Guild Wars 2

I’d add that it may be extra frustrating to have all the items except for 1 unlocked on some achievement. That last item is just tempting you, but locked behind a mini game.

Almost all grinding in the game is not interesting or frustrating. Collecting the large amount of materials needed for some things is hardly interesting, but I can sit down and spend a little time each day doing it, knowing I am getting closer.

Same if partial awards were given for these mini games. While I may not enjoy the grind of doing it 50 times, if I’m at least seeing progress for the goal, I would probably grit my teeth and do it. But I’m not going do play them (except perhaps as a daily) when I don’t see any real hope of me getting to the silver level.

If anything, letting people get small rewards might actually get more people playing these games, so depending on what the goal of the developers are, it could be a plus. You’d get the people who want that item and now have a real way to get it.

The problem is you can’t grind out the minigames. You can play them repeatedly and still not get good enough to complete the higher requirements.

One thought might be on each ‘bronze’ attempt, you get a fragment of the desired item. And 50 fragments (or some other number) can be combined in to the actual object.

Thus, players could grind it out. Doing 50 sanctum sprint runs would be annoying, but I could see doing a couple a day, so you get it done in a month. And at least you would seem some progress.

Note that legendaries are optional content (ascended is equal, stat wise, and gong to be easier to get), so I don’t necessary mind it being time consuming to get them (just like all the time gated crafting that is needed).

But I’m going through HoT with my second character, and picking up most of the map or story achievements, but for most of the mini games one, I’ve just resigned that I’m never going to get above Bronze, because repeatedly playing them and hoping my skill increases enough to get silver (lets forget about gold even) really isn’t worth it, and not something I find fun.

If you swap weapons right after be launched by the zippers, you will be launched the correct distance (this does require playing a class that can swap weapons). However, this adds yet another timing mechanic to the game – if you are too slow on that, you shoot too far. But it isn’t that hard, and you could practice this on the zippers right at the entrance (where if you zip to far, you don’t die and can get back to where you were). IIRC, there is a zipper that that launches you to a rock.

I don’t know if I’d want a full compact in the bank, since I often put different types of items in different tabs. But a ‘merge items’ would be good, without it moving other items about that don’t merge.

I don’t think it is in the daily jumping puzzle rotation (there may be a few other really hard JPs not included). At least I’ve never seen it in the past 6 months or so.

I have occasionally seen people porting others up. On the plus side, the map is right outside of Lions Arch, so easy to hop onto the map and see if there is a commander around there – if so, they are probably porting.

Doing this during busier times (weekends), you probably have more success. I was on that map with one of my characters shortly after completing the dive, and there was a person doing ports.

Starting to play through them on my second character, and this time isn’t quite so bad. I think some of the problem on the first character is a lot of the map was hard to move around until you got through the relevant masteries. Since those are account bound, they are mostly open to my second character.
However, one thing that is still annoying is trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. I don’t have a solution, but trying to use the map to figure it out is pretty much useless. So I find that there is a lot of wasted time trying to figure it out.
Perhaps that is part of the design (maps are confusing and hard to navigate). But I don’t find that particularly fun – given the limited time I have to play, going in the wrong direction, finding dead ends, etc, isn’t particularly interesting.

One thing I’d like is that if you have something in a shared inventory slot and you get another, it merges with that instead of going into the normal inventory.

I tend to put keys in shared inventory slot (since I might have one of several different characters going to the map that uses them), and after doing events, I find more of that same key in normal inventory.

Seems to me that they most often pop up if you kill one of the bandit leaders. I don’t think that is 100%, but that is when I seem get some (can’t remember – do the bandit leaders have the embroidered coin purses?)

I did finally complete the dive on this a week or so back, so no longer have 37/38 on the dive achievement. Swapping weapons while the launchers launch you will move you the right amount. I used the evad track to get the right position for diving.
All of this is fine, but I’d prefer jumping/diving puzzles not A) require 20 attempts to get it right or require me to look at a video to see how it is done.
I much prefer being able to figure it out myself. Which is why the latest one in Siren’s Landing was nice. No need to resort to google to figure out how to do it, yet still challenging in spots.

