Guild Wars 2

John i dont think it is in your best interest to jest peoples at this particular point in time.

John Smith.4610:

InfinitytheSoulWarden.5963:

if you look at the world through the cold cynical eyes of economics

You rang?

Good one, but now’s really not the time I think.

1. They did a LOT of extensive testing and research on what players in China would be receptive too and wanted in an MMO.
2. They used this info to alter the existing GW2 game “starting experience” for the China release.
3. They introduced the TRAIT changes to NA/EU last feature pack.
4. They released in China.
5. They realized the PitA it was to maintain 2 code sets (maybe they knew this all along and realized later the extra resources it took).
6. Decided to consolidate the 2 code bases (to make it easier, less expensive?)
7. Attempted to present the Chinesse changes to the NA/EU players as a “fresh start” (best thing since sliced bread!).
8. Introduced all the changes (except the Trait changes they made BEFORE the China release).
9. Do not appear to be coping with all the criticism in a very good manner….

Note that the fact that they introduced the TRAIT changes BEFORE the China release tells me they had this “consolidation” planned all along and just didn’t want to dump all the leveling changes on us at one time.

I’m guessing they now realize this possibly could have been handled differently / better, but since most of these changes are being looked upon by a good number of players as a fully dressed feces sandwich, I’m not sure how.

I understand why they did it however it removed quite a few cool activities. They were fun to do. They were engaging and partly what made some areas unique. A lot of the bundles in the beginning areas is what added the flavor to the races and helped you immerse yourself into the race.

I think the proper thing to do is have the compass guide players to the hearts and not show the heart on the UI until they have talked to the heart vendor and received their instructions. This would have got rid of a lot of confusion not only on the bundles themselves and why your skills suddenly changed. But it would be a perfect time to explain more the mechanics of a heart.

Kain Francois.4328:

To be fair, Golem Chess is kinda annoying as a heart.

I do think it’s a cool minigame, but it really shouldn’t be the first heart.

It should have been moved. Not removed. Move one or two to rata sum. It was a fun minigame.

It absolutely blows my mind how much content they are willing to remove and the pace at which they do it, compared to the pace of content addition and the size of that added content.

Why the kitten are you spending your time taking away things? Make a Baby’s First Dungeon instance and put that in for the drooling idiots you think you need to cater to, don’t take away things that baffle those same idiots.

“Hmm, rates of high school graduation are dropping! Let’s extend pre-school by 5 years, that should fix things.”

One thing that would help with misinformation/misunderstanding would be if we could have an official list of the changes that were actually intended. The patch notes lack detail and I can’t find much in the way of detail other than trawling through staff responses one by one. This means that people are relying on third party videos and posts to give details when the people playing don’t know if what they’re reporting is intended or a bug.

naughteblonde.7194:

One thing that would help with misinformation/misunderstanding would be if we could have an official list of the changes that were actually intended. The patch notes lack detail and I can’t find much in the way of detail other than trawling through staff responses one by one. This means that people are relying on third party videos and posts to give details when the people playing don’t know if what they’re reporting is intended or a bug.

Oh, they’re probably still trying to work out which changes they want us to think were unintended. After so much time spent testing and testing and testing, things can get a little confusing.

IndigoSundown.5419:

I doubt very much that the complaints of players who left the game after a very short time playing centered on rewards, at least the way you mean them.

A good chunk of my friends stopped playing around Lv.15-40. They felt like they didn’t get rewards early on. They asked, so I honestly answered how it functions at end-game. You are restricted to getting rewards from encounters once per day, with it resetting at 2 a.m. CET, and you are honestly mostly looking at greens and blues, with one guaranteed better reward.

When they asked about expansions, I explained how the Living Story worked (at the time), how it’s a good chunk of content churned out, but how it disappears and are gone. They liked the idea of frequent content updates, but not that it went away and couldn’t be played again. They also asked about the rewards from them, and I showcased a lot of the rewards I had gotten. Some of them they liked, most they discarded as stuff they didn’t care much for.

They complained about the Achievement Point rewards, how the weapon skins were just horrible. They saw the prices of precursors after seeing my collection of Legendary weapons, and were simply discouraged at even thinking about the idea of getting those.

