Guild Wars 2

I’m in Sparkfly Fen, and I’ve just finished the Vista Point over the ruined tower on the West Side between Verarium Depths, and Karinn’s Passage. When you jump down with all the jungle boars, there is this hidden cave covered by brush to the west. Inside, there is a old catacomb style area, with an alter, and lots of background spiders.

Is this suppose to be a jumping Puzzle? Was this an abandoned event? Did this exist in the other guild wars and so they had to include it? Is it just so I can take a dark and mysterious picture?

Can anyone shed some light on this little tiny area?

Look, I get it. I don’t play dungeons on a daily basis. I’ve not gotten bored of them yet, because I’ve not really done them… and as a general player base, you’re not helping my situation.

I am the one that dropped out of the Waves of Honor Story Dungeon, because while four out of five of us were doing content as intended, the fifth decided they were going to blitz the dungeon. I left (After dying trying to keep up in an unfamiliar dungeon), because my enjoyment of the dungeon specifically is tied to having the experience of the dungeon. Without knowing the map, I ended up dying, because I didn’t know the dungeon as well as the blitzer, and the people who went along for the ride.

I enjoy dungeons intensely. I like the atmospheres, I like having encounters with things. By blitzing, you completely take out the enjoyment I get out of the content. I am in despair at playing Dungeons in this game, because if I don’t know the exploits, or if I want to look at things, I get kicked, or I get completely left behind.

It’s bothersome, because I don’t get to learn the content. It’s bothersome because I don’t get to enjoy the content in the first place, and it’s ultimately upsetting, because gear skins I would like to possess, are locked behind people without patients to spend more than 10 minutes in a dungeon.

I don’t know if there is any solution to this problem, and I don’t expect to find any here. I just need to complain to the community. The way you play through the end game content ruins the game for me, and that’s sad. Dungeons should be the experience you want to have. Not the chore you want to skip, but do anyway.

I agree. I don’t feel I should have to finish every achievement and do every activity to receive the reward for the end of an event. I did all but one, and I would have eventually finished the last one if it hadn’t been buggy and the locations didn’t keep changing.

I guess the reward was Gauntlets? I mean, I don’t horribly care in that case, but I do feel disappointed that I got nothing even after completing 95% ot more of all the achievements. A hour buff a reward and thank you for playing is mean.

I’ve been having a devil finding the locations of the last two items for Lost and Found, even with guides, and I was hoping to finish finding them before monday…. but with the Living Story moving into it’s last Phase, I don’t know if I can find it. I can still find the Dead Drop Messages, but I can’t seem to find any of the points for the Lost and Found achievements, even those that I know had been there just yesterday.

Am I just out of luck in finishing out for the chest? What was in the chest, anyway?

Maybe, but there is a lot of dialogue there (About 5 different lines, I think. Maybe 4…) and there is a sense of a relationship with the way the Skritt says “No.”

Given we have plant seeds in interesting relationships with each other, I’d like to think the game has room for budding love, as well as bitter remorseful love, as well.

I spend a lot of time around auction halls losing money to Bags, in desperate searches for Crystal Dust… So I get to hear a lot of background dialogue.

These two characters, in the Lion’s Arch Auction Hall seem… interesting. For sure, these two are friends and trading partners. However, I just get the impression there is more going on under the surface. I feel that the Human trader is interested in exploring a deeper relationship, but just can’t come out and say it. I also feel that the Skritt doesn’t feel the same way, yet. Maybe eventually, but for sure not right now, and maybe not really ever.

Really, this is about the only place I’ve seen in the game where the possibility of romance exists, which really excites me. I hope that maybe something will happen in the future, but for now, I’ll just ponder the possibility.

Calae.1738:

Mature content = blood, nudity, terror, coarse language, violence, politics, economics, moral controversy and scientific material.

I’m not trying to insult people who like Disney stuff. The psychological techniques used by Disney are well known to be effective. They’re very good at what they do.

