Guild Wars 2

GameVeight.2745:

If you really want a penalty then do it yourself. Reroll on death, buy an Orichalcum Mining Pick and destroy it, salvage your armor when it breaks, nothing is stopping you.

rincewind.9528:

Why can’t we have a relaxed and fun game? Why everything must be hard and mean?

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the people promoting death penalties actually don’t want them for themselves but for the “less worthy” players around them. The mindset expressed in several of the posts in this thread talks about “forcing people to improve”, but I doubt the people actually consider themselves among those who have to seriously improve to not be hit hard by the penalties.

It may just be an unconcious reaction, but most (if not all) of the pro-death-penalty arguments I have seen in this post come down to “I want better rewards than the worthless casual over there who can’t even survive”.

I know quite a few people in game who are constantly complaining these days how much work it is to get their daily achievements done (preferably all of them to not miss out on a single ap), pick up the daliy boss event bonus chests, do the daily crafting, harvest the daily nodes in their home instances, pick up the daily jp chests from jps where they parked a ton of alts, and maybe do some daily dungeon paths or fractal brackets to round out the grind. These people literally spend hours each night grinding out their daily bonus rewards that they feel forced to pick up and throw a fit if they happen to miss out on one of the rewards or another (due to lack of time or simply forgetting one step or the other).

Of course, it is their personal problem that they feel the need to pick up any daily bonus this game offers to them instead of just playing whatever they enjoy. But adding yet another daily bonus for whatever activity that possibly makes more people feel they miss out on if they don’t do whatever quest it is than it makes people feel additionally rewarded seems counter-productive to me.

The core of this game is not quest-driven but free exploration. You go out and do whatever you feel like, and are (in theory) comparatively rewarded no matter what you choose to do. There already are a lot of extra carrots around for people who prefer to be motivated by the rewards to do stuff. I honestly prefer to just go out and do whatever I want and to feel that I spend my time just as “productive” as people doing other things, instead of the game dangling (too many) daily carrots in my face all the time.

Extra daily quests for the sake of questing (like small scavenger hunts or solo bounties) would be right up my alley, but please no extra rewards. If the rewards are in the same league as regular dynamic events and possibly jp chests I’m all for it, but if it’s a reward system that adds to the “daily grind” for people then I don’t want anything like it.

Player model collision would also open doors to people griefing others by blocking access to places and events. There are spots where it would only take a few people moving strategically to block others from even entering events/attacking bosses.

Redden.5869:

I’m trying HOT for the first time and navigating the maps is a freakking nightmare. Imo when you play a game you should relax and enjoy it, but most of those maps are so kitten annoying and full of hordes of enemies that constantly harass you that I get so kittened to the point I just quit the game.

I agree with you that gameplay should be relaxing and enjoyable. But different people enjoy different things, and find different activities relaxing.

I’m as casual as they come, pretty old for gamer standards, with fulltime job and family (including two very “special” teenagers), house, and whatever else you can think of. I play this game whenever I find the time, to relax, to enjoy myself, to chat with friends. I refuse to grind or play any content I don’t enjoy.

That said, I love the HoT maps, and the Tangled Depths and Draconis Mons are probably my most favourite maps of the whole game. I love the exploration available on those maps, diving in blindly and exploring until I have figured out where to go and how to get to places. I love working my way around groups of mobs rather than just running through without paying attention to what is walking around.

Sometimes I die. Sometimes it’s a nuisance that I want to go places and can’t just walk straight in. But most of the time those maps are just so much more enjoyable and relaxing than going straight to an objective and being done with it.

To me, the journey really is the reward. That’s why I play MMOs in my free time, rather than just watching tv. I want to explore, I want to puzzle, I want to interact. This game sure is good for that, that’s why I’m playing this game to relax and enjoy myself. If it wasn’t like that, I’d rather find something else to spend my time with and leave this game to the people that enjoy this kind of thing.

That said, of course I’m hoping that PoF will give me more of what I love about the game, including multi-layered maps and true exploration.

warbignime.4610:

Rasimir.6239:

…

Well it all go backs to Zerker problem, as bad as holy trinity is, it is still way better than all zerker.

That’s your opinion. In my opinion, the holy trinity is a lot worse than the so-called “zerker problem”, since out current system allows a lot more variety and playstyles than a trinity system ever would. If people want to restrict themselves to preconceived roles and fight choreographies (“challenging boss fights” in trinity games usually end up with every one-trick pony having to know exactly what part they are supposed to be playing, without much variation … aggro this boss, heal that tank, interrupt at that point …), they can very well do that in this game, too.

Adjusting on the fly to ever-changing combat roles, and making fights work with different classes and abilities (and something other than “freeze this, burn that”, which is very much possible in this game) is much more fun to me than any forced trinity roles could ever be again. I’ve played endgame raids in trinity games, in different roles, and I’d much prefer duoing Arah on different class combinations, or going through it with a full party of casual guildies that haven’t been near the dungeon before. So much is possible in this game that a trinity system just wouldn’t allow, no way a trinity could ever beat that.

All trinity would do for this game is try to compete with a ton of similar games out there for the same pool of players, and leave players like me who enjoy the freedom and flexibility of the non-trinity system stranded without a decent game again.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Malediktus.9250:

I like mastery points.

There are 17 more tyria mastery points than required to max them all. So there are plenty of options
For HoT there are 22 more mastery points than required. Good luck.

I did not know that, this actually really disappoints me. There is no good reason to have extras since they’re not good for anything else.

Actually the extra points are good for the very thing they’re meant to be for: giving people variety when maxing their masteries. People like me who don’t much like worldboss events can gain their points while avoiding things like tequatl or tripple trouble, those that don’t like the story achievements in HoT can do jumping puzzles instead, and so on.

To me, allowing people to pick and choose (to an extend), whether it’s hero points, mastery points, or whatever, is a very important part of this game. Forcing me to get every single point available or else having to choose which benefit (mastery) to get for my account would really put a damper on the fun I’m having in game. So I’d say the “extra” points are very valuable indeed.

Jumpin Lumpix.6108:

MadBomber.3719:

sorry man 360 hours in 5 years is not a lot…

I’ve been playing games for 25 yrs now 500 hrs for me in wvw and I’ve mastered 99% of the game mode, telling me I need to spend another 1500 hrs is ridiculous when I’ve already mastered it after about 50 hrs.

You don’t have to spend any time in wvw if you don’t like to. The rewards aren’t meant as a sign of mastery. They are meant as an extra for people who play for the fun of it.

What would be gained for either ANet, the game mode, or the community you are playing in/with if you only play to grab the shinies via the most bearable (for you) route, then bow out again?

Disclaimer: I play wvw only casually, mostly with friends and guildies because I enjoy playing with them, which has brought me to roughly 650 ranks on my main account. I’m sure I’ll eventually get my hands on some goodies I’d like to have (there’s one of the mistforge hero’s weapon skins I’ve had my eye on ever since I didn’t have enough tickets to get it during the last wvw season), but if what I want costs more than I gain by playing and enjoying myself, then I’ll just do without it.

disclaimer: rant ahead with too many characters, so split into two posts

Jerus.4350:

A game should try to encourage players to master it. … it should encourage and try to train it’s players to use the resources available.

I’m very torn on this. Of course it’s useful to give the players the chance to learn and understand the game’s principles and master its mechanics. On the other side though, there’s only so far a game can go in training its players.

There’s a saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, and in a way, it applies here, too. “The game” can only teach those who want to learn. Many players in this game though are here not because they want to master the game’s mechanics, but rather because they want to immerse themselves in a fantasy world, and experience that world, rather than worry about its mechanics.

