Guild Wars 2

OP, i feel your pain. It is MMORPG, the second M is “multiplayer”, it is not “social”, then it would be MSORPG. Secondly the R stands for “role” and lone wolf is a perfect role. I typically also prefer to roam around on my own, sometimes in a small guild group.
I do however hope that the new maps are full of solo-explorable places (or at least some, that you can get to with the people you meet randomly). On the BW3 at last I felt I could participate in most event flows as a single player. Raids will be a problem, but they will be a problem anyways.

so before I begin talking about my beta experiences lets set some ground rules. if you don’t have anything constructive to say, say nothing. example. “I think that this content was fun for me/the content could be changed in this way to make it better” is constructive dialog and “ok what do you expect? I think you are…” these are not constructive. moving on.

the negative impacts of my beta experiences on my opinion of HoT were as follows.

1. I didn’t really like Revenant. why? a lack of customizable utility skills allows for minimal variance between revenants. build variety should be treasured. if a class is added that class should follow the general guide lines of the other classes including their own selectable individual utility skills. the replacement of utility skills with locked spirit skills hurts the classes playability.

2. all of the content I have seen so far is intended for groups of 3 players and more. why I see this as bad. there are several players out there that want solo content/duo content.
I believe there to be many guilds out there that are husband and wife(like mine) or a couple of friends that play together only. I have been playing gw sense initial na release of gw1. I have enjoyed years of gameplay both in gw1 and gw2 with my wife. I have very little interest in dealing with elitists who want you to play their way only/feel they should have some sort of supervisory powers over you and your playtime/play style.
I have said before “the less I deal with other players the more I enjoy my playtime.” this has been proven to me repeatedly and for over 20 years of gaming. every time I hear a player say “oh but it isn’t like that” and I try and deal with those players it all eventually turns into the same aggravating overly dramatic negative playtime. this has been tested on 50+ games hundreds of times. (raids take a commander tag which one must purchase for hundreds of gold./guild missions and guild halls will only be able to be built/done with guilds working at 3 players+ at a time.) is it so wrong to want to play the game content silently and in my own way that I enjoy? raids should have been part of the lfg tool or their own icon/interface where players can select a raid and get matched to a party to do the raid.

3. the super Mario brothers syndrome. imo SaB was the worst content ever made for gw2. why? because of the low quality throwback graphics/SMB style play. I want new content shown to me in new ways. from my new expansion to my cutting edge game.
I was seriously discouraged to find out that the trampoline mushrooms(and they are even mushrooms) from the super Mario brothers series(that hasn’t entertained me sense I was 8 ) was apparently going to be a major part of the HoT maps(as they made up a large portion of the beta map/mastery system)

when I mention these things in game(only after being asked direct questions) I am told the same thing “why do you play mmos” the answer? because I enjoy the playtime I get with my wife and my friends(before they all quit gw2 rather then spend hundreds of gold regearing their mains after last feature pack: my friends that is). there are no high quality massive single player rpgs anymore as mmos have replaced them. while I understand the need for group content I feel that less social players who simply want to silently play their game are excluded when you require player counts. until anet either establishes a banned on first social violation(thus scaring everyone into playing nice) or gear inspects/build inspects being declared as forms of player harassment this will continue. I originally thought anet agreed that “every player and every build should be accepted every time” was their stated goal(and a good goal). but a lack of follow through on the zerk only toxicity has shown otherwise. it should be noted that I am willing and capable of enjoying group play by taking instructions that are content only related (what to do at a particular boss etc) without being told what I must run/equip.
I do not enjoy my average interaction with other players and so I find following in silence is the best course for me and groups.

I’m done with this post I had more to say but I see I am expressing it through a frustrated perspective which solves nothing. I can only hope I am judging the expansion on an incomplete system. otherwise I am discouraged that I spent 200$(two copies of ultimate. one for me and one for my wife) on content I can never play.

Dye application bugged (again)

Walhalla.5473:

Ayakaru.6583:

fine, fine, kill Phlunt, we don’t need the asura to fight the elder dragons

To be more precice we need no other race to fight the dragons. Killing an ambassador is political suicide and I don’t think the other races would work with us when they see that we killed an ambassador.

Just because a member of the race X killed him, that doesn’t mean that it was on the orders of the given race’s government. It can be a personal quarrel

Nobody needs, to know. Now, Councilor Phlunt, this way please….

