Guild Wars 2

Disappointing. I never expected Anet to be this greedy. I can’t believe they aren’t including a free character slot for the Revenant.

This has been an amazing event. I loved all the Acts, minigames, and achievements. Keep up the good work.

A lot of you are missing the point entirely.

It’s not about the difficulty for some of us. It’s about the forced mechanics of it all.

Some people like these platform mechanics by jumping and collecting coins. Okay, great. The rest of us don’t, and that’s why we voice our concerns. If Anet wants to cater to the former, then fine, but they will just exclude the rest of us who do not.

A better design, would be to offer alternative ways, to enjoy the content, but currently , this isn’t possible. It’s required for the story and the new zone, for the achievements and rewards.

For those who don’t like jumping and using secondary mechanic skills (aspects), they are screwed with this update.

The OP is right. It feels forced, and this soap opera isn’t interesting, at all. Can’t they think of something else, instead of a lesbian love relationship, that interjects itself in every episode along the main story?

You want to know how out of touch they really are?

GuildMag: Similarly, some people are wondering what your stance is about adding a first-person view?

Matt Wuerffel: I think it falls into the realm of, you know, that is not something that we would rule out, we do play around a lot with different camera views and controls and I think even in the betas you’ve seen… like, some people found out ‘oh man, there is like, kind of an eagle view, a top-down camera view’. It is something that we explore and we think about how would this work in the game and what would it make the game feel like, and what does it add for players? But, off the record, there is nothing we can say at this time.

Devon Carver: Yeah, the one thing I would say is… the first person mode which we’ve had, we used to kind of toggle in and out of it on our dev client before, the biggest reason to stay away of it is that the sense of direction in combat is really important in our game, as well as positioning – positioning is really important. So, when you go into that first-person mode, you really completely lose the understanding of anything that is going on behind you, which can make our combat really difficult to understand and just difficult to play. There is some PvE scenarios where probably it wouldn’t be a big deal, but certainly in PvP or World versus World, it becomes very difficult to actually understand what is going on in combat. Which means that it really handicaps you as a player at that point; it makes it difficult to know what is going on and for that reason it is something we probably won’t be doing much work with, because we have really done a lot of work and continue to do a lot of work to make combat as readable and understandable as possible, and, like I said, direction and positionality is really important in our game, so not being able to say all that playable space is really valuable.

The community never wanted it for combat. They wanted it for screenshots and immersion.

First the traits unlock at 30, now the hotbar skill unlocks are gated.

I urge everyone to try out a new character before commenting.

Slot 1 is unlocked at lvl 1
Slot 2 is unlocked at lvl 2
Slot 3 is unlocked at lvl 4
slot 4 is unlocked at lvl 7
slot 5 is unlocked at lvl 10
slot 6 is unlocked at lvl 1 (heal skill)
slot 7 is unlocked at lvl 13
slot 8 is unlocked at lvl 24
slot 9 is unlocked at lvl 35
slot 10 is unlocked at lvl 40 (elite skill)

Personal Story unlocks at lvl 10.

The only reason it seems like there is more skimpy armor, is because more people use it, not because there is more.

I’m not a fan of the Living Story, at all. If this is their only means of content distribution, then sadly, i won’t be sticking around.

This new system is terrible!

It’s going to turn off a lot of new players. I’m not even new and it discourages me from leveling an alt.

Certain traits should’ve been locked, but not all of them! Having to gather all of them is too overwhelming.

Yes, we can buy them, but as someone said earlier, it totals up to 40+ gold and skill points. This is so ridiculous.

That doesn’t sound like trolling to me. Maybe they are just new? Some people need to start giving new commanders a chance to learn. Also, there are no rules that says there can only be 1 commander.

Even worse, Trahearne might come back. The new trailer shows the Pact getting attacked in Timberline Falls.

PopeUrban.2578:

Keep in mind that a lot of the loot decisions are structured around account based MF now, as stacking MF is basically the “endgame” stat progression for GW2. Thus, the idea is that you start out on blue/green drops and luck them out until eventually those drops start to poop out better stuff.

It would not at all suprise me if inventory bags were subject to MF.

Also, the “good” rewards are in the secondary mission achievements, wherin the main reward from the primary plotline is unlocking said achievements. Makes sense really, as the story itself, unlike the GW1 story is “designed to be beaten” rather than “Designed to be a challenge” wherin the secondary achievements are the loot generators due to their more nuanced or challenging mechanics in most cases.

