Guild Wars 2

Ohoni, we don’t deny the fact that other means to have legendary armor is probably necessary. We just don’t like your ideas because it will devalue the entire purpose of normal raid, and that you want to obtain the same thing as us but with à fraction of the effort we put in learning raids…

It’s less effort in learning the mechanics, but more effort in actually applying it, since it would require more repetitions of the content to earn the eventual rewards. It’s a different type of effort, certainly, but it’s obviously still effort.

Again, I’d be open to the idea of them having a completely different method of earning the armor, along with an easy mode raid that only rewards ordinary stuff, but I just see that as a waste of resources, and in the current environment I can’t see them getting around to implementing it as quickly. I mean, if they say “there will be an alternate method of earning the armor,” in ANet-speak that means “sometime between now and 2030.” That’s just not good enough.

And btw, each week with my guild we carry unexp people, and we mostly succeed. So the content is not that hard, assuming you’re willing to put some effort in it. If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine, but then stop asking for the same reward as us.

I do not want to be carried, and I do not want to grind against walls. I have explained what I do want, and I really wish people would stop suggesting ways that I could stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. I want an experience that is fun and easy for casual people that do not enjoy the challenging raids that many of you do enjoy, just as you guys want fun and challenging content that is not as easy and casual as other content.

The whole reason why the knights were changed was so that you could fight the hologram prime. Before, hologram prime started a minute or so after you killed the first knight. Hence why you were supposed to kill them seperately. The problem was that people were just killing one first, then moving to the others. This meant that you lost a good 4+ minutes on the hologram prime fight. that is the reason why they did it.

Maybe so, but before Friday I was able to get into the Holo fight about five times, and each of those times we beat her with plenty of time to spare. Since the patch I haven’t been able to get into the Holo fight even ONCE out of about a dozen attempts. I don’t consider that an improvement.

None of those tomes matter anymore. They all got converted into “Spirit Shards” which you can use at the mystic forge. Your actual skill points got reset to a fixed amount based on leveling from 1-80, which should be almost enough to earn all pre-HoT upgrades, and then one each for all the Skill Point nodes out in the world. All Skillpoints that came from leveling up or skill scrolls just got turned into those shards.

So basically, if you have a level 80 with world completion, you should have enough points to max out the pre-HoT options, and then unlock something around 1/3 of the Elite spec. It’s a bummer, I know, but everyone’s in the same boat. If you don’t have world completion, then you might need to earn a few more points someplace. Between all my alts, only one of my serious characters was lacking three HP needed to earn her Elite spec, but most of them didn’t have enough to go much further than the first or second node.

I don’t know if someone has said this before, but here’s what I want:

Style inspection only.

You should be able to “inspect” the other player, but instead of showing their gear as it would in the player’s Hero pane, with the names and stats and all that, it would just show the names for the styles of their gear. So instead of seeing that they have exotic level 80 CoF armor that they’re used Transmutation Stones to make look like Acolyte armor with Cadeucus shoulders, you would just see that they have:
Acolyte Helm
Noble’s Mantle
Acolyte Chest
Acolyte Gloves
Acolyte Leggings
Acolyte Boots

It would give no indication of the armor’s strength or stats, but it would let you know what to look for if you wanted to duplicate that look. It would not have an elitism involved, but would be a helpful tool for style hunting.

Yep…in the old days, one trait point didn’t actually get you anything. You needed five to actually unlock a point. That 1 point is like five of the old points.

Honestly, I don’t mind that specific change. I don’t see it as a huge improvement, and it was at least nice to be able to buff up some stats each level, but the 5-point thing isn’t a problem. The problem is that at level 49 I only have four of these 5-point points to play with, whereas this time last year at level 40 I would have had seven of them, and been able to put them into second tier Traits as well. THAT bothers me.

I also noticed a delay, not quite as pronounced as Tapioca is talking about, but noticeable. It might have just been an animation thing though, hard to tell. But yeah, the DD special dodges all seemed to have like a quarter-second pause before you’d actually do anything that isn’t noticeable with a vanilla dodge.

I noticed the same thing, huge, massive, insane delay before actually dodging on daredevil.
Also Asuran dodge animations changed to some lame looking charge?

That’s only if you pick the “dash” GM trait (which is the default when you log in). The Lotus one is more similar to the default dodge animation, and the Bound one is a crazy flip-stomp. Make sure to try them all out. I do wish that Dash kept the Asura backflip animation though.

I’m ok with them taking the weekend off, but when they get back I really hope that they will spend time addressing the various issues we’ve been talking about head-on, rather than staying silent on the issues.

At least let us know for a fact that you’ve heard (and not in a general “we read everything,” I mean specifically “we are aware that the guild challenges weren’t working this week and you all lost out on rewards from them, we plan to fix this, and here’s compensation for your wasted time”), that you agree with us that X is a problem, and some idea of what you’d like to do about it.

Aaaaand I’m done. This is the fallacy fallacy — that is, you’re implicitly accusing me of committing a non sequitur because I supposedly can’t come up with an argument, because clearly the only reason anyone would every be annoyed at a lack of basic netiquette would be if they have nothing else to say. You’re being intellectually dishonest and I have no interest in debating with you any more. I wish you luck in the future.

And yet. . . not one word about the topic itself in your post. Methinks you doth protest too much.

Aha, so you basically want to penalize people with a higher tax, if they pick up more gold from the tp than a certain amount per day you deem to be too much.

I will tell you why this will completely fail its purpose:

Because it doesnt only penalyze your target group but also the very players you are trying to protect.

Lets say this daily limit is 50g, if i sell stuff on the tp for more than that between 2 daily resets, i have to pay an additional fee.

It would be a longer scale DR than that. It wouldn’t be a hard daily cap, it would be something that you would accumulate over time. Take in 50g in one day, nothing would happen. Take it in two days, maybe still nothing. Take the same amount each of three days, maybe a 1% added difference. Go a few more days with minimal profits, and it would go away again. Make 50g per day for the next few days though, and it might go up to 2%. Average 1000g per month, and you’d have a steadily climbing rate, make very little for a long time but make a few big sales, it would balance out. They could even weight it against large one-time sales, so that selling a Precursor for 600g would have less of an impact on raising the DR than selling 50g in various random items each day for twelve days.

It would be designed to be forgiving of single item spikes, forgiving of bursts of trading with long gaps in between, but penalizing for a consistent history of activity. Does that make more sense to you?

If i buy an item for 20g and would normally sell it once the price is at 60g, i would just wait until it is at 65g, to pay the extra fee.

But what if it never hits 65g? And if it would hit 65g, then why would you sell it at 60g in the first place? Did you not want that other 5g if you didn’t have to pay off your fees? Keep in mind, just because a high volume trader might need that extra 5g to pay off his costs, doesn’t mean that the market would automatically cut him that slack. Other traders would be able to list it at 60g and still make their full profit, because they are less active traders.

If i put in a lower buy order because my profits are less, someone will get less gold for his loot.

Nah. If you put in a lower buy order to protect your profits, then someone else will just overcut your low order. The customer still gets his price, he just does it without you.

