Guild Wars 2

It’s also worth mentioning that the difference in rewards for T3/4 Dry Top isn’t that remarkable. The gold cost for the recipes and items remain exactly the same at all tiers; only the geode cost goes down. So for Dry Top, at least, it’s not of absolute importance to achieve the higher tiers. If you’re just after all the cooking recipes, you can simply get them at T3. It’ll cost you a bit more Geodes, but you’ll probably get that in your repeated farm attempts to reach T4 anyway.

I couldn’t agree more. I love the system of “perform better, and get better rewards” but the system in which we have been thrust into doesn’t allow us to actually form a map to our liking very easily.

I’d very much like a gemstore item to open up our own maps of these locations, these would not allow people in except through being pulled in by a group member.

This way guilds/organizations/even LFG could be used to get people in who want to work together leaving those who want to just log in and do their own thing to do just that instead of forcing both groups of people into the same sets of maps.

The only part I disagree with is that I think ANet has done an excellent job of making t4/golds accessible with proper effort. The problem is when you have a system set up that expects so much out of every player and many players simply don’t hold their own weight it becomes an issue. If they didn’t do this then the content would simply be too easy and there’d be no point to scaled rewards as everyone would hit the top without trying. The problem is you have situations where say 2/3 of the map is organized and trying, some doing above par and some just holding their own. But then you often have another 1/3 of the map doing more or less nothing, just trying to get their own things done, but the system has to count them as a participant because they are there. So the 2/3 has to carry that last 1/3 and well… sometimes that’s a bit too much to ask.

I really think if we could have our own maps to control things could be much smoother. Anet could make some money by charging a decent amount of gems for it. And Ideally I’d have it be a time based thing (24 hr, 3 days, 1 week maybe as options) and let the map creator purge it clearing the whole map and restarting it when they feel like it so we have the power to deal with griefers.

I had been in many full maps for CP and the reason most lost out on gold was because of a lack of coordination. So many tried to Zerg it and scale up the bosses. Dry Top maps have had the numbers but they don’t make tier 4 due to not coordinating the events.

Yes, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the coordination, but ANet has not given the player the tools to ensure that you easily end up on a coordinated server. You can blame the other players all you like, but you can’t force other players to coordinate, and if you, as a player who is willing and able to coordinate, end up on a server that is mostly people with no interest and/or capability to do so, then you stand no chance at getting anything out of your time spent in the game.

I’m not saying that they can’t have goals that require player coordination, I’m just saying that if they do have such goals, then they need to make 100% sure that any player that WANTS to coordinate is able to do so without the hassles of map changes, purges, and join spamming. I mean, during the Blitz I was doing gold runs, but I popped a Birthday Boost partway through, 24 hours of boost uptime, and yet I probably ended up wasting half of that time just standing around in the center trying to join in on people who had an active map, while the map I was in was stuck in Bronze the entire time.

That is NOT game design that is working well, however you might try to spin it.

I’m not sure how they would implement your ‘logging in and choose Gold rewards’ suggestion.

I’m not exactly sure either, but until they have a solution, they should not implement maps with goals that allow you to not ‘log in and choose Gold rewards.’ I’m not saying I have the complete solution to this one, I’m just pointing out that they have a problem, it’s their job to fix it, but I’ll help however I can.

You can just open LFG and find a taxi, or make a group looking for a taxi. Whenever I’m in a t4 shard, I always try to taxi pugs in using LFG.

And then we’re back to join spam.

Ok, here’s at least one solution they need to implement ASAP. Remove join spam. Bring back the queues. Make it so that instead of having to hit “join→ok” a thousand times before the map actually loads, preventing you from doing anything at all productive with your time, make it so that you can hit “Join your party member in the map” and then it puts you into a queue. The when your number comes up, you get in, done.

In the meantime, you can run around the map you’re in, doing whatever there is to do. Ideally you could even queue up form other maps, and hop around doing any ingame activities until your queue pops.

