Guild Wars 2

Portuguese is actually spoken by more people, worldwide, than French and German combined.

Hughs.6549:

but still, always succeeded. No i’m not a super hero or anything : p, the game is just extremely forgiving (paying repairs has nothing to do with the gameplay btw). You basically only need to keep one person alive kiting the whole thing and the others can die as much as they want and yay ! Get your crappy blue/green chests

This is a game. It’s supposed to be fun (though I agree the current dungeons frequently fail at that). Do you think your enjoyment of the game would be increased if, instead of being able to run back and finish off the boss (thanks to the fact that at least one player in your group was able to stay alive), you had to keep restarting the same fight over and over?

How would that make the game more fun, exactly?

And, if you do think that makes it more fun, then all you need to do is kill yourself (assuming you’re that one player who managed to stay alive) and let the boss reset.

Making all dungeons easier (or harder) is a shot in the foot. What a game needs to be successful in the long term is to have a wide range of experiences. Not everyone has the same skill and not everyone has the same amount of free time.

Some dungeons should be hard and long (cough), some should be hard but short, some should be long but easy, and some should be short and easy.

Even the “difficulty” should be of different types in different dungeons. Some should require more mobility, some should require more accurate timing, some should require more teamwork, etc..

I do think that “challenge” by itself is almost worthless (people should play the dungeons because the dungeons are fun – and that should be the #1 priority of the developers – not just to “beat” them), but making all dungeons instantly accessible to everyone would eliminate the feeling of personal achievement that players get from the learning process associated with mastering a specific dungeon or a specific encounter.

Variety (of difficulty and length) is the key to satisfying a wide audience.

Now we know what GW2 is doing during those 20-second loading screens when it’s not even accessing the disk. It’s receiving alien transmissions from our Caudecusian overlords.

Permadeath, now. Die once, buy a new copy of the game.

That’s great to know (although at least some developers must have the ability to get any item they want, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to test the game properly). But assuming that you are not one of those, and that you cannot simply give yourself a full dungeon set (even temporarily), I have to ask:

Do you enjoy having to play a single dungeon over and over again to get the set that you want, instead of being able to go play other dungeons with your friends, while still earning tokens that are of some use to you?

When my friends ask “can you come help us in AC?”, the current token system is pushing me to reply “no, I can’t; my play time is limited, I want the TA set for my necromancer, so I have to go play through TA for the 30th time with some strangers instead of playing AC with you”.

In fact, I generally don’t tell them that, because I like my friends. Instead, I have over 700 tokens from AC taking up space in my bank and absolutely nothing to spend them on. And my Necro still doesn’t have her TA gear, and I still have to do TA in PUGs to get the look I want, because most of my friends hate that place (and so do I, by now).

Instead, I could be doing dungeons I enjoy more with people that matter more to me, wearing the armour that makes my character look the way I want it to look.

You know, having more fun.

How this system benefits anyone is beyond me.

CtrlAltDel.5309:

Any time any boss has a 1 hit kill that is either pass or fail to me isn’t a fun mechanic. It just screams poor/lazy design.

I disagree, although I do think GW2 abuses one-shot-kill mechanics, and that most GW2 bosses are quite boring (too much HP, too repetitive, no phases, no imagination, no good use of the environment around them).

But I do think that one-shot-kill mechanics are acceptable in boss fights. Where I think they are pretty much unacceptable is mob fights, but GW2 abuses that even more. When a group of 5 or 10 mobs reacts together, and when there’s a chance that all of them will shoot the same player at the same time, that’s bad design (realistic, maybe, but still poor gameplay design). When one or two mobs in that group have a one-shot-kill ability (or an ability that takes >50% HP and can be cast in quick succession), that is bad design (even if they have a “tell” – there’s no way you can see them through GW2’s particle effects). When mobs have the ability to stun you or knock you back before the previous stun is even over, that is bad design. When mobs can hit you and pin you down even when they’re clearly facing away from you, that is bad design. When a mob can remove control of your character (through fear, stun, knockback, etc.) and keep damaging you while that mob itself is immune to pushbacks, interrupts or stuns cast by the rest of your party, that’s bad design.

And so on.

When you’re fighting a single boss, I find a one-shot-kill mechanic far easier to accept, because that’s the only thing you really need to be paying attention to (although some could use better “tells” – namely in terms of audio, since the image can get messy with all the spell effects that other players cast and you have no control over).

cele.7398:

The Lieutenant in AC frustrates us to no end.

Not only is his wind-up barely noticeable without constantly watching for his animations, but it also breaks through Dodge and even pulls through the Pillars sometimes due to lag.

Kholer is actually one of the fairest bosses in GW2. He takes almost 3 seconds to raise his arm, the animation is clearly visible even through spell effects, etc.. It does not “break through dodge”, although lag spikes can make you fail the timing (and some people just dodge too soon, while his arm is still raised).

