Guild Wars 2

Welcome to the GW2 social experience.

If your solution to the problem is to throw more money at it, I don’t see where the incentive is for the problem to be fixed on the developer’s end.

I know what you were trying to do when you put that rock at the finish line, but I don’t think you understand how effective that method actually ends up being.

Besides, there are stronger methods to break the arena than that one.

Tumult.2578:

This is not a race.
This is not a race by any definition.

Yes, it is. Participants are asked to make their way from a start to a finish in a given span of time, which is all there needs to be for it to be a race. Perhaps you think that by being a race, there has to be direct competition between participants. In that sense, there is no competition between players in this event because nobody interacts with each other in any way and, as you say later,

The rewards are not awarded according to which position you finish in.

It’s still a race though.

There is extremely little talent involved.

By that, I can only assume that you mean that it takes very little skill to reach the finish line with the amount of time available to reach it, and I would agree. However, to say that trying to finish first takes no skill would be silly.

The skills are intentionally glitched.
Actions that normally work every time, only work most of the time here.
Each time a skill fails, (and at least one will every trip) you usually start over.
The 3 elemental spirits generally only block normally good moves of the leaders.

Tinfoil hat conspiracy.

Maybe, “The Generally Intentionally Glitched Dolyak Experience” would work for a name.

They could replace “race” with “rush” since it’s basically the same thing as a guild rush.

Perhaps then more people will try it.

No, anybody who is looking to blow some time racing is already spending time in Sanctum Sprint and not wasting their time waiting around for >8 minutes to get a reward that isn’t even necessarily gold because they can’t race more than once or guarantee enough participation for a gold reward or by having to suffer moving around invisible traps.

Sanctum Sprint is what exists for people who want to race. If the devs want to start paying attention to caring about activities, maybe you can convince them to improve that instead with better placement-based rewards or less-frustrating global attacks.

I agree wholeheartedly with the OP. The introduction of Ascended gear has trespassed over the most important reason for why I purchased GW2, why I played GW2, why I spent so many years in anticipation of GW2, and why I thought ArenaNet was a team that I could stand behind and support in creating the game I wanted to play. Their position on vertical progression moving forwards feels like the highest betrayal of my trust, and gives me great incentive to reconsider logging in in the future.

It’s become even worse recently with the introduction of laurels. Laurels are a reward that can only be earned so many times in a specific window of time. Miss the window, and you miss the reward. Perform within the window, and you can’t earn more than you’re allowed in that period. Some Ascended gear can only be earned by purchase with laurels. This means you have to spend time completing the goals in each of these windows of opportunity in order to get closer to purchasing one of these pieces of gear. At the current rate, it takes about a whole month to get just one of these pieces! Plus, laurels are used to buy several pieces of Ascended gear, and by spending them on one piece of gear, you forfeit the chance to spend them on another piece. That might seem obvious, but it’s worth mentioning again since the time investment associated with each piece is a whole month. One month for a piece of gear is outrageous, particularly when it’s the sole method for obtaining it, it’s the best level of gear, and it has no equivalently performing counterpart. Guild commendations, and also guild merits in a similar fashion, suffer from the same issues as laurels.

The result of all of this is that GW2 has gone from a game which I dearly loved for its first two months to something that has deviated and continues ever more quickly to deviate from the core design of GW that I was so enchanted by. It’s very hard to think about having waited five years past the release of Eye of the North to reach this “finished” product that looked like a nearly pristine gem, only to see it hastily ruined by design choices that I had believed ANet had learned were unappreciated and unwanted by fans of their previous work, and with no signal from them that they won’t continue a focus on vertical progression and time gating over horizontal progression.

The worst part about all of this is the feeling of hopelessness that I have about encouraging ANet to return to the better path. My experience in interacting with ANet during the development years of GW (between the release of Prophecies and the announcement of GW2) and from my time on the Test Krewe has led me to believe that any effort to persuade off or discuss with ANet any of their design decisions is futile. It is for that reason that I am seriously contemplating putting down this game for good shortly after I see what the full scope of March’s update brings. I would rather not be tugged along another five years by their charades than invest what slivers of hope I have left in trying to encourage them to make good decisions.

