Guild Wars 2

insanemaniac.2456:

are you suggesting we should spy and grief servers from their own home where they cant kill us ?

Yup, that’s what he’s saying. See this.

According to the apologists, a game without monthly fee can’t affort the staff necessary to follow up on complaints.

As a result, bans happen occasionally (read: rarely) and in waves but in total, most transgressions go unpunished and griefplay can go on unhindered for a long time.

Personally, I don’t buy the “no sub” excuse. What matters in the end is the bottom line. How much revenue has the game created, not how did it create it. But not even that is the whole story. If you invest too little in customer support, you might lose more revenue than what you saved in expenses. Also, since keeping players is much cheaper than attracting new players, losing them to a few griefers makes no business-sense.

But alas, that’s how ArenaNet has been operating since day one.

Flissy.4093:

It’s hardly an item spiral if, one year on, they still haven’t released a full set of “next tier” items.

I think you mixed up your words: When you said “hardly” you meant “slowly”.

Yes, it’s an item-spiral. It’s just that it’s turning slowly. On the other hand, obtaining the items takes way more effort and times than in MMOs with faster turning geargrinders.

Ignore what Yamiga wrote.

The so-called Mac-version is actually the normal Windows-program bundled with a flavor of the WINE-emulator into an app. Right-click on the app and select to show the contents of the package. What you’ll see is directories for a virtual c-drive and all sorts of Windows-stuff.

Performance for WINE is nowhere near native Windows. If you want to enjoy GW2 properly, you’ll have to use bootcamp.

Source: I have GW2 installed both on OSX and on Windows (Bootcamp). The difference in performance is staggering.

Kurakura.7281:

Whats the point of a marketplace if you can’t manipulate it?

This may come as a shock to someone who shouldn’t really care if he’s playing a space-game like eve or a fantasy game because in reality, he’s playing wall-street and his main interface UI mod is called “excel”:

The marketplace should help players exchange items that are roughly equally hard to get so they get what they need, not what they happened to find.

Isslair.4908:

All I can see on the forums is people complaining on how you can’t kill a thief when he is fleeing from you.

No, that’s a strwman.

All I see are people complaining that it takes far more skill to avoid being two-shotted by a thief than to two-shot people as a thief.

Oh, wait, I also see people complaining that it’s a sign that something’s not right if seven classes have to adopt their playstyle and (to some degree) even their equipment / skills to surviving against one profession.

The rest are players who think a class is not overpowered if other classes can survive them if they skill corectly, equip correctly, play well and are constantly looking out for thieves.

CETheLucid.3964:

You need to calm down and take a step back from all this.

How they handle mistakes they made might lead to more “stepping back” than they anticipated.

Areanant currently receives a lot of flak for theit actions. Actions that basically say “if we kitten up, you’ll pay for it.”

Players have agreed to TOS that basically say that ArenaNet can at any time permaban them for any or no reason at all. Players agree to such TOS because they’re commonplace and the unspoken agreement is, that the gaming companies feel they have to reserve those rights for legal reasons but won’t use them unless in legal conflicts or for the worst of offenses.

ArenaNet has just demonstrated that all the time and effort spent in the game can at any moment evaporate. I’m not a crafter. I was not affected. However, I can completely understand how people would think that this time-limited (and thus limited in volume of ectos created due to the limited supply of snowflakes) crafting item was indeed introduced to bring down the inflated prices of ectos a bit.

Had I been a crafter and had I been aware of this, I might have fallen into this trap as well.

Bottom line is that seemingly normal actions can get you permabanned in this game. This is a unique feature of GW2, in no other MMO I know have permabans for company-mistakes been issued and issued so easily. Therefore, I highly doubt I will waste more time (let alone money) on GW2. After all, it could all be taken away any moment when the next mistake they make is labelled an exploit.

Areanant currently receives a lot of flak for theit actions. Actions that basically say “if we kitten up, you’ll pay for it.”

Players have agreed to TOS that basically say that ArenaNet can at any time permaban them for any or no reason at all. Players agree to such TOS because they’re commonplayce and the unspoken agreement it, that the gaming companies feel they have to reserve those rights for legal reasons but won’t use them unless in legal conflicts or for the worst of offenses.

ArenaNet has just demonstrated that all the time and effort spent in the game can at any moment evaporate. I’m not a crafter. I was not affected. However, I can completely understand how people would think that this time-limited (and thus limited in volume of ectos created due to the limited supply of snowflakes) crafting item was indeed introduced to bring down the inflated prices of ectos a bit.

