Guild Wars 2

Creslin.1758:

My favorite, and the most evil jumping puzzle in the game is in Eternal Battlegrounds…and the evilness has very little to do with the actual puzzle.

That people kill others trying to do it, yeah, lol. I tried it in the beta and laughed pretty hard. Such a troll thing to do :-p

It’s an interesting idea but they would need to do it in a way that doesn’t give any advantage to the people buying these things. Basically, it would just equal to question elsewhere except that graphics and/or sounds and/or text is new. If people are willing to pay for that and the developers are willing to create a team dedicated to creating that content, then it seems like a fine idea!

I, personally, probably wouldn’t buy into that unless the content is really cool. But the more tools people have to help themselves enjoy the game the better, in my book.

Venator.5780:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Here is a quote from Jon Peters a while back on how they viewed death penalties in GW2 http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/07/08/to-live-and-die-in-tyria-death-healing-and-combat-in-guild/

“If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason—it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time.”

Now the game is live we get penalized THREE times.

1. Cost of Armor repairs
2. Cost of Way point travel
3. Reduction in downed state health, so we have less time to recover each time

I wonder what changed?

Hopefully it’s just a matter of gathering more feedback and data – the current system is flawed.

The system appears to be designed in such a way that would assume you are never soloing content, but rather in a group at all times. And for players that play that way, there won’t be an issue.

But for anyone soloing, or working through the less populated areas – it’s an unfun scenario when it occurs.

It’s meant to be un-fun. You just lost. If you’re not feeling penalised in some way then what’s so great about winning? The only time I find the system particularly annoying is when I die for a stupid reason, like a mob pushes me back and I go flying off of a cliff to my death, or the mobs respawn in 30 seconds and I get mobbed by mobs and have no chance at escape (though I need to learn to turn around and RUN more often).

It’s easy to make back the money lost on repairs and using WPs. Takes only a few minutes if you just grind some mobs down. As an elementalist, I suspect that I have the most difficult class to solo with, and so I die a lot. Yet with a few exceptions, I feel I always had the chance to either win the fight or to get away with my hide intact. So I take it as a learning experience and improve. The small penalty combined with a mostly challenging and doable game results in a very satisfying experience.

If you really don’t want to ever have to pay for WPs, then wait to be revived. Stay in common areas. Or just find yourself a friend. There are plenty of people out there. Or you could stick with WvW where waypoints are free. If you don’t want to repair your armour, try replacing it! If you die only a few times a level, you should be able to find replacements quite easily.

You’ve got many options to get around the very small penalties applied to you upon death. Feel free to use them.

Eddard.2930:

Naive question: is this a scam or spam? There is a way to report either. I’m not sure which to use, although it probably doesn’t matter if the context is clear.

Anet? Any guidance?

If it’s asking for money or is in some other way obviously selling things, it’s spam. If it’s asking for things like account info or credit card info or whatever, then it’s a scam. Basically, spam is trying to provide a service and scam is trying to steal from you.

Mevem: You’re exagerating. By your own admission, you still got silver which is far from “nothing”. Furthermore, it’s not punishment, it’s merely not as great a reward as DPSing tons.

I totally agree with you on the AoE tagging. I’ve mostly played as my elementalist so I haven’t had complaints about that aspect yet, but I see how it could be really annoying to people. I don’t find I get loot from every mob I tag, though, so it doesn’t really seem OP and we kinda need a reason to zerg up like that anyway.

I don’t know about your experiences, but my experience is that I have some support abilities, some tankish abilities, and some DPS. I don’t play any one role all the time in groups. I keep switching based on my needs as well as those around me. I’m quite satisfied with the balance in this regard.

As a group, I can see my party members on the map, have a group only chat, and have access to their portraits. Not sure what I’d use the portraits for ATM but as I learn other little things about the game and as it’s fleshed out, that may prove to be very valuable indeed! It also shows their buffs and debuffs which is useful for supporting them and gauging if they’ll be able to support us.

But yeah, either we should learn more about how support exactly is rewarded or it should be modified (or both). The party system, also, could do with improvements. Sorry to repeat myself, but I really don’t find them to be much of a problem ATM. Just not as great as they could be.

Edge: It’s a matter of balance. Fact is, you still got plenty of credit for what you did even though you didn’t get as much as you deserved. The difference between a gold and a silver isn’t that great and at least you know, and probably those around know, just how epic your actions were. And the fact that the game engine allows for such epic play is amazing in itself. Aye, this system does need work but there’s plenty of time to work on it and, as it is, much of the rest of the game is really quite epic, all things considered.

You didn’t take into consideration the XP gained at the completion of the even which would probably add, what, maybe another 6k XP to them both? If he got gold and she silver, maybe she’ll only make 5k XP but it’s still pretty close. Yep, definitely needs work but it’s still at least functional and not completely broken. Plus, knowing the system isn’t balanced as well as it could be, Bob could reward Jane in some way, like giving her mats she needs or giving her some silver to buy a nice new piece of gear. Aye, it’d be great if the game took care of that but at the same time, it’d’ve been great if Blizz had introduced better ways to manage loot ninjas in WoW. I played that game for years and it was still pretty broken in that regard.

Distributing rewards fairly is very difficult. If everyone gets the same regardless, then it rewards players to get into range of an event then go make themselves a sandwhich. Any system they implement will likely have ways of exploiting it. Again, I’m not saying the system is fine the way it is. It certainly needs work and I’m sure AN knows it. I just think it’s not as broken as I feel you’re expressing.

