Guild Wars 2

The PvP daily achievement requirements has been excessively increased (and way out of the way to complete outside of light, normal play). If anything, the PvE daily should’ve been lessened or more streamlined/generalized (say, 30 daily instead of 40 kills in Kryta and Ascalon and a bunch of ambient kills).

I’m very concerned that the development team is implementing ways to make this game more of a grind or adding more time commitment components with every major patch, contrary to the original philosophy of this company prior to the game’s massive success.

Perhaps the time commitment issue doesn’t matter for some of the younger crowd or those with a very flexible schedule. However, I already have a boss and a domestic partner taking my time away from my free time. I really don’t need my (favorite?) gaming company to micromanage my life, either.

There’s so much to do in this game and I like to play both PvE and PvP, despite my busy life. Why not allow me to play what I want, when I want to?

This should stay a fun game, not become stressful, boring grind!

This is MMO, not Single Player game! Come on ppl!

Im hope in this dungeon, will be parts where party must cooperate, and final fight will looks like fight with frog in SAB, where we need some kind of strategy to win.

Without meaning to steal somone elses idea (cant remember who suggested it) however the best suggestion iv ever heard was to have a story-teller NPC that you could replay any old content for the living story and event narratives.

Think of the amount of content that would be available if something like that were to come out. What with halloween, lost shores, xmas and now living story, theres alot of content that the developers have needlessly deemed as temporary.

Let me set the scene; A player begins his guild wars 2 life late this year. he says, ‘this is a cool game, how long has it been out?’ Another player says; around a year and a half now. The original player then asks, ‘So what content is new? I heard they update every month’, the other guy unfortunately has to tell the new player; ’Yea they do, however most of the stuff they implement content wise is temporary… You get to play it for a month if that… I could tell you everything youv missed but im pretty sure your not gonna like that as anet still havnt added ways to replay them.

USE YOUR IMAGINATION ANET AND STOP MAKING TEMPORARY CONTENT.

GW2’s PvE being boring is I think just from the mechanics of combat and not the repetitiveness. If combat itself is fun, you can spend 1000+ hours and never get bored, I had that in other games. In GW2 though, people may defend the action-oriented easy-accessible combat all they like, but I can’t even play GW2’s PvE for 1 hour without getting bored of killing every mob in exactly the same way.

We all like playing video games, ya?

The challenge, the sense of achievement, the beautiful graphics. We all have our reasons for playing games, but in the end we are really just looking for mental stimulation.

When that stimulation is strong, most of us will dedicate countless hours to a game without so much as a second thought. My Batman: Arkham City “hours played” result is a great example of this, even if it is a tad embarrassing.

What happens through, when a game starts to get boring? What makes a game boring, and what happens to players when they struggle with this?

If you’ll bare with me, I would like to take a few moments to explain my thoughts on the current state of GW2, and what it means for the future.

— What is boring? —

Lets admit right off the bat that boredom is a subjective concept. For some, it can be pure agony to run around killing creatures, yet for others it is a pleasant task to pass the time. Despite this, I think we can all agree to some degree that in general, boredom is doing a task repeatedly beyond a point where most of us would consider it mentally stimulating.

When applied to video games, and specifically MMOs, the number of times a task is done, must directly compare to the reward, or sense of achievement a player feels. For example, I spent countless hours working on certain jumping puzzles, but despite the repetitive nature, not often felt bored. In contrast, I’ve found myself struggling to do simple tasks such as killing 150 periscopes for the monthly achievement.

So, if we can agree that players are more likely to become bored, the longer they must weigh the task being done, with the reward being offered, we can move on.

— What happens to a bored player? —

I think it’s pretty common knowledge that when humans get bored, they start looking for things to stimulate them. Anyone who has ever went to school, or worked a job can probably recall numerous times when they’ve found themselves doing anything to avoid the boredom of what they’re tasked with doing.

In the video game world, players who find themselves getting bored, must also find something to keep thief brains from melting into a grey goo. The problem is that when a player finds themselves bored with the game they tend to seek alternative forms of stimulation.

For a game company, this can be dangerous. The last thing they want is their player base bored silly. They know that bored players are much more likely to find reasons to complain. They know that bored players will start looking for shortcuts and exploits. They know that these players are likely to spend less time playing the game, and ultimately they know these players are much more likely to move on to other games.

Boredom can be hard to avoid, and because the potential consequences are so high for a game company, its obvious they’re going to do everything possible to keep player happy right?

