Guild Wars 2

However with an OH, the only real mainhand this works with is dagger. Scepter seems like it was an afterthought – the blast finishers on fire don’t even work.

Yeah, but you can’t think of Eles like any other class. A mainhand dagger on most classes mean they only get three abilities, and most of them are melee range. A mainhand dagger on Ele means that they get 12 abilities, most of those 400 range (over twice melee range), and a few of them 600. An Ele with a single mainhand weapon brings twice the versatility in that slot than most classes offer (even with weapon swapping), and double the range, allowing them to work that middleground of being too far out for the melee to hit, while doing more damage there than a pure ranger would.

And yes, this spec was not especially intended to work well with Scepter, although you can certainly try. Not every weapon pairing needs to be ideal, not ever spec has to work with every weapon combination. Tempest is designed to work with D/D, D/W, and maybe D/F, with S/D-W-F being weaker, and Staff being not a great idea at all. That’s fine. Just use the tools it was intended to work with, or run a vanilla Ele build instead, which is also intended to remain viable. They’ll add additional specs later that might work better for you.

There is two loot systems in mmo. Random drops from bosses or token system. Token system leads to less frustration because you decide which stat set you get in exchange for your effort. That’s why Anet made dungeons that way. But you can’t grind dungeons for tokens because of daily reset. Your idea of NPC exchange destroy the purpose of daily dungeon reset. You can do all dungeon and then exchange all tokens for one specific dungeon reward.

So what if you did? That would mean that you’d be running all the dungeons, and that seems like a worthwhile activity to me. Now if all you care about is clearing out the rewards from one dungeon, then yeah, it would be faster to run all the dungeons and beat the daily lockout. On the other hand, if your goal is to get ALL the dungeon armors, then you’d be better off saving up all the tokens and spending each on their respective dungeons, because the exchange rates would make exchanging tokens less efficient.

Basically, if it takes 23 runs of CoF to get a full set of armor, over eight days if you do all three paths, then you might be able to accomplish the same thing in 2-3 days if you run all 24 dungeon paths each day, but you’d be doing a lot more work, so why shouldn’t you get the reward?

The point of the daily reset is to lock the maximum total rewards you can earn, and they would still achieve that purpose, no worse than the current system does. At most it would give you a little more flexibility.

Grind is repetitive activities.
Fun has nothing to with it.
You don’t find dungeons fun, but that does make them grind, because of daily reset for tokens you can’t actually grind them (you can enter but you don’t get reward, so it’s pointless doing them more than once per day).

Daily resets do nothing to make dungeons less of a grind if you don’t enjoy repeating them. Repetition is repetition whether it is 23 times over eight days or 23 times over one day, it’s still 23 times.

No.

Let’s not.

Im not saying you can get into main server easily with 5 min before events, im saying you can get into an overflow, which seems to have just as much chance to succeed as the main. Overflows come from all servers, so it doesnt matter if your main is gandara or it aspenwood, could end up in same overflow

And I can say that this is patently untrue, as I’ve participated in the event about 7-8 times now, and in every time my team has gotten on stage we’ve killed the warden (except once), and yet I’ve never been part of a run that got further than two cut strings. It failed CONSTANTLY on overflows.

The way I read it is that achievements will be less grindy (i.e. kill 250 things), and more challenge based (i.e. kill this boss without getting hit by this attack).

I’ll just point out that I HATE “kill this boss without getting hit by the attack” achievements, because unless you’re very lucky they tend to require replaying it a bunch of times, doing everything right 90% of the time, but then you make one mistake or just get a bad combination of circumstances that cause you to get hit and have to redo the whole thing over again. I much prefer the achievements that run along the lines of “dodge the enemy’ attack 5 times” to “dodge the enemy’s attack every time,” because at least in the former, if you don’t get it on the first try, all the effort you put into that encounter still counts towards eventually completing the achievement.

I can’t understand the desire to be able to get all of the achievements on a first play through. They are called achievements, not freebies. They are meant to be an accomplishment, a show of ability to play the game. Sure, you should be able to get some on your first play through, but definitely not all of them.

Well, I don’t mean that they should just be handed to you, that you should get them without even trying, just that achieving them should be POSSIBLE if you do things right on the first try. I mean, imagine a scenario, you’re fighting a boss. The boss makes ground waves. There is an achievement for just beating the boss, and also one for “activate the glowy sphere before killing him.” Now, to my mind, the “right” way to implement this is that you fight the boss, you activate the glowy sphere, when the boss dies you get both the “kill the boss” AND the “glowy sphere” achievements. You should not have to go back in and kill the boss a second time to get the glowy sphere achievement, particularly since your second try may not go as well as the first. If you get it right, you should get credit.

They should also avoid achievements that are pure grind, like “beat the boss ten times.”

Do you have zero desire to become a better player?

Yes.

I have a desire to only be the player that I am. If I improve then that’s nice, but if I don’t, that’s fine too. I want content where I can improve on it, but I don’t want to have to improve in order to get credit for it. I mean, if there’s a boss fight and I manage to get through it without getting hit by an attack, then yay! Just accomplishing that without any outside acknowledgement would be good enough for me, but if I’m doing the boss fight and do get hit, then I don’t want my reaction to be “doh, I’ve just wasted this entire run and have to do it again if I want the achievement.”

I’m not terrible, I have most of the Gauntlet achievements, only missing the ones related to Liadri, the T3 Gambit ones, and the Ooze one, I’m in the 90th percentile overall (and that’s without any WvW or PvP ones), but there are a lot of achievements over the years that I’ve just had no interest in, and would hate to see them take over the LW achievement lists. A good example of what not to do would be the achievements related to the original Atherblade Retreat dungeon, which all seemed to focus on everyone doing everything perfectly or receiving zero credit.

Offering every reward from every activity isn’t making a game rewarding at all, it makes it a grindy mess. Progressing towards what you want by doing anything you want leads us to the gold problem, you can progress towards any reward on the TP by playing anything you want, yet that doesn’t feel rewarding the least bit.

Because it’s on the TP, but progressing towards dungeon armors you want, or Silverwaste badge rewards, or geode purchases can be a lot of fun. The only point at which is becomes “grindy” is when the asking price requires you to spend more time in that specific area than you’d care to, because you’ve already done all you wanted to do there and would prefer to move on.

That’s why it’s best when you could then earn those same tokens in other areas, so that if you get, say, half the ambrite weapons, and still want the other half, but are totally bored with Dry Top and it would be a grind to stay there any longer, you could move on to another zone, but continue to collect something fungible into geodes, so you can continue to progress your ambrite collection, just at a slightly reduced pace.

It’s only grind when you’re not having fun.

Universal currencies are bad for rewards. Multiple ways (to clarify: A LOT of them) to get rewards are like universal currencies, therefore multiple ways to get rewards are bad for rewards.

None of these are statements of facts, they are all your opinion, and I disagree with all of them.

Why do you want those multiple ways if you can just use gold/karma then? Because you can buy gems with cash and flip the TP? That’s your only reason?

for gold, yes. The way the TP is run has ruined gold as a currency. Karma could have worked as a currency, but it was horribly mismanaged over the past three years and is currently impossible to fix. They did too poor a job of managing sources for karma, and too poor a job at creating sinks for it, to the result that anyone who has been in the game a long time now has millions of karma. If they attempted to do anything practical with karma then it would either result in A. Any veteran player could buy All The Things in the first day, or B. Any recent player would have to save up years to afford anything, or C. The new items would be very high priced but the new methods would be much more generous, effectively making the last three years of karma collection pointless. None of these things would go over well.

They would need to start with a fresh currency, one that they could start with each player having zero, and only earning what they intend for them to earn.

The funny part is you actually believe that? Really? As we have proven that ascended was planned launch yo.

Repeating that “it was proven” multiple times does not make it proven. You did not prove your case, you just made several assumptions and insisted that they constituted proof.

November 2012 is as good enough as at launch. You just refused to accept it.

No, it’s not. Launch is launch. Post launch is post launch. If it wasn’t there at launch, it wasn’t there at launch.

Where do you get that number? Made up? Is that a specific player?

It’s according to GW2Efficiency, of the median 100-500hour player that owns an account worth 960g.

It’s only natural that specific rewards require specific actions.
You can’t run dungeons and have www badges to buy gift of battle.
You can’t run ascalon for arah badges.

You can PvP and get dungeon tokens, why should you not be able to earn other things elsewhere? For the record, the system I had been discussing before, you wouldn’t actually be able to earn Arah badges in Ascalon, not directly, but you would be able to convert between the two at an NPC, at a lossy exchange rate and adjusted for relative difficulties. If you enjoy doing Arah, then running Arah would remain the most efficient way in the game to earn Arah tokens (aside from PvP, of course), but if you don’t enjoy Arah, you could pursue it via other activities, albiet at a slower rate.

