Guild Wars 2

It’s the Wizard’s Tower. We don’t know who the Wizard is. We don’t even have enough information to hypothesize.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Wizard's_Tower

I’d be surprised if anything is ever done with it. It is sort of important that the tower makes sense from a lore perspective because of it’s roots in GW. If the Lich, Titans, Destroyers, Shiro, Abbadon, Mantle Oppression of it’s region, Mursaat, Zhaitan’s Rise and Toxic Alliance couldn’t stir the occupants to give a kitten, then why would they open the doors all of the sudden under the threat of the remaining Dragons? Especially when said Dragons haven’t even done anything since they woke up.

No new professions on the horizon.

Even new weapons and traits for existing professions i’m not sure will do the trick for me because ill just end up settling into what I think is most effective or fun.

A new profession gives me a reason to re-experience all of the content from a new perspective using different techniques and to grow a character from scratch, learning it as I go.

Now it seems like my interest is shifting more towards the meta of the game events and pvp rather than the overall experience each thing offers. A new profession would instantly flip that back over and reintroduce some wonder rather than spreadsheets.

Alas, we can has none.

Gibson.4036:

Amazing how our perceptions color things.

I am more amazed at how bias can shape perceptions to the point they aren’t really indicative of reality at all.

http://goo.gl/zDROzx

Sylvari are the second least popular race in the game. It’s hard to go back far enough to find polls before the re-design, you can do that digging if your like, but early race polls regularly placed Sylvari as the second or third most desired to play. Post redesign, interest plummeted.

Elven races are typically right behind humans in popularity because they are identifiable, but still exotic.

I am not saying I don’t think the Sylvari look awesome. They do. And Perry did do an awesome job. But in the end, they just came off as too alien and lost a lot of appeal. I’d bet a shiny nickle that if the redesign weren’t so extreme, we would be seeing as many if not more Sylvari Elementalists and Mesmers than human and most definitely more than Norn.

I think bubbles went the way of Part III of Guild Wars Beyond, the extended experience mobile app, the t-shirts we all voted on pre-release, and the Cantha district.

Mordremoth at least was a thing, that became not a thing, that we discovered a name for and references to in the game, that became a thing again. Bubbles never got past…bubbles.

Asyaru.9280:

kyubi.3620:

why was that thing not in the game in the first place if we saw it in the manifesto… thats lame

why is Caithe a sylvari if we saw her as a human in the manifesto…thats lame

Caithe was always Sylvari. There was a big Sylvari redesign that made them look “less like forest elves” in Anet’s words, and more like plant people. There were mixed reactions to this. A lot of people liked the more traditional elvish look and the point still got across they were plant people. Seemed like change for change’s sake and race population suffered slightly. A lot of people that usually play the elvish type races just rolled a human instead.

I would be surprised to see Tengu as a race TBH. Right now, Charr are the least played race. They have the biggest issues with armor integration. They have the lions share of the clipping issues. Their models limit features that could otherwise be added to the game (cloaks).

That is despite there being a Charr protagonist in EoTn, the novels and Destiny’s Edge and a marketing push towards playable charr with more merch and promotional material than any other race.

If their first attempt at a beast race flopped, even with all of the exposure, and is more of a hindrance in the game than it’s worth popularity wise, then why would they try a lesser known, beast race post launch that will have identical issues?

The original Tengu/Avicara would have been much better. They were more humanoid and more defined. The new ones are slouching, scrawny, chicken looking nightmare fuel. I can’t see their new incarnation being any more popular than the least popular race in the game that they share a base framework with.

Marionette did not always fail on Dragonbrand. Lots of DBers probably had seen commander Kismet around there constantly for the first two weeks. I usually led lanes 1 or 3 and many of my runs were successful.

Dragons of Shadow also led Marionette events where we had 3/5 paths covered with [DoS] commanders (Brother Andres usually the most vocal) as late as last week that I am aware of, and many of those runs were also successful.

I myself have been focusing on Wurm with [TTS] since the EoTm patch, so the Marionettes I have done have been on guested servers. And even the notoriously low pop servers had enough people show up to get a win, without knowing there was an organized run happening.

I’ll probably be back to doing Marionette in my homeland this weekend so I can get that chest a few more times before its gone. I have a hard time believing it went from being on farm to totally abandoned in the 6pm-12am EST hours in the last week.

nicolas.9045:

Every class but ranger and nécro.

it doesn t surprise me anymore that is srill a broken class. Who cares? Not dev….

I know of a Dev that plays a ranger and has a photo-bombing Wolf pet named Moon Moon.

Not even kidding.

I dunno. I am just put off by the idea of another dragon, when we haven’t even explored the idea of perusing the current ones.

Honestly I think this is a player created dragon. Maybe an antagonist that was originally planned and then scrapped due to time, but was resurrected when players began discovering all the artifacts of his existence (Project Alpha’s skills for one). I mean Scarlet and her activities really don’t mesh well with the dragons we have already. I just get the feeling that if this ends up being the case, that they just realized they needed a big finisher about halfway through and drew Mordremoth out of a bucket.

