Guild Wars 2

An optimal solution from the POV of ALT players would be to have a shared bag slot. And say around double the cost of a normal bag slot would have been reasonable for that, I reckon. So this an example of the cash shop making gameplay for ALT players substantially worse than it could have been with a different implementation.

I think Arenanet should be asking: “what is the best experience we can give our players?” and then fitting the cash shop around that.

This kind of thing isn’t as bad as the worst F2P abuses and GW2 still has the best inventory of any MMO, but it is a big step in the wrong direction.

“It would be better for players, worse for ANet profits.”

I understand that Arenanet needs to make money, and am perfectly prepared to contribute, but surely upgrading your armour as you level in an MMO isn’t intended to be a painful and expensive chore and many people aren’t going to bother when they know they’ll have to repeat the process in a few levels, every time they upgrade an armour piece.

A solution that could work alongside the existing one would be to make it possible to buy the skins (or have a new permanent transmute stone) you want once and for all in the same way that you buy the outfits in the gem store. Obviously that would have to cost a bit more than using existing transmutes, but I suspect Anet would make more money if they offered that option, not less – like many players I’m very reluctant to spend gems on highly temporary things.

As it is, the system feels a bit like renting wedding clothes and since the cosmetic system has always been a core part of the game play in GW, that is annoying. Along with ending dye drops, that is two things that make leveling in the new expansion a poorer experience than it was before.

How do I use the wardrobe to maintain the same look I had before as I level? Do you have to use a transmutation charge every time you want use your old skin on a new item for a slot, even if you used it before on the previous item in that slot?

If that is the case then presumably it doesn’t make sense to maintain a particular appearance whilst levelling, since you would need to transmute every new item you equip – which seems a bit nonsensical. Wouldn’t it be better if transmute charges just unlocked skins so you can use them like the heritage skins we got from GW1?

Think someone should maybe change the title as it sounds like Arenanet have added some strange new race inspired by Dr Seuss’s stories.

Doolio.1865:

I mean, forums get flooded ONLY when something is critical and important, you won’t see two threads about “why the sword of x is blue, it needs to be green”, let alone ten.

I’m not going to mention some of the things that have lead to hysterical reactions, since I absolutely wouldn’t want to reignite those controversies. In this case, though, we all know that it’s annoying and it should be obvious that Arenanet are working on it as quickly as they can. There just isn’t anything to be gained by spamming the forums with identical complaints. Just give them time to fix the problem and then we can all move on.

@Thesaint – You need to contact support if what you say is true. We have no way of telling and many people will try to justify their actions with stories such as yours. That’s one thing that makes Arenanet’s job in eliminating bots/gold sellers harder than it looks.

@Oceanless – It’s best that the whole forums aren’t taken over with threads about bots. Especially, since nearly all the posts say pretty much the same thing with little comprehension of the real difficulties.

If you have some constructive criticisms or interesting things to discuss about the game, you will find your posts will be fine even if they are critical. But, your above post is neither constructive or likely to lead to interesting discussion, is it?

Wolfend.5287

:Transmute stones are simply a band aid for what character levels break.

I think the decision to put levels into the game (and so many!) is the root cause of most of the problems in the game. Levelling games need the sort of escalating gear grind endgame WoW has otherwise you just hit a brick wall where there is nothing relevant to do. GW2 sits rather uneasily between GW1 and WoW in design and they now need to decide which way they really want to go.

Wolfend.5287:

Similar to dynamically scaling character, crafted items should have a scaling aspect.

Then crafted items would be in even less demand because you’d never need to change your armor – essentially negating crafting almost entirely.

@Ditton – Am not saying that WoW/Lotro have great crafting systems, there were also problems with those mainly involving grind and churning out masses of useless items to level. But, they were most certainly better than GW2s system where you can’t make a single useful item that can’t be obtained more cheaply on the market. But, in LOTRO you can actually make money from crafting – not too easily, but that’s how it should be.

@ferguson “I tend to use the free portals or walk everywhere.” I do that somewhat too, but would be nice to have a few more gates like the one between Divinities Reach and Ebonhawke, particularly as then you wouldn’t have to follow the same routes so often.

Ditton.3149:

roqoco.4053:

The key to crafting is diversity. If there are too many crafters making one thing then crafted items are always going to be worth less than the materials used to make them, since all the crafters need to make them anyway to increase their crafting level. A hard problem to solve, but GW2 makes the situation even worse by having equivalents to crafted items drop in the open world and as karma rewards, which greatly exacerbates the problem.

Nah..the auction house screws that completely. The only way you can artificially limit it is to put it in a hard to find area..like you must kill lupicus to make “X” ingredient for a sword, the issue is any regular component that can be farmed will be manipulated within an inch of its life by the TP vigilantes. Im looking at you vanilla beans.

