Guild Wars 2

To me it seems ridiculous to lock something as HUGE as raiding behind a paywall. Now for small to mid size guilds, assembling a Raid team may be much more difficult. They will need to have 10 EXCEPTIONAL people who also have HoT…

Um, ok, I dropped out of WoW fairly early, but when WoW released an expansion, and that expansion included new raids, weren’t you required to buy that expansion to access those new raids? Why is this considered something unusual?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Labjax.2465:

JohnnySupernova.9182:

Arena net has some of the worst communication out of any game company I can think of. When they’re not giving crappy non-answers and ignoring problems, they’re outright lying to the playerbase.

you really wont see a change in communication. Josh foreman got yelled at for communicating TOO MUCH. Even if anyone at anet WANTED to communicate, they wont be able to because the higher ups deemed it bad for business.

I’ve only been around for a few months, but in that time, I’ve seen them not only make an effort to communicate more, but Gaile now has the title “ArenaNet Forum Communications Team Lead” and has been posting in several threads.

If that’s non-answers and outright lying, then consider me fully duped.

Duping!!?! ~gasp!~ Oh, sorry, different type, gotcha.

Things aren’t going to change overnight, but we are making a concerted effort to improve communications. Not every thread gets — or realistically can get — a reply. That is driven not so much by a particular topic but more critically by sheer volume. And yes, not every question can be answered, but maybe it just can’t be answered in the short term, or maybe it’s taken under consideration for a more focused means of communication, such as a CDI, or maybe you’ll see an answer in the Update Notes. And sure, I guess some questions will go unanswered, too, but not for lack of effort or interest.

The truth is, you’re noticing, or I hope you’re noticing: We’re actively taking steps to be more communicative and involved, and we’ll continue to do so as time passes.

I feel that it’s important that we get a higher quality of communication rather than quantity of communication. We don’t need a red flag on every thread, and we certainly don’t need devs popping in to say “I’ve read this” using way more word than that. What we do need is devs making it clear that they understand where we have serious issues with the state of the game, and that they are actually working to fix those things.

There are numerous very common complaints and concerns that come up on a weekly or even daily basis, and we have no idea where the developers are headed on those topics. We need less player-to-dev communication, less “dev-telling-us-they-read-our-posts” communication, and more “dev actually talking about the future of the game in a comprehensive manner” communication, and yes, I’m aware of the “company policy” that prevents talking about future development, but that policy MUST go, no question.

. . . even more than I already did.

I mean, I never liked PvP, at all, but I still played unranked a few times a month to fill out my dailies sometimes. And it was usually awful, but I had a pretty decent win/loss average, and it wasn’t completely intollerable.

But now there are the PvP leagues, and for that you need to play way too many matches per day, and win way too many matches, with every character class, apparently, and it’s the most horrible experience that I’ve ever had in this game. I keep ending up on teams where the opposition is WAY stronger than the team I’m on, I haven’t been on a winning team yet. I don’t know how I’m meant to get the 40+ wins I’m expected to get to clear out just the first tier of achievements.

This is just horrible Anet. Make it better. Or at the very least, avoidable.

People are impatient, and yes, I know it’s been two(2) years, but still, glaciers don’t move a mile a minute.

Yeah, but two years is an eternity in game dev time. I’ve played through two Assassin’s Creeds in that time, and will be starting on a third in the near future. Most games that aren’t MMOs just get played for a month or two and never again, and if that’s ANet’s goal for GW2 then I suppose I’ve been misreading them and that’s on me, but if they want to keep players invested in the ongoing present then we need some concrete goals to look forward to in the future as well.

Imagine if Blizzard just stopped communicating all of the sudden… idk why ANet gets away with crap like this.

Yeah, and to be clear, “communication” means conveying actual concrete information that we did not already know, not just repeating that “the devs read the boards” or that “we do not discuss things until they’re done,” that’s not communication, it’s just talk.

Yes, Taimi is always a scene stealer. More Taimi in season two. Taimi all the time, Commander and Taimi, 100 years.

OMG, could we get a Taimi backpack? Like the Ho-Ho tron Backpack? Just like a little Taimi that rides on your shoulder and yells at everything? I would totally drop some serious gems for that.

A puzzle that relies on “Trial and error” is poorly designed.

agreed. Any good JP, you should be able to use intelligent reasoning to determine the correct next jump before you make it. If something looks right but turns out to be impossible or auto-kill you, then that’s not good gameplay, it’s just needlessly cruel.

The breakdown between arguments is pretty ridiculous here.

Side A: Adventures are fine for those who enjoy them, but we’d rather not have to do them, thank you.

Side B: No, we like adventures, so you have to do them.

