Guild Wars 2

The perennial argument between two senses of “fun:” 1) min-maxing performance and efficiency, and 2) goofing off pretending you’re an adventurer in a virtual world.

Personally I’m a 2) type of player usually, and don’t have enough time to get really deep enough into games’ metas, but on those occasions I do get deep enough into a game, I think it’s only polite to fit in with the meta if you want to get the big rewards that come with it.

You gotta laugh at the state of the education system these days

I think the fx are beautiful when you’re playing solo – the trouble is, they have the same “impressionistic” feel as all the graphics in the game, which, again, is beautiful in and of itself – it has a painterly look. But that “painterly” look makes the ability fx a bit fuzzy.

I remember CoH used to have absolutely tons of fx as well, but they had sharper outlines in general, they didn’t have that “painterly/impressionistic” effect, so it was somehow easier to see what was going on.

But I don’t think that can be changed at this stage, it’s part of the feel of the game. They probably do need to work on having more sliders to tone things down a bit more for those who like clarity though.

DocHolliday.5921:

You’re the only person who’s said that in quite some time. Many people are pointing out that they see lots of people leaving. Yeah, you’re most likely wrong.

I think he’s most likely right.

After all, how do you know that you and your chums are at all representative of the majority of the playerbase? That’s what you’d need to know to make your anecdotal evidence extrapolatable.

Another point: players come and players go. You have no idea whether you and your friends are being replaced by different kinds of players or not.

Last point: forums are not necessarily representative of the majority’s opinion. They can be, sometimes, but it takes a real game-breaker to get people onto forums who aren’t the usual suspects.

I’ve been around on many MMOs, and for me, this doesn’t have the feel of a game that’s in trouble at all, quite the contrary. Unlike, say SWTOR, where you could tell that the forums were representative, and that numbers were actually dwindling fast, or even going back to AoC, when there was a similar scenario – it was easy to tell in-game that it was losing people by the thousands. This game just doesn’t have that vibe for me at all. Not even close.

Anecdotal, sure, but none of us have the numbers, or even the wherewithal to figure out the numbers from anything we do in-game.

Healix.5819:

I like what Wildstar is doing. Blind actually blinds your screen and doesn’t affect your abilities while disarm knocks your weapon to the ground and you have to find it. They also have counters to control skills, where for example, if stunned, you can spam a key to shrug it off or dodge roll out of a knockdown. Personally, I wish GW2 would have gone with more of an action oriented combat style like this, rather than the hybrid it is.

I must admit I’m really excited by that CC wildstar video. I particularly love confusion being sudden reversal of direction controls! It makes sooo much sense to have CC be something that skill of one kind or another can shorten.

Jatacid.3725:

However, lets say I only am ABLE to play 1 hr a week. Is it fair for me to wait almost a year of my life to get the items I want?

“Hours played = stuff gained” is the very definition of fair, because it’s the same for everyone. How many of those hours you play per day is totally your business, not Anet’s.

If you were to make a special arrangement that shrunk the number of hours played required to get something, for some people, that would be the very definition of unfair.

However, there’s some truth in what you say. Some people have more time than money, and others have more money than time (in terms of “willing or able to spend on the game”). Traditionally, MMOs have favoured people with more time than money. But recently they’ve seen the virtue of catering to people with more money than time too, much to the annoyance of some people who have more time than money

For those who really aren’t able to play many hours in the day, well, that’s partly what Cash Shops are for – for people who have more money than time, so they can get to roughly where people who have more time than money are (it’s why they sell things like XP boosters, etc.)

colesy.8490:

And if you make players have to pay attention more you’re just going to get (even more) QQing bads who want the rewards at the end for free.

Yeah but screw them, they shouldn’t be playing dungeons. The way I see it, dungeon content should be the content niche in MMORPGs that’s for really good players, to challenge them – and not just the first time they do it, but always, every time. That’s why the rewards should be high.

Doing a “learned” dungeon seems to me to be the acme of tedium. I’d rather have something fresh each time and have to work through it slowly, as an adventure, with a bunch of people who are concentrating, bantering, etc., like virtual comrades, rather than grimly getting on with it like ships that pass in the night (which is what it often gets to be).

That’s usually what it’s like first time with a dungeon with a bunch of people who have never done it before, and that’s where (as I see it) one is immersed in a virtual world, rather than putting another tick in a box.

Obviously it’s going to be easy to pick up for some, and hard for others, either because of differences in intelligence, or because of differences in paying attention, or both.

Obviously, Anet have to pitch it in the middle somewhere; obviously that is going to be subject to ongoing adjustments.

