Guild Wars 2

village idiot.1436:

Subscription model is bold? Backward maybe. This game made 116 million dollars last year i think.

Yes subscription model in 2014 is bold. Zenimax even had a Forbes article saying they would fail because of subscription. Buy-to-play or Free-to-play is what mainstream is nowadays. Going the subscription path means you are setting expectations a lot higher than you were back in 2003, and that means you have very little margin for error.

village idiot.1436:

The heart of the dynamic events system is being ripped out.

The most important events will be static, repetitive and heavily regimented. Rates that we do events will be slowed down and player choice severely limited.

The dynamic events system was one of the primary appeals of the game for me.

Dynamic events were a great concept on paper, but in reality they have failed IMO. Being this repetitive they break immersion. Also, they take a lot of storytelling out of the game, compared to traditional quests.

I was a fan of the event system, but right now I’d rather take a well written and smartly done traditional quest system over dynamic events.

The sweet spot would probably be to have both. I think the mistake here was to found the whole game on DE, and leave storytelling only in the personal story.

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

After reading all the concerns, I feel the new mega server system was neither wanted by the players, or needed by the players.

I fully agree with you.

They are trying to provide a radical solution for problems that already had a less radical but friendlier solution in guesting, and that nobody asked.

Personally (and I’ve been saying this for a while now) I consider the megaserver system as ANet’s way of concealing a server consolidation because GW2’s PVE is dwindling. Don’t forget they have access to statistics we can’t see.

What led them to introduce a system named after Zenimax’s Elder Scrolls Online Megaserver System, and that will go live exactly eleven days after the Elder Scrolls Online launched? Coincidence? I seriously doubt it.

Such a defensive move done towards a company that is boldly adopting a subscription business model (going against which was one of the foundations of ANet’s manifesto) I think doesn’t suggest a rosy outlook for GW2’s western players.

I think ANet should finally PROVE that their buy-to-play business model is sound, and start delivering REAL content, instead of wasting work hours on systems nobody asked like the megaserver.

Otherwise the annoying trend of quoting GW2 as the proof that you don’t get AAA content unless you pay a subscription will continue and expand, and the loss of players won’t diminish, even though it will be hidden by the megaserver system.

Lankybrit.4598:

Fair enough. But investors look at actual revenue rather than number of subscriptions (which they pore over for WoW). The argument was made that GW2 is doing this because the game is dying. I see it far from that, as it’s an excellent feature to get more people playing the game.

And just to be real. Cross Realm Zones were like MegaServers. Connected Realms is essentially merged realms, which one could say WoW is doing because the game is dying.

Diying might be an excessive term, but think of this: as someone pointed out, a megaserver-like system is easier to implement for GW2, because it already has overflows, than it is for other games.

So why now? I don’t think it’s too hard to see that it has to be because on many servers there are a lot less players than expected / optimal.

I’m pretty sure that, if all the servers had a healthy population, we wouldn’t be posting here right now.

Also, maybe it’s me, but the fact they are announcing right now this “Megaserver” system, which is exactly identical to how it’s called in Elder Scrolls Online, that as we type is in its early access phase and launches in two days, seems a lot defensive.

Sometimes defensive moves work, but I find it a little cheap to be honest.

Lankybrit.4598:

GW2 is not subscription based, so number of current players isn’t as important. Unlike WoW and ESO. So comparing these games with each other is a bit ridiculous.

Paradoxically, the number of current players is more important for a buy to play game like GW2 than it is for a subscription-based one.

If players don’t play they don’t buy gems, which is what supports the game. Conversely, in subscription-based games there are a minority of wealthy players that do keep their subscription active even in periods of time when they have very little time to play.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

To the people who say that the Megaserver is a sign that the game is dying:

World of Warcraft had 8+ million subscribers when they merged their servers. Is that a sign that the game is dying?

Elder Scrolls Online is launching with this feature. Does that mean they are expecting to have very few players?

When people asked for this feature at the launch of GWII, was that a sign that the game was dying a few days after it launched?

Server consolidation is always a sign that the player base is contracting. It’s been known for a while now that World of Warcraft has been losing players in the last years. That doesn’t necessarily equate to dying, especially when you have the size of WoW.

Elder Scrolls Online is different, since it has the Megaserver feature from the start. It will certainly help to mask difficulties with the player base’s size, though, should they have any in the future.

About GW2, I think the game’s PVE is contracting yes. Will the game die? I seriously doubt that. I think they will have a very successful launch in China.

But still, I see this move as a sign of weakness on ANet’s side, a proof that their business model wasn’t as brilliant as they have trumpeted and it’s showing its limits in the markets where ANet is operating right now. If they will succeeed in China, as I think they will, that won’t necessarily put them in financial trouble in the short term, but it will affect the quality of the game IMO.