Seems fair.

I’d say the majority of players are doing what they’ve always done: flocking to the Blue Dorito, autoattacking while doing other things on a second monitor, and expecting a huge reward.

Oh, and ignoring mapchat completely.

This is unhelpful. If they do this, they will die. This is not the problem with the event. The problem with the event is that if they go to the bosses, and pay VERY close attention, and do EVERYTHING right in their own fight, they still get no reward because dozens of other players zerged something else and the scaling all goes out of whack.

Stop with the lazy “the problem is all those people just spamming 1” excuses, that has NOTHING to do with this particular event or the complaints people have about it.

5 other Commanders and I just organized and progressed all the way up to 30 seconds off of Gold. It isn’t hard.

That’s the problem right there. You shouldn’t need ANY commanders to do pug content, if you log in to the map then it should be achievable. If there is to exist any content in the game that needs organization of this level, then it should be an optional mode that players can opt into, with no greater rewards than the pug version. You should have to play well yourself, you should have to pay attention to survive and pull your own weight to achieve a reward, but you should not have to rely on dozens of other players splitting up into evenly balanced parties.

The new Crown Pavillion is working exactly as it’s supposed to. Those who’re willing to put in the extra effort to coordinate with their guild, server community, or game community at large can set up a farm for themselves where they can reap 8 champ bags and 50 festival tokens every ~20 minutes or so.

Which is bad for the game. This is not that game. There are other games that are about hardcore raiding kind of activities, this IS NOT THAT GAME. This is a FUN game, it’s one where you should be able to log in, enjoy yourself, and be rewarded, not one where the encounter becomes an hour long slog with NO rewards at the end of it because the server you happened to log into didn’t have six commanders and a bunch of well informed and organized players on it. I’ve spent about three hours running Boss Blitz, participated in about 9-12 boss kills personally, spent about 20-25 silver on WPing after death, and only ever seen about 4-5 tokens and 1-2 tickets in return for my efforts, NEVER a completion reward. It is probably the least satisfying time I’ve ever spent playing this game, and it absolutely ruined a night in which I did a lot of other very fun things that would otherwise have made it a great night of GW2.

Joining these communities is actually easier then most think. GW2Community for example. Just google it.

I Do Not Want to join a community. I could join a guild, I have no interest in doing so. I want my community to be whomever is on when I log in, I just want that to WORK, and that is on ANet to provide. I do not want content that requires coordination, the event itself should enforce whatever coordination it requires, not just fail you if you don’t provide that coordination yourself.

I really think if we could have our own maps to control things could be much smoother. Anet could make some money by charging a decent amount of gems for it. And Ideally I’d have it be a time based thing (24 hr, 3 days, 1 week maybe as options) and let the map creator purge it clearing the whole map and restarting it when they feel like it so we have the power to deal with griefers.

“Private maps” would work out fine for those who had access to them, but would ruin the game for everyone else. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of a large guild would be completely locked out of most content because any players worth having around would migrate to those maps and everyone else would be left in also-rans. They need a solution that works for ALL players that are willing to put in the effort, not just those in the right guilds.

One thing that came up during Blitz discussions about “AKFers” was that some people wanted the ability to kick AFKers somehow. I think this would likely be abused, but there might be a compromise. Instead, the system should track you as being “AFK” after a minute or two of inactivity. If you are AFK, then 1. you do not scale up anything nearby, ever, and 2. you get no credit for anything nearby, ever.

This would mean that players would have to participate, but that if they weren’t participating, then they wouldn’t in any way harm your experience. Also, whatever the cap on a given map, the content would scale to the point that even if only half the map is participating, they can complete all the objectives (but it would be little easier if every single player on the map were participating). Only those who play, can win, but those who are playing wouldn’t be punished for those that weren’t.

Likewise, challenges should be based on active participation, not DPS checks. The Blitz was far too susceptible to having uplevels and mis-geared characters unable to pull their DPS weight on several of the bosses. The challenge should be in staying alive and avoiding attacks, not in bringing the health bar down in time if you do.

It’s also worth mentioning that the difference in rewards for T3/4 Dry Top isn’t that remarkable. The gold cost for the recipes and items remain exactly the same at all tiers; only the geode cost goes down.

It’s not as big a deal as the Blitz, certainly, but it is still a step in the wrong direction, a sign that they’re still designing content of this type, without yet implementing the tools for players to manage them. I highly doubt they will ever “fix” Dry Top, they’ve moved on to other projects. This is more about fixing whatever content they still have time to mess with before release.

Yeah, the Legendary blog post left me without a lot of hope. It seemed to describe a long process of “do exactly what we tell you, no choice, no options, PLAY IT OUR WAY.”

