Guild Wars 2

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

snipped

Thanks for taking the time to comment Anthony.

First, I’d just make clear I don’t see this event in any way as a step forward. Concentrating mob grinding content in an area the size of a small baseball stadium has got to be one of the biggest steps backward for the game. I like the story, but the content is just bad.

Second, Dynamic Events. Back when Colin talked about the strategy for adding tons of new DEs to the game, he actually specified that the intent was to drop that content into the game with out fanfare, with each update, so that over time, players would continue to be surprised by fresh, new content in the game world. To now insinuate that the reason you abandoned that approach was because it received little attention and fanfare is just plain bizarre.

Dynamic Events can be added with as much or as little fanfare as you desire. It shouldn’t just be random events tossed into the game, it should be an evolution of events with in each zone in a way that makes sense given the events that occurred there previously. It would make perfect sense to use storytelling to bring focus on a zone where the more dramatic events for each update will play out, while still progressing content in other zones and building the foundation for big events to come. The writers would have plenty to do with out the Living Story framework.

It seems you gave up way too quickly on the content that makes the game special, in order to pursue gimmicky content that would never have made it into the game during pre-launch development. That the gimmicky stuff has been temporary just makes it all an even bigger waste of time, money, resources, talent and potential.

The issue I and others have is really multi-tiered. The wasting of development resources best spent elsewhere, the underwhelming impact and limited benefit of most content created under the “Living Story” and, at least as importantly, the abandonment of the evolution of the game world.

Tyria, outside of the temporary and gimmicky content, has not progressed or evolved. Dynamic Events only produce an organic, dynamic gaming experience if they themselves change and evolve on a regular basis and in a way that makes narrative sense.

Queen’s Pavilion would be considered a satirical representation of old school, mindless, unimaginative MMO game design if it weren’t so clear you seriously believe it represents progress.

The game world has become stale and static. The game has suffered under many months of events that draw people away from organic, free form game play in the incredibly vast and detailed game world, with the trend further reinforced by “jump through these hoops” dailies and monthlies.

Everything you have done this year has been designed to reward hoop jumping, cool-aid drinking, linear game play and then you wonder why so few people still free roam the long static game world ?

IMO, we are way beyond the point where fine tuning the current strategy based on player feedback is going to do much to preserve the ongoing potential of the game. The game, at launch, was an incredible achievement and sparked significant success. Why you would decide to undo everything the core game design and the Dynamic Event approach to content managed to achieve is just beyond me.

Arenanet laid out the case for this world design and the value of Dynamic Events as the core of the new MMO content delivery paradigm prior to launch. The game at launch proved the concept. Then you just toss it all aside because there was no fanfare about the DE content you added last October, after stressing that you would be adding such content with out fanfare? Please, clear up my confusion, because I don’t get it.

It almost seems that you guys didn’t have the patience for the long game, didn’t get the instant gratification you wanted from adding Dynamic Event content, so then started working on tossing out flashy gimmicks, hoping no one would notice that you gave up on the game world.

The game, at launch, was extraordinary, perhaps the best MMO at launch in the history of the genre. In 2013, the perpetual drum beat has been to drive a march towards the extremely ordinary, under the cover that you are “doing more than almost any other MMO developer has done”. Quality is probably more important than quantity, but it has been sorely lacking. That this year’s content actively undermines the core game content, rather than supporting it, sadly means that the game would probably have been better off with nothing than what was actually produced.

Stop designing live updates as if this were just any other ordinary, stale, quest driven, last generation MMORPG and start supporting, expanding and renewing what made the game special and successful at launch!

Personally, GW2 lost so much due to insecurity on ANet’s end. The game was praised for its new concept of a living and breathing world that came with dynamic events that told stories of specific and sometimes overlapping zones. What we got was great, a game that truly felt like an RPG. A game where your choices and actions mattered. In a small scale true and on a timer, true, but it still mattered.

ANet then turned away from the very core pillar of this game. It replaced most of the new content with quests. One time quests, that tell a story, but it is executed so badly that many people miss a lot of lore, because of bad presentation. I am not against story pieces forming slowly and painting a bigger picture, but everything feels so disconnected, fragmented.

Instead of adding player-driven content to the zones and expanding on the DE system, we got heavily scripted quests on a timer. Players need to rush through content, so they don’t miss an achievement or some hint on the backstory. I don’t want to be rushed, because playing is my leisure time. I want the game to wait for me, not the other way around.

