Guild Wars 2

Most games rarely if ever get new hairstyles so the fact that GW2 does them so frequently is definitely unusual. I feel like they should focus on other things.

But if they add anything to character creation, I want new face and body options. Give me prettier, more normal Sylvari female faces and bodies so I can really make it a pretty, elegant elf style plant thing. And add more cute faces and bodies to the Asura so I can truly make something cute that doesn’t look like a goblin rat thing.

I’d LOOOVVEE if they did that. Then I’d feel like we actually had more character creation options. I mean there IS a reason why there are so many Human Females out there.

They also need to add race changes into the shop. No reason why they can’t honestly. Just switch the story over to the new race’s story, maybe via player choice. Or don’t even, I don’t think it matters.

How would you guys feel about them adding a 10v10 or 15v15 (whatever works on the map sizes) to sPvP? I think a lot of players like that larger, more traditional battleground style feel. The maps are designed well for it right now, it just seems with the 5v5 that it’s a bit too big for such small group sizes and a lot of players don’t like such small 2v2 style fights, or attacking/defending a flag by themselves. I’ve always found it weird they didn’t do standard 5v5 arena maps and essentially put an arena sized group on a battleground map. But what do you guys think of adding another mode for a larger size? I think it’d be a pretty easy addition.

Agree with OP. When I spend 3k gems on account bound permanent gathering tools, I expect to get a version sent to every character. Otherwise, it’s completely useless to make them account bound. Don’t nickel and dime me ANet, that’s just kittenty business practices.

If you’re offering a convenience item, make sure it’s actually convenient and not a cash grab. If I have to buy two items to make just one work properly, then it’s pretty terrible and greedy design. There’s no defense for that.

Also it’s worth pointing out that in order to get 3k gems you need to spend $50 US and then you have 1k left over. Or you could make two separate purchases of $45 and have 600 left over. Either way it’s a lot of money – the equivalent of buying the game outright, or buying an expansion. For that much money, I expect a better deal.

This was just fixed in the patch they just released, at least for me. Try restarting your games and it should be ok.

nsleep.7839:

They decreased the salvage rate, added more materials required to refining squares, added leather to the patches recipes and introduced sinks (ascended gear, guild halls.)

No, the market won’t fix itself in the case of leather, it’s a requirement to anyone wanting to make ascended gear and exotics that aren’t obtainable via dungeons and those are things needed by almost every player that doesn’t want to be a scrub forever, and the drop rates are egregious and unreliable. It’s not a guild hall node or a few WvW nodes that will solve this issue.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. This really needs to be fixed ANet. Stop making excuses and just do it.

No. I want to get as far away from automated tab target gameplay as we can. GW2 is mostly action combat and I hope it continues to go further in that direction.

Some of us don’t like anime or Japanese culture, nor would we ever wear cat ears in real life. We just think cat ears on our GW2 character is a cute idea.

I think a lot of you have hoarding problems and should learn the difference between a need and a want. There’s a lot of stuff you can get rid of. If you don’t need it now or use it regularly, you can probably sell it or delete it.

The fact that you guys do every piece of content in the game on one or more characters (which I’m sorry makes you a minority and yes I’ve been there), hoard crafting mats and other items you may or may not make use of in the future (which is crazy and things you need to sell or get rid of), have numerous gear sets you may not truly need, does not make GW2 different than any other game. Those issues are present in every MMO and inventory management is present in every MMO. In fact GW2 makes it far easier than other games to manage inventory already. So if you don’t like not having enough space, it’s time for spring cleaning.

Can we do something about leather drop rate? Ignoring the hoarders, I think all of us personally notice a huge difference in personal supply. Getting cloth, wood, and metal is extremely easy via regular farming. I get tons of all of those via natural play activities, but leather is extremely scarce. I don’t think the price is due to hoarders who are probably doing what you’ve encouraged them to do anyway. If the drop rate was increased to be on par with other materials, we wouldn’t have this problem. It needs to be more easily farmable.

You guys are so creative lol. My pets are all named after my boyfriend cause I thought it’d be fun and since I can’t convince him to play GW2, it’s the next best thing haha.