This has been broken for many months, and there are other posts on this topic. So it isn’t a new bug, just an old bug that has yet to be fixed.

Somewhat annoying for my account, since the Not So Secret dive is the last I need to complete, so diving master always shows up in my achievements I’m close to completing.

In terms of materials, one could only unlock those recipes if one has HoT. So sure, a player without HoT could get bloodstone dust, but if none of the recipes are unlocked for that person, it doesn’t do them much good

Note even if they are hitting the NCSoft servers directly, free accounts likely has nothing to do with it it.

Just submitting millions of request to authenticate with bogus (non existent accounts) will take up resources if someone wanted to do a more targeted attack.

And the first D in DDOS is distributed, which typically means many thousands of servers (typically unpatched systems that were easy to infect), so it is not like a single block of IP address can be shut down.

There is a reason why these types of attacks are hard to prevent and resolve.

It depends on when they looked at it, and if they continue to do so.

A few years back, the number of 4K users was likely pretty small. But as time passes, that number (as a percentage) is likely to only increase.

It is hard to imagine that allowing an even bigger interface should cost too much to do. Or allowing more flexible resize for different elements.

Mini map is my main gripe. If I scale down to 1080P (which looks terrible btw), the mini map ends fairly close to my skill bar – perhaps a quarter width of the screen. At 4K, there is a large amount of empty space, and the mini map is perhaps 1/8th the screen.

This is the same number of pixels (which must be what is limiting its size), but it means at 4K resolution, I need to be zoomed fully in to see anything. At 1080P, I can be zoomed out one step and still see things.

I actually don’t much much problem with text size, but then I’m on a big (40") monitor.

As a 4K user (in windowed mode so that I can get to my browser easily), I do hope they spend some time improving it.

While probably hard to measure, I do wonder if it indirectly hurts sales – someone decides to give the free version of GW2 a try, and after dealing with the poor interface on 4K, decide to give up/not spend any money for the full version, and instead spend their time & money on a game that does support 4K well.

Thanks for all the good information – I wasn’t sure all the rewards.

The one other potential benefit is that if I do plan to play through on main character for the mastery points, playing through on another character first to refresh the mechanics of the story to know what to do to get mastery points probably isn’t a bad idea. Though I’m sure if I do a little digging, someone has made a guide on this.

I played through LS2 on my main character, but haven’t yet done it for any of my other characters. I’m just trying to figure out if there is in fact any reason to do so.

Unlocking the central tyria mastery points require a second play through of a character that already completed it, so if I want to go for those, doing it on another character doesn’t help out.

It also isn’t necessary to play through to get access to the silverwastes or dry top – one can just get those easily enough.

My only though would be if there are any unique items rewarded, or if people otherwise had thoughts on benefits for playing through on each character.

What always bothers me more is that when your character dies, you just go back to some waypoint. But this isn’t true for the rest of the people living in Tyria. So whenever a character is killed off in the story, I’m thinking “Why don’t they just waypoint out?”

I do realize it is a game, and it would be really annoying if our characters really died forever. But I find that more jarring than toilets and food and water. And in fairness, since I ’ve a bunch of junk food from leveling up chef, my characters actually do eat quite regularly.

While giving out mastery points after earning lots of experience may trivialize them some, right now, gaining some number of them is also a trivial exercise, but may be in content one doesn’t want to play. And some are quite hard/time consuming – for the Central Tyria ones, there really isn’t any consistency.

The problem I have is that some are behind content I really don’t find that interesting – 8 or 9 are the second points for doing the story. Repeating the story multiple times to pick those up is anything but fun to me. An improvement there would just be make those achievements available on first play through – thus, I might actually pick them up if I play the story through on my other characters, but that doesn’t work right now. I noticed that they did make this change for LS3.

