On pets with LOS special F2 attacks with long cast time, like the Marsh Drake special, the pet should able to track your target and fire directly at them when thier cast complets, rather than aiming the attack at where the target was (and no longer is) when you pressed F2.
While reviewing my achievements in the hero achievement panel, It says I am only a handful of points away from the level 400 Artificer craft, however none of my 5 toons currently have Artificer active. How do I tell which character can switch back to it, and how do we do that.
Totally agree about the Drake F2 skills Insect Swarm and Fire Breath.
As they are now the Drake Insect Swarm and Fire Breath skill descriptions should read:
Damage is directed to where a mob was when the pet started the cast, resulting in mostly misses unless the target is a training dummy.
Drake power attacks, Insects Swarm and Fire Breath hit hard IF they land, but…
They only land if the target does not move which might be only 10% of the time in PVE and 0% in PVP.
Useless skill in PVP and marginal in PVE.
Shame they continue to overlook this broken skill.
You guys really need to hire someone who knows how to deliver mass patches.
My internet speed tests out fine, but your downloader for todays patch crawls along at 1 to 151 KB/s.
One thing you can say for Blizzard and WOW is they know how to deliver decent patch download speeds.
Please do better as it is I can’t play yet.
I took a break from the game, and having recently returned, one thing that stands out to me that I don’t remember seeing before is open world enemy NPC’s using profession skills effectively in combat. I notice the Lake Doric area has lots of Mesmer NPCs that use quite a few mesmer skills against you when you fight them.
Is this new? Are there other open world NPCs using other profession skills in combat?
That whole area of the map looks like unfinished business to me. It reminds me of the same northeast map corner in Hirathi Highlands. You did not go there solo unless in a group or if an event was going on just like like the temples in Orr.
I would not be surprised if the area gets further developed in later patches with events etc.
I can’t really believe they created that area and all of those mob behaviors just for a leather farm.
Getting the same message:
Build: 71018
Error Code: 42:1000:7006:1231
While trying to download the game, it starts just fine, downloads at about 2Mps for one minute then download stops and this error message pops up.
I can hit the play button during that first minute and get online, and have been able to be online for half and hour to an hour, but the downloads always stop after 1 minute.
Since the downloads have not completed I cannot visit various zones like Lornar’s Pass etc.
I don’t trust these kinds of things.
Anyone who has ever created and run public surveys/polls, knows how easy it is to get the results you want by creative wording of questions, deciding which questions to ask, and even stacking the order of multiple choice response choices.
I think what would improve player trust in the company is knowing who there is responsible for each decision on issues of interest to players, plus regular feedback that addresses player concerns and explains the basis for controversial decisions that is fact based, and not spin. For a company that claims to have massive data collection tools in place, they should publicize more of this data instead of keeping it hidden.
(edited by Jalad Lantana.3027)
I think is is disrespectful and antagonistic to refuse to acknowledge customer input. Sit in a room with another person and never directly respond to them when they talk to you, and you will very quickly alienate the other person and turn them hostile to you.
Another way to distance yourself from any other social entity is to hide your identity and responsibilities. Decisions come down and customers have no idea what person or persons at your company is responsible for them. The contributes to stacking the deck against yourselves in terms of building a trusting relationship with customers.
The lenghts some of your company proclamations go to obfuscate who the decision makers are related to specific issues that are controversial with players is astounding. Almost everything is attributed to a global “We” as if every employee there was involved in reaching a consensus based decision.
You have built a very closed and insulated social unit that purposefully avoids communication based on facts, and specializes in one way communication based on spin.
[quote=2944053;Thrumdi.9216:]
If they want to take the buff away they have to split up.
Total points at the end of the week are almost totally decided by coverage.
Coverage means server 1 has more and larger zergs, and… wait for it, more and better roamers.
The Bloodlust control points are decided most of the time by roamer type players who prefer that kind of spvp type play on an open map.
Maybe occasionally a zerg will stop doing a karma train and wipe a few Bloodlust control points, but day in and day out, those are decided by the roamer population of each world.
If your words has better coverage, that coverage extends to roamers and roamers decide bloodlust points.
On the other hand, if the weak servers don’t put in the effort in communicating and organizing, then they deserve to lose.
That’s how I see it.
99% of getting points in this competition is decided by coverage, not skill or tactics or organization. Skill might come into the equation, but only in matches where coverage is close to equal, which by all observation is rare due to the population/participation imbalance between stacked worlds and the worlds that have been deflated due to players leaving to stack further up the ladder.
I have seen this kind of dynamic in other MMOs and games.
The producer gets fixated on a particular design choice and will ignore everything, even declining player bases and declining income just to stick to their guns.
