Guild Wars 2

1. return some form of stability, even with just 20 lines or static fields a stack of 5 stability doesnt get you anywhere.
2. Give players in wvw a boost in health/toughness, this would help create longer and better fights. It also ofsets the power spike that happened with HoT.
3. Remove all pve aspects from wvw, there is eotm for that and wvw really should be focussed on fights between groups of players. So remove the single mobs that are placed all over, remove the hyleks/dredge/ogres from eb and the event from the desert maps.
3b. Remove the cc from desert borderlands keep lords to make the fights less annoying. The break bars and big life pool are fine since they will stall a bit to give a chance to defend.
4. Give points for capping as well as points per tick, this is to make it more rewarding and give players a bigger sense of contribution.
5. Better rewards, easiest would be to give more gold and return the ascended drop chances.

You should also find a way to reward commanders, on my server there are only a few and when there is no one commanding everyone just stands around waiting for someone else to command (It has always been like that also on the two other servers I have played on). Having more people wanting to command will make more people want to play wvw.

So far it seems to have fixed the oom crashes for me. Played through multiple wvw fights no problem.

Has there been any earlier communication about changing the reset times? Because I haven’t caught anything like that and it seems like it has been decided on a whim. Having the reset on fridays is a nice way to start the weekend and also keeps the maps nice and busy for that weekend. I expect cutting the weekend in half will probably do the opposite of getting wvw population higher at the end of a match-up as there will most likely be as much people playing on saturdays as on fridays then. Which means less activity in the weekend and a lower population overall.
Capturing towers might be fun but a lot of players play wvw because of the fights.

Linken.6345:

Yea I think you got burned you saw it selling for high and hoped to sell it for higher, its human nature

Honestly, rather than hoping to sell for higher I was just hoping it would keep its value. I never had any use for such a big pile gold at anytime and I enjoyed having the item.
If only I was good at economics, I could have made thousands of gold over the years like many others.

I agree I am partly to blame for not being smart enough here and I have enjoyed playing the game for the past years at least some of the time. I would like to argue though that having more gold lets me buy more sets of equipment and lets me enjoy the game in more different ways.

Locce.8405:

Welcome to the world of economics! This has nothing to do with stealing and everything with availability of resources, supply and demand. If the supply becomes more readily available but the demand remains unchanged prices drop.
You could make a case that it is Anet who is making these resources more readily available, but it is still basically the same as if a mining corporation discovered a huge deposit of raw diamonds and broke the De Beers monopoly with it. That corporation would not be stealing from De Beers, yet De Beers would be poorer for it.

In the end it will always be Anet deciding how they make something available. And similar items like the permanent banking license and such are only available as a very rare drop from the black lion chests. These items being pretty valuable as well may have guaranteed a more steady price drop if the mystic forge conduit was reintroduced in this way.

It seems the only way to really be able to enjoy the game is by studying the trading post. Just playing the game gets you nowhere.

I made my own Mystic forge conduit when Guildwars 2 just started and kept it since as a way to save my money. If I had checked the price more often I would probably have sold it. In my mind it was about 600-800 gold but it seems it actually had been worth over 1500 gold. With the way they made it obtainable again now it lost all its value completely.

If this is Arenanet taking down high value items none of them are worth a thing now, we already know that legendaries and precursors will be easier to obtain in Heart of Thorns.

Meanwhile the players having these high value items will be robbed of their money.
What are your opinions? Is it fine if they just decide something should not be worth as much as it is?

I quickly scanned the tread but I havent seen anyone commenting on the following. I completed events at the gate of arah and the temple of grenth defeating the champions in them, but it did not unlock the trait. I can only assume this is because the event has to be an assault event and not a defend one.
Is this working as intended and if so why? Because as it is I have to wait not only for the event but also hope others wont keep succeeding the defend event.

When I get it its pretty much alway skill lag/ skills not activating at all. I’m playing on aurora glade. I wanna guess its whenever a big fight happens, probably involving over 80 players.
What I cannot understand however is that it had not been a problem for a decent amount of time and then got worse again some time after forum posts saying arenanet was working on the wvw lag problem. I can’t draw conclusions though as im not in a position to confirm anything.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Back on randomness/replayability/rewards: I think the intent has always been to make the Fractals a very replayable experience by using random to create semi-unique iterations through the content. But the extrinsic reward motivators work to the contrary, making random unfavorable for optimal gain.