Some I convinced to stay a bit longer, to give it a bit more time, but once they got to dungeons and felt the rewards being terrible, they just handed in the towel. In the broad picture, they looked at rewards and the content available, and just stopped, moving back to other MMO games. I’m about the only player left out of my circle of friends, who is still playing (not counting friends I’ve gotten through playing this specific game, that are perhaps still playing, although a lot has recently quit due to lack of content updates in areas such as World vs. World).

I still enjoy the game, but understand how the game can feel unrewarding. I perhaps have a extra bit of love for the game, because I played Guild Wars. It could be that which is keeping me around, the nostalgia. Although if they’re planning to destroy all evidence of the previous game, such as Old Lion’s Arch under the waters of Lion’s Arch.. I dunno, stuff like that really got me annoyed. (As a side-note: Why in the world did you destroy that? It was my first “Oh my gawd! Skweeee— It’s Lion’s Arch! I know this place! Wooooooo~ excitement!” in Guild Wars 2, and now it’s obliterated because you couldn’t put that darn machine a bit further to the other side of the map. You destroyed a landmark people can recognize from the old game and get excited over. Just.. why?)

Everyone has said that the combat was fun though. It just wasn’t rewarding, nor did it seem like it would get any more rewarding. Legit concerns which are somewhat true.

Gamers aren’t some unintelligent drivel that are unable to get information about how things are going to turn out later on. They may start to feel a certain way early on, maybe around Lv.15? Where are my rewards? Does my rewards get better later on? How much is a precursor, these legendaries look awesome. What content is there to do? They’ll ask fellow gamers, friends or strangers, they’ll read articles, forum posts, comments on websites about the game. They’ll watch videos on YouTube, they’ll look at streams over at Twitch. They are able to get the information, and will be able to make up their minds on if they find this to be worth their time. Sadly, for me, my friends went with “Why bother?” and quit. They just didn’t see the reason in leveling to end-game when there were practically no end-game for them to be had. There weren’t any rewards and the content available wasn’t really all that much to shout hoorah over. At least for them.

Recently I’m losing more and more of my in-game GW2 friends who enjoy WvW as their main venue, to other games. There’s hardly been any updates to WvW over the course of two years. I mean more in the sense of freshness, new maps. We got Edge of the Mists, but it’s.. a PvE map. At least it’s turned into one, with it not being a part of the match-ups. They’ve always felt their rewards are rather.. meager. And there not really being a incentive to win. Why bother? What do you get? Pride? What is pride going to get you in the long run of playing a video game? You want rewards. It all boils down to rewards.

I wonder if their interviews with players who quit, actually revealed how displeased mostly everyone is with the rewards in this game. Blues and Greens, are not rewarding. On top of that, we are prevented from doing something more than once in a 24-hour period, if we want any type of reward out of anyways, or rather the chance at a decent reward. There’s a distinct lack of rewards for harder encounters as well. Nobody really does Tequatl after it was made more challenging. And don’t get anyone started on the Triple Trouble of wurms, as practically nobody does that anymore at all. It’s encounters designed wrong, encounters who requires way too many players and that takes far too long a time to complete over any other world event that may be up at the time. At least there are a few unique drops in these encounters, but you can’t sell Ascended, nor do they look good, so the interest is dampened. They’re also extremely static. Take Shatterer as an example of how terrible most of these encounters really are; we are all, grouped up on its right hand side, with it pouncing and attacking straight ahead. It pays no attention to the hundred-man army killing it. It’s not dynamic, and it isn’t engaging. It’s ridiculous. Why isn’t it turning around, attacking us at its side? Why doesn’t it fly and land somewhere else nearby? Why is it so blatantly scripted? (That’s not to say you should kill off anyone doing anything by making it too complicated, or too difficult, but at least make it fun, and put some fun rewards in all these encounters who are practically Guild Wars 2’s version of raiding.)

This is where ArenaNet needs to work on things. Rewards. Not trying to make leveling into a reward by slowly unlocking things. Pretty much nobody has ever enjoyed leveling in a game because it unlocked more and more skills, or the ability to dye something… They endure it because they want to reach the highest level and expect the fun to be there, the end-game. I will give ArenaNet the compliment again of saying this was the first MMO game in which I found leveling to not be a drag, I actually really enjoyed it. But I never felt rewarded and I still don’t to this day. I got blues and greens, and this is what I mostly get to this day. Fun.. There’s also an excessive amount of Account Bound things that are either worth a few silver to a vendor and/or that I can’t even salvage. They take up space, so you’re given the choice of deleting your reward or simply having it take up space. I’ll ask as I have before, who wants to delete their reward, for nothing. Drag it out of their inventory, click confirm and poof, it’s gone. That is not rewarding, that’s discouraging. And who wants to sell their top tier items for a silver.. a silver! If it was because players deemed their value to be a silver, that’s different, over the game saying you can’t even try sell them to other players and the vendors are willing to grant you a measly silver for it, that’s just.. annoying. It doesn’t feel rewarding.