ANet does not care about activities. It is not by the fault of the playerbase nor their responsibility that activities are so unpopulated.

• ANet has so oversaturated the rest of the world with incentives that nobody wants to spend their time there instead of earning better rewards just about anywhere else. There are no unique rewards (barring Kegmaster) or systems set up to justify the time investment (particularly through intangibles) over anything else.
• Daily Activity Participation is a joke. It doesn’t encourage anyone to play activities, it only gets them to show up and stand around for a match. Many game-specific achievements are awful too, either being easily manipulated (Keg Brawl intercepts, steals, recoveries) or promoting terrible play (hit racers with offensive powerups in Sanctum Sprint, kill yourself and lay nothing but teleport traps in Southsun Survival).
• Bugs have cropped up over time of ANet changing things in the background and breaking parts of activities as a result (Sanctum Sprint fireworks, Lunatic Inquisition villager triggers, any start of match to Southsun Survival) and some bugs have gone forever unaddressed (guardians getting free aegis that works like normal if you enter late, crab gets stuck in ref box in Crab Toss). During the feature patch in April when PvP gear was changed, no check was done to make sure there would be no spillover effects in activities, resulting in incredible gear abuse in Southsun Survival and Crab Toss, and despite people pointing this out and complaining about it for the months it was around, no fix to it was done until the FotFW when people were one-shotting each other in Aspect Arena and ANet realized how stupid it made them look (particularly to their new Chinese audience).
• Competitive avenues for activities go unexplored. There’s no time-based leaderboard for Sanctum Sprint or tournament mode for Keg Brawl despite both of these avenues having been explored in Guild Wars and being successful and the infrastructure already existing in GW2. Some games are so poorly designed that playing to win is best achieved through terrible gimmicks (collecting rations and running to the southwest corner in Southsun Survival, skipping checkpoints in Sanctum Sprint, sabotaging your team and then switching sides in any team game where team switching is possible).
• Reaper’s Rumble, a DotA-style activity, was such a good idea that they are making a whole PvP mode out of it (Strongholds) despite canning it after the first Halloween and never making it available since. Instead, they brought back a broken Lunatic Inquisition.

ANet talked in their last PoI that they are introducing activities that they initially promised in the base game, such as the shooting gallery, as adventures. They talked about this new system as a separate addition to the game and made no other connection with it to activities. This demonstrates several things:

• Minigames, things which play within the base mechanics of GW2 but with a different focus and ruleset and smaller scale, just like all activities are, are something that ANet wants there to be more of, and it stands to follow that they’ve recognized they have players that want to play them.
• ANet would rather build adventures tied to expansion packs that people have to pay for than develop new activities or fix old ones.
• Old ideas that ANet had for activities will be relegated into adventures instead (shooting gallery, bar brawl, Polymock).

There is also little to no reason to expect ANet to adapt their system for adventures into one which also enhances current activities, either by providing more rewards or competitive leaderboard. All adventures that have been discussed thusfar and some highlighted aspects of their design, particularly their being instance-based, show that they want to have players compete by proxy through the leaderboard, but don’t want them competing within the same game like how every activity is set up.

It’s over; activities are dead, ANet killed them, they only serve as a stepping stone for them to develop something like them that they can make people pay for instead of polishing their old work.

People should have stopped paying attention to the shill in this thread years ago. I don’t understand how people keep falling for his bait.

If you just look at PoF’s Mount Races and compare them to adventures like Ley Line Run and Flying Circus, and then compare those to Sanctum Sprint, or look at Basket Brawl and compare it to Keg Brawl, you’ll find that the quality, complexity, and creativity of activities/adventures/minigames has gone way downhill. If you look at how seasonal events have been handled over the past couple years and how everything is pretty copy-paste despite not being all that rewarding or demanding, especially for or of anyone of decent skill, or how games like Aspect Arena and especially Reaper’s Rumble do not make consistent returns to the game, or how broken two of the four daily activities are and have been since their inception, you’ll see how little interest the developers have in improving or showcasing this kind of content.

