Guild Wars 2

The less armor and content issue is one of my favorites tbh. Once upon a time anet made their money by creating and selling large blocks of rewardingly replayable content with short production times.

Had they spent more effort and design on ensuring they could continue that model, we probably wouldn’t have the issues of small content, grind, and unsatisfying rewards that we do now as all of that is a result of their reliance on gems for revenue. I wish I could have seen that GW2.

I love it. Open world feels like a video game now instead of a participation trophy queue.

Every time someone brings this up, I love how people get so completely offended that someone in the world doesn’t want to play with them and automatically start insulting and degrading them for not being social.

There are plenty of reasons for someone to want to do some solo content in an MMO and most games recognize and support it. Even GW2 does, because Anet understands that. But it has a couple of issues:

• Most things you can do without a group are either not engaging, or not rewarding (or both.)
• The exception to this, going solo in content designed for groups, is is not something most people can do, it is tedious because of the large hp pools, and you’re locked out of many paths because of group check mechanics.

If you want to make dungeons less popular, please redesign the group mechanics for solo play as well so we don’t have to wait hours trying to fill a group.

TBH, the Mursaat could be related in some way. Mursaat, Seers, Dwarves, and the Elder Dragons were already on Tyria before Humans, and possibly even the Gods that brought them.

Just as the Seers devised ways to combat the Mursaat, all three would have had to find ways to protect themselves from the dragon cycle. It’s not impossible that Glint would have used knowledge from all of them in her preparations.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

risa.1382:

DX12 hype is just there to get you into Windows 10 so Microsoft can sell everything you do and type to marketers and… others.

and this is different from EVERY other search engine/OS/company on the planet how?

yea its got issues… so does everything else and If you think for a second that its the only one doing this or that you can somehow “shield” yourself from it happening to you, you are living a false dream my friend. all it takes is one person…. one person at any company anywhere in any OS etc to free all your data to whoever they want to with or without your knowledge or consent. and 99999.9999999/100000 times, you wont know they did it. then there are hackers that break into everywhere you shop online or in the real world… all it takes is one and your info is out there….

now…. quit hating on the new OS cuz its the mindless popular thing to do… they are all bad and all have flaws, get over it.

Not every search engine and OS does it. And just because others do, doesn’t make it right. I swear every time I see that argument, I just see lemmings walking over a cliff one by one.

There are in fact plenty of ways to protect yourself, they’re just beyond people who are willing to give up because “well everyone else is doing it so whatever…”

DX12 hype is just there to get you into Windows 10 so Microsoft can sell everything you do and type to marketers and… others.

The article was pretty specific about them being humans as early as 300 years ago.

I got a vision crystal on a beta character…
Opening chests is just automatic, what a waste.

They have a very strong habit of forgetting things they learned in GW. Or should have learned.

Gear stats shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place. That’s the only way you’ll get away from having a strict stat meta.

Making zerk unviable via content design or stat effects will just make some other set the most efficient, and nothing will change but the name.

There’s a reason most people have to go out of their way to get to a legal casino. Not everyone can be responsible in the face of an addiction, which is why these boxes exist. To prey on the people who are easily hit by it and will drop hundreds of dollars in minutes, regardless of whether or not they can afford it.

Are you kidding? Gambling boxes are NEVER the right direction. Profitable maybe… but so not right…

And then 99% of them are so poorly fitted that you can fit two of your characters inside.

When the Monk outfit came out I almost reflex bought it just because it was one of like 4 bottoms that didn’t have a crinoline. And then they fixed my wrongheaded desire to give them money by putting the crinoline in…

I don’t think they thought this through at all. Now legitimate players are going to get trolled out of their keys.

• You can very easily go through 2 of the story steps that reward keys in less than a week. It’s even possible to go through all 3 in a week for hardcore players.
• Some people don’t do story steps as they come up, instead either saving them and doing them in a large bunch or from having leveled via tomes.

