Guild Wars 2

Thought about returning to the game and after digging through and finding my account details, downloaded the .exe and set it going.

After letting it run all night I expected to see the game ready to play (the launcher indicated as such), however the PLAY button was greyed out. No problem, I’ll restart the launcher.

Bad move.

Now the launcher is re-downloading the whole multi-tens-of-gb installation – AGAIN!! – and I’m left wondering whether another multi-tens-of-gb hit to my cap is worth it.

I’m guessing probably not.

May try again next month – though the thought of going through all of this again is making me think not. Add to that the complaints on the forums about the performance of the game, and I’m starting to remember why I left in the first place.

Having played since beta, I missed a couple of the Living World updates and when I finally managed to get back into the game, I just couldn’t get into it any more and had no idea what was going on.

And I haven’t logged back in since.

Gameplay was ok, but I dunno it just felt “wrong” in some way that I can’t describe.

GW2 remains on my system, and I’ll have a run every now and then, but even the thought of playing it is “meh” at the mo.

It was good while it lasted but it lost me with the whole Scarlet thing.

I actually thought that the whole rationale behind GW2 is that it is a race to see who is best dressed!

You never hear people brag about their combat moves, but you do hear them brag about how cool their weapon looks or how sexy their avatar is in that shiny new dress/battle armour.

Though most conversations on the forums these days seem to devolve into a “is a p2w or isn’t it” style discussions. Kinda gives you an indication of where the game is headed though.

Those who don’t feel they are getting value for money or who are getting bored walk (anyone remember RIFT? L), those who feel the value is worth it stay.

Pay or grind – one costs money, the other costs time. If you have either to burn then you end up “winning” in the game.

Though what you win is something for a much deeper discussion.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

They are gold sinks, and absolutely necessary for a healthy in-game economy.

LOL at the use of the word “economy” in this game as if it actually meant something.

Hebee.8460:

January 21st

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-world-2013-the-year-in-review/

Next part of the living story is then.

Cheers – good opportunity to take a break from the game then (not enjoying Wintersday that much).

1. proper guilds, guild management and guild halls
2. removing all invulnerable mobs
3. removing all account bound restrictions on loot (unless used)
4. make LFG work across servers
5. make events in wvw directly affect the pve world
6. get rid of the lag ingame

That’ll do for me.

If I wanted to play guitar hero, I’d buy an X-box.

Less lag.

Come on Anet, get your act together and do something about the lag in this game. It’s getting worse with every update and Wintersday is a nightmare (though it looks fun).

Phy.2913:

I don’t want to be downleveled more. If I’m trying to farm T3 mats I don’t want every enemy to be a real threat, not when drop rates are so low to begin with.

You hit the nail on the head. The endgame progression actually works against anything you do to the starter and mid levels.

If you attempt to “fix” these levels, you annoy the heck out of the 80’s who are farming them; but if you don’t, you lose the ability to attract and hold the new player and those 80’s that are looking for something beyond the “rinse and repeat” nature of the game.

As with the jazzed up T3 human cultural armour on the Gem Store to make some $, they have painted themselves into a “kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t” corner of the MMO world (where they join many other slowly failing games).

Scarlet appears, the volume goes down until she goes away. Nuff said.

I learnt that Marjory and Kasmeer are in a sort of relationship ….. of a sort that would get them banned in some southern US states.

Teq is ok. He lands, no one cares, he flies away.

So what’s the problem?

GoldenTruth.2853:

Things implemented:
- Continuing 2 week release cadence – which most people get to half do before it disappears

- Improved (or at least changed) world bosses – which no one seems to do much of these days (witness fails at Jormag on most servers, the non-event that is Teq, etc).

- Updated dungeons (though only 1 was really updated) – these are ok for speed running (once the initial wow factor has gone)
- Created world events with larger scale and more permanent impact – another one that players seem to ignore. Most don’t even pay attention to invasions anymore.

- Increased number of dynamic events – once you have done them a dozen times, they fall into the “I need to farm these for xxx resources”.