I’m confused, why do you need a portal at all? You can just do the first part of the story quest which is just you listening to a few NPC’s talk, and it gives you the port automatically. Why would you buy scrolls or anything else so convoluted when it’s so easy and fast to get the port already? After you complete the story quest on your main, you can do the quests in any order you wish on your alts, meaning you are free to jump right to this episode to get the port (but you’d want to do the port for Blooddstone Fen as well).

Alga.6498:

This is the hardest JP indeed. Took me over 2 hours, and since I was a mesmer I helped out quite many people up with a portal if they were stuck or falled down.
The bad/good thing was the checkpoints. I made it to the top but the chest told me I didn’t get all the checkpoints.
I was literally going to throw a sword all the way to Anet HQ to the guy who created this hell-of JP….!!!!1111
But a person told the reward was crap anyway so meh, atleast I got the achievement, thank godness.

Never, NEVER again.

Unfortunately they changed it late last night in a ninja patch they told nobody about. I guess the intention was to prevent people from porting others to the top (which you can do with other JP’s, but whatever). But that also means that anyone else who accidentally misses a checkpoint is screwed and won’t get anything, not even the achieve and mastery point.

Nikal.4921:

Leiloni.7951:

I’m not sure why you’re asking for such an unusual and irregular body type. I think they’ve done a fairly good job in offering a wide variety of female body types already.

As a female with such an “irregular body type”, I would love to see a body type more in line with my own. It’s what I live with, what I’m comfortable with. Would love to also see a slider for bosom size, for downsizing purposes in my case. I have an athletic type body, I’m very happy with it, and it feels a little odd to me for that body type to be so underrepresented in this game and others.

They have several body types already with small or nearly flat boobs, though. That’s part of why I said they have several realistic body types for several races.

Tigaseye.2047:

nerovergil.5408:

yesss!!! yessss!! i want big boobs and big butt!!!! why i cant get it anet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You already can (within reason).

The body type in the attachment I linked to has both.

My issue is that you can’t have a female character with a reasonably substantial ribcage (like that one), unless it also has a larger bottom half, as well.

It’s not realistic for a woman to have a large midsection without having a hip/butt area that’s appropriately proportioned for it. It sounds like you’re asking for a male style straight down body. Women of all sizes – even slim ones – still have curves because we’re built to have babies so the natural proportion is for the waist/ribcage area to be smaller than the hips/butt (because without a larger bottom area, you’d break your body trying to squeeze out a tiny human and the hips need to be larger than the waist in order to support the baby properly in pregnancy).

I’m not sure why you’re asking for such an unusual and irregular body type. I think they’ve done a fairly good job in offering a wide variety of female body types already.

ekarat.1085:

In light of what happened with Wintersday last year, I would like to make a request not to require the Mad King’s Clock Tower JP for any Halloween meta rewards.

Just to avoid confusion, I don’t have a problem with an achievement or title for doing the Clock Tower JP because I can just skip that. What I don’t want is to link that to some larger collection that I would otherwise participate in (without allowing us to skip one of the items).

If you weren’t going to do the Wintersday JP, there wasn’t much point doing the other items in the Wintersday collection last year. Except for the JP and Festive Imbiber, I enjoyed working to get those achievements/collection items. In fact, I even managed to finally do the JP; however, the Halloween JP is even harder and I messed up my wrists badly enough doing the Wintersday JP.

In short, an achievement for the Halloween JP is fine by me, but requiring it for a meta-achievement (without the possibility of skipping) is not fine by me.

I completely agree with this. Many players don’t like JP and it’s not a standard MMORPG activity anyway, so why require people to do it? Personally I really hate them and it would ruin the fun of Halloween if I couldn’t earn a something because it required doing a JP along with the other actually fun activities. JP’s should be a fun side activity for those that enjoy them, but don’t require the rest of the playerbase to endure such stress when we’re supposed to be having fun.

Donari.5237:

LyonTheCat.6857:

You have to carry the apply all the way, so no weapon skills, but you can still use the other skills – ie healing etc.

