Guild Wars 2

Potential timing issue/s:

1) The patch notes indicate that Fire Shaman is supposed to be part of the boss rotation, but he is not part of the schedule posted by Colin and Anthony on April 2 . Normally I’d just assume the table was out of date, except for:

2) The patch notes indicate that Tequatl should have spawned this evening at 20:00 PDT = 8:00 PM PDT = 11:00 PM EDT. Instead, he spawned at 10:00 PM EDT, as the aforementioned schedule posted on April 2 said he would.

Hey, yet another post from me about trait unlocks!

I really like the idea of using heart vendors to help fix quest-based trait unlocks.

• Leverages an existing mechanic instead of having to code a new one: reduces time and expense, hopefully to a level where we can see quick changes.
• Still encourages exploration if the heart vendors used are spread across the world, and preferentially chosen in parts of zones that traditionally people don’t level in.
• Adept trait books could be available from level-appropriate heart vendors, costing only karma once the player completes the vendor’s task (like other heart vendor items). The level of these heart vendors should be spread out, so that some traits can be unlocked immediately (at 30) and others won’t be available until higher level (max vendor level should be ~55).
• Master trait guides are supposed to require more effort than Adept ones, so maybe they could be spread out over several heart vendors. For example, to get a single Master guide you may have to complete tasks for 3 different heart vendors in different zones, buy a piece from each vendor with karma, and then combine the pieces (via existing double-click mechanic) to get the actual guide. The heart vendors could be of pretty much any level (max ~75).
• Grandmaster trait guides should be the exception to this change, being far too valuable to put on heart vendors. Here we rely on the new system, but now we have more options. There are currently 15 grandmaster traits per class, and there are currently 65 trait unlock quests. Pick 15 of the best unlock quests (see next bullet) and assign those to the grandmaster trait slots.
• “The best” = Quests that require a group to complete (at least 2 people, no more than 5) and which represent a cross-section of the entirety of the desired GW2 experience. Since the character has to be level 80 to use the guide, these quests can be of any level and be anywhere: Orr, dungeons, WvW, …
• The code for the 50 removed quests should be saved for some future use, of course… perhaps someday we can have class-specific or even trait-specific trait unlocks, and some of these might come into play then.

Thanks to whoever posted first about using heart vendors, and thanks for listening.

P.S. I just realized that I am posting the most about traits, one of the few things in the patch which does not affect me (lv 80 in each class). Which just goes to show that I’m posting because I care about the game, not because I have any personal stake in this. Yay me!

The wintersday achievement festive imbiber requires a more than reasonable number of drinks. I say this from two viewpoints: in absolute terms and in relative terms.

In absolute terms, 10,000 wintersday drinks means opening far more than 10,000 presents. That’s a really big number for a limited-time event. Maybe the designers were thinking that a casual gamer could make it up the difference by buying the additional drinks needed on the TP? See relative terms, below.

In relative terms, it -should- in theory be almost as easy to complete the wintersday drinks achievement as the one for eating candy canes. For every X presents opened, you get about 3 drinks and 1 candy cane. But the market has determined differently:

10,000 wday drinks @ >7s = over 700 g
2,500 candy canes @ <3s = less than 75g

I know people who are selling precursors just to have enough money to get festive imbiber. That’s too much.

It honestly wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t one of the achievements required for the winter shoulder collection, but it is, so it is.

Please consider lowering the number of wintersday drinks required for the achievement. I don’t see another way to make this okay.

Thank you. And Happy Wintersday.

P.S. On a positive note: to whoever designed the wintersday drinks to have the ‘consume all’ option, you are awesome.

Feedback about patch changes to traits:

- Trait Unlocking -

• Having the ability to unlock traits through quests and exploration = Awesome. This makes the game feel more like a RPG -and- it shows that you listen to player feedback.
• I suggest that a single trait at each level of each tree should be auto-unlocked, so that the players can feel that they’ve progressed as soon as the trait slot becomes available. You could pick a default or (my favorite) have the choice made randomly when the slot becomes unlocked.
• Adept tier trait unlocks should be soloable by a relatively new player, wearing gear procured through semi-random means (common-uncommon quality), some of which may even be level-inappropriate. These are introductory traits, and should be unlockable with some effort, regardless of skill.
• Master tier trait quests should be doable by a semi-experienced player in level-appropriate gear (uncommon+masterwork quality), maybe requiring two such players for the hardest of them. Even the hardest of these unlocks should be soloable by a highly experienced player who is well-geared (masterwork quality, maybe some rare). Many players (especially casual players) do not wish to group until they have reached max level, and that should be supported as far as reasonably possible.
• Grandmaster tier trait unlocks should be possible with at most a 5-person party of experienced players whom are well-geared (level-appropriate rares, maybe some exotics). Something fundamental like a trait unlock should absolutely not require you to do anything that requires multiple groups of other players, such as kill a world boss. The core parts of this game were designed to be done by 1 to 5 people, and it should stay that way.