I’d like to see more speculation on middle ground solutions which both add meaningful variety to the Fractals without forcing players to feel like they’re trudging through non-optimal reward paths.

Also, this is all just speculation. I’m not advocating or declaring an official re-work of any system here. Just exploring possibilities for the evolution of this and future content.

I have been thinking about this as well and ended up thinking that there should be a higher emphasis on the randomness so that people expect and accept it instead of just finding it a chore. Maybe you could turn the fractals+instabilities into a sort of slot gambling system. Dividing them in groups of difficulty, let the player choose a difficulty ( like every fractal) for the fractals themselves and for the instability then multiply the rewards by a factor decided by the difficulties. As it is the fractal level would provide a baseline for the rewards. You could even tie this in with leaderboards by awarding points for more difficult combinations along with a timer.

On the topic of scaling, I wouldnt mind a CDI focused on this.

ColinJohanson.2394:

spoj.9672:

But on to the point of explorable modes not being heavily story driven. Why does the new aetherpath in Twilight Arbor still have unskippable cutscenes and needlessly long dialogues? This is a major reason a lot of players avoid the path.

This is a perfect example of why heavily driving a lot of lore and story into something that is intended to be a group re-playable experience isn’t a great idea, and something typically we try and avoid. Thus the challenge here, to get across these cool stories, without the cost of the pacing of the fractal experience!

If you could give players an option at the start or before entering the fractals dungeon to skip all cutscenes then that would be perfect. You could just copy the lving story stuff into fractals and remove all the dialogues for people that chose to skip. In this case I think the lfg tool will let players group up with like minded.

The Lost Witch.7601:

RiShardV.8456:

I find the idea of saving progress in fractals interesting because that may remove a barrier players have for starting fractals: it takes time to complete. A problem I can see is that it is equally troublesome to keep a party together or plan these multiple runs with the same party. Maybe this can be resolved by coding the floppies with a way to save how many fractals have been run and allowing players with the same amount to enter the next one in line?
After re-reading it seems (if i understand correctly) you saw the same issue with parties but had a different idea with the floppies. I think that if it should save anything it is not the amount of ractals run but the “level” reached inside the fractals dungeon. This still leaves a problem of having to find people with the same amount of ractals completed though.

I believe I intend what you have in mind. But apparently it didn’t show clearly in my previous post.

The floppies would save the difficulty level and the tier. For example, after completing the dredge fractal you would have the following coordinates on your floppy: Difficulty level 23 and tier 3.

Flopp would then send you to the fractal you abandoned. (Let’s say the molten bosses fractal) Or, if you have teamed up with other people that had the coordinates: level 23 tier 3, you may end up in a different boss fractal, depending on who opens the instance.

Okay, so in this case it would restart the fractal in which the player or the party left i guess. The way I see it what should be saved is the amount of fractals run up to 3. In the example you used that would mean you can start the boss fractal on the same difficulty level, which could be any boss.

The reason I dont think you should let people restart or even return to the same spot they left in a fractal, is because players might not feel like it if the experience was too horrible and it sort of takes away the experience if you can shuffle to the end one step at a time every day.

The idea you had of letting people with higher level saves join lower level ones also makes things easier, all in all I still think its a very nice idea. The main point would be that you can stop after every fractal and start the next one next time to give a better sense of completion instead of leaving it at 1 or 2 fractals every time and lower the barrier by putting the end point closer.

I would be very interested to know if more people would start fractals more often if they could save their progress after every fractal.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Wethospu.6437:

The Lost Witch.7601:

I believe that if fractals are to become harder (which I believe is a good idea), there should be a way to save your progress as a team. (Up to the start of a fractal)

That way we can feel happiness and relief after struggling through a seriously hard version of the uncategorized fractal, instead of feeling down because we can’t finish a full run.

Nice idea but what about the implementation?

How would this work on pug teams? Where you aren’t guaranteed to get same team together?

What if someone leaves? Could you invite someone else? Who’s progress would get saved?

Good questions. I’ll try to come up with some good answers:

Proposal Overview

Making it possible to save fractal progress. (With improved rewards as a side effect)

Goal of Proposal

To make more challenging fractals possible, without creating a situation where players would feel disheartened after completing a difficult fractal when realizing that they have no time for completing all four.

