Guild Wars 2

Banjal.7328:

It’s called Bag of Lies.

That was the title of the topic I created (“Bag of Gold? Bag of lies!”) , but some moderator apparently decided to edit it and didn’t even add a note saying he had done so…

Anyway, my main point is that they shouldn’t exist at all. They’re just a useless intermediate step requiring extra mouse clicks and extra inventory space.

It’s not even hard, it’s just annoying. Everything in Orr (and other high-level zones, to be honest, but Orr is the worst – Southsun Cove is just totally devoid of personality) seems designed with one goal: making players waste time.

And while I could sort of understand that in a game with a monthly subscription, I have no idea how this horrible design made its way into GW2. I guess some developers’ mentality is stuck in “WoW mode”.

There’s no point in even killing the monsters, because they respawn after 10 or 15 seconds. There’s no sense of achievement or progress. You’re not merely killing identical (or nearly identical) mobs over and over and over gain. You’re actually killing the same mobs over and over again, because they respawn before you’ve even finished looting their previous incarnation.

Throw in the frequent leashing and HP resetting (often happening right in the middle of a fight, or followed by the mob running back to you), or the way mobs get “special protection” in the form of invisible walls that prevent players from throwing them off ledges, etc. (but player characters can get thrown off, so we know the game engine can handle the falls), and you just get the feeling that some of Arena Net’s designers really don’t understand the concept of “fun”, and can’t even distinguish “challenging” from “repetitive and annoying”.

A couple of issues with the “bags of gold” that are now found in the satchels looted from dungeon champions:

1. Is there even a remote chance of them containing 1 gold? I’ve never seen one with more than 4 silver. So… why called them “bags of gold” ? Why not simply “bag of coins” or “extremely small pouch containing a minute amount of silver” ?

2. Why are they soulbound? Since money can be freely shared between characters, why is a container containing nothing but money bound to the character that got it?

2b. Why is there still no way to know which character something is soulbound to? I have eight characters. I put one of these bags of “gold” (hah!) in the bank by mistake (probably double-clicked while I had the bank window open, and it got sent into the bank instead of “used”). Now I have to log in (and travel to the bank) with every character just to find out which one can actually “use” the bag and extract the wild riches within.

3. Why do these “bags of gold” exist at all? They seem to be just a useless intermediate step requiring one free inventory slot and two extra mouse clicks. Why don’t we simply get the money directly from the blue satchel dropped by the boss? Or, indeed, directly from the boss, when looting?

Similar thing happened in Sorrow’s Embrace (story mode) the last time I was there. After Caithe and Zojja get to the closed door and play 3 movies, Zojja is supposed to start working on opening the door while several waves of dredge attack. Instead, both NPCs just stood there (not even following players), no dredge attacked, and the door remained closed.

We even kited some mobs from a long way off (using scorpion wire to prevent them from leashing back), used them to kill Zojja and Caithe, but after respawning they still wouldn’t open the door or trigger the event.

Seems like some fundamental design bug (as opposed to an accidental code bug) in the way events are triggered, possibly also responsible for the dozens of events stuck all over the game world (areas between level 50 and 79 seem to have more stuck events than working ones).

Good luck with this. About eight patches (and over two months) ago, Arena Net replaced the AC and CM exotics with level 80 versions and posted the following in the patch notes:

Updated vendors in the Ascalonian Catacombs and Caudecus’s Manor to sell level 80 versions of their unique skins rather than level 60 and 70. Players who purchased the level 60 and 70 versions will soon be given the opportunity to upgrade those to level 80 without having to use transmutation stones.

If it takes them over two months to add a recipe to the Mystic Forge that simply spits out a level 80 version of the AC items when people put in the original level 60 one, I can only imagine how long it will take them to give people rewards for participating in an event they probably don’t even have any record of.

Just to add to this, the following sequence seems to fail pretty much 100% of the times now, as thief:

• Auto-attack while waiting for Initiative to be full
• Cloak and Dagger (consumes 6i, correctly hits and stealths the player)
• Backstab (correctly hits)
• Cloak and Dagger (consumes 6i, appears to hit but fails to stealth)
• Backstab (obviously fails because the previous stealth failed)

In fact, stealth now seems to fail whenever cast less than 3 seconds after the end of the previous stealth. I doubt this is deliberate, and there’s no way I have constant 3000 ms lag spikes (always exactly when casting stealth), so it seems that something in the previous patch messed up stealth in general. Could also be related to ability queueing (perhaps the server thinks the previous attack is interrupting the stealth cast after it?).

