Guild Wars 2

Or coordinate a transfer and have everyone involved move to one of the lower population servers instead of trying to force more people in to a place that’s already at capacity.

If you are high enough level you can do dungeons together without anyone having to transfer. Just both be near the dungeon when one of you goes in and everyone will get a dialog box to join. Even ’cross server.

I heard on buildcast that the duration of bleeds is rounded down to the lowest second. So it’s possible to waste rune slots on bleed duration that wont make a difference and it’s better to stack in intensity instead.

The example they gave was that if, for instance, you had a 5 second bleed and 20% bleed duration increase then your bleed would last 6 seconds. But if you had a 20.5%
duration increase, your bleed still only lasts 6 seconds. Meaning unless you can rune to a full second duration increase, use the slots for something else.

There is a diminishing return on farming the same type of creature in for an extended period of time. This is the problem people have with Orr. Last I heard, everything is categorized as Orrian so people are getting the DR pretty quick since DEs are pretty much all enemy zergs.

As I understand loot:
Every monster, chest and area has a loot table. Everything in that table has a % chance to drop. So a white item might have a 50% drop rate, a blue – 30%, green – 15%, gold – 4.8% and Orange – 0.2%.

Magic find factors in to the existing chance for a magic item to drop. So that 0.2% chance for an exotic becomes a 0.4% chance if you have 100% magic find. Your 4.8% becomes 7.2% with 50% magic find.

Thats a little over simplified, but it’s the general idea.

Hrm…don’t you get, on average, three chests per dungeon? And pre-patch, didn’t the tokens take an item slot from each chest?

Now tokens are a standalone reward for dungeon completion and those slots have been opened up to be anything from the chests loot table, and you have body-drop loot from the bosses.

So…you should be getting more more loot from the dungeons now: drops, three chests, 60 tokens (vs. 30 max pre-patch), and 26 silver (vs. 5(?) pre-patch). For about 40 minutes of your time.

Sans getting an Orr run where DE timing works out in your favor and you get lucky with a lot of drops and magic find, dungeons are about the most rewarding thing you can do post 80 for time/effort required.

I know there will be an event. I am pretty sure the ??? in the monthly achievement will have something to do with it.

I’m just wondering how many of the GW Halloween traditions will stick around and how many will be scrapped.

What are people’s hopes for the event? What would you like to have seen stay and what wouldn’t you mind seeing go?

I personally would like to see character bound masks, account bound costumes, a grinning moon and squash serum.

I don’t particularly mind not having to run to all of the reapers without using attack skills.

I will miss Candy corn golem dance parties.

@bojangles:

250 Dyanmic events > Scenarios

33 Dungeons > End game Raid && 6 New 5 man dungeons along with 2 old re-makes

Crafing Exotics & Discovery & speedy crafting & Mystic forge > New Farming system

Pet Battles Yes it’s neat WoW implemented Pokemon. To let you in on a secret, GW had polymock years ago. And most players would be surpsied if they didnt bring it back. And…. Polymock > Pokemon.

Tyria > New World to discover

Level via DE / SM / Crafting / WvW > Tons of quests to where you can max level by doing about 1/2 the new area

Behemoth & Shatterer & Claw & Tequatl & Giant & Lupicus > New World Boss

WvWvW > New battleground

This was fun. Try again.

So Halloween was one of the biggest holidays in the original GW. There were costumes in the cash-shop, and every year had a different mask that you could get from the mad king by playing his games.

You also had the decorations and special chain quests.

So, without trying to cause mass hysteria…do you guys think we will lose seven years of Halloween tradition? O.O.

As I see it:
- No mask maker. Would be a shame not to have our masks saved so an npc can remake them every year…if there are masks.

- No paper, rock, scissors emotes. Srsly…this was the Mad Kings favorite.

- No access to Underworld. Is Dhumm finally going to retake the underworld?

- There is no costume maker. And I am slightly concerned that Nexon lady will convince people to take away our unlimited account bound costumes and make them soulbound transmutable like the armor skins.

Im sure the Mad King will be back and I’m sure he will look great. The decorations for Lion’s Arch will probably also be pretty amazing. But its looking like if I want to play rock-paper-scissors for a sweet mask, then I’m going to be booting up the original. I mean…I planned on it anyways. I still have 250 everlasting mobstoppers to turn in.

@Detamaio, now let me use your counter-argument with the same game to demonstrate how you missed the point.

The situation you have here is more like if you grinded out CoD in one mode on one map to unlock weapons for one category to get the first level of prestige. And then complained there wasn’t enough in the game for you to do.

Well, you didn’t play any other modes, you didn’t unlock perks or weapons for any other classes, you didn’t see how modes can change maps and vice versa. You picked one path, burnt yourself out on it, and then complained for lack of entertainment because that one path wasn’t long enough for you.

Now I’m going to show you how your direct insult actually makes you look…not so bright…if you don’t want to 100% the map then don’t. If you don’t like sPvP, then don’t do it. If you don’t care for gear aesthetics, don’t horde karma. But once again it’s not the game lacks those things or plenty of other things to do. It just doesn’t have things you want to do.