I hope we get a Living Story season 1 postmortem.

So the popular theory for some lore hounds for a while now, and to a lot of the general player base after finding Scarlet’s bunker, is that the voice in her head is probably Mordremoth, the jungle dragon that some other parts of the game have alluded to.

Since pre-launch. Way…way prelaunch, we knew of the four elder dragons. Zhaitan, Jormag, Primordus and Kralk. There was some teasing about a deep sea dragon that players named Bubbles, but a lot of speculation favored it not being an elder dragon strictly, but a big kitten dragon in the water or even something else. Either way, there has been no Bubbles news for well over a year.

Now it is seeming more and more likely we are getting a brand new dragon. And I wanted to know how people feel in general about getting Mordremoth when we haven’t even seen three of the four original elder dragons? All of the minions, and lore, and lieutenant battles, and displaced races, and damage those creatures have wrought…that we have essentially ignored for, going on, two years now. Primordus has had time to tunnel under and swallow all of Kryta and Ascalon in a sink hole. Kralk could have branded the entire continent by now if he was motivated.

What would you think of all of the attention getting shifted to this new dragon, that has come out of pretty much no where, as a result of living story…while three of the original four remaining ultimate destroyers of worlds sort of sit by the wayside and continue to be the most threatening, non-threat in Tyria?

@kta, im not sure you can count all of those as Sylvari couple deaths. They are different story lines or different paths of a story line.

For an individual character’s personal story, you only see a third of those. Also it’s not limited to Sylvari. That template applies to pretty much all of the races. There are little narrative differences here or there, but for the most part, everyone’s story goes through the same motions with different dressing until it just gives up and converges (it is a converging story btw, calling it a branching personal story line is a bit of a misnomer) into the same story for everyone near the end.

I understand that kind of. Most players probably wont play through the story for every race and they wanted to make sure everyone had similar experiences going through. At the same time, drastic sweeping and huge thematic changes would have made the story a lot more re-playable.

You guys know what I’m talking about. Fight a big boss then do menial local tasks, meet the orders, then the order thing happens on the island, then start the new place with the guy, then go to Orr and do the things. Sprinkle in some NPC deaths and a character creation shout out at levels X, Y, and Z. And bam, you have every personal story in the game.

Anyways, sorry. I went on a rant. The point is all of those NPC deaths don’t count because they are in different timelines. And those timelines can be replayed, reproduced or changed. You could create a timeline where those characters never die by never playing that mission.

Living story deaths are awesome because they are the same for everyone. They are permanent. They are in the absolute timeline of the lore and will still be an event that happened whether people ignore it, miss it, or come along two years from now. This thing happened and this character is dead forever (Or until someone finds Livia).

My vote is still for Kasmeer

I think you might be expecting a bit much from all of nearly 6000 individual users that participate with TTS and comment about it on forums, twitter, reddit, youtube and where-ever else.

Would a separation help alleviate confusion? Yes. Is it realistic to expect or enforce on this scale? No.

Especially because of the casual medium we are communicating with. It is more common for a person to use “we” when they have participated in something with a group of people than “they and I”. But just because “we” was used, doesn’t mean that the person saying it represents the views or opinions of everyone else. In fact, when you are looking at a group in the thousands and one person uses “we” in a way that is representative of that group, that should automatically raise a red flag because of the very broad generalization.

At some point you, as a reader, need to be responsibly critical of the content. We are pretty conditioned to ask for verification or sources when we have a question about something. So when one person appears to be speaking for thousands, of different ages, spread out across different servers, in different countries, the responsible question to ask them is if they can verify they have the authority to speak for that body. They will say yes and provide some verification, if they cant, then assume its a grain of salt until clarified.

If you read a controversial opinion on the WvW forums and a person talking about their server says “we”, with regard to all of their WvW players, do you just assume that person has authority to represent every single person on that server? Do you judge that server now, in it’s entirety, based on that insinuated relationship? Or do you chalk it up to lazy grammar?

The onus is as much on the reader as it is on the writer for conclusions drawn from something read on the internet.

Rezz.8019:

All that has to be done is play the normal way…

This is incorrect and makes many assumptions. This bug has happened several times to groups while they are playing as normal as possible. It moves, the zerg follows, it moves. And if some conditions are right a bug can be triggered.

If it looks like things are going a way that might trigger the bug do you think everyone should just stop and wait for the wurm to move again? No one is going to do that because of the time constraints.

Can conditions be manipulated to make it more likely? Im sure they can. But it’s also very very possible to just have the wurm randomly get itself into that state without intentional influence of the group there. Thats how this whole thing started to begin with. The wurm did something random and it became a rumor, then it did it again and there was a theory, then the exact conditions were discovered to reproduce and it was proven and pretty much immediately after that it was being fixed.

