Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

A message from the PvP team:

Five weeks ago, we launched the first season of our “PvP League system”, and since then we’ve been talking to many of you in-game and keeping our eyes glued to our forums, reddit, Twitch, and other social platforms in an effort to take in as much of your feedback as possible. Now that we’ve had time to fully digest your thoughts and contextualize it with the heaps of data that we’ve collected, we’d like to kick off the New Year by discussing the changes that will be coming to PvP Leagues for Season 2.

Matchmaking Changes

The matchmaking system in Season 1 uses a blend of both your current division placement in Leagues as well as your individual matchmaking rating (MMR). This means that you’ll generally get paired with and against players in your division that are of similar skill levels. Unfortunately, what this also means is that from day one you’re going to have difficult matches, and because of the way MMR works in Ranked play, you’ll have a very difficult time maintaining enough of a win-streak to progress through tiers and divisions. This is especially true as you climb into divisions such as Ruby where you can lose points as well as tiers. While this system helps ensure that your matches are always as competitive as possible, it does mean that it’s also more difficult to get to the division where you actually belong based on your skill – for example, as a top tier player, the difficulty of your matches in Amber would actually be fairly close to what you’d experience in Ruby and beyond. After analyzing your feedback, we’ve decided to shift toward having your division standing in PvP Leagues be even more reflective of your personal skill level than it currently is.

Beginning with Season 2, matchmaking for Ranked matches will use your placement in your current league division as your primary matchmaking consideration and pair you against players who are placed in the same point range as you, regardless of the skill level (MMR) of the other people in that point range. While we’ll be using divisions to match you against your immediate opponents, we’ll still use your MMR to place you on teams with similarly skilled players (from your division point range) to help ensure that you’re not forced to play with individuals that are of a much higher or lower skill than you. Ultimately, this means that the new matchmaking changes will make PvP Leagues much more reflective of your actual skill, and each division will be progressively more difficult to compete in.

Win Streaks

Since the new matchmaking changes may make matches more volatile at the very beginning of the season (since everyone will be starting in the same division), we’re also planning to introduce a “Win Streak System” into PvP Leagues that will help more skilled players climb through early league divisions and get them into the divisions that they belong. On your third consecutive win (and for every win afterward), you’ll automatically earn extra league points toward your division progress for as long as you can keep the streak going. But keep in mind that a loss while on a win streak will reset your win streak status back to zero, and you’ll need to start another win streak in order to begin gaining extra points again.

Point Confusion: Fixes & Clarifications

If you’re not familiar with the more detailed workings of our match prediction system, then we realize that there’s still some confusion as to why you earned or lost points at the end of a match (for example, “Why did I gain 1 pip for having won a close match, but lost no pips in a blowout?”). With Season 2, we’ll be displaying a postmatch breakdown for you at the end of each game, which will include items such as the win probability that our algorithm determined for your team and an explanation of why your points changed the way that they did.

Shopping for Ambers

In addition to the changes above, we’ll also be adjusting the way that parties are scored in our matchmaking algorithm based on the overall division spread of a team’s makeup. It is important to us that anyone can play with their friends regardless of league standing, but in doing so, we also want to ensure that teams aren’t gaining an unfair advantage in match difficulty based on their rosters. An example of this would be two friends: one is in Diamond and the other is in Amber. For Season 2, these two players will still be able to team up and play together, but they’ll be placed into Diamond level matches based on the highest division player in the party. This means that forming a party with players in a higher division than you will always bring you up to their level for matchmaking and prediction, rather than adjust to compensate for party members at lower divisions. This specific change will go into effect in our next scheduled release (prior to the end of season 1).

Wrapping Things Up (For Now)

There are a few other things coming that will impact the next season of PvP Leagues (namely our next balance update) that will be discussed separately – so keep an eye on our forums and on Guildwars2.com for updates.

We’d like to encourage all of you to please keep sharing your constructive thoughts with us so that we can continue to make PvP Leagues (and PvP in general) even better together. From all of us here on the PvP team, we wish you all a happy New Year and we’ll see you in the Mists!

So correct me if I am wrong, but technically you all are ignoring a huge glaring problem, just hoping it goes away and effectively changing the system to another kitten setup? Just making sure because the way I read it you intend to have team queue-ing. I don’t think you understand how competitive ladders work, but you cannot allow people to choose teams, they will team stack, period. They will always find a way to break your perception of a somewhat balanced team setup because you are too proud to say hey we kittened up, we need to have solo queue or duo queue max just like EVERY other successful competitive game. Either implement multiple queues, or remove team queueing all together, otherwise your game is and will continue to be a joke in the competitive community.

Though the way I see it, as somone who has played since day 1 of pre-release… you guys were never really good at biting the bullet when you were wrong.

Nokaru.7831:

While you’re at it, how about make it so that if a teammate disconnects at any point, your team doesn’t lose a Pip for not winning, and you instantly give that teammate who disconnected dishonor. You know, instead of the current system where everyone loses a Pip. I don’t care if he comes back in 1 minute, you fall behind real quick in PvP when you’re doing 5v4. But hey, at least that teammate came back and he didn’t get dishonor!!!11

This is an ignorant statement, because when you get disconnected for 1 minute, and are still the game winning factor by taking people 2 v 1 at a point, you would still lose 2 pips… disconnects under a minute should not be punished by dishonor, sorry if you are raging at someone dcing in your game, but if you fell behind “real quick” in a 5 v 4 you probably didn’t deserve to win anyway.

90% of these changes are good but I can see one very serious flaw. The number of rallying players being reduced so greatly will crush groups that work on rallying instead of defensive ressing. That however would not be a huge issue, though I might suggest making it 2 or 3 rather than 1 from 5, too drastic a change can create a really nasty change that people don’t like.

The big big problem comes from “hard ressing” Not being able to res in combat will be a hassle if you are stuck in combat, it will stop groups from being able to hard res if needed in combat… that is not resolving combat, that is disadvantaging a group if their dps goes down… meaning it will flux groups to only target certain players in fights… its not really a good change. Ressing a player in combat should be a tactical choice, not something denied by a system. Ultimately everything is in line, but I would suggest changing the rally to 2 instead of 1 from 5, and taking out the hard res. At the very least until you see how this is going to affect the combat in WvW.

So a good step in the right direction, but please be careful with some of the rampant over-nerfs you will see with stuff like this… good luck

harold.3526:

Jiggawattz.2697:

It is not that, nothing is better on condi’s

Cond is required on Vale Guardian, Cond is better on Abomination on Arah P2, Cond has more overall DPS on fights over 30 seconds, and more.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Also allowing conditions on other structures like the Thermal Core would be really nice.

True

I was referring to fractals ^^, I meant in the context of my post that Anet has done great things to bring condi’s back into the game, but fractals still need a few tweaks.

harold.3526:

Some stuff will be better on cond, some stuff will be better on power, thats ok

It is not that, nothing is better on condi’s and some stuff is impossible without power damage. I am just looking for an in-between. Like with my warrior I do 190k damage in 1 skill to the mining boss, with 24 stacks of bleed on the mining boss on my necro I yield about 6k damage per second… that is a massive disconnect…

Now that you have made conditions viable in fractals and raids, and allowed us to choose in some ways how we go about killing things… and then balanced the high level fractals to include standard dps types.

Could you find it in your heart to go through fractals and make things like the “thermal core” take damage from conditions? So we don’t end up with a condition heavy party that takes forever to kill something that is a rather trivial part of the mission. Same goes for siege in the urban battleground and a couple other pieces of fractals…

Edit: Please Please don’t forget to do something about the mining facility boss, power damage does 10x damage to those bosses while conditions deal no extra damage…

I have a near flawless record in pvp, I never dc because my net company is usually solid, I don’t rage quit, I always play fairly and so on…. however last night I was playing with a friend and I was 1 mark from ruby, when I got disconnected from my net, I guess it was a net reset or something, I was out of the actual match for about 15 seconds, when I came back to the game, no points were taken and we won, yet I still lost pips and received dishonor.