Daevinia.9184:

The guild tag may be the same but the name of the guild must be different.

It is possible to tell..

Did you actually read what I wrote? The name of the guild is “X Invaders”, where X is the name of a different server, not of a different guild.

In other words, let’s imagine we have a bracket with the following servers:

• Castle of Rock
• Scissors Keep
• Papery Tower

A guild from Castle of Rock names itself “Papery Tower Invaders”.

Now, in WvW, if a player from Scissors Keep selects a player who is in that guild, although that player is from the Castle of Rock server, he will see (under the character’s portrait) “Papery Tower Invaders”.

He will also see “Castle of Rock Invaders”, as the correct server name still appears (and is the only one shown over the player’s head, in the 3D scene), but it can still be a bit confusing for some players to see a character that is simultaneously tagged as being an “invader” from two different worlds.

Since Arena Net even censors names that contain the string “gm” in the middle of other words “because it could be used to impersonate a game master” (although there are no actual game masters using a “GM” tag in GW2), I’m surprised that they allow guilds to use names of other servers or the word “Invader”.

As a player from the server being “mimicked”, I don’t have any trouble distinguishing them from our real players (different colour, no character name, etc.). In fact, it’s sort of flattering, albeit in a pathetic kind of way. But players from the 3rd server in the bracket could be fooled.

There are actually two guilds doing this, on different servers / brackets.

oneleggedpony.8531:

With regards to the recipe dropping from a level 65 instance on a lvl 66 character – whilst unusual

I don’t think it’s unusual at all. The recipe is called “Husk of the Destroyer” and drops from a boss called “Destroyer of Worlds”. They clearly knew who the recipe was going to drop from, and what level the instance was.

Even if the recipe was only supposed to drop for level 80 characters (which wouldn’t make any sense – they are levelled down to 65 when inside that instance anyway), then it would make even less sense to have a level 80 requirement to learn – since lower level characters wouldn’t get it to begin with.

It’s just incomprehensible why they have a character level requirement on a crafting recipe, which already has (and should be governed by) the craft skill level requirement.

But, as mentioned above, this happens with several other recipes, has been reported months ago, and hasn’t been fixed, so one can only assume that someone at Arena Net thinks this improves the game in some obscure way.

In fact, even from a commercial point of view, this seems like a shot in the foot, since it makes it less desirable for players to have alts (versus concentrating all their professions on a single character), and Arena Net makes a profit whenever players buy a new character slot.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

I’ve said my goodbyes to that inventory slot.

With the “corrupted” weapon recipes, it’s more like eight inventory slots.

allways.9270:

Hahaha ..
.. now this is ridiculous. Maybe they are joining forces to push your server down the tier. Or only an attempt for mind trick ..

Well, if that’s the plan, they’re failing spectacularly.

I think they’re actually doing it to mess with the other server in the tier. They’re red to us, obviously (so we’ll never mistake them for local players), but people from the 3rd server might get a bit confused.

zortek.9607:

There is nothing to discuss here.

Hello, officer. Thanks for telling us what we can or cannot discuss…

zortek.9607:

Report it and move on.

There’s no place in the “report player” UI to write any comments, or any entry related to guilds.

Fixing portal bombs is easy:

• Lower the CD back to what it was (it was fine).
• Put a limit on how many players each portal will teleport (ex., max 5 teleports, then it disappears).

If well organised teams want to teleport more players, can can still do it with multiple mesmers, but this would put an end to 1 mesmer = 40 (often invisible) players spawning somehwere.

I’ve noticed at least two WvW guilds that are named “X Invaders”, where X is the name of a different server. I realize this will only fool very distracted players (the real server name still appears over the head of their character – the “fake” name only appears under their portrait, when they are selected), but it seems a bit unethical / unsporting, and might fall under Arena Net’s definition of “inappropriate naming”.

Currently, Magic Find is a very “selfish” mechanic in parties. If a player is in full magic find gear, he will get better drops, but he will also be hurting the rest of his party (by doing less damage, healing less, taking more damage and thus requiring more frequent assistance from the others, etc.).