Orpheal.8263:

I also don’t know why anet just made this kind of Basketball like minigame for lettting us play it just for a few weeks and then just removign it again, instead of keeping it and giving it likle all others their own achievements, especially when its something thats appreciated and liked by most of the community – havent read here anything bad about it.

The reason you haven’t read anything bad about it is because this forum is a terrible place for honest, critical feedback. You can find mine in the link above. Also, nobody actually cares about that game.

• Players can spawn consumables in the arena and use them. Seen in the attached file (gw269), the player has spawned some sort of ice rifle and used it to damage and chill other players. They were also able to kill the Ale Keeper in this way, preventing one team from scoring for some time. Green Fireworks were also brought into the arena and were usable.
• Dive Roll while holding a keg allows players to dodge. Dive Roll while not holding a keg does not dodge.
• Player traits should be checked to make sure they are turned off. I have seen at least one instance of a ranger with Opening Strike. That, to me, is an indicator that other traits may work such as those that give extra speed under certain conditions (elementalists attuned to air) or extra endurance for more dodging than others. After checking myself, it seems that traits do not work, as desired.
• At the beginning of the game, very rarely is it possible to pick up a practice keg and still be holding it when the match starts (I have seen this occur once only and am unaware of how to duplicate it). by passing a keg to another player who is already holding a keg, the keg that falls at that player’s feet will not disappear when the game begins.
• At the beginning of the game, if you throw a practice keg to the keeper and score, the chute will launch a new keg into the game that will not disappear when the match begins. This allows a second keg to be introduced early into the game.
• Kegmaster does not increase in progress when other keg “skills” have been maxed out. See attached (gw274).
• When struck by Punch, the daze effect
• * prevents kegs from being picked up;
• * sometimes locks players into motion, often because they try to do things (pick up kegs, use a skill);
• * can bring knocked-down players back up faster than normal;
• * does not prevent the use of the Throw skill.
• Charge sometimes reaches the target before the channel expires, idles the player, and then knocks them down as if they had not reached the target.
• Assists are not given when players who have been passed the keg by another teammate score the keg by talking to the Keeper NPC instead of tossing it in with a Throw or Lob skill. Fixed 9/25/2012.
• The autobalance mechanic does not take into consideration the contributions of players. This means sometimes that players who score many kegs for one side may be balanced to the other side near the end of an almost complete game. See attached (gw260). Fixed 10/1/2012.

AysonCurrax.3254:

I find it odd that those who support this “exclusive” reward are people who dont even collect minis themselves, and hence dont seem to understand what it feels like for us who do, or maybe they just dont want to understand, i dont know. All this comes across as is on the level of “haha you cant have the shiny stop whining”. A collectible should never be that near impossible to actually achieve, seeing how it is limited to, at best, 640 Mini Llamas total, or more realistically, a mere 40. One or the other per X Million players. that is far from fair.

And I suppose you just don’t understand the viewpoint of those who vie for limited edition or limited quantity items and the notion of having something so rare, or maybe you just don’t want to understand. Your own stance is a demand for every thing to be shared just because someone might otherwise not be able to satisfy their ambition of having every opportunity open to them, even though there are others who, because of its scarcity, are willing to put that much more of themselves into getting something.

If the item is that rare and the competition for it is that fierce and you want it that badly, you’re just going to have to up your game and get it.

eekzie.5640:

I don’t get this obsession from Anet to make ’’exclusive’’ miniatures.
There’s loads of people who collect them. They even pay gems to collect them.
You’re just giving them the boot.

I honestly would not have an issue with a limited PvP reward track to give out an exclusive miniature that’s only available for 2 weeks.
I don’t see the correlation between miniatures and PvP though.

