Guild Wars 2

The CDI is not your place to air grievances because you know the devs are reading.

As a dude, I think it’s awesome that there’s some smart, cool female leads in the story. Unlike the previous poster, I can totally relate to Marjory, despite the gender difference. Kasmeer is a total catch, you go Jory!

Harajuku.3412:

I don’t understand how people aren’t understanding the reasoning for this. Large guilds have recieved access to guild missions when they were released. This is for SMALL guilds, who don’t even have the influence coming in to even get the Art of War level 5, and such. By doing these new missions, it will help us build up the influence to acquire AoW level 4> then 5. THEN we can partake in the guild missions the larger guilds are able to partake in. Not everyone is in a guild with your hundred random people herpaderping/piggybacking off other members progress.

I can only speak for myself, but I’d say this: the change is a good one, but it’s not enough. We were hoping for more, but it seems like this is all we’ll get.

I’ll take it! Gladly! But it’s underwhelming.

I’d prefer to flaunt my hard-earned title.

Chris-

Vertical Progression, as you said, is a good way for players to slowly learn how to play. Start simple, add complexity and power as you go. This is fine.

The vertical progression most of us are concerned with is additional, required vertical progression added after launch. The reason we dislike it is because we feel a sense of completion by max-leveling our characters and getting the proper gear.

When you add new levels or new gear tiers, it destroys that sense of completion. It starts to feel like work, not progression. And for players like me with 8 toons (only 5 that I’ve even managed to get to 80… none with Ascended weapons… only 2 or 3 with their Ascended accessories), that becomes a huge, demoralizing setback.

So vertical progression at launch is fine. Post-launch vertical progression is terrible.

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

This would mean lots of people in the open world, though just within the zone of the day. Still, it’d mean you can do some open world content with better rewards.

Here’s my issue: wanting to watch the videos, kill all the mobs, and otherwise PLAY THE GAME (as opposed to EARN ALL THE TOKENS) does not make you a n00b.

Some of us just prefer to work for real money at our real jobs and play games for fun in our spare time. We shouldn’t be insulted for that.

Are you all about 6m speed runs? Fine. Be open about it when you try to party up and make it easier for us to avoid you.

Reanne.5462:

Because anet does not want new players to have a fun gaming experience.

So this is what it’s come to now? Not “it’s a hard problem to solve” or “players might respond poorly if ArenaNet was more active in managing populations” or “it’s a temporary imbalance that will fix itself,” but literally YOU CAN NOT HAVE FUN HAHAHAHA.

Jeeze.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

timmyf.1490:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Optional or not does not help people feel less forced, or less like they are being made to play a certain way.

Read this again.

This is the fundamental problem with so many unhappy gamers. “I have self-imposed rules which I must follow and their interaction with this game creates a situation I dislike.”

It’s just another facet of Scrub-ism.

Congratulations on being a kitten.

But I’ll stop trying to explain, you simply just don’t want to get it. Players feeling forced to play a specific way is not a new issue, in fact it goes all the way back to …well…when they dropped ascended into the game. There’s a big difference between what you’re talking about, and what I’m trying to explain.

It’s not that I don’t want to get it. I just disagree with you. I don’t think even the addition of Ascended gear (which I think was a horrible mistake) counts. YOU DO NOT NEED ASCENDED GEAR.

If you, individually, as a player, make the decision to acquire a title, piece of gear, achievement, etc, you cannot then claim ArenaNet is “forcing” you to play a certain way. You CHOSE to take that task typically with the full understanding of what it requires.

You can say “the reward is not worth the effort.” You can say “I don’t think this skin/title/chivo should require X.” You can say “I dislike content X.” You CANNOT SAY you were FORCED to do it.

(For my part, the WvW doesn’t bother me, but I HAAAAAATE Hearts and will likely never do world completion on another character. But I CANNOT SAY ARENANET FORCES ME TO DO HEARTS.)

I can’t believe people are literally suggesting they’ll quit if ArenaNet builds content they aren’t personally interested in playing. This blows my mind.

Also, why the hell do you call it GREEN when it is clearly LIME or perhaps FRESH AVOCADO!? THIS IS KITTEN RIDICULOUS ANET!!!!

