I can’t help but feel like it’s a strange idea to spend development time on temporary content.
Kind of like how the Southsun Cove is now. It’s fallen into obscurity, but newer players who wern’t around for the event have the oppourtunity to discover the area and explore it.
There are still so many areas of this game that can be filled out. Why spend time on this when you can make more permanent additions to your game and use them as selling points? Just from past updates, I get the impression that the dev team is spread thin enough as it is without tacking on tasks that only have a temporary impact. Spend those resources elsewhere like patch QA, bugfixing, mini games, new zones, polishing the personal story, balancing skills and traits, etc. I think that would be appreciated more than what were getting with the living story now.
Well I would have highlighted “bug-fixing” as with every patch I expect bugs, no game is perfect but with GW2 you can expect to wait a month, or more, before those bugs are fixed. As for new zones? That sort of goes against what you are asking for here as you do mention filling in the current zones first and I’m all for the latter.
I love the idea of the ever-changing story and I get your fears about it, both plausible and agreeable but I also want to see how far it goes, will it perform well,? Only time can tell. We do have to remember the game is just 7 months old.
Just to clarify, I meant “areas” as in different aspects of the game like PvP or WvW, not a location. But I will adress your good point anyway. The difference between changing a zone that exists and adding a new zone is that the new zone creates more space to explore. If you change something you already have, you’re replacing something that already existed, even if it was just a plain hill or a field. I think the zones we have now are reasonably spaced out now. If you cram in new feature after new feature into the landscape, it’s going to start feeling unrealistically spaced (moreso than MMOs already do).
I am remembering that this game is only 7 months old. That’s kind of a big issue as to why I feel this way. It’s a 7 month old MMO and it feels like one because I’ve done pretty much everything it has to offer. I’ve reached burnout on the game for now and I’m taking a break to give the it time to develop and grow. It’s a great game and I’m sure I’ll come back to it at some point, but I’ll never experience part of this living story, and any other living stories between now and whenever I decide to log back in. The only people the living story benefits are the people who are already playing the game. Future players and players who aren’t currently active will never see the fruits of these development efforts.
And again people are comparing Guild Wars 2 with other MMO’s
Ok then, what am I supposed to compare it to?
This game is amazing compared to Super Mario Bros! It’s got amazing graphics and story and it’s in 3d and the different characters aren’t just a palette swap!
This game sucks compared to ice cream. It tastes like plastic and metal. Ice cream tastes like cold, chocolate goodness!
I can’t help but feel like it’s a strange idea to spend development time on temporary content.
If you look back at older MMOs like Everquest or World of Warcraft or City of Heroes(RIP), they contain a seemingly bottomless pit of content. Years and years of updates and expansions stacked on top of one another make for a wealth of content that newer MMO’s can only hope to obtain in time. Even if it ends up being largely unused as the players keep up with the ever advancing endgame, it allows newer players to see and explore the past. Kind of like how the Southsun Cove is now. It’s fallen into obscurity, but newer players who wern’t around for the event have the oppourtunity to discover the area and explore it.
There are still so many areas of this game that can be filled out. Why spend time on this when you can make more permanent additions to your game and use them as selling points? Just from past updates, I get the impression that the dev team is spread thin enough as it is without tacking on tasks that only have a temporary impact. Spend those resources elsewhere like patch QA, bugfixing, mini games, new zones, polishing the personal story, balancing skills and traits, etc. I think that would be appreciated more than what were getting with the living story now.
I neither like it or dislike it. The original graphic was fine as it was. What was the point of changing it?
Stop doing tasks that have already been done and go fix the hundreds of other issues this game has.
There was a time, right up to around launch, that I had full confidence in this company as well. Everything they did, not just spoke about, indicated that they were keen advocates for their players and were doing everything in our best interests.
However, in the months since, the decisions they’ve made have made it clear to me that player enjoyment no longer was a priority. It’s as if some Wormtongue is whispering treasonous notions into their ears as they sleep, and those ideas are being thrown into the game without any thought.
Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with game bugs or technical weaknesses. I can live with those. It’s the actual decisions on how things should work in the game that I find abhorrent. ArenaNet has consistently succeeded in driving wedges into their player base, fracturing us with design mechanics that could so easily have been inclusive rather than exclusive.
The most recent example is the guild missions, which clearly have caused no end of anger and consternation with a huge cross-section of players. It would have been so easy to avoid this, but ArenaNet made a conscious decision to go forward with it anyway. That tells me they are either clueless as to what affect these types of mechanics are going to have on their players, or they just don’t care. That’s a long way from the company I remember from the months and years prior to release, who seemed to have their finger squarely on the pulse of their target audience and knew exactly what we were wanting from a game.
Frankly, it feels like completely different team from the one that got me hooked on the game with nothing more than a design manifesto. This one is not only out of touch with their community, but is borderline incompetent.
So yes, I would say that I no longer trust them. I’m not even sure who the hell they are anymore.
Agree 100%. The company that developed this wonderful game simply isn’t the same company maintaining it. I want the original team back, badly.
Honestly, I don’t care how their QA team would like the idea considering how much they seem to miss each patch.
A public testing server would likely require a completely seperate environment to be brought up. You’d have to login to it with a seperate client and your characters would exist completely seperate from the live game. Most companies allow you to clone your live characters into the public testing server, but nothing would carry over back from time spent playing on the PTS.
I Want My Hat Back
My hat is gone. I want it back.
Have you seen my hat?
This is a good idea. If not a test server, then something needs to be done.
ANet needs serious help with their patching process. They might have introduced more bugs than they fixed this time around. Comedy of errors really sums it up. Having to hotfix your patch FOUR times is just embarassing.
Race doesn’t really matter. Go with whatever you want to play.
Warrior or Guardian.
Ranger’s pretty easy too if you just want to do PvE.
Depends on which 2/26 patch you’re talking about.
The broken patch?
The broken patch designed to fix the broken patch?
Or the possibly broken patch to patch the broken patch designed to fix the broken patch?
If I were a software developer, I might find this somewhat embarrassing…
Thought I’d raise this point again after seeing the bugs caused by this most recent patch. Smaller patches more frequently means less changes, means fewer bugs caused by said patches.
The chests are kind of a formality since they’re so easy to come by. Honestly, I don’t see why they even exist.
Just replace the keys with unlocked chests and delete the locked chests from the game.
Just got stuck at the same spot, twice.
Thought this game was out of beta.
No. ANET failed at making anyone care. You can see the quality of the personal story fade as you progress. It starts strong and gets buggier and more poorly written as you go.
Elementalist only pays off if you really dive deep into it and learn it inside and out. It REALLY pays off though, in results and just sheer fun. The depth of possibilities with combos and synergy makes them feel the most actiony in this action mmo.
Haven’t done much with necro but he seems to be fun so far. You don’t really see a whole lot of minion master necros running around, not sure if it’s because the build doesn’t work very well or because they’re buggy or what, but I’ve seen it once or twice. It’s possible.
Mesmer is kinda rough. I played one to 80. It’s very effective, but it’s boring as hell until you get deceptive evasion (a level 40 trait). It’s not as micromanagey as you’d think. You don’t control the illusions directly. The only thing you have to do is shatter them, and that’s a single button push.
Quite an epic drunken rage. Was it pvp related? Because if I had known I’d made someone rage that hard, I think I might be set for my entire gaming life.
Both will work. Depends if you want him to use magic or be grounded in reality.
magic=guardian
real=warrior
They both have the same armor styles available to them.
I can’t think of a good reason to solo an event in a dungeon when you have other people with you.
While your at it, new elite: Conjure lightning pistols.
Look at it like this,
You can play an ele without swapping attunements. You can also play the game without dodging. You can play the game without armor on. You can play the game without a keyboard. Hell, you can play the game with your monitor off if you really want to.
The other skills in the other attunements are there for you to use. Choosing not to use them is your choice, but there’s no disadvantage to using them, so why not use what’s available to you?