At 20, most people are probably very much into “optimising” their gameplay, the mechanics, and getting the “most” out of their game. But the older you get, the more real life changes you, the more your focus shifts, too. There’s jobs and families that challenge you to the fullest, and your desire to get “the most” out of a video game often takes a backseat. This is not to say that we “oldies” wouldn’t like to be able to master our games, too, and some do, but the majority tends to become realistic and not put as much emphasis at mastering our gaming as we did when we were half as old.

Personally, I’d love to be able to solo Lupi one day, but my reflexes (or possibly my latency, or most likely a combination of both) are so bad that I can’t even evade his kick 9 times out of 10, even if I see it coming every time. Maybe, if I spent every free minute practicing, I could get there one day. But that’s simply not worth it for me these days. 20 years ago, I would’ve love to do this (and did similar things in other games), but not today. Real life, in the form of family, job, and other stuff, just takes too much of my time and energy to devote enough to learn a video game to the max.

I’m already the odd one out among my guildies, many of which are close to my age or even older (some even in their 50s or early 60s). They all love the game for the world and the possibilities they have here, enjoy playing dungeons and fractals together (even if it takes close to an hour to get through one path of CoE), but want to enjoy the game without spending a long time banging their head against “hardcore” barriers that need a lot of learning and training before they get to enjoy the content locked behind it.

My friend list on the other hand is filled with people I enjoy being around because they share my interest in getting down to the mechanics of this game, mastering the dungeons and other content, improving class and character knowledge and understanding. None of these people is anywhere near my age though, in fact, a lot of them aren’t even half my age. And I do notice that compared to them, I’m a slow learner, and often not nearly as tolerant of repeated failures, because my time is too precious to me to fill it with repeated frustration.

One of my guildies, a guy in his early 60, and in retirement already, once said to me: I’ve been through school and work life, I have learned and practiced a lot of things in my life. These days, I’m through with working and practicing, I just want to enjoy myself. There’s a good many people like that playing this game, people that more or less don’t like the game to train them, and don’t like to play games that require a lot of training to enjoy them.

These people are not necessarily bad, they simply are different. They have a different focus, and are willing to invest different things into this game and its community. You won’t find them in other games, not because those games are better at teaching their playerbase, but rather because they don’t have interest in games that require them to be taught to a level they don’t enjoy. They are however very much one of the demographics ANet targets with this game, and as such, have every right participate in it without being “taught” how to master the game’s mechanics.

The game can encourage the players all it wants, there simply are a lot of people that enjoy MMOs that don’t enjoy getting to the bottom of all its mechanics. Any MMO, including this one, is a complex thing, and mastering it takes a lot of time and brain power, something not every one is willing to invest. Personally, I love this game because it allows all different kinds of people to participate, and to invest different levels of “work” in mastering it.

To be honest, I like that titles are “pointless” regarding game-mechanics and rewards. I prefer them to be cosmetic and fit my character, rather than having to select a specific one because it gives the “best” boost. We already have guild boosts for things like +gold or +exp, personally I think that’s enough.

Would you mind explaining what changes in particular you are talking about?

As Batelle said, check your achievement tab in the hero panel. Mastery points in core Tyria (as well as many mastery points in HoT) are tied to a variety of achievements. The red “core Tyria” mastery point symbol marks every category that has points you haven’t yet earned, as well as the individual achievements. Same for HoT, except those have the familiar green symbol.

Define “rewarding”, please. What do you consider rewarding, and how would you expect a reward structure to be so that the “reward” of the challenging content is on the same value level as “reward” for other GW2 content?

The major complaint I see these days about the challenging content this game does have (no matter if it’s complex world bosses like thw or harder dungeons like high-level fractals) is that “it isn’t rewarding because no guaranteed skins and you get gold easier in other places”. This leads me to the conclusion that (many) people asking for challenging and rewarding content actually expect said content to have better rewards for other parts of the game, which indirectly forces people into that very content again.

It may not be a WoW-style gear treadmill, but it leads to the same situation: People are forced into a certain kind of content to get the “best” rewards and the bragging-rights attached, if you make rewards for that kind of content outstanding. And if you don’t make it outstanding but keep it in line with the rest of the game, a large part of the people calling for challenging content end up complaining that the content isn’t worth it because they get their shinies easier through other content.

You have to learn how to navigate the maps by trying to navigate them. There’s really no way around it.

Start out in Verdant Brink. If you’re there just when the day cycle starts (check the event timer by typing /wiki et ingame in your chat box), then head south and you’ll find the start of one of the event chains, the pale reaver outpost chain. Follow that chain all the way through to the end to get a tour through a large part of the southeast of VB, including unlocking the shrouded ruins waypoint.

Next time you’re there at daybreak, head north as far as you can go, then slightly west to the village of Yakka Itzl, where another event chain starts that will take you around that part of the map. A third chain (that covers the center of VB) starts at daybreak near the pact encampment waypoint which you’ll get to by playing through the HoT storyline.

There are two more meta event chains in VB starting at daybreak, one around the nobles camp at Faren’s Flyer waypoint, and one towards the northwest that is probably the most difficult to catch the beginning of since it starts in a cave in the middle of nowhere and only gets to its waypoint towards the end of the chain.

As long as you’re not comfortable with navigating around VB, try to avoid the zone during the night cycle. Aside from the fact that it’s dark, there are also a lot more mordrem around and no long event chains that can lead you to places. Also, try not to beeline for pois, vistas, or hero points unless you see the way or have an idea of how to get there. Until you’ve got the feeling of how things flow (and how event chain status might effect the map accessibility) trying to force your way to an unknown point is a certain recipe for frustration.

Once you’re comfortable with (or tired of ) Verdant Brink, move on to the Auric Basin. The event chains here start after the battle of Tarir, also known as the Octovine event (check the event timer again if you want to know when the cycle starts). There is one chain each in the north, west, south, and east of Tarir. If I’m not mistaken, northwatch and southwatch chains start at their respective waypoints just outside the city gates. I’m not quite sure where the other two chains start, but they should be easy enough to find, since AB isn’t quite as twisted as the other two maps.

By the way, if you are in one of the new maps and unsure where to go, the current outpost event status including any active event will always be shown at the top right of your screen, so you always have at least some idea where the action will be closest to you.

Once you get through AB and want to go even further, Tangled Depths basically works like the other two maps. There are four outposts (ogre, nuhoch, rata novus, scar), in this case corresponding with the four lanes that feed into the ley line confluence, the central waypoint of this map in the very south. TD, however, isn’t quite as accessible at first as the other two maps, although once you’ve figured it out it becomes a favourite map for many people.

The easiest way to deal with this map is probably to follow the HoT story that leads you past the Teku Nuhoch and Rata Novus waypoints, as well as the ley line confluence and dragons passage points. Alternatively, you can get to the ley line confluence point by following the Nuhoch or Rata Novus lanes which are accessible from their respective outposts, either by nuhoch wallow or a short walk away.

Leave Teku Nuhoch to the southwest and head straight south, or leave Rata Novus through a tunnel to the southwest, and you’ll eventually get to the corresponding lane. Now that I come to think of it, the exits from Ogre camp and SCAR camp to their lanes are southwest of each camp, too, so while in TD, heading southwest out of either of the four camps/outposts should set you well on the way down to the central lanes.

