Guild Wars 2

1. Not having mounts. Every legendary MMO had mounts, and some even mounted combat (UO for one). Having to “hoof” it everywhere is tedious and unrealistic.

It’s a basic tenant that is unreasonably opposed. Many here seem to think mounts are vanity items? I’m not sure how this opinion was formed. Maybe these folks have never played an old school sub MMO (UO, SWG, LotRO, Vanguard, even WoW).

The objective is to make exploration, and getting around the map more enjoyable because of increased movement speed. You can’t tell me it discourages exploration, and yet have way-points every 5 feet. Way-points are cheesy, not facilitating realism and immersion with mounts.

2. High level crafting mat drop rates on MoBs is still horrible. To boot, high level crafting also feels pointless since I can buy exotic armour dirt cheap.

3. Low server populations. I find myself soloing events 9/10 times. Far different than how it was at launch.

Over the years, computers have become a veritable commodity and thusly MMOs have become mainstream entertainment, therefore, communities overall deteriorate. This is a problem in every MMO now. Even the old classics.

It used to be that computers required some measure of intelligence just to run a game, or get on the net. This inherent requirement was a natural mechanism for filtering out the silly people.

MMOs aren’t a niche anymore, and the people that play them, not quite as enchanting.

arcqe.6734:

while it’s nice you’re warning people, I don’t see how raging on the forums fixes anything.

Because trolling fixes things.

I’d have to strongly disagree. With all due respect, and not to be argumentative or offensive, the games you list in comparison are also bad examples of crafting systems, with the exception of WoW who’s crafting system is a bit better than the others you mentioned actually.

You’d have to rewind a bit, to understand the importance and effectiveness of crafting systems. Ultima Online so far is the best example of a successful crafting system, but second place is definitely LoTRO which has brilliant interdependency as well as a proficiency / mastery system.

Interdependency – Crafting systems must have interdependency to support a healthy economy. Interdependency means certain mats required for your craftsman are created and sold by other craftsman. GW2 does not have this.

Proficiency – Meaning that without much trouble your crafts-person should be proficient enough to support himself with his craft as he adventures but, mastery should rightfully require more work. The problem with GW2 is the work required to reach mastery is exclusive of the crafting system itself. It’s wholly creature based, which requires hunting… not harvesting or – ahem – crafting. Add to that that drop rates are very low for these materials so… by hunting for hours to gain the mats required for mastery, you far out-level your crafting altogether.

Ok levels don’t matter much here but if levels are that unimportant than why have them at all? Even non-level systems have skill progression. So levels, or skill gains ARE important design wise. I don’t think either should be trivialized, but one should be decided on.

Also we should not gain adventure XP from crafting. That’s fanning the flames.

Slight tuning of drop rates to rates required to craft would be a start as far as improving the crafting system, but still I feel it’s too linear of a system. All professions and all levels of mastery use the exact same mats, just less or more of them respectively. That’s VERY grindy and linear. As far as my experience goes anyway? I haven’t done cooking.

Perhaps Anet just needs more time to bolster up the crafting, but again OP, I disagree that it’s the best, or even close to it.

Thanks.

I agree you shouldn’t hold a grudge or wish doom on the game. I used to think this was the best MMO out, but now I feel it still needs some time to improve.

My complaints are not your typical. Myself, I found that the game felt neglected after level 50. DR or not, drop rates just stopped working properly to maintain even one crafting discipline. Also doesn’t help that the crafting system is far too linear. There needs to be a lot more recipes and choices.

Wave after wave of inquest or risen, and the maps getting progressively uglier, just didn’t float my boat either. Additionally, I expected more in the way of RP mechanics, as I’ve talked in detail about in posts, and in my blog. GW2 lacks even the most basic RP mechanics to actually make it an MMORPG, and while I love hack-n-slash I can only take about an hour of it at a time. People who say, “I’m just not engrossed”, or “GW2 just doesn’t pull me in”, need to consider this factor. The world is beautiful, but only acts as a backdrop for combat and very little else.

