Guild Wars 2

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

Some skins don’t show by default in the bank, unless you’ve unlocked them. The Lava Skull and anniversary backpacks are among those.

That’s kind of silly of ANet to do that. If they are hidden not everyone will know they are an option and do the content to get them. They should all be unlocked to show all those possible skins and content.

Everytime I read a title: “Can my PC run GW2?” then I see them list
“Intel i7”
“GTX”
Freakin “16GB RAM!!!” Like COME ON! Of COURSE IT CAN! LOL

You’re Not running a potato and even a potato can run GW2 just fine with an intel HD integrated graphics and YOU GOT a GTX Card which blows that out of the water!

Anyways for future reference you can play any game just fine with your specs at high settings with GTX1070, 16gb of Ram with Intel i7 7700k! No more asking if you can run games, just trust me your PC can handle ANY Game! =) You got a beast of a PC and you don’t even know it!!! Well you do now I hope. haha

How the hell do you end up with a PC of that spec then still have to question if a game will still run on it?! Dropping the sort of money that PC must have cost, you must have at least done a bit of research on specs / components, certainly enough to know it can basically run anything!

That’s a beast of a PC! Wish I had that sort of power haha

For some reason ever time I see these threads I just imagine the OP is trying to brag out their machine. lol Now I’m not accusing this OP of that, it’s just what I always tend to think when I see them.

Not to long ago the public was asked to vote for profession locking, which would disable the ability to swap classes before the match started to improve matchmaking. At first it was winning, but then people took it the wrong way and on reddit people were asked to vote NO, thus fabricating the true results of the poll.

The poll itself really did not explain properly what it was for, and it even seemed voting YES would be a negative.

If this poll had succeeded, instead of having an account MMR you would have one for each profession. This would allow you to queue up on an alt and earn your own ranking again. You would also have profession specific leaderboards, probably being the best PvP feature to ever come to the game.

But, unfortunately people took this as a negative because they felt they needed to swap in order to win. Let’s face the honest truth here, no matter what rating you are in your alt is not going to be better than someone elses main.

If I play elementalist for 4000 hours and I’m in Gold Rating, I highly doubt someone in the same rating as myself is going to perform just as good as I will with only 200 hours on their elementalist. I am more likely to lose rating if I swapped to another class, than to simply remain on my elementalist even if we had 2 of them on the same team.

I’ve played 12 games so far this season, and I’ve already encountered at least 3 matches where my team was heavily stacked on one class. Not a single person swapped because presumably, they felt they were not skilled enough with any other class and would likely harm the team if they swapped.

Developers, you have the stats. You should see how many people actually swap on a stacked team, and I am willing to bet that those who swap are more likely to lose than those who do not.

Please reconsider implementing profession specific leader-boards in the future. Because as it stands, it makes no sense at all to multi-class. If I’m going to queue up on my revenant, I’m expected to lose 10-12 games in a row ruining the experience of all those players because quite frankly, I’m simply not gold worthy on my revenant.

Guild Wars 2 as far as I know is the only game for MMORPGS that uses an account bound MMR and not profession/hero specific. So you’re essentially trapped into only playing your main.

Leiloni.7951:

How would you guys feel about them adding a 10v10 or 15v15 (whatever works on the map sizes) to sPvP? I think a lot of players like that larger, more traditional battleground style feel. The maps are designed well for it right now, it just seems with the 5v5 that it’s a bit too big for such small group sizes and a lot of players don’t like such small 2v2 style fights, or attacking/defending a flag by themselves. I’ve always found it weird they didn’t do standard 5v5 arena maps and essentially put an arena sized group on a battleground map. But what do you guys think of adding another mode for a larger size? I think it’d be a pretty easy addition.

I don’t know how I would truly feel about this in GW2. I think 10v10 or 15v15 would be much worst then 5v5. Think about it what has happened. The population declined so much in PvP. That ANet was forced to only allow 2 people to queue together. I honestly believed, That solo duo has solved nothing. If anything it made the mode decline even faster then before solo/duo.

It’s my belief as person from the outside looking in. The right thing would have been to reduced team size to 2v2 or 3v3. However instead we are thrown into a contest of who can make the best builds to carry some of the most useless players that are playing Ranked in a 5v5 setting where the most you can control is you and your buddy. While the rest depending on division, either team mates who instantly die to one Necro at mid. Or the lemmings who just respawn and keep running into the 1v3 situations that got them killed in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.

