Showing Posts For Vile Lasagna.1369:
Regardless of where they put the information, it should be easily accessible from all of these channels. Once a new patch is released, fine, let’s say full patch notes are only in the forums… But when I see my game downloading stuff I want to know what it’s about. The launcher should have a news item pointing us to the forum post with the patch notes, their facebook and twitter should also do the same: “New item in the gem store, event fixes in Kryta, and more on the newest GW2 patch! <link here>”
It’s important that this information is easy to access and know about. Even if it’s something small and irrelevant, like “A problem with the last patch, half an hour ago, caused one of the children in beetletun to spawn dead and untargetable. This quick fix is just to patch that”…
It’s all about reassurance. Right now we have a small patch like that and the feeling is like “Okay, which item I need has had its drop rate reduced this time?” And because the patch just comes, you can never be sure. Unless, MAYBE, if you dig the forums and it turns out there are notes for that patch there. But you, the player, have to stop and go out of your way to search for the information, with no guarantee you’re finding it even if you do
A lot of the game feels as if it’s in a limbo where designers couldn’t decide between A or B, tried to sort of compromise and ended up failing to service either end properly.
The situation with levels and scaling, imo, is one of these…. Back in GW, (Prophecies aside) once you finished the starter area, you were almost at lvl 20. You’d reach Kaineng or Kourna at like lvl 17. And the game very clearly started at lvl 20 because that’s what was expected of your character. GW2 stretched the levels (I could never find a good reason for this… still can’t) and we ended up having only two end-game areas, Cursed Shore and, later on, we got Southsun Cove as an update. We do have Frostgorge Sound and Malchor’s Leap as areas that “welcome us” to end-game, but that’s about it. The rest are scaled down, so that players can “progress through them”… except everything else in the game is designed to start at 80. You have loads of dungeons around.Except there is just no way you’re going to go there before 80. That lvl stamp is nothing more than a lie to the player. Those places are difficult, and that is good, that is excellent, imo. You need top tier equipment and all your traits and experience… that is very much end game content, but it is labeled otherwise.
So, what IS there to be done from levels 10 through 79? Not much that is productive, unless maybe you go to WvW or get a boss train like the old Queensdale train and power-level your character up… You can do map completion, you can do your personal story (but that one turns real bad starting with Battle for Claw Island, basically the time it stops being personal). Whatever it is that you do, it’s all just a wait for you to finally get to level 80, for you to finally have access to dungeons and Teqatl, and Karkas, for you to finally be able to get all your traits, for you to finally feel like investing in equipment is worth cause you’ll use it for more than a couple of weeks….
The game wants to tell us that it scales smoothly and that we have loads to do… but everything we do is just a waste of time because we’re waiting to unlock the relevant content.
Same situation with builds… So much is gone…. Some came back with trait changes, but that is one heck of a hydra. Your first character in GW2 can feel interesting and like a surprise. Starting from the second, you know how the game works. So you make your new character. You take ALL THAT TIME just to learn how the weapons work with your new class, having to kill things at random just to get your basic skills unlocked. Once you’re done, you decide to understand how the class works. You press H and go check your skills… but you can’t… before you level up and unlock them, you have no idea what they do. So you have very little idea of what kind of tactics are available to you. You go to trait tab… except you can’t even get there… What do my minor traits do? Is this weapon going to be viable for a condition build? You can’t answer any questions… nevermind not HAVING the traits, which is already very depressing as a player, you don’t even get the opportunity to fantasize with them… The game keeps telling you you have options but you’re not getting any. (not to mention all the grind that was introduced in just unlocking your traits now). At the very least, they dealt away with the abomination which was having to pay to re-specc your traits but then WHY can’t we save builds? It’s not like it takes long, sure, but why can’t we? Why can’t we easily show and tell, compare them, discuss, show a trait we just discovered in our class? This was such a huge part and as it HAS been maimed with utility skills being VERY much secondary in character, the vast majority of elites being fairly useless and weapon choice determining about 80% of your strategy… but where are the scraps we were left with? I want those scraps…I still treasure them above the vast majority of what this game came to offer me when all that was Guild Wars went away (Because, let’s face it. GW2 is not a sequel and that it is NAMED as one is merely a coincidence). But Anet gets stuck into telling me they’ve given me those scraps and presenting me with an empty basket.
This is why we talk about policies and honesty and transparency. I DID find many things I like about this game, but I can’t help but play it feeling deceived all the time. They tell me they still want no grind and put in a whole new tier of items which are better than what we had and cannot be bought or gifted, you have to grind for them yourself. Then they tell me they want to make traits easier and more meaningful and they make them harder to get. They tell me that we’re going to have this underwater thing and it’s going to be awesome. Breathers are hard to find, require a seventh rune, more weapons, bad camera and if you’re an asuran elementalist, you only have ONE choice of underwater elite.. and that’s a tier 2 elite, that’s your fiftieth skill point.
Hi, I’m “The friend”.
I think with equips, part of the disparity of opinions come from us being veterans from the original Guild Wars. And as such, there is a very clear disparity disparity between equipment with “the correct numbers” and absolute rubbish. I think it’s reasonable to stretch this a bit for GW2. Full Exotic is, imo, the base of comparison for any character. If your equipment is not exotic, it’s basically trash. Ascended equipment have better stats, this makes Exotics now, also trash. Because Ascended equipment is the one with the correct numbers. Even worse, they have a whole new class of upgrades. If you have any intentions of getting into doing fractals, you need them. So when Ascended exists, Exotics are now trash as well. But they’re the trash most of us can get.
And yeah, it’s not that there’s a gun pointed to our head that says we have to craft or gtfo, or we have to grind or gtfo. But if we don’t, it’s cool. We’ll just be locked out of content and have no option but to play with sub-par equipment.
Again, this could be a reminiscent of our experience with guild wars. “You’ve finished the tutorial! Congratulations! Now go get the grown-up swords and have fun!” and the difference between common and rare equipment was all in the swagger. A Tormented shield was no better, it was all about status. And this is still present in a way with legendaries. I look at, say, The Juggernaut and I WANT to put effort into getting that skin. But there’s the thing. I WANT that skin. And I need to level up my crafting to get myself ascended equipment because I don’t want to feel like I’m playing with a crippled character. Because that’s the bottom line. A character without access to “the proper equipment” is crippled, you’re locked out of content, out of “your character’s potential” because you haven’t put in the X hundred hours for that piece of equipment that makes you deal 10% more damage, have 10% more health….