Healix.5819:

Gw2 has had this tech from the beginning. All this is, is main servers turned off and everyone in overflows.

If it was so easy to just turn off servers and put everyone in overflows, have you asked yourself why they are doing that a year and a half after launch and not before? And why they had to give this, that according to you is a “non-feature”, a name and that name is the same it’s used by Zenimax for Elder Scrolls Online?

Maybe buy to play isn’t all that good as a business model after all.

Beldin.5498:

And Elder Scroll Online has “stolen” if from Champions Online, that has already a Mega-Server since release in 2009

And with the guesting function here, i always thought that we had indeed something like a mega-server already, and the only reason to have different server was just for WvW.

However i’m not really in favor of the system if everything is done automatically and we don’t have any control to choose a specific instance of a zone.

I don’t know Champions Online, but the fact they just announced they are adopting the same technology of a major MMO that is currently in early access phase and is launching in two days, and they are calling this “new feature” exactly the same, makes all this appear like Elder Scrolls Online scares the heck out of them.

Since they have the user access stats and we don’t, it makes me think things aren’t very rosey for GW2. Seems like a desperate move to revert some sort of downspiral.

This feature is being added to try and hide the fact this game’s PVE is dying.

It’s basically a smarter kind of server consolidation, where they mask what’s going on under the hood and how unpopulated some servers are.

It works better if you launch your game with this feature, rather that adding it halfway, but at this point it was probably needed.

And I can’t help but finding it really desperate, with the shameless feature name and idea stealing from Zenimax and all.

If you guys at ANet really had to steal this idea from Elder Scrolls Online, you could at least have changed the name of the feature.

The feature in itself is certainly a welcome improvement, but this way to me it appears a bit desperate.

Where’s the MMO Manifesto’s ANet that was founded to innovate?

Linguistically Inept.6583:

As people have already said knights (p/p/t) gear is available from SE/Arah
rabid (prec/tough/condition damage) is available from CM/TA/HotW

Rabid is Arah/TA/HotW. It’s not found in CM.

Then you didn’t really hit the bug I was referring to, and that ANet aknowledged. When she bugs out that way, she goes back to phase 1 each and every time she gets out of stealth.

First time she stealths exactly at 50%. No matter how quick you are to kite the sparks, when she reappers she has something more than 50% health because she did regen a bit. Let’s say she has 50,9%. As soon as you bring her back down to 50% (which in that case would take mere seconds if you have decent DPS) she disappears again. Rinse and repeat.

You can’t kill her if she disappears at 50% no matter how little she’s been visible. That’s why in phase 2 her stealth is supposed to be driven by a timer and not her health.

If you were able to kill her then she wasn’t really bugged, or at least not in the way my party has experienced.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

The first time, we tried the 4-1 method to see if it would still work. It didn’t, and that messed up the rest of the fight. She would get to 50% health and stealth again, and after repeated attempts to get her below that 50%, we reset her and did it the normal method.

That’s what happened to us too, minus the 4+1 method. We directly kited the 5 sparks the normal way.

I think in your case the fact Simin bugged when trying the 4+1 method was just a coincidence but there’s no cause-effect relationship between the two circumstances.

Also, in our case resetting her whouldn’t reset the bug.

When the bug happens, she switches back to phase 1 when she goes above 50%, instead of staying in phase 2 and being driven by a stealth timer and not by her health level. As you saw yourself, you can’t kill her when that happens, because she enters a loop where you can’t bring her below 50%.

Iehova.9518:

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

They nerfed her hard enough that the 4-1 method isn’t necessary anyway. You have to try it to see for yourself just how bad she got nerfed.

I have the feeling that convincing my group to do Simin will be harder than killing her. The last round of carrying scrubs to DM was particularly painful.

When it come about dungeon group setup we play “Mesmer Wars” .

Bullkitten. TW and feedback are merely gimmicks which aren’t necessary to complete any of the content.

From what I saw yesterday you’re right and I’d say P4 is significantly easier than P1 now. The only problem is that presently P4 is a russian roulette, because if she bugs out she will stealth each end every time she hits 50% health, even if she came out of stealth 2 secs before and you kited the sparks in record time.

If that happens, you’re not going to kill her, no matter how much DPS you have or how coordinated is your group.

Rezz.8019:

Also, it’s not bugged in any way. I is the elite path of the elite dungeon so you should just try harder and play better.

Moderator:

Hi Zenith,
The team is aware of this bug and is working on solving it. We understand this can cause frustration – since Arah is already a tricky dungeon – but we would like to aks you to have some patience. We hope to bring you good news about this soon.
Thanks for your understanding.
This thread is closed.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Simin-is-a-DPS-check/1649696

Which part of the expression “this bug” isn’t clear to you?

Reunen.7306:

That wasn’t my intention, sorry if I offended you

No offence taken mate, it’s all good.

