Guild Wars 2

Bish.8627:

I wondered for weeks why I just didnt want to play any more, even though I love the gameplay and this thread has given me that answer. I can’t play as I want, as there is no reward in that.

This is basically the root of the issue and I think is what is missed by a lot of people. I love the new level design and think what they have done to innovate in the open world MMO space is amazing. The open world content is actually easier than Orr at release when we all had crap gear and packs of respawning mobs would chain CC you. What is different is now everything feels like it’s locked behind something else and you are not rewarded for just logging in and wandering around like you were in the base game.

The base game had a lot of challenging content in the form of jump puzzles, mini dungeons, world bosses and some world events. All of that content felt optional so they were mostly activities you did if you wanted to challenge yourself. You could always log in and find something interesting and set your own goals.

Now with collections and mastery points items and locations are locked behind very specific things. Here is some of the “challenging content” I am running into as a casual returning player.

1. Waiting 45 minutes for dragons stand to get going, trying to spam click join taxis and ending up with “world is full” with no way to get on another map for another 2 hours.
2. Getting DCed/crashing during a meta boss event and finding myself in a world with no progress.
3. Achievements that require events to fail in order to progress with no way to select a map thereby requiring begging other players to not complete a map.
4. Mastery points requiring gold medals in twitch based games with crappy camera angles.
5. A general push towards “event chains or bust” in relation to gaining experience needed for masteries which are needed for exploration.

Overall none of this would be as big of a deal if things were so much was not gated behind it all. In general my playstyle of logging on and exploring around makes me feel like I am not making progress and I feel much more pushed towards activities I don’t enjoy because if I don’t I won’t have a skill that lets me progress through some other area.

Yes. I gave up on that kittening mastery point in verdant brink between this, wrestling with the camera and getting dumped into pits I couldn’t jump out of over and over.

Out of curiosity what builds is this an issue for? I typically help anyone I can get to, use my CC (if useful) on cooldown, and drop group heals. I don’t have any issues getting gold as long as I am not getting to the event at the tail end. I do have to contribute damage, but it doesn’t feel like the game is asking for a whole lot of that.

Putting this in here:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cathedral_of_Zephyrs_
This event is setup such that it requires a fail state of the defend Zephyrs event in order for the main chain to start up that actually completes the quest. This is not well matched with the hint for Dawn which says “Cleanse the Cathedral of Zephyrs in Malchor’s Leap and loot this from the chest.”

I showed up there last night and there were 8 people sitting at Zephyrs and a bunch of other people waiting around for the main event to start. The people up at Zephyrs kept defending the temple not knowing that is was not what’s needed for the precursor quest.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cathedral_of_Zephyrs_
This event is setup such that it requires a fail state of the defend Zephyrs event in order for the main chain to start up that actually completes the quest. This is not well matched with the hint for Dawn which says “Cleanse the Cathedral of Zephyrs in Malchor’s Leap and loot this from the chest.”

I showed up there last night and there were 8 people sitting at Zephyrs and a bunch of other people waiting around for the main event to start. The people up at Zephyrs kept defending the temple not knowing that is was not what’s needed for the precursor quest.

Geting a bunch as well. Seems to be related to specific threads.

Vasham.2408:

Lupi is the only decent boss in this game.

Most of the current bosses in this game have 1 phase. For all the hate on lack of trinity well this is the thing that most people are really missing. This boss has multiple phases and requires a group to talk about them up front, learn from what was done wrong, adjust then try again. To use WoW as reference that is what separates a raid boss from a heroic dungeon boss and raiders do not typically view heroics as “progression content”.

I really do think we just need to give them time on this one and see what they come up with. The fractals is such a huge improvement over the explorable dungeons and they have stated their next priority is to take a second pass at the release dungeons to make them a better experience. They need time to see what works and what doesn’t work with their new experiment and add mechanics/challenges accordingly.

Stigma.7869:

The other side of the coin is whenever Anet introduces something that hints at vertical progression AKA Ascended Gear, the casual crowd raises just as many pitch forks..

It’s a tough call for them based on their initial design and it’ll be interesting to see if they put something in that does provide a good hook for people. From what I read about Guild Wars 1 what it had was a lot of options in the form of skills. What Guild Wars 2 seems to offer is a lot of options in the form of content.

