Guild Wars 2

I think for the sake of semantics, let’s call campaigns from GW1 expansions, because that is ultimately what they boil down to, the standaloneness of them was rarely exercised by anybody in the player base.

Let’s also make a distinction between temporary and seasonal. People make the idiotic bluster of “We should keep the halloween and wintersday stuff around year round so the lazy kittens can do that too” which isn’t the point. Seasonal stuff comes back every year. If I don’t complete all of the achievements this year, then it’s ok, they’ll be around again (and this better be the case). So on to the discussion of Living Story:

1) It is an IV drip of content. People often manage to complete all of “goals” as they come out in the same day. Sure, making things like a difficult dungeon slow it down, but it’s not exactly a lot of stuff, and making people grind enemy slaying titles for longer doesn’t exactly constitute content or fun for that matter.

2) Fun on someone else’s schedule is not fun, it’s work. I shouldn’t have to plan my life around a game. They got better about this since the first couple months where there was some 1 time event. And it’s not even that an occasional special thing is so bad, but this is continual. If I am not playing on a daily basis, I am missing out on stuff that never comes back. I work a job, have a wife, and would like to play other games and more importantly do other things. A steady stream of permanent content would add up. I could do it at my own pace, and get to enjoy all that content when I would actually enjoy it.

3) Temporary content is throw away content. There is a psychology to people making things, especially when it isn’t intended to be permanent. No matter how much people may pride themselves on their work, if it is temporary, they will be more willing to cut corners and lower standards to make the constant deadlines. Even if it isn’t visible yet, it will start to happen more and more as time goes by. Making things permanent means people will continue to take it seriously. If every player from now to the future does it only once, that’s still a more worthwhile return on investment for the developers than what they get now.

4) At some point, a vast majority of the stuff in the game will be gone and inaccessible. Look at your achievement pane and tell me how many of those are tied to things that cannot be completed anymore. Not most of them, but a new set of achievements is added to that screen every month, so how long until there are more temp achievements than permanent ones?

5) Screw people and their fragile egos that need to bar other people from having something to feel good about themselves. Seriously, why does their own sense of accomplishment rely so heavily on other people’s failure? People should be rewarded for skill, cleverness, and/or persistence, not merely having bought the game earlier than other people. If Anet is using this to justify creating temporary content, they should be ashamed. I didn’t realize when I bought the game I was buying a freaking commitment.

…Continued from above

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/listings.json?id=27321
  This will pull in the buy and sell listings for the first 20 prices as seen when you click on a specific item in the trading post. It returns the price, number of listings at that price, and the total of numbers ordered at that price. If you specify type=buys or type=sells it will return that type, but by default returns both. The data is not all listings for an item, and since only one item can be returned at a time is a much slower way of getting data out than search.json so if you have no reason to look at specific listings, just stick to search.json

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/trends.json
  This odd little output shows all the trending information you see on the main page. It has all the standard item information for the items, and a list if IDs for each category. There are no parameters for it, and may not even be up to date at a given time. I would not rely on it for much, but am including it here for the sake of completeness.

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/me.json
  This output actually requires a session-id that originates in game to be able to access. I won’t get into how to retrieve that particular session-id. This is what you see when you view your transactions, and requires a combination of parameters to return a valid result. The type=buy or type=sell will return either your buy or sell transactions respectively. The time=now or time=past shows either your current listings or your historical transactions.

gemstore outputs:

• https://gemstore-live.ncplatform.net/ws/search.json
  This outputs all of the information about a given gemstore item and requires either the discounted=1 parameter, the category= parameter, or the text= to return a valid list. Using a combination will limit it further. The category= uses actual words for the categories, and the following are valid: decorative, consumable, convenience, boosts, minipets, account. The text= parameter must have a valid text search after it to return results. Optional parameters are offset and count, which behave the same as the tradingpost search.json.

• https://gemstore-live.ncplatform.net/ws/history.json
  This outputs items previously bought on the gemstore, and requires a session-id that originates from the game. It is the same information as the search returns, except historical based on your account. The only known parameter is count=

exchange outputs:

• https://exchange-live.ncplatform.net/ws/trends.json
  This outputs the raw data powering the little graph seen on the bottom of the exchange. With no type specified, it by default outputs the equivalent of a type=ReceivingCoins parameter, with the gem counterpart being type=ReceivingGems.

• https://exchange-live.ncplatform.net/ws/rates.json
  This is another one that requires a session-id from the game. It is what provides the conversion rates between coins and gems. It requires a coins= and/or gems= number parameter added on to return values of that type. I have not managed to get this to successfully work myself, so I think this also requires some sort of character id to be passed. I do know that it is how Gw2spidy and some others pull in data.

