Guild Wars 2

Well, it’s a tough call on what exactly Anet “learned”. The problem with the whole “learn from mistakes” thing is that there’s a million ways to rationalize, deny, and explain things away. There’s arguments that somethings are wrong, and yet there are arguments that those same exact things are right.

I’m in the camp that HoT was alright:

Difficulty: Solid. I liked the need for cooperation, the harder mobs, and a terrain that isn’t just a flat plain that is easy to navigate. About this level is where I think the game should stay, but I could still see the difficulty bumped up a bit.

Story: A bit anemic. It was fairly fast and bare bones, and it felt like the story was purposely avoiding a lot of things that it should’ve covered for the sake of “mystery”, but we all know that’s just lazy writing. Probably the weakest aspect of the expansion right here.

Mastery System: This was pretty good. The masteries need to be a bit more creative, since a lot of them were “You’re now allowed to press F on this object”. It seems like an unassailable and daunting task at first, but I soon found myself capping out points and having no use for experience again. The gliding mastery was pretty awesome, though. It really did change the way that I looked at the game.

Events: Solid again. Though a lot of people hated this because it was on a timer, that is exactly what I like about it. I like the fact that I can glance at a clock and know what is going on, and what will be going on. There’s daily rewards for hero points encourages players to group up for them, and I’ve found the awards for most of the map metas to be satisfactory and the events entertaining.

Elite Specializations: Here is the prime example of ambiguity in “learned” here. The elite specializations were way too hard to acquire at first, and this was changed. It wasn’t changed because Anet thought it was a wrong decision, but because a mass of people gave GW2 a bad metacritic score for being unhappy about how elite specs were handled. So, what did Anet learn? Did they learn that their decision was bad in the first place, or are they going to try the same thing again and just convey the grind earlier in the future?

Regardless, this was initially a mixed bag, but now it is great. Getting the elite specializations at first was like pulling teeth. You had neither the masteries to get the skillpoints, nor the knowledge to get mastery points. Running through tangled depths at launch with basic gliding and mushroom jumping is the definition of grueling. But now that the requirements were lessened, it is much better. The specializations themselves are fun, and the only bad side to them is that they eclipse the other specializations.

Precursor Journey/Legendaries: Not going to lie, I haven’t done this. Once I learned that it was a massive gold and material sink, I said goodbye and never looked back.

Guild Halls: Haven’t touched this myself. But it seems awesome, at least from what WoodenPotatoes shows in his vids.

WvW Map: Haven’t really gone here myself. I grew tired of PVP and WvW awhile ago, so this remains neutral for me.

Gear Prefixes/Runes/Sigils: These are pretty good, too. As always, there’s a bunch of “play how I want” sets in the mix, but I can legitimately see players running around in Marauder, Trailblazer, and Viper. Most of the runes are pretty meh, but Berserker and Chronomancer Runes have made it on to a few builds.

New Skins: On these I’m pretty indifferent. This is a matter of aesthetics, so it’s subjective here.

Revenant: Love the new class. Though its build possibilities are placed squarely in a box, it’s a good box. And hey, thanks to Ventari I managed to reflect the dreaded Schrodinger Wurm (A triple trouble run where the server had an aneurysm and the in-server lag was several minutes long. Named so because the server’s processes were lagging so far behind that, at any point in time, you weren’t sure if you were alive or dead).

… I think that’s most things. There are somethings I’m not sure whether to include or not (raids and squads, for example), but generally I think they did things right.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Tengu land is kind of odd. It stars in LA,and borders on Caledon. But there is a human port right in the middle of it where the wizards tower is, it has moved from where it was to around where the temple of tolerance was. I’ve given up on trying to compere the 2 game maps, the seismic changes to the maps should have killed everyone. Things do not change that much naturally with out a loss of a lot of life. Mountain ranges appearing from no where, sinkholes swallowing places, Ascalon city, Temple of the Ages, the dwarven village in Loners pass that was in dreadnoughts drift.

Is the wizard a Tengu by any chance? A story arc right there could open up the Tengu being playable. Let’s be honest, if there is going to be a new playable race it’s going to be Tengu due to some infrastructure for them being in place, sharing meshes with Charr, and being highly demanded.

Zaxares.5419:

The only way to make people stop farming completely is to remove the need for gold.

This thread isn’t about farming though, it is about afk farming. Let’s not get into a general “pro or anti farming in games” discussion. Afk farming is done in addition to normal gameplay, at times when a player normally would not play at all. It is not something a player will choose to do instead of playing the game and it should not influence the reward structure of the game. It is forbidden and should be sanctioned like other offense against the rules. As long as that happens, there should be no problem. I believe the biggest problem with afk farming is that ArenaNet has been a little sloppy when it comes to catching and sanctioning players doing it in the past, as well as communicating that it breaks the rules when it got out of hand after the introduction of the loot mastery.