You can also use that same argument to say every activity in the game is unenjoyable except for the reward part – which is clearly false. So your statement is just false. You’re just cherry picking. Typical.

If you don’t enjoy any activity in the game then you have no reason to be playing the game. The whole point of rewards is to enhance the time you spend playing in the game world, if you don’t play in the game world then there’s no point to earning rewards in that game, and you should probably seek rewards in some other game that you do enjoy.

If, however, you really enjoy some parts of the game, which I assume you do, but perhaps don’t enjoy other parts, then it benefits no one for the developers to pressure you into those areas you do not enjoy, when you could be in the areas that you do enjoy. The less time you spend doing things that you do not enjoy, the less you begrudge the game, making you more likely to continue playing, and keeping you happy enough to buy things in the gem store.

If you don’t want to play Raids, don’t play. Simple as that. If you really want that Legendary armor, but don’t want to play Raids, then you’ve agreed to never getting it.

And I’m saying that this attitude is bad business. It’s forcing a lose/lose situation on the customer. Either lose by giving up entirely on something that you want, or lose by engaging in activity that you do not enjoy, making that portion of your life a negative rather than a positive experience. Who benefits from that?

It’s like saying “I want a college degree in Economics”, while also saying “and I prefer getting it without having to go to school”.

And in the real world, we can both agree that this would be silly. But this is a game, the rules can be anything ANet says they are, and if they say you can get an economics degree without going to school for it, then sure, why not?

Yes there will be a lot of players who won’t like Raids. At the same time, there will be a lot of players without Legendary armor. And to the point of this thread, that is ok.

That is your opinion, I disagree.

Legendary gear, going forward, will only be for those who put in the efforts. You can call them Elites, Hardcore, what have you. The common theme they’ll all share is that they’re worthy of such gear.

Nobody is “worthy” of anything,. It’s a game. You are handed what the developers choose to hand you. The people that receive fancy things are not better or worse than other players, they just happen to fit into the right shaped hole that the things they are willing and able to do are the things that needed to get done to be handed that item. That’s it. I’m just asking that they widen the options for being given those items.

They won’t, according to the blog.

Yeah. . . but hopefully that’s more a slip of the tongue, or something they’ll backtrack on. I mean, if they let players that don’t buy the expansion continue to accumulate SP, then that might actually end up better in some ways, while if they just don’t let them do anything, then that’s just straight up taking away something from current players, which seems against the theme of the game.

If you feel miserable when challenged, why do you play computer games? Why not just grind FarmVille 2 or watch TV if all you want is to see stuff move on the screen and not having to worry about getting “killed”?

For reasons that you don’t have to agree with or understand, but are equally valid as any reasons you might have to play games. Done.

The point of this apples analogy is that if you give players two options to earn rewards- one slow and easy, one quick and hard- most of all players will never rise up to the challenge and tackle the hard mode. This is a trend that we can pretty universally plot across all MMOs.

So what? If that’s how they want to play, that’s how they want to play. LET THEM.

Rewards are used to direct populations and provide incentives to participate in particular content and to encourage people to step out of their box, in multiple avenues.

I’ve discussed this before, maybe you’ve heard it before, maybe not, but I think this is an abuse of rewards. It is fair to use rewards to get players to step outside their comfort zone, it is not fair to use rewards to get players to run a marathon outside their comfort zone.

There is a perfectly valid place for rewards that encourage players to TRY new things, to spend a few hours, tops, engaged in that activity, to judge for themselves whether they could enjoy that activity. Once they have had reasonable time to decide, however, a game should RESPECT their choices, respect their time and interests, and if the player truly does not enjoy that content, they should be free to go without having to abandon a desired reward.

Games should have two types of reward, the “try me” reward, and then the “dedication” reward. The “try me” reward can be exclusive to one specific content in the game, but should be fully earnable in a couple hours or less. Try the new thing, decide whether you like it, get a prize either way. The “dedication” rewards are the ones that take tens of hours or more to earn, like Legendaries, but should be available through multiple paths, to increase the odds that at least one of those paths is something the player will truly enjoy, so that he can pursue the reward AND enjoy the journey. Nobody benefits from a player who is not enjoying the journey, least of all the developer.

So specific to raiding, I don’t mind if there are rewards that are 100% exclusive to raids, but within the context above, they should be rewards that you can earn from a couple hours of raiding, which basically means by reaching phase two of Vale Guardian or something equivalent, not even beating him. That can be an exclusive, that can be used as a draw to new players to make sure they give hard mode a try, but if they truly and honestly decide that hard mode is not for them, you shouldn’t dangle rewards over their head as they leave, there is no benefit to that. The long term rewards can be earned through raids, and can be earned faster there, but that should not be the ONLY place to earn them.

The population argument boils down to “if easy mode is implemented, will there be people running hard mode”, and the answer is unequivocably ‘no’ when there is no real incentive, read rewards, to go into higher modes.

If that is true, then hard mode should not exist, end of story.

Hard mode can only justify its existence if people actually ENJOY doing it, regardless of rewards. Since we’re actually talking about significantly HIGHER rewards for hard more than easy, if people still don’t want to do it, then it has completely failed to justify itself.

Sure, but apples only come from apple trees.

Yet individuals can acquire their own apples from trees, from the ground around trees, from carts, from stores of all shapes and sizes.

Meh.

Is my only reaction to those changes.

Still nothing to fix condition stacking.

While I think a great many players also agree, the CDI for guilds was talked about before the patch.

Yeah, but I didn’t care about it then either. CDIs are great, but there is nothing they could do involving guilds that would make the game any better, and the only thing they could do is make things worse (by adding new features that you need to be part of a large guild to benefit from), so I’ve never cared about a guild-based CDI. Before this week, I would have wanted a CDI on the destructive changes to the Traits system introduced in the last feature patch.

This new patch is a major issue though, and they need to have a major sit-down explaining why we shouldn’t hate the things we believe we hate about it. Why should we like the new level-gating system? Why should anyone? Why should we appreciate having to go several layers deep to see what we just sold rather than having it as a top-level option? These are all far more important topics of discussion than anything involving guilds.

Ok lets assume that in the world of the CDI Guild Halls have a lot of horizontal progression such as the ability to create buildings, upgrade them and customize the whole experience. What is the smallest guild size that this would be suitable for. Even more specifically is it ok to have a ton of progression in this Guild Hall example and have small guilds work through it.

Unless the “Guild Hall patch” comes at the same time as (or after) the “Personal Housing” patch, I would say that the minimum guild size that should reasonably quickly be able to acquire a guild hall one be “one member.”

If Guild Halls become the upgrade system it is an opportunity to look at the upgrade distribution and make it more meaningful and more sensible.

The important thing to keep in mind is that guild-based upgrades need to be shared with all the other players. It would really harm the game if players in guilds were able to achieve semi-permanent tangible bonuses that players outside of large guilds would not get. Guild Banners are a good example of doing it right, only guilds can make them, but everyone benefits from them.

I’m still happy with the game, but I am disappointed by the lack of vision in the game’s development. It has not grown as much as I would have liked over the past two years, and most of the September patch is a downgrade, not an upgrade. Everything they talked about for low level characters, for example, is to make the game worse than it was, for some unknowable reason.

The only good things they announced are the account bound Tags, a few of the class balance tweaks (though many were nerfs too), and the crafting UI improvements. Everything else was at best neutral and in many cases straight up negative.

I am really putting my hope into the week three basket, fully expecting them to be crushed.

Yeah, the bonus gear not only looks a bit lame, but it’s an OUTFIT. When will they learn that nobody wants outfits. We want armor skins, bits and pieces that we can mix and match with different armor skins as we see fit. I would take a single completed armor set for 2-3 dozen outfits any day of the week. I would take a single good pair of shoulders or gloves over a full outfit skin. They need to give up on the Outfits, and this pre-order bonus is a really bad sign.

One of the reasons we are more conservative about axe when it comes to balance is because axe uses a unique attack action in our game that cannot be avoided using positioning. Normal melee attacks have an attack arc and normal ranged attacks use projectiles. Enemy players can use positioning and movement to avoid these attacks. Axe 1 and 2 by contrast just hit you when you are in range regardless of your positioning. While some utility skills (like Corrupt Boon) also use this targeting method, it’s rare on weapon skills and thus we are wary of buffing it too much.

This sounds like a PvP issue. I hope that you are taking that into consideration and not weakening the PvE version because of this.

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

Don’t worry about that, the pistol is still awful and Necro is getting the Reaper.

Only, if lot of people would want them. Which is not the case.

