Guild Wars 2

That’s just like your opinion man.

The problem here is that people assume that this has to work like a lottery. This shouldn’t be gambling at all.

When I first heard about this I thought it would be like a 33% chance to get a Halloween related item. If you wanted one specific skin, it would probably end up around 1-3% chance. This seems reasonable. If you open 10 chests, you are very likely to get an item.

You should get a middle-man or something. Find someone reputable and well-known that you can both send your weapons to, then when that person has received both of the weapons, he can send the new one to each of you, completing the trade.

They were a temporary solution to the huge supply of materials that had little use and were stuck on the lowest price point on the Trading Post. It’s become obvious that this didn’t solve the problem though. Little use + high drop rate caused the huge influx of butter, iron, soft wood logs and so on to begin with, and that was never adressed. We might see ANet taking a slower approach to it this time around, focusing on the core problem instead of just implementing a temporary solution like they did the last time around.

I seriously don’t get why people are so upset with the price of the T3 set. I mean, if they lowered the price then people would complain that there are no cool-looking sets to work towards anyway. There needs to be some exclusive sets that are expensive so people can set long-term goal. Most T3 cultural armor are kind of good looking, thus the high price. If you care for it, then take a bite of the sour apple and just farm that gold, if not, then stop complaining and let the people who do want it do so in peace.

I think the Guild Wars 2 community is the only place where you get shunned for accomplishing things. Some of the comments here are quite sad in fact. OP decided to go for something, lo’ and behold, he did it, so let’s congratulate him instead.

I’ve been looking at some crafting materials recently and saw that Large Skulls were selling for relatively cheap and could be used in the MF. I tried to look it up on the wiki but there doesn’t seem to be any recipes listed there. Do any of you know if there are any currently known recipes that include Large Skulls? I mean, they are kind of like Giant Eyes seeing as they’re the only crafting material with no additional information listed on them when you hover over them. I’ve heard that there’s some community effort with creating a spreadsheet with information about all discovered MF recipes, do you know where I could find it?

Looks like they’re dropping in price again. Down about 14 silver in buy orders and 10 silver in sell orders in about two hours.

So, anyone else who’s keeping a close eye on the market out there? It has been an interesting week so far. Ghost Peppers increased in price as people discovered a new MF recipe, some people bought up close to a million cinnamon sticks in an attempt to manipulate(?) the market or just in anticipation of the upcoming content patch on the 22nd. Several Lodestones also saw an increase in price, particularly Molten Lodestones, and the wrongly named Glacial LoNestone which has tripled in price over the last twenty-four hours. Last night someone bought up over 70K Saffron Threads at the 10c price point. Mystic Coins has been on a rollercoaster ride, trying to find its equilibrum, but it is now on the rise again, closing in on the 4 silver 50 copper mark. Giant Eyes spiked massively because of one small note in the patch notes, while other T6 Fine crafting materials keep decreasing in value as more and more of them are pumped into the market, but few people finding a use for them. Dusk seems to be falling in price, now with 7 for sale at the same time, with the lowest one currently at 354 gold. Sugar Pumpkin is on the rise again, maybe in anticipation of the Halloween content.

This is what I’ve picked up over the last few days. Anyone else have any fun observations to share? It’s hard to keep tabs on everything going on.

Watch it. I prepurchased after watching that. Tell me now that I was wrong in expecting something else than what I’m currently playing.

And what people don’t seem to realize is… people leaving is not a good thing. If ANet is losing a lot of players, it means less players will buy gems, that means less money for ANet and Ncsoft, that means less development. Players leaving is not a good thing. You want as many people to stay as possible.

My two friends who joined me quit a week ago, they don’t even talk about GW2 at all. They just left, not a single complaint, just left. Every day I see more and more people complaining in my guild, we’re down on active players. Every day I see less and less people in Lion’s Arch. This is not the trend you want. Stop fooling yourself.

Raging Bull.5048:

Shriketalon.1937:

One of the original premises of the Dynamic Event system was the way they would scale to the number of people. However, in practice this isn’t working, since the game isn’t accounting for the way fighting twenty people is completely different from fighting two. Rather than altering the event, DEs are just throwing more enemies at the players or increasing the boss’s stats Instead of just scaling the numbers, events need to start treating larger groups differently than smaller teams.

