Guild Wars 2

It’s annoying as hell but it’s a viable and clever tactic. Rather than everyone following the commander in the omniblob, it encourages single players to lose out on personal reward for the greater good of the server. Tap keep, slow down enemy reinforcements from getting back to SMC or bay/hills.

As of 3/16/2017 none as all major T1 guilds transfered and are ’’trolling’’ down a tier or 2 making matters worst. I would sit and wait before joining / transfering anywhere!

Yes. I happen to have The Hunter sitting in my bank and I just used it to unlock the skin.

Silly arguments about legality and debates about whether or not meters belong in the game at all aside -

If a group or leader makes it clear they are using a tool that evaluates the group and you individually up front, then it is on the player to decide if they want to join that group.

If a leader or any other member uses a tool like this and chooses not to tell you about it until they want to criticize, then they are a toxic troll and you should leave the group and make a note not to run with them in the future. Enough people do this in Pugs and the people doing this will quickly find themselves with no one to play with.

Basically, as long as people are open about the use of these tools up front, I dont see an issue.

Maybe some industrious player could come up with a tool that told players when other players were using these tools. That would be a nice fix, imo.

or, possibly, came up with a tool that somehow blocked or misrepresented your personal data in such a way as to invalidate the use of such tools directed at you (but not other players) – as a way to combat the trolls using the tool without saying anything.

Just as another perspective, let’s assume that the toxic groups aren’t likely to ever fall off ever, that’s pretty natural when you have so many players of different personalities trying to mesh in this game.

Regardless of whether DPS meters were involved, these groups would find any excuse, LIs, Achievement points, or simple guesswork to kick good and bad players from their squads. A DPS meter is just another measure that they can try to determine the fault in their squad, and if they were not going to be using a DPS meter they would still inappropriately kick players out of their groups.

Is that a fair assessment of a disadvantage of the DPS meter? Giving these toxic groups just another measure to try to figure out why their group is failing? Because even without a meter, they would aimlessly kick otherwise, there’s no way they wouldn’t just keep going.

That all being said, what does a DPS meter do that can acts as a positive for it? Well, interested players and squads can use it as a tool to teach and improve. It has a great use towards making raid groups more effective, and somewhat friendly competitive guilds might race on the DPS against a boss they regularly fight weekly. The DPS meter acts as another layer towards improving an aspect of End-Game PvE.

Both the flat positive and negatives aside above, we have a bit of gray area that needs to be brought up. I am more than certain that there are raid groups using this tool constructively, but have a member, regardless of being an old friend or a stranger, who just isn’t pulling the DPS they need to succeed, and absolutely refuses to improve.

This was able to be figured out from the DPS meter showing the DPS, and this person just can’t, or refuses to improve their damage and it is impacting the group’s performance. Does the raid group become toxic if they decide to kick this player from the group? I have my own thoughts about this but I want to hear from you guys first.

There’s a lot of other variations and variables involved in this, but I am of the standpoint that for Guild Wars 2, a DPS meter is more productive than destructive. Compared to any other Raiding MMO out there right now, I am seeing more proactive training groups and people just willing to take absolute strangers everyday than anywhere else. That might be because of how Raids are handled, they aren’t really the big focus of the game, but they are A focus that anyone can participate in if they want to spend the time to do so.

Khyan.7039:

OriOri.8724:

Khyan.7039:

@Cynz.9437 Thank you but I already did everything CM related.

And yes, I am serious. The enrage is forgiving most of the time on some encounters. I should add also, there is a lot of flaws in the design of some raid bosses, but most of the time it’s like bugs or things not intented by the Raid team.

o.0

“I want raids to be harder”

Few comments down

“I don’t want to do the CM anymore”

I don’t get it. I never said anything like these. Please, if you want to provide an answer, avoid creating wrong statements. It’s a bit ridiculous. Nor my initial post and so on said I want harder things or I will not play cm anymore. If you have issue with reading, I’m afraid I can’t do anything.

Your initial post complains about enrage mechanics not being punishing enough, and you complain about people being able to make the fights too easy by ignoring mechanics. You also directly tie “better” enrage mechanics with more difficult content. If you didn’t want to ask for raids to be made more difficult, then you shouldn’t have asked for them to be made more difficult. But your entire initial post is complaining about raids not being punishing enough, and that they are too easy.