So exclusive minis are bad because then minipet collectors will have a hard time collecting all the minis, but exclusive skins are fine because nobody cares about skin collectors. Or maybe it could be an exclusive title, because nobody cares about title collectors. Or maybe it could be an exclusive tonic, because nobody cares about tonic collectors. Minipets are of course the only thing that anyone could ever collect in this game and it is such a travesty that an exclusive prize would be a minipet instead of any other thing in the game, which couldn’t possibly be collected.

You wouldn’t have a problem with a PvP track only available for two weeks because that’s doable with time and effort and has nothing to do with scarcity and demand for skill.

Teckos.1305:

Well when you guys are complaining on the forums pretty sure there is some guys really into miniature forming his team for TOL.

Whining is easier than winning.

Venirto.4208:

2. Keep aspects, remove orbs and make it a deathmatch type of game, or king of the hill.

Here’s a good example of what not to do.

Since ANet decided for this recent event that they would tie more rewards to winning games rather than just playing, there have been some complaints about winning being “hard” or “luck-based”. There’s some truth in that; poor teammates can be a real drag on success. But, I believe that these complaints are chiefly coming from people who suck at games, because people who are good understand how much influence they alone can have in a match. I also believe that many people who are bad at games don’t understand how bad they are or why what they are doing isn’t good enough, and that some of those people could learn to become really good if only they could see the perspective of someone else who is already good.

For those of you who fall into this last category, wanting to get better but not knowing how, here is a video for you - a four-minute video with closed caption commentary (if you turn it on) of the thought process of someone scoring 20+ points in Dragon Ball. This isn’t how all of my matches go, but this attitude and playstyle is what allows me to win just about every match I play. It only takes me about one hour to get through one rep of the reward track, or about a half hour for the wins daily.

Some time in the next week, I may also put together a series of videos showing a whole rep of the reward track to provide a more complete view of what playing so many matches in a row is like, sorta like what I did for the Dragon Bash.

Edit: I just finished recording, editing, and uploading one rep of ten wins, so you can see what this active playstyle looks like over a set of games by checking out this playlist.

What progress?       

Shocker, right? Our highest scored MMO is also our current Best MMO of 2013. Even if you’re not a fan of ArenaNet’s sequel, you’d be hard pressed to deny the team’s dedication to adding to and improving their game. In the six-plus months since its launch, Guild Wars 2 has added more content and features than any other MMO on this List has in the same amount of time. And there are no signs of the pace slowing down… in fact, they only seems to be speeding up their output. Oh, and all of it has been free too, let’s not forget that. We wish more developers offered this much value with your purchase, and gave you so much quality content for so little investment. ArenaNet stands head and shoulders above the pack for 2013 so far.

While it may be true that it’s been free, having cash shop promotions shoved down our throat with every update makes saying something like that sound a little disingenuous.

GW was an okay game that became great with time. Most of the additions to GW really made it better, and the only times it ever lacked in something were often due to developer neglect in terms of skill balance and bug/exploit fixes. The most important thing about GW that made it great was its core design: short time to max performance, tons of things left to do after hitting max, and initially, a segue from PvE into PvP and a connection between the two.

GW2 as of late has just felt empty to me. Now, before release during the beta weekends and for the first two months after release, I was having the time of my life. GW2 was giving me an experience far greater than anything I’d ever gotten from GW. The combat was engaging (even if easy at times), visuals stunning, and the world alive. When I eventually got into sPvP, I had my fair share of fun there, even if its depth or balance didn’t seem quite up to the standards of the best of GW. I had some complaints with how expensive exotic armor was and how absurd having the best-in-slot gear so far out of reach was, but I still had the feeling that that core from GW was there. I could max out my characters, deck them out in top-of-the-line gear after not too long, and then be on my way with really experiencing the endgame, which was basically whatever I wanted to do in GW2.

