Guild Wars 2

I would just like to add that this has more or less killed my interest in GW2. I went from being a very active player, to barely logging in since the Megaserver was added. Not only did it destroy the RP community, it also turned Guild outings/missions into a horrible PitA.

Rather than creating an environment that feels more rich and full of life it has created largely meaningless interactions with players that you will be very unlikely to ever interact with again, rather than running into people you might remember as you go about your gameplay.

SlackerATC.5934:

It seems to me that the term “ultra-challenging achievements” has been used to describe the LS2 Story Journal Achievements several times now, but I question whether or not these have been “ultra-challenging.”

I was very excited when I saw ANet’s mention of ultra challenging achievements being worked into the Season 2 living story. And I, too, am still looking for them…. Would be really nice to have something challenging that requires working at it for quite a bit in order to get it down and succeed. An hour or so of story instances, and then another hour or two of completing achievements for them just isn’t cutting it.

So that is the extent of it then? One new world boss, a reorganizing of the ruined city of Lion’s Arch, and an hour or two worth of story instances in a new mini zone?

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but is this really what ArenaNet considers content now? No new basic dungeons since launch, no new Fractals since November, nothing else new for people to run? Comparing this to what was done in Guild Wars I really have to wonder what is going on. There are several games in end-of-life development that get more content added to the game over six months than this!

Edited to remove some snark.

I need a bit of help here. I have not been playing Guild Wars 2 for quite awhile, but I found myself with some spare time this weekend and decided to get it updated and give it a go! So I jump in and check out the new Living Story content. Not really a fan of the aspect crystals and mobility challenges, but hey some people are so it’s all good. I take a couple of hours to explore, look around, run through all of that stuff. Everything seems to be right on pace.

Then, after I am finished with all of that, I look around for what is new since last I played. Dungeons? Nope. Fractals? Seem largely the same since Fractured. A quick question in general chat pointed out the Three-Headed Wurm world boss. Hopefully the forums can help me out with a bit more than that. What new content has been added over the last six months?

I am not sure that I am really on board with the specifics listed in the OP, but I quite agree with the general idea of the message.

Suikoden III was a great example of storytelling in a video game. Enough information was given to the player that they felt like they were constantly progressing, without just dumping everything on them in a way that left little mystery to chase. And all of this was done within the confines of the game itself, none of the reliance on the website or forums to disseminate information.

Contrast this to Guild Wars 2’s living story. Where most of the dialog seems to be built around amusement rather than story building. In two hours of following the opening of Season 2 I was left mildly curious about who this Master of Peace really was and greatly annoyed that even though she is dead the storyline still seems to be all Scarlet, all the time. Two hours into most games I am really building my excitement, learning what is going on and being made more and more eager to find out more!

Sadly, this issue has existed for an extremely long time. It was very common around the Fractured update, when people would post a LFG listing and then boot out the 3 PUG members to invite guild mates to quickly and easily get them their fractal levels. If they have not done anything about abusive grouping practices by now it is pretty clear that this just isn’t much of an issue for them.

Justin ODell.9517:

Many, many successful games ease players into options, and, in my opinion, trait unlocking isn’t any different.

Yes, many games ‘ease players into it’ by releasing abilities to them a few at a time, so that they get to learn the abilities in manageable chunks rather than being thrown in over their head. And this works pretty well for RPGs and many other games.

But that is not what is going to happen with unlocked skills in PvP. What happens is that people want to use the new abilities in the new build that they want to try out. Only now the original design philosophy that ANet stated of jump right in and play is gone. Before you can make the build that you want for PvP you have to grind the character up just so you can start playing. You now have a level of unfair competition, where no matter your skill you can’t start really playing until you get your unlocks done.

GW2’s attempts to be an eSport have been somewhat disappointing from the start. Lacking features, a single game mode, and several other things have kept it from gaining more than a small, diehard PvP following. The state of things has improved quite a lot since release. This decision, however, makes it an absolute joke in that regard.

Normally, I would say that a server transfer is a luxury type thing that it isn’t a big deal what they want to charge for it.

However, when Arena Net takes an active hand in picking winning and loosing worlds it becomes rather dirty. For example, in WvW Season 1 the Arena Net team destroyed Sanctum of Rhall as a WvW server by choosing matchups that consistently left SoR where they were going to take second place to Blackgate’s paid PPT, while feeding Jade Quarry easy first place finishes. Half way through the season most of the serious WvW Guilds were already gone, because it had become clear that JQ was being fed so many points by the season organizers that they were going to get second place no matter what. The company that wants to sell the server transfer actively created the situation that destroyed the server and necessitated the transfer. And that is when it becomes less acceptable to me.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Just a quick note to let you know i am up to date.

I am assuming that you all feel that for example a Dredge rework is higher priority than say a rework to rolling?

Chris

Absolutely. The dredge isn’t bad at low scales, but that clown car becomes an absolute pain as it scales up to the point that with some groups you might be better quitting and starting over!

Compared to that, having the reduced variety that is a result of rolling is a dysfunction that should probably be addressed. But it is not one that really keeps anyone from enjoying Fractals.

