Guild Wars 2

Largely agree with Sirendor, except his conclusion I guess – bit overboard. But yes, gold should play a minimal role, and particularly serve as a safety net. Also, it should be given not for massacring mobs, but for playing the game.

That is key. Stop making RNG loot the primary mechanism to get the things we work for. DE’s? Let the primary reward be from DE completion – instead of the loot from mobs killed. Make Jumping Puzzles rewarding.

USE the DE system to its full extent. Player needs lodestones? Give him DEs that reward lodestones upon completion (say, for clearing an elemental infestation), instead of mindlessly killing the mobs over and over.

Balance DEs. Is a DE popular? Lower its rewards. Impopular? Raise rewards. This could probably be automated, and should ensure players won’t just try to do the most rewarding DEs.

Make DEs meaningful and impacting the world. Don’t have a dragon minion spawn every 2 hours. Make it a series of event lasting several hours across at least an entire map, culminating in a serious battle. Reward players based on how many events they helped in. Say it’s a series of 10 DEs: the player who does the first 9 before logging, gets a major reward; he who just logs in to slay the dragon, gets little. Afterwards, plenty of DEs in rebuilding the villages that were burned down (/frozen solid/crystallized/undeaded/devoured by Oblivion gat…nvm).

And that’s just basic suggestions. Area gets neglected? Let it be overrun, with only main roads remaining safe (somewhat). Make visuals for players to see what maps need help, and make all rewarding for lvl 80 players.

Another one: fewer mobs. Exploration gets annoying if you’re just battling through mobs and hoping you don’t get respawns in your face. Just compare the landscapes of Skyrim and Tyria… and yes, it’ll mean some zones get almost cleaned out by players. So? That’ll give them some incentive to go somewhere they’re actually needed.

Could also make the map status impact the world. Most maps overrun? With trade routes broken, various costs increase, and DE npc’s can’t pay their saviours as much. As players help in taking back zones and rebuilding the settlements, those rewards will increase again.

Pretty much all of that, seems to me, is extending the DE system. Adding new DEs is a means to that end. Yes it’d take time to do that – how about doing that for monthly updates?

And while at it: make it all in tune with the endgame shinies. Legendaries and ascended gear should NOT be a matter of grinding, nor of doing stuff we don’t like. It should be goals you’re working towards just by playing the game – working for it just means you focus your efforts on something specific. Make it depend on skill, and some persistence. Minimize RNG, it’s cheap and if half the vision of GW2 is true, ANet can do better than that.

That’s enough for now I think. To respond to the topic title: if ANet’s disappointed in its players, it failed to take the lessons of the past. If you make your rewards depend on grind, people will do that, and once a bunch does that, the rest is drawn into that by the economy. Players respond to how the game behaves, and that’s how developers have that power. So make sure the game rewards the behaviour you wish to see; take action against players who’ll break rules in their farming behaviour; make the game interesting. DEs can do all this, and more. That’s why I saw it as vision – something that has yet to materialize. I understand Divity’s Reach wasn’t built in one day, but ANet’s had about a year to work out the child’s diseases and get a basic structure of year-round dynamic content. Now it’s time to start fulfilling the true promise of the game.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Really, all of you deserve a big ‘thank you’. Everyone.

I disagree.

I think the community is by far the worst aspect of Guild Wars 2. A game that in theory would get players who want to have fun has been flooded by players who just want to grind, farm, and exploit.

Every bad decision made since release can, IMO, be traced back to what the players want and how they play the game.

I’m sure the GW2 community must be great for a MMORPG community. But MMORPG communities are bad in the first place, so GW2 is just the best among the worst.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Quarktastic.1027:

There are more champions in this game than you might think. So it’ll force you to spread out a bit. Go run some dungeons. Did you know thy also have champions? And they give out a fancy daily reward all their own.

now please tell me the reason to waste time in a dungeon killing what? couple of champs when i can farm 6 in frostgorge in about 5 minutes or less… Dungeons are irrelevant and are only here for ‘fun’, when you’ve done hundreds of runs in the passed 11 months the fun part isn’t there anymore.

You realise that the Frostgorge farm is going to get so hard with the nerf hammer that you wont want to go back there, I can see them making the champs only spawn every 3-6 hours, and a stupid long event chain to get to that point, so if you miss it to bad, this is always the result of something that is rushed into the game, can you honestly say that they did not forecase that people would flock to the 80 zones and farm champs all day, they will kill this farm in FG and in CS aswell, so that they become ghost zones again, so farm it while you can.

If they make champs once a day, they have to exclude WvW, as in PvE you have a choice whether to kill a champ or not, in WvW you HAVE to kill the champ to claim a tower/keep etc, remember that anet when you bring the nerf hammer down.

