Guild Wars 2

@Chris
Everything in your first post is extremely encouraging and exciting. I only have one vital thing that should be added (and it may have been mentioned in the past 65 pages). From housing to grail quests, these all need to be steeped somehow in lore, and they need to add to the overall picture of the world, telling the stories of areas, races, people, organisations, even if only in brief. Also I would recommend at least some of the these grail quests chain. I think the quest format is perfect for GW2, marrying the co-operation encouraging mechanics, with classic MMO storytelling would be fantastic, and would make the world feel even more vibrant and exciting.

Also, if there are multiple ways for obtaining the reward, for example multiple different grail quests towards the same goal, after earning the reward the other quests ought to still be rewarding with lore and the typical event rewards.

So much that is coming down the pipes for GW2 is exciting! The game is now truly how ideally it would have been at launch and now for the next year I look forward to it becoming even more amazing!

timmyf.1490:

Wilderness Zones

Unlike regular zones in the game, wilderness zones are instanced areas without waypoints and without respawning mobs. These zones exist at the edge of the current map and would serve as an introduction to soon-to-be-released new zones.

In wilderness zones, you and your party venture through the zone in an attempt to hunt down and defeat some sort of boss. Because there are no checkpoints, a full wipe means you have to waypoint out of the instance and start over.

I would refine this by giving you the ability to add/unlock waypoints to the zone – just make the gating more demanding that “walk up to the site” we have now.

There comes a point where I’m not exploring anymore. The zone is old hat, and it should gain convenience over time if the game expects me to keep coming back after the initial shine has worn off. Maybe you have to find a full set of 5-6 Points of Interest to reveal a waypoint in that portion of the map (exploration reward). Maybe you need to succeed in a long string of DEs on par with a Temple Event to reveal a Waypoint (skill reward). Maybe you have to give/spend 100,000 karma at an NPC to reveal the waypoint for that village (karma sink). But eventually the map should be well known to your character rather than as frustrating as most of Orr .

You know what would make me laugh?

If this turned out to be just a basic thing, you buy Gems once and become VIP then “rank up” as you spend more Gems and these benefits become progressive as you rank up rather than all at once. Like, basic VIPs get the bag/char/bank slot, but only top ones get the Waypoint Reduction and Resurrection Buff.

And everyone got worked up over “subscription service” for nothing, and would never apologize for it.

There are two aspects of the economy.

The first is taking care of unwanted items. 1) Sell them to a vendor; 2) Salvage them for materials; 3) Sell them to another player meaning the TP. I believe the number of items that are dropped by critters are in the 10s if not 100s of thousands a day. Most of them are items that are completely unusable or unwanted to the player it’s dropped on.

It’s my belief that what most players do with this unwanted loot is either salvage them into mats and immediately dump the mats into their collections clearing inventory space or bring up the TP interface and select “sell now”, again to clear it out of their inventory. And it’s that “sell now” action that creates an environment where TP traders can thrive. If there is a market to later sell those items or salvage them for a profit, then it’s the TP traders who are putting in the majority of orders and will compete with each other, raising the price a player will get if they choose “sell now” as long as a profit can be made. And if they are selling them the reverse is true, undercutting each other.

It’s the fact that most players choose to use the TP simply as another vendor, buying and selling at the offered price, that lets those willing to risk their money to make money by acting as merchants by buying goods from players who don’t want them and sell them to players who do. And there is nothing wrong with that.

The second part of the economy is crafting and that is simply broken beyond repair. There are very few items as you level up a crafting skill that is profitable unless you gather all the raw materials yourself. Frequently refined materials are cheaper than the raw variety. Same with sub-assemblies. And that’s because the market is flooded with those items because everyone who is leveling up their crafting ability need to make X of those items simply because they give the most crafting experience at the time. Must “discover” as many recipes as possible even if the result isn’t worth anything. Must craft them until they give me no more crafting experience.

Sure once you get your crafting level up there there may be items you can craft for a nice profit, but they are few and far between. And since most players don’t craft in parallel with their level, they aren’t even capable in making items that are useful or better than items that drop. And due to the crafting flood of items, their are better items for a song on the TP. So crafting isn’t a viable income source. Normally crafting items and a means to sell them to other players go hand in hand but in the case with GW2, crafting isn’t worth doing as a source of income while trading items found by yourself or others (yes TP traders use the general population to do farming for them) is a viable means of income.

