Guild Wars 2

While the UI is much, much, much better than what often occurred in WoW, I agree that the spell effects are still over the top.

However, I think the best way to counter this would be to at least reduce effects that surround or obscure bosses. Big stuff on the ground or at range is fine, but many boss fights become difficult because of obscured boss tells rather than the fight mechanics themselves.

Hey Colin,

I would like to see Anet address the insane particle effects.

I can never anticipate when to dodge the statue of dwayna attacks because of this. You can barely make out the enemy model. Particle effects are nice and all, but in gw2 they are overly done. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this issue in any mmorpg I’ve played.

Honestly, I’d love to be able to turn off certain effects.

Like turn-off effects that are outside of my group (or the mob). While this would need some though behind it about WHICH effects this actually turns off it would be helpful. There are some effects, like Wall of Reflection, that are nice for an entire zerg to see/use, but an Ele’s comets, or a Guard’s F1 burn on the mob are completely useless to me and they obscure the mob. Hell…in fractals on my Guard I sometimes skip F1 so that I can see the mob and dodge at the right time.

This game is a “twitch-game” insomuch that you have to know when to dodge. It’s difficult to know/learn when to dodge when you can’t even see the mob underneath or behind all of the spell-effects.

The “clutter” is not the UI imo it’s the spell-effects that fill your screen and would give an epileptic person seizures.

I see no issue with the UI, personally. Doesn’t seem excessively large or obstructive at all. Not to say some size sliders for individual UI assets wouldn’t be welcome (I could do with shrinking the skill bar down a bit, and target health indicator too, without shrinking my text in my inventory and such), but its far from “OMG I can’t see anything”.

The spell effects, on the other hand… yah. In larger groups, those get downright silly. Fighting something like the Labyrinth bosses in the zerg, there’s really no chance to react to enemy attacks because you can’t see them (especially when the strategy seems to be “stack stack stack”). Its one of the major reasons I dislike zerg combat and avoid it whenever possible.

Special effects overkill. The biggest joke in the game is the LOD effects checkbox, which I thought was supposed to be the fix for this.

The massive UI doesn’t make things any prettier. GW1 had lots of windows, but everything was nice and small. At 1920×1080, the UI feels like it is made of Duplo.. And if you set it to small text, the font becomes unreadable if you have antialiasing disabled in your video card drivers or the game settings.

That looks very similar to how my screen in WoW used to look back in the day. I consider gw2 to be far more of what I call a “twitch” game than wow ever was though. By this I mean its less about timing skills and more about dodging and real time twitch reaction. This is what I was looking for when I came to gw2 but now given how badly it performs in practice I see why many other mmo’s don’t do it. Its really kinda a shame too because the art team for gw2 seems very talented but you rarely get to enjoy there work. I was playing in the labyrinth yesterday fighting the lich and it occurred to be I had killed him about 20 times that day and didn’t know what he looked like because I could never see him.

All other issues aside with this game aside…does it just seem to be getting more and more screen cluttered? I know I’m getting old but after having recently been in some other mmo betas I came back to gw2 and was amazed at how messy it felt. I don’t feel like I can ever see whats going on in many circumstances due to the akward ui, spell graphics, bad camera, and just overall clutter. I see people on here talking about looking for cast animations and things like that but I don’t reasonably understand how you can see i minute gesture through all the rest of the mess. Then with the terrible optimization it just seems to make the issues all the worse. Can other people really see these things?

1) Plans for making Rangers viable in WvW.

2) Plans for alternative ways to obtain ascended items. I don’t want to craft, many people hate crafting and shouldn’t be forced to do that in order to attain ascended gear.

1. Class Balance
We’ve had a recent patch, but it was extremely disappointing. Everyone should just roll a warrior. There should be a dev thread in each class forum discussing traits, skills, and builds.

2. Ascended items
Needs to have much more ways of obtaining them. Please don’t time-gate them. If a player wants to put in their time and resources to get it, why not let them? Let people do it at their own pace. Artificially prolonging it is such a drag and is not fun.

3. World bosses
Why on Earth is there a 15 minute time limit? Stop with the artificial difficulty. There needs to be much more interaction with the bosses. Have them move around and hit players instead of us tickling their toes to death. It feels the same as auto attacking a gate.