Then further down, Cynz suggested that you could do the CM for more challenge and you shot that idea down. You directly said "Cynz.9437 Thank you but I already did everything CM related.", which implies that you don’t want to do the CM anymore.

If this isn’t what you meant well I’m afraid I can’t do anything, but this is what you wrote.

Have you checked your Collections tab at the bank? Minis used to be deposited there, and any minis that you haven’t manually removed and added to your account will still be there. The minis are all the way at the bottom of that tab.

Interestingly enough even if you could block DPS meters, doesn’t mean you won’t be discriminated against for low DPS.

I only run DPS meter while raiding, to see my own dps and let the raid leader see my dps to detect issues etc.

I never run it outside raids. But still sometimes when I pug fractals I end up with a group whose DPS is abysmal. I don’t need a DPS meter to see this. I run T4 daily and I know on average what a great DPS is, what an OK is and what a horrid one is by the speed we kill bosses at.

Now I’m not toxic generally, and I never kick people, I just leave the party myself if I’m not willing to put in the time. However when I’m feeling antsy I can occasionally mention in the party the fact that I think people’s DPS is very low, or joke about asking people if they are wearing Nomads (which occasionally will cause people to link their zerker gear which I find pretty funny) – and yeah that’s a bit toxic I suppose? That case of letting your bad mood affect your actions in game.

This makes me think that now that DPS meters are allowed, any time anyone says in chat ‘low DPS’, people assume they are running a meter. Not necessarily, not necessarily.

Vayne.8563:

Okay wait a second. So I buy a game. I play a game for 3.5 years. I invest time and money into that game, and energy. I play the game because I like the game and want to continue to play it. I didn’t invest time and money and energy to stop playing when the first expansion came out.

The options were don’t buy the expansion, or buy the expansion. Obviously if you want to continue playing EVERYTHING is in the expansion. Want to glide. That’s in the expansion. Want to use new weapons. That’s in the expansion. Want to continue the story, that’s in the expansion. Basically buy the expansion or stop playing the game. Do you think that’s better somehow for raiders? Cause I don’t.

Just because I bought the expansion doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the expansion, nor does it mean I have to support everything, or remain silent about the things I don’t like. Yes, I bought the expansion because it was my only option to keep playing a game I genuinely like.

Honestly if there were another MMO that checked as many boxes as this one, I’d consider moving to it. There’s not…yet. By the same token revenue is down since the expansion and it’s raids. Clearly someone didn’t buy or, or clearly some people are no longer spending money in the cash shop.

If I’m less happy with the game (and I am) then I will spend less money in the cash shop. I’m not miserable about the game. I don’t hate the game. But I’m not as enthused as I used to be.

Raiding hasn’t been good for my guild. It hasn’t been good for the community as far as I can tell, and I don’t think they belonged in the game.

I disagree whole heartedly here. You are really not in the place to claim what has been good for the community and what not. Revenue drops have many different factors and you cant draw a corrolation between raids and revenue – that is just fictional.

Again. If you want to play everything in the expansion you can do that. There is nothing but yourself stopping you from doing it – just because it doesn’t apply to your selfmade requirements for playing.

I never disagreed that people will like a game mode and not like another. But maybe its time to accept that instead for calling for changing a game mode over and over again.
Id never call for pvp to be less competetive because i don’t like competition in a game.

Miku.6297:

lucadiro.4519:

p.s.: even if I run a dps meter, that doesn’t display other DPS, i still never say nothing to other player of they like provide poor quickness, GotL or alacrity. Nor I say nothing if we fail because not enough DPS or because someone make mistake at doing mechanics.
If for me the group can get the kill, I try untill we do it or the group disband. If I think the group can’t do it, i Just leave without blame people

100% Support this attitude!

I am using a meter that can see the dps of all party members (estimated dps). I mentioned that in a raid this weekend and people asked me how they were doing and were interested in their performance. I didnt blame anyone or flamed in squad chat to kick underperformers. I told one guy (after he asked me) that he was underperforming (and by that i mean he was doing half of what the other dps classes did in the same squad). He improved after that and got into the top dps for the next tries until we got the kill.

If hed ran that meter himself he would have benefitet earlier. And thats true for a lot of persons.