If one class is SO OVERWHELMINGLY POWERFUL that the best advice is “2v1/3v1 him” and thus implying it takes multiple people doing everything just right to kill a single elementalist, then perhaps the elementalist is too powerful?

I agree and disagree, I think that If you build yourself to have pretty much no damage, then it’s ok for you to be nigh indestructible. I think there is a valid place for hardcore tanks.

I do think that there are two issues here for the game as a whole though.

1. Aura eles are solid healer/support as well as bunkers, meaning that not only are they immortal, but they make their team mates less mortal, meaning in 2v2, and even 3v3 situations they are a serious force multiplier, since they provide significant advantage to the others, and in less than 4v4 situations you likely won’t have the DPS to drop them.

2. This is a game of “capture and hold,” so immortal characters can make it impossible to retake their point.

The solution to 1. would be to make the “self immortality” elements of the Ele builds conflict with their team support options, so that the more effects they can pump outwards, the more personal vulnerability they’d need to accept.

The solution to 2. would help with all bunkers, and that would be to give players better options to overturn points than just killing all opposing players in the ring. Things like Tranquility, but on a smaller scale, that would allow you to decap held points without killing the guy on it. Also perhaps making it so that an Ele’s immortality rotations would involve more abilities that make them unable to hold points, so that they can either stay alive in a 2v1 situation, or they can keep hold of the point, but they can’t do both at once and if you wear them down while staying on point then you’ll gradually steal it away from them.

A bunker should have the ability to make it difficult to retake a point, but not impossible, and you shouldn’t have to kill them to take the point back.

Those who think DH are over powered and think they are entitled to Legendary status.

Then there are those who think DH needs buffs and absolutely thinks Unrank is absolutely laughable.

What side are you on?
Trust me… we already know by what ur posting on the forums…

I think it’s all fairly awful and would enjoy nothing better than to have no reason to engage with any of it.

A player can feel whatever because people don’t really have control over their emotions. That’s what emotions are. But it isn’t a flaw in the game that someone has trouble with or doesn’t at all want to fight the giant wrestler to win his champion belt, when that belt doesn’t confer any advantage compared to one you can get elsewhere, craft or purchase.

Ok, apparently we need to spell out a few ground rules.

1. GW2 is a game.

2. A game is an entertainment product, designed to cause people to have fun.

3. Any design element that causes people to have less fun than they otherwise might, is a failure of the game.

Therefore, keeping these three things in mind, any element that causes more players to enjoy the game less, is a failed design element. That doesn’t mean that a game cannot survive some, or even many such failures, but they should make effort to correct as many of them as they possibly can.

That’s why not all things are available everywhere. This causes no harm because gear that is just as strong is available somewhere and nobody is actually left out.

Except that this is only relevant to someone who values “strength.” To someone who instead values “how it looks” over strength, “because gear that is just as strong is available somewhere” does nothing for them, they ARE left out. To satisfy that player, you would also need to have “an item that looks exactly like that item is available somewhere else.”

I am not misrepresenting your arguments and then defeating them. I am telling you what would be a better thing to argue for.

If you would like to argue for those things, then go ahead, but they are not things I have any interest in arguing for, they are not “better” versions of my positions.

(1)Why are you fine with having to go to a particular place to get something? (2)Why is requiring thoughtless tedium acceptable but demanding that someone engages with the game is not? (3)You don’t want people to do things they don’t like to get gear so you might as well have everything available from the start.

(1) Because it usually is a minor hassle, and that would be worth thematic unity. It cannot be compared to having to grind out a raid for several weeks.
(2) This has nothing to do with anything I’ve said, so I don’t really have an answer for you.
(3) If there is nothing that they like in this game then they have no reason to be playing it. It is fair to have rewards that require effort in the game to acquire, but when the game consists of many different elements, which a reasonable player might only enjoy portions of, it is best to ensure that they can earn whichever rewards they are trying to get, by playing those portions that they do enjoy most. This should NEVER be confused with a demand that everything should be “given away for nothing.”

What…given these obviously silly numbers would you say the average person in Silverwastes working on Vinewrath runs, who enjoys butchering that Flower everyday and the ambient loot in the area, would have to spend proportionally to meet the requirement at the same chance at that drop?

Ok, first, it’s hard to compare RNG to a token system. Ideally in this scenario even raids would involve some sort of token mechanism so that if you don’t get the drop you want after X tries, you can still afford to just buy it instead. But setting that aside, You say it would take an average of 30 hours for a flawless group to earn the reward. Can we posit that a reasonably successful, but less flawless group could take perhaps 40 hours in total?

If that’s the case, then someone doing the Vinewrath, to completion, could perhaps expect to earn it in 50 daily runs, taking a total of maybe 50-70 hours and with possibilities of failure along the way. Now keep in mind, this would include some slight changes to how the map gets rewarded, it would require that the player run the entire event chain from near the beginning, not just map in right as the VW starts and kill it, that would, if anything, offer a significantly lesser amount of reward, and I believe the daily requirement would help limit the grind aspect. But yeah, about 50 kills would be good.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the raiders would not be getting nothing aside from the Legendary. They would be getting plenty of reward packets along the way, so that their total rewards would be comparable or greater than what the VW player would be earning even if we factor the Legendary out of the equation. Their time would be fully valued by the game.

1 to 1? 1 to 5? 1 to 10? 1 to 50? Are the conditions for forming a successful raid so difficult that it is 100x EASIER just to run Silverwastes forever? Is a person’s time or effort more important in this case, or perhaps time = effort?

If the conditions to form a raid are so onerous, then the solution is to make them lekittenous, not to further reward the players for accomplishing it. If a person’s time is so valuable to them that a long raiding session is an inconvenience, then that should not be raiding. The only people who should be raiding are those for whom raiding is the most fun thing they can think of to do with that block of time.

There are people who enjoy cooking. Would you expect them to cook for you for free, if you asked it of them?
There are people who enjoy fixing cars. Would you expect them to fix your car for free, if you asked it of them?
There are people who enjoy all sorts of things and enjoy payment for providing those services for others. Raids are no different.

I don’t expect anyone to offer me services for free that they do not want, but THIS IS NOT A JOB, it is a game, and people are meant to be having fun in it. If people enjoy raiding, and are raiding, then that doesn’t make them inherently more deserving of things than people who enjoy kegbrawling and are kegbrawling.

I’m not asking that raiders carry me through raids for free, I’m not asking to take any time out of their oh so busy schedules, I don’t want that at all. What I am asking for is an improvement to the game that would allow me to play a mode that I would enjoy as much as they enjoy raiding, and provide the same rewards that they get out of the mode that they enjoy. You may not agree, but it’s not like I am being unclear about what I am requesting here.

You keep saying “different strokes for different folks” in as many words; if these are not your strokes, then don’t do it.

but again, we’re right back into the old GW2 raiding circle kitten conversation:

“I would like to earn Legendary armor” ->
“Well then raid for it” ->
“But I do not enjoy raiding, it would be a horrible experience for me” ->
“Then you don’t get Legendary armor, ever, no matter how much other stuff you play”->
“but I would like to earn Legendary armor”->
“then raid for it” ->
etc., etc., etc.

Why can we not head that one off at the pass, and any time you’re tempted to introduce one of those little chestnuts of uselessness, you just. . . don’t?

