Showing Posts For Pahawe.4865:
The result of the poll doesn’t really matter, Teon. I know the community will probably have enough sense to say they don’t want completed content removed from the game.
The whole point of my post was that Arenanet should never have even put this poll up. It makes them look like amateurs and it should never have made it past their PR department because it can only really do harm to the image of the developers, and the image of the game as a whole.
Self imploding before our eyes lol
And? So I ranted, maybe went off track during my post. So I, as you put it, without proof or actual explanation, I might add, ‘self imploded’. (Unless you actually mean that my anger at these changes and bungles boiled up to the point where I started ranting during my post. If so, guilty as charged.)
The only reason I’m doing so is because I’m deeply concerned about the direction a game that I’ve loved playing for years is heading in.
I’m actually trying to maybe get a message over to the devs that things are looking kinda dicey with the studio and the game right now, and I would rather they change tack to win back some of the folks they lost in the aftermath of HoT.
……….. seriously?
So the devs opening up communication with the wvw community for the first time in years is a problem?The past few months have been fantastic. If we’d had this kind of interaction before they made all the mistakes like kitten near everything that came with HoT, and the stability change, wvw would be in an amazing place right now.
I get what you’re saying. I agree, it’s good that we finally have the WvW team communicating with us in some form. But this is not the first thing that anyone here should hope to see from them!
I don’t get how you can call this kind of communication something that would make WvW an amazing place. All it does is promote the devs to just screw around on wild concepts and then just flat out delete them if they don’t work out in live, rather than actually working on them and improving them!
DBL is NOT a bad map. The problem is that it was just a radical shift from the kind of WvW gameplay that this community had experience with in the years leading up to HoT, and as a result, it got a lot of flack, some of which was good, honest criticism of genuine problems with the map, such as it’s difficulty to traverse without things like gliders. Some were people who felt genuinely aggrieved that the style of WvW they’d loved for so long was taken out of the Borderlands maps.
The vast majority of the criticism, however, and this is my personal opinion, boils down to the fact that people just couldn’t be bothered to learn to play on a new map layout during a period which saw the effective death of WvW due to developer neglect. When we finally got something it was just the wrong time.
If we’d had that vibrant community we’d had at launch, the servers would have been swarming and great fights would have been happening all over DBL, just like they did when the new reward track actually brought players back into WvW again and zergs were regularly butting heads there. But back then you just logged in, got lost because you didn’t know the map, couldn’t find anyone to fight, and effectively said ‘to heck with it, I quit’ and condemned the map because of things it had little to no control over.
But anyway, rant aside, we need more open discussions with the devs, more Q&A sessions with them, more questionnaires sent to the players asking them what they’d like in the game that don’t contain this kind of question. That’s what I expect from a competent development studio that actually knows it’s business.
This current poll, combined with some of the other things that A-net’s been pulled up on ever since HoT released, however, is showing me what I’d expect from a bunch of amateurs taking their first video game classes at college. And considering that this game has been out for so long, that is not a good thing.
I’m just gobsmacked that they even put that poll up. You don’t just make all that content, pull it from the game for improvements after complaints and then actually say to the players ’A’ight, can we delete this then?’
This is meant to be a triple A gaming studio. There should be no room for the word ‘quit’ in this scenario! The only things we should be being asked is whether we want them to focus their efforts on improving DBL, Alpine or Eye first!
You’re asking the community whether you should delete an entire borderland. You’ve put thousands of hours into the making of this map, which a considerable group of people, when they actually played it stated they -liked- when compared to alpine, and now you’re actually debating whether to delete this content entirely.
What gaming studio does this? Everything I am seeing from you is just so kitten backwards that it boggles my mind that you are the studio that delivered Guild Wars 2. And now… This. On top of the recent Charr and Asura legendary armor mess up, the hugely unpopular shift in policy towards Black Lion weapons, and the debacle that has been Heart of Thorns post launch…
Just… What happened to you? How has it happened? You literally had the gaming population eating out of your hands in the year or two after Guild Wars 2 released because you showed us you were competent and you showered us with content at a a bi-monthly cadence. You were the guys who were up there with Final Fantasy in showing developers like Blizzard how to run an MMORPG! You gave us the Battle of Lion’s Arch and showed just how an open world event should affect your game world and playerbase!
