Guild Wars 2

Have you tried joining a guild that focuses on planning and playing open world pve events? Almost any problem can be solved with a sizable guild.

ANet is in its full right to ban anyone they see breaking the ToS. However, they could do something to eliminate people’s needs to even say these things. As mind boggling as it sounds, there is currently no way of solving an argument about religion or politics in PvE. In the real world, if a conflict can’t be solved diplomatically, there is war. In PvP, there is fighting. What can you do in PvE to prove that your opinion is right? Compare titles? That doesn’t work. PvE needs dueling, bad.

They definitely planned a polymock and /or minipet battle minigame at some point, as well as a racing mini game in LA. With how they are pumping out holiday content, I’m not sure they will be able to start working on features that didn’t make the timeline until after April 2013. We get one balance/WvW update in Jan/Feb, then probably some Valentines stuff, after which they need their resources to hide chocolate eggs for Easter.

tigirius.9014:

That’s my thoughts. Been waiting for the mobile software since launch, the web apps, home instances, bug fixes in classes.

They also mentioned wanting to let players have a profile page with information about their characters, which would be super helpful for other players if they need to check whether somebody has sufficiently powerful gear. Obviously these very forums were built with the extended experience in mind(note the disabled personalized character avatar feature), and I think if they want to tie everything together, so that you could access these features in game, they really need the time to make it work flawlessly. The home instance I count as another area that could be connected to public character profiles, but I’m not even sure they still want those.

The game engine is flexible enough allow all sorts of cool mechanics, and I hope they’ll use it to bring together what they had in mind for the home instance with the guild hall feature. Scrap home instance development and let players have their personalized instance as part of a guild village, an instance for guilds with many buildings, where each player has his own room so to speak. Have different skins for guild villages, just like guild halls had in GW1, and make them able to be upgraded into guild towns housing a small alliance of guilds, provided enough resources are available.
I don’t like the idea of neglecting home instances, but with guild housing being as good as confirmed, I feel that all the work being put into home instances could be rendered obsolete, as a large majority of players will prefer to hang out at a centralized dwelling of their guild.

Judging from this thread I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the player base wants some form of meaningful achievement point progression. Maybe add bonus damage per 1000 AP? Constant Speed boost? Anything useful, really.

Want to do other dungeons? Get a guild, or two or three.
Other activities? How about playing the TP? If you invest smartly, you can make some decent profits. If you want to do general PvE, just offer to pay anyone 1 gold per hour for partying up with you and doing content. The money you need for that you get from playing the TP or doing fractals. Everybody wins, except the scrubs who loose their potential profits to power traders on the TP, of course. It all comes together, how cool is that?

Although I dislike the game from a gameplay perspective now, the art direction and visual concepts used in Orr is something I’m extremely impressed by and have never seen in any other form of media. Not to this extent.

The Orrian architecture creates a much more unnerving atmosphere for me than the Risen. The whole concept of static eccentricity is so paradox, my brain never stops asking “How could it have been practical to build megalithic asymmetrical, but perfectly round stone structures?”

If you ever wondered about Baalbek and how or why its 2000 ton stone blocks were lifted on top of each other, you know what I’m talking about.

It’s likely that the Tyrian god lore was inspired by the ancient astronaut theory, so maybe the reason(s) for why this architecture exists was also adopted.

Give it a bit of time, I’m sure they’ll listen sooner or later. Although the PvE side of this game was built for carebears, it can become much more than that if the people that want it keep voicing their opinion day in day out.

Fortunately, ANet has shown to be willing to experiment with group sizes in the past(Factions elite missions were 12 man raids), so chances are if people want it enough they will consider implementing it. However, adding raids to the game without a competent dungeon finder/auto grouping feature would generate a lot of frustration.

What if a thread with a non-descriptive, unfinished title got deleted before anyone had the chance to read it, would the thread actually have existed or not?

