Guild Wars 2

I find their comments about branching story extremely funny. It isn’t giving the player the choice that was the problem… the problem was that the stories were TERRIBLE and after a few levels they all merged to the exact same even more terrible story anyway. Why would anyone go through the mess that was your branching story line more than once? It was a pain to do it the first time.

I know of other MMO’s where I (and anecdotally most of the players I know) play almost every alternate story (SWTOR for instance).

This is like blaming the fact that no one ate your turkey at Thanksgiving on the fact that people must really hate turkey instead of admitting you burnt the thing and its now a dry tasteless husk.

I don’t compare GW2 and GW1 because other than a few lore elements and a name they share nothing in common. If you take into account the level of technology of the time, GW1 is mostly superior to GW2 in every way.

In particular I have issues with the story in GW2. It has been a disaster since release. Check out the Story sub forum for the list of 100’s of obvious flaws (many involving the word ‘Trahearne’) in what has to be one of the worst written plots in any MMO I have played.

And things seems to only get worse. I groan in pain everytime I have to watch Marjory and Kas go through another borderline creepy, completely out of place love scene (and not because they are a same sex couple, but because it’s written with all the subtly of a Mac truck). I get it ANet. You’re a modern open minded company. No need to beat us over the head with it.

Playing through the extinction of the Dwarves in Guild Wars was one of the highlights of the storyline in that game for me. Nothing in GW2’s storyline has come close yet.

I wouldn’t have minded GW1 slowly disappearing from the game if GW2 has been better, but in just about every way except graphics GW2 is inferior to GW1. They removed just about everything interesting from GW1 and turned it into a minigame.

I think that is why you still see players referencing GW1 two years after this game’s release. GW2 is pretty much only good enough to play for the few days surrounding each new event and then it slips back into obscurity.

The hidden path under neath the wreckage of the drill that leads to an escape boat and a secret path up to the gates near White Crane Terrace?

Could be nothing I suppose…

Might I note how ridiculous it is to have a major story point with a mechanic that can be instantly completed with zero effort by one class and requires 40 attempts and studying strategy guides on the Internet to be completed by the rest.

Sadly, with the class balance problems that have plagued this game since release, this is what I have come to expect from ANet’s design team.

@Nyel.1843… if you have paid ANY attention to the story of this game over the last two years — even a little — you already know.

No drops for me yesterday either, even on my first run, and I was in a full party for all of the fights.

Should I just delete the ones I have now? Is there any reason to keep them (I was unable to play for a while and missed the end of the event, so I have some left over).

scerevisiae.1972:

• Removal of skill capturing (signet of capture). One of the best & debatably most game-defining features of the first game, I cannot fathom the logic of why it was elided from GW2.

I agree with you that removing this was a mistake, they stated some time before the game’s release in a dev interview why they did it.

To make skill capture viable you have to have LOTS of skills. Apparently the large number of skills was a balancing nightmare and major resource drag and they stated to avoid those problems again they would not have the number and variety of skills in GW2 that they did in GW1. I wish I could find the article for you but it was a really long time ago.

I also think that most of the mistakes in the game are implementation problems rather than mistakes. Getting rid of the holy trinity was not necessarily a mistake. Putting NOTHING back in to replace the holy trinity was. For instance, if ALL fights required the group coordination of Tequatl it would be ok. You don’t need class roles if the fights have roles built into them. Unfortunately that is the only fight where this has been properly done.

I think one of their biggest design mistakes was not allowing players to wear cosmetic armor in combat. It basically made this type of equipment worthless and hurt their own sales while reducing character customization.

They are siege weapons that are already in progress and other people seem to be able to contribute to building them, but I can not.

I thought it was probably me doing something stupid that people would instantly recognize, but maybe its an actual bug?

I will make a video and post is to the bug forum. Thanks for the feedback.