— All aboard the boring train to Boredtown —

If game companies know that happy players will spend more time, and money in the game, why do companies insist on making them bored?

As we’ve hopefully agreed upon above, repetitive tasks are one of the biggest contributing factors to boredom. Yet MMOs such as this one, continuously add tasks that demand repetition. This repetition is often called grind.

Of course, I don’t have to tell all of you what grind is, but perhaps ANet hasn’t quite figured out that grind, basically means vast amounts of repetition. Now, I’m not so stupid to think that MMOs aren’t about repeating the same task again and again. This is basically what MMOs are.

The problem is that it seems game companies seem to feel the easiest way to create something for player to do, is to give them a task, then ask them to repeat it a ridiculous amount of times. The trick, as you can guess is to find that fine line between doing something just enough times that the player feels they’ve done something, and finding themselves bored.

MMOs unfortunately seem to fail at finding this sweet spot for most players. These companies tend to over estimate the patience level, and time availability of the average player. This is unfortunate, because when companies default to grind like tasks for content, it brings their players just that much closer to boredom.

First off, let me state that I love this game, but I am also not afraid to be critical of it. Let’s face it: Guild Wars 2 is dying already.

• Activity is nowhere near what it used to be. Guilds (besides very large guilds of 475+) are slowly collapsing from inactivity. I understand that the intent is that dying or small guilds can merge with others for those who want to successfully do guild missions and other events, like dungeons or fractals, but here’s the thing: guilds are very unlikely to merge because there is no built-in mechanic for this. In order for guilds to merge, one guild literally has to give up all of their progress, influence, merits, unlocks, their guild name, and hard work for nothing. If there was an option for guilds to merge, while actually merging unlocks, influence, deciding between one of the names, etc., this would be much easier for guilds to do, if that’s really what Anet is after.

• Dungeons are failing miserably. If by “making AC more fun” they really meant “force people to not play AC, unless you want to join a level 80 group that goes for the best group composition”, then they’ve done a fantastic job. I remember when there used to be LOADS of people outside of the dungeon along with guild banner buffs. I did an AC run with guildies the other day, and when we finished the dungeon, there was not a single person outside of our party by the entryway. Really shows how they’ve killed AC…..now people only run CoF p1 (Mostly “full zerker, 4W1M or GTFO” groups) or FotM, which even those get dull after a while.

• Final personal storyKilling Zhaitan...well, let's just say we can tell you were in a rush to finish the end of the story and leave it at that. If you were hoping to get players to feel very disappointed after climaxing through the rest of the game, you've done a great job.

• Living Story… It’s a great idea, but I’m going to be honest with you, Anet…it sucks. There’s very little content involved in the living story, and what is there is utterly boring. The sooner you realize this, the better.

• PvP…I believe Anet is focusing way too hard on PvP right now, especially when even that is dying. Yes, I understand some things need urgent nerfs and such, but don’t neglect other aspects of your game then. Also, don’t make PvE players suffer from PvP nerfs. I’m glad you’re finally realizing that there needs to be a split between balancing PvE, WvW, and PvP.

• User-friendliness: This is a very broad topic, so I won’t cover much, but things like key-bindings and guild interface needs a lot of improvement still. I mean honestly, if I accidentally have a typo in my guild’s message of the day, why do I have to completely retype the whole thing without at least being able to copy/paste my old one?

• Many other things as well…I found this video, despite it’s awful cheesiness, to point out actually great points and I really believe you should listen to them, Anet.
  Wake up Anet, your game is starting to die. It’s a great game and it’s a lot of fun, but people are just plain running out of things to do and reasons to keep them involved of the game. I know a lot of my guild will be moving to ES:O when that comes out…can’t say for sure whether I will as well or not, but if you want to keep people in your game, you need to start listening to them and giving your players what they actually want.

Guild Wars 1 was great…I don’t see why so many of the good things from GW1 are missing from this game.

Edit: What I mean by “dying” simply this: Activity is decreasing. I don’t think really anyone can argue with that.

I think this game has tons of time sinks which many people can interpret as a grind. That being said, I do not have nearly as much fun as GW1 and am waiting for another game to take my interest away.

lets discuss who is actually enjoying the game at level 80. also, do you consider this game a grind? in my opinion, people are leaving this game because its incredible boring and grindfest at level 80. what do you guys think?