I find the idea of saving progress in fractals interesting because that may remove a barrier players have for starting fractals: it takes time to complete. A problem I can see is that it is equally troublesome to keep a party together or plan these multiple runs with the same party. Maybe this can be resolved by coding the floppies with a way to save how many fractals have been run and allowing players with the same amount to enter the next one in line?
After re-reading it seems (if i understand correctly) you saw the same issue with parties but had a different idea with the floppies. I think that if it should save anything it is not the amount of ractals run but the “level” reached inside the fractals dungeon. This still leaves a problem of having to find people with the same amount of ractals completed though.

Fractals is in my eyes really cool for when I want to play gw2 pve but dont have any particular place to go, since it supplies a (limited) different experience every time. And the progression system works well since it lets you choose your own difficulty. The things I would like to see changed are:

-I would like to be able to exhange my ascended rings for something else, maybe for les fractal relics then I can buy them with. So that I do feel like I actually got something no matter which one I get. (The same is probably true for other ascended gear although to a lesser extent)

-Agony. The Agony system is just a barrier stopping people from going into higher fractals without the resist. In effect this makes players have to farm in order to get further when you actually want to have people enjoy the content. As well as that this is totally different from the rest of the game meaning that you can be a good player but not be able to play high level fractals.
To get these things on the same page you could forget about agony resistance ( leave the agony as a special attack) and have some sort of small boost in damage or defence against all fractal enemies. This would let people without enough skill play higher level fractals and diminish the one hit kill wonders that scaling in all aspects of the game seem to have.

-Fractals doesnt really have an end. Which may be the point of it but I think it would be nice if the highest current fractal level available would be something special. Like an entirely thrown together map of different parts of fractal maps or parts of the game. Which at it best would be randomized as well.

1. ranger
2. thief
3. engineer

The proposal as stated sounds great and I would be very excited if at least some of it would eventually make it into the game. Besides that this has been a really interesting process to follow and I am looking forward to the next one.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Which current system do you think works great specifically? In theory, we have a lot of systems already

[snip]

- Collect skins: Purchase them for currencies (which becomes play the fastest way to earn currency X), get them as rare drops (play fastest way to kill mob/content type X), or purchase them off the trading post. (Play the fastest way to earn gold)

- Legendary: This one doesn’t really have a totally clear path to acquisition other than earn crazy amounts of gold, which goes back to play the fastest way to earn gold. (note legendary is only horizontal if you already have ascended)

- PvP Skin Locker & PvP Ranks: Play PvP. (This is basically just play PvP since the latest release.)

Not everyone plays the way I described above, but many of the systems above encourage you to want to play the fastest way possible to earn the rewards, sometimes at the cost of not playing the way you’d find the most fun. The upside of Gw2 is you can play the things you enjoy most and still be rewarded for them in most cases, even if it’s not at the fastest rate. The downside is because almost everything can earn you most of the same rewards, this becomes a matter of choosing to do the things you enjoy the most, but getting rewarded slower because of it.

Potential different systems would create more diverse game play, but the challenge is making it not overly complex, and running the risk of driving players to force one specific type of game play they may not enjoy since they can’t earn it other ways. These are some of the challenges we face we looking at any form of horizontal progression, and some of the discussions that come up when looking at new potential systems as well.

Yes, sadly people will try to get rich as fast and easy as possible as it is their nature to do so. As long as everyone can do the same thing it is however fair (barring scams and such). I remember one of the developers saying he would like more skill based content (correct me if i’m wrong) and thats something I think would be great for the game. More challenging content should automatically give higher rewards which I think is currently lacking. Across the game players get mostly rewarded for their time investment not because they know that part of the game very well. When you let more champions/bosses give special rewards, like with tequatl, players would have more incentive to seek these champions off the beaten path. I think this would then be more fun and rewarding towards players that actually play the game instead of the trading post. In effect, it should be easier for players that are good at the game to gather gold and start collecting other things.

In line with the more unique rewards you could couple skills for skill hunting to make it feel even more different then other bosses. I would say that adding a npc to lions arch that can give players directions towards the different skills would be understandable enough.

Three things I would like to be able to do would be:

More weapon skill bars. I definitely agree with wanting to keep it simple and keeping the weapon skills locked. There however is a lot of room here. You can create new weapons, add existing ones to a proffesion that doesn’t have it yet or just add the choice between two different skill bars for the same weapon.