A simple way to fix this is to average the Magic Find bonus across the entire party. That way, if a player chooses to give up on damage, survivability or healing in exchange for improved loot, other players will still need to work a bit harder but they will also get some kind of benefit.

Daulnay.4971:

There is one that will turn you into a random ruminant.

With the exception of Charr, I don’t think there’s much cross-over between ruminants and cats, though.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

There is, fractals.

Really? So which fractal reliably drops charged lodestones? And how can you ensure that you will get that specific fractal, and not a set of three different ones?

tristen.7684:

yeah, but you can sell lodestones you don’t need and buy ones you need

Which applies to any item in the game, no? You can sell any item you don’t need to buy the ones you need. The problem is when the ones “you don’t need” sell for 30 silver a piece while the ones you do need cost almost 3 gold, due to the disparity in their drop rate and the nonsensical material requirements for some recipes.

oneleggedpony.8531:

I think this must be an oversight or something no? […] Perhaps bug report it?

I reported the same issue with another set of recipes (the “Corrupted” items – Corrupted Spear, Corrupted Cudgel, etc.), bought from an NPC (these aren’t even exotic, they’re masterwork quality, but you cannot learn them unless your character is level 80).

And, two major (and several minor) patches later, those haven’t been fixed, so either this is intentional or no one bothers to read bug reports (or both).

I’d like to see some sort of official explanation as to what Arena Net thinks the game (or its players, or even the publisher) gains by making these recipes impossible to learn before level 80.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

God save us from trashy recipes of lv65 rings noone would even barely consider to buy.
Be an 80 and enjoy the rarity you got.

Your post becomes significantly less “clever” in view of the fact that the recipe is for a level 80 ring (Husk of the Destroyer), which is why the original post mentions “making it to wear on level 80 characters”.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

You’re not supposed to craft nor wear 80 armor pieces when 28, where is the sense of progression?

Again, your reply becomes significantly less “clever” when paired with the information that the items in question only bind on use.

If the game wasn’t designed to let characters craft items for other characters, it wouldn’t allow a thief to become a tailor, for example. There are these things called “Bank”, “Mail” and “Trading Post”, that allow characters to swap and sell items to each other. You should check them out, some day.

Yes, it would cost about 700g to make.

Crafting in GW2, in general, is a huge disappointment and a complete mess. Boring and grindy beyond belief. Compared to crafting legendaries (or anything else, for that matter) in GW2, WoW’s level 20 weapon quests (ex., “The Hand of the Light”) were a masterpiece.

I’ve just done Sorrow’s Embrace with my level 66 character, who has maxed out (400) jewelcrafting. I got a recipe for an exotic BoE ring which I cannot learn because the recipe itself requires level 80.

In other words, I can’t make the ring to sell at the TP or to wear on my level 80 characters until I get this specific character to level 80.

Why? What sense does this make? Why have a level 80 requirement on a recipe that drops in a level 65 dungeon? In fact, why have a level requirement at all? Surely the relevant “level” for crafting should be the craft skill level. If a character has 400 in jewelcrafting, it’s not like he can get any “better” at it.

As mentioned above, just climb up across the ships. Why is this under “game bugs” anyway?

The fire trail left by Burning Retreat does not seem to be working as a fire field (projectiles going through it do not trigger a combo).

It seems that I and several other people (everbody?) has been noticing some bugs with stealth since the Lost Shores patch. Namely:

• Mobs continue to target, accurately track and shoot characters as if they weren’t cloaked up to 2 seconds after cloaking (which is the same as totally ignoring most stealth skills).

• Some stealth skills fail completely (ex., using Blinding Powder while auto-attacking with a pistol often results in no stealth and no Sneak Attack).

It doesn’t happen only with thieves; mesmer invisibility (Veil, Mass Invisibility, Decoy) also seems to suffer from the first issue.

Sabo.1485:

Plague.5329:

I’m certainly not going to buy anything from them or (especially) NCSoft, ever again. The sooner both of them crash and burn, and all their employees lose their jobs, the happier I’ll be.

So, because they made a change in the game that you don’t like, you’re actively hoping that a lot of people suddenly lose their jobs and are unable to support their families?

I don’t see anything in his post about “unable to support their families”. Want to throw in some random statement about killing puppies, too?

