Guild Wars 2

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

SilverShadow.3021:

+1
Seems like Anet has replaced most of its story writers, because in GW1 story was quite good whereas in GW2’s Living Story it’s (imo) horrible.

They both had good moments but as a whole?

Eh, not really. All six versions of story (four for GW1 and two for GW2) were serviceable but not awesome. Riddled with cliches, predictable, and just strong enough to tie things together. Especially Prophecies and Factions.

Personally I liked the Nightfall storyline, it really sucked me in.
In my experience it is Nightfall > EotN & Factions > Prophecies.

Prophecies was a little bit lacking in my opinion but on par with GW2 main plot.
And for me the LS is at least10 times worse than the GW2 main plot.

+1
Seems like Anet has replaced most of its story writers, because in GW1 story was quite good whereas in GW2’s Living Story it’s (imo) horrible.

Anet successfully removed the holy trinity but sadly while doing that they introduced the holy unity: DPS, DPS and MOAR DPS.
This is one of the major flaws in the game which really kills my interest in playing anymore.

To be honest the holy trinity in GW1 was FAR better than the holy unity introduced in GW1. Anet needs to indroduce viable heal and cc mechanics so that people just can’t 11111 stomp with their zerker gear through basically all content that’s available.
The current meta promotes just focusing on your own while not needing to care about anyone of your group, because you can do everything on your own.

Bring back castbars, direct targeting of allies to buff/heal, interrupt mechanics and new balanced content around these changes and the game would be just great.
This guy actually sums it up perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBxStGB6-UE

tl;dr
A disappointed GW1 veteran.

Btw. most people complaining about the holy trinity should have tried GW1 gameplay first. The GW1 “Holy Trinity” differs a lot from normal holy trinities of all the others MMOs; it was really awesome.

Lokki.1092:

Aisa.2817:

So basically, we have to keep ourselves alive and work as a team to get through dungeons. What’s wrong with that?

Work as a team? Are we playing the same (PvE) game. My teams seem to work like this.

1. Get in group
2. No need to speak to anyone unless someone doesn’t know what to do
3. Wait for cut scenes.
4. Skip what needs to be skipped
5. Kill what needs to be killed.
6. Type in /s “P2 P3?” or “Ty”

Repeat.

There is no teamwork. Those player may as well be DPS bots or NPCs. Nothing I can do will save them nothing they can do will save me. And we are all better off DPSing our faces off and just avoiding damage in the first place.

This. Exactly this.

Will we ever get skillbars? Missing them from GW1

Galen Grey.4709:

Ehh I dont follow sorry. The Q2 report says they did $25m this last quarter they reported on. not $7.7m Unless I am misreading something. Its $28b krw which are equivalent to $25m usd. Thats excluding the box sales. Total so far is $160m which covers all the wages for 5 years alone.

Thats also not counting the easter market which generally is greater then the western market making it so potentially it could do $200m a year from the gemshop alone.

During the call itself they said the game is doing strong and seems stable financially. It would be illegal to say that if the income was smaller then the expenses.

You’re missreading it. Page 10 counts the gem shop sales (11.459 KRW in MN =7,79 mio €=10,32 mio $) and page 5 the boxed sales (28.899 KRW in MN = ~20 mio€ = 26 mio $). I’ve been following the financial reports for ages (GW1) and it has always been like that, media report the same numbers.
Nonetheless that doesn’t change my calculation by a lot.
As you’ve maybe noticed I’ve muddled up US$ and €, sorry for the confusion.

Galen Grey.4709:

Gehenna.3625:

The financial reports shows that Last year GW2 made a lot of money and in the first two quarters of 2013 sales are down dramatically, like 70% down…Also the second quarter was down from the first quarter again. So the financial reports actually show that the game is going down financially in the first half of this year. In that sense GW2 has followed the same trend as other MMOs.

Anet/NcSoft have also said that by now the game is stabilising and slowly growing again. So the game is not dying but financially I don’t think they’re exactly sitting on roses either.

So my assessment is that it’s doing ok. Not great, not horrible, but ok.

First quarter it made a ton of money cause it sold a ton of boxes. it did what 2 million in 1 month? at $60 not counting deluxe and collecters thats $120m right there. No game can keep selling 2 – 3 million boxes per quarter. At lauch you have all the people who have been waiting for it buying it. Then its people who come across it, or who change their minds etc.. the later will always be a lot smaller.

They choose micro transactions as the revenue driver and that has increased quarter over quarter according to the financial reports . That means its actually doing great for them.