You have no basis for this claim. The amount of people who want mounts in GW2 is somewhere between like fifty and a million, you have no basis for claiming it’s any specific number within that range. You believe the number is likely relatively small, and that might be true, I believe it’s likely fairly large, at least as large as various other systems they’ve implemented. ANet has to use polling and other data to determine what that number is.

Well, there is an adept trait for all classes that reduces falling damage – a mostly non-combat utility.

Not so, Everyone one of those is designed as either an offensive or defensive trait as well, offering stealth, crippling, damage, etc. when you bounce. They are designed specifically to allow you to drop on enemy’s heads without taking damage, or to make reckless leaps when running away from enemies and further elude them. That they also come in very handy for things like Jumping Puzzles, which likely weren’t even a feature when those skills were added, is a fringe benefit.

Yes, players more often activate those traits for doing terrain challenges more safely, but if that was their intended use then the offensive options are almost entirely useless.

Devs seemed to disagree, when the idea of making +25% perma speed bonuses for those few classes that don’t have them was floated around. Their answer was that not having access to such utility was on of the design decisions for those classes, and that adding it would require redoing those classes completely.

But again, perma utilities are PERMA, meaning in combat, meaning balance consideration. Mounts would be outside of combat, and outside of PvP, so not a balance consideration.

And to counter an argument you will likely try to make – people generally do not take +25% speed signets for combat utility, but for out of combat one.

What they “generally” do or do not do is entirely beside the point, there are plenty of abilities in the game that players “generally” do not use at all, but they all had an “intended” point, and that’s what matters.

Yes, it’s the idea. You are not supposed to have your cake and eat it.

Actually, you have to have your cake to eat it, what you can’t do is eat your cake and have it, but that’s beside the point. The point is, what’s the problem with free cake? I mean, not everything has to be a class balance issue. I mean what if only one class could use the wardrobe system? Or only one class could use dyes? Or out of all the classes, two of them could not harvest resource nodes, or three of them could not area-loot? There are plenty of basic game functions that are given freely and equally to all classes, there’s no reason why out of combat movement speed should not be one of these things, beyond your personal preference that they not be.

In-combat mobility serves a purpose, it makes some classes more effective than others in specific situations. Out of combat mobility does not, it just makes them more convenient or more annoying, and there’s no reason why this should be the case if they can prevent it.

Google GW1 running builds.

I’d rather not, as “look to GW1” examples tend to be irrelevant to GW2, seeing as how they are apparently very different games in numerous ways.

There’s no way that they would give one class in the game the ability to scale vertical surfaces. If they ever add that capability, it would be a Mastery that all classes can use.

Well when looking it from that perspective then maybe you are also hardcore at something (there must be some content you are above average in) and then it’s nice if you would also be specifically rewarded for that. Well that is how I feel about it.

Right, but the thing is, I don’t want a unique reward for that one thing I’m good at, I want to be able to earn ALL things through that method, and I want other people to be able to earn all things through the methods they enjoy too. I want people to be able to play their favorite content as much as they want, and not have to worry about getting all the unique rewards for that content and having no other rewards left. I want people to be able to dabble in any content that interests them without having to worry that they are making zero progress towards that One Cool Thing they really want to earn. I want for players to be able to “do that thing they really enjoy doing” AND “win that reward they really want to win,” without the two things likely being mutually exclusive.

So Elitist is rewarding?.. you know because if you can get everything in any way it’s not really rewarding anyway.

It’s rewarding you for putting forth time and effort, instead of rewarding you for doing one specific thing.That’s still a reward, just a less specific one.

In fact I think that is one of the mistakes Anet made imho.. From the starts people have been complaining about the bad rewards in GW2 and so Anet did keep increasing rewards, now when you do a bid of EotM you bags are full in no time (what you can sell for geld) however complains have never stopped.. Why, because such rewards don’t really feel like rewards.

That’s because most of the stuff you’d be earning that way is stuff that you already have. I’ve had every green/blue/yellow skin unlocked since weeks after the Wardrobe came out. Still, if an Exotic dropped with a skin I didn’t have yet, I would still view that as a reward. And you can always sell the “junk loot” you acquire and use that gold to buy something you want. And they could always change the loot mechanics a bit so that you could be working towards specific rewards of your choice, instead of piling up trade goods.

1. Ranger (mainly keeping ALL pets alive and viable, rather than having to used ranged just to keep them out of the fight, and also fixing the Sword 1 issues).

2. Mesmer (better survivability and better balance between burst and sustained damage).

3. Necro (condition spec is great against a bunch of weak enemies but worthless about world bosses and other situations that are either immune to conditions or max out stacks, they need to do full condition damage to objects and there needs to be some solution to stacks).

The important thing to remember though is that this is NOT about sPvP balance, that is not important, it is about making sure that the class is balanced against all variety of PvE content.

It’s simply not fair to have two separate sets of players. I am aware two diamond players may never meet, but in this scenario, they will never meet. The system should ideally place you regarding your skill relative to the entirety of the playerbase and separate queues do not achieve that.

Why not? You would still be placed relative to the other guys, just in a different queue. It’s like in a tournament bracket, presumably the four teams in the semi-finals are of roughly equal relative skill, but except in cases where there is a third-place playoff, the two losing teams will never meet, nor would ANY of the other teams in those brackets.

The League system does not have “finals,” it will never be determined who the absolute best of the best is (through the league system, at least), so what does it matter whether you’re among the best in the soloQ or the teamQ?

Many of the complaints are due to poor rotations – I personally don’t see any other solution for this.

I’d like to see better simple UI changes. Have onscreen buttons you can use to call for help, or other common commands. Let players assign hotkeys to these commands. When you activate them it would ping the minimap, and maybe put a visual prompt and an audio queue, similar to Foefire’s “Your base is under attack!”

So for example, if I just took Far, and I see a bunch of players coming my way that I can’t take, but believe it’s salvageable, I could hit the “Defend Far” button, it would ping Far on the map, put up a mid-screen message “Ohoni needs help at Far”, and maybe audio shout “Far is under attack!”

Given the fairly simple rules of Conquest and similar map structures, a few multi-purpose buttons could do a lot of good, and would be much faster and more visible than chat. It’s not quite as good as TS, but a useful middle-ground without getting into the social/customer service downsides of TS.

A lot of the responses in this thread are just sad. Of course female Asura and Charr should have access to the female versions of the armor. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise OP. They are not the boss of you.

Nike.2631:

I think raids are an interesting addition to the menu of things to do in game. I have greatly enjoyed raiding in other MMOs… while the raids here are definitely a contributing factor to my having all but entirely stopped playing GW2.

I think Developers’ widespread belief that they have to treat raiders’ time as a quantum leap more valuable than the time in-game of every other type of player by grossly over-incentivizing raids is a manifestation of mental illness. It’s misguided and it’s insulting.

Basically there’s an unwritten understanding setting up raids SUCKS. It is for the adventure craving typical player with limited free time one of the single worst things you can possibly get bogged down in. And so Devs keep tying an enormous porkchop around their raids’ necks to get the dog to play with it in the form of ‘exclusive’ advancement instead of improving the watching-paint-dry level of boredom brought on by the pre-raid logistics.

You should be raiding because you enjoy that kind of gameplay, not because they’ve jammed a hook in your mouth with a shiny you can get nowhere else and have been dragged into it with blood running down your torn cheek.

Man, I wish you could double or triple “+” a post.

See, thats your issue right there. you like to drop condi dmg on something and auto till it dies.

Well, not necessarily, I mean on other classes that doesn’t work (and obviously with the Necro you have to use other abilities as they become available too), I was just using the Necro as a comparison and showing why they were much more effective at dropping tons of AoE conditions when compared to my Mesmer, and considering that Necros are probably the closest class to Mesmers (given that they are cloth, have lots of condition damage, and use disposable “pets.”).

Mesmers are immensely more active than that. If your lvl 40 on your mesmer and dnt have deceptive evasion traited and are complaining about clone generation being too slow then you clearly havent put the time into learning the class.

I don’t have Deceptive Evasion traited at the moment, but since I only just hit 40 anyways it was completely unavailable to this point. If it’s vital to the class then it probably should have been available much earlier.

Our shatters give us amazing aoe and condition damage.

But the problem with Shatters is that it kills all Clones and Phantasms, and Phantasms are much harder to replace. If you have a very Shatter-focused build that treats them as disposable then fair enough, but even in that build it takes time to queue up the three illusions, kill them off, and then you’re left alone and have to rebuild them while all the remaining enemies turn to target you (meaning you might want to wait until their cooldowns are up). The “burst” of a shatter is “instantaneous,” but only after you’ve spent several seconds setting up the conditions for it. It would be far better of you could A. launch only one or two illusions rather than all of them, or B. if you could queue up clones before battle, like Necro pets.

