Guild Wars 2

Respect has to go both ways. Just saying.

I have been playing online for many years, more years probably then many here have been alive and it has always been the same with regards to end game content/dungeons. A certain portion of the population will run these dungeons over and over again and post on how they did it in 15 minutes. The next group has to better that so they will finish in 10 minutes and then state on how “easy” that dugeon is to beat for players of their “skill level”.

So the game developer makes that dungeon more difficult but forgets about the majority of their population that does not run them over and over again. Yet it is not about skill level at all, it is all about knowledge. Take the JP in the Wv3 borderland for an example. The first time I did it it took me upwards of 2 hours. Now I can run both halves of the keys and get to the chest in under 10 minutes. Is that skill? Not in the least. I am no more skillful with the keyboard then I was a year ago, or 10 years ago. However I do have the knowledge of which path to take, where to jump from, where to jump to, etc.

So we have people who can speed run a dungeon in 10 minutes and claim it is all skill when skill does not factor in at all. It is just knowledge of where the mobs are, which ones you have to attack, which ones you can bypass and so forth. If that dungeon was randomized each and every time do you think any of these skillful people could run it in 10 minutes? I am willing to bet they would not for they would once again lack the knowledge required.

So the developers make the dungeons more difficult but those players that regularily run them will eventually learn the knowledge to be able to run them in 10 minutes again. They do not become more skillful, just more knowledgeable. That however leaves the casual players at a great disadvantage. They do not have the knowledge of which mobs to kill, which to skip, where to hide, where to jump and most do not have the luxury of time to gain that knowledge.

So where does it all end? With a small group of “elites” telling others that an mmo is not meant for them yet those same elites would cry foul if the dungeon was random each and every time forcing them to utilize skills versus knowledge.

The best class is the one you like playing.

Skill lag over the past couple of months has not improved but in fact has gotten worse. I lost count of how many times I have died in WvWvW due to clicking my heal skill and having nothing happen. The heal skill is the one that seems to be the most impacted and even in PvE it is noticeable. On my Guardian, level 80, I have experianced skill lag just farming mobs in PvE and even automatic healing is affected. After a battle the healing at times does not kick in for upwards of 5 seconds, without having any debuffs applied and I find myself having to stop to wait for my health to regenerate before going to the next group. Now I can see if I had a condition preventing me from healing but it looks like ALL conditions will prevent my heal from kicking in and not just those that have “prevent healing” in the tooltip and as stated even with no conditions the delay on the heal is noticeable.

Heal however is not the only skill impacted. I was defending a tower a couple days ago and using staff at the gate when my character froze up in cast. So I backed away from the gate and attempted to build a catapult, nothing happened. I backed up to the Lords Room and attempted to use a mortar and again nothing. Finally, while standing at the mortar my character started to move again…BUILDING the catapult while he was up at the mortar! My character movement was not impacted but any skills I tried to use or any actions other then moving was. Needless to say the gate went down and I was crushed by a wave of enemies.

With the upcoming patch doing away with “culling” I am hoping that lag on skills will also be addressed. I did not experiance this problem through last year and it is only the past month or so where it has become problematic. Because of this my WvWvW time has dropped dramatically and even my overall time spent in the game has dropped. I can live with dieing due to my personal lack of skill but I cannot accept it when it is a result of game mechanics not working.

And that is the point I am trying to make. They introduce the Ascended weapons yet force you to play PvE to get the materials required. If it is that easy to get the dragonite in PvE then it should be just as easy to gain that material in WvW. They could add it to rank up chests instead of the normal blue and green pieces of junk that you pull from them.

You have to go to PvE to make any reasonable amounts of gold.
You have to go to PvE to gain any reasonable amount of dragonite.
You have to go to PvE if you want to gain any of the LS rewards.

Yet we are currently fighting for season rewards in WvW where it is all hands on deck if you want the chance to win the season. I spend up to 12/14 hours some days in WvW, (retired) yet I would dearly love to build my Ascended GS for my Guardian. All other parts are complete except for the dragonite but I do not have the time to PvE until after the season is over.

Something to me seems amiss but that it just me I suppose.

Edit: And the sad part is a PvE’r can go into WvW long enough to get the Achievement (easily possible in 2 weeks) and never enter it again for the next 5 and still get the full season reward.