How is being in a Grove Overflow more disconnecting from your server of choice than being in a Lion’s Arch Overflow?

Estriella Faerie.4029:

RedShipRaider.9560:

Proposal Overview
I propose that the vote-kick function be locked once the group has advanced most of the way through the instance.

While I agree with you that there’s a problem with people kicking to invite their friends at the end, I don’t think your solution is the right one. It just has too many problems which aren’t solved.
For example, if some people in your groups get disconnected or rage-quit and don’t come back, you’re just stuck with no way to replace them. Trolls or AFK would also be able to abuse this in complete impunity. To avoid that, we need some ability to kick, but we also need incentives not to do so, so that the system isn’t abused.

I’d suggest rather a long time after a kick where you can’t invite anyone else. That way, people would think twice before kicking other players, and use it only when they’re forced to do so.

Correct me if I am wrong, I may be thinking about a different game, but can’t you remove offline party members from the group without a vote-kick? That would make kicking someone who went AFK and never came back with a long timer before you can invite someone else functionally similar to carrying on without them until they are auto-logged off and removing them. With the difference that if the AFK member had something urgent come up that they were able to handle within those few minutes before they were auto-logged they would still be able to rejoin their party.

This does still allow malicious players to intentionally Troll the group, by being present but not participating. However, I really do not think that people would work through two Fractals of the set just so that they can get to the third to troll the party nearly as often as players form LFMs with the intent to kick out all of the pugs that join in order to either get friends their daily rewards or else sell paths.

EDIT: I am also not certain that having a long cooldown period after vote-kicks would stop people from booting all of the pugs from their party to invite guild mates. Many of the people that I have seen doing this say that they are doing so in order to get their friends who may be at work or whatever to the Boss Fractal without having to spend an hour getting there when they get home. They could still accomplish this by getting the instance set up and booting out the rest of the players before their friends gets online. They would just have to kick out the other players long enough in advance that they could do something else and be ready to go once all of their friends are online.

A lot of interesting proposals so far. Some that I agree with, and some that I think would be a major mistake. I don’t really want to bog things down with personal view points, though.

There was one proposal that I thought I could add more to the Risks of that perhaps wasn’t seen:

Proposal Overview

Scaling Fractals for Number of Players.

Goal of Proposal

Open up game content that is currently unmanageable for small groups of friends who like to game together. Applies to fractals, dungeons, or any instanced GW2 content.

I game with two friends whom I know in RL outside MMOs; they have effectively left the game due to being locked out of party-oriented PvE content. The game currently allows for simple single-player roaming, 5-person dungeons, or zerg events. Groups of RL friends less than the magic number of 5 need not apply.

Proposal Functionality

Similar to the instances in the Tower event and other NC Soft games (e.g., late great City of Heroes), the fractal (or dungeon) would scale depending on the size of the party when the instance is generated. Rewards would also scale, as required.

Associated Risks

Some players may try to game the system to optimize party size vs. rewards.
Some party sizes may not balance well. This is true now with the scaling in the Escape from Lion’s Arch event, and was also true in the Tower.

Fractals, as well as dungeons, are balanced around a party not an individual or pair. In order to make many of the encounters possible for smaller groups to complete the content would have to be dumbed down to a less complex level. That goes directly against the stated purpose of Fractals of the Mist.

There have been several other proposals regarding ‘training mode’ or ‘practice’ versions. Making these ‘practice fractals’ soloable, or with any number of players, would work to give players who do not want to go in with a full group something to do, as well as give players new to the game a way to experience the dumbed down version of the mechanics in a situation where they do not feel pressured to perform. Just make the ‘practice’ not yield Fractal-specific rewards, so that it does not turn into ‘easy-mode farms’.

Which brings up:

Maybe casual player want to get ascended gears with fractal but they lack time. I think the solo-mode IS a solution for “Fractals are too difficult to get into” (along with the “practice mode”)…

I would have to ask, why? There is nothing statistically superior from Fractals that you can not receive other ways, if there were I could see the point. Why should someone who is not willing to face the challenge of Fractals be able to blow through easier solo versions to get the Fractal rewards?

Galen Grey.4709:

Proposal Overview:
Ideas on a reward system for User generated content (UGC) should this be considered viable

<snip>

As for the overall reward my idea here is if there is going to be UGC someone needs to review them for obvious reason, be it GMs or perhaps even a player group. After a play through meant to ensure content is appropriate they’ll be asked to rate the UGC fractal on a number of matrix, say length, difficulty, effort, abusive etc.. This score can then scale a reward appropriate to the overall score. If a fractal is deem to have abuse potential say its lengthy but way too easy, this could be marked and the fractal itself might then give a small end reward or no reward at all. I would not remove the fractal itself unless its inappropriate because people might have designed it for a roleplaying scenario or story heavy or something of the sort.

User generated content seems like it holds a lot of potential. But in the extreme majority of cases the quality of even the best results is subpar compared to professionally developed content.

What is suggested seems like a very labor intensive review, which has to be applied to the extreme flood of content that user generation creates. Is it really better to devote so many resources to validating what will likely turn into a small handful of good content, rather than producing high quality professional content?