What ruined everything for me was Ascended armor, but not because of the new tier itself. What the introduction of Ascended armor really showed me about ANet is that it’s not out of their design scope to throw in extra vertical progression over horizontal progression. After all, there were several other things in the game they could have expanded upon to give players more to do if they wanted people to stay in the game longer. However, they opted for the route that I could have found in most any game – giving me bigger numbers to chase. GW did this too in different ways, what with Lightbringer skills giving statistical advantages against certain creatures or improving certain skills, and then eventually with Factions allegiances and racial tracks. This progression wasn’t remarkable, since the largeness of each title controlling the power of these skills made them slow to progress, but one good thing about them is that they gave their bonuses in addition to the core max armor. They didn’t ask you to give up on your max armor that you already had for cheap and instead have you chase after a new maximum performance gear to replace the old set. In fact, the core best-in-slot gear became even cheaper at the release of the expansion. Ascended gear, on the other hand, requires a large time commitment or material cost for a single piece and replaces gear from a lower tier. This runs counter to GW’s design philosophy of maxing out being easy or quick and then leaving you with the rest of the game to experience.

High standards of quality for competitive players are less important to ANet’s budget than skinner box mechanics.

Crossplay.2067:

You know that skill that is supposed to reflect fireballs? I was killed while that was still up. The kick always misses. About 75% of my attacks miss, regardless of how close an opponent is. I can’t target enemies that are right in front of me and are usually the sole person in front of me.

Basically, I don’t see how any amount of skill is going to counter mechanics that flat out don’t work.

• The reflect only bounces your shots once, so if you are getting attacked by someone else with a shield up, their shot bounces off yours, bounces off theirs, and goes through to hit you. The bomb has a large enough radius to hit people inside the shield without being reflected by landing close to it. The animation lasts longer than the actual effect.
• The kick has a very short range.
• You aren’t training your targets properly to compensate for automatic projectile motion tracking or don’t have the fast sphere upgrade.
• You have bad camera control.

The mechanics are the way they are. Part of getting good at a game anything is mastering the mechanics. Even if you think the mechanics are broken, saying that is just a bad excuse to not get better. You can learn and use broken mechanics like any others.

Anyandrell.6238:

and, besides the “omglookatmeimsoawesome” part, your point is….?

Provide a demonstration and guide for skillful play the likes of which Dulfy and dozens of other video makers don’t provide. They will show someone how to play, I will show someone how to win. I figured some people would rather have a resource for improving themselves to overcome a challenge instead of spending all their time complaining about it, but that’s not for everyone.

Absolutely nothing of value was lost. That game was terrible.

Reaper’s Rumble, on the other hand, is worth mourning.

I like the way you’ve fleshed everything out over a year and gave the development of the world a sense of direction and scheduling, something which the story as of late has lacked. Knowing that you’re going up against the forces of a dragon with full intent of taking them down gives you a sense of purpose. Fighting rag-tag enemies with seemingly no connection or explanation of why each of them sprung up gives no purpose at all. It didn’t even make for a good surprise when it was revealed that one person was behind it all, because nobody knew who that person was or why they should be seen as a threat, particularly when every faction they put together previously had been promptly stamped out.

I think panning out the story across the year the way you have would give a developer a proper sense of when to focus on story-driven content and when to focus on other things like mechanics or loot.

Also,

>Polymock
>August 2016
>implying ever

Ayrilana.1396:

The activity is not broken.

This is all I need to hear from you to gauge where your mind is. There’s no longer any need to take you seriously.

Be sure to buy HoT and more gems if you like seeing ANet treat you this way.

Collect candy corn, play all of your favorite Halloween activities, and earn sweet new rewards.

There won’t be any of my favorite activities, since Reaper’s Rumble was canned and Lunatic Inquisition is buggered as hell.

Remember to buy Heart of Thorns and get your friends to buy Heart of Thorns if this is how you and them would like ANet to continue to treat you.

lordkrall.7241:

Is the inconvenience of 1% more valuable than the security of 100%?

You are implying that 100% of players are significantly at-risk for having massive amounts of gold moved off their account, which is an absurd claim that, if true, would indicate much more severe security issues than a gold transfer cap would address.

Actually, you need to start looking over this code right away to make sure this doesn’t become a problem for Wintersday.

GW2 was a questionable decision seven years ago.

kineticdamage.6279:

The definition of a game is to “play by the rules”. If you break those rules by purpose, you’re not playing that game anymore. That, even a child does know it.

