Guild Wars 2

As a 23 year old male who just finished university, I’ve never been more worried about the state of our world when the smallest of things constantly offend people.

Tekoneiric.6817:

Sorry, I meant Fractals. It’s been awhile since I looked at them. There are 14 locked up in Fractals.
…

There are 11 points required for fractal masteries. If you don’t care about them, then (in effect) only 3 masteries are locked behind fractals.

Tekoneiric.6817:

More options for people who want to take different paths is better.

Not counting fractals, one needs 38 points to unlock the other two lines and (not counting fractals) there are 52 available points. There already are lots of options.

I’m not against ANet adding another 10-15 points to give us more options. I just don’t think we should exaggerate the situation.

CMM.6712:

The Sims is a few doors down, maybe that would suit ya better?

You joke, but I would be all over a Guild Wars 2 Sims. Build a house in Divinity’s Reach, invite Destiny’s Edge over, try to drown Logan in the pool. It’d be great!

This bothers me too.

I think there’s a good range of options for how much skin female characters show (although there could be more variety in other areas – e.g. fewer long coats on medium armour) but for males you’ve got relatively few options even for something as simple as bare arms.

It would be nice to have the option to show off charr fur patterns, norn tattoos and sylvari bioluminescence instead of hiding them under layers of clothing all the time.

Fishae.2503:

heres a solution, raise your gem to gold ratios, even the big sites have 2-3 times the exchange rate
i would buy from them if not the the risk of gold being taken by anet
and i dont mind changing gem to gold if not for the super low rate in comparison

Anet doesn’t influence the exchange rate, players do. When players exchange gold for gems, the value of gems increases. It has been increasing overall since the game launched, gems are worth many times more than they were in the beginning.

Seera.5916:

The Last Hobbit.6492:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Keep in mind, as others point out, malicious companies who find they are blocked often just create new names, so containing them can be a bit of a case of “whack-a-mole.” Still, we do take this seriously, and we act on RMT spammers every day. With your help, we can do more!

I’ve got a huge blocklist of RMT spam-bots and I can safely say that you’ve banned them all.

However, while you say that they pick a new name, every single whisper I’ve had since 2012 has been for the SAME WEBSITE. It’s the one that rhymes with GvG Rank. You could have blocked that string of characters ages ago. It’ll cost a heck of a lot more for them to get a new domain name and update all their bots than for you to simply add their domain into your filters. Simply discard any whispers they send and put up a flag (or temporary ban after multiple discarded whispers) on their account. Don’t inform them they’ve used blocked words.

Then they’ll start to bypass the filter. Instead of Google.com, they’ll put G00gle.com. then just Google. Then G00gle. Then G00g1e. Then G o o g l e.

Filters will never be perfect.

The only way gold sellers will stop is if they run out of customers.

This has happened with the gold selling spammers in Path of Exile. The amusing thing is that it has gotten to the point where the spammers’ messages are so obscure that you would have to spend a bit of time to decipher what it says.

The Last Hobbit.6492:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Keep in mind, as others point out, malicious companies who find they are blocked often just create new names, so containing them can be a bit of a case of “whack-a-mole.” Still, we do take this seriously, and we act on RMT spammers every day. With your help, we can do more!

I’ve got a huge blocklist of RMT spam-bots and I can safely say that you’ve banned them all.

However, while you say that they pick a new name, every single whisper I’ve had since 2012 has been for the SAME WEBSITE. It’s the one that rhymes with GvG Rank. You could have blocked that string of characters ages ago. It’ll cost a heck of a lot more for them to get a new domain name and update all their bots than for you to simply add their domain into your filters. Simply discard any whispers they send and put up a flag (or temporary ban after multiple discarded whispers) on their account. Don’t inform them they’ve used blocked words.

Then they’ll start to bypass the filter. Instead of Google.com, they’ll put G00gle.com. then just Google. Then G00gle. Then G00g1e. Then G o o g l e.

