Guild Wars 2

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Conncept.7638:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Gaebriel.3754:

I’m not someone who likes gambling on keys, but I couldn’t not have a shot at such a fashionable prize! …..

….thus endeth the lesson….

Gotta hand it to Anet.

Well there’s nothing wrong with buying gems if you can afford it. If you stop buying food to instead buy gems to try for a chance at an item that in the end is meaningless to anyone but you while you play a cyber-game… well, THEN you have a problem. And let’s face it, 99% of the GW2 population can’t afford to shell out 3500g (in game wealth) for one item, cuz… nerfs.

Purchasing gems isn’t the issue, gambling is, and it is incredibly stupid no matter how much money you have.

Well buying a stock is a gamble. Warren Buffet must be a complete moron.

But I’d guess a successful stock buyer will hedge their investments to make those high risk/high yield ventures worthwhile, the ones who don’t are the ones throwing themselves off roofs and bridges.

If you’re throwing benjamins at the vanishingly small probability of obtaining a single item, that’s the definition of casino gaming.

I see the stomach split visual bug on female toons still isn’t fixed. Good grief, are they ever gonna sort that?

The game has certainly taken a lurch into territory I never planned on buying into pre-launch with fractals. had I known it was in the plan I might have considered passing on the game, which would have been a shame because GW2 really is a good game.

But it’s no biggie, not really. It’s still far less grindy than most.

I’m really glad about it, long overdue. I’ve done my fair share of server hopping but it hasn’t worked in my favour being a rolling stone.

Is guesting in yet?

Isn’t it pretty much business as usual though? In all my years of playing these games I’m struggling to think of one company that really had any significant presence on their own forums.

Maybe it’s considered a best practice thing, knowing how hard to please and often out and out hostile MMO forum communities can be, it wouldn’t surprised me if it was a policy. I recall when the Tera EU blood patch business blew up, their community managers got a very rough time of it, it seemed the more they tried to engage the more heated everybody got.

Trion are pretty hands on if I recall.

Actually, on balance I think ANet are pretty good at posting news items and such. Where they really fall down is with these stealth nerfs. I’m also not too keen on getting patch notes after the patch, it’d be nice to see some discussion on the reasoning for what are often pretty broad sweeping changes.

Why on earth is this not stickied yet? One of the best and most dedicated ele gurus on the forum, give him some love.

TheGuy.3568:

I went DD after I saw daphoenix solo a champ. Had nothing to do with pvp at the time. Reason I play DD still is for the challenge. While normal content gets easier I feel like ele is a class that takes time to perfect.

Real reason I play ele now is that my stats are middle of the road everywhere save precision. I do enough dps to be good for the team and I heal quite a bit. Ele is the only class where I am not asked to sacrifice survivability to do decent dps.

Edit:

I am 346 hours in on this toon alone it is my main nerf or no nerf I don’t see another class filling the gap.

Yeah that’s spot on. I’ve been pleasing myself what stats I go for with my gear, consequently my survivability is pretty respectable and so is my dps. I’m very pleased about that, coming from other classes that seem so inflexible that way.

I love the style of d/d, it’s a nice break from the mage archetype, or so I’ve found. Great escape options, great gap closers, great at sticking to fleeing enemies, all round sky high mobility. Love it.

I had a fire traited staff ele at launch and I found her horrendous to level, she was constantly eating dirt. I deleted the kitten.

I’m leveling an ele again having been through the game several times on what I’d consider were easier profs. This time as dagger/dagger though, and it’s miles better. I’m still eating dirt when I’ve blown my escape cooldowns or spammed dodge to exhaustion, but I’m far better at actively avoiding damage than I was at launch. I like the fact that I might come out of a fight with dangerously low HP, but I’ve just blown a pack to kingdom come dizzyingly fast with an array of seriously righteous AoE attacks that don’t require me to go head to head with anything. Risk/reward is just about right I’d say.

It’s not the easiest class at all, but actually I’m fine with that. Warrior’s by comparison just entirely trivialise content, and for me that’s the quickest way to take the shine off this game.

TB seemed pretty warm to GW2 on his final beta hands on. He mentioned a few things that he suspected might marginally suck and those things have turned out to be the case for me too.

