I agree with this – the font gives the game a very generic feel. Every other aspect of the UI and UX seems to have been given significant thought – perhaps the ability to at least modify the colors?
Wars have been OP in PVE since beta, it’s so much easier to level a GS war that just about anything else. The traits are straight forward, they’re not terribly gear dependent when leveling, and the damage is higher than most (things die faster).
Just to help provide some clarity on this, we’ll be releasing within the next couple of weeks a high level summary of our big plans for the first half of 2013 to help provide more transparency into our plans with the game going forward. This will include providing more details about our goals for the game, information about the stories and features that you’ll see in the Jan/Feb/March releases.
To set expectations accordingly, the January release will be a relatively small release that sets the table for the stories and features we plan to roll out with the Feb/March releases and beyond. Also, there will be no new race, profession, or new region with these larger Feb/March releases. One of our major goals with these releases is making our existing world as strong as possible, ensuring there are reasons to go to all the locations in the world we’ve already built, and strengthening the core game we’ve provided. In saying this will be an expansions worth of stuff in these releases, we’re talking about the number of new features that will be rolled out across PvE, WvW, and PvP in early 2013, which usually you’d only find in an expansion for a traditional MMORPG.
More details and specifics to come in the next couple of weeks, but I hope that helps provide some more insight into what to expect at a very high level.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high for anything in the immediate future.
In the context of the GW2 storyline, it would go against the sense of self-preservation to be evil – to cut to the logical conclusion it would be faster for those characters to simply jump off a cliff. Perhaps they did that… and they did it in Orr… hence all the Risen.
That said, there are nuances of profiteering and those taking advantage of the chaos.
I don’t feel so much like a hero as I do like a regular schlep.
I hate that it happened, but this is one of those things where it pays to slow down and click carefully. I don’t think a refund option is the answer – don’t want to encourage test driving, but a better confirmation dialogue might have mitigated the issue.
I solo just fine in Orr. I usually try and pull 4 at a time with my greatsword/hammer build, and rarely die. a smart build and a little skill goes a long way in this game.
Same. And if a couple more come I handle it – but I also take a moment to make sure there aren’t any roaming packs I’m going to agro while doing it, and that I’m not moving in an area with a fast respawn.
I tend to take on veterans one or two at a time though.
Boring isn’t the term I’d use – but I would say the quality of life on Orr is severely lacking. Soloing isn’t very efficient, and travel is pretty brutal both in terms of cost and hassle.
I really enjoyed this quest – and all that have come since.
I went in as a mesmer and didn’t have any trouble at all. There were a few intense moments, but I let the NPCs do most of the tanking – as well as a bit of kiting.
If anything they might increase the recommended level a bit – but I thought the difficulty was spot on (no wipes).
Anyone have any tips for getting back above the world?
At least two or three times per evening, I find myself phase retreating under the world, with no viable way that I can find to return short of paying the WP cost.
Closest WPs always seem contested, and I’m spending 1-2s a pop when this happens – normally during an event (worst possible time).
Since blink and phase retreat are unavailable for use underwater, I can’t get back the way I came.
If anything, this is going to be the first step towards an OSX native binary. If people don’t use it, or interest is ‘meh’, odds are any further development in this direction is going to be limited.
Enoch explains it pretty well – performance is a matter of hardware and overhead more so than the OS (being part of the overhead). That said, GPU driver support may be better in Windows, leading to some performance gains.
Either way this allows me to play a bit at the office, as bootcamp’s not an option and Fusion is too much overhead.
eve is a tour de force.
but its not for everybody.
endgame wise, they nailed it.
personnaly, i prefer to switch game once in a while.
and gw2 it is for now.
EVE is the greatest game ever conceived – until you play it…
That the whole thing runs on a once-a-second server tick (in space) is highly annoying once you notice it. As is grid-fu.
That said, if you can get past the initial few months, it makes an excellent hobby, it had me from late 2005 until just recently. Thankfully GW2 is a game, not a lifestyle.
Not to be oppositional, but I absolutely love the minimalist theme of the GW2 web content and can think of no meaningful way in which it could be improved.
“If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason—it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time.”
Now the game is live we get penalized THREE times.
1. Cost of Armor repairs
2. Cost of Way point travel
3. Reduction in downed state health, so we have less time to recover each time
I wonder what changed?