Anyways, I’m not arguing that Mesmers can’t be made good, clearly some people have had a lot of success with them. All I’m saying is that they don’t seem to work well “out of the box,” and the specialized knowledge that makes them playable is not well explained to the players. A good class just works, you throw them at the enemy, use the abilities as listed, and do a decent job of it. Of course there should be “secret” builds that require a lot of clever tricks to get a marginal boost in performance, but they should be a lot less hassle right from the start. The other problem that I had is that they still seem to have more momentum than any other class in the game, taking far longer to get going than other classes.

And for the record, I can’t imagine Mesmers as being “one of the easiest classes to level” for anyone. Even the “no, they’re totally not sucky guys!” build videos seem to focus on mid-game to higher tier traits. Warriors are the easiest to level, without question, then probably Guardians, then maybe Thieves. Eles and Necros are good, but take until at least their teens or 20s to take off (still well earlier than the Mesmer though). I haven’t played my Engineer since they made a few changes to the class so I can’t comment yet, but they were better too last I checked. Mesmers may be way better at the upper levels, but I would never suggest someone start with one.

Anet, why don’t you simply admit the Trinity is an essential part of gaming beyond the zergs we’ve had for three long years?

Because the trinity is silly and unnecessary.

It’s not meant to be easier,cheaper and faster way. It’s a non rng way of gettingit.

Easier and faster are irrelevant, but it should definitely be cheaper. If it’s not “meant to be” that, then it was not “meant to be” what it needed to be.

GW2 was successful but had troubles holding players (their words) and income did kept dropping (until the announcement of HoT).

But they never related their dropping players (which every game has) with any of the things you try to relate it to. You seem to insist on it being related to loot grind burnout, while the only time they referenced not retaining enough players, it was to justify the NPE trait and skill changes, which mainly impacted low-to-mid level players. That indicates that their metrics were showing people leaving well before hitting endgame, which is where the effect you focus on would be taking place.

because then we would indeed not make these changes and even would not have had HoT but another LS instead.

No basis for this either. An expansion was always likely at some point, I don’t know how they would have been able to add new class option or anything like that as part of a LW update, and of course people wanted major additions. I do not see HoT as a “failure” of the LW model, but rather a compliment to it. We have no idea how the performance of the LW might have effected their planned timetable for HoT, but if it were really a disaster, they likely would have launched HoT much sooner than they did.

What a complete nonsense. What I (some of us) suggest here, does not hold any item away from anybody. Anybody can get those items, they might just have to do some content they don’t like to get some of the items they might like.

One, you presume that anyone is capable of completing any content “if they just try,” which is factually incorrect.

Two, you forcing players to do content that they do not like is of no benefit to the game, or those players. It is not something to be encouraged.

Just as your suggestion does exactly the same. Because in your way, if you like that hunt / content for exclusive never have that game-play / content in the game.

You still always have these methods available as an option, they are just not the ONLY option, just as you always have the option of working towards dungeon armor via dungeons, OR via PvP reward tracks. I am not removing any options, I am only adding them. If you insist on seeing choice as somehow reducing your options, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

So everybody who feels different from you is stupid?

No, I do not, but that isn’t to say that all of the people who feel different from me aren’t stupid either. You referenced some of these people, the some who would argue " it might be more selfish to take away the exclusive rewards from content," but I don’t think these people are representative of the whole. I’m not even sure they actually exist.

People will still get bored by the content. That does not change.

Yes, but then they would be able to leave without regret, and play stuff that didn’t bore them. See, that’s the advantage, if you bribe people with loot, then they will get bored just as quickly, but they will feel compelled by the loot to keep playing anyways, hating the game more and more each time, until they get the loot they wanted and finally they can get on with their lives.

If you don’t bribe them with loot, if the loot you get is only comparable to loot elsewhere in the game, then they can play until they get bored with it, and then move on with a clear conscience, doing something else instead. Not only would they be happier with that new content than they would be grinding out the old content, but they would also be less disgruntled with the old content (since they weren’t forced to stick around longer than they wanted), meaning that the chances of them coming back eventually are higher. In the latter example, the player might end up spending well more time in that content over the lifetime of the game than if you forced him to stay there for X weeks straight trying to earn a specific reward.

Ok so finally we agree in both systems not everybody gets what he wants. So then you would look for a compromise (what you did not want before because your system would give everybody what he wanted.. according to you) that brings us back on the 50/50 deal.

I think you misunderstand how compromise works. Compromise doesn’t mean that each side gets half of what they want. Compromise means that maybe each side has to give up some portion to reach a solution that is best for everyone. Not always. If there are more of one group than the other, for example, the larger group gets more of what they want, and the smaller group gets less. If what one group wants is ultimately bad for everyone, then maybe they get none of that.

I’ve laid out the compromise I would be satisfied with. Having any exclusive weapons or armor would not be part of that compromise. If that’s the only sort of compromise you would be willing to accept, then I’m prepared to “take it to the jury,” and let the game’s population sort out who gets what, rather than “settling out” for something that would not at all work for me. We can’t “split the baby” on this one.

Anet did try to implement it and we don’t know why the people who did leave, leave. But the (bad) reward system is a topic, or subject in many topics, that pops up a lot in these forums. So that says something.

Yes, it says that forums are terrible scientific samples of mass opinion. There are numerous topics that pop up on the forums of this and other games that offer a vastly distorted perception of the game. Someone mentioned earlier how the LotRO forums were awash in discussions of raids and raid balance, and yet only 10% of the population turned out to be serious raiders. I don’t doubt that there are some people who are bothered by GW2’s reward structure, I just have serious doubts that these people make up a serious portion of the game’s population. If they can be made happy without reducing the QoL for everyone else then I’m fine with that, but I don’t see grounds to make them happy at everyone else’s expense, without evidence that there actually are a lot of them, rather than just a few noisy people.

That is not a compromise if it comes to skins right.. That is saying.. I like skins, I don’t care for titles, you can do with the tiles what you like and I say this is a compromise.

It is offering something to those that claim that they like “exclusivity,” that they like earning something that is specific to an area and can only be earned one way. If titles are that thing, I am fine with that. If skins are that thing, I am not.

So you do not accept that excessive grind and excessive rng is a serious turn off for players and something that causes games to fail. OK that’s your problem, but those are far more serious offences than having hardcore content.

That is a very different thing than what I said, or what you said that I was responding to. I do think that excessive grind and excessive RNG are bad things, and should be avoided as best they can be, and the system I propose would do just that.

I do not, however, think that they are worse than hardcore content, because ultimately they are just as bad, with the added problem that while everyone CAN grind, whether they like to or not, not everyone can do hardcore content, whether they want to or not, so it’s all the negatives, plus more negatives.

That’s the same thing. So you want exclusive rewards to be “spam 1” content and non-exclusive to be in other types of content. What’s the point of those exclusives then?

They entice people to try out the content, to give them a fair chance of seeing if they like it. If they do like it, then they can continue to play that style and earn the other rewards in the game, if they don’t like it then they can move on with a clear conscience. It’s just like how stores will have a “doorbuster” sale where they have something that is a really nice deal that you get for just showing up, on the premise that maybe you’ll see other stuff you want to buy while you’re there.

Or have content for both, with its own rewards.

which does not work, since if the player who enjoys one type likes the rewards that the other type offers, he’s stuck doing that other content to earn those rewards. How about this instead, have content for both, each with its own rewards, and also able to earn the rewards from the other one?

It depends on how you see the word reward. if you see them just as pretty skins then yes they aren’t in conflict, if you see them as what they stand for then they are directly in conflict with each other.

So basically, “if you use an incorrect definition of the term, then you will reach an incorrect conclusion?” Well yeah, that’s to be expected. A “reward” is an item that you receive for accomplishing a task. There is no burden on that reward that it only be given out for accomplishing a single task, the same reward can potentially be earned any number of ways, and it is still a reward. What you insist on calling “a reward,” is actually “an exclusive reward,” a reward given out for only a single possible task. If you continue to misuse the term, you will continue to get inaccurate results.

I said that adding more exclusive rewards in the game (everywhere) will bring more players to the game, you said they are fictional and do not exist just like the raiders who were supposed to go to Wildstar. Just having this entire thread proves they are not fictional.

You said that adding more exclusive rewards would bring in more players, those who don’t play GW2 now, but would at the promise of more exclusive rewards. I pointed out Wildstar, a game that made similar claims, that if they made a “hardcore, raid focused game” in 2015, that people would pour in to play it. I believe you have no basis for your claims that these people exist in sizable numbers. You assume that because you want something, there must be a lot of other people that want it, and that would come into the game if that thing were offered. I do not believe this is true. All you can fairly say is that if they made this change, you would be happier, several people in this thread would be happier, and that’s about it. You can continue to believe that a larger population would also prefer this change, but I do not share that belief, and would not act on it without more evidence.