As for his top 10, he went to great pains to say that some of his choices might seem off the wall, and he wasn’t kidding. He’s a big Planetside 2 fan, as far as I’m concerned that game has more problems that GW2 does, it’s good but it’s extremely flawed in some pretty major areas. So he’s just like the rest of us, he has his foibles. That’s why I like the dude so much.

And given how much Angry Joe likes GW2, he laid into Planetside 2 pretty heavily. So there you go, different strokes.

cesmode.4257:

Regarding the cost of waypoints:, this is by design and largely wont change. Here is why:

-There is not subscription fee for this game.
snip

I’d say you’re pretty close to the mark to be honest. I feel the gem store has had a little too pervasive an impact on some basic fundamental stuff, and it’s selling the experience short. I feel ANet gave me this great big world to play in, but they’d prefer to funnel me into the narrowest and least remarkable aspects of the game (dungeons) if I want to get a decent tangible amount of reward for time and effort. That approach is short-sighted and it won’t end well if they persist with it.

They need to be a little more flexible in their thinking of ways to entice us into RMT, rather than smothering the game experience with false ceilings and bold as brass cash sinks.

To put this in perspective, if NCSoft could guarantee that every player of Aion FTP spent $50 on stuff in their shop during their entire lifetime playing the game, I imagine they’d be over the moon and rubbing their hands with glee.

Armourer. That’s been by far the easiest and cheapest of crafts to level for me.

Cooking though, bleh…you can make some nice stuff that’s very useful indeed, but it’s a messy craft, tons of stuff in your bags. It’s a level 80 craft for me.

The loot table in this game is just horrible. Great game, terrible lack of anything exciting happening as a result of downing a champion.

If ANet were to swallow their pride, admit they’ve made a really shoddy decision for whatever reason (keep the economy in a stranglehold to incentivise us to us the gem store?), pump up the chances of desirable stuff dropping from dynamic events or champs and vets, I reckon a lot more people would do them regularly.

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

I do them because I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and my server is one of the most populous so I rarely have a problem getting them done.

Pro-tip, advertise them. If you come across one let the zone know, and link a nearby waypoint. Literally every time I do this a bunch of lone wolves suddenly appear and we get it done.

What Gorwe said. Dagger/dagger elementalist is tons of fun to play, lots of swiftness, gap closers, easy ways to rapidly disengage and you can stick to fleeing enemies like glue. It also has one of the sexiest combos in the game imo with Churning Earth/Lightning Flash. And if that wasn’t enough, you can also conjure a hammer, bow or great sword for some temporary variety in how you play. The big caveat to all of this is that to really unlock the potent power of the elementalist you simply have to learn to dance through attunements, sitting in fire is going to really gimp you.

I’ve played most of the classes and found that all had their pros and cons.For me the irony is that my first toon was a fire traited staff elementalist that I grew very bored of in her 40s, so much so that I deleted her! And here I am back with one and having huge amounts of fun with it.

I much prefer GW2 over GW, for the open world structure alone. I’d like to see some of the stuff mentioned, particularly skill collecting, and I’d like to see pvp get some serious love (I’m not a big pvper but that really ought to be a highlight of this game given it’s pedigree).

I also share the opinion that the gem store as a major revenue stream does seem to have had quite a major impact on some basic areas of the game. It kind of irritates me to be honest, I really don’t want to feel like I’m playing Guild Wars 2 Lite, but things like shared bank space limits that seem extremely tight and just the fact that money is so hard to come by often leaves me feeling like I’m playing a very pretty, slick FTP game.

But overall I think GW2 is a really great game, one of the best MMOs I’ve played (and I’ve played most of ‘em), it will improve with age I’m sure.

I’m okay with waypoints overall and for most of the leveling, but they become far less trivial an expense at later levels, so much so that I tend to avoid using them unless I need to get to a major hub. It really irks me to have to pay out hard earned silver on a traveling convenience that was previously costing me a handful of copper.

I’ve fallen short on levels every time I’ve been through Queensdale. But really, it’s not that big of a deal, you’re showered with exp for virtually everything significant that you do.

The easiest way to get you back on level with content is to craft and do the personal quests. It’s the player’s prerogative to avoid those activities if they’d prefer though they’re missing out on a huge chunk of easy exp by doing so.

On the PQ difficulty, some of them do seem a touch unfair, I’ve never been a fan of those that spawn a bunch of mobs on you from out of nowhere when there’s no room to kite them, not a problem if you’re a warrior or guardian I guess, but for low level clothies it can be a frustrating experience.

