Guild Wars 2

Andrephi.5692:

yeah it kinda sucks…having a story quest every 2 lvls or so had a great flow to it and kept things interesting, now it feels like a grind…
so every 10 lvls I get like, 5 story missions since they are not every 2 or 3 lvls anymore ?

The flow was actually pretty terrible at low levels as you’d often be a couple levels shy after a while if you focused on the story, which resulted in people leveling up in the open world then focusing on the story in big chunks. It’s those people’s actions which apparently influenced this part of the update.

Ideally, I wouldn’t mind. The issue however is that the personal story was designed and written with a continuous flow in mind. Now you have “visit me when you get well” (human storyline) but you don’t – you wait until you get level 10 to visit (it’s not so bad for asura, sylvari, and norn, but charr it’s just as bad with your warband recently deceased – no need to report in soldier! Go do some training out in the field first! >.>). Another bad part being the Racial sympathies – the end of the now-level 40 arc ends with you picking a racial sympathy, but then you have to get to level 50 to continue it, and it’s only once you hit level 60 that you see the race’s speaker (Gara, etc.) with your Order head. The other splits aren’t so bad with the time gap.

I personally don’t mind the time gap, except for those cases.

Oh, and how about how we get AC unlocked at level 30 – but in the level 40 PS is when Eir gets the idea of retrieving Magdaer and heads off to the Ascalon Catacombs. So now you’re doing dungeons 10+ levels before they should happen in accordance to the Personal Story! Logic!

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

From the update notes:

Chapter 7 is now focused on helping Trahearne cleanse Orr.
Chapter 8 is now focused on defeating Zhaitan.

The story steps that were in Ch8 that involved helping Trahearne with his wyld hunt have been moved to Ch7.

Can you please explain this decision? I made a thread here about it, because it makes no sense.

As I point out in said thread you:

• Fight the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan, which has been long designed to be a climatic battle where your defended by your allies throughout your trials in Orr.
• Then you go to the Temple of the Forgotten God, where you meet first of said allies, and encounter a lesser Eye of Zhaitan.
• Then you kill said lesser Eye of Zhaitan. Where you meet second said ally/allies.
• Then you fight out the revelation that there’s more than one Eye of Zhaitan…. but we… killed… two… now…
• Then it’s the mouth, more allies, then risen supplies, more allies, then it’s invasion into Cursed Shore… where we already were for the cleansing of Orr storyline – which I should add, begins with a series of Pact troops in Cursed Shore! Seems like we invaded it already, when we invade it later now.

Unless that is, there has been a dialogue – both spoken and text – change throughout all of these steps to ensure they flow better. But if that’s the case, and you spent time and money “fixing” the personal story, why not spend this time and money making a better Season 2 or making Season 1 permanent content?

So, again, please explain this design decision. Because it makes no freaking sense.

Vorch.2985:

The story change is fine.

This way makes much more sense and gives the story in chapters rather than 5 minute segments every 1-2 hours.

You missed the point. It’s not about clustering the personal story mission into big chunks.

It’s about the removal of several story missions for no reason, which is not fine.

It’s about changing the order of the orr-missions in an inconvenient and logically inconsistent way, which is not fine.

Vayne.8563:

Boost tapers off at level 10, because you can do 5 story instances in a row if you want at level 10. And it’s still faster till level 15 than it was before the patch.

someone wants to complain?
well..here comes vayne!

on-topic: i agree that it should be toggleable. this is the sort of problem that should be fixed first. doing a major change based solely on a small part of the game. now, it’s reworking a major part of the leveling experience based on the supposed betterment of the new player experience.

it’s like the problem with skills/traits/builds. seems like everything is being balanced based solely on pvp even tho alot of the people who are affected by the change only play pve.

Imo, they should add a low level fair that features encounters styled like the Queen’s Gauntlet. Each encounter should teach something specific that works up to a “show me what you know” styled boss.

Yargesh.4965:

Look up resistance to change.

That doesn’t mean what you think it does. Resistance to change is a business concept and one of the reasons people are resistant to change include a change having a negative impact on them. That doesn’t make the people resistant to the change irrational or their reason for resisting change invalid. I

t can be a perfectly valid position that, for example, a change that forces someone to work 4 10-hour shifts rather than 5 8-hour shifts, even if beneficial on paper, is a change in their terms and conditions of employment that has a significant negative impact on their life. For example, a single mother that needs daycare services when none are available in the area that cover a 10-hour shift is negatively impacted by something others may embrace. Or, when a change saves the company money at the expense of the workers, for example making three people do the work of five people by laying two employees off and not replacing them.