You don’t need gear from raids unless you’re after Viper’s accessories which is something that everybody already agrees with being released to open world content.

Again, it’s a game, everything is subjective. You seem to believe that players can have a valid “need” to have Viper’s gear, presumably because it offers a marginal stat boost over alternatives and you put great personal value in that. You believe that it would be fair to insist on alternative methods of earning those. You do not believe that players can have a valid “need” for an armor skin, presumably because you do not value a player’s ability to control his cosmetic appearance as highly as you value his stats.

I don’t expect empathy from you, I don’t expect you to truly inhabit a different person’s shoes and attempt to view the world through their perspective, but at the very least, assume that there are in fact people in this game world with you, people who have as much right to be there and to be happy as you do, that put their value MORE in “cosmetics” than they do into “stats,” and that however it is that you feel about Viper gear availability, they feel all that and more about exclusive skin availability. Again, you don’t have to truly understand how or why this could happen, just accept that it does happen.

Which there are. Every single piece of content in the game other than Forsaken Thicket is not a raid, and it’s free for you to enjoy.

But that’s another rung on the circle kitten.

“Well you can do [alternate content] instead.” ->
“But [alternate content] doesn’t provide any path towards Legendary armor” ->
“Yeah, so you won’t get Legendary armor.” ->
“But I want Legendary armor, could [alternate content] provide it too?” ->
“No, only raids” ->
“Why?” ->
“Because that’s how WoW did it.”->
“But GW2 breaks from WoW tradition in so many other ways. . .”->
“Not raids, raids are sacred to the WoWite tradition, they MUST contain exclusive armor or the gods shall be displeased.”->
etc. etc. etc.

We’ve been through all this before, you already know my answers.

I’m also curious how you tell how much raiders are enjoying the content. Do you have some kind of fun thermometer? Funmometer? They are enjoying the content because it is exactly something that GW2 did not offer prior and by all accounts you would never enjoy.

I’m not saying that Raiders are enjoying raids more than I’m enjoying the rest of the game, I’m saying that they are enjoying raids way more than I enjoy raids, either that or they have a VERY serious problem. And I assume I am enjoying other parts of the game as much as they enjoy raids, but the thing they enjoy rewards Legendary armor, and the things I enjoy don’t, even if I do my thing considerably more. That’s a problem to me, that the thing they enjoy doing rewards an extra special reward that I can’t get, while none of the things I could enjoy offer that reward.

It’s not better for the people whose enjoyment would be cut by needing to run through an easy mode,

Good news!

Those people do not exist.

There would be exactly zero people who would have to run through easy mode, it would be entirely for those who didn’t want to run through hard mode. People who prefer hard mode can continue to run through hard mode, completely untouched.

And since easy mode would presumably launch well after hard mode, anyone who was going to tackle hard mode “blind” will have had plenty of time to do so.

It’s not better for the raiders who enjoy being able to sell runs to other people.

Yeah, boo kitten hoo on that one. Crocodile tears over here. I can barely read the screen.

It’s not better for specific time tuning for rewards because it increases the speed at which you can get this stuff by 33%.

You mean that by running both hard and easy mode to lock-out you could max the cap quicker than just hard alone? Perhaps, but they could find ways of balancing that. Perhaps the two tracks would be incompatible, so that you could progress one or the other or both if you really wanted, but you’d have to 100% each separately, getting 50% in one and 85% in the other would not equal one 100%. Personally though I don’t see a huge problem with them speeding the process up a bit if you’re doing more work to do it. It would give raiders an additional thing to do in the week if they felt like it. No harm there.

You can keep saying it’s better for you, that’s fine. But if you’re calling for empathy it’s hard to give it to you when you don’t show any by making absolute statements about what’s better for everyone.

I’m not saying it would be better for each and every person. Any change is likely to make someone’s life subjectively worse in some way. I mean I’m sure them putting rabbit ears back in over Easter was a travesty for people who’d already had them and felt like special snowflakes. My point though is that it would help far more players than it would harm, and the ways in which it would help people would be far more positive than the ways it would harm anyone.

For example, yeah, it would harm the people selling runs (although not entirely because there would still be yahoos willing to buy hard mode clears just to do it), but for each person selling runs that gets harmed by this, dozens of players would benefit by NOT having to buy runs (assuming at least one customer per week over multiple weeks). And on top of that, it would benefit an uncountable number of other player who aren’t buying runs, but might want to and can’t justify the expense, or that would need to but can’t conscience doing so. So by any reasonable measure, far more players would benefit in that closed system than would be harmed by the change, and those harmed were on the shady side of the situation anyways, like crying that reducing crime in a neighborhood would put too many drug dealers out of business.

Well, the thing is, when you’re dealing with dragons that are, at minimum, the size of a football stadium (and in some cases much, much larger), there is no plausible action that a player character can take under their own strength that will have any sort of impact. You aren’t just going to hack away at its shins with your sword until it dies of boredom.

so yeah, when you’re dealing with Godzilla, the hero is the scientist. Taimi builds the gadget that will save the day. The player’s role is to make sure the gadget gets where it needs to be and goes off without interference, or scouts out the data needed to complete the gadget. You’re the field agent, not Superman.

God, I am so tired of entitled gamers that whine when any NPC has a leadership or technical role that make them feel less than omnipotent.

I like SW mostly, and on a good map you can get both a ton of chests AND keep all the keeps, but they could definitely tweak things. All they need to do is 1. Remove a few chest spawn points around Amber (my count is around 12 of them in that open field), drop that down to about six or so. 2. Add more chest locations to open areas around the other forts, at least six each, just as convenient to farm as at Amber.

There, problem solved. You’d split the zerg four ways, each of the four groups would be able to run the local content, and also have equal chance to dig up loot when time allows. You still might have a larger zerg at one fort or another, but not by a huge amount.

Also, if they want to encourage players to run the supply yaks, a simple way to do it is that they stop about 2-4 times between A and B where you have to fight off a pack of mobs? Have it so that each time they do so, when they start moving again they either uncover a chest location (requiring a key), or they drop a little bug similar to the Skritt Burglar. This means if you follow the whole track you get 3-4 little rewards which should make it worth taking seriously.

This is gw2efficiency’s table of magnetite shards. Assuming people don’t spend them as soon as they get them, if you are making an argument for how ‘most players have never even set foot into raids’, you’ll need to explain how more than 50% of the playerbase who’ve clocked a few thousand hours into the game – the ‘veterans’ that have supposedly been driven away in hordes by the raid content – have a few shards in their wallet.

You do understand that GW2 Efficiency does not track most players, right? It only tracks players who have chosen to give them their information. Since the people most likely to give GW2 their information are those sorts of “highly invested” players, the mini-maxers, meta builders, etc., any results you find on Efficiency will always skew in favor of the hardcore, the PvPers, the Raiders, the wealthy, basically any significant category of achievement, you’ll find a higher percentage of them on Efficiency than in the general population.

Also for the record, I have a couple dozen shards myself, I just can’t spend them on anything ankitten ot likely to get any more any time soon, so “some amount of shards” is no sign that players are actually enjoying the content.

