Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

ronpierce.2760:

Evan Lesh.3295:

What about Ranked do you want?
Is it standard models?
The type of matchmaking?
Is it the map selection? Now that the maps are updated, is this still an issue?
Do you want to climb the ladder until the the season resets?

The ladder and match making would be nice.

I feel like 24/7 ladder would create a lot of burnout. Plus there wouldn’t be time for big balance patches to settle before the season starts.

Regarding matchmaking, it seems that two camps are developing. What about ranked matchmaking do you prefer over unranked?

I’ve been playing a lot of League of Legends lately, and they have a really developed update/balance cadence which I think would be worth taking a look at as a potential model.

The ladder is constantly “on” with big changes being previewed on their Public Beta Environment, which is always 1 step ahead of the “live” patch. Competitive play lags behind slightly (for example, the current live patch is 6.8, which just dropped – while the LCS finals were on, the pros played on 6.6 while the rest of the live game was on 6.7).

I simply mention this because I think some sort of staggered patch structure like this would be one way to address your concern about metas developing. On the other hand, constantly having a reason to give your best may help the meta settle faster; as it is now, unranked really isn’t worth playing because of rewards and the pool of players is really small, so there’s very little variability in the sorts of matches you get (either you get stomped or run away with the win).

As old as Guild Wars 2 is (almost 4 years!), the competitive scene is really just getting started, and I think it’s worth ANet’s while to look at some successful esports games to get an idea of how to work around this problem. sPvP has huge potential to be fun and interesting imo, but it currently feels lacking; I think some of it has to do with population and numbers, and some of it has to do with the fact that the established cadence relies on this “turning off ranked” period which I think most players agree isn’t good for the game’s growth as a potential esport.

As an aside, not related to ranked vs unranked, most of the esports I find interesting always have an element of persistence between matches that makes games and matchups interesting. In League of Legends, it’s the pick & bans of the draft mode where a metagame really flourishes over the course of a series. In Counter Strike, it’s the economy and how it becomes an important focus over the course of 15 rounds. DotA2, Overwatch, etc all share these elements. Currently, Guild Wars 2 lacks something like this “series metagame” as all teams blind pick what they want to play (with some idea as to their matchup) and just go at it. The series metagame potential is fairly low, imo, and as a spectator that might not be deep into the game, the choices players make seem to be related more to a developer dictated meta, rather than due to the matchup or series ahead. Part of this, I think, has to do with the fact that the trait system is fairly obtuse for players that aren’t already fairly engaged in the game.

The only constructive idea I had that might move GW2 this way (and it’s super not hashed out) is to simulate a sort of “Draft” mode for teams going into a match “lock-in” one member at a time that the other team can see – this way there is much more potential for a series metagame to evolve – which would probably mean a Bo5 series might make more sense than Bo3. I think this approach does a better job of surfacing the importance of traits and builds and makes it a central part of how a team builds for the match ahead. As I said, it’s not very well thought out, but a start.

Curious as to what changes are in store for fractals.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I wanted to check with you folks who have had purchase issues today:

• Are you using PayPal?
• Are you getting a “failed transaction” type of message from PayPal?
• Do you then get the gems, anyway? Perhaps multiple times if you tried more than once?

Thank you!

Yes. I tried to purchase gems twice using PayPal – both were failed transactions. I then purchased gems on my credit card. It seems the PayPal transactions went through anyway. I now have a lot of gems.

Ticket #2105978

Draknar.5748:

Things that people claimed weren’t casual friendly pre-HoT:

Fractals (3 mini dungeons plus a boss?! I don’t have time for that I play 20min a day, I’m casual!)
Dungeons (I can’t get into a group because I don’t have zerk gear and I don’t speedrun! I’m casual!)
World completion (why do we have to do WvW for world completion, I’m casual, I don’t like PvP!)
Story-mode finale (I need a group to finish the story?! what the heck Anet! I’m too casual for that!)
Living Story S1 (these LS events are timed?! You’re saying I can’t do all of the achievements within the 2 weeks if I only play 10min a day?! I’m casual, wtf ANET!
Living Story S2 (wtf Anet, I didn’t log in when these were released because I’m super casual, and now you want me to grind gold so I can trade for gems? I’m casual! I don’t have the time nor money to do this!)
Dailies (Whoa, Anet, look at how long it’s taking to do these dailies! And I have to do it to get laurels?! I’m only on for 2min a day! I can’t possibly get all of this AP that you are forcing me to get! Make it casual friendly!)

I think a lot of people think that casual friendly means everything needs to be able to be completed quickly or easily. A casual player does not imply a bad player, it implies someone that plays at their own, typically slow, pace. Being able to do things at your own pace: that’s the definition of being casual friendly.

In GW2 you can do literally everything at your own pace (minus holiday events, as those are time limited). That is casual friendly. Raids is the only area that I would say has the biggest obstacle to casual players, and that’s getting a 10man group together.

I’d love to hear what exactly in GW2 you couldn’t do at your own, casual, pace.

If something takes a long time, it doesn’t mean it isn’t casual friendly, it just means it will take longer to complete, but it can still be 100% casual.