And now here we are, actually seeing you debating whether you should permanently delete content that’s already done, made and polished for the game’s live version. What’s worse is that you’re putting it up to a community poll and that it’s even an option in that poll! There should never be a time when a gaming company looks at a map that is done and in the game files, and then just flat out put the quit option on the table.
You are Arenanet. You are game developers. It is not your job to look at something and say: ‘okay, let’s yank this out.’ Not when it goes live. Your job is to look at this content and think: ‘okay, so some people didn’t like what we put out. They had valid concerns about the verticality of the map, the lack of gliding and certain blobbing issues. How can we fix this and make the map a better experience for our players going forwards?’
Stop putting community polls like this up. It only serves to make you look like an incompetent dev team that’s throwing paper planes at a wall and seeing what sticks. Worse still, when one of those planes that did stick suddenly falls, you drop it like a hot potato and immediately try something else entirely.
Speaking of potatoes, Woodenpotatoes showcases this brilliantly with his series of map viewer videos. There is so, so much potential content in the game files, all already in, coded, hell, a full three way WvW map in a unique style with completed voicework.
Where is that? Why is that not being polished, refined and added to give some much needed variety of content to things like World vs World, dungeons, fractals, anything! We’re sat in the middle of what is effectively a nine month content drought if you don’t raid, and no, I don’t class adding in a few new named bandit NPC’s to the world as new content!
Mr O’Brian, over the last year we’ve seen this game take an alarming turn. It’s gone from being a unique title with a great dev team that did it’s own thing to being something that is looking VERY akin to World of Warcraft in terms of both development direction (time taken for new content, focus of new content (endgame only being raids, ever increasing focus on gem store weapons and outfits) and actual gameplay (grinding the same four maps over and over and over again in order to attain certain pieces of achievement gear and mastery points/ranks).
We thought that maybe Colin was the problem. Perhaps we were right. Perhaps you did have to make some hard choices after Colin left in order to right the floundering ship. But right now, you need to take a hard look at the choices you are making in regard to this game’s direction, both in terms of monetization and development focus. If you don’t change the direction that Guild Wars seems to be heading in, I can see this being it’s worst year to date in terms of player retention and public image.
Make Guild Wars 2 what it was again. Show us that you are still the dev team that brought us the Battle for Lion’s Arch. Show us that you can still deliver to us a quality experience without taking anything else out of the game (yes, I am still slightly salty that you advertised and sold the game in part thanks to a feature that you one-eighty’d on after launch). Only then will you even begin to recover some of the consumer goodwill that you’ve lost from myself and a large number of other players, both current and former.
I’m not really against zerging, as a game mode it’s fine, but it rapidly gets boring in this game because of the sheer volume of spell effects going off. Combat in a zerg is seriously hard to read, and while it can feel satisfying to watch an enemy zerg melt under the firepower of your own blob, I can’t really point at any moment that felt epic to me because I can’t read the combat very easily and tell who I’ve killed or how I’ve contributed, unless, of course, I contribute by building up some siege in the back and racking up kills with the ballista while we’re defending a point.
Truth be told for zerg on zerg warfare to feel epic you need to spread out the blob to a level where you get that epic feel but instead it’s in an awesome battle raging across an entire castle rather than just in the corner under the stairs, and you need to make one-on-one fights within that zerg feel more memorable, either in terms of rewards or in simple recognition of killing the enemy that was on the ballista, or who was keeping their group buffed or healed.
To do that, you need to introduce mechanics that are aimed at spreading the zerg out, be it during a siege to force them to attack multiple locations at once rather than just ramming a single gate down, or be it during open world engagements with other zergs.
To do that, you need to look at something Desert Borderlands did very well, despite it’s flaws: passive buffs, effects, and key areas within a fortress. The keeps need to do something other than just sit there on the map waiting to be ram raided. They need to send out raiding parties of their own, trigger dust storms or rain down artillery barrages against nearby strong points and detected zergs (thus making the sentry points a much higher priority objective to defend) in order to force those zergers to spread out.
