Guild Wars 2

You aren’t being coerced to PvP, you’re overreacting. It’s like the monster under the bed. Once you get down and look under the bed you’ll see there’s no monster at all. Anet’s not trying to coerce you, there’s just too much hype and inaccurate hyperbole about it being some epic battleground when it’s really pretty much just another open world.

WvW maps are huge. Even on packed, competitive, large servers where the maximum amount of players are playing WvW you can completely avoid contact with other players for long stretches of time. Starting corners of the map are on a rotation so you’ll never have to get your realm to conquer an area to make it safe to explore*. If you want to completely avoid pvp combat you can just treat it as any other time gated activity in the game.

Side note: There’s no indication or reward for 100% map completion that’s strictly pve.

*bold part: This I’ve noticed is what a lot of people don’t realize when their heart stops upon hearing they have to explore in wvw to get their 100%.

Which is outrageous. Claim tickets shouldn’t be treated as currency. Claim tickets represent something that’s already yours and you just need to present your ticket to pick it up. Making them a currency is ridiculous, imho.

I’ll just reiterate what was said a little earlier that this would have been much more useful if it were just a replacement for the 5 point trait that has virtually no impact. Having a defensive on-attunement effect at 5 and offensive on-attunement effect at 15 for all 4 elements would shore up those weak minor traits. (Yes, that is a suggestion to rework all 4 elements’ minor traits)

Additional way to rework our talents

~Combine our 20% reduced weapon skill recharge trait with the passive buff to the broad passive damage buff from that attunement. This would make sense in line with other professions’ traits that have a 20% reduced recharge to a specific weapon skill in addition to another minor effect. 20% reduced recharge to water weapon skills and additional damage when health is above threshold, 20% reduced recharge earth weapon skills and additional damage when within 600 yards, Bolt to the Heart + Aeromancer’s Alacrity, Pyromancer’s Alacrity + Ember’s Might… freeing up 4 more talent options. .

Scarlet puts new skins on the gem store to make everyone mad and Anet takes the blame? Typical.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Leuca.5732:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Not going to dive too far into answering this but the designers moved these traits to the master line because they consider them traits too strong to be adept. Surely you can imagine a bunch of ideas were on the table.

Why are they too strong to be adept? A condition cleanse every 10 seconds (requires maxed Arcana) and some boons on attunement. Stating the obvious here, but wouldn’t a better solution have included identifying factors that make them so strong and then toning those down? For instance, how numerically strong would Cleansing Wave still be if it only affected the Elementalist? I can only guess ideas like this were brought up, but who actually thinks Cleansing Wave would be too strong for the Adept tier if it had no aoe, and what ele wouldn’t still find it useful for the most part?

My issue with many of these changes is that they are unnecessarily counteracting changes that are meant to increase versatility.

It’s the only tier 1 AOE cleanse in the game is the main reason, other factors are that its also an on demand cleanse, and it can be used every 10 seconds.

^^ directly from JP’s mouth just now

We’re on the shortest clock vs dps conditions having the lowest hp and absolutely no complete condition wipes. We absolutely need short cd cleanses as just a minimal maintenance vs conditions, & it’s one of the last useful specialties for us to bring (right there with cycling buffs from Elemental Attunement…) and still… many players don’t even value it as our contribution. A ten second cleanse for us is our only reliable maintenance vs any sort of condition. Our hp is too low to try and stall for our 50 second dagger cleanse or 40 second cleansing fire cooldown.

We need the tier 1 AOE cleanse to be valuable/viable. Our minor trait is useless, and the practicality of using it every 10 seconds is akin to saying water attunement weapon skills are never worth using over a single condi cleanse. Not to mention… we don’t have any way outside of runes of lyssa to wipe conditions off ourselves! 1 cleanse every ten seconds amounts to… falling behind. The profession with the lowest hp and armor is already on a really short clock vs condition dps, and we have to eat effects like chill and cripple just to keep it available in case someone puts a poison on us and auto-wins.

Keep universally valuable, splashable abilities in tier 1, and specialized abilities in higher tiers. Filling tier 1 with overly-specialized abilities and making them go to 20 to splash a trait destroys the class. Yes, that’s exactly what it’ll be. Going to 20 to splash a trait, making it so any build outside of water has 50 points to work with instead of 60. Oh, but then there’s people who don’t really want to go into arcane, either, but they’ve got to go 20 in to splash a trait… leaving 30 points to make a unique build. Then again, evasive arcana’s around the corner….