That seems to be the opposite of fun to me, and the opposite to the first three years “play it your way” promise. I really hope they clarify all this that you will have actual options, and not be forced into specific lanes if you want specific rewards. There are plenty of activities that I absolutely love in this game, but there are also plenty of activities that I want no part of, and I don’t want the game telling me that I have to do a little bit of everything if I want certain rewards.

i really dont know what ppl call for weapon swap

you have utilities swap which is the same and even more unique

They don’t need to add weapon swap IF they rebuild the existing weapons so that their functions shift a bit for each Legend, so that each weapon provides some useful benefits no matter which Legend you run. As it stands, each weapon is way too tied to one specific Legend, and kinda junk for any other, and that means when you swap Legends your weapon becomes broken.

TL;DR, They need to EITHER add weapon perks that shift based on current Legend OR allow you to swap weapons along with swapping Legends.

Wow, so much rude behavior in this thread. Shameful. Anyways, I hope they do have options for very small guilds to get by in the new system at least as well as in the old one.

Paying a lump sum every now and then for full maps and the content to go with them, I’d be fine with that, but paying on a bi-weekly or monthly basis for new content is too much like a subscription fee, and if I wanted that I’d be playing ESO.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On the schedule:

• It is not written in stone. We will adjust it as necessary.
• There’s lots of ways to go about this, but the current thinking is that it would be more convenient to plan for specific daily times rather than have a “sliding” rotation. We felt this was particularly necessary for larger events like the Triple Wurm and Tequatl.
• Although the old system had certain advantages, it had some major disadvantages as well:
  • Although non-scheduled events are more dynamic, you have a low chance of encountering events with long cooldown periods. Although it was originally thought that big events would be happenstance and rare opportunities that players would stumble on and become immersed in, we found that many players enjoy this type of content as a mainstay of their GW2 experience. When they can’t access that content regularly, we have a problem.
  • On the other hand, you may be aware of the external event tracking sites and have been using them play on regularly basis. This is a good approach in concept, but there’s some major pitfalls if you miss an opportunity to play because of a new build or encounter an overflow server.
• The intent of the schedule is to:
  • consistently provide access to large scale content for players who want to play it
  • deliver that content in such a way that players can plan and organize to prepare for it
  • help ensure that there are always enough participants in the content
  • help ensure that there is always enough server capacity to for all of the participants regardless of overflows, megaservers, etc
• There are still and will always be a large number of meta-events and bosses that are not on the schedule.

At some point, we would also like to introduce a messaging system in-game so that it’s always clear what world event content you participate in without having to utilize a resource outside of the game. I have no guarantee or ETA of when we might actually see this though.

Having a schedule is all well and good, but one thing the schedule currently handles poorly, when the events you want to do ONLY occur at times you’re unable to play. Players are not at the beck and call of your master schedule, we have lives outside the game. There needs to be better ways that the player can find the event they want WITHIN the time they have available to play, rather than having to structure the time they play around the game’s schedule. Predictability is good, but there also needs to be choice.

Make it so that multiple events are running simultaneously, so that they can stack up on once-per-hour cycles instead of “one per three hour” cycles, and you can choose which ones you want to join at any given time.

I’m not saying that the current system is perfect, only that the new system you’re proposing is worse.

It seems with each successive release that you guys would like Karma to be viewed as a valuable resource, since Karma drops tend to be the most common “Living Story” rewards, and yet the players are determined to consider Karma as a practically worthless resource, since it’s such a pain in the kitten to spend. There are useful things to buy with Karma, but they are spread all over the place, with travel costs to get there and often event chains that need competing before you can access any of them.

My suggestion would be to open a Karma Bazaar, a single location in the game where most of the desirable karma-based items can be purchased. This could be in LA, although since that city is already packed to the gills I might suggest Rata Sum instead. This place would allow you to buy all the karma-harvesting tools, all the karma cooking ingredients, at least most of the karma clothing pieces, etc.

To some this would cheapen the specialness of unlocking these vendors in the wild. Perhaps if possible it could require that you “unlock” each vendor in the bazaar in order to use them, like for example if you have a vendor that sells every piece of level 50-60 karma armors, to unlock him you would have to first unlock each of the heart vendors that already sell those items, and then maybe have to activate a small quest, which would then unlock that vendor in the Bazaar for all your characters.

I really think that making it easier for players to buy handy items using their Karma would make people have much more value for the currency than they currently do. As it stands, they’re a bit like that gasoline rebate on the tv show where to collect it people had to climb a mountain. Yeah, the reward is nice, but is it really worth the bother?

I remember when butter was popping out of trees. Pretty sure I heard people being annoyed/confused/amused by the sheer amount of butter, including “Why is this dropping so much!?”

