Guild Wars 2

Thank you so much for fixing hobosacks, ANet! I love my new grenade kit—just how I always imagined my engi actually carrying them.

Maybe cross-post this to the lore forum?
I’m not sure if this belongs in “lore” or “game” and it’s less likely to get completely buried in the “lore” forum, though I don’t know that devs go there. :/

No, I got mine this afternoon, about five or six hours ago.
Check the patch notes in the forums. Once you see “removed item Portal to the Heart of Maguuma from drop tables” or something similar, then it’s over.
Until then, happy hunting!

Been having the same problem. Sent error reports every time.
Please fix this! It’s terrible. Partying is a basic function and this… I just… no words.

This has also been going on for me for a while. Unfortunately I am not sure precisely how long.
It will not auto-launch even though I have all the relevant boxes checked, and I seem to need to manually log in (including typing in my password).

I realize that this is a necro but the issue is still not fixed, at least not for me nor for a friend of mine.

It’s not really a major thing, but the auto-launcher was a nice QoL thing and I’d like for that to be brought back if possible.

Bumpity bump bump bumpity bump bump over the hills of hobosack hate! (I want to take my flamethrower to them!)
At this point I can only repeat what others have said: please fix this!

Also filled out; would love to be updated on your conclusions once you’re done! Good luck!

Kudos for noticing all this.
Either you’re a roleplayer or the RP community would love to have you.

Thanks for posting this and I will cross-link it. Can’t say how much I appreciate this compilation.

Mental Paradox.3845:

For example: my character spends 1g on a weapon. For her (at the moment), this is 1/15th of her total net worth. She can, by Tyrian standards, be considered “middle class”. So how “valuable” is 1g to Earth standards? Well, I dunno about you, but 1/15th of my net value is several thousand bucks (I’m middle class too, kinda). So buying a 1g bow in Tyria would be like buying a brand new assault rifle in real life (they can cost up to $4000, easily).

Buying a legendary would be like buying the ancient sword of a real life Japanese Emperor, which will cost you a few million $ at least.

Good comparison. I can see a “good weapon” (level 80 being the standard) costing a couple thousand here on Earth as well.

Also, one standard I’ve see around the roleplay community is 6 copper = about 1 Euro (or ca. $1.30). This is based on alcohol prices in-game vs in real life. (Other things are hard to compare since the price of gear, etc. scales with level, while that obviously doesn’t happen in real life, unless you want to say your warrior starts out with a plastic toy to defend themselves. xD)

http://www.guildwars2roleplayers.com/ is the hub for English roleplay, though Germans and French (at least that I know of ) also have their own RP forums.

Piken Square is the “unofficial roleplaying server” for Europe, and Tarnished Coast is the one in the NA server group. Megaservers have made it more difficult to get the community together, although the current community makes use of OOC guilds and taxiing to try to get around that. I can see how it would be difficult for a new RPer to “get into” the community, as the community has trouble sticking together in-game with the new infrastructure anyways.

Your best bet is to head to the GW2RP forums, make some friends, and arrange to hang out in-game from there. Best of luck and I hope you find good RP soon!
—Hail from Piken Square

TheDaiBish.9735:

• Chill increases skill cooldown
• Slow increases skill activation

Vukorep.3081:

chill reduces your movement speed and increases the cooldown on skills you use during chill.

Slow works like quickness but in reverse. It decreases your attack animations.

Meaning if your 1-1-1 chain takes 2 seconds it will now take 3 second to pull off.
If your ice bow 4 takes 3 seconds to cast, it will now take 4.5 seconds to cast.

This also effects melee skills such as 100blades or whirlwind. Makes them easier to spot and avoid. Thats the whole point of slow i guess

Thanks. That clears that up.

My two priorities in a game are 1) good gameplay, which GW2 does hit on the head with its basic combat system and is also one of the things they haven’t changed much since the original core game, and 2) immersion.

The recent changes, especially the NPE, have broken immersion terribly for me.
Even the whole “you now have skill number 4 unlocked”, while being fairly standard MMO fare, rips immersion apart for me now after having experienced unlocking weapon skills by using the weapons.
I now farm PvP to get Tomes of Knowledge to try to bypass the lack of a smooth, natural-feeling progression in GW2’s current leveling experience, but I feel like I’m missing something by doing that, too.

My Suggestions:

-Give players the option of either unlocking their skills by using the weapon or paying a trainer to unlock them (at a very low cost for beginning players without much money). These could be added to the “wares list” of the existing trainers that sell profession traits.