Unfortunately, commercial failure seems to be the only thing large companies understand, as evidenced by the fact that, until WoW started losing subscribers, everyone was obsessed with copying it. Unless bad design decisions have a financial impact on the company, the people who made those decisions will tend to remain in charge, and continue making equally misguided decisions.

So yes, sadly he has a point. Until a few people at Arena Net get fired, things will probably keep going in this direction. I’m sure they’ll have no trouble finding a new job.

I differ from him in one point, though; I would have no issue buying other NCsoft products (Arena Net has claimed several times that they were given total freedom to design GW2 the way they wanted); NCsoft is just a publisher. I won’t be spending another cent on Arena Net products, though.

Narkosys.5173:

A dev stated clearly there is no reset.

Was he absolutely categorical? If so, we can probably expect a reset soon.

krookie.6378:

This just underlines the severe need for a proper LFG tool.

That’s like stabbing yourself and then saying it underlines the need for tourniquets.

While the LFG tool in GW2 does need some improvements (namely, it needs to be world-wide or at least server-wide, and needs to let players list which dungeons or zones they are interested in grouping for), a WoW-style dungeon finder (which is what a lot of people tend to think of) will only destroy any sense of community and make players treat each other like disposable “assistants”, like it did in WoW.

I’m not saying that’s your idea of “a proper LFG tool”, but I know it’s some people’s (because that’s how they see multi-player games – a single player game where you occasionally need to use other people to get what you want).

And, either way, that’s not the issue here. The issue here is the gear grind / number grind / player base fragmentation. The chat spam is just a symptom. A better dungeon finder would just make it less visible in chat, it wouldn’t actually solve the gameplay problem.

Karizee.8076:

Or 2 rehashed dungeons for 8 months. Zul’Aman, Zul’Gurub anyone?

You do realize I was being sarcastic, right? I was in no way suggesting that WoW’s system (of making previous content obsolete through stat inflation – or simply by not fixing its bugs) was good. 3 or 2 makes no difference. The problem is the philosophy behind that kind of design (which GW2 was supposedly trying to avoid by making all dungeons and all areas of the world equally “desirable” for players – and then failing miserably because some of the designers only seem to understand the concept of vertical progression).

And FotM’s player base fragmentation (both through the “fractal level” mechanic and the difference in gear drops) is a step in the WoW direction. And one that they shouldn’t have taken, and should undo ASAP, but instead we’re going to see some half-baked attempt to save face and keep the new system with a ton of modifications that water it down while still being worse than simply reverting to a horizontal system (and making legendaries feel like a real achievement, rather than a painful grind – which is the real problem).

Similar to the FoV debacle. One month it’s “our current FoV is essential for gameplay reasons and will never be changed” (which was nonsense, since people with multiple monitors already had a different FoV), the next month it’s “we’ve changed the FoV”. But there’s still no FoV slider, which is what every 3D game actually needs so that players can adjust the FoV to the distance they sit from the screen (ex., the “new” FoV is slightly better on my PC screen – though still not wide enough – and it’s far too wide when I’m playing on my HTPC). But adding a FoV slider would be admitting that the players (and beta testers) had been right all along, so we get this weird incomplete “solution” that is different enough to avoid admitting that, but results in a product that is worse than it could and should be.

tigirius.9014:

Y and Z might be fake but the rest of that is exactly what I see in map chat now too.

Actually, no, Y and Z are not fake. Y was me, and Z is a very polite rephrasing of the reply I got (which included the words “QQ”, “kitten”, “kitten”, and “go earn your gear like everybody else”).

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

I made absolutely zero claims about or referances to wow or wow players in my post.

Thanks for quoting an entire message to point out that obvious fact.

I included two paragraphs about WoW to give another example of how a change in game design can affect a game’s community, and how you can’t judge a game’s original community (ie, what made it successful in the first place) simply based on the few that jump on the new “feature” (which will ultimately kill that community).

Does that make the “referance” clearer?

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

judgung by that snipit of dialogue, they gave the people what they want.

If you assume the entire server population is those 15 players, and don’t count the ones who log in, stare at that depressing spectacle for 5 minutes, and then just close the game and go do something more productive with their lives.

You probably also think that WoW’s player base was exclusively composed of people who treated others like disposable “assistants” even before the Dungeon Finder was introduced.

