Showing Posts For Inune.6214:
I personally don’t need someone texting about their cat in a chat window to feel like I’m having an interactive social game experience. The social aspects of the game come through on a much more tactile manner than any other MMO I’ve played.
I would just like to reinforce this statement as boldly as I possibly can because it is 100% spot on in everything that Guild Wars 2 got right about grouping up.
I don’t really understand the people who are all about being forced into formal groups to “learn about and socialize with” the other people playing the game. I’m going to be brutally honest here: I really do not want to learn about and socialize with the vast majority of people playing the game – for the exact reason that Logun (jokingly) stated in that first sentence: I don’t want to hear about your cat.
I have been playing MMOs since Plains-of-Power-era Everquest and out of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of people I have played with since that day to this one, I have maybe 2-3 enduring friendships with a handful of others that I presently hang out with that have been created through games. And here’s the kicker – absolutely none of those have come from random groups. They are all the product of me seeking out a like-minded guild via forums or other means external to the game itself.
It seems to me that, at best, random grouping might give rise to shoot-the-breeze type conversations akin to something you would have with a person of good social graces on public transportation. It might be a pleasant conversation, but you’re never going to see them again and there really isn’t a deep enough connection there to warrant it anyway. At worst, you’re locked in some boring/off-color/awkward/whatever conversation with people of poor social graces (and there are a lot of them) by the formality of the grouping system and the conscientiousness to not ignore the group’s needs or ditch as soon as you got your stuff done. The odds of actually finding someone that you have a deep connection with are slim to none.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some person-hating, asocial prick. I’ve struck up conversations here and there with people that I’ve come across in game. Usually it’s with people that I’ve stuck with through a couple DEs or hearts and noticed that they were actually concerning themselves with supporting me (it’s not really that hard to pick up on the fact that someone is actively supporting you). I remark something to the effect of them making it more pleasant to play the game and that’s about it. I also partake in /map whenever I have something not stupid to say in it. It doesn’t really go deeper than that because there’s absolutely no reason for it to.
I think GW2’s grouping system is absolutely perfect. It’s cooperative with your server-mates, rather than pointlessly competitive with them. It’s not restrictive by forcing you to group formally to take advantage of buffs or shared rewards. It allows for more persistent grouping, but doesn’t force you into it to get things done during leveling (an aspect of MMO gameplay that has been predominantly solo since the sit-in-one-spot-and-grind days of Everquest). There are things I don’t think GW2 has done right, but the grouping system definitely is something it completely nailed.
And hey, if you want a deeper social experience, why don’t you try actually looking for it? There are tons of guilds out there looking for members that you can probably get along with a lot better than some random people from the DE you’re doing. That’s always worked for me far, far better than socializing via a group of people that just want to trudge through leveling/farming content to get something done for a couple hours.
(edited by Inune.6214)
Pretty simple idea here: you only need one 2-handed weapon; you need two 1-handed weapons. Yet on any vendor, 1- and 2-handed weapons have the same cost.
Makes no sense.
This event is horrible. If it were the culmination event of, say, Mount Maelstrom, it might be more acceptable (although I still think the bottleneck at the bridge is a dumb way to design the fight, regardless of what level it is), but we’re talking at the end of a starting zone.
If they’re progressing naturally up to the event, people do not even have full sets of gear yet (they’re still missing at least 3 slots). They’re still trying to figure out the optimal ways to play their own classes; which weapons they want to use, etc. They likely have only 1 active slot skill and only 4 trait points.
Then they wander into Fire Elemental, an event that not only one-shots you for not having a ping of less than a couple micro-seconds and gaming-trained twitch reflexes, but is designed with the greatest paradoxical juxtaposition of both needing a group and brutally punishing you for having too large of one (a group that, by definition of it being a world event, is going to not be organized in all but the rarest cases).