By that logic, anyone who accomplished something and then boasts about it is just doing it to be happy about others not being able to do so.

That is generally the nature of boastfulness, yes. Has anyone ever boasted about something when they were the last person to do it?

Where is your evidence that there is a a massived groundswell of people that is upset that some skins are exclusive? GW2 had exclusive skins locked behind content from day one.

Because there have constantly been complaints about the more difficult to acquire exclusive skins. They tend to ebb and flow, no point belaboring an issue that isn’t changing, but it always comes up. I expect the topic of raid rewards to die down eventually as well, but that doesn’t mean that people stop being bothered by it, just that they don’t see the point in continuing to talk about it if nothing it changing.

They have made some changes on the matter of exclusivity, such as tokenizing Fractal weapons, adding PvP reward tracks, adding Precursor crafting, but they could always do more. The addition of raids takes this a step beyond anything they’ve done before, as everyone, on both sides of this discussion, is assuming that they will be more difficult and time consuming than previous content, and therefore an exceptional burden on those who want to earn those rewards, and therefore adding raids, with exclusive rewards, cannot be viewed as merely a continuation of previous trends.

One problem I had with it was that I tried to use it while my character was on an Overflow server, and it seemed to be seeking responses only from other Overflow people. It should instead ALWAYS seek out members of my home server, or at the very least offer a dropdown menu of which server I’m seeking to group on.

Personally I would really like this and we can discuss it more when we get to the Raid phase of the discussion. i specifically like the idea of making them part of the Living World with complimentary story, strategic group challenge and rewards that really show of that you have beaten the content.

Please no, none of this. The Triple Threat event is already bad enough. I really don’t like the content in the game where you need to “organize” well in advance and hang out on a map for hours just to stand any chance of completing it. The goal when designing content is that if it launches at XX:00, then any single player who knows what he is doing can show up at five minutes before it or less, hop in, do his part well, and receive the reward for the event.

There should be no waiting around beforehand, no need to taxi people in to hard cap the map, no need for a guild, no high likelihood of failure just because not everyone has it down already, no need to exclude players from the event because their presence might disrupt the team.

One of the core philosophies of vanilla GW2 that made it BETTER than other MMOs on the market was the idea that “every other player makes your experience _better,”_ but that philosophy has been greatly eroded the more content that comes out. Too much of it now allows for other players to make content worse for you, by scaling up events that require every player to be at 100%, and any player that is less than 100% is actually hurting you because someone else could be there doing it better. By content that requires 100% of the players on the map to be actively engaged in the task at hand, meaning any players on the map that are doing anything else, through no fault of their own, are killing your chances at the main objective. Getting T6 on Drytop was always a problem not of the skill of the players trying to complete it, but instead just of whether or not enough of the players on the map were even trying, when most of them had perfectly reasonable other things to be doing. Success and failure should be determined only by the skill of the people actually attempting a challenge, anyone who is on the map not trying to work on that challenge should not even be counted against whether it succeeds or not (meaning everything should scale to only require half the map or less, rather than ever requiring a fully capped map).

If you do insist on adding more of that sort of content, then do not give it any cool unique rewards that players might want even if they have no interest in that type of event. If it takes a lot of time then it can involve a larger quantity of reward to justify the time spent, but it should not be a higher quality of reward, including unique skins, than one could earn elsewhere, because any player that really does not enjoy that sort of gaming experience should never feel bribed into doing it anyways just because he wants that specific reward.

I think you’re overreacting to a few things that some people are making as just suggestions. There’s no guarantee anything here is going to be implemented — and the stuff that has less of a reasoning behind it or isn’t nearly as widely supported will have even less of a shot.

I’m not over-reacting, I’m just making it clear that I don’t want their suggestions to ever see implementation. Since ANet doesn’t talk about things they are working on until they launch, I don’t want six months from new to see those features in the next patch and then have it take six month months for them to fix it. It’s not like I’m leaving the game because they’re suggesting things I don’t like, but if this game became one in which non-guilded players became second class citizens, I might play it a lot less.

Isn’t is fair to assume that many paying customer where expecting a game where guilds did where an important element of the game? The game being named Guild Wars. Most won’t know the lore. So guilds having a big role should not be a problem.

People have been playing this game for two years now, I think its safe to say that while most players might want to see incremental improvements in guild features, they are reasonable comfortable with the nature of guilds in GW2, and the amount of players who would want a fundamental overhaul of them would be relatively small.

Most of the changes recommended in this thread I fully support, I just don’t like the idea of tying guilds into a mandatory endgame leveling system as some have suggested.

At best you might be locked out of some specific new guild-related content (guild raids for example) otherwise and it’s rewards while you still are able to get items / rewards of the same type in other way.

And that much I’m fine with, so long as these guild raids do not present unique rewards that non-guilded players are locked out of. Really though I don’t like the idea of guild raids, they should just be raids, and while a tight knit guild might do better at them since they have more experience working together, you should be able to hotjoin them as well.

However to stay more on topic, why don’t you make your concerns visible in the form of a suggestion. Thats what this thread is about in the first place

Fair enough, Suggestion: Don’t do what that one guy said.

This most likely will have to bet met at middle ground, where we will lose some things and gain another ones in return, with perhaps the most difficult task sits on how to do it by gaining the most, with the minimum loss and impact possible.

Not every situation calls for a middle-ground. Sometimes one side is just wrong and doesn’t deserve to get anything they wanted. If a player suggests something that would make things worse for more players than it makes things better for, then that feature does not deserve to be implemented, even in a “middle-ground” fashion.

I don’t mind Scarlet, but it’s not enough. That’s a side story. We can’t just have side stories to tread water. The world needs to PROGRESS. We took down one dragon. We need to take down another five eventually. I don’t expect to have them all dead by next year, but I expect to have at least one dead every year or two, and we’re already running late on #2.

We need to get moving on a second dragon within the year. Maybe Jormag, maybe Kralkatorik, maybe Primordus, whatever. Don’t care which, but we need to move forward. We need a new dragon as a target, and we need a steady addition of new zones for explorers to explore. We need at least one new Caledon Forest style zone per year, and at least 2-3 other permanently available mini-zones like Southsun Cove. Minor tweaks alone won’t cut it.

Well really, when it comes to raid formation, the balance they should really be working for is this, that there are eight classes in the game, and ten slots. There should be a class-specific role that each class can play, and a balanced raid team should want one of each of these roles. There should also be a raw DPs role that each class can play equally well, and the other two slots would go to them. Every raid group should “need” one Chrono, and if two Chronos want to join, there should be room for that too, but the other one in the DPS role.

I’m aware that this is not where they are currently at, but it should be the goal.

I’m thinking more like the glider levels of Sunset Overdrive than Flappy Bird.

In case you can’t tell what’s happening in the video, the power meter on the left drops constantly as you try to fly level or climb, and is refilled by passing over those vents. It’s very forgiving in that game, but I could imagine a much harsher system.

Keep in mind that they’ve also said that at the most basic level there is a limit to how long you can continuously glide, so early JPs might be about gliding from one landing pad to another, while once you master the skills it would make that easier.

No, killing mobs should always be more rewarding.

this is not a solution. “make people leave” can never be a solution.

It does if those people don’t want to be there, have a completely different success metric and ethos than the people who do want to be there, and are essentially just junking up the place.

Think of it this way, say you’re a Death Metal band who wants to promote your album, so you offer a free concert in a big stadium, and your label offers to give out free Taylor Swift tickets at the end of the performance. Suddenly, the stadium is filled with a few hundred fans of your music, and a few thousand Taylor Swift fans who want no part of your music. They are bored, they boo your songs, they are not having a good time, and they are basically bringing down the entire atmosphere. What benefit does that serve anyone? Just give them their tickets and let them be on their way.

50% of what? But this is my point: Other content has exclusive rewards, what’s wrong with raids having exclusive rewards? Your saying you don’t want ANY content to have exclusive rewards?!? Or are you saying you just don’t like raids and you want the rewards but are fine with other stuff for some reason having exclusive rewards? If your answer is A, then I advise you go to a different game cause I highly doubt anet is suddenly gonna say screw you exclusive rewards to all its content. If it’s B, then you just chucked logic out the window. I don’t see any c, but if you got one please do explain. But so far either way you slice the pie its not looking good for you.

I would go with A. While the raid content bothers me personally more than the other systems, ideologically I’m opposed to anyone not being able to get the rewards they want just because they can’t or don’t want to participate in one specific aspect of such a multifaceted game. So this is the topic I am most vocal about, but if someone else really cares about making PvP armors less exclusive, then I certainly wouldn’t argue against them.

