Guild Wars 2

I think it isn’t that people are misunderstanding the game. It’s that the game isn’t as great or as unique as some people think it is. Conceptually, it isn’t that different from Rift except that there is a chain event tied to GW2’s DE; and even then, it’s not all DE, only some. Many of them are one off events and even if they aren’t the game does very poorly at linking these things together.

The issue is that Anet dislikes questing and quest structure. In fact, even their own DE descriptors are so brief, you end up not really caring or knowing what’s happeining.

Look at WarHammers Public Quests (which is the precursor of DE btw) and you see that Mythic was able to weave structure and story into the DE; you could jump in at any time and figure out what was going on – not so for GW2. It’s all unlinked and inconsequential.

The decision to do away with trational questing and story text is lazy at best and catastrophic at worst – to their own DE chains. Even Warhammer was able to weave questing into their event structures – heck, even Rift’s “dynamic events” had a little more cohension than GW2’s DE – and they still managed questing and story structure as well.

Describing the Dynamic Events as a huge leap forward is ignorant at best. It’s a feature that by relying completely on it as the “structure” of the game, ended up feeling and looking lazy. It doesn’t at all let you know what’s going on in the zone or even at the event itself. Even if you randomly talk to NPC, you still won’t know.

At the moment, Anet has a very nice land mass (zone designs) that are begging to be filled out properly. It’s unfinished at this point; and until they go back to every event to try and tie these together more coherently, it will remain unfinished.

Also, OP, see Rift. See Warhammer Online. -I would say, Warhammer Online’s public quests were superior to Dynamic events in execution. They acted much more like mini raids than DE and had interesting loot – also, their contribution system, while not perfect by any means, was more fleshed out and requried more participation than just “tag a mob” earn bronze, or tag 2 mobs earn silver, or tag 3 mobs, earn gold. You do that in WH and you’d earn nothing.

Shadey.2180:

Ingmar.7530:

There were no equivalent sets in the first game. Equivalent sets in the first game would have had the price of 15k armor but the stats of level 18 gear.

There was no transmutation the original guildwars so any expensive gear bought would have to be at the max level.

People complaining about price should all be shot

Seriously now guys, if you think its too overpriced then the value you put on the look might me too low, not everyone has your view. People buy it because they want the look, even if they themselves might think its overpriced.

IF ITS TOO EXPENSIVE DONT BUY IT

The real problem here is that Gold has a real exchange rate with RL dollars; making the T3 costs 120G look ridiculous, particularly for a new game. It costs $450-$500 real money in exchange. It’s value isn’t at all related to what is offered. That changes the meaning completely once real money enters into it. Every gold you earn is actually you earning real currency; no longer just virtual. It’s value is real.

When you put that into context, it’s highly overpriced for what it is and what is offered. I’d rather pay $15 a month and pay for T3 with karma. It’s value, even as -especially as- a cosmetic item, is very poor.

If they had made t3 cultural a karma bought set at double the cost of the karma vendor exotics, you wouldn’t see people complaining – because karma has no dollar value hence people aren’t going to feel like a used car salesman just bent them over a hood and work them hard from behind.

Some people like me will still get it. I’m 2 pieces from complete but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good value. It’s exceptionally poor value. I have no problem with $200 haircuts or $3000 camera or $100 t-shirts; but I have real problems with $500 virtual goods. It’s kitten poor value -again- and is nothing like buying Prada in real life.

If they are going to charge $500 real life dollars for a virtual good, it had better be designed by Christian Dior or officially branded by a real life equivilent.

I’m surprised noone has jumped on you about learning to play yet.

GW2 is melee unfriendly. You can melee and it’s powerful but it’s not something you do generally. The game was design as kite and kill.

You can do it but at a large disadvantage relative to range. Even on a guardian, the wimpy sceptre is a more effective playstyle than going into melee; particularly vs bosses/champs.

the effects are nice looking but completely impractical. I looked many times for ways to just turn it off completely but they don’t have that option.

In fights involving more than 3 players, you don’t even see the mob unless it’s a giant; and then, all you see is his shin even pulling camera back.

It’s just impractical for the type of game play they designed. just give option for us to disable player effects. Not reduce, disable. I’m fine with just circles on the ground.

you do know that the smart gold sellers don’t actually send gold from their accounts right? They use other people’s accounts or accounts that are otherwise legit.

What is the purpose of asking this again. In the other thread about banning buyers, noone has addressed the points I made about proper identification of what is and what isn’t a legit/illegal transaction.

1. most people making a ton of gold from the TP were the early birds. It’s always advantageous to start working the trade house early in the game’s life. it’s where you get rich quickly; but that time has passed. By in large, you won’t be making much of anythin gby playing the TP.

I’ve bought low and sold high and for all that, you only really end up with a bunch of silver profit – and it can take a while. Also, to make it worth doing, you need to be investing more gold than you have to make any noticable returns. It’s not really the best way to earn money. you can use it to supplement your income however.