There is such a disconnect for individual ratings and skill atm. That most who did at one point took GW2’s PvP serious. Now either play other PvP games on the market that, fits their competitive nature as competitive gamers. Or they just play GW2 with a numb mind and heart with only earning more gold and ascended gear as the goal. At the moment with the proliferation of smurf accounts who throw matches for gold or even outside real money. Is it no surprised that the PvP community is at a all time low, and is farther declining.

Most players playing PvP these days. Throw huge fits over not be awarded effortless, easy, free PvE ascended armor. Rather then throwing fits over the 5 hour old smurf accounts farther destabilizing match quality. That’s was my example of the state of mind that this current generation of “PvPers” playing ranked has. To me all sense and meaning of healthy and competition is completely gone from Ranked PvP in GW2.

The biggest thing ANet can do, but will refuse to. Is to force smurf accounts into having more time commitment to be able to play ranked. Say PvP ranked 60, I’d personally say PvP Rank 80 before allowing a account to queue for Ranked. It works so well in all of the other PvP games on the market. It limits troll smurf accounts to Unranked, unless the person is really going to put forth 30 to 80 hours to reach PvP Ranked 60 or 80, instead of now under 5 hours to hit PvP Ranked 20. If you want to push sales then how about allowing players to buy a PvP Rank Booster for $60 USD for every 20 PvP Ranks. Meaning in order to get a smurf to PvP Ranked 60, or 80 instantly. The person with the smurf account has to shell out $180 to $240 USD to get there instantly. That in combination with my next group of statements, would make smurf users have a tangible commitment cost for running a smurf.

Another thing is to punish players who do troll ranked. ANet can do this with a 3 strike rule.

1st Strike, 2 week suspension from Ranked matches.
2nd Strike account suspension from Ranked for the remainder of current season and the next season.
3rd Strike Permanent suspension from Ranked queues.

Other then those two. I don’t know atm how I can help turn PvP Ranked from a Joke Fest PvE Reward farm to a competitive, healthy, and self sustaining game mode in gaming. Without talking about balance policy changes, and match making policy changes.

Hi,

From what i read the buffs presented, or newly implemented sigils, aren’t going to be strong enough (or realistically serve that much of a purpose) to be used over the nerfed sigils (such as doom/geo). I could see some use in maybe cleansing/escape but overall (from the sigils presented) nothing really got buffed, just nerfs.

..to which i present you with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsC8io4w1sY&feature=youtu.be

Don’t take the video with salt or anything please, its a good listen/watch/insight only to try and help GW2 PVP. I don’t really consider PVE not knowing much about it-

Maybe more buffs; more ways for the player to express themselves by presenting a risk or a downfall to using a strong sigil such as doom by having it also poison you for 1/4 or 1/2 the time (2-4 seconds) or make it slightly more risky by 30% chance to poison yourself for the duration and your opponent for 1/2 ( 30% chance to poison you for only 1/4 or 1/2 et cetera).
Then players decide on taking that risk or just going for a safer more unused sigil like exposure (vulnerability is less scary than poison if it backfires).

##Also on-hit sigils don’t really need a nerf as getting them to actually land as a “cover condi” (which is what they are primarily used for) is like 5-10% chance as they are.##

Regards,

Meanwhile my other MMO does lock characters in place – they’re always shown in the order they were created, and people are forever asking to be able to move them around, with one of the most common requests being to put the most played/most recently played at the top.

But I think in reality both communities are asking for the same thing – the ability to choose the order ourselves instead of having the game order our characters for us.

For some people order of creation is perfect, for others most > least played is perfect, but there’s a large group of people who don’t like either and would like them in alphabetical order, or by level, or by race/profession or a custom order that only makes sense to them.

Personally I’d like to be able to set a custom order because what makes the most sense to me is to have my ‘main’ character first and then all the others in order of priority, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with when they were created, their level or anything else quantifiable.

I suspect it’s one of those things which is not impossible but it’s harder than it might seem (bear in mind there is currently no UI or tech to allow you to change the order so it has to be built) and it’s too low priority for anyone to be able to allocate time to it. Rather like the website updates I need to do in my job. If I didn’t have everything else to do I could get it done in a day or so but I can’t justify delaying everything else by a day to get it done.