If they sold them as skins rather than actual items, they might sell more. Add account bound harvesting tool slots and it’s a more flexible system.

I love endless gathering tools but what would make them even better than they are now is being able to add them to the wardrobe. That way we can see what they look like when we use them instead of looking it up on youtube. Also, we’d be able to just click a button on what look you want if you have multiple types instead of having to shuffle them between characters or remember to put them back in the shared inventory slot before using another character. I think it would also make it more worth the 1,000 gems if it was in the wardrobe. Another thing is that if you’re someone who bought the Watchwork Mining Pick the one that gives you a chance at getting sprockets whenever you mine then you would have it unlocked since it’s in the wardrobe so it wouldn’t matter if you’re using a different look. I just think it would be great.

That sounds terrible. A complicated solution for something that isn’t a problem.

I also don’t understand the benefit to this.

For one thing a bank tab holds 30 items while a character with no extra bag slots and 18 slot bags (at about 2g each) can hold 92 items. So converting a character slot into a bank slot actually loses you a lot of storage space.

And as people said it’s highly unlikely the number of bank characters in the game is a problem for Anet given they allow everyone to have about 70 characters each, if we’re willing to buy the slots.

It would also complicate a system that’s currently very straight forward. If you want another character you buy a character slot. If you want more bank space you buy a bank tab. If you have a spare character slot and want more space you can make a mule. Mixing them all up and making them interchangeable just confuses things.

As someone else said it’s a complicated solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

You may not want more than 2 characters and that’s fine. The issue is that once you make level 80, a lot of the rewards setup in game are designed specifically to help us create additional level 80 characters. It’s a system that works fairly well because it gives the player a lot more freedom and options, and as those characters become level 80, we want more characters to use the next rewards on, so we buy more character slots, bags, stuff, which is good for the game.

I’m…pretty sure you just suggested raising the price of bank tabs by at least 200 gems. While mystic slots would be more flexible, if you just want a bank tab, that’s not an improvement.

I guess I’m not sure how this idea is very useful. If I’m just using a character for storage, I can get way, way more storage by loading them up with bags than I could converting them into a single bank slot. It’s slightly less convenient, but I’m mostly storing materials, not stuff to which I need constant access. Meanwhile, I think it’s more confusing to be able to convert characters into bank slots and bank slots into characters, because that’s a pretty bizarre equivalence to anyone unfamiliar with the practice of using alts for storage.

As for the servers, they hardly need to save space. They’re not storing player data on floppy disks. ;P

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Shiyo.3578:

I mailed two people and now I can’t mail anyone else. TWO people.

Why is this a thing?

Please make it not so restrictive.

Another fine game feature brought to you by your friendly Goldsellers. Message them a thank you when you get the chance,

You would think that but thats not true. Gold sellers don’t use mail system to spam people they use map chat or private messages 95% of the time. This changed after anet added the report link/icon in the mail system. That mean’t gold sellers were reported sooner if they abused the mail system, than if they just used the private message system.

The heavy mail restrictions are for a completely different reason though anet will never offically admit it. They are restricting mail to discourage people moving things to their ALT/mule accounts. This in turn makes people BUY more bank/invent bags/tabs and in turn makes anet more money. I moved 100 items over to my alt account this took HOURS due to the mail restrictions that kick in after only 3 mails and only allows you to send up to five items per mail.

So the real reason is to prevent people using their PAID for alt accounts for extra storage and NOTHING to do with gold sellers advertising. They also added more restrictions to guild banks for the very same reason, to punish people using other storage means.

Even before those new guild bank restrictions they targeting people thinking about starting a guild for the 50 slot guild banks. Right after HOT they changed guilds and how upgrades could be ordered completely removing influence system. With influence system removed solo-guilds no longer could upgrade their guilds or order more storaging unless they had a bigger none-one man guilds. And they now have to run guild missions etc before they are allowed to upgrade guild bank stoarge, making it impossible for solo-guilds to get the free storage now.

They also recently added to the max allowed normal bank storage people can now BUY if you didnt notice, to get those already at max stoarge to buy even more bank tabs…..