When the action on a BL is light there is no need for a tag. You see something that needs to be done and you do it. I stick to our home BL and represent our little guild of 2 people, the wife and myself. If there is a push on a keep or tower and they call for people I will go, tag or no tag. If there is a camp to flip I will flip it. If there is a tower to capture I will set up a cata myself and start hammering away, eventually people will come over or I map call for help when the wall is down.

Too many people are sheep and need the tag to be effective. I do not have a tag, neither does the wife but there are many times we will have half a dozen people following us because we do what needs to be done. If there is a ktrain running we normally avoid it and go capture camps or other objectives, set up siege, refresh when needed, repair as required. Do not put yourself in the position where you need to be told what to do, find things that need to be done and do it.

Prior to getting into the topic I will give just a bit of history of my gaming experience. I am 57 years old and began online gaming back in the days of script based games, public dialports and BBS’s. I have played many,many different MMORPGs since that point in time and will probably continue to do so but GW2 is starting to leave a sour taste that I just cannot shake.

So the purpose of this thread is to point out, as constructively as possible, ANET’s flaws and mishandling of bugs/exploits/hacking although with their policies I suspect it will garner me an infraction or possibly my first ever ban from a gaming forum.

In most if not all of the other games I have played there was a direct option to report someone for using an exploit or hacking from within the game. In GW2 you have to jump through hoops to make a report. This needs to be fixed and sooner rather then later. ANET wants us to provide screenshots/video of possible infractions yet they do not support us in the effort to do so and that lack of support is glaring.

If I witness a possible case of someone using a hack in-game it happens over the course of a few minutes before that person is gone. At that point in time I have to have video capture software at my fingertips and be able to turn it on quickly and record what is happening on my screen. Other games made it possible to contact a GM who would “ride on your shoulder” or be there invisible in order to observe for themselves and to make a decision if what you were seeing was a verifiable hack.

Other games published the fact that they suspended “X” amount of people for hacking even to the point of what type of hack was used but here it is all hush hush. If I reported what I believe to be someone using a hack I do not even get the courtesy of a reply to let me know if I was correct in my assumption or not. Any forum posts are immediately infracted and locked/deleted. I want to know if what I just witnessed was an actual hack or just a misconception on my part.

Then there are the game “bugs” that go un-fixed. 4 months ago, in this thread,
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/ANET-Fix-Your-Towers/page/2#post2612972
I posted on the NW tower bug that allows people to bypass closed gates/walls. At that time I caught on a screenshot an ANET employee who told us that it would be made a top priority issue but 4 months later nothing has been done as it happened again 4 days ago.

There is the ongoing argument over mesmers dying at gates and being rezzed through them. Not once has ANET appeared in any of those threads to tell us it is or is not an exploit. There have been discussions on how those dead people can extend their “time out for inactivity” timer yet to this date you can still manipulate that timer.

Arrow carts with their ability to hit anywhere in a tower if one manipulates his windowed screen size is another issue ANET chooses to ignore rather then address again one way or the other.

So my suggestions:
1) Make it easier to report hacking suspects so it is quick and efficient
2) Post on whether or not something is an exploit or is working as intended
3) Provide feedback to people reporting hacks verifying that it was or was not a hack
4) Post the number of people banned for cheating/hacking on a regular bases
5) Provide in-game GMs that go go into the field to verify reports immediately on receiving them.
6) Provide even a quarterly report on game bugs that have been reported and a tentative “fix” date. (such as that bugged tower)

And above all quit infracting/banning people for posting about hacks/cheats/exploits as this only leads us to believe you value the possible revenue loss versus the satisfaction of the customer when it comes to the integrity of your game.

Thank you for your consideration.

I used to hunt spiders in the Maguuma Jungle, just south of Gauntlet Waypoint. There are four spider nests in the area that you could stomp and one veteran spider and his entourage that you could take out in between. The timing was nice because you could make a round of the nests, kill the veteran and then go back to the nests. It was a pleasant place to kill an hour until DR kicked in and by the end of that hour I would usually have 2 rares and enough potent venom sacs to make 4 rare broadswords to flush down the Mystic Toilet. While the better half was making supper I used this area to spend some time in and still come away with the feeling that I accomplished something. Not any more.

