Guild Wars 2

Yeah this event is pretty tragic. Not that I love the rest of that chain anyway, but that event felt like it went on way too long. It’s out of sync with the other events in that arc. It really needs to be looked at.

Do you use LFG to get to a populated map? Most of the time, if they’re doing the meta, it’ll be listed in LFG. Other maps are around just doing hero point trains, or just casual playing of events.

You can get to the meta, if you look for the meta. Don’t depend on just being in a random map.

Anet listens to everything I suggest. The trick to get this to happen is to make all your suggestions right after they implement the stuff you’re suggesting.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I’m of the opinion if you’re asking this question. . . ? You already know the answer. But I’m not getting into the debate about LFG, taxiing, and those other excuses.

No, Sir, not again, thank you.

I’m afraid I don’t understand this post.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

^ I had exactly that situation on Ley Line Run several times over. I gave it all I had to get that last second.

This highlights something that I think separates jps from adventures in terms of fun, at least for me. I enjoy jps because they don’t ..usually.. have that time pressure. Or it’s at least disguised more effectively. You get to stop and enjoy the scenery. You can choose to fight creatures, stealth past them or teleport. You have options.

Adventures take away your options and slap you with a blatant time limit. There’s no time to enjoy the view. No time to think of strategy. And no helping others. In fact, as someone pointed out, you’re often getting in others’ way. Jumping puzzles are bringing people together. Mesmers are porting people. There’s a sense of comraderie. Adventures are alienating people.

You might say adventures are the anti-jumping puzzles. Even when they involve jumping.

Actually it’s not entirely true. You can do adventures casually and sight see. You won’t get a mastery point, but then you don’t have to go for the mastery point.

For example, I never get a mastery point of the field test scrap item, well at least not till yesterday, but I had fun doing the achievement where you break all the eggs, without even trying to kill chak.

The experience is what you make of it.

Sometimes there are maps doing it, sometimes there aren’t. It’s not dead, though. I’ve caught it in the last few days, in the middle of the night. So people still do it.

You don’t need a full server to do it, either. Just coordination.

But you really do need to use LFG tool to find the server that’s organizing. Without organization, it’ll fail.

AliamRationem.5172:

WhiteKnight.6759:

Djinn.9245:

AliamRationem.5172:

Djinn.9245:

AliamRationem.5172:

The canopy in VB is always accessible to anyone with access to updrafts (bounce mushrooms are also recommended). You just haven’t learned your way around yet. The HP challenges themselves are far more difficult in AB. Most of them are champions where VB has only 3 champions out of 11 total HPs. AB HP champions are also a little tougher on average.

Explore a little more in maps like VB and especially TD before you make your final judgment. You might be surprised.

I have done all of the maps in HoTand I still think VB is a more difficult map to traverse than AB in general.

That’s what we call subjective information, or “opinion” if you prefer. It’s subject to interpretation and preference. As opposed to objective information, like the number of HPs that spawn champions in each zone.

You may personally have more difficulty navigating VB, but as I said that would be because you aren’t as familiar with the layout as you are with AB. If completing HPs is your goal, however, VB is objectively the easier zone (provided you don’t have an HP train, which would obviate the need for this discussion). A player with the requisite skills can far more easily complete more of the HP challenges in VB than they can in AB.

I had 100% map completion on TD long before I knew my way around it. I’m not surprised maps like TD and to a lesser extent VB still give players trouble after they complete them. I think that was partially the point: to present a true exploration challenge. And they succeeded beautifully in that!

Yep, the OP was opinion and I am expressing that I have the same opinion. The OP didn’t talk about Champions being an issue – that seems to be YOUR opinion. Apparently mobs are what you see as difficult while the OP is talking about navigation via Masteries and gliding skill. I can see why you disagree with the OP but that is a difference between your opinion and his.

I’m going to guess the difference is unlimited gliding. VB becomes a pleasure when unlimited gliding is unlocked. Before that it’s a puzzle.