If you’re trying to force a change on people, you want to use “afraid of change,” which is used in change management to stifle decent by attaching a stigma to opposing to the change, even for valid reasons. For example, saying “I understand that people are afraid of change, but…” or “I know there are a lot of changes going on and that can be scary…”

It makes people hesitant to speak up against a change because nobody wants to be seen as cowardly. And, it lets the initiator of the change frame the opposition’s argument as emotional rather than rational.

I can bear the expenses, but less customization? Very, very bad.
Customization is a good thing, please don’t remove or reduce it. Players want options, possibilities. With the new system, there are so many restrictions on customizing your playstyle in place that leveling a new character is no longer fun.

The old system was good. Nobody ever complained about the old system. It wasn’t confusing to new players. It was fun to experiment.
Me and all my friends were new players too back then and we loved it, that’s why we stuck with Guild Wars 2.

And with the latest patch you put even more restrictions in place.

Weapon Skills & Utility Skills changes

Old system:
- Unlock Weapon Skills by fighting with your weapon, no level requirements
- Unlock Utility Skill Slots at levels 5, 10 and 20, Elite at level 30

New system: (September 2014 feature patch)
- Unlock Weapon Skill 2 at level 2, 3 at level 4, 4 at level 7 and 5 at level 10
- Unlock Utlity Skill Slots at levels 13, 24 and 35, Elite at level 40

Again, more restrictions, less customization.
More button 1 spamming, less varied play-styles.

And did you even think about professions that are more dependent on Utility Skill slots, like the Engineer?
Are you supposed to level to 13 without any kits? That is absurd. What are you going to do? Spam Rifle 1? That is not fun.

I can’t even begin to understand why you would implement such changes.

Please, revert all changes you made to Trait & Utility Skill systems back to the ones we had before the Spring 2014 feature patch.

Regards

tl;dr version:
Go see a doctor please.

Long, ranty version with stories of ‘ye olden times’:
I remember when I first logged into this game back in Beta, what instantly caught my interest was the way that character progression and customization worked. Compared to other MMOs where you have to run back to town every 1-2 levels to learn skills from a trainer, in GW2 you could just pick up a weapon, whack enemies over the head with it and learn skills that way. You’d still have to get a Trait Book at levels 11, 40 and 60 to unlock the trait lines, but 3 ports and 3 purchases all the way from 1-80 wasn’t so bad.

Leveling was very fluid and a lot of fun. I must have leveled at least 20 characters to 80. For a lack of character slots and losing interest at lvl 80 I deleted most of them by now, but leveling them was great.
I know a lot of players don’t think leveling is an important aspect of MMOs and it’s all about the endgame – and don’t get me wrong I like the “endgame” too. The three characters I actively play at 80 have ascended gear and I was lucky enough to be able to craft a Sunrise as well – but to me, leveling is very important, I loved it. I’d level characters for fun, I’m just that rad. Having a fun leveling experience is also important to entice new players.

Anyway, with the Spring 2014 feature patch and now this September feature patch you took, and I’m not trying to sound dramatic here but that’s how I feel about it, you took all the fun out of leveling.

Trait system changes

Old system:
- Get 1 Trait Point every level from level 11 to 80.
- Unlock access to Adept Traits at level 11, Master Traits at level 40 and Grandmaster Traits at level 60.

New system: (Spring 2014 feature patch)
- Get 1 (5 in old system) Trait point at level 30, 36, 42, 48, 54
- Get 2 Trait points at level 66, 72, 78, 80
- Unlock Adept Traits at level 30, Master Traits at level 60 and Grandmaster Traits at level 80
- You are required to – and yes I have leveled three characters from level 1-80 since the new system, so I know the reality of it – excuse me you are required to travel all over the world map to unlock access to your traits. You COULD buy them from your profession trainer, but especially for new players this is VERY, VERY expensive (more expensive than unlocking them via Trait Manuals in the old system), and it also requires Skill Points of which you do not have such an abundance while leveling unless you know exactly which Utility Skills you’re going to want to use and don’t even bother unlocking the rest.

