Guild Wars 2

What is really amazing is that if you go back to the original written and video design discussions, you will find that Waypointing after being defeated was a highlited FEATURE of dungeons in GW2!

Also of interest is that it was acknowledged in the blog for this change that a number of dungeons had to modifed so that they would be able to be completed (maybe) now that a player could not return to the fight from a Waypoint.

And the poster is absolutely correct in saying that for the vast majority of the fights, there is NO opportunity to revive another player. Pulsing AoE, Boss Focus on Downed players, and all that is assured to keep downed players downed until they are defeated.

I think that this is a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived problem that needed a much different solution, if any at all. I also agree that no one is going to want to work innexperienced or low-geared players through dungeons now.

Agree.

Kick vote should be four of the five players to remove someone.

If two or more players are so obnoxious that they would need to be kicked, that should be obvious on the first round of heavy trash or the first boss. When it is that obvious, just reform the group without them and start again.

Thanks!
Missed it; was looking for regular button.

I will focus on just one Design element, but this applies across all GW2 mechanics.

It has recently been posted that the ability to return to a Boss fight via Waypointing is going to be removed. This ability has been a fundamental design concept in GW2 for the past 5+ years. Touted as a gameplay feature in written documents, blogs, and videos.

Most Boss fights currently require a normal group of folks to be able to return to the fight after being defeated. If they could not, it is almost an assured wipe of the group (and all the consequences that follow). GW2 Boss fights have been carefully designed and balanced with players being able to return to the fight.

Now, I will grant you that teams of well-geared, practiced, and coordinated folks can run a dungeon and not need to ever Waypoint to get back into a fight. But I have not been in many; usually because many times there are one or more folks new to the dungeon along. This is especially true in Story modes.

Please, there are 5+ years of testing and balance on the Dungeon Boss fights, with Defeated Waypointing as a major part of the strategy. Be very careful about just tossing it out because some groups use it for farming; find another solution.

Should have been in Suggestions.
Sorry, please move.

Logged in and have received no less than 5 Gold-Seller mails in the last couple of weeks. We really need a Report button on the Mail page here so we can Report, then Delete.

Thanks

I understand that GW2 is an MMO, but Grouping has to be an optional mode of play for most world content. EQ2 (and other MMOs) have learned a very hard lesson with implementing Forced Grouping in an across the board fashion. It always sounds like a good idea, but never works in actual practice.

This is going to be especially true in GW2, since the population levels in almost all zones has fundamentally crashed. Very rarely do I see a DE go beyond Stage 1; there simply are not enough players.

Unless the reward structure is heavily modifed to incentivize masses of players to return to lower level zones, Forced Grouping (even GW2’s Co-op style) is going to make matters worse, not better.

I suggest you implement the rewards structure FIRST; get it going and the populations up. Only then, implement any Forced Grouping paradigms.

I would suspect that any transactions that take place outside of the GW2 BLTP, in whole or in part, would be considered a bannable offence.

The point of this post is to give feedback on why one person has stopped playing the game, and is no longer buying Gems. Or adding participation to DEs.

I am indeed playing other games now. One that I subscribe to, and one that is a full F2P game.

The original intent was to give feedback to the folks who make the game. But, the title of the thread got it deleted. So I reposted with a different title.

I find myself playing GW2 less and less these days. In fact, I pretty much no longer play at all. My playing time started to fall off after my first Fractals run (failed Swamp run) on the launch day for Fractals. All the changes to the core foundational game design elements of GW2 since then has pretty much driven me away from the game, probably permanently.

Now, the game that I saw in the Manifesto, and the one I played in all the Beta events (except the first), and the game I played at launch, is the GW2 game that I want to be playing now. Sadly, that game no longer exists, and every fundamental part of the original design is now nowhere to be found.

I was all for this game. I bought Gems on day one to trade for gold to have a little seed money. I bought Gems to buy character slots so I could reserve all my desired character names, one for each profession. I bought Gems to expand my bank slots. I bought Gems to expand my character inventory slots. I leveled two characters to 80 and was working on my third, when it all fell apart.

