Guild Wars 2

Farzo.8410:

I hope what Matt Visual and WoodenPotatoes said should happen to her.

She stands there talking, sounding boring and cliche as usual. And suddenly a big Elder Dragon just lands on her, crushing her or impaling her on its claw, or whatever.

- and that’s how Jormag/Kralkatorrik/Bubbles/Mordremoth/Primordius is introduced.

I think I’d clap for that perfect landing. Waving the signal ligts could be a part of her final fight.

I think assuming that people only disagree with you due to their own ignorance is the height of arrogance. Whether a villain is “good” or not it subjective.

To me, Scarlet is a cliche right out of the cartoons I watched in the 80s/90s. She giggles maniacally while telling us how sadistic and cruel and chaotic she is. And yet this clearly mentally unstable person is capable of amassing an endless army to serve her every whim. She wouldn’t be out of place on He-Man, or the old 60s Batman TV show.

I hope what Matt Visual and WoodenPotatoes said should happen to her.

She stands there talking, sounding boring and cliche as usual. And suddenly a big Elder Dragon just lands on her, crushing her or impaling her on its claw, or whatever.

- and that’s how Jormag/Kralkatorrik/Bubbles/Mordremoth/Primordius is introduced.

The biggest problem we got is that the the living story is so disjointed that it doesn’t progress her as a character.

Still not any great villian. She’d fit to Rayman Adventures or Lego Series with PEGI +6, but not to actual MMO.
Most of the playerbase is very fed up with all that magitech and salad all around, I tell you.
Give us a villian like Vizier, Shiro, Palawa Joko from GW1, Vilgefortz from Roggeven from The Witcher Saga, or Azar Javed from The Witcher 1 game, something grim, villian that we actually respect…not a mad salad lady who appears everywhere in every plot, runing it due to her middle-age crysis and menopause…

I’ve kind of lost my groove in the game. I’m a casual solo player. I have a life away from my computer that requires more attention and effort than trying to keep up with a game.

I loved Guild Wars, all 3 campaigns. I liked the way the story was fluid and you could progress through it at your own pace. I really like that about Guild Wars 2 as well. Except, its just one story. I am not in anyway trying to diminish the epicness of the story as a whole. But after doing it at your own pace, it suddenly ends and you get thrown into this enforced race to keep up. But you’re not keeping up with a single cohesive story arc, you’re chasing a series of short stories with no real cohesive back story that feels rushed and ad-hoc.

3 Guild Wars campaigns, an expansion, the books, the wikis, the community, all built this massive backstory of lore that could have some kind of impact on the current history of the game, and you throw us the Aetherblades and Scarlet?

I’m not a hard core player. I work 6 days a week. But I like good stories. I will play good stories. The game doesn’t even have to be a great game if the story is good. I play solo because I can’t devote honest time to a guild. I played through Guild Wars because the stories in the game were fluid and made sense within the lore. There was also a personal sense of being able to achieve something on my own, even if it took me longer than people that were progressing through the story far faster than I ever could.

The time limit on the Living Story, and the sense of missing out on bits of the story, frustrates the bejeebuz out of me. I don’t much care for the trophies or even the achievements. But I’d like to be able to follow the Living Story at my own pace, feel like its actually building or fits within the lore of the game, and get a sense of achievement for playing through a complete story.

(Secondly… Completely off topic… Can we please get rid of the RNG for things like Black Lion Chests or Mini packs. I don’t mind buying the outfits, picks/axes/scythes, other goodies and more. But I like to know what I’m getting before I buy it. Not get a half dozen of the same item that everyone else already has multiples of. If you’re going to have RNG items like that, make it worth the cost of entry and stop putting anything less than Rares (or something) in them.)

I love the game in most other respects. I love the Hearts, map completion, daily and monthly achievements, the scale of the game for different sized groups, the leveling system, world events/champions/dragons/bosses… Hell, I even love the gem store a little too much.

