Guild Wars 2

Lore question: Have the pact or racial groups done any research about the thumpers that have shown up in their back yards. Will we get any more pact specific lore (quest driven perhaps) to go along with the living story, or is our membership in the vigil, priory, etc. more or less done and over at this point?

Atlas.9704:

erroch.8061:

I’ve also yet to get teabagged in wvw. This really happens commonly?

I’ve had folks jump on my corpse during the times I tried to complete map.
I’m glad that’s over now.

That’s just tacky. I usually save that behavior for guild-mates before raising them.

Ronah.2869:

If it was meant for Chinese then why the texts are in English? Shouldn’t they be in Chinese?

English developers and English testers. Make sure it all works in English then send it to an localization team and say “Translate this.”

At least that is how it works with the companies I’ve done development work for.

Neural.1824:

Seems to me they gave a lot of non-answer answers.

As for the comment about forcing players to “experience” WvW for world completion, I am going to stop just shy of calling bullkitten on that. PvE players who want world completion go to WvW to experience being ganked and teabagged. Really encourages them to play the game. :roll eyes:
Is Arenanet really that desperate to gain just one or two WvW players, that they feel it is necessary to subject thousands to the humiliation that they will have to go through in WvW? Is that how Anet sees it? That humiliating players is a good way to get them to enjoy the game?

Maybe it’s a server issue. I went into WvW for the first time for world completion with no intentions of actually playing it.

You know what? This idea sometimes works. I got my world completer in a militia group taking a defended / fortified bay in series of sieges that lasted two hours.

But then again, from if the horror stories like the above are common, then the Tarnished Coast community is a good bit more accepting and willing to help other’s get up to speed then is usual.

There wasn’t any humiliation. Yes, I got blown out of my boots a lot, but overall, once I figured out what the blue dorito was and met some folks to run small roaming groups with, it was a blast.

I’ve also yet to get teabagged in wvw. This really happens commonly?

On the gem store…

I enjoy the game, I like that I’m not required to shell out $15 a month to continue playing, and I enjoy that we don’t have our content and progression segregated into “pay for expansion to win” style deliverable. (In the expansion model traditionally there is an increase in item power and or character level tied with the new content to force everyone to pick them up to remain competitive)

Another side effect of most expansion driven MMO’s is that you usually get completely new isolated content in the expansion and everything else rots. There is a mind set caused by the business model that because it’s not new, it’s not what people are paying for. Anything added to the old areas beyond small quality of life issues, is not driving forward your profit-model. An example of this: how many years was it before WoW revisited the vanilla areas. They only did so when they became pain points for new players and they needed to touch the areas anyway to implement new tech for an expansion.

Love or hate the living world story, but we’re getting a trickle in expansion effectively. New skills (arguably of dubious use in some cases), some temporary and permanent content, and because of the model they don’t need to worry about segregating the content, or effectively making it “pay to win by expansion.”

It is a rather interesting idea to me that even the person who bought the game on sale and never dropped another penny into the game can be competitive with someone who has sunk a hundreds of dollars into the game.

There isn’t any other MMO, I think, that has pulled it off to this level of effectiveness without a subscription while pushing regular content.

I’ve looked at the gem store as, not so much as a requirement, but a way to say “Hey, thanks for that $15 bucks” instead of “Give us your $15 or sod off” or “This will be your annual $60 contribution to the expansion, buy it now or forever alone in game”.

As long as required items don’t end up in the gem store, I’m pretty content with it.

As a side effect from this, I don’t feel the pressure to play to get my “money’s worth” in GW2 as I have in many other MMO’s. If I decide to take a month or two off to do something like learn another language (python was fun), create some artwork, hit crunch time at work on a release, or just focus on another aspect of my life, it’s not a big deal. I’m not “wasting money”.

So yes, I’m buying Gems. I’m happy to do so. I and quite a few of the folks I play with will continue to do so because we enjoy the game and don’t want it to close because it became unprofitable. I don’t see it as “ruining the game” as much as telling ANet"I had a lot of fun with the game this month, well done. " and buying the type of items I wouldn’t mind seeing more of in the gem store.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

That’s why gold “runs everything”. It’s also very deeply ingrained in RPGs to have the basic necessities bought through gold (or a stand-in for it like “Zenny” or “gil”, or “pokedollars”) rather than through other means. Designers haven’t gotten away from it too far except for a few games I can think of, but MMOs almost always default to some form of coin currency as their basic building block.