Ideally, every map should be able to get t4, but that’s not gonna happen considering the majority of players. People don’t like to work hard in this game. So you’re gonna have to find other players that do want to work.

I don’t think it’s at all fair to blame player laziness. I’ve been on plenty of maps where I’ve seen people scurrying around, running events constantly, and still only barely gotten T3, if that. Getting T4 requires a ton of people that are all focused on that goal, knowing when every event is up and completing it in minimal times, with bonuses.

When players fail to get Gold or T4, it’s less often because of laziness, and more often because ANet screwed up somewhere in the design, allowing things to scale poorly, or not training the players in the proper tactics. T4 in Dry Top, for example, would be much easier if EVERY event were visible on the map at all times, so you would always know what’s up without having to be near it or requiring pony express. The “this boss is up” messages are a nice step, but only account for about 1/3 of the potential events in the zone, and don’t last long on screen.

Ayrilana.1396:

So basically you find it unfair that people who work together get better rewards?

Or if you decided to be reasonable you might say that OP thinks it’s backwards that getting the rewards is nothing more than a matter of how many people are participating and therefore the barrier to getting said reward is finding a map that has enough participants.

The bazaar events tended not to reach gold most of the time and very little effort was actually required on the part of players, making it fairly clear that the only reason why map-wide events fail or only achieve partial success is that not many people are participating.

Lately there’s been an increase in content in which the way your map as a whole performs causes huge differences in the personal rewards each player gets. In the Pavilion, even after the loot changes, if you were doing Gold runs on Boss Blitz, you’d earn about 560 tokens per hour, 21 Master+ items, and 70 loot bags. If you were doing Bronze runs in that time, you’d be making no more than around 120 tokens, 9 Master+ items, and 18 champ bags. That’s a HUGE difference. HUGE! This is a double dipping effect, since not only is a gold run winning more rewards on each successful completion, but it’s also completing the event more times per hour.

On this current event, not only does a Tier 4 map offer significant discounts off the amount of geodes needed to buy things, but you also earn a lot more geodes over the course of playing it, since you are completing more events and achieving more bonus and unlocked objectives. This is double dipping too, cheaper prices AND more resources to spend if you get on a T4.

Now in the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with this, better performance = better reward, makes sense. The problem is, the game’s architecture is HORRIBLE for managing this sort of thing, because players have almost no choice as to whether they end up on a T4/Gold map, or a T2/Bronze map. You just load up and hope for the best, chances are you’ll get the latter and there’s little you can do about it.

During the Pavilion, there was one method of controlling this, but it was a bad one. If you could find someone else who was on a gold map, you could join their team, and then keep spamming, and spamming, and spamming the “join in pavilion” button until eventually, maybe, you could join them on that map. This mean most nights were spent with 5-50 minutes just standing around, spamming join, and that’s if you were LUCKY.

For the new event, there does not seem to be any good method for controlling which map you end up on.

So this sort of thing needs to stop. Give players awards based on individual events, the ones they personally participate in, not these massive map-wide meta events that are relatively easy if you’re lucky enough to get onto a well organized map, but more or less impossible and pointless if you end up on most maps. Make it so that each player’s rewards are based mostly on how well that player performs, rather than an aggregate score of dozens of players. I’m not saying that events themselves should not require team work and coordination, just that the reward differences should not be so massive, and the scope of the events should be contained to within a small area and time scale, rather than covering the entire map for an hour at a time.

If you do insist on keeping these map-wide meta events, then you need to do a better job of accessing them. There needs to be a way that players who want to play on a Gold Run/T4 map can do so, EVERY time, the instant they log in, rather than having to spam join for a half hour to get into one. You should just be able to choose “I want to do a gold run map” and instantly join one, never ending up on a bronze run/T2 map. If you can’t guarantee that then how can you expect players to put up with it?