That is an incredibly frustrating system, either make the dishonor system not remove rank at all, or have it track certain settings. Honestly just making the dishonor system cause 30minutes, 1 hour, 1 hour 30 minutes, and so on scaling up, weekly time-out for disconnecting, you could avoid most of this, because the goal is to punish people who leave by taking them out of the game, not people who DC for a couple seconds and still win… because they came back and fought hard…

Actually, warrior is worse than condi rev purely because condi rev has like 10 survival abilities that could be chained together with 100% resistance uptime, now that it got nerfed, condi rev is manageable.

While I fully agree with this, I am at the very least trying not to bash on them too much, at least they got to well of precog and condi rev before we had to play against that kitten for the next 3 weeks…

Razarei.2809:

Gaile. Could you ask the balance team why they thought it was necessary to gut mallyx resistance? A five second ICD is far too long for the 2 second resistance it grants.

There shouldn’t be an ICD at all considering boon strip exists in a variety of classes. If the change stays then it needs to be toned down to 2 seconds maximum.

This change alone just eradicated Mallyx from the game, and revs will now be non existent in WvW and PvP.

They needed it, but mesmer needed to go with it, and ele is a kittening mess.

A message to the balance team: Get your head out of your kitten….

Mesmer
Echo of Memory: Block duration reduced from 2.25 to 1.5

How is this going to balance the nearly spam-able team wide distortion and blur that are non removable, non corrupt-able, non counter-able invulnerabilities? Or perhaps the team-wide stability and protection and quickness and slow… like are you out of your gokitten ed minds? Is the balance team actually a thing? Or is it just someone attempting to make it sound like there are people ACTUALLY working on this?

Every single match in the esl has contained 4 mesmers, and your answer is to take off .75 seconds of block… I am sure that will kittening deal with this mess nicely.

Ele’s are not being touched? They have 90% play time in the ESL as well… like please….

Stop “taking a hard look” at balance, and instead just glance at it. A child could see some of the glaring problems without looking more than casually.

More amulets are not being used… they added a few and people are still using the same ones, marauder, rabid, cele… stop trying to justify the kittenhole pvp is in.

I would forgo the entire reward system, literally give up every reward in spvp and go back to getting nothing if Anet would bite the bullet and kittening balance the game like they need to.

Anet has resolved to only put out 4 balance patches a year, no matter how rediculously broken pvp in the game is. They pump 400k in prizes into a tournament and then let it stagnate because they are too busy or too lazy to put out balances patches more frequently. Right now the balance is so boring for the first time in the game I turned off the ESL and went to go watch something else. I mean bunkers were always boring to watch, but chrono giving a team like permanent invuln and tempest being immune to condis which are the only damage anyone can do while healing everyone on their team up is kittening boring to watch….

Its like watching paint dry, but I made several posts about this, I made a wall of text that got a couple hundred replies begging ANET to look into this before seasons, they don’t listen to their playerbase, and they don’t have a kittening clue what pvp balance looks like, nor do they seem to be trying. I guess this is mostly my fault for getting my hopes up when they raised the prize pool for the tourneys that it might turn into something, that they would give it a reason to grow, and support it in doing so, instead they threw 1 big patch, that kitten on everything, and went on to make sure we realized they would not be touching the game until 3 months from now, no matter how bad it is.

Garbage ANet… you have done a lot of lazy stupid stuff in this game before, and we usually overlook it because of the fun parts of the game.. but this pvp season…. team queueing instead of solo queue, and refusal to balance patch…. this kitten takes the cake…

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hi all,

We’ve been closely monitoring PvP Leagues since their release this last Tuesday and we’d like to provide an update on where things currently stand. Some of this information is available in other locations, but it’s always good to have everything in one place.

Match Manipulation

There have been reports of players intentionally losing games in an effort to lower their overall matchmaking rating. The idea is that if they lower their rating, their subsequent games will become easier, and they will gain pips more reliably in future win streaks. Regardless of how unlikely this is to actually happen (read on for why), we’re still not cool with players intentionally losing as this is in direct violation of our Code of Conduct.

In the short-term, our customer support team will be investigating reports of this and punishing the behavior accordingly. Please use the “Botting” reporting option to bring these instances to the attention of our team. For a longer-term solution, we’ll be working on improving the in-game reporting system to better handle these types of situations. Chris Clearly has been posting on the topic here.

Queue Times and Division Matchmaking

As Evan Lesh mentioned on reddit matchmaking rating and division standing are both used equally for matchmaking. This is currently affecting both queue times and matchmaking, especially in higher divisions. The season has only been active for three days, so there are fewer players in the higher tiers, meaning less people for matchmaking in those divisions. This will correct itself as the season progresses and players begin spreading through the divisions more evenly. Related to the point above, tanking MMR for the purposes of easier matches isn’t feasible considering division still plays a large part in the matches you get.

Forfeit wins and pip loss

We will be correcting a bug where players can lose pips after a win if someone in their party had disconnected for longer than 2 minutes, causing a forfeit. This fix should be in our next release.

Guild Team MMR Workaround

Today we fixed an issue that allowed high-skilled players to constantly spin up new guild teams and have themselves matched with lower-skilled players because of how personal MMR and team MMR worked together. This gave them faster queue times, faster league progression, and allowed them to climb the Guild Challenger League more quickly than intended for each team created. As mentioned above, we’re aware of the longer queue times for high-rated teams, but this is mostly attributed to how divisions are factored into matchmaking and should be less of an issue as the season progresses. Additionally, we will also be enabling rating decay on the Guild Team Leaderboard after we have enough data to determine the correct values to decay by. This will cause inactive teams to fall down the leaderboard.

Pip/Point behavior is difficult to understand

You gain a variable number of pips depending on the difficulty your match-up (from -3 to +3). The majority of games (even matches) are +1/-1 for winning/losing. The odds of winning a match is based off of division standing between the two teams involved and roster sizes. If you’re heavily disfavored in a match-up (the system predicts that you should lose), you could potentially gain up to 3 points for winning. You also gain partial points as you cross point thresholds, so there’s always a reason to keep trying even if you don’t win. The system also works the other way around. If you’re favored to win, but lose, you’ll lose more pips than you would in an even match.

Now to the crux of the issue – it’s not entirely clear why you’re winning or losing X amount of pips after a match, as the odds are not displayed to the player. We’re looking at making changes to the in-game UI to communicate this more clearly, but this won’t be in for season one.

Vial of Salt

This amulet will be updated to correctly have ascended stats with our next release.

In closing…

We’d like to thank everyone for their feedback so far. Leagues are a complicated system and we’ll be iterating on it until we get it right.

All of this is well and good, but I still get put against 5 man premades. Use your noodle Anet, we appreciate you addressing our concerns but you didn’t address the one we warned and begged you about in a 3000 reply long post about putting in a gokitten ed solo queue. It is not skill if you have a HUGE advantage…

Crinn.7864:

Arken.3725:

Except you can dodge traps…Even the instant ones don’t activate until after a small moment of time(right after the daze).

I think his point was that “just dodge it” is a lame reasoning because you can dodge pretty much everything.

I mean really, they could put in a ability that hits for 20k that bounces across five targets with 1200 range and you could still “just dodge it.”

If dodgability is the definition of balanced then there has never in the entire history of this game been a overpowered class.