Well, not really. Let’s do a basic calculation.

Anet is said to have +300 employees long before release, today there might be a lot more. To be conservative with this assumption I’m going for 300 employees.

The average annual salary in the US in the games industry is around 75-80k, but I’m going for 70k like the first time.
300*70k=21 mio $
So we have at LEAST 21 Mio $ of costs to be covered, not counting in additional employees (well, you could try to count them from the recent ANET image we got) or lots of other expenses.

According to the NCsoft earnings release 2013 Q2 they achieved gem shop sales of 7,7 mio. 7,7*4=30,8 mio; that’s not a lot compared to my very conservative assumption of expenses.
I don’t see how they could cover studio costs while maintaining a decent revenue share just with gem shop sales.

The biggest income factor is still boxed sales with 20 mio in 2013 Q2. So yes, including boxed sales Anet is doing really good, but boxed sales WILL go down rapidly as time goes on (-4mio compared to last quarter).

To be honest that makes me really happy, because it’s basically predicting that they HAVE to deliver an expansion at some point (apart from the fact that the LS is pretty much bs in my opinion).

Very disappointing. I don’t care about the two-weekly Living “Story” updates as it’s practically a grindfest with no story at all.
Seems like I need to continue “watching” the game rather than “playing” it, because most of the living story is no “real” content.
At this pace we will never be able to discover whole Tyria or even Elona or Cantha….sad thing.

Well the boss wouldn’t be so hard if I could just SEE the red circles.
They’re nearly invisible for me.

Same here, got 210g now and no achievement.

Krosslite.1950:

So they have stated that for FREE they will basically doing an expansion over a period of month instead of forcing us to pay $25 up front for an expansion pack will kill this game?

That is bull.

Doing it for FREE will gaunttee this game will be the new model for all future MMOs

Do you really think you will get expansion like content?
Looking back I’m definitely saying no.

Well to be honest if they’ll really do this the way I’ll think they’ll do it then this is a pretty dead game.
Living story content was nice if (!) they would have been working on an expansion, but basically what he’s saying is that the whole company worked on the updates. Are you kidding me?

I don’t care about these small living world updates because
- it’s all about rng and gems
- they always introduce NEW plot holes (like the aetherblade story which makes no sense at all) , why can’t you just expand on Guild Wars lore?
- The only real content they ever created in more than 10 months were (the bad) southsun cove zone, fractals and to some part guild missions. Will we ever get any decent content like GW1 expansions? Of course not. If they keep the pace we haven’t even seen the whole map of Tyria in 5 years.
- Living story content just isn’t really good if you’re not doing expansions. It kind of feels like a minigame but not more. Every patch we get something like pumm 150 pinatas, do you really think that’s fun?

I’ve yet to see any decent content worth an expansion like whole new zones on par with release zone content or some permanent elite dungeon with STORY (fractals was the best excuse for not having a story at all…).
Give us something like DoA, FoW or UW; just limit those casual living story updates and start pushing out serious (!) content.

tl;dr
I’m very disappointed.

Well I guess that I need to play my GW1 ranger for a bit longer now.

Those “balance” changes as expected /facepalm
Mr. Sharp, why did you ever say “we know ranger is one of the weakest classes” (Back in january)? Obviously you do not.

I completely agree with the OP, ranger has been in such a bad state since RELEASE (especially in PvE) it’s not funny anymore.

I’ve really lost hope in any of Anets Balance-Devs, especially Jonathan Sharp who promised to improve ranger in every aspect (didn’t deliver at all) as he never showed up here again commenting on serious ranger issues.
Sadly the only dev caring about the ranger seems to be Robert Hrouda, which isn’t even his job at Arenanet.
Atm sPvP ranger seems to be in an “ok” state, but PvE is still as bad as it was from release on. Meanwhile we have other classes like mesmers who are one of the best classes in every aspect of the game like sPvP or Dungeons since release (Yes, I’m jealous).

It seems like Arenanet has no idea what they want to do with the ranger, imo they should completely scrap it. Return the damage from the pet to the ranger itself and make BM a viable OPTION. Then start giving us a lot more crowdcontrol abilities like in GW1.

tl;dr
I’ve never been so dissatisfied with any class in any MMO I’ve ever played and the horrible thing is that the corresponding devs seem to have no idea how to change this.

Cameirus.8407:

because punishing people for leaving misses the point.

Why do they want to leave…..thats the issue that needs addressing.

There will always be leavers, no matter how good the gamemode actually is.
For example Dota 2 would be a mess without leaver punish.