Well, to be fair, in the real world, most trees barely produce a single stick of butter per season.

While I would personally love such a system to be in place, I suspect the reason ANet has done things the way they have is because, quite frankly, if things became a lot easier for players to obtain, player retention would go way down.

this has nothing to do with making things easier. Right now they are as easy as it gets, you can just hit “o” run a search, and buy them. How could they possibly make it easier? This is about making them if anything harder, because you’d actually have to go out into the world and find them yourself. The challenge should be in actually accomplishing the task, not in accomplishing a relatively easy task dozens and dozens of times until you’re lucky enough for the desired reward to pop.

This is going to be another one of those topics where they could just come out and make a red post and lay it out and say “this is what it is and why” and squash it, and that would be that.

Bwahahahahahah!

And so key farming has depressed the price of skins so much that key farming is now the only alternative to getting skins at a fair price.

Anet has also had lost revenue opportunities from those who would rather key farm than buy keys. The lower price of the skin on the TP also lowers the gold/gem rate to the disadvantage of Anet, although that calculation is a lot more complicated and it’s not 100% affected.

ANet should not base their revenue on gambling in the first place, they should worry about the “you get what you pay for” products not the “pull the lever again” products.

I didn’t play GW1, and don’t care what GW1 did or did not do.

I was just reading an interesting article about the psychological effects of windfalls, and thought it was an interesting commentary on the debates we have around here about who “deserves” Legendaries and other high-value items, and what is best for teh game as a whole. Here is an except:

“As expected, those who received transfers reported greater satisfaction with their lot after the money arrived. Cortisol levels and the incidence of depression fell too.

However, the satisfaction of those who did not receive anything fell sharply as their neighbours’ fortunes improved. The decline in satisfaction prompted by seeing one’s peers get $100 richer was bigger than the increase of satisfaction from getting a handout of the same size. The bigger the handouts to others in their village, the greater the dissatisfaction of non-recipients. (The handouts did not seem to have any impact cortisol levels or the prevalence of depression among non-recipients.)"

Full article can be found here:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21677223-new-study-shows-money-can-buy-you-happinessbut-only-fleetingly-others?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/keepingupwiththekarumes

Take from it what you will, but I remain convinced that the game as a whole benefits most when large portions of the population are “best off,” rather than when only a tiny minority are “best off” and the majority of the population are well behind them.

If I have to salvage an Exotic and don’t get any Dark Matter, ok, fine, I’m down a couple gold, too bad. But if I’m forced to salvage an Ascended item for new mats, I’d better be getting 100% of the total possible reward every single time. I want this to kittened in stone before the feature launches, so they don’t have to feel bad about people that burned through all their supplies on day one.

You obviously never ran dungeons or fractals before HoT. Sure, there were groups welcoming pretty much anyone, but they were in a significant minority compared to the groups asking ‘2 ele, 1ps, 1thief, 1guard exp meta’ with or without gear check and where you would be kicked if not playing well.

There were always elitist groups out there, and always will be, but there were also always more casual groups, and they were successful too. Yeah, if you were playing a suboptimal build you couldn’t join up with the “elites,” but you could still find an LFG for “just whoever,” and join that group, and usually succeed. I have never been a huge dungeon person, but there was a period where I was running CoF 1 and 2 daily, and only a handful of 2 runs collapsed due to player error and frustration.

The raids are a much more complex, inherently elitist, and easier to implode undertaking.

Fun fact, btw, raiding almost completely destroyed my guild, which had been running rather smoothly after HoT dropped, but then after the first raid we had some teams attempting the raid, some on TS and others not, and those on TS were pressuring the rest to join in, even just on listen mode, but for whatever reason the guild leader was very averse to voice chat, and the pressure to conform eventually caused her to snap and kick out some of the most vocal advocates, which then caused a Night of Drama where sides were taken and punches were thrown, and eventually most of the people involved settled back down, but it certainly was A Thing.

We truly understand the interest that our loyal players have in knowing more, but we’re not able to share too much at this juncture for the reasons that are stated above and outlined in more detail in Mike’s post.

Rest assured — and my daily e-mails confirm this — the devs are reading the forums daily to keep abreast of your input on a wide variety of game elements, in addition to which they’re analyzing, prioritizing, weighing whether to and how to address areas of concern, considering how to implement positive changes, and much more, based on the input you give us on the forums.

Yes, but again, it has to be a two way street. “The devs are listening to your prayers at night” solves nothing, because they’ve been listening for the last two years and still get an awful lot of things completely wrong, like the trait overhaul, the NPE, the very limited number of new zones, etc. Even trusting that the devs are reading our comments, we have no idea if they are taking the right lessons from them or not until the content launches, which is far too late in the process.