IMO, if in a few months the system hasn’t taken significant strides in a positive direction, then I’d say your stance is quite reasonable. As it is, they’re still, I believe, focussing on basic issues of connectivity, major flaws like exploitative bugs, and expanding the servers to deal with the high traffic volume.

Yeah, now that you mention it, they’ve been great with downtime! Blizzard, on the otherhand, always screwed me over with that. It always annoyed me and yet there were so many apologists telling us that it’s “necessary”. Turns out it’s not!

It’s quite excellent considering it has just launched. The coming year will really determine the fate of GW2. So far the signs are good that they will improve upon the problems in a timely fashion. I’m very disappointed with the PvP system but it doesn’t fail in principle, only in the details.

You may very well be right about you 40% figure. It sounds very reasonable to me. However, I don’t think all those people will stay away from GW2. As it is, GW2 is not only a massive success but it is keeping many people playing it for weeks now. We also know that they will be improving GW2 as time goes on, so it just remains a question as to how effective their improvements are and just how kitteny the competition is.

Because of the no subscription part, it will be very easy for players to drop other MMOs, such as WoW, and come back to GW2. It’ll also be fairly simple for many players to pop back into GW2 to see how it has changed without committing to completely dropping their other MMO. This may not be the WoW killer but that doesn’t really matter because it’s a fun game that many players are planning to stick with for the long term.

Report them for spam. If everyone does this then those spammers will be removed. It’s not a great solution but it’ll work for now while the AN team work on the problem. It’s an arms race between spammers developing spam tools and AN developers finding more effective ways of catching them.

I like the jumping puzzles but at the same time I think thtey need a lot of work on both the jumping mechanic and on the terrain pathing. It gets prettykittenwhen, functionally, I’m running up a ramp but graphically, I’m walking up air around some skinny pieces of wood.

I’d love the jumping to have a power modifier based on how long one holds down the space bar. So for example, one could jump normally by pressing space bar and would jump max distance if one just holds it and one cuts off the jump as soon as one lets go fo the space bar. They could also introduce a kind of charge-up where one holds shift or something before pressing space bar to do a stronger jump. They’ve built a really cool world but the enjoyment we get out of the world is only as good as our power to explore it.

The camera derping is a biig thing they need to fix, IMO. Half of the time I spend on jumping puzzles is me trying to get the camera into a good position

It takes time for meta game to adapt. I’ve seen some impressive things in PvP and WvW. It requires intelligence both to do these things and to counter them. This game is more complex and has more potential than any holy trinity game I’ve ever played, IMO. This game is not chaotic. Seeing chaos only means you aren’t seeing the patterns. Whichever people/clans who see through the chaos faster and more accurately will gain significant advantages over the QQing newbs who don’t want to/can’t.

Waffles.3629:

I would have to agree with you here. I found the game a lot more rewarding once I notice certain social issues were being addressed. You’ll find out that certain main characters in the story lines are part of the LGBT community. I won’t spoil it for you, but it makes you appreciate the game much more. I like how they created characters that players of all kinds of backgrounds can identify with.

That’s very cool! Can’t wait to see what else I uncover

Oh, and for those of you who think it’s too expensive or are otherwise upset about the cost, try making a few money saving modifications to the way you play. For example, it’s rarely cost effective to sell equipment on the TP! There are soooo many items up on the TP being sold slightly above the cost of vendering them. So once you’ve paid the posting fee then have the 10% taken off what you made from the sale, you’ve gotten less than you would have gotten from vendoring the item! Hell, there are even some items (I’ve only found this in low-level items) that one may buy from the TP, salvage, then sell the mats on the TP for a profit!

Also, don’t salvage every bit of crappy equipment you get. Wood is rarely worth much on the TP and I’ve actually only found level 1-15 or so gear to actually potentially be worth more in salvaged goods than selling at the vender.

If we apply more thought to our play, most players, I think, will save more than they are paying on WPing their way around the world.

I think the cost is fine ATM. At level 60 it costs maybe a silver to save about 5 minutes of walking. One may make that money back in less than a minute of fighting. Repair… I dunno, does it cost more for epic items to repaired than crappy blues? Repair makes the game more dynamic and stops it from just being a “grind this area over and over” thing.

As was mentioned above, using waypoints, instead of graveyards, is much more convenient, gives much more freedom, and is a method that makes sense! Furthermore, you need not take the WPs. You could sit around and wait for someone to rez you.

Having said that, little tweaks may improve this system even more and they may come up with an even better system eventually. But the way things are right now sits very well with me.

In response to WPs and repairing being a gold sink, I don’t think that’s necessary as we have gem purchases for that already, as well as the gold lost through the TP and the gold spent in WvW.

So I’ve found many good and bad things about the game. Considering I inteded to play with friends and we can’t easily PvP together, that’s a huge flaw. Then in terms of events, some are really interesting and fun, and many are just grindy and simplistic.

I just started playing a new character, a human thief. I went to an event where one had to answer the questions of children about their heroes, the heroes of each of the races (like Zojja and Rytlock, et al). I found it one of the better events but what really impressed me was in the end. Billy said “I want to be Zojja” and some other child, Catherina, said that he can’t be Zojja because Zojja’s a girl, but then another girl, Lulu, said he could be Zojja if he wants.

Now, though this little back and forth sounds simplistic, it strikes me as being heart-warmingly progressive! There are many people in the world with sexual identity crises who are treated directly, and indirectly, with such malice that encountering such acceptance in a game is very refreshing. Mainstream games, I’ve found, tend to mostly follow the average opinion and tend to reinforce these cultural beliefs, be they repressive or liberal. Even though this may seem like a petty small thing to most people, it gives me great hope for humanity, American culture, ArenaNet, and gaming in general.

Keep up the great work!!!