Guild Wars 2

Only one type of “stack” sigil can be active at the same time. For that reason, I use the +precision on my rifle and the flame blast on critical on my GS for my warrior. I build up the stack on my rifle since it’s more of a “secondary” weapon, which adds the +precision stack which helps the crit on my GS, which gives me more flame blasts.

I made the same mistake when I was starting out, trying to use the +power and +magic find on my hammer/staff Guardian. Thankfully they were only Minor Sigils. Sorry to hear you spent so much money on this =/

I’m just saying that we’ve got some crippling inflation going on. Every time I say this though, people come out and say that since things like crafting mats are still going down, that’s not the case. It is. It’s just that there’s so much supply for them and so little demand that they’re beating the inflation by virtue of being valueless. Currently, the only things on the TP that have any kind of constant demand are food and mats for crafting Exotics, and even the demand for those mats are declining as more and more people get into Exotic gear and the supply remains constant.

That leaves Legendaries as the only thing people have left to put money towards, besides WP costs and gear repairs. Those still have a constant supply, but now the full force of the economy is being directed towards acquiring them, as they’re just about the only thing people have left to get aside from replenishing their supplies of Omnomberry Bars and sharpening stones. Follow that trend to its conclusion, and you’re going to see the prices for everything else in the game selling for vendor+1c while Dawn/Dusk cost, basically, “all the money.”

Even games that came out in 2001 have added a server-wide LFG tool. I understand if this is being held off for when cross-server Guesting is implemented, but even a basic LFG interface with your name, character class, level, and a blurb about what you’re LFG for on your own home server would be an absolute godsend.

Spent 2 hours waiting for an Ascalon Catacombs Story group on my new alt when he hit 35. Found 2 other people, but we gave up after an hour of not finding anyone. Mind you, 5 explorable mode groups cycled through in the same time. I’ve only even done AC Story on my main because I wanted to run through the Dungeon storyline in order to get the full experience, but haven’t found a group for CM story in the month I’ve been looking. This is on a high-pop server as well.

I’ve also gone back to my old EVE account and changed the PW there, as my account still had my CC information stored, so they could have renewed it automatically, bought a ton of PLEX, sold them in-game for ISK, sold the ISK for cash, etc. if the actual accounts were breached. Probably not necessary, but it’s better to always err on the side of caution.

Even if GW2 wasn’t breached, anyone with a linked GW1-GW2 account would be in danger. I’m going to change all my passwords just in case.

I’m not all that concerned by the price creep in terms of getting a legendary. I really don’t want one.

What concerns me is the price creep as an indicator of the health of the overall GW economy. I remember when Dusk was selling for 9g. It jumped up to 30g a week after that and I said, “Well, hello inflation.” Everyone said “Nah, the prices will stabilize” etc, etc.

Basically, what I see is Precursors, Exotic Gear, Ectos, and top-tier crafting mats being the only items with a value much above their vendor price atm, which is scary. The prices for rare crafting mats continue to fall, as well as dye and everything else, and what this indicates to me is a lack of growth in the game with a lot fewer new players coming in and crafting low to mid-level armor, while the high-level players are already mostly 80 with full exotics with only legendaries to look forward to. Overall, GW’s more economically moribund that Greece.

Well, this is… troubling. Visa’s been getting hammered by cyberattacks, same as all the major CC companies and banks. This is bad.

Noticed the same thing. Got probably 60 of the things, usually one every few chests or so, the first week or two. Haven’t gotten a single one since on two separate characters.

Probably more Gem Store incentivization.

Erm, lemme put it this way:

If you get hit by more than the first hit or two of hundred blades, you’re an idiot and should quit PvP forever. Seriously. It locks you in place and only hits a ~100 degree cone.

It’s got a high charge time, takes multiple seconds to complete, is easily dodge-able, and makes you immobile for the duration. Next people are going to be complaining that warriors’ aimed shot rifle burst skill does too much damage (I’ve one-shotted caster profs with it with critical+might stacks. What now?).