The reluctance to experience raid content is largely driven by players who have to overcome their mindset that the raid experience is necessarily going to be like XYZ. If you spend 15 minutes in teamspeak with any static team, you know it’s a fun experience for people. Otherwise no one would be doing it.

Except that it’s not a fun experience. It might be fun for you, but that doesn’t mean that other players will have just as much fun with it. Resistance to raids has nothing to do with “not giving it a chance.”

And I would argue that many Mastery Points are a lot more difficult to attain. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. If this particular Mastery Point was the most difficult to attain in the game, I would be happy.

Again, nobody is arguing that this one is difficult, it obviously is not. The argument being made is that it is not FUN, and there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be.

Maximum efficiency is less than about a minute per apple, so at worst, it’s an hour of effort. (Only the first apple or two might take longer, til you figure out how to go back/forth quickly.) Mind you: it’s so stupefyingly boring to me, that it feels like hours of grinding.

Yes, which, however people insist on defending it, is a BAD GAME DESIGN.

Same. ANet seems determined to never comment on a guild mission issue.

Is it really necessary to “duh” the person you’re responding to? Not a very contructive attitude there.

I’m sorry, I didn’t think you were going for “constructive” in the post I was responding to, given that it didn’t seem to reflect actually reading the post you were commenting on. I mean, you did say “Our pet don’t die to beeing targeted. They die to massive AoE. Furthermore our pets aren’t even avle to hit most worldbosses.” in response to a post where I specifically noted that the pets should be able to deal damage after death, meaning that getting hit by AoEs wouldn’t be a huge problem anymore.

Having immortal pets is worse than pet-stow, especially if you include a death mechanic to control their effectiveness as it stinks of abusability and diminishes the pet role. Why even have a pet if it’s just being treated as a DoT?

Flavor. Why even have weapons if all they are is a way to deal damage? Why even have spell effects? Why not just have all the player avatars be cubes that float around, invisibly applying damage numbers to other cubes (or maybe spheres for enemy mobs)?

But no, you give them a sword or a bow because it’s cooler to have them hitting each other with swords and bows. Same thing here, it’s cool for you to send a hawk or a spider after the enemy instead of an invisible DoT, so let’s do it!

The devs have specifically stated that this is not the vision of pets they want.

Maybe, but it seems truer to their vision than no pets at all, right? And pets cannot remain in their current form, for the reasons brought up over and over. Ideally pets would have impeccable AI, able to effortlessly avoid any attack or obstacle that a human player would, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon, so in lieu of that, allowing them to largely ignore those sorts of attacks in a way that is not overpowered or abusable seems to be by far the best compromise. It would certainly be better than having the “stowed” build be a viable one, right?

People would just ignore the pet as there’d be no incentive to do otherwise.

Yeah, they pretty much should ignore the pet under this meta. You could maybe apply some debuffs to slow them down, dodge to avoid their attacks, that sort of thing, but since you couldn’t take them off the board entirely without defeating the Ranger attached to them, targeting the pet directly would not be a good use of time. But as many have noted, in the current meta pets tend to die almost immediately anyways, so pet targeting is not something that has ever yet been “balanced.”

Furthermore, it wouldn’t fix the AI issues. Pets still wouldn’t be able to hit moving targets.

Maybe. For that I was thinking, couldn’t they make it so that pets have a range of, say, 2-3 times melee distance for their melee attacks, but that they always try to stay closer than that to the target? So like Bear Slash has a range of 130, couldn’t they bump that up to 390, but have the bear always try to stay within 130 range when they can manage it? That would mean that it would always try to be within melee reach of the enemy (so it wouldn’t be harder for enemies to hit), but that it would be able to take wide swings at the enemy and not get stuffed by enemies that stay just outside normal melee range. If the bear is within 200 range of an enemy and takes a swing with a 400 range attack, there’s no reason it shouldn’t land.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Traits are already on the gem store. If you don’t like the unlock quest for a given trait, you can buy it for gold. If you don’t have enough gold, you can “Get More Gold!” using the convenient button on the TP, which gives you free gold (in exchange for gems).

1.) Did we ask specifically for the trait changes no. But we did ask for more meaningful horizontal progression. We asked for a system similar to Guild Wars 1 to where we unlocked skills.

“We” didn’t, some random GW1 yahoos did, and they should have been ignored, as they were by the GW2 community at large. If they did want to add horizontal progression, it should have come by adding NEW elements at level 80, not by altering the existing sub-80 game in any way.

Specifically pay attention to front-loading information on players. This is why things were put behind a level gate. Level 5 takes maybe a half a hour. It is estimated that you can get to level 10 in about a hour or two.

So “spreading things out” accomplishes nothing. Again, the solution has nothing to do with padding out when you learn things, it is entirely about properly training players to use the tools they are given, by both optional and mandatory tutorial elements that walk them through those tools.

I began playing GW2 in May, so I’ve only ever experienced the new trait system. And I can tell you that I really resented it when I learned about the old system. If I’d only discovered GW2 a few months earlier, I’d have all my traits to play with, but I don’t. It feels like new players got kittened.

Yeah, I feel for you. I had most of my characters to 80 by then, and I’d been starting a new character right around the time that happened. I’d gotten him to level 25-30 when the patch hit, and he went from having two minors and a major to having only one minor. On the bright side, he got grandfathered into the old system since he’d already been created, so all his sub-GM traits are auto0unlocked, otherwise he still probably wouldn’t have any useful traits.

I know how there’s a tendency to say “in my day, we had to walk up hill in the snow to school, both ways,” but honestly, GW2 players that started at launch have it so much better than any players that have come since.

Seriously, they worked fine on Tuesday. Each patch since has made them worse and worse. Revert them to how they worked on Tuesday.

I’m sure if you compete in World Tournament Series pvp after HoT comes out and earn world first or second place in the pvp tournament, they’ll hand you a full legendary armor set.

It’s possible, but that isn’t something I’m likely to do either, so it’s a rather moot point.

Or you can just do the content as they are intended for the players to do and earn the proper reward

Or I can continue to push for alternatives until they are provided. At the moment, that seems to be the better solution for me, but you’re free to pursue any solution you choose.

1. Multi-guild chat (being able to see chat channels for guilds I’m not repping).
2. Guild Alliances
3. Being able to merge stacks in your guild bank without taking things out first.

I was really bored by the week 1 announcements, and the week 2 announcements were super lackluster, I was really beginning to despair that we might not be getting any changes worth caring about out of this September feature patch, but finally they’re making some big substantive improvements to the game! I mean, I don’t PvP, so I almost never have an opportunity to actually use Finishers anyways, but moving the finishers from the hero tab to a different portion of the hero tab?! Squee! :\

This sounds like. . . something? But it’s nowhere near good enough for their penultimate patch release that they’ve teased out over three weeks.

Surely you wouldn’t want the same experience? Otherwise you wouldn’t be advocating that you want an easier raid. An hypothetical easier Raid isn’t the same as the current raid. They are entirely different experiences. Which also seems to be what you want.

Well I think that the answer to your question should be obvious, but I’ll provide it anyway. Obviously an easy mode would be different than the current raid in some ways, but those differences are ones that people are seeking, differences in the penalty level of making mistakes. If they are asking for alternatives, then it’s relatively safe to assume both that they are not satisfied by the totality of the current version, and are also interested in aspects of the current version.