- Super Adventure Box – personally can’t stand it, but that’s just my opinion.

- Added new skills and traits (though not on the scale they made it seem so this could be a rightful complaint) – some of these are good and the balances are getting better. more work needs to be done and the future changes in Dec look interesting.
- Increased way to earn skill points – most have more skillpoints than you can point a stick at. Since when did SP become currency though?
- Champion rewards – I laughed so hard the milk came out my nose – champions and rewards are two words that are only loosely associated together in GW2. Champions and junk is a more apt joining.

- Dungeon reward revamp – see Champion Rewards

- New crafting materials – most of which is account bound, takes weeks to gather and is largely hidden from newer players who don’t want to continually tip money into the game.

- Magic find revamp – this is neat but once everyone has the same MF level, what is the point?

- Making blues and greens matter more – see above on Magic find revamp. Really though blues and greens only matter for recycling, nothing more.

- Ascended weapons – poor mans legendary without the flashy particle effects.

- Improved functionality of legendaries – *good for the 1% of the population who have them(

- Replacement for Borderlands orb mechanic – now this was a good move but has increased the zerginess of wvw

- PvP solo rated play (albeit very buggy) – spvp is the weird redheaded step-child of the game

- LFG tool – * cool tool that allows you to meet people who rage-quit the dungeon at the slightest “you aren’t doing this right!!!!”*

- Limit culling in PvE – * allowed us to use the full functions of the awesome machines we play with (once A-net realised that we don’t play with consoles)*

Things not implemented:
- Updated fractals (though it’s obvious this will be released before the end of the year either on Nov 26th or Dec 24th). do people still do fractals?

- Wintersday (most likely released on Dec 10th) it’s fun playing winter games in the middle of summer

- All crafting professions to 500 let’s make everything crafted below 500 useless and superfluous in the same manner that everything below 400 is these days.

- Ascended armor (which has been datamined) Exotic is gonna be the new rare

- Building precursor (good chance of not being implemented before 2014) bets are now being laid on components only being available via the GS

- New legendary weapons will be interesting to see
- New type of legendary so a legendary legendary?
- Improved PvP rewards much needed
- New PvP map types would like new PvE maps at some stage
- Way to gain legendary skins in PvP

Looking at the list the only people who got kind of screwed over was PvPers, and even then there’s 3 updates left (excluding tomorrows) before people can rightfully complain.

That said I would argue the main complaint should be the scale of some of the things they implemented, mainly things like skills/traits and dungeons (though for dungeon updates I expected them to only be 1 or 2 new dungeons). Besides, they even said the things listed could change. It’s far better for them to be open about what they are working on than just tell us right before a release.

lordkrall.7241:

It is most likely about laws and such in different countries.

Nah, more like laziness on the part of A-net in not being able to read a map that doesn’t show the US or Europe on it. This doesn’t seem to stop other companies from doing the exact same thing (Wargaming.net do it all the time, as does Blizzard, etc).

Seriously, the people going on about “different laws in different countries” have absolutely no idea what they are talking about and just parrot earlier responses of the equally clueless.

MrIllusion.5304:

Gear threadmill… that’s a good one.

Some people mistake a walk over a bump for a threadmill.

Real threadmills have you getting gear to do content to get the next tier of gear, to do content that gives yet another tier of gear.

That’s not how it is in GW2 right now.

You have a point, in GW2 it’s just crap loot drops from here to eternity.

Do the hardest content – get crap loot.
Do the easiest content – get crap loot.
Do a grind – get crap loot.
Do LS storylines – get crap loot.
Do dungeons – get crap loot.

Do all of the above hundreds of times over and over again and get nothing but crap loot.

A gear grind GW2 is definitely not because that would mean that sometimes something decent will drop for you.

And after a couple of thousand hours playing, I can assure you that this is not the case.

Don’t get me wrong, I play the game because it is fun – for the moment – but it’s starting to wear thin. Personally I am about out of content that is worth doing (or that I feel like doing) and the fun is starting to drain away from it – and yes, endless crap loot is putting me off logging in.