If you like puzzles, you might like it. If you don’t like puzzles it’ll be painful.

Certainly advanced gliding is one of those obvious QoL improvements that nearly everyone is going to unlock. But the key to VB is finding the routes into the canopy.

If you know those routes well, then you know that you don’t need advanced gliding at all. The objectives are in easy reach of one or more of these routes.

I always feel bad for those guys you see in map chat asking when the choppers will arrive to take them up into the canopy. I have to show them the way!

I’m pretty sure I know all the ways to get to the canopy, but even without that, at any time in VB, just staying up there and getting from anywhere to anywhere is very very nice.

Sometimes I just glide around up in the canopy for no reason at all, except it’s beautiful up there.

Djinn.9245:

AliamRationem.5172:

Djinn.9245:

AliamRationem.5172:

The canopy in VB is always accessible to anyone with access to updrafts (bounce mushrooms are also recommended). You just haven’t learned your way around yet. The HP challenges themselves are far more difficult in AB. Most of them are champions where VB has only 3 champions out of 11 total HPs. AB HP champions are also a little tougher on average.

Explore a little more in maps like VB and especially TD before you make your final judgment. You might be surprised.

I have done all of the maps in HoTand I still think VB is a more difficult map to traverse than AB in general.

That’s what we call subjective information, or “opinion” if you prefer. It’s subject to interpretation and preference. As opposed to objective information, like the number of HPs that spawn champions in each zone.

You may personally have more difficulty navigating VB, but as I said that would be because you aren’t as familiar with the layout as you are with AB. If completing HPs is your goal, however, VB is objectively the easier zone (provided you don’t have an HP train, which would obviate the need for this discussion). A player with the requisite skills can far more easily complete more of the HP challenges in VB than they can in AB.

I had 100% map completion on TD long before I knew my way around it. I’m not surprised maps like TD and to a lesser extent VB still give players trouble after they complete them. I think that was partially the point: to present a true exploration challenge. And they succeeded beautifully in that!

Yep, the OP was opinion and I am expressing that I have the same opinion. The OP didn’t talk about Champions being an issue – that seems to be YOUR opinion. Apparently mobs are what you see as difficult while the OP is talking about navigation via Masteries and gliding skill. I can see why you disagree with the OP but that is a difference between your opinion and his.

I’m going to guess the difference is unlimited gliding. VB becomes a pleasure when unlimited gliding is unlocked. Before that it’s a puzzle.

If you like puzzles, you might like it. If you don’t like puzzles it’ll be painful.

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

AB fails due to lack of organization. You only need 10 people per side to beat AB. If it’s well organized and people explain stuff it never fails. I’ve done it a lot.

Edit: Out of curiosity do you look for it in LFG for the organized maps?

Well, I’ve been there and there just aren’t 10 people per side is what I’ve noticed. I am not familiar with this LFG group tool you mention. I’ve seen of course that it exists but haven’t really looked into it. Is this a cross server tool then?

AFAIK there aren’t servers anymore, at least not fixed servers.

The LFG tool is broken into categories. Open world content has a tab for each HoT zone, just open it up, click on the tab, and click on squad. You’ll find open squads for different things. Maybe a hero point run or maybe Tarir.

Join a squad. Go to the zone if you’re not already there. Then right click on any player in the squad that isn’t green (green squad members are already on your server) and choose join in Auric Basin.

This will take you to the map (server) that the event is happening on.

With AB it can be a bit confusing, because there are some squads that do multi-server, so there are six maps doing it at one time.

If you’re just randomly waltzing around maps, you may get a map that’s doing the event, but you may not as well.

You can do this for all the metas in HoT.

anninke.7469:

Yep, the ley-line loop is totally awesome! I sometimes spend minutes just going round-n-round and making “wheeeeeee” noises in RL to my boyfriend’s amusement (luckily he’s just as weird as I am)

If I ever find someone as weird as me, I’m going to marry them.