My main’s a Hammer/Staff guardian and I have never lost to a warrior. Due to our much-decried complete lack of ranged ability, I always fight them in melee. Hundred blades, whirlwind, etc. have never been an issue for me at all. Now I’m not usually the kind of guy to say “learn to play, lol,” but in this case I think it’s absolutely true. These skills do high damage, yes, but are easily counterable/avoidable altogether.

Also, it seems like the majority of the people here aren’t even complaining about how much damage these skills do, they want warriors nerfed because their classes aren’t as good in comparison. Here’s some news, a well-played mesmer is the single biggest asset a team can have in WvW, be it a siege, a defense, or open combat. Mesmers seem to be the most whined-about in terms of power, but it’s true. Simply put, it’s an advanced class, and it’s very hard to do right, but it has a lot of potential. It was the same in GW1. Literally anyone can play a warrior, but a mesmer takes a lot more skill to be played effectively.

You mean accent symbols? Well, considering that they’re common in pretty much every language except American English, and that the game isn’t just in America…

I had about 6g at 60 on my first char about a week after launch, including keeping one crafting prof up with my level.

My new alt only has 2g right now at 60, without leveling any crafting and getting all his gear made by my main. Don’t quite understand it.

I’m pretty sure that the legendaries are outside of canon =p

After all, the bow shoots unicorns.

Lion’s Arch keeping their fleet in reserve and out of harm’s way is literally the only smart thing they could possibly done with it.

Let’s break down the factors: Based on what we’ve seen, the Humans use conventional wooden sailing vessels armed with broadside-style cannon placement.

The Risen have Bone Ships and Dead Ships. Now, the dead ships are pretty much identical to their human counterparts from what we’ve seen. They’re just wrecked ships raised up and used primarily for logistics purposes such as “troop” transport. Reasonably, if they were all that Zhaitan had, Lion’s Arch could arguably meet them on more or less even terms.

The Bone Ships, however, are an entirely different animal. First, they can submerge and rise up anywhere without warning. If you did the Cursed Shore naval storyline in the PS, they do it with complete surprise and not even the Asuran tech installed on your vessel can detect them. Big advantage, both tactically and strategically. Tactically, because they can take you by surprise and strategically because you will never know where they are.

The Bone Ships can also move independently of wind. The advantage of any ship that moves under power as compared to under sail cannot be overstated. Once again, superior both tactically and strategically.

Finally, the “fish throwing claw” weapons on the Bone Ships seem to be able to fire in any direction. In the same vein as the previous issue, this is a massive tactical advantage. A Bone Ship could literally run circles around a human vessel, bombarding it even as the humans tried to bring their guns to bear.

An also less-than-insignificant fact is that if you lose a ship, Zhaitan raises it and adds it to his own fleet. Even worse, though, is that the captain and crew become his minions, and as we all know Zhaitan knows everything his minions ever knew, he now knows everything that captain knew about the size, deployment, and missions of your whole fleet.

Asking the Lion’s Arch fleet to take the fight to Zhaitan with what they’re presented to have would be like asking Francis Drake to defeat the Spanish Armada if the Spanish had 1880s steam frigates, that could incidentally turn into submarines. And if the Spanish could then probe his dead body for intelligence if he failed.

Yes, but moonshine and bootleg tobacco aren’t anywhere near a significant portion of all sales, much less the majority of them.

I really don’t think the prohibition analogue works here. For that to work, the US Government would have to be legally selling cocaine to people and the drug dealers would just be undercutting them.

Wyrdthane.6801:

Race: There are enough Humanoid races, how about a Krait, or Squidlike race with an asian cultural influence.

An Underwater Race Starting area would be awesome. With a storyline that is 55% underwater, using the Endless Ocean area on the SW corner of the worldmap and the Islands nearby as the main zones.

This would also give Anet a good excuse to flesh out the Underwater Weapons/Skills/Utilities. MAYBE, add some new underwater only utilities and elites.

Class: Something along the lines of a Ritualist, but with more emphasis on the Ritual aspect of things.. Like make all his/her skills/ animations move like a ritual dance or something, that can seamlessly combine with eachother.