Well that’s not the games fault. It’s yours. You spent your money without researching the franchise, or the game, or the development studios design principles.

So once again , unless you can show me you have consumed the content that’s available, which many many people enjoy and think there is an adequate amount of at the time being (even though more would be good), then get out of here with that “not enough content BS”. There is plenty. You just think there isn’t enough catered to your tastes.

And you’re making a WoW comparison? For real? You do each different path of a dungeon twice. Two different days of the week, you have yourself enough tokens to buy a piece of the highest end exotic dungeon armor. In WoW you do the same path of the same dungeon six times and hope you get that magic belt buckle you are looking for.

If the game isn’t for you it isn’t for you. Go play something else. Beauty of no monthly fee is when your tastes change you can come back and pick up where you left off. If your tastes never evolve from farming a raid for the mystic talismen-of-now-I-can-group-for-next-raid , then they don’t. Im not expecting anyone will miss you.

Im still waiting for screen shots from someone of:
Their character select screen with all medals.
Their achievement screen showing all dungeon paths complete, all story paths complete, and all jumping puzzles complete.

Without those demonstrating you have completed all of the content, all criticisms that there is not enough content are invalid.

Time and time again we find out the players that say they are bored, and that there is nothing to do, rushed to 80 and treated the game like a wine tasting party. They tried the dungeons in story mode or ran the first chest of one path of a dungeon, so there’s no need to do the others. They did one jumping puzzle, no reason to do the others. They previewed the dungeon armor sets, so there’s nor reason to get them. Probably played one match of sPvP, concluded their class was under-powered and quit with an empty locker.

Yes there are things to do. And there is a difference between the game not having enough content, and the game not having enough of the type of content that you prefer. Maybe they will add more things later to satisfy different players individual tastes. The only people that will ever really be “up the creek without a paddle- thank you for your $60 – buhbye” are the ones that define their play time by stat based gear progression. Gw has never and will never be their cup of tea.

They nerfed mid dungeon rewards because people were going in to the easiest paths, running to the first boss/chest and then quitting and doing it again.

Now the bulk of the reward comes after completion. Instead of 15 silver and 30 dungeon tokens over three chests and completion reward, you get three chests of random loot and 26 silver + 60 tokens when you kill the last boss.

So better rewards, but you actually have to do the dungeon. Also, unless you are using the dungeon specific damage boost consumable, take some magic find food with you. Or use the guild magic find banner/3 day buff. Or all three at the same time. I get nearly all blues and a few greens per run. A gold probably every 2-3. Including reward I probably make between 40-50 silver per run. Ten silver per ten minutes and sixty dungeon tokens isnt too horrible IMO.

300+ hours. I have had two exotic drops. One an emerald of some sort for weapon upgrade, and the other a level 80 named shield, “Rivetwall”.

The emerald dropped for me in Orr. The Rivetwall dropped in HoTw from a trash mob.

Drop rate seems acceptable to me. I mean, I would expect them to be more common in Orr and dungeons. And I barely spent any time in Orr and have only been focusing on explorable mode dungeons for the last week or so.

I have 300+ hours of play, but less than 100 have been spent doing content that is likely to yield exotics.

I get rares more regularly. Some days I might get two or three, others I see none. In a day I might do 4-5 explorable dungeons. Some I get from mobs, some I get from chests.

Make sure you eat your magic find food before dungeons and Orr events. Also, the 30 min magic find guild banner and the three day buff stack with food. I don’t have magic find in my armor, but I always have a food or guild buff active.

If it has a subscription fee, I wont touch it. If its buy to play like GW2, I might give it a go and play both.

I played GW1 for seven years. That wasn’t exclusive. I tried lots of other MMos and did a lot of console gaming. It was still my go-to game. GW2 will likely be the same way. I might wander out now and then to try something else, but i’ll be back eventually.

The Elementalist in GW got a major overhaul last year.

You could look at that as we might see major changes to professions in about six years, or that re-work broke the ice for them and now changes will come as needed or at least not every half decade.

The game is losing players. At least temporarily. Theres really no denying that. It’s only a little over a month in, so some fall-off is to be expected. Especially from people that burnt themselves out.

But look at the facts:
- World of Pandas, Borderlands 2, Torchlight, and a few other big name games all dropped within the last few weeks. And as we get closer to the holidays, more are going to be coming out.

- People burnt themselves out and got bored with the endgame (wrongfully yes, but it happened).

- GW2 has no sub so people aren’t “guilted” in to playing it.

The player population for GW2 over the long term will look something like a sine wave. When new games come out people are excited about, a fraction of players are going to spend some time on those until they beat or get bored with them. When Anet releases content patches, expansions, has holiday events, or blockbuster season for games passes then players will come back.

Half my guild right now is playing Borderlands 2. We are all still on Mumble daily. They love GW and are going to be playing it again soon. But they also like Borderlands. That doesn’t mean GW2 is “dying” or “failing”. Just means no sub gives people freedom to come and go and play what they want when they want to, without throwing out $15/mo.

Sindariel.2354:

Forge.5426:

But then if it’s meant to be transmuted, why don’t they make it an item to double click and apply to another piece.

The only reason why cultural gear is not exotic and not transmutable like HoM-Rewards
is to force players to buy transmutation stones in the gem store. Nothing else.

