Guild Wars 2

I have only done AC explorer mode path 1 and I am beginning to doubt I even want to play this game anymore.

I know the goal of revamping dungeons is to make them more challenging but seriously they are not at all more fun or reasonable changes for enjoyment. I really can’t imagine a group of level 35s with greens or blues doing AC anymore, much more any pre level 80s trying to do AC, TA, CM

The spider and graveling hatchlings hp shouldn’t of been upped… they are way to tanky, especially since in a group they spam way to many attacks.

The Spider queen’s AoE circles are ridiculously large not to mention they seem to last about about 20 seconds so it makes it almost impossible not to walk into. Its dodge one just to roll into another one. Not to mention the crazy immobilize now.

Condition removal is almost pointless because you break out or the immobilize or remove the poison just to get stacked up with some more poison or immobilize immediately right after.

Sure the Spider Queen is squishier than before so its easier to kill, but the amount of times you go down makes it harder than it should be. Not to mention its pretty much suicidal to try to mainly melee the Queen because of the AoE circles which kinda defeats the purpose of being Warrior.

Like I did AC yesterday and all the times before I could actually effectively melee the Spider Queen with a good bit of kiting. Today I couldn’t do anything but stand in one tiny spot in between giant AoE poison circles and range the Spider Queen.

Then the Champion Stalker after Queen was super lame and not at all more fun to fight. If it goes invisible fine, but invulnerable!!!? It doesn’t make it anymore challenging or fun, its just annoying like the Champion Dredge that stacks bleeds on you in SE and wastes time.

Kholer I really have nothing to comment about him, nothing is really different about him other than he spawns 2 lame adds that just waste like 5 seconds to kill. Which of course makes it a bit more difficult to kill him since they waste your dps and maybe some of your health. But as always lame and all it did was waste a bit more time.

The Howling King was extremely lame. Just a bunch of stupid adds with knock backs, and the scavenger with the kitten perma knock down that is guaranteed to down you is kitten Sure it makes it more challenging, but fun or rewarding? Not at all. Again just a waste of time and in game gold for repairs.

Honestly how do you expect someone to successful dodge those? They have pbaoe, and if you manage to dodge like 2-4 of those pounces in a dodge the other like 4 will get you. And by some miracle you manage to actually successfully dodge twice the pounces are like a machine gun, they just keep coming and coming and you’re screwed because your endurance is recharging. And the poor person trying to revive you has to worry about the same thing.

So unless you’re planning to make rolling infinite with like a 1 second cool down path 1 is not possible to successfully play through the path without dying or going down a few times even if you are a decent or good kiter unless you are really lucky. Which completely baffles me about the entire no zerg respawn concept. Is your goal that we don’t die and come back 1 by 1 like 5 times each but have us all die and come back like 15 times as a group?

Seriously if you want to make the game more fun, get rid of the lame oh I am just gonna give these npcs a ton of armor and hp and bump up their damage. Give them some interesting attacks and make them have more random attack patterns. Or make the monster npcs weaker, and more of them, and actually have them be able to fight like the guards do in WvW. Also maybe make the npcs that stand around and do nothing like the ones in CoF actually help you out.

Core problems:
(1) This mechanic has created a disparity between large and small guilds.
(2) This disparity is that large guilds have better, faster, easier access to large content.
(3) The consequence of the disparity is that there is extreme pressure on small guild players to leave their small guilds and join larger guilds.
(4) The practical effect of this disparity is that it creates an unfair and unfun tension within small guild players: they must either sacrifice their friends, their guild, or their ability to enjoy content as first-class players. (Options: (1) Have the entire guild merge into a larger guild, the small guild dies and the special relationships they have are diluted in the big guild, assuming they are all folded into one and can find one that suits their taste, culture, habits, language, environment… this can be a destructive process. (2) Splinter and join large guilds separately, losing the friendships. (3) Endure as a small guild with unequal access to content.)
(5) Players in large guilds, whose incentive maximizations are already satisfied, do not have this problem. They both do not have any incentive or structural reasons to understand why small guild players are “whining”, “qqing”, etc, and do not see any reason that the current system is wrong.
(6) It is uncertain that small guilds will even be able to complete their guild missions at all under any circumstances, or if so, that they will only be able to do so under reduced circumstances, effectively meaning small guilds are barred from guild content, or that small guilds are not legitimate/acceptable under ANet policy. If this is the case, it is EXTREMELY offensive to small guild players, like myself, who believe that our guilds while small are just as legitimate as large guilds.
(7) All of the above are destructive to many guilds and communities. In effect, this patch has done harm to the community that it sought to promote friendship and playing together within. It has had the opposite effect for many players.

