Guild Wars 2

the free model of GW2 and the community it fostered shows in the comments here. this is welfare gaming and the fact that most defenders here (and most other threads) continually say the refuse to pay for anything but then demand more content… it’s absurd at this point.

1st of all this has a cash shop and and if you pay attention to any news about ESO AFTER august of last year they have said their cash shop is not going to be any different from here (all convenience or aesthetic, not p2w). and EXACTLY like GW2, you do NOT have to spend money there. there simply is no reason to get mad about things you don’t have to do… (side note: i’m going to start listing cash shops and gay marriages in one category—things some people want but the loudest voices on the subject are the most ignorant.)

to whoever said “the subscription model is dead”… you couldn’t be more wrong. i personally know hundreds of people who tried GW2 and quit because, quote, “you get what you pay for.” personally i think we got a little more than what we are paying for, but they are essentially right. (we all have a lot of worn out “1” buttons as proof.) i’m at the point i’d rather pay monthly (even if it only lasts a year) because that seems to be more incentive to try and fix/produce in a more meaningful and interactive way.

ESO is getting a lot of hell about the bugs—almost all of which were fixed in last weekend’s beta btw, why not spread some facts around for change? BUT here in GW2 we just suffered for about 6 days of a 14 day release with broken events/achievements/etc —and now that content is gone so if anyone missed it, too bad. and oh yeah we’ve been doing that every 2 weeks for a year and a half. even if some stuff is broken at release of ESO, its content is going to speak to the millions of gamers who gave up on this because they want to play at their own speed…which means maybe doing that content in 1 month from now…something impossible here. (and lets not bring up the first 3 months here where everything not tested above level 30 was pretty much gamebreakingly broken. or how mesmers can still glitch through gates in WvW. or the fact flying gorups of golems and thieves still hack everything to death in WvW without being banned. or how everything in pve is just stack and spin to win.)

there were tons of people who paid their $60 for GW2 and got 1-2 months out of it. there is a HUGE realm of gamers that do this for every single MMO. the simple fact of that matter is that gamers ARE going to pay the $60 and take their free month and the next 1-2 months (at the very very least) will negatively impact GW2. in fact it will negatively impact a LOT of games. if may not impact YOU, but please keep a sense of reality so your arguments are negated by stupidity…

well to be fair…WvW get more players whether it works or not… the reason sPvP gets more attention from Anet is because they want more people playing it.

but what have i learned…let’s get on topic…

“roamer guilds” will never fight even numbers… these talentless “roamer guilds” only jump people 5v1…… if you go to them 5v5 they all run. every time. no exceptions. for guilds to get reputations as being “good” at this is completely pathetic.

i’ve also learned we can watch the same 5 guildless thieves hack into towers and keeps every night at exactly 1am eastern and get reported every night and nothing happens. we watched similar things happen during season 1 and it was pathetic but now the same server is brushing off their hacks this last week in what looks like preparation to hack into anything/everything during season 2 again. nothing happened to them before and still hasn’t and probably won’t. i know one specific guy bragged he got caught and got a 3 day ban and is back and bragging that he is doing it again and yet nothing happens. i guess he learned his lesson, right?

i’ve learned that now that the overall population is stabalized, Anet can’t risk losing people, so we have entered the warhammer online phase where warriors will never get nerfed and always account for 60% of the population. yet when 60% was thieves, they got every nerf possible to spread the population. bad business to not aim for equality.

and i’ve learned that every thief that runs away from every fight or every thief that only roams with 5 other thieves spamming heartseeker thinks that that passes for skill. really over it at this point. and that’s coming from a guy who mains thief, does nothing but pvp and wvw, and has 4k hours in the profession of a total of like 4500 played. i’m not worried about how they play…it bothers me how many bad thieves play this way so continue to keep eyes on us for nerfs, and then talk all the trash in the world about how amazing they are making everyone hate us and make it hard to party.

that’s what i’ve learned.

before capping the villain, that cutscene needs the option to skip if you are going to make an achievement that requires repeating one finishing move with precise timing.

the 1st time i watched it was exhilarating. the second was satisfying. the umpteenth has made me literally not give a single kitten about what happens to any of these characters. how easy/hard getting the achievement doesn’t matter to me. i’ll do it 1 or 1000 times if i have to…what annoys me is having to watch endless amounts of the same 3 minutes of footage to try and hit 3 buttons in time and then start over the same 3 minutes of footage then try and hit 3 buttons in time and then start over the same 3 minutes of footage then hit 3 buttons in time…. hopefully you get my point.