So… you are telling me that being mature means playing with content I typically don’t want in my games (Blood, Nudity/Sexuality,Rude Language,Overexagerated violence), specifically since I see those things as immature.

Maybe we need a new definition here?

Actually, I was wondering about this. I, as a consumer and as a non-game persona is going “Aww, cute and adorable!”.

However, I think about these things way too much….

Plushies, or Stuffed Animals, as we have called them, all arrive from various places, but if we take the basis to be from taxidermy, it makes a Plush is a representative of a dead creature. We give them to children to help give them comfort and to protect them from imaginary fears, but they still represent a dead thing.

It’s like running around with a dead Charr on your back, and you are trying to make yourself friendly to Charr. Even worse, what if you are Charr wearing this backpack? What the heck does this say about your character? Does that make your character childish? A murderer?

Furthermore, does wearing a plump image of a Charr mean you are ridiculing one of the most powerful races in the world? Would Charr take this as a sign that they rule over all other races? What does this mean?

I just find the ramifications of this, in character, to be interesting and terrifying.

OOC, though, it’s cute.

I’ve been running back and forth getting trinkets and healing refugees, but I keep reading on the official patch notes that there is suppose to be new events tied to The Living Story in the old zones? I’ve yet to see one. Am I just looking in the wrong place, or have they not been implemented yet?

Seriously, your plan is not working.

Here is a screenshot of WvWvW in front of Anvil Rock Keep (Eternal Battlegrounds) at 1/11/13, at 4:46. What you are not seeing is… my allies, my enemies, the AOE’s that are killing people who have not rezzed… in fact, you ’re not seeing anything at all.

You sPvP is bueatiful. I’ve never had a problem playing with it. Not that I play very often, but I like playing in large group actions. I like being part of WvW. I do not like not having basic information available to me, such as enemy posistions! I waited three minutes before taking a screen shot, just hoping my own SERVER people would render. No dice.

I know I’m running somewhere between recommended and required specs, but really, I don’t know what the problem is. I can go play Planetside 2, and I don’t have this problem. I don’t have this problem in Wow. I don’t have this problem in any other game.

I know you keep saying you are working on it, but I am having a hard time believe that when you just mentioned that you abandonded the fix that you had planned a month ago.

WvW at peak times is unplayable as it current stands for any of my machines, and it is frustrating to say the least. While I love a lot of things about this game, something about allowing one side to see the battle, and not the other HAS to be done.

Human Female Thief

There appears to be no graphic for the head piece for the Vigil Armor Set.

Armor Worn: Complete Vigil Cultural Set. (Vigil Mask, Vigil Coat, Vigil Shoulderpads, ect.), which I obtained from the Vigil Armor Vendor at the Vigil Citadel.

That’s fine. The Pacifist needs no outside recognition. Advancing without loss of life is reward enough.

I am looking to do something I usually do in WoW. In WoW, I usually create a character that is a zone explorer whose goal is to not kill a single thing. I usually make this character a healer type, and I would run around and heal people.

Crafting/Mining/Exploration/Jumping Puzzle is obvious the way to level up a character of this type, but I am unsure which class/race combination has the best defensive setup. I like Engineers for their Support powers, and it might be possible to lvl up a Pacifist using an Engineer with Sheild and something with Healing and Net Turrets, with the Barrage Support packages. I’m not sure if that’s the best option though, and I don’t know which racials are the best for this kind of build outside of humans.

I am looking for opinions, though, on what you would consider the ideal pacifist build?

To put the situation in perspective, I like to buy Bags of Goods (of all types) from the AH to restock on goods for crafting. A Yellow drops out of the bag about 1 out of 40-60 bags? Sometimes more, sometimes less.

This means that you probably don’t see one till about the 50th kill drop you preform. That seems fine to me.

Re: How much $ is a Gem Worth.

Actually, math easily provides an answer.

Arena Net believes that 80 gems (1200/$15) is worth 1 dollar.