Much of what the OP mentions doesn’t bother me much if at all, I roll with it because I enjoy the game. And it’s odds on that many of these little wrinkles will eventually be ironed out.

You and the rest of the community I’d say. Risen are aggravating to say the least. And if you’re on a lower pop server, finding a waypoint that isn’t contested can be an exercise in futility too.

I’m okay with difficult, but being CC spammed to oblivion as I inch my way from one ludicrously short spawn to the next…not so much. All the profs I’ve rolled thus far have ways to mitigate these problems but it still smacks of uninspired design to me, a little like the Flood levels in Halo 1, or the alien planet in Half Life.

And undead foes in the MMO genre is getting sort of old now. I agree with another poster re Branded, much cooler enemies.

Unless it’s significantly changed since I last logged, signet warrior is just about the easiest leveling experience you can have, virtually unstoppable.

Engel Angel.9076:

lagrangeify.5641:

Here’s my gal, dressed for warfare ^^ She’s a skirmishing trap ranger and beastmaster who’s fond of her pet raven, jaguar and polar bear. She likes to get her hands dirty with a great sword generally, though uses an axe and warhorn as a backup….sometimes she even uses a bow.

What armor is that? I recognize some parts, but not all of them

The top is Duelist, the leggings are from the Vigil, the boots are from the leather worker vendor’s karma insignia set, the shoulders and gauntlets I can’t remember the name of but they’re commonly available models.

Well I’ve never been impressed with loot drops, in fact I’ve had one yellow drop in about 4 days of extensive veteran and champ hunting,. But then I’ve never bothered with MF gear in the past so I can’t be sure my experience historically is representative.

But I have noticed that I’m not getting many dyes at all. Whereas before I’d expect to get at least a dozen in a week, this week I’ve had maybe 3. Don’t know if that’s illustrative of an overall issue with loot tables or not.

Relentliss.2170:

Your answer is simple don’t visit the forum. Forums are where people come to debate. Things are unlikely to settle down… maybe for months.

If only that were so, but I’m afraid it hasn’t been for a few years. People come onto MMO forums to rage about every conceivable little issue.Anyone else who comes on here merely to “debate” are quickly drowned out by the general rage quit narrative that completely holds court here.

I’ve just had a second run through of the story mode quest, Forging the Pact and was astounded by how much tighter and more slick that quest is now. Likewise, A Light in the Darkness is now far less meandering, the ridiculous scaling has been tamed a little, and I found both of these formerly despised quests to be completely bug free.

I’ve been able to complete every single zone I’ve recently hit, right up to level 68. Not a single bugged heart or skill point, perhaps one bugged dynamic event in, well, a hundred odd that I’ve participated in?

I haven’t seen a bot in over a week on my server, only three weeks ago it was absolutely infested with them. Similarly, the gold spammers are pretty much a rarity suddenly. How long the cease fire holds I don’t know, but I’m impressed by this almost total annihilation of the RMT forces of darkness.

In the last month, we’ve received two major content releases, one holiday event that was in my opinion a tremendous success, and one timed event that was highly ambitious but hampered by performance issues, bugs etc.

Tl;Dr -What I’m trying to say is that all of these issues were considered major enough for people to threaten to rage quit on a daily basis on this rancid, bad tempered forum. And they got fixed. They’re actually so proactive compared to most subbed MMO developers, that I have every faith that they will have learned from the one time event problems and we’ll see significant improvements in their handling of them in the future. Because according to the evidence thus far, that’s how this developer seems to roll.

Arena Net, for all the doom saying, all the conspiracy mutterings, all the rage fueled emotional blackmail being fired at them, for all the missteps or the poor communication, all the potentially divisive design decisions…..despite all of that, they’re still working hard on their game, making strident efforts to deliver on most of what they promised.

This is not the signs of a game being run by a company that doesn’t care. And honestly, their effort deserves better than this increasingly vile community gives it.

I’ll be drowned in fanboy name calling and hair pulling for this, but actually I’m just calling it as I see it. And I reckon I’m a great deal more rational and open minded about it than the vast majority of haters that come on here.

Obsidian.1328:

@lagrangeify

y u so reesnibble!!

I’m onto you! You and your rational discourse and calm demeanor. How dare you soil these forums with reasoned compromise! Begone foul beast!!