Elementalists will get 30 points to make a unique build unless they want to make a 1 trick pony gimmick build.

Talents you can splash for 10 are a good thing, not a bad thing. Make more talents available at 10 that are universally beneficial to every build in all the trait lines, put slightly more specialized abilities in Master, and highly specialized in Grand Master.

I’d say leave gold out. Have guilds receive karma based on players representing them doing wonderful things and noble acts for the land of Tyria. Rather than taxing, though, it would just be a bonus. Clearly the player has their own karma. There could also be a bonus for multiple guild members working together, such as an additional 1% from each member present!

Also, I’d never tax economic transactions your members make.

I’ve got toys everywhere and I need a wardrobe to put them in! Don’t make me leave them out, Anet. Or I’ll curse you all to step on a lego.

Invisible bike!

Oh wow, Scarlet’s been the protagonist the whole time? What a twist!

The only change I don’t understand is making trait start at lvl 30 instead of 10, and ridiculously slowly acquired after that. It was already hard enough getting new players acclimated to gw2 coming from other games, & this is another setback to those of us trying to pull new friends into the game. It’s really rather upsetting that they went that route.

Everything else, I’m happy with… a little miffed about the awkward megaservers interfering with community but willing to see where it goes from here.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth…

It won’t take long to get used to ground targeting, and it’ll show itself to only be an improvement once you get the hang of it. Ground targeting will happen naturally and fluidly. It’s very easy to get used to, just give it a chance.

juno.1840:

Make the heal the “ranged” version — this is actually a better solution for player

This… this would be great. I could totally back this if people are that upset about getting ground targeting.

Jasmine.8195:

… or a limited sprint on button push

4) Double jump…. why do so few games offer this.

Would be interesting to get more uses for that endurance bar

My toons can’t even sit in a chair properly idk how you guys expect to stay on a mount.

Blind is really good…

that it stacks in duration is a little awkward… intensity would be a bit OP and enable some disastrous effects.

Throwing an idea out there… perhaps if blind instead of making the next attack miss, have each attack miss for the duration, but taking 5 seconds of the duration off for each miss.

I think it would be pretty funny if the living story made events where your server would at times follow an npc party to attack a zone in another server, entering by hijacking and contesting waypoints and pouring in at various locations like Scarlet’s minions for the duration of the event.

I’m kinda wondering if Anet has put any thought into what a class is supposed to do while leveling. With the proposed changes, new elementalists get nothing until they get into the master tier.

Just another design flaw with putting everything useful at the master tier.

Mash Hog.5672:

Chasind.3128:

I’d love to see builds after this nerf- I hope this is just for PVP & not PvE

What do you feel is getting nerfed?
And how will that effect gameplay?

The nerf is in the availability of key traits players could splash for 10 points in both water and arcane, & that now our options are going to be even more limited. To reduce our dependency on arcane they butchered the adept tier, when they should have been focusing on improving the others. In fact, the adept tier is now butchered across the board, making 30 of our 70 points nearly worthless.

Their thinking that strong talents should be in master or grandmaster is nonsense and any class they apply it to gets broken by it. Every tier needs strong traits. What determines which tier a trait goes in should be determined by its role. Traits with broad roles worthwhile in any build should be in adept. Traits that contribute to a more specific theme work well at master, and traits that add a lot of power to specialized builds but will be awkward in others should find their home in grandmaster.

Let me put their changes to our over-dependence on arcane and water in the form of a metaphor. If someone’s overly-dependent on public transportation, the answer isn’t to remove bus routes to make it harder to get to their destination and waste more of their time. They’re still going to depend on it, and just be directly worse off for it, or they’ll have to invest in a car, and live with less spending money.

We’re still going to have the same problems, and dealing with them just got harder.

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

If I tried to make posts like this to solve my relationships ruined by playing too many video games… well, I guess I can’t knock it ’til I try it.

I’ll use the Wupwup Claymore as an example as I used it in another thread to illustrate a potential solution that wouldn’t be complicated to implement.