I can’t help but feel like it’s a strange idea to spend development time on temporary content.

If you look back at older MMOs like Everquest or World of Warcraft or City of Heroes(RIP), they contain a seemingly bottomless pit of content. Years and years of updates and expansions stacked on top of one another make for a wealth of content that newer MMO’s can only hope to obtain in time. Even if it ends up being largely unused as the players keep up with the ever advancing endgame, it allows newer players to see and explore the past. Kind of like how the Southsun Cove is now. It’s fallen into obscurity, but newer players who wern’t around for the event have the oppourtunity to discover the area and explore it.

There are still so many areas of this game that can be filled out. Why spend time on this when you can make more permanent additions to your game and use them as selling points? Just from past updates, I get the impression that the dev team is spread thin enough as it is without tacking on tasks that only have a temporary impact. Spend those resources elsewhere like patch QA, bugfixing, mini games, new zones, polishing the personal story, balancing skills and traits, etc. I think that would be appreciated more than what were getting with the living story now.

As I fall into the 35-40 demo, allow me to speak for my brethren that think super adventure box is the most kitten thing I have ever seen in my life.

This is supposed to be a game of epic world vs world pvp.. instead we get hello kitty adventure island.

Character balance needs work, the engineer class is crud, WvW is about as interesting as a game of leap frog.. or watching people jog... and we already have a pointless mini-game; it’s called S-pvp.

My father taught me that you don’t start a new project you finish the last one.

Anet never finishes anything they start, and the fact that our "expansion’s worth of content" is super adventure box, makes me want to stab babies with a coat hanger.

If you need me, I’ll be watching Game of Thrones. I can’t take any more of this kids stuff.

These “living events” seem to be more of a joke if anything. I think this update is a nice April fool’s day thing.

After finishing up Rox and Brahms stories I figured I’d make a thread for people to post their compliments/questions/critiques/concerns.

On the plus side Rox’s story was alot better than I thought. Since you barely have to look at her the whole anime eyes thing never really bothered me. The baby devourer is pretty cute though. As a ranger she was also actually useful in combat. I could sit back and she’d be able to tank things for quite a while. Voice wise it was a bit atypical but not grating, the more I heard it the more it grew on me.

Brahms story was complete kitten, especially his character and “background”. I assume the same person wrote both and phoned it in for this part. Mechanically he’s a guardian with a mace and shield. His symbols are worse than untraited ones and his shield 5 is also less than useful. His voice was equally abysmal, enough that I considered turning off the sound.

I honestly thought this would be the other way around since I normally love Norn and dislike the Charr but there it is.

Both missions played out exactly the same. Kill things, walk over here, kill some more things, kill a gold ringer.

The reward was also lacking. Fortunately this means I won’t have to repeat it for a measly 2k karma and 2 bags of coins once a day.

All in all I’m filing this part of the Living Story with the rest; under K for kitten.

TO THE WIRE WE GO VIZ. Russian holiday!. In mother Russia viz gets morning capped.

The new daily system and the new guild mission system is gated. I use this term because there is a hard limit to the number of laurels and guild commendations you can receive for any day/week/month.

The reasons for this is obvious – it artificially slows players down from being able to achieve the items of higher costs. This is good for some casual players, an office worker in a 9 to 5 job can probably spare an hour every evening to do their dailies, they can probably manage their monthly without putting in any extra time – so it’s not hard for a working player to earn 40 laurels a month.

Guild commendations similarly have limits though those limits depend heavily on the size of the guild involved. I’m not going to go into the size issue which is covered by more threads, all that one needs to know for this topic is that players can earn X commendations per week (where X is dependent on guild size and a few other factors).

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that Anet has forgotten a portion of the working player population in the design of the new daily laurels and weekly guild commendations. Not everyone can earn 40 laurels a month, or X commendations a week. And those of us who cannot have no way to make up for that loss. The people I’m talking about are people like me, the workers in the resource industry.

We need mines, and oil rigs, and CSG, because these industries produce the metals we build our PCs with, and the electricity we run them off. Those of us who willingly work in this industry don’t work a 9-5 job in a city office, we work in remote locations with little to no internet access, long hours, and typically spending only one week of every month at “home”.

Now some of you might say we are paid well for our time, and in general we are – but we can’t buy laurels, we can’t buy the chance to do the dailies we miss. In short in one month we can make 17 laurels maximum, regardless of how many hours we can put in. In my one week at home I might well be able to put in more hours of play than an office worker can in one month, but I am severely punished by the game for this style of play.

