Guild Wars 2

In some ways I think this is like EA’s move into mobile. Telling their customers “The new dungeon keeper wasn’t made for you, it was made for a new generation of fans”. Clearly, gw2 was not made to appease the people who played gw1. Maybe at one point that was the intention, but then some committee got ahold of it and now it’s just one big hot mess.

The game needs dynamic changes. Huge reworkings. Not skill balancing, not nerfing this skill and buffing that one, but big huge reworkings like when Blizz redid their starting zones with new missions and so on. The fact is, however, that if that ever happens in gw2, it will only happen when it is financially the only way left to survive. The vast majority of the things your real fans want (like the roleplayers you just screwed by taking their dyeable town clothes away, I don’t even RP but it’s clear that’s a jerk move aimed at the people who actually bother to buy your gems, and for what?) are never going to happen. You’re going to placate us with bits and pieces and hope it’s enough, and maybe it is enough for some out there. Maybe it’s enough for enough whales to keep buying those BL keys and keeping you going. I hope it is. I hope you manage to pull an expansion out in a year or two and give me someplace to actually wear those legendaries and be “proud” of them. As it is I look at that time spent as a complete waste of my life, and that’s not something I have ever felt about a game before. It’s something that really makes me re-evaluate where I want to spend my time and money, and that’s another sensation I’m not used to feeling from a game. I can name a few games I’ve played 1000+ hours of, and I have no regrets for them. No regrets for the hundreds of hours I sunk into gw1 at all. Then again, gw1 was never like “Hey break out your credit card and support me if you want bugfixes. You do really love me don’t you?”. The attempts at manipulation are transparent and unbecoming. I realize all mmo’s are skinner boxes to some extent, but you’ve really piled up the psychological impulses to buy (more! now! don’t you want the best stuff?!) in ways that are obnoxious and clearly visible. Everyone knows why the 5% listing fee doesn’t show up in the projected profits, and it’s no accident that it happened. The game is set up to make you waste money testing useless builds that require a full set of 20g armor+runes+sigils+this and that and oh you need more laurels and more this and more but you can skip it if you just. break. out. that. credit. card.

I know that this post will get flamed, and that’s cool, I don’t really plan on responding anyway, I just have wanted to express my displeasure with the direction this game has been taken for a long time, but today was finally a large enough, over-hyped letdown that I am uninstalling, and I wanted to say why before I go. I hope my criticism here has been constructive enough that it won’t simply be removed.

Yes, I spent 1000+ hours playing this game. However, that time has only made me increasingly positive that wherever you’re heading with it, it’s not going to be any place worth actually traveling to, and nothing I couldn’t find in 100 similar mmo’s, with new ones being released now on a near monthly basis. After 1000 hours, for someone to say “I don’t recommend that game, it’s a complete waste of time and a non-stop grind” is about the harshest criticism you could receive, but I don’t pretend that anyone that matters will actually see me pointing it out or care.

See you in a few weeks or whenever your new dragon comes out. Will not expect to be impressed. Feel free to prove me wrong on that one.

Thank you for your time, although, if I could go back to 2012 and do it all again, I would not have bothered to give you mine,

BFS

The other day, while I was sitting out of wvw (the only thing I like doing anymore in gw2) after a transfer, unable to actually play anything other than eotm, I thought about getting a new game. Maybe go back to WoW, maybe try some D3, oh, I know, Wildstar. I’ve heard a lot about Wildstar. I go to pre-purchase it, but it’s an NCSoft game. Right there beside gw2. People tell me NCSoft is just the distributor, but after the “experience” of feeling ignored for two years in gw2, instead of pre-ordering like I do just about every other game that comes out, I hesitated. Did I really want to give money to people related to this? Did I really want to set myself up for another game of “Well I’ve put 1000 hours into this so I might as well stick with it?”. And the answer was “No”. No I do not feel like getting mired into another unrewarding gaming experience that sees my wallet like it has a bullseye painted on it. The only devs I’ve ever not bought games from based on past reputation are Peter Molyneux and EA, if that gives you any indication of how low my opinion is at this point, but just being associated with ANet now is enough to make me put my credit cards away and move on.