That’s pretty much everything I know about these APIs. If there is anything I missed that needs to be clarified or if you have anything to share, let me know and I will add it.

A friend of mine wrote something way back about this. He was pretty disappointed by the fact that Charr get all these cool fur patterns and the like but nobody could actually see them because of the way armor was designed. Seems strange that a fur covered race would be more keen on being fully covered than the furless races.

Kaaboose, you once again prove yourself a man after my own heart. Their “every professions can take any role” idea looks like it comes pretty directly from the profession design coming from Factions and Nightfall’s specific professions, as well as the playstyle direction that the players themselves were driving the game towards. Rits were central to almost any build because they could buff, heal, protect, damage, etc. about as equally with different builds. There was rarely a build that put characters full tilt into a single role by the end because it was more effective to distribute your ability to heal, damage, or whatever amongst multiple characters. So creating a system where any profession can fill any role is the logical conclusion. Of course, if that means sacrificing the highly engaging customization of the first one, it doesn’t seem worth it.

But I don’t think we have a customization system that is actually worse in GW2. The wide variety of runes and sigils and their myriad effects are a far more interesting system. Traits have a great deal of interesting interactions. If more weapon and utility skills came with time, there would probably be plenty of interesting possibilities to explore. So why does everybody regardless of profession end up just tossing on a set of zerker’s set and trying to deal as much damage as possible?

1) Pure Math: It was pretty obvious to me during the betas that boosting power would be the most efficient way of getting the most from any character, just because it was weapon*power. Of course, I didn’t realize how much of a difference precision made, and the amount of damage people can do is staggering. With ALL SKILLS’ damage attached to the same numbers, what is the downside? Less Healing Power for a heal that you can only use once every 30 seconds at best? Vitality and Toughness aren’t much better, bosses do so much damage per hit you would be just delaying the inevitable if you get hit regularly. Condition damage might be worthwhile, but it’s hard to compare to thousands of damage every hit.

2) Action mechanics: I generally like the boss designs because they have a similar feel to the sort of big bosses you would get in a Zelda, God of War, or even Mario game. The idea of being able to dodge their attacks and land some sort of fatal blow on them is cool. But it also means that most of their attacks are easily dodgable. And when you’re not dodging, you can generally run and gun your way to victory. If you’re one of those people who almost never takes damage in a Zelda game, you wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing all your unnecessary heart containers for the opportunity to one shot every boss.

3) Discouraged Experimentation: One of the things that made GW1 great was the ease with which things could be tried out. Grab your heroes, tweak some settings, try it out. If you failed, only your pride was hurt. If you succeeded, you felt great. If I want to try something out in GW2, I have to acquire an entire equipment set (instead of changes some runes if anything), find a place to store my current gear, pay money to change my traits, buy runes and sigils, hope for a party willing to put up with my experimentation, and then pay for any armor repairs should it fail. sPvP is just a little too different to make that a decent replacement. Not much point in taking any of that risk when the zerker’s has been proven to be more than adequate to power through everything.

All that aside, I find the control skill situation pretty abysmal. I expect KDs to be rare and/or expensive, not something you can just do every 3 seconds. If they weren’t so common, there wouldn’t be so much of a need for defiant. And then later area enemies have a continual stream of KDs so that you will spend half your time knocked down if you don’t have stability, which for some reason IS actually hard to come by for any length of time. So as it stands, I can’t get much use of it, but am constantly subjected to it. At least in SAB we were given some blink time where we were immune to further knockdowns.

People really think this is about nerfing farming? This is being done because of the great amount of conflict and divisiveness it was causing in the player base. If anything, this is letting people have their cake and eat it too. All the people who didn’t rely on MF will now get to have some, and people who relied solely on it won’t have to, and both groups won’t have to fight about whether or not it’s fair that someone is using MF gear.

