Guild Wars 2

Geralt.7519:

Lishtenbird.2814:

The problem is with megaservers and world bosses, not with downscaling.

Exactly this imo.

The solution is not nerfing the downscaling system but adding an option to let people to switch to less crowded maps (not to mention this would solve a lot of late big issues about lag spikes and freezes).

I disagree, the problem appears in small groups as well. High level players trivialize events for leveling players.

Furthermore, without megaservers you couldn’t even complete group events in most zones.

I definitely most dislike Tequatl, because the event lasts too long and you didn’t get enough for the efford.

Imho the event doesn’t last too long, but the preparation absolutely is. You’ll have to be on the map long before the event starts, in order to participate on that map and not in an overflow map. This is horrible. A couple of times I spent about 20 minutes and longer waiting for the event to start… literally doing nothing. Anet created a bad queue here.

Also creating those huge zergfest-events (Scarlet Invasions, Tequatl) for the living story and making those permanent is quite a noble thought, but are they really permanent? Can you find enough people in a few months (or even now) to being able to complete these events? I just feel that content for smaller groups would be not only easier to balance/create but also more sucessful because players would feel more important, having more impact instead of being one in a million who spams the same key over and over.

in short: I don’t like that…

• the badge costs gold instead of WvW badges (since when do you actually earn gold in WvW?)
• you have to buy each colour seperate, so if two commanders have bought the same colour there is no way to choose a different one

What was the motivation behind that decision?

to be fair: I wouldn’t compare the story mission with a dungeon, but instead with a story mission in F&F like the Braham-Mission in Cragstead. We got a few new events and get a Meta-Event chain, don’t forget that. Plus a Minigame.

I think one of the reasons why people enjoy it lately is because the story is clearly coherent now. What is Scarlet doing in the Mists? What is the Marionette for? A big drill? Leylines below Lion’s Arch? Destruction incoming. It’s not small incoherent parts which make no sense together but instead putting the pieces together paints a pretty interesting picture and leaves room for a lot of epic speculation. Who doesn’t want to experience the rise of an elder dragon?

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

From what I have seen personally, and from our guildies these are topics in need of discussion for each section:

General:
1. Guilds (General)
a) Guild
b) Guild Content is nearly nonexistant, all attempts so far have just been stop-gaps. Guild Missions were a great idea, but lacked sustainability (especially once maxed on merits).
c) Guild
d) Guild
e) Guild
f) Guild

2. Guilds
-snip-

Oh god no, please not more guild stuff. I hate that there is content which is doable for guilds only. Yeah, I can participate in a certain way, but won’t get the rewards.

I got away from games like WoW because I wanted to get away from this heavy organized playing on a schedule. No to large instanced group content, the open world direction is so much more fun to me than having to find a whole group of players who have the exact same timetable as I and actually the morale to stay a couple of hours in the game, just to complete content. I’m a family man now and can’t do this anymore. GW2 shouldn’t change it’s direction 180 now. Don’t make GW2 another Raid-game, there are enough others there already.

Tequatl was an awesome first step, there certainly are problems but I feel this is the direction that works for GW2.

I really wonder how many GW2 players are part of a larger guild because they want to, and not because they can only complete certain content that way for the rewards.

I have to say I’m a bit disappointed about the villains we have in GW2 so far. The Elder Dragons are just beings without any character, then we get some characters which aren’t really that scary. (SPOILERWARNING: I’m talking about Canach and a Karkaqueen)

GW2 has such great concept art and really scary looking characters… why not flesh out a storyline which introduces those as dark lords, nemesis, someone to be feared and present (not hidden at the very end)?

http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/9027365_orig.jpg
http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/442814_orig.jpg
http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/1626017_orig.jpg

My ideal villain would be like Shiro (Guild Wars Factions)
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/8377/gw997m.jpg
this lore-video gives you a pretty good idea what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thVuIZDdn80

what do you think? Which villains would you like to have?

it would be interesting to know the number of people working in each of the teams (WvW team, an average living story team, the other team which works on content for future updates).