If they keep the pace of the ascended gear there really won’t be much to worry about for people who don’t like treadmills as the final piece in the set will trickle in sometime… next year maybe? Unfortunately thus far no alternative advancement of the horizontal variety seems to be on the table anywhere.

On the flip side it ends up as this guy states in the video. Where gear tiers are not blasting in quick enough for a crowd who does like vertical progression. You may get ascended gear but it does not give you so much of an increase as to feel “more powerful” so if you crave that it may feel like a small long and pointless grind.

In the end it seems that if the content is no longer interesting it’s time to stop playing. Which really does seem like a more heathy view on games in general and their business model appears to support it on the surface. Will be interesting to see how it all lands in the end.

I have a friend joining the game and my server has been full for weeks (from what I can tell). They really need to get guesting working at this point even if it’s just the option to join an overflow.

I get the WvWvW thing of locking down the character to 1 server but at this point to play with my friend I either have to:

a) Ditch my guild and transfer to another server (or at least not participate in group events beyond dungeons).
b) Tell my buddy to solo and check every hour of the day in hopes a slot opens up on my server.

Neither one seems like a great solution.

I’m wondering if anyone has found any creative solutions to work around the lack of guesting being in the game. I am currently on a “full” server (70% of them at this point in NA it seems) and have a guild I really like. I also have a friend joining within the next couple of days who I wanted to level a character with. My issue is that if I leave my current server I no longer have the option to do WvWvW with my guild and I happen to like the server community. Without guesting implemented I don’t know of a way to run open world events and quests with my buddy if he can’t get on my server.

Has anyone figured out a creative way to do activities besides dungeons with friends on different servers?

There’s just less people in these zones since the last patch. Some of the events seem to react to the amount of people around but many of them need to be started. If you are with a couple of people you should be able to start many of the chains yourself.

Guardian is probably the best class for offering synergy with pretty much any group. That said I really have not seen a need so far to have any specific class combos in the dungeons other than people occasionally looking for plate wearers.

I don’t think they’ve “killed” the game. They have just been implemented in a strange way that it focuses attention to them. They are in LA so all chat in the central hub of the game now relates to them. They offer a disjointed leveling system so people have to work harder finding a relevant group thus increasing the chatter. They offer the BIS gear with a random drop rate so many people will run them repeatedly. Even if they are not actually drawing any more people than the initial dungeons were they will definitely appear to for anyone who steps foot into LA.

Personally I would love to see more people out and about in the world but looking at Cursed Shore before this patch made me realize they really don’t (for now at least) have a solid enough system in place to motivate people to be spending the level cap doing events. FoTM is primarily designed to keep people busy and focused on something. It is being very effective in this role. Let’s hope it gives the developers the distraction they need to focus on what they need to so that the next major content patch like this does not feel like it turns the game on its head like this one did.

The regular dungeons themselves just need a good tuning. Some work well such as Subject Alpha in CoE. You really see the difficulty ramp up as you progress as long as it’s not being out healed. Others such as TA seem to have the difficulty getting easier and easier as you progress.

In general the FoTM seems like a good idea in the right direction with a few key flaws.
The positives:
1. There are mechanics (such as the hammer) feel more integrated than a lot of the ones that exist in the launch dungeons.
2. The leveling system gives different players a “difficulty slider” so that everyone a chance to see the dungeon while giving others a chance to push themselves.
3. The random fractals and changing difficulty keep recycled content fresh.
4. Overall each fractal seems to ramp up in difficulty climaxing at the end boss.
5. The lack of waypoints encourages people taking a bit more time to learn the encounters rather than just rez to win.

The negatives:
1. The leveling implementation makes this instance punishing to play with friends. Even ones who are at the same skill level. The dungeon is too long to want to backtrack to catch players up especially when the whole theme of the dungeon is progressing.
2. The rewards system on it causes fragmentation. A random drop system can be very frustrating if the goal is progress and the content is gated based on that. Choices in offensive vs defensive and group composition would be better here than if someone in the group has had good luck.
3. The way the party system work should be rethought. Currently disconnects and the lack of ability to player swap are serious issues.
4. There are still issues where players can skip or beat the content in unintended ways (running over the lava) leading to not playing the dungeon “as designed”. If left alone players will use these paths more often than not and they lead to dungeons being very unsatisfying.