People claimed crafting legendaries wasn’t casual, but I can assure you I crafted two from scratch, casually, over the course of 2 years. Some days I felt like working towards a requirement, some days I didn’t. I dictated the pace I completed things. THAT IS CASUAL.

If only I could give you reddit gold for this.

I don’t particularly understand the elitism complaint. This kind of stuff already happens without a DPS meter: ping your insights, GW2E your character, AP requires, etc.

It’s really a way to making sure everyone you bring into a group is on the same page about getting things done. Frankly, a chat log API for both chat and combat would be a huge benefit to the game. Primarily, it gives players the opportunity to improve their own play, as well as potentially log and save fun stories they create together.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hello Ren,

Thanks for posting this on the forums, for as I explained in response to your PM, I get a lot of PMs and I think it’s nearly always most productive to answer questions on the forums, where the information is helpful to all players.

I have asked about the “husk blocking” situation twice. Here was my question:

• Is husk blocking or reflecting eggs on Triple Trouble an exploit or is it okay to do?

Here are the precise answers that I have received:

1. Yes. The fight in its current state is as intended, and skills/objects that can be reflected are intended.
2. It’s okay. It still requires some skill to time and block those things, and it has become the evolved strategy on Live.

So there are you answers, and I hope they are helpful to you and other players.

Thank you for the answer. It is nice to hear official word over the ephemeral “I heard from a dev” assertions.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Jacobbs.9468:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Interestingly enough, some people use deposit, but don’t use compact. So having them combined would kitten some people off. Not me, since I do typically hit one and then the other when I’m cleaning inventory (unless I’m sorting), but I have seen / do know people that don’t use both options intentionally.

They should be separate buttons, there’s room up there.

Wasn’t positive that was what you were going for. I suppose I’m fine with that, although I don’t really care about the extra click personally.

Yea it’s not a fuss over all, but it is an “extra” click.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Interestingly enough, some people use deposit, but don’t use compact. So having them combined would kitten some people off. Not me, since I do typically hit one and then the other when I’m cleaning inventory (unless I’m sorting), but I have seen / do know people that don’t use both options intentionally.

They should be separate buttons, there’s room up there.

Why aren’t compact & deposit all materials buttons in the inventory panel beside the gear? There’s space there for it, and they’re a one click -> result action.

https://twitter.com/simmonli/status/631845230149419008

[edit] they should be separate buttons, guess I’m not super clear.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Stormcrow.7513:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Stormcrow.7513:

By the time the meta data is analyzed, the raid material constructed and the content is released, there will be other games more interesting.
AKA Too little too late.

Yes Storm perhaps your right. Maybe we should not discuss raiding at all or any other evolution of the game for that matter.

Or perhaps we should have a think about the impact that CDI has had across all aspects of the game in what can only be described as a swift manner in development terms.

So why am I taking the bait? Because it is an opportunity once again to make a few things clear. CDI is of a massive benefit to the team and community, but if you don’t believe that then you don’t have to be part of it. But please don’t bring others down because your thoughts differ from theirs.

And to be clear this is in reference to a number of folks posting in the thread and not just you.

Finally the CDI is a dev tool and if folks cannot respect that and find it difficult to be collaborative and valuable in this kind of design environment then they will have their oppurtunitu to be part of the initiative taken away from them. Of course they will still be allowed to give their opinion elsewhere on the forums but not in the CDI.

In the Design Dept. we have three golden rules:

1: Postive attitude toward problem solving is a key requisite of a great designer.
2: collaboration is king
3: Respect for others is paramount.

Hopefully it isn’t to much of a stretch therefore to see how I also believe these tenants to be true for the CDI.

Thanks,

Chris

To be fair Chris, people have been waiting for over 2 years for end game raiding content.
I am sure you can understand the apathy and frustration that people have from that long of a wait.
I love GW2, I really do. The problem is the lack of new and exciting content.
I am wholeheartedly looking forward to the CDI and raid content in general but currently, the game(for me and probably others) has become stagnant.
I would rather have better monster AI and mechanics rather than the same stack and smack zerg raids anyday.
I hope that in the end the CDI helps Anet form a plan that the user base will find fun and entertaining.

Awesome. And I respect what you are saying.

The Raid CDI is going to be great and I look forward to doing into it with you Storm.

Chris

The CDIs are a great way for you guys to interact with us, but I strongly believe (and this is no shot at you specifically) that it will be much too little, much too late. While GW2 seems to be doing well trying to serve its current prime markets, I really think that management dropped the ball putting so much stock into Living Season 1 at the expense of any progress for the game.

While I may (and I hope I am) be wrong about the lack of progress we have seen since LS Season 1 has slowed down, I believe that a lot of the people that are bored with this game are so jaded because there is just a stonewall when we try to ascertain where Guild Wars 2 is headed in the medium to long term. Living Story Season 2 has had its great moments, especially as far as potentially compelling end game content is concerned,The dragon fight was amazing. I keep hoping Living Story Season 2 will culminate in another world boss event a la wurm. It feels like a pipe dream on my part, and I wish it didn’t feel that way.

