Guild Wars 2

Bumping this back up… The infinite spawn is still happening and making it completely impossible to advance past this dungeon. It is a slow escort from watching youtube videos and the respawn on these guys is less than a second and there are easily 20 enemies at all times.

Blueshield.6291:

I agree in principle with the concept of precursors being earned rather than obtained via lottery. I’m not certain that the laurel system is the best way to handle this, though. I don’t really have a fully worked-out alternative, but I feel that daily/monthly completion is too low of a bar for precursor acquisition, regardless of the number of laurels needed.

Yes, I am in total agreement that we need to earn precursors by actually playing the game vs gambling large quantities of coin on the lottery. Because let’s face it, the lottery system only encourages people to grind through boring parts of the game that will give you money, which you can in-turn gamble away.

I guess I am leaning toward the laurel system because it is a way to earn some kind of token that is account-bound and can be redeemed for items. With this system in place, your hard work of actually paying the game (and not farming for money) could be rewarded for something you actually want.

What I’m really looking for is a path getting a pre-cursor that is fixed and not random. Basically, something that says: “If you do A,B,C for the next X months, you can earn a precursor”. I am totally ok with ~8 months of effort being involved… but tell me what I need to do now so I can start the 8 month journey to a pre-cursor.

Ronah.2869:

Races, personal stories. Yes, Other games have this feature and even GW1 had it with small limitations.

Not true. You could change your secondary profession changed in GW1. You never had the option of changing your main profession. Secondary profession selection was part of making/perfecting a “build” and we don’t have this same skill selection build in GW2.

In addition, your character model is built upon the profession choice you make so it would be weird to create a necro from the start and then switch them over to a warrior or guardian. It just wouldn’t look right.

Dunno where you get your base numbers but I find it extremely difficult to earn 60g and 200 WvW tokens a week. 60g a week might be possible if you did nothing else but farm and crafting via trading post. 200 WvW token in a weekend? Even when factoring in all 4 jp in WvW (saturday and sunday), at best you get 4 * 4 * 2 = 32 and maybe another 30 for individual kills. So ~60 tokens best case?

Realistically, I think on average most people get about 20g/week and about 30 WvW tokens if there focus is just on grinding out money and tokens.

So, there is no way IMO that pre-cursors are appropriately priced at 600g.

So maybe 250 laurels is too high, but having some way to earn pre-cursors by participating in the game is better that throwing 500g into the mystic forge and still not getting a pre-cursor.

There was talk about doing a scavenger hunt for obtaining a pre-cursor which I am also ok with. But with the whole Laurel system being introduced (and built upon in future updates), I thought this would be a good opportunity to reduce the difficulty of just one part of the legendary grind.

Even if you earned 500g in 8 months of work, for most legendaries that still isn’t enough money to buy all of the parts required for crafting.

The title pretty much says it all. I think there needs to be a way to “earn” a pre-cursor…. not RNG from Mystic forge. If say, the laurel vendor would let you pick any one pre-cursor for 250 laurels… It’d be ok with that.

That way, I would feel like my daily/monthly achievements would lead up to somethin of epic importance.

I am actually working on getting Bolt. I don’t have the pre-cursor yet (Zap), but even if I did, I am a long way from crafting it. The major holdbacks so far is getting 100 charged lodestones (~350g from TP), icy runestones (100g), and a stack of ectos (~100g).

Ectos were cheap a few months back and I should have bought my stack back then. So even if I had the pre-cursor, I easily need 600g in materials and some sunstantial grinding to get the other stuff. I’ll be happy if I can get my precursor this year!

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I think there has to be some change in communication. People speculate a lot about things they get from you… small bits. There is just too much emphasis on things you are bringing in the future far far away and we actually don’t know much about the things that are coming soon.

No, I think there needs to be some change in speculation! We are getting information straight from the devs that are working on projects that are months or years of work.. However, the community extrapolates the smallest comment and makes predictions about what it all means and when their theoretical predictions will come to fruition. Software development is complex and we haveve just been lucky so far to have sneak peeks at what cool things they are working on. The problem is that once we get a glipse, we want it immediately (never asking how much coding is behind it)

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Emphasize the next patch, on things that are likely to see the light of the day. There must be more of those upcoming near changes/new additions which are 95% in the next patch… why not be more transparent about it? Otherwise people just get disappointed, like hearing from you something which sounds too good to be true (scavenger hunt) and then… “yeah, we aren’t releasing it in the next 10 months”

don’t tell us what’s not in the patch, tell us what actually is (specifics, not like: we are working on the old world to make it more fun; but: we’re doing this and that and try that, but are not sure if this works out).

The problem with that idea is that they won’t know what the 95% is until weeks before launch. And that is just what we are getting. Next week we’ll get the details because they will be >95% sure that it will be in the patch. If they tell us that something is gonna be there early in the month and then it fails QA testing… what then? There will be way more QQ about being told something will be there and then isn’t. ArenaNet is actually doing the right thing by running all new content through QA and then making a formal announcement for the update.

The point is this… we have to treat all comments from dev as “sneak peaks” with no expressed or implied release time and that is that. Otherwise you’ve set your expectations too high.