Hopefully it’s just a matter of gathering more feedback and data – the current system is flawed.
The system appears to be designed in such a way that would assume you are never soloing content, but rather in a group at all times. And for players that play that way, there won’t be an issue.
But for anyone soloing, or working through the less populated areas – it’s an unfun scenario when it occurs.
It’s meant to be un-fun. You just lost. If you’re not feeling penalised in some way then what’s so great about winning? The only time I find the system particularly annoying is when I die for a stupid reason, like a mob pushes me back and I go flying off of a cliff to my death, or the mobs respawn in 30 seconds and I get mobbed by mobs and have no chance at escape (though I need to learn to turn around and RUN more often).
It’s easy to make back the money lost on repairs and using WPs. Takes only a few minutes if you just grind some mobs down. As an elementalist, I suspect that I have the most difficult class to solo with, and so I die a lot. Yet with a few exceptions, I feel I always had the chance to either win the fight or to get away with my hide intact. So I take it as a learning experience and improve. The small penalty combined with a mostly challenging and doable game results in a very satisfying experience.
If you really don’t want to ever have to pay for WPs, then wait to be revived. Stay in common areas. Or just find yourself a friend. There are plenty of people out there. Or you could stick with WvW where waypoints are free. If you don’t want to repair your armour, try replacing it! If you die only a few times a level, you should be able to find replacements quite easily.
You’ve got many options to get around the very small penalties applied to you upon death. Feel free to use them.
I’m reading a bunch of work arounds that don’t address the root of the problem.
Yes, I could do any one of these things – and the amount of silver I’ve lost to WP’ing around is surely still less than a single Gold. However, it stands apart as something that doesn’t fit into the flow of the game, as an unnecessary tax on something that’s taxed to begin with.
As for waiting to be revived, most of the higher zones (short of Orr) aren’t that well travelled, and if I’m waiting for a random stranger I’m not playing.
What it boils down to is this: it’s currently an inconvenience. If the amount of inconvenience in the game surpasses the amount of fun, it becomes a moot point and you won’t have to worry about reading my posts.
It’s a different game for sure – and has taken some getting used to.
I prefer GW2 over WoW currently, but I wouldn’t put it in the same boat as Vanilla or TBC. It’s a sum of the little things in WoW that made it so appealing, there was a sense of permanence to the character as they developed.
This is all but lost on WoW’s current iteration, but it was pretty much magic while it lasted.
“If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason—it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time.”
Now the game is live we get penalized THREE times.
1. Cost of Armor repairs
2. Cost of Way point travel
3. Reduction in downed state health, so we have less time to recover each time
I wonder what changed?
Hopefully it’s just a matter of gathering more feedback and data – the current system is flawed.
The system appears to be designed in such a way that would assume you are never soloing content, but rather in a group at all times. And for players that play that way, there won’t be an issue.
But for anyone soloing, or working through the less populated areas – it’s an unfun scenario when it occurs.
Moving to the right seems normal however when strafing forward/left causes the character to appear to moonwalk backwards to the left (while moving forward to the left).
Dying should not be punished so much (in terms of silver) so I think the nearest waypoint should be free if you have died
discuss
Dear OP… The death penalty is largely laughable. Ok so you lose a little money.
Would you rather this game reinstate the old “corpse run”? I don’t know how old of a player you are, but I used to hate having to run back out into the world to find where I died, so I could loot my own corpse. In SWG it was even worse because I was naked (underwear), so everyone knew I had died. Talk about the walk of shame.
Really guys? Death isn’t punished nearly as much in GW2 than in many other games.
Even the point in dying is to take note that you A) are not good enough with your character, you’re in areas that are way out of your league, C) you aggroed too many enemies at once, etc… To die is to LEARN something and do it differently next time. If death wouldn’t be penalized at all, anyone could make progress just by dying from one enemy to the next untill all were dead. And I’m pretty sure that’s what neither you nor the game developers consider ‘fun’.
I think that the cost should stay where it is or even be increased.
I think this is an excellent suggestion if you want people to get frustrated and burn out quickly.
Waypoint cost in general is too high, having to waypoint upon death across the map because the closest waypoints are contested – and thereby having an additional tax on the tax is asinine and falls past the ‘is this fun?’ category fully into the ‘this is BS!’ category.