If WvW participation numbers go down, they will just downplay it and write it off with some BS like ‘the whole market is depressed’ etc. This happens even when other companies, like Rockstar are raking in billions and out-earning Hollywood movies.
When it gets to the point of the developers switching to “I can’t hear your” and broken record mantras ‘here are some more features you never asked for’ you know it’s done.
Enjoy the slide downhill.
The basic design of WvW is fubar, and fixing it means a serious re-write.
You could look at it from day one, and tell what was going to happen. Transferring to a T1 server would meant guaranteed wins 80% of the time. That is exactly what has happened and continues to this day.
Perhaps it was intentional, a sort of pay to win sort of move. If you want to play on a team with a full roster instead of a near empty one, pay to transfer, otherwise we hope you enjoy testing your skills while your always outnumbered.
New players who are considering buying this game for the WvW, you need to budget a few extra bucks to transfer to a tier 1 world if you care about winning.
If you don’t like zergs, go play spvp.
Mr Carver wants WvW to be just like war, with all the misery, evil and corruption it brings. Big countries opportunistically smashing smaller ones, making WvW just like that seems to be his gig.
Enjoy playing the role of Poland in WWII or pay Mr Carver and friends for the privilege of marching with the stomper hordes.
The build on October 1st is going …
I think he meant “player stomps” and “bonus for stomps” and simply misspoke.
We all know he wants to turn WvW into a recruiting ground for spvp, which is Arenanet’s number one obsession.
I am game, though I think the biggest challenge is how to game the overflow issue.
Invite pls!
I disagree, the difficulty is just fine with the actual instance.
What is completely fubar is the game of musical overflows 80+ organized people must negotiate before they ever have a chance to start fighting as a group.
The issue is the game breaks when too many people enter a world event zone and how to game that is the primary challenge.
I applaud the difficulty of the actual encounter, but, the participation logistics are so much the opposite of what this game has striven for since day one.
Having to wait long periods, and then failing due to the catch 22 where the number required just happens to be very close to the number that triggers overflows and then the overflows are somewhat random.
I am a casual player, I did not have 6 hours a day to play map and overflow roulette.
This past week I could spend no more than 2 hours a day for three days due to real life commitments. I tried often in that time, but always got sent to overflow and every single one of them failed mainly due to the disorganization and lack of numbers there.
It’s especially nagging to me because I have not really cared for much of the Living Story content, but have waited patiently for Anet to make good on their promises of challenging content. Unfortunately many casual player like myself were shut out of this new content not because of our playing skills, but because of the logistical failures of how the event is staged adding unintended hurdles.
Unfortunately it appears, based on Arenanet’s silence so far on this fiasco, they are hoping that somehow players will self organize Beat Teq guilds where the main challenge is the logistical one of how to game the overflow situation using the quasi-legal taxi method and not the actual game play.
I think the OP is right, that while some players who were lucky to get past the logistical hurdles still enjoyed the event and will continue being available to do it, that is not the pattern we have seen with other big event type things. If all that is offered as reward is the intrinsic fun and a few one time achievements, most players will just move on in the Achievement Point race to the next 2 week content installment. They might love to do the actual fight again, but not the pre-fight game of musical overflows.
The ball is Arenanet’s court.
(edited by Jalad Lantana.3027)
Less and less GW2 in general for me.
Anet seems intent on trodding the same pvp path Funcom did with Anarchy Online.
The game had multiple modes of pvp including open world duels, group arena pvp, open world binary global faction pvp, Tower Wars (a form of open world territory control) and huge faction vs faction battles over exclusive access to raid style dungeons.
Tower wars was hugely popular and the arena pvp was not.
Funcom gradually developed an obsession with arena pvp, and started trying everything it could to force players into it. They eventually made arena pvp the most practical way to get some of the best gear in the game, which meant if you really liked Tower Wars or raids, put in time in arena pvp was the fastest way to gear up for Tower Wars.
I think Bloodlust is just the beginning of Anet’s efforts to move WvW players into spvp.
I won’t be surprised if they continue adding more spvp like features to WvW and start changing rewards so that spvp becomes the most efficient path to being competitive in WvW.
If Arenanet continues down this kind of path, I am moving on to other games.
From what I have heard, Anet devs who regularly play WvW, do so exclusively on Blackgate or one of the other two T1 servers. (Repeated threads from T1 servers mentioning Anet devs playing there) I don’t think devs even know what it is like to play on anything less than a T1 server.
Bloodlust is fun when you outnumber the other 90% of worlds. Hey look at our five man, we can wipe your T12 puny 20 man groups with impunity.