Problem-Solving Goals:
(1) Erase disparity between large and small guilds.
(2) Find a way to lessen the disparity between how quickly large and small guilds can access content. (Use per capita math tools that track membership.)
(3) Reduce the pressure on small guild players to leave their guilds for larger guilds.
(4) Remove the tension that is placed solely on small guild players to choose between their friends and maintaining equitable access to content.
(5) The system is working fine for large guild players. Do NOT attack or drag down the large guild play experience. This is EXCELLENT! Instead, focus on AIDING small guild players by equalizing using per capita mechanics to bring them up to the level that large guilds have. Do not take action that will force a political backlash by satisfied large guild players.
(6) Ensure that small guilds are able to actually physically complete missions. Incorporate scaling to allow missions to be completed with few players when guilds are small. Small guilds include groups of 3, 4, and 5 players. Small guilds must be taken seriously, as they are a nontrivial portion of MMO guilds and are worthy of the same dignity and respect as any other guild in the game.
(7) Stop doing damage to the community by creating classes, wedges, and incentives that force some players to choose between content and friendships.

Specific Solutions:
(1) Implement a mathematical scaling system similar to level downranking to allow smaller guilds (measured per account) to have smaller influence requirements to gain access to new content. Obviously, this would need to be designed in a way to prevent exploiting by “everybody quit the guild, we’ll complete it fast, then have everyone pile back in again.” This would be even worse and would negatively impact large guilds. Have better returns to scale with large guilds so that there is an incentive for guilds to grow. Force the rate of benefit to be more favorable than the rate of scaling down, such that there will always be an economic incentive to be in a large guild, but not a prohibitively massive one. It needs to be a gentle push, like taking an 80 out into a level 20 zone, not like the current hard wall. This should also allow upward scaling so that large guilds have the ability to work towards large goals the same way that small guilds do as well. If the content lasts a week in some guilds and six months in others, neither section of players has benefitted. Unfortunately, now that many players in large guilds however expect access in time measured in days to weeks at most, converting this upward now for this content is dangerous. This scaling system should have been thought out in advance, and needs to be implemented in future content.

(post 3/4)

Martin, Izzy, et al:

Firstoff, thank you for being willing to come out and have a serious discussion with your playerbase. That’s one of the major positives that has set ANet in another class compared to many of the games and developer experiences my guild and I have had over the past decade plus.

However, I’d just like to calmly and quietly drop a friendly reminder about incentive structures and their impact on the game environment, the social dynamics of the game world, and destructive consequences that can come from poorly designed incentive structures.

This is a long, analytical post. My goal in making it is to shed some light on structural problems and more importantly the perceptions of stakeholders that have been overlooked. My intent is to take both ANET and the players of this gaming community seriously not because I like hearing myself talk, but because I believe there’s something here that’s worth fighting for, and that we’re facing a problem that can’t be fixed without some in-depth analysis and thought.

I have been the GM of the same small guild of four IRL friends who have known each other for now over twenty years, including at least seven different MMOs over the past decade.

I also do real-life work on large scale incentive structure and policy design (hey, who says gamers can’t be smart, right?) and just wanted to quietly drop a couple of friendly warnings about some things I’m now observing ANet coming out and doing in this latest patch.