Firstly get a full set of cheap rares off the TP, they are nowhere NEAR as expensive as the cultural stuff. That will really get you in a better place for those 80 zones and the personal story.

At 80 the exp dungeons are the quickest path to getting exotic geared at this point. Crafting may be the worst method at the moment as material prices are very high and buying the piece of the TP will often be much cheaper.

If you look at a variety of activities then you can get exotic geared in a variety of ways. I found the best way was to really mix and match methods.
- Buy a couple of Karma pieces.
- Get a couple dungeon pieces.
- Buy a couple items off the TP.
- Craft a couple.

Really at the moment there is nothing you absolutely need a full set of exotics to participate in beyond the higher level fractals. I think that’s important to keep in mind to feel like the game you are playing is not a grindfest.

I was able to get the method used by Recycle to work. The item says soulbound but when it’s in the bank the other character can grab it.

I’m almost of the opinion that they didn’t do quite enough in the scaling dept. In exotics I feel very overpowered for the older zones which makes them less appealing to visit. The good part about this is though that I can change my gear and set my own difficulty unlike in other games. The leveling content then remains relevant for my character as long as I want it to.

Zenyatoo.4059:

there is something similar to this called an underflow, which is where if the map has too few people you can be prompted to join an underflow, which enables people on that map to join a cross-server version of the map (basically an overflow in reverse)

It’s been suggested quite a few times already, and I do hope Anet plans to implement it.

This would be awesome. If they worked like the overflow ones it would also really help towards the “guesting” feature they have not implemented yet.

Distaste.4801:

On another topic, the Dredge fractal just once again proves how condition damage is worthless. The end bosses(ice elemental, mining suit) require lava be dumped on them so you do bonus damage. However condition damage is not included in that. Nothing like doing a 30k hit and bleeds ticking for 45…

This is the stuff I really wish they would work on. There really is no excuse to treat condition damage so “conditionally”. They talked about a fix for the inanimate objects in a post well over a month or two ago. Still waiting on that one.

Happyfool.8951:

And how is that different from being FF’d by 2-3 burst specs?

Sorry if it came off as me defending the condition debuff limits. I’m not. They will need to make a ton of changes to get it in line I guess is all I’m saying.

For this spell in particular:
1) It’s based off single target damage (conditions) which is usually higher than typical AoE spells.
2) It is multiplied by the fact that if 3 players focus on bringing up stacks they then multiply all that damage by 3. So instead of 3 people’s individual AoE damage kicking you spread all 3 of their single target damage 3 times.
3) It’s pretty close to instant and I don’t think there is a red circle to indicate you can dodge it.

On top of that they basically have left in all the core components of damage over time stuff that WoW has been ironing out for years.
1. In vanilla raids there was a global debuff limit. It took until just before Burning Crusade for them to remove this. We have debuff limits here again for some reason.
2. Gear that modified spell duration did not account for tick times. What this led to was dropoff in dps for anything that used off amounts. This was not changed until Wrath. They have this in with their condition duration where if you increase it wrong you will loose the last tick of damage and end up spending allocation points on a useless stat.
3. DoTs didn’t give critical bonuses and so they were very hard to balance against direct damage players who were stacking crit. Again not changed until wrath. Given that it’s pretty easy to get crit percentage up to 50% in this game the baseline damage for conditions would have to be nutzo high to really keep in line.

TL:DR
I agree debuff limits should be removed and damage potentially increased. I just would expect to be waiting a while as they used a lot of the mechanics that a game that is OBSESSED with balance took years to thin down.

Damage over time is always more situational and strangely tuned in comparison to direct damage. It’s more something that’s added because people like the play style.

In the case of the stack limits it probably has to do with spells like these:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Epidemic
Without stack limits the amount of damage that could be done in a PvP situation (or a PvE one that depended heavily on adds) would be absolutely out of control with 2-3 Necros timing it in synch.