All of TD is accessible without the nuhoch wallows mastery (nuhoch line tier 2), but the map has a good number of those that make navigating much easier. There is, among others, a nuhoch wallow connecting each of the four lanes to its corresponding outpost and waypoint, which makes moving around much easier, so you might consider leveling the nuhoch line until you have the wallows unlocked before you dive deep into TD.

Just like Nuhoch Wallows for TD, Exalted Markings (exalted line tier 1) are recommended to make traveling through AB easier, and gliding, updrafts (gliding t2) and bouncing mushrooms are good to have on all these maps. If you have those masteries unlocked you’ll be able to get to most parts of the new maps. A very few areas are locked out if you don’t have poison lore (Itzel t4) or leyline gliding (gliding t6), but you can easily come back to those later on.

Good luck in the jungle! It is confusing at first, but once you learn your way around the maps you’ll have a hard time going back to the plain old core Tyria maps. The jungle maps are just so much more fun to be once you’ve learned them .

You can pretty much play the game, especially the dungeons, in any gear/traits/utilities you like, as long as the group as a whole is consistent and adapts strategies that work with their gear/builds. What you can’t do is mix and match without regards for the weak points of the individual builds.

Five berserker-geared players that know how to adapt their builds, how to use their dodges/blocks/blinds/whatever and understand the content can breeze through even the toughest dungeons and win. Replace a couple of those players with other builds that are used to other strategies, and things will fall apart rapidly because the one weakness of most berserker-geared builds is that they won’t survive drawn-out fights.

I’ve got two accounts with dungeon master titles, all dungeons done myself with friends/guildies without berserker gear, often with wvw gear and full support builds on the team. We took our time to get through each dungeon, found our strategies to deal with whatever came up, and had a lot of fun. Any of us would at the same time have easily crashed a “berserker” party simply because we couldn’t contribute to the “soft” defenses the full-zerker strategie employs, namely killing the mobs quickly enough to not run out of dodge/block/cc/whatever.

I’ve also got full berserker gear on my two mesmers by now, and am in the process of gearing up the rest of my characters, and it’s a lot of fun, learning different strategies and seeing them work with the right team composition, just like the first “round” of dungeon experiences was. Both is viable, both is different kinds of challenges and fun, it’s just that mixing without thinking simply doesn’t work. I’ve still got a ton to learn about different strategies to adapt with a damage-only group, but that’s what I enjoy in this kind of game, learning new ways of doing things with new (or rather different) tools.

If running in and praying I beat my enemy in the first shot isn’t your style, don’t to it. Play with like-minded people, but accept that not all gear and trait set-ups work with yours, and not all people want to play with a set-up that matches what you enjoy. This game, unlike others, actually allows you to play those dungeons and succeed in them with your prefered playstyle, or else I never would’ve gotten through all dungeons casually.

It’s really not much different than other games … I’ve played my share of MMO endgames, and when you really look at it, the hardest challenges in other games eventually came down to tank stack max survivability, healer stack max outgoing healing, rest stack max damage, too. Actually, if I compare it to the last game I played, it was much more restricitve, since stacking max whatever really was the only way to beat the hardest challenges there, where in gw2 you can succeed with a variety of set-ups, many of which work just fine without max damage.

Berserker certainly is not the way for everyone. I have a lot of (casual) friends in this game that would never feel comfortable with the kind of challenge the berserker gear and related playstyles pose. They enjoy the game, including all of the dungeons, in their prefered gear (and don’t care if it takes them twice as long to do it … some of them actually prefer to rp-walk through Twilight Arbor and enjoy the scenery to counting out their dungeon tokens in the end ).

Accept that not all people enjoy the game the way you do, look for groups that enjoy what you like (through friends-list, guild or properly labled lfgs), and don’t worry what others do. This game’s dungeons certainly are accessible to most, if not all, players, despite the fact that a large part of the vocal dungeon forum posters prefers one style of gear/play.

Just keep on playing the parts of the game that you enjoy, and one day you’ll find that the gold has piled up and you are able to buy some things you thought unreachable before .

I started playing about three months after launch, and for the longest time I felt poor and was unable to afford stuff (like exotic equipment) that every ordinary player around me seemed to buy with their spare change. But I slowly learned more about the game and how to handle my characters, survive in high-level areas and events, do dungeons and fractals and enjoy WvW, and the gold (and other currencies) did start to accumulate.

I don’t think I started seriously thinking about exotic armor before I had played the game for half a year, if not more. I just didn’t have the resources, and since I hate to farm anything and try to spend my free time (what little of it there is) with things I enjoy, I found that yellows were much more affordable and adequate for what I enjoyed in this game (world exploration, events, casual dungeons with guildies).

Try to take your time. You can’t really go wrong with anything you are doing in this game, pretty much every activity will help you gather equipment, materials and currencies, and eventually you will have aquired enough to improve your equipment piece by piece. Contrary to popular belief (in part due to other MMOs where you do need specific equipment to participate in a large part of the “endgame”) there is (almost) no content in this game inaccessible if you are not equipped fully exotic/ascended.

Learn your class(es) and the abilities you have, how to use your weapons and skills to maximum efficiency, and how the game works in general. That knowledge will be much more helpful to you than getting the most expensive equipment right from the start. Eventually you will want better equipment of course, but once you have aquired skill and knowledge, the gold will come naturally, and you will be able to upgrade to whatever equipment you desire.

winterchillz.2564:

Just coming out of SE pt1 “ZERK WARR/ELE/GUARD” party. Decided to pug a dungeon for dem lulz .

Next time you decide to pug SE please give me advance warning. I still need a ton of tokens from there to outfit the thousands of asura that I leveled to 80 in the last few weeks when real life made me too casual to seriously run dungeons .

Back to general dungeon topics: I had a very casual dungeon weekend trying to level my daughter’s elementalist from 73 (I think) to 80. After two paths of AC we were left with a 4-man group, and since my husband was busy preparing lunch, I spontaneously decided to hand over the elementalist to my daughter on dad’s computer, jump on my mesmer and drag her into the dungeons with us.

We then proceeded to do AC 3 and TA up with an 11-year-old who had never been in a dungeon (or even in any serious group content) before and had pretty much only stumbled around with her elementalist until then (took her 1.5 years to even get to level 73). It went surprisingly smooth, I only had to take over for the TA skips, the rest (including producing fgs and icebow whenever mom told her to do so ) went better than with some pugs I have encountered.

Many thanks to winterchillz and his guildies who went through those dungeons with us! You made a young lady very happy (and her old mum enjoyed herself, too ).

Just some quick corrections on a few of your points:

2) You’ve got three different skins (drop, crafting, karma merchants) per armor weight for each of the level brackets 5-20, 25-35 and 40-50, plus a set of cultural armor somewhere in the late 30s I think, and a set of rare drops starting around lvl 39(?). That’s a total of 11 different skin sets available to any given character at level 40 that I can think of off the top of my head (not counting gem store and pvp reward tracks). Not exactly what I’d call “no variety of armor design”.

4) With a class/combat system as flexible as this game’s, you can’t just throw five random people in an instance and expect things to work and everyone to have fun. It’s much easier in a system where you know that you’ve got key roles in every group (tank, healer) and can random-match groupes based on that.

Personally, I like how our lfg allows for groups to at least give a basic idea about what kinds of people they’re looking for to play with, and for me it usually works out great, regardless of whether I’m looking for a group to join, or for people to fill up my group.

