Guild Wars 2

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

lordkrall.7241:

I would say that the pain of loss is a very good opportunity in the coming chapters, and that will be much stronger if there is an actual partnership between the two characters, and there are already hints that something will happen to Kasmeer.

It’s anet, when you start to like a character, they kill the character off.

You mean they hired George R.R. Martin?

warllockmaster.1379:

Wait-they are lesbians?
i was pretty sure that they were just good friends,which who tagged along well together teasing one another, while being on a case, while Majory wish for Kasmeer to go back home, and she rufeses since she knows majory, wishing to stop her from doing anything foolish.

Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me this reveal happened, but it also doesn’t make me twitch with “blatant fanservice”. We’ve seen Lady Kasmeer before shutting down Lord Faren so it was kind of hinted at way ago.

Also, I really hesitate to call any sylvari relationship one based on gender. Sylvari have genders but it’s nothing like what we have as humans. If anything should get people upset, it’s not “lesbian relationships” it’s a race of entirely potential bisexuals.

And no, I’m not one of those people, I don’t care one way or another what two NPCs do when I’m not around. Unless that thing results in one of them getting a precursor.

Wait-they are lesbians?
i was pretty sure that they were just good friends,which who tagged along well together teasing one another, while being on a case, while Majory wish for Kasmeer to go back home, and she rufeses since she knows majory, wishing to stop her from doing anything foolish.

— Role Diversification: ‘Grail Quest’ (Personal rights of passage) style adventures through the open world (testing the player in combat, discovery, and puzzle solving) which others can engage in once the activities are activated which could reward the Hero with New skills/traits, new weapons, access to inaccessible existing weapons, and infusions.

I want to point to the mentioned section. What kind of infusions are meant? Already existing ones or new ones? What steps could be taken to prevent a hidden vertical progression within the Grail Quest? What steps could be planned to prevent a hidden vertical progression by new skills and traits?

Would role diversification include WvW? Would this be a topic for an CDI in the WvW forum?

They are princesses and they can do what they want!

GrandmaFunk.3052:

pandora eight.9451:

Even the ‘high population’ servers are completely dead now. All the current servers need to be merged in 4 or 5.

Complete fabrication, there are no dead servers.

I remember the days when people were claiming the game was dead, pre-culling.

Then boom.

pandora eight.9451:

Even the ‘high population’ servers are completely dead now. All the current servers need to be merged in 4 or 5.

Complete fabrication, there are no dead servers.

Or does my character look like me?

Anyone Else have a character that resembles themselves? Let’s See!

~ <3 GW2

Devata.6589:

VOLKON.1290:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

VOLKON.1290:

Why? Because we can, of course, and it could flesh out tinkering a bit more, that’s all.

We . . . are fleshing out . . . Tinkering, something which doesn’t exist yet, with more things which also don’t exist yet, and we don’t even know if Tinkering is something we should be looking at?

Sure why not?

:)

Though it bears to question just what exactly is “Tinkering” supposed to do which “Artificer” can’t as a flavor thing?

The thought was to have a crafting profession for “fluff” items, such as furnishings for halls or homes, town clothing, etc. The posts go into ideas, such as drops off boss mobs being used to make items (dragon scale table for ex.). Tied into housing and all that it builds on the overall concept and helps players have more of a hand in progressing their place plus pulls the world into it by using items found on certain mobs, etc.

Artificing is tied to combat, as are all the professions. This would be ‘out of combat’ fluff.

Fun crafts as I call them. Yeah thats nice addition that I have been suggesting for a long time. Does not only have to been about housing. Just making fun items. Think of items like the SAB music box or a mini and so on.

It however also could mean raising mounts (not going into the mounts discussion again, just an example here) or taming / raising ranger pets and so on. Many ways to make fun professions. Important element is that you get the requirement really from game mechanics. Not so much from grinding gold to buy it. That means, put them in specific places. Can indeed be a boss but might also be a group of mobs. But not from something like.. it’s a general drop but champions are more likely to drop them.

This however should be mainly for the recipes. Not for every ingredient of course. Most ingredients would be more easily farm-able (wood, metal and so on).

Honestly if we’re talking about minis and being able to craft them . . .