Looks like they want newbies and scrubs to be able to lie their way into fractal groups, which of course decreases the average success chance of a fractal group if players don’t take any precautions to weed out those undesirables. But how? In GW1, you had tokens you could show to other players in trade. Yes, you could also buy them, but the chances for a scrub to buy 100+ was enough of a deterrent to keep out the worst.

Occam’s Razor: What’s most likely? That…
a.) the game code has grown too convoluted and complex for the dev team to determine if its a bug
b.) That the change is intended and they are (forced to keep?) stonewalling us
c.) It’s all jut in the heads of a few dozen players

The game is fine.
The population is healthy.
This issue is shard specific and can be solved with a transfer.
Guesting will eliminate the problem, once implemented.

Also, why are people lfg in the world zones instead of going to LA?

tonyl.5063:

But that’s what missing, there’s no real sense of progression and accomplishment

A wise man once said: “Unless it gives me an in game benefit, I ain’t doin it.”

The ascended gear related question already posted aren’t tackling the right angle IMO, so I’ll add my own.

1. With many players are already owning all currently available ascended items and beginning to loose motivation, can you give us a timeframe for when new ascended items will be released?

2. Are you considering adding meaningful titles that can alter your stats like you did in GW1?

3. Have made any progress on the subject of open world dueling, or dueling in general?

wasted.6817:

What now, i MUST w8 before doing this dungeon on another toon? Such a horse kitten imo.

A good bunch of other MMOs (new and old ones alike) have lockout timers on dungeons, so you can do them only once every x hours. It adds to the “exclusivity” of the dungeons, makes you appreciate them more. It also encourages you to do switch up farming spots.

As long as they can keep the majority of players happy with better gear to work for, they can take all the time they need with new features. It gave them some much needed breathing room.

Interdasting… If I were still playing, DR strangely wouldn’t be something I would’ve complains about. Huh, that goes to show you how differently players value certain aspects of the game.

KingClash.3186:

I see in the near future if this dosnt get acknowledged there will be a viral firestorm dragging them through the mud.

Funny, that’s exactly what people said when Ascended gear was introduced, and look where we are now.

As always, if there isn’t anything positive to say, or you can’t put a spin on concerning news, PR’s best bet is to stay quiet.

Pretty much: Get a guild.

I think what you need, OP, is a new tier of gear with high enough stats to make it worth chasing. I don’t know when you started playing GW1, but basically the later you started, the more was there to do for you. If you give GW2 some time, I’m sure they’ll add something worth your time. It may not be more varied goals, but once there’s this really powerful weapon with a unique non-replicable utility effect(PBAOE confusion on crit, et al), I’m sure you’ll start having fun progressing in the game again.

ANet is responding to what a majority of their customers want, and if that requires twisting their manifesto, then that’s just something you have to deal with. Even if it wasn’t about money, ANet would make a lot more of their players happy if they added a proper gear progression, raids and mounts, which are a staple in todays modern MMORPGS. ANet isn’t above admitting mistakes and fixing things, which is why we have Ascended gear(the first pieces anyway). I expect them to do what is best for the community as a whole, and if that demands collateral damage in the form of loosing a tiny fraction of old school players and “horizontal progression” guys, so be it.

Ascended weapon have higher stats, but currently there’s only rings and back pieces available. Legendary weapons will be upgraded to ascended stats at a later date, so if you want to invest in BiS gear today, start saving up for a legendary.

The last time they used a real world unit to describe something in their game was in the manual of vanilla GW1. I could tell you how big the world of Tyria is, but on a small scale, they always used non-descriptive measurements, like units or paces.

Have you considered looking for a guild to help you catch up with them?

You could make Orr completely soloable, and create instanced 10-20 man raid versions of all 3 maps. Make open world Orr easy for pugs to learn the area, so they can get experienced enough to enter the raid versions of those maps.
It would satisfy a lot of people who want raids with greatly reduced effort, as the terrain and NPCs have already been created and just need to be repurposed for raiding events.

Ridgeblader.7135:

Raids have never been apart of the GW franchise. Not sure why they would add them now.