Yeah, I feel like they need to stop trying to make raids out of megaservers. If they want to make big multi-person coordination events, just make the kitten ed raid with the tools for organizing people. Otherwise, just stop it.

I know they might lose their hipster cred if they make the “R” words, but there’s a reason MMOs do it. If you want a big multi-person coordinated event, you give people the tools to organize a big multi-person coordinated event.

A MMORPG (of all games) should not allow you to succeed solo, no matter how skilled you are, in group content if your group does not want it to succeed. Played ought to and should need to play together.

Perhaps, but IF that is so, then the game needs to provide a framework in which you can effortlessly choose to only associate with people who are interested in joining that challenge. If an event requires 130+ well coordinated people to complete it, and you have the desire to be one of those people, then the game’s design is obligated to provide you with those 129+ other people at your demand, otherwise it’s unreasonable to expect that of you. It’d be like serving someone a juicy steak and withholding any utensils from them.

The content should be a challenge, accumulating a group that is willing to attempt it should never be one. You should never log into the game and load into a map of Dry Top, intending to do a T4 run, and end up with a bunch of people collecting Coins, running story missions, attempting the jumping puzzle, etc. They have every right to do those activities, but they should be doing them on a different map than you loaded into if you were looking to do a T4 run. If the game can’t effortlessly provide that experience then it shouldn’t expect that of you.

Further, while I accept and even embrace the need for some other people to be involved in the outcome of the fight, I don’t see the value in factors outside of the tactical level entering into it. By that I mean, if I’m in Dry Top and I’m fighting a boss, and everyone around me is for whatever reason incompetent, and we fail that boss fight, then fair enough, I was there, I did my best, it wasn’t enough to overcome their worst, we lost, but at least we tried. However, if the group I’m with fights through five events and clears them all, but the map as a whole, outside my reach, fails to accomplish much else and we still end with T3, then where is the benefit to that? Things outside your reach, on the strategic level, should not impact your own level of reward. No single player can completely determine the outcome of a group encounter, but each player should at least be an active part in the outcome, rather than having whole portions of the outcome be determined by factors over which he has no influence at all.

I cited that as a flaw in the original marionette fight, that four platforms out of five could succeed effortlessly, but if even one wiped, entirely outside their control, the entire thing would collapse. A more appropriate system would allow players on cleared platforms to reinforce failing ones, or at the very least would have been based on a “best of five” rather than “all of five” element, so that one or two failing platforms could not invalidate the efforts three or four strong ones.

And you do get rewarded for killing your wurm head. If the other groups don’t kill theirs, you get a nice Bronze or Silver chest. If you want the Gold chest + Mega chest at the end, then the map needs to down all three heads.

I’m sorry, I just don’t see the benefit to that rule in an open world event with a map cap. The only way I can see this working right is if you could queue up for an instanced version of the map that ONLY included the Wurm events, so that everyone who tries to enter is there for one and only one reason, and with a UI that does a better job of making clear which groups need more members and which are overloaded. It also has too much of a DPS check to it, the wurms should not have as much HP as they do.

I don’t honestly mind this current event’s dynamic so much. It’s not super hard to get tier 3 with even a small group doing events right (getting the bonus favour), and tier 3 to tier 4 isn’t a SUPER huge difference where you’d never get it without tier 4 (and if you’re worried about time, get the things you can only get from tiers 3/4 NOW, because tier 2 definitely isn’t that hard to get, and you can at least still get those when the event drops in participation.

I just spent a couple hours on Dry Top, one run that was a middling T3, and then one where I was able to taxi in to a T4 run. They were like night and day. In the latter I was able to travel in a pack of 2-3 times the numbers of the “random” T3 map, I ended up completing way more events, and the events during the dust storm were awarding 10 geodes each, so I racked up a TON of geodes over the course of that run, probably 2-3 times more in total than during the latter run.

What was different? Just more people who knew where to go and bothered to do so. That’s it. If there were a method for players who were not explicitly attempting a T4 run to be able to self-select OUT of T4 capable maps, remove all non-event content from the maps like harvest nodes, lost coins, jump puzzles, story chapters, etc. and just make it a pure event-circuit, and then let players queue up for that mode, then I think it would work a lot better.

A true leech would join a map and AFK at the merchant until t4 hits, then buy cheap goods and split.

Honestly the bonus loot is a bigger deal than the shop savings, and you need to clear events to receive those.