Again, Karma. Used to feel rewarding, you could buy Exotics, armor as you leveled up, you could salvage and vendor these things. Then we have one incident, of some group of lame players exploiting one little mistake you make with the cost of some Karma reward. And you go bonkers and make it impossible to sell and salvage them. Why is it that you have kept it like this for nearly two years now. Why is this not “fixed” yet? I have not purchased Karma gear as I leveled up since that day. I don’t like destroying my rewards with nothing in return.

Also, why do we have a single sPvP map with a new game mode added? One TDM map. One! Why is the Borderlands of World vs. World still a copy-paste. We have two maps, Eternal Battlegrounds and Borderlands. Edge of the Mist was and is a great map, but it’s not included in the matchup, so that hardly counts. It’s not like players PvP there anyways.. they run in circles avoiding each other to farm it like a PvE map. Why do we have only two new PvE maps (three if you count EotM), which aren’t even the size of the original maps, combined, added over the course of two years. You have a massive world to take from. It exists in Guild Wars: Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North. We get one map that’s barely used, Southsun Cove, and one that is, well actually quite awesome, Dry Top, but that’s it though.

Over the course of two years, you have given us content, I’m not saying you haven’t. But where is all the content from the Living Story, Season 1. It’s gone, poof, it’s nowhere. You haven’t expanded your game. There’s hardly more content for a new player today, than there was a year ago. There is the problem. The game is stalling, it’s not rewarding, and you can only have fun for so long with the same toys provided to you. Player retention comes with rewards and new things to do. Players play for rewards. “Fun” is only rewarding for so long.

zenleto.6179:

Broom.2561:

cesmode.4257:

Colin.. No one asked for the leveling and new player experience to be changed. I can’t remember anyone complaining that it is bad. Like a broken record here, “if it aint broke don’t fix it”. You could have invested those resources on other things, like dungeons?? Or making open world PVE / DE more enjoyable and rewarding?

I seriousl’y don’t understand your decision making here. It makes no sense and is a clear example of the disconnect that you have with the playerbase. Again, no one asked for this and no one complained about it.

Personally, I’ve always said that the new player experience and leveling experience is second to none in Guild Wars 2. It is the best part of the game, because lets face it…GW2 is not known for it’s awesome level cap experience.

You need to admit that you did a wrong here… we didnt want this. Its confusing and makes no sense.

Heck, how about making it so newbies aren’t automatically refused for dungeons or world boss events their own level in favor of 80s, because newbies just don’t have the skills / DPS. Or make it so that level 80s with full world completion aren’t able to run through a lowbie zone oneshotting all the mobs while you as a lowbie can’t even get a hit in to get event credit? Those are the things I would consider discouraging as a new player (and even on a veteran player playing a low level alt).

These are player based issues. People are pricks. In the lower maps people are more than capable of adjusting their play to suit the area but they don’t. I’ve caught myself doing this, and I’m only on top of it because a year ago a guy I was doing the booze escort with in Wayfarer let me know he was waiting for me to get the first hit on things. It really got me thinking.

Its up to players, not the nanny.

Actually, this IS a design flaw, not a player flaw. Every developer knows there are people out there who enjoy spoiling other players’ fun. The trick is making it kitten the spoilers. And the downscaling system GW2 employs makes it easy. A max level does SO much more damage than a low level player in a low level zone, it’s not even remotely funny. And yes, I have actually tested this with 80 and low level of the same class in the same zone. It’s just plain ridiculous. A level 80 ranger can run into a cave full of lvl 3 Sons of Jormag, kill 10+ of them in seconds and hardly take any damage. A level 3 ranger will pretty certainly die in seconds before they’re even in the cave.

Having played games with downscaling before, I can flat out guarantee you that it is quite possible to do WAY better than this, making it so that if you downscale, you are actually on a par with the low levels for which the zone/mission/boss was originally intended.