I don’t dispute that certain group setups might cause the bug not to trigger or to trigger less often, and the fact the added DPS from a mesmer’s TW could influence the chance of the bug manifesting itsef could be useful to the Devs if they still haven’t reproduced the problem constistently and tracked down the root cause.

But since ANet has reduced Simin’s regen sensibly, I think I can safely say they are trying to part from dungeon setups that require a certain group composition, as this is against their initial idea that you could run dungeons with 5 character of the same class, of any class, provided they knew how to play.

Our guild is a small guild, and none of us has rolled a mesmer so far. We do other paths regularly with a group of 4 (and Lupi is even more fun that way). We don’t like the idea of having to roll a mesmer or invite one to complete path 4, and since it appears we couldn’t succeed because of a bug and not our group composition, we’d like to get a workaround.

Also, aside from selfish reasons, I think it would be nice for players who find out too late that P4 is bugged, to have a workaround so the time they spent to get to Simin is not wasted.

Of course if and when this bug will be fixed, that will be the ideal solution of the problem, this is just a temporary request in the meanwhile.

You do have an indication in which phase she is: after the first time she disappears the fight is in phase 2. And of course when she reappers she will be above 50% health, since she disappeared at 50% and you can be as quick as you want but she will regen a bit.

Now if she disappears every time she goes down to 50% instead of being on a timer, it’s impossible to kill her, time warp or not.

Also, it’s been aknowledged by the Devs this is indeed a bug:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Simin-is-a-DPS-check/1649696

So please don’t try and teach how to do Simin because that is off-topic.

Hi.
Yesterday afternoon me and four guildies of mine did Arah path 4 for the first time.

We got to Simin without any trouble, knowing the other three paths well.
And, like it happened to many others, she bugged out.

After some attempts, it was pretty obvious we had hit a bug, so we came here on the forums and we found out immediately we weren’t alone and it was indeed a problem with the stealth timer.

We reset her many many times (like 15-20), tried swapping characters, different positions, resetting her while she was visible, while she was stealthed, inside and outside the cave, but she just kept bugging out and disappearing at 50% health in any consecutive attempt.

I read the closed post where the moderator aknowledged the bug and said a solution was probably close. In the meanwhile, though, there are many players, unaware of the bug, who discover it the hard way, like we did.

Some players have reported being able to reset the bug by resetting the boss’ health, while others, like ourselves, couldn’t manage to have her behave as intended, no matter how many times we tried.

I think it would be useful if, while we wait for a definitive solution, the Devs explained workarounds to unlock the situation so that those who hit the bug’s wall don’t waste a run.

For us, being our first time and thus proceeding carefully, it was a wasted afternoon.

And before someone comes here acting all smart, no, it’s not a lack of DPS, sometimes we kited the sparks in a matter of 10 secs, and she was just a tad above 50%, when she reappeared, yet she would disappear immediately afterwards, as soon as she went down to 50% again.

ANet I really don’t understand why you guys have these wonderful ideas and then you fall on details.

You did that with fractals when they came out. The fact one couldn’t do higher level fractals was a bad idea which fractured the community. You could have avoided that, and in fact had to correct it afterwards.

Now you did the same with guild missions: a great idea, crippled by the most idiotic handling of details ever: putting the entry point at tier 5 of a tree PVE only guilds have never researched, and which feels too steep for smaller guilds.

Don’t tell me you guys didn’t see this coming. And if you did, why couldn’t you think of a better way of introducing this otherwise awesome feature?

Now what will you do? Wait for some small guild to spend all their influence on the lower tiers of Art of War and then in the next patch apologize and move the entry point somewhere else, so they feel betrayed twice?

Or leave it as it is and fracture you community yet again?

I thought you had learned from the way you introduced ascended gear and the consequent reaction from the community.

First off, I discovered the misalignment between the aura and scepter is not constant but it gets worse and worse as the camera gets closer.

If you watch your character from far away the aura is correcly aligned, yet it goes off axis as you zoom in.

Secondly, I can confirm it’s a bug on asura characters. While doing the “Urban Battlegrounds Fractal” and using the scepter as a charr it looked perfectly fine even from very close.

Please Anet, fix this.

It takes in excess of 130g of blood alone, without even counting mystic coins, to craft this item. As an exotic it’s a pretty expensive and exclusive weapon, and it’s not right that it looks this bad after all the efforts put into obtaining it.

I’d like to enjoy it on my asura as much as others can enjoy it on their characters of different races.

And a dev confirming it will be taken care of would be nice too.

Same on my asura. It seems like a graphic glitch. I would expect the red aura to be centered on the scepter.

I don’t know if it looks like this on all races, or it’s got something to do with improper scaling down of the various scepter elements when the weapon is used by an asura.

It would be nice to get a comment from some dev, just to know how things are., especially considering how expensive this thing is to buy/craft.

