Guild Wars 2

Well this thread seems to have backfired on the OP…

I have no problem with a couple months to fix minor issues… but our issues are not minor.

1. Scribe profession doesn’t work. You literally can’t progress past scribe 150 because the items to do so aren’t even in the game.

2. Guild halls can not complete many major upgrades because the items to do so no longer exist in the game

3. Precursor collections. These are broken in so many different places that it would take a page just to list them all.

4. Event bugs. In a map system where you need to complete all the events to earn the rewards, having events consistently and permanently bug out is kind of a major problem.

5. Map completion. Want your rewards? Want to work on your legendary? too bad, so sad.

So out of about 6 major features for the expansion, 2 of them don’t work at all, and 2 aren’t even in the game yet, and they still don’t work after 19 days!!!

Notice the trend; there is now more cash shop only skins released of recent than things you can earn in HoT combined, all in a matter of weeks since launch. And the actual rewards you can earn by just playing the content is extremely low quality compared with what you can get with RL money.

It seems that all good things are now being put in the cash shop rather than earned in game. It’s lame but I guess this is their new direction/business model.

They also moved all the WvW buffs (like +5 supply) out of the core game and into HoT. It’s a pretty shady move.

Ryptel.5196:

That is just literally insane that a company is producing a product and providing incentive for customers to pay money for that product.

I mean, we are all entitled to full access to someone else’s livelihood without paying for it. I have this argument every time I need to fly somewhere and I call a taxi. Since my wife normally drives me to the airport, why should I need to pay for the taxi?

It’s complete elitism and infringes my freedom and needs to stop.

Cannibalizing old content and restricting it to new content isn’t providing incentive, it’s a dodgy business tactic to fluff a lackluster product.

Test.8734:

You begin with a rotten foundation -

The thing is MMORPGs have moved away from the foundation, and has moved into what you described. The foundation of MMORPGs was to have a RP based game in a MMO environment. This means that the role is up to the player, and the world environment is generally shaped by players. However now it’s structured to be linear and static, where devs now need to add walls and grinds to spread out content since almost all content is dictated via whatever new stuff the devs can push out compared to how fast the player consumes it.

Granted WoW did balloon the MMORPG market probably more so than what it can sustain, and now it is normalizing itself. Doesn’t mean the market is dead, just that it isn’t where it was at its peak.

It is interesting though, Devs usually don’t want to take chances when it comes to investing in something outside of the box, yet continuing to do the norm can be just as fatal.

E: Also +1 to the post above me. GW2 needs to scrap levels and leveled zones, it doesn’t need it and limits the games potential.

Congratulations to all that strived for the upcoming changes and also to ANet for having listened.

Some never give up on grinding, others never give up on real life.

Best regards.

GW2: run around casually picking flowers, killing some mobs along the way, doing some hearts, viewing some vistas. Come across an event, do it, a couple of people show up, do it with you. Go back to your frolicking after event is over.

HoT: run past every mob because some of them can 3 shot you even in full heavy ptv gear, only do events with 10+ people because the mobs are so obnoxious the only way they are worth the hassle is if you can upscale some of them to champs to get bags and spawn extra to tag them for more exp for masteries. Once event is over, hope you have someone who pins and moves the zerg to the next event. Otherwise, afk at an uncontested wp until an event starts.

it’s not a “get good” issue, the entire pacing of the game was changed.

I was ganged up on in my guild for expressing negative opinions in GC yesterday, which is a shame, as I was always very positive about this game. Luckily there seem to be lots of kindred spirits here so I’ll freely express my opinions.

In my mind (and as many have said) fixing the three things below will make a massive difference.

1) Drastically reduce the number of hero points needed to unlock elites. While I am not especially bothered about my elite spec I know how much others were looking forward to them. It was only in a post literally a day or two before the expansion that it was explicitly stated that these would be ‘unlocked’ – not helped by the beta weekends making them instantly available. This gave a lot of people the wrong impression and I can understand their frustrations. I would reduce this to around 60 points or so.