DSRilk.2978:

timmyf.1490:

I can’t believe people are literally suggesting they’ll quit if ArenaNet builds content they aren’t personally interested in playing. This blows my mind.

It’s not about building content I’m not interested in. It’s about the impact the drain on resources would have on the rest of the game. If they could magically create that content with zero man hours, then I really wouldn’t care – but that’s not at all what would have to happen in reality.

As a player interested in instanced content, I would have quit this game a long time ago if I had your attitude. It’s a good thing some of us recognize that we may only enjoy portions of the game and aren’t so selfish as to suggest 100% of resources must go to game modes we enjoy OR ELSE.

Save condi builds! Nerf one of the main ways condi builds proc condis!

Julie Yann.5379:

This war, spies are to be expected. If it is against the ToS, how do you prove it?

The comparison to spies is foolish.

In real life, spies can be captured or killed. In this game, spies appear as allies and we are without recourse.

You should know better and probably do.

Kaz makes some good points and there will definitely be some people who are never satisfied, but that said…

Fractals are great! But they serve a very different purpose from dungeon paths. The reward structure (and rewards) are totally different. They require a longer time commitment than most dungeon paths. The level of difficulty is different. The integration of story is different.

And look, if Dungeons are somehow no longer a thing and Fractals are the future, that’s something I can learn to live with. (I still don’t like the time commitment that comes with Fractals, that’s why I rarely do them. I know how long it takes to do a AC 1 and 3 or COE 3, for example. Fractals are always a toss-up… sometimes random is nice, but sometimes you want to be able to plan your gaming time. I can’t, for example, commit to Fractals if I know I only have an hour. Some runs just go bad and take longer.)

I sort of want to make a longer post or maybe a video about Aetherpath and why I think it’s played so much less than other dungeon paths. I’m sure Anet views their only post-launch actual-dungeon path as a failure, but I’m not sure they fully understand why. Rewards is a big part, but it’s only a part. I’ve been trying to come up with a few easy rules for making dungeon content that’s fun, not frustrating.

For example, the boulder puzzle in COF1 and the laser jump puzzle in COE are both fun. The ooze puzzle is a nightmare and makes me want to throw stuff. What’s the difference?

Good dungeon puzzles have some flexibility. You can complete them with 2 or 3 members knowing what to do. Having one person who doesn’t communicate and who doesn’t know what they’re doing shouldn’t mean failure.

Good dungeon puzzles also don’t rely on NPC pathing or glitchy aggro mechanics. (Aetherpath at least used the ooze attractant stuff, that’s a plus.)

Good dungeon puzzles also shouldn’t rely too heavily on randomness or unclear factors. For oozes, I’m thinking spawn times. If a few lava elementals spawn and aggro your ooze, well, sorry bro. Start again.

I ran Aetherpath the other night with some folks who aren’t experts on the path but have all done it a handful of times. It took well over an hour and was maddeningly frustrating. And for the 2g path reward (and no good drops along the way, not even a rare, despite my nearly 200% MF) it just wasn’t worth it.

Also, it’s not that Aetherpath is bad, it’s just that it feels like they crammed way too many fights and mechanics into that one path. Imagine, instead, it was a new dungeon and oozes were on one path, Sparki and Slick on another, and the electric room + holo generators were on another. Each path could have its own end boss and maybe a few more medium-sized fights within… Guess what, without significantly more work than that one path took, you have three explorable paths of more reasonable length.

Anyway, just a few thoughts from somebody who would like more dungeons… but not dungeons as long and complicated as Aetherpath.

Pirlipat.2479:

timmyf.1490:

And if you’re so entitled as to think they “owe” us that interaction, there’s not really anything I can say. You’re wrong. Your $60 bought you a game, not the ability to force people to listen to you yell about how much you hate them and the work they’ve done.

Yep I bought a more or less working game over one and a half year back. I didn’t pay 50 Euro to become a laboratory rat for their mega-server-project. Atm we may leave some feedback which might or might not be read while the project itself got forced on all maps way faster than announced. Now we are experiencing some on the fly changes that might or might not solve our problems.

This is a great example of the problem.

“forced on us way faster than announced”

ArenaNet talked to us, but their plans changed. You use that as ammunition. THIS IS WHY THEY DON’T TELL US STUFF.