When you’re designing incentive structures for large groups of people in competitive environments, which all MMOs are, one of the things that it’s crucial to do is make sure several people on the design team are able to put on their “economist” hats and think about how the people interacting with that incentive structure are going to behave in order to narrowly maximize rewards for the absolutely lowest amount of effort possible. This is what folks will do; it’s common sense and basic policy design. At the same time, it’s also crucial to have people in the same room wearing their “equity and human dignity” hats and thinking about whether this min/maxing behavior is going to break anything: legal systems, social systems, etc. Finally, you also must have someone in the room with their eye on the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish not just in terms of the narrow intervention, but its impact on the broader picture.

For the first time observing this game evolve, I’m concerned that all three of those sets of people were not present at the table.

In concrete terms, here is what I’m observing:

Problem One: This Mechanic Has Created Unfair-Feeling “Classes” of Guilds

The new “Guild Missions” system has been rolled out and advertised primarily, on ANet’s end, as a way to (a) allow guilds to be play-relevant, (b) allow large numbers of people to play together in organized, coherent ways, © provide a dump for large amounts of existing guild influence in large/wealthy guilds, and (d) provide a series of long-term goals for guilds generically to work for.

As a general design strategy, this looks clean and efficient, because it provides content for a missing chunk, creates long term goals, and allows people to play together.

Here’s the problem with this analysis: nobody put their “economist” cap on and considered what actual behaviors would result from this given reward-maximizing and absolute-effort-minimizing behavior. To summarize, here is what players will actually do as a result of this system, including the reasoning behind it:

(1) Players will attempt to access this new content as rapidly as possible. People play games to access content.

(2) Rapidly accessing the content will require large amounts of influence quickly.

(3) Because there is no per capita/per player check or mechanic baked into the system, there is an instant inequity created between large guilds (who have the influence bankroll to immediately begin researching and working on this content) compared to medium and particularly small guilds, including mine which consists of four players, which will not see that kind of influence for a very long time.

(4) This creates a blatant situation where some people are able to access content and some are not.

(5) This creates feelings of (i) anger over the unfairness, (ii) a sense that players need to choose between their friends and accessing content, (iii) a sense that small guilds are not acceptable, (iv) a sense that small guilds are not viable, leadin to (v) small guilds rapidly being emptied or broken up, (vi) and many players abandoning their guilds to join larger ones.

It is crucial for MMO developers to understand that their games live or die by access to content and the long-standing social interactions formed.

(post 1/4)

Welcome to Grind Wars 2.

You know whats funny? I saw the lead game designer talk about how Guild Wars 2 wasn’t going to have any gear grinds.

Listen to them talk about grinds. Skip to 1:20

laurels are out of control. i suppose the idea behind this is to keep us playing by requiring us to complete a daily every day to try and keep the time required to get ascended slightly less insane?

assuming you get a laurel every day it will take:

30 days for amulet
80 days for the other two ( also ectos because those are tacked onto everything)
rings can be done in fotm more easily. (if you don’t do fotm i feel extra bad for you)

completing 3 monthlies can take 30 days off which leaves a total of 80 days (assuming you do it every single day).

now 80 days might not be so bad (imho it is) but consider that many people use multiple gear sets and have multiple 80s. i myself have 3 80s. i only use two and those two each have 2 sets of gear. that means i’ll need 4 amulets, 8 rings and 8 earrings. i don’t even need to do the math to start laughing (even if i get rings from fotm)

is it really logical to require us to play each day for upwards of a year to get our gear? i’ve played grindy mmos, but this is just in a whole new realm of crazy.

PS: this is ignoring all the nice infusions at 20 days each.

kenzuro.1073:

Stop complaining about the costs of Influence, this thread is not about that it is about the bugged mission panel.

on some level you cant really blame them

kenzuro.1073:

Stop complaining about the costs of Influence, this thread is not about that it is about the bugged mission panel.

There was no mention of UI until your post.