Before I found Hal I had experimented with the apples. You can drop them on the ground, fight, then pick them up again.

That doesn’t work because the apple despawns after a few seconds. So if you try to fight one of the hard mobs around the area your apple will disappear before the mob is dead. Stupid.

I know you can hide hats on costumes if you turn off the hat option in your equipment screen. Does that not work for shoulders? Or for gloves for that matter?

cranos.5913:

Vayne.8563:

If you were going to make a legendary, you could have been stockpiling the daily materials all along. It’s supposed to be a journey. People who buy the materials because they can’t wait are gong to pay more, but it actually costs less of you make the materials.

According to gw2efficiency.com the cost of crafting it using mats you’ve gathered and crafting your daily cooldown is 313 gold.

What you’re paying for is convenience (or perhaps impatience).

Lmao how is having to log in daily to craft some mats “a journey”? Besides it’s way more profit just to sell those mats and buy the lover. Let’s not pretend the precursor crafting of the original legendary sets is decent in any way.

The journey is personally going through all the steps to earn the weapon yourself. Pride in all that hard work is part of the satisfaction of having a Legendary weapon. Not just the cool looks and useful stat swapping, but the fact that walking around with it says you worked your butt off for it.

Celtic Lady.3729:

I wish this, too. I still have 5 characters that need that mushroom queen or whatever it is HP in Tangled Depths.

I’ve spent hours using the LFG, map chat, and even random whispers to get help for it since I can’t seem to solo it on all my classes, but no one ever comes by or agrees to help with it. I feel like most of the time, even after taxiing, that I’m more or less alone in the maps. I’ve also tried at all different times of the day and all the days of the week. Nothing helps.

You don’t need every HP to get enough to complete your Specialization, though. There’s a lot of HP’s I don’t have. You’d only need that particular one if you were going for map completion. And even then if you need the map completion for Specialization Weapon Collections, the first two maps are easier for that anyway.

Amane.9158:

Not sure if this has been suggested yet…but…tails! What about tail skins?

And kitty ears (there’s the bunny ears but no kitty). If we had tails we could spruce up our look even more!

What about packs that have both a matching tail and ear skin. And in addition to bunny and kitty sets, we need fox sets.

I never noticed it had an Anet logo on it’s bum! Nice touch haha. I did notice the other day while a bow user was doing an event with me in Orr the sound that bow makes. Omg it made that neigh sound every single time he used a skill, it was crazy!

SmirkDog.3160:

Khisanth.2948:

… and then it would just look like you don’t have HoT and they would just yell about that

and if it just hides everything then they would just yell about the fact that it is hidden

You are just wasting your time with that type of people. The simplest solution has always been “don’t play with those type of people”

I don’t think “don’t play with those type of people” works when you’re just hangin’ in LA and someone starts giving you crap for not playing 24/7 and getting everything as soon as it’s available. Like, it’s not who you hang out with, and some things can’t be solved by avoiding certain people.

And I’m not saying to make it look like you don’t have HoT, I mean just hide the number. Again, it could just have the mastery symbol and —- after it or something.

I’d rather be yelled at for hiding my mastery level than get yelled at for only being at mastery level 50 almost a year after HoT came out. And maybe some people with the highest possible mastery level would want to hide it so people don’t think they’re jerks that do that sort of thing.

The key here is the option. Don’t make us stuck with one option.

I’ve never had anyone yell at me while hanging around LA or anywhere else. I’ve never had anyone yell at me for my mastery level or in general. I don’t know where these people are but it can’t be hard to avoid them if I’m doing it without even trying.

I play solo and have had no trouble getting people for HoT Hero points on two recent characters and working on a few more currently. Often as I’m clearing the maps I’ll just find people already at those points and we do them together, or people ask for help in map chat so I go join them. Otherwise, I will ask in map chat myself when I get to the point, or I’ll just join a Hero Point train which are often advertised in both LFG and map chats. Either way, there are numerous easy ways to get help for these. I haven’t had any trouble with it. Personally I like that they’re a group activity.