They also need to have key points within the keep that you need to capture as well. Think SM’s hard now? Imagine if you had invincible auto turrets that were controlled by an Asuran monitoring station that you needed to cap, a guard post that constantly spawned NPC reinforcements that you needed to cap to disable, a generator that creates freak lightning storms in the courtyards… Just having a single objective, the keep lord, makes the fight rather uneventful and leads to the same old cycle of ram, kill zerg, kill keep lord, repeat. Having some secondaries would at least make the zerg spread out more and fight over a wider area for that more epic feeling.
The current plan is to rotate the borderlands maps each quarterly update. That said, now that we are actively polling the community, perhaps we can start exploring other options.
For instance, nothing is really stopping us from having a combination of ABL and DBL maps running simultaneously. 2 of one and 1 of the other. If we polled that, and players approved it, then there’d be no need for the rotation, and players on both sides of the issue could play on their preferred map. The downside of course, would be any perception of imbalance that may arise from one map being considered the stronger “Home” map, but we could always give the more defensible map to Red/Blue and leave the less defensible map to Green.
Thank you so much for confirming this. The return of Alpine borderlands is good and all, but roughly a week into my play there I realize why it was that I stopped playing in them, and EB as well. The trouble is that the map is too empty, and paths are too straightforwards. I’ll grant you that DBL took the opposite extreme of this issue, but I think that there could be a happy medium reached with both maps.
Right now the zerg rules this game mode, and while there are certain methods of getting around them or decimating them at choke points using siege, Alpine doesn’t really allow for this because the maps aren’t allowing for multiple avenues of approach to an objective and the choke points are few and far between, and usually there’s only really one that the enemy zerg will camp so long as a defense is up, draining your manpower from other areas if you have fewer numbers than them.
Also, compared to the DBL keeps and outposts, Alpine is just… Dated. The plethora of different passive defenses and buffs the locations provided were awesome, as was the idea of having to take one location to advance to the next, something that isn’t really present in Alpine at all.
So, yeah, if you’re gonna bring back both maps at the same time, awesome, and more power to you, but I think that Alpine definitely needs looking at and changes need to be made, if only to discourage blobbing and mindless zerg trains. I’d say the same ideas need to be applied to EB as well, as it’s showing it’s age now.
The Black Citadel isn’t a city. The entire structure is a giant machine that folds up onto itself, with the Core as its, well, core. Look around for the joints and non-fused gear plates throughout the “road” system and across the various structures and outcroppings. They’re at oddly specific angles for random scrap, but if you stand on them… they all bend toward either the center or another fold. I believe those aren’t roads at all. They’re walls.
Furthermore, I suspect the collapsed form is mobile, to some degree. I found structures resembling rocket boosters underneath the foundry, and plenty of designs resembling conveyors or some form of treads. I haven’t found anything resembling “hands”, or fine manipulation devices, so I surmise the collapsed form isn’t humanoid… perhaps a big tank or gyro wheel.
Awesome though it is to imagine the Black Citadel rising to take on a dragon a-la Gypsy Danger taking on a Kaiju, I don’t think the Iron Legion would have the technology to convert an entire city into a tank.
Any self respecting Charr would choose a wall of guns over a wall of stone any day. Walls are for weak, cowardly humans. They can’t even withstand apocalyptic meteor impacts of giant crystals. Why bother…
A fine point, but where exactly is the hole in the wall that you poke your gun out of? Look around the Citadel, and tell me how many places you can see near it’s outer wall that you can actually believably imagine someone defending from.
Charr make their own holes.
Honestly though, as a society, Charr are a very “die a glorious death” type of people who would only ever really resort to hiding in a fortress if they were on their last legs.
While it could be viewed as poor environmental design, it;s pretty easy to simply see the Charr as a people who would much rather jump in their Charr Cars and those big boxy APC’s and meet an enemy head one, even if it was an unwinnable fight.