Filters will never be perfect.

The only way gold sellers will stop is if they run out of customers.

Peura.3796:

Yeah where did all the spammers come all of a sudden. Im blocking multiple ones every day the past few days. Was there a discount and scammers bought hundreds of copies or what? This is getting out of hands. Infuriating.

That’s an easy question. Because of the LS release. Influx of players makes it more of a target rich environment that gold sellers are willing to use their leveled up/stolen/fraudulently bought accounts on, which will get deleted assuming players are reporting them as they spam, so we end up seeing more of them.

Don’t think LS is the reason? Looking at the UK PC games sales for last week, HoT is back on the list at 19.

Paulytnz.7619:

sophiewhite.3149:

The V.8759:

Gaile,
I am asking the following question just out of curiosity :
Can’t things like this be taken to Court to shut down the site? Fighting it at the source sounds like the most efficiënt option.

(I’m assuming it’s not easily done, otherwise it would have happend, but I’m just wondering how that works)

the most famous gold sellers move to china because china gets paid so they dont care who gets scammed.

Not only that even their government gets accused of hacking into business’s and such of other nations. So you would imagine they may even hire people to do so.

Seems kinda racist, without any data to back that up. Could just as easily be US personnel operating on US soil. And are we forgetting all the bad stuff the NSA, CIA and FBI does? Probably best not to try and attribute any of this to a particular country.

I would rather not. It’s not an inherently bad idea, but as a player who plays with a guild only occasionally, I’d never interact with this system other than seeing some random name plastered on all of the maps. I don’t mind seeing guild names on other players, but I’d rather keep a world that feels wilder and more open.

Also, since you’ve been gone, you may have missed the change to megaservers. Instead of having Jade Quarry copy of Queensdale, a Blackgate copy, etc., everyone is mixed together in maps that are created/destroyed based on player population. This is important, because it means that a guild taking a map would apply across all servers, meaning only the 33 largest guilds in the whole game could really participate in the system, and that’s assuming they don’t take multiple maps.

To a river so deep…

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I look at it this way, and this is purely my opinion: If I have to go out of my way, at any given scenario to do an event, then said event is questionable as far activity.

You don’t have to go out of your way to do the event – you can try to solo it all you want with the same chance of success that the event’s always had for players who don’t want to ‘go out of their way’ to do, whether in a group of 2, or 100.

The answers here so far (and really, in every other thread about this “issue”) only ever mention that “raids are interesting precisely because they are hard and require a challenge”. The OP did not refute this; In fact, he is even implying they could be even HARDER, as long as there was a mode with toned down mechanics for everyone “casual” to play in.

Note here that, toned down does not mean easy and auto attacking at all. Anet has already done this right, very right in fact, with Fractals of the Mists. To someone who regularly play through lvl 100 mai trin and cliffside and whatnot for their tier 4 rewards, it may sound like easy mode auto attacking to play lvl 25, but to the player at that level, it is indeed a challenge, and that player definitely does not feel like he is just tapping 1 on his keyboard. And this is precisely what the OP requests to increase raid population – this is good for everyone: no matter how much LI you may have, you want more people to play with as your static group gets less and less playtime together due to many reasons.

So, what we have here is not anymore of those threads asking for raids to be nerfed. Quite on the contrary, as I see it the OP is asking whether or not it is better to introduce progressive rather than static difficulty. And as someone who is getting into raids already, I welcome this idea greatly, because there would be something to look forward to even after I get used to a particular wing, because “nightmare” mode would supposedly always be a nightmare; and for every other day I didn’t feel like going through that hassle, I could still raid in a lower tier and help people through (like many of us already do with Fractals, including me).

Agree with the OP on this. Raids are content. Tiers are not a problem; they are a mechanism to allow more people to experience content. This is actually the acknowledged purpose of tiers in other games I play and I don’t see a problem with this. And, rather than arguing about how to do this just benchmark how it’s been done successfully. The answer is out there.