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

they had a perfectly good reason in SOTG of why this is the only game mode. a death match in this game wouldnt be good <strong>because teams would wait until full elites</strong>

thats not a good reason at all, if this is the case balance the skills to either promote or discourage this type of gameplay

again this is simply arenanet trying to shift responsibility away
role based metas that are built into the character/class mechanics is the worst thing for esports/gaming unless the teams are substantially sized (like in tribes) or its not an mmo

we have this thing called balancing for skill and balancing for counters and esports need to include both

balancing for skill is a very simple concept, the higher the difficulty of the execution is the more power you should get, balancing a class around long CDs and dealing large amounts of damage with very few button presses is not acceptable, nor is creating a class thats so over complex that when played at its best level is vastly more powerful then anything else in the game (as it throws out the majority and dominates)

balancing for counter is a harder concept to understand but probably more important, its essentially the idea that if X player uses X skill then Y player should have a number of skills or tools at his disposal to deal with it, when you dont give players these tools they will find that they are helpless and just end up quiting, when you give players too many tools the attacking player will find that there attacks are useless and just end up quitting again

these issues become more glaring issues when only some classes have access to the utility needed to deal with certain situations, things like mesmer portal or quickness are terribly designed mechanics because the mesmer portal OVERVALUES the mesmer and quickness DOES NOT SCALE EQUALLY across all classes (rangers are DEPENDENT on it, elementalists get almost no gain aside from casting churning earth faster)

if you balanced for deathmatch you can seamlessly integrate all other gamemodes and thats because most video games with it as the priority gamemode often demand the player to be offensive, defensive and aware and these concepts transfer well into other gamemodes

balancing around dom forces players to be ONLY defensive or ONLY offensive, classes that overperform in these roles will be prioritized over others, this causes bad balance

now on an unrelated note damage in this game in general is WAY too high and some classes dont seem to be well designed for players with higher latency (such as australians) a good example of this would be burning speed which likes to randomly overshoot or undershoot targets and it appears this happens because im 250 ms behind because i tend to rubberband after casting the spell, should probebly act like a leap finisher without being an actual leap finisher (so no auras into oblivion)
another example is with the infamous oneshot thief, the thief uses the combo while i might use lightning flash as a stunbreak, to teleport away but latency dictates that im downed and teleporting (so it basically looks like i just used lightning flash while in a downed state to the other player)

wow i said alot

Pyrial.2917:

Defektive.7283:

Pyrial.2917:

Defektive.7283:

If a game loses momentum early on it becomes increasingly difficult for them to get their playerbase back.

GW2 sPvP lost its momentum roughly 3-4 months ago. A lot of people have quit or barely play. I myself have moved on to greener pastures and log an equivalent 10 minutes of GW2 time a day, maybe less.

ArenaNet should take notes from Nadeo and their ShootMania series for how they developed the game with competitiveness in mind and decided to not release the game until every piece of the puzzle had been completed.

TLDR:
Low population (lets just say 2,500 and be generous, across all countries).
Little amount of playable modes.
No legitimate ranking system besides time invested.
Lack of variety in class mechanics.

= game on its last legs. I just want people to admit it so we can get past the rose tinted glasses.

I think alot would agree; however the pvp is still some of the best out there. The shame of it all will be that this game will never realize its potential.

Personally, I consider the PvP to the bottom rank among the top tier.

GW2 is to Captain Falcon of SSBM.

Please, let us know what the top tier games are then.

What genre specifically?

Not to go against the ‘community’ grain here but I find WoW pvp to be a lot more robust and interesting to watch.

I wouldn’t even put it past Path of Exile or D3 in having more indepth and interesting gameplay mechanics just from the sheer size of available builds and concepts thrown around. Not to mention LoL, Dota2, Blood Line Champions, probably even Smite (which seems to already have a larger PvP following).

When compared to other less specific ‘player vs. player’ games, the mechanics of this to even some things like ShootMania, Gunz Online (of all things), TF2 etc. out shine this game on the sheer availability of mechanics, gamestyle and interesting concepts.

What we have here is a standard MMO PvP where targeting isn’t needed. A ‘dodge’ button that really just moves your character X feet and makes you immune to incomming attacks, coupled with 3 point King of the Hill mechanics.

You bundle all of that into lack of build variety, standards across different continents (NA vs EU), a hand full of maps and a lack of any real skill indicator…

Well, you get the point. GW2 is a good show and tell of once interesting mechanics executed in a flawed manner and never followed up on.