Not only is the new system more confusing than the old one, it also requires that players spend more money and/or more effort to unlock their Traits. Wasn’t the new system supposed to make leveling LESS confusing for new players? (Which wasn’t necessary in the first place!)

The new system also reduces the amount of customization available to your character while leveling. Traits unlock at a much later stage, the final and most important Trait Tier unlocks at level 80 as compared to level 60 in the old system.
Not only does that leave you with fewer build options, it also eliminates more specialized builds that require Master or Grandmaster Traits to work.

For example my first Engineer I leveled in the old system. It was actually my first character I got to 80. Total noob back then. The old system allowed me to try out all kinds of builds, try out the Traits, try out all the Utility Skills and Kits because I could spend my Skill points on them. This was fun. Being able to try out different builds and skills while leveling is fun. Customizing your character is fun and is an important aspect of a good MMO.
I then found at level 60 that the most effective way to level was to roll with the Grenade Kit & Grenadier Trait. Levels 60-80 were a breeze and and very enjoyable.

Now I leveled a Charr Engineer from 1-80 under the new system.
- not enough Skill Points to get all the Utility Skills and Kits (even though I completed every zone I was in)
- less Trait Points (while leveling) to try out different builds.
- to unlock the Traits that I needed I had to travel all over the world map to do a certain event or something.
And the worst part? You walked all the way there and the event that you need to do to unlock a Trait isn’t even taking place, so you have to wait for the event to start (and how are you supposed to know when that happens?) or you have to unlock the Trait via Trait Guide which is awfully expensive.
This must be extremely off-putting and awkward to new players. It certainly was to me and I’m a very experienced player. Luckily I have enough gold in my pockets to buy the Trait Guides from the trainers – new players don’t.

In short, now we have:
- Less customization
- More expenses
- More restrictions

Its restrictive, dumbed down and gated to oblivion. Its terrible, and it has nothing to do with progression.

Kaldrys.1978:

It doesn’t affect me so I don’t care. I’m really surprised at the number of people claiming to be impacted by this change. Did everyone choose to create a new character today or something? Not sure why you would do so knowing the changes that were coming. It’s like people are going out of their way to find something to complain about. I just find it funny that all the veterans are getting worked up over a feature that was never designed with them in mind.

a lot of people played this game for the alts, in fact it was probably one of the only things a lot of people who have played for a long time can do.

Some die-hard fanboys who’ll kiss Anet’s kitten no matter how much they ruin the game.
The leveling experience is just as fast for me as it was before, it’s just 100x more boring than it was already with the new trait system
So, yeah. I guess nobody.

Is it so hard to waive the artificial feature walls for players that have already been playing for years or have characters at cap? Because right now these new leveling “features” seem more like a punishment for having the nerve to roll an alt. Being able to start a new character without have to go through hours of artificial hoops was one of best parts of Guild Wars 2 in the past. It would be a shame to lose something that was obviously part of the design philosophy of the game from the beginning.

I have been playing with many build types in the last 3 months just for giggles and fun for the DnD ele after 2 years of boredom

• Builds

DnD
02246 , 00266, 02066,02444

So for Builds the most efficient cantrip based build is 02066.

The “Lets have some fun” is 02246 with the incredible auras all day long and Signet of water and earth with LF just for LOLs.

The 00266 build is going to rob you of perma fury but give u almost perma protection with cantrips and is a build that is used also as much.

Other builds will apply but these are the tested and most used among dnd eles in wvw.

• Gearing

When you first start you will be having a mix of clerics,soldiers and valks.

Now as you progress , you first get rid of all your trinkets. Replace the entire set with celestial that you can get from laurels or PvE.

Once all your trinkets are celestial head on over to get your ascended back piece. Go Berserker on that.

Now after this is where u must do your own homework on what you want with your playstyle because trust me, its a pain to redo the rest.

Following that , get your ascended armour i.e. if unsure go all celestial though i like them to be 3 cav and 3 knights

Weapons should be celestial or if you feel like a risk taker , 1 celes or 1 berserker or both berserkers.

Please note, take very good care before making the armour and weapons. Hard to redo them.

• Stats

This is an area that cannot be agreed by there is an average consensus on the issue

1. Healing Power – ~500

Healing power doesnt scale that well for eles. Is there a difference between 1000 and 500 healing power, yes, but not as great as you think.

400(Lowest)
500(Average)
700(Great)
1000(significant diminishing returns)
2000(Really?)