Uhmmm… Warrior Killshot, Ranger Killshot, Mesmer Shatters, Warrior Hundred Blades, Thief pistol pistol spam… the walls are easy to dodge through… sorry never had an issue with them… or you can just bunker up until they dissapear and they are gone for 30 seconds and I face off against a guardian with 12k hp and no defensive stats…

Don’t pretend like people should be able to eat the walls and shake it off.. they are a utility… if you walk through a firewall you take 3 stacks of burning dealing 5k damage and nobody ever kittened, and those can be placed from a range ontop of you…

I suppose that could be a reason o.o… it still seems a bit unnecessary… I mean… few people bought them before, then people would buy them, now people won’t again… Its almost like there are two teams at Anet, one that is like santa claus to the players.. giving buffs and good value trades to vendors and players all over tyria, and then theres the wicked witch of the nerf, who swings in behind them and takes it all away, making previously existing things less valuable, or completely useless…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Add your complaints to ours where we complained about them going into our inventories and removing the karma boost option, and see what it gets you.

A big fat nothing is what it will get you. ANet is not going to answer and you’ll get people telling you that because it’s not a problem to them then it’s not a problem to you.

Oh, I was just wondering if there was a distinct reason they ninja nerfed them again… it didn’t quite make any sense…

So they used to be their own type, which allowed them to stack with old and new boosters which was cool, but then they nerfed that….

Which would have been okay because they made it 2 hours for 1 laurel… I thought it was a great deal for our time limited resource… but maybe a bit much… so a nerf might have been in order, however now I look instead of getting 2x 1 hour boosters for our 1 laurel, we now get 30 minutes… which is a 75% nerf…

So now not only do they not stack, but they are 75% less time for our laurels… with exp more necessary than ever why the distinct and horrendous overnerf? Does anyone know did they even explain it? I never saw anything in the patch notes talking about it which means they most likely ninja nerfed it…

I mean ultimately we can still get exp boosters… but 30 minutes for laurels… which we get like 40 of a month… is pretty harsh… especially when they are the ONLY way to get ascended amulets…

This system is already quite frustrating, when looking for a group if you join 3 parties in a row that are either in the wrong instance, or happen to be disbanding you are then locked out of finding a party. There is never any notification as to “how long” you have to wait before you can join another party, and the bug comes in where tonight I have been unable to join a LFG group for about 20 minutes now and after restarting the client, changing characters, I am still unable to join a party.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Please post your reports of issues with HoT in this thread. That will allow our teams to review your reports and deal with them as promptly at possible.

Ley-Energy Matter Converter progress has been reverted. I unlocked all my pages on the matter converter and now they are all locked again but I was not refunded the currency used to unlock them.

As a long time WvW player, I can say the new borderlands are frustrative and not condusive to actual combat. They are built large and vertical with very little in the way of mobility. The keep auto upgrade system is absolutely obnoxious and defense sided, in no way should it ever take 12 people a half hour to take a completely unguarded keep… but that is what we face because if you own a keep overnight when the next shift comes in they have to face walls that take guild and superior seige ages to get through. The map is garbage, not only does it have booby traps which aren’t something that a “balanced” map needs, but they have very few entry points forcing players to go into narrow passageways. It takes the strategy out of it. Zerging is literally the only way left to take anything.

lmperdigao.2567:

Yes, it’s way too big and disruptive. A smaller one, and/or placed in another position would help. If you could disable, would be great too

Everything in the new WvW is big and disruptive… the whole map is big and disruptive… not cohesive to any sort of PvP combat… it looks like it was designed as a dungeon for raid groups… which makes sense because the keep lords are raid bosses… and the doors are even more of a raid boss than the keep…

ArchonWing.9480:

Not just WvW. HoT is not very solo friendly at all.

In b4 people say define one of the Ms in an MMOs when we’re talking about options.

Its not friendly at all… you can’t even zerg that map because of all the vertical inclines and booby traps… not to mention it took a team of 15 people with 3 superior catas like 10 minutes to get through a keep front gate that was uncontested… its pathetic… They overscaled the monsters, the map is cancer… pretty much 95% of the changes they made are the death of WvW… solo players might as well not even enter the battlegrounds… just boycott the kitten new maps and lets make them understand just how bad they are. If they get no traffic (which they already aren’t, I am in T1 and there is nobody on our maps when they used to be maxed for WvW) Anet will have no choice but to either re-design them or put our good maps back… for now I will just play on EBG and EOTM where there is at least a few spots to actually fight people instead of doors…

Xenesis.6389:

A quality of life change they want to hide behind a mastery, but don’t want to make a mastery for it in wvw. First you guys want to treat wvw like pve and now you don’t.
Unbelievable.

I agree with this… I mean they buffed the hell out of all the npc guards in the new borderlands, and lets not get started on how the new borderlands is basically a stupid jump puzzle that isn’t designed for WvW…. there is a reason nobody is in those, but edge of the mists and eternal battleground are still active… its because at least those are functional… you can’t do kitten in that sandy wasteland… too much vertical and not enough room to fight… they went overboard with their new vertical map creation…

But like you said, they want to treat us like PvE, except for when they make a mistake, then its “keep the game modes seperate”…

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We are looking at adding a way for players to earn Quickloot in WvW as well. We wanted to keep PvE progression (Masteries) separate from WvW progression (Ability Lines). However this means when a new Mastery ability is created, that might also be useful in another gamemode, it doesn’t automatically crossover.

Here is another question, since we are so dead set on keeping game types separate, why does autoloot work in maguma jungle, where the mastery is not even active. How about you all just bite the bullet, admit it was bugged and fix it… you will get a lot more respect from the community than trying to backpedal on something you literally said a month before launch.

We aren’t stupid, we watch the dev posts… we know autoloot was intended for WvW…

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We are looking at adding a way for players to earn Quickloot in WvW as well. We wanted to keep PvE progression (Masteries) separate from WvW progression (Ability Lines). However this means when a new Mastery ability is created, that might also be useful in another gamemode, it doesn’t automatically crossover.

Really multiple interviews and dev posts had said specifically that WvW players would want autoloot, and also went about talking about how WvW would work with autoloot…. and then autoloot comes out… we all grind for it… and you tell us it doesn’t work and you are “looking into adding”… really… that’s hours of work based on information YOU gave us…. and I bet you didn’t even bat an eye when you decided to go back on your own word… Anet is really starting to disappoint me these days… and that isn’t something I thought would ever happen.

Edit: Making sure to reference the post where the made it clear that autoloot was supposed to work in WvW… so that everyone can see Anet is trying to backpedal on a decision for god knows what reason. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3g5smh/central_tyrian_mastery_poi_livestream_notes/ctv8i05

I know it may seem like I am being a jerk to ANet, but there is a reason I don’t let this stuff die. It is because we hold them to a higher standard… some of us hardcore loyal since bwe players base our play almost soley on the information given to us by the devs… if we can’t trust them to stay by what they say is happening and decide to change it last minute (as we saw with the “elite spec” fiasco…. thankfully they somewhat remedied that)… what do we have to go on. I mean I get that sometimes devs make a error in the way they speak, but in some cases, such as this one it is obvious that it was 100% intended for WvW and not just something they were “looking into” and I find it really sad to see our WvW maps turned so sour, participation is almost down to 0 even in my tier 1 server because WVW players would rather PVE to get our stuff because WVW is so kitten ed frustrating atm…. the maps are just too big, and too vertical and provide little to know mobility while also going about making the doors a 20 minute struggle to get through even with 3 supperior rams.. I know they wanted to make it defense sided but it is gosh darn rediculous.