There’s at least one NPC in the Black Citadel who gets sentenced to years of degrading behavior before a final exile for fleeing a fight his warband was losing rather than standing and dying by his comrades.
The trouble is that the Charr’s outlook depends entirely on his Legion. We know that each Legion has it’s own territory, and therefore it’s own Citadel, so following that logic each Citadel should conform to it’s owner’s philosophy on warfare. Going all out and facing the enemy head on? Right on, but that’s mainly Blood Legion’s forte. Luring your enemy into a maze of tricks and traps before you stab them in the back? Totally Ash (and that’s why I feel that the current mish-mash design of the Citadel may have been the work of one of them).
This is Iron Legion we’re talking about here. These are the guys who got booted out of their own territory and fought tooth and nail for their land. who’ve been fighting ghosts in deeply ingrained siege warfare for centuries, who built their capital on a haunted human city and fortified it for two hundred years, who built Steeleye Span, who choose to dig in and use defensive tactics, preferring to blow the enemy to pieces from a distance with ranged weaponry rather than charging in head on. The Black Citadel does not feel like their capital city. So much potential for defense is wasted here, as is so much precious war material that could be used in more effective ways.
I want to see the Citadel go back to what it was back in pre-alpha to an actual city/fortress/factory, rather than the hanging scrapheap in the sky we have in the current game.
Any self respecting Charr would choose a wall of guns over a wall of stone any day. Walls are for weak, cowardly humans. They can’t even withstand apocalyptic meteor impacts of giant crystals. Why bother…
A fine point, but where exactly is the hole in the wall that you poke your gun out of? Look around the Citadel, and tell me how many places you can see near it’s outer wall that you can actually believably imagine someone defending from.
I thought it was supposed to looked slapped together.
Whilst Charr tech might at times look rather ramshackle, I don’t really think a city that’s been built up over two hundred years by the most defensively minded Legion of them all should look ‘slapped together’ in a way that makes it look entirely ramshackle and indefensible.
You can see the early Black Citadel in the Races of Tyria trailer, from 1:13 in the video.
As the title says, I think that the Black Citadel needs an overhaul. My reasons for this are many, but let’s just start on the graphics first. Compared to every other city, it looks positively dated. Blocky, poorly rendered buildings, stretched metal textures extending in a sea of grey, an abundance of low-res textures as well, it just doesn’t look appealing or modern in comparison to the visual feast we have in every other city, and especially Divinity’s Reach. What strikes me about it is that we know from the early trailers that the dev team went back and did a total overhaul on the Citadel at some point to create the look we have now, and that look has not aged well at all.
Alright, next big issue for me on this one is the ability to believe that this place is actually a city that people live in, and more importantly, an Iron Legion city. I get that the area was meant to feel like it’s been built up in layers over the centuries since the fall of Ascalon around the ‘core’ of the ruins of Rin, and to a great extent this has been managed, but in the wrong way. I simply don’t see a city that an Iron Legion engineer could have designed, purely because what we’re presented with is an indefensible mess of iron and steel that’s been lashed together in a very haphazard fashion.
There are no actual walls, rather curved screens for things to hide behind and massive, jutting steel overhangs that don’t look like they can support the weight of anything atop them, and are only there to be a waste of metal. Where are the tall, stout walls with inner layers of ramparts, the gun platforms, the firing slits for riflemen and the layers of cannon laid out in rings of steel that actually make tactical sense?
And while I’ve mentioned weight, why is every ‘road’ in the city made of mesh grating that barely looks like it could hold an Asura’s weight, let alone that of the siege engines we see parked next to the main gate? And let’s not even go into the impracticality of walking across something that should realistically snare your foot at every step. There are so many areas of the Citadel that simply scream ‘waste of metal!’ I get it. It’s the Iron Legion, they’re meant to be renowned for scrapping things together in order to make great results, but the massive scrapyard that is the Citadel isn’t worthy of them.
