Showing Posts For Thoom.9653:
Things that must be in a template:
- Weapons
- Sigils
- Rune
- Amulet
- Skills
- Traits
What could be in a template:
- Skins
- Dyes
- Outfit
- Finisher
How I’d like to see it work: Separate templates for each part, and the ability to combine them into meta-templates that can change as many or as few aspects of your character as you like. This is mainly for PVE reasons. Gear is expensive, so my traits and skill loadouts are going to change much more often than my gear, and if I have a bunch of templates it would be a pain to go through and update the gear in each one when it does change.
Things to consider:
- Sharing (chat links? codes? urls?)
- Viewing (seeing some else’s vs. seeing your own)
- Saving (notepad vs. local vs. account vs. web)
- Building (one spot in UI vs. multiple spots)
- Websites (third-party sites should work with in-game)
- APIs (Could expose an API to third-parties)
- PvP vs PvE vs WvW (each mode requires different configuration options)
Sharing: Codes that are converted to links when pasted in chat. Also, the ability to copy/paste from the chat window.
Viewing: Pop up an interface like GW1 had when you click a link, that lets you see an overview of the template and gives you the option to apply it or save it to your collection.
Saving: Account.
Websites: All you have to do is make the template code format open. It’s on the websites to do the rest.
PvP vs PvE vs WvW: All the more reason to make it modular as I suggested above.
I personally changed all my ciphers 4 hours ago. After tha last marionette what we killed in Baruch’s Bay. Honestly i don’t know why did you guys don’t use yours after every marionette.
The character I made the power cell on was only 53. I was hoping to level to 80 this week.
Her lair is still there, but the chests are gone.
I feel a tiny bit betrayed by the ANet rep that posted in that thread, even though what they said was technically true. I still have 9 cyphers left over, which I wasn’t in a huge rush to use since I thought there would be a grace period.
Speaking from a PVE/QoL perspective:
1. Necromancer
2. Ranger
3. Engineer
Hi All,
Here is the next evolution of the original Vertical Progression proposal based on a summary of our discussions:
Regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method.
A review of current RNG metrics.
The ability to change gear stats (Note there is still a lot of discussion about whether people want this or not)
The ability to build up to Ascended Gear through drops rather than just relying on RNG.
Ascended Gear mats dropping more equally across the game, for example WvW.
No more new Gear tiers that make the existing tiers obsolete.
Additional ways to earn Ascended Gear at accelerated for Alts.
Note this is the formulation of a proposal for discussion. Once the proposal is finalized it will be discussed internally. However there will be no promise of actions or schedule.
Chris
Bump. We are close to being able to move onto the ‘focused’ Horizontal Progression part of this conversation.
Does anyone have anymore comments on the proposal above based on our discussions?
Chris
I’m 100% in favor of being able to change the stats on existing gear for a cost drastically less than crafting a whole new set.
Strongly agreed on no new gear tiers. I think that point is pretty much unanimous.
I’m not in favor of making Ascended gear faster for alts as a sole solution. I think this is a bandaid rather than a fix of the core problem (e.g. throwing away/wasting effort). I think account-wide stat unlocks are a much better way to incentivize crafting Ascended for alts, and that the current crafting balance (where leveling crafting from 400-500 costs about 5-10x as much as crafting a single gear piece) provides sufficient acceleration if unlocks are added. That said, I wouldn’t be opposed to some additional acceleration if it was offered alongside unlocks.
I’d like to chime in with some thoughts about how GW2’s current progression systems have pushed me away from the game. Before GW2 came out I was super ultra hyped for it, and the first few weeks I played something like 6-8 hours per day. Then I started to realize the implications of some of the mechanics like transmutation, and it dropped to 3-4 hours. Then Ascended gear showed up, and it dropped to 1-2 hours. Now I log in for a couple hours a month (except when Super Adventure Box is around — then it’s back up to 4-8 hours/day).
My core issue with the progression systems in this game is that I don’t like throwing the results of my hard work away. Let’s take an example: suppose I decided to bite the bullet and slog through the 4 months of grind it would probably take me to assemble a full Berserker’s ascended set with a set of skins I liked for my Elementalist.