Forcing players into content they don’t want to play never really seems to work out. When the game first came out, one had to do the WvW maps for world completion, and people constantly complained that they really didn’t want to be forced to the WvW for what is mostly a PvE task. Arenanet did eventually change that.

I had originally thought of having different mastery tracks with different rewards instead of spirit shards, but this could make things more complicated (having 6 different tracks for rewards to choose from could start getting messy). Perhaps simpler would be a reward track that gives a chest, and that chest then has a choice of rewards, like is done for many of the storylines (and it could be roughly balanced out, eg, 1 foo or 3 bar, or 8 whatever).

I find the loss of experience annoying in central tyria, simply because events have a reward of a few silver, a few hundred karma, and 20K experience or so. Once exp is capped, effectively a third of the already paltry event reward just goes away.

HoT did a better job with this, as events reward a chest, those chest generally have at least something sort of decent plus usually keys to open more chests on the map.

I think one problem with the entire Central Tyria points is that they were added in as part of an update. If they had been put in with original design, like those in HoM, there wouldn’t be much an issue, as they’d be more scattered about the maps and in more varied content. As such, a good amount are locked up in the Silverwastes, and I don’t really feel like just constantly work on that area.

There has been various discussions about how experience becomes wasted if you are not able to unlock all the masteries and there is nothing for them to go into. There is also discussions about the Central Tyria Mastery points and the pain it can be for those. So my thought for a solution:

Add a repeatable mastery track that does not take any mastery points, takes 254,000 experience to complete, and gives you a spirit shard.

Thus, players can get back to the pre HoT behavior if they want. If a character does not have any masteries they can advance, experience would funnel here. Or if a player just decides there are some masteries they just don’t care about, they could choose this mastery instead.

My second part of this would be to add a repeatable mastery track like the above, with some high (5 million?) total that gives you a Central Tyria Mastery point. Thus, players could grind out those points over time instead of doing content they don’t really want to do.

With a high total, it would almost certainly be faster to do the achievements. But this just provides an avenue for those players to get the CtM points.

Thus same thing could be done for HoM points also – at least so far, to me, those seem easier, but at some point, experience will get locked behind completing a raid (there have been different discussions on that).

This would require some development work, but would seem to be using logic that is already mostly in the game, so maybe no so hard.

For myself, my main issue playing at 4K is the size of the mini map – it seems its maximum size is dictated by pixels, and not size of the screen. I have to have it zoomed in at maximum level to be able to see anything, where as at a lower resolution, the minimap would effectively be bigger, and I could be zoomed out a step or two, and see more things.
So my only request would be to make the minimap more flexible on resize. To limit amount of information (so a player couldn’t see the entire map), perhaps as the player makes it bigger, it zooms in automatically to effectively make it so that the player can never see more of the map than they should.
I think this improvement would be useful beyond just 4K.

This, like the winter wonderland puzzle, is one in which you really need to use mouse turning – if you are using the keyboard to turn, I don’t think you can really turn fast enough.
I originally tried skipping stones before the winterday one, and was using keyboard turning, and never got very far in either. I trained myself to turn with the mouse, eventually being able to complete the winter wonderland with some degree of reliability. I then revisited skipping stones, and found it fairly easy.

Note you can always get to your bank through any crafting station also, which some explorable areas have.

I would think that any such tax would have to be voluntary.

Otherwise, I see numerous problems – player joins a guild and not realizes it taxes them (and if low level , 1 g/week might be all they have). Or you are part of a guild who starts taxing, but you have taken a break from the game for a while, only to log in 3 months later to find out you have been taxed the last 2 months and a lot your gold is gone.

I suspect the issue is that there is no actual jumping in that puzzle (rather, all swimming), and the ‘puzzle’ is really just figuring out the right combination/how to get that combination.