The old “I’d like to be rewarded for the effort” just doesn’t apply to this game anymore and over and above everything, this is what is making me look forward to my next MMO.

I’m seriously thinking of ditching GW2 to go and play GW1. I never played it but from what fellow guildies tell me, and from reading comments in here, it seems a great deal more in depth than what I seem to be playing now (some of my guildies have never stopped Gw1, though some have stopped playing GW2). GW2 is just zerging from one encounter to another – I can do that in a dozen other games tbh.

Knote.2904:

I really don’t know why it’s not permanent? What good reason is there?

Could be because it sucks horribly as content.

Vol.5241:

Yeah I’m sorry your friends/guilds don’t like this, but personally I enjoy the new content every 2 weeks. The summer metrics and concurrent playerbase show it’s working.

And these numbers are located where exactly? Anet (of course) report slow and steady growth in box sets sold, and remark that they are seeing this translate into “long-term players”, but as far as actual figures, they are few and far between.

Games like this survive because of the player longevity, not short-term churn rates.

And so far this game has gone from feeling like a stayer, to feeling very RIFT like in it’s rush to add content.

marnick.4305:

www.arena.net > there’s a job application page. If you’re really as good as you claim, that’s your approach angle. If not, you should post on the forums.

You don’t give source code examples and assume everyone believes you. On that complete lack of proof, but with an implied degree of authority you try to make us believe the RNG is botched. For trolls and haters, that would suffice. Unfortunately I do know what you’re talking about and I need a little bit of proof, not just hyperbole and hearsay.

Credentials do matter in this thread. Do you have linkedin?

And you are talking from what sort of authority?

The details that he has offered do actually check out (if you had bothered to read them – but going by your response we can all see that you haven’t). You on the other hand have offered nothing by way of firm rebuttal but have instead resorted to a rather weak form of character aspersion.

Please consider this constructive criticism as you are essentially doing the exact same thing as you accuse that poster of doing.

Maybe in future you should refrain from hitting the submit key until you actually have a clue what you are typing.

Shufflepants – you said exactly the same thing I said except that you used about 2000 words more and dressed it up like it was some form of logic. Please spare us the dime-store logic and lay off the googling of statistics and probabilities – you just embarrass yourself.

Silvercyclone.1462:

Vorch.2985:

Purchasing Guild Halls with merits + influence + gold would be nice.

This would be the worst thing Anet could do with guild halls. It would be saying guild halls are not for small guilds or guilds who see guild missios are a waste of time and influence.

As it should be. Small Guilds and ones who don’t run guild missions shouldn’t get the rewards of those who put time and effort into their guilds.

Ignore the new bits if you don’t like them and wait for the old bits you liked to come around again (hopefully they will if they keep returned PoC like SAB).

Personally, I lost track of all the new stuff around the release of the thing with the kites.

With no monthly fee you can just stop playing whenever you like.

Random being random I can understand, and even taking into account axioms of probability you can sort of excuse the current system – but the overall experience of the system (from myself and others) has the feeling that the randomness is generated once per account, after which you are stuck with that forever.

This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.

It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life.

I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.

Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities.

Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.

Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.

If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.

SAB1 I couldn’t stand after playing it a couple of times, SAB2 I gave a try once and found it just as bad, possibly even worse, than SAB1.

Teq I’ve tried a couple of times and even though I’ve been in a crew that got it down to 5% before the timer went out – it took a few days to get into main instead of OF – and then the battle was just a zerg that stood still for most of the time. After about the 5th time I just couldn’t be bothered. The last time I went to Teq there were 5 people there doing their jumping over the waves achievement. I had already done it but wanted the daily …. which I got whilst laying dead and afk. I was in the other room eating dinner at the time.

Most of the LS has been good, the last few though have just seemed to be a procession of annoyance – well a procession that increases in annoyance as it moves along.

On our server, Invasions are now rarely attended (it’s easier and faster to zerg the champs elsewhere); Teq is done maybe once or twice seriously on the weekends; most WB’s are lucky to get five or six people when they spawn; and the Orr temples are never seriously bothered.