I think that it would be great to let players choose one past meta achievement that they may have not had time for. Limiting it to a single choice keeps the past accolades from being devalued significantly, while giving players who missed that one thing that they really regret not being able to go after at the time a way to ‘catch up’.

Proposal Overview
Two or three unscrupulous players are able to enter an instance so that they ‘own’ it, create a Fractal group on the LFM, and then proceed to kick the rest of the party that has joined them once they have gotten to the boss fractal. This is done so that they can bring in friends that want the end reward without having to put in the time to go through the first three Fractals in the set. I propose that the vote-kick function be locked once the group has advanced most of the way through the instance.

Goal of Proposal
The goal of this proposal is to stop the abuse of public grouping on the LFM for the reward of small groups of unscrupulous players. A secondary goal would be to promote further use of the LFM system for mid to high level Fractals, because many players currently choose to only run this content in closed parties or not participate at all rather than have their time and efforts wasted by a few malignant players.

Proposal Functionality
Currently, only two players are required to kick another player from the instance, and they are able to do this at any point. Even right before the victory is achieved. I propose to lock this function at the start of the third Fractal in the set. This greatly reduces the payout for players looking to abuse this.

The first two Fractals in a set should give a sufficient amount of time for a party to recognize if any of their members do not belong in the party, either because they do not have sufficient AR or mastery of their character to contribute or because they are trolling the party that they have joined. Having to go through the Third Fractal and Boss Fractal makes the reward for abusing the vote-kick much less appealing than being able to just hop into a nearly finished run, do one fight, and collect your reward.

I suppose that this could be applied to non-Fractal dungeons as well, with the vote-kick being disabled as soon as the next to last boss is engaged. But the majority of this problem currently is in Fractals, where the instance is much longer and more difficult to get through.

Associated Risks
Under this proposal there would be no way to deal with players who go AFK just as you reach the end of your run, other than waiting for them to time out. The risk for abuse is there, however it is much less of one than exists in the current system.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I would like us to start of by listing the top three things we would like to see evolved in Fractal Design.

The first and most important, in my view, issue that needs to be addressed with Fractals of the Mist is the Instance Owner and Group Kick abuse. I am talking about the more and more common practice of two or three guildies starting a group on the LFM, entering the instance first so that one of them is the one who have the instance ‘owned’ by them, and then booting the rest of their group once they get to the boss fractal so that they can bring their friends in without their friends having to put the time into getting their rewards. To make the situation even worse for honest players, GW2 was designed so that when you have been booted from a group the chat log is wiped, meaning players that have had this done to them can not even block the offenders to make sure that they do not group with them again. And on top of that there is no clear way for players to report this type of action, either ingame or on the support website.

My second greatest issue would be with uneven rewards for higher level fractals. High level Fractals are much more challenging than the typical GW2 dungeons, which makes them much more exciting. Yet playing them gives players a tiny fraction of the rewards that standard dungeons do. I did not see this as much of a problem when Fractal runners were being rewarded with account-bound rewards that could not be sold, and so do not increase player’s wealth while still giving some kind of reward, but ever since the Fractured update the unique rewards seem to be both diluted with lesser rewards (uninfused rings) and less frequently given out (weapons). As it stands right now, it would really make Fractals seem more worth while if there were an increase in either the account-bound or else wealth rewards.

Since a top three was asked for, I guess that my third would be the way that some things kind of fall apart as the Fractal Level scales up. The dredge fractal, especially. At the low scale, it seems perfectly alright. However, as the scale goes higher the volume of dredge starts to become absolutely ridiculous. If you have a plan in place to deal with 30 dredge at once, then turning that into a larger number of them is not going to increase the difficulty greatly just the time needed to execute. Since the Fractals have been organized into tiers now, it would be nice to see roughly similar time expectancies across all of the Fractals of a similar tier. Not one that drags on forever, to the point that it can be faster to restart than it is to slog through it.

This would certainly give players a feeling of empowerment, like their actions truly matter! But would it really be worth only getting half as much content? The Thaumanova/Abbadon choice was possible because there was a long gap between when the choice was made and when the effects were seen, so that they could develop the chosen Fractal. But in the suggestion that there is a pass/fail branch at the end of each Living Story that immediately selects between two different ways for it to continue, both outcomes would have to be fully developed and ready to be revealed depending on how player’s actions turn the tide of the story.

The really interesting thing about using video games as a story telling medium is the interactivity of it. So far, the majority of the Living Story Season One has been a very inactive episodic format. Scarlet influences things to make something go crazy, and the players show up to enjoy the themepark until the episode is over and everything goes back to it’s stable point. The Tower arc kind of broke away from it being entirely episodic, with there being a much larger lasting impact remaining on the world, and that is nice to see. But there still isn’t any real interaction between the players, and how the Story progresses.