As long as critters drop items, then crafting will never flourish as an activity, but it will end up forcing players to participate in it which is against a philosophy that the game provides XP for a variety of player types (except now ascended weapons and armor does push players wanting those items into crafting whether they want to or not).

I understand you didn’t want the “rich” to simply buy up ascended gear, that you wanted them to quest for it so everyone was on somewhat level ground but by soulbinding those items you also took away a class of items that could have made crafting a viable income source. That’s just an aside.

Sorry for the text wall.

Don’t forget the overall pvp picture.

When you take a step back, the real question you want to answer is:

what is the ideal pvp infrastructure for both casual and competitive players that enables them to play with 0 to 4 friends and has a smooth learning curve?

Wall of text incoming, brace yourself. It is pretty cool and super robust because it covers the overall system.(very modestly:p :p)

1/ revisit the pvp initiation.

This one is a major overhaul and the answer to the learning curve. I’ll just throw in some guidelines:

- teach players about builds: stun breaker, condition removal, gap closers and cc used both offensively and defensively, stats thresholds.

- teach players about pvp combat: duel every class with slow motion animation of each skill with explanations as to what it does and how to counter it (including downed fights).

- teach players about game mode mechanics: no need to be 2 to cap, mini map awareness, when is the best time to kill bosses…

Ideally all of the above can happen on demand:
- when you visit the mists for the first time
- whenever you are in the mists and want to train
- when you are in a real fight and want to understand what happened. ( this third part is crucial and probably the hardest the implement)

2/ casual play
The current hot join system is cool and it can only get better if you integrate the above initiation phase into the fight itself.

3/ competitive play: solo players

After players hit pvp rank 20, if they only played hot joins before, prompt them if they want to join arenas with explanation on the reward and the matchmaking.
Repeat every 5 rank gained if they still never tried arenas.

Apart from that keep the current solo arena system and keep working on what you mentioned already: more intelligent matchmaking, adjusted MMR depending on how experienced you are with a class, leavers penalty… Don’t forget to integrate the initiation phase to solo arenas as well.

4/ competitive play: groups

Groups can be 1-5 players playing together or real teams. Real teams are registered as such for each season while groups are just players grouping together.

Simple groups function as they do now in team arenas.

To register a team you need to fill in:
- team name
- team tag
- nationality (country, continent, region)
- at least 5 players accounts. One of them being the captain.

Team system:
- 1 account can only belong to one team at a time
- team hierarchy in terms of rights: sponsor>manager>captain>Member
- you can only swap teams a fixed number of time during each season (once or twice if you leave on your own, a bit more if you get kicked or disband the team)
- disbanded teams disappear from the ladder and reset the count of match participation to the season.
- only players who played a certain amount of matches during the season get rewarded.
- the reward depends on the team’s position on the ladder when the season ends.

Matchmaking system:
- real teams and simple groups are in the same pool, meaning they can face each other (in order not to split the player base even further)
- the system prefers to have teams face each other and groups face each other though.
- the matchmaking for teams is based on their ranking in the ladder
- the matchmaking for groups is based on the average personal MMR of each member of the group.
- teams gain and lose more rankings on the team ladder when facing another team.
- each participant in the team also gain and lose personal MMR
- if three players or more belong to the same team, they automatically play as this team.
- if three players or more play 15-20 matches per week under no tag team at all, then they cannot play again unless they form a team or they wait the next week.

5/ competitive play: tournaments

- every month, there is a tournament for teams only.
- Specific rewards for top 16. From top 16 onward, matches have a greater impact on the team ranking than normal season. Not too drastically though so that regular season matches are not insignificant.
- any team that is 1 week old can enter the tournament.
- if there are too many teams, split the tournaments into leagues (based on teams’ ranks in the ladder)

I’m on holiday for New Year’s, but one thing I really wanted to bring up before I forget is the thrill of finding loot. I recently got my necromancer to 80 and when I decided to gear her up, do you know what I did? I opened the trading post, because I wanted the Phoenix Reborn axe.