Myself, I’ll just take a break from it, re-sub to an old favourite (no not WoW). I’m very hopeful though, that things will improve in a month or two. Anet seems very talented and attentive. They do need to take support and security a little more seriously though. I don’t think they expected such a huge influx of players and hackers alike… and I feel horrible for those who had their accounts cleaned out with no restoration being possible.

I love underwater combat, but I notice some lesser skilled players struggle with it.

Anywhere around Orr just sucks right now. Insane re-spawn rates and hordes of endless risen are the status quo, and it’s just bad design all around in my book. The designers of those areas perhaps played a little too much L4D. While not a bad idea for an MMO, hordes of undead would have had more impact being isolated to maybe 5 adventure levels, not 30? That is to say, it gets old when you’re fighting those same swarms of undead for 30 levels… and it just gets worse as you progress. Almost laughable.

Cheetara.6107:

Again I’m coming from 7 years of hardcore World of Warcraft so I’m not new to MMO.

But the thing I hate about this game is in dungeons there is no way to control mobs. There is no taunting no way to build aggro because there is no real tanking… That’s a horrible idea… Dungeon runs are a mess, kiting shouldn’t be the solution and it takes the fun out of dungeon runs.

Although I don’t believe “hardcore” and “WoW” should ever be used in the same sentence, I will agree that there needs to be more CC in GW2. 2s roots and stuns just don’t float the boat.

@ kipperfiend “Anet for all the positive things I can say about them are stupidly heavy handed in their approach to problem solving. In itself I find the lack of subtlety most disappointing for such an innovate company which claims to have players interests at heart.”

Well said, and it’s called, “damage control”. Anet has been doing a lot of that lately. Just seems they don’t have a support initiative to handle mass exposure. Again, very promising artistically, but their lack of technical support is forcing a lot of poor moves.

Yup. I’m close to being done myself. Game started out strong, then everything took a dark turn. Not only with the DR but everything after lvl 50 is diminished! Landscapes get ugly, mobs are unimaginative, just swarms of inquest or undead over and over.

Now being that crafting is broken (thanks to DR), the game is just a big hack n’ slash grind fest. Hardly an MMORPG.

ArenaNet needed to go forward, instead they went backwards.

Despite DR I think drop rates just suck.

The only one I really liked for warrior was the 10 skill point war banner. My 30 skill point hounds would be awesome if they lasted more than 30 seconds. One problem I find with every skill in this game is short duration. Doesn’t balance well with the amount of HP everything has.

Also, that Avatar of Melandkittenll where you turn into a tree is also horrendously bad.

(edit: don’t know why name of skill is censored)

Go back and explore the maps, not pokemon them, but actually explore them. Meet new people, make friends, help newcomers. I’d say learn to roleplay but Anet hasn’t added any roleplay mechanics yet. This game is young, give it time.

Is there anywhere that actually outlines how the DR system works, or if it exists at all? Drop rates do indeed suck, and it ruined crafting for me completely, however, I’m not going to go on about a DR system unless someone can prove to me it actually exists. I would appreciate it, thanks.

Anet just needs anti-exploit code at the application level (built into game binaries) to detect whether or not keystrokes are hardware or software derived… and / or have the game detect most known bot progs and refuse to run if one is present. There’s many ways to combat exploits but it has to be done on the application level to be most efficient. You could do it on the network layer but that would increase bandwidth slightly.

I hate instanced dungeons with a passion. AC was a bore and I could happily never do another one.

An instanced dungeon is just MoBs with 10x more health that hit 10x harder for the next 2 hours of your life. How is that exciting or interesting?

Hated instances since EQ invented them, and still hate them today. I’m glad Anet realizes that overland content should be just as exciting as instanced content, and hope they continue down that much needed path. Open world raids are AWESOME!!!

Hyral.4168:

Even for non-RPers, I mean how much could they complain. Most these issues are the skillset of an animator / coder, not necessarily the same guys who are going to be ironing out event bugs.