For the last two sessions of WvW, I see a large red text message everytime I try to contribute to building a siege weapon of any kind — “You can not craft siege weapons”. I have supply, so I am at a loss to explain what I am doing wrong. I am sure it’s something stupid.

I’ve never had this problem until recently. If anyone has an idea as to what goofy thing I am doing wrong I would appreciate it.

If every game worked like this, they would all be essentially the same game. If you are short on time, why not play a MOBA or some other short session game like a Tower Defense game? GW2 is already the most trivial, casual MMO of the 30 I have played and traditionally MMO’s have been oriented for when you want a longer, deeper gaming session.

There is a reason there are lots of different types of game. If they make GW2 any more trivial they might as well turn it into a Tetris clone.

I left months ago because everything was a mindless zerg fest, but came back to check out the Tequatl update. IMHO its a blast. I have been in 4 loosing attempts and 1 successful attempt. If people don’t work together and play smart you loose, plain and simple. This is exactly the kind of content this game needs.

Red Falcon.8257:

I’m still not understanding why this is a “living story” and why I should care for it.

I agree. The ‘Razing’ is supposed to be the ‘third’ installment, but the first two were short, inconsequential, and boring. Running around and clicking on 75 things, then finding two random items is too meager to count as the ‘first two parts’ in anything much less a ‘living story’. Camping spawn points to kill the exact same timed spawn went out of fashion with Everquest.

The plot so far is paper thin and extremely disappointing.

Kai.3680:

I normally just swim around frostgorge and kill salmon. I don’t really care about the rabbits but for some reason i cant shoot the armadillos

Because armadillos are cute and innocent… where as rabbits are BLOOD THIRSTY KILLERS! I will NEVER forget what happened in Drakkar Lake!

People are starting to have to show up for events 30 minutes to an hour before hand and sit around waiting just to get a spot before the zone fills up and then goes to overflow. Then the event lasts about 2 minutes as the hordes of people slaughter the boss before any of the phases can even happen.

Those that don’t get lucky enough end up in a nearly empty overflow server having wasted money to port. They are typically not happy.

This is killing the game.

I tried the Claw of Jormag event tonight for the first time in a while and was stunned at how bad this event has become.

The lag was so terrible that no one could even tell if they were attacking. None of the phases of the event even occurred. This used to be my favorite event of the game because it actually took some effort. This time the entire even lasted less than 5 minutes and no one could even be sure if they were doing anything. None of my attacks seem to actually fire and the poor dragon just set there stunned and died a minute or two latter.

I could understand if this was at launch, but having such an abysmal failure of an event occur this many months after the game was released is ridiculous.

To a lesser extent, almost all of the events in the game suffer from similar problems. Events mean nothing if they are over in seconds and lag prevents anyone from participating.

I don’t care about grind or no grind, if ANet has changed their philosophy or not, drop rate nerfs, or any of the mess you usually see complaints about on these forums. But when you can not PLAY the game because of such severe server lag, the game has no value in my opinion.

Actually, that’s horizontal progression, meaning you get better by being better rather than having higher stats.

The number of skill points you had access to depended only on how long you played, and a wide variety of skills was critical to playing. It did not matter how good you were, if you didn’t have the needed skills you were not going to get invited to or be able to complete Speed Clears.

Skill point acquisition, Skill capture and Hero Acquisition were most definitely vertical progression.

A newly minted lvl 20 could barely make it through Prophecies. A lvl 20 with the extra skill points, a wide selection of heroes and gear for those heroes, and the skill points and faction (acquired through continual play) to buy a wide selection of skills could solo Glint’s challenge.

I have to agree with the nay-sayers on this. There has been ‘0’ story so far.

Jan: The story amounted to nothing more than us clicking on 75 items. Seriously?

Feb: I magically know about some cup some guy dropped and I have to compete against 50 other characters to try to get kill credit on random portals that pop up IN THE MIDDLE OF A EMPTY AREA during the 5 seconds before the portals get killed.