I don’t honestly mind this current event’s dynamic so much. It’s not super hard to get tier 3 with even a small group doing events right (getting the bonus favour), and tier 3 to tier 4 isn’t a SUPER huge difference where you’d never get it without tier 4 (and if you’re worried about time, get the things you can only get from tiers 3/4 NOW, because tier 2 definitely isn’t that hard to get, and you can at least still get those when the event drops in participation.

Just as long as they don’t go back to the end of S1 and the requirement of needing the map to work together and take down the Assault Knights and subsequently the Prime Hologram in order to see the story.

That being said, what I think they should have done is made it a permanent track that unlocks the tiers forever, just with more work required, and that everyone contributes to. That way, it doesn’t matter which map you’re on, and you could never be “locked out” from the items.

You’re mistaking the difference between solo content, and group content. If you have the skills to succeed at solo content (ala Liadri), then yes you deserve to be able to go in and succeed. But if you have the skills and knowledge to your part in Group content, now you’re just one piece of the puzzle. There is no “i” in team.

Like I said, tactical, not strategic. I don’t mind having to share responsibility with my own group, with the people within eyeshot of me that are all working on the same short term objectives. I don’t mind that if those people do poorly then I don’t get the best rewards. At least I don’t mind much. But dozens and dozens of people spread across an entire map are too many people for my personal fate to be tied to. If I can’t talk to you in say chat then you shouldn’t have any baring on the outcome of my gameplay experience. I do not see that as being good content, and I’m asking that they stop making it.

Just like with the Great Wurm. I know what to do, but I can’t go in by myself, and solo down all three wurms. You need people in the correct spots, who all know what to do.