Back to my original point, we have faith in what the devs say… so to see them have something broken and then play it off like it was never intended and now they have decided to “work on it” reminds me too much of some of the other lesser game developers I loathe to talk about… and I hold Anet devs.. my Arena Net… the company that I have been a fan of since gw1 and 100% loyal to… and all of my trust… to a much higher standard…

I believe the real problem with the current economy is the steepening of solid gold transactions like commander tag which cost a flat 300 gold, and the things like 12 silver threads needed for crafting. While the value of gold goes up… the price of those items remains static, essentially increases many “needed” items in price.

This does not mean they don’t see the problem… but like I responded to John, the problem wasn’t the removal of gold from dungeons it was the lack of any gold coming from other sources as it was promised. Fractals were supposed to be the new gold income, but they set the price of keys at 1 gold, so you essentially lose gold from fractals now… at least liquid gold. which means there is no fresh gold coming into the economy outside of trash loots from npcs and people who sell their greens instead of salvaging… this is a huge huge problem for the economy in the long run.. taking out 50-70% of the community bringing in 10-15 gold a day, and putting in them bringing in 20-70 silver will create a downfall in the price of every item on the auction house… this creates a larger wealth gap than before essentially taking us back to the early days of gw2.. the only problem with this is… at this point there are players with 10-20k gold banked that will allow them to easilly manipulate entire markets because the prices will get so low… this is why quick instead of gradual inflation decreases will cause problems.. I just hope they solve the fractal situation soon.. maybe adjust the price of keys so it yields slightly higher than what you put into it… or adjust the drop rate of the more rare 20 silver 1 gold and 5 gold trash drops. In my testing the average yield from a key was 12.6 silver, at a cost of 20 silver per key. After 1000 boxes. There is some variation there, but it is FAR from the liquid gold infusion we were promised to offset the balance of the decline of dungeon income.

John Smith.4610:

Hello everyone, we’ve been tracking a lot of markets closely and I wanted to make a quick statement about flax seeds. At the current price some pieces of guild halls may seem very hard to get. A lot of people are storing the items up in their banks causing some temporary, artificial price inflation. To help out, here are a couple of ways to easily obtain more seeds:

There’s a secret garden under an Itzel Village that may help.
They’re found all over Auric Basin.
Check out the “Torn From the Sky” Achievement.

Cheers and happy trading all.
John.

The only problem I have with the new economy changes are that you stated in your post that fractals would have liquid gold shifted to them… however you cannot gain liquid gold in fractals at any real rate because you no longer get raw gold… if you open chests you can get trash item, however you guys at Anet saw it in your hearts to set the price of keys at 20 silver per key… and after 1000 boxes the average silver drop per box is 12.7 silver… meaning you open boxes at a loss… which means no liquid gold… which means assuming we do all of our dailies we can bring in about 80 silver a day in trash loot from free keys from doing 9 fractals, equivilant to 9 dungeons which used to give 9 gold. I know you are attempting to combat inflation.. but putting a gold sink where you previously stated their would be a gold income is kind of sore spot for me. Also I wanted to point out that I have fractal mastery… the “bonus items from chest” mastery is a complete sham, I have gotten no greater loot from chests since having the mastery..

Charming Rogue.8071:

Valento.9852:

This video is horrible… this guy takes AGES to fill up the mastery tracks!

Are you sure? Because I did it too and completed all Tyria masteries in 6-8 hours of doing this.

Yes but you abused a game mechanic that will be fixed shortly and is widely considered an exploit… so you probably shouldn’t make that sort of comment on a forum post meant for a developer.

TheFibrewire.6845:

all the things in HOT is perfect.

you have created a world with full of secrets, heavy exploration challenging mobs, treasure chest and cool NPC with funny and awesome writing. and i dont want to mention how awesome the exalted carving writing is.

people complaining about masteries need nerf and need more XP is complete wrong, they will get used to it after one month and everything will settle down.

look at this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01jyqxoU2tw

Anet never stated you have to play like this i know you devs intend players to explore, talk,socialize, create community and defeat awesome bosses.

but these players are spreading rumors saying this is the way Masteries has to be gained. your game has a policy of play how you like.

so please don’t take care of any suggestion given till now about the grind as this the situation and these players are spreading rumors and converting more players and ultimately whole community is burned out so for these players don’t nerf your awesome game.

the Expansion is awesome and perfect doesn’t require any changes.

so Colin i urge you to disregard these post on saying the game is grindy because its the mistake of players choosing it to make it grindy not the fault of devs and you never told we need all masteries on day one.

Colin for god sake dont nerf anything the game is perfect.

You are taking things out of context. We enjoy the world… but we want to explore it at our own pace, on our terms… which is sort of gw2’s call sign “play how you like”. If I don’t want to grind nearly impossible skillpoints for two days to run around as a reaper and see all the stuff HoT has to offer, then I shouldn’t have too… that is the kind of game I signed up for.

Also you look fairly immature blatantly telling a developer to ignore a mass outcry in feedback about the game that is their lively hood. That is akin to telling a boatman not to worry about the crack in the hull, because you think it adds flavor to the room and you enjoy the sound of flowing water. Please understand the situation and think about more than just what you enjoy.

If you want to provide feedback that you didn’t think the grind was that bad. Constructively say so in the post that is marked specifically for that subject.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Lots of passionate feedback and discussion in here on either side, and a friendly reminder that constructive feedback helps us make better games (please do keep it constructive!) We don’t always get every detail perfect the first time, but I like to think one of our strengths is we’re always open to and listening to feedback from our community and making good decisions based on that feedback.

Ultimately, we’re thrilled with the parts of HoT everyone is enjoying. Your passion is awesome, and it’s part of why we all love creating this game. In particular, in game we’ve seen a really positive reaction to the game from folks who are busy playing, which has been really cool to see.

While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!

Thanks again!

Thanks for the checkup Colin… I do wish you all had been able to get to this when we immediately made a 3000+ post outcry saying that 400 points was going to be agony, and it definately was. I spent my first two days in the game painfully struggling through skill nodes… which were even more of a hassle than I thought because a lot of them are linked to masteries… just so I could play HoT the way I had wanted, which was as my reaper. We were sort of ambushed by this new change. I know you needed a way to get players to dip their feet into new content but I just never thought locking it the specializations we had been playing, anticipating, and dreaming about for months… That move made me a little salty, especially since this announcement was only a week prior to HoT coming out. That was also a sore spot for me.

I can understand in the end, you had a lot on your plate. However in the future, if you really wanna avoid such negative immediate feedback from so many players the best way is probably to prioritize the final weekly patch towards addressing some of the things that are viewed negatively heavily. Even if the general consensus at the offices is that “This is probably just a huff, they will understand once they play it”… in my experience in playing games, the community impact stays negative, even if it wasn’t that bad… Like even if the skill points hadn’t been absolute hell, that gave me a headache trying to finish… I would say I probably would have been upset, because I was forced into something the community as a whole screamed out in union against.

Either way, the rest of HoT seems pretty cool save for the horrible horrible WvW maps… which are more like drytop jump puzzles than actual fortress arenas… those things should be canned all together…We had two coordinated max tier 1 servers in WvW running around in there for about 6 hours and never saw each other but one time…. that is horrible for WvW because we want to fight…. some of the pvp skills need tuning badly… like really badly.. but I suppose that will come with time. Other than that good luck on the game.

TLDR: Thanks for responding, you probably should have seen the warning flags sooner, forcing hardcore content and map completion to obtain skills has never been GW2’s m.o. Even as a beta player it wasn’t this bad. WvW is dead, pvp needs reviving, the rest of HoT seems great.

Saiyan.1704:

glaphen.5230:

Saiyan.1704:

@glaphen

The only thing unusual about the pics you’ve posted is

• You ate condi Ranger’s Traps
• You don’t do well against condi Guardian because you’re a thief (condi Guard always show burns as high hit proc and dmgs)

There wasn’t anything unusual about the other pictures.
For the record, I meant “Highest damages by players” tab. It makes it easier to see exactly what and who hit you.

