Guild Wars 2

in fact, it seems the performance of the game has gone down a bit since release. I’ve experienced more notable GW2 crashes while loading into areas during the last 2 weeks.

deleted my local.dat file, still can’t log back into the last toon I had logged in (Harathi Hinterlands).

Account.9832:

That is definitely part of the problem. I think GW2 dungeons fail in several aspects:

• Bosses have too much HP and too few mechanics. Fights just get boring. Nearly every boss should have 30% less HP and multiple phases or abilities (preferably triggered at random times and /or in random orders). A lot of them just stand still firing projectiles, or chase players repeating the same attack over and over again.

• Bosses make little or no use of their environment. For example, the door guard in CM has a ton of potential. When I first saw that room I expected the boss to do things like run to a rope, cut it and make the chandelier drop (causing AoE damage in the middle of the room), shake the walls causing books to fall (causing damage near the edges), run to the fireplace and throw out burning embers (forcing players to use furniture as cover), or something like that. Instead, we get a guy that just chases players, then stops and swings his sword (damaging players who are behind him and nowhere near the sword, BTW). Boring, boring, boring. And he’s not the exception, he’s the rule.

• Mobs also have too much HP and hit way too hard. When a group of level 80 adventurers with exotic gear and elite skills goes into a dungeon, they should feel powerful. They should feel that they’re overcoming incredible odds. Instead, it takes 5 “heroes” almost one minute to kill a couple of nameless guards – guards who are able to kill them in 3 hits. This is ridiculous; it makes players feel like wimps. No “trash” mob should be more powerful than a fully-geared player of the same level. Instead, the party of 5 players should be pitted against larger groups, or groups with some tactical advantage (ex., access to cannons, turrets, traps, etc.). That’s how you give players a challenge while making them feel powerful. It’s dungeon design 101.

• The only enemies that should be clearly more powerful than players should be bosses and mini-bosses. And that extra power should be justified by their appearance (i.e., they should be big, or look like powerful wizards, or carry some menacing weapon, etc.). Not just another humanoid guard who happens to have 50x more HP than any player can ever have, and 10x more attack power than any player can ever have. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen players say something like “GW2… where trash mobs kill you in 2 seconds and bosses die with 5 minutes of auto-attack”. It’s not even irony; it’s just true.

• Mobs’ behaviour is often nonsensical. I’m talking about things like riflemen and archers who don’t move at all (did someone glue their feet to the ground?), like the ones in CM, or armies with infinite soldiers that spawn out of thin air but attack only 3 at a time (like the ones in SE). If you want to have an enemy that just shoots and doesn’t move, use a turret, not a human. And if you want to have a steady but infinite stream of enemies, justify it in some way (ex., make them robots, coming out of an assembly line – not living creatures popping out of thin air but choosing to attack in small groups instead of just steamrolling the enemy). What are the mobs doing there in the first place, anyway, besides waiting for players to come kill them? If you can’t justify their presence and behaviour in some credible way, rethink the dungeon.

• Explorable mode paths are often extremely similar, sharing parts of the terrain and even some bosses, not to mention the first third of the dungeon is always identical. Before launch we were told that dungeons would have “several bonus events” that could “surprise” players. In the end, there is effectively one random event (the troll in AC). Everything else is fixed.

Overall, dungeons are one of the weakest parts of GW2. Unimaginative, unrealistic, unrewarding, repetitive and boring. The fractal dungeons are better (at the cost of making even less sense), but still suffer from some of the problems above (bosses with too much HP, that just get boring half way into the fight, “low end” mobs that are far more powerful than any player, things that pop out of thin air with no justification, etc.).

It feels like the dungeons and their inhabitants were designed by completely different people, and that the latter didn’t really have a RPG mentality and weren’t even trying to create believable places, just sprinkle the dungeon with some semi-random mobs with semi-random abilities. Their guiding objective (reinforced by most of the changes introduced after launch) seems to have been to make players spend time rather than make the players have fun.

I think nearly any player with a couple of years of gaming experience could design more interesting dungeons. Maybe not code them, but certainly design them.

