Guild Wars 2

Rauderi.8706:

When it comes to some fantasy universes, world-moving phenomena are generally attributed to something ubiquitous and generally magical. In FFX and X-2, it was “spheres.” in XIV, all crafting required “crystals,” which is common to the intellectual property and fantasy tropes in general.

So what ubiquitous magical thing does GW2 have?

Dragons!

That’s right, dragons are somehow responsible for our bathing and poo.

Aaaaand now we know where the water dragon has been hiding – the sewer system under Rata Sum.

When you log , waypoint or use an Asuran gate, You go behind the scenes like at a theme park where there are lounges. and all sorts of amenities including bathrooms where you can take a break. While it seems only seconds betwwen screens is actually hours in the alt dimension.

Vukorep.3081:

Because magic ofc!

Also nobody urinates in the world of tyria..did you see any toilets around?

I find it ironic that Tyria discovered toilet paper but not toilets.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The question doesn’t make sense. GW2 is a simulation of what life might be like in a fantasy universe; it’s a game and, like all games, the devs make choices of what to include based on what’s fun, not what’s most realistic. There are tons of anachronisms and inconsistencies compared to our real lives. You can get up to six different sorts of herbs from the same plant in Tyria; not so in real life. Things on fire don’t burn nearby things, as they do in real life. And, of course, we don’t see everything that our characters get up to during their lives, including sitting down to a meal.

In short, it’s a game.

And you take life way too literal and serious.

Vukorep.3081:

Because magic ofc!

Also nobody urinates in the world of tyria..did you see any toilets around?

IKR how is this sustainable?

Because magic ofc!

Also nobody urinates in the world of tyria..did you see any toilets around?

She does all that stuff when you log out.

Ragnarox.9601:

…why this still exist?? Its been 4+ years. It still ruins 90% guardian shields. Do something, change this ugly Aegis once and for all. I

The only thing that ruins your look is the Christmas tree you wear.

Some ppl hate it, but I love it. I think Aegis makes 90% of shields look better in this game. And it certainly makes guardian stand out from warriors and revenants.

:D

If there’s going to be any extra security I’d prefer it to be on the whole account rather than just 1 portion of 1 currency. If they get into your account and take everything and delete your characters I can’t see that knowing part of your gold is safe is going to be much reassurance.

Also if someone does get into your account you can contact Support to get it back and then they’ll reset it to a time before it was hacked so you get everything back.

It sounds like the existing two-factor authentication system does what you want, except it protects your whole account. The way it works is any time you login from a new IP address you get a code sent either to your phone, email, or to a Google Authenticator on the PC and you have to put that code in to be able to log into the account.

Since hackers won’t have your phone, access to your email account or the authenticator on your PC they won’t be able to get the code and so can’t login.

It also means you’re notified any time someone tries to login to your account, so you know that they have your email address and password and are trying to get in, which means you can change the password to stop them even trying.

(Also if you’ve been hacked in every game you’ve ever played it sounds like your password isn’t as good as you think it is. Do you by any chance use the same email and password in other places, especially other games? Or on 3rd party sites like fan forums associated with a game? Those tend to have much weaker security than the games themselves, especially because it’s reliant on the admin keeping it updated and not everyone who decides to make a forum knows how to do that or remembers to do it regularly.)

Ayrilana.1396:

How can you really master something if you only do a few things in the expansion?

Good point, how about an option to opt out of the mastery system entirely (or at least tuck it away somewhere so it’s not visible) for those who have no desire to “master” anything. Fair is fair, right?

The achievements are there to get you to go out and do things you may not normally do. Not all of them will interest everyone. How can you really master something if you only do a few things in the expansion?

With how easy large amounts of XP are to obtain, and the likely reasons Anet put mastery points behind a lot of achievements, they should not be obtained from XP.

The solution to the raid thing is easy: excise the raid masteries from the rest of the HoT mastery tracks and put them in their own little section. It keeps people who don’t raid from being penalized for it, and gives Anet a place to put masteries for future raids.

Also they really do need to give some alternatives to that spirit shard, maybe a chest with a couple additional options (nothing too valuable, like the sort of options you get from the ley-line converter maybe). I’ve got 6600 spirit shards, i don’t need more.

tl;dr there’s some important principles involved; I agree that these are worth addressing. However, spirit shards are such a minor reward that I don’t think ANet should spend time worrying about fixing this until they are also making other big changes to masteries (e.g. adding new specializations or new masteries, such as we expect with Expac #2).

There are several distinct concerns raised in the thread. There’s also a missing context.

Context first: ANet removed rewards for XP past L80 when Specializations were added. The community complained about it. Ages later — with masteries now in the game, ANet added in spirit shards as a reward after maxing masteries. It was a kludge, a sop to end the complaints (although: little did they guess how well we can complain ). But it was clearly the least valuable reward ANet could have offered.

