Guild Wars 2

SrebX.6498:

SrebX.6498:

OP, please help me understand your logic,
because I honestly don’t understand why people that obviously are looking for zergs don’t just get on TS/Discord/Find a guild/Do whatever it is necessary to actually help YOURSELF and help YOUR server get better results.
Commanders exclude people from squads when they don’t get on TS because then people don’t know when to pop their buffs or when they should be going right or left.
Guilds exclude people from squad because they don’t want pugs running around not knowing what to do and when because they’re trying to create Organism .
Why do pugs insist on playing suboptimally? you’re screwing your server and your teammates, it’s stuff like this that hold a server back

Please, Im honestly looking for an answer to this

Pretty simple, I don’t view wvw as a serious game mode, which others do (I used to). I don’t think its been serious since the last wvw tournaments (which vets say they dont want to return lol). Winning at the end of the week amounts to nothing. You get nothing for it, and your server gets nothing for it. BG wins every week simply because we have huge population of wvwers, even though a lot of times we get trounced in zvz. By the end of the week it doesn’t matter because we pull ahead and win every week.

The game mode is not balanced for a million reasons. You have people in the mode roaming (which isn’t something that is supported by anet or balanced) zerging (which is supported by anet and is sort of balanced? but is not really taking seriously (in all honesty), no ESL coming to wvw anytime soon.) and you have GvG (doing content that isn’t supported at all by wvw, where they just engage in zvz and cap nothing, usually). You also have 2v1’s which is not Counterable, under any circumstance when it occurs. SO if you take all of this then I would argue its not a serious game mode so who cares about squad requirements?.

As such I’m not willing to put in serious effort to play “optimally” by getting in TS, unless i feel like it (and usually i don’t), because whats the point? Its a joke. I have also observed tons of commanders dominate without needing TS and I have seen tons of commanders require teamspeak only to be really bad at commanding at getting everyone wiped repeatedly.

Believe it or not good players can follow a tag and figure out what they’re doing without being in TS, or meeting all of the commanders silly requirements for entry into the squad. And again if not being invited to squad is no big deal, then certainly letting people in the squad should be no big deal either.

I get it the mechanics are that the party leader is the dictator, which is basically anets (and every other mmos) way of saying mechanically were not going to spend effort or money to try and regulate this, leave it to the community, because its too complicated/expensive/not good ROI. doesn’t mean they might want to do something to it, and it doesn’t mean that they haven’t tampered with group exclusion issues in relation to social interactions in the past (see adding vote kick to parties, which we didn’t used to have at game launch.)

The game revolves around playing casually, your playing a casual mmo, many people play this specifically because its a casual mmo, but by all means continue the pro “optimal” strats and 100% effort for no return on anything, pointless zvz ad infinitum, and then after you take that argument make the other flippant argument about how you all play for fun and that me playing for rewards is wrong lol. And also be very judgemental and tell others how to behave and conform, and if they don’t then bully and exclude them (like lord of the flies) because we all want to pretend this is 1984.

Banzie.5248:

Inb4 “Map population caps have been reduced in all World Vs. World Battlegrounds”

Tbh lowering all maps caps by like 10, lowering each server player cap, opening another tier and changing relinks to be every one month would probably help the servers a bit.
Offer free transfers to ‘low’ pop servers to spread players a bit.

Also deleting blackgate could help.

sigh

1. Testing on live is a good thing because you get to see the skills against current builds from Vanilla and HoT, and not just the expansion builds against themselves. Hopefully it will help balancing game wide, although personally I don’t have any confidence in anet’s balance team.

2. They will get much more players involved, more testing results done, more feedback given, on live servers than they would on a test server, for the simple fact that many wouldn’t bother downloading a separate test client (if they have to). We already experienced this with the desert borderland testing which was separate from live, the attendance wasn’t exactly great, not that there weren’t other problems from anets side of things.

3. Anet never had a public test server in the 5 years of the game, why you expecting one now?

4. Even if you do a separate test server a lot of stuff still fall through the cracks, the bigger the test pool the faster something may be found. Even a giant game like WoW still find broken stuff on live after months of testing on the public test server.

5. It’s 3 days, suck it up. At least you’re getting a chance to check out the elite specs, (which really is the only thing that will matter for pvp with this expansion), for free no matter what type of account you’re on. If you’re on the fence about getting the expansion then use this weekend to check out the specs.