I’m from Italy as well and since yesterday I’m experiencing abismal lag spikes like others on this thread. I’m on Whiteside Ridge.

Today I had a huge 2-3 min lag spike that obviously got me killed.

I tried rebooting my router to no avail. I also contacted my ISP, but they checked and everything is fine on their end.

All my internet services besides GW2 work flawlessly. My VOIP provider has servers located in Germany, yet I’m able to talk to my guildmates without any lag whatsoever, so it doesn’t seem to be a routing issue on my network.

Please investigate the problem since the game is completely unplayable right now.

Thereon.3495:

I opened 14,000 Halloween bags two days ago. I was saving them but with the amount in the game and the space they were taking up I thought what the hell….

… after 12,750 bags I got the Endless tonic.

Expect a similar rate for the tonic and bell this event.

My friend I don’t think you understand how probability works. Nobody can expect anything.

A drop rate is merely an average, but each gift has the exact same amount of probability to drop the unbreakable bell as any other gift, no matter how many gifts you have already opened. And no matter how many gifts someone else has opened before getting the bell. Or how many halloween bags before getting an endless tonic.

This means you could open gifts ’til the end of time without ever getting the bell.

Of you could get it in one of the first giant gifts you open. Which by the way is what happened to me (I think it was the 6th or 7th giant gift I opened, and dropped in the Groove Tixx dungeon) and I didn’t have a clue it was so rare until I read this post.

That is the nature of probability.

Edit: and it seems someone else got even luckier:

Humposaurus.5764:

Got my unbreakable bell with my first giant present =)

There’s not need to be anal about the OP’s words choice. What (s)he meant is clearly that (s)he believes forums to be a statistically valid sample of the whole community and therefore to be relevant in determining the community’s reaction to any ArenaNet action.

You may rightfully agree or disagree with the OP but if you argue about the words choice you are wasting forum space and showing little reading comprehension skills.

And by the way I agree with her/him. It might not be the most accurate sample ever, but it surely gives a true enough idea of the community feelings that ArenaNet should take them seriously.

Mirta.5029:

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6915/99384436.png
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/9392/52397020.png

1. They’re not allowed to alter such information, because they’re being checked by more than one company. If they altered their own information there would already be a case about it. So no, don’t tell me that the information is altered.
2. I’m seeing people EVERYWHERE.

The game is not dying. Snap out of it.

Why do you guys keep taking for granted that that is any indication of the players actually logged on?

The truth is we don’t know how the server status is handled, but since it appears in the home server choice / transfer window it makes a lot more sense that it has to do with how many accounts have any server as a home server rather than how many concurrent players are online at any given time on that server.

Before you use that as a proof of the good health of the game, you need to know precisely how it works, and you don’t. None us us does.

However, a lot of other things, like the introduction of ascended gear, which they said was a reaction to players hitting the so-called “lengendary wall”, point towards a bleeding in active players. A bleeding that is so relevant that prompted ArenaNet to take an action they expected it would be received very badly by the community. Both the reason of the introduction of ascended gear and the expected players’ reaction are not an assumption, they come from the words of ArenaNet’s representatives.

Or, in other words, it points towards xfire numbers coming from a statistically valid sample and being a faithful representation of the whole player base.

Verrah.3027:

People need to stop complaining about what was said in the past (the manifesto was made 2 years ago! That is a long time). Instead, give suggestions to improve or change things about the game. I see these forums and I see thread after thread where the only point is to call out a developer or the company and villainize them as greedy, liars, or worse. I see fellow players attacking each other as if they are enemies, for simply stating their opinions on something. Is this what we want to turn this game into? A group of people arguing and fighting each other over words, opinions, and thoughts? I certainly don’t.

That’s what happens when an issue that is strongly felt by the community (or part of it) is substantially ignored.

Sarie.1630:

MrThebigcheese.2014:

Anet hyped this game like crazy and simply didn’t deliver.

Developpers don’t need to create the hype, the players do that all on their own. ANet released few trailers, really, in the 5 years before release. Most of the videos on YT creating the bulk of the hype came from press reviews and the like, in particular big voices such as Total Biscuit and The Yogscast.

ArenaNet didn’t need to create hype. The players did that all on their own.

Oh, and “they didn’t deliver” is only opinion. I think they did. The only thing I feel quite let down by is the lack of Guesting right now, and in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big a gripe since you can enter instances with friends on other servers anyway.

Nobody here is arguing because of things said by TotalBiscuit or the YogsCast. It was the manifesto and some devs’ interviews and blog posts that set pretty bold goals in developing the game. Those goals were backed by the then perfect track record ArenaNet sported.

Semantics aside, what ArenaNet kept saying was grind is bad, and thus should be optional.

If ArenaNet was ok with vertical progression from the beginning, why did they make the most grindy items in the game, legendaries, identical in power to exotics? Because that’s what they always meant to do.