Now, suppose I wanted a different skin. If I want to keep my stats, my choices are to go through another 4 months of grinding to generate a completely new set, destroy all my old skins that I worked so hard for, or pay nearly $20 in gems to buy transmutation splitters. That’s kind of demoralizing.
Suppose I want different stats (e.g. Soldiers, or some new stat combo)? Same problem, but worse. Another 3 months of grind, followed by the choice of either throwing away the months I spent grinding the Berserkers’ stats, a month grinding out fresh copies of the skins (which isn’t always even possible, since some skins are limited-time-only), or another $20 down the hole.
Suppose I decide my Mesmer is my new main and I don’t want to play Elementalist any more? Everything I strived for on my Elementalist is now meaningless, and it’s yet another four long months before I’ve repaired the damage I’ve done to my progression by daring to play another of the 8 professions.
Just thinking about all the ways my invested time could be so easily be thrown down the drain makes me tired and not want to play the game. I don’t want everything handed to me on a silver platter, but I’d also prefer if my hard work wasn’t invalidated every time I want to change things up and get a little variety in my gameplay. So how could things be better?
My suggestion is to make soulbinding an item unlock its stats and skin for your account. Then repurpose transmutation crystals to be a reagent for reconfiguring the stats/skin on a piece of gear to anything you’ve previously unlocked.
Then I could craft a full set of ascended gear for one character, and a full set for a different character with a different set of stats, and benefit from both. Rather than accelerating the process for alts, this would make repeating the process more meaningful and less of a chore, because you’d be benefitting your existing characters by unlocking a new stat combo, and benefiting each successive alt more by opening them up to a wider and wider pool of choices.
I think this would change the mode of progression for many players from “one and done” or “not even gonna bother” to “gotta catch ’em all”, which is probably healthier for the game long-term.
It would also define a very fun and useful niche for Legendary items. Equipping a Legendary unlocks a unique skin along with all Ascended stat combinations for that slot, and allows you to freely swap skins and stats for that piece on that character forever.
Also, it’d be great for you to be able to have multiple tabs of guild chat open at once (one for each of your guilds)
This, to me, is the most important thing. I started playing GW2 with a bunch of my RL friends, but we never had enough people on line to do big activities like WvW or dungeons. So some of us joined a bigger guild to get a chance to get in on those things. But then we couldn’t chat in our friends-only guild, and eventually it withered and died and most of my friends stopped playing the game.
Only being able to chat with one guild at a time is a death sentence for small guilds.
This is a great suggestion. Another big benefit is that if you’re playing with a low level friend who’s going through a zone you’ve already completed, you could actually participate in hearts with them rather than just twiddling your thumbs and waiting.
Are there any improvements in the pipeline for GW2’s social systems (e.g. chat, guild interface)? Not being able to chat with your guilds besides the one you’re representing is currently a huge black mark on the game.
The only things I could see addons being useful for is gear management, which could also be implemented by ANet anyway.
A lot of things “could” be implemented by ArenaNet, but won’t be because they don’t have the manpower or inclination. Addons are a great solution to that.
You don’t have to worry about combat parsers and elitism, because the combat log doesn’t provide enough information to make one (doesn’t record condition application or removal, doesn’t record condition ticks, etc.).
And if looking at the UI is a hinderance as you say, you won’t have to worry about people using addons in PvP.
It can be a bit of a pain to keep track of which of your friends are online without constantly bringing up the Contacts panel. Here are two simple suggestions to make it easier:
1. Separate loot out of the “Game Messages” chat channel and make it a separate one of a different color. This will let players more easily distinguish “Friend Logged On/Off” messages from the constant spam of loot, and let them get just the useful messages without the loot spam if they so choose.
2. Overlay a counter on the Contacts icon in the upper left of the screen, showing how many friends are currently online.
I guess I’m just an old fogey that doesn’t like VoIP very much. I use it grudgingly for stuff like dungeons and raids because it’s the fastest way, but for general chat it’s just not very good. Headsets are uncomfortable for long term wear, it’s vulnerable to noisy environments, mandatory quiet environments (sleeping wife/husband in the next room), and gets very chaotic with more than 2 people.