again this isn’t about difficulty or bugs or loading screens or even repeating the fights… its being forced to watch the same scene over and over and over and over with no option to skip. ridiculous

i know parts of this are going to sound extremely elitist, and i apologize in advance, but… I just have to say I’m really disappointed in seeing the return of many rewards with this bit of the living story. from a very personal standpoint, i loved having this conversation about my jetpack:
“wow nice back. how did you farm the 600g for it?”
“oh i didn’t…i’ve actually been playing since the very beginning. i got it in the living story dungeon about a year ago.”
“wow that’s even cooler.”
now granted, i didn’t think it was worth the recent 600g-800g price tag, but it made my backpiece extremely special, because no, i didn’t see it very often on other players. i have the same reaction when someone runs by me with the greatsaw skin and i think “man, i wish i had bought that at the time it came out.”

there were few and far between more unique rewards that could speak to our experiences here, and i know in another six months or a year my backpack might feel special again, but for the near future, it feels cheap. i feel like the reward system at this point is why, as a society, we should have never started handing out participation medals.

what’s done is done, but in a related matter, please please please do not bring back the liadri fight and please please please if you do for god’s sake don’t make it easier. that is the one and literally only thing i feel was truly earned through determination, skill, and maybe a bit of luck. when i have the liadri mini out or talk to other people who got it, it is like a little niche club for those of us who saw how utterly frustrating it was and managed to beat it. i think the game needs more things like that reward and a lot less of things like handing out more backpacks and firestorm minis…

maybe i’m thinking of this in terms of “T1 problems” but 99.9999% of the time this is griefing. when it’s used legitimately it can turn a battle—this is true. but i would invite you to come watch JQ borderland sometimes or even EB during certain primetimes. there are people who will literally log in and spend 8-12 hours knocking on doors to contest waypoints. its pretty much the same few people from the same few guilds who do this. they won’t fight you if you attack (although some will try to run if you chase). they are so persistently doing nothing but contesting and dying that it’s honestly just sad that any human would devote this much timer per week to it. (and why it’s been heavily speculated that bots are doing it but personally i haven’t seen evidence to prove that.)

and most of the time these guys are doing this uselessly. i’ve personally watched a warrior in EB do this for 6-8 straight hours when his server had the outnumbered buff. he wasn’t even doing this to let his people take or control things…he didn’t even have people he was supporting by doing this. similar guys have done this in the borderlands too—constantly contesting a waypoint when we own the whole map and not a single other person is trying to take anything but maybe spawn towers or spawn camps…for hours…

personally i think the contesting is way overdue for a change, especially with another season threatening. what has been stupid, nonsensical contesting over the last 2+ months is about to be considered “legitimate” all the time “because its season 2 lol!!!!1one.” eso doesn’t let their version of waypoints become contested until a door/gate/wall is taken down by 5% and from what i saw in the betas, it wasn’t swaying battles like people are scared of here.

consider this:
if anet would bite the bullet and make the door take 5-10% damage, it would actually be a zerg-busting tactic. instead of one guy ringing a doorbell, a small group would have to run up together, clear guards, drop a ram and hit and until noticed, forcing someone somewhere to respond. if this pulls some people off the enemy’s zerg, then great, because by having to have a group move to accomplish the waypoint constesting, they are pulling off their own zerg anyway. resources and manpower being split to have cause and effect is a good thing imo.

the only problems i see in wvw is not enough zerg-busting mechanics. gate-tapping, when used appropriately, is still one guy hitting a door and does nothing—-2 people can wait and kill him repeatedly while he is 1 less person in his zerg. and usually even in the appropriate format, that door knocker is doing it to ensure his zerg is not interrupted with an accidental pvp fight while they pvdoor. so while it may be used to give a team of 10 time to take a keep before a team of 40 comes to kill them, i don’t see this happen very often.

the only thing i hate is the combination of the following facts:

i am a gamer. i play to win. i don’t understand people who play and don’t care about winning. i’m not a role-player, but i severely enjoy immersion. when the event is to save people and i’m surrounded by people who don’t care, this bothers me. i like feeling that we have people to save…and hate that i am surrounded by people who choose NOT be immersed which pulls me out of my own immersion.

since inception this game was touted as a game that would have these stories drive it forward and be ever changing and yet for some reason the number of people who care about the story and playing to the mechanics (rather than using/abusing them) seem wildly outnumbered by people who don’t care about anything the game has proposed, offered, and delivered to us.