Until something we don’t know happened and they did a u-turn. Maybe they started losing players quickly, or something changed in the management and they were forced by their parent company to change course.

Either way, I would have appreciated more if they admitted the manifesto was plain wrong, or poorly executed, and they had to change direction to survive because, after all, they are a business.

That’s something I can relate to. Substantially ignoring the biggest and fastest growing thread in the game’s short history, however, is not.

Agenteusa.6380:

They didn’t change anything in GW2 at the last minute. Almost 3 months have gone by. In SWTOR they said ranked pvp would be in from the beginning and they failed to deliver. People kept playing anyhow. They announced some 4-5 (can´t remember accurately) months later the ranked pvp was ready and would come out in patch X. At that point several players had put the game on hold. Curiously the patch was supposed to be release right at the end of a billing cycle. The day the patch was supposed to be released they announce some hours before that ranked pvp wouldn’t be in it. So that means lots of people payed for something that was announced and wasn’t delivered.

Sure they gave free time and crap but the scam was still there. I don’t see anything comparable in GW 2 , sorry.

And you might have misinterpreted me, I was waiting for ranked pvp in SWTOR so I was scammed.

I’m divided. I’m not a big fan of having to grind everytime a patch/expansion comes out but I’m also not a fan of sitting at endgame aiming at skins for character progression.

They did change things the last minute. The game was going in a completely different direction and all of a sudden you have this post saying that in a few days the game will abandon horizontal progression for vertical progression.

If that wasn’t abrupt I don’t know what is.

P.S. can you please include the poster name when you quote someone? It’s difficult to follow the conversation when all you quotes are anonymous. Thanks.

Bonefield.9813:

First off, most of the ArenaNet employees are on holiday for Thanksgiving. This is right after many of them worked over the weekend on the event, which, considering how it went, had to have been pretty stressful. They did respond, several times, with the last communication being a promise that next week they’ll have information for us on their plans. I don’t begrudge these real people their personal time off to spend with their families because I’m upset about a video game, and my opinion is that anyone who does needs to get their priorities straight. I’m willing to wait for next week to see details, since any misunderstandings they didn’t have the time to work out now would only fuel speculation and possibly fury over the next few days, when they don’t have time to respond. Even something as simple as, “We’ll be addressing your concerns about Ascended gear” would most likely be seen as a promise by some to remove it and an indication that they weren’t denouncing it strongly enough by others.

Second, the OP never says that s/he’s in favor of Ascended gear, and in fact talks about what we can do to give constructive feedback so that ArenaNet will adjust their plans. I’m very much against Ascended gear. I’m sure other people in here are too, and we’re also trying to open up communication with the developers. The point the OP is trying to make is that it’s a two-way street: we can’t expect full and open communication if everything ArenaNet says is met with hostility from those who aren’t pleased with their exact wording or level of boot-kissing.

The replies we got were generic and didn’t address any of the many points the community articulated in the mammoth post that got eventually closed. Many of which were constructive and offered suggestions on ways to deal with the ascended gear problem.

Things went downhill from there because the core of the problem remained totally ignored. Even in his last post, Chris Whiteside refers to the many technical problems they experienced during the event, while gracefully overlooking the ascended gear dissatisfaction that grew rampant on the forums.

You didn’t issue any manifesto, you didn’t change the game, I didn’t give you any money based on your design phylosophy, yet I’m here arguing with you instead of ArenaNet.

I stay my case: those who haven’t anything meaningful to say about the problem should stay on the sidelines and let those who have try and communicate with ArenaNet.

There is something I really don’t understand.

Those of us who dislike ascended gear, are trying to establish a communication with ArenaNet. We aren’t trying to argue with other players, we just try and make our concerns heard by those who have the power to change things.

Furthermore, the reason of a lot of anger is that ArenaNet failed to even aknowledge the very existence of our negative feedback, which is something that those companies who value their customers usually do.

This is where those players that don’t disllike the changes come in and make things worse because they basically try and delegitimate those who are upset, while they could just leave us alone in out attempt to start a debate with the devs.

If you guys who accuse us of having spoiled the forums are really so concerned about the community and the atmosphere on the forums, why are you throwing gasoline on the fire, instead of staying on the sidelines and wait?

Why can’t you guys be a little more empathic and say “OK I see where you are coming from. Personally I like the game better how it is right now, but it’s a fact this is a direction nobody would have expected after what was said in the manifesto.”

You preach the union of the community, yet you play ArenaNet’s advocate while forgetting they are the ones who don’t communicate with us on the matter, making things much worse.

Gehenna.3625:

Urxx.6840:

This post shows contempt rather than a genuine desire of a better communication. And nobody is going to take you seriously after you have told them to grow up without even knowing anything about them and their personal evolution.

Or, in other words, it creates an environment which is hostile for communication, blatantly contradicting your own stated intentions.