FYI they are looking at this. The posted something on the reddit interview yesterday:

“Hi Cesmode,
Yep there is no doubt that the fractal level system is causing fragmentation. We are currently looking at solutions, one of which is to set the levels into tiers whereby all those within that tier say 1-5 can participate. This has implications on reward and difficulty which is why we are still looking into it.
Chris”

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/

GrapeGatsby.6937:

I think a global lfg system would solve this without having highest player being the standard for the difficulty. The only reason someone would want to go into higher difficulty without doing lower difficulty is not for the fun factor of the dungeon because it’s the same fractals at higher difficulty, but to get loot that they did not work for by progressing through FotM.

You may be right. Honestly it seems like many of their philosophies are just kinda colliding. They want us to work together as a core team and build a community so no LFG tool (I like this one for better or worse). Now we’ve got stats to chase, but I’m kinda doubting most guilds have setup organized progression nights like you would in a game with gates like this.

Overall I think this content was setup to be inclusive in the sense that you can run it and enjoy it at the difficulty level you can push yourself through. At the moment though there really lacks a clear direction of how to go about that.

A good change would be to set the difficulty slider to be based on the highest level completed by a player instead of the lowest. The variant levels people are already doing on this thing is just nuts and it REALLY starts penalizing players with less playtime on both sides of the fence.

In it’s current implementation it doesn’t matter how good of a player you are or how well you know your class, if your guildies reach level 15 this week and you are not playing you really are stuck with 2 options:

1) Convince 4 other people in your guild that it is worth their time to do 14 runs (at 1-2 hours each) of the dungeon with lower rewards and less challenge with no option to progress.
2) Try and find a pug (with no global lfg options) and hope you can find 4 more people with the same level as you have who all can commit to a 2 hour run.

It seems logical to me that the weak link in a group should be pushed out based on not being able to contribute enough to the current level of difficulty.

Astraea.6075:

I’ve yet to start running the new Fractals, but I’m not too concerned because I know my guild will help me out. If you don’t have access to a guild, you could always try to start your own lower difficulty group..

With the way it’s implemented now I wouldn’t count on that too much unless you’re willing to be on a lot. The ideas of levels is well designed with the exception of locking to the LOWEST member in the party. If your guild has been at it all day and you get on they will have to spend an extra 2 hours per level running content they’ve been through in order to get you up to speed.

Luckily there is a quick fix for them if this if it becomes a real issue:
“Patch note XXX: FOTM now sets the level being entered to the level highest in the group.”

Lemuria.3195:

For all the arguments against adding another equipment tier the only one I’ve heard which isn’t already present with the existing tiers is that Anet said they wouldn’t add a ‘gear grind’. Worse is there’s no evidence supporting that there even will be a gear grind, as absolutely everything is just conjecture. Every MMO in existence has had some logical form of equipment progression, so why are so many vocally opposed to Guild Wars doing likewise?

You have to look at stat progression for what it is to really get why there’s so much concern. There are 2 reasons for a developer to add it:
1) You want to give players something to work for.
2) You are tuning your high end content against it.
Both of these require you to repeat the process each and every time you release high end content in order for it to work well. This can be fine and very satisfying if your game revolves around it.

There are however tradeoffs to progressing like this.
1) All of the content that came before it is now under tuned for this level of gear. That means what a lot of what people look for in an end game (something to do) gets thinned down to a razor thin slice in terms of variety.
2) Once stat inflation is in it is really hard to remove. The outcry in this thread is nothing compared to what would happen if they announced they were bringing stats back down to exotic level after releasing newer sets.
3) It starts to push players more and more into separate groups, and gives players with alts or real life breaks more barriers to get back in and play with their friends. This compounds over time as more gear is released.
4) It makes it really hard for developers to get a baseline on balance as adding in inflated stats all the time gives them no norm to develop content around so only the current content is tuned and adjusted.

For me it’s the invalidation of the old content that worries me. That to me was a huge selling point of this game that distinguishes it over most of the competition. I’m already seeing the content I’m doing now getting really easy with the upgrade to exotics. Better stats will only make this worse and push more groups away from it as people chase power. Instead of AC being something fun for a change of pace in 3 years time, it will end up being irrelevant content within months as storymode dungeons pretty much are already.