Had I been a crafter and had I been aware of this, I might have fallen into this trap as well.

Bottom line is that seemingly normal actions can get you permabanned in this game. This is a unique feature of GW2, in no other MMO I know have permabans for company-mistakes been issued and issued so easily. Therefore, I highly doubt I will waste more time (let alone money) on GW2. After all, it could all be taken away any moment when the next mistake they make is labelled an exploit.

haviz.1340:

Finally people start to see the truth

I knew this would happen eventually since day 1. The idea of fractioning community, inability to rejoin after dc, inability to play with your alts, inability to cross server unless from overflow and everpresent RNG. Those are major issues with fractals as of this moment.

Seems they packed everything into the fractals that players generally hate to see if we would swallow it. It seems we (as a community) did, so this concept is there to stay. Expect more of it in future content!

Conner.4702:

Actually this would just move the problem around. What actually needs to happen is to give people natural reasons to visit areas.

So give areas boosts (XP, karma, loot…) depending on how long you didn’t do anything there. That would spread out the player base nicely, as each player seeks out areas they havn’t been for a while.

Rookni.2469:

Lets hope they enable pvp in it. Oooh the christmas grief would be splendid <3

What is it about you griefers (in general)? Is it a character trait (of the player) that you generally like to see people suffer or to torment them? Or is it purely an in-game personality disorder?

I truly wonder what kind of people griefers are in real life. Never met one so far.

Azure.8670:

people quitting the game over ascended gear is AMAZING to me.

Why is this amazing?

We were promised a game that we could leave for a month or a year and then come back and join whatever is the latest content. Ascended gear, infusions, FotM-levels and the confirmation that the level-cap will be raised that the game that’s currently called “GW2” is not the “GW2” we bought. So we stop playing it.

I have no intention to update all 4.5 (soon to be 5) sets of exotic gear for my 80s to ascended plus infusion. I was collecting exotic sets so I could swith playstyles. now with item-inflation slowly but steadily devaluing these items, it just feels like it’s not worth it anymore.

GW2 used to be a nice walk to a restaurant in a park. And once I was there, I could go on another walk and eventually return. But the goal would always be there and I’d eventually get there. Now it’s a race and if I’m slower than the guy carrying the goalposts, I’ll fall behind. Thanks, but I have a job, I want to relax having fun, not to struggle to keep up. You do that, I won’t.

The past weekend, I went to Orr to finish my daily achievment. I made it a habit to do the events and the gathering there. As always, I port to Malchor’s Leap first. Usually, the trebuchets are being attacked, some troups need an escort, a risen knight (flying vet) wants to be killed and the chickens in their pens are revolting.

Now, however, there’s… nothing. A group-event (eye of zaithan) that my party-of-2 doesn’t want to take on alone. And… that’s more or less it. After having the gathering part done, I head on over to the Cursed Shore. Again, no events. We go to that island off the west coast. Nothing.

So what we did was go to WvW to find some events.

What happened to Orr? It used to be a place where you would often see several events on the minimap at the same time. There was always stuff happening and that was fun. Now it was just a risen-filled area without purpose. Did they lower the number of events spawned there? Why? To make the new tropical island of boredom look better?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The problem we are seeing a lot of that is causing this, is that people are skipping mobs and rushing through things, and it breaks their scripts when the players activate something while the NPC is stuck in combat.
We try to find and fix scripts in those areas to decrease the chance of it happening though, so details about where and how the NPC broke, and what your group was doing (don’t fret about admitting to rushing or exploiting something) will help us in identifying and fixing the problem.

Wow, I just lost confidence in this game ever working decently.

I mean, honestly? NPCs are scripted and if somehting, anything happens inside the dungeon that’s not in the script’s comfort-zone, the dungeon bugs out? There’s no NPC-AI, they’re just led around on a leash by a script and should the leash get entangled, the dungeon is broken?

Somehow, the explanation you gave leaves me with the nagging suspicion that no matter how much blood, sweat and tears you’re pouring into this implementation of NPCs in dungeons, you’ll never be able to get to the source of the issue – the framework you’re using.

GregT.4702:

If you’re on the forums right now, you haven’t quit the game over Ascended Gear.