As it turns out, by doing it so quickly, they locked themselves into two issues: max masteries in core Tyria include things that don’t interest some folks (legendaries and/or fractals) and HoT Masteries were originally setup to include Raid masteries.

Neither of those things is quick or ‘cheap’ to change.

Current day:
For a variety of reasons, we are at a point today were some people have decided they don’t want to Fractal/Legendary masteries and some (not necessarily the same) people aren’t willing to find a way to unlock raid masteries to max them out.

As a consequence, there’s a sizeable fraction of players who have max level characters, play a lot, but don’t earn anything for post-80 experience. That’s definitely an interesting conundrum for ANet.

Importance of issue
How big a deal is it that this happens? Are spirit shards valuable enough to worry about? How important is it for ANet to allow all HoT players to share rewards rather than locking any behind raids?

Personal opinion
My take on it is: of course ANet should adjust things. The principle is important; raiding shouldn’t gate standard rewards. However, this particular reward is so tiny that I don’t think ANet should prioritize changing stuff.

When they next update masteries, they can make adjustments, including what’s in the HoT mastery tree. They can reconsider what rewards should be available for post-80 XP.

Until then, none of us are going to suffer much because we get somewhat fewer spirit shards.

I think that they should have make the Soul Shard it’s own Mastery line, that way you could select it at any time if you wanted to spend XP on it, rather than wait until you have everything unlocked first.

I’d also be OK with a few other lines such as a Karma consumable, bag of coins, random bag of dungeon tokens, random bag of HoT currency, etc. The amounts of XP needed for these tracks should probably be somewhat steep, but I think it would add a level of enjoyment and reward without being excessive.

I’d love this first suggestion, too, and I was thinking about a separate Mastery Track with different repeatable masteries, each with another reward, so players could choose, which mastery they would invest their experience into.
Players could choose their reward (hrmmmm …. even laurels, maybe? ) and ArenaNet would have easy access to which rewards are offered to the players by activating or deactivating these respective masteries. Plus, ArenaNet could easily control the amount of experience points needed for each reward (considering the “in-game worth” of the respective reward).

There has been various discussions about how experience becomes wasted if you are not able to unlock all the masteries and there is nothing for them to go into. There is also discussions about the Central Tyria Mastery points and the pain it can be for those. So my thought for a solution:

Add a repeatable mastery track that does not take any mastery points, takes 254,000 experience to complete, and gives you a spirit shard.

Thus, players can get back to the pre HoT behavior if they want. If a character does not have any masteries they can advance, experience would funnel here. Or if a player just decides there are some masteries they just don’t care about, they could choose this mastery instead.

My second part of this would be to add a repeatable mastery track like the above, with some high (5 million?) total that gives you a Central Tyria Mastery point. Thus, players could grind out those points over time instead of doing content they don’t really want to do.

With a high total, it would almost certainly be faster to do the achievements. But this just provides an avenue for those players to get the CtM points.

Thus same thing could be done for HoM points also – at least so far, to me, those seem easier, but at some point, experience will get locked behind completing a raid (there have been different discussions on that).

This would require some development work, but would seem to be using logic that is already mostly in the game, so maybe no so hard.

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

This never meant that those two things were supposed to fulfill exactly the same role.

They said that explorable dungeons and the temples of Orr would be this game’s Raids. They were supposed to be the hard and challenging content that we were used to from other games. And for a couple of months they were, while the game was new and we (as a community) didn’t know how to play.

Example:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1185945-Dungeons-Explorer-Mode-

Nah, the “mass exodus” was just the content locust leaving. This happened to every MMO game for the past many years. Those people would have left anyway.

Not really. If there was interesting end-game at release a lot of them wouldn’t leave. You can easily verify this by the amount of players who left GW2 after the first few months and now they are coming back because of Raids. These players would’ve never left the game if Raids were in the game at release, or their “Version of Raids” was what was advertised and expected.

They also said you wouldn’t need a dedicated healer. They’ve said lots of things. Some of those things have come to pass and others haven’t.

People don’t care about what’s said, so much as what they experience. If I say I’m not going to hurt someone and I poke him in the eye, he’s not going to trust me the next time, no matter what I say.

Dungeons are nothing like raids in reality, no matter what was said. And again, challenge to developers is often very different from challenges to players.

Developers have very little time to test and play their own game compared to players. They don’t have the benefit of dulfy or youtube starting out. They don’t have a million people trying something to find the easy way.

So of course, dev-challenge, doesn’t necessarily mean the kind of challenge you’re thinking of.