It is really off base to say all of the communities that have beaten the wurm so far knew full well about the bug and went out of their way to take advantage of it.

killcannon.2576:

AcidicVision.5498:

killcannon.2576:

Gems are created in the gemstore to buy with gold whenever someone trades gems for gold. They are a finite resource created from outside the system by people with real money. When you use gold to buy gems, you are not buying them from Anet. The only supply of gems in game comes from…..real money. Any and all purchases from the gem store use real money. Either yours or someone else’s.

Anet had to create gems to populate the pool initially. In beta, headstart, and launch night there were gems available to buy via in game currency before enough transactions were made to create a surplus. Also, gems are given as rewards for achievement chests. Those chest rewards are a set value that is paid out at an undetermined time per player with no regard as to how many gems are in the “pool”.

So they are not created from outside the system, they are not created with only real money, they are not a finite resource and not all gem store purchases use real money.

Wow, you’re right. Here, I’ll change it.

99.99999% of all gems are made from real money.

Sources please. First you said all gem purchases, now you pull an arbitrary percentage out of your kitten. What empirical data did you use to derive that figure? You did say we were just talking about the facts afterall.

How many gems have been purchased? How many total have been given away for achievements? How many gems were available at the start of the game and has there ever been a time Anet has had to inject more? I am sure you don’t know. The closest any of us may be able to get is gems given through achievements via leaderboard.

It seems to me like you are presenting your own opinions as facts here and then telling everyone else that their opinions are invalid to the point.

Btw, were you aware that hyperbole is also it’s own logical fallacy? That’s three you are guilty of in the same discussion. Like I may have said before, I dont expect that to actually change your tune any. I’d just like you to know that there are names and cliches for the different kinds of bullkitten you are spinning.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The real difficulty is killing the wurms fast enough, and at the same time. That boils down to a DPS race, and you want to use TS to coordinate that. I don’t think difficulty should come from a timer, or a DPS race. Nor do I think boss encounters should be designed with third party software in mind.

Im not going to trivialize the wurm boss in any way. Its hard as hell and some people here are really downplaying the depth involved. Yes its a dps race, but organizing how and when that DPS occurs is more complex than just spamming skills fast enough.

I guess the simplest way to put it is that all of the players skills/cool-downs make up the commanders resource pool. If those resources are mis-used, then the event fails. When and how you want to use things like consumables, time-warps, banners, or other long cool downs, varies based on the situation. If a commander misreads a situation and wastes long cool down resources, the event fails. And you have this going on with three different groups, with three different leaders, on wurms with three different mechanics.

But where I can agree with Malafide is that third party tools should not be needed. The Marionette is a great boss because its challenging, but manageable to lead a group that isn’t on TS. It requires macro and micro coordinating of paths and resources, while not being so difficult that voip is required but can be very advantageous.

The wurm on the otherhand I do not foresee anyone ever beating without voip. Not only is it unfair to expect every player to download additional software to every other players detriment, it is also unfair to disabled gamers.

Also, while the event is heavily reliant on voice comm, there is no mechanism in place to enforce it. If your server tries to organize a wurm run and twenty people enter the instance that refuse to use it for one reason or another, then your entire run is hosed. You cant force them to comply because its a public zone. You cant kick them. Your server has no recourse.

Hard content is A-OK. Content that requires 150 people coordinating is fine by me. Something so difficult that it requires other software and excludes players as a side-effect is not ok. Encounters should be balanced with the assumption players only have access to the tools that the game provides and are running on medium to low spec machines. Server competition and much much higher level coordination with external software could still be encouraged with extra rewards for hitting time milestones, or subsequent server kills, or bonus objectives (with no achievements attached) that can be ignored by smaller or less organized groups.

/rant

edit: Bonus objective suggestion reminded me of “LFG HM Mission+bonus”. …The good ’ol days.

Meglobob.8620:

Also, Anet recently made some changes to the Wurm, I think they fixed some bugs/made it a lot easier.

So all that takes away from your Wurm kills…just saying…

lol! The change made to the wurm actually makes it more difficult. It adjusted the factor that was influential in every single wurm kill to date, whether that intentionally triggered or not.

The TTS kills were just as valid as any other wurm kill to date. But at the same time, all current wurm kills could be considered unofficial, since they happened under special circumstances.

This in no way diminishes the accomplishments of every one who beat it, IMO. The coordination, effort, and teamwork it required for all of the guilds and servers that cleared the event was enormous. More demanding and less margin for error than anything else in the game to date. Even if extenuating circumstances appeared in the last thirty seconds of an attempt. Getting to that last thirty seconds to begin with is a feat.

Now we all get to beat it again for the first time and everyone can remove that asterisk from their wins.

Video of Crimson for the second kill is uploading now.

killcannon.2576:

Gems are created in the gemstore to buy with gold whenever someone trades gems for gold. They are a finite resource created from outside the system by people with real money. When you use gold to buy gems, you are not buying them from Anet. The only supply of gems in game comes from…..real money. Any and all purchases from the gem store use real money. Either yours or someone else’s.