There are many jumping puzzles in the game which IMO are not puzzles are all – the solution itself is obvious, just one needs fairly precise execution (Coddler’s Cove or Chaos Crystal Cavern are a couple that come to mind) – in the case of the later, the only real puzzle may be how to get there.

Jumping Challenges may be a better term, but as noted, Portmatt’s lab isn’t even jumping.

Jumping puzzles is easy because their is an achievement tab only for that, with each puzzle being its own achievement.

Diving is more complicated. I’m going through now with my character doing all the dives, but I did not keep a get record from the start (so at the start of this effort, I had 15 of the 37 or so). In some cases, the count increased for a dive I thought I already had done, but perhaps did not do so. And there are certainly reports of dives not registering when done – if that happens in my current circumstance (I get to the end with 36/37 complete), I’ll have no real idea of knowing what dive failed to register.

So something like a /dives command that just dumps that out might be nice.

Based on the ‘its really easy’ and ‘its really hard’ responses, it seems like making different difficult versions would make sense. They could do it like the fractals – choose your difficulty going in, and the higher difficulty gets better stuff. Perhaps have a special achievement if people achieve the really difficult version.

For this particular puzzle, just adjusting the timing would be all that is needed. If really easy gave people 5 seconds longer, that might be enough even for keyboard turners or those not particular skilled. And if it was 5 seconds shorter, I suspect that would pose a pretty good challenge for even the best players. Each level could basically chop 1 second off the time allowed – at some point, there will be a best possible time.

Maybe /suicide, unless that was considered not appropriate for some reason.

Simple solution to prevent the described abuse of using it in combat – death penalty and armor damage, would be that if you use /resign, you do suffer those things.

As such, you would only use it in real bad circumstances. I’ve been in more than one fractal were someone died in an inaccessible area, and only solution was for all the other players to get killed – in which a /resign would have been much faster than waiting for the monsters to finish the players off.

I did finally finish this last night. What makes this one harder than some is that there is no checkpoint – you have to get through the entire thing in one go. The one in metrica province (which I completed without nearly so much difficulty) does have checkpoints.

But like many game aspects, if you have the right skills (or in the case of certain encounters, the right skills/classes/equipment), you say it is easy, and if you don’t, it is hard. There is no single right answer.

I’ve completed most all the jumping puzzles (did not do clock tower, have yet to do emerald sanctum), and some of those were fairly difficult, and some fairly easy. The gap can in fact be quite wide – I remember doing one in Curse Shores – when starting it, I was just seeing where the stack of shells went, and I got to the top, got the reward, and thought ‘that was the puzzle?’

One thing that can be frustrating on this puzzle is the restart time. If you are lucky, and few other people are doing the puzzle, it means that the restart times will be quick (if everyone is worse than you are, other than the 10 second timer, there is no wait). but if the other people in the puzzle are good and do it to completion, you may be waiting most of the 2 minutes if you fall off early.

I do also wish that the snowman near the starting platform that obscures the finish area was not there, so you could watch those people to completion.

While I’ve yet to complete it (I was one of those keyboard turners who has gone to mouse turning for thus puzzle), I’m certainly making progress, and hopefully will get it done before wintersday finishes up. I don’t know if I would be amused or ashamed if GW2 actually kept track of number of attempts and made it visible.

However, I do agree that a timed puzzle in a shared instance is tough – having 3 or 4 other characters (especially big ones like Norn or Char) jumping on the same path as I am is difficult. The solution is to let them get ahead a snowflake or two, but then this puts me at a disadvantage in terms of timing, so is hardly an ideal solution.

It is pure speculation that reducing waypoint/armor repair costs would result in a huge amount of inflation.

This depends greatly on what portion of the money flowing in is from those sources. If only 5% of gold going in is from waypoints, removing the cost would have little effect. If it is 50%, then removing the cost would have a big effect.

I suspect that the black lion trading company is a big source of money removal – there is a lot of traffic there, but a lot of it is higher priced items

My main complaint with waypoint costs is that if affects gameplay – I’m less inclined to spend money to teleport accross the map for an event if I won’t get near the payback for that event (especially true if you are high level in lower level zones).