For two months now we have been bashed over the head by the fact that there are refugees streaming from the north. OK, I get it. There are refugees. They are streaming. This is a fact, not a story.

Maybe in the future there will be a story, but there is zip so far.

As a side note… who plans the military operations for these ‘invaders’? You open your portals, which are giant flaming circles seemingly aimed to maximize attention and potential aggressive response, in a giant open area with absolutely no significant strategic or tactical objectives around?

It’s pretty obvious they are behind on their schedule and that they did not release the content they planned to.

Stuff happens…

The game is free to play. ANet has to make money to run the servers and fund the expansion of content somehow. Buying keys is one of those ways. Given that the chests have nothing really important in them I don’t have a problem with this.

I just throw the chests away when I get them.

As a side note: I am not the type of person to buy costumes, but Anet needs to let those that do wear the costumes in combat. Right now the costumes are pretty useless. Stop shooting yourself in the foot Anet.

Silverbane.6905:

yes, but why SHOULD being in a mega guild be better?

Because its MORE people putting in collectively MORE effort which should be rewarded with MORE rewards.

Why should your 15 people’s worth of effort get the same rewards as a guild with 45 people’s worth of effort. Are you 15 people some how MORE SPECIAL so that there effort should be worth more?

You want the same rewards for less effort. That doesn’t even make sense.

I think it is perfectly OK for there to be content small guilds can not access. My guild is just 3 people. Are you going to make it so that our guild can reach this content too? If so it could practically be done solo and what is the point of calling it a guild activity. Bigger guilds with access to more resources will have access to more stuff. It’s crazy to expect otherwise. Anet has already gone out of their way to accommodate small guilds.

I mean this in the nicest most constructive way. You are done. Go do something else until the next expansion. It sounds like you got more than $60 worth of entertainment out of it. There is no monthly fee so leave it installed and pop back in occasionally to see if any of the monthly content additions interests you.

I finished all of the content and got as far as I wanted in the HOM so there is no motivation for me to go back.

Flamenco.3894:

Actually GW1 is much more of a game than GW2, almost superior in every way.

I agree, but it wasn’t when GW1 was released (ahhh, my youth). It took over a year or two before GW1 was the game it eventually was. I am cautiously optimistic we will see the same with GW2.

I have been complaining about this for 4 months. Combat gets very boring after a while because of lack of skills. Auto attack is not fun.

I recommended in the Suggestions forum that they let us equip one of each weapon that our class can use and rotate between all of our weapons (with the same delay they have now). That would give us access to a large number of skills without really affecting balance since the game is balanced around being able to swap to a certain extent.

Stupid request for the ‘we were bored and had some time’ list…

Please make the blue headband on the Asuran male head ‘dyeable’. It tends to clash with other color schemes

I support both the special slot and the not toggling off on zoning…

“Pets would go from obscurity to needed.”

…this game needs more carrots anyway, I see no problem with this.

I don’t think its a problem…

- More stuff will come
- You can easily balance out the bonuses from Ascended with other stuff

Norn Prestige armor for Rangers… it looked amazing dyed blue.

If we are talking about game mechanics, then dual professions and skill capturing for sure…

GW2 isn’t deep enough for me to want to pay monthly for it. If a game offered some compelling or unique feature I would definitely not mind paying monthly for it.

I would have been willing to pay for SWTOR for the cinematic and voice acting, but the game play was fundamentally broken and the game was as ugly as sin.

If you took SWTOR’s story, voice acting, and cinematic and merged it with GW2 graphics and game play, I would pay monthly for that willingly.

There are still utility slots for builds if you have to have them, and you can still be ‘unique’ by your choice of stat bonuses, sigils, armor, when you choose to use what weapons, etc…

This doesn’t take anything away from the game, it simple adds game play options and prevents players from sitting there spamming the same 3 or 4 abilities over and over.

Yes! I have been requesting this for 6 months now!

I would like to suggest giving us the ability to equip one of each type of usable weapon and then being able to swap between any equipped weapon.