The Deep and Urgoz’s Warren disagree with you.

You might say those missions weren’t popular during the later phases of GWs live, but that was only because the rewards weren’t scaled up with the rest of the power creep in the game. When it was profitable(Zhaishen Bounty), pugs and guilds alike lined up like crazy to do them, because they were a lot more accessible than FoW and UW with their non completion methods.

I’m certain raids will come in the future, and I’m anxious to see what they will do with them.

Blackwolfe.5649:

All it takes is for them to say “Yes, this is intended” or “No, this is not intended”. Unless they are dumb, deaf and blind, they should inform us, and soon!

Rarely does a company that size choose to talk openly if they know they cannot give their statement enough of a PR spin to generate a positive vibe from it, and with the outcry they generated with Ascended armor and the whole Lost Shores event, I think they just don’t want to risk another image hit. In short: Nothing they could tell you right now would make you any happier, so they rather not say anything.

Another indication of this being intentional is that this thread here has been allowed to stay in the general discussion forum, which usually only allows for discussions of game features that are part of the game.

Navi.7142:

Yeah, it is focussed on me, me, me, but I experienced that some other players have similar opinions.

That’s perfectly fine, and nobody’s going to argue that you as a customer shouldn’t be prioritizing your own preferences. My post was not intended as a rebuttal of someone’s opinion, but meant to speculate what all of these changes(gear/loot/funneling) are affecting the players, the game, assuming all of their action were intended and thought trough. I don’t think a 300 man company can allow themselves to make uninformed decisions, which is why I think it’s more likely to assume everything’s just going according to plan.

Navi.7142:

Isn’t it hurting themselves seeing how many legit players are suffering?

That’s what people said about the new gear treadmill, and look how that turned out. Maybe they managed to get a large enough population to be able to loose fringe groups like HP purists, loot addicts and people that actually took the marketing/manifesto seriously.

Scaling the loot in certain areas is actually a pretty ingenious way of controlling player density organically without having to merge servers. They have tools to analyze player density for every single area in the game and seem pretty positive with the frequency they are rolling out new content. Maybe you/we are just a minority amongst many many more players ANet attracted unintentionally and is now trying to satisfy.

If you had the choice to stay true to your original vision and just make enough money to cover the bills, or stumble upon the possibility to make 20 times as much by altering the game in a few key mechanics that would satisfy waaaay more customers than it would upset, what would you do?

Maybe the former loot rate was just a little thank-you to players who’ve supported them in the beginning, sort of like limited time extreme magic find booster, and this is how they actually wanted the loot table to be like. They said they thought people got their legendaries too quickly, so nerfing the loot table across the board to make it take longer is actually a pretty logical solution. The scarcer loot is for everybody, the more valuable it is obviously. The market is destabilized for the moment, but they probably thought it was a price worth paying. After all:

The longer your journey to the legendary is, the longer you are feeling you’re working towards something useful, especially once ascended weapons roll out and legendaries get upgraded. Can you imagine the pride you’d be feeling after being done working for a weapon for 2 years? It’d be out of this world.

Uhm, do you have any idea… ANY idea how much work they have to put into creating free content every three months for players to devour, while at the same time working on their real expansions?

Guesting, like Guild Halls, are a pretty large game feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pushed it back to release them as part of their first real expansion.

I think you aren’t grateful enough for all the free entertainment they provide you with. You know what would enable them to work faster? More people. Man hours are expensive. You can help them pay the bills by using them Gem Shop. You get cool stuff, and the features you want faster, while they can keep working on the game you love.

You guys might get a few loot samples going and compare them to a sample after tomorrow. Hopefully whatever special drops and nodes appear won’t mess with the existing loot probabilities. Not that I wouldn’t put it past ANet to blame new drops for a decrease in regular ones. It could be possible, but it wasn’t the case during Halloween nor in GW1.

Personal experiences are all fine and carry some form of credibility, but they cannot replace raw data.