One thing I want to mention here that might surprise a lot of players looking for guilds…

As a guild leader, I want to find players who want to be in my guild. NOT just a guild. If I ask people what they’re looking for and they respond something like “Whatever/idc/everything/dunno,” that means I walk away.

Consider this also from a player perspective: would you prefer to be in a guild of people who joined the guild because they don’t really care about what the guild does? I’d think not. Most players probably want a guild full of people who have similar interests, playstyles, etc.

The only way to ensure you find a guild that’s a good fit is to be choosy. And your guild should be choosy as well. It’s worth taking the extra time to find a good fit… or you’ll just be bouncing around a bunch of guilds full of people who are just names in /guild chat.

Their argument boils down to “incentives force me to do it.” They make no distinction.

Oddly, incentives should also force them to run full Zerker speed clear paths to earn gold, but they manage to ignore those incentives just fine.

My guess is that 95% will move on and the rest will keep bringing it up whenever possible, change their signatures to some snarky comment about it, and be a general pain around here.

We’ve seen it before with Fractal reset and Megaserver. I imagine it’ll be similar.

I think subclasses are wrong for this game. Those who support subclasses seem to want a lot of things, none of which actually require a subclass system. I’d far prefer a redesign of the trait system to be more flexible, but even that is questionable because of balance concerns.

Adding subclasses opens up ZERO additional fun content or customization options.

Want more armor? You can have it without subclasses.
Want more skills? You can have them without subclasses.
Want more traits? You can have them without subclasses.
Want more weapons? You can have them without subclasses.
Want profession-specific weapons? You can have them without subclasses.
Want cosmetic options tied to specific roles? You can have them without subclasses.
Want control and support builds viable? You can have that without subclasses.

Development of systems like subclasses costs tremendous amounts of resources, resources that would be much better spent on other systems. (Order Missions or another idea I don’t love but recognize is popular: housing.)

Hey guys, I’ve been struggling with something and wanted to get some feedback.

I’m on Sanctum of Rall and we’re pretty good about calling events, especially in low-level zones. Most people, when near an event that’s starting, will name it in mapchat. A good number of folks even include nearby waypoints. This is great!

What irritates me are all the requests for events. There are CONSTANTLY people asking “Events?” “Any events?” “Need events, any up?” If you stop for a moment and look at mapchat, you’d see that people are calling them…

My assumption is that these people are asking for events the moment they enter the zone because OMGZ need 2 do dailiez @ max speed and get back to CoF1!!!! so I usually gently harass them. Something like…

Them: Events…?
Me: …are being called as they start right here on mapchat.

Them: Any events?
Me: Yes. All over. Constantly. Wait 30 seconds.

I’ve done this a few times and been called many different not-so-friendly names for this and gotten precious little support in my direction. So here are my questions…

1) I know I’m being a bit of a jerk, that’s intentional, but am I wrong here?
2) What is Queensdale like on your server? I assume it’s kind of the same thing everywhere?

I think the thing ArenaNet didn’t anticipate with this system is that players would EXPECT (yes, EXPECT, not WANT) to unlock EACH AND EVERY TRAIT RIGHT AWAY instead of unlocking them as needed for a build.

I absolutely don’t understand this desire, but it certainly seems widespread. For players who have it, their characters feel “incomplete” until they finish unlocking everything. Which is, as many have said, time-consuming and expensive.

I think the best bet would be to reduce the cost of paying for traits or to switch trait unlocks to Grandmaster only.

Eurhetemec, I’m not going to sit here and have a personal argument with you on this thread. If you’d like to do that, you’re welcome to message me here or in-game and we can do that.

I have never said that Megaserver is perfect. What I have said, repeatedly, in multiple threads (some of which you may not be reading) is that Megaserver is an improvement for me, needs some tweaking (better ability for guilds to get together, inclusion of Friends list as a mechanism for sorting, ability to choose a style of megaserver such as RP, Dungeon runner, casual, etc) and has a large problem dealing with language which definitely exists, though is not a problem for me. If you disagree, you can easily look up my post history to verify this information.

I think the design of Megaserver is imperfect but a step in the right direction. I think it can be tweaked and made to work well.