I don’t see him on anymore, but my favorite was a norn named “Mandudeguysir”. It’s just fun to say.
I will second this. I bought this set not knowing there was a bug with (3) bonus. Is there a way to get gold refund?
No.
I asked about a similar issue months ago. I bought a runeset that granted haste when below a certain health threshold for several gold. The quickness part of the bonus didn’t work, but it DID drain all of your endurance, making it impossible to roll. I couldn’t stand it and I had to buy more runes to replace them, the speed runes, which are also bugged.
I wasn’t even given a response about the issue. So, just remember, before you buy anything in this game, make sure to do extensive research to make sure it isn’t bugged in some way!
And make sure you report any beneficial bugs you find, or you will be banned!
Got two, and feel kinda screwed. Waiting for the fix.
You feel screwed? How about the people who opened the box, got gear that was unusable, and aren’t even dignified with a response when they ask if they will be refunded?
Humm.. I can imagine that it is pretty annoying that it doesn’t work properly, but it is game breaking for you?
Another issue (that is indeed game breaking for many players) has lots of pages, thousands of replies and there is less communication from devs than in here.
So – compared to that – I would think your are provided quite good with information about what’s happening.
I think they will do their best to fix it (including a fix for the already opened ranger boxes) and update you again when they are ready. ^^
I feel very sorry for you, but it isn’t the biggest issue we have right now ingame that should be solved ASAP, is it?
For me, it IS game breaking. Not because of this incident specifically, but because of what a lack of a refund for a bug means.
Should I be afraid to spend gold on any new content, because I can’t trust that it won’t be bugged in some way? What if the bug had involved the mystic forge spitting out a gray instead of a legendary, would I still not be refunded? Should I be forced to look everything up on the forums to doublecheck that what I’m buying from a vendor is what I’m actually gonna get?
So how long do we have to wait to get this fixed? 3 days without an update and if A-NET is not going to fix it, we should at least get a refund, this is just ridicuolus, c’mon 4 days and you cannot figure out what is wrong?
I think three days without a response IS the response.
That’s annoying.
I can’t think of a great way to prevent this without some sort of human moderation. And I doubt ANET has the resources.
Is there any sort of benefit to kicking people like this, or are they just doing it to be jerks?
I think the future of this game depends on the developers giving us the ability to run with the /cry emote.
My guild needs to know when they hurt my feelings and should come running after me and tell me how awesome I am and that they can’t run the guild without me and that I’m super smart and handsome and I’m the best guild leader in the world and then I’ll tell them to bake me cookies.
You could make it so commanders can only change their commander flag outside WvW to prevent toggling abuse.
Playing melee in a huge zerg vs zerg skirmish is incredibly dangerous anyway. Yeah, you couldn’t get away with playing a glass cannon melee commander very well, but the idea would be to shift the focus of the commander more to the tactical side.
In real battles, you don’t want your commanding officer leading the charge. If commanders feel like doing some risky fighting, they simply turn the commander flag off.
Thinking about this further…
It would make it difficult for the commander to participate in the actual combat. You could counteract this by giving commanders a percentage chance to get credit for kills made by his squad.
Also, this idea would open the way to new tactics. Commanders would become very tempting bait for traps and ambushes.
So… Arenanet, when are you starting to reward skillful play?
(Kunst – Guardian – Desolation, on the edge of quitting)
When you roll a non-baby class.
OOOH I WENT THERE!!!!
Partial credit to Blueshield for making me realize this idea is actually worth exploring.
In WvW, what if players could see who the enemy commander is in a zerg? (Not on the map, just within visual range) It’s a small change that would have a huge impact on how zergs play. If you can see the enemy commander, he’s going to be focus fired. This would result in commanders having to fight from the center or the back. It would make the zerg more clumbsy in a skirmish, slower to charge on afterwards. Coordinated leadership would have to result from more communication and less having a shiny icon on the map.
You could go further than that by having commanders be worth more when killed.
You could go even further if you prevent a commander from activating his commander tag for a certain period of time after dying.