And you’re very likely not going to. You’re either going to:

( a ) quit the game because actually you’ve finished all the content you want to and you’re bored with it;
( b ) quit the game because as a hardcore player you have a high game rotation and honestly you were going to move on to another game soon no matter what GW2 did;
( c ) not quit the game, and keep complaining for another three years; or
( d ) not quit the game, and enjoy it.

(e) lose interest in the game, hardly ever log on but still follow the forums for what the game used to be.

IndigoSundown.5419:

The open world is still gorgeous, the art is fantastic, a ton of work went into the DE’s, the zones and many other things in the game. The game is flat out fun to play.

I fully agree.

Please, PLEASE make visiting low level areas attractive to high level players. Have DEs drop for their level. Have mobs drop for their level. Tune downscaling so that it’s not “easy farming” but challenging when you go there.

The world is great but currently, we’re discouraged from going there. Even levelling alts there is discouraged since the new dungeon favours playing one character only.

Sad, really.

mcwurth.2081:

wintersday is coming and as seen on their event notification page it looks like something will happen in januari aswell. just wat and see what they got for us. Anet does listen it just takes time for them to “fix” things.

Yea, right.

“Wait and see” helped a lot when it was preached to the outraged masses when Ascended was announced. “Just wait and see, you havn’t seen it yet, you don’t know how exactly it’ll be implemented…”

And about the time it takes them to fix core elements like dungeons months into the game: Many of the dungeons don’t work properly. I honestly though that SW:TOR was killed by the horrible, horrible patching. GW2 is worse.

mcwurth.2081:

for anybody else complaining: i do realize it is no fun and do realize it will “drive” a certain amount of people away (good ridance if you ask me) but if any of you people can do it beter then anet: be my guest and make such a great team and great game as Anet team did and make your own game very fast.

I need not be able to build a sportscar in order to relize that the one I bought runs on 3 of its 8 cylinders only and ruining suspension so that going 30 feels like going 100 is not a valid replacement for actual speed. I need not even be able to remove the dead fish from the car’s AC in order to tell that it causes a stink.

Ebon.7641:

It’s completely broken and getting it basically means you have to restart. Is there ANY good reason why ANet either hasn’t a.) fixed it or b.) at least disabled it until they do?

They couldn’t give a rodent’s behind about stuff that doesn’t negatively affect economy (read: yields more gold or stuff than they wanted to) and thus might interfere with gem sales?

Iehova.9518:

phooka.4295:

Edit 2: I should have pointed out that I’m generally a prankster and I dearly love irony, cynicism and similar rethorical means. Also, I use them liberally, for example when writing a tinfoil-hat parody.

You ruined the post. Edit it out man.

Let’s just say that when it comes to hermeneutics, I’m a follower of Hans Magnus Enzensberger. The meaning of the text is not for the author to descide. So if I write some stuff as parody that I think might get an infraction when not posted as such, it’s not in my hands anymore.

Tinfoil hat and all.

Working as intended.

GW2 economy works like this:

- BOTs provide raw materials for crafters.
- Crafters craft exotics.
- Non-crafters buy gems to trade for gold to buy crafted exotics.

As you can clearly see, random rare drops that could be salvaged or thrown to the forge or – worst possible outcome(!) – used would interrupt this beautiful money-making machine.

Now, I understand that “BOTs provide raw materials” might be something many players frown upon. I understand, I used to think so, too. However, with the disappearence of BOTs a few weeks ago, we’ve seen prices on T6 materials and ectos skyrocket. As a result, prices for exotic armor have almost doubled.

Now, the rational reaction would be to farm for ectos and T6 mats. Sadly, droprates have fallen to levels a human player can hardly bear. However, if a huge enough army of bots brings the prices down sufficiently, human players might again be able to afford exotic armor.

Recently, BOTs have started to re-appear. In case mindless robotic drones manage what human players are not supposed to achieve – that is, farm a sufficient amount of materials to satisfy the demand the human players have – I might be able to buy another set of armor for my main to play around with a support build.

Do I like this? Of course not! But with the latest nerfs to open-world drops, mindless machines slaving away 24/7, batteling the droptables are my only hope for a fun game experience (aka “being able to affort a new set of exotics once a month to play around with different builds”).

Edit: In case you’re wondering why Arenanet needs to crack down on BOTs from time to time (“in waves”) if they provide a service needed to sell gems, here’s why: You keep them in the game long enough to farm and sell mats, then permaban them to take the gold they made selling materials from the economy, leaving only gem -> gold as a viable source of income for players with RL-jobs and RL-income. It’s crucial to leave the BOTters in the game long enough to stimulate a demand for mats and items that results in a demand for gold but to take them out before they reappear as goldsellers, undercutting the tradepost. Hence the BOT banning in waves.