I only have so much of my day during which I can play GW2, and during that time, I want to be doing something fun the entire time. I don’t want to log in only to spend tens of minutes staring at the screen and spamming a join button before I can begin to have fun, or leave a character AFK in a map for an hour before a fight like Teq or the Wurm to maybe get a decent group involved. It’s a simple test for new content ideas, really. Just ask yourself “can a random player just log in, and instantly and ALWAYS be a part of the ‘good run,’ with his reward being based on his own efforts to complete it?” If not, back to the drawing board with it.

I can’t even begin to say how refreshing it is to see threads on this board with players talking about and consumed with ideas, paths, problems, what is really happening, etc on this vine thing. I have been out myself to just check waypoints to see what is happening and where. So cool to see quite a few of us so immersed in the story…Anet has done a really good job on this one, imo.

So fun to just try and figure out what is happening and where the true threat is going to appear, and what is being done to the wps……so cool….so cool!!!!

I’m not trying to be rude, but this Dry Top screen literally looks like someone just put random brush strokes on a sheet of paper and was like… “yeah, this kind of looks like…something”. I don’t recognize those weird shapes. _ I’m okay with abstract, if it doesn’t take me 10 minutes to figure out what’s on the painting.

I know this is off-topic somewhat, but the preceding posts reminded me that I no longer (and haven’t for some time) had that slow rendering on the mini-map, inventory, bank, etc. that plagued many for such a long time.

Thanks, Devs! =)

Magi.8061:

Andraus.3874:

I’m concerned the devs won’t even bother looking at this thread and use this as an excuse:

3. Do not post more than one bug per thread: lists of bugs are not very helpful to us because we’re frequently sending thread links to specific people who may not be able to address the other bugs you’re reporting. Please make a separate thread for each bug you’re seeing. [edit] This is with the exception of a staff request for bugs to be consolidated.

This is under the sticky on how to report bugs. If I’m mistaken let me know and I’ll delete this reply. But at the moment there is so much other stuff in here besides just a plan bug report.

You may be right, perhaps this is why the devs ignore us. What shall we do now? Make 40+ new threads here?

The devs stopped noticing the thread for two reasons:

• It has too much offtopic grumpiness. Yes, there’s a reason for it, which is: no appropriate dev attention to these problems. That’s a vicious circle. When we got that attention, we appreciated it, remained pretty constructive and waited patiently for our fixes; when the one person who seemed to care left, we were left with even more miscommunication, unfixed bugs, new bugs and ninja-nerfs – so no wonder we’re a bit upset here, right?
• They have their own view on our class and on our bugs, while they also have a large queue of bugs, little time dedicated to actually fixing things, and a skewed priority system (iLeap “fix” vs unbugged iWarden). This is made worse by the fact that they can’t (or are strongly not willing to as it is not cost-efficient in their view) fix the underlying mechanics of the engine which cause bugs like pathing issues, broken blinks and getting permanently stuck in place.

Having an extensive properly formatted list of fully documented bugs with examples and suggestions from the community is useful for any developer, provided that a) it has all the necessary information regarding the bug and/or b) has links to specific posts, videos, threads; “naked” lists which purely say that bugs exist are not really helpful indeed. Proper lists may also let the person dealing with a specific bug notice something in an adjacent bug what was actually the key to solving the problem. This also serves as a good argument in assigning more time to a specific class if a coder wants to get it from his uppers. New bugs, though, should still get separate threads regardless for ANet’s forum combers to easily register.

However, since I’ve personally lost faith in this idea after a certain incident with a piece of my feedback, I’m not eager to run this list anymore. Again, if anyone feels like s/he can update the list to its current ~30-40 form with proper formatting, grammar, forum/youtube links etc. and make it into a new thread, I would be happy to “move” there.

Right, and and dragon’s made of purple crystal flying around a giant wasteland caused by a titanic sized dragon simply flying by, is more plausible than a purple glowing vine?
I honestly doubt A-Net would show us an elder dragon’s tail at the very beginning of the season.