What you are saying about him pulling people through pillars is true, but not due to lag. A couple of pillars near Kholer (and a few other walls in AC) are immaterial. You can literally walk through them, and the harpoons go through them and pull you through them as well.

I’ve reported that using the bug report form several times, but apparently no one has had time to fix the collision boxes. Or maybe it’s deliberate because they think a dungeon full of ghosts should have ghost walls? If so, it’s a bit of a jerk move on the part of the designers.

In my opinion the messed up “frontal cones” of some of the final bosses and scavengers (that sometimes hit you even when you’re behind them) and the lack of cooldowns on some mobs, coupled with the lack of stunlocking protection (that cause players to get stunned or knocked back multiple times in a row, even if they have a stunbreaker) are far more annoying than anything Kholer does. I would classify those as outright bugs, not just bad or “unfair” encounter design.

Besides, if you find Kholer hard you can always ask a friendly troll to help you.

If by second boss you mean Brangoire (some people count all the champions as bosses), he is soloable, as several people have pointed out.

Slow down the spiders (or equip speed buffs), avoid the gas clouds (or equip condition removal), keep moving.

A bit of a silly fight (and about 30% too long, same as most boss fights in GW2 – I’m usually bored by the end), but definitely not hard.

In fact, in TA (as in most GW2 dungeons) the bosses are generally easier than the mob groups between them. They just take longer to kill due to the big HP pools.

The last encounter is harder (since you’re dealing with multiple bosses, and things can get a bit messy), but once you understand the fundamental mechanic (attack Faolain to prevent her from resurrecting the other bosses) and start by dealing with the only real threat (Eir), it becomes quite simple.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The main problem we see with a universal token system, is that players will find the easiest dungeons they can do within the DR system’s influence range, and just do them over and over.

And why is that a problem for you?

If someone prefers to do (for example) Twilight Arbor, but likes the look of the Ascalon Catacombs armour, why do you want to force that person to do Ascalon Catacombs dozens of times?

How does that improve that player’s experience or the experience of any other players? How does it benefit Arena Net? How does it benefit anyone?

If you think a certain dungeon path is objectively “easier”, simply make that path give less tokens. In fact, doesn’t the current diminishing returns system already do that?

Even if I “find the easiest path” (whatever that means), I would need to do it 4x to get as many tokens as if I did the easiest path followed by a different one. Is any path in GW2 so much easier than all the others that you can do it 4x faster?

I’ve already posted this in a couple of other threads, but I’ll repeat it here in case none of the developers saw it. Most players seem to think this would be a good solution:

• Add an NPC that converts tokens from one dungeon to another as long as that character has managed to complete every path in both of those dungeons at least once. I think this would be the most balanced solution, in terms of ease of use and fitting the lore.

• Add an NPC that converts tokens from one dungeon to another for a karma fee (ex., 50 karma to convert each token).

• Add an NPC that converts tokens from one dungeon to another for a gold fee (ex., 5 silver to convert each token).

• Add an NPC that converts tokens from one dungeon to another for a gem fee (ex., 1 gem to convert each token).

• Add all of the above (and let each player pick the NPC more convenient to them).

• Use a universal token system instead (one token type for all dungeons, possibly with some dungeons paths giving more tokens than others).

In addition to that, I would like to see this:

• Add a small chance (ex., 1-2%) that the last boss will drop one (account-bound) item from that dungeon’s armor or weapon set. This will strengthen the connection between the set and its respective dungeon, and as long as players also get the fixed reward of the tokens they won’t feel that they’re just gambling, as in other games where the random drops are the only way of getting gear.

The current system forces players to grind a single dungeon over and over again to get the set they want. It goes completely against the DR system, which aims to encourage players to do as many different dungeons as possible.

Adding a way to convert tokens (or switching to a universal token system) will allow players to experience the dungeons they enjoy (and join their friends when they ask for help) instead of feeling that they’re wasting time doing any dungeon other than the one they “need” for their gear set.

The whole point of having the dungeon sets being sold by NPCs outside of the dungeons is to avoid that mandatory grind (ex., like in WoW where you have to repeat that specific dungeon because it’s the only place where you can get a certain item – but not even WoW does that for token gear). By having dungeon-specific tokens (and no way to convert them), you are “unsolving” that problem and making the game grindy again.

I guess part of the problem is that the developers can give themselves any item they want, so they don’t seem to understand how annoying it is for players to be forced to play the same content over and over again when we could be doing multiple (different) dungeons instead, in the limited time we have to play.

And if that person (first to enter) happens to have a real-life emergency or his internet connection drops just before the last boss, everyone in the party has just wasted all their time in exchange for zero tokens.

This is a very ugly bug that Arena Net has been aware of for a long time, and yet they still chose to change dungeons to withhold all tokens until the last boss instead of giving people ate least some tokens after they defeat each boss.