Eventually, you’ll be able to kit yourself out with a full set of Ascended gear and high end Infusions to help give you the edge in end game content.

So they’re going to introduce one of the major MMO issues they wanted to address. Talk about laziness. Not really sure what they hope this will solve. There’s no trinity barrier, no large group barrier, and no lockouts. If this content is not completely grind ridden the players they are looking to attract will rip through this in days get bored, complain and leave. Again. The rest of us get stuck with an MMO with an inferior PVE endgame and the removal of one of the key things making this title stand out.

There have been a lot of complaints (as with EVERY MMO launch) about there being an unfocused endgame, but there are so many better solutions to the problems. Larger group sizes, skill focused content, difficulty settings and timed runs are some of these. Rewards can range from cosmetic gear skins, cosmetic spell effects, new elite skills, detailed itemization. Really it comes down to focusing on the content and making that entertaining and challenging.

So much of this conversation has revolved around “hardcore vs casual” but anyone who has spent any time seriously raiding will tell you they don’t need stat inflation to keep the long term content compelling. Well designed encounters that take coordination, interesting choices in itemization, mechanics that get fixed when they are cheesed and glory for “knowing your class” are what make an endgame. Here we get are getting the worst of both worlds.

“Ascended armors are ‘slightly more powerful than exotics’ and can, in some cases, hold slots for infusions”

Tread lightly Anet. A lot of us are still sticking with this game and have defended a lot of bugs and questionable content on the basis of not seeing the stat treadmill. I realize a ton of players are crying for more powerful rewards, but introducing a treadmill will:
1) Not make them happy they will have this stuff in 3 weeks and be crying for more/complaining about nothing to do.
2) A lot of your content is being trivialized by exotics already. Power creep will only push this further.
3) It will alienate a lot of us who are just sick of seeing this sort of thing in this genre and want to move on from that.

The thing that makes this game great to me is the fact that I can count on Ascalonian Catacombs being relevant as an activity in another year and that while I may want to make different decisions about my gear I am never “falling behind”. I understand you guys are having issues pushing people towards the content you want them to see but this is not the way. Strong creative direction and alternative itemization based on the same item budgets would be better places to start.

BrunoBRS.5178:

really? going back to LFG instead of solving the problem? and especially in such a fun dungeon? :/

Just a byproduct of people wanting to find the shortest path to gear (CoF path 1 in this case). I did see somewhere that they are going to adjust rewards for story mode so hopefully that’ll help.

The problem with TA is that the difficulty seems to just ramp down as you get through. With the exception of forward/forward, the nightmare vine and the dogs at the front are harder than anything else in the instance. PUGs I’m in often wipe 5 times on these then manage to just zerge through the rest.

@op if you’re struggling with the beginning portion having a guardian in your group, and asking everyone to slot condition removal skills will make it a lot less of a headache.

This seems like a good call. I ended up stuck with a pug for CoF that could not get into the instance because all 5 of us had not done story yet. None of them wanted to do the story mode, they instead wanted to break group and find people that had already run it. I have been looking for a story group for that instance for days, but no one really wants to do it because there’s very little incentive.

Take a look at this thread, in particular at Ariana’s first post as it sums up a lot rather clearly:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/A-lot-of-Necromancer-s-problems-comes-straight-from-gear/first#post457972

Well any armor that has +condition damage on it really. The common consensus is look for gear with condition damage, toughness, precision. This is based on taking traits/enhancements that 1) improve condition damage based on toughness and 2) add extra bleeds based on crits done. Overall it’s good to balance some and use common sense though. If you focus on these stats without adding any vitality for instance you will drop like a fly in any condition heavy fight.

They need server wide global chat channels for sure. This is a huge feature missing from this game that is in most MMOs. Lions arch and the particular zone for the dungeon are not where I’d like to be all the time when looking for a group, and it would be nice to be able to hit up a different zone and quest while searching.

From the POV from someone who played WoW for a long time I think the danger of a full blown match making system has more to do with the content than the community. The dungeon finder absolutely killed 5 mans for me in that game. It was nice in Wrath but the dungeons were super easy in that expansion, a chore you did for tokens. As soon as they tried to introduce content that took a shred of coordination (cataclysm) it devolved into people being the nastiest I had ever seen them in all my years playing that game. 3/4 of the groups in the dungeon finder would not work together and would drop, flame each other and otherwise considered other players a “barrier” to their 30 minutes until badges. The conversation went straight to trying to get them to tune the dungeons to make them work better for their LFG tool.