Cereally though, I can totally agree to that.

Well I like to buck the trend now and again

This game’s open world pve has had me grouping with a frequency that puts most others to shame. But it does so in such a non-invasive way that to all intents and purposes, you’re soloing.

The dungeon crawling is typical MMO stuff, and that’s just how it is. Sadly I do think ANet have made something of a misstep with gear progression, but what the heck, as my grandfather used to say “You either s***or you get off the pot”

I recall that ArenaNet themselves saddled GW with the CORPG acronym, presumably recognising an opportunity (having designed a game that deviated from the standard EQ/WOW MMORPG model), to distinguish their game by playing on the differences rather than the similarities – a marketing exercise in other words.

We human beings have (quite rationally in my view) realised that we can convey distinctive concepts in a shorthand way once they have become firmly established in the popular consciousness. Naturally though, as we make small deviations from what was established, we have to come up with new shorthand ways of conveying the difference without having to go over the minutiae of it all.

GW was different to most established MMORPGs in some really very significant ways. We could either spend the next 20 years pulling each others hair about it, or just accept that not only was it very different from WoW, it is also very different from GW2?

Here’s my gal, dressed for warfare ^^ She’s a skirmishing trap ranger and beastmaster who’s fond of her pet raven, jaguar and polar bear. She likes to get her hands dirty with a great sword generally, though uses an axe and warhorn as a backup….sometimes she even uses a bow.

What a marvelous idea. Not dumb at all. I’d LOVE to see this as something I could spec into, ie, sacrifice my domain over animals and instead receive their innate spiritual characteristics, maybe represented in the same way as the engineers kits and toolbar.

Well done.

Ain’t gonna happen though.

Curlybaby.6258:

lagrangeify.5641:

I know, I know. Calling on people to try to keep in perspective is not the done thing. Maybe it’s my age, but I’m patently less inclined to throw the baby out with the bath water than many of the “that’s it! I QUIT!” people out there…I mean, seriously? Quitting a game that’s already been paid for but continues to provide stuff to do for many? I admit it, I just don’t get it.

I think you are wasting your time if your purpose, and those who think like you, are to come on these forums and “call on people to try to keep things in perspective.” What you people don’t realize is that some of us “hate, hate,hate” gear treadmill MMOs. And if we had been told that GW2 was going to become a “gear treadmill” MMO, we would have stayed far, far away from it, just as many of us have stayed far, far away from the leagions of copy/paste WOW clones in the MMO genre.

It has nothing to do with having things handed to us, or desiring ease of game, or being over-dramatic about what many of you call a “minor” change. It has everything to do with the fact that we were promised GW2 would be the anti-gear-treadmill MMO and we purchased the game under that premise, only to be back-stabbed by turning a game we planned to play for a long while into a hated gear-treadmill MMO.

I understand many of you wanted GW2 to become a gear-treadmill MMO. I read your threads from time to time on these forums so I know you are out there. You are all the same people who are chastising us who are voicing our displeasure because Anet has done a complete 180 on what they had promised us this game would be.

All I can say is you got what you wanted. A gear-treadmill MMO. Just please stop trying to minimize the feelings of “the deceived.”

I didn’t ask for a gear treadmill either, so quoting me and then lumping me in with some mythical group of your own invention just for suggesting that people try to stay on planet earth?

As I said, I understand the frustrations, some of them I share. I’m just not having a brain fart over it. You however, are probably a prime candidate for an accute myocardial infarction if this is how you carry on whenever you hit a few wrinkles in life.

morbidillusion.2759:

After seeing the recipe for the new ascended items and after realizing ANet has destroyed drop rates to make this game even more of a pitiful grind – I’m pretty much done with the game. Lost Shores will be the patch that killed GW2.

Hmm, your name seems to suit your current state of mind. Self fulfilling prophesy much?

Sundial.9015:

Like I said, this isn’t it even about the money. This is about a broken promise. Sub or not, I just want what they promised me in the manifesto back.

I don’t think money should ever be used as a way to justify this kind of thing.

Are we gamers really so shallow that all we can think with is our wallets and not our love for a game?

It’s not that I don’t see where you’re coming from. Believe me when I say that as a ranger I have my own frustrations beyond the frustrations with a sudden unveiling of further gear grind. I just think the general outpouring of unbelievably high strength vitriol dwarfs the issues themselves, by an absolute country mile.