Yes and what about the traps? They are as big as the point, you expect me to leave the point and and decap it?

So now Trap Rangers are OP… you’ve just lost every bit of credibility here.

You’re not suppose to stay in Ranger traps.. so yes.. you should have left point. Probably shouldn’t have 1v1’d that Condi Ranget anyways :/

Again, Burning (conditions in general) is only an issue against solo players on unsynchronized teams… and apparently Thieves… 99% of the Thieves in this game QQ about burns or conditions, more than any other aspect in the game.

I play a lot of burning condi classes and a necro, and I still think burning is ridiculous. It is by far the most damaging condition in the game and it is way too accessible. They almost INSTANTANEOUSLY nerfed necro because dhumfire could apply 8-10 stacks of burning from various sources, and yet… burn guard, burn engi, and hell even a kittenty condi ele can apply 15-20 stacks with ease. Don’t defend the condition, there is literally NO REASON for it to be 3-4 times the damage of bleed… every other condition is based on bleed damage, torment bleed damage at rest 2x bleed while moving and it is much harder to stack. Confusion, 1x bleed, 2x while casting…. you don’t see a pastern here? Burning 4x bleed but, requires no attribute to do extra damage, it is literally just superior, and in the case of several classes easier to stack. Anyone that defends it does not care about the actual balance of the game and it just looking for cheese wins.

MyPuppy.8970:

Burning is a burst condition and requires combos or staying in fire fields to be effective, others are attrition and can be more spammable.

You’ve obviously never played an engi or burn guardian. Burn guard has a skill that resets its own cooldown and has an 8 second cooldown, that applies 4 stacks… then 3 stacks per “line cross” on their fire circle, and 3 stacks in an aoe from their teleport, and another 2 from the heal, 1 on every attack, 2 if you use it, in a single 2 second easy to use spam every button combo I can stack 18 stacks of burning using a guardian" requires combos or fields" lol clown

Mefiq.7039:

Well i agree that thief puts players to risk playmode without proper reward, problem is thief is still insane in terms of pressure it can make vs enemy team.

REMEMBER! CLASSES in Guildwars2 ARENT balanced around 1v1!!!! they are balanced around 5v5 conquest mode! that means Burnguard is fine cuz you should always have 1 guy in team that shouts to clean burns thats why many of you say old PU mesmer was op, YE it had INSANE dmg but almost no CONDICLEARS, still very meta build cuz it should be always played with shouter in team. Same goes for glint/shiro herald and other builds thief that deals no condi dmg will consider so much more powerful.

You want balance? Make standard formats of “team” and allow players to choose what playstyle they are playing so we wont get 5x guard/ 5x supp / more than 1 thief teams in soloq. By choosing thier playstyle we could reward them around this playstyle like Healers will get bonus points for heal, dps for dps decappers for decaps.

I agree with most of this, up until the last part… Having specific queues would devastate queue times, and the idea of giving “healers” points for “healing” is stupid because guild wars is an omniclass game. Nobody is a healer, even the new druid class isn’t a full healer and it was only designed for raids because the WoW kittens came over and polluted our game.

Jana.6831:

Jiggawattz.2697:

Meh, yes and no… I don’t have hope for anything. It is a game and it is their design. I prefer to look at the game objectively and play what I think is best at the time, between my three preferred classes. I just wish others would do the same or stop kittening about balance.

Why should we stop “kittening about balance”? Isn’t that what makes a game great? And in fact that was what anet said about GW2 before launch “we are going to make this game the best balanced on the market” – long time ago, right? I don’t mind to be the underdog, but this is too much to be still called “ok/balance” – and I do wonder if how and when they’re going to fix all of it – not talking about thief only. Right now most classes are faceroll to win – and that is boring.
And I guess we have explained why the balance for thieves is off, I can’t talk for other classes as I play this game for thief (I have all classes but no interest to play them).

Edit: So I can’t say which specific traits make the classes faceroll everything.

A couple of things. One I can tell by the way you speak…. that you are not a high rank player, or even anyone with grounds to talk about what is actually balanced in this game. Two, if every class is “faceroll to win” then how does anyone ever lose? Oh that’s right, its because if every class is “faceroll to win” then the game is fairly balanced. Thirdly you being a tool on the forums is not what makes a game better. Respectfully submitting data that you collect… objective, non opinionated, numerical data that is correlated directly to the balance compared to another class could make a difference, if posted in the correct place, but 90% of this post will be brushed off, because a person with a job to do…aka balancing the game, does not have time to listen to everyone whine about their class and why it needs to be stronger than the other classes. They get most of their data from high end competitive tournament play, so the game is more balanced at that level…. and if you look around the game and say this game isn’t anywhere near balanced… then I have bad news for you, you need to practice and probably shouldn’t waste your time on the forums.

The overall gist of it, is that too many people complain for class buffs, instead of figuring out how to play with what they have, and as we have seen in the most recent ESL, thief can be played at a high end competitive level and serve a valuable roll. That is balance, just cause you die to someone does not make the game imbalanced, it makes you bad.

SolarDragon.7063:

Jana.6831:

SolarDragon.7063:

I fully agree that the biggest problem right now is the condi meta, but unlike the poster above I don’t see much hope of it going away.

I have no hope

Apologies, I meant Jigga :P

Meh, yes and no… I don’t have hope for anything. It is a game and it is their design. I prefer to look at the game objectively and play what I think is best at the time, between my three preferred classes. I just wish others would do the same or stop kittening about balance.

I disagree and agree with some points of this post. Most of it sounds like raging over being outclassed in pvp because you can’t perform your role. It is true that PARTS of the thief are “under-tuned” in COMPARISON to other classes of a more simple nature, but that being said. It is important to realize that some of the best players in the games use thief in such a way that it is not only a NON-OPTIONAL part of a team, but it is sometimes the complete and total reason for a win or loss.

A very good thief can rotate and dps on a rate that no other class can do, even mesmer has trouble keeping up with thief, and they just got pu and portal nerfs that bring that level even closer. HOWEVER thief requires a lot of skill, a ton of mechanical skill honed over a long period of time. I have literally seen a thief win an entire match, finding the weak links and destroying them. We have all seen what a game is like in a 4 v 5, well a thief can very easily create a 4 v 5 scenario in a situation where they are skilled enough to isolate and eliminate node cappers.

Before you flame me for supporting the idea that thiefs are in an okay place. I do believe their condi cleanse is the biggest part of the problem. With the huge buffs to condi it has created a situation where if a thief shows itself it will be so stacked with conditions that it cannot recover, which I believe is the largest reason why thiefs are often viewed as weak, because in the activity of holding a node they are weak, especially to the current meta game, but this is also a cop out because good thiefs will often 100-0 an opponent without ever being touched…. the condi meta is slowly dieing, and if they ever get on nerfing burn it will finally hit the level it needs to, but I don’t think this is a problem with the thief, I think it is a problem with conditions. Conditions do too much damage for something so easily stacked if not removed… and the thief lacks removal. The answer isn’t give thief condi removal so they and every other class is forced to stack condi cleanse to the absolute max… or die… it is to solve the root of the problem which is primarily conditions.

Ultimately I agree that thief could use some help if the meta is to continue the way it is… however if you are in this post kittening that thief is useless, do yourself and everyone else a favor and forget ever playing one, because you don’t have the tact or drive to train the mechanics and game awareness needed to play a class at its maximum capacity.