Whoever made that decision clearly doesn’t play MMOs, or thinks that the real “achievement” worthy of reward is simply being present when the last boss dies, not actually doing all the work required to get there…

Vicariuz.1605:

I think ANET should just add actual post lvl 80 content […]

That would do nothing to make mid-level zones feel less empty, on the contrary. There are already plenty of games following that model; GW2’s philosophy is to keep the entire game world alive, regardless of player level.

Also, please don’t turn this thread into yet another discussion about “I have nothing to do at level 80”. This is specifically about ways to make the acquisition of a legendary weapon (or its components) more epic and memorable.

Not about making it easier or about other things you might want to do at level 80. Please stick to the topic (thread title) and post comments about the suggestions in the original post or (even better) more suggestions on how to achieve that goal.

Jason King.2647:

Yeeaaaaaah. That’s a bug.

Thanks for the report; we’ll have a fix for it soon.

Just out of curiosity, how many would be the “right” limit? Just one? Seems a bit boring. I think you should let players have three dogs summoned at the same time (like the Caudecus statue), even if that means making each dog slightly weaker.

Geyser has been practically worthless since beta. It’s so short that by the time other players notice that it’s there and start moving towards it (or stop moving, if you tried to cast it directly under them), it’s gone. The heal is also very poor.

Like Sojou said, it’s only (vaguely) useful if you manage to cast a blast finisher on it, which is just too much work (and too narrow a timing / spatial window) for too little reward.

It should either last longer, have better healing, or have some other useful effect (ex., knock back enemies radially, which would make water attunement feel a bit more dynamic).

Getting legendary precursors at this point seems to be almost exclusively a matter of luck or time, which makes the whole process of acquiring a legendary feel like a pure grind / gamble.

I think it would be interesting if there were some skill-based ways to “nudge” that luck, making the process feel more epic and and perhaps making players travel more around the world in the process (some zones feel completely empty).

Here’s my suggestion:

• Give legendary precursors a (ridiculously small) chance to drop from all named veterans and champions above level 25 (slightly higher for higher-level enemies, but not by much, so that X, Y and Z below would still matter more than level).

• That chance increases by X if the player is fighting the enemy alone (no other players within 2000 units of the enemy for the duration of the fight, no external healing, etc.).

• That chance increases by Y multiplied by the time since that particular enemy was last killed (similar to bonus XP).

• That chance increases by Z multiplied by the time the player spent at less than 10% HP while fighting that enemy.

X, Y and Z would be adjusted by the designers based on data collected from the game and the intended final drop rate. I am aware of the fact that all the factors above also have some drawbacks (such as promoting solo play vs. group play, in the case of X), but it’s hard to judge how “epic” something is using such simple metrics, and I think a good balance of the various coefficients could be found.

This system (or a similar one) would increase the drop chance based on the “epicness” and “rarity” of the fight, making the acquisition of the precursor more memorable (“I survived by the skin of my teeth, but it was worth it!”), and will also encourage high-level players to travel around, participating in events that spawn rare enemies and / or visiting emptier areas of the map, to improve their chances of a drop.

In the long run, this will lead to a better distribution of players across the game world, which means max-level players won’t get as bored of Orr as they currently do. It will also increase the number of players getting legendary precursors after an epic and memorable fight, rather than simply as a result of Mystic Forge gambling or spending a lot of gold.

For those who don’t want to adventure, the current methods would remain.

Note: I’m posting this in the “crafting” forum because most of the discussions about legendaries seem to take place here, and legendaries seem to be treated as an aspect of crafting by the GW2 developers. If the moderators / developers think this makes more sense in the suggestions forum, feel free to move it there.

Yes, the current system makes no sense. You see a material that doesn’t list any of your crafts and sell it in the TP or to a merchant, only to find out later that it is used by your craft(s) after all.

People can already see which materials are used for discovery because those will be the only ones appearing in the discovery section of the crafting window.

The tooltip should be a reliable source of information about whether or not the material is useful to a given craft.

If this is “by design”, then it’s a design / usability bug.

Cisza.9540:

Buy a title for 3 gold […] I say – no, thank you. Titles are there to show you achieved something, not spent 1hour with crafting booster near the proffesion station.

So I guess you’re against “Combat Healer” as well, because all it shows is that you spent a couple of hours reviving players and NPCs. Or “Master Crafter”, because all it shows is that you spent 8 hours levelling 8 professions (I’m sure you already have this one, right? After all, by your maths it’s so trivial to get!). Or “Been There Done That”, because all it shows is that you spent 2 days running around hitting map markers.

Oh, wait, that’s how you get pretty much all achievements and titles: By spending time playing the game, and some of them take more time than others.

Now, you might say that reaching 400 in a craft takes too little time (or too much time). Maybe you maxed out all your professions in the first day (I didn’t, I think most people didn’t). But that’s a separate discussion.

The issue here is: Shouldn’t the fact that you’ve reached the maximum possible skill level in a craft allow you to use that craft as a title for your character? Aren’t real life chefs typically called “Chef X”, even when they’re nowhere near the top of the skill ladder?