Current Price of Gold to Gems for 80 is 1.6568g (1.65 USD). This means to the game, your Gold is worth less than 83 cents,

Furthermore, cashing 80 Gems to Gold is 1.197g (1.20USD), This means that your dollar is worth 20 cents more when buying gold from their shop.

At this exact time, if you were a gold seller and gaming the system, you would make 20 dollars off of ever 100 dollars of real money for offering gold, by legitimately going through the Gem Shop. Even more if you actually used a credit card and didn’t buy game cards. Continuing to game the system, will eventually increase these profit ratios.

My belief is that the Gem Exchange was not meant to be used in such a fashion, and that either ANet will decrease how many gems you get for your dollar, or the system will continue to degrade and only encourage gold sellers. From the Long View, this is bad for the game, and needs to be fixed.

Bots (and the Gold Farmers who use them) are detrimental to the game. They sell goods cheaply, which means that people can not gain gold as easily, which means they can not afford to buy high end items or gold to gems. They use the gold they acquire to drive up the price of Gems, so that they benefit from stocking up on gems, and then selling them for gold. This is all so that they can exchange virtual currency to real currency. The fact that people still do this after decades of this kind of behavior boggles me.

Half the reason the economy is busted in this game is because of Botting. There is no defense for this behavior, and those that feel that they are beneficial are being Barnum’ed.

RE: Gem Shop

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you want me to buy things from the shop, they need to be either pretty, or things I want to do. If I want to do them, there better be a reward for it that I feel is worth monetary value. Currently, we don’t have any of that. We have Manly things in the shop, and none of the Pets are especially rewarding or pretty.

I really hope that the next year actually opens up the accessory market for the TP. I really would like to see vanity items that makes me want to spend Gems, instead of rationalizing my way out of spending more money.

I do a lot of Jewelery Crafting at Divinity’s Reach, and part of the reason is I get to run through the little aquarium on the way to the AH and Bank. I finally noticed that there actually is something besides Coral in the tank. A few Jellyfish.

I really don’t think that’s enough, though. I’d like to see a bit more fish in the aquarium. Maybe not like the big salmon things, but a few more frittering tropical fishies would be nice.

Great. Another way to have uncaring people who won’t do the math to figure out the math to at least break even at the market a way to make loss leaders even faster across all goods. No thank you.

Not to mention your Skills.

Yeah… if you’ve been paying attention, switching GP to Gems has been dropping every week. We are now at about 70 per gold, which is a ridiculous exchange rate, given the return on that gem market.

While I am not arguing that Gold to Gems should be cheap, I do feel it should be reasonable, and the reward for doing so substantial, and I’ve yet to see it be so. I am still waiting for Vanity Items that I would want to wear to appear in the store.

If I may add a brief argument?

If this is Supply/Demand, it is the worst implemented one in existence. When this game started, one could get about 300 gems for a gold, more or less. Right now, it sits at 80. Before Consortium Chests, the only thing that one could buy was buff/rez stones and Keys for Black Lion Chests. At a gold a pop, these temp items are worth it…

At 4+ gold a Key (which never returns it’s investment) or a Rez, people are not using the Gold to Gems to buy things from the net. So, why exactly is the exchange at 80?

It’s not because there is a demand for gems. It’s because Anet is protecting it’s investments. It wants people to buy gems, instead of earning it through the game. They want to make it more attractive to buy gems with cash, than to earn it though play.

I wouldn’t be so disappointed in this, if they actually had items worth buying in their cash shop. I could see them wanting to profit, however, they’ve not even gotten around to making enough Vanity Items to even be protecting anything. At this point, they are just preventing people from losing money opening up BLC, which are not worth it anyway.

…

As a further example, they currently are pricing a Black Lion Key at 285 commendations. That’s about 5 gold, before you start factoring in the money for crafting or the repaid bills for going out and farming the aprox. 850 weapons needed to create one. At about .8 c a pop, that’s 8 gold for a Black Lion Key. The return on investment is 3 silver pieces.