1. Power

You want to aim for 3000 with stacks

With Stacks and buffs—>

2500(Lowest)
2700(Average)
3300(Great)

1. Crit% and Crit Damage

Crit% should be ~30%(50% when you count in fury)
Crit Damage ~ 180%

20%crit/170 crit damage(Lowest)
28%crit/177 crit damage(Average)
30%crit/190 crit damage(Great)
80%crit/220 crit damage(Things go Boom but you may also die in a boom)

1. Armour

This includes toughness

Average is 2.5k for a DnD

2.4k(Lowest)
2.6k(Average)
2.8k(Great)
3k(Wait, whos the tank in your group?)
3.3k(Really?)

dandamanno.4136:

I do wish they would change the downed state in WvWvW. It is annoying when a smaller group outplays a larger one, but simply can’t wipe the other group out because the numbers advantage allows them to consistently rez.

In PvE it’s fine, and in sPVP it works because of balanced numbers on each team, but yah in WvW it could use a tweak.

My suggestion would be to double the rate of health loss in downed state in WvW and also no hard rez at all. If you die you die. Respawn.

But… then how would numerical advantage be important? One of the key concepts of warfare, have better numbers and deploy so that at each individual engagement you got superior numbers despite in total not having more (same map cap!).

That’s how army tactics work. Superior local force. I mean, that’s quite obviously what the escalating rally/rezz mechanics are there to implement. They give a serious advantage to whoever can have the better local deployment. Now, how to consistently do that despite having the same team size in total, yeah, that’s difficult.

Am I the only 1 tired of nondescript thread titles? If I was a mod on this forum things would be very different :-P

RyuDragnier.9476:

Telemin.7380:

As much as I want harder content, I do not want it at the expense of other content. If I had a say, id say for a new hard boss and leave this one as is.

This. We do not want Shatterer to become a ghost town like what happened with Tequatl.

Tequatl isn’t a ghost town. I kill him every night at reset.

4) Related to number 3, but egregious enough to be worth special mention:

Orr.

First, there’s the taking of Orr. So, we have the ancient holy city of the human gods, now corrupted by Zhaitan, where one of the major challenges is that the old temples of the gods have been corrupted and are now radiating energies that assault the attacking forces. This would have been a perfect opportunity to allow humans to shine without taking the spotlight – while charr provide heavy equipment, asura provide teleporters and golems and giant plasma cannons, and sylvari provide scouts that are immune to corruption, humans provide their knowledge of the region from their old stories, while human priests of each god move to each cathedral to wrest control of its power from Zhaitan.

What do we get? The Cathedral of Secrets is simply a series of duels, while the Cathedral of Victory is a simple military assault. In PS Trahearne walks us through Lyssan funeral rites in the Cathedral of Lyssa, and in open world it’s Asuran and Charr technology that is used to take it. The Cathedral of Zephyrs actually uses human lore in the open world, but in PS it gets levelled by ghostfire (I guess that ultimately comes from human ghosts…) and/or captured by an asuran golem. Melandru is a simple military assault, aided in the PS by a Searing Cauldron.

The Cathedral of Silence, to be fair, does actually involve a ritual… but in the open world, this ritual is performed by a kittening atheistic charr. In the Personal Story, it’s actually a human performing the ritual… but no, she doesn’t know the rituals of her own god well enough to perform it herself, they had to put in asura magitech to show how it’s done! And then, when the priestess praises Grenth for giving them the information, said asura is rude enough to correct her and claim all the credit himself right in front of an emissary of Grenth… who fails to upbraid him for the implied insult.

To top it all off, once the various cathedrals are captured (apart from Abaddon’s), how are they shut down? By another piece of kittening Asura magitech!

Somehow, I don’t think we’re ever likely to go through the ruins of corrupted Quora Sum or even a large Inquest base where all of the malfunctioning asura magitech is disabled, not by an asura sorting it out, but by the prayer of human priests, sylvari calling roots from the ground to tear it apart, and norn invoking the Spirits of the Wild, but that’s what Orr feels like.