Anet had to create gems to populate the pool initially. In beta, headstart, and launch night there were gems available to buy via in game currency before enough transactions were made to create a surplus. Also, gems are given as rewards for achievement chests. Those chest rewards are a set value that is paid out at an undetermined time per player with no regard as to how many gems are in the “pool”.

So they are not created from outside the system, they are not created with only real money, they are not a finite resource and not all gem store purchases use real money.

Ayrilana.1396:

The gem store does rely on any outside source. Also please explain how buying gems with your own gold is using someone else’s money?

Pay close attention. You are about to see some La Nouba caliber mental gymnastics…

ZudetGambeous.9573:

It’s really a pity that even though GW2 is one of the most blatantly P2W MMO’s on the market that people keep using various straw man arguments to claim it isn’t P2W every time a new P2W item is introduced into the gem store.

Your hyperbole is likely why you aren’t getting a dev response. There are games where the only access to top tier weapons, or armor, or consumables, is literally through an integrated cash shop. It would be the equivalent of Anet making ascended gear only available through gem purchases. Special gems that you cant get by converting gold. And then allowing it in sPvP.

Your opinion on GW2 gemshop is that it is blatantly right up there with those games. That is in no way reasonable. And why try to communicate with someone that isn’t reasonable? I shouldn’t even be doing, but I wanted to point out that accusations like that have a factor in whether or not devs decide to even bother opening a dialog.

Also strawman doesn’t mean whatever you think it means. People are presenting that the argument that this pick is pay to win because its a gemshop item that gives another player more of something than the top tier picks available in game and it doesn’t matter what that something is. Because they want to keep things objective.

Everyone one else is countering that the item isn’t pay to win because cash isn’t required and you can use currency conversion. Which is a fact. A purely objective fact.

Once again, since we cant introduce subjectivity, since the people declaring the pick axe is pay to win want the conversation to remain objective, then the amount of gold or time it may take to get enough gems, or the definition of what “normal play” is can’t be part of their argument.

There is no straw man present. Plenty of landsliding cherry pickers. But no straw man.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

2. There was negative player response to the frequent NPC deaths in the Personal Story before the Living Story got written. ArenaNet appears to have taken this into account in the Living Story. (For example, it would have been easy to just kill off Otilia, or the minstrel, or Noll.) Besides, the PS had a different writing team than the LS does. These are all reasons that recently introduced NPCs getting killed left and right is unlikely in the LS.

Really? I don’t recall any of that. And the only notable deaths I remember were your mentor on claw island, and the sylvari that sacrifices herself in Orr. There was the minor death of your partner in the Fort Trinity, orb chain. But she was around for about five minutes.

Considering the scope of the story, I’m not sure the deaths were overly abundant or out of place. We were fighting the telepathically linked zombie army, of a giant magic eating zombie dragon, that made a kingdom out of the formerly sunken island of the gods. And that was amid-st bandit attacks, a centaur war, two faction wars, terrorists, an evil cult, and the minions of another dragon laying waste to an entire region.

I actually thought the consensus was that the personal story was a little to “Disney” due to very few key deaths that happened off-screen. It was supposed to be a war.

This living story is a little different. At least I hope so. Scarlet started out as a scooby doo villain, but she has been getting darker with each release and is now legitimately deadly since we know that instead of just being slapstick as a narrative device, she is totally batkitten insane murderous and hyper intelligent. She became less Batman the animated series, Harliquinn and more The Killing Joke, Joker. It would be a real shame if Anet decided to cap off that trend towards a darker story with a Saturday morning cartoon ending.

killcannon.2576:

It is indeed not subjective. It’s a store.

A store that is part of the game.

part
pärt/Submit
noun
1.
a piece or segment of something such as an object, activity, or period of time, which combined with other pieces makes up the whole.

But you are free to disagree. Its your opinion. And opinions are subjective.

With that I am done. I think all of your arguments have been sufficiently stuffed, using your own words.

killcannon.2576:

The gem store is not part of the game, any more than Gamestop is part of the game.

That is subjective. I can open the gem store in the game. I get items from the gem store in my in-game mail. I get gem store items for achievement rewards. It is just your opinion its not “part” of the game.

See how this works? You are cherry picking again. http://goo.gl/Ztqzz

killcannon.2576:

The only wrong point of view here is trying to say that p2w is subjective. It is not.

Anything that sets one player above another in any way that can not be obtained through normal play in game is p2w. This includes qol items.

If that is the definition you want to stick by, ignoring the fact that the definition of “normal” play itself is a subjective, then everything in the cash shop is available through normal play since there is a gold to gem conversion.

To say otherwise introduces subjectivity the other way. Since now you have what one group of people might think its an unacceptable conversion rate, or that it takes too long to get gold, or that the gold needed isn’t worth the benefit of the item. And you will have another group of people that doesn’t care and is fine farming/grinding for gold to get the same items. There is a split between the people that value their time more than their money and vice-versa.

To be purely objective, using the goal post you set, means that there is no pay to win since everything is obtainable through the game itself.