Unless there is something that we don’t know about the chests, Arenanet is overvaluing these chests, which currently can be purchased for 3 copper a piece. Something is dead broken in this economy, and it needs fixing

My weekends are busy, so I don’t always get to see these events go off in their entirety, however, following up on my previous post about spreading groups out, you really really need to do so better.

I just popped onto the Lost Shores map, and decided to explore around a bit, and was given the choice between two landing points. I figured these landing points would be on the opposite sides of the island, and offer two different experiences that spiraled around to a central point, which would be bueatiful in keeping population control going.

What I’ve seen your designers decide to do instead was to place both of the waypoints on the same side of the island, seperated by a moderate distance, where all traffic would funnel into a central location nearby.

THis is extreme poor planning, and shows your Event Design Lead has not studied other games, and has no clue what large populations do. They did not study your own WvWvW issues, and decided to press on anyway. This is a horrible idea, and frankly, the Lead Developer (who I assume is a different person) should have jumped in and told them no, and explained why they shouldn’t have done this.

A lot of your negative feedback keeps bring up the fact that your teams do not do their research into what other games of done, and how their events have failed. You have failed your customer base, by not observing other’s past mistakes.

I can not say this enough. Pretty Please, learn from other people’s experiences. Do not let the mistakes of the past keep repeating. Learn what works, and doesn’t work, by observation, so you won’t make the same mistakes again.

I might have had the same problem. I also can’t be sure, though, because I was disagreeing with the Party Leader on what needed to be done with the end boss there, and I might have been kicked for being contrary.

I know world events are suppose to be exciting, but they simply do not work without some constraint, and you have failed your cliental by not observing other such events in the past.

Every other game has had these exact issues with just having a server level full event where they expected all players to be in one place and do the same thing, from the Famously Broken Tabula Rasa to even WOW> In all cases, the Client Side can’t handle the flow of information. Furthermore, because you use cloud technology, instead of actually having real assests on your client server to load, there is even more delay time in getting things to render. I got to see the opening cut scene, but because I was still downloading the sound, I didn’t get to hear anything about what it was suppose to sound like.

I know this is stream of conciousness, but your Halloween event was so good. You spread it all over the maps, you made it so that the instances could pop up easily, and you created a situation where both server and client could handle the load easily. As of the time of this writing, one of your overflow server still hasn’t figured out that the Fractal Dungeon is open, and the other overflow server knows it’s open, which is preventing people from getting into the same dungeon, and relieving stress off the Lion Arch Que.

Simply, this is a mess, and your team learned nothing from other MMO team’s failures. I am disappointed that your team didn’t educate themselves about this kind of event first, before realizing they should have done something else.

For the most part, they’re Sylvari. There are a few Human and Asura, but it’s mainly a bunch of Sylvari.

I suppose it depends on how you look at time travel. Take Dr. Who for example. Dr. Who travels back and forth in time and destroys hundreds and thousands of timelines each time he does. He even removed his Homeworld from the timestream. End Result? Nothing. No damage. Everything is fine.

There is also the GURPS Quantum proposal, which says that one doesn’t really travel through time, and more travel to points that are similiar in almost every practical way to the time that you wanted to travel to, but they can’t affect the part or the future, because they are not really that ‘time’ period, but a alternative dimension.

There are other examples, and I’m sure if I dig into the Twilight Zone episodes, and pull up about a dozen more. The simple idea, though, is that there is more than one theory of time travel, and your objection only holds weight if you subscribe to your version of Time Travel.

So, today I really explored out the Citadel, and I was surprised to find out that there was a whole little slum under the city, filled with all these people with the name Plebeian instead of Citizen… which brings me to the next thought.

What are or who are the Plebeians? They apparently live under the city. They are not part of any of the legions as far as I can tell, and I can’t really tell what they are suppose to be. Are they freed slaves of the Charr? Are they Homeless Refugees? Is it a title that signifies second-rate citizen status? What does this word mean?