But I have hardly played in the past couple of months because I just simply cannot devote the time it now requires, just to keep up. Let people fly through the stories and get the achievements and the titles and the items associated with those stories, but unless you make it possible for someone like me to keep up, you’re on track to becoming that game I play on my day off when its raining and I have nothing else to do.

I can see King of the Hill working fairly well with how the game has been designed so far, as long as the capture mechanism is an object you interact with to “flip” the point rather than a Capture Point circle you stand in to cap/decap.
- Bunkers will still have a role in guarding the flip mechanism
- Burst will still have a role in trying to dislodge/distract bunkers from guarding the flip mechanism, or going after the opposing teams burst.
- Support and harrasment specs will have a role in disrupting enemy “supply lines” (Ressing players traveling back to the hill from their home point), and possibly dislodging players guarding the “flip” point and delaying them.
- With only 1 point to hold, comebacks from large point deficits will be possible – a team will have time to examine and adjust their strategies and hopefully re-take the point.
- Most importantly with the “flip” objective being an intractable object rather than a capture point you stand in, the dynamic of holding and flipping the point will be changed enough to shake up the current meta without being so extreme as to force balance changes which are currently all balanced around capture point.

This is probably the hardest topic to discuss as the only time there will never be true balance without drastically limiting the number of people playing per side, which shouldn’t happen. The only thing you can really do here is to create additional artificial controls which shape the way people play the game. The only control currently is outnumbered, 3 factions and siegerazer which are not up to snuff as a method to help with population imbalance.

1. Boost incentive for 2v1 to aid with imbalances

Currently 2nd and 3rd place tend to concentrate on one another rather than both attempting to knock 1st place down when it’s a runaway/imbalanced match. Most of their decision process comes from wxp farming and the easiest points are from the most picked on (paper), which tends to be the last placed team.

There is a pretty easy fix here. Make it so that the rewards for wxp is greater the tougher the tower. A paper tower should be worth a x1 muliple, t2 a x4 multiple and a t3 a x8 multiple. The same with keeps. Rewards in general should be higher the harder the task. This idea should be extended when facing the server that is “stacked” by having a general multiple when killing or taking land from the server in the lead.

This will help with fulfilling DAOC’s old idea that the two weaker groups will gang up on the strongest group. It’s currently failing in gw2 as it’s more about wxp then winning.

2. Artificially strengthen and weaken servers via NPCs

As a server gets pushed back to next to nothing it causes the weaker server to lose even more players and the stronger server to gain players due to pvers jumping on the “karma train”. As a side is pushed back add more and better defenses that potentially scale to what they have left, and possibly spawn attackers to help take back what is lost. Make reducing a server to nothing an incredible undertaking and give those that are outnumbered hope that as they are pushed back they will eventually see those legendary defenders out in the field and in action.

Specifically on the topic of gross server population differences. The solution (as much as there could be one) was already in place back at launch. The Glicko system (with a few procedural tweaks to keep the ratings within shouting distance between tiers) was reasonably good about generating matchups that were “competitive” relative to the established scoring system. The whole point of the Glicko system was to ensure that servers were matched which could gain roughly similar average PPT over the course of the week.

Of course, because server populations don’t shift wildly from week to week, we ended up playing the same servers (the most ideal populations relative to our home servers) week after week. That was the whole point of the system, but some players interpreted the ranking as a measure of “best” and other players complained of boring matches if the opponents were always the same, so the system was changed and we wound up with wildly imbalanced matchups in every tier. It may be too late to return to that system now, but that was the most “balanced” time we ever had in WvW.

Overall though, main problem that I see with relation to population balance is that the whole system of WvW suffers from a fuzzy objective.

It seems to want to play as a league-type sporting event, but then makes no effort to enforce balanced teams and match-ups.

In some ways it seems to want to simulate open warfare, where a balanced fight is usually the result of a tactical mistake, but then the system intervenes with periodic resets and points accumulation, and on top of that there is no tactical or strategic reasoning behind fighting this fight at all.