The funny part it that the heroics were actually easier than the burning crusade counterparts, but people had become used to a different system that encouraged little coordination and DEMANDED changes. Considering the dungeons in this game are really the only PVE content that requires group coordination of any sort I would not want to see the pressure on for Anet to start making these areas more friendly to random groups.

Global user created chat channels would really help this one along as it would still require some sort of initiative to engage with the people you are going to group with but you would not feel like you were pushed towards some specific zone while you were trying to find people.

Full on LFG tools (while convenient) start pushing things in a different direction for a game and not always for the better. Everyone ends up in a global pool so it is far less likely people will ever see each other again and so they tend to be far nastier and more impatient with each other as soon as something goes slightly wrong. It ends up pushing the game designers to design the content to require less coordination as they now have to balance around strangers getting through the content.

@Nepocrates
A necro can be specced for power, but condition damage is fun and viable. I did all 3 paths of AC last night and the only place condition spec poses an issue is the burrows fight. For now in events where you have to target static elements (turrets, burrows) it’s best for that person to find something else to do, like what Dibron posted above. This is short term though as Anet have said in another thread that they are working on scaling in condition for these types of items, they just have not figured out how that will be implemented.

I hit level 80 recently and 4g will get you far in the AH.
What I did was buy rares in the AH (you can get some of these pretty cheap) then did searches for superior runes:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune
Scroll down to condition damage. You can upgrade all the rares with these and I was finding that a lot of these are like 2s each. Also think about buying some of the cheaper karma trinkets off the orr vendors if you need upgrades there. This will give you the ability to have a HUGE upgrade walking into 80 and use your karma for a couple of really nice pieces that compliment well.

VendettaDFA.9368:

If you can identify and ban gold-sellers and botters then you have the capability to follow the electronic paper trail generated by the illegal tranactions and ban the gold buyers accounts as well.

This gets pretty sticky pretty quickly unfortunately. Most of the smart sellers will deliberately obfuscate the trail of money so it’s not coming from one account. They’ll use tricks like putting money into the the trading post or trading it through hacked accounts. The trail becomes not so clear at that point and becomes hard to tell who was actually involved in the transaction.

SpectacularYak.6518:

I have to admit, I never thought I’d see the day where people embraced the busywork and turned their noses up at the actual game, but here we are, I guess.

Gotta say I’ve been extremely surprised at this as well.

I love WoW, it it is a great polished game. When it came out really captured my imagination. Over the years though I’ve become very tired of keeping up with the fastest progressing players or trying to figure out how to come up with some formula for playing with my buddies who all play on different servers and different factions. I’ve ended up playing more standard multiplayer games because of it. For a lot of us I think it’s just exciting to see an MMO that is trying to spin that around and make a strong attempt to not keep us gated.

I desire more content and polish in the end game (who wouldn’t) but really for the first time feel like I can put this game down for a couple of months, wait for them to fix and add things then come back and see what’s there.

Does anyone know if there is a blog or thread that explains each stat in greater detail and how much it applies to our various spells and defenses?
Some examples of this are:
1. How much does toughness actually mitigate damage and what types of damage does it apply to?
2. Does power apply to conditions at all?
3. Do any stats get applied to our minions beyond our traits?

Do a search for them on google with gw2 in the title and click images you’ll find a bunch:
http://www.google.com/search?q=midnight+ice+dye+gw2

Corian.4068:

How do we make these players get it about Guild Wars 2?

Or can we at all?

I don’t think there is any reason to. For a lot of people this is what an MMO is all about. Most of the complaints I am seeing go something like “I got through the content and now I have to stop because there is no more interesting content to play. Giving me stat based progression would help me enjoy dull content and feel accomplished.”. To me not having any reason to do unpleasant content over and over is a perk. If you get through that many hours of playing a game and you need a developer to drip feed you statistics it’s probably time to take a break. Wait a few months for the dev team to come up with some new fresh content. This is what most folks do with single player RPGs.