I would really like to see more RP stuff thrown in, especially since we’ve been given so many prompts. Dyes, town clothes, transmute potions… To include all these things in the first place is proffer to RPing. None of them are enjoyable in combat or tactical gathering situations, which comprises the entire rest of the game.

Interactive chairs, barber shops, profiles, whatever you guys can think up would go a long way.

Very good points.

What about the mundane aspects of Roleplaying a character? Do I speak only for myself when I say, that I miss those days where you had to eat, or sleep… or feed your pets? Surely I don’t expect that level of depth – RP wise – in GW2 but, I certainly wouldn’t complain.

Anet has taken a very critical look at the direction and failures of current MMOs. I hope they can continue to ponder these ideas as well because, I really think this would improve the state of modern MMOs, as well as create a better, more mature community.

Corian.4068:

Are MMO players trained to play for progression rather than for enjoyment?

Subscription MMOs have, over the years, used inflating gear rewards to keep players in the game, because progression is exciting. There’s no denying that, I think everyone likes seeing their character get stronger.

However, I think in recent years we’ve come to a point where we see a growing number of people who play solely for the purpose of seeing their progression. Once they have the strongest gear with the prettiest text color or whatever, many of them simply stop playing until there’s even stronger gear to progress towards again. We all know players like this.

I question if these players even like the game they play as opposed to the feeling of getting something newer and shinier.

And why I bring this question up, is because I also question whether or not this kind of player is worth attempting to retain in the GW2 community as they are.

I would hate to see hard work on the part of the developer go into content that only a small fraction of the community will do, and even then only for about a week until they’ve progressed past it and go back to complaining.

To answer my own question in the title bar, I think the modern MMO player is trained to play games they don’t enjoy as long as there’s progression. So here’s another question: how do either the developers—or us as a community—break players of this mindset, and remind them that, well, gameplay can actually be enjoyed on its own? That exploring and playing the game IS doing content, even if there’s no gear progression? How do we make these players get it about Guild Wars 2?

Or can we at all?

Nature of the beast I’m afraid. Those types of players will always exist, and I’ve seen it since the UO and EQ days, however…

What continues to accelerate the problem is that most modern MMO’s are not MMORPG’s. Since WoW released, MMORPG’s have become more like MMOG’s (massive multiplayer online games) since there is very little roleplaying in them. You don’t have to eat, you don’t have to pay rent, or maintain your equipment. There are no pets to feed, you can’t really be a dedicated crafter because mats require killing monsters – you can’t harvest cotton or flax and spin it into yarn, etc.

As amazing as GW2 is, it’s painful for me to say that GW2 is feeling more like an action game to me, and what else is there to do in an action game than to “get to the next level” right? Therein lies the problem.

As I’ve stated in the Suggestions section of the forums, I’d like to see all this action in GW2 offset with some roleplaying mechanics. Visually and technically GW2 is such an achievement. I’d like to see it live up to it’s full potential as an MMORPG rather than just being a MMOG. A very good MMOG mind you, but still a MMOG.

@ Deep Dew – Good times.

Alviss.1256:

But now that a month has passed, people are hitting level cap and exploring high end areas/dungeons, and they are discovering that the mindless run and gun mentality isn’t working.

Everyone has been trained to play this game that way.

Personally it has frustrated me. Running into the mansion dungeon and seeing everyone mindlessly run around with their heads cut off, pulling aggro from multiple rooms, and ending up getting destroyed, and then wondering “why?”

There are roles, and there are classes, they’re just more flexible in GW2. Sounds like people want more clearly defined roles because they’re not understanding how to play their character? Well I don’t agree in dumbing down the game for that problem because crappy players will exist no matter what.

I will agree however, we need more CC, or simply improve the CC that’s already given to every class. As it stands rooting a MoB for 2 seconds is pretty useless.

As far as people zerging dungeons. People will zerg dungeons no matter what. It’s always been a problem in every MMO. Roles wont force a crappy player to be good, it will simply limit their exposure, which overall is bad for everybody because then the game becomes too simplified. Lowest common denominator.