The differences between say, Forsaken Thicket and Citadel of Flame, on the other hand, are FAR more significant, involving setting, story, and the basic themes of the encounters. So when people say “well why don’t you just do Fractals or Dungeons instead?” I can’t imagine that they are genuinely interested in providing the other person with a satisfying alternative. Rather, it seems apparent that this is merely an attempt to get that person to stop requesting what they actually want.

I already know that one of your first principles is: “All content must be complete-able at an easy/medium difficultly level.”

OR completely ignorable. If the content does not contain any armor or weapon skins, does not contain any story elements, basically does not exist except to provide a high challenge experience, then it’s acceptable to exist only in a high challenge mode. But broadly speaking, yes, so long as there are valid reasons for people to want to engage the content outside of wanting to engage high challenge levels, then it should be available at a challenge level equivalent to other elements of the game.

I don’t think many people share this view, and it certainly isn’t applicable to guild wars 2, ever.

It largely has been. Most content in the game prior to HoT met that “baseline” standard. High level Fractals did not, but the content of those levels was contained in more accessible, lower level versions. At one point Tequatl and Triple Trouble did not meet that standard, but power creep and direct nerfs resolved that, so now anyone can get the rewards from those if they care to bother. I can’t really think of anything of significance that was actually barred in the way that raid content is.

The OP’s concern seems to be the content drought. Which is a valid concern. But it is unfair to assign the blame for this on raids.

I think the OP’s case is his to make, not yours, and while you may be right that he would be less concerned if not for the content drought, there is no evidence for this claim and it could as easily turn out to be false. As for whether the raids are “to blame” for the drought, obviously they are not, although it’s fair to say that if the raid team were not focused on developing raids, they could have provided more non-raid content, which would at least help alleviate that drought.

If all the raid wings were released at the launch of HOT, would you still be upset?

Certainly. Why wouldn’t I be?

I know you would answer “yes.” But I think most would answer no.

And I think you’d be wrong on that.

The problem is that there hasn’t been any new content, other than raids, in a while.

That’s certainly one of the problems, but it is not the only problem.

One of the points OP presented is that other games feature multiple difficulty levels and it would be good for GW2 to do so. Even though this might be unbelieveable to some, raids in their current state are about equivalent to most game’s easy mode. There’s a huge room for error and you can complete a whole raid wing (= 3 bosses) in just under 30 minutes after you get some practice. If there was another difficulty to introduce, it would have to be way harder with much less forgiving timer, which I don’t think those “99% of people” are asking for. Be glad we have super easy raids and enjoy them.

Sorry, GW2 is not other games. What works for those other games would make GW2 look like Wildstar. Just like Wildstar made Wildstar look like Wildstar. You can call the current raids “easy” all you like, but that will never make it true for the bulk of this game’s population.

The female characters they do have are fine, but in this day and age I just find it sad how little gender diversity they have in the cast. Yes, there are a few token males, mostly following the standard female gaze stereotypes, but it would be nice if there were more men that were positive role models for young boys who may be playing the game.

Considering how the blog post claims that post-80 your mastery point total replaces your level, it seems that masteries are essentially the new raised “level cap.”

In a sense they are, but in a sense they aren’t. They definitely aren’t a strict level cap, in that a “0 mastery” character is not any weaker in a general sense than a “10 mastery” character, while a level 80 is definitely stronger than a level 70 (in a level 80 zone, at least). Also, it seems like you can progress through the mastery tracks in a non-linear fashion, so while if they raised the cap to 90 then you would have to do 83 before 84 and all 84s would have the same stat boost, in this system it seems like you could progress your traversal masteries before really doing much with the combat or lore masteries, or vice versa, up to you, so while a fully maxed out character might have the same capabilities as any other, it stands to reason that most characters with 50% of the available masteries will have all sorts of different capabilities.

But it is similar to raising a level cap, in that there will be content and regions that will require a certain degree of mastery to access. It’s a progression, just a very different progression than just raising the cap.

I like the idea of Masteries… but presented as it was… I am not excited about it at this point. So far, given what we know about HoT… I’m still not sold. Im waiting until they unveil their New-New Trait system to make a final decision.

I honestly can’t imagine any current player not being “sold” on HoT yet. I mean, I have my concerns, things that seem like they could be a step back or that I’m worried they might need some changes, but there’s no question I’ll be buying it at the earliest opportunity.

Basically: OP’s version ~ maybe 800 g? maybe more?
Reddit user’s version (2 days before) ~ 600g

Now that everyone’s buying all the materials used to craft the legendaries, its quite obvious that the price would only go up… Yet no one wants to wait and let the prices settle down, or to play the rest of the game while slowly building up the materials on the side.

I think most people are willing to wait for prices to stabilize, that is not the issue. The issue is that even at historic average prices, it’s still far too high. The price shouldn’t even be tied to the market at all, the market could plummet or go sky high and it should not impact the price. The materials that you need for it should not be market materials.

Whats idiotic is that there are some people who expected ANet to basically give them the precursor for free, cuz they’ve had the game for 3 years, and “deserve it” or to continuously change the recipe based on a fluctuating market, lol.

I don’t think anyone believed either such things, though I agree that it is much easier to shoot down imaginary idiots than to actually address the concerns of actual players.

I believe it is intended that players cannot join a map that has completed the meta (maybe to prevent people from selling spots for noxious pods and hp’s etc).

I can understand that impulse, but it’s not worth the down side of people who earned those rewards missing out on them.

I think there is a fairly basic solution, Agony. -ish. Just have it so that when you kill Mouth, it floods the entire map with “Leyline energy” or something. This is toxic and will rapidly kill you. But, if you did kill Mouth yourself, if you get complete credit, then you have a buff for about 5 minutes past reset, making you immune to this damage. This would allow anyone who beat the boss to come and go as they please until the map resets, while people who didn’t kill the boss and taxiied in would be wiped out.

Did 100% map completion in Verdant Brink and got no reward!
Did 100% map completion in Auric Basin and got no reward!

This is a known issue, supposedly fixed by Tuesday.

Sure, do that. Why would anyone swap characters after loading the map anyway? Is there a reason for that which wouldn’t be cheating? If you want to swap characters, do it in the lobby.

It would seem like the ‘problem’ here is that you’re demanding one of the devs to cater to your specific interests.

no, no, more that I expect the game, and the devs who work on it, to cater to the players in general. There will always people who want things to be harder, who want to feel more “leet” than the next player because they can get through content that is too challenging for them, but these people should be ignored. The goal shouldn’t be to make things so hard that only a fraction of the players can manage it without excessive difficulty, it should be to make it accessible to the broadest reasonable swath of the population. Of course there are people who like the new dungeons, there are people that like Dark Souls or Battletoads, but these people should largely be ignored.

Well, I’ve been gobbling Dragonite daily, but only because I had bags, and bags, and bags of the stuff. I do plan to stop when I still have several dozen slots of it though. I can stop at any time.

Any time.

so I guess these are your demands? playing the game income is normalize against the TP traders?

Give or take. It’s hardly a “demand” though, I’m in no position to issue ultimatums, it’s just what I believe would be healthier for the game overall.