So, what would I suggest to improve on this? I’d say you need to redesign the city on a few fundamental levels:
First and foremost, less metal. The first images we saw of the Citadel showcased a city made of black stone wreathed in metal, with a lot of fires all over the place and brilliantly colored banners hanging from the walls. That needs to come back, because right now we need something to break up the endless grey of the city that isn’t a ruined stone structure.
Perhaps actually incorporate the ruins more into the actual fabric of the buildings, as if the Charr are using them as actual foundations rather than something to simply lean their buildings against. Seeing a building with a metal exterior surrounding a stone interior looks far better than having steel everywhere.
Give the city actual, proper roads and walkways that aren’t made of metal. Use the old black stone, the stone from the epicenter of the Searing, to make the Black Citadel live up to it’s name and to actually make players believe that the walkways are something meant to be trodden on, and not something that’s supposed to be used as a garden trellis. It would also draw the eyes of the player more towards areas that you want to stand out, like the Bane arena and the Imperator’s Core, as well as the statues that simply blend into the city as it is because of it’s bland color palette.
Give the city actual walls. Divinity’s Reach does this well, because the walls there actually look thick and sturdy enough to survive an assault, and you can actually believe that people can fight from those areas. The current Citadel ‘defenses’ look like they’d topple over under their own weight at the gentlest shove, and need to be replaced with proper stone walls reinforced with metal that actually look like they’re stable structures than an engineer has designed and then reinforced over the centuries.
Make the city look believable as a city. A weird suggestion, I know, but right now it feels more like a factory than anything else. I know that this is a soldier society whose citizens live in rather spartan conditions, but as it stands every part of the city except for the Gladium’s Canton feels sterile and unlived in. Where are the personal effects, the areas that you can tell a warband has actually bedded down in for an extended period? Where are the food stores, the smaller forges actually being worked?
Right now we see tonnes of chimneys and the like emerging from the walls, and that’s great, but they don’t actually seem to have any practical use other than as something to break up a static skyline. Compare this to Divinity. You can point at somewhere and go ‘Oh, that’s a tavern, oh, that’s a peasant’s house, a noble’s house, a workshop’. Compare this to the Citadel’s large variety of rather wonky metal constructions. I defy you to point at them and say anything other than ‘Uhhh… Maybe it’s part of an oil refinery..?’
So, that’s my issues with the Citadel, and my suggestions for it. Anyone else agree with what I’m saying, and have other suggestions?
I’m sorry, but why do I sound entitled when I’ve put time and effort in to actually kill these bosses, then lost my rewards because of circumstances I cannot control at all? It is by no means ‘entitlement’ to expect the game to have a feature that is contained in other games which are, in fact, far older than it. It is not ‘entitlement’ to ask that I receive the rewards that I have rightly earnt twice over.
Adine, I think you’re missing the point spectacularly. Why is the game punishing me for a crash that’s happened after the boss is dead, something completely outside of my own control? The problem isn’t my connection or the lack of 64-bit client (which I did upgrade to after the first KQ kill was ruined by the crash). The problem is that the game should be mailing players the contents of the champ chests they earn if it can detect that the player has not opened the chest itself because of a crash.
Here’s hoping they implement that then. In the meantime, can anyone give me some advice on how I can contact customer support about this issue? Surely they’ve some way of tracking which world bosses I’ve killed recently, and it should at least show my latest kill of KQ. I’m not after any loot to sell, only the collection item she drops for the Mistwards Warboots.
Twice today I have killed Karka Queen. The first time, the game crashed before I could loot and booted me out of the shard I was on, locking me out of my loot chest. The second time, I looted the Queen’s body, and just got to the chest, spammed f… Then my connection died. Again. Booted off the map, denied my loot. Why. WHY. All I am after is one single, stupid collection item for my Mistward boots. That’s all I want. Why have I had roughly six hours of my time wasted when I could have had the loot mailed to me when the game detected I hadn’t looted the chest before it despawned? Why is such a basic essential of a modern MMO neglected here? I’d like someone at ANet to give me an answer, please. And if possible, my loot as well.