And ignoring that is cherry picking. Proponents want to argue its pay to win and will only lead to much more grievous pay to win items, then try to say its not a slippery slope point of view because of the subjective value of sprockets; meanwhile they ignore that the items are available to all players through game, without spending a dime, but apply their own subjective opinion as to how the time needed to not pay cash is unreasonable.

You pay to win folks are all over the place.

Incorrect. You have to look at the impact of that singular item on the game as a whole. In that regard sprockets are insignificant. And they are rendered even more insignificant due to the home instance node. A person with the pick has no more of an “advantage” over everyone without it as the people that got the meta node do over people that didnt get it.

We arent talking about Ori, or lodestones, or something that can destabilize the economy and the way people play the game, or devalue everything those items were used for previously.

Aedelric.1287:

The pick is a legitimate concern, how would any of your feel if we had a 2000 gem pick that had a 20% chance to drop an ecto? The pick sets a prescience and the potential of what can be made in the future is something to be worried about.

The best thing Arena Net can do is remove the bonus and offer an apology and refund to those that choose it. Not that they have to give a refund, the pick was not advertised to have a bonus anyway.

This is the exact rational that makes this entire thing ridiculous. What you, and most other people are doing, in their opposition of the item is called a slippery slope argument.

And that is a known logical fallacy. Here is some reading material: http://goo.gl/Txni

Summarized,
“A slippery slope argument states that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant effect, much like an object given a small push over the edge of a slope sliding all the way to the bottom. The strength of such an argument depends on the warrant, i.e. whether or not one can demonstrate a process which leads to the significant effect.”

There is no warrant in this argument because its already been proven the effect of the items is insignificant. When boosters were first announced the game was dubbed pay to win. Then the player base at large came to realize their effects overall impact was insignificant.

The same thing happened when it was revealed there would be a currency exchange. Which would cause a landslide of people buying legendaries which would give those players a significant advantage in WvW with the ascended upgrade and….ad nauseum. It never happened en masse.

This pick and the complaints around it demonstrate that fallacy to perfection. Its broken logic and a flaw in reasoning.

I bought one of these for each of my characters.

The highly profitable sprocket market has a new kingpin! In 3,000 years you will all tremble in awe at my sprocket castle made of solid gold! And then I can declare myself the winner of GW2!

All because you fools chose to bicker on the forums and left me to very very slowly gather items, worth a whole 30c, one at a time. HAHAHAHA!

I would not play if there was a sub. On principle.

However, I would sub to a premium service.

Such as a $15/mo sub that gave you something along the lines of a special subscriber black lion chest that had a pool of higher end items like make-over kits, fine trans crystals, ticket scraps, butler golem, and maybe reasonable odds (1:75?) at whatever the LS items are for that month, or gem allotment that evens out the value of each months chest (as in high value items = small gem allotment. Lower value items = higher gem allotment).

That would have value for me. Anet could count on my money every month and I would end up saving more money per year, or less time farming gold and waiting for a favorable exchange rate.

As it is now, I have no problem spending money in the gem store. Usually $20 or so at a time depending on whats there (never keys). Anet doesn’t know when they are going to get that money, they cant budget around expecting that money. They don’t know when people that usually buy gems might be going on hiatus from the game, and skewing projections.

I don’t see such a service as evil or unfair at all. I see it as a straight up trade. Anet can budget knowing they have x dollars every month at the least from subscribers. In return subscribers get the things they were probably going to buy eventually anyways at a discount.

Dragonbrand attempts and beats the Marionette regularly. Hell, Even Devona’s Rest beat it earlier this week while I happened to be there.

Maybe the reason your server cant beat Marionette is because everyone is assuming your server can’t beat it and guesting to Blackgate? Not only is that a pretty crappy attitude for your server to have, it also hurts Blackgate because guests are flooding their main maps. Seems extremely selfish to me and doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.

Get some commanders together. Decide on a time for a run and post if on your server forums. Add an announcement in your server TS. An hour beforehand have people recruit advert the event in LA and Queensdale so you have time to organize. Nag at people to join the server TS and run down Warden tactics.

Its a community event. Work on your community and you wont have to jump on the coattails of other servers.

I don’t think they would kill Majory.

A whole lot of People really like her style.

There is a line there that writers are well aware of and don’t often want to cross. To draw a parallel with…lets use The Walking Dead, people like Hershel and people like Darrel. Viewers would feel bad about Hershel’s death and think it sucked, but they would carry on with the show; on the other hand, if Darrel were to be killed lots of people would just up and stop watching altogether.

Same comparison could be made with early (good) seasons of Dexter. There are characters that die in the books that live through the show because people liked them too much to kill. So other characters were added, written to get the audience attached but not too attached, and then killed.

Tormenting those “safe” characters though is perfectly ok. Either Braham or Majory will see a major loss. But I don’t expect them to go anywhere.

Perhaps “nothing is sacred” applied to characters more than places. And how would it change the face of Tyria if all of the sudden players knew that key, likable, NPC characters weren’t fixed parts of the world?