I’ve gotten fine transmutation stones from chests with keys I have looted or gotten are rewards.

But you’re right. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Cultural armor was designed purely to make $3 each off of the tiny fraction of players that will farm the gold for and buy it, who didnt manage to get the stones from drops and that, despite having well over 100 gold for the cultural set, decide not to buy the measly amount of gems needed with gold instead of cash. How utterly diabolical! Should just call themselves pAyNET.

… ^.^

@roqoco, I still don’t buy it.

Not everyone is a high roller yet. A majority haven’t fully decked themselves out in exotic armor. And of those that have, a good portion still don’t have two sets of exotic weapons and full set of exotic accessories.

So what your saying is basically, anyone with yellow, a mixture of yellow and orange, or mixture of orange and green is screwing the party because they cant contribute the max stats available for their class. What about people who bought gold just to min-max there gear but are average if not below average players? You would rather have them than a good player and team-mate because the latter might be using magic find?

That attribution you are making is that out of five people, the one that takes MF is selfish and inconsiderate. That only works if the five people involved are equal in every single way. And that is very near impossible. Even if you gave people the same gear, they would have different play styles; if they had the same style, they would have different skill levels; if they had the same skill level, they would have different understandings of the dungeon…see where this is going?

As easily as there could be a leech in MF that is marginally affecting the progress, there could just as easily be one that is picking up the slack for less experienced, lesser equipped, or fully equipped dimwits in the party.

You cant judge a player based on the gear.

I can agree with most of the reasons people are against magic find. Except for the one where it hurts the party. That is totally subjective and based on the player.

For example, what if someone stacks power + precision on their armor and dies all the time. Did they screw the party by not taking toughness + vitality as much as the guy thats traited the same and hasn’t been downed once but decided to take magic find over toughness?

Without accounting for the player and their build as a whole, you cant make a statement as broad as everyone that uses magic find gear in a dungeon is screwing everyone they party with.

Jestunhi.7429:

AcidicVision.5498:

Edit: lol at kitten mobo. Srsly guys?

Was that A-five-five that got censored?

Yep.

The difficulty for most parts I think is ok. Some of the bosses though just have way to much health, and that combined with some of their abilities to 1-shot players it too much.

The tree boss in FA…too much health. You sit at the mouth of the cave and auto-attack and dodge when he shakes like a dog. Every now and then kill some spiders. Or kite some spirits. There is little to no actual threat and its just a time sink. Cut his health and give him phases. That fight can be shorter and more challenging.

Alpha in CoE is the opposite. He has a huge amount of health and can obliterate a party. In the case of the Alpha, I don’t have a particular problem per-say with the damage he can do. But that combined with his health pool is just too much. As a thief I can dodge his earth spikes consecutively upwards of 25 times. I would consider that impressive since its a delayed skill that does nothing for x seconds and instantly resolves. But if I miss that 26th time bam kitten dead. And factors beyond my control can sometimes effect that timing. So it may not even be my fault I miss the dodge every time. The Alpha is plenty dangerous enough as is, but really needs his health cut down. There is a difference between expecting players to do extremely well over a period of time, and expecting them to be completely flawless with a perfect internet connection for an extended period of time.

The Evolved Destroyer, also in CoE. Too much health. Not dynamic at all. Three players on the lasers, two on the steps, drop the shield, and aoe…lather-rinse-repeat. It takes forever and there is no challenge. Sure, you can have the people manning the laser jump down to the second platform and add some DPS, but by the time they get there, they might get 2-3 skills off, if they are lucky, before the shields go up. That only saves about three minutes over-all and risk > reward, so why do it? This boss can use the same treatment as the TA tree boss.

Fimbul in HoTw…why does he have 10 trillion health and become invulnerable for 15 seconds at a time for no reason? Ok, he traps himself in an ice-cube. It’s his gimmick. Every boss needs a gimmick. Cut his health down, make him spawn ads when he goes in to the cube and regen health until players kill the ads. Now this fight isn’t the most boring, miserable thing in the entire dungeon.

Mark I and Mark II end Golem bosses in SE…don’t change a thing. That fight is difficult, requires strategy, attention, constant communication, quick thinking and resource management. It’s longer, engaging enough to keep you from getting bored with it. One of the best explorable dungeon bosses in the game.

tl;dr – I don’t think bosses are too hard. Just imbalanced in either they do nothing and take forever, or they are balls hard and take forever. The ones that do nothing need to be spiced up, the ones that insta gib should have life taken down a notch.

You can also put in the words gold farmer, and bot, and suggestion, and account bound dyes, and DM system, and a number of other things. Threads get closed and deleted when they clutter up the boards with the same few people kittening over the same things over and over again that Anet has already spoke their bit on.

It’s nothing personal. You had an issues, they acknowledged it. You didn’t like the answer. Now FoV threads go buh-bye because there is nothing new to be added and nothing threads can do to change their minds.

Stop. You are making yourself look silly.

There have been some cool games made. A few of them gave me head-aches. So I didn’t play them. Lots of other choices out there.

Carnival rides also make me nauseous. But roller-coasters do not. So I quit riding carnival rides.