New Crafting Profession: Toymaker
- Craft living dolls resembling real creatures. Killing a creature type enough to earn Rank 1 Slayer for it will open a blueprint for a Common miniature, Rank 4 for an Exotic one. Each mini in a rank is different, so collect them all.
- Refine “Junk materials” such as ‘tattered fur’ or ‘dark stained claw’ into toy parts! Toys require internal mechanisms from “gear” junk, stuffing from “fur” type junk, frames from “bone” type junk, and one other refinement for each type of critter relative to their forms. (Hooves for centaurs and such, warm stones for destroyers, et cetera.)
- Craft toys and other fun diversions for other players to use. Make playable instruments, or confetti guns, fireworks, toy weapons, or even disguises to appear differently. (Note: Disguises disabled in WvW and PvP.)

New NPC options: Bless the Children
- Talk with young children around Tyria and find out what they are interested in most. Present them a toy for karma and a loot bag of a level applicable to the area.
(Tentative: if housing gets implemented, maybe they send a “thank you” drawing you can hang up on the wall for a one-time Karma reward. Instead of eating it. You monster.)

Orpheal.8263:

New Crafting Jobs that GW2 should receive are:

• Writer
• Tinkerer
• Peasant
• Artisan
• Enchanter
• Musician

Just a few I can think about, that would be fitting.

I would add the alchemist to that list. With temporary recipes that are on a mysterious rotation. The crafting process is filled with riddles and guesswork.

I wrote about it earlier here.

What do you think that these crafting jobs should produce btw?

No I don’t need that to accommodate the need for mounts. Mounts are something many people like. You can leave in all way-points and still add mounts.

However if you talk about reducing way-points (That was, what was being talked about) then the question becomes if you need to replace it with something and then mounts come to tough.

I really don’t need to have way-points to be removed in order to suggest mounts.

And no, it does not fit with the lore. I know you don’t want to see it but mounts fit better with the lore. That does not mean you might not be against mounts. Thats up to you but the lore arguments just does not fit.

I never had any problems in any other mmo’s with mounts and many people liked them. You might have missed the many topics about them.

People can now also block the way of NPC’s. If you want to remove that you need to implement hit-detection on users and NPC’s (but that would create other problems that would require flying mounts to fix.. just saying). Thats totally unrelated to mounts.

How can you possibly continue with the absurd claim that mounts are part of the lore when the lore from both games clearly shows that to be false? No, sorry, concept art doesn’t count, nice try. What’s in both games counts… and it’s not mounts.

Reducing waypoints is also unnecessary. The system works fine as it is and encourages a more ‘take your time’ approach to exploring without the inconvenience of excessive travel times when you’re in a hurry, plus we avoid the plague of mounts and the pox of elitism that is inevitable if anything remotely prestigious is introduced.

I haven’t missed mounts one bit, and I bought a Sparkle Pony back in the day. So much wasted time, so many people cluttering towns trying to show who has the bigger dragon, the griefers blocking access to mailboxes and bankers etc… what a mess that was. Nothing good came of mounts, they were only a faux convenience for a deliberately added travel time sink. We don’t need those time sinks… there’s no need to make us stretch out our playtime to give the illusion of getting our money’s worth for our subscription.

Devata.6589:

skullmount.1758:

VOLKON.1290:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

timmyf.1490:

I’ve felt this for awhile, though I still don’t quite know how to phrase it. Wondering if others might have an opinion.

As convenient as I find the waypoints all over the place, I feel like it trivializes much of the exploration we would be having without them.

I’ve suggested zones without waypoints as a way around this. Does anybody else feel the same way? Or am I romanticizing the runs from towns to far-flung locations in GW1?

Edit: should have said this originally, but all the credit to Sir Arthur for expressing my feelings better than I’ve been able to. This post was meant as a huge +1 to his.

Hi TimmyF,

I agree:

‘As convenient as I find the waypoints all over the place, I feel like it trivializes much of the exploration we would be having without them.’

Chris

What’s funny is that after playing for years in the original Guild Wars I disagree. I mean, you have to explore as it is to get to the waypoints, but the thought of tedious runs across zones to try and get somewhere you’ve already been… it seems like a step backwards, and if that were to happen in GW2 you’d find the very next hour people demanding mounts or some other means to get around faster. Map travel has always been a part of GW, even included in the lore of the game (there’s a quest you get from a kid who claims his mother invented map travel in Elona if I recall).

I don’t think any exploration is trivialized at all… you still need to walk to where you’ve never been. But the added convenience to get to where you’ve already been… I love that.