Imho the Hall of Monuments was the perfect solution. A place where I see my personal progression and can show it to others while I’m free to do the content to achieving these goals a.) by myself b.) with some friends c.) with my guild.

Outlaw.3421:

Attached an example I created real quick in Photoshop.

yeah this is great. I really wonder why Anet can’t implement such thing when a fan can create this in a short time. There must be reasons other than the mechanical stuff —> They don’t want it, I guess. The reply in this thread looked like they are quite happy with the current situation and only want to change small things (re-implement cutscenes instead of refining the system). Users who agree with the current situation are basically against refinement and enhancing so that it can become something truly good. As someone stated above GW1 had a more in-depth system and this looks like a step back. (seriously http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/thumb/0/0c/Storybook.jpg/375px-Storybook.jpg )

I don’t think it’s all about money for them. It just takes much more work to create a context (story, events) for the new skin-set – so it’s about ressources. Maybe Maguuma is the perfect chance since there will be enough content.

about the part where a dev states “we don’t create long texts because people don’t read it”… This makes me sad. While reading isn’t for everyone, there are still tons of people out there who enjoy a good read.

Anet shouldn’t ignore successful RPGs out there. Skyrim has ingame books with hundrets, if not thousands, of pages of text. Pushing the game towards the Fast Food consumer just makes for a poor quality imho.

As I’m playing Skyrim at the moment because I’m a bit burned out of GW2, I can see that big difference which I haven’t seen before. Quests seem to make the big difference in the storytelling department. I like how Bethesta can create THAT huge amount of stories/quests/lore in that short time (since Oblivion).

I’d bring back a form of the traditional quests. Not the same, but something (a system) that tells us stories again. I’m tired of the generic events.

I disagree with the OP, having done them on my own only and I like the challenge. Lv.80 missions are supposed to be really difficult imho.

what’s up with all those off-topic suggestions and wants? The topic at the moment is about the rotating questions and the polls. Not some “I want… blah”

Here a thought to adress the huge number of players participating in the meta-event boss battles. Make them more punishing while giving better rewards for the people who make it to the end.

You can’t come back from a defeat. Once you’re dead you have to leave the map or stay on the ground (defeated) until the battle is over. No ressing allowed due to the condition “strain”.

Imagine you start with a huge amount of players and the boss does this one well telegraphed but deadly attack. 20 players go down at once, the boss scales down to the number of players still alive but there will be another of that attack.

(The dead player will get a smaller reward chest sent to him once the battle is over, even if he is in another map.)

The more I think of it, the less appealing seem customizable guild halls to me. Think about a 100man+ guild, or even multiple guilds forming alliances with one common guild hall… and then there’s you, a non-guildleader who has little to no way to customize anything.

Compared to the concept of housing (taking WoW’s garrisons as example) with heavy customization opions, tons of personal things to do in those areas and directly driving your game-progress (even storywise and the higher level progression) guild halls just seem lacking tons of things.

so my question to the guild hall supporters: what specific thing would make you want to be in a guild hall other than hanging around with friends? Why would I care about some crafting NPCs in there, when I’m not interested in looking at people while I’m crafting stuff. Why would you care about some tables, curtains,… that someone from your guild might have put at certain locations? What gameplay value is there?

I hope the devs won’t stay away from this and similar topics because a bunch of people try to derail the threads again and again.

seriously frustrated wvwer, this is not a bug-list, start reading the actual topic

timmyf.1490:

Remember when Southsun had those Magic Find buffs? What if there was just an NPC – Nicholas-style – who moved between zones every day. He gives you a buff with +MF EXP Karma Coin only within the zone.

I love that idea, but I also think that events feel too unrewarding compared to champions. Also exploring feels too unrewarding to me, why not have the champions roam around instead of waiting on a location to be killed?