The best part is that this is where the lack of level 80 stat progression really comes into play, as in 6 months time you will be able to jump back in check out what’s new with your friends and not worry about having to “catch up” or “gear grind” to get involved. The fact that they have no sub fee means that it really doesn’t hurt to just put it down for a while and pick it back up at a later date.

Just happened to me as well posting screen

Tuluum.9638:

It also seems to be a percentage of possible reward within the level range, though I dont care enough to figure out if its consistent.

This is actually the important part about it. You are correct in money scaling pretty good all the way up. It’s what happens when you go back down to play with a friend.

level 1-10 zone waypoint usage at level 1-10 is copper and rewards from quests/events are also copper.

level 1-10 zone waypoint usage at level 80 is multiple silver and rewards from quests/events are STILL copper.

This kinda encourages thoughts of “Do I want to go grind somewhere else later for the convenience of helping my friend?” or “I guess I’ll be out some silver to help out my friend.”. These don’t come up much when you’re in a level appropriate zone. Maybe it’s a good gold sink for the economy. It is also is a great way to get people to feel hesitant about grouping with their friends, especially if they are broke at the moment and want to run a dungeon later or save up for a vanity item.

I think a lot of the complaints are not directed overall at waypoint costs or ways around them but more at how they effect low level areas and getting to your friends. Yes I can use the PvP to Lions Arch gates to get to the starter zones to help my friends. My “risk vs reward” there is pay a substantial amount of silver or face 3 extra loading screens. Once I am in that zone helping my friend if he wants to zip around with waypoints his cost is copper while mine is silver yet the monetary rewards we receive from events, hearts and so on do not seem to scale to level (I will still receive copper). What this ends up meaning is that I am encouraged to go back to the high level areas and participate in activities there to get back to where I was financially. Considering they took all the time to scale our levels and add fast travel so that we would not have to deal with a time sink this seems like an oversite on anet’s part.

I think the thing we all forget is that these types of games are not new anymore. When vanilla WoW came out prolly 90% of the people playing had never touched an MMO. Everyone was learning how to play and novelty of being around other people in a persistant world made stuff so fresh. Everyone just wanted to talk and group to find out what it was all about. You mention that the social aspect dropped off at BC and I think that has a lot more to do with people getting over that initial rush and getting more focused on gear. Remember they made raid sizes smaller so that people could group easier essentially giving more people who felt locked out of the end game social club access.

Also many of the things that promoted strong social activity in vanilla WoW are now seen as tedious now by most of the MMO community. For instance you knew the good healers on the server because you had to spend an hour in LFG trying to get a run together and it was not fun to then spend an hour wiping after going through that. Raids required 40 people which did promote coordination and interaction between those folks, but you had to play a ton to keep up with that. BGs you got to know folks because you’d be sitting in your home city’s “lobby” to queue up for them so it was a good time to talk to the other people you always saw there.

To address the “time sink” over the years WoW came up with things like the dungeon finder, bg queues and small raid sizes. With those additions the community in WoW is now mostly gear driven and nasty to each other now. Everything is cross server so there’s no accountability for acting like a kitten.

Anet has done an amazing job of creating the underpinnings for social interaction under the current expectations of MMOs. You can get in an hour of gameplay and get something done WITH other people. I find that most of the random people I run across are extremely friendly in this game. I’m not being viewed as competition in the way of them completing “x activity for x reward”, so people are more inclined to stop and talk a bit if I make the effort. That to me is better than any of the other MMOs I have played over the past 5-6 years and makes me feel an experience much closer the magic in the vanilla WoW I remember.

Something does seem pretty off with how the waypoints scale in price. When I read about Guild Wars 2 they mentioned travel and way points to increase the “fun” factor and cited things in other games like having to travel real time to get to where your friends are at (via a griffon or whatever) as a timesink that ruins “fun”. Unfortunatly with the way the pricing scales we now have people using a 3 loading screen “fast travel” to a home city and a long jog to get where we want to go.

Seems like they are torn between what they initially set this up for and a fear of letting the economy get really out of control. The good part is this is a very fixable thing for them with a couple of database tweaks.