2) Half the XP needed for each mastery. Although these are account-bound (which is good) I still feel they’re too grindy. I find myself looking at my XP bar a lot. I never did in the base game.

3) When people are not around hero points (often because they’re mastery gated or very hard to get to) stop with the unsoloable champions with time limits! Downscale them to veteran mobs so that soloers can have a chance. This will become even more obvious once fewer players are on the map and people are attempting to get hero points for their alts. Implementing point 1 would massively reduce this issue also!

ANet made a good move by getting rid of the story requirement to have Itzel 4 mastered.

Come on ANet – if you sort these three things out, the majority will be a lot happier.

Turethir.7281:

I was ganged up on in my guild for expressing negative opinions in GC yesterday, which is a shame, as I was always very positive about this game. Luckily there seem to be lots of kindred spirits here so I’ll freely express my opinions.

In my mind (and as many have said) fixing the three things below will make a massive difference.

1) Drastically reduce the number of hero points needed to unlock elites. While I am not especially bothered about my elite spec I know how much others were looking forward to them. It was only in a post literally a day or two before the expansion that it was explicitly stated that these would be ‘unlocked’ – not helped by the beta weekends making them instantly available. This gave a lot of people the wrong impression and I can understand their frustrations. I would reduce this to around 60 points or so.

2) Half the XP needed for each mastery. Although these are account-bound (which is good) I still feel they’re too grindy. I find myself looking at my XP bar a lot. I never did in the base game.

3) When people are not around hero points (often because they’re mastery gated or very hard to get to) stop with the unsoloable champions with time limits! Downscale them to veteran mobs so that soloers can have a chance. This will become even more obvious once fewer players are on the map and people are attempting to get hero points for their alts. Implementing point 1 would massively reduce this issue also!

ANet made a good move by getting rid of the story requirement to have Itzel 4 mastered.

Come on ANet – if you sort these three things out, the majority will be a lot happier.

This is excellent feedback. I wanted to quote it to increase its chance of being noticed.

I would add that I feel unlocking masteries with both points and XP seems redundant (possibly even confusing). A more radical suggestion: what about removing the XP requirement from masteries entirely? I think it would eliminate the grindy feel, while still requiring players to work for the mastery points.

4/10 I could provide my reasons but I don’t have the mastery for that yet.

/facepalm x 10000 to Anet…
Whenever you think they could sink no lower, they always exceeds that expectation.

Also the lies that Teq could be crit (only the head can be and its difficult to land a hit on its head).

If you think about it, many of us spend a good $50 heck, even $60 on a new game. Take Fallout 4 for example. If they had announced Fallout 4 a day before it released, no one would need to know ANY details about the game because players know Bethesda and they know that they truly deliver on their games. Players trust Bethesda which in turn makes them LOTS of money.

Maybe the real issue here in our community, isn’t that the price is “too high” or that vets aren’t getting enough freebies. Maybe it’s all a matter of a degraded trust between us, the playerbase and ANet over the last couple years.

Truly this isn’t the first time the community has been toxic, look back at the gem to gold conversion back last summer. The rage was very toxic then and it all came down to us being angry over communication issues. Shortly after that degradation of trust we had the game developers conference where a couple of devs said that there weren’t any current plans for SAB at this time. The community once again absolutely boiled over in toxic hate and rage, due solely, in my opinion, to a further eroding trust between silent devs and a playerbase that was tired of being kept in the dark.

Now fast forward to now. We have been conditioned to fall into a hype cycle where things are overhyped and underdelivered. Can anyone really blame the state of the community? Is anyone really surprised? If you look at the history between ANet and us, the players, the trust has been eroding for quite some time. I think this may finally have been the straw that broke the camels back….