I love my alts and play them whenever I get the urge, but I usually have one alt I’m focusing on over the others at any given time. But no I don’t feel like I’m wasting time. There’s no rush to do anything in this game since it’s different from others thankfully, so you can do things on your own time.

Rococo.8347:

Ok folks im going to try some of these out, thanks Fluffy for looking at the Elite specs V vanilla – thanks for all the advice everyone

- Ayrilana, im just trying to use up all the Dungeon boxes ive accumulated rather than just salvaging them all then having to buy/craft condition gear

Don’t forget you can get easy gear from the Temple vendors with Karma in Orr. They have Rabid and Rampagers there which, assuming you have a lot of Karma and nothing to spend it on, is an instant way to get some gear. Or you can also get some acccessories, backpieces, etc. from those vendors.

Can we get a shareable storage spot for Ascended items?

Since Ascended items are account bound and never soulbound, I think we need a better way to share them between characters. Sure I know some people just run Fractals all day every day, but for the masses of us to whom Ascended items are a big achievement, we’re more likely to want to share them between characters.

It seems to me that making Ascended items account bound was for the more casual players among us but sharing is not very user friendly at all and this needs to change.

Right now we have a nice method of retrieving and sharing previously earned achievement rewards with this nice “Unlocked Rewards” section at the bottom of the Achievement panel:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:September_2014_Feature_Pack_Achievements_Panel.jpg

I’d like something similar for Ascended items, so I can wear them on multiple characters at the same time. I’d be ok with making these “copies” unsalvageable, unvendorable, and whatever other limitations need to be put on them. But right now my only option would be to throw them in the bank and as someone who switches alts numerous times a day, this is not really an option.

I think a minor UI change would be a huge QoL change that wouldn’t be too hard to implement and would make a lot of players happy. And really if your intention wasn’t to make these items easily shareable, then they shouldn’t be account bound to begin with. But since they are, I think it only makes sense to make it easier to do.

I love the old Lion’s Arch. I would love it if they brought it back for good. Just have Primordius burn it down or something lol.

Can we also get some cute dog mini pets to follow me around in my adventures outside the Home Instance? Cause everyone knows Dogs are way, way, way better than Cats.

Well now we’re down to entire map every player instant DC’s.

People in map chat for Field of Ruins are saying that anytime any one person touches a crafting station it disconnects everybody on the map.

Widowmaker.2547:

Big issue after the Roll back, any players that were in the Field of Ruins are getting constantly kicked to LA and getting their progress reset each time.

I was in Cursed Shore on one character and Divinity’s Reach on another, and any time I try to teleport over TO Field of Ruins I keep getting disconnected. I just want to do my daily.

I logged out/closed the client for about 15 minutes and about a minute after I logged back in I got DC’d again. I’m also not getting my money for teleporting restored when it resets me.

And no it’s not just me, everyone in chat is saying they’ve been getting DC’d repeatedly since servers came back up.

Yea I’m getting the DC’d back to character select with that network error every few minutes even on different characters (someone mentioned something about max crafting but I tried a character who doesn’t have that and still got booted). I keep trying to teleport over to Field of Ruin to do the daily but can’t stay online long enough. Also every time I log back on, I’m back where I started, so the game seems to be rolling my character back a few minutes each time it DC’s me. I did try closing the client but it didn’t help.

I’m just a bit sad because I won’t be online tomorrow before the dailies reset. :\

Gaile Gray.6029:

Pro Tip: If you’ve been sitting at the log-in screen, you may continue to get the “Can’t log in” message even though the game is accessible. Close the game completely and start over. Success!

See you in the game!

Ooh we can play?! Nice, I still have an hour or so before I need to get ready for bed.

Agreed I would really love to see them in the store this week!

I’m glad I’m at work right now hahaha. Sucks for the rest of you. And if it’s not up in 2.5 hours when I’m home, well I went to bad too late last night (got wrapped up in the so not that urgent Herta achievement) so I think there’s a nap in my future anyway.