If WvW is to be a sporting-event, then world populations need to be balanced the same way that sports league teams are. Somehow teams will need to be picked in a reasonably even fashion and assigned to a given “side”. As pointed out previously, WvW is the only server restricted element of GW2, so it doesn’t really matter what servers are played for – WvW players could be shunted around the servers as needed. I’d imagine that metrics could be generated to give each player or guild a possible home based on WvW activity and timezone – but it would honestly be a lot of work and of uncertain success at the end.

If WvW is instead supposed to be a wargame, then there needs to be an elimination of the “gamey” aspects of points-per-turn and weekly resets, and installation of hard and fast strategic reasons for holding the keeps and towers on each map. The problem would then be engineering it such that the eventual victor has great difficulty holding their gains and the system naturally falls back to a more balanced state. A mercenary system would probably go a long way to help in such a vision as well.

It might seem trite, but I think that the population balance problems are really secondary to much more fundamental issues in the WvW game-type, and without solving those issues the specific problem of pop balance is grabbing for the tail of the problem rather than the head.

Chris,

I believe you may need to be more specific when posting these topics for discussion (that is, unless the purpose is to cast as wide a net as possible). In this instance, it’s not overly clear exactly what flavour of population imbalance we are supposed to be discussing, as I’m reasonably sure there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

There is the global population imbalance (i.e. total WvWvW population on server X is greater than that on server Y), there’s the timezone imbalance (i.e. the Oceanic population on server B is way higher than any other server in that timezone), and then there’s the hour-by-hour population imbalance (i.e. it’s no fun to play WvW on Wednesdays at 3pm because we’re always outnumbered twenty to one).

I’m guessing the overall flavour is the gross imbalances, but at times they’ve all been hot-button issues.

WvW population imbalance is really, really weird to me for a couple of reasons as an MMO vet:

1. The game mode is completely incentivized. It’s probably one of the best ways to get EXP and Karma in the game, and provides access to a lot of exotic gearsets through its own currency. Additionally, it drops an abundance of T7 mats and I’ve personally received a couple of Ascended Rings from the rank chests.

2. It doesn’t correlate completely with overall world population. Though the Server list is notoriously nondescriptive of the actual activity of the servers, I have seen T2 servers like FA be a whole descriptor lower than a server like Kaineng.

These lead me to the conclusion that some servers just lack a WvW-focused group, and for whatever reason the majority have no interest in participating in the game mode. Thus, I feel we should avoid making any sort of conclusion like “low wvw pop -> game is dying” because I don’t believe they are linked in any discernible way.

If I had to spitball a direction for how to tackle the imbalance, it can either fall in one of three ways:

1. Force PvE’ers against their will into WvW. Tying it to the living story, or making it better than FGS or CS for farming, will force a number of players into WvW that may not want to be in there. Other MMO’s have done similar things with large quest hubs tied to a pvp zone.

2. Shift the majority of changes to the game mode to accessibility for casual and non-pvp’ers. Listen to their complaints first and foremost, and have them direct the development of the WvW area. This would likely lead to a reduction of the value of the strict “control the most nodes” game we have now, and shift the points to things like pvp dungeons and other semi-competitive pve encounters.

3. Continue on course, addressing the concerns according to the prioritization Anet had already concluded, and hope that a “better” yet same game mode will naturally attract more players as the gameplay becomes increasingly compelling.

I probably missed things, but that’s my conclusions on pop imbalance off the top of my head.

While I understand Server population has an impact on just how many you can squeeze into anyone server, your transfer fee’s should not be based on over all population.

The only reason to transfer currently is because of WvW.

PvE has guesting, SPvP is cross server so the only real impact transfer have, again is WvW. These costs should be based on server rank, currently you have servers such as Anvil Rock who are rank 24, not because of lack of skill it is because of WvW participation, the server is considered Very High and thus costs the same amount as it would to transfer to one of the Big three (JQ, BG, SoR). Why would someone transfer down to the bottom when they can transfer to the top or middle for the same fee ? It makes no sense at all.

As for Anvil Rock being very high population, I dispute this, I played on AR from release up until recently, after guesting to other servers AR even in PvE is not remotely close to the server population as many other very high server’s.