Luthan.5236:

It’s hotjoin.
15char.

Yes and thats the problem. Maybe implement another queue for serious players if you want to have an unfair zergfest with people jumping in and out.

I just don’t understand why we don’t have leaver punish implemented yet, more than half a year after release.

Basically every team game like dragon ball or sPvP in general is HORRIBLE because 90% of the time you lose since it is virtually impossible to get an even teamfight (5v5,6v6,…).
I seriously dont understand why Arenanet even bothers to implement such arenas as they aren’t any fun at all because most of the games are just plain unfair.
You really need to stop the system of starting games without even teamsizes and then just punish everyone who leaves with a 1 hour penalty.

Fix it for the future, please.

I’m not convinced that sPvP in GW2 will be good anytime soon.

First of all we’d need gamemodes other than the boring roam & bunker PvP that we have now. I dont think this will happen in the near future because Arenanet insists on their stupid gamemode someone decided to be “fun”.

They (well i guess most of the PvP crew from GW1 could have already left) created 2 really unique gamemodes (GvG & HA) and what are they coming up with in GW2?
Some random cap battles which unifies the worst of GW1 PvP (Hero battles just with players instead of heroes now).

There’s a reason why no top tier GW1 guild is seriously playing sPvP, because it’s just so much worse than GW1 PvP.

So don’t get your hopes up. As a die hard GW1 PvP fan I’ve just decided to switch to PvE and other serious (!!) PvP games like Dota2 or Stacraft.

This spam gets really annoying, can I add “support@guildwars2.com” to my spam filter or would this probably block some legit ArenaNet Emails too?

Please bring Cantha (and ofc Elona) back!

garethh.3518:

SilverShadow.3021:

Imo it was one of the best signets, even before patch.

I haven’t seen a respectable ranger run it ever since I came back from my 4~ month break from the game.
So I think they have a rough idea of what they are doing… this time.

I use it a lot in dungeons as a panic button.
Other than that the 6s while you tank can take lots of pressure from your team mates in boss fights or while pulling.

I’m kind of surprised about the signet of stone buff.

Imo it was one of the best signets, even before patch.
With a certain trait your pet AND yourself are invulnerable for 6s.
6s invulnerability for you and your pet every 80s is actually very nice.
I hope the devs knew that, because otherwise i shouldnt have written this; FML

Anyways, the rest of the patch notes is really disappointing. I see that they’re trying to improve pet usefulness, but I’d rather have decent DPS on my ranger and not my pet.
And LB is still useless.

Okuza.5210:

IMHO, rangers not being desired in dungeons is entirely due to the players themselves and not the class at all. The class has a few issues in Arah (all with the pet), but not other dungeons.

What are players doing and why don’t people want them? Well, if I see a ranger using a Long Bow and Bear, I’m ready to punt them from the group. That’s pretty much the lowest contribution (worst dps/etc) setup you can bring. Bear/lbow rangers seem to have other bad habits, too, such as a tendency to knock things back at very inappropriate times, destroying the group’s DPS efforts.

I think rangers could use some changes to make them more interesting to play (they’re basically auto-attack bots now), but absolutely should not be buffed up for PvE. The class is already right up there with warrior as the most over-powered PvE class around. Pets easily solo open world veterans and tank all the non-group champions with ranger help. Just how much stronger does the class need to be?

Well, I strongly disagree with you.
I’ve been playing my ranger for over 700 hours now and the only time I’ve ever used non-bear pets is PvP and open world PvE.
Warrior is FAR stronger than the ranger in basically every situation (esp dungeons).
One of the biggest problems is that warriors have a) much more DPS (ranged DPS is ridiculous compared to LB DPS) b) more health and c) more team support.
I’m not surprised with groups being like “ugh a ranger” when i join the group.
To be honest, I always hope for warriors+guardians+mesmers in groups that I join, because they’re just a beast in dungeons.

Not taking bears in dungeons is the worst thing that you can do. It doesn’t matter if you choose ranged or melee pets, in most fights they just die instantly to any Boss AoE (biggest problems in fractals). Bears might not be the best DPS pets but first they can tank a lot of damage (even from bosses with 20s swap) which benefits the whole group and secondly they deal a consistent amount of damage (it’s even more important to take a bear if you have the +5% damage while pet alive trait).
It happens a lot to me that my team can regenerate while my pet is tanking tons of damage (that’s why I always take signet of stone; 6s invulnerability for me and my pet ist just too good to pass).