On topic: Bloodstone Fen is a great map…and it’s addictive too.

Dinks.2478:

WhiteKnight.6759:

Mirta.5029:

I do not like HoT and I’m happy that it is not netting a lot of money because:

- it destroyed dungeons
- it took away fractal rewards from everyone without the expansion
- it imbalanced PvP
- removed guild upgrades that guilds already had
- made the guild halls too much of a money and item investment for a small guild to ever be able to have it all
- went back on their promisses with the legenary weapons.

Full rant in my signature.

There’s a lot of truth here. The only thing I disagree with is the dungeon comment. I don’t think HoT destroyed dungeons.

But its not untrue that HoT destroyed dungeons, they only recently made dungeons rewarding again (and really not that rewarding still) and they still haven’t recovered fully from the damage that was done when anet neutered them into total wastes of time.

What HoT destroyed were people making a quick buck with a couple of dungeon paths. Because Anet abandoned dungeons 2 years ago, when they disbanded their dungeon team. They said back then Fractals were the 5-man content moving forward.

I do more dungeons now than I did pre-hot. I get to do different paths, because you need 8 different dungeons to get your five gold.

I never seem to have trouble finding people to run the dungeons I run.

What is true is that by making Fractals more profitable than dungeons, Anet has shifted the people running dungeons for gold to a different place. Dungeons are still there. Dungeons can still be done. Dungeons are still profitable.

Fractals, however are more profitable, and most people will go where the profit lies. Which isn’t to say that HoT kill dungeons.

The decision to kill off dungeons was made long ago, in a galaxy far away…well in Seattle, anyway.

Ashen.2907:

Solori.6025:

Vayne.8563:

Solori.6025:

Vayne.8563:

Aside from that the expansion launch was botched. Not the expansion itself. The expansion itself isn’t as bad as you’d lead us to believe, in my opinion.

I actually think the expansion wasn’t that great. No one ( in my opinion) likes to grind just to do content.
But that’s just me being bitter about that…still….

Vayne.8563:

Without knowing if sales would have been higher or lower without the expansion you have no argument.

I disagree.
The thing about the business world is that you don’t get second chances.
You dont get a “what if”

The sales before were higher before the expansion. We can all agree the numbers tell that fact. It is. indisputably. a fact.

The sales were at an all time low after the expansion.

Now that was 2015- All time low-
From 2012-2014 the numbers never got that low
But last year 2015
All time low.

You cannot say that it wasn’t because of HoT, not when the game was released in 2012 and the numbers NEVER got that low(according to the report) BEFORE HoT.

The numbers, the report, the sales AND the history pretty much point this on the release of this expansion.

There’s absolutely nothing to disagree with. This is factual.

You can’t know how well something would have done had you not done it. That’s my point..

And I agree, You will never know if something would succeed unless you do it. But if it fails, then it fails.

Vayne.8563:

That is to say without an expansion those numbers could be lower than they are now. There really is no way to know.

That’s a “what if”
The fact is, they released the expansion.
The numbers are in fact lower.
The expansion did not do well for the company.
That’s a fact.

Vayne.8563:

You can say the expansion launched and numbers went down. What you can’t prove is how much they would have gone down if the expansion hadn’t launched. It’s simply not provable.

I agree, but that isn’t the reality.
That is also not pertinent to the discussion at hand.
The expansion launched, the numbers went down.
Years before that, No expansion, the numbers stayed up.
That’s a fact. That can be proven with quarterly reports.
This expansion was not successful.
This is proven in this report.

Vayne.8563:

Edit: A baseball manager brings in a pinch hitter. He drives in 1 run. They lose the game anyway. That doesn’t mean if they hadn’t brought in that pinch hitter, they wouldnt’ have 1 more run than they ended up with. There really is no way to know.

Better analogy.
A baseball team has had a seasoned pitcher for 2 years
They havent lost a game.
The baseball manager decides he wants a new pitcher.
The lose the next game considerably.