1. Guild Related Events/Perks/etc such as
Guild Calendar
Guild Mass Mailer
Guild Housing/Mansion/Keep/Castle
Member Login log
More Guild Missions and revamp to mission rewards i.e. increase limit of rewards
Guild Instance/Dungeon aka instead of current 5man limit, increase Guild Dungeon to 10-20. Always fun to run around with guildies…
Many more….
2. Living Story, make the rewards easier to achieve since this is a limited event. I hate the part where I have to do >50x of something. Make it simple, and fun. A good example is lighting the effigy, back then for Aetherblade. The lighting should have been limited to just 5 and it will be as good.
3. Craftable precursor pls. I have played this game, almost everyday since start and farmed Orr and temples back in the early days and RNG hasn’t been kind to me. Forging >400g worth of exotic, and >200g worth of rare turned out nothing as well for me. You could say, I’m the unluckiest. So, if there’s a way for craftable precursor that doesn’t involve RNG, then it’ll be awesome. But if say, you make pre craftable and it requires lots of RNG based mats (say that doubloon that is needed for legendary) then it’s super bads…

Make the crafting of Pre a good journey. Say:
a) Do this Living Story, and you get this piece.
b) Then you have to go to this place and to do tasks 1 to x, and get another piece.
c) Next, you are summoned to WvW and partake into taking the SM Castle, and in so doing, you are again rewarded another piece.
d) Followed by gaining certain points in pvp
and so on..

The thing is, those I listed required effort. But nothing based on RNG. Make the making of precursor, a legendary experience.

Hello hello!!Once the game is destroyed by Arena net …what happens to the worldvs world is completely sick…People that in past were in WvW no can’t cuz of high participation of pvers to get this achievments points…omgf.I am really sad and i don’t enjoy this game anymore with this choices if u want to add more achievments points add to pve section or enlarge wvw maps…To add more one map is not the solution…

aspirine.6852:

Handin.4032:

PvE people come into WvW for achievements —> get addicted --> more WvW people. Sure, not 100% of the people who are achievement hunting will stay, but even 10% staying will be great!

Worked for me, I had to do world completion and decided to try just one fight in wvw. Hooked from then on.

Good to see this happening but I suspect the end result is more of a zero sum game. Currently on my server you would need to gain 5 dedicated WvW players to offset the loss of me and my 4 friends. No complaints from us, the game has just gone in a direction we would rather not follow.

The thing I think is hurting ANET and will hurt them even further if it ever changes:

Right now (we have all seen the comments from devs) the stance is something like: “Forum people will complain, but they are only a small portion of the player base”.

Which translates to: People will always gripe about something, if they were that unhappy they and others would be leaving the game. We are not seeing people leave the game, so it must not be that bad and might even be good.

The problem with that line of thinking: The only reason (I truly believe) we have not seen more people leave (and there have been a ton leave no matter what anyone says), is because there is no other game that currently offers RvR or WvW. What I am saying is that just because there is no competition does not mean that things are “good”.

If another company or game for that matter comes along and does it even slightly better, people will leave. Lack of subscription and at least having a semi-operable WvW is what keeps a lot of folks here.

TL/DR: The main reason why people have stuck with this game so long is there is no other WvW-type games out right now, so it is better to have “something” better than “nothing”…But just being “something” is not really a good thing to strive for.

yeah balance in wvw is an abkittene joke. all a mesmer is needed for is veil, veil and veil again and then tw and maybe a pull or two. noone asks for rangers or wants them,no engis and thieves are only good to gank straggelers. most important ones
1 warrior
2 necro/guardian
3 ele

thats all u need and then maybe 1 mesmer to veil them. now as a mesmer u have nowhere near enough stability to survive in a zerg. u are squishy and there is barely any viable zergs builds. they all feel likerandomly puzzled together to somewhat accomplish something that is sowhat useful to deal dmg in zergs. te only 2 real zerg builds were immortal mesmer and glamour builds and anet destroyed those.

now there is a rumor of a new heal that removes apparently all conditions that mesmers can inflict at once soe another kick in the groud ad another build gone that somewhat dealt a little dmg. same with rangers, they finally had their pets boosted and due to spvp it got nerfed again.
meanwhile warriors are godmode and the new skill will make them even more unkillable. if anet introduces a skill like the one the rumor is about, then please redesign the entire mesmer class as we are all about confusion and clones and phantasms (and torment was really good). clones die in 1 second or dont even appear, the permablind prevents phantasms and phantasms die pretty fast too. so gg

stemare.2578:

AydenStar.4216:

this game is not a serious PvP game and should have never been advertised or treated as one.

I most agree with your post, but that’s just false.
GW2 has NEVER been advertised as a PvP game by Arenanet.

Many promotional videos about GW2, before the open beta weekends, had developers saying that they wanted to cater to the esport community, that was basically and a clever way of advertising GW2 as a future esport. Hence, many enthusiastic pvp players took this as a sign that GW2 would push to be an esport eventually and that is the reason why many pvp oriented players picked up this game.