I suggest you follow your own advice.

But I am the customer and they are the company. As much as you are right (and you are) about there being many stabs in this post of mine, the point is that it’s a choice for a company to show customer service or not. It is not up to the customer to start building a bridge but it is up to the company. They are trying to sell a product or service.

What do customers think when they do not communicate or in ways that ignore the customer’s reaction? And that is what is in my post, as you noticed.

I really mean it. I do wonder what Anet thinks about communication with their customers, because I really don’t get it.

Sorry I wasn’t more clear, my post was directed to the OP.
I edited it for clarity.

Agenteusa.6380:

SWTOR’s downfall was indeed scamming. What triggered(although I’m sure it isn’t the only reason) it was the descisions on the inclusion of ranked pvp. They announced it would come in patch X and players resubbed and at the last minute they said it wasn’t ready. That is scamming because players payed to play content not delivered to them in the due time.

I really don’t see why you consider that very different from here. They said there wouldn’t be vertical progression, poeple purchased and at the last minute they said they’d add a new tier of gear.

The only real difference I see is that you disliked ranked pvp in SWTOR while you are fine with vertical progression in GW2.

I wouldn’t call that being objective.

OP, your post shows contempt rather than a genuine desire of a better communication. And nobody is going to take you seriously after you have told them to grow up without even knowing anything about them and their personal evolution.

Or, in other words, it creates an environment which is hostile for communication, blatantly contradicting your own stated intentions.

I suggest you follow your own advice.

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

You all have already made at least somewhat of an impact. As of this morning, across all servers, 4 are full, 3 are medium and the rest are high population. There are still plenty of people playing and enjoying the new content though.

If the numbers showed a larger scale of people leaving the game (a mass exodus), then I could see ANet changing it back to the old system. If, however, the new system brings in and retains more players than it loses, it would make financial sense for them to keep the new system in place.

It doesn’t change the fact that some of you are upset over what you see as a direct contradiction to their manifesto. The question is: where there enough of you who didn’t want end game progression enough to keep the game going over the long haul? I think a lot more people reached level 80 and left because there wasn’t the type of end game content that they expected than there were people who were just happy to explore and grind for cosmetic skins.

I highly doubt the server status shows how many players are actually online at any given time, but rather how many accounts have that server as a home server. Otherwise it should mean that concurrent accesses are way higher now than they were at launch, which is quite unlikely.

XFire and other similar sites show a big decline in players online since then. The very decline I suspect lead ANet to introduce ascended gear.

Also, I can’t speak for others, but personally I’m not posting to boycott the game’s success. I don’t want a dead game with horizontal progression, it wouldn’t help anybody.

All I want is to push ArenaNet to talk MEANINGFULLY with that part of the player base who thinks that the manifesto was a good idea and all GW2 needed was more endgame content and not a new tier of gear.

Kimbald.2697:

Truth is that foriums are a limited form of feedback, but at the same time they are the most clear form of feedback.

Also, if ArenaNet wants to make the point that the forums aren’t a reliable form of feedback because they don’t necessarily represent the whole community, then this should’ve also been true of the feedback about the “legendary wall” problem which led to the introduction of ascended gear.

Either the forums are reliable as a mean to survey the community’s stances on various issue, or they are not.

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

There’s nothing wrong with leaving your constructive feedback on the forum when you leave. I encourage you to do so as it helps the developers make a better game.

The problem is people are leaving their constructive feedback on why they left and then repeating it over and over for days and days until the rest of us feel like our forums are being held hostage by them.

There is a practical impossibility to tell who has actually left the game, since there isn’t a monthly fee and unless someone asks for a refund (in which case their account is deactivated and I doubt they can still post), someone could have materially stopped playing but is still a customer with a right to voice his/her opinions.

Besides this, I understand where you come from, but I think you guys should try and switch your point of view a bit.

The reason we keep posting is ArenaNet hasn’t even aknowledged the existence of our negative feedback, let alone saying they are doing something with it. So we keep repeating things because it’s the only way we have to let them know that ignoring our feedback is not making us magically accept their new direction or get accustomed with it.

We want them to know that, if they want to settle things, they have to confront us honestly and not ignore us. And since there isn’t a subscription we can cancel to give them a clear message, either we keep posting our dissatisfaction or we actually forget about this game and move on.

Which is something some of us are not prepared to do just yet, and ArenaNet should thank us for that.

Neoeve.5461:

now that i think of it, i made a thread back when the new big patch was annonced, i was happy with the changes thinking i would have fun, but now i see, it’s the community that ruined it, everybody is just fractals and fractal level limits are starting to appear(if you’re level 2 it’s hard to get a party since everybody wants higher)….i want to do something else and i’m not able.

The community is just reacting to the changes. What you describe is people loving freedom and variety playing less and less, and people obsessed with loot and power incresing their share in the game population.