And just like with the Great Wurm, the reward should be based on the wurm you’re fighting, and on how well you do at it, rather than on what people halfway across the map are up to.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Lasica.5068:

~~~ snip ~~~

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

Maybe you should work on your reading skills then. Denying his arguments without properly answering to them is of no interest.

“You must not understand the implications to what a “private map” would do. The whole reason for the private map or shard is to exclude players. "

You must not understand what “open world” means in ANet mouth, as they already explained their thinking.

Things lacking are basically a queue for joining / a guide (events shown on whole map, indicating number of people at the event, etc.). There is none of that. The event is not hard, it’s made hard. Completing it without proper tools and with tools so we could actually do something productive without needing a freaking teamspeak would be day and night. Plus it’s boring aswell since it requires you to complete it again and again for the rewards and the events in themselves are not quite fascinating.

But all you’ll read is it’s too hard

I have no idea how the tier system in Dry Top even works. Though from reading this thread I can guess its something to do with everyone on the map doing X amount of events within a certain period of time or something.

All I know is that I’ve never seen it go about T2, and about 80% of the time I log into the area its not even past T1. I’ve yet to see any attempt at organization or even event call outs for the most part. I see an occasional “Champ X up” in map chat and that’s about the extent of it.

There’s a lack of feedback for individual players about their contributions. A bigger problem is that there isn’t much in the way of proper tools players can use to join up together. My time in Dry Top so far has been fairly casual and I don’t care if we only get T2. Why should people who want T4 get stuck with me? And if I wanted T4, why should I get stuck with people who don’t really care?

There is also a lack of feedback for players about their individual contributions, and players who don’t contribute are rewarded just the same (in terms of map rewards).

The first solution that pops into my head are raid sized parties where people can group up and start new maps if needed.

I know that Anet is really trying to push open world content, but when the only instances that are succeeding are the ones taxi’ing members in it ceases to be open world content. At this point this content may as well be instanced. OP you’re absolutely right. None of the open world encounters in this game are difficult on an individual basis, and yet despite doing everything right I’ve found myself time and time again failing at Tequatl, Marionette, Assault Knights, Boss Blitz, etc. because I happened to be in a map where the majority of the people didn’t share my mindset. How is it fair that my reward is determined by the people in my map when I have no control over who those people are?

If Anet is deadset on promoting open world content they must do a better job of incentivizing individual contribution. Many players at these events have no motivation to give their full effort because the rewards are tied 100% to groupwide success. As a result you see people afking, refusing to res, autoattacking, etc. However, if a percentage of the reward were determined by individual contribution you would see players doing more to help out at these events. And even if the group as a whole were to fail, you would at least have the players contributing the most towards groupwide success be rewarded something for their efforts. The funny thing is that a system like this is already in place (the reward medals for dynamic events), but it’s so easy to get a gold medal that it’s completely meaningless.

The main problem here is that there are so many players who want to get the best stuff, but don’t want to take the time to organize or coordinate themselves.

The main problem is people who are on the latter group, and are NO DIFFERENT THAN THE FORMER GROUP, and yet are not getting the same rewards because they just happen to not be on the same map.

I was doing gold runs in the pavilion every day of the last month. I was running them for about an hour or two per day, I wound up with almost two stacks of each type of Champ bag, I know pretty much everything there is to know about doing gold runs.

And yet still, on the last day of that patch, it was a huge hassle to make it happen. I had to hook up with people who were already running a good map, I had to join one of their groups. I had to spam “join on member” for maybe a very short time if I was lucky, but sometimes over a half hour of my time, doing nothing but a very tedious and repetitive task.

And then sometimes those gold blitz maps broke down, started getting lots of silvers because people started going AFK or were replaced by people that didn’t know the drill, and yet all the people who left, the same “worthies” that had been getting gold before, started to get silvers. So then the people involved had to find a new map, which was a complicated process that typically took 30+ minutes to perform, then a few trial runs that often went silver before we were back into gold shape. It was a HUGE waste of time, and that was when everything was working “right.”

Now, you can say “when Gold Blitzes are working they work well,” and that is true, but don’t try to chalk it up to the people involved being a better class of people. They are just people that happen to be on gold blitz maps. Those same people on a bronze map would be hopeless.

I’m sorry, but all I’m hearing is “it’s too hard”.