Now as much as they state they do not mind farmers the above spot has been nerfed. Now when you stomp the nests they do not respawn and after waiting about 10 minutes or so I gave up in disgust. There was no mention of this change in any of the patch notes and my guess is the change would have happened in the last month.

I am finding that my “fun factor” with this game is rapidly disappearing. Sad but that is just the way I feel.

Insidious.3720:

1) You shouldn’t be farming to begin with.
2) Nothing was changed, your perception is just different.
3) Nobody cares.
4) If you aren’t having “fun” anymore, then quit.

1) Who says I should not be farming…you?
2) It was changed…hard to alter perception when something that used to spawn no longer spawns.
3) If nobody cares why did you bother posting?
4) I said I am rapidly losing that “fun factor”. I never stated that I have reached that point yet.

The root of the issue is in the poor design of towers and keeps and rather then fixing the flaws they add more gimmicks. Siege placed on a wall is easily taken out by a large zerg with no threat to them whatsoever. Cannons and oils can be taken out by standing against the wall where you are “obstructed” from above. If you are defending you are forced to stand on the lip of the wall in order to target the enemy but the enemy can aoe you anyplace on that wall. With the proper siege mastery any outer keep wall can be opened up before the swords pop which hurts smaller servers. Now add to all of that the issue with arrow carts and FOV manipulation or with the problems involved with placing ballistas on the walls where they can do some good and you can see the design flaws. It is interesting to note that the elite skill with ballista mastery is practically useless unless you are firing point blank, straight into an enemy zerg. Any elevation advantage and the arrow spread goes into the air.

So now they want to add a siege disabler. Think about the above design flaws and then on where a defender would have to stand to “throw” that disabler. Yep, on the edge of the lip or he will be obstructed but if he stands on the lip he will be yanked into the zerg below. Yet the attacker can easily stand below and toss the disabler up especially if it works in the same way as grenades do now.

Fix design flaws before adding gimmicks or it will just end up making things worse then they are now.

…and it would be nice to see all the information on the leagues placed here, on the WvW page, where it belongs, in a sticky. How it will be set up, the goals and achievements that are possible, what type or rewards we can look forward to, the rules on transfers pre and post season, all the stuff that pertains to this new format gathered in one logical spot. If there is any changes in how PPT are calculated, how a servers position during season one will flow into season two…….so many questions.

So how about it Devon?

The sheer amount of materials required to fashion an ascended weapon is ludicrous. I have read fantasy novels ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper and considering “Stormbringer”, “Excalibur”, “Sting and Glamdring”, “Werewindle”, and “Callandor” nowhere could I find a sword that requires over 800 ingots of metal to create. (not counting all the other materials). One can overlook the 1,500 ingots used to create a Legendary such as Twilight as those are used to create a “Gift of Metal” which then becomes part of the sword’s creation. With Ascended however they do not even bother to hide the grind behind the story of a “Gift”, just throw all this stuff into a forge and you will get a sword light enough for you to wield with special powers.

They could have done it differently and still dragged out the process as long as they wanted to. Clues in the world to special recipes, certain beasts to kill for special reagents, skills that need to be required by practice, and so on.

Sadly game developers have lost the ability to tell stories in their games and to make those stories believable. That lack of believable storytelling is what turns great games into a grind. They take the easy/lazy way out by increasing or inflating the costs for items in materials or gold rather then adding real content and sadly this process exists in all games. A game starts out with great promise; there are new stories to be told; new discoveries to be made that fit the story being told but eventually they reach the point where that story no longer makes any sense. It gets lost in the inflation of gold/materials/time or more commonly known as the grind to fill in the gaps.

Single player games have a finite timeline. They have a beginning and an ending to tell a story and thus can be made to be more believable. MMO’s are meant to be ongoing so the timeline they can encompass does not end. The lack of a good story is filled in by the grind and this is a good example of that. One day, hopefully, a developer will begin to understand that the greater and more believable the story you tell the greater your game will be.

This game does not need more developers, it needs more story tellers.

I stated earlier that respect has to go both ways. Let me illustrate.