Best post I’ve read so far, this needs its own thread.

LordByron.8369:

i never ask particular classes…..

But when i play with a guardian (well not every guardian just some builds) the game is easier.

Has to be said that:
-ranger
-mesmer
-thief
-engineer

Are great too for other purposes…
Also some warrior builds __

I just want one of any ._., well btw a good guardians makes life simpler for everyone.

Engineer… great for 1500 range aoe/dps plus lots of options for utility/support. Put us in the same category as rangers? HOW DARE YOU SIR… how dare you!

TSW had great voice acting even though your own character didn’t have his/her voice. NPCs felt very natural compared to this monotone, inflectionless, crap we’ve seen from both GW2 and SWTOR.

The one voice worth mentioning in this game (for story-mode) that I felt came across the most successful was Tybalt Leftpaw from the Order of Whispers arc. This game could definitely use, even benefit from a better VO tech team, albeit a bit late in the process now to go back and correct.

The basic point to all this is: If you’re going to shell out the dime to get a team of well known voice actors for all the major roles in the game, might as well take advantage. Right now it sounds like you guys had a running joke were you’d use all the worst VOs before launch, then plug in the right ones at launch, but lost the good sound recordings, basically shooting yourself in the foot. It would still be tragic, but hey, at least you got a good story out of it.

eldavo.6054:

DC’s have affected me probably 10 times. They’ve caused literally hours to be wasted. Last night was the worst on yet:

Fractal 22
1. Grawl
2. Dredge
3. Cliffside

Party member DC’s during Cliffside. We keep going but get wiped at the third set of symbols and the party ends up giving up. 2 more hours down the tubes… This is by far the most aggravating bug I’ve encountered since playing this game at pre-release. I am really hoping there’s a fix for it on Saturday.

Don’t forget, you couldn’t even load asura earlier that day Diav.

Still a huge issue which was supposed to be the FIRST thing they were going to work on fixing several weeks ago. Apparently making cliffside the biggest waste of time in the game was more important than fixing the only bug in FoTM that any of the players care about.

Eleazyair.5716:

This is a joke. Each patch is getting worse and worse. What is happening at Anet??

maybe SOE or Bioware is taking over lol. Seriously though, they should not be pumping out un-tested patches.

Dead.7385:

Tenebrae.8062:

You were able to fix exploits in a matter of days, but when it comes to making a dungeon not disconnect, or at least open it up like the other dungeons instead of the “no rejoin” policy? I’m quickly losing faith in your programming abilities.

Well lets be honest. It doesn’t seem like this “emergency” path (as devs RUSHED to fix exploits) was tested in any serious manner. It is clearly evident by the gamebreaking bugs the path iteself introduced.

Seriously? You bugged jumping AND the fractal that you fixed an exploit that allowed easy completion.

For real, the most pressing issue is not the number one issue (to players)… it’s taking the extra 5-10 minutes to down arch-guy three more times than normal.

I’m almost offended you added this patch before you fixed players who crash in fractals who cannot rejoin their group (the number one issue with fractals before you added this patch) and instead added a patch which was undoubtedly not properly tested.

In the future please fix pressing issues first, then fix the dumb bugs, and before release test it to the full extent.

What I want to know is, how the hell did they break the jump in only a couple places?

I agree with the above poster, shut down cliffside until the appropriate fixes are in place.

From this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Connection-failed-please-try-again-1/first#post570284

A:

Hi eveyone

Anet is aware of the current log in issue and they are working on it to provide a fix as soon as possible as you can see in this message

Login and MK Dungeon issues
We are aware of the Login issues and issues with entering the Mad King Dungeon.
We are working to solve them, and apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you for your patience!

Thanks for your patience and understanding

Same error here after crashing while trying to load into Lions Arch.

plant, necro

wish i took a pick but my goodness, the prize is weak! I want a scythe, and no I’m not paying 20-30 gold for it.

Terrible reward BTW, how about giving us our choice of Halloween skins instead? That would be more festive than some stupid boots.

look down when you get to the tip of the beam

same problem here, got to the very tippy top of the beam, ran back down to look around, back up… nothing.