It wasn’t. But, nowadays, it pretty much is. As I wrote above, make a product jerk-friendly and soon your entire user base will be jerks. Game design shapes its community, because it determines who stays and who leaves.

The EDIT and addicted number-grinders will put up with the spam – or indeed with anything else you put between them and the next number. And I can even understand tailoring WoW to them (after all, they’re paying a monthly subscription). But that is not the demographic that buys stuff from the cash shop, and it’s not the demographic that recruits new players into the game.

Edit by Moderator: Removed questionable term

Edit by poster: How is a term used in psychology, with a pretty well-defined meaning, “questionable”…? Definition: “A neural pattern characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior”.

samathana.1254:

This also happens in other games, it is not a problem of the latest patch.

The problem is mostly the players.

No, the problem is (some) designers backtracking on all their “principles” and trying to change GW2 to be more like those “other games”. And failing to realize that the majority of GW2 players chose GW2 precisely because it wasn’t.

Kana.6793:

Not really much difference.

Actually, quite a bit of difference (i.e., people doing all the dungeons available in the game, instead of the same one over and over and over again – at least when WoW releases a new patch, people brainlessly repeat three new dungeons, not just one).

Plus there was nowhere near the same volume of spam in the chat channel (there were often several discussions going on), and people who were looking for dungeon X could find someone reasonably quickly.

Now they have to worry about being at the right “fractal level” – because they couldn’t possibly join a group below their “level”, which would be embarrassing and cut down on their “phat lewtz”. And they can’t join a group above their level, either, because Arena Net decided that someone who hasn’t done “level 5” couldn’t possibly be allowed to join a “level 6” group. Better just keep them all spamming city chat for 40 minutes until the number matches.

The number is our Lord. The number must match. Must be the right number to get gear with higher number so we can advance to the next number.

ostracize.8316:

Someone said “shut up noob” in correct grammar and with punctuation?

I considered using “chat grammer”, but I realised that, if I did that, someone would post here telling me that I couldn’t write properly, so I decided to save us all that extra bandwidth.

Player A: LF3M FOTM LEVEL 12
Player B: LFG for Fractals of the Mist (level 1).
Player C: glf2m fractals stage 6
Player D: LF2M FRACTURE 8 THEN G2G
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player A: LF3M FOTM LEVEL 12
Player F: LF3M Fractals L9
Player G: LF1M FotM L17, guardian or no reply
Player H: LFM frac level 2 80 only
Player A: LF3M FOTM LEVEL 12
Player I: LFG Fractals 3!
Player J: Necro LFG for FotM L17.
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player B: LFG for Fractals of the Mist (level 1).
Player I: LFG Fractals 3!!
Player K: L78 Guardian LFG for Fractals stage 2.
Player L: LFG for anything except FotM. Group up in Timberline Falls, anyone?
Player M: Player L, you’re such a dehrp! Gear in FotM is much better.
Player H: LFM frac level 2 80 only
Player D: LF3M FRACTURE 8 THEN G2G
Player C: glf2m fractals stage 6
Player F: LF2M Fractals L9
Player K: L78 Guardian LFG for Fractals stage 2.
Player H: LFM frac level 2 80 only
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player E: FRAC 5!
Player I: LFG Fractals 3!!!
Player D: LF2M FRACTURE 8 THEN G2G
…
Player Y: Do you remember when people played games to have fun, not just to see some number increase?
Player Z: Shut up, noob! I bet you don’t even have any ascended gear.

“So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet.”

“We have no intention of creating a lobby game.”

“Putting the RPG back in MMORPG.”

Yeah. Congratulations.

Clem.2963:

So, is there any sort of legitimate reason as to why it’s like this?

They’re different characters, with different life stories, so what would be the “legitimate reason” to make the feats of one influence the story of the other?

The really weird thing in GW2 is why are so many things account-wide. It kind of goes against the fundamental principles of RPGs, especially of RPGs with distinct classes. Getting a certain achievement with one character can be much easier or harder than getting it with another, and it would make a lot more sense to make (most of) them character-based.

The problem with CM isn’t the difficulty, it’s the randomness (and the general “fakeness”). Get lucky, you take almost no damage. Get unlucky, 3 riflemen decide to shoot you at the same time, and you’re dead.

