Guild Wars 2

GW2 is never going to become a serious esport

Who says it has to?

Not every game that has competitive elements (ie. PvP gameplay) needs to become a “serious esport”, which by that I assume you mean professionally sponsored, livecast from a central location, etc.

There are plenty of other games for that. It’s not needed here.

Lighter.5631:

warrior for fast pace face to face cool looking melee combat, which is not the case in gw2, so i regret my decision and i blame anet for that.

Having played a warrior to 80, I’m not really sure what to make of this.

Fast paced? I’d say the combat is as fast paced as a MMORPG could be. Melee in GW2 is all about moving around your target and trying to stay behind it, you’re constantly in motion. If you’re just planting your feet and pressing a key rotation while eating all incoming attacks, I dare say you’re doing it wrong.

Face to face? Other than going into a first-person view, I’m not sure what you mean by this.

Cool looking? Definitely, especially compared to MMOs of yesteryear. Two-handed melee weapons in particular are stompy as hell, and much more gratifying than in previous MMOs.

Please feel free to point out where you think I’m wrong, I’d love to get a dialogue going on this subject. :)

In the first 4 months of the game, I played a Norn Warrior. His name was, not surprisingly, Junkyard Wolf. Mostly Sword+Axe, though occasionally Rifle when stuff needed kiting to death that didn’t die nicely in melee. In those early months it was quite common to stumble upon someone needing saving, and I loved being the Big D-mn Hero. Nothin’ beats coming across a bad situation and Savage Leaping into the middle of the fight to save the day (God I love that skill). Good times.

After about a 4 month break, been playing a newly rolled Ranger. And once again, I find myself occasionally coming across someone in over their head, but now it’s send pet, lob traps from afar, group heal, kite everything to death, res the downed, and quietly slip away. The name? Enigmatic Stranger, wearing an old-west style trench coat. Howdy folks, I was never here.

Go ahead and psychoanalyze that to your heart’s content, but whatever the verdict, I’m havin’ fun. :)

It’s working! Logged back in at 10:55am EST. :)

Hope you all are having similar luck!

Still broken on Gate of Madness as well, can’t complete the zone. Also…

LordSeeker.5302:

Could we just use the cattlepult during event?
It’s my sollution.
Btw, still stuck too.

This! Please at least give us a work-around if you guys can’t fix it for whatever reason.

exocet.6308:

Helmet, Shoulders and Coat: Tier 1
Legs and Boots: Pit Fighter
Result:

Cool samurai vibe. :)

My warrior, going for the “primitive barbarian” look. Think I mostly nailed it.

Edit: SO many awesome designs in this thread! Whatever other flaws and/or shortcomings GW2 may have, character customization is certainly not one of them.

Hmm, that’s a stumper. I would try…

1. Changing the Interface scale, this might nudge the offending window somewhere you can grab it.
2. Changing screen resolution (go lower and then back if needed), again might reposition the window where you can get to it.

Best o’ luck.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WoodenPotatoes/videos

^ Gobs of GW2 videos, containing countless hours of in-game footage from beta to present, and that’s just one list of many.

If you want to make your own GW2-dedicated channel, I think you’ll be fine. :)

MB can mean either megabit or megabyte depending on the context.

Context is secondary to case. A capital ‘B’ means Byte, ie. MB = megabyte, while a lower-case ‘b’ means bit, so Mb = Megabit.

Also, you’ll often see “mb” to refer to ‘megabit’ which is incorrect though sadly all too common, where a lower-case ‘m’ technically means ‘milli’ or ‘one-thousandth’, the opposite of ‘mega’ or ‘million’.

The main thing here is the case of the ‘b’, lower=bit, upper=byte. The case of the ‘m’ is played rather fast and loose, though it matters little as no one uses ‘millibyte’ which of course doesn’t exist.

Confusing, yes. Just watch the ‘b’.

Dear Santa,

I want a big honkin’ two-handed battleaxe for my warrior. Call it a “greataxe” or “warrior axe” or whatever, I don’t care about the name, I just want one. (And no, it is not the same thing as a halberd, if you think it is then you’re an uneducated cretin.)

That is all. Cookies are by the chimney.