For the record, I HATE MMOs. If games are a hearty stew, MMOs are a watery gruel, only a faint hint of flavor amongst an otherwise plentiful yet unsatisfying experience. That being said, I LOVED Guild Wars 1 tremendously, especially after the advent of heroes. Making builds and tackling HM with them was great. It was nice to know that with a full party of heroes, there was no ambiguity that it was possible, and I just wasn’t doing it right. The fault lied entirely with me, and I was the one to fix it. I would get tired of GW1 for months at a time (as I think people should be allowed to do with a game) but I still felt it was always one of my favorite games ever. Nobody randomly attacking me, nobody stealing my stuff, and I always had the opportunity to do things with other people if I wanted. People can argue about it being a CoRPG instead of an MMO, but it’s rather irrelevant. The first reference to the term I saw was an interview after they had announced they were working on GW2, basically admitting that they failed to make an MMO. But hey, if we want to make genre distinctions, here’s this:

The game we’re playing here is Guild Wars 2, not Guild Wars Online or some other thing to signify a departure from the things that people identify with Guild Wars 1. So if GW1 is a CoRPG, then it would make sense that given its direct sequel status, its genre would remain intact. But this isn’t really important. It may be good by MMO standards, but I would not say it’s a worthy sequel by any means. It’s not just some misplaced nostalgia for the first game either. It was that nostalgia that drove initial sales, but the game is lacking the stuff that kept people coming back to GW1 year after year.

The thing is that the people who are here complaining about playing the game are actually still playing it, despite their complaints. Most people when they don’t like something don’t complain, they just stop. Believe it or not, people don’t generally like to put themselves out there. They’re either more prone to speak up, or feel really strongly about it. My long time GW1 guild has mostly stopped playing GW2 at this point, and you probably haven’t heard from a single one of them on the forum. A few people complaining is many more people leaving. And no amount of living story temporary content is going to make them come back once they’ve decided they’re done.

The complainers need to be listened to. Already I see LA regularly abuzz about the next MMO to be released. A large portion of the player base will just migrate to something else because that’s what they do when an MMO comes out, and quality has nothing to do with it. The complainers are the people who really want to like the game, and are willing to stick with it despite the fact they aren’t enjoying it as much as something else they can still play (you don’t need to remind them of that, they are fully aware already).

If games are supposed to make people feel important within the game world, this one does a poor job of it. I succeed in an event, it will be back in an hour tops. Countless events aren’t even possible by myself. The outcomes of the living story will happen whether or not I had anything to do with them. If the goal was to make a game where people feel like a replaceable cog in society and make all of their accomplishments feel meaningless, then they managed to do so. At least once I completed a quest in GW1, those enemies would disappear. Combine that with the stranglehold the current system puts on the “monetary” rewards, then the whole game turns into a cycle of doing chores for someone’s loose change (Achievement Rewards are a huge step towards alleviating this particular problem though). I could get more into actual mechanical and systemic issues, but if you want to understand why the game doesn’t “feel” very satisfying, that’s a big part of it.

If I would sum up Geotherma’s Posts, in two words it would be MANAGE EXPECTATIONS. Marketing is playing with fire: You absolutely need it, but you can’t let it go out of control. Hype something up too much and it is bound to disappoint, even if what you’re offering is genuinely good. Promise us a fun time, not a dramatic world altering event. If it weren’t for the occasional sonic periscope, I would not have realized the flame and frost stuff even occured.

Having devs and other non-PR folk talk to us helps humanize the entire company. People are a little more sympathetic when they can have a casual conversation about something and not just feel like they’re being fed a carefully constructed line from a faceless corporation. That’s something that has been done well. Getting a dev to give their honest assessment of when something is or isn’t a reasonable request will quell a great deal of stuff. Getting a generic “your suggestion has been noted” is basically the same as being ignored.

I probably seem to complain quite often on the forum. But as someone who has to develop stuff for a living that sometimes I do not agree with from a design perspective, I have the utmost sympathy and appreciation for what the devs do. They do a great job with the limited time they have to implement new features and content and fix bugs. So give them the credit they deserve and make sure the patch notes are thorough. Sloppy patch notes give the impression that the work being done is sloppy, which is unfair to the people doing the work.

There is nothing but rumors going around about what current monetization choices for the game are Anet’s doing or were edicts handed down by NCSoft. Not that it would make much of a difference to the conspiracy theorists, but I think people would genuinely like to know who is ultimately holding the reigns.

The CMY color model doesn’t get enough love. I say we make the 3 teams Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta. It would be consistent, and probably easier for everyone to differentiate

Yeah, I’ve considered the recolor weapons thing too, but the way I see it, that’s just kinda lazy on their part anyways. One of the reason I like the zenith weapons is because they go well with my Illumination dyed draconian armor, and my one issue with the radiant armor is that it doesn’t. So yeah, more dye channels all around!

Isn’t this basically what the titles you get for every 5K AP are supposed to be?

I like this, maybe I’d actually have a mini out if I had this.

I totally get that not wanting to play after doing dailies feeling, and I didn’t get that in GW1 either.