I know the air might be a bit thin on top of that high horse, but you’re missing the point. This isn’t about “it’s too hard.” Liadri is hard. Never managed to beat it. I’m fine with that, it’s a personal challenge and it’s hard, Fine. Nothing about gold blitz or T4 is particularly hard at all. I mean, some of the events are moderately challenging, but none that I would classify as “too hard.” The only difference between T2 and T4 on the Drytop map is not skill or effort, it’s just luck. Plain and simple luck. “Are you lucky enough to end up on a map with people who are willing and able to reach T4?” If yes, then you’ll get T4 easily enough. If not, then it’s impossible, no matter how awesome you are. There is no particular skill to the outcome, it’s random chance. You can no more reasonably say that Dry Top is “too hard” than you could say that coin flipping is “too hard” if you lose a flip. Nor can you reasonably claim to be awesome because you won the coin flip.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The main problem here is that there are so many players who want to get the best stuff, but don’t want to take the time to organize or coordinate themselves. These types of players are prevalent in all MMOs. We call them leechers. So if there are 1,000 players who all want to get the max tier rewards, and 50 are willing to work together, the other 950 players all try to tag along because now there’s a group. Once the map gets hard capped, the remaining players complain instead of trying to fill a new map with each other.

Not really, the way it is designed it doesn’t make it easy to guide players into getting T4. To do it you need to complete events across the entire map that spawn in a variety of different locations and although they are at set times most people don’t even know where all the events are. A well designed game should not require players to study up on event spawn locations and strategies to complete. That isn’t fun and most people just won’t bother.

The Moa for example needs someone who can consistently stun her (a thief for preference, but a couple of other classes can also do it). And that event goes off every 10mins, so what if the person stunning her goes elsewhere in the meantime, the event now fails. In fact, I’ve rarely seen the Moa event succeed more than once/hour unless I’m personally there on my thief ensuring she is stunned.

The event in the north mine to encourage the Zepherites to escape, almost impossible without a number of people there at exactly the right time because they die too quickly. Even the one in the south mine to rescue the Zepherites from cages often fails because too few people turn up, or they all concentrate in one area instead of spreading out.

Instead what you get are people that move around the map doing event after event but without a visual guide on where to go (e.g. commanders who tag up to show where people need to go) it will rarely get to T4. Most of my attempts at organisation (with no commander tag of my own) get to T3 which I’m satisfied with, but if you gave me 3-4 people with commander tags who are willing to listen to me I could get to T4 all day long because there would be a visual guide for players to go to locations.

This was my problem with the pavilion as well. The events were designed for players to split up and tackle each boss at the same time, but it’s human nature for people to congregate together and the design of the map didn’t separate players into different areas. Had I been designing that area I would have got rid of the gold requirement to spawn them altogether and had 6 separate circles that a minimum of 5 players had to stand in to activate the event. Each circle would lead to a ramp down into the area where the boss spawned. That’s all that would be needed and players be guided into the right strategy without forcing them.

Now take the current map, there is nothing that guides players to the events they need for T4. It relies on players knowing where the events are and when they spawn. Now I’ve read a guide so I do know the spawn times for each event and where each of them is, but is it reasonable to expect everyone to know that? No it isn’t. You can’t force players to study to have fun, but as a consequence of this a map without significant organisation will fail to reach T4.

That said, I think the current map is a lot better than the Pavilion because it doesn’t get harder when you fail to reach the T4 level you just get less rewards. The Pavilion was significantly easier if you could kill all the bosses at once than it was to take them down one at a time which is doubly punishing those who can’t get the gold level with less rewards and a tougher fight. That was a poorly designed event, with the current map I see T4 as a bonus to rewards you are already getting anyway so it’s not really punishing people who don’t get T4, so it is a big improvement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had been in many full maps for CP and the reason most lost out on gold was because of a lack of coordination. So many tried to Zerg it and scale up the bosses. Dry Top maps have had the numbers but they don’t make tier 4 due to not coordinating the events.

Yes, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the coordination, but ANet has not given the player the tools to ensure that you easily end up on a coordinated server. You can blame the other players all you like, but you can’t force other players to coordinate, and if you, as a player who is willing and able to coordinate, end up on a server that is mostly people with no interest and/or capability to do so, then you stand no chance at getting anything out of your time spent in the game.

I’m not saying that they can’t have goals that require player coordination, I’m just saying that if they do have such goals, then they need to make 100% sure that any player that WANTS to coordinate is able to do so without the hassles of map changes, purges, and join spamming. I mean, during the Blitz I was doing gold runs, but I popped a Birthday Boost partway through, 24 hours of boost uptime, and yet I probably ended up wasting half of that time just standing around in the center trying to join in on people who had an active map, while the map I was in was stuck in Bronze the entire time.

That is NOT game design that is working well, however you might try to spin it.

I’m not sure how they would implement your ‘logging in and choose Gold rewards’ suggestion.