2. Farm Orr events. Find where the zerge is. They usually camped a few event locations. This is the BEST way to make money. You can make anywhere from 70s to 1G per hour if you don’t go afk a lot. In between events, just kill mobs or take a bio break.

3. Sell everything. Don’t keep it. Don’t use it. Just sell it. That includes any and all crafting material. Yellow drops, sell on TP for lowest list price It usually sells within a day or less. Sell all green and blue drops to the vendor.

4. Don’t be afraid to vendor crafting material if the TP can’t give you any profit on it. A lot of crafting mats are pretty worthless; just treat it as vendor trash.

5. Don’t use the Mystic Forge. It’s a massive gold sink. You may think putting 4 yellows in there is cheap but look at how much the yellows sell for. At current prices, yellows range from 15s-25s. 1 Mystic Forge trip is essentially throwing away ~1G.

Granted, I have gotten yellow combines and 2 exotics for it but the amount of money I put into it is far more than the actual profit. I have a lvl 80 exotic dagger selling for 3G on TP for the last week. It hasn’t moved.

only use the Forge on bound items you no longer want/need. Never for items you can sell on TP.

If you play for 10 hr/s per day following those rules, you should be able to realistically pull in 7G to 10G per da. That includes all yellow drops selling on TP and vendoring everything else.

It’s alright to take an 30 min to 1 hour break in between to reset the diminishing returns.

Finally, there are no quick ways to make money. It’s all farming.

even with the small chance of recovering a perm banker/trade post item, it’s simply not worth it to actually pay real money for these keys. There’s too much worthless junk in there.

Please look at DCU boxes. Those things actually have high rates of giving you really good loot and well worth the real money you put into it. I’ve gotten unique items with unique skins, equivilent of an exotic armor x2, cloaks, etc… I’ve opened maybe 20 boxes there. GW2’s chests? atm, still just a very bad value proposition. I’ve opened ~30 chests and have gotten useless items to transform me into an ostrich (I have so many I just destroyed them all), supposedly a stack of the highest quality harvest tool that actually returns “ruined ore etc”.

These need to have a chance to drop cultural T1-T3 pieces that are account bound (10%).

A chance to drop a BOE random exotic weapon (7%)
A chance to drop a BOE random exotic armor piece (7%)
A chance to drop bound on account karma/dungeon piece for your class (7%)

wookie slayer.4259:

Orr with my guardian was easy as pie. I rarely die and hunt ori ore solo all over the zone. Do people really find Orr hard?

not hard; supremely annoying. Some days, I feel like Orr is perfectly fine, then the mobs decide to play ping pong with my CC prone carcass, one knocks me back into range of another mob aggro so he decides to pull me which puts me in range of another. Then that 3rd one knocks me down/roots me, where the first mob decides he can play the pull game as well so there goes my toon flying back where he came from before something pulls me to yet another area.

I ended up dying because I couldn’t even cast my heals before I got another CC. that happened to me last night and all I did was spend 10 seconds watching my toon completely out of my own control.

Not hard, annoying.

Polluxo.4967:

Gatts.4865:

have you been to orr yet? if you havent you ll be complaining of the massive respawn rate everything comes back

The only thing increasing spawn rates does is make pure DPS builds mandatory, and is easily countered with a group of more people. I think he’s referring to a more fundamental sense that NPCs are uninspired, lacking depth which could offer to make them more challenging.

It’s unfortunate that your statement rings so true. I’ve never been a dps player and would rather have the option to spec myself out to survive a mass attack wave like that even if it takes me 15 minutes; but in GW2, that’s just not possible. It’s all abotu DPS, DPS and AOE DPS.

3 of the most boring/repetitive zones in the game. Particularly harsh since many spent maybe 30 levels across 3 maps fighting undead only to end up with 3 more undead zones.

It’s great the first time through but after you get a run of the place, after a week, you’ll be back here singing a different tune.

many of the lower zones and the level 70-80 norn zone is definitely more fun over extended periods. For one, you can actually complete your daily variety kill task – something nigh on difficult/impossible in Orr. You can get 1/2 of the variety kill tsk done in Orr though. They just look remarkittenhe same as every other mob there.

now that you mention it. I do see the similarities and wouldn’t be too surprised if it was. Many fantasy world settings are inspired by real life locations (the more exotic the better) and Singapore is just as ‘exotic’ a location as any. Especially pre-Lee Kuan yew Singapore.

All you guys screaming omg don’t rush it are slow levelers point blank if you were in a guild from day 1 that took the game serious you are lvl 80 in 3 weeks max

If you’re following the progress of the story and just go with the flow, you can hit 80 quite casually in 3 weeks. No need to push very hard or take it seriously.

I got to 80 in 3.5 weeks with 55% map completion; which is about how long it takes in modern games to hit cap level. DCU, you’d hit it in 1.5 weeks no problem.

It isn’t the players rushing; it was designed with a goal of “it should take someone roughly 3 weeks to level to 80”. The ones rushing are doing it in 1 week – 2 weeks.