What I’m less certain of are these forums. There are lots of smart people saying lots of smart things, even things I disagree with, about the update. But those smart things are often lost in a sea of complaints, I’m-quitting posts, hyperbolic “this has ruined everything” posts, and demands for immediate responses from the devs.

This is all counterproductive. We would all be much better off attempting to provide actionable feedback that explains precisely the issues we have while giving enough information to allow the devs to fix the algorithms for Megaserver.

If this is happening somewhere on the forums, I have not seen it.

If it’s any consolation, myself and several others pushed Order missions hard during one of the Collaborative Development Initiatives. Activities with/progression within your Order is an area that ArenaNet recognizes interest from players.

That doesn’t mean they’ll add it, just that they know we want it.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Opposition isn’t the same thing as griefing.

Then we need a new term for people who enjoy killing players who have no interest in player-to-player combat.

Ayrilana.1396:

timmyf.1490:

Ayrilana.1396:

Those who AFK are not hurting you.

You say this like you’ve never tried to join a friend’s instance only to find it’s full… and your friend reports back there’s 20-30 people idling away, waiting for Breach/Vinewrath.

Yes, AFKers are hurting me.

Not being able to get onto a friends map is much different than harming the progression of breach. Whether your your friend could get on or not is not relevant as they wouldn’t have been able to get on even if those players were not AFK.

May or may not be able to get in. If AFK players are kicked from a hard-capped map, it opens up new spots. Spots for active players. This seems really obvious to me.

My only assumption, therefore, must be that you afk in the map and are simply defending your own behavior.

Elbegast.6970:

BobbyStein.2315:

The first improvement to address this went live on 10/29. The special event UI now tells you where to go and in what order to experience the story bits.

Are you talking about the box on top right of the screen? If so, I can’t tell that it has changed at all. It’s not telling me anything except to fight the toxic alliance. It looks the same as before the 29th. We, as a community, still have to go to Dulfy to find out what is going on with this release and to find things like the Obelisk Shards.

As a matter of fact, I’ve already given up on Tower of Nightmares patch due to the cluelessness, confusion and the apparent grindy content. It’s rather sad as I’m only at 4/14 achievements.

You see, I don’t go to 3rd party websites to learn about things that happen in-game. I expect everything to be explained in-game, on the official website or in patch notes.

I get the idea behind the obelisk shards: “Hey, this will be a great way to get people into this handful of maps! They’ll have to run around and find the shards!” Except most of us won’t do that.

Some of us will, as this poster said, just go to Dulfy, find the list, and WP around to get them. This is the very definition of un-fun.

Some of us will, as I intend to do, skip it. Just like I skipped dragon teeth.

I imagine a few folks will use it as a reason to spread out into the zones and search, but without a built-in way to track which you’ve found and which you haven’t, I could imagine it ends in disaster for a lot of people…

This always comes to mind. Attached for convenience, linked because I’m not a dirty thief. http://xkcd.com/1425/

Oogabooga.9138:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Great idea, I’d love this too, as would my poor extra finishers I never remember to use.

Wow a response after 5 posts, yet none in Megaserver or Trait threads with thousands. Maybe you forgot about us too? Is the China player base dealt the same wonderful PR?

It’s almost like they’re being honest when they say they’re always reading the forums but can’t always make time to respond. (Or can’t respond because they don’t speak about upcoming features until they’ve been announced. etc.)

Begins the conversation with insults. Wonders why people refuse to take him into raids.

OP, in case you don’t realize it, calling people “meta clones/drones” is not exactly the way to get them to help you. Based on the attitude you’ve shown here, I wouldn’t welcome you into my guild or my raid.

You can keep saying “it’s not about me,” but it is about you. It’s about your bad attitude toward the rest of the community.

That attitude wasn’t built by a failure to find a raid group. You ALREADY had it when you went looking. It’s easy to identify and it’s the reason you’re having issues finding people to play with.

When you’re ready to be a part of a team and you communicate that out to others, you’ll find more success. You need to drop the defensive attitude and open yourself up to the team strategy.

I look at it the same way I view team sports like basketball or football: there’s lots of winning strategies, but you can’t have each player picking their own strategy. You need one single team strategy and all the players have to buy in to that.

You might be Lebron James, but if you can’t play on a team, you can’t win.

Thaddeus.4891:

Guess want, EOTM ppl want more love and content too.