We get a good amount of new armor sets compared to other games along with cosmetic items. I’m not sure why all the complaints. And extra races are a must. Even though I like humans, I have Sylvari and Asura as well. The variety keeps things interesting visually and lore wise whether you play them or not and attracts more players to games. They’d be dumb to do human only. I think it would be a great idea to make an additional race for an expansion as well.

Ele cause it’s always just the most fun and so versatile – it never gets boring. Also love the elemental magic in every game and it also has support which I also love in every game, so it’s really the complete package.

carabidus.6214:

I think playing through the personal stories of all the races is an essential feature of the game. That being said, Charr are impossible to clothe. They are large, hunched and have a substantial tail. Anything I put on them looks awful, which is disappointing for a game so heavily rooted in chasing skins.

The same can be said for the Asura. Their compact, little bodies don’t carry most skins and armors well at all.

This is a big reason why I main human characters exclusively…

Agreed but I think making armor designs unique to each race would solve that. That’s what other games have done (notably TERA). When you design an armor set specificially for an Asura’s tiny body instead of fitting a design made for a human onto them, they’ll look so much better. Same for Charr. Just like in real life, different body shapes look better in different clothes. Why can’t we treat our GW2 races the same way? Give each race their own designs for each set and people will be happier. It might even be easier to create.

Agreed that it would make sense to allow the player to stand in the shield. It would also prevent a lot of frustration. From what I learned the gliding and updrafts are not bugged, they’re just poorly designed and take several failures to figure out.

I was so mad and ready to quit when I did this but I was afraid I’d have to redo the entire part of the story that led up to the fight so I kept going. Several failures later and lots of forum research, I figured it out.

1. The only gliding masteries you need are the ones the story tells you to get. I’m sure others help, but they’re not needed.
2. You shouldn’t die after one hit by a rock. You may need more HP, but also have shields, invul skills, or heals on hand for when you do. Try to get more HP and Invulnerability skills if you do nothing else – it saved my butt!
3. The updrafts don’t work like any other updraft in the game (DUMB). Do NOT glide into them, do not press F, do not do anything at all. Just walk into them, that’s it. Walk and it will throw you into the air immediately – then, you will need to open your wings so you don’t fall.
4. When you see a rock coming at you, stop gliding for a second to dodge them. It worked every time easily when I did this. Just let go of the button for a second as it comes toward you and then glide again quickly.
5. Gliding in circles above the updrafts keeps you in the air along with the occasional rock.

Depends on what you want to do? Personally I start out by finishing the story (Personal story, Living World Season 2, then HoT which I’m not done yet and then LS3). While doing that you can work on completing the maps you’re in while doing those stories, do events in those areas, earn items and gold towards getting a set of exotics and then towards making Ascended (assuming you already have 500 crafting), work on necessary masteries in HoT maps as the story tells you to, you’ll also gain a lot of Hero Points doing the various maps so you should be able to complete your Elite Specialization, etc.

There’s so much to do and so much you can do simultaneously. I just started out by wanting to catch up on the story and ended up working on a number of other things at the same time. One thing leads to another in this game, it’s almost hard to focus because you get taken in all these different directions. So just do anything and you’ll find your way.

Zephic.3075:

Except leveling doesn’t give you a full exotic level 80 set of gear. When I finished leveling my mesmer on my alt account. I had a mishmash of level 68 to level 78 exotic gear, which are decidedly worse than most level 80 gear.

To address OP’s point, I agree that leather prices are too high. Perhaps the sources for leather can be boosted?

I leveled an alt recently and they’ve changed the story quest rewards so that you get about half a set of exotic armor. The rest you can either buy via gold or karma. So it’s not terribly hard to get equipped in exotics now.

Regarding the backpieces for Largos, I don’t think it’s really an issue. There’s plenty of space as you can see in these screenshots for a backpiece. As for wing backpieces, or different glider skins, they can use the existing toggle to choose between showing their skin or showing their natural wings. Not a hard decision.

