Guild Wars 2

Ok, some other stuff missing from that list:

• Replacing the missing profession mechanics UI for the Elementalist, Engineer, and Guardian professions

• Offhand weapon not unlocking until level 7

• Weapon Swapping not unlocking until level 15

• Utilities 7, 8, 9, and 0 not unlocking until levels 13, 24, 35, and 40 respectively

• Underwater combat not unlocking until level 8, underwater skill 5 not unlocking until level 23

• Most juvenile pets missing from starting zones

• Mechanics of many early heart quests reduced to make them more boring.

• Apples missing from apple orchard

I may still be missing a few, but fixing those need to be a priority as well.

This is silly. They should have created an entirely new tree, one in which the most basic mission is available right from the start, while the more advanced ones would require further progress into that tree. Building it into the upper branches of an existing tree unfairly penalizes those that didn’t see a point to the existing tree options, and unfairly rewards players that already liked the content in that tree.

Lately there’s been an increase in content in which the way your map as a whole performs causes huge differences in the personal rewards each player gets. In the Pavilion, even after the loot changes, if you were doing Gold runs on Boss Blitz, you’d earn about 560 tokens per hour, 21 Master+ items, and 70 loot bags. If you were doing Bronze runs in that time, you’d be making no more than around 120 tokens, 9 Master+ items, and 18 champ bags. That’s a HUGE difference. HUGE! This is a double dipping effect, since not only is a gold run winning more rewards on each successful completion, but it’s also completing the event more times per hour.

On this current event, not only does a Tier 4 map offer significant discounts off the amount of geodes needed to buy things, but you also earn a lot more geodes over the course of playing it, since you are completing more events and achieving more bonus and unlocked objectives. This is double dipping too, cheaper prices AND more resources to spend if you get on a T4.

Now in the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with this, better performance = better reward, makes sense. The problem is, the game’s architecture is HORRIBLE for managing this sort of thing, because players have almost no choice as to whether they end up on a T4/Gold map, or a T2/Bronze map. You just load up and hope for the best, chances are you’ll get the latter and there’s little you can do about it.

During the Pavilion, there was one method of controlling this, but it was a bad one. If you could find someone else who was on a gold map, you could join their team, and then keep spamming, and spamming, and spamming the “join in pavilion” button until eventually, maybe, you could join them on that map. This mean most nights were spent with 5-50 minutes just standing around, spamming join, and that’s if you were LUCKY.

For the new event, there does not seem to be any good method for controlling which map you end up on.

So this sort of thing needs to stop. Give players awards based on individual events, the ones they personally participate in, not these massive map-wide meta events that are relatively easy if you’re lucky enough to get onto a well organized map, but more or less impossible and pointless if you end up on most maps. Make it so that each player’s rewards are based mostly on how well that player performs, rather than an aggregate score of dozens of players. I’m not saying that events themselves should not require team work and coordination, just that the reward differences should not be so massive, and the scope of the events should be contained to within a small area and time scale, rather than covering the entire map for an hour at a time.

If you do insist on keeping these map-wide meta events, then you need to do a better job of accessing them. There needs to be a way that players who want to play on a Gold Run/T4 map can do so, EVERY time, the instant they log in, rather than having to spam join for a half hour to get into one. You should just be able to choose “I want to do a gold run map” and instantly join one, never ending up on a bronze run/T2 map. If you can’t guarantee that then how can you expect players to put up with it?

I only have so much of my day during which I can play GW2, and during that time, I want to be doing something fun the entire time. I don’t want to log in only to spend tens of minutes staring at the screen and spamming a join button before I can begin to have fun, or leave a character AFK in a map for an hour before a fight like Teq or the Wurm to maybe get a decent group involved. It’s a simple test for new content ideas, really. Just ask yourself “can a random player just log in, and instantly and ALWAYS be a part of the ‘good run,’ with his reward being based on his own efforts to complete it?” If not, back to the drawing board with it.

good thing is HoT is optional you dont have to play it if you dont like it simple as that stick with the core game plenty of content there still.

Do you honestly believe that comments of this sort will make anyone feel better? Is there someone whom you imagine in your mind would read that and go “oh, well that’s ok then?”

People are are complaining do not just want to continue playing the same content they have been for the past three years, they want NEW content as much as anyone else, they just want new content of the type of the previous content. They want new material of the same formula, and it should come as a surprise to no one if they are unsatisfied with new content that is well outside their interests or capabilities.

If you like the new content direction, that’s great, you’re allowed to say as much, but there’s absolutely no point to belittling or attempting to silence people who genuinely believe otherwise. Let them speak their mind, honor that their opinions are just as valid as your own, and let ANet decide what to do about it.

I really hate this change. I said as much back when it was announced, and I tested it out tonight to give it a try, and this is what my life in game will be, because the schedule never changes. I can only play from 11pm-1am EST or so, occasionally picking up the 10-11 and 1-2 blocks a little, but not usually. This means I’ll NEVER get to do the Karka event again, since it ONLY happens at 9pm, when I NEVER play. Yay Arenanet. Also, since the megaserver isn’t fully implemented, one of the few events that does happen during my play period, the Triple Wurm, was completely 100% empty on my server when I attempted it. Not a single soul around. Not one. I don’t think it’s soloable. Much more fun not doing the Triple Wurm than successfully doing the Karka Queen. :|

I get that the old methods would no longer work with the megaserver, and I do think that the megaserver in general was a great idea, but there need to be several changes:

1. There need to be at least three separate schedules cycling, once the megaserver is fully implemented, at least. Every hour on the hour you should be able to do at least two, if not three of the following: Karka Queen, Claw, Shatterer, Triple Wurm, Teq, Megadestroyer. It should be up to the player to choose which one he wants to attend, but within any given two hour period he should be able to attend any one of them at least once. There should be no events that are permanently outside of any window.