And as for the money aspect, many less progressive MMOs come with a subscription charge in order to provide you what ANet has given for free in a mere two months of being live. You may wish to pass this off as an irrelevance, but if we’re going to talk about shining beacons then for me anyway, that qualifies.

I know, I know. Calling on people to try to keep in perspective is not the done thing. Maybe it’s my age, but I’m patently less inclined to throw the baby out with the bath water than many of the “that’s it! I QUIT!” people out there…I mean, seriously? Quitting a game that’s already been paid for but continues to provide stuff to do for many? I admit it, I just don’t get it.

I’m going to adopt the tiniest voice possible when I say that there is another way of looking at this – ANet have already been far more active in trying to evolve the game with stuff than any other MMO operator that I’ve ever known. Perhaps only Trion are similarly proactive when it comes to their game, and they charge a sub.

I’m not saying you should suck up what you don’t approve of, just bear in mind that what this isn’t a case of, is a hands off developer operating a policy of fire and forget, post launch. Anything but.

My pint is half-full. I paid £40 for a game that contains an absolute ton of stuff for me to do, some 2 months after purchase. Most devs would have charged a micro-transaction for this latest set of events…..and frankly had ANet done that then I’d be joining the bloody revolution. But they didn’t, the gave it to us for free, warts and all.

The sense of drama on this forum far out-strips what I would personally think of as verging on hysteria, over a game that makes no financial demands of you whatsoever in order that you can take part….or indeed to not take part.

Some perspective gently offered, though I’ve no doubt I’ll get my face chewed off.

I’m afraid that’s the way it goes on a game’s official forum. Actually, they let a vast amount of criticism go by without challenge so I’m not sure what the criteria was that they applied to your post, other than perhaps it was repeating information that was already covered frequently elsewhere? Who knows – without anything other than canned responses from the CMs, it’s a guessing game.

If you really feel like you’re being dogged by over-zealous censorship, maybe call in on http://www.guildwars2guru.com, it’s a decent community there, well moderated but a little less inclined to stomp on bad news.

Cyric.7485:

I don’t understand why this is a problem at all. Don’t like how someone is recruiting for their own group? Create your own group, problem solved. You can scoff and think you’re morally superior in your own little world of fancy candy canes and pink goblins riding unicorns with butterscotch clouds that rain chocolate hearts for all the kiddies because now it’s your group to do what you like with.

Play how you like, that’s the slogan, right?

This “elitism” only affects you because you refuse to take the initiative to put your own group together. So while you’re sitting on the sidelines judging that elitist jerk for having “crappy morals”, relax for a second and look in the mirror because at that moment you’re no better than what you perceive him to be now.

I must say this guy right here is right on the money.

If more of us, shall we say, relaxed folk took the initiative to form groups instead of being both individual snowflakes AND wallflowers, then the elitists would have their own little island and we would have ours, and there would be no need to moan about the fact that there’s no ferry service between islands – who cares, their island sucks.

Rise up meek brethren, for whatsoever thou soweth, thou shall also reap!

I just think it’s up to the guild leaders. I won’t join a guild that insists on it, I don’t like having hurdles placed in front of me as a barrier to entry before I’ve even proved my ability, I get quite enough of that in RL. Instead I’ll join a guild that’s a little more flexible and relaxed about such things. It’s only a game for goodness sake. But that’s fine, a guild has a right to want to create the community it wants.

But if it’s a decent guild run by open minded people it won’t bar a deaf person anyway, they’ll work around it, because contrary to popular belief, one is more than capable of using a combination of visual cues, some basic text instructions and good old fashioned common sense and experience to complete ANY dungeon currently known to mankind. This isn’t a NASA moon landing people, this is a relatively simplistic game of whack-a-mole with some added green stuff to not stand in.

No guild that flatly refuses to is worthy of being represented by your buddy anyway, and that’s a fact.

Ballistic.4531:

From Linsey Murdock’s Blog post (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/):
“…The first end game mechanic we will introduce is Agony…”
So he sais they will keep introducing new mechanics later on. Who sais you won’t need new “ascended items” to fight off new “agony mechanics”? This is just one of the issues we are having.

Yeah okay, re-reading that it certainly looks like they’re going to be introducing further ascended items with each new major endgame encounter. Oh dear.