Thief is a highly skill driven class… if I had to make a spectrum of skill to game impact I would say a class like cele ele, or zerk warrior have a very high level of impact for very low skill.. but a very low impact compared to the high level of skill play. Thief is the exact opposite, a bad thief can’t do anything, you might as well not even queue… you are a complete deficit to the team… but a good thief can literally drag a burning team across the finish line and dance on the enemies graves… they are one of the highest impact per skill class setups in the game… so please instead of kittening on the forum about a meta that trust me, they know better than you… just train thief and learn how to play it at its maximum…. This post isn’t actually going to do anything to persuade arena net. They have a team that’s sole job day in and day out is to study and optomize meta shift and class balance… and it will never be perfect… it CAN NEVER be perfect. Perfect balance in a game is a paradox and these kind of posts always exist “My class isn’t strong enough, the game would be more balanced if it was”, instead of posting the truth “I am not skilled enough to play this class but I would really like to, lower the skill cap please”. I am not saying lowering the skill cap of classes is bad, but honestly if you look at mesmer and say it does everything better, you should play a mesmer because you weren’t cut out to play thief at its high end, and probably never will be because you are posting on a forum instead of practicing dodge mechanics.

Understand the game, accept imbalance, shift your playstyle, and improve… don’t blame the game for your shortcomings when there are alternatives and there is proof that thief CAN be played well and make a huge impact, because we have seen it in tourneys… please… just play the game…

official.7362:

Ok so i can stress how important these will be to a healthy pvp base

Id just like to know EXACTLY how you plan on handling this system..

if you make it a grind (it will fail to do what its trying to accomplish) ie pair like skilled players together.

so how exactly do you plan on separating these different skilled player bases together

what is the algorithm? and how will you handle soloq/team q

Imho you either have to go ALL IN on either Soloq or Teamq u cant have them separated because lets face it there arent enough players to have both in this game and its fair or fun to either player base to have to fight each other

u have to take a stand once and for all Either PROMOTE teams ONLY to play pvp or Dont at all imo

ill go ahead and guess ur ganna save all the juicy info until after you sell copies of the game so u dont kitten people off who wouldnt buy the game if they knew soloq was dead or not

By the way, you are assuming the recent long queue times are because of a “LACK” of population but I think you are misunderstanding. Currently in the pvp zones there are multiple megaservers packed with people all complaining about queue times. Why would this be the case if it was low population. The current reason the queues are slow is because of OVER population. The growth from free to play and the added popularity of pvp has caused the pvp servers to have to struggle to keep up. They have already said they are working on it.

Danikat.8537:

What were you expecting in the anniversary sale?

They’ve brought back and/or discounted a whole range of weapon and armor skins, outfits, minis, toys, bank tabs, bag slots, infinite gathering tools and various other items and added some new stuff. There’s a full list in this thread

Unless you were waiting for a specific item which hasn’t appeared, or somehow confused a gem store sale with a new release, I’m having a hard time understanding why it’s disappointing.

For me this is actually better than the first year anniversary sale – when that was announced I decided I’d get the infinite gathering tools when they came back (there were only 3 at the time) and a bank tab when they were discounted. I got the molten pick even though I didn’t like the animation and a month later they brought out the bone pick which I liked a lot more. As for the bank tab I ended up waiting 5 months because they didn’t go on sale until January.

From the first 5 replies it seems like nobody took the time to actually read what I was posting. I will quote my own post “my disappointment with today’s sale. Mostly because it did not fit my needs, or perhaps I expected something more grandiose as it is their 3rd year anniversary”

This was a post talking about how we are often juxtaposed to the idea that Anet is a company and can’t possibly always meet up to our expectations because we hold them to a standard that they couldn’t reach again even if they wanted to. So in that this was more to shed light on the fact that we often hold have expectations of amazing sales that suit OUR needs only, or we get upset when they don’t do what we would normally expect them to do and how that is not really fair to a company.

We do as a community get upset when they do things like release sales that are in no way related to buy patterns. As a company they have information on top selling items and could have chosen items that they know we are likely to need or that would be considerably more beneficial for the majority player base. Things like the “item booster” and costume setups that have notoriously low sale rates probably will tend to disappoint the mass of players because they neglect the realization that many of those items are not being purchased at all, much less do they meet up to the expectations of an all amazing anniversary sale celebrating their glorious third year in operation. That being said, that was not the focus of my post. The focus was on the idea that we as a community should be more forgiving of them for not meeting up to our expectations because our expectations are going to be unreachable high because we have set such a high bar for Anet and it is unreasonable.

Please next time before you take the time to hassle a forum post taking the white knight position, read the whole post and understand its context. Thank you.

I woke up this morning and was thinking about my disappointment with today’s sale. Mostly because it did not fit my needs, or perhaps I expected something more grandiose as it is their 3rd year anniversary… and something occurred to me. I have found myself disappointed with what I perceived as the decline in content or the short sightedness of events and sales, only to come to the simple truth that while I find certain things of unsatisfactory like changes about balance and sales and events, it is only because I have an unrealistic expectation of Arena net as a company.

They have been so grand and outstanding in everything surrounding guild wars for a long time and I think they set the bar quite high for themselves. Especially in the first year of the release the constant events and content. Mad king’s revenge was outstanding(still sad they didn’t bring that jump puzzle back)… so many things were amazing that I came to believe that they would be able to, or even that we as their loyal players were entitled to this pace of content, these sales, events…

I and many other players have lost sight of what matters. We feel betrayed by the price of the expansion as we payed for the game once before, but we fail to realize that they literally busted kitten for 2 years to provide some of the best content I believe this game will ever see. The company can’t keep this pace up forever and while they still provide some outstanding content I guess it is unfair of us as their long term players to really feel disappointed in their performance because not only did they go above expectation and provide us with such a good time over the first few years.

In short I hope they can retain some of their former glory, and never stop going out of their way to provide great events and put real thought into sales and content… but I know that is an unrealistic expectation and, while I myself am on a fixed income and find it hard to save money for the games I want to play I cannot feel disappointing in them selling heart of thorns at full price to veterans because I can only assume they will do their best to provide the same kind of content for the same price as before. Here’s hoping, and happy hunting.

DarcShriek.5829:

Jiggawattz.2697:

maddoctor.2738:

Dager.2390:

The thingh is that we didn’t buy only the game but also we contract a service (every mmo is a service) and here is the problem in the moment we bought the game the say to us that the game was b2p but now is a f2p.

I’m not agaist new players but I’m agaist what Anet is doing the things

And your service is still valid, you bought the service to play the game forever without paying again and that’s what you got, that never changed.

But the value of the offer has changed drastically. You pay 60 dollars to go to a show, and as you get there and get seated they announce that because 50% of the seats are empty they are letting everyone else in for free. Outrage will insue for anyone that values money and carefully chooses the things they enjoy enough to invest in. As somone who is physically disabled and has to manage my money carefully I made a very active decision to save the money to pre-purchase gw2 because I love the title and the company despite many of my posts on this forum.

And contrary to popular belief I am in no way shape or form unhappy with that investment, even knowing this would happen (I would be less happy about it) but I would do it again, and pay the 80 bucks up front. Now that being said this does not discount or change the feelings of animosity or distrust built by both the secrecy of this deal, because you know they knew this was going to happen and could have told the community earlier than yknow… the day they did it… nor does it change that I am upset that our consolation prize yielded to me no real value of any sort.

They did provide us with some garbage royal guard skin that looks like something that got downvoted too many times so they couldn’t greenlight the release on the trading post… however to many of us, especially most of us that will never ever use such a horrendously disfigured skin, this feels like a cop out, or at the very least gives veteran players (and this has happened many times before) the idea that we are worth next to nothing. That our continued support and promotion of their game is to them, worth whatever they found in the bottom of the barrell… They couldn’t dare to part with 15% off the expansion? Or even to generate a few in game gems to let us purchase something of actual use? Gems are an unlimited currency, they could have provided consolation compensation and chose not to. This is why most of us hardcore veteran players with 1101 days played are a little bit sour over this whole deal.