If you like, the events could be set up so that there is one “permanent” cycle, basically the current one that will always be the same to allow for easier planning, and then one “rotating cycle,” that is offset so that it shifts by an hour or so each day, causing events on that cycle to only be available every other day or so.

2. The schedule DEFINITELY needs to be available in-game. No option otherwise. People need to be able to track which events are coming up, as well as while events are active in other parts of the world. It’s nonsense that I have to keep the scheduling page open when playing the game.

The world boss scheduling should never have been implemented until both the Megaservers were fully implemented (to ensure healthy populations), and the in-game schedule app was working. I like a lot of the other changes in the feature patch, but this one was nowhere near ready for prime time, and is going to seriously harm my interest in playing the game until it’s resolved.

Yeah, I definitely do not like this at all. They can merge the paths into a single daily if they like, but if so they still need at least 7-8 pure PvE ones and the rest can be WvW/PvP. Don’t even think for a second that you’re going to lure me into PvPing by putting objectives in there, just accept that I do not enjoy it and move on. The more they try to nudge me into PvP, the less interested I am in playing at all.

Yeah, that would have to be a joke.

I think it’s fair to say that there are some people who like hard mode. There are plenty who come out and say “make X more challenging.” Fair enough that, they know what they like and are entitled to express that. But there are also people who do not enjoy hard mode, and they are not your lessers, they are no less deserving of getting what they enjoy out of the game, and we all need to keep that in mind.

With that in mind, we have the constant discussions over adding difficult content to the game, and the best ways of doing that. I think that it’s important when difficult content is added, that effort is taken to make it as optional as possible. It should definitely be there for those that want it, but those who do not enjoy that sort of play should be able to avoid it completely, and not feel punished by the game for not enjoying that sort of thing. They should not be blocked out from fun experiences and cool rewards, they should not have a slower advancement path, just because they do not want to participate in difficult content, or are incapable of doing so.

In its ideal form, every type of content should have both “easier” modes, and “hard modes” available. I’m not talking “turn on auto-run and auto attack and you’ll be fine” easy, I just mean that it doesn’t require absolute coordination and precision to survive the encounters, content similar to the basic content the game launched with. The more challenging modes can go crazy with one-hit kills that must be avoided, elaborate death traps, that sort of thing, but these should be avoidable by those who choose to avoid them.

The most important factor is that there should not be a reward gap between the two varieties of play. Just because a player is not interested or capable of hard mode does not mean that he is less deserving of a cool looking skin or useful piece of gear. Hard mode content can have a leaderboard, or titles, so people can show off that they have completed it, but should not have anything that is inherently cool that cannot be earned elsewhere, nothing that would be cool whether it denoted the achievement or not. The basic test is, “if anyone got this item for free in the mail, might you still want it?” If so, then it should not be locked behind hard mode content.

If hard mode content always takes more time to complete than the normal mode, even once you have it on farm, then it can provide a quantity of loot sufficient to make it no less rewarding than the easier mode per minute, but anything you can earn from that mode should be earnable in both. for example if a hard mode dungeon takes 500% longer than a normal mode one, even once people have mastered it, then it could offer 50% more loot drops, so that it balances out, but there should never be a super special armor type that you can only earn from that mode, or that technically drops in both but has a decent chance of dropping in hard mode while only a Precursor-level chance fo dropping in normal.

You should be running the hard mode because you enjoy the challenge, not because the game bribes you into it, and if for a second you begin to think “well if it only offered the same rewards as normal then I wouldn’t do it,” then you should be playing normal mode, and maybe they shouldn’t even bother with a hard mode if enough people think that way.

If you want more challenging content because you enjoy a challenge, then I hope ANet lives up to your expectations. If you want harder content because you want access to rewards that most players can’t have, then that’s just being a selfish jerk, and I very much hope that ANet does not indulge you in that.

Agreed, nobody cares about this nonsense, if we aren’t there, then we don’t want to be there.

I enjoy Fractals well enough, I do, but asking players to run four Fractals in a row, even the very shortest, is too much time investment. ONE fractal is plenty. If you want players playing more fractals, that’s how you do it, drop the “four in a row” business entirely.

If you want to force players to complete the fractals that they don’t enjoy, like the Dredge fractals, in order to get the final rewards, then just use some sort of lock-out system. Let players pick the fractals they want to do, and each fractal completed offers a key, and three keys are needed to unlock the boss battles, but you can’t get a key from a fractal you’ve already done until you clear each of them once, meaning you can do them in any order you want, and take as long as you want to do them, all at once, once per day, even one per week, but you’ll need to do each at least once before you can start over again.

Similar mechanics are already used in the Nightmare Tower.

I had been in many full maps for CP and the reason most lost out on gold was because of a lack of coordination. So many tried to Zerg it and scale up the bosses. Dry Top maps have had the numbers but they don’t make tier 4 due to not coordinating the events.

Yes, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the coordination, but ANet has not given the player the tools to ensure that you easily end up on a coordinated server. You can blame the other players all you like, but you can’t force other players to coordinate, and if you, as a player who is willing and able to coordinate, end up on a server that is mostly people with no interest and/or capability to do so, then you stand no chance at getting anything out of your time spent in the game.

I’m not saying that they can’t have goals that require player coordination, I’m just saying that if they do have such goals, then they need to make 100% sure that any player that WANTS to coordinate is able to do so without the hassles of map changes, purges, and join spamming. I mean, during the Blitz I was doing gold runs, but I popped a Birthday Boost partway through, 24 hours of boost uptime, and yet I probably ended up wasting half of that time just standing around in the center trying to join in on people who had an active map, while the map I was in was stuck in Bronze the entire time.

That is NOT game design that is working well, however you might try to spin it.

I’m not sure how they would implement your ‘logging in and choose Gold rewards’ suggestion.