I still can’t get over Mr. Carter’s “WvW is not meant to be fair” remark.
If that’s the case, why not make spvp teams world based?
You don’t have to quit entirely to send a message, simply half the number of hours you put into the game.
I was already cutting back from PVE do to the gimmick laden, forced todo lists that the living story patches became, but this rush to make things as unfair as possible in WvW, is convincing me to find other more productive things to do with my time.
NO
This blatent attempt to turn WvW into spvp is wrong on so many levels.
The last thing this meta needs is adding buffs for full servers.
It’s that old esport Jones, clouding everyone’s minds at Anet.
The new areas look like cheesy last minute rush jobs that were hastily patched in, now the center of the map is this jumble of landscapes that make no sense and turn what was once a fairly realistic environment into gooney golf.
As I write IOJ has all three buffs and pretty much using their superior numbers to paint all the maps their color.
First we got “WvW is not supposed to be fair”, and now we get “lets make the high population worlds steamroll go even faster.”
Mr. Carter’s statement that ‘WvW is not supposed to be fair’ pretty much sums up the nature of the fail here.
Ask you self one question, why aren’t spvp teams world based? World based large scale pvp is going to be a constant series of blow-outs as long as there are significant differences in participation due to restricting teams to worlds. Your never going to have fair sports until you have even sized teams. Please show me a popular successful sport that involves uneven teams?
People need to quit crying, seriously. Even in professional sports, you have a great team that has to play an average team, or even a terrible team.
Just about every sport out there requires a set number of players on the field for each side.
This WvW system ignores the number of players fielded. It encourages and rewards players to transfer to packed worlds that can field full map quotas.
In any other sport if one team fails to field a full team, the event is either cancelled or forfeited.
Anet showed good sense by making spvp NOT server based. Rewarding points when one side cannot field a full roster is absurd.
Of course any sport based on skill, there will be winners and losers, but most sports don’t expect teams to play with uneven rosters.
The very first time I read about how WvW was supposed to work (and at the time, transfers were free for months,) it was obvious, what was going to happen was that the most competitive players would naturally head for the top servers. It could take years for that initial imbalance surge to get evened out.
It just insanity to run any sports league where the players are free to transfer teams at any time, regardless of cost to the player. The cosmetic rewards for 1st and second are immaterial and not why players transfer. Players are not transferring to the top tiers for a chance for a cheesy finisher. They are transferring to be on a world that consistently fields a full team.
They are tired of playing on teams with short rosters and being consistently outnumbered.
Imagine If major league sports teams were set up like this and matches were allowed to proceed even it one team only fielded one person.
Its no fun for the ‘winning’ team to play against a partial team. And those who experience playing on partial team are going to be highly motivated to play something else or cough up the dough to transfer to a team that can field a full team.
I think transfers either need to be free or totally prevented. Other wise it is truly pay to win or pay to not lose situation.
I think Power of the Mists needs to be awarded only to those who actually participate in WvW and perhaps be made more attractive, with things like more ‘luck’ points dropping in WvW.
It’s a very hard sell at this point to convince new PVE players on a low tier world to enter WvW.
(edited by Jalad Lantana.3027)
I think all this is going to accomplish is to lower the WvW participation rates on lower tier worlds, while bloating the top tier worlds with transfers.
This is getting ridiculous.
So many people have given up on HOD.
The gates in LA used to be packed on reset night, tonight there was barely 30 people there at reset.
IOJ is light years ahead of us participation wise.
Just spent an not so fun two hours trying to make a difference with 25 people in HOD BL only to be creamed instantly in any fights by vastly more numerous IOJ zergs.
I don’t understand how anyone at Arenanet can look at this situation and think this is a good design.
I just don’t get it. We didn’t even have the outmanned thing going.
I guess HOD has turned into PVE only server, as this BL turnout was just sad.
When I port back to LA and see it packed with people it’s even more frustrating.
If you used Arenanet’s fail logic about why unbalanced fights are good you would think they would change spvp so that matches would require that all team members be from the same world, and the matches go on even if only one person shows up for a side.
Arenanet is too proud to admit the WvW design is inherently unbalanced and that like spvp, needs to have balance if it is ever going to be successful.
They are cutting off their noses to spite their face at this point.
As Sacrx pointed out in his longer than needed rant, Arenanet sees WvW as nothing more than a funnel for casuals to somehow get sold on going into spvp which is the only thing that is a priority there.
These changes in WvW are designed to decrease WvW participation with the misguided idea that spvp will become the only choice left to players wanting something else other than PVE.