I shall also drop a quick thanks to the devs. I rarely ever post on the offical forums but I want to say that this is the type of dev communication that we desperately need more of. And with more I don’t mean just more often. More openness about why changes was made will allow us to, if not agree with, at least understand your point of view.

That being said I am still severely disappointed with this feature pack, I dislike the majority of the new features and couldn’t give a kitten about the rest of them personally. I think you are taking the game in a bad direction both for yourself and your long time fans, where you seem to put more emphasize on cheap skinner box psychology to retain players rather then focusing on what’s actually fun for your current players.

To a certain degree I can understand this, retaining new players is important for your buisness but like many others I also feel like after 2 years if the veteran players are not a priority for you guys then perhaps I will move on. This feature pack shows you’re not really interested in keeping me as a player, but would rather churn me out and get fresh meat for the grinder. If this patch had come a year ago it could have been understandable, but focusing on brand new players in a 2 year old game where there has been little real end game content ever added to the game just goes to show how much interest you guys actually have in retaining those players who stuck with you for so long already. This makes me sad. Ask yourselfs, what was the last real endgame PvE content you added to the game? Dungeons are a joke for experienced players, even fractals lvl 49 are easy (And still has bad rewards for the effort spent on them). Where is the truly challenging end game content for your hardcore players? There is none. Never was, and in 2 years you haven’t thought to add any. But for new players you completely revamp the leveling system at this point in the games life span.

To quote a favorite tv-show of mine. “Because our friendship is fundamentally asymmetrical. I clearly like you more than you like me.”

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

MentalFS.2589:

I just started chapter 8 before the patch. Since some steps were moved to chapter 7, am I going to skip them?

No, the story script will recognize that you’re on Ch8 but did not complete the steps that moved to Ch7, and they will occur where they used to in Ch8.

Can you explain to us how this isn’t confusing and working well? You seem to be dodging that with “working as intended”

Explain how having Trehearne console you on Tonn’s death and the widows grief isn’t totally confusing to new players when the entire arch was taken out

Or how being stopped by Sayeh casually before Trehearne has even introduced you to her isn’t confusing

The story wasn’t broken before, now it’s COMPLETELY ruined and confusing. All we’re asking is if we can have the story back to when it ran smoothly if time isn’t going to be put into making it run smoothly with this needless change. I’ve several friends and a sister that just started playing the game and haven’t hit 70 yet (thank the gods) and I’d feel devastated if they missed out on what was a great story and one of the reasons I loved this game so much

Wait wait wait…
I had 2 left. 2 to finish my PS.
I’m now in Chpt 7?
And it’s lovely that the Wiki has been altered, and that any trace of the original PS arc has been obliterated. I appreciate that. Really. You can throw any amount of sarcasm you like into that statement. It won’t hold a candle to the amount of true disappointment and honest hostility I’m feeling right now.
Completing my PS has been put on hold due to real life. My best friend has received his Master’s degree and is finally settled in his new job. We have been awaiting the time to finally finish the PS arc we started over a year ago.
And now this. This “re-work” of the PS system that wasn’t broken to begin with, that in all of the time I’ve spent on the forums I’ve never seen any complaints about (at least about continuity).
My character’s life has been re-written, and now placed “back in time” so far it will take us a month (or more) to dig our way back to the place we were when he started school last year.
2 quests away, and now this.
I am so angry I’m not sure I will play a PS on any character I have ever again.
You can reprimand me, delete my post, I really don’t care. You need to know how upset this makes me, as a member of your player base, to cut and paste and jigsaw the game back and forth with zero warning, zero reasoning.
I spend time and money personally to facilitate your game, have brought in 7 additional game accounts by word of mouth, and I feel like I’ve been betrayed with your new game design.

I am honestly completely befuddled at who made the decision to cut this part of the story and needlessly reorganise the Orr plot. I mean… why? Did whoever make that decision not have any grasp on the concept that stories tend to have a logical progression of events and plot points? The whole idea of a story is that you follow it from beginning to end and because of that you get an enriching experience that makes chronological sense.

It should have been obvious to anyone at ArenaNet that mercilessly and carelessly rearranging the key plot points of the personal story will result in continuity errors and broken pacing… but they did it anyway.