I know people are going to point out that I got my money’s worth from gw2. Fair enough, I certainly did. But it’s not 2012 anymore, and we’re still playing 2012’s mmo. That’s really clear to a lot of people. I’ve played mmo’s since everquest 1, been playing muds since they were back on compuserve and AOL online “was” the internet to most people. Only in the most pay-to-win games do I see new people join and drop out like they do in gw2. I see many, many new people (low ap scores) buy the game, join a guild, play for 20 or 30 levels and quit. They don’t even bother to max a single character, because everyone in their guild has told them, repeatedly “There’s nothing to do at 80, leveling is the fun part”. They don’t believe it at first. Surely there’s more to it. But eventually, after they’ve been told by several people “No, really, there’s nothing special at 80 except more dungeons” it finally sinks in that they’ve totally wasted their $25/$50/whatever.

I want to support this company. I feel strongly, however, that whatever made gw1 great (seriously, that’s my all time fave mmo, you really outdid yourselves in a lot of ways) has been watered down and neutered into something boring, formulaic, and so startchy-clean and perfect looking that there isn’t a spec of dirt on a norn. Giant sweaty dudes wearing leather and carrying axes, killing things all day, but every single one gleams like the top of Mr. Cleans bald head. That was ok in 2004 with 2004-era graphics, it’s not ok a decade later.

I can’t do it anymore. Between the writing (those hiccups to break what laughably little tension there was in the Scarlett final scene are a perfect example), the family friendly until it’s painful art style, the npc’s in major cities constant spouting about how wonderful war is (as a veteran, “I had a dream about a war, I must go fight in it” is the single stupidest reason I’ve ever heard to volunteer to be a body bag, fantasy situation or no), and now this… modifying of things, instead of adding content, and acting like it’s something special… It’s the last straw for me for a while. I’ve put a lot of hours into this game, waiting for it to get good. It’s not getting good. I understand that now. This update has been upsetting to a large portion of your userbase, and I think most of them are going to sigh quietly and either go back to wvw or just move on to another game. Normally I would join them, but things have been wrong (to me) for so long here, and I’ve abided it patiently, that I feel I should speak up.

I’ll come back for the next LS event. I won’t expect there to be more than an hour or two’s worth of new content, and I will expect to grind that content until it gets boring because it will be the only thing there is to do in gw2 that I haven’t already grinded into the dirt.

There are a lot of people out there with 3x/4x/5x the achievement points than I do. People who never stopped defending you. If you go to reddit and mention that you’re disappointed with gw2 you’ll be downvoted to oblivion. It still took you two years to give those fans account-bound legendaries and account bound WxP. The phrase “battered spouse syndrome” comes to mind.

It was fun for about 5mins until it set in that the amount of times I missed or was obstructed was greatly overstated. It’s just a terrible trait in general and certainly not worthy of a GM slot.

My experience with it is limited to WvW though as that’s all I ever really play.

I’ve been using it in WvW for about 15 mins now.

At first I was like “oooh…”

But then I was like “urgh…”

This shouldn’t be a grandmaster trait. This is a basic fix.

It carries the illusion of increased attack speed which is why Anet are palming it off as a GM trait.

Should at the least be merged with Eagle Eye or Piercing Arrows.

Ridiculous.

That’s how it worked in GW1. More customization is always better.

Believing the Manifesto. ba dum tssss!!!

Hello, lootbags. WvW thief here. Since power Rangers are considered a happy corpse on legs by most thieves, i’ll try to show you our perspective, what we hate to bump into. Okay, here it comes.

1. AoE on Shadow Refuge. Since you bothered to slot that longbow, don’t waste your Barrage on silly stuff like my Black Powder/Heartseeker combo. I’ll just move out on it. What i hate is when my Shadow Refuge has an ugly red circle on top of it. Of course, other AoE/Cleave weapons work even better. Hit me with a maul, i’m dead.

2. Did i mention “Hit me with a maul, i’m dead”? Ranger’s melee weapons are an effective choice against me. Sword/dagger offers obscene amounts of evades. It’s like trying to backstab a grasshopper. Greatsword, on the other hand, is a great backstab deterrent. Nothing makes me throw a juicy kitten like a GS #4 right when i am about to backstab, followed by Hilt Bash and Maul.

3. Canine Pets. Yeah, forget bears/cats/devourers/moas/piggies. They just take valuable space and waste natural resources. If you want to give me a challenge, at least bother slotting your Wolf. And remember, dogs execute their awesome leap right after pet swap!

4. One, two… dodge! That doesn’t apply only to Rangers, but it’s an effective strategy against all D/X thieves. If you see me stealth, count to two and dodge. You’re almost sure get away. If you have no dodge, bind about face to a nearby key. Difference between 10k and 5k crits is amazing if you ever have to eat it. Weapon dodges count too, so keep them in mind.