I’m fine with armor cost – means I should avoid dieing. And if I’ve done something which resulted in a bunch of my armor being damaged, using one of the repair cannisters I’ve acquired is a good deal.

What I would like to see as a gold sink is more worthwhile things to buy from merchants – the only thing I regularly buy from merchants is salvage and harvesting kits. Make the main gold sink people actually buying things they want to use, and not fees for playing the game.

GW1 seemed to do that a lot more – top line armor was fairly expensive, and it did not have a trading post, but did have a sort of supply/demand system for dyes and materials, but the price difference on the buy/sell on those was much greater than what BLTW charges in fees.

I pretty much always just open the present, rush in, grab the presents, then run away (with my pet usually slowing down the pursuit).

End result is that I probably leave a trail of angry toys in my wake for someone else to clean up. If there are other players in the area who attack the toys I create, I will join in and help finish them off.

But if you are simply going for the presents and hoping for something decent, the time it takes to kill the mob of 5 toys isn’t worth it. And the toys themselves often don’t seem to have any decent drops to make it worth killing them.

I wish the scrollbar that sets turn speed also applied to the keyboard turn speed, and not only mouse turn speed. I tend to use keyboard all the time for movement in the world, so to try and start using the mouse for the few jumping puzzles that need it is a bit of a pain.

Target closest is certainly broken. After playing GW1 (where it worked), I bound the c key to it, and try to use it all the time. But a fairly large portion of the time, it does not target the closest – rather, it seems to prefer whatever is most directly in front of the character, even if a ways away.

This is somewhat annoying all the time, when there may be something a bit to the side I was trying to target, more so with ranged, where I aggro a creature I did not want to. But with melee weapons, this is really annoying where instead of attacking the creature right next to you, it targets something further away, and you move in that direction because the weapon skill includes movement.

As a ranger, I often harvest while in combat – I let my pet deal with killing the creature around me while I harvest.

I totally agree that the pet logic needs to be improved.

But I was just suggesting what should be a fairly simple (and easy) mechanic they could do right now to permanently stow pets. I would certainly prefer the logic was such that pets were smart enough so that I generally would not need to stow them.

One way they could achieve this is just have a way to choose ‘no pet’ in your pet choices – if you have no pet chosen, the obviously it can’t come out and be annoying.

IIRC, characters start that way (but typically get a pet pretty quickly), so it is not like this would be something unsupported – just a way to get back to that state.

Having the pet always pop back up when taking damage is pretty annoying in the jumping puzzles.

In addition to showing number of players, it would be nice if such a list existed to show you completion of each zone (could even have columns for hearts, skill challenges, etc). As it is now, it can take quite a bit of looking if to figure out that you completed most of a zone before leaving.

Even better would be some option that brings up a menu/list of all the zones and the number of players in each of those zones, so one could easily see at a quick glance which zone is hot.
It would be fine if the numbers were not even that precise (±25% or round to nearest ten or hundred players)

Right now, it is not possible to equip harvesting tools during combat. I can think of various reasons why the do not want players able to equip/change armor or weapons during combat, but I can’t think any reason for harvesting tools.

This becomes fairly annoying when you are running about harvesting, have aggro’d something, and your harvesting tool runs out (more likely when at rich ore nodes).

I’ve also had cases where I’m ‘in combat’, but am not being attacked by anything (because the creature can not get to me or some other reason). I then have to hunt down that creature, kill it, so I can equip the item, go back to the node, and finish up harvesting.

After playing and exploring a bit in Orr, I decided to take a break, and went off to explore Snowden Drifts.

I personally found that much more enjoyable. And while that is my preference, if enough people decide not to explore Orr because they do not find it enjoyable, then it will become just that much more difficult to actually find parties, get the dynamic events, etc, completed there, as everyone is off elsewhere.