The raid issue is a new issue because raids are new to this game. They were not in it before, and therefore everything related to them is a new discussion. Other content might have been in some ways similar, but that does not mean that just because previous content did something a certain way, that raids have to follow suite, or that it would justify raids following suite.

How about a pve/pvp split?

I don’t pvp that much (so it’s not for me), but it seems a reasonable compromise for high prestige items.

I could agree to that, IF raids are considered to be on the “PvP” side of that split. I have a feeling that raiders and PvPers have a lot more in common than raiders and PvEers. However the split ends up, there needs to be a split between raiders and general PvE players.

GW2 though is in definite need of CGC and rewards go hand in hand with that, as it will require some time and dedication to complete (it wouldn’t be challenging if it didn’t) the situation is unavoidable that people who cannot spend that time will not get those rewards.

It isn’t even remotely unavoidable. You avoid it by providing alternate methods for those people to acquire those rewards. Boom, avoided.

This is by design and complaining that something other people will love exists because it doesn’t fit with your life priorities isn’t fair – its your life and you decide what to do with it, sometimes this will put you in a different camp from certain other groups (be it photography night, spawning children or going fishing at the weekend).

I haven’t heard anyone seriously complaining that raiding exists, only about the negative impacts that it could bring to the game, such as locking up exclusive rewards. So long as non-raider players are not incentivized to participate in raiding, it’s a “live and let live” situation. But so long as non-raider players ARE incentivized to raid, well then it’s war, and one side has to burn.

You know (as you seem experienced in gaming) that the CGC must have special rewards linked to it. They are adding Legendary backpacks to PvP and Fractals and new weapons too (Fractals being reduced in required completion time). There will be plenty to do and get for those who don’t have time for raiding.

Like what? You just listed two things that are no less of a time/skill investment than raiding. It’s like you just said “you don’t need to be a doctor, you could also be a lawyer or a hedge-fund manager, like, whatever.”

Then they are being bloody hypocrites. You can’t be ok with exclusives for content that YOU like and then not ok with them when you don’t like the content.

Of course you can. People can care about what they care about and not care about what they don’t care about, that does not make them hypocrites. What would make them hypocrites is if they care about it in their own case, but actively fight against it in someone else’s case.

So if someone says “I care about these rewards being exclusive, but I don’t care about those rewards being exclusive,” then that is not hypocritical, their degree of investment is their own business. It is only hypocritical if they say “I care about these rewards being exclusive, but I don’t want you to have these other rewards because they are exclusive to something I like.” I am not taking that position, and so far I don’t believe that anyone has.

It is more accessible.

Let’s wait to see if they’re actually hard before we get into that part though.

I don’t buy that they can ever balance it out. If the raiders like it, then it’ll be too hard for most players. If it’s easy enough that most players can do it, then the raiders will drown the forums with their tears about how it’s too “casual.” My assumption is that if they’re going to bother with raiding at all, that they will at least try to err on the raider’s side, at least at first. After a few months, they might give up on that though.

There needs to be a reward for doing Raids. Hopefully these rewards will be sellable. Otherwise, outside of trying to sell a path, they’ll be no reason for me to repeat the content.

There should be rewards, just not exclusive ones. The amount of rewards you get should be comparable or better than other activities in the game. If you enjoy raiding, so that on a level playing field raiding is how you would prefer to spend your time, then great, it’s available for you! If you don’t prefer raiding, and would not do it unless bribed into it via exclusive rewards, then also great, you don’t have to raid! Everybody wins!

Ohoni, you don’t deserve the rewards because you don’t want to do the content. Thats as simple as it gets.

It’s also a nonsense statement. "deserving " a reward is entirely based on meeting an arbitrary goal put there at a developer’s whim. They are free to change that goal at their whim. If they choose to say that players “deserve” the armor for completing the raid then that’s what players deserve. If they say that players can also “deserve” the armro for completing some other challenge, then players deserve that too. I’m just pushing that they adopt the latter position.

There a lot of things locked behind certain content… do you see an uproar in the community of players complaining about PvP getting their own exclusive stuff? or fractals getting their own stuff?

Yes. You don’t? There’s not so much of it right at the moment, because neither gameplay type is particularly novel, but each time they’ve added exclusive rewards to those modes there has been some degree of negative response, and there continues to be under the surface. I imagine that vocal criticism of raid armor will die off too over time, after the game releases and people have fully tried it, but don’t confuse that for acceptance, it just means that people have given up on trying to change something that they still do not like, and that still makes them less happy about playing the game.

Raids shouldn’t be any different. Disagree all you want, I know this won’t stop you , but sooner or later, you need to realize that you are not going to change anet’s stance on exclusive rewards.

Why? They’ve changed their stance numerous times before. Just coming up we’re going to be getting non-RNG routes to earning Fractal weapons, non-RNG Precursors, why should I not expect to ever see them change their stance on raid armor?

This game (or any MMORPG) would be a disaster with your views of a reward system. Thats why there is no MMORPG out there that does not have exclusive rewards.

I’m playing Marvel Heroes at the moment, and it doesn’t have exclusive rewards. Much of the loot is themed, and more likely to be acquired directly from certain scenarios, but almost every item in the game can be gained through some alternate means, and those that can’t are just stats, not skins, so it really isn’t that important.

Than those players that still struggle need to step up their game. If i suck at playing hockey im not gonna be a NHL player. So why should someone whos bad at raids be allowed to complete them.

Because the NHL is a professional league and this is an entertainment product. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to compete.

By your logic i should have a easy PVP mode just becuase i would struggle in a competitive manner.

Sure. I mean, they should do their best to match poor players with other poor players, resulting in competitive match-ups, rather than to match poor players against great players where they basically stand no chance. You want to try to create a fun experience for everyone, not just those with the highest level of skill.

Just by reading this thread I can see that more people are defending the new more difficult content than those who complain about it.

Yes, and just by reading this thread you’ve accumulated absolutely zero relevant demographic data for the relative sizes of those populations, so. . .

The point is, there have been a lot of threads like this, started by different people each time, it’s an issue that keeps coming up, and it’s usually the same people shouting it down each time, likely people that were asking for “moar harder” content before. Again, it’s up to ANet to determine how large the population is and what to do about it, but “number of people responding to forum thread” is completely useless for accomplishing that.

Add in the fact that usually those who like the content are playing and not complaining on the forums, and I’m pretty sure it was the majority that wished for more challenge.

Nope, kittenumption. It’s also important to keep in mind that forums skew towards higher engagement, higher challenge type players than actual games do. Even if a game’s forum population seems overwhelmingly in favor of challenging content, chances are that the people actually playing the game are considerably less so, on average.

And they were players of the “old content” aswell, just like you, and just like you they contributed to the success of the game.

Based on self reporting, a lot of them fall into the “lapsed player” camp, the “I gave them three months to put raiding in, but they didn’t, so I stopped playing, but I’d come back if they changed the game to suit my tastes” camp. How many is impossible to tell, but there are at least some of them.

For the others though, I have to question that if the pre-HoT GW2 was so completely different from what they wanted in a game, then why would they have played it continuously for three years like the rest of us? I mean, the casual gamers have good reason to be upset about how HoT’s content greatly shifted the flow of the game they had been enjoying, but what were hardcore gamers doing with their time pre-HoT?

I find it very hard to believe Anet would have deliberately done changes to their game against the majority of their players’ wishes. That would be just plain bad business.

Yeah, that’s just what I was thinking when I was playing Super Adventure Box last week. . .

Will it stop that thing where if I take my Engineer to fight Karka Queen, and I try to hit one of my many ground targeted abilities like grenades, the icon will pulse for a second or two, and then just say “no, I don’t feel like actually firing, what else you got?” That is super annoying.

Don’t qq about people qqing, play your own game.

If people are complaining then they are not enjoying themselves, and something needs fixing. It may not bother you, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t bother them. One of the first steps of growing up is being able to understand that people who are not you might think differently than you, and that this is ok. Get better.

Keep in mind you are scaled down unless you are an asuran.

Yes, but his point is a valid one, regardless of which character I’m using the key’s attack has an effective range of half the stick’s. Maybe it’s got something to do with the stick having an arcing cone attack, while the key is perhaps a single target thrust? If this is working as intended, fair enough, it probably should have a reduced range, but if it’s a bug. . .

That’s not lag. That’s the player collision cylinder being a bit wider than your feet.

It’d almost be nice if the player’s collision cylinder were depicted on screen, like the new banner-circles that show the buff’s effective range. just a small permanent circle around your feet to show exactly where you’d start to fall.