The guardian is still very strong though the change is massively annoying.

What I have found out since the patch is, now, I can chain kill faster with my hammer than with the greatsword because the cooldowns are lower. Maybe that was their intent in a very roundabout way.

lotusedge.6743:

The humilation would prevent others from buying gold. Maybe it is a little harsh for the icon to always be on the name if you are guilty of buying gold. If you give the gold back or arenanet takes it they can take the icon off your name. Then you would not do it in the future.

If it was a legitimate gold transaction from guild member to guild member or friend to friend it would be easy for arenanet to find out and take the icon off, maybe the icon goes away while the ticket is being processed.

That is you are assuming the system is accurate. It isn’t. I have been banned (albeit reinstated) from nearly every mmorpg I’ve played because either they mistook me for a gold seller and farmer or because some nimrod thought I was one.

My most recent 3 times was in WoW where I got suspended/banned for
1) flagged and identified as gold farmer.
2) Selling Gold.
3) Selling Gold.

In all those instances, I had my account reinstated after I asked them to go check my history. There is no activity there that would warrant this. And in all its irony, after I took a 1 yr break, my account got hacked (even with the authenticator) and THAT hacked account wasn’t banned and was allowed to freely trade and sell gold through my account (not to mention they vendored all my gear which required a full restore from the date I stopped playing-which I’m quite impressed with btw.)

there’s no point in shaming people randomly when the evidence of guilt is shifty at best and wrong at worst. It doesn’t matter if later, they find you innoccent. the way human beings work is, once someone sees you labelled as “insert random illicit offender”, people will always remember them as being that person who did that illegal thing.

It’s a witch hunt and about as accurate as a witch hunt. Did a black cat just run past that house? there’s a witch inside. burn it down!

So even after my lengthy reply abotu how it can’t work to ban buyers, people are still saying it’s the best option.

well lotro bans buyers
Yes they do. They also aren’t catching all of them. I know because I know a lot of people who have bought gold and they are still around despite the warning on the launcher. In fact, I would say they haven’t even caught most of them.

The ones they’ve caught are the guys bragging about it or letting it slip in chat or dealing with sellers who couldn’t care less about covering their tracks properly.

Not all gold sellers are created equal. Some are more shady and unscrupulous than others. There are those who treat it as a real business venture and focus on customer retention. All you need to do is go talk to them in game. If they like you, they tell you stuff about how they get around getting detected and how they keep their buyers protected. I have listed some of the ways previously.

Here is one simple way (again).

launder the gold. Split it among various accounts. Give it to the buyer at different times in smaller amounts. always trade something of value during the transaction. <- this is how they operate in LOTRO. The reason you don’t see more gold sellers in lotro is because the value of gold in the game simply isn’t there. You do very few things with gold and the player naturally earns enough from regular play for it not to be an issue. It’s just not profitable for them; though there are still sellers catering to a smaller niche there.

As long as the cash money transaction happens outside the game for the gold purchase, there’s very little you can do to the buyer.

yeap i agree. The bosses are either laughably easy or they are laughably ridiculously badly designed to gib people. The middle ground is actually more rare from my experience.

I think it’s fair to say most people just want challenging bosses, not bosses and champions designed to cheapshot you as a mechanic or a boss that doesn’t have a mechanic so they put in cheapshot abilities on it; or nukes that aren’t telegraphed before they happen.

I would have preferred the T3 sets to be exotic. That way it looks and feels like it is worth your time. I mean, all exotics are equal in stat distribution anyway.

At the moment, at current prices, there isn’t any reason not to make them exotic. Everyone would have earned 2 sets of karma exotics by the time they can get the full t3; making it the most difficult/long set that you can get.

If people prefer the stat distribution of the T3 exotics, they can use that; otherwise they can transmute it to the crafted or the Karma exotics. And frankly, the karma armor skins look nicer than the T3 anyway…..

Galen Grey.4709:

AlexanderFaust.4518:

Sorry, but white knights aren’t helpful to game design.

I’ve seen countless threads in the suggestions area.. many of which are very well thought out and would improve GW2 greatly! ~

However, no one seems to care =/

They’re far more interested in telling other people they they’re playing GW2 “wrong” and/or expecting too much from it.

lol, imagine IF the Knights put half as much effort into making legit suggestions to improving GW2 as they do trolling the forums…

But then again, IF they did that.. they would just be trolled by other “fans/knights” or be completely ignored anyways..

#the vicious cycle ~

QFT

Did you ever stop to consider that perhaps what you’re calling white knights are actually people who legitimately love the current design? Doesnt it make sense / should be that if they disagree with a suggest they voice their opinion?

Things suggestions are subjective! Some love a particular suggestion others think if that suggestion gets implemented it would destroy the game! And this is universal go in the forum of any game you want and you will see this !

You seem to like the game as is, which is just fine. However, some of us do like the game but realise there are issues and problems with it that can be resolved. games are far from perfect. GW2 is just such a game.