Also to many of the people on this forum this anger and unrest is being redirected at the new guys coming into the game because they are easily accessable and it will only cause problems in the future, fracturing those who play for free and those who don’t. You will see free to players getting kicked from parties, us vs them mentality. All because Anet couldn’t part with something other than a skin that looks like a beatleborgs halloween costume to placate a disenfranchised mass of veteran players who have been at the lesser valued end of pretty much every deal since the initial purchase. Veterans are not respected. Anet is a company that as a company is much like a shark, they know about time investment, and they know that as a company they don’t have any need to placate players that already exist because we stand to lose more than they do if we stop. They already have our money. This is the overall idea behind this whole fiasco.

A post or two from the red names and perhaps something of actual value would settle down the veteran players and really help to smooth the transition of these new guys into the game. Personally I am happy to see new players, I am unhappy that I was not given consideration in the method that they chose to aquire them.

I live in Las Vegas so your movie analogy falls completely flat. Many times live shows offer reduced price seats, or even free seats to people just to fill the theater. These tickets are not comps, they give them out in order to fill the theater so that the performers and the people in the audience will have a better show. I’ve often sat next to people that have paid full price.

I suppose it is a difference in principle, or perhaps regional expectation of value vs. service. Where I live services and products are based off of a set value, and are expected to hold that value by maintaining their exclusivity to the value. The economic view on this may be different from where you were raised, but the idea is that if companies just “give away” things any time they aren’t selling well, people will eventually catch on and stop buying them, waiting for them to be free because they know the companies make rash decisions.

I want to re-iterate the fact that I am not upset about f2p players. I actually enjoy the idea of people being baited into buying the game, what I don’t like is that out of this veteran players were not treated as the valued and loyal customer’s we are. We essentially got the worst deal of anyone purchasing HOT right now, which is the opposite of what is logical in a give and get situation. If that clears anything up.

I am not saying everyone has to agree with me, I just know that a large portion of the community is like myself livid over the show of bad faith from ArenaNet to its actual customers, and worse.. to its long term LOYAL customers, showing everyone that to Anet see’s loyalty as a resource they can USE not as a gift given by the players, and that leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

MiniEquine.6014:

Jiggawattz.2697:

maddoctor.2738:

Dager.2390:

The thingh is that we didn’t buy only the game but also we contract a service (every mmo is a service) and here is the problem in the moment we bought the game the say to us that the game was b2p but now is a f2p.

I’m not agaist new players but I’m agaist what Anet is doing the things

And your service is still valid, you bought the service to play the game forever without paying again and that’s what you got, that never changed.

But the value of the offer has changed drastically. You pay 60 dollars to go to a show, and as you get there and get seated they announce that because 50% of the seats are empty they are letting everyone else in for free. Outrage will insue for anyone that values money and carefully chooses the things they enjoy enough to invest in. As somone who is physically disabled and has to manage my money carefully I made a very active decision to save the money to pre-purchase gw2 because I love the title and the company despite many of my posts on this forum.

All of your posts are completely riddled with logical fallacies and the sort. Let’s spell it out using your analogy.

Say you bought GW2 1-3 years ago. I paid $60 for your “ticket” to the show. You have been watching this show for the past 1-3 years. Other people looked at either the price of the ticket or the show advertisements and said, “nah, I can’t/don’t want to do that”. You said, “Yes, I do want to do that”, so you bought your ticket and have been watching the show while they were not watching the show.

Show’s over now. There is nothing about “empty seats” or 50% off; the show has ended. However they release a new show for the same price that allows you to continue watching the old show parts and new parts. You must pay $50 this time around regardless of who you are, but if you saw the old show you also get a complimentary drink. Maybe your drink tray is full, but they offer you a drink anyway. At one point, as the old show was finishing up, they sold tickets for the exact same price as this drink. They now let people into the old show alone without having to pay, but they moved the chairs out, however you can upgrade and see the old+new show like everyone else for the $50.

You chose to watch the show earlier than everyone else. Market trends clearly display that shows lose value as more people watch it (less viewers remaining). This means that at some point the old show by itself was going to either become less expensive or free at some point or another. Either that, or it won’t even be offered at all. You could very well wait 60 years before watching a recording of this show when you can get it and the sequels for a grand total of $5 in the discount bin at Big Box Mart, but then you’d have to wait that long.

The show never ended, that’s the thing. I paid for the show in its entirety, and they did not. You created a fallacy to attempt to make mine seem negative and only proved my point without realizing it.

thehipone.6812:

Birthday gifts containing super-expensive dyes that f2p players would have to wait 3 years to get.

Oh that is a reward for purchasing the game? I thought that was my reward for STILL playing the game after 3 years… hence birthday gift… You gotta do better than that.

maddoctor.2738:

Dager.2390:

The thingh is that we didn’t buy only the game but also we contract a service (every mmo is a service) and here is the problem in the moment we bought the game the say to us that the game was b2p but now is a f2p.

I’m not agaist new players but I’m agaist what Anet is doing the things

And your service is still valid, you bought the service to play the game forever without paying again and that’s what you got, that never changed.

But the value of the offer has changed drastically. You pay 60 dollars to go to a show, and as you get there and get seated they announce that because 50% of the seats are empty they are letting everyone else in for free. Outrage will insue for anyone that values money and carefully chooses the things they enjoy enough to invest in. As somone who is physically disabled and has to manage my money carefully I made a very active decision to save the money to pre-purchase gw2 because I love the title and the company despite many of my posts on this forum.

And contrary to popular belief I am in no way shape or form unhappy with that investment, even knowing this would happen (I would be less happy about it) but I would do it again, and pay the 80 bucks up front. Now that being said this does not discount or change the feelings of animosity or distrust built by both the secrecy of this deal, because you know they knew this was going to happen and could have told the community earlier than yknow… the day they did it… nor does it change that I am upset that our consolation prize yielded to me no real value of any sort.

They did provide us with some garbage royal guard skin that looks like something that got downvoted too many times so they couldn’t greenlight the release on the trading post… however to many of us, especially most of us that will never ever use such a horrendously disfigured skin, this feels like a cop out, or at the very least gives veteran players (and this has happened many times before) the idea that we are worth next to nothing. That our continued support and promotion of their game is to them, worth whatever they found in the bottom of the barrell… They couldn’t dare to part with 15% off the expansion? Or even to generate a few in game gems to let us purchase something of actual use? Gems are an unlimited currency, they could have provided consolation compensation and chose not to. This is why most of us hardcore veteran players with 1101 days played are a little bit sour over this whole deal.

Also to many of the people on this forum this anger and unrest is being redirected at the new guys coming into the game because they are easily accessable and it will only cause problems in the future, fracturing those who play for free and those who don’t. You will see free to players getting kicked from parties, us vs them mentality. All because Anet couldn’t part with something other than a skin that looks like a beatleborgs halloween costume to placate a disenfranchised mass of veteran players who have been at the lesser valued end of pretty much every deal since the initial purchase. Veterans are not respected. Anet is a company that as a company is much like a shark, they know about time investment, and they know that as a company they don’t have any need to placate players that already exist because we stand to lose more than they do if we stop. They already have our money. This is the overall idea behind this whole fiasco.

A post or two from the red names and perhaps something of actual value would settle down the veteran players and really help to smooth the transition of these new guys into the game. Personally I am happy to see new players, I am unhappy that I was not given consideration in the method that they chose to aquire them.