Also, the encounter design is really bad. It takes place in a great setting, full of potential, but it’s just wave after wave of mobs with huge HP pools, half of which are completely static. I’m a max-level adventurer in (supposedly) the best gear available in Tyria, and yet some random “cannon fodder” guard has 10x my HP and hits 5x harder than I do. Does this make any sense? I can understand giving them a tactical / numerical advantage, but why the huge stat advantage? Because hitting a static rifleman 30 times is more fun than hitting him 15 ? It isn’t. Also, why is he static? Feet glued to the floor?

When I first saw that big room with the fireplace, the chandelier and the bookshelves, I expected to meet a boss that would do things like cut a chain and drop the chandelier (damaging players near the middle of the room), shake the ground and make books fall (damaging players near the edge), or throw out embers from the fireplace (damaging players who didn’t hide behind the furniture). Instead, the boss you meet in that room (the “door guard”) just runs after players and does a (cheap and deceptive, because it hits even if you’re clearly out of range and behind him) AoE attack over and over again. Sigh…

CM just doesn’t feel like a real place. It looks like a real place (more so than most GW2 dungeons), but the inhabitants are just weird and behave in nonsensical ways.

It’s as if whoever designed it was trying to simulate / emulate other MMOs, instead of trying to simulate or emulate a realistic place, which is what RPGs are (or should be) all about. The end result is formulaic and artificial.

The solution to GW2’s empty dungeons isn’t an automated dungeon party finder (which will only lead to people treating other players as disposable “assistants” – WoW’s “dungeon finder” was the coffin in its nail, community-wise). The solution is to make the dungeons themselves better, so that people want to play them (you know, because they’re fun – that strange concept that used to guide game design 10 years ago, before bad design became acceptable as long as there’s “loot”) and to make the process of acquiring dungeon gear less grindy.

It doesn’t make any sense to make people repeat the same dungeon dozens of times to get the set of armour they want, while giving them no “useful” reward for running other dungeons – which they or their friends might prefer, while disliking the “local” armour sets. This would be easily solved by adding and NPC that would exchange dungeon tokens as long as the player has completed every path in both dungeons at least once (ex., if you have the CM and AC completion achievements, the NPC would let you swap AC tokens for CM tokens and vice-versa).

GW2’s dungeon token system manages to out-WoW WoW (and the dungeons themselves feel a lot less polished – with low ceilings leading to horrible camera angles, etc.).

Weird, I have a couple of characters at level 5 and never noticed going through 4 in a row before.

Also, the loot was pretty normal stuff (I think I got a rare hammer with the highly original name “Hammer”).

What makes it a “bonus”, exactly? If we choose to go out we’ll still have the progress recorded? If not, it’s not really a “bonus” as much as one extra fractal you have to do while hoping that no one gets disconnected or needs to deal with some real-life issue.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of the swamp. It seems to rely too much on luck / speed boosts / class mix, and not require or even benefit much from tactics or teamwork. In fact, it just leads to conflicts between players when one of them can’t make it back in time a couple of times in a row.

Also, trap collision detection is buggy as hell. I frequently walk 1-2 feet next to a trap and see it break (and knock me down, and freeze me for 2 seconds, and force me to sit through the “getting up” animation, and then get slowed). And no, it’s not that I hit another trap, because I can see it “break”, although I never went anywhere near it.

Today, after doing 3 fractals, instead of being given the option to go back to the lab, my group got sent to a fourth fractal. Is this supposed to happen? Advanced mathematics or a bug?

Specifically, these were the fractals we did:

• (0) Started the Grawl / Volcanic fractal, but one player had to leave right at the start, so we went outside and got a new player.
• (1) With the new player (party of 5) we did the Svanir / Snowblind fractal.
• (2) Next we got the Dredge / Underground Facility fractal. One player got disconnected half way through and couldn’t come back, but we finished it without him.
• (3) After that, we got the Colossus / Cliffside fractal, which we completed with the 4 remaining players. At this point we expected to get sent to the lab, but, instead…
• (4) We got the Jade / Solid Ocean fractal, which again we completed with the remaining 4 players.
• Finally we were given the option to teleport to the lab.

Does the fact that a player leave (see step 2 above) reset the counter? Note that we did not go out at any point after (1).

Ruggy.7819:

What is the big deal? Need a temple unlocked.. get your guild to help you.