Yes, and that sucks. They should change that before launch.

Function gyro not to your tastes? play something else. This is hands down the BEST elite skill for pvp when you trait for it. you can instantly stomp someone from range and there isnt jack they can do to stop you. you can target teammates in the party window (spvp/dungeons =/) in order to res them from a range. added bonus: you can even stealth gyro AND res them yourself to get anyone up almost instantly. It’s the best skill in the game for ressing, bar none. stealth gyro is even instant kitten so you can stop someone stomping a teammate perfectly every time.

Function Gyro is good in PvP, but it has limited use in PvE, especially when not in a zerg. I wish there were more to it, like you could send it out to harvest things for you.

Play some PvP matches and you will feel it

Nobody cares.

Anyways, I like my scrapper well enough, but do wish that they made the Gyros that are meant to follow you into “hard locked” items, 1:1 affixed to your character’s anchor point and impossible to shake. They had to no that no AI solution would ever be viable. I mean, come on,. . .Rangers.

As you can see, it’s a self inflicted problem. Everyone wants the same item (i.e. Dusk), that’s also very limited.

That’s not a self-inflicted problem though. ANet made Dusk the way they did, they created an item with the intention that it would be in high demand. You can’t then turn around and say that it’s the player’s fault that the item is in high demand. The Dusk price is what it is because of decisions ANet made, and perfectly predictable human nature, and it’s just farcical to try and remain willfully ignorant of that fact.

It’s the player’s lack of understanding that other Precursors exist, but the hyper focus on two or three force prices up.

Utter nonsense. The players are in no way whatsoever unaware of the other precurors, they are plenty aware of them, they just don’t WANT them. You can stack up dozens of Rages, but so long as they never add up to a Twilight they don’t get the job done. It’s like there is a flat head screw and someone is asking for a flat head screwdriver to remove it, and you just keep offering them dozens and dozens of philips head ones.

That is not the right tool for the job.

Yeah, I’ve given up. I’ve tried it about a dozen or more times now, and I think I do pretty well myself, I almost never die (maybe 2-3 times total between a dozen or so runs), and I feel I contribute to the group’s success, but I’ve never been in a group that’s gotten him past 50%, and most of the overflows I end up with stall out above 75%. I logged in tonight, and was surprised to find that I was able to get into my home server on my first try, but only because everyone else on my home server had just stopped bothering, so again we stood little chance of success and I went to do other things.

I’m sorry, this whole event is just one huge fail for me. I’m willing to put in the time and effort, but at the end of that time and effort I need to win it. If I haven’t won it yet then that means I need to keep going, not that the kitten gets to fly away and I end up with nothing. Remove the timer and I’ll chip away at Teq as long as it takes, hours if necessary, I’ve soloed a few champs in my day, but put a “you lose” timer on him, and that just earns a big old “kitten you very much” in return.

Will the pip system from season 1 be returning as well? That was the vital part that made season 1 the best season, that if you ended up against an impossible team, you wouldn’t lose any pips for it, and if you did well enough you could even gain a pip. The win/loss streak system just led to frustration, as there was no bonus for w/l/w/l/w/l/w/l/w/l/w/l would get you nowhere at all.

I just want to be put on the winnable team. I’m tired of being assigned to the losing team. This matchmaking system just flat out does not work without the sdeason 1 pip-assignment system, and they need to fix this BEFORE it is too late to gain ranks over this season.

Why do they go full silence between seasons? They just bunker down and don’t even try to fix the current season, and then the season ends and they come out like “well, we kittened that one up royally, but here’s what we’re going to do next season,” no, next season is too late, do something about it today! Or maybe tomorrow, I’m not picky, but don’t wait until it’s too late to actually matter.

I will note this: If and when you guys get around to initiating the final battle storyline against Jormag, the lore apparently indicates that this series of events will begin when “someone” is capable of breaking Jormag’s tooth in Hoelbrak. I’m giving you a friendly warning right now, if, in some strange fever dream, you guys have even considered making this “someone” be a random NPC, rather than the player character, I would strongly advise against it. If you think the Trehearn hate is bad, you can’t even begin to imagine the deluge of hatemail that “Mary Sue Toothbreaker” would have showered upon her for “tooth-blocking” the player character like that.

“Exclusive” titles don’t have the same value as “exclusive” skins. There is thing thing called path of least resistance.

They don’t, I can totally understand why exclusivity players would prefer to keep as “big” a thing exclusive as possible. But the people who want exclusive things don’t deserve to have exclusive access to things like skins. The other people who wants skins deserve to have them more than the exclusive people deserve to take them away from other players.

Quantity between content types is very hard to balance, there is a reason players do the silverwastes chest farm, it’s the best income for the time/effort needed.

Sure, but “quality” of rewards between content types is even more difficult to balance, to say that one type of reward is “worth” having in one type of content, while another type of reward is “worth” having in another. Balance is hard, nobody is saying otherwise, but you’re saying that the type of balance I’m looking for is so hard that it’s not worth doing, while I note that the balance you’re looking for is considerably harder to achieve.

At least in the balance I’m looking for, the worst case scenario is that some task is viewed as much easier than another, and thus over-played, or another is viewed as much harder than another, and thus underplayed, but conditions being relatively simple to fix by either bumping/lowering the rewards or reducing/bumping the effort needed to earn them. The balance you’re looking for, on the other hand, means that there are no other options, that if you don’t want to do the one thing the reward is attached too, too bad. There is no way in which that is not worse.

But you are saying it shouldn’t reward both exclusive skins and exclusive titles, so how do you say now that it should reward both? How is it both if you only want exclusive titles and not exclusive skins?

I’m saying it would reward skins, not exclusive skins. My point is that you keep saying “they just get the skins,” as if that’s all they walk away with, they would get other stuff too. It’s like, let’s take a modified CoF dungeon, and lets say that your proposal for it is that the only way in the game to get CoF gloves is by beating CoF path 1, you kill the boss, chances are that the gloves would drop, and that’s the one way to get them.

My alternative suggestion would mean that while you could do that, you could kill the CoF boss, and you would get the gloves that way, exactly as often as under your proposal, and you would also get an “Effigy Slayer” title or something, there would be other ways to earn the gloves. You could earn the gloves by collecting tokens, or PvP reward tracks, or various other means.

So basically, if you want to do the intended content, you will get all the same rewards, at all the original rates, you just won’t get exclusive access to them, while you would retain exclusive access to the titles.

What is difficult varies between people. You either put exclusive behind content or you don’t, if you do, all content gets the same types of exclusives. Who sets the “difficulty” barrier? Who says what is difficult and what is not? There is no such thing as “average” especially for un-released and un-tested content.

Yes, but again, there is nothing new or unique about that, it’s a problem when releasing ANY new content, of any type, and with any reward structure. The system I propose is no more (or less) prone to points of failure, but it is fairly easily corrected by tweaking various factors. As I noted, I’m willing for there to be a “cooling period” on the alternate methods, to give players time to test out the raid content and actually see how difficult it is, and only once they’ve got it pretty figured out, determine what amount would be a fair alternative to that.

Again, you keep saying “you can’t make it perfect, so you shouldn’t do it at all,” when “doing it perfect” was never an option, including for the status quo.

Why are world bosses going to have exclusive rewards and not raids?

I don’t think they should either.

I find Liadri easy to fight because it’s a good encounter for me, but I despise the SW chest farm, as extremely grindy/farming content is for me extremely difficult. So by your definition using the “average”, why is the chest getting exclusive rewards and not Liadri?

It shouldn’t.

No, as I explained before.. it makes people enjoy the content longer. People enjoyed the MF every time they did it, that’s why they asked for it to be put back. But when it was back and there was no reward they did not start doing it again.

Like I said.. Reward and Fun of content go’s hand in hand.

I don’t think that’s really true, I think that’s just how you interpret it.

I suggest it, to make the game-play of the hunt for items a more fun interesting item.. I suggest it to make content more fun, I do it to give more value to the items. and yes, drawing people towards different content is a part of that, but not the sole, or even the main reason.

I think that while it’s possible to add value to items, I think that items have enough value within themselves, and do not need value added to them. If you want to add value to things, do it to things with little to no intrinsic value, such as titles.

Funny enough, that is exactly how I feel about your solution, and at least the way Anet implemented your solution has so far proved to work like this.

Just so long as you understand that this is your personal feeling on the matter, and should not dictate how everyone else plays the game.

What you don’t seem to grasp, is that the unique reward are a reason to not be bored with the content so far. Again, MF is a great example of that. It required good content and good specific rewards.

No, content is only fun so long as it is fun. When it stops being fun, then rewards do not keep it fun, they just keep you doing it despite not having fun. There are plenty of elements in this game where I either never had fun with it or lost fun with it well before I stopped doing it, but I kept at it because there was a specific goal I wanted out of it. That is to no one’s benefit, not mine, not ANet’s.