5. Don’t stand there. Nothing brings a smile on my face as a Ranger having a casual picnic and plonking things with his longbow. Yes, expect me to dodge that Point Blank Shot. And then you’re already a lootbag. MOVE. Especially when i stealth.

I hope those few tips will help you in countering us Thieves a bit better.

Keanu Reeves is sad.

What is Sad Keanu sad about?

He is losing this outfit on the 15th. I hope you’re happy ANet. Keanu was already sad about his sandwich. Now this.

The Gem store is so incredibly disappointing to me for a number of reasons.
Rather than list a large number of things that I dislike I will attempt to be constructive and offer suggestions for improvement.

1.) Make all gem store items permanently available so that people can purchase what they want when they want, and not be arbitrarily punished by being unable to play at a given time.

2.) Make more of the ‘Toy’ items permanent rather than charge based, or have a charge based version and a perma version at different price points.

3.) Lower the prices across the gem store by 20% – 25%. In comparison the the best ftp cash shop I have ever seen in a game (I deliberately do not mention which game, as people will focus on that and derail the topic of focus), GW2 prices are much too high, especially for one use items (and LOL keys, wtf Anet, really?).

4.) Round Gems to the dollar. I’m sick of being nickle and dimed paying $10.00 for 800 gems. Whats wrong with evening it off and making it $10.00 for 1000?

5.) Provide More content and more interesting content. More skins, more toys, make tonic transforms more interesting (add jump and emote animations at the very least and even add the ability to fight mobs while wearing an illusion), add fun RP props and heck, even add mounts.

There are so many neat things that could be sold on the Gem Store, but instead ANET chooses to overcharge for junk. I just don’t understand why?

Greetings and salutations.

With Season 1 of the Living Story drawing to a close, it seems appropriate to offer review and reflection of everything that has come thus far. Sadly, there is much to consider, as the brand new path trod by Anet has many missteps and mishaps along the way.

Rather than talk about individual flaws, I thought it might be best to take a stab at the overall writing style of the Living Story and the narrative flaws it continues to exhibit. Plot holes come and go, individual complaints will always remain, but the best way to help Season 2 is to consider the pitfalls of Season 1 from a writing and gaming perspective. And so, I thought I would offer up a bit of constructive criticism in silly infographic format.

For your consideration, Fifteen Lessons From Fifteen Months of Scarlet Briar.

Could you quit doing this?

Yeah, thanks.

Hey, guys! Hop on over to THIS thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-Mix-n-Match-TOWN-CLOTHES

…and post your Mix ‘n’ Match Town Clothes pictures to show ANet in a positive way how much you will miss it if they carry through with this ugly scenario!

(continued from last post)

Q: So tell me, Curtis. How can they believe they’re capable of designing things that look good as a set when they CAN’T? It’s so hard to make a Charr look good, and none of their sets do. Aesthetic unity I can understand, but their aesthetics suck according to pretty much everyone who actually wears town clothes. The only possible thing they COULD value is “not having to deal with seams.”
A: Don’t call me— Whatever. In all fairness, that’s a pretty understandable thing to value.

Q: Maybe if they weren’t making a game in which appearance is so important to the players! Skins are the endgame in this game, for crying out loud! The entire Wardrobe is based on making customizing your appearance easier! Caring about seams is part of their JOB!
A: Yeah. And I think they realize that now. The thing is, this happened to be the one change they didn’t think to toss out there well in advance. But, I suspect that the end result of this whole ordeal will be that they’ll find a way to reintroduce a town clothes system.

Q: Well they need to LET US KNOW! I need to know whether to demand refunds or hold onto the hope that they’ll get their collective head out of their collective sphincter and make the stuff I paid for useable again!
A: They have two weeks to do so.

Q: And given how hard it is to extract any sort of information from them…
A: Think of it like this: If I were trying to solve a problem, would you expect me to tell you how it was coming until I’d solved it? :P

Q: I would expect you to tell me that you recognize there’s a problem and you’re working on it. We haven’t even gotten that. Right now all we’ve gotten is “We are sorry.”
A: We have gotten an answer. They’ve been talking about it.

Q: Even if they ARE working on the problem, what they SAID to us is, “There is not a problem.” So it is entirely possible that they talked about it and decided it is not a problem. (Editor’s note: This is me losing faith, largely because I was hungry and being hungry makes me grumpy.)
A: What they said is, “This will not turn out as bad as you think, but we don’t have as much leeway as you expect, either.” Largely for the technical reasons I outlined that might be the case. I’m pretty sure “you’d be surprised how many skins will be useable as armor” are weasel words for “we are frantically working to make the skins you apparently like useable as armor now after we didn’t realize we needed to.”