Dungeons in GW2 are embryonic at best. Personally I hate dungeons so this is fine by me, but the ones I’ve done in GW2 so far have been pretty brute force and un-interesting with a few exceptions.

Still, I’d rather Anet focus on continuing to make PvE environments amazing. The idea of the instanced dungeon is kind of outdated IMO and I’d like to see that EQ era tangent die completely.

Secret World bombed, man. The company had to lay off like 50% of the developers because of extremely underwhelming sales. Funcom has a history of unpolished and broken games. AoC for example.

If you think GW2 is a WoW clone, you’re missing a lot.

Tradewind.6913:

What about mounts to bypass content. I think that would become a concern. GW2 has many areas that have large concentrations of mobs, right now you’re somewhat forced to deal with them if you’re trying to get somewhere. Mounts would serve to trivialize that danger.

Most games handle this by forcing you off your mount if you get hit.

The bypassing content argument doesn’t fly with me. All the waypoints are a bit more ridiculous in my mind with regards to bypassing content. Even if you have to find them first, you only need to find them once and then you can bounce around anywhere instantly? Waypoints severely break up the flow of exploration.

Mounts would be far better than waypoints. You should have one recall stone that brings you to your major city, portals, and mounts. Nix the waypoints I say.

Signed… however mounts are pointless to me without mounted combat. Ultima Online had mounted combat in 1998. I can’t believe modern MMOs have never been able to pull it off since. I think LoTRO just added mounted combat but it’s very zone restricted and weird.

If any team is talented enough to add this functionality it would be ArenaNet. Come on guys! I believe in you!

Alexandar.9043:

I don’t agree with you at all. Crafting in this game is incredibly easy. Sure you have to grind to farm some mats, but leveling with discovery is mind numbingly easy.

That’s why prices are so suppressed.

I’m tired of people complaining about grinding not being fun. IT’S a CRAFT! it takes work, if everything is handed to you, anyone and everyone would be doing it and nothing would be worth anything.

It’s the work, and some things being hard to get what drives value in an economy!

This game in general dumbs down everything to make it ‘easy’.

Stop whining,

I don’t understand this logic. A craft is better defined by an intricacy in how an item is created, not by mass producing it. You become better at something based on an intimate understanding of it. You are not an assembly line worker, you are a craftsman, and I certainly don’t want to play the role of an assembly line worker in any game… because that seems boring… and oh wait, grindy.

What we need is a craft system that supports the adventurer as well as the dedicated crafter. As an adventurer who takes up crafting, I should be able to maintain a level of crafting that supports my exploits, but if I choose to dedicate more of my time to crafting, there should be more available to me in the way of discoveries or rare recipes. Or perhaps a boon based on the number of real time crafting hours.

As it stands, an adventurer simply cannot support his or her self adequately because it simply requires too many mats to maintain crafting levels. There should be a differential between ‘maintaining’ and ‘mastering’.

I’d like a fix over a response because it’s definitely broken. There’s no doubt that it’s acknowledged considering the numerous posts about it.

MatthewMedina.5419:

Hey everyone! I was one of main the city designers for Guild Wars 2. So for those of you who are concerned about this issue, could I get you to clarify, are you talking about:

A. the greets (spoken by an NPC when someone interacts with them)
B. the random talk lines (these are usually just a single line spoken by a nearby NPC on their own, unrelated to player activity)
C. Idle Scenes (spoken by two or more NPC’s, conversing back and forth)
D. All of the above

NPC’s in the cities do a combination of these four types of vocalizations. Around the vendors and crafting areas I tried to keep idle scenes (which I had the most control over) to a bare minimum, and when they are there, I have them on fairly long timers (although I recognize some of you are standing in the crafting area for a long time, so you’re more likely to hear them). The other audio would require a bit more massaging to make any changes, which is why I’m asking for this additional information.