When a person is in WvW which is as we are all aware of, quite well populated with “hacks” they naturally come to the boards to voice their frustrations. The post will be deleted by the moderators and the OP will get an infraction BUT their concerns are NEVER addressed by a developer! Instead we are told to submit a report but we are never told if it was truly a hack or not. Left in the dark like a mushroom as someone has stated.

Not to mention that there is no valid choice to report a game hack or possible exploit in WvW, the population has to jump through hoops and log it as something totally different. This problem and others have been reported time and time again, the threads are invariably closed and nothing is heard from the developers.

Now I understand fully about having a priority list. Twenty years as a senior planner with a major corporation taught me the value about having such a list. However, there is one thing that ANET is remiss in doing and that is they are NOT telling their customers exactly what the priorities are. We get soon, or a list of things going to be looked at before the end of the year BUT it is a list that does not address all those little irritants such as the aforementioned hacking or the lack of a proper reporting tool.

Take all those concerns that you STATE you read diligently, place them into a list, even if it is 3 pages long, and simply state what the priority is to action those items or even if they will be acted on or not. Do not simply have the moderators close a thread and impose infractions on the poster. That poster posted for a reason, try to understand that reason first and then tell that person you understand.

Or in simple words “respect breeds respect”. Respect given will be returned in a far greater quantity.

Sadly any changes that have been made to WvW and the upcoming golem mastery have done nothing for defending an objective and everything for taking one. If you make it easier to take down walls/doors/siege then it is now then what incentive is there to upgrade anything? It is just going to become a karma train as EotM is now.

We have been asking for design changes in tower and keep walls that will allow defenders to hit attackers without getting the “obstructed” message. We have been asking for wider walls that would allow siege placement out of the range of attacking AOE’s. Ballistas are still useless on the walls, cannons are too easily taken out and arrow carts still abuse the FOV and can hit anywhere inside a structure. Add to all of that the target cap with siege staying at 5.

You cannot make WvW fun by placing all the emphasis and upgrades on the attacking side unless they are trying to emulate EotM and not everyone finds EotM fun.

So which one of my 8 level 80’s that I use in WvW should I outfit first? If it takes 2 weeks to be able to create one ascended weapon and lets us say that my toons will need 4 each minimum, that adds up to 64 weeks of grind and still does not answer all of the possible weapon combinations.

Definitely an alt killer!

Please ANET, for the sake of the poor lonely male moose and in order to sustain the population from hunting pressure could you find it in your hearts to introduce a few female moose? I have had moose walk up to me, begging me to kill them and put them out of their misery as they wander Tyria in vain looking for a mate. They stand for hours staring in jealousy at the stags who have their does, at the minotars that can pass down their genes to their calves yet what do they have? Only other male moose. I could swear I heard one mournfully singing that song from ZZ Top, " just looking for some Tush" the other day. It was heartbreaking.

Pity the Tyrian moose. To help these poor creatures please send your generous donations to me on HoD.

Hint: Moose cows do not have antlers

My argument is with Laurels. They are time gated AND account bound meaning you can only gain a given amount of laurels over a given period of time YET anything you purchase with those Laurels becomes soulbound on use. For this reason GW2 is extremely alt-unfriendly.

I can get dragonite ore with each of my characters running the same event in the course of a day yet I cannot do that for Laurels.

The only issue I have with raids as per the WoW example is that it breeds elitism. Then you have what we currently have with the Warrior/Berserker requirements for dugeon “speed runs” but multiplied a hundred fold. Raiders “expect” you to have specific gear, be traited in specific ways, to do things in specific order and so on. When a game gets to that point and I have to play my character the way someone else wants and not the way I want in order to take part in the latest content then it no longer becomes fun.

The Devs wonder why people are getting fed up with the lack of progress in WvW. Waiting for the major changes would be so much easier if the little things that have plagued us for months were fixed but we go patch after patch, bug fix after bug fix with nothing being done and no acknowledgement from the powers that be that a problem even exists!

I will set the scenario for the attached screenshot. Just after the last patch/reset the enemy started a Breakout event on our southwest tower. I was at the tower at that time. At the same time their main force attacked our Bay keep leaving the Yak, Siegerazer and 2 enemy attackers at the tower.