- Trait points per level -

• a.k.a. The “you-only-progress-every-X-levels” system
• First off, I recognize that we may be missing vital information about why traits were changed like this. An example:
  [ Pretty much everything critical about a character’s power now only goes up every 5-6 levels (gear has always basically followed this jump model). What if the level cap is being dropped to 20 (like in GW1)? Divide level by X, and bam …]
• If I’m wrong, and we’re not missing some viewpoint-changing information, then the trait progression rescaling is an inconceivably awful move; the idea of incremental progression is absolutely critical to game design, and removing that without reason is… well, I’ll stick with inconceivable. Not much else I can say, you already know the problems with this system… and if you didn’t before, theres 8+ pages of people who’ve listed them already.

- Other -

• Free instant-anywhere trait resets: Superb. Makes the endgame far more fluid and fun.
• Adding new traits: Excellent. Please continue to do this at all levels. Horizontal progression FTW.

Whenever the devs get back, if any of you pay attention to this, thank you for reading.

If this has already been mentioned, then consider this my support for whomever argued the case best:

Please make the shared inventory slots able to be moved around just like a bag. Having it on top completely ruins my bag scheme. Even having it on the bottom would be better – although best would be able to place it between my regular bag slots and safe/invisible ones, as a marker between the two types when I hide bags.

Additional feedback about traits:

1) Please spread out the trait points. You -need- incremental character progression, otherwise levelling is awful. I’m not going into my usual level of detail because others have already covered what “awful” means. Just adding my vote to the pile.

2) Quest-based trait unlocks were designed to make world exploration integral to character development. Right now each class has the exact same unlock quests.

• After the first character, the unlocks no longer serve to encourage exploration.
• I have one character of each class, and its not fun to do the same quest 8 times.
• Previously this post requested that each class get different unlock quests. I have edited this out because the unlock system has serious problems that need fixing before we can even consider improving it. Details can be found in my other posts.

Wow, I did a short post. Is the world ending?

Post-post edit: lol. I posted this in the wrong feedback thread. Still works here, so I’m leaving it, but still (/em shakes head at self). All the comments about RP do make a lot more sense now :P

To RP peoples: Jeez. Didn’t even consider how hard this would be hitting you. You have my sincere sympathy, for whatever thats worth (not much probably).

Why the devs aren’t responding

• Many of the devs, including most of the forum posters and many of the coders, are on break until early next week (No, I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m like 90+% sure based on a whole load of evidence).
• The only devs reading our responses are the ones whose job is to keep the threads in order and pull information to present to the rest of the devs. It’s not their job to talk to us, they’re not trained for it, and so they’re not talking. (P.S. By the way, good job. No sarcasm.)
• Semi-related: Bumping does no good – CS agents in pretty much every company are trained to purposely weight their response to not reward it. Bumps only help your post get seen by more players, not by more devs.
• It’s not that ArenaNet does’t care (I assume). It’s that the devs who can fix things and/or talk to us about fixing things simply aren’t here right now.

The Megaserver system isn’t going away

• Decisions like redoing the entire server architecture are made at the highest level of a company, and there is a massive amount of corporate inertia you have to reverse to undo them. The only way they’d undo the Megaserver change would be if they were absolutely convinced they were going to lose a big chunk of their player base… which they aren’t if they respond appropriately on their return.
• I’m not saying don’t complain about the Megaserver, complaints about it = awesome, it shows where the problems are, and motivates change. But posts requesting or demanding it be “undone” are not going to be heeded. Spend your effort on a more useful endeavor, like giving more specific feedback, and/or making suggestions for improvement.
• I’m seeing lots of people getting upset enough to quit the game, here and in my own play circles. Please be patient, at least for a couple days. We players have submitted many dozens of well-thought-out ideas, ways to make the Megaserver a workable solution instead of the mess it is now. We just have to wait now, until we see the response.