7) Take a closer look at the upper left of the crafting menu. There’s a search box that lets you type in a string of letters that will only show you recipies that have the search text either in their name or in the name of one of the components. If I’ve got too many onions in my bank, I’ll type in onion and see which of the recipies my cook knows look like a good place to dump the extra onions. If I want to craft an ascended berserker weapon, I type in Zojja in my weaponsmith’s crafting menu and only see the recipies related to that task.

Right next to the search box you’ll find a drop-down menu that allows you to refine the display even more, by checking/unchecking what crafting level(s) and/or what rarety of result you want to see (may actually be easier to just check “ascended” than do the “zojja” search I mentioned above), as well as a few extra conditions (have materials, gain experience).

Search box plus filter options should give you enough flexibility to customize your crafting menu to your tastes.

8) Substantial rewards are only substantial to the point where everyone gets them … and things like zone completion and story missions are achievements many people do, thus making the rewards you get from them somewhat common-place. It’s hard to award something in that spot that feels special.

On the other hand, I completed two zones on my mesmer this weekend, which got me a stack of 40 iron ore, a stack of 40 cotton scraps and two blacklion keys. I wouldn’t exactly call that a joke (and I would’ve even been happy with 2x 40 logs and two transmutation charges, but this definitely is better).

Mishi.7058:

Captain Unusual.9163:

Why would you get the points for achievements that you didn’t do? It’s not like you can’t go through the process to unlock another precursor.

And what about those of us who crafted our Legendary?

What about them? The points for the precursor collections are given for doing the collections, not just having the final result. If you want the points but not the precursor, do the collections and sell the result. The existing precursors will still be tradeable no matter if you got them through precursor crafting or other sources.

Hey Gaile,

Thanks for trying to bring reason into this chaos.

• You may be surprised to know this (I know I was) but very few people bought gems at smaller denominations than the first one offered in the new system. That’s not to say they never did, nor that there wouldn’t be the desire to do so. But overall, the current options were selected based on player purchases in the past.

Thinking back, I know I rarely bought less gems in one go, but I mostly did try to buy the specific amount of gems I needed/thought useful at the time, which often were more or less than 400/800/1200. Currently I’ve got 795 gems on one account, 115 on the other, after purchasing some stuff on sale that I hadn’t calculated into my previous gem conversions. I was considering getting a new character slot soonish, but to top of the 5 gems I’m short, the new system would make me “waste” gold on 395 extra gems that would then be sitting in my account wallet with nothing that I feel worth buying (at the moment) in that price range.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• The team is going to listen to your feedback and, if and when it’s practical and desirable, they can look towards adjusting the new system to better meet your needs.

So please keep your thoughts coming on the new system. Feel free to make suggestions but please, keeping them constructive would be very much appreciated.

I wasn’t really happy with the old conversion, because it would only let me input coin, but I’d have to play around to figure out the right amount of coin to get the number of gems I wanted. In that way the new system of choosing the amount of gems to buy (rather than gold to spend) is preferable. What I would wish to see (especially considering the thoughts I’ve outlined above) is an additional option to free-form input the number of gems I want to buy. Let me exchange gold for 705 gems, so I’ve got enough for my new character slot and the new outfit, or 505 if I decide to go for the krytan armor skins instead. Don’t make me feel I need to “waste” my gold on gems I can’t currently use just to get the gems I want.

The same goes for the gem-to-gold exchange, really (even though I never use that ): allow people to put in the exact amount of gems they want to convert, to give those left with uneven gem amounts a chance to spend it all instead of being left with “useless” gems that they have no means to convert down.

Olvendred.3027:

Apparently I have some serious mental issues. What a way to find out

Don’t worry, you are not alone .

Personally I’m closing in on my 6th yellow (gold) star (8% to go), and I still enjoy taking my characters out into the world and going all over places I haven’t been to in a while. And guess what? I usually find something new, a formerly unexplored (by me) cave, a hidden chest, an event (or a whole chain) I hadn’t noticed before (or simply forgotten). If I get friends/guildies to join me for part of the journey it’s even more fun.

Map exploration to me is a great way to pass the time when I’m not in a mood for dungeons, WvW or PvP. I’d rather map-explore than run the world boss train or farm Dry Top events any day. Getting rewards in the end is a nice bonus, but not the reason for me to go out exploring in the first place. I do it simply because it’s what I find fun.

ShadowStep.3640:

Now I have to spend forever, to simply get there to unlock that waypoint

Since complaints like these appear regularly on this forum, I did a little experiment a couple of weeks ago to figure out how long “forever” actually is. I created a new character and did nothing but run to open up all waypoints (and use a few tomes if I was too low level for the next area.

The result: It took me a little less than 10 hours to unlock all waypoints that are part of map completion. Just by running across the map, next to no fighting or anything else involved. Actually there was just one waypoint that turned out somewhat difficult to get, and that was the one in the very north-eastern corner of Frostgorge Sound that noone needs anyway, and this was on a lvl 71 character in a lvl 80 area … even Cursed Shore was easy to unlock at lvl 72/73.

So “forever” to unlock specific waypoints on lvl 80 characters really isn’t the case. As someone above said, you can unlock the racial cities (plus Ebonhawk) in a matter of minutes, and to access the first four dungeons all you need to do is step out of one of the starter cities as long as someone in your party has the dungeon waypoint.

Just consider how many waypoints you could already have unlocked in the time it took you to post this …

Nick Lentz.6982:

YOU CAN farm that all you want and take your time. BUT IT WILL ALWAYS be cheaper to get it on the tp. by selling the materials you get for your pre.

Who cares?

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who likes to gamble at the forge had a streak and pulled out several “the legend” in a moderately short timespan. He didn’t intend to craft the Bifrost himself and was getting tired of putting them on the tp, so he offered one of them to me as a gift, knowing that I was thinking about crafting it.

I declined, just like I never considered getting one off the trading post, even if I’ve got enough resources to buy one out-right. Yet I’m very much considering doing the Bifrost precursor collections once I’ve gone through some of the other HoT content, simply because it looks like a fun way to occupy my time.

Getting in-game shinies is nice, but over three years of casual play I’ve collected enough shinies to get a heap of gold should I care to liquidate my assets, yet I don’t do it. Just as I don’t spend my time wondering about the “gold worth” of the activities I do in-game.

I’m a grown up with family and job that keep me occupied a lot. This game is my hobby, the time I spend to relax and enjoy myself. I don’t care to farm materials just to put them on the TP and exchange them for random gold. I don’t care to spend gold on shinies just to have a status symbol. I do care to spend my time playing stuff that amuses me, and precursor crafting looks just like the kind of stuff I’d enjoy, slowly gathering what I need during my play-time.

To me, a fun activity is infinitely more worth than efficient gold-gain that doesn’t amuse me. I don’t care if it’s cheaper to buy a pre than collect its pieces. Even if I got the precursor for free I’d still prefer the collection, since my fun is in collecting and crafting, not in possession.

Azhure.1857:

The -15% penalty, per death, isn’t “harsh” or “severe” in my book. Its not taking anything from your inventory, its not resetting you in experience gained, and its not game breaking. It also can be countered afterwards by gaining more experience.

It is taking one of the most valuable things I have: My time.

If I am working on content I have not mastered yet, whether it is a dungeon path my group hasn’t fully figured out, a solo-challenge like Liadri, or an Orr temple event where a sizable part of the participants doesn’t fully understand the event mechanics, if I fail (and die/wipe), I want to use what little time I have for playing to try again with an adjusted strategy.

Stat-penalties that I either have to wait or do other content (gain experience) to remove only serve to keep me from trying again with the best I can bring, and force me to spend my precious playtime on other things than the boss/event/whatever I had wanted to work on.