I think that Anet has been making Kasmeer and Taimi way too likable as of late. And they are also trying to draw on player sympathies with different personal tragedies for each character.

You see this in movies all the time. Support characters that have overcome something out of the ordinary and who go out of their way to be endearing with every appearance end up being spectacularly killed in order to stoke that emotional investment the audience has. Then each new character that comes along has that added mystique. We know now they can die, so all the moments of suspense are just a little more suspenseful. Out of the three new characters, which one will make it to the end?

So I fully expect either Kasmeer or Taimi to be Scarlet’s final victim at the end of the finale. Maybe it will even be player choice. Similar to the the election. Players have a week to choose the left path or the right, the choice determines who we save and who is left for dead. How will Majory or Braham react towards players in the future based on that decision?

That last bit might be a little darker than Anet is willing to go. It will probably be some heroic sacrifice that leaves their companion devastated.

Either way, someone is going to die.

Start your own LFG. Put in the description its a casual run with no min AP and no gear checks. Then enter the dungeon and wait for the group to fill.

You will more likely be in a group with people you will enjoy playing with, and not have to worry about being booted.

The entire system doesn’t need to be adjusted when there is a much better solution for your particular issue that you can resolve easily with the tools available.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Keep the suggestions coming, we’re always listening and do want to resolve getting stronger, more approachable, easier to understand stories as part of the Gw2 experience.

You had a solution to this in GW. The books. Not only did they have a purpose for game play (turning them in for rank), they also gave players keep-sakes of the things they accomplished (dungeon books), let them recap their progress up to a certain point (story books), acted as a checklist for completionists, a reference for lorehounds, and were repeatable in case you lost one for whatever reason.

Why try to invent new complex systems to replace something that was efficient, effective, and wasn’t broken?

There has been a lot of talk about collaborative development, and how much player feedback shapes the game coming, from devs as of the last few months.

The problem that a lot of GW2 community members have (from posts on official forums, facebook, reddit, guru, and a few other fan sites) is that it is largely a one way line. We scream into a void and get nothing back. Six months later a change vaguely resembling the thing we were discussing comes along and we are left wondering whether we influenced that or if it was just a coincidence.

One developer was actually acting in the spirit of collaboration. He was openly discussing how a piece of content was designed, why some things worked the way they did, and acknowledged players directly when he thought they brought up valid concerns. That open communication led to a patch that was a true collaboration between the dev and players and it made that event much smoother for players of different skill levels. And then he was stopped. Valid reasons as the company may have had, they put the kibash on something that was productive on both ends.

My suggestion to the dev, or even PR teams, is to adopt an activity currently used by another studio and developer that, itself, has already borrowed heavily from GW2’s original design principles.

They have a weekly round-table, where a question that is currently on the whiteboard gets asked to the community with poll style options to answer and at the end of the week there is a short video where devs (Chris and Colin would be my nominees) discuss the popular choices from players and what those could mean. There is no guarantee that they will implement whatever was voted on for a variety of reasons (budget, man power, time constraints, complexity); however, this creates a limited, but very direct and transparent line of communication. Anet gets valuable data (I heard Mike O likes data) and players get to feel involved. It’s a win win for everyone.

There is real merit behind this process and I hope the guys over at the studio at least toss the idea around and give it serious consideration.

The first time I cleared the dungeon with a pug we were stuck on Slick and Sparki for easily an hour (factor in that we were openly experimenting with different tactics to see what was and wasn’t viable).

When we finally had a strategy figured out that we were sure would work and that we could effectively teach other people, the party kept wiping due to one warrior that refused to follow instruction. He would get ooze aggro, ignore it, and run all over the room, so oil pools were scattered and unmanagable. He thought what he was doing the right thing and rage quit when everyone else told him to stop and listen. We had someone else come in, from LFG tool, that did listen, and we beat it on the first try.

One player with a bad attitude can have a huge negative effect on the party. In my experience, pug issues come down to…

1. Failure to stick to a plan
2. Failure to communicate
3. Failure to adapt
4. Refusal to follow
5. Lack of patience

More often than not, the people rage quitting were contributing to the problem. I would rather have four new people with me that can stick together and are capable than one Prima donna that is going to do his own thing and have an attitude about it.

If you are having a really hard time puggin, hit me up in game and ill try to get people into guild groups. No armor check, min AP or specific profession required. We have gotten pretty efficient.

eisberg.2379:

AcidicVision.5498:

We learned recently that there are no new classes coming. There are no new races coming.

When did they announce that? Can you link to me Anet saying there will be no new classes or races, I missed that annoucement/interview/blog post/forum post.

Look up the Mike O’Brian one year press releases and Colin Gamescom interviews. They were asked directly about new classes and said they feel “the classes they have cover all bases and archtypes” and they were asked about new races and said “its something we will look at eventually but not in development now”.

All their eggs are in the living story basket. Its emphasis is modifying what is there instead of giving us something 100% new or reasons to create alts.

Have to kinda agree with the lameness of this. Even from the microtransaction point of view it really doesn’t work.