Proberly? Proberly?! Ugh…

Anyway, yes, I completely agree that medium armor is absolutely wretched in its lack of variety at the moment. Hopefully this will be corrected in a future patch with additional styles.

As much as I’d love to level a thief or ranger, seeing a large, bestial cat-person bounding along on all fours in a friggin’ trench coat just completely destroys any sense of fun associated with the respective professions.

Edit: And not just any trench coat, but one that poofs out at the bottom like some ridiculous Snow White ball-room gown. Really, ANet? Really? What the hell were you people thinking…

I see the word here already, but for the record, a “2h battleaxe” is actually a Halberd, and yea it should def be included.

Not exactly. A halberd is a specific type of pole arm (halberd is also known as a “staff axe” or “pole axe”). Pole arms in general, including halberds, were meant primarily as anti-cavalry weapons. Two-handed axes, or “warrior axes”, had much shorter grips (enough for two hands and some extra reach) than pole arms, and were for close-quarters (infantry) battles.

I think a good solution would be to put in Hammer skins that look like great axes. The animations are good enough, and that way we could get the look without changing abilities.

I think this is a brilliant solution!

YES! I’d love to see some big whoppin’ two-handed axes. Was very disappointed when I first started playing and they were absent.

Also, whips. Saw some NPCs using whips/whip-like attacks that looked positively awesome, would love to see that as a player option as well.

And javelins, for both melee and throwing.

I would also like to see bare-fisted martial arts style attack options for warriors and rogues. Especially for rogues.

I’d also like to know, is there a katana-like sword skin in this game, either 1h or 2h? Would love to unleash my inner samurai.

And throwing stars for thieves, because why the heck not.

endless.1376:

I implore ArenaNet to rethink this system, as it seems out of place not only in Guild Wars, but also feels strange. I didn’t want to buy another dungeon crawler, but rather an MMO with combat that feels more in line with an MMORPG.

So in other words, you want a completely different game than what GW2 is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you’re probably better off simply playing another game.

As to GW2’s combat mechanics, I personally like the more action-oriented style of combat, and I suspect many others do too, or they wouldn’t be here. Frankly, I’d argue it didn’t go far enough toward being more action-oriented, but that’s entirely subjective. But to expect it to be a mere continuation of the original game’s combat style when it’s an entirely new game is naive; in that case, a mere expansion pack for GW1 would’ve sufficed.

As to your assertion that combat is “confusing”, well… might I humbly suggest that maybe you’re just bad at it? I find nothing confusing about it. If I wanted to simply stand in one spot and mash a button sequence to execute some idiotic rotation, I’d still be playing “that other MMO” (you know the one). I want more than that, so I’m here, because GW2 offers more. And frankly, perhaps a bit of confusing combat — some chaos, if you will — is just what people need to kick them out of their brain-dead MMORPG ruts. This genre of gaming could be so much more than what it presently is, and it’s not the lack of imagination by developers holding it back, it’s players who refuse to adapt to new ideas and progress.

IHIavok.4753:

That’s just it. You take away the grind, you take away what makes an MMO an MMO.

This is the attitude that is crippling the evolution of MMORPGs as compared to other gaming genres. “Grinding” is the lazy developer’s crutch, and should be treated accordingly. It’s the easy way out when honest development effort is required to come up with something better. Consequently, it places blinders on the players who expect such a system to be in place, creating a nasty feedback loop of confirmation bias.

Many years ago, a wild-haired physics geek commented that “mediocrity cannot see higher than itself”, and when it comes to modern PC gaming, nowhere has this been as painfully evident as in MMORPGs and FPSs (honestly, the two are running neck and neck for the crown on that one, but even if you win you still lose).

We are at a stage where the only thing holding back developers from thinking outside the box is players.

Draehl.2681:

And again, like everyone else, you’re describing a scenario where you’re worried about dying and have a need to avoid damage and position yourself. The game is just fine in those scenarios. What about the rest of the time when you’re just fighting a mob and there is no need in taking action to not die? That’s the entire point I’m trying to make. This game is so perfectly set up when you’re seconds away from taking a dirt nap. So perfectly, that Anet didn’t bother to make the game at all interesting when you’re not in that type of situation.

How could one possibly expect interesting gameplay in a fight where there is no possibility of defeat?