(edited by Thoom.9653)
So the general consensus in the thread is that people should have to resort to out of game communication tools, because the in-game social experience in this Massively Multiplayer Online RPG will never be adequate, and nobody should ever dare to think that it could be.
Cool.
Why go back to doing things like worse games, when Guild Wars 2 has the potential to be so much better?
Other than a custom chat-channel, which doesn’t seem much different to guilds, parties or a 3rd party program like Skype or Vent I can’t remember hearing of anything that would help.
Custom chat channels are very different from guilds and parties because you can have as many of them as you like, simultaneously. If I could chat with all of my guilds without switching representation, I would be completely happy.
I’m particularly curious about what they do to solve the problem of friends with mis-matched levels since my understanding was the complete opposite
They don’t solve it at all. Guild Wars 2 is better than other games in this respect, I’m just disappointed they don’t go as far as they could have.
(edited by Thoom.9653)
1. You can’t be bothered to play with your real life friends because they are holding you back.
It’s not an issue of “holding me back”. It’s an issue of the higher level in a mismatched pair having literally nothing to do but stick their thumb up their kitten and wait around for about half the play time. But I’m willing to concede that’s how it’s supposed to be if it makes you happy.
2. You and your real life friends are in different guilds.
Yes, and? I find it hard to believe this is a particularly uncommon situation.
3. You and your real life friends have absolutely no way to communicate outside a game.
We have plenty of ways to communicate outside the game. What I’m complaining about is that we have no good way to communicate inside the game.
If you find yourself missing the notifications you might want to look into the options for the chat window to see if there are any channels/notifications you don’t often use and can turn off to simplify it.
What I’d like to turn off is loot. That’s the thing that gets in the way. There’s no way to have the friend notifications without loot spam.
True you can’t repeat hearts but hearts are a very small part of PVE. I often find at least one DE I haven’t seen before when repeating areas I thought I knew well.
This hasn’t been my experience at all. When I’m roaming the world I generally spend 10-15 minutes between DEs now that most zones are empty of players. If I don’t have hearts to work on in a zone (pre-Orr, anyway — Orr is obviously designed around not having hearts), things get really boring really quick.
Edit: I just spent 90 minutes in Lornar’s Pass, and found a grand total of 2 events that entire time. Events are simply not frequent enough to be the bread and butter of gameplay.
3. You’re talking about a relatively small number of people and you apparently like much the same things – why don’t you all join the same guild instead of each being in seperate ones and having an additional one to talk to each other?
Because most guilds probably wouldn’t appreciate having their chat channel flooded with our private banter and in-jokes.
Alternatively it might be worth planning your meet-ups the same way you (presumably) do in real life. What you’re doing at the moment is the online equivelent of going into town and wandering around hoping your friends have had the same idea at the same time. You’d never really do that
Except we always used to do that. It worked fine for six years in WoW, because WoW gave us the tools to be casually social while playing the game.
(edited by Thoom.9653)
Worst decision ever that I noticed you’re missing: no party join for activities (toypocalypse, keg brawl, etc.).
That too. The frustrating part is that ArenaNet seems to be making all these bad decisions (limited chat & chat customization, no group activity join, etc.) purely out of a desire to not be like WoW.
1. They put in the option, it just isn;t…good enough for you? Oh, and people who care to see when smb logs in do have that visible. In the main chat window.
How do you actually see people chatting through all the loot spam?
2. And that’s a GW2 problem…how exactly?
Because it could easily be so much better.
3. Meet party chat.
So when I join a dungeon group I just stop talking to my friends until it’s over? That’s a bad solution if I’ve ever heard one.
Really though, get a Vent server or something – these things are pretty much standard issue for any member of the MMO community these days I thought.
Voice comm doesn’t lend itself well to background chatter in my experience. A chat channel is a far superior tool for that purpose. It’s a basic feature provided by pretty much every other MMORPG.
If the fact that you are seperated by levels and so you don’t all get the same amount of progression sought by gaming together then, plain and simple, your priority is not gaming together.
The question isn’t about “the amount of progression sought”. It’s about having to literally sit on your hands while the other person grinds something you’re not allowed to participate in anymore.
This isn’t a condition unique to GW2 and I’m not sure what A-Net or any other company could do to change this fact.