I’m not exactly sure either, but until they have a solution, they should not implement maps with goals that allow you to not ‘log in and choose Gold rewards.’ I’m not saying I have the complete solution to this one, I’m just pointing out that they have a problem, it’s their job to fix it, but I’ll help however I can.

You can just open LFG and find a taxi, or make a group looking for a taxi. Whenever I’m in a t4 shard, I always try to taxi pugs in using LFG.

And then we’re back to join spam.

Ok, here’s at least one solution they need to implement ASAP. Remove join spam. Bring back the queues. Make it so that instead of having to hit “join→ok” a thousand times before the map actually loads, preventing you from doing anything at all productive with your time, make it so that you can hit “Join your party member in the map” and then it puts you into a queue. The when your number comes up, you get in, done.

In the meantime, you can run around the map you’re in, doing whatever there is to do. Ideally you could even queue up form other maps, and hop around doing any ingame activities until your queue pops.

Ideally, every map should be able to get t4, but that’s not gonna happen considering the majority of players. People don’t like to work hard in this game. So you’re gonna have to find other players that do want to work.

I don’t think it’s at all fair to blame player laziness. I’ve been on plenty of maps where I’ve seen people scurrying around, running events constantly, and still only barely gotten T3, if that. Getting T4 requires a ton of people that are all focused on that goal, knowing when every event is up and completing it in minimal times, with bonuses.

When players fail to get Gold or T4, it’s less often because of laziness, and more often because ANet screwed up somewhere in the design, allowing things to scale poorly, or not training the players in the proper tactics. T4 in Dry Top, for example, would be much easier if EVERY event were visible on the map at all times, so you would always know what’s up without having to be near it or requiring pony express. The “this boss is up” messages are a nice step, but only account for about 1/3 of the potential events in the zone, and don’t last long on screen.

This makes me sad. Kessex was such a pretty zone before and now it’s an ugly mess. First they ruined lower Sparkfly and now this, and they still haven’t given us a restored Orr. Make the game world prettier, not uglier.

Maybe put that Lion’s Arch girl back out there to collect money to replant the trees.

By “save points” I mean that there needs to be some way of checking in that you’ve made progress, so that if you miss a jump, you are not set back all the way. As it stands, this puzzle has several stages. There is the initial stage to get into the cave. There is the short stage to get inside the Zeppelin. There is the hops under the Zep to the launcher. there is the launches up to the top, then there is the top of the zep and beyond. The problem is, if you fail at any point after entering the cave, you have to start the ENTIRE process over again, short of a friendly Mesmer. I don’t enjoy that sort of jump puzzle.

A better example would be the Obsidian puzzle, which is great so long as no opposing players are involved. In that one, there are about 5-6 discrete stages to it, and after you pass each one, if you fail on the subsequent stage then you fall only to a point where you can continue from the beginning of that stage. If you fall in the dark room, for example, you don’t end up back outside. If you fall in the arena, you don’t end up back in the dark room.

Likewise, there are dungeons like Spekk’s Lab or Goem’s lab, where each time you complete a stage, it makes a checkpoint, and a little robot will teleport you to that checkpoint if you fall. I like these mechanics, it means that you need to master each discrete element of the puzzle to reach that point, but that once you have, you don’t need to do it over and over again just because you’re having trouble with a point much later in the puzzle.

Specifically to this JP, I would suggest having steam launchers stationed throughout the puzzle. These launchers would make you temporarily invulnerable and then launch you ballistically towards specific locations in the puzzle, but you’d have to reach the target points to unlock them.

The cannon could be located on that “control room” sort of space right near the bottom of the puzzle, and would launch you towards the airship interior once you’ve unlocked it. Next, there would be one on the cliff next to the airship that would launch you over the airship and to the point shown in this screenshot or somewhere near there in the puzzle. Then, somewhere near there, would be a cannon that would launch you on top of the zeppelin. More “save points” would be better, but I believe those would cover the big sections that cause trouble. Again, this would not let you skip any content, you’d have to progress to the target area to unlock the relevant cannon, it would just let you more quickly get back to where you fell from, and thes would reset after a certain amount of time.

The main problem here is that there are so many players who want to get the best stuff, but don’t want to take the time to organize or coordinate themselves.

The main problem is people who are on the latter group, and are NO DIFFERENT THAN THE FORMER GROUP, and yet are not getting the same rewards because they just happen to not be on the same map.

I was doing gold runs in the pavilion every day of the last month. I was running them for about an hour or two per day, I wound up with almost two stacks of each type of Champ bag, I know pretty much everything there is to know about doing gold runs.

And yet still, on the last day of that patch, it was a huge hassle to make it happen. I had to hook up with people who were already running a good map, I had to join one of their groups. I had to spam “join on member” for maybe a very short time if I was lucky, but sometimes over a half hour of my time, doing nothing but a very tedious and repetitive task.

And then sometimes those gold blitz maps broke down, started getting lots of silvers because people started going AFK or were replaced by people that didn’t know the drill, and yet all the people who left, the same “worthies” that had been getting gold before, started to get silvers. So then the people involved had to find a new map, which was a complicated process that typically took 30+ minutes to perform, then a few trial runs that often went silver before we were back into gold shape. It was a HUGE waste of time, and that was when everything was working “right.”

Now, you can say “when Gold Blitzes are working they work well,” and that is true, but don’t try to chalk it up to the people involved being a better class of people. They are just people that happen to be on gold blitz maps. Those same people on a bronze map would be hopeless.

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

I know the air might be a bit thin on top of that high horse, but you’re missing the point. This isn’t about “it’s too hard.” Liadri is hard. Never managed to beat it. I’m fine with that, it’s a personal challenge and it’s hard, Fine. Nothing about gold blitz or T4 is particularly hard at all. I mean, some of the events are moderately challenging, but none that I would classify as “too hard.” The only difference between T2 and T4 on the Drytop map is not skill or effort, it’s just luck. Plain and simple luck. “Are you lucky enough to end up on a map with people who are willing and able to reach T4?” If yes, then you’ll get T4 easily enough. If not, then it’s impossible, no matter how awesome you are. There is no particular skill to the outcome, it’s random chance. You can no more reasonably say that Dry Top is “too hard” than you could say that coin flipping is “too hard” if you lose a flip. Nor can you reasonably claim to be awesome because you won the coin flip.