Never decided to verbally accost the people that made the game or carnival rides or have little tirades on the internet about it though.

Not taking the side of Anet here or defending their decision. Just trying to make a point that if something makes you ill, stop doing it until you can correct the problem. Don’t expect every one else to correct it for you. That kid that did 24 hours of sPvP for charity that had Muscular kittening Dystrophy didn’t come on here and rage that some of the mechanics or bindings or dexterity required to play some parts of the game were too hard for him or uncomfortable. He made adjustments and got the tools he needed to enjoy the game. Compared to that I can’t help but see your fit sort of petty.

Remind me of the joke “Dr., it hurts when I do this.” so the doctor says “Well don’t do that.”

I just built a computer for my brother for his birthday. It has the following:
AMD A4-3400 2.7G Dual core
MSI A55M-P33 kitten Mobo
2x 4GB G.Skill ram
Zotac GTX 560

I think that’s about as mid-range as you can get. Might even be the lower end of mid-range. It runs at a steady 45 fps on medium settings and can dip down to 30 in heavy WvW fights. Could probably squeeze a few more out it and up the texture quality if I completely turned off shadows and reflections. Those features never really seemed like they were worth the performance hit imo.

Edit: lol at kitten mobo. Srsly guys?

Like I said in the OP, I think they will be handled the same way. Just one massive swing of the ban hammer along with an update to patch out the hacks and scripts they are exploiting.

As a side note, we can mess with them as players by moving them around the map with Mesmer portal skills. Most of them have F spammed to pick up loot. You can chain portal them to middle of no where ;D

This weekend there was near total absence of of gold selling spam in Lions Arc. And the last spammer email I got was when I logged in Friday.

They are all just…gone.

Looks like Anet silently eliminated them en masse. Well done.

I have a feeling the same treatment is coming for bots.

Anet doesn’t mind people running things. They mind people running things by exploiting geometry and mechanics that are not working as intended.

They might make it harder to run. But not impossible if they have the same stance on it they had in GW. Popular running paths weren’t totally closed off, and they very easily could have been. But every so often those areas would get a surprise buff that didn’t made a difference to people that fought through the areas, but caused runner to rethink their strategies.

It sort of became part of the meta-game.

But there are still plenty of people that will fight their way through things and shy away from gimmick paths and builds. Even folks you see running through stuff might not necessarily play that way all the time. Maybe they only have X time left to play, or tried and died repeatedly with another group on that part and just don’t want to deal with it again.

I know if you are doing a full clear (all three paths back to back), by the third run those thorn wolves and poison flowers get pretty old. You know your group can do it, they’ve already done it twice, this is the final path of the dungeon for the day…just skip it.

/co-sign on better dungeon rewards for story modes. Nothing ridiculous. Maybe approximately half of what you get for explore-able.

I don’t particularly agree with all of the people that think they should be non-group events or made easier. They are already optional to do as you progress through your story, and the main missions are all solo-able.

The dungeons, explorable and SM, get easier with time. I remember thinking in a BWE that Ascalon Catacombs was brutally difficult. And during the first week or two people were saying the estimated time to complete was 2-3 hours. People are regularly doing story mode of that dungeon now in under 50 minutes. Players just get much much better and seem to not notice since the game-play is reactionary and not stat based.

If you think they are too hard now, just move on and come back to it a bit later. You might find that you can effortlessly make it through parts that were previously making you want to smash your keyboard.

There is a free one called Raidtalk. I have never used it, so I can’t speak to its performance. I just know its what my fiance’s all girl guild uses.

The standard is Ventrillo. Some people still use Teamspeak. I recommend Mumble. It’s as reliable as ventrillo, cheaper, has less latency, uses less system resources.

More and more people have been switching over to mumble, but Ventrillo is so old and so many cross-game guilds and players have had it for so long that they just hang on to the server.

A bit of advice: Just download and configure all 3 clients. You might jump in groups for dungeons or PvP that want to use voip and there’s a 1/3 (I know statistics people, this assumes equal number of people using each, im just getting a point across) chance they are using the same one you. Its good to have them all ready so if you’re asked to jump on, then you are good to go.

price, low to high:
Raidtalk (free) < Teamspeak (practically deprecated) < Mumble < Ventrillo

latency low to high (lower is better):
Mumble < Ventrillo < Teamspeak

resources less to more (less is better):
Mumble < Ventrillo < Teamspeak

audio quality best to worst:
Teamspeak > Ventrillo > Mumble

Mumble doesn’t sound “bad”. Voices are still clear and distinct. You know who is talking. It’s like comparing the sound quality from an expensive cell phone and a cheap cell phone. One obviously sounds better, but they both get the job done.

Sound quality is also directly related to resources used and latency. Hence team-speak sounding the best, but taking the most memory and processing power and having the most lag.

So I guess use that info to point you in the direction to whats best for your particular needs.

^ This. WvW is completely pointless. You level faster, its cheaper, and you bank more by just playing PvE. If you want PvP, 8v8 or free 5v5 tournaments can scratch that itch and come with no risk or reward (other than skins).

The reasons to WvW are large scale battles, assault/defend gameplay, server pride, and badges of honor for legendaries or PvP exotic gear.