Cannith? You mean Cannach?

MF adds aura which buffs allies (but not yourself of course) —> problem solved

fractals aren’t only for the hardcores, you can go in at lv.1 with likeminded people (lfg – webpage or the lfg-tool later this (?) year).

The problem I think could arise: People want to play the new dungeon but fractal-rounds are random. The number of fractals gets larger too, so the more content they bring to fractals, the less likely it will be to get a new one.

Wouldn’t it be cool if every player can set his/her favourite fractal and one of the 3 will be the most-voted one. Or That you can choose to play specific fractals with reduced rewards or without rank-up chance? So that people can alternatively visit fractals because they are interested in one specific fractal.

Merge Living Story with your home instance like this:

Characters from the LS which you’ve the metachievement of appear in your home instance.

Braham and Rox as Skill-challenge like encounter: you can spar with them, each time you beat them they get stronger & stronger. Beat them on difficulty: “elite” to turn them into vendors who sell you their weapon-skins for 100 laurels each. (difficulty elite: you have to be alone in the instance to participate). You also can earn one Skillpoint per day when defeating them.

I agree with König, your pace is a bit too fast and a lot of players & developers would like to see it a bit slower. How about 3 weeks?!

A suggestion how you could improve lore distribution: having npcs/static books in the world who/which tell stories is ok imho (still better than nothing at all), but it would be better if each of those dialogues would unlock an corresponding entry in a compendium. Here you would have these entries sorted in chapters in an order that makes sense and people would see which lore tidbits they still haven’t found.

You mentioned a page limit to these ingame books. A simple solution would be that you make more than 1 volume. Split up longer stories to a few volumes and you’ll never have to worry about the page limit. It also makes it more interesting, because people have to find each of the chapters first in order to get the whole story (—> collectible, great). Important: it should be easy to read these in the correct order, so static books which you can’t take with you in different locations would be bad.

Draygo.9473:

8) disable close waypoint

yes please! It’s like graveyard-rushes in dungeons at the moment. It was a problem there and Anet fixed it. It is a problem here too. The boss can’t win, because we can’t die.

What I don’t like is the part the trading post plays in this.

Take for example champion loot weapons. These are so rare that you rarely see one of them drop yourself. If you want one, it’s much more realistic to farm the money to buy it on the trading post than to fight monsters.

I imagine: IF those weapons would be account-bound, we would see much more drops of these weapons from monsters. —> you feel more rewarded for doing specific game-content instead of farming the most efficient content to buy it. There might be a problem that would come up with account bound drops: you get weapons you don’t want/need. A possible solution would be to make these account-bound weapons salvageable into mats that could create the desired weapon with the right components.

in short: the tradeable nature of drops might change the fun we have in aquiring those drops. Not sure if I’m right with this hypothesis.

Edit: LordHogFred beat me to it, I totally support him.

Fiontar.4695:

-snip-

Even though it’s quite rude I read a lot of truth in there. I also don’t get why the open world doesn’t grow in the dynamic event sector. It’s kind of disappointing.

I’d like to have a dynamic magic find value based on your actions during an event. Events should track much more than a bit of participation, so that your effort and skill reflects your reward-chance.

example:

• you dodge attacks during the event (can already be tracked as it’s part of some daily achievements)
• you don’t fall below 50% health during the event
• you accomplish an optional goal (e.g. participate in killing 4 veterans)
• you accomplish an optional goal (e.g. the friendly npc musn’t go down once)

all these and more should be tracked. Events should give an extra reward when finished based on your tracked actions/accomplishments.

So basically this means that events should be given bonus objectives and a new UI should track your actions to allow greater rewards (choose 1 of 3 items which are influenced by a dynamic magic find which is based on your doings)

This would allow for a temporary much higher magic find value so that you feel the difference, not only know there should be a difference on paper. Also being able to choose 1 of 3 possible items increases the chance to get something useful.