- There would still be a 30 second delay on swaps, so this shouldn’t cause a balance problem

- Classes would still be limited to the weapons they can use, so this shouldn’t drastically affect class balance

- To those who are bored with the limited skills available this would open a bunch of new skills they could swap to

- The game is already balanced around being able to swap some, so those who just want to stick with 5 or 10 skills wouldn’t be substantially out powered by those that wanted to learn to swap all of their weapons

- This would dramatically increase the demand for weapons maybe helping the economy

I’ve wondered if giving us the ability to equip one of each type of usable weapon and then being able to swap between any equipped weapon would help.

- There would still be a 30 second delay on swaps, so this shouldn’t cause a balance problem

- To those who are bored with the limited skills available this would open a bunch of new skills they could swap to

- The game is already balanced around being able to swap some, so those who just want to stick with 5 or 10 skills wouldn’t be substantially out powered by those that wanted to learn to swap all of their weapons

- This would dramatically increase the demand for weapons maybe helping the economy

“Story Quest Gives an Epic or Legendary Item, as per GW1 (not a rare)”

This is insane. What is the point of having Legendary weapons if EVERYONE is going to get one.

They are supposed to be hard to get. Most people are supposed to NEVER GET THEM. I for one will never have one. I know this. For me to be able to get one with my casual play would completely ruin the point of them.

You should see a person toting around a Legendary and stop, stare, and think, wow this is the first time I have ever seen that Legendary. Not “Wow, I have 5 of those in my bank collecting dust”.

There are certain types of players that like to spend enormous amounts of time chasing hard to get items. Legendaries are for them. If you are not one of these players, they are not for you. There is plenty in this game to do other than get Legendary weapons.

In reality I think there is a hatred by a certain very vocal minority of the game’s players for ANYTHING that looks like WOW.

Mounts… raids… new armor tiers… if it was in WOW they hate it rather it makes any sense in the game or represents an improvement on previous MMO’s or not.

There was one post where someone went ballistic because ANet added broom transformations… broom transformations with no speed boost and no other benefits of any kind were close enough to ‘mounts’ to cause one player to write a page long gripe to ANet, and he even had a few supporters.

I often wonder if this game is going to survive these forums. I have yet to see ANet add anything without someone complaining about it. Either its too close to WOW, or it violates some kind of blood oath ANet made, or it excludes someone because they don’t happen to like that particular type of game play.

I wish that people would just play the game and let ANet do their job and if they don’t like the results go play something else.

I understand your point. The nerf to event chests was overly severe. I even agree, but…

…a game where the rewards from defeating chickens were better than those from defeating dragons BY DESIGN would probably be the coolest game ever.

“This comes up every few weeks in this forum. most regular visitors know bout it.”

Hmmm… so this topic keeps coming up again and again? Interesting…

If there was only some kind of concept, technique, or procedure that would allow one to take frequently occurring information in a forum, centralize it, and make it highly visible so that everyone could see it. That might prevent posts like this from reoccurring ‘every few weeks’.

Yeah, something like that would be amazing…

This should really be “stickied”

(and no, they aren’t mine)

Just for future reference, something that starts on the 29th doesn’t really start on the 28th… I didn’t think I needed to spell something like this out…

The core problem is that the players complaining about ‘not having horizontal progression like in GW1’ are so off base about GW1 that it is confusing the conversation.

GW1, for example, had a MASSIVE vertical progression… it just wasn’t in terms of gear. Its true that gear capped out with perfect weapons, but if you took a character that had just hit 20 and had a perfect weapon versus one that had been 20 for a long time and had a perfect weapon there was no comparison. The vertical progression was in the form of grinding for skill points for buying a variety of different increasingly powerful skills, completing the missions for your extra attribute points, completing content to obtain more heroes, etc…

My newly minted level 20 with an awesome bow a guild mate gave me could barely solo Nightfall missions. After a long time grinding to build my skill list, obtaining heroes, etc… I could solo Glint’s Challenge AFK and I soloed all the points for my Kurzick faction armor by doing speed runs with just my heroes.