Also note that the open world mechanics were overhauled a lot to make it a much better source of rewards as well as much more replayable form a content standpoint. Anet really wants players doing theri farming in the open world, wherin the story instances are purposely designed to not be a “farm” but rather an ongoing narrative. This is why they don’t recycle the rewards, and generally only pay out big at the end of big plot threads.

If that’s true, then it should be changed.

Magic Find should never be used for the Living Story rewards. Even if it’s not true, the Living Story should have it’s own separate database for meaningful loot, specifically tied to the new zones, which could drop geodes, lockpicks, etc.

This is why people are justified when they say GW2 rewards suck, because you get grey-quality junk after spending all that time. It’s very unrewarding, and underwhelming.

I didn’t realize how awful this new one is until i hit level 30 last night.

I thought all the old traits would be unlocked, and that the new Adept ones, were the only ones that needed to be unlocked.

I was severely mistaken. ALL the traits are locked. I never felt so discouraged to level in any MMO until now.

There’s 30 traits in the first tier.
There’s 20 traits in the second tier.
There’s 15 traits in the third tier.

I can no longer try each trait, while leveling, unless i unlock 30 traits, just in the first tier. It’s bad enough we have to wait until level 30, but some of these traits are locked behind a level 50 personal story quest. That’s insane!

My major problem with this system?
It forces me to stop my personal leveling experience

I’m not able to level how i want to.
If i want all the traits, i’m forced to do pvp, personal story, dungeons, map completions, etc.

The only alternative is to waste 38+ gold and hundreds of skill points.
This is just unacceptable. I can only imagine the new player hit with these restrictions at level 30.

If you’re level 80 or had your traits unlocked already, please make an alt to 30 and see for yourself, and look at this new system as a new player without gold and skill points.

I’ll just level to 35 for the cultural armor, and stop leveling anymore alts, until the old system is brought back, or they fundamentally change the way we acquire traits.

It would’ve been fine for the new Adept traits, but not all of them. That’s where this new system went wrong.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re trying something very unique and different with Gw2, and a lot of it plays back on the original ideas and concepts we had for the game all these years we’re trying to build towards and accomplish. It’s important to us to continue to try new things, looking at ways of evolving and innovating what a live game can be. In many cases, we’re learning right along with you guys how all of this is going to work for a live game, and constantly adjusting as we see the outcomes and find ways to innovate on what a true online world experience can be.

Living World is above all, the attempt to really give the sense the world is constantly changing and evolving. That there is events and content that change the world in the short term (like our current events) and events that can occur or change for the long term, which is what we’re slowly building towards in the future with Living World content.

Living world absolutely does not mean nothing but content that comes in and leaves again a few weeks later, and though so far that’s primarily what you’ve seen, it’s not all we will do in the future. The intent is living world provides us with a story and narrative experience, sort of like your favorite TV show, to constantly update and change the world and provide unique and exciting rewards on a regular basis.

We might have events that occur and came back again with a few modifications in the future. We may have events that occur and then find new homes permanently down the road. We may have bosses from a storyline that continue on forever as guild bounty hunts when a story completes. Living world also allows us the opportunity to upgrade and make parts of our existing game better permanently, a living world narrative could allow us to rebuild and change an existing zone or dungeon, or could destroy one entirely.

Our goal is to get to a point where on a regular basis, the world around you is not only changing in the short term through our normal event system, it’s changing and evolving permanently through our living world releases as well. What you’ve seen so far is primarily some tests and warmup stuff while we in the background organize the company to support this exciting future for our game, the future for living world is filled with endless possibilities.

Enjoy the ride!

I don’t get the feeling that the world is changing, instead i get stagnation of the current world. If you really wanted persistence, of an evolving world, then you wouldn’t waste time on temporary instances/dungeons, and instead, you should develop:

newer dragon bosses
newer dynamic events
newer heart tasks
newer mobs to fight
newer crafting professions
newer skills
newer races
newer guild activities
etc.

A feeling of, character & world progression, is needed.

Flame & Frost was fun. Flame & Frost was just too long, and it spanned over several months, while Southsun Cove has stagnated and feels abandoned.