Anet if you want to support players who don’t have the time to grind out high level gear, why are you gating ascended gear in a way that punishes those of us who spend time doing necessary jobs in remote areas where game play every day simply isn’t possible?

A large part of the free to play mentality has always been if you can’t put in the hours you can pay to have cool stuff. But if Joe Blogs (living and working in NYC) and I both put in 30 hours of play a month Joe is rewarded with double the progression towards top level gear. Equal “work”, but very unequal “pay”.

I come from games with hard lock-outs. You either just couldn’t go back or you could but would get nothing.

The time it takes to get the gear for one character isn’t all that bad. But coming from sales pitch of playing your way and anyone able to be anything, it just doesn’t jive. The game fits the many characters mentality very well until you get to Ascended gear. Luckily you don’t need it, but it does add up and can help (who doesn’t want to be the best possible?).

My biggest complaint is the addition of daily chests and weekly(?) guild rewards. This takes me back to log in, do your dailies and weekly, log out. Heck, this month’s “Monthly” was easily completed by the third day of the month.

A casual player isn’t someone who logs in for fun every now and then and expects to be able to jump into end game content with their hardcore friends. He doesn’t want to be catered to (pitied) like that.

A casual player is a just hardcore player who doesn’t have as much time. He wants what the hardcore player wants – to be a worthwhile. He wants to be a valuable addition to any party whether it’s a dungeon, regular PvE, or in WvW. He understands that it will take him longer, but he’ll get there eventually and be on par with the hardcore player in terms of value to others. He doesn’t mind if you occasionally raise the level of “best gear” that let’s the hardcore player increase the gap between them.

But you have to be careful ANet. If you move the gear treadmill too quickly he’s going to see that either 1) he will never be able to reach parity with the hardcore player at any point in time or 2) every time he does, you raise the standard of gear and he has to grind it out all over again.

ANet, two things make me think you’re going to handle this better than the designers behind other games who’ve faced similar problems. First, you’ve said you’re going to upgrade Legendaries to stay “best-in-slot” which is good for the casual player because he can rest assured knowing all the farming he’s doing right now isn’t going to be overshadowed by the next patch. Second, you’ve already done a great job making sure your “best-in-slot” items are somewhat on par with your much more accessible second-in-class items, which shows the casual player he can still be a valuable addition to any party even while he’s trying to get the best gear.

I urge you to be careful about how you’re making the game accessible to “casual” players. We don’t want handouts or artificial mechanics that make others include us. We want the time we’ve spent to mean something, just like a hardcore player does. Give the hardcore players the gold medals because they’ve spent more time and they deserve it. Just make sure our silver medals still mean something.

Ianervan.3415:

Hey Magnus, another thing came to my mind. Do you know why exactly are numbers so important and defining in WvW?

Because hardly any group uses tactics.

So it all ends down to zerg clashes where you have some skilled people on one side, some skilled on another, some low lvls on one side, some low lvls on another, all with mixed random professions. But there is no group organization. What is considered tactic is attacking tower A instead of tower B, but let’s call that strategy; I meant combat tactic.

While this is generally true, the main reason numbers are so important is because several game design decisions are absurdly zerg-friendly, so it’s no surprise that almost everything devolves into zerg vs zerg.

The most obvious example is the rez mechanic which makes it impossible for a smaller group to fight a bigger one through a war of attrition. Either you manage to kill all the enemies in one go or you lose.

Another problem is that maps are small and travel is fast, so you can afford to have your main force on a map deployed in 1-2 zergs and you will still have plenty of time to respond to any threat which might materialize on any part of the map.

Or the way a bigger zerg can carry more supplies and thus build more siege wherever they go. Or the inefficiency of siege weapons against big zergs unless you build dozens of them, and how fragile and easily destroyed by AoE they are. Or the fact that the bigger your empire is, the easier it becomes to manage its logistic and keep everything supplied instead of the other way around.
Far, far too many zerg-friendly systems in the game right now for it to be anything else than a numbers’ game, unfortunately.

Also, let’s be honest here: the main “tactic” I see used (and this includes us btw, at least the groups formed by our best WvW guilds) is the turtle ball, which isn’t really a tactic but rather an exploit of absurd weaknesses of the game engine. I understand why everyone uses it since it’s too powerful to pass up but it’s pretty lame to fight mostly static fights against invisible enemies.