And as an MMORPG, it’s accepted that it will undergo many more changes. Even the game you like now will change over time. How those changes happen and in what direction they happen can be influenced by the community.

I will admit that a lot of mmorpg communities ask for junk but by in large, most of the complaints about GW2 are constructive and valid and come with some good suggestions.

Camera problems have been labelled as whining in these forums; yet it is a real issue – as highlighted recently in the patch notes. It’s not even working properly for them

Relaxing of the DR, without doing away with it completely was because of people like us making suggestions and “whining” about it and “playing it wrong”.

Also you suggested in a reply above that a good way to mitigate visiting lower areas is “not to die” which is ludicrous. It’s an unreasonable and elitist statement in a game you “white knights” clearly declare as being non-elitist. PPL die in an MMORPG. that’s how it works. We will die. We will get gibbed trying to res a lowbie. We will die because of lag. We will die because a mob knocks us off a cliff or you bounce off a cliff wall during a knockback. There’s plenty of ways to die not of your own accord and i have not even listed them all.

Try the bandit champion in the human area (the cave). You can do everything right and he can easily 2 shot you with his rifle even with exotics on.

I’m all for a difficult game but making us pay level 80 costs in a scaled down lowbie zone seems like an oversight, not by design, and certainly it doesn’t make the game difficult or challenging by any means whatsoever. That is what is called a penalty. That isn’t the way to get people to play zone as “level 80 content”.

For one, try playing like a lowbie with your lowbie friends. I don’t know abou tyou but at lower levels, it was easy to port around the map to help fight champion pops and respond to calls for help. Try doing that with your 80 and come back and tell me you won’t be broke or flat by the end of the day. Of course, with the way you’re looking at it, you’d likely argue that level 80’s should run everywhere at lower levels or maybe, we aren’t meant to be playing with lowbie – that’s the wrong way to play the game!

No, GW2 is like any other MMORPG. It has its problems and there are clear areas they need to optimise, some that need fixing and some that require long term rethink… just like all other mmorpg.

Compared to other game forums, GW2 forums are actually generally helpful and constructive. The biggest problem with this forum are the white knights who will try and derail constructive posts.

Wingchild.9830:

Gosh, yes. The hordes of nude and semi-nude ranger-bots infesting the human starting areas on presumably every server weren’t getting sufficient loot drops.

Glad we made them more profitable.

They were profitable with or without the DR. All the DR did was affect legitimate players.

For a botter, it’s very easy to completely circumvent the DR completely. This changes nothing for them and helps us, the players, quite a bit; which makes their offering much less enticing.

Thanks john. Looking forward to further fixes here. It’s a real annoyance atm.

A good mouse makes all the difference,with a razer naga setting it to 2000dpi …

I have a RAT 9 as well as a basic mouse for when I’m not at home. Both mice, despite difference in dpi and quality, have the annoying habit of dropping target while strafing. Which is to say, it isn’t the mice at all that is the issue.

For some users, it won’t matter but for others who mouse look a lot and quickly, it’s annoying. It should not drop target unless I left click on the ground or another target. Right now, it drops target if i right click and hold to pan camera.

Zionka.6897:

Again. I wish people could understand this IS action.. Moreso than having 50 skills. Pressing a ton of buttons does not a fight make. Having 50 skills is nothing more than thinking about what buttons to push next.. That is NOT action fighting. GW2 is redefining that misconception.

edit to add and as far as individualism goes, I have played games with tons of hotbar skills, and each class pretty much was a carbon copy of same class across the board. Individualism is defined by methods and skill IMO. And doing it with flair It’s not what you got, it’s how you use it!

I’m not sure what you mean by other games had carbon copy of classes.

Even in Warhammer where they had mirror classes of both realms, they were really quite different. The abilities were different and had different effects so, for example, a Marauder and White Lion actually played very, very differently. A White Lion plays the “strike hard, fast and get out!” while the Marauder played more similarly to a DPS tank.

A Sword Master and a Black Orc were, beyond physical appearance and same mechanic, very different classes and the playstyle was different.

An Ironbreaker and Blackguard? Nothing alike despite the same class mechanic. They also played differently.

GW2 is a lot more homogenous in that respect. Different skills for classes yes, but effectively, apart from the Thief, the playstyle of the every other class is remarkably similar, as is the role.

I do give them this; the thief is very well designed conceptually. It is quite unique among the classes.

I just prefer the trinity model better if we’re all being honest. It has its problems but core to the success of it was that everyone had a role and they had to be good/excel at it. A simple concept but very difficult to master. Central to the trinity was that every person has a function; we were all useful in our own way, which is how we all want to feel in life. And basically, it allowed different personalities to excel in different functions.

The removal of the trinity really took that away. Now, no one has a purpose except damage and survival. The mobs/encounters generally follow this pattern as well. It’s simply too basic by itself. People who aren’t particularly good at providing damage will struggle or find it boring and people who want to feel valuable as support will find it limiting and too unfocussed; thus boring.