Maybe this is on me, but does anybody else miss loot tables? The idea of going somewhere to get a specific item with a reasonable chance of getting that item is something that I miss. I realize that karma gear and dungeon gear are starter sets of gear and can be obtained by doing specific content, but it would be nice if there were some rhyme or reason to where and how things drop. (This is kind of a supporting structure to visual customization, in case you’re wondering why this is coming up in a discussion about horizontal progression.) I kept meaning to mention this and getting side-tracked by all the good ideas. I’ll be back to posting in the New Year! Be safe, everyone, and have a good one!

Quote paraphrased to fit limit:

Orpheal.8263:

If you fear subclasses because they limit what you could make your characters, then everyone who thinks this, should stop playing, as the game will never make you happy, because with its 8 current Main Professions it already limits you

Shriketalon has already said most of what I was going to say, but on this claim in particular:

There’s always going to be a bit of compromise between totally freeform structures and highly rigid subclass-for-everything-under-the-sun systems. There are benefits to having a class-based system – easier to balance, convenient recognition of what somebody else’s character can be expected to do, carrying themes that link a character to a setting’s background (the four schools of magic in GW’s case), and so on.

There are also benefits to keeping those themes fairly broad, to allow players to come up with their own interpretations within those themes.

To give examples from pencil and paper roleplaying: 3rd edition D&D had a class system, but not a subclass system. I won’t say that any concept could be played straight out of the Player’s Handbook (certainly not and be viable) but there was a lot of room for interpretation and customisation (feats, skills, spell selections for spellcasters) within a class. Maybe not the paladin, but the other classes gave a wide range of options. (Prestige classes and new core classes did come out that were more specialised, but they served more to enhance things that were already possible, rather explicitly sorting characters into boxes in which they must fit or be less viable.)

4E, though, had what was pretty much an explicit subclass system, although they didn’t use the term. For some it was more obtrusive than others, but for most classes the subclass pretty much determined what powers you would be taking, what feats you would use to support those powers, and so on (even, usually, determining which race your character would be). For comparison, in the 3.5 Living Greyhawk campaign, I played with dozens of players with a variety of characters, and there are only a couple of particularly broken builds I can think of that I saw more than once. In the 4E Living Forgotten Realms campaign… there were maybe a dozen people I knew who were participating, and even then, I regularly found that a character concept I had was also being used by someone else even in that small group before we pretty much all gave up on the system. What basically happened there was that if there was a subclass that fit the concept you had in mind, you were all but identical to everyone else who took that subclass, and if there wasn’t, you were SOL.

At the moment, GW2 is closer to the 3.5 model. There are classes, but the classes we have are fairly broad… and while there are gaps within those broad ideas, there are clear ways in which the professions can be expanded to cover concepts that don’t currently fit simply with the addition of new skills, traits and weapons.

Consider the warrior, for instance. A GW2 warrior could be a noble knight or a rampaging berserker, a disciplined soldier accustomed to fighting side-by-side with close allies or a mercenary who fights dirty. He or she might be an officer accustomed to calling out orders to rally the troops or a champion that plants the unit’s standard and defends it to the death. They might even be a trained marksman, expecting to draw a melee weapon only if things go wrong, or a mace or hammer warrior may even be a crude battlemage, drawing on earth magic to shake the ground, enhance their strength, or fortify themselves against attacks. And that’s just what I can think of in a couple of minutes brainstorming.

A subclass system would cut the field down to, well, however many subclasses that ArenaNet has the resources to make. It becomes, as D&D 4E became, a system where you either have your concept handed to you by the developers on a silver platter or it just isn’t going to be viable at all. Simply expanding the options within a profession, without restricting them to subclasses, allows players to come up with their own combinations without being hindered by unnecessary artificial restrictions.

Personally, I don’t like playing the “if you don’t like it, you should play another game” card, but since you’ve brought it up… have you tried Rifts? Last I heard it was free-to-play, and it sounds like it would be right up your alley. In Guild Wars 2’s case, though… people who bought it, did so with the knowledge of where it sat on the spectrum between freeform and regimented subclass systems – namely, in the middle, with a small number of fairly broad professions. Shifting that midstream is a dangerous proposition, and now that the game is over a year old and sixteen months worth of players have signed up based on the current system, a swing towards either extreme is probably going to displease more players than it pleases.

idea for Order progression:

Priory progression:

• There are tons of artifacts in the game. For each artifact you complete, you gain progression for the order of Priory.
• Each artifact consists of 6 or more parts, which have to be combined to complete it.