The community behaving in a certain way is a reaction to bad design.

It’s up to the devs to encourage social behaviors and discourage pidgeon-holing.

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

The forums are for the people who still play the game, not for those who have left the game for whatever reason. The problem is, the second type of people are still on the forums spewing their hatred for the changes in the game. This makes it a hostile environment for those of us who do still play this game.

Again, this forum is for those who DO play the game. If you don’t play the game anymore for whatever reason, please move elsewhere. Thank you.

What you call “spewing hatred” I call giving feedback. The difference between you and me is that you are trying to silence me while I haven nothing against you posting.

Especially if you manage to be more constructive than you have just been.

Kana.6793:

Still playing every day, same as usual.

Then you are OT. This thread is specifically about those who are playing less and their feedback on the reasons. This could actually be helpful to the devs, if it stays clean.

If you want to state that you are playing exactly like before open a new thread about that.

slazzy.7309:

Urxx.6840:

What does the ToS have to do with all this? Nobody is saying they don’t have a legal right to change their game.

This is a problem of trust. Lying in most instances is not illegal (unless you are a witness in a trial or something to that extent), yet I don’t think you would trust somebody after they lied to you.

As someone else already pointed out, a MMO is a long term time and money investment, and you don’t invest in something that has an uncertain future because you can’t trust the company that sets the rules anymore.

The ToS has everything to do with it. You should expect them to change. And what did they lie about. What specifically.

If they said: “we promise we will never under any circumstance add any type of stat increase to a piece of gear above exotic and legendary ever” are they lying if they do? Or did things change? And why did they change?

“Well, we added some progression so players would have something to do. Many were asking about it. So we implemented something to help improve. "

“But..but you promised you wouldn’t, you promised!!” “You lied to us all!” “You said you wouldn’t, you said!”

When do the temper tantrums stop, dude? At what age?

Maybe you’re lying to yourself. Maybe that’s the lie.

Usually those who respond to the points made instead of getting all personal and trying to depict the counterpart as a whiny kid are more believable and constructive.

Nobody here is opposing change per se. I think it’s pretty obvious to everybody that an MMO is ever evolving in nature.

Still, if you don’t want your game to become a mess, its evolution should follow a direction. In the case of GW2, the direction was stated in the manifesto. I don’t even want to get caught in the semantics game and analyze every single word of it.

It was pretty clear that the stated DIRECTION of the developement and evolution of GW2 was to privilege horizontal as opposed to vertical progression.

The stated intention was to cater to those who were sick of grindy games. People bought GW2 specifically for that.

Now the direction has changed.

Had they said: “hey look, we really wanted to hold true to our manifesto, but unfortunately our game was losing players like it had 25 stacks of bleeding on it, and we were forced to change things.”. Those who are here bacause of the manifesto would have at least felt they were respected and not lied to.

The way they have handled the whole thing is way different: the manifesto is now toilet paper, vertical progression is now a reality, but they managed to deny that the introduction of more powerful gear is in fact vertical progression, like we were complete idiots.

You are welcome to accept to be treated like an idiot by a company, but you should understand those who don’t.

My reasons are similar to yours OP.

Recently I helped my fiancee with her alt a bit, but we are both disappointed by ArenaNet and the new direction. We feel the game is now on rails and everybody is in Lion’s Arch doing FotM over and over again.

What was a free and rich experience before is now less and less appealing.

I come to the forums a lot more than I used to. Before I was ingame playing and posted very little, now the game doesn’t attract me all that much, so I come here hoping I’ll hear something meaningful from ArenaNet that can restore my faith in them, even though I know perfectly it’s not likely to happen.

I met my fiancee in GW1 7 yers ago. So you can imagine ArenaNet devs felt a bit like family to us. I know this is a personal detail and you guys couldn’t care less, but I think it’s menaingful because it shows what kind of demographic they have managed to disappoint.

If anything we would err on the fanboy rather than the hater side.

OP, I’m one of those who disliked the recent change in direction very much.
I’m here to voice my concerns because I think ArenaNet hurt us and themselves with the new tier of gear.

I think this and only this is the place to voice our discontent, not the game. I play less and less, but when I do play, I try to be nice to other players and I leave my disappointment behind.

So, if you don’t see any reason to be unhappy about the recent developments and still love the game, by any means log on and have fun instead of coming here and be depressed by what you read.

Let us have a way to try and be heard by the devs, while you enjoy GW2.

You know what? I actually envy you.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Not always, sometimes LA doesn’t have an overflow.

So it’s even worse than I thought. Sad.

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

My server is still Full. My server still has overflow. My server still has people in the starting zone and everywhere else. I got the Balthazar Cathedral armor for my mesmer today. ^-^

There are some threads saying the opposite and people complaining because a lot of areas are deserted.