There’s a problem with this argument though. They already released these items as gem store purchases. People bought them, and then there was an abrupt bait and switch as they were turned into tonics. Gems have already been wasted on these items through no fault of the player, so these items shouldn’t be turned into in-game rewards, they should simply be fluff armor pieces you buy on the gem store and can use in your wardrobe with the rest of your gear to create a unique look, as was the original intent. Anything else they release though, hell yes, give us Southsun swimwear done through swimming races or the like!
As the title suggests, I think it’s a good time to bring back the casual city clothing we had access too before the wardrobe was put into the game. Summer’s here, and it’s high time for adventurers to strut their stuff in style with both the city and casual clothing that was put into the game after launch.
However, I DON’T want to see it come out as an outfit. We have enough of those as is already, thank you, and the models themselves are already configured to work with the existing wardrobe system, so I want to see them as armor pieces that anyone can make use of to mix and match with their current armors.
Also, there needs to be a way to turn those elixirs into those items again. ANet pulled a big bait and switch on us when those items, which we bought with our hard earned gems under the assumption that we could mix, match and dye to our heart’s content, were turned into elixirs that gave us one fixed look. It’s time for this to be set right, and doing something like this will probably generate a lot of goodwill with older players who bought those items.
So, what do you say, folks? Do you want to look stylish once more?
I’m devastated about what they’ve done to engi. Not only have they destroyed my characters visuals by simply yanking out the various kit backpacks, but they’ve taken one of the things that gave character to my Charr engineer: the mortar. Is the grenade launcher kit (and let’s be frank, that IS what this is now) any good? Sure, I guess. But I liked the old mortar kit better, and my Charr just dropping down a mortar for her warband to make use of was so awesome, and it was something the warband loved in turn. I was always getting calls to drop the mortar in the Canton so my warband could do a bit of firing practice. Also, this worries me because what was a fun, Charr themed skill has been effectively yanked from the game and is now only accessible as this: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deployable_Mortar_Kit
A-Net needs to take a long look at how they’ve done this and realize that they need to work more with the community on this issue, because just yanking away our backpieces and skills like this can leave a very sour taste in a lot of players mouths. Oh, and also, please, for the love of all things holy, fix the bomb animations if you’re going to change the look for them!
(edited by Pahawe.4865)
…Where are they? I’m wondering what’s happened to the two child NPCs, an unnamed human female and charr female that used to run around behind the bank in old LA, yelling ‘Ghosts!’ and ‘Monsters!’ then joking about how they had to keep their friendship secret. I’ve looked all around LA, yet I haven’t found them! Does this mean they didn’t make it out during Scarlet’s attack?
I don’t think you can really put a figure to the number of soldiers in any Legion, purely because the unofficial scrapper bands, ‘retired’ soldiers and gladium aren’t being taken into account here. There’s also the fact that every Charr, whether they be farmer, blacksmith or carpenter, is also a soldier. There is no such thing as a Charr that isn’t a soldier, at least not inside the Legions themselves. For that simple reason I’d put the number of soldiers as high as the number of Charr on Tyria, and for all we know that could be in the range of a few million, considering the size of the territories that they control.
Hrm… Something that annoys me about the lore… Well, it’s not really the lore itself that annoys me, but the player reaction to it, namely the conflict between Charr and humanity, and the insane idea that humanity could actually attempt to take on and win against the Charr in this day and age.
First and foremost, to those arguing about who did what first, who exactly struck the first blow doesn’t matter. What does matter is that in terms of lore we’re told that humanity started this whole thing off by expanding into lands they didn’t really need and using the power of the human gods to force the Iron Legion out of their homelands.
No matter what anyone says about whether the Charr were too brutal and savage against the humans, the fact remains that they were forced out of their ancestral lands by invaders who they had no quarrel with, and who viewed them as simple beasts. That a ‘primitive’ race that had little to no access to magic wound up using the age old tactics of brutality and genocide against another, larger ‘tribe’ should come as no surprise, nor should their eager embracing of the Gold legion’s magic to combat the humans’ powers. Neither too should it be said that it’s wrong of a group of people to hold a longstanding grudge with another group, only to act out on it when they had the power to do so. Were the native American Indians in such a position, would some of their tribes not do the same to regain the lands they had long since been robbed of by the American settlers?