OR Voodoo Priest. Main point would be to Support Boon from a distance, OR Condition in melee. Skills that focus on helping your friends or hinder your enemies. more ability to interrupt skills,

I get the feeling they have something like this planned for the Largos. It seems odd that there are only about 5 of them in the entire game, yet they’re all fairly prominent and have such detailed models, animations, dialogue, and abilities for being so comparatively minor in the broad scope.

I feel like a kid trying to see what’s in his Christmas presents with a flashlight =p

I’ve had this happen a few times, though with much less valuable items thankfully. Only seems to affect buying from a sell order though, in my experience. Never had it happen with a buy order being filled, so that’s how I handle all my large-volume or expensive purchases for the most part.

Rizzy.8293:

sainguine.2870:

GW2 First Expansion:Return of the trinity starring Monks

Monks turned into Guardians.
they upgraded their discipline to include being able to wear plate armour

I actually feel like Guardians are a more direct analogue of W/Mos. At least, I’ve been quite successful playing my Guardian in almost the same way I played my W/Mo.

My Warrior I play more like my A/W crit build from GW1, with the only exception being the slightly heavier armor.

@Leiloni Read your post and got the image of people getting turned on by Charr in skimpy dresses. Not your fault, but I’d like to state for the record that I vomited in my mouth just a little.

But yes, this does look just a little silly =p

Sorry for the massive post. I’ll start off by assuming we can all agree that the gold selling issue is having a major impact on the game. We might have different opinions on the magnitude of that effect, but we can all agree there is one. In my own opinion, a major part of this problem is that, even though players are provided with a legitimate way to trade gold for real-world money in the form of gem purchases and currency exchange, gold sellers are able to dramatically undercut this with the prices they offer.

Now, as far as buying gems with gold via the exchange goes, I feel the prices are fair. 1 gold currently buys roughly 270 gems, and the boosters and other items you can buy with this I consider fair. However, in terms of real-world money, the items available are simply not worth it. For example, depending on which gem package you buy, a black lion key costs roughly $2 US. This is simply staggering. I can’t think of any normal player who would pay that much to open a black lion chest, the rewards of which are generally underwhelming. I think that the massive amounts of black lion chests posted on the trading post for one copper above vendor price back me up on this. However, were the keys, say, $0.25 or even $0.50, I’m sure I would have happily bought $10 worth without a second thought. Right now, each black lion chest on the market is a potential $2 that Anet is could be earning, but since the number of them keeps going up, it’s money they will never earn. That doesn’t even count the stacks of them sitting in peoples’ inventories. I personally have over 200 of the things collecting dust, which would currently cost me $400 to open. I’m sure there are plenty of other players with the same situation, and if even one of them paid $400 to open them all I would be shocked.

In another example, the 2000 gems for the Deluxe Edition upgrade would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30, as opposed to the extra $10 you would have paid for it had you bought the boxed version. I can understand that someone should have to pay more for the upgrade than they would have if they bought it originally, but having the cost to do so be triple the difference between the standard and deluxe boxes makes no sense to me. I had planned on buying the deluxe edition, but only the standard was available in the store I bought the game. I was very happy to see it available on the BLTC, and was going to buy it there. When I opened the “buy gems” interface and calculated the cost of buying it, though, my credit card went back into my wallet and has remained there ever since. I would have been fine with paying, say, kitten premium for the upgrade versus the boxed purchase, but paying three times the amount for something I could have gotten literally the day before for $10 was ridiculous.

Now, what I’m suggesting is either increasing the number of gems you get for a gem purchase, or at least slashing the prices of items on the gem store drastically to make the in-game benefit match up more with the real-world cost. I haven’t talked to a single player who has bought gems with real-world money to buy items from the gem store. At best, they’ve used in-game gold to buy gems. At worst, they’ve simply done without and never opened the screen again.

The way gold sellers tie into this is simply the difference in n-game value that real-world money will get you is vastly different between their prices and Anet’s, in terms of buying gold from them versus buying gems to sell for gold. The current prices we’re seeing every time we go in to Lion’s Arch are roughly $1=1g. Buying gems and selling them for gold gets you roughly $1=20s. It is in fact, much cheaper to buy gold from the gold sellers and then exchange that gold for gems to buy gem store items than it is to buy the gems from Anet.