Well, it’s hard to have server pride when the longer the match goes on the smaller the 2nd and 3rd place servers get because fence-hoppers transfer. Its hard to enjoy the assault/defend mechanics when your server is so demoralized or full of trolls from transfers that you don’t have enough people to make an honest push or legitimately hold real-estate.

A lot of people on Dragonbrand are just disregarding WvW until the transfers are done. We are tired of them being the determining factor in matches over effort, commitment and investment, and we are tired of the channel trolls and supply leeches.

The community has been pretty unanimous on this. More so than a lot of other issues that have been directly addressed anyways. It would be nice to see the issue acknowledged. I don’t really consider the 24hr transfer cooldown and acknowledgment. I have no idea what anyone realistically thought that would solve. One can hope its a robustness test for a larger implementation. Still does nothing to resolve people transferring to servers they are currently matched against.

2 week WvW lockout after transfers that are free or otherwise.

People are only hurting themselves. There are other areas in Frostgorge to farm the stones. Namely the NW corner. That event just has the highest number and density of the type of mob needed.

What Anet will see: mobs are available elsewhere, people farming the event without the intention of completing it, getting a dragon chest as a byproduct of taking advantage of the event spawns rather than actively trying to complete it.

And what they will do: remove loot from the elementals.

What we end up with: Instead of getting the loot from those mobs during the event every three hours as sort of a bonus and addition to what we could be getting elsewhere, we get nothing. And hooray for the people that farmed the kitten out of it and ruined it for themselves and for everyone else for the life of the game.

Also, as far as I know, the Dragon chest there is the only way to get the recipes for the Shamans weapons, which are required to craft corrupted weapons. IMO that’s worth completing the event for.

Kiviar.7063:

The problem is the damage has already been done to many servers and stopping transfers will destroy any hope of them ever recovering.

Some larger WvW guilds have already talked about wanting to switch servers because people jumping on to theirs has made queues so bad they have a hard time playing together. Their hesitation is coming from knowing as soon as they move, if their new server is winning in WvW, then people will transfer and it will just happen all over again.

If Anet just enabled the kittenkittening two week lock-out as intended and announced a date for ending free transfers, then those servers would have a better chance to recover than they do now. Because at the 11th hour all of the large guilds and small ones alike that want to get away from queue times and band-wagoners will transfer so they can’t be freely followed.

As it is now the lower pop servers will just continue to bleed players and higher pop servers will just get worse. Unless they are intentionally trying to empty some servers so they can merge and close them, the free transfers are creating an absolute disaster.

I don’t really play either exclusively or prefer one over the other, that said I am a big believer on doing what is required if you want a particular thing. If you want map completion, the includes doing the vistas. If you want the monthly that includes doing the PvP portion.

If you dislike those things more than you want the achievement, than don’t do it. Vise versa, suck it up.

Your argument could just as easily be applied to the survivor portion of the monthly. That might not be specifically targeted towards PvE…but it is. Getting monthly survivor in PvP isn’t the easiest thing and it’s a lot more painful when you lose progress. At least you cant get knocked back down to zero with the invader kills.

PvP players have to jump over to PvE. PvE players have to jump over to PvP. It’s an achievement that makes you explore out of your little box if you want it bad enough. Decide if it’s worth the effort and then do it or don’t. But expecting everything to be adjusted to your personal taste so it’s easier for you to get will be a long time wait for a train don’t come.

You honestly dont think there wouldn’t constantly be a crowd of people in black citadel waiting for a turn to 1v1 for an audience? Or if there were a moa race every ten minutes and you had a chance to see the birds racing and place bets (up to a realistic max of course)? Just like you can nearly always find people around for Keg Brawl.

Different events appeal to different people in different moods. Make them varied and unique enough between cities and people will have reasons to hop around more.

I make my money from doing dungeons mostly. So I go to LA and do all of my crafting/trading stuff while looking for dungeon groups.

This is directly because of waypoint costs. If I want to do Twilight Arbor, but then get there and find it difficult to form a group for the paths I need, I would decide to maybe go to Ascalon Catacombs and try there…well I have just wasted nearly the entire silver reward I am going to get from eventually clearing a path on waypoint travel before I have even found a group.

It’s just easier and cheaper to occupy myself in LA until I see someone looking for people for one of the dungeons I feel like doing. Then waypointing to the entrance when the group is full. Even if I had the option to go to other capitals for free, it wouldn’t really serve that need.

Edit: I know a good number of players travel to Hoelbrek to do Keg-brawl. Maybe if other events or games were added to each city that had similar appeal and re-playability, then they would see similar traffic.

Black Citadel – 1v1 arenas
The Grove – Pet battles
Rata Sum – Poly-mock / rock-em-sock-em golems / that weird golem chess game pvp.
Divinities Reach – Moa races

Gimmicks like that will keep players coming back and forth fro mthe cities for different reasons for the life of the game.

Free transfers need to go. Or Anet need to implement the originally planned two-week moratorium on WvW for transfers.

WvW takes more time and resources than any other portion of the game. Siege equipment is expensive, repair bills can get expensive, structure upgrades are expensive, and battles and map travel take a huge amount time. All this while you are earning fewer and less valuable rewards to offset the cost.