Fire Elemental teaches you to hate everyone you play the game with. It teaches you to automatically forsake anyone who goes into a downed state because the odds are 99 to 1 that you’ll get hit trying to res them. Increased ember spawns, combined with downed players being factored into the spawn rate teaches you that if you care about your own skin (and repair bills) to never take the initiative and cross the bridge personally because odds are you’re going to get severely punished for other people’s mistakes due to increased ember spawns. It teaches you that if you want to get any actual progress made, graveyard zerging is not only the most effective strategy, it’s as close to necessity as you’re going to get unless you somehow were blessed by the divine internet gods with people who actually listen to what you’re saying in map chat.
I’ve done the fire elemental several times since release (latest was roughly a week ago) and it has turned out the same every time: despite all of the amazingly insightful strategies given by the enlightened few in this thread (see: obvious common sense) also being talked through in map chat repeatedly, I wind up one of 3-4 people out of 20-30 who are actually throwing caution (and repair costs) to the wind to be inside the room alive and partaking in the fight. There are 10 people dead on the bridge, 5 people trying to res them, a handful standing around gawking because they have the good economic sense to not put themselves in the middle of the kittenstorm, and one guy yelling about how everyone is a noob. I last anywhere from 30 seconds to 10-15 minutes before the embers finally overwhelm me by raw numbers and I die. I then res at the waypoint, sigh deeply, make a kitteny comment over my guild’s voicechat service, and trudge back towards the reactor to try again. Repeat this for an hour, the fire elemental finally dies and I get rewarded with a whopping nothing because the chest is either bugged out or the game decided I didn’t contribute enough to the event. I then swear off ever doing the event again until two weeks later when I’m wandering by and figure “hey, maybe it’ll be different this time around.”
I have no clue how people could actually like this event unless they’re excessively masochistic or are one of those people that just revels in watching others fail slightly less than they do to stoke their kitten.
I understand that MMOs are of rather insane proportions when it comes to upkeep, but you guys have gotta throw us a bone over all this broken stuff while leveling. Our character progress is balanced around being able to do everything a given zone has to offer. It’s built into the experience curve that, along with our personal story, we should be doing all hearts, any events that pop up, gathering and crafting along the way – that’s the only way to progress without having to run through two separate zones at the same time, which I can not believe would be an intended game mechanic.
And yet with so many events, skill points, and even renown hearts broken, it’s cutting significantly into our ability to level without resorting to meta-strategies like spending specific amounts of time in WvW or parallel progressing through two zones at the same time. That’s not fun. It’s an annoying hassle that you do just because the game isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. If you can’t fix the events yet, you need to do something that is within your power currently to balance it out.
Up the rewards for the renown hearts and events that work so that it compensates for all the ones that don’t. Reset servers daily so that the broken stuff doesn’t build up as horribly.
Bandaids aren’t long-term fixes, but they sure are nice in the interim.
High respawn rates are a common issue with this game, though I disagree that every area has respawn rates that are too high.
I would agree. There are a fair amount of places where the respawn rates are within an acceptable range, but even then I’d say that they’re on the high end of the acceptable range. Was not trying to say that every area has respawns too high.
Perhaps a different way of phrasing it would be “respawn rates are universally high enough that if you were to globally lower respawn rates, I doubt any area in the game would suffer because of it.”
The main thing I hate about Orr is the absolutely asinine respawn rate.
I can deal with the insane mob density; I either group up with a buddy or take it slow and steady.
I can deal with mobs CC’ing me, even though when it’s combined with the mob density, it becomes tedious as all hell. It’s just something you suck it up and bear with.
I can deal with all the waypoints being contested by just setting aside a couple hours to get any exploration or event chains done in the zones.
What I cannot deal with is fighting through 30 mobs packed into a 50×50 yard area that all CC the absolute hell out of me, only to stand on the other side 30 minutes later facing more risen in front of me and be aggro’d from behind while I’m figuring out my next move.
If I suffer through a 30 minute slog to clear from the nearest waypoint to a single skill point site, the mobs that I suffered through killing need to STAY. KITTEN. DEAD.
I will only agree with making mobs dodge AE abilities if that coding is first applied to pets and AI teammates.