One might complain that the grind now is gear oriented rather than skill point oriented, which would be a valid complaint, but that isn’t what I am seeing people griping about.

The majority of the complains seem to be ‘I don’t want any kind of tread mill — give me more interesting content instead.’

A reality check — it takes 3-5 years of a team of 100+ to make a content heavy game that the typical player will blow though in 50 hours or so. ANet has already done an amazing job of adding content with the Holiday patches (better than any other MMO company I can think of), but even that content takes a day or so to finish.

No company in existence can realistically add content faster than player can finish it. The only option is to make content that is replayable because of the mechanics (think of FPS’s like Call of Duty or Halo or multiplayer RTS like Starcraft) or add treadmills (which is the modern day equivalent of ‘points’ in a game like Pacman).

There is already ‘mechanic’ oriented replayable content in the form of WvW and sPvP which I hope they continue to improve (though they need brackets for sPvP as soon as possible or sPvP is dead soon).

And while I seriously hope that ANet continues to attempt to add new content like the Holiday activities, I am realistic enough to know that they are also going to have to add treadmill oriented content like gear, skill point, or level based power progression or the game is just going to run out of things for us to do.

I make it my personal goal to make any rude emotes available to me any time I am near ANYTHING relating to Komir’s god hood.

I think the fact that they have stupid gods like Komir is one of the main reasons the Human species has declined and is nearing extinction. (though maybe that is an intentional part of the lore… hmmm)

Trehearne is Kormir V. 2.0

With this number of CC’s there is no sense of danger or impending doom. Its just tedious.

It would be better if they INCREASED the number of undead and then got rid of CC’s on these mobs altogether. As it is, it’s just a chore to have to adventure there.

Better yet, give the MOB’s there some real AI other than “attack nearest, spam CC and damage ability”.

If Anet was going for the whole zombie apocalypse vibe they failed badly. Those movies generate a sense of doom from having to escape a mass of dangerous mindless enemies. Never once have I seen in a zombie movie where the protagonist gets frozen in place and then beat senseless.

I agree with the previous poster that the number of CC’s are a lazy attempt at adding challenge to the area. They seriously need to rethink this.

Other than lore elements this game has nothing in common with GW1. It isn’t even the same kind of game. GW1 has more in common with Diablo II than it does with GW2.

That said, I do like this game on its own merits. I wish they had hired a decent writer for the storylines, because they are so bad and I think this was a missed opportunity to set this game apart. Other than that its a solid MMO and the commitment from the live team to keep the game fresh is outstanding.

Do keep in mind that the game that most of us think of as GW1 was not there on release. Even hero units were added later. GW2 is starting on a fantastic base and has huge potential. I am looking forward to what comes out with the first expansion pack.

I think ANet definitely planned for it to be an e-Sport, but there are serious class balance and game mechanic issues including the downed state problem mentioned before and I don’t think it has a chance of gaining popularity with the e-Sport crowd in its current form.

Possibly if they fixed the issues and then started sponsored tournaments…

I predict that many years from now, when we are all getting ready for Guild Wars 3 and are scrambling to pay 700g for a Ventari Doll to complete HOM V2, many people will look back at this as one of their favorite GW2 memes.

If they want to fix Rangers they could start with the 100+ bugs listed in the Ranger bug sticky that hurt almost every build you can come up with to at least some degree. If you don’t believe me, read the bug thread and make a list of the skills that are currently NOT effected by some bug. It will be a very, very short list.

Its been three months since we have heard ANYTHING about the numerous bugs preventing well over half of our skills from working correctly.

Once the bugs are fixed they could start by redesigning the numerous skills that are almost useless even when they do work, like regen skills that heal for 50 points a tick at a level when you have almost 9000 hit points (even when fully decked out in healing+ exotic gear).