop rates on various ends if compared to the other two ascended materials despite being the one people have the least of, unless they camp those temple and dragon sites day in day out.

On that note: Is there a reason why Giant Gifts i.e. seem to yield Dragonite Ore at 1/4th of the chance they yield the other stuff people are swimming in? Wouldn’t that have been a chance to at least even that out a little with the ascended armor being introduced, fully knowing that Dragonite would be in high demand again?

Since I read a couple of people who want even better stats than we’ve got with ascended through some sort of “raid” model – why do you want that?

For me, it’d be perfectly awesome if those raids or bigger scale challenges (read Anet: not stupendous zerging, but actual mechanics that want to be beaten) would reward me with unique skins that others can not have access to, if they don’t compete the same way.

Whether that’s WvW, PvE or PvP – doesn’t matter. The principle stands.

I am purchasing bragging rights by skill and everyone is encouraged to do the same, if they want what I have.

That’s a concept that has worked for as long back as I can remember when it comes to MMORPGs and better stats don’t always had anything to do with it.

I am pretty convinced, if there were something like that in GW2 – it’d be flourishing, because people are both, reward- and challenge-starved with the current check-liste & gold grind purposes the game exclusively caters to.

Part 2/2:

Take DEFIANCE for example. I feel that the upcoming Wildstar does a way better job with that, despite having a trinity to fall back upon. In Wildstar you’ve got something called ‘Interrupt Armor’ and it’s basically the same thing, a certain amount of stacks which swallow CC effects that need to be taken off, before a boss can be interrupted.

However, theirs has the additional complexity of TIMED CC attached to it. Meaning that each member of your group has to apply their crowd controlling effects at the same time, for them to come through and actually have an effect on the boss. Which leads to more challenging encounters on the one side, but also to more build diversity on the other. If people are encouraged to bring CC abilities to certain encounters in order to prevent them from dying or to enable them to beat said challenge – you’re already one step closer to the DPS, Control and Support alternative you’ve tried to pull off with Guild Wars 2.

TL;DR1: Anyway, I feel that horizontal progression should definitely be the focus of your game design, it should at least partially move away from the cash shop and instead reward skillful play in PvE, PvP or WvW alike.

Vertical Progression:

I will keep this very brief: There are developers who have a very firm grasp on this. They offer vertical progression but it never seems to be the obvious focus of its playerbase, but instead some underlying motivation to do it.

It’s almost grotesque to name World of Warcraft as an example of how to do this right, because it’s probably best known for its continuous and frequently reset gear treadmill, but hear me out!

All the time I have played that game, I spent preciously little thought on rewards, as compared to Guild Wars 2. There was always a place, depending on my character’s progression, where I would go and complete challenges for, in order to obtain something that would make my character either be more powerful (Vert. Progression) or look better (Horiz. Progression) and it felt good to overcome those challenges either in a group of 5 or one of 10/25/40. People bonded with one another and became friends in a way that often transcended pixels.

I do strongly believe, ANet suffers from a reverse Midas Touch when it comes to vertical progression, because everything you touch, in that regard, turns to kitten.

Fractal Levels were heralded to bring greater reward for greater difficulty. I don’t know if you ever played higher tier fractals, but in 99.9% of the cases you leave them with Greens and Blues, poorer loot than you’d have gotten if you ran circles in the world, joining massive Farm Trains.

WvW Ranks – shouldn’t ever have been character bound and the stubbornness on that regard was an absolute insult to your players. But that’s not even the worst about them yet. The amount of time required to progress in that system is cynical at best, deeply misantrophical, if we’re more honest.

Don’t believe me? Do the math. How long would it take a person, playing 8 hours a day to at least meddle with the higher echelons of that system? 10 years? Awesome! Well-balanced!

And what do you get for every level you do? Well, preciously little – Season 1 rewards were an absolute joke for a 7 weeks meta, but it’s long become a dictum that Guild Wars 2 rewards are not worthy of the name. I won’t rehash on that, again.

Luck System: Up to 150% it is tolerable, you progress on a steady pace and then all of a sudden, it becomes absolute madness. Who is responsible for those sort of numbers? Are you gauging what would be the brink of acceptability for your Q&A team and then multiply it times a million?

To give a brief example of what I mean:

Your MONTHLY achievement gives you an essence of luck worth 500 Luck. Something you can only do ONCE per month grants you 500 Luck. Now how much does it take later on to advance a level? Of the top of my head I think it was something like 30.000 Luck. Who made the decision that this would be proportionate?

It’s the common theme of the game though: Be so unrewarding to your players, that they feel the only way they can progress in it, is to buy gold or dedicate their lives to grinding.

TL;DR2: And I think that’s the crux of the matter. As long as you don’t reasses that balance, it will mean preciously little whether you do vertical or horizontal progression, it will both feel equally unsatisfying and people at one point, will just move on to something that rewards them more for their time invested.