Edit 2: I should have pointed out that I’m generally a prankster and I dearly love irony, cynicism and similar rethorical means. Also, I use them liberally, for example when writing a tinfoil-hat parody.

Yes, it’s joke. Unfortunately, it’s not a “ha ha” funny joke. More like a sad one.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

to update:
Our QA dept was aware of this problem, and had a bug on it. We were just unable to fix it in time for the patch.

So basically, Funny, you just couldn’t be bothered to fix the teleporting grawl bug, huh?

How about this, a new priority list for bugs to fix:

- Bug prevents players from actually playing.
- Bug breaks major aspect of game (FotM DC…)
- Bug makes the game less fun to play.
- Bug allows players a non-gamebreaking advantage the developers didn’t intend.

The last one, of course, is dabatable. If the game is playable, fun and not even long-term aspects (economy) are affected too much, it could well be argued that the last category of “bug” can be renamed to game-feature and any effort to fix it (that should not even be started unless the first three categories are completely resolved) should rather be used for additional fun content.

A priority-list like this would ultimately focus on, you know, the game being fun once more.

Now, since this post could be read not only as a sarcastic remark but also as a suggestion, I fully expect it to be quickly deleted or moved to the suggestions-forum under an uninteresting title so that it quickly disappears. This way, at least one mod will have to read it, though.

Gilosean.3805:

I’d love to see bugfixes too, but at this point I think the best bugfix is to hire new QA staff.

There, fixed that for you.

As soon as they raise the level cap, I’m gone. Yes, I know they will eventually raise it. That just means that I already know that whatever I do here is temporary.

I deleted my creadit card information from the gem store the day they announced gear progression.

morrolan.9608:

Has this answer form Mike O’Brien been discussed because I find it kind of remarkable:

“How is introducing VP respecting the player? Because it’s fun to be challenged and rewarded. Because it’s fun to have the character you play grow and evolve over time. Because ArenaNet (sort of) held a hard line against all VP with GW1 — no VP ever, year after year — and it wasn’t that fun. It was stagnant.”

So according to them now horizontal progression is stagnant. Amazing comment given how successful GW1 was over a number of years.

Oh, I didn’t read that part of it. He really said so? Well then, good to know that I won’t have to pay a dime for GW2 anymore. I hope I can ignore the progression (not falling behind too much) until new exciting MMOs are released. I’ll definitely have a look at Elderscrolls to see if it’s any good.

Which is sad, really. The Guildwars 2 of the first beta weekend was – for me – perfect. The open world was challenging. It was non-vertical. We didn’t know that downlevelling was to be a joke (on my 80 exo warrior, low level mobs are charge, 100b, dead before last swing). Had they simply shipped it and kept it as it was back then, I’d have stayed a loyal fan for years. It’s not me who changed. It’s them.

I’d love to buy gems for all sorts of stuff, including gold. But not anymore. I know that whatever I spend it on, it’s temporary, sooner or later to be outdated and trashed. Not gonna do that. Takes so much fun from the game.

hydeaut.1758:

I will believe that when I see it:

as far as I remember Whiteside said there will be additional ways to obtain it, that they might make it cheaper to craft and that he wants to make it less grind. But he also said, he decided to roll the ascended gear out the way it is currently – why did he do that then?

Obviously, rolling out the patch in time (knowing that it will offend many, many players) is way more important than to get it done “right” or just “the way it was supposed to be.”

Maybe his year-end bonus depends on shipping patches on time and on budget. Publicly traded companies often have incentives like that for managers. Maybe it needed to be rolled out that fast so that there’s enough time between the patch and the winter event. We’ll never know.

Personally, I’d like them to roll out content more slowly but in a more finished state. Oh, and to maybe fix some of the bugs that plague existing content since it was released and keep various dungeons virtually unplayable.

But who needs existing content if there’s an event around the corner that will hopefully be over before the bugs that plague it raise to much of a stink?

Oh, come on! Everyone knows that for years on end, everyone here was screaming for GW2 to be more like WoW. And now you complain again.

They said it years ago in some video, too. That noone likes a guaranteed loot at the end of an instance. Everyone loves the thrill of not knowing if a ring will drop or, if it drops, if it’s specced right. Oh, the excitement!