We need more than “the devs are reading what you say,” we need the follow-up to that, “and here’s what they think about that, and what they plan to do about it.”

As Mike also said in his post, much value has come through the CDI’s. I just prowled the hallways to see if I could find out more about the timeline for the current and future CDI. Alas, Chris Whiteside is in a meeting, but I know he’s committed to the format so I hope you’ll be involved in those and if there are some dates he or I can provide one of us will do that later.

The CDI has been about guild stuff for the past month now, there’s been no sign that it will move on to more important topics since it started. The CDI alone is clearly not up to the task.

But HoT didn’t modify GW2. The casual Guild Wars you’re looking for didn’t vanish. It’s still out there. Go play in any of the core zones and you’ll find them as casual as ever.

Your analogy makes it look like GW2 was transformed into an entirely new game while in truth it simply added new (albeit different and less casual) zones. GW2 will need many many more expansions before the “car” becomes a “truck”.

HoT is the present of the game. That is not debatable. If the continued expansion of the game does not include the casual gameplay we’ve come to expect, then the continued existence of the previous content is not relevant.

I couldn’t disagree with the OP more. Silverwastes needs at least one more waypoint for the space it occupies, placed somewhere along the current western edge. The run back from the existing one is far too long. A lot of the recent maps suffer from similar problems, Edge of the Mists is AGONIZING to play in because if the action is happening on the other end of the map it can take five minutes or more to catch up. When designing maps they need to clock the time it takes to run from the nearest WP to where you died, and if it’s more than a minute, add more waypoints.

HUGE disappointment. I HATE the new bosses. They have the worst failings of recent boss updates, in that they force players into random overflow servers, and the rewards are based too much on whether other people screw it up. They really need to do some rethinking if they think that this is what GW2 players want.

This content is for people who hate what makes GW2 good.

Archeia.8905:

ikr? how dare devs expect us to play with other people in an online multiplayer game in order to tackle content? like wow what were they thinking. They should also nerf fractals cause I can’t solo those

Just. . . never use this argument. There’s no point to it, but it comes up constantly in multiplayer game discussions. If people want to play with other players, and other players are available to do so, then that’s what they’ll do. If they’re expressing a desire to be able to solo something, then it’s because either they have their reasons for not wanting to team up, or they are finding the logistics of teaming up challenging. They have a legitimate issue, and deserve a legitimate hearing. Trivializing their concerns does not benefit anyone.

KickzNGigglez.4958:

My warrior that I rarely ever play anymore is sitting on 364 spare hero points. I actually think devs made too quick of a decision on reducing the elite spec requirements. I actually find it mind boggling people are still finding it hard to get the hero points they need.

Did you get World Completion on that character before HoT? That can make a huge difference, whereas players that just want to complete their new character just wants to be able to clear the HoT HPs and get moving.

Why would you even want a Hall when your alone???

To explore the place, mostly.

I just would find it dumb to have a Hall and be alone in it LOL

And that’s fine, I don’t think anyone said that you had to make one. I’m really not sure what you seem so upset about.

I tried the new crown pavilion, and after about forty minutes we got stalled on the 5th boss and I really had to quit. Some in map chat were saying that this was because we were meant to take all six on simultaniously, “splitting the party” as it were. The Lion’s Arch fight had a similar mechanic.

Stop this.

Don’t hate on the zerg. The zerg, whether you like it or not, is a core aspect of this game. Mechanics that you put in to split up zergs make the game LESS fun, not more fun. They make a fight that should take a few minutes and everyone cheers into a total slog. You do not currently have the tools in place to allow players to well coordinate multiple parties of appropriate sizes. If you enter a map, the question is “where is everyone? Ok, then that is where I want to be.”

Maybe in the future you can add in an element that projects on the map how many players are at each location, so that they can better distribute themselves to each, but those tools are not in the game right now, so stop designing content that is intended to “twart” the zerg. Embrace the zerg, it makes the game better for everyone.

I spent considerably more on gems than I would have on sub fees over the first few months, establishing extra bank slots and character slots, but then my buying slowed considerably, so over the first year I spent well less than on a sub-based game. I am likely to buy a bunch of random stuff by the end of the year though, just because I think they’ve earned it.

So apparently Legendary armor will be available for players who like to raid, which is great for those players, but what about all those players who have zero interest in raiding but who want to earn Legendary armor? What methods will be available for them? Well we be able to earn armor pieces through the Legendary Precursor crafting system that’s being added?

Keep in mind that a large chunk of GW2’s population is here to get away from raiding type games.