So, I hate to compare games, but other games allow you to change the order that your characters are displayed (in the character select window), and keep them in that order. This is something I would love to have here in Guild Wars. I like having my main characters in the front (far left side), even when I decide to play one of my… not-so-played characters. I am not sure the amount of work it would take to accomplish this, but it is something I would like.

I can see locked-in content for subsets of your playerbase being an unfulfilling option to develop, actually. If you split 3 ways, you have to work 3 times as hard, while reducing viewership of each part to 1/3rd. I can see why you would prefer to do that only for things players like enough to play through multiple times, like the racial storylines in GW2.

I say that, but I would love to see a bit more lore for our professions. Not as much as the racial storylines, but a few little quests where we explore the meaning and philosophy and heritage of our professions would be really cool.

At least let us be able to show other head gear along with the rest of the outfit.

Do you remember the way Collin joked about the ginding/farming existing in other MMO’s?
" I killed a centaur! I killed a centaur again! …. Woaaaaa ! Look ! I killed another centaur!" Or it was “sword” instead of “centaur”? No matter :-))
Now look at Mike O’Brien’s own words in the GW2 Manifesto:
“GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun
………………………………………………………………………………
Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.”

And now, with this leather FARM Anet team considers that they followed the Manifesto. Moreover, they expect us to have fun from this?

This “challenging farming spot” is one of the most important proofs that the actual Anet team discarded the vision of the initial Manifesto. Or, because of so many changes in the team, it may be very possible the actual team is not even aware that such vision exists.

And you are still wondering why the playerbase get smaller and smaller?

The most worrying thing is that even if the old vision was discarded, a new declaration/statement/Manifesto was never released. In this moment, without a document stating the direction/goals/intentions, GW2 looks like a sail floating adrift. The efforts of the passengers (the players) to save the sail may be not enough as long as the crew do almost nothing in the right direction.

Back to the “challenging farming spot”: In a game with ample antifarming rules, going from diminished return to forcibly limiting the number of samples of certain materials you can receive daily, the idea of farming seems to be a way to mock the playerbase.

Why mocking? Because you can farm as long as Anet wants! Even this method to address the leather issue has a limited use. Limit left at Anet will under the form of DR.

And another evidence: The players complained about the very small quantity of T2 / T3 / T4 leather a lvl 80 player can get by playing the endgame. And for the limited quantity of T6 leather you can get – no matter what content you play. Anet solution: they invented the “challenging farming spot” – the output is more than 65% the T5 leather. Nobody complained about T5. Thanks Anet :-)). If the farming spot will be a successful idea, the game will be flooded with T5 leather.

We had this situation in the past. Because of the abundance of T5 Anet decided to reduce the input of all tiers leather. It may be possible that in few months Anet will decide that too much T5 leather is on the game, so they will reduce again the input of the T2/T3/T4/T6 leather :-))))

Vayne.8563:

Dawnbreaker.6215:

maxwelgm.4315:

The deal is that people consider it funnier and more enjoyable if they are doing something optimized. It makes them feel better in general that they are doing something well. This might sound weird at first but, are we not encouraged to do our best at whatever we do?.

That said, this is not a real pressure outside of Fractals/Raids. Marauder, Valkyrie and the like works wonders for survivability as well as damage. You can also wear Celestial to be an all-rounder (change build as you wish without ever worrying about equipment!) and do well at most stuff.

Just remember though, toughness in particular needs a rework. They have severly nerfed it because of a previous PvP bunker meta, and it is basically a junk stat. You need vitality and proper use of protection+vigor much more than you need toughness, as enemies will simply pierce through you in groups. So it might actually be hindering yourself rather than protecting yourself, if you wear toughness equips.

What’s more optimal though, a dungeon run with 3 party wipes or a dungeon run 1 minute slower than the world record?

You’re assuming that dungeon wipes don’t happen if people don’t wear zerker. However if one person doesn’t wear zerker and four do, everything still dies slower and if the zerkers die and that guy is left the only one alive trying to solo a boss it’s not any faster.

There’s no real evidence for what you say, or at least it’s not my experience.

We used to run Lupi in our casual guild, which you’ll find in every path of Arah. Every path. And we’d take 8-10 minutes to kill him, during which sometimes we’d have deaths and sometimes we’d wipe.

Now, everyone is the guild that runs dungeons runs zerker. We kill Lupi in about 2 minutes after the first phase is over or in about 20% of the time we used to take. Fewer people go down because we don’t have to play perfectly for nearly as long.