So, stop whining. The fractals are perfect. They’re the ultimate answer to all you ever wished for.

Oh, sarcasm may or may not be included in this posting.

The one time event really showed that GW2 is based on an overrated GW1 engine unfit to handle what was thrown at it.

As already witnessed in WvW, the engine does not handle more than ~20 players and an equal number of NPCs very well. In fact, more than that becomes unplayable, unless you think “not seeing allies or enemies” is how games ought to be played.

Maybe you should bring some of the old GW1-spirit back to the open world and give every group of 5 and / or every 20 players in a zone their own overflow. Basically, you’d leave the big city with your party and enter your private overflow (aka instance) where you could at least see all allies and enemies. The game-engine does not seem to handle anything that exceeds this well at all.

The grind is huge. The reward is minimal and unrewarding, but at the same time, the reward is artificially inflated to “essential” due to agony.

“Agony” faithfully describes the ascended grind, by the way.

I’ve never played an asiagrinder so far and thus, GW2 is on its way to becoming the most grindy, unrewarding MMO I’ve ever played. To paraphrase the Treehorn: “This isn’t going to end well. Moving on.” Someone mentioned Firefall on this forum, taday. Bethesda needs no mention.

The island is useless. I have no idea what it’s about.

In Orr, it was all about the pact closing in on the dragon and cutting off its ressources. There were warbands marching west. Lost island? More like “lost cause”.

Sorry if I was phrasing it ambigously.

I want to get to Orr for the event-part and the gathering items for the daily achievment. My preferred route to get there from <anywhere> before the patch was:

- Mists
- LA
- Grove
- Malchor’s leap (I somehow like ML more than the others)

With the patch, I thought that the equally fast route

- Mists
- LA
- Karkaville-south
- Malchor’s Leap

would be cheaper. However, it’s not. So I’ll still get to Orr via the grove.

Well, if this is to be a progression-game, we need the tools to help us progress. That includes DPS-optimization (and DPS-recording partymembers to see who’s slacking) as well as gearchecks so I know whom I invite to that level 22 fractal.

Do I want this? Kitten, no! I hate it like mad. But it’s the logical extension of a progression-based MMO and I can very well understand anyone who asks for it (as well as an LFG-tool).

If it’s finally implemented, it’ll be time for me to quote Traherne, for once: “This isn’t going to end well. Moving on!”

Oh well, since wayporting from there to Orr is still more expensive than from the grove, the it seems like that place won’t see too much of me for the time being, then.

I went there on the weekend, saw the event chains that opened the waypoints. OK, we own the place, now what?

Turns out, I have no idea. The map seems devoid of any real story. Events happen from time to time but they mostly feel like “Karka attack us, help!” mixed with boring old WoW-quests that just happen not to be there half the time and are therefore “events”.

Granted, I went there, did the weekend-stuff, got the map filled out and all, then got bored and left. I just didn’t see the point to the area.

So, what’s to do there? What’s it about?

Galen Grey.4709:

There is still no vertical progression, a single new tier doesnt make it so unless there is some written law somewhere that say 5 tiers is okey to consider a game horizontal but 6 tiers makes it vertical! the only vertical progression they really introduced isnt the ascended gear itself its agony / infusion system in FoTM and that doesnt even kick in after level 10.

Galen, I must admit that you’re the most eloquent, silver-tongued apologist I’ve seen here so far. However, that does not make your arguments any more valid where you’re simply ignoring the truth that’s out there for all to see (who don’t close their eyes).

The new tier was announced as the “start of the progression initiative”. Not as the “final cornerstone of level-80-equipment.”

It was announced that we’d eventually have a full set of ascended items available. So to say that it’s only rings and back is disingenious.

Also, it has been said that better quality than rare infusions will come. Even if you’re only forced to keep the wheel spinning for infusions, that doesn’t really make it less of a treadmill.

You need to periodically update your equipment or you will, over time, become less powerful than players who do. This is my personal, generic definition of a treadmill. Please tell me which part of it is wrong or does not apply to GW2. Remember that ascended gear was introduced as “beginning of progression initiative” and that higher-quality infusions were already promised if you try to argue the definition does not apply to GW2.