There is no high level content that you can just stroll in and complete that easily.

But there should be. And again, your definition of “easy” is not the same one I’m using. I am NOT arguing that you should just be able to faceroll content, that it should not take effort, skill, and perhaps practice to be successful at it. What I am saying is that once you know everything there is to know, once you have YOUR skills on point, you should be able to engage the content, do your best, and win without a bunch of standing around or set-up hassles.

I’m not arguing that I should have gotten a gold Blitz run on my first try, first day, but within a couple days of the last patch I had Blitz DOWN, I knew all the skills I needed to know to do my role perfectly (or at least close to it). I was not any better at it in week four than I was by the end of week one. Even still, the last day of the patch it usually took me the better part of an hour of tedium and poor gameplay before I could be in the position to put any of my skills to use. As soon as I was in that position, gold, gold, gold, gold, for an hour or more until I decided to leave, but the hassles of setting that situation up was NOT a fun use of my limited gameplay time.

I believe that ultimately, rewards should be based on the tactical level, rather than the strategic. The rewards that you, as a player, achieve, should be based on the work that you, as a player, put in. So for example, instead of having a zone-wide meta-reputation that is based on the efforts of players you’ve never met on the other side of the map, the reputation should be based on the events YOU participate in. If YOU complete a half-dozen or so events over the course of the chain then YOU have tier 4 access to rewards and vendors, and maybe someone who was doing Lost Coins at the time would only have T1 access. You still need to play alongside the other players to make the most of the events, to complete them as fast as possible, but the rewards you get are based on the work you put into it.

If they want to have a zone wide meta, then just have it be a pride thing, a “good job guys, you completed ALL the events, here’s a fireworks display!” pat on the back, rather than a material reward that creates a practical imbalance between those who complete it and those who don’t. It’s like speed-running Tequatl. You don’t get any bonus loot if you complete Teq in the fastest time possible, and well that you don’t, but it’s at least bragging rights to try and that’s fine.

No. And convert more of the female human armors to female Asura and Char. Moonbeam Dewclaw wants to look pretty.

You know, it’s funny, on the raid and dungeon forum we’ve been discussing how and why the game could have an “easy mode” raid that would solve most of these issues, and yet any time I raise any of the concerns that you guys have almost all raised, the raid-heavy players over there act like vampires in the presence of sunlight.

And not the sparkly Twilight kind.

You can’t miss what you never had, and there is soooo much more to guild wars 2 than traits.

There is, but traits really make or break a lot of the features of the game. There are tons of abilities that are practically worthless until you slot in a trait that completely changes how they work. I just can’t imagine the 10-30 experience not being a total drag without having traits to juggle, and even the 30-60 region sucking without access to adept and master level traits to that point.

New players might not know what they’re missing, but they would still be missing it. The only difference is that instead of thinking “I really hate my level 25 character because he doesn’t have access to Expeditious Dodger and Power of Inertia,” they would instead just be thinking “I hate my level 25 character, and I’m not really sure why.”

I also have a level 18 spare Thief that I’m leveling, and sure I have 8 “boost to 20” scrolls and several level boosting scrolls, and could afford to pick up more, I don’t particularly want to “cheat” him to 80, I want to level him up the normal way, but I want it to be fun while I do, and I can’t imagine the leveling experience being fun without access to basic traits.

I have to admit I agree that the push from 40/60 to 60/80 is too much, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world/massive drawback that people in this thread are making it out to be. It’s unfortunate, but mostly irrelevant.

But if everyone agrees that this is a bad thing, why not return it to its previous state? It’s not like this change is at all necessary.

Yes, they are overpriced. Nobody can rationally claim otherwise. They need to change this soon, but they might not because they have that troll streak going. “Oh, you want cheaper precursors? Trololololol.”

The best way to disengage as a Revenant is to walk over your opponents’ corpses.

The way I see, and this is probably were we differ, is that Turret gunners are a part of the group. You have North and South gunners, with someone usually in charge of the area. If one Turret is broken, someone is there to fix it. If a finger AOEs the Turret with poison, the call goes out for a Cleanse (i.e. North Middle needs a Cleanse!). The total sum of the individuals involved in the fight account for the overall victory. Failures in ANY part of the fight can lead to a loss.

What if one of the turret gunners is AFK? Or what if some yahoo got on there and won’t get off? The group can do absolutely nothing to recover from that. Six individual players shouldn’t wield that amount of impact over the outcome of the battle. Yes, you need more than just the turrets to win, but you NEED all the turrets to win. Each of those six players is worth a dozen other players, if not two dozen, and there’s no justification for that.