Screws what? Think I just stated one of the problems with crafting rather than offered a solution. There are some things other games try such a time limited crafting etc. but whatever way u look at it GW2s crafting is a big backwards step over say WoW/Lotro (except the fact u can craft with material in your bank – thats cool!).

@Solid Gold: “It’s about the effect the waypoint charges have on the social aspect of a game.”

Don’t think you can pin the fault on Way points. People are following the money: event chains with lots of taggable mobs, circling around ore farming routes etc. that’s why you can’t get people to do content, particularly content that is a bit more challenging than the norm – since that takes time when they could be getting more money elsewhere in less time.

The key to crafting is diversity. If there are too many crafters making one thing then crafted items are always going to be worth less than the materials used to make them, since all the crafters need to make them anyway to increase their crafting level. A hard problem to solve, but GW2 makes the situation even worse by having equivalents to crafted items drop in the open world and as karma rewards, which greatly exacerbates the problem.

Whilst I think that waypoint cost does scale up a little too much, I think the problems you are having with skillpoints, that say have a champion sitting on them, aren’t really caused by that. One problem in Orr right now is that players tend to ignore challenging events and particularly champions in favour of following routes that maximise income. That’s a problem that does need to be addressed, I reckon, but not by making things easier, I hope.

I expect a lot of people in Europe and Oceanic areas probably don’t even know what KKK stands for. In fact it took me a while to click and I could easily have used those initials without thinking of the connection with the US cult.

What they do I think is launch a new instance of the game that has been patched, but allow players to continue in the old unpatched instance until they relog or exceed the timer. Sounds simple in theory, but in practice keeping everything synced over the two running builds is a pretty cool programming feat.

fellyn.5083:

roqoco.4053:

Great post and love the sound of: “more awesome stuff to do at level 80”! Not that I doubted that Arenanet was working on all these things of course.

They’ve been saying for a while that we’ll get another big update in November on the scale of the one we got this week, or even bigger.

That being said. 10000 bots banned is a nice number. Sadly it doesn’t really show in the game. Why do you need to gather data when you can clearly see that a train of 20+ rangers all with bear pets and all running the same exact circuit are bots?

Just park a gm in the popular botting areas and it will be more than obvious within 5 minutes.

I report a lot of bots and take care not to make mistakes. However, the other day I did report someone who was running with a squad of bots and looked like a bot. 5 minutes after doing that I got an odd reply to my earlier checking whisper. Maybe the guy was a bot with a few simple replies built in, maybe he was the bot overseer (a common practice is to have an overseer multi-boxing lots of bots), but maybe that one guy was just someone who spoke no English and liked the company of bots. I don’t know. Similarly, I whispered a ranger with both a bear pet and an odd asdfassdfd type of name the other day and got a convincing reply – didn’t report that one. But, maybe some people are less careful than I try to be on who they report.

Anyway the moral of this story is that Arenanet need to be sure and have full documentation backing up any bans, because otherwise there will be very many false positives and that will cause even worse problems with aggrieved players asking to be reinstated – were they really bots … or not, Arenanet needs absolute certainty and the documentation to prove it.

Don’t worry you won’t get kicked out of a dungeon as the timer is longer for dungeons. Agree it would be nice if they gave us a bit longer than 3 minutes in the open world, but haven’t had a problem with it so far.

@selo – that’s a good consequence of a system with movement, since you can do the same as a player and it adds to the strategy needed in combat. Modern games are trying to move away from static, always hit skill spamming. It also allows for skills that are more powerful when they do connect, which increases the necessity to dodge etc..

In a game where you can attack whilst moving it doesn’t make sense to restrict targeting to some absolute range, since the target might move into range during your attack’s travel time.

Target closest enemy should do exactly that – you can’t expect the game to check your graphics setup every time you target an enemy, that’s clearly ridiculous and would be thoroughly confusing anyway.

@mimizu: “i have a massive issue with the deluge of karma merchants who sell nothing but Basil Leaf, Bell Pepper and Ginger Root, they could be recruited for this.”

.. or useless food. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this too: Trade is the main reason why towns exist in the first place and if you abstract all that out into the market & the cosmic forge then it’s very hard to see how any of the cities are going to be more than painted back drops. I do notice a few placeholders for mini games, maybe that will help a bit.

@ “i like this idea, please make a thread about it in the suggestions forum.”

Think i already suggested something like this a while ago. Arenanet must surely have considered shops though at some stage as they’re a pretty staple part of RPGs – maybe they just didn’t have the time to do them. Can’t believe they thought that tossing everything into a bucket would be a better idea.

I haven’t used the cosmic forge much, since trying it in beta, since it feels a bit like using a unix command prompt where only ten% of your commands actually do anything and anyway I don’t want to RTFM. Big turn off.