And I seriously doubt anybody will even notice an increase in drop rates. I’ve gotten maybe 2 or 3 keys since headstart, and none since around a year after launch. I’m really not expecting to see one anytime soon.

How about we just admit that gambling boxes for real money are exploitive, and stop doing it altogether.

Not everyone on the internet is capable of expressing themselves through logic and language effectively or succinctly. In fact, most people aren’t regardless of the medium. It becomes harder to truly comprehend a person the more you focus on these things.

This is a good example, by focusing on the treadmill semantics you miss, marginalize, and/or obfuscate the core of many players frustrations with the relevant portion of GW2’s direction.

It takes almost no context or logic to realize that people complaining about treadmills are simply expressing their dissatisfaction with increasing the pressure on them to stat grind, which is not an expectation they, rightfully IMO, had for GW2.

I won’t buy promises. Selling a foundation for future change is just that. Some people are throwing around numbers equaling the cost of an entire game, or GW1 campaigns which rivaled the amount of content in the original release.

I’ll buy it or not buy it based on its price → content ratio. I of course won’t make that judgement until I see its entirety released and picked apart, but what I’ve seen so far wouldn’t have me pay more than 5 or 10 dollars.

This is largely due to my experience with the core game and its post-release development. For example the Living Story’s focus on creating a small bit of content with large time sinks to keep you zerging that same content over and over again got old for me very fast. I wouldn’t pay for more of that. And yet from what I’ve heard they seem to have little interest in creating other kinds of content.

There are weapons and trait lines that I never touch as it stands, it would feel like gambling to just buy it and then hope the new additions are better or more fun than the builds I’m already pigeonholed into. Or that I wouldn’t be pigeonholed into them.

That is also one example of major issues that have gone unresolved since release. Sometimes even issues that affect core profession mechanics such as pets, minions, and other summons. If I mained ranger I would have shutdown my hypeoid gland the instant I saw their new subclass would still have a pet with no evidence that Anet had any inclination to fix their issues.

And let’s not forget that part of the core design is the monetization of the economy, nay, nearly every aspect of the game. That’s the foundation that was supposed to enable constant content creation without having to sell expansions. So now we’re in a situation where all of the things that I don’t like about having gems→gold I still have to put up with in addition to having to buy the new content…

So yeah, all of these things work against any desire I might have to buy an expansion. Well that and seeing other high quality F2P games regularly releasing the same if not more for free. The actual content would need to be large, diverse, and rewarding for me to spend more than a few dollars. Simply “keeping up” doesn’t hold sway with me anymore.

My advice to people starting GW1 is really simple:

• Play through all of the campaigns first. Stick to one at a time but do unlock the main city in every campaign as soon as you can for the skills and heroes available there. Wiki the missions and plan/build according to what you’ll face.
• Try to get the bonus for every mission, even if it means trying more than once.
• Don’t worry about meta builds yet. You’ll learn more, and you don’t have access to the skills they need anyway.
• Don’t be afraid to control or at least watch your hero skill bars.
• Wiki every word you come across in game or in chat.
• Hexes, Conditions, Enchantments, Protection Prayers, Tanking, Zaishen Challenge Quests, Nicholas the Traveler, Skill Quests, Attribute Quests, Collectors.

I would start with a Prophecies character, the difficulty goes up more slowly and it works well as a tutorial campaign, including having the most quests that reward skills for free. Do everything you can in pre-searing.

By the time you finish all of the campaigns you will know much more about the game and be better prepared to chase those later achievements. Enjoy the journey!

P.S. All skills you unlock on any character will be available for all of your heroes on your account (and for characters in pvp, or pve by spending tomes.) For instance, you can make temporary characters in Factions and do their tutorial skill quests and then put those skills on your main’s heroes before you can switch secondary professions.

While I much prefer GW1’s expansion method over this gem store and economy based gaming, I doubt LS releases would ever be worth paying for, or that it would do anything to change the gems and gems → gold centered development.