The ‘league’ is simply fancy PR spin of what already exists and a justification for even worse matchups, that and it’s a really lame excuse for not working on any WvW balance or other issues.
Instead of trying to find a solution to the problem players agree is the biggest drawback to WvW, that of lousy match ups, this BL thing pours gasoline on a burning house by rewarding steamrolling. It is clear that if a side has the resources to smother the map, they need a performance buff like a hole in the head.
It is laughable that any devs think that small groups will be able to make a difference in this proposed scenario. They obviously have never played a solid week on a bottom tier world against a world 8 to 12 tiers above them.
This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
I say no to the league and the buff, and yes to moving WvW up in status from tepid introduction for casuals to pvp with the intent of funneling them into spvp, to an end in itself that deserves more resources than it gets now.
I don’t think Anet even has a single person with WvW in their title or as their primary job responsibility.
At best it seems to be some kind of ever changing committee assignment that gets tacked on to the rookie devs plates and which they do their best to get out of as fast as possible.
Remember Anet has chosen the Zynga/Facebook/Club Penguin style of game diversity and is set on dumbing down every vestige of classic MMO play.
Just be happy they don’t shutter WvW entirely.
Thanks to Arenanet’s game design wisdom, with this matchup, (the most lopsided in the entire NA side of things this week) our 18 place world gets to meet a 10th place world.
Now I can really get good at respawning and fine tuning my knowledge of the most stealthy routes across the WvW maps.
At last a truly target rich experience!
This is really going to motivate all of our reluctant PVE folks to lend a hand!
Best learning moment from last night: While lying dead after our group of 25 got wiped by a CD group 5x our size, one of our members counted at least 25 guardians in the CD group.
Unfortunately they ran off before we could get a good count of the Necro and warrior contingents, but hey, we have a whole week ahead for more in-depth census taking while prone.
(edited by Jalad Lantana.3027)
This is the opposite of what WvW needs at the moment.
The most glaring problem with WvW is about half the worlds have low participation while the structure of the game rewards population.
This new change simply rewards the world with the largest population and which can keep all of their map slots filled, 24/7.
People who think this sounds like a good idea have never played, week after week against worlds 6 or more tiers above them, or played on a world that cannot keep it’s map slots full.
Where is the dialog? We get these faceless procalmations. We don’t even know who is responsible for this decision. Is it one person, two, a committee?
Games that have test servers populated with players, not devs or paid testers, avoid this kind of top down Dilbert style management stupid design changes.
This is one of the worst design decisions I have seen in a long time.
I get the impression that who ever is making the decisions about WvW, has never ever spent any time trying to play on world in the lower half of the tier ladder when they are matched with a world 6 or more tiers higher.
If you are saying you don’t ever even want the chance to try and show your skill against a higher ranked server, then I don’t know what to say.
I wonder if Mr. Carver has EVER used his dev privileges to jump in as HOD world player and face IOJ for a week and seriously thinks that is fun.
That response is like saying if you don’t want the chance to stand in front of a speeding bus and test your skill against it, he does not know what to say.
What is the most frustrating thing is all of Arenanets head in the sand attitude towards any situation where they clearly have made bad design decisions and cling to them. The current basic WvW system has some serious basic design flaws that no amount of tweaking will ever improve. Some things in WvW need to be rethought and changed from the ground up.
As I have posted many times in the past, game companies will always keep pet classes as subpar. The fact that the recent meta has elevated pet classes to OP-ness and the absolute kitten storm of player QQ has been hurricane force.
I always wanted pet classes to have some equity, not become the brain dead Petting Zoo solution to dumb down the game so any short attention span mouth-breathing consumer can win at tournament level simply by pet spawning and spamming skills face roll style.
I just have to comment that the defense for not splitting skills prettymuch solidifies my take that Arenanet bit off way more than they could chew, and like so many areas of the game now, simply don’t have to resources to fully realize their original grandiose plans.
Trying to create an esport while having to force it to work within the constrictions of two different types of game play is simply not working out, and as result there is an over abundance of excuses and promises, and very little, delivered very late.
You can orate all day long to the fan boy choir if you wish, but if you cant provide 3 separate types of game play (wvw, spvp and pve) without dumbing them all down to an fitful compromise, perhaps Arenanet needs to rethink things.
Wow, just wow.
So the current brainstorm is to make spvp console friendly, ie. all random and no skill.
It figures.
The blowouts if your near the bottom of the ladder now will only get worse, and more frequent. Which in turn will drive more players out of WvW in the bottom of the ladder.
Devs, come play on any tier 18 or lower world for a week in EB and tell me you ‘enjoyed’ the the experience, then imagine it when the worlds are 12 tiers above you instead of 6.