Now, if the difference in value was smaller, I’m sure that, in addition to the people now buying gems from Anet who had previously bought from neither them nor the gold sellers, many of the gold sellers’ customers would buy from Anet instead. The fact is, those sites are an absolute breeding ground for identity theft, but with the payoff being so much greater for dealing with them, they’re thriving anyway. The fact is, the people who would be inclined to buy gold from anybody would vastly prefer to buy it from Anet, but with so great a disparity they’re either not buying from anyone or taking their chances with the gold sellers.

Long story short, I hope that this would both boost the number of players giving Anet their business, as well as help undermine the gold sellers who are stealing that same business, and by extension, Anet’s money.

Yeah, you do have to give them credit in the fact that making a compelling story in an MMO is crushingly difficult. Even BioWare had the same kind of problem with SWTOR and they’re one of the best storytelling companies out there.

Other parts of the game, like DE chains and some heart quests, feel very organic and alive. It does just seem like the story was a it rushed though. Could chalk it up to the multiple paths everywhere. Even though each character will only get something like 40-50 story missions, there’s probably a couple hundred of the things total between all races, orders, and path choices. Ironically though, it seemed like the story dumbed down as it converged. IE, the Orders and Race missions were great, but when it got to the Pact part where all those storylines converged into content that almost everyone would see, there was a big drop.

Yeah, as far as the classes go I think they have most of the bases covered. I will say one thing though, any class they do add should be unique and not just a mashup of two existing classes. Something with unique play mechanics that adds depth not just volume.

Here are a few issues points I’d like to put in perspective:

Firstly, the games that made statements saying they wouldn’t ban gold buyers were all subscription-based. It fit their business model better to have these players keep paying $15 a month rather than being banned. In short, the benefits of banning them were outweighed by lost revenues. GW has no subscription, thus all profits are from the initial purchase and the purchase of gems. Since the initial purchase has already been made, and since people buying gold online are most assuredly not also buying from the gem store, there is no opportunity cost for banning them in terms of profits.

Secondly, since Anet is supporting this game on the micro-transaction model, they depend on players purchasing gems. If gold sellers are undercutting the gem store, Anet is actually losing profits every time someone buys from the sellers rather than them. These players and the people who sell to them are effectively stealing money from Anet.

Thirdly, banning people based on whether or not they accept money from gold sellers in no way affects people simply sending money to one another legitimately. If the account that sent the money is identified as a gold seller and banned, then yes, any large sums of gold they sent to a player would be very much suspect. However, saying that the 1c attached to spam mails would cause players to be banned makes no sense at all. If Anet had the capability to track who is sending money to whom, I’m fairly confident that determining the actual amount sent would be trivial, as that data would have passed through their servers as much as the text content of the message itself. Now, the idea that sellers randomly sending large amounts of money to people is equally silly, because that money is their product, which is worth real money to them, and they gain no benefit from getting random players banned. All they do is waste product that they could instead have sold. If that was true drug dealers would be giving out free crack to people every day just to get them sent to prison.

Another thing I’d like to point out as a contributing factor is the fact that buying gems to sell for gold right now is silly. At current gem prices, a full suit of T3 cultural armor would cost around $600 US. I don’t see the “micro” in the microtransaction model. If the gems were even close to the prices the gold sellers offer, I believe the vast majority of players would prefer that method to third parties, especially if they knew there was a chance they could get banned and lose their entire investment.

Seems like Kodan and Tengu are the two most likely candidates.

One thing I did notice is that in some places there seem to be big gaps in the story. Also, a lot of the “heroic sacrifices” and “sad death” moments were kinda meh because the characters weren’t that fleshed out to begin with and you had no emotional investment in them… or it was way too predictable/unnecessary. Let’s just say that when a character mentions he has a wife, etc. he’s a dead man walking, which is incredibly cliche. It just feels like they try to force you to like certain characters in a purely formulaic way, then kill them off to try to make the story more interesting. All it really did was tell me “Oh, you said something that someone thought would make me like you? Okay, you’re gonna die.” and stop caring at all about any of the characters.