Danikat.8537:

Leiloni.7951:

No, never. One of the things I like most about this game is there’s no pressure to buy anything ever. I can and do buy things when I want to but that’s it. Any regular payment is not something I’m interested in. I’ve played enough games with “optional subscriptions” by now to know they’re anything but optional – in an effort to make them as appealing as possible, the devs throw a bunch of stuff in there that you’d be a fool to go without. TERA, SWTOR, ESO… BDO is only the newest example. No freaking way.

I’m glad to hear so many of you are so against it as well – the communities in the above mentioned games (aside from BDO because we all know Kakao doesn’t care one bit what it’s community thinks) are very accepting of the subs in those games, which is why they exist.

To be fair at least two of those games (SWTOR and ESO) started out as pay-to-play games where you had to have a subscription simply to play, so having an optional subscription is actually a step down for them.

Whereas Guild Wars 2, like Guild Wars 1, was marketed as subscription free from day 1. For me at least it’s a major selling point of the game.

I’d played P2P MMOs before and I liked the online, shared world concept but paying a sub just doesn’t work for me. At least half the time I’d end up paying for a month in which I never got to play the game, or I’d feel like I had to play because I’d paid for it and then I wouldn’t enjoy it as much because I felt like I was only doing it because I had to.

So when I saw my brother playing a new game which looked pretty cool (the charr impressed me) and he told me it was an MMO without a subscription that was all I needed to know. Next time I was in town I bought my own copy.

Sure in theory it’s different with an optional subscription, but chances are good the players who are paying a subscription will keep asking for more benefits and the developers will be very tempted to give in to that – why wouldn’t they want to keep their subscribers happy whilst also maybe tempting more people to subscribe. And if it’s just a ‘small’ change surely it won’t upset too many people….

And maybe on it’s own it won’t. Elder Scrolls Online started off (when they switched to buy-to-play) with what I thought was a very fair optional subscription – you got automatic access to all the DLC (which non-subscribers have to buy separately), cash shop currency equivalent to the full price of the subscription and something random like 10% extra experience.

But then they keep adding extra subscription benefits. Nothing game-breaking or pay-to-win exactly. Things like infinite storage for crafting materials, which you’d otherwise have to store in your bank. There are dozens of different materials in that game so they’re the main reason people feel pressured to buy bank upgrades.

Sooner or later it reaches a point where the only realistic option is to pay a subscription, and then it’s basically a pay-to-play game again.

You’re right and TERA also used to be P2P. I used to really like ESO’s payment model and it was something I used as an example of a good one, until the past several months where they keep adding stuff to it that makes it less than optional, along with the fact that the DLC’s are too close together so even if you avoid the sub you’re still paying frequently and likely also buying the occasional cash shop item. It became too much.

With how I play games now, either I lose interest in a game temporarily, or just get busy in real life, so I can’t feel good about paying a subscription I may not make complete use of. The freedom of GW2’s B2P model allows me to play on my terms. That is so important. So I purchased the expansion and I buy occasional gem store items when I want or need them and I feel like that’s worth my money and puts me in the driver’s seat.

However it’s a slippery slope – we consumers are smarter than we used to be so we recognize when a company is trying too hard to make purchases look too good so we buy more. I don’t want to feel like a company is incentivizing me to spend more than I want to spend. It just makes me want to stop spending altogether and quit.

Right now I know a lot of people buy cosmetic items like outfits, wings, backpacks, and random consumables like keys or boosts a lot on the shop. In GW2 that doesn’t affect me at all, so if that makes ANet the most amount of money I’m ok with that and I hope they continue doing it.

It’s just a matter of keeping the customers in game via good game design decisions (which apparently post initial HoT release was a problem but I wasn’t here for that). I don’t think the payment model here is an issue, it’s patches and game design decisions. Just keep players in game and they’ll spend as much as they used to.

No subscription, never. One of the things I like most about this game is there’s no pressure to buy anything ever. I can and do buy things when I want to but that’s it. Any regular payment is not something I’m interested in. I’ve played enough games with “optional subscriptions” by now to know they’re anything but optional – in an effort to make them as appealing as possible, the devs throw a bunch of stuff in there that you’d be a fool to go without. TERA, SWTOR, ESO… BDO is only the newest example. No freaking way.