• We are told there will be no variety, and then variety is added for a cost.

We learned recently that there are no new classes coming. There are no new races coming. The majority of new skin sets since launch have been locked behind atrocious RNG. Each living story gives us +1 or more new back items, but we only have one back per character. So now new hair styles are added, which is the first addition to character creation we have seen in long time I think, and its a post new character screen gem purchase.

I have no particular problem with “premium” styles or colors as the occasional exception. But when we know there is no character creation variety coming any time soon, or even actively being developed on the side, not every character customization option should be gem locked.

• New characters means more money

The idea that they have to charge for hair styles to pay the bills doesn’t hold water. A new character means more bag slots, potentially more bank slots, more infinite harvesting tools, possibly salvage device, possibly dye packs, more gold needed overall so more temptation for G2G conversion. Many people with altaholism like to have “all the things” on each of their characters. And some things (like infinite harvesting and max bag slots) are just too handy to NOT have on each character. It just doesn’t make sense at all for the long tail of the game to discourage fresh character creation in favor of a quick sale.

In closing, this is an un-anet like decision that is not player friendly and lends towards quick cash-in rather than design practicality and forward thinking. It has Nexon reek all over it. I can only assume Ms Crystin Cox was behind the decision.

I don’t think this thread contains one piece of constructive criticism so far all. What looks bad about them? What specifically do you not like? What would make it look better?

“Armor is ugly because ugly” is honestly a worthless post and anet will just ignore the feedback because it isn’t offering a single thing of value.

I have much less of a problem with these armors and ascended weapons than I do some of the other things already in the game. At least there is a GW feel to the new ascended stuff and id rather see more of this style than anything holographic or hideous impractical themed back items (what is the back item from Twilight Assault even supposed to be?).

As Mesket said, there is some silly crap in game already that I would much rather do without. GW lasted a long time without giving into novelty and cartoonishness. Even when they did put in odd accessories, they were really difficult to come by and subdued in comparison to what we are seeing now (chaos gloves, blindfold, glasses).

Hey Dociu, tighten up that crew and reel in those designers. More dark world where Dragons threaten the existence of all sentient life, races are displaced and driven from their homes and humans are on the brink of extinction; less happy, glowy, sparkle time, laser stuff, tempered with the heat of the care-bear stare and cooled with unicorn pee.

The OP is spot on. This is an issue I guessed would happen when the event started. People that are up for it would grind out attempts until it was conquered and then never bother again because of the huge time investment involved.

World bosses shouldn’t be faceroll easy. But the stars also shouldn’t have to align to be able to beat it.

My experience over the weekend:
I spent hours and hours in overflow, actively TRYING to get into my server. I even guested to other servers to try to get out of overflow and it was nothing doing. Only two attempts got Tequatl below 75% health, because most of the people in overflows are there AFK or waiting to get into their main map and don’t even bother with the fight because if you do manage to get him below 75%, then you get a chest with a green item in it that doesn’t pay 1/5 of your repair or waypoint costs.

Once, I managed to get into my home server on Friday night and couldn’t even play the game. I was afraid that I left Sparkfly that I would never be able to get back. So I spent all night sitting in one zone in the world and waiting hours to attempt a 15 min event.

It is a learning experience, and I hope they have taken a lot away from the Teq launch. But this event has been the worst experience for me so far in the entire game.

Zhaitan could be the title held by the elder dragon of the undead. We killed a Zhaitan and made room for the next. Perhaps as long as their are dragons with power over the undead, there will always be a new Zhaitan to take the mantle when the previous one dies.

Tequatl may have been spending the last year beefing up so he can make a run for the position.

There. The lore is nice and tidy. In GW3 Tequatl will be the new Zhaitan

Overflows are there to allow you to play the game when content on your home server is at capacity. In just about every other online game prior to GW, you would sit in queues on a regular basis and wait for your turn to play if you were in a large population servers.

After content updates, expansions or anticipated patches, that queue could last hours. Overflow may have its drawbacks, but at least you get to play while you are in queue rather than staring at a timer.

That said, Blackgater’s concerns will soon be alleviated. The guilds that organized the fight are going to grab their members, BG regulars and people on their server TS and guest to a lower population servers so the encounter isn’t clogged up with bandwagoning guests.

The players trying to guest over and brute force through overflow are just going to end up in the same situation they would have on their own sever. In a map with a bunch of people that haven’t completed it and have to figure out what to do and how to work together. Actually, their situation may be worse, since at least on their home server the other players around will be trying to win. BG Sparkfly is just going to be full of the players that want to ride along for the rewards with as little resistance as possible. Collectively they wont be able to accomplish anything.

The game and boss changes (Tequatl aside) are plenty accessible to new players.

The difference is that now people cant AFK farm bosses on a rotation. Give players a moderate challenge and engage them. Standing by the Shatterer’s right leg and setting auto attack so you can get your daily ecto chance was not fun, challenging or engaging.

