Guild Wars 2

(Forgive me if this has been suggested before.)

Concept: An idea to increase the longevity and interest of WvW.

A series of capturable resource structures that, when owned, upgraded and defended, provide a set of concrete and powerful PvE and/or PvP bonuses to the server that owns them.

Examples:

• A farm structure could provide bonuses to food crafting (say, a bonus to experience or an increase in the chance of crafting double) and, when sufficiently upgraded, WvW only buffs that are equivalent or similar to some food buffs.
• A smith building could provide bonuses to armor and weapon smithing and provide a slight to moderate bonus to the damage of friendly units that acquire a buff (e.g., “Your weapons are sharpened/magically improved for 30 minutes.”) from the smith master.
• A logistics center that, when sufficiently upgraded, increases the speed, frequency of supply amount of caravans from supply camps.
• A lumber mill that increases PvE logging harvesting yields and/or provides discounted harvesting equipment at a special merchant (located in major cities).

Additional possibilities:

• distillery (tonics for increased hp%, reduced condition duration?)
• artillery camp (cheaper supply cost for building siege?)
• barracks (bonus to downed state HP? reduction in contested WP reset time? additional guards for keeps/towers? deployment of NPC scouting parties or patrols?)
• crystal/magic area (+healing bonus?)
• archaeological dig site (mf% increase?)
• Asura engineering station (allows maintenance of two or three portals on the map?)

Mechanics/Implementation: Resource structures must be built, upgraded and defended.

• Small upgrades to defense (number of guards, wooden walls, etc.) can be ordered, and supply would be necessary to construct them.
• Significant upgrades would entail spending money on more personnel to run these structures.
• A command could be given to have these personnel retreat to the nearest keep/tower should the structure come under heavy attack, thus increasing the purpose of fortified structures.
• Bonuses could increase at a steady rate (until reaching some cap), giving servers a strategic incentive to defend and upgrade such locations for the long term.
• Buffs and bonuses would be applied on a per-character basis by having the player visit the relevant structure’s NPC.
• These could be implemented in a new battleground or, to some extent, the current WvW set up.

Increasing the importance of keeps: Like medieval warfare, keeps could play a strategic role in sheltering key components of the local “economy”

• Supplies and personnel from these structures can be moved to keeps during sieges or attacks, preserving part of the investment a server makes into resource structures
• A keep must be upgraded to include a “civilian shelter” or “resource deposit center” (?) in order for the personnel and resources at a resource structure to be evacuated.
• Looting a keep that has personnel and resources would reward the victorious server with bonuses of some sort (e.g., faster upgrades to the resource structures they now own, extra gold, etc.)

Summary:

• Capturable structures provide bonuses to WvW and PvE.
• Upgrades to these structures provide increased bonuses and incentives to capture and defend them.
• Resources and personnel upgrades can be partially preserved after a resource structure is attacked by sending them to a local keep.
• The ability to loot these resources from a keep increases incentives to siege and defend and provides a logical order of attack (raid resource structures, then attack keeps).

Thoughts?

Shifty.7104:

Well , sigh just sigh.

I had lots of confidence in the changes you had made to the game arenanet until now, this is simply going to be zerg fest rolling over under prepared servers that neither have the coverage or population to deal with it, untill it becomes zergs vs doors.

Incredibly bad move.

I think the point is, yeah you might get stomped one week. Then you might stomp the next. Then you might have a tight, intense matchup the one after that, and against servers you might not expect to be so close.

The very top and the very bottom could potentially get stale, if you’re always winning or losing; but in a sense you already were anyway.

At any rate, I’m more than happy to see what it’s like for a few weeks before I pan it, and I actually think it’ll be fun.