If the game penalizes me for trying challenging content in a way that seriously hinders my ability to keep trying, that content (and most likely that game) isn’t something I want to play. I love this game because it allows me to choose what part of it I want to play, instead of randomly restricting me from content just because I was unlucky, didn’t know the boss/event inside-out yet, or worst of all had an unlucky disconnect or family aggro at the wrong moment.

Depends on your playstyle and what kind of things you enjoy.

If you love exploring areas, finding new things around every corner, and looking for the veritable needle in the haystack (or forgotten mask in the trees ), HoT is for you.

If you love doing event chains that tell stories and require a bunch of people to cooperate at times, HoT is for you.

If you love huge map-wide meta events and world boss encounters that require more than just “press 1 and win”, HoT is for you.

If you enjoy scavenger hunts and collections, HoT is for you.

If you are fine with mobs that come in different sized packs and bring different abilities, making you adjust to fights out in the countryside and accept that you can’t just stroll past them all the time, then HoT is for you.

If you like to play just wherever the game sends you and jump into whatever event crosses your path, HoT is for you.

On the other hand:

If you like to have a clear way to a specific goal you want to reach right now, HoT can be frustrating, since there’s so much to do that not every path to every meta event, collection item, or resource, is open all the time.

If you prefer to farm for specific resource, HoT can be frustrating since most stuff is spread out and not easily farm-able (although that’s not so much different to the rest of the game).

If you feel like an experience bar has to filled optimally at all cost, HoT may not be for you, since concentrating on filling the mastery bars instead of taking in all of the stuff the expansion offers may quickly lead to a very grindy feeling.

If you are uncomfortable with a surrounding changing in difficulty (and even availability) based on the actions of all players on the map, HoT might not be for you, since all the new maps revolve about map-wide meta events that you don’t always can influence to the point where you’d like it to go.

If you don’t like the fact that certain parts (group events, champion hero points, etc.) might require a couple of other players to stroll by and participate, so won’t be available to you just the moment you stumble upon them, then HoT could hold some frustrating moments for you.

My personal opinion:

I love HoT. I’m the type of casual player that just jumps into the game whenever time allows (not that much with family and fulltime job) and do whatever fun things seem available at the time. There are a few collections and achievements I’d like to finish, but the base game has taught me that going for one thing specifically is (for me) a recipe for quick burn-out, while just playing what seems fun at the moment and going with the flow of the maps makes me end up with anything I’d want eventually, while having fun all the way.

On the other hand, I do like to learn my classes and come up against challenging content, and the HoT open world definitely is a good bit more challenging than anything core Tyria has ever thrown at me. Sometimes it does get frustrating, but then I’ll just go do something else and come back another day.

HoT is a full win in my book, but I can see how many people with different playstyles and priorities just don’t enjoy it as much as I do.

I feel like a kid on christmas day: so many new toys, I really don’t know what to play with first.

Since I got off work Friday afternoon, I’ve taken my first character through the new story all the way to the third map, played a couple of other characters into the first expansion map, did a bunch of fractals with different friends, registered our guild at the guild initiative and checked out what to do to claim our guildhall, unlocked 7 of 8 elite specs (18 hp missing for the last one) and their respective weapon collections, played a few rounds of Mad King’s labyrinth, unlocked some of the new collections, found a new pet for my ranger, and did a ton of other things.

I love navigating the new maps, and how they open up whenever you gain a new mastery. I love figuring out how to get to places, and what to do there. I love jumping and flying, even if it means having to try a bunch of times before I get the jumps right or hit the correct updrafts. I love the feeling that there’s sooo much yet to discover, and that there’s new stuff around every corner.

This was probably the first weekend in ages that I haven’t really checked forums or other games at all, because I was too busy trying to do everything at once . I even got up extra early this morning (horay for the end of daylight savings time) to get to work at 6:15 so that I may go home early this afternoon to keep on playing. Now if only time would pass as quickly at the office as it does when roaming the jungles …

Had a great weekend in game with (maybe too) many dungeon and fractal runs that I very much enjoyed. Ended the weekend last night with a very different kind of dungeon run: I took some of my casual guildies into Arah explorable path 3.

We had two longbow rangers (one even with bear pet ) that had never been in any explorable Arah path before, a staff elementalist who had only been through p4 once a while back, a guardian (fortunately with a good amount of Arah explo runs, although only in ranged/no-skipping parties), and myself on my full berserker mesmer. I actually dug out my greatsword for the run, as being the only one in melee just wouldn’t work, and of course I ended up to be the one to explain things (despite the fact that I don’t know p3 all that well myself).

It took us a bit over two hours to range down bosses (Lupicus included), clear out trash along the way (no skipping involved), and finally finish the ritual, but it was awesome fun. All three people that had (almost) never been in Arah before were positively surprised by the dungeon, no longer intimidated simply by the name “Arah”, and have shown interest in coming back and learning the dungeon. I’m actually looking forward to going in there in a slow, relaxed group of oldtimers (our party average age was somewhere in the mid-40s ) every now and then for the different kind of Arah experience.

Well, I learned something new about my preferences yesterday: I realized that I actually prefer to run dungeons with mediocre players that are nice and friendly, instead of with good players that don’t communicate at all and treat you like an npc.

Not a single word in chat all through the run, and not so much as a “bye” before kicking me out of the group once the run was finished … never thought I’d be upset by that so much, but I guess I play this game to play with people. If I wanted no communication I could just as well go back to single player games …

Just link the item to your chat box. /wiki <shift-click item> leads you to the right wiki page.

Bomber.3872:

It’s really hard to argument on this forum

That may be because your arguments seem fundamentally flawed.

The scarlett invasion events were not fine. There was a lot of trouble around people actively working against the event goal to increase their loot chance instead of actually finishing the event, which did lead to some nasty situations. By taking the loot drops out of event mobs they’re trying to get people to focus on the actual events rather than individual drops. Whether they’re successful in their goal or not is another question, but at least to me this seems to be primarily aimed at a part of the old player base that’s more interested in “gaming the system” to increase their gold gain rate than at the new people (who, as far as I’ve seen, are mostly interested in just playing the game as a whole and not nearly as focused on their rewards ratio as certain veterans).

Key runners, again in what I see in game, were mostly veterans, too, and not the ones that occasionally buy gems with cash. I know of people that had a habit of doing at least one key run a day, and sometimes as many as thirty in a week or two. They’re the ones that have their banks full of black lion weapon skins and make good gold trading those on the trading post. The new people that I’ve met are again too busy playing the game as a whole to even think about keyfarming.

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

winterchillz.2564:

So, how do you guys feel since the dungeons sub-forum seems to be getting some attention? I’m sorry, but I’m too lazy to go through 200+ posts, 150 of which are prolly off-topic, so that I can make my own conclusion.

I have to admit that I tried to read up on what I missed the last few days (being home sick doesn’t leave me enough time to check the forums it seems ), but gave up pretty quickly. Not because of off-topic posts, but rather because I quickly got the impression that most people posting right now (not just in the dungeon forum but all over the place) are too busy convincing each other that everything (not) said or done must be interpreted in the worst possible way, and everyone is just out to ruin our fun .

Personally, I like reading (and participating in) forums to interact with people of similar interests and talk about the things I like … if the talk is only about what’s wrong and bad and how things will never improve but only get worse, it defeats its purpose for me. So I’ll probably reduce my forum activity a lot and concentrate on what fun I have in-game. While playing “head in the sand” towards forum interactions won’t be any help to changing the game, it will certainly help me to keep enjoying what fun I have in game.