To phrase that better, right now an event goes like this…
Few Players) five centaurs attack per wave
Some Players) eight centaurs attack per wave
Lots of Players) twelve centaurs attack per wave
Horde of Players) eighteen centaurs attack per wave
Convention of Players) twenty-five centaurs attack per wave

….This doesn’t work. It just means that players start throwing down nuclear strikes on the centaurs to chew them up the instant they arrive. Conventional tactics don’t beat the zerg. Instead, the event needs to be clever.

Few Players) centaurs charge them
Some Players) melee centaurs charge them, ranged centaurs fan out and snipe
Lots of Players) melee centaurs, ranged centaurs, and a miniboss shaman with AoE earth magic
Horde of Players) melee centaurs, ranged centaurs, two minibosses, and a catapult
Convention of Players) melee, ranged, three minibosses, two catapults, and a partridge in a pear tree

Siege us. Nuke us. Blast our groups, break our formations, bleed our lines. Make players split up to take down multiple objectives in a massive fight, and force teamwork by giving the opposition their own strategic cohesion. The zerg won’t be defeated by more zerging by the NPCs. The zerg will be broken when the opposition steps up its game, and forces players to do the same.

The result will be better for everyone. It will teach proper tactics, encourage situational awareness, and require cooperation. It will make players feel special even in a mob of players (lead the charge to take down the left trebuchet, and you’ll feel like you saved a hundred lives), and make us actually respect the opposition. And most of all, it will make a massive battle feel like a proper war, rather than just a farming run.

I’ve been saying post after post after post that GW2 needs more depth and complexity. This is a step in the right direction. Hell, make it even more complex. Make the each fighting line (melee, ranged, catapults, mini bosses) with a few more layers to it. For instance – a group of players is dispatched to destroy a catapult that’s raining heavy fire all over the battleground.

Catapults are heavily guarded, but once you finally break through to them and get them to – let’s say 50% HP, another mini boss shows up, casts a defensive barrier on the catapults, and enemy engineers rush to fix the damaged catapults. You must kill the mentioned mini boss as quickly as possible, but it’s not as easy as it sounds because he evades, heals and uses all sorts of CC – slows, knock backs etc.

Was just talking off of top of my head, but yeah, more complexity and depth, PLEASE. I crave for it. Same applies for dungeons, same applies to PvP. I hate simplicity and shallowness in video games. GW2 is better than this, it’s up to ANet to justify our beliefs.

Great idea, I do fear that people simply won’t bother though. Why spend so much time doing that when you can just spam your AOE and get loot and get the same reward in the end anyway? There’s a reason people zerg the easy, straight-forward events and avoid the ones that actually require coordination and are different. I mean, no one kills the champion shark in Orr.

Tradewind.6913:

RoRo.8270:

Why do people keep using the term free to play for buy to play games? What is so difficult about it?

Does it really matter?

Yes. XBox games aren’t free to play, they require you to buy it. GW2 isn’t free to play, they require you to buy it.

Free to play games are games that rely EXCLUSIVELY of selling cosmetics, services, or for web-browser games, power.

The key difference here, which can actually be noted in game, is that in GW2 you are able to convert gold into gems, which would not be the case if it was FREE to play. They already made a large amount of money selling the game, so they don’t have to rely on selling gems.

muthax.4720:

Psilocin.1435:

Alice.8694:

How about rats in a box?

WoW’s mechanics are so brutally dependant on skinner’s box. That it is borderline disturbing.

GW2’s PvP is so poorly implemented that there is no element of true player skill or tactics involved.

See, a horrible generalization that is false. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.

That’s it for me though. If you want to reply with another worthless post without any structural or logical arguement to back it up, it’s simply pointless for anyone to continue this discussion. And here people are complaining about the “WoW-fanboys’” idiotic generalizations that aren’t even based on reality. Oh, the irony. I guess people are right. There’s no middle-ground on official forums. You either get stupid fanboys who make no attempt to keep a civilized discussion going, or you get idiotic haters who believe that anything that doesn’t cater to them is wrong.

I don’t understand why you get so angry if people complain about wowkiddies: that term indicates wow players from wrath on that tend to want everything and NOW! and that will go to new games and start complaining that the game isn’t like wow and trying to force the devs to turn it into a wowclone (and then generally leave).

No one is saying nothing about wow players PER SE. By the way, I agree 100% on the last part of your post but that same sentence seems to apply more to the so called ’wowkiddies"

I said I would leave, but I actually see the benefit of clarifying here. What Alice did, and several others do, is to refer to the entire game WoW, as something mind-boggling boring, tedious, addicting and so on. It’s the fact that they talk as if the entire game is something bad, and GW2 is everything right, when it’s obvious that everyone has their own taste. I don’t even believe the term “wowkiddie” or “wowfanboy” has been used in this thread. What has happened on the other hand, is that they keep talking about the PVE and PVP of WoW as if it’s something horrible and the source of everything that is wrong with new games nowadays. When it is, in fact, just THEIR PERSONAL OPINION.