This is worse than what George Lucas did with Star Wars. At least he didn’t have the Death Star get blown up before Luke meets Han Solo.

Blackjacks.9856:

You’ve lost the faith of long time customers and they are spreading the word to your new ones.

You dun goofed.

+100
Not even advertising this game to people anymore. Even friends in the game store, who know I buy a lot of their gem stock, are surprised I’m leaving the game, until I explained why. Now they’re advising me to try Destiny, ArchAge and The Secret world.

Here’s a real fact for you I don’t think your cooperation has processed yet. There’s more of us than there are of you and our collective brain power is quantitatively larger than yours. We are playing your game. We are observing the facts. We’re informing you of the facts. You are choosing to ignore them.

MatthewMedina.5419:

I want to clarify one point I’ve been seeing expressed. This is one type of retention. There’s another type of retention where new players try the game and churn out before they even get to the point where they’re seeing the potential the game has to offer. Yes, a certain amount of people will just do that; they’ll log in to see what it’s about, have their curiosity satisfied, and move on. But we were seeing a lot of places where people who would otherwise have become active users were churning out prematurely because of the issues that we’re addressing with the NPE.

As Colin stated above, we can’t talk in detail about the ongoing development to drive retention for our veteran players, but I just wanted to make the point that the NPE was deliberately designed to address the early game retention issues, and ensure that Guild Wars 2 can benefit from a strong and steady influx of new players into the game.

Oh Mathew, if you thought people were turned off by the leveling system that got universal praise from critics and fans alike. I beg to differ. Remember when Colin talked about how dynamic combat would be where you would not rely on auto attacks most of the time (swing a sword again and again). That still happens. Or when dynamic event were suppose to ever changing. Guess how fast those chain quest regurgitate after you just completed them? Or if all progress would stops because they are still buggy.

How about all the enemies who were built to be HP sponges that pose no threat. Or better yet the hard content that was upped by artificial tacky difficulty content (health sponge and timer related). Furthermore quite of few of these events and hearts provided crud for rewards. Keep everything to a universal boring method, and never spicing it up with different dynamic rewards. You know like certain unique material/skin rewards are guaranteed (not RNG) rewarded to those who complete certain events.

The AI constantly fight against itself to understand it’s own environment (instead of taking advantage of it). Let’s not forget about all those collisions environment issues that instead of fixing you made it harder to range the target. However you can still attack certain said targets by standing on a 5 foot boulder with certain weapons, but they can’t attack you. Also how about that stubborn policy Arena Net has about the Ranger pet about not being able to be stowed permeability (with all of these AI problems). At least give them that until the rest of this mess is cleared up.

The lack diversity in game modes for PvP and that of the different location for WvW (not the same borderland copy & pasted two more times over). As of a matter of fact some those players left because it took you so long to fix things like the trading post or even getting out the looking for group tool. Since they should have been done a few months after the release. Or better yet not to release the game until it was done; which even include that Zhaitan fight. Which was stated by CJ was rushed for the release of the game. Guess how many new people simply skipped through to the end with YouTube, just to see that anticlimactic fight that has been forever immortalize on the internet now. It does not help that I can say, “it’s still like that two years latter.”

I could go on about the real problems, but I would digress for a long time. The leveling system honestly was not one of them. It feels like all that was done to give the excuse there was a problem with the leveling system, because how well the game was received in China (compared to other countries). So it was just copy and pasted to us. Instead of any major tweaking whatsoever. Also Colin please stop saying “we release or talk about thing when we believe they are (close to being) ready.” Since this was clearly one of many updates that clearly was not ready to be released. It’s half finished and buggy. Which is something you even state yourself about this refurbished leveling system. It just makes you look like a hypocrite.

King Slacker.1843:

I think the fundamental issue is ANet went 100% after new player metrics with blinders on. They completely ignored retaining current players. No common sense was applied.

I can’t argue with that.

I think if Anet doesn’t fix their fundamental issues, the game is doomed anyways. This strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning.

No. The game had a lot going for it a launch, especially after several months after they had reduced the number of horrendous bugs that were in the launch version. It’s not that Anet’s strategy was doomed from the beginning. It’s that their strategy failed from poor planning or implementation, in this case both.