A recent informal survey on Reddit nicely summarizes many complaints about the game that have become more and more prevalent in the community since the release of HoT. Although not everybody agrees with all of these gripes, the unfortunate reality is that just about everyone does agree with at least some of them.

Without intending to overstate the case, it’s fair to say that in a certain way all of these come down to a lack of content and a lack of meaningful and achievable rewards to pursue. There is also an undercurrent across these of the disconnect that has long existed between the very hardcore players and average players. (For the record, I’m somewhere in between. In most games, I have been a hardcore player focused on the most difficult content and that is still what’s “in my heart,” but in this game I’ve played more casually primarily because I’m now married with kids).

Often, all of these coalesce around one issue: raids. Raids have been divisive in that one portion of the community avidly supports them, while another views them bitterly as content that betrays the spirit of the game. The hardcore players sees them as new content that is more in the spirit of what they’ve always wanted, while most or many others see them only as something that has taken all of the developers’ time to provide content for a select group while leaving the rest of the playerbase in a months’ long drought.

The fact is that raids accomplished a great deal for the game that was truly needed. They introduced content that genuinely requires intelligent play and sticking to mechanics in a game in which, other than the two large world boss events, no mechanics really mattered and autoattacking was good enough to clear anything. They took the control and support roles, which had never actually had any value for the life of the game, and made them useful, rewarding, and heck, worth running. They introduced a reason to actually make use of some of the enormous variety of stat sets that have long been in the game but for just as long had no purpose beyond leveling crafting. They did a lot more, too.

In short, raids made the game so much more complete than it ever was – but only for a small group of players. For the rest, it’s unchanged.

So while it’s clear that raids have been an enormous success, there has been one enormous failure in the midst of that: the failure to provide different difficulty tiers. Every MMO I have ever played has difficulty tiers for their raid content. Typically, there is a normal mode, an easy mode, and a difficult mode. For example, SWtOR typically releases it’s Operations (what they call raids) first in a normal mode, and then later in story mode (an easy run through with only basic mechanics which lets more casual players experience the story and play the content) and a nightmare mode (a much more difficult mode with more demanding mechanics and more punishing foes which experienced guilds still take some time to clear).

There is absolutely no reason that GW2 should not have this in their raids. In games which have tiered difficulty, the hard/nightmare modes provide an engaging experience and prestigious titles/rewards for the most hardcore players, while the normal and easy modes provide content for others to play through, to earn some rewards in, and to give them the chance not to feel left out.

Tiered difficulty gives something for everybody:
- More content for the entire playerbase
- More rewards for the entire playerbase
- Something to “work towards” for everyone, even if only cosmetic
-Prestige for top tier players
- A sense that all players are getting new content with raid releases
- The opportunity for all players to experience the story/lore
- A reasonable “next step” of difficulty for players to attempt rather than only a giant leap to go from casual to raiding.

What’s more, it even adds reasonable efficiency to developers’ workflow. In many cases, the difference between modes is as simple as removing a particular ability from an enemies table, skipping a phase, or turning off a certain condition application for a given encounter.

All in all, providing tiers of raid difficulty moving forward could add a great deal more contentment to the player base of this game for comparatively very little overhead and social costs. It could literally turn the community’s attitude around overnight.

Reddit mirror: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4rioou/different_raid_difficulties_would_alleviate_a/

Recognition/respect, both to Laura for being so dedicated to helping others and to Asumir for recognizing and appreciating in such a nice way.

Your exactly the kind of players that make the GW2 community so much better than ‘the other guys’.

Breeze

TheHeretic.3529:

I know they’re cheaper now than they used to be, but the price on these is blowing up again. A week ago they were 3g, now they’re 10g.

So 18 lilies for a set of exotic armor is 180g without factoring in the costs of other mats.