Is the amount of hand-holding too high or too low in relation to the ideal average, at the moment? Probably a bit too low, but not much. Tooltips are there, and the wiki is there. I agree with those who are saying the China release will probably see some adjustments made, and it will probably be in the direction of a little bit more hand-holding for beginniners, but not much.

pullnointer.1476:

arjeidi.2690:

Be creative. Make things challenging.

bad argument. I shouldn’t be the one to g_imp myself for challenging content, it should be presented by the developers.

Not at the expense of making it too difficult for players who are less good than you.

Not everyone who plays an MMO is interested in challenge, many play for relaxation, to get into a trance state and unwind, or for light-hearted fun.

Open world ought to be “mediumly challenging”, at a level that’s not too hard for the weakest players, not too easy for the best; if you want to progress through more challenging content, that’s what dungeons, etc., are meant for.

A lot of complaints about lack of challenge have a subtext “I’m a great player, all the rest of you are kitten, the game should be designed around me.” But that’s not how MMOs are designed nowadays, they’re meant to be a big tent form of entertainment, with niches for those who like challenge.

Fringilla Vigo.8594:

gurugeorge.9857:

Ex hypothesi, if you don’t “need” gold that much, then farming shouldn’t bother you.

If I don’t need gold per se, it doesn’t necessary mean that I don’t need gold to get me closer to my gold.

So I need it in the sense that everyone does. Not that I can’t play without it but it makes me closer to things i want to achieve.

But that doesn’t bother me as such. What bothers me is that most maps are desolate and empty. Because there’s no economical reason to play them. Some maps are flooded. because theres some economical reason to play them.
Is that clear enough now?

In one sense every one needs gold, of course – gold is needed to purchase things, and if you want the things, you need the gold.

But for some players having things is secondary to other goals, while for others having things is closer to their primary goal – they want to achieve, to accumulate, to have the best gear, etc., etc. For them, it’s more like racing than playing about. And that’s fine, that’s a playstyle (the Achiever playstyle). Anet has to provide some way for them to do their thing, because they’re a huge part of any MMO playerbase.

Now, you’re saying that because of the lumpiness of distribution of players across mapes because of farming content on some maps, that’s stopping you from achieving your goals. But think about this:-

For those farmer, there’s no economic reason to play on your empty map.

But for you, there is still an economic reason to play on your empty map, isn’t there?

So really it’s not an economic argument you’re making, but it’s more that you are sort of lonely and wish there were more players playing on your map.

And I agree wholeheartedly with that. The maps should be more evenly populated.

But for that, it seems to me, the rewards have to be upped for DEs and normal play, to the same level as the Champs and “farms” are now.

This is why I’m suggesting that actually Anet have built a fair bit of headroom into the game for extrinsic rewards, and are now starting to let rip with it, first with Champs, and I think soon with DEs and other content.

Again, I think we must, must, MUST talk about this subject bearing in mind the bot problem Anet had right at the beginning of the development of the game. The relatively paucity of extrinsic rewards up till now has, I believe, a lot to do with that.

So, ok, the only argument left is that if they up the rewards across the board, it will screw the economy. But I think it’s likely that the economy was designed with the higher level of rewards in mind – which means, in effect, I think they always intended it to be a bit easier for everyone to get the stuff they want, but they couldn’t get to that state while there was a bot problem.

I think the “lumpiness” of player distribution is temporary. Anyway, I sure hope it is

colesy.8490:

Well that’s the thing, I don’t see it as a fault. Like I said above, players get rewarded with fast clears if they learn the encounters, people who want to shut their brain off will get rewarded with a long, tedious dungeon crawl and most likely will be taking long dirt naps.

It’s a fault because the structure doesn’t allow the various options in the game to be utilized. And whatever your precise definition of “RPG” may be, it must surely involve choices with consequences? And whatever your particular definition of “adventure” may be, it surely cannot include “doing the same thing the same way over and over again”?

I don’t disagree with what you are saying about rewarding players who pay attention and punishing players who don’t pay attantion players at all. That is how a dungeon ought to be.

But don’t you think the game ought to be designed so that all the options for armour and weapons HAVE SOME USE (responsive to the idea of choices with consequences that’s core to the concept of RPGs) in a situation where players ARE paying attention?

But it hardly ever so in MMORPGs. And that’s because designing static content which can be learned once is always going to be easier than designing content which changes up a bit every time you play it, so that EVERY time you play it you have to pay attention in the same way as you paid attention the first time you played it.

Ex hypothesi, if you don’t “need” gold that much, then farming shouldn’t bother you.

I appreciate the point about potential inflation, but that’s what I mean by “headroom” – I don’t think Anet are stupid enough not to realize what the recent reward-upping might mean for the economy; I think the fact that they’ve upped the rewards means they have some built-in headroom for rewards across the board, and they don’t think it will adversely affect the economy. And I think they will up the rewards for open world content to a comparable level.