In order to enjoy the buffs from POTM, a player will have to earn a minimum number of WvW badges each week.
The number of points required to earn POTM also needs to be increased, as it is now, every world in NA has them, making them no advantage and just useless game clutter.
It serves no purpose to reward players who do nothing in my opinion.
I think this would greatly motivate more PVE players to give WvW a serious try, especially on lower tier worlds that frequently have low WvW participation.
You guys realize that NA is getting broken into 4 leagues for the season right? There isn’t going to be just one winner.
Where do you get 4 leagues from, Dulfy’s site says only 2 for NA, or are you referring to EU?
This reset evening was allot of fun. Lot’s of things flipping, from SM to camps, I lost track of how many times we fought over AP.
Good times.
I think it’s safe to say 2 of the biggest complaints about WvW are: The fact that this could get done relatively easily and it hasn’t been yet tells me it’s not high on ANet’s priority list, nor will it be so long as they’re getting revenue in other ways.
There is like one dev assigned full time to WvW. That should tell you something when craptent like the bi-weekly updates have several teams of 6+ each working on them.
Anet is leaving the door so wide open for a newer MMO to take over the WvW style play market. It’ only a matter of time now.
I am a bit confused about what the purpose of the upcoming additional ascended gear/weapons is supposed to serve.
1. Why does anyone need more AR? Don’t players already get enough from ascended trinkets to get to the FOTM level cap? Has Anet said anything about increasing agony in FOTM or simply introducing it elsewhere?
2. Isn’t this new gear just stuff with slightly better stats than exos, but require 10x the effort/cost to acquire.
3. Will new ascended gear also drop as loot, and if so, will the drop rate be like that for exos, precursors or _?
4. Isn’t this just the kind of gear treadmill Anet claimed to have wanted to avoid?
5. Will this new tier of more powerful gear give an insurmountable advantage to players who are time or cash rich.
This is just too rich, people who have cleaned up making 100’s of gold, now concerned that the rest of us will also cash in.
Sounds too much like, hey I got mine, quick turn it off so I can enjoy a significant advantage over those who missed out (on vacation, sick etc.) for the last week or so.
My guess is everything will revert to the same old gray, nothing is worth farming landscape once the celebration is over.
I want to thank Devon for responding to at least some of our WvW concerns and most importantly verifying a key player suspicion, that Arenanet places a very low priority on WvW and they have committed minimal resources to it.
WvW is where I spend most of my time online. I do along with many other WvWers buy gems on a regular basis, and as such do provide a significant revenue stream. I don’t buy the argument that the WvW neglect is do to a lack of revenue.
I was hoping to get a response that showed that Arenanet has a substantial vision for WvW that includes a long term plan to significantly improve and expand this game mode.
Instead we are getting company feedback that verifies what we have suspected; WvW is getting the short end of the stick in terms of development resources and there really is not a long term plan to significantly improve/expand this part of the game.
What puzzles me the most is the discrepancy between my experience, which is that WvW participation is high and far outshines sPVP or PVE dungeons. With the last 6 months of temporary content influxes to everything except WvW, Areanet seems to be doing everything they can to entice players out of WvW.
It is as if WvW was only added in the first place as a requirement put forth by marketing, and once that checkbox is filled, that is the end of the story. It as though Arenanet has consciously set out to discourage WvW participation by only putting significant rewards and priority development effort into PVE.
Given the official response so far to this thread, things do not look promising for WvW in the long term. There are several upcoming MMO launches in coming year(s) and I will be very interested in the large scale PvP modes they will offer as Arenanet’s WvW effort seems to have ground to a halt and is limping along with a skeleton development crew.
What happened to the promise that WvW players would have equity with PVE players in terms of achievement points and loot income?
With the recent QJ patch, PVE players are raking in the loot and achievement points, and WvW got what?
My worlds participation in WvW this past week has been minimal. It is pretty discouraging when 90% of your supposedly WvW guild is staying in PVE all week.
And before some fan boy jumps in with ‘what do you expect, look at all the stuff your getting for free…’ line, most players I know and myself regularly spend cash on gems than adds up to far more than some measly $15 a month subscription. The fact that it is optional, is not the point, the point is many of us are paying Anet handsomely.
(edited by Jalad Lantana.3027)
Wow, just wow.
I almost given up hope of anything ever getting past the bean counters that seem to be in charge there who insist that anything new have a positive impact on gem sales or at least do not adversely effect them.
This stuff has been taking more and more inventory space, and this seeming small act renews my hopes this game actually has people in charge who are not completely consumed with how much gems they can sell.
A huge thanks.
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