Vayne.8563:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Good Evening,

A couple of things.

1: The next phase of the CDI will be delayed until this weekend or Monday due lack of available time on my part.
2: whilst I am very much looking forward to the raid discussion and chatting with you all about it I do want to make it clear that this last CDI has been excellent, with maturity and collaboration throughout. So to be clear unnecessary comments about ‘True Gamers’, ‘Elitists’ and ‘Dress Up Players’ won’t be tolerated.

I just want to make this clear so we can all have a healthy discussion and design out a Raid System proposal that is born out of GW2’s core mechanics, personality and community passion.

Looking forward to having a great discussion with you all.

Chris

Thanks for this. I really can’t stand people judging other people as “real” gamers, or carebears because they prefer one aspect of games to others. It’s demeaning and unnecessary.

Glad to see it won’t be tolerated in the raiding thread.

I strongly believe that the respect you speak of runs both ways. There are players that want some challenging, instanced raid content, but we just get called elitists and that’s that.

I’m in TTS, and we’ve been called elitists despite our open recruiting policy. We have a few simple rules to abide by: 1) rep when you do world events with us, 2) we ask that you get on TeamSpeak for Triple Trouble because of the nature of the fight (and we always explain everything for those that are joining us who are new – TS makes this much faster and easier) and 3) be nice to people. I don’t see how these rules make us elitist, but haters gunna hate.

Bottom line: the want for challenging content does not automatically mean that we want to exclude people from content in the game.

Zaklex.6308:

You’ll never see a roadmap like that because the A.net communication policy is not to talk about speculation on what they might be doing but only on things that are completed and ready for consumer consumption aka release.

And players like us don’t see any direction the game is going to. It doesn’t help that they massively oversell the Living Story content as well.

It’s a shame, I think Anet could do much better on the communication front, but hey – I’m just a player.

Peachy Keene.9215:

Jacobbs.9468:

Peachy Keene.9215:

There have been pretty much non-stop posts in this thread all day and yet the last “feedback” we got was 19 hours ago. Where are the devs?

Having lunch, duh!

I guess it’s taking a little longer than usual because they only wanted a couple of sandwiches but had to buy 400 of them.

And they got their change back in condiment packages.

Peachy Keene.9215:

There have been pretty much non-stop posts in this thread all day and yet the last “feedback” we got was 19 hours ago. Where are the devs?

Having lunch, duh!

I should add, an element of PS2’s road mapping that is completely missing in GW2’s CDIs is any tangible progress or timeline. In short: CDIs lack concreteness that PS2’s roadmap has.

Notice how all of the posts in the roadmap forum have a month in which the team plans on embarking on those specific challenges. Guild Wars 2 CDI posts are nebulous in that regard and fail to provide a sense that the team is focusing on specific issues. I should also mention that the scale of the roadmap posts in PS2 have been retuned. A lot of the older roadmap posts had timelines much longer than the ones currently on the table, and also had more ambitious changes laid out.

It is hard to articulate the difference, but the roadmap posts for PS2 seem to be much more tangible than the Guild Wars 2 CDI threads. This, I think, heavily relates to the amount of energy I perceive to be invested in the CDI threads relative to the roadmap threads in PS2. To be sure, SOE drives the conversations in the Roadmap posts by putting up what they consider to be major issues in the game, but let the community provide feedback and suggest changes. For CDIs, ANet does not seem to drive the conversation, but rather provide general parameters for a broad and nebulous discussion.

In effect, a roadmap-like feature would force the development team at ANet to really focus on concrete problems, rather than blow smoke up the GW2 community’s butt.

Is there some sort of internal road map for development? As far as I can tell, the development unit gets specific quarterly directives on what the business side needs (ie, focus on new box sales) and just does that for the remainder of the quarter. Of course, I know there are large gaps to this story, but ANet has not given me faith that anything other than the above strategy is how they approach Guild Wars 2’s future. Is there a longer term framework at work for growing Guild Wars 2, both in terms of its game world and its player base?

Planetside 2, for example, released a public road mapping forum quite early in its development which helped to massage user expectations, but also helped to make sure the game was connected with its community. While there has been some disappointment over the pace at which new content is coming out, they seem to be doing relatively well with a fairly public and transparent approach. (Here is a link for those that are curious: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?forums/roadmap.59/) This allows the game to actually show users the kinds of progress they are making in terms of development as well as give users a general sense of where the game is looking to head. Of course, these roadmap posts for PS2 have raised expectations (and perhaps sometimes unreasonably), but the system has been great to make sure that many of the stakeholders for the game’s success at least feel like they are being heard.