You can ignore the writing on the wall. Unless you update your equipment regularly, you will, over time, fall behind your fellow players as far as survivability, DPS and utility (e.g. heals for others) are concerned. Tell me how this is less like WoW and more like GW1, please.

tkalamba.2541:

Not all new content is going to be utilizing Agony. The dungeon has been very obviously designed around adding new fractals, which will use agony, new world zones, and whatnot will not use agony. You only fall off the train if you want to run the fractals. Anything else, Ascended doesn’t mean anything. Even the stats increase, its so small, you don’t even notice a difference.

Luckily, we’ll know more after the reddit AMA. Luckily, why? Because your optimism is just as unfounded in knowledge of actual facts as the doom and gloom sayers’ pessimism.

So far, pessimism led to the correct answers more often than optimism. “Wait and see”, for many, meant that after waiting, what they saw was their worst nightmare come true. Those who had descided that they’d rather protest than wait and see found that protest (or feedbacl of any kind) was summarily ignored.

However, that does not mean that pessimism will continue to lead to correct predictions for the future of GW2. What the past has taught us is, that the players have zero influence about the short- and possibly mid-term development of GW2. So we may indeed “wait and see” and conserve our energies to finding exit strategies should things become worse.

havoc.8569:

Been doing 2 FotM dailies per day (besides first day) and haven’t gotten any rings. I haven’t even found enough vials/glob to upgrade my backpiece. Managed to get to scale 25 but and it’s just a huge liability for anyone to take me. Who wants someone with only 5 resist for 25+? I wouldn’t. Really puts a damper on trying to enjoy the game.

It’s also awesome when someone in my party gets their 4th ring. RNG… really makes effort seem pointless sometimes.

You must be clearly wrong.

As we know everyone loved a good treadmill to keep them occupied. And since the patch is the best thing that ever happened to GW2 (which was clearly dying before the patch), you must be wrong. Everything is fine!

(Sorry, the folks sounding like that must have gotten to me.)

Keep higher-than-exotic out of dungeons, too!

I love dungeons. I don’t like grind. I want to be able to joind friends and guild in any dungeon without the need to grind first. Keep ascended out of dungeons!

Ooops.

See how ridiculous “keep ascended in dungeons” is? You may not like the fact that it affects your game and dungeons may not be a part of that. I don’t like the fact that it affects my game but dungeons are a part of it.

Solution? Simple. Remove higher-than-exotic stats from the game altogether. Anything less is only a pseudo-solution.

Galen Grey.4709:

Now it seems there is another yet mis perception and yes this is a misperception because its a fact Ascended gear didnt change a single thing yet the same exact game that was amazingly fun to play has suddenly become boring?

Sorry to say so, but that sounds quite naïve.

Orr is not the same. With most players in LA, you’re likely not able to play in Orr as you were before the patch. Group events don’t happen because too few people are there to do them. Waypoints are contested.

The old dungeons are not the same. The dedicated dungeon-player knows that the time to get ascended gear is now. If he wants to continue past fractal level 10 or likely into upcoming content, agony will be there and it’ll get worse. So he knows he needs it eventually. If he gets it now, he will keep the capacity to join his (hardcore) friends in whatever content they’re up to. If he doesn’t, he fears he’ll be left behind. Therefore, many, many people grind fractals like mad. This means, however, that fewer people go to the old dungeons, especially for the hard paths that you might still need for the title “dungeon master”.

Crafting is not the same. I would’t buy a non-ascended ring or backpiece anymore. Why waste money on something I’d discard as soon as a locky drop makes it obsolete, no matter how perfect the itemization. This destroys markets.

Thus saying that ascended gear changed nothing is simply incorrect. It changed a lot for the game I used to play and the way I used to play it. Both were immensely affected. For someone levelling alts or aimlessly wandering around the countryside for fun, nothing may have changed. For me, it has.

If you fail to see this point and keep pretending nothing has happened without a qualifier like nothing has changed for me, you’re showing gross disregard for other players and their arguments. I… don’t know how to characterize such disregard. I don’t want this post deleted.

Veltoss.9135:

So you guys think it’s a good idea to make >huge< assumptions and complain non-stop about something that has not yet happened and may never happen? How is this helping anyone? How is this beneficial?

No. We guys see that we’re in free fall since we left that balcony on november the 15th. Sure, for now the wind rushing past us and tearing at our hair isn’t hurting too much and who knows if that round big thing we’re heading for is gonna hurt on impact? Let’s wait and see.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

As for the people who like grind, why did they buy a game that promised to not have any?

My opinion?