I am not going to list out a litany of what is causing me not to play. That has been covered my many people in many posts. Here in these forums, and in outside venues as well. The one thing I will point out is that GW2 is, for me now, a Free To Play game. And yet, I have no desire to play it anymore.

Make of that what you will.

Guardian is EZ-Mode profession.
Spec and Gear into Power and Vitality until you get to 60ish or higher.
Gather and sell all you get on the Trading Post, so you can buy better gear on Trading Post.
Save crafting until you are very high level.

Good Hunting

Yeah. I found this out the hard way with an Elementalist. Until you get to the stage where you are kitting up Rare gear, focus on Power and Vitality builds. Gear, Traits, all of it. Even with Rares, I now usually make vitality and power my main focus, and then whatever 3rd stat I want is last. I found not even worrying about anything else until 50ish works really well.

Stacking Sigils have strange rules -

• Only ONE SS (Stacking Sigil) will ever be active.

• If you have one on each weapon, then the one on the Main Hand weapon will be the active one.

• If you have an SS only on your Off-Hand weapon, it will still always trigger on a kill.

• If you swap weapons, even to a set that does NOT have an SS on it, you will retain the current SS stack until you lose it by normal means.

• If you swap weapons to a set that has a different SS on it, you will NOT get the new SS to stack until the old one is lost by normal means.

• You CAN have a non-SS type sigil on a second weapon, and it WILL do whatever it does in addition to the SS effect.

Hope this helps
Good Hunting

I did not say it was to difficult to implement now.
I said :

• If it was EASY to implement, it would have been there at launch.

• Any implementation they do is likely to be bug ridden and cause more problems that it is worth.

Let me say this up front, I despise the World of Warcraft LFD tool. I really do. I think that it basically killed the game as it regards anything other than end-game Raiding guilds. Everything else was now a Solo operations, and LFD groups are just sort of a ‘Dungeon with Player NPCs’. Sort of thing.

Sadly, with the inclusion of vertical gear grinding and gearcheck dungeon runs, I am afraid GW2 is going to NEED a LFD tool of some kind or other. Already, the community is splitting into the ‘Have’ and ‘Have Nots’ of gear levels.

Trying to find groups that want to do the now ‘Classic’ dungeons in GW2 is becoming very difficult. Even within a guild, almost everyone is now just running the vertical gear grind dungeon. Not much fun, actually.

If it was that easy, it would have been in the game at launch.

This is just another example of an underdeveloped and poorly implemented feature. In this case the BLTP. Almost every feature in the game has a sort of ‘Proof-Of-Concept’ placeholder feel about it. Asked for items not to be able to be posted below vendor price (Sell and Buy) since launch. But I guess getting vertical gear grinding into the game was more important.

The real issue is that ArnaNet is not allowing the FREE trade of Gems<→Gold. They are capping the market artificially and skimming huge amounts in the transfers.

The external Gold Sellers will sell you four to five times as much gold on the dollar as ArenaNet will via the Dollar→Gems→Gold and Gold→Gems transactions.

Thus, ArenaNet is actually encouraging the usage of external Gold Sellers by controlling the market (they think) to their advantage.

Before you all even START to think about Pro E-Sport in GW2, I suggest you go about fixing some of the critical defects in the implemantion. For instance :

• Inadequate Skill descriptions
• Skill Descriptions not actually matching Skill behavior
• Bugged Skill behaviors
• Absurdly terse Combat Log detail level

I am not even going to mention class/skill balance issues as I don’t see how you can even begin to address that if the above informational and behavioral issues are not resolved.

I suggest you address those issues ASAP.
Even the PvE game is suffering from them.

Just give folks a free server transfer every 3 months. And institute a $20 paid server transfer in the TP (Ya, I know. Buy Gems – Buy Transfer).

I see ‘Guesting’ as nothing more than a huge potential for bugs, and a never-ending source of Tickets for Customer Service.

For very little gain.
Sounded good on paper.
Not going to be so good in reality, I am thinking.

Developers, do not be swayed by the Fan-Boyz that are telling you that FOM is a great addition to the game, and that there is nothing wrong with it.