If you add in trinkets and weapons, you’d be over 500g.

Any chance the drop rate can be increased? They’re just too rare.

Bruh, never craft exotic armor, buy what compares in Orr, or buy it and forge it into what you want through the force. When your crafting costs exceed 50g you might as well step up and craft ascended

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Fluffball.8307:

Do you know what you’re talking about? Or are you just making things up based on what you believe? The wurm is killed SEVERAL times per day.

Let’s say a group of one-hundred people out of the entire joined servers kill the quest in question daily. Multiple times per day. This requires LFG and sitting in the specific zone anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour to get the quest done. Just to secure your place in said quest.

Now compare this to what is happening in the new zone where nearly all the server is farming all the events for said daily.

Yes, I know what I’m talking about. And no I do not make these things up. But I’m also not blind to common sense. In comparison, yes the event is dead. Please note, I did not say it could not be done.

And given the responses and advice above? Yes, it’s no walk in the park these days to get a successful group to gain said success and/or achievements. And let’s not split hairs. Even you know it unless someone else said this:

Fluffball.8307:

If you’re not on the map that is completing it, literally no one will be doing it.

Again, compare Triple Trouble to Bloodstone Fen’s legendary guardian. I stand by what I said. Yes, the zerg has moved on to greener pastures. Even you acknowledge that. Don’t know why that’s suddenly a point of contention.

How can an event be dead when it’s done daily? That doesn’t make sense.

Dead isn’t a comparative state. Something is either dead or it’s not.

The OP wants to do the event. Saying it’s dead when it’s not helps absolutely no one.

Stay near water so you can break it at any time? You could reclaim the word “troll” to mean “a scary monster who lives under a bridge” again. Your water gates will be safe once more!

I see your point, but we were all base game players for years, with no better option than to buy it if we wanted it depending on the item, whatever IT was. There needs to be incentives for people to upgrade to HOT, and a feeling of reward for those that did, even if the rewards are as small as mastery lines that provide access to better stuff, better buffs, new maps or cheaper options to do something as basic as removing an upgrade.

I feel for the people that can’t afford hot, but if something as small as that were accessible to vanilla or even FTP accounts, I’d be pretty niffed that so many people grinded for the pleasure of use, while others were able to spend nothing and get it for free basically.

Complaining about spending a few hours getting a mastery to buy cheaper extractors very funny too. Especially after we told all the pvers GOB track only takes 8 hours

RodOfDeath.5247:

Jeknar.6184:

RodOfDeath.5247:

I don’t understand any of this. I’m just going to wear exotic stuff and play the game.

You can get easy rings and amulet from playing solely WvW. Just because you’re not interested doesn’t mean others may not be… Showing these people that they can just spend some minor time in PvE and get a upgrade is a good thing.

Never said it was a bad thing buddy.

I’m not your buddy, friend.

RodOfDeath.5247:

I don’t understand any of this. I’m just going to wear exotic stuff and play the game.

You can get easy rings and amulet from playing solely WvW. Just because you’re not interested doesn’t mean others may not be… Showing these people that they can just spend some minor time in PvE and get a upgrade is a good thing.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I’ve also had many people make fun of me when I happen to mention anything about my class in chat such as the time someone said “get on a real class and you’ll be fine” or “can you even kill anyone with a Ranger?”

Heh, it’s definitely a sad state of affairs when someone can think they’re hot stuff for putting full nomads/minstrel on a guardian, taking Force of Will so they can brag about never dying while following 40 people at all times pressing 1 (probably badly too while the eles do all the real work) somehow manage to talk down to people while probably not even understanding what your class even does, much less how they work.

Then again, that seems to be true everywhere.

I feel you. I’ve had lots of people berate me for choosing to play a Ranger and while I understand that it doesn’t contribute as much to a zerg as many other professions do, it does have it’s place.

I’ve also had many people make fun of me when I happen to mention anything about my class in chat such as the time someone said “get on a real class and you’ll be fine” or “can you even kill anyone with a Ranger?”