WvW demands more and gives less. Which most people are ok with because they are there for the competition and the co-operation.

That in mind, free transfers totally undermine the enjoyment people are getting for their investment.

Players transfer to recently lost keeps and use all of the supply to build useless rams inside the walls, so their server can come take it back. What was a long, expensive siege is rendered totally irrelevant in about half an hour.

Trolls are jumping over and either harassing people in /t, or they are jumping in to squads and relaying information to their servers larger WvW guilds and squads via voip.

Entire matches and every bit of effort made by a server is trashed because guilds, en masse, jump from a losing server to the winning server or one that is in close second. That is akin to half the players of a losing football team quitting and signing with the opposing team in the 4th quarter of a game.

I can understand wanting the players to spread out. And they will. But server populations will always be mercurial, and WvW will be pointless to participate in while players can willy nilly jump to and fro.

No one is going to pick a home if they don’t have to. Bloated servers are becoming more bloated due to people brute forcing themselves on during off-peak hours or after resets.

Enable the two week moratorium and announce a date for the end of free transfers.

Unless I’m missing something, a commander can’t see who is in their squad. But can see the three dozen green dots on the map following them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if less than a third of those green dots bother to join the squad, and of whats left, probably half of them are even paying attention to team chat.

So if the commander wants to even make an honest attempt at directing the zerg, then the only option they have is Team chat.

Commanders need to see who is in the squad. In fact the squad needs to see who is in the squad.

Let’s say the commander orders a group of 5 to go defend and report from the ruins. Well there might be three green dots on the way over there. Are those your guys? Who knows. Commander want’s a handful of people to bring supply for a treb. You see allies going to and from a camp. Are those guys grabbing supply for your squads treb or for their own?

It’s very hard to play re-actively when you and the commander have no idea of what the squads actual presence is. When you are dodging arrow carts its not exactly like you can do a squad chat role call and see what every one is up to.

There should definitely be more the encourage squads and not just zerging around an icon. Honest to gods, I watched a group of at least 20 follow a commander right off the side of a cliff. Pile of dead bodies at the bottom. Commander’s presence is supposed to increase the effectiveness of a group of players…not diminish it to the intelligence level of rodents.

I dont know man I’m just saying that on /r/GuildWars2 the week of launch, after alll of the bwes, GoM was listed in the top post of the page with their server list as one of their primary servers.

Maybe because of DarkHaven filling up during the events and the horrible reputation the server was getting before the game even launched.

Anyways, you weren’t sure what my original post had to do with: I was trying to point out that GoM’s population problems now are in part due to people shying away from the server that didn’t want to get mixed up with the large community that was supposed to be backing it. And never showed up. The WvW population problem is not exclusively because of a bad rap for hacking or exploits.

Trying to give your server’s integrity the benefit of the doubt. And lay blame on reddit claiming server + people not wanting to deal with them and anticipated long queues + those people nor reddit showing up = smaller WvW attendance than anyone expected.

Actually, Gates can blame reddit.

I can attest to four guilds: mine, a WvW specific group with 150+ people, and two other guilds with 75-100 people.

Two went to Dragonbrand, one went to Henge, and the last one went to the EU Shiverpeaks server because they played late evening hours.

We were all supposed to be on Gates of Madness but changed servers just a few days before launch because reddit added it to the list of their servers.

GoM was originally chosen because it hadn’t been adopted by any of the internet “mega” communities. We didn’t want to have trouble getting all of our people on to play together and we didn’t want a server that was largely dominated by a clique of players from a website.

If I know of four respectively sized guilds personally that jumped the fence with reddit’s announcement, then there are probably a good few other guilds or individual players that were like minded.

Not making this stuff up. Anyone that followed the Asuralabs server polls could see the trend. Most of the servers stayed stable, and Gates was the 4th lowest pop option. Its population doubled in the 72 hours after that post.

It’s starting to sounds like they either all got on their first choice server, a fraction of the people that were going to be in the reddit guilds followed through, or they transferred and didn’t support GoM post launch.

The invoke worry for me. You never know when you aggro one how many will follow it. Then you either run, and risk aggroing more/bigger/worse enemies or try to fight however many there are in tight corners so you don’t inadvertently pull more that you didn’t see. And gods forbid a dynamic event spawn in your immediate area. Then your fight is interrupted as about 50 more risen bum rush you.

Orr is the only area where you have to pay attention to where you are going and what you are doing. If you aggro one thing, odds are three or more are coming your way and you need to be prepared. Because if you take too much damage or blow to many resources, you might aggro another group by breathing in the wrong direction too hard when recovering.

It’s really the only zone (besides Fireheart rise) where you can’t just tra-la-la around without a worry. Yes that can be aggravating. Especially if you are trying to do one specific thing and they keep getting in the way. But it’s also nice to have enemies and z one that keeps you on your toes.

Drakes. On the entire first page how has no one mentioned drakes? They are everywhere. Every region has their own special little breed of drake. From 1-80 one thing you are guaranteed to do anywhere you go is a dynamic event involving drakes, or killing drakes for the next tier of crafting mats.