Bobby has come to the forums and said that a great deal was learned during Living Story Season One that will be put into practice for Season Two. It would be really nice to see more interactivity between players and story, even if it isn’t really viable to develop two different continuations for each step of the Living Story. Even something like players being given a dialog choice in the Story Instances (For example, Marjory could ask the player if they think that she should start investigating who Mr. E may have been or if they think that her talents would be better spent shoring up defenses.) and the choices that players make could be visibly tallied to be used to shape what happens a couple of months down the line. Even if the same story element happens either way (A later Living Story update could involve Marjory tracking down the identity of Mr. E and the players arrive just in time to defend the NPC from an attack, or alternatively the place Marjory was sent to defend could come under attack during which Mr. E reveals themself in the course of the defense.) this would at least make the player an active part of the Story, rather than being an observer who doesn’t really matter as many players have complained about.

.

It would be really neat to see entirely divergent consequences based on what players do! But that would require a tremendous amount of wasted development. Would it be worth it to players to only get half as much content in exchange for this?

Would a slower forming but still interactive touch be enough to make players feel more involved and connected to the story, if the OP’s suggestion of every update having a branch is unfeasible?

Deified.7520:

Hello,
So something I enjoy doing in this game is wandering around the world. Doing events, gathering, etc. Every once in a while I come across a new player thats doing his first level 80. Most of the time this person will have no idea what the Living story is or what has happened. What I usually do is give them a summary of recent events and take them around the world to show them the sights of previous LS content. I always get the best reactions with the zeyphr sanctum model or the toxic tower cinematic. So it gave me idea.

Story Tellers Campfire: Place an item down at your feet that when players interact with it, it will play a cinematic of your choosing.

Extremely cool of you! It’s great to see people so welcoming of new players, rather than their only first contact with the GW2 community being the Queensdale Champion Zerg yelling at them for screwing up ‘the rotation’.

I really love the idea of this, and Sonkofa Jimiyu’s elaboration as well! It serves as a way to let new players see old content and also as a way of showing off what you have participated in! And it allows old resources that would otherwise never be used again to continue to have a purpose.

Hopefully someone will take note of this because I would really love to have something like this in game, even if it is something that you have to go to your Home Instance to access. I also would have loved to run across someone like the OP when I was a new player!

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

It could be only events you have participated in (based on the Living Story Achievement Completion), or based on when your character was created, giving each player unique content of available stories to tell.
The animations that require a player character, would have the owner of the item as focus, like a party leader.

I can’t really see how it is a bad thing to have enemies actually try to kill players with highly forecast moves. It is true that it becomes extremely difficult to watch for the signs when you are in the middle of 20 different MOBs all having visual effects dropped on them. So maybe it would be more effective to not jump into the middle of a pile of 20 MOBs if you want to stay standing? Fight from the edges and clear them out methodically rather than just jumping into the pile and swinging away.

Large spike damage like this, on a forecast move, gives the designers a way to actually threaten players while still giving players an easily accessible counter play.

Darkobra.6439:

Someone misused irony again! takes a shot of whiskey Now to the rest of the MMO forums!

You must really hate your liver with that kind of game!

mtpelion.4562:

It is fine. Different materials drop from different kinds of content.

If you need Dragonite Ore, you will have to do the things that drop Dragonite Ore.

And by ‘things that drop dragonite ore’, he means ‘bore your face off with mind numbingly simple and repetitive world boss and temple zerging’. I hope that you are able to play at 0000 GMT, because if you are not able to jump on the server reset train this is a rather time consuming grind.

I really thought that GW2 was supposed to be a game about playing to have fun, not being forced into monotonous grinds in order to advance.

Diversity of tactics is certainly a good thing. But so is realizing that you actually have a competent WvW commander when they are calling out when to stack and buff, where the water fields will be placed, where the electric fields need to be, and so. It is much more fun to participate in an organized group that everyone can take advantage of, rather than just rushing the allied blob into the enemy blob.

I do not really see how altering how combo fields would have a beneficial effect other than just ‘changing things for the sake of changing them’. Could you elaborate more on what sort of diversity you would like to see?

It seems like this sort of system would be really, really neat and fun! For the first couple of months. After that, with the exception of about two to four Worlds all that you will see anywhere that you go are ‘failed’ versions of zones, without enough interested players to rebuild them.

This would make for an absolutely terrible new player experience.

I empathize with the OP’s point of view that this creates a discontinuity for them. But really, for me, the breaking point in Guild War’s lore came in Eye of the North. Just like any work of fiction, if you follow it long enough and close enough you will have your willing suspense of disbelief pushed beyond breaking. Many Dune fans felt this effect with the sixth novel, ‘Chapterhouse: Dune’, while others did not really notice the schisms until the prequel books written by Frank Herbert’s son.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

People forget that GW2 is 250 years after GW1…………… I do not see how old lore could make it back into GW2 from GW1…..

If you want Guild Wars 1 lore, you are playing the wrong game. Guild Wars 2 is 250 years in the future, so things are forgotten.

Lets look at real life…. do you really care what happened 250 years ago?

Really? You do not think that the events that happened 250 years ago change the way that you live? British Colonialism creating arbitrary national boundaries where long standing enemies are forced into being part of the same overarching nation, such as Iraq, is something that no one should care about because it was happening 250 years ago? It is rather difficult to claim that this ‘old lore’ does not have any modern impact…..