Mif.3471:

DevonCarver.5370:

So, as always, make good suggestions in a positive way and you’ll see changes.

People have been making VERY good suggestions for nearly an entire year now, and the number of changes in WvW can be counted on one hand.

People are fed up with WvW being neglected, and this is the reason people are critical of the Devs. It has nothing to do with “hating” as the OP childishly puts it.

I don’t think the WvW devs are sitting in some corner and watch the skies while ignoring user-suggestions. I think it’s rather a problem of manpower and how much one can do while still working on other important features which take time.

also consider that a lot of good suggestions may have downsides too…

That said I would like to see more changes in WvW too. I don’t see how being angry will help though.

spoj.9672:

(cant drop them as easily as you can drop regular bundles)

just press 5

Ronah.2869:

So instead of quests we have heart quests + Vistas, Pois and Skill points

In case you missed it: hearts were implemented as a guide to event-hubs since test-players had no idea where to go in the beginning. They were overwhelmed by the freedom of a dynamic world.

well new idea that wouldn’t break immersion like the rainbow-clouds: Anet puts in a golem-battlesuit for disabled people which auto-runs/jumps the way through the jumping sections

And if too few get it the event dies as not enough show up to complete it. So which is more important a few feeling special or the event remaining populated? I think the latter.

I agree. With a constant flow of tokens people will rather try it again and again than with a random chance nobody knows… precursor chance?! – I’ll give up already.

Personally I think jumping in GW2 is not very difficult IF you have the right setup. The standard control scheme is garbage, using the weapon skills with the same fingers that are doing the movement means you have to give up one for the other… makes no sense to me.

I would highly recommend people to buy some kind of gameboard for the game (which of course can be used for all your games). I’m using the G13 from Logitech and running with my left thumb while at the same time circling through my rotation with the other four fingers works like a charm.

http://www.everythingusb.com/media/logitech-g13-on-hand.jpg

Rauderi.8706:

But are they limited in expressing opinions or statements of liking?

Forum: “I have X idea on how to Y.”
Dev: “Oh, I like that idea. We’ll look into it.”

The acknowledgement is a simple way to show us that our ideas are getting heard.

I can clearly remember that (edit: oops wrong name) Chris Whiteside did appreciate certain ideas a couple of times during the horizontal progression CDI. (which had an impact on the game as it is now, as I linked earlier)

The thing is… he seems to be one of the few who has time to do this (which is/was often after work, so this tells A LOT about him as a person as well as his motivation to keep communication running). I guess we can’t/shouldn’t expect this from the developers since they have a great game to work on.

It’s a tough nut to crack, I think it would be best to dedicate specific people to communication, and I mean not someone who works on the game. It has to be someone who has a direct line to the team which works on specific things.

If I had the money I would probably hire someone for each sub-forum (sPvP, WvW, Dungeons,…) who commutes between dev-workplace and forum, who makes notes and asks a few questions without hindering the devs from doing their work. Someone who is as passionate about the sub as the players who play that specific content all the time. And whose main job is to talk to us in a Gaile Grey-frequency.

at least we can pick the weapon of choice – it’s nice to have tickets instead of weapon-drops

all the money I’ll make by running this epic battle again and again will outweight the paid waypoint costs by far

I like your suggestion about WvW-Keeps. Give them unique strategic advantages so that it makes sense to defend those.

spoj.9672:

And omg that Aerin fight was beyond frustrating. Pick up the crystal to jump to him, drop it and dps a bit. Oh look he moved! Pick up another crystal and jump to him again. Oh look he moved again! Pick up another crystal….

Ahem, you can run up to him. You only need the red crystal to break his shield. The other jumps are possible without crystals or just use a ranged weapon.

juno.1840:

To be clear — I don’t want more Tequatl. I want smaller scale, instanced, difficult content requiring coordinated team play.