Also, Actions speak louder than words.

A prime example is that Anet spend most of their PvP resources in the beginning of 2013 developing the Ranking system, spectator mode, rank/solo 5v5 tournaments, held their first tournament championship during the PAX event, State of the Game podcast focus mainly on sPvP balance. Just because they never admitted to it fully doesn’t mean that they didn’t make teaser statements that were taken seriously by esport enthusiasts.

I am not saying you are wrong, but they did entertain the concept to keep their pvp fan base hopeful.

Blizzard admitted early on that they weren’t going to make PvP a priority over PvE for WoW; whereas, ANet always had plans to focus on both PvE and sPvP with WvW as a casual friendly PvP environment. Furthermore, the bad decisions from Anet to only focus on Conquest modes and limited profession balance has pushed many pvpers away from this game.

I agree for the most part.

SPvP just feels wrong in so many ways. Class balance, game mode, visuals, lack of team-synergy, etc. etc. In the last weeks I played various MOBA games. And after playing them I really cannot bring myself to play SPvP anymore. It just feels boring and pointless. It’s simply not satisfying.

WvW could be nice. It’s special. It has potential. But it also has many issues. And it seems these issues are getting worse with every month. Mostly population imbalances, class balance (warrior, guardian, staff-ele, necro or gtfo), the increasing favoritism of zergs (hello AoE cap), the queue times and the lag, lag, lag.

The only reason why I still have GW2 on my harddisk was WvW. But since the beginning of the league this game mode isn’t playable anymore.

it sucks how they will include things like vulnerability in condition builds, then make it not apply to conditions.
like how a lot of skills will have ‘proc to apply condition on crit’, so you have high crit to give all the conditions, but then conditions don’t benefit from crit, so those conditions are weak.
almost like they want you to diversify and just be meh in everything.

Blackmoon.6837:

Story & Characters
_This specific content is missing a lot of depth and emotion. The voice acting is great,

I agree with your proposition but I don’t agree that the voice acting is great. Some characters here and there are good but by and large its pretty bad.

Dear Anet,

Can you please fix it for me so that my preferred build owns everyone else. i am fed up with people being so inconsiderate as to come up with a build I lack the skill and imagination to counter.

I personally don’t like healing and as my opinions are more important than anyone else’s, you should change the whole system to cater to my needs. God forbid you have a game that requires thought and teamwork.

Your sincerely,
A really bad player.

I am also very disappointed in the direction “support” functions are implemented. I like helping out in groups. But, because I never got any loot worth much when I used my heals or other support talents, I stopped doing it.

When in a large group fighting a world boss, I think support should be equal attention for loot drops as the dps/direct damage does.

I do miss healing which I enjoyed in other games. It was not that easy..you really had to pay attention and being a group healer meant you also had to watch your cleanses, buffs and debuffs for the group as well as the heals.

I was so hoping after reading Anet’s idea of support that I would be able to slide into the support role and add my dps along with cc’s and stuff as we rolled through content. I was extremely disappointed that support became Friday’s red-haired step-child and ignored.

Well, seeing as the “add said to medium or low” and all the server pops I see are “high, very high, of full” then what medium server would there be? Seemed like more of a troll sale then a real one.

[SUGGESTION]

Calculate server rewards based on population!! Servers with a very low WvW population get better rewards based on their score.

For example:
Vabbi has about 1/2 the numbers of the servers WSR and FoW.
Though we still have a score of 152.000, compared to WSR 167.000 and FoW 196.000.
Consequently the players on Vabbi have put in a lot of effort to fight back and get such a score. Reward that!

I agree the bosses should have light and medium attacks but bringing in the tank/healer/dps bs from other games is just a dumb idea. This is a skill based game, having 1 person be super tanky and 1 person super healing a near unkillable tank is not the answer to making this game better. Imo, it would make this game like all other crappy mmos an take any skill out of the gameplay.

If you really want to find a way to make the game better, look for ways to make both ranged and melee mechanics a must for a fight, find ways to make condition builds shine, make bosses target highest threats first instead of the tankiest.

If a party is all going melee, the boss starts kiting away and uses movement conditions. If the party is all ranged, the boss uses leap attacks to catch the kiting players and use anti-projectile skills. If the team is using both, the boss can’t shut everybody down. The answer is boss mechanics, not nerfing all classes so they become just like another wow-clone game.

Kaaboose.3897:

Sadly with the current system there isn’t much call for it as players are either getting hit for no damage or so much that healing won’t make a differnce.

Seeing exactly this with the Southsun defense events. L84 young karka eat through a full necro DS and health bar in a couple of blows (and that is not accounting for their tail needle spam), and the event spawns masses of them basically on top of you.

