Guild Wars 2

I wanted a very simple tool to show current and upcoming events using the new Megaserver Schedule. Enter gw2sched.azurewebsites.net!

A very simplistic site to show you what events are going on right now, and events coming up soon using your local time.

Check it out and let me know what you think! I plan on adding a couple more features here soon!

aRestless.6213:

Using a language that isn’t understood by all people around you is mostly considered impolite.

No language is understood by all people, that’s the whole issue.

Another problem with this babylonian language mess is organising events like Teq or 3H-Wurm.
If your event zerg is split into 4 main fractions (english, french, german, spanish – all of these used to have their own servers) where a lot of people do not understand what the other 3 are saying, the event is destined to fail. And then the blaming and hate starts. This already used to happen a lot on the overflows for the living story events like scarlet’s marionette, now this is the standard game mode on the main maps.

Also don’t forget that there is a game mode called WvW that is a source of rivalry between servers that naturally carries over into PvE.
It’s like expecting fans of Real, PSG, Bayern and ManU to support a mixed european football team. Not going to happen.

And of course european history with thousands of years of intermittent wars (2 of theam spreading all over the world) and longstanding enmities does not help this cause.

Seras.5702:

Literally everyone on here thinks the push back of traits to 30 is a bad idea. No matter what everyone thinks of the new traits, their acquisition, the challenges, the costs, the balance, the bugs….everyone hate the push back to 30. I’d really love a dev response because simply saying “we want to make progression for new players easier and simpler” is not holding water for me. Or any of us apparently. Heck, even new players are more confused now since they’re logging on and have a mere fraction of what they did before.

pretty simple, they want to make it feel sucky to level up, so people appreciate being max level more. This change is inspired by China release, which has longer grinds per level, and plans to make more money off things like experience scrolls, VIP bonus exps, etc.

Problem is, it really isnt a good idea for players over here. If they wanted to incentivize getting to higher levels, they should have done something like add improved animations to certain skills, etc. Built better max level game goals, etc.

Have you all seen this?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trait_guide

I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I can’t believe what they’ve locked traits behind during the whole leveling process.

Multiple story modes, multiple events around the world, multiple world events (some that have no schedule such as the fire shaman and dredge commissar) all the temples and the best:

Complete the Obsidian Sanctum jumping puzzle.

You have got to be kitten kidding me ANet devs.

I am not a casual player or a solo player but I find that list terrible. Personal character progression should NOT be locked behind unsoloable things!

And seriously: how on earth are we supposed to know when these events are up considering the megaservers and the removal of API?? Most maps I’ve been mapping into in Orr have had all temples and Arah open. How am I supposed to know my server is making a Balthazar attempt when I’m no longer being put on maps with primarily my server?

I’m sorry that this is worded so strongly, but this is just an absolute mess and I honestly can’t believe how you thought this would be good for the majority of your players. Yes, people enjoyed skill hunting in GW1 but it could all be done solo. That’s the type of system you should have emulated and put in place: personal skill challenges that could be done whenever the player chose to do so.

I suppose maybe this is yet another push for players to use up their gold in order to try to make them buy gems and convert to gold and completely drain them of skill points.

I have to voice my opinion on this ‘new trait system makes it easier for people to understand’ argument. It’s rubbish.

Seriously, to whoever though this up, what time and age do you think we live in? Were you raised in the Sierra games period perhaps, where forgetting to pick up an inconspicuous piece of cheese would result in permanent game over 3 stages later, all the while without any hints or online guides to help you?

Because we don’t live in that age any more. We live in the now, the now in which there is a tutorial for every trivial, menial task one could ever come across. And we know it, because most of us spend over half our day online, via pc or smart-phone.

It’s downright insulting to think that a large percentage of players would have had trouble figuring out how trait points used to work. And even if we assume that this is so, which is asinine, then giving us the choice to change our traits at any time, free of charge would have been the fix all along.

I’m sure there are reasons for these changes, but the ones I’ve been given are really lacklustre.

Also, I have to wonder how large this group of struggling people must have been for you to change the trait system for, considering you apparently care diddly-squat for the significantly sized RP community.

What mostly angers me is not as much the decisions made as the inadequate, if existing, justification of the changes. For some reason I feel like I’m constantly being lied to or deceived, and when people are calling them out on it there’s only silence.

17 mega maps and counting …

The mess in the EU region will only get worse,

Whats the point of half of the meta chains (and all of the good meta chains) when the finale is timegated to schedules? “Dynamic” events my shiny kitten.

