Guild Wars 2

GW1 districts were the right way to do it. The mega-server is messed up. I also hate the fact there is no DC queue that guarantees you will return to the same map during a meta or world boss fight. The old system was best.

I wish we could switch servers in maps like in GW1.

allow ppl to choose which ip they want to be in is the best way.

To be honest, we shouldn’t really be relying on manual taxis to do content in the first place.

You forgot about the biggest fail so far, namely the the personality trait system.

I wonder how much time and money was spent (wasted) on that while the game was in development?

Sadly, it does seem to sum up the way many things are developed at Anet. Someone has this ‘good’ idea, so they develop it a bit, implement it into the game and then realise they’re not quite sure what they were trying to achieve in the first place and it gets dropped or forgotten about.

Anet has yet to prove that it’s capable of finishing ANYTHING they start working on. These are issues that are dragging on since release. So before moving on to another thing I suggest you turn around and take good look at what you terrible lack of consistency and discipline left in its wake. These are too big to be left in a state they are in right now!

1. Ascended crafting.

• No 500 jewelcrafting
• No jewel socketing on ascended, of course
• No 500 cook.

2. Still no sign of full core skill sets that were promised eons ago.

• Elementalist (conjure heal, arcane elite, signet elite)
• Warrior (banner heal, physical heal, Mending undefined, elite stance, elite shout)
• Ranger (signet heal, elite trap, elite signet)
• Necromancer (spectral heal, elite signet, elite well)
• Guardian (spirit weapon heal, consecration heal, Shelter undefined, elite spirit weapon, elite consecration)
• Thief (trap heal, elite signet, elite trap)
• Engineer (gadget heal, elite gadget)
• Mesmer (glamour heal, Ether Feast undefined, clone/phantasm heal, elite mantra, elite clone/phantasm)

3. Everything related to underwater left in shambles

• No second Revenant underwater weapon.
• Ton of skills not working underwater across all classes
• discontinued production of underwater skins

4. Legendary weapons dropped

5. LS season 1 still missing

6. SAB never going to get finished

Probably I’m missing more stuff that’s just dropped unfinished into the game, but to me these are the biggest, most glaring issues that need to be addressed.

You can argue about whether Anet broke a legal contract until you’re blue in the face. But the fact is no one is going to sue Anet over this so that’s all moot.

The important point is that Anet has lost all its credibility with customers, which means sales of the next expansion is going to be even lower than sales of this one.

Thanks half expansion mike!

April fools day gag this year is a glider skin with Mike’s face on it. When you fly it leaves a trail of words saying “this is not half an expansion”.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

However, what if ANet doesn’t want people to gain 3,650 points per year from dailies? What if they are happy with the leaderboards in PvE (since each adventure has one)? I’d like to hear what they think achievement points are designed to achieve for the game and its community & how the current mechanics help reach those goals.

I can’t answer for ANet, but since they aren’t going to answer, I’ll hazard a guess.

Ever since the initial dungeon armor rush, players have taught ANet to dread the words, “I’ve done everything. What do I do, now?” Consider this. How many of the non-trivial reward systems in the game at launch required a significant amount of time/effort/gold to acquire? How many non-trivial reward systems that have been added since require a lot of time/effort/gold?

The AP chests, in particular the armor sets, are a reward. Setting the daily AP cap at 15K slows down the players who are trying for the full sets. ANet has been trying to keep players around since November of 2012.

Not sure if trolling

What gets me is that Guild Wars 1 had a district system so peeps could manually select a map instance and meet up. If the district was full then it was full but you could try.

All we have is the “Join in…” method which requires another player to be an anchor. Many of us are familiar with the “map search” people that try various methods to land on a certain IP and then ferry people over. It’s so crude. The technology now is worse than it was over 10 years ago in the previous game.

Not only were GW1’s districts dynamic in adding additional districts as player demand for a map grew, I’ve seen this stuff in other games like TERA where they have a district list at the top centre of the screen. The system will assign a player a district automatically when they first enter the map, but there’s always the manual option to attempt to get into a particular instance.