Currently the stats are:
+83 Power
+83 Precision
+83 Toughness
+83 Vitality
+83 Condition Damage
+11% Critical Damage
+83 Healing Power

Rather than making them all 83 points, which with a 16:1 ratio would be a flat 6% nerf (11 – (83/16)) to Crit Damage, the way they should do it with a 16:1 ratio is multiply the current Critical Damage by 16 (11 * 16 = 176) add that to the other stats’ total(83 * 6 = 498) , 498 + 176 being 674, and then divide by 7 to decide the value for the 7 stats evenly.

This would result in a Wupwup Claymore with 96 of each stat instead of 83 +11% crit dmg. The crit damage of 96 ferocity with the 16:1 ratio would be 6%, a 5% nerf counterbalanced by the buffs in the other stats.

Hopefully, Anet thinks along the same lines as I have.

Anierna.6918:

The Game Slayer.7632:

There are some builds out there that are working for ele. Just gotta put more effort forth. Try out condi ele, dire gear is OP.

this quote from Game Slayer is a perfect example of why I should join a teaching guild, gasmic. ill be on in half an hour and pm you for an invite (assuming no rep req, right?)

we’ve got to convince these people that stupid stuff like condi ele just doesnt work. in a pve context, I’ll be happy to prove that both the s/d + lh and the staff metas do higher damage. in a pvp context, you’ll never be able to match the condi damage of other classes (think necro), so dont even try.

And a perfect example of elitism at its finest.

I’m proud to b an ele. I absolutely love the class, love wearing the letters off my keys with manic apm, playing to anticipate rather than respond… it’s exhilarating. However, I implore you to reconsider your ideology. Elitism is an ugly thing to associate yourself with.

Be a better elementalist.

ELEvate yourself.

what’s situation on 10.9.x? I haven’t updated from 10.7.5 for fear of losing gw2 playability, but other games are dropping 10.7.5 support now.

Onion

I’ve double clicked on onion more times than I’d like to admit thinking it was a loot bag.

^ Skritt mini that gets smarter around other skritt and skritt minis with idle animations and occasional sayings, possibly conversing with other skritt and telling skritt stories.

I agree with all the other insulted people that this ad has broken my immersion.

To all those worried they won’t get their money back and will instead get gems:

When we update the Flamekissed Armor Skins with the new artwork, any player that has already purchased the set and who does not like the new, updated look, can get a full refund by contacting Customer Support.

Don’t piggyback on assumptions. If you bought gems just for this, explain that to customer service when you request your refund.

neurojame.8570:

Inactivity is the fertile field in which the thorns of tyranny grow.

Sylvari business lawyers? Hm, maybe we all could use a little more of Ventari’s teachings in our lives.

Act with wisdom, but act.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Im Mudbone.1437:

I think people in general are calling it an expansion sized patch because of its size only and not what the GW2 game establishment called it.

We do not even know the size.
Why would people talk about it that way. And why would ANet not give a clarification. The last thing this game needs are more disappointed people because of false expectations.

We know how this ended with “an expansion worth of content” before.

By this statement one can assume it to be large; “Due to the size and scope".

That’s not even in regards to the feature patch… it’s about the final Scarlet LS chapters.

Nice memorial.

So how many of you took your screenshots after seeing this thread?

Konoha.4613:

Lol, engineer is fine at the highest level. Which is where I believe the game should be balanced.

Bingo

Coltz.5617:

Oniyui.8279:

You aren’t being coerced to PvP, you’re overreacting. It’s like the monster under the bed. Once you get down and look under the bed you’ll see there’s no monster at all. Anet’s not trying to coerce you, there’s just too much hype and inaccurate hyperbole about it being some epic battleground when it’s really pretty much just another open world.

WvW maps are huge. Even on packed, competitive, large servers where the maximum amount of players are playing WvW you can completely avoid contact with other players for long stretches of time. Starting corners of the map are on a rotation so you’ll never have to get your realm to conquer an area to make it safe to explore*. If you want to completely avoid pvp combat you can just treat it as any other time gated activity in the game.

Side note: There’s no indication or reward for 100% map completion that’s strictly pve.

*bold part: This I’ve noticed is what a lot of people don’t realize when their heart stops upon hearing they have to explore in wvw to get their 100%.

We’re being coerced to WvW not PvP, and all you suggested shows we still must be in WvW not able to avoid it.