Saying that you can do a dungeon faster is non-zerk gear is an argument I used to make. I found out from experience, I was wrong.

The corollary to this point being in direct opposition of the usually stated belief of “zerker = more skilled play” haha!

Obtena7952

Leather farm is simply that … a place to farm leather. It’s for players that want to play a challenging area that gives them leather.

Challenging ….. farm. Farming = challenge? Are you serious? With such kind of ideas, no wonder the devs transformed the game in a farmfest claiming that GW2 is now more challenging as ever.
Comparing to the Leather farm in Lake Doric, the Champion Train in Cursed Shore is much more challenging. There, at least, you should know how to approach an event chain to maximize the return.
The actual farming is very much similar with the Labyrinth run from Halloween. On the same challenging level. And requiring the same amount of attention. Farming is not challenging. Is boring.

In my opinion this “challenging farming spot” is an insult to the playerbase coming from the devs. They and not the players changed the drop ratio from salvages. They and not the players changed the recipes and the amount of material for each component. They and not the players added countless sinks for leather.
And now they said these are issues difficult to fix by changing something in the dropratios/recipes. And these issues should be solved by players. How? By FARMING

GODS of GW2 ! Where are you? Come and see what the game is now. And, if you come, please farm some leather. Is challenging.

Normally I just silently read posts and move on, only commenting from time to time.
However, I want to comment on a growing trend that I am seeing.

First off, I would like to ask you, how do you know for certain that someone is a pve player. When it is the intended goal of Anet to get people to balance and play across all game modes, there are very few players that never set foot in WvW or PvE and only play PvP these days. Now, alot of us like me, love PvP and play it the most, as in I play it most every night of the week and only branch out from time to time.

However, you have to stop blaming the quality of your matches on pve players. It might be a bad day for some, it might be something you are doing, it might of been a bad roll of the dice. Any one of these three are the actual reasons, your match was lost.

Secondly, new players are the lifeblood of every game mode. You were new once and I am sure you didnt appreciate being referred to in a derogatory manner due to your newness. Most new players know they are not that great yet, and are in fact trying to learn.

If you want to make a change in how things are matched, how things are managed in PvP my suggestion is you turn this anger and hate to constructive criticism that will actually help minimize blow out matches and improve the quality of matches for new and Vet players. You could also offer to help someone who is a suspected PvEer or New player….

Vacheron.9870:

You (I’m assuming you are against having the invisible shoes, apologies if I’m wrong), on the other hand, who owns a bicycle, points out that it’s unfair since cars and bikes are all methods of transportation, why should it be that cars are 100x more expensive? The answer to that question: It is designed that way. It’s not like somewhere out there there’s someone who has an “all toggle-able character.”

Lolwut?

Cars cost significantly more than any bicycle because they cost more to design, test, build, and advertise.

There is no omniscient being that decried that all cars should cost x% more than bicycles.

There was a person/s who sat down and decided that invisible boots should be rarer, thus significantly more expensive, than any other boot or armor skin for that matter.

This is not the result of any natural force, this was a conscious choice on the developers part to make 20 minutes of work obscenely hard to get for no other reason than to encourage gem2gold sales.

We need a bag for bags.
An inventory bags where other bags goes. Like we have the trash, gear and crafting ones.

Then we would have a bag for bags with bags.

Not even kidding, this would be great.

Being able to sell all green/blue sigils and runes with the sell junk button.

Ive made a few in my time of where GW2 had some qualities that have long since faded but this one is less about saying GW2 is bad and more about saying what the current zones are doing wrong.

The problem with Grinding when it becomes too much:

Too much of a ‘good’ thing to some is often a bad thing to others. One of the issues with Season 2 and HoT zones dry top/silverwastes and all the HoT zones specifically, is that every single bit of content requires you to regularly farm events in that zone in order to aquire a zone specific resorce thats basically a glorified time sink that takes a few days of your life to get the attained equipment you desire.

Solution:

Not “every” zone, needs a grind, not every zone “needs” gear that is attained via farming regular content, some zones “should” be easy, almost laughably easy because it balances the challenging content and gear from the easier more rewarding content that gives a level of instant gratification.

Basically, grinding needs to be something available to the zones in HoT and episode 1 of S3, but from now on, every future zone should have bosses that literally “drop” the loot you want every run you do them, literally “drop” the gear you need to start making progress, such as maybe an early ascended accessory to start people off.

