- Finally, I want to add that a few things (hello traits!) are things that can be improved for players who make multiple alts, we’re aware of this, and though company policy prevents us from discussing what’s in development: I can say we know Gw2 can be an even better game for people who love making alts in the long run, more info: when it’s ready™.
Company policy can be changed, not being vocal about what is in development is what’s lead to this situation in the first place, if people had been made aware of these changes possibly months in advance there could have been ideas tossed around between you the developers and the community about how to come to a working medium ground that can both retain new players (possibly better than this current system) and not alienate the older players and recently joined new players as well. Instead the policy kept the players in the dark on a massive change that a large portion of the player base simply didn’t ask for or want as was plainly evident by the amount of posts speaking out about it (the increased level gating, the gating of diving goggles [really] and the gating of skill points [I liked being able to setup my skills how I wanted to in early levels])
Having a public test server would be one of the best ways to go about doing this. This situation just proves that the company policy is harmful the the ongoing development of Guild Wars 2 as a whole and should be taken to management about having the policy altered to allow more transparency in the development of features like these.
The NPE is so dominant in peoples eyes because it changed too much, the removal of the fluid way to unlock weapon skills, the downed state being rendered useless until a later level, F1 – F4 being gated, utility and elite skills being gated to higher levels. it just feels like a way to curb botting but only hurts people that actually THINK about what they’re playing.
I personally wish there was an option to tick where people can opt out of this system so that i can go back to leveling my weapons the old way…
I tried it, Don’t like level gating weapon skills (feels arbitrary, the old way was better felt more fluid) I don’t like how the elite is gated at 40. I don’t like how you’re handicapped underwater until 23, how you’re handicapped in the downed state until level 19, short version is i just felt handicapped arbitrarily for no obvious reason. I wish I could have opted out of the level gating of weapon skills and kept the fluid unlocking of skills as you used the weapon.
New players WILL walk away out of frustration, there’s already posts by some new players that just started a bit before the feature pack came out and they’re now quitting because of these asinine changes that didn’t need to be made (and were only made due to metrics and focus groups and not actual feedback). Focus groups and metrics don’t do jack for game development if anything they make it worse.
Imagine if all of the innovative games that came out relied on metrics and focus groups to base their development on (they wouldn’t have been innovative) this is because focus groups tend to point developers towards the status quo (in this case to be more like WoW) and the same can be said for metrics.
You want to retain players? that’s not going to help. No one is going to keep playing this game because of the early levels…every MMORPG maker knows that endgame is how you retain players, not the early stages that get completed in less than a week…. so for the 10000th time, please work on a CONTENT PATCH FOR VETERANS. thats how you get new players to commit to this game and stay commited…. not by this pointless NPE.
I want to clarify one point I’ve been seeing expressed. This is one type of retention. There’s another type of retention where new players try the game and churn out before they even get to the point where they’re seeing the potential the game has to offer. Yes, a certain amount of people will just do that; they’ll log in to see what it’s about, have their curiosity satisfied, and move on. But we were seeing a lot of places where people who would otherwise have become active users were churning out prematurely because of the issues that we’re addressing with the NPE.
As Colin stated above, we can’t talk in detail about the ongoing development to drive retention for our veteran players, but I just wanted to make the point that the NPE was deliberately designed to address the early game retention issues, and ensure that Guild Wars 2 can benefit from a strong and steady influx of new players into the game.
And now you’re churning out the veteren players that were thinking of making alts but now can’t bring themselves to do it because of the asinine way skills are locked, Elite at 40 is horrible, at most it should have stayed at 30, if you wanted to level gate so badly you should have done it in a way that everything would have been unlocked at the same time it would have before the “feature pack” (I don’t consider level gates as a “feature” I consider them bad design.) Additionally locking the downed skills means that when a new player gets downed for the first time they’re going to be completely screwed if it was in a fight with multiple enemies since they won’t have any utility to assist in survival at that point only 1 and 4, and 4 is interrupted on ANY damage.
Elementalist being locked out of earth attunement until 24 was also quite silly as is locking the last underwater skill until 23. (earth attunement was considerably earlier pre-“feature pack” and was a heck of a lot less confusing than it is now (why am I being kitten for longer?)