I have more hours in WvW than a lot of people and probably more hours in my Ranger alone than a lot of people do in their entire accounts. It doesn’t mean I’m skilled but it does mean I have a heap of experience. I know exactly what I’m doing and how to do it and I don’t need to be criticised by brain dead zerglings. I may be a Diamond rank but I got many of those ranks by playing by myself or in small scale and I’m one of the few Diamonds who continues to do things alone.

And on that note, I’d bet money I die less, pay attention to the commander better and get at least enough kills to be considered relevant. I may be restricted to singular targets but let me tell you I am the bane of all staff Ele’s. I understand 110% that my profession of choice is not optimal and doesn’t contribute as much as a meta build but others need to understand that a competent player is just as valuable as a player with a meta build.

I agree that this is good advice but only if you can be reasonably sure the event will go on long enough that people will be able to get there and participate enough to get credit.

I’ve made the ‘mistake’ on more than one occasion of announcing an event and finding that by the time I’ve found a nearby waypoint or POI, posted it in map chat and written a short message like “event north of here” I barely have time to do enough damage to get credit and anyone arriving doesn’t have time at all.

Not that it takes a lot of time to do that, but if it’s a simple event (like ‘kill the vet/one group of enemies’) and 3 or 4 people show up who want to get it finished ASAP so they can move on to the next one it can be completed in about a minute.

I’ve ended up getting abuse from people who are angry at me (even accusing me of deliberately posting ‘fake’ events to troll people trying to do the daily, or to draw them away from real events so I can steal credit), plus people who are angry that I don’t immediately answer their whispered questions about what the event is, exactly how far north of the waypoint it is and how long it will take to complete that I’m now wary of saying anything unless I know the event is going to take at least 5 minutes to finish. (Either because there’s a timer or because there are waves of enemies and I know from past experience they show up at fixed intervals.)

Which is a shame because normally the GW2 community is lovely, but people who are stressed because they’re trying to finish their dailies as “efficiently” as possible seem to be an exception.

(And on the other side I’d say it’s worth bearing in mind that events on daily maps finish very quickly even if everyone involved tries to go slowly so if you don’t see an announcement when it’s first posted it’s best to assume it’s over instead of going to the waypoint and then getting disappointed or spamming the person who posted it to ask if it’s still going on.)

What some people don’t understand is depending on what you do in game you can easily become a target of these gold sellers and other spammers/nasties.

For example I notice that if I am playing SPvP and talking often in the map chat between matches (out of boredom, to help answer questions or whatever) you will soon become a target. The same can be said for if you are in a city crafting or whatever or just doing daily/map complete out in the world. Basically if you speak in chat often you can soon become a target.

This may not be a problem for people who just play wvw (less people to see you speaking since you can’t see the 2 enemy team’s chat), run dungeons all day or who are naturally quiet/shy in game or whatever. But for those of us who are vocal, usually because we like to help people this can soon become a problem.

Additional privacy options will in no way effect the game in a negative way. Oh you say but what if people need help and can’t whisper random people? Well there are other options, all they need to do is use their initiative. Such as:

1 – Ask in map chat.
2 – Ask people on their friends list.
3 – Come to the forums.
4 – Use the wiki or google.

There are plenty of options. For those of you who are saying make another chat window and block whispers. This is no answer. Why should I miss out on whispers from people who I want them from (friends) simply to just block out the nasties? Would you go and deafen yourself just to not listen to people who are annoying/loud or would you move away from these people and ignore them? Seems pretty extreme to me the latter.

I don’t mean to sound like a rule enforcer or anything else myself either but I would like to add you should edit out the site url if anything for fear this entire thread might be deleted because of it.

This thread is a valid one and I support it so I would hate for it to be shut down because of something as trivial as that address showing.

Edit: yay you bet me before I posted this lol.