Guild Wars 2

I’m actually satisfied with the skill system in place although I do not have much MMORPG games played in the past since I come from a mainly FPS background so I can’t say for certain about games like vanguard or GW1 and such having a better combat system which is as active/dynamic as GW2.

The weapon swaps/kits/attunements to me brought about another depth into the combat system and that’s inclusive of the traits and skills. That is, to determine which set of skills do I want to operate at that point of time and when should I swap them. It also helps in knowing your opponent’s weapon skills when combating them like knowing whether they’re a d/d or p/d thief or whether its a hammer warrior or a GS wielding maniac which is crucial to me in PvP in knowing what to anticipate so I can dodge, which skills to use my stun breaker on to avoid massive damage, etc.

When I first tried out elementalist, I was swamped with the decision as to which weapon was the best for my way of playing and had to test them out individually and experiment on the timing for swapping the attunement for the different weapons available and trying to find a good keyboard configuration for the attunements.

Of course, it wasn’t long before I realise I didn’t want to bother to move a lot of the keys to accommodate the attunement keys since I intended to switch between them frequently and also because I remembered why I don’t normally play magic caster professions in games which is their lack of visual appeal to me in the long run as fireballs are not as fun as slashing to me, so I went back to my melee warrior. (Coordinate a Death from Above attack with several warriors when defending a keep and you can see the invader’s morale in attempting to siege the keep lowered… against zerg pugs of course )

Definitely great fun. Don’t have anything much to complain about for the Halloween event besides some minor annoyances and preferences like wanting costumes being wearable in combat as I liked the witch outfit for my male charr that much to want to make it my armor.

Scavenger hunt was fun with doing it for the back item (wish its account bound so I can give it to my future necro alt XD) and those pToT bags; liked those in LA the most with the ring of fire and such so its too bad they removed it in a patch for exploits and people can’t experience it any longer.

The jumping puzzle was great for me, never had such a positive adrenaline rush for a long time in an MMO and the last I had was in BF3. Definitely worth all the time and effort it took for me to complete it and more. The mini-games were also interesting although I only did a few rounds of each because I was just too attracted to the jumping puzzle at that time.

The Act III dungeon was also a blast with my guildmates although a bug with a guildmate of mine not being able to join our instance dampen the experience a little at the start. Great time we had fooling around in the dungeon almost throughout the entire journey of it, dropping to our deaths and attempting to jump onto the hard-to-reach roots poking from the surface of the floating rocks.

I would have really recommended it to my friends if I had known the events they’re making were of this caliber. If only they weren’t so bitter about the hype from D3. Sure, I didn’t get anything note-worthy throughout the whole Halloween event as of now and occasionally face bugs but I still enjoyed it enough that it didn’t really irked me. Hopefully the future events will be as good if not, better than this Halloween event!

Haha indeed, one of the many fun of the puzzle is to see and hear the sound effects of people falling into the green while you’re still going strong or laugh even more because you got distracted by those and fell too.

Especially like it when the people who use speed buffs themselves just run straight across the platform and falling while I enjoy some free speed buffs.

Although its not something that will affect me since I’m free on that timing and will probably be present for that event but I still do agree with them that these one time event would only work if it actually did have separate servers for the different timezone but they don’t. Honestly, imagine for places with GMT+8 like Beijing, Singapore or Malaysia, it’s at an ungodly hour of 3 AM I believe.

Sure, it’s understandable that they’re attempting to please the majority while trying to keep to their game design philosophy and such but still, the minority of the players which I assume are predominantly the asian players that will basically be miffed by the odd event timing so they do have a valid complaint.

All I can say is good luck, hope they hear your complaint, if not for this event then, hopefully for the future events.

Man, when people give advice, think about it and not dismiss it like that. Esturk and the others are giving proper advice as I too would have pointed out those method of jumping even when using a charr and if somebody were to pause awhile and think about what they wrote, it would have made sense to almost everybody. Sure, its harder in practice but that’s what people are doing to get around this added challenge in this jumping puzzle.