Everyone is forgetting the bot context. When the game started, bots were a huge plague. Obviously in that context, Anet couldn’t up the reward level. One must presume that, given they are upping the reward level (and are likely to do it across the board) this is because they feel they’ve got a handle on the bot abuse potential, and that they launched cautiously, but now feel they can give the players the level of reward-buzz they originally intended the game to have.

Either that, or they are idiots who don’t know what they’re doing – these are really the only alternatives, so far as I can see. I’m just loathe to believe that people who made a game as good and successful as GW are idiots.

colesy.8490:

As condescending as this sounds, if you run a dungeon once and carefully note the animations and types of attacks mobs do, next time, you know to reflect the projectile attacks, dodge the melee hits and your DPS won’t be compromised by weak gear. If you have problems wasting dodges, there’s the superior sigil of stamina, and if you have no dodges there’s blurred frenzy and distortion.

Quite right.

But (going broader on the topic) stand back a bit from what you’ve just said – in what way is “knowing a dungeon” playing an RPG, or having a virtual adventure?

It’s not your fault, you’re just fitting in with what has been designed, and formally you are correct in what you say.

However, dungeons in my opinion OUGHT NOT to be “learnable”. It’s precisely the “learnable” quality of dungeons that creates the Zerker meta for dungeons. (It’s also responsible for the analogous syndrome of “damage is king” in pretty much all MMOs. That is to say, despite all the wonderful options devs give people, most MMO metas eventually default to the same.)

Of all the content in an MMORPG, dungeons ought to be be the most “living”. Why? In order to make them genuine adventures where a good reward is hard-won at the end. Under such cirumstances, the meta would then be more spread out amongst all the possibilities.

The tediousness of the Zerker meta – and the tediousness of dungeons in general, such that they are something you can “learn” and then do more or less mechanically – is entirely the fault of the game design.

I hope Anet do spread their philosophy of “living” content back into the micro-level of dungeon design. Then we will see more use for build and gear variety.

I find zerg trains huge fun, I loved the CP, I love the current content. In fact, it’s the massive zergs in the starter areas when I started playing that made me excited about the game.

However, I also find soloing fun, I also find dungeons fun, etc., etc.

With all these, they all have some intrinsic reward. The question is whether they have enough extrinsic reward, and I would say no, or rather, not until recently. I think the move to better rewards is a good thing, and I don’t think Anet would be doing it unless they felt they had some headroom to do it.

IOW, I think they’ve been being deliberately cautious about rewards up till now because of the botting problem. I think they are going to be upping rewards across the board without breaking the economy (i.e. I think the game was designed with a higher level of rewards in mind). And I think this is a good thing.

All the activities in GW2 should be very rewarding both intrinsically and extrinsically, it’s not an either/or.

Galen Grey.4709:

Its not Arenanet who are driving us away from the open world towards rewards, its us the players who drove arenanet from the open world to farming because thats what us the players did. (very generally speaking)

Yeah, I agree with this.

Mind you, OTOH, I don’t think they ever wanted to discourage farmers altogether, I think it likely that they have a fair bit of headroom built into in the game for even more farming (rewards are probably going to be upped across the board).

I think they’ve just been cautious about it up till now. Also, taking into account the bot problem they had early on, perhaps they felt they couldn’t really turn rewards to Eleven until that problem was licked.

Looks like they now feel they can turn it up to Eleven.

All in all, I don’t think anything fundamentally bad is happening. I think it’s more a question of overall emphasis – they’re never going to abandon any particular area of the game for the sake of farming, but they are now looking at making farming more fun. They do want to please all the players, after all.

colesy.8490:

And I’m tired of people using non-berserker thinking they’re actually contributing a lot in PvE.

“Contributing” in what sense? “Optimal” in what sense?

It all depends on what you want out of PvE. For example, some people want it easy and quick (e.g. to get rewards quickly), some people like it tough and edgy (because doing it easy is a snooze-fest for them and they don’t care about rewards that much).

Your personal preferences are not absolutes.

Stomp interruption from 2 is a great troll, it’s like sayingkittento the person who’s just downed you

colesy.8490:

Name me one encounter where non-berserker is optimal.

Optimal for what?

Everyone likes to troll, no-one likes to be trolled.

I picture something flashy, whirling and AoE melee. A bit like blurred frenzy but 360 degrees?

A purple weighted chain coming from a Focus might do it, whip is too “soft” for concept, it needs to be something fairly solid whirling around. Maybe a virtual Staff, akin to the Guardian evoked weapons (e.g. a Bo) coming from the Focus? Animation: raise the Focus high above head, stuff whirls from it.