Besides, no one forces you to “wear” any title. If you think you “don’t deserve it”, don’t select it.

I have no interest in the title “Master Crafter”, and it gives other players no information about what my current active crafts even are. If I could wear “Master Chef” (or “Master Artificer”, etc.), other players I come across would know that I took that particular craft more seriously (seriously enough to pick it as my displayed title), meaning I probably have some recipes that most other chefs (or artificers, etc.) don’t.

It’s good for role-playing, it’s good for trading, and it has absolutely no downsides (except, apparently, making you angry because someone else got something that doesn’t affect you in any way).

I think this is easy to solve without ruining the “atmosphere” in cities:

Simply implement a delay on the client-side controlling how soon each player can hear a sentence that has been heard recently.

Ex.:

• The game server tells the client to play “Hello, may I help you?” using voice #7.
• Game client checks the id of that sound clip against its “recent voice lines” log (containing the last 100 lines or so).
• If that line is in the list and was played within the last N seconds, the client does not play it.
• If that line is not in the list, or was last played more than N seconds ago, the client plays the sound and adds the line to the list, with the current timestamp.
• Players can control N through a slider in the options menu (ranging from 0 to 1000 seconds, for example).

This way, if the NPC has just greeted the player, that player won’t hear the NPC repeat exactly the same the line if another player approaches. If the NPC uses a different line, then the player does hear it, adding some atmosphere without the annoying repetition. Once the NPC has used all its greetings, they will all be in the list.

This will allow the game to maintain some consistency (i.e., when NPCs says something “new”, all the nearby players hear it, so we don’t have a situation where each player is hearing a completely different thing, which can be a bit confusing), but where players who have been there for a while don’t get bombarded with the same lines over and over again.

I don’t know the details of how the GW2 client handles chatter, but I don’t think this would be hard to implement.

And yet Sunrise and Bolt are horribly ugly, with cheesy “please look at me” effects while Bifrost, Kudzu, etc., are stylish and elegant.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

You can. If you play long enough you’ll eventually get a Legendary. It’s as simple as that.

Someone doesn’t understand how probability works.

You can play forever and never get an item with a 99% drop rate.

Unless the game has some sort of mechanism to increase the drop probability over time (reaching 100%), like the one in Team Fortress 2, there is no guarantee that you’ll get any item, regardless of how long you play.

I think what people are complaining about is not that legendaries are “hard” to get, it’s just that there’s nothing particularly epic about the process of acquiring them, other than dealing with some very big numbers and some very small probabilities.

No story, nothing to challenge your skill, they’re basically just a test of luck, willingness to endure repetition, and free time. None of those is much of an achievement; in fact, the last two just make the recipient of the legendary seem a bit sad.

GW2 legendaries manage to out-WoW WoW.

Please add some way to disable the filter in our account options. I’d much rather see what people actually wrote than have to mentally go through a list of swearwords every time something gets rendered as “kitten” and I need to figure out what was there originally to make sense of the sentence.

If you don’t like the look of the staff… don’t get it.

Get a different staff, with a look that you do like.

That’s the whole point of a game which isn’t about stats or a gear treadmill. When you get gear, you’re fundamentally getting the look. If you don’t like the look of a particular piece, get a different piece.

I doubt you’ll hate the look of every single staff in the game.

I believe there is a convoluted way, by making a second character, playing through the story again (but choosing the vigil), buying the sword with that character, then transmuting the sword’s look into a level 0 white sword, which allows you to transfer it to your original character via your bank (it will say soulbound, but your other characters can get it). You can then transmute the sword again to an exotic (or whatever), making it soulbound again.

I’m not sure if this still works. I have a feeling that Arena Net will at some point consider this “an exploit” and make it impossible to do, while adding no “legitimate” way for players to change orders, or even see the gear before deciding which order they want to join.

Edit: Tested (with a different sword) and it still seems to work. Either way, caveat emptor, etc..

Oranisagu.3706:

exactly. and you only need to decipher one half correctly, as they anticipated there would be illegible words anyway.

Er… no. Assuming you’re talking about reCAPTCHA (developed by Google), one word is the test (a deliberately deformed sequence of letters, typically very hard to read and with no real meaning), the other is a scan from a book.

You always need to enter the test “word” correctly. By entering the other word (which is optional but generally much easier), you are helping them create digital versions of scanned books.

Visit the reCAPTCHA site for more details.

Oranisagu.3706:

actually no. ocr is great and everything but captchas can still be made impossible to read for ocr software

You’re living in 2008. There are several companies selling commercial CAPTCHA solvers with 1st try success rates higher than humans. Even stuff like Phoca CAPTCHA, which groups small numbers and letters to make the shape of a larger number or letter is solved with a success rate of >75%.