They’re clearly not thinking this through thoroughly enough. There is a way to provide a sense of progression, just by introducing increased gear aesthetic variety. As long as something is best in slot, people will chase and chase gear just to regularly attain a distinctive and unique look.

And if they want there to be prerequisites to dungeon entry, then sure, have a all gear with a slot that takes interchangeable items that one has to grind for. That also represents gear progression, but the emphasis is different – rather than being about chasing a wholesale hike in stats in order to be top geared it’s about being “attuned” to specific dungeon mechanics (not in the WoW sense) in order to mitigate that dungeons specific effects.

That, to me anyway, makes sense as a way to move forward – have a flat level of ascended armour, ramp up the choice of gear aesthetically to give people something to chase should they so wish, but make the dungeon effect that requires mitigation purely temporary, something you apply to existing gear. That way, the devs can think up new and fiendish ways to have us rushing around without feeling we’re having to make stupid little incremental base stat increases just so we don’t get left behind.

Job done. Right?

I’m interested to know how long this new tier of stats has been on the cards. It does seem like a big u-turn, this isn’t something they’ve designed and implemented on the fly in the last couple of months, right?

I’ve not been keeping up with the rage and I’ve deliberately kept away from the ascended details beyond the basics. All I know is that defensive infusion is needed to counter agony and ascended items with infusion slots are a bump of stats on exotics.

That being said, does this not imply that this tier is now the top tier of gear there will ever be, that it’s required for the agony mechanic that we’ll see in future endgame instances and as long as you have ascended items slotted with infusion you can compete in them?

And if that’s the case, that hardly represents power creep, it’s just the unveiling of a final tier of gear that will always be needed for this style of dungeon?

See, I said I wasn’t clued up. And that’s because ANet aren’t communicating their full intent very well at all. They could resolve all this rage by confirming that this is the case, then all the bad feelings would go away.

ASP.8093:

lagrangeify.5641:

sock puppets

What “sock puppets”?

You do realize that every forum account on here costs $60, right?

Yeah I do, and I retract the petty insult, for that’s what it was, said in frustration.

Though if you know how these things work (I hang out at plenty of subscriber political news sites whos forums are often infested with them) then you’ll know that paying a one off fee is no impediment to people who, for whatever reason, are intent on causing disruption.

But yeah, I take it back in this case, it was uncalled for.

There was one lone gold spammer yesterday on my server but he seemed rather pathetic, and currently in receipt of a few dozen reports no doubt. But I haven’t seen a bot in any of the major farming spots for a few days now. Congratulations ANet, that’s a tick in the positive column.

The Sacred Voice.1623:

It just irks me that people complained constantly about a lack of endgame content and then when extra endgame items appear along with a new, complex endgame dungeon and another endgame area then all they do is howl that the game is pandering to traditional MMO concepts.

Ditto. I’m starting to wonder how many sock puppets are starting these threads, you know, the ones that are drowning out all the others. On the ranger sf, some poor guy asked people to check out his build, only to be immediately pounced upon by someone telling him not to bother…..and if that isn’t a sad indictment of the current state of MMO forum communities I’m not sure what is.

So yeah, it’s probably paranoia on my part to think of the kinds of people who infest forums with negativity having an agenda, but regardless, I’m getting sick to my stomach with every game getting kicked to death by it’s forum community. It’s as dull as a rainy day in Milton Keynes.

I’ve played WoW literally to death, to the point that my involvement in it’s pve experience amounts to exploitation of something I know so intimately well that I might as well be a bot. It’s now so kitten fugly that even I, someone who generally isn’t all that bothered about high graphic fidelity, can never go back to that lumpen, etch-a-sketch world, not after Tyria anyway.

I’m not an Eve sort of player, though I do admire what it does for sure. I’m just not driven enough and I don’t have even remotely the amount of time required to succeed in that game, and I don’t like it’s setting anyway.

That leaves the former P2Ps that have gone FTP (the purpose built FTPs almost universally suck imho), and since I played most of them when they had a sub and didn’t like them enough to stick with them, I can think of no possible reason why I’d want to play them over GW2. They weren’t that hot when they were subbed, nothing about not being subbed makes that any less the case.

That leaves me with GW2. I’m enjoying it immensely. But then I’m at a time in my life when the things it offers me are hitting my sweet spot. I can quite understand that the more careerist MMO gamer is looking for something that will hit their’s, though I humbly submit that such a game simply does not exist in the genre.