I think that is where the problem lies, not with deficiencies in auto-attack damage balance. ArenaNet have run head-long into a problem that so far plagues MMORPG devs everywhere, namely: How to make the ordinary feel “not ordinary”.

The problem here is two-fold, but they are intertwined.

First, the typical over-world fight against a single normal (not Vet or Champ) enemy has basically no danger attached to it. As pointed out, it is possible to simply stand and auto-attack, soaking the trivial conditions and whatnot, until the enemy is dead. Rinse and repeat.

This is mostly the fault of the 1990’s-era A.I. in the game, where an enemy simply stands still and applies its rotation of attacks/conditions/whatever to the player until one of them dies. Having enemies that move around, try to flank the player, occasionally dodge player AoE attacks, would be vastly more interesting, dynamic, and overall just more entertaining. However...

The hard part is implementing such a dynamic A.I. in a way that doesn’t overly punish the player when faced with adds, because adds — whether from rapid respawns or just dense enemy population — are the routine in this game. Fighting one or two dynamic enemies could be exhilarating; fighting 4 or 5 of them could be agonizingly frustrating. This is a tough thing to balance in a game with not only high enemy population density, but high respawn rates on top of that.

Of course, if the devs were to do an “A.I. pass” on all enemy types and make them individually more dangerous, they’d also have to go through the population densities and respawn rates to balance this accordingly (although A.I. improvements would be the hard part, pop/respawn balance easy if tedious). Currently, the player’s toolset has been dramatically improved (for an MMORPG) while the enemy A.I. is still operating the same as MMORPGs a decade ago, and the former has only served to cast a glaring light on the deficiencies of the latter.

Second, and not completely unrelated to the first, is that as the game stands now, when fighting “ordinary” enemies, players simply do not need to pay much attention in order to not die. This trivializes those fights, and makes them mere speed bumps along the way, rather than a genuine threat to overcome. Making those enemies more dangerous, whether through A.I. improvements or simple stat boosting, would again require a rebalancing of enemy density and respawn rates.

Long story short: There’s no simple way to make “ordinary” fights more than ordinary without requiring a lot of rebalancing in other areas, or otherwise trivializing content in the process. Somehow, I don’t think we should get our hopes up on any of these fronts.

So you’re telling me that my example of fighting the ettin is acceptable? Because situations like this make GW2 one of the most non-interactive games one could play.

That entirely depends on your profession. Fighting an Ettin as a melee-focused character is entirely different from your experience, by miles.

I dunno, maybe there are issues with Necro, I haven’t played one yet. But from playing warrior, ranger, guardian, thief, I have not encountered the “auto-attack boredom” you’ve described so far. Maybe Necro play style is something ArenaNet has to look at?

…run-of-the-mill basic combat it seems to devolve pretty quickly into watching your character autoattack and I dont find that enjoyable either.

I dare say, you’re “doing it wrong”. There’s more to GW2 combat than just rotations. Movement is vital, and I don’t mean just dodging. I find even in “mundane” fights that if I circle an opponent (even in melee) and keep ‘em turning, I’m far more likely to avoid “gotcha” attacks and to generally avoid damage at all.

Planting your feet in one spot and going toe-to-toe with an enemy is, in my opinion, just dumb (and unbelievably dull). With few exceptions (bursts, etc.), you can attack on the move — make use of it! Time your stand-still attacks between the enemy’s knockback/knockdown attacks. If melee, dodge those knocks and gap-close back in for the burst. If ranged (caster, bow, rifle), kite the enemy, don’t just let them run up to you and get hits on you while you continue to use ranged attacks in melee (again, dumb). While kiting, be situationally aware and don’t agro more than you can handle. When you do agro, it should be intentional; time it based on the CDs you’ll need to handle it, be aware of what you’ll have available when the previous mob dies.

And lastly, combat is as interesting as you want to make it.

^ That.

I’m with Tanish, count me among the Group Z “laid back explorers”.

Exploration, DEs, occasional WvW. Love finding vistas, figuring ’em out can be frustrating but very rewarding.

The game world is awesome to explore, at times a real treat to just run through and appreciate the beauty of some areas.

I like tinkering with different builds/play styles and min-maxing, but also enjoy just running around bashing enemies to a pulp.