The only tests that still resist reasonably well are image association ones like Kitten Auth or AreYouAHuman, that don’t rely on numbers / letters at all, but it would probably just be a matter of time to have software written specifically to solve those, if there was enough incentive.

Another patch today, still no mention of how to upgrade the old version to the new one.

LinseyMurdock.4165:

We can’t have any recipes that are karma/coin only due to the ease in earning karma and coin.

Er… and that would be a problem… why? If you think the TP would just get flooded with that particular dish (unlikely, since the price would go down and people would stop making it), then just raise the (gold / karma) price of those ingredients.

It’s not like the dishes can even be sold to merchants to convert karma into gold (or vice-versa).

Can you explain what the negative impact would be of having some recipe that used only karma items, for example?

Anyway, it always strikes me as a bit silly that creatures in general seem to walk around with butter in their pockets (in fact, many don’t even have pockets – best not inquire where they were keeping the butter).

A lot of items in GW2 (not just cooking, but it’s probably more noticeable in cooking, since it’s a more recognisable craft) seem to come from very illogical places.

P.S. – There are currently over 1.5 million units of butter, walnuts and cinnamon at the TP. Maybe add them to some high-level recipe, so that level 80 characters become consumers too?

P.P.S. – The current segregation of materials by zone level and recipe level makes mid-level game areas very empty, because level 80 characters need materials from level 80 zones for their level 80 recipes, and feel like they’re wasting time in (for ex.) level 50 zones. The result is they spend all their time in a single zone,. and get bored, while all the other zones are empty. This affects most crafts, really, not just cooking (in fact, it probably affects cooking less than other crafts). There should be high-level materials and gathering nodes available in mid-level zones, and at least some high-level recipes should use one or two mid- and low-level materials. That would give high-level players a reason to travel more, make the world feel more alive, and make them less bored with Orr.

Lady Vireo.5189:

I love this idea and really hope it gets added at some point. Why don’t you start a thread in the Suggestions forum?

Mostly because things in the suggestions forum tend to scroll out of the first page (and into oblivion – or possibly into skyrim) in 10 minutes, and it seems that the developers responsible for crafting actually read this forum.

Panda.1967:

Ok, lets go back to the example with your hands, Cup your hands around your eyes again and look at something then move back an forth. This will simulate camera zoom.

No, no, no. When you change the zoom in a camera you’re changing the FoV. That’s what a zoom lens does. Moving back and forth changes your position (distance to subject). You can do that even with a prime (non-zoom) lens.

I know a lot of people call camera movement “zoom” in games, but it’s incorrect, and only adds to the confusion.

Grab a real camera and change the zoom – that is not the same as moving back and forth.

GW2’s camera distance is fine (although a way to limit the maximum distance would be nice). The real issue is the FoV (or “lens zoom”) – the angle covered by the camera.

clegane.5861:

I don’t get it, expanding the FOV seems to be the same as scrolling the camera backwards. isn’t it?

No. Changing the FoV doesn’t alter your point of view, it just shows you more stuff to the sides (and top, and bottom).

It’s like the difference between changing the zoom in a camera (which changes the FoV) and walking towards or away from your subject. The first one just changes the framing (showing more or less at the edges), the second changes your actual point of view.

Given the fact that the story, home instance, etc., is tied to your race, race changes are very unlikely.

However, profession changes would be quite easy to implement, since your profession doesn’t influence the story (naturally, you’d lose the ability to equip your previous armor if it was of an incompatible type, etc.).

Some people like to have a single character but might still want to try out multiple professions, so if Arena Net offered a way to change the profession (ex., for half the cost of a new character slot), I think it would be profitable and make some players very happy.

I doubt this will happen any time soon, though, but it’s more likely to happen than a race change.

FYI, robots (OCR software) are better at solving most CAPTCHAs than humans. I kid you not.

Unless Arena Net was willing to change its CAPTCHA “type” on an almost daily basis, it would be trivial to code a bot to solve them.

What the game needs is:

a) GMs that will actually check bot reports and ban them ASAP. If they stay in the game long enough to make a profit, banning them just means the farmers will buy a new account and come back within minutes.

b) Code to automatically detect bots (but this won’t solve anything without (a), because it can make mistakes, so it always needs human confirmation).

c) A way for players to sell gems to each other directly (ex., through the trading post), like Mike O’Brien said we’d have before launch. This is what Eve did, and it turned every player into a competitor for the gold sellers, which meant that their margins went down and 90% of them left the game to go sell gold somewhere more profitable (ex., WoW, and now GW2).

Do those things (especially (a) and (c)) and the bot problem will become negligible.

It’s not specific to SSDs. I have GW2 on an array that transfers at close to 750 MB/s and I also get loading times that can vary between 10 and 30 seconds.

It’s also impressive how GW2 manages to go through 15-second loading screen when you’re teleporting back and forth between two waypoints in the same zone, and sometimes even when you teleport to a waypoint that was already visible on your screen. It’s literally faster to walk there.