A MMORPG (of all games) should not allow you to succeed solo, no matter how skilled you are, in group content if your group does not want it to succeed. Played ought to and should need to play together.

Perhaps, but IF that is so, then the game needs to provide a framework in which you can effortlessly choose to only associate with people who are interested in joining that challenge. If an event requires 130+ well coordinated people to complete it, and you have the desire to be one of those people, then the game’s design is obligated to provide you with those 129+ other people at your demand, otherwise it’s unreasonable to expect that of you. It’d be like serving someone a juicy steak and withholding any utensils from them.

The content should be a challenge, accumulating a group that is willing to attempt it should never be one. You should never log into the game and load into a map of Dry Top, intending to do a T4 run, and end up with a bunch of people collecting Coins, running story missions, attempting the jumping puzzle, etc. They have every right to do those activities, but they should be doing them on a different map than you loaded into if you were looking to do a T4 run. If the game can’t effortlessly provide that experience then it shouldn’t expect that of you.

Further, while I accept and even embrace the need for some other people to be involved in the outcome of the fight, I don’t see the value in factors outside of the tactical level entering into it. By that I mean, if I’m in Dry Top and I’m fighting a boss, and everyone around me is for whatever reason incompetent, and we fail that boss fight, then fair enough, I was there, I did my best, it wasn’t enough to overcome their worst, we lost, but at least we tried. However, if the group I’m with fights through five events and clears them all, but the map as a whole, outside my reach, fails to accomplish much else and we still end with T3, then where is the benefit to that? Things outside your reach, on the strategic level, should not impact your own level of reward. No single player can completely determine the outcome of a group encounter, but each player should at least be an active part in the outcome, rather than having whole portions of the outcome be determined by factors over which he has no influence at all.

I cited that as a flaw in the original marionette fight, that four platforms out of five could succeed effortlessly, but if even one wiped, entirely outside their control, the entire thing would collapse. A more appropriate system would allow players on cleared platforms to reinforce failing ones, or at the very least would have been based on a “best of five” rather than “all of five” element, so that one or two failing platforms could not invalidate the efforts three or four strong ones.

I’m also very worried about the new direction. I enjoy the HoT content in how I play it, but the current Map Meta cycles are way too long to complete, and the content is way too pointless if you don’t intend to complete the metas, so you’re stuck doing them if you want to accomplish anything. They should make each meta cycle half or less the current time requirements, trimming events as necessary.

Also, if a “good map” can complete a task, while a “bad map” is more likely to fail it, then they need to give players better tools for arriving at “good maps” than they currently offer. LFG and “join on player” are not nearly good enough. Players should be able to select specific maps from a list, not get randomly assigned one.

And they definitely need to stop locking cool rewards behind things like raids. If raiders want to raid, let them raid. If players want legendary armor but have no interest in raiding, they shouldn’t be forced into raids to get it.

This has been a peeve of mine for a while now, Warriors leaving their banners lying around where anyone hitting “F” ends up picking them up. Nobody wants your stupid banners, we want to pick up loot. Make it so that only the person who drops the banner can pick up the banner, or at least give a toggle in the options to prevent yourself from being able to pick up banners by hitting F.

This achievement is just not fun. If Teq can be soloed, at the very least it’s well beyond my capabilities, and the alternative is you just sit around for fifteen minutes until the event closes out, which isn’t a lot of fun either. It just seems like a waste of my gaming time to just be hanging out near the cannon for fifteen minutes, waiting for Teq to leave, when I could instead be having fun in some other part of the game.

It’s a fairly simple easy problem to solve though, just remove the “Here Be Dragons” achievement from the rotation of available dailies, at least until such time as Tequatl is a more reasonably achieved objective for all players, on all servers, at all times of day.

I’ll disagree with you on having to play the full meta. I guess it depends on what you want from the game. If you want loot, then yeah you’d have to put time into it. But I don’t think that’s so much an issue of how long the meta is, so much as no matter what ANet did there would always be a minimum time commitment to get something out.

There would always be the minimum, but the minimum should be under thirty minutes, ideally under ten. You should be able to get in, do a thing, and then leave when it’s done, and the loot tables all reset.

If you want to do three things in a row, then you get the rewards for three things, but if you only want to do one of those three things, then you get 100% of the reward for doing that thing, rather than only getting 10% of the reward and only getting the other 20% of the reward that event would entitle you to if you also complete the surrounding events.

Take the current VB meta. It’s currently a two hour cycle, 75 minutes of day, 45 minutes of night. Too much. Ideally it would cycle faster than that, but since they tied it to the day-night cycle of the game rather than just an internal loop, they should just compress the periods of activity.

Instead of having five meta stories that launch at dawn and you want to complete by dusk, sometimes taking most of those 75 minutes to complete, break it into two distinct time blocks, the “morning” missions and the “afternoon” missions, each chain designed to be completed in 30 minutes (meaning stream lining the number of enemy waves, the number of sub-events, etc.). Completing the morning missions would give you 100% of the meta reward you could achieve, and then your progress would reset at XX:35. Then you could do the Afternoon missions, or do anything else in the game, no difference in reward received.

The same would then apply to the Afternoon missions. Afternoon missions would be in no way dependent on morning missions, if all the morning missions failed, the afternoon ones would still start off from the same place. In some cases this might require an NPC push during the ten minute cap between them. The rewards would also be rebalanced a bit, so that you get slightly more reward for each sub-event, and slightly less for the meta chain.