I’d prefer they actually work on real WvW, a game mode that needs the love a lot more than EOTM. Anet could make a map that consisted of 9 Skyhammer maps connected by rope bridges and if they put enough champs and “capture events” in there, people would play it 10 hours a day for the next 8 years because LOOOTZ!!!!

Let’s not pretend people are in EOTM for the content. They’re there for the low risk + high rewards and super-simplistic gameplay.

Im Mudbone.1437:

That works two ways. In the past 2 years, can you say with a straight face and honest concience that they have(in regards to my underlined part in your statement)?

That’s a really good question and one which every individual needs to answer for himself. Personally, they’ve kept several promises they needed to – not making the gemstore pay-to-win, for example. Regularly updating the game with new features and content. That sort of thing.

There have obviously been disappointments as well. If I were concerned about eSports, I’d find trusting them hard. The PvP community hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves and it’s probably too late. Dungeons have been a major disappointment (but to be fair, they never promised a bunch of new dungeons.)

Personally, the introduction of Ascended gear hurt me the most and has made me hyper-sensitive to any further increase in gear or level. The trust I have in them would quickly vanish if additional levels or an addition gear tier were added.

But I can say with a straight face that, despite some missteps, I think they are actively trying to make this a better game for the vast majority of the playerbase (sometimes at the expense of minority groups like hardcore PvPers and the RP community.)

What’s left of the Living Story?

Memories. (But not stale instances nobody cares to play anymore.$

Potential fix for guild missions, wondering if anybody has feedback:

Allow right-click Join in <Zone> through the guild panel in addition to the party menu.

That would allow the full guild to join on somebody without all the hassle of re-partying. Would that work? Are there unintended consequences?

Let me give an example of useful feedback…

ArenaNet-

As the leader of a large guild that likes to do guild missions regularly (with about 80-100 people at a time), we’re running into an issue with Megaserver. Previously, when we loaded into a zone, we’d create an overflow and then taxi our members into that overflow. It was a timely process, but we all eventually got there.

With Megaserver, this doesn’t seem to be working. We get split up into a few Megaservers, but because none of them are empty like the overflow, there’s too many other people already there to fit our whole guild.

This has made it incredibly difficult to do guild missions, especially Puzzle, Rush, and Challenge (where Bounty is a bit easier because you can just split to different targets.)

As a suggested solution, if a player maps into a zone where the guild has an active mission, perhaps the server will “reserve” room for all online, representing members? If there aren’t 80-100 spots on a Megaserver, it would create a new Megaserver map for the guild. This would mean we’d have to launch the mission before we waypoint in, but we usually do that anyway.

That is how you give feedback. Not “omg Anet ruined teh game bcuz gemstore kitten off you suck.”

My Prime Holo fight last night had 3-5 AFKers. I reported them all for botting.

Their defense? “Getting chivos.”

In Guild Wars 2, you get achievements for standing in the corner avoiding combat. You get rewards for standing in the corner while you do something else on your computer.

It just boggles my mind.

ArenaNet: PLEASE at least add an option for Leeching to the report menu so we can correctly identify why we are reporting a player. The AFKers try to scare people away from reporting them by saying “You can’t report me, there’s not an AFK option, you’ll get in trouble instead for a false report” which keeps a lot of people from filing the report.

I have an idea for you, Chris. One which might seem a little radical, but here goes:

Have an all-(relevant)-hands-on-deck release with the entire (relevant) development team building new Dynamic Events. Shoot for the moon: dozens or hundreds of new Dynamic Events. Call it a “Game Changer” because it is literally changing the game world.

Based on various loose-lipped comments I’ve heard, you have something big planned in the next few months. Why not follow it with a huge overhaul to the in-game world? Give everybody a reason to go back out and explore again.

And then… repeat. 3-6 months down the road, cycle out 100+ events and add 100+ new ones. And repeat. And repeat. That’s a real “living world.”

“announced”

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Proposal Overview

World-chat for communicating with members of your home world.

Goal of Proposal

While this may not seem like a guild problem, it’s become significantly harder to do guild recruiting in the Megaserver age. I consider this an absolutely necessary guild QOL change. Making guilds cross-world was nice, but guilds that do a substantial amount of World vs World may wish to limit recruiting to players on their home world. (Might make a separate proposal for this, but we need to be able to see the World of members in the guild roster as well.)