I think if you thought of a spectrum of MMOs as a line between GW1 and WoW, GW2 would fall much closer to WoW. And I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game by any means. The game critic Jim Sterling said about Resident Evil 6 that the issue with the game was that it was trying to be things that were not its strong suit (being a survival horror game). I feel GW2 is much the same way, adopting the more standardized conventions of its peers instead of holding onto the conventions that made people like me keep playing it for every expansion and for the many years during which the developers slowly turned their backs on it.

I feel that it is unfair to compare a game still in its first year to a game that has had years to build upon it, but at the same time I do remember what it was like when I started playing it the christmas after it came out, before anything had been added onto it. It was already a far more engrossing experience. Being able to adjust my attributes and skills freely, not having it cost me if I die, and being able to grab henchmen whenever I wanted made it a convenient challenge. While I can understand people’s complaints about the later Heroes, the emphasis always remained creating a build that was capable of overcoming the challenges presented to you. I spent hours researching skills, existing builds, mechanics, and enemy behavior trying to find or create better builds that could get me through the next challenge. And when I reached a point with my builds that I was able to breeze through a section of content, I felt triumphant in my discovery. Until I challenged something new.

So what then is GW2? Is it a matter of creating builds to overcome all of the challenges presented to you? I don’t think anyone could say it was even that focused. There is a semblance of the core systems of GW1 in there, but not the fulness of it. All of the attempts to be more of an action game are to the detriment of this core of skills and builds. Placement was important, but now holding still is folly. The greatest challenges presented in the game are Jumping Puzzles, which are just the game trying to be something that it isn’t.

What is a sequel if it doesn’t actually build upon its predecessors? Is it really unfair to compare something that was wholly conceived afterwards to its namesake?

Yes, I prefer GW1. Absolutely. If they decided to continue giving it full support while working on GW2 I would have happily kept buying campaigns and expansions. I would not feel the same disappointment that I do now, because I would still have my continuing cherished experience, and I would have GW2, which would be a nice addition. But that did not happen, and I have already sucked the marrow from GW1 as thoroughly as I was willing while waiting for a promise that did not deliver.

I totally agree with this. I think Valve was the first to do this idea with TF2, and I think it is a wholly despicable practice for any game. It wouldn’t be a big deal if it were just a random grab bag type of arrangement in the gem store, but the fact that the chests drop so commonly, it really feels like they’re pushing it on to us. I can’t play for more than an hour without having one of these end up in my inventory. And then they make sure to give out the keys just often enough that you are aware of what you can get from it.

Charging money for cosmetic stuff? If you want to dress up your character, that’s great! packs of random dyes and minis and the like? sure, that’s fine as long as the chances are fair to fill out your collection of whatever. But don’t go setting up your game like a hotel casino.

I agree, DarkSpirit, we should focus on the grand hopes and dreams for what we personally would like to be able to build, and let the devs decide whether or not that is a reasonable request. No hurt in suggesting, right?

That being said: I would like to be able to retrieve the entire list of current listings out there. All in one go would be nice (don’t worry, I can handle the throughput), but just for specific items would be fine (the ids= type of parameter would be nice if this is the case). Last actual transaction for items with price and time would be great too. Being able to pull in gemstore items would be great. Exchange rate for gems to coins and back is a must have. Getting current prices out from behind the authentication barrier would also be great.

Thanks, that’s a pretty handy reference. If we could enter those all as a list into an events.json parameter, that would be super handy.

Creating a data structure that can store a list of colors and give them a name is easy. The time consuming part is adding it to the UI. One of the devs mentioned elsewhere that anything with words has about a 4 week turnaround time just for the localization.

But yes, this would be a great feature to add. If I ever get to the point where I feel like storing multiple sets of armor, I would love to be able to quickly track the dyes I used for each. What would be really cool on top of that would be something similar to the ability to ping builds in GW1 where I could just ping them my current dye scheme if they ask me what it is.

always remember that if one of your players is angry with you, it is because he really cares about the game, and that’s much healthier for you than apathy

That’s a line from Jeff Strain (one of the founders of Arenanet) in a speech he gave soon after GW2 was announced. Keep that in mind before you say anything about people complaining on forums.

I can firmly say that I quit last summer, as I last logged into the game to make sure that my account wasn’t stolen. I still check into the game’s updates and read the forums from time to time, because you could say I invested quite heavily into the game, what with the waiting and anticipating for half a decade (big GW1 fan). I really like the many changes that happened in the feature pack (even if stuff like megaservers left the API a pile of smoking rubble, but sacrifices have to be made sometimes), and the announcement of season 2 living story being more of a permanent nature is almost enough to make me come back. But as much as my stopping was in protest of those sorts of practices (activity level speak louder than forum posts), I remember what I spent most of my time in game doing each day: A checklist of repetitive chores that leave me not wanting to play at all once they were done.