If they want to be taken seriously, which I really hope they want to, as I’d love to keep discussing the pros and cons of WoW, GW2 and everything between heaven and earth, they need to stop doing that. People have different preferences. Some prefer the PVE in WoW, some the PVE in GW2. Some prefer the PVP in WoW, some the PVP in GW2. And that’s reality. GW2 isn’t worse or better. Neither is WoW. What we can talk about is what specific aspects we would prefer to see in GW2, because that is what is relevant. No one cares if they believe that WoW is a horrible game. Absolutely NO ONE. What we do care about is what they would like to see changed in GW2, or what they would like to see unchanged. What they think GW2 succeeds in doing, and what it could need improving on. That is fun to talk about. Both the praising and the hating of WoW has just become old, and it has no place on this forum unless it is to analyze GW2’s current state.

This thread has potential, and I’ll keep my eye on it. I just want people to get out of this evil circle that they seem so caught into, and start actually contributing instead of reducing every single thread into either mindless bashing of either WoW or GW2.

Alice.8694:

How about rats in a box?

WoW’s mechanics are so brutally dependant on skinner’s box. That it is borderline disturbing.

GW2’s PvP is so poorly implemented that there is no element of true player skill or tactics involved.

See, a horrible generalization that is false. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.

That’s it for me though. If you want to reply with another worthless post without any structural or logical arguement to back it up, it’s simply pointless for anyone to continue this discussion. And here people are complaining about the “WoW-fanboys’” idiotic generalizations that aren’t even based on reality. Oh, the irony. I guess people are right. There’s no middle-ground on official forums. You either get stupid fanboys who make no attempt to keep a civilized discussion going, or you get idiotic haters who believe that anything that doesn’t cater to them is wrong.

Tusuri.3178:

What I blame is a kind of playing mindset, which was arguably introduced in the WoW era, that consists basically in the application of the FPS/Arcade gaming methodology to the MMORPG field. In this sense, everything related to immersion, lore, RP, complex player interaction, intelectual challenge and, in general, anything related to the use of imagination is disregarded. The only thing that actually matters, as in any good arcade, is to achieve maximum XP in minimum time.

MMORPGs were not designed with that philosophy in mind. The very acronym gives you a hint of what is this about: Massive Multiplayer Online -Role Playing- Game.

I’ve been in the MMORPG scene for a long time and I can say that there was a before-and-after WoW. The appealing point of WoW was that, no matter you were mentally handicapped or a chimp, you could be be considered a good player as long as you could smash the rotations and memorize the scripted fights. It supposed a massive dumbing-down and linearization from previous MMORPGs. This is, on the other hand, a big reason for its success as the MMORPG genre was opened to the “lower-common-denominator” type of players. With WoW came as well the glorification of macros and add-ons that are not less than permitted cheating.

The consecuence is that we have a pool of players that cannot conceive another way of playing. Even worst, many of them believe they are skilled players which, of course, they are not.

Blizzard played its cards really well, focusing on game addiction (the eternal treadmill for better gear) as the main motivation for playing.

Besides the addiction argument, I freak out at these people as I don’t understand why they play MMORPGs when they could be playing Pac-Man and get the same feelings.

Anyway, this is my opinion and, after all, this is a free world. My sincerest suggestion is that:

- If you want a linear, gear based progression game, you can find a lot of WoW clones in the market. There are a lot of Diablo clones as well that focus on the gear grind and stats based progression.

- For the rest of us (and I assure you we are legion), that are more interested in the immersion and open-world aspects, we have a new home here.

You make some good points, but I just can’t take you seriously when you reduce millions of fellow gamers who happen to enjoy different aspects of the MMORPG genre to mindless zombies. I could do the exact same thing about GW2 players, but it would add nothing to the discussion.

Stark.1350:

I don’t see any “major flaws”.

I’m gonna try to list a couple of flaws while trying to remain as neutral as possible.

- SPvP is currently lacking content. No rating system; hard to play with friends; lack of game modes; way too many pets, turrets, clones, summoned stuff (TG); animations aren’t clear enough to make out what is going on; some maps are generally unfun to play on because of design flaws (Ruins of Caledkfjdkfjs), sharks ruin underwater combat, people abusing the dip up and down thing in water so it takes 20 seconds to kill them.