Its all about the money.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Seera.5916:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

BunjiKugashira.9754:

The limit is 1 message every minute with a maximum of 2 messages piling up. If you’re sending wintersday’s gifts to everyone on your friendlist you get to know the limits pretty well. ;D

I think the limit should be extended to 4 messages piling up. You should at least be able to send everyone in your group some bufffood. Also the restrictions should be lifted/extended for accounts that have been active and safe for an extended time. If my account didn’t get hacked by goldsellers for more than 3 years then it likely won’t be hacked any time soon. There is no reason to keep such ridiculous restrictions on safe accounts. You could even tie the removal of these restrictions to having 2 factor authentification. Would be a better reward than that dragon mini.

It’s been a while since I got my two factor authorization so I’ll have to ask. Is there a reason why a gold seller can’t get the 2 factor authorization in order to bypass the messaging limits?

I think that’s happened in the past. I’ve seen posts in the past of players suddenly going: I’ve got 2 factor authorization on my account but I didn’t put it on there.

Yeah, I’ve seen those also.

As to being unlikely to be hacked because your account is 3 years old, probably true. But that doesn’t mean someone else’s X year old account is equally as unlikely to be hacked since it depends on the person’s security measures, not the age of their account.

That’s exactly why I’ve proposed to lift the restrictions on accounts that are

1. old enough to be sure that they don’t belong to goldsellers
2. using 2 factor authorisation so it’s harder to hack them

I don’t see a reason to put restrictions on an account where you can be 99.9% sure that it will never be in the hands of a goldseller.

I’ve never gotten mail from a gold spammer.

I don’t enjoy restrictions that do harm to me as a player to counter gold sellers.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Shiyo.3578:

I mailed two people and now I can’t mail anyone else. TWO people.

Why is this a thing?

Please make it not so restrictive.

Another fine game feature brought to you by your friendly Goldsellers. Message them a thank you when you get the chance,

I don’t see why it needs to be TWO whole people to stop goldsellers. The cap should be like 10 or 20, something a normal person wouldn’t experience. When your anti-goldseller measures are so excessive that they effect normal players you’ve failed.

Justine.6351:

restrains got sensored for hilarious reason.

Ahh… “restrains”! I was scratching my head wondering what you were trying to say. Don’tcha just love this “kitten-filter” sometimes? There are a few perfectly harmless words/phrases that I have censored all the time, and I have to figure out a different way to say it. It makes communication difficult at times.

It’s annoying, isn’kitten ?

yeah don’t go special snowflake route. It rubs everyone else, kittentrains themselves from doing this, the wrong way.

who (ahahaha) restrains got sensored for hilarious reason.

Hamfast.8719:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Glider suggestions. Share them here

Aww, maaaaaan… don’t do that to me! Now they’re gonna merge my thread and it’ll disappear.

Or be read by the staff in the thread they made, instead of sliding off the front page and disappearing by the time they get back on the forum sometime tomorrow.

Furthermore, the question is completely pointless to begin with. It seems like you (mauried) want to suggest that if a game company is unable to completely stop bots, players should just stop caring about it, accept the bots, and mind their own business.

Like Cyninja already remarked, you reduce the actual situation into a hypothetical “black or white” situation and then ask a question which (even when answered truthfully) produces an irrelevant result.

In the same way you are arguing here, you could tell people that they should not complain about criminals, because they have always existed and no city will ever manage to get rid of them 100%. Ask someone moving to a city if he has inquired if there are any criminals in the city, and if they haven’t, claim they have no right to complain (or care) if they are robbed. This scenario is about as realistic as what you are obviously trying to express with your post.

Healix.5819:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

Try playing as a keyboard turning clicker – WASD to move (no strafing) and only clicking skills, including dodge to be fair. Only use 1 hand at a time (keyboard/mouse) and delay all your actions by a second to simulate a slow reaction time. Limit yourself to random rare gear, clear your traits, choose whichever profession you play the least and base your weapon/skill choices on whatever looks the coolest. You’re now almost at the level of the average MMO player, which is why nearly all MMOs are below easy.

I already am. But seriously, I mouse my skills and imported the old control scheme from city of heroes, so I use the keyboard primarily to turn. I imagine watching me play would be actually frustrating to someone who’s good at the game, because to change my camera I end up having to anchor myself in place for a few moments. I learned to play this game on a track pad. Granted, it was a Mac trackpad, which is the Cadillac of the trackpad world, but still.

Seera.5916:

That tells you the what they did that caused them to fail. You don’t see the reason.

It could be because the player has a disability or they could have poor internet connection in general. You just assume that any mistakes are due to lack of knowledge. Not the kittenumption to make, but the video itself doesn’t tell you that.

What they did is a direct consequence of why they did it. Cause and effect share a necessary relationship. People, being people, generally do people things, so it isn’t too hard to figure out.