All I’m suggesting is to look at WvW another way. They’re just maps. Just because it’s called WvW instead of PvE doesn’t mean the gameplay is drastically altered. The only factor that is different is player vs player combat can happen there. If it’s not player vs player combat you’re trying to avoid in WvW then for all other purposes WvW maps are like any other maps in the game. You may as well be arguing that you don’t want to explore cities and you’re upset that cities are unavoidable to get 100%. It’s overreacting.

Regarding player anger about it I agree something could be done to summarize how WvW works and exactly what to expect in WvW in comparison to PvE maps.

An shamanistic race of purple and blue goat-people that have travelled from an alternate dimension on a godly-entity’s craft to gather Kralkatorrik’s jewels to use as a source of power and to adorn their belly-dancers with.

Elementalist is a ton of fun but your traits have got to be a dedicated work of art, a tiny little diamond from a lump of coal.

Necromancer’s a ton of fun and their traits are pretty much already one big diamond you can’t go wrong with.

You see a bush rustling in the wind… and realize there is no wind.

You interact with the suspicious bush… and…

A wild Mini Caithe appears!

I like that sprockets will be continually available in decent quantities in the future, keeping options open for people that want power/precision/healing. It’s far better than relying on time gated home instance dispensers… for everyone, not just the people with the pick.

I don’t agree that it’s pay to win. It could become a slight economic advantage in the future, but a) it’ll take a long long time to make up the cost of purchasing it and b) I don’t consider bought economic advantages “winning” when there are so many in-game options to gain economic advantages and break the trade center already. People buying gems, or “paying to win” are actually working against inflation.

I don’t agree that people who bought the old items are entitled to refunds or reimbursement of any kind. They got what they paid for, and it still functions as advertised. Technology advances, and you can spend money to keep up to date or you can stick with the version you have.

I understand the concerns of people looking it as a precedent for potentially broken advantages being added to gems-exclusive purchases, but right now I see it as just a slippery slope argument.

Phantom.8130:

Oniyui.8279:

Phantom.8130:

did they deliver on what they called attention to? not even remotely.

Actually… they delivered on a lot of it and addressed most of it in some relatable form.

let’s look at the list from the OP.

Supremelo.8437:

Professions and balance
-There will be new unlockable skills and traits.
Precursors, and legendaries
-New legendary weapons.
-New types of legendary equipment (possibly a trinket).
-New precursor acquisition methods (I am aware that Arenanet later announced that this would be postponed)
sPvP
-New map types.
-It will be possible to gain legendary weapon skins in sPvP.
-Additional rewards and growth will be added to the major competitive sPvP tournaments.

they really didn’t deliver on very much of that list at all. by and large, the bulk of what they’ve done is cement their reputation of all bark and no bite. and reputation does play a large part in the well being of any company. as they continue overhyping, and failing to live up to that hype, the public perception of their company takes a downward turn. as public perception dips, so do sales.

while they are able to come up with some great ideas, their execution of everything is just flat out sloppy, at best. i don’t mean bugs, i mean poor design and poor PR. it’s quite unprofessional. however, it doesn’t fall onto the shoulders of every single employee. it falls onto the shoulders of those who are in charge of those two particular jobs, who are failing to do their jobs. truth be told, what anet really needs is an enema, because there are a few people causing tremendous problems for the company as a whole. if they clear out the crap, they can work on regaining their positive image without monumental hindrances. there are thousands of people lining up for those jobs, who can and will do them much better than they’re currently being done. at the end of the day, it is indeed a business. they need to either all be doing their jobs, or get people in there who will. having some do their jobs while others shoot the entire company in the foot isn’t a good business plan.

they’ve been lucky so far, because they haven’t had any decent competition, but that’s not going to always be the case. when actual competition presents itself, the customer base is presented with a choice of two. go with a company that continuously fails to deliver on their hype, or go with anyone else. many many people will go with anyone else, regardless of who they are, simply because they’re sick of having their hopes built up to always end up disappointed with the results. that’s not to say that people will be any happier with the other company, only that they’ll no longer be giving their money to arenanet.

The OP’s list doesn’t reflect the article put out by Anet. Read the actual linked article, not what someone else says is on it.

ghaleon.2861:

Then enjoy the boring bunker celestial cheese comp /thread

Cheese comp… lol. Cheese implies using a minimal effort pattern repeatedly to defeat opponents regularly identified as vulnerable to that pattern, and depending on that pattern. Celestial bunker… is like the opposite of cheese. Zerker rotation-oriented builds… now there’s where to look for cheese.