As to humanity actually standing against the Charr… No. Look at the lore. Humanity isn’t even a shadow of it’s former glory at this point. Confined to a single major city and smaller outlying settlements, with much of it’s military locked in a never ending war against centaurs that can barely be kept from the city gates, they simply wouldn’t have the force of arms to hold off an assault from the Charr.
Technologically as well they’re outclassed. There’s only one human inventor that’s on par with the Charr right now, and his watchwork legion is trashed and buried amid the rubble of Lion’s Arch. Humanity at this point is impressed by windmills, water wheels and the odd steam powered orchestra. Militarily, they’re still using catapults, ballistae and trebuchets. The Charr, on the other hand, have long since mastered these technologies and now have everything from helicopters and flamethrowers to mortars and main battle tanks. Were even a handful of their kitten nal turned against the Reach, it would be in flames within a fortnight.
Humanity needs to learn its place. Its time of glory has come and gone, and now it needs to either fall by the wayside for the other races to take their place, or it needs to learn to suck up it’s pride and work with them to ensure it’s survival. Right now, it’s doing the latter, thanks to Queen Jenna. She understands the situation. I just wish that the rest of the Reach did.
Indeed JG, I’d like to see more of an involvement from the races themselves than simply tossing in characters like Marjory, Rox, Braham and Taimi and leaving it at that. The Seraph’s brief involvement with the siege was a fine example of how this could have been expanded upon; did they really need to just make a brief appearance to try and arrest Heal-O-Tron? Why did they just turn back and return to Divinity empty handed, and why did Divinity not send aid and soldiers down to Lion’s Arch? Surely, Logan and a few of the Seraph’s finest wouldn’t have gone amiss after Scarlet’s attempt on the Queen’s life.
It was an opportunity to give the Krytans more screen time, and it spawned a nice little side story that left the player with a question: exactly how were the Seraph planning to use Heal-O-Tron? Are they truly so corrupt now that Caudecus is out of the picture that they’ll stoop to blackmail to get their goals? And how far up the chain of command does that corruption spread? Indeed, it also gave an opportunity to showcase a little bit of internal conflict among the major powers of Tyria. What would have happened if the Seraph hadn’t taken no for an answer, and tried to force their way into Vigil Keep after Heal-O-Tron? Would blood have been shed to protect the little golem, or the rights of the Vigil? It’s that kind of intrigue that the story needs more of, in my opinion.
Just a question for the devs here. How come we never see the Charr siege engines being used properly in the game? We know they can move and have animation, as evidenced by the footage in the Anniversary Trailer that was given to us last year, yet for some reason these objects remain static in the game world and have no real use. We see them used as mobile encampments more than anything else, which is all fine and dandy, but why the hell are the guns never trained on the approaches to the camp, and more importantly, why do those guns never fire?
At points, it even becomes infuriating. One prime example I can give is of the Battle for Fort Trinity, where you go to inspect the lumber camp. The first thing I thought when I went to take a look was ‘Oooh, I never saw these tanks here before! Cool!’ Then, when the undead giants drove us back through the gates, a thought occurred to me. The cannon of one of those engines was pointing -right- at the backs of the giants, facing towards the gate. Why was no-one in it if the area was dangerous? Why didn’t it at least take a token shot at a giant before being destroyed?
At the moment, I find the siege engines one of the most infuriating things about the Charr. Having them everywhere may at first seem to flaunt the Charr’s power, but it quickly becomes apparent that the show of force is impotent, because they’re just there as a kind of scene dressing.
Anyone else agree with me here, and wants to see those metal leviathans finally start taking a more active role in gameplay?
As the title says, this concerns me. We see plenty of involvement from these new racial heroes like Rox and the forces the Orders command, but we’ve seen little to nothing of the true powerhouses of Tyria, the individual nations whose lands have been invaded and despoiled by Scarlet, and whose technology has been so blatantly stolen and put to foul use.
