Guild Wars 2

Pochibella.8394:

I am seriously considering deleting my 100+ BL chests out of my bank. I will NEVER buy keys from the cash shop so they are just taking up space.

This. Unless you are an obsessive-compulsive min-maxer or collector, the contents of the chests are basically pointless. I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to spend gems on getting what’s inside.

It’s obvious that even the designers realize this, and tried to “fix” it in their favor with the weapon skins at halloween. Maybe this approach will continue to be a relief valve of sorts during each holiday event. It would be much nicer, however, if they’d just make the chests drop something that’s actually desirable for the average player.

Claudius.5381:

Senik.6549:

Honestly, the best fix for this is to somehow share MF across everyone in the group. Like other players gain a % of the bonus from the guy with all the MF gear, since they are carrying him to a degree. Obviously it would need to be designed so it couldn’t be abused via stacking (caps or something else), but it would make people feel a whole lot better about bringing players who are stacking MF.

I think that would be best. Simply average the magic find in the party (may be excluding food). So if I have 80% MF gear and the four other guys have 0%, we both have 80/5 = 16% MF in a dungeon. Everywhere else MF is applied as before.

I don’t know that straight averaging is exactly the right way to do it. In your example, that’s an 80% nerf to MF for the one guy stacking MF. If they implmented it that way, people would just stop using MF altogether in dungeons. I’m sure that would make some people happy, but it wasn’t my intent.

What I had in mind was more of a weighted average. For example, the game would buff each party member’s MF by 25% of the total MF of all other party members. Each player’s new total MF would then be divided by two to keep the total party MF the same as before the averaging.

So if you had 1 guy with 80% MF, 1 guy with 50% MF, 1 guy with 20% MF, and 2 guys with 0% MF:

• The guy with 80% MF would now have 48.75%
• The guy with 50% MF would now have 37.50%
• The guy with 20% MF would now have 26.25%
• The guys with 0% MF would now have 18.75%

The total party MF is still 150%, but it’s spread out a bit more fairly, so the players who are doing more DPS get a bit more loot, and the players who stacked a ton of MF give up a bit in exchange for a faster run.

Honestly, the best fix for this is to somehow share MF across everyone in the group. Like other players gain a % of the bonus from the guy with all the MF gear, since they are carrying him to a degree. Obviously it would need to be designed so it couldn’t be abused via stacking (caps or something else), but it would make people feel a whole lot better about bringing players who are stacking MF.

Minos.5168:

ArenaNet promised there wouldn’t be a gear grind. They stated that high end gear would only differ in looks. Their stance is now completely different from what they said when they were launching the game.

It’s not completely different, that’s an exaggeration.

Completely different is a WoW expansion where the green item you get as a reward from the first quest you do in a new starting area is comparable or possibly better than the BIS you spent months grinding out. What they are doing is nothing like that at all. It’s insanely gradual, and they’ve already said they’ll bump the stats on legendaries to keep things even.

I get that people with no interest in PvE are super worried they will be forced to grind. But no one knows for 100% certain that will be the case. For all we know, you’ll be able to buy crafted versions of everything you need to stay competitive. At this point people are just jumping to conclusions without all of the information.

Cloudwalkernz.1328:

However, this does bring in an annoying fact that now I need to keep specific gears for specific dungeons. This is going to kill all my storage space.

That was obviously why they tried to roll typical stats for an upgraded BIS item (for the same slot) into the stats of the Ascended items. It would have been much better if they just let us add extra infusion sockets to our existing gear, or even handled the infusions in some way that isn’t tied to gear at all.

They cynic in me, however, quickly notices that their current implementation has the potential to sell more bank slot unlocks from the gem store.

DrCereal.1765:

Ergo, going from full exotic berserker gear, to full Ascended berserker gear increases your damage by, roughly, 26%.

Never mind the fact that a full set of Ascended gear is currently impossible to obtain, and will be for a very long time, according to the devs. So this is really an extrapolation of the next year+ of this game’s evolution, during which time an awful lot of things could change rendering this entire concern moot.