6. They should have done the elite spec test with the pve content last week at least, not every pve will like the pvp only testing.

Because it forces interaction between current builds with the new elite specs. It’s how ANET can gather the data to try to bring things in line before launch, I’m sure there are a crapload of things that are way overtuned/undertuned that will be changed before launch thanks to this test.

Its only one weekend. This isn’t going to be the only weekend you’ll ever be able to play GW2 WvW Ever and Forever 1000 years www.wvwweekend.com 100 years

The idea of dueling has been proposed a number of times. Often, posters have explained why they like dueling in games. Sometimes, they’ve even tried to work with people who disagree, folks who see it as a distraction to the core game, folks who’d rather see ANet work on stuff, and folks who see it as undermining a core ‘feature’ of the game: cooperative PvE.

That doesn’t appear to be the case here. Instead of having a conversation, one poster can’t seem to offer more than, “the criticisms are inadequate” or “childish” and that people are against it because they are “scared.” There’s no way to have a conversation when someone is that unwilling to consider other points of view.

I’ll make one attempt to make my view clear: devs have limited resources; they can only work on some of the great ideas we suggest. Based on threads like this, it seems the dueling is incredibly popular among a tiny fraction of the population, rejected out of hand by a large fraction, and a majority probably don’t care if it’s in GW2 or not. I think there are so many other ideas that the majority would love to see or even just that the fraction of “yes, please” is larger than the fraction of “over my defeated character.”

Given that I’ve been wrong about such things before (e.g. I thought raids would be bad for the game; turns out they’ve been, on balance, great), I’m keeping an open mind about how ANet would implement something like dueling; it might be good.

Or in brief, it’s not at the top of the list for best cost:benefit for the community as a whole. Seems like a good feature for other games, but probably not GW2.

It’s time to make MMORPGs more social

MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I’m out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn’t I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he’s going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? Or if I want to play with someone, shouldn’t we naturally have the same goals and objectives, rather than discovering that we’re in the same area but working on a different set of quests?

We think of GW2 as the first MMO that actually has a cooperative PvE experience.

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Of course GW2 has great support for parties, but they just don’t feel as necessary as they do in other MMOs, because your interests are always aligned with all other nearby players anyway.

…

We even redesigned the competitive part of the game to be friendly like this.

Not really a self-proclaimed tenet of GW2.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto/

…

So with all those mechanics available, and being the way they are….. there is very little incentive for an open world dueling system. And in pretty much every case were you’d want to request a duel with a player, all it would take is engaging in conversation. And that right there is where a Prompted Duel notice can be a nuance (can be unsolicited), on top of being difficult to find willing participants given the current play context.

There are a few more edge cases I didn’t cover… but those are either rare, or runs counter to the intended game design, and should be addressed directly; rather then have Dueling tacked on to either distract from it, or enable something that should be a fully realized game mechanic/encounter.

With all that said…. I would actually like to see public arena fights incorporated into full blown dynamic event or regional meta, if for no other reason then to present a more casual PvP situation in the spirit of friendly competition (and contribution toward group meta rewards). Theres no denying that sPvP is way too intense, and taken far too seriously for most people to enjoy.

But if you want an example of how this can work in the spirit of PvE mode.

Single or Dual tournament, with qualifying rounds against AI mobs. Its of critical importance that the early fights be against AI contenders, as it serves as a warm up and gives time to let a salty attitude calm down. Special attention also has to be paid to what types of rewards are given, since you don’t want players fixing fights to farm them. The ladder also has to be relatively short (~ 5 rounds for the PvP portion), and cycle fast enough so player aren’t invested more then hour for the bulk of the meta. Given the casual atmosphere, sloppy builds will be common, but does encourage playing with traits for better performance (which is a good thing).

For reward structure, I would say rewards would have to be normalized to purposely favor rounds played for those who want to “farm” rewards, but offer minor bonus for winning the round (either bonus coin, or +1 to the normal item reward). For Tournament winners, that bonus is doubled at the last round.