Arenanet seemed to want to do a lot with the Living Story, but it’s still hardly picking up steam even after limping along so many times in the past. Either through poor writing or poor execution, LS has just failed to interest people with the exception of particular patches which were particularly interesting or (more often than not) had in-game rewards or mechanics which were worth playing while they were there. Even now, the revamped questing UI and the story achievement system have done more for Living Story than the actual STORY.

Living Story wasn’t inherently doomed. It just didn’t live up to the goals at some part of the process, and the whole story suffered as a result since it never really recovered from its shortfalls.

This recent patch is different. Rather than failing to branch out into a new area that Anet’s been dreaming of, they are changing the existing game that we are already playing into one that many players including myself find less fun. This is why you see so much backlash. If something like Living Story, Super Adventure Box, or some similar project fails: it only really affects that project and players who were interested in that content. Other players only complain because that time and resources could have been spent on something else. But when you go and change the entire leveling system and it fails and it’s a buggy unbalanced mess, that affects everyone who is not exclusively playing level 80 content. It’s not one of those “Oh I don’t like to fix sign posts, this patch sucks” kind of problems. It is a larger and more pressing issue that affects more players in more ways. It doesn’t help that a lot of these changes are unpopular in the first place….

ColinJohanson.2394:

Anyway as for level 80 this is a post about new player experience specifically, not level 80 stuff. There is a great CDI going on right now about guilds in (and more coming soon) where you can help give feedback on what you’d like to see the level 80 guild experience be in particular!

Most of the feedback is from people who have at least one level 80 character and are making alts, or rather not making them anymore due to the “new player experience”. There needs to be a different leveling system for veteran players. You guys are skirting around this distinctive feedback, in which many people are asking or requesting whether this will remain just for truly new players or is this kind of gating something veterans have to deal with every time they want to make an alt.

ColinJohanson.2394:

- There is misinformation…

this does not negate the MANY things in the patch that actually are true and far more egregious than that. and dodging, imo, should be the FIRST thing you teach new players as it is so integral to survival same with the downed state. and why there are not any downed state skills/elite skills that players can actually read and become acquainted with OUTSIDE of the actual state in the skills panel is beyond me.

- There are some things happening at the wrong levels…

why you guys would want new players to do dungeons without their full compliment of at least all their skills (because the current trait unlocking system is so…aaaah) is beyond me

- Not all of these changes were made as ways to teach the game, some of them are to provide a better sense of pacing, reward and progression…

this further confines new players ability to play the game they want to and instead the way you deem then able to. that is one issue many are having with these changes; they fundamentally change the way players play the game and when i tell someone new to “just do whatever you feel like to progress”, that does NOT hold true under this current system. there should be an opt-in/out selection during character creation because if you don’t put one in all you are doing is reducing the freedom of choice of players and not as you hope increasing their fun and excitment, because people play and enjoy content differently.

With the addition of the new rewards…

this could end up backfiring big time as if you level very fast early on say 1 level every 5 mins and then get to 20 and start leveling at one level per hour that could make people feel that the game progression has now become very sluggish all of a sudden and not wish to continue.

- In general…

if the development cycle was faster, more transparent, was more robust and lead to more tangible results, you might have a point. but it seems like you are catering to a non-existent crowd atm and not your current player-base. the veteran layers want many things to keep them entertained from rolling new alts, to new dungeons, to new WvW mechanics, new tPvP game-modes and better and MUCH more frequent balancing. now had we received or known that immediately after we would be getting the things we want, there probably would not be this backlash (which can be seen as being more about the general dismissive nature of development towards veteran players based on what is being focused on and what is being developed now). the ANet of today cannot walk and chew gum at the same time from what you have admitted you are not working on for veteran players in the foreseeable future.

- Over a years worth of testing…

i hope your metrics will also show you why veteran players stop playing and don’t return. many of us were waiting for the patch thinking that it’s been 6 months, surely ANet have not forgotten about us. but with very little new and fulling engaging long-term content (or in the case of a this feature patch; the ability to enjoy existing content) coupled with no new dungeons, no new changes to the structure and mechanics of WvW, not even any new Marionette type encounters from the living story, no new weapons, races, etc how long can we veteran players be retained at this rate?

- Finally, I want to add that a few things (hello traits!)…

it’s been 6 months already, you cannot expect people to keep waiting forever.

I can play my personal story once I exited the starting dungeon area in the old system. Now I have to grind all the way to level 10. That’s not " the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time " Colin.