I hate to see our community the way it is, but ANet’s silence doesn’t help anything either. The longer they prolong a response to very valid anger and rage, the harder it will be to build that trust again with the devs.

So I believe that this isn’t a price issue, it’s an issue of trust between the community and ANet. I really hope that trust can be restored, cause that is what will keep this game successful and profitable.

DeceiverX.8361:

I think the big issue at hand is that simply put, the content in HoT to our knowledge thus far isn’t worth the $50.00.

THIS.

Really, nothing else needs to be said.

From what we have been told in the past six months, we content of Heart of Thorns is so minimal that our guesses at its size is not worth $50. If ArenaNet wants to calm folks down, the best way to do such is to give us a ballpark figure of how much content we are paying for.

We paid $60 pre-purchase for 80 levels, 5 races, 8 professions, 15+ storylines, 2+ dungeons, 5 regions which included 11+ maps and ‘all open betas’. That is the core game that we knew when the pre-purchase showed up.

We are paying $50 for 0 levels, 0 races, 1 profession, 9 sets of new skills (guessed 54-69 skills) 1 storyline, 0 dungeon, 1 region which includes 1 maps, and ‘all open betas’. That is HoT pre-purchase and what we know.

Price is basically the same, content is not.

Well, I expressed severe dissatisfaction with GW2 when it came out, disappointment with the direction I saw the game heading. I was attacked by all brands of defensive fanboy-ism (humorously, mostly from people whose GW introduction was GW2. Myself, I’ve been around since the first few days of GW1).

Seeing all the various disrespect the company seems to have for its fanbase, the cashing in…nickle and dime-ing (and quartering and dollaring), etc etc.
Well, sucks to see an IP I loved go down the tubes as a mediocre, microtransaction piggy bank for the company.

I feel vindicated at least.

(….guild halls finally. Hmm, wonder how many hundreds of gems they will cost.)

BrickFurious.7169:

Is there something wrong with making best-in-slot gear reasonably obtainable?

The one thing wrong with it is that there is a portion of players who want to treat a video game like a full time job or hobby. There’s no way to generate enough content for them, so you have to keep them playing with dangling carrots, unless you’re content to do without that portion of the MMORPG population.

I understand it isn’t a huge difference between exotic and ascended, but BiS is BiS. There’s a rather large psychological satisfaction in knowing your character is geared to the max, and conversely there’s a psychological dissatisfaction in knowing when it isn’t. This change is only going to increase that dissatisfaction among players to whom ascended gear feels unfairly difficult to obtain (especially WvW players).

Thank you for articulating this. It’s what the “you don’t need it to do anything but high level fractals” crowd just doesn’t get.

These games feature a character progression scheme. Putting a sudden spike in the progression curve one step from the end and telling them to just be satisfied with second best is jarring, at best. The thing that keeps people grumbling a little but continuing to play the game was the small stat increase that gear gave. A move toward increasing the gap just alienates more players and makes it harder for them to ignore.

Pockets.3201:

I’d love a key for the beta, but I just can’t bring myself to spend hours on end in some rather boring zones farming for something with a really low drop rate…
Especially since I’m not getting much else for the time I waste there.

Exactly my take on it too. Both DryTop and SilverWastes are just plain grindy, and most people I know of tend to hate it there.
Now ArenaNet is trying to coerce people back there to grind some more by throwing in beta keys, rather than actually trying to make those areas inherently fun instead.

Test.8734:

That’s ArenaNet these days, I guess. It really shows us what kind of players they’re making HoT for.

I’ve actually been a bit worried about HoT because of this. Both DryTop and SilverWastes seem way more grind-focused than pretty much any other maps in the game, and most people I’ve heard talk to about them in the game have said they hate the grinding aspect that’s involved in them.
Now they’re throwing in beta key access to try to get people back into them to grind some more, rather than trying to make those maps more inherently fun instead.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Hamfast.8719:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Seeing my female char idly kicking the ground at a tense moment or stretching sensuously while consulting with important people felt very wrong.