It’ll be totally off-putting for some people including me if it was by default a solo instance and I can probably imagine people making threads saying the game ain’t encouraging community bonding and pointing at the solo instanced jumping puzzle Halloween event as an example.

I know someone who is good at playing the TP for gold and I respected him for that but he can’t do jumping puzzles for nuts but after some advice and trials he could eventually complete it.

Deified.7520:

Dominated it. Dont it about 20 times now. http://beta.xfire.com/video/5bc735

Now do it where you also get the ToT bags from the two chests in the jumping puzzle. Almost impossible I tell ya. XD

Charr Warrior
Human Thief
Asura Engineer

Did it a couple of times for each character. No speed boosts personally used. Rather funny to see people who use their speed boosts and just run straight off a platform.

The way I do the puzzles is to focus on the center of my screen rather than looking where my character is.

Whoa, I did not know it was a bug at all. Now that I’ve realised it, all that time doing WvWvW was just a waste of time.

Really hope its fixed, never changed server since day 1 and I’ve never had any of the bonuses apparently since I didn’t even know that mousing over WvW Icon will list the bonuses.

Edit: This can also be said for Guild bonuses. Occasionally, guild bonuses that are supposedly activated are not shown when hovering over the guild icon so I assume its also the same situation.

Same problem here, tried to do Caudecus Manor – Story Mode and the final part of killing 3 separatists is bugged.

Tried to do them again by allowing them to respawn but to no avail. Unfortunate experience for someone who rarely does dungeons. :/

Just wanted to share something funny that happened a few hours ago.

DB was knocking on the gate of our green tower while TC was stealthily eating up our wall from the other side. Back then, I was hoping the two would fight it out once they’ve realise that they were so close to each other however, besides a few stray skirmishes from both sides, there wasn’t any all out fight.

Of course, I didn’t stay to see what would happen next.

Jestunhi.7429:

It’s worrying how many people equate “groups are not required” with “ANet doesn’t care about social aspects”.

^ This. Besides actually requiring a party to complete contents due to the trinity required to beat those though mobs which I don’t count as social interaction, I’ve seen little to no content in other MMOs that is based upon urging social interaction between players besides some events like horse-racing and such which usually just become ignored because it’s not fleshed out properly. Partying to level up faster? That is in no way socialising but just a form of efficient levelling. Which is also true in GW2 since normal mobs don’t scale in amount of players so most content are cleared faster and you don’t even need to party to get that benefit.

I’m sure or at least believe that Anet will give us events/games to do which promotes socialising between the community. In fact, they already do but just not apparent/ fleshed out enough. Especially with the siege system, I can already imagine of some of the events that could utilise that functionality to make games out of it for the community to enjoy. Heck I can imagine making game similar to rugby if only there was collision detection between players. I honestly have not seen any game that came out with these kind of event already present at launch and usually they release it after the game’s been out awhile to keep the interest of the game going.

For grouping, sure forced grouping gives higher chances for conversations since people eventually get bored of partying and raiding in silence so they eventually start the conversation during the nth time in the instance or that cause it gets so “fun” that one mistake makes people start arguing and rage excessively. But hey, I do that too — the peaceful conversations I mean, when I’m observing the TP, waiting for DEs in Orr or sitting on a keep waiting for zergs to come in back when WvWvW was more relaxed and when it takes time for zergs to go from point to point.