Does anyone have any clues?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have absolutely zero desire to adventure in Orr. I’m already working on Exploration Content in the lower level zones, because the end zone is too stressful and not attractive enough to keep me there.

I’d much rather be doing Ascalon and Shiverpeaks Content, than I do grinding out things in Orr.

I desire no raid content, and I feel that this is more a cry for becoming more special than really is needed. Break up your groups, people. You don’t have to run around with 10 or 25 near strangers that you like working with to enjoy a game. The current Dungeons and World Events satisfy just fine.

Exactly what are you trying to accomplish by playing with 8 people and 2 pugs that you aren’t accomplishing right now with two 4 mans with 1 pug each?

Hey, at least you got a skirt. That’s more than I’ve ever got.

I want to let you know I am actively avoiding wearing my ‘casual’ outfit for the Silvari, because, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. I am wearing effectively hooker ware. Whose idea that I want to rpg out of character wearing pasties and calf high boots? I don’t like not having a choice of wearing flower petals covering my genitilia and calf high boots.

Can you not somehow get into the Gem Shop some normal, casual clothing, so I can feel like being out of armor is an okay thing?

Claw Island isn’t all that bad. There are worse PS stories out there (Try the OoS mission after Claw Island. UGH! The mini map helps not!), and for it’s part, I thought the pacing and the telegraphing of what kind of action sequences you would be performing was pretty good overall. I remember enjoying my experience, and thought it was a fun experience.

(Although I agree the dragon fight on RtCI was a tad boring compared to the group Dragon Fight at Blazeridge Steppes)

This doesn’t work. Here’s why.

There is a specific area during the level 60 quest chain where you end up having a AI army fight a AI Orr Army. During this encounter, your allied AI army will fail, and that leaves a mob of about 7-12 (Depending on if the second wave triggered or not) zombies chasing you around the field. Even with Run and Gun tactics, you will be overwhelmed at least once, after which you can run around the army and revive your own.

However, there is a near guaranteed Death during the mission in question, due to the lack of the AI army on your side. To have to restart that scenario, instead of going to the Waypoint and rallying your dead troops, is just going to be an exercise in futility.

My Sylvari, Minus her hood, in Ebenohawk

I think I’ve accidently found an exit point for a Puzzle Complex, with a Chest Reward, but I can’t figure out how to get to it.

If one looks at the Vista Point between Twin Sisters and Behem Gauntlet, there is a Waterfall with an obvious Bridge on the second tier. Well, as it turns out, you can walk into the Waterfall, and there are slimes that drop interesting loot, and a Vetran Shark deeper in that lower cave area. However, there is this whole complex above the Shark Pool that I can’t figure out how to get to. I figure that I’m going the wrong way, but there doesn’t seem to be any other climbs inside the cave. I tried going the long way around to see if I just missed a cave entrance, but outside of a Spider Den (with a close quarter Veteran Spider Fight, Yikes!), I have not found any other enterances.

Does anyone else know about this? Can you help me figure out how to get up into that higher level above that Shark Tank? If you can, thank you very much!

Actually, from what I can tell, there is a lot of depth in the Character Choices, but it’s hard to see at times.

While the choices you make don’t persist in the storyline as such, the game contains 15 starting scenarios (One for each character story choice from the start of the game), 5 Racial Scenarios, then the 4 Choosing an Order Scenarios. the 1 Initiation Scenario, then the three Lesser Race Scenarios… and I’ve not finished past that point, and that doesn’t start talking about divergent branches in the scenario groups.

This means there are at least 27 paths per race to play through to the end game. The game is designed for re playability, and while the end result is always the same, the choices you make will lead to a different game than a person who made different choices.

To me, this is good design, and while it shows some strain at the seed point of the tree, it manages to do something special when it comes to these types of games. Actually have a different story through the early levels from every other character. You don’t get that in any other MMO.

I never said “Level through Personal Story Alone”. I said "Make the levels for a ‘Chapter’ closer together.