Easy! Step 1, allow players to participate in hearts they’ve already completed. Step 2, provide some minor incentive to do so (like getting a small karma bonus for helping a party member finish their heart). Step 3? Haha, hahahaha. There is no Step 3.
3. Again. Vent, TS, Mumble. Something. Free server and a $10 headset w/ mic from Wally World and you’re in there like the 4th stripe on Adidas.
Again, voice comm isn’t what I would call fit for purpose, and it’s an embarrassment that the game requires you to use an external program just to keep in touch. Custom chat channels
Is it just me or does Guild Wars 2 do everything that it possibly can to keep you from playing with your friends?
I have a few IRL friends that also play GW2. We made a guild together at launch, but 4-5 people isn’t really enough to sustain a guild full time, so I had to join another more active guild to actually glean benefits like guild perks and a pool of people to recruit for dungeons. Since then, I’ve found that it’s basically impossible to play with my friends without setting up pre-arranged playtime through out-of-game means, because the game itself does absolutely everything in its power to get in my way.
1. I seldom have any idea if my friends are even online. As a rule, I don’t spend all my time compulsively bringing up the friends list, so there’s no way to reliably find out. In theory, the game notifies you when your friends log in/out. In practice, this notification is buried in the Game Messages section of chat, which also contains loot, and no sane person keeps it as a part of their main chat window.
2. Even if I somehow discover they’re online, there are some serious limitations on what we can do together. None of us are very into PVP, so that leaves PVE content. We only manage a full party of 5 once a month or so, so it’s mostly world PVE. For any given group of characters that we might want to play at the moment, it can be very hard to find content both that’s within the acceptable level range for the lower levels in the party and not something the higher levels have already done.
World PVE (pre-80) centers around map completion, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how skull crushingly boring it is to tag along with someone else while they work on a map you’ve already finished. Aside from the occasional event it boils down to babysitting them, or sometimes simply sitting around twiddling your thumbs while they do some of the less combat-intensive hearts. Especially since many hearts actively bar you from participating after you finish them. This is not exactly engaging or rewarding stuff, so we often end up going our separate ways.
3. When we’re doing separate things, I can’t easily talk to them. Since guild chat requires you to represent the guild you want to chat with, even if I swapped to representing my friends/family guild there’s no guarantee they would be representing it (in fact, it’s fantastically unlikely). It would be annoying to have to individually contact each one of them and beg them to represent just to have a casual conversation, not to mention that they might not want to be pulled out of whatever conversation they’re having with the guild they are representing. This makes it basically impossible to have the sort of friendly background banter we’re accustomed to in other MMORPGs.
This whole mess gives the game a very solitary feel, and really turns me off from playing as much as I otherwise would. It’s hard to find motivation to log on randomly when I know my odds of meaningful social interaction are so low. Does anyone else feel this way?
All of these are great suggestions, and most of them sorely needed. Especially this one:
- Custom channels: Allows people to form their own little communities separate from guilds, maybe create a LFG channel, allow guilds to streamline communication in high traffic scenarios like mass-wvw, etc. Easy feature, big impact.
In addition to this, I’d like to request that guild chat be un-linked from guild representation. There’s no reason to arbitrarily restrict us to chatting with just one of our social groups to the exclusion of all the others. This is by far the biggest thing that’s taken Guild Wars 2 from a 3hr/day to a 2hr/week game for me. I’m forced to choose whether to be able to chat with my friends while playing, or to be able to participate in a large, active guild. Having to make that choice is sufficiently unfun that I usually just don’t bother playing.
Another really simple, obvious thing that should happen is Loot being put on its own chat channel separate from other Game Messages. This way we could actually turn on Game Messages in our main chat tab to see stuff like friends logging on without being spammed with items.
- If you do nothing else, please replace waypoints with checkpoints in explorable paths (or disable waypoints while a boss is in combat). Graveyard zerging isn’t something that should be allowed.
- There are better ways to challenge players than bosses with a million HP and trash mobs with autoattacks that hit for half of a player’s health. In general, fights would be more fun if they were more mechanically complex and a bit less chaotic. Test us on coordination (“kill these two mobs at the same time”), positioning (“these adds make a painful red circle on the ground when they die — kill them in places that won’t fill up the room”), execution (“the better you do in phase 1, the smoother phase 2 will go”) and teamwork rather than just on who can hit the dodge button at the right time through a swarm of particle effects.