Well if I had to make a guess, I’d say now it’s China and their All Mighty Yuan=$.

Shocking fact : You’re probably a US player, and you don’t experience the problem the EU players are facing with this.

So give me one positive about not being able to communicate with the community?

To try to use this constructively, I’ll say this:

I like the switch from a 70 point system to a 14 point system. Ten point stat boots were a nice little treat per level, but almost meaningless.

However, curving the traits so that Masters don’t kick in until 60 and Grandmasters at 80 kind of defeats using leveling to learn to play. As an example, my engineer started figuring out his flamethrower kit once he picked up Juggernaut at 40. Well, now I have to wait until 60 for Juggernaut to re-appear. That’s 20 more levels I get to spend with my Adept traits that really don’t help most of my kits.

You’re given more time to learn how to use your weapon and utility skills, and that’s good. As a trade off, though, you’re 80 before you even know what your Grandmasters are. And at that point, you’re led to believe you’re ready for Cursed Shore and Arah. I’m not sure if that’s entirely a good counter idea.

Let me know when you put back my traits to where they were- I really can’t face redoing 10 sets of traits when I had different builds than the cookie cutter norm.

Every change they make in this game completely ignores multiple alt playing people (statistically we’re the most likely to use the gem store btw).

OR From a Hilly Hike to a Climb Up a Sheer Cliff

I have played Guild Wars since Autumn of 2005. I have played Guild Wars 2 since Beta Weekend 2. I have twelve alts, three of which began their lives in the headstart period. Let’s get that out of the way.

Outside of a few of them, I play mostly casually. I like to take my time and enjoy the sights and sounds and smells of Tyria. I have games that I have not yet beaten, DOZENS, because I adore getting immersed and lost in them. GW2 is devilish because it has tickled that fancy of mine.

That said, I came into the patch with a wide open mind. A lot of changes were coming and the fundamentals of the game would be changed for good. I welcomed the wardrobe, the dye consolidation, and the megaserver. If nothing else, towns are a lot livelier now. I adore seeing the world alive with players.

But here is the rub—traits. Before the patch, progression was very gradual, but it was there. Every level you’d have a shiny new trait point to assign to a line of your choosing. You’d incrementally increase your basic stats and work towards minor and major traits as a greater goal. What is missing now is that incremental increase that kept you focused or gave you the idea to try something else.

In my opinion, there was absolutely zero reason to disembowel the trait progression as it was. All it did was turn levels 11-30 into flyover country and greatly inhibited the capabilities of younger characters to make their way through the wilds of Tyria. I was overjoyed when I was finally able to unlock my first major trait on my mesmer, because her burdens became that much easier to shoulder. That was at level 20. Now, at level 32, a single minor trait is all she can afford, and her efficacy is that much reduced. Trash mobs may be cannon fodder now, but taking boss veterans and larger enemies has become a kitten exhausting battle of attrition. I was just starting to love my mesmer, but if the next 48 levels are going to be like this, one can hardly blame me for wanting to just hang up the pink butterflies and make the curtain call.

Life has certainly improved for my veteran characters. But the experience of newer characters has been severely impacted by the removal of gradual progression, the engagement of experimenting with builds in early levels, and the ability to take on challenges in the mid-level ranges.

ANet, you have either inadvertently or by design turned GW2 into one of those games where the endgame (which many argue doesn’t even exist) IS the game. You have turned my hikes into chores, where leveling was previously a joyous little race where little victories gave way to meeting goals and eagerly trying out that combination of traits that you had been eyeing for so long. I implore you, please, please consider reverting to the old 70 point system, at least for PvE. (The new system works extremely well in PvP, kudos to that.)

Your players and new players are not too dumb to comprehend 70 trait points, I promise.

Weylin.6478:

I know a lot of people are upset with some of the changes, but try and understand the reasons from the developer point of view and allow for some things to be readjusted as necessary.

some of the changes that people aren’t liking will possibly be further tweaked with hotfixes, just give it time.

The best you all can do is provide calm and detailed feedback like some have already been doing. It is possible that they had overlooked some things and all of you will do a better job at finding the issues than a small team would be able to.

Feedback:

Anet nerfed my characters into the dirt today by taking away almost all Traits my characters had earned. I am not a good enough Player to reach level 80. That’s right, I am not good enough at this game… but I love parts of GW2 enough that I had kept the game installed so I could return one day.
Well today I log in and my highest character, lvl 51 ELE has four traits out of the over 15 he used to have. FOUR. I was having a hard enough time as it is.

