There are three ways in this business to make a living: be first, be smarter, or cheat.
WoW was first and it has outlived every other mmo (aside from Eve i suppose, but that’s a niche market).
That’s not to say WoW is any good. I have never played it, but i have played several mmo’s that followed the WoW formula (except for the being first part) and then died. But WoW was first (first big mmo) and it is still around.
GW1 looked like it could outsmart WoW but although the servers are still up that game is essentially dead, as are many others who have tried for longevity.
Wrt GW2 it’s to early to tell, but it’s neither first nor smarter than the others.
I’m not very in-depth either but i did play GW1 for years, starting with open beta.
I’d say GW1 still is much more different that most other mmo/rpgs (whateverthekittenyouwanttocallit) out there, than GW2 is.
Main downside of GW1 is that it has a lot of gated content (even more than GW2), which caused it to devolve into what is in effect a single player game.
“It felt more like a tug of war with HP and Energy than a number crunching game. "
Word. I hate number crunching games.
“The only down side right now is I am not logging in to do daily/monthly activities in GW2”
Imho there’s something wrong with the game if one of the main attractions is to quickly do a couple of mundane daily tasks.
The challenge appears to be to spend as little time and effort on it as possible, and folks do the tasks for the reward, not because it’s fun to do, let alone heroic.
All i want is so few bugs that i don’t dread starting the quest.
Same problem here.
As soon as i start the mission on the first ship, about 5 or 6 mobs one of which a veteran spawn inside the dingy right on top of me and the npcs.
The npcs die within seconds and my elementalist can’t handle that many mobs at the same time in close combat. I managed to escape the dingy and the mobs stay in the dingy, i can hit them and it shows i’m doing damage but the mob’s health is not affected.
I managed to pull a few mobs out of the dingy and kill them, then figured i could kill the remaining mobs inside the dingy, only to find that more mobs spawn inside the dingy.
Interesting that this progress blocking bug has not been fixed in over a month. For shame.
Good things do not compensate for major bad things.
The number of bugs and other issues that still remain 8 months after release -while Anet focuses on additional content – is shameful.
Penitent event chain bugged again, stuck at “revive technician Martijn” – who is nowhere to be found. Same as last week and the week before that.
8 moths after release DEs are still bugging out (cursed shore, Penitent event chain).
Un-kitten-believable.
If Anet is not embarrassed about it, they should be.
The looks of many of the high tier armor and weapons is totally over the top to me. I prefer not-over-the-top armor and weapons.
“non clipping armor”
That to. Mix-and-match often does not work well because of minor clipping issues.
“is actually pretty hard to achieve,”
Certain pieces obviously can not be made so that they do not clip, but beyond that it’s really a matter of attention to detail with designing the mesh and with vertex weighting. But attention to detail = time, and time = money.
To all the smart kittens pointing out the meaning of the word “unique”:
Why would anyone look up the meaning of an every day word at all, let alone on the GW2 wiki instead of the dictionary?
Why would anyone suspect that in GW2 the word “unique” is not just another item class label such as “rare” or “exotic”, but instead has a important but different meaning than what it has to the rest of the world?
To the rest of the world unique means “there is only one”.
That obviously does not apply to GW2 because in the game everyone can have more than one.
In GW2 it means
“there are infinitely many and you can have as many as you want, but you can wear only one at a time.”
With the entire floor covered in vortexes how are you going to avoid ending a dodge roll inside a vortex?
Anyway, it looks like it did get fixed, though it took Anet less than a couple of months.
It leads to the questions, “Why, even when unlocking it themselves would take less time, do people resist doing the missions to unlock content?”
Because this game is all about loot. For many people the work that we’re supposed to do to get the loot is not enough fun.
Culling isn’t just a bug, it’s more of a hardware issue plus internet latency.
That does not explain why during the Balthazar event i recently took part in virtually no players, npc’s or mobs were visible for the entire duration of the event. 20 minutes hardware and internet latency? I don’t think so.
Rather i think that this:
Habib Loew: “It was all about limiting the breakdown of resources from a client to server standpoint.”
is much more about server resources than about client resources.
Yesterday i participated in the event to free the temple of Balthazar (starting at Pact Rally Point).
Most of the entire event i saw no player characters, no mobs, no npcs, only visual effects of the fighting, and about 5 commander tags floating in the air. Only a few times i could actually tag/hit a mob.
Things started to show up only minutes after the event was over, i estimate about 20 players took part in the event.
Yeah nice. No monthly for those who don’t care about crafting.
What is this argumentation. All you have to do is press a few buttons and you get a free monthly and free exp.