1. Anti Stealth Traps are USELESS. Period.
10 supplies and nearly 4 seconds cast? Really? Seriously guys? Thief will kill me before I open my Inventory…
2. Thieves can easily escape from EVERY fight. He starts a fight, loses, stealths, heals and resets (or escapes)… and so on. Two days ago I saw a Thief kiting 2 people AND killing a Dolyak in the same time… that’s insane…
3. There is no possible way to counter stealth. I am asking – WITH WHAT? With that useless traps?
4. The risk of roaming as a Thief is 0. Beautiful, round ZERO. He can run away whenever he wants.
I have leveled an Engineer especially for WvW (because my Ele was nerfed again, and no – I’m not talking about D/D but about my Mist Form) and I use dual Pistols + H S B U Elixirs and Supply Crate of course. Traits: 10/30/0/30/0. Armor: Power/Vit/Condi. I have a question – how am I supposed to fight versus someone who is invisible 75% of the time? Glue Shot immobilize and Supply Crate stuns are useful but still – they only let me to harass him – not kill…

Having No Stealth Class
Having No Favoritism of Classes; a.k.a The Golden Child

GW1

From first couple years of eq1:
1) player run economy:
other than vendors for selling trash items, players ran the economy, buying and selling by trading between players. You got ripped off once in a while, but those who ripped you off got blacklisted and no one would trade with them.
2) longer levelling times. It was an achievement to get to level cap(months, and sometimes years for the casual player) not this hit level cap in 2 days thing we see now
3) death meant something—you died and had to retrieve your corpse or you lose your items. death also meant exp loss, you could lose your newly gained level, even.
4) Even friendly NPC’s could kill you. Hitting the “A” key while talking to your class trainer meant you got one shot.
5) KoS status—if you were the wrong race in the wrong city, the guards would attack you. You had grind faction (even though it was time consuming)to get them to be ok with you.
6) No flying, mounts, or instant ports (other than player ports)—you walked or ran everywhere. Certain classes could speed you up (can I get a SOW please?) to run to your destination. Wizard could port you to certain cities, also.
7) Rare mobs that dropped things you needed for quests or items: it was a pain in the butt, but if you wanted to do your epic quest, or get a coveted item (like jboots), you had to do it.
8) Fippy Darkpaw!

From DAOC (pre TOA)
1) player crafted items were as good and sometimes even better than drops. You could customize your gear for the stats you wanted mostly through player crafting. This gear was good for both pve and pvp.
2) Easy access to raid level content—players organized raids on dungeon bosses. My first DAOC raid was a Legion raid. I wasn’t even level cap and no one cared. After successful raids, the designated lootmaster would hold the loot, and lotto it off.
3) Duels—honed your skills and gave you a challenge
4) No communication with enemy players—couldn’t chat with em, or group with em. None of this friendly duel other realm stuff either. “If it’s red its dead!”
5) Guild alliance system
6) realm ranks and titles—you knew who the elite players were because you could see their realm title. They were more powerful than you as well, because of +1 skill point for each realm rank.
7) emain!

I preferred the DAOC system to the eq1. I had a life, so the time required to excel in eq1 was out of the question. But the pre TOA DAOC game was the best time I ever had gaming.

ColinJohanson.2394:

kissofthehell.3720:

Is there time when the event will start or its going to repeat for the whole day of 28th?

There is no one time only content in the May releases, it’s all available for week(s) or in some cases, will be available permanently.

Thank Dwayna!

It’s great to see ArenaNet continuing to move GW2 to be an MMO where people don’t have to reschedule their lives. I love the game but it is still a game, it should fit to my schedule not the other way around.

Again ArenaNet is proving that they learn from their past missteps, and that’s will only make GW2 better and better. I hope more MMO developers are watching what ArenaNet is doing.

PvE culling is my biggest complaint atm

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

1. The fact that there is a main city rather than having all the features available in every city.

And what features would that be? Aside from certain plot points relating to LA as a location (ex. you had to be there for Halloween), I can’t think of anything that it has over any of the other cities. Mystic Forge? Those are all over WvW, so definitely not unique to LA. Every city has crafting stations, banks, trading posts…what else are we missing? LA is just a hub. Like literally, that’s what it’s used for: traveling to and from other cities, WvW, PvP, some zones/dungeons. Making every city into a hub would be silly :P

One of the little things that bugs me that people don’t talk about is the fact that there is no activation bar for enemy skills. In GW1, every ability that took longer than 1 sec to cast had an activation bar so you could see the progress, and interrupt it appropriately.

Buuuut there’s way bigger issues like moving the camera making you change targets mid-combat that concern me wayyyy more!

My biggest annoyance these days is the laziness of other players.

Event scales up, people are afk, auto attacking or laying there dead. I often find myself wondering why I’m carrying these miscreants when we’re just going to get the same reward for our efforts.