It might have turned out to not be interesting to me, but what bothered me was having to go to a 3rd party site where I had to watch commercials before watching what I was there to watch.

Sadly they’ve already decided to nerf the already meager coin rewards from events in the upcoming patch, so I don’t think Anet will agree with your idea at all.

I agree that we need better rewards for these things, but I think it would be better to suggest more tangible rewards than coin.

I remember a long time ago they added a bunch of new events and were happy to announce it because a lot of us were asking for it. However there was almost no feedback on the new content and Anet figured it meant nobody really cared and they should not bother adding any more.

Of course the real problem was that these things were and still are the least rewarding content in a game focused on grinding rewards.

I really don’t see why we have to have one piece costumes. Everything else is fine, just let the costume system keep its multiple slots, it satisfies all of the complaints. If you don’t want people running around in undies with stats, that’s where you put “default” clothing.

I’m going to miss being able to easily put skins I like on lowbies. For 80’s it’s great but customizing while leveling is going to be too expensive unless they make transmuting <80 things free.

But they don’t like alts, why would I want to spend any effort leveling another one, much less getting gear for it?

Leveling is fast compared to the grind for max gear.

If they nerf key farming they would not increase the drop rates because of gold → gems. Also because the whole purpose of RNG boxes is to get as much money as possible from people by tickling the gambling addiction nerve with little chance of getting something good.

My concerns are based on how they are acquired. How much they will cost in gold or effort and if they are RNG.

Unlocking skills for gold worked in GW because they were the primary progression. Max gear was easily obtained, even 40/40’s that could cost a bit had easy avenues of acquisition via content rewards. Here the gear grind is already ridiculous and adding more gold costs to progression worries me.

This might not be an issue depending on how we obtain trait guides. For instance, if they are purchasable via dungeon vendors for a reasonable amount of the appropriate tokens. However if they’re RNG based or the cost/effort to obtain them is large I’ll just see it as a move to “encourage” gems->gold, like what we know so far of the changes to pvp rewards and progression can easily be seen as a move to overly monetize pvp progression.

Considering it purely as a method to increase horizontal progression however, I like it. It’s not as good as new unlockable weapon skills and it seems new additions will come slowly, but it’s something. There is also still the issue that the horizontal progression is locked behind the gear grind needed to support some different builds.

It’s not very complicated. If you want people to learn how to play then make the focus for new content solo and group. Nobody is going to learn how to play when they have 150 other people to carry them.

1 Guardian and 4 RoJ Monks.

Good catch, I knew that Gnashblade was up to no good. I’m glad I supported Kiel.

At least you can refine luck with level 0 Artificer. Would be nice if we could refine bags like that.

Tken.1986:

Difficult part:
It’s not really possible to take down any knight at all if there are less than 30 people fighting, which happens all the time in OF’s.

Because most people are ranging and auto-attacking.

Killing her was… not engaging. Like really? The death of public enemy #1 is me walking up to her and pressing my activate button? And what happened to the 50 people I was just with? I might not like zerg fights and I was certainly happy to be out of it but that made no sense and killed whatever immersion might have been there.

Pls for more solo challenge.

It’s not that people can’t do enough DPS for these things, it’s that they refuse to.

They get hit or downed once in melee and rather than learning when it’s safe to melee they range 100% of the time.

Even if you explain about the condition mechanics before the fight people will still be spamming condition fields, I especially love getting chain blinded from someone’s smoke field.

Tell them that the boss takes extra damage when its condition shield is off and to save Time Warps and such for those periods… and you’ll see Time Warps when its shield is up, and none when it’s down.

People turn their brains off in zergs. Likely because their contribution matters little if at all, or they learned how to play the game in Champ trains. You can get anything you want in this game by zerging, and the majority do. They will never get the oppurtunity to learn how to play as long as the primary focus remains on zerg content because there is absolutely no indication of your personal performance in them. And of course since you personally cannot visibly affect the outcome why even try. You might as well turn off and just wait to see if the zerg knows what it’s doing this time (it doesn’t.)