I also need to be of high enough level crafting to make things that qualify for master crafter, which i’m not because i don’t care about crafting.
Yeah nice. No monthly for those who don’t care about crafting.
I’ve been part of groups that took more time hunting down an uncontested server than it would have taken to meet up and unlock it ourselves.
Otoh for many people it takes more time to get a group together then it takes to hop servers to get the rewards while skipping much of the game content.
Besides lackluster grouping tools, there is lack of incentintive to do the “kill mobs” part of the gameplay so instead people focus on the “get the reward” part of the gameplay.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
Culling can manifest even when it’s not crowded at all. Just the other day it took my pet some 3 to 4 seconds to appear (the name tag was already showing) after me getting out of the water. That was in Orr open world, only a few mobs standing around.
If it feels like Arenanet are doing nothing to address problems it’s simply because staff are not posting in every other thread that complains or reports.
I think it feels like that because after half a year still quite a few DE’s remain bugged or otherwise inaccessible.
Not that many actually. Almost every bugged event that I encountered when I was 100% worlding my first toon in september was no longer bugged when I 100% worlded my second toon in december/January. There were bugged events but reeeeeeally not “Quite a few”, certainly less than my first 100% world, and almost never the same ones.
Events that are bugged eventually get reset and are then not bugged until they become bugged again. No-one said bugged events are bugged all the time or that certain events are bugged at specific times.
But more importantly – as i said previously: enough events are either bugged often or are group events that are being ignored by the player base (making that content in effect unplayable, eg certain temples in Malchor’s Leap) – that it is noticeable to the many end-game players who spend a lot of time in Orr.
The problem starts with the fact that the game is designed to revolve around loot/rewards.
Like i said: Grenth difficulty scaling is backwards.
yes bugged events are frustrating but they’re in the minority and they’re not preventing anyone from playing… 99%(?) of the game
To most people easily 90% of the game is irrelevant once at lvl80. People are either leveling and pretty much rush through most of the content, or they do dungeons, or pvp, or open world pve in Orr.
A few bugged events in Orr comprises a fairly large percentage of unplayable content that is relevant to the latter group.
Add to that apparent lack of incentive to do other high level open world zones (imo a ‘bug’ in the design of the game) , and it becomes quite noticeable that certain event regularly bug out and remain bugged for a good part of the week.
If we report bugs, they will get looked at and if the problem can be duplicated/identified then it will be getting fixed (at least attempted).
Attempted alone is not good enough. Sure it takes time to fix, but at some point to much time has passed.
I know i will not be buying GW3 as soon as it is released, but give it at least a year to get sorted, and then wait for the opportunity do a trial account (which may be never).
If it feels like Arenanet are doing nothing to address problems it’s simply because staff are not posting in every other thread that complains or reports.
I think it feels like that because after half a year still quite a few DE’s remain bugged or otherwise inaccessible.
Another way to put it is that with Grenth the difficulty scaling is backwards.
you need to party up to get loot.
If that’s true then Anet forgets to mention it when they say GW2 does not require party.
“You don’t need to team up – as long as you don’t mind getting no loot” doesn’t sound quite right for a game that revolves around loot.
Thanks, that’s useful.
I recently tried Grenth with a 3 man pug, and there definitely were fewer vortexes than there are with a larger group (also Grenth definitely does cast vortexes on the stairs next to Jonez).
In spite of being with only 3 people and in spite of it being a pug we got Grenth down to 20% before there were more shades than i could handle.
So with a large group the chance for each player to be caught in a vortex is significantly higher than with a small group. With a small group the event is easier in absolute terms.
They could make loot scale, rewarding time and effort, but since one of their points was that you should never not want to see another player, they can’t do this.
Why is that a problem for temple events but not for ordinary DE’s?
Primary reason why many people avoid temple events is that those offer low drop reward for much effort.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
I see many people hating on RNG.
Life is based on RNG.
No.
Random numbers is just a cheap way to fake complexity.
+1 for the Tinfoil hat comment :-D
Yeah, ridicule is awesome.
Cheap, but awesome.
Thanks for the reply Healix,
When you say the vortexes cover the floor, are they overlapping and are you sure you’re not also counting the red circles from the other AoEs.
I’m referring to actual vortexes; the brown swirly things on the floor. Some do overlap, but mostly it’s just that there are a lot of them. It’s hard to not dodge into one while avoiding another – if i even get the chance to dodge.
They cover the floor even when I’m duoing it
In the video i see far fewer vortexes/less floor surface covered by those, than in the “need more people at Grenth” zergs i’v been part of.
The sides and back of the room (where Jonez is) has always appeared to be a safe spot.