There are two things that really annoy me:

1. The fact that there is a main city rather than having all the features available in every city.
2. The voice acting for female characters. Honestly, if I close my eyes and then a female character speaks I most likely won’t be able to tell what race it is. Except for Asura, Quaggan and Skritt.

…not sure if trolling, or…

I miss Gandara! cause they have good players, roamers, small groups. Here i see only brainless zergs and coward players with no skills (except very few rs)

Yawn.. blob blob.. run away when you see an outnumbered group.. blob some more, have some more skill lag..
Boring stuff so far.. Guess we should all go bunker and spam 1 hoping to outlast the opponent.. maybe we can get some reasonable balanced fights after the weekend.

I played for..an hour just after reset and it was terrible so to speak. Nothing but zergs and lag! I do hope it won’t be like this all weak. Good luck to all!

Let the hunger games begin. I doubt there will be many from RS/AM here.

Really disappointed from reset so far. Only giant zerging for 3 hours now.

The best way to “fix” mobs, in my opinion, is to give them what GW1 mobs had. Good attack speed, aka attack speed similar to what the players have.

Mobs in GW2 (normal ones) die before they even attack once when you are doing events, so adding more and more mobs isn’t the answer, they will just die in seconds. One way to solve this problem is to add Veterans and Champions, what’s Anet is doing. That’s also wrong, how about making those hit the moment they spawn with quick attacks? Something that all mobs are missing are skill1 attacks, reduce their overall dps slightly, and give them small, but fast, attacks, similar to skill1 attacks that players have. It will also have the added benefit of making Toughness/Vitality more valuable, a player without any will die after numerous small attacks hit him, can’t dodge them all.

Some Veterans can already deal some damage, the new F&F mobs were actually challenging, great design on those. More of those are needed, maybe in bigger groups (with normal versions) instead of big groups of easily killed normals and one veteran. The Risen in Arah are also nicely done, they actually form parties and are challenging to defeat, there is a reason they are sometimes “Harder” than the bosses, so players skip them. More of those, but in normal/veteran qualities instead of dungeon mobs, are needed, maybe even make some spawn at events instead of champions. They have varied attack patterns and actually useful skills.

Zietlogik.6208:

I prefered the enemies in GW1 that had nearly full skill bars, and fought in “packs”, but that was because GW1 it was more like a team v team encounter everytime, rather than actually feel like solo play.

That was much more engaging for me than simply swinging my sword, then swinging my sword again….hate to say, I actually think you can compare the blandness of enemies to games like early-game WoW and Aion

I agree with this. GW1 enemies were infinitely more challenging for the players because you had to have the right team composition and skills to counter mob teams whose skill sets grew more sophisticated as you progressed through the game. It is called synergy, and whatever team is more "synergized " comes out on top which, interestingly, was both true for GW1 PvP and PvE. (Solo farming builds in PvE would be an exception).

In GW2… yeah… “I swung a sword, hey, I swung a sword again!” pretty much sums up GW2 PvE combat. And the word “bland”, when describing monsters in GW2 compared to GW1, fits everything in one word. The mob mechanics are ancient and cliche: tons of hp, one-shot mechanics, non-removable conditions, cc spam… where’s the design revolution in that?

This is why I favor small, tightly knit guilds. While there are lulls in the conversation at times, people will always say hi when you get online, or come help when you need it because they know that you would do the same for them.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Edited to add: This is a great place to throw out your ideas of what you’d like to see any of them do encounter wise to make them more exciting.

Hey Colin!
I know your programmers & animators are gonna hate hearing this but there is no way around this:
The Dragons need to dynamically walk around, attack specific groups of people, have fully animated turning & directional movement & have environmentally important, not scripted, varied tactics. I know you don’t have an animated turning system & only things like the Karkas really are big & walk around, but it has to change. There is no short cut.

Every other option boils down to it being extremely obvious that the dragon is a glorified turret. (sometimes a turret that can’t even rotate) It HAS TO WALK AROUND. And the current “spin in place” animation doesn’t cut it. A lot of us were saying this before & during beta: look at Tera BAMs. They have the proper animation, movement, targeting & attacks, they just lack the interesting mechanics of raid bosses.

I would prefer that they also effect/can attack the whole zone, but just moving & attacking things DYNAMICALLY not in a script, is the main problem. Also, there should be MULTIPLE outcomes to fighting the dragons. several win types & several loss types.