Catchup isnt a bad thing, nor is toning down older content

When was the “last” time you honestly tried to farm an Amberite weapon with a zone of people? When was the last time you cared about bandit crests, when, was the last time you tried to get a Sceclarite weapon?

If the answer is, forever ago, then your on the right track to recognising the problem. The issue is that older content is going to be less relevent, and that includes the grind towards it.

Solution:

Simply reduce the grind, its time to nerf the amount of geodes you need to collect Amberite weapons, its time to nerf the amount of crests you need to collect Carapace Armor, and theres “nothing” wrong with that nerf since it was “relevent” then, and not now.

Easier is often better, Gw2’s launch advocated this game as a casual friendly MMO

Longevity is less tied to grinding, and more tied to gratification, people “like” to feel rewarded, they dont like to spend weeks upon weeks farming for specific loot that feels pointless and niche in the games future.

Example: Going through ascalonian catacombs to grind dungeon runs for the tears feels like you’re missing the point. Its not the resorce that mattered, its the loot.

If I kill a dungeon boss, I want a dungeon loot reward, I dont care if its an item I cant use, I dont care if its a duplicate of an item I already own, I “want” that loot as it feels like an “instant” reward.

Grinding has much more effective ways of appearing, in Wrath of the Lich King in WoW the large success of the expansion was lended to the fact there were “multiple” ways to loot things. Not all of it required farming weeks of dailies, sometimes, you could just spam dungeon runs and get loot every boss, even useless trash.

Solution:

If I get a piece of loot I cant use, thats leagues more interesting to me, than getting a masterwork or rare piece of loot that has no value to me at all, TL:DR I am probably “not” going to care if I get a rare, but I will care “greatly” if I get an exotic, even if its one I cant use.

The Casual matters, no matter what the hardcore say

In the end, There are OTHER ways to add content with challenge that does NOT require the game to sacrifice its casual base for its hardcore, or vise versa.

Examples and Solutions:

Raiding: Add a story mode raid difficulty for those looking to experience the lore of the raid, simply deny anyone doing it any loot while doing so or if they get any loot, maybe they get a basic ascended accessory at the end of the run per account.

Dungeons: Make every story mode entirley solo, not just Arah, so that everyone can get into explorable without having to waste the effort on finding a group. Revamp the Explorable experience to make it harder and more challenging, and equally, reward loot every boss, even crap loot nobody wanted in ADDITION to tokens.

Fractals: Incentivise the noobie to join the fractal experience, offer a double-reward weekend event, tie this to other experiences like raiding/dungeons and pvp to increase their value.

PvP: Add the “activities” into this category as an ‘alternative’ to the mainstream pvp progression, let people earn the progression rewards from it, though keep the ranked pvp rewards to ranked gameplay only.

WvW: Add a third borderland type, not much to say on this but there is more I can go into but id need a seperate topic for it.

Dailies and Questing: Add a “Dragon Watch” mini secondary questing system that lets you do mini quests at random once per day, each one takes you across Tyria doing variable activities and offers a bit of lore/va thats repeatble each day with random new adventures, similar to fractals, rewards you with some laurels at the end.

Specializations: As a future way of fixing the “trinity” you’ve created, give us 18 new specializations by expansion 2, ambitious I know but hear me out, by adding 3 specs for each class, you can give each one a soft trinity of its own, allowing us to pick tank/heal/dps for any class bringing “back” what Vanilia GW2 had, the ability to play without feeling too grounded to a class/role choice. I could go into some suggestions on this but I digress its just something to muse on.

Anyway, these are “some” things you can do to fix the game and work on it in a productive way.

As a preface: I’m at legendary rank, prestige 1. The game keeps putting me tantalizingly close to prestige 2 and then I get a massive string of losses. I solo queue.

I’ve played a lot of games that are “competitive” in nature — Call of Duty, Mario Kart, WoW PvP, so many Half-Life deathmatch mods and Team Fortress. I enjoy playing competitive games at their core. And Guild Wars PvP is no different to me.

But there comes a point when the game ceases to be fun. Those moments are obviously when you keep losing, but also when you keep winning. Facerolling people is only a slightly slower way to lose interest than to keep getting facerolled.

Most competitive games learned this problem long ago. Call of Duty gives you some boosts when you’re on a death streak. Team Fortress has short matches (so if you do get facerolled, no big deal) and randomizes the teams every game. Mario Kart gives better boosts to the people in the back, and less useful boosts to the people in front.