As far as Guild Wars 2 is concerned, the community has no idea what is down the pipe at all, or even what ANet considers to be development objectives in both the near term and long term. There is incredible excitement and energy in the Guild Wars 2 community, but it is currently not being harnessed well by your public relations team at all – which relates to the fundamental problem of development and progress. The game has not seemingly moved forward in any direction for veteran players and there are no plans on the horizon to keep us at all engaged. There was a job posting for a Raid designer recently, and everyone went nuts. The CDI for raids is coming up, but CDIs really don’t mean anything, it seems. There is no stated goal to the CDIs other than to try and get a pulse on the community. The expectation management your community team does is non-existent. So we see a raiding CDI and the job post and we think “HOLY kitten RAID CONTENT SOON!” Rather, all it would take is a simple, vague timeline a, la: “We do plan on adding end game content, which is why we have/will hire/d a raid designer. We expect the preliminary stages of raid content planning to be underway by Q2 of 2015 with tangible end game content being released in Q1-2016/Q2-2016. This timeline is, of course, subject to change based on the challenges we will face along the way.” This way, your player base knows, vaguely, what is coming down the pipeline and (I know this is dangerous), can hold you accountable for delivery. We want the game to be a success as much as you do, but you have to give us something to work with.

As it stands, I feel that Guild Wars 2 is no longer making any productive progress and I do not see much from ANet to the contrary.

I have 4 level 80 characters I do not play regularly because they are hamstrung by these trait changes. Any word on this?

Jacobbs.9468:

Skins are only so large of a market, and ANet is milking the crap out of it for lack of actual content to serve veteran players. Listen, at the end of the day everyone in this thread would probably buy an expansion. I just don’t understand why ANet is so intent on keeping the game in homeostasis and trying to grow the game on the Gem Store.

Yes, I am quoting myself. I wanted to be clear: I’m not claiming this is what ANet has set out to do, this is how it feels to me as a player.

It seems the bottom line is this: we want to support ANet, but there doesn’t seem to be any drive in the company to actually serve long-time customers by giving us content that we can purchase and enjoy.

Skins are only so large of a market, and ANet is milking the crap out of it for lack of actual content to serve veteran players. Listen, at the end of the day everyone in this thread would probably buy an expansion. I just don’t understand why ANet is so intent on keeping the game in homeostasis and trying to grow the game on the Gem Store. Was is bad project management vis-a-vis the budget? So now ANet is in the position of having to finance any substantial development work through, essentially, quarter-on-quarter gem store revenue? Because that seems outlandish to me as someone with fairly little business experience. Why would a company of ANet’s calibre not save or re-invest a portion of box-sales (especially when the game was fresh) for potential franchise or content expansions? I mean, it seems in the first year of the living story that ANet did manage this, but they didn’t manage to save up much money from that whole ordeal, so Living Story season 2 is much more spaced out and reliance on the gem store has increased.

It seems as though ANet’s business model has failed to cultivate long-term success and thus there is a huge focus on the near-term.

lordkrall.7241:

Jacobbs.9468:

maybe people come back because they think to themselves “let’s see if ANet got it right this time” only to be disappointed time and time again?

Which would suggest that they turned up with every update, and yet they only turn up with updates that have controversial changes.

The past few major updates have had controversial changes.

lordkrall.7241:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Why funny? These people clearly have a passion for the game or they wouldn’t even bother. I think it’s kind of sad… they want the game to go in a good direction and may even want to give anet money, which is why they stick around despite what are arguably terrible changes.

But that is just the thing. They aren’t sticking around. They are coming back as soon as there is a new big thing to hate. When there are no new things to hate on they are very quiet and you more or less never see them post anything at all. But as soon as something controversial turns up they start posting like mad.

maybe people come back because they think to themselves “let’s see if ANet got it right this time” only to be disappointed time and time again?

Extremely disappointed with the direction of the game. I was involved with GW2 since before the beta, but it failed to captivate me then, came back for 4 months to give it a chance – after burning through the newer content (revamped Tequatl, Triple Trouble, Aetherpath), I find nothing appealing about GW2.

Perhaps it’s time for ANet to focus on veteran player retention, but given the release history and the recent focus on the Chinese market, I don’t expect veteran player retention efforts to begin in earnest until Q2 2015.

Rikimaru.7890:

Since Halloween is returning then it most likely means the Clock Tower too.
So let me guess the first time reward:
errr hmmm is it a pair of gloves that will look just like some other generic gloves, without the rest of the suit?
Or maybe the developers will try to be “original” by making it a backpiece this time?

But seriously now, since there will probably be new weapon skins too, then why not make it a single weapon skin of our choice?
Or if it has to be armour then make it a whole set. Now I’m not saying a whole set in one go, but a single piece each day.
The reward will be soulbound anyway so I see no reason not to.

Unlocks would be too confusing for many players – they’ll put it in the gem store instead.

VodCom.6924:

Jacobbs.9468:

maha.7902:

Astralporing.1957:

maha.7902:

Just as a reminder to everyone. When ANet added the mechanic to the champion wraith in the grenth temple which drained everything in an AOE and it had to be CC’d to stop it, literally every time without fail for weeks on end nobody would CC and there would be a massive wipe.

Well, besides the normal quality of average players, Anet did forget here that Defiant in bigger player groups makes interrupting on demand practically impossible.

It had the base defiant that bosses in dungeons have. I’m pretty sure 10% of a 60-man zerg can CC a boss with defiant on.

Defiance scales by how many players are around it, iirc. In 80+ zergs, it will likely stack to 77. So you require at least 78 hard CCs to consistently remove stacks of defiance and interrupt again.