Here’s what I think the problem with meta achievements was:

• Daily Living Story counted towards the meta, so you could skip as much inconvenient achievements as you liked.
• LS achievements were mostly silly, grindy (“kill X new mobs”) and easy, people didn’t feel those were “achievements” and could burn through them in 1 day.
• LS achievements sometimes relied on random zerg too much, so you could never get several simply because you weren’t lucky enough to be in the right map – which caused frustration and discontent as these weren’t personal achievements.
• People ignored the meta skins and still wanted to get more rewards from playing content (as direct drops) instead of themed gear in Gemstore.

There aren’t however many problems with meta achievements here, apart from maybe people who were doing counter-productive things in the limited time they had to get the time-gated reward, and by this making other people’s lives harder. But since the story achievements are now fully personal, this problem no longer exists, and the meta reward can return.

The only problem we might have now is people who’re unable to complete these (rather easy IMO) achievements even in a party, but 1) that’s an L2P issue and 2) they now have as much time as they need to get those rewards.

So, here’s how I would’ve distributed the rewards in this LS:

• Give out Adventurer’s Scarf to everyone who completed 6 out of 9 episode achievements (so that people who’re terrible at, say, jumping still have options).
• Put Adventurer’s Goggles into hidden chests and tradeable (as it is now).
• Make Adventurer’s Mantle craftable using both components and account bound (as it is now).

This way, we would’ve had:

• A direct reward for direct “work”, which is now absolutely personal.
• An RNG reward for playing content with randoms, which can be bought instead if you don’t feel like playing with them.
• An extra reward for those who’ve done both.

I think that’s how it should be and hope to see it in next episodes

…is what a sylvari mesmer would be happy to see as a meta achievement reward for the next episode of LS.

Seriously, I miss meta achievements and their rewards. Now that we have episodes permanent, absence of the meta reward makes me think “Nah, I can just do it later if I need APs one day…” and postpone replaying of the story for achievements till never.

A friend just pointed this out to me. I have no idea how long he’s been up there…but we are being watched. No indication that the centaur are related to Mordy, but corruption is always a possibility. Or they end up being allies, seeing that their terrority is under assault by a dragon.

Sandshoes.

Coming to a gemstore near you!

A little suggestion I’d like to see getting implemented, which will help players in this achievement here now for sure and also for all upcoming similar collection achievements that we might see in the future..

Why could you Anet not count up all of the collection items in the achievement screen and hide their “number” of the collection with a question mark, up uuntil the player has found a collection item.

Once you found one, then the achievement screen will show you, which actuall number of the collection you found with that item.
This way a player can easily check, which collection items of the maximum amount of collection items they have already found, and which numbers of the collection are still missing to complete the collection.

Example: I’m a fresh new player, which as not collected any coin yet, then you’d see in the fittign achievement panel to the Coin Collection the following thing.

30x ?, so

?
?
?
?
?
?
?
and so on …

Now I go on the search and find a coin and suddenly I could see, which number of the collection I just have found there.

?
?
3
?
?
?
ect. …

A very simple checking method for collections.
So if you run up all 30 places and you are dead sure, that you collected all 30 and the achievement panel still shows you then 1 ? left together with the Achievement showing you 29/30, then you as a player have at least instantly A CLUE, which coin exactly is missing and that makes it also easier for the devs to find a fix for the problem, when you could clearly see, which collection item number creates the problem…

PS. it also enables to compare the situation with other,s to see if everyone is missing the exactly same coin…

So, according to Majory i am now officially the leader of this band of “adventurers”.

While it was hinted at with the last release, where Kiel introduced me like that, i am still not comfortable with it.

I guess it is easier to write that way and streamlining it makes more sense, but i feel like i get a lot less choice in my character movements and motivations.

We had this topic a bit before, though i cannot find it at the moment, but now it seems like it is the direction they want to go with us.

Was the comment of me being “the boss” just a snarky remark by Majory (or, if i am mistaken Kasmeer at that point) and do i overreact a bit?