A comparison from the current market: any of the LotRO raids (4 teams of 6) in Orthanc. Those were hard requiring many attempts to master.

I want them to go away from instanced content. BUT I also want something similar as you: content for small groups.

This doesn’t have to contradict each other imho. Sure, if you put a huge timer on a homepage, people would swarm such szenarios. If these are found via exploration though, and they are random events in the world, I think people would be excited. I feel that we need such events as rewards for exploration.

for the sake of further ideas, would someone be so kind and explain to me GW1s raids in a few words. I’ve watched Woodenpotatoes Underworld-vids and it looked quite boring to me, to be honest. I’m not sure if I get what eveyone loved about these.

What I know about it:

• it’s instanced and a big map with possibilites to teleport (just like our GW2 maps)
• there are 10 quests you can finish (aren’t events superior to quests?)
• there are some hard enemies (quite similar to Cursed Shore)

What’s the difference? Those seem to me a bit like GW2s lv.80 maps, maybe a bit more difficult.

I won’t say a lot this time, only that I’m disappointed. what a bummer. Would it have been too much to ask for a single stand-out skin (helmet, backback, weapon) for a whole season reward? We got such skins for 2-week long PvE content updates.

the only problem I have with this system is spending real money on rich coffers and not have a guaranteed ticket. Imho rich coffers should cost 800 gems and have 1 guaranteed ticket.

Include Utility Minis which have to be found in the open word (through exploration – like collecting pieces of them and putting them together).

possible Utility Minis:

• collects your loot
• has a single bag – more bagspace
• eats all the junk-items you collect
• …

in general I think that all types of collections are needed in GW2 to give people more to do instead of focussing on armor only. It should be usable in combat though, since this is what gameplay is all about.

I think that the minimalistic forum structure is a big problem for readability. It looks nice, but it’s quite difficult to read through big threads and focus on a specific idea.

The imdb message boards has some nice features that would certainly help analysing threads like the CDI one.

• you reply not on the thread as a whole but on the posts within. If you don’t want to discuss a certain idea it’s easy to see where another idea starts. The answers on a post are indented (is this the right word? english isn’t my main language, sorry).
• merging wouldn’t destroy the whole thread since ideas are still structured and can be followed easily.
• you can minimise posts. It would be helpful I think if devs could (on their own account or dev-account) tag certain users as “destructive” so that their posts have a different colour or get minimized automatically. This would certainly decrease the frustration when reading a thread since devs could easily skip trashtalk.

I love the CDI’s and parttaking in them, but I think it’s very hard to follow ideas in there and it’s very difficult to read when you’re a day away. There needs to be a certain structure.

You can’t change the Thread-structure over night, but I think doing the CDIs on platforms like reddit (which have a much more readable layout) until the forum-changes are done would go a long way.

• new ideas and answers to it are seperated from different ideas and answers automatically
• You could ask a reddit-responsible to disable the downvote-function.
• when you install a tool (forgot the name) you can tag other users in order to increase recognition of those users.
• you can easily minimise posts (and their follow up posts) which makes it much easier to find new idea-strings

TL:DR: I think that the simplistic forum structure is a big hindrance to good and productive communication. There are very good examples of forum-features out there which help in readablity and filtering bad posts(posters).

PS: such a simple thing as forum-avatars would make it much easier to find well liked posters and/or identify forum trolls.

Edit: example of reddit-structure: http://i.imgur.com/3QEqsQ2.jpg

Some of the bigger differences between GW1 and GW2 is the fact that you’d had to clear areas out of mobs. There was little skipping of enemies (I might be wrong, I didn’t experience the harder missions in GW1).

What would you think of enemies which have no aggro-reset? Imagine mobs following you around the whole instance until you decide to kill them. Would it be a chore for you or would you like that? (provided that enemies aren’t just trash-mobs which aren’t challenging at all and can all be killed easily by stacking-methods).