My thoughts mirror this as well.
What happens if you are doing the exploring that you want, and a friend wants/needs help doing something. First they’ll have wait till you run there. Then after you finish helping the friend, you’ll need to: 1)remember where you were (granted that already kinda happens even with the waypoints) and 2) run all the way back there. All that time running could mean much more exploring you could get done.

The wilderness zone idea is interesting, but what happens if an actual zone is released that takes up the space next to where those portals into the wilderness zones “lead” to? Are those zones temporary? or do they continue on in that next map released (thus kind always ‘leading’ out to unexplorable portions of the world map?

Maybe a travel to a friend option could help in some situation. At least a travel to guild options (having at least a few guild-members in one spot) would be nice. But overall I never found this getting to a friend a big problem, also not in other mmo’s without way points. Thats where mounts come in.

You seem to have this need to add a buttload of different little systems in order to accommodate the unnecessary and unneeded mounts. We have a system in place that works well with the existing lore of the game, and on top of that you add the nightmares of any other game with mounts relating to the kittening, the trolling (placing mounts on NPCs for example so people can’t access them) etc. Sir Occam is twitching nervously in his grave at the very thought of this.

Morrigan.2809:

I have never said anything even remotely in favour on mounts- I think they will not work for GW2.
I do think way points give us the option to explore or not

Right. And to take away that option would be game breaking. Sadly, the second people saw “no waypoints” they jumped on the mount-train discussion…

Devata.6589:

Sir Cusfreak.5971:

I’m sorry, but how could waypoints “trivialize exploration” when you can only open waypoints in places you’ve already explored? If you haven’t explored somewhere, you can’t waypoint there.

They mean after the first time. You run to it once to unlock it and after that never come across much of the land because you simply way-point to your location.

I have lots of places I go once and never ever go back to again. This is not because I can just waypoint through, it’s because I don’t want to go there.

And I think you overestimate how mounts will help – I can look at the maps and see there are plenty of places it simply won’t be possible to use them to travel reliably with. Bloodtide Coast, Sparkfly Fens, Frostgorge Sound . . .

Not to mention places where the terrain isn’t level and will wind up hampering it, like through parts of Kessex Hills and Brisban Wildlands . . . not to begin with Caledon Forest and Metrica Province, where clear roads are kind of a luxury and not a given.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

in terms of narrative I’m thinking:

would it be possible to melt existing activities with a strong storyline? Do that jumping puzzle not because of the chest at the end, but to find a npc from your story, some kind of hermit who hates people and hides from other people. (yeah, it’s easy for static activities like jumping puzzles, events would be the hard part)

I can see having its own storyline, but as a gate on a main/required storyline you’re courting disaster. There are people who just CANNOT do jump puzzles.

I think this is a reminder we need more branches or at least side tracks. Second Chances. If you hit a point in the narrative where you could go to person X or Y to achieve a favorable outcome, Ms. X could be at the end of a jump puzzle, and if you get frustrated you can always stop and just head over to see Mr. Y who may be at the end of a long narrow corridor filled with critters with lots of teeth. Or even have a low-road/High-road situation where there are Jump-puzzle style shortcuts that let you skip 70% of the critters on your way somewhere.

Other puzzles or non-combat challenges could similarly allow you to side-step a portion of the combat on the way to a goal. You could also have short-cuts based on having a certain amount of crafting skill. “Hold-up guys. We don’t need to fight those. I have enough tailoring to negotiate safe passage with the spiders. Just give me a sec to click something….” or “Stop! I can use that cauldron over there to bribe the Ogres with some home cooking. We can skip this whole fight.”

Faerun.3091:

Crazy idea about how to do specialization
What if wearing Berserker armor changes some of your weapon skills, but only if you want it to? Maybe we can do specialization of classes this way? Honestly I have no idea what rings, backpiece, etc would do in this implementation, maybe they can stay as they are.

Something similar just came up in another thread that would produce much the same effect – giving each class some new Utility Skills that had stat-prerquisites. You could only take “Godawful Smash!” if you had over 1200 power for example. Or “Greater Temple of Light” as a heal skill if you had at least 1200 healing power.

Basically you would have to dedicate a fair amount of gear towards hitting that threshold.