The tooltip clearly states that the exit portal should be open for 20 seconds, yet it seems to expire in about 12 seconds. I can’t say for sure but this seems to have happened in the last few weeks. Not sure which patch this bug was introduced.

LOL, thanks! I agree that the message could have been more clear. Ultimately I did the insane to complete this quest…. I gave up on the trebuchet and simply swam out to the undead ship. Then I dove underwater and proceeded to attack the hull with my spear until it was destroyed.

Yep, that’s right I speared the ship to death. Luckily that mechanic worked for me, because the mission was not giving me enough direction as to what I was doing wrong.

ArenaNet, please consider adding a better error message!

Great decision ArenaNet! Keep up the good work!

I also gave up after trying it for about an hour. I couldn’t get past the fact that there were all those Norn and Char blocking the screen for me. I am typically pretty good at jumping puzzles, but I need to see where I am jumping. I hope ArenaNet will consider a solo-friendly version next year.

I agree with others that this content was fun and ArenaNet did a great job! Here is my short list of things I liked and would like to see improved next year(or next event)

Liked:

1. Pumpkin carving (even though I didn’t get my title)
2. Costume Brawl. Especially at the end of Mad King Says. There is something epic about 80 people suddenly being thrown in brawl mode and seeing the awesome brawl than ensued.
3. Decorations and Halloween skins were awesome
4. Candy Corn farming. I loved the fact that you would see a huge candy corn sticking out of the ground and you could hack away to get your chunks of candy corn. I also like that I never felt like I had to straight up farm for it. I did at first but quickly found that I could do it at the same time as my normal questing

Needs improvement:

1. Acts 1 and 2 were nearly impossible to figure out on my own. I could not follow the clues and having to randomly click around on the “ghost finder” made it also difficult even though I was in the right area. To be honest if people hadn’t posted the answers online, there would be no way that I could have completed it. (yes, I cheated)
2. Mad King Dungeon time span was far too short. I know that for the story it made sense to seal up the hole prior to Oct 31st, but I really thought I should have been able to do the dungeon all the way to Nov 1st. Sadly, I had a very busy work schedule for Act 3, so I missed it which makes me a sad kitten.
3. Clock Tower was nearly impossible with all the people running it at the same time. I would have like to do this in a solo instance because I could not see where I was jumping half the time given the large Norn and Char characters. Most of the time I fell off because I walked over the ledge because of the blob of people
4. Item skins from Black Lion Chests was a bad idea. Item skins should be purchasable from the gem store similar to the way you can buy costumes. If you want to keep them as rare items, then make them as rare drops from the Mad King Dungeon and keep it at that. Mixing chance with real-world money is never going to end well. There can be chance (from chests) or use real-world money(buy using gems), but don’t mix these two together.

I hope you can use this information to continue to make this game the best MMO… ever!

Thanks,
Terrell

Dear Regina and other ArenaNet devs,

Please consider adding a festival hat maker to future holiday updates. For those of you not familiar to GW1, there used to be this! It made it much easier to participate in holiday events and to forever save your hats!

Right now I have my devil horns, witch hat, and launch ball cap sitting in my storage and I would really like to just craft them up on as-needed basis. For example, I don’t want to throw away my ball cap, because I got it for being there at the time of launch but I don’t want to keep in in inventory for the next 5 years!

Thanks,
Terrell

Dear Regina and others at ArenaNet,

Let me first say that I love this game and admire your resolve to tackle new ideas and make this game better at each update. I am not going to rage on this issue, but instead provide a suggestion for how to address this for future holiday events.

I think the major issue here is that the way that the rare items were rewarded here were tied to both chance AND real-world currency. In the past I have read in the GW2 blog that the gem system was going to allow ppl with disposable income a way to short-cut through the grind of getting that rare item. On the other hand, those who don’t want to spend the money on gems can just invest game time and eventually have a path to achieve the same rare item.

In this instance, ppl with disposable income only had a chance to purchase the rare item. And although it was stated that this was a chance, nobody knew what that chance was and so they spent alot of money for nothing.

My proposal:
————————-
1.) Rare holiday skins should be straight up purchased from BLTC. I’d advise researching price points and would direct your research to LOTRO’s model as I always felt it was “reasonable”. Something like $9.95 for a single skin makes sense to me as that was what costumes costed in GW1

2.) If you desire to keep the randomness approach, I would suggest going the same route as purchasing mini-pets from BLTC. Basically someone can buy a bag that contains a random skin. If it’s not the one they want, then they can sell it to someone who wants it and take that profit to buy the skin you actually do want.

3.) To keep with the theme that if you don’t have disposable income there is still a path to get that item… Make these rare skins random drops from dungeon chests or even monster drops. A drop rate of 2% on dungeon chests and 0.1% on monster drops is feasible to me. It reminds me of the mini-polar bear in GW1. People were running the snowman dungeon for ages just to get that thing and I think it would apply here as well.

To me, this is the only system that makes sense. People who want to buy cosmetic items should be spending much more than $10 to get want the want. And for those who want to earn it in game… Play the game! When that rare item just drops in your lap there are very few things in this world that can match that level of excitement

Anyways, I hope you will consider this idea for future holidays like Christmas.