There it is. I was waiting for someone to say it was “sensuous” or “sexy”. I don’t see it. I sincerely hope that isn’t part of the reason for its removal. But then, I’m not worried about the Norn fist-smacking or Asura knuckle-cracking either. My “immersion” isn’t spoiled so easily.

The animations are there to convey emotion. The Norn fist smacking can express readiness to fight. The Asura knuckle cracking can show readiness to start a job. Tell me, what does a woman idly kicking the ground or stretching show readiness to do?

It simply was inappropriate for the female chars to stretch like that or to idly kick the ground. You might not seen the stretch as sensuous, but it was routinely described in those terms. Having those animations did not fit the emotions the personal story was trying to convey.

This response sounds as if it was lifted directly from ‘Political Correctness – The Way Forward’.

If you believe ‘diversity’ is a list of 3 builds that exist above a magic line you can move up and down at will to fit your current argument, then HoT is increasing diversity because you can pretend you’re not going to move that line to again exclude everything but what you feel is the post-HoT top three and say “oh, after HoT hits I’ll set my magic line so now there are 5 builds above it — woo hoo diversity”.

If you’re one of those people who understand the word ‘diversity’ has an actual meaning that encompasses all possible permutations that don’t crash the second you leave a city-safe zone then you know that the design space of the game if about to experience an apocalypse that will annihilate 99% of the game’s diversity. And since the reality has ALWAYS BEEN that new top builds emerge over time as people explore those deep and vast wilds of possibility, the future meta-builds of the game are being murdered in their sleep in favor of the blatantly obvious builds left in the wake of this change.

Test.8734:

Hamfast.8719:

Bring back the animations! ’Nuff said.

I think the true reason was that some people saw the animations as “sensuous” (because of course a woman cannot stretch her arms without having the goal to show off her breasts, no, we need all women to keep her arms below the waist at all times), and so ArenaNet removed them in order to cater to the overly conservative and misogynist players.

It’s a shame, but isn’t the first time ArenaNet makes the game worse in order to cater to the lowest denominator.

Guild Wars 2 was given a T for “Teen” rating from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB). This means “content is generally suitable for ages 13 and up. May contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling and/or infrequent use of strong language.”

Sensuality of this nature is well within their game age rating. Nothing wrong with it being included here.

Of course they may be trying to expand their player base by getting the rating lowered. The “dumbing down” of the game will soon make it suitable for an EC rating (Early Childhood).

Brother Dulfite.5793:

They have been working on this expansion for years. do you honestly think it took hundreds of anet employees to make the living world season 1 and 2 content over the last 2.5 years? They probably had like 20 developers working on that stuff while the rest focused on the expansion. Living story is just, and will continue to be, stuff we get to fill the gaps between expansions, which I love considering other mmos only release expansions then nothing new for 6-12 months.

If they have been working on this for years, it’s bloody amazing they haven’t got a betah yet, and some of the specializations and the revenant details are not final yet. Realistically speaking they haven’t been working on this for years. Cause they wanted the living story to be their thing. And it just didn’t work out for them. China didn’t go as stellar as they hoped either. That’s why we’re getting this living story + feature patch “expansion” now. I mean truly, if all we get is 3 to 4 new zones, a new class and masteries after 2.5 years of development, we’re pretty much doomed. 2,5 years and they couldn’t add a dungeon? Some new fractals? A new race? Fix underwater combat? or add the ability to have skills/traits templates? Hell not even the ability for rangers to perma name their pets! I think it’s time we faced the reality of our situation. This is a filler expansion while they’ll start working on a proper one later on. We’ll get stelar quality living story content for the price of an expansion and a possibly cool (i most certainly hope so) feature patch. And that’s ok.