Shooopa.5632:

When you started playing the game and it had other players everywhere you went sometimes you had to play in the overflow server to about 2 months later being lucky to see even a tumbleweed in 99% of zones you start to wonder how healthy the game really is.

Or how healthy your server is. On mine during the normal busy hours there are plenty of people running about, even in the remote corners of low traffic maps I bump into the odd person.

MMO gamers have been doing this whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing for a few years now. I find it really quite wretched actually, a really sad state of the genre when people who are drawn to it like moths to a flame proceed to try to wreck their own game with pronouncements of doom, seemingly wishing to goodness that it does indeed come to pass. How weird is that?

GW2 is a B2P game…that makes a world of difference to you doom sayers pronouncements, which normally might apply to a sub model but clearly to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, do not apply here. Think about it.

I get why you’re tying to put some positive spin on this patch OP, but really, it’s a lost cause.

They not only failed to deliver anything remotely significant in this patch, they’ve nerfed our traps, right off the back of an SB stealth nerf. Aside from a pretty major kick in the pants to trap rangers, the changes they’ve made are comically insignificant.

Basically ANet need to pull something out of the bag very fast, or the only rangers you ever see will be the ubiquitous bot train.

JonPeters.5630:

Hi Anders, I’m totally not here so skip this post and read on…

We made the improvements we had time to test. There are still more ranger improvements but when our time is limited we have to focus on things we know we can fix. Signets and shouts are still on the docket, and I suspect some of each of these will get some love in the next time around. As you can see a lot changed in this build for every profession and we have to test these changes as well.

I do still believe ranger is the profession in most need of improvement after this patch and we will continue to make those improvements. If we could fix everything at one time we would, but the reality is there are a limited # of hours to make changes.

I see a lot of talk about ranger weapons, but I don’t think that is the real problem. I think sword and longbow are both good weapons, which is why the changes take longer. The problems are deeper, in pets ability to hit moving targets, trait lines with not enough viable choices and skills that are often too specialized to really compliment the weapon builds. These aren’t things we can change overnight. The change to Greatsword block was in fact a very difficult change, but we made it because we knew it was the right thing to do.

There are >500 skills in this game, 480 traits, and 2 designers working on this. Even then often we are bottle necked by other issues. I’m not going to say we are not working on these things, nor can I say there are things we could have changed but just ran out of time on, but this was a patch that contained ranger improvements and it will not be the last one that does so. Maybe you want more than honesty but that is what I currently have to offer.

Jon

Thanks for the update Jon. It takes a certain amount of bravery to come on here and face the music, even though you might have been better to start a topic of your own rather than burying it here.

I’m sure we can appreciate you’re working under constraints, but you yourself set the expectation that there would be substantial updates, and that certainly is not what you guys delivered. Correction – you delivered a substantial nerf to my trap build. But the underwater stuff, the great sword stuff, the icon change? Pfft.

It really does seem like you guys don’t want us to play rangers, you want us all playing warriors instead. I guess you’ll find out just how much of an issue that really is when you review your metrics, good luck explaining that at your board meetings.

Oh that’s awesome, not only am I playing the most maligned of professions, but they nerfed my build?

Why are ANet so determined that I play a warrior?

Jon Peters, you have a great deal to learn about managing the expectations of your customers.

Oh…..dear.

I’ve only just started my ranger. Guess I should have rolled an engineer after all.

Hmm, my ranger’s not exactly overwhelmed by her changes.

well if it’s any indicator (I know it won’t be but hey), it was 8k odd files, mine’s now halfway and I’ve dl’d 325mb .

dirtyklingon.2918:

it’s because he’s a worse mary sue than the vast majority of devoiant art fanfiction.

if kirk and spock had a baby and that baby went on to save the galaxy single handedly and marry wesley crusher, it would be more interesting and less 2 dimensional than traehearne.

bella swan has more depth and pathos than traehearne.

You had me right up until the Bella Swan part. She makes Trahearne look like Jim Carey.

Well my first run through the game was with Order of Whispers, I did loads of stuff with my partner who was a great bloke, we had a lot of laughs, we got a lot of big important stuff done….then Trahearne took all the credit.

He’s an opportunist leech with all the personality of a plank of wood. And he’s rubbish in a fire fight.