Thank You,
Terrell

My personal story tells me to use a trebuchet to destroy the warmonger but I get an error saying I cannot fire in that direction. It will not allow me to finish this part of my personal story, so I can’t progress the story.

dirtyklingon.2918:

i’d also like to note that when a guildie was hacked with 90 ectos and 30 gold due ot the at launch bug with email authentication and validation, although his account was recovered in a timely fashion(less than 24 hours- which is very good turn around)…

in the worst sort of victim blaming i’ve seen to date in this genre, none of the stolen items were restored to his account, and we was left to restart with 0 gold and 0 tradeable assets.

he’s lucky he got his account back before his gear broke, vendored and then relegated to ad spam bot.

as a guild we’re lucky he didn’t simply give up at that point and quit the game.

This has nothing to do with bots or the removal of bots. There was a security leak at launch and that was recognized and reported to us within a week or two. And there have been a ton of posts from ArenaNet saying not to use the same password as other accounts, so I feel they’ve done there best to rectify their mistake.

It is a bummer that your guildie was hacked, but at least it happened early on. Can you imagine if you had spent 1 year building up your fortune and loot only to be stolen!? Yes 30g and 90 ecto is alot, but if the guildie farmed that within the first 2 weeks of play then I don’t see the issue of starting over. It stinks, but it is doable to restart.

That is one reason to have a strong guild to pick up a member when they’ve been knock flat. Your guild would come together and help out a fellow mate, right? That is the power of a strong community and I think GW2 has one of the best communities out there in the MMO world.

Thanks ArenaNet! I have personally seen about half a dozen bots and reported them all. In my case, they were a bunch of bots standing in a known DE spot and spamming their no.1 skill. To top it off, they were not being very clever… there was 4 characters in one spot using the default Charr Ranger skin (i.e. “skip to end during character creation”) and all four had almost the same name but one character was different.

These guys were just farming the measly 30 copper the DE would give out every 5 minutes. I’m glad to see that work is being done to purgue these bozzo’s.

I think someone suggested above to kick AFK people after 20min… well in the case of farming bots I don’t think this would work because they are activating skill no.1 so GW2 would view them as being near the keyboard. I’m totally cool with perma bans on these guys.

ONE SUGGESTION: Please implement the Dhumm animation on banning. Holy cow was that awesome to see in GW1!!

The skill descriptions doesn’t say much more than turn your opponent into a Moa bird. What are the advantages of doing so? Are they no longer allowed to use skills during that time? I’ve tried using it on tough bosses, but the duration seems to be much shorter on them, so I kinda don’t get why I would use this over a race elite that could summon a monster to fight by my side for 60sec!?

If I had to guess, it was a fix to handle botting. In this area in particular I have seen multiple bots just sitting there firing their weapons on areas with know DE’s. People will then go AFK for days or weeks to come back and find their character level 40 and sitting on a wealth of money. I would hope that the very first time you do a DE you get the full XP, gold, and karma… and then on all subsequent attempts you get very little.

This would then discourage people from gaining experience and money for little to no effort.

I also noticed this yesterday. The Pirate Harpoon and Pirate Speargun have their models swapped.

Hello,

I notice that a lot of people think that they have a mail bug when in fact they are using 10 out of 10 messages. I think the problem stems from the fact that there is no clear “Hey, your inbox is full!” indicator.

I’d suggest a system similar to when your inventory gets full… the icon for the mailbox should turn red when the mailbox is full. That way you’d have something that draws your attention and you’ll know that you need to clean out the inbox to make room for stuff your friends might send you.

Krarr, delete everything from your inbox. (I mean everything). I had this issue with a friend of mine who was unable to receive mail from me (and only me). His inbox said 9/10 and of those 9 messages a couple were from me. We were doing this so we could have a nice and easy spot to hit “reply” as we are frequently exchanging stuff.

One night we were extremely frustrated that we couldn’t swap materials and he started cleaning out his inbox. As soon as he did, all my mail for the past week and a half started pouring in. Apparently, one of my old messages had “held up” all the rest of my mail.

I have heard rumors that the down-scaling algorithm relies on the ratio of your armor level to your actual level. I cannot confirm this, but the theory is that if you are a level 50 with level 40 armor, when you get downscaled your equivalent armor is now (40/50)*30 = 24. So it’s like your a level 30 rolling level 24 armor.

When my friends and I did the Catacombs 6 days ago, we all had armor that was no more than 2 levels below us and we generally had no issues. The “lover” bosses still proved to be a challenge because sometimes it is really hard to keep them apart.

If you want to try this theory, upgrade your armor and try again.

Saraneth, have your brother delete everything from his inbox. (I mean everything). I had this issue with a friend of mine who was unable to receive mail from me (and only me). His inbox said 9/10 and of those 9 messages a couple were from me. We were doing this so we could have a nice and easy spot to hit “reply” as we are frequently exchanging stuff.

One night we were extremely frustrated that we couldn’t swap materials and he started cleaning out his inbox. As soon as he did, all my mail for the past week and a half started pouring in. Apparently, one of my old messages had “held up” all the rest of my mail.