Not a great fan of the mystic forge. They could have done the same thing with a collection of shops in the major cities that specialise in certain stuff. So if you went to the sword shop you might get something like this:

Shopkeeper: “Try this nice sword … suits you sir … that’ll be 10 gold or I’ll take those 3 old swords off of you.”
.
.
etc.

That would have been simpler (for players) and given some badly needed life to the cities.

With most professions your 1 skill is spammable so you don’t waste anything by using it as a range tester. The only time I’ve had a bit of difficulty with range judgment is with the mesmer sword closing skill (3), which has a range of 600, since the other skills are melee range.

“Not to be a kitten, but I’ll believe the bot problem is being addressed when the value of dropped crafting mats starts going back up. 400-skill dropped mats shouldn’t be selling for 17c.”

Bots aren’t the only reason for the low value of crafting mats, hopefully that’s another area that will be addressed, but its part of some interrelated issues to do with the economy as a whole I reckon – for instance its already cheaper to buy many things on the market than to buy the materials needed to craft them and one wouldn’t want to exacerbate that.

The thing is that at heart GW2 is non linear exploring game. And it does that so much better than any other multiplayer game out there right now, the quality of the environments and for me interaction with them is simply on another level to previous games.

The problems in the game, I reckon, arise from compromises made to appeal to those who like a more competitive gear oriented, progressive, levelling game and these seem somewhat half hearted. Instead they should stick to their vision of making a compelling virtual world, that isn’t a gear farm, since that’s clearly where the bulk of the effort has been made – you don’t make cities such as Divinity’s reach and all those detailed events in five minutes and it’s a pity that some of the game mechanisms tend to encourage you to skip over them.

Great post and love the sound of: “more awesome stuff to do at level 80”! Not that I doubted that Arenanet was working on all these things of course.

“one of which i am shocked i came up with because it is so fiendishly clever lol”

Probably just luck, you know like when you guess one of the answers to a question on University Challenge.

Of course Arenanet are working on the problem, its just harder to resolve than it appear to be (other games have been plagued by bots for years) – so report any bots you see and try to report all the bots in a train. One thing that doesn’t help is players who follow bot trains around hoping to benefit themselves, since its easy to report them as bots by mistake; not that I’d be too sorry to see players that think this is acceptable behaviour go as well.

Awesome – tested it out this morning.

After that you can start an alt.

Well I don’t really agree, I think, at this stage they need to be able to make changes quickly when they see something that is a potential exploit.

One thing that would be nice would be a developer diary type blog that summarises what is going on, on a weekly or so basis, and I liked those state of the game posts that give an indication of changes and what’s changing.

Nerfs are always a tricky thing, noone really likes them, but they have to be done for the long term good of the game; a bit like bad tasting medicine.

On your first character the story takes you, for the most part, through areas that you might wish to visit anyway. But, you don’t have to do it that way you can go where you want.

I think the gameplay works best if you play through the content slowly just exploring areas rather than trying to achieve anything special. Many of the players who are getting frustrated are those who play PvE in MMOs as a competition to get the best gear as fast as possible. They power levelled to level cap and then found that there isn’t really so much to do in PvE after that.

It takes time to ramp up customer support and the number of issues this close to launch is likely to be much higher than it is when the game settles in. In any case I’ve seen a lot less offensive names in Guild Wars 2 than in many other more established games.

Recently, I needed to contact support with a minor issue and they were very responsive, friendly and fixed my problem extremely quickly.

krojack.4920:

mokaiba.4169:

19 * 3 = 57 silver minus (max travel cost —> 10 silver) = 47 silver profit for little work.

Ummm, 1 node = 3 ore.

(19 * 3) * 3 = 171 silver or 1 gold 71 silver.

Not sure what calculations you guys are trying to do but ori sells for just over 3 silver on the market ATM, so if you get 3 from a node that’s about 10silver for the node. Not quite sure what point that would prove tho, unless you want to farm on some waypoint that has a node/s next to it.

You begin to appreciate why the discovery of the scientific method was the greatest advance that mankind has made, when you read threads filled with anecdote on the effect of magic find in GW2.

Not a great fan of the mystic forge. Seems like an over complicated way to do something that would be better done by having some shops and that would breath some life into the cities in the game.

Corian.4068:

Thank you. I keep trying to tell people that they’re playing this game with the wrong mindset. I dunno, I think they just want a new treadmill to run on, rather than an actual video game to play.

You’re right, I reckon. But Guild Wars 2 design is a bit schizophrenic, because although the most enjoyable way to play it is probably to just explore, do the content and not worry about levels there are incentives in the game to level fast and farm for rewards. Sometimes the design feels a bit as if one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing.

Two part names are easy to create. If u want a good 1 part name try: http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/. Also olde English such as Chaucer is a good source for names.

He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.

Watch your health, equip an escape (swiftness buff, condition removal) get the kitten out of there when your health drops under 50%.