Victory via attrition is more or less the order of the day in dungeons and no, it’s not fun.
Well dang, I shouldn’t have uninstalled XFire I guess then. Sorry, I just didn’t want it running in the background when it really didn’t have anything to offer me.
I accept the blame.
If Xfire can be used as proof of GW2’s decline, it can by extension be used as proof that more people play GW2 than WoW?
Edit: Hint – the graph indicates how many hours people are playing on average. 4 hours a night is a pace I can’t maintain, but it will settle between 1 and 3 over time.
I agree on the feeling of victory through attrition – especially when it comes to graveyard zerging. It doesn’t feel very epic to bring a boss down if you died and ran back 3x during the fight.
But the game is young, and I do think a soft trinity will begin to develop as time goes on.
I anticipate that graph looking something like the profile of a pregnant woman. An initial bump (boobies) of players at launch, a decrease as the early adopters wash out, followed by a more traditional bell curve of the games life cycle.
Time will tell of course, but anecdotally speaking this game has delivered at a level miles above anything else to launch in the last few years.
How about free WP travel once per hour?
This would discourage willy nilly waypoint usage without imposing a financial burdon on taking care of business in LA once in a while.
WP travel to LA should be free
As in free from the cost of two loading screens.
If you’re playing for loot you’re playing the wrong game.
So loot as a means to progress my character is not possible in Guild Wars 2…is that that your agreeing with?
How you progress your character is between your chair and your computer, not some arbitrary loot with higher numbers,
I disagree. In the context of progression being that under which I am progressing through the content of the game if I’m not replacing my loot about every ten levels I have a hard time soloing. It may be that my chosen class (mesmer) is more gear dependent than others, or it could simply be that better/more of my primary stats make me more effective.
To that end, I don’t run dungeons for the gear but for the experience, but likewise it would be ‘flavorful’ for certain bosses to drop certain items.
Dungeons in GW2 feel like actual dungeons – I think what people are missing is the ad hoc ‘run and gun fest’ that say WOTLK heroics presented. My experience so far has been that dungeons in general take a bit longer that what I was expecting, and are somewhat over tuned in the context of a undeveloped character.
The end result is that dungeons are merely part of the journey, not a lifestyle.
Suggestions in no particular order – many of which have been repeated above:
Waypoint Costs: Currently too high – feels like a tax when trying to play with low level friends.
Character Selection: Hide Helm/Shoulders if they’re hidden in the character sheet.
Tooltips: Add math/numbers/totals.
Underwater Combat: Isn’t fun, I feel weak to the extent that I’d rather drag the mob onto land every time.
In-Game Support: Option to “use current map location” to specifically point out invisible boulders as well as places likely to put you under the world. Likewise an option to note the current DE location/stage as problematic/bugged.
ESC Button: Don’t cause it to have your character stop running – just cancel target if there is one, and pull up the menu if not.
Clicking on Corpses: Let us click on a corpse even if we’ve already clicked on one – change the corpse target on click.
Player Level: Display the actual level when downranked.
Alternatively, they could scale all WP costs up to their current level 80 values, thereby discouraging (and by extension reliance on) their use entirely.
100% zone completion should permit discounted travel to/in that zone.
Costs should scale with level, or money earned from DEs/hearts should.
The WP to Lion’s Arch should be free – it currently comes at the expense of two loading screens instead of one.
Pumpkins, Jack-O-Lanterns, and candles in towns would be great for Halloween. Maybe even a holiday event where Champions roam about (like the devourer) one-shotting everything in their path.
Would be great to see a large Christmas tree in the center of Divinities Reach.
I strongly agree – waypoint costs are too high from about the 50’s on to the point that I can’t afford to play my high level character with low level friends.
Solution: Play with them on an alt.
Suggestions for the game mechanic:
* Have waypoints costs scale with zone level
* Discount waypoint costs for fully explored zones
* Have DE gold reward scale with level
you’re in areas that are way out of your league, C) you aggroed too many enemies at once, etc… To die is to LEARN something and do it differently next time. If death wouldn’t be penalized at all, anyone could make progress just by dying from one enemy to the next untill all were dead. And I’m pretty sure that’s what neither you nor the game developers consider ‘fun’.