I blame George R.R. Martin for doing the whole “Kill the characters you love” thing so well, now everybody thinks that “Step 1, make likeable character. Step 2, kill character. Step 3, profit.” is good storytelling.

I think we’ll see an expansion regarding the Largos at some point. They seem deliberately mysterious and vague, yet well-developed and thought out enough that there’s a lot more planned for them. It even says that they fled horrors that had invaded their home in the deep, so there might be a whole ‘nother dragon down there we don’t even know about.

Playable Largos would be awesome, imho. They remind me of the Quarians from Mass Effect, except with wings and the ability to teleport.

Favorite playable race has to be Charr, which surprises the heck out of me a a hardcore GW1 Charr-hater. The steampunk aspect and general overall bad-kitten-itude are just awesome.

Least favorite race? Asura, with Sylvari a close second. I mean… when you see an Asura and a Norn hitting each other with warhammers… >.<

For non-playable races, favorite is Dredge. I just love the communist mole-people, I crack up at every line they say. Close after them is Kodan for just being awesome, and Skritt for being almost as hilarious. Largos are also awesome, but they barely appear at all so there’s not much we know about them. The mystery is cool.

Least favorite NPC races are Krait and Quaggan. Quaggan are annoying and always need saving, and Krait… they’re like Risen training, incredibly annoying to fight, everywhere underwater, and eat people.

I loved the personal story… up until a certain point. Norn storyline was great, then I joined the Vigil and enjoyed it immensely, then… the story seemed to go off the rails. I mostly blame a certain sylvari who pretty much embodies the concept of a “Mary Sue” character.

I don’t think I could bring myself to delete my chars if they died. Got me thinking of stuff I could do along similar lines, though. This weekend I won’t respawn at waypoints on death, if I die I’ll stay dead unless a player rezzes me =p

If this issue’s actually making players with vertigo ill, then it should definitely be addressed. In the meantime, what aspect ratio do you guys have on your monitors? The game looks fine to me on a 17" 16:9, but I definitely see what you mean when I switch to 1600×1200. If you’re using an older 4:3 monitor you could try forcing it to run in 16:9 or 16:10 for some improvement, though you’ll get the black “widescreen” bars on it.

If that doesn’t help, you could try turning off post-processing. Different issue, but things like motion blur can cause nausea, so it could be contributing as well. I’ve never suffered from vertigo, but excessive motion blur does give me motion sickness and migraines, so I always turn it off. It is, in fact, the only thing I’ve found that gives me motion sickness, which is good considering I work on ships XD

Natjur.4017:

Anyone else notice the auto deleveling issues with turrets?

Drop a turret in a L10 area, the turrets drops down to a L12 turret. The engineer then walks off into a L15 part of the zone and they delevel to L17. Their placed turret also delevels to L17 (even tho its STILL in a L10 area) and now it just owns EVERYTHING.

Maybe this is why the one OP was talking about was one shotting everything.

I had honestly not noticed this. If this is happening, then yes, it should be fixed.

I think people need to tone it down with the nerf-calling. Turrets are incredibly flimsy and can’t last by themselves for any amount of time outside of the easiest areas of Queensdale.

Being a high-level engineer has nothing to do with it, either. A level 4 turret is a level 4 turret, regardless of what gear the player has. The only advantage a level 4 rifle turret dropped by a downscaled engineer has over one dropped by a level 4 engineer would be solely from trait buffs, the effect of which would be almost negligible at that level.

On top of that, the wurms there are “hatchlings” and therefore have a fraction of the HP normal mobs do, which in that area is already very low. I usually one-shot them on new characters I roll. The argument could be made from this situation that turrets need to despawn after a set time/distance from the player, but you really can’t make a valid justification for nerfing something based on a single incident.

Even calling this blatant griefing is a stretch in my book. If it was a rifle turret, which I assume it is since rocket turrets have a delay between firing and hitting the target, and therefore wouldn’t be able to “instantly” kill things, and thumper/flamethrower turrets don’t have the range to hit the whole area, it could have been planted there by a brand-new engineer doing the heart and forgotten about. He could have run over to the crafting area or gone AFK. I try to always take down my turrets when I leave an area on my engie, but you sometimes forget. So yes, put in a timer on turrets or have them blow up when you get too far away, but don’t take away damage potential from what’s already one of the least-played classes in the game.