i think this thought a lot when i’m playing:
in another 2+ years, this game is going to be unbelievably amazing… why? because the only people left will be people who truly care about it, truly love it, and truly want to play what we are given.
it really is NOT anet’s fault for when we cannot win or when things don’t go right or when people cannot work together. this community is constantly failing itself. i love this game but the vast number of “nerf this” or “change that” or “give us this” threads are ridiculous at this point. the content and its mechanics have been relatively consistent. it just boils down to why so many people choose not to play as intended. “because the content/rewards/story sucks” is not an answer…if people are going to constantly hide behind that statement then why are they even here? let those of us who do NOT think this game sucks enjoy what we are supposed to be doing already.

they need to go old school with AoE damage:
remove cap, but make it damage/people = how much each takes
i seriously don’t understand why games stopped using that formula.

No. they have done nothing to balance servers or change how points work. watching almost everyone bend to help BG do what they wanted under the promise of BG’s protection only to get screwed by said protectors seemed to sink in only for SoR… and that took most of the tourney to figure out. somehow no one else learned 1v1v1 is meant for weaker opponents to work together (which almost never happens in this community).
On top of that, it again boils down to coverage and especially who can keep q’s up during the week—something only sor/bg/jq seemed to do in season 1 after the first 2 weeks. its unbalanced, unfair, the community doesn’t work together properly. then throw in the fact they are trying to just copy everything eso has been talking about for over a year now and you have a recipe for pre-emptive copying and fail.

when keep ownership grants points only—-ONLY—when you have all your camps…when towers ONLY grant points when you own the closest camp and maybe an enemy objective of sorts… then ok, institute seasons. that’s the only way to zerg-bust…and for a match up of 20 vs 100 on a map for the 20 person group to stay competitive by wrecking small things that are tied to big points.

since only rewards and match ups are changing, all this will accomplish is showing new people just how uncompetitive they truly are in the grand scheme. change the mechanics and make servers actually work and spread out instead of blobbing to 100 and pressing 1.

i love how sor and jq came down too but because bg is down, you say it must be one of us doing it. kitten and gtfo lol

this one of about a billion threads where thieves (or insert your hated class) are blamed for something that boils down to awful community play. as overflows for any giant content can show you, there’s a small % of people who try and be part of the community. downed state is no different.

as a thief, i see a downed person and shadow refuge is pretty much automatic on my part when fighting. you know what 99.99999999999% of downed people do? they start spamming attacks at anything try to stomp them and i can’t rez in time. their fault not mine.

i go down in fights, and literally i’ll have 5 people around me including necros and hammer wars and other thieves. you know what 99.9999999999999% of you do? not even try to rez, or if you do try rezzing, no one fears, hammer stuns, uses shadow refuge…

people come to this game to spam 1. if they came to work together, in the above instance, the war would spam some hammer stuns, the necro would let off a fear or well, and the thief would shadow refuge and rez.

don’t blame the mechanics or the class: everything has been set to easy mode so everything has a counter. the problem is this game is so easy mode, no one takes the time to even think about using counters, being smart when helping other players or even receiving help, or being part of the community that is outside their guild or friends.

we would have had a lot less nerfs to all jobs if people analyzed the skills instead of just crying in the forums constantly. can thieves invis too much? yes …but can every other job spam cc counters to them? absolutely. unfortunately we have been spoon fed too much press-1 content for people to bother actually learning how to synergize.

disagree entirely and i’m a thief… i’m sick of watching so many bad thieves pretend they are good in wvw because they attack bunnies to invis off. all ambient creatures should be removed from there too imo. the only function they serve is for a class mostly full of baddies to find more ways to run away from fights they can’t win. again: this is coming from a thief with 4k hours played on said thief.

as someone born the day after valentine’s day irl… i thank you kindly for all these skins and i seriously want almost every single one of them! thank you for something fun to finally balance out the crazy amounts of toxic, marjory, scelerite, and other takes-itself-too-seriously skins we have had for the last year or more!

I’m wildly upset by the armor rollback.

I had t3 before the changes…I hated the extra colors like the purples and greens that edged and highlighted it. I wound up selling it all back to a vendor.

Then they announce the glow changes and I took a look just for fun…and the glow of the molten dye was so amazing, I bought the set a 2nd time. For a month I loved watching myself on screen like never before.