FOM is a cancer that could spread throughout GW2 until every aspect of the original GW2 game design is corrupted and destroyed.

The folks that came to GW2 did NOT come to GW2 to play ‘World of Warcraft’ style Heroics and Raids.

Fan-Boyz killed ‘Star Wars The Old Republic’ by giving the developers a false sense of security in their decisions. SWTOR has lost 90% of its players.

Listen to the player base that is NOT happy with what you have done. Look at your original design concepts and see how far off the mark you are. Take FOM off line and restore GW2 to it’s original design.

You listen to the Fan-Boyz at your own peril.

Everything I despise in “World Of Warcraft” style Heroics and Raids.

Not going to even bother listing out the elements of FOM that betray the principles set down over the past years for GW2 gameplay. Suffice it to say that FOM violates pretty much all of those principles.

Don’t think that GW2 is ‘To Big To Fail’. I would guide you to the failure that is ‘Star Wars The Old Republic’, which launched with 140 some-odd FULL U.S. servers and are now down to 14 partially populated servers. They have lost 90%, or more, of their player base.

Folks came to GW2 for the ORIGINAL design concepts. Not for a rehash of ‘World Of Warcraft’ gameplay.

FOM designs and concepts are a cancer.

The best thing you could do is take FOM offline, redo it to match original GW2 standards, and never do this sort of thing again.

Word to the wise.

Ascended Gear flies in the face of the principles laid down for Guild Wars 2 over the past 5 years!

Don’t have Ascended Gear at this particular ‘gearscore’ level? Then you can forget about doing that dungeon with that group! Don’t have any level of Ascended Gear? Then you can forget about doing that dungeon at that level , ever!

Horrible, horrible decision on ArenaNet’s part. Whoever green-lighted this should be moved out of decision making immediately!

This is NOT what GW2 is supposed to be about; divisive game mechanics that drive players apart.

This design shift reminds me of the one that Mythic did in Dark Age of Camelot with the Trials of Atlantis expansion. ToA introduced endless gear grinding to that game, and flat killed the game.

Now, in GW2, we will have to grind specific gear in order to play? Well, the sociopaths are going to love it. The folks that have been making GW2 a home because GW2 was not like WoW are going to hate it!

Fair Warning Given

I had two Ruby Orbs slotted into my Scepter/Dagger and had 33% Crit chance.

I replaced the two Ruby Orbs with two Superior Sigil of Accuracy (+5% Crit Chance each).

My Crit chance went DOWN to 31%, and if I remove my weapons, the Crit Chance STAYS at 31%.

This leads me to believe that either the Sigil is not actually adding to my Crit Chance % (which would really suck) OR the numbers displayed in the Attributes window does not reflect the true Crit Chance.

Could we get a response here from ArenaNet as to if the Sigil is actually broken (thus no +5% Crit Chance); or if it is just the display of the totals that is broken.

Please.

This is a good concept, but a couple of things :

• Please provide a ‘keyRing’ authenticator like WoW and SWTOR use. Not everyone has a ‘mobile device’ capable of doing this task.

• Note that even with this system, the concept of “..this ensures that without your mobile device, an attacker would not be able to compromise your Guild Wars 2 account…” is not valid. A ‘Man-In-The-Middle’ attack can compromise an account even with this sort of authentication.

Still, I have the ‘KeyRing’ style authenticator for both my WoW and SWTOR accounts and do feel very secure with them.

Please do provide this option. I think I paid around $6 for the ones I have.

Thank You

Anyone that needed to buy Gold for gear or repairs would be insane to use the ArenaNet ‘closed’ currency exchange system to buy Gems for RL$ and then trade them back to ArenaNet for Gold (does anyone REALLY believe there is a fair market price on Gold/Gems?).

Easy math shows that a person can get five times (or more) Gold for their RL$ than what ArenaNet will give. That is NOT a recipe for stopping gold sellers.

ArenaNet should have an open GEM / Gold market (just like EVE has for Plex) where players can buy and sell directly to each other over the market. Unfortunately, ArenaNet chose the path of soaking the most $$$$$ from the players.