-Implement a “training grounds” area in each city or starting area with the aforementioned profession trainers, dodge trainers, actually hittable training dummies like we have in Heart of the Mists, and and area where players can see and test out the effects of combo fields with their own finishers, and their own fields with various finishers. This would allow players to learn about their skills and what the combat system has to offer through experience in a controlled environment (which both the NPE and tutorial fail to do thoroughly, and which I assume is part of the goal of the NPE).
One could even add an area for the player to get a feel for their downed skills and a pool for underwater combat. Players could unlock their weapon skills here as well as in the world.

- Revert the traits system to the original one, or else make trait unlocks profession-specific and have what the trait does actually somehow correspond to what you need to do to get it. For instance, one could defeat a fire elemental or Flame Legion shaman for a trait corresponding to burning. For the engineer’s “juggernaut” trait (gives stat boni while using flamethrower), they could kill x number of Flame Legion Igniters.
This would add more variety and help players explore the open world/game more (which I assume was the original goal of the traits system).
(And yes, this really belongs in the trait thread, but I wanted to “bundle” my suggestions together, as this also affects how new players experience the game.)

-Do not level-gate the downed system or underwater combat. As some people have previously pointed out, these are key features of GW2 and should not be locked for new players. The mechanics are not very different from normal combat and gameplay, so I do not see the issue.

-Do not level-gate POIs, Vistas, and Skill Points. The current level gate leads to backtracking for new players (which I believe GW2 wanted to eliminate) and denies new players sources of experience early on.

-Give players their profession skill completely. Why does my engineer have to wait until level 19 for his profession skill number 4 despite the fact that it operates on exactly the same principle as every other of his profession skills? Same goes for the mesmer, and the elementalist.

-Lower level-gates on other things, such as weapon swapping and receiving trait points. Level 7 was okay in the old system, because that was when you’d gotten a “feel” for more than just your starting weapon usually, but I might even go lower.

-I’m all for the loot you get by leveling up (helps me not feel so under-geared when I use Tomes of Knowledge). However, I really like someone else’s suggestion of having these things given by a quaggan, able to be turned back in for extra XP. I would make it some racial representative instead (Quartermaster for Charr or humans, for instance).

-Make level progression feel smoother again, with stat points being added passively as well as skill points, and a trait point every five levels or such. “Batches” feel very jerky, and it creates the artificial feel of “some benevolent deity of progression decided to hand you these”.

Essentially, I liked the old system. The new NPE has done little to correct the lack information contained in the old one. Heck, the information needed could be better more thoroughly delivered by a mandatory NPC dialogue (akin to talking to the scout like after the first PS instance) or by more mails from “Your Herald” giving information than by what the NPE does.

Sorry for the long post.

Especially during the past Wintersday I do not want to think about how many times I have gotten tired of spending five minutes just opening boxes. And bags. I fear the same will come with the Lunar New Year’s envelopes (although those seem a little less plentiful).
I still have… maybe 90-something Wintersday Gifts waiting to be opened just because I got so tired of all the clicking required to open them.

This would be a small quality-of-life change that I think many would appreciate. The same could apply to things like skill point scrolls, or tomes of knowledge, or stacks of anything usable without a cooldown time or un-stackable effect (unlike certain consumables like Ash Legion Spy Kit or items that give you a rock, plank, etc.).
Would be much appreciated, especially with what seems to be a recent proclivity to give us consumables like boxes and XP scrolls and “bottles of PvP reward”…

Uhm… how about slow = chill?
Just without chill’s effect on cooldowns, I guess?

Charr have to deal with terrible clipping issues, graphics-wise (I believe Asura as well). Most of the armor sets in game are designed for humans, and look terrible and terribly out-of-place on Charr, or Asura, or even Sylvari when you consider their cultural backgrounds.
Basically almost any armor set could pass for “human cultural”, but considering their background and customs, the other races only get 3 “cultural” sets per armor type (maybe 4 if you count dungeon armors, such as TA for Sylvari, CoF for Charr, and CoE for Asura, but then humans get more with CM and AC).

As a Charr player, this is something I don’t like. My ferocious war-cat looks ridiculous in turtlenecked “swindler” coat and feathered pirate hat, but sometimes those are the drops I get while leveling.

Rewards are different from the experience of the story.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t even done the revamped story so far, but I hate the fact that they took out the “greatest fear” arc.

ANet… I used to love leveling. Absolutely love it. Leveling my alts was never a chore. It was fun to unlock weapons skills by using the weapons, progress through my personal story as slowly or quickly as I wanted, feel like I was slowly getting better as I got a trait point + skill point + passive stat increase per level…
It was smooth, realistic, polished. It made sense and never broke immersion in your lovely game. It didn’t feel like I was being handed anything (like gear) and I didn’t need to be handed anything. Drops worked fine.