I don’t want a gear treadmill either, but having to collect 2 pieces every 3-4 months hardly seems like a treadmill. It seems more like something to do so I stand less of a chance of getting bored with the game. This is honestly no different than if access to the new content was gated by a key/attunement, or if you had to pay/quest to add the infusion sockets to your existing gear. They way they implemented it just struck a nerve with people.

This has really been a sad week on the forums. You guys are like a bunch of rescue dogs that were ruthlessly beaten with a broom by your previous (MMO) owners, to the point that you now come completely unhinged at antyhing that looks remotely like a broom.

People need to seriously calm down and wait to see how things turn out after the expansion, rather than proclaim the sky is falling.

Everyone is going to feel really embarassed when they realize how much they were overreacting to this whole thing. I’m 1000% against any kind of gear treadmill as well, but the devs would have to be vegetable-class braindead not to be aware of that, especially after everything that’s happened this week. You all need to seriously chill and give it a chance.

That said, this entire calamity probably could have been 100% avoided if they had implemented this a bit differently. For example, a gold sink that adds an extra upgrade slot to your existing gear for the new infusion upgrades: Totally optional, 100% equivalent, doesn’t affect gear balance, and is only an active mechanic when in that one dungeon. That’s basically the gist of what they are doing, but the way they did it (new “tier” of gear) was the equivalent of poking 100 sticks into an anthill.

Zaxares.5419:

I wouldn’t mind the level cap being raised to allow people to gain more trait points (even at level 100 you still wouldn’t be able to max out every trait line), but with the gear remaining capped at level 80.

Yeah, but this would be a major balancing nightmare IMO. An extra 20 traits points would let you max out 3 trees, which it’s currently not balanced for. There are a few classes that would become pretty OP due to synergies between top-tier traits from 3 lines.

So either they’d have to be levels without trait points (making it largely moot), or they’d have to add additional tiers to the trait lines (or additional lines). I could see that going either way (with respect to being a good thing or a disaster), but IMO they still have a few balancing issues — not to mention a giant pile of bugs — to fix with the existing traits/skills. Adding even more combinations on top of that doesn’t seem like the best idea right now.

Snow.5269:

The entire design philosophy behind precursors is just a awful mess. You have the entire legendary process that is more or less account bound & then 1 component that is not & can only be obtained by gambling or hoping you are that lucky .0000000001% that have 1 drop.

Sure, but assuming they want to ensure legendaries actually remain somewhat rare, how else would you recommend they implement it? At some point, it has to be governed by a (very) limited resource. And, unfortunately, they have to make that resource tradable — e.g. if I ever got a precursor drop and couldn’t trade it, it would just sit in my bank forever because I still won’t be bothered to perform all the other steps required to forge the item.

IMO, this thread is really just a symptom of the fact that there is an growing problem with inflation in the game’s economy right now. If you play the TP market with any seriousness, you’ll see this. The buying power of gold is going down with respect to truly constrained commodities, because too much gold is flowing into the economy, either from gold farmers or other sources.

It’s possible that the precursor market is being manipulated somewhat by gold sellers, but only the devs could determine this (and I assume they are keeping an eye on it and would do something about it if they thought there was a problem).

Teppo.9203:

Ari Kagura.9182:

Personally, I’d like to have the option to always ask me for the 6 digit code regardless of where I go to log into my account.

Add me to the list of folks who chose to be paranoid. Would really like this feature.

+1 more. There’s a checkbox letting me choose whether the login client remembers my password or not. There should be a corresponding option for the authenticator.

I’m all for you guys trying to streamline logins for people who want that, but I would really rather have the peace of mind of knowing the authenticator challenge is always being presented, regardless of where the server thinks I’m logging in from.

SamTheGuardian.2938:

All they have to do is increase the drop rate and then let everyone know they are increasing the drop rate.

That’s great in theory, but to fix prices via increasing the drop rate would mean increasing it to the point of legendaries becoming utterly commonplace, which defeats the entire purpose. Then you end up with WoW’s “welfare epics” all over again, thereby reinforcing an immutable sense of entitlement in a whole new generation of players. The devs have gone out of their way to avoid a lot of the same community-poisoning design mistakes from other games, and I don’t see them making exceptions here.