However, if you’re a “huntard” or “rouge” or a “lolwarior” mentality from WoW, you’ll love it because it boils down to “Alright, gang that mob with everything you got! lawl look at my damage!”

The synergy between players, and their roles was important and it helped to define encounters to test group unity rather than individual performance.

It’s so easy to identify gold buyers in this thread.

Is this where you tell us how you know if someone is a witch? Or maybe we’re terrorists if we think the proposed is 100% never going to work?

Raging Bull.5048:

ounkeo.9138:

4) Shared nodes for everyone.

I’m fine with yoru other points but not this. Having limited resources is fine. That is already controlled by the long respawn timers and 24 hour timers.

We really don’t need to have yet 1 more limiting factor built on top of it.

That level of scarcity is just as artificial as GW2 implementation but I do feel GW2 does a better job here of making it feel that even though resources are limited, they aren’t so limited that you can’t scoop up some mineral just because someone in the area just did so a second earlier.

Honestly I am comparing everything with WoW. It is by no means a perfect game, but in my opinion it does certain things best. Crafting/gathering materials being one of them. It carries more weight collecting materials in WoW than it does in GW2. It just doesn’t feel satisfactory. I really can’t offer any comprehensive explanation of why that is, it just is.

certainly, I think crafting in WoW had a bit more value but as I recall from Vanilla, I had to fight with a lot of gold farmers for the nodes. On Windrunner, they were camped 24/7. It got better after the expacs but still, I’m not a fan of a system where it is easy to grief other players.

the TP has this problem that looks like a delay in action. Something similar happened to me except in the opposite direction.

I bought an item and it told me there was a error. I tried other items and it kept giving me errors so I couldn’t buy any items. a day later my coin stash was drained and all the error purchases showed up in my TP panel for pick-up… which is just… annoying since I only needed 1 item except I got a dozen. I lost a lot of money there.

I was trying to buy a sword. I ended up with a dozen swords that I ended up selling back at a loss because prices dropped.

Welcome to the largest MMO economy ever created.

Serious question, but how do they qualify this as the largest economy in mmo? Is it because it’s not server restricted?

4) Shared nodes for everyone.

I’m fine with yoru other points but not this. Having limited resources is fine. That is already controlled by the long respawn timers and 24 hour timers.

We really don’t need to have yet 1 more limiting factor built on top of it.

That level of scarcity is just as artificial as GW2 implementation but I do feel GW2 does a better job here of making it feel that even though resources are limited, they aren’t so limited that you can’t scoop up some mineral just because someone in the area just did so a second earlier.

HawkMeister.4758:

You get them by DESTROYING THEIR PROFIT, neither with a “War on Gold Sellers&Buyers” nor outright banning their stolen accounts. Which will slow them down, no doubt.
But they will always come back and learn to be sneakier if the profits are there.

This is the solution and always has been to combat this type of problem.

the problems MMORPG’s face are similar to the music and movie industry.
1. pirates providing copyrighted content
2. users downloading the content

The industry solution:
First, go after the pirates. When that didn’t work or had little effect; go after the downloaders. Thousands and thousands of regular users, innocent and guilty, old and young, people with internet connection and those who didn’t even have a computer. All targets and all threatened and/or taken to court.

Piracy is still rife.

The proper solution:
Is exactly what Apple did with iTunes. Provide a competitive alternative. Cost wise, the price is reasonable. They made content available and easy to get. the problem of piracy cannot be absolutely eliminated, but it can be managed and controlled and mitigated.

Likewise, mmorpg developers can absolutely mitigate the problem by offering the better solution. If gold is highly desirable by the community, they should provide different ways to get it.

- For people who want to work for it or have a lot of free time, let them farm/play the game as per normal.

- For people whose time is limited and they find the earning of gold and wealth to be too time consuming.

The first group are valuable, but the second group is where MMO’s are losing from from. They are just missing that opportunity. Balancing it should not be that difficult as LOTRO seems to manage that rather well. Gold is important but not important enough to really be worth buying. It’s more worth it to spend money in the shop. It really is. And the shop has minor influence on the overal in-game economy.

They have to get in there and compete. Go through Anet and you won’t be scammed. While it won’t ever match gold sellers, the prices are affordable/reasonable and there’s guarantee against scamming and it’s convenient. The formula really is remarkably simple. Executing on it; should be tricky – but not impossible.

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

How about if I want to give my wife’s character 30 G so she can up her crafting? I don’t like to craft, she does. I like to farm, she doesn’t. I give her money and she happily crafts stuff for me to use/wear. I’ve done it in every mmo I’ve played with her.

Like I said, “practical”. developers can do a lot of things but very few of them are functional or practical.

There are no easy, simple solutions to this. Even just limiting gold trade via guild bank is laughably easy to bypass – legally mind you.

I have example to give.

Back in one of the other games, I was farming coin for my mount and another character was there in the same area. After a day of farming, he came over to me and started talking in Mandarin. I told him I only speak English so he typed in broken english. We had a chat for about 20-30 minutes and asked me if I got any good drops and we traded info on what we got (I got nothing but junk). Typical chit chat in an MMORPG.