I’m not exactly sure either, but until they have a solution, they should not implement maps with goals that allow you to not ‘log in and choose Gold rewards.’ I’m not saying I have the complete solution to this one, I’m just pointing out that they have a problem, it’s their job to fix it, but I’ll help however I can.

You can just open LFG and find a taxi, or make a group looking for a taxi. Whenever I’m in a t4 shard, I always try to taxi pugs in using LFG.

And then we’re back to join spam.

Ok, here’s at least one solution they need to implement ASAP. Remove join spam. Bring back the queues. Make it so that instead of having to hit “join→ok” a thousand times before the map actually loads, preventing you from doing anything at all productive with your time, make it so that you can hit “Join your party member in the map” and then it puts you into a queue. The when your number comes up, you get in, done.

In the meantime, you can run around the map you’re in, doing whatever there is to do. Ideally you could even queue up form other maps, and hop around doing any ingame activities until your queue pops.

Ideally, every map should be able to get t4, but that’s not gonna happen considering the majority of players. People don’t like to work hard in this game. So you’re gonna have to find other players that do want to work.

I don’t think it’s at all fair to blame player laziness. I’ve been on plenty of maps where I’ve seen people scurrying around, running events constantly, and still only barely gotten T3, if that. Getting T4 requires a ton of people that are all focused on that goal, knowing when every event is up and completing it in minimal times, with bonuses.

When players fail to get Gold or T4, it’s less often because of laziness, and more often because ANet screwed up somewhere in the design, allowing things to scale poorly, or not training the players in the proper tactics. T4 in Dry Top, for example, would be much easier if EVERY event were visible on the map at all times, so you would always know what’s up without having to be near it or requiring pony express. The “this boss is up” messages are a nice step, but only account for about 1/3 of the potential events in the zone, and don’t last long on screen.

Lately there’s been an increase in content in which the way your map as a whole performs causes huge differences in the personal rewards each player gets. In the Pavilion, even after the loot changes, if you were doing Gold runs on Boss Blitz, you’d earn about 560 tokens per hour, 21 Master+ items, and 70 loot bags. If you were doing Bronze runs in that time, you’d be making no more than around 120 tokens, 9 Master+ items, and 18 champ bags. That’s a HUGE difference. HUGE! This is a double dipping effect, since not only is a gold run winning more rewards on each successful completion, but it’s also completing the event more times per hour.

On this current event, not only does a Tier 4 map offer significant discounts off the amount of geodes needed to buy things, but you also earn a lot more geodes over the course of playing it, since you are completing more events and achieving more bonus and unlocked objectives. This is double dipping too, cheaper prices AND more resources to spend if you get on a T4.

Now in the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with this, better performance = better reward, makes sense. The problem is, the game’s architecture is HORRIBLE for managing this sort of thing, because players have almost no choice as to whether they end up on a T4/Gold map, or a T2/Bronze map. You just load up and hope for the best, chances are you’ll get the latter and there’s little you can do about it.

During the Pavilion, there was one method of controlling this, but it was a bad one. If you could find someone else who was on a gold map, you could join their team, and then keep spamming, and spamming, and spamming the “join in pavilion” button until eventually, maybe, you could join them on that map. This mean most nights were spent with 5-50 minutes just standing around, spamming join, and that’s if you were LUCKY.

For the new event, there does not seem to be any good method for controlling which map you end up on.

So this sort of thing needs to stop. Give players awards based on individual events, the ones they personally participate in, not these massive map-wide meta events that are relatively easy if you’re lucky enough to get onto a well organized map, but more or less impossible and pointless if you end up on most maps. Make it so that each player’s rewards are based mostly on how well that player performs, rather than an aggregate score of dozens of players. I’m not saying that events themselves should not require team work and coordination, just that the reward differences should not be so massive, and the scope of the events should be contained to within a small area and time scale, rather than covering the entire map for an hour at a time.

If you do insist on keeping these map-wide meta events, then you need to do a better job of accessing them. There needs to be a way that players who want to play on a Gold Run/T4 map can do so, EVERY time, the instant they log in, rather than having to spam join for a half hour to get into one. You should just be able to choose “I want to do a gold run map” and instantly join one, never ending up on a bronze run/T2 map. If you can’t guarantee that then how can you expect players to put up with it?

I only have so much of my day during which I can play GW2, and during that time, I want to be doing something fun the entire time. I don’t want to log in only to spend tens of minutes staring at the screen and spamming a join button before I can begin to have fun, or leave a character AFK in a map for an hour before a fight like Teq or the Wurm to maybe get a decent group involved. It’s a simple test for new content ideas, really. Just ask yourself “can a random player just log in, and instantly and ALWAYS be a part of the ‘good run,’ with his reward being based on his own efforts to complete it?” If not, back to the drawing board with it.

Wanderer.3248:

Alex.9567:

movement on the vertical axis is an obvious next step for mmo’s as a genre, .

MMOs should take a look at games like Uncharted or Assassins Creed. Forget this bouncing along like a maniac on a pogo stick, and put in some actual _climbing_.

+1 to more actual climbing.

Age of Conan has climbing in it - not everywhere, of course, but it’s still there and it’s interesting. Anyone could do it as well, since it’s only restrictive in as many skill points you’d put into it (and the skill points are there to use without issue).

It’d be a nice addition to GW2, if it could be created. In future content, perhaps it could even be an alternative route to jumping in some places.

EDIT! In relation to the update itself? I believe Bilacus had it right at "hamster wheel." The sandstorms in the map make me a little sick, and although I appreciate the beauty of the map, I don’t feel inspired to work the place for the achievements I previously would’ve been after (my issues with aspect jumping and whatnot aside). There are some other things that weren’t overly enjoyable, too, but now I just feel apathetic toward the place, and have marked it down as another Southsun: somewhere that’s just not that interesting to hang around. Which is a good thing, because from what I understand, the tier system isn’t forgiving and I wouldn’t want to be wasting someone’s time by not participating in the "correct" manner. :/

It effectively boiled down to another release containing some content Not For Me™.

Well, let’s be honest here. It’s rubbish, innit?

It’s all about moving around a small map, repeating the same timer-controlled events over and over again to gather a new current used for getting new recipes.
Beautiful and breathtaking area? It’s a brown desert.
Great story telling? Most players use Wiki and Dulfy guides to understand what’s happening and what to do. This is my biggest gripe with this game. It relies far too much on external sources for information. How many players got the diving achievement (or created a legendary weapon) without reading some guide on the Internet? How do you know what Cactus Soup is before you buy the recipe if you didn’t first Google it?
If you just play the game and go to Dry Top, how much do you understand of what’s happening, or what has happened before?

I like the GW lore and the LS story is OK, but there are better narrative techniques than grinding and googling – and the Dry Top events really take it to the next level. It’s basically a hamster wheel.

longshot.1397:

I am so thorothly disenganged from this content.i liked the previous stories, but this I just cant even be bothered finishing. Being forced to play Mario Bros to finish the story…… well I just do not find it rewarding my gameplay time.

Big thumbs down so far..

I agree, this is really starting to get on my nerves with fighting all these vines and NO UPDATE on how each of these area’s are to be accomplished? I hate spending all day fighting those vines in Cornered section of Living World 2

Came back after a month, played the new chapter, and now i’m leaving again to continue playing all the games i got from summersale…
So, meh…

It wasn’t the most boring release I’ve ever seen, but neither do I think it was amazing. The zone was too small to make me excited about exploration, there is little challenging tactical content (Teq reboot patch was still my favorite in this game), and a whole lot of gw2-style grind, but virtually no chance for anything amazing, as usual.

But really, these are gripes I have with the LS and GW2 design choices as a whole, most of which run counter to my personal preferences. I prefer expansions over LS, I prefer the trinity (yes, the trinity) over zerging, and I prefer difficult raid content with loot tables where at least someone in your raid is basically guaranteed to go home happy, rather than everybody having the same .000001% chance at something remarkable and all leaving empty-handed as a result. Consequently, I don’t log in for much longer than it takes to do the daily anymore. The greatest redeeming quality about gw2 is that I see a lot of potential in the lore and story, so I’m keeping one foot in the door, but I’m not holding my breath.

Why? Because I don’t think MMOs naturally lend themselves that well to good scripted storytelling, although I never played SWTOR. All the LS does is makes me feel is that my character has been taken out of my own hands, which would be fine in a single player game where the characters are written for you and sometimes written very well, but in an MMO it doesn’t sit well with me. There aren’t even any meaningful or humorous dialogue choices such as those in most Bioware games, and neither is there a robust faction system to make you feel that the world distinguishes you in any way from the other players (the orders and original charisma/dignity/ferocity systems had potential for this, but one has virtually no impact on your experience and the other has already been dropped from the game). When I have to choose a dialogue option (the only one available) that is written completely differently than how I would like my character to express itself, that takes me more out of the experience rather than immerses me. TBH, and I know some people will probably disagree with me, I would much rather have the PC be a silent protagonist or have to actually type out sentences containing key words/phrases (EQ style) than just be forced to click a prepackaged, prewritten sentence to advance the story.

The lines where the PC is made out to be the best at everything such as explaining things to super-detective Marjory or Marjory calling the PC “boss” are especially eye-roll inducing. Yes, it’s nice to feel like the hero of a story, and many people have complained about this in terms of the personal story and LS1, but IMO it should be something that is built slowly and earned through trials and adventuring instead of suddenly stuck into the dialogue in a manner that makes the NPCs around you suddenly seem uncharacteristically ingratiating. Not once during LS 1 did I feel like I was leading the group or being built into a leader, and to suddenly be in charge of DEv2 is jarring and feels entirely contrived and artificial.