Exactly. All the whining that they wanted to have “raids” to do with their guilds, but when they finally have a chance to prove themselves in a large sequence of chained events designed for more than 5 people, they whine that no one else is there to do it for them.

knives.6345:

There should be some encouraging events to re-populate Orr and keep people there.

Why? The game has a huge world, and Orr isn’t even close to being the most interesting area (especially Cursed Shore, which is the blandest of the three Orr zones).

What the game needs is less “level segmentation”. High-level players tended to spend all their time in Orr not because they enjoyed it, but because it was where they could get the drops and materials they needed for high-level crafting, etc..

Most of them flew past the mid-level areas, which is where some of the most interesting content is, and have little reason to go back (even if they enjoy the content, they’ll feel like they’re “wasting” time there, because they’re getting the “wrong” kind of materials, the heart vendors have nothing they can use, etc.).

Sprinkle some level 80 resource nodes in level 35-75 areas, add a few world bosses with unique drops (ex., doesn’t even have to be gear; could be mini-pets, etc.), and high-level players will spread out more evenly across the game world, which is not only a better use of game assets, but also improves game performance.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

Just as with every other person, if every time someone thought an update nerfed drops, no one would be getting anything.

I’m sorry you had some bad luck.

I used to get a couple of powerful blood drops a day. I haven’t seen a single one over the past week. Most high-level crafting materials have increased in price at the TP by 600% in the last week. Did everyone suddenly get “unlucky” ?

Please do some basic research before accusing people of just whining.

Drops rates for several materials have changed. Whether this was a bug or deliberate (to make people buy more gold at the gem exchange?) I have no idea, but there has clearly been a change.

All my characters are currently level 80, but whenever I see someone asking for “level 80s only” (or “need a tank” / “need a healer”), I add that person to my block list.

Saves me the (obvious) pain of getting grouped with someone that clueless later by accident.

Asking for “level 80s only” is a bit like saying “hello, I just arrived from WoW and I have no idea how this game works”.

EntDS.4687:

Because it’s a middle step between Exotics and Legendaries.

There is no legendary armour. There are no ascended weapons.

So how exactly is it a “middle step”…?

It’s just one (totally unnecessary and uninsteresting) step above exotic. I’d much rather see actual legendary armour, with a slot for plugging in custom visual effects (ex., lightning, shadow, poison cloud, fire, frost, heat wave, etc.), and the same stat budget as exotics.

Adding a new tier of armour with increased stats serves no purpose; it will only make current content less challenging and make the game less about skill and more about grind.

Seems to have been fixed in this update, although it wasn’t mentioned on the patch notes.

Blinds do nothing to prevent AoE damage, which is 90% of the damage done by the mobs in the infinitely spawning waves.

Clearly you didn’t get the spawn timer bug, or you wouldn’t even be suggesting that as a “solution” (which it wouldn’t be anyway, because not every group has access to a 20-second blind, and the fight obviously isn’t designed to require one).

Also, the boss doesn’t die in 45 seconds, especially not if one team member is spending 20 of those seconds spamming blinds instead of high-damage spells).

The spawn rate of waves was buggesd after the Halloween update, and the developers acknowledged as much. The issue is that we were told it had been fixed in the next patch, but wasn’t. There have been some changes to Sorrow’s Embrace in the Lost Shores update, though, so hopefully this time path 1 has been fixed for good.

We were told before this event that there would be “many pages of patch notes”, but the end result is still missing dozens (possibly hundreds) of changes.

It’s fine to have a “condensed” version with only the things you consider more important, but why not also have a version listing all the changes made to the game?

Here are a few things I noticed within 15 minutes of playing the game after the patch:

• Fine transmutation stones are finally called “Fine Transmutation Stones”. The item name had been misspelled as “Transmuation” since beta. Four months to fix a typo doesn’t exactly suggest an efficient QA pipeline, but I guess better late than never.

• The Twilight Arbor light armour set now has floppy sleeves. It had always annoyed me how they looked like rigid blades; this makes my necromancer look 300% better.

• The APC in path 3 of Sorrow’s Embrace has a different collision box, that makes it harder for players to stand on top of it. No idea if the spawning bug in path 1 was fixed, though, since it’s not on the notes (but neither is this, so clearly dungeon updates didn’t make it into the notes).

• New UI elements, such as the BLTC warning about items / money ready for pickup, the dungeon “ready check” dialog box, etc..