If you have deleted all your mail, and picked up all Gold and items from the Trading Post, waited an hour or two, and still no mail from the Gem Store (can one gift keys?), your friend (as they are the one that made the purchase) would need to contact the CS Team via the ‘Support’ link above/below and ‘Submit a Ticket’ for assistance.

Good luck.

Rednik.3809:

It’s confirmed that revenue before HoT was at least 33% higher, and there was no fresh HoT boxes to push it up. So, how exactly revenue from HoT sales + gem sales while being so significantly weaker than previous revenue without HoT sales, somehow can be on par?

It’s confirmed that the revenue from gem sales is stable, that’s something you can’t deny because it’s official. Which means your comments about “LOTS of players leaving the game due to Raids” as a cause for the revenue drop is unfounded and without any kind of data to back it up.

What isn’t selling is the expansion itself. It’s not selling as much as the base game did before the expansion was announced, Guild Wars 2, an already old game by 2015, was selling more than Heart of Thorns (before the free 2 play announcement). The reason for the revenue drop is the “low conversion” rate of the expansion, this includes both old players and free 2 play players not converting to the expansion.

That’s a clue as to where to focus and it’s not Raids, it’s not even the difficulty of meta events or of the expansion in general and it’s obviously outside the topic of this thread.

Well, there are still festival currency vendors in DR that accept a coin that’s not been earned in, what, years, now?

The cost of leaving the vendor in-game is zero. The cost of removing it is non-zero in both developer and player time. The math is left as an exercise for the reader.

elrin.4750:

I’m a new player, don’t have an 80 yet. Reading the forums and reddit it seems HoT is ‘L2P or GTFO’.

Still enjoying the core game, but not looking forward to HoT.

Don’t worry about HOT. I’m a very casual player who I just got HOT a few weeks ago. Yeah, those maps are more challenging but far from impossible. I enjoy the complexity and multi-layer nature of them. But they can sometimes be work and frustrating. All the more fun to succeed.

I know there’s a lot of cool high end stuff I’ll never see but that’s fine. I’m also never doing the grind to craft legendaries; that’s just not my thing. Not raiding either. Still, there’s plenty for me to do and I’m enjoying it so far even though I’ll never have the shiniest of the shinies.

I’m another WoW raider refugee and I sort of get the OP’s point. My draw to GW2 was the ability to play casually, by myself when I wanted to, with others when the opportunity arose and I felt like it. I still think this game has something for everyone.

And, as an added bonus, for the most part this community is one of the most helpful and civil I know of in any game and that means a lot to me. Sure, there are jerks here and there—that happens when you deal with humans—but from my experience, they are few and far between.

Behellagh.1468:

I’m a soloist. I enjoy GW2 due to it’s PvE lack of required teaming on 95% of it’s content, it’s PvE design philosophy that you should never be afraid to see or help another player, and it’s flash mob world events.
…

Has GW2 “changed”. Yes because a 4+ year old game has to, it’s not majority populated by new players with first time lower level characters anymore. It’s full of grizzled vets looking for something interesting to do. GW2 has always been a game where you set your own end goals, that hasn’t changed. It’s just some of those things require a bit more of an effort than before.

+ to all your post, these bits especially.

VaLee.5102:

TLDR; What makes GW2 different than any other generic MMO right now?

How would you convince a WoW player for example to come and play GW2 today? Because I can’t think of anything else but “well it’s like WoW, but different…it has asuras instead of gnomes, and you don’t need 100 addons to be able to get into a raid…yet”

Lack of gear grind resets. Effective level scaling. More interesting combat. Designed to avoid other players ever being a negative thing to see. Different story. Different aesthetic in-game.

I appreciate that you feel like permitting DPS meters is a bad thing, but (a) they were there before this, and (b) hostility comes from players, not meters, even if they are the current wave of excuses.

Also, ultimately, we really are just another bunch of murder hobos, running about committing mass murder for cash. It’s really not that distinct from other MMOs.

Coconut.7082:

Having full exotics does make quite a difference, Ascended weapons + Trinkets are easy to get (LS3 maps, Achievements, Fractals, Drops), give you a bigger stat bonus than Armor, and are a minimum to start raiding IMO.
It’s not that you can’t do it in exotics, just having the above shows a basic level of commitment.

It’s not as hard as you put it, those who feel “naturally excluded” are the ones to set the entry bar higher than it really is.
You can always even start your own group.