- More multi-phase fights. A 10 minute boss fight with 4 phases is a lot more interesting than a 10 minute boss fight with 1 phase (though a pair of 5 minute fights with 2 phases each is even better).
- Make sure there’s at least some reason for veteran players to go back to Story mode, so that new players have someone to go with.
- Add a large variety of achievements each dungeon, with a reward (a title, mini-pet, or unique gear skin) for completing all the achievements of a given dungeon. Give players some way to demonstrate their skill beyond merely completing the dungeon.
The flaws in this game’s chat systems (and the lack of user mods to make up for it) are the biggest thing holding this game back.
This is really the take-home message here. These days I find myself logging in for an hour or so every week and quickly getting bored because all my guilds are desolate wastelands. If it was easier to keep in touch with everyone, I’d be playing every day.
Alliances would be nice for other reasons (they’d the problem of the guild size cap still being a bit low for my tastes), but they don’t really solve the main problem. If I have different groups of friends with different interests, and I’m the only factor that links the two groups, it would be silly for me to ask them to form an alliance solely for my benefit.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, but it has some serious issues as a social experience. A big reason for this is that the cumbersome chat system makes social interaction a lot more painful than it need be. This post is an attempt to collect all the biggest issues with the chat system in one place, along with arguments about why they’re important and how they can be improved. They are arranged in roughly descending order of importance.
Guild Chat — Singular
By far, the biggest issue with chat in Guild Wars 2 is that you can only chat with the guild that you’re currently representing. I think it will be obvious to most people why this is terrible, but I’m going to explain it anyway just to be sure, because this is so important.
ArenaNet has said that guilds are meant to be social groups, rather than the highly regimented/structured organizations they are in other games. It’s completely ludicrous that the choice to talk with one of your social groups excludes you from the opportunity to hear what the others are saying. Imagine for a second that to read the forums you had to ‘represent’ a single topic, and any posts made outside the topic you’re currently representing were permanently invisible to you. That would be silly, right? Same deal in game.
This also leads to a problem of guild dilution. Many guilds, despite their good intentions, wind up as ghost towns because their members are mostly representing other guilds that provide some more direct value.
The simple and obvious solution is to let us choose any and all of our guilds to chat with on any given tab of our chat window, in the same checklist that shows the other channels. They would be accessed with /g1 /g2 /g3 and /g4, with /g acting as a shortcut to the currently represented guild.
Chat Window — Singular
It is can be difficult to separate and follow several threads of discussion (/party, /map, /guild). Tabs help somewhat with this, but it can be a frustrating experience having to constantly switch tabs to keep up with different discussions. Multi-guild chat would contribute further to the clutter.
Luckily, there’s a simple and well-understood solution: let us tear off chat tabs into separate windows so that we can have multiple individually filtered views visible at the same time. To help with screen clutter on smaller displays, it might be good to have an option to fade out all but the main chat window during combat.
Readability
Lengthy conversations can be a bit hard to follow for another reason: your eyes have to do a lot more work than is necessary to see who wrote a given message. The more differentiated player names are visually, the less time you have to spend reading names and the more time you can spend reading content.
The solution is simple: color-code player names in chat. Give each player a unique color (many IRC clients do this) or color them by class (WoW does this). A simple combination of color and length is quite often sufficient to identify the speaker with a high degree of accuracy. This actually fits in neatly with one of GW2’s design goals as well: the less time you spend with your eyes scanning chat, the more time you can spend looking at the game (not the interface!).
“Game Messages”
The “Game Messages” chat channel contains useful information like notifications of your friends logging on and off, but it is far, far too cluttered, mostly by the loot log. Loot should be split off into its own channel. Nothing controversial here.
Links
How many times have you been frustrated when a guild member pasted a lengthy URL into chat, only to find that you have no way of getting it out aside from manually retyping it in your browser? Speaking for myself: many times. Sharing links is part of the basic foundation of online communication, and it shouldn’t be so painful.