It’s normal to get tired of a game after a while, and I got tired of GW1 regularly. But the thing is that I left the game still liking it, just wanting to do something else. So I kept coming back to it. I think about GW2 and I don’t want to get mired in it again. Part of that has to do with the timegating making it feel like I am being punished for not putting time in every day. Punished for being busy, essentially. I am not going to play something that does that. If that changes, maybe I will come back for a bit.

I am all for skill based achievements and rewards IF I don’t have a hard time limit before it is lost forever. Then it’s basically a project at work, except without the luxury of having dedicated work hours to do it or actual monetary compensation for my time. That is why so many people complain about the difficulty: Time constraints making it more stressful than necessary.

When my charr wears the light heritage armor, there’s actually a spot where the pants clip through the back of the jacket. And that’s the same set…

The horns disappearing makes even less sense than the Asura ears

Pretty sure they didn’t do it before because nobody used it in GW1 despite having the option. Of course, that’s mostly because weapon dying in GW1 was pretty lousy. I think they could do it way better and it would go a long way to improving the ability to customize characters.

fact: nobody cares about the karma, gold, or experience they get from dailies. They don’t even factor into this argument because there are alternative ways to get them, some of which are potentially more efficient. The only thing that matters are the laurels and their exclusive stat boosting rewards.

If there were alternative ways to get laurels or the prizes bought by them, people would not be sweating the dailies so much and creating 8 page threads.

I can appreciate the OP’s feelings on the matter, it makes me sad to see the game degenerate into a mindless loop around a single zone. More time gating is not the answer though. It would just add another item to the list of chores that you need to do every day in the game to make progress towards any long term goals, and chores should not be in games. If they need to regulate the value of the exclusive exotics, they can just lower the odds of them coming out of the boxes. Right now champ boxes are probably the only thing in the game that gives a constant (and decent) reward vs time. And that is something that this game really needs, no matter how you may feel about farming.

It’s true that good information and communication can be huge deciding factors in the outcome of a battle, but I think the release of the information will have fairly minor effects. The main reasons being that the primary people who are interested in this information can already receive most of that in the map, and people who are not in the map are not in much of a position to act on it in a timely manner anyways. Having more information available outside of the game or WvW proper will likely not cause people who are not interested in WvW to suddenly jump in and start playing. All the servers are still faced with the same population caps and the same information available. Even if people have the information, it still takes skill to draw good conclusions, devise a strategy, and somehow get the people on the server to work together long enough to carry it out. If someone manages to do that, I’d say they’ve earned their victory.

That skritt burglar event description is used for different events that occur in several different maps in the game. That is perfectly reasonable output

perfect imbalance or cyclical imbalance as used in extra credits is a really terrible term for what they were talking about because it gives people the idea that it is somehow the opposite of balance when in reality it’s just a different type of balance. A better term would be Non-transitive Balance which comes from mathematical term Nontransitive game, which is something like Rock Paper Scissors. Which option in Rock Paper Scissors is actually more powerful? None, they are all perfectly balanced. But if you were to solely compare them in pairs, you would be under the impression that one was inferior to the other. This sort of comparative weakness allows for vast metagames to emerge, and many successful games that rely on strategy often have multiple layers of nontransitivity going on. So please, let’s not call it imbalance, it’s confusing and not really accurate.

That being said, nontransitive balance works best in a competitive setting. The reason for this is because players can naturally adapt their strategy to counter what is commonly being used by other players. In a cooperative (or solo) game, if a single profession or whatever can’t be used to overcome all possible obstacles (since the obstacles generally aren’t going to change to counter you) it suddenly becomes useless and nobody wants it, or vice versa if it counters everything by itself. When the balance isn’t done right, you end up with a Hammer that can counter everything. This generally comes up by ignoring the way different stats interact outside of the direct RPS relationship (speed and attack damage being regular culprits).

This sort of balance is really hard to do, as the more complex the system involved, the more difficult to maintain. So if you are going for this sort of balance, you can choose to either keep the system as simple as possible so as to keep it maintainable, or you make it so complicated that it could take forever for someone to find a Hammer.

Removing secondary professions and making the party size top out at 5 makes the system simpler and easier to maintain, but due to being able to boost the different parts of the damage formula with equipment, it causes tremendous imbalances, especially combined with the fact that damage is the only way the game can count your participation. So there are some systemic issues that would need to be solved before this sort of balance could be completely achieved. Even if this sort of balance was really created, it would probably have to be noticeably different between the gameplay modes.