Now… I don’t know whether to smile or grimace when I see that icon on the right side of my screen. I’ll get a spike in stats, or a bundle of trait points, maybe some information on some sort of “new” feature (that’s been there all along, just I’m only now being informed). Or even a non-reward like “You can now go play this dungeon!”
It disturbs my immersion, it’s not any more useful than the previous system, and it feels like someone’s handing stuff to me instead of me earning it, and expecting me to be excited.
Level-gating options as well (weapons skills, traits, WEAPON SWAPPING) is never good. Give the player a set of options at the start, and trust them enough to start experimenting once they feel ready. Trust their intuition. I maybe like to flatter myself that my intelligence is above-average, but I did get the downed state on my own when I saw it, no explanation needed.

Yes, some things like combo fields could have been explained better to me as a new player.
The dodge trainer is fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. That is the way to teach players how to do things.
Maybe give them a tooltip or something once they make their first combo, or just set up a “training grounds” area (or instance) in the city where you can try out combos, learn dodging, hit dummies to get a feel for your skills, etc. If you want to you can talk to a trainer there to instantly unlock (aka buy) weapon skills or traits. Doesn’t that make sense? Not this kitten popup dialogue
Yes, some things about the old NPE could have used improvement.
But there were so many things I loved about it, and the new system doesn’t make up for its shortcomings in any tangible way, I feel.

I do like dividing the story into more cohesive “chapters”, but on the other hand, I don’t like the level-gating. Take that as you will, but it’s a more minor issue for me.

Just felt the need to add my voice here. “Please don’t try to fix what’s not broken.”

I have to add my voice to this.
I am so very thankful that I made most of my functional characters before the new trait system was introduced.
Good idea, HORRIBLE execution.
The things to complete have absolutely no bearing on the actual trait (otherwise it might actually make it interesting!).
They’re exactly the same for each character, so if you have more than maybe two characters, it turns into a major grind.
I miss being able to see all my traits whenever I wanted to. And the cost to unlock them can be exorbitant. So your options for said 3rd character are: grind out the events/map completions/etc. despite feeling brain-dead doing it, suck it up and pay for the traits (assuming you can get enough skill points and gold, which is another grind), or be completely ineffective. How is this a good thing? In ANY way?
I have no problem with learning my skills. Just… not this way. Not this way, A-Net.
And don’t get me started on the event-based ones. With events that are broken, or constantly defended so you can’t do the capture. (I think Foulbear was broken before the patch, or at least I’ve only ever fought the chieftan once despite all my Charrs that passed through there on their way to 80.)

I also hate the NPE, now giving out skill points and attribute increases in batches, or sometimes just gear for leveling up (who thought that was a good idea?), giving skills at level unlocks facepalms (like just about every other fricking MMO out there), and generally destroying the leveling experience/NPE that I really, really enjoyed when I first came to the game.
I loved unlocking skills as you went. It made sense to learn how to do more with the weapon the more you used it. Now? Being unable to go underwater until… level 7 or 12 or something? Really?
/end rant

I just felt like I had to add my voice to this. Please, A-Net, don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. With the addition of free re-traits, I WANT MY OLD SYSTEM BACK!
Free re-traits, yes. pats on the back You did good there. The rest of the changes to leveling, traits, etc? grabs a sledgehammer

1. World Bosses: 0
Not such an issue for me. Set times makes it easier to coordinate. I’m sorry you can’t choose to play against a boss on your own really now, but I’m willing to take that if it’s the price for megaservers. World Bosses aren’t something I care THAT much about.
2. Home Worlds vs. Megaservers: +1
Love Megaservers. PvE feels alive, even during “off” times, in which I sometimes play. Major thumbs up.
3. Unlocking Traits: -1
Major fail with this one. The idea had potential: do stuff to learn your new skill! Except it wasn’t “beat this Flame Shaman Boss to learn this Guardian Trait dealing with Burning”. Nope. “Complete this map. Killed all the time in WvW? Too bad. You’re doing this for the n-th time on your new character because we were lazy and made them all the same? Sucks for you.”
4. Unlocking Skills: -1
Completely agree with the OP’s assessment. Nothing much to add here. New “unlock skill #n at level x” makes it feel like every other kittening “railroaded classes” MMO.
5. Personal Story: 0
I like how they deliver it in chunks. One thing that sort of “got to” me before was how I’d do one bit of the personal story, not be powerful enough for the next instance, go level up and lose the immersion in the personal story, then go back… rinse and repeat. Chunk delivery: yes. Level-gating: no. I’m all for choice. —Oh, and while you’re at it, can we make the personal story instances repeatable, please? No achis needed, but as a lore geek if I want to go back and look at something I don’t want to have to make a new character just to go through it again. The infrastructure is there.
6. Exploration: +1
OP, there’s the option to TURN OFF THE ARROW in case you didn’t notice. I did that. For newbies who want/need it, the arrow is good. I remember wandering around kinda lost my first few days here.
7. Dailies: -1
Agree with the OP here. Not much more to say. Maybe sounds strange that I didn’t like going too much out of my way to get the dailies, and the re-structuring seems weird. I guess I like my rewards not too hard but not given away for free?