Now. History has shown that the Veteran has had a higher success rate that the noobs.
Had the baseball manager kept the veteran in. There is a higher chance they would have won. History shows and validates that record.
But he didn’t. He chose the noob.
They lost because of his choice.

The noob pitcher pitched one of the best games of the team ‘s history allowing only a single run. But the team’s all-star hitters were down with the flu and the team didnt score a single run of their own. The noob pitcher outpitched the veteran’s record against the opposing team but still they lost because you cant win a baseball game without scoring and a pitcher doesnt do that. How was the loss caused by the manager’s decision to put in the noob?

Correlation does not mean causation.

Personally I dont doubt that the expansion influenced the revenue drop, but that is speculation, not fact.

It’s very rare for anything to ever have a single cause. Western thought tends to propel us into a fictitious idea of causation, but causation is almost always more complicated than most people like to think.

I think you’re right. The expansion probably had something to do with lower numbers. But was was one factor among many. There are probably a few major causes and dozens if not hundreds of minor causes, because game sales are a complex system.

Saying the expansion caused the problem is almost definitely wrong. So is saying the expansion didn’t cause the problem.

It’s only chapter one. Plenty of chapters in Living Story Season 2 that didn’t change the world at all, including the first chapter.

Blipp.5206:

WhiteKnight.6759:

Aidenwolf.5964:

I just want the legendary weapons I kittening paid for. They still haven’t delivered what they sold with HoT.

If they released the new weapons as drops not collections I’d be fine with that.

This.

Whether I make one or not really isn’t the point. If a company tells you they are going to deliver something, they should deliver it.

Really? So Nevermore and Astralaria was in the game before HoT? Or they are not legendary weapons, since you see Anet haven’t released any with HoT, according to you. Yes, new legendary weapons are currently not worked on, but that does not mean that we wont see any in the future, yet. Also, as far as I remember from interviews and reviews pre-HoT, they never actually stated -how- many new legendary weapons will get released.

@OP: What old system? Having to wait for a lucky drop or to grind gold to buy the precursor from the TP? No, thanks. Its way better now, when you have to actually do content and work towards a guaranteed precursor in the end.

Arenet said they’d provide a full set of legendary weapons, that would come out at short intervals. Their words, not mine.

Then Mike O’Brien said that they would putting the legendary weapons on indefinite hold, which for most people would read cancelled. There is no longer a team working on the new legendaries are all, even the four have been delivered.

By my count that’s only 25% of the legendary weapons that were supposed to come with the expansion. If you wanted a legendary sword or great sword, you’re just out of luck I guess.

Aidenwolf.5964:

Griffin.5379:

WhiteKnight.6759:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Thanks for selling me a BUY TO PLAY MMO then giving it away for free! You’ve tought me to never ride hype trains.

To be fair, there’s a whole lot of limitations on the free to play game. No daily log in rewards, so very very few laurels, only 2 character slots, not full access to the trading post, no talking in map chat at all, and limited ability to whisper people who aren’t on your friend’s list. Can’t use a guild bank. Can’t send money or items to people at all. It’s a pretty long list.

I see the free to play as more of an unlimited demo than a full copy of the game.

While WhiteKnight is right, you see that from a wrong perspective.
Point is, you brought a game for money x and played a lot of hours. Would you say that your enjoyment of the game was not worth the money you payed?
In my case, like with Skyrim where i dumped hundreds of hour into, was way way more worth than my original purchase price, the same goes for GW2.
(I think for a Gamer there is just one important calculation: spend money / time of enjoyment)

Offering the game as F2P now only causes more people to play who did not want to take the risk of buying the game and not enjoying it at first, people who were not on the hype train.
End result is, a lot more people playing the game who would otherwise not play.
And for an MMO, the more people the better.

After your logic i have to be kittened about any game I bought for a high price that got cheaper over time. Or were on a sale somewhere, sometime.(Hint: that’s about any game).