From my point of view, GW2 has degraded a lot and lost a lot of the true potential it had in the beginning. Everything feels so generic and meaningless. Sure, we can vote on something, but does it really change anything. Like the story of GW2, which starts good and then gets really bad and bland, GW2 has devolved into something I don’t like and don’t support.

Some time ago Colin said that making expansions helps devs and players sync what they want. So far ANet has been doing whatever they want and a small percentage of players is throwing hundreds and thousands of dollars in their direction. Please, give others a reason to do the same.

After release, there hasn’t been a single content update I’d consider worth my money. And no, quality of life improvements is not content. This is how you build long lasting customer relationship.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

If you have an issue with this new quality of life improvement you are not required to use it. Go ahead and turn off ‘Effect LOD’ in the graphics settings.

You really don’t understand how game breaking this issue is.

We literally cannot see any of the spell effects, nor the red circles from them.
It makes commanding an absolute nightmare, especially when you are running with 25-30 people against 70+. Movement is everything for a smaller group! Imagine (because you clearly don’t play WvW so you will have to imagne this) not being able to see your own water fields, nor the enemy static fields, lines of warding, sanctuary, or even ground targeted aoe’s. How can you possibly expect us to take on larger groups when we cannot move or even regroup safely?

The ‘Effect LOD’ setting does not make any difference to this issue.

This issue is literally breaking the game, and turning it into ‘which blob hits first wins’. Small groups are being killed off by this.
Fix this fast or you will loose even more WvW players (not that you care).

On a side thought: This is probably a stealth buff for arrowcarts, can’t see the circles!

We just did SE p2 and the reward for it is 1g. Considering its length and dificulty it should give at least 2g. Comparing to cof p1 which is WAY EASIER (letter could be even bigger here), SE p2 giving 1g is a joke imo….

Poor Diddums

I do agree with the OP. I think the gap between offense and defense gear is too great. So it is hard to design pve content when group can consist of 5 tank to 5 glasscannon.

That being said, a 30% difference in effecitive health also mean the difference between being able to stay full health or die.

I really think Anet should consider “for pve” lessen the gap between offense and defense gear.

But on the other hand, player should realize they should get a berserker set. Having a bunch of gear and build don’t mean every build is viable in every situation. It mean you should learn to adapt and use different gear and build in different situation.

gw1 had a cool district system
like so many things, gw2 threw it away to make room for more “mmo” features

I’m ambivalent about the update. There’s a lot of potential, but there’s a lot of bad, too.

The Queen’s Gauntlet, for example. I think it’s great that ArenaNet is playing with combat design in the game. One of the main flaws of PvE is the way it works when fighting against bosses, most of which consist on dodging the ocasional big one hit kill attack while dealing damage to a huge HP sponge. It’s great that ArenaNet is trying to find ways to make encounters more interesting and more unique.

In other hand, guess what is the very first fight we face? One in which we have to dodge the ocasional one hit kill attack… Underwhelming to see the same old, same old as the very first fight. Some of the enemies in there rely too much on stuns and knock downs, with are the cheaper effect among everything the GW2 combat system could have used.

And then there are all the small design flaws. Making it “somewhat” in the open world so people could watch is a hassle – I have absolutely no interest in having people watching me fight, and the way it has been set makes it impossible to predict when is an interesting fight going to happen, in case I wanted to watch someone else (I don’t, for the records). Having to wait in a queu is far worse than having the fights in instanced content, considering how little would be lost with that. And there’s the issue of the camera within the dome – the walls actually hurt visibility and prevent us from looking around the fiel properly. Had this been designed into instanced content using open arena-like environments, this issue wouldn’t be there at all.

The inside of the Crown Pavilion has been a disappointment. It feels a lot like the Southsun update, in that it’s just farming grounds. No interesting event, just people randomly running around trying to farm enemies while under a huge Magic Find buff. The boss battles against the three champions are a huge mess. I honestly believe GW2s combat system doesn’t work well in huge fights like that. Even with the changes to particle effects, I can’t see what’s happening in melee range of those bosses, other than there are a lot of players there; but playing from range is safe, and other than moving away from the ocasional red circle, it’s basically a matter of spamming attacks. If the Queen’s Gauntlet is trying to show us interesting fights, the champion bosses below it show the same old, same old. Isn’t a boss there meant to reflect projectiles or something?

Although, the environmental effects can be interesting. I barely noticed the reduction in endurance regeneration, since most of the time there isn’t even the need to dodge. The effect with the hawks is very amusing, and is a nice way to make people actually care about what exactly their AoEs are hitting, even if it relies too much on dodge (again). And speaking about “again”, the saboteurs spamming knock down bombs are very annoying – again, relying on chained knock downs is a rather poor and simplistic mechanic.