Orr for instance is not designed to be empty. If players don’t go there, things become increasingly difficult and frustrating because of corrupted statues, contested waypoints, contested Arah (when it’s not bugged, that is).

Also, I’m pretty sure server status doesn’t reflect how many players of that server are online at any given moment, but rather how many accounts have that server as their home server. Which is a completely different thing. You might have zero players online and still see a lot of server as full because they have a lot of accounts on them.

About overflow, the only zone where I’ve seen an overflow recently is Lion’s Arch.

slazzy.7309:

“My theory is that Arenanet are adding this tier of gear specifically to fund future development of the game.”

Indubitably, my dear Mandrax. Indubitably.

You are trying to delegitimate the disgruntled crowd making us sound like our problem is that ArenaNet is trying to survive by earning money.

That’s not the case at all. Actually a lot of the same people who have been vocal against ascended gear were periodically buying gems for things they didn’t need as a voluntary way of funding the game.

No, the problem is that when they announced the cash shop they were very clear players wouldn’t need to spend real money in order to remain competitive.

But if the most powerful tier of gear in the whole game is out of reach for a large portion of the playerbase, how is that still true? Either they spend real money or they are cut off from ascended gear. If an ascended backpack costs 60+g to craft, how much will it be for a full set of armor and weapons?

With exotics that wasn’t the case. It was very easy to acquire them via crafting, karma, or whatever, even if you didn’t play a lot.

A lot of people bought the game specifically because of the no grind promise and the “only cosmetic things for real money” phylosophy. And now they found out that if you are a casual player, real money is your only chance to be on par with others.

slazzy.7309:

The problem I have is how many of you are trying to scare away players based on false assumptions. Violation of a manifesto? Read the ToS. They have the right to change the content and nature of the game to their liking.

What does the ToS have to do with all this? Nobody is saying they don’t have a legal right to change their game.

This is a problem of trust. Lying in most instances is not illegal (unless you are a witness in a trial or something to that extent), yet I don’t think you would trust somebody after they lied to you.

As someone else already pointed out, a MMO is a long term time and money investment, and you don’t invest in something that has an uncertain future because you can’t trust the company that sets the rules anymore.

VOLKON.1290:

More ascended gear along the same tier. Similar stats, new skins, new infusions. It’s not that complicated. FotM ascended gear will be comparable to new ascended gear from the next dungeon, but there will likely be new infusions to go for. Instead of agony gear, maybe vampiric gear or something. Similar stats, different mechanic to account for.

Yes so a year from now if I want to be able to do all the difficulty levels in all the dungeon I’ll need a collection of infusions.

Please.

That’s just lazy design. Instead of finding a better way to continually increase the difficulty of these dungeons, they settled for gating mechanics that require a lot less work: adding some items which don’t even have a skin to their database as opposed to finding new and interesting dungeon mechanics that could scale with difficulty.

I hate WoW’s gear threadmill, but on the topic of making encounters interesting and challenging, ArenaNet has a lot to learn from Blizzard.

Hawken.7932:

Urxx.6840:

Hawken.7932:

The legendaries form a natural cap on item progression.

You could have said the same about exotics.

Hey, they won’t add anything more powerful than exotics, because legendaries are a natural cap.

A cap that gets moved up every time they want to add a new tier.

No, if they had moved the legendary cap, which they haven’t, then that would be true. As it is, they’ve only made a tier which bridged the gap between exotics and the top.

Unfortunately that’s not the case. You bought their “filling the gap” BS, but it’s just that, BS. There wasn’t any stat gap. They actually introduced a stat gap with ascended gear, which forced them to raise the cap on legendaries.

Lindsay Murdock:

You’ll also see more Legendary items in the future and an update to our existing Legendary weapons. Legendary items were always intended to be on par with other “best-in-slot” items. So fear not, all existing Legendary weapons, which are currently on par with Exotics, will be upgraded to be on par with Ascended weapons at the same time that we add Ascended weapons to the game.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

tkalamba.2541:

I said it was an ‘attempt’, by actively campaigning to write negative reviews solely because you do not agree with the game is an attempt to sway the opinions of others.

A lot of people are in fact giving very bad reviews on Amazon based on the fact ArenaNet has changed their phylosophy and they feel betrayed. But they aren’t doing so because they are Columba’s mindless zombies army.

They do so because they simply agree that what happened wasn’t ethical on ArenaNet’s part, and that was a move they didn’t expect.

Hawken.7932:

The legendaries form a natural cap on item progression.

You could have said the same about exotics.

Hey, they won’t add anything more powerful than exotics, because legendaries are a natural cap.

A cap that gets moved up every time they want to add a new tier.

tkalamba.2541:

Telling people to flood online review sites is an attempt to force an opinion on the masses.

Forcing is pointing a gun to a person’s head. Do you do something just because Columba says it’s good? I hope not.