PowerCat.5738:

Tagging while in a party works differently: Your entire group’s damage is compared against the mob to see if you TAG it. That is to say if 4 players in your party do 500 damage, but one does only 100 damage, they’ll still tag it, because as a group, you did 2100 damage.

Oh, so THAT was the reason why people looked for farming groups in Orr. I’ve always wondered why they’d do that.

GW2 isn’t GW1. There’s a lot more money to be made with people that favor gear progression. If you attract a big number of people, intentionally or not, that want a certain feature in your product, you want to make them happy. You don’t need or have to get max stat gear if it’s too much work for you. If you think the leveling process is too long, then you might want to stack more xp boosts, because the level cap will be raised in the future. GW1 was playing in the little league compared to GW2, so it could survive without meaningful progression. GW2 is a big boy’s game, and those big boys want their journey to be as long and hard as possible.
Nobody is going to kill you if you accept that you don’t have what it takes to stay on top. Feeling entitled to be on the same stair step with people that worked hard for it however doesn’t make you any friends. Be humble, know your place.
GW2 is a harsher environment, and the falloff rate for aspiring dedicated players is far higher, but that is what is needed to allow the masses dedicated players to feel a sense of superiority without breaking the game for those who decide to underperform.

The reduced open world drop rates is obviously a measure to protect the majority of players and the economy from bots. We know that ANet knows how many players are playing at any given time in any given area. The ratio of open world PvEers to dungeon raiders must be pretty low, low enough for them to sacrifice their happiness in order to focus their development on dungeons and item progression, so that they can keep a majority of players happy.

For all your complaints about lacking content, I agree. But ANet has you covered. You will be able to get ascended gear in WvW, and they will look at new game modes for sPvP. Just give them some time. They obviously had a lot of plans(housing/guild halls/mini games) that they were forced to cut out because they were pressured into a release.

Class balance in an ongoing process, and with the next big balance patch only a few days away, it’s clear that they are working hard to make ever profession viable in a number of ways.

RedBaron.6058

Increased our need for gold + Killed gold bot business = Gems store Jackpot!

Thanks and best regards,

Red

If I’d put on my tin foil wizard hat, I could speculate that they introduced the FotM funnel to lure people away from the open world(and keep them away with ascended farming), so the reduced loot drop rate wouldn’t be noticed by a majority of the non-forum player base.

Obed.7629:

I noticed some giant, transparent, blue-tinted spheres now in WvWvW, e.g., at Greenbriar tower.

Think this will be incorporated in the December even?

Did it look something like this?

Why aren’t you running FotM? The amount of loot per second spent playing is unmatched, and it also helps you get ready for the next ascended gear piece release. Prefarming your infusions is useful for the future, and doing that will also have you make enough gold to get by. It’s a win/win, I would guess.

They’ve said they will add Ascended gear progression to WvW as well, so if you’re a PvPer you just have to be patient for a little while longer. ANet is doing what they can do keep the bots at bay, and it’s pretty obvious that the amount of people interested in open world PvE don’t seem to matter(they can analyze player density for a specific region). So you might want to join a FotM guild to have an easier time getting a group.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

I’m just going to wait 1-2 years from now and bump this thread up so people can be embarassed on how much ascended gears did not become a starting point for a endless progression theme for this game overall.

The treadmill system is not the only issue people have with the gear, you know. There’s also the point of people not wanting to spend long amounts of time gearing up to max stats. So even if the item progression stops at 12 pieces of ascended gear and ascended infusions for good, it takes far longer to get geared up in a complete set than it took getting Exotics. It’s the reason I always say “I’ll come back when the treadmill stops and the amount of time I have to spend for a full set of max armor doesn’t take so long that it’s an achievement in itself.”
ANet won’t deliberately lower the time investment for max gear to become trivial(which it was with exotics), so all I personally can hope for is that power and reward creep will catch up to the requirements for full ascended a few years down the line.