I understand that they want to get us in a position where we “lead” however they have to give us options.
I do not think the one option we had towards the end actually had any influence (choosing to go into the town or complimenting Majory.. i do not know)

I personally do not want to be their leader. I want to be on the same level as them, as a band of adventurers (if i have to be, its not like i have a choice)… what are your thoughts?
Do you like being their “boss”?

Okay, let me rephrase it.

There does not have to be a lot of “choice” or anything.

I do not mind taking the lead, but it somehow ended up “rushed”.

No one else get`s the feeling of “suddenly you are the leader”

I just feel like we are missing a step here.
- Season 1, we mostly rushed everywhere and were becoming “friends” with everyone.
- Season 2, we are suddenly “their leader”, just because we did the final strike against Scarlet.
Kiel introduces us to the Master of Peace and now we get dialog saying we are in the lead just because we did what had to be done at that point and thanks to convinient writing were the only ones to do so (yeah, i could have written, thanks to the circumstances, but at this point it is tomato tomata for me. But i liked the ending mostly)

There was no indication or any dialog that the group, who still travels their own merry ways most of the time, has elected me their lead.

Even if it was something that goes “without saying” I would have liked at least some dialog options where my character questions his new “role”. Something like:

P: “don`t call me that, since when i am the boss?”
M: “Well, you took down Scarlet and a giant Dragon, who else should it be?”
P: “You got me there, but how about the others?”
M: “As far as i know, no one has a problem there. You are a good friend and dependable person. we trust you.”
etc…

Or at least something like that. Just a little piece of dialog that explains the new position our character is in.
In the whole personal story we get promoted or asked if we want to hold a certain position. Trahearn askes me to be his comander for example.

Being suddenly the leader of them, without saying just feels a bit wrong and could certainly be handled better in my opinion.

BobbyStein.2315:

Hmm. We added a story step that made interacting with the Ceara/Scarlet hologram required so that people wouldn’t miss it.

Actually, i find it a little bit sad that you did. :/

I was excited like a little kid when I found the device although nothing pointed to it beside a short remark by Taimi. I very much liked the fact that there was “bonus content” to discover (and I count the “coffin blueprints” as such, too) if you kept your eyes and ears open, instead of just clicking the UI in brain-afk mode to skip forward.

To me, the game has always been at it’s best when exploration was rewarded with interesting and non-obvious findings. Please keep adding such hidden treasures, don’t destroy them. Personally, I don’t want to play a game where the 100% complete step-by-step walk-through is intrusively integrated in the UI so that I will never ever miss a thing. If so, where are my choices, why playing at all, why not watch a movie instead?

~MRA

Absolutely agree with OP, the storytelling in Season 2 is MILES ahead of what was presented in Season 1. So kudos to the story telling team.

I have another little nitpick, i didn’t even noticed there was a Scarlet Hologram
in the room until after I had finished the story and actually viewed Points of Interest Episode 2. Interestingly enough, even Kate herself also mentioned she missed it.
Was it too well hidden? Would be better if it was at least mentioned in the dialogue.

Other then that, yea Great New Start to Season 2, looking forward to the next episode.

Just wanted to say I’m very, very glad to see how the storytelling has improved with this episode. I’ve been criticizing the poor storytelling, together with the lack of lore cohesion, since pretty much release.

This episode has been awesome storywise. The storytelling was pretty good, and what I always wanted and felt that was missing in this game. Congratulations for moving forward and improving it so much.

Deeper analysis:

The story was told very well, there were references to many things, the instanced story had steps in the open world, and the instanced and open world versions showed cohesion between them, dialogues included. I’d give it a 9/10, it was great. Some nitpicks:

The only part where this cohesion failed was when, in the instanced version, there were nearly no zephirites, while in the open world it’s full of them. I think the instanced version should have showed some injured zephyrites, or the same zephyrites as in the open world.

The seraph feel a bit out of place, too. We see none after crossing the portal, and then there’s a few medics who appeared out of nowhere, without any escort, and with the target of their expedition in front of them, and no reaction by them whatsoever. Where’s Corporal Jantzen and his troops? Why isn’t there at least one soldier next to the portal talking with the zephyrites to coordinate the medic camp north?