As an amusing aside, in the first MMO I played (Asheron’s Call), gold/pyreal was so easy to get that it effectively became worthless. The players ended up basing their economy for the longest time on “shards” dropped from certain mobs. The really interesting part with this is after you had 32 of them, they had no personal intrinsic value anymore. You had your set of armor they produced and were more or less done with them forever.

In time as more consumable things were added that had intrinsic value, the “shard” economy fell apart, but it was an interesting development when it happened.

It was a rather interest bit of emergent behavior back then due to the lack of the built in currency having not much real significance.

Sorry for the off topic, but I thought you might find it interesting, Tobias.

Devata.6589:

With buying gems you are not supporting the game you are helping to destroy it. And I will not explain why again.

Explain in the current model how you financially support the game without buying gems please.

Rezzet.3614:

there s a diference for other servers siege is optional in the case of TC ACs and Ballistas are main and offhand weapons lol

And we wear our trebuchet’s as backpacks.

bob.8632:

Agreed, in that context your quote makes much more sense. I have yet to understand why this sense of “we understood WvW would not be balanced” seems to insinuate that they are OK with these lopsided blowout matches…Or moreover, why they thought this would be “fun” for the playerbase.

I don’t think they’ve said they are OK with the lopsided blowout matches. I think helping avoid these is entirely what the recent post about reducing variance in the matching was to help avoid.

The biggest problem with the blowout matches seems to be a social one. With guilds being able to easily server transfer, it gives more incentives to hop servers then it does to grow a server community. There’s far less work that way.

I’m not certain at this point if there is really a fix for it, other then to disincentive stacking somehow?

Eh, it’s holiday time.

This time of year in most games shows a decrease in numbers. (A trend I’ve noticed DJing for online games. Numbers always go down in December) You’ve got the normal holiday stuff topped off with quite a few schools / colleges are in semester finals this week.

Combine it with two new living world sets of achievements for people to horde, ascended armor to craft and new “challenges” in fractals and of course you’re going to see WvW numbers dwindle a little.

Then add in that we’re just coming off Season 1 where a lot of people busted their balls to keep their server rank up, and probably burned out a little doing it. Now that we’re back to ‘regular old WvW’, it’s a good time to go outside and throw real snowballs at people. (As an adult, this never gets old… if only it would actually snow…)

That said, I’m still seeing full zergs in our borderlands most nights (not necessarily ours), and still spending time in queues on TC, just not as long as it was two weeks ago.

Edit: Give it a few weeks, and it’ll be back in full swing again, I’m betting.

Sometimes in WvW an objective doesn’t have to be a keep, tower, camp, or the like. Sometimes it can be as simple as a dead necromancer.

Our little four man crew was doing our own thing, avoiding the massive server zergs that were map hopping around Sunday since we needed a break from being ‘on task’ and looking for a tower or two to ninja. We settled into Water Camp with the intent of maybe ninjaing the south east tower when we got in a little scrap with a small group of FA folks from Flames of Andraste. (I think I got the name right)

At the end up the scrap, we realized their necromancer hadn’t released. And he was right were we’d planned on dropping a catapult. We decided it would be wrong to define his corpse by using it to stabilize a catapult. Instead, we decided, to give in to our guild name induced tendencies and take a bit of a nap. We snuggled up to the necromancer and decided to wait to see what happened. Would he release, would he wait out his timer?

This turned our afternoon into a bit of an unexpected scenario.

FoA decided they could not leave their fallen comrade behind and would mount a rescue mission. We clued into it after we were baited off the hill (always take the bait) By the time one of us turned around, there was a thief (or mesmer, I forgot which of you was there) reviving our new snuggle buddy.

Well.. as righteous followers of the Toast, we couldn’t have that, could we? We knew it was only a matter of time before our friend would be taken from us, either by timer or by his allies. We knew we had to hold our ground. He was just so cozy. Where else can you find a decent pillow in this siege tortured land?

We set up camp and had few amusing skirmishes. Two Mesmers and Two Engineers, guarding a necromancer from his thief, Mesmer, and warrior compatriots. Eventually one or two more came and pushed us off the hill and their companion was resurrected. We made our way back after reviving at the waypoint and gave a parting salute before being righteously stomped into the ground and limping off to tend to real life.

I hope you folks in FoA had as much amusement and laughter from our little back and forth as we did.

Those of us from “I should be sleeping” salute you all from Fires of Andraste.

~ Dominik Tibor

PS: So many guilds with similar tags to us on TC these days…. We’re [Zzzz] not to be confused with [ZzZz] or [ZzZ] or [zzzz]