If the guy playing the game has Parkinson’s disease, he’s going to mention it. I’ve seen plenty of discussions on game difficulty will someone will bring up a disability of some sort that would prevent them from getting better. But, I also see plenty of posts that proclaim the game impossible with absolutely no explanation as to why.

The problem is, you’re trying to take a very specific and rare theoretical case, and use it to abandon common sense. It is fairly easy to see the set of paradigms governing a person’s actions in the game, and once those paradigms are shifted, the world opens up to them. If some specially misshapen snowflake should come my way, I’ll take that into consideration.

Seera.5916:

Watching does nothing for me. The only way it would be remotely useful for me is if they did a dual with the game and the keyboard/mouse. Seeing the effects on the screen or the keyboard/mouse by itself will not tell me how to better play. And how one person plays is the worst for someone else. Because people have different reaction times and internet connection speeds. I’m very very hands on learning. I have to actually DO it to learn it.

That’s the thing, that’s what I do and I still die. So it’s obviously not as easy as that. Please find me and link me a build that literally says do whatever skills you want for the rotation. All of the ones I’ve seen, dictate which skill when and when to switch attunement/weapon.

There is an oft under-emphasized point of education, but nonetheless it is an important one: listening is a skill.

Yes, it is a skill. It is a shame that most people are expected to just know how to listen, and it is also a shame that people expect to just zone out at stimuli and learn things. If you intend to learn, you can’t just have knowledge drizzled all over you and expect to consume any of it.

Take an active participation in your listening. When watching a tutorial, slow the video down so you can see which skills are activated at what time. Look at the build screen to see what equipment they are using. If you’ve lost the train of thought, go back in the video and watch that part again to see what is happening. Make a mental checklist of what they are doing. Keep the video open in another window while you try out skills on a golem in the mists.

That said, there’s a strange irony in what you’ve said here. To see someone’s hands or keyboard while playing is actually nearly useless information, since keybinds can be individualized. But, there’s also a reason why it is that the build videos go over specific rotations: the builds, skills, and techniques are chosen to have the maximum combination of DPS and group support. Because of this, there is no “this build is worse for other people”.

Likewise, on pretty much any build video I’ve seen, and on nearly every metabattle page, appropriateness and discretion are encouraged. They come with a variety of weapon/utility changes for different circumstances. The rotations and skills chosen are a best case scenario. You’re still expected to dodge when a big attack is coming your way.

‘The average age of someone who plays games is 31 years old. In fact, more gamers are over the age of 36 than between the ages of 18 to 35 or under the age of 18. They are also mostly men, but by a slimming margin’

considering computer games have been around from the early 80’s and we havent died yet

Raizen.7981:

…and I also understand that most of us are now between 20-30 years old

I have no hard facts, but I suspect your typical age estimate might be at least a decade too low. Gamers are older than you think.

I’ve been claiming to be under 30 for almost 20 years now….

Healix.5819:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

Try playing as a keyboard turning clicker – WASD to move (no strafing) and only clicking skills, including dodge to be fair. Only use 1 hand at a time (keyboard/mouse) and delay all your actions by a second to simulate a slow reaction time. Limit yourself to random rare gear, clear your traits, choose whichever profession you play the least and base your weapon/skill choices on whatever looks the coolest. You’re now almost at the level of the average MMO player, which is why nearly all MMOs are below easy.

Which is why also MMOs are a dying breed unfortunately. I understand that we’re the generation who made MMOs popular back in the 2000s, and I also understand that most of us are now between 20-30 years old, meaning uni/jobs/families, so we don’t have the time to invest in games which we used to, like 10 years ago. 10 years ago, a noob could learn in 20 hours what a good player would learn in 20 minutes. The problem nowadays is, that the noob doesn’t have 20 hours to invest, in order to learn that particular thing, so he’d rather try and rant, so perhaps the game will change around his tight schedule. Some MMOs actually did that. Gw2 is the biggest MMO that has the system that even players who have little time to invest can reach the “top” of the game in a short amount of time.

The problem is that the people are greedy, and they want more. You made a hard game easy? Make it easier. You made it easier? Make it even more easier. And so on. That’s why I honestly haven’t heard of a title easier than Gw2, and it saddened me to see(after the SQU) that the devs are giving in to the demands of the bads and making the game even easier.

There’s a couple ways to play a game when you find it going tough :

1. you can keep trying different things and learn thorough experience, and be rewards for your genuine progress (this is what games are meant to offer)
2. you can research how other people do it and learn from that
3. You can procrastinate and look for excuses rather than either of the 2 above (because we know deep down 10 – 100s of thousands of other people with the exact same class can do the content with no issues right)

The game is not a hardcore examination of your memory and motor skills, its simply a little challenging at the high end of its content spectrum.