There has been solutions a plenty suggested here on these forums on how to fix this. A personal Favorite was Teambattleaxe’s suggestion on how to work Leagues, he adressed many if not all of the issues regarding balancing, blowouts, population, and fun factor. I think the WvW team would be wiise to take a look at his purposal and take it into serious consideration.

I understand you may not want to do this exact solution, there is many good ideas in the video, that allows for alot of our concerns, and the best part of all, with three colors everyone is a winner, 1st, 2nd, 3rd.

Even if you only take the how to blanace servers from this, it will be a step in the right direction.

If you choose to ignore the video, thats your choice howeve I then ask you start basing transfer’s off of Server Ranking instead of Overall population which means nothing when it comes to WvW.

I love the concept of “The Living World,” things changing and not always knowing what to expect when I venture out into the land.

But a while back I was stuck and blase about the game and couldn’t figure out why. I loved the graphics, the setting, the skills, etc. But I just couldn’t get excited and went to play The Secret World instead.

Then it hit me: my lovely Necromancer had gone as far as she could (interestingly) go. I had hit max level, had all my skills unlocked and had some cool equipment. There really wasn’t anything else compelling to do.

I could have chased down more skill points – but for what? I’m not insane enough to try to craft a legendary. I could have explored more of the world – but why? What would that do for me, aside from harder-core pursuits that I wasn’t interested in?

Then it occurred to me: the issue was that my character was essentially stuck in a rut. She had nothing else to achieve, and her personal story was just window-dressing. She had no personality, really, aside from the surface-level voice acting and diary entries from her story mission. Her choice of God didn’t seem to mean anything, nor did her “decision choices.”

When I dumped the Necro and switched to Guardian, I suddenly was interested in the game again. It wasn’t the Living World that brought me back, it was the fun of building a character again.

I would love to see the GW team continue to innovate by turning their attention to the avatars themselves. Haven’t these little digital people been stuck in the same place for too long in MMO history? My Guardian, as cool as she is, is basically just a doll, an action figure.

What if instead GW2 gave players a platform to create characters like other media do, like books or movies?

What if there was a game system – not just a silly diary that no one else would read – but a game system that allowed players to explore their characters’ pasts, make choices that impact their personalities? What if you could “unlock,” like you can today with skills or weapons, pieces of your character’s past, with real consequences? Maybe if I discovered my parents, for instance, I could actually go visit them, and perhaps inherit their house as a base of operations? Or if I met my long-lost sister, and discovered she was evil, and she became a nemesis to stalk me throughout the game, as in Champions Online?

Or maybe the Living Character system could unlock emotes, dialogue options, armor sets, costume sets, pets.

Just some thoughts as I wait out “Error attempting to sell!”

I’m MM and I don’t even want them… But at the same time, I wish they’d make greater marks baseline

This is very concerning to me.

In my opinion this is an attempt to gain power and control over these forums, not for the purpose of creating a positive and productive atmosphere, but for the purpose of controlling the content.

The sentence I just wrote, under the new policy could be interpreted as a personal insult under the new rules. Let me explain.

The Dev in this thread posted the following:

Insulting & non-constructive:
“Anet isn’t competent enough with this game”
“Anet lied to us”
“Fire whoever designed this dungeon/weapon/armor”
“whoever designes this dungeon/weapon/armor clearly has no clue”
You can discuss things we’ve said (manifesto, dev posts, blog posts, interviews) and disagree with them or even criticize. We’re okay with that. When it crosses over to insults is where we draw the line.

Its not hard to see what is going on here. ANet has essentially created an environment where any comment that they deem reflects badly on the company (not an individual), will be stricken from the record. They’ve created an environment where users must now very carefully, and very meticulously dance on eggshells to avoid what may or may not be considered a personal insult.

This kind of “force field” moderation will surely work in their favour, but will by no means improve the communication, nor productivity of these forums.

Wow…even writing this post is becoming increasingly difficult as I attempt to find a way to be clear in my criticism, but not “insulting” to an individual, which in ANet’s eyes is also all of ANet.