Now if they really wanted to go all out, you design a World Boss event to attach to the end of the meta. A 3-lane gauntlet supported by siege elements. Now for the gimmick…. players who advanced to the last 2 rounds of the Tournament are given a buff that activates during the Boss event. 2nd Rank gain Veteran status, increasing HP and Damage scaling. Finals runner up Rank gains Elite status, increasing HP and damage scaling plus access to a targeted heavy CC action skill. Finals Winners gain Champ status, increasing HP and damage scaling, a defiance bar, and an AOE action skill that revives downed allies and taunts nearby enemies.
While the siege elements are there to mechanically normalize the event for Commanders to organize, the Tournament buff is a Power Play advantage (basically light siege) for the lanes those players join in. In PUG situations, this improves the overall odds of success (added DPS, and more durable)…. but in an organized map, those players can be leveraged for speed runs or making boss meta achievements easier for the group.
If you think about it…. its not too far off the Armor challenges in the Octovine meta. The lack of Golden armor doesn’t prevent the meta from succeeding, but it does make things a little easier.

zengara.8301:

ok, never thought people actually was deliberately against it, just thought it was one of those arguments like the mounts…..“devs havent done it, so dont ask for it” kind of mentality. I have not seen any spam messages in any other game having a open world duel system.

But is people asking you for a duel, an actual concern for people?

Guildwars is a very different game, with a much different set of design philosophies that guide. Most MMOs design based on “tropes” popularized by either EQ, WoW, or UO, thinking mass market appeal will make up for otherwise lazy, or unimaginative design. Guildwars on the other hand has a tradition of subverting those tropes, or at least distilling the most useful elements out of a design, and putting it to better use.

This experimental approach leads to the game’s very non-traditional approach to nearly everything, and puts purpose over “trends”. You ask the question “why we don’t have it”, but fail to answer the question of “what would we even need it for?”. I’ve played a number of typical MMOs with the Dueling requests, and they honestly fail to make sense since both sides have to agree to a fight, and 99 out of 100 times you’d either set boundaries for the fight, or go to an actual Arena already set up in a nearby town to have that battle. On the flip side, you don’t really wanna fight with someone who will put down what they were doing, and accept random challenges out of the blue. (Because everything from TV, Books, movies and even other games, suggests they’re confidant they’ll beat you, and this is the fastest way to get back to what they were doing).

Now compare that to Open world PVP or Hostility flags. Hostility flags in particular have a useful dynamic, because doing so exposes the player to collateral damage and draws attention from other nearby players. This is usually meant to be a self-policing system to allow PvP actions in an otherwise purely PvE environment, and help settle disputes or tackle disruptive behavior. However, some players leverage it for harassment; which is why most design them in a way to force commitment to Hostile actions. IE: Don’t activate it unless you really intend to follow through with something. While hostile, you become a free target to all non-hostile players. If going hostile to protect other players, most will not interfere if they’re aware of the circumstances. If a hostile player is in that state to be disruptive, then non-hostiles with enough bite can step in to deal with the problem. In some rare cases, hostile flagging is used to setup unconventional arenas using high level mobs as obstacles in the fight (often with a supervisor to warn/explain to other players that might accidentally wander into the arena boundaries).

Open PvP creates a certain type of player Ecosystem, while Hostile tagging creates yet another type of Ecosystem. But in a purely PvE game mode, Dueling doesn’t make any type of practical sense, or get turned down in 99% of all situations where it isn’t organized ahead of time.

Now if you add in the quirks of GW2’s tagging system, theres near zero need for self-policing tools. With this game’s design, loot is rolled on a per character basis, rather then a single “on kill” drop. As a result, there is no competition for drops so long as players can tag a mob with damage. Combine that fact with the dynamic level scaling of characters, and there is very few situations where a player can deny tags to other players by wiping an area too fast.

This tagging system immediately segues into the nature of Dynamic events. Because players have fair odds for a drop, regardless of how many people are present, this fosters a highly cooperative situation, where you can substantially increase the amount of Loot “everyone” gets by simply working together. Prior to this game… I have NEVER seen that seen that concept used outside of an open world boss, and never to this level of effectiveness in shaping player behavior. The ONLY time this ever became an issue is a hand full of events where there is an ulterior motive for a fail condition; even then, its always in the interest of getting better loot from the event that follows the failure.

Which leaves the last remaining fringe case…. Organized Dueling. This is where Heart of the Mists (PvP lobby) steps in, and does a much better job in all but one aspect. It offers areas where players are automatically hostile to each other (facilitating duels with no additional overhead), and gives all players access to sigils, runes, traits, and stat combinations they could ever want, plus gear tiers are normalized (so an incomplete gear set doesn’t prevent you from having a fair duel). The ONLY down side is the lack of granular control over stat distributions; and has been something the player base has been trying to get the Devs to address. Its not a show stopper…. but it does limit build optimization when you only need a small amount of a particular stat.