Anet doesn’t want People like me playing their MMO. Anet must want the Players that can breeze through leveling content to 80, which I admit I have had a hard time doing. Without those traits, and the benefits I each of my characters got from them, the game is now beyond my abilities.

These changes were great for the gazillion lvl 80s, but not good for Players that have a hard time with this game. Anet decided whom their preferred customers are and I am not on the list.

I am not rage quitting, I just realize I don’t belong here and there is no sense in holding out hope I might play GW2 again.

Feedback Given. Resigned from Guild. All Characters deleted. Game Uninstalled.

I really feel I lost a game I loved to play in this latest patch.

you don’t understand the problem Hannelore …
maybe because you not play at a EU server … its horrible at the moment with the chaos of languages … the system with all supported languages at one map dosn’t work at EU

and yes … most of eu players would chose a empty map with only players of their language instead of a full map with language mix

I play a mesmer. This is reason enough to not like the new patch.

1) MEGASERVEUR!
Especially in Europe, where he virtually 6 different languages??. This is a mess!

I don’t want a Megaserver. I don’t want to be on any map with people from other worlds, except by choice, i.e. guesting. Every home world has a different personality. Mixing up the different worlds is gonna cause issues, especially if it comes down to hate speech between WvW players.
And as Mustafa.7684 said above, what if you end up with a guildie who is from another home world and therefore is against you in PvP? He’s not paranoid, just foreseeing a problem.
I actually like being alone on maps sometimes, especially out in the wild mountains. And I always know I can use LFG to find peeps to do stuff with, or ask my guildies, or even just go to a city and ask around in map chat.

Megaserver, NO.

“Sorry, I gotta go. I have the 4:15 Fire Shaman I gotta catch.”

If you want to make Tyria feel more like people’s dreary real lives, you’ve succeeded.

This schedule is restricting player access to content that they’ve previously been always able to do based on their time zone and when they’re actually available to log in (i.e. not commuting, getting to bed at a decent time, etc.). Not only that, but it now requires a much larger amount of time to attend most of these in a day.

I don’t understand why you can’t have multiple bosses spawn at a time slot and allow players to choose which of the spawned set to attend. Something like having all low level bosses spawn at 15 past, mediums at 30 past, high levels at 45 past, and the mega-organized on the hours. That way at least a player who can’t be on for say, Fire elemental can decide to do that on a day since they haven’t killed it in a while.

I also don’t get why you felt the need to change Tequatl and Tri Wurm’s schedules at all. Why can’t the “mega-organized” events have their own separate schedule? It’s not like the world boss zerg was ever disrupted by those events. At the very least please add some more spawns than three times a day for these. Not everyone is capable of playing during your chosen prime time.

I have a level 40 character. Just logged in and boom down to only 2 trait points.

I think if we argue and post more, the devs will release it quicker.

I’m armed with brownies and sheer determination it’s 2:30am, bring it.

Whenever you idly sit at your computer and you realize you have one hand on the mouse, and the other one over the “w”,“a”,“s”,“d” keys.

You know you’ve been reading the forums too much when “kitten” replaces all your swear words IRL.

ehjhey.1894:

I think the stance Anet has taken in terms of discussing Megaservers at this point is “Let’s wait until you’ve actually tried it, and THEN talk about how we can fix it.” is it the best stance to take? probably not. Is it unreasonable? Don’t think so. It’s one more day. I wanna see with my own eyes how it plays out before I make any more suggestions.

Anet’s stance is “We’re going to do this, and you’re going to like it, and if not, who cares, we’re going to do it anyways.”

Until the system has been in a few weeks, no one, on either side, can definitively say what the real repercussions of the system will be. On one hand, we have the doomsayers, who proclaim the end is nigh, repent, for the end has come etc. On the other, we have the jolly chappies who themselves completely guarantee (tho how they have the knowledge/foresight to do that is beyond me) that no downsides can occur from this. What we have until tomorrow and beyond, is conjecture, and educated guesses at best. And depending on viewpoint, those lean one way or the other.

Personally, while I believe that the megaserver system can solve some issues, I do not believe in its current format that it will not create some new ones.