But where do you find these pieces? Each artifact belongs to a creature family, like the “Dredge Codex of the 1st Age”. Think of it like this:

• some pages drop from specific/non-random dredge veterans (droprate: 100%) all over the world
• some pages can be found in dredge structures
• some pages are the reward for completing specific dredge-related events

Of course these artifacts / pieces of artifacts are non-tradeable. Once you have all parts of an artifact, you need to talk to one specific related npc. Almost all of the related npcs can give you a hint where to go to combine the artifact. Here: talk to any friendly dredge in the game while having all parts of the dredge artifact. 70 % of these npcs will give you a name of a location and the target zone. Now you’ll have to look for this location on your zone map or (if you haven’t found it yet) look for yourself in that zone.

Now what happens if you’ve arrived in the target location? There may be various things that can happen now in order to complete your artifact.

-) You may find an npc who is able to combine the artifacts, like a specific smith
-) You may trigger an event where assassins try to kill you, but as you defeat them you get a missing piece from them which completes the artifact.
…

reward
A complete artifact not only drives your progress at the Order, but also unlocks that artifact for you to use (unlimited uses). It’s stored in the Priory Archives for you. The “Dredge Codex of the 1st Age” might be a codex with lore about the dredge race. You might also have artifacts in form of weapon skins, unique bags, environmental weapons (like the fire elemental powder), etc.

but why like this?

• You get the pieces while playing the game
• You get little missions when you’ve found all parts of one piece…
• … and a very specific reward for completing it
• this means new lore, new reward types,… it can be anything
• You get more and more pieces over time when playing a variety of content – a reward for going out in the world and explore it
• There is no farming here, just tons of shortterm goals which combine to a huge longterm goal: Priory progression. Each Priory rank also unlocks new rewards and achievement-categories.

Orpheal.8263:

Our Characters need to develop themself further over time, visually as like skillfully and mechanically and this goal can be only reached with redesigning the Trait System, adding Sub Classes and splitting the Trait System up into 3 seperate different Systems constisting out of Traits, Abilities, and Talents.

This would make Character Customization broader and give ANet also alot more options for overall Character Progression, vertically as like horizontally.

If I may, there isn’t anything about your post that demonstrates why we need subclasses themselves.

Skill Aesthetic Progression is a good idea. Allowing players to unlock intricate and magnificent animation options is a beautiful way to let players feel accomplished and to distinguish their character from others.

New weapons are definitely needed. Many classes simply don’t have enough weapons under their belt to fit the different roles in the game. Everyone should have reliable means of achieving concepts like AoE, direct offense, condition offense, defense, control, and support, but many classes were given the short end of the stick.

And finally, the trait system is not very well implemented because the format should not be the same across classes. Everyone is forced to use the Five Line Thirty Point method, no matter how foolish it is for different groups. A warrior is nothing like an engineer, so why are they required to use the same upgrade method?

But that doesn’t mean you need Subclasses.

If a class needs more weapons, give them more weapons. If a class needs a broader class mechanic, broaden the class mechanic. If the trait system isn’t up to snuff, improve the trait system. And if you want to provide skill aesthetic customization, implement systems that allow animations to be unlocked by story progress, Order choice, PvP rank, WvW winnings, difficult achievements, and other facets of existing gameplay.

Subclasses do not bring anything unique to the table. We already have active skills in the form of Weapons, Utilities, Elites, Heals, and Class Mechanics, along with passive effects handled by Traits. The system isn’t perfect, but it does theoretically cover everything a player needs to do. Anything you list as a possible subclass is either going to be a passive effect (your Duelist warrior has less armor but gains adrenaline faster!) or an active skill (instead of Death Shroud, your Necromancer gains Cloak of Doom!). The system already accounts for both of them.

If you believe the current system has lacks polish (an opinion I share) than improving the present mechanics makes a better outcome than adding another layer for the sake of a shiny name pasted onto the existing flaws.

People still seem to think that these releases are developed in a fortnight. They are prepared over a much longer period. It doesn’t bother me if they spend 8 weeks preparing updates and release them monthly, or spend 8 weeks preparing them but releasing them fortnightly.

UnknownAssailant.2375:

So according to the news, the next living story patch won’t come until late January.
But isn’t this what we wanted?
For the developers to put more time into each release so that its more polished and engaging.