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Accordly to Sun Tzu, number in war is not an advantage. This means, that a server has always the potential to win even if outnumbered: in fact if you organize in a militaristic way your server’s pugs, you will be able to win whitout even fighting, by just siege defence, ambush with roamers, attacking undefended targets, playing at different times from opponent server (nightshifts?), in fact to win against a bigger number server you have to destroy enemies fun by just never facing them in open field. Unfortunately, this is a game, not a matter of life or death, this means you can’t create a militaristic organization on your server, since you would destroy your server friends fun too. Also add to this that server nowadays keep permanently beeing linked to different ones, it makes almost impossible to create a server organization like above, so in fact it makes impossible to you to win against a server when outnumbered.
People don’t go in wvw cuz they want to win the match up, people want to have fun in this game. And to have fun, you have to play in the same way your opponents are, by fighting them in open field. Even the most skilled guilds just die when outnumbered, so yes the actual wvw is rlly about numbers.

Hmmmm tough issue….

If only there was someway to get off the overstacked servers and be more of a part of the solution instead of part of causing this problem in the first place ….

hmmmmm

if only ……

reddie.5861:

XenesisII.1540:

Nothing wrong with thieves you guys need to l2p.
And use stealth traps for heaven’s sake.

good luck trying to do that dmg when u dont have the time to wait for malice stacks when u are mad slow when no1 is standing unbuffed and when no1 will give u 25 might stacks and when u dont want to be 1 shotted.

fought so many new crap thiefs already they stand no chance versus Daredevil so beside some tower hugging and shooting some newbies u wont do much as this class.

Well to be fair game doesn’t have any class that would have any chance against daredevil. If you manage get daredevil under 50% hp you are moral winner.

The best way to fix the uncompetitive problem with BG is to either lower map caps, delete BG and allow limited servers, or delete all servers.

Which would you choose?

You all realize with the next xpac there will be a lot of returning WvW players. Players who quit BG and will return back to BG boosting their population even more. Of course Anet could force inactive accounts onto servers that lack population.

This is officially scraping the bottom of the complaint barrel now. How dare they make regular updates to the game.

What i want is the new weapon not tied to the new Elite Spec, with the Elite Spec having traits that benefits the new weapon.
So, using the new weapon with the new Elite Spec would be preferred but not mandatory.

I always wondered why do the weapon types unlocked by the elite trees have to be locked to them. Would it not be possible, in the example of Revenant to play a Herald, but use the new bow? I really adore a lot of the new abilities, but I honestly am annoyed when a particular weapon I like to use is locked into an elite.

So I was just curious does anyone else feel this way? Do you think that once you spend the points to unlock a weapon you should be able to use it regardless of what elite form you use? Let me know! I would love to hear how everyone else feels.

Must say, this is one of the more complete feedbacks that doesnt rely on resorting to extreme arguments (completely useless, noone will use this ever etc)

And instead OP just says at the starts that balance is still off but the mechanics are good enough. Which I pretty much expected from an early demo. I have yet to play a demo which was perfectly balanced. or a launch for that matter.

Would love to see more of this kind of feedback posts while I’m unable to play.

xarallei.4279:

You aren’t meant to camp beastmode. You are meant to move in and out of it. You cast your pet’s ability and then jump into beastmode and cast your skills then jump back out, etc.

I actually think this is a design mistake. This spec will appeal mostly to players who want to not have to be forced to use/interact with the pet itself. What they should do is let you swap pets while in beast mode, and also get rid of the incredibly distracting nature aura.

Danikat.8537:

According to the profession forums every single new elite is terrible and proof that Anet hates that profession. Yes, including the Deadeye.

I mean that’s just par for the course. People on these forums always think Anet is out to kill their class. Doesn’t matter how good the class currently is. It could be at the top of the meta and people would still complain.

According to Reddit, there’s some pretty ludicrous power burst with Soulbeast since one of your shouts just gives you 40% extra damage. There’s people mauling for 26k apparently. Yup, Soulbeast useless guys!

According to the profession forums every single new elite is terrible and proof that Anet hates that profession. Yes, including the Deadeye.