I’ve helped several friends claim guild halls for their personal guilds. In my experience both guild halls are do-able with 5-6 people participating. None of these actually have to be in your guild, so just put up a squad, place it on lfg as “need help claiming my guild hall” or ask around among friends/in map chat, and you’re good to go. If you’ve never claimed the hall in question before, it might take a try or two before you learn the potential spawn points or if you’re extremely unlucky with spawns, but don’t get discouraged.

Leveling a guild takes a while, too, but again if you just do what’s do-able for you (small bounty, treks, races) you’ll get there in time. Even the large guilds took a while to fully build (or are still building up), you’ll get there eventually.

Good luck and have fun!

Define “endgame” please. At what point do you think you have reached the end of the game?

• once one of your characters has reached level 80 (which actually happens pretty early in the game for most people)?
• once you have a lvl 80 of each class?
• once one of your characters has gotten to 100% map exploration?
• once one of your characters has finished their personal story?
• once you have finished all dungeon paths available?
• once you have succeeded in all jumping puzzles?
• once you have done all explorer achievements?
• once you have filled your wardrobe with all the weapon and armour skins you want?
• once you have done all the boss achievements for the world boss events?
• once you have reached maximum crafting levels in all crafting disciplines?
• once you have aquired all the weapon and armour stats you would like to use (possibly multiple sets for open world/dungeons/wvw)?

Check the achievements tab in your hero panel. You will find achievements associated with all of the points above, and more. Almost (?) none of them require you to reach level 80 before working on them though, so you could say endgame in this game starts the moment you create your first character. What you do with that character, which parts of the game interest you and how long it keeps you busy is totally up to you.

To make things even more flexible, you don’t have to stick with that one character. Pretty much everything in this game is account bound until you actually use it, so you can use dungeon tokens won by one character to buy equipment for another, or work on slayer achievements with several different classes, with all their kills adding up. You have the freedom to play with whatever character you like and still work towards your account goals rather than having to run specific content with a single character to make sure that that character gets the rewards out of it.

Personally, I’ve had my first character at lvl 80 about a year and a half ago, and still am busy trying to do too many parts of this game at once, because I’m having fun all over the place. I know people that have exhausted the parts of the game that were fun to them a long time ago, but until you try everything you won’t know how much of this game appeals to you. Just don’t expect it to become radically different just because you have reached a certain level, since that isn’t how this game works.

Taku.6352:

They are unhappy because they have to get out of their casual comfort zone

Taku.6352:

of spamming auto attack in WvW/PvE zergs to actually putting in effort to get some shinies.

I fully agree with the first part of the quote, but not with the second. A lot of people I know that are feeling unhappy about needing pristine relics for the ascended backpiece are simply people that are scared of fractals because they don’t usually play that kind of content and are not the type of person who just jumps in and tries new things. The feeling that four other people are depending on them getting something right when they don’t even have a clear picture of what it actually is they have to do in a group dungeon/fractal is extremely uncomfortable for those people.

Just last week I took a guildie into fractals who hadn’t been in there since shortly after the original fractal launch. She’s just not much of a group content person (for several reasons) and almost had to be dragged in there, despite the fact that she really wanted the backpiece. Afterwards, she said (in a rather surprised tone of voice ): well, that was actually fun, and not nearly as hard as I expected it to be (we did a level 19 since she had enough ar from her old fractal outings).

Yeah, I admit it, I’m just an old lady and a filthy casual , and thus have an unhealthy tendency to play with people who don’t just “jump in and try”.

yerok.5469:

you need parties to farm for rarer drops, maybe obsidian shards or increased key drops or new items whatever

Restricting rare/better loot to endlevel grouping isn’t the core of what this game is about. The idea is that the whole game is your endgame, and you can do pretty much everything from walking around Metrica Province to kicking Subject Alpha out of the Crucible of Eternity to gain rewards that are useful and relevant at your level.

Right now this works very well. Whether I walk around enjoying the sights and farming copper nodes that I can upgrade to much-needed iron by investing a skillpoint I gained at said walk in the park … or province, or roam a high-level dungeon for high-tier materials, a healthy mix of content as much as guarantees that I’ll gather a healthy mix of rewards that for example allow me to forge the ascended sword my mesmer has an eye on.

Once you put better rewards behind a specific content wall (in this case above-level group areas), you will restrict their accessability to a large base of casual-oriented players and at the same time force all players into the same kind of content to gain comparable rewards. Right now you can play all kinds of content in this game and still be able to competitively gear your characters fairly easily. Once one specific kind of content will offer rewards considerably better than the rest, this game is no better than all the other loot treadmill games out there.

Why do people hate min-max-ing?

Because math doesn’t come easy to many people. This game is a great one to play after a busy day of job and family, more involved and immersive than facebook games, but you can do pretty much all content without needing to spend too much time calculating your optimal equipment and skill rotation.

There’s people that enjoy that kind of thing, and there’s people that don’t. GW2 attrackts a lot of the later group, and they don’t care to “work” on numbers and optimizing when the game gives them the enjoyable experience they’re after just as well without that “work”.

(continued)

There’s days when I want to challenge myself, and enjoy duo-in Arah on less-played classes, or trying to solo one or the other dungeon encounter, and I’m happy to have friends in this game that allow me to do things like that. Other days I get home and just want to relax, not think, not react quickly, just want to do some easy content, some chit chat with guildies, and if one of us goes down, the others res and everything’s fine. I love this game because it allows people of all playstyles to play with each other, and gives me content to play regardless of whether I feel like getting deep down into the mechanics or not.

Some days I carry, some days I get carried. That’s the way it is. Some day I get frustrated crawling through fractals with guildies, but I still do so occasionally, because I value those people for other things. I’m glad the game doesn’t try to “train” them to the point where they simply stop playing.

This game’s player base isn’t bad. It’s diverse, and for very good reasons. It’s not always the way you want it, or even the way I want it, and I think it’s a good thing, because diversity to me is alway preferable to one-way perfect.

Fractals of the Mists are a set of dungeons that you can access through a portal in Fort Mariner in Lion’s Arch (just north of the WvW portals). It’s a collection of 15 different dungeons that you can run at adjustable difficulties. Each run through a difficulty at or above your (fractal) level will increase your fractal level and allow you to open fractals at a higher difficulty, with difficulties above 30 adding so-called instabilities that may (or may not) change the way you’ll play the fractals.

Currently you’ll get 4 fractals randomly selected (with a pre-set list of fractals available for each of the four spots). Instabilities are specific to each level, and the max fractal level is 50. Once the expansion hits in about three weeks, this will change to one fractal instead of 4, and each fractal level will be associated with one specific fractal instead of the random selection. They will also increase the max fractal level from 50 to 100.

Check out the wiki as well as the blog on upcoming fractal changes for more information.

Gear progression is not really a thing in this game. BiS gear at level 80 is anything of ascended (pink) quality, but the stat difference is only about 5% compared to exotic (orange) quality. You can play pretty much all of the core content well in exotic equipment. The one exception is higher level fractals which need a special kind of resistance (agony resistance) that you can only slot into special slots found on ascended equipment.

You can either craft your own ascended equipment if you’ve got the matching crafting discipline at level 500, win weapon or armor boxes as drops (pretty rare), or trade in jewellery from different sources. Rings are cheapest in fractals, amulets from laurels (and even cheaper if you have wvw tokens to spare), and acessories through guild commendations, but there’s always other (more expensive) ways to get them, too.