I don’t blame people for being dumb. I blame the content that forces me to rely on them. And I blame the game design that tells them it’s ok not to learn, these other 100 people will carry you.

Usually it’s a pet or something that gets munched when I try.

I’ve already seen people saying “why go help the other two if we won’t get extra loot.” Please stop the zerg content, these are the attitudes that my own success and enjoyment depend on at these things…

I broke my mouse +1’ing you repeatedly, hoping they’d all magically count.

All of this zerk elitists scaring away casuals is balogna. I have never not once seen someone kicked for not being in zerk or even asked if they were outside of friendly conversation. The only groups you could ever expect to see it from were the ones that advertise specifically for zerks, and they are perfectly avoidable while still doing the very same dungeons.

As for metrics, I’m sure anet is smart enough to realize that just because someone isn’t playing something doesn’t mean that they don’t want to play that type of content, there are plenty of meaningful reasons why someone would not be playing in a dungeon such as difficulty, quality of rewards, lack of variety, time required, or just being caught up in daily/LS chores. Those are far more likely culprits in “scaring away casuals” btw.

It’s definitely not a tactic that should be repeated in zerg content. Whether or not you have skills without condition damage as a condition user does not matter. You are forced to take a huge hit in effectiveness where others do not. On second thought, just being a condition user in zerg content already forces you to take a huge hit in effectiveness, nothing new here…

But for the rest of us at least maybe we can be saved from people who don’t know, don’t care, or would like to abuse it when we’re forced to shoot through condition fields or stand next to condition sharers.

Stop trying to get off stomps through her shield. When the fight starts run up to her attacking her and avoiding her grenades until she says that you can’t get through her shield. Then wait around the corner next to her until Kas says that she’ll distract her. When scarlet attacks in this stage her shield will drop, attack her (using ranged makes it easy) when it drops and she’ll get stunned more than long enough for you to stomp her. She’ll say something like “it wasn’t supposed to be like this” when she’s ready to be stomped. Maybe she says something else I don’t pay attention to her. You don’t need any class specific trick.

I don’t want quests but I do want more content in the high quality personal story format.

What disappointed me about the HoM was… well, how many people do you see using those skins? Most of them were badly done. It doesn’t even feel worth the effort for 30/50. Not that I want torment skins for my HoM.

mrstealth.6701:

There is some truth in that, I think the general point is right. I’ve always believed that Nexon’s influence was all over the insane amounts of monetization GW2 has. But there are a lot of factual errors and incorrect assumptions, mainly regarding ascended gear. You can’t buy it off the TP, but you can buy your way around the primary timegates (Deldrimor steel, damask, Elonian leather). You’re still stuck gathering up quite a bit of other bound items, but none of it is timegated.

The pay2win argument doesn’t really hold up well. You can pay to get something faster/sooner, which is p2w in a temporary and minor way. But you can’t pay to get anything exclusive that improves your character…at least not outside of the temporary armor/strenght/regen/speed boosts available from BL chests. I think those items are more p2w than using gems>gold to get ascended (or even exotic) gear faster.

The issue there is that they deliberately made the ascended grind so ridiculous to make you feel like spending money on gems is a good idea. The vision crystal part is not hard at all, the rest you can buy and those are the extremely grindy parts. It’s the difference between a game that is designed to be a great game for players and a game that is designed to make you feel like you need to spend money. One is making a great game and the other is exploiting your players, you can’t do both.

But on topic I was also very let down, not because they’re cash shop skins but like others because they’re BLC items. I wish people would stop calling it RNG and call it what it is, gambling.

There might have been one piece of silver lining in there, being that these skins don’t hold a candle to the quality of the originals. But then I realized that I’m even more insulted from them thinking they could use my love of GW1 to make me gamble on these things without even putting in the effort to get them right.