Based on the quotes you all have pulled and included in this thread, it sounds like it’s the greets that are most audible and most annoying? Given the popularity of crafting, I’m not surprised by this, but I understand the frustration it can cause. I’ll follow up with this and look into potential solutions. Please feel free keep this thread going, and to include more examples or particularly troublesome spots.

For me it’s not the greets but… Divinity’s Reach for instance, while I’m at the armour station all I hear is, “HA HA YES!!!!!” “HO HO!!!”. This goes on incessantly while I’m crafting. I attempted to run around the area and find out actually who was creating this audio but couldn’t pinpoint where this was coming from. I’m guessing it has to do with some kind of celebration or maybe the carnival? Gets really annoying in any case, because it just keeps looping.

Basically make creature drops 80%. That’s the point of hunting.

Take all those master level recipes and make them normal recipes but give them the same point output and make rare recipes require some kind of modifier component that’s hard to find so rare items can still sell well on the TC. This will easily give a balance between being able to keep our crafting up as fast as we level, and keeping rare crafted items rare, and valuable.

Agree with OP mostly. In fact finding mats in 50+ areas is so arduous and mind numbingly grindy it’s actually destroying my enjoyment of the game. Crafting is typically my main vehicle for enjoying MMOs because it drives me to do the thing I love most – explore. Which historically is a really natural human endeavor if you think about it. To explore lands to find resources.

Killing 10 mobs to find 1 out of 8 required mats to make 1 useless discovery (which wont even sell well mind you) to increase my crafting a tiny bit is so horribly un-fun that I’m having a hard time convincing myself to log in at the moment.

During beta, people were posting about making crafting “challenging” and “more difficult”. I chimed in of course because coming from the days of Ultima Online, I learned early on that crafting needed to be large in scope, but also fun and relevant to the adventure at hand. Sure you could spend all day mining, or digging up sand, but it least it was relaxing. I actually hate node based resource grinding but that’s another story…

Crafting should not be grindy, or become more difficult as you level as that’s counter-intuitive and not realistic. Early on mats were easier to find and crafting was fun because you could keep it relevant to your adventuring experience. Now I out-level my crafting just by going out to find materials to level my crafting? Which also begs the question. Why are mats for lvl 45 gear found in level 50 – 60 areas?

GW2 lives up to that ideal of not being grindy but that design philosophy doesn’t seem to carry over to it’s crafting system, which just seems slapped on and overly simplified to the point of boredom… and it seems as if the grind is only there to provide the illusion of complexity.

My biggest problem with crafting right now is the extremely low drop rate on stuff like scales, bones, and blood in the level 45 – 50 zones. You just don’t get enough of these mats to be able to keep your crafting up with how fast you level. This wasn’t a problem in the lower level areas so it seems like a tuning issue to me. Especially considering that you need about double the amount mats for rare recipes.

Another problem with the TC is that I think a lot of players abuse the ability to be able to post stuff anywhere and essentially turn the TC into an “insta-vendor” that they can sell to at any time, anywhere on the map. This could easily be why you’re seeing so many goods selling on TC at vendor price. As convenient as it might be I’d actually like to see this option disabled, forcing players to be at a TC agent in order to sell. Like the old days.

Drop rates suck. Crafting is not fun. I level way faster than my crafting and it’s just pointless to craft at this juncture. I could go on but why bother we all know crafting just isn’t balanced properly. Make crafting give more points or make drop rates higher to keep up with insanely fast leveling.

Fixed for me. I like how Anet can run these fixes without any server down time. That’s some nice new tech there. Cameron, give me an address to send some beer.

Andres.8513:

I just want to say that the way you’re handling this thread, Cameron, is really amazing and is a great example of how support-development teams should work.

Cheers to you and to ArenaNet.

I agree actually. Even if I’ve sounded sour – which I’ve tried not to – I’m really impressed by the level of humanity Cameron and Anet has portrayed. A seriously refreshing pace of things in the internet world.

CameronDunn.6473:

Cirah Ravenheart.9618:

Cameron never replied to my PM.