And we all are paying the price, one way or another.

@Voqar

I suggest you read my original post more carefully. Almost everything you have said has no relevance to what I posted.

By the way, what I mean by “Advanced Dynamic Event” content is not Dynamic Events in higher level zones. I mean that many Dynamic Events in lower level zones have multiple stages. But, even if you win a stage, a subsequent stage may not start because there are to few players on hand to trigger it. Or, if it does trigger, there will be to few players to win it, and everyone will recieve a nice repair bill for their troubles.

The buff that they gave enemy mobs just prior to launch did not help matters either, since they did not buff the Helper NPCs that are supposed to allow smaller groups to succeed in Dynamic Events. This leads to the Helper NPCs being burned down fast by the mobs; soon followed by the players taking the inevitable dirt-nap.

It is vitally important for the GW2 team to focus 100% on fixing all the broken content in the game before putting even more broken content into the game.

Saying you have teams dedicated to bug fixing while also having teams dedicated to doing new content is balony. I have been in software development for over 20 years, and if you don’t have your full team fixing defective software that is already in the field, then it will NEVER be fixed.

Pretty much everything in this game is currently broken in some fashion or another. Skill Challenges are a good example. Most are working fine. But many are not. They are either missing altogether, not functioning as designed, or somehow or another not accessable. So much depends on Skill Challenges being fully functional; Zone Completion, Utility Skills, Titles, Time Invested, and so on.

In today’s modern MMO era, games have a limited time to capture a major long-term population. Miss that window of time, and it is all over. You will NEVER recover (SWTOR, I am looking at you here). GW2 is in that window now.

Postpone doing new content.
Fix the game you have out there.
Now.

Have been casual exploring and leveling, done a few dungeons, and am now 61. But, except to specifically help a guildie, or to complete a zone, I do NOT play in lower level zones. Ever. Here is why I do not :

• Travel costs in lower level zones are the same as for my current level.

• Repair costs on my gear are the same as for my current level.

• Loot rewards are NEVER the same as for my current level zones. Loot can range from as little as 25% of normal, to best case 50% of current level norm. Gear rewards are laughable.

Even when I am doing a lower level zone to finish it off and/or pick up Skill Challenges, I NEVER stop to participate in any Dynamic Events. The risk/reward ratio is so skewed that only a crazy person would take a chance on being downed for almost no reward.

So if it is ArenaNet’s intention that higher level players go back and participate in lower level zones on a regular basis, the current design just does not make that a viable option.

Since a player’s stats and gear are all reduced in level back down to the lower level zone’s target level, all the associated costs (Waypoint, Repair, etc) should also be reduced. And the rewards (especially coin/karma) should all be increased to level appropriate ranges.

Otherwise, the low level zones will continue to die; and the advanced Dynamic Event content will never be seen by the vast majority of the playerbase.

@Nels,

Need to read a little more carefully, I think, sir.

I said the HIGHEST zone fee of the source/destination pair.

Which makes your argument, incorrect.

The current fee structure makes no sense at all. Neither lore-wise nor logic-wise.

It only make sense as a ‘standard mmo’, non-fun, gold sink. Very early WoW like; needs to go.

It’s actually a little worse in some cases than just “Go Kill 10 Rats”.

Sometimes, it is:

“Go kill some Rats, bring me back their Tails. Then, I will tell you that you are either done, or not done.”

You don’t even get to know how many Rats you need to kill. And, if you wait to long to run back, someone else may turn in a finalizing number of Rat Tails and you won’t get anything.

The current Waypoint fee model (rate based on distance traveled and player Level) is really NOT fun! If you want travel to be fun in GW2, the following would be a better model :

• Fee remains linked to distance traveled
• Fee is based on the highest zone of the Source/Destination pair

This would allow travel in a Lvl 1-15 zone to be fair for everyone, and affordable. But moving to/from, or within, a Lvl 40-45 zone, for instance, would cost a more appropriate (for the zone) amount.

I am not sure what the game lore rational is for charging more for waypoint travel based on the player level. Just seems like a way to loot player’s hard earned, and much needed for other things, coin.

Please Change