No problem, I had 100 supply so I should be able to build counter siege and hold off two attackers until the cavalry arrived right? Not a chance! As you can tell by the screenshot I was next to the supply hut in that tower and yet had full arrow cart aoe rings on me. I could not get supply and I could not place any counter siege that would be effective for the front of that tower as they raked the full front of that tower with the arrow carts on the outside, all the way back to the supply hut. There was another ring behind me! Any siege placed in the tower further back would have no effect on the front of the gate.

This issue has been bugged, it has been reported as an exploit, it has been reported as a hack yet NOTHING is being done about it although it has been mentioned time and time again for months! If it is working as intended then please say so as I will gladly hook up another monitor so I can be on the same level playing field but I highly doubt if it is intended to work this way.

It is the lack of any action on issues such as this one that makes people angry when things are done for PvP and PvE and we get nothing but promises. Fixing these little things would at least show people that WvW matters and make the wait so much more bearable.

The majority of people who want to farm are looking for materials for crafting. Why not give them areas to farm? Take Orr for example, plunk an island down and stock it with mobs and let people farm away.

But then the bots will take over right? Well you could always do something like this. At random intervals of 15 minutes to 2 hours an on screen warning pops up stating that a plague is sweeping across the island. You have 5 minutes to get out of the area or get insta-killed with all your armor taking damage. The reason could be that so much death has happened on the isle that things are ramping out of control.

Make that death costly enough to discourage bots but as long as the warning is ON SCREEN with maybe the Island turning dark green to warn off anyone approaching it then bots will not be able to adjust and get out. They cannot read on screen announcements, the have to rely on parsing the chat for that sort of information. especially if the announcement also moves around the screen at random.

They can still keep their DR, the can still keep their rng, the bots are controlled and those that wish to farm and grind things out can do so.

Hey, it is just a random idea from my patented random idea generator!

Ok enough with the Aspects already as well as the ever present jump here to jump there to jump up to jump down. Not everyone is of the Mario generation and not everyone grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog. A Living Story where your skills are secondary to some skills picked up from finding crystals just does not appeal to me and in my opinion they are already well overdone.

Take for example the Dive Point in Dry Reach. To get to that point you have to be extremely quick with the keyboard/mouse combination and hope you can get tot the top before your Aspect runs out of charges. This is all fine and dandy for a Mario super achiever but for us aging folks with slower reflexes it is frustrating as all hell. What is wrong with having the character you decide to use in these Living stories use their own skills?

To put it bluntly I have given up on the Living Story for this episode. it is just not worth the aggravation to get the achievements.

Why when we get an in-game warning that a “new build will be available within the next hour or two” we invariably receive a message no more the 10 minutes later that “Your game will restart in…” !

Why not " A new build will be available in 10 minutes" then? After 15 years of working as a Senior Planner I would say your planning staff needs some education!

- New street clothes have been added for all races. These street clothes can be crafted by a level 500 Tailor. Crafting levels will be increased in a future update.

- Badges of Honor are being replaced by Tokens of Friendship, Love thine enemy. Those of you that have been hoarding badges will lose them as hoarding is frowned upon. Besides we don’t need no stinking badges.

- To prevent the big HATE in WvW when you get killed by the same OP enemy 12 times in a row a system has been put in place where you can only kill a particular enemy once in a 24 hour period. Timer starts from the moment of staking.

- Since WvW is the red headed stepchild of GW2 and nobody really likes WvW the patch we have been promising has been pushed back to April…… 2016.

- A new scaling system has been added to all dungeons. The faster you move through the dungeon the higher the level the mobs will be. They will also gain new abilities such as stealth detection plus their aggro range will encompass the whole dungeon.

- Zergs are our best friend and the point distribution system in WvW has been modified to reflect this point. Moving forward the team with the largest zerg 24/7 will be awarded double the points for capturing the same objective as the team with the smaller zerg. Zerg members that are culled will count for triple the points.

- Finally on the issue of precursors. After listening to your feedback regarding precursors and Legendary weapons we agree that the grind to get those Legendaries was too steep. To remedy this all existing Legendaries owned by players will have their materials refunded in full and the legendaries removed. New updated Legendary weapons can then be purchased in the Gem store for 1,000,000 gems.