And for all those who come on crying saying it needs to be changed its screwing up the economy etc, where were you when they allowed the CoF farming for months, it did more damage than anything else since launch,

Remember the game isn’t to be played the way you want, its to be played the way they want you to play it.

DandySlayer.7019:

ITS THE FRACTAL HAMMER! I’ve wanted it since I first laid eyes upon it in November!

I have 4, no characters to use it on, would’ve given you one for free if this game wasn’t called Account Bound Wars 2.

Boy this is a great thread. 9/10 would read again.

My two cents is that I think the “every two weeks” update plan is too much for the budget/time they have allotted. This results in very thin updates that have a lot of “repeat 100 of this” type content, because otherwise they wouldn’t have enough to say they added something substantial. The updates would be better if they dropped what was filler and kept just the strongest stuff.

I think the two week plan is just not going to work. Personally, I would rather the company go completely dark for a year and focus on an proper expansion and then I would surely buy that. I think most GW2 players would too. It worked for GW1.
.
.
.
Consider this, we are almost 1 year from the release of GW2.

• 1 year from the release of Prophecies(GW1) was Factions

• Only 6 months from the release of Factions was Nightfall

• 10 months after the release of Nightfall was EoTN

^^^ That is why I became such a fan of Anet as a developer. Their record of consistent, solid updates to the IP was second to none. So what if it wasn’t every two weeks? The summation of these small multitudinous updates, which GW2 has added to the game in one year’s time, does not expand upon the franchise as much as Factions did with the same development time.

And, by the way, they still managed to do holiday events and added a new dungeon(Sorrow’s Furnace) just 4 months after release while working on Factions. So it wasn’t like they had to totally abandon Prophecies for a year.

That development strategy is the foundation upon which the franchise was built. That is what brought the success to even enable GW2 to be made in the first place. It is unfortunate to see Anet straying from that.

Only the most blind fanboy would still defend Anet at this point.
The game is a mess on most fronts. From SPvP, WvW to the PvE side. Not properly tested updates and badly designed content is running rampant.

ArenaNet disappointed their original fan base on launch, so they left after about 3 months (a vast majority of the original top GvG guilds and players). Now they are left with whatever has decided to try the game instead of the hardcore following they once had. If they want that hardcore following again then they are going to have to step up and make some major overhauls to their systems/game mechanics to what the original manifesto stated/promised.

Just some quick suggestions:
-Get rid of all the cheesy builds (heavy passive builds, stealth, one shot, etc)
-heavily reduce the grind needed for the ascended items (it shouldn’t take more than 2 days to redo every piece of equipment with new stats) so you can actually try different builds. (in guild was 1 it took less than 30 minutes for a casual to completely redo their build)
-make achievements actual achievements. No more of this grind mentality. Stop with the kill 100 of this, now run over here and kill 100 more. Those are not achievements. (Kill the tier three boss in the gauntlet is a step in the right direction, as well as the gambit system. Those are achievements as it takes some slight skill to accomplish).

Not including the new weapons, you’ve just described a human guardian.

How to fix all escort events and still allow mobs to use aoe:

Give all escorted NPCs full damage immunity as long as there are non-downed players inside the event circle. Then go crazy buffing the mobs to make it challenging.

As long as:
1) NPCs are too stupid to move out of aoe, dodge, or heal themselves effectively
2) There are no effective targeted burst heals, and healing/cleansing aoe is capped at 5 targets prioritizing players (these are good things, for the love of whatever, please don’t change this)
3) CC (mostly) doesn’t interrupt aoe or condition damage
These escort events will continue to be plagued by these issues.

To fix them all, make them hard as hell if you want, but require a full wipe OF PLAYERS as the failure condition. Tying the success/failure of the event so heavily to the interaction between hostile and friendly NPCs leads to players feeling helpless and frustrated.

I think this is more an example of Anet trying to find what players want but their dynamic event system isn’t exactly impacting on the player base. Everything we do is reset within the hour of doing it so nothing we do in a dynamic event feels like it has an impact on the world. Thus it wouldn’t matter how many dynamic events they added players wouldn’t notice because sooner or later that event is gonna repeat and all the work they did will be gone so the next group of players can do the event. Players don’t think about the impact they are making because their is none thus they don’t think about the dynamic event they are doing because it’s just another dynamic event to them.