How would this help alleviate the issue of the ultra-rare outliers? Simple. After an event where one of these ultra-rares can be found (say, after The Shatterer is destroyed) an NPC will let you trade a stack (250, once per day; maybe coinage as well) for a chest with the same loot table as the event’s finishing chest.

This would ultimately be better than nothing, although I am generally opposed to gambling mechanics. That is, if I kill a mob, or earn a chest by clearing an event or reaching it, then I don’t mind so much that RNG dictates what I get out of it, but when I have to pay a collected currency to open something, either earned through gameplay or even worse bought using cash, then it really bothers me when the result is random and potentially worth considerably less than the key. This is why I absolutely HATE the current Black Lion Keys set-up, hate it more than any other element in the game. Bandit and Dust Top keys are somewhat similar, but the odds of receiving equal or greater value than the key itself are much higher. Bandit keys you almost make as many badges alone per chest as it costs for a key, and while Zephyr keys will never pay for themselves, so long as you still need to collect stuff that comes from those chests, it’s one of the better ways to spend geodes.

I’d like them to avoid “pay for a spin of the wheel” mechanics as much as possible. Anything you have to pay a currency for should be a sure thing, you get exactly what you pay for, not a chance at something good.

(Oh, and Account Bind all Precursors. The ones on the Trading Post? They can stay there and get sold off or be pulled off and bound to the account. Whatever. Soon as they hit a bag, bound.)

I would agree with this, so long as they do add new, non RNG methods of earning them as well. Much as I loathe the Precursor market, it at least does provide an alternative to RNG that would not otherwise be available in the current system (but could easily be added). I do like the idea of a collection track to earn Precursors, the only thing to be careful of there is that there should not be “stumbling block” items like you have in things like the Treasure Hunter collections, where some of the items needed are also very RNG, and if available at all become very expensive on the market place. If the goal is to remove RNG from the equation, then every tick box for the achievement needs to be a guaranteed reward from completing a task (in some cases for completing it several times).

Because people either enter MMOs at launch or soon after launch, at an expansion launch or soon after expansion launch, or not at all.

Typically, yeah, but they also typically have a significant and often life-saving bump when they move from P2P to F2P, SWTOR did, ESO did, Wildstar did not. It got a very mild bump, but nowhere near what other games did. That indicates that it was not just the price, although it’s fair to argue it would have done better if it’d launched B2P, but clearly even for free, most players did not want what they were selling, and what they were selling were classic hard mode raids.

Finally, yes the raids have been a boon to the whole game, sorry your experiences are garbage but that does not change the facts. The game was missing challenging and engaging content that was not a zerg fest, raids fulfilled that role without taking away the core of the identity that was fractals.

It wasn’t missing those things, it just didn’t have them. It’d be like saying that someone was “missing kitten in their chest.” It was lacking, not missed. Now it has them and is bleeding out because of it.

. . . and how ANet ignored every one of them.

The new maps (at least Verdant Brink and Auric Basin, I haven’t done much with the later ones), clearly show that every lesson learned from Silverwaste and Dry Top was completely ignored by the dev team. For example:

1. Do not have a large map with a map encompassing meta chain. These meta events only work when you have large portions of the map focused on them, and in a real open world map, you cannot have everyone focused on those tasks. People have their own things to do, like story chapters, hero points, etc. I actually heard some guy on map chat saying “this content isn’t intended for pugs,” well sorry, but ANYTHING in an open world map should be designed for pugs first.

2. Don’t have hours-long metas. People don’t want to get stuck working on the meta chain for hours at a time. If they wanted that sort of experience they would be in dungeons or raids. Open world content should be "drop in, do a mission that takes 10-20 minutes, and then leave. You should not feel pressure to then do the next mission, and the next, and so on until all the missions are done. Having maybe one of these per map, taking a total of 30-40 minutes, can be fine, but to have 4-6 of them at once, all of which contribute to a shared reward pool, is just nonsense.

So how to fix this mess?

1. Tighten up the meta missions. in VB, shorten the day/night cycle to a total of an hour. Thirty-five minutes day, fifteen night, five minutes between each. Keep the existing event chains, but remove some of the bottlenecks. Spawn less waves of enemies in “defeat X waves” events. Require less collected bits during collection missions. Make them so that each can be completed in a fraction of the time, and if they are truly pointless to the plot of the mission, cut the phase entirely. Have only one round of night defense and then it’s over.

2. This one is vital to the game as a whole, have better map selection tools. It’s criminal that this hasn’t been done already, but the game needs the ability to manually pick which instance of the map you want to be on, to select from a menu of open maps, with populations visible, and ideally meta-progress visible as well, or at least let players label their map as being “meta progression map.” Do not rely on “join in on party” to move between maps.

3. The further away an event is from you, the less it should matter to you. Do not base personal player rewards on events that they cannot participate in. Players should only be rewarded based on the progress of the events they are working on, and if players halfway across the map drop the ball, that should not reduce the individual player’s rewards.

4. Do not penalize people for showing up late. A player logs in when their schedule permits, do not dump them on an empty map halfway through a meta chain that cannot possibly be completed. If a map is spawned late, perhaps shortcut the mission chains, so that they are already mostly done, but base the player’s personal reward on his own participation. So basically, if a new map would be spawned ten minutes before the end of a meta phase, then advance the missions to a point where they can be completed in that remaining time, but the players who do so would only get a portion of the total reward that a player would get for starting from the first event.

5. Do not have hours-long metas. This bares repeating.

6. Do not have too many things to do on a single map when there are goals that require significant engaged player populations. Don’t have a map that has a mapwide meta chain AND hero points AND story chapters AND hidden secrets to find, don’t give players fair distractions and expect them to ignore those distractions to pursue the meta instead. One or the other. If you want them to share the same physical space, have two different versions of the map, the “meta chain” version of the map with the meta event, and the “no metas” version that has everything else. Let players decide which version they are interested in.

7. Do not have hours-long metas.

8. If none of these are feasible, then at the bare minimum, raise the existing map population caps to about three times the current level. This would ensure that even when most of the map doesn’t care, at least some of the players would.

I also don’t see the issue with Liandri being a theoretical requirement for a legendary? The function of a (new gen) legendary is to be a highly desirable and high prestige/rarity item.
What would you design as the alternative gate then? say that your quota is 5% of the player-base being able to access (No all the players can’t have access as then it no longer fulfills any of its functions)

Quotas should be based on time and effort spent, not on personal ability. They should not go to the “best” players, they should go to those who put in the time and dedication needed, to their best of their own abilities.

In your version of the game, how does a player in say the top 100, get rewarded compared to a player in the bottom 100? Secondly within that top 100 how do you differentiate each game-play modes top 100?

With exactly the same rewards, because it doesn’t matter whether you are in the top 100 or the bottom 100.

Calm down dude, you’re losing your mind.

Read my post carefully.
I AM criticizing this system.
I AM criticizing the developers’ decision.

I don’t argue the person, I argue the argument, so if I’m commenting on a post you meant sarcastically, consider it supporting your position.

No, that’s not what “we” have been asking for — only some people wanted it. Most people asked for a way to get precursors that didn’t depend on saving a lot of money or getting lucky.