If the drakes ever learn to effectively communicate and organize, it’s the end of every single race on Tyria. You can’t hide from them, you can never out number them. They are so naturally well built that half of the weapons and armor on the continent are made out of their scales, teeth and claws.

Drakes man. Something needs to be done about them.

XGN, Polygon and Video Gamer are not exactly IGN, Giantbomb, Gamespot, or Gametrailers. I have been to Polygon exactly once since it launched and that was just to check out what Arthur Geise left IGN for.

It’s not uncommon for less popular or new online publications to diverge their scores from the norm to get more traffic. Destructoid and Giantbomb used to be horrible about under-rating good games or over-rating bad games to get traffic flowing from metacritic. Honestly, how many other reviews have you ever read from Polygon yourself? But you seen they rated GW2 lower than the big names so you went to see why.

Not to say their reviews weren’t mostly genuine. They might have just been a bit exaggerated to make a more controversial review.

Scourge.4317:

What exactly is this gigantic missing element you speak of?

He wants 25 man grinding for a belt buckle that makes characters with it 0.05% slipperier than characters without it. But not for himself. He wants it for his guild-mates.

I am a fan yes. And I am a gamer. And I am a professional Software Engineer II. I make military simulations. Not very much different from video games. We actually use the same technologies. And from your posts, I and any one else in here with a clue about programming, bug fixes, hot patches, or even basic architecture…can see you have no idea what you are talking about.

There is no bias. There is no fallacy. There is just you not knowing what you are talking about and imagining that bias because you can’t see how you could be wrong.

Thank you for the demonstration. I think our interaction has proven the point of this entire thread.

Zen.1740:

Guess which logical fallacies you used in your post.

First of all, there are over 200 people working on it, not 100. This in itself would make it twice as likely that the work will get done…

Your lack of understanding of software development didn’t answer my question. 200 people are not touching the code. 200 people aren’t even touching the tools that use the code.

But just to humor you, if they had, the more people that touch the code the more likely the chance to create bugs. Not less.

Also, tidbit of information for self-edification, as a general rule, bugs cost twice as much to fix as the initial feature cost to implement. So yes testing is done. But things are missed. Sometimes even simple things are missed, especially during crunch-time. So developer’s do no intentionally ignore bugs, or turn a blind eye. Or delay fixing it longer than necessary.

Lastly, Windows was built on the NT framework for over 10 years. And still had bugs. Similar stories with photoshop. And DirectX, and OpenGL.

There is no answer to my question other than:

“There has never been and never will be. I fully understand this not being a flawless piece of software and there might be stuff that isn’t working exactly as intended a few weeks after launch. I understand that what looks like a simple problem may have multiple causes and it takes time to discover the issue, design and implement a solution, test the solution, regressively test everything the solution could affect, and then deploy in a way and time that will be least obstructive to players. Perhaps by holding on to the patch to bundle with others that are currently scheduled to reduce over-all down time. For now I will try to be patient and enjoy other facets of the game or even go outside and play for a little while and hold off on being overly criticizing until an unreasonable amount of time passes.”

There. Try that. It might make you feel better.

Zen.1740:

3 weeks since release and there are still bugged skill points in Orr. Yeah sounds like we owe them an apology for having criticism.

Out of curiosity, what was the last piece of software you used, consisting of over a million lines of code, developed by over 100 people simultaneously, and under the stress of tens of thousands of people at any given moment of any day, that was completely bug free?

Actually, that might be a bit tough. I’m sorry. Unrealistic expectations. Instead of limiting it to your use, tell me the last time a piece of software like that ever existed anywhere…

Nope, not a pretty big assumption. That is a pretty safe assumption. The initial outbreak came in large part from people watching streams, while they were playing a game. I mean, yeah you could say it could have been house mom Betty that likes to double dose her gaming sessions while the kids are at school, but my money is it being a power gamer that is watching streams, on voice chat and playing the game at the same time. From them it spread like wild-fire.

Also, more was done with GW than “keeping it going”. After the last box expansion there was still free content being added. Actually a lot more free content added than most games with a sub gave you.

But what you are trying to say is that if all of the “hardcore players” ran off to Panda land next week, it would shut down GW2. And that’s far from the case. It’s actually incredibly arrogant. Akin to saying that if MLG quit hosting Halo or CoD tournaments that the games wouldn’t still be massively commercially successful.

I have well over 300 hours in GW so far. I wouldn’t consider that casual at all. I lead a fairly large guild and we handle the tougher content. I also competitively play fighting games and shooters. So I can say pretty confidently that something every hardcore, competitive community has in common: They whine too much and think they are more important than they are.

FarFarAway.6579:

AcidicVision.5498:

Bioware ignored player feedback

Bingo. What you’re reading on this forum is player feedback. Defenders of that other game posted the same kind of defenses you are posting here. I know because I was one of them. Diehard fan. Its stupid. I’m not making that mistake again.

What’s going to ruffle the feathers of Arenanet is a slowdown in their microtransaction activity. And don’t think it won’t happen. Who do you think spends the most cash on gems? Powergamers.

