Guild Wars 2

Part 2.

- WvW is fun for a while and the resource system is cool, but still feels like a bit larger version of sPVP battlegrounds. It doesn’t have the big open feel that DAOC frontiers had, which is what I was somewhat expecting. DAOC frontiers were more than just a zergfest. You could go there with a friend or two just to farm loot with the thrill of possibly running into a few enemies, or you could join a zerg and cap keeps. Here you can almost do the same but generally if u have a small skirmish during prime time, you better be moving on or every enemy in the area that sees the orange crossed swords is going to be rolling up on you. Imo those crossed swords should only show up at capturable locations. Also, if you go to wvw just to farm with a bit of risk, you are hurting your team if there is currently a que. The limits on # of players have their place, but a BIG lvl 80 open PVP (with no limits on # of players) area that offers slightly increased loot and risk to go with it would also be fun. In general I just really miss what other games call world pvp. This game is supposedly about pvp, and it’s pretty disapointing that it doesnt have a PVP server. IMO factional world pvp is best, but free for all would be ok also. It provides more of a reason to be in a good guild… and increased risk/fun while leveling. Some people don’t like world pvp, but clearly alot of people do, take for example WoW’s pvp servers – there is alot of them. Here the only incentive to being in a guild, other than just liking the people, is for a few guild perks.

-PvP in general is vanilla, and unbalanced. Some classes are just overpowered. Regardless if you can evade attacks, no class should one shot people in exotic gear. If a warrior has the right build and is lucky enough to land a knockdown on the wrong class, that guy isn’t getting up. Thieves can essentially do the same thing. I’ve seen one thief and his buddy instakill 6-8 people after his buddy ran in and used entangling roots on them first. Yes this is a good strategy, but it shouldn’t mean that people have zero chance if their enemies have the right build and the right skills off cooldown. Mesmers are kitten with their clones. Yes, I know you can mark them but generally it doesn’t matter, they run/teleport around while their excessive number of pets confuse you and eat you up with very little chance to survive. As a ranger I could possibly do an all out dps build that could kill them fast enough, but that build is not very practical in most other situations. Mesmers dont have to be good at their class to be overpowered, they just have to have the right build.

Anyways this post is long enough, and I hope any dev that sees this can take it constructively, its not really meant to be a kitten session. I really hope this game does well and that some of these things are addressed, because it has the potential to be really great. Not many games have had the apparently huge budget to spend on building such a great world, I just hope it gets put to better use.

I like this game, but something needs to be done about replay and endgame entertainment value. This game has some really good things going for it, but it’s very lacking in other ways.

Pros:
- the world is great, it’s the best I’ve seen, and the only thing that could make it better is if it was not zoned, which in my opinion ruins a certain amount of immersion and makes it feel smaller than it really is.
- some of the classes are pretty fun, for a while.

Cons – going to have to split this into 2 posts…
- Character progression is lacking. After you get your weapon skills unlocked by level 5, you’ve pretty much seen all you’re going to see except a bit more damage later on. You get a few cool traits that generally have long to very long cooldowns. For the most part you are using the same bread and butter moves from lvl 5 on, with a few minor tweaks. You get the good stuff early on and don’t have much to look forward to after that.
- Events are generally lame, especially at 80. Alot of events are pretty much just a gimme. You stand and spam your AOE hoping to hit as many mobs as possible and pick up loot. Either you dont get hit at all or are wacked dead very quickly. Some events are particularly bad, where hordes of mobs are invulnerable until they get to a particular spot, and the zerg waits there to spam. Some classes with limited AOE are just out of luck as things are dead instantly. Or, its 40 people vs one mob that takes 10 minutes and never drops anything worthwhile. The mob will occasionally kill someone but in general its just kited in circles while every one pew-pews away. On those events I just hit it a few times and move on, collecting my karma and free silver piece later. Events need mobs that take a bit longer (but not 10 minutes unless theres a greatly increased chance for a decent reward) to kill, or HP need to be scaled better to the number of people fighting them.
- The dungeons look cool, but are particulary useless, unrewarding and generally not very fun. Either you’re not getting hit at all or you are dead very quickly with little you can do about it. Very little strategy is involved anywhere except possibly in what type of group you take in there in the first place. You grind your way through, sometimes with many many deaths. For one fight in Arah, the technique generally used is to drag the boss back to a waypoint and die 20x (usually almost instantly) while you wear him down. Not fun at all, and I know very few people that have beaten him straight up. One arah run I had with a pug took a good 2 hours and pretty much everyone in group agreed that they would never come back. The rewards were rediculous and the mechanics & gameplay were not fun at all.

-Loot in general is just lame. I’ve killed thousands and thousands of mobs, never once gotten an exotic drop, but hundreds and hundred of rares. Despite this I had 2 full sets of exotics in 2 weeks after reaching 80, one magic find set and one dps/pvp set. At this point there is nothing really left for me to look forward to. If you get any loot at all its from the trash mobs, and its never anything you’re actually going to use, its rares for salvage or resale, probably for someone else to salvage. Legendaries require a rediculous amount of investment for a merely “cooler” looking skin. IMO the requirements for getting them need to be at reduced, and they should provide at least a small advantage other than appearance. 1-2% even might make them worthwhile for more people.
- Crafting, I don’t mind the crafting system by itself… but it’s perhaps too easy. I have 2 trade skills maxed, and could have all of them maxed by now if I thought it was worthwhile. I have enough money now that any new toon I make would instantly have the best gear in game as soon as he hits 80. All there would be to do is collect a few different skins for it.