1) I haven’t played a necro, but find that the combat system remains fun throughout the game on other professions as long as you seek out a challenge – otherwise you can get away with just spamming your first weapon skill. Really the movement and evasion is a lot of fun.

2) The community is a bit private, but you do get those moments when you just naturally play together with people. That’s a really good part of the design, I think.

3) There isn’t an endgame – best to start an alt, IMOP, since you can’t do all the content on one character without overlevelling everything. Maybe though they’ll add some new content some time at level cap or make it more fun to do existing content.

4) The open world PvE, events and the detail that has been put into them are great. I like least the levelling system and the reward systems which I think are responsible for pushing people out of the top of the game, where there is no more content, whilst leaving masses of good unplayed content at lower levels unplayed.

@Gaslov – Your comments have nothing to do with the topics. White Knights are just as destructive to discussion as unreasoned haters are. If you disagree with a point made by the op, just state your grounds of disagreement in a polite way. That’s what discussions are all about and this is a discussion forum. You may think that you are being helpful, but in reality you are just trying to kill discussion that doesn’t agree with your point of view and push the thread towards a flame war.

“Those of us who have been around awhile have grown tired of these types of posts.” surely summarises your real intentions. Just accept that disccusions don’t need your seal of approval or to reflect your POV.

Agree with a lot of the points you make, certainly in the first post. I don’t think combat sucks and like the new movement ideas. Also I think the open world PvE areas are largely excellent.

What it comes down to for me is that I don’t think Arenanet really designed much of the game within their own comfort zone, but rather were trying to second guess what compromises they would have to make to attract the WoW/casual crowd. Almost all the problems that I see in the game design (crafting, itemisation, drops, difficulty, levels etc) seem to arise in areas that are directly derived from mainstream MMOs, rather than being thought out to fit into the game.

captaincrunch.6731:

Perhaps they should simply make zone=>zone teleports cost a higher amount and intrazone teleports rather inexpensive (like less than 50c or so each).

I wouldn’t mind if it still cost me 4 or 5s to get from Cursed Shore to Frostgorge if, once I’m in Frostgorge, I could get around the map without spending another 5 or more silver on waypoints.

I think a better idea would be to have a few more Asura Gates. For instance I have no problem going to somewhere like Ebonhawke, since you can take the gate from Divinity’s Reach.

The reason it wasn’t implemented immediately is that the market is actually a separate system from the main game code and so there are some issues in passing information between them. Not something that’s unresolvable just more work. That’s a paraphrase from memory of what the devs said during the AMA on reddit.

Terok.7315:

I have two geared level 80’s, working on a third. I honestly can’t understand the negativity towards end-game.

The negativity towards endgame is that there simply isn’t one unless you either like to farm/grind endlessly or you enjoy going back to do content for which you are vastly overpowered and where the drops and rewards are no longer relevant. It’s as simple as that.

One thing we do share though, is alts. For me, making multiple alts is the only viable way of getting enjoyment out of all the content that there is right now – and really there’s a lot of it! and its probably the best, most detailed content yet in any game, not to mention dynamic events (when they work).

So alting is OK for now, but I’d really love my first toon to be able to do everything in the game and am waiting to see if Arenanet come up with any better ideas for that (better downscaling, hard modes etc).

I think the PvE content and the freedom to explore in it is easily the best thing in the game and more than makes up for other systems, which need some revision. So if you don’t enjoy doing that and don’t like WvW/sPvP then I’m not sure there’s a lot in the game for you. In the end PvE = content and when you have had your fill of the content then that’s it.

Agemnon.4608:

Both accounts would have the same IP though.

Is easy to change your IP.

Better not to turn this into another botting thread. Constantly repeating the same prescriptions just isn’t useful and if you do have some unique angle on the problem (unlikely), send a PM to support.

“You’re right, 500% isn’t right at all. It’s actually 600%
This can all be verified easily by searching google. It is very real.”

I’m not saying it’s false just that it’s unsubstantiated. I did what you suggested and see that many people are making a bunch of different claims in order to sell their exploits. What’s true or not true in this shady world of hacking isn’t so easy to sort out: At some stage in the looting process you have to hit server side code, I reckon (it can’t all be done on the client !?) and one might imagine that it would be a good idea to put some checks in there for this kind of thing.

The 500% magic find is an unsubstantiated rumour and the author of that article doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in technical understanding of how bots and other exploits are done: you can go over to reddit, there’s a long thread about his article there.

So before QQ it’s a good idea to know whether it’s true or not. Of course many do think that magic find (at any %!) is a poor mechanism that encourages bots, other exploits and intensive farming oriented playstyle in preference to other ways of playing the game; that has been discussed, in some detail, on this forum here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-Magic-Find-is-a-Poor-Mechanism/first.