I’ll never go for a legendary, as things are structured today, because when I think of the huge amount of other things I could do with the time and resources it’s not remotely worth it to me. But I could imagine being pretty annoyed if it did matter to me, and I worked really hard to get it, and then they changed the system so it was far less of an accomplishment to own one. There’s no way to keep that from happening unless the price of these items is, for better or worse, tied to the rate of inflation in the game’s economy.

Katreyn.4218:

Wish we could do something with all the low level transmute stones though. I have to force myself to use them. xD

Yeah, there really should be a mystic forge recipe (or some other way) to convert some number of low level transmutes to a level 80 one. Won’t ever happen though since it would cut into gem store sales.

If they would implement secure trade, this would be moot…

The seige blueprints are a valuable PvP resource. It’s simply good strategy to try to deny other teams access to that resource, just like orbs or supply or anything else.

I agree the seige is super cheap, but there are ways to counter it. It just requires a lot more coordination than zerging your way up to the enemy. I suspect half the people complaining about it would still complain even if the opposing team just stood patiently by the chest waiting for the enemy to arrive so they could engage in gentleman-like melee.

On a related tangent, the fact that there are achievements tied to the PvP jumping puzzles is a massive mistake. The chest at the end should be the only reward. A lot of PvE players are anal completionists (I know, I’m one of them), and the achievement is a giant carrot dangling from a stick. If the devs’ intention was to draw additional carebare cannon fodder into W3, because they feel those types of players taking up queue slots makes for a better overall PvP experience, then their design is a success. If the hope was that enticing PvE players to join W3 would somehow get them excited about becoming more active in PvP (after getting steamrolled and griefed while trying to earn an achievement), then I don’t know what they were thinking.

Polaritie.4851:

Clearly, we need to bring an army of players with knockback skills, and go nuts.

Bonus points for elementalists using Tornado.

Or a group of engineers:

Personally, I’d love to join in and help out with group events. There are three main problems:

1. Unless I happen to be very close to it, I’m faced with spending more coin traveling to a nearby waypoint than I’ll net from the event rewards (if I even have a nearby waypoint — otherwise I’d have to run and hope I get there in time)
2. There is no guarantee that even if I do show up there will be enough people to complete it
3. After the event, there’s no good way to get back to what I was doing without spending more coin on travel fees (or a chunk of time running across a zone)

I’d say that well over 50% of the times I see players taking on a group event, it’s a guild doing it versus random people who just happened to be in the area.

Mkalafut.1273:

Senik.6549:

The 5 events are usually the first I end up completing, although sometimes it’s the gathering. The one that’s super annoying is killing 15 different enemy types. On days where I decide to complete the daily, I almost always have to go way out of my way to make that one happen.

How is that possible? 15 enemy types is nothing. Each zone easily has 30+ enemy types. If you guys are doing nothing but sitting in Orr, then yes the dailys will be awful to do – 1 enemy type and just a ton of grindy events.

If, however, you do them as you play – they will complete themselves in no time and you won’t need to go out of your way at all.

Well, I’m pretty casual. I play for maybe 60 or 90 minutes a day. I rarely go back to a city. I just explore and go wherever whimsy takes me (it’s a beautiful world to just get lost in). I easily stumble across multiple events this way, since I’m not moving through areas very fast, in addition to a few hearts/vistas/etc. It’s a fun and very low-stress change from most other games in this genre (probably because there’s no monthly fee so I don’t feel like I need to “get my money out of it”).

The only times I haven’t enjoyed the game as much is when I’ve felt compelled to do very specific things, in order to pick up achivements (or e.g. to consume the Halloween content before it disappeared). But I don’t fault the game for that, I know it’s mostly a function of how I choose to play.

The 5 events are usually the first I end up completing, although sometimes it’s the gathering. The one that’s super annoying is killing 15 different enemy types. On days where I decide to complete the daily, I almost always have to go way out of my way to make that one happen.

Knote.2904:

Oh, and Human males only have like 1 decent looking face.