The opening ceremony was interesting, from a lore point of view, and I’m happy that (for once) the dialogue changed based on what our characters had done. But it was a bit underwhelming – I would have expected Queen Jennah to make a speach to the masses, not to stand in the middle of a mostly empty circle. We have very few characters with likeable personalities; Logan definitely doesn’t fit that role, and Rox and Braham aren’t that interesting either, considering how shallow their personalities are. It was great to watch the queen fighting, but c’mon, she should have been more impressive, and used trickery instead of just trying to fight – she’s powerful enough to deceive even an entire army, deceiving a few pirates should have been easy, at least to keep her and Anise hidden while we went to help Rox. And, for the records, when I was told to defend the Charr, no enemy spawned; I didn’t have anything to defend her from.

Despite all that, though, the opening ceremony was still better than the instances for most of the previous Living Story updates, with the exception of the Marjorie content in the Dead End bar.

My biggest disappointment is with the lack of good Dynamic Events. I think that’s Guild Wars 2’s most unique and most promising feature, but they have been poorly implemented in every single update. The events here are as bad as the ones in the Southsun update, just farming spawns with no story and with mindless repetition. Where are the nice event chains that actually tell a story, like the little boy trying to defend his family from the Dredge? Why are the events just “defeat this big champion” over and over, or “run from place X to Y” repeating endlessly?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

(…)

If I could have 1 thing, it’d be more content updates like Sorrow’s Furnace in guild wars 1. Even though it was a reasonably small instance, it had a lot of different pathes and mechanics that were really good and fun.

And… please… missions like in GW1 as well. Those are, in my opinion, the best story telling mechanism there is.

That would just make me so happy <3

This would really give me a sense of a living world. I don’t want to be in a world where everything is different all the time. That’s nice every once a while, but I want the world to evolve. I really don’t feel like any of the Living Story has had an impact on the game.

Well, hopes that these things would improve with experience is proven once again to be wishful thinking. IMO, this is by far the worst event in the Living Story chain to date and, yet again, another waste of developer resources.

You’ve taken a very free form MMO with a massive game world and reduced it to a stage on which to host the worst example of Theme park trash one could imagine.

The Queen’s Pavilion? Each piece of the pie is just a variation of a theme park exhibit of everything that is wrong with MMORPGs. Apparently, difficulty is supposed to make up for the complete lack of any redeeming design qualities, but it just makes the content as frustrating on a play level as it is on a design level.

The Balloon rides. Could have guessed we wouldn’t actually get a vista like traveling experience, instead it’s just another portal. Just gates to some stairs with a chest and an escort request required to unlock the door. Stale, boring, horrible; huge disappointment.

Yet another currency, because we all know we need more of those. Why not allow all holiday and LS events to share a currency, so players who are casual can maybe save up and buy something nice every other event, rather than just making it pointless to try to earn a temporary currency you may have no hope of making anything useful of.

Speaking of special currency, now we don’t just need special currency to get nice skins, we need that currency AND gold!

One of my guild mates that hadn’t completely abandoned the game, (the rest of the guild left after Guild Missions ended up being for large guilds only due to unlock costs), returned after a month away to check this out. It took us an hour to agree it was horrible, log out and go play something else.

Arenanet, you are killing the game. You are thumbing your noses at the Manifesto and apparently doing everything possible to make the game the worst kind of theme park.

I love the core game. It was very close to the game I’ve been waiting for since I started playing MMOs over 14 years ago. There was a natural progression for closing the gap between the game at launch and the lofty ideals of the Manifesto. It would have been hard work, it may have taken a couple years of steady progress, but the path ahead was clear.

Why have you abandoned the game world, allowing the illusion of life that Dynamic Events provided to flutter away as the world has remained stuck in an infinite loop, in exchange for the absolute worst kind of MMO content?

At this point, the issue isn’t more permanence, Living Story has culminated to the inevitable conclusion that Living Story itself is a colossal waste of everyone’s time and energy that needs to shelved for some miraculous Plan B asap.

It’s not fun. It doesn’t make the game feel alive. It’s frustrating for casuals. It’s the worst form of theme park content one could imagine. It diverts resources from where it’s really needed. It diverts players away from the assets of the game, the massive, richly detailed game world. It even sours the concept of Holiday Content, because Holiday Content is too much like LS content and many of us have had as much of that as we ever hope to experience.

If there is anyone left at ANet that believes in the Manifesto and actually understands what MADE this game so incredible, it’s time for you to show those who have become so lost the way back.