Meanwhile since I’m on the topic a already, WvWvW in more competitive realms are exhausting, now its all "Trebs @?! Zerg coming in right flank @ ?! …. ok we’ve defended well, let’s take a break and fix that gate, get some siege to defend and get some more supp… MASS TREBUCHET BEING BUILT @?! LETS GO BRING IT DOWN BEFORE ITS COMPLETE! Wait.. looking at the zerg just now + arrow carts/ballista defending it, we can’t down it with our zerg… focus on fixing gate! Buy us some time! Let’s cap @?! instead while they focus on @?! and when its relax time, its because we are already got everything so why not take our time.. which only happened in that one week matchup between CD-BG-GOM while the rest is constant conflict between zergs of several sizes and their siege… yea it’s fun sure, but definitely hard to keep up for hours… just like real siege wars… love it so much and can definitely be improved upon like having ladders similar in mount and blade!.. time to play that now that I’ve mentioned it. lol

@Jestunhi for the previous quote
I agree its not anti-social to reject, just wanted to justify why some people do guild invites in that way and why we shouldn’t disregard the invite because of it. Now that I’ve read my post again, it does not seem to bring across my point at all lol.

The reason for this is that I got an invite into a guild through that method in a previous MMO I’ve played and it was great. Active and fun guild community and even won first in PvP tourneys although I’m not inside it but did practice with/against them for the tornaments. Just saying that it could be a good thing so we shouldn’t just ignore such guild invites.

Anyway for the topic on why, I believe positive social attitude will just only increase the community’s social attitude. If everybody’s mentality is, “He doesn’t chat, why should I try to socialise with him?” which I actually also do, then of course the gaming community will be more unsociable as its currently perceived to be since I assume from the start, gamers naturally tend to be introverts thus less likely to start a conversation although wanting to party up and socialise. I know I was an introvert in my younger days since all I did was play games (NES/PS1 era) and you know what made me more sociable besides being conditioned by school to be the active participators and taking initiatives in class? It was making friends who started the conversations both real life and eventually in-game and for me it was in FFXI which was my 2nd MMO.

So, basically what I want to bring across is, don’t ponder why gamers are unsociable, but instead be the gamer who socialise with them instead. So like if they invite you suddenly, send them a whisper asking why and such for info. If you see someone running by and you think you want to party up, call em out and hope they stop to listen and party up. If you’re already doing that then uhh… hope more people do it so it becomes a habit for the community cause I doubt they’re sociable in real life if they’re not in-game so I doubt its something some feature in GW2 can fix instantaneously. Although some features could be implemented into the game to better facilitate the socialising aspect of the game.

Ugh, I get so used to typing a lot for school that it becomes habitual.

@Logan
I agree that shared rewards are a positive thing. Never liked it in previous MMOs, people either party up to share the rewards or don’t and some even spontaneously throw derogatory remarks just because they got the mob.

Umbra.5180:

I must be antisocial.

Since I always decline guild invites that happen without a simple Hello..

Same with group invites from players I’ve never seen on screen and I look around, each time.

I believe these are the kind of habits that we should attempt to eliminate. Although I’m not sure what drives the mass of the people to reject invites besides being busy, not interested,being invited into a guild that you know mainly speak in a foreign language or just want to play alone all the way which is weird to me since it is a MMORPG and not an RPG, unless you bought an MMO just so you can show off things to people you obtained by playing solo.

For me, I usually accept group invites and often, they are people who were close by and have a DE that they required help in or they found the way to the puzzle and such. If it was some bullocks I’ll just leave the party then. I know I can just look for puzzles on the .net but that kinda dulled the feeling of finding it.

For guild invites, how I perceive it for those guilds inviting without chatting first is that those who invite usually are hesitant of opening up first especially towards a specific person even when its just through whispers. Based on my past experiences I believe that it demoralises the person to continue recruiting when no response is given although not substantial and even unnoticeable at first.

Finally, I agree that voice chat are becoming more of the way to go since it is accessible while in combat although it does require purchase of peripherals and setting it up for which most casuals won’t want to do.

I’ve encountered several occasions during my puzzle hunt and map completions of social people where we group up or just explore together to solve puzzles or vistas although usually it’d be a one time thing and you’ll rarely ever meet them again, maybe in Lion’s Arch sometimes.

With that said, I believe those map pings are one other advantage for being in a group. It sure does help players who needed a more precise location for entrances to caves which are hidden in every nooks and cranny of an area.

I wish those map pings work for the whole map rather than just parties tho I can foresee ping spam in the entire map if they do.