What I got from the conversation was, the guy was really lonely and was just happy to have someone to talk to even if for a little while. He showed me an epic item that dropped off one of the mobs for him and to cut it short, at the end of the convo before I left and he went back to farm for more loot, he traded the epic item to me for free.

I thought he was a gold farmer. He thought I was a gold farmer. the reality was, I wasn’t, but he was. Or maybe he wasn’t. I can’t really say for certain because I aped his exact same pattern over the course of several weeks. What i do know is that, under your proposed system, I would be banned for “buying” from a gold seller because he gave me an epic item. When all it was was a lonely player grateful for some company showing his gratitude in the only way he knew how.

I’ve had a lot of ppl give me free stuff… playing a female character has its benefits.

Your proposal to “ban buyers” is an attack on the very meaning of “massive multiplayer online role playing game.” It would destroy human interaction in game completely.

Anything Diminishing Rewards Related
Now it has really just become mindless complaining, I don’t like DR either but I am not 6 years old so I can wait while they fix a video game. Devs have been so paitent with us that they still respond to DR threads after doing so 100s of times already. It will get fixed.

I agree with most of what you have said except that bit. There’s no point blindly defending the indefensible. Today was the first time in weeks someone officially spoke to us about the DR issue. Until this point, NOONE knew if this was a bug, working as intended or working but wasn’t tweaked correctly. All we knew was there was DR; it was to curb gold farmers/bots and that legit play was getting affected.

that was all we knew and it needed weeks of complaints before someone actually wrote to clear up the issue. I would hazzard a guess that the majority of the complaints on this issue was only due to the fact that we were nearly completely dark on its intent and intended function.

saying “wait for them to fix it” implies you knew it was a bug, which you didn’t. Noone did. According to the dev, it’s working but the threshhold needs to be adjusted to be less severe. now we know and now we should be patient.

there is always a huge risk when you do character to character trades. If you have played MMORPG’s long enough (especially the early days), you learn quickly not to do it if at all possible and there are other alternatives.

the trading post is a viable place to buy your items. You took the risk, probably because he offered a much lower price, and the risk didn’t pay off. Anet isn’t the police in this sense. they clearly have the TP just so these things are minimised.

their task is more broad than whether you got scammed or not on a 1 to 1 trade. That is for you and that individual to settle. Had the other party used a 3rd party program or developed a system to scam, then I can see Anet getting involved. Otherwise, it’s between you and him.

I would say, most games are worth the $60.

What we should be asking is, has GW2 been worth the $60 entry fee so far as an MMORPG?

as an MMORPG, they aren’t really meant to be played as a one-off event but through the course of time to get the real value relative to the genre, so the question can be a bit misleading. The criteria for judgement is / should be different. for one, this genre isn’t a stagnant one and is in a state of perpetual updates/fixes. to get a real feel of the value of an MMORPG and be fair with our judgement, it requires at least a few months of play.

I won’t judge GW2 yet. Am I having fun? Yes, but most mmorpg are fun for the first month or 2. Can it be fun thereafter is where the value of an MMORPG is at.

unfortunately I don’t like doing housework on my off days or when I get home from work. TV is also just full of junk nowadays. When are they red-doing Thundercats? I’d sit to watch that.

I usually surf the Trade Post after earning 3000+ karma; just checking out prices. Sometimes I will buy something. I’m still waiting to buy a nice exotic sword and mace for a good price.

Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.
I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.
Jon

Jon,

I have been very active opponent of the DR system since I’ve hit DR for the last couple weeks. My post history is full of it.

This was all I wanted to hear. Just a confirmation of if it’s fully intentional or a bug or whatnot. I’m reasonable and fully willing to play through this as you guys look into it and work through what may or may not be working in the system.

Thanks you for the response and clarification. I’m sure for some, it won’t be enough but for myself, I feel a lot more settled either way just by knowing Anet’s stance on it.

…getting 10-12k karma per hour before DR…

I’m not even doing that much and never have that’s why people’s accusations that people hitting DR are cheesing events kitten me off. I’ve posted my own screenshots clearly showing I earn about 3500 karma per hour and DR hits.

My screens again: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10429631/timerbline%20Falls%20screenshots.zip

Here’s the real problem

Anet has said nothing about this decision or the issues or any issues related to diminishing returns (except dungeons). It’s complete silence when it’s obvious something very wrong is happening with regular play!

No, “working as intended”, “there’s a bug”, nothing.

Is this intended?

Is it working correctly?

Where’s our threshold?

Are we supposed to figure this out by ourselves?

Why is it so inconsistent? -
Why are some people getting hit by DR after 10,000+ karma p/hr while others (like myself) are getting hit at 3500+ p/hr?

some risen kraits also have pulls.