Most people though ARE spending all their time harvesting mats and doing JP’s to get their ascended weapons.

To be perfectly honest, I would have RNG Luck over standard ordinary character assigned “luck” any day of the week.

RNG Luck is when you see a player with a lower “luck” rating than yourself get consistent drops of exotics every day – sometimes three to four a day. Whereas yourself on the other hand are fortunate if you get one a month (OMGWTF!!! I just for Arc after nothing for 6 weeks!! no lotto ticket for me this week……).

You’ll know the scenario. They run the same WB’s at the same time as you, they don’t do anything differently to what you do, yet as their RNG Luck is higher than yours, your chat is ringing with the “look at what I picked up! [stupidly expensive axe of head-choping]” as your marvel over the collection of crap in your loot (YAY, yet another worthless moto tiara and a bunch of green sigils and blue armour to vendor off for 15coppers).

You fight a WB or a Champ but as your RNG Luck – well for want of a better word “sucks” – you get nothing but blues, maybe a green and a sole rare in the daily box.

Now the voice in your head tells you “I grinded to get my luck up high so that after much hard work I have 114% Luck and my GB and food is pumping that up over 130%!! Why am I getting such crap drops all the time, every day, week in and week out!!”

But pfft, that is just worthless “Luck” – good only for getting an additional mat from an orrian truffle spawn.

What you really need to concentrate on is the luck that is generated by the Random Number Generator – the one that gives you two exotic drops in a single WB encounter, or four to five exotic drops a day. Or better yet, the RNG Luck amount that gives you not one, not two, but three precursor drops in the space of a week!

I just wish I could find the magic that allows the RNG Luck to start accumulating for my character.

Because after running WB’s each and every day, running dungeons, JP’s, invasions and champion zergs (and every other type of activity in the game), I have so far failed to gain any RNG Luck for my character.

Heck, I’d be happy for one exotic drop a month.

Maybe there is a magic ambient that you have to kill at a certain time in a certain place and that affects your RNG Luck amount ….. or maybe if you kill too many ambients your lose your RNG Luck o_0.

I. like many people, have given up on getting anywhere in this achievement.

I hear many people tell me it’s fun, I hear about the great drops they get, I even listen on mumble and can hear the fun they are having.

Sadly I am not as I am stuck forever in overflow, banished to try and enjoy a shadow of a game because the makers of GW2 are idiots and have no idea on how to scale their servers for the content that they slop out to the punters.

Teq is now on the list of useless content that this once great game is now producing.

Couldn’t stand it the first time, can’t stand it the second time.

If I wanted to play platform games I’d go and join the peasants and buy an X-Box or PS3. How about something else other than SAB A-Net???

I just delete my continue coins to free up bank space (along with that princess tiara and wig rubbish). It hits my backpack and it’s drag and drop out of existence.

Would love an option in the game setup that said “ignore SAB and all SAB related items”.

+1 to this. Even when you have team-mates who luck upon getting into main, you remain forever in overflow….

Like other content is this game, I’ve just given up and gone off to do other things.

I would happily give up on receiving any new content if a-net just spent time in fixing camera angles and charr/norn movement.

In fact, I would happily pay more money for this game if these two things were addressed.

The game is becoming a boring human/azuran free for all, with very few norn and even fewer charr running around. And with the emphasis of the latest expansions being based on jumping you can see why!! Forget about the new content if you happen to play charr or norn characters because the game mechanics ruin it for you.

So how about it a-net? Time to give some much needed dev love to the unloved two races of Tyria?

The first few days were great, the karka queen update was ok but the laaaaag is driving people away and making it unplayable.

Luckily I got my badges in the first day when lots of people had yet to experience the full impact of the lag, but after a few days it’s impossible to get even 4 or 5 people to show interest in the KQ. Most days the 4 villages remain in hostile hands as no one can be bothered with the lag induced deaths.

First major issue I have experienced in the game though so hopefully it isn’t a precursor to the festival.