I can’t even couch this with anything positive, other than maybe that some of the skins are nice, even if they are wasted behind a currency that few are going to want to bother earning.

The biggest problem is that the content isn’t just a waste, but it’s actually soured the game for a number of people in a way I could never have imagined possible a year ago. You would have been better off doing nothing but the occasional holiday event than this.

What should you have done? Well, you should have stuck to the original plan you talked about last fall and created boatloads of new Dynamic Event content. Content that would have advanced the story with in each game zone told by the Dynamic Events that were there at launch. Adapting some, replacing some, rotating some in and out of circulation. That would have created a Living World. that would have preserved the sense of a dynamic game environment. That would have shed the negative stereotypes about Theme Park MMOs.

Instead, we got this mess.

Queen’s Pavilion is satire of everything that is wrong with really, really bad theme park MMO design, but it seems you guys are oblivious to the joke. It may be the worst part of the Jubilee, but the rest of it isn’t much better.

I have a big problem with instant-kill mechanics. Never mind that they’re kind of cheap, I mostly have a problem with how each class is supposed to defend against it. This issue pops up again with Liadri. Now I’m not saying this cannot be done on a necromancer, since every class has 2 dodges. But it’s not exactly a level playing field is it?

Rangers are out of luck, since the AOE spam instantly kills their pet (who can’t dodge obviously). Pets couldn’t dodge back in Molten Facility… and nothing has changed since then. So why still design content like this?

And necromancers don’t have any vigor regeneration, evades, blocks or invulnerability. Surely when you implement a mechanic that makes defense completely redundant, all classes should have equal access to abilities to deal with it?

But I think worst of all, it reinforces this idea that everyone should be walking around in zerker gear, since regardless of defensive stats, the boss is going to one-hit kill you anyway. Is all of this difficult content going to remain focused on nothing but DPS?

I don’t have an issue with a difficult boss. But I DO think it should be equally difficult for all classes. If a boss has a core mechanic, everyone should have equal means to deal with it. Otherwise we might as well all roll a guardian for all high end content.

I don’t like instant kills. I think they are lazy, and not much fun. And it makes the player too reliant on a flawless connection, since even the slightest frame drop or lag can cause an instant wipe. For an online game, I think the content should be designed around the fact that it is online. Having a hundred players zerging into massive hordes of monsters underneath you, while standing in a very large detailed environment, does not improve FPS or connection speed. This would be all fine, if it weren’t for the fact that one second delay means game over.

I don’t think one-hit kills are a clever mechanic. I don’t even think they are a fun mechanic. I do like a challenge, but I think it should be a fair challenge. Fair to all classes.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Dante.1508:

Viking Jorun.5413:

Dante.1508:

Viking Jorun.5413:

I run an apothecary condition build on my thief in PvE with Signet of Malice and out-DPS zerkers while out-surviving them as well the moment I get and maintain 25 stacks on my enemy(s).

That is great because thieves have insane spike damage try it on a class that doesn’t and see if you out damage a zerker build.

Apothecary gear infers conditions. When I say I can out-DPS zerkers, it means I don’t run burst. L2Read.

Even on Apoc Thieves do more damage than most other classes so my quote still stands, Thieves damage is vastly above most other classes even condi based.

I doubt that a 7% crit chance combined with an average hit of 400 on Backstab is anything to cower at. The only reason I ever use my 1 skill is to apply poison when my initiative is recharging. People need to stop assuming that thieves have the highest burst damage when warriors can deal up to 18k with Eviscerate and 33k with 100b. Backstab does a maximum of 8k damage when you go full glass and it crits. But you know what happens when we assume, right? You make an kitten of yourself.

So much misinformation here…

33k with 100b is not burst…its 33k over 3 seconds channel time.
Backstab does well over 8k damage with full glass…try it out sometimes.

They need an “underflow” system. I’m sure this has been mentioned plenty of times in other threads. Overflow occurs when a certain population threshold is reached on a map. There should be a system in place that merges maps together when the population is below a certain threshold.

CoF1 accounts for like ALL of the gold creation in this game. No amount of changed rewards will be an increase over CoF1.

There are 40 members in my guild who earn 70g a day from CoF1.

Wukunlin.8461:

how do i logic?

Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go to do look more like?

Why do precursor drops always reward the terrible players <__<

colesy.8490:

If you are using gear that buffs your own stats without helping the team (toughness and vitality as examples) then you are being selfish. How hard is that to understand?