Sartharina.3542:

I’d actually argue against Metabattle – it has specialized, high-end builds that require you to know how to use them, most of them oriented to Instanced Group Play (How can I support my team of 4-9 others?), PvP (How can I kill other players while taking and holding points?), or WvW (Again – Killing players)

Not sure what you’re arguing against, you’re just listing types of specialised gameplay, metabattle excels at providing builds for that. Obviously you wouldn’t pick the ones you just mentioned if you wanted to PvE.

It’s better to start with a build you can tweak than from scratch if you really don’t know what you’re doing. I usually grab a Fractal or Raid build for PvE as general dungeon builds were always good for general PvE.

Seera.5916:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

It is a legitimate question. I see topics/posts with this content all the time:

“This stuff is too hard! I watched a video guide on what to do, but it didn’t work! I watched a build video, but it didn’t work! I got a group together and we still couldn’t do it! Nerf the content!”

And yet, each one of those things is a great asset to me. The biggest disadvantage to these threads is that, I don’t actually get to see the person who makes the claim play. I can’t critique them, and give them specific advice on how to help them deal with problems. I am expected to accept the notion that this player has reached some type of personal skill ceiling of which there will never be any improvement, and thus the game needs to cave to their demands.

And yet here I am, walking through hot in 8 out of 9 different classes, all in full glass cannon gear, and I’m not having a problem on any of them. I’m not exactly a “skilled player” either. In skill I’m rather average. I don’t encounter the problems that other people have. So, to give meaningful advice, I have to actually see the problem that someone is having.

If HoT is too hard, provide some type of evidence. A video of some kind, showing HoT being too hard.. That way, we can actually see the specific problems.

The problem is a video won’t show the why of the failure.

Some of us are just not that good at the game. I look at builds and the rotations just go right over my head. Loud whooshing sound and all. I can’t get movement and combat at the same time down, so there goes kiting if I’m alone. So I have to remain pretty stationary. That’s pretty deadly in HoT. It’s also pretty deadly in Cursed Shore sometimes.

I could very likely L2P may way out of my issues. But the frustration that it would cause would remove all of the fun from the game for me, so I don’t. I haven’t really played much in HoT maps so I can’t really say if they are too hard. My frustration level required for me to rage quit is not that high.

I disagree wholeheartedly. To actually see someone play the game would give a great insight into why someone fails. The best way to see what my students were having difficulty with was to have them work out a few problems as I watched, and then I could spot the mental mistakes that they were making. With videogames, it is not that different. The mental barriers are plainly visible.

This isn’t a Lupi solo, where you need to take a long series of flawless actions to succeed. You don’t need to be that good at the game. For the vast majority of enemies, there’s a simple one or two step trick that you need to follow that lets you beat them. Most of the time it boils down to the exact same thing: when the enemy does a super big and dangerous attack, step out of the way.

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

It is a legitimate question. I see topics/posts with this content all the time:

“This stuff is too hard! I watched a video guide on what to do, but it didn’t work! I watched a build video, but it didn’t work! I got a group together and we still couldn’t do it! Nerf the content!”

And yet, each one of those things is a great asset to me. The biggest disadvantage to these threads is that, I don’t actually get to see the person who makes the claim play. I can’t critique them, and give them specific advice on how to help them deal with problems. I am expected to accept the notion that this player has reached some type of personal skill ceiling of which there will never be any improvement, and thus the game needs to cave to their demands.

And yet here I am, walking through hot in 8 out of 9 different classes, all in full glass cannon gear, and I’m not having a problem on any of them. I’m not exactly a “skilled player” either. In skill I’m rather average. I don’t encounter the problems that other people have. So, to give meaningful advice, I have to actually see the problem that someone is having.

If HoT is too hard, provide some type of evidence. A video of some kind, showing HoT being too hard.. That way, we can actually see the specific problems.

I for one really like them, and I like that they didn’t shove them in our face saying “look what we made!” Spreading the word with subtle update clues and word of mouth is much better, because it feels a lot more like we’re making discoveries, rather than just stepping up to one more theme park ride. The actual gameplay isn’t great yet, but this is a step in a very good direction. At the very least, this is something accessible to any player while still being pretty intriguing.

option 1 : get a hint of a quest which tantalizes and spikes your curiosity, through mouth of word, forums and general chat we realise something is afoot, you go explore and are rewarded with a little snipped of content.

Option 2, you get an email that tells you to jump onto quest rails at plocation x.

The former is much more interesting, and it a subtle difference, but its the different something dull witted that has seeped into the modern mmorpg design from WOW and co and something more traditional where the player engages rather than being fed a quest rail.