Use emotion effectively in feedback

• “ANet” is being used almost like a curse word by a lot of users on these forums right now (way more so than usual). Consider how a local businessman would react if people talked about his business this way while inside his shop. Now extend that- how do you think ANet reps are going to feel about helping players when thats the attitude they’re facing?
• Please note that I’m not saying anger isn’t justified. For a lot of people right now it is. But anger solves nothing without calm to focus it. Like a laser.

To ANet devs:

• Dropping several game-changing features then disappearing for a week may not be the best move. Something to consider for the next post-Living Story drop :/
• Also, you may want to rethink dropping several game-changing features all at once, regardless. Makes it very difficult to get a good feel of each individual change, which is integral to troubleshooting in any form. Consider some form of spreading next time.

Regarding basic town clothes:

• Every character used to have a set of casual clothes available to them from the instant of creation: free, dyeable, and without using an inventory space. This is no longer true, since tonics are not dyeable and they use an inventory space.
• I understand that in this new system, the basic town clothes just don’t fit in their previous form, and that they had to be changed to armor skins or outfits or tonics.
• Someone posted here that the reason they were turned into tonics instead of armor skins or an outfit is that it would take far longer than its worth to code them as individual items in the new system, using as their argument how long it takes to make a brand new set of armor skins.
• I do not accept such reasoning. They were already coded as individual items, dyeable and all.
• Please, make outfits from the original town clothes that used to be auto-equipped on every new character. Use the same skins as before, just link the dye channels. If this is not possible, please explain why.

Regarding communication:

• You have thousands of posts here and in the other patch feedback threads. Of course some of them are from trolls or from people who won’t be pleased no matter what you do. But many of them are from understanding and intelligent long-term players who legitimately want to work with you to make this game better.
• If you do something that makes the game less enjoyable for the players, you need to explain why. If you don’t explain, the natural assumption is that it’s because your explanation would show you in a bad light. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there are hundreds of posts in these feedback threads saying that changes in this patch were made due to laziness, or greed, or because ANet doesn’t care about their players, or whatever. Explanations would alleviate a lot of concerns.
• I personally try to assume the best, to believe that decisions at ANet are made by people who care about the player population and are willing to work hard to make the game better … but every time a change is made that negatively impacts me as a player without a corresponding explanation of why, it becomes more difficult to take a positive viewpoint.

Anyway. Thanks for listening.

More trait unlock feedback and suggestions…

Please remove the skill point requirements for trait unlocks:

• The gold cost alone is incentive enough to use the unlock system. Additional costs of any sort are unnecessary.
• Traits and skills are separate advancement tracks. There should be no connection between them, and definitely not one as significant as this.
• During levelling, skill points are already in short supply, especially if a character follows the recommended levelling system of doing zone completions.

Comments on the trait unlock quests:

• Making trait unlock quests different for each class would be a good change, but it would take a lot of dev-hours to implement, and therefore shouldn’t even be considered until the current quests have their levels and difficulty fixed.
• For the same reason, even though I think the system would be better if the quests were related to the traits they unlock, I do not think that change should be in consideration for the near future.
• Fixes, needed ASAP: Quests need to be made level appropriate (self-explanatory) and quest difficulties need to be re-scaled (details in my previous posts).

As always, whenever this all finally gets to the devs, thank you for listening.

Also, a comment on another post:

Nerelith.7360:

Math trumps opinion any day.

A mathematical formula can be constructed to back up anything. How accurately math models reality depends on many factors, including the opinions of the person using it. Math is just a tool, using it doesn’t cause an auto-win.

I have been playing non-stop since shortly after release and this is the first time I’ve felt strongly enough about something to post. The required amounts of influence to unlock these missions, that they require influence at all, is awful. It is a slap in the face to small guilds, it is an insult to large guilds, and its completely against the entire Guild Wars philosophy as I thought I knew it. My reasoning:

1) I am part of a -very- small guild – only 3 really active members with a few others who play occasionally – and with all the influences we’ve gathered, and all the stuff we’ve unlocked, we can’t do any of the new content. None. It will take us months and months to unlock the missions, and then days to get enough influence to even attempt one.

2) There should be no content that requires unlocking. The idea that you can’t even attempt these missions without earning that right smells strongly of a grinding philosophy I would expect from Everquest or WoW, and it shocks me that it’s found in Guild Wars.