I saw the wraith being interrupted more than once, often without anyone even realizing that they should spam cc skills. They acted the way they are used to without trying to understand. You know what ? It worked.

It appears that in a giant zerg people don’t just spam 1: they button smash everything, resulting in much more cc being used that you can imagine.

Yea, it probably worked. It’s actually a problem when Defiance has to actively be managed, like during Triple Trouble. I can not tell you how many times I’ve peeled off 2 stacks of defiance, about to peel the third when someone pulls it off so my peel ends up reapplying the entire stack of 3. Very frustrating.

maha.7902:

Astralporing.1957:

maha.7902:

Just as a reminder to everyone. When ANet added the mechanic to the champion wraith in the grenth temple which drained everything in an AOE and it had to be CC’d to stop it, literally every time without fail for weeks on end nobody would CC and there would be a massive wipe.

Well, besides the normal quality of average players, Anet did forget here that Defiant in bigger player groups makes interrupting on demand practically impossible.

It had the base defiant that bosses in dungeons have. I’m pretty sure 10% of a 60-man zerg can CC a boss with defiant on.

Defiance scales by how many players are around it, iirc. In 80+ zergs, it will likely stack to 77. So you require at least 78 hard CCs to consistently remove stacks of defiance and interrupt again.

Guild Halls should be guild instanced, with the option of creating an inter-alliance meeting area. I think that it would be silly to have open world guild halls, because you then have to deal with a number of technical challenges that are bypassed with the instanced guild hall.

Coming from a large guild community (TTS has 12 guilds), while I would prefer for guild halls to be open world, the sheer size of our community makes this a challenge, especially if we’re going to be capping guild halls at the current map cap (roughly 150). We regularly run 4 maps for Tequatl, and 2 maps for wurm. Back of the napkin maths suggests we deal with at least 300 players every night. Would open world guild halls be able to sustain that many people? Because if not, I see no advantage to the open world guild hall vs the instanced.

The only reason open world guild halls would make sense if they are created in the context of alliances and are able to sustain and have many more players than the current instance limit. That way, for example, it would be possible for TTS to gather all raiders in our guild halls and load up maps from there. (I’m hoping, though I haven’t had confirmation, that guild instances of maps will be a thing soon. TTS gets a lot of flak about the way we flood/pick and choose maps, and a guild instance would be the best, though it means disconnecting us from the GW2 community at large).

Seems like it was the result of poor branch management. I do think, however, that this is not a priority for a lot of people because the thread doesn’t get very many replies.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

I say leave it where it is in terms of difficulty but have the completion of the objective have a significant chance of dropping a precursor.

We need some impossi-hard in this game.

That would mean guilds that kill the wurm regularly would be rolling in precursors. I am in one of those guilds, so I personally wouldn’t object – but it’s not a workable solution.

loseridoit.2756:

Taury.7108:

Here we go again. The only boss in the game that is actually challenging and people are asking for nerfs? Do you want another zerg 11111 afk boss? Don’t we have enough of those already?
And to those people complaining about other guilds organising it? really? You do realise that those people take time of their life to organise 150 people in order for you to get the achievements, and they ask for absolutely nothing in return?
Also what is this talk about this event being exclusive? I have never joined a wurm guild, all I do is hop on TS like the rest of their members and usually i either end up in one of their maps as they coordinate a jump, or I always find some friendly soul who is willing to taxi me in (usually taxis are announced in abundance in TS).

With that said however, I do agree that there is no incentive to do the event beyound completing the achievements and getting the titles. So I’d welcome higher reward for this event more than anything else.

open world raid is challenging?

https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/31112-why-40-man-raids-are-a-bad-idea/

I would say the most challenging part is managing the bureaucracy, manpower, and group drama.

GW2’s RNG loot system side steps a lot of potential loot drama that games like WildStar and WoW have to deal with.

Kitiara.2706:

Branden Gee.2150:

Huh, I can see how it would be frustrating for it to restart the spinning. Perhaps there is a happy middle ground where it starts out spinning then once you move the camera it stops.

That would be an amazing compromise. PLEASE!

To echo, this is the behaviour that was in the game from the date of the listed patch note above and the September feature pack. Since September, it’s been reverted to the behaviour it had at release.

Is there any news on this?

kokuou.9537:

Branden Gee.2150:

Huh, I can see how it would be frustrating for it to restart the spinning. Perhaps there is a happy middle ground where it starts out spinning then once you move the camera it stops.

As many people have now pointed out, the ‘happy middle ground’ you mention was how it worked previous to the Feature Patch and was actually implemented because players hated how it worked in the first place (as it is now, having been reverted).
While I am a bit baffled that a gameplay programmer would be unaware of this fact, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, but I still think we are owed a proper explanation as to why the ‘dead camera’ behaviour was changed back after being fixed and when we can expect it to be put back the way it was before the Feature Patch.

Yep, this reversion seemed to sneak in. My guess is that it has something to do with not quite on the ball branch management.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Here is the patch note from March 26, 2013:

• Automatic camera rotation while defeated will no longer restart after the camera is moved.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-March-26-2013/first#post1856151

So, I’m confused about why there would be a middle ground. Just re-enable the previous feature that was ‘broken’ in the patch.