So what I’m saying is that in dungeons pets other than bears are not viable at all. Your post doesn’t sound like you ever played ranger for a long time.

JonPeters.5630:

As we have stated many times we have tried many modes and there is a reason we ended up where we did. This is not to say we will not introduce new modes at some point, however a few notes on death match.

1) You can obviously have it without a healer.
2) Even games people consider to be DM have tons of secondary objectives (Quake 3, counter strike, Starcraft, etc.)
3) Objective based games tend to be both more total noob friendly AND more esport observer friendly as players/watchers can go/look at where the action will likely be.

Deathmatch without other objectives lacks things like a reason to engage, a way to break stalemates, and a tie breaker. It also creates much wider blowouts when someone on your team doesn’t know what they are doing (does this ever happen to you that you get a clueless teammate? Heh)

Hopefully that clears up some of our reasoning for future discussions.

Jon

Well, but you also have to consider that lots of people dont like the “roam and holding” gameplay.
Despite being a dedicated GW1 PvP Fan I’ve never had any fun with PvP in GW2 cause of the gamemode.
PvP in GW2 just feels like HB from GW1 with players instead of heroes (and i never liked HB because it just was a lame “get the best holding heroes and you win” meta).

Argadem.6135:

SilverShadow.3021:

So the end is after the raft trip (where you also get the 1 bubble extra)?
I’m just wondering because our instance creator left the game then so that we all got teleported to Rata Sum.

That is the end for World 1,but you still have World 2,3 and 4…enter them by going to other doors at the start of the instance

I don’t think so.
As far as i know now, we have World 1 with 3 zones + World 2 with 1 zone.
Here’s the complete walkthrough:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F8jpD06wL0o

And the end is the raffle ride.

So the end is after the raft trip (where you also get the 1 bubble extra)?
I’m just wondering because our instance creator left the game then so that we all got teleported to Rata Sum.

Do it like in GW1 = problem solved

Just don’t remove the title display completely, or there will be no reason for titles again.

To be honest, I don’t like this decision at all.

All I want is a big new content update, so that you can play for months again (like with an expansion), new classes, new personal story (!!!, no open world) and Cantha or Elona. This just won’t happen in live updates.

And if really the whole studio is working on these (compared to the team size) really small monthly content updates then I’m a little bit concerned about how long they’ll need for an expansion. 3 years?

300k Karma spent

- 1g
- 200k karma back (with booster)
- 1 Minipet
- 14 Obsidian Shards

So I spent 100k-30k(Obsidian Shards)=70k for Minipet+1g

madatom.5218:

nobody wants to play bunker/roamer/support domination games

NOBODY

the developers, the top players, the commentators and the people on these forums who support it are WRONG

as in completely WRONG
dark souls is a more competitive game then guild wars 2, that’s embarrassing
snowball mayham is more competitive then GW2 spvp, and thats only when everyone is running around killing everyone

i mean kitten its been months and people are still here thinking its perfectly fine to play a bunker, trade EVERYTHING to be useless in any situation that doesnt involve sitting on a kittening node, are you people listening to yourselves?

This, exactly this.

Out of all the game modes that exist, why did they have to create HB 2.0 only with players instead of heroes. Even if all promised features (that should have been available for release) are coming I couldn’t care less about sPvP because the game mode is so boring.

So it isn’t really surprising that competitive sPvP in GW2 is more dead than GvG in GW1.

Seriously, this is “our” update? What a joke.

Wow, Arenanet is deleting posts from this thread – Oo

-
5500 posts in, seems like they’re gonna sit it out.
Just change the ascended stats back to exotic stats and we would be really happy…

promurphy.2761:

5k comments. how many do we need to leave before a GW2 dev comments?

To infinity and beyond!

Anet, I really lost faith in you now.
I’m thinking about quitting now, maybe one year in from now you have +30% better gear than exotics? What a joke.

I never thought that you would let down your biggest fans, the GW1 Vets.
However it seems that I was wrong.

Well if this is really happening, time for a new sit-down!
Good ol’ GW1 times

HTXL.2598:

This should pretty much close the thread. Did you really expect, in all realness, no change in gear stats, ever?

Yes, because this is a guild wars game and it was promised that there’s no gear progression. It seems like that you’ve never played GW1. To be serious I don’t care about all those WoW/… players that want gear progression; please quit the game.

Arenanet, if this is true, I’m very disappointed.
It’s really sad but this would be a reason to quit for me. However I still have hope; I’m a loyal fan since 2005.