This, 1000×. Artists lately are on some kind of “Quasimodo meets Mongloid meets dropped on his head when he was a baby” tear, as the new chic for heroic male visages.

Several other games I’ve played recently did the exact same thing (swtor and amalur come to mind) — most/all of the female faces were at least semi-attractive, but nearly all the male faces were intentionally… weird. I’m all for getting away from boring chiseled/Legolas fantasy stereotypes, but the pendulum has swung completely to the other end of the spectrum.

I’ve already got one human male, with one of the IMO two decent faces. If I end up making another human for some reason, it will probably be female just so I can take my character seriously, versus running around with a circus freak face.

2560×1600. This is so much better! I’m not getting motion sick anymore like I did with the old (slightly) tunnel-vision FoV.

Thank you thank you thank you!!

Ensign.2189:

I personally massively dislike the teleport costs, as they discourage the exploration and social aspects of the game – where the tax is at its highest, relatively – while encouraging teleports for power farming.

This is completely backwards. Everyone keeps looking at it like a gold sink, which is partly true, but that’s not the only reason it’s designed like this. It’s also to encourage you to walk when you have a short distance to cover, to increase the chances of you stumbling upon and participating in dynamic events. That’s why most events have a relatively high difficulty or duration – to give people a chance to stumble upon them before they are over. If teleporting were free (or nearly free), I know I’d choose just to hop around the map that way, rather than running, which would cut out probably 90% of the events I would otherwise participate in.

Honestly, I’d rather be given the option when teleporting to have it drop me out of the teleport if any dynamic events are occuring along the path that I’d have taken if I just walked instead. More fun, karma, loot, experience, etc. Not to mention maybe events would be a bit more populated that way; events are about 1000x more fun when they scale way up to accomodate a large number of players versus when there are one or two people whacking away at it.

Shootsfoot.9276:

Choko.6821:

The bots I reported since weeks ago has become level 80… Anyway there is no such thing as report. The only fix and also the easiest method is target Arenanet employers such as Eva. And killing them. I have done once such as GameME creator and I will do so. And I think the doctor is currently the most craziest one.

What the…?

I think this should serve as a tragic reminder that friends don’t let friends use Google Translator.

indi.9832:

Chubbysumo.4736:

indi.9832:

Is there a way that you can make the box where you enter your authenticator code the active box so I don’t have to click into it to type my code… i am just hella lazy like that. Thanks!!

its not active by default to confuse bots that are trying it. Its a security measure, and albeit a small one, im glad they did it this way. Don’t make it too easy on the bot programmers.

So… a script is going to read the auth code and type it in automatically? Ummm if they made that sophisticated of a script I don’t think having the box not active is really going to hinder things. Furthermore, why would a bot account be using a authenticator? i am sure their password is just a bunch of random letters/numbers: kewvm43d3kd22kdff20f seriously… to deter bot accounts…. lmao

Just make the kitten thing active.

Yeah, I have to agree. I like the authenticator feature, it works well, but the fact that the text box doesn’t automatically get focus is just annoying. This isn’t going to slow down a bot by even 1 millisecond, but it’s a continual annoyance to all of the legit customers.

I suspect this is just a bug in the launcher, since the same thing happens with the password field — focus should go there automatically when you start the launcher, so I’m not typing my password onto the desktop. (Or at the very least, don’t have the cursor blinking if it doesn’t actually have input focus!!)

Masaki.2153:

Stop using salvage kits on everything

This. My experience has been that salvaging is a waste of money if you aren’t going to use the raw materials. Just vendor the items and you’ll net a lot more coin.

invizo.5408:

Last night I monitored my gfx cards running at 22% while I achieved 20fps…. It doesn’t make sense.

This is why I think something is up with your system. Something is keeping your CPU from giving the GPU enough work to do. FWIW, I don’t see this problem on either of my computers, and aside from my crossfire setup they both have pretty average HW.

I’d try turning down the texture quality to medium and see if that fixes it. Could be that you don’t have enough video RAM to run at high, or that it’s paging from disk too much. Otherwise, if you can find one setting that seems to have the most impact on your frame rate, it will be a lot easier to track down the bottleneck.