I enjoy occasional WvW. Haven’t touched sPvP, doubt I will; looks too much like arena-style PvP which doesn’t appeal to me.

Haven’t stepped foot in a dungeon yet. Was planning to eventually, but given the direction the devs are going lately I doubt I’ll ever bother starting down that path. Had more than enough of the grindy treadmill that is WoW, never going back to that sort of hamster-wheel play style again.

Once I get 100% World Completion will probably play through an alt or two before shelving the game and moving on. Originally planned on playing for much longer than that, but now I don’t think the game will continue to appeal to me beyond what I’m already doing. Still, at ~400hrs of fun I’ve already gotten far more than my money’s worth out of the game.

@kingghidra: I find Sword/Axe+Rifle to compliment each other very well. Whirling Axe (aoe damage + full Adrenaline) followed up by Flurry is a great close-combat “room cleaner” combo, and the same traits/gear that emphasize bleeds for Sword translate nicely to Rifle. Of course, you lack multi-target damage with Rifle, but that’s mainly for kiting a single tough Vet/Champ when needed, or to dodge away and pick off a tough group from range after whittling ’em down with WA/Flurry, since Bleed-based warrior tends to be glassy even with Healing Signet and some +Healing.

Still gobs of fun though.

Berserker’s Power and Heightened Focus emphasize keeping a full bar of Adrenaline and not using it in order to maximize damage; this is at odds with a Bleed-based Sword build, since Flurry is the best Bleed stacker you have, even against multiple opponents.

Adrenal Reserves is kinda wasted if you’re not planning on using Flurry often. And if you are going to use Flurry a lot, BP and HF are wasted. See where I’m going with this? :)

Yeah, I’m kinda mystified about this too, especially since most other MMOs that I’ve played put this small but important bit of info right up front when updating.

Maybe there’s some technical reason why it’s non-trivial to do this based on their back-end architecture or something, but I doubt that. It’d be nice if a dev would chime in here with, at the very least, an explanation of why this is absent.

aggros are so messy that tankers are not even viable, is pretty sad.

You do realize that the “messy agro” is intentional, right? It’s not a bug, it’s not a lack of foresight, it’s the way it’s intended to be. If that crimps your play style, maybe you need to check your old-school-MMO preconceptions at the door.

Not gonna bother commenting on the rest of your post, others have already covered those points.

So I will simply say this: I love NOT being pigeon-holed into a predefined “role”. I enjoy jumping into and out of the “tanking” role for brief periods, then kiting/rDPS for a while, then reviving fallen players, then AOE spawn-control, then back to tanking briefly. This game allows me to do all that, and then some.

During my years in WoW I was at various times DPS, tank, and occasionally healer. And every time, that “role” was all I could do. If I was spec’d as tank, then I could do nothing else during the run; likewise when spec’d DPS or healer (depending on class as well of course).

I don’t like being forced into a certain role and told to “stay there until we’re done”. I like variety. I like unpredictability, reacting to the situation. I like doing tanky stuff one minute, and the next reviving allies, and the next dealing out damage and debuffs, all in the same fight.

At this point I think the only people left who truly enjoy the predefined roles (ie. “this is ALL you will do in this dungeon”) are people who are so indoctrinated into the idea of following a script that they can’t conceive of gameplay that requires them to think on their feet and do things they weren’t planning on doing.

(I’m not saying GW2’s dungeons are revolutionary, but at least the way the game’s underlying principles inform other gameplay elements, you certainly always have options.)

RebelYell.7132:

Teleporting friends by right clicking them to save them confusion and waypoint costs – this is something Second Life uses to great effect.

Second Life is not a MMORPG. Hell it’s barely even a game, let alone anything to be held up as relevant when discussing gameplay issues here (or elsewhere for that matter).

@Efaicia.3672:

There are already quite a few MMORPGs that cater to exactly the play styles you described, and several of those games are still going strong today with healthy player communities and development. It’s not as if you won’t get what you want if it’s not provided in GW2. Quite the contrary, you (and people like you who enjoy those play styles) have MANY options, certainly many more than those of us who don’t.

In short: You already have what you want. Let the remainder of us have what we want.

And stop trying to make every MMORPG adhere to the same old formula when your wishes (and that same formula) are already being catered to by the vast majority of games in the genre.