Having multiple classes is a bonus, but not a must, as long as you have one properly geared/built class that fits the group’s requirement.

Raids are suppose to be challenging end game content, so they are not targeted towards players who just joined the game (if you are that new, I would suggest starting in Dungeons or Fractals before advancing to Raids).

Also, there are plenty of training runs & dedicated guild for beginner raiding, just look them up on the forum/reddit.

Most of the power is in the ascended weapons. The armor is a marginal gain for a massive gold sink.

So the OP can start with getting ascended weapons.

For reference, even high level guilds like LOD take in trials with exotic armor. I’m sure there are other guilds who do the same.

The content can easily be beat in full exotics.

Tarrant.7296:

I know this is old, but I’m struggling with the same issue:
- Oiled Orichalcum Greatsword Blade is in visible bag
- Machined Greatsword achievement is active
- also no other items that can be charged in inventory
- tried many places of power
Any ideas?

Your screenshot shows you at a Mastery Point. You need to go to a Hero Point “place of power”. Are you sure you’ve tried a Hero Point?

I see in your screen that you’re tracking the Machined Sword achievement, not the Greatsword achievement.

Are you sure you have unlocked the Greatsword one aswell?

“generally a bad narrative move if Lazarus turns out to be a fake.”
On the opposite, it allows for plot twists, and a redemption of Lazarus. In case you hadn’t noticed, the current Lazarus is a mockery of the original one. A bad joke, if you will. So if he turns out incomplete, or fake, then suddenly everything will make sense. For him to be genuine and complete in his current state is what I would consider to be terrible writing giving his recent personality

Khisanth.2948:

The other thing to consider is that if you put them in the hero’s choice then people will only pick it until it stops being the most expensive choice. That basically means it will track the price of amalgamated gemstones.

Given that is an order of magnitude lower, it would certainly reduce the complaints about the pricing, and would satisfy most of the goals of the folks in this thread.

OriOri.8724:

Best way to address this is to add it to the hero choice chests. It is timegated enough to keep the price from crashing, but it also offers a guaranteed way to gather them yourself if you were so inclined. Right now with the riduculous drop rate (I’ve never gotten a single one) its not feasible to gather them yourself.

I doubt the high price of this one this is actually that significant to the overall economy, but you might find chasing down John Smith and asking for a direct comment useful if you really care.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’ll change in large part because there are many viable alternatives to these flowers and that stat set, and the market doesn’t seem to be failing — in the sense of running out of them to trade — at this time.

For a game’s economy to be healthy, players cannot be able to farm everything they need easily. By distributing supply randomly through the entire playerbase, you force them to participate in the Trading Post which keeps the game’s economy running smoothly which provides two main benefits:

1. Fights inflation by destroying gold and
2. Makes the game rewarding by allowing players who get these items to sell them to players who want these items.

Being able to easily acquire the 18 lilies you want may make the game more rewarding for you (1 person), but it makes the game less rewarding for 17 other people who now just have more junk items in their bank.

Did you get an email back from them confirming that your ticket had been received?

That automated response is the first step in ensuring that your ticket works, and you will see communication from the anet support team.

Gliding is handled client-side, which can be very dangerous. When a zerg is taking on Hablion for example and causing the server to lag, if I don’t let it land naturally, I always die to falling damage. Likewise, if you’re gliding towards land and the server thinks you landed, it’s going to disable your glider.

The ping shown under the options is a better indicator, since it’s your ping and the server’s processing time. Packet loss is also going to cause problems, which you can try to diagnose using the pathping command or a program like pingplotter.

Eponet.4829:

And Verdant Brink Night fails whenever you don’t bring a small army of people to it, because the map never reaches the same numbers as the other HOT maps.

VB is definitely the toughest meta to complete, but it isn’t because the map never has the numbers. How could you possibly know that? As far as I know, there is no means by which players may determine how many other players are present on a map. The best indicator we have is when a map is full, but the only method we have of observing that is via LFG – and we still don’t know what that number is.

The problem with the VB meta is that it doesn’t start when the bosses spawn and killing the bosses does not guarantee a T4 win. The meta is the entire night cycle. So here’s the problem with that…

This morning I logged in to VB to grab the shard of Caladbolg for the latest current event. It so happened that I logged in right as the night cycle started and a few players were asking in map chat if this was a meta map. I responded that LFG had no meta map in progress, but if they wanted to we could begin to organize one.