I’ve been caught in vortexes while on the stairs fighting shades that are on Jonez.
I’m not sure what’s with the pre-drop damage that i often suffer, it happens so fast. One moment i’m on the ground with 90% health, next i’m near the ceiling with most of my health gone.
I usually drop from really high, regularly twice in a row because i get dropped on top of yet another a vortex.
Btw i have no trouble avoiding the ice aoe’s, which usually don’t do that much damage anyway.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
I missed the part where it’s unavoidable. The circles don’t overlap enough so as to cause major problems anymore
Depends on the size of the group. With many people there, Grenth covers the entire floor with vortexes, making it very likely for the group to be wiped.
With a small team the chance for each individual to be caught in a vortex is significantly smaller, making the event easier in absolute terms.
I predict this will be fixed, after Anet has “gone forward” a couple of months.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
Same here. It does not always happen but i have seen people hacking away at mobs that i see only many second later when most of the mobs are dead.
There’s really only 2 ways you’re going to die in the encounter:
1) You stood in a red circle – the ice drops or the vortex.
If #1, don’t stand in red circles.
The larger the group, the more vortexes, the larger the chance for each individual there to be dropped and die.
More people can deal with more shades, but more people can not deal with the entire floor covered in vortexes.
Smaller teams do better not only because they are better players but also because the event is easier with fewer people.
The only nerf needed is to not disproportionally scale up the chance of being caught in a vortex.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
With our recent update we fixed most of the issues with events in Straits of Devastation that prevented players from successfully taking the Temple of Balthazar. There is one outstanding issue we will address in a future – as it might look to players as being broken while it is not, I would like to explain what is happening:…
As you are all know, spawns in Orr are rather fast, so as long as you let the NPCs aggro a nearby creature, the event will continue.
In spite of the fix, still hardly anyone ever does Balthazar and Lissa. Apparently there is lack of incentive to do those.
It looks like difficulty scales up disproportionally with larger groups because Grenth puts down more drop-you-from-the-ceiling aoe’s, so that with a large team the entire floor is covered, leaving no safe place, greatly increasing the chance for all people there to be dropped (multiple times) and die.
Of course it helps if people know what they are doing, but it also helps that the event is objectively easier with a small team.
question:
Is the drop-you-from-the-ceiling spell supposed to remove 80% of my health even before being dropped?
Is making few copper bars that painful, really? Just asking.
Painful? How about fun?
Back in the days of the advent of multiplayer first-person-shooters, it was easier to find a group (just logged on to one of many populated servers), than it is now with thousands of people on the same “massively multiplayer” server.
Odd how these thinks work out, isn’t it.
For all i know there are a lot of people doing Fractals over and over to get certain mats they need for the next better piece of gear, and they do so for the reward (whether they “need” it or not) – not because they love Fractals so much. At best they love the rewards that Fractals has to offer.
That to me is grind. Yes i avoid it, just as i ignore dailies. But with so many people dungeon grinding, there are precious few out in the open world.
And putting a few high difficulty events out in the open world for “experienced players” does not do much to lure people out of the dungeons.
The idea with the dailies is for them to be achievable through normal play.
Which is why i ignore dailies, play normally, and end up not having done my dailies. Not that i actually care about the latter.
Oh well, maybe there is a market for “Guild Wars Reloaded”.
It’s not like ANet has a patent on grindless mmo, do they?
Also, have fun keeping your eyes peeled for his tiny waggle staff-wavey tell in the massive swarm of particles cloaking his body from spells.
Or, if you’re one of the folks dealing with the shades, keep one eye on the fireworks that cover the priest, and the other eye on the shades.
Good thing GW2’s massive FoV really helps us out with that….
The trouble with this is when there’s a group of 10+ people ignoring the shades…
Over the past 3 days i’v tried Grenth some 20 times with different groups, all failed. Sure many times it fails because to many people ignore the shades.
But a couple of times we did deal with the shades properly, only to find that almost everyone who had stayed on Grenth had died, presumably due to AoE. The group can recover from that once or twice, but Grenth just keeps covering the floor with that drop-you-from-the-ceiling AoE. Two dodges is usually not enough to escape.
Apparently Grenth is to hard for the vast majority of people running around in Orr, many of whom are by now GW2 veterans. The difficulty may be intentional, but i’m not so sure it’s smart to make it that hard. People who want hardcore already have dungeons.
As a side-note: I’ve given up trying to do this event when there are more than five people and less than twenty.
You imply you have completed Grenth with less than 5 people? Video or it did not happen.
I already have quit.