- Orr is severly bugged and doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Events are either mindless zergs, or people don’t bother with them at all because the server has a low population. A lot of events never fail, so you only see half the content. Several skill points are bugged, hindreing people from Map Completion. Risen are everywhere, they have a lot of CC, a lot of health, which leads to frustration on the players part as it becomes tiring in the length.

- Personal story should’ve been tested extensively during beta. People are experiencing dialogue that never appears, there seems to be bugs on a lot of the different quests, blocking progress. I personally experienced this three times, which rendered three hours of gameplay worthless. Those are just the bugs, I won’t go into the quality of the personal quest here.

- WvW has some issues as well. Large queues, or lack of players. That depends on the server you play on, but some people have to wait up to several hours to get to participate, others don’t even bother because there server has such a low population that they will just lose regardless. If there are large battles going on, mobs and players turn invisible to reduce framerate lag(?), which leads to frustrating experiences like believing you are fighting one person, then realizing you are in fact fighting ten.

- Dungeons have no immediate or distinctive rewards. Tokens are a grind, you don’t get that “holy cow, that’s awesome, totally worth my time!” feeling when completing a dungeon. Just adding a 100% chance of getting a rare at the end of each run would suffice for now. At least then you know you have something definite to look forward at the end of the run, something which you can see and use immediately.

- TP is undeniably not optimal when it comes to anything. A lot of it is not inituitve. There are way too few advanced search options, which often leaves you having to filter through tens of pages to find that one thing you are looking for. A lot of people, me included, are experiencing an inability to use it at times or always. Sometimes, it just shuts down for me, and I have to restart my client to be able to use it.

- There are a lot of number tweaking that needs to be done, however, this is easy to fix so I won’t go into that.

alcopaul.2156:

Why are there no variations in basketball? all you got is a ball and 2 rings?

That’s a terrible analogy, sorry. PvP covers such a large variation of game modes across hundreds of games. Starcraft 2, League of Legends, Dota 2, Battlefield, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, even basic flash based web-browser games have are entirely Player versus Player focused or have elements of it.

If you said “Why are there no variations in sports? all you got is-…” Oh wait, never mind, that doesn’t work, because there are thousands of different sports you can participate in out there, and they’re all entertaining. Even within “ball-sports” there are hundreds of variations! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket and handball just to name the ones that are most popular.

So there really is no variation in SPvP. There’s only one mode, when there are tens, if not hundreds of variations they could have implemented as well. Conquest would be the equivelant of basketball. It’s one spesific mode within SPvP, while basketball is one spesific mode within ball-sports.

I don’t disagree with your post. What you describe here would be the perfect MMO. Unfortunatley, GW2 isn’t. Maybe they’ll be able to fix some of it, but right now, it’s basically standing still, moving out of the fire and auto-attacking the boss along with fifty other players. If they have to reduce the mechanical difficulity of boss encounters because you no longer have clear roles present in the game, then I personally believe it’s a shame, because doing Ulduar in WoW, was one of the best gaming experience I’ve ever had.

If Blizzard makes a new MMO, I would move on to that instantly. I think they did a lot of things right in WoW, but unfortunately, the game has run its course and is now outdated and dried out. GW2 is nice because there is no subscription fee, if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t last for long.

Orr is basically an excersice in gathering, getting from point to point and generally accomplishing things while trying to kill as few mobs as possible.

Unless a DE is going on, it will usually take twenty minutes before I bother killing one of the mobs. As I’m a thief, I’ll just shadowstep, dodge, heartseeker, stealth heal around to avoid mobs. There’s no freaking risen, haha, good one, to bother with them. They take too long to kill without being fun or engaging. If I do take the time to kill it, it will respawn in twenty seconds, and I’ll most likely pull another one anyway.

Every single Spectral Weapon skill point keeps getting bugged. They should just be replaced with Place of Power, Commune skill-points for the time being. It’s really annoying not being able to finish the map because the last skill-point you need is constantly bugged.

Or they simply don’t care if they get one silver or eighty-five copper for an item. Sure, in the long run it adds up, but just throwing everything you have on the TP, not having to go to a vendor, and then eventually seeing that one gold you can collect is enough incentive to not sell to vendor.

Eochaidh.4106:

I know the queue is bad, but this is world completion. It’s only natural you have to get into some PvP for it.

The issue is with the queues, not world completion itself.