MrRuin.9740:

Do you people not have artificing on any character? And why do you have so many saved that “your fingers hurt”?
Artificer combines these, easily, with 3 clicks. Master->rare->exotic. Unless you are saving hoards of these, you shouldn’t have more than a few 200luck essences.
If you’re saving hundreds upon hundreds to click at once, well honestly, thats your own fault.

After doing a daily run of Scale 26, 36, and 46 Fractals I commonly end up with multiple stacks of luck numbering in the hundreds. This has nothing to do with ‘saving’ them, just the result of salvaging all of the junk recieved.

You’re asking for a system to be put in place when there already is one. Become an artificer on one character and slide all the luck to that character if you’re hoarding it for whatever pointless reason (it really serves no purpose to save it) and watch in amazement as the game combines all that luck for you into larger portions, thus leaving you a fraction of the consumables to click.

Actually, the practice of having to shift all of the luck to your shared bank, then hop over to your artificer character, then reduce the luck piles all down to manageable levels, then activate all of those reduced units is not what would generally be called a ‘game system’. It would be called a ‘work around’. Because Luck as implemented has turned out to be something of a PITA for players, forcing them into unnecessary work arounds. This deserves to be revisited.

Elementalist

Necromancer

Thief

mercury ranique.2170:

You do know that you have 6 gearpieces, and not all have to be Clerics. You can still combine, but now through your gear.

According to your post, though, you would have to select your gear based on what Traits you want. Not what stats support them. This lack of flexibility renders a great many options entirely useless.

There is some interesting ideas to what you presented here. But really, at that point you are going to have to make some fundamental chances to every aspect of the game. It would be the end of the game, as players have never responded well to having an MMO suddenly turned into a different game on them.

This kind of change would be a welcome convenience for some. And it fits very well with the original expressed goal of making PvP accessible, fair balanced, and immediate fun for players who may have no interest at all in the PvE side of GW2.

However, that does not seem to be their goal any longer. With the announcement that future skills will be added in such a way that they have a large Skill Point cost to use even in PvP they have already begun moving away from making it accessible to people who do not want to grind before they start playing. It would seem inconsistent to add this (very good) feature now when they are taking things in a different direction.

I like this suggestion. I would really love to see Guild Missions expanded upon. They were a great addition to the game; fun and different, and something that you can get your entire guild together and enjoy some time doing something in the PvE sphere with the entire bunch.

It is good to have a lot of easily accessible content for the widest range of players possible. I think that the current guild missions set up a fairly reasonable base for that. But it would be nice to see new missions added occasionally to keep things fresh for long time players. I think that it is also important to add higher tiers of content for guild groups who would like a chance to really push themselves, rather than the ‘challenge’ being to have the majority of the group wait by the door and goof around on a third party VoIP client, because it only takes a few people to do all of the important stuff.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

Why do players in this game have such a problem listening to orders? In games such as Eve Online, if a Commander tells you to do something people actually listen.

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

Why should the take the orders?

“Don’t tell me what to do, man!” That really is what it comes down to. Unfortunately, the game with the most skill-based mechanics of any MMO I have played also has some of the most self centered and inconsiderate player base I have ever seen. People who will troll and intentionally cause a group to fail an event just because they do not like being told what needs to be done.

When you get a good group together, GW2 absolutely shines. But so much of the game requires nothing more from players than flopping their hand around the keyboard to win, so there are a small number of players who expect to succeed with no effort in any and all situations. A lot of people complain about ’casual’ness, but I find that to be wrong. It is not about how much time a person puts into the game. I have met many players who only play for a couple of hours a week that I would love to have in a group, and players who are on for several hours a day who absolutely can not work side by side with another person to save their own lives. Some people just do not want to do anything at all and still feel entitled to be able to participate in everything, even group events that require them to coordinate with others.

Edit: For an example of this, some time ask random players that you come across if they can tell you about the different combo effects. It is rather scary how many players with caped and exotic/ascended and even 25+ AR do not actually know what finishers the weapons that they commonly use are able to deliver.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

To iterate: GW2 could include new drops in form of set pieces which are non-tradeable. Set-Boni could then be purely cosmetic (like changing the color of guardian aegis effects etc.) or quite significant (runes which can’t be bought on the TP, with unique effects).

Oh great, massive inventory clutter. ~.~

In order for drops while at max level to be useful to that character it has to be very time consuming to gear characters up, otherwise most people would already have it. This, creating a near never-ending gear treadmill, is precisely the kind of poor game mechanics that many people hated about other games and drew people to Guild Wars 2. I would much rather be able to gear a character up and start doing things that are fun with them than wasting time farming away for good gear.

Some very interesting ideas.

I do not really care much for the scaling idea that you have laid out. As it stands now, one or two sub-80s are a little bit of a drag on the party’s speed and efficiency, but this isn’t really a big deal since the content is generally very easy anyways. If they were cutting into the loot received, however, I would simply stop grouping with them. The dungeons already provide a sort of progression, some being more difficult than others, so I do not really see the need for that type of scaling. If your group isn’t quite cutting it at a certain difficulty level you can choose to do a different path rather than having to have the dungeon scale to you.