On occasions i am still tempted, but then i remember how lonesome it is to try and find some openworld PvE action.
It can be that way if you play the game as a checklist. Granted, there is a title associated with playing the game as a checklist.
Moreover: the game encourages check-list playing, which imo includes special drops and rewards that for many players seem to be the only motivation why they play any particular content in the first place.
Hopefully jan-mar will begin to fix it
It seems to be so integral to the gameplay, i highly doubt such a fundamental change will be implemented mid-flight. Maybe in GW3.
gw2lfg for dungeons…
its pretty sad when you have to use an unofficial website to find groups in this game… instead of them having a built in LFG tool…
Actually GW2 does have a built in LFG tool.
But
1) it’s a bit hidden
2) it is just as disfunctional as lfg tools in most other RPGs ever since the mmorpg genre was conceived. *mumbles something about lack of innovation..
“You just have to actually, you know, KILL MOBS now and again on your way to nodes and events.”
In many cases if you’d want to fight your way through you’d have to take on more than the occasional mob, likely more than one at a time. And then the respawn rate bites you in the kitten The event will be long done by the time you get there. That’s why people just run if they want to get from A to B.
Once used to it and kitted with exotic gear just getting around the place is quite doable but still tedious.
For sure Orr is a lot harder than other areas, and the player is hardly being prepared for it. Anyone claiming Orr is “not hard” as in, “easy” – especially the first time around, must have been bored out of their skull with the rest of the game, perhaps except dungeons.
People started leaving well before the release of Fractals. Some for lack of progression/grind, some for lack of no-grind content, some because of the many bots and bugged events.
Lack of Progression leads to stagnation.
Guild Wars 2 needs progression if it is ever going to survive its infancy.
They have also stated that they do not have plans for players to grind for a new gear tier every 3 months. Ascended gear is a vertical progressive statistical step-up from exotic gear. By this definition, I think of ascended gear more like a flight of stairs to be climbed rather than a treadmill.
That is until the number grinders have aquired their ascended gear. Then they are again in the situation that there “there is no progression”.
Then what is Anet going to do?
Leave those people at the top of the stairs, or add yet harder content and more stats upgrades – and so come full circle into the threadmill trap?At any rate, wrt rpgs the threadmill analogy doesn’t mean it repeatedly goes around to the exact same position where it started. Rather it means it repeatedly puts the player in the position where after obtaining the next level and the next better gear, the player is pitted against tougher mobs, so that a lvl80 char has as hard a time dealing with lvl 80 mobs, as a lvl 10 players has dealing with lvl 10 mobs.
So far, not a single mob has been made excessively more difficult.
That was not the point i made, my point is that mobs become harder as the player becomes more powerful. Meaning that in essence it stays the same while the player proverbially walks in circles.
At no point did i mention “excessively”.
Lack of Progression leads to stagnation.
Guild Wars 2 needs progression if it is ever going to survive its infancy.
They have also stated that they do not have plans for players to grind for a new gear tier every 3 months. Ascended gear is a vertical progressive statistical step-up from exotic gear. By this definition, I think of ascended gear more like a flight of stairs to be climbed rather than a treadmill.
That is until the number grinders have aquired their ascended gear. Then they are again in the situation that there “there is no progression”.
Then what is Anet going to do?
Leave those people at the top of the stairs, or add yet harder content and more stats upgrades – and so come full circle into the threadmill trap?
At any rate, wrt rpgs the threadmill analogy doesn’t mean it repeatedly goes around to the exact same position where it started. Rather it means it repeatedly puts the player in the position where after obtaining the next level and the next better gear, the player is pitted against tougher mobs, so that a lvl80 char has as hard a time dealing with lvl 80 mobs, as a lvl 10 players has dealing with lvl 10 mobs.
“How are to keep a MMO fresh without introducing new content and gear?”
Same way that just about any other game either online or offline stays “fresh”: by offering fun gameplay.
The current incarnations of MMO’s are the exception in that they lure people into playing content that they would not play if there would be no reward.
I used to play a lot of first-person-shooters PvP (Quake deathmatch, capture the flag etc). I especially liked that it was pretty much guaranteed that one could pick one of several well populated servers at any time of the day. No need to “lfg”, ever.
I lost interest in that in favor of games with more dept and slower pace, amongst which mmos/rpgs (GW1, AoC, Rift). So far my experience with MMO’s has over all been a bit disappointing, in that it’s usually harder to to find a well populated zone (find a group) in an mmorpg than it was to find a populated fps game server, even though the average mmo server/shard/world usually has many more players logged in at any time than an fps game server could ever handle.
Love/hate GW2?
yes (both)