Take the Asura Storyline as an example. There is no real reason that the first 5 missions (Spread out 2, 5, 7, 9 if I remember right) to actually be like that, because while the story proposes continuous time related events, the actuality is there is a large gap between when you do the missions, and the period of time that you are leveling.

It would have been nicer if they had put it together 2,3,4,5… and then you go out and explore till you hit the stage where the next adventures take place… then you can go 11,12,13,14,15? and then out into the world to explore again. That way, events that are suppose to be closely related and timed do end up feeling closely related and timed, and that the story flow of the game actually appears properly paced.

Instead what we got know is a game that’s story line feels like it constantly is on a pause button, and the time pressures of the story that is being presented to us don’t actually matter. This is horrible from a lot of perspectives. I’d much rather wait for blocks of content than being fed what should be timely content in the current fashion.

It might play out differently in different story lines, but with the sense of time seeming to be important to everyone’s personal story, I would have thought actual… you know, attention to how the timing played out would have been thought out a little better, that’s all.

It’s also not too late to change this, either. It’s a lot of work for someone through all the PS databases (Which means it’ll never be done), but tightening up the timing of missions could be worth it from an artistic point of view.

This fight isn’t all that bad, but players that don’t pay attention and just rush and spam like normal get everyone killed. In a lot of ways, this is the first “Raid Boss” of the game, and if you zerg in shooting the Embers all at the entrance and start pulling everything, you’re going to have a Zone wide TPK pretty quickly as the Embers all lay down AOE’s.

This is made worse when you have players waiting to be rezzed, and new players who have no idea the challenge this fight is run in and just start shooting willy nilly. This takes what should be a 10 minute fight at a most to a hour fight.

If you can get your zone organized, and you manage to get your team spread out, it is not all that difficult. The key thing, though, is not to zerg in. Unlike other fights up to that point, this one takes some thought, and that can be challenging for players still only 13+ levels into the game.

I get that one is suppose to level their way through content as they play through the game, but the level gap for missions seems a bit extreme. I am constantly finding myself having to pause playing through a storyline, because the mission is four levels beyond where I am (I’ve typically been playing through at Lvl -2).

As a person who like storylines that are more continuous and don’t have these long delays between ‘pages’, I wish that the Storyline Content was condensed more, so that one would level 1-5 levels of a Tier, and then go into Explorer mode to go out into the regions to do Dynamic Questing, and then come back at the start of the next tier, where there is a fresh new story, anyway, and pick up a new ‘chapter’.

The current configuration currently is making some aspects of this game feel more grindy than they probably should, and I realize that part of this is due to artifacts from the previous Guild Wars game. The change from a 20 level cap to an 80 is a big one, and it affects how stories are being told in this one.

As an Silvari Mesmer, the mid 30’s got really awkward as it became unclear where I was to go to level up to the Late 30’s. I blame this partly on the lack of direction in the game itself, and partly due to the fact that my Personal Story put me in a position where I was left floundering looking for a way to level that didn’t have me repeat the same Orange Events over and over again. (A problem with the Ascalon 25-35 Zone).

Not saying I am not enjoying myself. I just would enjoy myself more if I didn’t have to wait so long to finish a ‘chapter’ of the story.

I’ll be playing till a) I finish every starting Race Staring Quests (that’s 15 characters, at least), playing through each of their Order Recruiting Segments, and doing things that I would do in other MMO’s. I’ve got patients and I’m willing to suffer my lack of wvw guild.

OR

b) NCSoft puts some ridiculous login scheme like they did with GW1, which made me just give up playing the game in frustration.

One of the things about the M.Province is that it has a lot of Team Daily Events. This is one of them, and should be able to be handled by 3-5 people. This particular mission is most successfully handled when you have one or two people DPS’ing the smaller slimes, while the rest of the group concentrates on the big ooze. Movement is a big key to this fight, and getting swarms off people increases the durability.

This is a good training mission for the bigger event in the zone. Learning to work in teams, and observing how enemies react will save lives later on.