Just leave the temporary content to special events & holidays, which can be re-used over the years, but to completely develop a whole storyline, characters, dungeons, etc., only to remove it, is just a waste of resources and time, and it gives off that feeling that more important content (the list above) is being ignored.

Living Story has been a disaster in my view. I was loving GW2 up until Flame & Frost. Southsun with Canach is what really killed it for me. GW2 should’ve stuck with the traditional content updates other MMOs use. The traditional way also has it’s problems, but it’s still a lot better than this new content distribution that A-Net is trying.

Fiontar.4695:

Stone.6751:

OP – Your post made much more sense after I looked at every other post you have made. :P

Well, I hope you went all the way back to launch, because I’ve been a massive fan for a very long time. On one other site, I must have made close to 3,000 largely positive posts supporting the game from late 2010 until early 2013.

You are right though, if you actually are familiar with all my posts historically, this post will probably make a lot more sense to you.

I agree with you most of the time. I’ve even seen you defend the game on other sites like mmorpg.com. Just ignore the haters. They don’t know your post history and how you’ve defended GW2 from the real haters.

I also agree with you so much on how the Living Story concept has ruined GW2. It started off so amazing, then it devolved into a vapid waste of content that is temporary.

It’s actually quite sad, since GW2 had so much potential to actually be a living world with changing dynamic events, and a changing world, where zones would change based on mobs, climate, or destruction.

Instead, we get temporary fluff, such as, quaggan backpacks and RNG weapon skins. I’ve also mentioned that the major reason Living Story fails, is because of the rewards. They are not worth striving for.

Torvic.8256:

The sudden planetwide emergence of the Quaggan Empire?

You mean they don’t have one already? All those backpacks and hats they sell…

Everyone got hyped for HoT, then Anet dropped the ball again. They didn’t keep players interested after the HoT announcement. How did they not see this coming? They should have had another major update following that announcement to keep people interested until HoT. It boggles my mind they didn’t do this.

Adry.7512:

Hey, lets give it another shot, they have come closer and closer to perfecting their craft.

i see a bright future and no i am not a fanboy, never been. Either way, i think this game will become better than most of us expect it to become.

I see the opposite. The future looks bleak, especially with newer games coming out, and summer vacation for both kids and adults. The game since launch has strayed far from it’s original manifesto.

We can’t play our way anymore, especially with the new trait system, which severely limits new characters, and forces them to buy traits, or do tasks they don’t want to do.

I’m not even going to get into the “Beserker end-game” discussion either, which isn’t the fault of the playerbase, but Anet’s inaction on fixing it. So much for diversity of roles.

The SPvP revamp was made worse and more confusing. Now players start with their equipped weapons, or with ones in their inventory, with no guidance telling them they can also use vendor weapons (the same as original system but worse). Also, PvE loot in SPvP, to incentivize pve players, is always bad.

Then there’s the imbalance of Gem-Store items vs. In-game items. Just about all new content is pushed, and promoted, through the Gem-Store. The only new gear, or weapons, that have been released, is through Living Story achievements, and they aren’t even full armor sets. (i’m talking about acquiring them in-game, not gem-store-only items) I know they need to make money through the Gem-Store, but they need to do it less aggressive and be more subtle, otherwise the perception of greed, is what people see. Then there’s the RNG-lottery system, enough said.

I hate to say it, but the Living Story ruined GW2. The game had so much potential to expand on new professions, new zones, new races, new skills, etc. Instead, the resources were spent on experimentation.

My post sounds negative, but that’s because it gets frustrating seeing a great game being ruined as time goes on. There’s still hope with Season 2 though, which looks very promising. I just couldn’t agree more with the OP, that’s all.

8+ months of waiting for substantial updates to WvW.
-Golem upgrades
-300g for colors
-siege disabler

That’s it! That is just pathetic. I’m sorry, but it is.

WvW is pretty much dead now. If you want any pvp action, it’s in EotM or SPvP now, and EotM is basically a pve zone. K-train champ runs is all you’ll find there.

It’s too bad they removed them from world drops. I always liked getting surprised when i found one.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

This community can never be pleased.

To be fair, GW2 is touted as a casual game, but when it comes to selling their games, they aren’t so “casual” about it, especially when they enforce a deadline for the free perks. Why can’t company businessmen be pleased too? It goes both ways, right?

Avit.3165:

All those people, qqing here are pvers and achievement hunters.
They dont give s…t about wvw.