Respawn rates in GW2 seem to range from “high,” to “too high,” to “that just respawned while I was still fighting it.”
I understand that GW2 is developed under the assumption that nothing solo will ever take place in any part of the game ever – an exaggeration, but given some zones (see: Orr), not an entirely inaccurate one – but I have to say that it feels really terrible to encounter an area or (not group labelled) event with respawns so fast that you can not effectively even make a dent in the mob density.
The Orr zones are the absolute worst of this (although sparse locations around the rest of the world can be just as bad – looking at you, wurm cave in Wayfarer foothills); they may as well just label pretty much the entire zone “group,” because for the majority of locales from Straits all the way to Shore, you lose all distinction between “group” and “non-group” areas and events except for a champion mob that takes forever to kill. You still need a group to do almost anything else and the primary reason for that is the absurdly fast respawn timers that don’t allow you to make progress, albeit slower progress, solo.
I have struggled through my fair share of events in the Orr zones and save for a handful of them that were surprisingly easy to do, I usually had to go through 2-3 rounds of respawns before making any progress at all. At times, I was reduced to playing dodge-the-mobs while whittling away at an event objective without even fighting because fighting was utterly pointless. At worst, it was just an endless killing cycle until more people showed up. Think the “this just respawned while I was fighting it” in the opening paragraph was an exaggeration? In Malchor the other day I was fighting a Risen Acolyte when another Risen Acolyte spawned from the exact same spawn point as the one I was fighting. I almost died because I facepalmed so hard.
On one hand, at least if you just labelled the entire zone “group,” it would actually be honest. That way you could just plaster a giant sign on the zone that says “Don’t even bother if you’re playing on a mid-low pop server during off hours” and call it problem solved.
On the other hand, high respawn timers is a really, really crappy way to induce difficulty into your game. Not only does it break any and all immersion when you try clearing an area with a high respawn rate, it also does nothing to make the difficulty actually interesting. You’re fighting the same thing you just fought, having your progress impeded not because you can’t kill something or can’t respond to a game mechanic, but because of a raw numbers issue that likely stems from gear, lack of people, and/or not being talented pure glass cannon.
When your game mechanic actually makes difficulty boring, you need to reevaluate your game mechanic.
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*I know I talk mostly about the Orr zones, but respawns really are too high in pretty much every area of the game. The Orr zones, along with a handful of other locations, are just the locations where it transcends “annoyance” into “I’ve been fighting respawns in this same location for 15 minutes.”
I’m going to open with a statement of pure fact. It’s harsh, but I think adequately reflects the current state of a particular game system:
Your teammate/pet AI is utterly terrible.
I’m not trying to be derogatory, I’m sure that programming good AI companion is far more difficult than I could ever possibly conceive of – if it’s even possible at all before the singularity hits and we have AIs smarter than we are. Instead of looking at this as a bash on the game devs, I’d rather look at it as a simple limitation of game mechanics: Your AI sucks and is going to suck. Just accept it and balance the game without the assumption that you will get help from the AI.
Far and away, the best example I can submit of why the AI sucks is the Risen Abomination. This mob class is immune to CC and has a charge attack that stacks Frenzy whenever it lands on something. Watching a Risen Abomination – especially the champion variety – stack Frenzy on a pack of your AI teammates and/or your pet while you stare, helpless to do anything and knowing full well he’s coming after you once he’s gotten some obscene damage and attack speed multiplier, is frustrating as absolute hell.
Face it, Guild Wars is a game that tries to combine action-y elements into an MMO format. Combat movement, damage avoidance, dodge rolling at opportune times – all of these are not just optional mechanics, they’re flat out required to play GW2 well and, depressingly, AI teammates do none of these things.
The solution, in my mind, is rather simple to put down in words, albeit far more complicated in detail. Stop balancing the game around the assumption that the AI helps out. Stop spawning hordes of mobs on us and our AI buddies assuming the AI is going to pick up some of the slack. Stop pinging mob mechanics like Frenzy stacks off AI characters. Stop punishing me for your inability to program a good AI teammate, no matter how reasonable your failure to do so is.