Then night would fall, and night time would be completely distinct from the day time. Whether you completed all missions during the day or zero missions during the day, your personal reward scaling would reset at dusk, and the state of the world would be the same. Then there would be the defense phase, which lasts 20 minutes, but at the end of that, ALL night defense reward would be tallied, and you would start fresh for the “night boss” phase, which lasts the remaining 20 minutes.

A player who logs in to a fresh map 20 minutes before dawn would have exactly the same progress towards the boss phase rewards as someone who’d been there since dawn, and have exactly as much potential for reward in that boss phase as someone on a well established map (assuming that the map could be fully populated and organized in that time, which realistically is unlikely).

So basically, tighten it up. Make the meta durations shorter, don’t put so much emphasis on sticking with a single map for hours at a time. Focus the rewards more on what you contribute, not on what people on the other side of the map are up to.

Also, as a side change, if there is a participation track, don’t make it so that you have to wait until a given time to receive it. Let players “cash out” when they feel like it. Basically, in the current state, if you are on a VB map that gets T4, but you leave three minutes before dawn, you do not get the “end of night” reward bundle. This is silly. Instead, if you change maps for whatever reason, you should have the option of looting that reward, based on the earned level when you left. By that I mean, if you leave halfway through the boss defense phase, when the map is only at T2, then you could loot a T2 prize bundle, even though you didn’t stay the entire time. If you leave the map after the last boss is downed, but before dawn, then you’d get the full T4 bundle.

And then I’ll disagree with you on raid loot. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have raids have raid specific loot. Else what is the point?

If that attitude is true, then the point would be “none,” there would be no point to having raids and they absolutely should not have them at all. If, on the other hand, as some have asserted, there are people who actually enjoy raids, then that would be the reason for them, because people enjoy them. I can totally go either way, but what I cannot accept is the idea that enjoying raiding entitles anyone to a better class of loot.

People were saying same thing about old simin yet anet dev claimed he had watched their QA team doing it without any issue and we are all aware how their teams play and zerks are definitely not involved.

I don’t trust their internal testing teams. Not that they are deliberately misleading or anything, I just don’t think they behave like normal players. I don’t think they come and go enough, I don’t think they have the same haphazard numbers, I have no doubt that these events would work fine with groups of just the right numbers, I just think that on actual servers these random scaling issues occur that makes them much tougher than they were intended to be. I think us real people are doing things that their testers just don’t do, and they need to take that into account and also do those things deliberately.

Have a few players that turn off their chat window. Have a few players that run pointlessly around the events but don’t help. Have a few standing off the the side, but within the scaling radius. Have a few with pure condition/heal/defensive gear and whatever the worst combinations of weapons for the event could be (I imagine my Condi scepter/dagger Necro would be better off barehanded in the Knight fights), etc. Have at least 25% of the testers doing it completely wrong, and see if the other 75% can make up for it.

Nothing on the collectible list should be RNG, none of it should be tradable on the TP. It should not cost gold to fill out your collections lists.

Don’t be evil.

You’ve talked about no expansions, constant updates. I’m fine with that. What I’m tired of is having no idea what’s coming more than a few weeks out. There’s no big picture, and if so, we can’t see the shape of it, and so we can’t have any sense of anticipation. What’s happening after the bazaar? No clue. It could be in the Shiverpeaks, it could be in Ascalon, it could be on the moon for all we know.

That’s one nice thing about expansions, as soon as one’s announced, you have a goal. It usually involves hyping up a core location or story element, “oh, we’re going to Elona,” “oh, we’re going to be taking out Jormag!” The Living world gives no opportunity for that sort of anticipation, because as soon as we know something’s coming, it’s already here.

So throw your caps over the wall. You can keep the bi-weekly updates, those are fine, but give us a long term target, tell us that in six months, or even a year, we will definitely be in [some cool location], or we will definitely be doing [some epic conflict]. Give us a long term plan, it doesn’t have to be very detailed, and you don’t need to spoil what will happen in between, but set up a cool future event, something cool enough that people would buy a $50+ expansion just to experience it, and tell us that it will be happening in the relatively near future.

So Colin Johanson just added his “looking ahead” blog post, and while it had a lot about mechanics, it had almost nothing about story. Where is the story going?! This game needs a future, it needs a goal. What locations will be available in six months that aren’t available today? Adding a few more “playgrounds” like Southsun and Cliffs isn’t going to cut it, you guys need to pick a dragon and have us set out after it, and you need to get started now.

Unlock quests were added because players asked for it. They had a system like it in Guild Wars 1 for skills.

Don’t try to blame players for the trait unlock system. That is NOT on us. At the bare minimum we would have done it better, allowing you to unlock all adept traits by level 11 if you focused on them, all the Master ones by level 40, and all the Grandmaster ones by level 60 (and obviously the level at which you unlock each tier would not have been pushed back). All level 60-80 unlocks would be for the “new” traits that got added after launch.

Long story short, having easy access to a variety of traits makes this game SO much more fun, and lacking that access makes the game SO much more dull.

How would you put in a system that allows for newer and less experienced players to have the time they needed to learn things while making it easier for experienced players to speed up the process and have more freedom?

One, new players NEVER needed “more time” to learn the game. Time was never at issue. What they needed was more training, more explicit “here is the system and how to use it,” like the new dodge trainer. Just taking the existing ability roll-out and spreading it out over more levels solves nothing. If their goal is to make the game easier to understand, the solution has nothing to do with spreading the skills out more, and more about adding tutorials.

For example, instead of moving the downed state to level 5 and only giving you half the abilities, they could put it at level 2, which you hit when you reach the tutorial boss (rather than after), and then the tutorial boss is guaranteed to one-shot you at least once, putting you into downed state, but then leaves you alone, while a message pops up highlighting the downed state options, and then after about thirty seconds to a minute you are auto-rallied. Problem solved.

CC Danicia.1394:

Please don’t delete them!