This “feature pack” feels like a slap in the face with a steel gauntlet to veteran players. I for one won’t be spending any more money on this game for the foreseeable future due to it. (lets be real I haven’t spent any money since the “living story” first appeared and I realized that there wasn’t going to be any new dungeons)
Holy crap, stop trying to change the persons opinion, if they doesn’t like the changes then THEY DON’T LIKE THE CHANGES! And nothing you say can change that. I don’t like the changes and I’ve been around from early on. I vehemently hate the changes to weapon and skill unlocks. by level 15 I had ALL of my weapon skills for ALL of my weapons unlocked before on alts (because that’s what I did) now I can’t do that (which is something I liked to do so good job ANet telling people how to play the game…FFS). The elite skill being locked until level 40 is also stupid as now people with the mistfire wolf or who planned out a leveling plan to have a decent elite right at level 30 for going into Ascalonian Catacombs at level 30 or so are now prevented from doing so (can’t have people thinking about how they want to play their character, that requires thinking and planning, nope too confusing to “new players”)
Locking weapon skills and the freaking elite skill behind a level gate (especially elementalists earth attunement at level 24) was dumb plain and simple.
As was level locking the downed state skills, having just the 1 skill and 4 skill until you magically “unlock” the other two is well beyond ridiculous good luck getting a rally at low levels since you won’t have access to the better downed skills for every class.
Underwater weapons you don’t unlock your last skill (which is typically the most useful for a lot of weapons) until level 23. That’s a rather long level gap to be kitten underwater. I personally used to take the time early on to acquire ALL my skills and have them all ready and open before I even hit level 15 made leveling alts so much faster when you have everything available to you.
As for the elite skill ANET if you read this lower the skill locks so they cap at 30 (which was the old Elite skill unlocking point) having to wait til you’re level 40 is freaking stupid especially since there are fights in dungeons that you really do want to have your elites for between 30 and 40.
Can’t even use the mistfire wolf elite anymore, which you could have used as soon as you first unlocked the elite slot (around level 20ish?) now it’s 40… I haven’t played this seriously in about a year. Doesn’t look like I’ll ever come back with the way these updates keep going. Viva La ArcheAge!
It’s only the guaranteed rare (note that’s singular) that’s 1 per account per day, it’ll probably pop up the same way daily/monthly/map completion/guild mission chests show up). You’ll still have the boss chests daily per character that have the heightened chances for rares and exotics
That’s exactly my problem, they need to just increase the time for the start window by 5 or so seconds to give adequate time for slower machines to load in.
the only real solution would be for them to increase the time it takes for the snowflakes to start melting, the Mad King’s Clocktower was manageable due to it having a decent delay in the amount of time it took for the cloud to climb up. Here the snowflakes melt before I finish loading, increasing the time it takes for the snowflakes to melt by 5 seconds would enable people on lower spec machines (who are already on lowest settings) to have a shot on this one.
These timed ones blow… at least the Halloween one I could at least attempt due to a decent delay in the start time to give people time to load into the JP itself, this one the snowflakes start melting before I even load in (and getting a new computer is NOT an option at this point). Timed puzzles behind a loading screen are a bad thing. since not everybody has the same load in delay. Just having the snowflakes start melting say 5 seconds later would be more than enough time to give people on lower spec machines a fair shot to actually START this puzzle
Unfortunately, No, even freeing up a character slot will not let you create a new character on a different server other than your home server. The reason is to prevent abuse in world vs world (also the reason why server transfers were extended to once every 7 days from once every 24 hours).
Fortunately for you, you’re not forced to leave a guild on a server transfer, you’ll stay in the guild but you won’t have access to all the unlocked that are tied to your guilds primary server. You’ll have the ability to communicate with guild members on different servers though. You can however join a guild on the new server (it will take up a second of the 4 account guild slots).
Forget the majority of what you know from WoW, especially the Trinity.
One of the things you’ll want to do is figure out what server you want to play on, I personally favor Ferguson’s Crossing, especially since I’ve got a decent group of friends that I roll with when we’re all online at the same time.
You’ll also want to find a nice helpful guild that is willing to answer any questions you may have. To that end the Union is a good source of information, although I’d also have to say my guild is on par for helping people and for the most part we’re all on one server so it’s easy to find people who’d be willing to help with something that’s kicking you around (like a champion blocking a path or a hard jumping puzzle)
Only bumping cause it’s on page 3 and this is kind of a critical bug that needs fixed. I do not like this type of bug as it could be considered an exploit.
Only have 5 Superior Runes of the Soldier in my armor… however it shows 10/6 when I have my gear equipped, shows 5/6 when I remove the gear. I have also submitted an in game bug report as it could be exploited (even though I have absolutely no clue how it happened in the first place)
edited to add screenshot showing the bug in question.