It is time to throw a bit of oil on these troubled waters. When I posted the screens I had no idea that I had caught the nefarious Hugh Norfolk but I will attest to the fact that

A) He did glitch through the gate twice (both those screens of him were separate events)

B) He showed class in that he did not attack me but headed straight up the stairs to jump back out of the tower

So perhaps a little benefit of doubt is warranted here. First attempt was an “Aha! This is what they are talking about!” and the second was “Yep, that is how it is done!” sort of thing. All the politics and back and forth bickering are going to do nothing to help fix things and I am content that at least now this issue is now centered on their radar. They could probably fix it by closing that little hole between the gate and the gate frame.

Now a message for Hugh himself. Why do you waste your time on a server that needs 30+ people to take a tower manned by one lonely defender? Come on over to HoD and we will show you what real fighters can do. That bunch you are hanging out with is nothing more than a mindless “zerg” automaton; just think of all the trouble they just got you in! I mean they pushed you through the gate and tossed you under the bus. How can you trust such evil people?

Hey I can see that guy on the ground shooting arrows up at me! Really, truly I can see him! He is standing right there! Look! Yet when I go to fire back I get this thing called “obstructed” and I have to stand right on the edge of the wall in order to hit him. Now correct me if I am mistaken but should not the people IN THE FORT have more protection then those OUTSIDE?

I want to jump out of the ground like those caravan guards. That would be way cool!

Speaking of Caravan guards why is it called a caravan when there is only 1 yak?

I want to train my dogs to run straight up walls! Then I could have fun by throwing the ball up on the roof and telling them to “go fetch”!

Why can’t my jeweler use the pearls in the lake for recipes? They are quite a bit larger then the normal ones he uses so it should make a larger piece of jewelry right?

Can I leave my badge at home so the enemy cannot loot it off my body?

Speaking of which I know for a fact that the enemy I just killed has a Legendary weapon, exotic armor and some real nice trinkets. Why then do I only get spikes and low level stuff when I loot his corpse? Where did all that nice stuff go?

And you have to ride it facing backwards?

Waffler.1257:

morrolan.9608:

Waffler.1257:

The math is not very strong in you.

No need for insults, I didn’t calculate the 10% others did in other parts of the forum.

Believing statements by random people without question is the leading cause of stupidity.

Then pardon me if I do not believe you.

I will agree with one statement the OP made in his analysis.

“That other game has it; we’ve seen it done there and enjoyed it.”

I have always wondered about why people want to turn a game they are currently playing into one they left behind. If you left a game behind then it obviously lacked something that your new game has and whatever game element you left and now want in the new game was not a strong enough game element to keep you there.

Dyes should be account bound. Having them character bound is a pain in the dye factory. I was lucky enough to find Abyss in the early going and since my main at the time was my Guardian, he got the Abyss dye. When my thief hit level 80 I tried a myriad of colours but face it, a thief would look better in Abyss, right? Well I finally found a second Abyss and spent days deciding whether to give it to my thief or sell it for the needed coin.

I finally gave it to my thief and was heartbroken that due to the texture difference between the heavy armor on my Guardian and the medium armor on my thief that the Abyss just not look like Abyss on the thief, it displays as a grayer hue. I could have had +20 gold!

Now the one question to be asked and answered in regards to “spawn camping”. Are you intent on moving out into the enemy borderlands and capturing something or do you WANT to stay at your spawn, farming those that foolishly come too close to the Legendary defenders? If you are there to farm then I will in turn farm you. I have seen enemies gathered on the rock outside the SW tower that have no intention of taking the tower, even with only one defender inside yet they will kill the dolyaks and anyone running by solo. If a larger force comes by they quickly run back to their spawn.

Those types I will spawn camp and not feel guilty about it in the least.

The bitter irony behind it all is those that are insisting on “zerk” gear only are the most selfish people in the game. It matters little to them how someone else wants to play the game. The only thing that matters is they can squeeze out that one extra CoF run so their selfish desires for that extra run trump all else.

Tie any rewards for WvW, including Karma, coin and loot drops to the server population balance at any given moment, a modifier to multiply your chances. To maximize reward you will want to play during non-peak times or against a force larger then yours. Once the large, highly populated servers realize that they get more bang for the buck on the lower populated servers they will move. Over time it will all balance out. No need to change population caps.

thefantasticg.3984:

Nope. Cussing someone out is extremely rude and much more offensive than just being kicked from a group for no reason.