You can hold on to your extra blade shards, as the team will be adding something later which will allow you to convert the shards to something of value. Dev will be announcing more on that later. Thanks!

Thanks! Could we please get more clarity on these and other LW items in the future (and present)? I have tons of items in my inventory that I have no idea whether they will ever have future value. For example, I have:

Stacks of 3-7 assorted Marionette key fragments (not enough to form any more completed keys)
Powercore bits from the Marionette event
Wintersday 2012 cogs, frameworks, and stuffing (but not enough to make another mini)

And various other nicknacks that I’ve been holding on to in hopes I could eventually do something with them. It would be nice if ANet were more explicit about what items were no longer useful, like a note that says, either in game or even just in the patch notes “go ahead and delete those X if you’ve already made all the Y you might need, we’re never doing anything else with them.”

I will flip the kitten table if they don’t grandfather existing characters into the new system. I have nine level 80s at this point, and while one of them has map completion, the others are really a half-fast mix of various achievements, and I really have ZERO interest in taking them all on a scavenger hunt all over Tyria just to get them back to where they are today, while at the same time trying to level my Revenant and max out 1-2 mains in Maguuma Masteries. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

This is a feature that already would have some use, but with the new breakbar mechanic I think it would be super useful, and that is to have a bindable “Now!” button available that would cause your character to shout “Now!” along with a very large visual, like a giant spiky word balloon that players all around can see.

That’s just an example, of course, it could be something slightly different in terms of visual and audio expression, but I think it’d be a good idea to have a single keypress that a zerg commander could use to, without voice chat, instantly command the entire zerg to “do that thing,” whatever that thing might be in the specific encounter.

Yes, it might be possible to troll with this command, and it might be necessary to make it so that only commanders can use it, and maybe even that only squad members would see it, but overall I think it would be highly useful when compared to existing options.

I understand and sure, as a player, I’d like that info. But that isn’t what the company is doing right now, and we all know, under it all, that someone saying “to hell with policy” isn’t a professional stance to take. This is where we are right now. Not forever, but right now.

There’s nothing wrong with “to hell with the policy” when The Policy is a bad and arbitrary one. To hell with The Policy. I’m not saying that individual devs should just ignore “The Policy” on their own say-so, they would clearly get in trouble for that and nobody’s expecting them to go above and beyond for their customers like that, I’m saying that The Policy itself needs to go. This is not some law imposed by an outside organization, this is someone within ANet deciding to tie everyone’s hands behind their backs for no apparent reason. UNTIE THEM.

Anything else you may do is just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, it’s not solving the problem, the problem IS “The Policy.” To hell with The Policy.

They added a lot more dailies to the list, and that’s great, I will definitely want to do at least some of these. The problem is, it’s still “do three of these per day,” and it’s still “out of only four options.” And now it’s far more likely that some of those options will end up being very inconvenient. I managed today’s with no problems, but moving forward I’m dreading the terrible combos possible in the new system. They need to open it up so that there are at least 5-7 different activities available each day, and you can choose which three you prefer to do, rather than the game deciding it for you. Each day, there should be:

1 Harvest in X region
1 Find Viewpoint in X region
1 complete events on X map
1 complete X Jumping Puzzle or Adventure
2 complete X Dungeon or mini-Dungeon or Fractal

Now if they want to reduce the 2g reward for the daily, as a lot of people agree they should, that’d be fine too, I’m not trying to say that the “owe me” anything here, just that the dailies should be more about guiding you towards variety within the spheres that you enjoy playing, not requiring you to do things that you know you don’t enjoy.

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it. Challenge should be enough that you have to pay attention, learn certain patterns, and get things right most of the time, but should not require perfection.

2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious if your succeed and frustrating if you fail. The best content follows the rule of three, do one activity successfully, then have to do it a second time with slightly more complications, and then do it a third time with even more complications. All three rounds should be forgiving of minor stumbles, and you should never have to repeat the same sequence more than three times in an event (I’m talking broad objectives, I’m not saying each boss should die in three hits).

3. DPS checks are not hard. If content can be done easily when everyone is in full Ascended Zerk, but not when everyone is in full tank greens, then that is not hard content, it’s just gear-check, and nobody should be proud at succeeding in it. You didn’t do well, your shorts did well. Content should scale to the stats of the group, with better stats allowing you to win it faster, but not being necessary to overall success.

4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.

5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content. Anything achievable via “hard” content should be equally as achievable using “casual” content, it just might come to you faster, for example if a “hard” event takes more time and has a greater chance of complete failure, it might reward twice as many tokens towards a cool reward, allowing you to acquire it faster, but there should not be rewards that can ONLY be gained through hard content.

6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards. If this is the case, then you just shouldn’t have “hard” content because that’s clearly not what the players want. You should reward players adequately for the time spent, they should never say “I would do that but I’d make half as much as if I did this other thing,” but so long as they are adequately rewarded, if they still don’t want to do it, then they don’t want to do it, make it more FUN, not more rewarding.

7. As for breaking up the zerg, this is not hard to do, so long as you force it to happen. So long as everyone can move in a pack, they will move in a pack, because it’s the path of least resistance. The only way to avoid it is to make events in which you MUST engage multiple spread out targets at once, in which even 150 people on one only is impossible to win with, and you also need to convey this information clearly to the players. If they have to bang their heads against the wall or visit an outside blog to figure this out then you’ve failed, the event trackers need to make clear that some people need to go left and some right, and how many are needed at each, so that a totally new player who doesn’t know the event can figure out at a glance where he will be most useful. You have to balance out rewards and difficulty between events, otherwise people will just overload the easiest/more rewarding path.

Agreed with the OP. “Learn to play” people, if you don’t have a problem with the snipers, then that’s fine, but stop dismissing the reports from people who do.

No.

This suggestion is idiotic. (I would have left out the last bit, but the board insisted I expand on my premise).