Would be really nice if the developers would acknowledge that this is a problem with their game, and not just blow it off saying its everyones hardware problem. Makes me think they are not even considering looking into it. It’s incredibly frustrating. Tried so many fixes and reinstalled windows with many different configurations, minimum drivers etc (at least 5 win 7 reinstalls now). Each reinstall seems to allow the game to run fine for a day or 3, then crash crash crash. No errors in ram, memtest86+. This seems to be a conflict with newer hardware/chipsets, because same as another poster, the game runs without crashes on my older core2duo system.

FIX THIS CRAP!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/possible-fix-constant-corrupt-file-errors-crashes/first#post93567

Also try this. Read how to check if you have rste drivers installed wrong in my 2nd post.

Ok, there is a way to check if you have the rste drivers installed properly. Go into bios, and set sata config to raid, not ahci. Reboot. If your system bluescreens/crashes immediately on windows boot then you dont have the new rste drivers. If you dont have/arent using sata this is probably not your issue… it’ll probably only happen to newer pc builds.

Basically the fix will involve wiping your drives and reinstalling windows. I will assume you’re running windows 7 or 8. If you are completely noob at installing operating systems it might be good to find someone who’s done it before…. otherwise,

- go to http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?lang=eng&changeLang=true&DwnldID=20940#help

- download the rste driver, extract/unzip it and put it on a usb flash drive.
- go to your motherboard manufacturer’s website and download the latest bios version. Also recommend downloading all motherboard drivers for sound, lan, usb3, whatever else your board may have, but not the RSTE drivers they include, especially not if u have the same MB as me, the asus p9x79. Put all those drivers on the usb with the rste driver. Follow thier instructions on how to flash your bios. Might be a good idea to go into bios first and make note of all your settings, timings etc, because they will get wiped. After flashing bios, go into bios, hit f5 to restore default settings, then change whatever settings you had back to what they were. If in doubt just leave them all on default. I like to turn off all features I dont use though, like bluetooth etc.

-in bios, find sata configuration and set it to raid. You can return later and turn it back to ahci if you are not running your hds in raid, but it wont really affect you either way. The purpose here is to force you to install the driver at the right point.

- insert win7 disk and boot from it. may need to set boot order in bios so that dvd comes before hd. Some people like to download a win 7 install package, put it on a usb and install from there. That is faster, not counting download time, and you can put the rste driver on the same usb drive… im not going to go into how to do it this way, but you might be able to figure it out.

- As win 7 setup boots it will tell you that a driver is missing. Insert the usb drive (make sure it is a known usb2 port, not usb3. 2 is usualyl a white port, and 3 is probably blue), and browse to the folder you put the rste driver on. Click ok. Next step is semi important or your system might not boot correctly without the usb drive plugged in. After the driver is installed and you get to a screen that asks you what drive to install windows on, hit the back arrow in the upper left of the screen, then remove the usb drive. Go forward again. Hit f5 to refresh. Delete all partitions on your intended win7 drive. Format the drive, and select that drive for win install. From there you should proceed as normal with windows install. Do not allow windows to turn on automatic updates just yet. After it finishes, install intel chipset drivers first, then vid card, lan, usb3, audio, whatever is left (im using latest nvidia beta drivers 306.02 btw ), turn on windows updates, and allow all of them to complete.

Copy/download new version of gw2 and hope that you had the same problem that I did. Hope it works for some of you!

So for now the devs can only guess that people have hardware problems, but I find that highly unlikely to be the only issue. When I first installed the game on a brand new system i built it ran fine for a night of solid gaming, then errors popped up the next day. I had done a very basic windows (no bios updates for my asus p979x mb) install just to get up and running in a hurry. Installed no drivers besides intel inf and lan & gtx680 vid drivers. Installed gw2 from known good copy on external hd. No errors found in memtest86+, but i did indeed find file system errors on my 2 brand new ssds. The system seemed to run flawlessly in everything except gw2. Tried recopying game from good version. Immediate crashes, still couldnt play at all.

I tried a secure wipe and reinstall. This time I used mb shipped drivers (on included dvd) instead of downloading, installed all drivers from the disk. Allowed windows updates to complete, copied over gw2. This time I got errors right off the bat.

Another reinstall, went back to barebones install same as first time, only inf lan and grpx drivers install. Played for a week with no issues, then started crashing again. Recopied gw2 known good version from other older pc that has never had issues with the game via external hd again. Game still immediately crashed on first attempt to load. Definitely thinking its a driver issue at this point, possibly introduced by conflicts from windows updates I allowed to come thru after that week.

Internet research turns up issues with newer systems chipsets & constant file corruption, relating to which intel RSTe (rapid storeage tech, enterprise) drivers are installed. Turns out older versions included in win7 are much slower, and new versions need to be installed at initial windows installation. Old versions particualrly cause problems with faster ssds. The drivers cannot be updated after install, or rather they can be updated but you wont benefit from them. There is also a conflict between older mb bios versions and the newest RSTe drivers. Solution, flash bios, install latest RSTe at windows install. The below link may not completely apply to everyone, but it might help some of you. Pay attention to cisco guy’s posts. Most people probably installed the old drivers, not knowing any better, like myself

My conclusion is that I was fine untill i updated some drivers that conflicted with the old rste drivers. old drivers worked with other old drivers but not old rste with new. Gw2 is super sensitive to this, although i probably eventually would have acquired windows file system errors that screwed other programs too.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1668485

Now my only issue with the game is that 3d output wont initialize on game startup in stereoscopic mode unless i open another 3d vision application first. This one for sure is a gw2 issue.