Hunting for new skills. I’m not sure how much of an overhaul this would be but for pve this would be the most interesting way to get new skills and a way to say: “look, I beat that guy”. To just keep leveling up and spend tons of skill points on a new skill is not fun and doesn’t even feel worth it to me.

I also very much like the idea to unlock stat combinations for my gear. Maybe not ascended, but just legendary and add legendary armor to the game. The goal here would be to give the player (that will have to have worked for getting this option) more freedom. More freedom means the player can mix up his/her game to keep it interesting and fun.

I would like to say that this could have been much more a discussion by discussing commander functionality point by point, focussing on certain desired goals. Instead it seems to be a collection of posters repeating the same things and simply summing up what they think is needed. This is still very interesting for the developers but not so much for me to read, which means I am not as involved in the whole discussion.

On to the relevant stuff. For me it would not be necessary to make the squad a different colour because in wvw your fighting alongside all your allies and not just your squad. If there were more than one commander and moving in different paterns then it would be usefull to see where my squad is (so i wont get lost and get myself done in). In any case I would very much like to be able to see who is still alive, because the green dots of defeated players confuse everytime making it impossible for me to run away in time.

I absolutely love the idea of making events. It could clearly convey what the commander is planning to do to everyone in the area without having to rely on voice chat. To distinguish it from normal events I think it should be of a different colour so as to not confuse players. If it could be bound to something like the targeting system but just for the commander it would be very easy to use.

I agree on gold not being the best gating system. You however dont have to limit yourself to just one system. For one I would distinguish between wvw and pve. Pve can just maintain the current system and may even get the guild system added on top without much problems. I also think it can be a cool added bonus for guild leaders to get this icon, they would in that case be able to use it if the guild is a decent size and only if theyre representing. For wvw I would make the previous icons invisible except for the guild that the commander is in. Getting the commander icon in wvw will have to mean a bit more so that people will also feel comfortable following the commander. I am kind of lost as to what to do here since there is no real way of measuring the skill of a commander. The only system in place is the wvw exp system that measure the time spent in wvw. Using this as a gate may be the best option but could turn it into a “I have to grind enough exp and then I will be a commander” even though it would come naturally by playing. The system you are thinking about would not really be bound to wvw but does mean that they can get a group together and tackle events(if you have it cost guild merits) this would mean they have either good leadership or cooperation abilities. Would it not be possible to make the system a bit more complicated and have the commander gain a form of wvw experience aside from the wvw experience system. Like the commander will need to have ? wvw exp or gain ? commander wvw exp after unlocking comander to be able to even turn the icon on in wvw.

Hope this was usefull ^^

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Should we allow a WvW upgrade to see enemy commanders (not on the map just on screen) ?

It would be very easy to take a single person out, so giving someone a target above their heads will not provide very interesting battles. A more subtle way to tell who is commanding may be nice however. Maybe like a commanders hat?

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Thanks for all the responses : )

I’ve always felt the commander system had a lot of room to grow mainly it does a good job of giving people something to follow but that’s about it. I used to do a lot of commanding and I found splitting a group of 20-40 up into smaller groups to be very difficult and we just ended up using parties and voice but I’ve noticed the lack of tools to do this drives a lot of gameplay to follow the commander. I know in PvE and in WvW we’ve been trying to make the content force a little more splitting as the game becomes a lot more fun when there are a bunch of smaller fights then one big one.

Having different groups in one big fight can also provide for good tactics. It will probably be tough to split people up anyway though. When there are more then one commander people are gonna be following the one that will get them the most profit or they just like the most in general. This will still create one big(ger) group and one smaller, which provides even more reason to join the big group. In this case the most important thing would be to be able to coordinate with other groups, so that everyone is working towards the same goal and is getting their share of rewards.

For wvw you get rewards for taking towers or defending it. With defending having the advantage (which it should), splitting up to attack two towers only weakens your attack and can cause you to lose both battles anyway. Besides that only the group that meets no resistance will get rewarded. To make this process of conquering more rewarding you may want to consider mapwide rewards. But I guess this is off topic so back to the point. Having visual indicators of what all groups are doing would help the most. But with currently having 1 commander being the best, having a different type of icon, a smaller one, could work.