I don’t have issues with queues. I have never been placed in a queue when I try to get into WvW. But my server sucks. We never win, and we never have the things I need to get 100% World Completion. If we are placed against an opponent that’s superior than us on Friday, that means I’ll have to wait another week to be able to finish…

I don’t think a lot of people realize how problematic it will become once week long matches start. Even right now, a lot of people see their World Completion progress halted because of WvW.

So you have completed the entire map, the only thing you have left is WvW. Now, to simplify it, there are three possible scenarios you can face.

1) Your server is either winning, losing or tied with the other servers. Doesn’t matter, you’re stuck in queues and as a result you find yourself stuck. You can’t get 100% World Completion.

2) Your server sucks. You keep losing, and as a result, a lot of the points of interests, skill points and vistas you need are inaccesible to you. Doesn’t matter if you get into WvW in the first place, you’ll never be able to get 100% World Completion because your server can’t capture the keeps and forts you have left.

3) Your server is either good, or it faces some of the low-populated servers, and as a result, you control a lot of the map. What you don’t control, you might capture in an hour or two. Good for you.

This is a drastic change from what most people are used to. With every single other zone you have completed so far, you dictate the pace at which you wish to progress. Want to take it slow? Sure, go ahead. Want to rush through it? Feel free. But never ever, do you find yourself, INCAPABLE of making progress. This is exactly what WvW does right now. No matter how you go about it, you, as an individual is completely incapable of dictating how you want to progress. This might simply have been an over-sight from ANet’s side, but now that it’s become obvious and clear, it needs to go. It so anti-climatic to have that 93% World Completion and then find yourself unable to do anything to finish it.

When week long matches begin, it will get worse. Right now, at the very least, you switch location a lot, you face new opponents, thus you will, through patience, and being lucky with queue times, be able to make some progress. However, when those week long matches kick in, this stops. My server is not good. I’m pretty sure we haven’t won yet, and right now we’re third place, with 15k points while first place has 70-80k points. What ANet is telling me now, is that I might have to wait weeks, even months, before I’ll be able to get 100% World Completion. Not cool.

It’s become apparent that there are two opinions that are shared among the majority of players.

- Dungeons are fine as they are. They were intended as a challenge, and shouldn’t become mindless grinds that anyone can pull off without any strategy or coordination whatsoever.

- Dungeons are too hard, and yield too little reward for the effort required. It’s not fun to die countless times and then end up with less than you started with when you eventually get around to finish it.

There’s no right or wrong here. Both of those opinions are completely warranted. There has to be some PVE content that is challenging and that players can complete together. Still, we have to ask ourselves, should all the dungeons, both story and explorable, be this challenging?

A lot who voice their opinionon on how dungeons should indeed be a challenge, and should remain as they are, seem to think that the changes the “casual” player asks for, will hurt the content available to them. They wish to be challenged, because if it becomes too easy, every single run will become a chore, and farming the same dungeon hundreds of times, will become something mind-boggling boring and tedious. And I understand that, I want to be challenged too. However, even though I am level 80 and have 85% world completion, and thus obviously have a grip of the game, I’m a tad afraid of joining a group. And why is that? Because there is no entry-level dungeon. There is no dungeon that is obviously designed purely to teach new players, especially those who are new to MMORPGs, how to handle basic mechanics. I keep hearing about how you shouldn’t group up with randoms, and how important it is to be coordinated, that it ends up scaring me away from even attempting. I don’t want to be the guy who has to have everything explained to him. The guy who brings the rest of the group down.

What a lot of people are asking for, isn’t an overall “nerf” to dungeons. Sure, there are some numbers that should be tweaked, but there should be challenging content as well. I am looking forward to facing that when that time comes, but I wish there were a couple of easy dungeons, that would let pugs with “sub-optimal” group setups progress without having to die as frequently. I want to be able to join four other randoms, and feel sure that we will be able to progress, no matter how inexperienced they are.

Most people think dungeons are fun. Sure, some might prefer PVP to PVE, but doing a dungeon every once in a while is something most players would consider a rewarding experience. However, just as some people enjoy zergfests in WvW, and others prefer intense, one-on-one combat in tPVP, some people want to play easier PVE content, while others prefer hard and challenging content. It is not wrong to prefer either, but it is wrong to think that YOUR PREFERENCE should be the one ANet should cater to.

TL;DR – Let there be easy and challenging dungeons. Needs to be entry-level dungeons so noobs can get a feel for what the harder content will be like, but still keep a good chunk of challenging dungeons (explorable) so those who wish to be challenged and pushed to the max can do that as well.