You’re basing your entire argument on a single aphorism that, in the context of the work, pertains much more to morality than reward-seeking behavior. If you want to make a stronger argument on that subject, look into psychological studies involving operant conditioning. Psychologists refer to MMOs as “skinner boxes” for a reason, after all.

Also, I’d recommend against describing anything as “orgasmic” in any kind of paper unless you’re referring to the actual state of orgasm or specifically discussing pleasure responses in the nervous system. It’s not the most professional term for what you’re describing.

tolunart, I don’t know why you decided to go on such a lengthy rant about my post, which merely addressed the information on the server screen and didn’t even touch on the majority of issues you seem to attribute to it. To be honest, I find the majority of these topics a pointless waste of time that immature sub-humans use to feed off of one anothers’ anger to fuel their own “righteous indignation” high.

Do I think the game is dying? No. Do I think the game is experiencing troubles currently that could have an effect on long-term players numbers? Yes, most definitely. If you don’t feel that way, awesome. If you do feel that way, come up with ideas instead of just prowling the forums looking for someone to jump on. People talk about a “white knights vs. haters” debate, which is moronic. What I’m seeing is a small minority of people having discussions about how to possibly make the game better while the majority of people try to hijack these discussions to reinforce their own egos. “White knights” and “haters” are equally as useless and just clog the forums with meaningless pap.

I’m glad you and your wife are enjoying the game, and I hope you both continue to do so. In the meantime, please stop talking until you have something more constructive to add than the same “uh-huh! nuh-uh!” back-and-forth.

Mulch, we all wish that was the case, but it’s so prevalent that a player randomly LD’ing as they’re about to die is so abysmally unlikely compared to the alternative.

I’ve seen entire squads of enemies log out when they see us coming with a larger force. This is all, of course, assuming they’re logging out instead of just using the teleport hack to blink away.

Eochaidh.4106:

Ragnar Dragonfyre.1806:

A game with open PvP provides the best roleplaying experience possible. Conflict is at the heart of every great story and PvP is conflict centric. Having enemies that you can truly interact with creates the most memorable experiences.

Opinions!

RP community seems to disagree.

Actually, Darkfall was an open, full-loot PvP gane and had the highest population of hardcore RP’ers per capita of any MMO I’ve ever seen, by a wide margin.

Kill bandits in the area, water crops, and feed cows. Wurms aren’t the only way to advance that heart quest. Also, you’ll get some progress just from stomping the mounds.

rook.4625:

Eochaidh.4106:

I thought this had to do with the amount of accounts assigned to that server? They never said this is some sort of online player meter.

You are absolutely right, it has never officially been stated as a means to measure the amount of online players.

To add a little to this, if it was simply an online player meter, then you’d see people not being able to log in if they’re on these servers, or if you could log in but not transfer in when it’s full, the servers would just keep getting more and more players at off-peak hours until the server was way over capacity. So yes, there’s a lot more to this than how many concurrent players are online.

Depending on which Order you chose, a lot of those skins look pretty good. A lot cheaper than cultural, too.

Haha, I approve, Fungal.

Whenever I go into the Borderlands puzzle I always make sure I have the trait that reduces fall damage on my warrior/guardian. Usually leaves me with ~10k HP, so guys at the bottom tend to get a nasty surprise instead of an easy 1-hit kill.

But yes, I get logged out on constantly in WvW. Very annoying. Wish Anet would make it like other games where if you alt+f4 your character stays in-game for a short period.

I think that simply removing the mail system is a bad idea. You’ve got to temper the response here, because taking action that’s too drastic can sometimes be worse than not taking enough action. There are plenty of legitimate uses for the mail system. For example, if you want to toss some funds over to a friend so they can grab something from the TP, or if you want to buy a 1.5g keep wall upgrade in WvW and are a little short and ask for a few quick “donations” to get it going. I’ve even been known to toss a few low-level weapons/gear pieces I don’t need to new players just getting started because the warm, fuzzy feeling I got from their joy and adoration was worth much more than the few coppers I’d get from salvaging/selling it.