However cussing someone out is also a reportable and bannable offense and against game rules. Rather then kicking a person for that you should report and leave the proper course of action take place. It is too easy to state that “just before the final boss I kicked so and so out for cursing at me”. Yes it is rude and offensive but it also creates an excuse which could be easily abused.

It even trickles down to the NPCs. The quaggans in Frostforge that beg for your help to fight the icebrood will come back and say “Quaggans have defeated the Icebrood, you can come out now”. So if they want to be the heroes why ask for my help? Go ahead and fight them yourselves. Let me do my daily in peace.

If it drops a chest it will be killed.

I am against this thread and demand that you remove it and quit slandering my name! If you do not cease and desist I will be forced to retain legal council and take action.

You have been warned!

Meta Lurgy
Asuran Engineer
HOD

It is interesting to note that although NSP and SF are both HIGH population servers and HoD is a Medium population server, HoD is managing to stay within striking for second place. NSP which has the same population as SF cannot match SF’s pace.

So what that does all tell you? HoD relies on skills, not numbers, SF has numbers and NSP has neither!

You do NOT want to get a roll of everlasting toilet paper from the Mystic Toilet! Thinks carefully here, if it comes OUT of a toilet then it is USED!

What bothers me is these programs are easy to get. If they are not doing so already ANET should be using these programs themselves to see what memory addresses they use and how they work. Reverse engineer the fixes. The easiest way to find where the holes are is a bucket is to fill that bucket with water yourself and watch where the water leaks out. It is much more difficult to ask players to submit a report on exactly where that bucket is leaking.

I do get a chuckle out of these hack sites however. They call themselves “elite” gamers. There is nothing “elite” about cheating and it is just a pathetic way to make yourself appear better then you could ever hope to be.

So tonight I was taking a long soak in the tub, singing some carols and trying to convince my two dogs that they were the ones singing off key when I had what some would call an epiphany but what I normally call a thunk. So after drying off I logged in and did a wee bit of checking and have come to the conclusion that I would rather have lumps of coal instead of all these ugly sweaters, toy weapon skins, funny potions and snowflakes. See the thing is 10 lumps of coal go for 1 silver 60 copper on the vendor and people actually need the coal. As I see it a poor fellow like me could make a killing selling coal on the black market so this here is my confession.

I do not deserve any gifts, I have been bad all year so please put lumps of coal in the gift boxes for me.

Thank you so much.

I am not sure there is much they can do. They gave warriors more regen, more dps, more mobility, more CC… the CC should have been a Guardian thing and not Warrior but it is too late to change that now without Warriors crying foul. They have stated Guardians are supposed to get into a fight and stay there more or less. By that statement Guardians should have been the masters of Crowd control whereas the Warriors should have been the rabid dog killers.

Look…over there…the boat….they missed it!

I will admit it! I ran just yesterday as I was heading to solo the sw camp on our BL. Just as I was entering the camp a red sea poured over the cliff and came directly at me. There must have been 25 or more of them so I turned and ran screaming for my life! I am so ashamed of myself.

It is interesting to note that after reading the OP’s thread the first thing the wife said was "Why is it ok to portray all the females in the game as “battle bunnies” then? Face it in this game or any other females are portrayed sexually while males are portrayed comically. Blame it on the target audience for the game.

No matter how many warnings you put in an E-mail, no matter how many red flags there would still be people caught. Face it, there is just no cure for stupid. I know it is a harsh way to put it but if people fall for things such as “5000 free gems” in-game how many of those people have fallen for “I am a Prince and must smuggle money out of my country. I will split with you….etc.”. Then again it may not be stupidity but greed that ensnares them.

I am a confessed altaholic having 9 level 80 toons. At the same time I am also closing in on 60 years of age and to date have managed to craft 2 Ascended weapons, one for my Guardian and one for my Mesmer. I was lucky on RNG and found a third weapon which went to my engineer.

My issue is with the time gating and Laurel acquisition. With the addition of Ascended armor, the requirements needed to bring all my crafters to level 500 (I have leveled all crafts to at least 400 currently) and the materials that I will need to outfit everyone with Ascended armour and at least one weapon is out of reach. I just do not think I have enough time left on this earth to even get close to that. The recent changes in the amount of raw materials required to refine raw materials from 2:1 to 3:1 only exacerbated the problems driving up the cost of raw materials on the TP and extending the amount of time required to gather them yourself.