…my 2 cents (or 7). salutes
But overall I do feel that the direction they’re headed is… somewhat away from the game I got to know and love a year ago. Changes have been some good , some bad. I’ll see. It feels like they’re trying to make it more “mainstream” or something, though, which is… WHY? You’re already successful! You don’t want to just keep on making a good thing? (Yeah, yeah, I know, they’re also businessmen…)

I completely support the OP on this.
I liked the old achievement system, but I also want to keep an open mind.
After a day on the new achievement system, all I can say is: you done kittened it up. I liked the variety of the old achievements. I could get a daily without giving it much thought, most days. I like the idea of changing it up a bit, like the Ascalonian Vista one. But not reducing the variety available. If someone still wanted to just gather and kill stuff (y’know, participate in normal gameplay) for their daily, why not leave that open to them?
Login system is nothing good. Free loot—don’t really need it, just contributes to inflation. Also, what’s the point of rewards upon login? If it’s not there to habit-form (which they thank goodness didn’t do) then it’s just… yay, more click-to-get-stuff. shrugs
Not much good, added, overall user experience sunk.

Same goes for the new leveling experience. It feels even more contrived than any of the other MMOs I’ve played. “Well, you’re a new level now, here’s your new stuff, go that way!” except you don’t get it from an NPC, just a minimalist box on your screen. As someone who values at least a little immersion, I really liked the old system. Use your weapon to unlock skills—not auto-unlock at level X. No intrusive dialogue saying “you met this arbitrary number of experience points (also a contrived construct); we’re going to interrupt your experience again!”

I enjoy the Living Story. I like that they’re slowly introducing us to the new zones, and giving us some more story. I like that the world doesn’t just stay static.
If anything, I want more of this.
I want the original zones to change. Make Orr look like it’s healing, since it’s been two years. Thin out the Flame Legion, or think up something to make them come back after the death of their leader in CoF. I could go on for a while.
Or even, if you don’t want to do that, add a new dungeon. Something replayable with a small number of people, that can be used as a challenge if you want to try it solo. Buuut that’s not quite this topic.

I feel like the game has lost some of what made it unique when I started playing. What I liked about it. They’re messing with things that aren’t broken and not working (as hard as they probably could be) on what needs work. I almost feel like they have a few UX guys lying around doing nothing (because the user experience was great before, didn’t need work!) whom they just shoved together and said “do stuff”. And this was the result of that mess.

As a Charr player, I want the option to conceal my boots AND chest.
Male Charr just look bad-awesomekitten (censorship, sorry) without chest armor, and I like that as an aesthetic option.

PLEASE.
A-Net started out with a fair amount of customization, and went through the trouble to make so many different armor and weapon skins.
Our kits are our weapons. Can we please please pretty please make them look nice?

They don’t look THAT different from each other (hobo sacks with a few different decorations) so it can’t be that the appearance was that important. If it was, then we’d have vastly different designs for the kits—an actual toolbox or metal box (with tools sticking up) on the back for a toolkit, some kind of tank with a liquid in it for flamethrower, a keg on our back for bombs, a box with grenades for grenades, I guess another tank of liquid for elixir (but with different color liquid, different tank shape, etc. so you could clearly tell it from the flamethrower…).

^I just came up with that on the fly, and it’s so much more intuitive (and obvious to other players). Even if the appearance didn’t change (no skins) it would look much better than our hobosacks. * sniffles *

Please, A-Net. Even changing the appearance so they’re not hobosacks and actually resemble what they’re doing would be a start.
But I still want to skin my weapon kits, at least. Or be able to toggle “hide them completely” and have an icon similar to elementalists’ attunement icon let people know what I’m using.

I realize skinning would require a lot of work. But appearance change (something else instead of hobosacks), toggle and an icon? The architecture is already in place. I bet 75% of the work would be copy/pasting code from other parts of the game, and the graphics.