You dudes need to cut it out or you’re going to get this dude in more trouble. Trust me, the message you think you are sending or trying to send is not going to get the reaction you are hoping for.

I’ve been achievement hunting for a long while now. There were some I just didn’t bother with, but for the most part I have gotten the meta for just about every content release. Typically, if an achievement: was only worth 10 points or so, involved something I didn’t enjoy, would take longer than a few minutes to finish, and I already had the meta, then I skipped it.

Otherwise, I was point chasing for the majority of events.

Until recently.

Missed SAB the first go round, so I went in this time and got every achievement for world 1 (except 100 digs) in an evening. It was mostly enjoyable. I started world 2 and something broke. It was just too long, there were too many lame deaths, and too many bugs. I played through it to see what there was to see, but for the first time since release I had no desire whatsoever to repeat a piece of content for AP.

In fact, the brief consideration to attempting all of the Tribulation mode achievements was enough of a turn off for me to get around to trying a certain ftp super-hero arpg for some simple, relaxing fun. A few days of that and I was ready to come back to some meta events, alt leveling and guild activities. So I guess thanks SAB for exorcising achievement compulsion right out of me?

I was recently working on something like this myself. An issue will will come up against is that getting the entire item array and then iterating through it to get each item is a loooong operation and a ton of objects (especially if you are doing this for a mobile app). Consider there are nearly 30k ids and you could be doing an individual connection for every item.

A practical solution I came up with is to create an SQL database and write a PHPscript to populate it. Each entry in my case contains the item ID, name, type, rarity and level.

In the UI the user selects a type filter and level/rarity if they desire, then the app queries the database for all matching, puts their names into a dynamic list and holds on to only the item_id. When one is picked is connects to the API to get the rest of the details and displays them all pretty like.

You’ll be keeping API calls minimal and low resource usage on the user side.

You can also schedule the script to run once a week or so to query the GW2 build number, and update the database if its changed (which in all liklihood will be every kitten time with all the updates) but its still better than your app making 30k api calls on each use.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Red Tree.1936:

a race option that (believe it or not) many people actually like.

Well, not really..

I was going to post that same image in response to the quoted post. Its a legit thread as much as Red may disagree. Charr are the least popular race and the OP was asking why that was the case.

For some people there are lore reasons. For some people it has to do with armor and clipping. For others that could overlook those, the animations themselves caused issues.

As far as players go, Charr are just about a dead race. Consider that out of that 13%, X of those are alts made by players that want one of each race, but don’t play or care for it.

Could this be fixed? Maaaaybe. Perhaps make the Charr quadrapedal running animation kick in when movement speed is +25% or more. Make them stand up right. And probably the simplest solution for a lot of people…stop making them “play human” and give them some proper Charr clothes. Charr specific skins that can be applied to any armor set that is really just bandages, bone or bead mantles, decorative loin cloths.

There was a time that silhouette mattered to distinguish class. Well Radiant and Hellfire gear, and some of the LS event bonuses completely demolished the idea of profession silhouette. So just give people their universal cultural skins for Charr.

They are monsters that are good for nothing but Dragon fodder. But when I see a Charr in light armor, I sorta feel sorry for them. Like I feel sorry for those pets who have owners that insist on putting them in people clothes.

Itll never happen. Why waste time and resources improving something for the absolute minority of playable characters instead of doing a one off solution for all characters and letting that < 13% deal with it?

sanictoofast.9317:

all humans may as a well be brits. “ay guvna care to parlay in the queens jubilee”?
“roitey toitey lemme ask me mum wut bong i otta be home”

…Is that racist?

In GW we seen them destroy the human kingdom and kill woman, children and elderly. Gwen’s story showed us they had human torture camps. They helped resurrect the titans that could have ended all intelligent life. They held humans for nearly a decade kept barely alive in small cages. They performed ritualistic human sacrifices.

They were bad guys. All of them. Then Pyre comes along and says “uhh yeah, our bad.” And we are just supposed to say “nah bro it’s cool”?

I tolerate them because they are a useful tool against the Dragons. They worked so well for the Lich almost ending the world and all.

They never did anything with it in GW. After years and years of players asking and speculating on its potential. The White Mantle tried to get into it a few times but players stopped them. And we never actually learned where it came from, whakittens doing there, how its flying, who lives inside, what their power is or where it comes from.

I am beginning to think nothing will ever be done with the Wizard’s Tower because anything other than mind blowing revelations lore wise and content that could satisfy nearly a decade of curiosity would be a disappointment.

It’s a pretty big thing to risk screwing up.

This is EXACTLY what transmutation stones are for.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation_Stone

They take two items and you pick which skin, stat, upgrade you want from each to combine into one weapon. For higher end/ higher level armor you use a Transmutation crystal.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation_Crystal

For cultural and Orders armors its the common practice (and pretty much as designed) to buy it for the skin and transmute it onto the armor with the stat combo you want. Using dungeon tokens to buy your exotic armor set or weapons and then transmuting them with the skin you want is also a common way to gear your character.