For the rest of the group, the goal is the same. You’ll still want to keep the turrets cleansed and repaired, you’ll still want to keep the NPCs firing them alive, and you’ll still need to have players actively cleansing the Zerg as well, you just won’t have six fixed roles that only SIX players, no more, and no less, are responsible for that wield such an overwhelming impact on the outcome.

By making Turrets NPC controlled, you are essentially “nerfing” the event, since then the computer will know exactly what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.

It only makes the encounter easier for SIX players out of 120. If that is nerfing" it then so be it, call it that if you insist, but really an event where removing SIX player out of 120 completely changes the game, that just seems like a poorly designed scenario to me. ANY player in ANY role should be replaceable at ANY time if they aren’t living up to the task.

There’s no strategic thinking involved, save for the need to actually defend the Turrets. “Do I Cleanse the group up front, or bring down Scale stacks?” “Do I buff the group with Quickness while they AOE, or do I heal my fellow Turret gunners?”

There’s VERY little tactical skill involved there. If 2 is up, you USE IT. If 2 is not up, but 3 is, you USE IT. If neither 2 nor 3 is up, you use 4 or 5, if none of those are up, maybe use 1. In any case, it’s a role only performed by six out of the 120 players, so we can do without it. This is a massively multiplayer game, it should be about the massively multiplayer, not “six players and the Zerg.”

The computer will decide what’s important, even if it’s not a priority to what the group truly needs.

That’s why I recommended splitting the turret roles (assuming you read my original post, which I just can’t shake the feeling that you did not). You’d have 2-4 of the turrets as “Offense only,” that would only be firing 2 as often as possible, 1 when not, and then the remaining ones would be buff only, alternating between buffs at set intervals, and players using grenades would have to decide where and when to apply cleanses.

Do you keep all six turrets alive, or do you focus on the offense ones and let the Buff ones die? You could do that, which would free up defenders, but then you wouldn’t be getting those buffs. Do you have only 2-3 people on Cleanse grenades, and only prioritize targets, or do you try and get more players on there so that no poison is left unattended? Of course then they would not be contributing to any other aspect.

I think there’s a ton of strategic potential there, just a different sort than the current one, more about effectively using the numerous players available than about the individual skills of whichever six happen to be on the guns.

One thing I just thought of, is what if they then added an “overclock” item, like a wrench or something? The idea would be that if you used it on a turret, it would give the turret faster cooldowns, but the cooldown on the item itself means that each player would only be able to overclock one turret every thirty seconds or so. Do you overclock the Offense turret so that it can recover from a few missed shots and burn down the Scales faster? Do you overclock the buffs to make everyone super buffy? Do you assign a bunch of people to keeping the turrets all overlocked all the time, or do you only assign a couple people to the task, or none at all? Again, a lot of different ways to play that.

I second this, because I believe the current version is WAY overpriced, but you know how they love to troll the economy, so if they did introduce a recipe for the tonic it would take like 250 Charged Lodestones, a Gift of Zhaitan, 250 Unidentified Dyes, and a Dusk.

They should totally make this an always on thing.

Proposal Overview
Guild Halls should be available to all (ie not crazy expensive)

Goal of Proposal
I have a feeling that if Guild Halls are implemented they may cost zillions of Influence and only be available to people who are in large guilds. I would want them to be just as commonly available as guild vaults, something even a solo-guild could acquire. It currently costs 2500 influence to get a vault, and 52,500 influence to max out your vault capacity. I was able to achieve that in about a year on my personal guild. I would want a basic guild hall to cost less than that, preferably much less, although I suppose a truly grand one could cost more.

Proposal Functionality
It’s in line with existing systems that try not to exclude players from fun activities, and also competitive with other games that invlude personal housing options that are MUCH easier to get access to than in this proposal.

Associated Risks
Presumably it would involve tens or hundreds of thousands of these guild halls, one for most reasonably invested players, which might take up extra server space or whatever, I’m sure you guys could figure out the resources it would take and judge whether it’s worth it.

Nuzt.7894:

And what about those people who like the Class but not the pet aspect of it ? Should your opinion trump theirs ? What I was suggesting was basically having the option to stow the pet permenantly if YOU choose to do so. The pet would be more powerful if you traited for the pet to be powerful, just as the Guardians Virtues are more powerfull if you choose to trait them that way, same can be said for every other class in the game..

Being able to stow the pet permanently is fine by me, but it should always be a self-nerf, there should be no counterbalancing buffs associated with it that would make a petless ranger as strong as an untraited pet-using Ranger. It should not be balanced as an equal way to play the class, it should just be an option for people that really insist on going that route, just like a Thief that insists on never Stealing, or a Necro that insists on never using DS.

/second. The other stuff is fine, but the first five trait points should come at level 15, not at 30.