Vayne.8563:

There were times in the story your character would be required to act. Save this person. Save the whatever. Then you find, oh wait…I’m underleveled. I can’t save that person.

I"m literally going to have to stop saving this person, go help a farmer or whatever, level up and THEN go help this person. That to me was far more immersion breaking than doing the entire story segment at one time.

Then you wait until your level is high enough to all the quests at once. Problem solved. You always had this option. But now we’re forced to accomodate to a butchered questing system that forces me to backtrack into the previous zone to do the personal story missions.

Once I reach kessex hills, I have to go back to do the quests in friggin shaemoor village. Once I’m gendarran fields I do the circus quest in kessex etc etc..

The challenge was to create a personal story that tied into the leveling experience of the zone. Incorporate it organically with the flow of the zone. That was the challenge. And guess what? They succeeded at doing that. But not anymore. Now they butchered it for no reason.

I was frustrated with the population of the servers before, but now it’s insane. My complaint isn’t actually with the number of players around, but now it’s impossible to fail events. Most players come in with a default setting that events are quests to be completed and can not be deterred from this mindset. I have 2 goals:

1) The events tell a story, even when they are failed. There are so many events in this game that trigger off a previous event failing that can no longer be experienced. I like to immerse myself in the story and play every event for success and failure to take part in the full lore of the area.

2) Along with many other generous players, I enjoy adding to the GW2 wiki. My biggest endeavor is to help with the completion of the documentation of every event in the game. This task has become impossible as I can’t access those events triggered by failure.

Before the Megaservers, one could guest onto a smaller server to avoid these kinds of problems. I recognize that I am in a minority, but is there anything that can be done to allow players to access a dying or closing Megaserver so that players like myself can enjoy every aspect of this game?

As the population on a map changes over time, the megaserver system sometimes needs to close certain copies of that map. It does that by ceasing to add new players to that map (unless they intentionally join to be with their party) and by waiting until that map copy is empty to finally close it. This has occasionally created an odd experience for players left in the map, who will see fewer and fewer companions.
With the September 2014 Feature Pack, we’re introducing a new mechanism to solve this problem. When certain copies of a map need to be closed, the players on those copies will be notified and will have the option to be moved to a different map copy right away. This will help you make sure that there are always allies by your side, and it’ll help us more efficiently manage maps—which in turn makes everyone’s experience better. If you choose to volunteer to move to a new map, you’ll even get a reward in the form of a new effect, the Volunteer’s Blessing, which increases movement speed by 15%, karma gain by 5%, and experience from kills by 10% for 10 minutes.

I guess they noticed players deliberately waiting in a map for the zerg to leave so they could get a more comfortably populated zone to play in, and are now bribing them to leave asap

Well of course RPers do not take a major percentage in this game. ANet did one heck of a good job chasing them away. The last good thing they did specificly for the RP community was enabling walking animation for players. And that happened between beta weekend tests.

People can take a hint when you undermine (or just obliviously ignore the consequences of some changes to their collective preferences and priorities) their playstyle at every second update.

Incidently both TC and PS, the two unofficial RP servers were high population servers. Not all who were native to these servers were roleplayers. I also met a few who did not even know what roleplaying meant. But on TC and PS the majority were roleplayers. I wont try percentages though, as that appearently causes issues of “facts” and “making up numbers”.

Now though, technically every server has 100% of its population as WvW players, since technically that is the only place where the term “server” actually has any meaning left.

Oh, there is supposedly some algorythm that takes home servers into account when sorting people, but who believes that? Not in Europe we don’t. We are sinners against faith or something, because when we are not living the curse of the Tower of Babel, we are in silent limbo fearfull of uttering a word other than the bare-basic instructions of some brave commanders who just say the time and place of some events.

Seriously. I have never seen such silence in map and say chat. But the maps are full of people. Like sophisticated bots. Only i cant sit on a high perch and report them one by one (that was bloody good fun after release), because supposedly they are real.
Oh well. Gotta settle for the gold sellers.

I’d just like to point out that if Anet gave a flying kitten about our feedback, this arguing would have caused the thread to have been locked by now!

ANet? Are you listening? Are you listening? We’re slowly figuring this thing out for you. Will you implement it if we come to some sort of accord? (THIS is where the Developers are supposed to return to the forums and say “You are learning, Grasshopper!”)