This, 10x over.

I did a thread search and was not able to find this suggestion, but it would be fantastic to be able to post a guild bulletin. For running a guild that doesn’t have 100% representation, it can sometimes be a pain in the kitten to manually whisper people not representing at that moment about some event that is currently going on. It would be nice if it were possible to send out a guild bulletin (through the mail system, or through a “guild whisper”) that would notify everyone in the guild with some message.

Of course, this system would have to be tuned so that it wouldn’t be annoying in terms of the frequency, etc. but it would be a helpful subsystem to have for larger guilds that are not 100% rep.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Jacobbs.9468:

Beyond that, it’s not like Celestial is super desirable anyway, so I don’t understand why it’s all account bound.

Before Magic Find became account-bound, the celestial stats included an MF bonus, so they were very very desirable at the time. Maybe that is one reason why it was implemented this way.

Secondly, it gave us all a reason to mine 25+ quartz a day in the Labyrinthine Cliffs during the first release, that was before we had home instance quartz nodes.

Beyond the first Zephyrite release, it is still giving us something to do: Sure, many times it would be more convenient to have something available instantly instead of having to do stuff for it. A button saying “complete all dailies instantly” would be clicked by almost everybody. But I personally enjoy it more when I have to work at least a little for what the game gives me. For instance, running around Tyria and picking up spoons from karma vendors is many times more fun to me than buying all ogre weapons from the trading post.

All time-gating results in a number of players to log back on to GW2 daily, which is, of course, desired by ANet from a business point of view.

So much for the “why would they do that”.

Now why is it such a big deal? I crafted a celestial armor set back when it was released, and I didn’t suffer that much from not having it available on the first day. If you just mine your home instance nodes and charge a crystal daily, you’ll get there sooner rather than later. And you’ll feel satisfaction and happiness every time you craft one of your items, which is better than just feeling it once when you buy a complete set on the trading post.

Thanks for the info, really could do without the tone though.

I’m currently in the market for some Celestial exotic armor. Why is Charged Quartz account bound and time gated? From my perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. I could understand one or the other, but both? It causes the the Celestial Insignias and Inscriptions to be relatively inaccessible. Not to mention it means their availability is inconsistent with the other Insignias and Inscriptions. Beyond that, it’s not like Celestial is super desirable anyway, so I don’t understand why it’s all account bound.

Can someone explain this to me? I feel like, currently, if the market were to put a price on Charged Quartz, the price of the Grow Lamp would be impacted (downward) – and not much else that I can think of. Am I missing something? Was charged quartz important for something in S1 that necessitated time gating and account bound?

Or maybe presursor crafting will take stacks of charged quartz?? That’s really the only other reason I can think of.

Wondering if the Commander Tag is meant to be buried beneath all the other things on the mini map. I was under the impression it should be fairly visible when there were lots of icons on the mini map.

(2/2)

Here’s how I imagine it would work, and because it is an instance, the devs would be able to craft the content so that each step of the tutorial would be gated and more informative than just a popup.

For dodging, the devs could put a key behind a dodge wall which would open the next area with mobs to unlock a few weapon skills. Here, the player would be greeted with a defend event where a certain amount of mobs would spawn that would guarantee a weapon skill unlock. Once that defend event was over, the tutorial instance could introduce the weapon swap mechanic through something that would require a ranged weapon. (The assumption is that the instance would start people off with a melee or close range weapon.) “Hey, try to hit that statue over there, it looks quite far. Try to equip that long bow/staff/etc in your second weapon slot!” Once this portion of the tutorial was done, it would move the player on to a tutorial about the downed state and resurrection. After this portion was done, the tutorial could move to under water combat (just an introduction, one would assume the player would be intuative enough to figure at least some of the things taught above would apply underwater as well.) At this point, the tutorial would have to branch to cover specific class mechanics such as stealth, pets, adrenaline, initiative, shatters, etc. I have no good ideas for this part, but a good old brainstorm should solve that. Finally once the professions skills and mechanics have been introduced the game would move the new player into the game world as before. Now, the completely new player with no one to whisper for help has some idea about weapon swapping, the downed state, underwater combat, dodge and profession skills. If it were up to me (and obviously it isn’t) I would also revert the trait changes made in April and put a trait portion into this tutorial, but you can’t have it all I suppose.

This system would seem to be much better in addressing the problems that the new player experience was meant to address. Best of all, the instance itself could have an NPC that gave veterans the option to skip. “I’ve seen the world, let me out of here!” So that the experience would be optional for the people that either want to figure this all out on their own or have level 80s already. Again, I want to stress that I believe that locking skills/mechanics behind the levels doesn’t solve any of the fundamental problems stemming from the lack of a proper tutorial. I don’t understand why ANet didn’t just spend the dev resources to develop a proper tutorial, rather than this level gating stuff that makes the game more like other MMOs with arbitrary unlock points.

Feel free to add suggestions, critique my suggestion or agree with me! The more productive the conversation, the better ANet can make the experience.