The obvious solution is to make URLs in chat clickable, but that has its own set of issues (malware, shock/gore sites, rickrolling, etc.) that might have a negative effect on the game experience for unsuspecting players. One possible fix is to only make URLs clickable in ‘trusted’ channels (guild and party, but not say or map). An alternate (and much more generally useful) solution would be to have a button that toggles a mode where you can select and copy text from a chat window.
Came here to post this. It’s REALLY irksome.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, but it has some serious issues as a social experience. A big reason for this is that the cumbersome chat system makes social interaction a lot more painful than it need be. This post is an attempt to collect all the biggest issues with the chat system in one place, along with arguments about why they’re important and how they can be improved. They are arranged in roughly descending order of importance.
Guild Chat — Singular
By far, the biggest issue with chat in Guild Wars 2 is that you can only chat with the guild that you’re currently representing. I think it will be obvious to most people why this is terrible, but I’m going to explain it anyway just to be sure, because this is so important.
ArenaNet has said that guilds are meant to be social groups, rather than the highly regimented/structured organizations they are in other games. It’s completely ludicrous that the choice to talk with one of your social groups excludes you from the opportunity to hear what the others are saying. Imagine for a second that to read the forums you had to ‘represent’ a single topic, and any posts made outside the topic you’re currently representing were permanently invisible to you. That would be silly, right? Same deal in game.
The simple and obvious solution is to let us choose any and all of our guilds to chat with on any given tab of our chat window, in the same checklist that shows the other channels. They would be accessed with /g1 /g2 /g3 and /g4, with /g acting as a shortcut to the currently represented guild.
Chat Window — Singular
It is currently very difficult to separate and follow several threads of discussion (/party, /map, /guild). Tabs help somewhat with this, but it can be a frustrating experience having to constantly switch tabs to keep up with different discussions. Multi-guild chat would contribute further to the clutter.
Luckily, there’s a simple and well-understood solution: let us tear off chat tabs into separate windows so that we can have multiple individually filtered views visible at the same time. It might also be good to let us select one or more chat windows to fade out during combat, for people with limited screen real estate.
Readability
Lengthy conversations can be a bit hard to follow for another reason: your eyes have to do a lot more work than is necessary to see who wrote a given message. The more differentiated player names are visually, the less time you have to spend reading names and the more time you can spend reading content.
The solution is simple: color-code player names in chat. Give each player a unique color (many IRC clients do this) or color them by class (WoW does this). A simple combination of color and length is quite often sufficient to identify the speaker with a high degree of accuracy. This actually fits in neatly with one of GW2’s design goals as well: the less time you spend with your eyes scanning chat, the more time you can spend looking at the game (not the interface!).
“Game Messages”
The “Game Messages” chat channel contains useful information like notifications of your friends logging on and off, but it is far, far too cluttered, mostly by the loot log. Loot should be split off into its own channel. Nothing controversial here.
Links
How many times have you been frustrated when a guild member pasted a lengthy URL into chat, only to find that you have no way of getting it out aside from manually retyping it in your browser? Speaking for myself: many times. Sharing links is part of the basic foundation of online communication, and it shouldn’t be so painful.
The obvious solution is to make URLs in chat clickable, but that has its own set of issues (malware, shock/gore sites, etc.) that might have a negative effect on the game experience for unexpecting players. One possible fix is to only make URLs clickable in ‘trusted’ channels (guild and party, but not say or map). An alternate (and much more general) solution would be to have a button that toggles a mode where you can select and copy text from a chat window.
Export
So we have a combat log, that’s neat. But given how hectic GW2 combat is, it’s not all that useful to look over it manually. Please allow us to write the combat log out to a text file that can be parsed and analyzed by external tools.
Some in the community fear that this might lead to elitism about combat performance, but there’s a very simple solution: by default, a player’s combat events will only appear in their own combat log. They may opt in to allow other players to see their combat events, but this should be off by default. That way teams who want to look at their data together get to, and individuals who prefer not to be judged numerically by other players don’t have to be.
Let us chat with multiple guilds!
Joining multiple guilds is next to useless if you can’t chat with as many of them as you want. I’m a member of a small IRL friends guild as well as a bigger guild that actually does stuff, and it sucks that if I want to be included in activities I can’t chat with my friends without resorting to out-of-game communication.