I come at this issue as a roleplayer, and someone who has found a fantastic IC and OOC community in my GW2 home, Piken Square. Rpers raised the issue of potential community breakdown. Anets response was simply to say guild up, neglecting the nature of RP as an inter-guild experience as well as an open and spontaneous one. Indeed, they didn’t acknowledge that EU had a RP server as well (Piken Square), and still hasn’t acknowledged there are large gatherings of RPers in other language servers as well. As an RPer, such at best ignorance of a substantial (but by no means majority) community is not heartening, and raises doubts as to what thought we were given in designing this system. While, for the sake of plucking numbers out of the bum, 90% of the time we’ll still be grouped with RPers, we can’t guarantee it, and it is possible that our map population may be distributed to prop up the other servers from time to time. That makes our little enterprise harder. At the core, we have no guarantees that a community that has existed in game since launch, and existed as a collective even before the release of GW2, can be reliably sustained at all times. That is troubling, and is against the basic idea behind an MMO, social and co-operative gameplay. While that may not in reality be such an issue that will have a large impact, again we have no guarantees, and no player-based ones, by their nature, hold water. It is disappointing that Anet has not responded more to those concerns, as they have been persistent since the announcement, and are valid concerns at this stage. Just because one player will not be adversely affected does not mean others won’t be. It is a question of context.

As for megaservers being desired, well, not accurate, and has been pointed out, were referred to as Districts, in reference to the GW1 system. There is a fundamental difference between the District system and the Megaserver one. One that goes to the heart of the title of this thread, choice. We could choose what district we could enter.

“Let’s meet up in Kamadan, I’ll see you in America District 3”

I doubt at any point the desire was for a completely autonomous system without active player input. This system is halfway there, but is not the same, and with the absence of choice potentially does not give the flexibility to co-ordinate in that way.

An anonymous tag system at least gives some form of active player choice in the sorting of people. Apparantly, and if I read Anet’s announcements rightly, it will become a “smart” system whereby you are also sorted by what you do. If you dungeon, you’ll find yourself with more dungeoners etc. Fair enough, but what if you decide to try something different? At the extreme end of the system possibilities, you’ll find it harder to connect with people on the new activity. Some sort of player choice and tagging system removes that completely by allowing free choice. For those saying the technical challenge of such a system are too great, I would respond by saying that Anet have already met a huge challenge by creating the system as it seems to be at point of release tomorrow. Surely an extra feature to return choice to players, while perhaps prolonging the system’s development, is not prohibitively unreasonable.

As a player, I don’t like choice being taken from me, and I wonder what makes Anet and this system think it can make decisions about where I want to play better than I can. Especially when there is no evidence that this system can or will recognise, much less take into account, some of my preferred styles of gameplay and activities to engage in.

Astral Projections.7320:

You will be able to get free charges by doing area maps, including cities (1 charge for each). Make a character, run it through the starter instance, take the PvP portal to the Vigil. Take the portals to the cities, map each, get free charges. Repeat as needed.

Right but that’s only one. I used to get 3. Those were ‘really’ useful in playing alts up and having a nice look for them to 80. I do a ‘lot’ of map completion, and have a lot of those stones laying around. I have an alt Norn warrior that has 3 pieces of armor (chest, legs, boots) and about 8 weapons (lionguard skin) that I was migrating every 10 levels. I won’t be able to afford that any more, as rather than getting 3 conversions per map completion, I get 1.

Depending on the cost of charges, the ability to play alts and keep them in a look from 1-80 might be overwhelming. Short of doing it ‘once’ with some 18-ish level gear and then just running the train in Queensdale without ever changing my gear until 80 – which I’d really rather not do.

Thankfully she’s around 55 right now, so what I might do is try to milk her gear to 65, do it then, then milk that to 80. I have two characters I wanted to run up from scratch, both Norns, that I wanted to outfit and change up every 10-15 levels with new gear. What will that cost me now?

With map completion at 3 skin conversions each (below 80), I could at ‘least’ give them a full conversion (chest, leg, boot) every time I cleared a map, with extras for weapons, for free. I won’t be able to do that now, unless I pay real money.

I’m not opposed to paying money. I have spent $10-20/month on this game since it’s release, like clockwork (every month on the 20th, I buy 800 gems, and some months I splurge and buy more, like when I started my new Human thief and put together armor pieces from 3 different store sets – thank Jeebus she’s 80 now). It’s as much as I can afford. What this has done, is make me shift where I’ll need to spend that money, and take away many items I used to enjoy (like fun new puppy or lion pets).

Guess I won’t know for sure until I see what the cost/charge will be. Pardon me while I go pop in the game and write down some current stone/crystal prices…