More and more I’m starting to think our gear IS our sub-class. A Thief built around All-Settlers’ gear vs. a Thief wearing All-Valkyrie are clearly playing the game quite differently from each other. Berserker has just become our most popular sub-class for most professions because the content we have is very friendly towards it.

what could work imho:

• use the expedition system I explained in an earlier post to directly go to specific events. Now it wouldn’t be a problem to have to wait for an event to spawn, since expeditions only take you to event-chains with a guaranteed start when you arrive.

• Order NPCs don’t use local expeditions to take you to event-chains in the region (e.g. Kryta) but these NPCs have special expeditions: their portals go to Order-specific event-chains all around Tyria.

Now you’d experience how it’s like in an Order: the kind of life members of that Order have. Vigil events would be more battle/defense oriented while Whispers events are quite the contrary. Without the expedition system you would have a hard time finding Order-specific events. Even if you knew where to look, they might be on cooldown.

It still wouldn’t feel like a journey yet, there’s a narrative missing.

Devata.6589:

I think the traditional quest are exactly what you need. The only way they really don’t fit in to the design-idea is that it has to be different but then maybe change that idea.

The fact that quests aren’t repeatable also makes them give you more the feeling of having some small form of impact. A dynamic event that keeps repeating feels sort of useless to do.
When you done all the quest you are indeed out of content but they can add quest and there are the dynamic events that still keep on going.

I think the combination of the two would work great. It are both nice systems but not substitutes for each other while the dynamic events are now supposed to be substitutes for the traditional quests. Thats part of the problem.
Mix the two and you have the pro’s of the dynamic events and the journey and story feeling from the normal quest.

Well designing a quest would take ressources of dynamic events, which would be bad imho because

• if you add new events, the world becomes more alive, old events spawn less frequently and there’s always something going on.
• if you add new quests the world loses content for each quest you do. Since there are no new events (because ressources go to quests) you’ll always see the same events.

So it’s clear for me that the answer can only be: more dynamic events, but more interesting ones (writing!!).

Devata.6589:

Chris saying it’s a well made point when on a reactions that says “For example, I would pay $25 (2000 gems) for player housing that is meaningful and flexible and useful. Would enough players pay that much to justify development by Anet?” is basically agreeing that micro-transaction and the living story model reduces the quality you can deliver.

It’s nice to see a developer say something about that, but then maybe it’s an idea to rethink that model.

As a company you do not only want to make money but also deviler a good product I would think.

I disagree with this. If anything, having a consistent cash-flow helps reduce the risk of developing the game. Expansions can sell poorly, so there’s an inherent risk of losing money and business pressure to constrain the overall effort required. By having a cash shop, ArenaNet should be seeing a consistent revenue stream.

They know their funding model, they know how many resources that buys them, and they know (to some extent) that they’ll keep getting that money in the near future.

That isn’t to say that 1) expansions are a bad idea or 2) ArenaNet isn’t secretly working on an expansion without telling us, of course.

You are correct, though: the developers DO want to deliver a quality product. For most of them, not only do they play the game, they work with it 40, 50, 60 hours/week. This game means more to them than I’d venture it does to us.

I believe they made the decision to go without subscriptions or (frequent) paid expansions because they truly believe it’s the best way to deliver their game, both from a quality and from a profit standpoint.

Only if it comes with a minipet “herd” of about 25 cats…

Exosferatu.2961:

*Extend the level cap to 999.

*Leveling should be extremely difficult from level 80.

*Tome of Knowledge and any item that grant level will not work above level 80.

*Each level grants the character 1+ all attributes/stats .

*Add the rankings for high level characters on the Leaderboards.

*Every time a character reaches a hundred levels they unlock a new weapon (maybe?).

*You don’t have to grind for this because you level up as you enjoy a particular activity in the game like WvW/sPvP/PvE.

*This is for elitists.

I’m sorry but you are proposing a very bad (in my opinion) vertical progression.
So its bad and wrong place for it.

The worst part would be major unbalance. Also as players already said in CDI before, we don’t want vertical progressions. Just check last CDI.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Aeonblade.8709:

Swagger.1459:

I hope that if a “grand journey” to horizontal progression is introduced, the paths are equally offered to wvw, pvers and dungeon/fractal players or you’ll run into the same issues that we currently have with ascended vertical progression.

This, remember, WvW centric players aren’t going to be pleased if they have to farm PvE for their progression, be it horizontal or vertical

I certainly respect your points.

Chris

I have a point in mind also.
WvW has a horizontal progression system already, you can try to modify it and it should be cool.
PvP has rank system and will have some additional rewards soon so I would call it also a horizontal progression.
PvE has… Map completion? Few grindy achievements like slayer, hero and endless daily/monthly routine?