Now, from an adult standpoint, anyone knows that breaking a game’s rules will have negative consequences on other concurrent players.

Now what if you and I were engaging a friendly fight in real life, and you say “only punches”., but after a minute I suddenly started using a crowbar ?

An exploit in itself is not a breach in rules. It’s an action that can be seen as capitalizing on poorly defined rules. Your analogy is poor because in that case, you’re breaking our one rule of “only punches”. However, if I started using brass knuckles, I would still be within the bounds of our rule and also be taking advantage of the fact that the rule wasn’t declared to be “only fists” or something more well-defined.

Activities are dead, ANet doesn’t care. The daily only exists as a token measure for ANet to act like they think they’re still important. I could go on at length about the bugs and design flaws of every activity in the current rotation, but it would be a complete waste of effort for me and any other player to have that discussion.

Ayrilana.1396:

Southern Survival: Don’t leave the starting area and then you won’t get punished by being perma immobilized. Problem solved.

“Don’t do things that bug out the game and you won’t be affected by bugs” is not only self-contradictory, since you are saying that players can avoid being affected by bugs by letting the bugs affect the way those players play in order to get around them, but it’s also a toxic shift from holding the developer responsible for fixing their own game to holding the player responsible to play around the developer’s bad code. Stop making excuses for ANet.

Remember: it’s your responsibility to deal with the problems that ANet has created. It is in poor taste for you to to shame ANet for this when they have been so gracious to give you the option to spend money and switch to a different, lower population server where you and all of your friends could play.

:^)

eekzie.5640:

Exclusive =/= hard.

No, you’re wrong. The more scarce (exclusive) something is and the greater demand there is to have it, the more effort will have to be put out to acquire it, in order to outdo the efforts of everyone else who didn’t get it.

It’s already impossible for a lot of people to collect all skins. For a variety of reasons.
Therefor adding one more to an already incomplete collection isn’t as bad as the miniature.

This is also true for miniatures. There are miniatures in the game which are not obtainable anymore, and thus adding another to an already incomplete collection is not a concern.

Give them an exclusive statue. Name a skin after them. Name a miniature after them.
Do something that does not conflict with what people like to do in your game.
The reason people care so much about the miniatures has a long history dating back to GW1.

Another game with collectable items in such scarcity that not everyone was going to have one.

I also wouldn’t mind a hard miniature to get in PvP. Like, really hard.
Look back to how GW1 handled this. The miniature Ghostly Hero had a chance of dropping after winning in the Hall of Monuments.

Hall of Heroes.

The Hall of Heroes had a tournament-like structure in that you often (without gaming the timer for skips) had to fight several other teams before reaching the final map where you could make an attempt at claiming a prize. The Tournament of Legends is similar, except with limited entry, limited frequency, and guaranteed payouts that extend below first place. The difficulty in both comes from matching your skills in and knowledge of the game and coordination with your team against those of everyone you face.

But I guess that’s not hard enough. Pre-nerf drop rates for Chaos of Lyssa are what should determine difficulty for acquiring miniatures. Got it.

You totally missed the point. Miniature collecting should be hard. Should not be exclusive to participating in random one time events. That doesn’t mean it’s hard. It means it’s put behind a wall.

Scarcity of individual items and volume of content are what make collecting hard. Some things that people collect are just very limited in quantity. The people who get to complete their collections are the ones that do the work to make it happen.

This may not be the last Tournament of Legends and may not be the last time for people to get this item. If they don’t get it this time around, they can try again next time, and if they never end up getting it, then they didn’t want it bad enough, and that’s too bad for them.

Ayrilana.1396:

The bug occurs when you leave a decent distance from the starting area before the actual match begins. If you stay until the match begins, like you should, there would be no problem.

Once again, you are placing onus upon the player to work around the bug instead of putting any responsibility on the part of the developer to not leave their game broken, so much so that you even claim the problem is “solved” or doesn’t even exist as long as the player does something about it, nothing of which will actually make the bug go away.