Yeah, I see day/night cycles all the time. I’ve never bothered to time it, but I’d guess a full game “day” is roughly an hour of real time.

The difference between night/day isn’t crazy, but it’s definitely noticable. If you’re not seeing it, you might want to check that your gamma settings or monitor’s color calibration aren’t all out of whack. This is really a beautiful game when you’ve got everything calibrated properly.

Alexander Dragonfang.1759:

I feel the game is way too “shiny”

This is the HDR rendering, not the FXAA. HDR adds a lot of depth to a scene, but it’s also starting to get a bit overused and tiring. Kind of like how you get to stare at stupid, pointless blue lens flare effects for 2 hours non-stop in every J.J. Abrams film.

It would be nice if someday games started to include an HDR intensity slider to go along with the gamma adjustments. Still it looks a lot better with it than without.

invizo.5408:

U deserve 120fps on a dx9 game like this.

Why do you think that? You have old hardware, and this game runs a lot of complex pixel shaders and shadowing when the settings are cranked all the way up. New games target new hardware (or even a little beyond) for their high-end settings, not two-year old hardware.

Regardless, I’m running this at 2560×1600 (twice the number of pixels as 1080p), with all settings at max including AA, and getting a solid 60FPS with very few exceptions. This is with two HD6970s in crossfire @ stock clocks, so not exactly apples to apples, but the nvidia cards were more powerful in that generation anyway — a 6970 was nowhere near 2x as powerful as a 560. My wife’s system holds steady at 45-50 FPS @ 1920×1200 with one 560Ti 448 core card. There’s almost certainly something going on with your system that’s affecting your framerate, and it’s not DX9.

Krighton.2138:

DirectX 9 was cool when it was new. DirectX 11 or don’t bother guys.

You realize that when you request a 9level3 device from DirectX, all those DX9 calls just get mapped to the DX11 equivalents by the driver, right? DX11 isn’t some magical pink unicorn FPS boon. It can speed up some stuff, but most of the complexity in this game is the shadows and pixel shaders, and it won’t help much with that unless the shader code is overly complex or poorly written (but from what I can tell it’s not).

There’s still new HW coming out today that doesn’t fully support DX11. It would be dumb for them to only target DX11 because they’d lose access to a huge pool of potential customers. The right thing to do is get the engine stable on DX9_3 and then patch in a few things later from DX11 that can have a big impact on the rendering quality/speed.

[Edit to outsmart profanity filter: “s-i-n-g-l-e” apparenlty needs to be “singkitten”.]

+1 for adding a FOV slider, or some way to configure this.

I play on a 30" monitor (I know, first world problems), which really exaggerates the tunnel-vision effect from the narrow FOV. I literally can’t play for more than an hour at a time without starting to feel dizzy/sick. I end up tabbing out and surfing the web throughout my play session to give my eyes a break. I have never, in nearly 20 years of playing countless 3D titles, ever had this happen to me in another game.

I’m all for you guys standing by your artistic vision, especially when you’ve obviously put so much effort into creating a beautiful world, but something’s got to give. I know I’m in the minority, but I’m guessing that making your customers physically ill wasn’t on the list of things you set out to accomplish with this otherwise fantastic game.

I completely agree that everyone’s time is equally valuable, but the flip-side of the coin is that with the current system not everyone is getting equal value out of the game. Pitched PvP battles are much more fun than running around capping everything unopposed, but nighttime players don’t have as much chance to experience that the same way as prime-time players.

The current matching system tries to fix this, but the problem is that which other servers you’d be best matched with varies depending on the time of day. I think the best solution is simply to embrace this fact.

Break each day up into e.g. 6 hour chunks, and have the server matchups be different for each period. So e.g. the servers you are matched with from 6pm-midnight would be different than the ones for midnight to 6am, etc. This would give you MUCH finer controls over population/skill balancing than you currently have, because it would effectively be like immediately quadrupling the number of servers, in addition to working like a smoothing function for the population/skill. It would also give night crews an equal opportunity to experience an enjoyable level of competition, so they are getting the same value out of the game as everyone else.