MiniEquine.6014:

How can you even claim this when everything they’ve said literally says they’ll be getting new mechanics? They are not a completely new class, but they are not going to be 2-5 new weapon abilities. We’re talking serious changes that would require you to switch between the specialization and the normal class in order to use either of them. We’ve already heard references to a Druid Ranger, we’ve seen the Hammer Engineer with floating drones (things normal engineers have neither of, including anything remotely related to melee skills since they have none), and we’ve seen the Shield Mesmer using their shield to do some butterfly thing, who knows exactly what that is.

Maybe some of the specs are less different from the original class than others, but they are a lot more different than you’re letting on, and there’s nothing backing up your statements, at least not from Anet.

I claim that cause the ranger’s mechanic is their pet. And the druid will still have pets. That’s evidence that suggests that the core mechanics will not change dramatically (we might not even get a new trait line like it was originally hypothesized, just new shiny traits to go with the specialisation) but will be modified instead. Take that engineer for example and his floating drones. Even that can be handled like a modified base mechanic. All they have to do is have traits that affect turrets affect them too. See what i mean? New class mechanics are hard to do. It’s like designing a new class altogether. it’s unrealistic to believe that such a thing will happen. That’s why we’re getting specilisations in the first place.

That last bit is not really an argument, we’re expressing our opinions, our take on things. Same goes for you. You got nothing also (well ok you got promises but the value of words in the mmo industry is quite low, and for a good reason). They haven’t shown anything yet. But from what they have shown, you can easily infer what i said. In a few weeks we’ll know for sure. But, don’t hold your breath. I honestly and sincerely hope that i’m wrong and that we do get almost like a new and shiny class for each and every class we already have. I’d love that. But i feel that that’s unrealistic and we already got the first indications that that is not going to happen.

Vayne.8563:

Test.8734:

Vayne.8563:

I hate to agree with Test, but he has a point.

C’mon Vayne, you know you love me! <3 <3 <3

We don’t see eye to eye on pretty much anything, but yes, I quite like you. Don’t let anyone else know though. It’ll ruin my whole image.

Sorry, I had to do this.

Point two, really. The idea of the storyline is nice and all (and it’s not too badly written, I think) but it has zero effects once the story tier in question is completed. It doesn’t matter that my Charr is Iron legion if she meets other Iron Legion Charr after tier 1 of the personal story, they will still slowly explain to her what the Iron Legion is, as if she never heard of it.

The main issue that I had with the personal story (bearing in mind that I haven’t completed it yet – I’m more of a casual GW2 player, I guess. Played since release, but never for longer than a few months at once, then I took long breaks) is that it a) follows a pretty foreseeable pattern. You get uh… 3? quests, then one quest where you decide something, often with really weird decisions where it simply doesn’t make much sense to decide between the two instead of, well, doing both simultaneously. They cite “lack of resources” as the reason there, but that’s only a thinly veiled excuse, the only resource the other party in those decisions is lacking is me, the player character. So when I have the option to either help the durmand priory with research or debrief an order of whispers spy, I really don’t think that this is a decision that needs to be made. Do both. Send people to debrief the spy while doing the research, or vice versa. It’s really not that compelling a decision.

Secondly (which would be b) I guess) the decisions have barely any effect, save for short “shock” value. Once the tier is done the decisions are forgotten and never brought up again… which is a common problem in story driven MMOs. SWTOR hat the same, most decisions there were purely cosmetical, with the quests still progressing in the same manner.

Ultimately I believe that taking the personal story out and making it a story that is experienced by everyone can be very much a good thing, mainly because it allows the writers to focus on one singular thread of story and hopefully flesh that out a bit more than they did with the personal story. Choices would be nice, but since they already had little effect save from “do mission a or b, but you will win nontheless” I don’t think there will be much of a difference here.

The main reason we don’t have a release date is because ANet themselves don’t know yet. It depends on how the beta goes.

It may turn out that some of the systems they put in place will be rather poorly received by the players, meaning they have to go back and try again before release.