A thousand times this. Ridiculous that if one person leaves at any time for whatever reason, everyone else gets kicked.

Comparing 10k+ to 4k+ AP is a pretty ridiculous metric. Both players have the necessary experience. If you’re looking for someone who knows all the tricks of the speed running trade, make a guild for it. If you’re looking for players that farm all the AP boosting events they can, make a guild for it. If you’re looking for players that can bust up a zerg in wvw, make a guild for it. If you’re looking for players that do all 3, expect mistakes and don’t be a kitten about it.

jheryn.8390:

I actually love the “concept” of the living world as it was presented to us, but it doesn’t feel as if the world is living and changing/growing. It feels like going to work actually. You go to work and you have different situations and projects, but it is still the same job. Not much changes about what most people do. This is how the LS feels to me. There is no permanent impact on the world, just more of the same with different players.

My personal top 10 things I would like to see in the LS are :

1. Permanent content introduced or permanent changes in landscape, people and creatures.
2. Content that impacts and develops existing content. Many have mentioned more with the dragons. I think it could be anything existing or from GW1. Maybe new NPC’s are introduced into the orders or we get to see other area’s of the different orders bases. Maybe the Mursaat make an appearance and it affects Orr in some way. Maybe risen from Droknar’s Forge start to appear in the water. Maybe another stone dwarf NPC can be introduced. Maybe the grove suffers a fire in part of the city and we can watch it progressively heal like any vegetative area would. Maybe address the Charr/Human uneasiness that still exists.
3. I would like to see lore from GW1 be introduced into the living story and have it be a significant impact upon current lore.
4. I would really like to see maybe an extended break from the LS in order to bring an expansion size LS content into the game. I miss the epic amount of places, things and creatures to discover and not be given to me piece meal.
5. New maps.
6. Explanations for things that are missing from GW1. Gargoyles, Hydra, weapon skins, etc.
7. Story lines that feel significant. Scarlet is funny and BSC, but she doesn’t feel threatening. More annoying than anything. The story lines just don’t feel as rich in GW2. The living story has done nothing to remedy that IMO.
8. New skills and traits. If the world is really evolving through the LS, shouldn’t those thing grow and expand as well?
9. Personal story progression.
10. I am sorry for repeating but most importantly, permanent content. I hate seeing the wonderful things you people work so kitten and that we really DO enjoy being taken away. The Molten Dungeon for example.

Having content that has permanence would break up the zerg in those events as well, once people move on to the newest thing. Areas with some major geographic change or tribe migration would also be quite cool, possibly making map completion less static, as once in a while the priory sends you out to map the recent changes and see if you can get up on that new vista.

Phantom.8130:

did they deliver on what they called attention to? not even remotely.

Actually… they delivered on a lot of it and addressed most of it in some relatable form.

Selling apples just isn’t the same without customers…

All of civilization is under threat of annihilation from unimaginably dark forces, and those with the strength to fight are are worrying their weapon just isn’t cool enough.

I’d really rather not swap health pools with Mesmer. We have the tools to make up for hp with our greater abundance of heals, we just lack the mitigation to make those heals amount to something.

Yet they’re moving our active mitigation into the master tier. Our condition removal, the only “mitigation” vs conditions, is being put into the master tier. Regen and protection on attunement swap moved to master. Vigor, the amount of dodging we use to avoid the crushing burst that puts our healing way behind… master tier. Even the new condition removal they gave fire… they moved into the master tier.

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

PvP-relevant survivability is what we need most of all, and they’re kicking us while we’re down.

They have acknowledged that a lot of our traits need an overhaul. Their concern is we’re too dependent on arcane and water. How is it they don’t see the connection? FIX our traits that need an overhaul in the OTHER trait lines to make them more attractive and stop bending us over until we break! Improve our utilities by lowering the cooldowns on our stun breakers – hugely important for pvp active mitigation our, our major downfall – and ease up the need for us to make up for our utilities’ weaknesses with traits.

Players who don’t have all the time in the world not having a gear disadvantage in wvw is a real concern for them. You can say it’s not required all you want but in the end when one player has a handicap over another in direct competition it has imbalanced consequences.

WvW may not be intended to be balanced in the first place and currently it isn’t. There’s no reason to make that imbalance grow even quicker.