You can’t really deal with this zone, you just have to survive it or skip it after doing your story. Cursed Shore is better but not by much. the inbetween zones is just as bad as ruins.

though in Cursed shore, even as a guardian, you tend to get bounced around a lot depending what mobs are on you. If you’re fighting apes, yeah, get 3 of them on you and they knock you down and knock your prone corpse around like a soccer ball. You literally bounce around. If you’re unlucky, they can kill you while doing this.

It’s worth it to have 1 CC break available but having more is, in my experience, is a waste. If you need to use more than 1 CC break, then it’s likely the rest aren’t going to help you much. Just have multiple heals ready.

they are cultural armor sets you should be able to get at your capital city. It should be Cultural Tier 3 set.

It costs 120G total, so be prepared for that.

guardians can do burning damage (dot) as well as trait to do 10% more damage to burning targets. There’s also a lot of options to passively burn mobs in a radius as well.

I’m not sure how to compare to the rest but I found a condition specced guardian can do quite consistent damage even with the pitiful sceptre (which I use a lot of). It’s pretty easy to keep a single or group of mobs burning especially if you spec to lower the cooldown of the torch skills. It’s brilliant for a kite build.

Silencer.5028 … DR only hits if you cheese the events…

Silencer, whatever you may think, not all of us go around cheesing events. I could just as easily claim that you’ve actually never done any events that is why you aren’t seeing DR. It’s not the least bit helpful either way.

I’m not sure if you looked at my screenshots in my previous replies, but those do not require cheesing whatsoever. You can complete most of those events start to finish, or jump in somewhere half way. I included the map with circled event areas to show how close and how abundant those events are. Cheesing isn’t required.

In Cursed Shore, you can start at the top of the map

(risen giant champion event) head down to first town on path
(defend town) then you head back up because that defence triggers
(escort event from the first town back down) at the other end of the tunnel
(town defence) then, frequently
(escort NPC filia to look for Gorillas) It’s a 2 event chain that can also lead to, but not related…
(another town defence – or capture – of the outpost)
If it is a outpost capture, it is a 2 event chain that leads to the next town where there are about 3 events (a short escort, a champion slime and the NPC norn wave kill)
Then there is yet one more npc escort/kill event between that town and the final town at foot of arah steps.
Along the way you get another (escort)
once you get to the town, (you retake the town)
After that it spawns 3 events sequentially before leading up to the steps of Arah.

There is no cheese necessary. You may skip a couple events due to it not timing well with the escorts but by in large, it’s possible to do all of that in one go without cheesing it.

There’s more event in this chain than what it took for me to hit DR in my screenshots.

Maybe it’s not happening to you, but I can assure you, it’s happening to other people. The screenshots are there. They designed the map and events that way.

If the choice is between bots or draconian measures, I would take bots any day.

At the end of the day, bots and farmers are always going to do their thing; as long as it doesn’t adversely interfere with our every day activity, I see no problem with it.

There should be a clear policy to deal with these of course, but never to the point where it starts affecting the legit players.

silencer.5028
Never heard off or encountered this, can you elaborate? I’d see it for myself and get back to you if I haven’t done it already. I have yet to encounter the mystical loot drop DR myself, even in Orr.

The town between craven blight and compass plaza. There is an NPC event just outside the outpost (literally). I forget the name of the event but your goal is to fight the waves of mobs with the NPC. Some of them spawn just out of aggro range so you have to drag them to the npc. most of the waves will spawn right on top of you.

It’s a 30 minute event, but I’m pretty sure it could be longer than that. All you do is wipe out waves of mob until the event completes. It’s completely stationery.

I don’t know the spawn time of this event but the last 4 or 5 times I was there, this event was up. It’s a Norn female NPC.

The players on the forums and the subreddit complaining about deminishing returns are a vocal minority that have a problem of entitlement.

I have serious issues with statements like this. People like myself have highlighted exactly how DR affects NORMAL PLAY.

Getting hit by DR penalty for trying to complete an event chain is NOT an issue of entitlement. moving my way to another point of interest or town should not penalise me by diminishing my drop rates because they threw so many mobs at me along the way!

What part of that is self-entitled? Exactly. What. Part!

I do not see an issue with having less rewards for the steps you repeat again.

This isn’t a penalty for failing one step of the event. If you do other events on your way to the start of the event chain, you will hit DR before you even get to the gates even if you are 100% successful.

The penalty for failing to capture the gates is a time sink restarting back at the camp and redoing the 2nd half of the event over again. I’m cool with that as it should be. It’s a pretty long event so failure will set you back a good 30+ minutes.

For a person starting at the camp at the foot of the steps, they can fail 3 or 4 times before diminishing returns hit. They don’t get that penalty. (personally, I’ve never seen the event failed more than once).

OP, see my screenshot set:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10429631/timerbline%20Falls%20screenshots.zip

if you look through based on the time on the map and compare to how much Karma I get, you will see I end up severely diminished. Based on my shots, you will see that there are blocks of time where I am not doing an event; I’m actually gathering and talking with other people and doing some POIs.

If I wanted to do more events I could have, but i didn’t. i included a map of the zone with locations of the events in just the north/mid sections of the map.