For the person who does just not like that content you mean? Yeah your right.. Like I said, you can’t make everybody always happy. Your solution does not do that, mine does not.. That can’t be done.

My solution makes more people happier though, because they can always do the things they want to get the rewards they want. The worst case is that other methods are slightly more efficient. Your solution means that people either have to do content that they don’t enjoy (worse), or never get the thing they want (worse), so while my solution is by no means perfect, it is at the very least better.

WvW themed armor is something WvW-players will overall likely enjoy more than PvE players..

Not in any way whatsoever. There is no “WvW themed” armor that WvW players are more likely to be interested in than PvPers, dungeon runners, or chest farmers. Players will be attracted to the designs that attract them, it is impossible to design an armor that visually appeals to players who enjoy a specific gameplay type. If you design “WvW armor,” it is fairly inevitable that you will have just as many people who never WvW who want that armor as there are hardcore WvWers who want it, and plenty of WvWers who have no interest in it at all. You CANNOT pair aesthetics with content relaiably.

Now, functional items are an entirely different matter, it’s true that a non-WvWing guild would have no purpose for a high cost WvW-boosting item, so that sort of item could certainly be exclusively a WvW reward, but that has nothing to do with the discussion of armor skins.

Why do you think, multiple people tell you that they don’t like it.. because they get what they want with your solution?.. guess not.

It’s because they get what they deserve, not necessarily what they want. I don’t doubt that you guys would prefer to have exclusive access to things just for doing the content you prefer to do, that’s a perfectly reasonable desire, but you aren’t entitled to actually get it, and can make due with less than what you’d like. Players want to have nice things, I’m fine with that, give them nice things. Players want to be able to keep nice things away from other players? Kitten that, whether it would make them happier or not, they do not deserve to be happy when their happiness can only come at other players’ expense.

So your solution does not give everybody what they want, someting you claimed, not saying mine does.. and indeed..

I meant that you would not actually end up with “less.” You want the armor, you do get the armor, you have exactly as much in your hands as you would have otherwise. All you would not get, is the ability to look over at your fellow player, who did not get that armor because he did not run that content, and smile because he is sad. That is the only difference, that that other player would also be able to get that armor, so you would have less opportunity to be happy at his misfortune. Everything else would be the same.

Grinders will get their rewards, raiders theirs, dungeon-runners theirs and so on, and so on.

Which works fine, so long as you can guarantee that the grinders will never want the rewards made exclusive to the dungeon runners, and vice versa. Can you guarantee that? If not, then not, that is not “fine.”

Well you talked about pretty and non-pretty. With titles you don’t really speak about pretty and non-pretty.

It was in reference to Mad Doc’s comments about players caring how “pretty” a reward looks, and my insistence that players are perfectly valid in valuing how pretty an item looks more than its exclusivity value, and should be able to pick and choose rewards based on prettiness, without exclusivity getting in their way.

As much as I personally dislike RNG when the chances are really low, it is a shot of excitement for the addicted. I personally know reasonable and educated people that can burn through an evening of grinding and go to bed satisfied if they found something only remotely good and thrilled if they found a jackpot item. So I am not really sure if a group reward should be superior to a solo reward, coming from a business position only with the idea that I can fill my servers with solo grinders if nothing else.

One alternative, for RNG junkies, is random boxes. In Marvel Heroes, the big currency is “Splinters,” they drop in slowly, but are the currency you can use to unlock new characters, a little like Gems, but not as versatile. Anyways, a new hero costs 200/400/600 depending on the character’s complexity. You also have the option, however, of a “random hero” box, for only 175 splinters, that is capable of spitting out any hero. The downside, of course, is that you could end up with heroes you don’t want, or with heroes you already have (which is still useful, just considerably less so). So you can choose to gamble, and potentially get three 600 point heroes for less than the cost of one, or you could end up with nothing you wanted, or you could take the sure bet and get exactly what you want at the asking price.

My point is, if they did have a token system, they could incorporate an RNG mechanism as easily as with monster drops. For example a Molten GS costs 390 tokens, a Molten Focus costs 210, they could have a “Molten weapon box” that costs 190 or so that could drop any weapon, but at random, or maybe even a "Molten box for 150 or less that might also just drop runes, potions, or other “junk.” RNG and tokens can coexist, gamblers can have their run at the slots.

The idea that group content should always be better of course also appeals to me for the sake of fairness and for the pain to assemble 5 or 10 people in TS.

I think that the quantity of reward that a group can make in organized play should be more than a disorganized zerg, because it is harder to get that group together, but the quality should not be of a higher tier, it should not be more exclusive. It should take you less hours of play at organized content to accumulate “all the things,” but you should still be able to accumulate “all the things” via other methods if you put the time in.

NO one is asking to take away the rewarding solo open world zerg stuff. Just make group content more rewarding and balanced….which anet has decided they finally will in HoT

And nobody is saying that they shouldn’t make group content more rewarding or balanced, just that they shouldn’t do so using rewards exclusive to that content.

What is forbidden is to use any official tools/websites to advertise your trades, like the forums, the lfg tool, map chat, whispers, their facebook page etc.

Right, so if you can arrange a personal trade with a willing customer, then that won’t get you into trouble, but if you hassle uninterested players in trying to find a customer, then you can get in trouble for that, and they don’t have a dedicated “trader channel” or anything like that because they don’t want people doing personal trades except to good friends and that sort of thing.

But I enjoy raiding, and even if only a small part (i.e. 5-10%) of the playerbase loves raiding/hard content, then why not?

If a small number of the players want to raid then they should be able to raid, but they have no right to drag other players into the raid with them. The only people raiding should be people who enjoy raiding, not people who do not enjoy raiding but feel compelled to do it anyways for the loot.

Yet even in Mass Effect you have to do specific content to get specific rewards. You cannot get characters in your group without meeting them first and talking to them, they don’t magically spawn in your party. Different story maybe but it doesn’t apply to the rewards. There is no story reason for the two helms in your example to be the same item. Both Legendary maybe, but not the same item.

Where do you think the mob in the raid got his helm? There aren’t a lot of people making legendary helms out there. Also, keep in mind that NO item in this game is actually “unique,” nothing is one of a kind, every item that exists once in the game exists at least a few hundred, if not many thousands of times.

You don’t call PvE things PvP things because you feel the mentality is the same between the players. Raids are PvE. PvP is player vs player. No regard to what their mentality is. If a player who hates PvP is in PvP area doing it for the rewards it’s not suddenly PvE because of that player’s mentality. The PvP rooms for the daily aren’t PvE rooms because of the mentality of the players in the room. It’s still PvP. Raids are PvE no matter what the mentality is behind the players who enjoy the content.

Again, you’re choosing to focus on the distinction of PvE vs. PvP as if that is the most important factor between the two, I believe that the difference between “hardcore challenge” and “casual challenge” is the more important factor, regardless of whether that challenge is provided by AI or by another human. I still believe that raids should be lumped in with PvP as “hardcore challenge” content, rather than with more casual PvE content.

You can’t claim in one instance that a meal can be analogous to a game and then tell someone else that it can’t be. You said food a child hates. 9 times out of 10, that food is a vegetable. Can you come up with a food that a parent may serve at dinner that has no nutritional value? If not, then you can’t claim raids are a nutrient free food. Not in your analogy of a dinner with a food a child hates.

I thought I should respond to this, but then I couldn’t think of anything that could make sense of it, so I stopped.

Another one the misses the point entirely.
And for the silly one ring example you still can’t get it from multiple content at the same time. When it was on Sauron’s hand you couldn’t get it by fishing. Which is the whole point you and others intentionally miss.

Yes, but again you are confusing linear narrative with interactive narrative. Think of it a bit like Schrodinger’s cat. In a game, the whole point is to make the one ring available to the hero, so the “actual location of the ring” is not in any of those places until the hero’s actions put it within his reach. The ring’s location is a superposition of all possible locations until the hero decides “I’m going fishing today,” at which point the ring’s location is inside a fish, and it turns out it was never in any of those other locations.

And btw, from a P&P scenario, if you have a magical macguffin item that will instigate some massive chain of events, and you predetermine that it has a singular location in your game world, and yet the players decide to avoid that location and do something else instead, and so you completely abandon that entire storyline rather than to adapt and shift the location of the item to be along their new path, then that is just some serious DM malpractice right there.

And you want to joke around find me a true RPG where it’s possible to get an item from multiple types of content.

I was playing this game called “Guild Wars 2” recently where the most prized drops, the “Legendary Precursors” could drop off pretty much anything in the game.