Do I need the Ascended stuff? Perhaps not but if you put it into the game as a form of vertical progression, which it is, it has to be obtainable within a reasonable amount of time AND with a reasonable amount of grind for players with 9 level 80’s like me and not just for those that play one toon.

In every game I have played I have always worked towards crafting myself the best items that could be crafted. Spending most of my time in WvW now I am finding that I am rapidly losing the desire to obtain those “best crafted” items because the time that is required to get those items is being extended with each and every patch/update. This leaves me with nothing other then WvW to do. How long that will keep me interested in this game before I move on remains to be seen. I do not gain the same sense of satisfaction by finding an item RNG versus creating that item myself.

Soulbinding items versus account binding, time gating for Laurels per account versus per character, time gating Ascended components, all add to artificially extending the time needed to reach the top. If you place that pinnacle too far away for people like myself to reach why should we begin that climb?

There are too many factors that determine what type of loot you get in the game and too many demands on certain items which necessitates the need to farm for them.

First you have the drop rate which is controlled by ANET.
Then you have Magic Find, controlled by the players.
Add to that Diminishing Returns which modifies what you get as a drop.

Now throw in what many have complained about and what ANET refuses to address/acknowledge is that many people seem to have gotten stuck in a perma-DR mode.

Then consider that legendary weapons and ascended gear take a pile of resources. There are two methods to gain these resources, buy them from the TP or farm for them. Yes, legendary weapons should take time but consider that most people will spend no longer then 3 years at any game before moving on and you have a time-frame in which people want to accomplish things. Buying gems and converting to gold is fine for those with a good income but for students, retirees or people on fixed incomes buying gems is something they will do once in awhile and not on a constant basis.

By placing the dreaded RNG into the equation and limiting the window of opportunity to gain a certain item through rng you again place a timeframe on people which pressure them into buying gems to convert to gold.

Looking at it all in my opinion ANETs marketing gurus are painting themselves into a corner. People will move on to other games, that is a given in this business but the way things are currently going people will pack up and leave earlier then they normally would and word of mouth will not bring in new players.

What they should do is either lower the amount of materials required to gain special items (40 laurels AND 50 ecto for 1 ascended item?) or increase the opportunity for players to get these items by farming if they so wish. In other word quit trying to force people to follow what their bean counters want and give people the choice to either buy gems or grind for what they want. That choice will keep more people around for a longer period of time. The more they remove “choice” the more they remove the enjoyment for the game and the more greedy they look.

About that fight club thing. AR needs to teach their people some manners. Yesterday our south camp was under attack so two of us went down to check it out. When we arrived an AR warrior was in the process of capping the camp, as the Super was down and a few people from both sides were up at the windmill dueling. As soon as he spotted us he dropped the cap attempt and raced back up the hill to the Windmill trying to pretend he was part of the fight club.

I wish I could have killed that dweeb more then once, truly pathetic.

From in game comments the biggest beef seems to come from the lack of a proper reporting system for hackers and cheats. It is almost like ANET wants it difficult to deter as many as possible from making a report.

The second is my personal beef but it comes from the lack of any form of feedback to the players. I try to be very careful with my hack/cheat accusations. I tend to want to give the benefit of doubt before accusations but when I do file a report it would be nice to get some sort of feedback on whether what I reported was an actual cheat or just an erroneous observation.

If anyone has ideas on how ANET could improve this part of their game besides what I suggested above feel free to share. With enough constructive feedback we may be able to get them to notice?

The answer lies in the type of random number generator they use but ANET will never give a definitive on it. Pseudo random number generators using a FIXED seed will return the same set of repeating results over a given period of time. Since that seed number is fixed and more then likely fixed to the account and not per character you may very well have one person getting one set of results while another gets a different set and since both sets REPEAT themselves after so many rolls the first person could be luckier then the second but it has noting at all to do with luck and everything to do with that fixed seed.

There is a very clear explanation on the above problems with fixed seed rng’s here if you scroll down to the heading “Setting Seeds”.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28548/Pitfalls-in-Random-Number-Generation