The addition of more and meaningful rewards is absolutely dead on! This would really breathe new life into the currently lacking endgame, giving players something to go out and do that actually gives some (even if small) meaningful return. Many GW2 players really love showing off titles, and if they had an emote attached that would be all the better. There really should have been some repeatable thing to do with dungeon tokens from the start.

I also feel that 8 dungeons + FotM is not nearly enough. It has been over a year now. We need new permanent content!

Doon.2364:

This game suppose to be role playing and character development but it feels like the personal story was all just dream. None of it really happen.

Honestly, I would be much happier with “Everything regarding the Pact, and the terribly out of place technology was really a dream.” I mean, the Pact has had megalazers and helecopters for over a year now, and despite all of the attacks no one from Lion’s Arch decided that this might be a good thing to have? This goes far beyond what a willing suspense of disbelief can manage….

I earn the title, I deserve the tag.

You really didn’t ‘earn’ anything, though.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The other question that I hope is answered in the positive is this: Can the average player skill be raised by challenging content like this? We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges. And there are probably dozens of other systems that go unused by some portion of the player-base. If even 10% of that group hits a challenge like the Marionette and the subsequent tension causes them to look into these systems and they learn a new depth to the game they otherwise never would have, I think that’s a win for everybody. The average skill level rises, and in turn, we devs can make more interesting events that utilize the depth of the systems we have.

I think that it is a really great design philosophy. And there are many ways that the Marionette event succeeds at this. For example, in the lane defense phases players can really see where they stack up against others in regards to stopping the Clockwork, and what others do to handle the situation. Similarly, if someone is fighting the Wasp platform boss incorrectly they will end up seeing that they are no use to the group, and can then work to correct that while hampering but not crippling the group’s attempt.

But I think that the thing that frustrates a lot of players is more the situations where one person not pulling their weight causes a failure. For example, if an inexperienced player gets agro on the second platform boss, the one that lays the mines and needs to be kited over them, the player can keep running away from the boss and attacking it at range. This causes them to continue holding the agro, while keeping the entire group from being able to damage the boss. One person at the deep bottom end of the pool is able to cause the attempt to fail for 24 other players, and seriously reduce the chances for 124 others.

Very cool!

I liked the other steam punk stuff on your page as well.

Nick.6972:

As the title implies, do you like open world zerging?

Somewhat. In a well populated MMO there is room for a bit of everything, and it is certainly good that there is some content that boils down to a zerg of people facesmashing auto attack. There are some players who really do not want anything more engaging than this; just a chance to gather up with some friends and smash something while relaxing. To that end I like the fact that this exists in game.

Or would you rather prefer instanced content?

While I am glad that there already exists quite a lot of ‘zerg content’ for those who want it, there is not really very much for people who would like to push the limits of what their character is capable of doing in a PvE setting. There are a few notoriously difficult dungeon bosses that allow this, but there absolutely should be more, and more difficult boss encounters.

World bosses such as Tequatl and the new Ancient Wurm provide players looking for more of a challenge something to do. However, the fact that these encounters are open world makes it a huge PITA just to run them. Typically involving camping an overflow instance for an excessive amount of time in order to make sure that those in your organized party are able to be together for this. Without the ability to force the creation of a private instance for commanders to bring their group into, this ends up being a logistical nightmare that requires more waiting around not doing anything than it does actually playing. I would love to see more challenging encounters, but before we get any more higher-coordination fights to enjoy we first need command and organizational tools to remove the necessity of cheesing the game mechanics in order to get a half-way workable solution to group needs.

Nury.3062:

I am glad that there is a “hard” to get material,without that ascended would be just easy to get,the new “exotic”.

The only thing that is ‘hard’ about getting dragonite ore is fighting the urge to uninstall while mindlessly following the zerg and auto attacking for hours and hours to get the 1500+ needed.

Raine.1394:

I mean, that’s really what all those threads address, the fact that there is only really one role and that is DPS.

This. It was originally touted that GW2 would replace the Tank/DPS/Heals trinity with Damage/Control/Support. Instead, everyone is Damage that has various aspects of Support rolled in based on which profession you have chosen. Builds that do not emphasize damage, in addition to the forms of support that their profession can bring, are generally more of a hindrance on the party than any kind of help simply because they can build for the high damage without sacrificing the ability to provide support still.

It is not an inherently bad thing to do away with the Trinity that most MMOs use. But the way that things stand right now is rather limiting on the ways that ANet can design encounters. It would be nice to see a return to the original proposition, where Control and Support are roles that requires more specialization than a few trait and utility choices.

This would have been a much, much more exciting way to finish things! Something that actually engages players in a struggle with the risk of failure, rather than watching other actors play out their part and then getting to push some buttons (that do not really effect the outcome) at the end of it all.

Or at the very least, it would be nice to have the Waypoints that were put in front of the Guild Puzzles and other guild events. It is very boring being locked into characters who have explored all of the wp’s for guild events, rather than being able to use the alt most in line with what we are doing.

For dungeons and such it voes not matter as much, since you only have to get to that zone and you will be pulled into the instance.