I’m glad to hear so many of you are so against it as well – the communities in the above mentioned games (aside from BDO because we all know Kakao doesn’t care one bit what it’s community thinks) are very accepting of the subs in those games, which is why they exist.

Conncept.7638:

The dog that chases two rabbits, catches neither.

They had an audience for this game in players uninterested in the traditional MMO of gear grinding and tiered content and bean counting DPS output.

And they lost that audience while seeking after traditional MMO players, which in the end they never wound up getting.

And at this point, I think it’s years too late to turn things around.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. This game will go down long before we even have time to see the last of the six dragons.

Most content is still open world content like it always has been. Few people really do raids and most of us don’t think about it much. It doesn’t affect me that it’s there and on a daily basis I forget it even exists in game until I see someone talking about it on Reddit.

I hope they don’t change too much about the payment model because one of the things I like about this game is that I don’t have to spend a lot of money. I don’t care if other people buy every costume and glider skin on the gem store because that doesn’t affect me at all. But the moment ANet makes me feel like I have to buy more is the moment I stop playing. I’m already annoyed with ESO forcing you to spend a lot of money, so while it’s a fun game, it’s caused me to want a break. GW2 is my last hope.

I also play solo and have no problem with HoT content. Anything that needs a group you either already have a group there doing it, or you ask in map chat and people show up immediately. The masteries and achievements and whatever else just gives me things to work towards. As a casual solo player, I don’t feel the need to finish that stuff quickly and I don’t need any of it for any of the open world content I enjoy. So it’s just all fun stuff to do at my own pace. I’m even making myself some Ascended gear now and again, I don’t need it at all but it’s just a fun thing to slowly do while I work on HoT stuff.

Zedek.8932:

I actually pre-ordered HoT because FF14 turned into a pile of rubbish with actual content droughts and really only fillers. Even in the forums there is much more negativity out there.

Maybe some of you are just stuck in a weird mindset. I am having a blast with HoT and appreciate it to the fullest.

Tekoneiric.6817:

I’ve tried to get many people I know into the game but haven’t had any takers. Many don’t want to because it’s not on a console. I think ANet complicating things in the game isn’t helping. People usually want a simple distraction from real life not something that is more like work. The complicated crafting and open world meta events requiring LFG isn’t helping. The game doesn’t even allow single players to claim a homestead to mod and build in.

And I hope it stays this way. This audience is the last we need. If they want “distraction” of their life (which sounds like they are not quite in a good shape mentally), they can play some tablet games or on their phones. Same with consoles where nobody responds because they do not have keyboards/connected their keyboards (source: FF14).

If this game turns down the difficulty to cater the “console and tablet mini gamers” then I am out for sure.

I agree except I wouldn’t exactly call the current map meta events and usefulness of LFG with them complicated stuff. The game is very casual friendly for people who want a simple distraction. It definitely shouldn’t be easier, nor harder. It’s right where it should be. The map meta events can be figured out by stumbling into one your first time through – that’s how I figure it out without even looking them up – the game walks you through it and from there just follow the crowd. And you don’t need LFG – sure it’s useful and once you see people talking about their LFG groups in map chat you can look them up and join one, but you can just as easily walk up to a bunch of people and just join in, like everything else in GW2.

DoctorDing.5890:

I’ve not noticed any extra lag but I do now see a very very slow initial rendering of places which is something I have not seen before in this game. It’s particularly bad in the main cities. I’m not talking a bit of flicker. When I portal to Hoelbrak my toon stands in mid-air for one second then it takes probably 5 or 6 seconds for the environment to get fully drawn. Once it is done there are no further problems or lag. It’s so slow that I can portal in and run to and enter my home instance before more than a pot plant or two have appeared (it takes a bit of practice to avoid the invisible walls!)

So something definitely changed around the time of LS3.

This happened to me for the first time last night after the update. They did something weird with the update because that wasn’t happening before. It was also affecting my entire computer – I had a webpage open that also took long to load, but everything was fine after the initial loading of a map.

Edit: I’m also East Coast US, NA server if that matters.