(1/2)

While I applaud ArenaNet for seeking to address the problem of how potentially confusing the new player experience is, there are many things that are poorly implemented and/or missing the mark so as to make the new player experience atrociously bad.

I am a commander in the [TTS] community, and we exist, in part, to make sure that people that may not have a large enough guild can learn and participate in the larger, more complex fights that Guild Wars 2 has to offer. In short, we exist, in part, to teach. I want to start by saying this because I feel like I know a thing or two about how to teach people the mechanics in this game, I do it every night when we do our raid cycle.

Problem has always been that there is no tutorial in this game for the complex mechanics. Players old and new could level up all the way without ever explicitly being told about combos, for instance, or would not understand the importance of movement and dodge during combat because they were never introduced to it explicitly or forced to rely on dodge to survive the leveling experience. Downed state would be something players would figure out eventually because they had to, but it was still quite a jarring experience for newer players. “I’m dead, but I’m alive still? What”

In the end, I think ArenaNet was right to focus some resources on the new player experience to make sure these sorts of things are explained to the player, especially new ones that may not have any clue and (potentially) no friends in the game to whisper about these sorts of things. If anyone says that the new player experience was fine before the update, I’d wager they were already a veteran with enough time in the game to figure these things out. The obvious demographic for these changes are those new players that lack a network of friends to rely upon to learn the game, and so I will direct my critique of the new player experience with that in mind. Imagine yourself completely new to this game with no one to whisper when something confuses or baffles you. This player is (rightfully) the target of these changes.

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of my critique, there are many things that I like about the new player experience:

• The new leveling up reward interface is really cool. It feels exciting and looks fairly grand. It is also pretty explicit about what you get for getting to the new level. This is cool, no two doubts about it.
• The new rewards for leveling up (outside of base stats and unlocking skill slots) is pretty darn cool as well. Usable gear and all of that other stuff is always welcome.
• The pacing of leveling seems to have been improved at lower levels. I cannot speak to anything above level 7, but I can tell you it seems much faster up until level 7. This is a good thing for a number of reasons.

However, the major complaint about the new player experience seems to be the (over)reliance on level gating key portions of the game play. While I can understand the complaint from the point of view of veteran players (myself included), I also strongly believe that the change is counter-productive in solving the fundamental problem of the new player experience. Why do I say this? Frankly, the new player experience still does a relatively terrible job of addressing these fundamental gaps in knowledge. The route of hiding core mechanics of the game, to be unlocked or explained later, seems to me to be a poor choice for teaching these mechanics. I also believe it to be bad from a pedagogical point of view because the stepped learning may encourage bad habits that will be difficult to break later. (Elementalists not really switching attunements comes to mind, for example.)

I think a better solution would have been to implement a class specific tutorial instance, to be done after the first personal story instance. I can, in some ways, understand why this was not the route taken, as it would have taken developer resources away from other projects going on at ArenaNet whatever they may be. The tutorial instance would have been the best solution because it could explicitly introduce the mechanics in question, rather than rely on popups that people will likely just close without reading anyway. It could cover:

• Dodge
• Weapon skills
• Weapon swapping (here it makes sense to sub in attunement swapping as the teachable for elementalists – necessitating that at least two attunements be unlocked; ideally all of them would be available)
• Combo fields
• The importance of mobility and active combat
• Downed state
• Underwater combat
• Profession skills

The instance could be done for each class in the Mists so that it can share many assets (therefore minimizing resources spent – would only need logic and new assets per class). This way, each class specific version could go into details about stealth, pets, attunements, adrenaline, initiative, etc.

shadow.6174:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Party-chat-vanishes-when-leaving-party/4329687

Thanks. More threads, more visibility I guess. It is kind of dumb this is how it works though it is, at best, a minor inconvenience.

Party chat doesn’t seem to be persistent and gets removed from logs when the party is dismantled. For example, I have a tab called “Filtered” that is all chats except Map and Say and party chat is regularly missing from it when I am not in a party, even if I was in a party before. I see Guild Chat and Whispers that pre-date the chat that should be there but was through the Party channel.

Wondering if this is intended behaviour, is not new with the patch, but has been what I consider a bug for a while.

Xar.6185:

The delay is probably due to Halloween festivities / paranormal goings on throughout Tyria. (One can only hope anyway)

This also means there will likely be another break in the LS in December / January for the return of Tixx and the infiniarium for the Christmas holidays.

Personally I am ok with the delay in the LS if it is for these events.

Unless, of course, these events break the immersion of the new living story.

Shalloe.4867:

maybe its a delay because of working more on an expansion?

“Given that NCsoft’s major global peers
Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts are trading at 2014F P/Es of over 15x, the company
appears significantly undervalued. Most global PC and console game companies are expected
to suffer from stagnating margins in 2014. However, NCsoft is scheduled to launch an
expansion pack for Guild Wars 2 in the US and Europe in 2015.”

taken from
http://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/182450.pdf?attachmentId=182450

This is research analyst speculation based on what most game companies do, I think.

Vayne.8563:

phys.7689:

Vayne.8563:

Actually they may very well care what players think. But some players don’t think the changes are bad and I’m one of them. I didn’t like the initial trait changes, and think they need work. But this recent change is better for me as an altoholic.