One of the problems with storytelling has been the lack of named enemies, and this didn’t get enough attention. There’s one named Inquest asura in the instance, that dies seconds after we meet him, but in the open world, who I assume is supposed to be leading them has no name, and is a generic NPC instead. It would have been better if this NPC got a name, and same dialogues tied to the Inquest events showing their motivations. Right now they feel a bit like filler, mostly because they have close to zero personality. The NPCs, and specially villains, need more personality.

There’s many cool objectives across the zone, tied to the personal story. However, some of them should really stay invisible if you’re not doing the mission, else they feel completely out of place, and sometimes spoil what’s to come if you decide to explore the zone before completing the instanced story. I’m talking about the dead merchant and the notes, for example. They don’t really make sense as permanent world additions, they should stay invisible while you’re not (re)playing the living world story.

Finally, I don’t like the zone too much, which doesn’t seem to be tied to lore, but is. The zone is awesome, and I love everything about it, but it is too small. Why the major sites in the zone (Prosperity town, seraph camp and zephyrite wreckage) aren’t separated by a long walk across dunes and cliffs is beyond me, it really kills immersion to see everything so close. It affects gameplay negatively, too, since everything is so squeezed together you arrive anywhere by walking a bit. The feeling of crossing a wasteland is nowhere to be seen with such a small sized zone.

All in all, except the zone-size problem, which has more consequences on gameplay than lore, the game has really stepped forward, into a much more better direction. Great job, really, the story, lore and storytelling this patch were awesome.

@Snowmoon I don’t think the hologram was well hidden, I think it was well placed, it wasn’t that obvious, but if you waited a bit after you finished talking with Taimi you would see that she move really close to it and there would have a good chance to pop the “interact” in the screen if you tried to talk with Taimi again.

Yes, the story and how the instances was planned was very nice, a good variety of “missions” (defense, investigation, boss battle, so on) overall it was indeed a good improvement from LS1.

The size of the zone feels like they’re making Dry Top a larger map over subsequent releases, but that’s just speculation on my part.

There was a thread on this very same subject a few days ago, it got deleted for being disrespectful. I personally consider this feedback.

I mean no disrespect to the artist and I’m sure no one else here does either, but this particular piece just doesn’t seem to represent the zone very well and makes people wonder what it actually is.

To me it looks like the first stage of creating a painting, block in basic shapes and colors, then continue to refine and add details eventually turning into something recognisable. Unless highly abstract art was the goal, in which case you nailed it?

At this point I would rather high-quality screenshots of areas of the world over these latest loading screens… the one for Dry Top is the one I like least of this new style.

I love the art style of GW2, but this one is too fuzzy

I don’t like the loading screen either. Too abstract and way too much orange in an area that feels like sandstone. Perhaps it represents an area that is still evolving. Still too much orange though.

It’s terrible. If you were shown that art out of context (not knowing that it represented a specific area in a video game), you’d probably be hard pressed to even know what it was.

I would love it if it were only a little clearer. All those weird brush strokes make it very difficult to tell what the subject of the painting actually is. Is that a cliff, a crashed airship, or both? I can’t tell.

And that’s unfortunate.

I believe an important part of any good piece of art, no matter the style, is a feeling of effortlessness.

This does not have that. It looks rushed, messy, and like the artist was struggling. It looks like what I would do to make sure my colors were balanced and laid out nicely before going in and adding the details of the finished piece.

Maybe it upsets me more than it should, but I’ve always loved Guild War’s art in both games, and this is really disappointing.

If you’re talking about the loading screen art, then yeah, I don’t care for it. To me all it is is a bunch of colors. I can’t make anything specific out of it, unlike every other LS/Map loading image. Dry top is mostly brown, but it could have been a picture of the crash site or the town (but done in that painterly style that other loading screens have). Hopefully it changes with the next patch.