Something is rotten in the kingdom of GW2’s caching (and it’s not lack of RAM; I have 32 GB, of which GW2 never seems to use more than 2).

Can’t tell for sure without seeing it on a moving model, but it looks like the armour is clipping into the character’s body.

There were several threads about the resetting / leashing bugs (and the stupidity of having hard resetting and leashing mechanics in a 2012 game in the first place) back during the beta weekends. Nothing seems to have changed.

Someone at Arena Net seems to think that protecting the mobs’ right to kill players without those players being able to exploit some flaw in the mob’s AI is more important than letting the players have fun while playing the game.

That’s why they can magically heal back to 100, that’s why they can spawn out of nowhere, right on top of players, that’s why they can push players off ledges but players can’t push them, etc..

“When in doubt, mob is granted god mode.”

And when developers have that kind of mentality there isn’t much hope that things will improve.

Nurvus.2891:

Account.9832:

Using character-specific files doesn’t solve one of the issues with GW2’s skill order, which is that it doesn’t seem to follow any “logical” or “functional” pattern between weapons.

Or maybe you simply are not the best at figuring out patterns. The skills are arranged by recharge duration

Maybe you’re not the best at reading, since the post you are replying to mentioned exactly that:

Account.9832:

it doesn’t seem to follow any “logical” or “functional” pattern between weapons.
[…]
Sorting skills “based on cooldown” seems like the kind of thing an accountant would do, not a game designer, and certainly not a player with any experience.

cherrie.8907:

I understand where you’re coming from, however I just wanted to point out that they never said “when it’s completly ready”, just “when it’s ready for release”.

Although, to be perfectly honest, it clearly wasn’t. There were (still are) far too many progression-blocking bugs to consider the game “ready for release”, unless your standards for release are pretty low.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has a lot of fun content and I enjoy playing it, but speaking as someone who has worked in QA in the past, I would never have OK’d setting a release date with some of these bugs in the game, let alone actually releasing it.

Also, their bug reporting / fixing process seems extremely inefficient or broken.

Simple typos in the trading post take months to fix, bots can farm freely for weeks without being banned (making enough in gold sales to pay for another copy of the game if and when they finally do get banned), event chains in Orr (required to gain access to Arah) stay stuck for days without a GM noticing or resetting them (do they even have GMs?), developers ask players to post screenshots of terrain bugs in the forum despite the fact that the game has a built-in bug-reporting function, that automatically includes a screenshot and location data, etc..

Something is deeply dysfunctional in the world of Arena Net’s QA.

I don’t think the problem is the “reward system” (assuming that you’re referring to drops / karma / gold). Games that try to replace enjoyable gameplay with the promise of some reward at the end are exactly what most people playing GW2 were trying to get away from.

The issue is that level 80 players need some items (ex., crafting materials) that can only be found in level 80 zones, and don’t need any materials from lower-level zones.

The linking of player level, zone level and crafting material level always leads to this.

Materials should be found in their “logical” zones, regardless of what level recipes they’re used by, and high-level recipes should require materials of multiple levels.

If some high-level recipes needed soft wood, cotton, iron, etc., you’d see a lot more high-level players in mid-level areas.

Instead, they “have” to be in high-level areas (even if they’re bored of them – as most people are of Orr after a couple of days, due to the uniformity of mobs there) because that’s the only place where they can get the materials they need.

Sprinkle some high-level resource nodes through other areas and change high-level recipes to require some mid-level materials and the world will soon feel more populated (and high-level players will be less bored, because they’ll be able to play in different places, see more events, etc.).

It’s fine for some items to come from very small and specific areas (ex., Orrian Truffles could come only from Orr). I’m not saying that every zone should have every resource, just that there shouldn’t be such a strong link between zone level, resource type and recipe ingredients.

If it was just you, it was probably caused by connection lag or dropped packets. If it was happening to everyone, could be due to server-side lag (ex., server under heavy load, messing up some of the motion prediction).

Also happens during loading screens. It’s happened since the beta.

Foolsage.3019:

There’s a causal chain here.

1) ANet sells the Digital Deluxe Upgrade (DDU) for GW2 via the online store, for gems. That means that gems have a fixed price in real-world currency.

They have a fixed price regardless of that. The only way to create gems is (or should be) with real money. $10 for 800 gems.

Foolsage.3019:

2) Since ANet has an exchange between gems and gold, and gems are tied to real-world currency, this means that gold is too.

No, it doesn’t. Not if they let the gold-gem exchange rate fluctuate according to the market (by letting players sell gems to each other), anyway.

That will never alter the value of gems (which is still fixed at $10 for 800 gems, regardless of the gem-gold exchange rate, nor will it alter the price of the Digital Deluxe Upgrade (which costs 2000 gems, or $25).

The only way the cost of the DDU will change is if Arena Net decides to change its price or to change the real-money cost of gems. The gem-gold exchange rate never has any influence over the real-money price of the DDU.