I would love to see some of the people posting in here to go into a Las Vegas casino or a carnival booth and complain about how they are being taken advantage of like they are doing to ANet in this thread. You know you are gambling when you spend your money on any chest item in the shop or game. When you gamble, you can lose. If you don’t want to lose, don’t gamble and when you lose, don’t whine about it.

Sure, but the problem is that gambling is the ONLY way Arenanet has presented for acquiring several items in the game. That is the complaint, that many of us would like more sure-fire ways of getting it. If you could spend $10 on a bunch of boxes, and have a chance of getting a desired prize among other prizes, but you could ALSO just spend $10 and get it outright (but with no other prizes), then players would be less upset about it. Yes, if you go to Vegas and gamble then you may lose money, but there are other ways to make money, that do not involve gambling. The problem is that there are not other ways of gaining the mini-pets.

Long story short, the total average cost of acquiring the minis should be cheaper than it is, and should be less based on luck. If you want to roll the dice and take the chance that you can get it for cheaper then that should be an option, but so too should having a direct path that does not involve chance.

So you are happy.with one of the core selling points of HoT to be locked behind a pay wall if you buy the base game?

Nothing’s locked behind a pay wall. If you buy HoT you can roll up a Revenant day one without making any other purchase, you’d just have to delete an existing character. The same is true if you want to make one of the advanced classes and don’t yet own a character of that class. Do I think it’d be nice of them to give us a free character slot? Sure, free things are always nice. Do I think that they owe it to us or are monsters for not providing it? Of course not. Doesn’t really impact me one way or the other, the version I bought already came with a character slot, and a bunch of gems to buy more if I want. I was already strongly considering making two Revenants anyways, since their play style is so broken up into Legends and you seem to be able to make two or more completely distinct builds for them.

Besides, if you really don’t want to pay another dime to support the game, just buy the slot using gold. It would currently run around 300g or so I think.

Funny how a complaint always equates to whining as long as you are not part of the disatisfied party yourself. Another problem on this forum.

It’s really more about tone than content. If you’re saying in a measured way that you would prefer things to be a different way, but that you understand their side in things as well, then that is not whining. If, on the other hand, you frame it in terms of something that they should do, that they owe you, that they are Wrong for not doing and that they must fix to get Right, then yes, that is whining, and those engaging in it deserve mockery.

Yeah, locked adventures is the worst part. They are almost always locked when I feel up for doing one.

IMO you’re best off playing Rev understanding a) this is Beta and b) it’s not finished.
Why do so many people have a cry about things in beta, it’s so silly.

Because that’s how they get fixed before launch.

I have no problem with them gating story behind mastery POINTS, but I do have a huge problem with them gating them behind the XP grind. It’s just awful. We should be able to instantly unlock any abilities so long as we have the points to do so.

this shout is very problematic, what if you don’t hit a single enemy? you won’t get anything from it. reaper shouts going in a different direction than warrior and guard shouts is “okayish” but the difference between all the shouts is, on warrior or guard you don’t care of there’s nobody around, if you use them you will benefit from it. as a reaper the shouts are completely useless.

This I don’t see as a problem. There are a ton of abilities in the game that do nothing if you don’t hit enemies with them, that’s working as intended. It’s unusual for a shout, but these are meant to be unusual shouts, offensive, not directly buffs. I’m no expert, but Suffer actually seems pretty useful to me for a masochist condi necro build. Blood is Power and stuff, and then pass those condis, plus Chill, to the various enemies.

I do agree that in general though the shouts are very underwhelming. Also, Shouts should be instacast, the entire point of them is that you can launch them no matter what else is happening, in the middle of other moves if necessary. If you have to stop what you’re doing to cast a Shout, then it’s not a Shout.

DiamondMeteor.8345:

Goal of Proposal:

I can understand the reasoning behind placing a minute death penalty for the pet, but I just simply cannot comply with it’s mechanics considering how lackluster the pet AI reacts to our F1-F3 commands. Not only are pets easily exploited via movement impairing conditions, but they lack any sense of urgency to rally back to it’s master’s cause with the F3 command – sometimes, they walk at a snails pace toward the Ranger when called back, which is completely counter-productive when concerning the longevity of the pet. The following change will address the largest concern regarding the Ranger profession: the overly heavy opportunity cost of having a pet.

I’m 100% behind you on the goal,. but this alone would be a problem because of what Runeblade noted, that if you could keep your pet fully “up” constantly then you could just Pokemon encounters with no real risk to the player. I made a suggestion up thread that would allow you to keep pets out indefinitely while losing their tanking ability when they “die,” but your suggestion could work too if you added some element to prevent them maintaining infinite agro.