Why on earth this type of tech isn’t in GW2 when it’s old tech is beyond me. It’s not even like the megaserver system is incompatible with it, it’s just not there. I can only assume some form of institutional memory loss through staff turnover else why would something so basic and useful be missing?

Remove AP cap and retire the leaderboards. That would be the best way to handle it.

Employee reviews show they haven’t ever expanded their staff since initial launch.

They haven’t fixed competitive PvP or WvWs laughably one sided win condition, and in the case of PvP, refuse to even acknowledge it.

They’ve chosen to make the exact trinity content they claimed GW2 would never have at its launch, instead of simply fixing the break between the games build and active combat systems, solely because fixing it would take more work than they are willing to put in.

They’ve chosen to expand the build system with a time gated top gear tier requiring massive investment of playtime and account resources. Because such mindless filler content is an easy way to keep players around, and, once again, it’s too much work to make content for players to play through.

And finally, they released an expansion smaller than most DLC I’ve ever seen, and did so at nearly the full price of the original game.

The question we should be asking ourselves at this point, is not how we can support them, it’s what the bleeding hell they have done with the three years of support we’ve given them?!

Anet could fix this game by simply establishing an ongoing dialogue with their players, especially in regards to PvP balance, and actually listening to/discussing their suggestions. Their communication as it is now is a joke, no matter how many times Gaile posts to say “N-no, we all read the forums e-every day! Anet is t-totally listening!”

DoctorDing.5890:

I was slightly alarmed to see the recent ANet HP announcement say that they are very happy with the difficulty level of HoT. I can’t help but think they have lost touch with their core audience. I’ve recently left another game where the devs listened to the vocal minority who said they wanted it harder. It stopped being fun for me, and for others, so that game now has fewer players and might struggle to survive.

Casual players are the bread and butter of these games which means providing a huge quantity of relatively easy content. I don’t think the expansion can be a commercial success if it only targets hardcore players so, yes, I think it will get nerfed sooner or later. Open world stuff should not be a struggle for normal players with average kit. But it’s hard to ask those players what they want because most of them will never come to the forum.

Those HoT maps are big. There is plenty of room to accommodate players of all skill levels. Maybe Anet need to learn from GW1 and have a hard mode version of each map for those who are “in it to win it” rather than ramping up the difficulty in the normal maps.

Put simply: some players don’t play for the challenge.

If I can watch t.v. , and play a game at the same time there’s something wrong with the challenge, but maybe that’s just me. If you want less challenge tyria has about 25 maps already for ya.

well i played for the 400 hero points and i had my fun unlocking the elite spec the challenging way so i really feel like ive done the right thing. If other people want less and they get it i dont see the problem. What’s important is we did it the right way and that in itself is self satisfactory

I think it’s fair to say the majority of GW2 players have not had sufficient life experience to arrive to this conclusion, and honestly, I don’t imagine it will make any difference to read it without seeing it first-hand… but let me try to explain how it is that I never find myself up in arms about anything regarding this game. (Not anymore, that is.)

If I am not mistaken, ArenaNet has made it fairly clear what their objective is in producing this game, and it can be summed up nicely in this quote that I recall seeing more than once from various members of the team:

“It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.”

Aside from being a profound nugget of wisdom, this approach is evident in the expansion content. It will take more than a few hours to do much of anything, and that’s the bloody point, because when you do finally achieve whatever it is you’re working toward, it’s still nothing more than bits on a server. You don’t get a sensory or monetary reward, or even so much as a pat on the back here in the real world. So why are you doing it?

Think of it this way: when the day finally comes that you stop playing this game, who is going to give a flying kitten how many legendary weapons you had? Or if you unlocked all the elite specs? Or got whatever particular thing you have your sights set on? The obvious answer is literally nobody. You aren’t playing because it gets you anything in real life. You aren’t playing because you’re trying to make a fortune and send your future grandchildren to college. You’re playing because it’s a kitten game, and that’s what games are for.