Basically, all the reasons I typically play MMOs aren’t present here; there’s little sense of exploration, little reward, and little challenge. So here’s wishing the writers the best of luck in proving my expectations wrong and coming up with something great with the story, because that’s the biggest draw of the game for me at this point.

Dreiji.5419:

And as usual in this game, the reward is not worth the time.

Yup. Going through the story got me… two blues and green. Hyperbole, but I got nothing memorable.
The same will be for the achievement rewards, if I bother to do them at all. :\
Woo, some geodes or other salvageable garbage…
And then there’s the piles of (empty) sand…

My only complaint about this LS release, is that you have to wait around so much waiting for the npcs to finish talking to each other

Not terribly enthused with this first episode. /shrug

The Zephyrite focus and Aspects is an irritating way to get around on a 15-second time limit. It doesn’t work half the time anyway:
Got quicksand’d from a false lighting tether jump…
Sun dash across quicksand comes up horribly short.
Wind jumps often run into intrusive cliffs or miss false ledges. Then again, THE CHARR PROBLEM STILL LIVES

And o.m.g., please stop fawning over Scarlet. She wasn’t fascinating beyond her introduction. She’s dead. Leave her that way. -_-###

LS2 rewards are.. slack. Hopefully the next episode is better. Fingers crossed!

Jaken.6801:

i recently made a list of content that has stayed.
It is quite a lot.
Most of it is of course polishing and QOL stuff, but hey. they changed the feeling of the game significantly in my opinion.
(Starting from the queens jubilee, till now)
(Excuse the weird formating, i just copy and pasted it from my document)

General Changes
- Magic find changes (accountbound stat now) and its new mechanics
- Critical damage change into ferocity
- New combat visuals, like damage markers and AoE signs for worldbosses
- Introduction of ascended armors and weapons
- Upgrade to the ascended and legendary rarities, like acountbound and stat switching
- New crafting levels with new recipes
- Complete revamp of sigils and runes
- looking for group tool
- Lot`s of UI changes, like in PvP, WvW etc…
- Trait and Tooltips now show exact numbers
- The Megaserver system
- Repair and retrait costs removed
- There is now a wardrobe in game

PvE
- Tequattle is now a Hardcore Boss
o He drops unique items and themed ascended weapons and armor
- New Hardcore Worldboss “Tripple Trouble”
o A three headed Worm, which needs around 150 coordinated player
o Has its own unique mechanics and rewards (hardest boss in game right now)
- Worldbosses got a reward overhaul as well as a timer to make them more challenging
- There is a new path in the Twilight Arbor Dungeon, themed around the living story season 1 for lvl 80 characters
o Twilight Arbor got unique skin drops
- Fractals got an upgrade
o Three new Fractals
Molten Alliance
Aetherblades
Thaumanova Reactor
o Two new Boss Fractals
Molten Berserker
Mai Trin
o Bosses appear after every run
o Fractallvl is now accountwide
o Starting at lvl 31 you get punished with an handicap called Mistlock
o Rework of Agony
o Reward reworked
- The Living Story Season 1 has concluded, leaving in its wake:
o The destruction of Lions Arch
All LA unique facilities have been moved to vigil keep
o Kessex Hills got redesigned after they introduced the tower of nightmares, which was a giant construction in the lake
o There are new events in the world, based on remnants of the living story
o New items were introduced
Watchwork sprockets
Poison pollen

WvW
- The Borderlands got a complete overhaul and a new “Bloodlust” mechanic
o There is now less water on the map, but some nice ruins and objectives to capture
- The rewards got updated to reflect changes in the game
- The WvW UI got a drastic overhaul, offering real time data
- The obsidian sanctum is now a separate zone you can log into.
o It got expanded to cater to the Guild vs Guild people
o You have the ability to party up with other servers people to finish the puzzle
- A new Map was introduced called “Edge of the Mists”
o It is always available, even if all other WvW maps are full
o It resets every two hours
o Has unique objectives
o Teammembers are based on the color they represent in WvW right now and not on server
o WvW rank is now acountbound

PvP
- Glory and armor rewards have been removed in favour of a new system
- Costs for Ranks have been adjusted
- A Complete new rewardsystem which allows for gold and items of PvE
- New Arenatype: Duell

Classes
- A lot of balancing
- A new Healskill for every class
- The Traitsystem got a complete overhaul
o Every class got 5 new grandmaster traits
o Some traits get only unlocked after you explored the world in PvE
- Critical Damage has been removed and got exchanged for a new stat: “Ferocity”

Gemstore
- A few UI Improvements
- New Hairtypes in the stylingkit
- You can now buy unlimited finisher to punish your enemies
- New Booster
- New Armors in the shop

Nope, nothing permanently changed to the game… just these minor things…

Half of your list should have been included during launch. Aside from balancing and bug fixing the game is barren of new content. Re-skinning maps and buffing existing world bosses is NOT new content. Yes, some of the Living Story was fun, but it was quick and very possible to complete in two hours or less at a casual pace. And when those two hours of fun were over so was the “new” content.

Trouble, you should know by now that any thread posted by a player that implies a grievance about the game will immediately be shut down by the forum police. I agree with you in most regards except the grind. I enjoy the grind. But I would agree that the grind would be much better had the developers truly explored the possibilities of this game instead of simply scratching the surface.

The game is awesome and people want to keep playing, but… There is so much repetition people can actually enjoy. Expect even less new content now that the Chinese market is the main concern of anet.