Currently the animation & models are cool, but they are absolutely NOT fun to fight.

tigirius.9014:

Zenith.7301:

Vayne.8563:

Zenith.7301:

I’ve been doing MF runs and the occasional fractal with some world bosses for an entire month, and at best I ended up with 98 ectos. At that rate, it takes 2.5 months to get the backpiece.

That’s 2.5 times what it takes you to get an ascended amulet or an ascended accessory.

It takes ten minutes to run CoF path 1. Ten minutes. If you’re really not good at it, 15 minutes. During that time you get a minium of 2 yellows, which on the average yield two ectos.

I don’t know how often you’re playing but there are well over a dozen places you can get guaranteed golds every single day.

Since the average of about (more or less) 1 ecto per yellow, well that’s quite a bit of ectos.

More to the point, if you sell the mats and other stuff you get from in world and fractal runs, you can make money and buy ectos. Right now you can get 3 ectos for 1 gold or basically 50ish gold will get your all the ectos you need.

You might think 50 gold is a lot of money…but it’s really not in this game.

I don’t farm CoF. And it’s certainly not an average of 2 ectos per yellow. I wish that was my average, just like I wish I had gotten the jetpack after the 70 MF runs I did.

But this is a garbage casino-style gaming experience, where to mitigate that you must tediously repeat the one remotely profitable activity (cof farming or TP) because the alternatives or playing other more entertaining formats do not yield reasonable rewards (30 minutes of boredom killing Claw od Jormag for a single yellow and a couple of blues and greens is not my idea of time investment).

It is and people suggesting that you run dungeons to get what you need in a game that was supposed to be all about choice just don’t seem to get it. If it’s a choice then why are there only two means of getting any drops, and that’s precluding any problems with DR/magic find you might have? If it’s how Colin says it is, then why are there only two choices to follow to the end game? Hmm?

Actually, I only suggested it, because this player was complaining he had no money and he was running stuff for money anyway.

But that’s not the way I play, not the way my guild plays, and not the way many of the people on these forum play. If someone brings up a problem, I suggest a solution. That’s not to say that everyone should or has to play this way. This is just you twisting my words, or taking them out of context.

IF you feel you’re not getting enough money, there are ways to make more money. But that’s only for people with that mindset, who in my experience, don’t represent the majority of the playerbase.

I get why you’re disappointed with the game. That doesn’t mean everyone is or should be. This game isn’t about getting stuff as fast as possible because you’re not particularly locked out of content to get most of that stuff (the exception being the highest levels of fractals…but it still doesn’t lock you out of fractals).

If you approach the game with a more casual mindset instead of a farming mindset, you’ll probably enjoy the game more. If you can’t, then I make suggestions to try to help.

Because contrary to popular belief, I really do like to help people.

Rika.7249:

Nobody plays Dynamic Events.

In what game? Because in the game called Guild Wars 2 players do play Dynamic Events.

Angelus.1042:

Creeper.9360:

there are raids in GW2, just not instanced raids

and they are a joke….

Tons of people mindlessly hitting an HP sponge boss that does 2 or 3 things and dont stand in the red….yet large groups of random people cant even get that right.

Reminds me of WoW raids

I got 1200 hours of enjoyment out of a $60 game, that’s a huge success imo.

Angelus.1042:

Im starting to think that all that’s left are raging fanboys in the GW2 forums that aren’t open to any suggestions or changes…

To be honest, I see more raging from haters, and minimal fanboism all over. Also, not every hater offers solutions serving every player, but often just suiting their own preferences, and what they wish the game was so it was more convenient/fun to them-often these “solutions” go against the game’s original design as well (maybe not your solutions, which I know nothing about, but in general this type of “solution”: “if this game was more like WoW, it would be so much better!”) Not wholly disliking the game doesn’t mean you are a “fanboi”, and it’s ok for people to disagree without calling each other names, such as the easy way out, “fanboi” when people don’t agree with your complaints-even if they are valid to yourself.

Why some people order Chicken & Noodle soup, and then get angry because it had Chicken pieces instead of Broccoli/Cheddar boggles the mind. :P

The story missions are not designed to be done one after the other. The level gap gives you time to explore and participate in Dynamic Events, which are the core of the game. Go back to the story once your level is high enough, sometimes even a level or 2 above the recommended level.