I understand that you want to add content that rewards guilds for earning influence, but designing it so that it almost locks small guilds out of the content is definitely not the right way to do it. I am sad, angry, and confused, and desperately hope that you are willing to change the mission system.

If anyone actually reads this, thanks for listening.

Feedback about Megaserver system, problems then suggested fixes:

Problems

1) The Megaserver system effectively maxes player population, which causes massive problems for people who meet the “minimum” system requirements instead of the “recommended”. This effectively locks some people completely out of content which they could access before, and makes the content harder to enjoy for additional people who have to turn their settings down just to stay in zone. This affects not just these people, but also their friends and guildmates who depend on them being able to play effectively.

2) There are communities in place on each server of people who do world events, bosses, champ trains, and/or dungeons together. These groups of people are from the same server, and occasionally party up together, but rarely are in the same guild or have each other friended. With the current Megaserver system, these communities are not being placed together in the same instances, to the point which it is a very rare occurrence to meet another member of a given community. Either the commonly-plays-with detection algorithms need to be improved, or the Megaserver needs a whole new criteria to match against. In response to the potential question, these people could join the same guilds and/or friend each other to increase the chance of Megaserver matching, but for the following:
a) The members of these communities already have guilds and friends they’ve chosen via personal standards, and they shouldn’t have additions to those groups dictated by a server selection mechanic, -especially- considering that some of these communities are huge.
b) Ignoring this issue for this reason would be effectively saying that the only forms of community in GW which are valid are guildmates and friended people… and if you value the social playerbase at all, you definitely do not want to say that.

Suggestions

1) Drop the max player cap. This value should be based such that a computer which barely meets the game’s minimum requirements, when on lowest settings, can run the instance at max player population without -any- lag or disconnect issues. This is the absolute maximum population any zone should be allowed to have, no exceptions – thats the -definition- of minimum requirements. This would then be the “hard” cap for a zone, with the “soft” cap being even lower, to allow room for the Megaserver system to work on matching players with their playgroups.
-P.S.: Additional bonus, this would also help with many of the other problems players are having with the Megaserver, such as too many questers, difficulty getting credit, etc.

2) Add a new matching criteria to the Megaserver weighting, call it whatever you want, for now I’ll call it the “buddy” list. Each account would have a buddy list in addition to the friend list, ignore list, etc. Players can add additional people to their buddy list without being in the same guild or friending them, and the Megaserver system will account for this new list when trying to match instances, in addition to trying to match server/friends/guild. This gives each player an additional degree of control on who they want to see consistently as they travel the world.
-P.S.: I imagine that the easiest way to code this would be to have only one list count as a matching criteria per person – e.g. a person on both the friend list and the buddy list would only be counted as being on whichever list has the higher weight in the system. However, if it was possible, it would be nice to have this not the case, so that players could use the buddy list to prioritize certain friends or guildmates over others. In a small guild or to someone who only has close friends on their friend list of course this wouldn’t matter.

Whenever the devs come back, I hope this gets seen, and I thank you for reading.

Currently awesome things about squads:
1) When you’re in a squad, you can have way more people than a party. Awesome.
2) You can organize into subsquads, and use party chat vs squad chat to only communicate within your subsquad. Awesome.
3) Everyone in the squad shows as blue, same as if they were in a party with you. Mostly awesome.

Needed improvement:
It would make organization in mass events far, far easier if the subsquad you were in was a different color than the rest of the squad. I would suggest the current blue for subsquad, and a light green for the rest of the squad, that way it matches the respective chat colors.

This is a suggestion not only from myself, but from about a dozen experienced world event commanders. I’m just the mouthpiece.

If this should be rolled into another thread, sorry, I couldn’t find it.

It’s beautiful, I want it, but I had/have no interest in the other stuff in the Bandit Sniper Appearance Kit. Please make the glider available as a gem purchase on its own.

There has been no moderator or dev response to anything said in any of the response threads, and the dev tracker is way quieter than normal since the patch.

Possibilities:

1) Post-patch downtime/vacation? I imagine the Living Story + the Feature Patch involved a lot of sleepless nights for the coders. Could be we’ll see responses when they get back.

2) Maybe this level of criticism (especially regarding the bosses and the traits) was completely unexpected? They could be racing to find viable solutions (reverting to pre-patch is not viable), and we’ll see major changes once they have something ready.

3) The silence could mean they don’t consider anything in this patch to be a mistake, and that they have chosen not to explain their reasoning to us, nor to discuss changes. This would be bad, not just for us, but for the future of the game.