This Dodge isn’t a Chevy, I only like Chevys but figured I’d give this Dodge a try, it’s nice but would be sooo much more perfect if it were a Chevy! Make this Dodge be more like a Chevy and I’d love it fuh evah!

Just drive what you want, and leave other people (and their cars/trucks/games) alone.

Or to put it another way, stop trying to turn Product X into Product Y when there’s already so much of Product Y out there that there’s no reason whatsoever to turn Product X into something it’s not.

How are people not getting this?

Ugh.

Mesket.5728:

certainly not Norn… you will be left out without any elite skill but the banner and signet… plain boring.

I have to second this. While my Norn warrior is my main (and overall most fun) character, those elites are snooze-worthy. Especially compared to Charr.

idiggory’s post pretty much sums it all up (and very insightfully I might add), but I’d also like to add one thing. Now maybe I’m just simple-minded and easily entertained, but having played since launch, I gotta say Savage Leap + Flurry = endless fun. I could do that all day!

Oh wait, I do. :)

So in other words, you want an entirely different game. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you’re not going to get that here. Best o’ luck in your search, though.

Zcoks.3659:

I have noticed . e.g. in LA grand Plazza, the floor is rather greenish with FOV on , and brownish with it off .. hmm.

Just a Scientific Wild kitten Guess here, but I’m guessing that’s something to do with the reflection system, which affects more than just water visuals. Does the same effect occur when Reflections is set to ‘None’?

Great start! Just need to expand the FOV option even further by a few degrees (at least 100 max or more), and we’ll be all set.

Like many, I’ve been following this issue for quite a while, even before this thread was created. To be locked into such a low FOV in a PC game is flat-out unacceptable, but ANet has stepped up and addressed the problem, and for that many of us are grateful.

Based on the responses regarding both FOV and camera preferences (two technically separate but instinctively related issues), it seems the path is clear for the devs, to whit:

• FOV slider in graphics settings. This will make everyone happy, whether they prefer the old FOV or the new one, or expanded FOV even further, and everyone in between. Given what can be done with multi-monitor support, there’s no excuse not to do this. None. At all.
• Vertical camera position, just like the horizontal option. This is needed especially for some character models that experience visual conflicts in tight quarters, eg. some vista jumping puzzles, as well as not wanting the camera to sit on the ground when panning the slightest bit upward.
• Increased camera zoom-out limit option. Some people genuinely need this option due to visceral responses to visual stimuli (motion sickness, etc.), others want it for aesthetic reasons. Either way, a large portion of your player base wants the option to increase it.
• Option to zoom into first-person view. Really, this one’s a no-brainer.

And that about sums it up. I’ve no doubt the devs have the ability to make this happen, it’s a question of motivation. Personally I’m (mostly) happy with the game, but you’ve got to ask yourselves: How many players do you want to lose over resolvable technical issues? How much “good will” are you willing to risk by not implementing the above options?

The choice seems clear.

When it comes to underwater combat, I’m just not feelin’ it. I’d much prefer if we’d keep our same weapons as on land, maybe with a few tweaks so some of the abilities make sense underwater, but mostly the same. Being forced to use harpoon guns and spears, rather than have them as an option, doesn’t feel like I’m even playing the same profession. Yeah, I know, ground-target abilities would have to be completely reworked, and even then would probably still be clunky to use underwater; I can see why ANet chose to go with separate underwater-only weapons… I just don’t care for it personally.

I do like the full range of three-dimensional movement, kinda reminds me of playing Descent back in the day (albeit simplified, since here there’s always an “up”), but the way it’s implemented in this game means I only dive in if it’s needed for an underwater skill point, vista, heart event, or POI. Otherwise, I’ll keep my feet on dry land.

Just my 2c of course.

You know why WoW is successful? i have said it over the years, is because there [sic] support is awesome. They answer in forums and care, talk to the people. But the lack of support and communication is frustrating, especially when a class is so broken like rangers.

Apparently you’ve never tried getting a straight answer from the devs on the Hunter forums over there.

Not that it’s much better here…

In-game mail has nothing to do with your email account. Anyone can send you in-game mail, regardless of your log-in email.