So I threw up my mentor tag (I don’t have commander) and explained that I’d need 2 or 3 others at my location to maintain the camp and that others should spread out and claim camps, tag up, and move on if more than 4 or 5 players were already present at a camp.

A few others followed my lead, but throughout the cycle players kept popping into map chat to complain that the map was dead. The map is dead! Nobody is doing the meta!

How could they know that? In this case, there were several groups actively participating in the meta. And when the boss cycle came it turned out there were quite a lot of players present on the map. In fact, we completed all of the bosses with several minutes to spare. Unfortunately, because players were convinced they were on a dead map, they didn’t do enough prior to the bosses to get a T4 win.

Obviously, part of that is players not understanding how the VB meta works. And part of that is the VB meta itself. I think in this case I could agree that it would be a lot easier to win VB if killing the 5 bosses were all that was required to score a T4 win. Players are much too quick to look for others to do all the work and will not participate otherwise. Megaserver and the LFG mini-game aren’t helping the situation here, even if it works adequately (for those who know) on all of the other HoT maps.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This comes up a lot so I’m going to jump in quickly since it’s a new post.

Tier systems for Raids come up a lot as a result of what Fractals did. I worked on the original Fractals team and a tiered system with increased difficulty scaling was always part of the original plan for that team. It was never a plan for Raids. They are, and should remain, the most difficult content in the game.

Accessibility in terms of difficulty is something we talk a lot about internally. We’ve made efforts to help players get in by delivering entry level encounters that ease you into the content (STK) and you’ll see more of that in the next release. You’ll still see encounters that live up to previous raid expectations for mid tier and final bosses. And if you think Matthias is a chump then we have something for you as well.

Accessibility in terms of “Hey, my 5 man Fractal group wants to try raids, but we can’t find 5 other players!” is also something we talk about. It’s just a much more difficult problem to solve.

Bolded a specific sentence I felt was important to point out.

Fancypants.9705:

OP – do you actually play this game.. or log in once a week, fail a meta, and consider it not doable? Playing during NA, i beat the TD, AA, and DS metas randomly for a week straight. Didn’t fail any of those 1 time. All in all I believe AA was beaten 7 times, TD 4 times, DS 3 times. I wasn’t even trying to complete these I just happened to log on and find people forming in LFG….

I agree with you. Part of the problem is some people don’t really know to use LFG. It’s not organic. It’s not something they grew up with soloing. If you solo, why look at LFG? It’s a mindset thing.

But you can use LFG to taxi to a map doing the meta, and then leave the group and still complete metas.

Well, consider this: the difference between exotic and ascended gear is approximately five percent damage output. You can do the math from there.

(but, short answer long, yes, it’s worth it, generally speaking, for a power damage based build.)

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

i will give credits for the op of this post .but have never spent a penny at all in this game.

other than the money i spent to buy this game with real world money a long time ago .

for me i seen no need to spend any real world cash at all in the game. there is just

noting at all worth it. even more so with items from gem shop being able to be gotten

with in game gold . and change it over to gems in the cash shop .. and i will never spend

another penny at all on this company . giving the fact the game still uses only DX9 .

all the mean while much older games like this that i do play . have put in DX11

needless to say even tho they are much more older games when they updated to dx11

and put the more fun back into there games !! for me that said a whole lot more . with

out saying a word . unlike this company ANET has FAILED even more so with there

latest patch . thus they will never ever get another penny from me. until such time

anet fixes the game and adds DX11 . that is if the company is still around even .

What on earth do you think upgrading to DX11 will do for the game? The graphics will be the same and the gameplay certainly won’t change at all from that. Not to mention that the devs have explicitly told us that the lag is not caused by the rendering pipeline, so upgrading to DX11 won’t make the lag any better. Period. There’s no getting around that fact, because rendering is not what is causing the lag. Its everything else.

So what do you possibly think upgrading to DX11 would bring to the game?

ANet are very open to constructive criticism on the forums. There are many threads where people question their decisions, interactions, and so on.

That is to say: if your thread was removed, it was almost certainly because it was not a constructive post, rather than because ANet refuse to listen to feedback.