Yes, most people wanted a system that didn’t depend on saving a lot of money, and the current system still does. Again, if they removed the gold and gold-fungible components from the current Pre-Crafting system, I think most people would be on board with it.

Moreover, it’s only hellishly expensive now because the materials used are in high demand and low supply, because everyone and their sister is trying to worth on the same collections.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if they hadn’t included tradable materials in the crafting process in the first place, and the instant they did decide to do that, anyone with even a marginal understanding of the game could have predicted the inevitable result, and should have made efforts to correct for it so that we would not end up with the current situation.

Again, you do not need an entire forest worth of wood to craft a single staff, you only need a few planks worth, it should be the other, non-tradable components that upgrade it to “Legendary” class, not just throwing hundreds of sticks at the problem.

As in any economy, those in a rush to be first to get new shinies should expect to spend more, often a lot more.

Only if the system is designed that way. It’s easy enough to design the system to have relatively stable prices from start to finish, with only minimal blips as prices correct themselves, measured in hours or at most days, rather than weeks and months.

People who only need a few T7 mats don’t mind that their finished product costs 10 gold more than the TP price – thus the price for T7 mats will stay high. And I guess most people already/still have some T7 mats, so I don’t think that anyone really buys everything needed off the TP. I hope you get my point.

Even if you already own every material needed in your bank, if it’s more cost-effective to sell those materials and use that gold to buy the Precursor outright, and have money left over, than to craft it, then something has broken down in the process.

But GW2 is working, so your premise is inherently flawed.

No, it is not. That’s only your assumption. If you really think it is an inarguable fact then prove it. The burden of proof is on you.

It’s not really something that needs “proving.” It’s like you’re arguing that if a kitchen has ten people in it, and two of them are making only vegan meals and the rest on steaks, that if those two people were also working on steaks it would not result in more steaks leaving the kitchen. It may be possible that shifting the raid team off raids would not make the expected Living Story come out any faster, but they would be working on something, and whatever that something is, it would come out better and/or faster because they were a part of it. There’s just no argument to be made otherwise.

But that totally defeats the purpose of a raid?!? People shouldn’t be able to casually walk into a raid and just beat it. If you think you should be able to, then you are utterly wrong and this part of the game isn’t for you. Deal with it!

And that sort of attitude is the entire problem here.

I don’t think that they should weaken the existing raids, because some like them how they are, but they should provide a VERSION of the raid, completely optional to those who don’t want it, that would make them more accessible to the remaining players.

Difficulty is fine. If anything raids could use a hardmode, but not a casual mode.
Again, a casual mode totally defeats the purpose of raids. You should finally get that in your head.

Again, it’s not for you, it’s not about what you want. The existing raids are about what you want, and if you want a more hardcore version, I’d be fine with that too. But a more casual mode is for players who feel differently about the game than you do, and nothing you can say will invalidate their tastes.

then why not play the suggested “game” and similar instead of insisting to change GW2?

Yes, exactly. For people who didn’t find the content of GW2 “challenging enough” for their tastes, why ruin GW2 instead of playing a more challenging game?

I guess it’s an error that they haven’t gone back and tweaked the other materials yet, but honestly there are tons and tons of things in this game that they should go back and tweak but just haven’t been high enough priority.

There is no excuse. If they honestly feel that the silk change was a good idea that should remain, then there is a table someplace that says Mithrillium costs 50 mithril, and they need to delete the “5” and replace it with a “10.” If they think it was a bad idea, then there is an entry that says Silk Weaving Thread costs 100, and they need to delete least one of the 0s and the 1, and replace it with a 5.

Done. Takes less than a minute, I’m sure, or they’ve designed their systems terribly. In the meantime, the imbalance has lasted for what, nine months now? And I would say that making most classes loot less cloth and some classes loot more would be a very “relevant” place to balance out the values of each.

It isn’t made by anet, otherwise underwater precursers wouldn’t be dirt cheap and I’m pretty sure that the chances that any precurser will drop are equal. I don’t think anet ever changed that rate.

But they are that way because ANet allows them to be that way. John Smith said himself that he’s fine with objects of a supposedly equivalent tier having wildly different prices, Charged Lodestones being a specific example. If they decided otherwise, they could fix it. If they wanted the underwater precursors to cost as much as, say, Dusk, all they would need to do is dramatically lower their drop rate via the usual channels. That might take a while to have an impact if they did it quietly, but if they announced the change so that people wouldn’t have to do the math themselves, it would kick in fairly quickly. Of course, the true demand for underwater Legendaries is very low, they are purely a vanity item since underwater combat is so undervalued, but again, they could greatly up that by making underwater combat more important.

Likewise, with the terrestrial weapons, when they added new classes that made underused weapons more interesting, it bumped the Precursor prices and the prices for other rare skins.

Some markets they have very direct levers to play with and are very easy for them to manipulate, other markets either have such low supply or low demand that they are more difficult to tweak, but any situation can be nudged in the direction they want it to be if they so choose. There is push and pull, certainly, if they make a certain change the players might react in a way that softens the impact in the short term, but the eventual outcome would be inevitable, the more difficult/time consuming they make it to acquire something, the more it will rise in market value relative to its demand. The easier/faster they make it to acquire something, the more it will fall. The more useful/desirable they make an item to people, the more its price will rise relative to available supplies, the more useless they make it, the more its price will fall, and these factors are always at their fingertips without even having to touch the market controls directly.

Yeah, but we’re in a game and even with one character you’re able to gather a multiple of what you need for one Deldrimoor and Spiritwood a day.

Sure, but it requires time on your part, time that could be spent doing other things, and that time has non-zero value.

That’s why mithril and elder wood had relatively low market value when compared to the surrounding materials, because they were relatively easy to earn compared to other similar materials (since they heavily populated the more populous maps and could be salvaged from most level 80 drops). Now the sinks are a bit stronger so their value is rising again, but ANet still controls both factors. Silk is much higher value than mithril, not because there is some absolute universal Truth to that being the case, but rather because ANet chose to make it so that you cannot harvest silk from the world, causing natural supply to be far lower than most basic mats, and also made it so that you required twice as much of it as mithril in many core recipes, causing predictable demand to be significantly higher to achieve equivalent results.

If they’d instead chosen to allow you to harvest cloth from the world (as ESO did), and had Damask require the same amount of Silk as Deldrimore does Mithril (although one or both toned down slightly to account for metal being used in both armor and weapons), then the price of Silk would be equivalent to the price of Mithril.

They CHOSE for that not to be the case, and the outcome was entirely within their hands.

Yes, but like I said above, You can farm quite a lot of it still, you aren’t restricted to only x per day. Your restriction is 30-45 min for usual nodes to respawn, no respawn time if you’re using several characters to farm. That’s pretty generous actually.

And again, you can do that, or you can spend your time elsewhere. When players have to do things that are not inherently fun, things that they would not be doing if not for the “reward” of it, then the reward needs to be worth the time. In many cases, farming for mats is not what most players would consider worth the time to go out of their way. This is why items that occur in “meta” maps tend to have relatively lower market values to items that can only be found in “non-meta” maps, because less players are in those maps unless they are going there specifically to get those items.