Not to mention that Arah is the basically the equivalent of flipping Jerusalem, and from what we’ve told neither Jennah nor anyone else has even bothered to do so much as to send a diplomatic message to the Pact inquiring as to what their intentions may be for the peninsula in the long term. Supposedly, this is because the queen is paying all of her attention to the charr truce. While that is certainly important, completely ignoring Arah for nearly two years is a pretty casual attitude to be taking for what is the holiest place in the world for your religion – a religion that is arguably where the royal mandate to rule comes from in the first place!

pauses, takes breath

As a mental exercise, consider if humans had been completely wiped out – say, by the Great Tsunami – and asura and charr had expanded their lands and population to compensate, or maybe the tengu or centaurs were destined to join the alliance instead of humans. Can you really say Tyria would be worse off under those circumstances? All humanity really seems to be providing is cannon fodder, and anyone else can do that. Again, the charr excel at it.

For bonus points, apply the same question to the norn.

Now, I’ve deliberately exaggerated a bit for effect here, but only from my perspective, there are people I know who, if anything, would put things even more strongly than I did above. But I hope this gives you an understanding, even if you don’t agree with it yourself, of why people feel humans are being devalued and marginalised. Sylvari, asura, and charr have definitely been getting a disproportionate amount of the spotlight, in roughly that order.

(Now, don’t get me wrong – everybody deserved some of the spotlight, and I’m interested in seeing the other race’s stories play out as well, particularly the sylvari. However, everybody deserves some of the spotlight. ArenaNet really seems to have overcompensated the other way with humans.)

(PS: Oh, and let’s not forget that at the moment it looks like the Foefire might be something that can be undone simply by bringing the right magical artifacts together and saying the right words, and the need for a (presumably human) true king of Ascalon is completely bogus. Of course, we haven’t seen how that ends yet.)

Regarding the Pale Tree: The Glint analogy also fits, although Glint only really played a major role in Prophecies and was replaced by a succession of other figures. The Pale Tree, on the other hand, has been the central ‘prophet’ figure all the way through – at the expense of other possible sources of information such as the Spirits and the gods (through the medium of priests and other representatives).

On the whole, the Pale Tree is somewhere between the two. She’s a prophetic figure and guide, but where GW1 had Glint, the Oracle of the Mists, Kuunavang, and a series of others, in GW2 it’s been basically all the Pale Tree outside of race-specific personal story steps (ie under 30 stuff) and the ‘finding the Source’ story step near the end of the personal story. With the gods and the Spirits of the Wild marginalised, the Pale Tree has also taken the role, formerly taken by the gods, as being the most powerful figure that’s on our side, including it ultimately being her power that cleansed Orr. Meanwhile, she’s taking a more active role than the gods ever did in GW1, with the possible exception of the very end of Nightfall depending on how you interpret that series of events.

Now, clearly GW2 could not be as human-centric as GW1 was, and the gods needed to be reduced in importance (although to tell the truth, all that really required was for the story not to be about them – they could have continued sending the occasional avatar and still been no more important than the Spirits of the Wild). However, humans have also been downplayed and trivialised in the following ways:

1) Human ingenuity, in-game, seems to have totally vanished. In GW1, humans had powerful magical artifacts (teleporters, obelisks, Stormcaller), cannons and animal husbandry (siege turtles), a few crude golem-like things (including Kurzick juggernauts) and binding of djinns to serve as a defensive army. In GW2-related printed material, we see more of this – the Foefire (calamity or desperate last stand, it’s still a significant act), the djinn-powered ship, the Orrian xebec things, and so on. We also have powerful acts of magic, such as Jennah’s illusion at the end of Edge of Destiny.

But we don’t see any of this in-game.

From what we see in-game, humans haven’t invented anything of any real significance since Sea of Sorrows. Everything important, magical or technological, is invented by charr, asura, Scarlet, Occam, or Beigarth, and at best humans might reverse-engineer something made by one of the above and adapt it to their specifications. Sure, a lot of knowledge was likely lost in the various disasters that humanity has suffered, but we have plenty of precedent from the past that humans can do impressive things without it being a blatant copy of someone else’s work.

2) A minor point, related to the above: In the past, humans had a set of magical academies that rivalled the asura colleges now, in terms of teaching hands-on magic if not in theory and magitech. Ascalon had at least three, Kryta had their own, Cantha had Shing Jea and possibly others, and so on. In GW2, there’s no trace of any collective training of magic anywhere among humanity, not even among the priesthood or the military. Again, stuff lost in the Great Tsunami and other disasters, but not re-establishing at least one in Divinity’s Reach is moronic. Maybe it was in the Great Collapse and that’s what the Queen’s Pavilion is being used for when not acting as an arena.