The microtransactions that kept GW going for years after the last expansion was released were extra char slots, character make-overs, and extra inventory space. The same things you see people talking about buying from the gem store now. Not boosters. Nothing for power gamers. I would bet you a shiny nickle they have sold more dye packs and pet cages than they have consumable boosts.

You are speaking for a niche group. A small niche group. Hardcore players don’t keep the lights on. Which is why Anet has no issue banning the kitten out of them when they become poisonous to the community. As they demonstrated when those “power-gamers” cashed in on a Karma exploit.

And the things beta testers complained about in SWTOR beta were legitimate, game breaking problems and transparent time sinks to keep the subscription rolling. The biggest complaints you are seeing so far from GW2 players is that they have nothing to do after they rushed to 80 (even though they skipped past half of the content to get there), and that they don’t get a pretty enough bauble for their 30 minutes of time. Very very big difference between being fundamentally broken on several major levels, and the self-entitlement some players have that makes them think there should be a grand reward for every small accomplishment.

Who is saying it needs saving? I like how everyone ignores TradeWinds research a few comments up. That tends to happen when forum users make valid posts are arguments. Thay nay-sayers just gloss over the comment and pick out something they can more readily defend themselves against.

What a lot of the treadmill MMO players coming this way seem to forget is that ArenaNet has a built in and very passionate and loyal fan-base. They had at least twice as many customers come over from GW than individual copies of Secret World or WAR sold.

And Swtor went the way it did because it was rushed out incomplete, Bioware ignored player feedback, and EA had the nerve to charge a sub-for it. GW2 has none of those problems; yes, there are bugs. But every piece of software you ever use will have bugs. Some are apparent in minutes under the stress of millions of people, some are a little more illusive.

ArenaNet is not Bioware or FunCom. GuildWars isn’t a new or “fledgling” ip. Three weeks in we have already have multiple updates fixing issues, and adding features. Some of those fixes might not be popular and players are kitten sore Anet nerfed their farm of the week, but are best for the game and players in the long-term.

Something the vocal minority is incredible at is only considering themselves and the next time they log in and not giving a seconds consideration to the community or how the things going on now effect everyone months down the line.

The guys and girls over there have developed tough skin from dealing with the Guru sites for years, I doubt any of the people on here that came from other games they were tired of (but whine about GW2 not being like those other games?) ruffle their feathers at all.

mulch.2586:

I’d given up on WvW cuz of the queues.

I usually like dungeon content, but now…

Really regretting getting GW2 atm.

Poor kids. An MMO isn’t the same as the day they got it. Patches and updates change things.

Doesn’t matter if the decision was carefully thought out by designers and in the best interest for the game and players as a whole in the long run. Its got in the way of your thing to do for the week.

The dungeon patches were necessary. The people boosting them for gold, of course, will not like the changes. But for the past week is has been borderline impossible to get in a group for SM CoF or any explorable path that wasn’t Magg. And people that jumped in to explorable mode groups not realizing it was a speed run and made the slightest mistake were out right verbally accosted for causing the group another minute of time.

The dungeons were meant to take time. They were designed to punish you for grinding them (5 trophies subsequent completions) and reward you for doing each path on the days you log on (15 trophies initial completion).

This change was made to reinforce the design. Dungeons are what they were advertised to be. What they were before people figured out how to speed clear. Players adapted to them so they adapted to maintain their challenge and not become ez-mode free coin/trophy give-away.

It also makes the other content in the game relevant now. The other dungeons and paths were’t bad. In fact, a lot of them are a lot of fun and have unique challenges. But they were neglected because of the lure of a 15 min run for easy money in one particular area.

Now that that particular incentive is gone, people will spread back out and do other things. Players can get their story modes done, you might finally be able to make a party for other paths in explorable. New players aren’t getting left further and further back in the dust everyday. When the CoF runs started you had to show a stack of at least 100 trophies to get in to a good group. A few days later that became the norm and groups started wanting to see 250-500 trophies and a set of orange gear. The bar was getting so high, so fast, that there is no way people coming along in the next week or two would have been able to break in.

People should really have a bit of a broader perspective. This was a good change for ArenaNet to make.

100% world completion includes the battlegrounds. If 100% world completion is that important to you, then you will explore the battlegrounds.

If you don’t like PvP, then you don’t have to go near the place.

It’s up to you as a player to decide whats more important: 100% world completion, or your dislike of pVp to point of total avoidance.

This is just like the people that want zone completion without Vistas. It’s ridiculous. What’s there is there. Meet the requirements or decide the requirements aren’t to your taste and move on.

You can’t get zone completion without vistas, you can’t get world completion without the battlegrounds, you can’t get story rewards without doing story, you can’t get order specific armor if you chose a different order, you have to do dungeons to get dungeon tokens. And every single one of those things is something that is totally optional to character progression. So suck it up or move along to an activity you might have less complaints about.

It’s PvP. If there are people there giving you a hard time kill them. If there are too many, get your guild to help. Or friends. Or ask in team chat who else wants to get the puzzle instead of running 15 minutes back to a supply post siege and get them to come help you merc some dudes.

Or wait until your server is dominating, or transfer to a dominating server and run around and get your stuff hassle free. And I hope you find such victory shallow and empty :p