Anyway: yes, a smaller group using good tactics can win an engagement against a larger group if the numeric difference isn’t too big. However, in terms of map positions, this seldom changes anything. You can buy yourself a few minutes until the enemy reorganizes, but after they respawn and move back to you, you’re back to square one.
You need manpower to attack and defend and if you don’t have it, yeah you might be able to win a few engagements, or even many of them, but you won’t be able to hold control points. At a bare minimum you need scouts + constant defense of supply lines + manned siege weapons just to hold “your” tower for any period of time on a borderland map where you are outnumbered and start with nothing, and the enemy can simply bring its bigger main zerg on your tower/supply camp whenever he feels like it. Good luck expanding in such a situation.

(This is another example of absurd design btw: it’s impossible to strategically flank an enemy. You have to always attack from the same direction because there’s only one spawn point. Sure you can try to flip a tower/keep other than those closer to your spawn by surprise, but it will be impossible holding it for any decent amount of time anyway. So if you want to expand, the direction of expansion is fixed, which means the enemy outnumbering you knows all too well on which points he has to prioritize defense. And which tactic is ever going to help you if you are 20 vs 40 and all their 40 are on top of your first tower, fully upgraded to T3, filled with supply and a dozen assorted siege weapons?).

Let’s be honest here, we’re playing an alpha version, not even a beta. Hopefully they can fix some of this stuff but I doubt it’s going to be quick.

First half covers thieves. Second half covers warriors with a warrior versus thief duel at the end.

I thought you might be interested in seeing the fight from the other side and it also has some relevance when talking about balance which has been a hot topic as of late.

IMO, thieves need to be dangerous. Fighting thieves is my favorite fight because of the threat they pose, so I really need to be paying attention and play well or I’ll get face-planted by a good thief and this is something I appreciate since I play these games for the challenge.

So, I really don’t think the damage thieves do is a major balance issue. Every player should make sure that they have defensive measures in their build to counter burst. Yes, I get stomped by thieves when all of my defensive CDs are down but that is the nature of a game with cooldowns. Thieves also do equally poorly when their defensive CDs are down.

Do I think that thieves are perfectly fine? No. But, again, it’s not the damage that is a problem. I see two problems. Certain thief builds have too much mobility which removes too much risk versus reward from their gameplay.

The other thing I think needs to be looked into are the 1115 pistol/dagger thieves that save all of their initiative for cloak and dagger and just autoattack people to death over time. It’s cheese. It’s not skillful. It is far too effective. And, trust me, it will remain that way even after rendering is fixed.

Ranged damage mixed with stealth has always been an issue in MMOs. What keeps a melee thief that heavily uses stealth in check are AoEs. But, AoEs are not effective against pistol/dagger. If they are built for stealth and survival they can regularly suceed in 1vNs as we’ve seen in several thief movies. Some of those thieves are legitimatally good, but some are not and are being carried by cheese mechanics.

The real culprit here is cloak and dagger. This ability needs to be adjusted or changed to prevent 1115 cheese and something else needs to done to compensate for melee/backstab thieves who are more dependent on stealth.

This is how I see things because I fear that Anet might be looking at the wrong things based on player feedback, which isn’t always (heh) accurate.

People who have put in 600 hours into WvW are a little burned out, its commen that you get a little burned out.
There are many things that needs to change in WvW to make it more fun.

Any1 playing WvW with massive time investments knows culling is a very gamebreaking bug.
But its not only 1 thing, WvW is getting a arcade feeling to it, the honeymoon is over and its daily business.

Log in
Cap and defend
Log out
Nothing to show for then bragging rights.

More rewards are needed to keep fighting for stuff other then Tier 1 / 2 /3 etc etc
Iam sitting at 200k karma but nothing to spend it on.
Red vs Blue vs Green, almost no faces to remember.

So you reached Tier 1 and won it, was it worth the blood sweat and tears ? yes it was
Is it worth keeping it up ? no it takes to much dedication to remain #1.
Effort versus reward issue also comes into play offcourse.

Desolation needs more WvW guilds to many times outmanned buffed kicks in, this is not good for a server that fought its way to T1.

Combine this into 1 feeling and you see the results.

It doesnt mean GW2 WvW is bad, it just needs adjustments asap before wvw guilds move to PS2 or to TESO next year.