So, at the end of the day, the whole purpose of it all is purely diversion. And that is what you have been given. You may take it or leave it, for as long as you wish, however it suits you and your own personal circumstances in life. You may even find it simply isn’t worth your time or money to play this game, and if that’s the case, well, you shouldn’t be playing.

All of you who have taken it upon yourselves to cry outrage over the amount of time it takes to do X, Y, or Z, all that amounts to is petty signaling. You just want to show you have principles that you refuse to lapse. But that means nothing. The reality is that I have chosen to be satisfied by this game, with all its ups and downs, because the only thing I seek from it is to be entertained, and for as long as I am entertained, I will continue to enjoy it.

I urge any of you who are unsatisfied with the game to consider this perspective. It has rid me of the self-imposed burden of being upset about nothing, and I’m sure it can do the same for you.

Dradiin.8935:

wolfpaq.7354:

imsoenthused.1634:

I find it distasteful in the extreme, but arena.net hasn’t declared it verboten, so this is what we get. Personally, I wish they’d make an official statement forbidding it, an then actively ban anyone who tried to do it. Of course, the kind of people who buy and sell these services are hugely offended about anyone who feels this way. They always immediately start screaming “How are they hurting you?” “shouldn’t they be paid for their skill?” etc. I could care less about their arguments though, it’s just tacky and sad, exploitative on the sellers side and pathetic on the buyers. At the very least if Anet banned it they’d have to make shady backroom deals on 3rd party forums and such, and you wouldn’t see it in the LFG tool anymore, and that would be much better. They could hang out in the dark alleys of the internet making shady, shameful deals all they want, always fearful that their dirty secret would come out and their account would be properly banned.

Lol someone is seriously overreacting to people who sell dungeon runs.

I think this is a low point in GW2, the bar is set by WoW players who proliferate this mentality. I specifically started playing GW2 because of the developers wanting to move away from this mentality.

Support it all you want but it is a slippery slope, once this is considered “Normal” then the WoWification of yet another game is not far behind.

The “WoWification”?

Pff lulwut?

Like Gw2 is going to suddenly become a mainstream household name and go strong for 10 years defining a game genre? That’d be terrible indeed…

Sorry to kitten on your parade but Anet has been okay with people selling runs since the GW1 Prophecies days.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_Drok's_run

Clearly the metamorphosis into a perfect facsimile of WoW is a very slow process.

With queue times hovering between 5-10 minutes (sometimes even longer, although usually I give up by then), it sure would be nice if we could do stuff like duel in an arena, craft, etc.

There’s only so many structures in the Heart of the Mists that I can attempt to climb before boredom drives me out.

Could we at least try letting players queue from outside HOTM again, and see how many leavers/afks/etc. we get? I understand it was bad before, but then A.net introduced the “Ready Up” screen and the giant blaring horn sound. The Ready Up screen alone will already filter out anyone who would have been AFK due to inattentiveness (of course the intentional trolls would still get through).

Yes, there are a million threads on this already. Now there are a million and one. Please make it happen =)

Man, what is with this carebear society that I live in nowadays? Back in my day that stuff was expected, warranted, and you move on and show them up next time.

Count yourself lucky that you didn’t make this mistake with real money. Consider this a learning experience and make smarter decisions in the future.

omg anet you are so weird

DD°:

(lol)

Wanze.8410:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Sorry for my misinformation earlier. I amended my post, as per the request of the forum team. Thanks.

It doesnt matter anyways in which forum we post as we got zip feedback on the issues that have been discussed in either one of them.
Even though you commented a couple of times here and in the account issues forum, your posts were only giving advice on where to post about this.
Dont get me wrong, I dont expect you to comment on these issues as I dont think it is your responsibility as Liason.
Personally I also have some reservations about the introduction of the watchwork pick but the bigger issue for me is the lack of communication on this (or any other related topic in the BLTC Forum) from you guys, which has blown this discussion way out of porportion across the board.

This.