What does Guild Wars 2 do? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it almost seems like it revels in exacerbating the problem. Among other legendary players, it’s almost a running joke that the system already knows who’s going to win the match based on whatever stat the game keeps hidden from us.

I hear you trolls shouting: “So what? Working as intended. Stop being a carebear” And you may be right.

But the way the system is designed is the best way to discourage people from playing. It drives them away. Last night I got pitted against a team that had #1, 2, and 3 on the leaderboards against my team. Needless to say, we lost.

What reason did I, or the rest of my team, have to continue playing the rest of the night? We knew the system would do it again. The result is the game gets abandoned by the very people you need to keep it interesting, and queue times get longer. Have you noticed that queue times at the beginning of a season are often short (<30 secs), and by the end of the season, queues can take an excess of 10 minutes? The reason is that people stop playing, because the game stops being fun.

Yes, I am aware that GW2, being an MMO, has a much more complicated system to balance the ranking/matchmaking system. But there are simpler short-term solutions even if you do nothing to change the matchmaking:

1. Don’t let people backslide down tiers, regardless of rank. This is a very nice feature at lower ranks, but disappears later on. If the system already has a predicted winner for a match, it is humiliating and insulting to keep backsliding against a predetermined fate. Putting in the safety net stops the worst part of high level PvP. People who are exceptional will still rise to the top, and the rest of us won’t suffer for it.
2. The system should grant partial credit for a match well played. IE: If scores are within 100 points of each other, instead of penalizing you. Currently, losing a match 494-500 gets treated the same as losing a match 0-500. They’re simply not comparable.
3. If the system has predicted the match outcome with relative certainty (IE probability of 75% or higher) it shouldn’t penalize the losing team a point.

And if you include refinement of the matchmaking system to stop producing matches where the winner is already predetermined, you end up with a system that is a lot more fair and lenient to players who may simply be getting a bad hand.

/rantover

For now you’ll find me in unranked, where the matches actually seem to be more balanced, for whatever reason.

I hear it a lot, bad players don’t deserve the wings, they have no right to the rewards.
So by that logic why should they even participate, why offer themselves up as fodder so the higher ups can stomp them.
I’ll tell you why the so called bad players also deserve the wings and rewards, because even though they lose more than they win, most of them are fighting as hard as they can every single game and keep persevering even though it’s a lost cause.
So if you’re on a win streak, find the game a bit easy and have had no real challenge, you aren’t fighting nearly as hard as the bad players that don’t deserve a prize.

I’m happy to support games I like (even though I’ve not played too much for a bit now, but maybe the account still shows purchases?) and I really don’t mind it for a game such as this which is based on it and still delivers fair content – most of the time.

However, I will never pay money for something that is a gamble. I do not gamble for goods – perhaps i would have a different outlook if I did not have bills and other things to spend my money on, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of paying to overcome RNG. I hope this sheds some light on why I won’t personally get these skins, unless I can manage to find enough keys through playing the game. To reiterate, not because i don’t want to support A-net. I just don’t support gambling DLC/digital goods.

I suppose that falls beyond the scope of this particular discussion slightly, as it affects all key purchases. But it’s especially annoying to see when real money gambling is made the forefront way to achieve something.

Every time black lion keys go on discount, my guild jokes and calls it ‘the yearly reminder as to why we don’t buy black lion keys’.

When The Silverwastes first came out, this was pretty nice. People consistently working together to achieve a greater goal, without the PVP element of WvW. A few more maps like this would be wonderful. Awesome, we got four more. In hindsight, maybe it was a little overkill, though. Two maps would have been fine, with two more being more exploratory like the rest of Tyria.

As a primarily solo player, I like the casual group settings of these community events, where I can roll in, help to my abilities and if we don’t make it, we try again some other time. However, when all you have available are community events (sans arguments that a lot can be achieved soloable, if you know how to play,) you kind of get discouraged when you find yourself alone, or without dedicated help, trying to accomplish these events.

But we do what we have to do, right? Onward we go.

Here’s what I would like to see, again, as a solo player: I want to visit the dungeons and the raids, without necessarily getting the full rewards from them, if for nothing but exploration and story progression. I want to be a part of a persistent world, where if there isn’t another human player available, there are NPC’s to take up the mantle and continue the event.