I have to admit I don’t really get the Soulbeast, I can’t see what it offers that I’d be interested in having (other than maybe main hand dagger) but I thought the same about Druid and now I’m thinking I’d hate to give it up (and no, I don’t run a support build, it’s mainly condi DPS).

But just because you prefer one elite spec to another doesn’t mean it’s useless and certainly doesn’t mean the entire profession ‘died’.

To answer the original question: Yes, ANet has remembered the casuals. The issue is that ANet is also attempting to develop a game with broad appeal, and so they create content that, at least in theory, appeals to a wide group of gamers.

Part of the problem with Heart of Thorns is that many players (myself included) went into the expansion with no idea of how to really play the game. I don’t mean play as an experienced player, either: I mean play the game as it is built. I remember the first time I went to the jungle and fought Pocket Raptors. I thought: “Huh. I died FAST. Better put on some tankier gear and use more AoE-heavy weapons”. But that was largely because I’ve been playing GW2 since launch, and I remember running dungeons at launch, with level-appropriate characters and gear, and learning the hard way that dying is just what you’re supposed to do in the game, and if you want to NOT die you need to learn how to interact with the game.

But players that never had that experience, that really only ran dungeons when they were level 80 Zerker speed runs, didn’t or don’t PvP, or Raid, or tackle any of the challenging content in the game, don’t have anything in the core maps that teach them this. Yes, enemies in HoT use a LOT of burst and CC… at least, compared to core Tyria mobs. It’s not hard to deal with, but the game hasn’t taught the players HOW to deal with it. It’s amazing how swapping out a single trait line or utility skill can DRASTICALLY change your experience with HoT, and at times the new LW maps.

And that’s where the disconnect is: The difficulty jumps up in the expansion content, but the game itself doesn’t prepare you for this in a way that helps. This isn’t merely, “Git gud, scrub”; it’s the game not teaching casual players how to deal with content using skills they’ve likely never needed and traits that may at first seem pointless.

Hopefully PoF will solve this issue by having its first map act as a “tutorial” map, encouraging players to learn to tackle specific enemy and attack types, and preparing them for the types of encounters they’ll face in a way that supports skill growth.

Djinn.9245:

Dashingsteel.3410:

already been through it???? What did everyone decide the definition of casual is?

Read the thread.

I did and I’m still don’t see where people agreed about the definition. It’s a poor word choice to get the OP’s point across and I really wish y’all would stop using it. It distracts from the very conversation you’d like us to be having.

It would be better to restart the thread and state clearly, from the outset the things that the OP liked about the original game and which they haven’t found in HoT. In some cases, there might be a misunderstanding that can be cleared up; in some cases, there won’t be.

Also it would be better to avoid making claims that anyone can speak for anyone else. There are lots of different playstyles, lots of different ways of paying attention or not paying attention.

Right now, this thread is mostly people holding to their point of view and being unwilling to even consider changing their mind based on what others are saying. That’s not very useful to ANet and not all that interesting for those of us who would like to discuss what works, what should have worked, what doesn’t work, and so on.

Perhaps Anet has remembered the casuals…….. but unfortunately they remembered their version of casuals and not the ops version…… After all, there seems to be at least 5 different definitions on this thread.

This thread is still a jumbled mess because everyone has their own definition of the word casual.

OP, could you please give specific things that the developers need to do to “remember the casuals”

This request is just too vague.

"i haven’t played for a year, so i’m super rusty and right now i look like a monkey humping a football" =/= "i have absolutely no idea how to play this game."

all the assumptions you all are making are hilarious. keep it up. this thread is good for a laugh

I am a 60 year old grandma with arthritic hands. I am also the 2nd worst player in the game, grandpa is the worst, and we LOVE HoT. We found the base game a bit boring so we left for a while then came back to HoT. We love the challenge and the additions like gliding, bouncing mushrooms, and ley lines. Challenge is fun….easy is boring.

STIHL.2489:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Daddicus.6128:

Rhanoa.3960:

Has the game really failed? Far from it.

Nobody said it did; well, nobody other than you.

We said Heart of Thorns failed. Which it did.

It did not, not by any reasonable measure. It didn’t do as well as predicted, which is very different.

You realize that not meeting predictions, is Failure.. right?

Yes your right.
In your opinion the game failed.
What I do not understand is why you keep logging in?

What it tells me ANET has done a great job successfully retaining you as a customer!

See you in VB!!!