In addition, we often run WvW events that we wish to publicize to our world. We don’t want to inform enemy worlds that we are running these events. (Also, it seems spammy and rude to be messaging a bunch of people who can’t join.)

Proposal Functionality

Add a world chat option which messages all members who are members of your world. This should not include members who are guesting on your world. Ideally, this should message every world member in the current map regardless of Megaserver shard.

Meaning: if I send a message in Lion’s Arch to /world, all Sanctum of Rall players in Lion’s Arch will receive the message.

The option should be enabled by default on the main chat tab.

Associated Risks

As always, you have to worry about spamming and gold-selling. The existing flood control should perform reasonably well in preventing major issues.

Enabling the option by default could cause some difficulty for players who have heavily customized their chat tabs.

Please do not force members to spend personal laurels or commendations on guild halls, hall upkeep, or hall features. Guild Halls should be unlocked and kept up using shared guild currencies: influence and merits.

Here’s a proposal for handling some of the time-gating for Ascended mat refinement, etc…

Change the once-daily recipes to X-times-weekly (10 would be my suggestion). This means that you aren’t punished for “missing” a day.

I think we’d all find each other a lot more reasonable if we lowered the hyperbole, took a few deep breaths, and actually tried to listen to each other.

And I do honestly think that, if we set the right tone, we’d start to see a lot more developers feel comfortable posting here.

Cirran.1429:

Other than the disturbing issue of A-Net giving an official endorsement of don’t resurrect your teammates.

Calling Gaile’s personal opinion “official endorsement” is the reason none of us can have nice things. Your inability to distinguish between the two is, to use the word you used, disturbing.

I have no problems with “I’m leaving” posts from well-known players who make cogent criticisms of flaws in the game.

This meets neither of those conditions.

It’s almost like flipping out about something you don’t even remotely understand is a bad idea. Or something.

On the topic of combo fields, what if Raids included combo fields of new types… for example, a Draconic Energy Field which gives new effects for each finisher type? Perhaps these combo fields could be created by environmental weapons, so certain players may choose to carry and use the bundle to create the new fields?

That ties together a few different things: using advanced game mechanics, using bundles and other environmental weapons, and allowing some choice and flexibility in class and role.

Arghore and videoboy-

Please just stop.

Thanks.

Well, this isn’t mindless qq, but I have to ask…

If ArenaNet’s policy – probably made by Mike O’Brien himself – is that they won’t talk about updates until those updates are basically ready to ship, how will a Community Management Team help?

I mean, having a larger team to post “we can’t discuss features in development” on more threads won’t help.

A larger and/or better Community Management Team also won’t help those features or content get built faster.

So I’m not really sure the point? I think ArenaNet needs to improve its communication, but that’s not a knock (necessarily) against the people doing the communicating, it’s a criticism of the policies they have in place for communicating with us.

It’s true that “casual” means different things to different people. And no, I don’t ever expect that EVERYBODY will take the time to learn their class well, run effective builds, and care about winning or not.

But I got the feeling that a lot of people on SoR weren’t just saying “I do not personally care to try to perform better as performance is a metric that does not matter to me” (an opinion that is perfectly fine to have), but rather “you are a bad person for trying to help players who choose to join you be better.”

My own personal breaking point on this was seeing GSCH members laugh at us for running WvW training events. High-ranking members. People important to the WvW community on SoR.

Anyway, I’m glad to see Fog taking a more active role in WvW lately and it looks like it’s doing a lot of good. I keep hearing about how much fun you guys are having over there, so I’m glad you found your niche, even if it’s a niche that is entirely uninteresting to me.

As a small guild leader, I’m already dropping 2g/day for a Custom PvP Arena for my guild. I’d rather not also have to pay for Guild Halls on a daily basis.

Please don’t charge a daily fee for guild halls. Thanks.

Csele.1647:

ANET WILL NEVER ANSWER to this kind of topic, they will most likely delete or ignore they ONLY answer post about “spoil” , “hack” or technical problems

What would they say? “Sorry you don’t like RNG, but that’s the way we’ve built the game and it’s not changing.” You already know that.