Foolsage.3019:

Therefore ANet can’t just sell gold for less than they currently do, without devaluing their own product, as per #1 above.

Now you’re not just missing the point, you’re seeing it backwards. If gems are worth less gold, then it will take more gold to buy gems, and therefore more gold to buy the DDU, which means people will be more likely to just buy it with real money.

In other words, the gold value of the DDU would increase, while it’s real-money value would stay exactly the same.

You did get one thing right, though: Arena Net is effectively selling gold (while pretending not to).

Foolsage.3019:

Remember, income in gold is convertible to income in gems, which is convertible to income in real world currencies

Also wrong. You cannot take any real-world currency out of the game.

As long as Arena Net doesn’t create any gold at the gem store and only creates gems when people actually buy them (with real money), they can then let people trade gems directly with each other and the system works perfectly.

This is what Eve Online has been doing for years, and it’s how real economies and currency exchanges work.

That is how we thought GW2 would work, after Mike O’Brien specifically mentioned Eve’s PLEX as an example of how gems would work:

O’Brien highlights EVE’s PLEX system as a model. “As in that case, our system takes gold trading out of the hands of real-money trading (RMT) companies and puts it directly in the hands of players.”

This is what we were told by Arena Net’s president during the pre-purchase period. But it’s not what we got. Instead, we got a single “official gold seller”: Arena Net itself.

Arena Net’s “black box exchange” model lacks transparency and promotes gold farming and external trading, but, as long as players accept it, Arena Net won’t change it, because it also increases their short-term profits.

Even more so when you consider that as long as the system is profitable for gold farmers, any gold farmers they ban will buy a new account, giving Arena Net another $60.

It’s a win-win-lose system (for Arena Net, gold farmers, and players, respectively).

Foolsage.3019:

Fair point. I do not however believe that I have any legal right to engage in competition with the casino to sell their chips to their clientele.

How would you be “in competition” ? If you had the chips, then surely you had bought them from the casino in the first place, no? And if you didn’t sell them to other casino clients, you’d simply cash them in, so the casino would be no better off.

Gold sellers aren’t generating gold through some external means; they’re doing it by playing the game (or using bots – but some people use bots for personal gain too, not just to sell gold).

The issue here is that Arena Net is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by controlling the printing of two currencies (gold and gems) and by controlling the exchange rate between them.

Would you trust the Bank of China’s dollar-yuan exchange rate if they were allowed to print both dollars and yuans…?

With this kind of “black box” exchange come hordes of gold sellers, because they know that all they need to do is sell gold slightly below Arena Net’s price. And with bots staying in the game for weeks, it’s trivial for them to cover the cost of new game accounts, even if they get banned. Which I guess Arena Net sees as a good thing, because it means more (real money) profits for them. As long as they keep the game profitable for gold farmers, the gold farmers will keep buying new accounts.

And as long as players accept this “black box” currency exchange, the gold farmers will continue to fill the game with their bots and the chat channels with their spam.

There were several posts during the beta weekends warning Arena Net that this would happen if they didn’t allow the players to control the exchange rate, and guess what, those posts were right.

Since Arena Net even has an “in-house economist”, I doubt they don’t understand these concepts. They just choose to keep the game profitable for gold sellers because (as long as players don’t complain and leave the game), it also increases their profits.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

PvP content is meant to be the highlight of GW2.

Huh…?! What gave you that idea?

If anything, it’s in PvE that GW2 has more differences from other MMOs. PvP, while also an important aspect of the game, is far more standard.

There seems to be an obvious bug with the thief pull, but nowhere did Arena Net state that PvP (or WvW, which is actually a mix of PvP and PvE) was somehow meant to be more important than PvE.

Yes, a lot of prices seem to have been pulled out of thin air, without anyone at Arena Net bothering to do the maths. In many cases, if you’re going to buy more than a few bank slots and / or character slots, it’s cheaper to simply buy a second account (which has the extra advantage of letting you mail things to your other characters from anywhere).

Am I alone in thinking that the game should give players a title for reaching 400 in each craft?

For example, reach 400 in cooking, and you get the title “Chef” or “Master Chef”, etc..

Currently the only title is “Master Crafter”, which sounds terribly bland and requires 400 in every craft.

I’d much rather get a title for each profession and maybe a couple of other titles from maxing out extra professions.

• “Crafty” (2 crafts at maxed)
• “Jack of Some Trades” (4 crafts maxed)
• “Jack of Most Trades” (6 crafts maxed)
• “Factotum” (8 crafts maxed)

The dungeon vendors sell artificer recipes for “extended potions” for 400 tokens. However, the resulting potions have exactly the same effect as the discovered “powerful” potions, require the same ingredients, are valued at half the price, and are soulbound.

Is this intended…?!

Pay 400 dungeon tokens for a recipe that is identical to a free item, and which you can’t even sell or transfer to other characters?