Are you ever going to hold the developers responsible for the faults in their own game?

Please don’t resort to doing strawman arguments either. The argument was about whether the activity was broken or not and the poster gave that bug as an example. I was not arguing about whether the bug should be fixed or not nor whether Anet should be held accountable for it or not.

But you are saying that players are responsible for dealing with the effects of bugs themselves and that being able to do so concludes any issue of the bug being there in the first place, which is to say that the developers don’t need to have any part in dealing with solving the bug – that it’s not their responsibility.

If you don’t want to get called out for being an apologist to ANet’s bad behavior, don’t use language that creates excuses for them and blames players for not being able to put up with things that aren’t their responsibility.

It’s also not self contradictory as moving around that far from the starting position before the match begins really offers zero benefit.

Non-sequitor.

You’re not losing anything by staying at the starting point until the match begins.

Only a fool would not recognize the potential gains in getting away from the crowd at the start. On the other hand, you could be referring to how trivial the outcome of the game is in any case, but I don’t think you’re that good with your words.

It’s pretty amusing to listen to ghosts complaining about how ridiculously difficult this jump is for them to make and that they pretty much can’t win if a villager chooses to get into this spot and is successful. People are so used to the power dynamic of ghosts being so much stronger than villagers that when this dynamic gets shifted the other way around by the use of this spot, the shock of what they are being asked to do to win repulses them. These same people seem to fail to make the connection that this is how anyone trying to win as a villager feels all the time in this game, and that by the shifting of the power dynamic, they are being shown how imbalanced and terrible this activity is. Some ghosts even go so far as to say that the activity is fun or is great as they cleave down villager after villager, but as soon as one guy gets the upper hand over ghosts by going somewhere hard for ghosts to reach, the game then becomes dumb, boring, broken, and/or imbalanced. Then they go on to blame the villagers for ruining their fun, because how dare they use the only strategy demonstrated to be effective in having villagers win.

Accessing this area is a legitimate strategy, the only legitimate strategy that villagers have. I will stand corrected when someone shows me a series of themselves claiming victory over the ghosts as a villager using any other method.

The appropriate “fix” to this spot is not to block it off. The appropriate “fix” is to remove Lunatic Inquisition entirely and replace with any other activity, like Reaper’s Rumble.

Behellagh.1468:

Shayne Hawke.9160:

I could go back to GW and start a fresh character in Prophecies right now and have maxed out gear in less than a day. I could even shave a few hours off that if I permitted myself access to the expansion.

Show me how to do that in GW2, and I’ll stop believing that Ascended material and time costs aren’t absurd.

Ever considered that capability you had in GW was intentionally left out of GW2 because it’s dumb in terms of retaining players who spend real money in the cash shop?

ANet is in business and need to pay the bills and would like a steadyish cash flow so they can do more work and keep the servers up. Having a whole bunch of players insta-max level/max gear doesn’t lend toward that goal you think?

No, if their goal is to keep players on a hamster wheel of chasing after higher and higher stats, then giving players easy access to max gear isn’t a good idea. However, I would rather that ANet had a goal that is actually meaningful and enhances the game’s experience versus tying players to a treadmill, and a terrible one at that.

There’s a lot of infrastructure that still needs to be established before GW2 can even be remotely close to an eSport. Of all the things ANet has chosen to speak about and claim to tackle first, private servers are probably the last thing that would cross my mind as bringing this game closer to a sport. Observer mode and a ranking/rating/ladder system are two that right off the bat would jump to my #1 and #2 priorities to do.

You might be able to get away with saying that PvP is ready, but it absolutely isn’t eSport-ready. Seeing that custom rooms have been placed higher on the list than those two other features has me feeling that the team is misguided and that we won’t be seeing the critical features until some many months down the line. I hope we still have players by then that want to make the game successful as a sport.

Just go play GW and get it.

You don’t even know what end game is.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

HoT isn’t a game full of grind. It’s a game full of long term goals.

That is some incredible mental gymnastics in defense of content gating through arbitrary numbers.

I don’t know. Could you repeat the question?