Not exactly bad just shows that their events aren’t actually fully dynamic more quests on loop. If they want to make it so people have interest in dynamic events they need to allow them to go a little crazy sometimes. Allow entire zones to be taken and kept by enemies forcing players to get involved if they want their zones back to normal. Allow enemies and allies to fortify these bases they take and over time the longer they keep them the harder they are to retake or to be captured. You could then make it so the more fortified a base is the stronger the army is that attacks it. So players actually want to fortify and protect these bases so that more champions spawn across the map giving them more loot. If they lose a zone to they will still want to take it because chaining all the dynamic events together will net them some nice gold/karma and some champion spawns.

The living story is how Anet is impacting their world but their isn’t a lot of tools in game for the players to do the same while Anet is off working on updates. So working on dynamic events this way or in some form like this would allow more impact on the world by the players. It would definitely take a good amount of time to pull off but It wouldn’t be impossible and they could start out slow by adding to the current meta’s/dynamic events involving the major enemy factions of the game(son’s of svanir, centaurs, nightmare court, etc)seeing if players enjoy the impact and extra rewards for sticking around and fortifying or taking back an outpost. Adding choice on how players can go about a dynamic event not in how they perform it but how the outcome turns out(like buring down/seiging a base destroying all the buildings/walls/supplies making it worthless so humans don’t capture it, or going in and killing all centaurs causing a champion or two to spawn giving a better reward and a new base to help fortify)

You guys aren’t talking about dungeon rewards, your selling a service. Hell, TP flippers make a lot more than you and they never leave Lion’s Arch, a kid working at McDonalds can make a lot more gold than that.

Whatever you’re making running dungeons, the guy circle strafing Subject 7, the guy spamming AoE and looting mobs in the Pavillion and the guy racing to tag (that’s all it is, a race to tag, no challenge or skill) champions in Orr. All these guys are making more than you running dungeons.

1. shout heal warrior SONIC BOON!!!! beats all
2. bow bear ranger
3. flame thrower engineer
4. cleric staff guardian
5. p/d theif
6. condition necro
7. staff elementalist
8. greatsword/staff mesmer

I’m not a fan of any achievement you MUST pay money for first

that’s a big conflict of interest and would be pretty distasteful

Blix.8021:

It’s spelled “a lot.”

Skateboarding is not a crime

DevonCarver.5370:

And, while it isn’t an entirely new map, you can look forward to some changes to the borderlands soon. Let’s just say you should get your krait killing in now.

WvW updates
We feel that Krait have acquired too much of a negative image due to their lack of a player-friendly faction till now, so we switched it up a bit and instead of collecting pearls for Quaggans, you collect Quaggans for Krait now.

haha… never seen this, but whoever thought of it, props to you.

VidGhost.3215:

Dante.1508:

Not really if you like Gauntlet tickets and many green items then yes, outside of that no its still terrible RNG and mostly trash rewards.

Should have been guaranteed t6 and lodestones imo.

IT WAS!!! .. T6 and lodestones or cores.. BUT! they quickly passed through some updated to Nerf it back to T5+T6+junk and then nerf it again to Normal, Rare, Exotic bags lol

They were ALL exotic.. before the nerfs people were going CRAZY for them and T6 mats HALFED on the TP

Also there were on average 50 Champs ( mostly Champion centaurs ) in the arena .. now hardly any.

Somehow I am not surprised that this was the gimmick Anet would use for this patch. Make it seem amazing, then nerf the crap out of it. Make a change to loot, let the word get out “Anet brought loot back, come play again!”, then revert back to garbage.

Araziel.7201:

The highest price for one of the new champ exotics is about 300 gold right now. It’s worth it. I was wandering around Queensdale today doing balloons and came across the spider champ. People were camping it Everquest style. It was awesome

/yell Camp check!

Xobartik: “fbss”

Or do something other than PvE

Wait, this isn’t a troll thread?

Alex.9106:

Every class can do p3 solo, since the last update.
Theres this sweet little thing called watchwork portal device.
Every class can do mesmer portals now

Which costs more than you would get reward for the whole path.

I honestly don’t care what armor you wear as long as I don’t have to pick you up constantly. I don’t see why people on both sides of the fence make such a big deal over it. Try the grey area – its nice here.

darkace.8925:

Emmet.2943:

As a fellow Engineer i feel your pain at least we are the only ones who can bash peoples faces in with a wrench.

Unfortunately, you’re wrong. There’s a mace that’s skinned to look like a wrench. So warriors and guardians can also bash peoples’ faces in with wrenches.

NOOOOOOO /goes to cry in a corner

Is their even a kit that’s unique in look to the engi then?

Yeah totally agree with you guys. The NPCs should scale along with the event… its really difficult, if not impossible to save the NPCs when they get wiped in one hit by a champ (for example, a champ jester’s bomb skill).