Deamhan.9538:

The purpose needs to be the adventure again.

I don’t think this can be forced, because there are different types of players.

The Bartle Types are perhaps not the best way of distinguishing player styles (Bartle improved upon his original idea himself), but it’s close enough for jazz.

You have the dev-created Environment, and you have other Players.

Some Players are more interested in the dev-created Environment, some Players are more interested in interaction with other Players.

Of those who are interested in Environment interaction, some have a competitive attitude to it (get something out of it, exploit it for reward), others have a more passive attitude to it (take it in, enjoy it, the lore, etc., – “smell the roses”).

Of those who are interested in Player interaction, some have an aggressive attitude to other Players (combative, competitive), others have a passive attitude to other Players (chatting, socializing).

Thus you have Achievers ( + PvE attitude), Explorers ( – PvE attitude), Player Killers ( + PvP attitude) and Socializers ( – PvP attitude).

(Bear in mind that of course every actual player is some mixture of these types, but usually with any given player, they will be predominantly of one type. I myself am mostly Explorer, but I have some Socializer and Player Killer in me, but very little Achiever.)

What Bartle said, from his long experience of designing and playing MUDs and other text-based precursors to MMORPGs, was that for a healthy community, you actually need a decent mix of all types. There’s a necessary tension between these types of players that keeps things lively (e.g. each type has its natural “enemy” in another, and natural “ally” in another, and that social friction is actually good). If any one type has their way, the game dies.

But of course designing a game that pleases all 4 types and keeps them playing is incredibly hard. For example, both Achievers and Explorers tend to be “locusts” – once they’ve “done” content, they tend not to stick around. You can only experience a bit of story for the first time (and it be genuinely interesting) once; you can only get an achievement once, and when they run out … On the other hand, players who are more interested in player-on-player interaction, whether of the aggressive or friendly type, do tend to stick around. On the other hand, a game world designed around them can easily turn into a mere chat lobby, and loses its virtual world quality, so it doesn’t attract Achievers or Explorers at all, thus cutting down on the potential number of warm bodies in the game.

This is long-established lore in the gaming industry (as I said, there are refinements and slightly different takes, but the general idea still holds), so I’m sure Anet are very well aware of the need to cater to many different types of players and many different types of preferences. But it’s a plate-juggling exercise for them. Sometimes they’ll please one crowd more than another, and it seems like the sky is falling for the other crowd, and vice-versa.

TL;DR I counsel patience. The game’s not going anywhere, it’s going to be around for a long time. If you have an overall liking for the game, but don’t like something that’s happening in it now, give it a rest and come back later. It’s very well designed for picking up from where you left off. And it’s also not designed around retaining a core pool of subscribers, but utilizes the natural “churn” rate to its advantage.

I loved the game to bits first time round, got bored, came back, didn’t like it, came back later, kind of liked it again, came back later, am currently loving it to bits again. I may stop playing again some time soon. So what? It’s still going to be here, it’s still going to be just as easy to pick up my main again, or roll an alt.

And with Living World content, it’s going to be a bit different and a bit fresh next time I come back. What’s not to like?

I’m always grateful when a blue guy shows up on the map, it tells me where the zerg is. Seems like a good system.

Vayne.8563:

Some people play for rewards and some people play to have fun.

While I agree with your position on these boards on the whole, just a small correction – for many people who play for rewards in games, playing for rewards is their fun.

/rumination on

Generally, I think fun in videogames can be divided into two broad aspects. Obviously a person can do both, but usually people have a preference for one or the other, spend more time on one or the other:-

1) on the one hand, many people find challenge, and the beating of challenge, to be fun (self-challenge, challenge from other players in PvP, or challenge from the Environment in PvE).

2) on the other hand, probably just as many people, if not more, don’t want to be challenged but want to relax, kick back, get into a trance state.

For those who love 1), the prospect of doing 2) for longer than 10 minutes seems insanely boring, for those who love 2) the prospect of doing 1) is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

The question of reward intersects with these two in interesting ways. For example, “risk/reward” is a rubric often used in design. But 2)-lovers aren’t so interested in risk, but still want reward, at least for time put in if nothing else. On the other hand, people who are into 1) sometimes want to be rewarded, but not all the time, often the thrill of beating something is rewarding enough.

It must be one of the biggest challenges in MMO design to find ways of attracting both kinds of players (generally, MMO designers want to attract as many different types of players as possible, by default).

/rumination off

I think the phantasms are generally designed to be gotten out early and shattered after their first volley (and again, and again, etc.), UNLESS you trait them up for durability, fury and faster hitting.