OP, you might not understand why, but I wouldn’t want to go back to how it was. I prefer this current method (though the trait system still needs serious adjustment).

you like it because you are a collector, and like reinforcement for goals. They could have appeased you without alienating so many others though.

Actually my favorite part of the new patch so far is the new leveling experience, not the collections.

Locking weapon skills behind levels seems arbitrary. While the old system of unlocking weapon skills as you used the weapon was also fairly tedious, it made sense and I could get it done as I wanted.

There are some changes that make sense. The downed mechanic, for example, was confusing for new players – but removing it entirely was not a good idea, imo. Rather, there needs to simply be a better tutorial system where players are walked through the game mechanics.

In my head, it seems the time to revamp the story and leveling experience would have been better spent on developing new tutorial content (perhaps an intervening instance after the first story instance) that took the time to show players these mechanics. For example, the new “dodge” tutorial could have been combined with a downed tutorial, as well as an explanation of class/racial skills, the resurrection and way point systems. To save on asset creation, this could have taken place in “The Mists” so that all race/class combinations could have used the same instance. However, this would have been more time on the clock for ANet to pay for. Ultimately, how they approached the change was lazy and not forward thinking; it leaves the new experience barely any better than it was without any strong improvements.

Guhracie.3419:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

It will unlock at L60. No progress has been lost. The L48 step used to be the start of a storyline that ran from L48-L59, but they’re all now part of the L60 chapter unlock, so you don’t have to level up between every step.

You never had to level up between every step. With the new gates, you have to level up before you can see the next part of the story. This is a step forward?

Honestly, it works because the story outpaced level progression a lot previously. So what a lot of people did (myself included) leveled up to 80 and then went back to do the story. Nothing has changed, more or less, because the pacing problem exists both pre and post patch. The system we have now seems more arbitrary and restrictive than the old system, and it doesn’t fix anything.

Faaaaaaaaaaaanx – I thought I hit a waypoint or something haha.

I am a member of [TTS]. We were just on a map flagged for closure (apparently), but we didn’t get notification (at least not all of us did). My hunch is that the map was flagged for closure, but as far as we were concerned it was a relatively empty map. Lo and behold, we all taxi in and were spawning the Jungle Wurm when the map closed on us.

So what gives? Does a map marked for closure never reconsider? This seems to be the behaviour right now. As it stands, we have to burn a guild spawn to get our members the Wurm kill today (which is not a big deal considering the global guilds update), but is this working as intended? Why does the logic not consider this use-case? Obviously large communities like [TTS] will look for maps that are marked for closure to maximize the amount of usable map slots we can have for these kinds of high-organization events.

Solutions to the problem:

• Have maps flagged for closure indicate, with a persistent notification on the UI, they are slated to be shut down in x minutes
• Have maps flagged for closure periodically (every 15min or so) reconsider whether the map will close or not

Duke Nukem.6783:

Seera.5916:

Duke Nukem.6783:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think it’s fantastic that there are events that can’t be done by just any disorganized group of PUGs. There shouldn’t be a lot of these events, but there should always be a few things in the game that only appeal to a certain group, in the same that SAB has a diehard group of supporters (and is considered “meh” by the majority).

nobody is asking for the evne tto get easier, just to make it reasonable toa ttempt it, and they are PUGS that get in to the wurms, if u think the wum is actually “difficult” you are mistaken

And how is it not reasonable? I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people who are going to organize a run for Teq or Wurm to do things to ensure that most people in the area are wanting to do the event and willing to listen to and follow their instructions.

I don’t see a ton of posts in here going it fails often even when organized groups do it. It’s the content designed for organized groups. Not disorganized PUGs.

It’s part of ANet’s current answer to the we want raids crowd.

And you never answered my question earlier. What makes your dungeon groups so special that you shouldn’t be kicked because it’s your group, your rules, but when another group gets together to do group content and makes rules that you don’t like, it’s suddenly not ok for them to be immune to be kicked out of the leadership role?

we can have raid bosses w/o exclusivity, the boss will STILL require organization, this thread is merely suggesting we remove manpower as a limiting factor because individual people deserve an honest attempt

How do you propose to do this?

Final fight was a lot of fun. Once I figured out I could jump to avoid the “the floor is lava” attack, I was able to save dodges for the telegraphs which meant not dying. Died maybe 3 times? Would play again.

So, I was wondering why the swiftness it gives doesn’t stack (which makes the skill fairly useless), and was told that the skill was changed because people used to run over it to gain a crazy amount of swiftness, so they changed it so that it wouldn’t stack with Swiftness.

This, it seems to me, is not that good of a solution. Why not just give the Swiftness buff a cap time and return the skill to its former glory?

Paul Belz.7351:

Hey guys,

Just wanted to pop in and say that we are investigating the issues with the iron marches content as fast as we can so that we can get you guys back to progressing through the episode. These issues are indeed proving quite tricky to nail down (it’s not as simple as they simply won’t restart) but we are working hard to get everything addressed as quickly as possible.

Thanks for understanding and sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks for the update.