There is literally nothing the devs could release that would not result in at least 2-4 threads complaining.

This is exactly what we wanted and nobody is complaining, I havent yet seen any hate threads. People are actualy Ok with anet spending some time to polish their updates. On the other hand you are kind of stirring up stuff with this thread people might start to create those threads soon.

I’m glad about longer break from updates. It really feels refreshing. And maybe this time they will add somethings that is actually interesting and fun to play.

The Living Story and I don’t get along well but I am absolutely thrilled to see them spending more time on the releases. I am also very happy to see that one of the patches will be devoted to nothing but ‘features’.

I do hope they, at the very least, add the ability to move and resize the GUI elements, as in the first game.

im not complaining its giving us enough time to do the wintersday stuff plus enjoy the holidays. scarlets only got four more chapters and they are taking more time to do them and she hopefully gone for good and then a big content update afterwards…all good news in my book. they are going to reveal why she did all she did which might make some of us happy with all the not knowing why she was doing stuff.

I agree with Zaxares. Most people don’t speak out when they like something. It only looks like everyone hates the Living Story because they’re the ones giving feedback, but they don’t make up the entire player base. So there might not actually be an accurate way to tell for sure if most people like the Living Story or not.

So according to the news, the next living story patch won’t come until late January.
But isn’t this what we wanted?
For the developers to put more time into each release so that its more polished and engaging.

“The Nightmare Before Wintersday”

I’m on to you, Tim Burton
glares

Scarlet being an elder dragon would actually be a cool twist. I wouldn’t mind having a sentient elder dragon as an up-close antagonist, though they better not mess it up.

Just wait for the big reveal in a few months, where its turns out that Scarlet is [insert standard out-of-the-blue ‘ooh, nobody could have known’ hollywood cliché reveal] and that will explain the whole year of LS dealing with everything else but the dragon threat.

Oh…let me guess, Scarlet IS an elder dragon!

Just wait and see and be surprised.

Nike.2631:

Suggestion for small correction to Ascended Weapons crafting Recipes:

2-Handed weapons remain unchanged. They fill 5 skill slots and effectively require 500 dragonite ore, empyreal shards, and bloodstone dust.

Off-hand Only weapons (e.g. focus or torch) replace the Vision Crystal with a Lesser Vision Crystal. They fill 2 skill slots and require 200 dragonite ore, empyreal shards, and bloodstone dust.

Main-hand weapons replace the Vision Crystal with a new “Medium Vision Crystal”. They fill 3 skill slots and the new crystal is made with 300 dragonite ore, empyreal shards, and bloodstone dust.

This brings parity to the effort required to craft 2-h weapons vs. 1-h/off-hand builds. Using a main hand weapon in an off-hand slot is slightly overpriced using a 100-mats-per-skill-slot model, but its still far more forgiving than the 1,000 mats it takes now.

Last step in a perfect world would be to refund the excess 200 (for main hand) or 300 (off-hand) of each combined material via mail. These could be returned in their 100:1 forms (ingots, stars, and bricks).

If the system can track ‘chest’ weapons vs. crafted weapons they could be excluded, though there is a case to be made that a chest should always grant 1 weapon and the appropriate ‘left over’ mats to prevent chests always being converted into 2-h weapons…

+1 to this.

Ok, I really cant catch up now to what has been said on this CDI, but here is my opinion on some matters:

I feel that the time for character advancement is soon pass. Yeah, we get more armor and story, but atm with how achievements are done with getting bonuses account wide, or special armor, it seems that expanding on that would be a more logical way to go. Account bonuses to expand to all the characters, unlocking knew armor by doing knew achieves, etc.

It just seems that system is already in place, so why not expand on it more?

Now of course, another idea I saw was adding in a system like in WvW (which gasp the points are account bound :p), to specialize characters more. Perhaps increase harvesting chance to get more items, increase dmg to undead, reduce fall dmg, etc.

I just feel atm, that I am bettering my account as a whole now, and not characters individually is all.

Still not sure why a plant could explode, but eh, the story instance was fun and the cinematic was cool to watch. The NPC dialogues back at the camp are probably the best part though! Bloomanoo+Peneloopee flirting, Kasmeer’s armor “revelation”, and Braham’s flirting with Marjory were all hilariously awesome. Kudos to whoever’s writing their dialogue!