Shadow Blade.1324:

im disappointed its taken this long for this to be posted:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zn81sY7pqI

Part 1/2:

I do think that Shadow Blade has some very salient points, not only in regard to those links he posted, but also on what he thinks is fundamentally wrong with the game and needs to be addressed.

However, I’ll of course add my own thoughts to the discussion.

Horizontal Progression:

At one point in the game’s marketing strategy, that was well before its launch and has gradually shifted towards increasingly corny gloating and bait-and-switch manoeuvres, you prided yourself with getting away from vertical progression and the archetypical grinding that was usually involved with them in games that we all played and knew before.

I feel like this model, at one point, has been partially abandoned, because it has proven to be a lot more expensive than originally thought.

As has been pointed out in this thread, a core trait of horizontal progression, for players, still happens to be a unique look and style for their characters.

Now, that is also where the problem starts to rear its ugly head.

If I want horizontal progression in this game, I won’t get past the Cash Shop because that is the place where new armor sets are obtained from, where I can gamble my every last penny to get one of the new weapon sets that keep getting added and added and completely take advantage of people who long for that sort of progression in one of the most vile and consumer-exploitative RNG-fests I have seen to date.

Now, of course I can also obtain these things with ludicrous amounts of in-game gold but that’s hardly progressive, is it? I mean this game seems to be solely built on the acquisition of gold in order to compete and achieve anything the game has to offer, that should really be more, than a question of how deep your pockets are.

It’s more a treadmill than anything else I have ever witnessed in a game, because not only will you never catch up, you will be devastatingly behind if you stop playing the game for even a month. Inflation is spinning out of control, if I had 1000 g 3 months ago, I could have bought myself the world, now I’m lucky to get 1 pre-cursor out of it.

There is just not satisfaction in playing the game, because it rarely ever gets rewarded. I’m giving you an anecdotical example now:

I’m sitting at 3.800 hours of gameplay. That’d be a 158 days of 24/7 madness.

And you know what?

I opened almost every single unidentified dye I ever got (maybe 20 sold in the TP total) and guess what? None of those ever were Abyss or Celestial, nor did I get any new dyes whenever I TRIED to obtain them from the cash shop.

I had 0 precursors drop for me. 0. The only ones I got I had to spend well over 500 Gold on in attempts, or just bought from the TP, because I simply gave up.

0 Weapon Tickets from Black Lion Chests. Though, knowing my luck, I never invested a lot of money or gold into those, because it seems like exactly the kind of system that would have me ending up with a skin for maybe a 100 € or none at all.

0 Ascended Weapon Crates

An inventory full of fractal weapons and none of the ones I wanted: Mace, Sword, Scepter.

Do you see where I am going with this? I played well more than any person should ever play your game within a 1.5 years span and I still would have never gotten a single legendary, wouldn’t I have played along and made GOLD my single purpose, playing your game.

I feel like there needs to be a fairer way of acquiring certain things, because there’s nothing that feels more jading than seeing others build legendaries out of thin air, because they happened to have two precursor drops and basically selling one, financed the other. Yay them!

Horizontal progression would benefit a lot from being tied to challenging content instead.

If I beat this encounter with however many people it requires me to, I want to have something to show for. I would love an encounter in this game that requires both mastery of my class’ abilities and coordination on a bigger scale, but as the past has taught us, without the holy trinity in a MMORPG, this seems to be a lost cause, because boss mechanics have to be dumbed down a great deal, in order for the ‘every man for himself’ philosophy to have a grip on it and it’s still beatable, as long as everyone indeed, cares only for himself during the fight.

Not to delve too deep into this, but have you looked into more challenging mechanics that would work for your class-setup yet?

Thanks for pointing it out! Unbelievable that this has been going on for some people for a year already and there’s no response whatsoever.

Wow, having the same issue now and it’s rather disappointing that ANet wouldn’t post the least bit of tech support feedback to an issue that is prevailing for a year now and seriously ruins people’s game play experience.

Another low point has been reached.

Good morning,

ever since the 9/18 Update I’ve experienced that my right mouse button is not properly functioning any longer. Usually when I keep it down-pressed it would allow me to turn my character’s direction freely and unlimitedly so.

Now it will just behave as if I stopped pressing the right mouse button randomly when I still keep it pressed. So it will switch-back to the cursor and then just dash across my screen instead of turning as I wanted to.

I am not a 100 % sure this is a software issue rather than my mouse acting up – but since I asked around in my guild and there have been other people who’ve experienced this, it seems possible that this would be a bug caused by Guild Wars 2.

If any one knows a fix for this or what could possibly be wrong, please let me know here – as there is absolutely nothing as frustrating as not being able to control your character’s movement.

DevonCarver.5370:

Watch this Friday’s livestream.

I honestly feel sorry for the poor guy you sat down there to show this big fat piece of nothing.

I’d not be surprised if he were to be spat at in public over your usual marketing hype. This was just too mean for words. Why would you do this to your esteemed colleague?

Outrageously high dangling carrot now got knocked down a single peg now to make it more tempting for delusional people who’re willing to sacrifice it all.

Cash Shop Game 101 has been adhered to. WXP Boost – Suck my kitten.