Ascended.8312:

You get more character slots and inventory bag slots
You can start a new whisper conversation more than once every 30 seconds
You have no restrictions on mailing items to other characters
You can access WvW without a level 60+ character no your account
You can use map chat
You can leave the starter maps before level 10
You can go to Lion’s Arch before level 35
You have guild bank access
You have masteries
You can use squad chat before level 30
You can use LFG before level 30
You can use more PvP chat modes other than squad chat
You can chat in the PvP lobby before level 20
You get daily login rewards
You can use the Gem-to-Gold exchange
You can trade more things on the trading post
You can post on the forums

All pieces of the original services we contracted by purchasing the copy of the game when it came out. You can’t just go to a resteraunt and eat food there and when you end up with a fly in your soup they offer you nothing in return and they say “Well… you had a waitress… and somone seated you… and they provided water and breadsticks so you should be happy….”

They drastically changed the value of the game without previous notice and gave to veterans little to no consolation for this. That is why there is outrage. If the prize had been even a 15% discount on HOT you wouldn’t have this on the forums… or perhaps 1000 in game gems, something that is not hard for them because they dump gems into the game from pvp tournaments and other promotions…

All of these were options that they did not consider… and as veteran players it is more the lack of thought that makes it the worst. We were there supporting them from the beginning and we receive little to no thanks for it. It is an abrasive situation at minimum.

chemiclord.3978:

You did. You got the game three years before anybody picking up a (rather heavily restricted) version for “free.”

If you don’t get that the perceived value of something drops over time outside of a handful of rare exceptions, there’s little further discussion that could be had that would placate you.

This is a cop-out response “OHhh you got 3 years… that is what you get…” cmon man, you know kitten ed well what he meant go apply for Anet support if you are going to peddle that kitten here. 3 years of gameplay was the service we contracted by purchasing the game, as long as it was running and we obeyed the terms of service we were in fact ENTITLED to that.

What he is saying is that he wishes like most of us, that Anet provided some sort of decent “consolation” for having to pay 120 dollars for being essentially a “founder”

xinkspillx.3914:

Entitlement is a serious issue here, it seems. After reading just a few pages of this thread I can’t help feeling cynical and question the integrity of most of the people posting here. How selfish can you people be? Thousands of hours of gameplay for a price of $10 to even $100+ over the last few years (including content f2p users will never see) and you still think you’re being cheated, or worse, that ANet owes you something? I can’t even fathom it. Price cuts happen all the time. You don’t hear massive outcry when a game goes on sale for $1, but the second it’s FREE but heavily restricted it’s a crime? That’s nonsense.

Free to play is not taking anything away from what you purchased. You are losing nothing and the free accounts still do not have all of the access that paid accounts do so this should be a non-issue.

As a side note (although one that is still very much related): I think one of the worst parts of this whole thing is just the general ignorance of the gaming community at large as in the past f2p switches usually only occur with games that are circling the drain. It’s sad to see a lot of gamers that don’t play the game take this as a signal of defeat from GW2. >.>

I addressed this in my original post, we do not believe we are owed anything. I don’t think many of us are so jaded to believe Anet is required to do anything. That does not change the fact that “1000’s of hours” does not change that we are paying 120 dollars for access to something we could have just waited and got for 60 and were never informed of. You only see this the way you want to see it because it helps your argument, but some players only played for a few months after paying 60 dollars and not have to pay another 60 to play HOT… its just a mess.. veteran players who paid full price in good business practice that respects its elite loyal and hardcore fanbase would receive some sort of discount or incentive to purchase the new expansion especially when they are making the previous game free to play, devaluing the game as a whole…

TLDR: We don’t believe they owe us anything, we just feel like as the people who are their longest supporters, we were given the worst of the deal.

Sinope.5630:

Guild Wars 2 is just a product what have had normal product life cycle.

1. Price is placed higher than normal price would be.

• Innovators will buy product no matter what price is placed to the product.
• Innovators want to be first ones, those who are ahead of the time.

2. Price is lowering to that price what has been normal this kind of product.

• Mass consumers buy the product, because they have heard what innovators have talk about it.
• Some of the innovators start to quit use this product.

3. Product have discounted price

• Those users buy this product whom interests arise because they heard mass users talk about it. It is not so important, but they want to be part of that product.
• Innovators start to looking for something new and some mass users start to quit use this product.

4. Product start to be giveaway with some other product, or it is changed to be free to play (if it is a game or program)

• Those players will try it whom get it free. It is not so important to them, but it is nice to try it, because some people are still talking about it, or new version from it is coming to the markets (expansion).

So I only see positive action from ArenaNet that they put Guild Wars 2 free to play. It is nice to have new players to enjoy the game with us.

I have been enjoyed this game couple days over 3 years now and it has been worth all money what I have invested to it.

Guild wars is not just a product, it is a service. We are happy with the product, unhappy with the service. Re-evaluate and fix post.

Jehuty.1938:

HelloKittyZOMG.1875:

I bought the game full price, well my hubby bought it for me… to me this whole going f2p junk is bull, it’s basically a slap in my face. I think those who paid full price should get some sort of compensation, and those who disagree are probably those who’ve joined free. The economy is probably wrecked now.

I’m a veteran (not 3 years ago but close) and I have no problem whatsoever in gw2 becoming f2p. I mean it doesn’t change anything for me. I can understand the frustration of people who bought gw2 not so long ago and didn’t want to buy HoT. But for the others (I think the majority), it doesn’t change anything at all. You’ll still have to buy the expansion no matter how you jumped into the game, by paying or just downloading it for free.

Now regarding the community, we didn’t have to wait the f2p players to get toxic. Also, a lot of new players are just like me and you : people who want to have fun. The only difference is that they don’t have to pay to try the game and that’s GREAT. Just like O’Brien said, Anet is confident that new players will fall in love with the game and buy the expansion and I agree. Gw2 is an amazing and original MMO that deserves to be at least tried. The more new people try the game, the more constent players we’ll have. And in Gw2, more players mean more fun. So that’s a win-win situation honestly.

Regarding the economy, it is in fact an interesting decision. The gem store remains as it is now. New players gathering large amounts of Gold is going to be balanced by the Gold sunk into the new items HoT will provide. And for the price of the core game, it should be “re-earned” by the sales of HoT. Because indeed new players wont pay right now, but they will when they’ll eventually buy HoT or buy gems. So it is a rather good decision, at least in my opinion.

Also, ArenaNet made it clear now : everytime an expansion is available, the previous content becomes FREE. You won’t have to pay the core game + every previous expansion to be able to play. It is a great deal for newcomers and a great choice for the game in general. As for the veteran , it is how markets work. You buy something at launch and over time, its value decreases but you gained the amount of time you played the game. Sometimes I feel like people forget that buying games isn’t a “real” investment as you can’t profit by selling it later. It is something you buy to have fun, nothing more nothing less.

So the main question is : Did you have fun? If yes, then you have nothing to regret. If no, then quit the game and don’t buy HoT or wait till it comes out and see if you’re willing to make the same bet. Really it is as simple as that.

Also, the free outfit is a cool enough Thank you from Anet for us Veteran and we should be thankfull aswell for a game we spent more than a thousand hours playing and awesome people we met by doing so.

I bought the core game at full price and I don’t regret it at all. These last 2,5 years were great and I had a lot of fun, met awesome people that I may have not met if I waited for the game to be free.

This seems to be the argument they all use, its not a valid argument. Being satisfied with the product I originally purchased does not mean I have to be satisfied with all future changes or leave. As a customer I have the right to complain about my treatment by said company to the company. What they do with that complaint is up to them, but if I hear one more high school student ask me “Did you get 60 dollars worth of play out of it?” I am going to flip my kitten. That shows an ignorant, ridiculous, naive take on the real world…