Perhaps I’ll approach this a different way. Here is what I believe will be the eventual outcome of this new approach to communication.

1. Some players, fully meaning to be fair and constructive will find themselves on the wrong side of interpretation, thus leading to a suspension.

2. As ANet systematically deletes posts and users that they deem “insulting”, players will start to become increasingly agitated and afraid to post.

3. The forums, while visually “positive” to any outside viewer (AKA Google, Game review sites, potential customers), the quality of communication will drop.

4. Eventually ANet will be stuck with a community of players where the majority are free from criticism, and the rest are very, very careful with what they post.

5. Players that have been suspended, are likely to personally feel insulted based on how they interpret the situation, and are less likely in the long run to contribute to the game, or the community.

6. Like other websites/companies that have tried this, what will eventually happen is that players will move to a more open forum where they can vent, communicate, and discuss freely.

I have seen this before on many software, and gaming forums. Whenever a company attempts to put themselves in a position where they can’t be touched, and additionally have the power to suspend, or ban anyone who they feel doesn’t paint them in a positive light, it almost always leads to disaster.

Anyway, based on the moderation practices I’ve personally experienced, I fully expect that my days are numbered here. Once I feel that I can no longer openly and honestly provide my feedback into this game, I will be moving on.

Communication is a two way street, and respect is earned. When an individual or company attempts to control either of those through the use of power, or control, then communication will inevitably break down.

One of the reasons I feel people on the forums have become increasingly more insulting towards Anet has been the fact that over the past year not only has the game shifted direction multiple times from what players thought it was going to be but that most players ( myself included ) feel that we weren’t even kept in the loop. We had a vague idea at best as to where the game was going.

On top of that there were numerous threads in which players expressed concern about various aspects of the game or asked if certain features would or would not be implemented. If certain things were intended or not – if certain things were going to happen or not.
The majority of these threads as far as I saw were outright ignored – and the few answers that were given were too vague and too PR-heavy that you couldn’t really take anything out of them.
If a player asks something and the answer is " nothing is off the table " you’ve basically not answered anything.
The player was asking because he doesn’t know what will happen. he would like to know but as far as the information available to him goes it could happen or not. Answering with that sort of answer doesn’t really do anything.

Communication is a very important aspect – but it has to work both ways.
Numerous times feedback and suggestions were posted regarding a variety of issues and the answers came back in the tone of " we’re looking into it " – which is great – and I’m not doubting that they are but maybe add some more. Maybe let players know a little about your concerns and maybe let them be a part of the solution instead of shutting them down with a " we’re looking into it " and nothing more.

These things – coupled with various gameplay and gemstore related items have eroded the community’s faith in Anet, they have stretched the player base’s patience thin and right now the bubble is beginning to burst. Players are becoming frustrated and they’re taking it out on Anet – which is wrong and I’m not defending that – but merely offering an explanation as to why all this happened.

So – CC Danicia – if you want this community to be better – we can achieve it together but first the things above have to be taken into account and understood. Only then can we get to the cause of the issue.

Danicia, you really should remove that last line from the post. From the perspective of a casual observer, it almost sounds like you are trying to pick a fight with people. Don’t underestimate the Streisand effect… if people can’t communicate here, in an environment you have some control over, they will go elsewhere and you will not be able to control that.

On the other note, the amount of mistakes, condescending comments and trigger happy responses from the black post mods at times is disappointing. There have been plenty of times I have seen threads closed when they were not doing any harm or worse, when developers were posting and discussing things with users…

If you want to achieve a better community environment, it needs to come from both sides and ensuring those mods treat customers with respect. Sure, a game forum harbors negative attitudes, but Chris’s posts from last week are defiantly an improvement. Look at my post history for example – I was ‘infracted’ for posting a thread saying that on my server, gold sellers had gotten around your flood control and had been spamming for hours on end even after being reported frequently. The entire mapchat was, for hours, gold seller spam. My thread was infracted and deleted for including an image as proof that it was occuring. How is that supposed to make someone feel? They go out of their way to try to let you know a problem and that is how your mods respond? Even if including a picture was bad in their eyes, removing it would have taken far less time than it does to delete a thread/infract/post notification etc.