Now it’s rolled back to have all those purples and greens and no glow and I’m feeling ridiculously cheated out of not just 120g like some people mention, but 240g cause it’s the 2nd time I’ve bought the set….and I’m inches away from just tossing it or trabsmuting it. So I understand it’s upset some people once…but twice is frustrating as all hell.

I’m kinda holding out to see if we get a glow-slider option or something, but I still don’t understand who saw the glowing armor last month and got mad about getting to actually stand out in a crowd. To get us all reverted back to fruitloop colored armor with overly dark tones is just…bleh…and whoever complained, imo, is a boring person who shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the fun fir the rest of us who felt and looked fabulous.

Just an idea…and the collaborative thread seems over on spvp side of things…but, as the title says, how about a set of spvp arenas that are what affect the bloodlust? Spvp has constantly talked about a way to attract more people and many of us want some form of tie in to the entire universe the way everything else is tied in some way… well here it is. Bloodlust areans for wvw. Rewards could vary or even be chosen from current spvp rewards or wvw specific ones (like the gems with guard damage +/- or 15min wxp buffs). You’d have tons of people sick of zerging but bored of spvp in there. Your queues may even be relaxed by people who choose to fight for their server and make a difference in these type arenas instead.

Bloodlust was supposed to support small man operations. so far, what i’ve seen, is if we send 10 people to cap bloodlust, BG sends about 50 to keep us off it. its gone away from what it was intended to do—support roaming and small team play. This may be less of an issue on small pop servers, but bloodlust is semi-ruining the game at the moment from my standpoint.

A very large number of fight ends are ending with BG jumping into water or off cliffs. no chance at bloodlust’s war score bonus. This is something most other servers are not doing because, well,. we like to play, not act like kittens. Yes I actually wrote kittens, that’s not being censored. The mechanic is kinda broken when it actually supports less skill and weaker game play. I’m not blaming BG, it’s, techinically, a winning tactic…but it doesn’t promote any kind of actual warring or competitive atmosphere on the field of play itself.

I don’t want to see the new “meta game” become only fighting next to water and cliffs…which it will once that many people see it happening. (Gamers are lemmings…unfortunate metaphor too easy.) Either give us a way to spike in water or make all water kills a war score. Also, a cliff jump by someone who has been attacked should reward war score too. That ends this awful way of just being…well…silly.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents for the day. Not totally fleshed out, but i think we could run with them.

This is so long now, I can’t read through everything… but I think having the 3 biggest servers match up in the first week and last week is an absolute fail too. There’s tons of posts about the queues on big servers, I don’t need to go into it. But to give the worst collisions the worst weeks for it is absurd. Those two weeks are ultimately going to decide everything, and have them be the 2 weeks where everything is clogged with people jumping on the achievements in first week or rushing to get them done in the final week is just crippling to what the game is about. If the balance to overall populations is not created by season 2, these weeks need to be scheduled differently.

As far as balancing the servers though… My only suggestion is actually looking at the forces of the smaller servers and you just figure out which has the biggest time zone coverages for the ones that lack certain ones. But once you target what servers could benefit form a virtual merge of the two, reach out to those people directly and personally. Offer them something discreetly. Do NOT reach out to the GW2 base as a whole and expect us to work it out on honor. We’re obviously a community made up mostly of people that want to break dungeons, fail events to farm faster, and refuse to work appropriately on open world additions that require people to work together. It’s sad, but it’s true. Looking at scores and problems of the gold league right now, you could offer me 10 precursors to move off the big 3 and I would laugh at you. I’d rather queue for hours than have my face pushed in, and I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way.

I spend most of my time in WvW and the only part that felt crippling was the lifetime achievements that mostly seem unfinishable. So the current set of achievements, in my opinion, is a great solution. There’s so many posts about the current queue problems, but I don’t see viable solutions.

Personally I would do this:

WvW Season Achievements: don’t make them seasonal. Make them weekly. Make the weekly ones add up to a seasonal achievement. I think this will allow more players to get in and out quicker instead of clogging queues with people who are trying to do too much (or all of it) in one sitting… And I know there are a lot of us who do this with new content—myself included at times.

For example: week 1—get 50 kills, take 10 camps, capture 2 towers. All three complete? 1/7 seasonal achievements. Rinse, repeat w/new weeklies, etc. Get in and get out (if you want) or get in and teach/learn—all the new people to WvW might just get hooked on something bigger while those who move on quickly can get back to what they want to do too.

Just an idea.