I know what they’re coming from though, as I work in the game industry. What I frequently saw is that the marketing department comes up with some new ways to monetize the game. The designers raise red flags but are forced to implement it anyway (you see this a lot, conflict between marketing team vs design team, but from my personal experience, marketing always wins). Anyway, in my experience, marketing always feels as if they don’t need to account to anything. Even if the community is in uproar, they’ll stay silent. Instead, they’ll convince management that it are just some loud troublemakers on the forums. And they will ONLY let metrics govern their future decisions – so as long as it keeps making money, they’ll do it again and again.

Some of those marketing guys even told me straight in my face that it is good that some players quit over such things, as they are always non-paying users or users that pay little, and the game is better off without such players as they only cost bandwidth and CPU cycles. They only aim to please the people that drop 50+ bucks per month on the game. Anyway, that particular game died, partially due to its aggressive monetization and marketing interference in all the design decisions. The company collapsed a few months ago and was bought out by another party. Luckily I already saw that coming and quit that company 2 years ago.

Now this story comes from the F2P mobile gaming segment and GW2 fortunately operates in a different segment. But the story isn’t unique to F2P. There was another company I was involved with before that, and this was the result of their repeated marketing screw-ups:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/07/monocles/

“There is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst EVE players that these changes are bad,” he added. “I think they’re brilliant, but our players don’t. We’re going to face an uphill struggle, and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we’d be burned at the stake by the players.”

followed by
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/10/05/ccp-games-ceo-issues-letter-of-apology-to-eve-online-players/

So yeah. Don’t hold your breath if you expect an ArenaNet response on this. Marketing likely wouldn’t allow it. The only thing you can do is well, not buy any more gems so you show up in their metrics, and loudly state on the forum WHY you’re no longer dropping money on this game. Maybe organize an in-game riot or two if you really want to accomplish anything.

Cush.4063:

Woah! Surprise! The trolls weren’t the first ones to post in this thread and tell you how horrible the game and empty it is when it isn’t. Seriously, I’m really surprised. I sometimes feel they spend every waking moment looking for a thread to rant their hate towards guild wars 2. But no, the game isn’t dead in the slightest. Pick a good popular server though if you want to see more people while leveling. Enjoy!

imagine alot of trolls have already migrated to other places by now.

kidkilowat.5932:

Why, in a game focused on vanity progression, are 95% of the skins so ugly?

Good point. Let’s add ascended armor and make progression a vertical grind. Now ugly skins problem solved.

Coming up: New grade! Upper Ascended armor – obsoletes your plain Ascended armor (needs crafting to 600 to be useful again).

No dragons, no Cantha/Elona, no bug fixes.

“Is this just a cash grab move by you since it cost 1800 gems to transfer to a very high server. "

Yes.

/thread

“We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds! You will be able to earn these new traits and skills by unlocking them. To go along with this, we’ll expand the content and options to earn skill points to help encourage players to experience different challenges and content throughout the world. These skills and traits will be designed to be balanced with the existing skills/traits we currently have in the game, and will simply compliment and expand the range of abilities and tactics available to each profession.”

“The addition of new skills and traits on a regular basis will of course mean expanded variety of abilities, builds, and tactics in PvP as well. As these additional skills and traits are added, they’ll be automatically unlocked and available for competitive PvP just like all existing skills/traits work today.”

That was taken from the “Looking Ahead: Guild Wars 2 in 2013” news post.

Many things said in that post have come true, such as 500 crafting, champion reward boxes, and dungeon gold rewards. However, the regular addition of skills and traits was a complete lie. Since July of 2013, each profession has only received one new skill and no class has received new traits (certain traits have been re-designed, but none are new). A-net, you’ve completely failed in your promises to expand builds, let alone the addition of new skills and traits. The Oct 15th and the Dec 10th balance changes were toted as being much more significant than they really were. Neither of them introduced new, meaningful build combinations nor did they even change the meta. Not only that, but you also promised that any new skills would be automatically unlocked in PvP, which they weren’t.

New heals just don’t cut it..