That said, the overwhelming majority of mail I get are either gold ads or phishing attempts. I’d also imagine that based on the number of bots and sellers as well as the relatively few uses legitimate players have for the mail system, that the majority of all mail is bot-related. For the ads, a charge for unsolicited mail like EVE has would go a long way, I.E. if the player is not a contact, they are charged a fee for sending mail to you. For the bots offloading their ill-gotten gains, the amount of money they’re transmitting would be a big telltale as there isn’t a legitimate reason I can think of for transferring huge amounts of cash through the mail system. That is not to say, of course, that anyone sending a big wad of gold should be guilty until proven innocent or we might accidentally ban a guy who sent 20g to his guildmate to quickly grab a cheap Dawn of Rage off the TP.

Wayshuba: I wouldn’t say that I “worked” on Anarchy Online, I was a community volunteer, not a Dev or GM, just a lowly player granted the privilege of working alongside those demi-gods on issues similar to these. I think my experience in that is valid to this discussion, but I don’t want to misrepresent myself in that regard. Put in many an hour helping new players, resolving stuck petitions, and hunting down bots and spammers like teenage lovers in a horror movie, but I was just a regular player whose in-game persona had an alter-ego with superpowers and a shiny nametag =p

I like the idea in concept, it was one of my favorite aspects of Tabula Rasa and I was glad to see it make a comeback in GW2.

My problems with its implementation, however, are twofold.
FIrstly, there are no “front lines” of any sort. Every waypoint, with a few exceptions, is vulnerable all the time, which forces players to try to cover literally the entire map to keep all these waypoints clear, which never happens because some waypoints are more highly “valued” by the majority than others… which sucks if you want to go do something that’s near a waypoint most people don’t care about because of remoteness, etc. What I’d do is have a clear progression of friendly forces across the zone, I.E. first you take camp X, then move on to capture camp Y, then Z. While you hold Z, X and Y are “friendly territory” and therefore not in danger unless Z falls. To keep it dynamic, you could scale up the difficulty of defending Z based on the number of times it’s been defended. I think this would also do a lot to help with the bot issue, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The second problem I have with the system is the utter uselessness of NPC guards. Vigil soldiers in Orr may look strong and intimidating, but more often than not you’ll see four of them charge a Risen Plague Carrier and die instantly when it explodes, or just die immediately to normal enemies because they’re utterly worthless and underpowered. This makes it pretty hard for one player to hold one of these objectives, because the minimum enemy attack size is too much for them to hold off solo even though the attacks usually aren’t “group” events, and the minimum seems to be set with the idea in mind that the guard NPCs are actually useful as more than a 5-second distraction. Not saying to make camps defend themselves, but at least make each of the 4 guards as individually powerful as one of the 12 mobs attacking, because I see them get solo’d by normal mobs constantly without even taking down half their health.

I really do understand the aversion to PvP that many players have in games like this, and understand it’s an acquired taste. I was the exact same way for years. I wasn’t interested in the competition and didn’t think it would be very fun. I avoided it whenever possible in GW1 until Factions came out and I decided that Elite Kurzick Warrior armor was the coolest looking thing I’d ever seen and I wanted it now! But… it required a lot of Kurzick faction and Amber, which were very hard to scrape up outside of PvP, so I decided to suck it up and go do it. Still hated it for the first couple times, but then I got in a good group, we started working together well and complementing one another’s abilities, taking down teams of other players and generally being awesome.

Suddenly, 12 hours had passed, I loved PvP forever and now do it in every game I play. All I’m saying is, it seems like most of the people here are opposed to PvP in general. If you’ve tried WvW in GW2 and hate it, and not just because it’s buggy as all kitteh right now, that’s one thing… but if you won’t even give it a fair shake you’re really handicapping your own enjoyment in my opinion. It’s challenging, dynamic, and full of infinite possibility because the enemies can actually think and do their best to smash you into dust even as you do the same.