Because they couldn’t be bothered to get informed. Because they didn’t read. Because they didn’t care to just watch some videos on youtube.

And why should they? They’re accustomed to resort to complaining loudly if what they get is not what they want and to have their way in the end. And again, they were proven right.

I think it’s a cultural thing.

But it’s not just a cultural thing as far as uninformed, lazy customers are concerned. In the US, there’s a corporate mentality that the customer is always right. Surprise, he’s not and to pretend he is can often hurt your business. That’s also a cultural thing, I guess.

A company faced with customers complaining about a product being exactly as advertised should simply grow a pair, tell the spoiled brats to deal with it and keep doing what they do best, that is, keep true to their vision and continue to make the product the perfect image of the peoduct they envisioned when they started developing it.

Silentstorm.7531:

You realize that if the gear was already there live none of this wouldn’t matter. And again you fail to realize YOU phooka are in the minority in your wants. Do you see any magazines asking for OR pining for guild wars 2 to go back? Nope actually it’s the other way around. I’ll gladly post you guys links so you can realize how futile your whining is. And that you got the wrong genre for those desires.

Oh, you think that magazines are not voicing concern is an idicator for anything? Gaming magazines are dependent on publishers giving interviews and (more importantly) inviting them to beta test and pre-release demonstrations. They hardly ever voice criticism.

Also, did you not read what I wrote? Why did you dispute it then? I said that I’m fully aware that the audience GW1 was targeted at and that GW2 was announced to be targeted at might well be a minority. However, I also explained why that doesn’t matter as far as financial success for GW2 is concerned.

If there’s 90 customers who want pencils and 45 companies selling pencils, each one will sell an average of 2 pencils. If, at the same time, 10 customers want crayons and you were the only one selling crayons so far and just introduces a new brand of crayons, you’d likely sell 10 of them.
If you now chose to stop selling crayons and start selling pencils because there’s 9 times more people buying pencils than there are people buying crayons, would that be a viable business strategy? Could you truly expect to sell more pencils after the change of your strategy than you sold crayons before that?

Silentstorm.7531:

Stat capped games only work for RTS based games. You cannot keep a audience with no way for them to progress.

What makes you think that stat-increase is the only kind of progression?

When GW2 went life, I was so hoping for addon-boxes to be released at least once a year with new areas to explore, new cultures, new events and new parts for my personal story, maybe picking up loose strands of the choices I made when I created my characters.

There could be new ressources that would allow me to craft new exotics (and maybe legendaries), maybe with a completely new look to them.

I was looking foreward to the existing dungeons being fixed and bug-free eventually and I didn’t care when. Because I thought that whenever this would happen, the dungeons would still be viable content since they granted tokens for exotics, the best gear in game. I was also looking for new dungeons being introduced to the game. New encounters with new mechanics.

I was looking foreward to build up an armory of diverse gear over time that would allow me to change my traits and re-skill to fill different roles in a group or to be more optimised for certain content. I still havn’t tried a ranged-build for my warrior.

I was looking foreward to playing alts. And why wouldn’t I? It’s not like I’d have to play catch up with my guildmates who’d have progressed while I was playing my alt. No progression would mean that I could play the alt and whenever I wanted to be able to switch back to my fully geared main and be viable for all content the game has to offer, so I could play with my friends and help them with whatever they want to do.

Silentstorm.7531:

And what you really want is a console game not a online growing mmorpg. People really need to stop it with this subject its not going to work like that give it up. You really think a million plus people going to palette swap skins on gear for months after months. You must be smoking a new type of weed that makes dreams reality or something.

No, you’re wrong. I want an MMO that’s exactly the way GW2 was before november the 15th. I don’t even own a console. There was plenty of room for progression in GW2 back then, even without the need to ever raise any stat or level cap.

First of all: OP, great writeup of my feelings.

Wintyre Fraust.6534:

Look at it this way: GW2 proved, if nothing else, that not only could one be made, but it generated huge excitement and a very successful launch. That shows that it can be done, and even that it should be tried again by a company that won’t drop the ball 10 weeks into the game. ANET could have had the stat-cap player market, but even if they have permanently abandoned it, that leaves the door wide open for other developers. GW2 release, launch and this immense, very public reaction proves that there is a market for a stat-capped MMOG beyond what GW1 has been able to accrue.

Look at it as an analogy to the PC market.