I imagine there are other options, but those are the only three I can think of. Until we see some official response of some sort, I don’t think these response threads serve any purpose anymore.

ArenaNet: For every person who posts here, you have dozens just watching the forums and waiting to hear what’s going to happen next. We need communication.

Wake me when the giant stirs.

(I apologize if this is the wrong place for new feature suggestions.)

I suggest that the dance performed by a character using the /dance command, currently set permanently based on your race, instead be chosen by the player. Each character would begin the game knowing only his or her race’s dance. Throughout the world, there would be a way for each character to learn new dances, perhaps through items (training manuals?), minigames (e.g. Belcher’s Bluff), and/or quests. Characters would be able switch from their current dance to any other dance they’ve learned at any time. There should be dances that you can learn for free (via non-Gem interaction), and other dances that can only be learned via some form of Gem Store purchase.

Pros:
- Improves an existing mechanic.
- Increases character customization without altering game balance.
- Creates a new sink for in-game money (training costs).
- Has enormous real-life money-making potential via Gems.

I personally know dozens of people that would pay gems to learn new dances, and I would bet hard cash that entire guilds would pay to be able to learn a new dance they could synchronized group dance to.

This post is an attempt to increase the efficacy of existing and future feedback. It seemed more fitting standalone than as part of one of my many recent patch feedback posts.

To my fellow feedbackers…

Please stop making additional threads about topics which ArenaNet has already decided should be bundled together.

• A single response thread per topic is easier to scan for useful feedback. That’s why they make them.
• Any dev who sees your post is going to ignore it, or delete it, or move it to the thread where it belongs – that’s part of their job.
• Extra threads may even hurt the cause you champion: the more extraneous posts the devs have to sift through, the less time they have to gather useful data.
• The only people you will reach with this behavior is other players, which is not useful if your goal is truly to give feedback.

Please don’t waste good feedback

• I see a lot of posts here which have excellent information in them, but which will never even be considered because of their other content.
• Actively insulting ANet in your post is an excellent way to get ignored, regardless of any other content.
• … so is stating or implying that someone in power has previously interfered with your ability to post due to disagreement with your content. Even if this is true, a feedback thread on that same forum definitely isn’t the place to talk about it.
• Also ineffective is any post in which a player threatens to quit the game. It has been made very clear these are unacceptable feedback at any time.

Even if you’ve already posted, it’s not too late to go back and change your feedback to make it more effective… at least not until we start to see official responses.

Example: I use the term “dev” to refer to any ANet poster who is tracked by the “dev tracker”. This includes forum moderators, CS reps, coders, etc.

Anyway. Thanks for listening.

Thread feedback:

Lots of insults aimed at ANet in here, and now a few against other players…
the more people who don’t follow basic policies on feedback (be polite, be informative, no insults, etc), the less they’re going to want to listen to real feedback in here, and the more likely they are to just lock the thread out completely.

So please be polite and ignore the trolls, and to ANet reps, please ignore the hate and know that most of us can be useful.

Patch feedback:

I’m a coder, and I know game design. I understand why the Megaservers, and I understand why the schedule. But its just way too restrictive. There has to be a way to shape the gameplay in the way you want without harming the play style of such a large part of the population.

Note: I understand certain encounters will suck at certain times until the Megaserver is fully rolled out in all zones, and that this is a growing pain which there may be no way around, so in my feedback I’m pretending that this has already occurred.

Personally, in general at least, I’m with the consensus:

1) Change it so that all the low-level bosses spawn at the same time (15 and 45 past the hour), all the standard bosses spawn at the same time (0 and 30 past the hour), and all the extra-hard bosses spawn at the same time.

2) Alter the extra-hard boss windows to allow all players a chance to take part regardless of play window. Exact implementation I’m not sure on – I see problems no matter what you do- but there has to be a better option. Yes, changing this will make the new guild unlock effectively worthless- but its more important to make existing content continue to be available to all players than it is to add new content that only affects a small portion of the playerbase.

These changes will make it so that no matter what your play window is, as long as you can be on for a few hours, you can get all the world bosses… and if you don’t have several hours, you can pick and choose which ones you want to take out, instead of being forced into particular fights.

In other words, this part of the patch will rank with the rest of the major changes in the patch: it’ll be different, but either ~ as good as or better than what existed before. Right now, for most players, it’s worse.

Thanks for listening.