Going have to plug this then since it seems not enough people are aware or are spreading it around, there’s a third party website, http://www.gw2lfg.com/ very useful for finding groups since it’s not server specific and you can search for a specific dungeon or a specific server location, for example search north arah to get arah dungeon runs for north american servers, or europe flame for european citadel of flame runs.
I use it in combination with the 4 guilds I’m in for finding dungeon groups and it’s extremely effective, at most I wait 20 – 30 minutes to fill a group.
Dungeons can be a grind if you don’t enjoy them, tbh I love running dungeons so for me, no they’re not a grind. Wv3 however is a grind since my cpu is horrible and my framerate bottoms out in zergfests
NO. Just NO. It is not false advertise or bait-and-switch. NEVER was it said there wouldn’t be vertical progression by an ANet designer. Vertical progression was in the game at the start what do you think the fine > masterwork > rare > exotic progression was, it sure wasn’t horizontal. The fact of the matter is you can do everything in game save high difficulty fractals in masterwork armor… in fact that’s what I did until I got my exotic set and I had 0 issues surviving in dungeons due to gear.
Like I said in another post somewhere, gear is nowhere near as important as a players overall SKILL at the game. a good player in masterwork gear will 9 times out of 10 kill a bad player decked out in full exotics. The same holds true for an upleveled player in Wv3 being able to kill a true 80, if the upleveled player is better at timing dodges, heals , and condition removals they will be able to kill a true 80.
Across the two characters I was using today, I had around 7 Unidentified Dyes drop, so the drop rate is fine as it is… I just wish I’d get an abyss to pop from the forge finally
I don’t see what the deal is, I still run the original dungeons just as often as I always did before FotM came out, I don’t feel the sudden urge to grind just to have ascended quality items, they’re just 3 slots, 2 rings and a back currently, not overpowering in the least. My jewelry is masterwork as my jeweller isn’t at 400 yet and I do just as well as any others due to knowing how to play my build.
They’ll be back in the office today, They were out of the offices for the Thanksgiving holiday. TBH I’m not expecting anymore details on that until Wednesday at the earliest.
Early yesterday I had 10g, mostly from dungeon runs. when I got off I was at under 1g, bought 4 of the 50s runes of holding and made 4 15 slot bags for my main, bought crafting mats to get leatherworker closer to 400, and bought 5 Superior Runes of the Soldier to push my Vit/Toughness to higher levels. I find if I just do 3 AC Dungeon paths per day I average 2 gold a day, now I could do more, but too much of one dungeon can get tedious and burn you out so I tend to limit myself.
It’s not like I have to have tons of gold to do what I want, I’m not even contemplating a legendary yet as I still have to do 100% map completion and the last Wv3 maps I need to do look like they’ll take a while to finish. Plus I still need to finish off every area south of Lion’s Arch (with the exception of Southsun Cove as that isn’t counted)
@Chandelier, I’m online most days after I do my online college course work, I’m on Ferguson’s Crossing as well, I’m available to assist in anything you might be needing done farming-wise or for anything else you may need help with.
Indeed you can add a server password for clients to put in to connect, I run a small 5 man mumble server as a backup to my main guilds 1000 slot mumble server which is in fact password protected (I’m a server admin on both servers), you can also change the name of the lobby from Root to something different, although it can be confusing for first time server admins. I can offer up my assistance if there’s a need for beautifying the Union’s mumble server
Use safe internet practice, do NOT use the same password for your raidcall account as you do GW2 or any other site. It’s safe, has been around for a while, but I prefer Mumble or TS3 to Raidcall.
Ectos are rather rare, it’s better to use master kits at the very least, if you get any use the Black Lion Salvage Kits as they have the highest chances for getting ectos
Survey done. I had a slight laugh when asked if I trusted my fellow group members… I trust the thief I run with to run for the hills when the zerg comes leaving my engineer in the dust acting as a meatshield
@akamon – I won’t be in game anymore tonight, getting a bit too tired to focus on anything right at this time of night, I’ll be sure to check when I wake up.
Name: LordKabal
Main Character: Nadja Torres
Current Server: Ferguson’s Crossing
Interested Activities: PvE, Dungeons, Jumping Puzzles, Wv3, and sPvP
Active: every day after doing college work.
Additional Comments: Willing to help with dungeons cross server, but not willing to transfer due to main guild being well advanced.
Are you willing to participate in Operation: UNION’S project, Y/N?: Yes, Will Represent when asked. always available to answer questions via whispers.
3rd option is create a character on whatever server you feel like, get to know people there, and then when it’s available make use of guesting to play with your friends on another server