Baels.3469:

If I had everything but the precursor right now, and had to stop playing for 2-3 months… if those precursors rose another 400g due to inflation, it’s not exactly generating more riveting gameplay, is it? It’s just inflation causing a larger gold time gate

Ravenmoon.5318:

The much larger issue is for the kittens that flip precursors at the TP and obviously changing the price. Dawn used to be 300-400g few months ago, now its 700 lowest while there has been no gold boost. Go figure. Items NEED to have hardcoded TOP price. Player-driven economy is just a mess. Too many greedy people.

Screw precursors … lvl 20 Masterwork item costs 12 silver, or more. <o>

Sometimes it is really nice to be able to look at gw2Spidy and see what the truth of the situation is. “A few months ago”, when dawn was last 400g would be early January of 2013, over a year ago. 300g you would have to go back to 2012. In fact, aside from a spike at the new year the price has been pretty stable for the last five months, and reasonable well settled since February.

As for low level crafted items, take a look at the materials involved in making them. Most of them are already listed at a loss, and they are still significantly more expensive than dropped gear a level higher or lower. It really saves a lot of coin if you update your gear on levels that are not a multiple of five.

The only thing that a max sell value being tied to items would do is cause people to hoard valuable items such as precursors. Rather than complaining about having to save up hundreds of gold to buy them, people would be complaining about only being able to get them via barter for other extremely valuable top end items.

The Dragonite grind is already enough to kill the game for many players. It is not the ‘spawns within a certain window’ nature of the world bosses that make them a boring farm. It is the zerg encouraging mechanics of the encounters, and the way that Arena.Net is heavyhandedly shoving players at them to get Dragonite Ore.

Essence Snow.3194:

What you are referring to as “infinite amount of new wealth” is one of the 2 points made to define trading as finite. How does one thing get limited by an “infinite source”?

*note the " "

At any given point there are a finite amount of goods and currency in the game world. That is what limits the profit that can be made via the Trading Post. This is why different words are used for describing different things, such as how I used the words ‘currently available’ when talking about the wealth that is available across the game at that moment and ‘potentially’ when talking about future growth.

EDIT: Another way of explaining the same thing that might work better….

At any given time, you could build a model of GW2’s economy. This is because there is only a finite amount of wealth in the game at that moment. If you build another model a week later it might be larger than the last model, because more wealth has been farmed up. It might be smaller than the last model, because players have been using up resources. But no matter what point in time you choose, there will be a finite amount of wealth in the game.

Conversely, there is no such limit on the amount of wealth that can be introduced into the game by player actions. If five players do a dungeon speedrun they each get 1.5 gold, in addition to whatever else happens to drop for them. So the next moment that you make a model, it will have grown by 7.5 gold from this ingame action. If 50 people do this the model grows by 75 gold. If 5,000 people do it then the model grows by 7,500 gold. If you want to get really absurd you could say that 50 million GW2 accounts worth of people doing this dungeon speed run are beyond the technical capacity of Arena.Net’s infrastructure, but if they were selling that many accounts then they would quickly respond to fix this. ;-)

morrolan.9608:

John Smith.4610:

As far as other ideas like the GW2 economy has rampant inflation or there are other virtual economists online that don’t approve of this economy, that’s simply not even close to true.

These contain some criticisms:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LaurenMorton/20130708/195789/The_Soulless_MachineHow_the_Trading_Post_is_Tearing_Your_Players_Apart.php

When I read this I couldn’t just laugh it up and browse on through the forums. The difference between ’ other virtual economists online that don’t approve of this economy’ and a video game blogger talking about how efficient the GW2 trading system is, but complaining that it is ‘without spirit’ and how she doesn’t get to talk to other people while selling things is just…. staggering. Absolutely staggering.

Essence Snow.3194:

The main issue arises when every single other avenue is regulated. It also has exponential potential where as other avenues are linear. So the gap between anything else and trading only grows by leaps and bounds….ie it is not balanced at all compared to anything else in the game at completing objectives, since most all objectives can be bought.

It seems like your thoughts on this are inverted? The Trading Post has a finite (though large) amount of potential profit available from trading on it. It is limited by the goods (and currency) currently available. The more people are aware of the areas of the market that can return profits, the less profit there is to be made by individuals using this approach. Similarly, an individual can only make a certain amount of money in a particular segment of the market before that ‘runs dry’ for the time and there are insufficient other parties participating in it.

On the other hand, an infinite amount of new wealth can be added to the game via ingame actions. Unlike reality, where there is only a finite supply available, the more people that jump on the Zerg Train to farm Champions, the more wealth is being created. They are not competing for some capped resource, but instead each getting their own coin without any competition. The more players come and join in, the larger the potential wealth this creates grows without any limits.

As to the OP’s initial complaint, the problem seems to be with the encouragements given to players, not with the game’s economy. The problem here is not that the Trading Post is somehow ruining everything. It is that players feel that they need to go out and grind in order to get Ascended gear right now. Which is certainly something that requires some thought and perhaps new encouragements being provided by Arena.Net, but not in adjustments to how the TP works.

Several good points already made, especially using the Asura gate in your racial city to travel to Lion’s Arch, and then to another one. You get the same progress towards the next level for running the starter zones at level 50 as you do at level 5, but you are able to do it much faster.