It would go directly against the initiative to create a lasting sense of progression ANet is setting out to achieve, so generally I’d say “no”. The problem of being unable to find party members with the appropriate skill/fractal level is something that needs to be addressed, but not through the abolishment of their item progression philosophy. LFG with fractal level filters and auto grouping would go a long way.

I was adamant about not having mounts in the game when I still played, but now I can look at it from a more objective PoV. ANet seems to be good at finding virtually undetectable “gaps” in the game, and if they manage to find one of these between running on foot and waypointing, I don’t think there’d be any reason not to add mounts.

A slightly higher base running speed in the form of mounts would add another level of rewarding item progression. Tier 1-5 mounts with different skins and movement speeds, and later adding unique skills to battle for mount duels would give level 80s in ascended gear + asc infusions something new to do. Gem Shop profits ahoy!

If there has to be some drawback to appease the horizontal progression crowd, it could be that mount use would bar you from using waypoints for a set amount of time, like 10 minutes.

One of the main reasons fractal levels were introduced was to give players a sense of progression. Making it account wide would rob dedicated players of the rewarding experience to progress in fractals on more than one character.

I believe that it would go against ANets philosophy of creating a lasting sense of progression, even if the price for that is having a hard time finding other players. I’m not saying that is a problem and shouldn’t be looked at by ANet, but before you start invalidating progress mechanics that you’ve just introduced, they ought to do better and find a way to help players setup more easily(LFG tool+auto grouping). Maybe tie it in as a guild functionality, so there’s a strong incentive to join a guild(easy grouping).

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

phooka.4295:

Ascended gear, infusions, FotM-levels and the confirmation that the level-cap will be raised that the game that’s currently called “GW2” is not the “GW2” we bought. So we stop playing it.

The hell? Level cap being raised ALSO?!

Link please?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/c7762pk

Have you considered joining a guild or 3?

When I still used to play, I laid down portals in the BLTC HQ leading to planks or cliffs high above ground and watched people thinking they would end up in the crafting corner fall to their deaths.

They better release more, cause more and people are going to be wondering what to do after gearing up in fractals. You gotta keep the sense of progression alive.

Sky.9347:

I don’t know if I agree with you, but I do know that we will never truly know the answer to that.

During the mega-thread, many of the staunch supporters of “endgame content” ended up admitting that the stats on the gear really weren’t important to them.

That is because most players themselves don’t realize what they really want, the underlying desire behind the mechanics we enjoy in games. Those player archetypes that pulled back after Ascended gear was implemented, may not want the stat progression present in basically all MMOs, nor do they necessarily want to be forced into acquiring more and more powerful gear. I listed this archetype because those are the most obvious supporters of vertical progression. There’s another type of basic motivation that wants the to feel they are making meaningful progress, and that there’s always something for them to do to improve their character. On the surface, titles don’t feel like an improvement, a new gear tier or infusion however do.

Finding out what people really want is one of the reasons I’m still visiting the forums. It’s interesting to read peoples posts on what they like about certain mechanics, what the desire, and what the underlying reasons for those desires could be.

Duncan.7294:

One thing I don’t get is why not introduce less controversial grinds like reputation, epic quest chains, player character titles, timed dungeon leaderboards, or server firsts before jumping to gear progression?

All of that is not perceived by your standard MMO player as progression. The complain of “there’s nothing to do” can only be resolved by necessary item progression, because those players need the feeling of necessity to stay motivated. Horizontal progression can’t give them this motivation.

Southern Lord.7254:

There are Dragons ó_0

I didn’t know this. I’m guessing they are in the high-level zones?

Your personal story does only lead you to about 40-50% of the areas of the world. Plenty of space to hide from players that focus on the story. :P

Aelaren.3784:

douceline.2741
Happened to me too, just once for an hour in three weeks I was getting normal drops. Then the patch was installed and I stopped getting drops again. You can notice several people in this thread that had experienced same one-time “spikes of luck”.

That sounds like a telltale sign of a bugged DR mechanic that doesn’t properly reset once it has been triggered.