Common respect goes both ways. Posting ‘you have been warned’ does not exemplify a respectful or mature environment. Please don’t ban me for having an opinion. I go out of my way to try to help you guys out, but sometimes trying to be calm and respectful is hard with the nature of how your mods treat people…

thanks, this is the first piece of good news a lot of us have had in a while
could we please have a time frame for this?
i would logically assume it will come in play after the leagues
can we know if this is planned to be implemented this year?

thank you

yes but can we have a time frame when it will be released?
one month?
two month?

how long do you think it gonna take to create this?

I know that you are probably 110% focusing and your crew focusing on the league but how long when league have been launched should it take to create this?

Well that was a nice post full of PR speak. Chris, if you read other game forums you’ll realize that this is far, FAR from the worst the internet has to offer. EVERY game forum is full of trolls and angry people in my experience, except maybe Egosoft but I haven’t been on theirs since like a year and a half after X3 dropped so that may have even changed. Remember it’s the internet and 90% of people are jerks.

That said, I do think the communication from your end is lacking. I see things, such as guild events for smaller guilds, being added due to feedback from the forums. I also, however, see bugs go for months and months without even simple acknowledgement. In addition, slapping Josh on the wrist for actually communicating with the community was a REALLY bad thing to do. He should be the example for the rest of your employees to follow, not a warning to them. If your employees don’t have time to engage with the community even though you say it’s important to you, then you need to have better time management going on.

I honestly see it as a management problem. Your management is not prioritizing the fixing of obvious bugs, they pay lip service to community communications but then reprimand devs who actually communicate with the community. These problems are totally on management, which is not surprising since management is usually the weakest link in ANY company.

tl/dr: If you actually want to communicate with the community then you have to do it rather than just releasing a forum post full of PR speak.

For the first time this week in recent memory, many of the matches were not decided on reset night. People are actually gasp interested in playing hard the entire week because 5 to 6 of the 8 matches in NA actually are relatively fair match-ups based on PPT. Please take this into consideration going into the leagues. If you want to bring back server stability, put more limits into this glicko system you have.

1. Make it easier for transfer servers to climb rankings so they don’t torture lower tier servers for weeks and make everybody unhappy. Seriously, you read the forums (you claim to), make glicko adjustments based on even mundane things like server, or more specifically wvw population for the week.

2. Opposite of number 1, make it easier for servers that are dead or dying in WvW easier to fall to the bottom so they stop the bleeding of people leaving every week.

3. Give people variety, but be reasonable. Nobody wants the variety that is associated with getting roflstomped and spawn camped 24/7. There is a fine line between variety and stupidity and this system often crosses it. You can provide both variety and stability, it isn’t just one or the other, just be reasonable in RNG limitations. Make it harder for servers to be matched up out of their tier but still possible.

4. Leagues are a mistake. Tier 1 is without a doubt and pun intended, a league of its own. Servers buy guilds to enter into PPT&ego driven lag&queue fests that will only get worse when PvE players try to cram into already bloated tier 1 servers for meta achievements. There is no room for tier 1 players to play WvW on their own servers (because of the guilds on those servers own stupidity), and also no way for anyone outside of Stack Quarry, Sanctum of Stackers, or Stackgate to compete with the likes of their game-breaking coverage.

you guys have got to communicate back!

this is the worst game forum for having devs interacting with the players…..i think the best is marvel heroes albeit a different game but i think they have 3 informed people posting daily around 25-30 times each

but seriously, it is a two way street…..we give you feedback and we don’t know if your hearing it because you don’t make a simple post saying if you’ve heard it or not…so we get countless threads about the same kitten problem to make sure you hear it

i know you devs are busy making content for the game to hit your every 2 week deadline…but with the gem shop raking in tons of dough(apparently) hire 2-3 people who sit in on meetings and their only job is to reply on the forums

While I appreciate this idea of “collaboration” between the team and the community, I won’t believe it until I see it… And the track record is not proving positive.