The one exception seems to be iWarlock (Staff 3), which seems to be designed specifically to help burn down big bags of hitpoints with lots of conditions on them. 3 powerful, critting iWarlocks are the best possible contribution a Mesmer can make to a boss with tons of different conditions on him, possibly even giving the Mesmer some of the biggest sustained dps of any profession under those circumstances (i.e. I’m suspecting that’s what a parser would show).

Even solo, with one iWarlock, as a Staff player setting a bunch of conditions on a mob, you can see a bigger jump in the mob’s healthbar from just one iWarlock hit than almost any other thing you could do.

To maximize iWarlock, when it comes to condition buffs, condition duration is more important than condition damage per se – you want more different conditions up as much of the time as possible.

So yeah, that would be my top tip – be aware that while the Staff generally is a defensive weapon, it’s one offensive phantasm is a very heavy hitter under the right circumstances.

Erasculio.2914:

jwaz.1908:

TL:DR To summarize, the piling up ‘daily’ and time-gated content is just a shallow attempt to keep people coming back, and to restrict those that play many hours a day, causing GW2 to feel like a chore.

The daily activities are basically a grind-like chore, you’re right.

But guess what is more popular – doing Dynamic Events for fun, or farming (as if the game were a chore) for rewards? Just take a look at Orr to have your reply.

It’s bad game design, sure. It’s also what the GW2 community wants. ArenaNet has slowly been changing the game to make it more grind-based, which includes the time gated rewards, because that’s what the players have been asking for.

When the next batch of AAA MMORPGs gets released, we will see if the players asking for more grind (like in all other classic MMORPGs) will stick around or hop to the next big thing. If they leave, ArenaNet will be in trouble, since that’s the main target audience they have been catering to.

I don’t think the situation is necessarily that bad, I think this patch (and probably the earlier patch with the new island) has been testing the waters for them – it seems evident that they’ve deliberately upped the Champ rewards and put a farm in the patch, to gauge just precisely how many players do prefer farming.

But even how they go on from there, with that knowledge (whatever it may turn out to be – I think the playerbase probably isn’t as farmy as farmers think) is still unknown.

I should think they’re very conscious of the problem you’re talking about – after all, the “locust” problem has plagued all MMOs released since WoW.

Actually, tbqh, I suspect they’ve probably got a bit more headroom built into the game for farming than you might think (i.e. without ruining the economy, etc.) After all, the initial farming nerfs were more for the sake of the bot problem, they weren’t necessarily some grumpy decision on Anet’s part to minimize farming.

It might just be the case that Anet have decided the time is right to relax the prior restrictions on farming because they now feel they have a handle on the botting.

It might have temporarily killed open world for players at cap, but it hasn’t killed the open world for people who are still levelling, at least on my server (Piken Square EU).

sub par.5278:

If I may make a random observation, when randomly joining a party for farming purposes, I suddenly become more protective of my team mates even though they are as much strangers to me as everyone else. I find myself standing in fire fields trying to revive someone thinking “Oh no! Not XxxPwns, he’s my friend!*” Kudos to Anet for fostering a psychology of selflessness. Am I alone here ?

*made up name for exemplary purposes, not meant to refer to an actual player

Yeah, this is actually part of the “buzz” of MMOs in general, it’s one of the things that gets you to fall in love with the genre.

In other MMOs, you tend to get it only while grouped, the fact that you can get it even when not officially grouped and can help each other out in the field, is a plus point for GW2.

This is an example of why customizable UIs are a good thing. For some people, extra information would be just clutter, for others, they like to be able to have that deeper knowledge at a glance.

Vayne.8563:

People do what they can. If you have a life, if you work a lot, you can’t worry that you can’t keep up with people who can play 24/7. But in other MMOs, you also lose touch with the guild. I have people that haven’t played for 3 months, log in and they can start running dungeons again immediately. Out of the entire game, only higher level fractals are a barrier, and that was intentional. For the rest of it…this game was made for people to come and go to.

Totally agree with this. It’s very much forgiving of leaving and coming back, more so than any other MMO I know.

I do think that they’re testing the waters with this recent content though. I think they’ll make the game more farming-friendly going forward, as it’s clear to me that many, many people are enjoying the CP stuff and the Champion farming. I don’t think Anet would have put those in if they weren’t trying to gauge the reaction.

At the end of the day, it may just be the case that “smell the roses” type players, to whom the manifesto really speaks, are less in numbers than skritt-brained shiny-chasers. If that’s so (and Anet will surely know, after this update) then they’ll probably quietly drop the manifesto. After all, it’s easier for them to design more farming content going forward, and to adjust drop rates, than it is for them to design complex adventure content. Not that I think they won’t ever do any good new DEs or change DEs around in the future, but it will surely make life easier for them if the majority of the population proves not to really care about the possibilities they offered in the manifesto. Anet will just chalk it up to a worthwile experiment that certainly had some benefits (and going forward, it will always make new players attracted to the game), but ultimately didn’t work, because the conditioning from subscription-era MMOs is just too strong.