I do think ascended is a logical step to make gear progression very slow through small baby steps with the infusions, but the initial step from exotic to ascended isn’t is in no way a small step. It will have a significant impact for many months to come. It may get better after that, but the future is still cloudy.

I’m seeing two schools of thought behind the arguments on each side. There’s a discrepancy between those who want wvw to represent the legacy of their server’s hard work, strength, and experience versus those who just want a fair, perpetual pvp experience on a grand scale. Anet’s current design greatly favors the first. Over time, many months when ascended has settled in place, the two philosophies might see a little more eye to eye, but right now they are in contention.

Of course, this could all be made less dramatic if Anet would lighten up the godawful grind to ascended. Arguably, most of Anet’s demographic probably came to GW2 with WoW as their big mmo experience. WoW has level and gear progression to grind with every expansion… but by the time you hit max level for each expansion you can afford at least on of their max level pvp sets from battlegrounds and not be far from getting the premium set from arena points. in WPvP, the closest experience it had to WvW, this is a very competitive set with exception to maybe one or two pve cooldown pieces. Anet lead people in to believing GW2 would eliminate the grind, and all they did what make it worse with ascended gear. A lot worse. Unbelievably worse. Holy hell is it worse. BLTC inflation, terrible rewards with ridiculously unfavorable probability for anything useful making it even more dauntingly worse. My point is, there’s a lot of core issues making Ascended gear unrealistic for some people more than others.

… Well enough rambling. I’ve been watching a movie while typing so idk where this is going. xD

Act with wisdom, but act.

A player with a ton of AP has a lot of irrelevant experience. For all you know you could be hiring a plumber to bake a wedding cake based on how much cash in their wallet.

I do get the point of finding like-minded players, but it sounds like you’re applying this to pugs that you don’t stay in contact with anyways.

Zale.9645:

But forcing PVP into a PVE achievement, or vise versa, is always, I repeat, always bad. There is no arguing that.

It’s not a PvE achievement.

You’ll find it in the General tab, under the Hero section.

I’ve never understood the purpose of 1v1 in an mmo outside of practicing different matchups to make better decisions in team pvp.

For a 1v1 fighting experience with weapons you can always try Soul Calibur.

EotM is a beautiful competitive map with fantastic competitive mechanics that are wasted on karma trains that completely ignore and discourage anything that would get in the way of exploiting their easy rewards system.

Anet should just make a Facebook game that links to your gw2 account and provides lavish rewards for minimal work, with a little avatar to display the fancy clothes you earn.

Then when half the zerg that was only in it for the easy and efficient farm leaves, perhaps rework the rewards of EotM so there’s rewards for holding ground & for winning.

edit: also worth considering… mirroring the map in spvp for a larger scale spvp format. For siege… use the existing resource nodes for gathering a currency to purchase siege with.

The low drop rate on keys is fine imo… it’s the crap you get in the chests that’s dreadful. It’s mostly one-time extremely minor convenience garbage and things you just use or throw away as soon as possible because it’s not worth the space in your bags. If they’d clean up the rng a bit for opening them they’d be worth getting with gems… maybe. As is, though, you hear about people spending hundreds of dollars trying to get a Black Lion Claim Ticket or 10 scraps… and yet the skins from the Black Lion Weapons Specialist for some awful reason require you to have more than one ticket to claim a skin.

Hundreds of dollars spent on account bound garbage so they couldn’t even try getting the skins with gold after being a royally kittened for being suckered in by gem store “deals” and innocent-sounding npcs, thinking they’d have a chance at getting a couple nice weapon skins, only to find out they can’t even get one. However, they can at least summon a trading post representative anywhere in the world! Oooh, and mystery tonics, oh my!

I sincerely hope when you discard a trading post express that a Black Lion Delivery Agent gets summoned into an endless dark abyss for all eternity.

The Scarlet Raven.5416:

If i saw a woman IRL walking down the street in a similiar shirt, I would make an immediate assumption about her moral character.

Being judgmental and profiling people is completely inappropriate and is very distasteful.

Any context where anyone would dress in such an elaborate, sophisticated outfit that is also that bold you’d probably immediately understand that it’s part of a production. It’s an artistic piece, and it’s worn as an artistic piece. It makes the people who buy it feel empowered wearing it, & not with any sort of kittenty intentions. Just bold and confident as a statement in game.