I don’t mind having to go to EotM to do LW stuff, so long as it’s impossible for opposing players to kill me. If it’s possible for opposing players to kill me while I’m trying to clear LW stuff, then I’m flipping the kittening table. I do not like PvP, I do not want to PvP, and I greatly resent any systems they put in that would shove me into PvP situations.

To the people who design the armor and other unique rewards that are given out rare drops and meta rewards in LW content, such as the Adventurer’s Mantle, you do great work, but could we get less steampunk stuff? It’s not that I don’t like steampunk, but almost every LW related reward well over half at least, has been steampunky in design. We have the Aventurer’s headgear, the Molten Jetpack, the gas mask, the Spinal Blades, the Zephyr Rucksack, the Monocle, the Injector, etc. Not everything has been steampunk, but an aweful lot of it is, considering that Engineers are only one of eight classes, and not nearly the most popular of them.

Now a lot of this could be explained by them being leftovers from the whole Scarlet storyline, but I’d really like to see some more fantasy/medieval designs, or even some fancy Asura stuff, just gear that would fit on characters that aren’t Engineers.

If you are looking for a new steam punk item to make though, I would LOVE a pair of Adventurer’s goggles that are pushed up on top of the head rather than over the eyes.

Back when Super Adventure Box was live, you might remember that it was sometimes too hard, so they gave us the option of “Infantile Mode” so that anyone could get their way through it eventually. This was a great idea, and sometimes playing this game can be too hard. With that in mind, here are some changes I think would be a really good idea for low level content in the game, just shift things around so that it’s less confusing for those age 3 and up:

• Weapon skill 2 (Unlocked at level 2)
• Weapon skill 3 (Unlocked at level 3)
• Profession skill F1 (Unlocked at level 4)
• Rally(downstate) (Unlocked at level 5)
• Off-hand weapon slot (Unlocked at level 7)
• Weapon skill 4 (Unlocked at level 7)
• Underwater Combat (Unlocked at level 8 with underwater weapon skills 1 and 2)
• Personal story (Unlocked at level 10 in chapters every 10 levels)
• Weapon skill 5 (Unlocked at level 10)
• Utility Skill 1 (Unlocked at level 13)
• Underwater skill 3 (Unlocked at level 14)
• Weapon Swap (Unlocked at level 15)
• Down Skill 3 (Unlocked at level 19)
• Profession skill F3 (Unlocked at level 22)
• Underwater skill 5 (Unlocked at level 23
• Utility Skill 2 (Unlocked at level 24)
• Profession skill F4 (Unlocked at level 24)
• Adapt Tier Traits (Unlocked at level 30)
• Elite Skill (Unlocked at level 40)
• Master Traits (Unlocked at level 60)
• Grandmaster Traits (Unlocked at level 80)

When playing in Normal Mode, of course, all of these things should be left exactly as they were in March.

And btw, I think I might be sounding like a jerk, and I’m really not trying to be, I appreciate that the devs are trying right now, I’m just frustrated that so much of the time and effort they wasted on implementing the NPE could have been saved if they’d just discussed these changes before developing them. It’s like they spent hours working in the kitchen, promising a great surprise dinner and really putting forth a lot of genuine effort, and then “surprise, it’s shrimp pasta!” “I’m allergic to shellfish, which you would have known if only you’d asked first.”

And while they keep repeating that “it is their policy not to discuss things in development,” it’s their policy and they can and should change it because it’s unhelpful and destructive to the community. It’s like someone gets pulled over for swerving all over the road and says to the cop “I’m sorry my driving was so bad, but I put this blindfold on so. . . well what else can I do? Take the blindfold _off?”_

And on the flipside the community needs to recognise that there is a limit, or a boundary if you want, to how far they can go with expecting answers from questions. People may not be happy with it but it’s there.

But it’s self-imposed. It’s not like it’s the law that they cannot discuss things that are in development, they choose to have this rule. Chris may not have the power to throw of that rule on his own say-so, but ever dev that reads these boards should be fighting tooth and nail to have that rule overturned.

Note we want to make the fixes and then have a focused discussion about the system (Probably here)

We really want to hear what you think once the system/content is functioning as designed.

Chris

Again, waiting until it’s “functioning as designed” before having the discussion about it just pushes back the point where solutions can be reached. If you’d have discussed these changes with us months ago we could have hashed them out before the patch, and we wouldn’t be in this mess. Let’s say it takes another week to get things “functioning as designed,” and then we spend another couple weeks debating the changes, that’s weeks wasted when you could be working on fixing them now.

You guys already know which elements of the current game are bugs and which are features, so instead of waiting until the bugs have been removed, why not just TELL use which elements are not intended and which are, and we can discuss the issue from there?

This is the core about what we mean when we say we want communication. We don’t want to wait until things are implemented and then discuss them, we want in on the design process BEFORE you waste the time and effort implementing systems that we never wanted in the first place. Think of how many manhours you guys wasted working on these NGE systems that are dead on arrival with the players! How many other great systems could those developers have been working on instead in that time?

The last two events have TERRIBLE loot. I did the Wurm one, got exactly one champ bag off the midboss. Yay. I got in fifteen minutes of chaos what I could have gotten in thirty seconds of champ train.

Then I did the Marionette thing, and while my lane was able to cut one string, and almost cut a second before the event ended (my stage cleared ours with plenty of time), the event ended anyways and all I got was a cheap green and some key bits.

No thank you.

This is just horrible loot, horrible. If you’re going to only reward success, then reward INDIVIDUAL success. If you clear your stage, you get loot. If you defend your lane well during your other four rounds, then you get loot. If you deposit a bunch of color gas into the siphons, you get loot, reward players for doing stuff, don’t punish them for the failure of others.

When I logged in on my level 53 character, there were a whole bunch of points spent in stuff I don’t want, how do you reset those so I can spend them on something else?

. . .and you should feel bad.