3) This is probably what gets most people’s proverbial goats the most:

Back in interviews before GW2 was released, one of the things we were told was a special contribution of humans among the races is that they have a greater grasp of the world’s history and of the deeper mysteries of the world. What humans ‘know’, however, has been progressively retconned and/or demonstrated to be false, and what hasn’t turned out to be wrong has instead turned out to be irrelevant (humans have experience of the elder races – dwarfs, seers, forgotten, mursaat – that the other races don’t, but when have any of those been referred to since Arah explorable?). The Priory leader turned out to be an asura, and pretty much every time we’ve had an exposition-dump, it’s been asura. When was the last time a human brought forth some piece of historical information that was actually relevant? Take that away, and what are we left that we’ve been told that humans have?

Resilience and tenacity. Basically, the ability to get knocked down and get up again. Well, I’ll tell you who else have that, and in spades? The charr. Who also get to be Tyria’s premier industrialists, soldiers, and in one individual’s case, the head of Tyria’s biggest trading company.

(5001 characters)

Palador.2170:

Gaebriel.3754:

Actually, as a Commander of the Pact I think it is way more in-character that the player character defers to the Council Asura, instead of giving in to Taimi who – despite being a traveling companion and genius – is still a child and has acted irresponsibly several times throughout the story. That’s of course very much in-character for her, but from the viewpoint of a Commander it is clearly the better choice to defer to the experienced Asura of the Council. Phlunt might be a snarky kitten like most of them, but he probably didn’t obtain his position (in a culture that seems to be based on meritocracy) by being incompetent.

/sigh

You have a point. However, expecting Taimi to just roll over and take it is wrong.

She didn’t. She pitched a fit, stormed off, and almost got killed. THEN she agreed.

Was it nice of Phlunt? No. It still happened. It happens in real life all the time, although I doubt many of them involve children (could be wrong!). No, it wasn’t fair. But there is a very old saying about that.

It got him to come to the table, though. And, technically, he did say he would “hold it in trust” until she came of age – although I am about as likely to believe he’ll follow through as any of you are. But I’m sure that, by then, Taimi will have ways of making sure he does. She’s a bright girl – and, like any Asura, unlikely to ever forget a slight. If it comes down to a battle of wits between them, I’d put my bet on Taimi.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Naetell.3815:

Let’s be honest, given that much player agency would result in a world where every npc is killed off by players, towns are no more than ransacked burnt remains , and every map gets filled with kitten-shaped structures.

You’d think so, but there’s quite a lot of Minecraft servers which . . . despite the potential for perverse structures, it’s actually pretty nice. I think, honestly, it’s more likely players would reach an understanding over the “simple ground rules of decency” in a game and keep things clean.

But then, I’m an optimist when it comes to people. Mostly because I watch about six truly twisted and peverse people semi-regularly do freeform stuff on games and they seem to adhere pretty well to things. (I think it helps some of them have kids and know, at some point, they’ll find out.)

That’s because it’s minecraft. At this stage of the game’s lifecycle, most trolls have left it alone already. Also keep in mind the kind of crowd these games attract, as well as the fact they work with small servers that have the ability to keep multiple backup copies of work already done.
With GW2’s diverse crowd, you can’t hold them all to the same high standard, and there isn’t the money or server space to make frequent backups of all of GW2. Remember, it only takes one person to kill off Trahearne or Queen Jenna permanently.

Can you truly say no one would do so?

Next up, given how players already behave in GW2 atm, why do you think there wouldn’t be people out to spoil the fun of other people?
I’m talking about grievers, and they’re already out there in every section of the game. The dungeon forum is a good first sign. There are people out there who will join an LFG party only to kick everyone in the party for a cheap laugh.
As for an example where a few can screw over the many, just look at the WvW Season 2 underhanded tactics where commanders sold their servers out to give the victory to others.

Given that crowd and behaviour in today’s modern MMO games, what makes you think these people wouldn’t burn a city to the ground if they thought it would be funny to see how many QQ’s they can score?

And that’s the problem with having that degree of player agency. It takes a lot of people to build and maintain something, but only one mr. funnypants 2014 to tear it all down in an instant.

I’d like to believe in people too, but I can’t ignore the fact there already are people like that out there.

I think undoing progress every month is a terrible idea. If you want to do the hearts again, simply start a new character.