GW2 more than any other MMO out there is very forgiving of taking a break from it. I’ve taken breaks 3 times. Second time I came back, I liked the game less than launch, but now I’m loving it again.

The devs are doing all sorts of things, and some things will please some people, other things not so much.

It’s really a great game to dip into and out of, just to get a nice MMO jag whenever you feel like it. The combat system is forgiving enough that you can button mash for a while until you get the hang of your toon again.

It’s a different way of looking at MMORPGs – you don’t have to feel like you have to play 24/7 or your subscription’s wasted. The game is here, it’s not going away, and it’ll be here when you get a hankering for it again (as you certainly will, because there’s nothing else quite like it on the market – you might find it a bit difficult to go back to other MMOs).

Hedge.8760:

Also, I’m asking because I’m honestly curious about the views of other players, so don’t see it as a rage post over the story. Yes, I’m a bit disappointed, but this is not what it’s about. I want to hear other people’s perceptions of the theme of GW2.

I’m quite happy with stories that mix s-f and fantasy elements – but I don’t know the GW lore well enough to say whether it’s going wildly away from previously established lore or not. The Asura themselves are pretty much “technomages”, which lots of people find cool.

Frankly, I’m a bigger fan of s-f and superheroes than of fantasy. If GW2 was a superhero MMO with the high level of quality it has, I’d be in seventh heaven. As it is, I just find the fantasy aspect ok and enjoy the world’s charm.

Farming or any kind of repetitive gameplay can (if you’re in the mood for it) induce a pleasant trance-like state. That, and the loot, are good enough reasons for most people to do it. It’s on the opposite side of the spectrum of gaming from “I want to be challenged”, but it’s a valid gaming mode, nonetheless.

Butter.3024:

I am very new to this Class, I have no idea what is going on. Can you guys recommend a good leveling build and a WvW build for a newbie like me please??? ty

Check out Osicat’s guides stickied on this forum. They’re endgame builds, but going through the video guides will give you a good sense and overview of the class, with particular reference to WvW, and some very well thought-out builds to aim for/play around with (not saying they’re the be-all-end-all of Mesmer, but they’re great builds and you can learn a lot from how they’re built).

Midnightjade.3520:

…when you dodgeroll twice on your 8 foot norn guardian, then wonder why there aren’t three 8 foot norn guardians fighting the boss mob.

And yes, this happens to me several times a week.

That often happens to me when I play another toon for a break

wintermute.4096:

I guess a bta jenna mini for everyone is tyria’s equivalent for socks for christmas…

ROFL – you owe me a new keyboard and a replacement can of coke

Jeez, what a bunch of pathetic whining. Here you all are, enjoying the miracle of online internet gaming in a beautiful virtual world designed with love and attention, and a fun, frenetic combat system, and all you can do is whinge and whine about how this little thing or that little thing isn’t to your taste.

Servants! I can’t sleep, there’s a pea under my mattress!!!

I agree with the general idea that you advertise for what you want, and you pick teams that fit with your playstyle.

But having said that … when I used to play CoH, and lead teams, I took the responsibility upon myself to keep the team informed, to keep everyone co-ordinated, etc., etc., and if it was clear someone was not fitting in, to get a quick discussion going about it so that everything was fair. One can’t assume anything. e.g., you might be on a speed run and there’s a newbie, but he’s entertaining in chat, or his antics are amusing, so the team decides to keep going even though it’s a wee bit slower. It happens sometimes.

I’m not saying the leader should keep team chat constantly filled with updates, but he should definitely be aware of the team as a team, and have an overview of what’s going on, and be prepared to say key things at certain times.

That seems to be a lost art these days, and leaders are just the player who happens to have the right to kick.

I blame automated dungeon finders.

If they’re skewing things by turns, that suggests they’re datamining to see how the playerbase reacts to the skews. i.e. they’re not really balancing at the moment so much as they’re experimenting and seeing what people prefer (by how they vote with their feet, as opposed to selective moaning on forums).

I don’t find any of the classes boring, exactly, they all can be fun in different ways, if one gets into them.

I just have a personal dislike of some of the playstyles, (e.g. Necro, Thief, Ele) and a personal preference for others (e.g. Mesmer, Guardian, Warrior).

Mad Rasputin.7809:

There is some validity to this post.

The introduction of champ loot has led to zerg loot trains in a few select maps. Also, the introduction of the crown pavilion has led to zerg farming the bosses there.

Both of these seem very counter to the idea of getting people ‘out to the maps’ to explore.