If you’re getting loot from just walking up to the boss and hitting it a few times solo then there aren’t enough people to hit the loot limit. If you’re not getting loot despite being in a party and being full zerker or w/e then you or your party are still not in the top X percent.

Individuals in a group can get loot while the group does not because their personal dps is in the top whichever percentile. Group damage is likely averaged and if that average is higher than your individual damage then you get the groups average counted as your damage for loot purposes.

A lot of people seem to think just wearing zerk armor means you’re doing a lot of damage, but then you see those same people standing back auto attacking with guardian sceptre and then wondering why they’re not getting loot. If you want to regularly place in the damage competition you or your groupmates need to be doing melee or your classes version of melee, especially during burn phases.

Not that I’m saying it’s a good thing, GW2 was of course pushed as being non-competitive everyone gets their shinies. But keep these things in mind and maybe you can get loot from the LZ more regularly.

Happy she’s dead and we’re back to dragons. Her final cinematic was great, but the last fight felt like just walking in and collecting my “reward”.

I miss feeling rewarded… the last time I did BFLA I got my choice of weapon from the entirely new Oppressor’s weapon set. I could then continue doing the (permanent) War in Kryta content to earn the rest of the set. I also felt legitimately challenged doing so making it even more rewarding. Tired of all the good things coming from farming gold in such boring ways or playing a slot machine.

Kasjory win some of the internets, mostly for what it means being normal, but I’m sad their story couldn’t be told in a more complete way, with a quest line of the same quality and depth as the personal story. Some people are saying their relationship is shallow, I choose to believe it’s just that we haven’t been there for more than a small part of its development. I also really wanted to be shocked and impressed by Kas’s PO’d Mesmer magic, I tried to be, but I just couldn’t.

Brox. She’d better get in now, sometimes the hardest choice is not to fight. And one day, he’ll be big and strong and not slow down for a little broken leg, I expect more from a Norn!

Zergs are boring. I get that the concept of so many people playing together to achieve a goal is really nice, but in practice they’re just boring to play. And I don’t like it when my success is tied to 100 other people not being dumb or selfish. It’s tiring having so much new content follow this form. If the old elite areas ever return, I hope they’re instanced and not more of the same.

Torment weapons lost something in translation.

• Rewarding and challenging gameplay that doesn’t require a group or a zerg
• Rewarding and challenging gameplay that doesn’t require a group or a zerg
• Fit and polish on all armors

Paulytnz.7619:

If it had the same ugly slums that Cantha did on GW1 – NO TY!

You don’t like giant flows of poopy water cascading over your head while you fight ninja turtles?

bravoart.5308:

More work, less reward.

This and zergs are boring after 2 minutes for me.

You can use two windows accounts, using the switch user option in the log off menu to go back and forth. It’s probably the simplest way. You’ll want to disable password logins to speed it up.

I don’t understand how people think insurance companies are greedy. So what if they deny people coverage in their time of need, they have to make money somehow right? How can you expect them to make record profits year after year if they give it all away to sick people!

And preying on gambling addiction is no more ethical…

I like working things out for myself too. I rarely go to Dulfy outside of Guild Missions. I didn’t even go to her to get my Mini Liadri.

But I am glad she’s there, because there are a lot of people who need to follow the instructions, and they are very unpleasant to be around when there are no instructions to follow. Or less humorously, it’s nice to you know, help people that ask for it. That’s what typing in her URL or clicking the bookmark is, a person asking for help.

And here’s yall, saying they should be denied help because of no good reason. Because of the fallacy in believing that nobody will ever help someone else in map chat with content they did without a guide. Because guides kill communities and make you grind content. No the community kills communities, usually by being overfilled with selfishness. And grindy content is designed by the developers.

I can’t imagine that anybody could seriously believe the arguments against guides being released with content (which is something that’s been done since… Nintendo.) So I really just have to go with all of this hate being caused by base jealousy. You see her as getting preferential treatment and if you can’t get it too, then neither should she.