The game is overloaded with dodge or die attacks right now.

DevonCarver.5370:

Orion is correct, you will need to have done enough damage to the gate to get credit for the achievement.

So now it’s not only next to impossible to tag anywhere nearly as well in a large scale fight as a mesmer to get bags/kills, you cant even get a basic achievement against an inanimate object….

So I was playing WvW again and as soon as I got my keep it was skill lagging so badly already. There was not one person around me at all or anyone actually around the entire area. This lag has gotten out of control where WvW is not even playable.

I contacted support about the issue and look at the “I am going to play it off” excuse I got.

Me: Firstly I like the game you guys did a great job. But WvW performance sucks as the subject suggests. I know for a fact its not my computer. I have a really good pc. It consists of an Intel SSD, 16GB Memory, 2 7970’s in Crossfire, and an Intel 2600K that is overclocked to 4.8 Ghz. I ran Prime 95 for a week straight without an stability issues on my computer. My computer is plenty fast enough to run this game.

Issue I have and absolutely everyone in WvW has is when there is a zerg anywhere around the area, you can not use any skills because they won’t activate. Or it takes about five seconds for one skill to activate. Even if I turn all settings in the game on low, this problem still persists. This game has been now out for over a year and this problem has always been there since release day. I would have thought by now Arena.net would have fixed this issue by adding extra infrastructure to their networks or something within the game code itself. This is very frustrating and gets you killed all the time. Why doesn’t Arena.net address this issue already. Or come out and say WvW performance sucks to give everyone peace of mind that Arena.net acknowledges this problem.

Them: Hello Jeff,

Thank you for contacting the Guild Wars 2 Support Team.

The lag caused by WvW is because we have too many players in WvW in one area. This sadly affect game play somewhat. The solution we implemented for this is Culling, where you only see a part of the battle to not overload the Internet connection.

For more information on culling please go to the following site:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Culling

I love how they try to blame it on culling. When I skill lag there is not even anyone around half the time and if there is, it is only a few people. Plus I tried turning culling down to minimum setting for kittens and it didn’t do anything, but I already knew that. At first this skill lagging would happen frequently when anytime there was a zerg somewhere around but they were completely out of sight. But now it has gotten worse. There doesn’t have to be anyone around now for it to happen.

Obsidian.1328:

^

Which is why they need a new map or two in tandem with reducing map cap.

Yep which is why I believe they will be reducing the map caps (to what extent: who knows) once the “queue maps” are released.

The biggest issue is that when they established their “baseline” for this game to operate in terms of WvW, it did not take into account 3 servers pooling all of their players on the map into 1 spot in 1 huge fight. (100% of the map in a 1v1v1) And it really should have, or the worse reality was that the number-cap was so low (if they did take 100% of the map population fighting each other into account) when they realized it: skill lag was a better option at the time.

When you design a system with limits, you have to take into account the worst case scenarios, (in this case the largest server load) you could possibly have to set those “limits” (in this case: map caps).

Think about it for a second, when do you get skill lag? Usually the larger fights involving all 3 servers or 2 servers with large amounts of people. So if you get skill lag in a 30v30v30 (90 players) then the cap would have likely had to been lower than 30 players per server, in which case skill lag would have obviously been a better (but still not good) decision to live with.
(All of those numbers are just pulled from thin air, there are too many variables to be assigned to get a true hard number on actual combatants it takes to create skill lag 100% of the time I would guess.)

Zephyrus.9680:

luckywaldo.6089:

Zylonite.5913:

It is a core latency problem in distributed system and latency between network nodes and the client/server side.

Elaborate, please.

He’s basically saying that it’s a technical limitation with CPU power/bandwidth. It’s certainly not limited to GW2. And it’s more because cpu processes/data transfer increases logarithmically, not linearly, with the number of players in a battle.

In short, servers aren’t fast enough in general for that kind of real time process. So realistically, if you want less skill lag, you have to reduce something else like AoE cap or player limits in maps.

And therein lies the problem. If they cannot solve the skill lag problem via engine optimization or throwing more hardware at it, then they have to reduce the map caps. The game needs be able to handle close to worst case scenarios, which is every player, from all three servers, in one place, all attacking each other. If it doesn’t, then the number of players needs to be reduced to the point where it does or close to it. However, reduced map caps will increase queues, which are broken and are definitely not FIFO, and to make things worse, there is no report of estimated wait time which is absolutely necessary. They can’t reduce the caps until they fix the queues, and if they do, it would ultimately break up some of the larger server communities.

All in all it’s a crappy situation with no easy solutions.