Now this is all my opinion, and that’s fine. But ArenaNet shot itself in the foot a long time ago so it’s hard to rally behind them once again just to anticipate let down.

And the supply is ultra-limited.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Wait wait wait. I had no idea Anet is forcing me to sell my Dusk for 700 Gold. So if I were to put mine for sale at 400 Gold, will I be banned for not following the rules?

Man, this game just got so much more complicated.

Drop rates. Supply.

Learn to read.

Nike you said it yourself: The Exchange system follows explicit rules → rules which Anet set. So by setting them they control the market. The know the average time players play, so they can set it the way they want.
If they decide that they want a higher price, they just can reduce the drop rate, if the price shall drop, just increase the drop rate.
That’s what they did with Runestones, they invented the new bags. More drops in the same time.

Gasoline.2570:

Bottom of the line, we have no control over a drop rate of anything, stop acting like we do.

This was the point.

Just for the record – I don’t mind learning mechanics or hard fights.

So based on the following quotes:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I PUG dungeons quite frequently, and I often saw people not helping downed players, and not even trying to res people….

People really didn’t have to learn boss mechanics or communicate with each other to figure things out.

I am not saying that res-rushing was not a problem.

Some bosses – Lupicus being an example – have a habit of camping a person downed and causing the player to die anyways inevitably wiping other players trying to help (even if you aggro the enemy away – the red circles will get ya). That is why people were not helping downed players or they were in a spot that would get other players killed.

Yes, chances are you do not know the mechanic of the fight, but you still receive the death penalty without a chance of player redemption unless the group wipes and you all try again.

The new person trying to learn the dungeon suddenly gets booted from the group because they kept dying too fast for that fight, and the group finds someone with more experience. That is disheartening for the new players who want to learn the dungeons. (This can happen in really any MMO – just providing a scenario)

A question somewhat related to your class mastery comment:

What do you think about gear in dungeons?

Granted – everyone realizes the higher the tier, the better. So exotic / ascended is great.

However, there is a separation now where people are requesting Berserker geared people to take out Simin. If someone is a master of using Knight or more of a tanky build (less dps) – they now are missing out. I know some people are thinking to switch to Berserker gear just because they don’t see a point for the others. Next thing you know – everyone will be rolling a berserker geared warrior for everything.

Possibly developed that way because people don’t understand the mechanic of Simin? I am not sure but it shouldn’t be that way.

Please make dungeon runes account bound. If you have more than one char doing dungeons you’ll get double runes occupying double slots.

Also, if you don’t have a use to them you have to vendor it rather then use them on another char.

Shiren.9532:

Warriors need a DPS nerf.

No.

Nonononononononononononononono. Noooooooooooooo.

No.

Other classes need to be brought up to the warrior/mesmer level in terms of damage/other direct benefits.

Well, I wasn’t aware of this and I got scammed pretty good @ 11:15pm Eastern Time by receiving a rifle! Pretty angry about this. Since Anet knows of the bug they should 1) disable the feature until fixed properly and 2) Refund the lost laurels.

Just my 2 cents.

WARN everyone please

Make the mobs worth killing.

Simple as that.

The mobs are nothing but obstacles that currently give you nothing but perhaps [Generic Gray Vendor Trash item], if anything at all. Of course people are going to avoid wasting time and possibly resources (repair costs if you die).

Punishing people and forcing them to grind through these unrewarding mobs is not a proper way to handle the skipping “problem”.

Perma-aggro? Puh-lease.

Because they couldn’t come up with a better way of artificially gating content.

It just shows how pedantic they (ANet) are about their precious TP.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

2) I love RNG. It’s the great equalizer.

The Elitist Jerk doesn’t like to be put in the same pot as the Casual Scrub. Just saying.

TimeBomb.3427:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

If it is any consolation I am on scale 22 and have accrued over1600 fractal tokens and not yet gotten a ring either. It is RNG with the Jade Maw.

We are exploring alternatives to the current system.

This. Is. Awesome!

NO ITS NOT. This shouldn’t have been like this in the first place!!!!! Proper QA would have shown that the RNG SUCKS! Not surprised after seeing the dungeons in this game especially CoF.