Will the potions be updated (to no longer be soulbound and give a stronger effect than the discovered version)? If not, will the dungeon tokens be refunded?

Foolsage.3019:

By your logic, I should be able to stand outside casinos and sell people chips to use at their gaming tables.

If you had earned / bought those chips inside the casino, it would probably be legal to do so in several places (although it might have been illegal to walk out of the casino with them).

Gold sellers aren’t “printing money”. They cannot create any of the game’s currencies. Unlike Arena Net.

AsteriskCGY.5931:

Eh have all the temples sell obsidian shards. That’ll get folks comming.

If you need to bribe players with specific items to get them to play certain parts of the game, then those parts of the game probably need to be improved.

People should play in Orr (and other regions) because they are fun, not because they are the only source of item X, which they need to get item Z.

That kind of game design (“must go through boring gameplay to get some virtual reward at the end”) is precisely what has been making people move away from “other MMOs”.

Orr, as it exists now, feels like a drag. The landscape is interesting, but it’s covered in an almost completely uniform “blanket” of identical mobs whose sole purpose seems to be to slow you down as you try to move from A to B. There’s no real feeling of risk or awe, just annoyance and endless repetition.

Imagine how much better it would be if it alternated between desolate areas with no mobs at all, pockets of mobs so dense that you’d feel scared to go near them, areas that look empty but where dozens of mobs can suddenly rise out of the ground, areas that have no mobs but are covered with a poison cloud that makes it impossible to remain there for long, etc.. In other words, a variety of challenges (with actual risk involved), rather than just the current blanket of crippling / slowing mobs.

I don’t dislike the idea of multi-zone events, but I think it would really just be equivalent to making the Cursed Shore 3x bigger. It wouldn’t solve the core problem, which is that the gameplay in those areas is simply not fun.

As to making Arah inaccessible every two weeks, well, in most servers that seems to already happen, since the required events keep getting stuck.

Also this, which should be obvious:

vox.5019:

Ban waves are not effective at all here. The period between waves just allows them to generate enough gold to turn a profit regardless of the loss of accounts. They must be prevented from farming anything by immediate and persistent banning before any assets can be generated.

(I tried to add it to my post above but some forum bug is making the “edit” buttons invisible now, not just the “quote” buttons).

But apparently Arena Net can’t even afford (or doesn’t care enough about the game to) have one GM per server, following city chat and checking if any major events are stuck (to reset them manually when necessary), so they obviously have no one to check for “bot-like behaviour” and do quick bans.

yarn.3427:

What would you add to the shop that is “worth spending gems for”?

• More armour skins, including individual items (ex., a brass diving helmet skin for your aquabreather, an old-school aviator hat for engineers, etc.).
• Individual pets (priced higher than the random pet packs).
• Individual dyes (priced higher than the random dye packs).
• Voice packs for your character (I hate my Sylvari necromancer’s voice, for example).
• Different emotes for your character (ex., different /dances).
• Titles (ex., “The Big Spender”).
• More “fun” consumables (fireworks, cakes with a pop-out dancer, paper aeroplanes, etc.).
• Town clothes (and make the game automatically put them on when you enter a city).
• Add barbers / hairdressers to cities, paid in gems (ex., 10 gems for a haircut, 10 gems to dye your hair – price it low and people will use it a lot, without even stopping to think).
• Character name changes.
• Guild name changes.
• Character gender changes.
• Character profession changes (personal story in GW2 isn’t affected by your profession, so this is perfectly viable, and some people would prefer to keep their original character and just try new professions, rather than make alts).
• Character “plastic surgery” (change facial features / body type).

I would be personally interested in at least 7 of the above.

As it exists, the gem store is basically a way for Arena Net to sell gold to players (sorry but I just don’t believe that the number of players buying gems with gold is anywhere near the number of players buying gems with money to trade for gold – Arena Net is effectively creating gold for players who paid for gems, and that’s why the exchange system is a black box, with no indication of the number of buyers or sellers, and no way for players to set their own prices).

Make the gem-gold exchange transparent, with visible buy and sell orders (like Eve does), let players set their own prices (like Eve does) and the vast majority of botters and gold spammers will go away (like they did in Eve).

The problem is, Arena Net seems to have very little imagination (or very little time) when it comes to creating items for the gem store, so selling gold is effectively the way they make money, and they prefer to keep the gold-gem exchange rate artificially high (making gems an appealing way for players to get gold), rather than let the market decide (which would bring the gold value of gems down considerably).

This increases their short-term profits but it also increases the profits of all the gold sellers, so they’re not going away. The number of bots will continue to increase and their behaviour will become more sophisticated. And if Arena Net manages to get really good at detecting bots, the gold farmers will simply hire humans from developing countries (i.e., cheap labour) to farm gold instead.

I doubt Arena Net will change their policy regarding gem trading or exchange rate transparency, so get used to the farmers, they’re here to stay.