Which leads me to suspect that both CP and the champion loot are Anet testing the waters to see just how popular farming really is, in reality. Once they’ve got the numbers they can proceed in whatever direction they decide to proceed given that knowledge.

My further suspicion is that, to some extent, they’ve come to terms with the fact that the game as designed in the manifesto has only been a partial success, and that most players, being conditioned to farming from other MMOs, simply cannot or will not take the game in the spirit that it’s been designed, have no real interest in DEs, or in roleplaying (lite) or in the virtual world, but only in “shinies.” That’s probably a bit of a disappointment to them, on the one hand, as creative people, but on the other hand, as businesspeople, I’m sure they’ll accommodate, since it makes life easier for them: designing complex and interesting DEs has got to be harder than designing something like the CP or changing loot tables.

In the end, the majority will get what it wants, whatever it wants. If the majority is skritt-brained, then Anet will produce shinies.

Dagraan.2854:

there are very few actual skilled players wanting to do content because its challenging, and not because they feel entitled for a reward to shove in the face of others.

There is nothing wrong with having a reward to shove in the face of others.

HawkMeister.4758:

Ok, I really don´t want to start discussing the technological prowess of all those MMOs , or your erroneous definition of an instance.
It´s totally off topic too btw.

I agree, so I won’t respond again. But I’ll just leave this here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_dungeon

You think that because players can join the instances, and because there aren’t multiple copies, they don’t fit the definition, but they do. EVE “boxes” are instances. Note in particular:-

“Because the player characters in the instance do not need to be updated on all the information going on outside the instance, and vice versa for the characters outside the instance, there is an overall decrease in demands on the network, with the net result being less lag for the players.” [my bold]

The only difference between EVE boxes and instances is that there is only one instance for any given notional area of space, and some boxes (i.e. space-stations, asteroid belts, gates, etc.) are permanent (making them the nearest thing to zones in other MMOs, but of course they are tiny and still have the same informational self-containment). That, I agree, is different from having multiple instances of a dungeon, say. But the technology is basically the same. An instance spawns when it’s needed, has its players passing combat and positional information that’s only relevant to them, and not to other players outside the instance, and it disappears when it’s not needed any more.

i.e., the hype says “40,000 players in the same shard”, and while that’s technically true, what it really means is “40,000 players sharing the same chat system and info database, with 10 players in this instance here, 50 players in this instance here, 100 players in this instance here, 1 player in this instance here, etc, etc., etc.” The “40,000 players in a single universe” is pure hype and illusion, and I stand by my statement that EVE is the most heavily-instanced MMORPG of them all, and therefore a poor comparison for games based on fantasy or s-f or whatever, that actually have to design and render and test large persistent shared spaces.

You must have seen those threads about people wondering why we can’t dispense with gates? Think about it.

I agree with the people who are saying that separating out the achievements that are doable for most players (the Balloon stuff and the CP stuff) from the QG gauntlet stuff was an excellent idea. I, as a crap player, am nearly done with the celebration stuff and anticipate that I may well finish it, and am also plowing through the QG stuff as best I can, but I accept I may never get those achievements.

I think that’s ok. I will also probably never get achievements like “escorting 1000 dolyaks” in WvW, or “equipping 100 items of cultural armor”, and things like that.

It’s ok to have things that not everyone can do in a game.

And as to the person who said why make things that elite people can boast about – isn’t that part of the whole raison d’etre of MMORPGs, so that people can have virtual achievements that mean something in the virtual world, that they can be proud of, and that others in the same virtual world can recognize as difficult achievements?

axiology.5807:

I feel that with the Living World, content has become less of a game experience, and more of a stream of unapologetic behavioral manipulations, with very little game.

I dunno, I’m not quite as resigned as you seem to be. I think if anything the CP is a test by the devs to see how popular farming really is. I think that if the numbers show that this is what players want, they’ll go in that direction.

So how popular is it? Well, I can only go by my own experience. The CP is a hell of a lot of fun in bursts. I’ve been logging on every day to do a bit of CP and QG, but after a while it does get boring. The nice thing is you can zip out of it at any time and move back into the open world to do whatever else you enjoy doing – and that’s what I do. I move between the open world and CP quite a lot.

I don’t know if it’s the same for most players. If it is, then I think we’re safe, and Anet will continue to develop content all across the board. But if the majority of players really are stuck in CP and QG during this festival, I fear that the game will proceed as you suggest. It’s always going to be easier to make farming content than it is to make complex, interesting DE, and if experience tells the devs that the thing that’s easier to make is what most players want, they WILL go in that direction, manifesto or no (not saying they’ll abandon the more interesting content altogether, but it’s a cost/benefit thing for them).