Even for WvW’ers, these achievements are weak.

Anyone care to explain why asians would get offended? GW1 did an amazing job with Factions, and Nightfall, which included asian and african cutlure. Most MMOs do a terrible job at representing different cultures, but GW1 was an exception.

No tears would be shed for Trahearne if he dies. The most uninspiring leader ever.
Basically Trahearne in a nutshell: “Oh, but i don’t want to go, but if i must, i’ll go.”

Gating content behind a multi-step process doesn’t work too well, especially with RNG on the last step. There isn’t any skill or accomplishment in acquiring those. It’s all based on luck, which is fine in itself, but when luck is needed for your major content (the weapons) in an episode like this, it just leaves a bad impression on the player.

arjeidi.2690:

hype sells, content doesn’t. Their marketing division is way better than their developing one.

Servers are still busy with people. That means content does sell, or else they would be merging or closed down.

This happened last episode too. Do they even have loot databases?

I wouldn’t expect anything for GW2 for the future. Their policy states they cannot reveal info about it. I mean, how ridiculous is that? They should be announcing upcoming content, with something to look forward to. 1-2 weeks in advance doesn’t cut it, because it’s mostly for living story. Is there anything else to look forward towards? Currently, no.

Those Norn shapeshifting skills should just be tonics. They are pretty much useless as elite skills.

Sturmruger.3920:

No its not. I have a new character thats level 33 now. Only played it for about 3 evenings and used no tomes or boosters. If leveling were any easier it would be pathetic.

He’s not talking about leveling. He’s talking about acquiring traits. It’s amazing how many people don’t understand this.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Bobby.3721:

After all this time has passed, and looking back on the updates, tweaks, buffs, nerfs, and reworking of existing systems from day one of this game being released. I will never understand why they felt the need to rework traits in the game. What was so wrong about it? What was so difficult about buying three different books that unlocked all your traits in different tiers? Why fix something that isn’t broken, or hard to understand? I just don’t know.

Both anet and the playerbase wanted a scavenger hunt system tied to progression, kind of like GW1’s elite skill capturing, so anet added that into their trait system. The idea was good, but it was not well executed, and the game got worse for it. Now, they are changing traits to make them simpler to get again (in fact, simpler than the first system), while also making them easier to understand and that would make sense with the new specialization system.

Players expected new elite skills to be earned, but Anet decided to lock all the traits. One of the worst decisions of this game.

A better solution, would be to leave the capital city hubs as they were, and use the other zones for megaservers. They could be like WvW zones, where only server populations are allowed.

There’s still not enough details to consider buying it. There isn’t even a release date, or specifics about the new masteries or specs. Everything was so vague at Pax South, but there’s still time, and they’ll be releasing new info in the coming months.

Aicus.3174:

World boss like Claw of Jormag, Shatterer, golem near Old Sledge Site, Shadow Behemoth and others need some overhaul in their behaviour, attacks and location design I order to make people actually play the events instead of just stand in 1 location, spam auto attack, afk and collect loot.

This is especially obvious in events like Claw of Jormag, Shatterer and the golem near Old Sledge Site where people will just stand in a corner, set auto attack then just wait to collect loots.

For the case of Claw and Shatterer, the solution could simply be making the boss attacks hitting all the area with high player concentration and spawning groups of champs and elites on them instead of just the cannon area.

For the golem world boss, just make sure that there is no safe spot where plsyers can afk ans still be in attacking range, this includes the steps leading up to the platform.

As for Shadow Behemoth, make the portals tougher so that it tskes more than 5 people to destroy. Also the portals should spawn in the area180 degrees in front of the boss instead of going all the way to the back of the boss. The portal too should spawn more mobs more often faster.

Another world boss I think need some tweaking is the great jungle wurm. The boss used to be fun and require some effort where people actually need to stop the husk from reaching the boss, now the boss is dead before the first husk even has a chance to get near.

And then when you make them too hard, they become abandoned until a super-guild comes in and prevents players from joining the map, like Teq and Wurm.

Anet really needs to find a balance between the two extremes.

I don’t like it. It feels forced. There aren’t any other couples in the game, which makes it really odd. The only other couple i can think of is Jenna and Logan, but they aren’t really a couple.