So you want everything to be useless junk so the mats required are cheap? And to who is it useless to anet or the players? If it’s the latter then who sets the price?

That’s not the only tool they have. Everything is a case-by-case situation, but big picture I think the better levers would be in increasing supply of certain materials or reducing the amount needed by core recipes, in most cases. You don’t turn a cool item into junk, you just make it easier to put together, and therefore less effort on the part of the people making it, and therefore a lower expected price for it, because if you don’t offer a fair price then someone else will.

I disagree. You want a precurser, so you either have to work or to pay for it. Those who sell it put the same effort into gathering it as the buyers would who decide to pass that effort. This is true for at least metal and wood.

All true, of the current state of things, but everyone who put effort into getting that precursor put in exactly as much effort as ANet determined it would take. They harvested exactly as many nodes, killed exactly as many mobs, completed exactly as many quests, or spent exactly as much gold as ANet determined it should take, and if ANet decided to change any of those factors, then the amount of effort required would also change.

People asking for lower prices aren’t asking ANet to “declare” a new price for them by which the market must abide, they are asking ANet to change the conditions responsible for the current prices, so that players who sell them will feel that a lower price is fair relative to their new, lower efforts.

Of course, that’s why it’s a bloody awful idea to tie a random event to things players rely on, like karma vendor access.

But true varied random world Bosses throughout the zones would not be keyed to such things.

But it depends on how you have fun. One of the more fun things for me in GW2 is open world bosses. If they were not scheduled and were completely random, then trying to find one that was active would be nearly impossible. You might encounter one every few days, rather than several per day like I do now. The rest of the time you’d spend wasting time in random zones hoping a boss might pop, and when it does, it would likely be way underpopulated because nobody would know about it that wasn’t also randomly in that zone. No, it’s terrible.

The game was designed so that the Casual player can still succeed without all the extra fluff that high tiered rewards grant. You want the extra fluff on a personal level, and are vocal about having it. You don’t need it.

I need it as much as I need anything that could possibly be related to playing a game, so within the context of this forum, which is devoted to a game called GW2, yes I do “need” it. If we were discussing this on a forum devoted to necessities of life, weighed against things like food and shelter, than obviously game rewards would not qualify as “needs,” but when discussing what I need to keep me engaged inside a game world, yes, I’m afraid that does include feeling justly rewarded for the effort I put in, that if I put in equal effort to other players that I should be equally rewarded for it, without regard to what sort of guild they belong to. If I don’t feel that the developers are making good faith efforts to provide that, then I need to find something else to play, and I’d really rather I didn’t have to because when this game is working well, I really enjoy it.

Back to your desire to have the best rewards from group content, without the success of the group. You talk about wanting the conveniences of being about to join a group that’s doing group content. If you aren’t afforded that convenience, you feel no one else should have access to the high level rewards. Realize that you are an outsider to the group forming. As a solo player wanting to join a group, you still have that opportunity if you can find someone kind enough to taxi you in. Don’t take that kindness, and mistake that for the group being required to let you in because you feel you deserve to be there.

And recognize that even this elite little clique only exists at the largess of the game developers, who designed the systems. This is not the raid-guild’s world, they are just playing in it. I’m not saying that people on a T4 map are obligated to invite me in, I’m saying that ANet is obligated to provide a game system in which I shouldn’t have to be invited in, because merely wanting to be on a T4 map automatically places me on one.

It shouldn’t require outside coordination amongst the players, it shouldn’t require guilds, it should just be a natural consequence of the tools the developers provide that requires no direct interaction with any other players.

Nothing offbase about them supporting a system they designed and implemented. There is little point making suggestions that go completely against the things they value.

Of course there’s value in it, as ultimately they are creating a consumer product, not a pet project, and if the consumers fundamentally disagree with the things they value then it would behoove them to change the things they value. I’m not saying that my views definitely represent the majority, but they should at least consider that they might, and try to determine if they do.

There is evidence that they do listen, they have changed numerous other areas of the game as they’ve gone.

It would be like pushing for democracy in N Korea.

How awful.

Most people in these forums understand how the economy works. We know that each decision has consequences. Oversupply an item, and you ruin it’s value. Pretty straight forward. Anet makes intended changes that shift the velocity, but only after considering all the outcomes. You think Elder Wood is worthless now…

And I think I’ve made clear that I understand those systems too, which is why they should not oversupply anything, but rather appropriate-supply things. Right now precursors are undersupplied, they should make them more supplied, but not oversupplied. Supply should never be over demand. And then this will of course increase demand for ancillary materials, so they should increase supply of these, but never over supply them, just supply them adequately to the increased demand and no more than that.

They have done similar massive shifts in the past, and it’s worked out, so enough with the hysterics about how it’ll ruin the economy.

Precursor crafting, without proper gates, would shock the economy.

Which is why nobody is suggesting they shouldn’t implement proper gates. Nobody is suggesting as an ideal goal that they should just let you craft infinite re-sellable precursors or anything.

Why can’t you engage on this topic without resorting to strawman after strawman?

Right now, you can pay 100 bucks for gems to buy a precursor.
Give me 1 reason why Anet should devaluate their product just because they have the posibility to do so?

If ANet is keeping the value of Legendaries artificially high to deliberately incentivize players to buy them using gems, then they have committed a grave pay2win sin and deserve no respect from any quarter. Gems should be used primarily to buy gem store items, not to convert to gold to buy large scale purchases with. Ideally they would just remove the gold/gem exchange entirely. I do buy gems, and spend them, but only to buy items on the gem store that I believe are worthy of my purchase, because I do want to support the game, but if they are deliberately trying to get players to buy legendaries with cash then that is just predatory “evil gaming” behavior. South Park just did an excellent episode on that very topic.

You’re taking his example too literally. He’s not making a 1:1 comparison. His point is simple. People want luxury goods for cheap and it’s because they don’t understand how stuff is valued.

And the counterpoint is equally simple, there are no luxury goods in games.

Luxury goods in real life exist because the materials or craftsmanship used in their construction are naturally scarce, and therefore supply is by necessity lower than demand. In a game, supply is whatever the devs say it is, scarcity is always artificial. No item is necessary, no item is a luxury.

For example: Everyone wants to show off their Gy….something ghost dog mini pet.
No one runs around with Mini Queen Jennah.

My main rocks a mini-Marjory. She’s like my little sister.

Where did I say I want precursors for free? Seriously, where did you get that nonsense from? I’m questioning their way of acquiring precursors, not the time one needs to get precursors.

It’s called a straw-man argument, they love them around here.

He’s not implying they are a gemstore item.

But he is implying that players should be expected to buy them using gems, and that their market value is based on the fact that many players could never afford them without resorting to gems, which would make them a defacto gem store item.

if we don’t go daredevil, we’re still cripplingly squishy. I noted Karl asking if the daredevil can take mulitple enemies. half the time (PvP espescially) I find thief struggles to take single enemies. daredevil does have survivability, but base thief doesn’t, and it’s be nice to see that fixed.

Base Thief has other options. Base Thief is intended to go Stealth and/or maintain blinds, something DD has a harder time at. They are designing the DD to be more in your face the entire time, while a base Thief is intended to be more hit and run, opportunistic burst.