Something’s gone a bit skew-wiff, for sure. I suspect the problem is the bots in the early days. I suspect DR was initially an anti-bot measure, a holding pattern, until they could get to the core of the bot problem. Nowadays, they seem to be on top of the bot problem. So maybe now they could ease off on the DR and up the rewards for DE completion, esp. in Orr. I think it would be a tonic for the game.

The CP shows that Anet are not actually all that averse to people having fun farming, it’s a little gift to farmers. But I think they need to take heed that if they want to liven up the open world, it needs to have similar rewards. They ought to be confident enough about bots to be able to do that now.

If they do that, if they make the game more farm-friendly for players, I think they’re going to have to say good-bye to Legendaries as the notional top gear in the game. I suspect that they’re going to make Ascended more task-based, so that not all players will get it (or maybe they’ll switch it round so that Legendaries are that, and Ascended is more like Legendaries are now, whichever would be fine). Which is as it should be – there has to be ultimate prestige stuff in the game that sheer time or money doesn’t get you, but only player skill, team co-ordination, etc.

Another point: I’ve noticed that developers always underestimate how good some players can be and how quickly some players and guilds, etc., can eat up content. If anything distinguishes Blizzard, it’s that they didn’t do that (at least for a long time), they made the content that gives the ultimate rewards really, really, REALLY hard.

Now, it’s good that Anet have made a base game that anyone can play and enjoy, even a butterfingered player like me. But they have to stop underestimating player skill, and make top end content that makes top end players have to work really hard for their shinies.

This mean, I fear, that they’re going to have to invest resources into better AI, into making dungeons “l;iving” in the same way the world is (so they can’t be “learnt” so easily), etc., etc. It means some hard work for them. But on the other hand, since nobody seems to be interested in the content they initially created (the DE system) but most people are only interested in farming, they’re relieved of the obligation of trying to make rich DEs, so it sort of evens out.

Ronah.2869:

Efficiency is the main goal of every player. All want the easiest way to obtain what they want: shinnies.

No, it really isn’t, not ALL. See, these things are called “Massively Multiplayer ONLINE ROLEPLAYING Games”. Originally the main goal of players, particularly in the predecessors of these games (MUDs, MOOs, etc.) was to spend time in a “virtual world” and play a role for fun. They didn’t need to engage in rp proper (which is actually quite a difficult thing, although rewarding in its own way), but the idea was to play pretend, and to achieve things in a virtual world that allowed them to achieve things (particularly with the help of other players) that would be noticed by other players. Originally, sometimes it was shinies, but just as often it was more intangible things, like a position in a faction, or something like that.

But over time, this sort of changed, and especially with the development of the subscription models, developers realized that there was a sub-group of players who were into achievement for achievement’s sake, and that those players could be relied upon to keep subscribing so long as there were sufficient hamster wheels to keep running on.

And hamster wheels are always easier to make than meaningful content.

So the genre skewed its direction. On the one hand, this broadened its appeal, which was nice; on the other hand, the genre lost some of its original meaning. Farming for shinies is something you can dip into and out of more easily than committing to a virtual life in a virtual world. So it’s not that most players want shinies, it’s that most players are casual players, and want a reward for whatever time they’re putting in.

So nowadays, the general idea of MMOs is to be virtual lobbies to get together to farm stuff. The whole “virtual world” and “roleplaying” aspect of them is still catered to a bit, but it’s receded into the background.

Now, it’s hamster wheels all the way down.

Anet have tried to buck the trend, they tried to create a beautiful world to adventure in, with interesting stories that you’d come across if you were roleplaying a virtual wanderer, etc. But now they’ve found that basically only a minority is interested in that content, most (not all, but most) just want to farm, like in every other MMO these days.

So, I think they must be a) a bit disappointed, but also b) quite willing to oblige.

Having recently enjoyed a Warrior, I was amazed and somewhat chagrined at how logical and desirable the Traits are in the Warrior trees. Coming back to my beloved Mesmer off the back of that, I realized that the Mesmer Trait lines are indeed messy and quite often have weak or useless Traits.

I was always surprised while levelling at how many mobs I could handle at once, and still am sometimes. Especially with a shatter build and Staff/Sword+Focus- it’s glorious chaos!

But it’s one of those things where it’s all about timing and if you slip up you’re suddenly very, very, very squishy.

Aren’t Signets always magical? I seem to remember hearing that in the lore of the personal story or something, at some point.

Totally agree, even as a crap player myself, while I like the general easiness of content, I do think there ought to always be some content in the game that not everyone can beat.

I especially think that so-called “Legendaries” ought to have been locked behind that type of content. As it is, eventually everyone in this game is going to have a “Legendary”, so the concept is nearly meaningless.