Vayne.8563:

The thing is, if Anet puts time into make content for the people who want the hard core challenging experience, it has to be worth the time. The last really hard thing they made, besides Triple Trouble, was the TA dungeon. The hard core crowd says it wasn’t rewarding enough to run which is why no one runs it.

Anet doesn’t want to make it more rewarding to run, because if they do, people will feel that they have to run it to get X. It’s a kind of pressure. The idea was supposed to be that you can get the best rewards, more or less by doing anything. Hell a precusor can and has dropped from a mob in the starting area.

I seriously doubt Anet is going to want to compromise that part of the game to make the rewards worth it to do more challenging content. As much as it would be great for the hard core crowd, the more casual crowd wouldn’t like that change. Sucks but there it is. And it would be a change, since Anet has never really rewarded challenge. Fractal skins are the closest thing. They have to keep the RNG because everyone would stop running fractals as soon as they got the skins they want.

I think the people who run challenging content to be challenged, as opposed to for rewards, is very small. So Anet either has to up the rewards, or shift their focus.

I think they’ve made a choice on that. It doesn’t bode well for the ultra hard core crowd and I know that must be frustrating as kitten.

But there are people like me, for whom the new focus works quite well.

I don’t agree with everything you wrote here (I agree with you almost everytime). Anet tried something with Tequatl: they increased the rewards (more and better chests) for better performance. The skins are still very random drops, but the chance is higher the better the group performs.

Also most people love what Anet did with Liadri: a very difficult encounter which rewards players with a unique guaranteed mini.

TA could be more rewarding without being too rewarding: Skins are cosmetic only, exotic stats are really easy to come by. Why are the unique weapons that rare? If people had a good chance to get one of these every few runs more people would run it. A 0.001 % chance isn’t incentive for anyone who favours rewards to try.

…and why not add some other good rewards for a complete TA run? A unique mini for the first successful run, A 18slot bag with a unique utility (deposit all plants to the bank automatically) or unique titles for dungeon-achievements.

Would it really be too hard to implement some rewarding feeling after such a run?

scerevisiae.1972:

I would love to see GW1-style sub-classes return, even if it were a limited form, eg: you can choose skills from a subclass’ weapon skills if your own class can use that weapon.

I think you are misunderstanding, GW1 had dual-classes, we’re talking about a sub-class, e.g. thief —> assassin

A sub-class only the specific profession can choose.

jucca.8219:

Living story should impact the game world but at the moment there is special event for few weeks then it’s back to normal.

and this is where you’re wrong. Very wrong. After those few weeks there is another living story, new things to do. There is no going back to “normal”.

I agree, it’s more realistic to take existing rewards (dungeon rewards) than creating tons of now armor-sets. One of the devs clarified once, that creating new armor takes quite a while. I see no problem giving dungeon rewards to explorers now that you can get that gear through sPvP also. It’s not a showcase for completing the dungeon any more.

And think of it: a lot of players who prefer solo content (open world) rather than group content (dungeon) won’t have that gear yet and would love to work for it, even if it takes longer than doing the “more difficult” thing: the dungeon. (more difficult depends on the group of course, not everybody runs with a guild or good players regularly)

Markus.9084:

- why don’t we have this kind of topic in other languages ? Not a single red post about Horizontal Progression in De, Fr or SP…. And you said here :
“Our plan is to localize all this into German, French, and Spanish, so everyone can participate equally across each of our forum communities.”

I hope you’ll improve this point in 2014.

I’m from Austria and I really don’t mind that there is no translation / topic in the german forums. Why? Because there is a very limited number of developers who read this thread and it would take ages to translate it and also read it. As we learn English even before secondary 1 it should be no problem to post our ideas here and understand it perfectly imho. Give the guys a break.

Imagine you’d be a teacher in a class of 200 people instead of 25… yes, there would be some great ideas, but the teacher would have very little time to focus on one of these without frustrating the other 199 students.