After all, they ended up nerfing Orr. Thinned out mobs and made other changes to make it more friendly. So if they intended it to be that hard, they later changed their minds.

Vayne.8563:

In fact, before the change to rezzing, you could rez rush certain bosses and that was a strategy for people who weren’t as good, but you could still get through the content.

That wasn’t intended however. Dungeons were originally revealed as challenging group content for coordinated groups. I remember them talking about the unique dungeon skins as being prestigious rewards to show off.

The devs have always wanted the game to be more challenging, as they’ve always been for the gamers rather the majority like other MMOs. In BWE1, enemies could kill you within seconds, much like HoT, but had higher health. It was all heavily nerfed however for obvious reasons, as the traditional crowd would facetank and get instantly killed.

I thought the NCSoft people said Gem Store sales were steady, and only box sales were down these last few quarters. If so, I guess that would negate some of the theories.

To me, over the past nearly-5 years, many things have changed. This just seems like a bash-Raids thread. I consider Raids to be equivalent to WvW or PvP; something I don’t/did’nt initially find interesting, but would consider/did try out eventually. In other words, just another Game Mode I can take or leave.

I also don’t believe a player can’t be loyal to a game/franchise if they haven’t been playing since/near launch. No more than playing at/near launch would automatically make one a loyal player.

But, of course, each have their own opinion; one no more valid than the other.

Good luck.

Obtena.7952:

Hey call it whatever … it’s change. People might not appreciate the fact that games that don’t change enter ‘maintenance’ mode VERY quickly.

Change is neither good nor bad. But saying a game changes and that’s okay doesn’t work if people don’t get behind the change. Games have survived because of change and games have been killed by change. Change is not necessarily a good thing.

Saying games that don’t change eventually are going to die is probably true. Which doesn’t mean that the wrong changes won’t kill a game even faster. Ask the people who played Star Wars Galaxies about how change affected that game.

Sure, some change is good and sure Anet has made some good changes. But Anet also tends to make a lot of changes that aren’t well received.

Nerfing the dungeon rewards was a change. I don’t think it helped this game at all…even if they were later fixed.

Crinn.7864:

I feel like the biggest problem with raids is that they are called “raids,” and thus invoke all the WoW stigma.

If they had just chosen to call them 10-man dungeons or somesuch the wider gw2 community would probably applaud them.

You are probably on to something here.

I feel like the biggest problem with raids is that they are called “raids,” and thus invoke all the WoW stigma.

If they had just chosen to call them 10-man dungeons or somesuch the wider gw2 community would probably applaud them.

Thieves scare me to death in WvW. And they always seem to be alone. So, I don’t think Thieves need any ‘Holy Trinity’ in WvW.

Sartharina.3542:

Even at their worst, masteries were never as bad as The Time We Had To Unlock Traits.

Ah, the Dark Times. Actually highlights GW2 having trouble with its identity, even at onset.

“Let’s be like GW1!”
Turns out that GW2 players didn’t like that very much. :|

“We need ‘endgame content’!”
Accusations of becoming a Trinity WoW Clone fly as raids are finished by some groups in a day or a week and then whinge for more content.

“We need more challenge!” (Which, to be fair, old Tyria’s faceroll easy…)
While a few enemies stepped up their game in tactics, ‘challenge’ was delivered mostly as CC-spamming HP-sponges.

I like GW2 as a product overall, but I can readily see how over time that it’s still flailing for something to grasp onto as the game continues to grow. After committing to its own ideas on MMO combat (action combat, self-healing) and quality of life (insert huge list here), it feels like design is chasing what’s already been done instead of designing for the wonderfully free system they’ve created.

+1 this is an awesome idea.
Can u please listen to the community for this 1, anet?

I had sent a mail to the forums team via the provided address regarding the machup thread thingy 2 weeks ago after seeing increasing numbers of posters getting touchy about it and myself getting annoyed about it. Gaile Gray replied and then updated the thread about it. If you guys still think is questionable, do send in mail as making a thread about it is unlikely to get an answer as stated in the forums rule (iirc).

Kamara.4187:

Shazmataz.1423:

There is no point to it cos it means nothing……are you saying that people do this because they can?? Well still means nothing and nothing to be upset about.

I’m saying I bet you five dollars a memo will go out to staff or it will be addressed in a meeting soon because too many have complained at this point and it looks bad on the company. Turning off the tag is a simple fix to make everyone happy and change little.

I play this game, and I want it to be successful for my own selfish reasons. Something like this is damming to a games reputation. This is not the first time nor the first MMO to have had a community flare-up over it. It would be a shame to see something like this damage such a great creation when the fix is so simple.

It would be absolutely shameful if they caved. The anet guild members should be able to be just as proud of their guild affiliation as the rest of us.

wvw competitive – that’s a good one……