Has anyone else noticed any other obvious and / or important changes & bug fixes not mentioned in the patch notes?

The difference isn’t “+15 power”. From the example given in the Arena Net blog post, the increase to stats was between 8% and 42%. Assuming new gear is (eventually) released for every slot, that’s a very significant stat increase, that will make a difference when playing through existing content, and will make a difference in WvW.

And the fundamental issue is: What is the point of the stat inflation?

To make existing content easier? Or, if existing content will be updated to make it challenging with the new gear, what is the point of the whole thing? Make it harder for players who stop playing for a few months to come back to the game, because their gear will now be obsolete (or at least inferior enough that they’ll be at a disadvantage)?

There is absolutely nothing to be gained, in terms of gameplay, by raising the “stat ceiling” on gear. Games with a subscription adopt that model because they need to keep players paying a monthly fee (and the fear of “falling behind” on the gear treadmill makes them more likely to do so). This was even mentioned in a previous Arena Net post: “You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet.”

It’s also dishonest for Arena Net to say that ascended gear is merely “a step between exotic and legendary great”, because:

• Legendary weapons have the same stat budget as exotic weapons (or did, until now).

• There is no legendary armour.

• There are no ascended weapons (that we know of).

So, from a progression point of view, “ascended” armour should effectively be the equivalent of legendary weapons. So why not call it “legendary” and make it a cosmetic upgrade (ex., with a slot where players can plug in a customized visual effect – such as fire, ice, lightning, shadow, etc.), while giving it the same stats as exotic armour?

I’m pretty sure every Guild Wars player would prefer that over pointless stat inflation and loss of customizability (you can’t put gem / rune upgrades on ascended gear, so you can’t even make that small adjustment to the stats).

And adding that “the new infusions will be a must to play higher level content” and that “this is only the first level of infusions” is basically the same as saying “welcome to the gear grind”.

Personally (after buying two accounts, several character slots and bank tabs, costumes, etc.), I’m not spending another cent on GW2 until I’m fully convinced that they’ve abandoned this nonsensical idea.

Crackbone.5710:

It’s the almighty Dollar, Euro, etc.

They won’t be getting enough over the long term with only horizontal progression. It’s crystal clear.

Wake up folks. It’s a business. Business or lack-thereof likely dictated this change.

Well, they just lost a steady 30 euros a month from me for the foreseeable future. And if this becomes the norm (i.e., if there are more gear stat increases after this one), I’ll probably sell my copy of GW2 (which I am legally allowed to do under EU law).

Anyway, your post makes no sense. Increasing gear stats doesn’t increase their profits in any way (unless they started selling that improved gear for real money at the gem store – but even they aren’t that suicidal).

Swoo.5079

I’m not leaving the game. There is a lot of stuff I want to do in it still.

I’m not spending more money in the cash shop, though.

This.

I bought two copies of the game (one standard, one collector’s, adding up to more than $200) and I’ve been spending around $30 a month on stuff (costumes, bank tabs, character slots).

That has just dried up and will stay dry until I’m fully convinced that Arena Net isn’t just going to turn GW2 into another failed WoW-style gear treadmill. I’m also not even going to bother sending out my friend invites (they can’t join my server anyway, and guesting still doesn’t work).

It’s bad enough that they failed to live up to their pre-sale promises of a player-controlled gem transaction market or the ability to group up with and play with friends on other servers “at any moment” (in fact, this has gotten progressively worse, and currently you can only join a different group of friends once every seven days – this is in fact much worse than WoW where we can make characters on different servers).

If we wanted to play WoW, we’d be playing WoW. It has more polished dungeons, a more customizable UI and does the “shifting goalposts” game better than Arena Net ever will. We’re playing GW2 because that is not what we want.

ekimsfree.9406:

I don’t understand, in a PVE game, why do people care what stats other people have?

Why do people care if someone joining their party is level 80 or level 79? And yet some do. I tend to add them to my ignore list, but they exist, and take up space in the servers, reducing the effective “useful” population (i.e., of people with a clue, who I might be interested in playing with).

Unltimately, if the stats were irrelevant, why would the game have them at all? They clearly have some influence on the performance of your character. A 42% increase in Magic Find, for example, will significantly increase you wealth compared to players without that bonus.

And GW2 isn’t just a “PVE game”. Your PvE gear is also used in WvW.