At least give it a shot, you might be surprised at how much you like it.
~A PvP Convert

Banning the buyer as well as the seller is as important as getting rid of the bots, I agree. In a lot of games recently, this hasn’t been done. As a result, the stigma and fear goes away and it becomes accepted or even routine. In my experiences working with these issues in AO, that I related earlier, one big thing that I took away from it is that you can win most of the battle by just “flying the flag” so to speak. Make players afraid to buy gold in addition to hitting the bots. Players tend to be a lot easier to intimidate and deter than botters, as they stand to lose a product they paid money for (both the game and the gold), whereas the botters/sellers stand to gain profit from breaking the rules and will do so as long as the potential for that profit is worth the time investment. Hitting the supply and the demand cuts the margins at both ends, and if the margins get low enough, they’ll move their focus to other games where the environment is more favorable.

Now, I don’t know the in-depth mechanics of the mail system , so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that it wouldn’t be terribly hard to put in place a system that “flags” all large-scale gold transfers or high volumes of small ones between two characters (if, for example, they try to break it up to avoid detection). In addition to this, following the paper trail would also be fairly simple and effective if such a thing were in fact possible. Generally, bots send the money they make to a sort of “proxy” character that is not a bot or a seller, who holds the mass of it in case the bots or sellers get banned. Track the flow of gold from identified bots to the seller to the buyer and ban your way down the chain. Could even work backwards down the chain to identify more bots based on who else is sending money to the holding character, thereby rooting out the whole chain entirely. To keep operating, their operation would have to become more and more complex and convoluted to mask the transfers and at the very least require a lot more man-hours on their end, cutting their profit margins and leaving them with… shudder… diminishing returns on their investment.

Once again, the above suggestion is conjecture based on the assumption that the current mail system gives the devs the ability to do this. If not, a re-work of the mail system to allow such tracking functionality could be very beneficial.

As far as gold to gems goes, I don’t think MF presents a major inflation issue. Even if prices on the TP for individual items fluctuate, the amount of actual gold entering the economy wouldn’t be affected much. For this I’ll quote the Anet stats they posted a while ago that stated that only ~7-8% of gold entering the economy comes from drops sold to vendors. The majority comes from DEs/map rewards/dungeons, etc. So even if MF drives down the prices of Rares and Exotics, for example, it wouldn’t have a significant effect on the amount of actual currency coming into the game because it doesn’t affect the chance of mobs dropping loot, only the quality of it. There would be an effect from people getting more green/blue drops that sell for higher than while/gray, but with sales to vendors making up such a small percentage of the overall economy, increasing the amount of gold generated this way even by, say 50%, would be fairly negligible.

bwillb.2165:

Revenant.2691:

It doesn’t seem that bad for me in 16:9. Of course, now I’ll probably notice it next time I log in and never be able to stop noticing it >.<

I think if you got a chance to play it at 90ish fov, you’d never want to go back

Quite possibly. Like I said, I’m probably going to notice it now and have it bother me constantly from now on… thanks interwebs! XD

It doesn’t seem that bad for me in 16:9. Of course, now I’ll probably notice it next time I log in and never be able to stop noticing it >.<

I can see this as being an “unforseen problem” in need of addressing, but I’d ask everyone to be careful about demanding nerfs. Nerfs have destroyed many a game, and since engineers are already third from the bottom on the Reddit class-satisfaction forum, as well as one of the least-played classes overall according to published Anet stats. Nerfing an already unpopular class for something a few of them do could easily kill the profession, plus it could become a really slippery slope.

Time limits on turrets? Yessir, I can agree with that wholeheartedly. It doesn’t remove any utility or functionality, just makes the player have to be a little more attentive. Plus, the animations on most of them show turning hand-cranks like they’re wind-up spring-operated machines, so points for science (new thought, make it so they don’t expire, just have to be manually rewound after 5 minutes or so?). Nerfing the turrets themselves or their traits though, is a very bad idea. I honestly found turrets to be very lackluster compared to other builds in the vast majority of situations on my engie as it is, and they were one of the reasons I chose the profession.

Hall of Monuments shouldn’t be included because it’s only available to GW1 players. If it was part of it you’d have to go back and buy GW1 to get the achievement if you were new to GW2.

I lol’d at the comment about hitting F5. I did that so much when I first loaded the game up XD