Q: I suppose if they’d given us a reason to believe ANY of what they said instead of using weasel words…
A: Ultimately, they have yet to mess up in a way that they haven’t made right in some way. Even with the awfulness of the Living Story’s plot, the combat of the last several updates was awesome. So, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Q: Whatever you say… Curtis. :P
A: Don’t call me… whatever.

So, maybe that helps explain things. Or maybe it just gives the GW2 forums a disturbingly intimate view into my love life, I dunno.

Anyway, obviously all of this is speculation, and speculation that I don’t even necessarily understand and might have paraphrased poorly, but it’s speculation that helped explain to at least one layperson (me) what other people’s speculation might actually mean. Hopefully it will also provide a nice, convenient platform for ANet to use as a basis for communication, even if only to be able to confirm/deny things.

Edited to add: He would like me to note that he is also a historian, which I didn’t figure was relevant to the argument, but as he puts it, “My craft is pretty much the art of asking, ‘Why the cats would somebody do that?’ and coming up with a sensible answer.” Which actually makes a lot of sense, and now I don’t have to suspect that he’s secretly the avatar of Curtis.

Edited again to add: Apparently he didn’t want me to note that in my post, as he thinks it makes him sound like a French-word-for-shower, and also was talking out of his donkey. (Wheee translating my normally vulgar speech with my beloved into euphemisms?) He was just noting it to me. But I’m keeping it anyways because I thought it was funny.

Condition damage should’ve been more of a DoT really. Less cleansing, less condition spam (no applying on AA, only other weapon skills) and less damage overall.
The conception of Conditions was pretty classic – players using them need good survability so they have 1-2 bonus defensive stats. But as it stands now, conditions are very bursty. If you’re not bursty with your conditions, they get cleansed quickly. Failed concept.

As for Power Ranger – It is and should be okay as a Melee Power ranger using S/A+GS. But I lost hope for any play with Bows. Only semi-viable thing is spamming aa on SB in power spec but it’s so lame and boring that I can’t stand it.

I’d like to see old GW1 “Morale” debuff maybe. Not 15% each death because that was quite ridiculous, but 5% debuff stacking up to 5 would be okay

(continued from last post)

Q: So that means that because town clothes weren’t working as they originally intended, regardless of how they were actually being used, they decided to make the change to Outfits to fit the original intention?
A: Yes. I think ANet has an engineer’s perspective: This system is broken, so I will fix it. Why would somebody use something that is broken anyway?

Q: How the cats are you so good at translating— oh right, Engineering degree.
A: And game design nerd, thank you. I’ve read a lot about programming theory.

Q: I’m a nerd for game design too, though!
A: Yeah, but you’re into fluff, not programming :P

Q: Okay, point. All right then, He Who Knows the Mind of ANet… If Outfits STILL have to be made differently for each armor class, why did Curtis say that doing Outfits allows them to put armor in the store that DOESN’T have to be modified for each armor class? Or was he referring solely to the aesthetics?
A: Yup, aesthetics. This is the only way for them to be able to put out armor that doesn’t have to look like it’s Light, Medium, or Heavy, and also do it quickly. They can design an outfit, tweak it for each complete mesh without having to worry about seams, and ship it, then start work on the next. From THEIR perspective, it makes life easier for the art team and allows them to actually kick out more content. It also means that when designing a clothing item, they don’t have to think about how it would look with every other clothing item: it only has to look good with the rest of its outfit.

It’s pretty much ultimately the problem of any complex system: the more discrete objects you have to deal with, the harder it becomes to introduce new discrete objects. Outfits allow them to swap the paradigm around and eliminate the combinatorial complexity from the design equation.

Q: That DOES seem like what a confused engineer would think about how designers think. Really, though, the designer doesn’t have to make EVERYTHING compatible with EVERYTHING. You don’t go to the store and think that because they’re selling a navy blue shirt, it’s going to really well with the black pants they sell because everything they sell has to look good together! Besides, we’ve got plenty of single items that don’t match other things. Fuzzy bear hat and Charr town clothes?
A: Yes, but when was the last time they released something that wasn’t a complete set?

Q: But people never USE them as a set— Oh. OH. They didn’t KNOW that.
A: Even if they did, the fact is, combining things as a complete outfit and not worrying about how it goes with other things will allow them to pump out new stuff a lot faster. That, I suspect, is what Curtis meant by “you’ll be getting new outfits more often.”

Q: I should start calling you Curtis.
A: Please don’t.