Yeah, cause not being glass and going down all the time is so not helping anything. Pretty tired of picking up zerkers off the ground all the time cause they can’t deal with a fart wafting in their direction.

Hickeroar.9734:

Hit F11. Change your culling settings.

No such animal in PvE.

I really enjoy the combat and after playing another not yet released mmo and Tera I can say that GW2 nailed it for me. It’s not only the movement but also the dynamic of fights – dogding, combofields, projectile blocking, risk vs reward if you ressurect someone in a boss fight.

But I do think way to many encounters don’t require any special movement. Most of the time it is just the boring circledogding but we are seeing alot of new boss fights that at least try to get away from those 100%-0% Singlephase DPS Spam Bossfights

Galtrix.7369:

Umm, yeah, you can’t have a “soft trinity”. You either have the trinity, or you don’t. Ever tried to support your teammates with a heal in GW2? It doesn’t work well enough to be worth your while. They went straight for all DPS, and there is no doubt about it.

And I mean that GW2 lacks collaboration because there is no trinity. Sure, we can work together to kill the enemy by creating different strategies, but our characters don’t support each other. All we’re doing is finding a more efficient strategy to defeat the enemy together. I hope that makes sense.

By ‘soft trinity’ I mean roles that change in the flow of combat. That is, you don’t just stay as one role, and roles aren’t strict (Control and Support can easily blend into one on occasions, depending on the situation). A perfect example of this is going from damaging the enemy to reviving an ally that has been downed.

So you’re saying without hard, defined roles, there isn’t any way to have a system where you can support your allies? Because I can think of a number of different scenarios where you can support your allies without having the Trinity:

• CC’ing an enemy that is heading towards an ally in trouble (downed, low on health, heal on CD)
• Giving damage reduction boons (Protection, Regen, Vigor)
• Clearing conditions
• Reviving allies
• Taking my CoF example, swapping with an ally when stacks get too high.

How are these sorts of things not supporting your allies?

Combat kinda opens up in PvP, although even there it lacks the synergy inside team between classes compared to GW1. But in PvE it’s often dull and too repetitive.

Mana management forces you to play your UI instead of the game. It’s another layer that makes your game more complex, but not better.

No, and I’ll tell you why.

I got Dusk as a drop from a firefly in Godslost Swamp about a week ago, and was totally going to make Twilight. Of all the ridiculous places for a precursor to drop from..

Then I realized its colors don’t match my GS using classes and it would just look garish, it’s just one item, and maybe later they’ll release more legendaries that I’m legitimately really interested in.. and there are several other, smaller items I want more. So I sold it and bought The Mad Moon, the aetherized pistol skin, celestial dye, purchased a world transfer for a European friend to an American server he wanted in, and I’m saving the other 400g for a rainy day/spending it occasionally on close friends.

Now when I see legendaries, all I can think is “imagine all the other awesome things you could have bought.”

What I do respect? Things that take legitimate skill rather than blind luck, like I had. PVP titles, WvW titles like Stone above me, etc. Those impress me far more than winning the RNG game or having enough money to just up and buy a legendary.

We call them lolgendaries. Nuff said.

Maybe they think current prices are stupid. In MMO’s, they usually are.

THEN WHO WAS PHONE

Some people call their servers home, and some don’t care about wvw rank. If you’re going to abandon the smallest servers, then people will just move to big servers, and then the process of bigger servers getting all the transfers continues. We don’t need more stacking.

If anything the servers need more spread out population. Transfers to low ranked/low pop servers need to be heavily discounted.

Unless of course, you enjoy skill lag.

In any case, there are people playing on those servers— I think they should be the ones to decide?

Looks like you are trying to solve a problem without considering the cause. Population imbalance is a problem but so is differences in coverage. You could do great during prime time and still lose if you don’t have somewhat equivalent coverage. Mindless zergs are also too effective. ANet is at least aware of the last one if not all of these problems. They just haven’t done anything about it for whatever reason. Closing servers would be a short term solution at best or it would just make things even worse. When you force people to transfer where do you think they will go? Probably the already stacked servers.

Why do we have 100 speculation/idea threads about this new update?

It’s getting to be almost as bad as TA F/U threads.

There isn’t a single suggestion in any of these threads that is going to make it into the patch unless it is already in there for two reasons:

1. ANET obviously doesn’t read the dungeon forums anymore.
2. The patch, including all the loot tables and drop rates, are most likely already figured out and coded into the patch at this point in time.

The only thing we can do now is wait and see what happens. Then people can complain when they don’t do it right and then they can still not read the forums for suggestions on how to do it correctly. This really is becoming a vicious cycle.