Does a game really need to push the lesbian & gay idea of acceptance? I don’t think so. It feels like a forced agenda of acceptance, that hollywood and special interest groups use. Let’s be real here. A-net is only doing this because they feel pressured by political correctness, and they don’t want to feel intolerant. It’s not because they want to, but they have to, in fear of being labeled homophobic.

And why does it have to be women? Especially when they are both “hot”. Is it to cater to young boys? Of course it is. Will we see two males getting it on next? Or how about an asuran female and a male norn? Gotta include that inter-racial love too now. Should i even start at Charr and Humans, which is a step closer to bestiality? Will there ever be boundaries A-net will stop at?

All of this is just ridiculous, and i would rather not have it in GW2, or any other video game.

Some of you are being rude. Just because you can do it with ease, doesn’t mean everyone else can. Some players are also new to the game, due to GW2 being on sale a couple months back. They might have their traits locked behind the new trait system too, or bad gear. Some players are probably coming back to the game from a long break. Others might have ailments or disabilities. There are many reasons, but people shouldn’t dismiss other people’s complaints with “L2P”. That’s just being condescending.

Story content shouldn’t be a testbed for difficult encounters either. It should ease the players for more difficult content that happens afterwards, such as the achievements.

Supposedly someone got in Dry Top around 30 min ago. He even linked it in chat. He said it was from an event chest.

I just wish the item dropped all over tyria instead of DT and SW.

Not surprising. Another failed experiment by Anet, which will join the graveyard of all the rest such as EotM and Living World. All that time and money wasted by developing them. I feel bad for the devs who created them.

I wasn’t a big fan of the dungeons (due to various bugs, non-trinity, etc), but many people were, and a whole community based on them will be forced to do fractals and raids now, or they will just quit.

GW2 is all about grind though. I don’t see this changing at all.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-world-2013-the-year-in-review/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/announcing-the-april-2014-feature-pack/

These are GW2’s releases, and “roadmaps”. I’ll leave it up to everyone else to determine if this is worth 2 years of content for them.

That is just sad. I can already see some people defending this, which is even sadder.

I like what i’ve read so far, but i’ll have to try it when it goes live to see if it’s good enough.

Charging gems for story content is a terrible idea though. That’s akin to a monthly subscription, but at least in a subscription mmo, you get all the content, instead of having it in piecemeal chunks. Just terrible.

I don’t know why GW2 is trying to use new lore, when they have lore from GW1.

Bring back the White Mantle.
Bring back the Shining Blade.
Bring back the lore of the Deldrimor & Stone Summit dwarves.
Bring back the lore of Cantha, Factions, Prophecies.
Let us connect to GW1 lore again.

Utilize this rich history: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lore

Scarlet just came out of nowhere, and people don’t connect with her. She’s not taken seriously, because she’s always cackling and laughing, and playing games. It’s just silly.

Give us a real threat, instead of dragons, because dragons are boring. Every fantasy setting has them.

Give us deep storylines, like the way Blizzard did with the Lich King. It was WoW at it’s best, during Wotlk expansion. He was taken seriously. Just watch the wotlk trailer. He wasn’t laughing like a looney toon.

As it is now, GW2 feels like a cartoon for 10 year olds. It’s not mature or serious enough.

Kal Spiro.9745:

I just have it bound to my thumb button on my mouse, it’s easy. I feel like this is more of an l2p problem than an ANet problem.

Huh? It has nothing to do with learning to play. It’s an inconvenience. It has nothing to do with challenge. It’s about as useful as holding ctrl down to see players/npcs names.

I understand why they do it though, because they actually want people to search for items such as the coins in dry top or silverwastes, but they could actually code those to be ignored by the feature.

SAB should just be turned into an Activity in Metrica Province. Have it scale so people can solo it if they want.

This reminds me all too much of the famous NGE (New Game Enhancements) for Star Wars Galaxies. Now, the NPE (New Player Experience) for GW2 is just as bad.

This is just pathetic. It’s taking them this long to fix it? It just shows where their priorities truly are, and that’s the gem store.

Any news on multiple (or dual) trait builds? I really miss this from GW1. The ability to switch between different builds was amazing and efficient. As it is now, we need to re-trait everytime we reset our builds.

The solo instances of Braham and Rox were amazing. This one is just awful, with frustrating mechanics.
Knockdown after knockdown, etc.
Gimmicky quest item needed instead of using our own weapon skills.
Bleh.