Starting points to get your equipment are as variable as the kind of content you can play at 80. If you want to craft your own ascended equipment, you’ll find yourself going all over the world, picking up crafting materials from all tiers since you need pretty much everything. Other than that, it really depends on what you enjoy … like others suggested above, try everything and see what you like.

CookieMonster.5869:

The thing is I don’t have the gold to pay upfront like that. You lose like 100g+ by going that route.

Then don’t go that route?

I’ve never gone after ascended materials or bought them from the trading post, just used whatever I collected during regular gameplay, and I have finished two full sets of ascended armor (light+heavy) plus several weapons on the side. One day, it just happened that I had collected enough stuff so I started crafting.

And you know what? My other account, where none of the crafters have gotten past 100 in their crafting disciplines yet, and where I have a grand total of one ascended weapon from a lucky drop, doesn’t feel any less powerful than the main one. The only thing I can’t do on that other account is high-level fractals, but in any other kind of content I just don’t see the difference between my full-ascended and full-exotic characters (same class, some equipment stat sets, same traits/utilities of course).

Ascended isn’t worth it to worry about. Treat is like a nice surprise that pops up every now and then, not as something that’s defining your ability to play. In this game, player skill makes a lot more difficulty than equipment stats, and you can improve your personal skill just as well in exotics as in ascendeds.

No.

Chris Cleary.8017:

I’ll go ahead and comment on this thread, as it seems to be the most recent of the HOM ones.

I’ll try to explain this without getting too technical, and some parts are probably going to have to be left out.

The bug that caused players to unlock achievements/skins/titles and achievement points was caused when the GW1 server that stores the HOM status talks to the GW2 server that controls new character creation. Basically it was sending bad data to the GW2 server, and unlocking achievements that should not have been unlocked.

This means that there were multiple problem points that need to be cleaned up. The first thing to be cleaned up was the bug that caused this to happen, and that was fixed within a few hours. However, the removal of the rewards is an entirely different problem.

We don’t have the tools to easily mass remove achievements/titles, which means it’s something that has to be developed. Unfortunately, this came at a time where our resources are tapped to the max, so it’s taking longer than we would like to fix this.

Thankfully (lol), when the HOM rewards bug was happening, the actual HOM was not accessible, and those players were not able to claim any other HOM entitlements…so the damage was somewhat limited.

We are working on this, I assure you, and we will remove the rewards from players that should not have received them. I do not have a timeframe, as modifying accounts at this type of level is not something we would ever take lightly, and as long as we keep a majority of the entitlements locked there is less for us to clean up.

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

Satenia.9025:

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

I tend to be less technical in my replies on the specifics of what goes into fixes, but this recent post from Chris Cleary goes into detail on what is planned for this fix.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Hall-of-Monuments-Update/page/2#post5017030

Sounds like we still have a rather long wait in front of us

It won’t be next release, but there is progress being made. This fix will debut on a release day to much fanfare though.

tldr: ANet is aware of the bug and working on a fix. It’s just not as simple as you might think.

Looking at the other areas of this game, I seriously doubt it’ll be a problem. I’ve been all over the world lately, and there were always people around, even in the most out-of-the-way places. Megaserver does a good job of putting people on maps, and I doubt you’ll ever truly find yourself alone on a map.

Remmenz.6325:

What exactly is the end game content, and how do all you find it fun? Because farming for gear when it’s acquisition won’t be noticeable in these large end game events really makes me think twice about finding gw2 exciting

Endgame in this game is what you make of it. Sounds stupid at first, but when you think about it it opens up a variety of things to do.

Looking at my friends and guildies, I see a ton of different “end games”, all in one game.

Some are into dungeons. They spend their time getting to know each dungeon path inside-out, what traits and utilities benefit which encounter, and how to get the most out of their characters and parties. They like to learn how to duo or even solo the bosses and encounters, how to skip past specific mobs in different ways, and how to best counter boss mob mechanics.

Others are into open world PvE. They like to map-complete with multiple alts, do world bosses, farm crafting materials and generally get the know every last bit of the maps and where to find whatever resource they are after.

Some like WvW the most, and spend most of their time on the borderlands and the eternal battlegrounds, either in small groups or guild zergs. They learn how to best trait and skill their classes for the situation at hand, which, depending on the kind (and size) of group and your goal, can be quite diverse. They progress their wvw experience bar and rank to gain wvw abilities that have a serious impact on their play in that game mode.

I have friends that almost exclusively pvp, because they enjoy that game mode the most, and/or would like to have access to a specific rank finisher (phoenix for rank 70+ seems to be sought-after the most right now ).

Others spend most of their time in the silverwastes to unlock the full set of luminescent armor skins on their account.

There’s roleplayers, trading post specialists, story lovers that spend their time leveling multiple alts to experience the personal (and living) story from different angles, compulsive collectors, fractal frequenters, and last but not least the jack-of-all-trades that enjoy dabbling in all of these fields depending on mood.

The one thing you will not widely find though is people focused exclusively on gear aquisition, as that is just not a big thing in this game. You have to find the part of the game that is fun to you because you like to play it, not because it gives you better gear. If you are a meticulous crafter, this may result in you focussing on crafting ascended gear, but for most people, ascended is more of a by-product of playing the content they like, just like a legendary is something that you (ideally) build resources for over a long time, instead of force-farming the resources in one go.

Check out more of the game than just zerg event trains, and find the spot that appeals to you because you enjoy playing it. Rewards will come in by themselves, but focussing exclusively on them instead of enjoyable gameplay is (unfortunately) a pretty good way to burn out on this game quickly, as that isn’t how most (if not all) content is built.

Bomber.3872:

Rasimir.6239:

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

Yes exactly, but why put these restrictions on the veterans after these 3 years? Your example with some veterans doing alot of keyruns and getting gold out if it, is that bad? In my opinon keyruns are a fun ‘mindless’ part like silverwaste or like world completion for the 10th time.

Only ANet has the metrics, only they know how many keys were actually farmed by what part of the player base, and how that impacts the economy. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that they want to spread the key aquisition across the playerbase more evenly as suggested by the fact that they’ve upped the drop rate of keys at the same time and only impacted the aquisition rate of a rather small group of players expressly “farming” a bunch of keys by the same method in a short time frame.

You can still farm a key/week by playing the lvl 10 personal story, just not several. I still doubt there’s many people who have regularly farmed keys that way, and if they indeed will drop more often now to people just playing whatever content they enjoy instead of being concentrated on those people who farm personal story, then that’ll be a plus in my book. If it works out in the end we’ll see …

Bomber.3872:

The problem with f2p in general is that there are of course people trying to abuse it or be bad. These kind of f2p could and did farm hundreds of blc keys and yes everything they get is limited at first. But after these ‘bad’ people upgrade their account, they can flood the TP, the market, or the gold exchange, because then there are no limitations left.

All change that happend seems exactly to prevent such f2p issues. Thats again why I would love it if these limitations would only exist for f2p accs and not on all.
Because for veteran accs these restrictions make no sense at all.

If those people intend to upgrade their account to a paid account anyway, what’s to keep them from paying up-front and then go on a farming spree? I really don’t see your argument here, there’s no difference whatsoever between an account going paid now or later, other than that they’ll have a bit of wealth piled-up to put into the economy at one point instead of having that spread out over a few more weeks.

With an economy as large as this game’s, that’s literally a drop in the ocean. Even if they farm hundreds of keys, with an average of maybe 20 keys per ticket, that’s still only a handfull of skins and a one-time occurance. Check one of the trading post history sites around, and you’ll find that the impact on the overall economy of such an event would be minimal in the long run.