As far as frequency of receiving in-game spam mail, that seems to be rather sporadic and unpredictable. Personally I get about a half-dozen or so spam mail per week. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, just report them, delete the mail, and move on. At least that’s what I do.

On the other hand, if you’re talking about email spam from gold-sellers, then yes, that is absolutely something to be concerned about. Make sure that the email address you use to log in to GW2 is not used for anything else, and that the password for that email address and your GW2 password are both unique and not used for any other accounts of any kind, and are not the same.

Hope this helps.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can go into Manage 3D Settings and find the one called Antialiasing – Transparency, and set that to something other than Off. This will antialias any “billboarded” objects in the game that have partially transparent textures such as plants, improving their visual quality.

Haven’t used an ATI board for gaming in several years, so can’t say if Catalyst has a similar setting.

Beyond that, if your machine is up to it, you can try Supersampling in the game’s graphics settings, that should greatly reduce aliasing as well.

Also, your in-game Shaders setting will impact visual quality of plants and other billboarded objects.

Hope this helps.

Wow a lot of folks here are really missing the whole point.

First off, the whole concept of a never-ending “endgame” is just absurd in the context of an RPG, regardless whether it’s MMO or single-player. Those who’ve tried it (EQ, WoW, et al) have always failed miserably at it.

By definition, “endgame” must be, and always will be, a repetitive grind in some fashion, since devs can not possibly put out content faster than players will consume it; eventually they must start repeating the content in order to have anything to do at “endgame”. This does NOT make for good gameplay.

So what does that leave? The whole rest of the game. One huge lesson I’m sure ArenaNet are taking from other games is that when the focus is placed on endgame, it renders all the pre-endgame (ie. leveling) content obsolete.

Look at WoW for example. The vast majority of its content is pre-level-cap, and yet the level cap is supposed to be “where it’s at” in terms of gameplay. And what is that level-cap gameplay? Endless repetition until the next content patch or expansion.

Now take a look at many of the great single-player RPGs that have predated MMORPGs over the decades, right up to current RPGs like the latest Elder Scrolls games. There is no “endgame” where you stop exploring/questing/leveling and start grinding for months on end; it makes no sense, since once you’ve defeated the game’s ultimate badguy(s), you’re effectively done. Sure, you can keep playing and poke around the gameworld, but your progression is over, period. You’ve beaten the game. You can then either put it down and be done, or try again with a different class/race/whatever for a different style.

GW2 is not a traditional MMORPG, in many respects. From ejecting the holy trinity of class roles (finally!), to prioritizing the journey (exploring/leveling) over the destination (so-called “endgame”), they’ve made fundamental changes to the way these games are played.

To complain about lack of endgame content in GW2 is like complaining that you can’t drive a Ferrari in a football game. It’s apples and oranges.

GW2 is not a game where you’re meant to play the same character at the level cap for years on end. It’s a game to explore and experience, to pick up or put down at your whim, where you’re not pressured or even expected (though you can if you like) to dump days-long marathon sessions into it.

To expect the tank/healer/dps paradigm is to miss the point. To expect that you need to play every available minute to get your money’s worth is to miss the point. To rush through the leveling process for the sake of reaching “endgame” is to really miss the point.

I’m not telling people how to play, but I will say that if you expect something from a game — any game — that’s just not there, nor is intended to be there, you’re entirely missing the point of that game.

Also, I agree with the OP entirely. ArenaNet, stick to your vision; if you try to please everyone, well… go look at Blizzard’s failed attempt at that, and learn from their mistakes instead of repeating them yourselves.

Hmm, I didn’t even think about the Windows updates, which I applied today before doing anything else including GW2.

Can’t say whether there’s a connection though, pure speculation at this point. Guess all we can do is wait until more info becomes available either from ArenaNet or Microsoft.

I too just noticed this. It’s related to the Shaders setting in video options. Prior to today, having it on Medium worked fine. Suddenly, I have to put it on Low to get 50+ fps. So, go in there and set Shaders to Low and that should (temporarily) fix the problem for you (at least it did for me).

Hopefully this will be a very short-lived bug, because having NO Shaders is a huge drop in visual quality.

Edit to add: Prior to today’s update, with Shaders on Medium, was getting around 55-60 fps; after update, around 24 fps.