I’m not a die hard WvW player. I’ve done my share of time but I’m no commander and I’m on a low tier server. I’d like to hear how other, more serious WvWers would feel about the impact of this idea.
Hmm, the more I think about this commanders-visible-to-enemies thing, the more intriguing it sounds. This could be a great way to shake up the zerg mentality of WvW – commanders leading from behind rather than the front. As long as the visibility was limited to close-range only (not map visibility) it wouldn’t interfere with the possibility of surprise attacks.
As for commanders drawing fire to themselves… well, as a commander, I for one don’t have a problem with that. It’s a pretty small price to pay for the ability to have a personal zerg.
I hadn’t considered it too deeply, but it DOES sound like a simple, effective way to shake up the zerg. Gonna go throw it into it’s own suggestion thread and see if it sticks.
The Daily was something I enjoyed. Why do games insist on changing the things that players like? As a ranger it is almost impossible to dodge. I can stow my pet and make attempts, but if I get hit once my pet comes back. No way to put pets on stow until you want them back. Crafting? really? I ask you, Who gets enough materials to craft 10 items a day? I sure don’t. When I logged in tonight I saw the update and sat hoping the Daily had been changed. Stupid me, I thought it would change for the better. Not Good!!!!
I know others have already beaten this into the ground, but I laughed so hard when I read this. Rangers can’t dodge? Try using a sword/dagger combo. 2, 3, and 4 are all evade skills. And even if that’s too hard for ya, rangers have an evade built into the greatsword autoattack. You can get the daily by just standing there and hitting 1.
I like the idea of monthlies giving players a reason to do something they normally wouldn’t bother with.
My ideas for monthly objectives:
Complete 5 different events in 10 different zones.
Kill 5 commanders in WvW. (On second thought…this is cruel in a lot of ways.)
Kill 100 enemies without taking damage.
Kill 50 champions.
Obtain 5 levels on 4 different classes.
Kill 1000 enemies in a party of 5 players.
Interrupt 200 enemy attacks.
Buy 800 gems worth of items from the Gem Store. (This would just be to see the forums explode.)Responses to the bolded ones only:
Based on your parenthetical, I hope that’s a joke. With no way to view enemies commanders’ tags, this would be next to impossible without spending days in WvW hoping for random chance to favor you.
This would be a really crappy thing to pop up for players like me who have filled our 5 character slots with 80s. A monthly requiring me to either delete a max-level character or buy a new character slot would make me seriously question the dev team.
Amusing. Maybe they could lump it in the same month with the above.
The commander one doesn’t make much sense (becuase you can’t see who an enemy commander is) and would be incredibly cruel to commanders if you could. It’s not a great idea but I like the image of two zergs meeting and focus firing on eachother’s commanders.
The leveling multiple characters idea works if you count the gaining a new skillpoint with a full xp bar as a level.
As far as the goals go, I don’t think they should pander to everyone’s playstyle just because some people don’t like leveling alts or doing dungeons or crafting. If they wanted to pander to everyone’s playstyle, why have goals at all? Why not just give people a reward for playing an hour everyday? Because it’s boring! Try something new. If you really don’t like it, you could just not do it.
We’re actually pretty good underwater if you know what you’re doing. The problem is that it requires more practice than other classes, just like eles on land require more practice. I suggest taking some time to exclusively fight underwater. You’ll begin to get the hang of it.
Like the guy above said, water attunemet should be your base attunement when fighting underwater. Suprisingly, it hits the hardest. If you’ve traited heavily in water, the defensive bonuses just for being in water combine nicely with the damage.
If you’re a high crit junkie and have 25 points in air, you can combine the grandmaster minor trait (weak spot) with the piercing shards water major adept trait to great effect.
Whirlpool, even after the nerfs, still hits really hard and knocks people around. Don’t forget about it.
I like the idea of monthlies giving players a reason to do something they normally wouldn’t bother with.
My ideas for monthly objectives:
Complete 5 different events in 10 different zones.
Kill 5 commanders in WvW. (On second thought…this is cruel in a lot of ways.)