Tangled Depths is a challenge to learn. Even I had to take my time to learn my way around, and I usually memorize maps the moment I step on them, but once you understand the map it is much easier to get around and nicer layed out than any other map in this game. It is hands down my favourite map in the game.

Basically the map consists of the four major lanes (ogre, nuhoch, rata novus, scar) underground that connect to the ley line confluence in the south of the map. Above ground, there is a camp corresponding to each of the lanes, with a waypoint, a wallow that leads right down to the lane, and a path to alternately take you to the lane without the wallow.

Once you have got that basic map layout down and know your way around, everything else is close by one of the camps and/or lanes. Only a few points are really so much out of your way that you have to take a huge detour to get there.

If exploring the map on your own feels too much for you, I’m sure there are people around happy to lead you through the map and help you find your way. Just the other day, somebody in our guild chat asked about TD, and we ended up with a 6-man squad spending several hours exploring and enjoying the map, with a mix of players new to the map and veterans still stumbling about in places but having tons of fun .

tigirius.9014:

they label those of us who spent alot of time trying to improve the game by requesting things that would have increased the fun factor, trolls. That’s the problem I’m seeing. We have a dev team who struggles with connecting with the playerbase that’s left, and we have their white knights attacking those of us who really just want the finally get the game we paid for.

I’m sorry to say this, but the attitude you are displaying in this paragraph is exactly the attitude that has led me to disregard your posts before (and I have read a lot of them over the last few months). Making suggestions is great, and voicing them on the forums is certainly a good way to get them considered. In the end, if your ideas and suggestions are not implemented, this does not mean that the devs have trouble connecting with the playerbase. It just means the playerbase is large and diverse, and the devs connect with a part of it that does not necessarily share all your views and ideas.

Like I mentioned, I have read several of your posts, suggestions and comments, to the point where you have become one of the posters who’s name give me a pretty good idea of what kind of post I’m expecting to read (don’t take this personal, I simply have a good memory for names). Your suggestion may improve the game to you, and increase your fun factor, but they certainly don’t go in a direction I would want the game to go. I’m pretty happy the game is going in a different direction than the one you have been suggesting in the past, because the direction it is going is increasing my personal fun factor much more than your suggestions ever would.

If you could accept that your ideas and suggestions may not always be the be-all-end-all and stop accusing anyone with a different preference to being a “white knight”, I’m sure you’d get a much more favourable reaction to your posts.

Kerin.9125:

Actually, many people simply want to be able to use the Elite skill the HOT ads made a prominent feature of but failed to mention the huge time it takes to actually be able to fully use it.

Huge time? What huge time are we talking about? Even if you have no Core Tyria hero points, getting the 25 needed for full Elite from the HoT maps really doesn’t take long.

Vivien.6149:

You can’t NOT GRIND if you want to progress in the maps.

I must be playing another game them … I refuse to grind, and I haven’t perceived any need to do so in HoT so far. I’ve casually completed a couple of maps, played all kinds of events (but by far not everything yet), and enjoyed the new maps with several characters. I could’ve sworn I’ve progressed my account and characters a good bit since the release of the expansion.

If I hit a road block, I go do something else, and eventually I’ll find I’ve progressed to the point where the former road block is gone by itself. No grind required. It’s really not much different from me trying to run a level 20 elementalist to the Gates of Arah a while back. I tried to get as far as I could, then after banging my head against the wall (aka mobs beyond Fort Trinity in the Straits fo Devastation) a couple of times I turned to do something more fun. I’ll get back on the road to Arah with her eventually, just like I’ll get to pick up the mastery point in Tangled Depth that requires Leyline gliding one of these days … I’m sure it won’t go anywhere while I progress in other parts of the maps without grinding.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Make new friends and don’t randomly invite strangers to your guild.

This basically.

It takes a lot of time and effort to (re-) build a guild to the point where you have a critical mass of active members that keeps the guild alive and kicking. You will need to find people who fit into the guild and have similar goals and interests to the active members you already (or still) have.

Try building a friendlist of likeminded players, and eventually one or the other of them will enjoy your company and playstyle enough to become part of your guild. Be active in forums and all over the community to find more like-minded players.

Don’t be discouraged if many of the people you find, that you think would do great in your guild, already have another guild or simply don’t want to join yours for some reason or another. There are a ton of people out there, playing the game, and only a very few of them actually will fit into your guild.

Some people may look like a great fit, will join you, and sooner or later find that it’s not their ideal of a guild after all and leave again. Don’t be discouraged by that, either, it’s just the natural course of things. I have good friends in this game that I used to be in a guild with that eventually moved on to other guilds, because “our” guild just wasn’t exactly what they were looking for, despite finding a bunch of good friends there.

Other people will just play less, or stop playing at all, over time. This is, after all, a game, and all of us spend our free time in here, and it’s just natural that the interest will fluctuate. If you want to keep a guild alive, you’ll have to make new contacts all the time, meet new people, and constantly keep an eye out for who might fit in with you, to have a steady stream of new members that naturally are opposed by a steady stream of people turning less active.

If you are determined to “save” your guild, be prepared to put in a lot of time trying to promote a healthy, active community within your guild. It’s not easy, but it’s totally worth it when you one day find yourself surrounded by the people you most enjoy playing with. But you have to bring a lot of patience to find the people that mesh with each other. Just inviting every random stranger will bring big numbers short-term, but won’t keep the guild together long-term.

Map exploration actually gives a decent amount of experience, so if you have any alts at 80, going for a completed map on each of them (which you need for the specialization collections anyway) will take you a long way.

Experience boosters also help quite a bit. Get fireworks from the lunar new year, experience boosters from wvw dailies or the laurel vendor, and whatever food and utility consumables you enjoy to speed things up.

Eventually you’ll find it’s not so much the experience limiting you but rather the mastery points. Check your map and achievement log for mastery points that are within your reach. Going for those will also give you experience on the side.

And last but not least, do event chains you enjoy. There’s achievements tied to most of these, often even with mastery points attached, so it’s always a good idea to check your achievemnt logs for event chains you haven’t done/finished yet and play those.

Every now and then, my 8-year old daughter comes up to me playing gw2 and talks me into going back to Rata Sum and checking if the SAB has magically opened the gates again. She’s desperately waiting for the box to get back and to try it herself. Last time the box was online, she hadn’t mastered the game controls enough to play, but enjoyed watching me play it for hours.

She’s be ever so happy if the box finally opened its gates again, and so would I. As much as I like the content available now, the SAB is special, and I can’t wait to have it back.

If they’re truly afk for 30+ minutes, their map participation percentage will drop down into nothingness, which prevents them from getting rewards. To keep receiving map rewards they need to participate in events regularly. Besides, if they really are inactive for an extended period of time while people are trying to join the map, they’ll be automatically disconnected sooner rather than later.

I’ve had both happen to me on different HoT maps, not because I afk to leech rewards, but rather since I often get called off the pc for family reasons and don’t want to loose my map participation when I don’t know if I’ll be away for a minute or an hour (kids have the tendency to be unpredictable ).

ANet has systems in place that “protect” you from afk-ers while at the same time protecting people with real lives from loosing progress prematurely. Unfortunately there will always be a few people walking the fine line between those two groups to game the system, but from experience I’d say ANet has done a pretty good job at balancing the activity level. No need to put any power over other people’s participation in the hands of players with a subjective view of the situation.