Sorry, sadly I got a lot of PMs about this and can’t reply to them all. We’re using the information in each PM to look up the broken guilds and work out how to fix them.

I know it feels bad and I’m sorry it’s taking a while to fix. Trust me that we’re on it.

Cam

My faith is in you guys but can’t you just write an “if” script? Are the errors that variable?

gorb.5608:

MadPink.3895:

World= Isle of Janthir

Guild= Pink Bunny Brigade

Tag= PBB

My guild completely disappeared on me. It’s like I never created it. I had 10 members and a bunch of upgrades and such. on Tuesday when I logged on it first had all my upgrades gone and inflence gone. and no members besides me, that was when I checked in the morning, but my brother and boyfriend said that on their guild menu, it was still there. Later that day though, it had disappeared for everyone.

Anyone else have this issue?

I think there are a good number of people who have this issue. We ran into the same or a very similar issue 3 days ago. They are working on the fix, but we are still broken. There are a couple guilds who posted around the same time I did that appear to be fixed but no luck for us so far.

I’m still in the same boat as well. My guild has been gone for 3 days now. Filed a ticket the moment it happened, sent a PM to Cameron, made multiple posts here, and haven’t heard a peep from anyone. I know they say they’re working on it but It feels pretty awful regardless.

At this point, 3 days in, that small roster I had spent time building – hand picking people – and all of the guild rep we could have built in those 3 days is as good as lost I’m sure. I was about to get my guild stash before this happened. That’s a good amount of rep for a small 12 man guild.

Guild: Kingdom of Aragon
Server: Ferguson’s Crossing

Malleusx.6092:

I am a guild leader and have the same issues, no permissions for anything and this is detrimental and infuriating to my own, and my guilds game play experience. Can I please get an answer or this issue resolved as soon as possible?!

Guild name is Maverick Army [MVA], Yak’s Bend server.

Try having your guild + all progress completely erased from existence… then you’ll know infuriating.

2 days now and counting… no official reply to my support ticket either.

CameronDunn.6473:

Ponita.8204:

Can we be sure we’ll eventually get our missing guilds back and they’re not lost forever?

That’s how it looks at the moment – the guild system plays it really safe and if it notices any problems with the guild it basically refuses to load it (to prevent it getting more broken). All of the problems we’ve found so far are fixable and after we fix them, the guild loads fine and is available again.

I can’t promise that for every single case in the future – but for every case so far that’s been true.

Cam

Thanks Cameron for keeping us updated.

If you search the web, you’ll find this issue of guilds vanishing has been going on for at least a week now. Please, could we have some resolution on this? This is a serious drawback for many of us.

Thank you.

CameronDunn.6473:

KitKat.1695:

Any news on the outright missing guild where we have needed to recreate and start from scratch, after using tons of influence and research time?

We’ll look up your guild specifically and make sure that it still exists (even if you can’t get access to it at the moment).

Same problem. Guild doesn’t appear at all no matter what map I’m on.

Server: Ferguson’s Crossing
Guild name: Kingdom of Aragon [KoA]

Been waiting for some resolution since 10am this morning (eastern time). Guild has been guild-less all day and we’re pretty bummed.

Thanks for you help Cam!

My guild is gone. Like many others I logged in this morning to find that the guild that I run (Kingdom of Aragon) is no longer in existence. No other members of the guild can see it either. It’s just gone. Very disappointing obviously. Was all that effort wasted?

Yup. Same here. Everything is gone for everyone. It’s like it just doesn’t exist anymore. Been waiting all day for some kind of acknowledgment from support. Meanwhile my guild mates are floating around in other guilds and I will most likely lose some representation from those wondering why their guild leader is gone.

Yup, I logged in this morning and found my guild was no longer showing up in the guild panel. Other guild members are having the same problem.

I logged in this morning and my guild is no longer showing up.

I’m the leader of the guild so I know it’s not disbanded. I messaged other members of the guild and they also can’t see the guild.