So,
Thank You ArenaNet for turning most of the base Game F2P, so our community grows, and you get more people probably buying the game, thus earning more money, thus being able to make the game better.

And they make less money now than before FTP. Thanks for giving GW2 away? I’ll never understand some people, GW Factions still isn’t free and they don’t even support that game anymore.

Guild Wars 2 went free to play August 29, 2015. Seems to me they made more money till this quarter. I’m not sure why you’d draw some sort of correlation there.

The only one I care about is the Rit. Man, I loved my Rit. Not because it was OP, but because it just looked so cool. Those spirits straining in their chains! ZOMG!

Aidenwolf.5964:

I just want the legendary weapons I kittening paid for. They still haven’t delivered what they sold with HoT.

If they released the new weapons as drops not collections I’d be fine with that.

This.

Whether I make one or not really isn’t the point. If a company tells you they are going to deliver something, they should deliver it.

Zelanard.5806:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Oh, is that what you were asking for. I couldn’t make heads nor tails out of your previous post.

Yeah. Shrines we could kneel at and get boosts would be cool. However since the lore says the gods have left Tyria to itself I don’t see how it would work. Either they’re around and they can give boosts or they’re not around and they can’t.

The gods left according to the lore, way before the events of gw1 during the exodus of the gods… We have racial skills that call their power as it is. that they gods left only means that they left In Person.

Edit: Thus, after the events of gw1, the only thing that makes the gods be less essential, is that we have abandoned them, not the other way around. :P

At the end of Nightfall, the gods told us that we were on their own in the cut scene at the end of the next to last mission. That was long after the exodus.

Aidenwolf.5964:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Aidenwolf.5964:

HoT and FREE TO PLAY! Did not in any way increase revenue for Anet or their parent company NCSoft. The game made less Q2 2016 than at any point since launch.

Since we’re talking facts, this statement is factually incorrect.

Q4 15 revenue was up by something like $15M over the median revenue of the prior 3 quarters. Q1 16 revenue was up by a significantly lesser amount (~$8M) over that same median. There is no reason to believe that that is attributable to anything but HoT sales. So, while NCSoft did indeed state that PFF conversions to paying customer were disappointing, HoT itself did increase revenue. By ~$23M.

If you look back at the game’s financial history, this is not the first revenue decrease which occurred associated with a dearth of new content . Also, as the game has aged, there has been a general downward progression in revenue with up-spikes here and there. The most significant spike up (percentage-wise) was in Q4 15, with HoT launch. This downtrend is in the latter stages of a lengthy content drought, preceded by an XPac, which was preceded by a similarly long content drought.

What you’re trying to do is to blame this past quarter’s revenue decrease on HoT. I don’t believe we can point to one factor and say, “That’s it!” Was HoT a factor? For some people, sure. But was it the nature of the content, the price point, the perceived low volume of content, the perceived “screwing” of veterans by linking core? I think it’s fair to say that all of those had an impact. It’s also fair to say that 2 lengthy content droughts had something to do with it.

It’s fine for you to look at the game with bias because you dislike both HoT and PFF. However, bias tends to distort perception. It can also lead to erroneous statements, such as, "HoT … did not in any way increase revenue for Anet or their parent company NCSoft."

Did NCSoft make more money from the GW IP in Q2 2016 than they did in Q2 2015? No.

Now speaking for myself, as a consumer who owns a GW2 Collector’s Edition, every GW game, and has next to his monitor a stack of GW2 gem cards as a reminder of what I’ve spent on this Buy to Play game…

Free to Play, the overpriced xpac, and the absolute shift from casual non-MMO to wannabe hardcore MMO ruined the IP for me. I’ve always been critical of Anet since they removed unid dyes from harvesting in 2012. I smelled a cash grab and called them out. I hated the ascended gear that ran counter to what we were sold. They as a company have never lived up to the promise that was Guild Wars 2.