Kill 100 enemies without taking damage.
Kill 50 champions.
Obtain 5 levels on 4 different classes.
Kill 1000 enemies in a party of 5 players.
Interrupt 200 enemy attacks.
Buy 800 gems worth of items from the Gem Store. (This would just be to see the forums explode.)
I like having a little variety in the objectives of the daily. Doing the same thing over and over again got really boring. Now I’m actually looking forward to doing my dailies rather than just doing them as part of a grind.
I hope they keep adding new objectives to keep us on our toes.
D/D eles get more chicks too. We’re pretty cool that way.
I don’t feel lied to because of the very miniscule advantage that ascended gear provides in combat.
The difference between an ascended item and an exotic is very negligeable and will very rarely make the difference in the outcome of a fight. In WvW, a fair 1 on 1 fight is an extreme rarity as it is. And ascended gear doesn’t exist in sPvP, which is where you go for a fair fight.
The promise that I hold ANet to is skill > gear, and that still holds true disregarding extreme curcumstances (like full uncommon vs full exotic).
But…it’s not like when you level a healer and your whole role changes in a group dynamic.
You seem confused. Are you a solo ganker that eschews teamplay or someone who wants to heal in a group dynamic?
I’m not confused. What I want to do depends on my mood and what I feel like doing. Sometimes I just wanna stab people. Sometimes I wanna do something different and play with a group in a healing role. Very occasionally I might wanna tank.
Where my feelings are coming from (and this IS just how I feel about alts. Don’t get too hurt over it) is twofold. Because there are no full healers or full tanks, essentailly everyone is doing the same thing, which is killing stuff. You can kind of hybrid it in this game, but killing is really what your role amounts to.
Second, there are no factions. Every character has access to the same content. The racial differences are asthetic aside from the racial skills, which are small.
These two parts add together and make alt’s feel less…unique than they do in other games.
Do I think the holy trinity should be reintroduced? No. I like being able to grab a group of whoevers and run whatever with our favorite classes.
Do I think we need seperate factions with unique content? …Well. I haven’t given it much thought since it’s way too late for that now. It could’ve been interesting, but I see just as many reasons not to.
I was curious if I was the only one who felt this way. I’m probably not, but I appear to be in a very small minority. That’s fine.
I know the classes themselves play different. But…it’s not like when you level a healer and your whole role changes in a group dynamic or when you play an opposing faction and experience war from the other side. You’re still experiencing the same content in a similar way (kill the other dudes).
I’m also maining a D/D ele, which I suspect is part of the problem. The amount of combos and variations in their skills just make the other classes feel simpler, or at least, not as frantic. D/D ele almost feels like a fighting game.
I guess I’m in the minority then. Just curious.
I stuck it out for one of my other characters (Mesmer) and got him to 80. I haven’t touched him since. Gearing him up seems like a waste of gold and there isn’t anything he can do that my Ele couldn’t do.
Portals – Hello???
Lol, have you really played? Admit it, you haven’t!
I’m not really a team player in WvW. More of a ganker.
Yeah, I know. Judge me all you want.
Just curious how others feel about this.
I’ve got an alt for each class in the game. However, I find myself with very little reason to play them. With the elimination of the holy trinity and one single faction, I just can’t find a good reason to play anything but my main.
I stuck it out for one of my other characters (Mesmer) and got him to 80. I haven’t touched him since. Gearing him up seems like a waste of gold and there isn’t anything he can do that my Ele couldn’t do. Yeah it’s a different playstyle…but in the end, there’s no variation on what you’re doing, just how you’re doing it.
How does everyone else feel about it?
I’ve actually done this very matchup. Bunker won every time.
Press (2) to Zhaitan!
If ANet could add new content and fix bugs at the same time, I’d be all for it.
However, consider how long this patch took to came out, what this patch DIDN’T address, and what this patch broke. This was just a bugfix patch. Can you imagine how much stuff would have broken if there was new content thrown into the mix?
It’s basic stuff. You need to make the foundation stable before you decide to add a swimming pool to the roof.