So, I’m not really advocating creating a party of heroes, such as GW1, but have NPC’s in the game, moving the events along, with or without players about. For example, the fight for Auric Basin and the final run on the city. If you, and several other players, are the only ones active on the map for events, the events continue to progress, but with NPC’s instead. It doesn’t remain, as it does now, in a perpetual failure state until enough players huddle together to make it succeed. You come in, and in a manner of speaking, end up helping those NPC’s take back the city. Even if it ends up just being you.

And I would be all for decreased rewards for such a thing. Perhaps if a certain percentage of real players vs non-players is not reached, full rewards are not provided.

I wonder if this could help alleviate the megaserver concerns, if we’re not relying on logging into an active map with intentions on completing the events. A lot of ‘endgame’ seems to end up being achievement hunting, which is often limited by player involvement. Obviously this is doable and I have done it repeatedly, but I know I would have had more enjoyment if I wasn’t logging out repeatedly in frustration due to lack of map activity.

If the NPC’s were pushing progression, then all maps could be like HoT and Silverwastes. We could even see additional content being reintroduced back into the old world, like we saw in Season 1’s LS, but in a more, persistent manner. There are so many possibilities out there, on those maps, that we would be more than happy to revisit them, rather than doing so only during the several minutes we spend hitting them up for dailies or for legendary farming.

Anet needs to realize that them balancing the game and making matchmaking for the few on the top is more harmful than anything else.

The entire system would probably work well if it had 10 times more players than we have now. But we dont. Setting up teams as “fodder” for “pro” players and stacking players with high MMR vs others with lower MMR has got to be the most sadistic nonsensical idea with as little players as we have now as you can come up with.

Its going to make players leave SPvP and make it even worse than it was before.

Erik Waananen.6089:

This is by design. We allow duo queues to pair up against full pre-made teams, but not a full group of solo queues. We changed this during Season 2.

As for the spread, it’s because those players are grouped up. For example, the Amber on Red Team is brought up to Sapphire level because they’re pairing with a Sapphire player. The Blue Team has Ruby players on it because they’re most likely in early Ruby which puts them within the range of upper tier Sapphire players for the purposes of matchmaking. The Emerald player is subsequently brought up because they’re grouped with higher division players.

I know that match-ups like this may seem off-kilter at first glance, but it’s entirely within the parameters we’ve set in the matchmaking algorithm and definitely by design. It looks like it was a close match though, so I’m glad you had fun!

only and adjustement is required in case of full teams vs pugs and only a duo q to go for a even match: the pugs need to be beter individuals that the indiuviduals full team, the team has in his favor voice com for cordination and teorically can work as a team to outplay better individuals, the solo queuers not. puting a team whith one or two better players than all of individuals on the other side is going for a blow out, teams can play vs individuals and get a close match only if the individual skills of solo players are a bit better than the team individuals. in terms of adjusting mmr for even matches the team hasve to be considered a little better than the sum or coeficient or whar uses the sistem of all the individuals in it

A Miniature Doppelgänger (i.e. a Mini Me) because I’m so vain.

The expansion is not fine. It is a disaster. The whole advertising scheme was built around the whole “we won’t have x content ready at launch but here’s what your are eventually going to get”. This is a PR disaster. Couple that with the fact that they can afford to hire 70 employees to work on a future expansion when this one is not even finished.

Anet, please don’t show us any previews of the upcoming expansion. Don’t give us any details or “selling points”. I mean this is a fantasy role playing game but I didn’t know the make believe started with game features.

I wouldn’t call it a fail, but it is flawed.

I think the best thing to do right now would be to remove the Mastery Points required to unlock/learn Masteries. Yes, that means that many people will avoid the content that used to have the MPs behind it. But, there’s a reason they’re wanting to avoid that content, and they shouldn’t feel pressured into it.

If it was mine to do over, I would have skipped on the MPs, and had some of the Masteries set up so that story goals gave you the first level of it, with later levels needing to be earned. Finish the first part of the story? Scout should hand you a glider, unlocking Gliding Basics. Saved the froggies? “Here, let me show you how to use this mushroom to get up to our village.” Helped the Exalted? They give you a book to help translate their writings into something you can understand. And so on.

That would go for Central Tyria, too. Finish the personal story, and you unlock the Pact Mastery. Read a scattered series of books on old legends, and you unlock the Legendary Crafting Mastery.

A Mastery should NEVER become a barrier to part of the central story of the game. Instead, Mastery lines should flow from the story, so you have reason to know of them and then have the option to pursue them further.