(continued in next post)

Hm, just had a very interesting discussion with my boyfriend wherein he speculated about ANet’s reasons for this seemingly incredibly dumb decision, and made some pretty good points. He’s got some knowledge of programming and is a game design nerd but also a writer at heart, so he occupies a sort of middle ground where he might be capable of communicating what ANet cannot communicate, so Curtis, PLEASE pay attention to this and possibly DO A CONFIRM/DENY? for everyone’s peace of mind.

This is a paraphrase of a much longer and more involved conversation, but I hope it gets the gist across.

To start with, some very simplistic definitions: A skeleton is a series of lines that join together to determine points of articulation and movement. A mesh fits around a skeleton to provide the shape of what is moving. A texture goes on that mesh to give it color and pattern and such.

Q: So, why can’t town clothes be used in combat, anyway?
A: Because combat animations are based on armor class, and the mesh for each armor class is constructed differently.

Q: But your combat stance in both of them is identical, and the way you jump, run, and so on. And running and jumping animations and such are also identical no matter what armor class you wear, so they all must have the same skeleton. Why not just apply combat animations to the identical town clothes skeleton then?
A: Some systems in the game that affect animations probably reference the mesh itself, and not the skeleton; and they probably can’t go through and change all of those systems to interact with EITHER the character’s armor class mesh OR the town clothes mesh.

Q: But aren’t those systems already prepared to handle three different armor class meshes?
A: Yes, but right now, all they have to do is detect what armor class the character is. If a character could use two different meshes, they would also have to detect which mesh the character is using at the time. And we don’t know how many systems they would have to change.

Q: But you can fight naked, and you can do Costume Brawl naked. Obviously the naked mesh is the same either way. So how do those systems work then?
A: The armor mesh is still there, but without a texture, so it’s invisible.

Q: So what if you made the armor mesh invisible, and then put the town clothes mesh over the identical skeleton, so the systems have the armor mesh to interact with but the town clothes mesh is the visible one?
A: There might not be a way to code that now, after the fact, depending on how the game’s code is built. It could also lead to all sorts of bugs.

Q: And yet, they’ve already made Outfits that are the same for each armor class, and combat somehow works in them.
A: They probably made a different version of the Outfit for each armor class, which just looks pretty much identical. That’s probably why it’s easier to do for a whole Outfit and not for individual pieces, because they’re having to make completely new meshes each time, rather than using what they already have. And there are only about six complete outfits, so it’s something they had time to do.

Q: And what about all the ones getting turned into tonics? They made brand-new meshes for all of those too?
A: Those won’t be useable in combat.

Q: Oh man, that’s even worse than I thought. So people asked for combat town clothes, and now most of them are being taken away and not used in combat anyways. So why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they just leave town clothes, if they’re going to STILL have meshes that are specifically designated for being out-of-combat anyways?
A: Probably because it would be difficult to code the new Wardrobe system to hold two different armor weights per character. Right now it only has to display and use armor of one weight type per character.

Q: What if town clothes weren’t part of the Wardrobe, then? How about if they were collectibles, like the PvP bank, that became wearable after you withdrew them from the bank?
A: The new system doesn’t have a PvP bank any more, so it might not be able to support any kind of clothing bank. We don’t even know what they had to do to allow the engine to swap meshes; we don’t know if their new system will support that.

Q: There will still be out-of-combat tonics, though, and you can only swap traits out of combat, so obviously there will still be an “out of combat” tag. Why not have clothing items that you can use out of combat, still?
A: We don’t even know if town clothes were ever really intended to be an out-of-combat thing only, or if that was a stopgap measure.

Q: So you’re saying town clothes might have been initially conceived as being used in combat as well, but the way the code worked out they could only be used out-of-combat in order to work, and THAT’S what The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis meant about town clothes not working as intended?
A: Basically.

(continued)

I got stuck with 168 pvp glory boosters. I wish anet wouldn’t make us throw away all of the stuff we can’t possibly use or just don’t want to use that we either won as a reward or opened from a chest in place of something else we could have gotten that is still worth using.

This isn’t the first time and I’m sure it’s not the last. It’s been about 3 weeks since we were told not to delete our stacks of blade shards and nothing yet. Anet announced a trader merchant for them, but no date, nothing for 1.5 weeks or so now…

I haven’t bought any gems with cash because of this type of thing for a few months now and I used to spend $50-$100/month. My loss = their loss. GG

To be honest I’d rather see NO wardrobe at all than beeing robbed by ANet for the city clothes diversity.

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