My appoliges for continuing this tangent, but quite frankly the charr taking over Ascalon from the humans isn’t the same as when the humans first took it from the charr.
The Charr have a large region under their control, the humans simply pushed them out of it. When the charr invaded, they were trying to wipe the humans out, and frankly the humans were boxed in pretty well too. And the charr didn’t stop with Ascalon either…
Also, after a thousand years of of living in Ascalon; generations of people being born there, defending it against more then just the charr, farming the land, and eventually dying and being buried in the land itself, the humans had a greater claim on that land then the charr (of the time the Searing took place) did.
And lets not forget what the Charr did to take back ‘their land’. They ruined it. Under the humans it was a verdant beautiful country. Even after the 250 years, its still not completely recovered.

But, at the same time, the charr of today are not the charr that tried to conquer all three human kingdoms. The charr (for the most part) do not see humans as a plauge like the charr of the shaman caste days did.

And yeah, Adleburn showed how poor a leader he was long before the Foefire when he disowned and banished his only son over a triviality. The whole scale murder and condemnation that was the Foefire was simply his last failure.

It’s actually really strange that none of the races have evolved over the last centuries, except the Charr.

How is it possible the human race still uses such medieval technology even though their enemy (or at least the Charr were their enemy until not too long ago) has made huge leaps in technological development. You would think that, if a race is constantly at war, it’s technological development would sky rocket.

It doesn’t makes sense for humans to be so primitive, even though the Charr advanced so much.

Everyone! Stop crafting the new backpack of Mawdrey and Mawdrey II! It’s a trap, a trap to doom Tyria!

Don’t you think it’s odd? ArenaNet, before Season 2, began said that they want player choice to be bigger in Season 2 than Season 1 (where we had the election). But where is that choice? It certainly isn’t obvious. But what can ArenaNet monitor so well that not everyone doing the main story will do? It’s obvious, right? It’s the backpacks! Crafting, or not crafting, the backpacks will affect the future of the Living Story. How, you might ask? Why would this bring about the doom of Tyria? Because they’ll overgrow us and take over in the name of Mordremoth!

In 4 months time, when ArenaNet has had a chance to analize the results and build upon them, the backpacks will grow and the lies of their description being kind and cuddly will be revealed. They will stretch those tendrils around our characters necks and strangle them like they have done to so many NPCs around the world, and our characters will not be revive-able – for they are no longer knocked out like the defeated state, they are dead, and resurrection magic doesn’t exist anymore. Then with the heroes of Tyria gone, Mordremoth’s forces will spread ever eastward, a new day a new zone! And if most instances of the map doesn’t push back Mordremoth’s forces, they’ll take over. But because of all the backpacks, there won’t be enough level 80s to eliminate the threat in Dry Top, our characters that we’ll have to remake will be too low level to do anything in Brisban, and when they reach Rata Sum – no more asuran characters! When they reach the Grove – no more sylvari characters! Divinity’s Reach? The same! Hoelbrak and Black Citadel! You guessed it! And then, when Mordremoth’s forces inevitable encroach on the last bastions of Tyria, Ebonhawke and Deathblade’s Watch, and they fall, the PvE servers, and the game will be nothing but WvW and sPvP. The world of Tyria will be Mordremoth’s vineyard.

ipan.4356:

Why would they have to retract them in the first place?

Example: long long time ago, ArenaNet made a statement about alternative methods to acquire precursors. Going so far as to say that there was a designer working on such system at a high level.

Now unless that designer has been working on said system for the past year without getting anywhere (which means they have some problems to address in their management of of their development resources) then they really ought to address that old statement in some way other than evading the subject whenever it is brought up.

I know that every development decision made is always backed by a reason, some of those reasons can’t necessarily be made public but if that is not the case then these old lingering statements that the community from time to time likes to cling to should be cleared up.

It might be disappointing to hear f.ex. that the precursor changes are not coming for the foreseeable future or at all. But it is still better than this false hope that if not this feature pack then maybe next. At least if backed by some reasoning, that not maybe everyone can agree on, but the fact that those reasons are out there would make it lot easier to swallow than just having to draw that same conclusion regardless from all this evading and dodging they are now forced into doing.

Then if the plans change again, or they can resolve some of those reasons or problems at a later date, we can all be pleasantly rather than saying “It’s about god kitten time”.