In Orr, you can definitely hit diminished returns. If you follow the whole Arah event chain and fail just once, you will hit DR for both loot and karma.

silencer.5028:

DR is not a content cap in any way. If you are hitting it, you are doing it wrong. You can get a full set of exotics in a matte of days doing a daily orichalcum/ancient wood/omnom run, you just need to move and don’t circle the same area. If you are hitting the DR, you are doing it wrong. The marketplace is there for something, sell the stuff you do not need and buy what you need.

I would say without a doubt, if you are not hitting DR, you are playing the game wrong.

Let me give you an example in Orr. There is one event (ONE!) where the whole event is you fighting wave after wave of undead mobs. It’s about a 30 minute event but you will hit diminished loot drop within 10 minutes flat just by playing ONE event.

It’s been stated many, many times that if you play the major event chains as designed, you will hit DR on both loot AND Karma.

Or would you just tell us not to do the events? Is that your solution?

Yiyas.6187:

You can’t run around the world fighting all the time and be that skinny either, you’d build muscle; just compare how athletes are and there you will see. The “fat” phenotypes only look fat because you can only have a tiny head. Every character had to have “head size” scaled up to look decent IMO.

There are different types of fitness. Look at people who do cross training which is more similar to what our toons would be subjected to. They are typically of the lean variety. Muscle yes, but very lean and generally small in size.

Those muscle bound beefcakes you see on TV and walking around are bulking up in the gym. The guys who participate in iron man competitions are typically leans because they are acclimatized for endurance. You only really bulk up doing heavy weights in a controlled setting.

If you read books on Special Forces/Special Operations, you will see that during long operations in the field, they usually come back much leaner, lighter than when they first started. If you look at pictures of special forces in the field for long periods of time, you see most of them are extremely slim and not bulky at all. See SAS, there are a lot of pics of them in the field.

Likewise look at female runners, lot of muscle, very cut, but very lean to the point of skinny.

And kitten stop grinding…

There is an event in Orr where you have to spend about 30 minutes in a stationary kill fest. All you do is stand around the NPC killing wave after wave of mobs until you get credit and the NPC thanks you.

10 minutes into it, DR has already hit. Sorry to burst your bubble but the game was designed to be played exactly the way you don’t want us to play it.

OP, combat in this game centres primarily on range kiting. As a tank player myself, I feel your dissappointment. Tanking in inconsequential. You only need enough toughness/HP to survive from ghetting 1 or 2 shotted.

Then there times where I’d be in mid-roll, and for all practical purposes it looks to me like I dodged correctly.. But for whatever reason the game decides I didn’t and I still get face stomped.

That’s because when developers design combat systems like this, they don’t care whatsoever for the genre they are developing it for. One of the first things they should have asked was, if we have mob specials that have a .5 second reaction time to dodge, how much does latency affect this?

I’m sure they asked that and came to the conclusion it didn’t matter because the whole “downed state” basically reinforces the idea that the intent is to down the player as often as possible. That is why we have the downed mechanic and why everyone can res on the fly. They meant for us to be downed often, which is just the epitome of poor game design. they essentially designed a game to kill the player as many times as possible, even out of the player’s control.

And I’m certainly not the only one who noticed gigantic AOE red circles appearing AFTER you get hit by the AOE for 80% of your life and 2 DOTs that kill you shortly after you dodge out of it. On some encounters, the AOE circle appears at the instant or near instant the ability fires; I’ve said before that I see many players just randomly rolling – I didn’t know why until I got to 80. The red circles may or may not appear and you may or may not see the special ability wind-up.

It’s a completely impractical system even before you consider latency. I’ve pointed out that DCU online has a similar dodge mechanic, except their implementation is superior to GW2 because it takes into account latency and visibility. And it’s not that they can’t do it because in some mobs, it’s done properly. Other mobs, abilities are instant or near instant. It happens so fast that even if you dodge the second you see the animation, you’ll still get hit – latency on top of not having top-end 12 yr old kid reflexes.

Believe it or not, dodging randomly works much better in general than trying to dodge tactically <- that tells me, they clearly didn’t think it through and didn’t build enough redundancy into the system to support the practical application of it.

there’s a good chance the “haters” left; at least some of them. Disliking certain things about a game doesn’t make anyone a hater. Did I even need to point that out?

As for myself, I’d give the launch an 8/10. Very good launch but TP was down for weeks and a number of things I consider to be incomplete.

Today, I’d rate it at a 4/10.

Too many broken events in zone after zone after zone. Only 1 viable 80 zone. Advertised revolution in gaming never happened and it’s still the same old grind by any other name. Diminishing returns severely cripple the game experience for levell 80s and peculiarities like the “content not available” thing as well as the chat block “feature”.

It has and still has potential to be a really good game but right now, the bugs are hampering it as well as Anet itself hampering their own game with too heavy-handed decision making. The bugs can be fixed over time. The mindset, however, is something that simply isn’t likely to change.