Blacktide is awesome and have alot of dedicated WvW guilds, but ask members to put in hours and hours of play to remain #1 and you will ask for a burnout eventualy unless you have more WvW guilds that can take over the losses of players getting a little time free to do other stuff

Hey there everybody. I have decided to make a new thread to again help out the GW2 community. This time I will talk about the new weapons. If you enjoy this thread, then take a look at my a Halloween Act 1 thread here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/halloween/Halloween-Act-1-Informational-Aid-With-ToT-Locations/first#post541430

So there has been a lot of negativity going around on the topic of the permanent Halloween Weapons. Casual players feel like they have been left out or have been given an impossible task. I will come out now and say it to you directly:

You can do it at your own pace. (I believe in you! Believe in yourself! )

Yeah. That probably wasn’t convincing enough for you, so let’s take a look at the creation process. In bold are the Halloween event mats that can only be obtained at this time (unless you buy from the TP after the event).

Gift of X (Spiders, Souls, Moon) Recipe
-250 Candy Corn
-40 Elonian Wine
-10 Piles of Crystalline Dust
-100 X Rare Halloween Mat (Chattering Skulls, Plastic Fangs, Nougat Center)

Gift of X (Spiders, Souls, Moon)
-500 Dungeon Tokens (varies for gift)
-250 Orichalcum Ingot
-20 Ectoplasm
-100 Lodestone (varies for gift)

Weapon Craft (Mad Moon, The Crossing, Arachnophobia)
-Gift of X
-Eldritch Scroll
-100 Mystic Coin
-20 Superior Sigil of Night (20 Ori Ingot, 20 Lodestone, 2000 Candy Corn, 20 Ecto)

Let’s see how a casual player would go about obtaining and crafting this weapon. First the Halloween specific items:

Candy Corn: Readily accessible. People are swimming in this stuff.
Rare Halloween Mats: These can be obtained from Halloween mobs, regular ToTs, and Personal Tots. Just from Personal ToTs alone (which you can get 16 per character per day for a total of 80 solely with Act 1 locations) you should be able to get at least half of these.

That is all a casual player needs to obtain during this event for Halloween stuff. If you need help with this, I recommend you see my Informational Aid on Act 1.

And now for the rest of the mats that are non-Halloween and may be obtained at your own pace

Elonian Wine: For a long term goal, 10g could be achieved in a month with casual play. This makes the gift recipe comparable in price to others and I don’t see anything wrong with it at all.
Piles of Crystalline Dust: Cheap on the TP and not that hard to get at all.
Dungeon Tokens: Assuming you are casually playing doing 1 path a day 3 times a week, then this too can be completed in a month.
Orichalcum Ingot: If you make mining the nodes a task on your checklist when you get to play, you can accomplish this within 1.5 to 2 months, assuming you aren’t playing every day.
Ectoplasm: You basically need one successful salavage of a rare 76+ weapon each time you play the game to meet your checklist for the day. This can be easily done within a month or 2.
Eldritch Scroll: You can gain an extra skill point easily each time you play on a lvl 80 character. This can be accomplished within a month or 2.
Mystic Coins: Buy them off the TP or get one each time you play. Gain 20 for completing monthly. This can be casually completed within 2 to 3 months.
——-

So far, all of the above items can be obtained without excessive farming. Sure it may take 2 or 3 months to achieve the gathering of the mats, but this is a long-term goal.
Now let’s take a look at what is currently the limiting factor for most players:

Lodestones. The reason for their high price value is their low availability. The reason for their low availability are the low drops rates in combination with the few mobs that drop certain lodestones. Glacial and Molten lodestones are fairly accessible, while the others are not or currently only made via the mystic forge.

So what is a casual player to do? Simply just wait. We know that additional content updates will come, expanding the world by adding new events, zones, mobs, and dungeons. It is inevitable for these lodestones to drop in price once specific content is released. For example, once we start the fight on Jormag more lvl 80 zones and mobs will be added to the game. This will increase the availability of Corrupted Cores and Corrupted Lodestones, which in turn will lower the price.

So the method to minimize time investment and frustration obtaining these lodestones are to simply wait. Of course if you want the item now with the current pricing and availability, players should expect to pay or play a lot more to get them.

I hope this has been a constructive response. Do remember the GW2 works around a different philosophy then other MMOs. If you work with their philosophy, then the game is quite enjoyable and entertaining. Making a long-term goal into a short-term goal will naturally make it a grind.