Apple ships about 10% of all PCs. However, last time I looked, their profits (from PCs, not iOS) dwarfs the combined profits of the PC devisions of HP, Dell, Lenovo. Why? 10% of a huge market is still enough to run a healthy business. Also, the 10% they shipped were the high-margin PCs. They never even attempted to ship a low-margin, cheap Mac.

ArenaNet could have had 100% of the stat-cap players of MMOs. Even if that are only 10% of all who play MMOs at the moment, that’s still more than enough players for a healthy business.

Would ArenaNet also be grabbing the high-margin 10%? Hard to say. In my experience, it’s mostly “older” gamers with jobs and money but limited time who yearn for a stat-cap MMO. They might have (on average) more money to spend. But do they spend it? Or does a student living with his parents spend more because he spends a vastly greater percentage of his disposable income? As I said: I don’t know.

I’d like to think that the relaxed folks over 30 with jobs are the folks looking for stat-capped games, but how should I know? I’m not a marketeer and I didn’t run extensive surveys. But even if it’s just 10% of the MMO market and assuming that those 10% are only willing or able to spend as much as everyone else, that’s still more than enough to run a healthy business on since you’d be the only vendor catering to this audience.

GW2 has turned to the progression crowd. Maybe that market is bigger. Maybe it’s as much as 90% of the market. I don’t know. What I do know is that GW2 has not only turned to those players, it also re-positioned the game away from a unique selling position (stat-cap) into a market that’s immensely overcrowded (progression). It now competes with all that’s out there: Pandas, Aion, Tera, Rift, SW:TOR, LotRO and all the others. There’s currently dozends of MMOs out there trying to grab the players’ attention. The small fraction of 90% GW2 will be able to grab might well be smaller than the 100% of 10% that it could have had.

Furthermore, there’s so many progression-MMOs out there that player-retention is much worse than it was, let’s say, for GW1. GW2 will have a hard time to bind progression-players to the franchise once new AAA MMOs hit the market that offer a whole new world of content to explore. Elderscrolls is the “big on” announced for next year, but there are sure to be many more than that.

I, as a stat-cap player, can only hope that eventually, another MMO will pick up the ball that GW2 dropped.

Propaganda.8956:

1)I run the extract and the installer directly. Everything goes smooth until i have to select a partition to install it on and i get the error “This disk cannot be used to start up your computer”.

It could be that the partition table type or the partition type is not supported for starting up 10.8. I’d suggest backing up to a time machine volume (a very, very good idea generally and before any OS upgrades in particular), repartitioning the whole mess and just getting users / settings / programs back from the backup.

SpyderBite.6274:

Yes. OS X is not distributable. It is $19.99 per machine it is installed on. Just go in to the Mac App Store and ML is listed under “Apple Apps” on the right side menu.

However, for those ~$20 you get 5 licenses for 5 machines. It’s perfectly OK to make a USB-installer and install on more than one Mac.

GW2 made me buy an iPad mini.

Originally so I could watch video-guides to complicated jumping puzzles or look something up on the internet while playing in full screen mode.

However, with the patch this has shifted more to “so I can play casual games on it while not playing GW2 anymore”.

NCsoft -1
Apple +1

My budget now goes to the app store rather than the gem store.

ThiBash.5634:

Seriously, between those two statements, it helped me to remind why I dislike PR managers so much. But guess what? Ignoring it will not make it go away.

Ignoring it will make many of us go away, though. Mission accomplished.

In order to ease the pressure on lion’s arch overflows and to streamline the game, I want to make the following proposal:

Introduce a dungeon-finder that’s accessible from the character-select screen.

Let’s be honest, a good part of the playerbase is currently in Lion’s Arch looking for a group on their respective level of FotM. As a result, the Lion’s Arch chat is barely bearable and consists of nothing but LFG / LFM posts. There’s culling of player-avatars all around. Graphics cards are churning and using up electricity needlessly (sustainability nightmare).

All that most players do is:

• Try to find a FotM-group and
• chat with their guild.

So let’s just give everyone a guild-chat-box and a “looking for FotM” tool on the character-select screen. Once your group is assembled, you get transported directly to the dungeon. Unless you step through the lions arch portal from the hub, you exit to the character-select screen once you leave the dungeon.

To those who say “but that would eliminate the open world and reduce GW2 to a grindy dungeon crawler like diablo 3” I can only say that noone forces you to use this feature. Furthermore, there’s stil lots of things you can’t do in FotM, so you’re still forced to visit the rest of the world from time to time.