Also, you get a good bit of XP from the Personal Story instances. Once you get up to mid levels you can also do Dungeons for pretty close to a full level each run, if you have some friends that run that kind of stuff and don’t mind bringing a lowbie along. Most people don’t really mind one or two, since most of the dungeons are fairly easy to shortman even.

matacka.3584:

I hear I can do WvW at low levels but hear I really can’t hold my own til high level anyways.

You can get pretty quick XP from WvW, but I wouldn’t recommend that if you want to keep a positive reputation on your World. You get upleveled to level 80 when you enter WvW, but you do not get the traits or gear that a level 80 would have. As a result, all you are really doing is providing an easy opportunity for the enemy forces to rally by killing you.

GW2 is too far along for such a radical change. Though, it would be nice to see more viable Utilities to choose from. But any more of an overhaul than that and it would have the same impact as SWG had…. failing to get people who would like the new game to come and give it a try while alienating everyone who actually liked the game that was.

Druu.9604:

So far, what I’ve seen the most is ppl stacking out of LOS so the boss walks to them and we stand there, DPSing and dodgeing at the right moment.

Unfortunately, this is kind of a result of the ‘freedom’ that comes with a lack of defined combat roles. Rather than having any kind of important differences, everyone is just damage. Either direct damage or condition damage, with options to provide support tossed in on the side. This closes the door to many interesting encounters that would require greater strategy and means that the optimal solution is usually to stack and dump dps on it.

Romo.3709:

Bloodstone Dust – 1 hour of Champ Farm
Empyreal Fragment – 2-3 hours of Dungeons
Dragonite Ore – Doing every world boss meta possible in 24 hours, yup, you’re still short…

Indeed. And you essentially have to craft Ascended Armor in order to reasonably get 70 Agony Resistance for scale 50 Fractals. I can not bring myself to the mind numbing tedium of grinding world bosses and temple auto attack zergs, which effectively halts my progression in FotM…. This is something that I can not quite figure out.

Siphaed.9235:

I found the WvW Season #1 to rejuvenate WvW on my server and others. Queue time became huge because thousands wanted into the maps to participate (whether or not it can be argued that many were “achievement hunters”). In some people’s perspective it was ‘bad’, but most of those complaints either boil down to not being able to get into the map (something that Edge of the Mists should fix in the next season), or issues with GvG players (something that the revamped BG JP fixed, hopefully). Team play and tactical movements became an enjoyable norm to replace the keep-flipping that happened prior to the season.

I am glad to hear that WvW Season 1 was good for you and yours. However, I found that the weekly matchups were poorly planned and heavily biased against Sanctum of Rall, to the point that the event planner handed out weekly win points to other worlds while leaving SoR matched up against Black Gate and their paid WvW Guilds week after week after week after….

It was bad enough that several of SoR’s top WvW guilds left the server or disbanded part way through the season. Many of the Commanders that I enjoyed playing with are no longer around. I do not know a lot about how things went on other Worlds, but the poor execution of WvW S1 left SoR’s WvW crippled compared to what it was before. One of the two aspects that kept me playing GW2 gone, because they wanted to promote it but lacked the foresight to do the job well.

Rin.1046:

And providing the social players do not lose out (which they are not in GW2), I see no problem with that at all and welcome it very much. We are all different players, social and not so social. A good game caters to one, a great game caters to both.

I have to disagree with the idea that social players do not lose out. Guild Wars 2 simply does not provide much of a framework for social gaming outside of the PvP community. And this is a subset of the game that was crippled at launch and despite great improvements since then hasn’t really taken off to the level that many hoped.

World vs World guilds provide this is some respect, with several very close knit groups having formed up on the high tier servers.

In the PvE game, however, there really isn’t anything there. High level fractals are the only place that I have really seen any kind of social groups forming around anything more meaningful than sharing a global chat channel. And even then you are doing so in such small, five person groups that often do not reach beyond this insular ring unless one of their members is gone for awhile, that it is hard to really call that a community.

I have a hard time agreeing with the idea that corpse runs and excessive travel times were good for games. But the new generation of MMOs are most certainly lacking in the level of challenge that they provide players compared to older games. Without that challenge, there is no sense of teamwork or comradery that comes along with struggling to eventually overcome these challenges.

Guild Bounties and even more so Guild Puzzles were a good first step towards something that would help a chat channel of guild mates become a community. But I feel that this really needs to be pushed further, with challenges that require more than just following the commander icon to really bring players together in a meaningful way.

Edit:

Unfortunately in this game on the PVE side there are really only 3 things which require coordination. TA Aether path, Teq 2.0, and 40+ Fractals.

This was posted while I was typing. You are correct, I had forgotten about the updated Tequatl encounter when I was typing this up.

uberkingkong.8041:

But as for PvE, I pretty much have all the current armor I like but was wondering if there was a special holiday outfit I would be missing out on.

Just the two craftable back pieces that were mentioned before. Personally, I find the angelic wings to be quite awesome for some of my characters, but your opinion of the two pieces may vary.

EDIT: And they are really only special cosmetically. The stats aren’t anything great at all.