Why did this bother me? Because I genuinely believe this could have been an elite MMO, and they’ve constantly shot themselves in the foot trying to grab the low hanging fruit of gem sales.

The 19 minute mark of this video is when they killed GW2. Notice how MO brings up the 40 “Free” updates to GW2 almost as if he’s promising that with HoT. Then he gives my game away. I don’t play FTP games.

https://youtu.be/veJMHxgUGxM

You’re right, this game didn’t make more money year on year in the same quarter. A skeptical person might think that maybe games do make less money when they’re a year older. I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to say that that’s the case.

I think the pro and the con teams have their points.

On the side claiming HoT hurt Guild Wars 2, I don’t think anyone can gainsay that. HoT has obviously hurt the brand. It wasn’t well-received. It didn’t live up to expectations. It didn’t even deliver everything it promised to deliver. That’s a failure.

On the other hand, the game was already getting old and stale long before HoT. Not enough content updates. A bunch of excuses to rerun content for rewards, because there was no new content coming out.

I think the game was already in decline before HoT, and HoT boosted it for a couple of quarters. But HoT was a small expansion that they overcharged for. So it didn’t sell well and the residual ongoing effect is that it didn’t keep profits flowing long term.

This company has squandered an opportunity with the expansion, no matter how you slice it. But the downturn in sales is probably caused by more than just an expansion that didn’t hit the mark.

The game is getting older. It’s just not so shiny anymore.

Test.8734:

WhiteKnight.6759:

This is a really fantastic example. I guess the only question I’d ask about it is what’s the speed at which Arena Net could have introduced enough new content to make a difference, compared with the speed at which they could have implemented ascended gear?

Considering how three years after the release of Guild Wars they had already released Factions, which was nearly as big as the original game, plus another chapter in Nightfall, plus some other content such as the Bonus Mission Pack and Sorrow’s Furnace, plus one expansion, and had already began working on GW2…

If they wanted, they could have released far more than the couple new maps we have right now.

Oh cool! I didn’t know that.

Test.8734:

Vayne.8563:

Have a great night. I won’t be responding again.

C’mon. We both know that, sooner or later, yes you will. In fact, the post following yours is a great example:

Tachenon.5270:

Stark.1350:

Alright, I’m going to ask everyone in this thread a very simple question.

Say ascended armor was made much easier to obtain. Say it only took a month to complete “challenging content” to fully deck out your character.

With nothing else to work towards, yes or no – would you get bored with the game?

No. Having all my guys in the best available gear would not make me bored with the game. What will make me bored with the game, and has has made me bored with the game previously, is the lack of new things to do with my characters. I want more quests/missions/stories (and big, sprawling, fully-decked out zones in which to experience them). Those things will keep me going indefinitely. Especially if there’s enough of it so that there’s some variety along the way for each new character.

Imagine it’s 2012. Guild Wars 2 was released a few months ago, but now the number of players is falling. ArenaNet is discussing it at their offices, and they ask: “Players are leaving! What should we do?”.

Stark’s reply would have been: “Players are leaving because they don’t have enough to grind! Let’s give them more stuff to grind for!”. That’s what we got in GW2: ascended gear and Fractals.

Tachenon’s reply would have been: “Players are leaving because they don’t have enough things to do! Let’s give them more stuff to do and more ways to do it!”. That’s what we got in the original Guild Wars: a brand new chapter, nearly as big as the original game, without new gear tiers but with more professions, maps, missions and skills.

ArenaNet said they will never do something like ascended gear again. They have not been adding much to Fractals. Meanwhile, the original Guild Wars was successful enough for ArenaNet to grow massively and be able to make Guild Wars 2.

I guess it’s easy to see which one was the right answer, and which one was the wrong one.

This is a really fantastic example. I guess the only question I’d ask about it is what’s the speed at which Arena Net could have introduced enough new content to make a difference, compared with the speed at which they could have implemented ascended gear?