Where are they? Are the Charr and Norn still so tied up fighting the Flame, Icebrood and the Separatists that forces could not be sent in to aid Lion’s Arch when the Molten Alliance moved in? Are the Asura going to idly stand by whilst the ingenious designs that allowed the Pact to have their airships are used to bombard the citizens of the Arch?
What of the Sylvari? They of all races should feel a moral obligation to end Scarlet’s mad reign, having spawned the beast that destroyed the Arch and managed to unite the Tree’s darker offspring into the Toxic Alliance. And the Krytans… What more reason do they need than the blatant assault on Divinity itself, which nearly claimed the life of their Queen?
In my opinion, the focus of the story has shifted too far from it’s starting point: the individual races themselves. Far too much emphasis has been put onto the Pact, and whilst the Pact itself isn’t a bad thing, there are times when a little more internal conflict would do the story some good, especially as the Pact seems to have moved on from it’s state of distrust now.
What we need to see are the nations coming into their own, bringing their own forces into play whilst introducing new heroes alongside the return of the old. Destiny’s Edge shouldn’t just be some distant figures sending you mail every time something happens in the world. Has Rytlock become so bound by paperwork that he can’t take the field as he used to with us? Has Zojja locked herself away in the lab again, rather than kicking some Aetherblade kitten after stealing her designs? What of Caithe? Of all the Sylvari in the world, surely she has the most reason to deal with Scarlet directly, no?
What’s your opinion on the subject? Do you want to see the return of the nations to the forefront of the story, to share the spotlight with the Pact? Do you want to see the Charr finally getting off their kitten and steamrolling in, allowing you to -finally- pilot one of those siege tanks? And most importantly, do you relish the idea of Destiny’s Edge finally making a return? I know I do.
(edited by Pahawe.4865)
Has anyone else gotten a little tired of it? I know I have, and I think I may have a couple of suggestions as to how to fix it. First though, allow me to explain -why- I think this is a problem.
My server, Piken Square, isn’t exactly small, and it isn’t the worst at WvW. We have our WvW guilds, players of repute, and all that, but we’ve got something of a problem: we’re consistently matched against servers with larger populations, and because of this we’re dealing with zerg after zerg after zerg of players from the German servers. Do I mind being outnumbered in this situation? Not really, because most of the time I’m fighting from a fortified position with siege weaponry at my back, and quite often this is enough to break the backs of most zergs, even those that do come packing siege weaponry.
The trouble, however, is that we are very often denied access to our supplies because all of our siege camps are under attack, and the enemy is effectively choking us to death by ram raiding all three whilst they pummel away at our keeps, starving us of our supplies and denying us access to the tools we’d need to mount a successful defense.
Now, before I continue any farther, I should emphasize that I’m perfectly alright with this tactic, in fact, I applaud it when it’s used out in the Eternal Battlegrounds. When it comes to the Borderlands, however, it does kind of tick me off that the enemy can run rampant so easily, just by flanking our outnumbered defenders. It just doesn’t feel right that they’re able to take the rearmost point of the Borderlands so easily, when the fight for a Borderland should, in fact, be the hardest fight you get from a server, as it’s their home turf. You shouldn’t simply be able to sneak right into the backdoor without some heavy resistance, but the trouble is that it’s hard to mount an effective defense when you’re stretched thin as is, and there isn’t a notification given of an attack until it’s already in progress.
So, how do I think this can be fixed? Well, first and foremost, fortifying the mountain passes with extra gates and walls would go a long, -long- way to producing a harder fight. The enemy shouldn’t just be able to waltz through an open backdoor to take your last supply line from under your nose, they should have to fight tooth and nail for it! Adding a wall and gate to the pass leading to the Skritt and Centaur camps would do a great deal towards this, as not only does it slow the enemy down and actually give you time to respond, but it also means you’re given advanced warning of an attack so that you can make use of that time to send defenders racing in to the rescue.
The other suggestion I have would be to extend the range of the Skritt and Centaur patrols, or extend the camps a little further down the valley, to provide a little more protection for the defending side. So, what do you folks think? Is this an issue that bugs you as well? Do you think it needs fixing? And do you think I make some good suggestions on how to do so?