ColinJohanson.2394:

This is totally our fault, we dropped the ball on this plain and simple. We planned to have this messaged ahead of time to be fair to everyone, communication broke down between those who knew it was supposed to be messaged, and those who were supposed to message it and it simply didn’t happen.

As game director this is ultimately my fault first and foremost, and I’m sorry for those who potentially lost some karma as a result. It is our policy to message these kind of changes ahead of time with lots of warning, I’ll do everything possible to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future.

I’d recommend not using your karma consumables yet, give us a day or two to try and see what options we have available to help mitigate the issue.

So people who drank all their Karma because the change making it into the patch notes even, made it seem rather intended and final – are kitten out of luck with the current “rollback” going on?

Not that it’s a tragedy to have some ~300.000 Karma less than one could have had, because there is little to spend it on – but still. Seems a bit unfair.

I am surprised there isn’t a “Get 5 Precursors from WvW Rank chests” achievement, just to put the cherry on top of the already utterly wretched system we have in place currently.

If you stick to the game long enough, your heirs might one day have a shot at getting one out of there once the inheritate your holy grail of a GW 2 account.

I am sure it’ll be quite ceremonial.

And “hard to get with random luck” made me laugh out loud. The single most delusional remark on ANet’s RNG System I have yet to see. As there are people who just get precursors dropped for them with 0 effort and then there’s others who dump thousands of hours and gold into the acquisition of one and might never see one from any of the current RNG sources in place.

Tough luck.

DevonCarver.5370:

We will not be changing WvW ranks or WxP to be account bound. However, we are going to be implementing a host of changes that should make this seem less like some sort of punishment(a categorization I disagree with entirely) and more of a character progression system. The first step is the liquid WXP that is being added to the rank up chests which is account-bound. We are planning additional systems as well. Hopefully, as we continue to announce some of those changes, you will be happier with the system.

How would you rather categorize it? Because as I see it. You’re clearly at a penalty if your preferred playstyle involves a variety of characters instead of a single one.

You will be less useful to your server for the diminished perks you’d have on your main character. It will take you multiple times the amount of time to have the ‘must haves’ of the MASSIVE Vitality and Power/Condition Damage WvW Abilities.

I am curious to see how much those liquid WXP cans might give you. Since it takes you 5000 WXP to earn one – it’d at least make the levelling of a second character a little less painful.

Though you didn’t at all elaborate on the team’s decision to not make it account bound. I mean according to the GW 2 Wikipedia there are 9.945 Ranks to be achieved. Each of them require a minimum of 5.000 WXP after Rank 5(!). I am not sure if someone ever did the calculations during the development of that system – but let me ask you candidly: Did you ever did it? Did you ever look on your calculator and gasp at the staggering amount of WXP and how many years it’d take even the most devouted of players to play in the upper echelons of this system?

If you didn’t – let me do it for you.

Total WXP required: 49.705.000

Average hourly gain: ~ 2500 WXP on Average (if you’re on a populated server, winning some, losing some)

Time required to meet the maximum Rank:

6 Years 10 Months of playing World vs World 8 hours a day.

I will repeat it gladly.

If you decided you’d make Guild Wars 2 World vs World your main-priority in life, today. Treating it like a full-commitment job, it’d take you almost 7 years to make it to Diamond Legend.

Okay, so making completely inflated achievements that no one will ever reach unless they abandon their lifes to a grossly negligent degree is one thing (Who am I to tell someone they can’t kitten away their life to be a Diamond Legend, right?)

But to then not even have the common sense to make that rank account-wide is not only utterly nonsencial but a disservice on your player base. Because it simply discourages one play style over the other. That is a perfect example of where “Play as you like” is feasible to be applied to, because it shouldn’t matter whether I play 1 character or 10 in WvW in order to advance. It pits one against the other with glaringly obvious disfavour towards the latter.

If you hold individual character progression in such high regards – then allow people to spend and build on their characters individually with the WXP they collectively gathered on their account, but don’t punish them for playing a character that isn’t their main.

I doubt this will be read, but it should and I’d be most grateful for an transparent and truthful answer on what sort of thoughts went through peoples heads when the requirements of ranks were discussed.

Appreciate your reply.

Who is to say that? People in my groups got exotics that weren’t accountbound as well.

Can’t really defend that one, it’s rather pathetic. Sure, it’s a bit like cussing out the Minister of Transport for traffic jams on the first day of holiday – but it’s still rather bad.

I am glad I chose NOT to make use of the friend-feature, because I’d be rather embarrassed right now, if I exposed any new player to this experience.

Badly done.

Chidawg.6315:

Finally got all the gear I wanted.

Dyes: midnight teal, blood, steel, Purple breeze

Staff: deathwish
Scepter/dagger: TA

Helm: Arah
Shoulders:Arah
Chest: Arah
Pants: CoE
gloves: CoF
boots: CoF

Looks awesome. Tried to google up what you need to craft “Deathwish” didn’t really turn anything useful in – a heads up maybe?