The new system is just awful. It improves upon the old one in zero ways, and is worse than the old one in many others. Why did you do any of this? It just makes the game less fun for everyone involved, I don’t see the advantage for you in that.

So what new problems have been added?

1. We got Ghost Wolf Run, but instead of the usual 20+ minutes to do it, we only got 10, which gave me barely enough time to finish it twice.

2. When I did finish it the second time, it did not count, because apparently there is a lag at the finish line, and I had to cross it 3-4 times before it actually activated. This caused us to fail the first attempt, even though I made it through with 10 seconds to spare.

3. There is no chest at the finish line, you have to wait until the timer finishes.

4. We had Guild Trek in the easy column, which meant it only had five objectives (we used to always pick the 15 one). Five objectives is not fun to bother with.

5. Only the five people who actually tagged those objectives got a chest for the Trek, meaning that most players had zero chance of getting a personal reward.

6. Then we did a guild puzzle. Even though we all reached the end, many of us got ZERO reward for it, including me, even though I delivered 3/6 of the sparks myself. No chest in the room, no personal chest in the UI, nothing at all. It still says I could receive credit for doing it again, even though I already completed it.

7. We got the Deep Trouble Challenge last week, but three or four times when we tried to start it, we got into the instance, then a couple minutes in got kicked out of it with zero explanation, forcing us to restart.

8. Now that missions are instanced, if we don’t have the numbers to complete them, then we can’t complete them. In the previous system, we could COOPERATE with other players, which should be a good thing in an MMO. Why take that away from us?

9. You don’t get to choose which types of missions you want to do. If you don’t like Puzzles? Too bad, you’re doing puzzles or missing a credit for the week. Don’t like Bounty? Too bad, it’s all Bounty this week. Why? Why not let guilds choose which missions they prefer?

10. While you can set “PvE only” if you’re a PvP only guild, you get a reward penalty for doing so. Why? Why not just let players choose the missions they enjoy WITHOUT penalizing them for it?

It’s basically all bad, just turn it back to how it was, completely abandon every single thing that you made different than how it was, it is ALL awful.

wasnt it evident that this was the direction they wanted to go when they released Dry top and Silverwastes ?

And one thought they would have learned from those maps, but instead they just doubled down on it.

but honestly what direction do you want to go ? back to big static maps like Lornar’s Pass ?

For the most part, yeah. Maps that you can take at your own pace, do things you want to do, not that are on their own schedule of meta-events. One map like that would eb fine, but all four is a bit much.

No doubt someone will say but you never did idea ‘x’ or idea ‘Y’ !!!!

Well that’s one of the reasons why we are reluctant to talk about the road map and secondarily we don’t always agree with what some want but we always stay informed.

Look. Some people are going to be upset no matter what you do. Promise something and never deliver? People will be upset. Never promise anything, leaving the future a murky Sargasso? People will be upset. So ignore that people will be upset and do what’s right. If you promise things and you have a good reason for not delivering, just explain what that reason is, any sensible players will understand and move on.

“Sorry, we planned to do X, but then we decided that Y would be a better idea, and it made X obsolete/impossible/time consuming, so we abandoned it and moved on to Z instead.”

So long as you’re open and honest with us, the bulk of the players will understand, and maybe suggest ways to make X still work, or improve Z to make it more like X, or who knows what we can accomplish together. You know how tons of bugs are never found until a million players are crawling over the new content? Sometimes design ideas are the same way, and the earlier you can get players crawling over the ideas, the sooner potential directions can become apparent. There have been plenty of features that have gone live, or nearly gone live, only for players to point out why that was a bad idea in the first place and it takes a while to fix it.

In any case, this game needs to do a better job of giving players hope. It needs to present a more distant future, however vague, that is more than two weeks out. We need to know where this game is headed in the long term, rather than just wandering in a fog. I’ve said this before, but it’s like on the West Wing, where the President said that sometimes you have to throw your hat over the wall, to make a declaration of intent, so that people know that you’re actually striving towards something and not just floating in place.

We know that you have a policy to not talk about things until they’re ready to launch, but that policy is toxic, and it needs to go.

I would much rather spend badges than have to go back into the Fractals again, but ideally I wouldn’t want to do either. Why do they keep trying to force players to do Fractals? If you like Fractals, great, if not, leave us alone.

The problem is, raids are unfriendly by design. You have to be reasonably skilled to complete a raid, so a team forming a raid MUST either A: exclude people who are not already good at the raid, or B: commit several hours of their lives to an activity that could be completed in twenty minutes, with no guarantee of success even after that. I can’t at all blame people for choosing A under the current design.

That’s why the design needs to change, there need to be ways for a true pick-up group to go in, first attempt, and within a half hour or so clear the raid encounter. Once everyone has the gist of what’s going on they should be able to clear it, even if a few of the are bad at the game. I understand that this is not the raiding experience that some people want, but it’s the raiding experience that the game needs, at least as a companion to the existing option.

I hope nothing. The Ascension was toxic to PvP and to the game as a whole. They should not provide rewards that can only be earned through PvP, unless they can be something that nobody outside of PvP would ever want or need.

Agreed. The green viney graphics don’t fit the nature of the spec. It should be yellow to red in color, and more “animal-ish” than “plantish.”

Yeah, they were mean to offer it the first time around, downright cruel to offer them again. Never even remotely worth it unless they change the recipe. Of course, knowing ANet, as soon as they are off the market they will change the recipe to use Mithril instead of Deldrimor and suddenly the profit margins on the stations will shoot to 500%+.

At first we had the occasinal Sic ’Em or Lock on we dealt it.
Then we got the “wow Rev with reveal, hm i can deal with them.”
After, we get Berserker Taunt “Not bad.. not bad. This one i can take care of it.”
Later we get the Scrapper " …. what?"

There is one more reveal left guys and I can tell the Druid is going to tear us to pieces.

Druid heal skill spoiler: Kills all Thieves within 2400 range. 5s CD.