We would need more than anything a progression system that is a core PvE centered and maybe has some equivalents added to other system. That is basically the issue for me that only in PvE we feel like nothing is more to do so we farm gold, because what else can we do after doing map, JP and dungeons few times? Achievements are grindy and only for a short time and after that. If you are satisfied how your character looks you wont change that (it costs too much transmutation crystals) you can only grind more for legendary (which is a boring absurd) or log in once or twice per update to do meta.

For those of PvE players we need systems, juts like PvP needs more play modes.
Please bear this in mind.

Sociopolitical Diversification: Player housing, Guild Halls, and Faction Alliances leading to new game play opportunities, rewards and content.

Hero Recognition: Unique Skins, Titles, Rewards, followers and NPC reactions/opportunities based on the players individual feats in the world of Tyria regardless of how he/she chooses to play the game.

These two are extremely important to me, because they give the player a much more rounded sense of accomplishment in the game world over all, rather than in one or two specific areas limited to gear and itemization.

Currently, I really feel too little connection between my character and the game-world. I don’t feel like either the game world itself, or the live community of players in the game have absolutely any idea of each other’s accomplishments or impacts and are therefor not even thinking much about it. In the end, we’re just sitting around bored after we do our typical activities for the day.

Earlier on in the thread I talked about wanting “faction alliances” in a sense, because it could nicely bring you back to the core decisions you’re making with your characters and also introduce new decisions to make. I talked about the fact that when we created our characters, we made all these choices from the start but really only seemed to skim through them in the first 20 levels of the game. Everything after that is relatively the same as the next character, and we never really got to explore and learn anything about them outside of that, which then the story itself basically got hijacked by Traehearne and his wyld hunt to cleanse Orr etc, I could go on ranting about that particular situation but I won’t lol.

One of the examples I gave was, my first and main character in the game is a human mesmer, she’s a member of the aristocracy/nobility and joined the Vigil. Being able to do missions for “factions” joined could be very interesting, and even potentially converge at different points which could offer a more diverse experience while playing by making the decisions we’ve made since the start have more of an impact on our experiences. I’m a massive fan of story, lore, and also of political intrigue. So as a human noble, being a part of the Queen’s court would be a really exciting thing for me on my main, and being able to work up my rank within the nobility, thus granting titles and other prestigious rewards over time would be really fun. The same goes with my Order choice, where I could choose to specialize in a specific “area of expertise” within the faction (such as diplomacy, or battle). The possibilities there could be with other races and different options provided also seems more limitless and diverse as well.

That’s all of it everyone, going to take a break now.

I don’t think the home instance can do what most people are looking for in housing. Human, maybe, a section could be made customizable. But the Asura one is a whole lot of nothing and the Norn one is a dormitory, not a steading. Plus for now hunks of the PS make you travel through the home instance, so it runs up against the consistency issues that’s hamstringing other changes. (Me, I can wrap my brain around alternate status of personal and world story, but I’ve been RPing since the 1970’s and have practice at compartmentalizing character knowledge).

So housing will have to be in a new place, or in sections of city currently inaccessible, much as the Dead End got added to the DR city wall. I remain adamant that open world will not work, not nohow, not ever. I know ANet could surprise me, they’ve come up with many other creative hindsight-obvious solutions, but there simply isn’t room to cram in space for every player of millions. Or even of thousands if we localize it by server.

A separate map is possible. DaoC did that, though it became a subdivision that took effort to travel to and still had the warfare-level competition to get convenient locations with guild members nearby. LotRO did multiple subdivisions, spawning more as the old ones filled. Nice, but limited people per instance so if your guild was larger you’d have issues. Also it too required traveling to the subdivision entrance (less of an issue in a game with so many waypoints, we can just put one at the door in).

The movable doorway someone proposed long ago has some elegance to it. Slap it up anywhere in the world and it’s the way in to your custom place. Now the whole world is available to live in. (Doesn’t help if your alts have distinct lives, but as discussed above the odds of working it out to individual alts are low).

As to guild housing, I’m hopeful it will be quirky, with lots of details and good architecture in a choice of styles. Accessing it will likely be done the same way as individual housing. I wouldn’t want to tie personal housing to guild housing, interesting as that could be, because what happens to your home if you leave the guild?