I don’t mind having the squadmates there. They add to the flavor, to the immersion. Unfortunately, that flavor and immersion is ruined when your success is balanced around their aptitude and they seem incapable of getting their pants off their heads from dressing themselves in the morning. Even though I’m sure sphincter clenching and teeth gnashing over the idiocy of your squadmates adds a certain level of realism to the combat of Guild Wars, I think that’s one bit of realism that I can do without.
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A related topic is Ranger pets. As a ranger, I feel as if I should enjoy having my faithful pet at my side. And yet, most of the time I feel more like stringing it up and having a barbeque would be a more effective use of it.
My pet also doesn’t respond to mechanics (the F3 recall is far too unresponsive to avoid a lot of mob mechanics in a game where I have a half second or less to dodge-roll them if I want to avoid them myself). Further, if I leave it on Guard it often decides to run off God knows where, pulling who knows how many mobs in the process, and thus I am forced to keep it perpetually on Avoid Combat and send it in with F1 every time I target switch.
I’d love to use a devourer pet (they’re ranged and have awesome durability), but I cannot. Why? Because if anything looks at it wrong, it goes scuttling underground 20 yards back regardless of where it’s standing or what’s behind it and I have absolutely 0 control over when and where it uses this ability other than to tank every mob myself (unfeasible, given pets’ innate threat generation).
And best of all, it utterly baffles me when this happens, but occasionally my pets will decide that they feel like standing about 30 yards in front of my current position. Why? Apparently I didn’t shower in the morning or something – I have no clue. But they’ll sure stand out there. They’ll continue standing out there even when I switch my pets back and forth (now on a complimentary 20 second cooldown even out of combat – thank you so much for that, by the way). They’ll stand out there until I at least enter combat again, which is definitely going to happen given that I now have a aggro beacon preceding my every motion by 30 yards.
I don’t want to feel like my pet is a ball and chain that I begrudgingly have to deal with to play my class. If I wanted to feel responsible for dragging a drooling moron through game content against his will, I’d go pug a dungeon or play some WvW. Please don’t make me hate my own pets’ existences. Just give them some AE resistance (or make F3 a dodge button rather than a recall or something), make it stand right beside me when not in combat, give me control over abilities that are obviously going to function terribly if left up to their AI (devourer retreat thing) and maybe add in a pet AI scheme that just consists of attacking my current target and doing pretty much nothing else.
I have yet to be absolutely stonewalled on any story quest as a Ranger (up to the level 77 story quest at the moment), but I would like to echo three specific comments made already in the thread:
1)Random Fluctuations of Difficulty
2)Cheap Deaths due to (1)
3)Utterlykitten AI
(1) and (2) kinda go hand in hand. I can handle a hard game. I even like the occasional groin-kicking challenge, but what is necessary when you make something hard is that you make it consistently hard. The problem with a lot of the PvE side of GW2 is that the difficulty is nowhere close to consistent. A lot of the time you’re going along as a veritable demi-god that nothing can touch and then some random mob – possibly not even a Champion – drops out and just wrecks your face in. It doesn’t feel like a good challenge, it just feels like the devs were thinking to themselves “lol, watch this sucker.”
(1) and (2) also tie in with (3), as a LOT of the difficulty I’ve noticed in the latter levels of story quests has come from a quest clearly balanced around you having an AI squad at your back…and that AI squad having the collective IQ of my shoe. They pull random mobs, they behave stupidly in relation to AE and mob mechanics, they either never seem capable of holding aggro or else they hold aggro, but die in 2 hits.
As a stark example of everything wrong with your AI squadmates, words cannot describe watching a Risen Abomination stacking frenzy on a pack of your AI teammates. You know if you let frenzy stack too high, he’s going to utterly destroy you, but you can do literally nothing about it because you can’t get your AI buddies to move, the Abom is immune to CC, and all it takes is a couple of his charge attacks to have frenzy high enough that you’re going to be kiting like a scared cat lest you get one-shot by him looking at you wrong.
(edited by Inune.6214)